One-Way Street and Other Writings -Walter Benjamin-Penguin 17 May 2016 £10.99

“The angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”

Walter Benjamin

"Even the Dead Won't Be Safe": Walter Benjamin

"Influential individuals can change the individual features of events and some of their particular consequences, but they cannot change their general trend, which is determined by other forces".

Georgi Plekhanov

 "A great man is precisely a beginner because he sees further than others".

Georgi Plekhanov

"A rich old man dies; disturbed at the poverty in the world, in his will he leaves a large sum to set up an institute which will do research on the source of this poverty, which is, of course, himself."

Bertolt Brecht

In 1931, Walter Benjamin wrote in his diary that Bertolt Brecht “maintained that there were good reasons for thinking that Trotsky was the greatest living European writer.”[1]

Benjamin never met Trotsky but was clearly influenced by him, as these essays in One-Way Street show. The book is indispensable for readers of culture and politics. They combine literary form, philosophical insight and social diagnosis. Benjamin treats commodity society, urban life and mass culture as problems of cognition and political practice. Benjamin’s work is so contemporary that a systematic study of it prepares the reader to understand the crisis of culture under capitalism and what to do about it. Benjamin’s account of the commodification of experience, the loss of aura, and media’s role in shaping perception speaks directly to the age of digital capitalism: social media, algorithmic spectacle and the mass reproduction of imagery.

Born into a wealthy business family of assimilated Ashkenazi Jews in Berlin, Benjamin's formative years were spent in the shadow of the Weimar Republic, the crisis of European reformism and the rise of fascism.

As Leon Trotsky describes so beautifully, “The political situation in Germany is not only difficult but also educational, like when a bone breaks, the rupture in the life of the nation cuts through all tissue. The interrelationship between classes and parties—between social anatomy and political physiology—has rarely in any country come to light so vividly as today in Germany.

The social crisis tears away the conventional and exposes the real. Those who are in power today could have seemed to be nothing but ghosts not so long ago. Was the rule of monarchy and aristocracy not swept away in 1918? Obviously, the November Revolution did not do its work thoroughly enough. German Junkertum itself does not feel like a ghost. On the contrary, it is working to turn the German republic into a ghost.”[2]

Walter Benjamin’s work, especially the fragments gathered in One‑Way Street, his essays on mechanical reproduction, the Arcades Project and the “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, cannot be properly understood apart from the social and class dynamics of the Weimar Republic. A reader approaching Benjamin for the first time should see him as not an isolated intellectual or “aura‑minded” aesthete, but as a product of the crisis of German capitalism between the world wars: inflation, mass unemployment, the decomposition of bourgeois liberalism, the growth of mass culture and the political crisis that produced fascism.

The Weimar Republic (1918–1933) was a political shell overlying profound economic dislocations: wartime devastation, the burdens of imperialist indemnities, the crisis of international capitalism and the breakdown of pre‑war class compromises. These objective conditions shaped mass consciousness, German party politics and intellectual life.

As Plekhanov argued in his discussion of the role of the individual, historical circumstances give individuals their range of action—yet within those constraints, choices matter; neither voluntarism nor fatalism suffices. He writes, "Until the individual has won this freedom by heroic effort in philosophical thinking, he does not fully belong to himself, and his mental tortures are the shameful tribute he pays to external necessity that stands opposed to him".[3]

Benjamin’s perceptive fragments register both the objective sweep of history and the uncertain agency of cultural actors in that sweep. Benjamin’s analyses are a study of how capitalist social relations transform perception, memory and experience. His discussion of the “loss of aura” under mechanical reproduction and his montage‑style aphorisms in One‑Way Street register the ways commodity forms permeate everyday life—reducing experience to exchange, fragmenting historical consciousness, and producing the atomised subject susceptible to mass demagogy. Benjamin’s arcades and his attention to commodities are not mere literary motifs but critical categories for understanding how capitalist social relations shape consciousness and political possibility.

Walter Benjamin and Leon Trotsky

At the level of ideas and political practice, Walter Benjamin and Leon Trotsky represent two very different responses to the convulsions of early 20th-century capitalism. Placed within the materialist conception of history, their approaches flow from distinct social positions, class relations and political perspectives.

To understand their difference is to grasp how material conditions and class struggle shape theory, not merely by individual brilliance, which both of course had. The material conditions that produced both figures matter. Benjamin wrote amid the collapse of European democracies and the rise of fascism, a context that informed his aphoristic, crisis-lit reflections. Trotsky’s analysis emerged from active leadership in revolutionary struggle and the bitter experience of Stalinist counterrevolution—hence his sustained emphasis on the need for an international revolutionary party and the critique of bureaucratic degeneration.

Trotsky’s writings epitomise Marxist historical materialism and the dialectical method: theory as a scientific instrument for analysing capitalist contradictions and guiding revolutionary practice. His essays on culture—most famously Literature and Revolution and Culture and Socialism—argue that the working class must appropriate the accumulated achievements of past culture, master technique, and subordinate aesthetics to the objective task of socialist transformation while resisting crude reductionism.

Trotsky’s approach to technology was groundbreaking; writing in Culture and Socialism, one of the notes lying before me asks, "Does culture drive technology, or technology culture?" This is the wrong way to pose the question. Technology cannot be counterposed to culture, for it is culture's mainspring. Without technology, there is no culture. The growth of technology drives culture forward. But the science and broader culture that arise from technology give powerful impetus to its growth. Here, there is a dialectical interaction.”[4]

Benjamin, by contrast, was a philosophically rich and often melancholic critic whose writings—flashing with literary insight—tend toward allegory, aesthetics and a messianic conception of history. In works such as “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which is not in this book, he wrote The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. [5]

Benjamin emphasises interruption, memory and a theological-materialist image of history that foregrounds the ruins and suffering of the past. His thought is dense with literary metaphor and emphasises the ethical task of remembrance rather than programmatic political strategy. Crucially, Benjamin does not treat culture as epiphenomenal in a trivial sense. Cultural forms mediate class struggle; they can both mask and reveal social contradictions. But from a Marxist standpoint, these cultural phenomena are rooted in the material base. They must be understood as follows: changes in production, mass media, and social organisation produce new forms of ideology and temperament. This dialectical relation—base shaping the superstructure, and superstructural forms feeding back into class politics—must guide our reading of Benjamin.

Benjamin’s Attitude Towards Fascism

Benjamin’s writings were composed amid the disintegration of democratic institutions and the rise of fascist movements that exploited cultural resentment, myth and a politics of destiny. A political materialist account links cultural shifts to the left's organisational weaknesses. Trotsky’s warning that revolutions and counter‑revolutions hinge on party preparedness and leadership is instructive: cultural critique without programmatic and organisational content cannot substitute for political intervention. Benjamin’s diagnosis of the cultural terrain is thus necessary but insufficient on its own. It needs to be welded to a program that organises the working class to resist and seize power.

Benjamin had a fatalistic attitude towards the rise of fascism, expressed in this quote: “The angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”

Some time after writing these lines, Benjamin, fleeing the Nazis, took his own life in 1940. His personal situation was desperate; stranded on the French-Spanish border, he anticipated his own immediate arrest by the Nazis. On the one hand, the pessimistic viewpoint expressed in that citation stemmed from personal despair. At the same time, it was nourished by confusion arising from unresolved questions concerning the rise of fascism in Europe and the political degeneration of the Soviet Union under Stalinism.

Benjamin, who was familiar with Trotsky's writings, knew that Stalin had murdered almost all his left-wing opponents and had formed an alliance with Hitler. Nevertheless, among broad circles of intellectuals, some supported Stalin as the only way to avert the emergence of a fascist Europe. The extension of Stalinism into Eastern Europe after the war helped thwart layers of the intelligentsia from coming to grips with this issue. Benjamin did not end his life a supporter of Stalin. But his friends in the Frankfurt School certainly, and like Benjamin, had no faith in the revolutionary capacity of the international working class.

Benjamin’s work remains valuable for understanding ideology, media and memory in the age of social media, targeted advertising and spectacle. He offers the reader an indispensable tool for understanding how capitalist modernity shapes thought and feeling. It will take a classical Marxist to synthesise these insights with a rigorous, materialist account of capitalism’s laws and with a program for proletarian organisation and struggle.

NOTES

Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999)

The IIRE is working on a new collection of Trotsky's writings on fascism. This new translation of a 1932 article by Trotsky is part of this project. This article was originally published in the journal Die Weltbühne ('The World Stage'). Die Weltbühne was an important journal of the Independent intellectual left during the Weimar Republic. Cooperators and contributors included Carl von Ossietzky, Kurt Hiller, Erich Mühsam, Fritz Sternberg, Heinrich Ströbel, Kurt Tucholsky and others.

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[1] Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), p. 477.

[2] Leon Trotsky: The German Enigma-https://www.iire.org/node/1003

[3] On the Role of the Individual in History-www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1898/xx/individual.html

[4] Culture and Socialism – 1927-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/10/cult-o23.html

[5] Theses on the Philosophy of History-

Review: Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R. F. Kuang. Harper Voyager, 2022. 560 pages.

 

"I heard a traveller from an antique land….” (Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias” (quoted in Kuang 147) 

“She learned, in fact, that revolution is always unimaginable. It shatters the world you know. The future is unwritten, brimming with potential”

R F Kuang’s-Babel

“The historical significance and the moral grandeur of the proletarian revolution consists in the fact that it is laying the foundations of a culture that is above classes and which will be the first culture that is truly human.”

Leon Trotsky

'What is art? First of all, art is the cognition of life. Art is not the free play of fantasy, feelings and moods; art is not the expression of merely the subjective sensations and experiences of the poet; art is not assigned the goal of primarily awakening in the reader 'good feelings.' Like science, art cognises life. Both art and science have the same subject: life, reality. However, science analyses, art synthesises; science is abstract, art is concrete; science turns to the mind of man, art to his sensual nature. Science cognises life with the help of concepts, art with the aid of images in the form of living, sensual contemplation.'

Aleksandr Konstantinovich Voronsky,

R.F. Kuang’s Babel through a Marxist lens

It takes a brave and gifted writer to play fast and loose with British history and get away with it. However, the writer Rebecca F Kuang, who has a master's and two PHD’s, manages to pull this off with an erudition that belies her tender years.

R. F. Kuang’s “speculative fiction” is an attack on capitalism, or to be precise, British imperialism. In Babel, she quotes Frantz Fanon: “Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence”.

Of course, Kuang is free to quote whom she pleases, but Fanon is not the most healthy of anti-imperialist writers. Fanon (1925–1961) was a Martinique-born psychiatrist, anti-colonial theorist and participant in Algeria’s war of independence. His major works, most notably The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks, combined clinical experience, existential-philosophical reflection and militant polemic to expose the psychic and violent dimensions of colonial domination.

Fanon remains indispensable for understanding the brutality of imperialism, the profound psychological injuries inflicted on colonised peoples, and the legitimating role of national liberation as a political response to colonial oppression. However, his work tends to express an overemphasis on the peasantry and the “national” element. Fanon’s analyses sometimes valorise “the people” and guerrilla insurgency in ways that underplay the historically decisive role of the industrial working class as an emancipatory force.

Kuang was born in China but grew up in the United States. Aged 29, she has already written five books, has a list of impressive book awards and survived graduate work at both Oxford and Cambridge. Kuang’s first three books comprised a trilogy: The Poppy War (2018), The Dragon Republic (2019), and The Burning God (2020). Yellowface was published in 2023, and her latest Katabasis has just been published.[1]

Poppy Trilogy

Kuang’s The Poppy War trilogy is not a moral fable but works as a social document. In Kuang’s world, the countryside supplies labour, food and recruits. Peasants are dispossessed by landowners, corvée, and military levies; they are often the immediate constituency of insurgent movements. Urban workers, miners, artisans and the conscripted soldier class appear as the concentrated sites of industrial labour, political organisation and military potency.

In the novel, local merchants, industrialists tied to foreign capital, and landowning elites who broker deals with imperial powers function as a comprador class—they defend property, seek stability for capital accumulation, and will sell national sovereignty to protect their interests. The novel’s bureaucratic and military apparatus—police, generals, intelligence organs—is an embodiment of the state as an instrument of class rule. They administer repression, manage economic concessions and mediate between imperial interests and local elites.

To her credit, she warns against relying on nationalist elites or petty-bourgeois adventurism to carry out democratic or social reforms. In semi-colonial settings, the proletariat must assert independent leadership—organise urban workers, factory committees, soldiers’ committees, and alliances with the poor peasantry, rather than subordinating itself to comprador regimes.

Despite her tender age, Kuang possesses a verbal brilliance and erudition probably unsurpassed by any novelist of her generation. She has mocked many sacred cows. In Yellowface, she attacks the right-wing MeToo# movement. She hates contemporary identity politics, which typically originates in petty‑bourgeois layers with ambitions inside the cultural and professional hierarchy of capitalism. Kuang came under heavy attack for writing Yellowface. The public dispute over the book's accusers that an author has appropriated or misrepresented Asian experience cannot be reduced to questions of individual taste or moral purity. It is rooted in the concrete class relations and economic imperatives of the publishing industry.

At the surface level, the row frames itself as an ethical debate about representation. However, its intensity and public amplification are products of a crisis in cultural markets. Publishing has become an arena of intensified competition for scarce positions — advances, awards, media visibility — driven by conglomeration and profit-maximising behaviour. Large publishers, retailers and tech platforms compress cultural diversity into marketable identity niches, while promotional narratives and outrage cycles are monetised. The HarperCollins one‑day strike and workers’ testimonies show how publishing workers face low pay, expanded workloads, and corporate cost‑cutting even as firms seek cultural “brands” to sell; this creates an environment in which status and visibility are disproportionately valuable to authors and gatekeepers alike.

As the dispute over Yellowface shows, a writer does not write under conditions of his/her choosing, and artistic greatness is not something merely willed. Some periods are more favourable to genius than others. I am not saying Kuang is a genius, but the limitations of American intellectual life during the recent epoch will have shaped her. With a fascist gangster in the White House, it will be interesting to see how much she curses and kicks against the confines.

As the brilliant Marxist writer Leon Trotsky once wrote:” If environment expressed itself in novels, European science would not be breaking its head over the question of where the stories of A Thousand and One Nights were made, whether in Egypt, India, or Persia.” To say that man’s environment, including the artist’s, that is, the conditions of his education and life, finds expression in his art also, does not mean to say that such expression has a precise geographic, ethnographic and statistical character. It is not at all surprising that it is difficult to decide whether certain novels were made in Egypt, India or Persia, because the social conditions of these countries have much in common. However, the very fact that European science is “breaking its head” trying to solve this question, as these novels themselves show, indicates that these novels reflect an environment, even if unevenly.

No one can jump beyond himself. Even the ravings of an insane person contain nothing that the sick man had not received before from the outside world. However, it would be an insanity of another order to regard his ravings as the accurate reflection of an external world. Only an experienced and thoughtful psychiatrist who knows the patient's past will be able to find the reflected and distorted bits of reality in the ravings' contents. Artistic creation, of course, is not a raving, though it is also a deflection, a changing and a transformation of reality, in accordance with the peculiar laws of art. However fantastic art may be, it cannot have at its disposal any other material except that which is given to it by the world of three dimensions and by the narrower world of class society. Even when the artist creates heaven and hell, he merely transforms the experience of his own life into his phantasmagorias, almost to the point of his landlady’s unpaid bill”.[2]

Babel-Or the Necessity of Violence

Babel is set at 1830s Oxford University. Despite being labelled a historical novel, Kuang is adamant that it has lessons for today’s readers. In an interview, Kuang called her book “ a dark text of academia, saying, “ I love campus novels, dark academia novels. Moreover, I knew that when I finished the Poppy War trilogy, I was going to move on and do something in that genre. That is the setting in which I am most comfortable and familiar. Those are the interpersonal dynamics that I observe and most enjoy writing about—between students and rival students, students and teachers, etc.[3]

Roger Marheine writes “ Kuang pulls no punches in her scathing critique of Oxford professors who are either overt imperial agents of war (e.g. Robin’s father, Professor Lovell), willing dupes of imperial platitudes especially as they practice their daily craft within the very privileged confines of Oxfordian splendor, or specialists blissfully unaware of empire’s greater crimes as they live in academic cocoons and grasp only their own silo of knowledge. One of Oxford’s professors, Jerome Playfair, represents Kuang’s satirical comment on the British gentleman’s code of conduct, as they ruthlessly assert their global dominance.”[4]

Marheine is a pseudo-leftist and, like many on the radical left, echoes the Socialist Worker Party's sentiment that Kuang’s book is a "goldmine of revolutionary politics." While I am loath to downplay Kuang’s radical stance, she is not a Marxist, and this is not a socialist work of historical fiction. Some have argued that the book lacked nuance in its treatment of how characters from different marginalised backgrounds intersected with the imperial centre. There is a distinct lack of characters of a working-class background.

However, Rebecca F. Kuang’s fiction (notably The Poppy War trilogy and Babel) offers rich material for Marxist study: imperialism, ethnic division, bureaucracy, mass mobilisation, culture, and the politics of memory recur throughout her work.

Kuang’s critique of knowledge as imperial plunder in Babel does deserve a Marxist class analysis. Kuang’s Babel dramatises how the production, translation and curation of knowledge are woven into imperial accumulation. Her book shows that texts, languages and librarianship become commodities and instruments of state power. The novel makes visible several features of that process that are vital for organising library, academic and translation workers.

The main thread running through the book is that knowledge labour is expropriated and monetised. Kuang has clearly studied this barbaric practice because her book shows how scholarship and translation produce useful intellectual commodities, annotated corpora, glossaries, and archival order are appropriated by imperial institutions for political and economic advantage. The unpaid or underpaid labour of native speakers, archivists and junior scholars supplies content and expertise that enriches metropolitan libraries and universities, while the material rewards (funding, prestige, job security) flow to imperial centres. This mirrors the contemporary university’s transformation into a profit-generating arm of capital, in which millions of dollars in tuition and research funding are extracted. At the same time, adjuncts, librarians and translators remain precarious and low-paid.

Kuang is not overtly a Marxist; she does not mention Marx by name, but she does strive to present a materialist analysis of capitalism and empire. It would be very interesting to review her work in, say, five years to discover the extent to which it reflects the growth of fascist tendencies within world capitalism and how a growing radical working class can tackle this. Adopting a Marxist approach would give her already stunning work an even sharper edge, along with a much wider readership than this great writer has achieved so far.

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[1] keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2023/07/review-yellowface-by-rebecca-f-kuang.html

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

[3] www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/1570.R_F_Kuang

[4] Book Review: Babel by R. F. Kuang-mltoday.com/book-review-babel-by-r-f-kuang/

The Rise of Fake Academic Essays: A Marxist Analysis

According to journalist Robin McKie, writing recently in the Guardian, over 10,000 fake research papers have been published in journals, and these are the ones that have been caught. He believes this figure is just the tip of the iceberg.[1]

“The situation has become appalling,” said Professor Dorothy Bishop of Oxford University. “The level of publishing of fraudulent papers is creating serious problems for science. In many fields, it is becoming difficult to build up a cumulative approach to a subject because we lack a solid foundation of trustworthy findings. And it’s getting worse and worse. People are building careers on the back of this tidal wave of fraudulent science.’ 

Professor Alison Avenell of Aberdeen University said, “ Editors are not fulfilling their roles properly, and peer reviewers are not doing their jobs. And some are being paid large sums of money. “It is deeply worrying.”

The majority of these fake essays are being produced on an industrial scale by large-scale paper mills. An academic paper mill is a commercial operation that produces and sells fraudulent academic work — essays, term papers, theses, cover letters, peer‑reviewed articles, or entire datasets — to students, researchers, or institutions for a fee. Paper mills range from individual ghostwriters offering single essays to large, organised firms that produce fabricated research, manipulate authorship and citations, and systematically target journals and evaluation systems for profit. They are a symptom of the marketisation and commodification of higher education under capitalism.

Ivan Oransky believes “Part of what’s happening is that there’s an entire industry now, one might say an illicit industry or at least a black market, of paper mills,” he said. “A paper mill, and I heard a really good definition recently, is an organisation, a for-profit company, really, set up to falsify the scientific record somehow.”

The problem has become so vast that a growing number of websites, such as Retraction Watch, have been established to monitor this alarming situation. According to a study published in the magazine Nature, there were just over 1,000 retractions in 2013. In 2022, the figure topped 4,000 before jumping to more than 10,000 last year.

Professor Marcus Munafo of Bristol University was quoted as saying, “If you have growing numbers of researchers who are being strongly incentivised to publish just for the sake of publishing, while we have a growing number of journals making money from publishing the resulting articles, you have a perfect storm. That is exactly what we have now.” The use of generative AI to produce fraudulent academic work is not merely an individual moral failing or a technical problem; it is a social and political issue rooted in the commodification of education, the erosion of serious study, and the pressures imposed by capitalist labour markets, rather than providing instructions for misusing technology.

Passing off machine-generated text as one’s own substitutes appearance for understanding. The cheapening of academic credentials serves employers and the market, not the working class. From a Marxist standpoint, the proliferation of machine‑generated “fake” academic essays is not primarily a technical or ethical quirk of individual students: it is an outgrowth of the deeper social relations of capitalist education. Under capitalism, higher education is progressively commodified—turned into a service to be bought and sold, a pipeline for profitable labour and, increasingly, a supplier of research and skills to the military‑industrial complex. The phenomenon of fake essays, therefore, expresses class relations, market pressures and the crisis of public education.

Degrees have been transformed into commodities that certify employability. Many students, under debt and time pressures, view essays as means to an end, not as instruments of critical thought. The unequal access to quality instruction further pushes those under the greatest economic strain toward any available shortcut.

The erosion of collective knowledge and democratic control. When learning is reduced to transactional credentialing, the broadening of independent critical thought—essential for democratic working‑class organisation—is weakened. The result is a depoliticised cohort more vulnerable to managerial control and right‑wing reaction.

Historically, education has been both a terrain of class struggle and a crucible for political radicalisation. The bourgeoisie once used schooling to consolidate its rule; today, capital uses education to reproduce labour power for profit and war. The current trajectory—marketised universities, casualised labour, and the deployment of AI for managerial ends—mirrors earlier phases of capitalist restructuring that required a political response rooted in class organisation rather than technocratic fixes.

 

Notes

 

1.   retractionwatch.com

2.   More than 10,000 research papers were retracted in 2023 — a new record-Richard Van Noorden-Nature 12 December 2023

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[1] www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/03/the-situation-has-become-appalling-fake-scientific-papers-push-research-credibility-to-crisis-point

Robbie Lyle, Arsenal Fan TV and the political economy of fan media

Robbie Lyle is a very rich man, and his Arsenal Fan TV (AFTV) and his media empire are worth an estimated 6.8m. Lyle’s estimated wealth is around $5 million, largely attributed to the success of AFTV. The channel generates approximately $2 million annually, primarily through advertising and sponsorship deals. His YouTube channel has over 1.5 million subscribers and over a billion views.

Lyle is not simply a new phenomenon of internet celebrity or “fan culture. “His media empire is a product of the same capitalist restructuring that has transformed football into a global media commodity: a commercial ecosystem that converts working‑class passion into clicks, advertising revenue and political distraction. To understand the rise of AFTV, one should analyse the material forces that created it, its class function, and the tasks it poses for supporters who want to defend the club as a social, not purely commercial institution.

Over the last three decades, football has seen an unprecedented reorganisation around broadcast rights, sponsorship and private equity. Mega‑events and competitions are designed to concentrate revenue in the hands of owners, broadcasters and sponsors — as seen in the commercial logic behind FIFA’s World Cup build‑outs and the billionaire attempt to lock in revenues through the European Super League (World Cup 2006 commercialisation and political function.[1]

Robbie Lyle’s AFTV emerged as a consequence. Its model consists of over-passionate post‑match reactions, provocation, and personality‑driven content that fits perfectly with social‑media platforms that reward immediacy and outrage. It was this personality-driven content that fueled regular contributor Claude Callegari to make a racist comment about Tottenham Hotspur striker Son Heung-min during the North London derby in an AFTV video. Another so-called pundit, Lee Judge, commented that Arteta(Arsenal manager) showed "a little more effin bollocks" after a draw with Wolves. He also said in December 2024 that he wanted to "shoot" Martin Odegaard after a 0-0 draw with Everton. In 2025, the channel could not control the story when regular personality Julian Bucker was filmed trying to stop Lyle from being interviewed by another creator, Saeed TV, because Lyle was wearing a pro-Palestine badge.

Three years ago, AFTV presenter Liam Goodenough, known to viewers as 'Mr DT, was sentenced to three years in prison for stalking and kidnapping an ex-partner. He previously received a 12-month sentence and a 10-year restraining order for the same offences. AFTV was forced to issue a statement saying it was "utterly appalled and disgusted" by his actions and confirmed he would no longer appear on the platform. In a 2021 interview with The Athletic, Lyle said the situation was a "learning moment" for the channel. "That was a very rough moment," he said. "I knew he was in some problems, but I didn't know the full extent. I found out at the same time as everyone else. And it was shocking."

These negative attributes, however, do translate into views, advertising revenue, and brand partnerships. However, AFTV is not an outlet for authentic fan grievances about ticket prices, corporate ownership, and a lack of representation.

On the surface, channels like AFTV can seem both liberating and limiting. They give a voice to supporters denied influence by corporate owners, yet market logics shape that voice. Outrage, theatricality and polarising views win clicks; calm, strategic organising does not. This turns legitimate political sentiments into spectacle and fragments collective power into individual expression.

Robbie Lyle is a complex figure in this terrain. As a former Londoner embedded in supporter networks, he channels real fan feeling and often raises issues that echo wider social grievances. But his prominence has also made him a media mogul whose livelihood depends on producing content that performs for an audience and advertisers. The experience of many fans is therefore mediated through personalities and punditry rather than organisation.

AFTV emerged in this context. Platforms like it serve a dual role: they appear to give fans a voice, but they are also readily commodified—clicks, views, and outrage translate into advertising revenue, sponsorship deals, and influence. The anger of supporters is channelled into consumable content, packaged and sold back to the very actors (clubs, broadcasters, sponsors) responsible for the problems fans rightly oppose.

The commodification of fan culture serves class interests. It diverts pressure away from organising — from coordinating protests, supporting stadium workers, or demanding legal limits on financial speculation — into consumable episodes of frustration. The successful popular mobilisation against the Super League, by contrast, shows that when fans organise collectively and in the streets, they can force concessions; it was mass political action, not viral punditry, that delivered the outcome (the ESL collapse and fan mobilisation).

Left unchallenged, the logic behind AFTV and similar channels normalises a politics of spectatorship: fans as consumers whose only effective power is to withdraw spending or click “unfollow.” This is inadequate to resist the deeper enclosure of clubs as investment vehicles.

The commodification of fan culture serves the ruling‑class's interests. It diffuses anger into spectacle rather than organisation, fragments fans into consumers, and normalises the idea that clubs must be run as investors’ portfolios. This weakens the working‑class's capacity to reclaim football as a communal social good. Fans should move beyond clicks and performative outrage to collective organisation: form supporters’ unions, coordinate with players’ unions and stadium workers, and demand legal changes to prevent the predatory financialisation of clubs. Fans need to reclaim football from the market. Turn anger into organisation. Replace the commodity with a democratic, socialised sporting culture run in the interests of players and fans—not billionaires.

 

 

 

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

Workshop of the World: Essays in People’s History by Raphael Samuel, edited by John Merrick. Verso, 295 pp., £25,

Raphael Samuel (1934–1996) was a leading figure in post-war British historical culture. He was a Marxist/Stalinist-trained intellectual, a founder member of the History Workshop movement and the journal History Workshop, and a powerful advocate for what became known as “history from below”, the study of the social and cultural lives of ordinary people rather than ruling elites.

Samuel was not an orthodox historian by any stretch of the imagination. Anyone studying Samuel's archive at the Bishopsgate Institute would see that his note-taking and working methods were chaotic at best. According to Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite ‘ Each thought or reference to a source was written or pasted onto a single side of a loose sheet of paper. It might be the source itself – an advertisement, a jam-jar label or an extract from a Xerox – it mattered only that it was attributed and sub-headed under a theme. Then the notes were filed in groups. Scholarly prestidigitation allowed the pages to be constantly reshuffled so that new combinations of ideas appeared, presuppositions might be overturned, and surprising connections thereby be generated. All that was needed was reams of rough paper, scissors and a pot of glue, phalanxes of lever-arch files, and a hole-puncher.’[1]

His method and traits were learnt from Beatrice and Sidney Webb, progenitors of Fabian socialism, who developed it in the late 19th century. Samuel would have absorbed not only their note-taking style but a large chunk of their politics. But his work revitalised popular and local history, encouraged collective research methods, and brought working-class memory, oral testimony, and archival recovery into historians' practice. These are enduring gains. The recovery of workers' lived experience helps counter the abstractions and elitism of bourgeois historiography.

Before founding the Universities Left Review, Samuel was a member of the British Communist Party. He left two years after Kruschev’s secret speech. He was a very young member of the Communist Party Historians Group. The CPHG arose inside and around the British Communist Party and the wider milieu of Communist and labour politics between the 1930s and 1950s. Its best‑known members—E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill and others—produced influential work that challenged bourgeois and Whig traditions of national history and insisted on the agency of popular classes. The group’s scholarship should be read against the background of the political orientation of the Stalinist bureaucracy—its Popular Front politics, its nationalism and its accommodation to bourgeois forces—which indelibly affected the intellectual formation and institutional constraints faced by historians working within or alongside the Party.

The CPHG did, however, make enduring contributions to socialist historiography. It overturned Whig teleology, insisted that ordinary people make history, and enriched archival and methodological practice. These were advances that Marxists should defend and extend. However, the group's political roots in a Stalinist‑influenced party had concrete consequences. The Communist Party’s “People’s History” orientation and Popular Front politics tended to domesticate class conflict, subordinating proletarian independence to alliances with liberal or petty‑bourgeois currents. The result was, at times, an apologetic stance toward state bureaucracy and a reluctance to carry the political implications of Marxist analysis into the present.

Raphael Samuel and the Universities Left Review

Samuel was a leading British Marxist historian and a central figure in the post‑war “history from below” movement. He helped found the History Workshop and was associated with the small‑circulation left journals and intellectual networks that emerged in Britain in the 1950s and 60s, among them the Universities and Left Review (ULR). ULR (1957–60) brought together student radicals, young intellectuals and some socialist critics of the university and the Labour Party. It aimed to radicalise university life and cultural debate, critiquing orthodox academic history and promoting popular and labour history.

Samuel's main collaborator on ULR was Stuart Hall. Hall’s political and intellectual trajectory—from the Universities and Left Review (ULR) and the New Left to Cultural Studies and his later role in Marxism Today was the product of definite class formations, political realignments and the changing social position of layers of the intelligentsia after World War II. Hall’s work cannot be treated as an abstract contribution to theory divorced from the social interests it expresses.

As Paul Bond writes,‘ Hall’s central theme was the repudiation of the class struggle as the axis of social development, as this assumes that the working class is the decisive agent of political change. Instead, he argued for a turn to the cultural sphere. This was not a Marxist appraisal or critique of culture, but the elevation of “culture” as an arena contested by different “agencies”. Longtime Pabloite Tariq Ali wrote that Hall said, “half-joking to friends that his cultural studies project was politics by other means”. That indeed it was: a project that replaced class as the central political factor by race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality and other “sub-cultures” and “identities”, making it impossible, in the end, to address capitalist exploitation. Instead, the struggle had to be conducted in every supposedly “relatively autonomous” sphere. The logic led to garden-variety single-issue, bourgeois-reformist politics, as an article Hall co-authored last year made clear: “Mobilising resistance thus requires alliances of a sort which only a multi-focused political strategy can hope to construct”.[2]

From a historical‑materialist standpoint, the importance of Samuel, Hall and their ULR project lies less in any single programmatic contribution than in the social position they occupied: a layer of petty‑bourgeois intellectuals reacting to the crises of post‑war capitalism and the limitations of established reformist politics. Their cultural interventions—renewed attention to working‑class experience, local history and culture—were progressive in exposing bourgeois narratives and recuperating popular memory. Yet, understood in class terms, this milieu tended to substitute cultural critique for a political orientation to the working class as a revolutionary subject.

Samuel was in the Communist Party at the same time as the founder of People's History, A.L. Morton. As Ann Talbot brings out in her essay on Christopher Hill, "The Communist Party sponsored a form of 'People’s History', which is typified by A.L. Morton’s People’s History of England, in which the class character of earlier rebels, revolutionaries and popular leaders was obscured by regarding them all as representatives of a national revolutionary tradition. This historical approach reflected the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to internationalism and their attempts to form an unprincipled alliance with the supposedly democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis countries.

People’s history was an attempt to give some historical foundation to the policies of Popular Front—the subordination of the working class to supposedly progressive sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of political action to the defence of bourgeois democracy, which provided a democratic facade to the systematic murder of thousands of genuine revolutionaries, including Trotsky. It was the approach that Christopher Hill was trained in, along with E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, who were part of the Marxist Historians Group and came under the influence of Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr.’ [3]

The ULR and similar currents reflected objective social forces: a post‑war expansion of higher education, the growth of a politically conscious intelligentsia, and the fragmentation of the labour movement. These social origins explain both the strengths and limits of the project. Samuel’s cultivation of popular history responded to an objective weakness: official historiography ignored the working class. But the limitations were also objective: petty‑bourgeois layers, detached from a sustained orientation to working‑class organisation, are prone to turning working‑class culture into a form of moral critique rather than mobilising it as the basis for revolutionary political independence.

The lessons of Samuel and the ULR are twofold and complementary. First, recovering working‑class history and culture is necessary: it combats bourgeois erasure, builds pride, and strengthens class identity. Second—and decisive—cultural work must be subordinated to political orientation: it must be used to connect workers to a programmatic, internationalist Marxist perspective and to build rank‑and‑file organisation and a revolutionary party. Without that link, cultural renewal risks becoming an appendage of liberal reformism or of petty‑bourgeois radicalism.

Workshop of the World

Raphael Samuel’s essays, collected in this book, came under the rubric of a “people’s history”. They include material often associated with the idea of Britain as the “workshop of the world”. They do offer rich documentary and cultural evidence about working‑class life, memory and resistance. Samuel’s micro‑histories become instruments for understanding how material conditions, class formation and consciousness interact.

He helped institutionalise a new historical practice—through the History Workshop movement and collections of oral histories and local studies—that shifted attention away from great men and state archives toward popular culture, labour traditions and everyday life. This intervention broke important ground: it democratised history, widened the sources, and made working-class experience visible in ways that conventional academic histories often ignored. Yet, from a classical Marxist and Fourth International standpoint, Samuel’s legacy is both positive and limited.

Samuel’s History Workshop arose in the 1960s and 1970s amid rising labour militancy and intellectual currents that critiqued elitist historiography. He collected oral testimony, household economies, popular ritual, and the souvenirs of everyday life. This expanded the archive, exposed working‑class creative resistance and revealed how consciousness is formed through struggle, culture and community. These contributions are invaluable for socialists building working‑class memory and confidence.

But Samuel’s practice frequently stopped at descriptive recovery. While he emphasised the autonomy and creativity of popular traditions, he often treated culture as an end in itself—celebrating particularisms and local solidarities without always linking them systematically to the political organisation required to overthrow capital. In moments where the transformation of society is the question, empirical cultural history must be integrated with an analysis of capitalist accumulation, state power and the strategy of revolutionary organisation.

Samuel emerged in the same milieu that produced the 1960s New Left and the cultural turn in history. That milieu included significant intellectual currents hostile to classical materialism — strands of the Frankfurt School, post-Marxist and post-structuralist thought.

The domination of this school of thought meant the working class paid a heavy price for this fragmentation of the working-class perspective. Samuel’s work, while recuperative of working-class sources, often stopped short of linking that history to a program for working-class political independence. Samuel’s practical insistence that historians listen to workers, use oral history, and develop local archives advanced the working class's capacity to know itself. This recuperation of proletarian experience strengthens historical consciousness when it is anchored in a materialist understanding of class relations.

At the same time, Samuel’s culturalism and the New Left milieu into which he was embedded often moved away from a rigorous classical Marxist method. The petty-bourgeois currents of the New Left tended to relativise class as the central subject of history and to prioritise cultural, identity, or therapeutic frameworks over an analysis anchored in production and property relations.

Robert Tressell and the Early Socialists

There are two chapters in the book that I want to pay particular attention to. Robert Tressell (Robert Noonan), author of The Ragged‑Trousered Philanthropists, occupies an important place in the cultural and political formation of British working‑class socialism. His novel gives an unsparing depiction of artisan and factory life, petty‑bourgeois illusions, and the corrosive ethics of capitalist wage relations.

But to situate Tressell historically and theoretically, it is important to locate him within the longer trajectory from the early socialists and utopian currents to the emergence of scientific Marxism and the revolutionary program defended by the Marxists. Socialists like Fourier, Owen, Saint‑Simon, and later various British and French reformers raised vital moral and institutional objections to capitalist misery. They exposed capitalism’s inhumanity and proposed cooperative or communal remedies. Tressell’s literary moralism continues that tradition. His vivid exposé of exploitation aimed to awaken sympathy and spur reform among his readers.

Tressell’s milieu in Edwardian Britain was artisans, small contractors, and a growing industrial proletariat showing both the objective development of capitalist productive forces and the subjective unevenness of working‑class consciousness. Tressell’s novel contributes to shaping consciousness but cannot substitute for organised, political working‑class activity.

                           Origins of People’s History

Samuel’s essay on People’s History is probably one of his finest. Under the guise of the People’s History genre, it reopened questions long suppressed by institutional historiography: ritual, popular politics, communal solidarities, and the cultural forms that sustain working-class life.

People’s history—often called “history from below” was not merely a literary genre but a social product rooted in class relations. From the standpoint of the materialist conception of history, historical consciousness arises out of concrete social practice: collective labour, struggle, deprivation and organisation produce memories, traditions and forms of political culture. As Plekhanov stressed in tracing the emergence of the theory of class struggle, ideas about history flow from changes in property relations and social development; historians who ignore class obscure the motor forces of social change.

In Britain, after World War II and especially from the late 1960s, Raphael Samuel and the History Workshop movement institutionalised the turn to popular and cultural history. They emphasised archives of everyday life, oral history and collective memory, seeking to make the working class visible within historical narrative. This cultural recovery reflected real social processes: the postwar restructuring of capitalism, renewed political radicalism among students and workers, and a crisis in the authority of traditional elites.

There is a progressive side to the genre in that, correctly applied, it undermines the bourgeois monopoly on the past, restores agency to workers and oppressed groups, and supplies documentary armour for organising—stories of strikes, self‑organisation and mutual aid that can inspire present struggles. Recovering these experiences helps politicise layers of working people by showing that social change was made by ordinary people, not by abstract “great men.”

However, when detached from a dialectical, class‑struggle method, people’s history can become an end in itself: localist nostalgia, culturalism, or therapeutic memorialising that fails to connect the past to present class relations and the necessity of a revolutionary program.

Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory, 1994

Samuel did not write many books but concentrated on essay writing. He only wrote one sole-authored book in his lifetime, Theatres of Memory (1994). A second volume of Theatres of Memory, titled Island Stories: Unravelling Britain, was published in 1998, after his death.

As Samuel McIlhagga points out, ‘It is perhaps a unique feature of British intellectual culture that its greatest Marxists have more often been essayists than authors of lengthy theoretical treatises. The self-contained responses to a specific political or historical problem, or the witty corrective to dominant orthodoxies, are well suited to a nation whose intellectual elite are as closed and coherent as Britain’s. When E. P. Thompson wrote “The Peculiarities of the English,” his breathless polemic seeking to correct a dismissive attitude to the radicalism of his country’s history found in the work of the Marxist writers Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn, he was pitting himself against two thinkers whom he knew personally and who edited a journal to which he, too, had contributed.[4]

Samuel’s was a new orientation which drew on Marxist themes of class, labour, and social conflict. Still, he combined them with a broad culturalist sensibility and an emphasis on the historian as activist-organiser. From the standpoint of classical Marxism, this combination has both strengths and weaknesses. It should be pointed out that Samuel was not a classical Marxist.

Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory (1994, ed. with Paul Thompson) was a foundational intervention in the study of popular memory, oral history and the politics of historical representation. Samuel recasts history as a living, contested cultural terrain: memory is staged, rehearsed and institutionalised in festivals, museums, songs, local traditions and archives. There are similarities and major differences between Samuel's work and E.P. Thompson's. Thompson (The Making of the English Working Class) developed a class-formation method that treated class as a historical process: classes are made through concrete struggles, economic relations and political experience, not by sociological labels or algebraic categories. Thompson insisted on grounding consciousness in workers' material conditions and lived struggles.

Samuel, on the other hand, followed a culturalist tradition, i.e., history-from-below, collective memory, institutions, everyday life, shifting attention to the cultural forms, practices, and repositories through which people experience, narrate, and reproduce social life — oral tradition, rituals, popular politics, festivals, literary tastes, and memory.

These two contending historiographical approaches clashed in 1979. According to Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, "The 1979 History Workshop staged a rehashing of what was already one of the most vituperative disputes on the New Left, between E.P. Thompson and the advocates of ‘theory’. Thompson ripped into the other speakers, Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson. The atmosphere, as Sophie Scott-Brown describes in her excellent 2017 biography of Samuel, was already bad. The Ruskin student collective organising the conference wasn’t keen on the theoretical preoccupations of many academics in the History Workshop editorial collective; some members had already suggested forming a breakaway workshop to get back to the study of labour history. After Thompson’s blow-up, the final plenary session was quietly cancelled. Samuel, who probably took this decision, was essentially a Thompsonian: he defended a focus on ‘real life experience’ and empirical work, which he suggested could ‘do more for our theoretical understanding of ideology and consciousness than any number of further “interpellations” on the theme of “relative autonomy”. (A dig at Althusserians.) Samuel pointed out that, like ‘any other intellectual artefact’, theory isn’t timeless but ‘has its material and ideological conditions of existence’. But he wasn’t entirely a sceptic, arguing that good history required a ‘theoretically informed’ understanding of language, and that socialism required a serious analysis of ‘bourgeois ideology’.[5]

The dispute between E.P. Thompson and Stuart Hall was not merely an academic quarrel about sources or style. It expresses two antagonistic tendencies in the British left: Thompson’s historical‑materialist, class‑formation method, which locates class consciousness in concrete economic relations, struggles and political experience, and Hall’s culturalist turn, which relocates political explanation in culture, identity and “articulations” of meaning.

Contemporary relevance

Samuel’s method of reconstructing working-class experience: oral histories, rank-and-file reportage, and cultural memory are weapons against ideological amnesia. Culture can strengthen class identity, but without a program that explains how capital reproduces itself, and without organisation to transform class interests into political power, cultural mobilisation risks becoming either reformist co‑optation or nostalgic particularism. The dialectic here is crucial: cultural consciousness both expresses and shapes class struggle, but it is itself transformed by objective changes in production and by political leadership.

From the standpoint of classical Marxism, Raphael Samuel’s recovery of popular memory is an essential resource—but it must be subordinated to a revolutionary program. Marxist historiography does not merely collect fragments of working‑class life; it explains how those fragments arise from class relations and how they can be mobilised for socialist transformation. This rejects both bourgeois culturalism, which divorces culture from economics, and reformist populism, which equates cultural recognition with systemic change.

 

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[1] Ladders last a long time-www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n10/florence-sutcliffe-braithwaite/ladders-last-a-long-time

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

[3] "These the times ... this the man": an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html

[4] Why Raphael Samuel Matters-https://jacobin.com/2024/05/raphael-samuel-workshop-of-the-world

[5] Ladders last a long time-www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n10/florence-sutcliffe-braithwaite/ladders-last-a-long-time