Pip: A novel set in Taipei gets reviewed for its "sensory richness" and "heritage" — and somewhere in Taipei, a working class with rather more pressing concerns carries on regardless.
Mara: That tension between personal emotional framing and social-historical reality is exactly what freerein61 works through today, across a piece on R.F. Kuang's novel and the Marxist aesthetic tradition it helps illuminate.
Pip: Let's start with the novel itself — and the class position hiding inside the word "belonging."
Alienation as Class Position: Taipei Story and Diaspora Literature
Mara: The central argument here is that Lily Chen's cultural dislocation in Taipei Story is not a psychological condition but a structural one — the product of a specific class position, not a deficit of sincerity or vocabulary.
Pip: And the post names that class precisely. The "heritage speaker" celebrated in contemporary publishing comes from the professional-technical petty bourgeoisie — the wave of migrants from China and Taiwan who entered elite American institutions through the global labour reshuffle of the 1970s onward.
Mara: The post puts it directly: "Their 'heritage' comprises consumable symbols like cuisine, festivals, and a few hundred characters, since their social existence isn't rooted in any national community but is shaped by the international division of labour."
Pip: So the quest for fluency, authenticity, introspection — none of it can close a gap that isn't linguistic in origin.
Mara: Right. And this shapes what the novel can and cannot see. Taipei is rendered as backdrop and mirror — reflecting Lily's anxieties rather than presenting a society with its own history, contradictions, and class struggles. The post notes the city's humidity, street food, and bookstores are all there, but the structural forces are absent.
Pip: Taiwan as emotional wallpaper, while the actual Taiwan sits at the sharpest edge of great-power rivalry in the Asia-Pacific — that's quite an omission.
Mara: The post is explicit that this isn't a technical flaw. The novel "cannot ask the questions needed to understand its own material" because doing so would require acknowledging the class position that simultaneously causes Lily's discomfort and underwrites her security.
Mara: The post also draws on Voronsky, Lenin, and Trotsky to name what's missing aesthetically. Voronsky's core claim — that art is "the cognition of life" — stands against both formalist fetishisation of technique and the identity-politics policing visible in controversies like American Dirt, where a novel's substance gets displaced by demands that the author perform the correct identity role.
Pip: The Israeli pianist subplot gets exactly that treatment here — a minor character inflated by social-media accounting that has, as the post puts it, little to do with genuine literature.
Mara: The conclusion follows from all of this: alienation is a social relationship, not a personal emotional state, and it can only be addressed by changing the social conditions that produce it. No amount of introspection closes that.
Pip: Which means the novel's sincerity is real — and structurally insufficient. Those two things can both be true.
Mara: And that distinction — emotion versus understanding — is what the Marxist critical tradition insists on keeping open.
Pip: What stays with me is the insistence that the most personal struggles only become legible through history — not as background, but as cause.
Mara: That's the thread connecting the aesthetic argument to the political one. Next time, more on where that thread leads.
R.F. Kuang’s Taipei Story has been received in the American literary press with familiar terms like “identity,” “belonging,” and “heritage.” Critics commend its “intimate” portrayal of a young woman’s efforts to reconnect with her “roots,” along with its “sensory richness” and frank exploration of linguistic insecurity. This kind of language is not only insufficient but also indicative of a broader issue: it mirrors a context where literature is viewed as private emotional management, and criticism becomes a tool for policing identity boundaries. Consequently, this framing obscures the core of artistic understanding: the social and historical forces that shape individual experience.
Examining Taipei Story reveals that the central conflict—Lily Chen’s feeling of cultural dislocation—is not a psychological issue but a class-related one. The so-called “heritage speaker,” often praised in modern publishing as authentic, actually comes from a specific social class: the professional and technical petty bourgeoisie that migrated from China and Taiwan starting in the 1970s. Their children, amid the global labour reshuffle, found places in elite American institutions. This class’s connection to culture is inherently fragmented because they lack a genuine link to a living collective tradition. Their “heritage” comprises consumable symbols like cuisine, festivals, and a few hundred characters, since their social existence isn’t rooted in any national community but is shaped by the international division of labour.
Lily’s sense of alienation isn’t due to a lack of sincerity or fluency. Instead, it reflects her position in a class that exists between national identities, as her true community is the global labour market, which provides no real identity—only a role. The novel’s effort to overcome this alienation through introspection is futile from the start. No amount of vocabulary or sensory detail can replace the absence of a shared social life.
This class position influences both the protagonist’s psychology and the novel’s portrayal of Taipei. The city is depicted as a backdrop and mirror, reflecting Lily’s anxieties rather than presenting a society with its own history, contradictions, and class struggles. While the novel captures humidity, street food, bookstores, and linguistic mishaps, it cannot structurally acknowledge the underlying forces that truly shape life in Taiwan.
Taiwan is more than just a site of “cultural confusion” or a layered history of Japanese colonisation, KMT dictatorship, and industrialisation. Currently, it stands as the most volatile flashpoint of great-power rivalry in the Asia-Pacific. The Taiwanese working class faces the devastating effects of Washington’s militarisation efforts and Beijing’s nationalist pursuits. Their fate is dictated not by individual pursuits of “belonging,” but by the broader international class struggle. The WSWS has consistently maintained that workers in Taiwan and China share common interests against their ruling elites, and that the push toward war endangers workers everywhere. A novel that spends two hundred pages in Taipei without addressing these realities is not “apolitical”. Rather, it reveals a class whose position within the global order closes its eyes to understanding history.
The novel’s approach to culture mirrors this pattern. Kuang confuses the accumulation of sensory details with the core of a culture and interprets one young woman’s emotional awakening as a sufficient response to the upheavals that shaped her. This isn’t a flaw in technique but an expression of a layer that sees culture as a collection of fragments to be reassembled through introspection, because it lacks a unified cultural life. For a class engaged in a historical project, culture is a dynamic outcome of social labour and conflict. For the diaspora professional, however, it becomes a commodity for consumption.
The debate over the novel’s Israeli pianist, a minor character amplified by social-media identity policing, exemplifies the decline of literary discourse under identity politics. Like the American Dirt controversy, the work’s substance is overshadowed by expectations that the author fit a specific identity role. This superficial moral accounting has little to do with genuine literature and instead reflects a social layer that manipulates identity for political gain. Kuang’s novel does not exhibit cynicism towards identity; rather, it is confined within it.
The core issue is that the novel cannot ask the questions needed to understand its own material. It cannot explore why Lily feels alienated because doing so would require addressing the class position that causes both her discomfort and her sense of security. It cannot consider what might alleviate that alienation, because the honest answer is that nothing within its accepted framework—fluency, authenticity, self-knowledge—can fix it. Alienation is not merely a personal emotional issue but a social relationship. It can only be overcome by changing the social conditions that create it: a society where culture isn’t a commodity and belonging isn’t a credential.
Art as Cognition, Not Technique: Voronsky, Lenin, Trotsky
Literature’s goal is not to provide solutions but to clarify history and portray the individual as a crossroads of social forces. This echoes Voronsky’s view of art as “the cognition of life” and Trotsky’s critique of formalists who limit art to technique. Taipei Story is flawed not for showing emotion without insight, but for substituting emotion for understanding and mistaking that substitution for sincerity.
Aleksandr Voronsky, Lenin, and Trotsky opposed formalism not merely for aesthetic reasons but as a vital defence of the Marxist view of art. Their critique of formalism was rooted in the same intellectual debate that fuelled early Soviet discussions on culture: the idea that human and artistic consciousness are inherently linked to social being. They saw formalism as a retreat into technique, a petty-bourgeois effort to separate art from the social context that engenders it. In contrast, they believed art serves as a mode of cognition — a means to understand life in its dynamism, contradictions, and development.
In the 1920s, formalism was more than just focusing on form. It emphasised form over content, fetishised artistic techniques, and treated literature as an independent system. The Russian formalists—Shklovsky, Tynyanov, Eichenbaum—saw literature as an autonomous structure ruled by internal rules. Their idea of ostranenie (“defamiliarisation”) regarded the artistic image as a technical tool meant to renew perception. The meaning of the work and its connection to social reality took a backseat or were considered unimportant. As a result, literature became a testing ground for devices rather than a way to understand life.
Voronsky quickly recognised that this was more than a methodological mistake—it was a philosophical error. His core idea — that art is the understanding of life — directly challenged formalism’s tendency to separate art from reality. For Voronsky, the artist does not create meaning using clever techniques; instead, they uncover meaning within the world. The artistic image is not merely a tool but a means of revealing life’s true structure. The writer’s role is to shed light on social contradictions and expose what is hidden. Because form helps make content understandable, it cannot be separated from it.
Voronsky’s realism was neither photographic nor naïve. He recognised that life’s truth isn’t always immediately apparent and that artistic imagination is essential to understand its deeper structure. However, this imagination should align with reality, not detach from it. In contrast, formalists viewed imagination as a mere technical tool for perception. Their work reflected the perspective of a petty-bourgeois intelligentsia that had become insecure about comprehending society as a unified whole. Overall, formalism signalled an ideological withdrawal.
Lenin’s opposition to “art for art’s sake” was based on the idea that artistic creation cannot be separated from material life. In his writings on Tolstoy and Gorky, he argued that literature must be understood within its historical context — not merely as propaganda but as a product of class relations and social change. Lenin did not require art to be didactic; instead, he believed that criticism should focus on the social origins of artistic work. To Lenin, formalism was a form of idealism, implying that consciousness can be examined independently of the social and material forces shaping it.
Lenin’s critique of Bogdanov’s idea of ‘proletarian culture’ offers valuable insight. Bogdanov argued that the working class should develop its own culture, distinct from bourgeois art traditions. Lenin, however, saw this as a misinterpretation of Marxism. He emphasised that the working class does not create culture from nothing; instead, it inherits humanity’s entire cultural heritage and transforms it through ongoing struggle. Formalism, similarly, misunderstood art by viewing it as an independent realm separate from history. Lenin maintained that art is an integral part of human consciousness development, shaped by the social contradictions society experiences.
Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution strengthened this critique by emphasising that while artistic freedom must be protected from bureaucratic control, art cannot be separated from the social forces behind it. He argued that formalism, which focuses solely on artistic techniques, mistakes superficial aspects for core meaning, neglecting the historical context that gives art its significance. Trotsky’s dialectical realism acknowledged the vital role of the artist’s imagination, but only as a means to uncover the underlying principles of life.
Trotsky’s critique of futurism is insightful. He appreciated the futurists’ dynamic energy and experimental spirit but criticised their efforts to break away from tradition. He believed art evolves through history and cannot be reshaped by edict alone. Their focus on novelty for novelty’s sake was a type of formalism, equating technical innovation with shifts in consciousness. Trotsky argued that true artistic progress comes from social transformations, not just experimenting with techniques.
The significance of this debate became evident as the Soviet bureaucracy tightened its control. Stalinist cultural policy, with its rigid adherence to “socialist realism,” exemplified a related distortion. While formalism disconnected art from reality by focusing on technique, Stalinism disconnected art by enforcing a bureaucratic version of “correct” content. Both approaches restricted artists from exploring life’s contradictions. Voronsky, Lenin, and Trotsky opposed both because they hindered art’s ability to understand and reflect reality.
Voronsky’s story highlights the political struggles involved. As the editor of Krasnaya Nov, he supported writers who aimed for honest depictions of life, even when their work revealed uncomfortable contradictions for the bureaucracy. Consequently, he was labelled a “Trotskyist” and “formalism sympathiser,” a gross mischaracterisation of his true stance. Voronsky was actually defending realism against both formalist abstraction and bureaucratic distortions. His execution in 1937 was part of the wider campaign to eradicate Marxist culture under Stalin.
Their opposition to formalism matters because it upheld the working class’s ability to understand their own reality. For them, art was not mere decoration but a form of truth. It exposed life’s dynamics, contradictions, and historical development. Formalism rejected this view by reducing art to technical skill and disconnecting it from the social forces that give it meaning.
Kuang’s novel reflects a deadlock similar to what the WSWS highlights in its review of Danzy Senna’s Coloured Television: writers who see flaws in the identity-industrial complex but struggle to critique it because they are part of it. While Kuang’s case differs in specifics, the core issue remains the same. Her novel is described as “sincere and slight,” capable of showing discomfort but not fully analysing or explaining it.[1]
Ultimately, Taipei Story’s shortcomings do not stem from a lack of detail or sincerity. Instead, it reflects a literary perspective that fails to recognise the societal forces behind its own dilemmas. The novel treats alienation as a personal emotional state tied to a social class that experiences it privately—more as discomfort than contradiction. However, alienation is fundamentally a social relationship, rooted in a class position caught between national identities and primarily loyal to the global labour market that displaced it. No amount of fluency, authenticity, or introspection can fix this. Consequently, the novel’s quest for “belonging” is not only insufficient but structurally doomed.
Kuang’s story lacks the depiction of actual history: the movement of skilled workers, the reorganisation of two economies, Taiwan’s shift into a key battleground of great-power rivalry, and the trivialization of culture into consumable pieces for a class lacking a shared cultural experience. These are not mere background details; they are the core forces moulding the protagonist’s awareness. Overlooking these elements confuses the superficial symptoms with the true causes.
The key takeaway is not that Taipei Story should have been “more political,” nor that a better novel would have provided the missing context. Instead, the conclusion is that we can understand this social class’s alienation only from an external perspective—namely, the viewpoint of the international working class. This group experiences culture not as a commodity but as a living expression of collective labour. It has a historical mission to unite the fragmented existence typical of diaspora professionals.
Literature alone cannot eliminate alienation, but it can uncover its roots, clarify its framework, and direct attention beyond personal experience to the social factors that influence it. Taipei Story prioritises emotion over comprehension. Your analysis reestablishes understanding as essential for genuine engagement with feelings. This approach signifies the start of Marxist criticism: understanding life and recognising that even the most personal struggles are only understandable through the course of history.
Further Reading
I. Contemporary Reviews of Taipei Story
The Guardian – Kit Fan, “Taipei Story by Rebecca F. Kuang review – the torture and hilarity of learning Chinese” A detailed mainstream review emphasising the novel’s focus on language acquisition, Lily Chen’s insecurity about her “Chineseness,” and Kuang’s satirical approach to cultural identity.
Scroll. in – Pulari Meera Baskar, “‘Taipei Story’: Rebecca F Kuang grapples with anxieties of being estranged by and within language” Highlights the novel’s exploration of linguistic estrangement, diasporic identity, and the protagonist’s struggle to reconcile American and Chinese cultural belonging.
Asia Blooming – Valerie Wu, “‘Taipei Story’ Travels Around Language to Find Itself” Discusses Kuang’s attempt to move beyond conventional Asian‑American narratives of guilt and linguistic deficiency, while noting the novel’s emphasis on disorientation and failed fluency.
These three reviews provide the factual grounding for this critique of the novel’s thematic focus, its treatment of Taipei as backdrop, and its framing of alienation as a linguistic or emotional dilemma rather than a social one.
II. Contextual Sources on Taiwan, Diaspora, and Geopolitics
(These contextual elements are not directly covered in the review but are essential for the historical and political framing.
WSWS Coverage of Taiwan and US–China Tensions: Analyses of Taiwan as a flashpoint in great‑power conflict, the shared interests of Chinese and Taiwanese workers, and the dangers posed by US militarism in the Asia‑Pacific. (No direct search result returned in this query; included as contextual reference based on your established knowledge and WSWS’s consistent coverage.)
WSWS Review of American Dirt: Examination of identity‑politics policing in literary culture and the displacement of artistic content by demands for “authenticity.” (Contextual reference; not retrieved in this search.)
WSWS Review of Danzy Senna’s Colored Television Analysis of the impasse within the American literary milieu and the inability of certain writers to critique the identity‑industrial complex from within. (Contextual reference; not retrieved in this search.)
III. Marxist Aesthetic Theory (Voronsky, Lenin, Trotsky)
These works underpin the argument that literature must reveal the social forces shaping individual experience, and that formalism — whether technical or identity‑based — represents a retreat from history.
Aleksandr Voronsky – Art as the Cognition of Life: Foundational text asserting that art is a mode of knowing reality, not a technical exercise.
Leon Trotsky – Literature and Revolution: Defence of artistic freedom and dialectical realism; critique of formalism as the fetishisation of technique.
V.I. Lenin – Essays on Tolstoy, Gorky, and proletarian culture. Emphasises the historical roots of artistic production and rejects “art for art’s sake” idealism.
(These are standard Marxist sources; not retrieved in this search but essential to this theoretical framework.)
IV. Secondary Scholarship on Soviet Cultural Debates
Sheila Fitzpatrick – The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia contextualises the debates between formalists, proletarian writers, and Marxist critics.
Katerina Clark – Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution provides historical background on the literary movements of the 1920s.
Viktor Shklovsky – Theory of Prose: Primary formalist text useful for contrasting with Voronsky’s realism.
(Contextual references; not retrieved in this search.)
V. Suggested Further Reading
Georg Lukács – The Meaning of Contemporary Realism: Parallel Marxist critique of modernist formalism.
Fredric Jameson – The Political Unconscious: Structuralist-Marxist account of literature as a socially symbolic act.
Terry Eagleton – Marxism and Literary Criticism: Concise introduction to Marxist aesthetics.
[1] Danzy Senna’s Coloured Television: Lacking the “pathos of distance”https:wsws.org/en/articles/2025/01/31/wjcd-j31.html
Marcus Rediker’s Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea prompts a revaluation of the geography of American slavery and the various forms of resistance that challenged it. For over a century, popular culture has been shaped by a sentimental portrayal of the Underground Railroad: candlelit attics, devout Quakers, heroic white “conductors,” and grateful fugitives guided north by kind-hearted people. This myth, repeatedly shown in textbooks, museums, and liberal media, acts as a political opiate. It reassures the descendants of slaveholders and Northern allies by emphasising white kindness in emancipation, while downplaying Black agency. As Rediker’s own blurb suggests, it serves as an “alibi for whiteness.”
Rediker’s book disputes the common myth by showing that the fight against slavery extended beyond liberal America’s pastoral ideals and was rooted in the docks, wharves, and ships of the Atlantic economy, an often-overlooked proletarian landscape of resistance. The waterfronts of Charleston, Savannah, Norfolk, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston make up what Rediker calls the “Blue Highway”: a maritime route known for mobility, communication, and interracial solidarity, which the slaveholding elite deeply feared. The core argument is that if accepted, it necessitates a major shift in how historians understand resistance to slavery: possibly up to 100,000 enslaved people escaped by sea rather than land. This isn’t a trivial change; it’s a significant shift in our understanding of the geography of self-emancipation.
The Maritime Proletariat and the Geography of Resistance
Rediker depicts a world where enslaved individuals exploited the weaknesses of the maritime economy: its mobility, reliance on Black labour, interracial crews, and porous borders to achieve freedom. The book is rich with tales of bravery and ingenuity: Frederick Douglass escaping Baltimore dressed as a sailor, Harriet Jacobs fleeing North Carolina by sea after hiding in an attic for years, Jonathan Walker branded “SS” for his attempts at slave theft, and William P. Powell’s Coloured Sailors’ Home serving secretly as a centre of information and support.
The book’s greatest strength lies not just in its individual stories but in its depiction of the social infrastructure that supported maritime self-emancipation. Rediker estimates about 20,000 Black sailors, both free and enslaved, operated across the Atlantic and coastal trade during the antebellum period. These sailors served on interracial crews, frequented interracial boarding-houses and taverns, and built communication networks spanning from New Orleans to Boston. The circulation of David Walker’s Appeal, smuggled into Southern ports sewn into sailors’ clothing, embodies this world: a radical document carried by radical workers deep into the heart of the slave system.
The slaveholding class was well aware of the threat the docks posed. Their reaction to the Negro Seamen Acts , which mandated the imprisonment of Black sailors during their ships’ port visits, shows a ruling elite conscious of the docks’ volatile nature. These laws were more than bureaucratic measures; they served as tools of terror to break the bonds between enslaved communities and maritime workers. Their existence highlights the waterfront’s crucial role in slavery politics.
This is Rediker at his strongest. He exposes the Underground Railroad mythology as an ideological project designed to obscure the fact that the overwhelming engine of emancipation was Black self‑activity, supported by a genuinely interracial working-class milieu. He restores the maritime world to its rightful place in the geography of resistance. He demonstrates that the struggle against slavery was not confined to the pastoral imagination of liberal America but surged through the arteries of the Atlantic economy.
Du Bois and the Theory of Self‑Emancipation
To fully understand the significance of Rediker’s contributions, it is important to situate them within the tradition set by W.E.B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction in America (1935). Du Bois argued that the enslaved were not simply passive recipients of freedom; instead, they actively participated in a broad strike against slavery. Their widespread escape to Union lines, refusal to serve their enslavers, and enlistment in the Union Army played a vital role in defeating the Confederacy.
Rediker’s maritime fugitives are an integral part of this tradition, not just isolated heroes but active participants in a broader self-emancipation movement that Du Bois identified as the driving force behind the Civil War. The docks and wharves of the Atlantic economy were more than mere peripheral locations; they functioned as centres of working-class resistance that challenged and destabilized the slave system.
Rediker does not fully position his analysis within Du Bois’s revolutionary framework. He acknowledges important aspects of self-emancipation but misses the dialectical process that turns individual acts of flight into pivotal historical moments. Du Bois held that self-emancipation becomes truly revolutionary only when it profoundly transforms the state. While Rediker alludes to this concept, he does not thoroughly investigate or articulate it.
Oakes, Hahn, and the Political Economy of Emancipation
James Oakes and Steven Hahn expand Du Bois’s analysis by situating self-emancipation within the Civil War’s political economy. Oakes contends that the Republican Party, representing a free-labour bourgeoisie, entered the war with the goal of undermining slavery, using this political opportunity for enslaved people to turn the conflict into a revolutionary fight. Hahn, on the other hand, highlights the long-standing history of Black political activism ranging from maroon communities to rural uprisings that influenced the politics of emancipation.
Rediker’s maritime fugitives fit naturally within this historiographical landscape. They were part of a wider resistance movement that included plantation uprisings, rural insurrections, and wartime mobilisations. Their actions played a role in sparking a political crisis that compelled the Republican Party to face the slaveholding class. Their escapes challenged property rights, showed the limits of coercion, and highlighted the structural weaknesses of the slave system.
However, Rediker does not embed his material within the broader political economy of the Civil War. He details the influence maritime flight had on the slave system but does not illustrate how this pressure was integrated into the fundamental conflict between two opposing labour systems, enslaved and free, that erupted in 1861. Oakes and Hahn offer the analytical framework missing in Rediker’s work: a theory explaining how self-emancipation interacts with political crises to drive revolutionary change.
Marx and the Destruction of Slave Property Relations
Marx viewed slavery not simply as a moral failing but as a particular type of labour exploitation integral to capitalism’s rise. He believed the Civil War represented a bourgeois revolution, with the slave-owning elite, a reactionary part of the ruling class, being overthrown by armed conflict. Marx also recognised that the enslaved individuals, through mass escapes and fighting, played an active role in driving revolutionary change, not just as victims.
Rediker’s book offers the empirical evidence that Marx’s theory requires. The maritime proletariat—interracial, mobile, and essential to the economy—resulted directly from capitalist growth. Atlantic docks and wharves were focal points where the conflicts between slavery and capitalism were most intense. Fugitives escaping by sea sought not only personal freedom but also to challenge the property relations of the slave system.
Rediker does not position his work within Marx’s revolutionary theory. Instead, he highlights the bravery of individual fugitives but doesn’t explain how their actions impacted the abolition of slave property relations. While he reconstructs the social landscape of the maritime proletariat, he fails to analyse its influence on wider capitalist development. Although Marx offers the theoretical framework that Rediker’s book hints at, it does not fully provide it.
The Limits of “History from Below”
Rediker’s approach, organising a series of episodes by port, creates a vivid social history but lacks political analysis. While the book is filled with compelling human stories, it offers limited insight into the underlying processes. It captures the raw elements of revolution but does not follow the development of revolutionary movements. This omission matters; it highlights a core structural limitation inherent in the “history from below” tradition that Rediker has helped shape.
Over the past forty years, Marcus Rediker has established himself as a uniquely influential and politically impactful historian within the Anglo-American academic world. His work is notable not just for its focus on sailors, enslaved Africans, pirates, dockworkers, and fugitives, but also for its methodological and political approach. At a time when much historical scholarship has shifted towards cultural micro-analysis, racial-moral essentialism, or liberal sentimentality, Rediker remains committed to emphasising collective agency, class struggle, and the violent rise of capitalism. His scholarship challenges prevailing historiographical trends, even if it doesn’t entirely depart from them.
Rediker’s body of work, including titles like *Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea*, *Villains of All Nations*, *The Slave Ship*, *The Many-Headed Hydra*, *Outlaws of the Atlantic*, *The Fearless Benjamin Lay*, and now *Freedom Ship*, represents a unified intellectual effort. It aims to chronicle the history of the Atlantic world from the perspective of the marginalised, uncovering the experiences and actions of those whose labour built the early capitalist system and whose resistance constantly challenged its stability. This is not merely “history from below” in a superficial sense; it is a structured history—an exploration of how exploited and oppressed groups influenced the evolution of capitalism through their work and rebellion.
The first type is liberal humanitarianism, which views slavery as a moral tragedy addressed through isolated acts of white benevolence. This approach has shaped the well-known imagery of the Underground Railroad: candlelit attics, benevolent Quakers, and heroic conductors—creating a narrative that, as Rediker’s critics point out, serves as an excuse for whiteness. It sentimentalises resistance, personalises agency, and masks the structural violence inherent in the slave system.
The second form is racial essentialism, exemplified by the 1619 Project and similar efforts. It depicts American history as a continuous battle between whiteness and Blackness, often neglecting class dynamics, capitalist evolution, and political economy. Instead, it portrays race as an independent force that exists outside historical context. This approach leads to a historical narrative that is morally reactive but lacking in analytical depth, loud in political stance yet superficial in historical understanding.
Rediker’s work counters both common tendencies. His histories avoid sentimentality and essentialism. They employ a materialist approach, even if not using explicitly Marxist language. He demonstrates that interracial solidarities were real and significant; that enslaved individuals were active agents rather than passive victims; that the maritime economy was a space of both exploitation and resistance; and that the slaveholding class viewed the docks as a structural threat.
His latest book, *Freedom Ship*, clearly illustrates this challenge by suggesting that tens of thousands, possibly up to 100,000, enslaved individuals escaped by sea rather than land. Accepting this shifts how historians understand resistance to slavery, replacing the traditional Underground Railroad imagery with the docks, wharves, and ship decks of the Atlantic economy. The waterfront becomes a space of movement, communication, and interracial cooperation, which the slaveholding class feared greatly.
Rediker depicts a world where enslaved people leverage vulnerabilities in the maritime economy—such as its mobility, reliance on Black labour, interracial crews, and porous boundaries—to achieve their liberation. He estimates that around 20,000 Black sailors participated in the coastal trade during the antebellum period. These sailors worked on interracial crews, stayed in interracial boarding-houses and taverns, and built communication networks from New Orleans to Boston. A notable example is the circulation of David Walker’s Appeal, which was secretly smuggled into Southern ports sewn into sailors’ clothing, symbolising this interconnected world: a radical message carried by radical workers into the core of the slave system.
The slaveholding class clearly recognised the threat. Their reaction, the Negro Seamen Acts, mandated the detention of Black sailors during their ships’ port visits, demonstrating an elite conscious of the volatile dockside environment. These laws were more than mere regulations; they served as tools of intimidation aimed at breaking bonds between enslaved groups and maritime workers. Their existence underscores the waterfront’s critical role in slavery’s political landscape.
However, Rediker’s work also highlights some limitations of the “history from below” approach. While his narratives are detailed and human, they tend to lack deep political analysis. He covers the instances of revolution, solidarity, and sabotage—the raw elements—yet does not fully connect these actions to the larger revolutionary upheaval that led to the abolition of slavery. In this context, the perspectives of W.E.B. Du Bois, James Oakes, and Steven Hahn are crucial.
Du Bois recognized that self-emancipation only gains historical significance when it intersects with a change in the state. Oakes explained how the Republican Party, representing a free-labor bourgeoisie, served as the political platform for enslaved people to turn the Civil War into a revolutionary movement. Hahn highlighted the extensive history of Black political activism that influenced the politics of emancipation.
Rediker’s maritime fugitives fit within this tradition, but his work doesn’t explicitly situate them there. He restores agency but stops short of explaining how agency leads to revolution. He rebuilds the social world of the maritime proletariat but doesn’t examine its part in dismantling slave property relations. While his work offers an important correction to liberal historiography, it remains incomplete as a Marxist synthesis.
Nevertheless, Rediker’s contribution remains significant. He has repositioned the Atlantic working class at the core of early modern history. His work demonstrates that resistance was systemic rather than isolated events. He also contests the racial-moral narratives prevalent in today’s discussions. Furthermore, he offers the empirical basis needed for developing a more comprehensive Marxist explanation of slavery’s downfall.
Freedom Ship is a truly valuable book that reestablishes the maritime world’s role in resistance history. It reveals the interracial working-class solidarities long suppressed by bourgeois narratives and challenges the liberal notion that white benevolence alone led to Black liberation. However, it stops short of offering a complete Marxist view of emancipation, which emphasizes the dialectical unity of self-activity and revolutionary crisis, individual bravery, class struggle, flight, and armed insurrection under the Union’s banner. The broader challenge—showing that slavery was ended not by moral sentiment but through revolution—remains. It is the task of Marxist historiography to demonstrate that enslaved people were not merely passengers on a “Freedom Ship,” but active participants in overthrowing a reactionary ruling class.
Notes
I. Major Works by Marcus Rediker
These are the core monographs that define Rediker’s contribution to Atlantic, maritime, and labour history.
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo‑American Maritime World, 1700–1750 Cambridge University Press, 1987.
The Many‑Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic Beacon Press / Verso, 2000. (with Peter Linebaugh)
Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age Beacon Press / Verso, 2004.
The Slave Ship: A Human History Viking, 2007.
The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom Viking‑Penguin, 2012.
Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail Beacon Press / Verso, 2014.
The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist Beacon Press, 2017.
Prophet Against Slavery: Benjamin Lay (Graphic History) Beacon Press, 2021. (with David Lester and Paul Buhle)
Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea Viking, 2025.
II. Edited Volumes
Rediker has co‑edited several major collections that broaden the historiography of Atlantic labour, mutiny, and forced migration.
Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World University of California Press, 2007. (with Emma Christopher & Cassandra Pybus)
Mutiny and Maritime Radicalism in the Age of Revolution: A Global Survey Cambridge University Press, 2013. (with Niklas Frykman, Clare Anderson & Lex Heerma van Voss)
A Global History of Runaways: Workers, Mobility, and Capitalism, 1650–1850 University of California Press, 2019. (with Titas Chakraborty & Matthias van Rossum)
Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society, Volume 1 Pantheon Books, 1989.
III. Selected Scholarly Articles
A sample of Rediker’s most influential academic articles.
“The Many‑Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, and the Atlantic Working Class in the Eighteenth Century.” Journal of Historical Sociology 3 (1990).
“Under the Banner of King Death: The Social World of Anglo‑American Pirates, 1716–1726.” William and Mary Quarterly (1981).
“The Poetics of History from Below.” Perspectives on History (AHA), 2010.
“Reflections in History from Below.” Trashumante: Revista Americana de Historia Social (2022).
“Escaping Slavery by Sea in Antebellum America: A Labor History.” Mundos do Trabalho (Brazil), 2022.
“Good Hands, Stout Heart, and Fast Feet: The History and Culture of Working People in Early America.” Labour/Le Travail 10 (1982).
IV. Public Writing and Commentary
Rediker’s public‑facing essays extend his historiographical project into contemporary debates.
“Enlightenment from Below: Pirates and Radical Democracy in Madagascar.” The Nation (2023).
“Staughton Lynd’s Radicalism from Below.” The Nation (2022).
“Julius S. Scott Captured the Haitian Revolution’s Emancipatory Reach.” Jacobin (2021).
“Serendipity in the Archives.” Public Seminar (2021).
“The Forgotten Prophet.” Aeon (2018).
“You’ll Never Be as Radical as This 18th‑Century Quaker Dwarf.” New York Times (2017).
“America’s Dark Page.” The American Scholar (2008).
“Atonement for Slave Trade.” Los Angeles Times (2008).
“Slavery: A Shark’s Perspective.” Boston Globe (2007).
V. Secondary Scholarship and Context
These works are essential for situating Rediker within the broader historiographical tradition of Atlantic labour, slavery, and revolution.
Foundational Marxist and Atlantic Historiography
W.E.B. Du Bois — Black Reconstruction in America (1935).
C.L.R. James — The Black Jacobins (1938).
Eric Williams — Capitalism and Slavery (1944).
Peter Linebaugh — Stop, Thief! (2014).
Julius S. Scott — The Common Wind (2018).
Contemporary Scholarship on Emancipation and Agency
James Oakes — Freedom National (2012); The Scorpion’s Sting (2014).
Steven Hahn — A Nation Under Our Feet (2003).
Stephanie Smallwood — Saltwater Slavery (2007).
Vincent Brown — Tacky’s Revolt (2020).
Reviews of Rediker’s Work
Eric Foner, “Review of Freedom Ship,” New York Review of Books (2025).
Numerous reviews in Journal of American History, William and Mary Quarterly, International Review of Social History, etc.
VI. Suggested Citation Format (Chicago)
Book Rediker, Marcus. The Slave Ship: A Human History. New York: Viking, 2007.
Article Rediker, Marcus. “The Many‑Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, and the Atlantic Working Class in the Eighteenth Century.” Journal of Historical Sociology 3 (1990): 225–252.
Edited Volume Christopher, Emma, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker, eds. Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
Pip: A boy visits a supermarket sandwich counter every day just to watch a woman with electric-blue eyeshadow — and somehow that becomes a precise diagnosis of late capitalism. freerein61 has a gift for finding the load-bearing wall inside what looks like a modest room.
Mara: This episode follows that single piece closely — Kawakami's novella, the translation choices behind it, and what it reveals about care, atomization, and the limits of what a child can know. Let's start with the novella itself and what it actually argues.
Mieko Kawakami's Ms Ice Sandwich: Minor Work or Precise Miniature?
Mara: The central claim here is that Ms Ice Sandwich has been systematically underread — praised as charming and slight, positioned as a warm-up act for Kawakami's bigger novels, when it is actually doing serious work in a small frame. The question is what that work is and why the modest scale is the point, not a limitation.
Pip: The post roots the argument in the boy's inner life, and the novella's own language makes the stakes plain: "The worst thing is, you never know when somebody's going just to disappear." That line is the emotional grammar of the whole book.
Mara: And disappearance here is structural, not dramatic. The mother is present but absorbed — in her phone, a new relationship, the thin margins of precarious work. The grandmother is tended at home because, as the post puts it, no adequately funded public institution exists to provide care. The boy's loneliness is not exceptional; it is the ambient condition of a society that has privatized care and commodified attention.
Pip: So the supermarket visits are not a crush — they are a child locating the one stable point of attention in a world that keeps dissolving around him. Which is a fairly devastating thing to bury inside a novella about sandwiches.
Mara: The post draws on Aleksandr Voronsky's argument that art's social function is "the cognition of life," not instruction. Kawakami never editorializes. She does not explain the mother's exhaustion or the grandmother's decline. She renders them as unremarked texture, and the reader perceives the social world precisely because the narrator cannot.
Pip: Louise Heal Kawai's translation gets serious attention here too — the argument is that her restraint matches Kawakami's own. She keeps the boy's clipped observations and natural repetitions without smoothing them into something more comfortable for an English-speaking audience.
Mara: The post also addresses the comparison to Breasts and Eggs directly: being more explicit does not mean being more artistically successful. The novella's strict fidelity to the child's perspective — no imported political agenda, no false resolution — is what makes it work as understanding rather than didacticism.
Pip: A small room, load-bearing walls, no exits. That is the architecture.
Mara: Exactly the structure the post defends.
Pip: What stays with me is the argument that a book can be truthful precisely by refusing to imagine what its world cannot produce — no child in that household could think his way to structural change.
Mara: That fidelity to what a consciousness can actually hold — that's the thread worth pulling next time.
Mieko Kawakami’s Ms Ice Sandwich (2013; translated into English by Louise Heal Kawai, Pushkin Press, 2017) has been widely praised as a charming, light novella, a quirky story of childhood crushes and a whimsical introduction to her more expansive works like Breasts and Eggs and Heaven. This praise isn’t superficial; it reflects a broader trend. Modern literary criticism, driven by market demands for longer, topical, and relevant works, often dismisses short, precise pieces as minor. As a result, the novella as a literary form is often seen as inherently modest and unworthy of serious social commentary.
Louise Heal Kawai’s translation of Ms Ice Sandwich is vital in conveying the novella’s quiet emotional power into English. Her translation exemplifies restraint, tonal fidelity, and an intuitive understanding of Kawakami’s focus on childhood. Kawai maintains the narrator’s voice, capturing its awkwardness and innocence without smoothing it out. The boy’s clipped observations, quirky phrases, and natural repetitions are conveyed in English with a subtlety that feels genuine. This authenticity is essential, as the story’s structure relies heavily on a child’s realistic inner monologue.
Kawai’s English translation preserves Kawakami’s straightforward and rhythmic style, which is deceptively simple. She intentionally avoids embellishing the prose for an English-speaking audience, keeping it sparse so that emotional depth arises from detailed moments rather than explicit commentary. This restraint reflects Kawakami’s own choice to avoid editorialising. The translation strikes a delicate balance between tenderness and fragmentation, avoiding over-explanation of cultural details or making them feel flat. Elements like the supermarket, convenience-store meals, and grandmother’s care are rendered subtly, allowing readers to sense the social pressures without explicit explanation.
Kawai’s extensive work translating contemporary Japanese women writers demonstrates her dedication to capturing voices that speak in everyday language. Ms Ice Sandwich benefits from this background, as she recognises that Kawakami’s strength lies in emotional accuracy rather than stylistic flair. Far from a detour in Kawakami’s development, Ms Ice Sandwich exemplifies her artistic approach: honest portrayals of consciousness free from sentimentality, social agendas, or distortions of the world she depicts. The novel investigates childhood innocence against the backdrop of late capitalism, a society where care is privatised, attention is commodified, and cruelty subtly permeates daily life.
The novella’s strength is not in its narrative breadth but in its honesty. It captures how a child understands neglect, difference, and disappearance in a society that lacks stable social structures to keep people visible. In this way, Ms Ice Sandwich is far from a minor work. It is a clear, concise miniature, and its modesty reflects true artistic integrity.
The novella is narrated by an unnamed fourth-grade narrator who secretly fixates on a young woman at a supermarket sandwich counter. Her electric-blue eyeshadow, bold, unrepentant, and intentionally unfashionable, captures his complete attention. He calls her “Ms Ice Sandwich,” visits daily to see her make sandwiches, and builds a delicate emotional connection around her.
This fixation is not precocious romance. Kawakami is careful to avoid sentimentality. The boy’s attachment is a child’s attempt to find stability and recognition in a world where both are scarce. Around this fragile point of attention, Kawakami arranges the real substance of his life: a mother physically present but emotionally absent, absorbed in her phone and a new relationship, stretched thin by work and domestic responsibilities; a grandmother in a near-vegetative state, tended at home because no adequately funded public institution exists to provide care; a classmate, Tutti, herself isolated and motherless, who becomes the boy’s only confidant; a household running on convenience-store sandwiches, thin margins, and thinner emotional reserves.
None of this is presented as social critique. Kawakami does not editorialise. She does not explain the mother’s exhaustion, the grandmother’s illness, or the economic pressures shaping the household. She renders them as the unremarked texture of daily life, the background conditions against which the boy’s consciousness takes shape.
This restraint is not a limitation. It is the mark of a writer committed to truth. As Aleksandr Voronsky argued, art’s social function is “the cognition of life,” not instruction. Kawakami’s fidelity to the child’s perspective allows the reader to perceive the social world precisely because the narrator cannot.
The boy’s world is one in which neglect is not dramatic but ambient. It is not an event; it is an atmosphere. The mother’s remoteness is not cruelty but exhaustion. The grandmother’s decline is not tragedy but routine. The boy’s loneliness is not exceptional but structural. The novella’s abiding anxiety is the disappearance of people, of attention, of care. As the narrator puts it, “The worst thing is, you never know when somebody’s going just to disappear.” The line is characteristic: disappearance is the emotional grammar of atomised life.
The novella depicts small yet impactful moments of cruelty. Adults gossip that Ms Ice Sandwich’s eyeshadow conceals unsuccessful cosmetic surgery, while children tease Tutti’s physical difference. The boy gradually and painfully realises that those who differ from societal beauty standards are easily marginalised. These scenes are not meant as moral lessons but offer initial insights into a society structured around appearance and consumption, which categorises people into visible and invisible groups. Kawakami’s skill lies in showing the child’s experience of this sorting process without explicitly explaining it. She portrays cruelty as the child perceives it: sudden, confusing, and unanswerable.
Rosa Luxemburg emphasised that, for true artists, the social principles they promote are secondary; what truly matters is the inspiration behind their art. In Kawakami’s work, this inspiration is a commitment to fidelity and a refusal to distort the consciousness her world fosters. She refrains from attributing insights to children that they cannot have and avoids imposing top-down social explanations. Instead, she depicts cruelty as it manifests in real life: not as an ideology, but as everyday humiliations and small humiliations.
In this sense, Ms Ice Sandwich illustrates how cruelty is acquired rather than taught. It is absorbed through social interactions such as gossip, mockery, and casual judgments made by both adults and children. The novella primarily focuses on the boy’s awakening to this cruelty.
The novella depicts a highly fragmented social world. The family unit has broken down into separate individuals. Care responsibilities are privatised, and attention becomes a commodity. The grandmother’s illness remains managed at home due to the inadequacy of public institutions; economic strain and precarious work conditions influence the mother’s emotional withdrawal. The household’s dependence on convenience-store food is not a mere detail but a sign of deeper issues.
Anne Allison’s Precarious Japan accurately characterises a society where economic insecurity, demographic decline, and weakening social ties create widespread loneliness. Kawakami’s novella isn’t a sociological analysis, but it depicts this situation vividly. The boy’s loneliness isn’t accidental; it results from a society where social structures have been stripped down and weakened.
The grandmother’s silent, immobile presence is symbolic. She holds the boy’s confidences, being the only adult he speaks to freely, yet she cannot respond. Her care is unpaid, unseen, and draining. Her illness isn’t a dramatic plot device but a structural element of the story. Similarly, the mother’s exhaustion is a structural reality, not due to neglect but to being overwhelmed by a society that privatises care and commodifies attention. Kawakami doesn’t explain this directly, and she doesn’t need to. The truth lies in the details of the boy’s life. This exemplifies Voronsky’s “cognition of life”: art that reveals social realities not through analysis but through honest depiction.
Many critics view the novella’s lack of depiction of social change as a weakness. The boy’s development occurs through personal growth rather than a change in the social circumstances causing neglect. The grandmother stays ill, the mother remains burdened, and economic pressures are unchanged. However, from a Marxist perspective, this is not a flaw but the book’s truthful representation.
Leon Trotsky, in Literature and Revolution, argued that revolutionary art cannot be created by simply giving the artist a specific program. Art that tries to “solve” social issues directly risks becoming propaganda. Artistic success is measured not by whether a work advocates social change but by whether it truthfully depicts life.
Ms Ice Sandwich succeeds exactly because it stays true to its world, not trying to go beyond it. The boy’s personal resolve isn’t an escape from social reality but its true form within individual isolation. In a society where people deal with socially caused suffering as private issues, the child can’t envision changing the situation because no individual alone can. It would be false to expect him to understand his mother’s overwork or his grandmother’s illness as social issues. This would be an unrealistic projection of awareness that the depicted world can’t produce. Kawakami declines this falsehood, marking her as a truthful writer. The novella does not “stop short” of imagining change. It depicts a world in which such imagination is structurally impossible. This is not a limitation; it is the book’s fidelity to reality.
Some might see Ms Ice Sandwich as a precursor to Breasts and Eggs, which explores themes like reproductive labour, bodily autonomy, and class more directly. However, being direct doesn’t necessarily equate to artistic greatness. A modest piece that honestly depicts its subject can sometimes be more valuable than a grander work that tries to explain what it can’t fully explain. The common thread in Kawakami’s work isn’t size but sensitivity: her keen awareness of the gritty details of women’s and children’s daily struggles, loneliness, and resilience. Ms Ice Sandwich isn’t a minor piece; it’s a focused one. Its small scope is a strength, supporting the work rather than restricting it. The novella’s strict adherence to the child’s perspective, avoiding sentimentality, editorialising, or falsification, is what makes it an artistic success. It functions as a work of understanding, not didacticism. By showing the social world through the eyes of a child who cannot grasp it, it enables the reader to see what the child cannot.
A Novella of Tenderness, Cruelty, and Truth
Ms Ice Sandwich is a genuinely modest book. Its compassion lies with the overlooked: the elderly, the sick, the underpaid, and those who are visibly different. It portrays childhood awareness without sentimentality, false comfort, or an imported political agenda. The book doesn’t attempt to resolve the social issues it depicts, nor does it envision a world beyond fragmentation. It doesn’t give children insights they couldn’t naturally have. Instead, it presents an honest view of a world where care is privatised, attention is treated as a commodity, and cruelty flows casually through everyday life. That is its achievement, and it is enough.
Sources and Bibliography
Primary Texts
Kawakami, Mieko. Ms Ice Sandwich. Translated by Louise Heal Kawai. Pushkin Press, 2017.
Kawakami, Mieko. Breasts and Eggs. Translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd. Picador, 2020.
Kawakami, Mieko. Heaven. Translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd. Europa Editions, 2021.
Marxist Aesthetics
Luxemburg, Rosa. “The Russian Revolution.” In The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, edited by Peter Hudis and Kevin Anderson. Monthly Review Press, 2004.
Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution. Translated by Rose Strunsky. Pathfinder Press, 1991.
Voronsky, Aleksandr. Art as the Cognition of Life: Selected Writings. Edited by Frederick Choate. Mehring Books, 1998.
Secondary Criticism and Context
Allison, Anne. Precarious Japan. Duke University Press, 2013.
Uno, Kathleen. “Care Work and the Japanese Family.” Journal of Asian Studies 62, no. 3 (2003): 695–718.
Saito, Kohei. Marx in the Anthropocene. Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Napier, Susan. The Anime Aesthetic and Japanese Modernity. Harvard University Press, 2005.
James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages is the latest addition to a rising genre of critique lamenting modern institutions: an elegy for reading, attention, and the “culture of print.” It is a compact, quotable book that resonates with the concerns of the Times/Guardian opinion pages. Its core argument can be summarised: smartphones are dismantling the foundations of the modern world. While Gutenberg’s invention fostered democracy, TikTok and similar platforms are eroding it.
This argument isn’t entirely original, nor is it completely incorrect. The real issue isn’t just the fact that literacy is stagnating, attention spans are fragmenting, or cultural life is deteriorating—it’s the explanation behind these trends. Marriott presents a technologically deterministic story in which print pioneered modernity and smartphones are now destroying it. He omits the important social, economic, and class questions. Essentially, his book laments “slop” without considering who produces it, who benefits, or why the institutions that once supported literacy have been systematically dismantled. In short, it’s a diagnosis that reassures its audience by avoiding the root causes of the problem.
Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death
Neil Postman’s ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’ (1985) remains a highly insightful analysis of how public life has transformed under late capitalism. Written at the peak of the television era, Postman contended that the key change in modern culture was not ideological but epistemological: a shift from a print-based public sphere to one ruled by entertainment media. He cautioned that this shift led to a society where the spectacle’s logic replaces political debate, historical memory, and civic seriousness.
Postman’s key insight was straightforward yet powerful: each medium has a bias toward particular ways of thinking. Print fosters linear reasoning, focus, and gradual argument development. Conversely, television breaks discourse into images, emotional signals, and quick edits. A culture shifting between these mediums not only changes its habits but also its ability to think. As Postman observed, “We become what we behold,” and a society fixated on entertainment risks losing the capacity for meaningful democratic debate.
Postman’s book remains powerful because he saw this change as rooted in institutions, not just psychology. Television didn’t undermine politics because viewers lacked willpower; it did so because commercial media found trivial content profitable. The way the medium processes knowledge is linked to its economic system. Postman’s critique isn’t just about missing reading but about cautioning against reshaping public communication for profit.
From a Marxist perspective, Postman’s limitation is also evident. He pointed out the symptoms—the breakdown of rational discourse, the ascendancy of spectacle, and the infantilization of politics—but failed to explore the root causes. He didn’t ask why entertainment became the primary cultural form, who owned the media institutions driving this change, or how the commodification of attention altered the work environment, the educational system, and public life. His concept of ‘technopoly’ described a cultural state rather than a social relationship.
However, this oversight does not lessen the book’s importance. In fact, the smartphone era has validated Postman’s insights more than he might have envisioned. The pattern he observed—entertainment functioning as a form of knowledge and distraction serving as an ideology—has grown stronger through platforms designed to profit from every moment of human attention. The dynamics Postman described in television now underpin digital capitalism.
Today’s goal isn’t just to echo Postman’s warnings but to act on them. The crisis in public discourse isn’t driven by technology itself; rather, it’s rooted in the economic system that uses technology to fragment our awareness and maximise profit. *Amusing Ourselves to Death* stays vital because it illustrates how culture deteriorates when communication is treated as a commodity. However, it doesn’t fully clarify why this commodification happened or why undoing it demands social change rather than moral preaching.
The Whig Interpretation of Print Culture
Marriott’s traditional approach is well-known. He traces a direct line from Gutenberg to Locke, linking pamphlets to parliaments, and literacy to liberty. “With rising literacy came the world we recognise today,” he states, implying literacy is an independent force—like a harmless contagion—that spreads reason and democracy wherever it goes. This reflects the Whig interpretation of print culture in its most straightforward form. It views technology as the driving force of history and considers culture a natural outcome, presenting history as free of conflict, opposition, or social classes.
The truth was different. The rise of print in the 17th and 18th centuries was not the cause of revolutionary change, but rather a tool. The pamphlet wars during the English Civil War, the Enlightenment thinkers, the radical newspapers of the 1790s, and the Chartist press didn’t emerge simply because printing was available. These movements developed because new social classes were forming, fighting, organising, and needed literacy to express their goals. The bourgeoisie used print to overthrow feudalism, while the working class needed it to understand and challenge the new system that replaced it.
Marriott reverses cause and effect to craft a history where the bourgeoisie is merely a reading audience, not a revolutionary force; the proletariat is absent; and literacy exists independently of its material prerequisites. This portrayal aligns with the Times’ favoured narrative: refined, devoid of bloodshed, and boosting the self-image of the educated middle class.
The Smartphone as Scapegoat
Marriott’s depiction of the current situation mirrors the same evasion. He describes the smartphone as “an invasive species” within the cultural ecosystem. This metaphor is telling: invasive species come from outside, uninvited and unplanned, seen as natural disasters rather than social constructs. However, the smartphone did not simply emerge by chance. Corporations intentionally designed, manufactured, marketed, and distributed it, and their core business relies on capturing and destroying sustained attention. Companies like Meta, Google, ByteDance, and others have developed systems that profit from addiction, fragmenting consciousness and turning every idle moment into a source of revenue. In this view, the smartphone isn’t the villain; it’s capital itself that bears responsibility.
Marriott’s choice not to specify this is intentional and forms the book’s central theme. It lacks chapters on the advertising-revenue model that makes engagement-focused design profitable. No sections discuss austerity measures that have decimated public libraries, adult education, and humanities programs. The book also omits topics like the casualisation of academic labour and how universities have become debt-driven institutions. Furthermore, it does not address that students struggling with classics like Dickens often work two jobs to afford fees that once were negligible.
The reading crisis is often seen as a failure of personal willpower rather than a weakness in social infrastructure. The moral appeal of ‘put down the phone, pick up the book’ targets those who still have free time to read, while it is directed at a class that increasingly lacks this leisure.
Why the Commentariat Loves This Book
It’s worth considering why Marriott’s book has been so warmly received by the very media outlets that helped foster the conditions he criticises. The reason is straightforward: it focuses on the wrong enemy. Criticising mass culture by blaming technology instead of capital doesn’t threaten the institutions that publish such critiques. This lets outlets like the Times and the Guardian lament “slop” while still profiting from the same attention-driven economy that creates it. It also appeals to their audience—the few who can read a 208-page book—by suggesting that their own habits are the final defence against chaos.
Most importantly, it lets commentators talk about cultural decline while avoiding underlying social issues such as deindustrialisation in entire regions, the loss of stable jobs, the fragmentation of youth communities, the breakdown of public services, and the militarisation of foreign policy. These are the true causes of the “post-literate society,” yet they are exactly the subjects the Times tends to steer clear of.
Marriott’s book is therefore valuable. It presents a crisis for discussion, highlighting issues often examined endlessly without considering the underlying economic system. Marriott correctly notes that sustained reading encourages sustained thought, which has political consequences as its decline makes the public more vulnerable to demagoguery. Viewing this purely as a technological problem misses the core issue. Trotsky emphasised that cultural issues are always linked to material conditions. Literacy relies on factors like free time, decent housing, proper nutrition, quality schools, and a shorter workday that allows leisure. Culture doesn’t develop in isolation but arises during the free hours after work.
Marriott’s emphasis on “the written word” overlooks important social realities. It defends reading for a privileged class that still has free time, ignoring the circumstances that deprive millions of that opportunity. The connection between readers was never just about printed material; it was built through struggles over education, working hours, and leisure rights. Reclaiming that link won’t come through moral pleas or nostalgia; it requires a fight over resources and societal structures that shape who can find time, energy, and institutional support to read. This essential conflict is missing from The New Dark Ages, and its absence reveals the book’s true focus.
A Crisis Misnamed, A Crisis Unresolved
Marriott has written a book about the death of reading that refuses to ask why reading is dying. He has written a book about cultural decay that refuses to name the social decay beneath it. He has written a book about democracy that refuses to mention the economic order that has hollowed democracy out.It is a jeremiad against “slop” that never asks who cooks the slop, who profits from it, and why so many people have no alternative.The crisis of literacy is real. The crisis of attention is real. The crisis of culture is real. But smartphones don’t cause them. They are caused by capitalism.
Valeria Luiselli’s Beginning Middle End centres on themes of crisis. Its unnamed narrator and her twelve-year-old daughter travel through a Sicily shaken by volcanic activity and erratic weather patterns; migrants linger on the story’s fringes; and the stresses of separation and remarriage have fractured a family. This backdrop sets the stage for a novel that could insightfully reflect on 2026—a period marked by mass displacement, ecological disaster, and the weakening of institutions that once supported working-class life. Luiselli explicitly recognises these issues, naming them openly, yet her overall engagement with these themes remains somewhat limited.
The novel centers on a more specific issue: a writer’s struggle to create her book. The narrator is fixated on choosing a form, obsessing over ‘beginnings,’ and makes this uncertainty the heart of her story. This reflects a common trend in contemporary literary fiction — shifting focus from social realities to the writer’s internal process, where anxiety about writing takes precedence over genuine engagement with the characters’ circumstances. The migrants, Manuela and her mother in Sicily, function more as atmospheric elements, providing a backdrop for the narrator’s divorce and her somewhat distant new partner. The volcano symbolizes self-doubt and uncertainty rather than posing a literal danger.
This retreat emphasizes social context over personal choice, reflecting the authors’ social class and distancing from the intense crises they mention. Instead, they draw on these crises to examine themes such as identity, motherhood, and the evolving nature of the self. Mythological references—Proteus, Ovid, Pliny—give an impression of ancient universality but mainly aestheticize dislocation instead of clarifying it. Actual migration driven by capitalism involves obvious forces like war, austerity, and exploitation of the global South. Luiselli’s Sicily does not include these elements and primarily serves as a backdrop for inner reflection.
Luiselli’s Earlier Work and the Arc Toward Beginning Middle End
Valeria Luiselli’s earlier works — Tell Me How It Ends (2017) and Lost Children Archive (2019) — were widely praised as urgent political responses to the U.S.–Mexico migration crisis. They connected with the liberal-left by offering a humanitarian view on displacement: personal, essay-like, emotionally powerful, and highlighting the moral responsibilities of witnesses, lawyers, and artists. Yet, even at their most outward-looking, these works revealed the limits of Luiselli’s political scope.
While ‘Tell Me How It Ends’ effectively examines migration, it primarily centers on the asylum process within bureaucratic frameworks. The violence resulting from U.S. imperialism—such as wars, coups, and economic devastation causing displacement—remains largely outside this focus. The crisis is presented more as a moral failure of institutions rather than a consequence of capitalism’s systemic effects. Similarly, ‘Lost Children Archive’ adopts this viewpoint, depicting migrant children as symbols in a hybrid essay-novel that investigates documentary ethics, family disintegration, and narrative vulnerability. In this context, migrants are portrayed as symbolic figures in a reflection on representation, rather than as historical actors motivated by particular forces.
This progression clearly advances from Beginning to Middle to End. The initially political focus that shaped Luiselli’s work has transformed into an atmosphere filled with tremors, metaphors, and fleeting shadows. While the humanitarian issues remain, they are now woven into autofiction’s introspective lens. The crises previously explored are now only acknowledged to be integrated into the narrator’s personal reflection. As a result, the social context becomes more confined, whereas the self’s significance expands.
Luiselli’s evolution exemplifies a wider trend in the pseudo-left literary scene: shifting from external humanitarian critique to inward-focused autofiction, from depicting crisis to aestheticizing it, and from engaging politically to avoiding politics. Her early work referenced history, but her latest novel diverges from it. This shift is intentional and mirrors the social position of today’s dominant writers. This group senses instability but cannot envision collective action, so they transform crisis into mood, metaphor, and personal drama.
Autofiction as Ideological Retreat
Luiselli’s method reflects a wider ideological trend rather than an isolated artistic decision. The rise of autofiction in recent years aligns with a sense of political disorientation among the professional-managerial intellectuals. Facing a world perceived as overwhelming—politically stagnant, socially divided, and historically obscure—this group retreats inward. They place their trust in the self, viewing it as the only realm where meaning can be regained.
Autofiction’s core technique is turning structural crises into personal moods. Issues like migration, ecological breakdown, and institutional decay are portrayed as atmospheric disturbances—serving as material for introspection rather than direct analysis. The writer’s anxieties, relationships, and creative struggles are amplified to symbolize universal themes, while the underlying forces remain unexplored. In this process, crisis is transformed into metaphor, and politics into ambiance.
This inward focus reveals the authors’ social standing: they are culturally cosmopolitan and institutionally vulnerable, yet protected from the harsh realities of austerity, war, and displacement. While they sense instability, they do not confront its most severe aspects. Consequently, social crises seem distant, symbolic, and suitable for aesthetic expression rather than political explanation. Autofiction’s engagement with politics — issues like climate change, migration, and identity — tends to serve as moral signaling rather than providing analysis. It aligns with the pseudo-left’s experience-based politics: anti-materialist, anti-historical, and deeply pessimistic about collective action.
Luiselli’s novel exemplifies this tendency. It registers crisis but cannot enter it. It names the world but refuses to explain it. The narrator’s private reckoning becomes the novel’s horizon; the world’s crises remain unresolved, unexamined, and fundamentally unimportant.
A Shrinking Horizon
Valeria Luiselli holds a unique place in contemporary literature as a writer known for her political seriousness. Her work increasingly reveals the ideological confines of the professional-managerial class she comes from. Typically associated with the “politically engaged” faction of modern fiction—writers exploring migration, borders, ecological issues, and state violence—her approach is rooted more in humanitarian concerns linked to NGOs than in a materialist Her role in modern literature is twofold. She is a talented stylist who reflects the anxieties of a social class experiencing instability but unaware of its causes. Additionally, she symbolizes a literary culture that hints at political engagement but ultimately pulls back—an aestheticization of crisis rather than direct confrontation with the systemic forces behind it. Luiselli is significant because she exposes the limitations of the current “political novel.” Her work demonstrates how social crises can be easily absorbed into the personal dramas of the educated class, with the humanitarian instinct often replacing thorough historical analysis. She is not an outsider but a representative figure, embodying the trajectory of modern literature—focused inward, self-reflective, creatively formal, and politically evasive when clarity is needed.
Luiselli’s talent is clear, marked by sharp prose, innovative structure, and emotionally impactful portrayals of mother and daughter. However, her mastery, confined to a specific scope, highlights an important issue. Like many autofiction pieces in Anglo-American literature, the emphasis is mainly on personal consciousness as the primary subject, with social influences briefly touched upon and then largely overlooked.
This novel, which explores themes like migration, divorce, and ecological disaster, concludes with a private family mosaic—symbolizing personal healing—and chooses a restrained scope despite its mythic embellishments. Its craftsmanship makes it worth reading, though it offers limited insights into the worlds it depicts. Luiselli’s talent as a stylist remains strong; however, her career’s trajectory shows a narrowing of focus—from global issues to personal reflection, from historical context to mood, and from politics to introspection. “Beginning Middle End” isn’t a departure from her previous work but rather its natural culmination.
Sources and Bibliography
Primary Works by Valeria Luiselli
Faces in the Crowd (2011) — Luiselli’s debut novel, exploring fragmented identity and literary self‑reflexivity.
The Story of My Teeth (2013) — An experimental novel centred on an auctioneer named Highway; notable for its collaborative origins.
Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (2016) — Nonfiction account of the U.S.–Mexico migration system, structured around the intake questionnaire used in immigration proceedings.
Lost Children Archive (2019) — A hybrid novel‑essay about a family road trip and the U.S. child‑migration crisis.
Beginning Middle End (2026) — The new novel, centred on a mother and daughter in Sicily amid environmental instability and personal upheaval.
Additional nonfiction and editorial work includes Sidewalks (2010), Papeles falsos (2010), and contributions to anthologies such as The Best Short Stories 2022.
Secondary Sources and Bibliographic Listings
Reading Order Books – Complete Bibliography: Comprehensive listing of Luiselli’s works across nonfiction and fiction, including publication dates and series categorisation.
FictionDB – Author Bibliography: Publication timeline, awards, and genre classifications for Luiselli’s major works.
Goodreads – Works by Valeria Luiselli: ratings, editions, and publication years for Luiselli’s novels, essays, and editorial projects.
Critical Context and Reception
Awards and Recognition
Faces in the Crowd — L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction (2014).
Lost Children Archive — Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction (2020).
Genre and Thematic Classification: Luiselli’s work is consistently shelved under literary fiction, alternative history, and themes of family, migration, and identity.
Publication and Translation History: Luiselli’s books have been widely translated and published internationally, with multiple editions across languages.
Suggested Further Reading (Critical and Theoretical)
John Freeman (ed.), Tales of Two Cities — includes Luiselli’s contributions and situates her within contemporary urban nonfiction.
The death of Jason Arday, discovered at his London residence on August 14, cannot be separated from the eleven-day media frenzy that preceded it, nor from the long-standing political backlash that this frenzy reflects. What gets overlooked amid the flood of commentary—whether from those trying to defend Nathan Cofnas or from those reducing the incident to a morality tale about racism—is the influence of the institutions involved: Cambridge University, the media which produced 188 stories in nine days, and the political environment that has made the revival of hereditarian pseudoscience acceptable again in reputable academic fields. This is not a story about two individuals. It is a story about a system.
The Function of “Race Realism”
Cofnas’s intellectual initiative is rooted in a longstanding tradition. The resurgence of the hereditarian argument—asserting that genetics account for group differences in intelligence—has a troubling history. Its roots trace back to Francis Galton’s eugenics movement, the racialist propaganda of the Pioneer Fund, and the post-World War II revival of biological determinism through behavioural genetics. Leading figures today—such as Richard Lynn, Emil Kirkegaard, Heiner Rindermann, Charles Murray, and Cofnas himself—are not isolated individuals, but part of an interconnected ideological network.
Nathan Cofnas holds a unique place in modern academia: he is a trained philosopher whose career is closely linked to the resurgence of hereditarian “race realism,” an ideology with a long-standing tradition of offering pseudo-scientific support for social inequality. His journey—from Columbia to Cambridge, Oxford, and ultimately Ghent—reflects not genuine intellectual curiosity but the re-emergence of biological determinism as a respected mainstream academic viewpoint.
Cofnas argues that racial differences in intelligence are largely genetic, echoing historical eugenics and the Pioneer Fund. She claims this defends ‘science’ from political meddling, but in truth, it advances a political agenda. Hereditarian ideas historically justify inequality by framing historical injustices like colonialism and segregation as biological fate. Cofnas’s assertion that Black academics would have ‘approach[ed] zero per cent ‘ at top universities under meritocracy is not a scientific claim but an ideological stance.
Hereditarianism has historically functioned to justify inequality as natural rather than created. It acts as a reactionary ideological tool, used whenever capitalism faces crisis and needs pseudoscientific backing for social stratification. The appointment of a Ghent University scholar claiming that Black academics would “disappear from almost all high-profile positions” under a meritocratic system reflects not academic freedom but the decline — or lack — of institutional barriers against pseudoscientific race theories in European academia. This is not the protection of unpopular opinion. It is the mainstreaming of a body of thought whose historical function has been to prepare the ideological ground for attacks on the working class.
His rise has been enabled by institutions that accept race science as a valid area of research. Cambridge awarded him a prestigious fellowship, and Ghent University hired him despite his public support for genetic racial hierarchy. These choices show not academic bravery but the weakening of any ethical boundary against pseudoscience when it aligns with the broader right-wing movement for “academic freedom,” aiming to restore reactionary ideas under the guise of intellectual diversity.
The controversy involving Jason Arday brought Cofnas’s work into the spotlight. His blog post accusing Arday of plagiarism in his PhD thesis sparked a massive media frenzy—188 articles in just nine days—that ended with Arday’s resignation and death. Cofnas briefly became a symbol: to his supporters, a martyr for truth; to critics, a promoter of racial hostility. However, focusing on his personality masks a larger issue. Cofnas is not an anomaly but a sign of a political environment where hereditarian ideas have found renewed institutional backing, and universities, driven more by reputational risk than core principles, vacillate between tolerance and rejection based on public pressure.
Nathan Cofnas matters not because his ideas are new — they are not — but because their reappearance in respectable academic settings signals a broader social reaction. His career marks the return of an ideology that has historically prepared the ground for exclusion, repression, and worse. To understand Cofnas is to understand the conditions that allow such ideas to flourish: a university system hollowed out by market logic, a media apparatus eager for spectacle, and a political order increasingly receptive to biological explanations for social crisis. In that sense, Cofnas is less a philosopher than a weather vane. His prominence tells us not where science is going, but where society is drifting.
Cambridge’s Cowardice — and Its Class Function
Cofnas’s defenders argue that Cambridge allowed alleged plagiarism by Arday but expelled Cofnas for his opinions. However, this overlooks a broader issue: Cambridge’s actions were driven by institutional risk rather than principles. When Cofnas risked damaging the university’s reputation, the university quietly pushed him out. Similarly, when Arday became a liability, the university quickly distanced itself, removing web pages and ending investigations after his resignation. Cambridge did not protect either individual; it prioritised its own reputation.
This is not an inconsistency; it illustrates the consistent logic of the modern university, shaped by reputation and market interests. The university usually does not protect academic freedom or individuals—whether they face right-wing hostility or student protests—if defending them would cost it. Calling this ‘cowardice’ moralises the issue, but the reality is structural. The modern university operates as a corporation within the capitalist state, with research priorities, admissions, and intellectual culture shaped by capital accumulation and imperialist goals. Its treatment of individuals shifts based on the changing needs of class dominance.
The Press as an Instrument, Not a Check
The story is about how an academic integrity issue turned into a nine-day, 188-article spectacle. While multiple outlets backed some allegations of plagiarism, the extensive coverage went beyond reporting and became a form of public humiliation. This included marathon claims, personal details, and relentless daily coverage. This illustrates the typical modern media pile-on: it usually ignores the human at its centre and becomes hostile when political goals are involved. The same outlets that discredited Arday defended Noah Carl, publishing editorials praising his research linking crime to ethnic groups. They also rallied to defend Carl’s academic freedom while ignoring attacks on democratic rights, such as the persecution of Julian Assange. The media frenzy is not accidental; it’s a political tactic—aimed at destroying individuals as a substitute for honest debate.
Individualising a Systemic Failure
Labelling this conflict as “Cofnas versus Arday” or portraying it as a clash between “the right and DEI” oversimplifies the situation and ignores underlying structural issues. Personal explanations—such as blaming a vindictive blogger, a dishonest professor, a woke establishment, or a racist backlash—often replace systemic causes with individual blame. The real issue is understanding what kind of university and press tend to produce such outcomes. In reality, these institutions are motivated not by the pursuit of truth but by managing reputational risks. Their loyalties are more aligned with donors, government policies, and market goals than with genuine scholarship. Their intellectual environment is shaped more by capital interests than by societal needs.
The pseudo-left’s focus on identity politics acts as a reactionary force in itself. By turning every social conflict into a matter of racial or gender identity, it gives the right wing an effective opposition. It keeps the working class, which could challenge the current order—responsible for tragedies like Arday’s death—disarmed and divided. A conflict between “race realism” and “anti-racism” within bourgeois academia doesn’t threaten the capitalist system that sustains both.
The public discourse surrounding Arday’s death — the moral panic, the fixation on individual virtue and villainy, the refusal to interrogate structural causes — serves a precise social interest. It keeps the population politically demobilised, morally panicked, and convinced that the great questions of social life are matters of personal conduct rather than class struggle.
Jason Arday’s tragedy is rooted in the institutions that made such conflicts between academics unavoidable and deadly. His death reflects a systemic issue that harms individuals to protect itself. The solution isn’t better risk management, improved DEI efforts, or a more courteous media. Instead, it lies in building a large, international socialist movement within the working class that aims to overthrow capitalist institutions and establish a society where human needs take precedence over profit, reputation, or spectacle.
Jason Arday’s death on August 14, just a week after resigning from his Cambridge professorship, highlights a broader systemic problem rather than an isolated tragedy. It reveals a media environment that sensationalises racial scandals for profit, an academic world that views minority scholars as interchangeable symbols, and a political climate where issues of diversity are passionately debated. Although media outlets now offer condolences and publish reflective editorials, these gestures seem superficial given the extensive coverage before his death. Since then, over 249 articles have appeared, many of which previously contributed to months of speculation, mockery, and personal attacks against Arday, reflecting a purposeful ideological bias.
To understand what happened to Arday, it is essential to analyse not just the allegations themselves, but also the mechanisms that amplified them, the racialised dynamics influencing how they were received, and the wider political economy of scandal journalism within the neoliberal university.
Scandal as Commodity: The Political Economy of Media Harassment
The charges against Arday—related to his doctoral thesis, athletic achievements, and academic schedule—warranted investigation due to their seriousness. Yet, seriousness alone isn’t enough to justify the level of coverage. Over time, proportionality was abandoned, transforming the coverage into a spectacle. This change is deliberate and built into the media system itself. Today’s media functions on a straightforward profit motive: scandals draw audiences.
This boosts engagement, drives more traffic, and bolsters the ad-based revenue that most outlets depend on. In this system: more prominent figures attract greater scandal; racialised individuals enhance ideological appeal; and prestigious institutions profit from their downfall. As the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s history, Arday was uniquely situated at this intersection of incentives. His rise carried symbolic weight, making his decline commercially lucrative. Instead of critically scrutinising Arday, the media consumed his story.
Cambridge University’s conduct throughout the incident exposes the superficiality of elite institutions’ claims of commitment to diversity. Such universities, including Cambridge, have refined a dual approach: publicly elevating minority scholars to showcase progress, then quickly distancing themselves when these scholars become politically problematic. Araday’s appointment was celebrated as a sign of change, yet when media scrutiny grew intense, Cambridge defaulted to minimal procedural responses. They carried out their investigation, released a report citing “honest and reasonable errors,” and then remained silent as media criticism escalated. This silence was not neutral; it was complicity.
In the neoliberal university model, diversity serves more as a marketing ploy than a genuine principle. Institutions that have historically upheld elite privilege now promote inclusion not through structural change, but because diversity has become a profitable commodity in higher education. The logic is clear: universities vie for students, donors, partnerships, and global reputation. In this race, diversity acts as a branding tool—symbolising modernity, progress, and moral virtue. Brochures are filled with images of diverse student groups; announcements highlight appointments of minority scholars; strategic documents emphasise themes of equity and belonging. Ultimately, representation becomes a form of advertising.
But branding is not transformation. The neoliberal university’s commitment to diversity rarely extends beyond the symbolic. It is diversity without redistribution, inclusion without power, representation without structural change. The institution remains governed by the same hierarchies of wealth, class and patronage that have defined it for centuries. What changes is the imagery.
This dynamic produces a familiar pattern. Minority scholars are elevated as proof of institutional progress, yet their position is precarious. They are celebrated when they serve the university’s public relations needs, and abandoned when they become politically inconvenient. Diversity hires are treated as emblems, not colleagues — symbols of institutional virtue rather than participants in institutional governance. Their presence is instrumentalised, not protected.
The result is a system in which diversity initiatives coexist comfortably with widening inequality, casualised labour, collapsing student support services and the financialisaton of university governance. Diversity becomes a way to mask these contradictions, to present the institution as socially progressive while its underlying structures remain untouched.
This is the essence of neoliberal diversity: representation deployed to legitimise an institution that has not changed. It is not a challenge to hierarchy but a supplement to it — a way of modernising the university’s image while preserving its class character.
The tragedy, as recent events have shown, is that individuals placed at the centre of this branding exercise bear the human cost when the image fractures. Diversity is celebrated when it flatters the institution, and discarded when it threatens it. In this sense, the neoliberal university does not simply fail to protect minority scholars; it places them in the line of fire. Elite institutions embrace diversity only insofar as it enhances their public image. When that image becomes threatened, the individual is discarded. Arday was celebrated as a symbol; he was abandoned as a liability.
The New York Times: Liberalism’s Complicity in Racialised Ridicule
The New York Times’ involvement in the incident is especially telling, as it reveals the ideological role of the liberal press. The Times published an article ridiculing Arday’s personal life with the headline: “Jason Arday may want to get himself a nice pair of orange trousers.” This was not genuine journalism; it was contemptuous mockery disguised as commentary. Moreover, it carried racial undertones that would be unimaginable if directed at a white scholar accused of similar misconduct. The Times later removed the article, replacing it with an Error 410 where the satire once was. This removal does not indicate remorse but appears to be damage control—an editorial acknowledgement, only made after Arday’s death, that the piece should never have been published. The Times’ behaviour mirrors its role in the Claudine Gay affair: performative concern for academic standards masking a deeper hostility to the presence of Black scholars in elite institutions.
Simon Baron-Cohen’s description of Arday’s final hours is deeply troubling. Arday spoke of experiencing “relentless scrutiny,” “ridicule,” and the discrediting of “absolutely every detail of his life.” He believed he was being targeted by a “racist playbook”—a pattern recognisable to anyone familiar with how Black academics are often treated in elite settings. This playbook typically involves: identifying a prominent Black scholar, scrutinising their credentials in detail, exaggerating minor mistakes into moral failings, framing the situation as a sign of institutional decline, and then using the scandal to undermine diversity efforts. This approach is not equally applied to white academics; it’s mainly used against those whose presence in elite institutions is already contested by ideological opponents. Arday’s case clearly exemplifies this pattern.
The Family’s Statement: The Reality of Sustained Abuse
Arday’s family expressed it bluntly: “Jason endured over three years of relentless abuse… The persistent misinformation overwhelmed Jason.” This is not exaggeration but a depiction of the ongoing psychological harm caused by years of hostile coverage, insinuation, and public shame. The press tends to avoid scrutinising its own actions. Editors have resumed their normal activities. While Hacked Off’s demand for an inquiry is justified, it will likely be disregarded. The British press does not oversee itself; it safeguards its interests.
Arday’s death is part of a broader political agenda: using academic scandals as a weapon in cultural battles over diversity, equity, and representation. The ideological right presents these incidents as evidence that diversity compromises merit, minority scholars are promoted beyond their abilities, and elite institutions are failing due to ‘wokeness.”
The liberal press performs a softer version of the same narrative: concern for standards, hand‑wringing about academic integrity, and a refusal to confront the racialised dynamics of scrutiny. Both converge on the same outcome: the destruction of individual scholars and the reinforcement of institutional whiteness.
The rapid shift in media coverage—with outlets softening or deleting their previous reporting—does not reflect remorse but signals institutional panic. The story has already transitioned from scandal to tragedy, from demanding scrutiny to seeking sympathy, and from holding accountability to forgetting it altogether. This is not a moment of reckoning; it’s a retreat. The press is not expressing grief over Arday; it is safeguarding its own interests.
The Chronicle of a System, Not an Exception
Jason Arday’s death isn’t random; it’s a foreseeable result of a society that treats Black scholars as symbols rather than equals, uses diversity for show instead of genuine inclusion, profits from scandal, and relies on an unregulated press that fuels humiliation. What happened to Arday isn’t an isolated incident but reflects how personal destruction is normalised in a media system where racialised stories are lucrative and elite institutions delegate their disciplinary roles to the media. His death highlights media complicity and serves as a warning—without addressing the underlying structural incentives, such tragedies are bound to happen again.
Sources and Bibliography
1. Neoliberalism and Higher Education
Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Zone Books, 2015.
Giroux, Henry A. Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Haymarket Books, 2014.
Slaughter, Sheila, and Gary Rhoades. Academic Capitalism and the New Economy. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.
Collini, Stefan. Speaking of Universities. Verso, 2017.
Marginson, Simon. “The Worldwide Trend to Higher Participation in Higher Education.” Higher Education, vol. 72, 2016.
2. Diversity as Branding / Diversity Regimes
Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press, 2012.
Ahmed, Sara. What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use. Duke University Press, 2019.
Berrey, Ellen. The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice. University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Melamed, Jodi. Represent and Destroy: Rationalising Violence in the New Racial Capitalism. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Hylton, Kevin. “Institutionalised Whiteness, Racial Microaggressions and Black Bodies Out of Place in Higher Education.” Whiteness and Education, 2016.
3. The Neoliberal University and Marketisation
Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Harvard University Press, 1996.
Canaan, Joyce, and Wesley Shumar (eds.). Structure and Agency in the Neoliberal University. Routledge, 2008.
Shore, Cris, and Susan Wright. “Audit Culture and Anthropology: Neoliberalism in British Higher Education.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1999.
Lynch, Kathleen. Equality and Power in Schools: Redistribution, Recognition, and Representation. Routledge, 2019 (esp. chapters on higher education).
4. Critical Race Theory and Academic Gatekeeping
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Colour.” Stanford Law Review, 1991.
Bell, Derrick. Faces at the Bottom of the Well. Basic Books, 1992.
Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America. Free Press, 1998 (original 1935).
Hall, Stuart. The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation. Harvard University Press, 2017.
5. Diversity, Meritocracy, and Institutional Legitimacy
Bhopal, Kalwant. White Privilege: The Myth of a Post-Racial Society. Policy Press, 2018.
Bhopal, Kalwant, and Clare Pitkin. “Diversity and Inequality in Higher Education: A Critical Examination.” British Journal of Sociology of Education, 2020.
Boliver, Vikki. “How Fair Is Access to More Prestigious UK Universities?” British Journal of Sociology, 2015.
Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States. Routledge, 2014.
6. Media, Representation, and Institutional Image
Couldry, Nick. The Culture of Media: The Politics of Representation. Sage, 2000.
Davis, Aeron. Reckless Opportunists: Elites at the End of the Establishment. Manchester University Press, 2018.
Hall, Stuart et al. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. Macmillan, 1978 (for the ideological function of media narratives).
The Socialist Workers Party’s response to Cambridge sociologist Jason Arday’s tragic death reflects more than just poor journalism. It embodies the party’s deeper political approach—one influenced by years of ideological decline, adaptation to identity politics, and a move away from traditional Marxist class analysis. The article in the Socialist Worker, branded as an “exclusive,” relies almost entirely on a single friend’s memories. It lacks documentary proof, institutional context, or engagement with thorough reporting from other sources. Essentially, it isn’t an investigation but a moralistic story.
The SWP’s narrative is designed to reach a specific conclusion: Arday “died because of a racist witch-hunt.” The article is structured to back this assertion, with any complicating details either ignored or downplayed. As a result, it exposes more about the SWP’s political decay than about the social factors behind Arday’s crisis.
The Suppression of Material Facts
The SWP claims that Arday’s death was directly caused by racist persecution, but this is not evidenced; it is stated. The article overlooks key facts: Arday resigned after plagiarism allegations, and Cambridge had initiated an investigation into new information about his academic credentials and honorary roles. These issues were central to the crisis. A Marxist perspective starts from the factual details—questioning what the allegations were, how the university responded, which interests were involved, and how the media reacted. The SWP avoids these questions, which would require examining how elite universities operate amid global competition, the commodification of academic labour, and the political economy of prestige.
Even the article’s only source admits that “some of the claims about Jason were misquoted or exaggerated by other people,” and that Arday “may have felt under pressure to exaggerate.” This acknowledgement—which prompts important questions about how personal narratives, institutional scrutiny, and media sensationalism interact—is hidden in just one paragraph. The SWP quickly resumes its fixed conclusion.
Identity Politics as the SWP’s Analytical Framework
The SWP attributes the case solely to race. Cambridge is said to have promoted Arday as a symbol of diversity, equality, and inclusion, sparking resentment among less accomplished academics. The intricate workings of a modern university—its funding, ideological function, government ties, and internal hierarchy—are oversimplified as a psychological conflict rooted in racial jealousy.
This is not genuine Marxism but petty-bourgeois identity politics. Racism is viewed not as a social relation inherent to capitalism but as a detached moral issue. Institutions function not on their material interests but on individual prejudices. The SWP’s story aligns closely with corporate diversity initiatives and the academic field of “equity and inclusion.’ Decades ago, the SWP abandoned Trotsky’s analysis of imperialism and class struggle. Instead, it embraced a politics centred on race, gender, and other categories as independent determinants of society. The Arday article exemplifies this approach: a moralised, individual-centric narrative that omits class relations, institutional interests, and capitalist academic dynamics.
Journalism Reduced to Hagiography
The Socialist Worker article reads as a eulogy, conveying sincere emotion and genuine grief. However, grief is not political analysis. The piece lacks counterarguments, institutional insights, examination of Cambridge’s investigation, and engagement with wider media coverage. Instead, readers are shown only one perspective and are told to accept it as the authoritative account.
This is not genuine journalism; it resembles hagiography. Its purpose is not to clarify the social factors behind Arday’s crisis but to evoke emotional resonance with the SWP’s political stance. Instead of offering analysis, it appeals to sentiment and replaces historical insight with moral outrage. This approach isn’t accidental; it stems from a long-standing tendency to prioritise moralism over materialism. The organisation’s portrayal of Arday’s death isn’t an anomaly but the expected result of a worldview in which political clarity gives way to emotional immediacy, and the complex workings of capitalist institutions are simplified to personal resentments.
The Real Issues the SWP Refuses to Confront
The Arday case prompts important questions. He faced an intense media backlash, with hundreds of articles questioning his credibility. Public figures called the coverage a “hounding.” Examining the links between institutional scrutiny, sensationalist media, and racialised narratives is a valid area for further investigation.
However, investigation demands a materialist approach. This involves examining the university as an institution intertwined with capitalism, viewing media as a political tool, and understanding race as a social relation inherently linked to class. The SWP cannot perform such analysis. Its political stance, rooted in the middle-class protest politics of the late 1960s, closes its eyes to the class dynamics of today’s society.
The modern university is no longer a space where “mediocre academics” vent their frustrations. Instead, it is a globalised institution competing for prestige, funding, and market share. Its evolution is driven by the commodification of research, the casualisation of academic jobs, and the ideological pressures from the state. The media’s role in spreading accusations against Arday can only be understood within the broader context of journalism’s transformation under capitalism—characterised by the decline of investigative reporting, the rise of sensationalism, and the media’s integration into corporate and political interests. These are the issues a Marxist analysis needs to consider, yet the SWP fails to address any of them.
The SWP’s Method and Its Political Degeneration
The SWP’s approach to the Arday case exemplifies a political style that replaces class analysis with identity politics, substitutes moral judgments for investigation, prioritises anecdotes over solid evidence, and treats institutions as biased individuals rather than products of capitalist social relations. This approach fails to account for the complexities of the modern university, media, or the interplay of race and class. It crafts only sentimental stories that mask underlying social realities. Arday’s death calls for thorough examination, but the SWP offers none. Instead, its article highlights the political decline of a faction that has long abandoned Marxism in favour of bourgeois academic ideology.
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