The Political Execution of Robert Lockier: Bishopsgate and the Counter Revolution Within the English Revolution

 The mutiny at Bishopsgate on 24–25 April 1649, and the subsequent execution of Robert Lockier five days later, stand as pivotal moments in the English Revolution. Ariel Hessayon’s recent reconstruction, "What happened at Bishopsgate. Part two," offers a detailed account of these events, drawing from newsbooks, Leveller pamphlets, and the Laws and Ordinances of War. However, the accuracy of his detailed narration reveals the boundaries of current academic historiography. Hessayon provides evidence for a class-based analysis but stops short of making that analysis himself. As a result, his work presents a factual outline without the political analysis needed to understand the episode's significance fully.

The Bishopsgate incident was not an isolated disturbance at the barracks. It marked the beginning of a coordinated effort by the bourgeois leadership of the New Model Army — including Fairfax, Cromwell, Whalley, and Okey — to dismantle the Leveller-influenced agitator network within the ranks before it could develop into an organised political threat. Lockier’s execution symbolised the initial step in a counter-revolution conducted from within the revolution itself.

The New Model Army as the Representative of the Bourgeois Revolution

Marxists have long acknowledged that the English Revolution was a bourgeois revolution. Trotsky, in 'Where Is Britain Going?', pointed out two key revolutionary traditions in British history: Cromwell’s in the seventeenth century and Chartism’s in the nineteenth. The Whig myth of gradual constitutional change dismissed both. Cromwell’s army was not just a military force but the organised backbone of the revolutionary bourgeoisie. It repeatedly purged Parliament to align it with the interests of the emerging capitalist class. It overthrew the monarchy and the feudal system. When needed, it also turned against the working-class layers whose democratic hopes risked extending the revolution beyond bourgeois boundaries.

Christopher Hill, in works like The World Turned Upside Down, argued that the mid-seventeenth-century crisis was more than a constitutional dispute; it was a social revolution. The common people—soldiers, apprentices, small producers—became engaged in political life for the first time, gaining new awareness. They called for annual parliaments, manhood suffrage, legal equality, and the subordination of military authority to civilian control. Although these demands were not socialist, they challenged the limits of the emerging capitalist system.

The Levellers embodied the clearest expression of this popular democratic movement. Their impact within the army was significant. The agitators of 1647 compelled the Grandees to address political authority at Putney. The Agreement of the People was the most developed democratic plan arising from the revolution. In spring 1649, the Grandees aimed to suppress this current.

Bishopsgate: The First Confrontation

Hessayon’s account offers insight into Bishopsgate as a political clash. He highlights the mutiny’s roots in disputes over unpaid wages, the despised “wooden horse” punishment, and the soldiers’ defiance of what they saw as unjust commands. However, these issues were linked to wider political unrest. Soldiers wore sea-green ribbons—the Leveller emblem—and circulated petitions referencing Magna Carta and the Petition of Right. They were part of an organised network within the army that had been active since 1647.

The Grandees recognised this and responded quickly and in a coordinated fashion. Cromwell reached Bishopsgate, “very furiously breathing forth nothing but death to them all,” and declared that the mutineers “should all be hanged” before any trial could occur. Whalley, who had negotiated with the soldiers, acted as judge advocate—serving as investigator, prosecutor, and judge simultaneously. Witnesses faced accusations of perjury and of “whispering into the ears” of the court to stir up its “holy zeal.” The verdict was fundamentally predetermined. Hessayon cites these details but interprets them as mere narrative colour. In truth, they expose the political nature of the proceedings. The trial was not a genuine judicial process but political theatre designed to instil terror among the ranks.

The Execution of Robert Lockier

Lockier, approximately 23 years old with seven years of service and £140 in arrears, was widely seen as "a godly man" even by hostile officers. He signed the mutineers’ petition, refused the chaplain’s spiritual advice, and declared that his blood would “speak Liberty and Freedom to all England.” His comrades wrote an epitaph: “Thy blood send forth a Crop of Liberty.” Lockier’s selection was deliberate; he represented a social type the Grandees feared—a politically aware soldier linked to the Leveller network, capable of expressing the democratic hopes of the rank-and-file. His execution aimed to eliminate this type.

Five co-defendants were reprieved, while Lockier was executed alone. This was not merely "exemplary punishment” in a military context but a deliberate act of political violence. Nine days afterwards, Fairfax and Cromwell personally defeated the much larger Burford mutiny, effectively ending the Leveller movement within the army.

The Counter‑Revolution Within the Revolution

Bishopsgate's importance lies in illustrating how the bourgeois revolution's dynamics unfold. After the revolutionary bourgeoisie achieves its goals—dismantling feudal power and establishing a property-based constitutional system—it shifts its hostility towards the common people who supported the revolution. The Levellers’ agenda aimed to empower small producers, artisans, and soldiers with political influence, challenging the property settlement the Grandees sought to establish.

Lockier’s blood marked the boundary. The English Revolution did not fail due to the Levellers' extremism. Instead, it failed because the bourgeoisie, having mobilised the masses to overthrow the old regime, then refused to let those same masses influence or shape the new order.

Robert Lockier and the Blind Spots of Current Historiography

Hessayon’s essay serves as a valuable documentary reconstruction, with maps, illustrations, and meticulous source analysis creating a dependable narrative framework. However, its structure largely echoes the officer-class perspective, positioning Lockyer’s politics as mere background. The Leveller pamphlets are dismissed as curiosities, and the class nature of the mutiny remains unexplored. This isn't a personal shortcoming but rather a reflection of the current academic historiography, which has regressed into antiquarian empiricism and moved away from interpretative explanations. Instead of viewing the English Revolution as a dynamic process driven by class forces, it is seen as a patchwork of isolated events.

The execution of Robert Lockier on 29 April 1649 remains one of the most politically revealing episodes of the English Revolution. It exposes, with stark clarity, the moment when the bourgeois leadership of the New Model Army turned its guns on the plebeian layers whose democratic aspirations threatened to push the revolution beyond the limits of property and privilege. Yet in contemporary academic historiography, Lockier’s death is treated not as a political act but as an unfortunate disciplinary incident — a tragic footnote in the army’s post‑regicide turbulence.

This depoliticisation reflects a broader retreat in seventeenth‑century scholarship. The dominant trends of the last three decades — micro‑history, “lived experience,” and the rejection of grand narratives — have produced impressive empirical detail but have fragmented the revolution into disconnected episodes. Bishopsgate becomes a “mutiny,” Burford a “disciplinary crisis,” the Levellers a “political movement,” rather than interconnected expressions of class struggle within a bourgeois revolution.

Ariel Hessayon’s recent reconstruction of the Bishopsgate mutiny exemplifies this tendency. His narrative is granular, source‑rich, and archivally meticulous. He notes where “accounts differ,” weighs partisan newsbooks, and reconstructs Lockier’s final hours from multiple eyewitness sources. But the political meaning of the episode — the reason Lockier was executed at all — is left unexamined.

As was mentioned earlier, Hessayon records Cromwell arriving “very furiously breathing forth nothing but death to them all,” declaring that the mutineers “should all be hanged” before any trial had taken place. He notes that Colonel Whalley, who negotiated with the troopers, served as judge advocate at the court martial — simultaneously investigator, prosecutor, and judge. He quotes accusations of perjury and “whispering into the ears” of the court to stir up its “holy zeal.” These details reveal a coordinated political operation by the army’s high command to terrorise the rank‑and‑file and destroy the Leveller‑influenced agitator network within the army. Yet they appear in the essay as atmospheric colour rather than as evidence of class strategy.

The result is a historiography that can describe Lockyer’s execution but cannot explain it. The English Revolution is treated as a constitutional crisis, a “war of three kingdoms,” or a mosaic of local conflicts — anything but a bourgeois revolution driven by class forces. The New Model Army appears as an institution rather than as the organised instrument of the revolutionary bourgeoisie. The Levellers become pamphleteers rather than the political expression of the plebeian and proto‑proletarian layers whose democratic demands threatened the property settlement the Grandees were preparing.

A Marxist historiographical perspective restores what current scholarship has lost. It situates Bishopsgate, Lockier’s execution, and Burford within a single process: the counter‑revolution within the revolution, the moment when the bourgeoisie, having destroyed the old order, turned against the masses who had carried the revolution forward. Lockier’s dying words — that his blood would “speak Liberty and Freedom to all England” — were not rhetorical flourishes but the articulation of a political consciousness that the Grandees recognised as a mortal threat.

The poverty of current historiography lies not in its archival work but in its refusal to confront the political meaning of the evidence it assembles. Lockier’s execution cannot be understood without recognising the revolution's class dynamics. To treat it as a disciplinary episode is to reproduce, in scholarly form, the standpoint of the officer corps who ordered his death.

The task of historical scholarship is not only to recover what happened but to explain why it mattered. On this question, the mainstream historiography of the English Revolution remains silent. Marxist historiography must speak where it refuses to.

Why Bishopsgate Matters Today

The execution of Robert Lockier is not merely a footnote in the history of the New Model Army. It reminds us that every bourgeois revolution contains a counter‑revolution directed against the masses who made it possible. The democratic aspirations of the plebeian layers — whether in seventeenth‑century England, nineteenth‑century France, or the revolutions of the twentieth century — always exceed what the bourgeoisie can tolerate.

Lockyer’s dying words — that his blood would “speak Liberty and Freedom to all England” — were not fulfilled in his lifetime. But they remain part of the revolutionary tradition that Marxists defend: the tradition of those who sought to push the revolution beyond the limits imposed by property and privilege.

Bishopsgate is a warning and a lesson. Revolutions do not end when the old order is destroyed. They end when the revolutionary masses are suppressed.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary Sources

• The Laws and Ordinances of Warre (London, 1647–49). Official New Model Army code used in Lockier’s court-martial; essential for understanding the legal framework invoked by Fairfax and Cromwell.
• Justice of the Army against Evill‑doers (London, 1649). A hostile, Grandees‑aligned account of the Bishopsgate mutiny and Lockier’s execution.
• The Army’s Martyr, or, A True Relation of the Life and Death of Robert Lockier (London, 1649). Leveller‑sympathetic pamphlet containing Lockier’s dying speech and epitaph.
• Lilburne, John & Overton, Richard. The Picture of the Councel of State (1649) and related Tower pamphlets condemning Lockier’s execution as political repression.
• Newsbooks: Perfect Occurrences, Mercurius Pragmaticus, The Moderate, The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer (April–May 1649). Provide partisan reportage of the mutiny and execution.
• Maps and visual sources: Wenceslaus Hollar’s London prospects; John Norden’s Civitas Londini; Ogilby & Morgan’s London Survey (1676). Used to reconstruct the geography of Bishopsgate and St Paul’s Churchyard.

Secondary Scholarship: Current Historiography

Revisionist and Post‑Revisionist Works

These represent the dominant academic trends you critique — empirically rich, politically cautious, and often allergic to class analysis.

• Ariel Hessayon, “What happened at Bishopsgate. Part Two” (2024). The article under review; exemplary of micro‑historical reconstruction without political interpretation.
• Ian Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland (1992; rev. ed. 2022). Authoritative military history; emphasises discipline and institutional structure over class dynamics.
• David Underdown, Pride’s Purge (1971). Classic revisionist account of army‑Parliament relations; foundational for the “political process” school.
• Austin Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen (1987). Detailed narrative of army politics; cautious about Leveller influence.
• Michael Mendle, The Putney Debates of 1647 (2001). Important editorial work; tends to minimise Leveller radicalism.
• Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (2004). Cultural‑political analysis; part of the “religious turn” that often sidelines class.
• John Morrill, various essays on the “multiple kingdoms” framework. Influential in shifting focus away from social revolution toward constitutional crisis.

Leveller Studies

• Rachel Foxley, The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution (2013). Strong intellectual history; less concerned with class forces.
• H. N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution (1961). Still the most politically sensitive non‑Marxist study of Leveller democracy.

Marxist Historiography

These works supply the analytical framework missing from current scholarship—an understanding of the English Revolution as a bourgeois revolution containing a plebeian democratic wing.

• Leon Trotsky, Where Is Britain Going? (1925). Foundational Marxist interpretation of Cromwell, the New Model Army, and the revolutionary tradition.
• Christopher Hill
• The World Turned Upside Down (1972)
• God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (1970)
• The English Revolution 1640 (1940). Hill’s oeuvre remains the most comprehensive Marxist analysis of the revolution’s class dynamics.
• Brian Manning
• The English People and the English Revolution (1976)
• The Far Left in the English Revolution (1972). Manning’s work restores the agency of plebeian and proto‑proletarian layers.
• Ann Talbot, “Christopher Hill and the English Revolution” (WSWS, 2003). A concise Marxist appraisal of Hill’s contribution.
• David North, essays on bourgeois revolution and historical method (WSWS). Useful for situating seventeenth‑century historiography within contemporary ideological trends.

 

Thomas Müntzer and the Class Logic of the Reformation: On Andrew Drummond’s The Dreadful History and Judgement of God on Thomas Müntzer

Five centuries after his execution outside Mühlhausen, Thomas Müntzer remains a highly debated figure in the history of the German Reformation. Martin Luther regarded Müntzer as a “murderous, thieving mob-spirit,” a satanic agitator whose existence could undermine the Wittenberg movement. Conversely, in the German Democratic Republic, he was viewed as a proto-communist martyr, the first in German history to take up arms for social equality. Both portrayals are inaccurate when examined against the sources. Andrew Drummond’s recent biography, The Dreadful History and Judgement of God on Thomas Müntzer (Verso, 2024), seeks to uncover the true Müntzer, stripping away Lutheran demonisation and Stalinist iconography. It partially succeeds and partially fails, revealing not only truths about Müntzer but also the limitations of biography as a tool for understanding revolutionary history.

Müntzer’s Radicalisation From Below

Drummond’s key contribution is his reconstruction of how Müntzer became more radicalised. He does not depict Müntzer as a precursor who appeared fully developed at the pulpit, nor as a theological outsider forcing his apocalyptic views onto a passive peasantry. Instead, he outlines a two-way process: Müntzer’s theology was gradually radicalised through interactions with weavers, miners, and poor peasants whose complaints predated the Reformation.

This is more than just a biographical detail; it strikes at the heart of how revolutionary awareness forms. The common people and peasants of Thuringia had their unique traditions of resistance, sharing a feeling that the world was unbearable and pressing for relief from tithes, forced labour, and the enclosure of common land. Müntzer offered a language—apocalyptic, biblical, and in the vernacular—that allowed these demands to be expressed as universal claims.

This aligns closely with Friedrich Engels's analysis in The Peasant War in Germany (1850). Writing after the failed 1848 revolutions, Engels saw Müntzer not as a lone visionary but as representing a social layer whose demands exceeded what the burgher Reformation could accept. Drummond also reaches a similar understanding from the archives, without referencing Engels. Müntzer’s shift to militant eschatology reflects his audience's growing desperation, not a personal theological revelation.

However, Drummond’s book is limited by the biographical format. While biography has its strengths, it tends to focus on the individual's psychology, beliefs, and inner experiences. It cannot fully capture Müntzer’s role within the broader social context of the Peasants’ War, since no single person caused this conflict. The Peasants’ War was one of Europe's largest popular uprisings before 1789, involving hundreds of thousands of peasants across regions like Swabia, Franconia, Thuringia, and the Black Forest—most of whom never heard Müntzer speak.

Drummond recognises this but emphasises the biographies of Frankenhausen and Mühlhausen, making them the focal point while the larger movement loses prominence. Consequently, Müntzer appears more central than he truly was to the revolt, where he was ultimately a minor commander who arrived late and was quickly defeated.

Engels recognised the issue from the beginning. He portrays Müntzer not as the main figure but as a representation of a social class—specifically, the plebeian-proletarian group in early modern towns—whose demands went beyond the scope of the burgher Reformation. The Peasants’ War drama is less about Müntzer’s personal story and more about the clash among three major social forces: princely reaction, burgher reform, and plebeian-peasant revolution. Biography can hint at this underlying structure, but it cannot fully capture it.

Drummond rightly questions the validity of Müntzer's torture-induced confession, in which he claimed he wanted to establish “all things in common” and execute nobles who refused. This statement served as the basis for Lutheran slander and the hagiography of the German Democratic Republic. Drummond wisely avoids interpreting it as an early communist manifesto, which is a notable strength. However militant Müntzer’s outlook was, it stayed within the theological perspectives of his time. His goal to abolish tyranny was connected to the expected Second Coming. He did not have a modern plan for restructuring production or property relations.

This limitation is rooted in history, not personality. Engels’ statement is the most accurate: Müntzer’s communism was “a genius’s anticipation” of a social order that the current material conditions did not support. The class Müntzer represented—the urban plebeian proletariat—was not yet capable of effecting social change. Their demands could only be articulated through religious language. Müntzer’s theology wasn’t a departure from his politics; it embodied his political stance, as theology was the only language available for the oppressed to envision emancipation.

The Reformation as Contested Bourgeois Revolution

The main limitation of Drummond’s book — and many recent English-language analyses of the Reformation — is their reluctance to position Müntzer within a clear framework of the Reformation as a contested bourgeois revolution. The Reformation was more than just a theological event; it represented the political self-assertion of the emerging German middle class. Two Reformations emerged: the burgher-princely Reformation centred in Wittenberg, which aimed to transfer wealth and authority from the Church to princes and urban elites, and the plebeian-peasant Reformation, focused on figures like Müntzer, which sought—though only partially—to extend the principle of equality before God into social equality on earth.

Luther’s break with Müntzer was not a personality clash. It was the moment at which the burgher Reformation recoiled from the social implications of its own doctrine. If every man could interpret scripture for himself, why could every man not govern himself? If spiritual equality was true, what justification remained for material inequality?

Luther responded to these questions at Frankenhausen not through debate but with violence. His support for the princes who slaughtered thousands of peasants marked a pivotal point, where the German bourgeoisie, still in its early stages, prioritised order over liberation. The political reluctance that later hindered the German bourgeoisie in 1848, 1918, and 1933 originated in 1525.

Thomas Müntzer and Current Historiography

Thomas Müntzer is one of the early Reformation figures whose historiographical reputation has dramatically shifted over time. For five centuries, he has been portrayed in various lights—denounced, sanctified, appropriated, and reinterpreted—shaped by the ideological priorities of different eras. Now, with the 500th anniversary of the Peasants’ War (1524–25) sparking fresh scholarly debate, Müntzer has become a focal point again—this time not about his personal character, but about what revolution, heresy, and social conflict mean in early modern Europe.

Recent research shows that studies of Müntzer remain highly active. Marion Dammaschke, in her review of Johannes Elberskirch’s significant 2025 monograph, states that Müntzer is now considered "one of the best-researched historical figures of his era," and the field remains lively "despite the limited surviving sources." The focus has shifted from questioning if Müntzer is relevant to understanding how he is relevant and identifying suitable frameworks to interpret his significance.

For much of the twentieth century, Müntzer’s image was largely shaped by the German Democratic Republic. The GDR’s historiography, which often simplified Engels' dialectic, depicted Müntzer as a heroic figure symbolising the “early bourgeois revolution." This view was reinforced through state museums, textbooks, and Werner Tübke’s extensive Frankenhausen panorama. As Christina Petterson notes, the painting's original title, "Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany," emphasised the GDR’s view that the Reformation marked Germany’s initial bourgeois revolution, followed by 1848 and implicitly completed in 1945–49 under socialist leadership.

This account portrayed Müntzer as an early communist martyr and a visionary. His idea of a perfect future, or “utopianisation,” was most fully developed in Ernst Bloch’s 1921 work, Thomas Müntzer as Theologian of the Revolution. Bloch presented Müntzer not just as a radical preacher but as a prophet of the “world to come,” whose apocalyptic beliefs reflected a profound longing for a transformed society.

Current historiography has not entirely dismissed Bloch; in fact, Petterson’s 2023 article reexamines his interpretation with fresh rigour. However, it has clearly shifted away from the GDR’s teleological perspective. Müntzer is no longer seen as a proto-communist or just a forerunner of modern revolutionary movements. Instead, scholars now focus on the intricate aspects of his theological language, his social environment, and the conflicting elements within his revolutionary vision.

A notable recent trend in Müntzer scholarship is the rise of Catholic theologians as influential contributors—a significant departure from the long history in which Müntzer was often overlooked or dismissed in Catholic circles. Johannes Elberskirch’s book, Schrift und Geist bei Thomas Müntzer (Mohr Siebeck, 2025), exemplifies this shift. Elberskirch situates Müntzer more within the scholastic theological debates of his era than within radical Reformation thought, arguing that Müntzer’s doctrine embodies a “personalised authoritarian theology of God,” offering a new perspective in international Müntzer research.

This matters for two reasons: it revitalises Müntzer's theological interpretation after decades dominated by social historians and Marxists. It reinterprets Müntzer’s “inner word” doctrine, shifting it from eccentric mysticism to a systematic theological approach to authority, revelation, and spiritual certainty. Elberskirch’s work does not dismiss Müntzer’s political radicalism but emphasises that his theology cannot be seen merely as a reflection of class struggle. Instead, it suggests that theology and politics are interconnected, challenging simple Lutheran demonology and Marxist reductionism.

Drummond’s book is not a failure. It provides a clear, engaging, and philologically rigorous examination of a figure often seen as merely a footnote. It restores Müntzer’s complexity, bravery, and intellectual depth, dismantling centuries of misunderstanding. Nevertheless, it cannot replace the materialist framework Engels established in 1850. Without that lens, Müntzer appears as a tragic radical, Luther as a flawed reformer, and the Peasants’ War as a religious calamity. Through Engels’ perspective, the Peasants’ War stands out as the first significant, though ultimately defeated, attempt by early modern Europe’s common people to foreground the social question within the bourgeois Reformation. Drummond depicts Müntzer as an individual; Engels perceives him as a historical force. Both views are valuable, but relying on only one leaves the full picture incomplete.

Thomas Müntzer’s life is closely connected to the class struggles that influenced him. His theological views mirror the social demands he supported, and his failure is tied to the German bourgeoisie's political hesitation. Drummond’s biography emphasizes his personal story, while Engels’ analysis focuses on the wider social movement.

Thomas Müntzer: Sources and Current Historiography (Annotated Bibliography)

I. Primary Sources

1. Quellen zu Thomas Müntzer (Thomas‑Müntzer‑Ausgabe, Bd. 3)

Wieland Held & Siegfried Hoyer (eds.) Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften / Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, Leipzig, 2025. URN: urn:nbn:de:bsz:14-qucosa2-977613

The most comprehensive modern collection of contemporary testimonies about Müntzer: letters, chronicle excerpts, council minutes, interrogation protocols, landesherrliche instructions, and fragments of pamphlets. Essential for reconstructing Müntzer’s life beyond his own writings. Includes material produced within years of his execution.

II. Modern Critical Editions of Müntzer’s Writings

2. Thomas Müntzer: Schriften und Briefe (various editors)

The standard critical editions remain indispensable, but the 2025 Quellenband above is now the most up‑to‑date supplement.

III. Current Historiography (2023–2026)

This is the core of “current Müntzer historiography” as reflected in the searches.

3. Johannes Elberskirch, Schrift und Geist bei Thomas Müntzer. Eine systematische Analyse im Kontext der scholastischen Theologie seiner Zeit

Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, 2025. Reviewed by Marion Dammaschke, Theologische Literaturzeitung 2026.

A major new monograph by a Catholic dogmatic theologian — historically unusual, since Müntzer was “kein Gegenstand der katholischen Theologie” (not traditionally a subject of Catholic theology). Elberskirch situates Müntzer within scholastic theological debates, arguing that Müntzer’s doctrine constitutes a “personalisierte autoritäre Gotteslehre” (personalised authoritarian theology of God). This is a significant historiographical shift: Müntzer is re‑theologised after decades dominated by social historians and Marxists.

4. Christina Petterson, “Thomas Müntzer and the World to Come”

Religions 14:8 (2023), 1065.

A major contribution to the post‑GDR reassessment of Müntzer. Petterson examines:

• Müntzer in Marxist historiography,
• the GDR’s framing of the Reformation as the “Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany,”
• Ernst Bloch’s “utopianisation” of Müntzer in Thomas Müntzer als Theologe der Revolution (1921),
• the theological thrust of Müntzer’s eschatology.

Petterson’s work is central for understanding how Müntzer is being reinterpreted in the wake of the collapse of the GDR’s historiographical orthodoxy.

5. Thomas‑Müntzer‑Gesellschaft (ongoing publications, 2023–2026)

Elberskirch’s monograph was supported by the Müntzer Society, which continues to sponsor new research, conferences, and source editions.

IV. Classic Marxist Historiography (for context and contrast)

6. Friedrich Engels, Der deutsche Bauernkrieg (1850)

The foundational Marxist interpretation. Engels situates Müntzer as the political expression of the plebeian‑proletarian layer of early modern towns, whose demands outran the burgher Reformation. Essential for understanding the class‑analytic framework against which current historiography defines itself.

7. Ernst Bloch, Thomas Müntzer als Theologe der Revolution (1921)

A philosophical‑theological reinterpretation of Müntzer as a prophet of utopia. Petterson’s 2023 article revisits Bloch’s influence and critiques the GDR’s appropriation of his ideas.

V. Supplementary Scholarship (Contextual and Historiographical)

8. Werner Tübke, Frankenhausen Panorama (1983)

Not a text but a historiographical artefact. Petterson’s article analyses the painting’s original GDR title — “Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany” — as emblematic of the state’s Müntzer canon.

9. Enno Bünz, “In memoriam Wieland Held (1939–2003)”

Included in the 2025 Quellenband. Held was one of the most important Müntzer scholars of the late 20th century.

Summary of Current Historiographical Trends (2023–2026)

Based on the sources above, current Müntzer historiography is characterised by:

1. A renewed theological turn

Elberskirch’s 2025 monograph marks a shift toward scholastic and Catholic theological analysis, challenging the assumption that Müntzer belongs exclusively to Protestant or Marxist historiography.

2. A post‑GDR reassessment

Petterson (2023) shows how scholars are re‑examining the GDR’s portrayal of Müntzer as a proto‑communist martyr and re‑evaluating Bloch’s utopian reading.

3. Intensified source‑critical work

The 2025 Quellenband demonstrates that despite the “exhausted” source base, new editorial work continues to refine our understanding of Müntzer’s world.

4. A move away from teleology

Current scholarship rejects both Lutheran demonology and Stalinist iconography, emphasising Müntzer’s complexity and the contradictory nature of his revolutionary horizon.

 

Not an Aberration, but the Logic of the System: Capitalism’s Destruction of Culture in the Age of AI

 The details from 404 Media regarding Amazon’s LAS8 facility — where workers remove spines from books, scan them, and discard the remains — have caused widespread shock. The rumoured internal logo, depicting a tyrannosaurus devouring an open book, is more than just dark humour; it symbolises the relationship between capital and culture. The key point is not the gruesome imagery or the destruction of rare books but that this process is not unusual. It exemplifies capitalism’s fundamental principle: turning all human labor, creativity, and cultural heritage into raw materials for profit.

Capital views only inputs, not the rarity or scholarly value of a first edition, a rare monograph, or a fragile volume. It ignores the loss of centuries of intellectual effort because it measures only the rate of return. The destruction of books to develop AI isn't a flaw in the technology; rather, it's how the technology functions within capitalist social relations.

The irony of “uncontaminated” text

The AI industry’s demand for pre-digital books highlights a deeper contradiction. As noted, these books are valued because they are “uncontaminated'—free from the recursive errors and stylistic decline caused when AI models are trained on AI-generated texts. This situation exemplifies a system consuming itself. The companies flooding the internet with machine-produced content now have to destroy physical books to access untainted text, as their digital outputs have compromised the quality of the digital commons, effectively strip-mining humanity's intellectual heritage.

This is more than just irony; it vividly illustrates a core contradiction highlighted by Marx: as productive forces evolve, they surpass the social relations that regulate them. While AI has the potential to broaden human knowledge, remove monotonous tasks, and make culture more accessible, within capitalism it largely accelerates the erosion of cultural heritage and deepens exploitation.

Who owns the accumulated knowledge of humanity?

Tom Hall emphasises that AI systems are built upon the collective labour, knowledge, and creative outputs of millions of workers. This is especially true for the books destroyed at LAS8, whose contents—including scientific discoveries, literary works, and historical scholarship—represent the intellectual labour of humans across generations. These works are social products, created collectively and meant for universal access. However, under capitalism, they are regarded as a “finite and depleting resource” to be privately exploited by companies like Amazon, Anthropic, and others. After their informational content is extracted, the physical copies are often discarded as waste.

This isn't simply a copyright dispute; it's about who owns humanity’s collective intellectual legacy. The solution isn't to stop AI progress—such reactionary calls divert blame from capitalism and target the technology itself. As Trotsky emphasised, technology represents a fundamental victory for humanity. While machines may oppress workers, workers can ultimately achieve liberation only through machines. The real question isn't whether AI should exist but rather under what social conditions, in whose interests, and who should control it.

A key insight from the 404 Media investigation is that it relied on anonymous Amazon workers who risked personal safety to testify. This highlights a recurring point the WSWS emphasises: beneath every element of “automation,” human labour exists—hidden from public view and controlled entirely by corporate interests. The workers at VGT3, who cut spines and feed scanners, are part of a global workforce that also labels training data, moderates toxic content, and performs routine tasks critical to AI development. Their work is vital yet often deliberately kept out of sight.

The revelation about Amazon did not come from regulators but was uncovered by a $29 AirTag and a proactive reporter, which itself highlights a problem. No laws require Amazon, Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI to reveal what data they scan, delete, or how they protect rare materials. The industry’s own explanation of its actions surfaces only when it is compelled to disclose information—and even then, often through vague corporate statements.

Amazon’s statement, which claims to “purchase books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use,” is a carefully crafted avoidance. It omits any mention of AI, destruction, or why a company primarily selling books now runs a facility focused on their disassembly.

Removing rare books to train AI models does not indicate a regulatory failure. It cannot be addressed solely through disclosure requirements, cultural heritage protections, or ethical guidelines — although these measures might temporarily lessen the harm. Instead, it reflects the core conflict between the social nature of production and the private ownership of its outcomes.

Humanity's accumulated knowledge is a social creation, and the technology that makes this knowledge universally accessible is also the result of extensive social labour. However, a few monopolies control both and treat them as private assets for profit. The answer is not to reject AI but to advocate for the expropriation of major tech companies and their conversion into public utilities managed democratically by workers. The knowledge in books—and the technology that enables access—rightfully belongs to all of humanity, not to corporations like Amazon.

 

The Uses and Misuses of Revolutionary Memory: John Rees’s “The Black Oliver Cromwell, the Levellers, and the American Revolution”

John Rees’s essay, “The Black Oliver Cromwell, the Levellers, and the American Revolution,” thoughtfully traces how revolutionary memory was passed from the English Revolution of the 1640s to the American Revolution of 1776. It draws on a wide range of cultural, political, and biographical evidence to show that the memories of Cromwell, the Levellers, and Puritan revolutionaries remained alive in colonial America, rather than being mere historical curiosities. However, while the essay excels in cultural and intellectual history, it overlooks a key aspect: the absence of a class analysis. Rees uncovers the language of revolution but fails to address its social implications, highlighting the enduring radical memory while neglecting the class structures that shaped the American Revolution as a bourgeois movement.

John Rees’s historical writing is driven by a genuine aim to uncover the radical democratic traditions hidden beneath the official stories of the English and American Revolutions. His work frequently highlights overlooked figures, grassroots movements, and the cultural transmission of revolutionary memory. However, Rees’s historiography consistently suffers from a key theoretical flaw: replacing class analysis with radical symbolism.

Rees examines history by focusing on political inheritance — how ideas, slogans, and revolutionary methods travel through time. This approach helps him identify clear continuities between the Levellers of the 1640s and American radicals of the 1770s. However, it also causes him to exaggerate the political importance of these continuities. Just because Leveller language appears in colonial America does not mean Leveller politics did. Rees often confuses ideological similarities with real material parallels.

The core problem is that Rees treats revolutions primarily as contests of political ideas rather than as expressions of underlying class forces. His narrative foregrounds the circulation of pamphlets, sermons, and names, while relegating class relations to the margins. As a result, the American Revolution appears more democratic, more radical, and more continuous with the English Revolution than it actually was. The structural limits of 1776 — slavery, property qualifications, planter‑merchant dominance — are acknowledged but never made the organising principle of analysis.

This reveals a second flaw: political romanticism. Rees’s admiration for the Levellers leads him to seek modern counterparts, even when none are present. The American Revolution lacked a large democratic movement similar to the Levellers, and no class capable of executing such an agenda. By viewing 1776 through Leveller memories, Rees unintentionally hides the bourgeois nature of the revolution and the limited social class of its leadership.

Finally, Rees’s historiography often conflates revolutionary rhetoric with actual revolutionary capacity. For example, Jefferson’s reference to Rumbold’s scaffold speech is seen as proof of radical continuity. However, it actually exposes the ideological contradictions within a slaveholding elite that masks its class interests with universalist language. Rees notes the hypocrisy but overlooks its deeper roots in the property relations of a bourgeois revolution.

This critique contextualises Rees’s work within a Marxist framework, emphasising its contributions and political boundaries. It argues that the crucial historical connection is not just between 1649 and 1776, but also between both revolutions and the emergence of the modern proletariat — the only class capable of confronting the contradictions that challenged the Levellers and limited the American Revolution.

Recovering the Radical Memory of 1649

Rees’s essay convincingly illustrates that the English Revolution was more than an abstract concept; it left a lively cultural imprint in colonial America. His compelling evidence includes: Oliver Cromwell, a black soldier whose name embodies revolutionary ideals; the warship Oliver Cromwell, intentionally named to honour the regicide; the Cromwell’s Head Inn, featuring a low sign that makes passers-by bow—a satirical nod to monarchy; the frequent use of Leveller pseudonyms like “Joyce, Jun.” among American radicals; and Jefferson’s sermons on fast days, directly influenced by Puritan traditions as shown in Rushworth’s Collections. This highlights how deeply the Revolution’s symbols and ideas shaped American cultural identity.

These examples show that the memory of 1649 was widespread, not only among the Founding Fathers but also among farmers, artisans, and soldiers. Rees’s discussion of the Hudson Valley Levellers of 1766 offers particular insight. When Prendergast remarked, “if the king were there he would serve him so, for kings had been brought to by mobs before now,” he was speaking literally. He was referencing the regicide tradition as a current political tactic. This exemplifies the most direct form of cultural-political history. Rees emphasises the popular dimension of revolutionary memory, which mainstream history often neglects. Nonetheless, memory alone does not constitute politics, and that is where Rees’s analysis is limited.

Rees highlights class conflicts, such as the Sons of Liberty's opposition to agrarian rebels, the reemergence of class tensions during Shays’ Rebellion, and the Federalists’ worries about plebeian uprisings. Yet, these points are presented as side notes rather than the main focus of analysis. From a Marxist standpoint, understanding the American Revolution requires examining its core nature. Although it was progressive in overthrowing colonial rule and establishing a republic, it was also constrained by the class interests that influenced it. The elite of merchant, planter, and lawyer backgrounds feared the common people almost as much as they opposed the British Crown.

Over a century ago, Charles Beard famously argued that the Constitution primarily served economic interests by protecting property owners from democratic influence. Voting qualifications based on property persisted, slavery continued and even grew, and the planter and merchant elites remained in control. Rees’s comment — that calling someone ‘Sir’ in 1776 was simply good manners — underscores the formal republican ideals of that era, but it obscures the deepening class divisions. Although the revolution abolished monarchy, it also reinforced capitalist property relations and upheld existing economic hierarchies.

Why Leveller‑Style Radical Democracy Could Not Be Realised in 1776

The American Revolution is often draped in the language of universal liberty, natural rights, and popular sovereignty. Yet the radical democratic program associated with the Levellers of the English Revolution — annual parliaments, near‑universal male suffrage, equality before the law, and strict limits on property‑based political power — was never remotely possible in 1776. The reason lies not in the moral failings of individual revolutionaries, but in colonial America's class structure and its stage of capitalist development.

The Levellers originated from a broad movement of artisans, small producers, and soldiers opposing the ruling elite's oligarchic power in England. Their goals reflected the interests of common people aiming to eliminate feudal privileges and increase political involvement. Conversely, the American Revolution was driven by merchants, planters, and lawyers whose wealth depended on existing property systems they did not wish to change. These elites feared popular uprisings more than the British Crown itself. Their main objective was to maintain control over the colonial government rather than promote democratic reforms.

The Levellers drew strength from a politically conscious and radicalised soldier population during the Civil War. Conversely, America lacked a comparable unified group. Colonial society was fragmented into enslaved Africans, indentured servants, tenant farmers, and small landowners, without a shared political structure to push for radical democratic changes. The Sons of Liberty could mobilise crowds strategically, but they generally did not support independent plebeian initiatives—as shown by their opposition to the Hudson Valley farmers and Shays’ Rebellion.

The Levellers envisioned a society of legally free individuals. However, during the American Revolution, nearly one-fifth of the population was enslaved. The dominance of slaveholding leaders such as Jefferson, Washington, and Madison hindered the realisation of universal rights. A republic based on slavery couldn’t fully embody Leveller ideals.

The Levellers were crushed because the English Revolution remained within the limits of a bourgeois transformation. The American Revolution was even more tightly bound to those limits. It abolished monarchy but entrenched capitalist property relations. The Constitution was designed explicitly to restrain democratic pressures from below. The new republic institutionalised elite rule through the Senate, the Electoral College, and property‑based political exclusion.

Leveller-style radical democracy was impossible in 1776 because the modern proletariat, the class capable of implementing it, had not yet formed. The American Revolution was a bourgeois revolution, advancing by ending colonial rule but structurally unable to realise the democratic goals later linked to the working class. The unresolved issues from 1776 would be addressed only with the rise of a class whose interests shifted away from defending property toward abolishing it.

Rees’s key argument—that Leveller radicalism reached America—is historically significant but politically sensitive. The Levellers were authentic radical democrats who opposed monarchy, oligarchy, and the property laws of the 1640s. Cromwell silenced them because they posed a threat to the developing bourgeois order. No extensive democratic movement challenged property relations at the time. The closest example—Shays’ Rebellion—was similarly suppressed by the same forces who fought the British.

Jefferson’s reference to Rumbold’s speech — asserting that “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs” — is rhetorically striking but lacks genuine political impact. Jefferson owned over 600 enslaved people, including two named “Lilburn.” This isn’t merely hypocrisy; it exposes the core contradiction of a bourgeois revolution that claimed to promote universal rights while simultaneously endorsing the most extreme form of property rights: human ownership. As a result, Rees’s analogy risks idealising 1776 by suggesting that the revolution fully encompassed Leveller radicalism, which it actually did not.

Rees contends that although language from the English Revolution can motivate resistance against current capitalist leaders, rhetoric alone is not enough for real political change. Simply referencing history does not generate revolutionary awareness. The American Civil War, often called the “second American revolution," ended slavery but primarily served as a bourgeois revolution. Reconstruction's failure to sustain reforms allowed planter dominance to re-emerge in new ways. The key insight is not a lack of revolutionary memory, but that bourgeois revolutions are naturally limited in their ability to achieve full democracy.

The Levellers lost because the modern working class, the social group able to lead a revolution, had not yet developed. This applies similarly in 1776. The important historical connection isn't just between 1649 and 1776, but also involves both revolutions and the emergence of the modern working class. Ultimately, only the proletariat can address the contradictions that led to the Levellers' failure and limited the American Revolution.

 

Sources and Bibliography

Primary Sources: English Revolution

• The Putney Debates, 1647. In Puritanism and Liberty, ed. A.S.P. Woodhouse. London: J.M. Dent, 1938.
• The Clarke Papers, ed. C.H. Firth. 4 vols. London: Camden Society, 1891–1901.
• Rushworth, John. Historical Collections. London, 1659–1701.
• Rumbold, Richard. Scaffold Speech, 1685 (widely reproduced in contemporary pamphlets).
• Cromwell, Oliver. Letters and Speeches, ed. Thomas Carlyle. London: Chapman & Hall, 1845.

Primary Sources: American Revolution

• Jefferson, Thomas. Writings, ed. Merrill Peterson. New York: Library of America, 1984.
• Adams, John. The Works of John Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams. Boston: Little, Brown, 1850–56.
• The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter. New York: Signet, 2003.
• Records of Shays’ Rebellion, Massachusetts Archives.

Secondary Sources: English Revolution and Levellers

• Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. London: Penguin, 1972.
• Hill, Christopher. The Experience of Defeat. London: Penguin, 1984.
• Manning, Brian. The English People and the English Revolution. London: Bookmarks, 1991.
• Rees, John. The Leveller Revolution: Radical Political Organisation in England, 1640–1650. London: Verso, 2016.
• Sharp, Buchanan. In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England, 1586–1660. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

Secondary Sources: American Revolution

• Beard, Charles A. An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. New York: Macmillan, 1913.
• Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1993.
• Nash, Gary B. The Unknown American Revolution. New York: Viking, 2005.
• Holton, Woody. Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution. New York: Hill and Wang, 2007.
• Linebaugh, Peter & Rediker, Marcus. The Many‑Headed Hydra: Sailors, enslaved people, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.

Marxist Historiography and Theory

• Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
• Marx & Engels. The Communist Manifesto.
• Trotsky, Leon. History of the Russian Revolution.
• Trotsky, Leon. The Permanent Revolution.
• Draper, Hal. The “Two Souls” of Socialism.
• Anderson, Perry. Lineages of the Absolutist State. London: Verso, 1974.
• Anderson, Perry. Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism. London: Verso, 1974.
• Pashukanis, Evgeny. The General Theory of Law and Marxism. London: Pluto, 1980.
• Slaughter, Thomas P. The Whiskey Rebellion. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Rees’s Own Works (for contextual critique)

• Rees, John. The Black Jacobins Reader (co‑editor). Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
• Rees, John. Timelines: A Political History of the Modern World. London: Routledge, 2012.
• Rees, John. The Black Oliver Cromwell, the Levellers, and the American Revolution. (Essay referenced in your analysis.)

Useful Articles and Scholarly Essays

• Hill, Christopher. “The English Revolution and the American Revolution.” Past & Present (various essays).
• Nash, Gary. “The Urban Crucible.” The William and Mary Quarterly, 1976.
• Holton, Woody. “Did Democracy Cause the Recession That Led to the Constitution?” Journal of American History, 2005.
• Linebaugh, Peter. “The Levellers and the Atlantic.” Radical History Review, 2008.
•  

  

The Limits of Cultural Critique Under Capitalism: The Seduction and Failure of Cultural Critique

 Cultural critique under capitalism faces a paradox. It can reveal how capital exploits and sanitises opposition, yet it often halts at Marxist analysis. The Frankfurt School identified the industrialisation of culture with sharp insight, and Baudrillard analysed the spread of sign-value with notable brilliance. However, both eventually withdrew from class struggle, falling into pessimism, nihilism, or a focus on the simulacrum's metaphysics. While their descriptions are insightful, their political outcomes can be harmful.

The CUPRA ad campaign—a shiny interpretation of “street culture” aimed at selling a €26,000 electric vehicle—serves as a prime example for exploring this contradiction. It shows how cultural critique can shed light on capitalism's ideological workings while also exposing the limitations of viewing culture as separate from production. The ad’s boldness, its cynical awareness, and its portrayal of “rebellion” as a buyable lifestyle make sense when examined through the ideas of Adorno, Horkheimer, Debord, and Baudrillard. However, the campaign’s most profound contradiction isn’t in its imagery. Still, in the social relationships it omits: the workers at Martorell who assemble the car, the union officials overseeing them, and the gentrification of Barcelona’s neighbourhoods, which the campaign's aesthetic exploits.

The Frankfurt School

The Frankfurt School’s concept of the culture industry remains one of the most detailed analyses of how culture is produced under monopoly capitalism. Adorno and Horkheimer recognized that culture had become industrialized, standardized, and turned into a commodity; that false uniqueness concealed the uniformity of mass-produced items; and that the idea of personal expression served as a tool for ideological control. However, their cultural theory was inherently biased politically. It was based on the idea that the working class had been fully integrated into capitalism, with its revolutionary capacity depleted. The notion of a “totally administered society” was not an insight but a conclusion based on the failures of the 1930s and the betrayals by Stalinism. The culture industry concept was created to explain why the working class no longer pursued revolutionary change — not to explore capitalism’s inherent contradictions.

This is the Frankfurt School’s critical flaw. Their descriptive insights are compelling because they remain detached from the political outcomes they aim to support. While their analysis of commodified culture can be adopted, the political implications cannot. The CUPRA campaign exemplifies this well. The ad’s false rebellion, its industrial-like aesthetic of “authenticity,” and its simplification of lived struggle into stylish consumption all align with the Frankfurt School’s framework. However, the political conclusion Adorno might make — that resistance is pointless, that the working class is co-opted, and that critique is the sole form of negativity left — is contradicted by the very production conditions the ad hides.

Baudrillard: When Cultural Critique Becomes Liquidation

If the Frankfurt School embodies the more pessimistic side of Western Marxism, Baudrillard represents its end. His early work on consumer society offers insightful observations on advertising, identity fetishism, and the spread of sign-value. However, the turning point comes with The Mirror of Production (1975), where Baudrillard sharply rejects Marxism, calls use-value and exchange-value outdated categories, and argues that signs have replaced production as society's main organising principle. This shift is not just a theoretical development; it is a direct challenge.

Baudrillard’s focus on consumption rather than production highlights the political decline of a petty-bourgeois class that abandoned revolutionary efforts after 1968. His disdain for the masses — “they know they are nothing and they have no desire to know” — conveys despair rather than understanding. His later adoption of nihilism, simulacrum, and the vanishing of reality symbolises intellectual capitulation and political surrender.

Stefan Steinberg’s WSWS obituary accurately traced Baudrillard’s trajectory, portraying his work as the ideological voice of a generation that confused its own demoralisation with a sense of inevitable history. Baudrillard’s observation — that advertising promotes identity over utility — remains relevant. The CUPRA campaign doesn't merely sell a car; it promotes a lifestyle, an attitude, and a deliberately crafted rebellious identity. However, Baudrillard’s conclusion that class analysis is irrelevant is challenged by the very existence of the workers who assemble the cars. While the description can be borrowed, the underlying framework should be rejected. The limit of cultural critique is its tendency to treat culture as autonomous from production.

The CUPRA campaign’s omission of the material base is deliberate and central to its ideological message. CUPRA, a brand owned by SEAT and Volkswagen Group, has experienced notable workforce cuts—such as 686 layoffs in 2005 after strikes—and has faced wage reductions and deteriorating working conditions amid the EV transition. Union negotiations, exemplified by UGT at Ford Valencia in 2022, have led to some concessions. These unseen workers are the backbone behind the campaign—whose labour produces the items that marketing depicts as rebellious. Their exploitation sustains the illusion of individual freedom that the advertisement champions.

The Raval neighbourhood in Barcelona, chosen as the campaign’s visual backdrop, has experienced swift gentrification. Working-class and immigrant communities are being pushed out to make room for the demographic CUPRA aims to attract. The “street culture" highlighted in the ad is gradually being erased from the streets it professes to honour.

The core fact remains: a worker in Martorell is assembling the car. She knows the sign-value doesn’t deceive her; she understands her wages and the car's selling price. The difference between these figures highlights exploitation. The disconnect between the ad’s illusion and actual production isn't a complex puzzle but a clear class contradiction. Such contradictions are ultimately addressed through struggle, not just critique.

The CUPRA campaign’s focus on “self-expression” and “creating your own way” embodies neoliberal notions of the entrepreneurial self—viewing each individual as a brand and every life as a startup, with structural constraints seen as personal shortcomings. Marx and Engels countered this in The German Ideology, stating that bourgeois freedom is simply about individual independence separated from social relations. They argued that true freedom is a collective, conscious control over the conditions of life. While CUPRA offers the fantasy, Marxism exposes the reality.

Cultural critique can expose contradictions, reveal ideological operations, and illuminate the mechanisms of commodification. But it cannot explain the social relations that produce those mechanisms. It cannot account for exploitation, surplus value, or the role of the union bureaucracy. It cannot identify the agent of historical change. And it cannot provide a political strategy. The CUPRA campaign is a perfect specimen of late capitalist advertising because it makes its own contradictions visible. It sells rebellion while suppressing the conditions that produce rebellion. It sells authenticity while erasing the workers whose labour makes the commodity possible. It sells cynicism as a lifestyle while relying on the very social relations it denies.

The scope of cultural critique is limited by the tendency to see culture as separate from production. The Frankfurt School recognised the symptoms but failed to address the root causes. Baudrillard outlined the problems but declared the organism dead. The Situationists revealed the mechanism yet mistook exposure for genuine politics.

Marxism, however, offers a comprehensive method to integrate cultural phenomena within the broader framework of capitalist social relations. It uniquely identifies the working class as the agent capable of resolving the contradictions that cultural critique merely describes. Only Marxism firmly asserts that the real has not disappeared—though it is masked by ideology, it still underpins the terrain on which history unfolds.

The CUPRA campaign is not merely an advertisement. It is a window into the ideological operations of contemporary capitalism— and a reminder that cultural critique reaches its limit precisely where Marxism begins.

 

A Chronicle of Forms, Not Forces: Petitioning and Class Struggle in the English Revolution

Brodie Waddell's recent History Today essay provides a valuable catalogue of petitioning in early modern England, showcasing thorough archival research—tracking signatures, reconstructing subscription networks, and analysing how Elizabethan Puritan tactics were later adopted by apprentices, washerwomen, and Leveller activists. This kind of empirical social history work is essential. However, framing petitioning as a “technology of collective voice' introduces a formalism that strips political meaning from revolutionary history, resulting in a focus on structural forms rather than the underlying forces.

Petitioning did not simply evolve from elite subscription campaigns into mass mobilisation. Instead, antagonistic social groups captured, repurposed, and fought over it, driven by interests that were not only different but fundamentally opposed. The gap between the Elizabethan gentry’s push for more Church reform and the Levellers’ call for near-universal male suffrage marks not a smooth progression of civic practice but a rupture: the rise of a plebeian political movement challenging the limits of a gentry-led revolution. Framing this as a steady development of “petitioning habits” overlooks the class conflict within the parliamentary camp—an aspect thoroughly examined by historians like Christopher Hill, Brian Manning, and Ann Hughes.

Waddell’s evidence repeatedly hints at this conflict without naming it directly. The 1629 Chester “poor householders" invoking “the general good” against “private profit" were not just early users of civic technology; they were expressing an emerging class language that would become more explicit in the 1640s. The washerwomen protesting Charles I’s soap monopoly weren’t expanding “public voice" but resisting a royal economic attack on their livelihoods. The bold claim—quoted but not examined—that Leveller organisers could have mobilised “a hundred thousand hands” for their 1648 petition if Cromwell’s agents hadn’t obstructed them isn’t just a minor detail.

This clearly shows that the independent elites strengthening their power following the regicide were deliberately suppressing mass petitions from the plebeian left. This illustrates the class-based character of the post-1649 settlement, not just a statistical aspect of petitioning history. To grasp petitioning during the English Revolution, we should go beyond the liberal-pluralist idea of rising “voice” and view petitioning as a disputed social dynamic. In this arena, different class forces vied to steer the revolution’s direction.

Gentry Petitioning: Pressure Without Transformation

The Root and Branch petition of 1640, which gathered 15,000 signatures, is often seen as a sign of emerging mass politics. However, its class background is clear. Property reformers—merchants, clergy, and the parliamentary gentry—organised it to influence the Crown toward ecclesiastical and constitutional changes. Petitioning here was primarily a way to mobilise respectable public opinion, not to challenge existing property structures. It served as a tool for a political effort to reshape the state while maintaining the social hierarchy. This context is what Waddell considers the baseline: orderly lists of signatures, processed through parish systems, expressing grievances that did not threaten the core of propertied society.

By the early 1640s, different social groups had taken over petitioning. Artisans, apprentices, watermen, porters, and small producers used petitions to voice local grievances about monopolies, prices, military impressment, and corruption. Their language—"general good” versus “private profit"—reflected emerging class tensions, not civic virtue. This shift didn’t represent a broader "voice" but rather the political emergence of groups previously shut out of formal politics. The revolutionary crisis broke down the usual barriers that kept the poor, women, and the unpropertied outside public affairs. Petitioning then became a tool for those whose interests conflicted with the parliamentary gentry.

The Levellers turned petitioning into a powerful tool for mass democracy. Their campaigns from 1647 to 49 — calling for legal reform, religious freedom, freeing political prisoners, and almost universal male suffrage — marked a significant advancement. Petitioning shifted from a pressure tactic within the parliamentary coalition to a direct challenge to the parliamentary leadership.

The scale of Leveller petitioning was unparalleled, with tens of thousands of signatures collected from London wards, army regiments, and provincial towns. The claim that “a hundred thousand hands” might have been gathered in 1648, had Cromwell’s agents not intervened, shows the extent of popular mobilisation and the fear it instilled among the ruling class. Waddell reduces this to simply “mass petitioning,” but in reality, it signifies the rise of a revolutionary democratic movement that challenged property limits.

Once the Independent grandees consolidated power after the regicide, petitioning became a battleground of counter-revolution. The same authorities that had promoted petitions against the Crown swiftly turned to suppress those threatening their authority. Leveller organisers were detained; petitioners were scattered; women petitioners faced violence, imprisonment, and in some cases, death. The harsh crackdown on the August 1643 women’s petitioners—initially depicted by Waddell as unfortunate crowd violence—actually reveals how rapidly the parliamentary state was willing to deploy force against popular mobilisation that went beyond its limits. Petitioning was tolerated only when it aligned with property interests.

The essay’s conclusion—linking 17th-century petitions, abolitionism, Chartism, suffragism, and the 2019 Brexit e-petition—highlights the depoliticising trend of this genre. It shifts from a history of revolution, counter-revolution, and class struggle to a narrative focused on civic technology. The five million signatures of the Chartists are presented in the same continuum as a modern online petition against trade policies, stripping away the political stakes that separated a movement advocating for working-class voting rights from a 21st-century clicktivist act.

This illustrates Whig history dressed as social history: authentic archival efforts to recover popular agency are overshadowed by a story of an expanding “voice,” which perceives the state as a neutral stage gradually inviting more participants, rather than an instrument of class domination that needed to be challenged through revolution.

A serious examination of Civil War-era petitioning must confront the question raised by Waddell’s own evidence: whose interests did this “collective voice” serve, and against whom was it directed? Moreover, who moved to suppress it when it threatened to transcend the boundaries set by the parliamentary gentry? Petitioning during the English Revolution was not a developing civic practice leading toward modern democracy. Instead, it functioned as a battleground where the lower classes temporarily gained control of political communication, only to face repression when their demands challenged the interests of property-holders.

Brodie Waddell stands at the centre of today’s post‑revisionist social history: archivally rich, methodologically sophisticated, and politically cautious. As a leading figure at Birkbeck and an ex officio representative for Cultural & Social History, he helps set the tone for a generation of scholarship that foregrounds “ordinary people” while avoiding the class‑analytic frameworks that once defined radical Civil War historiography.

His work on petitioning, parish politics, and popular protest exemplifies the dominant trend: history from below without class. Waddell recovers voices, practices, and local interactions, but frames them through communication, identity, and “political participation,” rather than through the structural antagonisms that shaped those practices. Where Hill or Manning would ask what class forces produced these forms, Waddell asks how people “made their voices heard.”

The result is a liberal‑pluralist narrative of expanding civic inclusion — a story of participation rather than transformation. Petitioning becomes a technology of communication, not a weapon in a struggle between plebeian democrats and parliamentary grandees. Conflict is catalogued but depoliticised; revolution is rendered as a sequence of practices rather than a clash of forces.

In short: Waddell is the exemplary historian of a depoliticised social‑history moment — invaluable for evidence, limited in explanation, and firmly within the consensus that has displaced class analysis from the study of the English Revolution.

Sources and Bibliography: Brodie Waddell

Books

• God, Duty and Community in English Economic Life, 1660–1720, Boydell Press, 2012.
• The Power of Petitioning in Early Modern Britain (co‑authored with Jason Peacey), UCL Press, 2024.
• Petitions and Petitioning in Europe and North America: From the Late Medieval Period to the Present, Oxford University Press, 2024. (Co‑authored with Huzzey, Janse, Miller, Oddens, Waddell)

Major Journal Articles

• “The Popular Politics of Local Petitioning in Early Modern England” Journal of British Studies (2024).
• “Work and Identity in Early Modern England” (with Mark Hailwood) Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (2023).
• “The Economic Crisis of the 1690s in England” The Historical Journal 66:2 (2023).
• “The Rise of the Parish Welfare State in England, c.1600–1800” Past & Present (2021).
• “The Evil May Day Riot of 1517 and the Popular Politics of Anti‑Immigrant Hostility in Early Modern London” Historical Research (2021).
• “Verses of My Owne Making”: Literacy, Work, and Social Identity in Early Modern England, Journal of Social History (2020).
• “Writing History from Below: Chronicling and Record‑Keeping in Early Modern England” History Workshop Journal (2018).
• “The Politics of Economic Distress in the Aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, 1689–1702” English Historical Review (2015).
• “Governing England Through the Manor Courts, 1550–1850” The Historical Journal (2012).
• “Economic Immorality and Social Reformation in English Popular Preaching, 1585–1625” Cultural and Social History (2008).

Book Chapters

• “Economic Life” In Understanding Early Modern Primary Sources (2016).

Edited Collections & Collaborative Works

• The Future of History from Below: An Online Symposium (with Mark Hailwood) The Many‑Headed Monster (2013).
• Plebeian Cultures in Early Modern England: Thirty‑Five Years After E.P. Thompson (with Mark Hailwood), Social History 34:4 (2009).
• Introduction: Petitions and Petitioning in Historical Perspective (Huzzey, Janse, Miller, Oddens, Waddell…) in Petitions and Petitioning in Europe and North America (2024).

Archival & Digital Scholarship

• The Power of Petitioning in Seventeenth‑Century England (AHRC project, 2019–21). Project outputs include datasets of 3,800+ manuscript petitions.

 

Five Youths Killed in Athy Collision: A Tragedy Rooted in Social Crisis and Decades of Austerity

 Five teenagers died in a high-speed crash in Athy, County Kildare, causing widespread shock across Ireland. The loss of young lives and the severe injuries to a local family have left a deep human impact—families torn apart and a community in mourning. The usual response from politicians and the media has been to issue condemnations, advocate for stricter penalties, and call for increased police powers. This tragedy is often depicted as a matter of “individual responsibility,” “criminality,” and “youth disorder.”

This narrative is more than just superficial; it is ideological. It masks the social origins of the catastrophe and justifies expanding the state's repressive forces. A true scientific, Marxist analysis shows that this event is not an anomaly but a clear manifestation of the ongoing social crisis caused by decades of austerity, inequality, and neglect of working-class youth.

Athy and the social landscape of Irish capitalism

Athy exemplifies the experience of many working-class towns across Ireland, Britain, and Europe. Over the years, deindustrialisation has eroded stable jobs, giving way to insecure service-sector roles and ongoing underemployment. Austerity policies—carried out by governments from Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Labour, and now Sinn Féin—have severely reduced youth programs, cultural venues, mental health services, and community infrastructure.

In 2010, the WSWS cautioned that the economic crisis was severely affecting broad layers of workers, especially the most vulnerable—children, elders, low-income earners, and those with insecure housing. Since then, these impacts have only worsened. Today's working-class youth confront collapsing public housing, underfunded schools, growing poverty, limited access to sports, arts, and cultural activities, no secure jobs, and no political representation advocating for their interests. Under such circumstances, feelings of alienation are widespread. The phenomenon of “Lucky Dip”—car thefts recorded and shared on social media—is not about moral failure but a social indicator. It reflects the despair of a generation for whom capitalism offers no future, stability, or meaningful societal role. The ruling elite criminalizes the fallout of its own neglect.

The political establishment demands repression, not reform

Hours after the tragedy, politicians and media figures called for new criminal laws, stricter penalties, and additional Garda officers. Proposing a specific offence for wrong-way driving reflects a broader trend: the state often responds to social decay with repression. This pattern is not unique to Ireland; many advanced capitalist nations have also increased police powers, imposed harsher sentences, militarized domestic policing, expanded youth surveillance, and demonized working-class communities in response to rising inequality and social despair. The Socialist Equality Party, commenting on the 2005 Macquarie Fields tragedy in Australia, highlighted this link: "There is a deep-going connection between the trampling of democratic rights at home and the prosecution of war abroad.”

Under conditions of widening inequality and declining legitimacy, the ruling class increasingly relies on coercion rather than consent. The “law and order” agenda is not about safety. It is about managing the social consequences of austerity while preparing the state for future unrest.

None of these measures addresses the root causes of youth alienation. They intensify the cycle: poverty produces despair; despair produces destructive behaviour; the state responds with criminalisation; criminalisation deepens poverty and despair.

The funeral: grief, solidarity, and political vacuum

The funeral of 15-year-old Joe Carthy, featuring a gold coffin, a horse-drawn carriage, and T-shirts with his image, was a powerful display of grief, loyalty, and defiance. It symbolized a community that feels under attack, believing the boys were victims of social conditions and rejecting the official story of criminality. However, this grief lacks a clear political focus. It's a shared emotion without collective purpose. While the anger is genuine, the community lacks an organized way to express its understanding. The substantial Garda presence — including checkpoints, riot units ready, and surveillance — indicates that the state perceives the political significance of such grief better than the community itself. The ruling class fears that mourning might turn into resistance.

The pseudo‑left and trade unions: guardians of capitalist stability

The lack of political leadership among the working class is crucial. Sinn Féin, Labour, and the various Stalinist and social-democratic groups do not provide an alternative. They have long ceased fighting against austerity; instead, they manage capitalism and fail to oppose it. The trade unions act as industrial police, quelling protests and supporting state policies. None of these forces offers working-class youth a vision beyond voting for a capitalist party. Consequently, a political void has formed, turning tragedies like Athy into personal tragedies rather than social crises that demand collective action.

The Marxist conclusion: abolish the conditions that produce tragedy

The five boys in the car and the family they hit are not on opposite sides; rather, they are all victims of the same social order — one that inherently leads to alienation, despair, and social disintegration. The solution does not lie in increasing police presence, prisons, or criminal offenses. Instead, it requires a socialist transformation of society: restructuring the economy to prioritize human needs over private profits. This entails full employment at a living wage, high-quality public housing, free university education, cultural and recreational facilities for youth, large-scale investment in social infrastructure, and the eradication of poverty and inequality.

Such a program requires a political break from all parties of Irish capitalism. The working class must build its own revolutionary leadership, grounded in socialist internationalism and committed to unifying workers and youth across national lines.

The Athy tragedy is a warning. It reveals the human cost of a decaying society. The only way to prevent future catastrophes is to abolish the conditions that produce them.

 

The Method Is the Evasion: Liberal Journalism and the Manufactured Crisis of Intimacy

The Guardian’s recent concern over a supposed “kissing recession” among young people is more than just a shallow cultural critique. It exposes bourgeois demoralisation—the ruling class sensing the social order’s breakdown but unable to confront its causes without self-accusation. The article’s approach, tone, and findings are deliberate and serve ideological purposes. They aestheticise, psychologise, and ultimately depoliticise the crisis, turning it into a psychological or aesthetic issue rather than a political one. What seems to be a compassionate portrayal of youth anxiety is actually a political move designed to prevent a deep analysis of the social factors that caused this crisis. The Guardian’s approach is to evade such examination.

The Liberal Method: Personalisation as Political Containment

Contemporary liberal journalism often replaces historical and economic analysis with personal biography and psychological language. The Guardian’s article exemplifies this shift, showcasing a selective collection of anxious youth, each depicted as a psychological issue: “risk-averse,” “traumatised,” “lacking confidence.” Readers are encouraged to empathise and feel a vague sadness, but not to grasp underlying causes. This is not merely a stylistic choice; it reflects a class-based approach.

By focusing on individual psychology, solutions like therapy, self-care, and resilience-building become the only options. Structural issues—such as austerity, precarity, the erosion of community, and the atomization caused by decades of neoliberal policies—are ignored. The therapeutic language doesn't enhance social analysis; it replaces it, serving as an ideological tool for the bourgeoisie to avoid facing the outcomes of their policies. The Guardian's role seems to be to prevent readers from recognising that the crisis of intimacy is fundamentally a crisis of capitalism.

The Guardian’s article mentions “social atrophy” but does not specify its tangible causes. The elimination of “third spaces”—such as youth centres, libraries, community halls, parks, and informal gathering spots—was not merely cultural change. It was a targeted class policy. As documented by the WSWS, UK local government spending on youth services was cut by over a third from 2011 to 2016, removing more than £60 million, closing over 350 youth centres, and cutting 41,000 youth service positions. The Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition enacted these reductions, set in motion by previous Labour governments, serving the interests of finance capital while councils favoured developer tax breaks and corporate subsidies.

What was lost wasn't just physical "places to hang out" but also the infrastructure supporting unsupervised, face-to-face social interactions—essential for developing social skills that enable intimacy. The capacity to meet, flirt, argue, reconcile, and form relationships outside market logic was systematically dismantled. In this void, dating apps emerged: algorithm-driven platforms that profit from the loneliness capitalism engenders. Ironically, capitalism erodes the free social spaces where people meet, then monetises the resulting loneliness by selling digital profiles based on data, attention, and advertising. This process transforms alienation into a profitable commodity.

The Guardian portrays the pandemic as a natural event that 'interrupted' youth development, but this is misleading. In reality, the response to the pandemic was driven by class interests. Governments globally directed trillions of dollars to corporations and financial markets via measures like the CARES Act, while neglecting young people, leaving them to face isolation, unemployment, and mental health crises. The WSWS had already reported a sharp increase in youth mental health issues well before COVID-19, noting that suicide rates among Americans aged 10–24 rose by 56 per cent from 2007 to 2017—an era marked by austerity, job insecurity, and the disintegration of community life. The pandemic hastened existing trends driven by capitalist restructuring. Schools reopened not primarily for children’s well-being but to sustain economic productivity. Young people were pressured to give up their education, friendships, and social growth—all to safeguard asset prices and corporate profits. Viewing this solely as an individual misfortune instead of a class-based injustice is an act of ideological violence.

What the Guardian Cannot Name: Alienation

The Guardian’s social theorist mentions “social atrophy” but avoids naming it, as doing so would require addressing its root cause. The actual term is alienation—the process in which humans become estranged from each other and their social essence, stemming from a mode of production that turns every human relationship into a relation between objects. Alienation isn’t a simple mood; it’s the fundamental condition of life under capitalism: human abilities are turned into commodities, survival needs shape personality, intimacy becomes a gamble, and social interactions are influenced by money and algorithms.

The “kissing recession” isn't just a cultural phenomenon; it reflects a society where the market infiltrates every aspect of life. However, Marx’s insight—distinguishing Marxism from Frankfurt School pessimism—is that alienation breeds its own opposition. The same generation that reports loneliness and anxiety also supports socialism, led teachers’ strikes, formed the core of UAW and UPS actions, and is entering politics under conditions blocking reform. Alienation isn't inevitable; it is the foundation for revolutionary awareness.

The Guardian’s Despair Is the Bourgeoisie’s Despair

The Guardian’s article does not diagnose youth; instead, it reveals a bourgeois sense of helplessness. It admits something is wrong, yet its approach prevents action. It is a resignation wrapped in empathy. The ruling class feels the social order is crumbling. It cannot explain the crisis without admitting fault, nor describe suffering without risking revolutionary ideas. Acknowledging structural causes would threaten its legitimacy. Therefore, it resorts to biography, psychology, and therapeutic clichés — akin to hiding behind a curtain.

Marxists aim to restore the social wholeness that liberal journalism suppresses, illustrating how the crisis of intimacy stems from capitalism, and identifying the class most harmed by this system as the one capable of overthrowing it. The breakdown of communal life was intentionally engineered, not inevitable, and since it was engineered, it can be dismantled. Abolishing private property in the means of production isn't just a slogan; it's essential for restoring genuine intimacy, solidarity, and collective life. Only a socialist restructuring can recreate the spaces, time, and social relations necessary for humans to meet as equals. Capitalism has commodified even the kiss, and it falls to the working class to reclaim a world where genuine connection is possible again.