What The Rich Don't Tell The Poor: Conversations with Guatemalan Oligarchs Roman Krznaric-Paperback – 16 Feb. 2022

Krznaric’s book is a fascinating and valuable insight into the modern Guatemalan oligarchy. He examines the inner life of the oligarchy and how it has maintained its power and privilege for over three centuries. It is a groundbreaking work of political and sociological analysis based on wide-ranging personal interviews.

What The Rich Don’t Tell The Poor was written in 2006 and stems from Krznaric’s 2003 PhD thesis, The World View of the Oligarch in Guatemalan Politics.[1] However, due to political and literary differences with publishers, the book was not published in its original form until 2022. As Krznaric writes in the 2022 preface, although the book is ten years old and much has changed in Guatemala in the intervening years, the oligarchy remains in complete control of Guatemala’s political and economic life.

Guatemala is well known for its extreme wealth inequalities, which have been caused by centuries of economic and political domination by an oligarchy comprising around fifty families of European descent.  In this case, the term "oligarchs" usually refers to a small group of influential families (often called "las familias") that have maintained economic and political dominance since colonial times. As of 2022, approximately 245 individuals in Guatemala held an accumulated wealth of US$30 billion. The oligarchs dominate crucial sectors of the Guatemalan economy, including export agriculture (sugar, coffee, bananas), finance and banking, construction materials (cement), and consumer goods. Families such as the Herrera Family: Owners of Ingenio Pantaleón, the largest sugar production estate in the country, with significant interests in banking (e.g., Banco Agromercantil), the Castillo Family: A historically substantial family involved in the production of beer and other industries and the Novella Family: Major players in the cement industry for generations. These families and others make Guatemala one of the most unequal countries on the planet.

As Krznaric relates:  “Getting the oligarchs to speak openly was a challenge. Using all I knew about ethnographic and oral history interviewing techniques, I tried to be courteous rather than confrontational – a strategy that created an atmosphere which felt relaxed, unthreatening and conversational. I quickly learned that accusing them of violating human rights or exploiting workers made them clam up. However, encouraging them to share stories about their lives and experiences lowered their guard and led them to reveal much more about themselves. Rather than offering critical comments on the spot during the interviews, I found that I could defer my critiques until I was writing about them and interpreting what they said, as I do in What The Rich Don’t Tell The Poor.”[2]

Global context: Global Oligarchy and local oligarchy

The global charity Oxfam has recently released several reports that document what every worker knows: an accelerating concentration of wealth and power in the hands of an oligarchy whose fortunes have exploded even as mass poverty, precarious work and state austerity deepen. The charity’s data shows that billionaire wealth surged to a record $18.3 trillion in 2025, and that the wealthiest handful of individuals now own more than the wealth of billions of people.  The number of global billionaires recently increased by 30% to approximately 2,750 individuals, who together control more wealth than the planet’s poorest 4.6 billion people.

As Krznarics correctly states in the book, Guatemala’s oligarchy functions as an extension of global imperialist interests. Multinational agribusiness, mining and energy firms rely on local oligarchs to secure land, labour, and concessions. Yankee capitalism has historically backed Guatemalan oligarchs and their militarisation of Guatemalan life and carried out numerous coups to protect these interests, from the 1954 CIA overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz to more recent economic and political interventions. The oligarchs’ rule requires a combination of legal-clientelist institutions and outright coercion. They co-opt political parties, control key state ministries, and use the judiciary to neutralise opponents. When that fails, repression and violence are employed against organisers, Indigenous communities and trade-union militants.

The struggles of the Guatemalan working class against the oligarchs are not documented in the book. But these struggles are not isolated: the working class has challenged the supply chains and profit zones of global capital. Resistance to extractivism (mining and hydroelectric dams), land grabs for agro-exports, and labour discipline in maquilas strike at imperialist accumulation. International solidarity can disrupt investments, cut off supply-chain legitimacy and expose the complicity of multinational corporations and imperialist states. The global working class has an interest in supporting these struggles because they weaken the power of an oligarchy that helps sustain the world capitalist order and its wars.

Summary

Roman Krznaric’s book is a vital piece of journalism and provides essential insight into the world of the Guatemalan oligarchs. Krznaric’s suggestions for countering these oligarchs have profound weaknesses.  While addressing the moral and psychological gaps between wealthy elites and the poor, he argues that, to reduce inequality, workers and youth should challenge the oligarchs to change habits, broaden empathy, cultivate longer time horizons, and reframe public narratives so that disadvantaged people can adopt attitudes and strategies associated with success.

Krznaric’s approach is fundamentally an appeal to moral persuasion. He asks the wealthy to change hearts and minds — to exercise empathy, mentor, and open networks — relying on their voluntary moral action rather than on structural compulsion. He treats inequality partly as a deficit of habits and imagination among low-income people that can be remedied by teaching the “right” psychology and practices. These elements make the argument attractive to readers who prefer non-confrontational, reformist routes: it promises measurable improvements through persuasion, education and moral example, without directly challenging property relations or class power.

As Marxists point out, inequality is rooted in property relations, the extraction of surplus value and state power. Teaching better habits or eliciting elite empathy cannot change the class relations that produce mass poverty. Moral appeals to elites presuppose goodwill and avoid building an independent working class  

 

 

 

 

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[1] The World View of the Oligarch in Guatemalan Politics.A thesis submitted for the degree of PhD in the Government Department of the University of Essex, Colchester, UK 2003

[2] Want to Challenge the Elite? Then first Understand What Makes Them Tick. frompoverty.oxfam.org.uk/want-to-challenge-the-elite-then-first-understand-what-makes-them-tick/

The Holocaust: An Unfinished History by Dan Stone (Penguin). £12.99

The Holocaust: An Unfinished History by Dan Stone is a useful if limited account of how and why the Nazi’s perpetrated the murder of six million jews. Reading Stone’s book while a genocide takes place in Gaza and Trump’s fascist government carries out state-sponsored murders is a brutal reminder that fascism is on the rise again and did not end with the Nazi’s Holocaust.

Stone is the director of the Royal Holloway’s Holocaust Research Institute in London.  He is the author of over 20 books, including Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and The Liberation of the Camps. The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (2023), Concentration Camps: A Short History (2017), and Histories of the Holocaust (2010).

Stone’s book has a subtitle called 'The Unfinished History,' which probably alludes to the number of books on or about the Holocaust, which is approaching 40,000. But as the Marxist writer David North says:

“Here we encounter a terrible problem: For all that has been said and written about the Holocaust, it remains a strangely obscure event. A vast amount of empirical data about the Holocaust has indeed been collected. We possess detailed information about how the Nazis organised and executed their “Final Solution,” the murder of six million European Jews. And yet the issues that are central to an understanding of the Holocaust—its historical origins, political causes and, finally, its place in the history of the twentieth century—have, with very few exceptions, been dealt with poorly. This is, really, an intolerable state of affairs. The one basic question raised by the Holocaust, “Why did it happen?” is precisely that to which it is most difficult to obtain an answer.”[1]

It must be said that Stone gives a good go at answering North’s question. Stone’s book provides a "brisk, compelling and scholarly" account that seeks to supplement the vast historiography already in place. Stone argues against the historiography that the Holocaust was exclusively a German project, highlighting the extensive collaboration and independent murders from other European nations like Romania and France.

While accepting the idea that the Holocaust was an “industrial genocide” taking place at the main concentration camps, Stone supplements this analysis with other shocking facts that millions were killed elsewhere and by different methods, too. The “Holocaust by bullets” was responsible for 1.5 million Jewish deaths between late 1941 and the spring of 1942. In late 1944, as the Russian army advanced westwards towards Germany, the Nazis evacuated the camps. They forced the 750,000 or so surviving Jewish inmates onto “death marches”, sometimes over vast distances in the winter. This claimed another 250,000 victims, often shot by SS guards when they collapsed and could no longer walk.  

Ideology

Stone’s examination of Nazi ideology is to be welcomed. He argues that for too long, Nazi ideology has been downplayed. Stone is critical of the post-war tendency to deny any political coherence to the Nazis’ ideas. He believes that Nazi ideology represented a radicalisation of ruling class ideas of nationalism, imperialism and race. 

He says that the Nazis didn’t have a developed programme for genocide worked out in advance. But he says we need to take seriously their ideological motivation, which always harboured a genocidal potential capable of being unleashed under certain circumstances. 

While Stone does not accept the right-wing theory that the Holocaust is such a terrible event that it defies a rational explanation, he pays little attention to the historian’s ability to comprehend the forces that drive the social—or, more precisely, the antisocial—activity of man. In other words, Stone tends to downplay Marxist historians' attempt to use historical science and political theory to understand the Holocaust.

Although Stone uses a large number of historians to examine Nazi ideology, he mostly ignores any Marxist-based historiography. A simple reading of the writings of Leon Trotsky or Abraham Leon, to name just two Marxists, would give a historian a far deeper insight into the rise of fascism and of Nazi Ideology.[2]

Stone’s use of Ernst Bloch is problematic to say the least. Bloch was not a classical Marxist. Bloch (1885–1977) occupies a complex position in Marxist thought. He is best known for his attempt to retrieve utopian hope as an element of Marxist theory—most famously in The Principle of Hope—insisting that human longing and anticipatory consciousness matter for politics. From the standpoint of classical Marxism and the continuity of the Fourth International, Bloch’s contribution must be assessed dialectically: what in his work advances the materialist understanding of history, and what tendencies lead away from the independent revolutionary politics of the working class?

Bloch insisted that utopian impulses—aspirations, anticipations, images of a better world—are not mere illusions but social phenomena rooted in objective contradictions. He sought to recuperate the emotional and imaginative dimensions of social life that orthodox economic or “vulgar” readings of Marxism can marginalise. This emphasis corresponds to Marxism’s insistence that human consciousness is shaped by social being; yet classical Marxism places primary explanatory weight on the development of the productive forces and class relations as the motive forces of history. Bloch’s insistence on hope supplements but must not displace the materialist analysis of how objective conditions—production, class struggle, political institutions—generate revolutionary possibilities. To say that Bloch was “unusually” the only Marxist to take fascism seriously is not only wrong but is a political lie.

 

Another writer missing from Stone’s work is Konrad Heiden.[3] Heiden's biography of Hitler is worth reading. Heiden’s insight into Hitler’s anti-Semitism is worth an extensive examination.

According to Heiden, “Hitler hated the whole great sphere of human existence which is devoted to the regular transference of energy into product, and he hated the men who had let themselves be caught and crushed in this process of production. All his life, the workers were for him a picture of horror, a dismal, gruesome mass … everything which he later said from the speaker’s platform to flatter the manual worker was pure lies.

Heiden explains Hitler’s demonic obsession with the Jews. In Mein Kampf, Hitler explained how his conversion to anti-Semitism flowed from his encounters with the labour movement. It was among the workers that Hitler first came into contact with Jews. He then discovered, to his amazement, that many Jews played prominent roles in the labour movement. “The great light dawned on him,” wrote Heiden. “Suddenly, the ‘Jewish question’ became clear. … The labour movement did not repel him because Jews led it[4]The Jews repelled him because they led the labour movement. Heiden concluded, “It was not Rothschild, the capitalist, but Karl Marx, the Socialist, who kindled Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitism. ”Stone has profited intellectually from a careful study of Heiden’s biography of Hitler.

Given that Stone has conducted extensive historiographical work, he has written 20 books on or about the Holocaust; his conclusions on how to fight modern-day genocide and the rise of fascism are troubling, to say the least. He writes, “The fact is that Holocaust education goes out of the window if people feel their life chances are narrowing; nothing in the end can stop people from supporting these dark forces in times of crisis.”

This is extraordinarily fatalistic. The goal is not merely to “know” the Holocaust as an isolated tragedy, but to understand its roots in class, imperialism and political defeat—and to transform that understanding into organised political action to build the international socialist movement that can prevent future barbarism. From a Marxist standpoint, Stone’s empirical and historiographical contributions are necessary but not sufficient. Marxism begins with the materialist method: social phenomena, including ideologies and mass crimes, are rooted in concrete material relations—class structures, property relations, state formation and the competitive dynamics of imperialism. The destruction of mass working-class political organisations left the proletariat unable to interpose itself as an independent social force; this political vacuum was decisive.

 

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[1] The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners-www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html

[2]wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Struggle_Against_Fascism_in_Germany

[3]wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Heiden

[4] Konrad Heiden, Der Führer, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1944)

 

What in Me is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost By Orlando Reade, Jonathan Cape, 272pp, £22

 

Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.

John Milton

“Innocence, Once Lost, Can Never Be Regained. Darkness, Once Gazed Upon, Can Never Be Lost.”

John Milton

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

Karl Marx -Economic Works of Karl Marx 1861-1864

What in Me is Dark is a fascinating account of how John Milton’s Paradise Lost influenced a whole coterie of radical and not-so-radical people, ranging from the former Trotskyist C L R James, the black nationalist Malcom X, to the right-wing fanatic Jordan Peterson.

In the book's introduction, Reade attempts to situate Milton and his Paradise Lost within the context of the English bourgeois revolution. In a recent interview with the British Socialist Workers Party, Reade was asked, "What was John Milton’s relationship with the English Revolution?"

Reade answered, “By the end of the 1630s, Milton believed that the Church of England bishops were a threat to the liberty of protestant English people. This was the bedrock of his radical politics. Religious freedom was very closely connected to the idea of freedom to be a poet. Poets needed to be free, as Milton said in Paradise Lost, he was justifying the ways of god to man. He wrote the poem after the utter defeat of his political cause.”[1]

Reade is not a radical and has a perfunctory understanding of the English Bourgeois revolution. Describing Oliver Cromwell as “ruthless” and the revolution itself as a “failed Revolution”. The SWP did not challenge Reade’s lightness of touch regarding the bourgeois revolution, nor did they ask why Reade ignored the writings of Christopher Hill, whose book on Milton is extremely valuable in understanding the defeat of the revolution and how and why the monarchy was restored so easily without a shot being fired.[2]

A former SWP member, John Rees, offers a better summation of Milton’s importance to the English Revolution: “When the monarchy was restored in 1660, Milton was imprisoned. He narrowly escaped execution and lived to write his deep poetic meditation on the human experience of revolutionary change, Paradise Lost. The essential purpose of this great epic was a meditation on why, if the revolutionary cause was good, it had not triumphed. His prism for viewing this question was the original fall of man, the story of Adam and Eve. Milton concluded that greater enlightenment, education, and culture must make human beings fit to receive the divine providence of revolution. Even in defeat, Milton looked forward to the rebirth of hope. His own role in hastening that day, he wrote, was to “sing unchanged”.[3]

Interpretations of Milton matter because they inform political vocabularies: Milton’s critique of censorship (Areopagitica) and his republican prose can be marshalled for democratic struggles, while other readings can be used to justify hierarchies or cultural conservatism. John Rees’s interpretation should be assessed to see whether it advances working‑class political independence or adapts Milton to reformist or managerial politics. My understanding of Rees’s politics would side with the latter interpretation.

What in Me is Dark is Reade’s first book and emerged from his experiences as a doctoral student at Princeton and as a teacher at a New Jersey prison for five years. Reade is now a professor at Northeastern University, London. His BA and PhD were in English Literature, and he holds an MA in Renaissance Studies.

Paradise Lost has been read and written about by a huge literary and political glitterati, including Blake, Wordsworth, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot, all of whom feature in Reade’s book. Reade chooses twelve figures who, in one way or another, have been influenced and moved by a reading of Paradise Lost.

Hannah Arendt

As Nicholas McDowell perceptively points out, “What in Me is Dark mixes psychological speculation of this kind with analysis of the poem’s reception, for which documentary evidence is fragmentary and inconsistent. Some of Reade’s speculations are more convincing than others – the chapter on Hannah Arendt and her relationship with Heidegger strains to make the connection with Milton – but the weight of allusion and reference built up over the course of the book is compelling.”[4]

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was a prominent 20th-century political thinker best known for The Origins of Totalitarianism, Eichmann in Jerusalem (the “banality of evil”), and The Human Condition. Her distinctions between the public and private, her emphasis on the autonomy of political action, and her analyses of totalitarianism have shaped liberal and conservative debates about politics, rights and mass society.

However, from a classical Marxist viewpoint, Arendt’s ideas must be examined and criticised as products of a particular class milieu and intellectual trajectory, rather than as neutral philosophical truths. Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann focused attention on the bureaucratic and thoughtless character of mass crimes. While agreeing with Arendt’s exposure of bureaucratic complicity, it should be

noted that her moralising explanations detach such crimes from the concrete class politics and state interests that produce them. The tendency to universalise responsibility into moral categories can obscure how ruling classes organise mechanisms of repression to defend property and empire.

The reactionary Jordan Peterson

Reade tends to treat Peterson as an eccentric public intellectual. While Peterson presents himself as an independent intellectual, his role in contemporary politics is class‑based and reactionary. He functions as a mass media conduit for far‑right ideas—individualist ideology, anti‑Marxist polemics and cultural reaction—that buttress the interests of capitalist elites and help demobilise working‑class resistance. Understanding Peterson politically requires analysing the material forces he serves, not treating him as an eccentric public intellectual.

Peterson’s prominence exacerbates two strategic dangers for readers. First, he deepens fragmentation: identity and culture wars obscure objective class interests, making cross‑sector solidarity more difficult. Second, he aids the rise of authoritarian forces that will escalate repression against strikes, refugees, immigrants and left parties.

Peterson treats Milton as a repository of psychological archetypes and moral lessons about responsibility, suffering and the hero’s journey. This emphasises individual moral psychology and universal, trans-historical meanings. Peterson’s psychological universalism obscures the poem’s social roots and repurposes Milton as support for contemporary individualist and conservative politics.

C. L. R. James

Reade calls  James “an enabling thinker”. In an interview with Marina Scholtz he writes “It’s all about movement. There’s something about the dialectical tradition, which is all about not remaining stuck in contraries or conflicts, but always trying to find a way to overcome those conflicts. I felt energised when I finished writing about him, which I didn’t feel when I finished writing about Malcolm X, even though he’s my favourite reader of Paradise Lost, and the reader who I think is the most important in the book.”[5]

Reade is correct when he cites James as having a dialectical understanding of Milton. This was more pronounced in his early classical Marxist days than in later life. C. L. R. James reads Milton politically and artistically, and his use of the Marxist method situates Paradise Lost in the social and historical conflicts of the English Revolution and the rise of capitalism.

For James, literary works are not “timeless”: they reflect and refract class conflict and political projects. James’s method shows how culture becomes terrain for struggle over ideas, identity, and historical memory—an approach relevant to present-day battles over curriculum, historical narrative, and class consciousness.

C. L. R. James reads John Milton not primarily as a solitary religious genius but as a political and historical actor whose epic must be understood in the context of the English Revolution and the crisis of seventeenth‑century bourgeois society. For James, literature is social and dialectical: form and drama express fundamental social forces and political conflicts.

James’s understanding is that Paradise Lost is inseparable from Milton’s republican commitments, his experience in the Commonwealth, and the later Restoration defeat of the English Revolution. Milton’s theology and poetic choices, James argues, reflect attempts to reconcile liberty, authority and social hierarchy after revolutionary failure. Satan and the politics of sympathy: James confronts the Romantic tendency to valorise Satan as the proto‑revolutionary hero. He treats Satan’s eloquence and charisma as a political technique—an ideological appeal that can conceal class content. Rather than uncritically celebrating Satan as a liberator, he insists on situating Satan’s rhetoric within material and historical relations.

In another part of Scholtz’s interview with Reade, she asks him How did you first come across Malcolm X’s relationship to Paradise Lost?

Reade replied, “I found out about Malcolm X’s reading of Paradise Lost in quite a strange way. When I was at Princeton, I was in a Spinoza reading group, where we would meet every week to discuss a tiny chunk of Spinoza’s Ethics. Lots of philosophers and historians of philosophy would turn up and spend two or three hours poring over a single paragraph, which was sometimes a bit too much for me because I couldn’t always go there with them. Once, we were talking about Spinoza when a noise outside the philosophy building turned out to be a Black Lives Matter protest. We ended the session and left, and some participants joined the protest. I remember one of the philosophers telling me that Malcolm X had loved Spinoza. I read his autobiography because I was really curious about this fact. While in prison, he taught himself everything about the world and consumed Western history and philosophy. Before he read Paradise Lost, he read Spinoza. Malcolm X is an incredibly original reader. He wants to turn a lot of his reading upside down because he’s figuring out that the world he’s been educated into is not as it seemed, and that historians have whitened everything. So he wants to reverse that process of whitening, and often that involves coming up with quite surprising interpretations. So he’s really interested in Spinoza, because he thinks that he’s a black Jew. When he comes to Paradise Lost, he comes up with his own very original interpretation of it.”[6]

The juxtaposition of Malcolm X and John Milton’s Paradise Lost opens a rich field for inquiry. Reade’s critical study of Malcom X’s relationship with Milton shows how literary and political texts mediate ideas people live by — and how those ideas can either advance or frustrate political understanding of the need for revolutionary transformations.

Reade examines Malcolm X’s life and political evolution, which was the byproduct of a Black working-class experience in the US and internationally. His conversion in prison, the Nation of Islam period, his break with NOI, and his turn towards the working class internationalism (that ultimately led to his assassination) are essential in understanding his fascination with Milton and other literary figures.

It is easy to understand why Malcolm X saw Milton’s Satan as a complex figure — rhetorically heroic yet politically reactionary when read historically. Malcolm’s early rhetorical militancy drew on the image of a proud, self‑defending people.

Reade’s book shows that studying Paradise Lost is not an ivory-tower exercise. In a limited way, Reade’s approach to Paradise Lost is as a historically situated cultural text. He clearly admires Milton’s craft. He interrogates the social forces his epic both expresses and seeks to resolve. A Marxist would combine literary insight with the dialectical method. John Milton’s Paradise Lost should be viewed as a reflection of revolutionary struggle, interpreting the fall of the angels as a failed uprising against an absolute monarch. Ultimately, while Milton was not a Marxist, his focus on radical change, liberty, and the questioning of authority provides rich ground for a materialist and revolutionary analysis. 

 

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[1] Paradise Lost inspired generations of radicals-https://socialistworker.co.uk/reviews-and-culture/paradise-lost-inspired-generations-of-radicals/

[2] Milton and the English Revolution by Christopher Hill-Verso

[3] John Milton: poetic genius who was at the heart of revolution-https://socialistworker.co.uk/reviews-and-culture/john-milton-poetic-genius-who-was-at-the-heart-of-revolution/

[4] Awake, Arise, or Be Forever Fallen What in Me is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost-literaryreview.co.uk/awake-arise-or-be-forever-fallen

[5] The Many Readers of Paradise Lost: Orlando Reade in Conversation thelondonmagazine.org/interview-orlando-reade-in-conversation-by-marina-scholtz/

[6] The Many Readers of Paradise Lost: Orlando Reade in Conversation thelondonmagazine.org/interview-orlando-reade-in-conversation-by-marina-scholtz/

 

No Questions Asked: How football joined the crypto con by Martin Calladine Finch & Reese‏ Jan.2024

There are many aspects contained in this book that should disturb any reader. The primary issue is that many leading British and European football clubs are falling over each other to do business with Crypto companies that, in reality, either don’t exist or are little more than scammers and fraudsters.

Like many football fans (I have supported Arsenal all my life), I did not pay too much attention to products being flogged to football clubs, which, overnight, have become virtually worthless and have cost investors and football fans billions.

Football clubs deep involvement in Crypto marks a qualitative turning point in the financialisation of every aspect of the game. Financialisation, therefore, must be understood as both a symptom and a strategy of capitalist decline. When profitable real investment opportunities narrow, capital seeks profit in credit, speculation and the privatisation of social assets. This produces recurring crises, debt deflation/inflation cycles, and a growing parasitic layer of finance that extracts from wages, pensions and public budgets.2

As Calladine points out. “What’s concerning about these deals is that the cryptocurrency market, and the businesses and products based on it, aren’t substantially different or better regulated than they were when it destroyed tens of billions of pounds worth of investments in the crash of 2022. If prices crater or the companies go under – whether due to fraud or simple business failure – fans will have no protection. Despite this, clubs show no signs of doing any greater due diligence than before, let alone facing up to their responsibilities as global endorsers and amplifiers of these schemes.”[1]

The collaboration between professional football and cryptocurrency is not a “neutral technological development”. It is part of the ongoing process of capitalism to extract profit from every corner of social life—turning clubs, players and fans into assets for speculative circuits.

The failed European Super League, stadium renamings, and corporate sponsorship are expressions of the fact that football and sport in general are already subordinated to the logic of profit and global finance.[2] Cryptocurrency is seen as a new revenue stream and leverage point for investors and hedge funds. Is it really any accident that Hedge funds are buying up so many football clubs throughout the world?

With costs such as sky-high wage bills, it is little surprising that clubs turn to crypto, which offers quick inflows of capital, new monetisation channels (fan tokens, NFTs, club-branded coins), and opportunities for private equity and Wall Street to monetise fandom.

Beneath the hype of Crypto lies the fact that, rather than solving clubs' financial problems, they exacerbate them. Crypto does not suspend the laws of capitalist accumulation. According to the Bank for International Settlements, highly leveraged actors are increasingly dominating the global financial system, and opaque markets can spread shocks across the world economy (BIS warning on financial risks). Crypto markets—volatile, lightly regulated, and deeply tied to speculative sentiment—fit precisely into that description. When football clubs hitch their finances to such markets, they import systemic instability into their operations and the lives of workers and local communities.

Calladine’s book, while helpful in describing the increasing use of Crypto to offset clubs' financial problems, does not really tackle the root cause: capitalism’s search for new profit avenues amid stagnating real accumulation. Traditional revenue streams—broadcasting, ticketing, merchandising—are capped. Owners and financiers, therefore, turn to novel financial instruments: crypto-backed loans, fan-token sales, and fractionalised ownership. This mirrors the broader turn to non-bank financial institutions and leverage to absorb sovereign and corporate debt described by the BIS.

What are the implications for workers and fans, stadium staff, coaches, players below superstar level, and local suppliers? The risks can be devastating. A sudden crypto crash or a speculative run can produce abrupt revenue shortfalls, leading to wage cuts, layoffs or bankruptcies. History shows that sport’s commercialisation produces precarious, low-paid labour while enriching owners and financiers. Fans are turned into micro-investors and consumers, pressured to buy tokens or NFTs to access basic participation, while clubs cede control to distant capital interests. Speculators can even manipulate events for profit—as in past instances where market incentives helped produce criminal acts or reckless decisions—exposing football to the worst pathologies of financial markets.

This is not merely a question of inadequate regulation. The deeper problem is the private ownership of social institutions and the subordinate role of sporting life to capital accumulation. The Super League fiasco demonstrated how billionaire owners and banks seek to reorganise football as a closed, guaranteed-income franchise system—concentrating wealth at the top at the expense of the mass of clubs and supporters. Crypto initiatives are a continuation of that dynamic: financialising fan loyalty, securitising culture, and insulating profits from democratic accountability.

Workers and fans must develop independent class responses. Immediate demands include public disclosure of clubs’ financial links with crypto and hedge funds; protections for workers’ wages and pensions against speculative shocks; and legal safeguards preventing clubs from mortgaging community assets to opaque financial instruments. Politically, the working class must assert control over social wealth—bringing sports clubs, stadiums and media into democratic, public or cooperatively controlled ownership under workers’ and supporters’ oversight. 

In conclusion, cryptocurrency in football is not a harmless innovation but a step further in the financialisation of everyday life. It concentrates wealth, multiplies instability and will ruin the lives of football fans and workers alike.

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[1] The Great Crypto Con: why is football falling back in love with the blockchain?-sportingintelligence832.substack.com/p/the-great-crypto-con-why-is-football

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

Men of Maize by Miguel Ángel Asturias-, Gerald Martin (Translator), April 2025 Penguin Classics

 “Men of Maize” is a singular, difficult mine that will yield rich ore to those willing to dig for it.

Miguel Ángel Asturias.

“The earth falls dreaming from the stars, but awakens in what once were green mountains, now the barren peaks of Ilóm, where the guarda’s song wails out across the ravines, the hawk swoops headlong, the giant ants march, the dove sighs, and where sleeps, with his mat, his shadow and his woman, he who should hack the eyelids of those who fell the trees, singe the eyelashes of those who burn the forest, and chill the bodies of those who dam the waters of the river that sleeps as it flows and sees nothing until trapped in pools it opens its eyes and sees all with its deep water gaze …

Men of Maize

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”

― Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“To be radical is to grasp things by the root.”

Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

“There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.”

Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899–1974) is a pivotal figure for anyone who wants to understand Latin American culture and the anti‑imperialist struggle. His fiction and political writing—above all Hombres de maíz (Men of Maize) and El señor presidente (Mr President) combine a literature of the oppressed with a critique of oligarchy, comprador rule and imperialist intervention. Hombres de maíz in particular provides a complex myth‑social account of indigenous life and capitalist dispossession.

Having said that, outside of the work of Gerald Martin and a few others, Miguel Ángel Asturias has been, for a long time, treated by the literary establishment in Latin America and around the world like a “dead dog”, and not content with that, they have continued to pile a further amount of other dead dogs upon his literary reputation.

One of the primary reasons for the cultural abandonment of Asturias has been decades of political and cultural reaction, with dire consequences. The professors, critics and journalists who make up what is called the intelligentsia want no part of Asturias’s sharp critique of both Yankee imperialism and its oligarch friends in Latin America.

There is a hostility amongst these layers to his tireless commitment to social truth, to historical and psychological reality, his building up of his characters’ situations and dilemmas, his engagement with towering questions, including many of the essential facts of class society, critique of Latin American illusions and delusions, his refusal to flatter his readers, all this continues to fly in the face of contemporary academic pettiness and subjectivism, lazy, irrationalist postmodernism and political timidity.

While that dire situation has apparently not changed much, there have been slight but significant recent developments regarding this great writer's work. David Ungar’s excellent new translation of the 1946 novel El Señor Presidente (Mr President) by Ángel Asturias was published in 2022. While welcoming this critical event, several reviewers bemoaned the “strange lack of interest in the author in the English-speaking world.”[1]

On April 25^th 2025, Penguin republished Men of Maize with a translation by Gerald Martin, and in 2026, Verso Publications will release an English translation of "Weekend in Guatemala" by the renowned academic David Lee. The book is an essential collection of stories written in anger after the 1954 CIA-backed overthrow of the Guatemalan government.

Men of Maize, Asturias’s 1949 novel, is considered by many to be his most essential work, yet it remains one of the least understood novels he wrote. Asturias himself said of it as “a singular, difficult mine that will yield rich ore to those willing to dig for it.”

Hector Tober goes so far as to call it “Asturias’s Mayan masterpiece, his Indigenous Ulysses, a deep dive into the forces that made and kept the Maya a subservient caste, and the perpetual resistance that kept Guatemala’s many Mayan cultures alive and resilient. Like most people born in Guatemala, Asturias likely had some Indigenous ancestry, even though his father, a judge, was among the minority of Guatemalans who could trace their Spanish heritage to the seventeenth century. When the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera (later the subject of Asturias’s novel Mr President) sent the future author’s father and family into internal exile in the Maya-centric world of the provincial Alta Verapaz, the young Miguel Ángel fell deeply into the great well of Indigenous culture for the first time.”[2]

Miguel Ángel Asturias and the origins of magical realism

Asturias has long been credited with originating the Magical Realism style of writing. His novel El Señor Presidente (published 1946) prefigures the techniques later associated with Magical Realism. As Rafael Azul points out in his excellent article Gabriel García Márquez: A giant in the literature of the Americas, “Making the experiences of Latin American social struggle, repression, and tyranny the subject of his literary effort was not unique to García Márquez. Mister President (El Señor Presidente), by the Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias, who was exiled in Paris, was published in Mexico in 1946. The novel details the assembly line quality of sadistic brutality meted out by an unnamed dictator in an unnamed Central American nation. The novel, a blend of surrealism and naturalism, inaugurated a new style, magical realism, that characterised the later literary boom on the continent. García Márquez became one of its masters. By incorporating fantasy and magic into their narratives, Asturias, García Márquez, and others sought to represent reality, including the reality of human consciousness, in all its facets and complexities. Memories, native myths and fantastic beings are all integrated in the stories. The characters travel back and forth in time, and their memories of the past become activated in the present. The dead intervene in the lives of the living. All this is done not as a means of escaping or masking reality, but as a way of penetrating it.[3]

Any examination of Asturias’s work must situate it in the concrete social and political conditions of Central America—U.S. imperial intervention, oligarchic rule, and the class domination that produced mass dispossession and terror. Asturias wrote amid the rise of authoritarian regimes and open imperial interference in the region. The grotesque continuity of oligarchic power, state terror and foreign corporate influence created a social reality in which everyday life often had the character of a nightmare and the irrational. Magical realism emerges when lived experience itself is surreal: mass violence, dispossession, and ideological mystification produce a popular consciousness that mixes myth, memory, and the uncanny. Asturias’s novels compress these social facts into narrative forms that reveal the social totality behind individual pathology.

Asturias does not merely adorn his prose with “magical” elements for aesthetic effect. His technique fuses myth, surreal episodes and symbolic grotesquerie to expose the law of motion of class rule: how state power, landholding elites and imperial influence reproduce domination. This method both records popular memory and refracts historical processes through mythic forms—an approach that can illuminate social contradictions when read dialectically.

It should be warned against reading Asturias too uncritically. His examination of myths, while important, is no substitute for a concrete examination of social relations. There is, of course, a danger that idealist constructions can hide real social relations. Leon Trotsky insisted that aesthetic form must be abstracted from its social and class roots: the formalist separation of form from content obscures the class forces that shape cultural production. As Trotsky wrote

“It is unquestionably true that economic conditions do not create the need for art. But neither is the need for food made by economics. On the contrary, the need for food and warmth creates economics. Indeed, one cannot always rely on Marxist principles in deciding whether to accept or reject a work of art. A work of art should, in the first place, be judged by its own law, that is, by the law of art. But Marxism alone can explain why and how a given tendency in art has originated in a given period of history; in other words, who it was who made a demand for such an artistic form and not for another, and why. It would be childish to think that every class can entirely and fully create its own art from within itself, and, particularly, that the proletariat is capable of creating a new art by means of closed art guilds or circles, or by the Organisation for Proletarian Culture [Proletkult], etc. Generally speaking, the artistic work of man is continuous. Each new rising class places itself on the shoulders of its preceding one. But this continuity is dialectical, that is, it finds itself through internal repulsions and breaks. New artistic needs or demands for new literary and creative points of view are stimulated by economics through the development of a new class, and minor stimuli are supplied by changes in the class's position under the influence of its growing wealth and cultural power. Artistic creation is always a complicated turning inside out of old forms, under the influence of new stimuli originating outside art. In this large sense of the word, art is a handmaiden. It is not a disembodied element feeding on itself, but a function of social man indissolubly tied to his life and environment.[4]

Asturias’s life work must be read as a socio-historical document, not as an ahistorical ornament. Studying Miguel Ángel Asturias scientifically is not an inward-looking cultural exercise; it is a political weapon to expose the roots of oppression.

 

Notes

Revisiting Men of Maize: Historical Truths, Literary Distortions, and Asturias in Today’s Guatemala -Elaine Elliott

Tall Tales Made to Order: The Making of Myth in Men of Maize by Miguel Angel Asturias René Prieto: MLN, Vol. 101, No. 2, Hispanic Issue (Mar., 1986), pp. 354-365

Myth As Time and Word by Ariel Dorfman

Myth and Social Realism in Miguel Angel Asturias-Luis Leal

A Literary Study of Magical Realism in Hombres de Maíz -LIU Lu-yao

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[1] See keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2024/07/mr-president-by-miguel-angel-asturias.html

[2] On Asturias’s Men of Maize- August 16, 2024-www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/08/16/on-asturiass-men-of-maize/

[3] www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/05/14/marq-m14.html

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

Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kastner E. Hall (Translator) Puffin Paperback – 21 Sept. 1959

 

(This article is dedicated to the memory of Elisabeth Zimmermann-Modler 1956–2025: Trotskyist and fighter for the working class)

Emil: Are your people well off?

Professor: I don't really know. Nobody ever talks about money.

Emil: Then I expect you have plenty. 

Dialogue from Emil and the Detectives

“It is sufficient to remember that the German bourgeoisie, with its incomparable technology, philosophy, science and art, allowed the power of the state to lie in the hands of a feudal bureaucratic class as late as 1918 and decided, or, more correctly, was forced to take power into its own hands only when the material foundations of German culture began to fall to pieces.”

Leon Trotsky: Proletarian Culture and Proletarian Art

The story of Kästner's Emil and the Detectives illuminates Germany in the 1920s, before German culture began to fall to Pieces under the death blow of  Fascism. Published in 1929 and in English in 1931, Kästner would have been politically aware enough to know that the book and himself were living on borrowed time. While the Nazis burned his books, he, however, did not suffer the same fate despite being interviewed by the Gestapo twice.

There are many reasons why adults return to their childhood books. For some, it is a comfort read or just the pure joy of reading. Emil and the Detectives was one of my first reads as a child. Not sure why I was drawn to it, why I chose a foreign author rather than a British one, we will never know. I borrowed it from my school library because it wasn't on the school reading curriculum. I want to say that I was aware of its political overtones, but I was drawn to it by chance, as I was not yet politically conscious of the world around me, which would arrive when I reached sixteen. Nevertheless, the book will always evoke fond childhood memories.

Perhaps because children and adults, for that matter, face a return to the darkness that fell on Europe with the rise of fascism, that Emil and the Detectives still resonates today. It makes sense that a group of kids from 1929 would represent society's underdogs, at risk from the forces of fascism, not only in Germany but in America, too.

The text from the 1931 translation by Margaret Goldsmith gives a flavour of the children's class consciousness in Kastner’s book: “I don't understand that at all," little Tuesday declared. "How can I steal what already belongs to me? What's mine is mine, even if it's in a stranger’s pocket! ”These things are difficult to understand," the professor expounded. "Morally, you might be in the right. But the law will find you guilty all the same. Even some grown-ups don't really understand these things, but they are a fact. Or this dialogue

Emil: Are your people well off? Professor: I don't really know. Nobody ever talks about money. Emil: Then I expect you have plenty. ”[1]

As Uma Krishnaswami correctly writes, “Emil and the Detectives positions itself squarely on the side of ordinary people and against oppression meted out by the powerful. When a suspicious-looking man, Herr Grundeis, steals the money Emil Tischbein’s mother gave him, young Emil doesn’t go to the police. Instead, he dashes off to find the thief. In the process, the boy sleuth gathers a motley band of friends, including the unforgettable Pony Hütchen and, of course, the endearing Little Tuesday, without whose faithful vigilance the plan could not unfold. Naturally, the kids are victorious in the end.”[2]

Why read Kästner Now

Emil’s story raises perennial questions: how childhood experience is shaped by class, how working-class solidarity takes root in everyday life, and how the state and the market shape civic trust. Studying such literature trains workers and students to read cultural texts as expressions of material conditions.

So Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives (1929) is best read not simply as a children’s adventure but as a social document of the late Weimar Republic: a work that reflects class contrasts, urban life, and the moral questions facing youth in a capitalist society. Again, for workers and students, Kästner offers an accessible entry point into how literature can both reflect social conditions and contribute to political education. For a political framing of Kästner’s broader milieu and politics.[3]

Erich Kästner’s stories, poems and satires—written amid the political turmoil of the Weimar Republic—are rich in social observation: they identify petty‑bourgeois anxieties, the erosion of democratic habits, the everyday humiliations of children and workers, and the moral cowardice of elites. Reading Kästner in the workplace helps workers develop a literary sensibility while equipping them to connect cultural forms to concrete political tasks: building class consciousness, exposing bourgeois ideology, and preparing collective struggle.

One of Kastner’s most crucial works is Fabian or Going to the Dogs. As Bernd Reinhardt perceptively writes, “ Fabian has certain autobiographical traits and who more than once in his literary work blames 'stupidity' for social ills, referring to dumb Nazis, stupid Germans, and so on. The voiceover that features from time to time in the film quotes a passage from the novel where the fights between Nazis and Communists are compared to dancehall brawls. Like many other intellectuals, Kästner underestimated the danger of the Nazi movement. After the war, he admitted that they should have been fought earlier, because “threatening dictatorships can only be fought before they have taken power.”[4]

About the Author

Erich Kästner (1899–1974), a pacifist and satirist whose works were famously burned by the Nazis, though Emil and the Detectives was initially spared due to its popularity.

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[1] Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kastner E. Hall (Translator) Puffin Paperback – 21 Sept. 1959

[2] Why You Should Read (or Reread) Emil and the Detectives-www.umakrishnaswami.com/blog/why-you-should-read-or-reread-emil-and-the-detectives

[3] See the WSWS discussion of Kästner’s Fabian work and its relation to the Weimar social crisis, on Fabian and the dangers of the 1930s.

[4] German Film Award in Silver for Dominik Graf’s Fabian: Going to the Dogs-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/11/13/fabi-n13.html

Lord of the Flies: by William Golding-Faber & Faber 3 Mar. 1997

 “ A Libel Against Humanity”

David Walsh

‘The Satan of our cosmology is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which implies that everything is running down. Life is … a local contradiction of this law … [it] refuses to submit … and rewinds itself up again.’

William Golding

Anyone who moved through those years, without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.”

Wiliam Golding

Lord of the Flies, written in the aftermath of the Second World War, is essentially a “libel against humanity”. The book’s plot line follows a group of largely public schoolboys who descend into savagery at the drop of a hat after being stranded on a deserted island.  While Golding argues that "man produces evil as a bee produces honey," he rejects the premise that the boys' behaviour could be socially constructed. Golding believes violence is a default setting of humanity and not a condition of the competitive, capitalist and class-divided society in which the boys were raised.

A class analysis would indicate that Ralph and Piggy are members of the ruling elite representing the liberal-democratic order and that both exhibit "bourgeois" values. Jack would be the totalitarian/militarist, portraying the rise of fascism or the expression of Stalinism, valuing strength and production (meat) over intellectualism and law.

Piggy's alienation and death could be explained by his lower-class status (indicated by his accent and physical limitations), showing that an irrational" democratic system fails to protect those it deems inferior.  Golding believed that it would not take much for civilisation after the Second World War to suffer the same fate as the boys. A Marxist would argue that the novel reflects the "political subconscious" of the Cold War era, in which the fear of nuclear war and the struggle between democracy and communism are projected onto the children’s conflict.

As Alexander Lee points out in a recent article, Golding's postwar irrational vulnerabilities were preceded by Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), which had already pointed to a dystopian future in which rationalism and science run amok, destroying morality. In 1941, a Mass Observation Report found that a majority of British people believed that science was ‘out of control’.

Such was the toxic atmosphere created by the post-war period, by the American state and ruling class when they carried out a purge of socialist and left-wing views from film, writing and culture as a whole. Golding’s opinions, as presented in Lord of the Flies (1954), which present violence and atavism as central to the human condition, were already being expressed by other writers during this period.

However, William Golding’s novels are not merely literary artefacts; read dialectically, they are tools for political education—revealing how ideas, institutions and everyday relations reproduce domination, and pointing to why only organised working-class struggle can overturn the conditions that give rise to the very tragedies he depicts.

David North puts this better when he says, “Most of you are, I am sure, familiar with William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, which argues that barbarism is the natural condition of humanity. Release a group of ordinary school boys from the usual restraints of civilisation and they will, within a few weeks, revert to a state of homicidal savagery. This misanthropic work flowed from the conclusions drawn by Golding from the experiences of the Second World War. “Anyone who moved through those years,” he later wrote, “without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head. The popularity of Lord of the Flies reflected the bewilderment and despair provoked by the horrors of World War II. This mood was strengthened by the political relations that arose in the aftermath of the war. It became more challenging to engage in a discussion of the nature of the Third Reich after 1945 than before. In the reactionary political environment of the Cold War, it was no longer considered appropriate, especially in the United States, to dwell too seriously on the relation between fascism and modern capitalism.”[1]

In his defence, Golding was not born a pessimist or prone to irrationality. According to Alexander Lee, “Long before Golding began writing Lord of the Flies, he had also been a rationalist. The son of a science teacher, he studied Natural Sciences at Oxford before switching to English. He grew up believing that humanity was not only capable of change but also progressing. Like many students in the 1920s and 1930s, he agreed with Karl Marx that history moves in one direction: forward. He believed that, even if the process might sometimes be painful, even violent, the conditions of life would inexorably improve and humanity become happier, more ‘enlightened’, and fulfilled. It was inevitable.”[2]

So what changed? What made Golding write ‘We are the masters of ignorance, proud, frightened, and god-haunted. We have no country and no home.’ We are no better than before: worse, in fact. Death has become a calculation, and even cruelty has lost its horror. It might be tempting to compare this to the ‘law of the jungle’, but even that would be an understatement. In what jungle could you find six million people being processed through a death chamber?’[3]

Again, Golding was not the only writer to draw pessimistic conclusions from the rise of fascism and Nazi Germany’s responsibility for the murder of six million jews. Walter Benjamin’s famous “Angelus Novus”‑inspired lament saw history as an accumulating catastrophe rather than a process moving toward emancipation; Benjamin’s own despair culminated in suicide while fleeing fascism, a tragic personal witness to the collapse of political possibilities. Others turned to cultural nihilism or moral relativism—treating the Holocaust as proof that Enlightenment rationality and historical materialism were bankrupt. In his book Understanding the Nazi Genocide: Marxism after Auschwitz, Enzo Traverso makes clear his deepening opposition to Marxism as a method of historical analysis and as the basis of a political perspective.

In the introduction, he writes: “Between emancipation and genocide, the history of European Jewry, as much in its metamorphoses as in its wounds, can be seen as an excellent laboratory in which to study the different faces of modernity: its hopes and liberatory aspirations on the one hand, its destructive forces on the other. This history shows both the ambiguity of the Enlightenment and its heirs, including Marxism, and the extreme forms of barbarism that modern civilisation can take.”

The Marxist writer Nick Beams replied, saying, “This approach, in which 'modernity' is made responsible for the crimes against the Jewish people—one could say the crimes against humanity committed on the body of the Jewish people—performs a vital political role. It obscures the political forces and the social classes whose interests they ultimately served. Modernity is an empty abstraction. It is wracked by class division and class conflict.”[4]

While Golding’s and others' approach is psychologically understandable, this thinking depoliticises the lesson of Auschwitz. It turns the Holocaust into an argument that history has no laws or that socialism is an inadequate response and substitutes metaphysical despair for political struggle. As the World Socialist Web Site has argued, attempts to attribute Auschwitz to amorphous “modernity” rather than to specific class and imperialist dynamics serve to blur responsibility and paralyse resistance.

Since some of the article was written with the help of the WSWS’s Socialism AI, it would be churlish of me not to praise it, and to say that it has already become an invaluable educational tool in the struggle for socialism. One aspect I am particularly struck by is that it not only provides information but also offers a Marxist study guide. It provides a systematic framework for studying Golding’s book to inform both a theoretical understanding and aid political development.

 

 

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[1]The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners-www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html

[2] William Golding’s Island of Savagery Alexander Lee | Published in History Today Volume 75 Issue 12 December 2025

[3] William Golding’s Island of Savagery

[4] Marxism and the Holocaust-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/05/adde-m15.html