Ariana E. Vigil, Understanding Francisco Goldman (Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press, 2018), 141 pp.

There's a certain advantage to living in a small country like Guatemala, I think. You don't feel so distant from political reality there. When things happen, they almost seem to unfold on a Shakespearean stage, with the audience so close they can become actors too. This is partly what Joseph Brodsky meant when he wrote that small countries have big politics”.

Francisco Goldman

“As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.”

— Alberto Manguel

“I feel a responsibility, as I get older, to be responsible for what I've experienced, to what I've lived and been in a position to witness. I realise now that, as a consequence of having lived the life I have, quite apart from the one, as I understand it, lived by most American writers, maybe I now know some things and have some stories to tell that others don't know about or wouldn't be able to tell. Maybe there's an intrinsic value in that lived experience and knowledge, though of course what you do with it is everything.”

Francisco Goldman

The deeper the literature is, and the more it is imbued with the desire to shape life, the more significantly and dynamically it will be able to 'picture' life."

Leon Trotsky

Francisco Goldman is best known as a novelist and reporter whose work centres on Central America and on the moral and human consequences of violence, state terror and corruption. A large part of his work has centred on Guatemala, exile, memory and state violence are common themes of his writing. He is best known for the investigative account The Art of Political Murder, which traces the 1998 assassination of Bishop Juan José Gerardi and the political forces that sought to cover it up. Goldman's writing blends literary narrative, reportage and personal memoir to render victims’ lives visible — a valuable contribution that nonetheless requires political grounding to explain the class and imperialist forces behind the crimes he documents.

Ariana E. Vigil's Understanding Francisco Goldman is a highly regarded academic examination of the work of this gifted and important writer. It must be said from the start that this book is long overdue. Goldman was born to a Guatemalan mother and Jewish American father. Goldman's heritage has shaped his unique perspective and significantly influenced his literary themes.

Goldman documents, with clarity, the human costs of imperialism, military repression, and oligarchic rule. He emphasises the victims—peasants, indigenous communities, journalists and dissidents—and helps break through the complacent narratives of Western media. His moral outrage identifies perpetrators and abuses, but he rarely traces those abuses to the underlying dynamics of capitalist accumulation and imperial rivalry.

What is missing from Goldman's worldview is an understanding that wars, coups and economic “reforms” are expressions of the fundamental contradiction between social production and private ownership; without that materialist analysis, denunciations risk becoming appeals for better conduct by the same ruling class that profits from repression. Goldman’s solutions tend to expose corruption, strengthen human rights mechanisms, or press for better governance. These remain within the terrain of bourgeois politics and cannot uproot the capitalist interests—both domestic oligarchies and imperial powers—that sustain inequality and violence. While Goldman documents social suffering, he does not generally articulate a strategy centred on independent working-class political organisation.

To Vigil’s credit, she sets Goldman’s work within a broader process: the violent integration of Latin America into global capitalism under structural adjustment, privatisation, and the erosion of state provision. As she explains in this description of her own book: “In Understanding Francisco Goldman, the first book-length study of Goldman's life and work, I begin with a biographical chapter drawn largely from Goldman's essays and interviews. The following analytical chapters, one for each of Goldman's four novels and two works of nonfiction, provide biographical, historical, political, and literary context for each work and explore its major themes. My book examines the influence of literary and political history on the development of Goldman's characters and themes, as well as his use of multiple literary genres and the role of humour in his work. I underscore that major themes in Goldman's work—migration, political violence, love, and loss—are explored across nations and time periods, and that they remain significant today. In Understanding Francisco Goldman, I draw connections between the writer's life and work and demonstrate the appreciation he deserves for his influence, diversity, and breadth. Through his thoughtful, intellectual, transnational writing, Goldman expands the definition of what it means to be American.”[1]

The controversial and radical nature of Goldman’s work is certainly behind the lack of capitalist media coverage of this book. One of the few reviews was by Judith Sierra-Rivera, who perceptively writes: “Ariana E. Vigil has brought us a much-awaited comprehensive study on Francisco Goldman’s writing. Even though critical articles and chapters on specific works or aspects have proliferated in recent years, Understanding Francisco Goldman offers a broad overview of the author’s development, his significance across a variety of literary genres and traditions, and his complex position as a cultural translator in the hemispheric Americas. This is precisely Vigil’s most provocative proposition: “Goldman’s insistence on continuing to publish in and for U.S. venues indicates his commitment to not only translating Latin American issues to a U.S. and global audiences but also underscoring how interconnected these issues are, particularly for U.S. citizens and residents”.

While she follows this line of analysis throughout her presentation of Goldman’s production and in dialogue with other critics, she does so in a widely accessible discourse that serves both literary scholars and other readers. Vigil describes Goldman as “a truly American writer,” referring not only to the US but also to the rest of the North American continent and the Caribbean. She traces his racial and cultural heritage, birth and upbringing, education and career, and travels to help readers understand Goldman’s elusive identity. Although Goldman was born and raised in Boston, his mother is Guatemalan and his father is Jewish-American, which meant he always travelled to Guatemala, spoke English and Spanish, and, most importantly, navigated a complicated heritage. Furthermore, his travels and readings led him to move constantly among different countries on the continent and to eagerly embrace literary influences from a wide range of authors and styles, such as Truman Capote’s New Journalism and Gabriel García Márquez’s magical realism”.[2]

Goldman’s investigations teach readers how bourgeois states and imperial powers conceal crimes, how impunity is institutionalised, and how liberal human rights discourse can be recuperated by imperial policy. These lessons are directly relevant to exposing modern wars, occupations and media complicity. However, a serious, disciplined study of a contemporary writer such as Francisco Goldman requires more than literary taste or moral sympathy. It calls for a method that relates aesthetic form to social content, traces ideas to class forces, and connects interpretation to political practice. This is where a Marxist study is necessary. A Marxist understanding is not merely interpretive: it clarifies how culture reproduces or challenges ruling-class interests. When Goldman depicts violence, displacement, or memory, the reader should ask: whose interests are served by particular framings of suffering? Does the narrative naturalise imperialism, or expose its mechanics?

Studying Francisco Goldman’s work should strengthen readers' historical memory and human empathy while sharpening their class analysis. Francisco Goldman provides indispensable testimony about violence and impunity in Latin America. His work advances conscience and awareness. But to end the cycle he documents, it requires moving beyond humanitarian critique to a revolutionary strategy that uproots the capitalist and imperialist interests that produce repression—building independent working-class political power on an international scale.

Marxism does not reduce art to propaganda, but it insists that art is embedded in social life. As Marx warned against speculative mystification and Trotsky against empty formalism, the aim of any Marxist is a historically concrete, dialectical criticism that strengthens the working class’s understanding and capacity to act. Cultural study—of Goldman or any writer—must therefore be a component of socialist education.

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[1] http://arianavigil.com/

[2] Ariana E. Vigil, Understanding Francisco Goldman (Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press, 2018), 141 pp. Reviewed by Judith Sierra-Rivera,

Bob Dylan Outside the Law: The Poetics of John Wesley Harding by Robert Reginio – 27 Sept. 2025 Palgrave Macmillan

 “Words are always filled with historical meanings, and that makes language a shifting medium through which we see the world. The songs on John Wesley Harding have shifting meanings, too. They’re so layered in terms of intertextual references that the words are less about objectivity and more about being enmeshed in history. When we’re in this language, we don’t own it or use it to signify. We’re just borrowing this system of significance for our time on earth.”

Robert Reginio 

“To live outside the law, you must be honest.”

 “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” Bob Dylan

"There must be some way out of here / Said the Joker to the thief / There's too much confusion / I can't get any relief".

"All Along the Watchtower

I pity the poor immigrant/who wishes he would’ve stayed home’

Who uses all his power to do evil,/But in the end is always left so alone

I Pity the Poor Immigrant

"No martyr is among you now / Whom you can call your own / So go on your way accordingly / And know you're not alone".

I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine"

Bob Dylan Outside the Law: The Poetics of John Wesley Harding by Robert Reginio argues that the 1967 album is a sophisticated, critical response to the social turmoil of the 1960s in America rather than a retreat by Dylan to his folk roots. It shows that John Wesley Harding is not merely a record but a pedagogical tool that, if studied properly and with clarity, can reveal how art, politics, and class formation interact with the kind of political organisation the working-class needs.

Reginio’s book, according to Dr Barry Faulk (Florida State University), is a "pathbreaking study" and a "necessary corrective" to existing scholarship.": Reginio opposes the common assumption that John Wesley Harding was a simple, acoustic retreat because of his 1966 motorcycle accident. Instead, he argues the songs use "archaic tonality" to mask a complex, biting commentary on American politics and the myth of the "Summer of Love".

A word of caution is needed, as the reader should know that Reginio takes a “Post Structuralist Approach” to Dylan, drawing on theories by figures such as Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva. Both are similar in their philosophical outlooks, with Jacques Derrida advancing “deconstruction, to explain that there is nothing outside the text, he elevated language and textual play above an independent, objective social reality. This move dissolves stable reference, undermines the possibility of objective truth and relativises the relation between thought and material conditions. As for Julia Kristeva, drawing on psychoanalysis and semiotics, emphasizes the semiotic and the subject’s internal, linguistic drives. While opposing the philosophical outlook of both Derrida and Kristeva

By 1967, Dylan had broken with the role assigned to him by the folk-liberal milieu. As David Walsh notes in his long appraisal of Dylan’s trajectory, the artist “rejected the role that had been prepared for him by the ‘left’ folk music world” and moved across social and cultural circles rather than forging a consistent political line. John Wesley Harding should be read in the wake of that rupture: it follows the electric period and his motorcycle accident, and it arrives amid the radicalisation and disillusionment of the late 1960s. The record’s pared-down sound and biblical/shadow-play imagery mark both withdrawal and renewed moral interrogation.

John Wesley Harding is one of my favourite Bob Dylan albums and is one of the most important records for anyone studying culture and politics from the 1960s. It marks a decisive stylistic and ethical shift from the electric confrontations of 1965–66 and the explicit protest songs of 1962–64 to a leaner, quieter, quasi-biblical mode. To understand its significance for Marxist study, we must situate the album within Dylan’s trajectory and the wider political context.

After the electrified breakthrough and the controversial Newport performance in 1965, and following his 1966 motorcycle crash, Dylan’s public persona retreated while his songwriting changed. Critics and historians have noted that his move away from the role of “people’s troubadour” combined personal, musical and commercial factors, producing work that was inward-looking and allegorical rather than the direct indictment of power of earlier songs. Musically, John Wesley Harding strips arrangements to the essentials; lyrically, it draws on folk, country, and biblical imagery, producing ambiguous parables rather than straightforward protest.

Reginio correctly situates the album (1967) within the political convulsions of the 1960s. As James Brewer writes, “Anyone old enough by the summer of 1968 to be conscious of events will remember the upheavals rocking the political landscape. Younger people with a historical awareness will surely have some knowledge of them as well. On March 31, 1968, US President Lyndon B. Johnson, in the face of mounting anti-war sentiment, shocked the country by announcing he would not seek re-election. Only weeks before the release of Music From Big Pink, Robert F. Kennedy, by then a leading candidate for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, was assassinated. Dr Martin Luther King, who had come out strongly against US intervention in Indochina, was in Memphis, Tennessee, in support of the sanitation workers' strike when he was assassinated in early April. Inner city rebellions exploded in major US cities after King’s murder, as they had the year before, dubbed the “Long Hot Summer of 1967.”[1] 

“All Along the Watchtower”

The album’s sparse arrangements—on these two songs, acoustic guitars, organ, restrained rhythm—force attention onto language and narrative. This austerity is not retreat into solipsism but a formal device that foregrounds moral judgment and parable.

Songs like “All Along the Watchtower” (though released on later singles/performances) and many tracks on the record use legal, outlaw, and prophetic imagery—figures “outside the law,” testimonies, judgments. The album’s title itself evokes the frontier judge and a biblical outlaw archetype, blending American folk law and biblical registry to question authority and culpability.

Dylan deploys ambiguous narrators and compressed, elliptical lines. This resists facile appropriation by liberal managers of culture who wanted a single “voice of a generation.” As Elijah Wald’s account of Dylan’s musical path shows, Dylan was always a musical sponge whose form choices shifted with social circles and aims.[2]

All Along the Watchtower is one of Bob Dylan’s most enigmatic and influential songs. The three-stanza lyric compresses a parable-like scene—watchmen, a joker and a thief, a princess in a tower—into a terse, prophetic tableau. The song’s spare, elliptical language and biblical cadence mark a shift from Dylan’s mid‑60s surrealism and topical songs toward a more aphoristic, mythic idiom. Its meaning has been variously read as an existential fable, a critique of social order, or a poetic expression of historical rupture. The most famous reinterpretation is Jimi Hendrix’s 1968 electric cover, which transformed the song’s sound and popular resonance. Numerous artists have since covered the song.[3]

In I Pity the Poor Immigrant Dylan’s figure of the immigrant—vulnerable, suspect, morally ambivalent—maps onto real processes under capitalism: forced migration, precarious labour, and social exclusion. Such conditions are not isolated misfortunes but structural consequences of capitalist accumulation and imperialism.

One thing worth noting about the album's title is the figure of John Wesley Harding. As Tony Attwood from the website Untold Dylan writes, “Dylan’s preoccupation with outlaws does intrigue. And especially his tendency to upgrade certified nutcases to well-behaved, humane role models. Jesse James gets a single, friendly name check (in “Outlaw Blues”), and in “Absolutely Sweet Marie”, he plants the paradox that to live outside the law, you must be honest. A first standard-bearer, then, of that motto is John Wesley Harding. The half-beatification of Billy the Kid (1973) may be attributed to Peckinpah or to the angelic aura of the protagonist, Kris Kristofferson, but with “Hurricane” (1975), Dylan rather breaks his neck when he passionately defends a repeatedly convicted murderer and declares him a hero. A low point came with “Joey” (1975), the epic hymn to the immoral Mafia killer Joey Gallo.[4] It should be noted that Hurricane Carter was exonerated and released.

Dylan’s preoccupation with rescuing ruffians from historical obscurity aside for serious readers and students, John Wesley Harding provides a useful case study in the relation of artist to class struggle — Dylan’s shift underscores that cultural figures do not automatically translate artistic dissidence into political leadership. As David Walsh in his article (Does Bob Dylan deserve the Nobel Prize?) Dylan’s career shows the danger of individualistic detachment and the absorption into celebrity culture, which can dilute oppositional potential. There are limits to Dylan's cultural reformism; the album’s parabolic language can obscure material causes and class relations. This reinforces why Marxist cultural analysis insists on linking aesthetics to social forces and political organisation.

As David Walsh points out, “Bob Dylan was neither the first nor the last American popular artist, or artist of any kind, to imagine he could outwit historical and social processes–which threatened to 'slow down' or even block his rise–by avoiding their most vexing questions and problems. What he didn’t realise was that in turning his back on social life and softening his attitude toward the existing order, he was at the same time cutting himself off from the source of artistic inspiration, that he was surrendering forever what was best in him.”

 

About the Author

Robert Reginio is Professor of English at Alfred University, where he currently serves as the Margaret and Barbara Hagar Professor of the Humanities. He has published widely on Bob Dylan, including essays in The Politics and Power of Bob Dylan’s Live Performances: Play a Song for Me (Routledge, 2023) and Multitudes: Teaching Bob Dylan (Bloomsbury, 2024). He has presented his work on Bob Dylan at several international conferences and symposia and serves on the editorial board of the journal The Dylan Review.

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[1] Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band—a documentary film- www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/05/25/once-m25.html

[2] An interview with Elijah Wald, author of Dylan Goes Electric!- www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/02/13/ojlf-f13.html

[3] americana-uk.com/versions-all-along-the-watchtower

[4]  John Wesley Harding (1967). The argument against.bob-dylan.org.uk/archives/8381

A People’s History of Football By Mickaël Correia Translated by Fionn Petch Pluto Press 2026 £ 16.99

“Complaining about boring football is a little like complaining about the sad ending of King Lear: it misses the point somehow.”

― Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch

“In football, everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team."

- Jean-Paul Sartre

“I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it.”

― Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch

“Football has become one of the most profitable businesses in the world, organised not for play but rather to impede it. […] Luckily, on the field you can still see some insolent rascal, who sets aside the script and commits the blunder of dribbling past the entire opposing side, the referee and the crowd in the stands, all for the carnal delight of embracing the forbidden adventure of freedom.”

- Eduardo Galeano, in Football in Sun and Shadow

At the heart of Football, the world’s most popular sport, there's a conundrum.  On the one hand, you have a grasping global capitalist elite that owns the game who will stop at nothing to make more money out of the beautiful game(See Robert Stevens ’ Billionaires’ European Super League proposal shelved amid mass opposition from football fans), on the other, you have fans who still retain a love of the game in its purest and non-capitalist form.[1]

Stevens's article shows that workers and youth, who still make up the bulk of football's audience, are not a passive body that, in the words of Mickaël Correia, bends to “logic of the market” but, time and again, have sought to “shake itself free” of greedy capitalist control of the game. It is still a “crucible of resistance to this control.

As an addition to Correia’s book, it is well worth the reader having a look at Gavin Kitching’s article, The Origins of Football: History, Ideology and the Making of the People’s Game. In this article, he examines how the modern sport emerged not as a neutral cultural pastime but as a social product shaped by class relations, schooling, institutions and ideology. Kitching traces the transition from medieval “folk” games to codified, organised association football. It shows how the game’s form, meanings and social functions were transformed by industrialisation, urbanisation, public schooling and the rise of mass spectatorship. He exposes the ideological work of institutions—schools, the press, the FA—in turning a variety of popular practices into a “people’s game” whose apparent spontaneity masks specific class origins and power relations.[2]

Having said this, one critique of Correia’s book is that it offers too little space to the working class and its historical struggles against capitalism. Roger Domeneghetti, writing in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), makes this succinct point. “Correia’s history is epic in its scope, taking us from the origins of modern football in the late nineteenth century to the present day, from the playing fields of England’s public schools to the streets of Senegal. But this breadth is also the book’s weakness: in barely twenty pages, for example, we are taken on a whistle-stop tour of football in Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain and Stalin’s Soviet Union. The antagonisms between the respective dictatorships’ co-option of the sport for political ends and fans’ use of stadiums as a means of resistance are discussed but never afforded the space they deserve.

Correia acknowledges that the path he treads through football’s past is “meandering and fragmentary”, but this too is a weakness. Did the British football hooligans of the 1980s really have the same concerns and motivations as Palestinians trying to express a sense of national identity through football, or as the avowedly left-wing fan base of FC St Pauli of Hamburg? Beyond some loose notion of resistance to whatever form the mainstream (football) establishment in each country takes, the book never really makes a coherent argument as to how, or even whether, they did.”[3]

Even a cursory look at Correia’s A People’s History of Football would tell the reader that this is not a neutral “sports book”. Rather, it should be seen as a social-scientific document: a history of a mass cultural form shaped by capitalist property relations, class struggle and the politics of the state. Correia’s history explains why an episode like the Super League is not an aberration but an expression of capitalist accumulation in sport, how leagues are now nodes of global finance, vulnerable to crises and subject to speculative pressures. This explains recurring conflicts over ticket prices, gentrification of stadium areas, and players' labour conditions. It should be noted that not all footballers are multi-millionaires.

Correia’s book has a very contemporary relevance; he relates how football’s commercialisation and financialisation flow from capitalist accumulation and the demands of global markets. However briefly, he explains why fans, workers, and local communities are frequently in conflict with owners and governing bodies — these are class and social-interest conflicts, not mere “culture wars.” Also, how periodic crises (financial crises, pandemics) reveal the systemic contradictions of commodified sport.

Global context

Correia situates football’s transformation from a local, working‑class pastime into a global, profit‑driven industry within the same logic that governs modern imperialism, i.e. the concentration and internationalisation of capital. The expansion of transnational finance, media conglomerates and corporate ownership has turned clubs, leagues and broadcast rights into assets for speculation and surplus extraction. The 2021 European Super League episode illustrates this dynamic: billionaire owners and Wall Street financiers sought to “close” competition to guarantee revenue streams and asset values, treating clubs as franchises rather than social institutions.

Correia’s book addresses the international implications of this global, profit-driven industry for the future struggles of the working class and why those struggles must be international in both form and content. Football’s production chains and revenue flows are transnational: players move across borders, TV rights are sold worldwide, and merchandise is manufactured in low‑wage countries. Consequently, struggles are interconnected. When owners seek to centralise revenue (ESL) or when broadcasters pressure for cost efficiencies, the consequences reverberate across countries — layoffs in stadium workforces, intensified shift patterns for broadcast crews, and rising ticket and subscription costs that drive fans out of the game.

An isolated national struggle cannot stop global capital. The correct response is international working‑class coordination: rank‑and‑file committees of stadium workers, broadcast unions organised across borders, and fan organisations linking campaigns to worker demands. Partial reforms (fan seats on boards, wage floors) are necessary but insufficient. Correia’s framework leads to a strategic conclusion: only the socialisation of the commanding heights of the sporting economy — democratically controlled international public infrastructures for mass sport and public broadcasting under workers’ and communities’ control — can root out the capitalist incentives that create dispossession and commodification. This requires an international political movement of the working class that moves beyond national compromises. The strategic response is an international working‑class organisation that fuses fan resistance with the rank‑and‑file power of stadium and broadcast workers to reclaim the game as a social, not a speculative, resource.

 

 

 

 

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[1] Billionaires’ European Super League proposal shelved amid mass opposition from football fans- www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/24/supe-a24.html

[2] The Origins of Football History Ideology and the Making of the People's Game- History Workshop Journal No. 79 (SPRING 2015), pp. 127-153 (27 pages)

[3] The other football: A Meandering People’s history of the beautiful game.www.the-tls.com/regular-features/in-brief/a-peoples-history-of-football-mickael-correia-book-review-roger-domeneghetti

Joy Crookes — Juniper (CD): 2025

 

“I get angry at the cost of living rising because I know the struggle to pay for your life fractures relationships.”

Joy Crookes

"First, art is the cognition of life. Art is not the free play of fantasy, feelings, and moods: art is not the expression of merely the subjective sensations and experiences of the poet... Like science, art cognises life"

Aleksandr Voronsky

"The peculiarity of the artist lies only in the fact that he unconsciously separates and notices only the typical, and this typical is not abstract, but concrete. It is an object and exists in the form of images".

Aleksandr Voronsky

It is unquestionably true that the need for art is not created by economic conditions. But neither is the need for food created by economics. On the contrary, the need for food and warmth creates economics.

Leon Trotsky

Joy Crookes (born 1998) is a British singer-songwriter of Bangladeshi and Irish heritage whose work blends soul, R&B, jazz, and chamber pop with sharply observed autobiographical lyrics. She emerged as a distinctive voice in the 2010s-2020s for her warm, expressive vocal delivery and songs that interweave family history, migration, class and intimate relationships. Her debut album, Skin (2021), and earlier EPs and singles established her reputation for crafting songs that make private memory speak to broader social conditions.

Her debut album, Skin, and her follow-up album, Juniper, were written while embedded in the stifling atmosphere of the capitalist cultural economy—the crisis of the music industry and streaming economics shape who survives and what reaches audiences. Crookes frequently weaves social commentary into her music, drawing on her South London upbringing and Bangladeshi and Irish heritage to explore systemic issues. Her debut album, Skin, was particularly noted for its "vibrant politics and beautiful storytelling", as were all her previous works.

“You seem to forget you came here through a woman, show some... respect.” – was seen as a challenge to patriarchy and male-dominated capitalist political systems, and was written in response to the 2016 US election and the experiences of women in her family. Kingdom": Written the day after the 2019 UK General Election, it critiqued the re-election of the Conservative party and the resulting "wave of anti-immigration sentiment". “No such thing as a Kingdom When tomorrow's done for the children.” – Suggests that the state has failed the future generations.

Joy Crookes’ second album, Juniper (2025), is a richly textured work that blends soul, R&B, jazz, and chamber pop with candid lyrics about family, class, identity, and love. Musically and lyrically, it rewards close, repeated listening: warm string and jazz-influenced arrangements sit beside spare piano ballads and beat-driven songs. At the same time, Crookes’ voice moves between intimacy and soaring intensity. The album is notable for its ability to make personal memories and family stories speak to broader social conditions.

Listeners should pay close attention to the jazz chords, strings and restrained production, which create a humane atmosphere that contrasts with the alienation Crookes describes. “Mathematics” is a beautifully crafted song and my favourite on the album. As a social document shaped by class relations and cultural forms, it works on many levels. Crookes often grounds other songs in family portraits and migration histories.

It would help the listener to transcribe the lyrics and identify concrete images, used by Crookes such as repeated motifs, numbers, calculation, measurement), and who speaks. Her mother appears in several songs, suggesting an extraordinarily close bond between mother and daughter. Her words, arrangement, tempo, and vocal tone reflect her worldview.

Crooke’s music is a confirmation that Art cannot be separated from the social forces that produce it. But she is different and an exception. Most mainstream music globally is banal and controlled by corporate entities that shape what reaches mass audiences and how artists survive the music industry’s exploitation and streaming stratification. Crookes’ Juniper stands apart in that it centres working-class life and minority experience rather than offering mere escapism.

Joy Crookes’ Juniper is more than an accomplished musical second album: it is a resource for developing working-class cultural literacy. Reading songs as documents of lived social relations trains the political imagination—turning private memory into collective understanding and, ultimately, organised action. Her album should be treated as both an artistic and pedagogical text. A socialist analysis of her work will help build a socialist consciousness and a socially equal society based on need, not profit.

A People’s History of Portugal-By Raquel Varela and Roberto della Santa Foreword by Michael Roberts Afterword by Gordon Lafer-Translated by Ana Daglish de Almeida-Pluto Press 2025

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past"

George Orwell 1984

“One of the deepest impulses in man is the impulse to record, to scratch a drawing on a tusk or keep a diary… The enduring value of the past is, one might say, the very basis of civilisation.”

John Jay Chapman, American author (1862-1933)

“History is the study of all the world’s crime.”

Voltaire, French writer and philosopher (1694-1778)

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.”

Alan Bennett, English playwright (1934- )

A People’s History of Portugal is a valuable reconstruction of the last two hundred years of class struggle in Portugal. Raquel Varela writes, “In A People’s History of Portugal, written with Roberto della Santa, we develop the idea that Portuguese capitalism was dependent on British capitalism, in the sense of Ellen Wood’s notion of capitalism being exported by the British Empire to the periphery and semi-periphery”.[1]

Raquel Varela and Roberto Della Santa are contemporary historians whose work on Portugal must be assessed not as an abstract literary or moral account but as a political and social explanation rooted in concrete class relations. The central question posed by Santa and Varela and their “people’s history” is: which social forces and material conditions produced the events described, and how did political forms (parties, the army, unions) mediate the class struggle in Portugal?

Both Raquel Varela’s and Roberto Della Santa’s work belongs to a broad current in historiography often called the people’s history genre: recovering the struggles, experiences and agency of oppressed groups omitted from elite-centred narratives. This genre has considerable value insofar as it corrects bourgeois forgetfulness and restores the working class and oppressed peoples to the centre of historical inquiry.

One of the most important exponents of the genre put this way: “I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the 'obsolete' hand-loom weaver, the 'utopian' artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backwards looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience”.[2]

While this genre is legitimate and entirely worthwhile, the reader should know that, from the standpoint of orthodox Marxism, the recovery of forgotten facts is only the first step. Marxist historiography insists that facts be integrated into a scientific, materialist explanation that locates political consciousness and social movements in the social relations of production, class antagonisms and objective economic laws.

The father of Russian Marxism Georgi Plekhanov insisted that institutions, laws, and human ideas must be explained by deeper material relations and class interests, writing "The historical development of mankind is reasonable in the sense that it is law-governed; but the law-governed nature of historical development does not yet prove at all that its ultimate cause must be sought in the views of men or in their opinions".[3]

Why is Varela’s and Santa’s A People’s History of Portugal an important popular intervention? Because it recovers the social struggles, popular organisations and class conflicts that conventional bourgeois national histories either marginalise or explain away. From a classical Marxist standpoint, the value of Varela’s work lies less in doctrinal purity than in its insistence that classes and masses make history or as Karl Marx put it so succinctly ““Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionising themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language.”[4]

From the standpoint of a materialist conception of history, the people’s history method has two strengths: it exposes elite crimes and centres subordinate agency; and, in doing so, it helps break the ideological monopoly of official history. It also has its limits, as Marxist historian Tom Mackaman pointed out in his assessment of Howard Zinn. “ While it helps bring to light facts omitted from standard textbooks, Zinn’s work can only serve as a beginning in understanding US history. There is an unmistakable anachronistic, even a-historical, thread in A People’s History. If it has a theme, it is an endless duel between “resistance” and “control,” two of Zinn’s preferred words.

Populating his historical stage are, on the one side, a virtually unbroken line of “Establishment” villains who exercise this control and, on the other, benighted groups who often struck out against their plight. The names and dates change; the story does not. Complexity and contradiction do not rest comfortably in such a schema. The limitations of this approach are most evident in Zinn’s treatment of the American Revolution and the US Civil War, which he presents as instances of the elite beguiling the population to strengthen its control”.[5]

Raquel Varela’s erudition is plain to see in this scholarly book. Her work is noted for its attention to labour, popular movements and transnational dimensions of working-class struggle. She makes an important empirical contribution by documenting struggles and networks often neglected by mainstream historiography. Her work helps restore the subjectivity and agency of the working class to historical study, an indispensable corrective to bourgeois historiography.

But from the standpoint of Marxist science, any historiography must move beyond documentation to explanation, and that requires a mapping of the class composition and material interests of actors. It also needs an analysis of how material constraints shaped state and party forms. If left at the level of primarily descriptive, it can be hijacked by reformism or identity politics. Unfortunately, most books of this genre fall into this ideological trap.

In this book, Varela writes of the experiences of peasants, workers, and popular movements — showing how changes in production, imperialism and property relations shape politics and ideas. Varela’s narrative demonstrates how Portugal’s late and dependent capitalist development, colonial plunder and landlordism produced a fragmented bourgeoisie, a precarious working class and mass emigration — objective conditions that repeatedly gave rise to political radicalisation.

Varela and Santa reconstruct crucial episodes — the liberal revolutions, the rise of the republic, the consolidation of Salazar’s Estado Novo, the colonial wars, and the Carnation Revolution of 1974 — as outcomes of deeper economic and social contradictions. [6] Varela’s people-centred focus complements previous historiography showing how popular assemblies, strikes and local organisations expressed and attempted to resolve those objective contradictions. The book makes clear that Portugal’s political oscillations — reactionary regimes, fragile reformisms, anti-colonial wars — were not merely the result of individual leaders but rooted in capitalist development and imperial relations. The book is valuable because, by narrating the lives and struggles of ordinary people, Varela helps break bourgeois historiographical isolation of politics from production and class interest.

While invaluable as social history, Varela is not an orthodox Marxist, and her account can only understate the decisive political question of leadership.  The Carnation Revolution contained both an immense revolutionary potential and a political defeat: social democracy, Stalinism and pseudo-left currents helped channel working-class power back into capitalist institutions.[7]

Raquel Varela’s A People’s History of Portugal is well worth reading, and I would recommend this book. It is a crucial corrective to elite-centred history: it returns the reader to popular agency, material forces and class struggle. Despite its limitations, it offers a rich source of historiography and allows for rigorous analysis by general readers and Marxists alike. Only by combining social-historical recovery with Leninist-Trotskyist political organisation can the working class carry out the socialist transformation of society. Given the rise of Trump and his fascist oligarchy, this is an urgent historical necessity.

 

Notes

Social Conflicts in the Portuguese Revolution, 1974–1975: Raquel Varela and Joana Alcântara Le Travail, FALL 2014 AUTOMNE, Vol. 74

Raquel Varela. A People’s History of the Portuguese Revolution. Ed. By Peter Robinson. Transl. [from Portuguese] by Sean Purdy. Pluto Press

Fifty years since Portugal’s Carnation Revolution-Paul Mitchell- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/04/24/fgtz-a24.html

 

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[1] https://raquelcardeiravarela.wordpress.com/2024/05/01

[2] The Making of the English Working Class-E P Thompson

[3] Georgi Plekhanov’s The Development of the Monist View of History

[4] Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

[5] Howard Zinn, 1922-2010-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/02/zinn-f15.html

[6] See https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2020/05/a-review-of-raquel-varela-peoples.html

[7] See https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2024/12/the-portuguese-workers-revolution-1974.html

The Nazis, Capitalism and the Working Class by Donny Gluckstein Haymarket Books 26 July 2012

"Fascism is the political punishment meted out to the working class for the squandering of opportunities to overthrow the capitalist system”

Leon Trotsky

“If, against all expectations, Germany finds itself in a difficult situation, then she can be sure that the Soviet people will come to Germany's aid and will not allow Germany to be strangled. The Soviet Union wants to see a strong Germany, and we will not allow Germany to be thrown to the ground.”

Joseph Stalin[1]

“All these things are still apparent today. You Americans can see for yourselves how impossible it is to feed the German people from the German soil itself. From the viewpoint of a historian's perspective, one could say that Hitler would never have arisen if the Allies had not treated Germany so poorly. Justice Jackson said so himself. Today, things are more impossible than ever. The East has been taken away from Germany - in other words, hunger created Hitler, and paradoxically, Hitler created still greater hunger.”

Hans Frank[2]

“Not only did waging war against Hitler fail to save the Jews, but it may also be that the war itself brought on the Final Solution of genocide. This is not to remove the responsibility from Hitler and the Nazis. Still, there is much evidence that Germany's anti-Semitic actions, cruel as they were, would not have turned to mass murder were it not for the psychic distortions of war, acting on already distorted minds. Hitler's early aim was forced emigration, not extermination, but the frenzy of it created an atmosphere in which the policy turned to genocide.”

Howard Zinn[3]

It is a little surprising that a book of this significance has been so little reviewed. In fact, I would go as far as to say it has been completely ignored by the capitalist media. This is not surprising given that it purports to be a Marxist analysis of the rise of fascism in Germany and examines the struggles of the working class.

Gluckstein’s The Nazis, Capitalism and the Working Class is well-written and researched. It addresses a vital question for those interested in what social forces produced Nazism, and how the global working class should respond. This is not merely an academic debate. The answers determine whether workers adopt an independent socialist strategy or are diverted into alliances that preserve capitalism and open the road to mass fascism and barbarism. Gluckstein’s book is a significant attempt to understand the rise of fascism from the standpoint of the materialist conception of history. The reader needs to locate fascism in the development of capitalist class relations, not as an aberrant moral failing or solely a product of culture.

Gluckstein is not an economic historian, but his book does show that structural economic crisis and the disintegration of ruling-class authority created the conditions for the rise of the fascists. Marxist analysis explains Nazism as a political instrument forged out of definite class needs and crisis tendencies within German and world capitalism. Adam Tooze’s economic study, The Wages of Destruction, demonstrates how the Nazi project was shaped by the drive of German capital to overcome its relative decline and secure raw materials, markets and strategic position—in short, the connection of militarism, imperialism and genocide to economic aims.

In the introduction to his book, which is well worth reading, Tooze puts forward his basic thesis: “The originality of National Socialism was that rather than meekly accepting a place for Germany within a global economic order dominated by the affluent English-speaking countries, Hitler sought to mobilise the pent-up frustrations of his population to mount an epic challenge to this order. Repeating what Europeans had done across the globe over the previous three centuries, Germany would carve out its own imperial hinterland; by one last great land grab in the East, it would create the self-sufficient basis both for domestic affluence and the platform necessary to prevail in the coming superpower competition with the United States.... The aggression of Hitler’s regime can thus be rationalised as an intelligible response to the tensions stirred up by the uneven development of global capitalism, tensions that are of course still with us today.”[4] As Tooze points out, the German ruling class, fragmented and terrified by mass working-class struggles, turned to the far right as a means of defending property, reimposing discipline and preparing for future imperialist war aims.

Gluckstein’s work tends to emphasise aspects of this history; however, not being a classical Marxist is a handicap.  A Marxist critique would dig deeper. It needs to be explained how capitalist reorganisation, imperial rivalries and the political sclerosis of working-class leadership created the objective basis for Nazism—and why only a revolutionary alternative rooted in working-class independence could have prevented it.

The political defeat of the German working class was not a result of workers’ “backwardness” alone but of the collapse and betrayal of their organisations: Social Democracy’s subordination to bourgeois parliamentary politics and Stalinism’s bureaucratic compromises and purges left workers without revolutionary leadership. The trade-union bureaucracy and social-democratic leaderships, by integrating into the state apparatus and policing class discipline, blocked independent mass action. As Trotsky warned, the bureaucratized unions tend to “grow together” with state power and capital—creating a political vacuum that fascist movements exploit.

Nazism fused older anti-Jewish prejudices with virulent anti-Bolshevism to mobilise the petty bourgeoisie and small sections of the working class against organised labour and socialism. It should be noted that the genocidal culmination—the Holocaust—cannot be divorced from the imperial-colonial aims of the Nazi regime and its need to smash the labour movement and seize “Lebensraum” in the East (Imperialism and the political economy of the Holocaust). Ideology mattered—but ideology itself was shaped and harnessed to class strategy.

Donny Gluckstein comes from a political milieu associated with the Lambertist tradition; historically, this current has tended toward nationalist and economistic deviations from the Trotskyist method. The Lambertist milieu and the POID‑derived formations trace their politics to Pierre Lambert’s line. Historically, Lambertism emerged as a response to the crisis of the post‑war left: a stress on trade‑union work, factory embedding, and the construction of broad “workers’ parties.” But as documented in the history of the French PCI/OCI, Lambert’s priorities—rooted in unions and seeking broad alliances—produced persistent tendencies toward centrism, accommodation to union bureaucracies, and political compromises that diluted a Leninist program.[5]

Many on the pseudo left tend to treat Nazism primarily as a quasi-irrational cultural or psychological phenomenon, divorced from capitalist interests. These risks mystify its social roots and underestimating the conscious role played by industrialists, financiers and the military bureaucracy in bringing Hitler to power.

Gluckstein’s book came under sustained attack primarily from his fellow pseudo-lefts, and two are worth mentioning. Tom Cord’s article in Fighting Talk, issue 23, addresses fascism as a political phenomenon that the left must confront. His piece raises useful questions about the social roots of far‑right movements and the failures of centrist parties. However, Cord’s article, aside from being a right-wing attack on Gluckstein, suffers from theoretical limits that require correction. The starting point of a genuinely revolutionary analysis must be the materialist method: ideas and movements are rooted in social relations and the class interests that those relations express. Any assessment of Nazism that abstracts from the objective interests and political role of German capitalism will be incomplete and in danger of demagogy, which is precisely the tone and content of Ford’s review of Gluckstein’s book.[6] I am unable to find any reply by Gluckstein regarding Cord’s attack on his book.

The "debate" between German Marxist Horst Haenisch and Donny Gluckstein was a far more substantial matter than Cord’s somewhat simplistic riposte. The debate took place through a series of written exchanges in the journal International Socialism between 2018 and 2019. The debate over whether the Holocaust is a particular specificity to Nazism or a universal manifestation of broader modern imperialism) was at the heart of this discussion. The answer to this conundrum can be found in the realm of dialectics. Particular forms emerge out of universal tendencies: the Holocaust must be understood as both an extreme, historically specific manifestation and as rooted in broader processes. On the universal level, capitalist imperialism, racial ideologies developed in colonialism, and the social crises of a decaying capitalism create conditions in which genocidal solutions become thinkable and implementable. The reader should note that the racialist ideology of the Nazis was the most extreme expression of a wider European and global tradition of colonial, racial pseudo-science and political violence.

Who are the actors?

Donny Gluckstein is a historian associated with the British SWP milieu whose work addresses fascism, class struggle and working‑class resistance. His writings often emphasise political and cultural factors alongside social causes. The British SWP evolved from the revolutionary left and developed into a large extra‑parliamentary organisation; over decades, critics on the Marxist left have charged it with political adaptation to trade‑union and extra‑parliamentary alliances, opportunist united‑front practices, and failures to break decisively with reformist perspectives.

Horst Haenisch is a contemporary German author and scholar associated with German Marxist historiography. He is best known for his 2017 book "Fascism and the Holocaust: Attempt at an Explanation".

Haenisch’s critique — insofar as it targeted excessive intellectualism, opportunism or sectarianism — has a legitimate core if you believe that Haenisch insists the party must be in organic relation to workers’ struggles. But when such critiques abandon dialectical analysis or slide into petty‑bourgeois rejection of theory, they become politically harmful. The famous debate between Trotsky and James Burnham is relevant to this situation. Trotsky warned that anti‑dialectical tendencies among intellectuals often lead them to inconsistent politics, saying, "The 'petty-bourgeois opposition' is fleeing from the hard reality of the world struggle into the ivory tower of abstract 'reason'. James Burnham’s famous rejection of dialectics in the 1939 debate became a vehicle for abandoning working‑class analysis and led to opportunist conclusions. Burnham ended his days as a right-wing mouthpiece for capitalism.

To summarise Haenisch's position, he believed the Holocaust was a unique event that was not simply the fault of the ruling class. He claims it is the only Nazi project that falls into the category of the "primacy of politics" over economics.

According to Google’s artificial intelligence, he uses the concept of Bonapartism to describe the Nazi state’s relative autonomy, suggesting the Nazi party acted like a "Praetorian Guard" that could pursue its own racist fantasies independently of immediate capitalist needs. He distinguishes Nazi antisemitism from general racism, characterising it as a deadly "antisemitism of reason" driven by middle-class competition for professional positions.

Readers should ask themselves the relevant methodological question: do arguments rest on a concrete, historically grounded analysis of class relations and state form — a materialist-dialectical determination — or on impressions, eclecticism or petty‑bourgeois moralising that detach ideas from class reality? When theory becomes a matter of rhetorical flourishes or pragmatism, it ceases to serve proletarian politics and becomes a barrier to building working‑class independence.

Intentionalism versus structuralism

The debate between Gluckstein and Haenisch, to put it simplistically, was over two contending historiographical schools of thought which currently dominate historiography regarding the rise of fascism and the Holocaust.

The intentionalist school emphasises decisions and individuals—most prominently Hitler and top Nazi leaders—as the causal centre. Structuralist/functionalist accounts emphasise impersonal social structures, administrative routines and systemic pressures that produced genocidal outcomes without requiring a single master plan. To put it simply, one is relatively close to a Marxist historiography, the other is not.

Do agency and leadership matter: Hitler, Heydrich, Himmler and the Nazi leadership were decisive agents who gave ideological content, legitimacy and directives that escalated persecution to extermination. This move towards extermination appeared at The Wannsee Conference (Berlin, January 20, 1942). It was a high‑level administrative meeting of senior Nazi officials that consolidated and coordinated the implementation of the regime’s policy of mass murder of Jews—what came to be called the “Final Solution.” Far from a sudden, isolated act of criminality, Wannsee formalised a process already rooted in the racist, expansionist and economic policies of the Nazi state that flowed from the contradictions of imperialist capitalism and Germany’s drive for living space in the East.

Structural conditions enabled and shaped those decisions: the bureaucratic-capitalist state, the logic of war and colonisation, the collaboration of local administrations, and the preexisting racism of European imperialism created the technical and social capacity to carry out mass murder.

As Nick Beams argues, if one considers the question very narrowly, as we have noted, then it is easy to show that the mass murder of the Jews ran counter to the immediate economic and military interests of German imperialism. But that is the problem—the narrow perspective through which the issue is viewed. If we widen the horizon, then the underlying interests come into view. The Holocaust arose out of the war against the Soviet Union and the plans of German imperialism for the domination of Europe. The German capital had handed over the reins of power to the Nazis to carry out these tasks. To be sure, as occurred before the war, some of their actions conflicted with the immediate short-term interests of German business—although there is no record of opposition from within the German ruling elites to the mass murder of the Jews—but there was a direct coincidence between the drive of the Nazis for Lebensraum in the East and the interests and needs of German imperialism.[7]

Thus, the explanation is neither “Hitler did it alone” nor “structural forces made individuals irrelevant.” Rather, structural pressures channel and constrain agency; individuals choose within those constraints, and those choices can be decisive. The dialectical relationship between structure and agency is central.

To finish one question the reader should ask is whether this is just a historical debate or whether it helps us understand contemporary politics. Reducing the Holocaust to a metaphysical “evil” or to merely psychological explanations dissolves political responsibility and obscures the social origins of mass barbarism. Conversely, purely structural reductionism that denies conscious decision-making can excuse perpetrators as mere cogs. Both tendencies are politically dangerous and historically inadequate.

Understanding the Holocaust as an outcome of capitalist crisis, imperial rivalry and the betrayal and destruction of workers’ movements reveals the crucial lesson emphasised by Trotsky: the absence of an independent, politically conscious revolutionary leadership permits the rise of barbaric counterrevolutions. Stalinism’s betrayal and the defeats of the workers’ movement in the interwar period were decisive in opening the road to Nazism.

As the global economy careens into a new period of crisis, far-right and explicitly fascist parties are gaining ground across Europe. The urgency of preventing a resurgence of fascism in the twenty-first century makes it more necessary than ever to understand the political and social context of the Nazis’ ascent to power in Germany.

I don’t usually end a review with an advert, but readers of this article would be advised to read two books. The first being Why Are They Back?: Historical falsification, political conspiracy and the return of fascism in Germany by Christoph Vandreier  and secondly, Where is America Going -David North

 

Notes

German Marxism and the Holocaust-(Summer 2018) www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/gluckstein/2018/xx/holocaust.html

Imperialism and the political economy of the Holocaust-Nick Beams-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/05/holo-m12.html

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[1] Statement in September 1939, as quoted in "Stalin's pact with Hitler" in WWII Behind Closed Doors at PBS http://www.pbs.org/behindcloseddoors/episode-1/ep1_stalins_pact.html Contemporary witnesses/

[2]To Leon Goldensohn, March 16, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

[3] Howard Zinn on War (2000), Ch. 21: Just and Unjust War

[4] Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, Allen Lane: 2006, 832 pages,

[5] French revisionist Pierre Lambert dies aged 87- www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/01/lamb-j21.html

[6] libcom.org/article/class-analysis-afa-review-nazis-capitalism-and-working-class-donny-gluckstein

[7] Marxism and the Holocaust- Nick Beams-wsws.org