No Questions Asked: How football joined the crypto con by Martin Calladine Finch & Reese‏ Jan.2024

There are many aspects contained in this book that should disturb any reader. The primary issue is that many leading British and European football clubs are falling over each other to do business with Crypto companies that, in reality, either don’t exist or are little more than scammers and fraudsters.

Like many football fans (I have supported Arsenal all my life), I did not pay too much attention to products being flogged to football clubs, which, overnight, have become virtually worthless and have cost investors and football fans billions.

Football clubs deep involvement in Crypto marks a qualitative turning point in the financialisation of every aspect of the game. Financialisation, therefore, must be understood as both a symptom and a strategy of capitalist decline. When profitable real investment opportunities narrow, capital seeks profit in credit, speculation and the privatisation of social assets. This produces recurring crises, debt deflation/inflation cycles, and a growing parasitic layer of finance that extracts from wages, pensions and public budgets.2

As Calladine points out. “What’s concerning about these deals is that the cryptocurrency market, and the businesses and products based on it, aren’t substantially different or better regulated than they were when it destroyed tens of billions of pounds worth of investments in the crash of 2022. If prices crater or the companies go under – whether due to fraud or simple business failure – fans will have no protection. Despite this, clubs show no signs of doing any greater due diligence than before, let alone facing up to their responsibilities as global endorsers and amplifiers of these schemes.”[1]

The collaboration between professional football and cryptocurrency is not a “neutral technological development”. It is part of the ongoing process of capitalism to extract profit from every corner of social life—turning clubs, players and fans into assets for speculative circuits.

The failed European Super League, stadium renamings, and corporate sponsorship are expressions of the fact that football and sport in general are already subordinated to the logic of profit and global finance.[2] Cryptocurrency is seen as a new revenue stream and leverage point for investors and hedge funds. Is it really any accident that Hedge funds are buying up so many football clubs throughout the world?

With costs such as sky-high wage bills, it is little surprising that clubs turn to crypto, which offers quick inflows of capital, new monetisation channels (fan tokens, NFTs, club-branded coins), and opportunities for private equity and Wall Street to monetise fandom.

Beneath the hype of Crypto lies the fact that, rather than solving clubs' financial problems, they exacerbate them. Crypto does not suspend the laws of capitalist accumulation. According to the Bank for International Settlements, highly leveraged actors are increasingly dominating the global financial system, and opaque markets can spread shocks across the world economy (BIS warning on financial risks). Crypto markets—volatile, lightly regulated, and deeply tied to speculative sentiment—fit precisely into that description. When football clubs hitch their finances to such markets, they import systemic instability into their operations and the lives of workers and local communities.

Calladine’s book, while helpful in describing the increasing use of Crypto to offset clubs' financial problems, does not really tackle the root cause: capitalism’s search for new profit avenues amid stagnating real accumulation. Traditional revenue streams—broadcasting, ticketing, merchandising—are capped. Owners and financiers, therefore, turn to novel financial instruments: crypto-backed loans, fan-token sales, and fractionalised ownership. This mirrors the broader turn to non-bank financial institutions and leverage to absorb sovereign and corporate debt described by the BIS.

What are the implications for workers and fans, stadium staff, coaches, players below superstar level, and local suppliers? The risks can be devastating. A sudden crypto crash or a speculative run can produce abrupt revenue shortfalls, leading to wage cuts, layoffs or bankruptcies. History shows that sport’s commercialisation produces precarious, low-paid labour while enriching owners and financiers. Fans are turned into micro-investors and consumers, pressured to buy tokens or NFTs to access basic participation, while clubs cede control to distant capital interests. Speculators can even manipulate events for profit—as in past instances where market incentives helped produce criminal acts or reckless decisions—exposing football to the worst pathologies of financial markets.

This is not merely a question of inadequate regulation. The deeper problem is the private ownership of social institutions and the subordinate role of sporting life to capital accumulation. The Super League fiasco demonstrated how billionaire owners and banks seek to reorganise football as a closed, guaranteed-income franchise system—concentrating wealth at the top at the expense of the mass of clubs and supporters. Crypto initiatives are a continuation of that dynamic: financialising fan loyalty, securitising culture, and insulating profits from democratic accountability.

Workers and fans must develop independent class responses. Immediate demands include public disclosure of clubs’ financial links with crypto and hedge funds; protections for workers’ wages and pensions against speculative shocks; and legal safeguards preventing clubs from mortgaging community assets to opaque financial instruments. Politically, the working class must assert control over social wealth—bringing sports clubs, stadiums and media into democratic, public or cooperatively controlled ownership under workers’ and supporters’ oversight. 

In conclusion, cryptocurrency in football is not a harmless innovation but a step further in the financialisation of everyday life. It concentrates wealth, multiplies instability and will ruin the lives of football fans and workers alike.

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[1] The Great Crypto Con: why is football falling back in love with the blockchain?-sportingintelligence832.substack.com/p/the-great-crypto-con-why-is-football

[2] Billionaires’ European Super League proposal shelved amid mass opposition from football fans-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/24/supe-a24.html

Men of Maize by Miguel Ángel Asturias-, Gerald Martin (Translator), April 2025 Penguin Classics

 “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 25^th 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

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[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/

[3] www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/05/14/marq-m14.html

[4] The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism-Literature and Revolution-www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lit_revo/ch05.htm

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

 

(This article is dedicated to the memory of Elisabeth Zimmermann-Modler 1956–2025: Trotskyist and fighter for the working class)

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.