Tuesday, 27 October 2026

Klara and the Sun: Artificial intelligence, social inequality and the absence of a way forward

Klara and the Sun is a particularly revealing cultural response to the present. A story about artificial intelligence, technological unemployment, biological privilege, and a society divided between those who benefit from scientific development and those rendered increasingly superfluous inevitably raises some of humanity's most important questions. Yet the work approaches these questions indirectly. Social catastrophe is registered as atmosphere, anxiety and personal melancholy rather than understood as the product of definite social relations.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s original novel presents a genuinely disturbing world. Children from affluent families can be genetically “lifted”, providing advantages unavailable to others. Artificial Friends are manufactured as commodities, purchased as companions and ultimately discarded. Adults have undergone “substitution”, a euphemism for technological displacement. Beneath the quiet domestic surface lies a society increasingly divided between privileged layers able to purchase the benefits of scientific progress and a population whose labour is no longer required by those who own and control the productive forces.

Ishiguro’s achievement should not simply be dismissed. He is intensely sensitive to human vulnerability and to the fear of abandonment, ageing, loneliness and loss. Klara’s observations of the people around her expose the insecurity underlying apparently comfortable lives. The story asks serious questions about what constitutes humanity and whether technology can replicate affection, loyalty, memory, and personality. But this sensitivity is inseparable from a profound resignation before existing society.

The same limitation was already apparent in Never Let Me Go. A society raises cloned human beings so that their organs can eventually be harvested, yet the victims offer virtually no collective resistance to the system responsible for their fate. The extraordinary passivity is clearly deliberate, but it also reveals the boundaries of Ishiguro’s social vision. His characters suffer history rather than make it. Social relations produced through historical development consequently acquire the appearance of permanent existential conditions. Alienation becomes loneliness, inequality becomes personal misfortune, and social oppression becomes a condition to be endured rather than transformed.

This is one of the characteristic intellectual problems confronting contemporary culture. Many writers and artists are genuinely disturbed by inequality, technological disruption, environmental catastrophe, authoritarianism, and war, yet see no social force capable of fundamentally reorganising society. Capitalism therefore disappears as a historically specific system at precisely the point when its consequences dominate the artistic imagination.

Klara and the Sun therefore raise the decisive questions it cannot adequately answer. Who owns the Artificial Friends? Who controls the technology responsible for “lifting”? Why should a scientific development capable of increasing human capacities become a privilege available primarily to prosperous families? What happens to those workers who have been “substituted”? Above all, why should increasing productivity produce unemployment, insecurity and social disintegration rather than greater leisure, prosperity and cultural development?

These questions change Klara's significance. Under different social relations, automation and artificial intelligence could progressively liberate humanity from dangerous, exhausting and monotonous labour. Artificial intelligence could drive major advances in medicine, scientific research, education, engineering, and artistic production. Rising productivity could make a radical shortening of the working week possible and an enormous expansion of time available for education, cultural activity, and human development.

Under capitalism, however, technological development confronts the worker antagonistically because the productive forces remain privately owned. Corporations do not primarily introduce labour-saving technology to liberate human beings from unnecessary labour. They introduce it because technological innovation can reduce labour costs, increase productivity, and strengthen profitability. The extraordinary potential of artificial intelligence therefore collides directly with the social relations in which it is developed.

Consequently, Klara is deeply unsettling as a figure. She is obedient, endlessly patient and entirely devoted to those who purchase her. She demands no wages, possesses no independent economic interests, never organises, never strikes and ultimately accepts her own dispensability. She resembles, in exaggerated form, the ideal employee contemporary capitalism imagines: intelligent, adaptable, and endlessly productive, but with no demands of her own.

The idealisation of Klara’s self-sacrifice therefore contains implications that the story never seriously confronts. She becomes morally admirable partly because she desires virtually nothing for herself. What appears as a touching meditation on loyalty and selflessness can consequently be read as something far more disturbing. Klara is the worker who asks for nothing and can ultimately be put aside when her usefulness has ended.

The fundamental question raised by artificial intelligence is therefore not whether machines will eventually acquire souls, emotions or consciousness. Nor is it primarily whether artificial intelligence can imitate human creativity convincingly enough to replace a novelist, actor, illustrator or musician. The decisive social question is who owns this technology, who determines its purposes, and which social class benefits from the enormous increases in productivity that technological development makes possible.

It would therefore be a serious mistake to identify technological development itself as the source of unemployment. A machine does not demand the dismissal of the worker. An algorithm does not require dividends. Artificial intelligence has no inherent social requirement to impoverish the population whose accumulated intellectual and physical labour ultimately made its creation possible. Those consequences arise from the capitalist organisation of production.

In a rationally organised society, increasing productivity would mean progressively reducing the labour required of every individual while raising living standards. Under capitalism, the same development confronts workers as redundancy, wage pressure and insecurity. The contradiction lies not between humanity and technology but between the increasingly social character of production and the private ownership of the productive forces.

This is precisely the historical dimension largely absent from Klara and the Sun. The weakness cannot be overcome merely by adding more explicit political dialogue to the story or putting revolutionary declarations in Klara’s mouth. The deeper problem concerns the conception of society underlying the work. A culture that experiences capitalism as effectively permanent will inevitably present its contradictions as existential tragedies. Unemployment becomes displacement, inequality becomes loneliness, technological development becomes destiny and political reaction becomes an unexplained eruption of irrational behaviour.

What disappears is the working class as a conscious historical force. This absence has enormous artistic consequences. Without an understanding of social contradiction in its living historical form, conflict retreats increasingly into individual psychology. Characters remember, grieve, endure and reconcile themselves to circumstances that appear beyond human control. Society may be profoundly diseased, but nothing emerges from within that society capable of overcoming the conditions producing the disease.

That is why the resignation embodied in Klara and the Sun matters. Its world is technologically extraordinary but politically paralysed. Humanity has developed machines capable of reproducing increasingly complex intellectual functions, altered biological capacities, and eliminating enormous quantities of necessary labour. Yet, society remains trapped in inequality, competition, and private ownership. The contradiction between the productive forces and existing social relations could hardly be more sharply posed.

The alternative is therefore not less technology but different social relations. Artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation must stop functioning primarily as instruments through which a small corporate and financial oligarchy enriches itself at the population's expense. Instead, the immense productive capacities accumulated through generations of collective human labour must be placed under social ownership and democratic control.

Under such conditions, “substitution” would acquire an entirely different meaning. Automation would no longer mean workers become disposable because their labour no longer produces sufficient profit. Instead, it could mean shortening the working day, eliminating degrading labour, and making the benefits of technological progress universally available. What capitalism experiences as the terrifying possibility of human beings becoming unnecessary to production could become an unprecedented expansion of human freedom.

This is the future that Klara and the Sun struggles to imagine. Ishiguro senses something profoundly wrong with contemporary society but experiences its contradictions predominantly as moral and psychological conditions. The result is a work characteristic of an important tendency within contemporary culture: technologically fascinated, socially anxious, genuinely humane in certain respects, but ultimately resigned before the existing order.

Great art does not require artists to append political programmes to their work. Balzac and Tolstoy were not great because they possessed politically correct opinions, nor can Brecht’s importance be reduced to the slogans associated with his politics. What distinguished the greatest artists was their capacity, however contradictory their personal outlooks, to look beneath social appearances and reveal something about society's movement itself.

That is the challenge confronting serious artistic production in the age of artificial intelligence. The tragedy is not that humanity has developed machines capable of replacing increasing quantities of human labour. The tragedy is that humanity’s accumulated technological achievements remain subordinated to social relations that transform abundance into insecurity, rising productivity into unemployment and potentially liberating technologies into instruments of exploitation.

The question Klara and the Sun pose is therefore far greater than whether Klara herself is human. It is whether humanity will continue to let private profit dictate technological development or consciously reorganise economic life so these remarkable productive powers serve society as a whole. Klara’s unquestioning self-sacrifice offers no solution to that contradiction. The working class does.

Selected bibliography: Ishiguro

     World Socialist Website
  • Beams, Nick. “AI development and the contradictions of capitalism.” World Socialist Web Site, 14 February 2026. A particularly useful Marxist treatment of AI as a productive force whose possibilities come into conflict with capitalist private ownership and the profit system. [wsws.org]

  • Hall, Tom. “How workers can fight the wave of AI layoffs.” World Socialist Web Site, 10 May 2026. Examines corporate deployment of AI in connection with layoffs and argues that the central issue is social control of the new technologies. [wsws.org]

  • Reed, Kevin. “Artificial intelligence and the film and television writers’ strike.” World Socialist Web Site, 10 May 2023. Especially relevant to the review because it documents the conflict over AI during the Writers Guild of America strike, including the WGA's demands concerning AI-written material and the training of AI systems on writers' work. [wsws.org]

 

The Cofnas Controversy at Oxford: A Response from Robert Street

Not bad, Keith. I am impressed you squeezed in almost all the issues of interest to the chattering class over a speech by Cofnas on how DEI has influenced education. From addressing the " immense " wealth distribution to racism to the rising power of the right. And of course our Arday. Now Cofnas has achieved his 15 minutes of fame because he finally exposed this fraud. In my opinion, that is what he was. It's not worth debating. In fact, I suggest there is potential PHD for a PhD in explaining why Cofnas gained traction where others before him failed to expose both the man and the system that promoted him. Remember, I liked your post.

Your article suggests that, at last, people are prepared (or brave enough) to say we need a diversity of views that are expressed and debated, instead of cancelling those that contradict the current accepted views. I liked your opinion that, in this case, university administrators should not promote cancellations, since that would imply they hold the correct view. But how can our protesters outside the venue feel satisfied?

Robert street

Reply

Thanks. I think your last sentence is actually the most interesting part of your response. The protesters outside the venue get satisfaction by protesting and making their case, not necessarily by stopping the meeting.

If Cofnas is wrong, argue against him. If someone's academic reputation is inflated, demonstrate it with evidence. Protesters have every right to say a speaker should never have been invited and to oppose them as forcefully as they wish. But once we move from criticism and protest to insisting that university administrators prevent people from hearing certain arguments, we create a much bigger problem: who decides what may legitimately be discussed?

My objection is not to protest—quite the opposite. Protest, disagreement and argument are essential parts of democratic intellectual life. My objection is to replacing political and intellectual argument with administrative prohibition. Once university management is granted the authority to determine which opinions are acceptable, there is no reason to suppose that this power will always be exercised against people whose views we dislike. The same machinery can just as readily be turned against radical, socialist, anti-war or otherwise unpopular opinions.

So the protesters should have their say, Cofnas should have his, and the audience should be treated as adults capable of reaching its own judgement. The answer to objectionable ideas is not to ask administrators to make them disappear, but to expose their weaknesses publicly.

Paul Mason’s Reds: A Global History of Communism Or A Renegade’s History of Communism, With Trotsky Written Out

Paul Mason’s new book, Reds: A Global History of Communism, claims to equip a new generation to understand communism’s origins, its appeal to millions, and its descent into disastrous bureaucratic regimes. This is no antiquarian exercise: Mason presents the book as a political intervention for a generation asking whether capitalism can be replaced by something better. His answer is unequivocal: “not like this”.

That declared purpose makes one aspect of Reds: A Global History of Communism especially revealing: Leon Trotsky’s absence from its public-facing genealogy of communism. This point must be made carefully. No evidence currently available shows who chose the figures on the book's cover or in its promotional material, let alone that Paul Mason personally instructed his publisher to exclude Trotsky. Any such claim would go beyond the evidence. However, the omission still has political significance worth examining. The question is not what a designer or marketing department had in mind, but why Leon Trotsky—and, above all, the historical movement associated with his name—poses such profound difficulties for any narrative that presents twentieth-century communism as a broadly continuous movement from revolutionary aspirations to totalitarian dictatorship.

What happens when we restore Leon Trotsky to his proper place in this history? The supposedly self-evident progression from the Russian Revolution to Stalinism immediately becomes a matter of political dispute. We must reckon with the Left Opposition and the struggle over the nationalist doctrine of “socialism in one country”. We must also explain the political extermination of the generation associated with the October Revolution, the Moscow Trials and the Great Terror, the formation of the Fourth International, and, ultimately, Trotsky’s assassination in 1940. Above all, we must address the historical claim made by Leon Trotsky and the movement he founded: Stalinism was not the inevitable fulfilment of Marxism and Bolshevism, but a bureaucratic reaction against the international socialist programme on which the October Revolution was based. That is no minor historiographical disagreement. It goes to the heart of Reds: A Global History of Communism.

From revolution to “totalitarian nightmare”

The book's declared scope could scarcely be broader. Paul Mason deliberately begins in antiquity rather than in 1917, tracing communal and egalitarian movements through ancient and medieval society, the French Revolution, nineteenth-century anti-capitalist movements, and twentieth-century revolutionary upheavals. He says the book examines how Vladimir Lenin’s movement defeated its ideological rivals because, “for a time”, it seemed to work, before turning to what Paul Mason describes as the transformation of the twentieth-century communist experiment into a “totalitarian nightmare”.

The American promotional description is scarcely less explicit. It promises to trace communism's development from a political idea to a mass movement and, ultimately, to totalitarian regimes. The story acknowledges the genuine heroism of workers and peasants resisting exploitation, but ultimately foregrounds repression, famine, and authoritarian rule. At a time when capitalism appears increasingly unstable and communist ideas may therefore attract renewed interest, the book is marketed as a warning against the resurgence of an “authoritarian left” and as an appeal for an anti-capitalism grounded in “universal human values”.

There is nothing objectionable in documenting the immense crimes committed by Stalinist and Maoist regimes. Marxists have no political interest in concealing them. Indeed, the strongest Marxist indictment of Stalinism was written while the liberal intelligentsia and substantial sections of the bourgeois political establishment were accommodating themselves to the Soviet bureaucracy. The issue is therefore not whether Stalinist repression should be exposed. It is how Stalinism itself is explained.

Did the bureaucratic dictatorship headed by Joseph Stalin arise organically from Marxism and the October Revolution? Was Stalinism essentially Leninism carried through to its logical conclusion? Or did a bureaucratic caste emerge under historically specific conditions of economic backwardness, revolutionary isolation, exhaustion and international defeat, eventually destroying the Marxist leadership through which the working class had taken power? Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition make it impossible to evade this question.

The historical problem of Trotsky

Leon Trotsky matters not because socialists require an alternative personality cult with which to counter that surrounding Joseph Stalin. Nor can the historical argument be reduced to the claim that everything done under Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky was democratic and everything done afterwards was bureaucratic. Such an account would collapse under serious historical examination. The Bolsheviks confronted civil war, foreign military intervention, famine and the economic disintegration of an already backward society. During that struggle, their government employed coercive measures that remain the subject of legitimate historical and political controversy.

But this makes the subsequent conflict within the Soviet state even more important. For whatever judgement one reaches concerning Bolshevik policies during the Civil War, the Soviet Union of the late 1930s was not simply the political regime of 1917 grown older. An immense transformation had taken place. Bureaucracy had gutted the revolutionary party. Oppositionists had been expelled, imprisoned and killed. Many of the best-known figures associated with the October insurrection were accused of fantastic conspiracies, subjected to show trials and executed. The revolutionary history of the Soviet Union itself was systematically rewritten. The fundamental question therefore becomes: what social and political processes produced this transformation?

Leon Trotsky’s answer was developed over years of political struggle and reached its most systematic expression in The Revolution Betrayed. Russia's backwardness, compounded by economic devastation and, above all, the Soviet state's isolation after revolutions failed elsewhere, created conditions in which an administrative bureaucracy gained an increasingly privileged social position. That bureaucracy did not openly abandon the property relations established by October. Instead, it progressively monopolised political power while transforming Marxism into an ideological justification for its own interests.

The “socialism in one country” programme gave this bureaucracy its nationalist outlook. Against it, Leon Trotsky defended the conception that animated the October Revolution itself: that victory in Russia could not be seen as a nationally self-sufficient socialist development, but as the opening stage of the international socialist revolution. This political conflict cannot be removed from the history of communism without fundamentally changing that history's meaning.

Why the omission matters

That brings us back to the cover and promotional presentation surrounding Reds: A Global History of Communism. The argument should not be reduced to alleging an editorial conspiracy for which there is no evidence. Covers are marketing objects, and the personalities selected for them may reflect numerous editorial, aesthetic and commercial considerations. But historical representation is never entirely innocent, especially when the book is presented not merely as a history of communism but as an intervention in contemporary arguments over whether capitalism can and should be transcended.

Trotsky’s absence therefore matters less for explaining why someone left him off the cover than for asking what happens to history once he disappears. Trotsky does not fit easily into a straightforward genealogy in which revolutionary communism develops progressively into Stalinist dictatorship. His presence immediately introduces another history: the Left Opposition's struggle against the emerging Soviet bureaucracy, the conflict between permanent revolution and “socialism in one country”, the expulsion and persecution of oppositionists, the Moscow Trials, the founding of the Fourth International, and Trotsky's eventual assassination in 1940. The road from October to Stalin suddenly ceases to appear inevitable.

Put Trotsky back into the picture and Stalinism itself becomes a historical problem requiring explanation. If Stalin merely completed what Lenin and the Bolsheviks had begun, why was it necessary to politically suppress the Left Opposition and eventually destroy so much of the generation associated with the October Revolution? Why did Stalinism have to rewrite the history of 1917, erase political opponents from the revolutionary record and transform “socialism in one country” into communist orthodoxy? Whatever conclusions one reaches about these questions, their existence disrupts any seamless identification of Bolshevism with Stalinism.

This is precisely why the representation matters. Trotsky's significance does not lie in portraying him as an infallible democratic alternative to Stalin. Rather, it lies in the historical fact that Stalinism faced an organised opposition that claimed the legacy of revolutionary Marxism and socialist internationalism. The dispute, then, was not between communism and its liberal critics, but within the revolutionary movement itself, over the meaning and future of October.

The missing face consequently represents something much larger than a publishing decision. It symbolises a missing historical possibility. Restore Trotsky and the Left Opposition to the picture, and twentieth-century communism no longer appears as a single road running inexorably from revolution to dictatorship. It becomes a history of competing programmes, social forces and political struggles whose outcome was fought over, not predetermined. That is the history a new generation contemplating alternatives to capitalism.

Trotsky complicates the picture.

Return Leon Trotsky to the centre of twentieth-century communist history, and the reader encounters not one communist tradition marching inexorably towards dictatorship, but an enormous, ferocious struggle over what communism was to become. Instead of a simple chronological sequence ending in the gulag, one encounters competing programmes, different social interests and irreconcilable international strategies.

Joseph Stalin then ceases to appear merely as the next name in a succession beginning with Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. The Stalinist bureaucracy's decision to destroy the political tendency represented by Leon Trotsky requires explanation. Why was the Left Opposition suppressed? Why did “socialism in one country” have to defeat the internationalist perspective of permanent revolution? Why did so many leaders associated with October disappear into prisons, executions and exile? Why was the historical record of 1917 itself repeatedly falsified?

Whatever one's ultimate judgement of Leon Trotsky's answers, these questions cannot be dismissed without impoverishing history. This is especially true because Paul Mason presents Reds: A Global History of Communism as having an explicitly contemporary purpose. His own description links the history of the twentieth-century communist experience with present political questions surrounding China, Russia, the crisis of Western democracy, climate change and what he calls new forms of “techno-egalitarianism”. Paul Mason says that, as China and Russia challenge the democracies and a new “authoritarian left” attempts to displace social democracy, liberalism and anarchism, his book should be understood not only as history but as “a political intervention”. The history is therefore inseparable from the politics.

From revolutionary politics to radical social democracy

This gives Paul Mason’s own political evolution particular significance. He approaches Marxism neither as a conventional Cold War liberal nor as a conservative historian who has always regarded socialism with hostility. He travelled politically from the revolutionary left towards what he has described as radical social democracy. He now frames the central contemporary political division increasingly as democracy versus authoritarianism, while supporting the defence of the Western democratic order against Russia and China.

The institutional evolution accompanying this change is noteworthy. The promotional material for an October 2026 appearance identifies Paul Mason as a writer, broadcaster and “political strategist”, and as an adjunct fellow at the Council on Geostrategy. This does not prove anyone dictated the contents of Reds: A Global History of Communism, nor is such an argument necessary. The point is political rather than conspiratorial. The framework through which Paul Mason now examines the twentieth century has shifted profoundly from that of revolutionary Marxism.

That helps explain the extraordinary contemporary burden this history bears. The book is concerned not simply with why communist regimes emerged, developed bureaucratic dictatorships and ultimately collapsed or transformed themselves. Its lessons directly address the political choices people face today. Paul Mason acknowledges that Western democracies are stagnating, that an impending climate disaster requires radical economic solutions, and that millions elsewhere may see China's authoritarian, state-led model as a viable alternative. Under these conditions, he says the history of communism must warn a new generation against repeating the twentieth century.

But this formulation itself raises the decisive question: What exactly would count as repeating the twentieth century? Would it mean overthrowing capitalism, building a revolutionary workers' party, or establishing working-class political power? Or would it mean repeating Stalinism’s nationalist and bureaucratic repudiation of socialist internationalism? These are not remotely the same propositions.

Ethics against historical materialism

Paul Mason’s answer increasingly rests upon an ethical conception of socialism. The alternative to authoritarianism must be grounded in democracy and universal human values. The attraction is obvious. Against dictatorship, democracy; against brutality, humanity; against lies, truth. But moral categories cannot substitute for an analysis of the social forces that created the historical phenomena under discussion.

Marxism does not oppose democracy or human emancipation. Its distinctive contribution is to ask under what material conditions democracy exists, what classes exercise power, what social relationships sustain political institutions, and why political forms change. Without that approach, Stalin becomes primarily the representative of a disastrous political idea rather than the head of a definite bureaucratic social formation emerging under historically identifiable circumstances.

There is a further difficulty. If communism can be traced backwards through millennia as an essentially timeless desire for equality and communal existence, it becomes possible to detach it from the specific contradictions of capitalist society that produced modern Marxism. Paul Mason explicitly argues that the desire to live without hierarchy and property is deeply rooted in human nature and begins his story in antiquity rather than in 1917. 

At first, this sounds like an extraordinarily generous concession to communism. Instead of communist aspirations being unnatural, they become almost universal. But the price is considerable. Communism ceases to be understood primarily as the political programme associated with a historically specific class relationship generated by capitalism itself and instead becomes an ancient human aspiration that repeatedly assumes different forms.

The specificity of Marxism is thereby weakened. Marx did not derive communism from an abstract human desire for fairness. His critique began with definite material relations of production and with the contradictions of capitalist development. The modern working class occupied a unique position not because workers were morally purer than everybody else, but because capitalist production created a social class compelled to sell its labour power while simultaneously concentrating it within increasingly socialised processes of production. Once communism is removed from that material framework, its recurrent defeats can take on the appearance of an eternal human tragedy: noble aspirations repeatedly descending into coercion when someone tries to implement them.

International revolution or socialism in one country

Here the struggle between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin assumes its full significance. Its leaders did not conceive the October Revolution as the beginning of a self-contained Russian road to socialism. Russia's enormous economic backwardness made such a conception particularly implausible. The Bolsheviks understood their seizure of power as part of an international revolutionary crisis generated by the First World War. They expected the Russian Revolution to spark revolutionary struggles abroad, especially in Europe.

The isolation of the Soviet state was therefore not a minor complication. It transformed the conditions under which the revolutionary government had to develop. Defeats in revolutionary struggles elsewhere strengthened conservative pressures within Soviet society. After years of war, famine, civil conflict, and economic collapse, the working class that had provided the revolution's social base was exhausted. Administrative layers acquired increasing power. Political life within the revolutionary party deteriorated.

Joseph Stalin’s emergence must be placed within this process. The resulting conflict was not simply a contest between two ambitious politicians. Behind it were opposed political programmes. The theory of “socialism in one country” rationalised an increasingly nationalist orientation in which preservation of the Soviet bureaucracy's position became paramount. Leon Trotsky’s conception of permanent revolution insisted that the fate of the Soviet workers' state remained inseparably connected to the development of world revolution.

These competing strategic perspectives had international consequences. They shaped controversies over the Chinese Revolution, the rise of fascism in Germany, the Popular Front and the Spanish Civil War. Anyone attempting a global history of communism must therefore confront Trotskyism not simply as another branch of the communist family tree but as an organised Marxist challenge to the political foundations of Stalinism.

The strongest objection

Paul Mason’s defenders could reasonably answer that none of this proves Leon Trotsky represented an immaculate democratic socialism. It does not. They could point to the suppression of the Kronstadt uprising, the Red Terror, restrictions on opposition parties, and Leon Trotsky’s advocacy during the enormously difficult Civil War period for measures involving the militarisation of labour. These questions have generated an immense historical literature, and any serious appraisal of Bolshevism must confront them.

Indeed, the argument becomes stronger for doing so. The Marxist case against Stalinism should not depend upon constructing a sanitised picture of Soviet Russia before 1924. The revolution took place under catastrophic conditions. Its government made decisions that deserve examination and criticism. The historical debate concerns whether these measures sufficiently explain everything subsequently associated with Stalinism or whether a qualitatively different bureaucratic-political reaction developed under the pressure of isolation and defeat.

The mere existence of authoritarian measures before Joseph Stalin proves neither historical continuity nor historical inevitability. To establish that Stalinism was the necessary product of Bolshevism, one must explain why an organised opposition emerged against the bureaucracy, why the bureaucracy politically suppressed that opposition, why it had to outlaw its programme, and why so much of the revolutionary generation had eventually to be physically destroyed. Those events cannot simultaneously be treated as irrelevant and held up as evidence of an inevitable straight line from October to Stalin.

Stalin did not simply “continue” October.

This is where much conventional anti-communist historiography runs into a contradiction. If Joseph Stalin was carrying Vladimir Lenin’s project to its logical conclusion, why did his regime's consolidation involve such extraordinary destruction of the personnel and traditions associated with the revolution? The answer cannot be that every victim was a principled socialist opponent of Stalinism. They plainly were not. Nor should we romanticise the period's factions and political manoeuvres. But the scale of the attack upon the old Bolshevik generation remains historically significant. A regime confident that it represented a seamless continuation of October would scarcely have needed continually to rewrite October's history.

Leon Trotsky was particularly intolerable because his political and literary activity preserved another record of the revolution and another conception of its historical significance. He participated directly in the events of 1905 and 1917, headed the Petrograd Soviet in 1917, and later became the Stalinist regime's most prominent international opponent. The fight over historical memory was consequently inseparable from the political struggle over the future.

The Fourth International and the continuity question

This issue becomes still more acute with the founding of the Fourth International in 1938. For Leon Trotsky, Hitler's rise, without effective resistance from the enormously powerful German workers' movement, was decisive evidence of the Stalinised Communist International's bankruptcy. He concluded that the Third International could no longer be politically regenerated and that a new revolutionary international had to be constructed.

One can agree or disagree with that conclusion. What cannot reasonably be done is to write the political history of communism as though it does not fundamentally complicate the identification of Stalinism with Marxism. The Fourth International asserted the opposite precisely: that defending Marxism now required an irreconcilable struggle against Stalinism. This is why the question of historical continuity matters. If Stalinism was communism, then organisations fighting Stalinism from the standpoint of international socialist revolution become anomalous or inconvenient footnotes. If Stalinism represented a bureaucratic degeneration of a workers' state and a political betrayal of revolutionary internationalism, those same movements acquire central historical importance. A global history of communism must take a position on that question, whether explicitly or implicitly.

Why Trotsky breaks the picture

We can therefore return one final time to the question raised at the beginning: why does Leon Trotsky’s absence from the cover and promotional genealogy matter? Not because book-cover design constitutes historiography. It does not.

Not because we have evidence of Paul Mason sitting with his publisher and demanding, “Leave Trotsky out.” We do not. It matters because Trotsky disrupts the picture being presented. Put him back at the centre of the twentieth-century story, and “communism” no longer appears to move inexorably towards totalitarianism. Instead, there is revolutionary communism and Stalinism; internationalism and “socialism in one country”; the October Revolution and a bureaucracy that ultimately exterminated much of the generation that led it.

The Communist International emerged in the early revolutionary years, later becoming the Stalinised Comintern, with the bureaucracy and the Left Opposition fighting it. Suddenly, there was no single road. There was a crossroads. And if there was a crossroads, Stalinism cannot simply be declared the inevitable destination without reconstructing the struggle over which road to take. That is ultimately what makes Leon Trotsky so inconvenient to histories that seek to present Stalinism as the definitive historical judgement on revolutionary Marxism.

What is at stake

Paul Mason is certainly right about one thing: this history matters profoundly today. Capitalism confronts younger generations with widening social inequality, geopolitical conflict, environmental crisis, deteriorating public services and widespread insecurity. In describing Reds: A Global History of Communism, Paul Mason points to stagnant Western democracies, the climate crisis, and renewed arguments over alternatives to the existing social order. He explicitly says that his political purpose is to answer a generation asking whether capitalism can be replaced: “not like this”.

But the historical question remains: what did “this” mean? Did it mean the working class's conquest of political power, revolutionary internationalism, or Marxism? Or did it mean the bureaucratic suppression of workers' democracy, the nationalist rejection of international socialist revolution, and the destruction of the revolutionary movement that opposed those policies? These alternatives cannot be conflated without predetermining the conclusion.

The answer to the crimes of Stalinism is not to minimise them, still less to apologise for them. It is to understand their origins. And doing so requires recovering the history of those Marxists who fought the Soviet bureaucracy when doing so meant expulsion, persecution, imprisonment and ultimately death.

Leon Trotsky’s historical significance does not depend on portraying him as an infallible leader or an alternative secular saint. It rests on something far more important: Stalinism faced a Marxist opposition that challenged it in the name of international socialist revolution and sought to explain its emergence materially. This changes the historical equation. If Stalinism was already inevitably contained within Marxism and October, Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition become difficult facts to accommodate. Their struggle must either be marginalised or reduced to an unsuccessful contest for power within an essentially authoritarian movement.

But if Stalinism arose from the isolation and degeneration of the Russian Revolution, the defeats of the international working class, and the growth of a privileged bureaucratic caste, then Leon Trotsky belongs not at the margins of twentieth-century communist history but at its very centre. That is why his absence from the public image surrounding *Reds: A Global History of Communism* is so striking. The issue is not simply a missing face on a jacket; it is the missing historical alternative that face represents.

Mason wants to tell a new generation weighing whether capitalism can be replaced: not like this. But before that generation accepts his warning, it deserves to know that history offers another warning—one made not in retrospect by converts to liberalism or defenders of the existing order, but from within the revolutionary Marxist movement itself.

It warned that nationalism would destroy socialist internationalism; bureaucratic privilege would suffocate workers' democracy; subordinating the international working class to supposedly progressive bourgeois forces would bring catastrophic defeats; and Stalinism threatened not to fulfil the programme of October, but to destroy it. The bureaucracy tried to settle that political argument through repression. It murdered revolutionaries, erased people from photographs, rewrote the history of 1917, and ultimately sent an assassin after Leon Trotsky himself. But it could not erase the historical question he represented.

The history that cannot be erased

For a new generation once again questioning whether capitalism represents the final form of human society, the conflict between Trotsky and Stalinism is anything but an academic dispute. It concerns whether the catastrophe that overwhelmed the twentieth-century communist movement was the inevitable product of socialist revolution or the outcome of its isolation, bureaucratic degeneration, and the defeat of the internationalist perspective on which October was based.

This is why the answer to Stalinism cannot be a retreat into an ethically improved capitalism, supplemented by appeals to democracy and “universal human values”. The immense inequality, militarism, political reaction and social insecurity driving workers and young people towards anti-capitalist conclusions are not historical misunderstandings. They arise from capitalism itself. To invoke Stalinism as the final warning against revolutionary politics is therefore to evade the very social contradictions producing renewed interest in socialism.

Nor does answering Mason require concealing the conflicts and repressions of the early Soviet state or turning Trotsky into an infallible revolutionary saint. It requires something more serious: restoring the political alternatives that were actually fought over. The Left Opposition showed that Stalinism faced opposition from within the Marxist movement, in the name of workers' democracy, socialist internationalism, and world revolution.

That is precisely what breaks the comforting historical equation in which Marx leads inevitably to Lenin, Lenin to Stalin and Stalin ultimately to the gulag. History offered alternatives, and political struggle defeated them rather than historical inevitability disproving them. Any genuinely global history of communism must confront that struggle. Trotsky may be absent from the public picture surrounding Reds: A Global History of Communism. You cannot easily remove the historical struggle he represents. And for a generation searching once again for a way beyond capitalism, recovering that suppressed history is not merely about understanding the past. It is part of preparing for future struggles.

Selected bibliography

Avrich, Paul. Kronstadt 1921. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970.

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

Carr, E. H. The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923. 3 vols. London: Macmillan, 1950–53.

Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin: A Political Biography. London: Oxford University Press, 1949.

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

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

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

Fitzpatrick, Sheila. The Russian Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Getty, J. Arch. Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Lewin, Moshe. Lenin's Last Struggle. London: Faber and Faber, 1969.

Mason, Paul. Reds: A Global History of Communism. London: Apollo, 2026. The UK hardback was published on 27 August 2026. [waterstones.com], [politicos.co.uk]

Rabinowitch, Alexander. The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976.

Rogovin, Vadim Z. Was There an Alternative? Trotskyism: A Look Back Through the Years. Oak Park, MI: Mehring Books.

Service, Robert. Trotsky: A Biography. London: Macmillan, 2009.

Trotsky, Leon. The Permanent Revolution. 1930.

Trotsky, Leon. The History of the Russian Revolution. 3 vols. 1932.

Trotsky, Leon. The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? 1937.

Trotsky, Leon. The Stalin School of Falsification. 1937.

Trotsky, Leon. The Third International After Lenin. 1936.

Trotsky, Leon. The Transitional Programme. 1938.

 

Monday, 26 October 2026

Blackshirts, Capitalism and the British Ruling Class

Something has always felt comforting about the conventional British treatment of Oswald Mosley. According to the mythology, fascism was fundamentally foreign to Britain, an unpleasant continental import that could never take root in a country supposedly distinguished by pragmatism, parliamentary traditions and ingrained national moderation. Mosley consequently appears as an eccentric, a political adventurer who temporarily wandered outside the respectable boundaries of British politics before history consigned him to irrelevance.

Stephen Dorril’s Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism provides ample material to demolish this complacent interpretation. Dorril traces Mosley from conventional parliamentary politics into the New Party, the creation of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1932, his relationships with European fascism, his antisemitism and his later attempts at political rehabilitation. The book’s documentary strength rests above all on Dorril’s reconstruction of the extensive network surrounding Mosley, including political and aristocratic figures, secret agents, Nazi contacts, adventurers and outright crooks. This evidence matters beyond the biography of a particularly repellent politician. Properly understood, Mosley’s career illuminates the social and political forces that could produce fascism within British capitalism itself.

Mosley did not emerge from the political margins. Born into privilege, he entered Parliament as a Conservative, moved toward Labour, served in Ramsay MacDonald’s government, then broke with the party and established the New Party. His journey towards fascism therefore proceeded through the institutions of respectable bourgeois politics. His authoritarian turn was not an inexplicable psychological conversion but developed amid the enormous contradictions of the interwar period: the decline of British economic supremacy, mass unemployment, the Depression, the crisis of parliamentary government and, above all, the spectre haunting the European ruling classes since the Russian Revolution, the possibility of socialist revolution.

Fascism has consequently to be understood as a class phenomenon rather than simply an ideology of nationalism, racism and dictatorship. Leon Trotsky developed the essential Marxist analysis during Hitler’s rise to power. Fascism mobilised the desperation of the petty bourgeoisie, ruined small proprietors, disillusioned veterans and other socially dislocated layers and directed their anger away from capitalism and towards the organised working class.

But the social layers mobilised by fascism must not be confused with the class interests that fascism ultimately served. The petty bourgeoisie supplied the mass movement and its street fighters; fascist dictatorship defended capitalist property and destroyed the independent political and industrial organisations of the proletariat. The petty bourgeoisie was the battering ram, but it ultimately protected capital's interests.

Dorril shows how readily Mosley’s supposedly marginal movement intersected with elements of respectable British society. Around the BUF appeared wealthy sympathisers, aristocrats, businesspeople, military men, and political figures alongside thugs, adventurers, and political eccentrics. This mixture of drawing room and street corner was not incidental to fascism but central to its social function.

None of this means that the British ruling class collectively supported Mosley. It plainly did not, and it had little immediate need to. British capitalism retained an empire, established parliamentary institutions and, crucially, the services of Labour and the trade-union bureaucracy in containing working-class opposition within the framework of parliamentary reform.

That explains Mosley’s failure far better than appeals to a supposedly tolerant British national character. Fascism remained comparatively weak not because British capitalism was organically democratic, but because the ruling class had not exhausted the traditional mechanisms through which it maintained political authority.

This is what makes Blackshirt more than a biography. Behind Mosley stands a larger historical warning. Fascism was no foreign contamination of an otherwise healthy British political tradition. Mosley emerged from the contradictions of British capitalism itself. The decisive question his history poses, therefore, is not whether Britain was somehow immune to fascism, but under what conditions parts of its ruling class might have concluded that parliamentary methods were no longer sufficient to defend the existing social order.

From parliamentary politician to fascist

Mosley's trajectory was no personal aberration. It expressed the crisis of British capitalism and, inseparably, the bankruptcy of Labour reformism. He passed through both Conservative and Labour politics before breaking with established parliamentarianism. Dorril's account makes clear that Mosley's fascism cannot be reduced to personal ambition or psychological instability. His movement towards authoritarianism occurred amid profound international convulsions: the aftermath of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the decline of British imperial predominance, mass unemployment and the international economic crisis.

Dorril's biography therefore inadvertently poses a larger historical question. What is fascism? Here, Leon Trotsky's Marxist analysis during Hitler's rise remains indispensable. Fascism cannot be understood primarily as extreme intolerance, political violence or the appearance of charismatic dictators. Such descriptions concern its symptoms rather than its class content. As David North stressed in a 2025 discussion of fascism's historical development, fascism emerged after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent wave of working-class radicalisation. It mobilised sections of the petty bourgeoisie, demoralised workers, and lumpen elements against the organised working class to defend bourgeois interests. In the North interview, the Italian experience is characterised as a movement aimed at suppressing a radicalising working class. [wsws.org]

This framework is necessary for understanding Dorril's extraordinary cast of characters. Around the respectable politicians and aristocrats appear adventurers, spies, fanatics and swindlers. The publisher's description of Dorril's research itself emphasises precisely this collection of political figures, secret agents, Nazi spies, crooks and other marginal characters surrounding Mosley. But this social composition should not obscure fascism's fundamental class function.

The ruined petty bourgeoisie can provide fascism with its mass constituency and street fighters. It can supply the resentment, desperation and nationalism that fascist leaders transform into political reaction. Once fascism becomes a serious contender for power, however, these forces become an instrument for defending capitalist property against the organised working class. The petty bourgeoisie is the battering ram. Capital is the social force whose interests are ultimately defended.

Fascism and the British establishment

Mosley’s failure did not prove British immunity to fascism; it only showed that authoritarian rule had not become necessary. Dorril’s evidence does not demonstrate that the entire British ruling class supported Mosley. It did not, and his connections within the establishment do not prove a unified conspiracy. The historically important question is why parts of British ruling circles were willing to tolerate, finance, or sympathise with authoritarian political alternatives at all.

Mosley left conventional parliamentary politics before embracing fascism. His trajectory therefore places fascism within British political history rather than outside it. Some argue that a supposedly innate British attachment to democracy cannot explain its comparative weakness. Britain developed under different conditions from Germany and Italy. The ruling class retained parliamentary and reformist mechanisms that could contain working-class opposition without resorting to a fascist dictatorship. The decisive question, therefore, was not whether the bourgeoisie had collectively converted to fascism, but whether it needed it. As long as parliament, Labour reformism and the trade-union bureaucracy could preserve capitalist stability, authoritarian alternatives remained unnecessary. But unnecessary did not mean impossible. Mosley’s failure showed not that British capitalism was immune to fascism, but that its ruling class had not exhausted the political mechanisms it could use to defend its power. 

This is precisely why Dorril’s portrait so damages the mythology of Britain’s supposedly instinctive democratic moderation. Mosley did not inhabit a sealed political underworld disconnected from respectable society. His career intersected repeatedly with Britain’s political and social establishment. Dorril devotes considerable attention to these connections, including Lord Rothermere, and to Mosley’s relations with German and Italian fascism and British intelligence. These are central themes in Blackshirt, not incidental details.

The point is not that the entire British ruling class became fascist or supported Mosley. It plainly did not. Nor does the existence of contacts between fascists and members of the establishment demonstrate some unified conspiracy. Such an interpretation would substitute intrigue for an analysis of class relationships.

The historically important point is different. Within British ruling circles, forces were prepared to investigate, finance, tolerate, or sympathise with authoritarian political alternatives when traditional parliamentary methods appeared increasingly inadequate to the capitalist crisis. Dorril’s reconstruction of the milieu surrounding Mosley, including political and aristocratic figures alongside secret agents, Nazi contacts and adventurers, makes it impossible to separate British fascism from the society that produced it.

This places Mosley squarely within British history rather than outside it. He had, after all, travelled through conventional parliamentary politics before establishing the British Union of Fascists in 1932. His evolution demonstrated that parliamentary politics and fascism were not two hermetically sealed universes. Amid profound social crisis, politicians who had operated within the traditional system increasingly looked to authoritarian methods.

The weakness of British fascism therefore requires a historical explanation rather than one based upon national psychology. No peculiar democratic instinct supposedly embedded in the British character made fascism impossible. Britain developed under objective conditions different from those prevailing in Germany and Italy.

This distinction is fundamental. The British ruling class still had powerful parliamentary and political mechanisms to contain social opposition. Mosley founded the BUF, but British capitalism did not face the same combination of circumstances that produced fascist rule elsewhere. That difference tells us nothing about an inherent British devotion to liberty. It shows that ruling classes use political forms appropriate to the circumstances they face.

Germany's experience demonstrates the opposite side of this process. David North has emphasised that fascism emerged historically as a movement directed against a radicalising working class and mobilised petty-bourgeois and other socially disoriented layers to smash workers’ organisations in the interests of the bourgeoisie. The decisive question was therefore never whether an entire capitalist class suddenly underwent an ideological conversion to fascism. The question was whether mounting social and political crisis made authoritarian methods necessary to defend the existing order.

From this standpoint, Mosley’s failure offers no vindication of British exceptionalism. Indeed, Dorril’s evidence points the other way. British fascism matters partly because it shows how quickly supposedly marginal authoritarian politics could find points of contact within respectable society. The appropriate conclusion is consequently more unsettling than the traditional celebration of British moderation. Parliamentary democracy persisted not because British capitalism was constitutionally incapable of fascism, but because circumstances had not compelled the ruling class to abandon its existing mechanisms of rule. Mosley was not foreign to British capitalism. He represented one of the political possibilities that its crisis generated.

Why Mosley failed

The weakness of British fascism, compared with Italian Fascism or German National Socialism, must itself be explained historically. Britain had emerged weakened from the First World War and suffered severely during the Depression. Yet British imperialism retained enormous global resources, while its parliamentary structures and traditional parties remained far more politically resilient. Most importantly, Labourism and the trade-union bureaucracy continued to exercise enormous authority over the working class.

The British bourgeoisie did not face circumstances identical to those confronting German capitalism. Germany had suffered military defeat, revolution, Versailles, hyperinflation, intense class conflict, and, subsequently, the catastrophic effects of the Depression. Above all, it possessed a working class with immensely powerful mass organisations. The question posed in Germany was therefore not whether resistance to Hitler existed. It was why that resistance was politically paralysed. Peter Schwarz's lecture on the rise of fascism in Germany approaches the catastrophe precisely as a problem of political leadership and the collapse of the Communist International, rather than deriving Hitler's victory from some alleged defect in the German population. [wsws.org]

This was Trotsky's central concern during Hitler's rise. Against the Stalinist policy that characterised Social Democracy as "social fascism", Trotsky demanded a workers' united front. Communist and Social Democratic workers should act together against the fascist threat while the revolutionary party preserved complete political independence and continued its struggle against reformist leadership. That strategy was the antithesis of the later Popular Front. A united front represented common working-class action against fascism without abandoning political independence. A Popular Front politically subordinated the workers' movement to alliances with bourgeois parties in the name of defending democracy. This distinction had immense historical consequences.

Cable Street and the working class

Here, the Battle of Cable Street in October 1936 assumes its broader significance. Cable Street has often been absorbed into another reassuring national mythology: ordinary Britons, united by traditional decency, supposedly proved fascism could not flourish on British soil. Such an interpretation removes the event from the class conflict that produced it. Mosley's attempt to march through London's East End encountered mass opposition from workers, Jewish residents and anti-fascists. The central historical lesson is not that British institutions automatically protected democracy but that large numbers of people mobilised to prevent a fascist provocation.

Nor should we obscure the role of Communist workers. Whatever the politically disastrous consequences of the Stalinist Popular Front orientation, Communist Party members became important participants in anti-fascist mobilisation at Cable Street. This distinction matters enormously. The militancy and courage of Communist workers cannot be identified uncritically with the policies dictated by the Stalinist bureaucracy.

Indeed, the tragedy of the Communist movement during these years lay in the repeated contradiction between its working-class members' revolutionary aspirations and the increasingly counter-revolutionary demands of Soviet foreign policy. Cable Street therefore cannot be reduced to either a liberal celebration of British tolerance or the accomplishments of any particular bureaucracy. Its greatest significance lay in independent mass mobilisation.

Fascism and the crisis of leadership

Here, the British and German experiences illuminate one another, despite profound differences in their historical circumstances. Hitler’s victory did not demonstrate fascism's irresistible strength, let alone the political backwardness of the German working class. Germany had one of the world's most powerful and highly organised workers’ movements. The catastrophe of 1933 resulted not from an absence of working-class opposition to fascism, but from a crisis of political leadership that prevented this immense social force from being mobilised against Hitler.

Social Democracy and Stalinism had different but complementary historical responsibilities. The Social Democratic leadership subordinated the working class to the bourgeois state and presented defence of the Weimar constitutional order as the means of resisting Hitler. The Stalinist Communist Party, meanwhile, rejected the united-front policy advocated by Trotsky and divided Communist from Social Democratic workers through the disastrous theory of “social fascism”. The consequence was not an absence of working-class opposition to fascism, but the prevention of its unified political mobilisation.

The German catastrophe consequently sharpens one of the most important implications of Dorril’s history. Appeals to the existing capitalist state cannot finally eradicate the danger of fascism because fascism does not originate outside capitalist society. It emerges from its contradictions. Parliamentary democracy is a historically specific form of capitalist rule, not an institution that stands impartially above conflicting social classes. Under relatively stable conditions, elections, parliament, collective bargaining, reformist parties, and the trade-union apparatus can mediate class antagonisms. Concessions can be made and social opposition contained without challenging capitalist property. But these political forms are neither permanent nor inviolable. When economic and social crisis becomes sufficiently acute, especially when the working class appears to threaten capitalist property and political power, sections of the bourgeoisie can turn to increasingly authoritarian alternatives. Nothing about this process was peculiarly German. What was distinctive, however, were the historical conditions that gave it its catastrophic German form.

This is why Mosley’s connections within the British elite matter far more than historical gossip. Dorril’s extensive reconstruction of the political, aristocratic and intelligence milieu surrounding Mosley demonstrates that British fascism did not exist in complete isolation from respectable society. His study explores Mosley’s connections with Nazi Germany, British political figures and intelligence circles and the broader network surrounding the British Union of Fascists.

This does not establish that the British ruling class collectively embraced fascism. It did not. The more important conclusion is that elements within established society could contemplate, tolerate or sympathise with authoritarian political alternatives. That alone punctures the mythology that parliamentary democracy expressed some timeless quality of the British national character.

Dorril’s great strength lies in the accumulation of evidence. He reconstructs the world around Mosley in extraordinary detail, tracing connections among parliamentary politics, aristocratic society, fascist organisations, intelligence circles, and the political underworld. In doing so, he exposes how porous the boundary between supposedly respectable Britain and its fascist fringe actually was. Yet description alone cannot explain the phenomenon it uncovers. The decisive question is not simply who supported, financed, or associated with Mosley, but what contradictions within British capitalism created a political space where fascism could emerge at all.

That requires an analysis of class. It requires explaining fascism not fundamentally through Mosley’s personality, British eccentricity, antisemitic prejudice or political conspiracy, important as these elements are, but through the contradictions of capitalist society and the struggle between classes. Dorril provides extraordinarily valuable raw material for such an analysis. Marxism supplies the historical framework that allows its deeper significance to emerge. Mosley then stops appearing as an inexplicable British deviation. He becomes something considerably more disturbing: evidence that authoritarian reaction was one of the possibilities generated within British capitalism itself.

The contemporary warning

This is also where Dorril's book acquires renewed relevance. Historical analogies must be employed carefully. Contemporary politics cannot simply be mapped onto the 1930s, and the specific relations of class forces that produced Mussolini and Hitler cannot simply be reproduced eighty or ninety years later. Nevertheless, the social foundations upon which fascist movements can grow have not disappeared.

Capitalist crisis, extreme inequality, imperialist war, the destruction of living standards and the insecurity of the middle classes create conditions in which nationalism and authoritarianism can again be cultivated against immigrants, minorities and, ultimately, the working class. At the same time, fascism's victory is by no means predetermined.

This is an important element in David North's treatment of the question. His 2025 discussion stresses not merely the danger of fascism but also its link to the historical failures of revolutionary leadership and the need to attack the capitalist foundations on which fascism develops. [wsws.org]

The conclusion points in a fundamentally different direction from liberal anti-fascism. If fascism arises ultimately from capitalist crisis, it cannot be eradicated through an alliance with supposedly democratic representatives of the same capitalist order. Defending democratic rights cannot depend on subordinating the working class to bourgeois parties, state institutions, or trade-union bureaucracies. The working class's political independence therefore becomes decisive.

That is the lasting distinction between the united-front strategy Trotsky fought for and every variety of Popular Front politics. Workers belonging to different organisations may have to fight jointly against fascist attacks. But common action must strengthen, rather than dissolve, the working class's political independence.

Dorril's achievement

Blackshirt remains an enormously valuable work because its accumulation of evidence makes any sentimental rehabilitation of Mosley extraordinarily difficult. According to the book's published description, Dorril made extensive use of archival material and interviews, including one with Mosley's widow, Diana Mosley; the resulting study investigates Mosley's financing, Nazi connections, and the milieu that helped his movement.

Yet that material becomes far more significant when interpreted through the history of class struggle. Mosley was neither a freak nor an inexplicable deviation from an otherwise democratic British capitalism. He arose from its political institutions, responded to its crisis and found support among elements of its established society. Britain did not avoid a fascist government because the British ruling class possessed an inherent commitment to democracy. Nor did Mosley fail because fascism was somehow incompatible with the British temperament. Different objective circumstances prevailed. The ruling class retained alternative mechanisms of political rule. Labourism and the trade-union bureaucracy still had enough authority to keep the working class within parliamentarism. When Mosley tried to take his movement to the streets, he met determined opposition from below.

Dorril's book therefore teaches us that the deepest lesson concerns not Mosley's personality but the society that produced him. Fascism becomes possible when capitalist crisis drives threatened ruling elites towards authoritarian solutions and mobilises socially desperate layers against the working class. Its ultimate strength, however, depends on the working class's political condition and leadership.

That is what connects Germany in 1933 with Cable Street in 1936 while simultaneously explaining their profoundly different outcomes. The struggle against fascism is consequently inseparable from the struggle against the social order that continually reproduces the conditions of reaction. Mosley's blackshirts emerged from British capitalism, not from outside it. The enduring answer lies neither in faith in parliament nor in alliances with the supposedly progressive wing of the ruling class, but in the conscious, international, and politically independent mobilisation of the working class against capitalism itself.


Bibliography

  • Dorril, Stephen. Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism. London: Viking, 2006. The 2007 Penguin edition contains 717 pages and includes bibliographical references.
  • Eatwell, Roger. Fascism: A History. London: Chatto & Windus, 1995.
  • Linehan, Thomas. British Fascism, 1918–39: Parties, Ideology and Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.
  • Mosley, Oswald. My Life. London: Nelson, 1968.
  • North, David. “An Interview with David North on Fascism, Trump and the Lessons of History.” World Socialist Web Site, 16 April 2025. North discusses fascism historically as a movement that mobilises the petty bourgeoisie and other disoriented social layers against the workers' movement, in the bourgeoisie's interests. [wsws.org]
  • Renton, Dave. Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Britain in the 1940s. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000.
  • Schwarz, Peter. “The Rise of Fascism in Germany and the Collapse of the Communist International.” World Socialist Web Site, 11 October 2005. [wsws.org]
  • Thurlow, Richard. Fascism in Britain: From Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts to the National Front. London: I.B. Tauris, 1998.
  • Trotsky, Leon. The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971.
  • Trotsky, Leon. “What Is National Socialism?” 1933, in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany.

 

Sunday, 25 October 2026

Race, reaction and the fight for democratic rights: The political issues posed by the Cofnas meeting at Oxford

 The announcement that Nathan Cofnas, the self-described “race realist” whose writings have provoked widespread controversy, is to speak at Oriel College, University of Oxford, has become the focus of a political confrontation whose significance extends far beyond another dispute over freedom of speech on a university campus. Cofnas is scheduled to speak on 17 November at a meeting organised by the recently established Oxon Universities’ Reform Society, entitled An Evening with Nathan Cofnas: Is DEI Undermining Higher Education? Stand Up To Racism Oxfordshire has announced a protest outside the college and launched an open letter calling on Oriel College and the University of Oxford to refuse to host the meeting and support the society’s disaffiliation.

The controversy raises fundamental questions about the growth of the nationalist right, efforts to rehabilitate racialist views of society, the crisis of identity politics and, no less importantly, the defence of democratic rights. There must be uncompromising political opposition to attempts to explain social inequality through racial hierarchy or biological determinism. But that opposition must be distinguished from calls for university administrators to suppress meetings and decide which political views students may hear. The campaign to cancel the Cofnas meeting risks replacing administrative prohibition with political struggle.

It invites the authorities of one of Britain’s wealthiest and most prestigious universities to define the limits of legitimate political discourse. This perspective does not strengthen the struggle against reaction; it weakens it by shifting political responsibility away from students and workers and onto institutions whose role is not to emancipate society, but to administer a significant part of the existing social order. The racialist right must be confronted and defeated politically, intellectually and socially—not granted the status of persecuted dissidents through administrative bans.

Cofnas is an American philosopher and postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University who studied at Oxford, Cambridge, and Columbia. He has described himself as a “race realist” and is known for arguing that genetic differences contribute to average racial differences in intelligence. Overheard at Oxford reports that mainstream scientific critics reject his hereditarian position and that the Cambridge branch of the University and College Union has described his work as “race pseudo-science”.

The political significance of these arguments extends beyond the immediate academic controversies. Historically, biological explanations of racial inequality have served a clear ideological purpose: they recast conditions shaped by history and social relations as supposedly natural—and therefore more or less immutable—differences between human populations. As a result, inequalities in wealth, educational achievement, and social position no longer need to be explained by poverty, inherited wealth, unequal access to education, the organisation of employment, or society's class structure. Instead, they can be attributed, wholly or partly, to supposedly inherited differences between populations. This helps explain why biological determinism and eugenic doctrines have historically been so valuable to defenders of hierarchy.

They made existing inequality appear scientifically inevitable. Contemporary hereditarian arguments arise in a different historical context, and their proponents often distance themselves from earlier racial ideologies. Still, attempts to explain racialised social inequality biologically must face the most rigorous scientific, historical and political scrutiny.

The immediate backdrop to the Oxford meeting is the bitter controversy surrounding the late Cambridge sociologist Arday. Cofnas publicly accused him of plagiarising his doctoral thesis. Arday denied plagiarism but acknowledged mistakes in his doctoral work. Liverpool John Moores University, which awarded his doctorate, concluded that his degree should stand. Cambridge University later announced an investigation, citing what it described as new information about his qualifications and honorary appointments. Arday resigned and died later in August. The controversy cannot simply be dismissed as an invented allegation: Africa News reported that The Times had separately examined Arday’s thesis and identified passages it characterised as “identical or near-identical” to another researcher’s work. Questions were also raised about claims concerning his sporting and charitable activities.

But legitimate questions about academic standards could not justify turning an investigation into an escalating campaign of public denunciation that destroyed an individual. After Arday’s death, his family said a “campaign of misinformation” had become “too much for Jason” and that he had experienced a “campaign of sustained abuse”. The response to his death reflected widespread anger.

A Press Association report said that more than 30,000 people attended a vigil in Trafalgar Square, where Diane Abbott called the campaign against Arday “vicious” and “bitter”. By contrast, Lord Woolley described his death as a “public execution” and a “lynching”. These statements undoubtedly reflected genuine outrage. But the political framework through which much of the controversy has been interpreted—one that treats racial identity as the fundamental explanation for the conflict—obscures the deeper social and class processes at work.

The Arday affair exposes the profound contradictions of the diversity politics that has come to dominate universities, corporations and substantial sections of official political life. Within this framework, social progress is increasingly measured by the racial and gender composition of those occupying positions of prestige. Who becomes a professor, university administrator, corporate director, or senior politician becomes the principal measure of equality. But diversifying an elite does not abolish inequality. A university can celebrate the racial diversity of its senior leadership while students confront debt and academic employees experience insecure employment. Corporations can diversify their boardrooms without altering the relationship between shareholders and workers. Government institutions can promote representatives from different ethnic backgrounds while presiding over policies that increase poverty and social inequality. The composition of privileged layers can change considerably without transforming the social relationships upon which privilege itself rests.

The political right has learned to exploit precisely this contradiction. Reaction accepts the racial framework of liberal identity politics but reverses its direction. Where official diversity programmes attribute significance to the representation of minorities, the right declares that these same minorities have received unfair advantages. Where identity politics speaks of historical oppression, reaction increasingly portrays white people as the victims of institutional discrimination. Where liberalism invokes “lived experience”, its opponents appropriate the same terminology for themselves.

The statement issued by the Oxon Universities’ Reform Society regarding Cofnas demonstrates this process with almost parodic clarity. It claimed that he had been “repeatedly victimised with stigmatising language and structural apartheid by those with institutional power and privilege” and presented allowing space for his “lived experiences” as a means of rebalancing representation at Oxford. The rhetorical inversion is deliberate. The right has discovered that identity categories can be detached from progressive intentions and redeployed as instruments of reaction.

The development of the Oxon Universities’ Reform Society must itself be taken seriously. Registered with the University of Oxford in August, its announced programme has included Andrew Rosindell, Jim Allister, Neema Parvini and Cofnas. Its emergence points to a conscious effort to establish nationalist-right ideas among university students. We cannot counter this with the complacent assumption that reactionary politics will collapse merely because its arguments seem offensive to prevailing academic conventions.

The right seeks to capitalise upon a deepening alienation from institutions whose rhetoric of inclusivity increasingly conflicts with lived experiences of economic insecurity. Young people are continually assured that society is becoming more inclusive and progressive, even as secure employment, affordable housing, and financial independence become increasingly difficult to obtain. Reaction takes this social anger and provides it with a false target. Migrants, minorities, multiculturalism, “wokeness” and DEI become the explanation for contradictions rooted in capitalist society itself.

The international dimensions of the controversy surrounding Cofnas underscore the seriousness of these developments. Ghent University suspended Cofnas in August after his public statements about the Arday affair. The Press Association later reported that US ambassador Bill White pressured the university to reinstate him. More detailed reporting by Overheard at Oxford says the university replaced the original suspension with a three-month measure under which Cofnas works remotely, cannot teach, and must restrict his research to the subjects covered by his appointment, while an investigation continues. These details make clear the need to treat claims of simple “reinstatement” cautiously. Still, the reported involvement of an American ambassador shows that what might initially appear to be an internal university controversy has already intersected with wider political conflicts over academic freedom, DEI, and right-wing politics.

Under these circumstances, Stand Up To Racism Oxfordshire's demand that university authorities prevent the meeting is politically misguided. There is every justification for demonstrating against racism, exposing its scientific pretensions and challenging the programme of the nationalist right. But protesting a political meeting and asking the authorities to prohibit it are fundamentally different political acts. The first constitutes the exercise of democratic rights by students and workers. The second transfers political power to an administrative apparatus and asks it to determine the boundaries of permissible political discourse. Once the principle is established that university management should decide which political organisations can meet and which political opinions students are permitted to hear, no progressive mechanism guarantees that such powers will always be exercised in a way that respects the right.

The defence of freedom of speech must therefore be separated from political agreement with the ideas being expressed. Cofnas has the right to advance his arguments, and students and workers possess the equally essential right to condemn and oppose them. Those rights are not contradictory. Political freedom depends upon both. A mass political demonstration against racism represents the active exercise of democratic rights. In contrast, administrative cancellation removes the political issue from students and workers and hands it to the university bureaucracy. Suppression also supplies the right with its preferred mythology. Movements that seek to portray themselves as persecuted outsiders challenging an intolerant liberal establishment benefit enormously whenever their opponents attempt to prevent them from speaking. They can then present arguments that ought to be subjected to ruthless criticism as forbidden truths that powerful institutions supposedly fear.

More fundamentally, the growth of racial politics cannot be understood apart from the social conditions that make reaction possible. Britain is characterised by immense private wealth alongside declining public provision and profound economic insecurity. Millions struggle with housing costs, deteriorating services and uncertainty about their future. Under such circumstances, nationalist politics offers an explanation deliberately calculated to conceal society's structure. Migrants become responsible for housing shortages, refugees for overstretched services, multiculturalism for social fragmentation and diversity policies for declining opportunities. Each such argument directs social anger horizontally toward another section of the population instead of vertically toward concentrations of wealth and economic power.

This is why the struggle against racism cannot ultimately be separated from the struggle against capitalism. Marxism does not deny racial discrimination or minimise its consequences. It explains racial oppression historically and socially rather than treating race as the fundamental organising principle of human society. Workers do not stop sharing common material interests because they have different skin colours, religions, or national origins. On the contrary, ruling classes have repeatedly exploited such differences precisely because workers share interests that transcend national and racial divisions. When workers are persuaded to understand each other principally as members of competing racial communities, their capacity for common political action is undermined.

The answer to racialism is therefore not an alternative system of racial politics with more progressive objectives. Black workers and white workers, British-born workers and migrants, Christian, Muslim, Jewish and non-religious workers cannot emancipate themselves through competition for privileges within the existing social structure. Their common interests lie in transforming that structure. The great historical strength of socialist internationalism is its insistence that humanity can overcome racial and national antagonisms only by attacking their material foundations and uniting working people across the divisions cultivated by the ruling class.

The 17 November meeting should therefore become an occasion for political clarification rather than administrative censorship. Students and academics should expose the history and scientific weaknesses of racial determinism. Workers and young people should oppose attempts to blame migrants and minorities for the social crisis. They should challenge the nationalist programme associated with Reform UK and reject efforts to turn legitimate anger over deteriorating living standards into hostility towards vulnerable sections of society. At the same time, they should oppose attempts to hand university authorities powers to suppress political organisations. A movement genuinely capable of confronting reaction requires confidence in political argument and mass mobilisation, not reliance upon administrative prohibition.

This dispute ultimately concerns something much greater than whether Nathan Cofnas speaks for ninety minutes in an Oxford lecture theatre. The return of racialist ideas is one manifestation of a broader political crisis produced by staggering inequality, declining confidence in established institutions and the absence of a mass socialist alternative through which social opposition can find progressive expression. Reaction grows by exploiting this vacuum. It transforms class antagonism into nationalism, economic insecurity into hostility towards migrants and social inequality into competition between racial groups. Its arguments acquire influence not because racial pseudoscience has suddenly become intellectually convincing, but because conditions of profound social crisis create opportunities for forces that divert anger away from capitalism.

Fighting this danger requires a fundamentally different orientation. Students and workers must oppose racism without surrendering democratic rights, defend migrants and minorities without accepting the fragmentation of society into competing racial constituencies, and confront the nationalist right without placing themselves politically under the authority of the institutions of the existing order. Above all, they must recognise that the fundamental social division is not between white and black, native-born and migrant, or one nationality and another, but between the working class, whose collective labour sustains society, and the capitalist class that controls its productive resources and appropriates its wealth.

Racial pseudoscience will not be defeated by persuading Oriel College to lock the doors of a lecture theatre. Nor will administrative rulings from university authorities halt the growth of the nationalist right. We must defeat these forces in open political struggle by exposing the social interests they serve and removing the conditions on which they feed. That demands building an independent socialist movement that unites workers and young people across every racial and national division in opposition to inequality, nationalism, and the capitalist system itself.