Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish by Francesca Peacock, Apollo 14 Sept. 2023, 384 pages

“Fame is nothing but a great noise… therefore I wish my book may set a-work every tongue.”

Margaret Cavendish

“For I doubt not, but if it had been a thing contrary to any man's right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square, that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able.”

Thomas Hobbes

“Thus, Karl Marx wrote about the British origin of modern materialism. If Englishmen nowadays do not exactly relish the compliment he paid their ancestors, more's the pity. It is none the less undeniable that Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke are the fathers of that brilliant school of French materialism which made the eighteenth century, despite all battles on land and sea won over Frenchmen by Germans and Englishmen, a pre-eminently French century, even before that crowning French Revolution, the results of which we outsiders, in England as well as Germany, are still trying to acclimatize.”

Frederick Engels- Dialectics of Nature

The first thing that emerges from Francesca Peacock's 2023 book is that Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673), Duchess of Newcastle, a staunch Royalist author and philosopher, was profoundly influenced by the English bourgeois revolution. Although hostile to the revolution and all it stood for, she utilised her unique intellectual voice to understand what was unfolding around her as the world turned upside down.

The English Civil War and Revolution of the 1640s was not, as Whig historians preferred to imagine, a constitutional misunderstanding between king and Parliament. According to historian Christopher Hill, it was a genuine class revolution: the rising bourgeoisie, allied with sections of the gentry, overthrew the feudal monarchical order and cleared the ground for the development of capitalism in England. Hill, the greatest historian of this period, demonstrated that the execution of Charles I was not a ghastly mistake but "a complete break with the feudal past," of profound revolutionary significance. When the people put their king on trial and beheaded him, no subsequent monarch ever sat entirely comfortably on that throne again.

Although she lived over a century before Karl Marx, some left-leaning modern academics and writers who analyse her work through a semi-Marxist lens have even argued that there are strong parallels between her 17th-century natural philosophy and later theories of dialectical materialism. Specifically, her belief in a self-moving, intelligent, and interconnected material world renders her a "precursor" to Marxist dialectical materialism.

This has made Cavendish a genuinely fascinating figure of the 17th-century English bourgeois revolution. A prolific writer across genres (philosophy, poetry, drama, fiction, and early proto-science fiction with The Blazing World), she engaged seriously with the mechanist natural philosophy of her era, debating figures like Descartes, Hobbes, and van Helmont. She was one of the first women admitted to a meeting of the Royal Society. Her intellectual ambitions were remarkable for any person of her time.

The connection between Margaret Cavendish and Thomas Hobbes is well worth a look at. Both were central figures in 17th-century English intellectual life, and their relationship illuminates some of the deepest questions in the history of materialism.

Hobbes (1588–1679) was not, as some liberal and postmodern academics would have it, a reactionary ideologue of authoritarianism. He was, as Engels recognised, one of the founders of modern materialism, a thinker who, alongside Bacon and Locke, formed the philosophical chain that ran from England through the French Enlightenment, ultimately contributing to the intellectual conditions that made the French Revolution possible and, beyond it, to dialectical and historical materialism itself.

Hobbes’s connection with Cavendish was both direct and personal. Margaret Cavendish was the wife of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, the very Cavendish family whose patronage sustained Hobbes for over seven decades. Margaret Cavendish lived at the centre of this intellectual world. During the Civil War and the Interregnum, the Cavendish household, in exile on the Continent, was a gathering point for Royalist émigrés and natural philosophers, and Hobbes was part of this milieu.

Her philosophical position puts her in an interesting relationship to Hobbes. Both were materialists but of significantly different kinds. Cavendish rejected the mechanistic materialism that Hobbes (and Descartes, whom she also engaged with critically) championed. Against the view that matter is inert and moved only by external mechanical force, Cavendish argued for a vitalist materialism: matter itself, she held, is active, self-moving, and possessed of something like perception or cognition at every level. She was also an outspoken critic of the experimental method championed by the Royal Society, arguing (in her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, 1666) that telescopes and microscopes distort rather than reveal nature. That reason applied to natural observation without a mechanical apparatus is more reliable.

This is where the contradictions of her class position become interesting. She was an aristocratic Royalist — her husband, William Cavendish, was a leading commander for Charles I, and the family spent years in exile during the Interregnum. Her intellectual freedom was inseparable from her class privilege. Her access to books, philosophical correspondence, and scientific circles was a product of her position at the apex of the aristocratic hierarchy, not a challenge to it. She was not, in any meaningful sense, a "revolutionary"; she was a defender of the old feudal-aristocratic order against the revolutionary bourgeoisie that was remaking England.

The bourgeois revolution she opposed was, at the same time, creating social ferment that was generating the Scientific Revolution, dismantling Aristotelian scholasticism, fostering a new interest in nature as a material reality governed by discoverable laws, and challenging religious authority. The very intellectual tools she used were being forged by the same historical process that had destroyed her family's wealth and power. She could not entirely escape the spirit of her age, even as she tried to reconstruct the aristocratic world that had been shattered.

As the Marxist writer David North so eloquently put it, “Until the early seventeenth century, even educated people still generally accepted that the ultimate answers to all the mysteries of the universe and the problems of life were to be found in the Old Testament. But its unchallengeable authority had been slowly eroding, especially since the publication of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus in the year of his death in 1543, which dealt the death blow to the Ptolemaic conception of the universe and provided the essential point of departure for the future conquests of Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Johann Kepler (1571-1630) and, of course, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Intellectually, if not yet socially, the liberation of man from the fetters of Medieval superstition and the political structures that rested upon it was well underway. The discoveries in astronomy profoundly changed the general intellectual environment. Above all, there was a new sense of the power of thought and what it could achieve if allowed to operate without the artificial restraints of untested and unverifiable dogmas.

Religion began to encounter the type of disrespect it deserved, and the gradual decline of its authority introduced a new optimism. All human misery, the Bible had taught for centuries, was the inescapable product of the Fall of Man. But the invigorating scepticism encouraged by science in the absolute validity of the Book of Genesis led thinking people to wonder whether man couldn't change the conditions of his existence and enjoy a better world.”[1]

Peacock’s first book, Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish, makes a valuable contribution by rescuing Cavendish from the obscurity imposed by earlier critics who had laid a considerable number of dead dogs on top of her reputation. However, it exemplifies a trend often found in modern cultural biography: the application of contemporary identity-political categories to historical figures. In this case, Cavendish is portrayed through the lens of modern preoccupations, with her eccentricity, gender nonconformity, prolific publication, and resistance to social expectations for women recast as attributes of a proto-feminist "revolutionary".

This approach reflects more the concerns of today's upper-middle-class academic culture than the realities of 17th-century England. While reading Peacock’s work critically can yield valuable insights into Cavendish's intellectual life, the reader needs to maintain a degree of scepticism regarding the "revolutionary" framing. Such a perspective tends to absorb a complex historical figure into present-day identity-political narratives, thereby oversimplifying the intricate class dynamics that characterised the English Revolution.

Cavendish is now celebrated as an early feminist icon. She was the first woman to participate in a Royal Society meeting, boldly published her work despite norms that expected women to stay hidden, and earned the nickname "Mad Madge" for her unconventional behaviour. This recuperation is not entirely wrong, but it is ideologically loaded in a specific way: it abstracts Cavendish's gender from her class. It presents her eccentricity as a kind of individual heroism.

She stands in this constellation as a paradox: a serious philosophical mind whose very creativity was unlocked by the same revolution she personally mourned. That paradox is not a biographical curiosity; it is a demonstration of the materialist conception of history itself: that the development of human thought is inseparable from the class conflicts that drive history forward.

 

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[1] Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism-www.wsws.org/en/articles/1996/10/lect-o24.html 

Katabasis by RF Kuang is published by Harper Voyager (£22).

Katabasis, R.F. Kuang's latest novel, portrays modern class society primarily through the lens of academic elitism and the commodification of knowledge. The new book marks a departure for Kuang, as her previous work, such as Babel, focused on class and colonialism.

Kuang’s previous work should be approached with both caution and admiration. Her earlier novels, the Poppy War trilogy and Babel, drew considerable attention for their engagement with imperialism, colonialism, and historical violence. Babel examines British colonialism and the exploitation of non-Western knowledge through a fantasy lens.  These are legitimate and important subjects.

However, a limitation of this kind of literary-political fiction is that it frames oppression primarily through the lens of race and national identity rather than class. The enemy in Babel is, broadly, "the British empire" understood in racial and civilizational terms, rather than capitalism as a world-historical system that generates imperialism regardless of which nation or ethnic group sits at the top.

Katabasis critiques present-day class society, showing the "ivory tower" as a modern class structure that gatekeeps social mobility behind walls of wealth and power. The core of the novel presents the reader with many arguments regarding class in contemporary society. The first one sees academia as a modern class hierarchy. Kuang frames the university system as an "infernal structure" that mirrors a pyramid scheme rather than a meritocracy. Secondly, Characters like Alice and Peter are depicted as "cannon fodder" in a departmental war, spending their best years doing grunt work to further the prestige of senior academics, barriers to Entry.

The novel also critiques how prestigious universities gatekeep their institutions, making success nearly impossible for those without significant "financial privilege". The protagonists are so indoctrinated into this class system that they believe their lives are literally "not worth living" without validation from an elite institution.

If the Katabasis theme seems familiar, it is because it invokes the classical literary descent into the underworld (as in Dante, Virgil, and Homer). The novel continues Kuang's interest in dark, morally complex fantasy. It raises many questions, including whether the narrative's moral framework reduces social evil to individual wickedness or to ethnic or national conflict, or whether it points towards systemic, class-based contradictions. From a literary and political standpoint, does Kuang's "descent" have any genuine social content, or is it primarily psychological and individual? Great literature, even in fantasy, illuminates the real social forces that shape human suffering the test for the reader is whether Katabasis reaches that depth.

Dante's Inferno is perhaps the most elaborate katabasis in Western literature, and it is saturated with class content. The organisation of hell explicitly reflects the social and political contradictions of late medieval Italy popes, usurers, and political enemies are placed in their circles with meticulous class logic. The great usurers of Florence sit in the seventh circle; Dante was writing at a moment when merchant capital was beginning to corrode feudal social relations, and his moral geography encodes that anxiety. The sin of usury (lending for profit) damns early capitalists; the sin of betrayal damns political traitors to the feudal order.

Kuang's book is not just a history book; her katabasis metaphor, used in modern terms, takes on a different path. The world of the labouring poor, the mines, the factories, the slums, was consistently figured in the 19th and 20th centuries as an underworld into which bourgeois observers "descended." Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England is, in a sense, a social katabasis, a descent into the cellars and rookeries of Manchester to bring back testimony from a world the bourgeoisie preferred not to see. Émile Zola's Germinal centres on a literal descent into the coal mines; the underground is the space of proletarian labour and, ultimately, of proletarian rebellion.

This is where the class dimension becomes most politically charged. The bourgeoisie imagines itself above ground, in the light of civilisation and culture; the working class is relegated to the depths. But the katabasis trope, when deployed honestly, always carries the seed of a reversal; the hero who goes down returns transformed, with knowledge the surface world lacks. The revolutionary implications are not hard to see: it is precisely from the "underworld" of capitalist production from the mines, the foundries, the assembly lines — that the force capable of overthrowing the existing order emerges.

As Beejay Silcox observes, “Katabasis is far from perfect. There’s a pair of blood-drunk villains who feel like a gory distraction, and a nonsense MacGuffin. Bone creatures clatter through plot holes. Grand mythologies collide and compete. Chunks of the novel read like a Rowan Atkinson sketch. And the 1980s faculty politics look deceptively – or perhaps wearily – like our own (a fascinating companion read would be Helen Garner’s 1995 landmark provocation The First Stone). But none of that really matters – especially if you have a score to settle.”[1]

Katabasis is a complex and contradictory work. Kuang is not a Marxist, yet her work enables a Marxist to explain their approach to mythology. Marxists insist that artistic and mythological forms are not autonomous —they arise from and reflect material and social conditions, even as they develop internally. The katabasis is not merely a timeless archetype (as Jung or Joseph Campbell would have it) within a deeply ahistorical, idealist framework. It is a form that takes on different social content in different epochs, justifying imperial class rule in Virgil, mapping the contradictions of feudal society in Dante, and encoding working-class experience in the naturalist novel.

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[1] www.theguardian.com/books/2025/aug/14/katabasis-by-rf-kuang-review-a-descent-into-the-hellscape-of-academia

The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West: by A.J.A. Woods: Verso Publications: April 2026

 “To be sure, the line of development is toward internationalism, but the point of departure is ‘national’—and it is from this point of departure that one must begin”.

Antonio Gramsci

“The Revolution won't happen with guns; it will happen incrementally, year by year, generation by generation. We will gradually infiltrate their educational institutions and their political offices, transforming them slowly into Marxist entities as we move towards universal egalitarianism.”

Max Horkheimer

Our scribblings are usually not lyrics but whirrings, without colour or resonance, like the tone of an engine wheel. I believe the cause lies in the fact that, for the most part, when people write, they forget to dig deeply into themselves and to feel the full import and truth of what they are writing.

Rosa Luxemburg

As the class struggle sharpens in the U.S., Marxism will come into its own as a great popular study.

C. L. R. James

The premise of Andrew Woods' new book is that “Cultural Marxism” has been weaponised both in the past and in current political struggles. Right‑wing forces use it to explain social change as the work of intellectual conspiracies rather than class struggle.

The use of the term by right-wing and outright fascists is a reactionary falsification that treats social change (civil rights, feminism, LGBTQ rights, multiculturalism, critical race and gender studies) as the result of a coordinated, sinister plot by intellectuals, universities and cultural elites to “destroy” Western civilisation. This usage is politically motivated, ahistorical and often antisemitic in its modern forms.

The phrase, as treated in conspiracy literature and included in polemical works such as A. J. A. Woods’s book, is not an accurate description of Marxism as a scientific theory. It is a politicised and ahistorical label that collapses a range of very different intellectual currents into a single bogeyman, used to discredit working-class politics and divert attention from capitalism’s material contradictions.

“Cultural Marxism” circulates as a catch‑all conspiracy theory on the right: an alleged plot by the Frankfurt School and the Left to undermine Western civilisation, attack family values, and “replace” traditional culture. This is not an argument grounded in evidence or history; it is a political weapon. Woods is correct in drawing attention to the right-wing attack on Marxism, but what is more important is an orthodox Marxist understanding of the “Cultural Marxism” conspiracy, something that Woods is incapable of.

The Frankfurt School

The intellectual currents often lumped together as “cultural Marxism” had distinct social origins and political trajectories. The Institute for Social Research (the Frankfurt School) developed in a period of catastrophic defeats for the European working class and the emergence of middle‑class strata.

Woods' book devotes a significant amount of space to defending the Frankfurt School of Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and others. These anti-Marxists developed “critical theory” in the 1920s–50s to understand the collapse of mass working‑class revolutionary movements, the rise of fascism, and the cultural forms of modern capitalism. Their outlook was pessimistic and often abstract; it flowed from defeats of the international working class and the ideological disarray of the interwar period—not from any secret plan to subvert society.

As the Marxist David North explains, “The post-modernists and the adherents of the Frankfurt School advance an absurd politics not because their philosophy is absurd. Rather, the crass absurdities of their philosophy arise from their reactionary petty-bourgeois politics. One cannot understand either the Frankfurt School or postmodernism without recognising that the rejection of Marxism and the perspective of a socialist revolution based on the working class constitute the underlying political impulse behind their theories. Postmodernist theory arose quite specifically as a repudiation of Marxism and the perspective of proletarian revolution.

The foundational role of Jean-François Lyotard in its emergence is well known. He is the author of the sentence: “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.” The “metanarratives” to be discarded were those that advanced the Marxist perspective of socialist revolution. Thus, what is known in academic circles as “postmodernism” would be more accurately defined as “academic post-Marxism.”[1]

North goes on to explain that the Frankfurt School did not represent the revolutionary Marxist tradition embodied in the Fourth International. Its diagnosis—cultural regression, the “self‑destruction of enlightenment”—tended to attribute reaction to abstract cultural processes rather than to concrete class forces and the dynamics of capitalist crisis.

One of the hallmarks of the Frankfurt School was its opposition to the working class's revolutionary capacity. Wood cites all manner of radicals in the 1960’s that attacked the Fourth International’s “heavy emphasis” on the political independence of the working class and its nature as a revolutionary agent for change.

One of the leading players amongst the radical fraternity who led the attack on the revolutionary nature of the working class was C. Wright Mills. His "Letter to the New Left", written in 1960, is one of the founding documents of post-war petty-bourgeois radicalism. It is historically significant not for being correct, but for being symptomatic — it gave theoretical expression to a set of demoralizations and class prejudices that would define the New Left and, ultimately, the entire pseudo-left tradition that continues to mislead radical politics to this day.

The core of Mills' letter is a direct attack on what he called the "labour metaphysic" — the Marxist insistence that the industrial working class is the central revolutionary force in modern society. Mills argued that this was a tired dogma, an outdated faith clinging to mid-19th-century conditions. In its place, he looked to intellectuals and students — the "cultural apparatus" — as the new agents of historical change.

He writes, “What I do not quite understand about some New-Left writers is why they cling so mightily to 'the working class' of the advanced capitalist societies as the historic agency, or even as the most important agency, in the face of the really impressive historical evidence that now stands against this expectation.”[2]

Wright -Mill’s letter opened the floodgates for a slew of radicals to jump on the bandwagon. One such radical was Max Elbaum, whose Revolution in the Air memoir-cum-history of the "New Communist Movement" — the cluster of Maoist, Marxist-Leninist, and Third-Worldist formations that arose from the radicalisation of the 1960s in the United States.

Elbaum writes, “This book has been written partly to identify the markers on that slippery slope to sectarian irrelevance in hopes of better equipping a new generation to take a different path. But an equally important goal has been to call attention to how dedication to constructing a revolutionary apparatus can act as a potent positive force, unleashing individual creativity, building solidarity across socially imposed barriers, stimulating theoretical exploration, and strengthening activists’ commitment to peace and freedom.”[3]

While it was warmly received in pseudo-left circles as a rehabilitation of that era's left wing, reading it from the standpoint of classical Marxism reveals it as a deeply misleading document — a celebration of precisely the political tendencies that led a generation of workers and youth into a dead end, and whose legacy helped give rise to today's identity-politics pseudo-left.

The central problem with Elbaum's book — and with the New Communist Movement itself — is what it left out: the working class. The radicalisation of the 1960s was real and reflected genuine social contradictions: the Vietnam War, the civil rights struggle, and the crisis of American capitalism. But the New Communist Movement channelled that energy away from the independent political mobilisation of the working class and into the orbit of petty-bourgeois nationalism. The heroes of Elbaum's book — Mao, Che, Ho Chi Minh, the Black Panthers — represent not the Marxist tradition but its systematic falsification.

Identity politics vs Marxism

In chapter four, Woods spends a significant amount of time defending critical race theories and “identity politics”. Critical race theory is sometimes conflated with Marxism by critics on both right and left. The central theme of these theories replaces class analysis with competing forms of sectional politics that can be absorbed into capitalist institutions and the Democratic/centre‑left political apparatus. While racism, sexism and other oppressions are real and must be fought, their proper resolution requires a unifying working‑class strategy rooted in socialist politics—not a fragmentation into rival identities.

As Tom Carter, in his Introduction to Marxism vs Critical Race Theory, writes, “Critical race theory is a broad current, with many tributaries flowing into it and many offshoots flowing out of it. One can go to a library and walk down aisle upon aisle of shelves of this material, which at a surface level comprises many diverse and even internally contradictory trends that have emerged and shifted over time. In characterising this current, it is therefore useful to begin at the most basic level with its fundamental philosophical conceptions, the heritage of which can be traced to postmodernism and to the conceptions advanced by the Frankfurt School. This is the “critical theory” from which “critical race theory” emerges.

In the book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, two leaders of the Frankfurt School, concluded that the Enlightenment was to blame for all the authoritarianism and barbarism that characterised the first half of the 20th century, because it was all the inevitable result of a misguided attempt to exert control over nature through science and reason. Adorno would go on in Negative Dialectics (1966) to claim that all systemic thought is inherently authoritarian.”[4]

Stuart Hall  

Another favourite radical of Wood’s is Stuart Hall (1932–2014). Like many radicals mentioned in the book, Hall’s central theme was the repudiation of the class struggle as the axis of social development, as this assumes that the working class is the decisive agent of political change. Instead, he argued for a turn to the cultural sphere. This was not a Marxist appraisal or critique of culture, but the elevation of “culture” as an arena contested by different “agencies”.

Hall was the founding intellectual of Cultural Studies, the academic discipline centred at the University of Birmingham's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) from the 1960s onward. He has been lionised in the liberal-left press as a pioneering theorist of race, identity, and culture. Hall's career represents a politically coherent, decades-long effort to displace Marxism — specifically the Trotskyist current within it — and substitute identity politics and bourgeois reformism in its place.

In Paul Bond’s excellent obituary of Hall, he makes the following analysis: “Cultural Studies originated as part of an attack on revolutionary Marxism, directed above all against its contemporary expression, Trotskyism. The academic field sought to shift the focus of social criticism away from class and onto other social formations, thus promoting the development of identity politics. Its establishment, in the final analysis, was a hostile response to the gains made by the Trotskyist movement in Britain from the 1950s onwards.

Various media commentators have enthused about Hall’s ability to “identify key questions of the age”. History will judge him more harshly: his answers to these questions were confused, misleading and often supine. Despite his supposedly independent “Marxist” stance, Hall’s political outlook throughout his academic and political career aligned him closely with the Euro-communist wing of the old Stalinist Communist Party, and he eventually became a prominent writer for the magazine Marxism Today. The latter served as the ideological godfather of New Labour.[5]

Antonio Gramsci

Wood’s book is full of mentions of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci never used the term “Cultural Marxism. Gramsci's concept of hegemony — the idea that bourgeois class rule is maintained not just through coercion but through ideological and cultural domination, through the "common sense" of everyday life — is a real and important contribution. The bourgeoisie rules not merely through the police and the army but because subordinate classes internalise its values, assumptions, and worldview. The struggle for socialism, therefore, requires a struggle for ideological and cultural leadership.

Gramsci is an attractive figure for Woods not merely for his cultural writings—many of which were produced during solitary confinement under the Mussolini fascist regime—but also for his attacks on economic determinism, his explicit rejection of the theory of Permanent Revolution and his justification of the nationalist orientation of Stalinism: As Gramsci declared, “To be sure, the line of development is toward internationalism, but the point of departure is ‘national’—and it is from this point of departure that one must begin”.

Woods is not the only intellectual to use Gramsci for a defence of their own politics. Over the decades, his work has been used by the likes of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 1985) and by a whole generation of "post-Marxist" academics. Gramsci's work was turned into a rationale for abandoning the working class as the revolutionary subject.

The pseudo-left currents that claim Gramsci's mantle have produced, in practice, exactly what their theory predicts: subordination of the working class to bourgeois politics. Syriza in Greece is the paradigm case, the most "prominent example of a pseudo-left organisation" that came to power, spouting empty populist phrases, and then carried out "a criminal betrayal" of Greek workers, imposing austerity more effectively than the right could have.

Wood’s book is useful only because it forces the reader to study a Marxist alternative to “Cultural Marxism”. The answer to both the right-wing "cultural Marxism" hysteria and the pseudo-left's cultural politics is the same: a return to genuine Marxism

 

Notes

 

Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che by Max Elbaum, London and New York: Verso, 2002, 370 pages.

 

The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left: A Marxist Critique- David North Mehring Books

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[1] Philosophy and Politics in an Age of War and Revolution- www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/25/lect-o25.html

[2] "Letter to the New Left" www.marxists.org/subject/humanism/mills-c-wright/letter-new-left.htm

[3] Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che by Max Elbaum, London and New York: Verso, 2002, 370 pages.

[4] Marxism Versus Critical Race Theory-Tom Carter Mehring Books 2023

[5] Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014): A political career dedicated to opposing Marxism- www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/03/05/hall-m05.html

The Future in our Past: The General Strike, 1926/2026 by Callum Cant and Matthew Lee. Verso Publications

“Future historians will know the General Strike for what it is, a landmark in British history and its most important post-war event.  A general strike is not an accident due to incidental causes, workmen misguided by agitators, the stock shibboleths of the Tory Press. It is a major political phenomenon ultimately springing from the profound dislocation of the entire economic and social system. Nothing else can so move millions of men to united action. It is the class-war in its most acute pre-revolutionary stage: the next stage is revolution.”

C. L. R. James

“The conclusion which I reach in my study is that Britain is approaching, at full speed, an era of great revolutionary upheavals... Britain is moving towards revolution because the epoch of capitalist decline has set in. And if culprits are to be sought, then in answer to the question who and what are propelling Britain along the road to revolution, we must say: not Moscow, but New York.”

Leon Trotsky

“The only class I am afraid of is our own”

J.R. Clynes, Labour Party Politician

"What I dreaded about the strike, more than anything else, was this; if by any chance it should have got out of the hands of those who would be able to exercise some control, every sane man knows what would have happened ... That danger, that fear, was always in our minds, because we wanted, at least, even in this struggle, to direct a disciplined army."

J.H. Thomas, Trade Union Leader

It is hard not to agree with the points made by the Socialist Equality Party in its comments on the 1926 General Strike anniversary: “There are few more bitterly contested and less clearly understood historical experiences than the general strike of 1926, despite it being a decisive moment in the history of the British and international working class.  What will distinguish the SEP’s meetings from the slew of commemorative articles and books on 1926 is an examination of the general strike primarily from the standpoint of the disastrous line pursued by the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) under the direction of the Communist International (Comintern), led by Joseph Stalin and his allies.”[1]

The Future in our Past: The General Strike, 1926/2026 is one of many slews published in the last few months. Described as a fresh, accessible history of the 1926 General Strike on its centenary – telling a story of working-class community then and now, “it is one of the better books on the subject. It tells the story of the 1926 General Strike on its centenary. It is a compelling on-the-ground account of how workers brought the country to a standstill for nine extraordinary days.

Callum Cant and Matthew Lee take us on a journey through a Britain living on its nerves, from the London docklands to the South Wales coalfields and the railways and warehouses of middle England. Winston Churchill, then Chancellor, feared that labour militancy presaged a Bolshevik-style revolution. The question of power hung in the air as rank-and-file militants pursued a chaotic, improvised and wildly uneven confrontation with the British ruling class. This is social history at its most immediate and relevant.

Both Cant and Lee write for the Notes from Below website. It is a working‑class repository of workplace testimony, petitions and grassroots labour reporting. It performs an important practical function: documenting the lived experience of workers, exposing employer abuses, and creating links between isolated shop‑floor struggles. For that reason alone, such initiatives deserve defence and engagement by socialists. But a class‑struggle analysis requires us to go beyond sympathetic description to evaluate the political and strategic implications of the material and the direction this sort of project advances.[2]

The reappearance of rank‑and‑file initiatives and worker blogs is a product of the deepening crisis of capitalism. As employers accelerate restructuring, automation and outsourcing, and as union bureaucracies increasingly organise class collaboration with management and the state, workers are forced to build their own communication platforms. This social reality accords with the need for independent rank-and-file initiatives and organisations.

Notes From Below primarily offers empirical materials: testimonies, minutes, and petitions. This is indispensable for breaking information blackouts and building solidarity. But empirical documentation by itself is not a political program. Lenin long argued that trade‑unionist economism — which confines politics to immediate economic demands and local grievances — will not by itself develop the conscious leadership required to overthrow capitalist rule; political consciousness must be consciously brought to the working class by a revolutionary organisation. Worker‑produced media can and should serve as a training ground for political education. Still, without explicit political independence and a program that links struggles to the need to overthrow capital, such projects can be outflanked by reformism and the trade‑union apparatus.[3]

So what are the lessons of the General Strike for today's struggles? Begun on May 3 and officially lasting nine days, it was the first and remains the only general strike ever to have taken place in the UK.

The action was launched in response to a massive attack on the wages of Britain’s 1.2 million coal miners, amid a period of widespread labour unrest. Overseeing the strike, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) was terrified by its revolutionary potential and worked to bring it to an end, succeeding on May 12 and enforcing a crushing defeat.

But material conditions alone do not determine outcomes. Political leadership and organisation do. As Chris Marsden explains in his lecture, the decisive factor in the defeat was not only the state’s preparation—organisations for strikebreaking, emergency powers and armed forces—but also the political line imposed by the Comintern under Stalin, Bukharin and Zinoviev. That line subordinated the Communist Party of Great Britain to an alliance with the Trades Union Congress via the Anglo‑Russian Committee, treating the TUC General Council and its “left” representatives as safe conduits for “revolutionary” influence rather than exposing and combating them. The result was a catastrophic political misorientation: the CPGB was transformed into a left‑ginger group for the bureaucracy at the very moment when the class struggle required independent revolutionary leadership.[4]

The general strike of May 1926 was not merely a historical rupture confined to its nine official days; it was a concentrated expression of the objective crisis of British capitalism and the political maturity (and immaturity) of the working class at that historical juncture.  The reader should note that a Marxist materialist analysis locates its significance in the interaction of social forces—the objective erosion of British imperialist power, the consequences of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, and the class relations that produced both immense industrial potential and profound political weakness.

The general strike objectively posed “which class shall rule?” The working class in 1926 had the industrial capacity to disrupt capitalist reproduction yet lacked a party capable of transforming industrial militancy into political power. As Marsden’s 1926 strike lecture emphasises, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and the Comintern-influenced Communist Party acted to contain and demobilise revolutionary potential. The result was a strategic defeat whose lessons include the catastrophic consequences when the labour bureaucracy or opportunist “lefts” substitute themselves for proletarian political independence.

A century later, objective conditions again make a general strike a live political possibility. Global capitalism is convulsed by stagnation, inflation, war and austerity. It is important to see the connection between the historical weaknesses exposed in 1926 and the present-day degeneration of unions and reformist parties. The trade union apparatus today often functions as a corporatist arm of capital, seeking to manage and suppress rather than lead independent working-class offensives.

The social weight of the working class, its international integration, and the development of rank-and-file initiatives create objective conditions far more favourable to revolutionary politics than those that existed in 1926.

1926 is not an exhausted archive; it is a living repository of lessons for 2026. Capital’s crisis, the bankruptcy of union bureaucracies and the emergence of rank-and-file militancy mean the objective possibility of a general strike—and with it, the political question of power—again stands on the agenda. The working class must learn from the past not to repeat its errors: organise democratically in the workplaces, coordinate internationally, and build the independent revolutionary leadership necessary to turn strikes into a socialist strategy. The future is written in the material contradictions of the present; the past supplies the lessons to read it.

 

 

Notes

 

The General Strike at the National Archives- www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/explore-the-collection/stories/the-general-strike/

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[1] Socialist Equality Party (UK) announces public meeting series on 1926 general strike-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/04/09/fhfg-a09.html

[2] https://notesfrombelow.org/

[3] See (Lenin, What Is To Be Done?).

[4]. The new pamphlet by Mehring Books (UK), “Trotsky, Stalin and the 1926 British General Strike: Lessons For Today”.

The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered by Chris Hayes Scribe UK : ‎ 13 Feb. 2025 :336 Pages

Chris Hayes is one of the more articulate voices on the “left.” His 2025 book, The Sirens' Call, is well written and at times thoughtful. However, his politics are mostly characteristic of the petty‑bourgeois layer that passes for the contemporary media “left”: critical in tone, reformist in content, and ultimately subordinate to the interests and institutions of the ruling class.

Hayes—formerly a prominent host on MSNBC and a widely read public intellectual—has for years occupied a political position that illustrates the contradictions and dangers of the media “left.” His arguments, style and role function not as an organ of working-class struggle but as a channel by which layers of the petty-bourgeoisie and professional-class radicals are integrated into the interests and strategies of the capitalist state.

Readers familiar with Hayes's other books and media work will know that he operates within a media and institutional milieu whose social base is the upper strata of the middle class—journalists, academics, think-tank professionals, and professional managers. As far as  I can tell, Hayes is not linked to or is a member of any radical party, but for the sake of clarity, it would be safe to say that he is from the same social layer as other “pseudo-lefts”:

Hayes' early career was spent within a network whose executives, shareholders, and advertising base are embedded in the capitalist class. As a recent article on the WSWS leading broadcasters and columnists “operate in effect as the public faces of their respective firms” and must conform to corporate priorities to keep their platforms and fortunes” Hayes’s career has largely been spent making criticisms acceptable only up to the point where they do not threaten corporate clients, advertisers, financial interests or imperialist foreign policy He is a prime example of how individual dissent is tolerated so long as it stabilises, rather than challenges, the system. I doubt we will see Hayes on the barricades anytime soon.

During Hayes’s former program, he often performed the ritual of exposing outrages (inequality, racism, corruption), but the structural constraints of corporate ownership limited the reach of those critiques. The result is a media ecology where “critical” voices reinforce, rather than rupture, the legitimacy of capitalist institutions by confining debate within narrow parameters. Hayes’s style—moral passion, policy technocracy, and denunciations of right-wing reaction—fits this social function. He channels legitimate anger at inequality into policy reforms, electoralism, and crusades within the bounds of bourgeois democracy. This can radicalise public sentiment, but simultaneously diverts class anger into institutional remedies that leave capitalist property relations intact.

The political consciousness of media commentators like Hayes does not develop in a political vacuum. Their professional positions are secured by corporate media conglomerates, venture capital, and advertising markets embedded in global capitalism. The need to retain access to funding sources, advertising revenue, and elite networks naturally inclines such figures toward compromises with state and corporate power. The result: a politics of “reform” that is simultaneously anti‑Trump, pro‑liberal intervention, and protective of the neoliberal order’s basic rules.

The same political outlook that guides Hayes’s media work is carried into his books. No more so than in The Siren's Call. Hayes knows his audience. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, he knows his song before he starts singing. The Siren’s Call, like much of the punditry produced within the corporate media, performs an important political function: it channels popular anger and democratic anxieties into narratives that stop short of challenging the economic and class foundations of society. His audience is politically conscious but still embedded within the institutions of the bourgeois state and corporate media. This book is written to diagnose social problems accurately enough to win credibility—unequal power, corrupt elites, erosion of democratic norms—but then it prescribes solutions that leave capitalism fundamentally untouched.

To sum up, the siren call that Hayes and his Pseudo-Left friends offer—reform, managerial solutions, moralism—must be answered by a socialist perspective capable of ending capitalist rule.

The Housing Crisis in Kensington and Chelsea

One rule I have regarding this website is that I never talk about my personal situation or problems. That changed yesterday when we received an email that our attempt to stay in our parents' council flat had been turned down for the third time. Our story is that in 2008, we moved back into the family rental flat to look after our ailing parents. The flat had been in the family since 1976. When my father passed, we stayed in the flat to look after my mother, who was in no fit state to be left on her own.

Our first attempt to stay in the property was unsuccessful. Due to Kensington and Chelsea’s archaic and discriminatory housing policy, we were unable to succeed in the property. So insensitive were the council that when my dad passed in 2016, he had not yet been buried before they sent a notice to quit the property to my mother, who was not even on the tenancy. This was challenged by us and rectified.

When my mother passed away at the beginning of this year, we again asked for succession. Again, we were turned down, so we asked for a discretionary tenancy based on the fact that this was the family home for over 50 years, and that we had not only lived in the property for over 15 years, but we had also contributed to rent and council tax, both accounts were in our name. We spent a significant amount of money on decorating the flat. We fed, clothed, and cared for her even when she had her stroke that led to her passing. Yesterday, we received a letter stating that the council has refused our discretionary tenancy request, giving no reason, and that we must leave the property within two weeks, or they will take legal action to remove us. Aside from the cruel and unjust decision, the council never visited or spoke to us about our needs at any stage. No alternative housing arrangement has been made or discussed.

Having researched the housing crisis in the borough, I somehow doubt that ours is an isolated case. Kensington and Chelsea is one of the wealthiest boroughs in the United Kingdom. At the moment, there is a massive housing boom, but it is only catered for the mega-rich. Next door in the borough of Hammersmith is the former BBC Television Centre in White City, which has been redeveloped into high-end, exclusive residential apartments and luxury lifestyle areas. These areas now feature private clubs, high-end fitness facilities, restaurants and high-security residences, leading to descriptions of them as "playgrounds for the rich."

In Kensington and Chelsea, there is a severe shortage of affordable housing, with over 2,900 households waiting for social housing. It has the second-highest rate of use of temporary accommodation in the capital. The borough has a high rate of households with children in temporary accommodation, with nearly 30 per 1,000 households. There are calls for the council to take action against over 600 homes that have been left empty for more than two years.

The housing crisis is not confined to London; it is a national crisis of huge proportions. A recent article shows that “Across the UK, rents have increased by 40 per cent since the COVID pandemic began in 2020, and mortgage repayments by 40-60 per cent. Housing stress affects 67 per cent of the population—45 million people, struggling to pay rents or mortgages, cutting back on food and heating, or facing eviction and foreclosure. Up to 4 million people are on the waiting list for social housing, with 1.3 million of these waiting more than a decade. 400,000 people are homeless, sleeping on the streets, in hostels and shelters or sofa surfing. Up to 2 million children live in substandard and unsafe accommodation, including 1.5 million in England (one in six children). One million children live in homes with a Category 1 hazard, defined as “serious risk to health or safety”.Multi-occupancy accommodation with renters crammed together, and young people forced to lodge with their parents into their late 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s, is the new normal. Older adults in the private rental market face a nightmarish future.[1]

As I said in the opening paragraph, I am loath to go public with this. However, this council has given me no choice but to. My MP Joe Powell has been contacted about this case. We will seek advice from the Citizens Advice Bureau and will take legal action to prepare for the Council's impending court action.

 

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[1] The socialist answer to the housing crisis in Britain- www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/04/16/mpru-a16.html

Paul Weller: Dancing Through the Fire: The Authorised Oral History: Dan Jennings (Author), Paul Weller (Contributor) 11 Sept. 2025 Constable Publishers

I'm always looking for something. Not in an unhappy way. I like to try different things. I don't want to be morbid, but I'm not getting any younger.

Paul Weller

"Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

Walt Whitman

I get labelled as just being about one thing, but there are lots of layers to what I do.

Paul Weller

Dancing Through the Fire is the authorised oral history of one of the world’s most important musical figures: Paul Weller has almost Dylanesque managed to reinvent himself from the stunning rise of The Jam to the stylish reinvention of The Style Council. Since disbanding the Council, he has had a spectacular decades-long solo career. Weller, alongside Lennon and McCartney, remains among only a handful of artists who have topped the UK album charts in five consecutive decades. This excellent oral history by award-winning broadcaster and journalist Dan Jennings features over 200 hours of interviews with Weller’s family, bandmates, collaborators, and industry figures.

A study of Paul Weller’s career (from the Jam and Style Council to his solo work) and Dan Jennings’ use of the oral history genre will provide the reader with a rich entry point of how popular music reflects class formations, political currents and the shifting role of intellectuals and artists under capitalism.

The Modfather and Working-Class icon Paul Weller’s post‑punk and Britpop-era work reinforces a British working‑class identity, nostalgia, and dissent. Weller’s politics and music were grounded in the post‑war British political economy of deindustrialisation, youth unemployment, Thatcherism, and the music industry’s structural shifts toward commodification, consolidation, and global markets.

Understanding Weller through disciplined oral history equips readers to recognise how culture both expresses and can obscure class interests. Today’s struggles — precarious labour, austerity, environmental crisis — require cultural work that mobilises artistic forms for political education and organisation. A critical study reveals how artists may ally with bourgeois institutions (such as parliamentary politics and corporate sponsorship and how autonomous working‑class cultural forms can be revived.

One of the most important songs from Weller’s punk days was A Town Called Malice. Released in 1982 by the Jam (written by Paul Weller, recorded with Style Council musicians), the song emerges in the wake of late-1970s deindustrialisation, rising unemployment and the political consolidation of Thatcherism. These processes transformed the British working class—through mass redundancies, the decline of long-term industrial employment, and the expansion of precarious, service-sector labour—altering both objective class positions and political subjectivity.  

The pun names the locality (town) as a social relation: not merely a site of decline but a product of hostile economic restructuring. “Malice” anthropomorphises the systemic violence of capital’s restructuring—plant closures, wage cuts, rising rents—making structural brutality feel like an intentional social agent. The title functions ideologically: it mobilises resentment but frames it as a local pathology rather than an expression of class conflict.

The song captures the accelerated proletarianisation of entire layers: young people forced into wage dependency or precarious work, losing access to transitional education and apprenticeship pathways. The affective register—disorientation, fatalism, yearning—reflects a class composition with fractured organisation and weakened industrial solidarity. The lyrics’ focus on private emotional response rather than collective remedy points to the present limits of working-class political organisation under Thatcherism.

The song’s upbeat Motown-derived groove and horn lines give it a buoyant, danceable surface while the lyrics narrate decline. This contradiction of form and content is dialectically significant: an uplifting groove can broaden appeal (embedding class grievances in popular culture) but can also aestheticise suffering, sedating political urgency. The adoption of black popular forms—soul and Motown references—connects British working-class musical practice to international proletarian cultural traditions. Yet, here it is largely cosmetic rather than explicitly solidaristic.

Jenning’s book runs to well over 700 pages, but it is well worth the read. As you can see from the picture, I bumped into Weller recently. Had a brief but memorable conversation. He was kind and polite. I look forward to his next piece of work. Jennings's book is a masterpiece and reflects Weller's genius.

Sisters in Yellow: Mieko Kawakami (author), Laurel Taylor (translator), Hitomi Yoshio (translator), Pan Macmillan, 448 pages, 2026

For someone still at such a tender age, Mieko Kawakami is a stunningly good writer. She is a novelist, poet and essayist whose internationally acclaimed works — notably Breasts and Eggs, Heaven, and Paradise — probe gender, class, bodily experience and social alienation in late‑capitalist Japan.

Heaven, an early work on school bullying and the social formation of suffering; then Breasts and Eggs, which raised questions of reproduction, women’s labour, precarity; and Paradise, the moral and existential problems faced by Japanese women. All her previous work has themes of work, family economy, institutional violence, and bodily commodification. These are all acute portrayals of class stratification, gender oppression, marketised bodies and private suffering under neoliberal Japan.

Kawakami exposes how Japanese neoliberal capitalism commodifies bodies, care and intimacy, producing isolation, mental distress and precarious survival strategies. Her work demonstrates how private suffering is socially produced rather than merely individual pathology. She highlights the intersection of gender oppression and class exploitation in everyday life.

While the reader is free to read Kawakami as they like, reading Kawakami through a Marxist lens develops the capacity to see private affliction as a social product and to analyse cultural form as ideology.

Sisters in Yellow is a 2023 novel by Mieko Kawakami, translated into English by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio, and was published in March 2026. The title and the bar's name ("Lemon") refer to Hana's obsession with a feng shui belief that the colour yellow attracts wealth and financial security. Kawakami has described the novel as an exploration of a Breaking Bad-style story without the typical "macho drama."

It's a crime-infused story about friendship, betrayal, and survival in 1990s Tokyo, following 15-year-old Hana and her older friend Kimiko as they open a bar called Lemon, which becomes a haven but leads them into a world of crime and desperation. The novel explores themes of poverty, female resilience, and the harsh realities of life on the fringes of society, blending social realism with thriller elements.

Kawakami often portrays the pressures of precarious labour, consumerist culture, and gendered norms. Sisters in Yellow registers social vulnerability through small, intimate details that encode larger class relations. Her book shows everyday scenes of work: casual, piecemeal paid work, and precarious hours. They are material signs of neoliberal precarity. Part‑time shifts, temporary cleaning/retail tasks, work that starts or ends at odd hours, or days lost to cancelled gigs. These concrete markers show labour organised in fragments rather than stable employment. It must be understood that fragmented labour time is not accidental but a mode of disciplining labour power — keeping wages low and workers on call so capital can extract more surplus. This corresponds to the global growth of informal and platform work, where “casual labour” and algorithmic scheduling spread precarious conditions. According to the latest statistics, over 2.1 billion workers are in informal work worldwide.

Kawakami is part of a formidable new generation of Japanese writers. Takiji Kobayashi’s Kanikosen (The Crab-Canning Ship), essays and short stories by proletarian writers, modernists like Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, and later novelists who grapple with imperialism and postwar capitalism.

A significant section of modern Japanese literature exposes how culture can conceal and reveal class exploitation, how nationalism and militarism are built into cultural forms. The recent resurgence of proletarian texts shows literature's capacity to rekindle class consciousness in periods of economic crisis—an opening for political work among youth and precarious layers.

Given that Japanese women have borne the brunt of neoliberalisation, it is not surprising that some of the most important modern Japanese writers are women. Female Japanese literature today often grapples with precarity, social withdrawal (hikikomori), ageing, and the collapse of secure employment—issues central to contemporary class struggle. Japan’s casualised labour market, suicides and social isolation show the objective conditions that many recent novels and short stories dramatise.

Readers interested in the class struggle, gender, and Japanese imperialism are encouraged to read Higuchi Ichiyō, Hayashi Fumiko, Miyamoto Yuriko, Hiratsuka Raichō, and Yosano Akiko. Higuchi Ichiyō — “Takekurabe / Growing Up” (short story). A compassionate, class‑conscious portrayal of poor urban youth and women’s constrained social options under early modern capitalism. A good entry point to Meiji-era class/gender conditions. Hayashi Fumiko — Diary of a Vagabond (Nomad’s Diary) and selected short stories. Hayashi’s work offers vivid, autobiographical glimpses into the itinerant, precarious lives of women in the interwar period and the underside of urban labour markets.

Miyamoto Yuriko — fiction and essays from the 1920s–1940s. Miyamoto was politically engaged with left movements, and her writing expresses proletarian themes and women’s emancipation, and connects with the politics of the day; her work is useful for seeing how committed women writers sought to fuse literary and political struggle. Hiratsuka Raichō — essays and Seitosha (Bluestocking) journal writings. As founder of Japan’s early feminist journal Seito (1911–16), Hiratsuka’s polemics illuminate feminist demands, cultural critique and their tensions with rising national politics—Yosano Akiko — poetry and essays. Yosano’s career illustrates the ambivalence of some feminist-modernist currents that combined emancipation rhetoric with nationalist sentiment; studying her work shows how gender politics can be co‑opted by imperialist ideology.

These writers retain a contemporary resonance and how patriarchy, precarity and imperialist expansion are mutually reinforcing: gender oppression is intensified by capitalist industrialisation and militarism; nationalism and imperialism can co‑opt feminist rhetoric; and working‑class women are often the most exposed to dispossession and colonial violence. Understanding these dynamics strengthens contemporary anti‑imperialist, feminist and socialist practice by identifying the material roots of ideological illusions.

Mieko Kawakami is one of the most important contemporary Japanese writers because her work combines rigorous attention to individual subjectivity with an unflinching portrayal of the social forces that shape and deform everyday life. Mieko Kawakami is important not because she offers tidy political answers, but because her art reveals how capitalism structures pain and possibility. Sisters in Yellow is a book I heartily recommend.

   

Author

(born 1976) is a celebrated Japanese author, poet, and former singer-songwriter known for her visceral exploration of the female body, economic class, and social ethics. Originally from Osaka, she worked as a factory hand and a bar hostess before gaining national fame as a blogger and eventually a novelist.

 

Football in Sun and Shadow-Eduardo Galeano-Mark Fried Translator- 156 pages, Paperback First published January 1, 1995- Fourth Estate

“Football has become one of the most profitable businesses in the world, organised not for play but rather to impede it. […] Luckily, on the field you can still see some insolent rascal, who sets aside the script and commits the blunder of dribbling past the entire opposing side, the referee and the crowd in the stands, all for the carnal delight of embracing the forbidden adventure of freedom.”

- Eduardo Galeano, in Football in Sun and Shadow

“The world turned its back while Guatemala underwent a long Saint Bartholomew’s night. [In 1967,] all the men of the village of Cajón del Rio were exterminated; those of Tituque had their intestines gouged out with knives; in Piedra Parada, they were flayed alive; in Agua Blanca de Ipala, they were burned alive after being shot in the legs. A rebellious peasant’s head was stuck on a pole in the centre of San Jorge’s plaza. In Cerro Gordo the eyes of Jaime Velázquez were filled with pins… In the cities, the doors of the doomed were marked with black crosses. Occupants were machine gunned as they emerged, their bodies thrown into ravines.”

Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America:

“In victory, the players suddenly stopped looking like rich, pampered superstar athletes and became, instead, innocent young men bright with the realisation that they were experiencing a great moment in their lives.”

- Salman Rushdie, in a New Yorker article ‘The People’s Game’

“...So please, be tolerant of those who describe a sporting moment as their best. We do not lack imagination, nor have we had sad and barren lives; it is just that real life is paler, duller, and contains less potential for unexpected delirium.”

- Nick Hornby, in Fever Pitch

THE 2026 World Cup is now only two months away. Before even a ball has been kicked, the joy millions take from the “beautiful game” will be literally stomped upon by the “foul, for-profit priorities, violent classism and discrimination” that characterise world football. That other shame on the game, the European Super League episode, which revealed oligarchic designs to turn clubs into cash machines, and the popular backlash exposed mass anger against billionaire rule.

The late Uruguayan author and activist Eduardo Galeano would have a field day writing about it and other football-related developments. Although I am pretty sure even Galeano would struggle with the modern game's growing commodification and gentrification. Kerry Olsen, although not in the same league as Galeano, writes in a recent Financial Times article:

“On the shores of Lake Como, where Roman emperors, silk merchants and Hollywood actors have long embodied discretion and excess, a once provincial football club is rethinking the game. After multiple bankruptcies and a 21-year absence from Italy’s uppermost football league, Serie A, Como 1907 now finds itself near the top of the ranks as the season closes. Just two years after it rejoined the league, a lucrative Champions League place lies within reach. Yet for some, the most striking part of Como’s recent turnaround lies beyond goals on the pitch.

Club executives have been positioning it less as a conventional football team dependent on match-day successes and more as a global lifestyle brand that has Lake Como — and fashion — at its heart. Under the club’s chief brand officer Rhuigi Villaseñor, a seasoned fashion industry creative director and club shareholder appointed in 2024, Como works with four high-profile brands on lines for fans, including Brioni for formalwear, Rhude on casual and streetwear, Hublot on luxury timepieces and Adidas on its technical kits, including a sailing collection called Lago di Como. The team also offers luxury lake experiences and has launched a private members’ club called, well, Club on the Lake.”[1]

Galeano’s Football in Sun and Shadow is not just a literary celebration but contains within it a social diagnosis. He records the joy, myth and cruelty of the game while exposing how class relations, commerce and power shape football. The task of the reader is to combine Galeano’s humanist impressions with a scientific, historical-materialist analysis so that feeling is linked to explanation and to strategy.

While the book contains aspects of romanticism, Galeano is no fool and understands that “Professional football does everything to castrate that energy of happiness, but it survives, that’s the best thing about it – its stubborn capacity for surprise. The more the technocrats programme it down to the smallest detail, the more the powerful manipulate it, football continues to be the art of the unforeseeable. When you least expect it, the impossible occurs: the dwarf teaches the giant a lesson, and a scraggy, bow-legged black man makes an athlete sculpted in Greece look ridiculous.”

Eduardo Galeano

While football fans in general live one game to the next, which is understandable but not forgivable, Galeano was not like that. One of his best traits as a writer and historian was his gift for “remembering the past of America and above all that of Latin America, an intimate land condemned to amnesia”.

Eduardo Galeano (1940–2015) was a Uruguayan historian, journalist and writer whose work reached a vast international audience with its powerful combination of literary form, historical narrative and moral indignation. He gave the people a voice and helped them understand the beautiful game and the world around them. His books — above all Las venas abiertas de América Latina (Open Veins of Latin America) and the three-volume Memory of Fire — synthesise colonial and capitalist plunder, anti-imperialist resistance, and the lived experiences of workers, peasants, and indigenous peoples.

Galeano is not a Marxist theorist in the academic sense. Still, his writings are an invaluable entry point for a reader's political education because they humanise structural analysis and help develop the historical imagination needed for revolutionary politics. Galeano’s work is a bridge to political activism. His use of the genre “People’s History popularized a deeper understanding of the history of exploitation. Galeano is an indispensable literary and political voice for understanding the lived experience of oppressed peoples in Latin America.

Galeano’s narratives show how the logic of profit, foreign control and local elites shape societies. Those themes remain central today as Latin America confronts revived imperialist competition, debt politics and resource conflicts. Galeano’s work is useful in that it connects past plunder to present-day phenomena — privatisations, debt conditionality, and geopolitical rivalry — and exposes why petty-bourgeois nationalist solutions inevitably fail the working class (through an analysis of the “turn to the left” and its limits).

For Galeano, football should be experienced as a source of joy, community, and identity, and fans should have their day in the “sun.” His writing is lyrical and humanising. Galeano lets us feel a child’s first contact with the ball, an old supporter’s devotion, or the sensory celebration of a goal. But he is cognisant that it also casts deep shadows of nationalism, commercialisation, state power, and the coercion of migrant labour. Galeano’s use of the genre of “People’s History is compatible and complements a scientific, historical-materialist method, which explains how the game’s social forms arise from capitalism’s development and political struggles. Galeano’s succinct critiques of commodification, nationalism, or corruption in football.

A recent example of how Modern football is dominated by criminality and transnational capital, debt, and financial instruments was a German football team's coach bus, which was hit by roadside bombs. On April 11, 2017, three explosive devices detonated as Borussia Dortmund’s coach left the team hotel, wounding a player and badly damaging the vehicle. From the outset, official and media narratives raced to pin a “terrorist” label on the attack. But the immediate need is to understand this event not as an isolated mystery, but as an expression of social and political forces—above all, the sharpening contradictions of capitalism and the state’s readiness to exploit fear for political ends.

The initial police rush to invoke an Islamist motive, and the subsequent exposure of inconsistencies in the so-called claim of responsibility, demonstrate how quickly the state and media attempt to frame such incidents according to preexisting agendas. As the WSWS reported at the time, investigators found letters at the scene purporting to claim the attack for the Islamic State. Yet, these letters contained linguistic oddities and demands that echoed far-right political positions—pointing to the possibility of deliberate misdirection or false-flag signals rather than a straightforward Islamist attack.

The attack happened two years after Galeano passed, but there is no doubt that he would have written that soccer had become a “sad voyage from beauty to duty.  When the sport became an industry, the beauty that blossoms from the joy of play was torn out by the roots.  In this fin de siècle world, professional soccer condemns all that is useless, and useless means not profitable.

Galeano gives us the sun — the passion and stories of the people. Galeano teaches sympathy for players and fans; however, Marxism teaches who profits from their passion. Combining the two gives revolutionary clarity: the fight to reclaim sport—its stadiums, clubs and culture—must be waged as part of the broader struggle against capitalist rule and for working-class democratic control.

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[1] Balls, boats and billionaires: Como 1907’s lifestyle brand aspirations- https://www.ft.com/content/dfd3320f-492c-478c-81f1-e1b47ec58d7f