Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kastner E. Hall (Translator) Puffin Paperback – 21 Sept. 1959

 

Emil: Are your people well off?

Professor: I don't really know. Nobody ever talks about money.

Emil: Then I expect you have plenty. 

Dialogue from Emil and the Detectives

“It is sufficient to remember that the German bourgeoisie, with its incomparable technology, philosophy, science and art, allowed the power of the state to lie in the hands of a feudal bureaucratic class as late as 1918 and decided, or, more correctly, was forced to take power into its own hands only when the material foundations of German culture began to fall to pieces.”

Leon Trotsky: Proletarian Culture and Proletarian Art

The story of Kästner's Emil and the Detectives illuminates Germany in the 1920s, before German culture began to fall to Pieces under the death blow of  Fascism. Published in 1929 and in English in 1931, Kästner would have been politically aware enough to know that the book and himself were living on borrowed time. While the Nazis burned his books, he, however, did not suffer the same fate despite being interviewed by the Gestapo twice.

There are many reasons why adults return to their childhood books. For some, it is a comfort read or just the pure joy of reading. Emil and the Detectives was one of my first reads as a child. Not sure why I was drawn to it, why I chose a foreign author rather than a British one, we will never know. I borrowed it from my school library because it wasn't on the school reading curriculum. I want to say that I was aware of its political overtones, but I was drawn to it by chance, as I was not yet politically conscious of the world around me, which would arrive when I reached sixteen. Nevertheless, the book will always evoke fond childhood memories.

Perhaps because children and adults, for that matter, face a return to the darkness that fell on Europe with the rise of fascism, that Emil and the Detectives still resonates today. It makes sense that a group of kids from 1929 would represent society's underdogs, at risk from the forces of fascism, not only in Germany but in America, too.

The text from the 1931 translation by Margaret Goldsmith gives a flavour of the children's class consciousness in Kastner’s book: “I don't understand that at all," little Tuesday declared. "How can I steal what already belongs to me? What's mine is mine, even if it's in a stranger’s pocket! ”These things are difficult to understand," the professor expounded. "Morally, you might be in the right. But the law will find you guilty all the same. Even some grown-ups don't really understand these things, but they are a fact. Or this dialogue

Emil: Are your people well off? Professor: I don't really know. Nobody ever talks about money. Emil: Then I expect you have plenty. ”[1]

As Uma Krishnaswami correctly writes, “Emil and the Detectives positions itself squarely on the side of ordinary people and against oppression meted out by the powerful. When a suspicious-looking man, Herr Grundeis, steals the money Emil Tischbein’s mother gave him, young Emil doesn’t go to the police. Instead, he dashes off to find the thief. In the process, the boy sleuth gathers a motley band of friends, including the unforgettable Pony Hütchen and, of course, the endearing Little Tuesday, without whose faithful vigilance the plan could not unfold. Naturally, the kids are victorious in the end.”[2]

Why read Kästner Now

Emil’s story raises perennial questions: how childhood experience is shaped by class, how working-class solidarity takes root in everyday life, and how the state and the market shape civic trust. Studying such literature trains workers and students to read cultural texts as expressions of material conditions.

So Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives (1929) is best read not simply as a children’s adventure but as a social document of the late Weimar Republic: a work that reflects class contrasts, urban life, and the moral questions facing youth in a capitalist society. Again, for workers and students, Kästner offers an accessible entry point into how literature can both reflect social conditions and contribute to political education. For a political framing of Kästner’s broader milieu and politics.[3]

Erich Kästner’s stories, poems and satires—written amid the political turmoil of the Weimar Republic—are rich in social observation: they identify petty‑bourgeois anxieties, the erosion of democratic habits, the everyday humiliations of children and workers, and the moral cowardice of elites. Reading Kästner in the workplace helps workers develop a literary sensibility while equipping them to connect cultural forms to concrete political tasks: building class consciousness, exposing bourgeois ideology, and preparing collective struggle.

One of Kastner’s most crucial works is Fabian or Going to the Dogs. As Bernd Reinhardt perceptively writes, “ Fabian has certain autobiographical traits and who more than once in his literary work blames 'stupidity' for social ills, referring to dumb Nazis, stupid Germans, and so on. The voiceover that features from time to time in the film quotes a passage from the novel where the fights between Nazis and Communists are compared to dancehall brawls. Like many other intellectuals, Kästner underestimated the danger of the Nazi movement. After the war, he admitted that they should have been fought earlier, because “threatening dictatorships can only be fought before they have taken power.”[4]

About the Author

Erich Kästner (1899–1974), a pacifist and satirist whose works were famously burned by the Nazis, though Emil and the Detectives was initially spared due to its popularity.

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[1] Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kastner E. Hall (Translator) Puffin Paperback – 21 Sept. 1959

[2] Why You Should Read (or Reread) Emil and the Detectives-www.umakrishnaswami.com/blog/why-you-should-read-or-reread-emil-and-the-detectives

[3] See the WSWS discussion of Kästner’s Fabian work and its relation to the Weimar social crisis, on Fabian and the dangers of the 1930s.

[4] German Film Award in Silver for Dominik Graf’s Fabian: Going to the Dogs-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/11/13/fabi-n13.html

Lord of the Flies: by William Golding-Faber & Faber 3 Mar. 1997

 “ A Libel Against Humanity”

David Walsh

‘The Satan of our cosmology is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which implies that everything is running down. Life is … a local contradiction of this law … [it] refuses to submit … and rewinds itself up again.’

William Golding

Anyone who moved through those years, without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.”

Wiliam Golding

Lord of the Flies, written in the aftermath of the Second World War, is essentially a “libel against humanity”. The book’s plot line follows a group of largely public schoolboys who descend into savagery at the drop of a hat after being stranded on a deserted island.  While Golding argues that "man produces evil as a bee produces honey," he rejects the premise that the boys' behaviour could be socially constructed. Golding believes violence is a default setting of humanity and not a condition of the competitive, capitalist and class-divided society in which the boys were raised.

A class analysis would indicate that Ralph and Piggy are members of the ruling elite representing the liberal-democratic order and that both exhibit "bourgeois" values. Jack would be the totalitarian/militarist, portraying the rise of fascism or the expression of Stalinism, valuing strength and production (meat) over intellectualism and law.

Piggy's alienation and death could be explained by his lower-class status (indicated by his accent and physical limitations), showing that an irrational" democratic system fails to protect those it deems inferior.  Golding believed that it would not take much for civilisation after the Second World War to suffer the same fate as the boys. A Marxist would argue that the novel reflects the "political subconscious" of the Cold War era, in which the fear of nuclear war and the struggle between democracy and communism are projected onto the children’s conflict.

As Alexander Lee points out in a recent article, Golding's postwar irrational vulnerabilities were preceded by Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), which had already pointed to a dystopian future in which rationalism and science run amok, destroying morality. In 1941, a Mass Observation Report found that a majority of British people believed that science was ‘out of control’.

Such was the toxic atmosphere created by the post-war period, by the American state and ruling class when they carried out a purge of socialist and left-wing views from film, writing and culture as a whole. Golding’s opinions, as presented in Lord of the Flies (1954), which present violence and atavism as central to the human condition, were already being expressed by other writers during this period.

However, William Golding’s novels are not merely literary artefacts; read dialectically, they are tools for political education—revealing how ideas, institutions and everyday relations reproduce domination, and pointing to why only organised working-class struggle can overturn the conditions that give rise to the very tragedies he depicts.

David North puts this better when he says, “Most of you are, I am sure, familiar with William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, which argues that barbarism is the natural condition of humanity. Release a group of ordinary school boys from the usual restraints of civilisation and they will, within a few weeks, revert to a state of homicidal savagery. This misanthropic work flowed from the conclusions drawn by Golding from the experiences of the Second World War. “Anyone who moved through those years,” he later wrote, “without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head. The popularity of Lord of the Flies reflected the bewilderment and despair provoked by the horrors of World War II. This mood was strengthened by the political relations that arose in the aftermath of the war. It became more challenging to engage in a discussion of the nature of the Third Reich after 1945 than before. In the reactionary political environment of the Cold War, it was no longer considered appropriate, especially in the United States, to dwell too seriously on the relation between fascism and modern capitalism.”[1]

In his defence, Golding was not born a pessimist or prone to irrationality. According to Alexander Lee, “Long before Golding began writing Lord of the Flies, he had also been a rationalist. The son of a science teacher, he studied Natural Sciences at Oxford before switching to English. He grew up believing that humanity was not only capable of change but also progressing. Like many students in the 1920s and 1930s, he agreed with Karl Marx that history moves in one direction: forward. He believed that, even if the process might sometimes be painful, even violent, the conditions of life would inexorably improve and humanity become happier, more ‘enlightened’, and fulfilled. It was inevitable.”[2]

So what changed? What made Golding write ‘We are the masters of ignorance, proud, frightened, and god-haunted. We have no country and no home.’ We are no better than before: worse, in fact. Death has become a calculation, and even cruelty has lost its horror. It might be tempting to compare this to the ‘law of the jungle’, but even that would be an understatement. In what jungle could you find six million people being processed through a death chamber?’[3]

Again, Golding was not the only writer to draw pessimistic conclusions from the rise of fascism and Nazi Germany’s responsibility for the murder of six million jews. Walter Benjamin’s famous “Angelus Novus”‑inspired lament saw history as an accumulating catastrophe rather than a process moving toward emancipation; Benjamin’s own despair culminated in suicide while fleeing fascism, a tragic personal witness to the collapse of political possibilities. Others turned to cultural nihilism or moral relativism—treating the Holocaust as proof that Enlightenment rationality and historical materialism were bankrupt. In his book Understanding the Nazi Genocide: Marxism after Auschwitz, Enzo Traverso makes clear his deepening opposition to Marxism as a method of historical analysis and as the basis of a political perspective.

In the introduction, he writes: “Between emancipation and genocide, the history of European Jewry, as much in its metamorphoses as in its wounds, can be seen as an excellent laboratory in which to study the different faces of modernity: its hopes and liberatory aspirations on the one hand, its destructive forces on the other. This history shows both the ambiguity of the Enlightenment and its heirs, including Marxism, and the extreme forms of barbarism that modern civilisation can take.”

The Marxist writer Nick Beams replied, saying, “This approach, in which 'modernity' is made responsible for the crimes against the Jewish people—one could say the crimes against humanity committed on the body of the Jewish people—performs a vital political role. It obscures the political forces and the social classes whose interests they ultimately served. Modernity is an empty abstraction. It is wracked by class division and class conflict.”[4]

While Golding’s and others' approach is psychologically understandable, this thinking depoliticises the lesson of Auschwitz. It turns the Holocaust into an argument that history has no laws or that socialism is an inadequate response and substitutes metaphysical despair for political struggle. As the World Socialist Web Site has argued, attempts to attribute Auschwitz to amorphous “modernity” rather than to specific class and imperialist dynamics serve to blur responsibility and paralyse resistance.

Since some of the article was written with the help of the WSWS’s Socialism AI, it would be churlish of me not to praise it, and to say that it has already become an invaluable educational tool in the struggle for socialism. One aspect I am particularly struck by is that it not only provides information but also offers a Marxist study guide. It provides a systematic framework for studying Golding’s book to inform both a theoretical understanding and aid political development.

 

 

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[1]The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners-www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html

[2] William Golding’s Island of Savagery Alexander Lee | Published in History Today Volume 75 Issue 12 December 2025

[3] William Golding’s Island of Savagery

[4] Marxism and the Holocaust-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/05/adde-m15.html

Some Brief Thoughts on the WSWS’s Socialism AI

When the wicked rule, the people groan.

Where there is no vision, the people perish. …

– Book of Proverbs 29:2 and 18 (written before 700 BCE

Socialist World Media, the online media platform for the Committee for a Workers' International (CWI), recently published a fascinating article called "The Man Trotsky".[1]

This was published on December 14, 2025. It was initially written by the State Capitalist Rae Spiegel (later known as Raya Dunayevskaya) when she was  22 years old. Spiegel served as Leon Trotsky's personal secretary in Mexico. It was submitted to Max Shachtman for publication in the press of the newly formed Workers Party, but it was never printed.

The piece offers a rare, intimate look at Trotsky’s personality and his vision for a socialist future. The article is well worth a read despite her glorification of the GPU and FBI agent Joseph Hansen.

Given that the article offers fascinating insight into how Leon Trotsky worked, one wonders how he would have responded to the new WSWS Socialism AI platform. My feeling is that he would have welcomed it with open arms and would have had a field day on it. This was my initial reaction to it. I still need more time to develop a deeper understanding of it and its technology, but it appears to be a fantastic aid in the fight for Socialism in the 21^st century.

Socialism AI is a specialised chatbot designed to provide workers, students, and activists with access to over 175 years of Marxist theory and nearly 30 years of WSWS historical analysis. It should be seen as a library for the mind, with a fantastic librarian at the helm.

Users can pose questions about historical events, political theory, and current labour struggles (e.g., how to oppose layoffs at specific companies) and receive responses grounded in scientific socialism. While being a little surprised that some features require a paid subscription to cover operational costs, I agree with the initiative to "democratize access" to revolutionary perspectives.

As David North points out, “The historical significance of Socialism AI is sharply revealed when examined in the objective context of its public launch, amid the deepening world capitalist crisis. The working class faces a highly complex economic, geopolitical and social reality, while the bourgeoisie has thoroughly dismantled traditional centres of study and discussion. Under these circumstances, a system that synthesises and connects the insights of Marxist theory with current developments is no mere novelty. It is a means of intellectual counter-attack, of recovering the historical memory of the working-class movement.”[2]

North’s point about recovering the memory of the working class is extremely valid. This has always been the attitude of the Marxist movement, but the development of Socialism AI takes it to a whole other level. This change in how the Marxist movement operates, while not as fundamental as the shift from the Newspaper form to the Internet, is pretty close to that fundamental change. While not a replacement for the World Socialist Website (WSWS), it should be seen as a complement to it.

It has not taken the Pseudo Left fraternity long to start attacking the WSWS’s use of AI for revolutionary purposes. On a forum run by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, titled "WSWS group to launch a ‘Socialism AI’," the SPGB published several unopposed comments that broadly attacked the WSWS’s launch of Socialism AI and expressed hostility to both orthodox Marxism and AI in general.[3]

The WSWS recently published an attack by “Dmitri. The WSWS has issued an extensive reply to his short comments, saying “ Dmitri’s remarks, notwithstanding his use of technical jargon, exemplify the widespread lack of understanding of AI and hostility to the Marxist approach to technology within the milieu of middle-class radicalism.”[4]

Socialist AI is fit for purpose, and workers and students should embrace the concept behind Socialism AI and use it in their struggle for Socialism in the 21^st Century.

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] https://www.socialistworld.net/2025/12/14/the-man-trotsky/

[2] Technology and the working class: Responding to an opponent of Socialism AI www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/12/19/thbn-d19.html

[3] www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/topic/wsws-group-to-launch-a-socialism-ai/

[4] Technology and the working class: Responding to an opponent of Socialism AI -www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/12/19/thbn-d19.html 

The New Left Party: Seize the Time by Charlie Kimber and Tomáš Tengely-Evans Bookmarks 2025 £1.50

 ‘Oh what a tangled web we weave/ When first we practice to deceive,‘

Walter Scott- Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field

To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.

William Shakespeare's Hamlet (1601), Act 1, sc. 3, l 58

Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying!

William Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1' (1597), Act 5, sc. 4, l [148]

“Tell me anyway – Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies.”

— Leon Trotsky

"The New Left Party: Seize the Time" is the title of a pamphlet by Charlie Kimber and Tomáš Tengely-Evans, published by the Socialist Worker. This new left party is called Your party, but no matter how the writers from the SWP dress it up, it is nothing but a Labour Party mark 2 and a political trap for the working class that is moving significantly to the left.

The reality is that “Your Party” is a "pseudo-left" and reformist project that will ultimately lead to "betrayal and defeat" for the working class. One indicator among many of that political trap is that the orthodox Trotskyists from the World Socialist website (WSWS) were explicitly barred from attending Your Party's founding conference, which it condemned as an act of "targeted political exclusion" and "bureaucratic censorship".

The founding of the party signals the "dead-end pseudo-reformist politics" that seek to work within the existing capitalist system rather than overthrow it. It deserves its title as a "Labour Party Mark 2".

The WSWS criticised Your Party's "policy statement" as a collection of "sound bites committing the party to nothing". It stresses that genuine socialism requires the "conscious revolutionary mobilisation of the working class to overthrow the capitalist state and establish workers' power", which Your Party avoids. The  WSWS contends that Your Party's leaders, including Corbyn and Sultana, will eventually "betray and defeat" the working class, similar to other "pseudo-left" figures like Bernie Sanders or Yanis Varoufakis.

Despite Kimber et al saying that the lessons from other attempts across Europe to form a series of new left parties must be learnt, the reality is that the SWP supported these attempts, dressing them up as socialist organisations that would lead a struggle against capitalism. They did nothing of the sort, and like Your Party, they are and were a political trap for the working class. The most recent of these traps is the SWP’s promotion of Zohran Mamdani. The SWP said of Mamdani’s campaign, “An insurgent vision that breaks with the status quo can be popular. That’s the lesson of Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York. And it’s a lesson that Your Party could learn here in Britain.”

As the WSWS writes, “The experience of the past decade is replete with examples of parties and individuals whose claims to represent a radical break with the political establishment were shipwrecked on the realities of capitalist rule. In Greece, the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza) came to power in 2015, promising to end austerity, only to impose the most brutal social cuts at the dictates of the banks and the European Union. In Germany, Die Linke (Left Party) has participated in state governments that deport refugees and enforce austerity. In Britain, the Corbyn movement within the Labour Party capitulated to the right-wing establishment, paving the way for the return of open reaction. In class terms, these tendencies express not the interests of the working class but those of the upper-middle class—a privileged social layer seeking not a fundamental restructuring of society but a more comfortable position for themselves.”[1]

It has become pretty clear from the founding conference what type of organisation Your Party will be. What Pseudo Lefts were allowed into the hall were treated like dirt. As Laura Tiernan from the WSWS reports, “The SWP’s Samira Ali was physically removed from the conference venue by security guards who confirmed they were acting on the orders of Corbyn’s former chief of staff, Karie Murphy. The SWP’s Stand Up to Racism stall was dismantled. If this is how YP’s leadership treats loyal critics like the SWP, how would they respond in government to striking workers or to mass popular opposition to austerity and war?”

Mark Serwotka

The right-wing trajectory of Your Party was further expressed by a former ally of the Socialist Workers Party, Mark Serwotka. Serwotka is a leading member of Your Party. The SWP trumpeted Serwotka as a new breed of left-wing union leader leading a struggle against capitalism and Labourism.

Despite Serwotka's reputation as a left-wing, militant union leader, the reality is a little different. Serwotka and the PCS leadership have been "stifling action" and have failed to mount a serious challenge to government austerity measures and pay restraints. Serwotka has been incorporated into the Establishment, and pseudo-left groups such as the Socialist Alliance and Respect and the SWP give him a left cover and serve as a "safety valve" to contain working-class anger.

Serwotka writing in the Stalinist Morning Star wrote “We are not building a vanguard party — if we are not going to be the Labour party mark two, we’re not going to be the SWP or Socialist Party mark two either! We need to win the loyalty of millions, so we must emphasise a politics and campaigns that unite around people’s pressing material concerns, not the left’s factional, sectarian priorities. We cannot insist on ideological purity within our ranks — tolerance and acceptance of a variety of political views on the left is essential, including opinions about gender and sex, and a two-state solution.”[2]

The SWP and Trotskyism

While it is clear that the SWP has devoted considerable resources to the Your Party reformist bandwagon, it still maintains a Pseudo-Left usage of Marxists such as Leon Trotsky, Karl Marx, and Vladimir Lenin. They use these Marxists as a "calling card" to recruit members, particularly students, while ensuring that this nominal association never conflicts with its reformist objectives and certainly never advocates for genuine revolutionary change.

The use of a quote from the US Trotskyist leader James P Cannon is another calling card. This one is a little bizarre because Cannon and his party were once Trotskyists, and that is not the SWP’s political heritage. The SWP quote Cannon saying “that in every faction fight there is a reason—and then a real reason. Using Google's AI mode, I was unable to track down this quote. I just used an old-fashioned approach, and it comes up as this article- Factional Struggle and Party Leadership.[3]It is hoped that when The World Socialist Website launch its own Socialism AI, it will be easier to find quotes such as the one above.

The speciality of the SWP is airbrushing key historical figures, like Trotsky, from their events, such as the "Marxism" festivals, to avoid serious political discussion. Tony Cliff was the ideological founder of the SWP, and his organisation rejected every basic tenet of Trotskyism; however, this did not stop it from using elements of Trotsky’s perspective or analysis to suit its own political objectives. Throughout his life, Cliff sought to associate the SWP with Leon Trotsky as a historical figure. But in reality, it opposed Trotsky’s analysis of the Stalinist bureaucracy and denied the viability of the Fourth International that Trotsky founded in 1938. Trotskyism was “a cul-de-sac”, Cliff wrote, while “Trotskyists suffered from the psychological need to believe in miracles.

Your Party is a political trap, and the SWP is complicit in this trap. The urgent task is to resolve the crisis of working-class leadership and to build a genuine mass socialist party that unites workers worldwide and completes the epoch of world socialist revolution that began in 1917.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] The political and class issues in Mamdani’s victory in New York City-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/11/06/ygfl-n06.html

[2] A new left party is born — but can it break with old habits morningstaronline.co.uk/article/new-left-party-born-can-it-break-old-habits

[3] www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1953/facstrug.htm

Your Party: The Return of the Left by Oliver Eagleton, editor, £8.99 Verso Paperback 2025

This book from the Pabloite Verso publications has been rushed out to justify the need for a new reformist type party under conditions of a global crisis of capitalism, a fascist in the White House and the temporary replacement of the Labour Party as the favourite Party of the British bourgeoisie. While the need for a new party is palpable, this is not the one the working class needs.

The book consists of a collection of interviews edited by Oliver Eagleton, of Zarah Sultana MP, Leanne Mohamad, Stop the War co-founder Andrew Murray, Our Bloc author James Schneider, Andrew Feinstein, and former Corbyn speechwriter Alex Nunns.

Oliver Eagleton is an associate editor at the New Left Review (NLR), a Pseudo-Left publication that promotes a middle-class, reformist, and ultimately pro-capitalist perspective. Like all the people interviewed in the book, Eagleton, through his writing, seeks to channel left-wing sentiment into reformist, dead-end political projects like "Your Party" and the Labour Party establishment.

According to the World Socialist Website (WSWS), Eagleton promotes the illusion that genuine social change can be achieved through the parliamentary system and within the framework of the capitalist state, rather than through an independent, international socialist movement of the working class. He is a specialist in obfuscating class Issues by promoting "left-populism" to obscure fundamental class divisions and the necessity of a precise class analysis of society.

Eagleton’s first interview is with Corbyn’s second-in-command, Zarah Sultana. She is a Pseudo-Left “figurehead. Her "socialist" or "anti-fascist" rhetoric is merely a cover for a reformist agenda that ultimately serves capitalist interests. The feud that broke out between her and Corbyn was more about factionalism and a lack of Principles on both sides. It was also over who controls the not inconsiderable £800,000 membership fund, which is still growing.

Like other pseudo-Lefts, she presents her "rotten and spineless Labour 'left' colleagues as part of a fighting socialist alternative to Starmer". Despite her use of rhetoric such as  "class war", her focus remains within the limits of parliamentary politics and nationalistic frameworks.

Leanne Mohamad has no differences whatsoever with Corbyn or Sultana and has spoken on Pseudo-Left Platforms. She spoke at Jeremy Corbyn's Peace and Justice Project conference. Like other interviewees, she seeks to subordinate genuine working-class anger into reformist and nationalistic channels. The  WSWS has noted reports of a "bitter rift" within her campaign team, specifically with the Redbridge Community Action Group (RCAG), as evidence of the unprincipled and factional character it attributes to this political current.

Perhaps Corbyn’s most useful ally in this coalition of frauds is Andrew Murray. Murray has used his influence as a leader in the Communist Party of Britain, the Stop the War Coalition (STWC), and the Unite trade union to keep the working class tied to the Labour Party. Murray is a Stalinist and has a long history in the Communist Party of Britain. He has been a long-standing adviser in the Corbyn leadership.

James Schneider, a key figure of the British "left", co-founder of the grassroots movement Momentum, and former Director of Strategic Communications for Jeremy Corbyn.  Schneider was a founder member of “Your Party. His Momentum movement was instrumental in facilitating Labour's purge of left-wing members under Corbyn and in helping contain it within the confines of the Labour Party bureaucracy.

Andrew Feinstein’s politics are based on an appeal for a "more moral government" and "human values," which explicitly rejects a class analysis of society and obscures the fundamental class antagonisms inherent in a capitalist system.

Lastly, Alex Nunns is an author and apologist for Corbynism: Nunns is the author of The Candidate: Jeremy Corbyn's Improbable Path to Power and the forthcoming Sabotage: The Inside Hit Job That Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn. These books are part of a veritable "cottage industry" of "pseudo-left" post-mortems that fail to provide a genuine class analysis of the movement's failure,

Eagleton’s fellow pseudo-left organisations and every political scoundrel under the sun have welcomed Your Party. Probably the biggest of these political scoundrels is Tariq Ali. Ali has been intimately involved in the development of "Your Party" and has now joined it, marking the first time he has been a member of a political organisation since 1981. Ali will feel at home in this anti-working-class party. At 81, he still feels he has one more revolutionary movement to betray. He is also still a darling of the pseudo-left media. Recently, he was asked What do you think are the prospects for the left today?

He wrote, “Starmer is dreadful. I’m in no doubt that his policies will create a space that, at the moment, the far right will try to fill. We need to respond. But we can’t simply do what we did in the past the same way. In the 1970s, the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism were vital, but the world has changed, the situation is different, and we need appropriate responses. It won’t be easy, but you know it wasn’t always easy in the 1960s and 1970s. It took time to build the anti-Vietnam War movement. We were constantly under surveillance and harassment from the state.

Over the last few decades, we have witnessed the growth of dynamic movements such as Stop the War. Today, the struggle around Palestine has brought large numbers into action. The horrors of Gaza, the complicity of the Western governments in the slaughter, and the scale of the resistance movement on the streets will shape a generation. But we need to think about organisational outcomes, establishing networks and rebuilding a progressive political alternative. For the left, the Labour Party is finished. We should encourage the small number of Labour MPS (especially those who had the whip removed) to work with the Independent MPS to offer an alternative vision and voice for the future. We need some home, not necessarily a formal political party, for the 200,000 who left Labour when Corbyn was marginalised and kicked out; a home to those from the Palestine and anti-imperialist movements; a home for the old and new left. I think we face a long rebuilding period; there is no quick fix. But if we sit back and do nothing, things will only get worse.”[1]

Ali, like other pseudo-lefts, has argued that the new Your Party should be like other left-wing populist movements across Europe, such as Podemos, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise and Syriza (Greece). However, all these organisations have, in one form or another, betrayed the working class. Syriza (Greece), a coalition of the Radical Left, came to power and subsequently implemented austerity measures. Podemos (Spain) was a political trap for the working class, built by professional pseudo-left activists and academics. La France Insoumise (France): a movement led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon explicitly rejects a class analysis of society, instead relying on populist theories that pit "the working class against the French ruling elite. It obscures fundamental class antagonisms, thereby serving capitalist interests. Despite anti-establishment rhetoric, the LFI ultimately defends the French capitalist state, including its police forces and military. Mélenchon has called for increased military spending and supported French imperialist wars. Die Linke (The Left Party) (Germany) is essentially a capitalist party that functions as a loyal opposition and ultimately supports the German state's foreign policy.

One person missing from the book is Jeremy Corbyn. But his politics dominate Your Party. Corbyn and his acolytes are not leading a genuine socialist struggle but are preparing a political trap for the working class. Corbyn’s goal all along has been to subordinate the struggles of the working class to the Labour Party and the existing political establishment. He has always been pro-capitalist and nationalist. His closeness to the Stalinist British Communist Party and his agreement with its anti-working-class British Road to Socialism in his early political career have kept him in good standing.

His new party will act as a safety valve for working-class anger and work to prevent a genuine break from the pro-capitalist Labour Party. It is seen as a "Labour Party Mark II" that advocates only limited reforms to be pursued through parliament. The recent feud between Corbyn and his number two, Zarah Sultana, is evidence of its unprincipled, opportunistic nature.

Corbyn's platform, which includes campaigning on issues like "peace" and "social justice" but avoids explicit class analysis, is dismissed by the WSWS as "studied vagueness" designed to obscure fundamental class divisions. The WSWS also criticises Corbyn's reliance on and work with the trade union bureaucracy, which it characterises as having spent the last 40 years "shifting power and wealth away from the working class to the corporations and the state".

Your Party is not the party the working class needs. Workers and young people should reject Corbyn's new party. They should look for a genuine socialist alternative on the World Socialist Website.

 

Notes

Corbyn’s New Left Party: What It Is And What It Isn’t £3.00-mehringbooks.co.uk/product/corbyns-new-left-party-what-it-is-and-what-it-isnt/

 

 

 

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[1] www.counterfire.org/article/tariq-ali-memories-of-the-struggle-reloaded/

11-22 Lecture: David North — America’s Volcano-Political Crisis, Oligarchic Rule, and Socialist Strategy

Date/Time: 2025-11-22 14:13:15

London

(This is an AI-generated summary of the above lecture using Plaud Note)

This lecture by David North interrogates the trajectory of the United States amid an accelerating political and constitutional crisis, situating it within a global breakdown of capitalist democracy and the rise of oligarchic rule. Framing the decisive question “Where is America going?” in both objective (material forces, economic relations) and subjective (mass consciousness and response) terms, North adopts Trotsky’s historical method of posing strategic questions during periods of acute class conflict. He characterises the U.S. situation as “going to hell in a handbasket,” highlighting the rapid tempo of destabilisation, including Donald Trump’s denunciations of Democratic legislators as “treasonous” and calls for capital punishment after they urged the military to refuse illegal orders violating constitutional oaths. He notes the intersection of political leadership with U.S. intelligence agencies, underscoring the contested nature of civil-military relations and the legality of such relations.

Expanding beyond immediate developments, North argues that the apparent authoritarian reconfiguration of American governance after the 2024 election reflects a terminal crisis of global capitalism, driven by extreme inequality, financialization, fictitious capital, debt expansion, and erosion of the dollar’s credibility. He employs historical analogies (France before 1789, Chile 1973, U.S. slavery-era measures) to depict oligarchic aggression and spectacle—billionaire-dominated policymaking, symbolic restorations of reactionary iconography, and conspicuous consumption within state institutions—as symptoms of direct oligarchic rule. Internationally, he traces parallels with Britain under Keir Starmer and other governments, arguing that similar structural pressures produce convergent authoritarian trajectories.

The lecture critiques reliance on moral appeals absent a scientific socialist program centred on the working class, contending that war, militarisation, and genocide are ruling-class countermeasures to capitalist contradictions. North analyses the Marxist foundations of value and surplus value, rising constant-to-variable capital ratios, and the falling rate of profit; he contends that AI-driven automation intensifies these contradictions by displacing living labour—the source of surplus value—while delivering uneven, limited productivity gains. He rejects reliance on rival capitalist states (China and Russia), emphasising internationalist working-class unity (including between Russian and Ukrainian workers) against imperialism and national chauvinism.

North advances a strategic orientation built on transitional demands—expropriation of capitalists, factory committees, nationalisation under democratic control—and the necessity of a vanguard party to develop socialist consciousness. He underscores the degeneration of bourgeois leadership and the crisis of revolutionary leadership, asserting that U.S. mass sentiment trends left despite betrayals by the pseudo-left. In practice, he calls for organising rank-and-file committees, restoring Marxism’s authority through education on 20th-century revolutions and betrayals, and deploying new tools such as “Socialism AI”—an application trained on the WSWS archive and Marxist literature—to scale outreach, provide programmatic clarity, and assist in organising working-class struggles. The event concludes with a call to join the Socialist Equality Party and to build an internationally coordinated movement capable of resolving capitalism’s contradictions through conscious action.

Diary of a Nobody and News From Nowhere

At the time of writing this diary, the Blog/Website hit statistics have quietened down somewhat from the dizzying heights of the past two months. While I have increased the number of articles, I still urge anyone interested in writing for my website to get in touch.

The following articles are being worked on

1.   A Review of the Verso publication Your Party

2.   A polemic on the recent Communication Workers Union’s(CWU) publications. A CWU Local Reps Briefing and the year 2024 accounts of the CWU.

3.   History Today British Empire Special edition.

I have just downloaded and printed all the articles from the US SEP Summer School of 2025. The output from this school is extraordinary and unprecedented in the history of the Trotskyist movement. The Marxist writer David North is in London on November 22.November 22w. It is well worth your time to pay a visit.

Books Purchased Recently 

1.   Your Party, Oliver Eagleton Editor Verso Publications

2.   The New Age of Empire Kehinde Andrews-Penguin

3.   Inglorious Empire Shashi Tharoor-Penguin

4.   There is no Place for US Brian Goldstone

5.   I deliver Parcels in Beijing, Hu Anyan.

6.   The Crisis and the Crash-Richard B Day

7.   The Permanent Revolution, Leon Trotsky-Well Read books

8.   Unpacking My Library Walter Benjamin

 

Events

The American Volcano: Towards Fascism or Socialism-Saturday, November 22, November 22 Birkbeck University, Malet St, 2 pm

 

The Passing of Alan Gelfand: 1949-2025

It is with profound sadness that I hear about the death of Alan Gelfand, who truly was a fighter for socialism. I never met Alan, and I regretfully cannot call him my friend, but his struggle had a profound bearing on my own political development.

The conclusion of his struggle against the Socialist Workers Party (US) in 1983 coincided with the year I became involved in the Trotskyist movement. After a year as a supporter, I finally joined the WRP before the split, which was, in itself, a seminal moment for me. Although, as a teenager, I spent well over a thousand pounds on Marxist literature from the then Militant Tendency, they had nothing on the history of American Trotskyism. After the split, the then minority held classes on American Trotskyism.

I read James Cannon’s "The Struggle for a Proletarian Party" and many other works. I still have the books in my Library. Again, it was during the Split that I became familiar with the history of recent American Trotskyism, as embodied in the struggles of the Workers League. One thing that always struck me was the high level of camaraderie among the American comrades. They were on a different political and intellectual level and somewhat inspiring. Meeting Jean and Bill Brust was a thrill of a lifetime.

The first time I heard about the Security and the Fourth International (I had purchased a copy of How the GPU Murdered Trotsky but never read it, a bad habit that continues to this day) was when I read David North’s articles on the Death of Tom Henehan. Leon Trotsky and the development of Marxism, 1982, was published in the Young Socialists paper of the Workers Revolutionary Party. These articles were reprinted in the pages of the Young Socialist in 1984. I always read the YS paper as it contained far more interesting articles than the Newsline, which seemed more of a comic to me at the time. I learnt nothing about Trotskyism from it.

It was during the split that I learnt not only about the Security and the Fourth International investigation, but it was my first introduction to Gelfand's struggle. During the division, a large number of internal documents were circulated by the minority. A large number of these documents pertained to security and the Fourth International. But it was only with the release in 1985  of the two books The Gelfand Case: A Legal History of the Exposure of U.S. Government Agents in the Leadership of the Socialist Workers Party - Volumes One and Two (1 and 2/ I and II), Paperback that I really began to fully understand the havoc caused by the murderous agents of the GPU.

Gelfand will always have a special place in my political heart. It is inspiring that he faced death with the same approach he had to life, as the great poet Dylan Thomas wrote.

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at the close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Finally, as David North wrote, “In his final words to a comrade and close friend, Alan said: 'It’s hard to say goodbye. But I have joy in my heart and a smile on my face, and confidence in the movement and in my comrades.” Alan Gelfand will never be forgotten. His place in this history of the Fourth International and the hearts of his comrades is secure.”[1]

 

Notes

Alan Gelfand: A fighter for socialism and historical truth-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/11/08/eprm-n08.html

Harold Robbins Archive-https://findingaids.library.nyu.edu/tamwag/wag_175/

Register of the Socialist Workers Party records-https://oac.cdlib.org/static_findaids/ark:/13030/tf1k40019v.html

 

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[1] Alan Gelfand: A fighter for socialism and historical truth-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/11/08/eprm-n08.html

Making Space (The Time Traveler’s Passport) by R. F. Kuang, Amazon Kindle Edition 2025

Making Space is a beautifully crafted 32-page eBook. It is essentially about a childless couple who take in a mysterious boy in a dark and foreboding short story about the responsibility of parenthood, self-sacrifice, and how we perceive the future. It is also what happens to a person’s soul when they sell it to the devil. Although different from Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, there are striking similarities.[1]

R. F. Kuang’s Making Space is part of The Time Traveller’s Passport. It is a collection of stories about memory, identity, and the choices we make in life. New York Times bestselling author John Joseph Adams edited the book. It is a little surprising that Amazon would snare an author of Kuang’s stature. The book is currently only available on Amazon, and a printed version has not been released yet. Review copies appear to be sanctioned by Amazon through NetGalley.[2]

Although the short book genre is new to Kuang, she handles it superbly, serving as a testament to her intellect and experience. The dark and not-unsurprising ending is typical of Kuang. Her main narrative is beautifully crafted, delving into the complexities of human relationships and social responsibilities. However, it is a little disturbing that Kuang makes far too many concessions to the right-wing #MeToo campaign.

I am not saying that Kuang is an ardent supporter of the #MeToo movement. However, her work on Making Space makes it difficult to turn such narrow, selfish concerns of Jess into great, compelling drama.

As the great  G. V. Plekhanov wrote, “I know that an artist cannot be held responsible for the statements of their heroes. But very often he, in one way or another, indicates his own attitude to these statements, and we are thus able to judge what his own views are.”

And writing an observation that would not look out of place in today's world, He writes in the same essay, “in present-day social conditions, the fruits of art for art’s sake are far from delectable. The extreme individualism of the era of bourgeois decay cuts artists off from all sources of genuine inspiration. It renders them completely blind to what is happening in social life, condemning them to sterile preoccupation with personal emotional experiences that are entirely without significance and marked by the fantasies of a morbid imagination. The end product of their preoccupation is something that not only has no relation to beauty of any kind, but which moreover represents an obvious absurdity that can only be defended with the help of a sophistically distorted idealist theory of knowledge.”[3]

While there is nothing wrong with using the internet to publish books or short stories, it does contain certain dangers. Kuang has been accused of using AI to write her books on TikTok. But as one reader succinctly puts it, “Sadly, AI is so common now that talent is suspicious! Would you accuse Sanderson or Stephen King of AI? Or is 'too articulate' a critique only reserved for female authors?”.

In defence of Kuang Varika Rastogi writes, “Kuang—in no small part because of the role TikTok has played in her rise to success—is also deeply aware of the Internet being the 'realm that the social economy of publishing exists on, and she deploys this (Yellowface) novel as a means to assess how it can both heal and harm projects. A significant portion of Yellowface is represented through Twitter discourse and Goodreads reviews. By placing us in the shoes of the targets of its vitriol and negativity, the author attempts to make us privy both to the mental impact such harassment can have on a person, as well as to the fact that "allegations get flung left and right, everyone's reputations are torn down, and when the dust clears, everything remains exactly as it was." However, if nothing changes, it is also because someone is making a profit”[4]

Making Space is still a superbly written book. Kuang is to be commended for her recent efforts in the field of battle against the racialisation of literature, and her defence of the fundamental right of an author to write about whatever they want without fear of their books being burned or pulped. However, Making Spaces is a dangerous concession to the #MeToo movement. Her new book, Katabasis, which is already a best seller, will be reviewed at a later date.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray

[2] https://www.netgalley.com/

[3] Art and Social Life by G. V. Plekhanov 1912-https://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1912/art/ch03.htm

[4] https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/p/rebecca-f-kuang.html

The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr by Martin Luther King Jr Abacus Paperback – 6 April 2000

 “I sometimes wonder what I would have done if I hadn’t received the phone call, whether I would have written something that was more mine,” Carson reflected. “The best-selling book that I’ll ever publish is the Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. I can hardly take credit for piecing together his words. I’ll always know that Martin Luther King will always outsell anything I write, and his writings and speeches will be more lasting. But look, if you have to be overshadowed by somebody, it might as well be Martin Luther King.”

Clayborne Carson

“Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of enslaved Negroes who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.”[1]

Martin Luther King

“Here comes that dreamer!” they said to each other. “Come now, let’s kill him and throw him into one of these cisterns and say that a ferocious animal devoured him. Then we’ll see what comes of his dreams.”

Genesis 37:19-21

The theory of race, specially created, it seems, for some pretentious self-educated individual seeking a universal key to all the secrets of life, appears particularly melancholy in the light of the history of ideas. To create the religion of pure German blood, Hitler was obliged to borrow at second hand the ideas of racism from a Frenchman, Count Gobineau [4], a diplomat and a literary dilettante. Hitler found the political methodology ready-made in Italy, where Mussolini had mainly borrowed from the Marxist theory of the class struggle. Marxism itself is the fruit of the union among German philosophy, French history, and British economics. To investigate retrospectively the genealogy of ideas, even those most reactionary and muddleheaded, is to leave not a trace of racism standing.

Leon Trotsky

Clayborne Carson, PhD, was commissioned by Martin Luther King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, to be the editor of the massive collection of papers that King had left behind. The majority of these papers were held in the King Centre for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. When Coretta Scott King initially selected him for the project in 1985, Carson estimated it would take around 20 years to complete, a deadline that has long passed. It will take several historians to complete the task. The King family will direct the long-term project of editing and publishing Dr Martin Luther King Jr.'s papers.

Even a historian of his statue must have baulked at the prospect of this challenging task being handed to him by the King family. The offer to edit the King archive came out of the blue. Carson had not written a single word on King, but jumped at the chance. However, from the start, the role caused difficulties for Carson as he was based at Stanford and wanted to stay there. Coretta King wanted him to relocate to Atlanta, where most of the papers were located. However, a happy compromise was made.

The work has taken him well into the 21st century (Vol. 6 of the Papers was published in 2007. Clayborne Carson has not finished editing the complete set of Martin Luther King Jr.'s papers. While he has edited and published seven of the planned fourteen volumes, he has stated that the whole project will likely not be completed in his lifetime.[2]

“I sometimes wonder what I would have done if I hadn’t received the phone call, whether I would have written something that was more mine,” Carson reflected. “The best-selling book that I’ll ever publish is the Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. I can hardly take credit for piecing together his words. I’ll always know that Martin Luther King will always outsell anything I write, and his writings and speeches will be more lasting. But look, if you have to be overshadowed by somebody, it might as well be Martin Luther King.”[3]

The work done by Carson on this book is to be commended because it now enables us to lift the large number of dead dogs that have been placed upon the historical reputation of Martin Luther King Jr. As Helen Halyard wrote, “King was unquestionably one of the most powerful orators of twentieth-century America and a man of great personal courage. He was able to give voice to the passionate strivings of millions of people to throw off the shackles of racial discrimination. Unlike those in today’s official civil rights leadership who seek to cash in on his memory, King was an honest man, not driven by financial gain.”[4]

From an early age, King knew he was living on borrowed time and that sooner or later his life would be taken. Perhaps that’s why he crammed so much into his short thirteen-year political career, which has filled his archive with so much documentation. King, during his short life, was reviled, spied upon, and in the end was assassinated. Over the last five decades, King's courageous struggle for social equality has been politically undermined, and King himself has been turned into a harmless icon.

King was an essential part of what was a mass movement which fought against racial discrimination and in defence of democratic rights for both blacks and whites. However, as Helen Halyard correctly wrote, “ the leadership was characterised by a petty bourgeois class makeup and a thoroughly reformist political outlook and program. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference was based on the perspective that racial equality and social and economic justice for Black people could be achieved without challenging the existence of capitalist property relations or the existing government institutions. From the Montgomery bus boycott through to the marches into Cicero, Illinois, King and the SCLC's strategy was to mobilise nonviolent demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience to pressure the government into enacting reforms.”[5]

There is no denying King's leadership played an immense role in the struggle for civil rights, and some limited reforms were achieved, notably the enactments of 1964 and 1965, which established the legal groundwork for a new era of civil and racial equality in America. However, a lot has happened since the 1960s, and a balance sheet is in order since King’s assassination in 1963.

The limitations of the victories achieved by the movement he led are more apparent today than ever. An objective assessment is warranted to critically examine the political program that guided his movement. King rejected both Marx and Marxism from an early age, writing, “With all of its false assumptions and evil methods, communism grew as a protest against the hardships of the underprivileged. Communism in theory emphasised a classless society, and a concern for social justice, though the world knows from sad experience that in practice it created new classes and a new lexicon of injustice.” 

King was not a revolutionary, but he did have socialist sympathies. He understood that for the civil rights movement to win, it had to have the collaboration of the American working class.

He recognised that under capitalism, workers were being oppressed regardless of the colour of their skin. Writing in 1958, King drew on his own working experiences, when he witnessed  “economic injustice firsthand, and I realised that the poor white was exploited just as much as the Negro. Through these early experiences, I grew up deeply conscious of the varieties of injustice in our society.”

King’s turn to the working class, which probably got him killed, would be an anathema to the current leadership of the struggle against racial and social inequality. The leadership that is responsible for the New York Times' 1619 Project have made it clear that they want no part of Martin Luther King and his “left turn”[6]

As Tom Mackaman and Niles Niemuth point out, “the universal Enlightenment principles King fought for and defended are under vicious assault. It is striking that in the 1619 Project, the Times’ initiative to write the 'true' history of America as rooted in slavery and racism, King’s contribution to the fight for equality is totally ignored. This doesn’t represent a different interpretation of facts or a mere oversight, but an outright historical falsification.[7]

To his credit

 Eminent historian Professor Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, opposed and criticised the 1619 Project. In an interview for the World Socialist website, he noted that the ideals of the American Revolution and the Enlightenment played a key role in the civil rights movement and King’s own role as a political leader. “One way of looking at the founding of this country is to understand the audacity of a few hundred white male elites getting together and declaring a country—and declaring it a country based on the notion of human rights,” Carson explained. “Obviously, they were being hypocritical, but it’s also audacious. And that’s what rights are all about,” he noted. “It is the history of people saying, ‘I declare that I have the right to determine my destiny, and we collectively have the right to determine our destiny.’ That’s the history of every movement, every freedom movement in the history of the world. At some point, you have to get to that point where you have to say that, publicly, and fight for it.”[8]

2025 marks the fifty-fifth anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.It is perhaps remarkable still that the questions raised by the struggle of King and the civil rights movement have lost none of their urgency in the past five decades. There must be a serious discussion of this period to understand our present predicament.

As Patrick Martin says “The world we have today is not the outcome that King would have desired, nor does it represent the strivings of the millions of working people and youth—white as well as black—who joined in or were inspired by the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Those aspirations will only be carried forward through the emergence, at a far more politically conscious level, of a new mass movement of working people to challenge the capitalist system as a whole.”[9]

 

Notes

1.    The King Centre-thekingcenter.org/what-we-do/king-library-and-archives/

2.    www.archives.gov/research/mlk

3.    King-Jonathan Eig

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[1] www.npr.org/2010/01/18/122701268/i-have-a-dream-speech-in-its-entirety

 [2] www.archives.gov/research/mlk

 [3] Clayborne Carson: Looking back at a legacy-news.stanford.edu/stories/2020/08/clayborne-carson-looking-back-legacy

[4] Thirty years since the assassination of Martin Luther King-www.wsws.org/en/articles/1998/04/mlkz-a04.html

 [5]Thirty years since the assassination of Martin Luther King

[6] See www.wsws.org/en/special/library/nyt-1619-project-racialist-falsification-history/00.html

[7] Martin Luther King Jr. and the fight for social equality

Tom Mackaman, Niles Niemuth 23 January 2020.wsws.org

[8] An interview with historian Clayborne Carson on the New York Times’ 1619 Project-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/01/15/clay-j15.html

[9] www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/04/king-a07.html