H.N. Brailsford's The Levellers and the English Revolution, edited and prepared by Christopher Hill. 1961 Spokesman Publications

H.N. Brailsford's The Levellers and the English Revolution, published posthumously in 1961 and edited by Christopher Hill, stands as one of the most significant radical narratives of the mid-seventeenth-century English Revolution. It is valuable not only for what it uncovers about one of history's major revolutionary upheavals, but also for the insights into its political and theoretical boundaries, which shed light on the tradition it originates from.

Henry Noel Brailsford was among the most talented socialist journalists and writers in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century. He was linked to the Independent Labour Party, a strand of ethical, Nonconformist socialism that positioned itself to the left of the Labour Party's main faction but remained politically allied with it. Brailsford wrote extensively on topics like foreign affairs, imperialism, and international politics. His major work on the seventeenth century, The Levellers and the English Revolution, was left incomplete upon his death and was published posthumously in 1961, edited by Christopher Hill.

Brailsford engaged with the Levellers with sincere empathy and thorough scholarship. He restored the coherence and importance of their political agenda, the Agreements of the People, which calls for manhood suffrage, the abolition of tithes and excise, religious toleration, and legal equality, and positioned them as the most advanced democratic movement produced by the English Revolution. His respectful treatment of figures such as John Lilburne, Richard Overton, and William Walwyn as serious political thinkers, rather than merely eccentric sectarians, marked a significant contribution. Brailsford demonstrated that the Levellers were not just agitators but were working to establish a constitutional basis for a democratic republic, an effort with few global precedents at the time.

Hill edited Brailsford's posthumous volume on the Levellers, creating an apt collaboration as his research complemented and expanded Brailsford's focus on the radical plebeians of the revolution. A prominent figure in 20th-century Marxist historiography of the English Revolution, Hill's work was thoroughly reviewed by Ann Talbot of the WSWS, who emphasised its complexities following Hill's death in 2003. His ideas were influenced by the Marxist Historians Group of the Communist Party, which included renowned scholars such as E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton, and Eric Hobsbawm.

His main contribution was challenging the dominant Whig interpretation of British history, which presents a comforting myth symbolised by the Trevelyan family's country houses, owned by the National Trust, and suggests that Britain experienced a uniquely peaceful and gradual political development without revolutionary upheaval. Hill contended that the events of the 1640s were a true bourgeois revolution, with one ruling class overthrowing another, driven by the mass population whose awareness was significantly changed. As Talbot points out, "these achievements were considerable at the time and remain relevant today, especially as historians increasingly dismiss any serious economic or social analysis."

Hill's The World Turned Upside Down (1972) examines, more deeply than Brailsford, the radical groups such as the Diggers, Ranters, and early Quakers—highlighting how these marginalised factions advanced social change that the propertied classes leading the revolution could never permit. However, Hill's perspective was heavily influenced by the Stalinist politics in which he was educated. As Talbot points out, the Communist Party promoted a "People's History" that maintained a primarily national outlook aligned with the Popular Front, thereby subordinating the working class to supposedly progressive bourgeois forces. This resulted in a key limitation: Hill never placed the English Revolution within its broader international context, nor did he examine how the ideas of English revolutionaries connected to continental Enlightenment thought. He also retained a romantic attachment to specifically English radical traditions. His later interest in radical sects during the Restoration period, long after their revolutionary importance had faded, reflects this nationalism's desire to portray a continuous English revolutionary tradition rather than explore how revolutionary ideas spread and evolved across national borders.

Hill notably avoided the twentieth century almost completely. As Talbot observes, among the Marxist Historians Group, Hill focused on the seventeenth century, Thompson on the eighteenth, Hobsbawm on the nineteenth, and Hilton on the Middle Ages, none of whom specialised in their own era. This was intentional. In recent history, Stalinist politics exerted too direct a control; engaging honestly would have led to conflicts with the bureaucracy. Hill's sole engagement with the twentieth century, a 1947 study of Lenin, is marked by repeated dismissals of Trotsky as a "Westernising theoretician", a point Talbot rightly criticises as his weakest and most politically dishonest aspect. He could not fully pursue his true Marxist instincts where the bureaucratic line was drawn.

Trotsky's 1925 work, 'Where Is Britain Going?', surprisingly predicted many of Hill's key insights about the English Revolution. It emphasised two major revolutionary traditions in British history, the revolution of Cromwell and Chartism, which Whig gradualism tends to overlook. Trotsky saw Cromwell as a revolutionary bourgeois leader who suppressed the Levellers when they threatened to go beyond the limits of capitalist property.

Whether Hill independently drew these conclusions from Marx and Engels or was subtly influenced by Trotsky without acknowledgement, his most important historical work aligns with them. The tragedy is that his political background prevented him from realising that the essential lessons of the English Revolution, namely, that the bourgeoisie betrays democratic goals whenever property is at risk and that only the working class can finish the democratic tasks left incomplete by the bourgeois revolution, are highly relevant to the twentieth-century challenges faced by Hill and his generation.

Hill and Brailsford

Although they came from different political backgrounds, both aimed to rekindle the revolutionary-democratic spirit of the seventeenth-century English Revolution, challenging a conservative and complacent mainstream history. Brailsford was driven by an ethical socialist's moral commitment to the oppressed, while Hill applied the Marxist analysis of class structures. Collectively, their work exemplifies the pinnacle of the British left-wing historical tradition focused on this era.

Their shared limitations are also instructive. Both remained confined within a nationally bounded framework and did not fully explore the global implications of the English Revolution, such as its role in the Atlantic world, its links to the Dutch Republic, or the ideas that would later influence the American and French Revolutions a century afterwards. Moreover, for political rather than purely intellectual reasons, neither could apply the lessons of seventeenth-century revolutionary history to the revolutionary challenges of their own time. Trotskyism, however, broadens this horizon in a way neither the ILP nor the Stalinist tradition allowed.

The Levellers and the English Revolution

Brailsford's book focuses on the Levellers, a radical democratic group that emerged from the New Model Army and London's artisan and petty-bourgeois classes during the revolutionary upheavals of the 1640s. Led by John Lilburne, Richard Overton, and William Walwyn, the Levellers produced important documents, especially the Agreement of the People, which advocated for manhood suffrage, freedom of conscience, legal equality, and the abolition of monopolies and tithes. Their efforts broadened the scope of the English Revolution towards its most leftist and democratic ideals.

Brailsford's account is a passionate and richly detailed narrative that takes these men and their ideas seriously as historical actors, not merely background colour to the drama of Cromwell and Parliament. In this sense, the book is a real contribution to understanding the social depth of the revolution. Brailsford's socialism was rooted in the parliamentary, Fabian, and ethical-socialist traditions of British labourism. He never broke from the framework of reformism, the perspective that capitalism could be gradually transformed from within through parliamentary pressure, trade union organisation, and moral persuasion of the ruling class.

Trotsky's analysis of the British labour movement, set out in Where Is Britain Going? (1925) was a direct critique of this entire tradition: Trotsky argued that the ILP and the labour bureaucracy were incapable of leading the working class to power precisely because they refused to make the political break with bourgeois institutions.

Brailsford's approach is limited by the tradition he comes from. As an ethical socialist and ILP liberal, he admired the Levellers mainly for their constitutional and democratic demands, viewing them as early forerunners of liberal democracy rather than fully understanding the class dynamics behind their position. He focused on the moral strength of their arguments rather than on the social forces that enabled or hindered them. While he recognised that Cromwell and the Grandees suppressed the Levellers, he did not fully analyse why the bourgeois revolutionary leadership felt compelled to do so. This gap is not a personal shortcoming but a reflection of the ethical socialist tradition's tendency to moralise history rather than examine its material basis.

John Rees and the English Revolution

John Rees is arguably the most influential and skilled historian to employ a Marxist historiographical approach to analyse the English bourgeois revolution. His work highlights the strengths of Hill and Brailsford but also points to their political shortcomings. Rees, a longtime member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and co-founder of Counterfire, authored key works such as "The Algebra of Revolution" (1998) and notably "The Leveller Revolution" (2016), which explores themes similar to Brailsford’s. He provides an earnest scholarly view of the English Revolution from a leftist perspective. Nonetheless, from a Marxist/Trotskyist standpoint, both Rees and Counterfire operate as a pseudo-left, projecting a radical front while subordinating working-class political independence to broad front tactics, such as Coalitions like Stop the War, which link workers with bourgeois-liberal and establishment forces. Rees has played a key role in this strategic orientation.

As a result, despite his competent historical scholarship, Rees's political actions often undermine the very lessons of the English Revolution, such as the idea that the bourgeoisie betrays its revolution when the plebeian masses push beyond property boundaries, and that the working class needs its own independent political leadership. Brailsford deserves better than to be pressed into service as a respectable ancestor for Counterfire's brand of left reformism. He was a serious socialist grappling with real questions. The tragedy is that the tradition he inhabited, sincere in its individual representatives, was organically incapable of providing the revolutionary leadership the working class required.

The Levellers and the struggle for Socialism Today

The Levellers' experience offers deep lessons for today's working class. The key lesson is that, regardless of how radical the democratic demands are during a revolutionary crisis, they cannot be achieved unless the working class or its equivalent seizes political power directly. While the Levellers controlled the army and had street support, they lacked a party and a clear program to challenge the bourgeoisie for state control as a unified class; they merely pressured it. Cromwell understood this dynamic, which allowed him to outmanoeuvre and ultimately dismantle them.

Engels, in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, summarised the main lesson from the entire bourgeois revolutionary period: the ideological forms through which class interests manifested such as Puritanism, natural rights theory, and millenarianism were merely the historical guise in which emerging class forces presented themselves The Levellers, by demanding "freeborn rights," articulated the revolutionary democratic aspirations of the emerging plebeian classes in a language accessible to them.

The Diggers, led by Gerrard Winstanley, went even further, explicitly communalistic in their demands, occupying common land and arguing that true freedom required the abolition of property itself. Brailsford's book touches on this dimension, though Winstanley is not its central focus. From a Marxist standpoint, the Diggers represent the most historically prescient current of the English Revolution, expressing in embryonic and utopian form the communist impulse that would only find its scientific foundation two centuries later with Marx and Engels. In this respect, readers would do well to examine John Gurney's work on the diggers and Winstanley.

'The Levellers and the English Revolution' is Brailsford's most significant work historically, showcasing both his strengths and limitations. His strengths are notable: he vividly portrayed the Levellers as historical figures, reconstructed the Putney Debates with remarkable clarity, and took their radical democratic agenda seriously at a time when mainstream historiography overlooked them. On the other hand, his limitations are also evident: his framework was rooted in a liberal-democratic lineage, viewing the Levellers as precursors to parliamentary reform, rather than employing a rigorous Marxist analysis of the class forces that drove and limited the English bourgeois revolution.

The Levellers and the English Revolution is a crucial and accessible book about a highly intense yet often overlooked phase in the history of class struggle. Brailsford's work should be read alongside Trotsky's Where Is Britain Going?, Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down* and God's Englishman, as well as Engels's analysis of bourgeois revolutions in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. It shows that major revolutionary upheavals often produce unforeseen forces, and their success hinges on political leadership capable of completing the revolution. This remains a vital lesson for the working class in today’s revolutionary movements.

A Trumpet of Sedition: Political Theory and the Rise of Capitalism, 1509-1688 by Ellen Meiksins Wood, Neal Wood, New York University Press, 1997

 

"...The tongue of man is a trumpet of warre, and sedition." —

Thomas Hobbes De Cive, v. 5

“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”

John Locke

“Your slavery is their liberty, your poverty is their prosperity...Peace is their ruin,...by war they are enriched...Peace is their war, peace is their poverty”

―Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution

The discerning reader will recognise that this website is named after Meiksins-Wood's notable book, 'A Trumpet of Sedition: Political Theory and the Rise of Capitalism, 1509–1688' (1997), co-authored by Ellen Meiksins Wood and her husband Neal Wood. I received the book from my friend Tony Hyland, and its title seemed apt for a site created to share my interest in the English bourgeois revolution. Given that the website has been around for over eighteen years, a review of this book has long been overdue.

It is, without a doubt, an important work in the history of political thought. The book shows how modern political theory, from Thomas More to Hobbes and Locke, emerged as both a response to and an ideological expression of the rise of capitalism in England. Its central claim is that modern political philosophy was shaped not in an abstract world of ideas, but in the real social conflicts produced by agrarian capitalism, enclosure, and the dispossession of the peasantry.

The Woods carefully chose the title A Trumpet of Sedition because it evokes the radical political pamphlet culture of 17th-century England, the era of the Levellers, Diggers, and other popular movements that emerged during the English Civil War. This phrase, originating from the polemical language of that era, was used to describe writings that defied established authority. The Woods use it ironically and provocatively: their book explores how the political theory of that period could both justify the growing capitalist system (as in Hobbes and Locke) and oppose it (as in radical democratic movements later repressed).

Wood's approach marks a genuine advance on idealist histories of political thought, which treat Hobbes or Locke as merely responding to ideas rather than to material social conditions. Her insistence that political theory must be understood in relation to the class struggles and property relations of its time is fundamentally Marxist in method, even if Wood herself worked within the framework of "Political Marxism" associated with Robert Brenner rather than the classical Trotskyist tradition. 

The Woods and the Historiographical Debate

Lawrence Stone once characterised writing about the English Revolution as navigating a 'battleground heavily contested, filled with mines, booby-traps, and ambushes manned by fierce scholars ready to fight every inch.” Ellen Meiksins Wood and Neal Wood entered a historiographical landscape already shaped by Christopher Hill, the influential Marxist historian of the period. As Ann Talbot's obituary of Hill notes, his achievements were twofold: he identified the mid-17th-century crisis as a true bourgeois revolution that replaced one class's dominance with another, and he highlighted the vital role of the masses in revolutions, stressing that a change in consciousness among the people is essential for revolution. His works, The World Turned Upside Down, God's Englishman, The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution*, and Milton and the English Revolution presented a materialist view that influenced a whole generation's understanding of the era.[1]

The Woods built upon this tradition but added a unique theoretical focus. Their framework, "Political Marxism," linked to historian Robert Brenner, argues that capitalism began specifically with English agrarian property relations—particularly the competitive dynamic between landlords and tenant farmers that arose from the way feudalism broke down in England, unlike in France or other countries. As a result, the Woods emphasised the connection between property relations and political ideas.

Political Marxism shows significant shortcomings. Although Ellen Meiksins Wood was a thorough theorist of capitalism and its historical evolution, Political Marxism as a movement lacks a cohesive theory of revolutionary organisation, a clear strategy for capturing state power, and any link to the legacy of the Fourth International. It primarily developed and thrived in academic circles—through journals like New Left Review and Historical Materialism, whose social base is centred on left-wing intellectuals rather than the working class itself. This influences the questions it considers and, importantly, which questions it neglects. The crucial debates on revolutionary strategy—such as how workers can break free from trade union bureaucracies, the relationship between the working class and its leaders, and why the Russian Revolution failed are largely missing from Wood's work.

In A Trumpet of Sedition, it is shown that the great political thinkers from Thomas More (in 1516) through Hobbes and Locke were not just tackling abstract philosophical issues but were also engaging, sometimes secretly and sometimes openly, with the social upheavals caused by the rise of agrarian capitalism. The enclosure of common lands, the dispossession of peasants, and the commercialisation of agriculture were the material forces that led to the political crises of the 17th century and shaped the political ideas that sought to understand these changes.

Thomas More was another figure of profound ambiguity. His 1516 work, Utopia, is frequently regarded as the first depiction of a socialist community in English. However, Wood sees it not merely as a humanist fantasy but as a sharp critique of the dispossession driven by enclosure. More's well-known remark about sheep "devouring men" criticises primitive accumulation, a process that Marx later analysed in Capital as the violent severance of peasants from the land. Nonetheless, More was also rooted in the old order, a supporter of the Church. His utopian ideas lacked revolutionary potential; he could imagine an alternative society, but was unable to connect that vision to any class capable of enacting it.

Wood portrays Hobbes as more than just a defender of monarchy. She argues that his responses to social upheaval stemming from capitalism's rise and conflicts caused by agrarian change are central to understanding his support for a strong sovereign. This stance is seen as a reaction to class conflict and instability, not an abstract view of human nature. Wood challenges the common perspective among some liberal and postmodern scholars that Hobbes was merely a reactionary advocate of authoritarianism. Following Frederick Engels, she places Hobbes among the founders of modern materialism. In her view, Hobbes is positioned alongside Bacon and Locke in a philosophical tradition that, moving from England into the French Enlightenment, influenced the intellectual groundwork for the French Revolution and the development of dialectical and historical materialism.

Thomas Hobbes receives the most philosophically rich treatment. As Ann Talbot's article carefully establishes, “Hobbes played a vital role in the development of modern materialism and formed a link in a chain that passed from Britain to France that was, in turn, an organic part of the political developments that found expression in the French Revolution of 1789. Dialectical materialism and historical materialism would have been impossible without that earlier development. In his battle against the power of the Church, in his courageous stand for materialism at a time when the vagaries of fate favoured superstition, in his struggle to create a science of politics, and his insistence that no area of experience was not susceptible to scientific analysis, Hobbes was a man who transcended his times. But he was a man of his time and expressed the interests of his class and the experiences of the social layer to which he belonged.”[2]

According to the Woods, Hobbes's political theory illustrates the transitional phase of early capitalism: the bourgeoisie still required a strong state to ensure the conditions for economic growth, but its authority needed to be based on rational consent rather than divine right. As Talbot points out, "His conception of the state was, in that sense, a modern one rather than a feudal one." Importantly, Hobbes recognised Cromwell's Commonwealth as a legitimate sovereign once it demonstrated the ability to maintain order. This stance rendered him ineffective as a royalist propagandist and aligned with his materialist philosophy.

James Harrington, author of *Oceana* (1656), which the Woods also examine, is the thinker most clearly linking property to political power. He argues that how land is distributed shapes the government. This "agrarian law' idea is essentially a proto-materialist view of politics, reflecting the gentry class's awareness that had gained victory in the Civil War. They sought a theoretical justification for their political control.

John Locke faces the fiercest ideological critique in this analysis. While mainstream liberal thought regards Locke's *Two Treatises of Government* (1689) as a foundational theory of natural rights, individual freedom, and limited governance, The Woods challenge this view as a form of class mystification. Locke's property theory — that labour combined with nature grants rightful ownership — is not a universal principle but a tool used by the agrarian capitalist class. It endorses enclosure and dispossession by framing private property as a natural right that precedes political society. For Locke, the "consent of the governed" actually means the consent of property owners; those without property lack a genuine political voice. According to Locke, liberty is the liberty of those who already possess property.

Levellers, Diggers, and the "Trumpet of Sedition"

The book's title hints at the suppressed radical currents of the revolution within the bourgeois settlement. The Levellers, led by John Lilburne, advocated for manhood suffrage, freedom of conscience, legal equality, and the elimination of monopolies and tithes. Their 1647 Agreement of the People was a truly democratic constitutional proposal that challenged the limits of parliamentary gentry acceptance. Even more radical were the Diggers, or True Levellers, led by Gerrard Winstanley, who believed that genuine freedom depended on the common ownership of land. Winstanley's writings, blending religious language with radical social ideas, are among the most notable documents of 17th-century political thought.

In 1649, Cromwell defeated the Levellers, and local landowners dismantled the Diggers' communes with government approval. The Restoration of 1660 further suppressed these movements. The 1688 'Glorious Revolution,' which placed William of Orange on the throne and endorsed Locke's political ideas as justification, marked the final strengthening of the bourgeois settlement: a palace revolution that safeguarded the propertied classes from both royal absolutism and radical popular movements.

This brings me nicely to the importance of Leon Trotsky’s intervention in the debate over the English bourgeois revolution. Trotsky, in his book Where Is Britain Going? (1925), pointed to "two revolutionary traditions in British history — that of Cromwell in the seventeenth century and later of Chartism. For Trotsky, leadership was decisive, and this is summed up in these words: " Different classes in different conditions and for different tasks find themselves compelled in particular and indeed, the most acute and critical, periods in their history, to vest an extraordinary power and authority in such of their leaders as can carry forward their fundamental interests most sharply and fully. When we speak of dictatorship, we must, in the first place, be clear as to what interests of what particular classes find their historical expression through the dictatorship. For one era, Oliver Cromwell; for another, Robespierre, expressed the historically progressive tendencies in the development of bourgeois society. William Pitt, likewise extremely close to a personal dictatorship, defended the interests of the monarchy, the privileged classes and the top bourgeoisie against a revolution of the petty bourgeoisie that found its highest expression in the dictatorship of Robespierre. The liberal vulgarians customarily say that they are against a dictatorship from the left just as much as from the right. However, in practice, they do not let slip any opportunity to support a dictatorship of the right. But for us, the question is whether one dictatorship moves society forward while another drags it back. Mussolini's dictatorship is a dictatorship of the prematurely decayed, impotent, thoroughly contaminated Italian bourgeoisie: it is a dictatorship with a broken nose. The 'dictatorship of Lenin' expresses the mighty pressure of the new historical class and its superhuman struggle against all the forces of the old society. If Lenin can be juxtaposed with anyone, then it is not with Napoleon, nor even with Mussolini, but with Cromwell and Robespierre. It can be said, with some justice, that Lenin is the proletarian twentieth-century Cromwell. Such a definition would at the same time be the highest compliment to the petty-bourgeois seventeenth-century Cromwell.[3]

The Wood’s Contribution and their Limits

The Woods make a meaningful and enduring contribution in A Trumpet of Sedition. Their focus on interpreting political ideas through property relations and class struggle is inherently Marxist. Highlighting how Lockean liberalism functions as a class-based ideology rather than a universal philosophy is especially important, as is their revival of the revolution's overlooked radical traditions.

However, the constraints of Political Marxism are also evident. Its tendency to limit capitalism's origins to English agrarian conditions results in a somewhat narrow analytical scope. More critically, this reflects the academic left tradition that Woods figures in the book excels in historical sociology and intellectual history but remains largely silent on revolutionary strategy and the role of political parties. The Levellers' defeat was due not merely to an insufficiently radical program but also to their lack of a clear theory of state power and an organisational structure capable of challenging it. Winstanley's concept of communal ownership was more radical than Lilburne's constitutionalism, yet neither offered a concrete strategy for seizing political power.

Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution was created to address a key issue. In every bourgeois revolution, plebeian and working-class forces are mobilised but ultimately betrayed by the bourgeoisie, which fears social revolution more than the old regime. This lesson is both historical and strategic — the working class must struggle for political independence, led by its own party, aiming not for the completion of a bourgeois revolution but for socialist societal change. The Woods offer a detailed account of how the bourgeoisie in 17th-century England manipulated and later suppressed revolutionary masses. However, their framework lacks a political theory capable of preventing history from repeating itself.

A Trumpet of Sedition is a profound and essential work in materialist intellectual history, recommended for anyone exploring the ideological roots of capitalism. Wood's approach—placing political ideas within their class context—is genuinely Marxist and offers insightful analyses of figures like More, Harrington, Hobbes, and Locke. Its shortcomings are not in its analysis but in what it omits: the shift from merely understanding the world to actively transforming it, along with the programmatic and organisational issues that the Trotskyist movement has always emphasised as integral to any serious socialist politics.

 

---

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

[2] The ghost of Thomas Hobbes-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/05/hobb-m12.html

[3] Two traditions: the seventeenth-century revolution and Chartism-www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/britain/ch06.htm

The POUM: Republic, Revolution and Counterrevolution by Andy Durgan Resistance Books 15 Nov. 2025

Andy Durgan's book, The POUM: Republic, Revolution and Counterrevolution, published by Resistance Books in November 2025, is part of a broader effort to rehabilitate POUM's centrist politics and downplay the important lessons of the Spanish Revolution. Resistance Books, the publishing wing of the International Socialist Tendency (IST), is largely influenced by the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP). This connection is intentional and influences how Durgan presents the Spanish events of 1936–39.

Durgan is closely linked to Britain’s Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and has historically contributed to its media publications, including Socialist Worker and its main theoretical journal, International Socialism. He specialises in the Spanish Civil War and is particularly noted for his research on POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification). His background includes political activity with the SWP in the UK, academic research on the origins of POUM, and teaching modern history in Spain. Additionally, he served as a historical adviser for Ken Loach’s film Land and Freedom, which illustrates the POUM’s involvement in the Spanish Revolution.

However, as Ann Talbot notes, "Durgan’s conception of the relationship between class and society is derived ultimately from the anti-Marxist conceptions of the sociologist Max Weber, who developed an ahistorical view of society as a series of static ideal types. This approach proved influential for self-declared Marxists such as Louis Althusser, who developed structuralism, a major theoretical influence on the SWP. This theoretical background allows Durgan to adopt Graham’s theory of modernisation without as much as a hiccup. The Spanish Civil War, according to Helen Graham, was one of many European civil wars that reflected differing responses to modernity.[1]

Talbot believes that Durgan’s political affiliation is of minor significance when compared to his political approach, which is deeply rooted in the IST/SWP tradition. The publication of The POUM through Resistance Books in 2025 confirms that the institutional link between Durgan and that tendency remains. The SWP tradition provides the platform, distribution channels, and political support for his revival of POUM centrist views.

Any Marxist writer who has engaged with Durgan’s work has observed that, while he was willing to engage critically with Trotskyism in earlier writings, by 2007, he had fully embraced the Popular Front framework, disguised as "modernisation theory." As Dave Hyland detailed in a three-part WSWS critique in November 2012, Durgan consistently downplays the role of the PSOE and anarcho-syndicalists in the defeat of the 1934 Asturian uprising, neglects the Stalinist GPU's campaign of murder against Spain’s revolutionary opposition, and most importantly, fails to address Trotsky’s actual positions on the POUM seriously.[2]

Durgan's 2025 book on the POUM represents his most sustained effort to rehabilitate that organisation and to counter the Trotskyist critique. The POUM (Workers' Party of Marxist Unification) was established in 1935 through the merger of the Communist Left of Spain led by Andreu Nin, a former Left Oppositionist and former secretary of the Red International of Labour Unions, and the Workers and Peasants Bloc, led by Joaquín Maurín. Nin had distanced himself from Trotsky in 1930, refusing to endorse the Fourth International and instead forming an opportunist alliance with Bukharin's Right Opposition. This was more than a tactical disagreement; it was a profound political mistake with disastrous repercussions.

Trotsky’s assessment of the POUM differs sharply from Durgan’s and, contrary to Durgan’s suggestion, was not a retrospectively harsh judgment. It was a direct political intervention made in the midst of events. In The Class, the Party, and the Leadership, written in 1940 and published on the WSWS, Trotsky wrote:

“To the left of all the other parties in Spain stood the POUM, which undoubtedly embraced revolutionary proletarian elements not previously firmly tied to anarchism. However, it was precisely this party that played a fatal role in the development of the Spanish revolution. It could not become a mass party because, in order to do so, it was first necessary to overthrow the old parties, and it was possible to overthrow them only by an irreconcilable struggle, by a merciless exposure of their bourgeois character. However, the POUM, while criticising the old parties, subordinated itself to them on all fundamental questions. It participated in the “People’s” election bloc; entered the government, which liquidated workers’ committees; engaged in a struggle to reconstitute this governmental coalition; capitulated time and again to the anarchist leadership; conducted, in connection with this, a false trade union policy; took a vacillating and non-revolutionary attitude toward the May 1937 uprising. From the standpoint of determinism in general, it is possible, of course, to recognise that the policy of the POUM was not accidental.

Everything in this world has its cause. However, the series of causes engendering the Centrism of the POUM is by no means a mere reflection of the condition of the Spanish or Catalonian proletariat. Two causalities moved toward each other at an angle, and at a certain moment, they came into hostile conflict. It is possible, by taking into account previous international experience, Moscow’s influence, the impact of several defeats, etc., to explain, politically and psychologically, why the POUM developed into a centrist party. However, this does not alter its centrist character, nor does it alter the fact that a centrist party invariably acts as a brake upon the revolution, must each time smash its own head, and may bring about the collapse of the revolution. It does not alter the fact that the Catalan masses were far more revolutionary than the POUM, which in turn was more revolutionary than its leadership. In these conditions, to unload the responsibility for false policies on the “immaturity” of the masses is to engage in sheer charlatanism frequently resorted to by political bankrupts.”

A significant political distortion in Durgan's earlier work, which persists in this new book, is the consistent underestimation of Stalin's role in the GPU in Spain. As Hyland's 2012 critique observes, Durgan "remains silent about the part played by Stalin's murderous secret police, the GPU, and its impact on the Spanish workers' movement."

This silence is deliberate, aiming to rehabilitate the Popular Front framework by downplaying its realities, including the torture and murder of Andreu Nin, the framing of POUM leaders as "Trotskyite-Fascist" agents of Franco (mirroring Moscow Trials slanders), and the physical elimination of those opposing Stalinist class collaboration. Hyland’s work is further elaborated by Alejandro López's 2025 lecture writing “The Stalinist bureaucracy intervened to forestall revolution in Spain, launching a murder campaign against anyone even suspected of political links to Trotsky. The machinery of repression built in Moscow and refined in the Comintern was exported to Spain.[3] Ramón Mercader, who would later assassinate Trotsky, was specifically trained in Spain for this purpose. The GPU's activities in Spain were not an anomaly; rather, they exemplified Stalinism's core principle: repressive efforts to quash socialist revolution in order to protect the Soviet bureaucracy's privileges and maintain its diplomatic ties with the so-called "democratic" imperialist powers.

The SWP's stance on the POUM has gradually shifted to the right, revealing a clear trajectory. Ann Talbot's two-part WSWS review of Durgan's 2007 book reports that Britain's SWP supports the Stalinist perspective on the Spanish Civil War. In his earlier work, especially his 1990 article "The Spanish Trotskyists and the Foundation of the POUM" in Revolutionary History, Durgan and the SWP tradition indulged in what Talbot describes as "hero worship" of the POUM. They idealised its political mistakes while only superficially criticising the Popular Front. The POUM was portrayed as a brave, tragically defeated revolutionary group, martyred by Stalinist repression. This narrative aimed to conceal the POUM's own significant political role in the revolution's failure.

Durgan's new book should be understood within a broader context. It stands as the SWP tradition's most comprehensive, book-length effort to offer a sympathetic portrayal of the POUM — likely more nuanced than a simple apology, yet still based on the same core political evasions that Marxists have identified over the years. Publishing it via Resistance Books, the IST's own imprint, is a political statement: it represents the official account of its preferred historical perspective. For workers and young people looking to understand the Spanish Revolution, the key resources are Trotsky's writings — The Lesson of Spain — A Last Warning (1937) and The Class, the Party, and the Leadership (1940) — along with the WSWS's historical analyses.

 

Notes

En Lucha’s Andy Durgan: Historical distortions to justify political betrayal of Spanish workers- A Three-Part Article by David Hyland https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/11/dur1-n07.html

Britain’s SWP lends credence to Stalinist line on Spanish Civil War—Part 1 Ann Talbot- www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/09/swp1-s16.html

The Spanish Revolution, 1931-39 by Leon Trotsky (Author), George Breitman (Editor), Naomi Allen (Editor

Homage To Catalonia-George Orwell April 25, 1938.

Review: Andy Durgan, The Spanish Civil War: The Journal of Contemporary History-published online June 25, 2009

 

 

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[1] Britain’s SWP lends credence to Stalinist line on Spanish Civil War—Part 1-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/09/swp1-s16.html

[2] En Lucha’s Andy Durgan: Historical distortions to justify political betrayal of Spanish workers- A Three-Part Article by David Hyland www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/11/dur1-n07.html

[3] The Stalinist counterrevolution during the Spanish Civil War-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/09/26/opjp-s26.html

El Generalísimo-Franco: Power, Violence and the Quest for Greatness Giles Tremlett-06 Nov 2025-Bloomsbury Publishing

The Spanish proletariat displayed first-rate military qualities. In its specific gravity in the country's economic life, in its political and cultural level, the Spanish proletariat stood on the first day of the revolution, not below but above the Russian proletariat at the beginning of 1917. On the road to its victory, its own organisations stood as the chief obstacles."

Leon Trotsky

“The past is another country. But doing history is, by definition, an unending dialogue between the present and the past. Much of what was at stake in Spain remains in present-day dilemmas, at whose heart lie issues of race, religion, gender, and other forms of cultural war that challenge us not to resort to political or other types of violence. In short, as this book’s epigraph exhorts, we should not mythologise our fears and turn them into weapons against those who are different. The Spanish Civil War and all the other civil wars of Europe’s mid-20th century were configured in great part by this mythologising of fear, by a hatred of difference. The greatest challenge of the 21st century is, then, not to do this.”

Helen Graham, The Spanish Civil War

“There was no boss-class, no menial-class, no beggars, no prostitutes, no lawyers, no priests, no bootlicking, no cap-touching.”

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

Giles Tremlett is a competent writer, and his latest book is well-written and thoroughly researched. However, as a liberal journalist, Tremlett approaches the Spanish Civil War from a strongly liberal perspective, which is not just limited but also potentially misleading. This is because the key issues of the conflict are fundamentally political and class-related, topics that liberalism struggles to address honestly.

Tremlett, along with other liberal historians, has long dominated the historiography of the Spanish Revolution. Adam Hochschild referred to this dominant perspective as the "Authorised Version," which depicts the conflict as a clear-cut battle between democracy and fascism. According to this view, the Republic was defeated by Franco's stronger military, the non-intervention of Western democracies, and insufficient Soviet aid. Tremlett mainly works within this interpretive framework.

A Marxist approach to history challenges the liberal view of figures like Francisco Franco, emphasising that he cannot be understood without considering the revolutionary crisis he was tasked with suppressing. The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) was a pivotal event of the twentieth century, representing more than just a clash between democracy and fascism. It was essentially an unfinished workers' revolution, whose defeat was orchestrated not only by Franco's troops but also by the Popular Front and Stalinist institutions from within.

Franco initiated his military coup against the Spanish Republic on July 17, 1936. Within days, workers in cities like Barcelona and Madrid, as well as other locations, spontaneously resisted the coup by arming themselves and forming workers' power committees. The foundation for a socialist revolution was present. Franco's win was not predetermined; it resulted from a political betrayal.

Francisco Franco's 1939 victory was more political than military. It resulted from the strategic suppression of the Spanish Revolution by what was claimed to be its leftist defenders. To understand Franco, one must recognise the criminality of the pseudo-lefts of that time, mainly the POUM and the Stalinist apparatus it covered for. When the Spanish army launched its fascist coup in July 1936, the working class responded with remarkable spontaneity and strength. In Barcelona, Madrid, and other industrial centres, workers took up arms, formed militias, seized factories, and almost pushed the socialist revolution forward. Franco faced not only a defending republic but a proletariat actively revolting. The key question was whether the movement could find the necessary political leadership to achieve victory.

The influence of the modern-day pseudo-left groups covering for past and present Stalinist treachery persists today. Contemporary pseudo-left groups like the British Socialist Workers Party still endorse the Stalinist view of the Spanish Civil War. Their primary historian, Andy Durgan, wrote a book for students and teachers that systematically justified the Popular Front policies that led to Franco's victory. Durgan employed a Stalinist approach: denying the existence of dual power in Spain in 1936, dismissing the socialist revolution as a real possibility, and portraying the Popular Front as a class-collaborationist alliance that suppressed the workers' uprising, thereby presenting the workers' uprising as the only legitimate and feasible form of government.[1]

As Ann Talbot, who reviewed Durgan's book sharply, observes, “Durgan’s book reflects the rightward evolution of an entire layer of intellectuals who would at one time have associated themselves with left-wing politics and would even have identified themselves as revolutionaries. The book represents a shift away from the positions that Durgan expressed in his account of the POUM in Revolutionary History. Then the SWP hero-worshipped the POUM and glorified its political errors. Now Durgan is happy to accept a recent modernisation thesis, which depicts the POUM as a reactionary force opposing modernisation. The fact that Ealham must claim in his review that Durgan opposes Graham and Preston and their support for the Popular Front suggests that the SWP is still not ready to go along with this position in its public utterances. But Durgan’s position is a more accurate reflection of the SWP's current politics and the party's essentially middle-class liberal character.[2]

Durgan is not a Trotskyist and dismisses Trotsky's writings on Spain with casual contempt, reducing the political conflict between Trotsky and POUM leader Andres Nin to mere personal animosity. He notes that Trotsky's criticisms of Nin "seem particularly harsh." However, as Talbot illustrates, the actual correspondence—letters of Trotsky show a remarkable patience and political clarity—in which Trotsky, even as late as June 1936 and two weeks after Franco's coup, continued to reach out to Nin and proposed collaboration if Nin would adopt the banner of the Fourth International. The SWP cannot fairly engage with this material because doing so would validate Trotsky's entire analysis and condemn the Popular Front politics that the SWP has practised throughout its history.

Tremlett’s book on Franco is just one among many of his works that explore the Spanish Civil War. His titles include "Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past" (2006), and "España: A Brief History of Spain" (2022), which highlights Spain’s lack of a singular, unified identity and showcases its rich, multicultural history as its defining trait. Additionally, "The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War" (2020) provides a detailed account of the foreign volunteers who fought against Franco's forces during the war.

Tremlett's book on the International Brigades is sympathetic and, by most accounts, thorough in its documentary research. The volunteers who went to Spain, about 35,000 from 50 countries, were often genuinely heroic, motivated by a strong aversion to fascism and a desire to take action. This deserves recognition. However, the Comintern directed the International Brigades under Stalinist control, tying their deployment to the broader political strategy of the Popular Front. This strategy aimed to subjugate the revolutionary workers' movement to the "progressive" Spanish bourgeoisie and to show Western imperialist powers that Moscow could be trusted to uphold the capitalist order. Unfortunately, many liberal histories of the Brigades tend to overlook this political context honestly.

A further flaw in liberal interpretations of the Civil War, including Tremlett's view, lies in their treatment of the non-intervention by Britain, France, and the United States. The liberal account suggests that a more supportive stance by Roosevelt or the French Popular Front might have saved the Republic. However, historical evidence shows that the Western "democracies" fully recognised that a revolutionary workers' state in Spain posed a significant threat to their own class interests. Their "non-intervention" was not accidental but a deliberate class-based policy. Relying on these powers to save the Republic, as the Popular Front strategy aimed to do, was ultimately a political dead end.

This framework deliberately obscures the simultaneous revolution occurring alongside the war. In July 1936, when Franco initiated his coup, Spanish workers countered it in major cities through armed action. They took over factories, collectivised land, formed militias, and created workers' institutions. The foundation for a socialist revolution was present. As Hochschild's analysis highlights, this revolutionary effort was not merely an aspect of the conflict but its very essence. Interestingly, it was not Franco but the Popular Front government and the Stalinist Communist Party, acting under Stalin's directives, that upheld their alliance with the Western bourgeoisie and suppressed these revolutionary movements.

Another shortcoming in Tremlett’s book is the lack of a thorough explanation of how Franco managed to stay in power for so long. His extended rule requires a wider social analysis. Franco’s hold on power until 1975 was not solely due to repression; it also involved the accommodation of Western imperialism, which sought a stable anti-communist base in Iberia, and the Spanish bourgeoisie’s preference for "order" over democracy. The ongoing efforts by the Spanish right—including active-duty officers and the courts to rehabilitate Franco are not just about nostalgia. Instead, they serve as a warning that ruling elites, confronted with renewed class conflicts, are once again considering measures outside the constitutional framework.

The lessons from Spain go beyond mere historical curiosity. Marxists have consistently warned that the attempt by Spanish courts, the military, and the political right to rehabilitate Franco's legacy reflects a larger global pattern among the ruling class moving toward authoritarianism, driven by austerity, inequality, and escalating class conflict. The answer is not to revive a new Popular Front, which could repeat the failures of the 1930s, but to foster a revolutionary socialist leadership from within the working class.

 

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[1] Andy Durgan, The Spanish Civil War: Studies in European History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007: New York, New York)

[2] Britain’s Socialist Workers Party lends credence to Stalinist line on Spanish Civil War— www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/09/swp2-s17.html 

The Twittering Machine: How Capitalism Stole Our Social Life- Richard Seymour £10.99 Verso 2020

"If you don’t pay for it, you are the product",

a 2018 article by Margaret McCartney

"Checking social media is the new opening the fridge when you're not hungry."

— Matthew Kobach

“Vulgarity is too mild a word for what unfolded on the steps of the museum, since vulgarity implies a coarse vitality. The 2026 gala was a pageant of decay so far gone in self-parody that one struggled to know whether to laugh, vomit, or check out eBay for a working replica of Dr Guillotin’s invention.”[1]

David North

The Twittering Machine is a provocative and often insightful book, drawing on psychoanalysis, cultural theory, and political economy to argue that social media is not a neutral tool but a machine that reshapes minds.

Oliver Eagleton, in his review of the book, remarked that a “cadre of cyber-utopian theorists” was instrumental in reshaping subjectivity, attracting attention, and profiting from provoking outrage and anxiety. Eagleton commended the book, acknowledging Seymour as a significant voice. He emphasised that the book provides a critical analysis of social media platforms, particularly Twitter and Facebook, and similar sites, concentrating on their role as catalysts of addiction and compulsive self-disclosure within the "social industry."[2]

Eagleton is right to point out the genuine merits in parts of Seymour's critique.  He points out that the platforms are not neutral public spaces; they are capitalist enterprises whose business model is the commodification of human attention and social interaction. He is right that the dopamine-loop dynamics of "likes," retweets, and algorithmic amplification are deliberately engineered to maximise engagement at the cost of critical thought. And he is right that the platforms have become instruments of surveillance capitalism, as Shoshana Zuboff has also analysed.[3]

The Pseudo Lefts and Social Media

However, the book's limitations reflect Seymour's own political limitations. Seymour is associated with the British pseudo-left, a product of the Socialist Workers Party milieu, who moved toward a kind of post-Marxist cultural politics after the SWP's crisis. His analytical toolkit leans heavily on psychoanalysis (particularly Lacanian concepts) and Frankfurt School-inflected critical theory rather than on classical Marxism. This leads to some characteristic weaknesses:

Social media platforms such as Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok, and Substack have become dominant spaces where pseudo-left politics often replicates itself, for understandable reasons. The pseudo-left's focus isn't on comprehensive political education for workers or on forming a revolutionary party. Instead, it centres on gaining visibility, developing a brand, and wielding cultural influence within a specific segment of the educated upper-middle class. Social media is suited for this because it fosters outrage, identity-driven appeals, and viral controversies, all without requiring a solid theoretical or historical foundation. What looks like "left politics" online is largely a spectacle: hashtag campaigns, call-out culture, aesthetic radicalism, and the promotion of individual influencers as proxies for real political programs. The pseudo-left thrives here because it doesn’t need to organise workers; it only needs to attract followers who already share its class outlook.

The most critical point that liberal and pseudo-left critics of social media systematically miss is the class-directed character of censorship on these platforms. It is not random or neutral. The World Socialist Website (WSWS) was one of the first to document and expose the coordinated campaign by Google, Facebook, and Twitter to suppress left-wing, anti-war, and socialist content. The pseudo left's response, "break up big tech," regulate the platforms, and bring antitrust suits, is utterly inadequate. The problem is not that these monopolies are too big; it is that they are private property at all. A society that allows a single individual to own the communications infrastructure through which billions of people engage with public life has already surrendered democratic governance to the capitalist oligarchy.

The Oligarchs and Social Media

A significant flaw in the book is Seymour's emphasis on sociological and psycho-cultural factors, which undermines a comprehensive class-based analysis. He mainly focuses on subjects, drives, libidinal investments, and the "social industry," but neglects a thorough materialist critique of platforms as capitalist monopolies. This includes their ties to finance capital, involvement in state surveillance, and crucially, the class struggles of those who control or are harmed by them. The working class, with its unique interests and potential for revolutionary change, is barely discussed. Instead, "users" are portrayed as a uniform group of compulsive individuals, overlooking their exploitation—where their data and attention are appropriated by monopoly capital.

The connection between oligarchs and social media is a vital and complex issue at the core of current politics. This relationship is not accidental; it reflects a basic social truth: the most influential communications system in history is owned and controlled by a few billionaires, who leverage it as a tool for class domination.

In Seymour's defence, he's not the only one allowing social media oligarchs free rein. In The Social Dilemma (2020), Jeff Orlowski offers what some critics view as a brave exposé of the social media industry, including interviews with former employees and executives from Google, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other tech giants. It highlights significant concerns about how these platforms influence human psychology and negatively impact society.

However, the WSWS’s Joanne Laurier was heavily critical of the film, saying the “film proceeds to treat social media entirely apart from any discussion of economic life and trends, including the important issue of who owns the giant tech companies and which class interests they pursue. In the movie, the learned “experts” discuss issues such as mental health and threats to democracy entirely apart from the massive economic and social crisis and the moves toward authoritarianism by the ruling elite.

The movie insists that people need to self-censor on social media. If not, the state should step in, as its lead analyst, Harris (himself a millionaire), advocated at the Senate hearing. The real target of mass censorship implemented by the technology giants, on behalf of the state, is the left-wing political opposition, including workers’ use of social media to organise strikes and protests outside existing unions. Google, Facebook, Reddit, and other outlets have systematically targeted the WSWS. Having no social reforms to offer, the ruling elites see censorship and repression as the only means by which to prop up their rule. Consciously or not, the makers of The Social Dilemma offer their services in this endeavour.[4]

What Is to Be Done?

Seymour’s book concludes without suggesting a clear political direction. While criticizing the platforms, the implied solutions are limited to encouraging users to be more reflective or to acknowledge the platform's underlying logic. It lacks any vision for engaging the working class politically, connecting to the fight for democratic oversight of communication tools, or advocating for the nationalization of platforms under workers' management. This reflects the characteristic of the cultural-critical approach that has mostly overtaken socialist politics in pseudo-left groups: insightful critique but ultimately powerless.

In sum, The Twittering Machine is a culturally alert but politically limited book. It sees capitalism's symptoms more clearly than it sees capitalism itself, and it has no perspective for the working class as the agent of social transformation. It is the kind of book that is intellectually stimulating for a certain layer of the educated middle class while leaving the working-class reader with no road forward.

 

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[1] What is it about the Met fashion gala that leads one to think fondly of the guillotine?

[2] Mind Forged Manacles? New Left Review 120 Nov/Dec 2019.

[3] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

[4] The Social Dilemma: The “curse” of social media- www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/10/20/dile-o20.html

Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish by Francesca Peacock, Apollo 14 Sept. 2023, 384 pages

“Fame is nothing but a great noise… therefore I wish my book may set a-work every tongue.”

Margaret Cavendish

“For I doubt not, but if it had been a thing contrary to any man's right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square, that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able.”

Thomas Hobbes

“Thus, Karl Marx wrote about the British origin of modern materialism. If Englishmen nowadays do not exactly relish the compliment he paid their ancestors, more's the pity. It is none the less undeniable that Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke are the fathers of that brilliant school of French materialism which made the eighteenth century, despite all battles on land and sea won over Frenchmen by Germans and Englishmen, a pre-eminently French century, even before that crowning French Revolution, the results of which we outsiders, in England as well as Germany, are still trying to acclimatize.”

Frederick Engels- Dialectics of Nature

The first thing that emerges from Francesca Peacock's 2023 book is that Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673), Duchess of Newcastle, a staunch Royalist author and philosopher, was profoundly influenced by the English bourgeois revolution. Although hostile to the revolution and all it stood for, she utilised her unique intellectual voice to understand what was unfolding around her as the world turned upside down.

The English Civil War and Revolution of the 1640s was not, as Whig historians preferred to imagine, a constitutional misunderstanding between king and Parliament. According to historian Christopher Hill, it was a genuine class revolution: the rising bourgeoisie, allied with sections of the gentry, overthrew the feudal monarchical order and cleared the ground for the development of capitalism in England. Hill, the greatest historian of this period, demonstrated that the execution of Charles I was not a ghastly mistake but "a complete break with the feudal past," of profound revolutionary significance. When the people put their king on trial and beheaded him, no subsequent monarch ever sat entirely comfortably on that throne again.

Although she lived over a century before Karl Marx, some left-leaning modern academics and writers who analyse her work through a semi-Marxist lens have even argued that there are strong parallels between her 17th-century natural philosophy and later theories of dialectical materialism. Specifically, her belief in a self-moving, intelligent, and interconnected material world renders her a "precursor" to Marxist dialectical materialism.

This has made Cavendish a genuinely fascinating figure of the 17th-century English bourgeois revolution. A prolific writer across genres (philosophy, poetry, drama, fiction, and early proto-science fiction with The Blazing World), she engaged seriously with the mechanist natural philosophy of her era, debating figures like Descartes, Hobbes, and van Helmont. She was one of the first women admitted to a meeting of the Royal Society. Her intellectual ambitions were remarkable for any person of her time.

The connection between Margaret Cavendish and Thomas Hobbes is well worth a look at. Both were central figures in 17th-century English intellectual life, and their relationship illuminates some of the deepest questions in the history of materialism.

Hobbes (1588–1679) was not, as some liberal and postmodern academics would have it, a reactionary ideologue of authoritarianism. He was, as Engels recognised, one of the founders of modern materialism, a thinker who, alongside Bacon and Locke, formed the philosophical chain that ran from England through the French Enlightenment, ultimately contributing to the intellectual conditions that made the French Revolution possible and, beyond it, to dialectical and historical materialism itself.

Hobbes’s connection with Cavendish was both direct and personal. Margaret Cavendish was the wife of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, the very Cavendish family whose patronage sustained Hobbes for over seven decades. Margaret Cavendish lived at the centre of this intellectual world. During the Civil War and the Interregnum, the Cavendish household, in exile on the Continent, was a gathering point for Royalist émigrés and natural philosophers, and Hobbes was part of this milieu.

Her philosophical position puts her in an interesting relationship to Hobbes. Both were materialists but of significantly different kinds. Cavendish rejected the mechanistic materialism that Hobbes (and Descartes, whom she also engaged with critically) championed. Against the view that matter is inert and moved only by external mechanical force, Cavendish argued for a vitalist materialism: matter itself, she held, is active, self-moving, and possessed of something like perception or cognition at every level. She was also an outspoken critic of the experimental method championed by the Royal Society, arguing (in her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, 1666) that telescopes and microscopes distort rather than reveal nature. That reason applied to natural observation without a mechanical apparatus is more reliable.

This is where the contradictions of her class position become interesting. She was an aristocratic Royalist — her husband, William Cavendish, was a leading commander for Charles I, and the family spent years in exile during the Interregnum. Her intellectual freedom was inseparable from her class privilege. Her access to books, philosophical correspondence, and scientific circles was a product of her position at the apex of the aristocratic hierarchy, not a challenge to it. She was not, in any meaningful sense, a "revolutionary"; she was a defender of the old feudal-aristocratic order against the revolutionary bourgeoisie that was remaking England.

The bourgeois revolution she opposed was, at the same time, creating social ferment that was generating the Scientific Revolution, dismantling Aristotelian scholasticism, fostering a new interest in nature as a material reality governed by discoverable laws, and challenging religious authority. The very intellectual tools she used were being forged by the same historical process that had destroyed her family's wealth and power. She could not entirely escape the spirit of her age, even as she tried to reconstruct the aristocratic world that had been shattered.

As the Marxist writer David North so eloquently put it, “Until the early seventeenth century, even educated people still generally accepted that the ultimate answers to all the mysteries of the universe and the problems of life were to be found in the Old Testament. But its unchallengeable authority had been slowly eroding, especially since the publication of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus in the year of his death in 1543, which dealt the death blow to the Ptolemaic conception of the universe and provided the essential point of departure for the future conquests of Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Johann Kepler (1571-1630) and, of course, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Intellectually, if not yet socially, the liberation of man from the fetters of Medieval superstition and the political structures that rested upon it was well underway. The discoveries in astronomy profoundly changed the general intellectual environment. Above all, there was a new sense of the power of thought and what it could achieve if allowed to operate without the artificial restraints of untested and unverifiable dogmas.

Religion began to encounter the type of disrespect it deserved, and the gradual decline of its authority introduced a new optimism. All human misery, the Bible had taught for centuries, was the inescapable product of the Fall of Man. But the invigorating scepticism encouraged by science in the absolute validity of the Book of Genesis led thinking people to wonder whether man couldn't change the conditions of his existence and enjoy a better world.”[1]

Peacock’s first book, Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish, makes a valuable contribution by rescuing Cavendish from the obscurity imposed by earlier critics who had laid a considerable number of dead dogs on top of her reputation. However, it exemplifies a trend often found in modern cultural biography: the application of contemporary identity-political categories to historical figures. In this case, Cavendish is portrayed through the lens of modern preoccupations, with her eccentricity, gender nonconformity, prolific publication, and resistance to social expectations for women recast as attributes of a proto-feminist "revolutionary".

This approach reflects more the concerns of today's upper-middle-class academic culture than the realities of 17th-century England. While reading Peacock’s work critically can yield valuable insights into Cavendish's intellectual life, the reader needs to maintain a degree of scepticism regarding the "revolutionary" framing. Such a perspective tends to absorb a complex historical figure into present-day identity-political narratives, thereby oversimplifying the intricate class dynamics that characterised the English Revolution.

Cavendish is now celebrated as an early feminist icon. She was the first woman to participate in a Royal Society meeting, boldly published her work despite norms that expected women to stay hidden, and earned the nickname "Mad Madge" for her unconventional behaviour. This recuperation is not entirely wrong, but it is ideologically loaded in a specific way: it abstracts Cavendish's gender from her class. It presents her eccentricity as a kind of individual heroism.

She stands in this constellation as a paradox: a serious philosophical mind whose very creativity was unlocked by the same revolution she personally mourned. That paradox is not a biographical curiosity; it is a demonstration of the materialist conception of history itself: that the development of human thought is inseparable from the class conflicts that drive history forward.

 

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[1] Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism-www.wsws.org/en/articles/1996/10/lect-o24.html