Spinoza, Materialism, and the Revolutionary Lineage: A Trotskyist Historiography

 I. Introduction: Spinoza and the Problem of Historical Materialism

Baruch Spinoza occupies a singular position in the history of philosophy: a thinker simultaneously canonised and neutralised. He is celebrated as a rationalist metaphysician, admired as a pioneer of secular modernity, and invoked as a precursor to democratic thought. Yet these recognitions have often come at the cost of stripping his work of its revolutionary implications. Contemporary scholarship, even when sympathetic, tends to isolate Spinoza from the social antagonisms of the seventeenth century and from the radical traditions that later drew upon his ideas. Spinoza’s ideas were “dangerous in his own time, and remain dangerous today,” precisely because they undermine every ideological justification for hierarchy, privilege, and clerical authority.

2.Spinoza’s Life as a Historical Symptom

Spinoza’s biography is not an incidental backdrop to his philosophy; it is a historical symptom of the contradictions of the Dutch Republic. Born into Amsterdam’s Portuguese‑Jewish community  a community of former conversos who had fled the Inquisition  Spinoza was excommunicated at twenty‑three for “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds.” The severity of the cherem reveals the political anxieties of a mercantile‑rabbinic elite dependent on the Republic’s fragile tolerance. Spinoza’s ideas threatened not only theological orthodoxy but the ideological foundations of a commercial oligarchy.

His modest life as a lens‑grinder, his clandestine publications, and his sympathy for Jan de Witt’s republicanism all point to a thinker whose material circumstances were inseparable from his philosophical commitments. His attempt to denounce de Witt’s murder as “barbaric”  an act his landlord prevented for fear of reprisals  illustrates the political stakes of his thought. Spinoza’s biography thus becomes a site where intellectual history and class struggle intersect.

Leon Trotsky’s method of “concrete analysis of concrete conditions” is indispensable here. Spinoza’s intellectual defiance cannot be understood apart from the class forces that shaped the Dutch Republic: the rise of a commercial bourgeoisie, the crisis of feudal remnants, and the ideological vacuum created by the decline of scholasticism. Spinoza’s philosophy emerges not as an abstract system but as the rational expression of a world in transition.

3.Monism as the Ontological Ground of Materialism

Spinoza’s rejection of Cartesian dualism is the decisive philosophical rupture that makes modern materialism possible. Descartes’ division of reality into res cogitans and res extensa preserved the theological worldview of the seventeenth century. Spinoza demolished this architecture by asserting that there is only one substance “God or Nature (Deus sive Natura).” Thought and extension are attributes of the same substance; the mental and the physical are two expressions of one reality.

This monism is not a metaphysical curiosity but the ontological foundation of materialism. By dissolving the supernatural realm, Spinoza undermines the ideological authority of church and state. His claim that “the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things” anticipates Marx’s insistence that consciousness is a product of material conditions. Spinoza’s monism thus becomes the conceptual precondition for a scientific account of society.

Trotsky’s dialectical materialism deepens this insight. For Trotsky, the unity of mind and world is not merely ontological but historical: consciousness develops through labour, social relations, and class struggle. Spinoza’s monism provides the ontological ground; Marx and Trotsky provide the historical and dialectical method.

4.Consciousness, the Body, and the Anticipation of Marx

Steven Nadler’s argument is that consciousness corresponds to bodily complexity, citing Spinoza’s remark that “in proportion as a body is more capable… so its mind is more capable.” This insight dissolves the Cartesian “hard problem” centuries before its formulation. Consciousness is not an immaterial substance but the mental expression of a body embedded in causal networks.

Marx radicalises this insight by adding the historical dimension. Consciousness is not only the correlate of a complex body but of a body transformed by labour, tools, and social relations. When Marx writes that “consciousness can never be anything else than conscious being,” he completes the trajectory that begins with Spinoza’s monism. Spinoza provides the ontology; Marx provides the anthropology and the historical method.

Trotsky extends this further. In Problems of Everyday Life, he insists that consciousness is shaped by the rhythms of production, the organisation of labour, and the ideological apparatuses of class society. Spinoza’s insight into the embodied nature of consciousness becomes, in Trotsky’s hands, a theory of revolutionary consciousness: the capacity of the working class to grasp the necessity of social transformation.

5.Spinoza and Trotsky on Necessity, Freedom, and Determinism

The question of necessity and freedom occupies a central place in both Spinoza’s philosophy and the Marxist tradition. Yet the conceptual architectures through which each thinker approaches the problem differ in form while converging in political and historical significance. Spinoza articulates a monistic determinism in which freedom consists in the adequate understanding of necessity; Trotsky, working within the framework of dialectical materialism, transforms this insight into a theory of revolutionary praxis in which freedom emerges through the conscious intervention of the working class into historically determined processes. The comparison reveals not only a deep structural affinity but also the way in which Marxism completes and historicises Spinoza’s project.

Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution provides the conceptual framework for understanding Spinoza’s political significance. Spinoza’s democratic republicanism anticipates the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century, but it also contains the seeds of a more radical egalitarianism that can only be realised through proletarian revolution. Spinoza’s critique of superstition becomes, in Marxist hands, a critique of ideology; his defence of democracy becomes a defence of workers’ democracy; his monism becomes the ontological ground of dialectical materialism.

6 Spinoza: Freedom as the Understanding of Necessity

Spinoza’s determinism is absolute. Everything that exists follows from the nature of substance with the same necessity with which the properties of a triangle follow from its essence. Human beings, as finite modes, are no exception. Our actions, desires, and thoughts are determined by the causal order of nature; the experience of free will is an illusion born of ignorance of the causes that determine us. As the uploaded document notes, for Spinoza “freedom… is not free will but the understanding of necessity.”

This conception of freedom is not merely metaphysical but ethical and political. To understand necessity is to liberate oneself from the bondage of passive affects, superstition, and ideological mystification. Spinoza’s critique of religious authority rests on this insight: superstition thrives where causal understanding is absent. Freedom, therefore, is the achievement of adequate ideas — a rational comprehension of the causal order that governs both nature and society.

Yet Spinoza’s determinism is not fatalistic. The more we understand the causes that determine us, the more we participate in the activity of substance itself. Freedom is not the negation of necessity but its conscious appropriation. This is the conceptual core that Marx and Trotsky will later radicalise.

7. Trotsky: Freedom as Conscious, Collective Praxis

Trotsky inherits Spinoza’s insight that freedom is inseparable from necessity, but he transforms it by embedding it within a historical and social framework. For Trotsky, necessity is not the static causal order of nature but the dynamic, contradictory movement of history shaped by class struggle, technological development, and the global expansion of capitalism. Freedom emerges not through individual rational insight but through collective revolutionary praxis.

Trotsky’s critique of voluntarism and fatalism alike reflects this dialectical conception. Against voluntarism, he insists that revolutionary action must be grounded in an analysis of objective conditions; against fatalism, he argues that these conditions do not determine outcomes mechanically but open possibilities that can be realised only through conscious intervention. The working class becomes the agent through which necessity is transformed into freedom.

In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky writes that “freedom is the recognition of necessity — and the transformation of necessity into action.” This formulation echoes Spinoza but adds a crucial dimension: the transformation of necessity is a historical process, not a metaphysical one. Where Spinoza locates freedom in the intellect, Trotsky locates it in praxis.

8. Determinism Without Fatalism: A Shared Structure

Both Spinoza and Trotsky reject the notion of free will understood as uncaused choice. Both insist that human action is determined by causes that can be understood and acted upon. Both oppose superstition, mystification, and ideological obfuscation. Yet neither collapses determinism into fatalism.

For Spinoza, determinism is the condition of freedom: only in a universe governed by necessity can rational understanding liberate us from passive affects. For Trotsky, determinism is the condition of revolutionary agency: only in a world governed by historical laws can the working class intervene consciously to transform society.

The difference lies in the level of analysis. Spinoza’s determinism is ontological; Trotsky’s is historical. Spinoza’s freedom is intellectual; Trotsky’s is political. Spinoza’s subject is the rational individual; Trotsky’s is the revolutionary class.

Yet the structural affinity is unmistakable. Trotsky’s dialectical materialism can be read as the historical realisation of Spinoza’s monism: the unity of mind and world becomes the unity of theory and practice; the understanding of necessity becomes the transformation of necessity; the critique of superstition becomes the critique of ideology.

9. Necessity and Freedom in Revolutionary Time

The most profound convergence between Spinoza and Trotsky lies in their shared rejection of contingency as the foundation of human action. For both thinkers, freedom is not the assertion of arbitrary will but the alignment of human activity with the causal structure of reality. In Spinoza, this alignment is achieved through adequate ideas; in Trotsky, through the scientific analysis of capitalism and the strategic organisation of the working class.

Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution exemplifies this synthesis. The revolution is not a voluntaristic leap but the unfolding of historical necessity — the contradictions of combined and uneven development — realised through conscious action. Spinoza’s dictum that “the more we understand, the more we are free” becomes, in Trotsky’s hands, “the more the working class understands the laws of history, the more it can transform them.”

10. Completing Spinoza: Marxism as the Historical Realisation of Monism

The comparison reveals that Marxism does not break with Spinoza but completes him. Spinoza provides the ontological foundation: the unity of mind and world, the determinism of nature, the critique of superstition. Marx and Trotsky provide the historical and political realisation: the unity of theory and practice, the determinism of history, the critique of ideology.

Spinoza dissolves dualism; Marx dissolves idealism; Trotsky dissolves fatalism. Spinoza grounds equality in nature; Marx grounds it in social relations; Trotsky grounds it in revolutionary praxis. Spinoza’s freedom is the understanding of necessity; Trotsky’s is the transformation of necessity.

In this sense, Trotsky is the most Spinozist of Marxists — not because he repeats Spinoza’s metaphysics, but because he realises its deepest implications in the sphere of history and revolution.

11 Politics, Ideology, and the Democratic Lineage

Spinoza’s political radicalism emerges directly from his metaphysics. If all humans are modes of the same substance, then no divine hierarchy can justify monarchy or clerical authority. His defence of democracy, equality, and secularism is not an ethical preference but a logical consequence of his ontology. His critique of superstition anticipates Marx’s analysis of ideology: both identify false consciousness as the mechanism through which domination is reproduced.

Jonathan Israel’s argument that Spinoza was the first major modern democrat is historiographically significant, but a Trotskyist analysis must go further. Spinoza’s political thought is not merely democratic; it is revolutionary. It articulates the emerging interests of a class whose ascent threatened the existing order. Ann Talbot’s claim that Spinoza was “as responsible as any one person could be for the revolution in consciousness” preceding the Enlightenment captures this dynamic.

12. The Line of Descent: Spinoza → French Materialism → Marxism

The connection between Spinoza and Marx is not retrospective but genealogical. The French materialists — La Mettrie, Diderot, d’Holbach — absorbed Spinoza’s monism and transformed it into a militant atheism that confronted the ideological apparatus of absolutism. Plekhanov’s assertion that “present‑day materialism is a Spinozism that has become more or less aware of itself” captures this continuity. Engels’s remark — “Old Spinoza was quite right” — confirms that Marxism recognised Spinoza as a precursor.

This lineage is not a chain of influence but a sequence of determinate historical transformations. Spinoza’s nature becomes Marx’s social totality. Spinoza dissolves dualism; Marx dissolves idealism. Spinoza grounds equality in nature; Marx grounds it in social relations and class struggle.

Trotsky’s contribution is decisive here. He insists that materialism must be historical and dialectical, capable of analysing the contradictions of capitalism and the dynamics of revolution. Spinoza’s monism becomes, in Trotsky’s hands, a weapon against both idealism and mechanical materialism. The unity of mind and world becomes the unity of theory and practice; the critique of superstition becomes the critique of Stalinist mystification; the defence of democracy becomes the defence of workers’ democracy against bureaucratic degeneration.

13. Scruton and the Conservative Neutralisation of Spinoza

The contrast between Spinoza and Roger Scruton is a model of Trotskyist ideological critique. Scruton’s work represents the conservative attempt to reclaim Spinoza by stripping him of his revolutionary content. He admires Spinoza’s logical rigour but rejects the egalitarian implications of his monism. He transforms Spinoza into a philosopher of aesthetic consolation, a thinker whose metaphysics can be reconciled with hierarchy, tradition, and the “sacred.”

This is not an innocent misreading but an ideological operation. Scruton’s conservatism is “the ideological antithesis of Spinoza’s rationalism.” Where Spinoza dissolves the sacred, Scruton elevates it; where Spinoza undermines hierarchy, Scruton defends it; where Spinoza insists that social reality can be understood and transformed, Scruton insists it must be accepted. Trotsky would recognise this immediately as the reactionary function of philosophy under conditions of capitalist crisis.

Scruton’s domestication of Spinoza mirrors the Stalinist domestication of Marx: both seek to neutralise revolutionary thought by detaching it from its historical and materialist foundations. A Trotskyist historiography exposes these operations and restores Spinoza to the revolutionary lineage from which he has been severed.

14. Conclusion: Spinoza in the Age of Global Capitalism

Spinoza’s revival reflects the exhaustion of postmodernism and the crisis of bourgeois philosophy. As the ideological coherence of neoliberalism collapses, the materialist tradition — from Spinoza to Marx to Trotsky — re‑emerges as the only framework capable of explaining consciousness, politics, and social transformation. Spinoza was a revolutionary in the Dutch Republic; his ideas remain revolutionary under global capitalism. Marxism does not supersede Spinoza but completes him.

Spinoza’s monism becomes the ontological ground of dialectical materialism; his critique of superstition becomes the critique of ideology; his defence of democracy becomes the defence of workers’ democracy; his rationalism becomes the rationality of revolutionary praxis. In an era marked by deepening inequality, ideological disorientation, and the global crisis of capitalism, Spinoza’s rational, egalitarian, and naturalistic worldview offers not a relic of the past but a resource for the future. Only Marxism, as the dialectical completion of Spinoza’s project, can realise its emancipatory potential.

 

Bill Naughton and the Political Limits of Postwar British Social Realism

“Naughton documents the conditions of the working class with sympathy and precision, but he lacks the revolutionary perspective necessary to grasp the forces shaping those conditions.”

World Socialist Website

"I mean the only experience that doesn't do you any good is the one you learn nothing from."

Bill Naughton

Naughton’s humane portrayals of working‑class life stand in stark contrast to the complacent liberalism of Britain’s cultural establishment. Yet Naughton’s work, shaped by the ideological constraints of the Labour and Stalinist milieu, ultimately reflects the political impasse of the postwar settlement. His realism documents the conditions of the working class with sympathy and precision, but it lacks the revolutionary perspective necessary to grasp — let alone resolve — the contradictions of capitalist society.

The Social and Historical Background to Naughton’s Work

Bill Naughton (1910–1992) occupies a revealing place in the cultural history of postwar Britain. Born in County Mayo and raised in Bolton, Lancashire, he emerged not from the grammar‑school intelligentsia that produced the “Angry Young Men,” but from the most physically demanding layers of the industrial working class. Before turning to writing, he worked as a lorry driver, coal‑bagger and weaver — an increasingly rare biography even in mid‑century Britain. This background endowed his best work with a documentary authority and moral seriousness that sharply distinguished him from contemporaries who approached working‑class life from the outside. Yet Naughton’s career also reveals the political and artistic limitations of the postwar social‑realist tradition, shaped as it was by the ideological constraints of Labourism and Stalinism.

The Short Stories: Fidelity to Working‑Class Life

Naughton’s early short stories, collected in Late Night on Watling Street (1959), represent his most assured artistic achievement. The nocturnal world of the transport café — populated by lorry drivers, mechanics and night‑shift workers — is depicted with a fidelity reminiscent of the great realists. Crucially, Naughton writes from inside this world. He does not romanticise the men who pass through the café, nor does he treat them as sociological specimens. He knows the work, the fatigue, the camaraderie and the loneliness. This concreteness aligns with the Marxist insistence, from Engels onward, that truth emerges through the particular.

Yet the stories remain confined to the horizon of endurance. They register the emotional toll of night work — the isolation, the reliance on strangers for warmth — but they do not interrogate the social conditions that produce this world. The alienation is felt, not analysed. The result is realism without critique: a world faithfully rendered but not questioned. 

The Family Drama and the Crisis of Postwar Respectability

Naughton’s most accomplished dramatic work, Spring and Port Wine (1964), engages more directly with the contradictions of postwar working‑class family life. The Crompton household, ruled by the patriarch Rafe, becomes a microcosm of class ideology. Rafe’s authority is not personal pathology but the expression of a social form: the patriarchal working‑class family, constructed by capitalism and now destabilised by postwar prosperity.

The play’s central conflict — Hilda’s refusal to eat a herring — becomes a test of Rafe’s authority and, by extension, of the viability of the old moral order. Naughton perceptively shows how working‑class respectability, once a survival strategy, becomes a mechanism of oppression when material conditions shift. But the play ultimately retreats into reconciliation. The contradictions it exposes are resolved through a softening of Rafe’s heart rather than through recognition that genuine liberation requires transforming the economic structures — the wage relation, the sexual division of labour, housing dependency — that produced patriarchy in the first place.

Alfie and the Ideology of the “Permissive Society”

Alfie (1963), Naughton’s most culturally enduring work, reveals the ideological tensions of the 1960s with particular clarity. Alfie Elkins, the working‑class London wide‑boy who treats women as disposable, embodies the so‑called “permissive society”: rising wages, loosening sexual mores and a new working‑class male hedonism.

The work oscillates between critique and glamorisation. The women Alfie exploits are drawn with humanity, and the backstreet abortion scene remains one of the most disturbing moments in 1960s British cinema. Yet the film’s marketing, Michael Caine’s charisma and the jaunty Bacharach score package Alfie’s lifestyle as aspirational. This ambivalence reflects the commodification of sexual liberation under consumer capitalism. Freedom becomes lifestyle; masculine domination becomes cultural product.

“The realism that seemed fresh in 1959 proved politically weightless when the postwar settlement collapsed and the working class entered into direct confrontation with the Labour and trade‑union bureaucracy.”

Catholic Moralism and the Political Ceiling of Naughton’s Perspective

Naughton’s later autobiographical works, including Saintly Billy and On the Pig’s Back, draw heavily on his Irish Catholic upbringing. This moral framework — emphasising conscience, humility and personal responsibility — explains the ethical seriousness of his writing. But it also marks a political ceiling. Catholic social ethics addresses the symptoms of capitalism without identifying its systemic causes, resolving contradictions through personal renewal rather than collective action.

The Erasure of the Irish Working Class in English Cultural Life

Although Naughton’s Irish origins shaped his life, they are largely absent from his public identity as a “Bolton writer.” This reflects a broader pattern: the Irish Catholic working class of Lancashire, despite its major contribution to labour and cultural life, was rendered invisible by a literary establishment with its own image of “the working class.”

Naughton and the Postwar Social‑Realist Tradition

Naughton belongs to the wider eruption of working‑class subject matter in late‑1950s Britain — Barstow, Sillitoe, Waterhouse, Braine, Osborne. This was a genuine aesthetic achievement: the working class appeared on the page and screen with unprecedented fidelity. But the tradition shared a common limitation. It documented working‑class life during the relative stability of the postwar settlement but had no political framework with which to confront the crises of the 1970s — the collapse of full employment, the Thatcher offensive, the destruction of the very communities it had celebrated.

The Collapse of the Postwar Settlement and the Limits of Labourism

The realism that had seemed so fresh in 1959 proved politically weightless when the postwar settlement unravelled. Writers registered the world as it was, but they could not grasp why it was so, or how it might be changed. The Labour and Stalinist bureaucracies, which dominated the workers’ movement, systematically blocked the development of a revolutionary perspective. The result was a literature of endurance rather than transformation.

Conclusion: The Need for a Revolutionary Perspective

Bill Naughton deserves serious critical attention. His short fiction and plays capture the texture of working‑class life with honesty and intelligence. But like the broader postwar social‑realist tradition, his work stops short of political consciousness. It documents the working class; it does not arm it. It registers contradictions; it does not resolve them. The world Naughton depicted — Bolton mill workers, lorry drivers on night haulage, young women trapped by respectability — demanded more than sympathy. It demanded a revolutionary perspective capable of transforming the conditions of life themselves.

Naughton gave us the literature of endurance. What was needed — and what the Labour and Stalinist bureaucracies systematically prevented — was the literature of emancipation.

SIDEBAR

Jim Allen, Barstow, and the Trajectory of British Social Realism

The contrast between Bill Naughton and his near‑contemporaries — particularly Jim Allen and Stan Barstow — illuminates the political tensions within postwar British culture.

Allen, a former miner from Manchester, developed an explicitly socialist perspective that brought him into repeated conflict with the cultural establishment. His plays and screenplays, including The Spongers (1978) and Perdition (1987), confronted the betrayals of the Labour and trade‑union bureaucracy, the crimes of Stalinism, and the historical falsifications used to justify them. The censorship of Perdition by the Royal Court Theatre remains one of the most revealing episodes in modern British cultural life.

Barstow, by contrast, exemplified the strengths and limitations of the postwar social‑realist novel. A Kind of Loving (1960) captured the texture of working‑class life with remarkable fidelity, but it remained confined within the ideological horizon of the welfare state and the apparent stability of the 1950s. When that stability collapsed in the 1970s, the tradition had no political resources with which to respond.

Naughton occupies a position between these two poles: more humane and attentive to collective life than Barstow, but lacking the political clarity and historical consciousness that defined Allen’s best work.

 

Spinoza, Atheist Steven Nadler-Princeton University Press 2026-£25

Spinoza, Atheist: Materialism, Consciousness, and the Marxist Lineage

Baruch de Spinoza (1632–1677) stands as one of the most radical and consequential thinkers in the history of philosophy. His work helped detonate the ideological foundations of the seventeenth‑century world and laid the groundwork for the Enlightenment, the democratic revolutions, and ultimately the materialist conception of history developed by Marx and Engels. Steven Nadler’s scholarship — especially his insistence that Spinoza was, in every meaningful sense, an atheist — has revived interest in this extraordinary figure. Yet Nadler’s work also reveals the limits of academic philosophy, which often isolates Spinoza from the historical and social forces that shaped him and from the revolutionary tradition that later drew upon his ideas.

Spinoza’s thought was dangerous in his own time, and it remains dangerous today. As the World Socialist Web Site has noted, his ideas are “dangerous to the financial aristocracy of the twenty‑first century” because they undermine every ideological justification for hierarchy, privilege, and religious authority.¹ To understand why, we must examine Spinoza’s life, his philosophical system, his political commitments, and his place in the lineage of materialist thought culminating in Marxism.

A Life of Intellectual Defiance

Spinoza was born into Amsterdam’s Portuguese‑Jewish community, a group of former conversos who had fled the Inquisition. Educated in Jewish tradition, he quickly distinguished himself as a formidable thinker. But at the age of twenty‑three, he was excommunicated with unprecedented severity. The cherem condemned him for “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds,” though it did not specify them a sign of the community’s fear of his ideas.²

After his expulsion, Spinoza lived modestly, supporting himself by grinding optical lenses. He corresponded with leading scientists and philosophers across Europe, including Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society. His works circulated clandestinely, often in manuscript, because they were banned across Catholic and Protestant Europe. His Theological‑Political Treatise (1670) was published anonymously and immediately condemned as “a book forged in hell.”

Steven Nadler’s Spinoza: A Life reconstructs this world with remarkable archival detail.³ It shows Spinoza as a man of personal integrity, political sympathy for the republican cause of Jan de Witt, and unwavering commitment to intellectual freedom. When de Witt was murdered by an Orangist mob in 1672, Spinoza reportedly attempted to post a sign denouncing the killing as “barbaric,” only to be restrained by his landlord for fear of reprisals.

Spinoza died in 1677 at the age of forty‑four, likely from lung disease caused by inhaling glass dust. His friends published his Ethics posthumously, along with his correspondence and unfinished works. The Ethics would become one of the most influential — and feared — books in European intellectual history.

The Philosophical Break: Monism Against Dualism

Spinoza’s philosophical revolution begins with a decisive rejection of Cartesian dualism. Descartes had divided reality into two substances: res cogitans (thinking substance) and res extensa (extended substance). This dualism preserved the theological worldview of the seventeenth century: an immaterial soul, a transcendent God, and a universe governed by divine will.

Spinoza demolished this architecture. There is only one substance, infinite and self‑caused, which he calls God or Nature (Deus sive Natura). Thought and extension are not two substances but two attributes of the same underlying reality. As he writes in the Ethics, “the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.”⁴

This is the foundation of philosophical materialism. There is no supernatural realm, no divine providence, no miracles, no immortal soul. Human beings are modes of nature, governed by the same laws as everything else. Spinoza’s critics were correct to call him an atheist. Nadler argues persuasively that Spinoza’s “God” is not a being but a conceptual placeholder for the totality of nature.⁵

Spinoza’s monism dissolves the mind‑body problem centuries before it became the central obsession of analytic philosophy. If thought and extension are two aspects of one substance, there is no need to explain how an immaterial mind interacts with a material body. The problem is a product of dualist metaphysics, not a feature of reality.

Consciousness and the Body: Nadler’s Contribution

Nadler’s most significant philosophical contribution concerns Spinoza’s theory of consciousness. Many commentators have located consciousness in Spinoza’s doctrine of “ideas of ideas” — the notion that every idea has a second‑order idea that represents it. But Nadler argues that this cannot explain degrees of consciousness, since the doctrine applies uniformly to all ideas.

Instead, Nadler highlights Spinoza’s remarks linking consciousness to bodily complexity. In the scholium to Ethics IIp13, Spinoza writes:

“In proportion as a body is more capable than others of doing many things at once… so its mind is more capable than others of perceiving many things at once.”⁶

This is the basis of what Nadler calls “explanatory materialism”: consciousness is not caused by the body but is the mental expression of the body’s organisation. Degrees of consciousness correspond to degrees of bodily complexity. This anticipates modern embodied cognition and dissolves the Cartesian “hard problem” centuries before Chalmers formulated it.

From a Marxist standpoint, this is crucial. Spinoza provides the monistic foundation; Marx adds the historical and social dimension. Human consciousness is not only the correlate of a complex body — it is the correlate of a body transformed by labour, tool‑use, and social practice. Marx’s dictum in The German Ideology — “consciousness can never be anything else than conscious being” — completes what Spinoza began.⁷

Politics: Equality, Democracy, and the Attack on Ideology

Spinoza’s philosophical radicalism was inseparable from his political radicalism. Jonathan Israel has shown that Spinoza was the first major modern thinker to embrace democratic republicanism as the most rational form of political organisation.⁸ If all humans are modes of the same substance, governed by the same natural laws, then no divine hierarchy can justify monarchy, aristocracy, or clerical authority.

Freedom, for Spinoza, is not free will but the understanding of necessity — the rational comprehension of the causes that determine us. This is why superstition, religious authority, and political tyranny are intertwined: they depend on ignorance of causes. Spinoza’s Theological‑Political Treatise is one of the earliest and most powerful arguments for secularism, freedom of thought, and the separation of philosophy from theology.

It is no accident that Spinoza’s revival in the 1780s preceded the French Revolution. As Ann Talbot notes, Spinoza was “as responsible as any one person could be for the revolution in consciousness” that made the Enlightenment possible.⁹

Spinoza and Marxism: A Line of Descent

The connection between Spinoza and Marx is not a retrospective imposition. It runs through the French materialists — La Mettrie, Diderot, d’Holbach — and into the dialectical transformation of materialism achieved by Marx and Engels.

Plekhanov put it plainly: “present‑day materialism is a Spinozism that has become more or less aware of itself.”¹⁰ When he asked Engels in 1889 whether Spinoza was right that thought and extension are attributes of one substance, Engels replied: “Of course. Old Spinoza was quite right.”¹¹

Spinoza provided the monistic ontology; Marx provided the historical, social, and dialectical method. Spinoza dissolved dualism; Marx dissolved idealism. Spinoza grounded human equality in nature; Marx grounded it in social relations and class struggle.

Spinoza vs. Roger Scruton: Materialism Against Conservative Idealism

The contrast between Spinoza and Roger Scruton reveals the political stakes of philosophy. Scruton admired Spinoza’s logical rigour but sought to neutralise him — to turn Spinoza into a source of aesthetic consolation rather than a revolutionary materialist. Scruton’s conservatism, rooted in tradition, hierarchy, and the “sacred,” is the ideological antithesis of Spinoza’s rationalism.¹²

Where Spinoza insists that social reality can be understood and transformed, Scruton insists it must be accepted. Where Spinoza undermines religious authority, Scruton defends it as a source of social cohesion. Where Spinoza’s monism points toward equality, Scruton’s idealism defends hierarchy. This is not a difference of temperament; it is a difference of class position.

Why Spinoza Matters Now

The renewed interest in Spinoza — from Nadler’s scholarship to the embodied‑mind movement to the revival of radical Enlightenment studies — reflects a deeper crisis. Postmodernism, with its rejection of reason and truth, has exhausted itself. Bourgeois philosophy, trapped between scientistic reductionism and irrationalist relativism, finds itself returning to the materialist tradition it once abandoned.

Spinoza offers a way out: a rational, naturalistic, egalitarian worldview that rejects superstition and hierarchy. But only Marxism can complete what Spinoza began — by grounding consciousness, politics, and freedom in the material conditions of social life. Spinoza was a revolutionary in the age of the Dutch Republic. His ideas remain revolutionary in the age of global capitalism.

Notes

1. Ann Talbot, “Spinoza Reconsidered,” World Socialist Web Site, 2001.
2. Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 73–75.
3. Ibid.
4. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, IIp7.
5. Steven Nadler, “Was Spinoza an Atheist?”, Journal of the History of Philosophy 45, no. 2 (2007).
6. Spinoza, Ethics, IIp13s.
7. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1846).
8. Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
9. Ann Talbot, “Spinoza Revisited,” World Socialist Web Site.
10. G. V. Plekhanov, Fundamental Problems of Marxism (1908).
11. Ibid., correspondence with Engels.
12. Roger Scruton, Spinoza (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

 

Bibliography

Israel, Jonathan. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. 1846.

Nadler, Steven. Spinoza: A Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

 “Was Spinoza an Atheist?” Journal of the History of Philosophy 45, no. 2 (2007).

Plekhanov, G. V. Fundamental Problems of Marxism. 1908.

Scruton, Roger. Spinoza. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Spinoza, Baruch. Ethics. 1677.

Talbot, Ann. “Spinoza Reconsidered.” World Socialist Web Site, 2001.

  

The Blood Never Dried: A People's History of the British Empire by John Newsinger – Bookmarks Publications, ‎Updated Second Edition 2013

 "The blood of India is on England's hands... the whole system of English rule in India is one of systematic plunder and oppression."

Ernest Jones

"In the boundless areas of India, Egypt, Persia, over which the gigantic octopus of British imperialism sprawls—in this uncharted human ocean vast internal forces are constantly at work, upheaving huge waves that cause tremors in the City's stocks and hearts."—

Leon Trotsky on Britain

We plough and sow, we're so very, very low, That we delve in the dirty clay; Till we bless the plain with the golden grain, And then we're thrust away.

Ernest Jones

"They are closely bound up with and dependent upon British capitalism. They tremble for their own property. They stand in fear of the masses. They seek compromises with British imperialism, no matter what the price, and lull the Indian masses with hopes of reforms from above."—

Leon Trotsky's Writings on Britain

John Newsinger's The Blood Never Dried offers a powerful refutation of the widely held belief that British imperialism served as a benevolent, civilising force. Drawing upon the evocative words of Chartist poet Ernest Jones for its title, Newsinger’s work forcefully asserts that violence and coercion were not exceptions but fundamental to the Empire’s foundation and maintenance. The book traces this thread of brutality from the conquest of Ireland through to the Opium Wars in China, the forceful suppression of the 1857 Indian Rebellion, and the post-war counterinsurgency campaigns in places like Malaya and Kenya.

In doing so, it provides a necessary critique of the resurgence of imperial nostalgia in contemporary discourse. This challenge is particularly pertinent given recent attempts by figures such as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to portray Western colonialism as a positive legacy, thereby highlighting the ongoing political relevance and urgency of Newsinger’s intervention.

Ernest Jones: The Revolutionary Tradition the Pseudo-Left Buries

Ernest Jones (1819–1869) remains one of the most important yet often overlooked figures in British radical history, primarily because his ideas threaten the superficial politics of the pseudo-left. He was the leading revolutionary figure of the later Chartist movement, a close political ally of Marx and Engels in England, and possibly Britain's first to deliberately combine the fight for democratic rights with a clear socialist agenda rooted in the working class.

Jones had an unlikely background, born in Germany to a British military officer, raised as a gentleman, and trained as a lawyer. However, by the 1840s, he was fully dedicated to the workers' cause. A gifted speaker and poet, he conveyed genuine class anger in his poetry. His 1852 "Song of the Lower Classes," penned during two years of hard labour in Tothill Fields prison for his Chartist activism, remains one of the most powerful expressions of working-class consciousness in English. We plough and sow, we're so very, very low, That we delve in the dirty clay; Till we bless the plain with the golden grain, And then we're thrust away.

This was not mere sentimental reformism. Jones advocated for expropriating landlords and capitalists, nationalising land and industry, and empowering the working class politically. Unlike many of his Chartist peers, he understood that the six points of the People's Charter were not the final objective but, as Engels observed, "a mere means to further ends," specifically, the socialist transformation of society.

Marx and Engels held Jones in high regard. After the 1848 defeats of Chartism, when many leaders shifted toward bourgeois liberalism, Jones remained committed to the revolutionary agenda and maintained close ties with Marx and the International Workingmen's Association (the First International). In a 1858 letter to Engels, Marx emphasised Jones's significance, describing him as "the only educated Englishman (in the professional sense) among the politicians who is fundamentally on our side." Jones lectured on political economy, using Marx's categories, and maintained regular correspondence with Marx. He understood—more than most of his British contemporaries—the international nature of the workers' struggle.

Importantly, Jones was among the rare figures in 19th-century Britain’s labour movement to adopt a principled anti-colonial position regarding Britain's empire. During the peak of the 1857 Indian Rebellion—referred to by the British ruling class as the "Indian Mutiny"—as patriotic media demanded retribution, Jones spoke at large gatherings advocating for the Indian people's right to oppose British authority. He described the rebellion in his publication, People's Paper: "The blood of India is on England's hands... the whole system of English rule in India is one of systematic plunder and oppression."

This was not merely moral indignation. Jones understood the connection between the exploitation of colonised peoples abroad and the exploitation of the working class at home — that the same ruling class that ground down the Lancashire mill workers also bled India dry through the East India Company, that the surplus extracted from colonial peoples helped finance the bribery of the upper layers of the British working class. This is precisely the insight — the connection between imperial exploitation, the labour aristocracy, and the corruption of the working-class movement that Lenin later theorised in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, and that Trotsky built upon in his analysis of Britain.

Jones's legacy offers a clear political lesson. British schools seldom teach about him. When the pseudo-left discusses British radical history, it usually focuses on the "Moral Force" branch of Chartism—represented by William Lovett—emphasising respectability, petitions, and reform, rather than the revolutionary tradition of Jones and the Newport Rising. The true revolutionary aspect of Chartism, advocating for the working class to directly challenge the capitalist state both nationally and internationally, is deliberately downplayed by the pseudo-left.

John Newsinger's The Blood Never Dried: A People's History of the British Empire (first published in 2006, updated in 2013) is an accessible, unflinching chronicle of the British Empire's crimes: the slave trade and its defenders, the conquest of India and the deliberate creation of famines, the brutal suppression of the 1857 Rebellion, the Opium Wars forced upon China, the conquest of Egypt and Sudan, the Boer concentration camps, the suppression of the Irish, the Mau Mau torture camps in Kenya, the Malayan "Emergency," and the bloody retreat from empire through the mid-20th century.

Newsinger writes from a socialist perspective and plays a significant role in recovering the voices of those who resisted, including not only the colonised peoples but also the small number of British workers and radicals who refused to reconcile with the Empire. The book serves as a valuable popular history and offers a helpful counterpoint to the imperial nostalgia that periodically emerges in British society. Nonetheless, a Marxist critique of Newsinger's work must go beyond mere appreciation. Newsinger spent many years as a member of the Socialist Workers Party, the same organisation identified as a key vehicle for pseudo-left politics in Britain. The political limitations inherent in the SWP's tradition influence even Newsinger's most notable work.

The fundamental theoretical problem is this: The Blood Never Dried tends to present the crimes of the British Empire primarily as a moral and political outrage, which of course they are, without fully grounding them in the structural logic of capitalism itself. The Empire was not an aberration from British history that can be condemned and then set aside while preserving the existing social order. It was the product of British capitalism at its most expansive, driven by the imperatives of capital accumulation, the search for markets, raw materials, and fields of investment. As Marx wrote in Capital, capitalism came into the world "dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt." The enclosures that dispossessed the English peasantry, the slave trade that financed the industrial revolution, and the colonial famines that generated surplus value for British capital were not separate phenomena; they were facets of a single system.

This issue is extremely significant for contemporary politics. If the British Empire's wrongdoings are viewed simply as a historical moral scandal — terrible acts committed in the past by bad actors under a now-defunct empire — then the natural political response tends toward "decolonisation" rhetoric, reparations, and cultural politics within the current capitalist system. This pattern is evident in the SWP environment, which has shifted from a nominally anti-imperialist stance to becoming entangled in identity politics and "decolonise the curriculum" campaigns that fail to challenge capitalism and instead tend to divide the working class along racial lines.

The British Pseudo-Left's Approach to Empire: Moral Outrage Without Class Politics

This underscores the main problem with how the British pseudo-left, including groups like the SWP, Counterfire, and various Corbynite factions, approaches the history and legacy of Empire today. Their stance is characterized by three interconnected shortcomings. Firstly, they see imperialism mainly as a moral concern rather than a structural one. While they rightly condemn particular atrocities, they neglect to connect them to the underlying logic of capitalist accumulation. This view enables them to cling to the false hope that a reformed Labour government or a different foreign policy could make British imperialism "ethical." For instance, the Stop the War Coalition's proposal for Britain to pursue an "independent foreign policy" modeled after France and Germany reflects this belief: that imperialism can be made more humane from within, without challenging the capitalist class that sustains it.

Secondly, there is a shift from traditional class politics towards identity politics and the discourse of "decolonisation." The SWP's support for racial and gender issues, its endorsement of "intersectionality" as compatible with Marxism, and its focus on the professional-managerial classes in universities all tend to reduce the class debate to a cultural concern. While the atrocities of Empire are real and must be addressed, genuine confrontation occurs only when they are linked to the capitalist system that causes and sustains them. In contrast, identity politics promotes the absurd idea of a "diverse" British military—including women, people of color, and LGBT soldiers—participating in actions like bombing Afghanistan or supporting the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Representation within the imperial state is not a form of anti-imperialism; it is merely its latest cultural facade.

Most importantly, the pseudo-left fails to develop a vital political tool: an independent revolutionary party that genuinely represents the working class, the only force capable of ending imperialism. Ernest Jones understood that the working class needs its own party, program, and leadership that are fundamentally opposed to the bourgeoisie. In contrast, the SWP mainly revolves around the Labour Party, pressures the trade union bureaucracy, and confines anti-imperialist ideas within controlled bourgeois channels.

Alongside pseudo-left critiques of the British Empire, a new wave of right-wing and racist historiography has emerged, led by figures like Kehinde Andrews. Andrews' *The New Age of Empire* warrants serious critical analysis from a Marxist perspective because, although it rightly condemns imperialism and capitalism's crimes, it is fundamentally rooted in postcolonial theory and racial idealism. This framework, despite its radical rhetoric, ultimately offers a political dead end for the working class.

Andrews rightly sees that colonialism is an ongoing issue, not just a closed chapter in history. The exploitation of the Global South—through wealth extraction via unequal trade, debt dependence on international financial institutions, and the persistence of neocolonial regimes—remains a continuous aspect of capitalism. His critique of Western liberal hypocrisy is also valid. However, recognising these symptoms alone does not provide a full diagnosis, and this is where the book's framework falls short.

Andrews focuses on race rather than class as his central analytical category. He views racism—defined as a system of white supremacy rooted in colonialism and still ongoing—as the main organising principle of the modern world. This perspective resembles postcolonial theory presented as radicalism, yet it has historically favoured the interests of the upper-middle class and the national bourgeoisie in former colonial countries, rather than the working class.

His framework lacks an explanation for this history because it doesn’t clearly see it. When race is the primary lens instead of class, it's difficult to understand why formally "decolonised" nations led by Black and brown bourgeoisie remain trapped in poverty and dependence. The Marxist perspective is explicit: capitalism and imperialism are primarily class projects, and they employ race merely as a division tool.

"The Blood Never Dried" serves as a stark reminder that the crimes of the British Empire are ongoing. British imperialism has sent Challenger tanks to Ukraine and provided arms to Israel for the Gaza genocide. They detained Julian Assange and used the entire colonial state apparatus against its own working class through austerity and wage suppression. The blood continues to flow because the system responsible for shedding it remains unoverthrown. While "The Blood Never Dried" is valuable for exposing imperial crimes, workers seeking to understand the reasons for imperialism, how to oppose it, and what political strategies are needed should study Lenin's "Imperialism," Trotsky's "Permanent Revolution," and the daily analysis on the World Socialist Web Site. Ultimately, the history of empire is the history of capitalism; only when the international working class overthrows capitalism will it end.

 

This Dark Night: The Life of Emily Brontë by Deborah Lutz Bloomsbury Continuum‎ 28 May 2026

 I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will" Jane Eyre.

“The wind I hear it sighing, with autumn's saddest sound; withered leaves all thick are lying, as spring-flowers on the ground. This dark night has won me to wander far away; old feelings gather fast upon me.”

The Complete Poems of Emily Bronte Volume 1

The present splendid brotherhood of fiction-writers in England, whose graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together, have described every section of the middle class from the “highly genteel” annuitant and fundholder who looks upon all sorts of business as vulgar, to the little shopkeeper and lawyer’s clerk. And how have Dickens and Thackeray, Miss Brontë and Mrs Gaskell painted them? As full of presumption, affectation, petty tyranny and ignorance; and the civilised world has confirmed its verdict with the damning epigram that it has fixed to this class that “they are servile to those above, and tyrannical to those beneath them.”

Karl Marx: The English Middle Class

Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) stands as a significant novel in English literature, deserving of detailed analysis for its emotional and psychological complexity as well as its social themes. Paul Bond notes in a review of Emerald Fennell's new film adaptation that Wuthering Heights reveals "an almost organic expression of this devastating personal impact which has definite social roots in property relations." This view is essential for a comprehensive understanding of Brontë.[1]

Emily Brontë (1818–1848) stands out as a significant figure in English literature. An important question for any detailed biography is: how did a daughter of a clergyman, largely living in solitude on the Yorkshire moors, create Wuthering Heights? This novel wields deep emotional and social influence and continues to engage readers nearly two centuries later. As Bond observes, the novel's main strength lies in its "wild intensity" and "almost organic expression of devastating personal impact, rooted in social property relations." Wuthering Heights is more than a gothic romance or a story of doomed love; it is a novel where love, cruelty, ambition, and destruction are intricately connected to land ownership, social class, and social exclusion.

Heathcliff's tragedy extends beyond psychology. As a child, he specifically envies Edgar Linton, saying, "I wish I had light hair and fair skin, and was dressed, and behaved as well, and had a chance of being as rich as he will be." His vengeance involves property issues, mortgage debt, strategic marriage, and inheritance schemes. Brontë insightfully recognised that in bourgeois society, passion and property are closely linked rather than opposites.

The Danger of Biographical Reduction

Deborah Lutz's focus on Emily Brontë's life to understand her work is insightful. However, it risks falling into the trap of literary biography, which often explains a work through the author's psychology or personal details, reducing a great novel to a reflection of its creator's inner world. This approach is individualist and idealist. In contrast, a materialist perspective asks different questions: What historical and social circumstances made Wuthering Heights possible? What was the Brontë family's social class? They were educated and cultured but faced economic insecurity, were dependent on the church, and lived amid the rough industrial capitalism of the West Riding of Yorkshire. What did Emily observe about the harsh changes capitalism was bringing to the English countryside and its inhabitants during the 1830s and 40s?.

Lutz’s earlier research on Brontë certainly deserves attention. Her two publications on Brontë form part of Victorian studies that concentrate on either "material culture" or "thing theory." While this perspective offers significant benefits, it also faces limitations when detached from class analysis. Lutz’s "Paperwork" essay provides valuable insights and, in some respects, exemplifies a genuinely materialist approach to scholarship. By analysing physical elements of Emily Brontë's writing, such as the cost of paper in the 1830s and 1840s, the rag trade, the underdeveloped paper industry, and the tax on paper that wasn’t lifted until 1860, Lutz connects Brontë's poetic expression to tangible economic factors. The Brontës were not working in a detached, artistic realm; instead, they operated amidst material shortages. Small scraps, recycled Latin exercise pages, and meticulous handwriting all mirror these material conditions.[2]

The paper's main components were linen and cotton rag, with persistent rag shortages increasing costs; the manuscript's link to the rag-and-bone trade and working-class clothing provides solid historical context for good literary scholarship. For instance, Charlotte's concern that her “The Professor manuscript” might be reused as lining in leather trunks or butter barrels highlights the vulnerability of intellectual work within capitalism, even among Victorian middle-class authors.

Lutz's concept of "thing theory," along with material culture studies, haptic reading, and phenomenology, remains firmly rooted in bourgeois academic discourse. It focuses on objects and their meanings but does not fully explore the social relations involved in their creation. Collectors and workers gathered raw materials, such as rag cloth, which were processed into paper at early industrial sites, including paper mills. The challenges faced by the Brontës were not only personal or aesthetic; their status as daughters of a clergyman living in Haworth also shaped them. In this industrial region of Yorkshire, the wool trade had already transformed the landscape and affected the lives of the working class.

The article "Relics and Death Culture' highlights Terry Eagleton's Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës* (1975), which is arguably the most comprehensive analysis of the Brontës so far. Eagleton views Heathcliff's transformation from a social outsider to a vengeful landowner through the lens of the conflicts between early capitalism and bourgeois values. Myths of Power is among the most frequently referenced works of Marxist criticism in the Anglo-American academic world. It warrants serious consideration and critique. While it offers valuable insights into class contradictions in the Brontë novels, its broader theoretical framework aligns with Althusserian structural Marxism, ultimately distorting both the literary works and the Marxist approach it claims to represent.

The most significant contribution of the book is its argument that understanding the Brontës requires considering the unique social and historical context of mid-19th-century England. This includes the struggles between agrarian and industrial capitalism, the unstable status of the lower gentry and middle classes, and how ideas of personal passion and romantic ideals helped to interpret and obscure those economic and social conflicts.

Eagleton's interpretation of Wuthering Heights is particularly insightful. He sees Heathcliff as a symbol of the contradictions within a capitalist system that produces its own monsters: brutalised by the class system as a foundling, Heathcliff then exploits the logic of property and wealth accumulation to exact revenge on those who degraded him. As Paul Bond pointed out in his critique of Emerald Fennell's flawed film adaptation, Brontë's deep passion often manifests in complex ways through themes of land ownership and household dynamics — aspects Fennell, aimed at a narrow upper-middle-class audience, completely misses. Eagleton, however, understands this. He views Emily Brontë's novel not as a timeless romantic story but as a piece deeply rooted in real class conflicts and brutality, to borrow Bond's words. On this crucial issue, Eagleton is largely correct, and his analysis surpasses the more simplistic liberal-humanist criticism that previously dominated academia.

However, this is where the critique must become more precise. Althusser explicitly influenced Eagleton's 1975 theoretical framework, drawing on Louis Althusser's structuralist reinterpretation of Marxism, his concept of "ideological state apparatuses," and his idea of literature as a practice that creates a particular "aesthetic effect" by revealing ideology at its boundaries. This framework introduces a significant distortion into what might otherwise have been a straightforward historical-materialist criticism.

Althusserian Marxism was not a step forward from orthodox Marxism but a step back. By viewing ideology as a relatively independent "level" of social structure governed by its own internal logic rather than the conscious actions of individuals in specific historical contexts, Althusser disconnected literature from the real class struggles. In Eagleton's interpretation, this results in a critique that is formally Marxist but essentially structuralist: texts are examined as systems of signs and ideological conflicts, while the actual historical context—such as the particular stage of English capitalism, the working-class political movements, and the social struggles over religion, gender, and reform that shaped the world of the Brontës falls into the background.

Lutz's "thing theory" offers an alternative perspective, highlighting the non-commodity nature of relics and their resistance to circulation. However, this approach serves more as a complement than a replacement. Eagleton's core argument is that Wuthering Heights reflects the tensions and brutalities of a society in transition to capitalism, and that the intense, destructive love between Catherine and Heathcliff can only be understood in light of these social contradictions.[3]

One aspect of the "Paperwork" essay that warrants further thought is its treatment of Brontë's secrecy and isolation. Lutz carefully describes how Brontë concealed her poems, even from her sisters, in a tiny script "meant to conceal even as it revealed," and how the small size of the writing served as a form of privacy. This is a significant and compelling point. However, a Marxist perspective would question: what social conditions compelled an exceptionally talented woman to hide her inner life so completely? The Brontë sisters had to publish under pseudonyms  Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell to avoid potential dismissal. Emily's intense privacy was not merely a personal eccentricity or aesthetic preference; it was influenced by the societal position of women in Victorian bourgeois society, their exclusion from public intellectual participation, and their confinement to domestic roles. The "prison house" of the body, a recurring motif in Brontë’s poetry, was not merely a romantic or mystical image; it also embodied the tangible social restrictions women faced in mid-19th-century England.

Lutz's The Life of Emily Brontë extends this materialist-biographical approach across Brontë's whole life, centred on what Lutz calls the "nine objects" of The Brontë Cabinet (her 2015 work). This is a richly researched and readable approach to biography, and it avoids the worst tendencies of romantic mythologization to which Brontë biography is prone. But the limitation remains: the social and class framework stays underdeveloped. The Haworth that the Brontës inhabited was a specific place in a specific moment of capitalist development, the factory system, Chartism, and the condition of the working class in Yorkshire, and this context appears only at the periphery of Lutz's scholarship.

What Makes The Brontës Endure

Wuthering Heights is rooted not only in a harsh landscape but also in a real social world marked by class division and savagery, which must be reflected in the passions of our everyday lives. It, therefore, stands as a genuine and remarkable work of art. Should this benchmark be applied to any biography of Emily Brontë? Does it help us understand how a real person, shaped by specific material and social circumstances, created a piece of art that surpasses those conditions and resonates with universal human experience? The reader needs to ask whether Lutz's biography meets this standard by situating Brontë's remarkable inner life within the tangible context of Victorian England, including its class conflicts, treatment of women, religious hypocrisies, and economic instability among the educated poor. If it does, then it warrants serious engagement. Conversely, if it indulges in romantic myths about a solitary genius communing with nature, it will reveal less about Brontë than her novel already does.

The Brontë Sisters

The Brontë sisters—Charlotte (1816–1855), Emily (1818–1848), and Anne (1820–1849) hold a unique place in English literary history. Rather than serving as passive defenders of Victorian society, they acted as its passionate, often anguished critics. Viewing their work through a Marxist lens does not reduce it to merely sociological commentary; instead, it highlights why their art remains profoundly impactful: because it reflects, whether consciously or not, the genuine social contradictions of their era. Moreover, their greatest works explore universal truths about human experience that go beyond the specific context of their time.

The Brontës wrote during the 1840s, a decade characterised by revolutionary upheaval across Europe and severe social crisis in Britain. The Chartist movement, the first large-scale working-class political movement, was challenging the foundations of the British establishment. Ireland faced famine, while the Industrial Revolution generated immense wealth and profound poverty simultaneously. In 1854, Karl Marx recognised this social unrest in literature, noting that Charlotte Brontë, along with Dickens, Thackeray, and Gaskell, produced work that reveals more political and social truths than all the speeches of politicians, publicists, and moralists combined.

The Brontës were neither aristocrats looking down on society nor comfortably bourgeois. They were the daughters of a Yorkshire clergyman, forced into the fragile and humiliating role of governesses—educated women with refined sensibilities who had to sell their intellectual labour in households that viewed them with barely concealed disdain, neither fully servants nor equals. This sense of class ambiguity, caught between refinement and labour, permeates all their writing.

Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre (1847) fundamentally explores the dignity and independence of an individual who has nothing, no family, property, or social standing, in a society that judges worth solely on those criteria. Jane, an orphan, is sent to a charity school where harsh religious piety disguises cruelty. Her later role as a governess places her in a socially vulnerable position, which Charlotte experienced in her life. The novel is "rich with sharp social critique and disdain for the hypocrisy of organised religion and for social norms that corrupt genuine human relationships", created during a period marked by mass strikes and Chartist protests that challenged the British political system.

The governess's role highlights a broader social contradiction: while educated women are rising, they are still prevented from gaining independent economic power due to bourgeois property systems. Jane's famous statement, “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will,” is not merely romantic. It represents a rebellion against Victorian societal norms that viewed women as the property of their fathers, brothers, or husbands. Charlotte's novel underscores that this rebellion is justified. Jane's moral integrity, inner life, and independence are valued more than Rochester's inherited wealth and social rank.

The novel doesn't fully resolve this contradiction. Jane inherits wealth and marries Rochester, becoming equal again through the divine destruction of his past life. Charlotte wasn't a socialist, and we shouldn't interpret her as such. Yet, her strong focus on Jane's human dignity, along with her sharp critique of class hypocrisy, the parasitic aunt, the sadistic clergyman, the sycophantic social climbers, embodies a rebellious intensity that explains why the book has been adapted into film more than twenty times. Such passionate depictions of injustice remain compelling across generations.

The Brontës wrote from a specific social background, the provincial petty bourgeoisie, daughters of a clergyman on the Yorkshire moors, and their work thoughtfully explores issues of social constraint, passion, moral independence, and the oppressive influence of class society on personal growth. Wuthering Heights, especially with Heathcliff's origins in poverty and his revenge against the class system that harmed him, reflects significant social tensions that deserve deep literary-historical analysis.

The Pseudo Lefts and the Brontë sisters

A genuine Marxist view of the Brontës emphasises the historical and class factors that shape their work. This includes the effects of the Industrial Revolution in northern England, the strict constraints faced by educated women of their social class, and the tension between Romantic individualism and Victorian social norms. Rather than simply portraying them as proto-feminist icons for identity politics, a common approach among the pseudo-left, it's important to analyse their literature in its historical context. The Socialist Workers Party’s (SWP) cultural coverage often focuses more on political trends, such as feminism and anti-racism, than on literary analysis. True appreciation of great literature requires understanding it within its historical framework and recognising its universal, enduring artistic value, guided by the Marxist tradition of thinkers such as Mehring, Plekhanov, Trotsky, and others.

The Socialist Workers Party's portrayal of the Brontë sisters, detailed in the article "The Brontë sisters strove to be judged on their own terms," exemplifies the pseudo-left's approach to culture. Instead of genuinely engaging with the literary and historical significance of the Brontës' work, the SWP primarily depicts them as women fighting against male bias, reducing three of Victorian England's most renowned writers to symbols supporting a modern identity-politics agenda. The sisters are portrayed as proto-feminist tools in today's cultural conflicts—rather than as complex artists shaped by their specific historical and social contexts, whose work must be appreciated for its full complexity and depth.[4]

They engage in what could be described as "the worst kind of narrow-minded, ahistorical moralising.' The Brontës wrote during the 1840s, a decade marked by revolutionary upheavals across Europe, the same period when the Communist Manifesto was published, and Chartism reached its zenith in England. The West Yorkshire moors were not just an isolated, romanticised countryside; they were adjacent to industrial towns and symbolised the struggles of capitalism's rise. Viewing their work solely as a narrative of gender oppression fails to recognise the broader social and historical contexts that imbue it with greater significance.

When the SWP discusses the Brontës, it's not truly about them. Instead, it reflects the SWP's own concerns and frustrations, using three deceased Yorkshire writers as a convenient mirror. Had the Brontës been studied earnestly, they would have been more beneficial to the working class than to the SWP's aims. Trotsky valued literature highly and believed that great art, even from writers without revolutionary views, could elevate the human experience and expand understanding. The SWP, with its shallow focus on identity politics and political allegiance to Labour, cannot engage in this way. It reduces the complexity of the Brontës' work to a simple morality tale, women versus patriarchy, that conveniently aligns with its current political stance. This diminishes both the Brontës' legacy and the interests of the working class.

Emily Brontë's 'Wuthering Heights' is one of the most socially charged novels in English. The story centres on Heathcliff, a foundling of likely Irish or Romani origin, rescued from the streets of Liverpool, whose life is wrecked by a rigid class system that strips him of status and keeps him apart from Catherine. His quest for revenge embodies the anger of the oppressed, a fierce rebellion against the wealth-based social order. The novel is less about romance and more about how a class-based society corrupts and destroys individuals. Understanding this core is essential, and no focus on 'gender' or identity politics can replace it.

Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre presents a layered exploration of independence. Jane's notable assertion, "I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will", is often seen as a feminist statement today. However, it is rooted in a complex social context: Jane's independence is continually influenced by her class status as a governess, one of the most precarious roles in Victorian society educated yet without property, neither servant nor lady. Charlotte's own life experience informed her understanding of this contradiction. Anne Brontë, often the most neglected of the three, wrote The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a direct, unflinching account of a destructive marriage and a woman's struggle for legal and economic independence. It was considered so scandalous that Charlotte suppressed its republication after Anne's death to understand why requires understanding the property laws and social structures of the time, not merely projecting contemporary feminist categories backwards.

Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights

Charlotte's work is immediately social in tone, whereas Emily's explores deeper themes. Wuthering Heights (1847) remains one of the most outstanding novels in English literature. Its intense passions are not isolated but are linked to property, social class, and inheritance in every aspect. The emotional core of Heathcliff and Catherine's relationship cannot be understood without its social context. Catherine's decision to marry Edgar Linton rather than Heathcliff is not merely a betrayal of love; it reflects a preference for social status over genuine feelings, ultimately damaging both.

Emily excels at showing how capitalist property systems, such as land ownership, estate inheritance, mortgages, and foreclosures, are not just backgrounds but vital to human passion. Heathcliff's revenge is carried out through property dealings: he acquires Wuthering Heights through Hindley's gambling debts and employs marriage alliances to control Thrushcross Grange. The personal and societal are deeply intertwined.

What makes Wuthering Heights so difficult to simplify or shallowly adapt, as in Fennell's version, is that Emily neither romanticises passion nor the social structures that distort it. The novel demonstrates “hope in the possibility" of a better future, without suggesting such hope is easily within reach. Fennell's mistake highlights that by stripping away the novel's exploration of property relations, class dynamics, and the second generation of characters—who reveal Heathcliff's self-destructive vengeance—the adaptation reduces the story to mere "adulterous hot sex" and "sado-masochistic sexual cruelty."

What sets Brontë apart from a sentimental romantic novelist is her firm stance against letting passion escape its social boundaries. Catherine's well-known statement — "he's more myself than I am... if all else perished, and he remained, I should continue to be, and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger" — is not just romantic fancy. It reflects a love born under social marginality and class conflict, a connection built to defy Edgar Linton's comfortable, property-owning respectability. Nonetheless, Catherine also marries Edgar, knowing that "it would degrade her" to marry Heathcliff — not due to lesser love, but because social class restricts living outside its rules. Brontë here understands something that pure romance overlooks: the tragic distortion of human beings shaped by social forces beyond their control.

The second half of the novel, often overlooked in adaptations, is just as important. It shows Heathcliff's revenge reaching its final stage, with the younger characters (Hareton, Cathy, Linton Heathcliff) caught in the same social cycle. Brontë reminds readers that "primordial passion plays out often inarticulately in the mechanics of land ownership and household establishment," as Bond notes. Even the ending—where Heathcliff's desire for revenge wanes and Hareton and young Cathy find a tentative hope—is not purely about redemption. As Bond explains, it is a "novel of hope in the possibility" that human relationships can go beyond brutality—though not guaranteed, it offers a glimpse.

We should honestly acknowledge the limits of the Brontës' social perspective. They were not advocates of socialism or revolution. Their critique of class society is primarily moral rather than structural. The resolution in their novels usually points to a reformed or tempered bourgeois society, such as marriages between equals and personal redemption, rather than a radical overhaul of social relations that create inequality. They did not, and could not, articulate the collective action of the working class. The Chartist movement, shaking Britain at the time, appears only as a backdrop, not as a social force they recognised as significant.

This is not a condemnation; it is a recognition of the historical horizon within which they worked. The Marxist tradition has always insisted that even artists who do not consciously embrace a revolutionary perspective can produce works of great social truth when they are genuinely committed to depicting reality. Engels himself said that Balzac, a legitimist and Catholic, taught him more about French society than all the historians and economists combined, precisely because his artistic honesty compelled him to depict the contradictions of his world even against his own political sympathies. The same is true of the Brontës: their artistic integrity and their refusal to prettify the cruelties of class and gender in Victorian England produce works of enduring power.

The Brontë sisters are more than just great writers; their brilliance is deeply linked to their social context and their honest confrontation with it. The enduring relevance of their work—evidenced by how often Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre are adapted into films, studied, and widely debated—lies in their ability to portray the genuine human toll within a society driven by property, class, and the subjugation of women. This reflects "a real world of class distinction and savagery that must find reflection in the passions of our daily lives." The conflicts they identified remain unresolved; in fact, they have worsened and spread under mature capitalism. That is why their work remains relevant today.

From a Marxist standpoint, Wuthering Heights is a work of critical realism in the tradition that Engels admired in Balzac: an author who, regardless of her conscious intentions, captures the real social forces and contradictions of her time with pitiless honesty. Brontë had no programme of social transformation, but she had the artist's ability to perceive and render the devastation that class society inflicts on human beings — their loves, their psychologies, their possibilities. She shows us a world where the most profound human connection is crushed not by fate or natural evil, but by property, inheritance, and class power. That is an achievement of lasting significance, and it is why the novel remains, as Bond writes, "visceral and astonishing... rooted not just in a brutal landscape, but in a real world of class distinction and savagery that must find reflection in the passions of our daily lives."

 

 

 

 

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[1] Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights: Is this all that we can expect?

[2] Emily Brontë’s Paper Work-Deborah Lutz Victorian Review

Vol. 42, No. 2 (Fall 2016), pp. 291-306 (15 pages)

[3] Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture- Cambridge University Press 2015

05 January 2015

[4] socialistworker.co.uk/reviews-and-culture/the-bronte-sisters-strove-to-be-judged-on-their-own-terms/