Geoff Andrews' new book, Radicals: The Working Classes and
the Making of Modern Britain, explores the history of popular radicalism in
Britain from the late 1700s to today. Anyone familiar with British history
knows that Britain has one of the richest and most debated working-class
histories in the world. Studying this history seriously involves recognising a
key tension: the ongoing conflict between the authentic revolutionary impulses
of the working class and the official leaders' efforts to suppress, control, or
direct these energies.
Andrews is a British academic historian associated with the
Open University who has written sympathetically about Eurocommunism, most
notably his work on the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and the Italian
Communist Party (PCI), and on what he broadly frames as the history of
"radical" political movements. His intellectual project is
fundamentally one of rehabilitation: rescuing Eurocommunism from historical
disgrace and presenting it as a sophisticated, relevant tradition for
contemporary left politics. From the standpoint of revolutionary Marxism, this
project must be examined critically, because Eurocommunism is not a chapter in
the history of socialist advance; it is a chapter in the history of Stalinist
betrayal and class capitulation.
Eurocommunism arose in the 1970s, mainly through the Italian
PCI led by Enrico Berlinguer, the Spanish PCE under Santiago Carrillo, and the
'Euro' faction of the CPGB, whose voice was represented by the magazine Marxism
Today (for a time edited by Martin Jacques). Its core idea was to abandon the
revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and instead pursue a "parliamentary
road to socialism” working within bourgeois institutions, forming alliances
with social democracy and Christian Democracy, and framing this approach as a
sophisticated "renewal" of Marxism adapted to Western contexts.
Eurocommunism was not an accidental deviation; it was deeply
rooted in what Trotsky recognised as early as 1938. He noted the dual
dependence of Stalinist parties: on Moscow's subsidies and on the super-profits
generated by their own imperialist activities, funnelled through trade union
and social-democratic bureaucracies. As the Soviet connection became
problematic, these national Communist parties increasingly integrated into
their respective bourgeois states. The Italian PCI's "Historic
Compromise" with the Christian Democrats under Berlinguer exemplifies this
trend: even as the working class was shifting leftward in the early 1970s, the
PCI actively demobilised it and aligned it with bourgeois stability.
The CPGB's Euros, including figures like Jacques and
historian Eric Hobsbawm, served the interests of British capitalism. During the
early 1970s, when the working class mobilised, leading to the fall of the Heath
government through the miners' strike and the election of a Labour government, it
was the Communist Party that limited every protest to trade union action and
parliamentary Labour efforts, refusing to advocate for an independent socialist
vision. When Thatcher rose to power and Labour surrendered, the Euros blamed
the working class for its "decline" rather than addressing the
political issues involved.
Andrews' scholarly work, including his arguments in 2026
Radicals, fits within a broader academic-left project to dignify the
Eurocommunist tradition retrospectively. The typical move is to emphasise
Eurocommunism's criticisms of Soviet repression, its embrace of democratic
rights, and its engagement with "new social movements" and to present
this as a progressive legacy relevant to today's politics. This framing is
deeply misleading for several reasons.
Initially, the Eurocommunists' critiques of Soviet
repression were more strategic than principled. Their main aim was to make
these parties more palatable to mainstream bourgeois politics. Those Euros who
opposed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had previously been steadfast
Stalinists decades earlier. Their claims to democratic values were driven by
opportunism rather than genuine belief.
Second, the "new social movements" promoted by the
Eurocommunists, such as identity politics, feminism disconnected from class
analysis, and environmentalism as a replacement for socialist politics, were
actually the tools used to fragment independent working-class politics. These
movements scattered opposition to capitalism into various single-issue
campaigns, each manageable within bourgeois democratic frameworks. What Andrews
may see as a broadening of radicalism was, in fact, a narrowing and abandonment
of the aim of socialist transformation in favour of managing capitalism more
humanely.
Third, and crucially, the concept of the "parliamentary
road to socialism" promoted by Eurocommunism has been discredited by
history. The PCI's "Historic Compromise" did not lead to socialism
but resulted in austerity, which ultimately reinforced Italian capitalism. The
CPGB's Euro sector undermined Britain's only political tradition capable of
challenging Thatcherism with a socialist alternative, and it also contributed
to the Labour Party's shift towards Blair. Italy's successor party, the
Communist Refoundation (Rifondazione Comunista), tried to revitalize left
politics within the same framework, but by joining the Prodi government in
2006, it became fully integrated into bourgeois politics, as noted by WSWS, and
adopted the very austerity and military policies it initially opposed.
Academic work that rehabilitates this tradition, despite its
nuanced discussion of internal debates and sympathy for the genuine idealism of
individual participants, serves an ideological role today. It portrays the dead
ends of the pseudo-left as viable options. Andrew’s apology for pseudo-left
politics permeates the rest of the book. Britain's ruling class, uniquely
positioned atop the world's first imperialist power, was able to cultivate
within the workers' movement an "aristocracy of labour," a privileged
layer of trade union leaders and reformist politicians who "preached the
virtues of class collaboration and implacable hostility to Marxism and
revolution." This was not incidental to British working-class history; it
was its defining structural feature, and it ultimately determined the character
of the Labour Party itself: a bourgeois workers' party, resting on mass
working-class organisations but committed to the defence of capitalism.
However, this history also includes explosive revolutionary
episodes that directly contradict the idea of British workers as inherently
moderate and inclined toward parliamentary methods. In Britain, the Chartist
movement emerged as the first mass working-class political movement in history.
Over a decade, as Trotsky explained, it encapsulated the full spectrum of
proletarian struggle, from parliamentary petitions to armed insurrection. The
Newport Rising of 1839, where about 10,000 armed workers marched on Newport,
represents the most significant revolutionary challenge to British rule in the
19th century and demonstrates the genuine revolutionary potential of the
British working class when reformist politics did not bind it.
One of the most important books in this rich history is
Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It is considered one of
the most significant works of socialist literature in English and deserves a
thorough and enthusiastic review. Robert Tressell, whose real name was Robert
Noonan (1870–1911), was an Irish-born house painter and sign-writer. He spent
his last years in Hastings, on England's south coast, working in the
construction industry under challenging conditions of poverty and instability.
From 1906 to 1910, he wrote The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, creating a
manuscript of over 250,000 words in his free time, often after long, physically
exhausting work shifts, by candlelight and in longhand. He died of tuberculosis
in Liverpool in 1911 at age 40 while on his way to Canada, not knowing whether
his book would be published. It was finally published in 1914 in a heavily
abridged form, with the full original edition only appearing in 1955.
This biographical detail functions as a concise political
statement. Tressell was a worker with a keen socialist perspective, a deep
understanding of his class, and exceptional literary talent. However, the
capitalist social system he sharply critiqued ultimately frustrated and
destroyed him before his work could reach a broader audience. The book acts
both as a critique of that system and a tribute to the working class's capacity
to think, analyse, and resist. It holds a special place in my own political growth,
as it was the first book my father gave me.
The book functions on two levels at once. Primarily, it is a
detailed, realistic novel about working-class life, one of the most precise and
unsentimental depictions of manual labour, poverty, workplace dynamics, and the
daily hardships of wage labour in English literature. Tressell writes from
experience. He is familiar with the smell of paint, the heaviness of a ladder,
the petty abuses of supervisors, and the anxiety of seasonal unemployment. He
understands how poverty damages relationships, erodes dignity, and fosters the
servility that allows for continued exploitation. The
"philanthropists" referenced are the workers themselves, who, through
passivity, deference, and acceptance of the current system,
"philanthropically" give their surplus value to their employers.
On a different level, the book serves as an extensive
exercise in socialist education. Owen's well-known "Great Money
Trick" chapter, where he demonstrates, using bread pieces as raw materials
along with wages and commodities, how the capitalist system operates, how
surplus value is created, and why workers remain in poverty under capitalism,
is among the most brilliant examples of popular Marxist explanation ever
written. Tressell transforms Marx's theory of surplus value, as detailed in
Capital, into a political economy that is so vivid and tangible that it has
educated countless workers about the core mechanism of their exploitation.
What makes The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists truly
remarkable and different from sentimental or patronising portrayals of the
working class is its complete refusal to romanticise or idealise its
characters. Owen's colleagues are not noble victims waiting for salvation.
Throughout most of the book, they serve as obstacles to socialist awareness,
eagerly echoing the ruling class's prejudices. They ridicule Owen's socialism,
vote Tory or Liberal, and are wary of anyone questioning the current system.
Tressell's honesty here isn't pessimism but a serious
political stance. He recognises that working-class consciousness isn't
naturally revolutionary; that ideology is a tangible force; and that capitalist
society systematically shapes workers' ideas to reflect the ruling class. The
main role of socialists is to engage in patient, persistent work of political
education and persuasion. Owen isn't a messianic figure who suddenly awakens
his class with one speech. Instead, he debates, faces rejection, debates again,
and endures the frustration of seeing men vote against their own interests.
Yet, he never gives up.
This passage distils the core issue of revolutionary
leadership into a literary form, reflecting a perennial challenge faced by the
working-class movement from the Chartists onward. The working class holds both
the social power and the objective interest to revolutionise society. Yet it
has historically lacked a political party and a program to elevate its profile
and unify its efforts globally. Owen, depicted as a socialist advocate in a
small town, cannot solve this challenge alone, and the novel candidly
acknowledges this limitation.
From a revolutionary Marxist perspective, the book also has
genuine limitations that merit honest examination, not to diminish its value,
but to understand it accurately. Tressell wrote during the era of the Second
International, before the pivotal events of 1914 (when most socialist parties
supported their ruling classes during the imperialist war and the International
was betrayed) and 1917 (the Bolshevik Revolution). His socialist views, like
those of many progressive workers in Edwardian Britain, combined Marxist
economic analysis with the ethical socialism of the Independent Labour Party, a
form of socialism driven by moral outrage at capitalism's injustices as much as
by scientific understanding of its mechanics. Owen comprehends exploitation
with notable clarity; however, his vision of the alternative, the
"socialist" society to replace capitalism, remains somewhat vague,
more an ethical aspiration than a detailed plan.
More importantly, the novel's politics do not engage with
questions about the state, revolutionary power, or the international aspects of
the class struggle. Owen tries to persuade his fellow workers through argument.
Still, the essential issues of how the working class can seize and wield power,
which political party and program are necessary for this, are largely
unexamined. This isn't a critique of Tressell personally,
these questions were
only definitively answered through the experience of the Russian Revolution and
the formation of the Communist International. However, reading the book in
isolation can lead to a reformist view: the belief that the working class
merely needs education in socialism and that this education will automatically
lead to socialist transformation.
The history of the twentieth century, including the British
labour movement that Tressell so accurately portrayed, shows that merely
educating workers, fostering class consciousness, and forming strong organisations
are not enough. Leadership betrayals have often undermined these efforts in
1926, 1945, and many other instances. What is missing in Tressell's political
universe is the Leninist idea of a revolutionary party: a disciplined,
internationalist organisation based on Marxist principles, capable of providing
the working class with the leadership suited to each era.
None of these limitations diminishes the book's
significance. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists has remained in print for
over a century. Generations of British workers have read it as a revelation,
recognising their own lives, exploitation, daily frustrations, and
humiliations, all expressed with pinpoint accuracy. It has been handed down
from worker to worker, from parent to child, like truly essential books are.
During the 1984-85 strike, the Miners' Union recommended it. Shop stewards have
referenced it, and workers encountering socialist ideas for the first time have
discovered a connection between their personal experiences and Marxist theory.
This is the book's deepest achievement: it demonstrates that
socialist consciousness is not an abstraction imported from outside the working
class by intellectuals, but something that emerges from the working class's own
experience when that experience is honestly confronted and honestly named.
Tressell wrote it not as a middle-class observer of people with low incomes but
as a worker who was himself one of the "philanthropists"— who endured
the same conditions, performed the same labour, and drew from that experience
not resignation but revolutionary conviction.
The General Strike
1926
Geoff Andrews' book aligns with an important political
milestone, the 100th anniversary of the 1926 General Strike, marked on May 4,
2026. This centenary has led to many commemorative articles, scholarly works,
trade union events, and retrospectives. Interpreting the 1926 General Strike is
more than just an academic matter; it is highly relevant to current politics.
The way we view its failure today impacts the policy ideas we craft for the
working class.
One of Andrews' chapter titles, "The General Strike and
the Condition of England," hints at his interpretive approach. The
"Condition of England" is a long-standing literary and social genre
that traces back to writers such as Orwell, D.H. Lawrence, and ultimately to
Carlyle and Disraeli. It involves examining what defines England, its core
values, current problems, and potential for renewal. By framing the General
Strike within this tradition, Andrews likely views it as a reflection of the
development of a distinct English national identity and culture, rather than
merely an event in the broader international class struggle.
This is a politically meaningful choice that accomplishes
several things. It tends to domesticate the strike by minimising its
international aspects, such as the Russian Revolution, the Comintern, and the
Trotsky-Stalin conflict. Instead, it frames it as a mainly British event
centred on British people and traditions. The focus is on the elements of
cultural identity, community, solidarity, and moral courage that were genuinely
present in the strike—rather than on the political and ideological issues that
influenced its outcome. Additionally, it paves the way for nostalgic labour
movement politics that view 1926 as a golden era of working-class community and
culture—something to mourn and perhaps imitate in spirit, rather than analyse
as a defeat with specific causes.
Considering Andrews' Eurocommunist intellectual background,
his portrayal of the Communist Party's role is probably quite problematic. The
CPGB features prominently in the 1926 commemorative mythology as heroic organisers
and agitators, many of whom were, at the grassroots level, truly heroic.
However, Andrews is unlikely to subject the Comintern's political lines, such
as the Anglo-Russian Committee policy, the subordination of the CPGB to the TUC
lefts, and the "All Power to the General Council" slogan, to the
rigorous Trotskyist critique it requires. This type of critique is exactly what
the mainstream of British labour history, influenced by Stalinist and
social-democratic assumptions, has avoided for a century.
Andrews' connection of the General Strike with the
"Condition of England" also subtly prompts us to consider what
England might look like a century later. This highlights the book's relevance
to today's political implications. Currently, the "condition of
England" is marked by a deep social crisis: the collapse of the National
Health Service, widespread poverty and reliance on food banks, deteriorating
infrastructure, an unprecedented housing crisis, and a Labour government led by
Keir Starmer enforcing harsh austerity while backing imperialist conflicts.
Instead of resisting, trade unions act as tools of corporate management,
suppressing any struggles that challenge the existing order.
The key question about Andrews' framework is: what does he
mean by "radicals"? This term is not neutral or straightforward; it
reflects a political choice with significant consequences. Andrews'
academic-left background often treats "radicalism" as a broad concept
that blurs the important line between reform and revolution. This view groups
together Chartists demanding votes, trade unionists advocating shorter hours,
Fabians promoting municipal socialism, suffragettes, Eurocommunists, and
current identity-politics activists as part of a single progressive tradition
of popular radicalism. In this perspective, the working class is seen as
representing a democratic, rights-based politics aiming for inclusion and
reform within the existing system, rather than its revolutionary overthrow.
This perspective is deeply rooted in British labour
historiography, particularly connected to E.P. Thompson's The Making of the
English Working Class (1963). While Thompson's work is a major scholarly
achievement with enduring impact, it also presents some limitations. He emphasised
the cultural formation of working-class identity, highlighting experience and
agency, and championed "history from below" as a useful counterpoint
to the mechanistic economism common in traditional Stalinist historiography.
However, his framework often limited working-class
consciousness to a specifically national and English cultural context,
highlighting links to pre-industrial radical groups such as the Levellers, the
Diggers, and Nonconformist religion. It also tended to underestimate the
crucial role of a revolutionary international socialist party as the essential
vehicle for advancing working-class consciousness to address the epoch's
demands.
Andrews, influenced by the Eurocommunist academic tradition,
is likely to push this idea further, drawing on the history of British popular
radicalism to advocate for a diverse, broadly defined left politics that goes
beyond traditional class-based party structures. Essentially, this echoes the
argument that Marxism Today made in the 1980s: the old labour movement has been
replaced, and "radicalism" now needs to include a variety of social
movements. The future, therefore, lies in coalitions rather than in a
revolutionary working-class party.
The general strike symbolises one of the many betrayals
Andrews' books discusses, highlighting how various Labour governments—those of
1945, 1964-70, 1974-79, and 1997-2010—have repeatedly let down working-class
hopes. Each government, initially propelled by genuine working-class optimism,
ultimately implemented austerity, suppressed strikes, prosecuted imperialist
wars, and weakened workers' political influence. While the welfare reforms
under Attlee were notable, they also aimed to stabilise British capitalism
after WWII. They were partly funded by Marshall Plan aid, which was linked to
Cold War politics. Socialist figures within Labour, such as Tony Benn, acted as
safety valves, channelling socialist ideas into the party and preventing the
emergence of an independent revolutionary movement.
Choosing chapters for a 241-page book that covers extensive
history is always challenging. However, this review must consider the chapter
titled "Making History from Below." The reader understandably needs
to understand what the title promises and what it cannot deliver.
The term "history from below" holds significant
respect in leftist academic circles. It emphasises uncovering working-class
experiences hidden by history and asserts that ordinary people — rather than
kings, parliaments, or great individuals — are the true shapers of history.
When applied well, this approach has led to meaningful historical insights.
However, "history from below" as a method and political stance is not
identical to Marxism, and confusing the two has deeply affected how the
working-class past is interpreted and the political lessons derived from it.
Andrews, rooted in the intellectual tradition from the
Communist Party Historians Group through E.P. Thompson and into the
post-Eurocommunist cultural studies environment, inherits both genuine
achievements and notable political distortions of that lineage. Recognising the
origins of this tradition is vital for evaluating its true potential and
limitations. The group's potential and limitations were perhaps best
illustrated in the works of E.P. Thompson and his “Culturalist Turn.”
When E.P. Thompson distanced himself from the CPGB following
the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, he did not shift toward Trotskyism or
the Fourth International, the only movements that had actively defended true
Marxism against Stalinist distortions. Instead, he gravitated toward what is
now called culturalism—a form of historical analysis that emphasises
experience, consciousness, and culture as the main frameworks for understanding
class, often neglecting the foundational economic and social factors that
Marxism considers essential. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class
(1963) is the paradigmatic text. It is a masterwork of historical research,
recovering with extraordinary vividness the texture of working-class life and
struggle in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But its famous
opening declaration — that class is not a "structure" or a
"category" but a "historical relationship" that
"happens" in human experience — represents a decisive retreat from
Marxist materialism. By locating class primarily in experience and
consciousness rather than in the objective relations of production, Thompson
opened the door to a kind of historical voluntarism: the working class
"makes itself" through its own cultural activity, independent of the
structural determinations of capitalist production. This is not Marxism — it is
a form of idealism dressed in the language of social history.
The political implications were profound. If class is seen
mainly as a cultural and experiential category, then questions about leadership
— such as the role of the revolutionary party, political programs, or the
conscious steering of the class struggle — tend to be overlooked. "History
from below" then becomes a celebration of working-class experience and
agency, but without analysing whether that experience is geared towards seizing
power or is being undermined and betrayed by reformist leaders. This creates a
detailed portrait of the class in struggle. Yet, it ignores the crucial
question: why has the British working class, despite its militancy and bravery,
suffered consecutive defeats throughout history?
Stuart Hall
The line of influence from Thompson to Andrews includes
Stuart Hall and the 1980s Marxism Today environment. To be direct, Cultural
Studies, with Hall as a key figure, aimed to shift social criticism away from
class and toward other social structures, supporting identity politics. Hall
was the main theorist behind the CPGB's move toward Eurocommunism, explicitly
stepping away from class-based politics in favour of a framework of "new
social movements' that considered race, gender, sexuality, and cultural identity
as equally important and independent from class struggle. His idea of
"Thatcherism" as a cultural-ideological phenomenon rather than a
class offensive was hugely influential—and confusing—because it shifted leftist
theoretical efforts toward the cultural superstructure just as the bourgeoisie
was mounting a deliberate attack on the material base of working-class organisations.
Andrews is deeply engaged with this entire development. His
"history from below" project reflects this tradition, featuring a
genuine humanist sympathy for workers alongside a shift in focus from Marxist
economic theory to cultural analysis. It celebrates working-class agency but
remains silent on revolutionary leadership. While it seeks to recover
suppressed voices and experiences, it implicitly views social progress as
expanding democratic participation within capitalism, rather than overthrowing
it.
The fundamental theoretical issue with "history from
below" as Andrews applies it is the disconnect between agency and
programme. While working people do indeed shape history—such as the Chartists,
the miners of 1926, wartime factory shop stewards, and Labour voters in
1945—they were all active agents wielding significant collective power.
However, an agency without a clear programme does not lead to liberation;
instead, it represents energy that can be directed in various ways, including in
support of the status quo. The history of the British working class is
fundamentally a record of vast collective agency that has been repeatedly
diverted by their leadership, which claimed to represent them, into reformist,
nationalist, and class-collaborationist paths.
The "History from below' approach often romanticises
this agency while sidestepping the tough question of why it consistently failed
to effect revolutionary societal change. Answering this requires more than
cultural analysis; it demands a rigorous Marxist examination of the political
organisations—such as the trade union bureaucracy, the Labour Party, and the
CPGB that serve as intermediaries between working-class energy and historical
results.
These organisations systematically hinder the development of
a revolutionary path. This type of analysis is precisely what the traditions
Andrews relies on tend to avoid, because it involves confronting the record of
Stalinism and social democracy not as misguided but as well-meaning allies, but
as agents that systematically subordinate the working class politically.
Andrews' Making History from Below belongs to a tradition
that has made genuine contributions to the recovery of working-class history,
but whose political limitations are built into its foundations. It inherits
from the CPGB Historians Group the subordination of history to a nationalist
Popular Front politics; from E.P. Thompson the culturalist displacement of Marxist
materialism; and from Stuart Hall and the Eurocommunist dissolution, the final
abandonment of class as the primary category of social analysis. The result is a
history that gives working people a dignified presence in the past while
offering them no coherent political direction for the present.
George Orwell and the
Working Class
The association of George Orwell with "the working
class" in Geoff Andrews's book quickly reveals insight. Orwell
exemplifies, in many respects, the ideal patron saint for the politics that
Andrews advocates: the Eurocommunist and post-Stalinist academic left that aims
to uphold a progressive, anti-authoritarian, morally upright tradition.
However, it carefully avoids the revolutionary implications of a truly Marxist
view of the working class. This group frequently cites Orwell because he
embodies genuine contradictions: he wrote powerfully and sincerely about
working-class poverty, opposed Stalinism from a leftist perspective, and
despised bourgeois hypocrisy. His political journey ultimately culminated in
anti-communism, collaboration with British imperial propaganda, and the
equating of socialism with totalitarianism. This ambiguity makes him a complex
figure. Any honest assessment of George Orwell must start with what is truly
valuable and enduring in his work.
The significance of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia cannot be
overstated. At a time when virtually the entire liberal and left-wing
intelligentsia of Britain and the West was either duped by or complicit with
the Stalinist smear campaign, which claimed that Trotskyists and the POUM were
agents of fascism and Franco's "fifth column", Orwell had the
intellectual honesty and personal courage to tell the truth about what he had
witnessed in Barcelona. He saw the Stalinist suppression of the revolutionary
workers' movement firsthand. He was shot through the throat by a fascist sniper
and nearly killed by Stalinist secret police. And he wrote about it all with a
clarity and precision that earned him the furious hatred of the worldwide
Stalinist apparatus and virtual ostracism in British literary circles.
His earlier social writing, Down and Out in Paris and London
(1933) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), contains genuine and powerful
documentation of working-class poverty and conditions. These books were written
from the inside, or as close to the inside as a man of Orwell's background
could get: he actually lived as a tramp, washed dishes in Paris kitchens,
descended into coal mines in Lancashire and Yorkshire. The Road to Wigan Pier
in particular, with its unflinching account of unemployment, malnutrition,
overcrowding, and the daily indignities of working-class life in 1930s
industrial England, remains a document of lasting value.
By the mid-1940s, Orwell increasingly adopted an
anti-Communist stance. Intense pressures characterised this period: the
temporary post-war stabilisation of capitalism, the Stalinist bloc's dominance
over the left, and the Cold War's division of the world into two blocs. These
factors compelled socialist and radical thinkers to take sides. Many who had
once supported Stalinism, viewing the Soviet bureaucracy as true socialism, now
rejected socialism altogether. Similarly, former opponents of Stalin in the U.S.,
such as Max Shachtman and James Burnham, shifted to the anti-Communist side.
Orwell found himself caught up in this shift.
Orwell's 1946 article, "Second Thoughts on James
Burnham," sharply criticises the political stance it discusses. In the
piece, Orwell concurs with Burnham's reactionary view that Stalin did not
"betray" the Russian Revolution but rather expanded it along its
original trajectory—arguing that Stalinism was an inevitable result of Leninism
and Bolshevism. Walsh notes that this view was "the basis of one of the
great lies of the 20th century." Orwell also misrepresented Trotsky's
analysis, reducing it to the notion that "things would have been different
if Trotsky had remained in power"—a straw man he dismisses while labelling
Trotskyists as "ultra-left sects." By the time Orwell wrote 1984, he
openly identified his main goal as critiquing "communism."
And then there is the list. In 1949, a year before his
death, Orwell handed over a list of about 130 prominent individuals he believed
to be sympathetic to the Stalinist regime to the British Foreign Office's
Information Research Department, a secret anti-Soviet propaganda group. As Fred
Mazelis' WSWS analysis highlights, this was not simply due to personal fear or
selfish motives. Orwell genuinely believed he was combating totalitarianism.
However, in doing so, he adopted the stance that the Cold War required: that
opposing Stalinism meant aligning with British imperialism and viewing
bourgeois democracy as the "lesser evil."
The comparison with Trotsky offers valuable insight and
clarity. When the US House Committee on Un-American Activities invited Trotsky
to testify in 1939, he intended to use the opportunity to promote his
revolutionary ideas, not to give anti-communist witch-hunters a list of names.
The invitation was rescinded when they realised this. The distinction is more
than just personal character; it highlights two fundamentally different
political outlooks: Trotsky's belief that fighting Stalinism must go hand in hand
with opposing imperialism and striving for authentic socialism, versus Orwell's
growing view that capitalism, even if flawed, was the last safeguard of civilisation
against totalitarianism.
Orwell's trajectory was fundamentally limited by a
structural political challenge that appeared throughout his career. Notably,
his identification with the working class was driven more by emotion and
sentiment than by firm scientific conviction. He associated with centrist
groups such as the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in Britain and the POUM in
Spain—both of which promoted "left unity' influenced by Stalinism and criticised
Trotsky's severe condemnation of Stalinism as "sectarian." These organisations,
characterised by their centrism and political ambiguity, left the working class
vulnerable when the Stalinist regime moved to crush the Spanish revolution.
This gap between Orwell's moral passion and his lack of a
comprehensive program is precisely what makes him appealing to Andrews'
political tradition. The Eurocommunist and post-Stalinist left share this limitation:
they are strong in moral outrage and cultural awareness but have systematically
moved away from the Marxist goals of socialist revolution, worker empowerment,
and the formation of a revolutionary international party. Orwell's brand of
socialism—characterised as ethical, English, empirical, sceptical of abstract
"theory," and ultimately leading to a form of despairing
anti-totalitarianism that aligned with Cold War interests—served as the
literary blueprint that Marxism Today later sought to theorise.
Orwell has been claimed by virtually every political
tendency since his death, reflecting his political contradictions. The anti-Communist
right claims him as a Cold Warrior who exposed the totalitarian nature of
socialism. Liberals claim him as a defender of democratic values and free
speech. The social-democratic left claims him as a working-class champion with
a conscience. Even sections of the left that should know better treat 1984 and
Animal Farm as politically neutral warnings about the abuse of power applicable
to any regime, which is precisely how Orwell's own political degeneration made
possible the appropriation of these works by the forces of anticommunism.
Andrews' framework examines Orwell and the working class,
seeking to revive the earlier, more radical Orwell: the documentary writer
focused on poverty, the veteran of the Spanish Civil War, the anticolonial
advocate, and someone who worked in mines and hop fields. This rendition of
Orwell is what the British labour movement has traditionally admired and is
crucial for understanding working-class experiences and consciousness. This
material is highly valuable.
Andrews' interpretation preserves Orwell's political
ambiguities and his moral seriousness but avoids addressing the failed policies
that led him from 'Homage to Catalonia' to the Foreign Office. This approach
risks supporting a politics rooted in moral witness and social conscience,
which may not provide the revolutionary change the working class requires.
Orwell is portrayed as a patron saint of ethical socialism, diverse labour
movement culture, and politics grounded in decency and solidarity. While this
aligns with the Orwell tradition promoted by Andrews, it also distances Orwell
from the revolutionary significance of his most profound work.
Andrew concludes the book with an unusual and somewhat
unsettling epilogue. Only when you grasp its significance does something unsavoury
become apparent. An epilogue typically appears after the main story ends, signalling
that the narrative of the British working class—through the labour movement,
trade unions, mining communities, industrial towns, cooperatives, and socialist
groups—has come to an end. What Andrews offers is essentially a farewell, a
memorial, and a post-mortem. A Marxist must seriously ask:
whose conclusion is this, and what political purpose does it serve?
Andrews confronts an undeniable and devastating material
reality. The deindustrialisation of Britain, intensified violently under
Thatcher from 1979 and maintained by subsequent governments, dismantled the
material foundation of working-class communities at an unprecedented scale in
the twentieth century. The statistics are clear: at the start of the 1984–85
strike, there were 170 coal pits with over 181,000 employees. Two decades
later, only 15 pits remained, with around 6,500 workers. Entire communities—Durham,
Lancashire, South Yorkshire, South Wales, and the Midlands coalfields—were not
just economically decimated but socially wiped out. In former mining areas,
drug addiction affected one in three households. Young people fled, families
fell apart, and the NUM was reduced to a shadow of its former self. Trade union
membership plummeted from over 11 million in 1984 to less than 7 million, with
fewer than 19% of private-sector workers unionised.
This is the material reality of "unmaking", and it
is a ruling-class achievement, carried out deliberately, with a specific
political objective. As the WSWS analysis makes clear, Thatcher's assault was
not primarily about economic "modernisation." It was a conscious
class war offensive, prepared for years in advance through the Ridley Plan,
aimed at destroying the organised capacity of the working class to resist the
globalisation-driven restructuring of capital. The miners were targeted first
and most ferociously precisely because they had brought down a Conservative
government in 1974 and represented the most militant concentration of
working-class power in Britain.
This is where the core limitation of Andrews' method proves
crucial. The "unmaking" he laments was not an unavoidable historical
process, a natural force, or an inevitable outcome of technological progress.
Instead, it was a political loss—one that involved deliberate actions by
the very organisations that professed to represent the working class.
The 1984–85 miners' strike marked a turning point from
traditional industrial Britain to the deindustrialised wasteland that Andrews
criticises. It was not lost due to a lack of courage, solidarity, or
determination, as the miners demonstrated all three during a year-long fight characterised
by extreme hardship, police brutality, financial pressure, and legal attacks.
The defeat occurred because the TUC and Labour Party leadership, rather than
supporting the strike, deliberately isolated and betrayed it. As detailed by
Marsden and Hyland, the TUC opposed coordinated action; dockworkers' strikes
were quickly ended by their leaders, and the miners' strike was sabotaged,
without which no pit could operate, and scabbing would have failed. Neil
Kinnock, Labour leader, was a well-known opponent of the strike. The TUC
General Council, whose predecessors had betrayed the 1926 General Strike,
played a similar role in undermining Thatcher in 1984–85.
This explanation for the "unmaking" clarifies that
it was not due to capitalism's relentless technological progress. Instead, it
was a political defeat caused by a class-collaborationist bureaucracy that had
long since ceased to defend the working class. As the WSWS analysis states,
this bureaucracy effectively became "a police force on behalf of
management." The trade union bureaucracy and Labour Party didn't just
fail to stop deindustrialisation — they actively facilitated it, paving
the way for capital's aggressive assault on all fronts.
Andrews, operating within the intellectual tradition of the
CPGB Historians Group, the Thompsonian New Left and the post-Eurocommunist
Cultural Studies milieu, cannot say this plainly. To do so would require
confronting the entire tradition within which his work is embedded — the
tradition of seeking to reform and pressure the trade union and Labour
bureaucracy from the left, rather than recognising these institutions as obstacles to
working-class interests that must be overcome through the building of
independent revolutionary leadership.
Stuart Hall and the Ideological Preparation for
"Unmaking"
What makes Andrews' project especially insidious from a
Marxist standpoint is not merely that it mourns the destruction of
working-class communities, but that it does so through a theoretical framework
that actively contributed to making that destruction politically irresistible.
The WSWS analysis of Stuart
Hall is essential here. Hall, whose Marxism Today milieu
was Andrews' primary intellectual formation, responded to Thatcherism not by
strengthening Marxist class analysis but by systematically dissolving it. His
concept of "Thatcherism" as a cultural-ideological formation, his
argument that Labour could no longer rely on traditional trade-union methods of
struggle, his elevation of race, gender and cultural identity over class as the
primary axes of social analysis — all of this constituted, as Paul Bond's WSWS
analysis demonstrates, an intellectual justification for the political adaptation
to Thatcherism that New Labour subsequently carried out in practice.
Eric Hobsbawm's contemporaneous essay "The Forward
March of Labour Halted" — celebrated across the same milieu — performed
the identical function: attributing the crisis of the labour movement to
the decline of the working class itself rather than to the
betrayals of its leadership, and thereby providing theoretical cover for
Labour's rightward lurch under Kinnock and then Blair. When the working class's
defeats are attributed to its own obsolescence rather than to political betrayal,
the conclusion that follows is not the building of revolutionary leadership but
adaptation to the new bourgeois order — exactly the course New Labour took,
with the enthusiastic support of Marxism Today.
Andrews' "unmaking" thesis sits directly within
this ideological lineage. By framing deindustrialisation as the dissolution of
the working class as such — as the end of a particular
historical formation — rather than as a political defeat that must be
understood, reversed and overcome, it reproduces the essential move of Hobsbawm
and Hall: transforming a crisis of leadership into a crisis
of class. The working class is not unmade. It is defeated. These
are not the same thing, and the difference is everything.
The ideological basis for "unmaking" these also
draws on André Gorz's influence. In his 1980 book, *Farewell to the Working
Class*, Gorz argued that the proletariat as a revolutionary agent had been
replaced by automation and the post-industrial economy. A Marxist views Gorz’s
argument as a typical sign of petty-bourgeois political demoralisation amid
working-class setbacks, not as a scientific analysis but as an ideological
reflex. By claiming the working class is now a thing of the past, Gorz and his
followers avoided the challenging task of forming a revolutionary party, opting
instead for lifestyle politics, green utopianism, and post-class social
movements. Even if Andrews doesn’t explicitly reference Gorz, the
"unmaking" framework serves a similar ideological purpose.
The Marxist view begins with a fundamentally different
premise. Although the demolition of pit villages, steel towns, and shipyard
communities caused significant human hardship, it did not eliminate the working
class. Instead, it reconfigured and reshaped it. Now, new groups such as
logistics workers, healthcare staff, retail employees, transport workers,
public sector employees, and gig economy workers have emerged. For instance,
Amazon warehouse employees, NHS nurses, Deliveroo couriers, and call-centre workers
are still subject to capitalist exploitation; they embody the contemporary
working class. They remain linked by the same core class relations as miners
and steelworkers, but operate under new conditions that require different
strategies for struggle and organisation.
The core change was not the dismantling of the working class
itself, but rather the collapse of the institutional structures that
traditionally organised them. These included trade unions, which acted as
protective entities, and the Labour Party, which served as a symbolic voice for
workers. The process was mainly driven by trade unions and Labour
bureaucracies, which had long betrayed significant working-class struggles
since 1926. Thatcher's role was to deliver the final blow to these already
weakened organisations, which had become hollow shells from within.
The task of this analysis is not about mourning but about
constructing: forming rank-and-file committees and a revolutionary
internationalist party that can truly represent the working class against both
employers and bureaucratic structures that claim to speak for it. This is the
lesson of 1926, 1984–85, and every major working-class defeat in British
history. It is the lesson that Andrews' "unmaking" framework, despite
its genuine sympathy for working people, consistently inhibits readers from
understanding.
