What the Encyclopedia of the American Left Leaves Out

 

A free encyclopedia with a missing chapter

Anyone seriously interested in the history of socialism, communism, and political radicalism in the United States should welcome the appearance of a freely accessible digital edition of the Encyclopedia of the American Left. The project has an unusually long history. Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas began work on it in 1987. Garland published the first edition in 1990, followed by a substantially expanded Oxford University Press edition in 1998. Verso's current edition, supported by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and a grant from the Democratic Socialists of America Fund, is freely available online, and its publishers describe it as about three times larger than the initial version. Its stated objective is to provide information for "the growing socialist movement in the United States and globally". [versobooks.com]

That ambition makes a striking omission considerably more important than it might at first appear. One of the longest-established tendencies within American Trotskyism, represented successively by the American Committee for the Fourth International, the Workers League and the Socialist Equality Party, is effectively absent as an organisation having its own history and political standpoint. The same applies to its principal contemporary publication, the World Socialist Web Site.

This is not merely a question of whether a small political organisation deserves another entry in an already enormous reference work. The omission removes one side of a fundamental dispute concerning the history of the Fourth International after the Second World War. Whatever judgement one makes about the International Committee of the Fourth International, Gerry Healy, Tim Wohlforth, David North, the Workers League or the SEP, their history belongs to the history of American Trotskyism. An encyclopedia need not endorse their interpretation. It does, however, have to acknowledge that the interpretation exists.

The problem of historical visibility

Reference works inevitably establish hierarchies of historical importance. Inclusion does not necessarily mean political endorsement, and omission does not automatically prove deliberate suppression. Nevertheless, encyclopedias help determine which organisations, controversies and individuals subsequent readers regard as historically significant.

That makes omissions particularly important when an excluded organisation participated directly in events described elsewhere in the work. The International Committee's history cannot be separated from the Socialist Workers Party's history. Its American origins emerged from disputes within the SWP itself. Tim Wohlforth's 1971 The Struggle for Marxism in the United States, for example, explicitly described the Workers League as having been "born in a struggle within the Socialist Workers Party against revisionism in the 1960s". His book presented that conflict as inseparable from an international struggle involving the British Socialist Labour League and other forces within the International Committee. [marxists.org]

One can reject Tim Wohlforth's interpretation, as he himself ultimately did. But one cannot reconstruct the conflicts within American Trotskyism during the 1960s while making one of the organisations produced by those conflicts conceptually disappear. That is the central weakness here. The absence does not simply remove names. It simplifies a political conflict.

1953 and the meaning of Pabloism

The decisive historical background is the crisis of the Fourth International associated with Michel Pablo and the 1953 split. The International Committee interpretation insists that this was not essentially a personal or organisational disagreement. It regarded Pabloism as a fundamental political revision of Trotskyism concerning the role of Stalinism, bourgeois nationalism and the necessity for independent revolutionary parties of the working class. From this standpoint, the International Committee sought to preserve the Fourth International's programme and organisational independence.

This interpretation remained fundamental to the later Workers League. In his 1971 history, Tim Wohlforth explicitly traced the American tendency's development through its struggle against what it saw as the SWP's abandonment of revolutionary Marxism. This matters because treating the eventual 1963 reunification as proof that the earlier division had been overcome implicitly adopts the United Secretariat's interpretation of the dispute. For the International Committee, 1963 meant the opposite: reunification marked the SWP's political capitulation to positions it had opposed ten years earlier.

A neutral reference work does not have to decide between these competing interpretations. It could say: the United Secretariat regarded reunification as overcoming the earlier division; the International Committee rejected the reunification and argued that the first political disagreement remained unresolved. That modest historiographical distinction would immediately make the history considerably more intelligible.

The forgotten opposition inside the SWP

The American consequences of the international dispute emerged within the SWP in the early 1960s. Tim Wohlforth, who had entered the SWP after earlier involvement in the Shachtmanite movement, aligned himself with the International Committee. Another opposition figure associated with James Robertson followed a different trajectory. The International Committee's own retrospective history states that it expelled James Robertson from the SWP in December 1963, and suspended and expelled Tim Wohlforth and eight supporters after they issued a letter to the SWP membership on 30 June 1964. It states that the American Committee for the Fourth International formed in the summer of 1964 and that the Workers League was established in November 1966. 

This is the International Committee's account and should be identified as such, but it lays out an organisational chronology that any fuller treatment of American Trotskyism would need to confront.  This history matters because two enduring tendencies emerged from struggles connected to the SWP crisis: the tendency that developed into the Spartacist League and the tendency that developed into the Workers League. They subsequently became bitter adversaries. That does not make either irrelevant. On the contrary, their conflict forms part of the extraordinarily fragmented history of post-war American Trotskyism.

A reference work that discusses numerous small organisations should pay particular attention to these divisions, because Trotskyist history cannot be understood merely through membership totals. Its history is overwhelmingly a history of political controversies, theoretical disagreements, international alignments, splits, reunifications and competing claims to revolutionary continuity.

The Workers League

The establishment of the Workers League in 1966 supplied the International Committee with an American organisation that survived the enormous political transformations of the following decades. Its early development was difficult and frequently turbulent. The organisation recruited among radicalising young people during the Vietnam War era but subsequently argued that it needed a much deeper orientation towards the American working class. The International Committee's later history acknowledges a severe internal crisis during 1973–74, noting that the Workers League lost more than half its membership in about a year. [wsws.org]

This matters since it undermines any temptation to present the history hagiographically. The Workers League was neither a mass party nor a movement proceeding easily from success to success. At various points it was small, politically isolated and internally troubled. But smallness is not itself a convincing criterion for exclusion from the history of the revolutionary left. Indeed, much of the history of American Marxism consists of relatively small organisations. If numerical strength became the principal criterion of significance, enormous parts of American Trotskyism and revolutionary socialism would become incomprehensible. The better question is whether an organisation generated political arguments, publications and organisational descendants significant enough to form part of the historical record. By that standard the Workers League plainly qualifies. 

The Wohlforth crisis

Tim Wohlforth's career also makes the absence particularly conspicuous. His importance stems not only from his position as an early leader of the Workers League but from the extraordinary trajectory of his political development. He was initially one of the International Committee's most energetic defenders in the United States. His book, The Struggle for Marxism in the United States, attempted to reinterpret the history of American Trotskyism through the relationship between revolutionary Marxism and what he saw as the recurring pressures of American pragmatism, radicalism, and opportunism.

The rupture occurred in 1974. According to the SEP's later account, the Workers League leadership discovered that Nancy Fields, Tim Wohlforth's partner who had been elevated into leadership responsibilities, had close family connections with senior CIA personnel and that these connections had not previously been disclosed to the organisation. The Workers League removed Tim Wohlforth as national secretary and suspended Nancy Fields pending an investigation. Tim Wohlforth subsequently resigned and later returned to the SWP. These are claims from the SEP's own retrospective account and should be presented as such rather than converted into an independent historical verdict.

Precisely because the episode became so bitterly contested, it deserves historical treatment rather than disappearance. The International Committee interpreted Tim Wohlforth's departure as a turning point. Its retrospective history states explicitly that the organisation responded to the crisis by undertaking an extensive reconsideration of the history of the Fourth International and making the assimilation of that history increasingly central to cadre education. Tim Wohlforth, meanwhile, moved sharply away from that interpretation and eventually became a critic of his former organisation and of the tradition with which he had formerly identified. Here an encyclopedia could perform an especially useful function: present the rival accounts, identify the documentary evidence, and allow readers to investigate for themselves.

Security and the Fourth International

The next omission is still more consequential because it involves one of the most controversial episodes in post-war Trotskyist history: Security and the Fourth International. Beginning in the mid-1970s, the International Committee investigated the circumstances surrounding the assassination of Leon Trotsky, questions involving infiltration of the Trotskyist movement, and allegations concerning individuals associated with the SWP.

The arguments arising from this investigation became extraordinarily bitter. The International Committee regarded its investigation as a major defence of the Trotskyist movement's security and historical persistence. Its opponents accused it of making unjustified allegations and turned the investigation itself into evidence of what they regarded as the political degeneration of the Healy leadership.

The point here is not that an encyclopedia must endorse the International Committee's conclusions. Quite the reverse. This is exactly where encyclopedic neutrality becomes important. A proper article could explain what Security and the Fourth International was, identify its principal claims, summarise the evidence its authors presented, and then describe the objections raised against it. Erasing the controversy does not resolve it. It merely deprives readers of the opportunity to understand why it produced such violent conflict.

That principle applies equally to the crisis that engulfed the British Workers Revolutionary Party in 1985. For outsiders, the history of the International Committee is often collapsed into Gerry Healy's history. Consequently, the downfall of Gerry Healy is treated as though it automatically disposed of the political tendency associated with him.

But historians dispute that. The Workers League under David North became part of the struggle against the WRP leadership's political line. The factional crisis eventually produced a permanent rupture. The organisations remaining within the International Committee later argued that the crisis showed the consequences of the WRP leadership's abandonment of the political and theoretical principles the ICFI had historically defended. Others regarded that explanation as an attempt by former collaborators to distance themselves retrospectively from Gerry Healy.

Again, competing accounts shape history. An encyclopedia's responsibility is not to suppress one interpretation because another appears more persuasive. It is to establish what occurred, identify the competing political explanations and provide readers with enough bibliography to investigate the dispute.

From Workers League to Socialist Equality Party

The post-1985 history makes complete omission harder to explain as simple historical housekeeping. The Workers League did not disappear with the crisis of the British organisation. It continued operating in the United States and eventually became the Socialist Equality Party. This represented more than a name change in the tendency's own conception: it was tied to a reassessment of the relationship between revolutionary organisations and the working class following the long decline of the old labour and Stalinist organisations.

Whatever one thinks of that assessment, it produced an organisation that continued the political lineage extending from the 1960s. The further establishment of the World Socialist Web Site expanded the tendency's publishing operation dramatically and made its political material internationally accessible. Consequently, the question is no longer simply why a small 1960s Trotskyist organisation is missing from an encyclopedia. It is why an organisation with a history extending across successive political forms and a substantial online publishing presence receives no independent historical treatment.

How does such an omission happen? The explanation need not involve a conspiracy. The Encyclopedia emerged from a particular intellectual and political milieu. Its editors were centrally associated with the recovery and reinterpretation of American radical history that developed around the New Left. The digital project's own account describes a continuing expansion involving academics and activists and presents the project as an effort to recover neglected histories of American radicalism. Every historiographical tradition contains its own field of vision.

The New Left rediscovered organisations, movements and activists marginalised by conventional political history. That was an enormous achievement. But sections of that intellectual milieu also developed interpretations of Marxism and socialism sharply different from traditions stressing the Bolshevik party, Trotskyism and the historical succession of the Fourth International. The contemporary institutional circumstances are relevant too, though they should not be treated as proof of editorial interference. Verso explicitly states that the online edition received support from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and a grant from the Democratic Socialists of America Fund.

That is a fact. It does not establish that either organisation ordered the exclusion of the SEP or the International Committee. No evidence is presented here for such a claim. The more plausible argument concerns the intellectual environment within which political importance is recognised. Historiographical blind spots usually operate more subtly than censorship. Some organisations appear self-evidently significant. Others gradually disappear from the narrative because the historians constructing that narrative do not regard their controversies as especially important.

Two incompatible histories of Trotskyism

The deeper question, therefore, involves the historiography of Trotskyism itself. Two fundamentally different narratives emerged from the crisis of the Fourth International. From the standpoint broadly associated with the United Secretariat, the 1953 division was ultimately superseded by reunification in 1963. Subsequent anti-Pabloite tendencies therefore appear as increasingly sectarian survivals of an argument that history had largely overtaken.

The International Committee tells the opposite story. For it, 1953 identified a fundamental revisionist tendency within the Fourth International; 1963 did not solve the problem but deepened it; and the ICFI's later history represented the continuing struggle to preserve Trotskyist political continuity against adaptation to Stalinism, bourgeois nationalism, and middle-class radicalism.

Tim Wohlforth's 1971 book provides unusually clear contemporary evidence of that self-conception. It says directly that the Workers League emerged from an international fight against revisionism within the SWP and examines the history of Marxism in the United States as inseparable from international conflicts within the Trotskyist movement. Readers need not accept this interpretation. But historians cannot simply write as though it never existed.

There is nevertheless a serious counterargument. Encyclopedias cannot include everything. Revolutionary politics in the United States generated hundreds of groups, factions, committees, newspapers and ephemeral organisations. Editorial judgements must be made. The Workers League remained relatively small, suffered significant internal crises, and never became a mass political party. Moreover, some relevant entries could inherit structures and assumptions from earlier editions compiled decades before the SEP and WSWS's contemporary digital presence became significant. The present Verso edition describes itself as an expansion of a pre-existing work, not a completely new encyclopedia constructed from scratch.

Those factors could explain some of the gaps without attributing political motives to the editors. But they do not finally resolve the problem. Once an encyclopedia claims wide coverage of the American left, size alone cannot be a sufficient criterion. Many historically important radical organisations were tiny. Their significance derived from the ideas they expressed, the disputes in which they participated, the people they influenced, or the organisations they subsequently gave rise to. Marxist history would become extraordinarily thin if historians included only successful mass organisations.

The irony is that the problem would not be difficult to correct. The digital format makes supplementation far easier than it would have been when the original print volumes appeared. A concise entry headed Workers League/Socialist Equality Party could establish the essential chronology without accepting the organisation's political conclusions. It could explain the International Committee's origins in the 1953 split. It could outline the opposition that developed inside the SWP during the early 1960s, the establishment of the American Committee for the Fourth International and the Workers League, the 1974 Tim Wohlforth crisis, the controversy surrounding Security and the Fourth International, the 1985–86 international split, and the later emergence of the Socialist Equality Party and World Socialist Web Site.

It should also present substantial criticism. Tim Wohlforth's later repudiation of his previous politics belongs in the record. So do the criticisms made of the ICFI by rival Trotskyist traditions and former members. The disputes surrounding Gerry Healy, the WRP crisis and Security and the Fourth International should not be sanitised. But neither should the organisation's answers to those criticisms be omitted. That is what historical balance means. It does not mean finding an imaginary position midway between incompatible political arguments. It means accurately representing those arguments' existence and content.

The absence consequently tells us something about how the history of the American left is constructed. Historical canons do not arise automatically. Someone decides which organisations receive entries, which disputes deserve explanation, which books constitute "further reading", and which political traditions become essential to the narrative. Those judgements can reproduce assumptions without anyone consciously suppressing anything.

The history of the revolutionary left is especially vulnerable because it is composed of defeated movements, minority factions and arguments whose significance was frequently understood only retrospectively. A faction containing a handful of people can sometimes raise questions that later prove more historically revealing than organisations hundreds of times its size.

The fragmentation of American Trotskyism is itself historical evidence about the enormous political pressures confronting revolutionaries in the twentieth century: Stalinism, anti-communism, the Cold War, the trade-union bureaucracy, the Vietnam War, the New Left, identity politics, the decline of traditional labour organisations and the repeated debates over nationalism and the Democratic Party. The Workers League and its successors developed distinctive answers to all these questions. Those answers may be attacked, rejected or defended. But they existed, and they generated a political tradition extending across decades.

An encyclopedia should open arguments, not close them.

The issue here is larger than the fortunes of any single organisation. A socialist encyclopedia should encourage readers to investigate political controversies rather than settle them silently through inclusion and exclusion. The Encyclopedia of the American Left deserves considerable credit for being made freely available. Its publishers explicitly hope that the work will assist a growing socialist movement internationally. That is precisely why its omissions deserve scrutiny rather than being ignored.

The International Committee's interpretation of post-war Trotskyism may be right or wrong. Tim Wohlforth's early interpretation contrasts with his later repudiation of it. The extraordinary disputes surrounding Gerry Healy, David North, the SWP, the International Committee, Security, and the Fourth International can be examined from several sides. But none of that history becomes less important because it is controversial—quite the opposite.

Disputes over Pabloism, the 1963 reunification, party security, the relationship between Trotskyism and the New Left, and the international crisis of 1985 raise fundamental questions about what revolutionary socialism was supposed to be. They belong within any serious political history of the American left. A digital encyclopedia has one overwhelming advantage over its printed predecessors: omissions need not remain permanent. The solution therefore is not to demand an entry that endorses the Socialist Equality Party's account of itself. It is to demand something much simpler and historically more defensible: an entry acknowledging that this history exists, explaining why its participants fought so bitterly over it, and allowing readers to judge the evidence for themselves.

Until it does, the Encyclopedia of the American Left contains an important absence. And because that absence concerns one of the principal disputes over the historical continuity of American Trotskyism after 1953, it is not merely a missing entry. It is a missing argument.

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Bibliography

The Encyclopedia of the American Left

Buhle, Mari Jo, Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas, eds. Encyclopedia of the American Left. New York: Garland, 1990.

Buhle, Mari Jo, Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas, eds. Encyclopedia of the American Left. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Verso Books. About the Encyclopedia. The publisher states that work began in 1987, that the first and second editions appeared in 1990 and 1998, and that the current digital edition received support from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and DSA Fund. [versobooks.com]

American Trotskyism and the Workers League

Cannon, James P. The History of American Trotskyism: Report of a Participant. New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1944.

Breitman, George. The Last Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1967.

Wohlforth, Tim. The Struggle for Marxism in the United States: A History of American Trotskyism. New York: Labour Publications, 1971. The online edition identifies the book as first published in 1971 and records Tim Wohlforth's contemporary interpretation of the Workers League's origins. [marxists.org]

International Committee sources

International Committee of the Fourth International. Trotskyism versus Revisionism. 7 vols. London: New Park Publications.

North, David. The Heritage We Defend: A Contribution to the History of the Fourth International. Detroit: Labour Publications, 1988.

North, David and Alex Steiner. The Fourth International and the Renegade Wohlforth: The Struggle for Trotskyism in the United States. Labour Publications, 1984. The digitised volume includes contemporary and retrospective documentation on the conflicts involving Tim Wohlforth, the SWP, and the Workers League. [marxists.org]

Socialist Equality Party (US). The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (United States). The sections on the 1974 crisis give the SEP's account of Tim Wohlforth's removal and departure and state that the Workers League lost more than half its membership in 1973–74. [wsws.org]

Socialist Equality Party (US). The Workers League After Wohlforth. This section sets out the SEP's contention that the 1974 break initiated a larger re-examination of the history of the Fourth International. [wsws.org]

Wider historiography

Alexander, Robert J. International Trotskyism, 1929–1985: A Documented Analysis of the Movement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.

Le Blanc, Paul. Trotskyism in the United States: Historical Essays and Reconsiderations. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016.

Wald, Alan M. The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

Wohlforth, Tim and Dennis Tourish. On the Edge: Political Cults Right and Left. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2000.

 

The Era of Trial by Social Media Comes of Age

In defence of democratic rights

The recent incarceration of Russell Brand has been widely portrayed in the British media as the culmination of a prolonged public controversy. Regardless of personal opinions about Brand or views on the verdict, a broader issue emerges that transcends the specifics of this case. The central concern is the evolving political and legal context in which guilt is determined in public life, and the degree to which foundational democratic principles are being supplanted by a sequence of accusation, media amplification, corporate sanction, and only subsequently, judicial process.

The implications of the Brand case extend well beyond the individual. In the past decade, a form of extrajudicial punishment has emerged that can be described as trial by social media. Newspapers and broadcasters publish allegations, then social-media platforms rapidly disseminate them. Employers, publishers, advertisers, and technology companies impose economic sanctions, while parliamentary committees and politicians intervene. Commentators frequently call for institutions to sever ties with the accused as a demonstration of virtue. Frequently, these actions occur before any evidence is presented to a jury. This process inverts the traditional sequence associated with the rule of law: rather than investigation, charge, trial, verdict, and punishment, society is increasingly encouraged to accept accusation, publicity, punishment, and only later, potentially years afterwards, a trial. Such developments pose a significant threat to democratic rights.

The presumption of innocence

The presumption of innocence is often characterised as an outdated legal technicality, relevant only within the courtroom and irrelevant to broader society. In fact, it represents a fundamental historical principle: the state bears the burden of proving its case against the individual, who is not required to establish innocence before a potentially prejudiced public. British contempt law restrictions were partly instituted in recognition of this issue. Limiting prejudicial publication during active proceedings aims not to shield defendants from criticism, but to safeguard the integrity of the trial process. Jurors are expected to determine guilt based on admissible evidence presented in court, not on media headlines, edited television segments, or viral social media posts encountered before jury service. Digital communication has subjected this principle to unprecedented strain. Information is now instantly replicable across jurisdictions and remains accessible indefinitely. While a judge may instruct a jury to disregard inadmissible material, such directions cannot eliminate the effects of prolonged publicity from collective memory.

This transformation is both quantitative and qualitative. Traditional mass media wielded significant influence, yet publication was largely confined to identifiable newspapers and television networks, each subject to certain legal and editorial constraints. Social media introduces a vast apparatus for instantaneous content reproduction. A newspaper investigation can evolve into a television discussion, followed by thousands of clips, memes, posts, podcasts, reaction videos, and search results. Allegations become embedded in an individual's permanent digital identity. The core issue is not the existence of public opinion on criminal cases, which has always existed, but the emergence of an industrial system that translates accusations into reputational and economic penalties before judicial determination. This explains the importance of corporate intervention. A private technology corporation taking action against someone's ability to publish or earn an income is not equivalent to a jury returning a criminal verdict. The evidential standards differ, the procedures differ, and the opportunities for appeal may differ radically. Yet precisely this distinction has increasingly disappeared from public discussion. In the social-media age, corporations occupy positions once unimaginable for private enterprises. A handful of enormous companies control major infrastructures through which political argument, journalism, culture and entertainment circulate. Their moderation and monetisation decisions therefore have consequences that extend far beyond ordinary commercial relationships.

The risks are heightened when corporate decisions align with political pressures. Although the formal distinction between government and private platforms remains significant, democratic oversight is essential because decisions affecting public expression often arise from relationships more complex than direct government censorship. This issue has gained further prominence with the establishment of the British online-safety regulatory framework. The Online Safety Act 2023 imposes statutory obligations on social-media companies and search services regarding illegal content and child protection. According to government guidance, platforms have borne legal responsibilities for illegal content since 17 March 2025, and Ofcom holds enforcement powers that include investigations, substantial financial penalties, and, in the most severe cases of non-compliance, applications to the courts to block services.This legislation must be represented accurately. Ofcom states that its role is to ensure regulated companies implement systems to protect users from harms identified in the legislation, and its published guidance requires providers to assess illegal-content risks and establish appropriate safeguards. The political concern is not that Ofcom officials directly determine permissible online opinions, but rather that the state has established an increasingly expansive regulatory relationship with private corporations whose infrastructures mediate a substantial portion of modern public communication. This development warrants thorough democratic scrutiny, not complacency.

From Fleet Street to the algorithm

Trial by media is not new. British newspapers have damaged reputations for generations. Sensational reporting, moral panics, and politically motivated campaigns predate platforms like Facebook, X, YouTube, and TikTok. The primary change lies in the technological and economic infrastructure. While the traditional press produced newspapers on a daily cycle, digital platforms continuously monitor audience reactions and disseminate content through automated recommendation systems. Controversy acquires economic value because attention itself is monetised. Consequently, an accusation involving a celebrity becomes more than a news story; it generates content that can be perpetually reproduced across a vast ecosystem of professional journalism, amateur commentary, and algorithmically distributed material.

The commercial incentives are evident. Moral outrage sustains audience engagement, with each new allegation prompting additional cycles of reaction. Even denials generate further content, and every development can be repurposed into new programs, articles, or videos. As a result, capitalism has industrialised denunciation. However, this does not imply that allegations are inherently false due to media profit motives, nor does it suggest that individuals alleging abuse should remain silent. The fundamental point is that neither commercial profitability nor viral popularity should determine criminal guilt.

The lessons of previous media disasters

British history offers numerous warnings against disregarding this distinction. Sir Cliff Richard is a prominent example of the consequences of turning a police investigation into a televised spectacle. Police searched his home in connection with an allegation, and the event was broadcast widely. Richard was neither arrested nor charged, and his successful privacy case against the BBC illustrated the profound harm publicity can inflict before any judicial determination. The Metropolitan Police investigation known as Operation Midland serves as another cautionary example. Extraordinary allegations regarding an alleged Westminster abuse network were entertained and publicised, resulting in severe consequences for those accused. The eventual collapse of these allegations and the subsequent conviction of accuser Carl Beech demonstrated the significant costs incurred when institutional credulity and public certainty surpass evidentiary standards.The intention is not to suggest direct equivalence among these cases, as they differ substantially in their facts, investigations, and legal outcomes. The common thread is the caution against conflating accusation with adjudication.This warning remains relevant even when an individual is ultimately convicted. The principle of a fair trial derives its significance from its universality. Democratic rights must not depend on the prior sympathies of journalists, politicians, or the public. Rights that apply only to popular defendants are not genuine

The prosecution of Kevin Spacey exemplifies another aspect of this issue. Although his eventual acquittal in the London proceedings resolved the criminal charges before the jury, it could not restore his professional and reputational standing, which years of allegations and publicity had already damaged. This distinction is of considerable importance. The current media environment generates consequences that extend beyond judicial decisions: employment opportunities vanish, contracts are terminated, and access to cultural work is lost. Search engines permanently associate individuals' names with allegations. Friends and professional associates may fear that maintaining contact could themselves become grounds for denunciation. Certain institutional responses may be justified, as organisations have obligations to employees and the public, particularly when credible allegations concern immediate safety. However, precaution and conviction are not synonymous. Failing to recognise this distinction encourages institutions to act primarily based on reputational considerations. The central question shifts from “What has been proven?” to “What will happen to us if we are seen not to punish?” This represents an extraordinarily dangerous foundation for public life.

The controversies surrounding Lucy Letby's conviction show that the argument cannot be reduced to protecting celebrities accused of wrongdoing. Questions regarding media certainty are significant both before and after conviction. Once a high-profile criminal case becomes embedded in a dominant public narrative, challenging any part of it becomes extremely difficult. Journalists may have invested years in the story. Institutions have defended their actions through it. Politicians have commented on it. Documentaries, podcasts, and books have been commissioned around it. The financial and institutional interests generated by a major criminal narrative do not dissipate when the jury retires. This does not imply that any specific conviction is necessarily unsafe; only the appropriate judicial and review processes can determine that. Rather, it establishes a more fundamental point: journalism must retain the capacity to investigate potential miscarriages of justice without treating criticism of an established narrative as morally illegitimate. 

The historic campaigns surrounding miscarriages of justice, from the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four onwards, demonstrate the importance of precisely such scepticism. The disorders following the killings in Southport in 2024 revealed another dimension of this transformation. Social-media communication became closely linked to debates about disorder, misinformation, criminal prosecution, and the legitimate boundaries of expression. No socialist can object to prosecuting genuine incitement to violence under the law. Freedom of speech has never entailed freedom from responsibility for criminal conduct. However, hateful or irresponsible expression should not erase the distinction between speech, incitement, and physical action. A broader risk is normalising exceptional procedures whenever politicians declare an emergency. Governments facing social crises often assert that extraordinary conditions necessitate extraordinary powers. However, powers created to address unpopular targets rarely remain limited to those groups. Legal and technological mechanisms established today may be employed in entirely different political contexts in the future. The working class should therefore evaluate every extension of state power not solely from the perspective of the government's current target, but from the perspective of potential future applications.

Who possesses the microphone?

Advocates of social-media denunciation often characterise it as the democratisation of justice. From this perspective, established institutions historically silenced victims, while social networks now enable ordinary individuals to speak. This claim has some validity. Digital communication has undoubtedly allowed individuals to publish allegations and testimony without prior approval from newspaper editors or broadcasting executives. However, the theoretical ability to post content does not equate to possessing equal social power. The primary mechanisms of amplification remain profoundly unequal. Billionaire-owned media corporations employ professional newsrooms. Technology corporations control platforms through which vast audiences communicate. Governments possess press offices, police forces, and regulatory powers. Celebrities and corporations can purchase professional public-relations services. Ordinary workers possess nothing comparable. The worker subjected to harassment by a manager, victimised by an employer or injured because a corporation ignored safety measures does not ordinarily receive days of national broadcasting attention. Thousands of social grievances disappear almost completely from public discussion. What therefore presents itself as democratisation can conceal another hierarchy: everyone may speak, but only certain institutions possess the power to ensure that millions hear them.

The class content of democratic rights

For Marxists, democratic rights cannot be treated as gifts a benevolent state bestows on the population. They emerged historically through bitter struggles against arbitrary authority. The English Revolution challenged monarchical absolutism and generated unprecedented debates concerning sovereignty, representation and popular rights. The Levellers' agitation demanded political equality beyond the objectives of much of Parliament's propertied leadership. Later struggles for freedom of the press, trade-union organisation and universal suffrage were inseparable from the emergence of an increasingly self-conscious working class.

Chartism transformed democratic demands into a mass social movement. None of these struggles abolished class rule, but they established rights upon which subsequent working-class political and social organisation depended. This historical experience makes the fashionable dismissal of civil liberties particularly reactionary. The presumption of innocence, freedom of speech, public trials and procedural protections are sometimes derided as merely “bourgeois rights”. But precisely because workers lack wealth and institutional power, they require protection against state and corporate arbitrariness more urgently than society's privileged layers. A millionaire can employ solicitors, barristers, reputation managers and political contacts. A worker hauled before a court or dismissed because of an online accusation usually cannot. One of the most politically damaging developments of recent years has been the tendency within affluent sections of the middle class to portray elementary principles of due process as obstacles to justice. The reasoning is fundamentally wrong. Abuse does not cease to be abuse merely because evidence must be demonstrated. Nor is somebody “silenced” because an allegation is investigated rather than automatically accepted as fact.

A serious response to sexual violence, exploitation or harassment requires properly funded investigative institutions, access to legal support, social provision for victims and judicial proceedings capable of establishing facts. Replacing those things with social-media denunciation does not strengthen the oppressed. It replaces legal proof with social power. And once social power decides guilt, the advantage inevitably passes to those possessing newspapers, money, political connections, corporate platforms and influence. The underlying transformation cannot therefore be understood simply as a decline in journalistic standards. Media organisations and technology platforms operate within definite social relations. Their overriding economic purpose is not to discover truth but to accumulate profit. Enormous corporate interests concentrate ownership, while relationships with governments, advertisers, and financial markets shape the environment in which editorial decisions are made. The attention economy intensifies these tendencies because outrage itself has become monetisable. Measured in clicks, views, subscriptions and advertising impressions, indignation can become a commodity. Complex evidence develops slowly; accusation travels instantly. Qualification is difficult to package; certainty generates reaction. A judicial proceeding may last months, while social-media judgement requires seconds. The platform's economic logic therefore collides directly with the deliberative requirements of justice. A jury must listen. An algorithm must engage. Confusing the two is catastrophic.

War, austerity and democratic repression

These developments acquire their full significance only when placed within the wider crisis of capitalist democracy. Across Europe, governments confronting deepening economic inequality, military confrontation, collapsing public services and mounting social opposition are simultaneously expanding mechanisms for regulating political communication. The relationship is not accidental. A ruling elite preparing increasingly unpopular policies cannot depend indefinitely on popular consent. It therefore seeks ways to manage opposition, shape information, and delegitimise dissent. Measures introduced under apparently unobjectionable objectives can create legal and technological infrastructures with much broader applications.

The Online Safety Act 2023 itself illustrates the scale of the regulatory transformation. The Act received Royal Assent on 26 October 2023 and imposes new legal duties upon user-to-user and search services. Official guidance states that providers must implement systems and processes to address illegal content, while Ofcom establishes codes and has enforcement powers. The Act also formally recognises rights considerations. Government guidance states that Ofcom must consider users' rights when developing measures and that providers themselves have corresponding duties regarding users' rights. These provisions make it especially important that criticism remain precise. The political concern is not established by simply labelling all online regulation “censorship”. It concerns how regulatory powers operate in practice, how definitions develop, how corporate platforms respond to compliance incentives, and whether mechanisms designed to target genuinely illegal material can contribute to broader restrictions on lawful political expression. Such questions should be investigated, not assumed.

Because allegations against a famous and controversial individual evoke strong reactions, democratic principles matter. Defending due process for an accused person does not require admiration for that person. It does not require endorsing his politics, lifestyle, previous statements or public persona. And it certainly does not require indifference towards people alleging serious abuse. It requires only recognition of a foundational principle: a criminal allegation has to be proved. If that principle is abandoned whenever an accused person becomes unpopular, it ceases to exist as a principle. The socialist movement has historically defended democratic rights not because courts under capitalism are politically neutral institutions, but because limitations upon arbitrary state power provide essential conditions in which the working class can organise and fight. The same principle applies today to corporate power. A society in which banks can economically exclude individuals, platforms can erase audiences, employers can dismiss workers and media corporations can pronounce guilt before trial is not becoming more democratic because those institutions are technically private. Private concentrations of power can be as destructive of freedom as state bureaucracy, particularly when the two increasingly interact.

None of this diminishes the suffering caused by sexual violence or other serious crimes. Genuine accusations must be investigated. Evidence must be obtained. Witnesses must be heard and treated with dignity. Prosecutors must make decisions based on the evidence. Defendants must have access to the case against them and the opportunity to challenge it. Juries must determine guilt according to admissible evidence and the legal standard of proof. These are not bureaucratic obstacles standing between victims and justice. They are justice. Without them, society has only competing assertions backed by unequal amounts of money, publicity, and institutional influence. The answer to failures of the criminal-justice system is therefore not to replace courts with newspapers, parliamentary committees or technology companies. It is to fight for a genuinely democratic judicial system, adequately funded legal representation and independent investigation, while defending freedom of expression and the presumption of innocence.

The working class must defend democratic rights.

Ultimately, democratic rights cannot be safely entrusted to those whose social power increasingly depends on restricting them. The media corporations will not dismantle the profitable machinery of sensationalism. Technology monopolies will not voluntarily surrender their enormous power over communication. Governments will not renounce regulatory powers simply because those powers might someday be abused. Defending democratic rights therefore requires a social constituency whose interests fundamentally oppose arbitrary power. That constituency is the international working class. Workers require freedom of speech to organise politically. They require freedom of association to build organisations independent of employers and governments. They require the presumption of innocence and due process because they lack the money to insulate themselves against arbitrary prosecution. They require an independent press because the dominant media overwhelmingly articulates the interests and assumptions of the privileged layers of society. The struggle against arbitrary state and corporate power is consequently inseparable from the struggle against the capitalist social order that concentrates both economic wealth and control over communication in extraordinarily few hands. Trial by social media has reached maturity because the technological foundations of mass communication have developed far more rapidly than democratic control over them. Humanity has communications technology that gives billions of people unprecedented access to information, while ownership of the most important infrastructure remains concentrated in private corporations.

That contradiction cannot be resolved by demanding still greater power for billionaires to police their platforms, nor by handing governments unlimited authority over digital communication. It requires bringing the technological resources upon which modern social communication depends under genuine democratic control. The central principle must therefore remain uncompromising. An accusation is not a conviction. Popularity is not evidence. Virality is not proof. Corporate punishment is not due process. A parliamentary demand is not a judicial verdict. The rights won through centuries of struggle remain indispensable precisely because political reaction repeatedly presents their destruction as progress. A society that abandons the presumption of innocence in the name of protecting victims will ultimately protect neither victims nor defendants. A society that lets corporations decide who may participate in public life will not produce democratic speech. And a society accustomed to seeing punishment precede proof is being prepared for forms of political repression extending far beyond the sensational celebrity cases through which those methods have been normalised. The defence of democratic rights must therefore be taken out of the hands of media monopolies, technology corporations, and the capitalist state. It must become a conscious political struggle of the working class itself.

Bibliography and further reading

Legislation and official material

Contempt of Court Act 1981. UK Public General Act 1981 c.49.

Online Safety Act 2023. UK Public General Act 2023 c.50. The official legislation database provides the statutory text and records subsequent amendments. [legislation.gov.uk]

Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, Online Safety Act: Explainer. The government's account outlines the Act's scope, platform duties and Ofcom's regulatory responsibilities. [gov.uk]

Ofcom, Illegal Content Duties under the Online Safety Act, updated 25 June 2026. Particularly useful for distinguishing the actual statutory compliance regime from broader political arguments about censorship. [ofcom.org.uk]

Ofcom, Online Safety. Current regulatory material and guidance relating to implementation. [ofcom.org.uk]

Civil liberties, justice and the state

E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act. London: Allen Lane, 1975.

E. P. Thompson, Writing by Candlelight. London: Merlin Press, 1980.

E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays. London: Merlin Press, 1978.

John Rees, The Leveller Revolution: Radical Political Organisation in England, 1640–1650. London: Verso, 2016.

Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. London: Temple Smith, 1972.

Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714. London: Nelson, 1961.

George Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study of 1763 to 1774. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962.

Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution. London: Temple Smith, 1984.

Media, capitalism and public communication

Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon, 1988.

Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity, 2017.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. London: Profile Books, 2019.

Dan Schiller, Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

Vincent Mosco, The Political Economy of Communication. London: Sage, 2009.

Christian Fuchs, Social Media: A Critical Introduction. London: Sage, 2014.

Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy. New York: New Press, 2013.

 

Walking in the Footsteps of London's Working Class: A Review of David Rosenberg's Rebel Footprints

A walking guide recovers two centuries of struggle in the capital, yet it fails to provide readers with the political lessons that these struggles were intended to convey.

Ninety years on from the Battle of Cable Street, the debate about London's radical past is far from academic. In a city currently marked by such extreme social inequality, by the crisis of housing affordability, by the decline of public services and by the re-emergence of a kind of nationalism and anti-migrant politics, the history of those who had fought against poverty, exploitation, political repression and fascism is very much with us.

This is what makes the third edition of David Rosenberg's Rebel Footprints a particularly valuable contribution. It is neither a conventional history of London nor merely a guidebook. Rather, it offers a political geography of the city, built from the author's own walks, connecting streets and buildings to the movements that occurred there. Pluto Press describes the revised edition as guiding the reader from well-known to lesser-known sites associated with struggles from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. The third edition substantially revises the book, now comprising eleven main chapters. The Russian Revolution and the East End, Hackney, and radical Soho all receive new or reorganised treatment. The volume concludes with an epilogue on the Brick Lane struggles of the 1970s, and Michael Rosen provides the foreword.

The enterprise is immense. Rosenberg brings workers, immigrants, women, political exiles, anti-fascists, and socialist organisers back into the picture in a way they have largely been absent. The significance of the history he recovers makes the shortcomings of his political approach all the more glaring. Rebel Footprints is absolutely full of the notion that history is made through struggle. It simply doesn't come to terms with the question of why movements of such immense courage and such broad popular support ended up with such limited political outcomes, why they were defeated or why they were absorbed into institutions which were themselves committed to the defence of the social order against which those movements had been directed. The central issue is therefore a question of political perspective. It is a history of rebellion, but not a history of the working class's struggle for revolutionary leadership.

A rebellious city

The underlying concept of Rebel Footprints is absolutely effective. The streets we normally see as routes between railway stations, offices, shops, and houses are reconfigured as physical evidence of political struggle. London stops being the endless accumulation of palaces, monuments and institutions of the state as presented to us by the tourist industry. It becomes a landscape of contestation.

The 2026 edition begins with “Trailblazers for Democracy in Fleet Street and Clerkenwell”, followed by “Sparks of Rebellion in Bow and Whitechapel”. It then explores “The Russian Revolution and London's East End”, “No Gods, No Masters: Radical Bloomsbury”, “Hackney's Buried Histories” and the struggle for housing in Bethnal Green and Shoreditch. Subsequent chapters move south and west through Battersea and Soho, then head east again to Poplar, Bermondsey, and, finally, Cable Street and Long Lane. The historical itinerary continues beyond the main chapters with the epilogue, “Battleground Brick Lane 1970s”.

In my view, this is one of Rosenberg's real masterpieces. The geographical structure prevents radical history from being boiled down to the life stories of a few famous people. Political movements get a locality. They had meeting houses, workshops, factories, tenements and streets. Rosenberg has been running London social and political history walks since 2008. When talking about the genesis of the project, he has been very clear about the influence of Bill Fishman, the historian who believed you could understand history in a very real way, not just through the lecture hall but by walking through the very places where it happened. That is a very democratic approach. It's a way of confronting the monumental history of the city that the ruling class has always presented as its own.

History against official London

This is where Rebel Footprints is at its very best. London's history is increasingly being presented through the lens of heritage, tourism and property. The working people who actually built the city are only there in passing. Rosenberg flips the script completely. The centre of historical interest moves from Westminster, the monarchy and the City to the political activity of the very people who are normally invisible. The book is designed to get you to look at the apparently mundane and ask a very different set of questions: who lived here, who worked here, who organised here and what struggles took place here?

That approach has real power in a city which is constantly being reshaped by property speculation. Working-class areas get redeveloped and repackaged, and their social history is often turned into marketable 'heritage'. Rosenberg's approach is the other way around. The city itself becomes the archive. The history is also inherently international. London was not just the British capital. All over the world, industrialisation, empire and political repression have brought workers, refugees and political exiles into the city. Radical London was never a purely English phenomenon.

History is of course particularly pertinent when migrants are once again being presented as the cause of social problems they didn't create. The history of workers breaking down national, ethnic, and religious barriers points overwhelmingly to a class explanation of inequality. The very notion of internationalism in the labour movement is, however, problematic, and Rebel Footprints doesn't address it adequately. London was both the epicentre of working-class resistance and the capital of the world's largest empire. The relationship between those two realities is fundamental to understanding British labour history.

The Russian Revolution comes to the East End

One of the most significant additions in the 2026 edition is a whole chapter on 'The Russian Revolution and London's East End'. That massively broadens the political canvas. The Russian Revolution can't just be tacked on as part of the general tradition of London radicalism. October 1917 was a moment of total rupture. For the first time, the working class, under Marxist leadership, took state power and began reconstructing society on a socialist basis. That in itself was a moment of international political significance, and Britain was no different.

The importance of the Russian Revolution to the British working class cannot be confined to inspiration, solidarity, and radical culture. It sparked a major debate about revolutionary organisation, reformism, and the working class's political independence. That debate had a very real and tangible effect on the British labour movement. This is where the distinction between radical history and Marxist history becomes so important. Radicalism is such a broad term that it can cover everything from democrats to anarchists, pacifists, syndicalists, feminists, trade unionists, Labour reformists, communists, and revolutionary Marxists. What these different tendencies had in common was that they all provided diametrically opposed answers to the fundamental questions of state, capitalism, imperialism and political leadership. To absorb them into a single category of 'radicalism' and celebrate them as such risks erasing the very disagreements that ultimately shaped history.

The Labour Party as the destination of struggle

This is clearest where the histories of local revolt intersect with the growth of Labourism. You can see it in many of the people you met in Rosenberg's London who went from militant working-class politics to parliamentary Labourism. It wasn't just a series of individual biographies. It was a fundamental process in shaping the British labour movement.

The key historical question, of course, is why. The reformist interpretation is that the Labour Party, the recognition of trade unions, municipal reform, and ultimately the post-war welfare state were simply the institutionalisation of the popular struggles of the 19th century. In that view, the rebels of the 19th century are the forerunners of 20th century social democracy.

A Marxist account has to put the issue in a different light. Reform and revolution were alternative approaches to the problem, stemming from different conceptions of the capitalist state. The point is that reform in itself doesn't alter the capitalist relations of property or the nature of state power. The 20th century has shown time and again that reforms won under pressure from the working class can be taken away when the balance of class forces has shifted. British working-class radicalism therefore cannot be thought of as having reached its logical conclusion in the Labour Party. Labourism itself has to be a subject of historical analysis.

Poplar and the limits of municipal socialism

The Poplar struggle is the textbook example. The willingness of the councillors to go to jail rather than impose such onerous burdens on the poor working people was absolutely a landmark moment in London labour history. It was a demonstration of what could happen when a body of elected representatives was under the pressure of a mobilised working class. Poplar also, of course, highlights the limits of municipal politics. Municipal socialism can redistribute resources within the boundaries of the national state. It cannot abolish the capitalist social relations that are the very source of inequality.

This is particularly pertinent to George Lansbury. You can't understand his political evolution in terms of sheer personal courage or moral commitment alone. You have to see it as part of the evolution of Labourism. Trotsky's Where Is Britain Going? (1925) is still absolutely essential precisely because it looked at the contradictions of British reformism at a time of intensifying class struggle. Trotsky argued that the apparent gradualism and peacefulness of British politics masked deep-seated class antagonisms. That argument is not confined to Lansbury. Workers could be extremely militant within organisations which were formally and in practice nationally reformist. That contradiction is the thread which runs through much of the history Rosenberg reconstructs.

Battersea and the politics of accommodation

The Battersea section is another example of the book's strength in that it doesn't present a one-dimensional political picture. It's very much a geographical chapter in which south London is not some marginal area to the more 'familiar' revolutionary history of the East End. Of course, you have the same thing with individuals who start out in working-class and socialist movements and then go on to become quite accommodative of the existing order. Those shifts too can't be explained by biography alone. They resulted from very specific historical and material conditions. The strength of British capitalism, the huge amount of capital accumulated through empire, the power of the parliamentary system and the development of a privileged trade union bureaucracy all exerted a pressure on the labour movement.

That's why London's history is inextricably bound up with Britain's position as an imperial power. The same city which was home to such profound levels of poverty was the administrative and financial heart of the empire. The fact that such extreme poverty coexisted with the metropolis's immense wealth was a direct consequence of the international structure of British capitalism. You simply can't make sense of the particular vigour of British reformism without placing imperialism at the very centre of the analysis rather than at the margins.

Cable Street: heroism and political mythology

The chapter on Cable Street remains inevitably one of the most powerful parts of this historical landscape. The Battle of Cable Street on 4 October 1936 belongs to the collective memory of London's working class because Jewish, Irish and other workers mobilised against Oswald Mosley's fascist movement and attempts to march through the East End.

There is every reason to defend this memory. But Cable Street must also be rescued from mythology. The question is not whether Communist Party members and supporters fought courageously. Many unquestionably did. The historical problem is the politics of Stalinism and the Popular Front. By 1936 the Communist International had abandoned the revolutionary internationalism associated with the October Revolution. The Popular Front subordinated the independent political movement of workers to alliances with supposedly democratic sections of the bourgeoisie.

This was not an abstract dispute occurring somewhere outside the history Rosenberg describes. At precisely the time British workers confronted fascists in London, the Spanish Revolution posed questions of state power, revolution, and counter-revolution with immense urgency. Any account that commemorates anti-fascist militancy while treating the Popular Front primarily as a strategy of broad democratic unity misses the fundamental political issue. Courage cannot substitute for programme. Indeed, that is one of the central lessons running through twentieth-century history: workers repeatedly demonstrated immense courage while being led by organisations whose political strategy subordinated them to forces protecting capitalist property and state power.

What is missing: Trotskyism

The absence of sustained engagement with the Trotskyist movement consequently becomes more conspicuous as the historical narrative approaches the 1930s. Trotskyism was not simply another radical current competing beside anarchism, Labourism, feminism or Stalinism. The Left Opposition, and later the Fourth International, arose from the struggle against the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union and Stalinism's abandonment of socialist internationalism. This had direct implications for every major political question in the latter part of Rosenberg's book: fascism, the German catastrophe of 1933, the Popular Front, the Spanish Revolution, imperialism, and the approach of another world war.

One need not convert a London walking guide into a history of the Fourth International. But once a book seeks not simply to identify places but to explain radical political traditions, suppressing or marginalising conflicts over revolutionary programme becomes consequential. Without those conflicts, Stalinism risks appearing as merely another component of the broader radical tradition. It was far more historically significant than that.

Brick Lane and the extension beyond 1939

The addition of“Battleground Brick Lane 1970s” is therefore particularly interesting. It breaks the earlier tendency for Rosenberg's narrative to terminate around the Second World War and carries the geography of struggle into London's later history. That is a valuable development because migration changed but did not end the political character of the East End. The location that had earlier witnessed the organisation of Jewish immigrant workers became associated with later struggles involving newer migrant communities.

Placing those experiences within the same geographical landscape carries considerable historical power. The danger, however, remains that the concept of radical continuity replaces political differentiation. Successive populations certainly confronted discrimination and racist mobilisation. But the organisations, programmes and international political conditions within which they fought changed profoundly. Continuity of struggle should not be confused with continuity of politics.

Rosenberg and Corbynism

The project's political standpoint becomes particularly apparent in Rosenberg's own retrospective account of the book's history. Writing about the third edition in November 2026, Rosenberg recalled that Jeremy Corbyn was one of the speakers at the launch of the original edition in 2015. He describes Corbyn's subsequent entry into the Labour leadership contest as heralding “one of the most exciting and hopeful periods in Labour's post-war history” and notes that enthusiasm for earlier radicals increased when Corbyn became Labour leader, with what Rosenberg calls a “solid mandate for radical change”.

This is politically revealing. Corbynism represented an attempt to channel the widespread opposition created by years of austerity back through the Labour Party. Its essential proposition was that Labour could be reclaimed and transformed through mass membership and pressure from below. The fate of this project cannot be treated as external to the political lessons of Rebel Footprints. If history is invoked to demonstrate what mobilisation can accomplish, it is equally necessary to examine what happens when mobilisation remains politically imprisoned within organisations defending the existing state. The critical historical issue is therefore not simply that movements need courage, organisation or pressure from below. British labour history has all three. The issue is political independence.

History from below and the problem of leadership

The book shares many strengths with the tradition usually described as history from below. It turns attention away from monarchs, prime ministers and generals and towards people whose experiences were routinely excluded from official history. That intellectual achievement should not be diminished. But there is a danger in transforming history from below into history only from below.

The working class does not make history under circumstances of its own choosing. Spontaneous struggle does not automatically provide the political programme needed to overcome capitalism. Workers encounter existing parties, trade unions, bureaucracies and ideologies. Different tendencies struggle consciously for leadership. Consequently, leadership is itself a historical question. Why did revolutionary opportunities end in defeat? Why did reformist organisations acquire authority? Why did Communist parties that originated under the impact of October become defenders of Stalinism? Why did organisations created by workers come to police workers' struggles? These questions cannot be answered simply by reconstructing mobilisation, however sympathetically or vividly. The working class requires historical memory, but memory without political analysis can become commemoration.

The continuing value of Rebel Footprints

None of this diminishes the usefulness of Rosenberg's achievement. The fact that the third edition exists at all indicates the continuing appetite for histories different from those supplied by official heritage culture. A contemporary favourable assessment describes the walks as a form of public “history from below” that makes the histories of ordinary people accessible through the city itself. Readers should use the book exactly in that spirit.

Walk Fleet Street and Clerkenwell. Walk Bow and Whitechapel. Walk Bloomsbury, Hackney, Battersea, Soho, Poplar, Bermondsey, Cable Street and Brick Lane. Look behind the expensive apartments, redeveloped warehouses and commercial façades. Recover the city inhabited by generations who refused to accept the conditions imposed upon them. But then ask the questions that the landscape itself cannot answer. Why were their victories limited? Why were reforms reversed? Why did organisations built through working-class sacrifice accommodate themselves to capitalism? Why did socialist internationalism come into conflict with Labourism and Stalinism? And why, after two centuries of struggle, does extraordinary private wealth continue to exist beside deprivation in one of the richest cities on earth? Those questions lead beyond the politics of radical remembrance.

Which footprints should be followed?

This is ultimately the contradiction at the heart of the third edition of Rebel Footprints. Rosenberg has produced something genuinely valuable: a counter-map of London. It is a city populated not simply by kings, financiers, property owners and politicians, but by workers, immigrants, women, socialists, democrats and anti-fascists. It reminds the reader that rights presented retrospectively as natural stages in Britain's peaceful democratic development were secured through bitter struggles.

Yet history provides more than inspiration. It provides warnings. The working class's greatest defeats did not occur because workers failed to struggle. Frequently they struggled heroically. Defeat resulted when courage and militancy were subordinated to political programmes incapable of challenging capitalist power. That is why revolutionary history cannot finally be reduced to a collection of inspiring rebellions.

London's radical past contains competing political traditions, not a single progressive inheritance. Chartism, anarchism, parliamentary Labourism, Stalinism and revolutionary Marxism cannot simply be placed together beneath the heading of rebellion. Their differences concerned the most fundamental question of all: which class should hold political power?

In 2026 that question is far from historical. The physical London Rosenberg guides us through has changed drastically. But the social antagonism that produced earlier struggles has not disappeared. Enormous private fortunes coexist with workers struggling with housing and living costs. Migrants are again made scapegoats for crises they did not create. Nationalism is used to divide workers whose interests cross borders.

Rebel Footprints helps recover the memory of those who resisted previous manifestations of these forces. Its limitation is that memory is continually allowed to stand where political explanation is required. Readers should nevertheless take the book onto the streets. Walk the routes. Find the halls, estates, factories, meeting places and battlegrounds. Remember the matchwomen, Chartists, immigrant workers, suffragettes, tenants, socialists and anti-fascists. But their greatest legacy is not the proposition that protest eventually persuades society to become more progressive.

It is that every serious advance of the working class was secured through struggle against entrenched interests, while the decisive question remained the political programme under which that struggle was conducted. The footprints therefore point somewhere Rosenberg does not finally go. They point from protest towards the problem of political power, from radicalism towards socialism, and from the recovery of working-class history towards the necessity of revolutionary and internationalist leadership.

Bibliography

Book under review

Rosenberg, David. Rebel Footprints: A Guide to Uncovering London's Radical History. 3rd ed. Foreword by Michael Rosen. London: Pluto Press, 2026. 416 pp. ISBN 9780745351810. [plutobooks.com], [amazon.co.uk]

Earlier editions and related work

Rosenberg, David. Rebel Footprints: A Guide to Uncovering London's Radical History. London: Pluto Press, 2015.

Rosenberg, David. Rebel Footprints: A Guide to Uncovering London's Radical History. 2nd ed. Foreword by Ash Sarkar. London: Pluto Press, 2019.

Rosenberg, David. Battle for the East End: Jewish Responses to Fascism in the 1930s. Nottingham: Five Leaves, 2011.

Further reading

Branson, Noreen. Poplarism, 1919–1925: George Lansbury and the Councillors' Revolt. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979.

Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. 1845.

Fishman, William J. East End Jewish Radicals, 1875–1914. London: Duckworth, 1975.

Lenin, V. I. “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder. 1920.

Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. The Suffragette Movement. London: Longmans, 1931.

Piratin, Phil. Our Flag Stays Red. London: Thames Publications, 1948.

Rocker, Rudolf. The London Years. London: Robert Anscombe, 1956.

Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Victor Gollancz, 1963.

Trotsky, Leon. Where Is Britain Going? 1925.

Trotsky, Leon. The Spanish Revolution (1931–39). New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973.

 

Booker Prize 2026: M. John Harrison’s The End of Everything and the mystification of catastrophe

This year's Booker Prize winner, a dystopian satire by an 81-year-old veteran of the British sci-fi scene, has been described as a breakthrough. The book is a potent rendering of our time's crisis, but the reader is left with a catastrophe whose cause we can never quite know.

On 9 November, M. John Harrison was awarded the 2026 Booker Prize and its £50k for The End of Everything (his 13th novel). At 81, he is the oldest winner in the prize's history. The judges (chairing Mary Beard) were unanimous in their decision. The Booker Prize Foundation described the award as historic, with its CEO noting that Harrison was the first winner to come out of the 'bona fide SF world'.

The response has been absolutely ecstatic. The press have been all over the place, highlighting just how much the novel's sense of apocalypse and doom mirrors our current anxieties. That's not in any doubt. The more pertinent question is what the novel and the literary establishment that have anointed it actually do with those anxieties. Does it give us any insight into the forces pushing society toward disaster? Or does it merely present those forces as mysterious and intractable, beyond human understanding? Harrison is a very good and serious writer, and the award is in no way unexpected in literary terms. The way the award has been celebrated in relation to The End of Everything, however, tells us something about the prevailing attitude of the cultural establishment that hands out these awards.

A beachcomber on a ruined coast

The End of Everything is set in near-future England where the social order has been completely upended by some unspecified crisis. The state is effectively non-existent, Europe is out of sight, and the iGhetti (mysterious entities) are now involved in human affairs. At the heart of it all is Phillip Tennent, a beachcomber living on the coast with his elderly artist aunt Marnie. He makes a living picking up the oddities that turn up from the Channel. His discovery of a thing that is changing, that is in fact a living thing, and that starts to speak, is what sets the novel in motion. It's something that grows and, in the end, completely undermines the characters' belief that the world around them can be understood rationally.

Harrison's setting is eastern and southeast England, from Hastings down to the Thames and into Suffolk. More significantly, he said the themes and satire came from 'current affairs'. The official Booker description captures the essence of his central inquiry: what happens when the very fabric of the established order and the explanations we have for the world are in a state of 'ongoing disaster', and yet we have to go on living in it?

The link to contemporary Britain is very obvious. You've got a man literally trawling through the wreckage of a world he doesn't really understand, looking for things to sell. That's a potent image of life in a society which is in a state of insecurity and decline. That's where the book's real subject starts to emerge. Harrison has also pointed to the 2008 financial crisis as the novel's genesis. That's significant. The book isn't simply the product of some eternal fascination with the end of the world. Its creative origins are in one of the most pivotal convulsions of contemporary capitalism.

Catastrophe without causes

The 2008 crisis was the catalyst, but Harrison's imagined method goes far beyond that. The crisis wasn't a natural disaster or an alien invasion. It was the outcome of specific economic and social relations: the enormous expansion of financial speculation, the huge build-up of private wealth and private debt and a social order in which the economy is subordinated to the imperative of profit. The austerity then imposed on working people was, of course, also the product of political decisions and class interests.

In The End of Everything, the catastrophe is, in fact, very opaque. The Booker Foundation describes it as an adventure "into the very limits of human understanding" and the nature of the crisis is deliberately obscure. The characters are in no position to really understand what is going on around them. That obscurity is absolutely central to Harrison's conception of the book. Mary Beard told the press that it's a story of a society "going through a catastrophe which they don't really understand". Even more telling in terms of Harrison's view of the book, she said the point was that "when the catastrophe comes you won't know what's happening".

Here is the book's central problem: what starts off as a reaction to the breakdown of historical relations becomes a meditation on the impossibility of ever really understanding that breakdown. Historical relations (with their causes, their beneficiaries and their opponents) become an overwhelming, incomprehensible force which simply crushes the individual. That's not something particular to Harrison. It's a commonplace in contemporary literature and film. Ecological collapse, pandemic, technological disruption, war and social disintegration all come back as fate, as an inexplicable eruption, as the inevitable outcome of humanity's supposed universal tendency to bring about disaster. It's far rarer for them to be presented as the product of historically developed social relations, which could therefore be understood and changed.

Some people have actually suggested that the iGhetti is AI. Others have suggested it's a commentary on capitalism, others on Brexit or climate change. Harrison himself is very deliberately non-committal on the matter. If we take the AI interpretation, that highlights the point. AI isn't some autonomous intelligence that just turns up on an English beach. It's a technology developed within a particular economic system and overwhelmingly held by big corporations and states. The real questions then aren't so much what AI might become as who owns and controls it, how it's used and what social interests it serves.

Turning technology into an enigmatic guest whose ultimate purpose is utterly incomprehensible risks reproducing exactly the ideological veneer it needs to get through. Satire needs more than atmosphere; it needs an object. Harrison's objects are often rather obscure: the natural human desire for explanation, the persistence of the normal in the face of disaster, commercial opportunism and the sheer absurdity of trying to apply the familiar categories to a situation that has been utterly transformed. Those are all legitimate and potentially very rich objects of satire. The social relations which produce the catastrophe, however, tend to get lost behind them.

From the New Wave to the prize ceremony

Harrison's career absolutely merits serious attention precisely because The End of Everything didn't just appear out of the blue. It grew out of the very atmosphere of the New Worlds period, the seminal British SF magazine of the day (the one linked to Michael Moorcock). Harrison was at the heart of the British New Wave, and he was part of the movement that sought to shake up the genre and its inherited assumptions. His subsequent work (the Viriconium books, Light, Nova Swing, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, etc.) developed a particular prose style and a pronounced scepticism about any kind of neat explanation. The Booker material makes it clear he was never going to be comfortably pigeonholed. That scepticism was once genuinely subversive. It rejected the technocratic fantasy of mastery as much as it rejected the comfortable assumptions of much traditional genre fiction. His refusal to construct a fully and neatly rationalised universe assailed complacency.

But of course this aesthetic has its other side. As the political radicalism of the 1960s faded out in the 1970s and 1980s, so did a large section of the intellectual and artistic world move away from the attempt to understand society as a historical totality. The scepticism about false certainty gave way to scepticism about the very possibility of objective historical knowledge. Postmodernism provided the theoretical language for this withdrawal, with its scepticism about 'grand narratives' (Marxism and the various socialist narratives of historical development being the most obvious).

Harrison cannot simply be reduced to this tendency. His writing is too individual, and his intellectual formation too complex, for such a crude identification. But The End of Everything shares something of this wider historical path: what begins as hostility towards simplistic explanations ends perilously close to treating explanation itself as impossible. At the post-award press conference, Harrison celebrated the erosion of genre limits. He argued that the epoch of genres understood as “fences and boxes, pigeonholes” was ending, and that a contemporary novel could combine several genres simultaneously. Much is to be welcomed in the destruction of snobbish barriers between “literary” and genre fiction. However, formal hybridity is not in itself an artistic breakthrough. A novel may contain a thriller, mystery, satire, dystopia, road novel and realism simultaneously and still evade the most important questions raised by its subject. The decisive issue in art is not how many forms a work can combine, but how deeply and truthfully it penetrates reality.

Sugar, venture capital and “dynamite”

The Booker Prize has never existed in a vacuum. It's a product of history and society. Literary prizes don't just drop down from the sky to pass some kind of value-free judgement. They are institutions in their own right, products of a particular economic and intellectual milieu. That makes Harrison's reception so fascinating. After all those decades on the periphery of British speculative fiction, he's finally been welcomed into one of the country's most august literary institutions. That is, of course, a reflection of his actual achievements, but it's also a sign of the death of the old divide between 'serious literature and science fiction.

Yet the Booker set are very much in sympathy with The End of Everything's vision of apocalypse. It's a world in which the normal structures have all gone to hell, the future is terrifying, and nobody has the foggiest idea what's actually happened. Mary Beard put it quite clearly as 'the politics of now seen through the lens of the future'.

But what about politics? Contemporary official culture is absolutely fluent in the language of catastrophe. Catastrophe is in fact one of its key moods. Climate collapse, authoritarianism, technological dislocation, pandemics, war and the prospect of total societal breakdown are all part of the contemporary cultural landscape. What is largely absent from this is the notion that these disparate crises have identifiable social roots and that working people can consciously shape history.

The cultural establishment can therefore fully embrace the image of apocalypse so long as the apocalypse is in some way ambiguous, existential or intractable. It can be disturbing, it can be grotesque, it can be surreal, it can be ironic and it can be utterly radical in its aesthetic. The only thing it absolutely cannot be is a politically transparent apocalypse. In that respect Harrison's novel is absolutely the book of its moment.

A “twinge of optimism”?

In announcing the judges' decision Mary Beard did say that the book, in spite of its very dark subject matter, leaves you with a 'twinge of optimism'. Harrison has been considerably more cautious on the subject. When asked what he hoped readers would take from the novel he described the world of the book as very grim and very likely to stay that way. The most you could possibly say at the end of the day is that there might be a kind of 'relief' rather than any hope or sense of closure.

The point is rather telling, really. What survives the end of everything in The End of Everything is the sheer persistence of human relationships and the sheer fact of people trying to go on when the inherited explanations are no longer going to cut it. That should not be ignored. Human solidarity in the face of social collapse is a valid subject for an artist, and Harrison's emphasis on the persistence of the ordinary amid all that is going on is clearly one of the book's major strengths.

But such solidarity remains fundamentally private and defensive. People "muddle through" as Beard puts it. They're just trying to get on with the business of living in the face of immense forces utterly beyond comprehension. Muddling through is not the same as historical agency and that's precisely where a materialist criticism has to go further than both Harrison and his Booker contemporaries. The crisis of our time has produced confusion, fear and reaction. It has also produced opposition. Workers, youth and other sections of the population have not simply been the passive victims of history. They have on numerous occasions attempted to resist the worsening of their living conditions, the effects of austerity, inequality, the rise of authoritarianism and war.

What's missing from so much of the contemporary dystopian art is not necessarily an ounce of optimism (in the sentimental sense) but agency. Harrison's novel is very attuned to the experience of social disintegration. What it can't really convey is the sheer weight of the social force which could in fact overcome it. That's probably why the book has been so warmly received. You can be absolutely convinced that civilisation is in crisis and yet remain profoundly pessimistic about humanity's capacity to rebuild it on its own. That mixture of deep anxiety and political paralysis is in fact the hallmark of much of the contemporary bourgeois cultural life.

The End of Everything is in fact more interesting than either unqualified triumph or wholesale rejection would suggest. Its strengths point to a contradiction. Harrison is absolutely right to see something real in the picture: the social landscape in a state of exhaustion, the erosion of the old assumptions, the odd persistence of the everyday in the face of disaster, and the experience of the individual who increasingly feels the forces of economic, technological and political change as something which is simply happening to them from outside. The beachcomber trawling through the wreckage is an image which has real social resonance.

But art has to go beyond the surface of things. The fundamental flaw in Harrison's conception is that the mystification his characters go through might well become the very principle that organises the work. Their sense of being mystified by the forces that shape their lives becomes the very assertion that those forces are in fact unknowable. That's a very different route from the Marxist conception of art and history. Capitalist society is mysterious precisely because the relations between people take the form of relations between commodities, markets, corporations and all the various autonomous technological forces. The point is not to fetishise that mystery; it's to get through it.

The difference is absolutely decisive. "We don't understand what is going on" is a perfectly legitimate starting point for serious art. "What is going on cannot be understood" is a different proposition and one which can easily become an excuse for helplessness. The End of Everything is intelligent, disturbing and clearly takes the bewildered state of life in a society whose institutions and assumptions are clearly on the way out very seriously. Its refusal to offer any easy consolation is a real strength. Harrison's achievement absolutely merits serious attention rather than being ignored simply because of the acclaim it has received.

But its dominant conception fits perfectly with the view of a cultural establishment that sees catastrophe in every direction and yet sees no social force capable of surmounting it. What we need is not an artificially optimistic literature, still less a literature of political propaganda in the form of novels. Art has its own laws and will reveal truths which are beyond the reach of slogans. The greatest art is art which sees beneath the immediate surface the deeper movement of human relationships and of historical life.

The real challenge facing contemporary literature is therefore bigger than just imagining the end of the world. It's about making the utterly incomprehensible comprehensible, uncovering the human relations beneath apparently autonomous forces, and restoring the human being to history as more than a frightened spectator of their own destruction. The task of coming to terms with "the end of everything" is inextricably linked to the task of preventing it.

Bibliography

Primary text and works by Harrison

Harrison, M. John. The End of Everything. London: Serpent's Tail, 2026.

Harrison, M. John. Light. London: Gollancz, 2002.

Harrison, M. John. The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again. London: Gollancz, 2020.

Harrison, M. John. Viriconium. London: Gollancz, 2000.

Contemporary sources

The Booker Prizes. “Everything you need to know about The End of Everything by M. John Harrison, winner of the Booker Prize 2026.” 9 November 2026. [thebookerprizes.com]

The Booker Prizes. “The End of Everything: Winner of the Booker Prize 2026.” [thebookerprizes.com]

Loffhagen, Emma. “M John Harrison becomes first science fiction author to win the Booker prize.” The Guardian, 9 November 2026. [theguardian.com]

Jordan, Justine. “M John Harrison’s Booker prize-winner is weird, challenging and strikingly topical.” The Guardian, 9 November 2026. [theguardian.com]

Story, Hannah. “M John Harrison wins 2026 Booker Prize for dystopian novel The End of Everything.” ABC News, 10 November 2026. [abc.net.au]

Criticism and theory

Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005.

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984.

North, David. The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left. Oak Park, MI: Mehring Books, 2015.

Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution. 1924. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005.