The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution Is Reinventing Misogyny Laura Bates Simon & Schuster, £20, pp320

“We are hurtling towards a seismic shift in terms of really every aspect of our society is on the brink of being transformed by emerging technologies and, in particular, artificial intelligence.”

Laura Bates

“I’d also like to live in a world in which women can do whatever they want, without fear of what men might do to them. But we don’t live in that world. Our present reality demands that both men and women accept the existence of the sexual asymmetry, even if that means curtailing our freedoms.”

Mary Harrington

“The women of the property-owning class will always fanatically defend the exploitation and enslavement of the working people, by which they indirectly receive the means for their socially useless existence.”

Rosa Luxemburg

“Fucking ain’t fair, act accordingly” (Female Dating Strategy blogpost, 2021)

The New Age of Sexism is a lucid, well-written and deeply researched book on how right-wing and fascist forces are using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to attack minorities and women in general.

The subject matter contained in the book is, to say the least, disturbing. The degradation of male-female relations has reached a new apex with the use of this latest technology. AI, virtual reality, robotics, and the metaverse have delivered a “new age of misogyny” and, according to Bates “, We are standing on the edge of a precipice”.

As Barbara Ellen writes, “One recurrent theme is that women are no longer being 'merely' harassed, they are also being erased–replaced by increasingly realistic pornographic tech-proxies. Among them is a new generation of sex robots that can be purchased online and delivered to your door. Some models have mechanically articulated necks to simulate orgasm. Others give oral sex with back-and-forth head motions that Bates likens to a “pecking chicken”. Although vocal interaction can be enabled with sex dolls, many men don’t want it. It wrecks the fantasy – they prefer them mute.”[1]

The book is graphic in its accuracy, the rise of cyber-brothels, in which, believe it or not, robot sex workers take care of your every sexual need. Bates recounts in the book how a robot called Kokeshi: “A silicone shell being offered up as a warm, willing, breathing, talking, consenting sexual partner.” Bates comments that the robot's labia have been torn off. “Perhaps bitten off. I feel sick.” Writes Bates. Even more disturbing is that she finds sex dolls made to look as young as five, with child vulvas, holding teddy bears.

Although Bates wonders why society accommodates this parallel universe, the answer is not far away. In one chapter, she examines the rise of the so-called Metaverse and its control by oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg and his global Meta empire. Zuckerberg's promotion of a “virtual-reality social world” is a big money maker, and so lightly policed as to be non-existent, providing a license to print money by the billions.

As Laura Bates writes in a Guardian article: “Mark Zuckerberg has grandly promised: 'In the metaverse, you’ll be able to do almost anything you can imagine.” It’s the sort of promise that might sound intensely appealing to some men and terrifying to most women. Indeed, the deeply immersive nature of the metaverse will make the harassment and abuse that many of us endure daily in text-based form on social media feel 100 times more real, and will simultaneously make moderation 100 times more challenging. The result is a perfect storm. And I am speaking from experience, not idly speculating: I spent days in the metaverse researching my book, The New Age of Sexism.  She continues, “I visited worlds where I saw what appeared to be young children frequently experiencing attention from adult men they did not know. In one virtual karaoke-style club, the singers on stage were young women in their early 20s. However, based on their voices, I would estimate that many of the girls behind the avatars were likely around nine or 10 years old. Conversely, the voices of the men commenting on them from the audience, shouting out to them and following them offstage were often unmistakably those of adults.”[2]

The role of Meta and other social media websites, which are easily accessible on the latest smartphones, in spreading and profiting from this online abuse and illegality is well-documented. Although not documented in the book is the role played by corporate advertising in helping perpetrate this abuse. But as Thomas Scripps writes “The real problem is the poison spilling out of a rotting social system—from misogynist ideologies to the glorification of violence, wealth and selfishness—for which these technologies are a conduit, and the conditions of social neglect which make young people emotionally susceptible: the most vulnerable dangerously so. Conditions which also hinder the social dialogue necessary to help children learn how to interact healthily with new technologies and form genuine relationships.[3]

Meta is not the only one profiting from this sexual degradation and exploitation. Companies such as Elon Musk’s (X) and Sundar Pichai's (Google) are in charge of the algorithms, datasets, systems and search engines that promote and deliver this disgusting filth.

If the growth of cyber brothels was not enough, Bates tackles an equally disturbing phenomenon, and that is the massive rise of deep fake pornography. Bates has been the target of this illegal behaviour. In the book, she describes a panic attack after being sent deepfake pornographic images of her. Bates’s experience is just the tip of a massive iceberg of this kind of abuse.  A report by the Children's Commissioner for England makes the following points.

“The growth of the online world is a technological revolution, the likes of which haven’t been witnessed in centuries. The internet has enhanced our lives immeasurably by opening up education, communication, and research in ways that those of us who are now well into our adulthood might never have imagined. For children growing up in 2025, who are among the first generations to have never known a solely analogue life, being online is second nature.

It is an incredible asset in our daily lives, but it has also fundamentally changed the nature of how we interact with one another, how we stay safe, and how we maintain our privacy. For most children, if not all, it has introduced a darker side. They are forever in their digital playgrounds.

Every day, children tell me about the violent, upsetting or degrading things that are shown to them online by algorithms designed to capture their attention. That’s why, as Children’s Commissioner, I have been relentlessly focused on driving for greater safety online. It has also been driven by what I observed in children’s changing behaviour during my years as a teacher and headteacher, as they learned to navigate life through a digital lens. But the subject of this report – sexually explicit ‘deepfakes’ – is not one I was familiar with until more recently, despite having worked with children every day of my professional life. Of all the worrying trends in online activity children have spoken to me about – from seeing hardcore porn on X to cosmetics and vapes being advertised to them through TikTok – the evolution of ‘nudifying’ apps to become tools that aid in the abuse and exploitation of children is perhaps the most mind-boggling. [4]

There is no doubt that Bates is a sincere activist and her books are an essential part of opposing this alarming abuse of women, but her work is only half the story. Bates, by her admission, is not comfortable debating, and her critics are caricatured or derided as “male” or, worse, “Right-wing”. My criticism of her is not from the right but from the left.

In my review of Lost Boys by James Bloodworth, I examined the reactionary movement that has been somewhat lightly termed the Manosphere. The Manosphere quaintly refers to a motley collection of websites, blogs and online forums promoting misogyny, masculinity and opposition to feminism. It promotes racism, antisemitism, anti-intellectualism, climate change denial, homophobia and transphobia. This movement has become a recruitment centre and training ground for what can only be termed trainee fascists.

There is a flip side to Manosphere, and that is the rise of the Femosphere, which Bates has studiously avoided examining in any detail. This movement was spawned by the growth of the right-wing #MeToo movement.[5] The Femosphere, it must be said, is equally as reactionary as the Manosphere movement.

Bates has so far not commented much, if at all, on this right-wing movement, which has been written about in numerous academic papers and been fabled and glamorised in equal measure in books such as Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Stephanie Lacava’s I Fear My Pain Interests You.

In her excellent article [6], Rachel Healy examines the work of Dr Jilly Kay, specifically her use of the term "Femosphere" in a paper published in 2024. [7] Healy writes that “Kay has been researching a reactionary turn among young women, and how a backlash against mainstream feminism has created new spaces online. In the femosphere, instead of “incels” – male involuntary celibates – there are “femcels”, and instead of pickup artists there are female dating strategists and so-called “dark feminine” influencers who encourage women to find men to support them financially.”

It is not within the scope of this brief review to examine everything in Kay’s excellent research paper, which is freely accessible on the web. One of the more disturbing features of this so-called new feminist movement has been its adoption of the same fascist ideas as its male counterparts.

Kay quotes from an FDS podcast episode, which discussed a Reddit post entitled “40 Years a NEET: Reflections of a Stay-At-Home Son. One of the hosts said:

“I think men like this can’t be saved, I believe that the only that can be done about them is to allow them to perish on their own time […] we shouldn’t slaughter people for being like this but, like, they’re going just not to reproduce because again, they don’t have the drive to find a wife, they’re not gonna have kids, and I think it’s just better if their bloodline dies out, honestly, that’s probably just the best thing for society […] the only men who deserve to have families and kids are men who are gonna model ambition, drive and healthy relationship dynamics.”

The only difference between this group and their Manosphere counterparts is that the men have more ready access to guns than their female counterparts. It is undoubtedly only a matter of time before one of these trainee female fascists decides to launch a murderous rampage in the name of modern feminism.

To be blunt, this type of reactionary feminism would not look out of place in Nazi Germany. Their modern-day eugenicist ideas will be embraced by fascists worldwide. They make the same arguments that were put forward by the nazis. Only a cursory read of Mein Kampf would confirm that.

There is nothing progressive in this modern feminism, as Kate Randal points out. There is more talk of gender today than at any previous moment in history. The #MeToo campaign in the US has supposedly brought the conditions of women to the fore like never before. The Global media and Hollywood are animated by hardly anything else. But this is a fraud. The women receiving nearly all the coverage belong to the upper echelons of society, the richest five or ten per cent. Working-class women are largely absent from this discussion, except for a few token exceptions that highlight the rule. As Rosa Luxemburg once wrote, “The women of the property-owning class will always fanatically defend the exploitation and enslavement of the working people, by which they indirectly receive the means for their socially useless existence.[8]”That is true today as it was in Luxembourg’s day.

 

 

London-based author and activist Laura Bates, 37, is the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, a website that collates first-hand accounts of sexism from women around the world, using those experiences to press for change. She’s also the author of bestselling nonfiction titles including Misogynation and Men Who Hate Women, as well as novels for teens that grapple with issues such as revenge porn and slut-shaming. Her new novel is Sisters of Sword and Shadow.

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[1] Sexism with a silicone face-observer.co.uk/culture/books/article/sexism-with-a-silicone-face

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jun/10/the-misogyny-of-the-metaverse-is-mark-zuckerbergs-dream-world-a-no-go-area-for-women

[3] Adolescence: Gripping realism explores social pressures behind young male violence- violence-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/03/24/fbxd-m24.html

[4] “One day this could happen to me” Children, nudification tools, and

sexually explicit deepfakes April 2025-assets.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/wpuploads/2025/04/Children-nudification-tools-and-sexually-explicit-deepfakes-April-2025.pdf

[5] See - She Said: The origin story of the #MeToo campaign, or a version of it- it-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/11/21/bcwe-n21.html

[6] www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/29/welcome-to-the-femosphere-the-latest-dark-toxic-corner-of-the-internet-for-women

[7] The reactionary turn in popular feminism-www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14680777.2024.2393187#abstract 

[8] Women's Suffrage And Class Struggle by Rosa Luxemburg (1912) 

Trotsky in Exile by Peter Weiss- Atheneum-Hardcover – 1 Jan. 1972

 

Horatio, I am dead,

Thou livest, report me and my cause aright

To the unsatisfied.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2

“But who then, at that time [during the Stalinist repression], protested? Who stood up to shout his disgust? The Trotskyists can claim this honour. Following the example of their leader, who paid for his stubbornness by receiving the blow of an axe, they fought Stalinism totally, and they were the only ones. At the time of the great purges, they could no longer shout out their revolt except in the frozen vastness to which they were dragged to be more easily exterminated.”

Leopold Trepper: The Great Game

One of my favourite bookshops is the Amnesty International in Hammersmith, London. It is neither pretentious nor ostentatious, just a straightforward second-hand bookshop. I like it because you occasionally find a gem of a book. One such book was Peter Weiss’s Trotsky in Exile. I usually steer well clear of books on Trotsky’s life because they are inadvertently written by writers who are politically hostile to Trotsky and generally not worth reading, let alone reviewing. However, this play or book is different.

“Trotsky in Exile” is a play by German playwright and artist Peter Weiss, first performed in 1968. The play is a fictionalised account of the last years of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s life. Trotsky was residing in exile in Mexico and under constant threat from Stalin’s assassins.

The play is structured as a series of dialogues between Trotsky and various figures from his past and present, mostly revolutionaries, including his wife, Natalia Sedova, his son, Lev Sedov, and his former comrades in the Bolshevik Party. Through these conversations, Weiss explores Trotsky’s revolutionary ideology and his views on the Soviet Union under Stalin. The more Weiss read, the more he became a strong opponent of Stalinism. In 1967, this led him to meet one of Trotsky’s most important biographers, Isaac Deutscher.

Weiss's portrayal of Trotsky as a complex and conflicted figure is an honest one. Outside of Trotsky’s writings on the impact of exile and political isolation on his family, this is one of the few books that examines his personal life in detail. While being faithful to Trotsky’s politics, Weiss employs Brechtian theatre devices, such as music and dance, to create a sense of distance and alienation. This style serves to underscore the play’s political and ideological themes, highlighting how history and ideology shape individual lives and experiences.

Peter Weiss (1916-1982 is arguably one of Germany’s most important artistic figures. He was an extraordinarily talented artist. He worked as a painter, novelist, filmmaker, and dramatist throughout his life. Weiss was comfortable in German literary and artistic circles. He was fond of Bertolt Brecht, seeing The Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny in 1930.

In the 1960s, Weiss had a friendship with the German-born, Swiss writer Hermann Hesse. In a letter to his long-time friend Hesse in 1961, Weiss writes, “I am very preoccupied with the art which first comes about when reason, rational thinking is switched off. I have been unable myself to resolve this conflict: sometimes it seems to me that the most essential lies in the dark and the subconscious, then however it occurs to me that one can only work today in an extremely conscious way, as if the spirit of the times demands that the writer does not lose his way in regions of half-darkness.”

Unlike most of his generation of artists, Weiss was deeply interested in the seminal experiences of the twentieth century – the crimes of fascism, the October Revolution, and its subsequent betrayal by the Stalinist bureaucracy.

It is hardly surprising, given the political hostility to Leon Trotsky and the Trotskyist movement in general, that a play that is broadly sympathetic to Trotsky and his revolutionary life has hardly been performed, let alone written about. With 2016 marking the 100th anniversary of Weiss’s birth, no attempt was made to stage "Trotsky in Exile".

As Stefan Steinberg writes, “To my knowledge, the play is unique in its attempt to portray Trotsky’s life and political struggle on stage. The work has its flaws and, on occasion, reveals the influence of Weiss’s discussions with Ernest Mandel, the leader of the Pabloite Unified Secretariat. What is striking about the play, however, is Weiss’s valiant effort to correct all manner of Stalinist falsifications, to restore Trotsky to his rightful place in history as a leader of the Russian Revolution alongside Lenin and as the principal Marxist opponent of the Stalinist degeneration in the Soviet Union.

Of great interest also in Trotsky in Exile is Weiss’s recognition of the central role of culture in assessing the October Revolution and Trotsky’s historical significance. Weiss had studied Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution and devotes a scene of his play to a discussion among Lenin, Trotsky and leaders of the Dadaist art movement. In Zurich in 1916, Lenin is known to have met political co-thinkers in the same café frequented by Tristan Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck and other leading lights of the Dada movement. With legitimate poetic licence, Weiss brings the remarkable figures together in a discussion about the prospects for art in a post-revolutionary Soviet Union. A later scene features Weiss’s old mentor Breton in discussion with Trotsky and Diego Rivera in Mexico.”[1]

In the 1960s, Weiss became increasingly politically radical. One form this radicalisation took was, as mentioned by Steinberg, was Weiss’s conversation with Ernest Mandel.[2] Weiss had no fundamental understanding of Mandel’s politics. Mandel broke from orthodox Trotskyism. As Max Brody points out

“Mandel sought to provide the economic justification for the rejection by Pabloism of the revolutionary role of the working class. He claimed capitalism had reached a new stage, in which the imperialist powers had resolved the inner contradictions that resulted in the barbarity of the early 20th century. He initially referred to this new period as “neo-capitalism. “To make the central point from the outset, Mandel’s embrace of Pabloism did not flow from an incorrect economic theory, but the reverse. His economic analysis was based on his rejection of the revolutionary role of the working class as the harbinger of capitalism's demise.[3]

Weiss’s inability to understand the differences between orthodox Trotskyism and the Pabloism of Ernest Mandel was behind his decision to include Joseph Hansen in his book. However, Weiss did not know that Hansen was heavily involved in the assassination of Leon Trotsky. However, once Hansen’s treachery was in the public domain, Weiss should have at least told his readership of Hansen’s role in the assassination of Leon Trotsky.

According to a document entitled  The Role of Joseph Hansen “The initial stages of the (Security and the Fourth International)investigation uncovered recently declassified documents, which revealed the conspiracy that prepared Trotsky’s assassination and the fatal role played by agents who had managed to infiltrate all the major political centres of the Fourth International. The ICFI uncovered documents relating to the activities of agents such as Mark Zborowski, who became the principal assistant of Trotsky’s son, Leon Sedov. Zborowski played a key role in the murder of Sedov and other leading members of the Fourth International in Europe.

Another important Stalinist agent, who supplied the Kremlin with valuable information on Trotsky’s activities, was Sylvia Caldwell (née Callen), the personal secretary of James P. Cannon; however, the most significant information uncovered by the ICFI related to the activities of Joseph Hansen. Documents discovered in the US National Archives and others obtained through the Freedom of Information Act revealed that Hansen, immediately after the assassination of Trotsky, sought out and established a covert relationship with high-level US government agents. One such document, a letter from the American Consul in Mexico City to an official in the State Department, dated September 25, 1940, reported that Hansen “wishes to be put in touch with someone in your confidence located in New York to whom confidential information could be imparted with impunity.”[4]

Weiss’s radicalism and defence of Leon Trotsky against the slander of the Stalinists led to his investigation by the East German Stalinist police, following the publication and production of Trotsky in Exile. Weiss, in the eyes of the Stasi, had become a traitor.

The Stasi’s “Operational Information No. 551/69” of September 5, 1969, reported “that the enemy side is making massive efforts to win over and misuse famous authors for deliberate and destructive ideological purposes,” and “it should be recognised that the enemy has succeeded in turning the author Peter Weiss, who has been successfully featured in our theatres. The Stasi report described Trotsky in Exile as a “clear commitment to anti-Soviet positions” and made clear it favoured a total ban on the work and its author in the GDR.

To conclude, as Weiss writes, “ Every word that I write down and submit for publication is political. It is intended to reach a large audience and achieve a specific effect. I submit my writings to one of the communication media, and then they are consumed by the audience. The way in which my words are received depends to a great extent on the social system under which they are distributed. Since my words are but a small and ever-diminishing fraction of available opinions, I have to achieve the greatest possible precision if my views are to make their way”[5]

 

Notes

1.   The Heritage We Defend David North, 1988. The Heritage We Defend was first published in book form in 1988. Its origins lie in the political struggle waged by the ICFI and the Workers League, the predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party of the United States, from 1982 to 1986, to defend Trotskyism against the nationalist opportunism of the ICFI’s former British section, the Workers Revolutionary Party.

2.   Peter Weiss The Necessary Decision- Ten work points of an author in this divided world-NLR I/47•Jan/Feb 1968

3.   Hanjo Kesting-The Writer’s Resistance (Peter Weiss) NLR I/139•May/June 1983

4.   The mechanism of revolution in the documentary theatre- Gideon Tsunami, The German Quarterly, November 1971, Vol 44 No 4

 

 

1

 

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[1] The false friends of Peter Weiss, German dramatist, filmmaker and novelist-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/20/pete-o20.html

[2] See Mandel's review of Weiss’s Book www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1971/xx/exile.htm

[3] The ICFI’s exposure of Ernest Mandel’s “neo-capitalism” and the analysis of the global economic crisis: 1967–1971-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/09/09/rvtn-s09.html

[4] www.wsws.org/en/special/library/foundations-us/48.html

[5] 2.Peter Weiss The Necessary Decision- Ten work points of an author in this divided world-NLR I/47•Jan/Feb 1968

Lost Boys by James Bloodworth (Atlantic Books, £14.99).

 

‘Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on,’

 Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

“A revolution does not deserve its name if it does not help with all its might and all the means at its disposal- if it does not help women, twofold and threefold enslaved in the past, to get on the road of individual and social progress. A revolution does not deserve its name if it does not take the greatest possible care of the children ... for whose benefit it has been made. But how can one create ... a new life based on mutual consideration, on self-respect, on the real equality of women . . . on the efficient care for children-in an atmosphere poisoned with the roaring, rolling, ringing, and resounding swearing of enslavers and enslaved people, that swearing which spares no one and stops at nothing? The struggle against 'foul language' is an essential condition of mental hygiene just as the fight against filth and vermin is a condition of physical hygiene.”

― Leon Trotsky, Problems of Everyday Life & Other Writings on Culture & Science

“The women of the property-owning class will always fanatically defend the exploitation and enslavement of the working people, by which they indirectly receive the means for their socially useless existence.”

Rosa Luxemburg

Lost Boys by James Bloodworth is a journalist's examination of the reactionary movement that has been somewhat lightly termed the Manosphere. The Manosphere quaintly refers to a motley collection of websites, blogs and online forums promoting misogyny, masculinity and opposition to feminism. It promotes racism, antisemitism, anti-intellectualism, climate change denial, homophobia and transphobia. This movement has become a recruitment centre and training ground for what can only be termed trainee fascists.

It is not surprising that Bloodworth did not want to research and write this book. He replied to his editor, saying, “Why would I want to do that?”. He writes, “Today I feel a bit like a funeral director in the aftermath of a mass casualty event. I would have preferred things to have turned out differently, but considering they haven’t, I intend to put my knowledge to some practical use. Having spent so much time researching the manosphere – including interviewing and interacting with hundreds of men and spending months at a time embedded on a course which purportedly taught men how to become ‘high status alpha males’ – I feel as if I have something worthwhile to contribute.”[1]

Indeed, why should anyone want to associate and talk to a bunch of Nazi like scumbags who give two thousand pounds to learn how to hunt down woman and on some occasions rape them and then brag about their behaviour of social media.

The origins of this so-called pickup movement can be traced back to Neil Strauss’s 2005 bestseller, The Game. His book turned the art of seduction into a woman hunt, which sees women as nothing more than prey and being treated as such. The men within this movement have no comprehension of history but their attitude towards women would not look out of place in the Nazi Party of German fascism.

To his credit, Bloodworth exposes these trainee fascists. He reveals the close links between the manosphere and the far Right, including fascists like Donald Trump. Trump’s fascist partners in the While House who dismiss their enemies as “beta”. His vice-president, JD Vance, describes himself as “red-pilled”. As Bloodworth points out, the rise of the Anti-feminist backlash coincided with the growth of fascist forces worldwide, and it reminded him of Sinclair Lewis's dystopian novel, It Can’t Happen Here, which enjoyed a resurgence during the first Trump presidency. As Sinclair wrote, " Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.’  However, his political understanding of how and why these members of the lumpen proletariat and deranged petty bourgeois are cannon fodder for a fascist movement is limited.

Bloodworth’s new book was inspired by his watching of the Netflix series Adolescence. He writes, “It is a striking film that is masterfully shot and powerfully acted. It has also generated a worthwhile public conversation. Much of this conversation has been constructive; however, some of it has been animated by a desire to change the subject – to talk about anything but misogyny and the radicalisation of young men on the internet. I found Adolescence surreal to watch at times.”[2]

As Thomas Scripps writes in his review of the Netflix series, “The reality, as we have been shown, is that the problems are well beyond an individual family’s ability to resolve. Perhaps the most common expression throughout the series is “I don’t know”, or some variant, from kids and adults alike; they are buffeted and bewildered by forces beyond their grasp.

The role of smartphones, the Internet, and social media, in particular, is well-contextualised in this broader social landscape. It would be foolish to deny the role they play in creating an unprecedented level of exposure to peer pressures and corporate advertising, declared and undeclared, and in streamlining the passage of individuals damaged by these influences into darker waters. But the real problem is the poison spilling out of a rotting social system—from misogynist ideologies to the glorification of violence, wealth and selfishness—for which these technologies are a conduit, and the conditions of social neglect which make young people emotionally susceptible: the most vulnerable dangerously so. Conditions which also hinder the social dialogue necessary to help children learn how to interact healthily with new technologies and form genuine relationships.”[3]

So far, the opposition to the rise of the “Manosphere has not come from working-class women, but has taken the form of the middle-class movement centred around the #MeToo movement, which is already eight years old. As the Marxist writer David Walsh wrote, “The ostensible aim of this ongoing movement is to combat sexual harassment and assault, i.e., to bring about some measure of social progress. However, the repressive, regressive means resorted to—including unsubstantiated and often anonymous denunciations and sustained attacks on the presumption of innocence and due process—give the lie to the campaign’s “progressive” claims. Such methods are the hallmark of an anti-democratic, authoritarian movement, and one, moreover, that deliberately seeks to divert attention from social inequality, attacks on the working class, the threat of war and the other significant social and political issues of the day.”[4]

One of the more outspoken and articulate critiques of the “Manosphere has come from the pen of the writer Amia Srinivasan. Her book The Right To sex,[5] while containing so worthwhile observations, it essentially promotes the #MeToo movement's right to unsubstantiated and often anonymous denunciations and sustained attacks on the presumption of innocence and due process.

Srinivasan is the darling of all the radical groups, who fall over themselves in promoting her idea of social justice.  Her brand of modern-day feminism is dominated mainly by selfish, upper-middle-class champions of “women’s rights”. Srinivasan writes, “It’s essential in any radical political tradition. It’s no surprise that utopian writing always has these wacky ideas. I mean, think about More’s Utopia, full of these strange possibilities, because the same political imagination that leads to the disclosure of new possible social arrangements also sometimes generates some crazy shit. The broadening of the sense of what’s possible, as well as what’s delightful about human life, has to be central to a radical politics.

As Kate Randall points out, “ The fight for women’s rights is a social question that must be resolved in the arena of class struggle, not in the rarified atmosphere of the corporate boardroom and Hollywood. As Rosa Luxemburg once explained: “The women of the property-owning class will always fanatically defend the exploitation and enslavement of the working people, by which they indirectly receive the means for their socially useless existence.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes

James Bloodworth is a journalist and author whose writing has appeared in numerous British newspapers, as well as in many US publications. His book Hired: Undercover in Low Wage Britain was longlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2019 and was selected as The Times Best Current Affairs and Big Ideas Book of the Year in 2018. He has produced and presented documentaries for Channel 4 television and has appeared on many podcasts. He has a new book, Lost Boys: A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere, scheduled for release on June 5, 2025, the result of a five-year investigation into the subculture.

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[1] Adolescence’ and the Marketisation of Childhood, by James Bloodworth – 4 April 2025-https://leftrenewal.org/articles-en/bloodworth-adolescence/

[2] ‘Adolescence’ and the Marketisation of Childhood, by James Bloodworth – 4 April 2025-https://leftrenewal.org/articles-en/bloodworth-adolescence/

[3] Adolescence: Gripping realism explores social pressures behind young male violence-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/03/24/fbxd-m24.html

[4] One year of the #MeToo movement-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/10/19/year-o19.html

[5] The Right to Sex: Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2022 Hardcover – 19 Aug. 2021-Bloomsbury

 

Comment on Michael Braddick’s study of Christopher Hill by Christopher Thompson

I first met Christopher Hill at the start of Michaelmas term in October, 1965. I had actually heard him deliver a series of lectures in Balliol College’s dining hall in Hilary term of 1963, lectures which drew upon his draft work on Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England subsequently published in 1964, and had been more than surprised to find that he was to be my postgraduate supervisor for the ensuing years. We met in his office which was located in the main quadrangle behind the small outer one through which one had to pass and to the east. He sat in a chair that hung down by a chain from the ceiling and seemed principally interested on this first occasion on my social origins and the cost of my watch which was one of the first to give the date as well as the time. I did find his willingness to remain silent for long periods, which I later learnt was an old Oxford teaching technique, rather disconcerting, but, that apart, we were always polite to one another even though I fundamentally disagreed with his interpretation of the early modern period in general and of the ‘English Revolution’ in particular. That was still true when we last met at the Huntington Library in San Marino in California in January, 1997.

Most people who heard Christopher Hill lecture would, I think, agree that he was not an inspiring speaker. His delivery was affected by his stammer and he frequently sniffed after two or three sentences which made his performance a rather staccato one. Much more seriously, his work as an academic supervisor was hampered by his ignorance of the manuscript sources for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which form the overwhelming bulk of the surviving documentary material for the period. This was the more remarkable because the Bodleian Library, which is less than two hundred yards from Balliol College, had and has one of the most magnificent collections of manuscript documents covering this period but which he never examined. In several decades of research, I never once saw him in the Public Record Office or in the British Museum - now the British Library - or in any county record office. Printed sources alone, especially the spectacular and profound disputes recorded in the Thomason Tracts, are not in themselves enough for a comprehensive study of the figures Hill was interested in. And his practice of selective quotation from print rendered him liable as he found to serious criticism in the latter stages of his career.

There is no doubt, that he was a major presence in the historiography of seventeenth-century England for more than two decades after 1950. He was not, however, ‘the dominant figure’ in the field in Oxford or elsewhere. The presence of Hugh Trevor-Roper, of Lawrence Stone (until mid-1963), of J.P.Cooper, of Valerie Pearl, of Menna Prestwich, of Joan Thirsk, and of younger historians like Keith Thomas and Roger Howell, meant that he was surrounded by a strong group of influential scholars who did not subscribe to his contentions. Further afield, there were important figures like Gerald Aylmer in Manchester and then York, J.P.Kenyon in Hull, Peter Laslett in Cambridge and J.H.Hexter in the United States who did not share Hill’s views. Interest in ‘history from below’ was burgeoning in history departments across the country quite apart from a stimulus from Balliol.

It is a mistake, too, to suppose that the re-writing of early Stuart Parliamentary and political history, of constitutional, legal and religious history only began in the mid-1970s. Whig interpretations just as much as Marxist ones had been subject to serious challenges well before then. What distinguished Christopher Hill in Oxford and Lawrence Stone in distant Princeton was their failure to appreciate how the historiographical ground was shifting under their feet as their discussion of the English Revolution on Radio 3 in the summer of 1973 demonstrated. They had been ‘blindsided’ as one of Stone’s pupils later put it. Stone subsequently tried to claim that his analysis had actually been vindicated despite the arguments of the mis-named ‘revisionists’. Hill largely went on writing as if very little had happened and maintaining that his case was still sound. That was, in my view, not a tenable position.

An untenable position partly because Hill's adoption of Marxist analytical terms compelled him to argue that there was a 'bourgeois revolution' at first in its causes, later in its course and finally in its results four or five decades later. That is having one's intellectual cake and eating it several times over. There was never any possibility of a fundamental transformation in the economic and social structures of England and Wales whatever the Diggers and Levellers hoped for. They were, in any case, tiny groups without significant political leverage. There was never any religious millennium at hand. Hill was, moreover, completely blind to the realities of much of life for the bulk of the population outside the urban centres, especially London. Military rule, which the post-1646 regimes depended upon, lacked the basic consent needed to survive. The existence of complex bargaining arrangements within the early to mid-seventeenth century polity largely escaped him just as it did Charles I and Oliver Cromwell. Furthermore, there still are important sources on Hill's life - in the former Soviet Union, for example - and on his role as Master of Balliol that have not been covered. 

Nonetheless, in the last ten years or slightly more, a cult has arisen around the works of Christopher Hill. He is still cited as an authority in works published in South America. His books are treated in some parts of Eastern Europe as if they were canonical. In this country, different groups of people on the left in politics regard Hill’s oeuvre as inspirational. I understand why. I also believe they are profoundly mistaken.

 

Diary of a Nobody

In November 2025, this Blog/Website will be 18 years old. Started as a vanity project after my part-time degree at Birkbeck University, it has now become something more substantial. It is now comfortably racking up 10,000 hits per month, which is not bad for a website that, outside of the World Socialist Website, is the only orthodox Trotskyist website.

This year, I hope to expand the website and add more history writers, as well as a few additional subject pages. The other aim is to produce two drafts of the books I have been working on for some time. A collection of essays on Raphael Samuel and to rewrite my degree dissertation on Cromwell, the Levellers and the Putney Debates.

Meetings

If any writer has a meeting or book launch coming up, please don't hesitate to contact me to advertise it.

Book Launch - A.L. Morton and the Radical Tradition-

Author James Crossley introduces his biography of the Communist intellectual A.L. Morton, who pioneered studies of English radical history.

Thursday, 26 June 2025 - 7:00 pm Marx Memorial Library, 37a Clerkenwell Green, London, EC1R 0DU

 

National Portrait Gallery The Fiery Spirits: John Rees 10 July 2025, 13.00-14.00

Popular protest, parliament and the English Revolution

Books Purchased

1.   The Nazi Mind-Laurence Rees

2.   The Last Days of Kira Mullan- N Ricci

3.   Oliver Cromwell-R Hutton

4.   Did It Happen Here- D Jenkins

5.   Hiroshima-J Hersey

6.   Anne Frank-The: The Diary of a Young Girl

7.   The Many Lives of Anne Frank-R Franklin

8.   Marxist Modernism-G Rose

9.   Mafalda-Isabella Cosse

10.Mafalda Quinto 2025

11.America’s Fatal Leap-Paul W Schroder

12.Reform, Revolution and Opportunism M Taber

13.The Time of the Harvest Has Come M Empson

14.Billie Holiday The Lady Sings the Blues

15.Lost Boys-James Bloodworth.

 

What Is Black Lives Matter? (Who HQ Now) Penguin Paperback – 21 Sept. 2021 by Lakita Wilson, Who HQ, Gregory Copeland (Illustrator)

Under the influence of postmodernism and its offspring, “critical race theory,” the doors of American universities have been flung wide open for the propagation of deeply reactionary conceptions. Racial identity has replaced social class and related economic processes as the principal and essential analytic category.

David North

Like other great revolutions—including the French Revolution of 1789 that it helped inspire, and later, the Russian Revolution of 1917—the American Revolution fused the most advanced political thought with economic conditions that had reached sufficient maturity to make the overthrow of an old order both possible and, from an objective standpoint, necessary.

Thomas Mackaman

Indeed, the irrational, anti-Enlightenment, anti-Marxist, and anti-working-class perspective developed over the past half century has brought the pseudo-left into increasing alignment with the conceptions and politics of the far right.

Joseph Kishore

But the idea that racism is a permanent condition, well, that’s just not true. It also doesn’t account for the countervailing tendencies in American history because opposition to slavery and opposition to racism have also been essential themes in American history.

James Macpherson

The 1619 Project debuted as a special edition of The New York Times. The New York Times has funded a staggering number of publications, including this book from Penguin. It is primarily aimed at children and perpetuates a lie. The 1619 Project consisted of 14 essays, including the lead essay by project founder and New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, titled “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written.” Black Americans have fought to make them accurate.” [1]. She was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for commentary as a reward for her efforts.

As James McDonald writes :

The falsification of a society’s history is a tyrant’s weapon. As are our mythologies of blood. In its ongoing mission to disorient and divide the American working class, the New York Times has wielded both these weapons with its 1619 Project, which asserts that the “true founding” of the United States dates back to the year the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia rather than to 1776, the year of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

The common themes of the 1619 Project are that race is the primary division in American society, that anti-black racism “runs in the very DNA of this country,” and that African Americans have been the sole progressive force in US history. For Hannah-Jones and her co-essayists, the American Revolution was a counterrevolution intended to establish a slaveocracy, and the Civil War, the second American Revolution, in which some 750,000 soldiers died and which ended chattel slavery in the US, was of no historical significance. Hundreds of thousands of copies of the 1619 Project have been distributed to school districts to be incorporated into high school curricula.” The New York Times has ensured that its falsification of history has entered schools and libraries across America in unprecedented numbers .[2]

According to the blurb, from the #1 New York Times bestselling series comes the latest title in the Who HQ Now format for trending topics. It tells the history of a political and social movement that advocates for non-violent civil disobedience and protests against incidents of police brutality--and all racially motivated violence--against Black people.”

The origins of the “black lives matter” movement began as a legitimate protest
against police brutality and racial acts of violence. The movement gained attention in 2020 when it called for police reform in the United States after the police-related murder of George Floyd.

However, this movement was hijacked by a money-mad layer of the black petty bourgeoisie whose political aims and money-making were not part of the original hopes and aims of “black lives matter”.

As this critical article states, “From the beginning, the 'mothers of the movement' Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi—who collectively adopted the famous hashtag—specifically opposed uniting blacks, whites and immigrants against the brutal class-war policies of the capitalist state. Instead, the group did its best to confine anti-police violence protests within the framework of the capitalist system and push a racialist and pro-capitalist agenda.[3]

Lawrence Porter and Nancy Hanover's excellent articles go on to state that “In the wake of the monetary commitment by the big-business foundation network, Black Lives Matter (BLM) has explicitly embraced black capitalism. It appears the group is now well-positioned to cash in on the well-known #BLM Twitter hashtag. Announcing its first “big initiative for 2017,” BLM cofounder Patrisse Cullors stated that it would be partnering with the Fortune 500 New York ad agency J. Walter Thompson (JWT) to create “the biggest and most easily accessible black business database in the country.”

Lakita Wilson’s book is a whitewash from start to finish. The BLM’s purported aim to halt racial violence and oppression by ending “white Supremacy and oppression” is nothing but a means of promoting a grasping layer of the black middle class at the expense of black and white workers.

“The use and promotion of Black Lives Matter by key elements of the capitalist state demonstrate once again the class role of identity politics. For workers and young people looking for a way to fight, the social physiognomy and political program of Black Lives Matter stand as an object lesson on the role of bourgeois class forces and the reactionary dead-end of racial politics.”

 

Notes

The New York Times 1619 Project and the racialist falsification of history-David North, Tom Mackaman, Mehring Books- 2021

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[1] www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/black-history-american-democracy.html

[2] The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History: A significant political and intellectual event-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/10/fals-a10.html

[3] Black Lives Matter cashes in on black capitalism-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/04/04/blm-a04.html

A Rebel's Guide to Malcolm X by Antony Hamilton, Paperback – 29 Sept. 2016, Bookmarks Publication

“The notion was expressed that the British government would not, out of its free will, ‘donate’ self-rule to a colony and that the application of some element of force might be necessary.”

FR Kankam-Boadu

“If the Western world is still determined to rule mankind by force, then Africans, as a last resort, may have to appeal to force in the effort to achieve freedom.”

WEB Du Bois

“Every Negro who lays claim to leadership should make a study of Bolshevism and explain its meaning to the coloured masses. It is the greatest and most scientific idea afloat in the world today that can be easily put into practice by the proletariat to better its material and spiritual life. Bolshevism…has made Russia safe for the Jew. It has liberated the Slav peasant from the priest and bureaucrat who can no longer egg him on to murder Jews to bolster up their rotten institutions. It might make these United States safe for the Negro…if the Russian idea should take hold of the white masses of the Western world, and they should rise in united strength and overthrow their imperial capitalist government, then the black toilers would automatically be free!”

Claude McKay (1890-1948)

Trotsky asked me some straight and sharp questions about American Negroes, their group organisations, their political position, their schooling, their religion, their grievances and social aspirations and, finally, what kind of sentiment existed between American and African Negroes. I replied with the best knowledge and information at my command. Then Trotsky expressed his own opinion about Negroes, which was more intelligent than that of any of the other Russian leaders…he was not quick to make deductions about the causes of white prejudice against black. Indeed, he made no conclusions at all, and, happily, expressed no mawkish sentimentality about black and white brotherhood. What he said was very practical…he urged that Negroes should be educated about the labour movement…he said he would like to set a practical example in his own department and proposed the training of a group of Negroes as officers in the Red Army.

Claude McKay (1890-1948)

A Rebel's Guide to Malcolm X is further confirmation, if it was already needed, of the British Socialist Worker’s Party’s promotion of racialist identity politics. This small book largely whitewashes, if you pardon the pun, Malcom X’s pursuit of black nationalist politics and support for racial segregation.

Hamilton’s book and the party he belongs to have historically adapted to the reformist middle-class leadership of the international civil rights movement. The SWP presents black nationalism, along with other forms of petty-bourgeois nationalism such as Castroism in Cuba, as complementary to the fight for socialism.

This small book begins by granting political amnesty to Garveyism.[1] The SWP in all their articles on Garvey contain mild criticisms of him, but on the whole, they gave him a free pass, saying, “In the end, he is remembered for giving a sense of pride to black people in the face of the hideous racism of the 1920s. That is worth recalling, and his faults should be seen in that context.”[2]

But as the Trotskyist Lawrence Porter points out “Despite his radical aura, Garvey rejected socialism. Indeed, he steadfastly opposed the struggle for equality even among blacks. As time progressed, the left rhetoric receded and the right-wing essence of Garvey’s politics came to the fore. By the 1920s, he found himself in cooperation with Jim Crow politicians and the Ku Klux Klan, who agreed with black nationalism’s policy of racial separatism. By the end of his life, Garvey boasted he was a fascist.”[3]

The other organisation given a free pass by Hamilton and the SWP is the American Communist Party. Malcolm X was never a member of the Communist Party or even close to it. So it is a little confusing that while he was in prison, his correspondence was opened and intercepted by the FBI. In this letter, Malcom X clearly states he is a Communist.

Under the heading of “Communist Party Activities”, the heavily redacted FBI transcription of letters from Malcolm X while in prison noted:

“Several excerpts from letters written by the subject. [redaction’] these excerpts were not quotes but rather notes jotted down [redaction] on the contents of these letters. On June 29, 1950, the Subject mailed a letter from which [redacted] copied the following: ‘Tell [redaction] to get in shape. It looks like another war. I have always been a Communist. I have tried to enlist in the Japanese Army during the last war, but now they will never draft or accept me in the U.S. Army. Everyone has always said [redaction] Malcolm is crazy, so it isn’t hard to convince people that I am.”[4]

The free pass given to the Stalinists in the American Communist Party reflects their attitude towards the American Trotskyist movement and Leon Trotsky. Neither is mentioned in the book. For an organisation that purports to be Trotskyist, the SWP and Hamilton do not discuss the attitude of Leon Trotsky and the American Trotskyist Party towards Black Nationalism at any point. There is not enough room in this short review to include Trotsky’s discussion with the American comrades on black nationalism, which should be considered in any discussion of Malcolm X.

Trotsky wrote:

“The point of view of the American comrades appears to me not fully convincing. ‘Self-determination’ is a democratic demand. Our American comrades advance as against this democratic demand, the liberal demand. This liberal demand is, moreover, complicated. I understand what ‘political equality’ means. But what is the meaning of economic and social equality within a capitalist society? Does that mean a demand to public opinion that all enjoy equal protection under the law? But that is political equality. The slogan ‘political, economic and social equality’ sounds equivocal, and while it is not clear to me, it nevertheless suggests itself easily to misinterpretation.

The Negroes are a race and not a nation:—Nations grow out of the racial material under definite conditions. The Negroes in Africa are not yet a nation but they are in the process of building a nation. The American Negroes are on a higher cultural level. But while they are there under the pressure of the Americans they become interested in the development of the Negroes in Africa. The American Negro will develop leaders for Africa, that one can say with certainty and that in turn will influence the development of political consciousness in America.

We do, of course, not obligate the Negroes to become a nation; if they are, then that is a question of their consciousness, that is, what they desire and what they strive for. We say: If the Negroes want that then we must fight against imperialism to the last drop of blood, so that they gain the right, wherever and how they please, to separate a piece of land for themselves. The fact that they are not a majority in any state today is irrelevant. It is not a question of the authority of the states but of the Negroes. That in the overwhelming Negro territory also whites have existed. They will remain henceforth is not the question and we do not need today to break our heads over a possibility that sometime the whites will be suppressed by the Negroes. In any case the suppression of the Negroes pushes them toward a political and national unity.

That the slogan ‘self-determination’ will rather win the petty bourgeois instead of the workers—that argument holds good also for the slogan of equality. It is clear that the special Negro elements who appear more frequently in the public eye (businessmen, intellectuals, lawyers, etc.) are more active and react more strongly against inequality. It is possible to say that the liberal demand, just as well as the democratic one, in the first instance will attract the petty bourgeois and only later the workers.”[5]

In a lecture delivered at the Socialist Equality Party (US) summer school, held August 1 through August 6, 2021, Niles Niemuth, a writer for the World Socialist Web Site, made the following point. “Trotsky was seeking in brief discussions with American members in Turkey in 1933 and Mexico in 1939 to correct the American Trotskyists’ neglect of the “Negro question,” orient the party to a critical section of the American working class and facilitate the recruitment of worker members under conditions where the twists and turns of the Communist Party had alienated many black intellectuals and workers who had been drawn to Marxism over the previous two decades.” I don’t know if even the Trotskyists in the American section of the Fourth International would have been able to change Malcolm X’s subsequent political trajectory. Still, the ensuing political discussion with Malcolm X would have educated a much larger audience and clarified the question of Black nationalism.[6]

Section four of the book elaborates on Malcolm X’s time in prison and his life in the Nation of Islam. While in prison, Malcolm X read John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Orlando Reade[7] In an interview with the SWP, Reade said :

“Malcolm X read Paradise Lost in the late 1940s when he was a young man serving a long sentence for burglary. He had this desire to read, combined with a deep suspicion of white writers. Malcolm X was trying to bend the literature to make it serve his new radical viewpoint. When he came to Paradise Lost, Malcolm also perceived something true. Milton compared Satan on his way to Eden to European ships on their way to satisfy their appetite for sugar, spice and tobacco. Malcolm saw how Milton associated Satan with European kings and their armies, as well as the colonisers. Malcolm found something profoundly radical in Milton’s critique of worldly power. He found in Paradise Lost a critique of white supremacy.”[8]

In the June 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine, an article on the women in Malcom X’s life shows they were instrumental in his turn towards the politics of the Nation of Islam. [9]The NOI was not a threat to capitalism in the United States, nor was Malcolm X, as long as he was in it. But as David Walsh points out, it was only after breaking with the organisation that his life became endangered. Walsh writes :

“The assassinations of Malcolm X and, some three years later, of Martin Luther King Jr., could not have been accidental in their purpose or their timing. When Malcolm represented the Nation of Islam, his life was not threatened. Still, when he broke from Elijah Muhammad’s anti-white separatism and suggested, even in a limited way, that race was not the fundamental dividing line in the fight against injustice, he became a marked man. His newly formed Organisation of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) was undoubtedly quickly infiltrated by agents and provocateurs. At the same time, full advantage was taken of the threats made against him by the Nation of Islam. All the cops had to do was sabotage Malcolm X’s security and look the other way.”[10]

As I mentioned at the beginning, the SWP adapted to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. With the advent of the “Black Lives Matter” movement, it continues to maintain its stance in support of Black nationalism. How else would you understand the SWP’s Ruby Hirsch’s fawning article over the recent Super Bowl performance of Beyonce’s “ in which her dancers dressed in the black berets and raised gloved fists of the Black Panthers and stood in an “X” formation, was broadcast to more than 100 million Americans. It was a powerful tribute to Malcolm X and the Black Lives Matter movement.”

The reality of the Black Lives Matter Movement is somewhat different from the one described by the British SWP. As Lawrence Porter and Nancy Hanover write, “From the beginning, the 'mothers of the movement' Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi—who collectively adopted the famous hashtag—specifically opposed uniting blacks, whites and immigrants against the brutal class-war policies of the capitalist state. Instead, the group did its best to confine anti-police violence protests within the framework of the capitalist system and push a racialist and pro-capitalist agenda.”[11]

Malcolm X was a complex man. Who knows if he had not been assassinated, whether he would have moved further to the left and rejected his brand of black nationalism and taken up a struggle against black and white capitalism. To be blunt, Hamilton’s book is a whitewash of Malcom X’s history and politics and does nothing to clarify today's issue of black nationalism or racism.

 

 

 

 

 

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

[2] Marcus Garvey: a liberating legacy of challenging racism-socialistworker.co.uk/in-depth/marcus-garvey-a-liberating-legacy-of-challenging-racism/

[3] Marcus Garvey and the reactionary logic of racialist politics-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/03/02/qhdd-m02.html

[4] www.blackagendareport.com/malcolm-x-black-nationalism-and-cold-war

[5] On Black Nationalism-Documents on the Negro Struggle www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1940/negro1.htm

[6] Race, class and social conflict in the United States. wsws.org

[7] What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost, 2024, Jonathan Cape.

[8] Paradise Lost inspired generations of radicals-socialistworker.co.uk/reviews-and-culture/paradise-lost-inspired-generations-of-radicals/

[9] www.historyextra.com/magazine/current-issue-bbc-history-magazine/

[10] Two men convicted in 1965 Malcolm X assassination exonerated in New York court-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/11/19/malc-n19.html

[11]  Black Lives Matter cashes in on black capitalism-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/04/04/blm-a04.html