Milton: Poetry & Revolution By: Andrew Milner- A Redwords revolutionary Pocketbook 2026 £5

“Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:

England hath need of thee: she is a fen

Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,

Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,

Have forfeited their ancient English dower

Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;

O raise us up, return to us again,

And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.”

William Wordsworth

“For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”

― John Milton, Areopagitica

“Milton, for example, who wrote Paradise Lost, was an unproductive worker. In contrast, the writer who delivers hackwork for his publisher is a productive worker. Milton produced Paradise Lost in the way that a silkworm produces silk, as the expression of his own nature. Later on, he sold the product for £5 and, to that extent, became a dealer in a commodity.”

Karl Marx

“Life is not an easy matter…. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.”

― Leon Trotsky, Diary in Exile, 1935

To say that this small book of just 47 pages has gone under the radar would be an understatement. A Google and Bing search has produced no mention, reviews, or even an image of the book cover. A scenario that would not look out of place in Stalin’s Russia or in George Orwell’s 1984. This is all the stranger since Andrew Milner is a significant scholar and has produced a substantial amount of work on John Milton.

John Milton (1608–1674) is best known for Paradise Lost. He was also a vigorous political writer (Areopagitica, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates) who defended freedom of conscience and republican principles in the English Revolution. For any reader, Milton’s work is historically and culturally useful. He illuminates the ideas and political disputes of the 17th‑century bourgeois revolution in England, the rise of parliamentary power, and the ideological roots of modern notions of liberty and censorship.

Milner is a member of the British Socialist Workers Party and a Marxist literary scholar who has situated John Milton’s poetry and prose within the political and social context of the English Revolution. In this small book, Milner seeks to show how Milton’s imagery, rhetoric and political tracts are bound up with the emergent class formations, religious conflicts and ideological struggles of seventeenth‑century England. He is primarily known as a literary and cultural theorist; his work deals with ideology, culture, and intellectual history. His work addresses ideology, aesthetics and the left’s intellectual history. That terrain is important because ideology shapes class consciousness, and the battle over ideas is a necessary front in the class struggle.

However, cultural analysis alone cannot substitute for a rigorous political-economic account of property relations, surplus appropriation and class power. Classical Marxism holds that consciousness is rooted in material conditions; therefore, cultural critiques must be integrated into analyses of the social relations of production and the balance of class forces. Milton’s poetry and prose are embedded in the English revolutionary conjuncture. His biblical epic and tragic forms are works where he questions authority, liberty, and social order. Milner reads Milton’s theological motifs as ideological representations tied to emergent bourgeois and republican tendencies, while also acknowledging the contradictions and ambiguities in Milton’s voice.

Milner’s body of work, including this book, situates the poet within the political and social convulsions of the English Revolution. For any reader, Milton’s poetry and prose are productive areas for analysing how class conflict, ideology, and revolutionary consciousness are represented, contested and mythologised in literature. Studying Milton through Milner’s revolutionary eyes teaches how literature both reflects and shapes class consciousness.

Socialist Workers Party

At this point, it is worth examining Milner’s politics. Milner, as was said, is a member of the British SWP, which does not represent orthodox Marxism. Along with comrades in the SWP, he belongs to a tradition that broke with orthodox Trotskyism in the mid‑20th century and developed the state‑capitalist analysis of the USSR (most associated with figures like Tony Cliff).

For Cliff and the International Socialism tendency, regimes that nationalised industry but retained wage labour and commodity production were analysed as forms of capitalism in which the state functions as the collective capitalist; thus, they rejected the Trotskyist formulation of a degenerated workers’ state and argued for an independent revolutionary strategy oriented to overthrowing bureaucratic rule. In the 2010s, it was riven by a political and moral crisis around leadership, internal democracy and allegations of sexual abuse. 

Although Milner’s book illuminates how bourgeois and petty‑bourgeois cultural forms mediate working-class experience, it still risks idealism if detached from concrete, empirical investigation of the organisation of production and the state. Some critics have argued that Milner collapses literary meaning into class interest, treating Milton as merely an ideological mouthpiece of a social class rather than a complex, contradictory subject. Perhaps a more serious charge, one in which the great historian Christopher Hill was also charged with, was cherry-picking passages or contexts that fit a class‑interest thesis while ignoring counter‑evidence in Milton’s prose and reception.

In the book, Milner cites Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson as early influences. It is entirely correct to look at the work of these major historians when it comes to evaluating John Milton.

Christopher Hill treated seventeenth‑century literature as part of a revolutionary conjuncture. Hill’s interpretive stance is class-centred and teleological. He reads Milton as embedded in the Puritan radical tradition. He locates literary production within the contours of political conflict, ideology, and mobilisation. This is the Marxist tradition in history that emphasises the structures and social forces that shape ideas—Milton becomes a voice within a contested social order.

Hill’s major contribution was to relocate the English Revolution from a narrow constitutional dispute among elites into a broad social and cultural upheaval rooted in class conflict. Works such as Society and Puritanism in Pre‑Revolutionary England and The World Turned Upside Down argue that the upheavals of the 1640s were driven by changing material conditions—agrarian transformation, commercial expansion, and the rise of new classes and layers within the population—thereby producing religious and political movements ranging from Puritans to Levellers and Diggers. Hill’s method was classic historical materialism: ideas and texts are treated as expressions of social forces and class interests rather than as autonomous abstractions.

Hill emphasised the dialectical interaction between structural changes and conscious political action: material crises opened space for radical ideas, which in turn reshaped social relations until countervailing forces produced new stabilisations. His sensitivity to popular religion, millenarianism, and the “culture of protest” made visible the agency of Milton’s political tracts—Areopagitica, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, and his numerous pamphlets—which must be read as ideological interventions in the convulsive politics of the 1640s and 1650s. Milton defended republican sovereignty, individual conscience and vehement opposition to censorship; his positions reflected a fragment of the emergent bourgeois‑republican current and the layers of intellectuals allied with parliamentary and anti‑royalist forces. His great epic, Paradise Lost, also encodes the metaphysical and moral anxieties of a society undergoing revolutionary reconfiguration.

On the other hand, E. P. Thompson, by contrast, insisted on the agency, experience and consciousness of social subjects. Where Hill stresses the structures and propensities of classes, Thompson recovers lived mentality: culture is both produced by and constitutive of working-class self-activity. Applied to Milton, Thompson’s method would press you to examine how Milton’s language and political interventions circulated among social groups, how readers appropriated or resisted his ideas, and how ideological formations were lived and transformed.

Andrew Milner’s work on John Milton situates Milton’s poetry and prose within the political struggles of seventeenth‑century England and the emergence of the modern public sphere. Milner shows Milton not simply as an isolated literary genius but as a political writer whose formal choices—pamphlet rhetoric, epic mode, religious imagery—intervene in class conflict, state formation and the struggle over free speech. Milner’s contributions to cultural theory enrich our understanding of ideology and intellectual history. Still, they cannot replace the scientific analysis of class, property and state that classical Marxism provides.

The twilight of the physical letter — a class issue

A few months ago, the Financial Times in the United Kingdom published an article entitled “The Twilight of the Physical Letter”[1], writing: “Less than two weeks before Christmas, Danes are sending their last Christmas cards.” Not their last for this year, but the last ever to be delivered by the national postal service. As of the year-end, PostNord — which traces its history in Denmark back to 1624 — will cease carrying letters and will handle only packages. Denmark will surely not be the last country to end home letter deliveries by a national carrier. It is a step that portends something bigger: the twilight of the physical letter itself. Letters will not disappear entirely from Denmark; private companies will offer services, though PostNord’s 1,500 red mailboxes are being removed. PostNord, formed from a 2009 merger of the Danish and Swedish postal services, will for now continue letter services in Sweden, where letter volumes have declined by less than the 90 per cent slump since 2000 in its super-digitalised neighbour.”

The Financial Times’ account of the “twilight” of the physical letter frames the decline of letter mail as both a technological inevitability and a managerial problem to be solved by “efficiency” measures, price rises, and market-style restructuring. From a socialist perspective, however, the crisis is not a neutral consequence of digitisation: it is the political outcome of decades of capitalist restructuring that subordinated a public service to the demands of private profit and the interests of the financial oligarchy.

The postal crisis is rooted in the 1970s turn away from public provision and the conversion of national post services into self-funding, marketised bodies. In the US, this was formalised in 1971 and has since been used to impose a profit logic on the USPS. The result is not a natural “decline” but a targeted programme of austerity, precarious staffing and asset stripping that converts a lifeline public service into an exploitable logistics node for private capital.

What the FT calls “adaptation” is, in practice, the Amazonification of postal labour: intensified workloads, expanded part-time and on-call rosters, surveillance technologies, and the reorientation of operations to low-margin parcel volumes while letter delivery is downgraded or reduced. Across countries, the same pattern repeats: Royal Mail’s conversion under private owners, Canada Post’s shift to weekend parcel models, Australia Post’s “alternative” delivery schemes. These are not isolated managerial mistakes but an international offensive against the working class and public services.

Denmark’s decision to end regular mail delivery is not an isolated administrative rearrangement or a neutral response to “digitalisation.” It is the latest episode in a coordinated, international offensive to subordinate public services to the logic of profit, reduce labour costs and concentrate logistics in the hands of private and financial interests. Across Britain, Canada, the United States, Germany, and elsewhere, the same dynamic is playing out: universal services are downgraded, workloads are intensified, and precarious and low-paid labour is expanded to maximise returns for investors.

The collapse of everyday letter delivery in Britain is not an accident of logistics or “market forces.” It is the result of a political decision driven by private capital, the regulator and a union apparatus that has surrendered workers’ interests to corporate management. The Communication Workers Union (CWU) has been an active participant in the processes that have enabled the downgrading and dismantling of the Universal Service Obligation (USO), not its defender. The CWU too often acts as a manager's partner, negotiating frameworks that legitimise restructuring rather than mobilising workers to defend public services. The CWU’s role in the Royal Mail sell‑off shows how this bureaucracy neutralises resistance and imposes pro‑employer “solutions”

The time is not for moralising nostalgia, but for struggle to orient our response. The decline of first‑class mail volumes since 2007 has been used politically as evidence that “there is no money” for universal service. But billions are mobilised for war and corporate bailouts while postal budgets are hollowed out. The crisis exposes a class choice: fund universal public services and decent wages, or funnel social wealth into military spending and private return on capital.

For postal workers, the implications are immediate and stark. Management and pro‑company union bureaucracies are implementing cuts that threaten pensions, jobs and safety. The CWU’s Framework Agreement in Britain and the CUPW deals in Canada show how union leaderships can act as junior partners in restructuring, demobilising members and legitimising attacks. Rank‑and‑file resistance is therefore not optional; it is the only path to defend wages, safety and a universal public service. The rank-and-file committees forming in the US, UK, Canada, and elsewhere show workers reclaiming control on the shop floor.

The twilight of the physical letter is not an inevitability to be mourned in isolation. It is a political question—who controls the communication infrastructure, who gets paid, and whose needs are prioritised: the working class or the billionaire owners. The answer lies in workers’ independent organisation, international solidarity, and a struggle to put public services under democratic, worker‑led control.

Denmark’s ending of mail delivery is a warning: without organised, independent worker resistance and international solidarity, universal services can be dismantled everywhere. The response must be rank‑and‑file organisation, coordinated international action and a political fight for worker control of public services and for socialism.

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[1] The twilight of the physical letter-End of deliveries by Denmark’s mail service bodes ill for the epistolary form-www.ft.com/content/fecad9e1-5b32-420c-83ef-1c261241b352?syn-25a6b1a6=1

1996: Reflections on the year that changed my life by Tony Adams with Ian Ridley was published by Floodlit Dreams in paperback, £11.99

Tony Adams, the ex-Arsenal and England footballer, has just turned 60 and published his third book. Adams, along with his writer Ian Ridley, has now produced what could be termed a trilogy. All books deal in one way or another with Adams previous addictions. In line with his new sobriety, Adams has turned down a big birthday; instead, he has opted for a night with twelve people who have played different roles in his road to recovery from alcoholism. It has been 30 years since he became sober.

Adams' book is as brutally honest as the previous two. He talks bluntly about the carnage his addictions caused to his relationships and his body, saying, ‘I'm really proud that I've not pissed the bed for 30 years, guys,’ he says. ‘I'm incredibly proud.’

1996 can be written about in many ways: as a personal turning point, as a moment in football and popular culture, or as a year when broader political and social forces made themselves felt in private lives. When a year “changes your life,” that change is never simply biographical. It is the intersection of individual experience with wider historical forces. As Plekhanov argued over a century ago, individual action matters—but only in and through the context of social and economic development: the individual can “secure” already-ripened historical opportunities and thereby shape future links in the chain of events. This analysis should frame any reflective study of 1996.

Thirty years is a long time. Adams was both the captain of Arsenal and England. However, since he retired from the game, it has undergone a fundamental transformation. Football today is not merely a sport or cultural pastime; under capitalism, it has been transformed into a web of commodities, markets and class relations.

This transformation is not accidental but rooted in capitalism’s imperatives. Clubs, leagues and governing bodies are subsumed into capitalist enterprises competing for revenues, profit and market share. The World Cup and major tournaments are staged as vast commercial spectacles: broadcasting rights, sponsorship deals, and merchandising are central revenue sources, not the “joy of the game” FIFA and the leagues behave as commercial cartels that allocate monopoly rents and tax‑advantaged income while shifting costs and social harms onto the working class and public budgets.

Before I continue, I should add a full disclosure that I have been an Arsenal fan for well over fifty years. I have witnessed first-hand the rise of the Premier League (1992) and the full commercialisation of English football, which transformed Arsenal’s position in the social division of labour and urban life. What had been a locally rooted mass cultural institution—closely linked to the lives, rhythms, and neighbourhoods of working-class supporters—was restructured into a globalised commodity. The club was rationalised as a profit-making enterprise: broadcast rights, international marketing, sponsorship, corporate hospitality, and real estate strategies became central to its operations. This was not merely a change of “image” but of the material bases of the club’s existence: sources of revenue, ownership structures, investment in stadia and training, and the social composition of matchday spectators.

Football clubs are social institutions rooted in working-class communities, yet increasingly integrated into global capitalist markets. The club’s governance shifted toward shareholders and investors whose aim is capital appreciation rather than local communal provision. Decisions are subordinated to profitability and brand growth rather than the everyday needs of local working people.

Arsenal’s move from Highbury to the Emirates (2006) exemplified the monetisation of space—larger capacity for premium seats, corporate boxes, and sponsorship revenue. Across London, public funds and planning regimes have been repurposed to facilitate such projects; the same logic that turned Olympic infrastructure into public subsidy for private gain can be instructive (stadium costs and public subsidy). Rising ticket prices, corporate hospitality, and the retrofitting of stadia have pushed many traditional local supporters to the margins (my season tickets cost a basic £ 1,400 per season). What was once mass working-class attendance becomes a segmented market: tourists, international supporters buying TV subscriptions, and local middle-class consumers with higher disposable income.

Tony Adams is best known as one of England’s most prominent football captains. A one-club man for much of his career, he embodied the kind of working-class sporting hero that English football cultivated and commercially commodified from the 1980s onward. When Arsène Wenger arrived in 1996, he introduced continental training methods, dietary regimes and a more technical style—an adaptation to new competitive demands in a market increasingly valuing global broadcasting appeal and athletic optimisation. Adams’ captaincy during this transition represented a bridging function: he was the internal authority who mediated modernising reforms while defending squad cohesion against the depersonalising forces of commercialisation.

Adams built his reputation as a tough, disciplined central defender and long-serving captain whose leadership was central to his club’s identity. His personal story, as told in this third book, examines his leadership and public struggles with alcoholism. The book offers rich material for political and sociological study: how sport mediates class identity, how institutions respond to personal crisis, and how celebrity can both challenge and reinforce ruling-class culture.

Adams’ commitment—to club, teammates and fans—stands against the logic of treating players as commodities. The expansion of TV revenues and sponsorships produced new pressures: wage inflation among top players, increased speculation in the transfer market, and managerial decisions shaped as much by brand value as by sporting need. The commercial conversion of stadiums and the matchday experience—VIP boxes, renaming, and restricted access—illustrated how working‑class fans were being marginalised even as their devotion fuelled corporate profits. 

Adams’ emphasis on responsibility and accountability—on and off the pitch—can be seen as an assertion of the human, social relations that capitalism erodes. At moments when ownership and market logic threatened club traditions, his public leadership reaffirmed the club as a social collective rather than merely a business vehicle.

Adams’s public struggles with alcoholism and his later roles as a manager and pundit are widely known. Increasingly, similar pressures—financial precarity, commodified sport, celebrity culture and the expansion of online betting—have produced a new social pathology: gambling addiction among athletes, ex-players and the broader working class. The expansion of online gambling platforms, intrusive advertising and algorithmic “VIP” marketing has converted sport into a pipeline for extracting working-class wealth. Club identity has been repackaged as a global brand. Local histories and working-class memory are distilled into merchandise and heritage products, often stripped of their political content.

The expansion of revenue streams creates enormous wealth within football, but also deep social estrangement: local fans are priced out; the working-class connection is weakened even as clubs claim traditional roots. This contradiction generates instability—fan protests, supporter organisations, and occasional political backlash against corporate owners. The Premier League’s commercial boom coexists with growing popular resentment and declining local democratic control.

Mark Goldbridge and Gary Neville

One indicator of the enormous wealth in football is Gary Neville's buyout of Mark Goldbridge's media empire. The  purchase of an influential fan-media voice by a wealthy former player and businessman is not a neutral “business decision.” It is an expression of the relations of class and property that shape modern culture and politics. When Gary Neville — representing the interests and capital of a propertied layer — buys out Mark Goldbridge, a popular, independent-working-class–rooted commentator, what is at stake is not merely editorial direction but the social power to define what millions of working people see as “their” club, their grievances, and their possible responses.

Concentrated media ownership determines which viewpoints are amplified and which are marginalised. The consolidation of media in the hands of a few corporate and billionaire actors produces a press that serves elite interests rather than those of ordinary people (the concentration of media ownership is driven by profit and vertical integration). A takeover by Neville fits this pattern exactly: it substitutes the uncertain political and commercial independence of a grassroots voice for the resources, networks, and class position of a former elite insider. That transaction creates an immediate incentive to manage, sanitise and monetise fan sentiment rather than to foster independent working-class perspectives.

Tony Adams’ captaincy embodied the social cohesion and moral authority of a club rooted in its community—qualities under pressure from the 1990s’ turn to marketised, global football. His struggles—and the growing epidemic of gambling harm—are not merely private misfortunes. They are symptomatic of a society where sport and leisure are subordinated to corporate profit.

One-Way Street and Other Writings -Walter Benjamin-Penguin 17 May 2016 £10.99

“The angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”

Walter Benjamin

"Even the Dead Won't Be Safe": Walter Benjamin

"Influential individuals can change the individual features of events and some of their particular consequences, but they cannot change their general trend, which is determined by other forces".

Georgi Plekhanov

 "A great man is precisely a beginner because he sees further than others".

Georgi Plekhanov

"A rich old man dies; disturbed at the poverty in the world, in his will he leaves a large sum to set up an institute which will do research on the source of this poverty, which is, of course, himself."

Bertolt Brecht

In 1931, Walter Benjamin wrote in his diary that Bertolt Brecht “maintained that there were good reasons for thinking that Trotsky was the greatest living European writer.”[1]

Benjamin never met Trotsky but was clearly influenced by him, as these essays in One-Way Street show. The book is indispensable for readers of culture and politics. They combine literary form, philosophical insight and social diagnosis. Benjamin treats commodity society, urban life and mass culture as problems of cognition and political practice. Benjamin’s work is so contemporary that a systematic study of it prepares the reader to understand the crisis of culture under capitalism and what to do about it. Benjamin’s account of the commodification of experience, the loss of aura, and media’s role in shaping perception speaks directly to the age of digital capitalism: social media, algorithmic spectacle and the mass reproduction of imagery.

Born into a wealthy business family of assimilated Ashkenazi Jews in Berlin, Benjamin's formative years were spent in the shadow of the Weimar Republic, the crisis of European reformism and the rise of fascism.

As Leon Trotsky describes so beautifully, “The political situation in Germany is not only difficult but also educational, like when a bone breaks, the rupture in the life of the nation cuts through all tissue. The interrelationship between classes and parties—between social anatomy and political physiology—has rarely in any country come to light so vividly as today in Germany.

The social crisis tears away the conventional and exposes the real. Those who are in power today could have seemed to be nothing but ghosts not so long ago. Was the rule of monarchy and aristocracy not swept away in 1918? Obviously, the November Revolution did not do its work thoroughly enough. German Junkertum itself does not feel like a ghost. On the contrary, it is working to turn the German republic into a ghost.”[2]

Walter Benjamin’s work, especially the fragments gathered in One‑Way Street, his essays on mechanical reproduction, the Arcades Project and the “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, cannot be properly understood apart from the social and class dynamics of the Weimar Republic. A reader approaching Benjamin for the first time should see him as not an isolated intellectual or “aura‑minded” aesthete, but as a product of the crisis of German capitalism between the world wars: inflation, mass unemployment, the decomposition of bourgeois liberalism, the growth of mass culture and the political crisis that produced fascism.

The Weimar Republic (1918–1933) was a political shell overlying profound economic dislocations: wartime devastation, the burdens of imperialist indemnities, the crisis of international capitalism and the breakdown of pre‑war class compromises. These objective conditions shaped mass consciousness, German party politics and intellectual life.

As Plekhanov argued in his discussion of the role of the individual, historical circumstances give individuals their range of action—yet within those constraints, choices matter; neither voluntarism nor fatalism suffices. He writes, "Until the individual has won this freedom by heroic effort in philosophical thinking, he does not fully belong to himself, and his mental tortures are the shameful tribute he pays to external necessity that stands opposed to him".[3]

Benjamin’s perceptive fragments register both the objective sweep of history and the uncertain agency of cultural actors in that sweep. Benjamin’s analyses are a study of how capitalist social relations transform perception, memory and experience. His discussion of the “loss of aura” under mechanical reproduction and his montage‑style aphorisms in One‑Way Street register the ways commodity forms permeate everyday life—reducing experience to exchange, fragmenting historical consciousness, and producing the atomised subject susceptible to mass demagogy. Benjamin’s arcades and his attention to commodities are not mere literary motifs but critical categories for understanding how capitalist social relations shape consciousness and political possibility.

Walter Benjamin and Leon Trotsky

At the level of ideas and political practice, Walter Benjamin and Leon Trotsky represent two very different responses to the convulsions of early 20th-century capitalism. Placed within the materialist conception of history, their approaches flow from distinct social positions, class relations and political perspectives.

To understand their difference is to grasp how material conditions and class struggle shape theory, not merely by individual brilliance, which both of course had. The material conditions that produced both figures matter. Benjamin wrote amid the collapse of European democracies and the rise of fascism, a context that informed his aphoristic, crisis-lit reflections. Trotsky’s analysis emerged from active leadership in revolutionary struggle and the bitter experience of Stalinist counterrevolution—hence his sustained emphasis on the need for an international revolutionary party and the critique of bureaucratic degeneration.

Trotsky’s writings epitomise Marxist historical materialism and the dialectical method: theory as a scientific instrument for analysing capitalist contradictions and guiding revolutionary practice. His essays on culture—most famously Literature and Revolution and Culture and Socialism—argue that the working class must appropriate the accumulated achievements of past culture, master technique, and subordinate aesthetics to the objective task of socialist transformation while resisting crude reductionism.

Trotsky’s approach to technology was groundbreaking; writing in Culture and Socialism, one of the notes lying before me asks, "Does culture drive technology, or technology culture?" This is the wrong way to pose the question. Technology cannot be counterposed to culture, for it is culture's mainspring. Without technology, there is no culture. The growth of technology drives culture forward. But the science and broader culture that arise from technology give powerful impetus to its growth. Here, there is a dialectical interaction.”[4]

Benjamin, by contrast, was a philosophically rich and often melancholic critic whose writings—flashing with literary insight—tend toward allegory, aesthetics and a messianic conception of history. In works such as “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which is not in this book, he wrote The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. [5]

Benjamin emphasises interruption, memory and a theological-materialist image of history that foregrounds the ruins and suffering of the past. His thought is dense with literary metaphor and emphasises the ethical task of remembrance rather than programmatic political strategy. Crucially, Benjamin does not treat culture as epiphenomenal in a trivial sense. Cultural forms mediate class struggle; they can both mask and reveal social contradictions. But from a Marxist standpoint, these cultural phenomena are rooted in the material base. They must be understood as follows: changes in production, mass media, and social organisation produce new forms of ideology and temperament. This dialectical relation—base shaping the superstructure, and superstructural forms feeding back into class politics—must guide our reading of Benjamin.

Benjamin’s Attitude Towards Fascism

Benjamin’s writings were composed amid the disintegration of democratic institutions and the rise of fascist movements that exploited cultural resentment, myth and a politics of destiny. A political materialist account links cultural shifts to the left's organisational weaknesses. Trotsky’s warning that revolutions and counter‑revolutions hinge on party preparedness and leadership is instructive: cultural critique without programmatic and organisational content cannot substitute for political intervention. Benjamin’s diagnosis of the cultural terrain is thus necessary but insufficient on its own. It needs to be welded to a program that organises the working class to resist and seize power.

Benjamin had a fatalistic attitude towards the rise of fascism, expressed in this quote: “The angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”

Some time after writing these lines, Benjamin, fleeing the Nazis, took his own life in 1940. His personal situation was desperate; stranded on the French-Spanish border, he anticipated his own immediate arrest by the Nazis. On the one hand, the pessimistic viewpoint expressed in that citation stemmed from personal despair. At the same time, it was nourished by confusion arising from unresolved questions concerning the rise of fascism in Europe and the political degeneration of the Soviet Union under Stalinism.

Benjamin, who was familiar with Trotsky's writings, knew that Stalin had murdered almost all his left-wing opponents and had formed an alliance with Hitler. Nevertheless, among broad circles of intellectuals, some supported Stalin as the only way to avert the emergence of a fascist Europe. The extension of Stalinism into Eastern Europe after the war helped thwart layers of the intelligentsia from coming to grips with this issue. Benjamin did not end his life a supporter of Stalin. But his friends in the Frankfurt School certainly, and like Benjamin, had no faith in the revolutionary capacity of the international working class.

Benjamin’s work remains valuable for understanding ideology, media and memory in the age of social media, targeted advertising and spectacle. He offers the reader an indispensable tool for understanding how capitalist modernity shapes thought and feeling. It will take a classical Marxist to synthesise these insights with a rigorous, materialist account of capitalism’s laws and with a program for proletarian organisation and struggle.

NOTES

Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999)

The IIRE is working on a new collection of Trotsky's writings on fascism. This new translation of a 1932 article by Trotsky is part of this project. This article was originally published in the journal Die Weltbühne ('The World Stage'). Die Weltbühne was an important journal of the Independent intellectual left during the Weimar Republic. Cooperators and contributors included Carl von Ossietzky, Kurt Hiller, Erich Mühsam, Fritz Sternberg, Heinrich Ströbel, Kurt Tucholsky and others.

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[1] Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), p. 477.

[2] Leon Trotsky: The German Enigma-https://www.iire.org/node/1003

[3] On the Role of the Individual in History-www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1898/xx/individual.html

[4] Culture and Socialism – 1927-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/10/cult-o23.html

[5] Theses on the Philosophy of History-

Review: Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R. F. Kuang. Harper Voyager, 2022. 560 pages.

 

"I heard a traveller from an antique land….” (Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias” (quoted in Kuang 147) 

“She learned, in fact, that revolution is always unimaginable. It shatters the world you know. The future is unwritten, brimming with potential”

R F Kuang’s-Babel

“The historical significance and the moral grandeur of the proletarian revolution consists in the fact that it is laying the foundations of a culture that is above classes and which will be the first culture that is truly human.”

Leon Trotsky

'What is art? First of all, art is the cognition of life. Art is not the free play of fantasy, feelings and moods; art is not the expression of merely the subjective sensations and experiences of the poet; art is not assigned the goal of primarily awakening in the reader 'good feelings.' Like science, art cognises life. Both art and science have the same subject: life, reality. However, science analyses, art synthesises; science is abstract, art is concrete; science turns to the mind of man, art to his sensual nature. Science cognises life with the help of concepts, art with the aid of images in the form of living, sensual contemplation.'

Aleksandr Konstantinovich Voronsky,

R.F. Kuang’s Babel through a Marxist lens

It takes a brave and gifted writer to play fast and loose with British history and get away with it. However, the writer Rebecca F Kuang, who has a master's and two PHD’s, manages to pull this off with an erudition that belies her tender years.

R. F. Kuang’s “speculative fiction” is an attack on capitalism, or to be precise, British imperialism. In Babel, she quotes Frantz Fanon: “Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence”.

Of course, Kuang is free to quote whom she pleases, but Fanon is not the most healthy of anti-imperialist writers. Fanon (1925–1961) was a Martinique-born psychiatrist, anti-colonial theorist and participant in Algeria’s war of independence. His major works, most notably The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks, combined clinical experience, existential-philosophical reflection and militant polemic to expose the psychic and violent dimensions of colonial domination.

Fanon remains indispensable for understanding the brutality of imperialism, the profound psychological injuries inflicted on colonised peoples, and the legitimating role of national liberation as a political response to colonial oppression. However, his work tends to express an overemphasis on the peasantry and the “national” element. Fanon’s analyses sometimes valorise “the people” and guerrilla insurgency in ways that underplay the historically decisive role of the industrial working class as an emancipatory force.

Kuang was born in China but grew up in the United States. Aged 29, she has already written five books, has a list of impressive book awards and survived graduate work at both Oxford and Cambridge. Kuang’s first three books comprised a trilogy: The Poppy War (2018), The Dragon Republic (2019), and The Burning God (2020). Yellowface was published in 2023, and her latest Katabasis has just been published.[1]

Poppy Trilogy

Kuang’s The Poppy War trilogy is not a moral fable but works as a social document. In Kuang’s world, the countryside supplies labour, food and recruits. Peasants are dispossessed by landowners, corvée, and military levies; they are often the immediate constituency of insurgent movements. Urban workers, miners, artisans and the conscripted soldier class appear as the concentrated sites of industrial labour, political organisation and military potency.

In the novel, local merchants, industrialists tied to foreign capital, and landowning elites who broker deals with imperial powers function as a comprador class—they defend property, seek stability for capital accumulation, and will sell national sovereignty to protect their interests. The novel’s bureaucratic and military apparatus—police, generals, intelligence organs—is an embodiment of the state as an instrument of class rule. They administer repression, manage economic concessions and mediate between imperial interests and local elites.

To her credit, she warns against relying on nationalist elites or petty-bourgeois adventurism to carry out democratic or social reforms. In semi-colonial settings, the proletariat must assert independent leadership—organise urban workers, factory committees, soldiers’ committees, and alliances with the poor peasantry, rather than subordinating itself to comprador regimes.

Despite her tender age, Kuang possesses a verbal brilliance and erudition probably unsurpassed by any novelist of her generation. She has mocked many sacred cows. In Yellowface, she attacks the right-wing MeToo# movement. She hates contemporary identity politics, which typically originates in petty‑bourgeois layers with ambitions inside the cultural and professional hierarchy of capitalism. Kuang came under heavy attack for writing Yellowface. The public dispute over the book's accusers that an author has appropriated or misrepresented Asian experience cannot be reduced to questions of individual taste or moral purity. It is rooted in the concrete class relations and economic imperatives of the publishing industry.

At the surface level, the row frames itself as an ethical debate about representation. However, its intensity and public amplification are products of a crisis in cultural markets. Publishing has become an arena of intensified competition for scarce positions — advances, awards, media visibility — driven by conglomeration and profit-maximising behaviour. Large publishers, retailers and tech platforms compress cultural diversity into marketable identity niches, while promotional narratives and outrage cycles are monetised. The HarperCollins one‑day strike and workers’ testimonies show how publishing workers face low pay, expanded workloads, and corporate cost‑cutting even as firms seek cultural “brands” to sell; this creates an environment in which status and visibility are disproportionately valuable to authors and gatekeepers alike.

As the dispute over Yellowface shows, a writer does not write under conditions of his/her choosing, and artistic greatness is not something merely willed. Some periods are more favourable to genius than others. I am not saying Kuang is a genius, but the limitations of American intellectual life during the recent epoch will have shaped her. With a fascist gangster in the White House, it will be interesting to see how much she curses and kicks against the confines.

As the brilliant Marxist writer Leon Trotsky once wrote:” If environment expressed itself in novels, European science would not be breaking its head over the question of where the stories of A Thousand and One Nights were made, whether in Egypt, India, or Persia.” To say that man’s environment, including the artist’s, that is, the conditions of his education and life, finds expression in his art also, does not mean to say that such expression has a precise geographic, ethnographic and statistical character. It is not at all surprising that it is difficult to decide whether certain novels were made in Egypt, India or Persia, because the social conditions of these countries have much in common. However, the very fact that European science is “breaking its head” trying to solve this question, as these novels themselves show, indicates that these novels reflect an environment, even if unevenly.

No one can jump beyond himself. Even the ravings of an insane person contain nothing that the sick man had not received before from the outside world. However, it would be an insanity of another order to regard his ravings as the accurate reflection of an external world. Only an experienced and thoughtful psychiatrist who knows the patient's past will be able to find the reflected and distorted bits of reality in the ravings' contents. Artistic creation, of course, is not a raving, though it is also a deflection, a changing and a transformation of reality, in accordance with the peculiar laws of art. However fantastic art may be, it cannot have at its disposal any other material except that which is given to it by the world of three dimensions and by the narrower world of class society. Even when the artist creates heaven and hell, he merely transforms the experience of his own life into his phantasmagorias, almost to the point of his landlady’s unpaid bill”.[2]

Babel-Or the Necessity of Violence

Babel is set at 1830s Oxford University. Despite being labelled a historical novel, Kuang is adamant that it has lessons for today’s readers. In an interview, Kuang called her book “ a dark text of academia, saying, “ I love campus novels, dark academia novels. Moreover, I knew that when I finished the Poppy War trilogy, I was going to move on and do something in that genre. That is the setting in which I am most comfortable and familiar. Those are the interpersonal dynamics that I observe and most enjoy writing about—between students and rival students, students and teachers, etc.[3]

Roger Marheine writes “ Kuang pulls no punches in her scathing critique of Oxford professors who are either overt imperial agents of war (e.g. Robin’s father, Professor Lovell), willing dupes of imperial platitudes especially as they practice their daily craft within the very privileged confines of Oxfordian splendor, or specialists blissfully unaware of empire’s greater crimes as they live in academic cocoons and grasp only their own silo of knowledge. One of Oxford’s professors, Jerome Playfair, represents Kuang’s satirical comment on the British gentleman’s code of conduct, as they ruthlessly assert their global dominance.”[4]

Marheine is a pseudo-leftist and, like many on the radical left, echoes the Socialist Worker Party's sentiment that Kuang’s book is a "goldmine of revolutionary politics." While I am loath to downplay Kuang’s radical stance, she is not a Marxist, and this is not a socialist work of historical fiction. Some have argued that the book lacked nuance in its treatment of how characters from different marginalised backgrounds intersected with the imperial centre. There is a distinct lack of characters of a working-class background.

However, Rebecca F. Kuang’s fiction (notably The Poppy War trilogy and Babel) offers rich material for Marxist study: imperialism, ethnic division, bureaucracy, mass mobilisation, culture, and the politics of memory recur throughout her work.

Kuang’s critique of knowledge as imperial plunder in Babel does deserve a Marxist class analysis. Kuang’s Babel dramatises how the production, translation and curation of knowledge are woven into imperial accumulation. Her book shows that texts, languages and librarianship become commodities and instruments of state power. The novel makes visible several features of that process that are vital for organising library, academic and translation workers.

The main thread running through the book is that knowledge labour is expropriated and monetised. Kuang has clearly studied this barbaric practice because her book shows how scholarship and translation produce useful intellectual commodities, annotated corpora, glossaries, and archival order are appropriated by imperial institutions for political and economic advantage. The unpaid or underpaid labour of native speakers, archivists and junior scholars supplies content and expertise that enriches metropolitan libraries and universities, while the material rewards (funding, prestige, job security) flow to imperial centres. This mirrors the contemporary university’s transformation into a profit-generating arm of capital, in which millions of dollars in tuition and research funding are extracted. At the same time, adjuncts, librarians and translators remain precarious and low-paid.

Kuang is not overtly a Marxist; she does not mention Marx by name, but she does strive to present a materialist analysis of capitalism and empire. It would be very interesting to review her work in, say, five years to discover the extent to which it reflects the growth of fascist tendencies within world capitalism and how a growing radical working class can tackle this. Adopting a Marxist approach would give her already stunning work an even sharper edge, along with a much wider readership than this great writer has achieved so far.

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[1] keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2023/07/review-yellowface-by-rebecca-f-kuang.html

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

[3] www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/1570.R_F_Kuang

[4] Book Review: Babel by R. F. Kuang-mltoday.com/book-review-babel-by-r-f-kuang/

The Rise of Fake Academic Essays: A Marxist Analysis

According to journalist Robin McKie, writing recently in the Guardian, over 10,000 fake research papers have been published in journals, and these are the ones that have been caught. He believes this figure is just the tip of the iceberg.[1]

“The situation has become appalling,” said Professor Dorothy Bishop of Oxford University. “The level of publishing of fraudulent papers is creating serious problems for science. In many fields, it is becoming difficult to build up a cumulative approach to a subject because we lack a solid foundation of trustworthy findings. And it’s getting worse and worse. People are building careers on the back of this tidal wave of fraudulent science.’ 

Professor Alison Avenell of Aberdeen University said, “ Editors are not fulfilling their roles properly, and peer reviewers are not doing their jobs. And some are being paid large sums of money. “It is deeply worrying.”

The majority of these fake essays are being produced on an industrial scale by large-scale paper mills. An academic paper mill is a commercial operation that produces and sells fraudulent academic work — essays, term papers, theses, cover letters, peer‑reviewed articles, or entire datasets — to students, researchers, or institutions for a fee. Paper mills range from individual ghostwriters offering single essays to large, organised firms that produce fabricated research, manipulate authorship and citations, and systematically target journals and evaluation systems for profit. They are a symptom of the marketisation and commodification of higher education under capitalism.

Ivan Oransky believes “Part of what’s happening is that there’s an entire industry now, one might say an illicit industry or at least a black market, of paper mills,” he said. “A paper mill, and I heard a really good definition recently, is an organisation, a for-profit company, really, set up to falsify the scientific record somehow.”

The problem has become so vast that a growing number of websites, such as Retraction Watch, have been established to monitor this alarming situation. According to a study published in the magazine Nature, there were just over 1,000 retractions in 2013. In 2022, the figure topped 4,000 before jumping to more than 10,000 last year.

Professor Marcus Munafo of Bristol University was quoted as saying, “If you have growing numbers of researchers who are being strongly incentivised to publish just for the sake of publishing, while we have a growing number of journals making money from publishing the resulting articles, you have a perfect storm. That is exactly what we have now.” The use of generative AI to produce fraudulent academic work is not merely an individual moral failing or a technical problem; it is a social and political issue rooted in the commodification of education, the erosion of serious study, and the pressures imposed by capitalist labour markets, rather than providing instructions for misusing technology.

Passing off machine-generated text as one’s own substitutes appearance for understanding. The cheapening of academic credentials serves employers and the market, not the working class. From a Marxist standpoint, the proliferation of machine‑generated “fake” academic essays is not primarily a technical or ethical quirk of individual students: it is an outgrowth of the deeper social relations of capitalist education. Under capitalism, higher education is progressively commodified—turned into a service to be bought and sold, a pipeline for profitable labour and, increasingly, a supplier of research and skills to the military‑industrial complex. The phenomenon of fake essays, therefore, expresses class relations, market pressures and the crisis of public education.

Degrees have been transformed into commodities that certify employability. Many students, under debt and time pressures, view essays as means to an end, not as instruments of critical thought. The unequal access to quality instruction further pushes those under the greatest economic strain toward any available shortcut.

The erosion of collective knowledge and democratic control. When learning is reduced to transactional credentialing, the broadening of independent critical thought—essential for democratic working‑class organisation—is weakened. The result is a depoliticised cohort more vulnerable to managerial control and right‑wing reaction.

Historically, education has been both a terrain of class struggle and a crucible for political radicalisation. The bourgeoisie once used schooling to consolidate its rule; today, capital uses education to reproduce labour power for profit and war. The current trajectory—marketised universities, casualised labour, and the deployment of AI for managerial ends—mirrors earlier phases of capitalist restructuring that required a political response rooted in class organisation rather than technocratic fixes.

 

Notes

 

1.   retractionwatch.com

2.   More than 10,000 research papers were retracted in 2023 — a new record-Richard Van Noorden-Nature 12 December 2023

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[1] www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/03/the-situation-has-become-appalling-fake-scientific-papers-push-research-credibility-to-crisis-point

Robbie Lyle, Arsenal Fan TV and the political economy of fan media

Robbie Lyle is a very rich man, and his Arsenal Fan TV (AFTV) and his media empire are worth an estimated 6.8m. Lyle’s estimated wealth is around $5 million, largely attributed to the success of AFTV. The channel generates approximately $2 million annually, primarily through advertising and sponsorship deals. His YouTube channel has over 1.5 million subscribers and over a billion views.

Lyle is not simply a new phenomenon of internet celebrity or “fan culture. “His media empire is a product of the same capitalist restructuring that has transformed football into a global media commodity: a commercial ecosystem that converts working‑class passion into clicks, advertising revenue and political distraction. To understand the rise of AFTV, one should analyse the material forces that created it, its class function, and the tasks it poses for supporters who want to defend the club as a social, not purely commercial institution.

Over the last three decades, football has seen an unprecedented reorganisation around broadcast rights, sponsorship and private equity. Mega‑events and competitions are designed to concentrate revenue in the hands of owners, broadcasters and sponsors — as seen in the commercial logic behind FIFA’s World Cup build‑outs and the billionaire attempt to lock in revenues through the European Super League (World Cup 2006 commercialisation and political function.[1]

Robbie Lyle’s AFTV emerged as a consequence. Its model consists of over-passionate post‑match reactions, provocation, and personality‑driven content that fits perfectly with social‑media platforms that reward immediacy and outrage. It was this personality-driven content that fueled regular contributor Claude Callegari to make a racist comment about Tottenham Hotspur striker Son Heung-min during the North London derby in an AFTV video. Another so-called pundit, Lee Judge, commented that Arteta(Arsenal manager) showed "a little more effin bollocks" after a draw with Wolves. He also said in December 2024 that he wanted to "shoot" Martin Odegaard after a 0-0 draw with Everton. In 2025, the channel could not control the story when regular personality Julian Bucker was filmed trying to stop Lyle from being interviewed by another creator, Saeed TV, because Lyle was wearing a pro-Palestine badge.

Three years ago, AFTV presenter Liam Goodenough, known to viewers as 'Mr DT, was sentenced to three years in prison for stalking and kidnapping an ex-partner. He previously received a 12-month sentence and a 10-year restraining order for the same offences. AFTV was forced to issue a statement saying it was "utterly appalled and disgusted" by his actions and confirmed he would no longer appear on the platform. In a 2021 interview with The Athletic, Lyle said the situation was a "learning moment" for the channel. "That was a very rough moment," he said. "I knew he was in some problems, but I didn't know the full extent. I found out at the same time as everyone else. And it was shocking."

These negative attributes, however, do translate into views, advertising revenue, and brand partnerships. However, AFTV is not an outlet for authentic fan grievances about ticket prices, corporate ownership, and a lack of representation.

On the surface, channels like AFTV can seem both liberating and limiting. They give a voice to supporters denied influence by corporate owners, yet market logics shape that voice. Outrage, theatricality and polarising views win clicks; calm, strategic organising does not. This turns legitimate political sentiments into spectacle and fragments collective power into individual expression.

Robbie Lyle is a complex figure in this terrain. As a former Londoner embedded in supporter networks, he channels real fan feeling and often raises issues that echo wider social grievances. But his prominence has also made him a media mogul whose livelihood depends on producing content that performs for an audience and advertisers. The experience of many fans is therefore mediated through personalities and punditry rather than organisation.

AFTV emerged in this context. Platforms like it serve a dual role: they appear to give fans a voice, but they are also readily commodified—clicks, views, and outrage translate into advertising revenue, sponsorship deals, and influence. The anger of supporters is channelled into consumable content, packaged and sold back to the very actors (clubs, broadcasters, sponsors) responsible for the problems fans rightly oppose.

The commodification of fan culture serves class interests. It diverts pressure away from organising — from coordinating protests, supporting stadium workers, or demanding legal limits on financial speculation — into consumable episodes of frustration. The successful popular mobilisation against the Super League, by contrast, shows that when fans organise collectively and in the streets, they can force concessions; it was mass political action, not viral punditry, that delivered the outcome (the ESL collapse and fan mobilisation).

Left unchallenged, the logic behind AFTV and similar channels normalises a politics of spectatorship: fans as consumers whose only effective power is to withdraw spending or click “unfollow.” This is inadequate to resist the deeper enclosure of clubs as investment vehicles.

The commodification of fan culture serves the ruling‑class's interests. It diffuses anger into spectacle rather than organisation, fragments fans into consumers, and normalises the idea that clubs must be run as investors’ portfolios. This weakens the working‑class's capacity to reclaim football as a communal social good. Fans should move beyond clicks and performative outrage to collective organisation: form supporters’ unions, coordinate with players’ unions and stadium workers, and demand legal changes to prevent the predatory financialisation of clubs. Fans need to reclaim football from the market. Turn anger into organisation. Replace the commodity with a democratic, socialised sporting culture run in the interests of players and fans—not billionaires.

 

 

 

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