Friends in Youth: An elegy for the “moderates” of the English Revolution

Minoo Dinshaw’s Friends in Youth: Choosing Sides in the English Civil War has been warmly received. The book is an impressive achievement: learned, elegantly written, densely researched, and unusually attentive to personality, friendship, and the texture of political life. But the critical enthusiasm surrounding it also speaks to the political atmosphere in which the English Revolution is now being interpreted. The publisher presents its protagonists as principled young men hoping to restore harmony between Crown and Parliament. At the same time, the book’s publicity repeatedly emphasises reluctant choices, subtle differences, accident and the tragedy of unnecessary civil conflict. [penguin.co.uk]

That interpretation has proved especially congenial to reviewers. The Telegraph described the book as a “necessary cautionary tale about the human cost of political division”. At the same time, the Financial Times praised its “elegiac portrait of well-meaning moderates who tried to halt the slide towards violent division”. The publisher’s material and elsewhere reproduce these descriptions. Andrew Gimson’s ConservativeHome review goes further, explicitly welcoming Dinshaw’s resistance to the supposedly inadequate division of seventeenth-century politics into Cavaliers and Roundheads and concluding with Dinshaw’s own vision of his subjects as embodying an “attractive common world” opposed to party enmity.

The response matters because Dinshaw’s book frames the English Revolution as, above all, a tragedy of political polarisation: a catastrophe in which thoughtful, cultivated, and essentially decent men found themselves divided by forces that wiser statecraft might have controlled. Against revolution stands conversation; against ideology, friendship; against mass political mobilisation, the civilised intercourse of lawyers, scholars and gentlemen.

But this framing raises a more fundamental historical question. What if the destruction of that “common world” was not primarily the consequence of a failure of moderation? What if the institutions within which Edward Hyde, Bulstrode Whitelocke, John Selden and Lucius Cary moved were themselves being destabilised by transformations that no amount of cultivated conversation could reconcile? The great limitation of Friends in Youth is that it approaches a social revolution through the consciousness of men who desperately wanted to prevent it from becoming one.

Two friends and the collapse of a political world

Dinshaw builds his narrative around the remarkable parallel careers of Edward Hyde, later Earl of Clarendon, and Bulstrode Whitelocke. Their friendship developed in the intellectual and social environment of the Inns of Court. Both became lawyers, parliamentarians, politicians, and eventually historians of the revolution they lived through. Yet in 1642 they chose opposing camps.

This imaginative strength is central to Dinshaw’s project. Rather than starting with the armies already assembled, he reconstructs the political world before those divisions hardened. John Adamson notes that the originality of the conception lies partly in recognising how deep the friendship between Hyde and Whitelocke had been and how closely their political careers and attitudes had once converged.

Both men belonged to the extraordinary cultural world surrounding the Inns of Court, which functioned as far more than professional training grounds for lawyers. They brought together law, politics, literature, patronage and intellectual discussion. Their association with the Great Tew circle around Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, placed them within a cultivated milieu that recoiled from both Laudian authoritarianism and what its members regarded as Puritan fanaticism. Jackie Eales describes this circle as characterised by scepticism towards religious dogmatism and a tolerance of political disagreement, even as its individual members eventually divided over the war. [historytoday.com]

The tragedy at the centre of Dinshaw’s story therefore has genuine historical substance. Hyde and Whitelocke were not ideological opposites destined from youth to become Cavalier and Roundhead. Both opposed important features of Charles I’s Personal Rule. Both were hostile to prerogative government. Their differences sharpened as the parliamentary movement itself developed. Hyde interpreted Parliament’s increasingly radical demands as constitutional innovation, whereas Whitelocke remained with Parliament while continuing to seek compromise. Blair Worden summarises Dinshaw’s interpretation by noting his emphasis upon the comparatively small original political distance between the two men and upon the tragedy of their eventual separation. This makes for compelling biography. But it does not in itself explain the revolution  [the-tls.com].

The virtues and limitations of political biography

Dinshaw possesses an exceptional eye for character. His narrative brings court, chambers, country houses, parliamentary debates, and personal relationships to life in remarkable detail. His use of memoir, correspondence, and Hyde and Whitelocke's later historical writings lets him reconstruct how contemporaries understood their own decisions without simply accepting their retrospective accounts at face value.

The book should therefore not be dismissed as merely conservative history dressed up in elegant prose. The emotional consequences of political rupture were real. Friendships were broken, families were divided, property destroyed and careers overturned. It is also historically unsatisfactory to imagine that everyone entering political conflict in 1640 already knew England would experience civil war, regicide, and republican government before the decade was out. Dinshaw is right to restore uncertainty to historical experience. History is lived forwards even if it is written backwards. The danger arises when uncertainty becomes explanation. Neither contingency nor individual political actors' reluctance shows that the structural crisis producing their choices was accidental. A revolutionary situation can contain innumerable contingencies yet still emerge from profound contradictions within a society. This is precisely where biography reaches its limits. The crucial historical question is not simply why Hyde eventually chose Charles while Whitelocke remained with Parliament. It is why, by 1642, those alternatives confronted them at all.

Revisionism rendered as literature

In this respect Friends in Youth belongs, even if not programmatically, within the historiographical landscape created by the revisionist assault on older interpretations of the English Revolution. From the late twentieth century, historians including Conrad Russell, John Morrill and Kevin Sharpe challenged explanations that emphasised long-term social transformation and class conflict. They drew renewed attention to religion, political contingency, the composite monarchy, conflicts among the three kingdoms, parliamentary-political contingencies, and Charles I's decisions.

That intervention corrected real weaknesses in schematic accounts in which a “rising bourgeoisie” appeared almost automatically upon the historical stage to overthrow feudalism. Historical materialism cannot be reduced to assigning political actors fixed class labels and then treating everything they subsequently do as an expression of an economically predetermined script. But the revisionist reaction frequently produced the opposite distortion. In discarding crude determinism, they also erased social development itself. The causes of revolution dissolved into a chain of political accidents, misunderstandings, confessional disputes and personal decisions.

Dinshaw’s narrative is particularly effective as a literary expression of this approach because biography naturally privileges the immediate field of individual consciousness. His protagonists knew one another personally. Their choices were difficult. Their disagreements could sometimes appear surprisingly narrow. Therefore the subsequent catastrophe appears all the more tragic. Yet revolutions rarely begin because everyone wants a revolution. On the contrary, revolutionary crises historically develop precisely through the failure of successive attempts at compromise.

Beneath Westminster: the transformation of English society

The weakness of a history organised around political friendship becomes apparent once the social transformation of seventeenth-century England is restored to the picture. England experienced enormous changes in agriculture, property relations, commerce, and the concentration of population and wealth. Agrarian capitalism had advanced further than in much of continental Europe. Competitive leasing, market dependence, enclosure, and the transformation of relations among landlords, tenant farmers, and rural labourers reshaped the countryside. London expanded dramatically, becoming the centre of government, finance, trade, printing, and popular political mobilisation. The dispute between Crown and Parliament developed within this changing society.

This does not mean that Charles I represented “feudalism” while Parliament straightforwardly represented “capitalism”. Both camps contained landowners; commercial interests crossed political divisions; religious allegiance mattered enormously; and Parliament itself included men terrified by popular radicalism. But these complexities do not abolish class relations. They show how political institutions inherited from an earlier social order mediate class interests.

Robert Brenner’s Merchants and Revolution matters precisely here. Brenner showed that political conflicts surrounding Parliament cannot be reconstructed solely from parliamentary speeches or constitutional theory. The changing organisation of overseas commerce and the interests of London merchant groups shaped the material environment of political radicalisation. Similarly, Brian Manning insisted that the revolution cannot be understood exclusively through the political nation. London crowds, apprentices, artisans, tradespeople and poorer sections of society intervened directly in political events. Street pressure affected Parliament itself. Once these forces enter the picture, “moderation” ceases to be a politically neutral category.

The problem of the crowd

The parliamentary crisis of 1640–42 cannot be understood simply as a dispute within an educated governing class. Calling the Long Parliament created a political opening through which grievances accumulated during the Personal Rule could be articulated on a different scale. Petitions circulated. Print expanded. Crowds gathered around Westminster. Religious disputes became mass political issues. The struggle over Strafford, episcopacy, and the militia increasingly took place in an environment where political action could not be confined to the Commons and Lords.

Here Hyde’s evolution takes on a social dimension that describing him merely as a constitutional royalist cannot capture. Hyde had opposed important abuses of royal government. But as the opposition movement increasingly mobilised forces outside the established political elite, his overriding concern became preserving political and social order. The controversy over the Grand Remonstrance marked the widening division. The question was no longer merely whether to correct particular royal abuses. It increasingly became a question of who possessed political authority and on which forces that authority would depend.

For men such as Hyde, mobilising wider layers of the population threatened to transform constitutional opposition into something altogether more dangerous. This is the contradiction within the politics of the celebrated “moderates”. They could oppose arbitrary monarchy when the issue concerned the political rights of the propertied classes, but recoiled when resistance threatened to mobilise those below them. Moderation therefore describes not an absence of political interest, but a definite social standpoint.

Falkland and the tragedy of moderation

No figure better embodies Dinshaw’s elegiac interpretation than Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland. Falkland's death at the first Battle of Newbury in September 1643 became inseparable from the mythology that was later constructed around him. He appears as a sensitive intellectual destroyed by political fanaticism, a gentleman so disgusted by civil conflict that death became a release. Dinshaw’s world naturally gravitates toward such a figure. Yet Falkland's tragedy was also the tragedy of a political programme.

The constitutional royalists hoped to restrain the monarch and preserve the monarchy; defend Parliament while containing the popular forces increasingly mobilised behind it; oppose religious authoritarianism without permitting radical religious pluralism; and reform the state without letting reform develop into revolution. The programme became increasingly impossible because the conflict itself transformed the forces engaged in it. War required taxation, administration, recruitment and mobilisation. Parliamentary victory ultimately demanded a reorganisation of military power. The creation of the New Model Army in 1645 produced not merely a more effective army but a social and political institution within which religious and political radicalism could flourish. The revolution was beginning to develop its own organs and political language.No Great Tew conversation could halt that development.

Hyde, Whitelocke and the search for peace

Dinshaw does not end his story with Falkland’s death, which makes his account of attempted reconciliation more interesting than a simple elegy ending at Newbury would have been. As Blair Worden notes, Hyde and Whitelocke met during wartime negotiations, including at Oxford and Uxbridge, where Dinshaw portrays them as continuing their attempts to settle. But these negotiations actually reinforce the deeper historical problem. Why did peace repeatedly prove impossible? If civil war resulted principally from misunderstanding or extremist passions, reasonable negotiators ought eventually to have discovered a constitutional formula capable of reuniting the protagonists. Yet every stage of the conflict produced new facts on the ground and new demands.

A settlement had to determine control of the armed forces, religion, parliamentary authority, and the King's position. Behind these questions stood competing conceptions of sovereignty and different social constituencies that the war itself had encouraged to mobilise. The failure of negotiation therefore cannot simply be reduced to inadequate statesmanship. Contradictions progressively consumed the middle position it could not resolve.

Revolution breaks through its moderates.

This was the process that Leon Trotsky, looking back on the English Revolution from the revolutionary struggles of the twentieth century, considered essential. In Where Is Britain Going?, he emphasised the conflict's revolutionary significance and how political leadership passed beyond those initially seeking limited opposition to the monarchy. The history of the 1640s repeatedly confirms this pattern. The Presbyterian leadership sought victory over the King but feared the social and religious forces the struggle released. The Independents pushed further. The military crisis produced the New Model Army. Within the army, political radicalisation increasingly challenged the gentlemen who believed Parliament's victory should end the revolutionary process. Then came the Levellers.

At the Putney Debates of 1647, questions implicit during the initial constitutional conflict became explicit: who constituted the political nation? Did political authority ultimately derive from property or from the people? What political rights did men who had fought for Parliament but lacked sufficient property to qualify for conventional political power possess? Putney's enormous historical significance lies in the fact that the revolution brought into political speech people whose voices had previously been largely excluded from the constitutional arena. This is precisely the world that is not easily seen from Great Tew.

The people enter history.

The Levellers represented one expression of the radicalisation. Their programme of political reform, religious toleration, and substantially enlarged male political participation went far beyond anything the constitutional opposition envisaged in 1640.

Beyond them stood the Diggers, whose challenge went further still. Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down remains indispensable not because every theological radical can be translated into a modern political category, but because Hill grasped something that much subsequent historiography has tried to push back to the margins: once the old structures of authority fractured, groups previously excluded from political discourse began asking questions about property, religious authority and social hierarchy that the parliamentary leadership had never intended to place on the agenda. The revolution opened political possibilities larger than the objectives of those who began the parliamentary struggle. That is what revolutions do.

It also explains why the language of “moderation” must be treated critically. Moderate relative to whom? Moderate in defence of what? From the perspective of the Leveller soldiers who demanded political rights after risking their lives in Parliament's army, restrictions imposed in the name of property and social stability did not constitute political neutrality. The centre was already situated inside a social order.

Clarendon and the memory of revolution

Hyde’s later career as Earl of Clarendon adds significance to the story. His monumental History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England became a foundational interpretation of the revolution. The title itself announced the perspective. What later generations might interpret as revolution appeared, from Clarendon’s standpoint, as rebellion: a rupture of legitimate government, social hierarchy, and political order. Clarendon was far too intelligent an observer to produce simple royalist propaganda. The enduring power of his history comes precisely from its psychological acuity and its understanding of political character. Yet these literary qualities should not obscure the social assumptions organising the narrative.

Clarendon’s hostility to political enthusiasm and mass mobilisation expressed the standpoint of a governing elite traumatised by discovering what could happen when political conflict escaped the established political classes' control. Dinshaw approaches Clarendon critically, rather than taking his retrospective account at face value. John Adamson praises the book for its alertness to distortions in its subjects’ later accounts. But the larger problem remains: Friends in Youth reconstructs an emotional world that is overwhelmingly that of the educated and propertied classes.

We learn what revolution felt like through the eyes of gentlemen who feared losing control of it. Whitelocke is in some respects the more revealing figure because he survived politically through successive revolutionary regimes. His career shows the inadequacy of dividing the period into revolutionaries and conservatives solely by formal allegiance in 1642. He remained Parliamentarian without becoming a social revolutionary. Under the Republic and Protectorate, he held important state positions; John Adamson describes him as a senior legal figure in the English Republic and a Cromwellian confidant.

This career matters beyond personal adaptability. The English Revolution destroyed one political order without abolishing property or creating social equality. Its bourgeois character lay precisely in the contradiction between its revolutionary destruction of essential components of the old political structure and the social limitations that constrained that transformation. The propertied classes required revolutionary methods against the Crown, yet feared the democratic implications of mobilising the lower orders.

Cromwell himself personified this contradiction at a far higher historical level. The force capable of defeating royalism had to be mobilised through religious and political energies that could not subsequently be switched off at will. Hence the revolutionary army could become a political threat to the very property-owning forces whose victory it had secured. The suppression of the Levellers cannot be separated from Parliament's victory. They were contradictory moments within the same bourgeois revolutionary process.

1660 did not turn the clock back

The Restoration therefore did not simply erase the revolution. Charles II returned, but neither the political nor the social world of the 1630s could be reconstructed. The revolutionary decades had transformed relations between monarchy, Parliament, taxation, religion, landed wealth and commerce. The later settlement culminating in 1688–89 would confirm a political order fundamentally more congenial to the development of capitalist property and parliamentary government than the Personal Rule of Charles I had been. This is one reason why interpreting the 1640s exclusively through tragedy is inadequate.

Revolutions are undoubtedly tragic for individuals. They involve violence, dislocation and suffering. But historical judgement cannot stop at registering catastrophe—the enslaved person who rebels causes disorder. The peasant who refuses feudal obligations disrupts established custom. The worker who strikes interrupts economic life. Judging every social struggle primarily by the tranquillity it destroys already adopts the standpoint of the existing order. The English Revolution must therefore be judged not only by what collapsed but by what historical possibilities were created.

Marxism and the bourgeois revolution

The older Marxist interpretation was never as simple as its critics suggested. Karl Marx recognised the seventeenth-century English Revolution and the French Revolution of 1789 as struggles whose significance extended far beyond the political language consciously employed by their participants. The actors might appeal to religion, ancient liberties, or constitutional precedent; nevertheless, the struggles they pursued transformed the conditions of European social development. This distinction between political consciousness and objective historical function is essential.

Hyde did not have to understand himself as defending one configuration of class society for his actions to possess a class content. Whitelocke did not need to imagine himself an agent of capitalist development for parliamentary victory to affect the political environment in which capitalist relations subsequently expanded. Historical materialism asks not simply what people said they were doing, but what social relations made their activity possible and what consequences followed from their victory or defeat. Revisionism often turns the discrepancy between intention and outcome into an argument against social explanation. Marxism sees that discrepancy as one of the central problems historical explanation must solve.

The contemporary appeal of the “moderate”

This brings us back to the remarkable reception of Dinshaw’s book. Readers are not wrong to find parallels between the political divisions of the seventeenth century and those of the present. Indeed, the Guardian review explicitly opened this comparison, linking the appeal of Dinshaw’s subject to more recent experiences of political division. But such analogies themselves require political examination. “Polarisation” has become a preferred category for discussing contemporary political crises. Political conflict appears as a disease of democratic culture. The solution is dialogue, moderation, civility, and rebuilding a political centre. This language excludes the possibility that polarisation itself has objective causes.

Growing social inequality, declining living standards, war, collapsing confidence in established parties and institutions, and widespread hostility towards existing political arrangements cannot simply be explained as failures of civility. A political centre can disintegrate because the social relationships that support it have become unstable. From this perspective, Dinshaw’s reconstruction of the “common world” of Hyde, Whitelocke and Falkland resonates unmistakably today. It presents a lost world of cultivated men who disagree but keep talking, whose tragedy is being overwhelmed by less restrained political forces. The danger lies not in telling their story. It lies in mistaking their story for the revolution's meaning.

The view from Great Tew and the view from Putney

Friends in Youth deserves to be read. Dinshaw's achievement is considerable. He reconstructs a political and intellectual milieu with unusual intimacy and reminds readers that historical actors cannot be reduced to the labels later attached to them. Hyde was more complicated than “Royalist”; Whitelocke more complicated than “Roundhead”. Men who eventually fought on opposite sides could start with overlapping assumptions and still be haunted by the destruction of their earlier friendships. Dinshaw’s strength is that it lets us understand these people from inside their world. But historical explanation must also stand outside that world.

The gentlemen of Great Tew believed civilisation depended upon moderation, learning, hierarchy and conversation among educated men. The revolution demonstrated that England contained other voices and other interests. The distance between Great Tew and Putney is therefore more than geographical. At Great Tew, cultivated members of a narrow elite discussed how England should be governed. At Putney, the political revolution raised a far more disturbing question: who possessed the right to govern England at all? Friendship could not answer that question.

Conclusion: the revolution the moderates could not prevent

A collective loss of political manners did not cause the English Revolution. Neither was it the mechanical product of an economically predestined bourgeoisie marching towards capitalism. It emerged from the interaction of profound social transformation, religious conflict, constitutional crisis, capitalist development, popular mobilisation and the international and British crisis of the Stuart kingdoms. Contingency operated everywhere. But contingency operated inside structures.

The tragedy of Hyde, Whitelocke and Falkland was therefore more substantial than the tragedy of friendship destroyed by political extremism. They represented a political milieu that wanted reform without revolution and resistance without mobilising forces from below. Events repeatedly demonstrated the impossibility of maintaining that position. The revolution advanced because the moderates could neither defeat the King decisively nor restore the old equilibrium. The forces required to win the struggle transformed it. The New Model Army, the Independents, the Levellers and the Diggers did not appear because English political society temporarily forgot the virtues of moderation. They arose from contradictions that moderate constitutionalism could not resolve.

That is why the story cannot end emotionally with the lost civilisation of Great Tew. It must proceed to the army councils, the Leveller petitions, the Putney Debates, the regicide and the republic. Minoo Dinshaw has written a beautifully crafted portrait of men watching their political world collapse. Friends in Youth deserves praise for helping us understand what that collapse looked like from their chambers, libraries, and country houses. But the observer who remains there will misunderstand the revolution.

To understand why the old world collapsed, you must leave Great Tew and Westminster and follow the revolution into London’s streets, the parliamentary army, and the debates at Putney. There artisans, soldiers and men without great property entered a political argument from which the established order had largely excluded them, and asked the question the cultivated moderates could never satisfactorily answer: if ordinary people had fought to determine the future of the kingdom, by what right should political power remain the monopoly of the propertied few? That democratic eruption from below, rather than the disappearance of an “attractive common world” among gentlemen, gives the English Revolution its enduring historical significance.

Bibliography

Brenner, Robert. Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of. The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England. Various editions.

Dinshaw, Minoo. Friends in Youth: Choosing Sides in the English Civil War. London: Allen Lane, 2025.

Hill, Christopher. The English Revolution 1640. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1940.

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

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

Manning, Brian. The English People and the English Revolution, 1640–1649. London: Heinemann, 1976.

Manning, Brian. 1649: The Crisis of the English Revolution. London: Bookmarks, 1992.

Morrill, John. The Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives and Radicals in the English Civil War, 1630–1650. London: Allen & Unwin, 1976.

Russell, Conrad. The Causes of the English Civil War. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.

Sharpe, Kevin. The Personal Rule of Charles I. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

Trotsky, Leon. Where Is Britain Going? 1925.

Whitelocke, Bulstrode. Memorials of the English Affairs. First published 1682; various subsequent editions.

Reviews and contemporary responses

John Adamson, “Lawyers in Arms”, Literary Review, review of Friends in Youth. Adamson describes the work as a major exercise in historical narration, emphasising Dinshaw's discovery of the extent of Hyde and Whitelocke's early friendship and political affinities. [literaryreview.co.uk]

Jackie Eales, review of Friends in Youth, History Today, March 2025. The review stresses Dinshaw's treatment of the Great Tew circle, the parallel legal and political careers of Hyde and Whitelocke, and their developing constitutional disagreements. [historytoday.com]

Andrew Gimson, “Book review: Politics is not just a battle between Cavaliers and Roundheads”, ConservativeHome, 31 January 2025. Particularly useful for assessing the conservative reception of Dinshaw's conception of moderation and the supposedly lost common political culture. [conservativehome.com]

Kathryn Hughes, review of Friends in Youth, The Guardian, 22 January 2025. Hughes focuses on the parallel lives and reluctant divergence of Hyde and Whitelocke, and explicitly places the book in a modern context of political division. [theguardian.com]

Blair Worden, “Long divisions: A friendship broken by war”, Times Literary Supplement, 24 January 2025. Especially valuable as a critical counterweight to the more celebratory notices: Worden identifies both the gains produced by Dinshaw’s close-focus method and the historical problems generated by that restricted perspective. [the-tls.com]

 

A Stalinist museum piece returns: Mikhail Basmanov’s Contemporary Trotskyism reissued

The republication of a 1972 Soviet polemic against Leon Trotsky and the Fourth International provides an opportunity to reconsider the political function of anti-Trotskyism within Stalinist ideology and the historical fate of the bureaucracy that produced it. Mikhail Basmanov's Contemporary Trotskyism: Its Anti-Revolutionary Nature was not simply an academic assessment of a rival political tendency. It was part of a broader campaign in which the Soviet bureaucracy sought to discredit Trotskyism and suppress the historical significance of the Left Opposition’s struggle against Stalinism. The persistence of such polemics decades after Trotsky’s assassination showed the bureaucracy's continued sensitivity to a Marxist critique that challenged its claim to represent the political continuity of the October Revolution.

The subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union gives these arguments an additional historical significance. The bureaucracy that proclaimed Trotskyism politically bankrupt ultimately presided over the destruction of the USSR and the restoration of capitalism. Basmanov’s work should therefore be read today primarily as a document of Stalinist political ideology, revealing how the Soviet apparatus sought to answer an opposition whose analysis of bureaucracy, nationalism and the danger of capitalist restoration raised questions that official Soviet historiography could never satisfactorily resolve.

Who was Mikhail Basmanov?

Biographical information on Basmanov is surprisingly scarce in readily available sources. We can establish with greater certainty his political and literary role in the Soviet ideological apparatus. He was a specialist writer on Trotskyism, and his best-known work, Contemporary Trotskyism: Its Anti-Revolutionary Nature, was published in English by Moscow’s Progress Publishers in 1972 under the auspices of the CPSU Central Committee's Institute of Marxism-Leninism.

The circumstances of the book’s production are particularly revealing. The publisher of the new edition describes Basmanov as a “professional in the genre” of Soviet anti-Trotskyist literature and connects the book with a 1971 directive by CPSU Central Committee Secretary Ponomarev calling for an ideological offensive against Trotskyism. Contemporary Trotskyism therefore cannot be approached simply as an academic historian's independent scholarship. Its original title page explicitly identifies the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU, while its chapters attack Trotsky, permanent revolution, the Fourth International and contemporary Trotskyist organisations from the standpoint of official Soviet ideology.

David North and the Stalinist falsification of Trotskyism

Basmanov’s Contemporary Trotskyism becomes clearer when placed within the broader tradition of historical falsification examined by David North. North’s defence of Trotsky has repeatedly insisted that attacks upon Trotsky cannot be separated from the political struggle over the historical meaning of the October Revolution, the rise of Stalinism and the fate of the Soviet Union. His In Defence of Leon Trotsky, for example, challenges what he regards as the transmission of Stalinist distortions into contemporary historical writing. The WSWS presentation of the Russian edition described the book as a refutation of attacks by British historians upon Trotsky’s political and intellectual legacy and explicitly connected these controversies with the earlier Stalinist falsification of Soviet history. [wsws.org]

This provides an important framework within which to read Basmanov. The essential issue is not whether we can dismiss every factual assertion in Contemporary Trotskyism because its author wrote within the official Soviet ideological apparatus. The more profound question concerns the political method by which Trotskyism is defined. Rather than beginning with Trotsky's programme and historical writings and examining their relationship to the major experiences of the twentieth-century working class, the Stalinist polemical tradition began by identifying the Soviet bureaucracy with socialism. Opposition to that bureaucracy could consequently be represented as opposition to the Soviet Union and, ultimately, as counter-revolution.

North’s writings approach the question from the opposite standpoint. In a 2024 speech commemorating Trotsky’s exile on Büyükada, he situated Trotsky’s historical importance particularly in relation to the defeat of the German working class, the rise of Nazism and Stalinist betrayals in Germany, France and Spain. He argued that understanding these historical defeats remains necessary to confronting contemporary political problems. This emphasis on historical experience exposes the fundamental weakness of Basmanov’s method. Trotskyism must be judged not by the denunciatory vocabulary of official Soviet ideology but by examining the policies for which Trotsky and his opponents actually fought. [wsws.org]

The contrast became still more important after 1991. The bureaucracy that had declared Trotskyism historically bankrupt presided over the Soviet Union's final crisis and dissolution. The WSWS account of the Russian publication of In Defence of Leon Trotsky explicitly links the Soviet Union's fate to the historical struggle between Trotsky, the Left Opposition, and Stalinism, arguing that contemporary political questions in Russia cannot be understood apart from that history. Whatever judgement one ultimately reaches about North’s political conclusions, this is a question that any retrospective defence of the official Soviet attack on Trotskyism must answer. [wsws.org]

In this context, republishing Mikhail Basmanov’s Contemporary Trotskyism: Its Anti-Revolutionary Nature offers more than antiquarian interest. The Soviet attack on Trotsky did not disappear with the state apparatus that produced it. Stalinist distortions of Trotsky and the Russian Revolution continued to find expression long after the USSR's dissolution. Basmanov’s book, now republished with a critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, deserves attention because it preserves, in unusually concentrated form, the political methods the Soviet bureaucracy used to discredit Trotsky, the Left Opposition, and the Fourth International.

The book's historical provenance is unmistakable. Contemporary Trotskyism appeared in English from Progress Publishers in Moscow in 1972 and carried on its title page the attribution “Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU”. Its chapters announce the political character of the work before the argument has properly begun: “How the Trotskyites Permanently Fought Against the Revolution”, “A Scornful Attitude to the Peasantry”, “The Ideological Collapse of Trotskyism”, and “How the ‘Fourth International’ Was Hammered Together and What Came of It”.

This was not history written from an academic distance. It was political propaganda produced by an official institution of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union against the revolutionary tendency whose leading representatives had been persecuted and physically annihilated by the Stalinist bureaucracy during the preceding decades. The circumstances surrounding its production underline this character. The publisher of the new edition states that, in Kommunist no. 18 of 1971, Boris Ponomarev, secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, called for exposing Trotskyism’s supposed connections with anti-communism and right- and left-wing opportunism. It describes Basmanov’s volume as executing that political directive “at book length”. Contemporary Trotskyism's interest, therefore, lies far less in what it can tell readers about Trotskyism than in what it reveals about Stalinism.

Why 1972?

The date of publication is essential to understanding the book. Basmanov was writing in the aftermath of a period of enormous international political upheaval. The revolutionary crisis in France in May-June 1968, the struggles surrounding the Prague Spring, mass international opposition to the Vietnam War, and the political radicalisation of a new generation transformed the political atmosphere in Europe and beyond.

Even Basmanov could not simply ignore this process. The opening of his book describes the period as one of profound revolutionary change, specifically citing intensifying class struggle in advanced capitalist countries and the emergence of students and parts of the intelligentsia as active political forces. The new publisher draws attention to an even more revealing feature of the original. Basmanov himself acknowledged that, after supposedly being defeated during the 1920s and 1930s, Trotskyist movements began to revive from the 1950s onward. The publisher argues that the intensity of the Soviet polemic reflected the growth of the Fourth International and other radical tendencies among workers and students after 1968.

This contradiction runs through the whole enterprise. The Soviet bureaucracy insisted that Trotskyism was politically bankrupt, historically discredited and without a significant social base. Yet it continued to devote considerable ideological resources to combating it. The very existence of Contemporary Trotskyism is therefore evidence that the bureaucracy did not regard Trotsky’s political heritage with the indifference appropriate to a genuinely dead tendency.

Basmanov’s subsequent work makes the anxiety still clearer. In 1973 the Novosti Press Agency in Moscow published his Where Are Trotskyites Leading the Youth?, an English-language pamphlet of roughly 100 pages dealing explicitly with Trotskyism, political activity and youth. The title itself tells us something important. The bureaucracy was no longer merely conducting retrospective arguments about disputes from the 1920s. It was concerned with the influence of Trotskyist ideas upon a contemporary younger generation.

The method of the Stalinist school of falsification

The organisational structure of Contemporary Trotskyism displays the characteristic method of official Soviet anti-Trotskyism. Permanent revolution becomes an alleged rejection of the revolutionary capacities of the peasantry. Opposition to the Stalinist programme of socialism in one country becomes disbelief in socialism itself. The Soviet bureaucracy identifies opposition to its diplomatic manoeuvres and political betrayals as hostility to the Soviet Union.

The table of contents demonstrates the procedure particularly clearly. Basmanov moves from supposed Trotskyist hostility to the peasantry to the “rejection” of socialism in one country, the alleged ideological collapse of Trotskyism and finally the claim that contemporary Trotskyism was undermining the anti-imperialist and national liberation movements.

The method is significant. Political disagreements are not analysed according to their actual historical content. Instead, opposition to the policies of the Soviet bureaucracy is progressively identified with opposition to socialism itself. The bureaucratic leadership is thereby transformed from a historically specific political stratum into the personification of socialism, and criticism of the bureaucracy becomes by definition counter-revolutionary. This ideological formula had justified persecuting the Left Opposition long before Basmanov wrote his book.

Consequently, this framework pushed aside the historical questions that might have discredited it. What was the social basis of bureaucratisation in the Soviet Union? Why did Lenin, in the final period of his political life, express increasing alarm over the growth of bureaucratic tendencies? What political meaning did the theory of socialism in one country have, which had never formed part of the Bolshevik Party programme before 1924? What explained the catastrophic policies pursued by the Communist International in Britain, China and Germany? And why did the Soviet leadership undertake the physical extermination of so large a section of the revolutionary generation that had led the October Revolution?

These questions lead directly to writings that official Soviet polemics could not answer through historical investigation alone: Trotsky’s The Third International After Lenin, his writings on Germany and the rise of fascism, and, above all, The Revolution Betrayed.

The fundamental political significance of The Revolution Betrayed lay in Trotsky’s attempt to explain the Soviet Union's contradictions from a Marxist standpoint. He rejected both the Stalinist identification of the bureaucracy with socialism and the claim that the October Revolution had created another form of capitalism. He instead characterised the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers’ state in which the social gains represented by nationalised property coexisted with a parasitic bureaucratic caste exercising political power. Whether that analysis was correct is a historical and political question requiring serious examination. Basmanov instead begins from the legitimacy of the Soviet bureaucracy and evaluates its opponents accordingly.

The shadow of the Moscow Trials

A deeper historical continuity is involved. Basmanov's 1972 language was less murderous than that of the Great Terror, but the basic political logic had changed far less than the softer terminology suggested. Trotskyism continued to be presented not as a Marxist tendency whose political analysis might be right or wrong, but as a fundamentally anti-revolutionary phenomenon serving forces hostile to socialism.

That accusation was central to the Stalinist campaign against the Left Opposition. During the Moscow Trials of the 1930s, former leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution were accused of extraordinary conspiracies and subsequently executed. Trotsky, exiled from the Soviet Union, was made the central political defendant in absentia.

The twentieth-century history of Stalinism therefore cannot be separated from the history of anti-Trotskyism. Opposition to Trotsky was not one ideological feature among many. It played an essential role in destroying the political memory of the October Revolution and establishing a new official version of Soviet history in which Stalin's emergence appeared as the legitimate continuation of Bolshevism.

The contradiction became particularly striking after Nikita Khrushchev denounced parts of Stalin’s record. Once it was conceded that crimes on an enormous scale had been committed, an obvious question followed. What of the political opposition that had fought the bureaucracy before those crimes reached their height? Answering that question required reconsidering the history of the Left Opposition itself. 

What Basmanov cannot explain

Basmanov’s book's decisive weakness follows from its political purpose. To acknowledge Trotskyism as a genuine Marxist opposition to bureaucratic domination would have required reopening the basic political struggles through which the Stalinist regime consolidated itself. This problem extends beyond Trotsky personally. The history of the Fourth International after his assassination posed equally difficult questions for Soviet apologetics.

Particularly important was the 1953 conflict within the Fourth International associated with the tendency headed by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel and the formation of the International Committee of the Fourth International. The issue was not simply one more organisational split among left-wing groups. At the centre of the conflict was a debate over the historical role of Stalinism and other bureaucratic and nationalist formations.

For an official Soviet polemicist, treating all these conflicting tendencies as undifferentiated “Trotskyism” was politically convenient. The distinctions disappeared, and with them disappeared the awkward fact that one of the central conflicts within postwar Trotskyism concerned precisely whether revolutionary Marxists should adapt themselves politically to the Stalinist bureaucracies and allied movements.

The homogenisation of politically hostile tendencies therefore performs an ideological function. It lets Basmanov construct “Trotskyism” as a single counter-revolutionary phenomenon rather than examine the historical struggles through which different movements claiming the Trotskyist inheritance evolved.

A surprisingly useful primary source

However, Basmanov’s work contains an irony that the publisher of the new edition itself emphasises. Unlike many polemics in this genre, Contemporary Trotskyism quotes extensively from the publications of the movements it attacks. The publisher calls it unusually well documented for a Soviet source on the post-1968 radical left, noting its references to publications from several countries.

This gives the book a secondary value quite different from the one its author intended. It can be read as evidence of what the Soviet bureaucracy monitored, which tendencies it considered threatening, and how its ideological institutions tried to categorise developments on the international left.

The book is therefore potentially illuminating when approached against the grain. The reader should ask not merely, “What does Basmanov say about the Trotskyists?” but “Why was an institution of the CPSU commissioning and publishing this argument in 1972?” Seen in this way, the polemical excess becomes historical evidence. 

History’s verdict

The greatest problem confronting Basmanov’s argument emerged after he published his book. Trotsky insisted that bureaucratic rule did not provide a stable path to socialism. His conception of political revolution stemmed from the contradiction between the nationalised property relations produced by the October Revolution and the bureaucracy's political domination. In his analysis, defending the social foundations created by October required the Soviet working class to remove the bureaucracy and restore workers’ democracy.

The ultimate fate of the Soviet Union therefore poses a decisive historical question: which analysis more penetratingly captured Soviet society's contradictions, the bureaucracy's apologetics or the Marxist opposition to it? The state whose political invincibility was assumed throughout official Soviet literature disappeared in 1991. The CPSU ceased to rule. The Soviet Union was dissolved, and capitalist property relations were restored across the former USSR.

This does not mean that every prediction made by every tendency describing itself as Trotskyist was vindicated. Nor does the collapse of the USSR automatically settle every controversy over Soviet history. But it does require the central claims of official Soviet ideology to be subjected to an accounting that Contemporary Trotskyism, for obvious chronological reasons, could never make. The bureaucratic order Basmanov defended did not provide a stable and irreversible transition to communism. Its political institutions proved incapable of preventing capitalism's restoration.

This is why Soviet historian Vadim Rogovin's work matters in any retrospective assessment of Basmanov. In his multi-volume Was There an Alternative?, Rogovin reconstructed the history of the Left Opposition and the struggle against Stalinism as a real political conflict rather than treating the bureaucracy's ascendancy as the inevitable outcome of the Russian Revolution. The very title posed the historical question that decades of official Soviet historiography had sought to suppress: was Stalinism the unavoidable development of Bolshevism, or did a Marxist alternative exist?

From this perspective, the conflict between Stalinism and Trotskyism cannot be relegated to a dispute between personalities or rival factions. It concerned the international strategy of the socialist revolution, the relationship between Soviet economic development and world revolution, the nature of socialist democracy and, ultimately, whether the bureaucratic regime would defend or undermine the social foundations established in October 1917.

The new introduction

The 2026 edition's distinguishing feature is Dmitry Chasovennikov's introduction. The available evidence here requires an important correction to the assumption that the reissue straightforwardly represents an attempt to revive Basmanov’s political standpoint. The publisher explicitly describes the new introduction as “written from inside the tradition the book sets out to bury” and presents Basmanov’s book as “Moscow’s book-length answer to the post-1968 growth of the Fourth International”. Amazon reproduces substantially the same description, characterising the original as a Soviet attack on Trotsky, the Fourth International and the far left. [amazon.co.uk]

That substantially changes how the republication should be evaluated. On the evidence available from the publisher, the book is being presented not simply as a restored Stalinist polemic for contemporary use but as a historically situated document accompanied by a critical introduction. Nevertheless, one important question remains that the publisher’s promotional description alone cannot settle: how far does Chasovennikov’s introduction pursue the historical implications of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the archival record of Stalinist repression, and the political disputes inside the Fourth International? Without the complete text of the introduction, it would be unjustified to attribute specific answers to him.

The responsible criticism, therefore, is not to pretend that the new editor endorses Basmanov. The more interesting question is what contemporary readers can learn from republishing the book as an historical document.

Why republish it now?

On that basis, there is a legitimate reason to make Contemporary Trotskyism available again. Stalinist anti-Trotskyism deserves historical study. So do the institutions that manufactured it, the political vocabulary they employed and the historical episodes they systematically distorted or suppressed.

Indeed, the publisher’s framing unintentionally makes the book particularly suitable for such a reading. It notes that Basmanov’s polemic followed Ponomarev’s 1971 directive, stresses the political circumstances of its appearance, and explicitly characterises the volume as a response to the revival of revolutionary currents after the late 1960s.

Read critically, therefore, Contemporary Trotskyism can illuminate a significant episode in the ideological history of the Cold War. It shows how the Soviet bureaucracy understood the challenge revolutionary movements posed to its left and how it sought to inoculate Communist Party members and sympathisers against Trotsky’s political legacy. But precisely because of this, the book should never be read in isolation.

Readers seeking to understand these controversies should place Basmanov alongside the principal documents produced by the people he attacks. They should read Trotsky on permanent revolution, the Communist International, the German catastrophe, the Soviet bureaucracy and the founding of the Fourth International. They should investigate the Moscow Trials and the subsequent historical and documentary record. They should examine the conflicts within the Fourth International rather than accepting an omnibus category called “Trotskyism”.Above all, they should compare the rival historical perspectives with what actually happened.

A museum piece, but an instructive one

The most striking feature of Contemporary Trotskyism today is the disappearance of the political world from which it spoke with such institutional confidence. Basmanov wrote from within an enormous state and party apparatus that declared itself the authoritative embodiment of Marxism-Leninism and treated Trotskyism as a defeated deviation relegated to history. Yet the CPSU and the Soviet Union are themselves gone.

The political questions Trotsky fought over have not disappeared with them. The relationship between nationalism and international socialism, the political independence of the working class, the dangers of bureaucracy, the character of revolutionary leadership and the relationship between socialist revolution and democracy remain indispensable questions for anyone attempting to understand the twentieth century or the crisis of contemporary capitalism.

That is the final irony surrounding Basmanov’s resurrection. His book sought to demonstrate that Trotskyism belonged to the past. Half a century later, Basmanov’s polemic returns primarily as a historical artefact from a vanished political apparatus.

The new edition can therefore perform a useful service, provided it is read critically and historically. Approach contemporary Trotskyism not as an authoritative guide to Trotsky or the Fourth International, but as a primary source for understanding how the Soviet bureaucracy represented its Marxist opponents in the last decades of its existence.

And there is an appropriate way to test its claims. Read Basmanov. Then read Trotsky. Read the Left Opposition documents and the political conflicts within the Fourth International. Read the archival scholarship produced after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Finally, set the conflicting analyses against the history that followed.

That historical comparison transforms this republished polemic from an attack on Trotskyism into an unintended document of the political order against which Trotskyism fought.

Bibliography

Primary text

Basmanov, Mikhail Ivanovich. Contemporary Trotskyism: Its Anti-Revolutionary Nature. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972. The digitised original identifies the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU and confirms the 1972 English printing. [archive.org]

Basmanov, Mikhail Ivanovich. Contemporary Trotskyism: With a New Critical Introduction. Introduction by Chasovennikov. Progress Publishers Library, 2026. The electronic edition is listed as appearing in September 2026. [progresspu...ishers.org], [fnac.com]

Basmanov, Mikhail. Where Are Trotskyites Leading the Youth?. Moscow: Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, 1973. [openlibrary.org]

Trotsky and the Left Opposition

Trotsky, Leon. The Permanent Revolution. 1930.

Trotsky, Leon. The Third International After Lenin. 1928.

Trotsky, Leon. The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? 1936.

Trotsky, Leon. The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution. 1938.

Trotsky, Leon. In Defence of Marxism. 1942.

Stalinism and the historical struggle over Trotskyism

Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921. Oxford University Press, 1954.

Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921–1929. Oxford University Press, 1959.

Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929–1940. Oxford University Press, 1963.

Rogovin, Vadim. Was There an Alternative? Multi-volume study of the Left Opposition, Stalinism and the political struggles in the Soviet Union.

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

Further reading

Broué, Pierre. Trotsky. Paris: Fayard, 1988.

Serge, Victor. From Lenin to Stalin. 1937.

Sedov, Leon. The Red Book on the Moscow Trials. 1936.

 

The unions, the bureaucracy and the “forward march”: A review of John Kelly’s Trade Unions and Socialist Politics

John Kelly’s Trade Unions and Socialist Politics appeared in 1988, three years after the defeat of the British miners’ strike and amid the organised labour movement's continuing retreat under the Thatcher government. It targeted a growing body of opinion among left academics, Communist Party intellectuals, and trade union officials who argued that changes in the working-class composition, declining trade union membership, and Thatcherism's electoral victories had rendered the traditional politics of class struggle obsolete. Verso’s description confirms that Kelly explicitly challenged claims that unions were in chronic decline or had exhausted their progressive potential, calling such arguments based on “poor sociology and bad history”.

Kelly sets himself two fundamental questions. What kinds of trade union strategy are most likely to develop political class consciousness among workers? And what role could such strategies play in a transition to socialism? These are serious questions, and Kelly treats them with a seriousness absent from much of the literature generated by the demoralised British left of the late 1980s. The book is extensively researched and draws on historical material, strike statistics, surveys, and the writings of classical Marxists. Yet the volume's fundamental weakness is that it keeps these questions within the political horizons of the existing trade union apparatus and the Labour Party. Nearly four decades later, the fate of these organisations provides an objective test of the perspective advanced in 1988. That test has not favoured Kelly’s conclusions.

Kelly’s argument

The book examines the classical Marxist literature on trade unionism before considering the political and strategic problems confronting British unions during the 1980s. Kelly begins with Marx and Engels, for whom unions were both an elementary organisational expression of workers’ resistance to capital and a potential means for broader class consciousness to emerge. He then considers Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? (1902), with its argument concerning the limitations of spontaneous trade union consciousness, before turning to Antonio Gramsci and his discussion of trade unionism and the factory councils.

Kelly’s sympathies lean heavily toward Rosa Luxemburg. In The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (1906), Luxemburg examined how mass struggles affect the working class's political consciousness and organisation. Kelly draws on historical evidence from strike movements to argue that participation in industrial struggle can transform workers’ consciousness. This argument is central to his response to those who, during the 1980s, increasingly depicted the working class as fragmented, politically quiescent, and incapable of collective action. Verso’s account of the book similarly stresses Kelly’s use of empirical evidence to support Luxemburg’s emphasis on the transformative consequences of participation in trade union struggles. 

From this foundation, Kelly conducts a two-front polemic. Against the Eurocommunist and “new realist” currents associated with Marxism Today, which drew ever more pessimistic conclusions about the working class's historical prospects, Kelly argues that the difficulties confronting trade unions in the 1980s were neither historically unprecedented nor evidence that collective working-class organisation had reached its end. His criticism of this standpoint remains one of the book's strongest elements. The labour movement was experiencing a serious defeat. Still, defeat is not the same thing as the disappearance of the working class or the abolition of the fundamental antagonism between labour and capital.

On the other flank, however, Kelly challenges conceptions of the trade union bureaucracy, particularly those associated with tendencies to his left. He opposes the claim that full-time trade union officials constitute a distinctive conservative bureaucracy that systematically seeks to contain the struggles of the workers they nominally represent. Drawing on empirical studies, Kelly argues that officials may, under certain circumstances, be as militant as, or even more militant than, sections of their membership. The weakness here lies less in his evidence than in the political conclusion he draws from it. Comparing degrees of individual militancy cannot settle the Marxist critique of trade union bureaucracy. It concerns the apparatus's objective social position and political function within capitalist society.

Kelly’s strategic conclusions follow from this approach. He examines corporatist arrangements between governments, employers and union organisations and considers the possibilities for a more class-conscious trade union movement capable of placing political pressure upon the state. His ultimate perspective nevertheless remains centred upon militant trade unionism combined with a Labour Party committed to radical economic reform. The democratic road to socialism comes with qualifications, but it remains recognisably within the political traditions of the British Labour left.

The missing question: the unions’ programme

Kelly’s book is strongest when it challenges the new realists' pessimism. Workers had not lost their capacity for collective struggle. The miners demonstrated this with extraordinary force in 1984-85, sustaining a year-long confrontation with a government that mobilised the capitalist state's resources against them. The strike therefore never raised a deficiency of courage or militancy among miners. It was the political isolation of their struggle.

The miners’ defeat poses a problem that Kelly’s theoretical framework struggles to answer. A trade union bureaucracy cannot be adequately defined through the subjective qualities of individual officials. A bureaucrat can speak militantly, support particular strikes, and occasionally find himself pushed into conflict with employers, yet he remains fundamentally distinct from the membership in social and political terms. The decisive issue is how the trade union apparatus relates to capitalist property relations, the national state, and the political organisations that defend the existing social order.

Trotsky’s unfinished 1940 essay “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay” matters precisely here. Trotsky sought to link the development of monopoly capitalism to the tendency toward closer integration of the trade union apparatus with the capitalist state. He did not conclude from the bureaucracy's conservatism that revolutionaries should abandon workers organised in trade unions. Rather, he saw the revolutionary party's political independence from the apparatus as essential precisely because large sections of the working class remained organised within the unions.

Kelly’s presentation of Lenin and Luxemburg tends to blur this issue by presenting their differences too strongly through the categories of pessimism and optimism towards spontaneous industrial struggle. Lenin argued that workers were not incapable of militant struggle, nor that economic struggles could never contribute to political radicalisation. The essential point was that spontaneous struggle alone does not resolve the problem of socialist political consciousness and revolutionary leadership. The working class encounters not merely the employers but an entire network of political institutions and ideological pressures through which bourgeois society reproduces itself.

This distinction becomes decisive when Kelly moves from empirical evidence to strategic conclusions. His alternative to the demoralisation of the new realists is ultimately not to build an independent revolutionary leadership but to make the established relationship between the unions and the Labour Party more militant. This is the central limitation of Trade Unions and Socialist Politics. Kelly correctly insists that the working class retains an enormous capacity for struggle. Still, he does not adequately confront the possibility that the existing organisations claiming to represent that class had themselves become increasingly important mechanisms for subordinating workers’ struggles to the requirements of British capitalism.

The verdict of history

In the decades after Kelly’s book was published, this question gained an importance that 1988 could only partly have anticipated. The globalisation of capitalist production placed immense pressure upon nationally based trade union programmes. Corporations increasingly organised production across borders, while unions remained institutionally and politically tied to the national state. The old reformist perspective, which held that union pressure on national employers and Labour governments could produce an indefinite succession of improvements, became increasingly untenable.

Kelly’s own later scholarship continued to engage extensively with these problems. Rethinking Industrial Relations developed a mobilisation approach to industrial relations and collective action, and Kelly later revisited that work in a 2018 article examining conceptual and empirical questions that had arisen since its publication. His later research also examined union revitalisation, organising strategies, social partnership, and strike activity. His academic profile identifies industrial conflict, trade unions, and union organising as subjects associated with this work.

This later development matters because mobilisation theory addresses a key problem: how grievances acquire a collective character and become organised action. Yet, from a Marxist standpoint, it does not, by itself, resolve the more fundamental political question posed by Trade Unions and Socialist Politics. Explaining why workers mobilise is not the same as explaining the political role of the organisations through which they mobilise, nor does it determine which political programme their struggles should pursue.

The British strike wave of 2022-23 demonstrated the enduring relevance of this distinction. Rail workers, postal workers, nurses, doctors, teachers and other sections of the working class entered into major struggles over wages and conditions. The eruption of these conflicts vindicated a key aspect of Kelly’s polemic against those who had written off collective working-class struggle during the 1980s. But industrial militancy did not automatically resolve the question of political strategy and leadership. Lenin's central problem, identified more than a century earlier, remained: what political perspective should guide the struggles generated by the objective antagonism between workers and capital?

Consequently, the historical fate of Kelly’s argument is ironic. Against the “new realists”, he was right to insist that the working class had not disappeared and that trade unions still had the capacity for collective action. But the labour movement's subsequent history showed that these observations alone were insufficient. The more fundamental question was whether organisations rooted in national reformism could provide a progressive way forward under conditions of globally integrated capitalist production.

From Trade Unions and Socialist Politics to mobilisation theory

Kelly’s subsequent intellectual development makes Trade Unions and Socialist Politics particularly interesting in retrospect. His later Rethinking Industrial Relations shifted the analytical emphasis towards mobilisation, collectivism and the processes through which workers become involved in collective action. Kelly returned to that work in “Rethinking Industrial Relations revisited”, describing the later article as an examination of the origins and consequences of the earlier book and of conceptual and empirical questions raised subsequently.

His wider work on union revitalisation likewise examined the organisational possibilities confronting unions in a changing economic environment. Union Organisation and Activity, edited with Paul Willman, addressed union organising, statutory recognition, public-sector union strategies, partnership agreements, and the barriers existing union structures may pose to revitalisation. This provides an important bridge between the 1988 arguments and Kelly’s subsequent industrial-relations scholarship.

Yet continuity matters as much as development. Whether the analytical language is socialist politics, mobilisation, organising or revitalisation, the decisive unresolved issue concerns the political character of trade unionism itself. Unions cannot be understood solely as mechanisms through which grievances become collective action. Their leadership pursues definite programmes, operates within definite institutional relationships, and responds to pressures generated by its position between labour, employers, and the capitalist state.

This is ultimately why Kelly's examination of the classical Marxist controversy cannot be resolved by industrial-relations sociology alone. The question is political. Under conditions of globally integrated production. At the same time, the trade unions remain nationally organised, can the existing apparatus become the vehicle for an international socialist struggle against capital, or does its programme bind workers ever more closely to national economic competitiveness and the capitalist state?

Conclusion

Trade Unions and Socialist Politics deserves to be read. Kelly’s critique of pessimistic currents that declared the working class historically exhausted contained an important element of truth, and his insistence on the transformative potential of collective struggle stood in sharp contrast to the increasingly fashionable abandonment of class politics during the 1980s. The empirical seriousness of his work distinguishes it from much of the superficial theorising produced during that period.

But the book’s greatest significance today lies in the contradiction at its centre. Kelly correctly defended the working class's continued capacity for collective struggle but underestimated the political problem posed by the organisations that mediated those struggles. Workers' defeats cannot be explained simply by insufficient mobilisation, unfavourable economic conditions, or variations in membership militancy. They raise questions of organisation, programme and political leadership.

Read nearly four decades after its publication, Trade Unions and Socialist Politics poses a problem more clearly than it solves. The issue is not whether the working class can fight. Repeated eruptions of class struggle have answered that question. The fundamental question is whether workers can advance through organisations whose political perspective remains subordinate to national reformism and the capitalist state.

The alternative is not political passivity or withdrawal from workers already organised within trade unions. It is the struggle for the working class's political independence from the bureaucracy, combined with the development of democratic organisations through which workers can exercise direct control over their struggles and link them internationally. From this standpoint, rank-and-file committees are not simply a militant supplement to the existing apparatus but an organisational expression of a fundamentally different political orientation, based on the international unity and political independence of the working class.

That is the central question Trade Unions and Socialist Politics raised in 1988 but could not resolve. The intervening decades have made its resolution more urgent, not less.

Bibliography

Primary text

Kelly, John. Trade Unions and Socialist Politics. London: Verso, 1988.

Classical Marxist sources

Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from Political Writings, 1910–1920. Edited by Quintin Hoare. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977.

Lenin, V. I. What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement (1902). In Collected Works, vol. 5. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1961.

Luxemburg, Rosa. The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (1906). London: Bookmarks, 1986.

Marx, Karl. “Trade Unions: Their Past, Present and Future.” Resolution of the International Working Men’s Association, Geneva Congress, 1866.

Trotsky, Leon. “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay” (1940). In Leon Trotsky on the Trade Unions. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1969.

Kelly’s later work on trade unions and industrial relations

Kelly, John. Rethinking Industrial Relations: Mobilisation, Collectivism and Long Waves. London: Routledge, 1998. Kelly subsequently revisited the arguments of this book in 2018. [eprints.bbk.ac.uk]

Frege, Carola M., and John Kelly. “Union Revitalisation Strategies in Comparative Perspective.” European Journal of Industrial Relations 9, no. 1 (2003): 7–24. [scholar.google.com]

Frege, Carola M., and John Kelly, eds. Varieties of Unionism: Strategies for Union Revitalisation in a Globalising Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. [scholar.google.com]

Kelly, John, and Paul Willman, eds. Union Organisation and Activity. London: Routledge, 2004. The volume examines organising, recognition, partnership, public-sector unionism and union revitalisation. [routledge.com]

Kelly, John. Ethical Socialism and the Trade Unions: Allan Flanders and British Industrial Relations Reform. London: Routledge, 2010. John Kelly’s ORCID record lists the work among his publications. [orcid.org]

Kelly, John. “Rethinking Industrial Relations Revisited.” Economic and Industrial Democracy 39, no. 4 (2018): 701–709. [eprints.bbk.ac.uk]

Related works

Hobsbawm, Eric. “The Forward March of Labour Halted?” Marxism Today, September 1978.

Hyman, Richard. Marxism and the Sociology of Trade Unionism. London: Pluto Press, 1971.

Kelly, John. Labour and the Unions. London: Verso, 1987.

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

Contemporary reviews

Grimshaw, Bruce J. Review of Trade Unions and Socialist Politics, by John Kelly. Hummer, no. 24.

Review of Trade Unions and Socialist Politics, by John Kelly. American Political Science Review 83, no. 4 (December 1989).

  

An Injury to All: A history of the British working class that cannot answer its own question

Published by Verso on 27 October 2026, Ewan Gibbs’s An Injury to All: The Unmaking of the British Working Class sets itself an important historical and political task. Verso describes it as a social history of the British working class since 1945, extending “from the picket lines of the Miners’ Strike to the Amazon warehouses of today”. Through first-hand testimony, the book follows the transformation of a class once concentrated in mines, shipyards, and other centres of heavy industry into one dispersed across call centres, warehouses, and the gig economy. Its culminating question is explicitly political: “who now speaks for labour?”

That question could hardly be more urgent. The old organisations that claimed for generations to represent the working class have undergone a protracted collapse. The Labour Party has moved ever further from the reformist programme it was historically identified with, while the trade-union bureaucracy increasingly functions as an apparatus for containing workers’ struggles. The destruction of manufacturing employment, the privatisation of state industries, the erosion of social provision and the growth of precarious employment have transformed the social landscape in which millions live.

Gibbs brings considerable knowledge to this subject. He is a Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow and describes his research interests as encompassing energy, industry, work and protest. His earlier book, Coal Country: The Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialisation in Postwar Scotland, examined the decline of deep coal mining in Scotland and its consequences for work, communities, memory, class and nationhood. His subsequent research has extended into the political economy of energy and the problems associated with industrial transition.

The empirical virtues of this work should not be dismissed. Verso stresses the prominence Gibbs gives to first-hand accounts, while Rhian E. Jones praises the book specifically for “letting its subjects speak for themselves”. The recollections of miners, engineers and workers from communities devastated by industrial closure constitute important historical evidence. Such testimony preserves experiences that would otherwise be submerged beneath official statistics and the complacent narratives of politicians who have treated deindustrialisation as the unavoidable price of economic modernisation.

But the preservation of experience does not by itself provide a historical explanation. History must establish the relationship between experience and the social forces that produced it. It must explain not merely what happened, but why, which political forces intervened, what programmes they advanced, and what alternatives existed. It is precisely here that the concept of the “unmaking” of the British working class raises fundamental problems.

From the “making” to the “unmaking” of the working class

The title consciously echoes E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. The intellectual ancestry of the argument is made especially clear by Gibbs’s 2019 essay, “The Unmaking of the British Working Class: A Highly Provisional Thesis”. There he defined the “unmaking” primarily through the atrophy of what he called “Labourism”: the political and institutional world centred on organised labour and its attachment to the Labour Party. He linked this process to deindustrialisation, suburbanisation, the demise of collective action, and the political demoralisation visible in former industrial areas.

This is an important starting point because the decline of “Labourism” is not identical to the disappearance of the working class. The conflation of the two contains the central theoretical difficulty. The working class is not defined by living in a mining village, wearing overalls, possessing a particular regional accent or belonging to a trade union. It is defined fundamentally by its relationship to the means of production. Workers who do not own significant productive property must sell their labour power to live. Changes in technology, occupation and geography can profoundly alter the forms through which class consciousness develops without abolishing the underlying class relation.

Indeed, Verso's own description of An Injury to All illustrates the contradiction. It describes a class once “forged in mines and shipyards” becoming one spread across call centres and gig-economy applications. But this is not, strictly speaking, the disappearance of the working class. It is a transformation in the occupational structure and geographical concentration of wage labour. What has been shattered is something different: an historically specific form of working-class organisation and consciousness that grew alongside nationally regulated capitalism and became politically subordinated to the Labour and trade-union bureaucracy.

The distinction is decisive. If the decline of mining, shipbuilding, steelmaking and large-scale manufacturing automatically meant the decline of the working class, then the pessimistic conclusions associated with post-industrial sociology might follow. But if capitalist restructuring destroyed certain concentrations of workers while simultaneously producing new ones, the historical problem changes entirely. We are no longer asking why the working class disappeared. We are asking why organisations created in its name proved incapable of responding progressively to this transformation.

The exhaustion of national reformism

The postwar settlement in Britain emerged from definite international historical conditions. The Depression, fascism, and the Second World War had radicalised workers' masses internationally. Britain emerged from the war economically weakened and increasingly subordinate to the United States. At the same time, the long postwar economic expansion provided the resources to make significant social concessions while preserving capitalist property relations.

Nationalisation, the National Health Service, expanded welfare provision, council housing, and collective bargaining did not abolish capitalism. They represented concessions made within it under the immense pressure of the working class. This was the environment within which Labourism acquired its postwar authority. The Labour Party claimed that Parliament could gradually transform capitalism while trade unions negotiated improvements within the existing economic order. The bureaucracy’s privileged position depended on its ability to mediate between workers and employers.

The breakdown of the postwar economic order increasingly undermined this arrangement's foundations. The growing internationalisation of production brought national industries directly into competition within a globally organised system of production and finance. British capitalism responded by demanding wage restraint, rationalisation, closures, deregulation and attacks upon social spending. The Labour and trade-union bureaucracy confronted a historical choice. Either the working class had to challenge capitalist property relations, or its organisations had to accept British capitalism's demands. They chose the second course.

This is the history that the language of “unmaking” threatens to obscure. Workers did not wake up one morning and decide that solidarity had become unfashionable. Collective institutions did not simply evaporate under the influence of individualism or suburbanisation. Nor was Thatcherism merely the ideological expression of an inexplicable change in national “structures of feeling”. A sustained political offensive targeted the working class, and the organisations through which workers traditionally fought increasingly became mechanisms for suppressing resistance. From the standpoint of Marxism, therefore, Thatcherism cannot be understood independently of the crisis of Labourism. The strength of the Conservative offensive ultimately depended on the political paralysis its existing leadership imposed on the working class.

The miners’ strike and the decisive historical defeat

The 1984-85 miners’ strike occupies an unavoidable position in any account of this transformation. Verso foregrounds the miners’ struggle in An Injury to All, describing its narrative as extending from the miners’ picket lines to contemporary Amazon warehouses. The strike represented a historic confrontation between the working class and the Thatcher government. The government understood that the miners represented far more than one occupational group. Their defeat would alter class relations throughout Britain.

But the decisive question is therefore not simply why the mines subsequently closed. It is why the miners were defeated. An explanation centred upon geographical restructuring or the weakening of industrial solidarities reverses cause and effect. The demoralisation that followed the destruction of the coalfields cannot adequately explain a defeat that helped produce that demoralisation.

Consequently, labour movement leadership becomes indispensable. The miners needed to mobilise the working class as a whole. Instead, their struggle remained confined to an industrial dispute, while the Labour and trade-union bureaucracy opposed any political mobilisation that could threaten the Thatcher government. The subsequent devastation of the coalfields was enormous. Jobs disappeared, communities lost their economic foundations, and decades of accumulated collective experience came under sustained pressure. But these consequences must be understood historically as the aftermath of a major political defeat.

Gibbs’s 2019 essay provides valuable evidence of the bitterness that survived in former coalfield constituencies. Discussing Bolsover, he noted hostile memories of the miners’ strike and how electoral allegiances subsequently fractured. He placed this within a broader trajectory of deindustrialisation, demobilisation, and declining attachment to the labour movement.  But hostility towards the former institutions of the labour movement cannot be treated merely as evidence of weakening working-class identity. It must also be understood as the distorted product of decades of bitter political experience.

Workers repeatedly mobilised through organisations that claimed to represent them, only to discover that those organisations refused to wage a struggle against the social order responsible for declining living standards and industrial destruction. The resulting alienation did not mean class antagonism had disappeared. It showed Labourism's growing inability to contain that antagonism within its traditional political forms.

Hobsbawm, Marxism Today and the retreat from the working class

The theoretical lineage behind the concept of “unmaking” therefore deserves closer examination. Eric Hobsbawm’s famous intervention, “The Forward March of Labour Halted?”, offered an influential formulation of the claim that the traditional working class was losing the social weight socialist politics had supposedly depended on. Such arguments subsequently became central to the Eurocommunist current associated with Marxism Today.

The consequences were far-reaching. Rather than examining the betrayals the working class suffered and the need to build an alternative revolutionary leadership, this tendency increasingly treated changes in capitalism's occupational composition as evidence that class politics itself had to be supplemented or replaced by broader democratic politics organised around diverse social constituencies.

The political development eventually contributed to an intellectual climate in which accommodation to the market could be presented as realism. What had begun as an argument about changes within the working class became an argument for abandoning the working class as the central revolutionary agency of socialist politics.

It is significant in this respect that Gibbs opened his 2019 essay with Hall’s formulation from “Gramsci and Us”: “You lose because you lose because you lose.” The phrase encapsulates the danger of converting political defeats into sociological inevitabilities. Workers lose. Industrial communities decline. Labour loyalties disintegrate. Nationalism or right-wing populism fills the vacuum. History becomes an accumulation of defeats whose explanation resides increasingly in transformed identities, cultures and geographies. But Marxism must ask a different question: why did they lose?

Who led these struggles? What political programme did that leadership defend? What alternatives were suppressed? Why did enormous demonstrations of working-class militancy repeatedly terminate in retreats brokered by organisations that claimed to represent the workers? Once those questions are posed, the history of postwar Britain assumes a profoundly different shape.

The working class was transformed, not abolished.

The central empirical fact confronting the “unmaking” thesis is that capitalism has not transcended wage labour. It has enormously extended it. The old industrial landscape has certainly disappeared in many areas. The pit head, shipyard and steelworks that once dominated entire towns have closed. Millions no longer work in enterprises around which dense occupational cultures developed over generations. But capitalism replaced them with other forms of proletarian labour.

Hospitals, schools, logistics depots, supermarkets, telecommunications networks, warehouses, call centres and digital platforms depend upon vast numbers of wage workers. Privatisation has transferred former public services into corporate hands while retaining workers whose labour remains socially indispensable. The important historical transition, therefore, is not from a working-class society to a post-working-class society. It is from one configuration of the working class to another.

The social character of production has meanwhile become vastly more international. A worker employed in a warehouse or logistics depot in Britain participates in production and distribution systems that extend across continents. Components, data, finance and commodities cross national borders continuously. Capital already organises production internationally. Labour remains politically divided by national institutions. This contradiction is crucial because it suggests that nationally based Labourism cannot accommodate it. The development of globalised production did not destroy the material basis for international working-class solidarity. It strengthened it.

The turn towards nationalism

Here the Scottish dimension of Gibbs’s political outlook becomes especially revealing. In his 2019 New Socialist essay, he argued that Labour’s future in Scotland required breaking with its commitment to the unitary British state. He described nationalism as having “displaced Labourism” in Scotland, supported recognition of the right to another independence referendum and advocated pressure upon the Scottish government to defy Westminster. He suggested that such confrontation could be accompanied by civil disobedience. An important democratic question concerns opposition to coercive attempts to suppress national aspirations. But that does not settle nationalism's class character or establish it as a progressive alternative to Labourism. The Marxist starting point must be the independent interests of the working class.

A worker in Glasgow does not have fundamentally antagonistic social interests to a worker in Liverpool, Newcastle, Cardiff or London. They confront the same capitalist ownership structures, financial institutions, and, increasingly, the same multinational corporations. Nationalism translates capitalism-generated social grievances into political demands organised around national territory. It thereby offers another national programme precisely when capitalist development has made economic life more internationally integrated than ever before. The answer to the exhaustion of British national reformism therefore cannot be Scottish national reformism.

Changing the constitutional boundaries within which capitalist property relations operate does not abolish those relations. Neither does exchanging administration from Westminster for administration from Edinburgh resolve the contradictions between wage labour and capital. If the decisive historical development since the 1970s has been the internationalisation of capitalist production, the socialist response cannot consist of creating smaller national frameworks within which workers continue competing for investment. It must politically unify workers across national boundaries against globally organised capital.

Grangemouth and the limits of “just transition”

Gibbs’s recent work on Grangemouth provides a contemporary expression of these issues. His University of Glasgow profile describes his research into energy and industrial transition and records his involvement in work on the Grangemouth refinery closure. His publications include “Workers’ perspectives on an unjust transition: place, history, and workplace closure at Grangemouth oil refinery, Scotland”, “The Grangemouth oil refinery closure: lessons for ‘just transition’ governance” and, in 2026, “Scotland’s unjust transition: the view from Grangemouth”. Grangemouth sharply frames the conflict between social need and private ownership.

The fundamental question is not whether workers should be consulted more effectively about industrial transition. It is who controls the productive resources upon which entire communities depend. Workers possess enormous accumulated technical knowledge. Yet under capitalist ownership, the continued operation or closure of productive facilities ultimately depends on profitability. Decisions affecting thousands of lives appear as the private prerogative of corporations and investors. A genuinely rational transition to sustainable energy production would begin from entirely different premises. Society would determine energy investment according to environmental need and human welfare rather than private profit. Workers displaced from environmentally damaging production would be guaranteed decent employment, training and living standards as productive resources were redirected. But such planning immediately raises the property question. Who owns the energy industry? Who controls investment? Who determines whether a refinery, power station or industrial plant operates? Who decides what replaces it?

These are class questions rather than merely problems of governance. A socialist programme would therefore fight to place major energy corporations and strategic industries under public ownership and democratic workers’ control as part of an internationally coordinated transformation of production.

“Who speaks for labour?”

We can now return to the question Verso asks in An Injury to All: “who now speaks for labour?” The wording itself can mislead. The fundamental problem confronting workers is not discovering somebody willing to “speak for” them. Labour politicians have spoken in workers' names for generations. Trade-union officials do so every day. The real issue is political leadership. A class becomes an independent political force only when it understands its historical interests and develops organisations capable of fighting for them. No amount of sociological reconstruction can substitute for this task.

The old labour organisations developed within the nation-state framework. Their bureaucracy mediated between working people and national capital. When capitalist production became globally integrated, these organisations did not become internationalist. Instead, they defended the national economy more explicitly. The consequences followed inexorably. If British companies had to become “competitive”, wages and conditions had to be restrained. If investment might move elsewhere, workers had to accept concessions. When factories faced closure, union leaders sought agreements to persuade corporations that production would remain profitable.

The worker thereby ceased to be represented as a member of an international class and instead became a cost on the balance sheet of “our” national economy. This transformation cannot be understood merely as weakened solidarity. It was the political bankruptcy of nationalism and reformism under conditions of globally organised capitalism.

Not the unmaking of the working class, but the collapse of Labourism

This is ultimately the conceptual problem contained in the title An Injury to All. What disappeared was real and historically significant. Mining communities were devastated. Manufacturing towns were hollowed out. Trade-union membership declined. Labour loyalties weakened. Institutions through which generations of workers had expressed a collective identity deteriorated.

But none of this established that the working class ceased to exist. What collapsed was the identification of working-class politics with a particular set of national institutions. This distinction completely changes the historical perspective. If the working class has been “unmade”, socialist politics becomes an exercise in assembling coalitions among fragmented identities, regions and social movements. Politics moves from class towards culture, nationality and electoral sociology.

If Labourism has been exhausted while the working class itself has been objectively enlarged and internationally integrated, an entirely different conclusion follows. The problem becomes one of revolutionary leadership. The central lesson of the last half century is not that workers possessed too much belief in class struggle. Rather, enormous manifestations of class struggle remained politically subordinated to organisations committed to defending capitalism. The task therefore cannot be to recreate the labour movement of the 1950s.

Nor should socialists romanticise the industrial communities that have disappeared. Their solidarity and collective traditions represented tremendous achievements, but national reformism, trade-union bureaucracy, and, in important areas, Stalinism also dominated their political life. The future cannot be built by reconstructing the past's institutional arrangements.

An injury to one is an injury to all.

Gibbs’s title is therefore ironic. “An injury to one is an injury to all” contains a conception far more radical than nostalgia for industrial Britain's vanished institutions. It expresses the elementary internationalist truth that workers share fundamental interests arising from their common relationship to capital. Today that proposition possesses an objective material foundation on an unprecedented scale.

The worker in a British warehouse is integrated into the same international production and distribution processes as workers throughout Europe, Asia and North America. The nurse confronting deteriorating public services, the teacher facing declining real incomes, the delivery worker controlled through an application and the engineer employed by a multinational corporation occupy different workplaces but confront the same fundamental relationship between labour and capital.

Capitalism has globalised production while preserving private ownership and the nation-state system. It has created the material foundations for international working-class unity while continuously mobilising nationalism to prevent that unity from assuming conscious political form. That contradiction, rather than the disappearance of the proletariat, defines the present historical period. Gibbs has accumulated valuable material concerning the experience and memory of deindustrialisation. His previous work demonstrates sustained engagement with the workers and communities most immediately affected by industrial restructuring. His research encompasses precisely the terrain upon which some of the central class conflicts of modern Britain have unfolded. But An Injury to All cannot ultimately be resolved through oral history, electoral sociology, or the politics of national reconstruction. “Who speaks for labour?” is the wrong question if it means searching among the remains of Labourism for another institutional representative. The working class must speak for itself.

Doing so requires a political movement independent of the Labour Party and the trade-union bureaucracy, hostile to every attempt to divide workers by nationality, and consciously based on the international character of modern capitalist production. The British working class was not “unmade”. A historically specific labour movement based upon national reformism has undergone a profound degeneration and collapse. The distinction is not semantic. It determines whether the defeats of the past half century are seen as evidence of the disappearance of working-class politics or as historical experiences from which a new socialist movement must draw lessons.

The mines closed. Shipyards disappeared. Council estates were sold. The institutions associated with Labourism decayed. But labour did not disappear. Capital could not survive for a single day without it. The historical question is therefore not how to reconstruct the Britain of the postwar settlement. It is how the enormously expanded and internationally interconnected working class can transform itself from an objective social force into a conscious political force. In that sense the old slogan remains entirely contemporary: an injury to one is an injury to all. But taking those words seriously means following them beyond Labourism and nationalism to their necessary political conclusion: the international unity of the working class in the struggle for socialism.

Bibliography

Gibbs, Ewan. An Injury to All: The Unmaking of the British Working Class. London: Verso, 2026. [versobooks.com]

Gibbs, Ewan. Coal Country: The Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialisation in Postwar Scotland. London: University of London Press, 2021. [gla.ac.uk]

Gibbs, Ewan. “The Unmaking of the British Working Class: A Highly Provisional Thesis.” New Socialist, 19 December 2019. [newsocialist.org.uk]

Hobsbawm, Eric. “The Forward March of Labour Halted?” Marxism Today, September 1978.

Hall, Stuart. “Gramsci and Us.” Marxism Today, June 1987. Gibbs uses Hall’s “You lose because you lose because you lose” as the epigraph to his 2019 essay. [newsocialist.org.uk]

Nairn, Tom. The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism. London: New Left Books, 1977.

Shibe, Riyoko and Ewan Gibbs. “The Grangemouth oil refinery closure: lessons for ‘just transition’ governance.” Journal of the British Academy, 13 (1), 2025. [gla.ac.uk]

Marsden, Chris and Julie Hyland. “Britain: 20 years since the year-long miners’ strike.” World Socialist Web Site, 5 March 2004. This is particularly relevant to your argument because it links the miners’ defeat to the roles of Labour and the TUC and connects the exhaustion of national reformism to the globalisation of production. [wsws.org], [wsws.org]

Marsden, Chris and Julie Hyland. “Forty years since the British miners’ strike.” World Socialist Web Site, 5 March 2024. The article places the 1984-85 struggle within the international shift toward deregulation, global investment, and internationalised production, and argues that the reformist and Stalinist organisations' betrayals were decisive in this period's defeats. [wsws.org]