Ninety Years Since the First Moscow Trial: A Political Reckoning with Stalinism’s Crime of the Century

August 19, 2026

Exactly ninety years ago today, on August 19, 1936, the USSR's Supreme Court Military Collegium initiated the “Trial of the Sixteen,” the first Moscow Trial. This event marked the Stalinist regime's effort to eliminate the generation of Bolsheviks responsible for the October Revolution physically. Over five days, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and fourteen others confessed to an elaborate plot, supposedly led by Leon Trotsky, to assassinate Stalin and the Soviet leadership. Within a day of sentencing, all sixteen defendants were executed.

This was not a genuine judicial proceeding but the initial phase of the Great Terror: a political setup aimed not at uncovering crimes but at bloodily destroying the program and leaders of the October Revolution. Nine decades later, the Moscow Trials remain a pivotal moment of the twentieth century. Revisiting them isn't just historical curiosity; it directly relates to a key political issue of our time: which social forces caused the first workers’ state to decline and collapse, and what lessons should the international working class learn from this experience?

A Trial Without a Crime

The charges from 1936–1938 were fabricated without any material evidence. Confessions, which were the only basis for convictions, were obtained through well-documented techniques: extended sleep deprivation, threats to family members held hostage, and psychological torment aimed at men who had previously endured Tsarist prisons and underground activities, but could not withstand the GPU’s brutal tactics employed by former comrades.

Prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky turned the courtroom into a political spectacle. His accusations were more like propaganda than legal arguments, aimed at justifying the defendants' physical elimination and intimidating the Soviet people. Foreign observers who took the trials at face value— including many Western liberals, socialists, and some Trotsky sympathisers— unknowingly or not, played a role in one of the most effective frame-ups in recent history.

The 1937 Coyoacán-based Commission of Inquiry, led by American philosopher John Dewey, examined the charges with the scrutiny that Soviet courts denied. Trotsky testified under oath for an entire week. The Dewey Commission concluded that the Moscow Trials were fabricated from start to finish, a finding confirmed by later Soviet archival releases, including the posthumous rehabilitation of nearly all defendants during Khrushchev and Gorbachev's eras.

The Political Logic of the Terror

Viewing the Moscow Trials simply as the result of one man’s paranoia or a solely Russian illness misses the core issue they present. The purging of the Bolshevik Old Guard—the entire Political Bureau that took power in 1917, except Stalin, most of the Central Committee elected at the last Leninist Party Congress, and the Red Army's top commanders—was not a mere side effect of building "socialism in one country.” Rather, it was a deliberate and essential strategy employed to achieve that goal.

By the mid-1930s, Stalin’s faction had shifted from the original internationalist goal of 1917. They forsook global revolution in favour of accommodating imperialist powers and establishing a privileged bureaucratic class that ran a planned economy they neither founded nor fully controlled. The presence of a cadre still recalling the revolutionary ideals of October was intolerable. Trotsky and the Left Opposition consistently highlighted this contradiction. The Moscow Trials served as the bureaucracy’s response—not as a defence, but as a means of eliminating opposition.

This explains why the Terror extended beyond the destruction of known political opponents. It also targeted hundreds of thousands of ordinary Communists, trade unionists, and, starting with Marshal Tukhachevsky in June 1937, a large part of the Red Army officer corps. This destructive purge would cost the Soviets dearly in blood when the Wehrmacht invaded four years afterwards.

Trotsky’s Answer

From exile—initially in Norway and later in Mexico—Trotsky conducted a nearly solo effort to fight against the Kremlin’s setup of false charges. He recognised, accurately, that the true stakes extended beyond his personal reputation to the political destiny of the international working class. His insights, notably in The Revolution Betrayed (1936) and during his testimony before the Dewey Commission, framed the Terror as a result of Soviet bureaucratic decline from a Marxist perspective: a privileged class derived from nationalised property established by October, but gradually seizing political power from the working class and defending its rule against either capitalist restoration or proletarian revolution.

History has confirmed this analysis. The bureaucracy Trotsky described did not defend the property forms it administered. Four decades after the last of the Moscow defendants were shot, that same bureaucracy — or its direct heirs — presided over the dissolution of the USSR and the seizure of its nationalised industry as private capital. The class that emerged in 1991 did not spring from nowhere; its formation is unintelligible without the physical extermination, beginning in 1936–1938, of the political forces within the Soviet state that opposed bureaucratic consolidation.

The Moscow Trials and Current Academic Historiography

The Moscow Trials are among the most well-documented political frame-ups of the twentieth century. Investigations ranging from the Dewey Commission to recent Soviet archival releases have confirmed that the charges were fabricated, confessions coerced, and the trials designed to eliminate the Bolsheviks responsible for the October Revolution. Despite this, modern academic history still shows a notable ambivalence towards this political crime.

The facts are recognised, but their significance is stripped away. The trials are portrayed as results of Stalin’s paranoia, characteristics of “totalitarianism,” or customs of Soviet political culture. While these explanations use different words, they share a common purpose: to disconnect the Terror from the class struggles that caused it. The killing of the Bolshevik Old Guard is seen as a psychological event, a cultural act, or an unavoidable consequence of revolutionary beliefs — anything except a deliberate political move by a bureaucratic class tightening its grip over the first workers’ state.

This methodological evasion is deliberate. Addressing the political logic of the Terror means confronting the historical divide between Bolshevism and Stalinism. The bureaucracy's destruction of the revolutionary cadre was not the conclusion of October but its negation. It became the method by which a privileged layer—based on nationalised property but opposed to workers’ political power—reinforced its dominance. The subsequent collapse of the USSR and the privatisation of state assets were not unforeseen; they resulted from the long-term counter-revolution that started with the 1936–1938 trials.

Current historiography tends to merge Bolshevism and Stalinism into one indistinct phenomenon, serving a political purpose similar to the Kremlin’s distortions. This approach makes the revolutionary experience difficult for new generations to understand and blocks meaningful engagement with the Marxist critique of bureaucratic decline. The Moscow Trials are often seen merely as warnings about ideology, extremism, or authoritarian mindsets, rather than lessons on the risks posed by a privileged class that seizes political power from the working class.

A thorough evaluation of the Moscow Trials demands more than just verifying archival records. It also involves reestablishing the political significance that academic historiography has removed: that the Terror was the bureaucracy’s fight against the October Revolution’s ideals. Recognising this history is crucial for any modern effort to reconnect with the internationalist and socialist vision for which Zinoviev, Kamenev, and countless others were killed.

Ninety Years On

Ninety years after the first Moscow Trial, an honest reckoning with Stalinism’s crime of the century remains inseparable from the fight to reclaim the internationalist and revolutionary program in whose name Zinoviev, Kamenev, and thousands of others were murdered. The lessons of 1936–1938 are not historical curiosities. They are strategic questions for the working class today.

Sources and Bibliography on the Moscow Trials and Current Academic Historiography

Primary Sources

• The Moscow Trial Transcripts (1936–1938): Official Soviet publications of the Trial of the Sixteen (1936), Trial of the Seventeen (1937), and Trial of the Twenty-One (1938). Note: These were staged documents, but remain essential primary material.
• The Red Book on the Moscow Trials, Leon Sedov: A contemporary Trotskyist analysis documenting the frame-up from exile.
• The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes, Alexander Orlov Memoir by a former NKVD officer who defected; provides insider testimony on the fabrication of charges.
• The Dewey Commission Report (1937) Not Guilty: Findings of the Commission of Inquiry chaired by John Dewey, which concluded the trials were frame-ups.

Classic Scholarly Analyses (1950s–1970s)

These works established the foundational critique of the trials and remain central to historiography.

• Ritual of Liquidation: The Case of the Moscow Trials, Nathan Leites & Elsa Bernaut (RAND, 1954). A psychological and political analysis of the trials as staged political ritual.
• The Great Purge Trial, eds. Robert C. Tucker & Stephen F. Cohen (1965) A documentary collection with commentary by two major scholars of Soviet history.
• Power and the Soviet Elite, Boris Nicolaevsky (1965). Examines the political logic of elite purges and bureaucratic consolidation.
• Ritual of Liquidation, Nathan Leites & Elsa Bernaut (Free Press, 1954) A seminal psychological-political interpretation of the trials.
• From Purge to Coexistence, David J. Dallin (1964). A Cold War-era analysis of the political mechanisms of the Terror.

Historiography and Rehabilitation Studies

These works examine how Soviet and post-Soviet historiography has treated the trials.

• “Soviet Historiography and the Moscow Trials: After Thirty Years,” Jane P. Shapiro (JSTOR). A detailed study of how Soviet historians handled (and suppressed) the memory of purge victims, including the process of rehabilitation under Khrushchev.
• “Rehabilitation — and Perdition,” Leopold Labedz (Problems of Communism, 1963). A key analysis of the political and historiographical meaning of Khrushchev-era rehabilitation.

Contemporary Academic Historiography

These works represent the dominant trends in current scholarship — culturalist, totalitarian, and revisionist approaches.

• Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism; Tear Off the Masks! Culturalist interpretations that treat the trials as political performance and social ritual.
• J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: Revisionist scholarship emphasising institutional dynamics and downplaying intentionality.
• Oleg Khlevniuk, Master of the House: Stalin and His Inner Circle. Uses post-Soviet archives to reconstruct Stalin’s decision-making and the bureaucratic mechanisms of the Terror.
• Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler: A monumental biography that integrates political, cultural, and geopolitical factors.
• Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Places the Terror within a broader regional history of mass violence (though not focused on the trials specifically).

Trotskyist and Marxist Analyses

These works provide the essential class-based interpretation absent from most academic historiography.

• Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (1936): The foundational Marxist analysis of bureaucratic degeneration and the political logic of the Terror.
• Trotsky’s Testimony Before the Dewey Commission (1937): A systematic refutation of the charges and a theoretical explanation of Stalinism.
• Vadim Rogovin, Was There an Alternative? (7-volume series) The most comprehensive post-Soviet Marxist history of the Left Opposition and the political context of the Terror.

Online Scholarly Resources

• UMKC School of Law: “The Moscow Purge Trials (1936–38): Bibliography and Selected Links” A curated bibliography with primary documents and commentary.

Summary of What the Search Reveals

The search results highlight three key clusters of scholarship:

1. Classic Cold War analyses (Dallin, Nicolaevsky, Leites & Bernaut) that treat the trials as political repression and psychological theatre.
2. Soviet and post-Soviet historiography (Shapiro, Labedz) focusing on rehabilitation and the politics of memory.
3. Contemporary academic approaches that often depoliticise the trials through culturalist or institutional frameworks.

These sources collectively demonstrate the historiographical tension and the overwhelming factual evidence of a political frame-up versus the persistent academic tendency to obscure its class logic.

 

Letter to History Extra Magazine

 Re: “Are There Still Fascists in the 21st Century?”

To the Editors,

Your recent panel discussion on contemporary fascism highlights an urgent historical and political issue. However, your approach—using a typical taxonomy of debating definitions, checklists, and stylistic “markers"—only obscures the phenomenon you intend to clarify.

This approach is not just insufficient; it reflects a specific ideology. By viewing fascism as a standalone political style disconnected from the class relations that create it, the panel replicates a key flaw of post-war bourgeois historiography. Fascism is treated like a museum specimen, recognised by its appearance, rather than as a tool shaped by the ruling class during times of capitalist crisis.

Leon Trotsky, in 1931, emphasised that any thorough analysis must begin “in a scientific and Marxian manner.” This approach involves focusing not on morphology but on the relationships among the three key classes: the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, and the proletariat. Trotsky defined fascism as the mobilisation of the devastated petty bourgeoisie by finance capital, using it as a weapon against workers' organisations. He regarded fascism as a consequence of capitalist crises, rather than a particular political style.

Your panel’s approach isolates fascism from its social roots. It considers it an aesthetic, a rhetorical style, or a collection of behaviours. This isn't a neutral academic stance. Rather, it serves the ideological purpose of historiography: to remove fascism from its political context and link it to the capitalist system that produces it.

Contemporary fascistic politics can't be fully understood through 1930s frameworks. As various analyses indicate, today’s far-right groups are not grassroots mass movements but are instead shaped by top-down conspiracy, often originating within state institutions, security sectors, and oligarchic networks. The ruling elite has realised it can foster fascistic tendencies without relying on broad-based, spontaneous bourgeois mobilisations. The lack of large rallies doesn't reduce the threat; rather, it transforms its manifestation.

Your discussion equally overlooks the role of the so-called “democratic” opposition. Recent history shows that the traditional bourgeois democratic parties have not protected democratic rights but have contributed to their decline. The bipartisan growth of state surveillance, militarised policing, emergency measures, and increased executive power reflects a consistent trajectory, not an anomaly. The move toward authoritarianism stems from the fundamental crisis of capitalism, not the personal failings of specific leaders.

That's why the question “Are there still fascists in the 21st century?” becomes pointless when asked as your panel does. Fascism isn't about whether current movements look like Mussolini’s rallies or copy the NSDAP’s policies. Instead, it's defined by its role: employing extra-parliamentary and authoritarian tactics to suppress the working class in contexts where capitalism can no longer sustain democratic systems.

The essential question — often avoided in discussions — is: What social forces are dismantling democratic institutions today, and what should the working class do to fight back? Trotsky’s insights were never purely academic; they served as a strategic call to action in the class struggle. Combating fascism cannot be achieved by backing one bourgeois faction against another. Instead, it demands the independent, international mobilisation of the working class.

By framing fascism as just a definitional puzzle, your discussion unintentionally softens public perception of the real threat. This approach mirrors a traditional academic historiography tactic: it actually undermines the public's understanding of the danger while seeming to analyse it. Fascism isn't merely about classification; it's fundamentally about class struggle.

Yours sincerely, Keith 

 

Six Decades On The Divided Self: R.D. Laing’s Anatomy of Alienation

R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self (1960) is one of the most compelling works from postwar British psychiatry, notable for challenging the usual detachment between clinician and patient. Written when Laing was in his twenties, it aimed to make the inner experiences of schizoid and schizophrenic individuals understandable — not as mere symptoms to be classified or suppressed, but as rational responses to intolerable situations. Six decades later, the strengths and limitations of Laing’s approach become clearer. The book is more than a clinical study; it reflects the broader intellectual confusion of the postwar era — a time when the defeat of the working class and the rise of bourgeois subjectivism led many, including Laing, to turn away from historical analysis and toward existentialism, phenomenology, and mysticism.

Against the psychiatric establishment

The book’s main critique is evident from the beginning: it challenges the standard practice of British and American psychiatry, which viewed psychotic patients merely as collections of symptoms without considering their personal life histories or “existential positions.’ Laing, heavily influenced by the phenomenological tradition—spanning Husserl, Heidegger, and especially Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis—argued that psychiatry should strive to understand the world as the patient experiences it, aiming to ‘grasp the patient’s own existential position.” At the time, this was a notably radical stance, opposing both the view that mental suffering results solely from organic issues and the deterministic Freudian model based on fixed instinctual stages.

Laing’s key clinical idea— “ontological insecurity”—describes a state in which a person lacks a stable sense of reality, autonomy, and continuity. The schizoid mechanism of withdrawal, involving the creation of a “false self” that interacts with the world while the true self stays hidden, is not seen as random pathology but as a logical, if devastating, defence against overwhelming relationships. The case histories of individuals like “Julie” and “David” are thoughtfully and skillfully written, making the internal coherence of their experiences clear—something often missing in clinical notes of the time, which tend to view these experiences as mere disorder. This humanising approach is Laing’s lasting contribution, yet it also highlights the limits of what his existential perspective could fully understand.

The family as a site of harm — and the limits of phenomenology

Laing's most disruptive contribution—and its influence on the anti-psychiatry movement linked to Cooper, Foucault, and Szasz—was his assertion that these patterns originate in actual family relationships. He emphasised that communication patterns, especially those that systematically invalidate a child’s perceptions, are at the root. This was a significant step forward from traditional psychiatric views because it identified pathology within authentic social interactions rather than attributing it to a presumed biochemical defect.

But here the decisive theoretical gap opens. The family… tends to appear as a closed interpersonal system, to be understood through the categories of existential phenomenology.

This is exactly the issue. Laing sees the family as a source of psychic harm. Still, he considers it a self-sufficient system driven by existential concepts like “being-for-others,” “bad faith,” and “ontological insecurity.” What’s lacking is a detailed explanation of how the particular pressures of capitalist society influence the modern family and lead to its pathology.

A Marxist perspective argues that the family is not an isolated personal space but serves to reproduce labour power, influenced by capitalist production needs. The “systematic invalidation” of children's perceptions, as Laing describes, is not merely a failed communication method but an expression of a societal demand: children are conditioned to accept a life of alienation and a world where their actions are perceived as external, alien forces.

Laing’s existential vocabulary, precisely because it abstracts from these contradictions, can diagnose alienation with great sensitivity but cannot explain why it takes the specific forms it does, or why it became so pervasive in mid‑twentieth‑century life.

The postwar intellectual milieu: a shared retreat from history

The conceptual deadlock in The Divided Self reflects wider postwar intellectual trends. The Frankfurt School—of which Fromm was a part—shifted focus from engaging the working class politically to critiquing culture and psychology. Adorno and Horkheimer forsook the proletariat in favour of a pessimistic view of history; Marcuse aimed for revolutionary change through students and marginalised groups; and Fromm’s Freudo-Marxism attributed the root of capitalist society’s problems to distorted human needs instead of class conflict.

Laing’s existentialism marked a different kind of withdrawal. While the Frankfurt School embraced cultural pessimism, Laing looked inward, emphasising inner experience through a mystical perspective. Both approaches reflect the same core reality: postwar intellectuals becoming disconnected from the working class. The disappointment of the revolutionary wave after the Russian Revolution, the rise of Stalinism, and the integration of social-democratic parties into capitalism distanced the intelligentsia from active class struggle. Consequently, they turned inward towards subjectivity, phenomenology, structuralism, and eventually mysticism. Laing’s later works—such as The Politics of Experience, Knots, and his interest in Eastern spirituality—are not personal quirks but the logical result of a framework that recognised alienation but failed to grasp its material roots. 

Laing Among the Postwar Radicals

R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self arose from the same postwar intellectual upheaval that influenced Sartre, Marcuse, Foucault, Fanon, and Goffman. This period was characterised less by new theories than by the deep disorientation caused by the working class's defeats and the rise of bourgeois subjectivism. Laing is clearly part of this group, though his path more sharply illustrates its limits. Sartre supplied Laing with fundamental concepts such as the importance of lived experience, the drama of being-for-others, and the self-caught

between authenticity and bad faith. However, Sartre’s own retreat from Marxism following the failure of the French left in the 1940s foreshadowed Laing’s later drift. Both tried to combine existential phenomenology with social critique, yet ultimately found themselves stuck in a vocabulary that could vividly describe alienation but struggled to explain its historical roots.

Marcuse, a member of the Frankfurt School, presented an alternative perspective on retreat. He combined Freud and Marx to identify the psychological toll of advanced capitalism but shifted the focus away from the working class as the primary revolutionary subject. Instead, he looked to students, minorities, and marginalised groups as agents of change. Laing’s anti-psychiatry, which romanticised madness as a form of authenticity, echoed Marcuse’s emphasis on psychological rebellion over class struggle as a path to liberation.

Foucault and Goffman, despite their different methods, both shared Laing’s mistrust of institutional power. Foucault’s archaeological approach to madness and Goffman’s study of “total institutions” revealed the violence inherent in psychiatric confinement. However, they failed to explain why capitalist society tends to produce mental illness on a widespread scale. Their critiques focused on discourse and institutional practices but lacked a theory of class exploitation. Although Laing’s phenomenology humanised the issue, it faced the same fundamental limitation.

Fanon is somewhat of an exception. His analysis of colonial violence recognised that psychic disintegration is socially constructed—a subjective outcome of observable domination. Still, Fanon’s insightful work primarily targeted national liberation efforts rather than offering a Marxist critique of global capitalism. Laing’s emphasis on mysticism represented another response to the same historical impasse.

Overall, these figures illustrate how the postwar intelligentsia tried to comprehend alienation after the collapse of revolutionary Marxism as an active force. Laing’s perspective — which stresses that psychosis has social meaning — remains influential. Yet, his inability to situate the “divided self” within the fractured society that produces it exposes the limits of the postwar radical range. Without a materialist view of capitalist social relations, critiques of alienation become more critiques of personal experience, and the quest for liberation centres on authenticity. Laing is part of this range not as an outsider, but as its most telling example.

Laing’s later work increasingly romanticised psychosis as a kind of privileged inner journey. Viewing psychosis as authentic means abandoning efforts to understand it as a response to social conditions causing suffering. It replaces a mystical appreciation of symptoms with an analysis of the illness itself. This was the main shortcoming of the anti-psychiatry movement. While Foucault’s history of madness and Goffman’s institutional sociology revealed the violence of psychiatric authority, neither explained why capitalism generates mental illness on a widespread scale. Without a theory of class exploitation, critique remains passive rather than revolutionary.

The social origins of mental illness

A materialist perspective starts from the understanding that mental illness is a social disease, arising from the specific alienations caused by capitalist society. The widespread mental suffering is not due to faulty family communication or biochemical issues. Instead, it results from: social atomization; reducing human relationships to monetary exchanges; extending working hours and increasing labour intensity; dehumanising sexuality; and destroying collective life and political agency. These are not merely "environmental factors" but are direct outcomes of the capitalist mode of production, which presents the individual as an alien force, separates him from the products of his labour, and turns social relations into relations between things. Laing’s existential framework could not achieve this analysis.

None of this should overshadow what The Divided Self achieved. Laing challenged a psychiatric system focused on custodial care, electroshock, and a purely descriptive classification, asserting that the experiences of the mentally ill were meaningful and needed understanding rather than just management. He also linked family dynamics to the causes of mental illness, bringing a humanising perspective to a discipline that desperately required it. However, today’s readers must recognise both the impressive clinical and literary success of Laing’s phenomenological portrayal of schizoid and schizophrenic experiences and acknowledge the theoretical dead end inherent in its existentialist framework.

The book raises the question of how the “divided self” relates to the divided society that creates it, but it cannot answer it. The key division is not internal — between “true” and “false” selves — but between the individual and a social environment that appears as an alien force. This gap cannot be bridged through phenomenological insight alone; it requires transforming social relations. This involves dismantling a system where people face the outcomes of their collective labour as adversarial, and building a society where, as Marx stated, “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." Laing could identify alienation but not explain its origins or remedies. That challenge lies outside existential phenomenology, belonging instead to historical materialism and the revolutionary overhaul of society.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary Works

R.D. Laing

• Laing, R.D. The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. London: Tavistock, 1960.
• Laing, R.D. The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.
• Laing, R.D. Knots. London: Tavistock, 1970.

Jean-Paul Sartre

• Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956.
• Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existential Psychoanalysis. In Essays in Existentialism. New York: Citadel, 1965.

Herbert Marcuse

• Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilisation: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.
• Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.

Michel Foucault

• Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Pantheon, 1965.
• Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic. New York: Pantheon, 1973.

Frantz Fanon

• Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967.
• Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963.

Erving Goffman

• Goffman, Erving. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York: Anchor Books, 1961.
• Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963.

Secondary Works and Contextual Studies

Marxist and ICFI Analyses

• North, David. The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left. Mehring Books, 2015.
• Walsh, David. “Mental Illness and the American Dream.” World Socialist Web Site, 2000.
• Steiner, Nick. Marxism and the Dialectic of Alienation. London: Palgrave, 2012.

On Postwar Intellectual History

• Jacoby, Russell. The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe. New York: Basic Books, 1987.
• Jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973.
• Elliott, Anthony. Subjectivity in the Postwar World: Laing, Sartre, and the Crisis of the Self. Cambridge: Polity, 2014.

On Anti‑Psychiatry and Critical Psychiatry

• Mullan, Bob. Mad to Be Normal: Conversations with R.D. Laing. London: Free Association Books, 1995.
• Crossley, Nick. Contesting Psychiatry: Social Movements in Mental Health. London: Routledge, 2006.
• Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980. New York: Pantheon, 1985.

On Fanon, Colonialism, and the Psychology of Oppression

• Bulhan, Hussein Abdilahi. Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression. New York: Plenum Press, 1985.
• Gordon, Lewis R. Fanon and the Crisis of European Man. New York: Routledge, 1995.

On Foucault and Institutional Power

• Dreyfus, Hubert, and Paul Rabinow. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
• Porter, Roy. Madness: A Brief History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Archival and Historical Context

• British Psychological Society Archives, London.
• Tavistock Institute Papers, Wellcome Collection.
• World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) archives on psychiatry, social conditions, and postwar intellectual history.

 

The Autobiography of Rudolf Höss: Bureaucracy, Counter Revolution, and the Making of a Functionary of Extermination

Primo Levi and the Problem of Reading Höss

Few documents in history evoke such intense horror as Rudolf Höss's memoir, written in a Kraków prison cell just weeks before his execution in April 1947. It isn't literary or a moral confession. Instead, it is the self-portrait of a man responsible for leading the murder of over a million people, who, facing the gallows, recounts his actions with a detached, procedural tone akin to a factory manager reviewing production data.

Primo Levi, who wrote the introduction for the English edition, immediately recognised that the book’s importance lies precisely in its repulsiveness. He emphasised that the memoir is “filled with evil," lacking literary value, and that reading it is a challenging experience. However, he also believed it was essential — not because of its moral emptiness but because of it. Höss’s memoir documents extermination from within the machinery of genocide, compelling the reader to face fascist violence directly, without the filtering effects of remorse, reflection, or human warmth.

Levi’s insight was twofold. First, he saw that Höss’s flat, bureaucratic tone isn’t a flaw but central to the document's core. It reflects how a man who viewed mass murder as a technical and logistical problem approached his work—focused on innovation, efficiency, and discipline. Second, Levi realised that the memoir’s power comes from its absence of human emotion. It functions as a negative instruction manual, offering a stark look at how industrialised killing is portrayed by its perpetrator.

Levi’s firsthand experience in Auschwitz provided him with a unique perspective. He viewed the system from the perspective of a prisoner doomed to a slow death through forced labour, starvation, and dehumanisation. In contrast, Höss saw it from a top-down position, as the mastermind behind its daily operations. Levi’s introduction juxtaposes these contrasting viewpoints. He dismisses Höss’s attempt at introspection or portraying tragedy; he rejects calling it a confession. Instead, Levi presents it as a manifestation of bureaucratic evil, serving as a crucial insight into how genocide can occur within a modern capitalist framework.

This framing also pre-empts—and subtly critiques—future claims to generalise Höss’s behaviour through the concept of the “banality of evil.” Levi argues that Höss was not ordinary or banal. He was a particular type of official moulded by a specific historical crisis. His memoir doesn’t showcase universal human weakness but highlights the social forces that influenced the SS members: counter-revolutionary violence, racial ideology, bureaucratic rationality, and German capitalism's fall into fascism.

Expanding Levi’s insight involves understanding the memoir’s paradox: a text lacking moral content yet requiring moral consideration. It compels readers to view the extermination process as its perpetrators envisioned it — not as metaphysical evil, but as a technical operation integrated into the administrative routines of a modern state. Levi’s introduction, in its full historical context, functions not just as a preface but as a methodological guide: warning against sentimentality, rejecting psychological mythmaking, and emphasising that the memoir’s significance lies in its cold, bureaucratic precision. This perspective should shape how the entire document is interpreted.

The Making of a Functionary: Biography as Social Pathway

When faced with such a text, the temptation is to see Höss either as an inexplicable monster or as an ordinary bureaucrat whose evil was merely "banal.” However, both views overlook the core historical question. The focus should not be on what Höss was “like,” but rather on how a particular social context led to the emergence of a specific type of killer.

Höss’s personal account, when compared with the documentary record, provides the foundation for that explanation, although he never states it explicitly. Born in 1900 into a strict Catholic, nationalist middle-class family, he volunteered for the German army at sixteen and served in the Middle East during World War I. His experiences with defeat and revolution radicalised him against the revolutionary forces. In 1920, he joined the Freikorps, paramilitary groups composed of demobilised officers that the Weimar government and German bourgeoisie used to suppress workers’ uprisings in the Baltic, Ruhr, and central Germany.

This environment was pivotal, combining anti-Bolshevism, racial antisemitism, and the veneration of a betrayed generation into a unified worldview. In 1922, Höss first met Hitler. In 1923, on Bormann's orders, he took part in the killing of a man suspected of informing the French occupying forces. He spent five years in prison.

This is not just incidental biography; it illustrates how the counter-revolutionary violence from 1918–23 directly fed into the machinery of the Third Reich. Höss joined the SS in 1934, worked at Dachau and Sachsenhausen, and in May 1940 became the inaugural commandant of Auschwitz. There, he expanded and managed the largest extermination centre in the German system, introducing widespread use of Zyklon-B and continuously seeking greater efficiency in the killing process. A 1944 SS report praised him as a “true pioneer” in the field.

Höss was not a sadist in the vulgar sense. His memoir depicts him—and quite plausibly—as a diligent administrator who discovered his calling in organising death. This makes the document particularly important historically, as it details how the brutal violence of the Freikorps was rationalised, bureaucratized, and turned into an industrial process amid the collapse of German capitalism into fascism. Leon Trotsky, in 1933, described fascism as the process by which “capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism” that a healthy social development would have eliminated. Höss’s memoir, whether intentionally or not, serves as a case study of this physiological process.

The Industrialisation of Mass Murder

Höss’s memoir is striking for its cold tone. He writes as a manager, not a fanatic. The descriptions of transports, gas chamber construction, crematoria, Zyklon-B use, and the administrative “improvements’ after his 1943 promotion are detailed and precise. Historians confirm his technical and administrative claims are generally accurate, which makes the true horror lie in the understated tone rather than exaggeration.

This excerpt illustrates the bureaucratic ideology of the SS embodied in Höss. His claim to be a simple tool—merely following orders, seeking only a peaceful farming life—reflects not a psychological abnormality but the core self-image of the SS: viewing themselves as functionaries who see their agency as absorbed into the state machinery. The memoir serves as more than just an account of genocide; it reveals how fascism saw itself. The industrial scale of murder necessitated a cadre trained in counter-revolutionary violence, a bureaucratic system capable of rationalising such violence, a state dedicated to racial extermination, and a social crisis that merged all three into one overarching project. Höss’s memoir thus functions as the administrative voice of this entire undertaking.

The Memoir as Ideological Artefact

The Commandant of Auschwitz is most vulnerable, and its limitations need clear acknowledgement in Höss’s narrative of his motives and accountability. He controversially portrays himself as a soldier compelled back into action against his own judgment, deflecting blame upward to Himmler and Hitler, and depicting himself as a tool rather than a decision-maker. His time as a prisoner with other senior officials at Nuremberg in 1946 provided ample chances to perfect this rhetorical approach.

This is the same evasion that later commentary on Nazism, from Hannah Arendt’s formula of the “banality of evil” onward, has too often converted into a general theory rather than treating as a self‑serving defence to be tested against the facts. It is not banality, still less some universal human capacity for evil, that explains Höss. It is the concrete conjuncture of German imperialism’s crisis after 1918, the defeated revolution, the deliberate cultivation of counter‑revolutionary paramilitarism by the German state and capital, and the specific social layers—demobilised officers, déclassé nationalists, functionaries seeking order and advancement—from which the SS drew its cadre.

Against the “Banality of Evil”: Why Hannah Arendt Misread Fascism

Few ideas have strayed further from their original context and contributed more to obscuring the true history of fascism than Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil.” First presented in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), the phrase has become a moral shorthand, suggesting that genocide results from ordinary individuals following orders—bureaucrats committing horrific crimes not driven by ideology but by thoughtlessness, conformity, or career ambitions. This comforting notion has gained widespread acceptance, which is precisely why it is problematic.

Arendt’s core empirical claim—that Eichmann was merely a superficial clerk lacking ideological insight—has been thoroughly discredited. The historical evidence demonstrates Eichmann's dedication to Nazism, his racial extremist beliefs, and his active role in developing the Final Solution. Posthumously discovered writings show he enthusiastically supported exterminationist antisemitism and viewed himself as part of a revolutionary effort to reshape Europe racially. Arendt mistook Eichmann’s courtroom antics for genuine psychological insight, wrongly equating a legal tactic for self-preservation with his true mental state.

However, the fundamental issue is theoretical. Arendt extended Eichmann’s self-portrayal into a broad theory of modern evil. In doing so, she reduced the particularities of fascism to an abstract moral concept. The “banality of evil” idea regards genocide as stemming from ordinary human flaws rather than the specific social dynamics that created the Nazi hierarchy: the German capitalism crisis post-1918, the defeat of the workers’ movement, the rise of counter-revolutionary paramilitaries, and the bureaucratic logic of a state committed to racial extermination. It shifts blame from historical forces to psychological ones, and from class conflict to individual morality.

This is why the phrase has gained widespread popularity in liberal discourse. It enables the Holocaust to be remembered while avoiding critique of the political and economic structures that enabled it. It shifts the focus from fascism as a collapse of social order to a lesson about individual morality. By universalizing responsibility, it also conceals the actual agents and institutions responsible for genocide.

Rudolf Höss’s memoir, 'Commandant of Auschwitz,' serves as a clear counterexample to Arendt’s thesis. Höss was not ordinary or banal; he was a product of a specific historical crisis. As a Freikorps veteran, a racial ideologue, and a bureaucratic innovator of mass murder, he found his calling in extermination. His life exemplifies the social pathway where the violence of 1918–23 was rationalised, professionalised, and turned into an industrial process. Labelling him as “banal” misrepresents both the man and the system that shaped him.

Arendt’s framework serves an ideological role by depoliticizing fascism. It promotes sentimental interpretations of genocide and hinders the necessary historical analysis to prevent future occurrences. Not only is this approach insufficient, but it also hampers political understanding. To truly grasp fascism, one must reject the banality thesis and engage directly with the concrete social forces behind the extermination apparatus. Anything less amounts to evasion. A memoir that leaves out this analysis does not disprove it; it only highlights the need to supplement the account from outside the text.

Why the Document Must Still Be Read

None of this reduces the book's importance as a primary source. Its royalties were appropriately donated to a fund for Auschwitz survivors. Its unflinching account of the camp's physical operation remains crucial for anyone wanting to understand not just the idea of “evil,” but the actual system that enabled an advanced capitalist state to organize industrial mass murder. The relevance today is clear. The political manipulation of Holocaust memory—whether by trivializing fascism in popular culture, depoliticizing genocide in liberal discourse, or using historical suffering to justify current militarism—necessitates critical reading. Höss’s memoir serves as a warning about the social conditions that could produce such a figure again: conditions rooted not in human nature itself, but in the recurring crises of the capitalist system.

Bibliography and sources

• Höss, Rudolf. Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess. Translated by Constantine FitzGibbon, introduction by Primo Levi. London: Phoenix Press, 1959 (repr. various editions).
• Höss, Rudolf. Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz. Edited by Steven Paskuly, translated by Andrew Pollinger. Da Capo Press, 1996 (unexpurgated translation).
• Postscript Books, publisher's description and Primo Levi excerpt, Commandant of Auschwitz — https://www.psbooks.co.uk/commandant-of-auschwitz-age-of-dictators-1920-1945
• WorldCat entry and Primo Levi introduction excerpt — https://search.worldcat.org/title/Commandant-of-Auschwitz-:-the-autobiography-of-Rudolf-Hoess/oclc/43377307
• Amazon.com, publisher's note on composition and royalties — https://www.amazon.com/Commandant-Auschwitz-Autobiography-Rudolf-Hoess/dp/1842120247
• Testimony of Rudolf Höss before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg — https://famous-trials.com/nuremberg/1932-hoesstestimony
• Yad Vashem, extract from written evidence of Rudolf Höss — https://www.yadvashem.org/docs/evidence-of-rudolf-hoss-on-auschwitz.html
• Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, "Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Hoess on the Gallows" — https://www.auschwitz.org/en/museum/news/auschwitz-commandant-rudolf-hoess-on-the-gallows,461.html
• Laurier, Joanne. "The Zone of Interest: Making the commandant of Auschwitz into 'one of us.'" World Socialist Web Site, 1 March 2024 — https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/03/02/wzbs-m02.html
• North, David. Essay on Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, in The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century — https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html
• Trotsky, Leon. "What Is National Socialism?" (1933), in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany.

 

Jason Arday: A Case Study in Academic Witch Hunting and Institutional Cowardice

 The death of Jason Arday, discovered at his London residence on August 14, cannot be separated from the eleven-day media frenzy that preceded it, nor from the long-standing political backlash that this frenzy reflects. What gets overlooked amid the flood of commentary—whether from those trying to defend Nathan Cofnas or from those reducing the incident to a morality tale about racism—is the influence of the institutions involved: Cambridge University, the media which produced 188 stories in nine days, and the political environment that has made the revival of hereditarian pseudoscience acceptable again in reputable academic fields. This is not a story about two individuals. It is a story about a system.

The Function of “Race Realism”

Cofnas’s intellectual initiative is rooted in a longstanding tradition. The resurgence of the hereditarian argument—asserting that genetics account for group differences in intelligence—has a troubling history. Its roots trace back to Francis Galton’s eugenics movement, the racialist propaganda of the Pioneer Fund, and the post-World War II revival of biological determinism through behavioural genetics. Leading figures today—such as Richard Lynn, Emil Kirkegaard, Heiner Rindermann, Charles Murray, and Cofnas himself—are not isolated individuals, but part of an interconnected ideological network.

Nathan Cofnas holds a unique place in modern academia: he is a trained philosopher whose career is closely linked to the resurgence of hereditarian “race realism,” an ideology with a long-standing tradition of offering pseudo-scientific support for social inequality. His journey—from Columbia to Cambridge, Oxford, and ultimately Ghent—reflects not genuine intellectual curiosity but the re-emergence of biological determinism as a respected mainstream academic viewpoint.

Cofnas argues that racial differences in intelligence are largely genetic, echoing historical eugenics and the Pioneer Fund. She claims this defends 'science' from political meddling, but in truth, it advances a political agenda. Hereditarian ideas historically justify inequality by framing historical injustices like colonialism and segregation as biological fate. Cofnas’s assertion that Black academics would have 'approach[ed] zero per cent ' at top universities under meritocracy is not a scientific claim but an ideological stance.

Hereditarianism has historically functioned to justify inequality as natural rather than created. It acts as a reactionary ideological tool, used whenever capitalism faces crisis and needs pseudoscientific backing for social stratification. The appointment of a Ghent University scholar claiming that Black academics would “disappear from almost all high-profile positions” under a meritocratic system reflects not academic freedom but the decline — or lack — of institutional barriers against pseudoscientific race theories in European academia. This is not the protection of unpopular opinion. It is the mainstreaming of a body of thought whose historical function has been to prepare the ideological ground for attacks on the working class.

His rise has been enabled by institutions that accept race science as a valid area of research. Cambridge awarded him a prestigious fellowship, and Ghent University hired him despite his public support for genetic racial hierarchy. These choices show not academic bravery but the weakening of any ethical boundary against pseudoscience when it aligns with the broader right-wing movement for “academic freedom," aiming to restore reactionary ideas under the guise of intellectual diversity.

The controversy involving Jason Arday brought Cofnas’s work into the spotlight. His blog post accusing Arday of plagiarism in his PhD thesis sparked a massive media frenzy—188 articles in just nine days—that ended with Arday’s resignation and death. Cofnas briefly became a symbol: to his supporters, a martyr for truth; to critics, a promoter of racial hostility. However, focusing on his personality masks a larger issue. Cofnas is not an anomaly but a sign of a political environment where hereditarian ideas have found renewed institutional backing, and universities, driven more by reputational risk than core principles, vacillate between tolerance and rejection based on public pressure.

Nathan Cofnas matters not because his ideas are new — they are not — but because their reappearance in respectable academic settings signals a broader social reaction. His career marks the return of an ideology that has historically prepared the ground for exclusion, repression, and worse. To understand Cofnas is to understand the conditions that allow such ideas to flourish: a university system hollowed out by market logic, a media apparatus eager for spectacle, and a political order increasingly receptive to biological explanations for social crisis. In that sense, Cofnas is less a philosopher than a weather vane. His prominence tells us not where science is going, but where society is drifting.

Cambridge’s Cowardice — and Its Class Function

Cofnas’s defenders argue that Cambridge allowed alleged plagiarism by Arday but expelled Cofnas for his opinions. However, this overlooks a broader issue: Cambridge’s actions were driven by institutional risk rather than principles. When Cofnas risked damaging the university’s reputation, the university quietly pushed him out. Similarly, when Arday became a liability, the university quickly distanced itself, removing web pages and ending investigations after his resignation. Cambridge did not protect either individual; it prioritised its own reputation.

This is not an inconsistency; it illustrates the consistent logic of the modern university, shaped by reputation and market interests. The university usually does not protect academic freedom or individuals—whether they face right-wing hostility or student protests—if defending them would cost it. Calling this 'cowardice' moralises the issue, but the reality is structural. The modern university operates as a corporation within the capitalist state, with research priorities, admissions, and intellectual culture shaped by capital accumulation and imperialist goals. Its treatment of individuals shifts based on the changing needs of class dominance.

The Press as an Instrument, Not a Check

The story is about how an academic integrity issue turned into a nine-day, 188-article spectacle. While multiple outlets backed some allegations of plagiarism, the extensive coverage went beyond reporting and became a form of public humiliation. This included marathon claims, personal details, and relentless daily coverage. This illustrates the typical modern media pile-on: it usually ignores the human at its centre and becomes hostile when political goals are involved. The same outlets that discredited Arday defended Noah Carl, publishing editorials praising his research linking crime to ethnic groups. They also rallied to defend Carl’s academic freedom while ignoring attacks on democratic rights, such as the persecution of Julian Assange. The media frenzy is not accidental; it’s a political tactic—aimed at destroying individuals as a substitute for honest debate.

Individualising a Systemic Failure

Labelling this conflict as “Cofnas versus Arday” or portraying it as a clash between “the right and DEI” oversimplifies the situation and ignores underlying structural issues. Personal explanations—such as blaming a vindictive blogger, a dishonest professor, a woke establishment, or a racist backlash—often replace systemic causes with individual blame. The real issue is understanding what kind of university and press tend to produce such outcomes. In reality, these institutions are motivated not by the pursuit of truth but by managing reputational risks. Their loyalties are more aligned with donors, government policies, and market goals than with genuine scholarship. Their intellectual environment is shaped more by capital interests than by societal needs.

The pseudo-left’s focus on identity politics acts as a reactionary force in itself. By turning every social conflict into a matter of racial or gender identity, it gives the right wing an effective opposition. It keeps the working class, which could challenge the current order—responsible for tragedies like Arday’s death—disarmed and divided. A conflict between “race realism” and “anti-racism” within bourgeois academia doesn't threaten the capitalist system that sustains both.

The public discourse surrounding Arday’s death — the moral panic, the fixation on individual virtue and villainy, the refusal to interrogate structural causes — serves a precise social interest. It keeps the population politically demobilised, morally panicked, and convinced that the great questions of social life are matters of personal conduct rather than class struggle.

Jason Arday's tragedy is rooted in the institutions that made such conflicts between academics unavoidable and deadly. His death reflects a systemic issue that harms individuals to protect itself. The solution isn't better risk management, improved DEI efforts, or a more courteous media. Instead, it lies in building a large, international socialist movement within the working class that aims to overthrow capitalist institutions and establish a society where human needs take precedence over profit, reputation, or spectacle.

 

The Exhaustion of Liberal Humanism: Mario Vargas Llosa’s I Give You My Silence and the Terminal Crisis of the Latin American Boom

The death of Mario Vargas Llosa and the release of his last novel, I Give You My Silence, signify not only the conclusion of a notable literary career but also the exhaustion of an entire intellectual tradition. While the novel is praised in the bourgeois media as a “gentle meditation” on art and national identity, it serves as a confession—an unintended critique of the political and social worldview that guided Vargas Llosa from his early radical beginnings to Thatcherite conservatism. Its inherent limitations reveal the dead-end of the Latin American Boom and the class forces behind it.

The Paradox and Its Limits

Much has been discussed about Vargas Llosa's so-called "paradox": he’s a reactionary ideologue yet creates fiction that captures Latin American society's violence and contradictions. This isn’t an isolated or mysterious case. Engels pointed out a similar pattern in Balzac, whose royalist views didn’t stop him from vividly depicting the rise of the bourgeoisie. Trotsky later described the “fellow-traveller” writer, whose serious artistry enabled a more truthful understanding of social realities than the rigid “proletarian” literature of Stalin’s era.

Comparing Vargas Llosa with Balzac reveals more about his limitations than his depth. Balzac’s realism flourished when the bourgeoisie was genuinely progressive. His monarchism was mainly ideological baggage, and his realism anticipated future trends. Conversely, Vargas Llosa is a skilled writer connected to a class segment—the Latin American bourgeoisie allied with US imperialism—that has historically been reactionary. His evolution from early Castroism to neoliberalism isn't a personal quirk but reflects a class that moved away from the Cuban Revolution, increasingly siding with Washington and capitalist interests.

Vargas Llosa's "paradox' isn't about conflicting ideology and craftsmanship. Instead, it depicts a bourgeois writer living in an era where the bourgeoisie has fulfilled its historical role. His realism stays within his social-class boundaries, as his class has no prospects beyond the market and the state violence necessary to maintain it. The main idea in 'I Give You My Silence,' featuring Toño Azpilcueta, highlights a contradiction: Toño believes huachafería—combining popular Peruvian poor culture—can mend national divisions. Yet, this belief is naive, potentially flawed, and resembles typical bourgeois-nationalist ideology.

Vargas Llosa’s political perspective aims to address class conflicts by relying on market solutions and emotional appeals to racial tensions. These are liberal illusions, flawed because they confuse the surface symptoms of class society with its true causes. The novel also reveals that the idea of national unity through culture is a bourgeois myth, that liberal individualism overlooks structural exploitation, and that aesthetic feelings cannot substitute for political action.

Molfino dies impoverished not because Peru lacks cultural value, but because capitalism systematically suppresses human potential. The neglect by Lima’s educated classes toward their musicians isn’t just a matter of etiquette; it reveals the deep connection between a comprador bourgeoisie and the exploited masses. While the novel hints at this dynamic, it cannot fully articulate it, as doing so would condemn the class Vargas Llosa has long supported. This unspoken truth remains subtly unveiled throughout the story.

Gabriel García Márquez remains the most celebrated figure of the Latin American Boom, and the global canonisation of One Hundred Years of Solitude has obscured the political limits of his work. His novels possess extraordinary imaginative power, but they are shaped by the same contradiction that defined the Boom as a whole: the inability to conceive of the working class as the active subject of history.

García Márquez’s political horizon was set by the Cuban Revolution, which he embraced not as a concrete program for proletarian emancipation but as a symbol of anti‑imperialist defiance. His loyalty to Castroism—long after its degeneration into a bureaucratic apparatus hostile to socialist internationalism—was not accidental. It reflected the position of a radicalised petty-bourgeois intelligentsia that sought national renewal through heroic leadership rather than through the self-mobilisation of workers.

This contradiction saturates his fiction. The massacre of the banana workers in One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the most haunting episodes in modern literature. Yet, the workers themselves appear only as victims, never as agents. Their struggle is rendered as tragedy, not as the opening of revolutionary possibility. The novel’s cyclical temporality—its sense that history repeats, decays, and returns—mirrors the political pessimism of a class that cannot imagine a path beyond national catastrophe.

García Márquez’s achievement is real. But it is the achievement of a writer whose political imagination was bounded by the limits of Castroism and the nationalist illusions of the Boom. His work exposes the violence of imperialism, but it cannot envision the force capable of ending it.

In 'I Give You My Silence' and most Boom literature, the working class is notably absent as active participants in history. The WSWS obituary for García Márquez pointed out that Boom novels tend to portray the working class mainly as victims of exploitation rather than as revolutionary agents. Vargas Llosa, even in his best works, shows this limitation. For example, 'The Feast of the Goat' effectively depicts dictatorship but uses the masses only as background, not as changemakers capable of ending tyranny. 'The War of the End of the World' shows the Canudos rebellion as a metaphysical debate between fanaticism and reason, removing its class struggle significance. 'I Give You My Silence' marks a stage where politics is replaced by culture, and culture becomes just a source of comfort.

This absence isn't just an aesthetic issue; it highlights the political boundaries the Boom generation faced. Initially inspired by the Cuban Revolution, these writers saw it shift from guerrilla warfare to a focus on workers' self-mobilisation. As it became a Stalinist bureaucracy, Latin American intellectuals lost their revolutionary perspective. Some, like García Márquez, continued to see Castro as an anti-imperialist icon, even as that meaning faded. Others, such as Vargas Llosa, moved sharply to the right. Neither path brought them closer to the working class.

The Liberal‑Humanist Framework and Its Collapse

Vargas Llosa's critical reception, including many left-liberal interpretations, often separates his “craft’ from his ideology, implying that narrative clarity and irony are neutral vessels for political content. However, this relationship is dialectical: his late style—minimalist, rational, ironic—reflects his worldview, which favours market rationality, liberal transparency, scepticism toward collective efforts, and the belief that individual conscience can replace political activism.

The irony directed at Toño is not merely artistic honesty. It is a self‑exculpatory gesture: a way of acknowledging the bankruptcy of liberal humanism without abandoning it. The gap in Vargas Llosa’s fiction is not between imagination and reality. It is between a bourgeois worldview and the class struggle that worldview cannot accommodate. To close that gap requires not better novels, but a political break.

'I Give You My Silence' functions as more than a confession; it acts as a historical epitaph. It underscores the decline of the Boom’s political prospects, the fading influence of liberal humanism as a framework for understanding Latin America, and the bourgeoisie's exhaustion as a social force for change. Vargas Llosa's capacity to recognise the failure of his own project—albeit indirectly—shows his artistic integrity. Yet, it also exposes the limitations of his class position. The novel’s quiet melancholy captures the sorrow of a class that no longer has anything to contribute.

The task now falls to a new class and its corresponding literature: one that sees the working class as the subject of history, not merely an incidental element. This literature rejects cultural reconciliation and liberal comfort, and it challenges the capitalist system as something to be overthrown, not accepted as fate. The era of the Boom has ended, its contradictions played out, and its last representative has laid down his final words. Moving forward, Latin American literature will be shaped by those who completely abandon bourgeois perspectives and find in the international working class the power to drive societal change.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary Works (Literary)

 

Gabriel García Márquez

• One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
• The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975)
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981)
• The General in His Labyrinth (1989)

Carlos Fuentes

• The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962)
• Aura (1962)
• Terra Nostra (1975)
• The Old Gringo (1985)

José Donoso

• Coronation (1957)
• The Obscene Bird of Night (1970)
• Casa de campo (1978)
• Curfew (1986)

Primary Works (Political / Autobiographical)

• Mario Vargas Llosa, A Fish in the Water: A Memoir (1993)
• Carlos Fuentes, Myself with Others: Selected Essays (1988)
• Gabriel García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale (2002)

Marxist Theory and Criticism

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels

• The Communist Manifesto (1848)
• Engels, Letter to Margaret Harkness (1888)
• Engels, The Peasant War in Germany (1850)

Leon Trotsky

• Literature and Revolution (1924)
• The Permanent Revolution (1930)
• The History of the Russian Revolution (1932)

Other Marxist Sources

• Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel (1937)
• José Carlos Mariátegui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (1928)
• CLR James, The Black Jacobins (1938)

Historical Context: Latin America

General

• Tulio Halperín Donghi, The Contemporary History of Latin America (1993)
• Leslie Bethell (ed.), The Cambridge History of Latin America (multiple volumes)
• Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (2006)

Cuba & Castroism

• Samuel Farber, The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered (2006)
• Marifeli Pérez‑Stable, The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy (1993)

Chile

• Peter Winn, Weavers of Revolution: The Yarur Workers and Chile’s Road to Socialism (1986)
• Julio Pinto, Working‑Class Politics in Chile (2018)

Mexico

• Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution (2 vols., 1986)
• Friedrich Katz, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa (1998)

Secondary Literary Criticism

• Ángel Rama, The Lettered City (1996)
• Roberto González Echevarría, Modern Latin American Literature: A Very Short Introduction (2012)
• Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City (2002)
• Gerald Martin, Gabriel García Márquez: A Life (2008)
• Ilan Stavans (ed.), The Oxford Book of Latin American Essays (1997)

World Socialist Web Site (WSWS)

(These are essential for grounding your argument in the Trotskyist perspective.)

• WSWS Arts & Culture: “Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014): A writer of the Latin American ‘Boom’”
• WSWS Arts & Culture: “Mario Vargas Llosa and the crisis of liberalism”
• WSWS Arts & Culture: “The Latin American novel and the crisis of bourgeois nationalism”
• WSWS: Coverage of the Cuban Revolution, Castroism, and Latin American politics (various articles)

Useful Academic Articles

• Seymour Menton, “The Boom in Spanish American Literature” (Hispania, 1975)
• John Beverley, “The Margin at the Centre: On Testimonio” (Modern Fiction Studies, 1989)
• Daphne Patai, “The Boom and Beyond” (Latin American Research Review, 1983)

For Further Theoretical Context

• Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (1976)
• David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005)
• Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World‑System (multiple volumes)

 

Elegy for a Class Betrayed: Jonas Patrick Marvin’s Book and the Political Forces It Cannot Name

Marvin’s book arrives at a time when the British ruling class, alongside its media and academic supporters, tirelessly seeks to dissolve class into a mosaic of identities. In this environment, his steadfast emphasis on the reality of class—specifically, the ongoing existence of a working class shaped by exploitation, dispossession, and political betrayal—is particularly valuable. The book courageously challenges the popular notion that class has vanished into culture, region, or lifestyle categories. Marvin writes with sincerity, empathy, and a genuine effort to reclaim some of the collective dignity historically associated with working-class life. However, sincerity alone is not a strategy, and empathy does not substitute for analysis.

Marvin’s book, despite its vivid descriptions, primarily presents a phenomenology of decline rather than a clear explanation. It details the breakdown of working-class consciousness—such as its divisions into white, male, northern, immigrant, disabled, unemployed groups—but stops short of identifying the political forces behind this fragmentation. While it captures the emotional tone of defeat, it does not specify the institutions responsible for creating it. The author calls for a revival of “collective will,’ yet fails to propose a concrete plan to achieve it. Consequently, the book serves more as a lament than an intervention: it paints a picture of destruction but offers no insight into who built it.

The International Committee of the Fourth International has long argued that the British working class's defeat was not an inherent social process. It wasn't an unavoidable result of deindustrialisation, globalisation, or cultural shifts. Instead, it was a deliberate political failure caused by organisations that claimed to represent workers. Marvin’s book fails to confront this issue.

Instead of addressing the specific institutions that disarmed the working class—such as the Labour Party, trade unions, and labour reformist structures—he replaces them with vague terms like “power,” “capital,” and “the system.” By not naming these responsible forces, Marvin turns a political defeat into a cultural tragedy, framing the working class as victims of impersonal forces rather than of particular betrayals. This omission is significant; it’s the book’s primary limitation.

The miners’ strike of 1984–85

The miners’ strike of 1984–85 stands as a pivotal moment in modern British working-class history. It marked the point when the ruling class, supported by the state, faced off against a militant section of workers — with the Labour and trade-union bureaucracy ensuring their defeat. The SEP’s fortieth-anniversary analysis remains the clearest summary: Scargill waged the strike on a national-reformist platform, believing that militant action would secure concessions and that Labour would carry out a “Plan for Coal." In response, the state used unprecedented force. The TUC refused to organise solidarity actions, Neil Kinnock opposed the strike, and the NUM fought alone for an entire year.

This was not incompetence but the logic embedded in the trade-union bureaucracy’s structural role: a social layer whose existence hinges on suppressing independent working-class activism. The miners’ defeat did not transform Labour and the unions; it set the stage for such change. Blairism was not a mere deviation but the natural completion of Labour’s development. Marvin’s book cannot account for the decline of working-class power because it cannot explain the miners’ loss. Without that defeat, the later fragmentation of class consciousness does not make sense.

Identity Politics: The Ideological Weapon Marvin Describes but Cannot Analyse

Marvin catalogues the proliferation of identities — white, male, northern, immigrant, disabled — but treats them as organic developments. They were not. They were promoted. The SEP’s 2018 congress resolution identified identity politics as the political weapon of an upper-middle-class layer seeking to defend its privileges; it is directed against the working class and involves governments, media, universities, and NGOs. — all embraced identity politics because it fragments class consciousness, substitutes cultural antagonisms for class antagonism, diverts anger away from capitalism, and legitimises the political dominance of privileged layers. Marvin describes the fragmentation but not its purpose. He sees the symptoms but not the strategy.

The endorsements from Richard Seymour and China Miéville are deliberate indicators, revealing more than mere support. Both are tied to the post-Corbyn environment that has reconciled with parliamentary reformism—an approach that, instead of challenging the system responsible for working-class defeats, has acted as its latest conduit. Corbynism wasn't a challenge to Blairism; it functioned as a safety valve. It channelled the radical energy of hundreds of thousands, especially young people, back into the Labour Party—an institution historically guilty of betrayal. Every retreat was presented as a strategic calculation; every capitulation, a tactical move. This led to Starmer’s rise as the most right-wing Labour leader ever, a trajectory rooted in Corbyn’s own failure to reject Labourism. Marvin’s book, supported by this milieu, cannot criticise the machinery of betrayal because its endorsers are part of it.

The ongoing crisis facing the Starmer government confirms the ICFI’s long-standing analysis. Labour now primarily appeals to higher managerial and professional workers, with only 14 per cent of routine and manual workers supporting it—far behind Reform. This trend isn’t just temporary; it signifies Labour’s complete disconnection from the working class. However, the Labour “left”—including Corbyn, McDonnell, and the Socialist Campaign Group—plays a key role in maintaining stability by advocating for an “orderly transition” and discouraging workers from taking independent action. Marvin’s book cannot account for this crisis because it fails to explain Labour’s fundamental transformation.

Marvin and the Pseudo‑Lefts: The Elegy That Protects the Betrayers

Marvin’s book naturally belongs to the sphere of the pseudo-left — including the post-Corbyn intelligentsia, the academic-NGO sector, and the cultural left that has severed ties with revolutionary politics. This group excels at lamenting the working class while often defending, sanitising, or ignoring the political forces responsible for its decline. Marvin’s tribute aligns perfectly with this perspective.

The pseudo-left acknowledges the working class's setbacks but focuses obsessively on defeat through memoirs, documentaries, and sociological portraits of “left-behind” communities. However, it views these defeats as a social condition rather than a political failure. These setbacks are seen as tragic stories to be told, not betrayals to be examined or challenged. The role of the pseudo-left is to keep the suffering of the working class continuously visible without providing explanations or addressing the underlying causes.

This explains why figures like Seymour and Miéville endorse Marvin’s book. Their support isn't accidental; it reveals a pattern: a sorrow for the working class that overlooks the institutions that disarmed it. The Labour Party, trade unions, the Corbyn movement, and all of identity politics vanish into the fog of “power” and “capital.” The pseudo-left favours this because it absolves them of accountability. They can mourn the working class while still defending the very systems that contributed to its defeat.

In this context, Marvin’s book does not oppose the pseudo-left; it actually supports it. By avoiding mention of Labourism, trade-unionism, and identity politics as the main factors that fragmented class consciousness and hindered working-class struggles, Marvin offers the pseudo-left exactly what it seeks: a cultural story of decline that masks the political betrayal at its heart. His lament becomes a shield—protecting Labour, the unions, and the post-Corbyn left from the accountability they deserve. The working class doesn't need another lament; it doesn't need another book that lists its injuries while concealing those responsible. Instead, it needs clarity, strategy, and leadership. It needs a movement that explicitly names its enemies—concretely—and prepares for a renewed, internationalist socialist struggle.

Marvin’s book cannot accomplish this. The pseudo-left fails to deliver, and only a revolutionary party that strongly rejects Labourism, identity politics, and the petty-bourgeois ideology can. In Britain, this is represented by the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International. Marvin talks about a betrayed class, but without identifying the betrayers, the betrayal continues. His book is more a lament than a rallying cry. The working class needs more than emotional descriptions of suffering; it needs a political movement that directly names those who have robbed it of power and offers a plan to regain the struggle.

 

The Hounding of Jason Arday: Media Complicity and the Racial Politics of Academic Scandal

Jason Arday’s death on August 14, just a week after resigning from his Cambridge professorship, highlights a broader systemic problem rather than an isolated tragedy. It reveals a media environment that sensationalises racial scandals for profit, an academic world that views minority scholars as interchangeable symbols, and a political climate where issues of diversity are passionately debated. Although media outlets now offer condolences and publish reflective editorials, these gestures seem superficial given the extensive coverage before his death. Since then, over 249 articles have appeared, many of which previously contributed to months of speculation, mockery, and personal attacks against Arday, reflecting a purposeful ideological bias.

To understand what happened to Arday, it is essential to analyse not just the allegations themselves, but also the mechanisms that amplified them, the racialised dynamics influencing how they were received, and the wider political economy of scandal journalism within the neoliberal university.

Scandal as Commodity: The Political Economy of Media Harassment

The charges against Arday—related to his doctoral thesis, athletic achievements, and academic schedule—warranted investigation due to their seriousness. Yet, seriousness alone isn't enough to justify the level of coverage. Over time, proportionality was abandoned, transforming the coverage into a spectacle. This change is deliberate and built into the media system itself. Today’s media functions on a straightforward profit motive: scandals draw audiences.

This boosts engagement, drives more traffic, and bolsters the ad-based revenue that most outlets depend on. In this system: more prominent figures attract greater scandal; racialised individuals enhance ideological appeal; and prestigious institutions profit from their downfall. As the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s history, Arday was uniquely situated at this intersection of incentives. His rise carried symbolic weight, making his decline commercially lucrative. Instead of critically scrutinising Arday, the media consumed his story.

Cambridge University’s conduct throughout the incident exposes the superficiality of elite institutions’ claims of commitment to diversity. Such universities, including Cambridge, have refined a dual approach: publicly elevating minority scholars to showcase progress, then quickly distancing themselves when these scholars become politically problematic. Araday’s appointment was celebrated as a sign of change, yet when media scrutiny grew intense, Cambridge defaulted to minimal procedural responses. They carried out their investigation, released a report citing “honest and reasonable errors,” and then remained silent as media criticism escalated. This silence was not neutral; it was complicity. 

In the neoliberal university model, diversity serves more as a marketing ploy than a genuine principle. Institutions that have historically upheld elite privilege now promote inclusion not through structural change, but because diversity has become a profitable commodity in higher education. The logic is clear: universities vie for students, donors, partnerships, and global reputation. In this race, diversity acts as a branding tool—symbolising modernity, progress, and moral virtue. Brochures are filled with images of diverse student groups; announcements highlight appointments of minority scholars; strategic documents emphasise themes of equity and belonging. Ultimately, representation becomes a form of advertising.

But branding is not transformation. The neoliberal university’s commitment to diversity rarely extends beyond the symbolic. It is diversity without redistribution, inclusion without power, representation without structural change. The institution remains governed by the same hierarchies of wealth, class and patronage that have defined it for centuries. What changes is the imagery.

This dynamic produces a familiar pattern. Minority scholars are elevated as proof of institutional progress, yet their position is precarious. They are celebrated when they serve the university’s public relations needs, and abandoned when they become politically inconvenient. Diversity hires are treated as emblems, not colleagues — symbols of institutional virtue rather than participants in institutional governance. Their presence is instrumentalised, not protected.

The result is a system in which diversity initiatives coexist comfortably with widening inequality, casualised labour, collapsing student support services and the financialisaton of university governance. Diversity becomes a way to mask these contradictions, to present the institution as socially progressive while its underlying structures remain untouched.

This is the essence of neoliberal diversity: representation deployed to legitimise an institution that has not changed. It is not a challenge to hierarchy but a supplement to it — a way of modernising the university’s image while preserving its class character.

The tragedy, as recent events have shown, is that individuals placed at the centre of this branding exercise bear the human cost when the image fractures. Diversity is celebrated when it flatters the institution, and discarded when it threatens it. In this sense, the neoliberal university does not simply fail to protect minority scholars; it places them in the line of fire. Elite institutions embrace diversity only insofar as it enhances their public image. When that image becomes threatened, the individual is discarded. Arday was celebrated as a symbol; he was abandoned as a liability.

The New York Times: Liberalism’s Complicity in Racialised Ridicule

The New York Times’ involvement in the incident is especially telling, as it reveals the ideological role of the liberal press. The Times published an article ridiculing Arday’s personal life with the headline: “Jason Arday may want to get himself a nice pair of orange trousers.” This was not genuine journalism; it was contemptuous mockery disguised as commentary. Moreover, it carried racial undertones that would be unimaginable if directed at a white scholar accused of similar misconduct. The Times later removed the article, replacing it with an Error 410 where the satire once was. This removal does not indicate remorse but appears to be damage control—an editorial acknowledgement, only made after Arday’s death, that the piece should never have been published. The Times’ behaviour mirrors its role in the Claudine Gay affair: performative concern for academic standards masking a deeper hostility to the presence of Black scholars in elite institutions.

Simon Baron-Cohen’s description of Arday’s final hours is deeply troubling. Arday spoke of experiencing “relentless scrutiny,” “ridicule,” and the discrediting of “absolutely every detail of his life.” He believed he was being targeted by a “racist playbook”—a pattern recognisable to anyone familiar with how Black academics are often treated in elite settings. This playbook typically involves: identifying a prominent Black scholar, scrutinising their credentials in detail, exaggerating minor mistakes into moral failings, framing the situation as a sign of institutional decline, and then using the scandal to undermine diversity efforts. This approach is not equally applied to white academics; it’s mainly used against those whose presence in elite institutions is already contested by ideological opponents. Arday’s case clearly exemplifies this pattern.

The Family’s Statement: The Reality of Sustained Abuse

Arday’s family expressed it bluntly: “Jason endured over three years of relentless abuse... The persistent misinformation overwhelmed Jason.” This is not exaggeration but a depiction of the ongoing psychological harm caused by years of hostile coverage, insinuation, and public shame. The press tends to avoid scrutinising its own actions. Editors have resumed their normal activities. While Hacked Off’s demand for an inquiry is justified, it will likely be disregarded. The British press does not oversee itself; it safeguards its interests.

Arday’s death is part of a broader political agenda: using academic scandals as a weapon in cultural battles over diversity, equity, and representation. The ideological right presents these incidents as evidence that diversity compromises merit, minority scholars are promoted beyond their abilities, and elite institutions are failing due to 'wokeness.”

The liberal press performs a softer version of the same narrative: concern for standards, hand‑wringing about academic integrity, and a refusal to confront the racialised dynamics of scrutiny. Both converge on the same outcome: the destruction of individual scholars and the reinforcement of institutional whiteness.

The rapid shift in media coverage—with outlets softening or deleting their previous reporting—does not reflect remorse but signals institutional panic. The story has already transitioned from scandal to tragedy, from demanding scrutiny to seeking sympathy, and from holding accountability to forgetting it altogether. This is not a moment of reckoning; it’s a retreat. The press is not expressing grief over Arday; it is safeguarding its own interests.

The Chronicle of a System, Not an Exception

Jason Arday’s death isn’t random; it’s a foreseeable result of a society that treats Black scholars as symbols rather than equals, uses diversity for show instead of genuine inclusion, profits from scandal, and relies on an unregulated press that fuels humiliation. What happened to Arday isn’t an isolated incident but reflects how personal destruction is normalised in a media system where racialised stories are lucrative and elite institutions delegate their disciplinary roles to the media. His death highlights media complicity and serves as a warning—without addressing the underlying structural incentives, such tragedies are bound to happen again.

Sources and Bibliography

1. Neoliberalism and Higher Education

• Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Zone Books, 2015.
• Giroux, Henry A. Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Haymarket Books, 2014.
• Slaughter, Sheila, and Gary Rhoades. Academic Capitalism and the New Economy. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.
• Collini, Stefan. Speaking of Universities. Verso, 2017.
• Marginson, Simon. “The Worldwide Trend to Higher Participation in Higher Education.” Higher Education, vol. 72, 2016.

2. Diversity as Branding / Diversity Regimes

• Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press, 2012.
• Ahmed, Sara. What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use. Duke University Press, 2019.
• Berrey, Ellen. The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice. University of Chicago Press, 2015.
• Melamed, Jodi. Represent and Destroy: Rationalising Violence in the New Racial Capitalism. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
• Hylton, Kevin. “Institutionalised Whiteness, Racial Microaggressions and Black Bodies Out of Place in Higher Education.” Whiteness and Education, 2016.

3. The Neoliberal University and Marketisation

• Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Harvard University Press, 1996.
• Canaan, Joyce, and Wesley Shumar (eds.). Structure and Agency in the Neoliberal University. Routledge, 2008.
• Shore, Cris, and Susan Wright. “Audit Culture and Anthropology: Neoliberalism in British Higher Education.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1999.
• Lynch, Kathleen. Equality and Power in Schools: Redistribution, Recognition, and Representation. Routledge, 2019 (esp. chapters on higher education).

4. Critical Race Theory and Academic Gatekeeping

• Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Colour.” Stanford Law Review, 1991.
• Bell, Derrick. Faces at the Bottom of the Well. Basic Books, 1992.
• Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America. Free Press, 1998 (original 1935).
• Hall, Stuart. The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation. Harvard University Press, 2017.

5. Diversity, Meritocracy, and Institutional Legitimacy

• Bhopal, Kalwant. White Privilege: The Myth of a Post-Racial Society. Policy Press, 2018.
• Bhopal, Kalwant, and Clare Pitkin. “Diversity and Inequality in Higher Education: A Critical Examination.” British Journal of Sociology of Education, 2020.
• Boliver, Vikki. “How Fair Is Access to More Prestigious UK Universities?” British Journal of Sociology, 2015.
• Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States. Routledge, 2014.

6. Media, Representation, and Institutional Image

• Couldry, Nick. The Culture of Media: The Politics of Representation. Sage, 2000.
• Davis, Aeron. Reckless Opportunists: Elites at the End of the Establishment. Manchester University Press, 2018.
• Hall, Stuart et al. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. Macmillan, 1978 (for the ideological function of media narratives).