British Library to rent out public reading rooms as austerity guts national culture

Converting three reading rooms into hire-by-the-hour commercial workspace is the latest stage in a 16-year assault on Britain's public cultural institutions, carried out by systematically subordinating culture and knowledge to market demands.

The British Library's decision to convert three of its public reading rooms into commercial workspaces is far more than an argument about the internal organisation of a building in St Pancras. It raises the fundamental question of what remains of the principle that access to knowledge, scholarship and culture should constitute a public right rather than a commercial opportunity. The UK's national library, which holds more than 170 million items, plans to repurpose its Science and Social Sciences Reading Rooms into flexible workspaces available for hire by workers and businesses for coworking, collaboration and meetings. The changes form part of the library's six-year Growing Knowledge: A Refocused Strategy for 2026–2032. The new workspace is scheduled to open in 2028, while science and social science research services are to be transferred to the institution's remaining eight reading rooms.

The scale and significance of the decision should not be understated. The British Library currently has 11 reading rooms in London, where adults with a free Reader Pass can consult collection material or undertake personal study. The library itself describes them as quiet, dedicated spaces. Three of these rooms are now to be withdrawn from their existing function. What appears from management's standpoint as an exercise in rationalisation represents, from society's standpoint, a transfer of space from public intellectual use to commercial exploitation.

The opposition that has followed is therefore entirely justified. But the transformation cannot adequately be explained as an inexplicable failure of judgement by the library's executives. The commercialisation of the reading rooms represents the logical development of a policy pursued since the beginning of austerity: reduce public funding, compel institutions to increase self-generated income, commercialise their assets, suppress the real wages of their employees and then present each successive retreat from universal provision as an unfortunate necessity required to protect what remains.

What is being transformed is not simply the British Library's floor plan. It is the conception of what a national cultural institution should be. The plan was announced to library users on 21 October. Readers were told the Science and Social Sciences Reading Rooms would be repurposed as flexible workspace, giving the library a new revenue stream. The proposed facilities would be available to businesses and workers for coworking, collaboration and meetings. Management argues that the revenue generated will be reinvested in the institution and help keep its "core services free".

Within this seemingly innocuous formulation lies the entire logic of cultural austerity. The public institution is no longer funded because society considers its activities intrinsically necessary. Every part of it must increasingly demonstrate its economic utility. Space devoted to scholarship becomes space that could generate rent. What generations previously understood as public provision appears on the managerial balance sheet as an asset from which it extracts insufficient revenue.

The argument that charging for one part of a public institution will protect free access to another is one of the oldest justifications for marketisation. The commercial measure is never presented as the beginning of privatisation. It is described as the mechanism through which public provision can supposedly be saved. But once the principle has been conceded, there is no obvious stopping point. If three reading rooms can be commercialised to protect eight, why should a fourth not eventually suffer the same fate? If declining usage establishes the legitimacy of commercial conversion, then every reduction in attendance caused by declining services can itself become an argument for further contraction.

Researchers have reacted angrily. Simon Harley, an associate fellow of the Royal Historical Society, questioned why the British Library was embarking on a long-term commercial plan when services had not yet been completely restored following the catastrophic 2023 cyberattack. He pointed in particular to digitised First World War material that remained unavailable. James Crossland, professor of international history at Liverpool John Moores University, described the library since the cyberattack as travelling down an "enshittification road". At the same time, Oxford ancient historian Georgy Kantor characterised the workspace proposals as "utterly horrible".

Margot Finn, vice-president for research and higher education policy at the British Academy, adopted a more accommodating position. She argued that the cyberattack had severely affected the library's reserves and user base, and that extracting revenue from reading-room space might be necessary to preserve the institution, provided specialist staff were relocated appropriately.

The argument demonstrates how deeply the assumptions of austerity have penetrated cultural debate. The political question quickly becomes which portion of a diminished institution must be sacrificed to preserve what remains. Almost no one asks why one of the world's greatest research libraries should be required to cannibalise its own research facilities to remain financially viable. Workers' reaction has been considerably sharper. Noel McClean, deputy general secretary of Prospect, told Times Higher Education that union members were "furious" about the proposed conversion of the reading rooms as well as a separate proposal to outsource security. He said the repurposing of research facilities went against the institution's central function of providing access to the national collection. Prospect called for the plan to be halted and warned that it could move towards a ballot for industrial action.

PCS said it is simultaneously in dispute with management over the reading rooms, security outsourcing, and the 2026–27 pay offer. The union expressed concern about the possible consequences for services and employment and opposed the transformation of public research space for commercial purposes. This opposition matters because commercialisation cannot be separated from the conditions under which the library's workforce is expected to operate.

The origins of the present crisis trace directly to the austerity programme implemented after the financial crash of 2008. On 20 October 2010, Conservative Culture Secretary Hunt wrote to the library's then chair Baroness Blackstone outlining its settlement under the Cameron-Clegg coalition's Spending Review. The library's resource grant-in-aid was to be cut by 15 per cent in real terms by 2014–15. But the letter contained another instruction whose significance becomes especially clear in retrospect: the British Library was explicitly instructed to "pursue ways to increase its self-generated income". The government also promoted philanthropy, corporate support, and increased private funding for cultural institutions.

The genealogy of today's reading-room scheme could scarcely be clearer. In 2010 the state reduced the resources made available to the national library and instructed it to increase commercial income. Sixteen years later, the institution proposes renting public research space to private businesses to generate precisely that income. What was originally presented as emergency austerity has hardened into the normal method of administering public culture.

The British Library is only the most prominent example of a much wider destruction of cultural infrastructure. In 2020, CILIP reported that annual revenue funding for local public libraries had been reduced by £243 million in real terms since 2010. CIPFA calculated that spending on libraries fell by 29.6 per cent between 2009–10 and 2018–19, alongside reductions in paid staff numbers and increased reliance on volunteers. The deterioration of the national library must therefore be understood as part of an assault extending through local libraries, museums, archives, universities and the broader cultural infrastructure.

Into this already weakened situation came the catastrophic cyberattack of October 2023. The Rhysida ransomware group penetrated the British Library's systems, exfiltrated enormous quantities of information, and caused extensive disruption. The attackers exfiltrated about 600GB of data, which was later published after the library refused to pay the ransom.

The financial consequences were severe. A 2026 analysis put the recovery costs at at least £7 million, representing more than 40 per cent of the library's unallocated reserves. The institution itself continues to describe the restoration of its systems as a rebuilding process necessitated by the scale of the attack. EThOS records were restored in July 2026, while the UK Web Archive returned in October.

But the cyberattack cannot legitimately be invoked to obscure the policies that preceded it. Commercialisation had been written into the library's funding arrangements more than a decade earlier. The attack did not create the underlying policy. It greatly intensified the financial consequences of an existing one. An adequately funded national institution facing such an attack should have had the resources for complete reconstruction. Instead, the financial consequences have reinforced demands that the library generate additional income. In this way, the extraordinary damage produced by a criminal cyberattack has become another pressure pushing a publicly funded institution towards commercialisation.

The workforce has borne much of the cost of this prolonged crisis. PCS has pointed out that British Library employees received a 3 per cent pay award for 2023–24 when other public-sector workers received 5 per cent under the Civil Service Pay Remit. The conflict erupted into strike action in 2025 after management originally proposed a 2 per cent increase, which was subsequently marginally raised. PCS members voted 98.23 per cent for strike action on a turnout of 75.17 per cent. More than 300 workers were expected to participate.

From 27 October to 9 November 2025, more than 300 PCS members struck at the British Library. The union reported strong public support, and its membership at the institution grew during the dispute. Further industrial action followed in December, when security workers closed all the reading rooms.

At the same time, PCS challenged proposals for a senior-management restructuring that would have added £5,000 in annual remuneration for directors. Management subsequently abandoned the proposed restructure. The episode laid bare the class reality hidden beneath appeals for institutional sacrifice. Restraint operates differently depending upon one's position within the organisation.

The six-month dispute was ended in February 2026 when PCS members endorsed their branch executive's recommendation to allow management's revised pay offer to be imposed. The resulting settlement included a consolidated increase of 4 per cent for grades A and below, the London Living Wage for workers earning below the threshold, an additional £2,000 uplift for Grade C minimums, and a review of allowances affecting security staff. But PCS itself acknowledged that the settlement remained below its national pay claim. General secretary Fran Heathcote admitted that it was "not everything our members deserve", while the demand for full restoration of the 2023–24 pay loss was carried into the next negotiating round. [pcs.org.uk]

The importance of that episode lies not only in the pay figures. Library workers demonstrated considerable determination and won widespread public backing. But the underlying funding crisis was untouched. Less than a year later, workers confront new attacks involving pay, outsourcing and the threatened commercialisation of the very reading rooms that security workers succeeded in closing during the earlier struggle.

The controversy has consequently touched a nerve extending far beyond professional academia. Writing in the i on 2 November, Lucy Mangan described libraries as among the last places in contemporary society that can be used freely by anyone. Her argument centred upon the library as a public good and upon the importance of quiet, freely accessible intellectual space in an increasingly commercialised society. She noted both the decline in the library's real public funding since 2010 and the extraordinary financial consequences of the cyberattack.

Much of this outrage is justified. The reading room possesses significance precisely because it stands partially outside the everyday logic of commercial life. One does not have to purchase coffee every hour to justify occupying the chair. There is no admission charge based upon the ability to pay. The independent historian can work alongside the university professor, the pensioner beside the postgraduate student, the ordinary reader beside the professional scholar. Whatever inequalities exist outside its doors, the reading room's formal principle is that access to accumulated knowledge should not depend on wealth.

But liberal outrage reaches its limits when it refuses to confront the economic relations producing the destruction it laments. The commercialisation of the national library is not fundamentally the product of managers who have temporarily forgotten the institution's purpose. Management acts within financial conditions created through government policy. Its calculations concerning revenue, floor space and commercial opportunity are the administrative expression of political decisions about what should and should not receive public resources.

Appeals to management to remember what a library is for, therefore, mistake the symptom for the disease. The question is not whether executives possess adequate cultural sensitivity. The question is why organisations supposedly devoted to public provision are compelled to behave increasingly like businesses.

The issue now falls directly to the Labour government of Andy Burnham, who became prime minister on 20 July 2026 after becoming Labour leader on 16 July. Burnham had previously served as Culture Secretary, as well as Health Secretary and Chief Secretary to the Treasury. On entering Downing Street, he promised what he called a "new economic model", greater public control over essential services and action on the cost of living. The developing crisis at the country's national library provides one concrete test of what such declarations mean.

If the supposed break with the politics of the previous period leaves intact the financial mechanisms that compel public institutions to commercialise themselves, then nothing fundamental has changed. Austerity is not overcome by changing its vocabulary. Nor does public provision cease to be marketised because the government responsible describes itself as progressive.

The defence of the British Library therefore demands more than cancellation of one particularly objectionable scheme. No reading room should be transformed into commercial office space. No outsourcing of security or other services, and no job losses from management reviews. The losses suffered by employees through below-inflation settlements should be restored, and sufficient public resources must be provided to complete the reconstruction of the technological infrastructure damaged by the cyberattack and expand, rather than contract, access to the collections.

The same principle must apply to the libraries, museums and archives across the country that have endured years of cuts. Defending the British Library cannot be separated from restoring Britain's wider cultural infrastructure. Local libraries cannot survive long-term on declining budgets, volunteer labour, and reduced opening hours while the national institution itself moves further towards commercialisation. What is required is not another round of managed decline but a vast expansion of publicly financed cultural provision.

The inevitable response will be that the necessary resources do not exist. That assertion has provided the ideological foundation of austerity since 2010. Every reduction is pronounced unavoidable, every closure regrettable and every commercialisation pragmatic. Debate is restricted to deciding which service will be sacrificed next.

But Britain has not become an impoverished society incapable of maintaining libraries. What has changed is how it distributes its resources and the social priorities that govern their use. Vast private wealth exists alongside the degradation of public institutions. The problem is not an absolute shortage of social resources but how those resources are organised around the requirements of private accumulation.

This is why the reading room possesses a significance extending far beyond its physical dimensions. From the market's standpoint, a reading room can appear economically unproductive. A researcher may occupy a desk for six hours while consulting an obscure political pamphlet, scientific journal or seventeenth-century manuscript without producing a penny of immediate income. Yet that supposedly unproductive activity embodies the entire purpose of a research library.

Human knowledge cannot be valued according to the immediate financial return generated by its study. The reading room represents space and time partially liberated from the commodity relation. Its value lies precisely in the fact that a reader does not have to justify occupying a desk through consumption. It recognises, however incompletely, that intellectual activity has a social value that cannot be captured through a commercial transaction.

That is why the proposal to convert part of the British Library into rentable workspace is so revealing. It substitutes another principle of value. Public space becomes financially suspect precisely because it does not generate sufficient income. Commercial space acquires legitimacy because somebody can be charged for occupying it.

Once this principle is accepted, no secure boundary can remain around the rest of the public institution. Every room, collection, service and employee becomes subject to the question of economic return. Marketisation proceeds not necessarily by the spectacular privatisation of the entire institution but through the gradual colonisation of its functions by the methods and priorities of the market.

Consequently, the Growing Knowledge: A Refocused Strategy for 2026–2032 contains an extraordinary contradiction. The strategy rightly emphasises the importance of trusted knowledge and describes the library's custodial responsibility for its enormous collections as fundamental to scholarship and research. At the same time it emphasises generating revenue to reinvest in those priorities. The danger is that the second imperative progressively devours the first.

Knowledge does not grow simply because collections become larger. It requires librarians, archivists, cataloguers, conservationists, technicians and specialist reference staff. It requires functioning digital infrastructure and searchable catalogues. It requires adequately paid workers possessing the time and security necessary to develop professional expertise. And it requires spaces in which people can study without paying by the hour for the privilege.

The enormous scientific and technological capacities of contemporary society should permit the opposite of what has occurred. Digital technology makes possible the unprecedented democratisation of historical, cultural and scientific material. Public investment could extend opening hours, increase staffing, restore damaged digital archives, accelerate digitisation, and give researchers worldwide access to enormous quantities of material previously available only to a relatively small number of specialists.

Instead, one of the world's great libraries is calculating how much of its physical research space it can transform into a source of revenue. That contradiction is not principally technological or managerial. It is social. The defence of the British Library consequently becomes inseparable from a broader political struggle over who controls society's wealth and for what purposes it is used. Library workers have already demonstrated their willingness to fight. The task now is to connect their struggle with readers, researchers, students and workers defending other cultural and public institutions rather than allowing each dispute to remain isolated within the deteriorating financial circumstances of a particular organisation.

Three reading rooms might appear insignificant beside the immense crises confronting Britain and the world. They are not. Small struggles over public institutions frequently illuminate far larger social conflicts. What is being decided at St Pancras is whether another part of the social sphere historically removed from direct commercial calculation will be surrendered to it.

The books are not commodities waiting for sufficiently profitable readers. Researchers are not customers whose social value can be measured by what they spend. Reading rooms are not underperforming real estate. The British Library is not a landlord. It is a national institution entrusted with an immense portion of humanity's intellectual inheritance. Its collections and the facilities required to use them should be publicly financed and freely accessible. Knowledge accumulated over centuries should not have to constantly prove its commercial profitability before society permits people to study it.

The struggle over the reading rooms is ultimately a struggle over that principle. Whether culture will be allocated according to profitability or human need, whether knowledge will be regarded as commercial property or social inheritance, and whether institutions created for public enlightenment will remain genuinely public at all.

That is why defending the British Library matters. It is part of the wider struggle against the subordination of every aspect of social and intellectual life to the market, and for the socialist principle that humanity's accumulated cultural and intellectual wealth belongs not to those capable of monetising it, but to everyone.

Bibliography

British Library. Growing Knowledge: A Refocused Strategy for 2026–2032. London: British Library, 2026. [bl.uk], [bl.uk]

British Library. Cyber-attack Recovery Update. London: British Library, 2026. [bl.uk]

British Library. Free Study Spaces and Reading Rooms. British Library, 2026. [bl.uk]

CILIP. Time to End a Decade of Library Austerity. 2 March 2020. [oldsite-ym...lip.org.uk]

CIPFA. Decade of Austerity Sees 30% Drop in Library Spending. 6 December 2019. [cipfa.org]

Department for Culture, Media and Sport. 2010 Spending Review: Letter from Hunt to Baroness Blackstone, Chair of the British Library. 20 October 2010. [assets.pub...ice.gov.uk]

Jones, Frances. British Library to Turn Reading Rooms into Paid-for Workspaces. Times Higher Education, 22 October 2026.

Jones, Frances. British Library Staff ‘Furious’ about Paid-for Workspace Plan. Times Higher Education, 30 October 2026.

Mangan, Lucy. I Knew Britain Was Broken. Then I Heard What the British Library Was Doing. i, 2 November 2026. [inews.co.uk]

Museums Association. New Leadership for British Library as Cyber Attack Recovery Continues. 22 September 2026. [museumsass...iation.org]

Public and Commercial Services Union. British Library Workers Vote to Strike. 14 October 2025. [pcs.org.uk]

Public and Commercial Services Union. British Library on Strike: A Round Up. 10 November 2025. [pcs.org.uk]

Public and Commercial Services Union. British Library Dispute Ends with Improved Pay Offer. 5 February 2026. [pcs.org.uk]

Research Professional News. British Library Staff Accept Pay Offer, Ending Industrial Dispute. 6 February 2026. [researchpr...alnews.com]

Databarracks. Anatomy of a Crisis: Deconstructing the British Library Cyber Attack. 2026. [databarracks.com]

UK Government. Andy Burnham's First Speech as Prime Minister: 20 July 2026. Prime Minister's Office, 20 July 2026. [gov.uk]

  

Alberto Manguel’s The Reverse Side of the Tapestry: Translation, Labour and Who Owns the Loom

 

Alberto Manguel’s The Reverse Side of the Tapestry: Notes on the Art of Translation is a cultivated, erudite and often moving defence of literary translation. Published by Carcanet Press on 24 September 2026, the book is described by the publisher as a book-length essay on the translator’s craft and on translation as what Manguel considers the “keenest form of reading”. The volume also contains his own illustrations. Yet the book's fascination lies not only in what it says about translation, but also in the questions its conception of culture leaves unanswered. Its strengths and limitations belong to a recognisable liberal-humanist tradition in which literature appears primarily as a conversation conducted across centuries between writers, books and exceptionally attentive readers. What recedes from view is the material world that makes this conversation possible: publishers, markets, property, censorship, wages and, above all, labour.

The title itself provides a way to develop a more materialist conception. Carcanet Press explains that the reverse side of the tapestry is the definition of translation Manguel takes from Don Quixote. The metaphor is extraordinarily suggestive. Look at a tapestry from the front, and the picture appears finished and coherent. Turn it around, and another reality is revealed: knots, crossings, loose ends and the physical construction that produced the visible image. Translation similarly refuses the illusion that literature arrives before us in an immaculate, self-sufficient form. Behind the translated sentence stands another sentence, and between them stands a human being making decisions. [carcanet.co.uk]

A materialist criticism begins from much the same reversal. It turns the apparently autonomous cultural object over. It asks what the completed surface conceals: who made it, under what conditions, through which institutions, for which audience and under whose ownership. If Manguel’s metaphor is pursued beyond the boundaries he establishes for it, therefore, the reverse side of the tapestry leads from literary aesthetics into political economy. The difficulty is that Manguel, having turned over the tapestry, remains fascinated principally by its threads. He cares less about the loom.

A lover rather than a specialist

Manguel, born in Buenos Aires in 1948, has held a remarkable position in contemporary literary life as an anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist, editor, and former director of the National Library of Argentina. Carcanet Press describes him as Argentine-Canadian and notes that he now lives in Lisbon. His career has always resisted easy professional categorisation. He belongs to the old republic of letters, moving between languages, libraries, literary histories and forms.

Translation is not for him an abstract subject. Carcanet Press notes that Manguel has translated Jorge Luis Borges and Marguerite Yourcenar into English and Katherine Mansfield and Paul Éluard into Spanish. This practical experience matters because his argument rests upon translation as an exceptionally intimate encounter between reader and text. Translating means penetrating beneath the apparent transparency of words into questions of voice, rhythm, ambiguity and intention.

The publisher approvingly reproduces George Steiner’s description of Manguel as an “amateur” in the older, more generous sense of the word: “a lover rather than a specialist”. That characterisation captures both what makes Manguel’s writing attractive and what eventually limits it. His criticism refuses the bureaucratised compartmentalisation of contemporary academic life. For him, literature is a continuous historical conversation. A biblical text can illuminate a modern novel; Cervantes can supply an image through which the modern translator's predicament becomes intelligible.

There is something genuinely valuable here. Against reducing reading to the acquisition of information, Manguel insists on attention. Translation reveals that words cannot simply be exchanged like identical units of currency. To translate is already to interpret. The translator must decide. No dictionary can abolish those decisions because a sentence's meaning never resides exclusively in the individual meanings of the words that compose it. Tone, social register, historical association, irony, rhythm and the relationship of one sentence to everything surrounding it continually intervene. A translator consequently produces a reading of the original even where they strive for the greatest possible fidelity.

Here Manguel’s defence of translation rises above the merely antiquarian. Translation exposes something fundamental about literature itself. The apparently transparent act of reading involves interpretation, historical knowledge, comparison, and judgement. The translated text embodies this process. But at precisely this point another question presents itself. If translation is intellectual activity, interpretation and creation, then the translator is not merely the invisible intermediary between two literary personalities. The translator is also a worker.

Translation and the struggle over who may read

The political importance of translation long predates the contemporary publishing industry. The history of translating texts is inseparable from struggles over access to knowledge and over who possesses the authority to interpret it. The history of the vernacular Bible provides one of the clearest examples. William Tyndale’s English translation of scripture belonged to a tremendous transformation produced by printing, religious upheaval and the development of vernacular literacy. The issue was never simply whether one rendering of a Greek or Hebrew word was superior to another. Behind disputes over translation lay the far more dangerous question of whether ordinary people needed an established clerical hierarchy to mediate between themselves and sacred texts.

The subsequent history of revolutionary England reveals what could follow once texts and arguments escaped older institutional monopolies. The enormous expansion of pamphleteering and popular religious controversy accompanying the English Revolution allowed artisans, soldiers, preachers and political radicals to intervene directly in questions previously claimed as the preserve of churchmen, lawyers and rulers. Levellers, Diggers and religious radicals found within vernacular religious and political languages the means to formulate increasingly explosive questions about authority, representation, property and equality.

Translation in this sense belongs to the history of democratisation, but not in the comfortable meaning the term later acquired. Making forbidden, restricted or otherwise inaccessible texts available to wider populations could destabilise established authority. It altered not simply what people read but who could participate in intellectual and political argument. The same process took on an increasingly international character as bourgeois society grew. Philosophical, scientific and political works circulated beyond the linguistic environments in which they had originated. Ideas crossed frontiers that states, churches, and ruling classes repeatedly tried to police. Translation became one mechanism through which intellectual life acquired its genuinely international character.

The development of the socialist workers’ movement gave this process an entirely new historical significance. The writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and later the vast literature generated by socialist movements worldwide, could not have become the theoretical inheritance of an international working class without translation. Translating socialist literature was not an ornamental supplement to political activity. It formed part of the movement’s practical work of education and organisation.

This history points towards something only partially captured by a liberal-humanist celebration of translation as intercultural understanding. Languages do not meet one another in some realm floating above society. Human beings speaking different languages encounter each other through migrations, empires, wars, trade, intellectual exchange and class struggle. Translation is therefore necessarily historical. The reverse of the tapestry is already beginning to look much more complicated.

The translator as worker

Manguel approaches translation above all as a man of letters contemplating a craft. But translation is also an occupation situated within the capitalist publishing industry. This distinction matters because the romantic language surrounding literary production has always served an ideological function. Writing, translating, illustrating and editing can be presented as callings whose supposedly privileged proximity to culture somehow places them outside ordinary questions of remuneration and working conditions. Yet precisely because many people undertake intellectual labour from genuine commitment, their attachment to the activity can itself become a mechanism through which poorly rewarded conditions are normalised.

The organisations representing translators make clear that contracts, payment and rights are not secondary concerns. Britain’s Translators Association, part of the Society of Authors, describes itself as the collective voice of literary translators and advises members on translator-publisher contracts and negotiating payment. It also says explicitly that it campaigns for translators’ rights and fairer working conditions.

The evidence from the United States points in the same direction. The Authors Guild states that literary translation requires creativity, talent, and skill. Still, translators’ work is often overlooked or taken for granted, including through failures to provide proper credit or ongoing royalties. Its model translation contract was created specifically to provide translators with a basis for negotiating better terms.

Such mundane contractual matters expose the social side of Manguel’s elevated conception of translation. If translation is profound reading, then somebody must be paid to undertake that reading. If it requires sustained intellectual attention, somebody must possess the time in which that attention can occur. If the finished translation embodies interpretative and creative judgement, the translator’s right to credit, remuneration and a continuing interest in the exploitation of that work cannot be dismissed as matters external to culture.

The Authors Guild’s model contract gives this struggle particularly concrete expression. Its proposed clauses include a translation fee alongside royalties from print, electronic and audiobook editions and shares from the licensing of subsidiary rights. The Guild notes that payment arrangements vary widely between publishers. The very necessity for such model provisions reveals the contradiction behind romantic conceptions of literary translation. Culture may be discussed in the vocabulary of inspiration, interpretation and artistic fidelity, but the translator ultimately confronts a contract. The capitalist commodity does not cease to be a commodity because the object being bought and sold happens to be a book.

The new pressure of artificial intelligence

The social contradiction becomes sharper with the rapid development of generative artificial intelligence. Here the argument must avoid two equally unsatisfactory positions. One is technological romanticism, which treats human cultural activity as possessing a mystical essence that machinery can never approach. The other is technological determinism, which holds that the ability to automate part of an activity demonstrates the historical inevitability of replacing the humans performing it.

Neither begins with the decisive question: under whose control technology is introduced, for what social purpose, and who reaps the benefits?

Translators' concerns about generative AI are not hypothetical. The Translators Association states that it is “deeply engaged” in protecting translators’ rights and their craft in the age of AI and says it has called for solidarity with human translators whose livelihoods are threatened by generative AI. Meanwhile, the Authors Guild has incorporated provisions on generative AI into its literary translation model contract.

The Society of Authors additionally advises those negotiating fees to establish a commissioner’s policy concerning AI and says it expects consent to be sought before AI is given access to authors’ materials. These developments demonstrate that AI is already an issue of rights, remuneration and control within literary work, not simply a philosophical argument about whether machines can translate.

This is where Manguel’s conception of translation becomes unexpectedly radical in its implications. If translation genuinely represents an especially intense form of reading, then translating cannot adequately be understood as the mechanical conversion of linguistic units. It embodies interpretation. But a materialist criticism should go further. The central problem is not deciding whether a machine output is “really” translation according to some abstract philosophical definition. The more important question is what happens to human labour when automated systems are introduced into publishing under capitalist ownership.

Machinery under capitalism has repeatedly been presented as liberation from labour, while workers experience it as intensified exploitation, unemployment, deskilling, or loss of control over the labour process. The contradiction arises not fundamentally from machinery itself, but from the social relations governing its use. AI potentially contains enormously progressive possibilities. Technology capable of overcoming linguistic barriers could enormously broaden international access to culture, historical documents, scientific research and everyday human communication. For socialists, there is no interest in defending unnecessary drudgery merely because humans previously performed it.

But under capitalist relations the central criterion governing technological adoption is not the enrichment of human experience. It is profitability. That distinction transforms the AI debate. The question should not be posed simply as “human translator versus machine”. Both are trapped within a social organisation of production that subordinates technological development to private accumulation. The genuine alternative would be to use advances in automation to reduce necessary labour while expanding the time and resources available for higher forms of cultural, intellectual and creative activity. In such circumstances AI might become an instrument available to translators rather than an economic weapon deployed against them. 

Translation against nationalism

There is another reason translation should concern Marxists. In practice, the activity contradicts the nationalist mythology that cultures exist as self-contained, internally homogeneous organisms. Every translated book is evidence against such isolation. Languages continually absorb, transform and appropriate elements from one another. Literature develops through these exchanges. National traditions themselves emerge within international processes.

Marx and Engels recognised this tendency extraordinarily early. Capitalism created a world market and drew previously isolated national economies into an increasingly interconnected global system. Cultural production developed internationally alongside this process. Yet capitalism's contradiction is that economic life grows ever more global while political power remains organised through rival capitalist nation-states. Translation occupies one of the cultural pressure points created by this contradiction. It demonstrates the objective internationalism of culture while remaining embedded in national markets, publishing structures, and economic power inequalities.

Not all linguistic exchanges therefore occur between equals. Some languages dominate the international publishing market while others remain peripheral. Which authors receive translation, which works obtain international distribution and which disappear outside their original languages are not purely literary decisions. Markets and institutions shape them. Consequently, the existence of world literature does not abolish material inequality any more than the world market abolishes national inequality. It reproduces these contradictions on a cultural level.

Yet translation contains another possibility. It makes available humanity's accumulated imaginative and intellectual experience across geographical and historical boundaries. The same activity that capitalism turns into a specialised market also points beyond cultural nationalism towards the conception of culture as a genuinely common human inheritance.

Literature and the commodity

Here lies the deeper limitation of Manguel’s liberal humanism. Books and readers, libraries and writers, memories and conversations populate his intellectual world. This world is real, and defending it against intellectual impoverishment matters. But the danger is that the library becomes an idealised refuge from society rather than one of society’s products. Books cannot escape the commodity form merely because their content transcends it.

A publishing house must purchase or control rights, commission work, produce an edition, market it and sell copies. Authors and translators must earn their living. Distribution channels determine what reaches readers. The survival of literary works may depend upon libraries and public institutions whose budgets are themselves products of political struggle.

The cultural object consequently possesses the same double character that capitalism imposes elsewhere. It is simultaneously something created because human beings possess the need to express and understand their experience and something produced and circulated within definite economic structures. This does not diminish literature. On the contrary, understanding its material conditions makes a more serious defence possible.

Manguel’s tapestry metaphor permits precisely this kind of investigation. Once the work is turned around, we discover not only interpretative knots but a division of labour: author, translator, editor, designer, printer, distributor, bookseller, librarian and reader. Behind them stand institutions, technologies and property relations. The reverse side of the tapestry becomes society itself.

From humanism to materialism

The attraction of The Reverse Side of the Tapestry is therefore inseparable from its limitation. Manguel protects something genuinely precious: attentive reading, historical memory, linguistic subtlety and the conviction that literature creates relationships across languages and centuries. A Marxist criticism has no reason to reject this inheritance. Marxism did not arise through hostility to the achievements of human culture. It sought the social conditions under which those achievements would no longer remain the effective privilege of minorities. The difference lies elsewhere.

Liberal humanism ultimately appeals to enlightened individuals and institutions to protect culture. Materialism asks what social conditions culture needs to flourish and what forces have an interest in creating them. The translator therefore presents in miniature a much larger problem. How can serious intellectual work survive when the time needed to carry it out is continually measured against profitability? How can literature fulfil its universal possibilities while its production and distribution remain governed by private property? How can technological advances become instruments for enlarging human freedom rather than mechanisms for reducing labour costs?

These are not questions peculiar to translation. Writers, musicians, actors, researchers, journalists, designers and innumerable other cultural workers confront different forms of the same contradiction. The technology capable of distributing cultural works to billions exists alongside commercial and proprietary structures that seek to enclose intellectual production. Never has humanity possessed technological means of cultural communication remotely comparable to those available today, yet never has the pressure to translate attention, creativity and knowledge into measurable commercial value been more pervasive. The defence of culture therefore cannot finally depend upon nostalgia for a supposedly pre-technological literary civilisation. Nor can it depend upon persuading corporations to behave more benevolently towards creative workers. The problem is social. 

Alberto Manguel, Alexander Voronsky and the Struggle for Artistic Truth

Translation occupies a peculiar position within literature. The translator creates sentences without being their original author, interprets while resisting the temptation to replace the author, and necessarily changes a work's linguistic form while trying to preserve what made that form artistically meaningful. This raises the fundamental question confronting every serious translator: what in a work of literature must survive its passage from one language into another? Alberto Manguel and the Marxist literary critic Alexander Voronsky offer complementary answers.

For Manguel, translation begins with reading. In The Translator as Reader, he describes reading as a way to know more about the world and ourselves. He identifies the translator as potentially its most refined and knowledgeable practitioner. In The Reverse Side of the Tapestry: Notes on the Art of Translation, he develops this preoccupation with translation as an exceptionally intense form of reading. The translator cannot remain a passive recipient of meaning. Every sentence demands interpretation: rhythm, ambiguity, historical association and tone must first be recognised before they can be recreated.

Voronsky approaches the problem from another direction. For him, genuine art constitutes a particular form of cognition. In On Art, he argues that art apprehends reality, human thoughts and feelings through concrete images rather than through abstract propositions. Artistic cognition depends upon intuition, although intuition does not eliminate technique or conscious analysis.

Placed beside Manguel's conception of the translator as reader, this provides the basis for a richer conception of translation. The translator must not merely discover what the words say. The deeper task is to recover the artistic cognition contained within them.

A mechanically accurate translation can therefore remain artistically false. Every word might possess a plausible dictionary equivalent while rhythm is destroyed, irony flattened, ambiguity explained away, and differences between characters' voices homogenised. Information survives while literature disappears. Conversely, unrestricted adaptation can become equally false by replacing the author's artistic discovery with the translator's preferences.

Voronsky's discussion of the painter Mikhailov in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina illuminates the difficulty. He emphasises the artist's capacity to penetrate appearances, discovering the significant and characteristic beneath what obscures it. He adopts Tolstoy's metaphor of“removing the veils” to describe this artistic process. The genuine artist does not merely copy appearances but reveals something about reality that previously remained concealed. [marxists.org]

The translator confronts something analogous. Language itself has become a veil that must be removed and preserved at once. Russian cannot simply become English without transformation. Syntax, sounds, idioms and historical associations differ. Yet the translator must find an equivalent way to let another reader encounter the artistic relationships embodied in the original.

Here Manguel's translator as reader and Voronsky's artist as discoverer converge. The translator becomes a reader compelled to demonstrate the depth of a reading through recreation. An ordinary reader can pass over an ambiguity unnoticed. A critic can subsequently revise an interpretation. The translator must repeatedly decide what the ambiguity, rhythm or image is doing and choose words that recreate its function.

This labour also has a profoundly historical dimension. Languages carry the accumulated experiences of societies. Words carry associations shaped by history, social conflict, and cultural development. Translation therefore mediates between historical worlds as well as between vocabularies. Making a nineteenth-century Russian writer sound casually twenty-first-century may erase something essential; manufacturing artificial archaism can falsify the work just as seriously.

This explains translation's importance to world culture. It challenges the confinement of literature within national boundaries by allowing artistic discoveries produced in one language and historical experience to become available within another. Reading crosses boundaries of time and place; translation materially facilitates that encounter.

A historical irony lies in Voronsky's own case. His return to English-speaking readers itself depended heavily upon translation. Frederick S. Choate, translator of Art as the Cognition of Life, explained that little of Voronsky's critical writings had previously appeared in English and that translating them helped recover a major Marxist literary figure suppressed under Stalinism. Here translation became an instrument of historical recovery. [wsws.org]

Manguel helps us understand why the translator must be an extraordinary reader; Voronsky helps identify what that reading seeks: the cognition of life embodied in artistic form. The translator must therefore create to preserve and transform, to remain faithful. At its greatest, translation does not merely carry words between languages. It lets one society's artistic discovery of life live again within another language.

Who owns the loom?

The Reverse Side of the Tapestry remains an elegant and humane contribution to the literature of translation. According to its publisher, the book explicitly approaches literary translation as the translator’s craft and as an exceptionally intense form of reading. At the same time, Manguel brings his own substantial experience translating major writers between English and Spanish. These qualities make the book worth taking seriously. But its central metaphor ultimately demands to be carried further than liberal humanism permits. Translation is interpretation, certainly. But interpretation requires time, knowledge, training and labour. Labour takes place under social conditions. Those conditions involve contracts, remuneration and property. And property raises the question of class.

The development of artificial intelligence merely makes this chain of relationships more visible. The fundamental issue is not whether technological development should be halted to preserve every existing cultural occupation unchanged. Such a programme would be neither achievable nor desirable. The question is instead whether technological progress will be subordinated to private profit or consciously employed to extend human freedom and culture.

A socialist organisation of cultural production would not erect barriers between technology and creativity. It would seek to free both from their subordination to profit. Automation capable of reducing routine work should increase the time human beings possess for education, thought, creativity and leisure rather than threatening their livelihoods. The increasingly international circulation of culture should become the basis for fuller human communication rather than another field for corporate accumulation.

Translation demonstrates particularly vividly why this question cannot finally be resolved nationally. Translators inhabit the spaces between languages by profession. Their work testifies every day to the inadequacy of national boundaries as containers for human culture. The defence of their labour therefore points logically to workers' broader international interests.

Manguel begins from the back of the tapestry. It is an inspired metaphor because every apparently seamless work of art conceals the process through which it came into existence. Turn it over, and the order of the finished image dissolves into knots and crossed threads. The observer discovers construction where only beauty had appeared.

But turn it over far enough and something more becomes visible. Someone selected the material. Someone developed the skill required to work it. Someone performed the labour. Someone determined the pattern. And within a class society, someone controls the conditions under which that labour is undertaken and the product distributed. That is where a materialist criticism must begin where Manguel stops.

The Reverse Side of the Tapestry asks us to admire the hidden threads that make literature possible. The task today is to follow those threads from the book into society itself: from translation to labour, from labour to property, and from property to class. The decisive question is no longer merely what we discover when we turn the tapestry over. It is who does the weaving, and who owns the loom?

  

Bibliography

Authors Guild. “Literary Translation Model Contract.” 14 April 2021. The Guild describes the model contract as intended to promote fair contractual terms and payment for literary translators and includes provisions concerning generative AI.

Authors Guild. “Negotiating Literary Translation Contracts.” 2 June 2022. Discussion of translation fees, royalties, credit and rights. [authorsguild.org]

Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Part II, 1615.

Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. 1845.

Lenin, V. I. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. 1916.

Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. London: Flamingo, 1997.

Manguel, Alberto. The Reverse Side of the Tapestry: Notes on the Art of Translation. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2026. Carcanet lists the paperback at £14.99, ISBN 9781800175808, with publication on 24 September 2026. [carcanet.co.uk]

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I. 1867.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. 1848.

Society of Authors. “Rates and Fees.” Guidance addressing payment, rights and the use of AI in commissioned work. [societyofauthors.org]

 

Packing My Library: Fifty Years of Books and the Struggle for Marxism

 A personal library assembled over fifty years is more than a collection of books. It is a material record of intellectual and political development. Moving it to new premises marks the beginning of another stage in a writing project rooted in the history of Marxism, the Trotskyist movement, and the struggle to understand the great revolutionary experiences of the working class.

Over the coming months I will begin packing up my library and moving it into premises more commensurate with its size. A conservative estimate puts the collection at around 2,000 volumes, accumulated over half a century. What might appear from the outside as the relatively mundane business of boxing books, moving shelves and reorganising a workspace has inevitably assumed a more personal and political significance.

To dismantle a library is to excavate one's own intellectual history. Books encountered decades ago reappear. Forgotten arguments return. The circumstances under which particular works were bought suddenly return. Each shelf corresponds to a period of life and, in my case, to a stage in a political development that began in a London comprehensive school during the 1970s and proceeded, through more than one false start and political dead end, towards Marxism and Trotskyism.

I never assembled the library primarily for possession's sake. I have never regarded myself as a bibliophile in the conventional sense. These books were acquired because I wanted to understand something: why society takes the form it does, why capitalism has survived despite the suffering and inequality it produces, why revolutionary movements have succeeded or failed, why Stalinism arose in the Soviet Union, and above all how the experiences of previous generations of workers and revolutionaries bear upon the problems confronting the working class today. That process began not with Marx, Lenin or Trotsky, but with the novel.

Pimlico Comprehensive and the Working-Class Novel

The first books I bought seriously were set texts at Pimlico Comprehensive School when I was 16. Among the writers I encountered were Alan Sillitoe, Carson McCullers, Keith Waterhouse, Shelagh Delaney and Stan Barstow. They occupy only a small physical space in a library that subsequently expanded into thousands of volumes, but their intellectual significance was considerable.

These writers emerged from, or sought to represent, social worlds largely excluded from the respectable version of post-war society. Sillitoe's factory workers, Delaney's Salford, Barstow's West Riding and the lonely and marginalised figures inhabiting McCullers's American South opened up experiences remote from the official culture presented by newspapers, television and the political establishment.

For a working-class teenager, the effect was considerable. Literature revealed that the experiences surrounding you could themselves become the subject of serious art. But it simultaneously raised problems it could not resolve. Why were people's lives organised in this way? Why did some possess wealth and power while others sold their labour merely to live? Why did class determine so much about an individual's possibilities?

The best of these novels registered the human consequences of class society with extraordinary sensitivity. Still, literature by itself could not provide a scientific explanation of the social relations producing those consequences. That required an encounter with history and politics. Those first books were therefore instrumental in my movement towards the left. Half a century later, they remain on my shelves.

Militant, Stalinism and Trotsky's History

Once politics became a serious interest, my book-buying accelerated dramatically. The Militant Tendency, then operating within the Labour Party, maintained an extensive book catalogue, and I began ordering from it with considerable enthusiasm. I eventually spent more than £1,000, a substantial sum at the time. The scale of my purchases evidently attracted someone's attention because two young Militant members were eventually dispatched to my door to recruit me.

My membership lasted approximately six months. The promise of socialism attracted me. What proved inadequate was Militant's political perspective, centred on transforming the Labour Party into an instrument for socialist change. The organisation treated the existing labour movement as a vehicle through which socialism would somehow emerge, rather than subjecting it to the historical and political examination its own record demanded.

The books survived my membership. Most remain in the library. I subsequently joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, searching again for a political organisation capable of explaining capitalism and providing a strategy for its overthrow. That experience lasted another six months. It was enough. There is perhaps some historical justice in the fact that, while the library contains materials from virtually every other period of my political development, it contains no books from my brief membership of the Stalinist Communist Party.

The decisive intellectual influence of these years came from an entirely different political tradition. At 17 I read Leon Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution. Few books I have encountered subsequently have equalled its impact. Here history was no longer presented principally as the actions of governments, ministers and celebrated individuals. Trotsky reconstructed revolution as a living process in which millions of human beings entered history consciously.

The events of 1917 emerged neither as a conspiracy nor as the inevitable outcome of impersonal forces. The Russian Revolution was presented as an immense confrontation of classes, parties and programmes, in which objective conditions created revolutionary possibilities but political leadership ultimately determined whether those possibilities were realised. Trotsky's work demonstrated what Marxist historical writing could achieve. It united the reconstruction of events with an analysis of the class forces underlying them and, above all, with an understanding of the decisive role of revolutionary consciousness and leadership.

The implications extended far beyond 1917. If the October Revolution represented the working class's conscious seizure of power under Bolshevik leadership, then Stalinism could not be identified with Bolshevism. The bureaucratic regime that subsequently emerged required a historical explanation. Trotsky provided that explanation through his struggle against the degeneration of the Soviet state and the nationalist doctrine of "socialism in one country". Reading the History was therefore decisive in making me a Marxist. It also gave me an intellectual starting point for understanding why the crimes committed under Stalin represented not the fulfilment of October but its bureaucratic betrayal.

The WRP, the Redgrave Books and One Long Night

The library's next major expansion came after I joined the Workers Revolutionary Party in 1982. My period of candidate membership lasted an entire year, which I have sometimes thought might qualify as a minor record in the history of revolutionary politics. I bought extensively during these years, and much of that material remains in the collection. The books from this period have acquired an additional historical significance because they belong to the years immediately preceding the crisis that erupted in 1985 inside the WRP and the International Committee of the Fourth International.

One of the largest single additions to my library came shortly before that split. I was told that Vanessa Redgrave was moving house and needed to dispose of a substantial quantity of books. I bought many of them. These volumes now occupy a peculiar position within the collection. Whatever their original provenance, they became part of my own intellectual history at precisely the point when major political questions concerning the history and programme of the Trotskyist movement were coming sharply to the surface.

Among the books I value most highly is a proof copy of Maria Joffe's One Long Night. Joffe, widow of the Soviet diplomat and Left Oppositionist Adolph Joffe, endured decades of imprisonment and persecution under Stalinism. Her memoir belongs to the documentary record of the destruction of the revolutionary generation associated with October and of those who continued to resist bureaucratic reaction.

Such books matter because the struggle over historical memory is itself political. Stalinism could not consolidate its rule by physically destroying its opponents alone. It had to falsify the historical record, erase individuals from revolutionary history and transform the October Revolution into something compatible with the interests of a privileged bureaucracy. Trotskyism survived under extraordinarily difficult conditions because it defended not simply particular individuals or organisational traditions, but the international socialist programme upon which the Russian Revolution had been based.

A library containing this literature is therefore more than an accumulation of political texts. It preserves traces of struggles that the defenders of the existing order, including its Stalinist and reformist representatives, repeatedly proclaimed finished. They were not finished.

Birkbeck, the English Revolution and Historical Writing

The library's largest sustained expansion began with my studies at Birkbeck and the completion of my degree in 2003. At that point another strand of intellectual development became central: the seventeenth-century English Revolution.

I had written a dissertation on the subject which, with the benefit of hindsight, was not particularly good. But dissatisfaction can sometimes have more productive consequences than satisfaction. The attempt to find somewhere for my essays eventually contributed to the creation of my website and, from there, to a much more sustained programme of historical reading and writing.

The consequences for the bookshelves were dramatic. Probably around half of the present collection, roughly a thousand books, dates from this broad period. The shelves expanded to encompass the English Revolution, the Civil War, the Levellers and other radical movements, the development of Parliament, religious and political conflict, and the immense historiographical controversies surrounding the seventeenth century.

But the subject could never be confined to the seventeenth century itself. Serious study of the English Revolution raises fundamental questions about historical interpretation. Was it a revolution? What social forces produced it? What relationship existed between political and religious ideas and the material interests of contending classes? How should we understand the Levellers and other radical currents? What was the upheaval's international significance?

Behind these questions lay the still larger issue of historical materialism. The study of history is never politically innocent. The assault upon Marxist interpretations of the English Revolution did not take place independently of the broader ideological offensive against Marxism during the closing decades of the twentieth century. Historical controversies reflected, in mediated form, the political climate produced by the defeats of the working class, the degeneration of the old labour organisations and eventually the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

My library's expansion consequently followed the development of these controversies. Books led to other books. Footnotes opened previously unknown arguments. Historiographical disagreements demanded investigation of the political assumptions underlying apparently specialised academic disputes. What began with a relatively poor undergraduate dissertation gradually became a continuing engagement with the relationship between historical scholarship and contemporary politics.

Books as the Material Record of a Political Development

Seen together, the 2,000 volumes therefore amount to something quite different from a conventional private collection. The Sillitoe and Delaney volumes bought as a schoolboy belong to the discovery that working-class experience could become a legitimate subject of literature. Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution belongs to the discovery that those experiences could be scientifically understood as part of the historical struggle of classes. The literature accumulated through Militant, the Communist Party and the WRP records the search for a political movement capable of acting upon that understanding. The books acquired after Birkbeck record another development: the attempt to write history rather than consume it.

False starts marked that journey. Some books were undoubtedly bought and deserved to remain unread, and others were read more carefully than they deserved. Political development never proceeds in the straight line imposed upon it retrospectively. One investigates tendencies that lead nowhere, accepts arguments subsequently rejected, and only gradually acquires the historical experience necessary to distinguish what is essential from what is secondary. The value of a serious political library lies partly in the fact that it preserves these stages rather than concealing them.

Artificial Intelligence and a New Stage

The most recent development introduces another element into this history. Artificial intelligence has altered the technical conditions under which an individual can undertake historical and political research. Like every major technological innovation under capitalism, AI is developing within definite class relations. Corporations and governments approach it, above all, from the standpoint of profitability, labour displacement, surveillance, competitive advantage, and the intensification of exploitation. There is nothing inherently emancipatory about technology operating within capitalist property relations. But a Marxist response does not consist of recoiling from technological development. The productive forces created by capitalism repeatedly come into conflict with the social relations within which they develop. The task is to understand both technology's emancipatory potential and the class interests that determine its present use.

For an individual engaged in historical research, the possibilities are already considerable. Vast quantities of material can be searched and compared far more rapidly than previously. Bibliographical trails can be followed more efficiently. Arguments drawn from different periods and historiographical traditions can be related to one another. Research that once required weeks of preliminary investigation can sometimes be organised in a fraction of that time. That does not abolish the necessity for knowledge. On the contrary, the ability to evaluate material becomes more important. A machine can locate relationships between texts, but it cannot substitute for the political and historical understanding required to determine which relationships matter, which claims withstand examination and what social interests underlie competing interpretations.

After fifty years of reading, that distinction is crucial. For the first time, I feel able to research and write articles at a level approaching the political and historical understanding accumulated through decades of reading and political experience. AI has not produced that understanding. The books did. Political experience did. Historical study did. The technology makes it possible to mobilise that accumulated knowledge with a speed and breadth that were previously extraordinarily difficult for an individual writer working largely alone.

The Library as a Working Archive

This is the significance of moving the library. Over the coming months, the books will be packed, transported and reorganised in a small office where they can function properly as a working research collection. The change is practical, but it also marks the start of a new stage in the website's development. The intention is not to preserve the collection as a monument to fifty years of reading. Libraries become intellectually useless when they become mausoleums. Books justify the space they occupy when they continue to be read, questioned, compared and used.

The shelves that began with Sillitoe, Delaney, Barstow and McCullers at Pimlico Comprehensive eventually acquired Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky; the documentary history of the Russian Revolution and its degeneration; the literature of the Fourth International; materials from the WRP years; and an extensive collection dealing with the English Revolution, its radical movements and the historiographical battles through which its meaning has been contested.

What links them is not uniformity, because they contain writers representing every conceivable political and historical standpoint. What unites the collection is the struggle to understand history. Moving 2,000 books will be physically exhausting. But politically and intellectually the move represents precisely the opposite of winding things down. It prepares me for more work. The books accumulated through fifty years of reading are no longer simply the record of how I arrived at my present standpoint. Properly organised and combined with the possibilities opened by new technology, they can become the working archive for a considerably expanded programme of historical and political writing.

The journey that began with working-class novels read at Pimlico Comprehensive, passed through the first encounter with Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, the experiences of the revolutionary movement, and decades spent studying the English Revolution, therefore continues. Packing the library is not an act of putting the past away. It prepares for what comes next.

 

Kensington and Chelsea: An insider’s indictment that stops at the threshold of a socialist conclusion

Few places expose the class divisions of British capitalism more brutally than the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Here fabulous private wealth exists alongside overcrowding, hunger and social deprivation. Within a relatively small area, multimillion-pound properties and apartments that function primarily as repositories of international wealth stand close to council estates whose residents have endured deteriorating services, insecurity, and decades of political neglect. These are not simply contrasting social worlds accidentally occupying the same geographical space. They are interconnected products of a society in which housing and land have increasingly been subordinated to private profit, property speculation and the accumulation of wealth.[1]

These contradictions acquired their most terrible expression on 14 June 2017, when the Grenfell Tower fire killed 72 people. Grenfell was not an inexplicable accident that suddenly descended upon an otherwise functioning social system. It exposed before millions of people the consequences of decades in which council housing, building regulation, local government and public services had been progressively subjected to austerity, privatisation, outsourcing and the requirements of the market. The catastrophe revealed, with terrible clarity, the social consequences of a political order in which the living conditions and safety of working-class residents were repeatedly subordinated to financial considerations.

This social landscape gives Emma Dent Coad’s One Kensington its considerable importance. A Labour councillor in Kensington and Chelsea from 2006, Dent Coad was elected MP for Kensington in the general election of 8 June 2017, only days before the Grenfell catastrophe. The tower stood at the end of her road. Her book consequently occupies an unusual position between eyewitness testimony, political memoir and an indictment of one of Britain’s wealthiest local authorities. Its strongest passages provide an invaluable account of the arrogance, indifference, and class contempt working-class residents encountered while trying to secure safe housing and decent public services.

But the book also contains a fundamental contradiction. The evidence Dent Coad accumulates points toward an indictment of the social order itself. At the same time, her political conclusions remain largely within the framework of Labourism, parliamentary reform, and improved local government. One Kensington comes repeatedly to the threshold of a socialist explanation of the conditions that produced Grenfell, only to retreat from the conclusions demanded by its own evidence.

A record of class contempt

The most compelling sections of One Kensington concern the everyday operation of class power. Dent Coad describes not merely incompetent administration but an entire political culture in which social tenants and working-class communities were increasingly seen as obstacles to redeveloping enormously valuable land. North Kensington residents lived in the same borough as billionaires, international investors and owners of extraordinarily expensive properties, some of which were rarely occupied. Yet immense accumulated wealth did nothing to guarantee decent housing, secure public services, or provide basic social protection for everyone living in the borough.

This is precisely why the personal attitudes of Conservative councillors cannot adequately explain the inequalities documented in the book, however contemptuous those attitudes may have been. Kensington's extreme inequalities express the workings of the property market itself. The extraordinary rise in London land and housing values turned residential property into a major vehicle for accumulating and preserving wealth. Working-class communities therefore occupied homes standing on land that became increasingly attractive to developers and investors. Under these conditions, the language of “regeneration” acquired a definite class meaning: council estates could be represented as obsolete, existing communities disrupted and public land opened to forms of development from which those communities derived little or no benefit.

Dent Coad is particularly effective when demonstrating how these processes appeared at street and council level. Her background in architecture and housing gives her account an understanding of the relationship between planning decisions and social inequality. Food poverty, overcrowding, deteriorating estates and divisions in health and life expectancy appear throughout the book not as abstractions but as features of everyday existence within a borough internationally associated with extreme wealth. The result is a powerful documentary charge sheet against both Kensington and Chelsea Council and the broader social priorities it embodied.

Grenfell transformed that charge sheet into something still more serious. The working-class residents who repeatedly raised concerns about their homes were not suffering from a simple failure of communication between government and governed. Their experience demonstrated how little weight their needs carried when measured against the financial, commercial and political priorities governing housing. This is why Grenfell must be understood not only as administrative negligence but as a class question.

Grenfell and social murder

Friedrich Engels famously employed the concept of “social murder” in The Condition of the Working Class in England to describe circumstances in which existing social relations knowingly condemn working people to premature death. The concept remains indispensable to understanding Grenfell because it moves discussion beyond the narrow search for a single catastrophic mistake. It directs attention towards the accumulated political and economic decisions that created the conditions in which catastrophe became possible.

Grenfell emerged from a historical process encompassing deregulation, outsourcing, the degradation of council housing, the fragmentation of responsibility and the increasing subordination of construction and housing to commercial interests. Individual decisions plainly mattered, as did questions of corporate and institutional responsibility, but those decisions were taken within a society dominated by the capitalist market. The tragedy cannot therefore be explained simply by saying that Kensington and Chelsea happened to be run by unusually callous Conservatives.

This is where the evidence presented in One Kensington begins to exceed the author's own political framework. Dent Coad's account describes a system operating according to recognisable class interests, but her proposed political remedies remain centred upon reforming the institutions through which that system operates. The contradiction becomes increasingly difficult to ignore as the book proceeds.

The limits of the parliamentary perspective

Dent Coad's political horizon remains fundamentally that of Labour reformism. The principal enemy is Conservative-controlled Kensington and Chelsea, while the alternative is sought through community campaigning, progressive councillors, better MPs and the election of a Labour government committed to different priorities. The enthusiasm surrounding Jeremy Corbyn's leadership forms an important part of this perspective. Yet Corbynism itself showed the limits of trying to channel mounting social opposition through the existing Labour and parliamentary apparatus.

The problem is not that better councillors, stronger regulations or more socially conscious MPs would make no difference. Reforms improving housing conditions and building safety should obviously be supported. The deeper question is why such elementary requirements continually collide with powerful economic interests. A council may regulate property development more aggressively than another; Parliament may enact improved building standards; governments may impose stricter requirements upon landlords and construction companies. Yet none of these measures abolishes the underlying contradiction between housing as a basic human necessity and housing as private property, a financial asset, and a source of profit.

Dent Coad's political conclusions largely ignore that contradiction. Conservative mismanagement consequently becomes the explanation for conditions that developed under governments of both major parties. The Blair and Brown governments did not overturn the market transformation initiated under Thatcher. New Labour accommodated the essential economic framework created in the preceding decades, extending private-sector involvement in public services while accepting the market's dominance over housing and land.

Corbynism and the unanswered political question

The election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in 2015 expressed a genuine movement to the left among workers and young people after decades of austerity, war, privatisation and declining living standards. This social movement played a major role in Labour's unexpectedly strong performance in the 2017 general election and in Dent Coad's remarkable victory in Kensington. A constituency synonymous with wealth and Conservative power returned a Labour MP, apparently demonstrating the potential for a radical political realignment.

But the subsequent defeat of Corbynism exposed the fatal weakness of its perspective. Rather than building an independent political movement against the Labour right and the social forces it represented, Corbyn insisted that the Labour Party could be reconciled around a parliamentary road to reform. Repeated compromises strengthened his opponents while disorienting his supporters. Dent Coad's loss of Kensington in 2019 by just 150 votes formed part of the broader defeat.

For One Kensington, this experience should have raised the most fundamental question: if the Labour Party could not be transformed even under conditions in which hundreds of thousands joined or supported it in the expectation of radical change, what basis remained for believing that the working class could achieve a fundamental social transformation through Labour parliamentarianism? The book never seriously answers this question. Instead, Labour's defeat appears principally as a political setback rather than evidence requiring a reassessment of the party itself.

From indictment to socialist programme

One Kensington nevertheless deserves to be read. Dent Coad's eyewitness evidence, accumulated detail and anger over the treatment of working-class residents give the book lasting value. She records a borough where immense concentrations of wealth existed alongside poverty, overcrowding and insecurity, and she shows the extraordinary distance between official rhetoric about community and the experiences of those forced to negotiate the institutions supposedly responsible for protecting them.

But the power of that testimony makes the weakness of the political conclusions still more apparent. The central question is not whether Kensington and Chelsea could be administered more compassionately. Clearly it could. Nor is it whether stronger building regulations, competent housing management, more council housing and genuine democratic accountability are urgently required. They are. The decisive issue is why these basic social requirements repeatedly conflict with the interests of private property.

Safe and decent housing for all cannot ultimately be guaranteed while housing remains subordinated to profit and speculation. The construction industry, major developers, land and essential building-material production cannot remain instruments of private enrichment. At the same time, society is expected somehow to guarantee that human need takes priority over financial return. The major corporations dominating these sectors must be placed under public ownership and democratic working-class control. At the same time, housing itself must cease to function primarily as a commodity and speculative asset and become a guaranteed social right.

Such measures inevitably raise the question that One Kensington avoids: political power. They cannot be realised merely by replacing bad administrators with good ones while preserving the economic relations determining what local and national governments can do. They require the independent political organisation of the working class based on an international socialist programme directed against capitalism itself.

The working people of North Kensington were never lacking courage. They were never lacking warnings, intelligence, solidarity or organisation. Before Grenfell, residents repeatedly tried to make their voices heard; afterwards, bereaved families, survivors, and the wider community showed extraordinary determination in demanding truth and accountability. Their tragedy was not the absence of community activism. It was the absence of a political movement capable of transforming that social anger into an independent struggle against the class interests responsible for the conditions they confronted.

That is ultimately the contradiction at the heart of One Kensington. Dent Coad provides an insider's indictment of a profoundly unequal society, and much of the evidence she presents is devastating. But her politics remain tied to the institutions and the Labour Party through which that society has been administered. Her evidence points beyond municipal reform, parliamentary manoeuvre and hopes for another Labour renewal. It points to the need for independent political mobilisation of the working class and the socialist reorganisation of society. The book takes the reader to that threshold, but it does not cross it.

Bibliography

Dent Coad, Emma. One Kensington: Tales from the Frontline of the Most Unequal Borough in Britain. London: Quercus, 2022; paperback edition, 2023.

Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. 1845.

Grenfell Tower Inquiry. Grenfell Tower Inquiry: Phase 1 Report. London: HMSO, 2019.

Grenfell Tower Inquiry. Grenfell Tower Inquiry: Phase 2 Report. London: HMSO, 2024.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. 1848.

 

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[1] One Kensington: Tales from the Frontline of the Most Unequal Borough in Britain, by Emma Dent Coad, Quercus, 2022; paperback edition, 2023.