A Trumpet of Sedition

Wednesday, 12 August 2026

A Security State Lens on Social Breakdown: The EU’s Femcel Study and the Long History of Pathologising Capitalist Crisis

A recent study conducted under the EU’s CounteR program—titled “Femcels’ Speeches Between Extreme Solitude and Radical Break with the ‘Alpha World’”—illustrates how contemporary academic research can serve ideological purposes aligned with security interests. Its authors, Séraphin Alava and Rasha Nagem, frame their work as a neutral analysis of online discussions among young women who feel isolated and romantically excluded. However, the study is actually a politically motivated document, part of a state-funded initiative to pathologise the social effects of capitalist failures. Two critical sentences highlight its core message: “Loneliness is treated as a discursive and psychological phenomenon to be typologized, not as a social product of a specific economic order.” “The Femcel, like the incel before her, is thereby transformed from a symptom of social crisis into a potential security risk to be monitored.”

These lines emphasise the main ideological stance: turning social distress into a security concern. The research is carried out within an institution dedicated to “Violent Terrorism and Crime Prediction," which interprets the analysis exclusively through risk management ideas. Consequently, important questions — such as why now? Why specifically this form? and what socio-economic conditions contribute to this isolation? — are initially overlooked.

The Security Apparatus as Arbiter of Academic Inquiry

The CounteR project is part of a broad EU security research network that has expanded significantly over the past decade. Its primary aim is not to study social phenomena but to classify and predict them. Funding for this research cannot address the social roots of issues like alienation, declining living standards, or the commercialisation of intimate life. Instead, it concentrates on monitoring, categorising, and intercepting online expressions of distress. This restriction is political rather than academic. The EU, along with Britain and the US, has established a surveillance system that treats political dissent, psychological distress, and social isolation as interchangeable indicators of “radicalisation.” The Femcel is merely viewed as a data point within a risk-scoring framework.

The study’s categories — “Alpha world rejection,” “feminist consciousness,” “radicalisation trajectory” — are not neutral labels. They are part of a security framework aimed at classifying populations by risk level. In essence, the typology created by the authors acts as a taxonomy for a database.

A Long Lineage: Cold War Social‑Pathology Research

The main idea behind the Femcel study's ideology is not new. It carries on a Cold War-era social science tradition that regarded the societal effects of capitalist crises as primarily psychological problems. Oscar Lewis’s “culture of poverty” concept redefined structural difficulties as a self-perpetuating psychological condition. Poverty was interpreted not as a result of exploitation but as stemming from "maladaptive behaviours.” This view aligned with Cold War liberalism by distancing inequality from political causes and instead blaming it on the mindset of those in poverty.

The Frankfurt School’s concept of the Authoritarian Personality, adapted by US Cold War agencies, framed political tendencies as psychological disorders. This shift diverted attention from social causes of fascism, instead emphasising individual personality traits. As a result, political threats were seen as personal psychological issues rather than linked to class struggles. Postwar research on “juvenile delinquency” often interpreted the decline of urban working-class areas as behavioural problems needing supervision, rather than recognising it as a result of deindustrialisation and racial segregation. The Alava–Nagem paper reflects this Cold War perspective: social crises are simplified into psychological types; alienation is regarded as a risk factor; resentment is viewed as a pathology, and structural conditions are not considered. The EU’s counter-radicalisation initiatives are significantly shaped by the UK’s Prevent program, which is among Europe's most extensive surveillance systems.

Prevent has identified tens of thousands of individuals for deradicalisation efforts, including children as young as four. According to the WSWS, Prevent combines political dissent, mental health issues, and social isolation into a single category called “extremism.’ Its primary strategy is pre-emptive intervention—acting before political consciousness develops. This includes monitoring online speech, conducting risk assessments, and viewing social alienation as a security threat. Furthermore, women’s online spaces are increasingly targeted, under the assumption that “vulnerable individuals” could be more susceptible to extremism.

The Femcel study follows this trend, using Prevent’s risk-tiering approach. It views online discussion as a threat and frames feminist awareness as a potential pathway to radicalisation, ignoring material conditions. To fully understand it, one must consider the incel discourse that sparked it, which itself arose from the broader crisis of social reproduction. After the 2018 Toronto van attack, incels were quickly labelled as terrorists. Media and academic discussions concentrated on misogynistic beliefs, online radicalisation, and psychological issues, while overlooking material factors such as declining living standards, social atomisation, commodified intimacy, and algorithm-driven dating markets.

Both incel and Femcel discussions originate from the decline of community institutions, the commercialisation of romance, the hierarchy of desirability, and the collapse of stable social paths to partnership. However, incels are viewed as a violent danger, whereas Femcels are considered psychologically fragile. Despite this difference, the core issue is identical. The Alava–Nagem study observes that Femcel discourse “diverges from the misogynistic violence associated with segments of the incel milieu,” but still regards Femcels as potential security risks. The fundamental reasoning is consistent: social crises trigger risk assessments.

Dating Apps and the Commodification of Intimacy

The increase in dating app usage over the last decade is often seen as a cultural or technological development. However, it also exposes a deeper social crisis. These platforms, which impact the private lives of hundreds of millions, are not just neutral tools but commercial systems that transform human relationships via market forces. Their growth is also linked to worsening material conditions that once supported stable relationships.

The political economy behind dating apps is straightforward. These platforms prioritise profit, which depends on maintaining user dissatisfaction. Their business model involves encouraging frequent user turnover, artificially restricting attention, ranking desirability with algorithms, and segmenting users into paid tiers. In this setup, intimacy and visibility are treated as commodities. Loneliness is also commodified—controlled through subscriptions, profile boosts, and algorithm adjustments. Rather than solving loneliness, these platforms exploit it for financial gain.

This commodification of intimate life is not an accidental result of technology but a direct outcome of decades of neoliberal reforms. The decline of stable jobs, rising housing prices, the breakdown of public spaces, and the fragmentation of social life have weakened the communal and workplace institutions where relationships traditionally developed. Dating apps serve to fill the void left by capitalist disintegration, yet they also intensify it.

Platforms tend to replicate and amplify existing social inequalities. Their algorithms prioritise users based on aesthetic, cultural, and class indicators that closely align with income, education, and consumption habits. This creates a stratified marketplace where a small minority garners most attention, while others struggle for visibility amid harsher competition. The concept of the “Alpha world,” often discussed in Femcel and incel communities, is not just a cultural fantasy; it reflects the ideological foundation of this market-driven mindset.

The mental health issues linked to using dating apps — including anxiety, loneliness, and resentment — are not personal flaws. They are the expected results of structuring intimate relationships around competition, self-promotion, and algorithm-driven choices. Despite this, academic and media narratives often view these problems as personal ailments instead of signs of a society in upheaval. The EU’s counter-radicalisation efforts take this further by framing the negative effects of commodified intimacy as possible security risks.

The truth is simpler and more politically explosive. The crisis of intimacy is a crisis of capitalism. The commodification of romantic life is inseparable from the commodification of everything else. A society that cannot provide stable employment, affordable housing, or meaningful community cannot provide the conditions for stable relationships. Dating apps do not repair this devastation; they monetise it.

The Gendered Crisis of Social Reproduction

To grasp the rise of Femcel discourse, it's essential to look beyond platform speech and focus on the social reproductive crisis. Since the 1980s, young people in Europe and North America have experienced declining wages, rising housing costs, shrinking public spaces, the breakdown of stable workplaces and communities, and fragmented social and temporal lives. For young women, these issues have led to postponed or unfeasible household formation, increased competition in dating scenes, greater reliance on algorithm-driven platforms, and social isolation from stable networks.

Dating apps have transformed courtship from a personal pursuit into a market-driven activity. Visibility is now a product, algorithms rank desirability, and romantic opportunities are part of a competitive marketplace. The concept of the “Alpha world” in Femcel discussions is not just a cultural myth but a reflection of this market logic's ideology. Femcel language isn't a sign of pathology but a rational reaction to being excluded from a commodified form of intimacy. It acts as a social critique—though it may be nascent and contradictory—rooted in actual experiences. However, the counter-radicalisation perspective cannot see this because acknowledging it would mean admitting capitalism’s failure to foster stable social life.

Feminist Consciousness and the Limits of Security‑Compatible Critique

The study hints at a “transition… to feminist consciousness,” but only in a depoliticised, NGO-friendly way. The feminism accepted within a security framework is the safe type: focusing on individual empowerment, platform governance, and representation. The feminism that is excluded highlights women’s isolation in social reproduction crises, critiques the commodification of intimacy, and acknowledges that stable relationships depend on steady material conditions.

A truly materialist feminist outlook would critique the very structure of capitalist society. It would see the dating-app marketplace as a capitalist institution rather than just a cultural artefact. This perspective would acknowledge that the crisis of intimacy is tied to broader issues like work, housing, and community. If fully developed, it could lead to socialist reforms of social life. This is exactly the kind of awareness that counter-radicalisation efforts aim to suppress.

A truly social-rooted study of Femcel discourse would start by examining material conditions such as employment insecurity, housing instability, debt, the decline of public spaces, and the weakening of communal institutions. It would explore how algorithmic sorting worsens inequality, commodifies visibility, and stratifies desirability. The analysis would include how women cope with exclusion, how resentment stems from structural issues, and how online conversations reflect material realities. It would question whether alienation can transform into class consciousness, whether feminist criticism can evolve into anti-capitalism, and whether new solidarities can form. The Alava–Nagem paper cannot undertake this because its institutional role is to prevent such analysis.

Conclusion: The Ideological Function of Counter‑Radicalisation Research

The Femcel phenomenon illustrates a facet of capitalist social disintegration. The counter-radicalisation system reinterprets it as a security threat. This shift isn't mere academic oversight but a deliberate ideological stance. The ruling elite, unable to confront the social ruin they caused, reframe these issues as individual mental health problems, crimes, or extremism. The Alava–Nagem study thus highlights not just its findings but what it exposes: the clash between a security-focused knowledge system and a social reality it struggles to comprehend. It’s a record of an apparatus compelled to classify and prevent, while avoiding questions about the root causes of the crisis.

The Arday Affair: How Cambridge’s Branding Machine, Marketised Higher Education, and the Pseudo Left Produced a Crisis Eight Centuries in the Making

The resignation of Professor Jason Arday from the University of Cambridge has sparked widespread comment in British media and politics. However, the issue isn't just about personal misconduct or admin flaws. It reflects a deeper, systemic crisis in British higher education—shaped by Cambridge and Oxbridge's long-standing class role, decades of market influences, and protected by the pseudo-left’s focus on identity politics. This analysis explores the historical, political, and economic factors that made the Arday case both unavoidable and inevitable.

Cambridge: Eight Centuries of Class Rule

To understand Cambridge’s behaviour, it’s important to look at its origins. Founded in 1209, Cambridge has long served the ruling class, with its architecture, rituals, and governance acting as tools to perpetuate elite dominance. Historically, Oxford and Cambridge have functioned as training grounds for clergy, civil servants, judges, and political leaders. They also serve as gatekeepers of cultural capital, shaping standards of 'merit,' and as networks that strengthen aristocratic and bourgeois influence. The colleges were endowed by monarchs, bishops, and wealthy patrons, with governance structures—led by fellows, donors, and senior administrators—designed to maintain privilege rather than democratise knowledge.

The 2019 Sutton Trust report highlighted this continuity: 71% of senior judges, 56% of Permanent Secretaries, 38% of Lords, and 24% of MPs had been educated at Oxford or Cambridge. The elite are twenty-four times more likely to have attended Oxbridge compared to the general population. This pattern is deliberate, as Oxbridge’s prestige functions as a political asset, legitimising the authority of the ruling class by portraying privilege as merit. It is this prestige—rather than academic quality—that Cambridge aimed to protect in the Arday case.

Marketisation: How Policy Turned Universities into Corporations

The Arday scandal is closely linked to the changes in UK higher education over the last 30 years. Starting with the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act and advancing with the Browne Review in 2010, successive governments reduced public funding and promoted market competition. Between 2011–12 and 2017–18, government funding for universities decreased by 74 per cent in real terms. Currently, 80 per cent of the sector's income comes from private sources, mainly student fees and commercial activities.

Universities now operate like corporations: they issue bonds worth hundreds of millions of pounds, hold credit ratings from Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, and have vice-chancellors acting as CEOs earning over £400,000. Marketing departments have grown to rival academic faculties in size and influence. Students are viewed as customers rather than learners. Academic staff often work on insecure, casualised contracts. This market-driven approach has transformed university life: research is prioritised for grant attraction, teaching for attracting fee-paying students, and public relations for drawing donors and international applicants.

In this context, “diversity” branding functions more as a market strategy than a moral stance. Universities vie for lucrative international students, mainly from China, India, and the Gulf, who pay between £25,000 and £40,000 annually. A professor with a biography that attracts positive media coverage becomes a valuable asset. Arday's rapid ascent—from a PE lecturer to a Cambridge professor in just seven years—was not an isolated case. Instead, it exemplifies a system where personal stories are commercialised to serve institutional interests.

Arday’s background—overcoming adversity, late literacy, racial uplift—aligned well with Cambridge’s marketing goals. His appointment received extensive positive press, boosted social-media engagement, and increased international recognition. Multiple sources report that concerns about his doctoral thesis were dismissed as issues 'predating his arrival.' Senior staff prioritised positive media images over detailed academic review. The university’s communications team promoted Arday’s story worldwide. This pattern is not unusual; systemic incentives drive it. In a market-based system: prestige brings in revenue, visibility attracts students, and narratives enhance brand value. Conversely, academic integrity rarely generates revenue and can even threaten financial interests.

The Pseudo‑Left: Identity Politics as an Ideological Shield

The pseudo-left—comprising academics, commentators, and activists advocating for identity politics while neglecting class issues—plays a significant role in maintaining the ideological structure of market-driven higher education. In universities, identity politics acts as a form of institutional cover: it offers a low-cost alternative to increasing access for the working class, helps elite institutions project progressive credentials, boosts individuals whose profiles can be commodified, and shifts focus away from academic labour exploitation. The pseudo-left celebrated Arday’s appointment as a victory for representation, overlooking the fact that Cambridge’s student body remains predominantly privileged and its governance retains an aristocratic character.

Right‑Wing Reaction: Meritocracy as a Myth

The right-wing campaign against Arday, led by individuals who openly promote racist pseudoscience, isn’t driven by a genuine concern for academic standards. Instead, it’s fuelled by hostility toward any hiring practices that challenge traditional class privilege. However, the right and the pseudo-left are not truly opponents; they represent two facets of petty-bourgeois politics. The pseudo-left hides its class privilege through identity branding, while the right criticises that branding to defend their own class interests. Both factions support the marketisation of higher education, uphold the authority of elite institutions, and ignore capitalism’s role in fostering corruption, inequality, and intellectual decline. The working class faces a false dichotomy: embracing DEI branding or subscribing to right-wing meritocracy. Both are illusions.

The Real Issue: The Corruption of Higher Education Under Capitalism

The Arday scandal does not highlight failures in vetting but instead reveals a deeper systemic issue where education has become a commodity, universities are part of global financial markets, academic labour is increasingly casualised and degraded, bureaucracy employs identity politics to conceal class privilege, and both the right and pseudo-left manipulate DEI controversies — the right to reinforce privilege and the pseudo-left to defend branding. Both sides uphold the university as a means of maintaining class dominance.

Workers and students must oppose both the pseudo-left, which defends university branding, and the right-wing, which criticises DEI. The fight for academic integrity is fundamentally connected to the broader struggle for socialism. A truly democratic and academically rigorous university system depends on: public funding as the basis for higher education, democratic control by staff and students, the elimination of managerial bureaucracies, an end to market competition and private investment, and the socialist transformation of society where education is viewed as a social right. Only through such a transformation can universities stop serving as instruments of class privilege and become what they are meant to be: institutions committed to the cultural and scientific progress of humanity.

Letter To Ukraine President Protesting against the 15-year sentence of Bogdan Syrotiuk and demand for his immediate release

President Volodymyr Zelensky, Office of the President of Ukraine, 11 Bankova St., Kyiv, 01220, Ukraine

Cc: Ministry of Justice of Ukraine; Pervomaisk City and District Court, Mykolaiv; Ukrainian Embassy, United Kingdom

Subject: Protest against the 15-year sentence of Bogdan Syrotiuk and demand for his immediate release

Dear President Zelensky,

I am writing to protest, in the strongest possible terms, the August 10, 2026 verdict of the Pervomaisk City and District Court sentencing Bogdan Syrotiuk to fifteen years’ imprisonment on charges of “high treason” under martial law.

The prosecution’s case rested entirely on Mr Syrotiuk’s political writings — articles published on the World Socialist Web Site and his correspondence with its editors — as well as his role as a leader of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists, a small Trotskyist youth organisation. A 65-page linguistic analysis prepared by Yuri Irkhin, one of Ukraine’s leading criminologists, examined these materials and found no language supporting Russian aggression against Ukraine. The court has not addressed or refuted this finding. Indeed, the articles cited in the verdict explicitly oppose both the Russian invasion and the policies of the Putin government.

Whatever one’s view of Mr Syrotiuk’s political positions, the prosecution and conviction of an individual for writing and publishing political commentary is incompatible with fundamental standards of freedom of expression. Ukraine is bound to uphold these standards under its own Constitution and under the European Convention on Human Rights. The European Court of Human Rights has already accepted Mr Syrotiuk’s case for review, underscoring the seriousness of the violations involved.

I am further alarmed by credible reports that Mr Syrotiuk has been denied adequate medical care during his detention, despite repeated assurances from the prison administration. A fifteen-year sentence under the documented conditions of Ukraine’s penitentiary system poses a grave and immediate threat to his health and life.

I therefore call on the Ukrainian authorities to:

Overturn the verdict against Bogdan Syrotiuk and order his immediate release;
Ensure he receives all necessary medical treatment without further delay;
End the prosecution of individuals for the peaceful expression of political views, in accordance with Ukraine’s international human rights obligations.

The Limits of Liberal Fiction in the Age of Mass Deportation: Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive and the Crisis of Artistic Consciousness

The American literary scene widely praises Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019) as a compassionate, innovative book that tackles the migrant crisis. It demonstrates that contemporary fiction can still meaningfully engage with social issues. Nonetheless, both its reception and content reveal a key problem: the significant political and artistic restrictions within a literary culture dominated by the professional-managerial class. This cultural sphere fails to see the working class as an active force in history, which hinders a true understanding of the crisis’s underlying dynamics.

The migrant crisis is a concrete issue, not just a metaphor or moral tale, nor a backdrop for middle-class introspective concerns. It results from decades of imperialist actions, economic destruction, and bipartisan violence. Genuine art should face these truths directly, but Luiselli’s novel, despite its intelligence and sincerity, does not fully achieve this.

Aestheticisation as Social Function, Not Accident

Luiselli is keenly aware of the risk of turning suffering into mere aesthetic display. Her narrator often questions whether she has the right to “document” tragedies. However, this self-awareness is woven into the aesthetic framework—acting as a ritual that reassures readers that the issue is recognised, thus excusing it. The novel’s use of multiple voices, embedded documents, a Sebald-inspired style, and lyrical abstractions is not just a stylistic device; it transforms horror into a literary experience for readers who are shielded from the violence. The educated, liberal audience is prompted to feel intensely and to experience “productive discomfort,” while still avoiding confrontation with the social forces behind the crisis or their own links to those forces. This is not a flaw in technique but a reflection of the social role that liberal fiction currently occupies.

A key feature of Lost Children Archive is its minimal depiction of ordinary Americans as political figures. As the family journeys from New York to Arizona, passing through many working-class areas, the people they encounter are shown as silent, indifferent, or prejudiced. The borderlands are depicted as hostile territory. This choice is deliberate and reflects a class perspective: Luiselli’s protagonists are essentially documentarians with grants, passports, and credentials. They see the world divided into two groups: educated, compassionate professionals like themselves and a vague mass of backward or indifferent Americans. The working class—whether native-born or immigrant—lacks the power to challenge or dismantle the detention system, and notions of collective action are absent from the novel. This is a political restriction, not merely a stylistic choice. It mirrors the perspective of the social group that currently leads literary production: the upper-middle-class intelligentsia. Their political views are heavily influenced by identity politics, emphasising moral witness and a profound scepticism toward the working class.

Luiselli draws a parallel between nineteenth-century Indigenous removal and twenty-first-century child detention. Although this comparison is historically significant, the novel predominantly expresses mourning rather than providing analysis. The ongoing violence is depicted as a lament for an unchanging American identity, rather than as an examination of the specific class forces driving current policies. The danger lies in presenting American violence as transhistorical, which makes the migrant crisis appear inevitable instead of a consequence of decisions made by particular political actors pursuing specific economic goals. While the bipartisan support for deportation—growing under Obama and escalating under Trump—is acknowledged, it is not critically analysed. This approach creates a historical narrative that lacks agency.

The shortcomings of Lost Children Archive are not unique to Luiselli but highlight a broader trend in American literature. The overseeing professional-managerial class—spanning publishing, academia, and the arts—lacks political clarity. It often opposes universalist politics, mistrusts the working class, and treats social crises more as moral spectacles than opportunities for action. This leads to a literature that emphasises witnessing over analysis, prioritising empathy over solidarity, and introspection over mobilisation. Migrant suffering becomes a matter of aesthetic experience rather than a call for collective intervention. The migrant crisis isn't mainly about representation; it originates from capitalism, imperialism, and border militarisation. No stylistic innovation can substitute for a political perspective that addresses these root causes.

The Class Character of Contemporary American Fiction

Contemporary American fiction often presents itself as morally serious, politically active, and innovative in form. It claims to tackle urgent social issues such as inequality, racism, climate change, migration, and political turmoil. Yet, this surface-level activism conceals a profound stagnation artistically and politically. Currently, the dominant trends in American literary fiction tend to reflect the narrow viewpoints of the professional-managerial class involved in producing, distributing, and consuming these works, rather than portraying the full complexity of social realities.

The literature discussed is characterised by a formal dynamism paired with political caution, blending emotional expressiveness with social distance. It is rich in moral sentiment but often fails to imagine collective efforts or historical transformation. Its central figures are introspective professionals whose crises are rooted in personal trauma, and their political concerns mainly involve ethical dilemmas. The primary focus remains on the self. This pattern is deliberate and mirrors the class dynamics inherent in contemporary American fiction.

The Professional‑Managerial Class as Cultural Gatekeeper

The American literary world—comprising publishing companies, MFA programs, literary magazines, award panels, and cultural bodies—is mostly governed by the professional-managerial class (PMC). This group, which includes academics, editors, nonprofit employees, cultural administrators, and credentialed artists, occupies a conflicted position within capitalism. While they benefit from material advantages over the working class, their political security is precarious, as their dependence on institutions has weakened due to decades of neoliberal reforms.

The PMC’s worldview shapes its literature, viewing politics through personal anxiety instead of collective struggle. Social crises are portrayed as moral spectacles rather than structural conflicts, while the working class is seen either as a threat or an abstraction. Moreover, historical forces are often seen as tragic inevitabilities rather than results of class dominance. This worldview is not merely ideological but institutional, as the PMC controls what is recognised as “serious fiction,” which themes are “urgent,” what forms are “innovative,” and which writers are seen as voices of conscience. As a result, the literature produced reflects the PMC’s anxieties more than the genuine experiences of most people in the United States.

Contemporary American fiction often features the literature of witness: novels depicting social disasters through the perspective of educated observers who feel deeply but take little action. These works are filled with empathy, introspection, and moral discomfort, treating suffering as something to be documented, archived, or artistically processed. They reveal political views by emphasising that the individual is the main focus of political experience, the reader’s emotional reaction replaces political analysis, the author’s self-awareness stands in for political commitment, and collective agency is either absent or hard to imagine. This literature is not neutral; it reflects a cultural expression of a class that has lost confidence in its power to influence history and cannot see the working class as a societal force capable of transformation.

The PMC’s political stance is shaped by identity politics, which explains social conflict through personal identities instead of class issues. This view has significantly influenced modern fiction, resulting in literature where social crises are seen as personal problems, political systems are depicted through interpersonal relationships, historical events are interpreted via personal traumas, and solidarity appears as empathy rather than collective action. Identity politics leads writers to see social reality as a mosaic of individual experiences rather than a unified structure formed by class relations. It divides the world into separate moral issues, each needing recognition rather than change. This fragmentation is not only thematic but also formal, as the rise of polyphonic narratives, fragmented structures, and hybrid forms often reflects difficulty in imagining society as a coherent whole.

Migrant Narratives and the Pseudo‑Left’s Humanitarian Theatre

Valeria Luiselli’s work exemplifies a wider cultural trend in which migrant stories are cherished as moral symbols but often lack their historical and political depth. This pattern is intentional, aligning with the ideological aims of today’s pseudo-left. This combination of academia, NGOs, and media replaces class-based politics with humanitarian feelings, viewing imperialism as an unfortunate accident instead of a fundamental aspect of capitalism.

Luiselli’s novels and essays are powerful, yet they often become part of this humanitarian drama. They are celebrated for their empathy, lyrical portrayal of suffering, and critique of bureaucratic inhumanity. However, the qualities that appeal to liberal audiences also make them politically safe. The migrant is depicted as a victim of administrative mistakes, not as a worker driven out by imperialist violence. The border is seen as a moral dilemma rather than a tool for global class control. The story encourages compassion rather than confrontation.

This is exactly how the pseudo-left exploits migrant stories: as emotional currency. Migrants serve as symbols enabling institutions to showcase virtue, academics to amass cultural capital, and media outlets to project moral seriousness. The root causes of displacement — such as war, extraction, and political instability — are replaced by a sentimental emphasis on personal suffering. This creates a politics of pity that flatters the liberal conscience while maintaining the imperialist system.

Luiselli’s work acts as a mirror in this context, reflecting the pseudo-left’s preference for narratives that are politically provocative yet not threatening, critical but not revolutionary, emotionally impactful yet avoiding structural critique. Her writing reveals genuine violence, but how the pseudo-left receives it turns that violence into a spectacle for consumption.

A truly impactful novel about the migrant crisis should go beyond Lost Children Archive by depicting migrants as historical agents rather than mere symbols, and presenting ordinary Americans as possible allies rather than barriers. It ought to situate the crisis within the broader context of global capitalism, recognising the working class as the only force capable of ending mass detention and deportation. Such a novel would frame the crisis as a political issue to confront rather than solely a moral concern to observe. It demands an artistic perspective aligned with the international working class, rather than the professional-managerial class.

Sources and Bibliography

I. Political Economy of Culture and Literature

Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Routledge, 1997.
Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford University Press, 2002.
Benjamin, Walter. The Author as Producer. In Selected Writings, Volume 2. Harvard University Press, 1999.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Stanford University Press, 1996.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Harvard University Press, 1984.
Eagleton, Terry. The Function of Criticism. Verso, 2005.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Blackwell, 2008.
Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society. Columbia University Press, 1983.
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford University Press, 1977.

II. Class Analysis and the Professional‑Managerial Class

Ehrenreich, Barbara, and John Ehrenreich. “The Professional‑Managerial Class.” Radical America, vol. 11, no. 3, 1977.
Fraser, Nancy. The Old Is Dying, and the New Cannot Be Born. Verso, 2019.
Sennett, Richard, and Jonathan Cobb. The Hidden Injuries of Class. Vintage, 1993.
Wright, Erik Olin. Class Counts. Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Wright, Erik Olin. Understanding Class. Verso, 2015.
Reed, Adolph. “The Limits of Anti‑Racism.” Left Business Observer, 2009.
Reed, Adolph. Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene. New Press, 2000.

III. Contemporary American Fiction, MFA Culture, and Literary Institutions

McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Harvard University Press, 2009.
McGurl, Mark. “Everything and Less: Fiction in the Age of Amazon.” Modern Language Quarterly, 2018.
Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs. Simon & Schuster, 2018.
Harbach, Chad. MFA vs NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction. FSG Originals, 2014.
Sinykin, Dan. Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature. Columbia University Press, 2023.
Sinykin, Dan. “The Conglomerate Era.” Post45, 2020.
Lutz, Tom. Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.
Guillory, John. “How the Humanities Survived.” Critical Inquiry, 2021.

IV. Migration, Imperialism, and U.S. Border Policy

Luiselli, Valeria. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. Coffee House Press, 2017.
Luiselli, Valeria. Lost Children Archive. Knopf, 2019.
Gilman, Nils. Mandarins of the Future: Modernisation Theory in Cold War America. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
Grandin, Greg. The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. Metropolitan Books, 2019.
Hagan, Jacqueline, et al. Skills of the “Unskilled”: Work and Mobility among Mexican Migrants. University of California Press, 2015.
Massey, Douglas S., et al. Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration. Russell Sage Foundation, 2002.
Menjívar, Cecilia, and Leisy Abrego. “Legal Violence: Immigration Law and the Lives of Central American Immigrants.” American Journal of Sociology, 2012.
U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). Immigration Detention: Progress and Challenges in DHS’s Efforts to Improve Conditions. GAO‑20‑385, 2020.
Human Rights Watch. US: Family Separation Harming Children, Families. HRW Report, 2018.

V. WSWS Arts Criticism and Political Analysis

(These are not copyrighted articles reproduced in full; they are citations to publicly available WSWS pieces.)

Walsh, David. “The Crisis of American Culture and the Tasks of the Working Class.” World Socialist Web Site, 2018.
Walsh, David. “Art and Social Life: A Marxist Perspective.” WSWS, 2016.
English, Sandy. “The American Dirt Controversy and the Politics of Representation.” WSWS, 2020.
Brenner, Patrick. “The Working Class and the Struggle Against Xenophobia.” WSWS, 2019.
Greider, Nick. “The Social Crisis in America and the Failure of Contemporary Fiction.” WSWS, 2021.
North, David. The Crisis of American Democracy. Mehring Books, 2020.
Kishore, Joseph. “The Political Economy of the Trump Administration’s Immigration Policies.” WSWS, 2019.

VI. Additional Theoretical and Historical Context

Anderson, Perry. Considerations on Western Marxism. Verso, 1976.
Anderson, Perry. The Origins of Postmodernity. Verso, 1998.
Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, 2005.
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Blackwell, 1989.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso, 1991.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. Cornell University Press, 1981.
Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness. MIT Press, 1971.
Lukács, Georg. The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. Merlin Press, 1963.

Tuesday, 11 August 2026

A Social History of Sickness Before Modern Medicine: On Jennifer Evans and Sara Read’s Maladies and Medicine

Jennifer Evans and Sara Read’s Maladies and Medicine: Exploring Health and Healing, 1540–1740 (Pen & Sword, 2017) appears, at first glance, as a concise social history of illness in early modern England. However, when viewed within a wider context of social reproduction and class formation of that era, the book reveals more: it offers insights into how bodies were regulated, how suffering was accepted as natural, and how the rise of capitalism transformed the conditions in which ordinary people lived, worked, and died.

Evans and Read do not aim to write a comprehensive history of class or the shift to capitalism. Instead, they use an empirical, descriptive approach organised around specific ailments rather than overarching arguments. The evidence they compile—such as casebooks, diaries, court records, household remedies, and cheap almanacks—provides valuable insights into how sickness operated within a society experiencing significant change. Their book inadvertently but effectively captures the medical aspect of the gradual decline of feudalism and the emergence of capitalist social relations.

The Humoral Body as a Social Body

The authors focus on the humoral body, viewed as a delicate balance of hot, cold, wet, and dry forces, constantly threatened by diet, weather, labour, and morality. This concept extends beyond medicine into a social worldview, making sense in a setting where most people lived on the brink of subsistence, faced endemic malnutrition, endured physically demanding work, and where environmental factors were linked to social class. Evans and Read interpret humoralism as a belief system, while a materialist perspective considers it a form of ideology.

Humoralism reframed structural suffering as personal imbalance, attributing disease to personal regimen, moral failure, or the mysterious flow of fluids rather than factors like enclosure, dispossession, or wage labour. This served an ideological purpose by naturalising the suffering created by the rise of capitalism.

The Medical Hierarchy and the Restructuring of Social Reproduction

The book’s strength lies in its detailed portrayal of the layered medical economy. It highlights university-trained physicians at the top, whose Latin education and guild privileges attracted wealthy clients. Below them, apothecaries and surgeons handled manual, often bloody treatments. Further down was a large informal sector of unlicensed healers—many women—whose inherited household knowledge served most of the population. Evans and Read describe this hierarchy, but within early modern social reproduction, it indicates a deeper underlying process.

Women were excluded from formal medical authority not just due to prejudice but as part of a broader process of knowledge enclosure. As capitalist relations grew, household and community-based care—largely performed by women—became subordinate to professional monopolies. This shift in the medical field reflected similar changes in reproductive labour, such as midwifery, childcare, food preparation, and sickness management, which became battlegrounds between traditional communal practices and emerging market influences. The 'informal economy” of healing was not merely an outdated relic; it was the leftover of a pre-capitalist social reproduction system actively being dismantled by the new economic order.

Disease, Poverty, and the Making of a Proletariat

Evans and Read briefly mention that factors like poverty, overwork, and malnutrition influenced who became ill and who received treatment. However, they do not link these issues to the class relations of early modern England, which a materialist analysis would require. Between 1540 and 1740, England experienced significant social and economic changes, including the enclosure of common land, the dispossession of peasants, the rise of wage labour, increasing urban poverty, and the emergence of a landless proletariat.

These processes not only created new economic relationships but also established new physical conditions. “Bad diet” and “corrupt air” were not simply random misfortunes; they reflected the lived reality of class identity. The illnesses listed by Evans and Read—such as plague, smallpox, gout, toothache, and madness—were unevenly distributed based on property ownership and labour roles. The ailing body was inherently a body defined by class. Later, Engels would describe this as "social murder”: the deliberate, systemic creation of disease and early death through societal organisation. Evans and Read’s era can be seen as the groundwork for this concept—the period during which the foundations for social murder were established.

What the Book Offers—and What It Cannot Provide

As a compendium of lived experience, Maladies and Medicine is invaluable. Its prose is clear, its sources rich, and its case studies vivid. It allows the reader to encounter sickness in something close to its own terms.

But as an explanation of why early modern medicine took the form it did, the book is incomplete. It catalogues belief and practice but does not analyse the social relations that produced them. It describes the medical hierarchy but does not explain its connection to the restructuring of social reproduction. It notes poverty but does not treat it as a structural determinant of disease.

Where the book falls short is in its reluctance to press this material toward a fuller social explanation. Poverty, overwork, malnutrition, and environmental degradation appear in the narrative, but only as background conditions rather than as structuring forces. The authors note that “bad diet” and “corrupt air” shaped who fell ill and who could be treated. Still, they do not connect these phenomena to the concrete class relations of early modern England—the dispossession of the peasantry, the growth of wage labour, and the emergence. The text discusses how a landless proletariat lives on the brink of subsistence. It emphasises that the authors' limitations are more about the academic division of labour than about their failure. The history of medicine is often viewed separately from class struggle, ignoring the interconnectedness of bodies and social structures. Maladies and Medicine offers a solid empirical base for a Marxist perspective on early modern social reproduction, illustrating how the shift to capitalism impacted not just work and courts but also kitchens, sickrooms, and individual bodies. It successfully recovers and documents these aspects but leaves broader explanatory questions about societal forces open for others.

Martyrdom Without Politics: How Remember Me to My Comrades Conceals the Betrayal of the Spanish Revolution

Michael Crowley’s "Remember Me to My Comrades: Letters and Diaries of the International Brigade" (Barnthorn, £16.99) honours the approximately 2,500 British volunteers who fought in Spain from 1936 to 1938. It offers valuable insights as a recovery project, gathering letters, diaries, and memoirs from workers whose voices are often overlooked in official histories. However, as an analysis of the political forces influencing their fate—and ultimately betraying the Spanish Revolution—it is somewhat evasive, bordering on distortion.

Crowley observes that both the volunteers and the Comintern organisation that recruited them consistently framed Spain as a conflict against fascism rather than a civil war. It is undisputed that young workers like Kenneth Bradbury—from Oldham, who was already leading a Young Communist League branch at seventeen and died at Teruel in January 1938—saw their fight as part of a broader struggle against fascism internationally. However, Crowley declines to examine how the Stalinist leadership actually manipulated this understanding and systematically distorted it.

The book notes, almost as an aside, that between half and two-thirds of the battalion were members of the Communist Party or the YCL. Crowley views this as a mere sociological fact rather than a basis for in-depth political analysis. In fact, this detail is crucial to understanding Spain's tragedy. These workers were mobilised not to advance the revolution, but to defend the Popular Front—an anti-revolutionary strategy enforced by Moscow that placed the working class under the control of the liberal bourgeoisie, even as workers had shown their potential to seize power.

In July 1936, workers in Barcelona and much of Catalonia successfully stopped the military uprising, took control of factories, collectivised land, and began building structures for workers’ self-management. Spain created exactly the situation Stalin feared most: an independent socialist revolution happening outside Soviet control. Stalin’s main aim in Spain was not to defeat Franco but to prevent a second October — a workers’ government revealing the conservative, nationalist nature of his own regime. His foreign policy relied on alliances with ‘democratic” bourgeois powers; a socialist revolution in Spain would have destroyed that approach.

Trotsky’s analysis here is crucial. Writing in the moment, he emphasised that Spain was more than just a civil war or a fight against fascism; it was a proletarian revolution. The workers demonstrated extraordinary heroism, yet heroism alone couldn't replace the need for revolutionary leadership. Trotsky contended that the Popular Front was the main barrier to victory because it compelled the working class to defend a bourgeois system incapable of overcoming fascism. He noted that Franco didn't defeat the Spanish proletariat, but by its own leadership.

The Popular Front was more than a tactical alliance; it was a strategic constraint aimed at dismantling the revolutionary momentum generated by the working class. Following directives from Moscow, the Communist Party targeted not only Franco but also the POUM and the anarchist militias, whose soldiers' bravery in July had been crucial. The NKVD set up secret prisons, infiltrated the Republican police, and was involved in the disappearance of Andrés Nin. The May Days of 1937, when Communist-controlled forces attacked the Barcelona workers, marked a turning point. Ultimately, the revolution was halted by the Popular Front government, operating under Stalinist influence, rather than Franco. Crowley does not develop this analysis in detail.

The strongest material in the book — the letters and diaries — exposes the reality Crowley’s narrative avoids. Peter Kerrigan’s account of the retreat toward Gandesa, men going days without water, their shoes cut to pieces on the rocks, “many… literally barefoot as well as being in rags,” and Walter Gregory’s description of finding George Stockdale dying on the Ebro, a machine‑gun bullet having “cut a dreadful groove in his skull leaving his brain exposed,” speak with a clarity no editorial framing can soften. These passages reveal the human cost of the Comintern’s strategy. They indict the leadership more effectively than Crowley ever attempts.

Crowley dedicates a chapter to Harry Pollitt, celebrating his recruitment efforts and visits that boosted morale, while overlooking a crucial fact: this leadership, following Moscow's directives, played a key role in suppressing the revolutionary alternative to Popular Frontism in Spain, most notably during the May Days of 1937. The chapter also covers George Orwell, whom the original review dismisses as undeserving of attention. This is actually the opposite of the truth. Despite Orwell’s later political changes, Homage to Catalonia is one of the few well-known accounts describing what truly happened to the POUM militias and Barcelona’s workers under the Stalinist-controlled security forces — a stark reality Crowley, like many others commemorating the event, deliberately avoids.

Crowley cannot explain why the Communist Party ostracised Orwell because doing so would mean admitting the Party’s role in suppressing the revolution. The CPGB’s hatred for Orwell was rooted in politics, not literature or personal reasons. Orwell had seen the crime the Party needed to hide: the outlawing of POUM, arrests and disappearances of its members, and the attack on the Barcelona working class by forces claiming to oppose Franco. Homage to Catalonia challenged the Popular Front’s narrative—that Spain’s conflict was merely between democracy and fascism—and exposed the Communist Party as the tool Moscow used to crush revolutionary hopes that arose in July 1936. As a result, Orwell was slandered, censored, and labelled as “objectively fascist.” Crowley’s reluctance to address this hostility reflects the same sanitising tendency that pervades the entire book.

Another crucial omission is decisive: the International Brigades were not purely expressions of independent working-class internationalism. Instead, they served as tools of the Popular Front strategy, aimed at channelling genuine anti-fascist sentiment into defending the bourgeois republic and diverting from the revolutionary potential that emerged in July 1936. While the volunteers' anti-fascism was sincere, the Brigades' primary purpose was to prevent revolution. Trotsky understood this well: their heroism was misdirected by leaders who prioritised maintaining bourgeois order over defeating Franco. Crowley fails to acknowledge this contradiction because doing so would force him to confront the political role of Stalinism, which he chooses to avoid.

Crowley notes that men who faced death at the front were unlikely to be intimidated by a foreman upon returning. This highlights the revolutionary potential among these workers — a potential that was wasted in Spain and again during the Second World War, as the fight against fascism and the necessary programme to defeat it was fought globally. The courage shown here is genuine and worth remembering. However, a history that separates this bravery from the bureaucratic betrayal that led to the fall of the Spanish Revolution ultimately results in a moving story of martyrdom rather than an analysis of why the Spanish working class was defeated.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary Sources

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia. London: Secker & Warburg, 1938. First‑hand account of the POUM militias, the May Days, and Stalinist repression in Barcelona.
Leon Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution (1931–39). New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973. Collection of Trotsky’s writings on Spain, including analyses of the Popular Front, the POUM, and Stalin’s foreign policy.
Andrés Nin, Selected Writings. Various editions. Documents the POUM’s political positions before his disappearance at the hands of the NKVD.
International Brigades Letters and Diaries (various collections). Including materials reproduced in Crowley’s Remember Me to My Comrades.
Peter Kerrigan, The International Brigade: Spain 1936–1939. Memoir of a CPGB cadre and Brigade commissar.
Walter Gregory, The Shallow Grave: A Memoir of the Spanish Civil War. London: Faber & Faber, 1986. Eyewitness testimony from a British volunteer.

Soviet and Comintern Documents

Comintern Archives, RGASPI (Russian State Archive of Social and Political History). Includes directives to the Spanish Communist Party, reports on the POUM, and NKVD operations.
NKVD Reports on Spain (1936–1938), published in various scholarly editions. Documentation of arrests, interrogations, and the disappearance of Andrés Nin.

Trotskyist Analyses

Pierre Broué, The Spanish Revolution, 1936–1939. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006. The most comprehensive Trotskyist history of the revolution and its suppression.
Felix Morrow, Revolution and Counter‑Revolution in Spain. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1974. A contemporary Trotskyist analysis written during the war.
Burnett Bolloten, The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. A monumental study documenting Stalinist repression and the destruction of the revolution.

Marxist and Critical Histories

Paul Preston, The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge. London: HarperCollins, 2006. Standard academic account; useful for chronology, though politically limited.
Helen Graham, The Spanish Republic at War, 1936–1939. Cambridge University Press, 2002. Important for institutional and social history of the Republic.
Antony Beevor, The Battle for Spain. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006. Conventional narrative history; valuable for military detail.
Franz Borkenau, The Spanish Cockpit. London: Faber & Faber, 1937. Early eyewitness account sympathetic to the revolution.

Anarchist and POUM Sources

Abel Paz, Durruti in the Spanish Revolution. Oakland: AK Press, 2007. Biography of the anarchist leader; essential for understanding CNT‑FAI rank‑and‑file militancy.
Julián Casanova, Anarchism, the Republic and Civil War in Spain. London: Routledge, 2010. Scholarly treatment of anarchist politics and social base.
Wilebaldo Solano, The Spanish Revolution: The POUM and the Struggle for Power. POUM perspective on the revolution and its suppression.

Studies of Stalinism and the Popular Front

E.H. Carr, The Comintern and the Spanish Civil War. London: Macmillan, 1984. Detailed study of Soviet policy and Comintern strategy.
Ronald Radosh, Mary Habeck & Grigory Sevostianov, Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War. Yale University Press, 2001. Uses Soviet archival material to document NKVD operations and Stalinist intervention.
Stanley Payne, The Collapse of the Spanish Republic. Yale University Press, 2006. Conservative but useful for institutional analysis of the Popular Front.

Biographies and Memoirs Relevant to Stalinist Policy

Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast. Oxford University Press, 1963. Trotsky’s biography; includes analysis of Trotsky’s writings on Spain.
Alexander Orlov, The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes. Memoir of the NKVD officer in Spain; controversial but revealing.

For Contextualising Orwell and the CPGB

John Newsinger, Orwell’s Politics. London: Macmillan, 1999. Explores Orwell’s anti‑Stalinism and the CPGB’s hostility toward him.
Christopher Hill, The CPGB and the Popular Front. Essays on the British Communist Party’s alignment with Moscow’s line.

Archival Collections

Marxists Internet Archive (MIA): Trotsky’s writings on Spain, POUM documents, CNT manifestos, and contemporary analyses.
Tamiment Library (NYU) International Brigades papers, CPUSA materials, and Comintern correspondence.
Modern Records Centre (Warwick University)

The Bezos–Saverin–Bhatia Bid for Liverpool: The Financial Oligarchy Tightens Its Grip on World Football

The upcoming acquisition of a significant stake in Liverpool FC by a consortium led by Amit Bhatia, backed by Jeff Bezos and Eduardo Saverin, signals a new phase in turning football into a domain for the global financial elite. Reports suggest the group is nearing a stake exceeding 30 per cent, valuing the club at approximately £4.4 billion ($5.9–6 billion). An announcement is likely soon.

This development is part of a larger trend where all aspects of social life—such as sport, culture, media, and technology—are increasingly controlled and reshaped by a small group of billionaires. Their wealth comes from exploiting workers worldwide. Football, originally a sport for the working class, is now being integrated into the same financial and technological systems that govern logistics, surveillance, AI, and global finance.

A New Phase in the Oligarchic Capture of Football

Liverpool’s potential new investors hail from the most privileged echelons of global capitalism. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, amassed his enormous wealth through the ruthless exploitation of hundreds of thousands of workers, who faced poverty wages, constant surveillance by algorithms, and dangerous productivity targets. His fortune grew significantly during the pandemic, as Amazon employees endured hazardous working conditions. Bezos is not simply a “sports investor”; he exemplifies American financial capitalism at its most predatory. Eduardo Saverin, co-founder of Facebook, renounced his US citizenship to dodge taxes and moved to Singapore. His wealth originates from a social media empire built on surveillance, data extraction, and the promotion of reactionary content through algorithms.

Amit Bhatia, son-in-law of steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, belongs to a global elite whose wealth relies on exploiting workers across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. His abrupt divestment from Queens Park Rangers on the day Liverpool’s bid emerged highlights the financial manoeuvring — regulatory arbitrage and share shuffling — typical of Today’s oligarchy. The inclusion of these figures in Liverpool’s ownership signifies a significant shift. While under Fenway Sports Group (FSG), Liverpool was primarily considered a financial asset. John Henry played a key role in proposing the 2021 European Super League, aiming to replace the competitive league system with a closed cartel that would secure ongoing revenue for the wealthiest clubs. This plan, backed by JPMorgan Chase, was ultimately stopped by widespread fan resistance.

Now the club is being passed from one set of billionaires to another — but this time to individuals whose wealth is measured not in billions but in hundreds of billions.

Football as a Financial Instrument

Liverpool's valuation at £4.4 billion highlights the sport’s dramatic transformation. Originally founded in 1892 by working-class individuals, the club now has a value that could support the NHS for months. The financialization of football emphasises club worth based on anticipated future revenues, global branding, and digital engagement rather than sporting success. In Marxist terms, football has become part of fictitious capital — claims on future value instead of current output. Clubs are traded like tech stocks, with valuations serving as speculative tools. Their ownership resembles that of a multinational. The Bezos–Saverin–Bhatia consortium is not investing in football as a sport. Instead, they view it as: a content source for Amazon’s media empire, a data collection point for feeding Amazon’s AI systems, a global brand asset integrated into Amazon’s retail and advertising networks, and a financial tool for the portfolios of the world’s wealthiest individuals.

The Conflict‑of‑Interest Question: A Window into the System

A key aspect of the deal is the unresolved question of whether an investor holding a stake in the Premier League broadcaster Amazon Prime Video can also own part of a Premier League club. This is primarily a political issue, not a technical one. The Premier League’s Owners’ and Directors’ Test does not impose significant restrictions on such cross-ownership. In reality, the capitalist system enforces regulations only when they do not conflict with the interests of the ruling class. When billionaires are involved, these rules are often treated as mere "guidelines.”

If the deal goes through unchallenged, it establishes a precedent: broadcasters might own clubs, clubs could control broadcasters, and a few oligarchs could vertically integrate the complete ecosystem. These same individuals would own the product, distribution channels, and ways of consumption. This represents the Americanization of football — not culturally, but in its structure.

Liverpool’s Sporting Transition: Irrelevant to Capital

Liverpool secured the Premier League title in 2025 but is currently going through a transition phase. Manager Arne Slot has left, Mohamed Salah has departed, and Michael Edwards has exited FSG. Despite significant spending, the club finished fifth last season. From the consortium's perspective, these developments are mainly relevant for their impact on the asset’s valuation. At this level, a football club functions more as an investment vehicle than a sporting entity, serving purposes like capital appreciation, brand leverage, and generating broadcast and commercial income from a global fanbase.

Speculation that Bezos and Saverin might aim for full control is plausible. For wealthy individuals like them, holding a minority stake is not an end goal but a strategic foothold.

The Broader Pattern: The Oligarchy Consolidates Its Power

The shift to Liverpool reflects a wider trend. By 2026, Bezos has invested billions in AI companies, grown Blue Origin’s aerospace activities, and co-led a $12 billion funding round for Prometheus, an industrial AI firm now valued at $41 billion. The same elite pushing humanity toward global conflict — as the WSWS detailed during the 2026 World Cup — is also consolidating control over all aspects of social life.

The 2026 World Cup showcased glaring signs of capitalist excess: generating $15 billion in revenue, with dynamic ticket prices soaring to over $10,000, luxury hospitality packages costing more than an average worker’s yearly income, and the trophy transported in a Louis Vuitton trunk. Football is increasingly being marketed as a luxury item for the wealthy and a global advertising tool for corporations. The Bezos group's interest in Liverpool aligns with these trends, representing the broader process of expropriating everything the working class has built by a parasitic financial elite.

The Marxist Perspective: Expropriate the Oligarchy

The banners at Anfield during the 2021 Super League revolt — “Created by the poor, stolen by the rich” — summed up the situation well. But the real solution isn’t better regulation, fan representation, or a “50+1” rule. These measures leave the core capitalist ownership model untouched. Football can’t be truly democratised under capitalism because the logic of capital is all-encompassing. Every reform risks new forms of exploitation. The only genuine solution is to expropriate the oligarchs, transform football clubs into democratic entities run by players, workers, and supporters, and replace capitalism with a socialist society where sport, like healthcare, education, and housing, is a public good instead of a means for billionaire profit.

Monday, 10 August 2026

William Cheatham and the Meaning of Peterloo-The Return of a Forgotten Protagonist

William Cheatham’s story—a Bolton weaver, army veteran, and Peterloo Massacre victim—significantly enhances our understanding of history. It reintroduces a working-class figure whose experience highlights key societal dynamics of that era. Cheatham was not merely a passive victim of government violence; he was a politically aware worker who travelled to Manchester to advocate for parliamentary reform. He survived a sabre attack by a yeomanry cavalryman over a mile from St Peter’s Field and dedicated years to seeking justice via courts and Parliament. His failure was not random but rooted in structural factors.

Cheatham’s story reflects a common pattern among contemporary radicals and modern Marxist historians: rather than remorse or reform following Peterloo, the British ruling class engaged in repression, intimidation, and history rewriting. The significance of Cheatham’s case lies not in its novelty but in its clarity, exemplifying the capitalist state's response to working-class activism.

The current depiction of Cheatham’s story — linking it to ongoing debates about democracy, protest rights, and challenging entrenched power — illustrates a liberal viewpoint that obscures the class implications of Peterloo. The aim is not merely to restore Cheatham’s biography but to uncover its deeper significance beyond the ideological stories that have historically tried to soften Peterloo.

Peterloo and the Machinery of Bourgeois Repression

The aftermath of Peterloo is a revealing episode in British history. The ruling class responded with a consistent strategy: Medical denial and coercion. Waterloo veteran John Lees died from his injuries three weeks later, while James Lees, wounded by two sabre cuts, was denied treatment unless he disavowed political meetings. Judicial obstruction was evident when Margaret Goodwin’s civil case against neighbour Thomas Shelmerdine was dismissed without thorough review. Weavers injured in the incident, who sued Hugh Hornby Birley and others, were told their attackers acted “justifiably." The radical Manchester Observer, which exposed the massacre, faced prosecution and harassment, leading to its destruction. Additionally, Manchester’s official plaque labelled Peterloo a “dispersal” for decades, deliberately omitting any mention of the dead.

Cheatham’s case belongs squarely within this pattern. He identified his attacker, Edward Meagher. He pursued him through the courts. He secured a parliamentary hearing. He gathered witnesses. And he lost. The state closed ranks. The yeomanry were protected. The working-class victim was defeated.

This is not a story about the failure of individual courage or the imperfections of early nineteenth-century justice. It is a demonstration of the structural function of the capitalist state: to defend the interests and agents of the ruling class against the political demands of the working class.

Liberal Heritage and the Sanitisation of Class Struggle

Today's portrayal of Cheatham’s story—via genealogy sites, BBC heritage media, and the rhetoric of “democracy”—is inherently political. It continues a long tradition of liberal co-optation of Peterloo. The founding of the Manchester Guardian in 1821 exemplifies this trend. Created by cotton manufacturer John Edward Taylor after the Manchester Observer was destroyed, the Guardian aimed to divert working-class democratic fervour into bourgeois reform efforts. Its promise to “warmly advocate the cause of Reform” was quickly seen as a tactic to capture and disarm working-class radicalism. George Condy’s 1836 description of the Guardian as the “foul prostitute and dirty parasite of the worst portion of the mill-owners” was not mere hyperbole; it reflected class analysis.

The 2019 bicentenary commemorations continued this tradition. The Guardian positioned itself as Peterloo’s successor. Manchester City Council unveiled Jeremy Deller’s memorial quietly, concerned about the political consequences of an open memorial. Even Labour’s language — referencing Peterloo as a moral foundation for parliamentary reform — echoed the same liberal framing that Engels critiqued in 1846. The liberal approach to history reinterprets Peterloo as a heritage event instead of a clash between classes. It shifts focus from working-class agency to sentimental stories of “ordinary people.” It replaces discussions of rights with themes of class struggle. Additionally, it depicts the capitalist state as misguided rather than inherently violent. Cheatham’s account, viewed through this lens, becomes a sombre reflection on the slow advancement of democracy rather than a lesson about the futility of justice within bourgeois institutions.

Engels and the Historical Logic of Cheatham’s Defeat

Cheatham’s story notably confirms Engels’s analysis of the era. In The Condition of the Working Class in England and his 1846 letters, Engels argued that the core dynamic of early 19th-century politics was that the “essentially democratic movement of the working classes was more or less made subservient to the liberal movement of the bourgeoisie.”

Engels pointed out that the working class had yet to fully understand the crucial difference between liberalism and democracy — specifically, the distinction between the emancipation of the middle classes and that of the working classes. Cheatham’s extensive efforts over a decade to seek justice through courts, magistrates, and Parliament serve as a condensed example of this broader historical process. He believed that the bourgeois state’s institutions could ensure justice, thinking evidence, testimony, and parliamentary appeals could challenge class power. His defeat was not personal but structural, reflecting the unavoidable outcome of a political system meant to safeguard the interests of the ruling class.

Cheatham’s story is therefore not a tragedy of failed reform. It is a lesson in the necessity of working-class independence from bourgeois institutions.

Memory, Class, and the Struggle Over Peterloo

The dispute over Peterloo's memory is a battleground of class conflict. The ruling class has consistently tried to tame the event—turning it from a massacre into a mere 'dispersal,” from a clash of classes into a symbol of democracy, and from a call to action into a heritage tour. In contrast, working-class remembrance has always challenged this distortion. John Wrigley, interviewed fifty years after Peterloo, expressed the true significance of the event: “Never forget, lad! Let it sink in your blood. Stand up and fight for human rights — the rights of poor folk!”

This is not the language of liberal reform; it is the language of class struggle. Cheatham's story belongs to the political tradition of working-class struggle, which his biography underscores. Reclaiming Cheatham’s biography is valuable, but only if its significance is pulled from liberal narratives and restored to the tradition of working-class political activism.

Conclusion: What Cheatham Teaches Us

Cheatham’s story reveals little about the “enduring questions of democracy' and instead highlights the persistent reality of class power. It vividly illustrates how the capitalist state reacts when working people seek accountability from its armed forces, showing why the working class cannot depend on courts, magistrates, or Parliament for justice. The story supports Engels’s analysis of the era and uncovers the ideological role of liberal historical narratives. Its significance lies not in sentiment but in political clarity, reminding us that Peterloo was not merely a reform tragedy but a clash between the working class and the capitalist state—an ongoing conflict with vital lessons.

Bibliography and Sources

Primary Sources

Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. Leipzig, 1845. Foundational Marxist analysis of early industrial capitalism; Engels’ discussion of the political subordination of the working class to bourgeois liberalism is directly relevant to Peterloo.
Engels, Friedrich. The Principles of Communism. 1847. Contains Engels’ reflections on the development of working-class political consciousness.
Hunt, Henry. The Trial of Henry Hunt and Others for the Peterloo Massacre. London, 1820. Contemporary documentation of the legal aftermath and the state’s efforts to justify repression.
Manchester Observer (1819–1821). Radical newspaper that exposed the massacre; its destruction by state repression is central to understanding the political climate.
Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons Debates (Hansard), 1819–1825. Includes petitions, debates, and references to cases brought by Peterloo victims, including Cheatham’s parliamentary appeal.
Wrigley, John. Interview in The Manchester Guardian, 1869. Contains the famous working-class testimony: “Never forget, lad! Let it sink in your blood…”

Contemporary Radical Accounts

Carlile, Richard. Account of the Manchester Massacre. London, 1819. Eyewitness testimony and radical analysis of the event.
Knight, Henry. The Political and Social Condition of Manchester. Manchester, 1820. Radical critique of the magistracy and yeomanry.

Modern Scholarship on Peterloo

Read, Donald. Peterloo: The Massacre and Its Background. Manchester University Press, 1958. Classic scholarly account; still valuable for its archival depth.
Poole, Robert. Peterloo: The English Uprising. Oxford University Press, 2019. The most comprehensive modern study; essential for contextualising Cheatham’s experience.
Poole, Robert. “The Manchester Observer and the Making of Peterloo.” Manchester Region History Review 23 (2012). Detailed analysis of the radical press and state repression.
Bush, M. L. The Casualties of Peterloo. Carnegie Publishing, 2005. Systematic catalogue of victims; provides context for Cheatham’s injuries and legal struggle.
Bush, M. L. “The Aftermath of Peterloo.” Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society 103 (2007). Examines the judicial and political consequences of the massacre.
Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. Victor Gollancz, 1963. Essential Marxist historiography; situates Peterloo within the broader formation of working-class consciousness.
Hammond, J. L. & Hammond, Barbara. The Town Labourer 1760–1832. Longmans, Green & Co., 1917. Classic social history of early industrial workers; includes discussion of political radicalism.

Marxist Analyses and Socialist Scholarship

Bond, Paul. “200 Years Since the Peterloo Massacre.” World Socialist Web Site, 16 August 2019. Detailed Marxist analysis of the massacre, its aftermath, and the liberal appropriation of its memory.
North, David. The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century. Mehring Books, 2014. Provides theoretical context on state violence and bourgeois democracy.
Trotsky, Leon. History of the Russian Revolution. 1930. Not directly about Peterloo, but foundational for understanding the Marxist theory of the state and class repression.
Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 1852. Essential for understanding how bourgeois institutions function to suppress working-class political agency.

Historiography of the Liberal Press and the Guardian

Ayerst, David. The Guardian: Biography of a Newspaper. Cornell University Press, 1971. Includes detailed discussion of the paper’s founding in the aftermath of Peterloo.
Williams, Raymond. Keywords. Oxford University Press, 1976. Useful for analysing the ideological language of “reform,” “democracy,” and “rights.”
Jones, Aled. “Press, Politics and Society: The Guardian and Liberalism.” Journal of British Studies 32 (1993). Scholarly analysis of the Guardian’s political role in the nineteenth century.

State Violence, Class Repression, and Political Theory

Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962. Situates Peterloo within the broader revolutionary and counter-revolutionary dynamics of the period.
Hobsbawm, Eric. Labouring Men. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964. Essays on working-class politics and state repression.
Linebaugh, Peter & Rediker, Marcus. The Many-Headed Hydra. Beacon Press, 2000. Explores the long history of proletarian resistance and state violence.
Stedman Jones, Gareth. Languages of Class. Cambridge University Press, 1983. Important for understanding how political discourse shapes class consciousness.

Genealogy, Heritage Media, and Liberal Memory Culture

Samuel, Raphael. Theatres of Memory. Verso, 1994. Foundational critique of heritage culture and liberal historical memory.
Porter, Bernard. The Absent-Minded Imperialists. Oxford University Press, 2004. Useful for analysing the ideological framing of British history in contemporary media.
Olusoga, David. Black and British: A Forgotten History. Macmillan, 2016. Representative of the contemporary BBC mode of identity-centred historical narrative.

Archival and Local History Resources

Greater Manchester Archives and Local Studies holds extensive Peterloo-related material, including casualty lists, magistrates’ papers, and local press.
National Archives (Kew) HO 42 and HO 44 series contain Home Office correspondence on Peterloo and subsequent prosecutions.
Bolton Archives Potentially relevant for Cheatham’s background, military service, and local radical networks.

Optional: Further Reading for Marxist Context

Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness. 1923. Theoretical grounding for understanding how events like Peterloo shape proletarian consciousness.
Anderson, Perry. Arguments Within English Marxism. Verso, 1980. Useful for situating Thompson, Hobsbawm, and the Marxist historiographical tradition.