A Brothel, a Mob and a Monarchy: Holland’s Leaguer and the Class Relations of Early Stuart England

 On Shrove Tuesday, February 22, 1631, a group of London apprentices crossed the Thames in a rush toward a fortified estate in Southwark. Their goal was Holland’s Leaguer, London's most exclusive brothel, operated for nearly thirty years by the fierce Bess Holland. Though the house withstood the attack—its drawbridge remained intact, and the moat proved effective—the event is more than just a colourful tale. It offers a vivid glimpse into early Stuart class society, highlighting moments where the tensions around labour, gender, government authority, and elite hypocrisy were temporarily laid bare.

Viewing Holland’s Leaguer solely as bawdy London folklore overlooks its deeper importance. It functioned as a hub within the growing capitalist economy, where displaced women sold their labour to elite men, and where the monarchy engaged in activities it publicly denounced. Additionally, it was a place where the frustration of exploited youth was diverted from its real cause. On a small scale, the siege of Holland’s Leaguer exemplifies the social tensions that eventually led to civil war a decade later.

The Liberty of the Clink: A State‑Sanctioned Economy of Vice

Holland’s Leaguer was located within the Liberty of the Clink, an area intentionally separated from the City’s jurisdiction. Bankside’s theatres, bear-baiting pits, taverns, and brothels thrived not due to lax enforcement but because the law was purposefully structured to overlook those activities in that zone. The Clink functioned as a device for managing contradictions: it was a district where “vice” could be isolated, taxed, and enjoyed by the elites without threatening the City’s moral image.

This setup wasn't hypocrisy in a simple sense; it was built into the system. The Crown and the aristocracy needed places where their desires could be fulfilled without threatening the appearance of moral authority. Since theatres and brothels were highly profitable, socially significant, and deeply rooted in elite culture, they couldn't be abolished. Instead, they were physically separated—moved across the river, out of sight but still accessible.

Holland’s Leaguer itself was a capitalist enterprise avant la lettre. Its exclusivity — fine linen, modern sanitation, controlled access — mirrored the emerging logic of commodification. Sex was not merely sold; it was curated. The clientele included wealthy courtiers, foreign visitors, and, by later report, King James I and his favourite, Buckingham. The same monarchy that periodically ordered the brothel’s closure was among its most valued patrons.

This episode reveals the first contradiction: a ruling class that criminalised people with low incomes for the very desires it enjoyed openly, and that regarded the women working in such houses as disposable labour rather than as individuals entitled to legal protection.

The apprentices who attacked Holland’s Leaguer were not moral crusaders. They were young workers bound by indenture, denied wages, poorly fed, and subject to the arbitrary authority of masters who controlled nearly every hour of their lives. Their conditions were closer to coerced labour than to the free wage work celebrated in English political mythology.

Shrove Tuesday served as a safety valve: a single day when the built-up frustration of youthful repression could be released. Importantly, violence was allowed — often encouraged — provided it was aimed at safe targets. Places like brothels, theatres, and taverns were considered acceptable outlets for anger; in contrast, merchants, guildmasters, and the government were absent. This exemplifies a typical class society dynamic where horizontal violence among exploited groups replaces confrontation with those in power. The apprentices targeted visible victims—sex workers, who also suffered displacement—instead of challenging the property systems causing suffering for both groups.

The apprentices were still in the process of forming a distinct class. Their common living situations, collective grievances, and occasional street violence helped develop a proto-political identity. While not revolutionary yet, they were becoming less willing to accept their assigned roles. A decade later, they would join the crowds that expelled Charles I from London. The 1631 riot wasn't a revolutionary act, but it served as a rehearsal for one.

Sex Workers and the Gendered Labour Regime of Early‑Modern London

The women of Holland’s Leaguer were unfairly portrayed as morally 'fallen' by Puritan pamphlets. In fact, they were victims of a swiftly changing labour market caused by enclosure, falling rural wages, and the loss of traditional rights, which drove many to London. There, women encountered obstacles to joining guilds and often had to settle for jobs like domestic service, laundry, nursing, hawking, or fringe piecework. Sex work was not a moral failing but a survival strategy—an economic necessity to cope with a city that systematically undervalued female labour.

Brothels such as Holland’s Leaguer were not anomalies but integral parts of early-modern capitalism: venues where gendered labour exploitation was focused, commodified, and controlled for elite audiences. The apprentices’ assault on the brothel was therefore not a clash between virtue and vice but between two exploited groups, with their conflict aligning with the interests of the ruling class.

Holland’s Leaguer and the Historiography of Proto‑Proletarian Consciousness

The 1631 destruction of Holland’s Leaguer is more than just a striking event in London’s social past. It is central to a significant historiographical debate about when and how the English working classes started to develop a shared political awareness. Scholars like Christopher Hill, Brian Manning, Barry Reay, and Buchanan Sharp present perspectives that interpret the siege not as a mere rumour but as a key moment in the gradual emergence of a proto-proletariat in early Stuart England.

Hill: Apprentices as a Semi‑Proletarian Class

Hill’s work remains foundational. In The World Turned Upside Down and The Century of Revolution, he argued that apprentices were a transitional class: economically indispensable, politically subordinate, and increasingly aware of the contradiction. Their periodic riots were not random explosions of youthful disorder but expressions of a class whose labour was expanding while its rights remained static.

Hill would see the attack on Holland’s Leaguer as a classic example of this dynamic. Apprentices acted collectively, outside the control of their masters, in a way that revealed both their grievances and their potential political agency. The riot was misdirected — aimed at sex workers rather than merchants or magistrates — but it demonstrated a capacity for mobilisation that would become decisive in the 1640s.

Manning: Popular Agency and the Coming Revolution

Brian Manning sharpened Hill’s insight by insisting on the political agency of “the middling and poorer sort.” For Manning, apprentices were not merely reactive; they were active participants in shaping the revolutionary crisis. Their street actions were early rehearsals for the mass demonstrations that would force Charles I out of London.

Manning’s emphasis on popular mobilisation helps us see Holland’s Leaguer as part of a continuum. The same social layer that attacked the brothel in 1631 would, a decade later, besiege Lambeth Palace, disrupt royal processions, and form the backbone of London’s revolutionary crowds. The riot was not revolutionary, but it belonged to the same repertoire of collective action.

Reay: Gender, Sexuality and Displaced Labour

Barry Reay’s work on sexuality and popular culture adds a crucial dimension. Reay shows that sex work in early‑modern London was not a moral aberration but a structural response to economic displacement. Women entered the trade because enclosure, falling wages and exclusion from guild labour left them few alternatives.

Reay’s analysis reframes Holland’s Leaguer as a site where two exploited groups — apprentices and sex workers — collided. Their antagonism was not natural but manufactured. Both were victims of early‑capitalist transformation; both were denied legal protection; both were indispensable to the functioning of London’s economy. Their conflict served the interests of the ruling class by preventing solidarity between exploited layers.

Sharpe: Ritualised Disorder and Social Control

Buchanan Sharp’s work on Shrove Tuesday riots shows how the authorities tolerated certain forms of disorder as a mechanism of social control. Apprentices were permitted to vent their frustrations so long as they targeted “safe” objects: brothels, theatres, taverns. Sharp’s analysis explains why the attack on Holland’s Leaguer was indulged while attacks on merchants or magistrates were not.

The riot thus reveals a key feature of early‑Stuart governance: the state managed popular anger by directing it sideways—horizontal violence substituted for vertical challenge.

A Microcosm of Class Formation

These historians collectively depict Holland’s Leaguer as a small-scale reflection of early Stuart social dynamics: Hill highlights apprentices as a semi-proletariat; Manning emphasises popular agency and political activism; Reay discusses gendered labour and economic shifts; and Sharpe considers ritualised disorder as a form of social control. The destruction of the brothel was significant; it revealed the tensions within early-modern capitalism—such as labour exploitation, gendered insecurity, elite hypocrisy, and misplaced popular rage. This event is not just part of London's bawdy folklore but also a precursor to the English Revolution.

The State Intervenes: Coercion as the Final Arbiter

When Charles I ultimately commanded the closure of Holland’s Leaguer in December 1631, he relied on military force rather than moral persuasion. Soldiers, not magistrates, were dispatched to enforce his order. Bess Holland responded with resistance, raising the drawbridge to cause the first soldiers to fall into the moat, and her brothel workers dumped chamber pots over the troops below.

The siege endured for almost a month, serving as a display of state authority amid waning power. The Personal Rule had alienated many social groups, while financial measures eroded the monarchy’s legitimacy. Religious policies also sparked widespread discontent. In this climate, shutting down a brothel became a symbolic act—showing the King's attempt to assert control in a society that was slipping beyond his reach.

The closure had no effect; Holland just moved. The economic factors behind brothels—poverty, gendered labour markets, and elite demand—stayed the same. The state only suppressed a symptom without addressing the root cause.

From Scandal to Spectacle: Commodifying the Crisis

In just a few weeks, Holland’s Leaguer shifted from a site of conflict to a cultural commodity. Ballads spread widely, and Nicholas Goodman’s pamphlet cast the siege as moral theatre. Shackerley Marmion’s play turned the event into entertainment aimed at the same social groups that had patronised the brothel. This swift shift to commodification is deliberate; it reflects how class society processes scandal: exploitative labour becomes entertainment, state violence turns into farce, and class tensions are repackaged as local colour. The ideological role is evident: spectacle masks underlying social structures. The social issues—gendered exploitation, elite hypocrisy, misplaced popular anger—that created Holland’s Leaguer are hidden behind storytelling and theatricality.

Holland’s Leaguer and the Coming Revolution

Viewing Holland’s Leaguer through a Marxist perspective, it serves as a microcosm of early-Stuart England’s impending crisis. The monarchy relies on coercion instead of consent. The working class becomes less willing to accept its social role. The ruling elite's hypocrisy weakens its ideological authority. The cultural realm commodifies crises instead of resolving them. The destruction of the brothel exposes a society where class tensions intensify, ideological conflicts deepen, and social controls begin to weaken. The apprentices’ riot, while not revolutionary, hints at the instability that would eventually lead to civil war, regicide, and the temporary fall of the monarchy.

Conclusion: A Case Study in Class Society

Holland’s Leaguer should be remembered not just as a colourful episode in London's bawdy history but as an example of how early-modern class society organised, controlled, profited from, and ultimately abandoned its poorest and most vulnerable labourers. It shows how public anger was directed at the wrong targets, how gendered labour was commodified for elite amusement, and how the state only intervened when elite interests were at risk. Its contradictions—economic, social, ideological—provide a revealing glimpse into the world that led to the English Revolution. Beneath the chaos of riot and siege, deeper systems of exploitation and resistance were at work, which within a decade would threaten the monarchy's very foundation.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary Sources

• Goodman, Nicholas. Holland’s Leaguer. London, 1632.
• Marmion, Shackerley. Holland’s Leaguer: A Comedy. London, 1632.
• Contemporary ballads on Holland’s Leaguer (British Library, Roxburghe Collection).
• City of London Court Records, Shrove Tuesday disturbances (Guildhall Library Manuscripts).
• The Liberty of the Clink administrative records (Southwark Local Studies Archive).

Secondary Sources

Christopher Hill

• Hill, Christopher. The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714. London: Routledge, 1961.
• Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. London: Penguin, 1972.
• Hill, Christopher. Society and Puritanism in Pre‑Revolutionary England. London: Secker & Warburg, 1964.

Brian Manning

• Manning, Brian. The English People and the English Revolution. London: Bookmarks, 1991.
• Manning, Brian. Revolution and Counter‑Revolution in England, 1658–1660. London: Bookmarks, 2003.
• Manning, Brian. The Far Left in the English Revolution. London: Bookmarks, 1971.

Barry Reay

• Reay, Barry. Popular Cultures in England, 1550–1750. London: Longman, 1998.
• Reay, Barry. The Last Rising of the Apprentices: London 1661. Stroud: Sutton, 1999.
• Reay, Barry. Sexuality in Early Modern England. London: Routledge, 1998.

Buchanan Sharp

• Sharp, Buchanan. In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England, 1586–1660. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
• Sharp, Buchanan. “Rituals of Riot: Popular Violence in Early Modern England.” Past & Present 130 (1991): 90–122.
• Sharp, Buchanan. The English Riots of 1641. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

Early‑Modern London, Sex Work, and Urban Labour

• Griffiths, Paul. Lost Londons: Change, Crime and Control in the Capital City, 1550–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• Griffiths, Paul. “The Structure of Prostitution in Elizabethan London.” Continuity and Change 8, no. 1 (1993): 39–63.
• Ingram, Martin. Carnal Knowledge: Regulating Sex in England, 1470–1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
• Archer, Ian. The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
• Shoemaker, Robert. The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth‑Century England. London: Hambledon, 2004.
• Stallybrass, Peter. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.

Theatres, Liberties, and the Bankside Economy

• Dillon, Janette. Theatre, Court and City, 1595–1610: Drama and Social Space in London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Gurr, Andrew. Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
• Egan, Gabriel. The Struggle for Shakespeare’s South Bank. London: Shakespeare’s Globe, 2019.

The English Revolution and Popular Politics

• Underdown, David. Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
• Kishlansky, Mark. A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603–1714. London: Penguin, 1996.
• Fletcher, Anthony, and Peter Roberts (eds.). Religion, Politics and Society in Sixteenth‑Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Further Reading

• Shoemaker, Robert. Gender in English Society, 1650–1850. London: Longman, 1998.
• Capp, Bernard. The World of John Taylor the Water-Poet, 1578–1653. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
• Slack, Paul. Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Longman, 1988.
• Wrightson, Keith. Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain. London: Penguin, 2000.
• • Beier, A.L. Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640. London: Methuen, 1985.

  Archival and Digital Resources

  • British Library, Early English Books Online (EEBO).
  • London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), Apprentice Registers.

The Jason Arday Affair and the Crisis of the University: Identity Politics, the Far Right, and the Class Struggle in the Epoch of Capitalist Breakdown

The compelled resignation of Professor Jason Arday from the University of Cambridge is more than just an academic scandal or a British equivalent of the Claudine Gay controversy at Harvard. It vividly illustrates the political, ideological, and social conflicts tearing apart bourgeois institutions in advanced capitalist nations. The attack on Arday, driven by far-right extremists and enabled by a cowardly university administration, exposes the failure of identity politics, the rising confidence of reactionary forces, and the inability of liberal institutions to uphold their own principles. This event highlights the ongoing crisis of the university under capitalism and emphasises the urgent need for independent, socialist intervention by the working class.

The far‑right offensive and the political logic of the attack

Nathan Cofnas launched the attack on Arday, with writings rooted in scientific racism and eugenics. Cofnas’s claim that, under a true meritocracy, black people would “disappear from almost all high-profile positions" is more of a political statement than an academic argument. It reflects the worldview of a social segment that the right-wing radicalisation of some parts of the petty bourgeoisie and ruling class has empowered.

Cofnas’s use of plagiarism-detection tools was motivated more by political motives than academic rigour. It reflects a strategy described as a “weapon of war” by Christopher Rufo, who spearheaded the campaign against Claudine Gay. The far right has recognised that accusations of plagiarism can be highly damaging: they are sensational, difficult to disprove publicly, and can harm reputations over time. This method serves as a contemporary adaptation of McCarthyite tactics, tailored to the modern bureaucratic and media environment.

The situation with Harvard is precisely analogous. In both instances, a symbolic figure promoted through identity-politics discourse was targeted. Initial ideological critiques did not succeed in removing the individual. Subsequently, plagiarism allegations were used as the key weapon. The institution initially defended the individual but eventually capitulated due to political pressure. This pattern is deliberate, representing a coordinated effort by far-right groups to undermine universities, suppress intellectual activity, and alter the ideological landscape to support authoritarian and nationalist agendas.

The university as a bourgeois institution: prestige without principle

Cambridge’s first response to Arday—condemning the attack as a “vile campaign”—was not a matter of principle. It was a defensive impulse rooted in protecting the institution's own interests. Elite universities are guided by three main goals: safeguarding their prestige, which underpins their financial and political influence; avoiding political issues that could jeopardise relationships with donors, government support, or the media; and projecting moral leadership without implementing any meaningful structural reforms that could threaten their social role.

Once defending Arday politically outweighed the benefits of celebrating him as a diversity milestone, Cambridge withdrew. A similar pattern occurred at Harvard: Gay was a useful symbol—Harvard’s “first Black president”—until she became a liability, after which the symbolism was abandoned. This behaviour does not stem from hypocrisy but reflects the logic of institutions whose main goal is preserving elite privilege. Universities are not advocates for democratic rights; they serve the ruling class, and their focus on “diversity” is secondary to their allegiance to capital.

Identity politics as a mechanism of class rule

The Arday affair highlights a key contradiction in identity politics. Rather than being a genuine movement for social equality, identity politics serves as a political tool used by the ruling class to manage racial and social tensions without changing the fundamental class hierarchy. Its main functions include deflection—allowing institutions to appear progressive while keeping wealth and power distribution the same; containment—redirecting calls for equality into symbolic acts instead of real change; and fragmentation—splitting the working class into racialised groups, weakening solidarity and hiding shared material interests.

Arday’s appointment was highlighted in explicitly racial terms—as Cambridge’s “youngest ever black professor.” However, this celebration was more about branding than a real commitment to racial equality. Cambridge remains largely an institution filled with the children of the British elite. Youth from the working class, regardless of race, are excluded from higher education due to cost. Academic staff face casual employment, excessive workloads, and low pay. Overall, the university’s social role has not shifted.

Identity politics elevates individuals as symbols while leaving the social reality untouched. But symbolic elevation produces symbolic vulnerability. When the far right attacks these individuals, the institutions that elevated them cannot mount a class‑based defence—because they do not operate on class principles. They operate on PR.

The far right and the crisis of liberalism

The far-right attacks on academia go beyond a mere cultural issue. They stem from the larger crisis in liberal capitalism. With social inequality at extreme levels, democratic institutions weakening, and geopolitical tensions rising, parts of the ruling class are inclined to adopt authoritarian approaches. The far right offers ideological support for these approaches by criticising universities, scholars, and democratic principles.

The campaigns targeting Gay and Arday reflect a broader trend: attacks on “critical race theory” across the United States, efforts to purge universities of left-leaning faculty, and campaigns against trans rights, LGBTQ+ students, and progressive curricula. They also include demonising student protests against war, genocide, and austerity. These initiatives serve two main purposes: mobilising reactionary segments of the petty bourgeoisie and intimidating institutions that might oppose authoritarian policies. The universities’ surrender highlights the fragility of liberalism in confronting this offensive.

The working class and the defence of democratic rights

The working class has no real stake in this intra-elite conflict, whether on the far right's campaign against Arday or other factions. The far-right's reactionary stance must be resisted. However, the identity-politics framework that elevated Arday as a symbol is a tool of the ruling class. It causes division among workers, replaces demands for redistribution with representation, and leads opposition into the dead end of bourgeois liberalism. Defending democratic rights on campus cannot rely on university administrations, which have repeatedly shown they will sacrifice individuals and principles to protect their financial interests.

A working-class perspective entails defending academic freedom and opposing politically motivated purges. It calls for unity among workers against racialised frameworks that hide common material interests. Universities should be transformed into institutions that serve social needs rather than corporate or state power. It also emphasises independent mobilisation of students, academic staff, and broader worker groups. The fight against racism is inseparable from the fight against capitalism, as racism is not an anomaly but a structural aspect of capitalist societies, used to divide workers and legitimise exploitation.

The deeper historical contradiction

The Arday and Gay cases highlight a core instability in elite liberal institutions: they depend on identity politics for legitimacy. This approach creates symbolic figures that attract the far right, which then weaponises these symbols to attack the institution. In response, the institution sacrifices individuals to defend itself. This recurring cycle persists because the fundamental class conflict remains unresolved. The university cannot be fundamentally changed by diversity initiatives alone; true transformation requires dismantling the capitalist system that informs its operations.

Conclusion: Toward a socialist transformation of the university

The Arday incident serves as a warning, highlighting the rise in confidence among the far right, the timidity of liberal institutions, and the failure of identity politics. It exposes the fragility of intellectual life within capitalism and emphasises the need for socialist intervention. The working class must defend democratic rights, not merely as a supplement to liberalism but as part of a larger effort to rebuild society based on equality, rational planning, and human needs. The university should be revitalised as a centre for critical thinking, scientific research, and cultural progress—rather than becoming a tool for the ruling class's branding or a battleground for reactionary forces. Only through organised, independent action by the working class can the university be restored to fulfil its true historical purpose.

Sources and Bibliography

I. Primary Sources: Statements, Writings, and Documents

• Cofnas, Nathan. Various blog posts and essays on “race realism” and meritocracy, 2018–2024. (Includes statements on racial hierarchy and academic meritocracy.)
• Rufo, Christopher. Public statements and social‑media posts on DEI, Claudine Gay, and “plagiarism as a weapon of war”, 2023–2024.
• Harvard University. Official statements regarding Claudine Gay’s presidency and resignation, December 2023 – January 2024.
• University of Cambridge. Press releases and public statements regarding Jason Arday and responses to plagiarism allegations, 2024.
• Good Law Project. Public commentary on the Arday case and Cambridge’s handling of the allegations, 2024.
• St Edmund’s College, Cambridge. Statement on the termination of Noah Carl’s fellowship, 2019.

II. Secondary Sources: Journalism, Investigations, and Analysis

• The Guardian. Coverage of the Jason Arday case, Cambridge’s response, and broader debates on academic integrity and DEI, 2024.
• The New York Times. Reporting on Claudine Gay, plagiarism allegations, and the political campaign surrounding her resignation, 2023–2024.
• The Washington Post. Analysis of the far‑right network targeting universities and DEI initiatives, 2023–2024.
• Times Higher Education. Articles on academic labour conditions, casualisation, and the political pressures on universities, 2020–2024.
• BBC News. Coverage of the Arday case and Cambridge’s initial defence, 2024.
• Chronicle of Higher Education. Reporting on plagiarism controversies, DEI politics, and far‑right interventions in academia, 2023–2024.

III. Scholarly Works on Identity Politics, Universities, and Class

Identity Politics and Its Critique

• Reed, Adolph. Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene. New Press, 2000.
• Reed, Adolph & Karn, Walter Benn Michaels. “The Trouble with Disparity.” Nonsite, 2021.
• Michaels, Walter Benn. The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. Metropolitan Books, 2006.
• Fraser, Nancy. The Old Is Dying, and the New Cannot Be Born: From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond. Verso, 2019.

Universities under Capitalism

• Collini, Stefan. Speaking of Universities. Verso, 2017.
• Newfield, Christopher. The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.
• Bousquet, Marc. How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation. NYU Press, 2008.
• Giroux, Henry A. Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Haymarket Books, 2014.

Academic Labour and Casualisation

• UCU (University and College Union). Reports on casualisation, pay erosion, and working conditions in UK higher education, 2018–2024.
• Berg, Maggie. The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. University of Toronto Press, 2016.

IV. Historical and Theoretical Works on the Far Right, McCarthyism, and Ideological Struggle

Far‑Right Movements and Ideology

• Mudde, Cas. The Far Right Today. Polity Press, 2019.
• Burleigh, Michael. The Third Reich: A New History. Pan Macmillan, 2001. (For historical context on scientific racism and eugenics.)
• Camus, Renaud & the “Great Replacement” discourse. (Primary texts for understanding contemporary far‑right racial ideology.)

McCarthyism and Academic Purges

• Schrecker, Ellen. No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. Oxford University Press, 1986.
• Robin, Corey. Fear: The History of a Political Idea. Oxford University Press, 2004. (Useful for understanding political intimidation in intellectual life.)

Marxist Theory and Class Analysis

• Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. I–III. (Foundational analysis of class, exploitation, and capitalist social relations.)
• Lenin, V.I. State and Revolution. (On the role of the state and institutions under capitalism.)
• Trotsky, Leon. The Revolution Betrayed. (On bureaucracy, class power, and institutional degeneration.)
• Trotsky, Leon. In Defence of Marxism. (On political method and class analysis.)
• International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). Various statements on identity politics, the far right, and the crisis of capitalism, 2015–2024.

V. Contextual Sources: Cambridge, Harvard, and Elite Institutions

• Cambridge University Equality & Diversity Office. Reports on diversity initiatives and representation, 2015–2024.
• Harvard Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion. DEI frameworks and institutional mission statements, 2018–2024.
• Sutton Trust. Reports on social mobility, elite universities, and class stratification in UK higher education, 2010–2024.
• OECD. Education at a Glance (annual reports). (Data on access, inequality, and funding structures.)

VI. Additional Sources on Plagiarism, Academic Integrity, and Media Dynamics

• Bretag, Tracey. “Challenges in Addressing Plagiarism in Higher Education.” Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 2019.
• Posner, Richard. The Little Book of Plagiarism. Pantheon, 2007.
• Marwick, Alice. Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online. Data & Society Research Institute, 2017. (On far‑right media ecosystems.)
• Phillips, Whitney. The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists. Data & Society, 2018.

 

 

A Life Measured Against the Fiction: On Steven Zipperstein’s Philip Roth: Stung by Life

The withdrawal of Blake Bailey’s authorised biography of Philip Roth—by its publisher in 2021 amid allegations against Bailey—created an unusual silence around this major American writer. Despite its flaws, Bailey’s book was the result of years of archival work; its absence left Roth without a significant biography at a crucial moment when his role in postwar American literature was being reevaluated. Steven J. Zipperstein’s "Philip Roth: Stung by Life" offers a different approach: it’s shorter, more literary, and less focused on the grievances, affairs, and disputes that characterised Bailey’s work. This shift is, in many ways, welcome. However, it also highlights the limitations of biography when it relies mainly on close reading rather than on a broader understanding of the social context that shaped Roth and influenced his distinctive perspective.

Roth and the biographical problem of postwar American fiction

Zipperstein, a historian of Russian and American Jewish life, approaches Roth through the fiction rather than through the chronology of affairs, quarrels and grievances that dominated Bailey’s volume. This is a welcome shift. Roth spent six decades constructing a hall of mirrors—Portnoy, Kepesh, Tarnopol, Zuckerman—designed precisely to frustrate any biographer who attempted to extract a stable “real” Roth from the novels. Bailey’s method, which treated the fiction as a lightly disguised diary, flattened both the life and the work.

Zipperstein avoids this pitfall, but his alternative introduces another. To understand Roth “through his work” might risk replacing historical context with literary admiration. Roth was more than a skilled stylist interested in erotic humiliation and family ambivalence. His fiction documents a specific social group's evolution: the American Jewish middle class shifting from immigrant tenements in Newark to careers, suburbs, universities, and the culture industry. This trajectory—characterised by upward mobility, deradicalisation, and integration into postwar American capitalism—is essential to Roth’s significance. Without this perspective, his novels might appear as psychological curiosities rather than evidence of substantial social change.

What Zipperstein sees clearly

The book's strengths are evident in the author's focus on Roth’s discipline, reading habits, and continual self-revision. Instead of listing Roth’s achievements, the author emphasises the writer’s intellectual development and the debates—whether with critics, the Jewish establishment, or his early works—that influenced his writing. The analysis of The Ghost Writer as a reflection on literary inheritance is insightful, and the author is honest enough to admit that not all of Roth’s books are successful. This approach, which avoids saint-like admiration, is refreshing.

Zipperstein’s treatment of Roth’s complex relationship with American Jewish identity is equally insightful. The 1962 Yeshiva University confrontation, the repeated accusations of “self-hatred,” and Roth’s critique of his community’s parochialism are placed in their correct historical setting. "Goodbye, Columbus" and Roth’s early stories are interpreted not as personal confessions but as pointed social satire—biting, unsettling, and aimed at a burgeoning ethnic middle class concerned with its reputation.

Where the biography—and Roth—encounter their limits

The challenge isn't unique to Zipperstein; it stems from the historical context in which Roth and his peers wrote. Roth’s body of work reflects the end of New Deal liberalism, the rise and fall of the New Left, the Reagan years' backlash, the illusions of the Clinton period, and the post-9/11 era. His novels embody these historical shifts—such as in 'American Pastoral', 'I Married a Communist', and 'The Plot Against America'—but primarily analyse them through personal psychology and family narratives. For instance, McCarthyism's political disaster is depicted as personal betrayal in 'I Married a Communist,' and the decline of industrial America is conveyed through the tragedy of a single family.

This narrowing was not unique to Roth. It reflected a broader shift among a generation of American writers whose political perspectives shrank as early 20th-century mass movements—the socialist press, the CIO, the Jewish labour left—either disintegrated or merged into other entities. The university and the culture industry took over as the primary guardians of literary culture. During this period, the novel grew more introspective, focusing on the psyche and domestic life. Roth’s talent thrived within this context, but these limitations nonetheless influenced him.

A biography that focuses mainly on close reading often shares similar limitations. While Zipperstein clearly highlights Roth’s main concerns, he seldom explores why American fiction from Roth’s time often simplifies complex historical events into personal stories like marriages, affairs, or psychoanalytic sessions. This creates a portrait that is detailed but lacks broader historical context.

Roth’s fiction does not exist in isolation but is closely linked to the wider ideological movement of postwar American capitalism. As the working class lost political power, radical traditions were either suppressed or absorbed, and the middle class became part of the managerial and professional classes; American literature moved away from trying to understand society as a whole. The focus shifted from large issues like class, exploitation, and history to stories about private life. Despite his talent, Roth was influenced by this environment. His novels vividly depict a consciousness that developed within a limited scope. 

The international dimension: a shared contraction of literary horizons

Across the capitalist world, the postwar decades witnessed a profound narrowing of literary consciousness. Roth’s inward turn—toward the psyche, the family, the erotic life—has clear parallels in Europe.

Philip Roth and Günter Grass

Grass’s early works, notably The Tin Drum, arose from the aftermath of fascism and war. As West Germany found stability after the war, his fiction shifted towards allegory and personal recounting. Major political issues facing the German working class—such as rearmament, NATO membership, and radical movement suppression—became secondary to themes of inner guilt and national reflection. While Roth’s Newark is not directly comparable to Grass’s Danzig, both depict writers of great talent working within societies whose political scope was gradually narrowing.

Roth and Italo Calvino

Calvino’s journey—from the neorealist The Path to the Nest of Spiders to the metafictional If on a winter’s night a traveller—reflects the decline of the Italian left. As the PCI moved away from revolutionary politics and adapted to the postwar order, Calvino’s work shifted from social themes to the exploration of formal structures and philosophical ideas. Roth’s hall of mirrors offers a different aesthetic approach. Yet, it is driven by the same historical forces: the decline of mass socialist politics and the rise of intellectual life within universities and the culture industry.

Roth and the British postwar novel

In Britain, writers like Kingsley Amis and John Osborne captured the frustrations of a generation facing Labourism's stagnation and the decline of working-class influence. Their fiction often shifted social conflicts into themes of personal disillusionment, sexual frustration, and domestic disputes. Similarly, Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint reflects this international trend: transforming political conflicts into psychological struggles. Across different countries, a clear pattern emerges. As the working class lost political power, radical traditions were suppressed or absorbed, and the middle class integrated into managerial and professional roles, literature moved away from portraying society as a whole. Instead, it focused on the dramas of private life. Roth excelled within this framework, but he could not escape it.

George Orwell and Roth

George Orwell and Philip Roth stand at opposite poles of 20th‑century literature, not because they contradict one another, but because each exposes a different axis of modern unfreedom. Orwell is the great anatomist of political illusion, the writer who understood with surgical clarity how power corrupts language and how corrupted language, in turn, corrupts thought. Roth is the great anatomist of personal illusion. This novelist understood that the modern subject is not crushed primarily by the state but by the fantasies, appetites, and self‑deceptions that constitute the American psyche. Orwell writes from the battlefield of ideology; Roth writes from the battlefield of identity. Both terrains are lethal.

Orwell’s writing serves as a moral tool—precise, cold, and straightforward. It is shaped by direct political experiences: imperial Burma, Wigan's slums, and the Spanish trenches. His stories are not meant to escape but to diagnose. Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four go beyond just illustrating Stalinism; they serve as warnings about how power tends to turn into tyranny, how easily language can become a weapon, and how swiftly ordinary people can lose their independence. Orwell’s key point is that political oppression starts with linguistic corruption; once language is distorted, reality inevitably follows.

Roth’s writing, in contrast, bursts with psychological vitality—darkly humorous, sensual, introspective, and frequently self-critical. He aims not to critique the political system but to explore the self, thereby exposing the contradictions within American liberal ideology. Unlike Orwell’s Oceania, Roth’s America is a stage of desire, guilt, ambition, and myth. In works like Portnoy’s Complaint, American Pastoral, and The Human Stain, characters are shaped more by internal struggles and societal pressures than by Big Brother. Roth’s key insight is that the battle over identity begins long before politics come into play; the individual’s self-perception is often more distorted than the truth itself.

Where Orwell insists on moral clarity, Roth insists on psychological complexity. Orwell believes that truth can be defended; Roth believes that truth is always entangled with fantasy. Orwell’s nightmare is the boot stamping on a human face; Roth’s nightmare is the human face staring back from the mirror, unable to recognise itself. Orwell writes to preserve the possibility of collective decency; Roth writes to preserve the possibility of individual authenticity. Orwell’s enemy is the state; Roth’s enemy is the self—and the society that endlessly demands the self be something other than what it is.

Yet their projects converge in one crucial respect: both understand that modern life is a struggle against forces that seek to define us. For Orwell, those forces are external—propaganda, surveillance, authoritarianism. For Roth, they are internal—desire, shame, memory, identity. Orwell warns us how societies collapse into tyranny; Roth warns us how individuals collapse into incoherence. Together they map the full terrain of modern unfreedom: the political and the personal, the public lie and the private delusion.

A partial but valuable contribution

Stung by Life is a marked improvement on its predecessor: judicious, unsentimental, and written with an infectious love of Roth’s sentences. It restores critical distance without losing sympathy. Readers new to Roth will find in it a humane and intelligent guide.

But Roth’s significance lies not only in his literary achievement. His fiction is one of the clearest records of the political and cultural degeneration of postwar American capitalism, and of the transformation of a once‑radical immigrant milieu into a professional class reconciled to the terms of American life. Until a biography confronts that history directly, even the best of them will remain, in the end, only a partial account of the life and the world that shaped it.

The mechanism of deradicalisation. 

The deradicalisation of the American Jewish community was not a passive process; it was achieved through the systematic elimination of leftist influences from trade unions, universities, and cultural life during the Cold War—such as the Hollywood blacklist, the expulsion of Communists from the CIO, loyalty oaths, and FBI harassment. Roth's family was not radical—his father was an insurance broker. Still, the environment he depicted in Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy's Complaint had already been deradicalised by the time he started writing. The Patimkins in Goodbye, Columbus are not former socialists who lost their nerve; they are part of a rising ethnic middle class for whom socialism was never a genuine option. Roth's satire reflects the outcomes of a historical defeat without directly illustrating the defeat itself. This is not a sign of cowardice; rather, it shows that the defeat had been firmly established before he even began his literary career.

The comparison with Mailer offers valuable insights. Andras Gyorgy's 2009 essay on Mailer depicts a writer who maintained direct contact with the revolutionary left—through figures like Jean Malaquais and the Johnson-Forest tendency—and whose journey from Barbary Shore to An American Dream reflects a deliberate, self-aware regression. Mailer was aware of what he was forsaking. Roth, however, never had that to lose. His political perspective was rooted entirely within the postwar settlement, which makes his fiction particularly significant as a reflection: it illustrates the internal experience of narrowing, free from nostalgia or apology, as a fundamental aspect of life.

The main issue centres on the novel's very structure. Traditionally, novels have focused on themes like marriage, coming-of-age stories, and family sagas. The key question is whether this form can evolve to include historical forces as real agents, not just background or triggers for personal narratives. Great 19th-century realists—Balzac, Tolstoy, George Eliot—partly achieved this because they wrote when the connection between individual destiny and social change was still evident in their stories. By the mid-20th century, however, influenced by the Cold War and diminished leftist influence, the American novel largely moved away from trying to portray society as a whole. Roth's talent shone within this narrower scope; he didn’t reshape it. This isn’t criticism—it's a way to contextualise him historically, which is a meaningful form of praise.

A minor point of contention is Zipperstein's remark that he "rarely asks why American fiction of Roth's time often simplifies historical forces into personal stories like marriages, affairs, or psychoanalytic sessions.' This suggests that a more comprehensive biography would pursue this question. However, a biography focusing on a single writer, no matter how extensive, might not be suited to answering such questions. These inquiries belong to literary and social history, involving the broader transformation of American intellectual life post-war—such as the integration of literary culture into universities, the decline of the socialist press and popular front cultural institutions, and the Cold War's influence on thought and writing. A biography attempting to cover these would risk losing its identity or becoming so socially oriented that its structure would break down. The limitation Zipperstein points out may not be a flaw in this biography but rather a limitation of biography itself when addressing a figure whose importance is fundamentally historical.

Stung by Life is a marked improvement on its predecessor: judicious, unsentimental, and written with an infectious love of Roth’s sentences. It restores critical distance without losing sympathy. Readers new to Roth will find in it a humane and intelligent guide.

But Roth’s significance lies not only in his literary achievement. His fiction is one of the clearest records we have of the narrowing of political imagination in postwar American life, and of the transformation of a once‑radical immigrant milieu into a professional class reconciled to the terms of American capitalism. Until a biography confronts that history directly, even the best of them will remain, in the end, only a partial account of the life and the world that shaped it.

This is not a demand that Zipperstein write a different book. It is a reminder that literary biography, however well executed, cannot substitute for a genuinely historical account of the culture that produced—and rewarded—a writer of Roth’s gifts while steadily constricting the imaginative space in which American fiction operated.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary Works by Philip Roth

• Roth, Philip. Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories. Houghton Mifflin, 1959.
• Roth, Philip. Portnoy’s Complaint. Random House, 1969.
• Roth, Philip. The Ghost Writer. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979.
• Roth, Philip. The Counterlife. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986.
• Roth, Philip. American Pastoral. Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
• Roth, Philip. I Married a Communist. Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
• Roth, Philip. The Human Stain. Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
• Roth, Philip. The Plot Against America. Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

Biographies and Critical Studies

• Zipperstein, Steven J. Philip Roth: Stung by Life. Yale University Press, 2025.
• Bailey, Blake. Philip Roth: The Biography. W.W. Norton, 2021.
• Bloom, Harold. Philip Roth. Chelsea House, 2003.
• Royal, Derek. Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author. Praeger, 2005.
• Parrish, Timothy. The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• Shostak, Debra. Philip Roth and the Zuckerman Books: The Making of a Storyworld. Oxford University Press, 2014.

American Jewish History and Postwar Social Context

• Diner, Hasia. The Jews of the United States, 1654–2000. University of California Press, 2004.
• Sachar, Howard. A History of the Jews in America. Vintage, 1993.
• Seltzer, Robert. Jewish People, Jewish Thought: The Jewish Experience in History. Prentice Hall, 1980.
• Wald, Alan. The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti‑Stalinist Left. University of North Carolina Press, 1987.
• Wald, Alan. Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid‑Twentieth‑Century Literary Left. University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
• Buhle, Paul. From the Lower East Side to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture. Verso, 2004.

Postwar American Capitalism and Cultural History

• Brinkley, Alan. The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War. Vintage, 1996.
• Fraser, Steve, and Gary Gerstle, eds. The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980. Princeton University Press, 1989.
• Gerstle, Gary. Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government. Princeton University Press, 2015.
• Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism. Norton, 1979.
• Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Labouring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. Verso, 1997.
• Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991. Vintage, 1994.

International Comparisons: European Postwar Literature

Germany

• Grass, Günter. The Tin Drum. 1959.
• Hermand, Jost. Old Dreams of a New Reich: Völkisch Utopias and National Socialism. Indiana University Press, 1992.
• Gilman, Sander. Jewish Self‑Hatred: Anti‑Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.

Italy

• Calvino, Italo. The Path to the Nest of Spiders. 1947.
• Calvino, Italo. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. 1979.
• Rinaldi, Angelo. Calvino e la sinistra italiana. Einaudi, 1998.
• Forgacs, David. Italian Culture in the Industrial Era, 1880–1980. Manchester University Press, 1990.

France

• Sartre, Jean‑Paul. What Is Literature? 1947.
• Beauvoir, Simone de. The Mandarins. 1954.
• Robbe‑Grillet, Alain. For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction. 1963.
• Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. Penguin, 2005.

Britain

• Amis, Kingsley. Lucky Jim. 1954.
• Osborne, John. Look Back in Anger. 1956.
• Samuel, Raphael. The Lost World of British Communism. Verso, 2006.
• Anderson, Perry. English Questions. Verso, 1992.

Marxist and Socialist Cultural Analysis

• Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution. 1924.
• Trotsky, Leon. Problems of Everyday Life. 1923.
• Mehring, Franz. Karl Marx: The Story of His Life. 1918.
• Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso, 1991.
• Eagleton, Terry. The Illusions of Postmodernism. Blackwell, 1996.
• Eagleton, Terry. The Function of Criticism. Verso, 1984.
• Anderson, Perry. Considerations on Western Marxism. Verso, 1976.

Historical Background: McCarthyism, the New Left, and Postwar Political Culture

• Schrecker, Ellen. Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Princeton University Press, 1998.
• Isserman, Maurice. If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left. Basic Books, 1987.
• Marwick, Arthur. The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States. Oxford University Press, 1998.
• Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. Bantam, 1987.

 

The Age of Hobsbawm: A Historian Without a Reckoning

 

Eric Hobsbawm has historically held a contradictory position in modern history writing: a Marxist who became the most popular historian of capitalism, a lifelong Communist gaining mainstream respectability, and a scholar whose broad analyses of the long nineteenth century were celebrated. At the same time, his political views remained largely unexplored. Fourteen years after his death, this paradox persists. Emile Chabal’s The Age of Hobsbawm, the second comprehensive biography after Richard Evans’s 2019 work, is well-informed, thoroughly researched, but ultimately either unable or unwilling to address the core political issue in Hobsbawm’s life.

An intellectual biography that circles its subject

Chabal aims to craft an intellectual biography rather than a traditional chronological life story, focusing on the ideas, institutions, journals, and networks that influenced Hobsbawm’s worldview. In this focus, the book excels. It highlights Hobsbawm’s international connections—his correspondence with Braudel, his impact on Latin American economists, and his reputation in India and Chile. The author illustrates how Hobsbawm’s intellectual development was deeply linked to the transnational Communist environment of the 1930s and 1940s, and how his later significance was rooted in a cosmopolitan network that extended well beyond the British academic realm.

However, this strength also limits the book. Chabal emphasises intellectual formation but avoids addressing its accountability. The political commitments that shaped Hobsbawm’s life are seen as context rather than issues or contradictions. Consequently, the book offers a detailed portrayal of Hobsbawm’s ideas but largely leaves his political choices unexplored. Eric Hobsbawm’s reputation as the “most widely read Marxist historian of the twentieth century” hinges on a contradiction that not only defines his work but also the course of academic Marxism in Britain. He was a revolutionary historian who refused to challenge the actual revolution of his era; a Marxist who spent his life accommodating the forces that dismantled Marxism; a chronicler of class struggle who ultimately supported New Labour, which ended the last traces of the labour movement. The establishment’s veneration of Hobsbawm is deliberate, indicating how much his Marxism had been weakened.

The Stalinist Imprint: A Political Formation in the Service of Counterrevolution

Hobsbawm’s political formation was shaped more by the bureaucratic structure that suppressed Lenin and Trotsky's legacy than by their revolutionary ideas. He joined the Communist movement in Berlin during the Third Period, a time when the Stalin-controlled KPD labelled Social Democrats as "social fascists” and facilitated Hitler’s rise, effectively aligning with a counterfeit Marxism. This influence persisted throughout his life. He remained committed to the Communist Party of Great Britain until 1991, enduring events like the Moscow Trials, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia. His loyalty was not due to ignorance but a conscious allegiance to an organisation whose crimes he later acknowledged or suspected.

For a historian whose reputation rested on fearless engagement with evidence, this silence was not merely political cowardice. It was a betrayal of the very principles of historical materialism.

The CP Historians Group: Achievement Built on Avoidance

The group of Communist Party historians—Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton, Dona Torr, and Hobsbawm—revolutionised English historiography by emphasising class relations as central to history and creating works of lasting significance. However, their success was marred by a significant omission: they deliberately avoided the twentieth century, especially the Russian Revolution. This was not a mere oversight but stemmed from strict Party discipline, which prohibited honest analysis of Soviet history—an order Hobsbawm adhered to. He authored comprehensive histories of capitalism’s development but steadfastly avoided addressing the socialist revolution that shaped the modern era. This silence remains the most defining aspect of his historiographical legacy.

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 fractured the CP Historians Group, with Thompson, Hill, and others distancing themselves from Stalinism. In contrast, Hobsbawm did not. His later claim that remaining in the Party was only a “biographical question” dismisses the event as insignificant, but it was a political choice with serious consequences. By staying, Hobsbawm accepted the suppression of revolutionary truth as the cost of remaining in the Party. Thompson and Hill gained renewed intellectual energy after 1956, whereas Hobsbawm developed a stronger dedication to the bureaucratic worldview that influenced him.

Hobsbawm’s approach to history—marked by its wide scope and synthesis—was influenced by his political commitments. His works emphasise long-term social and economic patterns rather than individual political actions, focusing on societal structures instead of revolutionary choices. This is intentional, reflecting Stalinism’s ideology of structure devoid of agency, emphasising continuity over change, and viewing history as apolitical. Hobsbawm’s methodology and political views mutually reinforced each other. Consequently, his Marxism lost its revolutionary essence.

Eurocommunism and New Labour: The Final Capitulation

In the 1970s and 1980s, Hobsbawm shifted clearly to the right. His support for Eurocommunism and the Marxism Today group signalled a move away from traditional class politics. His 1978 essay, "The Forward March of Labour Halted," claimed that the working class was no longer the main force for social change—an idea that aligned closely with bourgeois sociology. This essay became a key reference for New Labour, and Tony Blair’s team openly recognised its impact. Hobsbawm even took pride in being called “the Marxist who inspired Blair."

Emile Chabal’s The Age of Hobsbawm sheds light on this capitulation. Chabal explains that Hobsbawm was not just a historian of revolutions but a key figure in an era where Marxism shifted towards cultural critique, academic sociology, and establishment-oriented analysis. His insight is powerful: Hobsbawm was a “revolutionary historian” who experienced revolutions he could not endorse and wrote about ones he could not participate in. His Marxism was global, structural, and analytical, yet never political. He documented capitalism’s growth while avoiding addressing socialism’s crisis. This is the reason the establishment supported him—he posed no challenge to their power.

The Unresolved Legacy: A Marxism Without Revolution

Hobsbawm’s historical work, especially on the long nineteenth century, remains highly influential. Yet, his political journey reveals the shortcomings of a Marxism detached from revolutionary action. Although he dedicated his career to studying revolutions, he avoided engaging with the revolution that truly mattered. Ultimately, he became a respected figure within the very political establishment Marxism sought to overthrow. His legacy is not only contradictory but also reflects the broader trend of twentieth-century academic Marxism—rich in analysis but lacking political vitality.

Chabal thoughtfully acknowledges that Hobsbawm’s Stalinist period is not entirely sanitised. He points out that before 1956, Hobsbawm saw Marxism as a comprehensive ideology and regarded the Soviet Union as its sacred heart. This highlights the almost religious loyalty he held. Additionally, Chabal revisits an episode often overlooked by more favourable accounts: Hobsbawm’s early-1950s review of Jozsef Révai’s pamphlet criticising György Lukács for lacking ideological purity. This was more than just literary critique; it was a form of policing orthodoxy during a time when such accusations had serious consequences.

Chabal stops short of applying the full extent of his critique. The instinct that once pushed the young Hobsbawm to uphold Kremlin cultural policies persisted throughout his career, though in a milder form. His 2007 defence of the Spanish Communist Party’s actions during the Civil War—criticised by Marxists as merely recycling "old Kremlin orthodoxies" and contradicting archival evidence—was not unusual. Instead, it reflected a consistent mindset rooted in the Comintern era that he never fully shed. While Chabal observes these continuities, he does not fully confront or analyse them.

Chabal presents his book as an “ethical act,” especially as the historical field feels under attack. This defensive stance reveals a bias: he admires Hobsbawm’s skills as a communicator but is more lenient towards his Communist past. The political beliefs that influenced Hobsbawm are seen as mere background details rather than crucial to understanding him. The main question—why Hobsbawm stayed in the Communist Party until 1991, despite later condemning Stalinism’s crimes—gets some context but no real analysis. Chabal echoes Hobsbawm’s late statement that this was “a one-off biographical question,” not a political issue. An honest intellectual biography should have challenged this avoidance. Instead, Chabal notes it without critique, reflecting a field hesitant to face its own contradictions.

This does not undermine the book’s valuable insights. Chabal’s detailed analysis of Hobsbawm’s global network offers clear illumination, and his careful interpretation of key texts is more focused than many posthumous reviews. However, like Evans’s earlier work, the book ends with a similar stance: admiration for the historian, discomfort with the Communist, and a lack of serious inquiry into why a scholar so aware of the material forces shaping the nineteenth century seemed unable or unwilling to address the twentieth honestly.

The absence of any reckoning, even fourteen years after Hobsbawm’s death and across two major biographies, is noteworthy. It shows that the historical field is still hesitant to confront the political ties of one of its most renowned figures, preferring to see those ties as quirks rather than fundamental issues. Chabal’s book, despite its merits, ultimately sustains this hesitance. The Age of Hobsbawm offers a meaningful intellectual biography. However, it does not fulfil the political scrutiny Hobsbawm’s life warrants. Until such scrutiny occurs, the core paradox of his legacy will persist, and the profession’s own avoidance of these questions will remain unexamined.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary Works by Eric Hobsbawm

• Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962.
• ——. The Age of Capital: 1848–1875. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975.
• ——. The Age of Empire: 1875–1914. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987.
• ——. The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991. London: Michael Joseph, 1994.
• ——. Interesting Times: A Twentieth‑Century Life. London: Allen Lane, 2002.
• ——. “The Spanish Background.” The Guardian, 12 January 2007.
• ——. Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964.
• ——. Primitive Rebels. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959.
• ——. Bandits. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969.

Primary Communist and Comintern‑Era Material

• Révai, József. The Tasks of Hungarian Literature. Budapest: Szikra, 1951. (English edition with introduction by Eric Hobsbawm.)
• Lukács, György. The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. London: Merlin Press, 1963.
• Lukács, György. Record of a Life. London: Verso, 1983.
• The Communist International: Documents, 1919–1943. Various volumes.

Biographies and Studies of Hobsbawm

• Chabal, Emile. The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2024.
• Evans, Richard J. Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History. London: Little, Brown, 2019.
• Anderson, Perry. “The Ends of History.” New Left Review 193 (1992): 1–20.
• Thompson, E.P. “The Poverty of Theory.” In The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays. London: Merlin Press, 1978.
• Callinicos, Alex. “Hobsbawm’s Century.” International Socialism 100 (2003): 155–166.
• Birchall, Ian. “Hobsbawm and the Spanish Revolution.” International Socialism 114 (2007).

Marxist Critiques of Stalinism and the CPGB

• Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin: A Political Biography. London: Oxford University Press, 1949.
• ——. The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929–1940. London: Oxford University Press, 1963.
• Broué, Pierre. The German Revolution, 1917–1923. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006.
• Harman, Chris. The Fire Last Time: 1968 and After. London: Bookmarks, 1988.
• Cliff, Tony. State Capitalism in Russia. London: Pluto Press, 1974.
• Rees, John. The Algebra of Revolution: The Dialectic and the Classical Marxist Tradition. London: Routledge, 1998.
• Birchall, Ian. The Spectre of Babeuf. London: Pluto Press, 1997.

Historiography and Theory

• Braudel, Fernand. Civilisation and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century. 3 vols. New York: Harper & Row, 1981–84.
• Carr, E.H. What Is History? London: Penguin, 1961.
• Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Victor Gollancz, 1963.
• Anderson, Perry. Considerations on Western Marxism. London: Verso, 1976.
• Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1983.
• Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Studies of the CPGB and British Communism

• Morgan, Kevin. Bolshevism and the British Left. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2006.
• Worley, Matthew. Class Against Class: The Communist Party in Britain Between the Wars. London: I.B. Tauris, 2002.
• Francis, Hywel. Miners Against Fascism: Wales and the Spanish Civil War. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1984.
• McIlroy, John, and Alan Campbell, eds. The Communist Party of Great Britain and the Trade Unions, 1933–1945. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2001.

Spanish Civil War and Communist Strategy

• Graham, Helen. The Spanish Republic at War, 1936–1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
• Preston, Paul. The Spanish Holocaust. London: HarperCollins, 2012.
• Broué, Pierre, and Émile Témime. The Revolution and Civil War in Spain. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006.
• Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia. London: Secker & Warburg, 1938.

Hungary 1956 and Soviet Repression

• Sebestyen, Victor. Twelve Days: The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006.
• Granville, Johanna. The First Domino: International Decision Making During the Hungarian Crisis of 1956. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004.
• Lukács, György. The Lukács Reader. Edited by Arpad Kadarkay. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.

General Works on Stalinism and the Twentieth Century

• Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror. London: Macmillan, 1968.
• Getty, J. Arch, and Oleg Naumov. The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self‑Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
• Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Everyday Stalinism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
•  

 

 

 

 

 

Diary of a Nobody and Some News From Nowhere

In recent months, both of my websites have undergone a transformation that I could not have anticipated even a year ago. What began as a modest corner of the internet — a place to publish essays, polemics, and historical reflections — has suddenly become a destination for thousands of readers across the world. Yesterday alone brought 6,000 hits, a figure that would once have seemed fantastical. If this trajectory continues, the month’s total will exceed 70,000. For a project built slowly, often in solitude, this surge feels both surreal and strangely vindicating.

Several forces have converged to produce this moment. The most obvious is the political climate. Periods of instability always drive people back to history, theory, and analysis that can explain the world’s accelerating contradictions. My work, rooted in Marxist historiography and the long arc of revolutionary movements, has found itself unexpectedly aligned with the needs of a growing audience.

Another catalyst arrived unexpectedly: two of the world’s most influential Marxists, David North and Joseph Kishore, followed my Twitter account. Their interest acted as a signal, prompting thousands of politically engaged readers to explore my work. On the very first day of this surge, visitors from 32 countries arrived — a reminder that political inquiry is now global, and that the questions raised by the English Revolution, the Levellers, Winstanley, or Trotsky resonate far beyond Britain.

A further transformation has come from technology. The integration of AI into my research and editorial workflow has been nothing short of revolutionary. Socialism AI on the WSWS has sharpened the political edge of my work. Copilot and Claude have accelerated the research process to a degree I would once have considered impossible. Tasks that previously required days or weeks — collating sources, structuring arguments, revising drafts — can now be completed within hours. The bottleneck is no longer labour but thought itself.

This acceleration has made possible a project I have long postponed: a complete rewrite of the entire archive. Beginning with the earliest essays from 2008, I am now working through 2012. Many of these pieces were written quickly, often under pressure, and with limited resources. They deserve better. Some of the more substantial articles will be republished later this year in significantly improved form.

Two major rewrites deserve mention. My BA dissertation — previously weak and not up to the subject — has been completely revised, incorporating the latest historiography and a more rigorous analytical framework. Likewise, my work on Raphael Samuel, originally part of an incomplete Master’s degree, has been revised to a standard I can finally accept. There is a real possibility that this material may develop into a book. Samuel’s relationship to working‑class history, memory, and radical historiography aligns closely with my own intellectual trajectory.

The Why I Write series has also been fully edited and is now fit for publication. It may be time to add new essays to this collection, reflecting the changes in my work and the political moment.

A CALL FOR CONTRIBUTORS

This website has never been a passive repository of historical curiosities. It is a platform built in the tradition of the Levellers, the Chartists, the early Marxists, and every working‑class intellectual who refused to accept the official version of history. It exists to challenge the complacency of academic orthodoxy, to expose the distortions of bourgeois historiography, and to confront the political lies that saturate public life.

The present moment demands more voices, not fewer.

If you are a historian, a socialist, a researcher, a polemicist, or simply someone who refuses to accept the intellectual poverty of mainstream commentary, I invite you to contribute. The only requirement is seriousness — seriousness about history, seriousness about politics, and seriousness about the working class as the decisive force in world events.

I am not looking for polite essays that tiptoe around the truth. I am looking for writers who understand that history is a battleground, that ideas have consequences, and that the struggle for clarity is inseparable from the struggle for emancipation. If you have something to say — about the English Revolution, the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, the rise of fascism, the crisis of capitalism, or the lived experience of the working class today — then say it here.

This platform is growing. The readership is international. The political situation is accelerating. If you have been waiting for the right moment to write, that moment has arrived.

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The Yahoo Boys: A Portrait of Global Loneliness and the Criminality of Capitalism

Carlos Barragán’s The Yahoo Boys offers a disturbing yet insightful look into the world of investigative journalism. It explores one of the most grotesque consequences of the global capitalist crisis: Nigerian online romance scammers who prey on the loneliness and desperation of individuals in wealthy countries. The book avoids sensationalism and moral judgment, instead providing a sober, humane, and often harrowing account of young men in Lagos who turn to cyber-fraud because legitimate avenues for social mobility have collapsed.

Amid the deepening contradictions of global capitalism, this book explores the increasingly grotesque and tragic behaviours these contradictions produce. Based on six months of reporting in Lagos, it delves into the lives of the “Yahoo Boys”: young Nigerians who make a living by executing online romance scams targeting lonely individuals in Europe and the U.S. However, Barragán’s observations—often despite his own framing—reveal more than a typical crime story; they depict the social ruin caused by imperialist influence, structural adjustment, and capitalism’s fragmentation of daily life.

The book starts with a personal injury: Barragán’s mother, alone in Madrid, is tricked by a fake American soldier named “Brian.” The con artist is never caught. Instead, Barragán discovers a generation of Nigerian youth drawn into an underground digital economy after the formal economy has been systematically broken down. The “Yahoo Boys” are not anomalies but expected outcomes of IMF, World Bank, and multinational oil policies that have exploited Nigeria’s resources and left millions unemployed and in poverty.

Barragán portrays four scammers — Biggy, Chibuike, Azeez, and Richie — with striking specificity. Rather than caricatures of criminality, they appear as young men forced into a form of labour after other options have been shut off. Azeez, a tailor’s apprentice, faces the brutal arithmetic of survival in a country where inflation has made honest work untenable. Richie bears the psychological weight of a scam that ended in a victim’s death. In their world, the platforms of global capital — Tinder, Instagram, Apple IDs, and gift cards — become the only viable labour market.

The "Yahoo Boys": A Product of Imperialist Plunder and Capitalist Decay

This reality affects a generation whose future has been damaged by imperialist reforms. Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, has experienced decades of structural adjustment policies that have dismantled public services, privatised state assets, and put international financial interests above development. Consequently, many young people are seen as surplus to capital’s needs—often turning to digital fraud as a risky occupation. The “Yahoo Boys'—young Nigerians engaged in online scams like advance-fee fraud, romance fraud, and business email compromise—are often seen by bourgeois commentators as a moral crisis, a cultural failing, or issues stemming from weak law enforcement. However, a Marxist perspective reveals that they are not an anomaly. Instead, they are a predictable result of Nigeria’s systemic exploitation by imperialism and its local comprador bourgeoisie.

The economic reality that produces them

Nigeria, Africa’s biggest oil producer and most populous nation, has earned hundreds of billions of dollars from oil since gaining independence. However, as documented by the WSWS, Nigeria captures only about 10–15 per cent of the crude's value at the wellhead. The remaining 80–90 per cent—generated through refining, petrochemicals, logistics, and finance—is siphoned off offshore by transnational corporations. Nigeria exports raw crude oil, and then imports refined gasoline at higher prices. According to Jean Shaoul's detailed June 2026 analysis of Africa's political economy, Nigeria exemplifies a system in which every profitable part of the oil value chain is systematically externalised.

The concrete consequences have been devastating. Nigeria’s oil sector employs less than 1 per cent of its 70-million-strong workforce — about 20,000 to 65,000 direct workers. In the 1970s and 1980s, the influx of petrodollars inflated the currency, made domestic goods uncompetitive, and gutted agriculture and manufacturing. Textile employment collapsed from 350,000 jobs to just 25,000, with nothing to replace what was lost. The result is mass unemployment — officially 27 per cent, and far higher among young people — while 102 million people, more than half the population, live in poverty.

The Yahoo Boys phenomenon originates from the economic marginalisation faced by many young Nigerians, many of whom are university graduates with skills, ambition, internet access, and fluency in English. Despite these assets, they encounter limited legitimate job opportunities. As a result, they are forced to choose between honest employment and criminal activity, or develop alternative survival strategies within an economy intentionally designed to exclude them.

The comprador state and the real criminals

Nigeria’s ruling class—a comprador bourgeoisie acting as an intermediary layer that benefits from foreign capital—continues to oversee this social disaster while accumulating vast personal wealth. Aliko Dangote is Africa’s richest individual, and Nigeria’s four billionaires have experienced a significant increase in their fortunes. Meanwhile, the government depends on police units like the infamous SARS (Special Anti-Robbery Squad), which has been linked to extortion, kidnapping, torture, and extrajudicial killings. These abuses overwhelmingly target young people aged 18 to 35, as documented by WSWS during the 2020 EndSARS protests.

The extent of theft by Nigeria's ruling class—whether through embezzling state funds, corruptly granting oil concessions to transnational corporations, or systematically siphoning public revenue into private accounts—far exceeds what Yahoo Boys could achieve. The key difference is that this form of theft is legal and often celebrated, while internet fraud is criminalised and penalised. Ironically, the very state condemning internet fraud is actually the largest criminal enterprise in Nigeria.

Not a revolutionary force, but a symptom

None of this is to romanticise the Yahoo Boys. Their activity is not a form of anti-imperialist resistance. It is an individualistic, lumpen response to social conditions that preys indiscriminately on working people abroad while enriching a layer of young men who often flaunt their wealth in ways that reproduce the values of the very bourgeoisie that has destroyed their country. The Yahoo Boys do not challenge the system — they aspire to join its beneficiaries.

The moral condemnation of Nigerian cybercriminals by the Nigerian government and Western media is deeply hypocritical. The same imperialist nations criticising these hackers have corporations that drain Nigeria's resources, making honest work impossible. Similarly, Nigerian officials who vow to crack down are often the ones who have looted the treasury. The Yahoo Boys' actions reflect a broken social system, not its root problem. Tackling this issue requires more than increased police, surveillance, or moral lectures. True change involves societal transformation through socialism—taking control of oil from multinational and local partners, organising Nigeria's productive sectors to create decent jobs for everyone, and building global worker solidarity to oppose capitalism, which causes poverty and crime. Nigerian youth don’t need sermons; they need a revolution.

Barragán’s access to these young men — their routines, chat logs, and self-justifications — enables an account that is both intimate and socially devastating. Rather than cartoon villains, they emerge as people shaped by intolerable conditions: mass unemployment, decaying infrastructure, and the extreme inequality that marks Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy and one of its most fractured societies.

Loneliness as a global commodity

Barragán’s notable insight is that the Yahoo Boys have harnessed a new resource for global capitalism: loneliness. In Europe and the U.S., years of social fragmentation, declining living standards, and weakened community ties have left millions feeling isolated. Scammers exploit this vulnerability with precision, weaving complex tales of love, military duties, grief, and financial hardship. Their targets are mainly working-class individuals — pensioners, widows, insecure workers, and others pushed aside by social structures — who seek connection. These scams succeed because capitalism has fostered significant social dislocation in the West.

Barragán does not excuse the scammers, but he refuses to reduce them to moral aberrations. Their actions grow out of the catastrophic failure of Nigerian capitalism: staggering youth unemployment, unreliable electricity, underfunded education, entrenched corruption, and a ruling elite enriched by oil revenues and foreign investment while abandoning an entire generation. In this context, cyber-fraud becomes a rational, if destructive, means of survival. The Yahoo Boys often justify themselves by invoking colonialism and global inequality — “We are taking back what the West stole” — but this pseudo-radical rhetoric collapses under scrutiny. Their victims are not imperialist governments or multinational corporations, but ordinary working people. The scams do not redistribute wealth; they transfer suffering from one section of the global working class to another.

Barragán’s book unintentionally highlights the limited capacity of individual actions during social collapse. The Yahoo Boys see themselves as rebelling against the global system. Yet, they rely entirely on its infrastructure: Western social media, international payment platforms, Chinese gift-card resellers, and the interconnected digital networks that sustain the global economy. Their form of "resistance” is more parasitic than revolutionary, leaving Nigeria’s ruling elite unaffected, failing to challenge imperialism, and ultimately worsening the social fragmentation and cynicism that capitalism fosters. The scammers are not opponents of the system but rather its desperate, informal offshoots.

The Yahoo Boys and the World Capitalist Swindle

One of the most revealing parts of the book details a gift card taken from a victim in the U.S. It travels through Nigerian middlemen, is laundered on online marketplaces, and finally ends up with Chinese vendors. This chain reveals how modern capitalism encompasses even fraudulent romance as part of a global system of value extraction. Barragán’s investigation demonstrates that cybercrime isn’t separate from capitalism. Still, a sign of its decline: the same issues—unemployment, inequality, and social collapse—that give rise to the Yahoo Boys are present worldwide in various forms.

Barragán’s reporting clearly illustrates this labour process. The Yahoo Boys establish their own division of tasks, terminology, and social structures. They are skilled in algorithms, adaptable, and entrepreneurial within the limited scope allowed by their environment. Their main offering is manufactured intimacy — a commodity derived from Western victims’ loneliness. The book’s most referenced line, “white men pay fast, but white women pay long,” is not a joke but an insightful market analysis by workers who have become experts in the emotional economies of the global North.

The Yahoo Boys are more than just Nigerian romance scammers; they represent a part of the worldwide cybercrime scene, which has emerged from neoliberalism’s fallout and is driven by the despair of millions left behind by capitalism. These individuals are not exotic criminals, but the marginalised children of a global system that provides them with no prospects. The young men Barragán encounters in Lagos are products of a society eroded by years of IMF austerity measures, oil industry exploitation, and a parasitic Nigerian bourgeoisie. Youth unemployment is dire; education systems are failing; infrastructure is minimal. In such circumstances, cyber-fraud shifts from being a moral issue to a necessary survival tactic. However, Lagos is just one part of a worldwide network. West Africa is known for romance scams and “419” fraud; Southeast Asia hosts large-scale scam operations dependent on trafficked labour; Eastern Europe produces ransomware and other cybercrimes; China engages in money laundering through extensive grey markets; and the West provides both victims and digital infrastructure. This situation isn't traditional crime but rather the informal labour market characteristic of modern capitalism.

Barragán’s key insight is that the Yahoo Boys exploit loneliness, which is the West’s often overlooked epidemic. Years of social fragmentation, declining living standards, and weakening community bonds have driven millions into isolation. These scammers do more than take money; they demand emotional effort, offering digital intimacy to those left behind by society. Their victims are not affluent elites but pensioners, widows, and insecure workers — all victims of the same system that created the scammers.

The Yahoo Boys and the Pseudo‑Lefts

Carlos Barragán’s The Yahoo Boys highlights the social crisis in Nigeria. Still, its true meaning becomes clear when viewed in the context of the politics of developed capitalist nations, especially the pseudo-left’s role. The Yahoo Boys—young Nigerians resorting to digital scams to survive—are not just a social anomaly but a sign of capitalism’s worldwide crisis, a reality that the pseudo-left has often hidden with identity politics, moralism, and middle-class focus.

Barragán’s book highlights two interconnected tragedies: the decline of youth in Lagos and the profound loneliness of millions in the West. Both stem from the same global system. However, the pseudo-left—comprising NGOs, academic radicals, lifestyle progressives, and those aligned with the US Democratic Party or Labour’s Blairite and soft-left factions in Britain—refuses to see this link. It attributes Nigerian suffering to “corruption,” “bad governance,” or “postcolonial trauma,” while dismissing Western workers' pain as “toxic masculinity,” “misinformation,” or “individual vulnerability.” In each case, the underlying class dynamics of the crisis are often hidden.

The pseudo‑lefts’ moralism: a substitute for analysis

The pseudo-left often reacts to phenomena like the Yahoo Boys with either moral condemnation or nostalgic pity. They label the scammers as misogynists, exploiters, or “digital predators,” while also romanticising them as victims of “global inequality.” In both perspectives, the scammers’ class background is overlooked. Instead of viewing them as products of systemic issues like IMF-driven structural adjustments, resource exploitation, and the decline of Nigeria’s industrial sector, they are cast as characters in a moral story.

This moral stance is deliberate, representing the beliefs of a privileged middle class whose material gains rely on maintaining capitalism. The pseudo-lefts refuse to recognise the structural causes of the Yahoo Boys' rise, because admitting this would reveal the influence of Western imperialism — encompassing the institutions they back, the governments they choose, and the NGOs they fund — in fostering the environment that pushes Nigerian youth into digital fraud.

Pseudo-left groups often analyse global inequality primarily through identity politics. They describe Nigeria’s crisis as “Black suffering,” “postcolonial wounds,” or “racial capitalism,” instead of pointing to specific causes like IMF conditionalities, currency devaluations, privatisation, and the exploitation of oil wealth by multinational corporations. This racialised framing serves a clear purpose: it enables them to criticise “whiteness” while ignoring the broader global mechanisms of capital.

In this perspective, the Yahoo Boys are seen not as products of structural adjustment but as symbols of “Black resistance,” “hustle culture,” or “diasporic survival.” Their victims, typically older Western women, are often dismissed as manifestations of “white fragility” or “privilege,” instead of being recognised as victims of neoliberal atomization that has dismantled unions, communities, and social supports. Consequently, identity politics serves its main ideological role: dividing the working class into racial, gendered, and cultural segments and hindering a unified understanding of the global crisis.

Barragán highlights the deep loneliness experienced by Western victims, many of whom send money to scammers over years due to their near-total isolation. The pseudo-lefts interpret this loneliness as a psychological issue — labelling it as “emotional labour,” “gendered vulnerability,” or “digital manipulation” — but fail to see it as a class issue caused by capitalism’s dismantling of collective institutions.

The pseudo-lefts often deny this truth because they have historically supported policies like privatisation, austerity, union-busting, and promoting 'flexibility,' which have contributed to social atomization. Their politics tend to originate from the professional-managerial class, which has gained materially from neoliberal reforms while claiming to champion 'social justice.” The Yahoo Boys are not rare exceptions but are emblematic of a global system that creates excess populations in the Global South and marginalises groups in the Global North. They are workers pushed into digital black markets due to the collapse of formal economies; their victims are those whose social structures have been broken down. The pseudo-lefts avoid confronting this reality because it reveals their own complicity. Having abandoned meaningful critiques of capitalism, they resort to moral performances, academic jargon, and outrage that lacks deep analysis. As a result, class struggle is replaced by identity politics, internationalism by NGO-driven humanitarianism, and socialism by lifestyle choices.

The Yahoo Boys are more than just criminals; they are victims of imperialism, and their victims are not simply naïve but also victims of social fragmentation. These scams reflect a worldwide crisis that the ruling class fails to address effectively. The same forces behind widespread unemployment in Nigeria also foster loneliness in Europe and the U.S. Similarly, digital platforms that facilitate gig economy exploitation also support romance scam schemes. The capitalist system that erodes livelihoods in Lagos is equally responsible for breaking social ties in Los Angeles.

Barragán’s book is important because it provides essential insight into this crisis. It offers a detailed account of what occurs when a generation excluded from formal jobs resorts to the only available labour market. However, this description must be linked to the broader history of imperialist control, structural adjustments, and the breakdown of capitalist society. Only through this context can the true significance of the Yahoo Boys be understood.

Moral condemnation, police crackdowns, and digital literacy campaigns are insufficient solutions to the worldwide crisis that yields both scammers and victims. This crisis can only be addressed by dismantling the economic system that has resulted in surplus populations, broken communities, and the commodification of intimacy. The Yahoo Boys are not exceptions but signals of a future where millions more could be forced into similar survival strategies unless a united international working class acts to overthrow the system behind this disaster.

Barragán’s achievement

The strength of The Yahoo Boys lies in its refusal to dehumanise its subjects. Barragán shows their contradictions, cruelty, humour, aspirations, and failures. He avoids romanticising or demonising them, instead placing them within the context of a broader crisis affecting a world system incapable of providing stable, meaningful lives for billions. In this way, the book aligns with the tradition of honest, socially conscious reporting praised by the WSWS for films like Eyimofe. It dismisses exoticism and moral panic, focusing instead on a straightforward analysis of the conditions that shape human behaviour.

The Yahoo Boys is more than just a book about Nigerian scammers; it explores the worldwide crisis of capitalism—a system that fosters loneliness in the West and desperation in the Global South, linking both through exploitation and deception. Barragán’s work should be seen not as a crime story but as a warning: when society neglects its youth, leaves millions hopeless, and commodifies human relationships, the consequences will be destructive, unpredictable, and deeply destabilising.

Sources and Bibliography

Books and Monographs

Ake, Claude. Democracy and Development in Africa. Brookings Institution Press, 1996. A foundational critique of how structural adjustment destroyed African developmental capacity.

Amin, Samir. Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism. Monthly Review Press, 1976. Classic analysis of dependency and the global division of labour.

Barragán, Carlos. The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026. Primary text under review.

Bello, Walden. The Food Wars. Verso, 2009. Useful for understanding how IMF/World Bank policies create surplus populations.

Berman, Bruce. Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya. James Currey, 1990. A model for analysing colonial labour structures that applies to Nigeria’s postcolonial trajectory.

Brenner, Robert. The Economics of Global Turbulence. Verso, 2006. Key text on the long downturn and global capitalist restructuring.

Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff. Theft of History. Cambridge University Press, 2006. Important for understanding the commodification of identity and pseudo‑left cultural politics.

Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. Verso, 2006. Essential for situating Lagos within global patterns of urban immiseration.

Ferguson, James. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Duke University Press, 2006. A central text for understanding how neoliberalism produces informal economies.

Gore, Charles. The Rise and Fall of Structural Adjustment. Oxford University Press, 2021. Directly relevant to Nigeria’s economic collapse.

Guyer, Jane. Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa. University of Chicago Press, 2004. Important for understanding informal monetary economies.

Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, 2005. Key text on the global restructuring that produced both Nigerian immiseration and Western loneliness.

Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Managed Heart: Commercialisation of Human Feeling. University of California Press, 1983. Useful for theorising the “manufacture of intimacy” as labour.

Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine. Metropolitan Books, 2007. On the political logic of IMF/World Bank interventions.

Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume I. Penguin Classics, 1990. Foundational for understanding surplus populations, labour markets, and exploitation.

Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. University of California Press, 2001. Useful for understanding the political economy of African states under neoliberalism.

Meagher, Kate. Identity Economics: Social Networks and the Informal Economy in Nigeria. James Currey, 2010. Directly relevant to Yahoo Boys’ informal labour networks.

Sassen, Saskia. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Harvard University Press, 2014. On how global capitalism produces surplus populations.

Standing, Guy. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. Useful for situating Yahoo Boys within global precarity.

Tilly, Charles. Coercion, Capital, and European States. Wiley‑Blackwell, 1992. For understanding state formation and disintegration under capitalism.

Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Routledge, 2001. Useful for contrasting moral framings of labour with materialist analysis.

Articles and Reports

Adesina, Jimi O. “Rethinking African Development: Beyond Impoverishing Adjustment.” Journal of International Development 16, no. 6 (2004): 825–846. On the destructive impact of structural adjustment.

Akinyoade, Akinyinka, and Chibuike Uche. “Oil and the Rentier State in Nigeria.” African Affairs 115, no. 459 (2016): 1–23. On oil extraction and elite capture.

Burgis, Tom. “The Looting Machine.” Financial Times, 2015. Investigative reporting on multinational extraction in Nigeria.

Guyer, Jane. “Marginal Gains and Monetary Transactions in Africa.” Africa 74, no. 3 (2004): 389–405. On informal economies.

International Monetary Fund. Nigeria: Structural Adjustment Program Review. IMF Country Report, various years. Primary documentation of IMF policies.

Meagher, Kate. “Informal Economies and the State in Africa.” African Studies Review 47, no. 1 (2004): 1–15, on informal labour networks.

Nwankwo, Chima. “Youth Unemployment and Informal Economies in Lagos.” Journal of Modern African Studies 57, no. 2 (2019): 245–268. Directly relevant to Yahoo Boys.

World Bank. Nigeria Economic Update. Various years. On inflation, unemployment, and currency crises.

Digital Labour, Scamming Economies, and Platform Capitalism

Abidin, Crystal. “Digital Intimacy and Platform Labour.” Social Media + Society 4, no. 3 (2018). Useful for theorising intimacy as labour.

Brunton, Finn, and Helen Nissenbaum. Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest. MIT Press, 2015. On digital deception as a rational response to surveillance capitalism.

Gershon, Ilana. “The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media.” Cornell University Press, 2010. On digital intimacy and loneliness.

Marwick, Alice. “The Public Domain: Social Media and the Commodification of Attention.” New Media & Society 15, no. 3 (2013). On attention economies.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs, 2019. On platform capitalism’s extraction of human behaviour.

Pseudo‑Lefts, Identity Politics, and the Professional‑Managerial Class

Brenner, Johanna. “Identity Politics and the Left.” Monthly Review 48, no. 2 (1996). Classic critique of identity politics.

Fraser, Nancy. “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump.” American Affairs 1, no. 4 (2017): 46–64. On the alliance between the pseudo‑left and neoliberalism.

Lind, Michael. The New Class War. Atlantic Books, 2020. On the professional‑managerial class.

Reed, Adolph. “The Limits of Anti‑Racism.” Left Business Observer, 2000. Foundational critique of pseudo‑left racial politics.

Reed, Adolph, and Walter Benn Michaels. “The Trouble with Disparity.” Jacobin, 2015. On how identity politics obscures class.

WSWS Editorial Board. Various analyses on identity politics, pseudo‑left tendencies, and global capitalism. Essential for the political framing.

Historical and Theoretical Foundations

Lenin, V. I. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. For understanding global extraction and surplus populations.

Luxemburg, Rosa. The Accumulation of Capital. On capitalism’s need for external markets and the creation of surplus populations.

Trotsky, Leon. The Permanent Revolution. On uneven and combined development — crucial for understanding Nigeria’s position.

Trotsky, Leon. History of the Russian Revolution. Methodologically relevant for analysing class forces.