The Bluesky Scammers Are the New Yahoo Boys

The fraud networks preying on Bluesky users are not an aberration confined to one social-media platform. From Nigeria’s Yahoo Boys to the trafficking compounds of Southeast Asia, online fraud has developed alongside an economic order that produces mass insecurity and poverty while transforming the internet into another arena for private enrichment.

On 17 October, Bluesky acknowledged that a phishing campaign had compromised more than 4,500 accounts. The attack spread posts promoting a fake government payment. The company temporarily suspended compromised accounts while attempting to secure them and restore access to their owners. [thehackernews.com],

The scale of the aftermath is evident in an independent analysis of Bluesky's public moderation stream. Agent Sky recorded 3,896 reversed account takedowns between 17 and 19 October. The researcher cautions that the moderation data do not themselves establish why each account was restored, although the exceptional increase coincided with the phishing incident. The episode was only the most visible manifestation of a problem that has grown alongside the platform.

Fake support accounts, impersonators, romance scams and investment fraud have followed users onto Bluesky. In December 2024, NBC News reported a “rapid increase in scam activity”, including romance and so-called pig-butchering scams. In March 2025, Bluesky Safety warned of scammers impersonating Bluesky and its staff while approaching artists through direct messages and attempting to move them off the platform. The potential target population has grown dramatically. According to the company's 2025 Transparency Report, Bluesky grew from 25.94 million to 41.41 million users that year, an increase of nearly 60 per cent.

The comparison with the Nigerian “Yahoo Boys” is apt, although not in the manner suggested by racialised representations of Nigerian cybercrime. The fundamental connection is neither nationality nor ethnicity. It is the growth of an international economy of fraud alongside poverty, precarious employment and extraordinary concentrations of wealth.

What produced the Yahoo Boys

The Yahoo Boy phenomenon developed in Nigeria during the formative period of popular internet use in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The name reflected the importance of Yahoo and Yahoo Mail to early internet communications. Fraudsters exploited email for advance-fee scams, fabricated inheritances and other schemes. Over the ensuing decades, the methods expanded into romance scams, business fraud and financial sextortion.

The consequences for victims can be devastating. Statistics maintained by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection show a pronounced predominance of boys and young men among identified victims in the sextortion reports and requests for assistance it receives. An investigation by CBC Marketplace reported in October 2025 that it had verified more than 40 suicides across North America, Australia and the UK during the previous four years that were linked to sextortion, including five in Canada.

The social-media companies themselves have revealed something of the scale. In July 2024, Meta announced that it had removed around 63,000 Instagram accounts in Nigeria that had attempted to engage in financial sextortion. Among them was a coordinated network of approximately 2,500 accounts that the company linked to a group of around 20 individuals. Meta said that the coordinated network principally targeted adult men in the United States, though some accounts also attempted to target minors.

Explaining the social origins of such criminality is not an excuse. Where children and young people are subjected to financial sextortion, there can be no ambiguity about the destructive character of the crime. But moral denunciation by itself explains nothing about why the phenomenon has developed on such a scale.

Nigeria is Africa's most populous country and has enormous natural resources. Yet its official 2022 Multidimensional Poverty Index found that 133 million people—63 per cent of the population—were multidimensionally poor. Older claims that youth unemployment exceeded 50 per cent should no longer be repeated without substantial qualification, as Nigeria later changed its labour-force methodology. The National Bureau of Statistics reported unemployment of 7.2 per cent among 15-to-24-year-olds in the second quarter of 2023. But this headline figure hardly captures whether people have secure, well-paid work.

The same survey reported informal employment at 92.7 per cent, time-related underemployment at 11.8 per cent, and a youth NEET rate of 13.8 per cent. These statistics point to a social reality far more complex than an unemployment rate alone can reveal: enormous numbers of people classified as employed remain in informal and precarious economic circumstances.

Academic research has likewise placed Nigerian cybercrime within a broader social crisis. A doctoral investigation by Tolulope Lembola Ojolo at the University of KwaZulu-Natal conducted in-depth interviews with 29 Yahoo Boys across Lagos, Ibadan and Ado-Ekiti. The research identified poverty, unemployment, corrupt political leadership and law enforcement, the failure of vital social institutions, and the proliferation of internet services as conditions that combined to facilitate cybercrime. Some interviewees rationalised their activities as redistribution or retaliation for Africa's historical exploitation through slavery and colonialism.

Such rationalisations do not transform fraud into anti-imperialism. The pensioner whose savings are stolen or the teenager subjected to financial blackmail bears no responsibility for colonial oppression. But the testimony reveals how social desperation can be refracted through a reactionary ideology in which exploiting another ordinary person is represented as revenge against the system. The result is not resistance to exploitation but its reproduction at another level.

The con moves to Bluesky.

As Bluesky attracted users leaving established social networks, fraud followed the migration. NBC News reported in December 2024 that scammers were using established romance and pig-butchering methods familiar from other platforms. Artists and writers have become targets. In July 2026, editor Rob Bignell documented what he described as the proliferation of supposed beta-reader and editor profiles targeting authors on Bluesky. He described profiles using similar approaches and said he had traced a number of the suspected scams to Nigeria, including through accounts on freelancing sites and suspicious LinkedIn identities. His investigation is an individual case study rather than a systematic measurement of fraud across the platform. Still, it illustrates how established forms of online fraud can be adapted to particular online communities.

The targets themselves are revealing. Writers, illustrators, editors and freelancers increasingly work under conditions of insecurity, competing for readers, commissions and contracts in a cultural economy being reorganised by digital platforms and artificial intelligence. Fraud preys upon the hope of a break. Somebody's search for readers, professional recognition or employment becomes the scammer's opening. One insecure layer of the international workforce is turned against another. Bluesky's own statistics demonstrate the pressures created by rapid expansion. User-submitted moderation reports rose from 6.48 million in 2024 to 9.97 million in 2025, a 54 per cent increase. “Misleading” content accounted for 43.73 per cent of reports in 2025.

The October 2026 phishing attack provides another perspective. Agent Sky's examination of the public moderation stream counted 76,772 account takedowns between 21 September and 20 October but no application of Bluesky's “scam” label to accounts over the same period. The analysis recorded just nine “impersonation” labels. These figures come from an independent analysis, not statistics published by Bluesky itself, a distinction that should be maintained.  But the underlying contradiction goes beyond warning labels. Social networks depend upon enormous populations communicating with minimum friction while simultaneously confronting organised actors seeking to exploit precisely that openness.

Fraud becomes an industry.

The Yahoo Boys represent one historical and predominantly decentralised manifestation of online fraud. In Southeast Asia, however, the fraudulent economy has assumed something approaching an industrial form.

Enormous scam compounds have emerged in which criminal organisations combine internet fraud with human trafficking and forced labour. In 2023, the United Nations Human Rights Office reported that credible sources indicated at least 120,000 people across Myanmar might be held in situations where they were forced to conduct online scams, while estimates for Cambodia were around 100,000. Laos, the Philippines and Thailand were also identified as destination or transit countries.

This phenomenon demonstrates the contradictory character of the international scam economy. Among the people committing fraud are willing participants, but others have themselves been trafficked and coerced into criminal activity. Research published by Asia Times in April 2026 described the experience of a trafficked worker who reported working 15-hour days, seven days a week, simultaneously conducting multiple conversations with prospective victims. The account described an organised division of labour in which different workers established contact, cultivated targets and extracted payments.

A 2026 UN report also documented torture, sexual abuse and forced labour within scam centres. It reported that survivors described severe economic pressures before their recruitment and that some police and border guards were alleged to have been complicit. Here the language of individual criminality becomes insufficient. A person sitting behind a keyboard may be perpetrating fraud against someone thousands of miles away while simultaneously being coerced by the organisation controlling the compound. Recognising that reality does not minimise the harm inflicted upon the person being defrauded. It reveals the extraordinary social relationships through which contemporary cybercrime operates.

The revenues are enormous. Guardio, citing Chainalysis, estimated $17 billion stolen across cryptocurrency scams in 2025, while saying pig-butchering scams grew by nearly 40 per cent year on year. Separately, the Associated Press reported a UN estimate that losses from scams in Asia during 2023 were between $18 billion and $37 billion. Governments have responded with raids, criminal prosecutions and geopolitical pressure. On 13 October 2026, a Chinese court sentenced three members of the Wei family criminal organisation to death for their roles in a criminal network operating in Myanmar's Kokang region. Another three were given life sentences, and 55 received prison terms of varying lengths.

But suppressing individual organisations does not abolish the economic conditions sustaining the industry. Research published in Asia Times described how infrastructure remained after supposed closures and argued that operations driven out of one location could reopen elsewhere. The same article cited estimates placing annual scam revenue in Cambodia at $12.9 billion in 2023, roughly 40 per cent of the country's GDP.

The platforms and the limits of moderation

The same contradiction appears at platform level. There is extensive evidence that technology companies are aware of the growth of financial sextortion and organised internet fraud. The Network Contagion Research Institute documented the circulation of instructional materials, scripts and videos facilitating financial sextortion and described Yahoo Boys as playing a major role in the extraordinary expansion of financial sextortion targeting minors.

The scale makes moderation immensely difficult. In June 2026, Snap said it was enforcing against about 220 suspected sextortion instances per day, or roughly 6,600 per month globally, counting both proactively identified cases and alleged violations reported by users. The company published these figures specifically while disputing the decontextualised circulation of an earlier figure claiming 10,000 user reports of sextortion each month.

Bluesky faces the same problem on a smaller scale. Its moderation operation was expanded to roughly 100 moderators during 2024, a year in which its moderation service received 6.48 million reports. The company also increased automation, which reduced processing times but could produce false positives requiring subsequent human involvement and appeals. Bluesky's decentralised architecture distinguishes it from some older social-media companies, but a different technical architecture cannot abolish the social relationships the technology operates within. A decentralised network connecting millions of people still exists within a world characterised by poverty, private wealth, commercial competition and economic insecurity.

Nor can the struggle against fraud justify unlimited surveillance. The existence of criminal exploitation cannot provide a blank cheque for states and corporations to impose universal identification or monitor legitimate political communications. Protection from fraud and defence of democratic rights must not be presented as mutually exclusive. Technology does not exist outside society. Neither do the criminals who exploit it.

The new Yahoo Boys

To describe the Bluesky scammers as “the new Yahoo Boys” therefore requires precision. It cannot mean that fraudulent accounts appearing on Bluesky are necessarily Nigerian, still less that fraud reflects some characteristic peculiar to Nigerians or Africans. The historical significance of the Yahoo Boys lies elsewhere. They represented an early manifestation of a criminal economy that has subsequently become international, technologically sophisticated and, in the Southeast Asian scam compounds, increasingly industrialised.

The form continually changes. The advance-fee email becomes the romance profile. The romance profile becomes the fraudulent cryptocurrency opportunity. Individual scammers operate alongside large criminal organisations commanding labour forces measured in the thousands.

The platform changes too. Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and now Bluesky become different territories across which fraudulent activity migrates. What persists beneath technological change is an international social crisis that provides both vulnerable targets and a continual supply of people who can be recruited, voluntarily or coercively, into the scam economy.

The individual fraudster remains responsible for deliberate harm. Social explanation cannot become moral absolution. But individual morality alone cannot explain mass social phenomena. When similar criminal industries continually regenerate across different continents, platforms and technologies, the question necessarily becomes social. Police operations can arrest perpetrators. Platforms can remove fraudulent accounts. Stronger security can prevent particular phishing attacks. Human moderation can disrupt individual networks. These measures matter because they can prevent concrete harm.

What they cannot do is abolish the conditions continually reproducing the problem. The experience of the Southeast Asian compounds exposes this most starkly. The worker carrying out the online fraud may have been recruited through fraud. The person sending deceptive messages about fictitious employment, investments or relationships may himself have answered a deceptive advertisement promising legitimate work. Capitalist social relations can therefore transform the deceived into the deceiver and the exploited into an instrument for exploiting somebody else.

Romanticising the scammer is not progressive. The victims, particularly young people subjected to sextortion, have an unquestionable right to protection and justice. But neither is anything gained by transforming the Yahoo Boy into a racialised foreign menace whose existence supposedly expresses an exclusively Nigerian pathology. The phenomenon tells us considerably more about the world economy.

A global problem requires a global answer.

Online fraud reveals one of contemporary society's sharpest contradictions. Humanity possesses communications technology capable of overcoming geographical isolation on a historically unprecedented scale. Yet this infrastructure has developed within societies characterised by staggering disparities of wealth and opportunity. The internet can connect the unemployed Nigerian graduate, the precarious British illustrator, the American teenager and the trafficked worker in a Cambodian compound instantaneously.

Capitalism determines the social circumstances under which they encounter one another. Too often that encounter becomes another relationship of exploitation. The answer cannot be nostalgia for an imaginary internet before fraud, nor continual migration from one commercial platform to another. Users moved to Bluesky. Fraud followed them.

Working people need both secure digital communications and democratic control over the infrastructure upon which social and economic life increasingly depends. These requirements cannot remain indefinitely subordinate to systems organised around private ownership, commercial competition, and wealth accumulation.

The worker whose savings are stolen and the unemployed young person recruited into cybercrime do not occupy morally equivalent positions. The latter has robbed the former. But both can confront different manifestations of the same international social order. Understanding those relationships does not diminish the crime. It helps explain why policing its symptoms has repeatedly failed to eradicate the underlying phenomenon.

A genuine solution ultimately requires reorganisation of economic life according to social need rather than private profit: secure employment, housing, and education for the world's youth, together with democratic control over the communications infrastructure on which humanity increasingly depends. Only on such a foundation can the extraordinary productive and communicative power represented by the internet stop functioning as another arena in which desperation is turned against desperation.

Bibliography

Bluesky. Bluesky 2025 Transparency Report. 29 January 2026. [bsky.social]

Canadian Centre for Child Protection. Resources & Research: Statistics: Sextortion. Statistical data covering reports received by Cybertip.ca and related programmes. [protectchildren.ca]

CBC News. “Sextorters are targeting young boys online — and flaunting how rich the scam is making them.” 3 October 2025. [cbc.ca]

Hansen, Randall. “Don’t believe claims Southeast Asia scam schemes were shut down.” Asia Times, 16 April 2026. [asiatimes.com]

Livesey, Keith.“The Bluesky Scammers Are the New Yahoo Boys.” A Trumpet of Sedition, 3 November 2026. [Present article.]

Meta. “Combating Financial Sextortion Scams From Nigeria.” 24 July 2024. [about.fb.com]

Network Contagion Research Institute. A Digital Pandemic: Uncovering the Role of ‘Yahoo Boys’ in the Surge of Social Media-Enabled Financial Sextortion Targeting Minors. January 2024. [networkcontagion.us], [networkcontagion.us]

Nigeria National Bureau of Statistics. Nigeria Multidimensional Poverty Index (2022). [nigerianstat.gov.ng], [nigerianstat.gov.ng]

Nigeria National Bureau of Statistics. Nigeria Labour Force Survey Q2 2023. [nigerianstat.gov.ng]

Ojolo, Tolulope Lembola. A Criminological Investigation into the Lived Experiences of Cybercrime Perpetrators in Southwest Nigeria. Doctoral thesis, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2020. [ukzn-dspac...ukzn.ac.za]

Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. “Hundreds of thousands trafficked to work as online scammers in SE Asia, says UN report.” 29 August 2023. [ohchr.org]

Snap. “Fighting back against online sexual extortion.” 12 June 2026. [values.snap.com]

British Library to rent out public reading rooms as austerity guts national culture

Converting three reading rooms into hire-by-the-hour commercial workspace is the latest stage in a 16-year assault on Britain's public cultural institutions, carried out by systematically subordinating culture and knowledge to market demands.

The British Library's decision to convert three of its public reading rooms into commercial workspaces is far more than an argument about the internal organisation of a building in St Pancras. It raises the fundamental question of what remains of the principle that access to knowledge, scholarship and culture should constitute a public right rather than a commercial opportunity. The UK's national library, which holds more than 170 million items, plans to repurpose its Science and Social Sciences Reading Rooms into flexible workspaces available for hire by workers and businesses for coworking, collaboration and meetings. The changes form part of the library's six-year Growing Knowledge: A Refocused Strategy for 2026–2032. The new workspace is scheduled to open in 2028, while science and social science research services are to be transferred to the institution's remaining eight reading rooms.

The scale and significance of the decision should not be understated. The British Library currently has 11 reading rooms in London, where adults with a free Reader Pass can consult collection material or undertake personal study. The library itself describes them as quiet, dedicated spaces. Three of these rooms are now to be withdrawn from their existing function. What appears from management's standpoint as an exercise in rationalisation represents, from society's standpoint, a transfer of space from public intellectual use to commercial exploitation.

The opposition that has followed is therefore entirely justified. But the transformation cannot adequately be explained as an inexplicable failure of judgement by the library's executives. The commercialisation of the reading rooms represents the logical development of a policy pursued since the beginning of austerity: reduce public funding, compel institutions to increase self-generated income, commercialise their assets, suppress the real wages of their employees and then present each successive retreat from universal provision as an unfortunate necessity required to protect what remains.

What is being transformed is not simply the British Library's floor plan. It is the conception of what a national cultural institution should be. The plan was announced to library users on 21 October. Readers were told the Science and Social Sciences Reading Rooms would be repurposed as flexible workspace, giving the library a new revenue stream. The proposed facilities would be available to businesses and workers for coworking, collaboration and meetings. Management argues that the revenue generated will be reinvested in the institution and help keep its "core services free".

Within this seemingly innocuous formulation lies the entire logic of cultural austerity. The public institution is no longer funded because society considers its activities intrinsically necessary. Every part of it must increasingly demonstrate its economic utility. Space devoted to scholarship becomes space that could generate rent. What generations previously understood as public provision appears on the managerial balance sheet as an asset from which it extracts insufficient revenue.

The argument that charging for one part of a public institution will protect free access to another is one of the oldest justifications for marketisation. The commercial measure is never presented as the beginning of privatisation. It is described as the mechanism through which public provision can supposedly be saved. But once the principle has been conceded, there is no obvious stopping point. If three reading rooms can be commercialised to protect eight, why should a fourth not eventually suffer the same fate? If declining usage establishes the legitimacy of commercial conversion, then every reduction in attendance caused by declining services can itself become an argument for further contraction.

Researchers have reacted angrily. Simon Harley, an associate fellow of the Royal Historical Society, questioned why the British Library was embarking on a long-term commercial plan when services had not yet been completely restored following the catastrophic 2023 cyberattack. He pointed in particular to digitised First World War material that remained unavailable. James Crossland, professor of international history at Liverpool John Moores University, described the library since the cyberattack as travelling down an "enshittification road". At the same time, Oxford ancient historian Georgy Kantor characterised the workspace proposals as "utterly horrible".

Margot Finn, vice-president for research and higher education policy at the British Academy, adopted a more accommodating position. She argued that the cyberattack had severely affected the library's reserves and user base, and that extracting revenue from reading-room space might be necessary to preserve the institution, provided specialist staff were relocated appropriately.

The argument demonstrates how deeply the assumptions of austerity have penetrated cultural debate. The political question quickly becomes which portion of a diminished institution must be sacrificed to preserve what remains. Almost no one asks why one of the world's greatest research libraries should be required to cannibalise its own research facilities to remain financially viable. Workers' reaction has been considerably sharper. Noel McClean, deputy general secretary of Prospect, told Times Higher Education that union members were "furious" about the proposed conversion of the reading rooms as well as a separate proposal to outsource security. He said the repurposing of research facilities went against the institution's central function of providing access to the national collection. Prospect called for the plan to be halted and warned that it could move towards a ballot for industrial action.

PCS said it is simultaneously in dispute with management over the reading rooms, security outsourcing, and the 2026–27 pay offer. The union expressed concern about the possible consequences for services and employment and opposed the transformation of public research space for commercial purposes. This opposition matters because commercialisation cannot be separated from the conditions under which the library's workforce is expected to operate.

The origins of the present crisis trace directly to the austerity programme implemented after the financial crash of 2008. On 20 October 2010, Conservative Culture Secretary Hunt wrote to the library's then chair Baroness Blackstone outlining its settlement under the Cameron-Clegg coalition's Spending Review. The library's resource grant-in-aid was to be cut by 15 per cent in real terms by 2014–15. But the letter contained another instruction whose significance becomes especially clear in retrospect: the British Library was explicitly instructed to "pursue ways to increase its self-generated income". The government also promoted philanthropy, corporate support, and increased private funding for cultural institutions.

The genealogy of today's reading-room scheme could scarcely be clearer. In 2010 the state reduced the resources made available to the national library and instructed it to increase commercial income. Sixteen years later, the institution proposes renting public research space to private businesses to generate precisely that income. What was originally presented as emergency austerity has hardened into the normal method of administering public culture.

The British Library is only the most prominent example of a much wider destruction of cultural infrastructure. In 2020, CILIP reported that annual revenue funding for local public libraries had been reduced by £243 million in real terms since 2010. CIPFA calculated that spending on libraries fell by 29.6 per cent between 2009–10 and 2018–19, alongside reductions in paid staff numbers and increased reliance on volunteers. The deterioration of the national library must therefore be understood as part of an assault extending through local libraries, museums, archives, universities and the broader cultural infrastructure.

Into this already weakened situation came the catastrophic cyberattack of October 2023. The Rhysida ransomware group penetrated the British Library's systems, exfiltrated enormous quantities of information, and caused extensive disruption. The attackers exfiltrated about 600GB of data, which was later published after the library refused to pay the ransom.

The financial consequences were severe. A 2026 analysis put the recovery costs at at least £7 million, representing more than 40 per cent of the library's unallocated reserves. The institution itself continues to describe the restoration of its systems as a rebuilding process necessitated by the scale of the attack. EThOS records were restored in July 2026, while the UK Web Archive returned in October.

But the cyberattack cannot legitimately be invoked to obscure the policies that preceded it. Commercialisation had been written into the library's funding arrangements more than a decade earlier. The attack did not create the underlying policy. It greatly intensified the financial consequences of an existing one. An adequately funded national institution facing such an attack should have had the resources for complete reconstruction. Instead, the financial consequences have reinforced demands that the library generate additional income. In this way, the extraordinary damage produced by a criminal cyberattack has become another pressure pushing a publicly funded institution towards commercialisation.

The workforce has borne much of the cost of this prolonged crisis. PCS has pointed out that British Library employees received a 3 per cent pay award for 2023–24 when other public-sector workers received 5 per cent under the Civil Service Pay Remit. The conflict erupted into strike action in 2025 after management originally proposed a 2 per cent increase, which was subsequently marginally raised. PCS members voted 98.23 per cent for strike action on a turnout of 75.17 per cent. More than 300 workers were expected to participate.

From 27 October to 9 November 2025, more than 300 PCS members struck at the British Library. The union reported strong public support, and its membership at the institution grew during the dispute. Further industrial action followed in December, when security workers closed all the reading rooms.

At the same time, PCS challenged proposals for a senior-management restructuring that would have added £5,000 in annual remuneration for directors. Management subsequently abandoned the proposed restructure. The episode laid bare the class reality hidden beneath appeals for institutional sacrifice. Restraint operates differently depending upon one's position within the organisation.

The six-month dispute was ended in February 2026 when PCS members endorsed their branch executive's recommendation to allow management's revised pay offer to be imposed. The resulting settlement included a consolidated increase of 4 per cent for grades A and below, the London Living Wage for workers earning below the threshold, an additional £2,000 uplift for Grade C minimums, and a review of allowances affecting security staff. But PCS itself acknowledged that the settlement remained below its national pay claim. General secretary Fran Heathcote admitted that it was "not everything our members deserve", while the demand for full restoration of the 2023–24 pay loss was carried into the next negotiating round. [pcs.org.uk]

The importance of that episode lies not only in the pay figures. Library workers demonstrated considerable determination and won widespread public backing. But the underlying funding crisis was untouched. Less than a year later, workers confront new attacks involving pay, outsourcing and the threatened commercialisation of the very reading rooms that security workers succeeded in closing during the earlier struggle.

The controversy has consequently touched a nerve extending far beyond professional academia. Writing in the i on 2 November, Lucy Mangan described libraries as among the last places in contemporary society that can be used freely by anyone. Her argument centred upon the library as a public good and upon the importance of quiet, freely accessible intellectual space in an increasingly commercialised society. She noted both the decline in the library's real public funding since 2010 and the extraordinary financial consequences of the cyberattack.

Much of this outrage is justified. The reading room possesses significance precisely because it stands partially outside the everyday logic of commercial life. One does not have to purchase coffee every hour to justify occupying the chair. There is no admission charge based upon the ability to pay. The independent historian can work alongside the university professor, the pensioner beside the postgraduate student, the ordinary reader beside the professional scholar. Whatever inequalities exist outside its doors, the reading room's formal principle is that access to accumulated knowledge should not depend on wealth.

But liberal outrage reaches its limits when it refuses to confront the economic relations producing the destruction it laments. The commercialisation of the national library is not fundamentally the product of managers who have temporarily forgotten the institution's purpose. Management acts within financial conditions created through government policy. Its calculations concerning revenue, floor space and commercial opportunity are the administrative expression of political decisions about what should and should not receive public resources.

Appeals to management to remember what a library is for, therefore, mistake the symptom for the disease. The question is not whether executives possess adequate cultural sensitivity. The question is why organisations supposedly devoted to public provision are compelled to behave increasingly like businesses.

The issue now falls directly to the Labour government of Andy Burnham, who became prime minister on 20 July 2026 after becoming Labour leader on 16 July. Burnham had previously served as Culture Secretary, as well as Health Secretary and Chief Secretary to the Treasury. On entering Downing Street, he promised what he called a "new economic model", greater public control over essential services and action on the cost of living. The developing crisis at the country's national library provides one concrete test of what such declarations mean.

If the supposed break with the politics of the previous period leaves intact the financial mechanisms that compel public institutions to commercialise themselves, then nothing fundamental has changed. Austerity is not overcome by changing its vocabulary. Nor does public provision cease to be marketised because the government responsible describes itself as progressive.

The defence of the British Library therefore demands more than cancellation of one particularly objectionable scheme. No reading room should be transformed into commercial office space. No outsourcing of security or other services, and no job losses from management reviews. The losses suffered by employees through below-inflation settlements should be restored, and sufficient public resources must be provided to complete the reconstruction of the technological infrastructure damaged by the cyberattack and expand, rather than contract, access to the collections.

The same principle must apply to the libraries, museums and archives across the country that have endured years of cuts. Defending the British Library cannot be separated from restoring Britain's wider cultural infrastructure. Local libraries cannot survive long-term on declining budgets, volunteer labour, and reduced opening hours while the national institution itself moves further towards commercialisation. What is required is not another round of managed decline but a vast expansion of publicly financed cultural provision.

The inevitable response will be that the necessary resources do not exist. That assertion has provided the ideological foundation of austerity since 2010. Every reduction is pronounced unavoidable, every closure regrettable and every commercialisation pragmatic. Debate is restricted to deciding which service will be sacrificed next.

But Britain has not become an impoverished society incapable of maintaining libraries. What has changed is how it distributes its resources and the social priorities that govern their use. Vast private wealth exists alongside the degradation of public institutions. The problem is not an absolute shortage of social resources but how those resources are organised around the requirements of private accumulation.

This is why the reading room possesses a significance extending far beyond its physical dimensions. From the market's standpoint, a reading room can appear economically unproductive. A researcher may occupy a desk for six hours while consulting an obscure political pamphlet, scientific journal or seventeenth-century manuscript without producing a penny of immediate income. Yet that supposedly unproductive activity embodies the entire purpose of a research library.

Human knowledge cannot be valued according to the immediate financial return generated by its study. The reading room represents space and time partially liberated from the commodity relation. Its value lies precisely in the fact that a reader does not have to justify occupying a desk through consumption. It recognises, however incompletely, that intellectual activity has a social value that cannot be captured through a commercial transaction.

That is why the proposal to convert part of the British Library into rentable workspace is so revealing. It substitutes another principle of value. Public space becomes financially suspect precisely because it does not generate sufficient income. Commercial space acquires legitimacy because somebody can be charged for occupying it.

Once this principle is accepted, no secure boundary can remain around the rest of the public institution. Every room, collection, service and employee becomes subject to the question of economic return. Marketisation proceeds not necessarily by the spectacular privatisation of the entire institution but through the gradual colonisation of its functions by the methods and priorities of the market.

Consequently, the Growing Knowledge: A Refocused Strategy for 2026–2032 contains an extraordinary contradiction. The strategy rightly emphasises the importance of trusted knowledge and describes the library's custodial responsibility for its enormous collections as fundamental to scholarship and research. At the same time it emphasises generating revenue to reinvest in those priorities. The danger is that the second imperative progressively devours the first.

Knowledge does not grow simply because collections become larger. It requires librarians, archivists, cataloguers, conservationists, technicians and specialist reference staff. It requires functioning digital infrastructure and searchable catalogues. It requires adequately paid workers possessing the time and security necessary to develop professional expertise. And it requires spaces in which people can study without paying by the hour for the privilege.

The enormous scientific and technological capacities of contemporary society should permit the opposite of what has occurred. Digital technology makes possible the unprecedented democratisation of historical, cultural and scientific material. Public investment could extend opening hours, increase staffing, restore damaged digital archives, accelerate digitisation, and give researchers worldwide access to enormous quantities of material previously available only to a relatively small number of specialists.

Instead, one of the world's great libraries is calculating how much of its physical research space it can transform into a source of revenue. That contradiction is not principally technological or managerial. It is social. The defence of the British Library consequently becomes inseparable from a broader political struggle over who controls society's wealth and for what purposes it is used. Library workers have already demonstrated their willingness to fight. The task now is to connect their struggle with readers, researchers, students and workers defending other cultural and public institutions rather than allowing each dispute to remain isolated within the deteriorating financial circumstances of a particular organisation.

Three reading rooms might appear insignificant beside the immense crises confronting Britain and the world. They are not. Small struggles over public institutions frequently illuminate far larger social conflicts. What is being decided at St Pancras is whether another part of the social sphere historically removed from direct commercial calculation will be surrendered to it.

The books are not commodities waiting for sufficiently profitable readers. Researchers are not customers whose social value can be measured by what they spend. Reading rooms are not underperforming real estate. The British Library is not a landlord. It is a national institution entrusted with an immense portion of humanity's intellectual inheritance. Its collections and the facilities required to use them should be publicly financed and freely accessible. Knowledge accumulated over centuries should not have to constantly prove its commercial profitability before society permits people to study it.

The struggle over the reading rooms is ultimately a struggle over that principle. Whether culture will be allocated according to profitability or human need, whether knowledge will be regarded as commercial property or social inheritance, and whether institutions created for public enlightenment will remain genuinely public at all.

That is why defending the British Library matters. It is part of the wider struggle against the subordination of every aspect of social and intellectual life to the market, and for the socialist principle that humanity's accumulated cultural and intellectual wealth belongs not to those capable of monetising it, but to everyone.

Bibliography

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Jones, Frances. British Library Staff ‘Furious’ about Paid-for Workspace Plan. Times Higher Education, 30 October 2026.

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Public and Commercial Services Union. British Library on Strike: A Round Up. 10 November 2025. [pcs.org.uk]

Public and Commercial Services Union. British Library Dispute Ends with Improved Pay Offer. 5 February 2026. [pcs.org.uk]

Research Professional News. British Library Staff Accept Pay Offer, Ending Industrial Dispute. 6 February 2026. [researchpr...alnews.com]

Databarracks. Anatomy of a Crisis: Deconstructing the British Library Cyber Attack. 2026. [databarracks.com]

UK Government. Andy Burnham's First Speech as Prime Minister: 20 July 2026. Prime Minister's Office, 20 July 2026. [gov.uk]

  

Alberto Manguel’s The Reverse Side of the Tapestry: Translation, Labour and Who Owns the Loom

 

Alberto Manguel’s The Reverse Side of the Tapestry: Notes on the Art of Translation is a cultivated, erudite and often moving defence of literary translation. Published by Carcanet Press on 24 September 2026, the book is described by the publisher as a book-length essay on the translator’s craft and on translation as what Manguel considers the “keenest form of reading”. The volume also contains his own illustrations. Yet the book's fascination lies not only in what it says about translation, but also in the questions its conception of culture leaves unanswered. Its strengths and limitations belong to a recognisable liberal-humanist tradition in which literature appears primarily as a conversation conducted across centuries between writers, books and exceptionally attentive readers. What recedes from view is the material world that makes this conversation possible: publishers, markets, property, censorship, wages and, above all, labour.

The title itself provides a way to develop a more materialist conception. Carcanet Press explains that the reverse side of the tapestry is the definition of translation Manguel takes from Don Quixote. The metaphor is extraordinarily suggestive. Look at a tapestry from the front, and the picture appears finished and coherent. Turn it around, and another reality is revealed: knots, crossings, loose ends and the physical construction that produced the visible image. Translation similarly refuses the illusion that literature arrives before us in an immaculate, self-sufficient form. Behind the translated sentence stands another sentence, and between them stands a human being making decisions. [carcanet.co.uk]

A materialist criticism begins from much the same reversal. It turns the apparently autonomous cultural object over. It asks what the completed surface conceals: who made it, under what conditions, through which institutions, for which audience and under whose ownership. If Manguel’s metaphor is pursued beyond the boundaries he establishes for it, therefore, the reverse side of the tapestry leads from literary aesthetics into political economy. The difficulty is that Manguel, having turned over the tapestry, remains fascinated principally by its threads. He cares less about the loom.

A lover rather than a specialist

Manguel, born in Buenos Aires in 1948, has held a remarkable position in contemporary literary life as an anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist, editor, and former director of the National Library of Argentina. Carcanet Press describes him as Argentine-Canadian and notes that he now lives in Lisbon. His career has always resisted easy professional categorisation. He belongs to the old republic of letters, moving between languages, libraries, literary histories and forms.

Translation is not for him an abstract subject. Carcanet Press notes that Manguel has translated Jorge Luis Borges and Marguerite Yourcenar into English and Katherine Mansfield and Paul Éluard into Spanish. This practical experience matters because his argument rests upon translation as an exceptionally intimate encounter between reader and text. Translating means penetrating beneath the apparent transparency of words into questions of voice, rhythm, ambiguity and intention.

The publisher approvingly reproduces George Steiner’s description of Manguel as an “amateur” in the older, more generous sense of the word: “a lover rather than a specialist”. That characterisation captures both what makes Manguel’s writing attractive and what eventually limits it. His criticism refuses the bureaucratised compartmentalisation of contemporary academic life. For him, literature is a continuous historical conversation. A biblical text can illuminate a modern novel; Cervantes can supply an image through which the modern translator's predicament becomes intelligible.

There is something genuinely valuable here. Against reducing reading to the acquisition of information, Manguel insists on attention. Translation reveals that words cannot simply be exchanged like identical units of currency. To translate is already to interpret. The translator must decide. No dictionary can abolish those decisions because a sentence's meaning never resides exclusively in the individual meanings of the words that compose it. Tone, social register, historical association, irony, rhythm and the relationship of one sentence to everything surrounding it continually intervene. A translator consequently produces a reading of the original even where they strive for the greatest possible fidelity.

Here Manguel’s defence of translation rises above the merely antiquarian. Translation exposes something fundamental about literature itself. The apparently transparent act of reading involves interpretation, historical knowledge, comparison, and judgement. The translated text embodies this process. But at precisely this point another question presents itself. If translation is intellectual activity, interpretation and creation, then the translator is not merely the invisible intermediary between two literary personalities. The translator is also a worker.

Translation and the struggle over who may read

The political importance of translation long predates the contemporary publishing industry. The history of translating texts is inseparable from struggles over access to knowledge and over who possesses the authority to interpret it. The history of the vernacular Bible provides one of the clearest examples. William Tyndale’s English translation of scripture belonged to a tremendous transformation produced by printing, religious upheaval and the development of vernacular literacy. The issue was never simply whether one rendering of a Greek or Hebrew word was superior to another. Behind disputes over translation lay the far more dangerous question of whether ordinary people needed an established clerical hierarchy to mediate between themselves and sacred texts.

The subsequent history of revolutionary England reveals what could follow once texts and arguments escaped older institutional monopolies. The enormous expansion of pamphleteering and popular religious controversy accompanying the English Revolution allowed artisans, soldiers, preachers and political radicals to intervene directly in questions previously claimed as the preserve of churchmen, lawyers and rulers. Levellers, Diggers and religious radicals found within vernacular religious and political languages the means to formulate increasingly explosive questions about authority, representation, property and equality.

Translation in this sense belongs to the history of democratisation, but not in the comfortable meaning the term later acquired. Making forbidden, restricted or otherwise inaccessible texts available to wider populations could destabilise established authority. It altered not simply what people read but who could participate in intellectual and political argument. The same process took on an increasingly international character as bourgeois society grew. Philosophical, scientific and political works circulated beyond the linguistic environments in which they had originated. Ideas crossed frontiers that states, churches, and ruling classes repeatedly tried to police. Translation became one mechanism through which intellectual life acquired its genuinely international character.

The development of the socialist workers’ movement gave this process an entirely new historical significance. The writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and later the vast literature generated by socialist movements worldwide, could not have become the theoretical inheritance of an international working class without translation. Translating socialist literature was not an ornamental supplement to political activity. It formed part of the movement’s practical work of education and organisation.

This history points towards something only partially captured by a liberal-humanist celebration of translation as intercultural understanding. Languages do not meet one another in some realm floating above society. Human beings speaking different languages encounter each other through migrations, empires, wars, trade, intellectual exchange and class struggle. Translation is therefore necessarily historical. The reverse of the tapestry is already beginning to look much more complicated.

The translator as worker

Manguel approaches translation above all as a man of letters contemplating a craft. But translation is also an occupation situated within the capitalist publishing industry. This distinction matters because the romantic language surrounding literary production has always served an ideological function. Writing, translating, illustrating and editing can be presented as callings whose supposedly privileged proximity to culture somehow places them outside ordinary questions of remuneration and working conditions. Yet precisely because many people undertake intellectual labour from genuine commitment, their attachment to the activity can itself become a mechanism through which poorly rewarded conditions are normalised.

The organisations representing translators make clear that contracts, payment and rights are not secondary concerns. Britain’s Translators Association, part of the Society of Authors, describes itself as the collective voice of literary translators and advises members on translator-publisher contracts and negotiating payment. It also says explicitly that it campaigns for translators’ rights and fairer working conditions.

The evidence from the United States points in the same direction. The Authors Guild states that literary translation requires creativity, talent, and skill. Still, translators’ work is often overlooked or taken for granted, including through failures to provide proper credit or ongoing royalties. Its model translation contract was created specifically to provide translators with a basis for negotiating better terms.

Such mundane contractual matters expose the social side of Manguel’s elevated conception of translation. If translation is profound reading, then somebody must be paid to undertake that reading. If it requires sustained intellectual attention, somebody must possess the time in which that attention can occur. If the finished translation embodies interpretative and creative judgement, the translator’s right to credit, remuneration and a continuing interest in the exploitation of that work cannot be dismissed as matters external to culture.

The Authors Guild’s model contract gives this struggle particularly concrete expression. Its proposed clauses include a translation fee alongside royalties from print, electronic and audiobook editions and shares from the licensing of subsidiary rights. The Guild notes that payment arrangements vary widely between publishers. The very necessity for such model provisions reveals the contradiction behind romantic conceptions of literary translation. Culture may be discussed in the vocabulary of inspiration, interpretation and artistic fidelity, but the translator ultimately confronts a contract. The capitalist commodity does not cease to be a commodity because the object being bought and sold happens to be a book.

The new pressure of artificial intelligence

The social contradiction becomes sharper with the rapid development of generative artificial intelligence. Here the argument must avoid two equally unsatisfactory positions. One is technological romanticism, which treats human cultural activity as possessing a mystical essence that machinery can never approach. The other is technological determinism, which holds that the ability to automate part of an activity demonstrates the historical inevitability of replacing the humans performing it.

Neither begins with the decisive question: under whose control technology is introduced, for what social purpose, and who reaps the benefits?

Translators' concerns about generative AI are not hypothetical. The Translators Association states that it is “deeply engaged” in protecting translators’ rights and their craft in the age of AI and says it has called for solidarity with human translators whose livelihoods are threatened by generative AI. Meanwhile, the Authors Guild has incorporated provisions on generative AI into its literary translation model contract.

The Society of Authors additionally advises those negotiating fees to establish a commissioner’s policy concerning AI and says it expects consent to be sought before AI is given access to authors’ materials. These developments demonstrate that AI is already an issue of rights, remuneration and control within literary work, not simply a philosophical argument about whether machines can translate.

This is where Manguel’s conception of translation becomes unexpectedly radical in its implications. If translation genuinely represents an especially intense form of reading, then translating cannot adequately be understood as the mechanical conversion of linguistic units. It embodies interpretation. But a materialist criticism should go further. The central problem is not deciding whether a machine output is “really” translation according to some abstract philosophical definition. The more important question is what happens to human labour when automated systems are introduced into publishing under capitalist ownership.

Machinery under capitalism has repeatedly been presented as liberation from labour, while workers experience it as intensified exploitation, unemployment, deskilling, or loss of control over the labour process. The contradiction arises not fundamentally from machinery itself, but from the social relations governing its use. AI potentially contains enormously progressive possibilities. Technology capable of overcoming linguistic barriers could enormously broaden international access to culture, historical documents, scientific research and everyday human communication. For socialists, there is no interest in defending unnecessary drudgery merely because humans previously performed it.

But under capitalist relations the central criterion governing technological adoption is not the enrichment of human experience. It is profitability. That distinction transforms the AI debate. The question should not be posed simply as “human translator versus machine”. Both are trapped within a social organisation of production that subordinates technological development to private accumulation. The genuine alternative would be to use advances in automation to reduce necessary labour while expanding the time and resources available for higher forms of cultural, intellectual and creative activity. In such circumstances AI might become an instrument available to translators rather than an economic weapon deployed against them. 

Translation against nationalism

There is another reason translation should concern Marxists. In practice, the activity contradicts the nationalist mythology that cultures exist as self-contained, internally homogeneous organisms. Every translated book is evidence against such isolation. Languages continually absorb, transform and appropriate elements from one another. Literature develops through these exchanges. National traditions themselves emerge within international processes.

Marx and Engels recognised this tendency extraordinarily early. Capitalism created a world market and drew previously isolated national economies into an increasingly interconnected global system. Cultural production developed internationally alongside this process. Yet capitalism's contradiction is that economic life grows ever more global while political power remains organised through rival capitalist nation-states. Translation occupies one of the cultural pressure points created by this contradiction. It demonstrates the objective internationalism of culture while remaining embedded in national markets, publishing structures, and economic power inequalities.

Not all linguistic exchanges therefore occur between equals. Some languages dominate the international publishing market while others remain peripheral. Which authors receive translation, which works obtain international distribution and which disappear outside their original languages are not purely literary decisions. Markets and institutions shape them. Consequently, the existence of world literature does not abolish material inequality any more than the world market abolishes national inequality. It reproduces these contradictions on a cultural level.

Yet translation contains another possibility. It makes available humanity's accumulated imaginative and intellectual experience across geographical and historical boundaries. The same activity that capitalism turns into a specialised market also points beyond cultural nationalism towards the conception of culture as a genuinely common human inheritance.

Literature and the commodity

Here lies the deeper limitation of Manguel’s liberal humanism. Books and readers, libraries and writers, memories and conversations populate his intellectual world. This world is real, and defending it against intellectual impoverishment matters. But the danger is that the library becomes an idealised refuge from society rather than one of society’s products. Books cannot escape the commodity form merely because their content transcends it.

A publishing house must purchase or control rights, commission work, produce an edition, market it and sell copies. Authors and translators must earn their living. Distribution channels determine what reaches readers. The survival of literary works may depend upon libraries and public institutions whose budgets are themselves products of political struggle.

The cultural object consequently possesses the same double character that capitalism imposes elsewhere. It is simultaneously something created because human beings possess the need to express and understand their experience and something produced and circulated within definite economic structures. This does not diminish literature. On the contrary, understanding its material conditions makes a more serious defence possible.

Manguel’s tapestry metaphor permits precisely this kind of investigation. Once the work is turned around, we discover not only interpretative knots but a division of labour: author, translator, editor, designer, printer, distributor, bookseller, librarian and reader. Behind them stand institutions, technologies and property relations. The reverse side of the tapestry becomes society itself.

From humanism to materialism

The attraction of The Reverse Side of the Tapestry is therefore inseparable from its limitation. Manguel protects something genuinely precious: attentive reading, historical memory, linguistic subtlety and the conviction that literature creates relationships across languages and centuries. A Marxist criticism has no reason to reject this inheritance. Marxism did not arise through hostility to the achievements of human culture. It sought the social conditions under which those achievements would no longer remain the effective privilege of minorities. The difference lies elsewhere.

Liberal humanism ultimately appeals to enlightened individuals and institutions to protect culture. Materialism asks what social conditions culture needs to flourish and what forces have an interest in creating them. The translator therefore presents in miniature a much larger problem. How can serious intellectual work survive when the time needed to carry it out is continually measured against profitability? How can literature fulfil its universal possibilities while its production and distribution remain governed by private property? How can technological advances become instruments for enlarging human freedom rather than mechanisms for reducing labour costs?

These are not questions peculiar to translation. Writers, musicians, actors, researchers, journalists, designers and innumerable other cultural workers confront different forms of the same contradiction. The technology capable of distributing cultural works to billions exists alongside commercial and proprietary structures that seek to enclose intellectual production. Never has humanity possessed technological means of cultural communication remotely comparable to those available today, yet never has the pressure to translate attention, creativity and knowledge into measurable commercial value been more pervasive. The defence of culture therefore cannot finally depend upon nostalgia for a supposedly pre-technological literary civilisation. Nor can it depend upon persuading corporations to behave more benevolently towards creative workers. The problem is social. 

Alberto Manguel, Alexander Voronsky and the Struggle for Artistic Truth

Translation occupies a peculiar position within literature. The translator creates sentences without being their original author, interprets while resisting the temptation to replace the author, and necessarily changes a work's linguistic form while trying to preserve what made that form artistically meaningful. This raises the fundamental question confronting every serious translator: what in a work of literature must survive its passage from one language into another? Alberto Manguel and the Marxist literary critic Alexander Voronsky offer complementary answers.

For Manguel, translation begins with reading. In The Translator as Reader, he describes reading as a way to know more about the world and ourselves. He identifies the translator as potentially its most refined and knowledgeable practitioner. In The Reverse Side of the Tapestry: Notes on the Art of Translation, he develops this preoccupation with translation as an exceptionally intense form of reading. The translator cannot remain a passive recipient of meaning. Every sentence demands interpretation: rhythm, ambiguity, historical association and tone must first be recognised before they can be recreated.

Voronsky approaches the problem from another direction. For him, genuine art constitutes a particular form of cognition. In On Art, he argues that art apprehends reality, human thoughts and feelings through concrete images rather than through abstract propositions. Artistic cognition depends upon intuition, although intuition does not eliminate technique or conscious analysis.

Placed beside Manguel's conception of the translator as reader, this provides the basis for a richer conception of translation. The translator must not merely discover what the words say. The deeper task is to recover the artistic cognition contained within them.

A mechanically accurate translation can therefore remain artistically false. Every word might possess a plausible dictionary equivalent while rhythm is destroyed, irony flattened, ambiguity explained away, and differences between characters' voices homogenised. Information survives while literature disappears. Conversely, unrestricted adaptation can become equally false by replacing the author's artistic discovery with the translator's preferences.

Voronsky's discussion of the painter Mikhailov in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina illuminates the difficulty. He emphasises the artist's capacity to penetrate appearances, discovering the significant and characteristic beneath what obscures it. He adopts Tolstoy's metaphor of“removing the veils” to describe this artistic process. The genuine artist does not merely copy appearances but reveals something about reality that previously remained concealed. [marxists.org]

The translator confronts something analogous. Language itself has become a veil that must be removed and preserved at once. Russian cannot simply become English without transformation. Syntax, sounds, idioms and historical associations differ. Yet the translator must find an equivalent way to let another reader encounter the artistic relationships embodied in the original.

Here Manguel's translator as reader and Voronsky's artist as discoverer converge. The translator becomes a reader compelled to demonstrate the depth of a reading through recreation. An ordinary reader can pass over an ambiguity unnoticed. A critic can subsequently revise an interpretation. The translator must repeatedly decide what the ambiguity, rhythm or image is doing and choose words that recreate its function.

This labour also has a profoundly historical dimension. Languages carry the accumulated experiences of societies. Words carry associations shaped by history, social conflict, and cultural development. Translation therefore mediates between historical worlds as well as between vocabularies. Making a nineteenth-century Russian writer sound casually twenty-first-century may erase something essential; manufacturing artificial archaism can falsify the work just as seriously.

This explains translation's importance to world culture. It challenges the confinement of literature within national boundaries by allowing artistic discoveries produced in one language and historical experience to become available within another. Reading crosses boundaries of time and place; translation materially facilitates that encounter.

A historical irony lies in Voronsky's own case. His return to English-speaking readers itself depended heavily upon translation. Frederick S. Choate, translator of Art as the Cognition of Life, explained that little of Voronsky's critical writings had previously appeared in English and that translating them helped recover a major Marxist literary figure suppressed under Stalinism. Here translation became an instrument of historical recovery. [wsws.org]

Manguel helps us understand why the translator must be an extraordinary reader; Voronsky helps identify what that reading seeks: the cognition of life embodied in artistic form. The translator must therefore create to preserve and transform, to remain faithful. At its greatest, translation does not merely carry words between languages. It lets one society's artistic discovery of life live again within another language.

Who owns the loom?

The Reverse Side of the Tapestry remains an elegant and humane contribution to the literature of translation. According to its publisher, the book explicitly approaches literary translation as the translator’s craft and as an exceptionally intense form of reading. At the same time, Manguel brings his own substantial experience translating major writers between English and Spanish. These qualities make the book worth taking seriously. But its central metaphor ultimately demands to be carried further than liberal humanism permits. Translation is interpretation, certainly. But interpretation requires time, knowledge, training and labour. Labour takes place under social conditions. Those conditions involve contracts, remuneration and property. And property raises the question of class.

The development of artificial intelligence merely makes this chain of relationships more visible. The fundamental issue is not whether technological development should be halted to preserve every existing cultural occupation unchanged. Such a programme would be neither achievable nor desirable. The question is instead whether technological progress will be subordinated to private profit or consciously employed to extend human freedom and culture.

A socialist organisation of cultural production would not erect barriers between technology and creativity. It would seek to free both from their subordination to profit. Automation capable of reducing routine work should increase the time human beings possess for education, thought, creativity and leisure rather than threatening their livelihoods. The increasingly international circulation of culture should become the basis for fuller human communication rather than another field for corporate accumulation.

Translation demonstrates particularly vividly why this question cannot finally be resolved nationally. Translators inhabit the spaces between languages by profession. Their work testifies every day to the inadequacy of national boundaries as containers for human culture. The defence of their labour therefore points logically to workers' broader international interests.

Manguel begins from the back of the tapestry. It is an inspired metaphor because every apparently seamless work of art conceals the process through which it came into existence. Turn it over, and the order of the finished image dissolves into knots and crossed threads. The observer discovers construction where only beauty had appeared.

But turn it over far enough and something more becomes visible. Someone selected the material. Someone developed the skill required to work it. Someone performed the labour. Someone determined the pattern. And within a class society, someone controls the conditions under which that labour is undertaken and the product distributed. That is where a materialist criticism must begin where Manguel stops.

The Reverse Side of the Tapestry asks us to admire the hidden threads that make literature possible. The task today is to follow those threads from the book into society itself: from translation to labour, from labour to property, and from property to class. The decisive question is no longer merely what we discover when we turn the tapestry over. It is who does the weaving, and who owns the loom?

  

Bibliography

Authors Guild. “Literary Translation Model Contract.” 14 April 2021. The Guild describes the model contract as intended to promote fair contractual terms and payment for literary translators and includes provisions concerning generative AI.

Authors Guild. “Negotiating Literary Translation Contracts.” 2 June 2022. Discussion of translation fees, royalties, credit and rights. [authorsguild.org]

Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Part II, 1615.

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

Lenin, V. I. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. 1916.

Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. London: Flamingo, 1997.

Manguel, Alberto. The Reverse Side of the Tapestry: Notes on the Art of Translation. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2026. Carcanet lists the paperback at £14.99, ISBN 9781800175808, with publication on 24 September 2026. [carcanet.co.uk]

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I. 1867.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. 1848.

Society of Authors. “Rates and Fees.” Guidance addressing payment, rights and the use of AI in commissioned work. [societyofauthors.org]

 

Packing My Library: Fifty Years of Books and the Struggle for Marxism

 A personal library assembled over fifty years is more than a collection of books. It is a material record of intellectual and political development. Moving it to new premises marks the beginning of another stage in a writing project rooted in the history of Marxism, the Trotskyist movement, and the struggle to understand the great revolutionary experiences of the working class.

Over the coming months I will begin packing up my library and moving it into premises more commensurate with its size. A conservative estimate puts the collection at around 2,000 volumes, accumulated over half a century. What might appear from the outside as the relatively mundane business of boxing books, moving shelves and reorganising a workspace has inevitably assumed a more personal and political significance.

To dismantle a library is to excavate one's own intellectual history. Books encountered decades ago reappear. Forgotten arguments return. The circumstances under which particular works were bought suddenly return. Each shelf corresponds to a period of life and, in my case, to a stage in a political development that began in a London comprehensive school during the 1970s and proceeded, through more than one false start and political dead end, towards Marxism and Trotskyism.

I never assembled the library primarily for possession's sake. I have never regarded myself as a bibliophile in the conventional sense. These books were acquired because I wanted to understand something: why society takes the form it does, why capitalism has survived despite the suffering and inequality it produces, why revolutionary movements have succeeded or failed, why Stalinism arose in the Soviet Union, and above all how the experiences of previous generations of workers and revolutionaries bear upon the problems confronting the working class today. That process began not with Marx, Lenin or Trotsky, but with the novel.

Pimlico Comprehensive and the Working-Class Novel

The first books I bought seriously were set texts at Pimlico Comprehensive School when I was 16. Among the writers I encountered were Alan Sillitoe, Carson McCullers, Keith Waterhouse, Shelagh Delaney and Stan Barstow. They occupy only a small physical space in a library that subsequently expanded into thousands of volumes, but their intellectual significance was considerable.

These writers emerged from, or sought to represent, social worlds largely excluded from the respectable version of post-war society. Sillitoe's factory workers, Delaney's Salford, Barstow's West Riding and the lonely and marginalised figures inhabiting McCullers's American South opened up experiences remote from the official culture presented by newspapers, television and the political establishment.

For a working-class teenager, the effect was considerable. Literature revealed that the experiences surrounding you could themselves become the subject of serious art. But it simultaneously raised problems it could not resolve. Why were people's lives organised in this way? Why did some possess wealth and power while others sold their labour merely to live? Why did class determine so much about an individual's possibilities?

The best of these novels registered the human consequences of class society with extraordinary sensitivity. Still, literature by itself could not provide a scientific explanation of the social relations producing those consequences. That required an encounter with history and politics. Those first books were therefore instrumental in my movement towards the left. Half a century later, they remain on my shelves.

Militant, Stalinism and Trotsky's History

Once politics became a serious interest, my book-buying accelerated dramatically. The Militant Tendency, then operating within the Labour Party, maintained an extensive book catalogue, and I began ordering from it with considerable enthusiasm. I eventually spent more than £1,000, a substantial sum at the time. The scale of my purchases evidently attracted someone's attention because two young Militant members were eventually dispatched to my door to recruit me.

My membership lasted approximately six months. The promise of socialism attracted me. What proved inadequate was Militant's political perspective, centred on transforming the Labour Party into an instrument for socialist change. The organisation treated the existing labour movement as a vehicle through which socialism would somehow emerge, rather than subjecting it to the historical and political examination its own record demanded.

The books survived my membership. Most remain in the library. I subsequently joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, searching again for a political organisation capable of explaining capitalism and providing a strategy for its overthrow. That experience lasted another six months. It was enough. There is perhaps some historical justice in the fact that, while the library contains materials from virtually every other period of my political development, it contains no books from my brief membership of the Stalinist Communist Party.

The decisive intellectual influence of these years came from an entirely different political tradition. At 17 I read Leon Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution. Few books I have encountered subsequently have equalled its impact. Here history was no longer presented principally as the actions of governments, ministers and celebrated individuals. Trotsky reconstructed revolution as a living process in which millions of human beings entered history consciously.

The events of 1917 emerged neither as a conspiracy nor as the inevitable outcome of impersonal forces. The Russian Revolution was presented as an immense confrontation of classes, parties and programmes, in which objective conditions created revolutionary possibilities but political leadership ultimately determined whether those possibilities were realised. Trotsky's work demonstrated what Marxist historical writing could achieve. It united the reconstruction of events with an analysis of the class forces underlying them and, above all, with an understanding of the decisive role of revolutionary consciousness and leadership.

The implications extended far beyond 1917. If the October Revolution represented the working class's conscious seizure of power under Bolshevik leadership, then Stalinism could not be identified with Bolshevism. The bureaucratic regime that subsequently emerged required a historical explanation. Trotsky provided that explanation through his struggle against the degeneration of the Soviet state and the nationalist doctrine of "socialism in one country". Reading the History was therefore decisive in making me a Marxist. It also gave me an intellectual starting point for understanding why the crimes committed under Stalin represented not the fulfilment of October but its bureaucratic betrayal.

The WRP, the Redgrave Books and One Long Night

The library's next major expansion came after I joined the Workers Revolutionary Party in 1982. My period of candidate membership lasted an entire year, which I have sometimes thought might qualify as a minor record in the history of revolutionary politics. I bought extensively during these years, and much of that material remains in the collection. The books from this period have acquired an additional historical significance because they belong to the years immediately preceding the crisis that erupted in 1985 inside the WRP and the International Committee of the Fourth International.

One of the largest single additions to my library came shortly before that split. I was told that Vanessa Redgrave was moving house and needed to dispose of a substantial quantity of books. I bought many of them. These volumes now occupy a peculiar position within the collection. Whatever their original provenance, they became part of my own intellectual history at precisely the point when major political questions concerning the history and programme of the Trotskyist movement were coming sharply to the surface.

Among the books I value most highly is a proof copy of Maria Joffe's One Long Night. Joffe, widow of the Soviet diplomat and Left Oppositionist Adolph Joffe, endured decades of imprisonment and persecution under Stalinism. Her memoir belongs to the documentary record of the destruction of the revolutionary generation associated with October and of those who continued to resist bureaucratic reaction.

Such books matter because the struggle over historical memory is itself political. Stalinism could not consolidate its rule by physically destroying its opponents alone. It had to falsify the historical record, erase individuals from revolutionary history and transform the October Revolution into something compatible with the interests of a privileged bureaucracy. Trotskyism survived under extraordinarily difficult conditions because it defended not simply particular individuals or organisational traditions, but the international socialist programme upon which the Russian Revolution had been based.

A library containing this literature is therefore more than an accumulation of political texts. It preserves traces of struggles that the defenders of the existing order, including its Stalinist and reformist representatives, repeatedly proclaimed finished. They were not finished.

Birkbeck, the English Revolution and Historical Writing

The library's largest sustained expansion began with my studies at Birkbeck and the completion of my degree in 2003. At that point another strand of intellectual development became central: the seventeenth-century English Revolution.

I had written a dissertation on the subject which, with the benefit of hindsight, was not particularly good. But dissatisfaction can sometimes have more productive consequences than satisfaction. The attempt to find somewhere for my essays eventually contributed to the creation of my website and, from there, to a much more sustained programme of historical reading and writing.

The consequences for the bookshelves were dramatic. Probably around half of the present collection, roughly a thousand books, dates from this broad period. The shelves expanded to encompass the English Revolution, the Civil War, the Levellers and other radical movements, the development of Parliament, religious and political conflict, and the immense historiographical controversies surrounding the seventeenth century.

But the subject could never be confined to the seventeenth century itself. Serious study of the English Revolution raises fundamental questions about historical interpretation. Was it a revolution? What social forces produced it? What relationship existed between political and religious ideas and the material interests of contending classes? How should we understand the Levellers and other radical currents? What was the upheaval's international significance?

Behind these questions lay the still larger issue of historical materialism. The study of history is never politically innocent. The assault upon Marxist interpretations of the English Revolution did not take place independently of the broader ideological offensive against Marxism during the closing decades of the twentieth century. Historical controversies reflected, in mediated form, the political climate produced by the defeats of the working class, the degeneration of the old labour organisations and eventually the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

My library's expansion consequently followed the development of these controversies. Books led to other books. Footnotes opened previously unknown arguments. Historiographical disagreements demanded investigation of the political assumptions underlying apparently specialised academic disputes. What began with a relatively poor undergraduate dissertation gradually became a continuing engagement with the relationship between historical scholarship and contemporary politics.

Books as the Material Record of a Political Development

Seen together, the 2,000 volumes therefore amount to something quite different from a conventional private collection. The Sillitoe and Delaney volumes bought as a schoolboy belong to the discovery that working-class experience could become a legitimate subject of literature. Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution belongs to the discovery that those experiences could be scientifically understood as part of the historical struggle of classes. The literature accumulated through Militant, the Communist Party and the WRP records the search for a political movement capable of acting upon that understanding. The books acquired after Birkbeck record another development: the attempt to write history rather than consume it.

False starts marked that journey. Some books were undoubtedly bought and deserved to remain unread, and others were read more carefully than they deserved. Political development never proceeds in the straight line imposed upon it retrospectively. One investigates tendencies that lead nowhere, accepts arguments subsequently rejected, and only gradually acquires the historical experience necessary to distinguish what is essential from what is secondary. The value of a serious political library lies partly in the fact that it preserves these stages rather than concealing them.

Artificial Intelligence and a New Stage

The most recent development introduces another element into this history. Artificial intelligence has altered the technical conditions under which an individual can undertake historical and political research. Like every major technological innovation under capitalism, AI is developing within definite class relations. Corporations and governments approach it, above all, from the standpoint of profitability, labour displacement, surveillance, competitive advantage, and the intensification of exploitation. There is nothing inherently emancipatory about technology operating within capitalist property relations. But a Marxist response does not consist of recoiling from technological development. The productive forces created by capitalism repeatedly come into conflict with the social relations within which they develop. The task is to understand both technology's emancipatory potential and the class interests that determine its present use.

For an individual engaged in historical research, the possibilities are already considerable. Vast quantities of material can be searched and compared far more rapidly than previously. Bibliographical trails can be followed more efficiently. Arguments drawn from different periods and historiographical traditions can be related to one another. Research that once required weeks of preliminary investigation can sometimes be organised in a fraction of that time. That does not abolish the necessity for knowledge. On the contrary, the ability to evaluate material becomes more important. A machine can locate relationships between texts, but it cannot substitute for the political and historical understanding required to determine which relationships matter, which claims withstand examination and what social interests underlie competing interpretations.

After fifty years of reading, that distinction is crucial. For the first time, I feel able to research and write articles at a level approaching the political and historical understanding accumulated through decades of reading and political experience. AI has not produced that understanding. The books did. Political experience did. Historical study did. The technology makes it possible to mobilise that accumulated knowledge with a speed and breadth that were previously extraordinarily difficult for an individual writer working largely alone.

The Library as a Working Archive

This is the significance of moving the library. Over the coming months, the books will be packed, transported and reorganised in a small office where they can function properly as a working research collection. The change is practical, but it also marks the start of a new stage in the website's development. The intention is not to preserve the collection as a monument to fifty years of reading. Libraries become intellectually useless when they become mausoleums. Books justify the space they occupy when they continue to be read, questioned, compared and used.

The shelves that began with Sillitoe, Delaney, Barstow and McCullers at Pimlico Comprehensive eventually acquired Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky; the documentary history of the Russian Revolution and its degeneration; the literature of the Fourth International; materials from the WRP years; and an extensive collection dealing with the English Revolution, its radical movements and the historiographical battles through which its meaning has been contested.

What links them is not uniformity, because they contain writers representing every conceivable political and historical standpoint. What unites the collection is the struggle to understand history. Moving 2,000 books will be physically exhausting. But politically and intellectually the move represents precisely the opposite of winding things down. It prepares me for more work. The books accumulated through fifty years of reading are no longer simply the record of how I arrived at my present standpoint. Properly organised and combined with the possibilities opened by new technology, they can become the working archive for a considerably expanded programme of historical and political writing.

The journey that began with working-class novels read at Pimlico Comprehensive, passed through the first encounter with Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, the experiences of the revolutionary movement, and decades spent studying the English Revolution, therefore continues. Packing the library is not an act of putting the past away. It prepares for what comes next.