Once a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” Czeslaw Milosz
“The relationship between mother and son and mother and daughter is different, because the mother is a mirror in which the daughter sees her future self and the daughter is a mirror in which the mother sees her lost self.”
Is Mother Dead
“What do we do with our despair if our lives are too small to contain it?”
Long Live the Post Horn!
“The relationship of a work of art to reality is uninteresting; the work’s relationship to the truth is crucial; the true value of the work doesn’t lie in its relationship to a so-called reality, but in its effect on the observer.”
― Vigdis Hjorth, Is Mother Dead
Vigdis Hjorth occupies a prominent place among contemporary Scandinavian writers. Her novels examine family conflict, memory, gender and legal institutions through psychologically acute, often fractured stories. Hjorth is extremely well known in her native Norway and throughout Scandinavia. She began writing in the early 1980s. She started writing children’s books and moved on to fiction for adults. She is a prodigious writer with some forty books under her belt. It is a safe bet that if more of her books were translated into English, she would be a far bigger writer. All her English books have been translated by the excellent Charlotte Barslund. Four of her books in English are variations on a story of family rupture and estrangement, with more or less the same cast of characters.
To understand Hjorth and the broader landscape of Scandinavian fiction, the reader must study the political-historical context of Hjorth’s work and examine the social functions performed by literature in a petty‑bourgeois milieu. Hjorth’s fiction often explores the fractures of bourgeois family life, individual trauma and the legal and cultural institutions that sustain property and social standing. On a deeper level, her work shows how “personal” suffering is shaped by class relations—inheritance disputes, cultural capital, gendered social labour, and the moral vocabulary that deflects systemic critique into private pathology.
While you would be hard pushed to describe Hjorth as a left-wing writer, her novels do make an ideal entry point for politicising cultural debate. Her focus on family law, inheritance, trauma and testimony intersects with current social conflicts over housing, social care, gender violence, and access to justice. She reveals how “private” disputes often reproduce material inequalities and legitimise social hierarchies.
Hjorth’s fiction is heavily influenced by other Scandinavian fiction, which also often depicts welfare infrastructures, gender norms and small‑property relations that appear “progressive” yet conceal new forms of commodification, household debt and petty‑bourgeois aspirations. Hjorth, like other Scandinavian writers, both male and female, frequently recycles sets of ideological strategies that hide class antagonisms while channelling popular grievances into non‑class answers.
Perhaps the master of this genre is Soren Kierkegaard, whom Hjorth greatly admires. Kierkegaard is a crucial figure in the genealogy of modern bourgeois ideology: his subjectivism and rejection of reason helped lay philosophical groundwork for existentialism, postmodernism and the anti-scientific tendencies of contemporary ideology. Kierkegaard’s turning away from reason anticipated the modern cult of subjectivity, the delegitimisation of science, and the promotion of personal mysticism as an alternative to collective political solutions. Hjorth has to be very careful not to get too close to him; her writing will take on a very reactionary turn.
In her latest book, Repetition Hjorth goes over familiar ground. As Elaine Blair points out in her critical review, “Hjorth has been returning to this material for more than two decades, offering different perspectives on the constellation of prodigal daughter, ambivalent siblings, convention-bound mother, and tyrannical father. Her novels have spanned different periods of time, some focusing on a limited period of months or years, others pulling back to tell the whole story. It’s as if she’s asking: Where is the story? What is the best way to tell it? In a sense, Hjorth’s narrators did not experience the crucial events of their lives in chronological order. An ordered timeline is true to the abusive father’s perspective (he alone knew what happened and when) but not to that of the daughter, whose experience of abuse, with its repressed and resurfaced memories, defies the schema of linear time. The abuse was happening to her, then it hadn’t happened to her, then it had happened to her, a long time ago.”[1]
Vigdis Hjorth’s novel Repetition, although only 144 pages, is a psychologically acute, formally inventive exploration of memory, trauma and personal alienation. The reader needs to understand it as part of the broader social and historical fabric, and not to study it not only as individual psychology but as a social product whose form and themes are shaped by class relations and institutions.
Hjorth’s Repetition locates trauma and interpersonal breakdown inside the family, legal procedures and therapeutic institutions. Far from being purely personal failures, these institutions appear in the novel as mediators that translate social distress into individual pathology. This depiction is symptomatic of the wider neoliberal transformation of social life in Norway and globally. Under neoliberalism, governments and employers have shifted costs and responsibilities onto households and individuals. In Norway, this has taken the form of tightened welfare provision, market pressures on municipal services and an expansion of private providers alongside public services. Internationally, the same logic prevails: health, social and legal services are re‑organised to be “efficient” for budgets and profitable for providers. At the same time, the working class and small proprietors pick up the bill.
Hjorth’s portrayal of family collapse, court proceedings, and therapy mirrors these transformations: families are expected to absorb economic and emotional strains; the law is increasingly an instrument for adjudicating private disputes in ways that reproduce social inequality; therapy becomes a form of individualised management that treats symptoms rather than social causes.
Why do Hjorth’s novels matter, and what can we learn from them? They are important now because they dramatise the individual consequences of social atomization under neoliberalism: privatised suffering, judicial and therapeutic institutions that individualise social injury, and cultural narratives that valorise personal authenticity over collective remedy.
Notes
A closer look at Kierkegaard-Tom Carter-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2006/04/kier-a17.html
“As a vast, solid phalanx, the generations come on; they have the same features, and their pattern is new in the world. All wear the same expression, but it is this which they do not detect in each other. It is the one life which ponders in the philosophers, which drudges in the labourers, which basks in the poets, which dilates in the love of the women. –
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Notebooks”
“The best things come, as a general thing, from the talents that are members of a group.”
Henry James 1879 biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne
‘Is imagination so fanciful that it can invent a memory and then transform it into something we understand as true?’
Eduardo Halfon
“First of all, art is the cognition of life. Art is not the free play of fantasy, feelings, and moods: art is not the expression of merely the subjective sensations and experiences of the poet; art is not assigned the goal of primarily awakening in the reader good feelings. Like science, art cognises life. Both art and science have the same subject: life, reality. But sciences analyse, art synthesises; science is abstract, art is concrete; science turns to the mind of man, art to his sensual [i.e., sensory] nature. Science cognises life with the help of concepts, art with the aid of images in the form of living, sensual contemplation.”
Aleksandr Voronsky
Eduardo Halfon is part of a new generation of Latin American writers who, to paraphrase Sir Isaac Newton, have seen further than most because they have stood on the shoulders of giants. These giants are well-known. In a recent interview, Halfon was asked about his earliest influences. “Mostly North American writers, and most of them in the short story tradition. Maybe that’s why I constantly go back to that genre. I’m essentially a short story writer. That’s where I feel most comfortable, or least uncomfortable. My technique or approach in constructing a short story is very much based on the North American tradition, much more so than the Latin American one. I feel much closer to Hemingway and Carver and Cheever, for example, than I do to Borges and Cortázar and García Márquez.[1]
Halfon and others are still paying their debt to these greats, but they are also now striking out on a new road. As Halfon succinctly put it, “ My house, then, is built on two pillars. But a writer must begin by destroying one’s house.
Like their earlier counterparts, these writers have to deal with their respective countries’ violent political pasts. In Halfon’s case, the past is the genocidal campaign by the Guatemalan ruling elite against its Mayan and working-class population. Although Halfon clearly is influenced by Guatemala’s great writers such as Miguel Angel Asturias, Augusto Monterroso and modern day writers such Francisco Goldman and David Unger his work is “intensely autobiographical, migratory and steeped in memory” Halfon’s focus on migration, memory and identity can be read as testimony to the real material dislocations produced by imperialism and capitalist restructuring throughout Latin America.
It is worth noting that every single Guatemalan writer or poet of note has been forced into exile due to the distinct possibility of being murdered by their respective dictators. Halfon noted this in an interview in 2015, “For the past century, Guatemalan writers have been writing and dying in exile. Miguel Ángel Asturias, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967, wrote his books about Guatemala while living in exile, in South America and Europe. He died in Paris and is buried at Père Lachaise. The great short-story writer Augusto Monterroso, after being detained by the military forces of dictator Jorge Ubico, was forced to leave the country in 1944. He fled first to Chile, then to Mexico, where he lived the rest of his life, and where he wrote most of his stories, and where he’s now buried. Luis Cardoza y Aragón, arguably Guatemala’s most important poet of the last century, suffered a similar fate —he was also forced into exile in Mexico in the 1930s, where he wrote his poetry and where he, too, died. Guatemala’s greatest playwright, Carlos Solórzano, fled the country in 1939—first to Germany, then to Mexico—and never returned. The writer Mario Payeras, a guerrilla commander in the 1970s, also wrote while exiled in Mexico, where he suddenly and mysteriously died (his remains were buried in a cemetery in the southwest of the country, but have since vanished). One of the most important Guatemalan novels of the last few decades, El Tiempo Principia en Xibalbá (Time Commences in Xibalbá), was written by the indigenous writer Luis de Lión, who in 1984 was kidnapped by military forces, tortured for twenty days, and then disappeared. His murder wasn’t confirmed until fifteen years later, in 1999, when his name and number appeared in the now infamous “Military Diary”, a haunting military document that secretly listed the fate of all the Guatemalans disappeared by the military forces between August 1983 and March 1985. Luis de Lión, born José Luís de León Díaz, is number 135. His novel was published posthumously, that most extreme of exiles.”[2]
Halfon’s recurring motifs of displacement, cross-border families, and fragmented memory are not merely personal or cultural; they are literary expressions of material processes driven by the global capitalist system. Halfon is not a Marxist, but he clearly uses these literary expressions in much the same way that the great American writer Phillip Roth did in his work to uncover the past and prepare for future struggles. How else would you understand Roth’s extraordinary prescient novel The Plot Against America?
Halfon does not explicitly examine the growth of Fascism in Guatemala. Rather, evocations in his stories are an indirect examination of the expansion of informal, precarious labour, the restructuring of national economies through neoliberal “adjustment,” and the integration of millions into transnational labour markets, all of which create the objective conditions for mass migration and social struggles.
According to the International Labour Organisation, more than 2.1 billion of the world’s 3.6 billion workers now labour in the informal economy. Platform and casual work are central mechanisms of modern labour casualisation These processes force families to fragment, livelihoods to be uprooted, and memories to be reconstituted around loss, survival and mobility, the precise themes of Halfon’s fiction. It has been said of Halfon’s collective work that it seems to flow into a single ongoing novel.
Chris Power points out that Halfon’s “ other recurring themes include Guatemalan history, the Holocaust, questions of Jewish identity, and the nature of violence. The books recycle stories, such as Eduardo’s grandfather’s experience of Auschwitz and subsequent emigration to Guatemala; the family’s relocation to the States; and Eduardo’s own career as a writer. When a novel’s narrator and its author share a name and identity, it naturally prompts questions about what is true and what is invented. But Halfon’s primary concern seems not to be with establishing facts, as a memoirist might, but to rappel as deeply as possible into those crevasses where meaning and truth disappear.”[3]
Before discussing other things, it is worth commenting on the translations of Halfon’s books, which merit a book in themselves. Eduardo Halfon’s fiction—works such as The Polish Boxer, Monastery, and The Lost Boy—explore memory, migration, identity and the tangled legacies of war and displacement. It is important to study the translations seriously and treat them not as incidental “products” but as historical-cultural documents.
For instance, Halfon’s The Polish Boxer was worked on by an international group of five translators who worked in concert with each other to deliver a very good manuscript. These translators understand how translations shape how working people around the world encounter cultures and struggles not their own. Translation determines which voices reach mass audiences and under what political framing.
Halfon and his translators stand on the shoulders of the groundbreaking translator Gregory Rabassa. His translations helped define an international readership’s image of Latin American culture and politics. Understanding these processes exposes the cultural market’s role in commodifying exile, migration, and anti‑imperialist themes and creates a basis for challenging who benefits and who is represented.
Gregory Rabassa’s work, most famously his English translations of Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar and Clarice Lispector, offers a model for studying translation as both a literary and political activity. It is important to learn from Rabassa methodically. The reader should combine a close technical study of his translations with an analysis of the publishing, class and cultural forces that shape which books circulate internationally.
As Rabassa once wrote, “The translator, we should know, is a writer too. As a matter of fact, he could be called the ideal writer because all he has to do is write; plot, theme, characters, and all other essentials have already been provided, so he can sit down and write his ass off.”[4]
Eduardo Halfon’s new book is elliptical, memory-driven and obsessed with names, absence and family traces. Still, it is also a powerful entry point for understanding how imperialism and transnational capital shape private lives. Reading Halfon alongside the history of the United Fruit Company (later Chiquita) provides the reader with a powerful understanding of the Guatemalan civil war, fought from 1960 to 1996, which was triggered by the United States at the behest of the United Fruit Company.
The US oligarchy was the largest landowner in the Central American republic. The United Fruit, in collaboration with the US government, sanctioned and organised alongside the Guatemalan ruling elite and its military, systematic kidnappings and murders that were part of the government’s counter-insurgency campaign saw death squads murder hundreds of thousands of political opponents and Mayan people.
The United Fruit Company was not a benign employer but a transnational corporation whose profits depended on control of land, labour, and transport. In Guatemala and across Central America, UFCO backed oligarchic politics, shaped infrastructure for export agriculture, and collaborated with US state power to secure its property and markets. The company’s role in creating the “banana republic” form, where export interests dominated politics and security, helped produce recurrent repression, dispossession and intervention that set the context for the civil war and ongoing violence.
US imperialism’s hand in Guatemala (1954 coup against Árbenz, long-term support for military regimes and counterinsurgency) turned economic disputes over land and labour into matters of geopolitical strategy. The Guatemalan state served as a repressive instrument of the dominant class. In Guatemala, this meant the security forces acting to defend plantation and export interests against labour organising and land reform.
The successor firms to United Fruit have continued the pattern of corporate power shaping violence and act with impunity. Contemporary cases, such as Chiquita’s payments to Colombian paramilitaries and the company’s light legal consequences, illustrate how transnationals use force and collusion to secure profits and suppress labour, often with the tacit protection of governments.
Eduardo Halfon’s fiction, memory-driven, autobiographical and formally inventive, provides a vital entry point into understanding how class, imperialism and genocide shape subjective experience. To study Halfon in relation to the Guatemalan civil war means reading literature as historical testimony: to connect aesthetic form and private memory with the social forces that produced mass murder, displacement and the long-term campaign of state terror.
Understanding Halfon together with the historical record helps expose the continuing rule of the oligarchy, judicial impunity and US influence, factors central to contemporary struggles over land, indigenous rights and militarisation.
Halfon rarely offers direct economic history; instead, his stories register the aftershocks: absences, silences, disrupted families, migrations and the odd conjunctions of identity that result from capitalist domination. Where Halfon evokes a vanished aunt, a rented house, a childhood street, those private traces map onto structures of class power: plantations that displaced communities, export economies that enclosed common land, and states that protected corporate assets rather than popular needs.
To read Halfon politically is to read the gaps as social symptoms: the inability to name perpetrators, the sense of illegible history, the recurring motif of “not knowing” where a relative went or why a place changed. These are not merely aesthetic devices but the subjective remnant of forced migrations, economic coercion and political terror produced by export capitalism and imperialist intervention.
Like most Guatemalan writers, Halfon learned to write as if his life depended on it. For most readers of his books, it must be hard to understand that writers like Halfon are in constant fear of assassination because of what they write and uncover. A prime example of this is Francisco Goldman. His book The Art of Political Murder nearly got him killed.
In an interview with the Guardian, Halfon recounts feeling paranoid about being followed. My understanding of the political situation in Guatemala is that Halfon is not paranoid. Given Guatemala’s track record of killing writers and journalists who get in their way, it is a real threat, not just paranoia.
It is worth quoting in length from Halfon’s Guardian article. Halfon believes that many things in Guatemala are not spoken or written about.
“ Just after I published my first novel in Guatemala, in 2003, I had a beer with the Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya, who was living there at the time. We met at an old bar called El Establo. As soon as he saw me walk in, he raised his bottle of beer, congratulated me, smiled a crazy man’s smile, and then warned me to leave the country as soon as possible.
Guatemalan writers, and Guatemalans in general, have lived for almost a century now in a climate of fear. If anyone dared to speak out, they either disappeared into exile or disappeared literally. This fear is still prevalent, woven deep into the subconscious of the Guatemalan people, who, over time, have been taught to be silent. To not speak out. To not say or write words that might kill you.
The first consequence of this, of course, is overall silence. Certain things in Guatemala are not spoken or written about. The indigenous genocide in the 1980s. The extreme racism. The overwhelming number of women being murdered. The impossibility of land reform and redistribution of wealth. The close ties between the government and the drug cartels. Although these are all subjects that almost define the country itself, they are discussed and commented on only in whispers or from the outside. But a second and perhaps more dangerous consequence of a culture of silence is a type of self-censorship: when speaking or writing, one mustn’t say anything that puts oneself or one’s family in peril. The censoring becomes automatic, unconscious. Because the danger is very real. Although the days of dictators are now gone, the military is still powerful, and political and military murders are all too common.
It was at a bookstore called Sophos. I was browsing some books on the table when an elderly man came over and introduced himself. He was dressed in a coat and tie. He said he had read my novel and talked for a few minutes about his impressions. He then shook my hand again and, still holding on to it, said it had been a pleasure to meet me, that I should take care, be careful. I asked him carefully about what. He just smiled politely and went on his way. I considered it strange, but didn’t give it much thought. Maybe he was just being nice? Maybe I misinterpreted his greeting (usted cuídese, you take care)? Anyway, I had almost forgotten about it until several weeks later, when I received a phone call. The voice on the phone said I didn’t know him, but that he was calling as a friend to warn me about my enemies.”[5]
Suppose you make the effort to read Halfon’s work; it is a joy. His work opens questions about the culture of migration, the commodification of memory, and the role of literature in representing displacement.
“It is unquestionably true that the need for art is not created by economic conditions. But neither is the need for food created by economics. On the contrary, the need for food and warmth creates economics. It is very true that one cannot always go by the principles of Marxism in deciding whether to reject or to accept a work of art. A work of art should, in the first place, be judged by its own law, that is, by the law of art. But the beauty of Marxism is that it alone can explain why and how a given tendency in art has originated in a given period of history; in other words, who it was who made a demand for such an artistic form and not for another, and why.”
Notes
1. The Purest Form of Writing, the Most Intimate Form of Reading-Eduardo Halfon, in conversation with his translators Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn, with Avinoam Patt, massreview.org/sites/default/files/10_60.3Halfom/index.pdf
The UN Historical Clarification Commission, “Guatemala: Memory of Silence”) and forensic anthropology studies on exhumations.
The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed Bishop Gerardi? Francisco Goldman Atlantic Books Paperback – 1 Feb. 2010-
Art as the Cognition of Life: Selected Writings 1911-1936 Paperback – 1 Jan. 1998by Aleksandr Konstantinovich Voronsky (Author), Frederick S. Choate (Translator)
5. Mastermind, by David Unger -AKASHIC BOOKS Paperback – 19 May 2016
About The Author
Eduardo Halfón (born 1971) is a Guatemalan novelist and essayist whose compact, often autobiographical works probe memory, identity, migration, and Jewishness in Latin America and the United States. His books — including titles translated into English such as The Polish Boxer, Monastery, and The Book of Owners — use fragmented narrative, irony and personal testimony to interrogate how individual life is shaped by history, displacement and cultural inheritance. His latest book is Tarantula.
The only time having a cult following is beneficial is when you are actually in a cult…However, being a stand-up comedian with a cult following means that most folks hate your guts.
—Norm Macdonald
“Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others”.
Groucho Marx
“ I am humorous, but the law bids me write seriously. I am audacious, but the law commands that my style be modest. [. . . .] The universal modesty of the mind is reason, that universal liberality of thought which reacts to each thing according to the latter’s essential nature.”
Karl Marx
“To live outside the law, you must be honest”.
Bob Dylan
By any stretch of the imagination, Norm Macdonald’s Based on a True Story is not exactly a factual memoir. In fact, I would say there is hardly any factual basis for it, but it is a very funny read. As David Letterman said, “I have read Based on a True Story, and I believe it to be largely bullshit, but it is very, very, very funny!” It is not entirely made up of bullshit, but it is sprinkled with a few truths; however, most events do not hold much water.
Norm Macdonald (1959–2021) was one of the most important voices in late-20th and early-21st-century North American comedy: deadpan delivery, an appetite for subversion, and a tendency to take jokes into uncomfortable territory. For the reader studying Macdonald is not merely cultural nostalgia but an opportunity to sharpen critical tools: to examine how humour reflects class relations, ideological currents, individual psychology and the shifting political landscape of the ruling class and its institutions. It is fair to say that Macdonald stood on the shoulders of a long list of great American comics, including Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor, and George Carlin, to name but a few.
My introduction to Norm Macdonald was through the superb American Comedy The Middle.[1] I was unaware of his history on Saturday Night Live (SNL) or his groundbreaking stand-up comedy. When Macdonald was told he had a cult following, he replied in the book, “I quickly developed a cult following. That sounds pretty good, but the truth is it’s the last thing you want to develop. The only time having a cult following is a great thing is when you are actually in a cult. Then you get to be a cult leader, and life is milk and honey… everyone thinks you are God… you get to lie down with all the ladies from the cult… In a short matter of time, you become drunk with power and begin to lie down with the men, also, not because you want to, but just because you can. Yes, being a cult leader with a cult following is fine work if you can find it. However, being a stand-up comedian with a cult following means that most folks hate your guts.”[2]
Macdonald’s character in The Middle was Uncle Rusty. It is extremely difficult to determine Rusty’s social type. Certainly, he was, in the past, a worker, but he was a bit of a grifter and, at times, represented small-business conservatism, also exhibiting working-class insecurity. Macdonald’s work on The Middle is a masterful example of comedy, both in form and content. His comic timing, silences, and persona were a joy to watch.
Macdonald’s comedy exemplifies the tensions of a semi-petty-bourgeois cultural milieu whose ironic detachment both reflects and reproduces social atomisation. His recurring themes are scepticism of elites and a delight in subverting norms, but often a retreat into cleverness and anecdote. He offers a case study in how cultural forms can register genuine grievances without pointing to collective, class-based solutions.
The Middle sitcom captures the rhythms of precarious, small-town life under late capitalism: juggling low wages, shrinking public services, stalled upward mobility and the cultural weight of respectability politics. The Middle” (the ABC sitcom) and a character like “Uncle Rusty” function, in cultural terms, as a compact social text: they reflect and reproduce the values, anxieties and ideological compromises of a broad layer of American life — the suburban, small town and petty bourgeois milieu often called “middle America.”
Rusty and Macdonald, for that matter, were rebels without a cause. He certainly had an anti-authoritarian air. Rather than adhering to a strict ideology, his comedy and public persona focused on refusing to pander to audiences or authority figures, such as when he mocked the idea of “violent terrorists” respecting velvet ropes during the January 6th Capitol riot.
Through his character Uncle Rusty, Macdonald critiques cultural conservatism and populist resentment: he typically combines sharp jabs of humour aimed at elites with an affirmation of traditional family values, localism, and personal responsibility. This mixture can predispose audiences to see social problems as moral or personal failures rather than systemic contradictions. However, by framing Rusty’s flaws as quirks and resolving them within the family, the show channels potential political anger into private reconciliation and comic relief. This is a common function of mainstream sitcoms in stabilising social relations. At times, the character can expose managerial stupidity or precarity, offering openings for critique. The decisive question is whether those openings are developed into a class explanation or left as individual anecdotes; the show mostly expresses the latter.
As capitalism intensifies precarity, sitcoms like The Middle shape millions of impressions about who is to blame and what can be done. Understanding the show’s pedagogy helps organisers convert diffuse resentment into class consciousness by exposing the gap between individual coping and collective action.
Comedy is not a neutral amusement; it is a social form rooted in class relations and the material conditions that produce ideas, tastes and collective sensibilities. From a Marxist standpoint, comedy must be analysed as part of cultural production: its forms, audiences and effects are shaped by the economic base and the class forces that struggle within a given historical epoch. Historically, comedic forms reflect shifts in class power.
Carnival, farce and satire in pre-capitalist and early-capitalist societies allowed subordinate classes to mock elites—ritualised inversions that temporarily loosened hierarchy. Under capitalist commodity relations, new comic genres emerged (burlesque, stand-up, situation comedy), shaped by urbanisation, wage-labour rhythms, mass media, and the commodification of leisure. The avant-garde and revolutionary epochs produced satire and grotesque comedy that targeted bureaucrats, profiteers, and false consciousness; conversely, periods of reaction saw comedy co-opted to reinforce nationalist, patriarchal, and consumerist norms.
Today, comedy circulates globally through streaming platforms and social media, shaped by corporate algorithms and advertising imperatives. Many comedians occupy precarious economic positions while addressing issues—inequality, racism, surveillance—that concern working people. This contradiction produces both sharp, politically conscious satire and commodified “safe” humour that normalises neoliberal individualism.
The book has an overall tone of melancholy, of sadness, which Norm carried throughout his life. But he also carried an antidote to that in a sharp, rebellious comedy. Both the book and the TV series The Middle are worth reading and watching. Macdonald was a fine exponent of his craft.
Krznaric’s book is a fascinating and valuable insight into the modern Guatemalan oligarchy. He examines the inner life of the oligarchy and how it has maintained its power and privilege for over three centuries. It is a groundbreaking work of political and sociological analysis based on wide-ranging personal interviews.
What The Rich Don’t Tell The Poor was written in 2006 and stems from Krznaric’s 2003 PhD thesis, The World View of the Oligarch in Guatemalan Politics.[1] However, due to political and literary differences with publishers, the book was not published in its original form until 2022. As Krznaric writes in the 2022 preface, although the book is ten years old and much has changed in Guatemala in the intervening years, the oligarchy remains in complete control of Guatemala’s political and economic life.
Guatemala is well known for its extreme wealth inequalities, which have been caused by centuries of economic and political domination by an oligarchy comprising around fifty families of European descent. In this case, the term “oligarchs” usually refers to a small group of influential families (often called “las familias”) that have maintained economic and political dominance since colonial times. As of 2022, approximately 245 individuals in Guatemala held an accumulated wealth of US$30 billion. The oligarchs dominate crucial sectors of the Guatemalan economy, including export agriculture (sugar, coffee, bananas), finance and banking, construction materials (cement), and consumer goods. Families such as the Herrera Family: Owners of Ingenio Pantaleón, the largest sugar production estate in the country, with significant interests in banking (e.g., Banco Agromercantil), the Castillo Family: A historically substantial family involved in the production of beer and other industries and the Novella Family: Major players in the cement industry for generations. These families and others make Guatemala one of the most unequal countries on the planet.
As Krznaric relates: “Getting the oligarchs to speak openly was a challenge. Using all I knew about ethnographic and oral history interviewing techniques, I tried to be courteous rather than confrontational – a strategy that created an atmosphere which felt relaxed, unthreatening and conversational. I quickly learned that accusing them of violating human rights or exploiting workers made them clam up. However, encouraging them to share stories about their lives and experiences lowered their guard and led them to reveal much more about themselves. Rather than offering critical comments on the spot during the interviews, I found that I could defer my critiques until I was writing about them and interpreting what they said, as I do in What The Rich Don’t Tell The Poor.”[2]
Global context: Global Oligarchy and local oligarchy
The global charity Oxfam has recently released several reports that document what every worker knows: an accelerating concentration of wealth and power in the hands of an oligarchy whose fortunes have exploded even as mass poverty, precarious work and state austerity deepen. The charity’s data shows that billionaire wealth surged to a record $18.3 trillion in 2025, and that the wealthiest handful of individuals now own more than the wealth of billions of people. The number of global billionaires recently increased by 30% to approximately 2,750 individuals, who together control more wealth than the planet’s poorest 4.6 billion people.
As Krznarics correctly states in the book, Guatemala’s oligarchy functions as an extension of global imperialist interests. Multinational agribusiness, mining and energy firms rely on local oligarchs to secure land, labour, and concessions. Yankee capitalism has historically backed Guatemalan oligarchs and their militarisation of Guatemalan life and carried out numerous coups to protect these interests, from the 1954 CIA overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz to more recent economic and political interventions. The oligarchs’ rule requires a combination of legal-clientelist institutions and outright coercion. They co-opt political parties, control key state ministries, and use the judiciary to neutralise opponents. When that fails, repression and violence are employed against organisers, Indigenous communities and trade-union militants.
The struggles of the Guatemalan working class against the oligarchs are not documented in the book. But these struggles are not isolated: the working class has challenged the supply chains and profit zones of global capital. Resistance to extractivism (mining and hydroelectric dams), land grabs for agro-exports, and labour discipline in maquilas strike at imperialist accumulation. International solidarity can disrupt investments, cut off supply-chain legitimacy and expose the complicity of multinational corporations and imperialist states. The global working class has an interest in supporting these struggles because they weaken the power of an oligarchy that helps sustain the world capitalist order and its wars.
Summary
Roman Krznaric’s book is a vital piece of journalism and provides essential insight into the world of the Guatemalan oligarchs. Krznaric’s suggestions for countering these oligarchs have profound weaknesses. While addressing the moral and psychological gaps between wealthy elites and the poor, he argues that, to reduce inequality, workers and youth should challenge the oligarchs to change habits, broaden empathy, cultivate longer time horizons, and reframe public narratives so that disadvantaged people can adopt attitudes and strategies associated with success.
Krznaric’s approach is fundamentally an appeal to moral persuasion. He asks the wealthy to change hearts and minds — to exercise empathy, mentor, and open networks — relying on their voluntary moral action rather than on structural compulsion. He treats inequality partly as a deficit of habits and imagination among low-income people that can be remedied by teaching the “right” psychology and practices. These elements make the argument attractive to readers who prefer non-confrontational, reformist routes: it promises measurable improvements through persuasion, education and moral example, without directly challenging property relations or class power.
As Marxists point out, inequality is rooted in property relations, the extraction of surplus value and state power. Teaching better habits or eliciting elite empathy cannot change the class relations that produce mass poverty. Moral appeals to elites presuppose goodwill and avoid building an independent working class
[1] The World View of the Oligarch in Guatemalan Politics.A thesis submitted for the degree of PhD in the Government Department of the University of Essex, Colchester, UK 2003
[2] Want to Challenge the Elite? Then first Understand What Makes Them Tick. frompoverty.oxfam.org.uk/want-to-challenge-the-elite-then-first-understand-what-makes-them-tick/
“Men of Maize” is a singular, difficult mine that will yield rich ore to those willing to dig for it.
Miguel Ángel Asturias.
“The earth falls dreaming from the stars, but awakens in what once were green mountains, now the barren peaks of Ilóm, where the guarda’s song wails out across the ravines, the hawk swoops headlong, the giant ants march, the dove sighs, and where sleeps, with his mat, his shadow and his woman, he who should hack the eyelids of those who fell the trees, singe the eyelashes of those who burn the forest, and chill the bodies of those who dam the waters of the river that sleeps as it flows and sees nothing until trapped in pools it opens its eyes and sees all with its deep water gaze …
Men of Maize
“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez
“To be radical is to grasp things by the root.”
Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
“There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.”
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1
Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899–1974) is a pivotal figure for anyone who wants to understand Latin American culture and the anti‑imperialist struggle. His fiction and political writing—above all Hombres de maíz (Men of Maize) and El señor presidente (Mr President) combine a literature of the oppressed with a critique of oligarchy, comprador rule and imperialist intervention. Hombres de maíz in particular provides a complex myth‑social account of indigenous life and capitalist dispossession.
Having said that, outside of the work of Gerald Martin and a few others, Miguel Ángel Asturias has been, for a long time, treated by the literary establishment in Latin America and around the world like a “dead dog”, and not content with that, they have continued to pile a further amount of other dead dogs upon his literary reputation.
One of the primary reasons for the cultural abandonment of Asturias has been decades of political and cultural reaction, with dire consequences. The professors, critics and journalists who make up what is called the intelligentsia want no part of Asturias’s sharp critique of both Yankee imperialism and its oligarch friends in Latin America.
There is a hostility amongst these layers to his tireless commitment to social truth, to historical and psychological reality, his building up of his characters’ situations and dilemmas, his engagement with towering questions, including many of the essential facts of class society, critique of Latin American illusions and delusions, his refusal to flatter his readers, all this continues to fly in the face of contemporary academic pettiness and subjectivism, lazy, irrationalist postmodernism and political timidity.
While that dire situation has apparently not changed much, there have been slight but significant recent developments regarding this great writer’s work. David Ungar’s excellent new translation of the 1946 novel El Señor Presidente (Mr President) by Ángel Asturias was published in 2022. While welcoming this critical event, several reviewers bemoaned the “strange lack of interest in the author in the English-speaking world.”[1]
On April 25th 2025, Penguin republished Men of Maize with a translation by Gerald Martin, and in 2026, Verso Publications will release an English translation of “Weekend in Guatemala” by the renowned academic David Lee. The book is an essential collection of stories written in anger after the 1954 CIA-backed overthrow of the Guatemalan government.
Men of Maize, Asturias’s 1949 novel, is considered by many to be his most essential work, yet it remains one of the least understood novels he wrote. Asturias himself said of it as “a singular, difficult mine that will yield rich ore to those willing to dig for it.”
Hector Tober goes so far as to call it “Asturias’s Mayan masterpiece, his Indigenous Ulysses, a deep dive into the forces that made and kept the Maya a subservient caste, and the perpetual resistance that kept Guatemala’s many Mayan cultures alive and resilient. Like most people born in Guatemala, Asturias likely had some Indigenous ancestry, even though his father, a judge, was among the minority of Guatemalans who could trace their Spanish heritage to the seventeenth century. When the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera (later the subject of Asturias’s novel Mr President) sent the future author’s father and family into internal exile in the Maya-centric world of the provincial Alta Verapaz, the young Miguel Ángel fell deeply into the great well of Indigenous culture for the first time.”[2]
Miguel Ángel Asturias and the origins of magical realism
Asturias has long been credited with originating the Magical Realism style of writing. His novel El Señor Presidente (published 1946) prefigures the techniques later associated with Magical Realism. As Rafael Azul points out in his excellent article Gabriel García Márquez: A giant in the literature of the Americas, “Making the experiences of Latin American social struggle, repression, and tyranny the subject of his literary effort was not unique to García Márquez. Mister President (El Señor Presidente), by the Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias, who was exiled in Paris, was published in Mexico in 1946. The novel details the assembly line quality of sadistic brutality meted out by an unnamed dictator in an unnamed Central American nation. The novel, a blend of surrealism and naturalism, inaugurated a new style, magical realism, that characterised the later literary boom on the continent. García Márquez became one of its masters. By incorporating fantasy and magic into their narratives, Asturias, García Márquez, and others sought to represent reality, including the reality of human consciousness, in all its facets and complexities. Memories, native myths and fantastic beings are all integrated in the stories. The characters travel back and forth in time, and their memories of the past become activated in the present. The dead intervene in the lives of the living. All this is done not as a means of escaping or masking reality, but as a way of penetrating it.[3]
Any examination of Asturias’s work must situate it in the concrete social and political conditions of Central America—U.S. imperial intervention, oligarchic rule, and the class domination that produced mass dispossession and terror. Asturias wrote amid the rise of authoritarian regimes and open imperial interference in the region. The grotesque continuity of oligarchic power, state terror and foreign corporate influence created a social reality in which everyday life often had the character of a nightmare and the irrational. Magical realism emerges when lived experience itself is surreal: mass violence, dispossession, and ideological mystification produce a popular consciousness that mixes myth, memory, and the uncanny. Asturias’s novels compress these social facts into narrative forms that reveal the social totality behind individual pathology.
Asturias does not merely adorn his prose with “magical” elements for aesthetic effect. His technique fuses myth, surreal episodes and symbolic grotesquerie to expose the law of motion of class rule: how state power, landholding elites and imperial influence reproduce domination. This method both records popular memory and refracts historical processes through mythic forms—an approach that can illuminate social contradictions when read dialectically.
It should be warned against reading Asturias too uncritically. His examination of myths, while important, is no substitute for a concrete examination of social relations. There is, of course, a danger that idealist constructions can hide real social relations. Leon Trotsky insisted that aesthetic form must be abstracted from its social and class roots: the formalist separation of form from content obscures the class forces that shape cultural production. As Trotsky wrote
“It is unquestionably true that economic conditions do not create the need for art. But neither is the need for food made by economics. On the contrary, the need for food and warmth creates economics. Indeed, one cannot always rely on Marxist principles in deciding whether to accept or reject a work of art. A work of art should, in the first place, be judged by its own law, that is, by the law of art. But Marxism alone can explain why and how a given tendency in art has originated in a given period of history; in other words, who it was who made a demand for such an artistic form and not for another, and why. It would be childish to think that every class can entirely and fully create its own art from within itself, and, particularly, that the proletariat is capable of creating a new art by means of closed art guilds or circles, or by the Organisation for Proletarian Culture [Proletkult], etc. Generally speaking, the artistic work of man is continuous. Each new rising class places itself on the shoulders of its preceding one. But this continuity is dialectical, that is, it finds itself through internal repulsions and breaks. New artistic needs or demands for new literary and creative points of view are stimulated by economics through the development of a new class, and minor stimuli are supplied by changes in the class’s position under the influence of its growing wealth and cultural power. Artistic creation is always a complicated turning inside out of old forms, under the influence of new stimuli originating outside art. In this large sense of the word, art is a handmaiden. It is not a disembodied element feeding on itself, but a function of social man indissolubly tied to his life and environment.[4]
Asturias’s life work must be read as a socio-historical document, not as an ahistorical ornament. Studying Miguel Ángel Asturias scientifically is not an inward-looking cultural exercise; it is a political weapon to expose the roots of oppression.
Notes
Revisiting Men of Maize: Historical Truths, Literary Distortions, and Asturias in Today’s Guatemala -Elaine Elliott
Tall Tales Made to Order: The Making of Myth in Men of Maize by Miguel Angel Asturias René Prieto: MLN, Vol. 101, No. 2, Hispanic Issue (Mar., 1986), pp. 354-365
Myth As Time and Word by Ariel Dorfman
Myth and Social Realism in Miguel Angel Asturias-Luis Leal
A Literary Study of Magical Realism in Hombres de Maíz -LIU Lu-yao
[1] See keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2024/07/mr-president-by-miguel-angel-asturias.html
[2] On Asturias’s Men of Maize- August 16, 2024-www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/08/16/on-asturiass-men-of-maize/
“At the moment, it wouldn’t be going too far to say [Swift] is one of the most powerful people in the world.”
Georgia Carroll
How has Swift achieved such phenomenal success with albums like this? To some extent, her rise can be attributed to the persona she has cultivated, together with the music industry. In the interest of mass appeal, the singer offers something to everyone: a little bit acoustic and country, a little bit electric and urban, a soupçon of sexiness, a pinch of feminism, and a lot of spectacle. At the same time, Swift has taken pains not to offend anyone and to remain relatively “apolitical.” She won’t “corrupt the youth” or inspire critical thinking, which is music to the ears of the industry.
Eric Schreiber
“If the time becomes slothful and heavy, he [the poet] knows how to arouse it . . . he can make every word he speaks draw blood. Whatever stagnates in the flat of custom or obedience or legislation, he never stagnates. Obedience does not master him; he masters it. …”
Walt Whitman
The essays in this book came about through a so-called Swiftposium held in Melbourne, Australia, before the start of Taylor Swift’s 2024 Eras world tour. The Symposium was the first of its kind. Its remit was an academic examination of the singer-songwriter Taylor Swift.
This, however, was not a regular academic conference. Despite the organisers going out of their way to say it was not a fan convention, it was pretty clear that the speakers and the audience had other ideas.
According to one report, “Fans were also desperate to take part, and on Sunday, hundreds of people—walking advertisements for rhinestones, cowboy boots, and Swift’s signature red lip—flocked into Melbourne’s iconic Capitol Theatre to hear lectures about the megastar. At a sold-out friendship bracelet-making workshop beforehand, 19-year-old Soumil says the event – run by RMIT University – is helping heal the wounds left by the ticketing bloodbath of last year, so much for academic impartiality.”
As this quote demonstrates, the degree of impartiality of these essay contributions leaves a lot to be desired . Swift fanatic Rachel Feder writes “ I was first introduced to Taylor Swift through my students, and then through my relationship with Tiffany, who grew up with the albums. She even has a picture of meeting Swift after a concert when she was 15. She’s an OG Swiftie.
At the Grammys last year, when Swift announced her “Tortured Poets Department” album, Tiffany texted me, saying, “This is your album. This is your era,” because Romanticist tortured poets are my whole thing. I shot off a quick email to my editor that said, “Hey, sorry to email you at night about Taylor Swift, but do we want to do ‘A Swiftie’s Guide to Tortured Poets?’” The team had all these incredible insights on how to make it capacious, like a “Swifties’ Guide to Literature” slash “Literary Guide to Taylor Swift.” Then I brought Tiffany on board, and we wrote it so fast. We had seven weeks to do the first draft, and we got through every album before “Tortured Poets” dropped in April 2024. We experienced that album in real time, writing that chapter in two weeks, which was a nerdy, bookish Swiftie’s dream.”[1]
It does not need an academic to tell you that Swift is big business. With a fan base of over 500 million, she is the highest-earning pop star of all time and is now a billionaire and a member of the American oligarch club. Her billionaire status has largely come off the back of fairly routine and uninteresting songwriting. Swift admits that her favourite songs are the ones where she has to think.[2] If that is the case, then only two albums from her extensive catalogue, Folklore and Evermore, are worth listening to.
One thing is clear from the essays in this book and in general is that Swift is protected and defended by not only a group of fanatical academics, but she is a fully paid-up member of the #MeToo movement who defends her with vigour.
Two such fanatics, Mary Fogarty & Gina Arnold, launched an attack on the songwriter Bob Dylan, writing “Swift may be replacing Dylan feels a bit like reparations. Dylan’s work influenced a generation of singer/songwriters, as well as those who wished to write about music, rather than make it, but unfortunately, he is responsible for, among other things, a swath of material which relegates women to objects and does worse. The women of his songs, as many have noted, are, as Katrina Forrester (2020), put it, ‘Unappealing. They were clawing, childish, neurotic, and demanding, women who wanted too much or took what he didn’t want to give. The feminist invocation of Dylan inhabited the uncomfortable terrain between critique and homage: could they use his words to transcend the relations of a world that he described so well yet also embodied? When Ellen Willis (2012) later revised her classic 1967 essay on Dylan, she wrote that he exemplified the ‘bohemian contempt for women’.[3]
It is hard to know where to start with this venomous essay. My point is that Dylan had far more insight into the nature of relationships between men and women than Swift will ever have. As David Walsh writes “A perusal of Bob Dylan––Lyrics: 1962-2001, at least its first half a dozen years or so, reveals a lively imagination at work, and sometimes deep feeling. Dylan can be witty, satirical, insightful and, as well, genuinely outraged at American society’s injustices. The lyrics are capable of conveying physical and psychic longing, both for “the beloved” and for recognition by society at large.[4]
As for swift her songs the Marxist writer Eric Schreiber claims they are indistinguishable, vapid and self-centred. Instead of poetry, her lyrics resemble teenage journal verse, including the inevitable pretentiousness.
Making a further point, he writes, “Swift is best understood not as an artist but as a creation of the music industry and a reflection of the present state of cultural decline. She was born in West Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1989. Her father is a former stockbroker for Merrill Lynch, and her mother worked as a mutual fund marketing executive. When she was growing up, Swift enjoyed the privileges of America’s financial elite. She spent summers at her family’s vacation home in Stone Harbour, New Jersey, where the median price of a house is $2.5 million.[5]
Her latest album, Life of a Showgirl, continues in the same vein as her previous work. As Alex Petridis writes in his Guardian review of Showgirl, “More startling still is the distinct lack of undeniable hooks and nailed-on melodies. The songs are well turned, but in terms of genuinely memorable moments, Showgirl evinces just one killer chorus (Elizabeth Taylor), some impressively unexpected key changes on Wi$h Li$t and the authentically heart-tugging Ruin the Friendship, which finds Swift returning to her home town for the funeral of a high school boy she regrets not dating. There’s a fantastic chord sequence on Actually Romantic, but, alas, 37 years ago, Frank Black wrote a very similar one for Where Is My Mind? by Pixies, a song you can literally sing along to Actually Romantic. The rest floats in one ear and out the other: not unpleasantly, but you might reasonably expect more given the amassed songwriting firepower behind it, and Swift’s claims of “keeping the bar really high”.[6]
Given what has happened in the world recently, you would have at least expected some form of comment to appear in her new album. Swift is an intelligent girl, but has chosen to stay silent. Again, like previous material, Life of a Showgirl deals with her feelings and past relationships. Her perspective has not matured appreciably since her early days.
Schreiber is correct when he writes, “Swift also arises out of the remarkable and ongoing monopolisation and narrowing at the top of the music industry. Record companies, artist management, broadcasting and concert ticketing and promotion, respectively, have come to be dominated by two or three corporate goliaths each. Of the 2 million artists on Spotify, less than 4 per cent account for over 95 per cent of streams. In 1982, the top 1 per cent of artists took in 26 per cent of total concert revenue; by 2017, the number was 60 per cent. In short, Swift’s great success is a symptom of the decay in popular music over the past several decades. It reflects an official culture unwilling or unable to look at itself critically and honestly.”[7]
Swift it would appear to be trapped in a prison largely of her own making. As Shakespeare writes in Hamlet ‘This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.’As any great artist male or female this should be their starting point. Bob Dylan was a spokesman to a generation for a time and was true to himself. Swift has had plenty of chances to speak out against the injustices and inequality in the world but so far has chosen to stay silent. This will be the legacy of her work and she will not be able to shake this off.
Notes
1. “The Story of Us” (Taylor’s Version): Taylor Swift and Interconnections of Sociological Theory and the Music Industry- Reema Azzo
2. Are You Ready for It? Re-Evaluating Taylor Swift- Mary Fogarty & Gina Arnold
3. Left of #MeToo -Heather Berg -Feminist Studies, 2020, Vol. 46, No. 2 (2020), pp. 259-286
4. Does Bob Dylan deserve to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature? David Walsh
5. Ceasing to be the voice of a generation-Paul Bond
6. Celebrity, Music, and Public Persona: A Case Study of Taylor Swift
7. Elaina K.M. Junes Minnesota State University, Mankato
8. Campaign Problems: How Fans React to Taylor Swift’s
9. Controversial Political Awakening- Simone Driessen
10.Miss Americana: Taylor Swift as a Battleground for Feminist Discourse
11.Juliet Eklund University of Denver
12.Who Needs to Calm Down? Taylor Swift and Rainbow Capitalism Eric Smiale
13.“Blue Swift”: Popular Culture Meets Politics∗ Orestis Troumpounis† Dimitrios Xefteris November 2024
[5] The Tortured Poets Department and the Taylor Swift phenomenon-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/05/21/wzwk-m21.html
[6] Taylor Swift: The Life of a Showgirl review – dull razzle-dazzle from a star who seems frazzled-www.theguardian.com/music/2025/oct/03/taylor-swift-the-life-of-a-showgirl-review
[7] The Tortured Poets Department and the Taylor Swift phenomenon-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/05/21/wzwk-m21.html
Perhaps the most significant development in the life of both my websites has been the exponential rise in hits. For the first time in its seventeen-year history, the original blog, which began in 2008, reached fifty thousand hits in September.
Two interrelated developments account for the rise. Firstly and most significantly, the huge radicalisation taking place has produced an interest in Marxism. Secondly, the move to publicise the websites on Bluesky has not only led to a significant rise in hits but has also attracted a new audience for the websites. In the past, a slight rise in hits would have presented no problem, but this month’s increase is substantial, and if it continues, it would mean I need more writers than just myself. So this is an appeal for guest articles. The website needs to expand into other areas beyond my personal interests.
Perhaps the most important book I have read and reviewed over the last month was John Rees’s Fiery Spirits. The book is superbly written and well researched. The book breaks new ground, and already, Rees is working on what will probably be the third book in the trilogy. Like his book, The Leveller Revolution, it needs a second and possibly a third read. It is safe to say that Rees and I do not share the same political outlook, but his work as a historian should be respected, and he is taking the study of the English bourgeois revolution to a new level. I am at a loss to explain, however, why the main bourgeois media outlets virtually boycotted the book. I look forward to his latest book.
Meetings
A People’s History of the Anti-Nazi League Date: 06/10/2025 to 06/10/2025 Time: 17:30 to 19:00 Venue: Online- via Zoom – Institute of Historical Research
Roundtable with editors and authors of In Solidarity, Under Suspicion: The British Far Left from 1956 Date 3 Dec 2025, 17:30 to 3 Dec 2025, 19:00 Venue Online- via Zoom. IHR
“Canceled Lives tells the whole sad story and the personal pain Bailey suffered. His publisher had no right to do what they did to him. This book, about accusations of terrible behaviour and their effect on a book and its author, goes beyond memoir and reveals the profound harm such assertions can cause. It deserves a wide and discerning audience.”
Martin Garbus, Prominent First Amendment Lawyer
“I heed the cry of the women insulted and injured. However, I am also anxious about the nature of the tribunal that is adjudicating these charges. As a civil libertarian, I am anxious because there doesn’t seem to be a tribunal. What I see instead is a publicised accusation instantly followed by peremptory punishment.
Philip Roth
“The history of my discontent, as I remember it”
Philip Roth
“The purging of Bailey’s book sets a sinister example, intended to intimidate artists, biographers and scholars alike. The message being sent is clear: any influential figure who rubs up against establishment public opinion can be denounced and dismissed in like manner.”
David Walsh
When Blake Bailey’s excellent 900-page biography of the writer Philip Roth was published in 2021, it should have been the standard work on Roth’s life for some time to come. Unfortunately for Bailey, we were already amidst the #MeToo movement’s vilification of Roth, his work and worldview. Roth was cognisant of the fact that some women had been abused, saying, “I heed the cry of the women insulted and injured. But I am also made anxious by the nature of the tribunal that is adjudicating these charges. I am made anxious, as a civil libertarian, because there doesn’t seem to be a tribunal. What I see instead is a publicised accusation instantly followed by peremptory punishment.”[1]
Bailey became a casualty in this war against Roth for essentially defending Roth’s right to his worldview. Bailey fell afoul of his publishers’ “morals charge” after accusations of sexual abuse were levelled at him via social media. Some of Bailey’s former eighth-grade students at Lusher High School in New Orleans came forward with allegations that he had groomed them for sex. Two women, including one of his former students at Lusher, subsequently accused him of rape.
Although no formal charges were made against Bailey, it did not stop his so-called friends in the literary scene, who “fell over one another”, disassociating themselves from Bailey. His biography was then pulped by his publisher, W.W.Norton, an act that is akin to book burning carried out by the Nazis in the 1930s.
As David Walsh wrote, “ In a significant act of censorship, with chilling implications for democratic rights, publisher W.W. Norton has announced its decision to “permanently” remove Blake Bailey’s biography of American novelist Philip Roth (1933–2018) from print. Several individuals have accused Bailey of sexual wrongdoing, including rape, dating back to 2003. None of them has come forward with any evidence to back up the claims. Bailey’s 880-page book, well-received critically and considered one of the essential works of the year in its field, will be pulped. Norton also reported its dropping of Bailey’s 2014 memoir. In a statement dripping with hypocrisy, Norton’s president, Julia A. Reidhead, asserted that “Mr Bailey will be free to seek publication elsewhere if he chooses.” Overnight, Bailey has become a “non-person.” he has ceased to exist.[2]
Most of Bailey’s friends and fellow writers stayed silent when he was made a “non-person. It was not until the World Socialist Website marshalled some resistance that people started to speak out. Several prominent writers, historians, and film people contacted by the WSWS condemned W. W. Norton’s treatment of Bailey. Novelist, memoirist and short-story writer James Morrison wrote, “Even if Blake Bailey were charged, tried, and convicted of a crime, it would still be indefensible for W. W. Norton to pulp his book. Can American readers not have the option to think for themselves? The “#MeToo movement” might have accomplished something if it had facilitated the prosecution of cases involving harassment or assault. Still, it has resulted in something like its opposite: a bizarre spectacle of social panic, moral shaming, and public burning, based on unfounded accusations in the media. Norton’s cancellation of Bailey’s book is not the action of a free institution in a democratic society. It is the procedure of craven functionaries deep in a politburo.[3]
Author, editor and blogger Kathleen Spaltro said, “Thomas Aquinas clarified that the aesthetic value of art has nothing whatever to do with whether the artist is a good person. The artist may be a good person, or not, but that is the moral question faced by the artist as a person, not as an artist.
Film critic, film historian and author Jonathan Rosenbaum: Cancel culture, perhaps the most poisonous and befuddled offshoot of “political correctness,” is a totalitarian expression of impotence, not any real exercise of political power. It’s a way of saying that because one can’t defeat racism or misogyny or abuse in the real world, at its sources, one can pretend to defeat it symbolically, by canceling words, sounds, images and other forms of communication, thus pretending that the people and communicators one disapproves of can be “canceled” (i.e., ignored and suppressed). It’s an insult to the principles of free expression that can only be practised by defeated bigots who’ve given up on free expression and democratic processes, and by gamblers who prefer to cheat.”
It took a while for Bailey to understand what had happened to him. Canceled Lives is his attempt to process and collect his thoughts and to answer his detractors. Patrick Mullins describes the new book’s journey: “Originally titled Repellent, it was scheduled to be published in April 2023. Speaking circumspectly, Bailey has explained that the executors of Roth’s estate, Andrew Wylie and Julia Golier, objected to the inclusion of Bailey’s conversations with Roth in the manuscript, arguing that the publication of these exchanges, which supposedly made up the bulk of the book, would violate the agreement Bailey signed as Roth’s authorised biographer. And so Repellent was reworked, becoming Cancelled Lives, and Bailey’s dealings with Roth were transformed into an account of his father’s death braided with chapters narrating Bailey’s disgrace.”[4]
There are many themes running through Canceled Lives. One being Bailey’s sexual activity. Bailey was no angel, and some of his relationships were questionable at best. There seems to be a period in his life where his penis did most of the thinking, but this does not mean he deserved what happened to him.
He writes, “The worst of what I was accused of wasn’t true. I did nothing illegal and nothing vicious. I’m not a rapist, I did not deliberately groom anybody; these were long-time friends. You have enterprising reporters calling hundreds of your former students, hundreds of the people you’ve mentioned in your acknowledgements. People, for various reasons, are eager to get their shots”.
A strong theme of the book is death. Bailey discusses the life and early death of his older brother, Scott, who committed suicide in his early thirties after a life of drug addiction and crime. Bailey harshly describes Scott’s suicide as doing “himself and his loved ones a favour ”. Bailey spent a significant amount of time researching his book on Roth, so much so that he must have ended up with deep feelings for Roth.
He tells how he witnessed Roth’s final moments alongside Roth’s former lovers and closest friends surrounding his hospital deathbed. It is not surprising that the book provides little information about his relationship with Roth. Given how much he had to process in his own life and to come to terms with so many devastating attacks on him. Perhaps it is just as well, as he was while Roth was still alive, unable due to disclosure limitations imposed by the Roth estate on Bailey.
As Walsh intimates in his work on Bailey, most of the attacks on Bailey are less about his sexual proclivities and more to do with the fact that he wrote a perceptively objective biography of Roth and, in the end, defended both Roth and his political worldview against his detractors in the #MeToo movement.
In a recent video call, David Walsh spoke with Bailey about his new book, “The Sexual Witch Hunt,” and democratic rights, as well as briefly discussing the subject matter of his various biographies. Bailey thanked the World Socialist Website for its support, saying, “You could be speaking for me, and you did, after everything blew up. I was enormously grateful for the courage of it. Very few people spoke up. People wrote me private notes expressing their outrage, or at least chagrin, about how viciously and relentlessly I was attacked. But I can’t think of anyone offhand who was as outspoken publicly as you were. And if I didn’t say it emphatically enough before, let me say now that I was very grateful for that.[5]
It is striking that the Trotskyist movement has been left to lead the defence of Bailey and his democratic rights in the pages of the World Socialist Website. The campaign to defend Bailey has cut across the right-wing attack on him led by the #MeToo movement. It is worth noting that the movement has been ably assisted by numerous pseudo-left media organisations that have joined the attacks on both Roth and Bailey. These so-called leftists have shown their support for banning books and removing them from bookshelves. The next logical step for these organisations will be to join the book burning.
Bailey’s new book, Cancelled Lives—My Father, My Scandal, and Me, is a stunning response to his detractors and slanderers, and it deserves a broad audience. Unlike too many of the #MeToo victims, Bailey has decided to fight and set the record straight. This is an entirely welcome and healthy development, a contribution to the cleansing of the cultural atmosphere. Bailey has the right to see the world as he sees fit.
[2] Book-burning comes to America-https:ww.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/29/bail-a29.html
[3] Writers, biographers protest W.W. Norton’s decision to “permanently” remove Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth from print-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/05/04/bail-m04.html
[5] A conversation with Blake Bailey, Philip Roth biographer and author of Cancelled Lives: My Father, My Scandal, and Me: “I said … I’m not going to take this lying down”
In November 2025, this Blog/Website will be 18 years old. Started as a vanity project after my part-time degree at Birkbeck University, it has now become something more substantial. It is now comfortably racking up 10,000 hits per month, which is not bad for a website that, outside of the World Socialist Website, is the only orthodox Trotskyist website.
This year, I hope to expand the website and add more history writers, as well as a few additional subject pages. The other aim is to produce two drafts of the books I have been working on for some time. A collection of essays on Raphael Samuel and to rewrite my degree dissertation on Cromwell, the Levellers and the Putney Debates.
Meetings
If any writer has a meeting or book launch coming up, please don’t hesitate to contact me to advertise it.
Book Launch – A.L. Morton and the Radical Tradition-
Author James Crossley introduces his biography of the Communist intellectual A.L. Morton, who pioneered studies of English radical history.
Thursday, 26 June 2025 – 7:00 pm Marx Memorial Library, 37a Clerkenwell Green, London, EC1R 0DU
National Portrait Gallery The Fiery Spirits: John Rees 10 July 2025, 13.00-14.00
Popular protest, parliament and the English Revolution
“There are lots of people with lots of money who’d like a trophy. But you then lose track of them and they disappear, until they pop up on the market again.”
Prof Jean Seaton
‘I hope I shall get the chance to write the truth about what I have seen. The stuff appearing in the English papers is largely the most appalling lies, more I can’t say, owing to the censorship.’ –
George Orwell, May 1937
All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others
Animal Farm-George Orwell
“The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds, any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp”.
1984
About 160 historically important George Orwell papers have been acquired by University College London. The Gollancz Papers, as they were known were at risk of being sold to the highest bidder at auction.
The papers contain Orwell’s correspondence, contracts and readers’ reports relating to his earliest novels, dating from 1934 to 1937. The papers relate to four of his earliest published works – A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, The Road to Wigan Pier and Inside the Whale . His analysis of the politics of 1930s Europe, shaped his world viewpoint. The newly acquired papers contain manuscript notebooks, personal papers and the first handwritten notes of some of Orwell’s most famous words and phrases, such as “Two Minutes Hate”, “Newspeak”, and “War is Peace. Ignorance is strength. Freedom is slavery”.
The collection acquired by UCL had originally belonged to Orwell’s publisher, Victor Gollancz, who founded one of the 20th century’s most important left-wing publishing houses. Publishing several of Orwell’s early novels. However he refused to publish three of Orwell’s major political books, Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Gollancz was particularly hostile to Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Gollancz thought Orwell was a Trotskyist and was hostile to Stalinism. Although no Trotskyist, Orwell was hostile to Stalinism. Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is an important written by a gifted and honest writer committed to exposing the truth.
“Written in 1937, it is a moving account of the heroic revolutionary struggle of the Spanish people against fascism and for socialism. Above all, it provides irrefutable proof by an independent living witness to the crimes committed by the Stalinist bureaucracy in Spain and its betrayal of the Spanish revolution. Orwell’s account was a vindication of the analysis that had been made by Leon Trotsky and the International Left Opposition of the Soviet bureaucracy, whose policies had by then become utterly counterrevolutionary on a world scale.”[1]
A spokesman for University College London (UCL) said the papers were “a valuable piece of Britain’s cultural heritage”. UCL already has the world’s most comprehensive research material relating to Orwell. The purchase by UCL was done with the help of the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Friends of the Nations’ Libraries to stop the collection falling into the hands of a few money-grabbing collectors. Anger was also expressed at the condition of the papers, which had been “languishing in dozens of rusty, dusty filing cabinets”.
The Orwell papers were owned by the Orion Group, which was in turn owned by Hachette. Hachette had no interest in the cultural value of the papers. Their decision to sell to the highest bidder because they were closing down the warehouse where the papers were stored had been condemned as an act of “Cultural vandalism”. According to Rick Gekoski in his 2021 book, Guarded by Dragons, “No one on the Orion board cared where they went, or to whom.”[2]
How Orion came to get the papers was explained by Richard Young, who writes, “Gollancz continued as an independent publishing house even after the death of Victor Gollancz in 1967, under the guidance of his daughter Livia. In the late 1980s, however, the business was sold to new owners and went through several changes of ownership in the 1990s, ending up under the Orion Group. In 2012, Orion was faced with a problem, in that the archive of Gollancz was by then housed in a warehouse on the south coast, along with archives from several other publishing houses. The warehouse provider planned to close the facility in the coming years, and so faced with this, Orion took the opportunity to put the archive up for sale.
So, what exactly is a publishing house archive? Essentially, it consists of two main elements: so-called file or archive copies of the books published by the firm, and secondly, the correspondence or publishing files relating to each of the published works. Gekoski did his best to place the entire correspondence archive with an institution. Those tapped included the British Library, as well as Universities in the UK and the US. The price tag of 1 million pounds, which Orion was seeking, proved to be a stumbling block, however, and all negotiations to sell the archive (which included significant George Orwell correspondence) in its entirety fell through.[3]
The capitalist speculators of the Orion company stands in stark contrast to the “extraordinary generosity” of Orwell’s only son of Richard Blair, who with his own money purchased 50 letters to donate them to UCL’s Orwell Archive, to stop them being gobbled up by vampire collectors and according to him “Then they’re never seen again.
Orwell’s biographer D J Taylor concurred with Blair, saying, “This is a fantastic treasure trove from the point of view of Orwell and publishing history … Literary manuscripts have a terrible habit of disappearing”.
