Scam Compounds and the Terminal Crisis of Global Capitalism

 Introduction: A System Exposed in Its Naked Brutality

The insights in Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds go beyond exposing a criminal underground. They reveal how modern capitalism operates, eliminating its ideological illusions. As noted, these compounds exemplify “the most extreme manifestation of the essential logic of capitalism; these are human beings that enjoy no rights beyond those of the commodity: to be bought, sold, and used.” This point is crucial. The authors show that this isn't a deviation but the inevitable outcome of a global system built on extracting surplus value from increasingly vulnerable, disposable, and surplus populations.

The scam compounds—fortified complexes in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and the Philippines—are not anomalies. They operate as state-approved capitalist ventures, are integrated into global financial systems, and depend on the same labour control, coercion, and profit-motivated methods that drive the world economy. The book’s findings underscore an important point the WSWS has long stressed: modern slavery is not just a leftover from pre-capitalist eras but a core feature of today's capitalism.

The Scam Compound as a New Form of Capitalist Production

Industrialised Fraud as a Labour Regime

The scam compounds exemplify a new, hybrid form of capitalist production: they commodify deception itself, employing trafficked workers who are both victims and coerced tools of exploitation. Workers are compelled “to become the instruments of exploitation against others,” caught in a “victim-offender trap.” This is not just crime; it is organised, hierarchical, profit-driven production on a global scale. The compounds operate through shift systems, quotas, performance metrics, punitive discipline, vertical management, and financialised profit extraction. Essentially, they resemble the Amazon warehouse, Foxconn factory, and Uber.

The Role of Surplus Humanity

The Asia-Pacific region’s share of “66 per cent of the world’s modern slaves” is intentional. It results from large-scale surplus populations generated by agrarian collapse, IMF-led structural adjustments, export-focused industrialisation, land dispossession, and climate-driven displacement. These millions of people serve as the human foundation for both sweatshops and scam operations. Capitalism not only accepts these conditions but depends on them.

State, Crime, and Capital: A Single Integrated Apparatus

A key politically sensitive point in the document is its claim that “systemic impunity" is not a flaw but the norm in the capitalist state within these regions. The compounds are not secret criminal hideouts but are: Licensed casinos, tax-paying tech parks, Joint ventures with political elites, and protected by police and military forces. The distinctions between state, business, and organised crime are nonexistent—they are fully integrated. Although this situation is not unique to Southeast Asia, it is more visible there. The scam compound exemplifies how the capitalist state can function under high inequality and global capital flows: as a tool to safeguard profits, irrespective of legality, morality, or human cost.

The Liberal‑Reformist Dead End: The Limits of the Verso Framework

As the book in question was published by Verso, it is worth looking at the politics promoted by the publisher. Verso Books holds a unique place in today's intellectual scene. It is the most prominent “radical” publisher in the English-speaking world, but also one of the most politically tame. Its catalogue features detailed explorations of global capitalism's horrors—such as sweatshops, border controls, environmental destruction, and financial exploitation—yet it often stops short of advocating the revolutionary actions that its evidence suggests are necessary.

Although Verso’s output “meticulously documents capitalist horrors, it ultimately channels opposition into dead-end political conclusions. This is not just a flaw; it defines Verso’s role: managing dissent, transforming systemic critique into marketable radicalism, and preventing outrage from developing into revolutionary consciousness. Its degeneration is therefore political, structural, and historical, not merely editorial.

The Political Economy of Radical Publishing

Verso originated within the New Left Review environment, which itself developed after the 1956 crisis of Stalinism and the decline of traditional Communist Parties. Its founders aimed to establish a space for independent Marxist scholarship, separate from both Soviet orthodoxy and Western social democracy. However, the fall of the USSR, neoliberal changes in academia, and the commercialisation of “radical theory” have shifted Verso from being a platform for Marxist discussion to a niche brand within left-wing critique.

Today, Verso operates under the same market logic as any other cultural enterprise: it must sell books, cultivate a brand, appeal to a professional-managerial audience, and avoid alienating liberal institutions, NGOs, and academia. It also must stay within the ideological boundaries of the capitalist state. This structural position shapes its politics, preventing Verso from advocating the overthrow of capitalism, since its survival depends on reproducing the class relations it criticises. Therefore, there's a contradiction: Verso markets radical ideas as a commodity while simultaneously neutralising their revolutionary potential.

The Ideological Function: Radicalism Without Revolution

Verso’s political decline is most evident in the genre typified by Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds. This book reveals a shocking brutality—trafficked workers coerced into large-scale fraud, shielded by alliances between the state and criminal networks—yet the political scope stays limited to: “better regulation,” “international cooperation,” “corporate accountability,” “ethical consumerism,” and “strengthening civil society.”

The founder of the Global Slavery Index suggests consumers should “ask the company where it was made,” a view that simplifies structural exploitation into individual choices. This encapsulates Verso’s approach: a systemic critique that ultimately issues a moral urging. The literature that arises from this approach: identifies capitalism’s crimes, explains how it operates, details its victims, reveals its hypocrisies, and then offers solutions that preserve capitalism. This is not radicalism but left-wing liberalism with a Marxist visual style.

The Class Basis of Verso’s Degeneration

To grasp Verso’s political direction, it’s essential to analyse the class forces it appeals to. Its primary audience includes: academics, NGO professionals, graduate students, cultural workers, journalists, and the progressive segment of the professional-managerial class. This group opposes the ruling class but is wary of the working class. They advocate for social justice yet fear social revolution. Their goal is to regulate capitalism, not dismantle it. They pursue moral purity rather than engaging in class struggle.

Verso’s catalogue reflects this social position. Its books critique capitalism’s excesses but stop short of challenging its fundamental structure. They support reforms that do not threaten property rights, promote activism that does not confront state authority, and celebrate movements driven by moral outrage rather than class analysis. Furthermore, these publications favour identity-based frameworks over class-based explanations. This approach explains why Verso can publish works on slavery, trafficking, and exploitation without concluding that only expropriation of capital by the working class can eliminate these issues.

The Commodification of Dissent

Verso’s decline is closely linked to the wider commodification of radical politics. In the neoliberal age, dissent has become a commercialised niche. Radical critique is often packaged, branded, and marketed to an audience that treats it as a lifestyle choice. Verso’s role is to offer: the semblance of radicalism, the language of critique, the aesthetics of Marxism, and the moral comfort of “being informed” — all without endangering the material interests of its readership. That’s why Verso books frequently conclude with appeals to NGOs, calls for increased “awareness,” demands for transparency, pleas for ethical consumption, and proposals for regulatory change. These are not revolutionary tactics; instead, they serve as means of draining revolutionary energy.

The Political Consequences: Paralysis in the Face of Crisis

The world faces an unprecedented crisis: widespread inequality, worsening climate change, mass migration caused by war and ecological collapse, authoritarian regimes, disrupted global supply chains, a resurgence of slavery and forced labour, border militarisation, and rising imperialist conflicts. The Scam Compounds are not isolated incidents but part of a larger ongoing pattern of exploitation. This includes Amazon warehouses with injury rates exceeding those in logging and mining, gig-economy workers considered "independent contractors,” sweatshops in Bangladesh and Vietnam, migrant detention centres in the US and EU, Foxconn’s suicide nets, and quasi-indentured labour in the global shipping industry. The same relentless pursuit of profit fuels these issues—driving Amazon warehouse conditions, the gig economy, and catastrophic factory collapses and suicides. The scam compound is capitalism stripped of its facade.

Why Policing Cannot Solve the Problem

The push for transnational policing—like Interpol task forces, crypto-tracking, and border enforcement—relies on a major misconception. These scam hubs are not outside the system; they are embedded within it, serving as profitable points in global capital flows. Policing cannot eliminate them because it addresses only symptoms, not root causes. It ends up reinforcing the repressive tools of the capitalist state, shifting exploitation elsewhere, criminalising migrants and trafficked workers, and leaving the profit system intact. No amount of transnational policing… will abolish this industry.”

Conclusion: The Future Is Being Written in Sihanoukville

The scam compounds aren't just a peripheral horror; they serve as a warning—a preview of the future capitalism is heading toward as its crisis worsens. With the rise of automation, climate disasters, and geopolitical instability, the ruling class will increasingly depend on Coercive labour systems, criminalised profit-making, State-backed violence, Digital monitoring, and disposable populations. The scam compound is not the final form but a prototype. Only the organised, global effort of the working class can stop this slide into a world in which the Sihanoukville model becomes widespread.

 

Alexander Rabinowitch (1934–2026): Historian of the October Revolution and Defender of Historical Truth

 

Alexander Rabinowitch, who passed away on June 16, 2026, at age 91, was the foremost American historian of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Over more than sixty years, his extensive research created a body of scholarship that critically challenged both Stalinist distortions and Cold War anti-communist myths. His work revived the vibrant, democratic, mass nature of Bolshevism and highlighted the revolutionary role of the Russian working class in history.

Rabinowitch’s notable achievement is even more impressive given the political and intellectual climate in which he grew up. Born in London to Russian-Jewish émigrés who fled Petrograd after the revolution, he was raised among Mensheviks and liberal critics of Bolshevism. He remembered that in his family’s circle, the October Revolution was seen as “a cold-blooded coup... by a small group of Lenin’s fanatic followers." During his time in the United States amid the McCarthy era, he was taught in ROTC to see the Soviet Union as the personification of evil.

Rabinowitch’s research challenged the biases of his upbringing. A pivotal 1963–64 trip to the Soviet Union led him to dispute the Western view of 1917. His 1968 dissertation, Prelude to Revolution, argued that the July Days were a popular uprising, not a Bolshevik coup attempt, and that the Bolsheviks initially tried to control it. This conclusion set him apart from both Cold War orthodoxy and Stalinist doctrine.

His second book, The Bolsheviks Come to Power (1976), marked a significant milestone in the historiography of revolution. Despite lacking access to Soviet archives, Rabinowitch carefully reconstructed Petrograd's political landscape by analysing newspapers, minutes, and memoirs. He demonstrated that in 1917, the Bolshevik Party was not a secretive, conspiratorial group, but rather a large workers’ party with deep connections to factories, barracks, and local districts. Its internal dynamics featured lively debate, factional fights, and broad democratic involvement. Lenin’s April Theses and Trotsky’s leadership of the Military Revolutionary Committee were not top-down commands but reflected the revolutionary hopes and demands of the working class.

This work significantly challenged the anti-communist view of October as a coup and questioned the Stalinist myth of a united party that followed Lenin without deviation. Rabinowitch’s conclusions largely aligned with Trotsky’s analysis in Lessons of October, a point that Soviet authorities quickly recognised, condemning him as a “bourgeois falsifier.”

The collapse of the Soviet Union granted Rabinowitch access to archives that had long been unavailable to him. Instead of succumbing to cynicism, as many scholars did after 1991, he deepened his research. This led to the publication of The Bolsheviks in Power (2007), a comprehensive analysis of the first year of Soviet governance in Petrograd. Utilising newly accessible party, government, and Cheka records, he depicted the enormous difficulties faced by the revolutionary administration: economic collapse, famine, sabotage, foreign intervention, and the breakdown of the previous state structure.

Rabinowitch’s account uncovers a political process far more intricate and democratic than the simplified portrayals in anti-communist and Stalinist histories. He highlights the intense debates within the Bolshevik Party regarding the formation of the Soviet government, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, and the Red Terror. Additionally, he restores the contributions of many Bolshevik leaders—such as Smilga, Uritsky, and Volodarsky—who were later killed during Stalin’s purges and subsequently erased from official history.

His final book, The Bolsheviks Survive: Petrograd 1919 (2026), completed just before his death, explored the remarkable endurance of the revolution during the civil war. It represents the culmination of his lifelong efforts to uncover the truth of one of the most significant events in world history.

Rabinowitch’s research put him at odds with the reactionary intellectual climate of the post-Soviet period. In Germany, where the ruling elites have tried to downplay Nazi crimes and restore imperialist militarism, right-wing historians like Jörg Baberowski have attempted to prevent his lectures. Their opposition was more than academic: Rabinowitch’s work revealed the distortions that underpin modern historical revisionism. His lectures in Berlin and Vienna, organised by the International Students for Social Equality and attended by hundreds, became notable political events.

During these struggles, Rabinowitch formed close intellectual ties with members of the Trotskyist movement. He worked with Mehring Verlag on the German editions of his books and gave interviews to the World Socialist Web Site. This was driven not by political allegiance but by a shared dedication to uncovering historical truth. As the WSWS obituary pointed out, he was part of a rare generation of historians who saw history as a science aimed at enhancing human understanding.

When Empiricism Becomes a Political Blind Spot

Rabinowitch’s work has some limitations. His empirical approach, though highly valuable, occasionally caused him to underestimate the broader international context of the revolution or to misread the political reasoning behind certain decisions.

Alexander Rabinowitch’s extensive four-volume series on the Russian Revolution represents a significant scholarly milestone. However, even meticulous empirical research struggles with complex political issues that cannot be fully understood through archives alone. The most notable flaw in Rabinowitch's analysis is his handling of the Shchastny affair—Trotsky's decision to prosecute and execute Admiral Aleksei Shchastny in June 1918. This mistake is more than a simple misinterpretation; it signifies a fundamental category error that exposes the limitations of relying solely on empirical data without incorporating the Marxist theoretical framework.

Rabinowitch labels the trial a "sham" and claims Trotsky organised it alone, possibly making it the first Soviet show trial. Yet, this characterisation is both inaccurate and historically unsound. It conflates revolutionary coercion with bureaucratic terror and confuses the defence of a workers’ state with Stalinist attempts to dismantle the revolution. Rabinowitch’s analysis of the Shchastny affair is not only flawed but also a theoretical oversight that contradicts the very evidence he presents.

 

The Historical Context Rabinowitch Underestimates

By spring 1918, the Baltic Fleet faced near-insurrection as German forces advanced following the collapse of the Brest-Litovsk talks. Mutinous mine-layer crews and factory workers at Obukhov were on the verge of revolt. British agents—Cromie, Lockhart, O’Reilly—were actively encouraging counterrevolution, circulating forged documents alleging Bolshevik plans to surrender Kronstadt and the fleet to Germany. Rabinowitch describes this tense situation in detail but does not incorporate it into his analysis of the Shchastny case.

Shchastny was not just a neutral military officer. He circulated false documents accusing Bolsheviks of treason, promoted distrust toward the Soviet government, defied orders to relocate or scuttle the fleet, and positioned himself as a potential Bonapartist leader within the navy. In a revolutionary context, these actions go beyond mere administrative errors—they are political acts that could lead to severe consequences.

Rabinowitch’s assertion that the Shchastny trial was “possibly the first Soviet show trial” is historically unfounded. A show trial, in the Stalinist context, involves fabricated charges, forced confessions, predetermined verdicts, and the political suppression of the Old Bolsheviks. The Shchastny trial does not fit this description. Trotsky’s charges were public and political, aligned with the revolutionary government’s need to control the armed forces during a civil war. Comparing Trotsky’s 1918 actions to Stalin’s purges of 1936–38 ignores the critical difference between defending a workers’ state and establishing a bureaucratic dictatorship. This distinction is not merely semantic but is central to 20th-century revolutionary history.

Rabinowitch’s mistake arises from a methodological flaw: he views political events as isolated administrative incidents rather than as parts of a larger class struggle of historical importance. He notices a trial, a formidable commissar, and an officer being condemned. However, he overlooks the German advance, the mutinying fleet, British agents, and the fragile state of the revolution. Absent the dialectical approach, the deeper political significance of these events is lost.

Trotsky openly admitted his involvement, sharing his testimony in 'How the Revolution Armed' and later in his 1926 Works edition. This is not indicative of someone orchestrating a “sham trial,’ but rather of a revolutionary leader defending a political decision to the working class. Trotsky understood that the fleet was a vital military resource; its fall could result in German forces occupying Petrograd, and Shchastny’s actions threatened the revolution's survival. In such a context, revolutionary justice is concrete, representing the dictatorship of the proletariat as it safeguards its existence.

Rabinowitch’s key point is that his own archival evidence contradicts his conclusion. He presents records of the mine-layers' mutiny, the Obukhov uprising, forged German documents, British intelligence efforts, the Left SR assassination of Mirbach, and Petrograd’s near-collapse. However, he treats the Shchastny trial as if it happened in isolation. This isn’t just an oversight but stems from a theoretical bias: a failure to differentiate between revolutionary coercion and bureaucratic repression.

By suggesting a link between Trotsky’s actions and Stalin’s purges, Rabinowitch unintentionally supports the flawed idea that Stalinism was an unavoidable result of Bolshevism. This contradicts what his research actually shows. However, these limitations do not undermine his overall contribution. His work offers the essential empirical basis for developing a Marxist interpretation of the revolution.

He is survived by his wife of more than six decades, Janet Rabinowitch, an accomplished editor who supported his work at every stage. His death is a profound loss to the historical profession and to all those committed to the defence of historical truth. Yet his legacy endures. As new generations confront the crises of global capitalism, the appeal and significance of his work will only grow.

Alexander Rabinowitch’s scholarship epitomises intellectual honesty. Amidst an era of misinformation, he emphasised the importance of evidence. During times of reaction, he championed the revolutionary role of the working class. And in a world increasingly at risk of war and authoritarian regimes, he highlighted the crucial period when humanity nearly escaped exploitation. His work will continue to be essential for anyone studying the Russian Revolution and for those advocating for a socialist future.

 

The Miseducation of Emancipation: Robin Blackburn, the New Left Review, and the Retreat from Marxism

Robin Blackburn’s The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights was seen in academia as the final part of a significant trilogy on New World slavery, with an impressive empirical scope. However, Marxism’s role is not to praise scholarship for its own sake but to examine the political and theoretical assumptions behind historical narratives. In this aspect, Blackburn’s work does not embody a Marxist synthesis; instead, it reveals the gradual decline of the New Left Review environment and its shift away from revolutionary politics towards the more comfortable, conformist corridors of liberal academia.¹

The tragedy is not Blackburn's lack of knowledge but his absence of a revolutionary perspective. Without this standpoint, the history of slavery and emancipation—arguably one of the most pivotal moments in the global capitalist development—fails to be fully understood in its world-historical context.

The New Left Review and Robin Blackburn: A Political Intellectual Symbiosis

Blackburn’s political development is closely linked to the growth of the New Left Review. Over the years, the NLR has claimed to represent “Western Marxism.” Yet, it has consistently dismissed key Marxist principles: the revolutionary importance of the working class, the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat, and Trotskyism's internationalist agenda.²

Since Perry Anderson’s early involvement with Maoism and Tariq Ali’s support for Castroism and other nationalist regimes, the NLR has been a center for various pseudo-radical movements, but it has notably excluded the essential: the autonomous political action of the working class against capitalism.

Blackburn’s commitments—like his support for the Cuban Revolution, his sympathy for “third world” nationalism, and his connections to reformist and Stalinist movements—are fundamental rather than incidental, shaping how The American Crucible is understood at every level. The book’s political stance aligns with the academic left: it uses radical language, maintains a liberal content, and generally downplays the revolutionary potential of historical materialism.

The connection between Robin Blackburn and the New Left Review is more than just biographical or institutional; it is structural. Blackburn is not a rare exception within the NLR; he embodies its core ideals. His work encapsulates the political development, theoretical evasions, and class stance of the NLR over sixty years.

To grasp Blackburn’s view on slavery and emancipation, it's essential to recognize the NLR's political agenda—a project that has continually favored academic radicalism over revolutionary Marxism and eclectic theory over a strategic focus on the international working class. The NLR’s fundamental contradiction is its Marxism without revolution.

From its beginning, the NLR positioned itself as the successor to a defeated and discredited left — including the Stalinist CPs, the Labour left, and the collapsing post-war consensus. However, instead of reviving revolutionary Marxism, it developed a hybrid approach: Marxist in language, anti-Trotskyist politically, nationalist in sympathies, academic in style, and pessimistic about the working class. This was the NLR's original sin — attempting to analyse capitalism without seeking to overthrow it, critiquing the system without forming a movement to dismantle it. Blackburn entered this environment not as a dissident but as a loyal architect. With an erudite, cosmopolitan, and empirically strong intellectual persona — qualities highly valued by the NLR — his work’s political content nonetheless reveals the limitations of that milieu.

A hostility to the revolutionary proletariat

The NLR’s suspicion of the working class is not occasional but fundamental. From Anderson’s initial structuralist approaches to Nairn’s nationalist theories, the journal persistently dismisses the Marxist idea of the proletariat as the agent of history. Blackburn reflects this stance by concluding history prior to the rise of the working class. There is a notable fascination with nationalist and Stalinist regimes.

The NLR’s fascination with Cuba, Vietnam, Algeria, and other “Third World” nationalist projects influenced Blackburn’s own political views. He tends to see emancipation more as a national-moral saga than as a class revolution, aligning with liberal human-rights discourse—a form of academic radicalism. By the 1980s, the NLR had become a hub for world-systems theory, post-Althusserian structuralism, and post-colonial critique, all of which replaced class struggle with abstract theory. Blackburn’s focus on “human rights” as a key concept reflects this ideological shift.

The NLR’s Ideological Drift and Its Impact on Blackburn

The NLR’s development can be outlined in three stages, each aligning with Blackburn’s intellectual growth: first, Western Marxism (1960s–70s), which focuses on philosophy and culture rather than revolutionary class struggle, reflecting Blackburn’s early work on slavery that is rich in theory but limited in political strategy.

Second, Academic Leftism (1980s–90s), where the journal becomes a centre for academic radicalism increasingly disconnected from the working class, paralleling Blackburn’s emphasis on structural analysis over class agency. Third, Liberal Human-Rights Marxism (2000s–present), with the NLR adopting NGO perspectives, global civil society, and the moral framework of human rights. "The American Crucible" epitomizes this stage, recounting emancipation through the lens of liberal ideology.

Why Blackburn Cannot Produce a Marxist History of Emancipation

Blackburn’s work reflects a lack of political perspective rather than intellectual deficiency. Since he shares the NLR’s core beliefs, he cannot anchor emancipation in the fundamental conflict between free and enslaved labor, see the enslaved as revolutionary agents, view the Civil War as a bourgeois-democratic revolution, or understand the rise of the modern working class from slavery’s abolition, nor recognize the Civil War’s role in the global evolution of capitalism. Instead, he replaces these with human rights instead of class struggle, moral progress instead of revolutionary breakages, national histories instead of internationalist analysis, and academic neutrality instead of political engagement. This is not coincidental but logically follows from the NLR’s gradual departure from Marxism and the Political Meaning of the Blackburn–NLR Synthesis.

The Blackburn–NLR nexus illustrates a wider trend: the post-1960s left evolving into a professional-managerial class embedded in universities, NGOs, and cultural institutions. This group criticizes capitalism but does not oppose it fundamentally, praises resistance without mobilizing it, and references Marxism while dismissing its revolutionary aspects. Blackburn’s trilogy on slavery exemplifies this political and intellectual formation.

The Fetish of “Human Rights”: Liberal Ideology in Radical Dress

Blackburn’s explicit use of “human rights” as the main framework to interpret the end of slavery clearly reflects this retreat. The subtitle—Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights—is intentionally chosen, indicating a theoretical surrender rather than neutrality.

The language of human rights is not a universal liberation doctrine. Instead, it serves as the legal ideology of the bourgeois system. As Marx showed in On the Jewish Question, the Rights of Man primarily protect the rights of the individual property owner, emphasizing the egoistic rights of a person separated from others and the community.”³ To elevate this ideology to the status of historical motor is to invert the real relationship between class struggle and its ideological forms.

Blackburn’s framework conceals a crucial truth: the abolition of slavery was not merely driven by humanitarian ideals. Instead, it resulted from a fierce conflict between opposing social systems—free labor and slave labor—that could no longer coexist. The enslaved people, through widespread resistance and the general strike from 1861 to 65, compelled this issue to the forefront of history.⁴ The capitalist North, compelled by military necessity and class interest, destroyed a rival ruling class based on slave property. This was not a moral awakening. It was a revolution.

The Civil War: A Revolution Without a Revolutionary Analysis

Blackburn recognizes the revolutionary nature of the Civil War, but his approach diminishes its class significance. His perspective aligns with the “New Historians of Capitalism,' emphasizing the economic integration of the North and South and minimizing their fundamental social conflicts.

This is a profound distortion. The Civil War was not a fratricidal misunderstanding among capitalists. It was, in William Seward’s famous phrase, an “irrepressible conflict.”⁵ As Marx wrote in Capital, “the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.”⁶ The destruction of that pedestal was a world‑historical act that reshaped the global trajectory of capitalism.

Blackburn’s failure to emphasize the fundamental clash between free and enslaved labor causes him to overlook the revolutionary role of the enslaved and the importance of the Union victory. The Civil War was the most significant social revolution of the 1800s. Considering it merely as part of the development of “human rights” diminishes its true significance.

The Vanishing Working Class: A Political Omission with Theoretical Consequences

The key omission in Blackburn’s narrative is the working class itself. His account concludes with emancipation and Reconstruction, yet the end of slavery marked only the start of a new phase. From the wreckage of the slave system and the growth of industrial capitalism arose the modern American working class—comprising both Black and white individuals, native-born and immigrant.

The great strike waves of the 1870s, the rise of industrial unionism, the formation of the CIO in the 1930s—these were not peripheral developments. They were the dialectical resolution of the contradictions unleashed by the destruction of the slave power.⁷ The working class, not the discourse of human rights, is the engine of historical progress.

Blackburn’s framework has no place for this. And this omission is not accidental. It reflects the NLR’s longstanding hostility to the revolutionary role of the proletariat. A history of slavery that cannot account for the emergence of the working class is not a Marxist history. It is a liberal history with radical footnotes.

 What a Marxist Analysis Requires

A genuinely Marxist account of slavery and emancipation must begin from the following premises: Slavery was integral to the rise of capitalism, not a pre‑capitalist residue. The enslaved were central agents of their own liberation, not passive recipients of humanitarian benevolence. The Civil War was a social revolution, rooted in the clash between incompatible labour systems. The destruction of slavery set the stage for the emergence of the modern working class. Human rights discourse is an ideological form, not the motor of historical change. The international working class is the decisive revolutionary force. These principles are absent from Blackburn’s work because they are absent from the political tradition to which he belongs.

Conclusion: The Necessity of Revolutionary Marxism

The American Crucible is a thorough scholarly work, but it doesn't present a Marxist analysis. Instead, it shows the tiredness of the New Left Review tradition, which has replaced revolutionary politics with academic radicalism and shifted from human-rights liberalism to class struggle. Marxism's role isn't to dress up liberal ideas with history, but to expose the class forces shaping history and equip the working class with the awareness needed for liberation. To do this, one should look not to Blackburn, but to Marx and Engels, to Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, to classical Marxist historiography, and especially to the ongoing tradition of the Fourth International.¹⁰.

FOOTNOTES

1. Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (London: Verso, 2011).
2. Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso, 1976).
3. Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Penguin, 1992), 234.
4. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, 1998), esp. ch. 4, “The General Strike.”
5. William H. Seward, “The Irrepressible Conflict,” speech delivered October 25, 1858.
6. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 925.
7. Philip S. Foner, History of the Labour Movement in the United States, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1947).
8. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).
9. Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution (New York: Pathfinder, 1969).
10. David North, The Civil War in the United States and the Birth of the American Working Class (Oak Park: Mehring Books, 2016).

 

 

 

Slavery, Capitalism, and the Problem of Historical Categories: A Critical Assessment of David McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism

Abstract

This article critically examines David McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History (2020) within the broader discussion of slavery's connection to capitalism. While McNally seeks to distinguish his view from the “New Historians of Capitalism” (NHC) and the racialist elements of the 1619 Project, his approach ultimately exhibits a common flaw: merging slavery and capitalism into a single, unified system.¹Building on classical Marxist theory, especially the concept of modes of production, this article argues that McNally’s framework conceals the fundamental differences between enslaved people and capitalist relations and fails to fully account for the origins or revolutionary importance of the American Civil War. It concludes by emphasising the importance of preserving clear analytical categories in Marxist historiography.

Introduction

The connection between slavery and capitalism has become a hotly debated topic in recent history. The emergence of the NHC in the 2010s, along with the 2019 launch of the New York Times’ 1619 Project, triggered a surge of research claiming that American capitalism is deeply linked to racial slavery.² Historians of the Civil War era have criticised these works, asserting that merging slavery and capitalism blurs the fundamental differences between them and makes the Civil War harder to understand historically.³

David McNally’s 'Slavery and Capitalism' positions itself as a deliberate Marxist critique. He aims to address what he perceives as the shortcomings of both the NHC and specific Marxist interpretations, which, according to him, draw an overly strict line between slavery and capitalism. His main argument is that slavery was not separate from capitalism but a fundamental part of its rise as a global system, especially in the context of cotton production for British industrial growth.⁴

This article contends that, although McNally's empirical input is valuable, his analysis ultimately replicates the conceptual collapse typical of the NHC. By focusing on how slave-produced commodities are integrated into global markets, McNally conflates slavery as a mode of production with capitalism as a separate social system.⁵ This blurring carries important historiographical and political implications, especially for grasping the essence of the American Civil War and the mechanisms of racial oppression in the contemporary United States.

The Historiographical Context: The NHC and the 1619 Project

The NHC, including experts like Sven Beckert, Edward Baptist, Walter Johnson, and Matthew Desmond, contends that slavery was not just a leftover from pre-capitalist times but actually played a key role in driving the growth of American capitalism.⁶ Their work highlights the managerial strategies, productivity measures, and global commodity networks that connected the plantation South with the industrialising North and British textile manufacturing.

Critics observe that this method depends more on analogy than detailed analysis. James Oakes contends that the NHC “effectively erase the fundamental differences between the two systems” by emphasising only superficial similarities in commercial practices.⁷ The outcome is a historical account where the Civil War appears inexplicable. If slavery and capitalism are fundamentally the same system, then the underlying reason for the North-South conflict disappears.

The 1619 Project popularised this framework, arguing that racial slavery is intrinsic to American capitalism and that the country's founding principles are based on racial dominance.⁸ Although McNally does not support the racial essentialism promoted by the 1619 Project, his work is influenced by the historiographical landscape it has helped shape.

McNally’s Intervention: A “New Marxist History”

McNally’s book seeks to reshape the understanding of the link between slavery and capitalism through a Marxist lens. He cites Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation, emphasising that colonial slavery and the transatlantic slave trade were pivotal episodes in the violent sequence of events that set the stage for capitalism's development.⁹ McNally argues that cotton produced by enslaved people was crucial to the rise of British industrial capitalism, framing slavery as a pivotal part of the development of the global capitalist system.

This argument provides valuable insights. Marx indeed recognised the importance of colonial plunder, such as slavery, in the development of capitalism.¹⁰ McNally correctly highlights that capitalism's roots are intertwined with centuries of global violence, dispossession, and forced labour, rather than arising in isolation. However, the central question remains whether slavery should be considered a form of capitalist production, not merely whether it contributed to capitalism’s development. This is where McNally’s argument becomes weaker.

Modes of Production and the Problem of Conceptual Precision

Classical Marxism differentiates modes of production based on their core social relations. In slavery, the direct producer is treated as property; labour-power itself is not a commodity. In capitalism, the worker is legally free and sells their labour-power on the market.¹¹ These differences create distinct economic laws of movement, class organisations, and political behaviours. The enslaved individual in the South existed within a slave society. Wealth was rooted in human property, the economy was relatively conservative technologically, and a planter aristocracy dominated the class structure, with interests opposed to those of the northern bourgeoisie.¹² The capitalist North, by contrast, developed based on free labour, industrialisation, and the expansion of an internal market.

McNally’s focus on incorporating slave-produced cotton into global markets causes him to blend these distinctions. However, being part of a world market does not define how the cotton is produced. Merchant capital has historically shown no concern for the social systems involved in trade.¹³ Manchester manufacturers buying cotton from slave plantations does not make the plantations capitalist, just as medieval merchants purchasing wool from feudal estates does not turn those estates capitalist. By confusing exchange relations with relations of production, McNally undermines the analytical framework necessary for Marxist historical analysis. 

The Civil War and the Consequences of Conceptual Collapse

The merging of slavery and capitalism profoundly impacts how we interpret the American Civil War. If slavery is viewed as a form of capitalism, then the North-South conflict appears as an internal struggle within the same system, rather than a revolutionary clash between fundamentally different modes of production.¹⁴

This interpretation cannot explain the secession of the slave states, the political economy of the planter class, the industrial and demographic bases of Union victory, or the revolutionary nature of emancipation. Marx himself acknowledged the Civil War as a revolutionary conflict between free and enslaved labour.¹⁵ To collapse the two systems into one is to obscure the historical significance of the war and to undermine the Marxist understanding of its causes and consequences.

Marx, Engels, and the American Civil War: Capital, Free Labour, and the Revolutionary Destruction of Slavery

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels closely examined the American Civil War, creating over fifty articles and letters from 1861 to 1865 that analysed the conflict, its class struggles, and its international implications.¹⁶ Their writings represent the most comprehensive engagement by nineteenth-century socialist thinkers with the issue of slavery and its link to capitalism. Unlike modern views that see slavery as a form of capitalism, Marx and Engels emphasised the fundamental differences between the two systems. They viewed the Civil War not as an internal conflict within capitalism but as a revolutionary clash between two different modes of production: slave labour and free wage labour.¹⁷

Marx and Engels on Slavery as a Distinct Mode of Production

Marx’s analysis of slavery is based on his overall theory of modes of production. In Capital, he differentiates slave labour from capitalist wage labour through the nature of property relations. In slavery, “the labourer himself is sold as a commodity,” while in capitalism, “the worker sells his labour-power.”¹⁸

This distinction was not just legal but structural, influencing how accumulation, production, class relations, and political structures developed. Marx and Engels often pointed out that enslaved individuals in the South were not capitalists. In a 1861 article for Die Presse, Marx described the South as embodying “a specific mode of production based on slavery,” with its expansion driven by the limitations inherent in slave labour.¹⁹ Engels, writing to Marx in 1862, described the planters as “a quasi‑feudal aristocracy” whose economic interests were fundamentally opposed to those of the northern bourgeoisie.²⁰ This analytical distinction is central to their interpretation of the Civil War.

Free Labour and the Dynamics of Capitalist Development

In the mid-1800s, Marx and Engels regarded the North as the most advanced example of capitalism. Its industrial expansion, expanding domestic market, and reliance on free wage labour demonstrated its clear alignment with the process of capitalist accumulation.²¹

Marx argued that free labour was the necessary foundation of capitalist development because it created a mobile, commodified labour‑power and compelled constant technological innovation. Slave labour, by contrast, was economically stagnant, technologically conservative, and dependent on territorial expansion to maintain profitability.²² This divergence produced a structural antagonism between North and South.

The Civil War as a Revolutionary Conflict Between Modes of Production

Marx and Engels viewed the Civil War as a revolutionary conflict between opposing social systems. In an 1861 article, Marx described the conflict as “a war of two social systems,” emphasising it was more than just a political disagreement.²³ The South aimed to maintain a slave-based economy, while the North, despite initial doubts, was driven by the conflict's logic to abolish slavery. Engels was clearer, stating in an 1863 letter that the war would “necessarily lead to the abolition of slavery,” as the Union couldn't defeat the Confederacy without disrupting its economic basis.²⁴ This interpretation stands in stark contrast to contemporary frameworks that treat the Civil War as a conflict internal to capitalism.

Emancipation and the Transformation of the War

Marx praised the Emancipation Proclamation as a pivotal step in the revolution. In his 1863 speech for the International Working Men’s Association, he stated that Abraham Lincoln had “inaugurated a new era of the ascendant working class. .²⁵ Emancipation changed the war from merely defending the Union into a revolutionary attack on slavery. Marx and Engels highlighted the active role of enslaved people, pointing out that widespread self-emancipation—such as fleeing to Union forces, stopping work, and fighting—was crucial in weakening the Confederacy.²⁶.

VI. The Global Significance of the Civil War

Marx and Engels regarded the Civil War as a significant moment in world history. They believed that abolishing slavery in the United States would eliminate a major barrier to the growth of the global labour movement.²⁷ Engels noted that the British working class overwhelmingly supported the Union despite the cotton famine, demonstrating the international solidarity of labour against slavery. This solidarity was, for Marx and Engels, evidence that the struggle against slavery was inseparable from the struggle for socialism.²⁸

Marx and Engels Against the Collapse of Historical Categories

Marx and Engels’ analysis sharply differs from modern interpretations that conflate slavery and capitalism into one system. Their works emphasise the structural differences between enslaved people and the capitalist modes of production, highlight the revolutionary significance of the Civil War, and underline the importance of free labour in the development of capitalism.²⁹ To treat slavery as capitalism is to negate the theoretical foundations of their analysis and to render the Civil War historically unintelligible.

Marx and Engels’ writings on the American Civil War represent a highly detailed analysis of slavery, capitalism, and revolutionary change in nineteenth-century political thought. Their focus on the fundamental conflict between enslaved people and capitalist modes of production provides clarity that remains vital in modern historiography. At a time when the line between slavery and capitalism is becoming increasingly unclear, their analysis offers a solid alternative based on historical materialism. It emphasises the revolutionary importance of the Civil War and reaffirms the essential role of free labour in the development of capitalism.

Political Implications: Race, Class, and the Contemporary Left

The breakdown of the connection between slavery and capitalism in historiography has political implications. If slavery is seen as a form of capitalism, then racial oppression appears as a permanent aspect of American society, rather than a historically specific form of domination rooted in particular social relationships.³⁰ This framework aligns, however unintentionally, with the racialist politics that have gained prominence in contemporary liberal and pseudo‑left circles.

McNally’s political background within the International Socialist Organisation (ISO) is significant here. The ISO’s politics were influenced by the interests of the professional-managerial class, frequently substituting racial categories for class analysis. Although McNally’s scholarship is more precise than the ISO’s public messaging, his analytical approach still tends to blur class boundaries and align with dominant ideological trends.³¹

Conclusion

David McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism is a serious and ambitious contribution to a contentious field. Its empirical material is valuable, and its engagement with Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation is welcome. However, its conceptual framework ultimately reproduces the NHC’s central weakness: collapsing slavery and capitalism into a single system.

A Marxist historiography must maintain clear analytical distinctions between modes of production. Only by doing so can it adequately explain the origins and dynamics of the American Civil War and provide a coherent framework for understanding the persistence of racial oppression in the modern United States. McNally’s “New Marxist History,” despite its intentions, represents a retreat from this clarity.

ENDNOTES

1. David McNally, Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History (London: Verso, 2020), 3–5.
2. For an overview of the NHC, see Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014); Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
3. James Oakes, The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Norton, 2014), 12–15.
4. McNally, Slavery and Capitalism, 27–30.
5. Ibid., 41–45.
6. Beckert, Empire of Cotton; Baptist, Half Has Never Been Told; Johnson, River of Dark Dreams; Matthew Desmond, “To Understand the Brutality of American Capitalism, You Have to Start on the Plantation,” New York Times Magazine, August 14, 2019.
7. Oakes, Scorpion’s Sting, 14.
8. Nikole Hannah‑Jones, “Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written,” New York Times Magazine, August 14, 2019.
9. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 915–926.
10. Ibid., 915.
11. Marx, Capital, 270–72.
12. Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery (New York: Pantheon, 1965), 7–12.
13. Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre‑Industrial Europe,” Past & Present 70 (1976): 30–75.
14. For a critique of this collapse, see Charles Post, The American Road to Capitalism (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 45–52.
15. Karl Marx, “The North American Civil War,” Die Presse, October 20, 1861.
16. See the collection in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Civil War in the United States (New York: International Publishers, 1937).
17. Marx, “The North American Civil War.”
18. Marx, Capital, 271.
19. Marx, “The North American Civil War.”
20. Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, June 1862, in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 41 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1986), 389.
21. Marx, Capital, 713–15.
22. Ibid., 716–20.
23. Marx, “The North American Civil War.”
24. Engels to Marx, January 1863, in MECW, vol. 41, 453.
25. Karl Marx, “Address of the International Working Men’s Association to Abraham Lincoln,” January 1863.
26. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935), 67–108.
27. Marx, “Address to Lincoln.”
28. Engels to Marx, February 1863, in MECW, vol. 41, 470.
29. Marx, Capital, 270–72; Engels to Marx, June 1862.
30. Adolph Reed Jr., “The Limits of Anti‑Racism,” Left Business Observer 121 (2009).
31. For a critical history of the ISO’s political evolution, see Paul D’Amato, The Meaning of Marxism (Chicago: Haymarket, 2006), though the ISO’s later racial‑political turn is better analysed in Reed, “Limits of Anti‑Racism.”

 

  

The Limits of Bourgeois Reformism in the Debate on Sex Work and the Commodification of Intimacy

Benjamin Weil’s article, despite its focus on inequality, precarity, and platform economy hierarchies, remains firmly within the realm of bourgeois reformism. Its goal is the ongoing survival of capitalism, presented more benignly with an “inclusive” regulatory approach. Using the language of solidarity and rights, Weil’s suggestions essentially amount to requesting that the capitalist state better oversee the exploitation it already oversees.[1]

To grasp why this framework remains politically sterile, it is essential to start from the Marxist view that the commodification of human intimacy is not an anomaly but a fundamental aspect of capitalist social relations.

The Commodification of Intimacy: A Product of Capitalist Social Relations

The article’s core slogan—“sex work is work”—is viewed as a political goal, meant to be recognised through legislation and state support. However, while this view helps defend against criminalisation, it hides a deeper truth: under capitalism, all things are transformed into work because they become commodities. The real question isn’t whether selling sexual services counts as "work," but rather the social system that forces people to sell their bodies, time, emotions, and innermost abilities to get by.

Marx and Engels vividly outlined this dynamic. In The Communist Manifesto, the authors argue that the bourgeoisie has reduced human relationships to self-interest and monetary exchange, converting all human worth into “exchange value.” The rise of OnlyFans does not signal a democratisation of pornography. Still, it continues this logic into the most personal areas of life, driven by algorithms, payment systems, and the global economy. The platform economy doesn't free people; it monetises their activities. It doesn't give power; it extracts it. It doesn't promote democracy; it creates stratification.

The Pseudo‑Left’s Framework: Reform Without Revolution

Benjamin Weil accurately points out the incoherence of the “sex worker” label and the absurd spectacle of celebrities using the slogan for their own branding. However, his proposed solution — “solidarity from top to bottom” and “permanent protections” provided by the capitalist state — leads to a political dead end.

The capitalist state does not serve as a neutral protector of rights; instead, it functions as a tool for class domination. Its laws—such as FOSTA-SESTA and the Earn It Act—have repeatedly increased efforts to criminalise, monitor, and marginalise sex workers. Asking this state for protection is like requesting the arsonist to control the fire.

This represents the typical approach of identity-based reformism: recognising a genuine social harm and attempting to fix it within the existing system that causes it. It struggles to conceive of a world beyond capitalism and advocates only for kinder management of capitalist exploitation.

What the Article Cannot Theorise: Inequality as a Structural Feature, Not a Distortion

The article criticises how earnings are concentrated among the top 1 per cent of creators, highlights the racial biases embedded in platform algorithms, and discusses the gap between celebrity “sex workers” and those pushed into online sexual labour out of economic necessity. However, it views these issues as distortions within an otherwise legitimate industry.

This is a significant misconception. These inequalities are not exceptions but rather the usual operation of capitalism. The gig economy—exemplified by OnlyFans—is capitalism in its most current and pure form: removing employer responsibilities, fragmenting workers, and transferring all risks to individuals.

David Walsh’s analysis of singer Kate Nash’s shift to OnlyFans highlights a broader social issue: a society that marginalises its artists, pushing them into pornography out of shame and neglect. This also reflects the millions who, during the pandemic, turned to online sexual work—not because they felt empowered, but because capitalism provided no alternative for their survival.

The pseudo-left uses terms like “agency,” “choice,” and “bodily autonomy” to mask underlying coercion. It presents economic pressure as a form of self-expression.

The “Sex‑Positive” Industry: A Pseudo‑Left Apologia for Capitalist Degradation

Today, few ideological groups are as reactionary yet as skillfully marketed as the NGO and academic “sex-positive" industry labelled as "progressive." Operating under the guise of empowerment, autonomy, and liberation, this scene acts as a political cleanser: it disguises capitalist exploitation as a colourful array of “choices." This sector serves as the ideological extension of a large commercial system that gains from turning intimacy into a commodity, fragmenting social life, and capitalising on the desperation of millions.

Rather than contesting the social pressures that force people to commodify their bodies, the sex-positive industry instead celebrates this tendency as a form of self-expression. It serves as an ideal ideological partner to a system that has turned every aspect of human capability—physical, emotional, and sexual—into a marketable good.

The Ideological Function of “Sex Positivity”

The sex-positive framework didn't arise as a bold critique of capitalist morality. Instead, it functions as a market-friendly rebrand of sexual commodification. Its main principles — “agency,” “choice,” and "empowerment” — are directly borrowed from neoliberal ideology. These same ideas are applied to defend zero-hour contracts, gig-economy insecurity, and the reduction of social protections.

When NGOs, academics, and media personalities promote "sex positivity," it often comes across as a moral obligation: people are expected to embrace the commodification of intimacy, or else be labelled prudish, conservative, or "anti-sex," which is a severe criticism in this context. This does not represent true liberation. Instead, it acts as a form of censorship against dissent, all in the interest of capitalism.

The NGO‑Academic Complex: A New Clerisy of Capitalist Morality

The sex-positive industry depends on a complex network of NGOs, foundations, university departments, and media outlets. Their funding comes from sources like corporate philanthropy, tech companies, and state-aligned foundations, underscoring their class affiliation. Instead of opposing capitalism, they act as its ideological subcontractors.

These institutions primarily perform three roles: They depoliticise exploitation by presenting sexual commodification as just another form of 'work,' thereby concealing the underlying coercive structures that force millions into it. They individualise systemic issues by framing poverty, unemployment, and social neglect as personal “choices” that lead to entry into the industry. Additionally, they lend moral legitimacy to capitalist platforms, with companies like OnlyFans and Pornhub described as “empowering tools' instead of profit-driven entities that benefit from human desperation. This creates an ideological framework that turns capitalist exploitation into a lifestyle brand.

The Academic Wing: Postmodern Apologetics for Exploitation

Scholars supporting the sex-positive industry—mainly from gender studies and postmodern theory—have developed a language that obscures exploitation. Their terminology mixes Foucauldian micro-politics, intersectional terms, and neoliberal voluntarism. For example: coercion is called “choice,” economic desperation is labelled “agency,” alienation is described as “self-expression,” and platform exploitation is termed “entrepreneurship.” This is not genuine scholarship but ideological obscuration.

These scholars view the capitalist market as a neutral space where people negotiate meaning, identity, and pleasure. They are unable to imagine social relations beyond the commodity form because their entire theoretical framework rests on rejecting the concept of class.

NGOs and the Business of “Empowerment”

The NGO sector has realised that promoting "sex positivity” is a profitable brand. They offer numerous workshops, conferences, “empowerment” seminars, and consulting services. Although they claim to "support sex workers," their true role is to divert discontent from class struggle, focusing instead on seeking state recognition, regulatory changes, and philanthropic funding. Their political outlook is rooted in sustaining capitalism, masked with an inclusive, rainbow-colored image. Rather than fighting exploitation, they tend to manage it.

The Pseudo‑Left’s Role: Sanitising the Market

The pseudo-left, which includes the DSA-influenced scene in the US, the NGO-Labourist groups in Britain, and similar organisations worldwide, has fervently embraced sex-positive ideology. This change is deliberate. These groups have abandoned their socialist roots and now prioritise lifestyle, identity, and personal expression over the goal of dismantling capitalist property systems.

For these individuals, turning intimacy into a commodity isn’t seen as a social tragedy but as a form of “resistance.” They praise the entrepreneurial “creativity” of OnlyFans creators, ignoring broader problems like unemployment, declining wages, and weak social safety nets that push people toward these platforms. Their viewpoint promotes recognising, regulating, and even celebrating exploitation instead of eliminating it.

What the Sex‑Positive Industry Cannot Admit

The sex-positive movement often overlooks the essential fact that prostitution, pornography, and the commercialisation of intimacy are rooted in a class society. Engels showed that these issues emerge alongside private property and the oppression of women. They are not timeless, natural, or solely expressions of freedom; rather, they are manifestations of alienation.

Accepting this would mean recognising that true liberation depends on dismantling capitalism, which would immediately cut the sex-positive industry off from its sources of funding, institutional backing, and ideological roots. Therefore, they hold on to the illusion that the market can be made more humane, that exploitation can serve as a form of empowerment, and that commodification can lead to liberation.

The Marxist Position: Abolition, Not Celebration

Marxists oppose the core idea of the sex-positive industry: that turning intimacy into a commodity aligns with human freedom. Their goal isn’t to sanitise or destigmatise exploitation but to eliminate the social relations that enable it.

A socialist society, characterised by collective ownership and democratic control of the means of production, would remove the economic pressures that push people into commodified sexual labour. It would establish the material basis for truly free human relationships, free from monetary influence. The sex-positive industry struggles to envision such a society. Marxists are actively working to create it.

Conclusion: The Pseudo‑Left’s Moral Bankruptcy

The NGO-academic sex-positive industry does not truly promote liberation. Instead, it acts as a complex ideological tool that justifies capitalist exploitation by masquerading as empowerment. Its role is to persuade individuals to accept their own degradation, turning structural coercion into a matter of personal choice, and to frame the commodification of intimacy as a victory for autonomy.

Marxists oppose this reactionary politics by advocating for the struggle for socialism, which is the only way to create a society where people no longer have to sell their bodies, emotions, or intimacy to get by.

The Historical Materialist Perspective: Prostitution as a Product of Class Society

Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, argued that prostitution and the sexual double standard are not innate aspects of human existence but are shaped by class society — particularly the monogamous family structure that emerged alongside private property. The commercialisation of sexuality is inherently linked to the broader commodification of labour.

Viewing sex work as a fixed, natural category means abandoning the perspective of historical materialism. Alternatively, seeing it as a legitimate industry in need of improved regulation implies accepting the enduring nature of capitalist social relations.

The Real Solution: Abolition, Not Sanitisation

The working class cannot attain liberation by simply regulating how their bodies are commodified. The fight is not just for a “safe home to sell” sexual services, but for a society where nobody is forced to sell intimate access to their body.

This calls for more than just legislative change; it necessitates dismantling the capitalist system that equates all human interactions with exchange value. A socialist overhaul — including ending private ownership of production means and empowering the working class with democratic control over the economy — is essential for ending prostitution and the commercialisation of intimacy. Only in such a society can human relationships be freed from the cash nexus and reconstituted based on equality, solidarity, and genuine freedom.

The article’s call to “instate the obvious” flips reality. What needs to be established is not just acknowledging that “sex work is work,” but realising that a society based on the commodification of everything — including human intimacy — should be dismantled. Reform efforts cannot resolve capitalism’s contradictions; they can only contain them. Marxists’ role is not to humanise exploitation but to eliminate it.

 

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[1] Sex Work is (Gig) Work: Assessing the OnlyFans effect: Benjamin Weil

 The Baffler, MAY-JUN 2022, No. 63 (MAY-JUN 2022), pp. 78-86

BBC investigation into OnlyFans exposes the brutal reality of platform capitalism — and the political forces seeking to conceal it

 “What sort of society drives its artists into pornography? One that does not need virtually any of them—is, in fact, ashamed of them, and wishes them to be ashamed too. It wishes the artists had the same view of themselves that it does—as scoundrels capable of any degradation. After all, there is always the danger one of these “scoundrels” may hit a nerve with the public and expose the rottenness of the social order before tens of millions.”[1]

David Walsh

"The community of women is a condition which belongs entirely to bourgeois society and which today finds its complete expression in prostitution. But prostitution is based on private property and falls with it. Thus, communist society, instead of introducing a community of women, in fact abolishes it."

Frederick Engels— The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

"If you expel prostitution from society, you will unsettle everything on account of lusts."

Saint Augustine

The worst part about prostitution is that you're obliged not to sell sex only, but your humanity. That's the worst part of it: that what you're selling is your human dignity, not really so much in bed, but in accepting the agreement - in becoming a bought person.

Kate Millett

A BBC investigation has inadvertently torn the veil from one of the most profitable and ideologically protected sectors of the platform economy: the sexual content industry centred on OnlyFans. What the documentary reveals — and what it desperately attempts to obscure — is the operation of a system of exploitation inseparable from the social order defended by the British ruling class and its media apparatus.[2]

The investigation documents a world in which women are coerced, threatened, physically assaulted, and financially drained by predatory “managers” who openly describe their method as the “pimp method.” One agent, following a business model discussed in public Telegram forums, threatened to have a woman and her daughter “written off” before sending masked men to strangle her in her own home. As this article notes this is not an aberration but the norm: “he is following a business model that is discussed openly in these forums.”

Yet the BBC’s framing is entirely predictable. It isolates the most grotesque abuses, invokes the language of “modern slavery,” and calls for regulatory tinkering — all to prevent any examination of the capitalist foundations of the industry. 

A platform built on the commodification of human intimacy

OnlyFans, owned by Fenix International, generated $684 million in pre-tax profits last year. Its business model is simple: extract a 20 per cent rent from the sale of sexualized images and interactions, while disclaiming responsibility for the conditions under which this content is produced. The platform “takes its 20 per cent cut and washes its hands of everything else.”

This is the purest expression of the rentier logic of platform capitalism. OnlyFans does not produce content; it extracts value from the labour of others. It does not employ creators; it parasitises them. It does not police exploitation; it creates the conditions in which exploitation becomes the norm.

The OFM Empire Telegram group, with 24,000 members, functions as an open training ground for predatory extraction. Agents take 50–70 per cent of creators’ earnings, demand full account access, impose fines for leaving contracts, and enforce compliance through threats and violence. This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is the informal enforcement arm of a platform that relies on the atomization and desperation of its workforce.

The BBC’s ideological function: to contain, not expose

The BBC’s response exemplifies bourgeois journalism confronting the fallout of its social structure. The documentary references the Online Safety Act — a broad censorship tool aimed at suppressing political dissent — and features an interview with the UK’s anti-slavery commissioner, who describes the issue as “modern slavery.”

This framing is politically significant. Calling it “modern slavery” portrays extreme exploitation as a rare crime rather than a fundamental feature of capitalism. This allows the state to target a few offenders while leaving the economic forces that compel women into the industry unchallenged. The BBC’s stance “individualises exploitation, prosecutes the worst offenders, and leaves the economic structure that produces the desperation intact.” In doing so, the BBC isn’t exposing the system; it’s managing public outrage to ensure the system’s continuation.

The pseudo left’s role.

The BBC's probe into OnlyFans has triggered the expected reaction from the pseudo-left circle surrounding the Labour Party, NGOs, and the 'sex-positive' academic industry. Fearing that revelations of coercion, violence, and exploitative middlemen could threaten their rallying cry “sex work is work,” they have swiftly come to the platform economy's defence with fervour often seen among junior allies of capitalism.

Their stance is not just incorrect; it is politically regressive, lacking in theoretical credibility, and socially harmful. The so-called pseudo-left argues that the abuses reported by the BBC — including women being threatened, strangled, extorted, and robbed by “managers” employing the “pimp method” — are caused by too little regulation, not capitalism itself. Their repeated answer is always the same: increased oversight, more NGOs, and expanded “labour rights” for an industry fundamentally based on turning human intimacy into commodities.

This is not Marxism; it represents the ideology of the petty-bourgeois professional class, which sees commodification not as a social disaster but as a career opportunity. The pseudo-left views OnlyFans creators as ‘entrepreneurs’ needing better protections, and uses terms like “choice” and “agency which reflect the upper-middle-class worldview. This reflects the pseudo-left’s class stance: a segment disconnected from the working class and uninterested in challenging the profit-driven system.

“Sex work is work”: the slogan of capitalist realism.

The phrase “sex work is work”, often associated with the pseudo-left, is not an innovative idea; rather, it exemplifies capitalist realism—the notion that all human interactions must become commodities, and opposing this is seen as prudish or anti-sex. However, the women featured in the BBC documentary were not acting out of genuine ‘agency.’ Instead, economic hardship pushed them into an industry designed to profit from their bodies. The platform itself deliberately blurs the line between ‘content creation’ and outright sexual exploitation.”

The pseudo-left’s claim that this is merely another form of labour is comparable to the justification of child labour in the 19th century: “They choose to work. They need the money. Who are we to judge?” This is not liberation but capitulation. Their support for OnlyFans is deliberate, reflecting the material interests of a class that has embedded itself into the commodification of identity, sexuality, and self-presentation.

In this class, commodification is portrayed as empowerment, precarity as flexibility, exploitation as entrepreneurship, and the market as the definitive measure of value. These ideas serve as ideological tools of neoliberalism, framing capitalist relations around concepts such as “consent,” “agency,” and “self-expression.”

The women from the working class featured in the documentary — facing threats, assaults, and financial exploitation — are absent from the pseudo-left’s perspective. They serve as uncomfortable reminders that capitalism is not a space for self-promotion but a system rooted in coercion.

The pseudo left’s political function: to neutralise opposition to capitalism

The pseudo-left is essential in maintaining the stability of the capitalist system. By claiming that exploitation can be defined as “safe,” “ethical,” or “empowering,” they shift blame away from the system itself and onto individual bad actors. This tactic is similar to the BBC’s ideological strategy, which “individualises exploitation, prosecutes the worst offenders, and leaves the economic structure that produces the desperation intact.”

The pseudo-left adopts a progressive veneer, condemning 'pimp managers” but defending the platform that allows them. They criticise violence yet endorse the market that necessitates it. They push for regulation but oppose any challenge to the commodification of the human body. Their politics are not reformist but rather counter-revolutionary.

The Marxist position: abolition, not sanitisation

The Marxist view is straightforward: turning human intimacy into a commodity isn't a problem that rules can fix. It originates from social forces that erode stable jobs, weaken cultural work, and push millions into precarious survival strategies. “No amount of regulation can make the commodification of the human body humane.”

The pseudo-left opposes this stance because it dismisses Marxism, class analysis, and the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. It also rejects the idea that human relations should be freed from market forces. Instead, it functions as an ideological cover for the very system responsible for the horrors reported by the BBC. The working class must oppose the pseudo-left’s attempt to normalise exploitation. Fighting against the platform economy—such as OnlyFans, Uber, Deliveroo, Amazon, and the broader digital rentier capitalism—requires a revolutionary agenda: expropriating tech monopolies, abolishing the market in human intimacy, reimagining culture and labour as public goods, and building an independent socialist movement.

Predictably, the pseudo-left aligned with the Labour Party and NGOs will claim that “sex work is work,” asserting that the core issue is stigma and insufficient regulation. This stance effectively concedes to capitalism, cloaked in radical rhetoric. It normalises and accepts the commodification of deeply personal human relations as inevitable.

It views the OnlyFans creator as an “entrepreneur” in need of better labour protections, ignoring the fact that most women join the platform due to economic coercion. The document succinctly highlights this: “The language of ‘choice’ and ‘agency’ is the ideology of the upper-middle class, for whom OnlyFans might be a lucrative side hustle. For Rebecca from South Wales, it was a trap. “The pseudo left’s celebration of 'agency' is the moral alibi of the market. It is the same logic that hails Uber drivers as “micro entrepreneurs” while they sleep in their cars.

The BBC investigation should be viewed within the broader decline of sustainable income in the cultural and creative sectors. As highlighted even well-known artists like Kate Nash now incur losses on each performance and resort to platforms like OnlyFans to finance their tours. This is not due to personal shortcomings but results from factors such as streaming services paying just $0.00173 per play, touring expenses increasing by 40% since the pandemic, 80% of music revenue being captured by only 1% of artists, and the monopolisation of cultural production by a few large corporations.

Given these conditions, turning to sexual commodification is not a voluntary choice but a forced response to the collapse of stable, socially supported cultural work. OnlyFans is not an exception; it represents the inevitable outcome of neoliberal cultural production.

Why can't regulation humanise exploitation? The BBC’s suggestion of increasing regulation is deceptive. Regulation assumes that the market is legitimate, but the market for sexualized images isn’t a flawed part of the system; it’s a lucrative and growing sector of capitalism. The violence Rebecca endured isn’t an accident; it’s the way this market enforces itself, demanding continuous content creation even in desperate conditions.

“No regulation can humanise the commodification of the human body." The state cannot eliminate this exploitation because it is inherently designed to uphold the market. The socialist solution: eliminate the conditions that lead to commodification.

The only way forward is to eliminate the social conditions that force women into the platform economy, such as unstable jobs, social isolation, cultural monopolisation, and the reduction of all human interactions to market exchanges. This entails expropriating tech monopolies, socialising digital platforms, transforming cultural labour into a public good, and forming an independent political movement for workers. The violence reported by the BBC is not an isolated incident; it is capitalism laid bare without its ideological mask.

 

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[1] On contemporary music and musicians: What singer Kate Nash’s choice tells us. www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/12/23/hdgy-d23.html

[2] www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002xv2q/onlyfans-inside-the-machine

The Guardian as the House Organ of the Professional Managerial Class

Today, The Guardian serves more as an ideological hub for a privileged, self-satisfied professional-managerial class than as a traditional newspaper. Its editorial stance is driven not by the needs of the oppressed or working people, but by the concerns, ambitions, and economic interests of a narrow social group whose wealth and status rely on the stability of capitalism.1

Identity politics serves as the common language within this environment. It acts as an ideological tool that dissolves class conflicts, replacing them with a moral classification based on identities, privileges, and ‘‘positionalities.’’ The Guardian has adopted this perspective as a comprehensive interpretive model—one that accounts for everything except the fundamental structure of capitalist society. Consequently, the publication consistently champions notions of ‘‘justice’’ while upholding the social system that prevents true justice from being achieved.2

The Guardian’s identity-politics framework is based on a straightforward yet politically impactful idea: that race, gender, and sexuality are the main factors shaping social life, not class. This idea is not only incorrect but also reactionary in its political implications. 3

By framing social conflict as a clash between identity groups, the Guardian conceals the core opposition between the working class and capitalists. It shifts from material analysis to moral judgment, from structural critique to therapeutic talk, and from political action to personal confession. This isn't a mere coincidence but a reflection of the interests of a class that stands to lose much.

The Guardian’s racial discourse operates as a closed system, with core assumptions left unchallenged: that racial identity is a crucial political factor, that whiteness has a longstanding influence, and that the working class—especially its largest part—is inherently suspicious. In this view, social progress is attributed to elite-led “representation” rather than widespread activism. As a result, the working class is often seen as problematic—regarded as too backward, provincial, “privileged,” or overly white. The Guardian’s writers usually discuss workers with a mix of fear and condescension, akin to Victorian liberals’ view of the “dangerous classes.”

The Guardian’s approach to identity politics tends to erase historical context. It overlooks key events like the interracial strikes of the 1930s, the CIO’s extensive organising campaigns, multiracial alliances in the civil rights movement, and the integrated struggles of miners, autoworkers, and dockworkers. It also ignores the global history of socialist and anti-colonial movements rooted in class solidarity. Recognising these facts would mean accepting that racial divisions are not fixed or impossible to overcome—that, through struggle, the working class has repeatedly bridged racial divides.

Instead, the Guardian advances a historical narrative that portrays racial oppression as the only driving force in American and British history, while rendering class struggle invisible or disguising it as racial conflict. This is not true history; it is mythology used to suppress political engagement. The Guardian’s focus on identity politics serves a key political role: it redirects social anger from the capitalist system onto the working class itself.

By framing white workers as the main barrier to progress, the Guardian provides a convenient scapegoat for liberal capitalism's failures. This perspective helps the Democratic and Labour Parties, along with their wealthy supporters, avoid facing their own roles in austerity, war, inequality, and the dismantling of public services. Identity politics then serves as a moral excuse for a political elite that has long abandoned even superficial social reform. Consequently, the Guardian’s editorial stance benefits the ruling class by dividing and demoralising workers, reducing their political activism, while leaving the fundamental structures of capitalist power intact.

The Class Basis of Grundy’s Argument

This is why the paper favours academics like Saida Grundy. Her thesis—that white workers are inherently reactionary—mirrors the worldview of The Guardian rather than being an isolated view. Saida Grundy, a sociologist at Boston University, exemplifies the ideological stance of the current professional-managerial upper class. Rather than offering true scholarship or sociological analysis, her article acts as a political tool aimed at dividing the working class. Its goal is to “sow division, contempt, and fatalism,” serving as a pseudo-intellectual justification for the Democratic Party’s shift away from class-based politics towards racialist frameworks.

Grundy’s argument is based on the material interests of the wealthy upper-middle class she represents. Her claim that white workers “choose racial domination over putting food on the table" is not only factually questionable but also mirrors the political fears of a social group that depends on maintaining capitalism and suppressing class consciousness.

This argument aligns with a broader ideological view that emphasises racial identity over class as the main focus of political analysis. It weakens universalist politics and portrays most of the American working class as inherently reactionary. This perspective favours a privileged group that views both white and non-white workers with distrust and hostility.

The Falsification of Electoral Reality

Grundy argues that white workers mostly vote Republican because of racial hostility. However, this claim is based on misleading and biased data. The main story of the 2016 U.S. presidential election was not the large number of white workers switching to Trump, but rather the nearly 99 million eligible voters who abstained, reflecting widespread disillusionment with both capitalist parties. Among those who did vote, economic issues were the dominant concern.4

The 2020 election highlights the limitations of the racialist narrative.5 Joseph Biden’s wins were mostly among white workers, especially those without college degrees. Conversely, Trump saw increased support from wealthier African American, Latino, and LGBT voters. These patterns suggest that economic class, not racial identity, is the key factor influencing voting behaviour. Grundy’s framework misses this fact, as it relies on dismissing class differences and replacing them with racial essentialism. This approach aligns with the Democratic Party’s political aims and the social groups it represents.6

The Cynical Abuse of W.E.B. Du Bois

Grundy references W.E.B. Du Bois’s idea of the “psychological wages of whiteness” to bolster her argument. However, this use significantly warps Du Bois’s original Marxist analysis.7

In Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois contended that the Southern elite used the concept of a “public and psychological wage” to persuade poor whites to accept their economic exploitation.  Importantly, Du Bois saw this as a tactic by the ruling class to hinder interracial working-class unity.8

Grundy challenges this analysis by framing the “psychological wages” as an inherent trait of white workers, rather than as a historically specific tool used by the bourgeoisie. This shift not only distorts Du Bois’s argument but also removes its revolutionary significance. The document highlights that Grundy’s reinterpretation is effectively “a betrayal of Du Bois’s Marxist method.”

Erasing the History of Interracial Class Struggle

Grundy’s narrative reflects the racial essentialism seen in the 1619 Project, portraying American history as an ongoing lineage of white supremacy and omitting the importance of class struggle.

This depiction is historically incorrect. U.S. history features many instances of working-class solidarity across races, such as the CIO's extensive organising in the 1930s, multiracial wildcat strikes post-World War II, and civil rights-era movements driven by socialist and labour activists.9

These episodes show that racial divisions, though real and historically important, are neither fixed nor insurmountable. Eliminating these divisions is essential for Grundy’s argument, which relies on depicting white workers as naturally opposed to progress. As the document notes, recognising this history would “expose the bankruptcy of her racial essentialism.”

The Political Function: Justifying the Democrats’ Rightward Turn

Grundy’s article functions more as a political statement than an academic analysis. Its goal is to defend the Democratic Party’s emphasis on Wall Street, intelligence agencies, and the affluent upper-middle class.10

If white workers are viewed as hopelessly racist, the Democratic Party need not prioritise their economic issues. Instead, it can continue to support the financial elite while advocating for "racial justice." This approach advantages a privileged social segment that fears the working class more than the far right. The Guardian is central to this strategy, acting as a hub for racialist politics promoted by the professional-managerial class.

The Socialist Alternative

This article challenges racialist myths by emphasising the unity of the American working class, described as "the most diverse in the world" and including people of all races, nationalities, and backgrounds. Their commonality lies not in their individual identities but in their shared relationship to the means of production. Socialists seek to build a movement that bridges racial gaps and promotes the collective class interests of all workers. Racialist ideas—whether promoted by The Guardian, the Democratic Party, or the identity-politics scholarly industry—are employed by the ruling class as tools to prevent the development of a united, politically conscious working class.

The solution to Trumpism is not to demonise white workers, but to build a revolutionary socialist party that can lead the working class in its fight against capitalism.

Notes

1.   “It is not scholarship. It is not an analysis. It is a political weapon aimed squarely at the working class…”

2.   Ibid.

3.   For analysis of identity politics as a class ideology, see Adolph Reed Jr., Class Notes (New York: New Press, 2000).

4.   “The abstention of 99 million eligible voters…”

5.   See Pew Research Centre, “Voters’ Issue Priorities in 2016,” 2016.

6.   “Biden’s gains came from white workers… Trump increased his support among wealthier African American, Latino, and LGBT voters”.

7.   W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935), 700–701.

8.   “This is a falsification of history and a betrayal of Du Bois’s Marxist method”.

9.   See Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).

10.See Jeremy Brecher, Strike! (Boston: South End Press, 1997).