Review Matthew Worley's No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–1984 (Cambridge University Press, 2017),

“The legacy of The Clash continues to shape what has been best in popular music. It was The Clash’s pushing back of the boundaries, for example, that made possible (and helped shape) the ska revival of the late 1970s/early 1980s, one of the highest spots of political songwriting in recent British musical history.” Paul Bond

"Punk rock should mean freedom, liking and accepting anything that you like. Playing whatever you want. As sloppy as you want. As long as it's good and it has passion." — Kurt Cobain.

“God save the Queen/The fascist regime/They made you a moron”.

Sex Pistols

Matthew Worley's 'No Future' offers a comprehensive academic history of the connection between punk rock and political culture in Britain from 1976 to 1984. It covers the initial punk explosion, its subsequent split into post-punk, Oi!, anarcho-punk (Crass), the Two-Tone ska revival, and the Rock Against Racism/Anti-Nazi League movements. This work is a thorough and well-researched cultural history, yet it has notable analytical limitations that readers should be aware of.

Worley situates punk within a clear social and historical framework: the collapse of Britain’s postwar Keynesian consensus, high youth unemployment, issues within the Labour Party and trade unions, and the rise of Thatcherism. He emphasises that punk is not merely fashion or nihilism but is deeply rooted in genuine social anger. The book's broad coverage, including bands like the Sex Pistols, Crass, Sham 69, and the Specials, illustrates that punk was a multifaceted cultural phenomenon in which class struggles, political beliefs, and generational discontent interacted in various ways.

Worley’s earlier academic work is highly valuable, offering substantial examples of historical research. His Cold War article rightfully cites Discharge's 'Realities of War' (1980) as a significant turning point, both musically and politically, as it was the first sustained punk effort to directly address working-class anger towards the war machine and nuclear threats. His detailed and balanced depiction of Crass highlights that the band was more than just a musical group; it served as the centre of a genuine communication network that included fanzines, pamphlets, independent records, benefit concerts, and connections to CND, squatting movements, and animal rights groups. He quotes their sleeve notes from 'Christ The Album' (1982), stating: "War is confirmation of the imposed reality in which we exist." This stands as a notable political statement.

The " One Nation Under the Bomb article is even more valuable as raw material. Worley has done hard archival work that nobody else has done, tracing hundreds of fanzines from Aberdeen to Bristol, from the first issue of Sniffin' Glue (1976) to the anarchist 'zines of the early 1980s. His account of the breadth and geographic spread of punk fanzine culture reaching into Sunderland, Bradford, Telford, and Northampton gives the lie to the London-centric picture that dominates most punk historiography. He shows that punk fanzine culture was a genuinely national, working-class youth phenomenon, not a metropolitan art-school project.

He depicts British punk through the themes of nuclear anxiety and Cold War politics. This perspective highlights key aspects of the anti-nuclear movement and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which indeed influenced punk culture, especially within the "Oi!" and anarcho-punk scenes linked to bands like Crass. This was particularly evident in the early 1980s when Thatcher's deployment of cruise missiles at Greenham Common coincided with a surge in the peace movement. However, this approach risks emphasising an ideological or culturally political view at the expense of the underlying class dynamics.[1]

Worley's focus on the British punk fanzine is historically genuine in one important respect: fanzines represented something qualitatively different from the commercial music press. In the pages of Sniffin' Glue, Ripped & Torn, Kill Your Pet Puppy, Maximum Rock’n’roll, or the anarcho-punk publications that clustered around Crass Toxic Grafity, Enigma, Punk Lives, there was a raw, unmediated attempt by working-class and lower-middle-class youth to make sense of their world in their own voice. The do-it-yourself ethic ("Here is a chord. Here is another. Here is a third. Now form a band") was not merely aesthetic posturing. It was a direct rejection of the cultural gatekeeping of capitalist media.

However, it is essential to examine punk fanzines honestly rather than celebrate them uncritically. They covered a broad spectrum, from almost solely music-oriented to explicitly political, and included publications that primarily served as channels for anarchist propaganda. The political fanzines linked to the early 1980s anarcho-punk scene, those linked to Crass, Flux of Pink Indians, and Discharge, are where Worley's Cold War and anti-nuclear themes are most clearly expressed. Publications like Scum or zines related to Poison Girls combined an anti-nuclear stance with feminist separatism, veganism, pacifism, and anti-statism, creating an eclectic yet recognisable ideological package.[2]

He also correctly identifies the political heterogeneity of the scene. The SWP's Red Rebel and RAR's Temporary Hoarding sit alongside the far-right NF's Punk Front and the anarcho-punk Toxic Graffiti as competing attempts to harness punk's social energy. And he notes, honestly, that punk's "abiding impulse was to 'do it yourself', not conform to the diktats and doctrines of self-appointed ideologues", which is why all these attempts brought "only scant reward."

No Future’s main weakness is that Worley lacks a theory of class. Despite its ambitions, No Future is largely constrained by the academic framework Worley employs. Cultural studies, strongly influenced by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (including Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige, etc.), is not aligned with Marxism. Worley views youth subcultures as symbols of "resistance", resistance shown through style, music, identity, and subversive aesthetics. Worley consistently overlooks the crucial question posed: what is the connection between these movements and the class struggle?

Cultural Studies emerged as an alternative to the class struggle, acting as a safeguard against revolutionary class politics. Paul Bond's article on Stuart Hall examines the origins of Cultural Studies. His insightful obituary of Hall emphasises that it was intentionally developed as a critique of revolutionary Marxism, particularly its modern form, Trotskyism. Its rise in Birmingham in the 1960s is linked to the political upheaval following the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the ensuing defections from the British Communist Party. During this time, the key question was whether disillusioned individuals would embrace Trotskyism and authentic Marxism or seek a new intellectual framework that opposed capitalism in theory but not in practice.[3]

Analysing punk through 'subculture theory' reveals endless nuances about symbols like safety pins and mohawks. However, it doesn't address the key question: why did punk's social energy, rooted in working-class alienation and anger, fail to ignite a revolutionary political movement? The answer isn't in the music or subculture itself. Instead, it lies in the political context of Britain's working class during that period: the dominance of the Labour Party and trade union bureaucracy over the labour movement, the pseudo-left groups like the Communist Party, International Socialists/SWP, and the Militant tendency, which diverted social anger into dead-end political avenues, and the lack of a mass Trotskyist party capable of offering genuine revolutionary leadership.

Rock Against Racism and the SWP

Worley discusses Rock Against Racism (RAR) and the Anti-Nazi League (ANL), movements mainly organised by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the late 1970s, focusing on the punk and reggae scenes. He views these efforts mostly positively as effective youth mobilisation against the National Front. However, I am somewhat more critical. The SWP exploited RAR/ANL to enhance its organisational presence while often placing political awareness secondary to anti-fascist unity. In practice, this meant aligning with the Labour Party and trade union leadership, simplifying the complex social issues faced by working-class youth to a single-issue moral campaign against the NF. This approach neglected to foster independent working-class political opposition to both Thatcherism and the Labour/union establishment that enabled it. The SWP's "anti-fascism' strategy created a pressure group rather than a revolutionary movement.

Anarcho-Punk and Its Limits

The anarchist element in punk, notably Crass, along with Conflict, Flux of Pink Indians, and others, sought to connect music more seriously with radical politics. Worley discusses this thoroughly. However, anarchism's main weakness is also its biggest flaw: its rejection of political parties, programs, and the pursuit of state power ultimately makes punk politics ineffective. Crass's politics focused on individualist, countercultural withdrawal from bourgeois society rather than strategies for the working class to gain power.  Ideas such as "Do It Yourself," autonomous communities, pacifism, and lifestyle politics, although sincerely held, cannot overpower a capitalist state with police, courts, and armies. Worley is too sympathetic to these tendencies. He views the limitations of the anarcho-punk scene as interesting complexities, rather than as the result of a petty-bourgeois political outlook that cannot provide the working class with a way forward.

The Title's Irony: Its Value and Limits

The book's title, inspired by the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen," reflects a harsh truth: the nihilism and despair among working-class youth in late 1970s Britain, who believed they had no future within the current system. However, the historical lesson reveals that a future did exist, the prospect of socialist revolution. It was the lack of revolutionary leadership that led many to see "no future" as the only honest response. Different groups, such as the SWP, the Labour left, and the anarchists, in their own ways, helped ensure that this genuine social anger was absorbed, dissipated, and ultimately conquered.

No Future is worth reading as a detailed empirical account of a culturally rich and politically charged period. But to understand why the energy of that moment did not lead to a revolutionary transformation, you need Marxism, not cultural studies. The crisis that produced punk has never been resolved; it has only deepened. The "no future" of 1977 is the social reality confronting young workers across the entire capitalist world today.

Worley's work is genuinely valuable as a historical record of what working-class youth actually thought, felt, and produced in Britain in this period. The sheer empirical richness of his research is impressive, and the raw material he uncovers is politically important. Discharge's "Realities of War," the network of fanzines stretching from Aberdeen to Bristol, the Crass collective's fusion of music, politics, and communal living, these things deserve to be remembered and taken seriously.

To determine whether punk was a revolution, we need to look beyond Worley's framework. Punk was not a revolution; rather, it was the cultural expression of a working-class generation overlooked by existing political organisations. The reason it didn't become a revolution isn't mainly due to punk itself, but to the movement's failure to build a mass party capable of channelling that frustration politically. This remains an unfulfilled task. The factors that fueled punk mass unemployment, imperialist wars, a ruling class dismissive of workers, and political parties offering no alternatives—are still present, even more acutely today. The question "no future?" still awaits an answer.

  

Notes

Obituary: Joe Strummer of The Clash, dead at 50-Paul Bond- www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/01/stru-j13.html

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[1] One Nation Under the Bomb: The Cold War and British Punk to 1984- Journal for the Study of Radicalism, FALL 2011, Vol. 5, No. 2

[2] Punk, Politics and British (fan)zines, 1976-84: 'While the world was dying, did you wonder why?" History Workshop Journal, No. 79 (2015), pp. 76-10

[3] Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014): A political career dedicated to opposing Marxism- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/03/05/hall-m05.html

Emma and the Fake, AI-generated profiles on Twitter (X)

I have known Emma for over a month. She has contacted me four times and follows me after I post an article. Although she claims to live in Shoreditch each time, she seems to have multiple personalities. Her end goal appears to be to generate revenue from her OnlyFans page, which she advertises.

To draw in customers, she shares photos of herself in revealing clothing. She is attractive and has a notably large backside, if that's your preference. The source of these images is uncertain, but they are likely generated with highly realistic synthetic faces, bodies, or bios created by language models to mimic real users. These accounts are primarily involved in coordinated influence campaigns, crypto scams, spam, and political boosting. Research shows that such accounts often operate in groups and tend to have fewer followers.

To understand how these accounts operate, particularly given the advanced AI technology involved, visual and behavioural cues are crucial. Emma’s fake accounts seldom post original or varied content. Other fake profiles often act as reply-guys, spam affiliate links, promote schemes like "get-rich-quick,' cryptocurrency scams, or use generic language similar to ChatGPT. These profiles usually follow thousands of users but have very few followers.

Although Emma the bot dismisses her work as trivial and insists she's real, the rise of AI-generated fake identities and synthetic bot networks poses more than just a technical challenge. It exposes a deeper problem rooted in capitalism's social dynamics. This issue significantly affects humans as aware, social beings and could be harmful. To fully understand this, we must link it to capitalism's long history of using technology to benefit the ruling class, as well as the wider social crisis capitalism has induced in human awareness and community.

I identified Emm’s game early, but for others less aware, a collapse of Shared Reality can threaten mental health. One of the most damaging effects of AI-created fake profiles is what can be called an epistemic crisis—a systematic breakdown in an individual's capacity to tell reality from falsehood. This problem isn't novel under capitalism; historically, the ruling class has sustained control via ideological mystification.

However, AI bots operating on an industrial scale mark a significant advancement. When someone cannot be sure if their online interlocutor is human or machine, if the consensus they see reflects genuine public opinion or a synthetic effort, and if the emotional connection they feel is with a real person or an algorithm  the very basis of rational social discourse begins to break down..

This has profoundly corrosive effects on individuals. The natural human response to an environment saturated with deception and manipulation is a generalized suspicion, not merely of bots but of everyone. When you cannot reliably distinguish the genuine from the fake, you begin to distrust all online interactions. This cynicism is, in many ways, a rational adaptation to an irrational environment, but it carries an enormous psychological cost. It deepens social atomisation, makes solidarity harder to build, and breeds a pervasive sense of isolation and powerlessness. People retreat from engagement, or are drawn into filter bubbles where algorithmic amplification — often driven by bot networks — creates false communities built around manufactured outrage.

In this already fragmented social landscape, the emergence of AI-generated fake social environments often results in predictable harms. Young people, still forming their social identities and seeking validation through peer interactions, are particularly vulnerable. When online communities are dominated by artificial personas created to provoke engagement, outrage, or emotional reliance, authentic developmental progress is hindered. The fundamental human ability to form genuine relationships—based on mutual vulnerability, genuine uncertainty, and meaningful stakes—is jeopardised when these interactions occur mainly with machines rather than real individuals.

 

David North, "A Letter from Afar by A. Lincoln" — and the Debate Around It

On May 22, 2026, David North issued "Lincoln and the Enduring Legacy of America's Second Revolution: A Reply to a Critic of the 'Letter from Afar'," a significant document that defends historical Marxism, critiques sectarian pseudo-radicalism, and clearly states the SEP's current political stance. I admit it took me some time to grasp the implications of the "Letter from Afar fully." If written by a human, it's an outstanding and brilliant piece. If created by Artificial Intelligence, then all praise to the creator.

North’s commentary on Lincoln — a "letter from afar" reflecting on the current American political crisis from Lincoln's historical perspective was widely received, mostly positively but also with some criticism. Some readers believed that referencing a bourgeois politician was a concession to nationalism and bourgeois democracy. North's response directly addresses these critics and outlines a thorough Marxist interpretation of Lincoln, the Civil War, and the links between bourgeois-democratic revolutions and the socialist movement.

It should be stated clearly from the beginning that it takes either bravery or foolishness to confront North on Lincoln and The Civil War as the Second American Revolution. Aside from Leon Trotsky, North is arguably the most significant Marxist of this century and the last. Like a fine wine, he only improves with age.

North's core argument is clear: the Civil War was essentially the second American Revolution, marking a global historical event through the violent end of the slave power and abolition of chattel slavery. Rather than viewing Lincoln as separate from socialist tradition.North cites Marx, who in 1865 praised Lincoln as "one of the rare men who succeed in becoming great, without ceasing to be good," describing him as someone who carried out his "titanic work as humbly as Heaven-born rulers do little things with the agility of a giant." Lenin, in his 1918 "Letter to American Workers," also referenced the revolutionary deeds of 1776 and the Civil War. Trotsky studied Grant and Sherman’s campaigns during the Russian Civil War, not merely as a historical interest but because he saw these struggles as Foundational to the development of the modern American working class

The critic attempted to contrast Lincoln with Trotsky using a rhetorical analogy: "Lincoln died that the slaves might be free — in and with capitalism; Trotsky died that workers might be free — through socialism." North counters this by stating that this analogy overlooks the true historical relationship between the bourgeois-democratic revolutions and the socialist movement that followed. Viewing Lincoln as unrelated to socialist ideals is rejecting the approaches of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky, favouring instead a sectarian view that isolates the working class from the broader history of revolutionary struggles against feudalism, slavery, and absolutism.

                                                1619 Project

North's defence of Lincoln directly supports the WSWS's ongoing campaign against the New York Times' 1619 Project. This initiative seeks to strip Lincoln of his status as a revered progressive figure and to replace class analysis with racial mythology. The WSWS, working with notable historians like James McPherson, Gordon Wood, James Oakes, and Victoria Bynum, defends the democratic and revolutionary core of the American Revolution and Civil War against this misrepresentation. The Lincoln letter continues this effort, now criticizing Trump's fascistic oligarchy, which threatens birthright citizenship—the achievement of the Civil War protected under the 14th Amendment—and the broader democratic rights of the working class.

One of the most notable parts of North's response involves the critic's assertion that the WSWS "is not a website for literature, novels, or literary experiments" and that "because Marxism is scientific, metaphors are rarely used when discussing the class struggle." North strongly counters this narrow view: Marx's prose — from the opening of the Manifesto, the Eighteenth Brumaire, to the passages on commodity fetishism in Capital — isn't just decoration; it closely intertwines literary flair with scientific analysis. Trotsky was a master of twentieth-century prose style. Lenin’s writings are marked by sharp wit. The idea that the working class should be spoken to in a "flat, bureaucratic language" has no basis in Marxism; it stems from Stalinist cultural decline, which the WSWS openly rejects.

North clearly explains why the Lincoln letter was written and its purpose. As the U.S. marks 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, the working class faces a historic challenge from a reactionary capitalist oligarchy with overt fascistic traits, threatening democratic rights. In this context, referencing Lincoln and the revolutionary heritage of 1776 and 1861–65 is not nationalism. Instead, it aims to activate and deepen the working class's democratic beliefs, guiding them toward independent political action needed to oppose the oligarchy on a socialist platform.

The SEP and WSWS will be marking the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution with an online webinar, among the themes of which will be Lincoln's place in American and world history as "the man who carried through the unfinished business of 1776, and whose work it now falls to the working class to complete on an international socialist foundation."

 

The New Luddite Movement and Artificial Intelligence’s jobs massacre under Capitalism

Science does not reach its goal in the hermetically sealed study of the scholar, but in flesh-and-blood society. All the interests and passions that rend society asunder, exert their influence on the development of science, especially of political economy, the science of wealth and poverty.

Leon Trotsky- Marxism in Our Time

We know that it has been mentioned to our great men and Ministers in Parliament by those who have Factories how many poor they employ, forgetting at the same time how many more they would employ were they to have it done by hand, as they used to do.  The Poor house we find full of great lurking Boys....  I am informed by many that there will be a Revolution and that there is in Yorkshire about 30 thousand in a Correspondent Society....  The burning of Factories or setting fire to the property of People we know is not right, but Starvation forces Nature to do that which it would not.

A letter from "A Soldier Returned to his Wife and weeping Orphans" to a Member of Parliament from Wiltshire (1802)

"But whilst these outrages must be admitted to exist to an alarming extent, it cannot be denied that they have arisen from circumstances of the most unparalleled distress... nothing but absolute want could have driven a large, and once honest and industrious, body of the people, into the commission of excesses..."

Lord Byron-Song for the Luddites 1816

"[The Luddites] contained within them a shadowy image... of a democratic community, in which industrial growth should be regulated according to ethical priorities and the pursuit of profit be subordinated to human needs."

E.P Thompson

Recently, several articles have explored the emergence of a “neo-Luddite anti-AI backlash." One notable example is “The New Luddite Movement," which was recently published in the Financial Times, a prominent newspaper serving Britain's financial elite.

Camilla Cavendish, the author of the latest article, is a senior columnist at the Financial Times and a former head of the Downing Street Policy Unit under David Cameron. She comes from the liberal-technocratic wing of the British establishment, a perspective focused on improving capitalism rather than replacing it. When a figure like Cavendish advocates for "new Luddism," a reader must first consider: which class interests does this perspective promote?

The Financial Times, along with the New York Times and other outlets representing the liberal bourgeoisie, has increasingly published sympathetic articles attacking anti-AI and anti-technology sentiments, portraying them as a progressive social response to capitalism's technological progress. It's important to recognise what the Financial Times truly represents, as it serves as the official publication for global financial capital, representing the interests of the City of London and Wall Street. When it features sympathetic profiles of "new Luddism," it does not express solidarity with workers. Instead, it channels genuine working-class frustration into politically harmless outlets, ideological dead ends that do not threaten the system. The FT will never ask: who owns these AI systems? That is the one question it is inherently unable to address.

The Real Luddites vs the New Luddism

The early 19th-century Luddites were skilled textile workers who opposed not just technology, but the capitalist exploitation enabled by machinery that threatened their jobs. Engels and Marx saw them as an early form of working-class resistance, imperfect in method (such as machine-breaking) but sincerely rooted in class antagonism. The "new Luddism' promoted by the FT represents a fundamentally different phenomenon: a middle-class ideological stance that confuses the tool with the social relations that determine how it is used.

The scale of this new capitalist pushback is remarkable; over 300,000 jobs were eliminated by American companies in just the first four months of 2026, with AI being the main cause for two consecutive months. Despite investing $145 billion in AI infrastructure, Meta is cutting 8,000 jobs. Oracle is reducing its workforce by up to 30,000 employees, including those who spent their last month training AI systems that eventually replaced them. The stock market responded positively to these developments. This goes beyond simple disruption; it appears more like a form of class warfare.

A consequence of this class struggle is the development of Socialism AI, which seeks to protect workers and serve as a tool against capitalism. Recently, it countered a bourgeois commentary in the New York Times, claiming that capitalism—rather than AI—is to blame for mass layoffs, healthcare denial, and wealth concentration among a few oligarchs.

The development of Socialism AI by the ICFI directly challenges the new Luddite viewpoint. Instead of rejecting AI, it is vital to harness the technology to serve the working class. David North and Evan Blake's responses to critics of Socialism AI highlight this stance: the petty-bourgeois critic who calls AI a "bullshit machine" is not showing genuine scepticism but rather engaging in "romantic anti-capitalism that criticises  the current social order in a conservative and even reactionary way."

By avoiding engaging with complex productive forces, this stance unconsciously longs for a pre-technological era and results in ineffective abstention instead of action. Socialism AI is genuine, not a superficial trick. It represents a practical use of the same historical materialist method Marx used for the printing press, the telegraph, and other key technological advances: these tools only become liberating when the revolutionary class actively and knowingly adopts t

On Arsenal’s hold on the streets and the elites

‘Up against a UAE-owned club in the Premier League and a Qatar-owned one in the Champions League final, Arsenal stand out as the Iranian Revolutionary Guards of football.’

I do not recognise my club."

Thierry Henry, expressing dismay over modern, soulless, capitalist football and club management.

"Politically, I am for efficiency. Economically first. Until the 1980s, the world was divided into two... The capitalist model in the modern world also looks to be unsustainable."

Arsène Wenger, on individual interests and balancing maximum earnings with a "minimum amount of money for everybody".

The Financial Times article on Arsenal’s influence in both the streets and among elites is a remarkable example of journalism. It bizarrely depicts Arsenal as an outsider challenging the status quo of elite football, where ownership by the UAE of Manchester City and by Qatar of PSG is viewed as typical. In contrast, Arsenal is portrayed as a fanatical menace. The reference to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards is intentional, mirroring Western imperialist language that depicts Iran as a rogue state, defying the "rules-based international order." That the FT, a publication aligned with global finance, uses this language to discuss a football club underscores the political symbolism embedded in the metaphor.

The initial point to highlight is the normalisation of ownership by Gulf states. The UAE and Qatar are absolute monarchies that harshly suppress their own populations, exploit migrant labour under conditions nearly akin to indentured servitude, and act as major tools of US and British imperialism in the Middle East. There is a well-documented history of repression and torture in these Gulf countries that the Western media consistently overlooks. However, according to the FT's perspective, the presence of Emirati and Qatari sovereign wealth funds at the top of European football exemplifies how sport operates in the 21st century, sleek, modern, and globalised. Meanwhile, Arsenal is portrayed as the odd, intimidating entity.

The second point to examine is the political significance of comparing Iran in this context. The United States designates the Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organisation because they oppose American imperial influence in the Middle East. Regardless of one's opinion of the Iranian bourgeois clerical regime, the FT's label isn’t meant to serve as a strong political argument. Instead, it seeks to evoke emotion: Arsenal fans are depicted as zealots, irrational, and potentially dangerous. This language reflects the rhetoric of the ruling class, which views the working-class cultural phenomenon with suspicion. North London has a long-standing working-class history, and Arsenal supporters are numerous, vocal, and deeply passionate about a club that predates both billionaire and sovereign-fund ownership. The FT appears unable to interpret this passionate support except as a threat.

The third and most profound irony is that Arsenal is owned by billionaire Stan Kroenke, an American whose family also owns the Los Angeles Rams and various other sports teams. There is no real alternative ownership model to compare with those in Abu Dhabi or Doha. The FT's true concern seems to stem from the cultural resistance of fans, the feeling among some supporters that football remains more than just a commercial spectacle. Even their lingering connection to community and place is enough to earn the City of London's newspaper a comparison to the Revolutionary Guard.

The core political message suggests that football reveals a broader truth about capitalism: it appropriates the labour of the working class, strips away its authentic social meaning. It turns it into a means for profit and societal control. Additionally, sport serves an ideological purpose for the ruling class, channelling working-class passion, energy, and collective identity into tribal loyalties tightly managed by billionaire owners. This prevents those energies from fostering political or class consciousness.

The protests by fans against the Super League revealed that working-class people have an instinctive sense that something is being taken from them. However, this instinct must be linked to a broader political outlook. The core issue isn't just about "greedy owners' needing tighter regulation but about the capitalist system itself, which relegates all facets of social life, including culture and sports, to the pursuit of private profit. The solution isn't reforming UEFA or creating fan-ownership schemes within capitalism, but rather pursuing a socialist transformation of society, in which cultural institutions truly serve the working class that creates them.

The Financial Times article highlights how imperialist geopolitical language effortlessly influences its coverage of culture and sport. Gulf petrostates sanitising their global image via football clubs are depicted as part of the landscape, while mass fan culture rooted in working-class communities is portrayed as a militia. The biases of finance capital are quite evident.

This leads us to Alex Callinicos, who retweeted the FT article. Known as an Arsenal supporter, his fandom adds an interesting political irony. Callinicos is a prominent theorist of the British Socialist Workers Party, a pseudo-left group. Under Callinicos's guidance, the SWP has often placed working-class politics behind reformist pressure groups that support Scottish nationalism, ignored Trump's coup attempt, and praised Syriza's concessions in Greece. The SWP is not a revolutionary force; rather, it is a faction rooted in the upper-middle class that redirects working-class unrest,

The Arsenal connection may seem minor at first glance, but it highlights a fundamental contradiction at the core of the SWP and the broader pseudo-left. Here is a man who claims to be a Marxist anti-capitalist theorist. Yet, as noted in the FT article, his club is owned by billionaire Stan Kroenke, an American sports franchise magnate who has faced ongoing protests from Arsenal's working-class fans. These fans oppose Kroenke's asset-stripping of the club and his view of it merely as a financial asset. Their protests—rooted in opposition to billionaire ownership of a community institution—carry more authentic class sentiment than anything the SWP has articulated in years.

To our knowledge, Callinicos has not seriously addressed the political economy of football ownership or what it indicates about modern capitalism. This gap is notable because issues such as football's commodification, Gulf sovereign wealth funds' role in sportswashing authoritarian regimes, and the erosion of working-class fan culture through financialisation offer valuable subjects for Marxist critique. The pseudo-left largely overlooks these topics, as engaging deeply with the cultural experiences of the working class would require moving beyond abstract seminar discussions and NGO-like activism typical of groups such as the SWP.

The FT's comparison of Arsenal fans to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and the SWP's deliberate indifference to what this comparison uncovers, reflect two aspects of the same issue: one a voice of financial capital dismissing working-class cultural bonds as fanaticism, and the other a pseudo-left that has long lost touch with the real nature of working-class life.

Martin Empson's "The Time of the Harvest has Come -Revolution, Reformation, and the German Peasant War. Bookmarks 2025

 

“Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.”- Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History?

'Behind the peasant the revolutionary beginnings of the modern proletariat, already red flag in hand and with communism on its lips'". Frederick Engels

“History is the long struggle of man, by exercise of his reason, to understand his environment and to act upon it. But the modern period has broadened the struggle in a revolutionary way. Man now seeks to understand, and act on, not only his environment, but himself; and this has added, so to speak, a new dimension to reason and a new dimension to history.” - Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History?

"Heaven was to be sought in this life, not beyond, and it was, according to Muenzer, the task of the believers to establish Heaven, the kingdom of God, here on earth”. Frederick Engels

Martin Empson is not simply an individual author who happens to have certain political views. He is an organic product of a specific political tendency, the British Socialist Workers Party, and everything he writes on history is shaped, consciously or not, by the theoretical and political framework that tendency has built up over decades. When Martin Empson writes history, whether about the German Peasant War, ecology and capitalism, or any other subject, he does so within this theoretical and political framework. Several specific distortions flow necessarily from it.

The German Peasant War is one of the most important pre-capitalist revolutionary upheavals in European history, and Marxists have always taken it seriously. Friedrich Engels himself wrote the foundational Marxist study, The Peasant War in Germany (1850), composed in the immediate aftermath of the failed revolutions of 1848–49. That timing was no accident. Engels wrote it explicitly to draw historical lessons for the modern revolutionary movement from a great popular uprising that had been defeated.

The material roots of the uprising. The Peasant War was not simply a religious rebellion dressed in the language of scripture. It arose from the concrete, material oppression of the German peasantry and plebeian masses, feudal dues, enclosures, the consolidation of princely power, and the crisis of the old feudal order as early capitalist relations began to penetrate Germany. The Reformation provided the language and ideology of revolt, but the driving force was social and economic antagonism.

Thomas Müntzer is a revolutionary figure. Engels drew a sharp distinction between Martin Luther and Thomas Müntzer. Luther represented the interests of the moderate bourgeoisie and the princes. He wanted religious reform but recoiled in horror from the social revolution of the masses. When the peasants rose, Luther called for their bloody suppression with his infamous tract Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants. Müntzer, by contrast, represented the most radical plebeian wing of the movement. His theology was a revolutionary doctrine in religious disguise. The "Kingdom of God" he preached was, in essence, a demand for the abolition of class privilege and the establishment of a society of equals. Engels called him a "religious and political revolutionary of the first rank."

The SWP and the German Peasant War: How History Serves Opportunism

The question of how the Socialist Workers Party relates to the German Peasant War is not simply an academic matter. It goes to the heart of what the SWP is as a political tendency, how it uses history, what lessons it draws (and refuses to draw), and whose class interests its politics ultimately serve. To understand this properly, we must first establish what a genuine Marxist history of the Peasant War looks like, then examine how the SWP's theoretical and political framework systematically distorts it.

The SWP advocates for its core idea of “socialism from below' as a return to genuine Marxism and opposes Stalinism. However, in practice, it appears to use this idea to dismiss revolutionary leadership. Empson views Müntzer and the peasants mainly as symbols of heroism and spontaneous radicalism but overlooks Engels’ key argument: Müntzer's defeat resulted from the movement lacking the political and organisational conditions necessary to transform mass militancy into victory. The SWP struggles to accept this because recognising it would mean acknowledging the need for the Fourth International, which it has generally opposed.

Thomas Müntzer (c. 1489–1525) stands out as a significant and tragic figure in early revolutionary history. As a theologian and preacher who broke away from Luther's Reformation on the left, Müntzer became the ideological and military leader of the most radical faction during the German Peasants' War of 1524–25, the largest mass uprising in Europe before the French Revolution. Engels offered a detailed, sympathetic, yet strictly materialist analysis of Müntzer in his influential work, The Peasant War in Germany (1850). Written shortly after the failed revolutions of 1848, Engels drew clear political lessons for the proletariat movement. To Engels, Müntzer was not just a religious eccentric but a true revolutionary; his theology was the only way to express a proto-communist agenda within the 16th-century context. Müntzer's idea of the "Kingdom of God" fundamentally advocated for a society without class divisions, private property, or a ruling state authority.

What distinguished Müntzer was his radical departure from Luther. While Luther's Reformation mainly aimed to transfer church wealth from Rome to German princes and create a new bourgeois-Protestant system, Müntzer supported the plebeians and peasants—those most marginalised and argued that the Reformation must genuinely transform real-world conditions. He called for the immediate realisation of the "Kingdom of God" on earth. Engels viewed this as the start of something truly new: a revolutionary who saw religious reform as potentially masking social reaction.

Engels also provided a stern Marxist critique of Müntzer, which serves as a key lesson. As outlined in Chapter 6 on the Peasant War in Thuringia, Müntzer's tragedy highlights the common story of a revolutionary leader who guides a movement whose class base is too weak to support his proposed program. The greatest danger for a leader of an extreme faction is being forced to take control of a government when the movement is not yet ready for the dominance of the class he represents. Instead, he is forced to represent not his party or class, but the class for whom conditions are finally suitable for control.

This analysis highlights Engels at his most incisive, emphasising the limits of the class that imprisoned Müntzer and the peasantry, as well as the plebeian masses he led. As a fragmented, pre-capitalist, land-based class, the peasantry lacked the resources to bring about enduring revolutionary change. They could rise passionately but lacked the means to take control, reorganise production, or form a new state. Their views were mostly local, combining traditional communal values with aims for equality. During crises, the very forces Müntzer inspired failed to respond adequately. The Battle of Frankenhausen in May 1525 ended in a disastrous massacre; Müntzer was captured, tortured, and executed.

Engels drew a notable comparison to 1848, noting that the German bourgeoisie of his era had acted as traitors, like the princes and moderate reformers of 1525. For the proletariat, the message was straightforward. Unlike the peasantry, the modern working class has the potential to seize power and reshape society because it is a direct outcome of capitalist production. Consequently, the Marxist tradition regards Müntzer as an early figure, emphasising that his defeat was not accidental but rooted in systemic factors: revolutionary will, no matter how heroic, cannot replace a revolutionary class.

What connects Müntzer and the SWP?

Initially, they may appear entirely disconnected, a 16th-century millenarian theologian and a 20th-century socialist organisation. However, a common thread exists. Engels' critique of Müntzer revealed a core issue: what occurs when a revolutionary leader or group promotes hopes beyond the existing class forces capable of advancing them? Müntzer reacted by pushing ahead with revolutionary zeal, replacing class analysis with religious conviction, a move that led to disastrous outcomes.

When the SWP and authors like Empson examine the German Peasant War through the lens of "socialism from below," they often introduce consistent distortions: While the SWP tradition celebrates the heroism and radicalism of the peasant masses, it intentionally ignores Engels' conclusion that their lack of proper class leadership and organisation led to their downfall. Although their heroism is authentic, heroism without a clear program, a leading class, or an international revolutionary organisation does not constitute true socialism from below. It remains a tragedy. The SWP focuses on the inspiring aspects of the uprising but neglects the critical lesson: the necessity of building a revolutionary party with a scientific program. This lesson reveals the SWP's own longstanding hesitation to do so.

Engels' prefaces from 1870 and 1874 place the German Peasant War within a global context of class struggle. He compares 1525 to key moments like 1789, 1848, and the rise of workers' movements across Europe. The main lesson highlights internationalism: the working class can only succeed if united as an international movement. The SWP, which parted ways with the Fourth International in 1951 and has criticized Trotskyism for decades, fails to understand this lesson. Therefore, their history remains largely national and episodic, viewing each major uprising as an inspiring but isolated event without a unifying thread leading to revolutionary change. Engels clearly states that the German Peasant War introduced, in a rudimentary and confused way, the issue of state power. Müntzer's program, expressed in theological terms, called for the overthrow of the existing social order and the creation of a new one.

The core issue is who controls state power. The SWP, following Tony Cliff's rejection of the working class's revolutionary role, lacks a true theory of socialist revolution and a plan for the working class to seize state power and dismantle the capitalist system of oppression. Their version of "socialism" is essentially pressure-group politics. In historical analysis, this approach reduces the question of state power to vague ideas of "people's power" or "mass mobilisation” that often culminate in no concrete revolutionary plan.

Martin Empson’s book on the German Peasant War, for all the factual research it may contain, cannot be trusted as a work of Marxist history. The framework through which it interprets the facts is designed, consciously or not, to produce conclusions compatible with the SWP's current political practice, which means conclusions that do not lead the reader toward the revolutionary programme. None of this suggests that Empson's factual research is useless or that his book on the German Peasant War lacks valuable information. Engels, writing in 1850, emphasised that the historical record of the uprising was important and worth examining in detail.

However, the framework Empson uses to interpret that record is politically biased. The test is straightforward: does his analysis guide the reader toward Engels's conclusions — that the failure of the Peasant War was due to a failure of class forces and revolutionary leadership, that moderate reformers were objectively counter-revolutionary, and that the modern working class needs an international revolutionary party to prevent a repeat of that tragedy? Or does it lead the reader to celebrate spontaneous mass struggle, implicitly supporting the SWP's politics of pressure, popular frontism, and subservience to the Labour bureaucracy?

For a genuine Marxist history of this period, read Engels' The Peasant War in Germany in its entirety, all three prefaces and all seven chapters. It is not long, and it remains, 175 years after it was written, the most penetrating analysis of that great uprising ever produced. No SWP book has improved upon it, and none can because improving upon it would require a political honesty that the SWP's entire existence depends on avoiding.

 

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick, SF Masterworks 1968

“If you find this world bad, you should see some of the others.”

Philip K Dick

Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.

Leon Trotsky- Literature and Revolution

Although Philip K. Dick was not a superman, he certainly pushed his physical and mental limits to elevate both his own consciousness and that of his readers. His 1968 novel, 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?', is among the most philosophically ambitious science fiction works of the twentieth century.  disparity.

This novel embodies Dick's humanist viewpoint, delving into the key question: what truly defines being human amid a heavily dehumanised world? Set in a post-nuclear-war wasteland where most animals are extinct, and much of humanity lives in off-world colonies, the story explores themes of alienation. Rick Deckard, the bounty hunter tasked with hunting androids, focuses more on character development and the desire for genuine emotions in a world that feels largely synthetic and empty.

The novel's social commentary is powerful. The androids (Nexus-6 models by Rosen Corporation) act as a form of slave labour created to serve, deprived of rights, and hunted when they escape. Dick clearly compares the androids' lack of "empathy" with the spiritual numbness capitalism causes in humans. The "empathy boxes" and the shared religious practice of "Mercerism," which is eventually shown to be fake, symbolise a desperate collective longing for genuine human connection in a world driven by commodification.

The way animals are treated is equally important. In the novel, owning a real, living animal serves as a status symbol in a world filled with death, and Deckard's shame about his electric sheep reflects how capitalism diminishes all relationships, even the most personal, to their exchange value. This embodies a core Marxist idea: the commodity form becomes so embedded in life that the line between real and simulated dissolves completely.

Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, inspired loosely by Dick's novel, is renowned for its stunning visuals. Its depiction of a rain-soaked Los Angeles filled with neon ads, off-world colony signs, and deteriorating urban splendour has shaped dystopian sci-fi aesthetics over the years. Roy Batty's final monologue ("I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...") remains profoundly impactful.

The film simplifies many of Dick's social critiques. While it still explores the key existential question about whether replicants are truly human more deeply, it downplays the portrayal of the Tyrell Corporation as a capitalist entity that creates enslaved beings. Elements like the novel's critique of consumerism, the emotional connection to the electric sheep, and the depiction of a working-class bounty hunter feeling alienated are overshadowed by visual spectacle and personal existential dilemmas. Consequently, the focus becomes more on spectacle, reducing the emphasis on broader social themes.

Carlos Delgado's review of Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049 highlights a key critical insight precisely: "A more rigorous artist might have explored the social and psychological implications of 'synthetic' beings that have become sophisticated enough to exhibit human traits. They could at least have drawn parallels between the plight of the replicant 'slaves' and our current labouring class. However, aside from a brief scene in a child labour sweatshop, Villeneuve appears uninterested in depicting the conditions faced by workers, whether human or artificial."[1]

The review comes to a harsh conclusion: "This is bleakness without understanding, the work of artists who perhaps sense an impending social catastrophe but lack the tools to identify its source or to raise awareness or protests." This effectively captures a common aspect of contemporary dystopian art — an aesthetic of crisis that lacks the intellectual framework to recognise capitalism as the cause or the working class as the agent of change.

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) was a deeply innovative and reflective mind in postwar American science fiction. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he focused not on technological marvels or space tales, but on exploring what it truly means to be human amid systematic social dehumanisation. He authored 44 novels and over 120 short stories before dying of a stroke at 53. His works have inspired numerous major films. Hollywood's selective embrace of Dick, adapting his plots but often neglecting his deeper social insights, illustrates how capitalist culture can absorb and neutralise art.

What makes Dick's novel timeless is that it was written amid significant social upheaval in 1968. That year saw the Tet Offensive, the Prague Spring, the assassinations of MLK and RFK, and a global wave of revolutionary fervour. Through fiction, Dick explores whether the dehumanising logic of capitalist society, treating humans as tools, manufacturing desire via advertising, and reducing all worth to exchange value, ultimately turns people into androids.

This is not a mystical question. It connects directly to Marx's concept of alienation: the worker who sells their labour power becomes estranged from the product of their labour, from fellow workers, from their own human potential. Dick's "androids" are capitalism's ultimate product, beings manufactured for exploitation who, in seeking freedom, are destroyed.

This portrays a society profoundly affected by alienation. Genuine emotions, particularly empathy, are now scarce and highly prized. The central mechanism in the novel is that Nexus-6 androids, created by Rosen Corporation for slave labour in the colonies, are indistinguishable from humans through physical tests. They are only identifiable by their absence of spontaneous empathetic responses. The Voigt-Kampff test, which bounty hunter Rick Deckard employs, identifies replicants by measuring whether they instinctively show concern for others' suffering.

Dick's irony lies in the fact that the society which hunts androids for their lack of empathy is itself creating a world where true empathy is absent. People connect through "empathy boxes" to participate in Mercerism, a communal spiritual experience later uncovered as a fake, a televised show. Owning a real animal is a mark of status since many animals are extinct; Deckard's embarrassment over his electric sheep reflects the shame of someone whose emotional life feels inauthentic. The pervasive influence of commodities has so deeply infiltrated human life that genuine feelings are indistinguishable from their artificial counterparts.

This directly relates to Marx's theory of alienation in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, where the worker is separated from the product of their labour, the act of production, other humans, and ultimately their own human potential. Dick's androids are not external threats to human civilisation; they are the results of it—manufactured beings designed for exploitation and discard. As they escape their circumstances, they expose the deep flaws and corruption within the society that created them.

A recurring theme throughout Dick’s work is how we can know what’s real. What do we make of experiences that go outside everyday reality, like madness, religion or drugs? Such philosophical questions are handled lightly. Dick delights in paradox and has a characteristic dark humour. Though his writing addresses abstract questions, it is emotionally engaging. He often writes sympathetically about ordinary people trapped in situations they cannot control.

Emmanuel Carrère’s semi-biography shows us the roots of all this in Dick’s own life. An introverted and anxious teenager, troubled by the thought of a twin sister who had died in infancy, Dick began a lifelong involvement with psychiatry aged 14. His first marriage (of five) lasted some six months. He worked in a record shop, fascinated by high culture, and dreamed of becoming a ‘serious non-SF writer.

Dick wasn’t politically active, except for a deep-seated and lasting hatred of Richard Nixon. He mingled with bohemian pseudo-left circles and shared their criticism of 1950s American consumerist and suburban culture, as reflected in his SF stories from that period. It appears that FBI agents provided multiple-choice questionnaires for Dick and his socialist wife to indicate their opinions on Russia. They carefully considered the options, taking into account Dick’s background in psychological testing.

Dick's portrayal of Nixon's ousting as a major victory against tyranny, seen as the culmination of "reprogrammed variables," exposes a significant limitation. Watergate was not a break in the capitalist power structure; it was a manipulation within it, essentially a palace coup by rival factions of the ruling class. Agencies like the CIA and FBI were heavily involved. The system that elevated Nixon, including the national security state, the imperial presidency, and the surveillance networks, remained fully intact and has only grown more powerful since. Ultimately, emphasising Nixon as the embodiment of evil helped reinforce confidence in capitalist institutions by framing their self-correction as a form of democratic accountability.

By the early 1960s, during his third marriage, Dick was producing as much science fiction as he could. The income helped pay his bills and motivated him to write more and earn more. He also took medication for a heart murmur and agoraphobia, along with pills to handle side effects. His novels, such as *The Man in the High Castle* and *The Clans of the Alphane Moon*, started to succeed, but his marriage was falling apart. He saw a vision of a large, menacing robot face in the sky. A compassionate priest thought it was Satan, leading him to become a Christian, though his beliefs were quite unorthodox. In 1964, Dick moved to Berkeley and entered his fourth marriage. He wrote *Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep* in 1966, gaining recognition as a counterculture icon. This stable period ended with the disillusionment of the 1960s, especially after Nixon's re-election in 1968. By 1970, his fourth wife had left, and his home was often filled with drug casualties.

Philip K Dick and Modern Capitalism

Philip K. Dick's 1977 Metz speech is a notably compelling document that warrants a thoughtful materialist analysis rather than dismissal. As a highly insightful literary figure of the 20th century, Dick's keen attention to counterfeit realities, surveillance systems, and the core question "what is real?" is profoundly linked to the social context of American capitalism that influenced him.

The speech's clearest political insight is also its most straightforward: Dick explicitly states that "a state in which the government knows more about you than you know about yourself... is a state which must be overthrown. It may be a theocracy, a fascist corporate state, a reactionary monopolistic capitalism, or centralistic socialism." This statement offers a genuine insight. His novels—The Man in the High Castle, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, A Scanner Darkly—mirror a deep, visceral horror of authoritarian surveillance, the suppression of individuality by state power, and capitalism's ongoing falsification of consciousness. These themes are intentional, representing the artistic expression of genuine social contradictions.

His depiction of the "black iron prison"—the oppressive and unavoidable system of control he saw underlying daily American life—aligns closely with the Marxist idea of reification: the process by which capitalism turns human relationships into object-like, alien, and controlling structures that seem natural and everlasting. Dick experienced this, even if he couldn’t articulate it theoretically.

However, this is where the materialist critique becomes crucial. Dick directs his keen perception of a fabricated, alienated reality entirely into an idealist and theological perspective. The answer to the "black iron prison" is not organised revolutionary action by the working class; it is divine reprogramming. The "programmer-reprogrammer" God adjusts variables; chess moves are played against a "dark counter-player"; and liberation is achieved not through collective human effort but via cosmic intervention, experienced mystically by an individual under sodium pentothal.

This is precisely the form that social despair takes in a petty-bourgeois intellectual cut off from the working class. Dick registered the horror of capitalist reality with extraordinary sensitivity. Still, having no connection to the actual social force capable of transforming it, he displaced the solution into metaphysics, Gnosticism, and personal mystical experience. The "orthogonal time" theory is, in a sense, a brilliant literary and philosophical elaboration of the impossibility of imagining social transformation within the framework of isolated individual consciousness.

Dick's emphasis on simulated or artificial realities, referred to here as a "computer-programmed reality," demonstrates a keen intuitive grasp of Marx and Engels' concept of ideology. This process involves the dominant ideas of a given era being presented as inherent, unchangeable, and timeless, reflecting the interests of the ruling class. In Dick's view, the capitalist system functions as a form of simulation — it portrays its exploitative, historically specific structures as if they are natural aspects of human nature.

However, the Marxist perspective on this insight is entirely different from Dick's. Marx views the response to false consciousness not as a mystical awakening into a separate realm, but as the development of class consciousness through the concrete struggles of the working class. While Dick describes the "awakening" as a solitary, drug-induced vision, Marx sees it as a social process where the working class becomes aware of its position within the relations of production and collectively works to alter those conditions.

What is Dick's Enduring Significance

Dick's work has achieved true artistic significance. It remains relevant because the social realities he predicted—such as the surveillance state, manufactured consent, and the commodification of consciousness—have only grown stronger in 21st-century capitalism. The universe of *A Scanner Darkly, where the government uses addictive products to undermine and control people who act as informants, is now more recognisable in today's context of social media influence, opioid crises, and widespread surveillance compared to 1977.

The task is to take Dick's accurate perception of capitalism's falsified, coercive, and alienating nature and anchor it within the only framework that can both explain and challenge it: Marxist analysis. This approach sees capitalism as a unique historical mode of production that inherently produces these conditions. It views the international working class as the force capable of replacing it with a truly human social order. Dick envisioned a garden world, and Marxism explains how to realise it.

Despite flaws such as an emphasis on individual paranoia over collective social critique, influences from drug culture, and Hollywood adaptations, Philip K. Dick remains a significant literary figure because he genuinely posed questions that capitalism urges all thinkers to consider. What does it mean to be human when humans are treated as commodities? How can we identify genuine emotions in a world overwhelmed by artificial simulation? What defines identity amid widespread alienation? These are practical questions, not mystical ones. Marx approached them from a materialist perspective, whereas Dick addressed them through a restless, troubled artistic sensibility confronting American capitalism at its postwar peak. The aim isn't just to admire Dick's dystopias as predictive, but to understand the social forces behind them and develop a political movement to end these conditions.

 

 

 

Notes

Philip K. Dick Speech- Delivered at the Metz Sci-Fi Festival in 1977, www.academia.edu/127936472/Original_METZ_SPEECH_1977_transcription_Philip_K_Dick

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049: A dreary future- www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/11/20/blad-n20.html 

Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe by Katja Hoyer is published by Allen Lane (£30).

"The pauperisation of the petty bourgeoisie, barely concealed by their ties and socks of artificial silk, eroded all official creeds and, above all, the doctrine of democratic parliamentarism... In the highly fevered atmosphere brought about by war, defeat, reparations, inflation, occupation of the Ruhr, crisis, need, and despair, the petty bourgeoisie rose against all the old parties that had cheated it."

Leon Trotsky- What is National Socialism? (1933)

"The class struggle is a law of social development. For ages, that struggle has been between the poor and the rich, the exploited and the exploiters."

Jack London: The Iron Heel

“The 'ordinary German' who populates Daniel Goldhagen’s book is a vacuous generalisation from which all internal social antagonisms and conflicts have been extracted.”

David North

"They can only maintain their position while they honestly believe that civilisation depends on themselves alone..."

Jack London On Oligarchy

To understand Katja Hoyer's contributions to recent historiography, we need to consider the broader academic landscape in which they fit. The 'Ordinary Germans' historiography is central to her latest book’s introduction. Since the postwar era, this field has been shaped by ongoing tensions between Marxist class analysis and various idealist, culturalist, and nationalist perspectives. The question of 'ordinary Germans' extends beyond mere academic debate; it is key to understanding fascism and influences the working class's readiness or inability to oppose it. Since the 1990s, discussions about 'ordinary Germans' have been dominated by three main positions, none of which fully align with a Marxist view. Hoyer’s work synthesises and, in some respects, integrates elements from all three.

The primary perspective linked to Daniel Goldhagen's 1996 bestseller, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, is that the Holocaust was carried out by "ordinary Germans" driven by deeply rooted, centuries-old "eliminationist antisemitism" unique to German culture. Goldhagen argued this belief was so ingrained that it could be activated without coercion or specific circumstances; Germans killed Jews simply because they were Germans. David North's 1997 critique, The Myth of "Ordinary Germans", points out a key methodological flaw: the idea of "ordinary Germans" is an overly broad, abstract category with no internal differentiation, which makes it scientifically meaningless.

As North observes, questioning whether "ordinary Germans" refers to a factory worker, shopkeeper, lumpenproletarian, Junker landowner, or industrialist reveals that this category ignores class differences within German society, unintentionally reinforcing the Nazi myth of a unified Volk in a distorted way. Goldhagen's notion of ewige Deutsche (eternal Germans) as enemies of Jews parallels the Nazi ewige Jude (eternal Jew) as enemies of Germans. Both are racial-nationalist abstractions that erase nuanced history and social class distinctions.

Furthermore, as North emphasises, the Goldhagen thesis relies on making the German socialist movement essentially invisible. In a 622-page book about Germans and the Holocaust, there's not a single mention of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, August Bebel, or the Social Democratic Party, which by 1912 was the largest party in the Reichstag, drawing most of its support from the German working class. This omission is intentional; it's structurally necessary because recognising a large socialist workers' movement with millions of Germans directly contradicts the idea that all Germans shared a uniform antisemitic worldview.

The second perspective is offered by Götz Aly's 'Hitler's Beneficiaries' (2005), which suggests that ordinary Germans mainly supported Hitler for economic reasons they gained from the confiscation of Jewish property, a Nazi welfare system funded through expropriation and war spoils. While this outlook is somewhat more materialist than Goldhagen's, it remains problematic: it portrays the working class as passive recipients of stolen wealth, dismisses acts of resistance, and continues to use the broad category of "Germans" as beneficiaries, oversimplifying the significant class differences in who benefited from the Nazi economy.

The third major perspective most pertinent to Hoyer is the Volksgemeinschaft historiography. Since around the 2000s, this view has been dominant in German academic history and is linked with scholars like Michael Wildt, Frank Bajohr, and the broader 'Nazi society' social history movement. This approach examines how the Nazi idea of the national community was actively built, enacted, and accepted by significant segments of German society, rather than merely being imposed from above. It highlights the roles of participation, consent, social pleasures of belonging, and the integration of the Mittelstand (middle classes) and parts of the working class into a racially defined national identity.

Hoyer and the Volksgemeinschaft Turn

Hoyer's 'Weimar intentionally challenges the so-called "Weimar syndrome' the common tendency to interpret the republic solely as a precursor to Nazism. She aims to analyse the republic on its own terms and emphasise the daily lives of ordinary people who did not anticipate the impending catastrophe. She highlights Weimar's cultural vitality, genuine social reforms, the expansion of women's rights and sexual freedoms, and the democratic activism of the working class through unions and political parties. A crucial point underlying this is that vulgar retrospective determinism, which views fascism as the inevitable outcome of all developments in Weimar, is indeed poor history. However, Hoyer's correction veers too far in the opposite direction, a mistake tied directly to the Volksgemeinschaft historiography.

The core issue goes beyond mere emphasis and highlights what is fundamentally missing. When Hoyer and other Volksgemeinschaft historians analyse the daily lives of "ordinary people" during the Weimar Republic or Nazism, they often blur the distinctions among class, the nation, and the people. The German working class, which nearly achieved socialist power during the November Revolution of 1918, consistently supported the SPD and KPD throughout Weimar and maintained underground resistance networks in Berlin, Hamburg, and the Ruhr well after Hitler's ascent to power.

These workers are frequently portrayed as simply part of the indistinct mass of "Germans" experiencing the republic, depression, and Nazi rise in largely uniform ways. Hoyer’s historiographical approach, though it varies in details from Goldhagen's, reaches a similar conclusion through a different method: it minimises "the relationship between capitalism and fascism" and depicts "all workers, the petty bourgeoisie, industrialists, and bankers as 'the Germans.'"

The evidence opposing the dominant narrative is strong but often overlooked in this historiography. Hans-Rainer Sandvoss's detailed archival research into Berlin workers' resistance to the Nazi regime, utilising Gestapo files that only became accessible after 1989, revealed that the working class in Berlin and other labour hubs largely remained resistant to Nazi propaganda for several years following Hitler's rise to power.

A Gestapo report from March 1936 noted that in Berlin one could go days without hearing the Führer salute, except from officials, uniformed personnel, or provincial visitors. The Nazi party regularly encountered challenges in industrial areas such as mining regions, Hamburg's docks, and factory zones. This is not romanticisation but a reflection of the historical record. Yet, this resistance vanishes completely in a historiography that depicts all Germans as uniformly "ordinary."

Why does this historiography remain so influential? Its foundation lies in the political and intellectual climate established after the fall of the Soviet Union and the so-called "triumph of capitalism." Since the 1990s, numerous historians have justified abandoning honest and objective analysis by pointing to the collapse of the Soviet Union and East Germany, as well as the apparent victory of capitalism. In doing so, they have replaced genuine scientific methods with subjective, postmodern ideologies.

Abandoning class as the primary analytical focus is a politically motivated choice, not a neutral one. As David North notes in his critique of Goldhagen, during the postwar period, framing fascism's class aspects through psychological, cultural, or national-identity lenses was linked to the Cold War objective of undermining Marxism. This also served to hide that fascism was essentially the capitalist ruling class's response to revolutionary threats from the organised working class. Goldhagen attributes this entirely to German national psychology, while Volksgemeinschaft historians approach it more subtly by highlighting consent, participation, and everyday social integration. This indicates that "the Germans" collectively created fascism, instead of acknowledging that a particular class imposed it on a divided society—one in which millions were coerced, terrorised, and ultimately wiped out.

Focusing on Hoyer, there's an additional point to consider. Her earlier book, Beyond the Wall (2023), depicts the GDR as a society with significant social achievements and broad support. This mirrors the strategy used for Stalinism: emphasising the daily lives of "ordinary people" to soften, contextualise, and ultimately justify a regime largely defined by bureaucratic dictatorship over the working class. In both Weimar/Nazi Germany and East Germany, highlighting "ordinary experience" aims to diminish political and class divisions and foster sociological empathy.

Leon Trotsky examined Weimar Germany and German fascism not from the standpoint of current social historians, but through his own contemporaneous writings, which remain unmatched in their analytical insight. He saw fascism not as stemming from German national character or broad social trends, but as a tactic used by the capitalist elite to unite the impoverished petty bourgeoisie—including shopkeepers, artisans, clerks, and disillusioned farmers—against the organised working class, especially when bourgeois democracy proved unable to resolve the social crisis.

This perspective is elaborated in his 1933 book, 'What is National Socialism?'. He describes how the impoverishment of the petty bourgeoisie, barely hidden by their artificial silk ties and socks, undermined all official beliefs, especially democratic parliamentary doctrine. Amid the tense environment created by war, defeat, reparations, inflation, the Ruhr occupation, crisis, need, and despair, the petty bourgeoisie turned against all the old parties that had deceived them.

This analysis focused not on the cultural attitudes of "ordinary Germans" but on the class struggles within a society facing a severe capitalist crisis. Central to the discussion was the question of revolutionary leadership: whether the organised working class would seize power or whether the petty bourgeoisie, with no viable working-class alternative, would be pushed into the arms of a movement supported and financed by large capital interests. The outcome depended on the betrayals by the SPD and the Comintern, rather than on any intrinsic psychological traits of a uniform "German people."

This framework is consistently rejected by "ordinary Germans' historiography, from Goldhagen to Götz Aly, the Volksgemeinschaft school, and Katja Hoyer. This rejection is deliberate, as it precisely identifies the actual determinants of the outcome: class struggle, the crisis of revolutionary leadership, and the counterrevolutionary roles of Social Democracy and Stalinism. These lessons remain highly relevant today, with the rise of the AfD in Germany and the pseudo-left channelling working-class opposition into bourgeois safe havens. Rediscovering these truths requires not a softer or more empathetic history.

Katja Hoyer is a historian of German and British background, author of "Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire" (2021) and, more recently, "Weimar Germany: Democracy on the Brink" (2024). She also wrote "Beyond the Wall" (2023), an alternative perspective on the GDR. Her Weimar book seeks to portray the republic not just as a precursor to Nazi disaster, a "Weimar syndrome" she explicitly aims to go beyond, but as a lively, authentic democratic experiment with notable achievements in culture, social policy, and politics. From a Marxist standpoint, there are serious methodological and political problems with this kind of liberal rehabilitation project.

Like many liberal histories, Hoyer emphasises Weimar's lively cultural scene—covering the Bauhaus, Expressionism, Brecht, Grosz, cabaret, and sexual liberalism. Although these are important and genuine, highlighting them as the city's main achievement shifts focus away from the crucial relationship between culture and politics. The innovative cultural output of Weimar arose from a revolutionary crisis in a drastically changed world. Many key figures, including Brecht, understood that this culture was closely linked to the revolutionary struggle. To focus too much on aesthetics risks neglecting Weimar's political significance.

The Weimar Republic emerged from the German Revolution of November 1918 but was quickly thwarted by Social Democracy. Led by Ebert and Noske, the SPD violently suppressed the revolutionary movement, killed Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and kept the capitalist institutions and the Junker military hierarchy unchanged. Any explanation of Weimar that ignores this foundational betrayal—the counterrevolutionary actions of Social Democracy—fails to truly account for subsequent events.

The so-called cultural boom of Weimar's Goldene Zwanziger era was funded through repeated betrayals of the working class. Under pressure from the Comintern, the KPD called off a planned insurrection at a critical moment—an action that led to a catastrophic failure, enabling German capitalism to stabilise temporarily. These "golden" Weimar years were merely a brief, circumstantial pause rather than a genuine democratic achievement.

The collapse of the Weimar Republic was not mainly caused by weak democracy or mass irrationality. Instead, it resulted directly from the Stalinist "social fascism" theory, which falsely labelled the SPD as equivalent to the Nazis and prevented a united working-class front against Hitler. This was compounded by the SPD's own policies of supporting Hindenburg and collaborating with emergency measures under Brüning and von Papen. Trotsky's writings from that era, such as What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat and The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany are essential resources, offering profound analysis that forecasted the catastrophe. Nevertheless, there was still time to avert it.

The Social Democratic Party (SPD) stepped in not to lead the revolution, but to suppress and then drown it in blood. Led by Friedrich Ebert and Gustav Noske, the SPD allied with the old imperial military officers to crush the revolutionary movement. They organised the Freikorps, early fascist-style paramilitary groups, to eliminate the revolution's key leaders. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, founders of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), were pursued and killed in January 1919 under the orders of the SPD government. The traditional Junker military aristocracy, judiciary, civil service, major banks, and industrialists — all reactionary forces — remained untouched behind a newly formed democratic facade. This was the original sin. As the Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Germany) states plainly: "In 1918, the SPD had strangled the proletarian revolution to save the bourgeois order. The result was the Weimar Republic, in which the old forces of reaction continued to live behind a democratic facade."

The republic experienced continual crises during its short fourteen-year span. In 1923, it faced two major setbacks: the French occupation of the Ruhr and a severe hyperinflation that destroyed the savings of the middle and working classes, causing widespread despair. That year, the KPD, guided by the Comintern, planned a revolutionary uprising but cancelled it at the last moment, which Trotsky later called "a classic demonstration of how it is possible to miss a perfectly exceptional revolutionary situation of world-historic importance." German capitalism temporarily stabilised thanks to American loans under the Dawes Plan, and the mid-1920s are often seen as the "golden years" of Weimar—brilliant in culture, fragile politically, and economically reliant on foreign capital.

Then came 1929. The Wall Street Crash cut off American credit, the German economy collapsed, and unemployment exploded to over six million, roughly a third of the workforce. The social crisis was catastrophic. The middle classes — small shopkeepers, artisans, farmers, white-collar employees — who had already been ruined by inflation and were now devastated by the depression, were thrown into a desperate search for a way out. Into this vacuum stepped Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), offering an intoxicating brew of nationalist demagogy, antisemitism, and violent scapegoating aimed at the most desperate and disoriented petty-bourgeois layers.

As the crisis deepened, the SPD's response was to retreat, capitulate, and appeal to the very institutions of the bourgeois state to save it. In 1930, when President Hindenburg appointed the Catholic conservative Heinrich Brüning as chancellor and began governing by emergency decree, bypassing parliament altogether, the SPD tolerated this, refusing to bring down the government. It feared revolution from below more than dictatorship from above. In 1932, the SPD supported the re-election of the arch-reactionary field marshal Paul von Hindenburg as president. This man would eventually appoint Hitler as the supposed "lesser evil" against the Nazis. When von Papen illegally deposed the SPD-led government of Prussia in a July 1932 coup, the SPD lodged a complaint with the Supreme Court rather than mobilising its millions of members to fight back. As the SGP historical document summarises, drawing directly on Trotsky's analysis, the SPD's attitude was that the fate of Germany depended "not on the fighting strength of the German proletariat... but on whether the pure spirit of the Weimar Constitution... shall be installed in the presidential palace."

Even more grotesque was the behaviour of the trade unions. The ADGB (the main trade union federation) actually dissociated itself from the SPD three and a half months before Hitler seized power, hoping to demonstrate its "reliability" to the new order. They marched under the swastika on May 1, 1933. The Nazis rewarded this servility on May 2 by storming union offices, arresting and murdering union leaders, and dissolving the ADGB entirely.

The Communist Party of Germany was founded in direct response to the SPD's betrayal. It had millions of members and supporters, its own armed Red Front defence organisations, and a working class willing to fight. But under Stalin's domination of the Communist International, the KPD pursued a line of suicidal ultra-leftism, the theory of "social fascism." This theory held that Social Democracy and fascism were not opposites but "twins" — that the SPD was itself "social fascist," and that the main enemy was not Hitler but the SPD. On this basis, the KPD refused any united action with SPD workers against the Nazis. It even made common cause with the Nazis on occasion, supporting a Nazi-initiated referendum in 1931 to bring down the SPD-led Prussian state government. All the while, it consoled its demoralised members with the slogan: "Nach Hitler, kommen wir"  "After Hitler, it's our turn"  the grotesque fantasy that Hitler's regime would quickly collapse and the Communist revolution would follow.

The Weimar Republic and the pseudo-lefts: Then and Now

To understand the pseudo-left's stance towards the Weimar Republic, we first need to identify what truly led to its downfall. The Weimar Republic didn't perish due to internal contradictions or the overwhelming rise of fascism. Instead, it was dismantled by the organised workers' movement, specifically by its leadership. This is the key lesson that the pseudo-left today tries hard to conceal.

The SPD, representing the German working class, showed its true colours with its betrayal in November 1918. Instead of leading the revolutionary effort—which aimed to seize state power and expropriate capital—it chose to defend the existing bourgeois order. The party was responsible for the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, suppressed workers' councils, and upheld the Junker officer caste and state structure that, fifteen years later, helped facilitate Hitler's rise. As noted, "the Social Democratic Party... sided with the bourgeois order in 1914 and became the main supporter of the bourgeois state in the Weimar Republic." In the final years of the Weimar Republic, the SPD backed Brüning's emergency decrees, which gradually dismantled democratic rights and undermined the working class, thereby paving the way for Hitler rather than resisting him.

The devastating role of Stalinism followed. The KPD, controlled by Stalin through the Comintern, dismissed Trotsky's urgent plea for a united front of Communist and Social Democratic workers against the Nazis. Instead, it adopted the destructive "social fascism" thesis, claiming that the SPD was equivalent to fascism and that there was no real difference between bourgeois democracy and fascist dictatorship. This was not just a tactical error but a politically damaging disorientation that froze the German working class, separated Communist workers from Social Democratic workers, and at times even led the KPD to collaborate with the Nazis against the SPD, such as in the 1931 Prussian referendum. Hitler’s rise to power in January 1933 occurred without organised resistance from the German working class, despite the SPD and KPD each having millions of members and their own armed units. This catastrophe proved Trotsky's view that the Communist International was no longer a revolutionary force and that the Fourth International needed to be established.

The Frankfurt School

This reveals the connection to the modern pseudo-left. The Frankfurt School—comprising Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Benjamin—originated directly from the confusion following Germany's defeat. Notably, "Horkheimer and Adorno do not mention [the role of Social Democracy and Stalinism] once and avoid discussing Stalinism in all their other works." This silence was intentional. The Frankfurt School crafted a comprehensive theoretical framework—covering Critical Theory, the Dialectic of Enlightenment, and the theory of the "authoritarian personality"—which attributed fascism to mass psychology, the irrationality of the masses, and the failures of the "Enlightenment," largely ignoring the political betrayals by the SPD and the Comintern.

Why is this important? By framing the crisis of revolutionary leadership as the main explanation, the Frankfurt School adopted a different political stance: moving away from building a revolutionary Marxist party rooted in the working class, and instead emphasising cultural criticism, identity politics, and pressure on bourgeois institutions. This shift lies at the heart of the modern pseudo-left, as David North details in 'The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism, and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left.' The Frankfurt School's move away from viewing the working class as the revolutionary agent—to focusing on the "critical intellectual" and later prioritising racial, gender, and cultural issues—set the stage for all that now claims to be 'left,' but fails to challenge capitalism.

The Contemporary Pseudo-Left

The contrast between the 1930s and today is more than superficial; it’s structural. With the neo-fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD) now Germany’s second-largest party, pseudo-left groups like Marx 21, the SAV, and RIO are, in a modified form, repeating the political crimes that facilitated Hitler’s rise. Marx 21, influenced by Tony Cliff's International Socialist Tendency, cynically invokes Trotsky's "revolver-poison" analogy to justify demanding that the bourgeois state ban the AfD, directly contradicting Trotsky's actual stance. Trotsky opposed the SPD's reliance on the Weimar state and police to fight fascism, understanding that the state was not neutral but filled with reactionary elements. History confirmed this: it was Hindenburg, the Reichswehr, big business, and the judiciary—all institutions the SPD appealed to for protection—that implemented Hitler's appointment. Germany's domestic intelligence agency (the Office for the Protection of the Constitution) was, until recently, led by fascist Hans-Georg Maassen, who secretly met with AfD representatives. Calling on this agency to defend democracy from fascism is the twenty-first-century equivalent of the SPD crying "Help! Intervene!" to the Weimar state.

The SAV, descended from the British Militant Tendency, tends to praise the trade union bureaucracy as a defender against the right and envisions a Left Party–SPD–Green coalition as a "democratic alternative" to the AfD. Yet, as Germany's ruling coalition, the SPD and Greens have carried out the AfD's refugee deportation policies, approved the largest war budget since WWII, and frequently collaborated with the AfD to normalise its presence in parliament. At the same time, trade unions have agreed to austerity measures with the government and corporations. The SAV's approach isn't aimed at "pushing them left" but at aligning working-class frustration with the very forces responsible for it.

RIO, associated with the Morenoite Trotskyist Fraction-Fourth International, claims to support a "united front" and "anti-capitalism from below." In reality, it partners with the SPD, Greens, trade unions, and Fridays for Future. This strategy conflicts with Trotsky's original concept of the united front, which was meant to awaken workers from Social Democratic stagnation and rally them around a revolutionary program. Conversely, RIO's "front" seems designed to align workers with bourgeois parties, often employing radical rhetoric.

What unites these trends, both historically and socially, is their class origin. The Frankfurt School consisted of segments of the bourgeois intelligentsia that had forsaken the working class. Currently, the pseudo-left champions privileged middle-class groups—such as academics, NGO workers, and trade union bureaucrats—who benefit from the current system enough to be wary of a genuine socialist revolution. Their emphasis on identity politics, state intervention, and parliamentary tactics reflects their social standing. Just as the KPD's "social fascism" idea was driven more by the needs of Moscow's bureaucracy than the interests of German workers, today's pseudo-left ideology mirrors the interests of a social class with a very different relationship to capital than that of the working class.

Why Does a Marxist historiography Matter Today

The fall of the Weimar Republic was not due to democracy being fragile, mass irrationality, or fascism being an inevitable historical force. Instead, it collapsed because the organised workers' movement was led by parties — one reformist, one Stalinist — that, for their own class-based reasons, refused to unite the working class in a revolutionary fight against capitalism. The key takeaway is not "defend liberal democracy" or "vote for the lesser evil," but that capitalism's crises lead to fascism.

Only revolutionary working-class mobilisation under genuine Marxist leadership can prevent this. This is the core task of the Fourth International — both then and now. In short, Hoyer's attempt to portray Weimar as a democratic success is ultimately a liberal ideological exercise. It aims to extract lessons about defending "liberal democracy" against modern populism, rather than the true historical lesson that, without a revolutionary Marxist party leading the working class to power, capitalism's crises breed fascism. Trotsky's lesson remains highly relevant today.