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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Notes

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

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

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

Homage To Catalonia-George Orwell April 25, 1938.

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

Leon Trotsky

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

Helen Graham, The Spanish Civil War

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

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

a 2018 article by Margaret McCartney

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

— Matthew Kobach

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

David North

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

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

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

The Pseudo Lefts and Social Media

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

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

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

The Oligarchs and Social Media

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

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

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

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

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

What Is to Be Done?

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Margaret Cavendish

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

Thomas Hobbes

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

Frederick Engels- Dialectics of Nature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Katabasis by RF Kuang is published by Harper Voyager (£22).

Katabasis, R.F. Kuang's latest novel, portrays modern class society primarily through the lens of academic elitism and the commodification of knowledge. The new book marks a departure for Kuang, as her previous work, such as Babel, focused on class and colonialism.

Kuang’s previous work should be approached with both caution and admiration. Her earlier novels, the Poppy War trilogy and Babel, drew considerable attention for their engagement with imperialism, colonialism, and historical violence. Babel examines British colonialism and the exploitation of non-Western knowledge through a fantasy lens.  These are legitimate and important subjects.

However, a limitation of this kind of literary-political fiction is that it frames oppression primarily through the lens of race and national identity rather than class. The enemy in Babel is, broadly, "the British empire" understood in racial and civilizational terms, rather than capitalism as a world-historical system that generates imperialism regardless of which nation or ethnic group sits at the top.

Katabasis critiques present-day class society, showing the "ivory tower" as a modern class structure that gatekeeps social mobility behind walls of wealth and power. The core of the novel presents the reader with many arguments regarding class in contemporary society. The first one sees academia as a modern class hierarchy. Kuang frames the university system as an "infernal structure" that mirrors a pyramid scheme rather than a meritocracy. Secondly, Characters like Alice and Peter are depicted as "cannon fodder" in a departmental war, spending their best years doing grunt work to further the prestige of senior academics, barriers to Entry.

The novel also critiques how prestigious universities gatekeep their institutions, making success nearly impossible for those without significant "financial privilege". The protagonists are so indoctrinated into this class system that they believe their lives are literally "not worth living" without validation from an elite institution.

If the Katabasis theme seems familiar, it is because it invokes the classical literary descent into the underworld (as in Dante, Virgil, and Homer). The novel continues Kuang's interest in dark, morally complex fantasy. It raises many questions, including whether the narrative's moral framework reduces social evil to individual wickedness or to ethnic or national conflict, or whether it points towards systemic, class-based contradictions. From a literary and political standpoint, does Kuang's "descent" have any genuine social content, or is it primarily psychological and individual? Great literature, even in fantasy, illuminates the real social forces that shape human suffering the test for the reader is whether Katabasis reaches that depth.

Dante's Inferno is perhaps the most elaborate katabasis in Western literature, and it is saturated with class content. The organisation of hell explicitly reflects the social and political contradictions of late medieval Italy popes, usurers, and political enemies are placed in their circles with meticulous class logic. The great usurers of Florence sit in the seventh circle; Dante was writing at a moment when merchant capital was beginning to corrode feudal social relations, and his moral geography encodes that anxiety. The sin of usury (lending for profit) damns early capitalists; the sin of betrayal damns political traitors to the feudal order.

Kuang's book is not just a history book; her katabasis metaphor, used in modern terms, takes on a different path. The world of the labouring poor, the mines, the factories, the slums, was consistently figured in the 19th and 20th centuries as an underworld into which bourgeois observers "descended." Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England is, in a sense, a social katabasis, a descent into the cellars and rookeries of Manchester to bring back testimony from a world the bourgeoisie preferred not to see. Émile Zola's Germinal centres on a literal descent into the coal mines; the underground is the space of proletarian labour and, ultimately, of proletarian rebellion.

This is where the class dimension becomes most politically charged. The bourgeoisie imagines itself above ground, in the light of civilisation and culture; the working class is relegated to the depths. But the katabasis trope, when deployed honestly, always carries the seed of a reversal; the hero who goes down returns transformed, with knowledge the surface world lacks. The revolutionary implications are not hard to see: it is precisely from the "underworld" of capitalist production from the mines, the foundries, the assembly lines — that the force capable of overthrowing the existing order emerges.

As Beejay Silcox observes, “Katabasis is far from perfect. There’s a pair of blood-drunk villains who feel like a gory distraction, and a nonsense MacGuffin. Bone creatures clatter through plot holes. Grand mythologies collide and compete. Chunks of the novel read like a Rowan Atkinson sketch. And the 1980s faculty politics look deceptively – or perhaps wearily – like our own (a fascinating companion read would be Helen Garner’s 1995 landmark provocation The First Stone). But none of that really matters – especially if you have a score to settle.”[1]

Katabasis is a complex and contradictory work. Kuang is not a Marxist, yet her work enables a Marxist to explain their approach to mythology. Marxists insist that artistic and mythological forms are not autonomous —they arise from and reflect material and social conditions, even as they develop internally. The katabasis is not merely a timeless archetype (as Jung or Joseph Campbell would have it) within a deeply ahistorical, idealist framework. It is a form that takes on different social content in different epochs, justifying imperial class rule in Virgil, mapping the contradictions of feudal society in Dante, and encoding working-class experience in the naturalist novel.

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[1] www.theguardian.com/books/2025/aug/14/katabasis-by-rf-kuang-review-a-descent-into-the-hellscape-of-academia

The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West: by A.J.A. Woods: Verso Publications: April 2026

 “To be sure, the line of development is toward internationalism, but the point of departure is ‘national’—and it is from this point of departure that one must begin”.

Antonio Gramsci

“The Revolution won't happen with guns; it will happen incrementally, year by year, generation by generation. We will gradually infiltrate their educational institutions and their political offices, transforming them slowly into Marxist entities as we move towards universal egalitarianism.”

Max Horkheimer

Our scribblings are usually not lyrics but whirrings, without colour or resonance, like the tone of an engine wheel. I believe the cause lies in the fact that, for the most part, when people write, they forget to dig deeply into themselves and to feel the full import and truth of what they are writing.

Rosa Luxemburg

As the class struggle sharpens in the U.S., Marxism will come into its own as a great popular study.

C. L. R. James

The premise of Andrew Woods' new book is that “Cultural Marxism” has been weaponised both in the past and in current political struggles. Right‑wing forces use it to explain social change as the work of intellectual conspiracies rather than class struggle.

The use of the term by right-wing and outright fascists is a reactionary falsification that treats social change (civil rights, feminism, LGBTQ rights, multiculturalism, critical race and gender studies) as the result of a coordinated, sinister plot by intellectuals, universities and cultural elites to “destroy” Western civilisation. This usage is politically motivated, ahistorical and often antisemitic in its modern forms.

The phrase, as treated in conspiracy literature and included in polemical works such as A. J. A. Woods’s book, is not an accurate description of Marxism as a scientific theory. It is a politicised and ahistorical label that collapses a range of very different intellectual currents into a single bogeyman, used to discredit working-class politics and divert attention from capitalism’s material contradictions.

“Cultural Marxism” circulates as a catch‑all conspiracy theory on the right: an alleged plot by the Frankfurt School and the Left to undermine Western civilisation, attack family values, and “replace” traditional culture. This is not an argument grounded in evidence or history; it is a political weapon. Woods is correct in drawing attention to the right-wing attack on Marxism, but what is more important is an orthodox Marxist understanding of the “Cultural Marxism” conspiracy, something that Woods is incapable of.

The Frankfurt School

The intellectual currents often lumped together as “cultural Marxism” had distinct social origins and political trajectories. The Institute for Social Research (the Frankfurt School) developed in a period of catastrophic defeats for the European working class and the emergence of middle‑class strata.

Woods' book devotes a significant amount of space to defending the Frankfurt School of Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and others. These anti-Marxists developed “critical theory” in the 1920s–50s to understand the collapse of mass working‑class revolutionary movements, the rise of fascism, and the cultural forms of modern capitalism. Their outlook was pessimistic and often abstract; it flowed from defeats of the international working class and the ideological disarray of the interwar period—not from any secret plan to subvert society.

As the Marxist David North explains, “The post-modernists and the adherents of the Frankfurt School advance an absurd politics not because their philosophy is absurd. Rather, the crass absurdities of their philosophy arise from their reactionary petty-bourgeois politics. One cannot understand either the Frankfurt School or postmodernism without recognising that the rejection of Marxism and the perspective of a socialist revolution based on the working class constitute the underlying political impulse behind their theories. Postmodernist theory arose quite specifically as a repudiation of Marxism and the perspective of proletarian revolution.

The foundational role of Jean-François Lyotard in its emergence is well known. He is the author of the sentence: “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.” The “metanarratives” to be discarded were those that advanced the Marxist perspective of socialist revolution. Thus, what is known in academic circles as “postmodernism” would be more accurately defined as “academic post-Marxism.”[1]

North goes on to explain that the Frankfurt School did not represent the revolutionary Marxist tradition embodied in the Fourth International. Its diagnosis—cultural regression, the “self‑destruction of enlightenment”—tended to attribute reaction to abstract cultural processes rather than to concrete class forces and the dynamics of capitalist crisis.

One of the hallmarks of the Frankfurt School was its opposition to the working class's revolutionary capacity. Wood cites all manner of radicals in the 1960’s that attacked the Fourth International’s “heavy emphasis” on the political independence of the working class and its nature as a revolutionary agent for change.

One of the leading players amongst the radical fraternity who led the attack on the revolutionary nature of the working class was C. Wright Mills. His "Letter to the New Left", written in 1960, is one of the founding documents of post-war petty-bourgeois radicalism. It is historically significant not for being correct, but for being symptomatic — it gave theoretical expression to a set of demoralizations and class prejudices that would define the New Left and, ultimately, the entire pseudo-left tradition that continues to mislead radical politics to this day.

The core of Mills' letter is a direct attack on what he called the "labour metaphysic" — the Marxist insistence that the industrial working class is the central revolutionary force in modern society. Mills argued that this was a tired dogma, an outdated faith clinging to mid-19th-century conditions. In its place, he looked to intellectuals and students — the "cultural apparatus" — as the new agents of historical change.

He writes, “What I do not quite understand about some New-Left writers is why they cling so mightily to 'the working class' of the advanced capitalist societies as the historic agency, or even as the most important agency, in the face of the really impressive historical evidence that now stands against this expectation.”[2]

Wright -Mill’s letter opened the floodgates for a slew of radicals to jump on the bandwagon. One such radical was Max Elbaum, whose Revolution in the Air memoir-cum-history of the "New Communist Movement" — the cluster of Maoist, Marxist-Leninist, and Third-Worldist formations that arose from the radicalisation of the 1960s in the United States.

Elbaum writes, “This book has been written partly to identify the markers on that slippery slope to sectarian irrelevance in hopes of better equipping a new generation to take a different path. But an equally important goal has been to call attention to how dedication to constructing a revolutionary apparatus can act as a potent positive force, unleashing individual creativity, building solidarity across socially imposed barriers, stimulating theoretical exploration, and strengthening activists’ commitment to peace and freedom.”[3]

While it was warmly received in pseudo-left circles as a rehabilitation of that era's left wing, reading it from the standpoint of classical Marxism reveals it as a deeply misleading document — a celebration of precisely the political tendencies that led a generation of workers and youth into a dead end, and whose legacy helped give rise to today's identity-politics pseudo-left.

The central problem with Elbaum's book — and with the New Communist Movement itself — is what it left out: the working class. The radicalisation of the 1960s was real and reflected genuine social contradictions: the Vietnam War, the civil rights struggle, and the crisis of American capitalism. But the New Communist Movement channelled that energy away from the independent political mobilisation of the working class and into the orbit of petty-bourgeois nationalism. The heroes of Elbaum's book — Mao, Che, Ho Chi Minh, the Black Panthers — represent not the Marxist tradition but its systematic falsification.

Identity politics vs Marxism

In chapter four, Woods spends a significant amount of time defending critical race theories and “identity politics”. Critical race theory is sometimes conflated with Marxism by critics on both right and left. The central theme of these theories replaces class analysis with competing forms of sectional politics that can be absorbed into capitalist institutions and the Democratic/centre‑left political apparatus. While racism, sexism and other oppressions are real and must be fought, their proper resolution requires a unifying working‑class strategy rooted in socialist politics—not a fragmentation into rival identities.

As Tom Carter, in his Introduction to Marxism vs Critical Race Theory, writes, “Critical race theory is a broad current, with many tributaries flowing into it and many offshoots flowing out of it. One can go to a library and walk down aisle upon aisle of shelves of this material, which at a surface level comprises many diverse and even internally contradictory trends that have emerged and shifted over time. In characterising this current, it is therefore useful to begin at the most basic level with its fundamental philosophical conceptions, the heritage of which can be traced to postmodernism and to the conceptions advanced by the Frankfurt School. This is the “critical theory” from which “critical race theory” emerges.

In the book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, two leaders of the Frankfurt School, concluded that the Enlightenment was to blame for all the authoritarianism and barbarism that characterised the first half of the 20th century, because it was all the inevitable result of a misguided attempt to exert control over nature through science and reason. Adorno would go on in Negative Dialectics (1966) to claim that all systemic thought is inherently authoritarian.”[4]

Stuart Hall  

Another favourite radical of Wood’s is Stuart Hall (1932–2014). Like many radicals mentioned in the book, Hall’s central theme was the repudiation of the class struggle as the axis of social development, as this assumes that the working class is the decisive agent of political change. Instead, he argued for a turn to the cultural sphere. This was not a Marxist appraisal or critique of culture, but the elevation of “culture” as an arena contested by different “agencies”.

Hall was the founding intellectual of Cultural Studies, the academic discipline centred at the University of Birmingham's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) from the 1960s onward. He has been lionised in the liberal-left press as a pioneering theorist of race, identity, and culture. Hall's career represents a politically coherent, decades-long effort to displace Marxism — specifically the Trotskyist current within it — and substitute identity politics and bourgeois reformism in its place.

In Paul Bond’s excellent obituary of Hall, he makes the following analysis: “Cultural Studies originated as part of an attack on revolutionary Marxism, directed above all against its contemporary expression, Trotskyism. The academic field sought to shift the focus of social criticism away from class and onto other social formations, thus promoting the development of identity politics. Its establishment, in the final analysis, was a hostile response to the gains made by the Trotskyist movement in Britain from the 1950s onwards.

Various media commentators have enthused about Hall’s ability to “identify key questions of the age”. History will judge him more harshly: his answers to these questions were confused, misleading and often supine. Despite his supposedly independent “Marxist” stance, Hall’s political outlook throughout his academic and political career aligned him closely with the Euro-communist wing of the old Stalinist Communist Party, and he eventually became a prominent writer for the magazine Marxism Today. The latter served as the ideological godfather of New Labour.[5]

Antonio Gramsci

Wood’s book is full of mentions of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci never used the term “Cultural Marxism. Gramsci's concept of hegemony — the idea that bourgeois class rule is maintained not just through coercion but through ideological and cultural domination, through the "common sense" of everyday life — is a real and important contribution. The bourgeoisie rules not merely through the police and the army but because subordinate classes internalise its values, assumptions, and worldview. The struggle for socialism, therefore, requires a struggle for ideological and cultural leadership.

Gramsci is an attractive figure for Woods not merely for his cultural writings—many of which were produced during solitary confinement under the Mussolini fascist regime—but also for his attacks on economic determinism, his explicit rejection of the theory of Permanent Revolution and his justification of the nationalist orientation of Stalinism: As Gramsci declared, “To be sure, the line of development is toward internationalism, but the point of departure is ‘national’—and it is from this point of departure that one must begin”.

Woods is not the only intellectual to use Gramsci for a defence of their own politics. Over the decades, his work has been used by the likes of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 1985) and by a whole generation of "post-Marxist" academics. Gramsci's work was turned into a rationale for abandoning the working class as the revolutionary subject.

The pseudo-left currents that claim Gramsci's mantle have produced, in practice, exactly what their theory predicts: subordination of the working class to bourgeois politics. Syriza in Greece is the paradigm case, the most "prominent example of a pseudo-left organisation" that came to power, spouting empty populist phrases, and then carried out "a criminal betrayal" of Greek workers, imposing austerity more effectively than the right could have.

Wood’s book is useful only because it forces the reader to study a Marxist alternative to “Cultural Marxism”. The answer to both the right-wing "cultural Marxism" hysteria and the pseudo-left's cultural politics is the same: a return to genuine Marxism

 

Notes

 

Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che by Max Elbaum, London and New York: Verso, 2002, 370 pages.

 

The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left: A Marxist Critique- David North Mehring Books

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[1] Philosophy and Politics in an Age of War and Revolution- www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/25/lect-o25.html

[2] "Letter to the New Left" www.marxists.org/subject/humanism/mills-c-wright/letter-new-left.htm

[3] Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che by Max Elbaum, London and New York: Verso, 2002, 370 pages.

[4] Marxism Versus Critical Race Theory-Tom Carter Mehring Books 2023

[5] Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014): A political career dedicated to opposing Marxism- www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/03/05/hall-m05.html

The Future in our Past: The General Strike, 1926/2026 by Callum Cant and Matthew Lee. Verso Publications

“Future historians will know the General Strike for what it is, a landmark in British history and its most important post-war event.  A general strike is not an accident due to incidental causes, workmen misguided by agitators, the stock shibboleths of the Tory Press. It is a major political phenomenon ultimately springing from the profound dislocation of the entire economic and social system. Nothing else can so move millions of men to united action. It is the class-war in its most acute pre-revolutionary stage: the next stage is revolution.”

C. L. R. James

“The conclusion which I reach in my study is that Britain is approaching, at full speed, an era of great revolutionary upheavals... Britain is moving towards revolution because the epoch of capitalist decline has set in. And if culprits are to be sought, then in answer to the question who and what are propelling Britain along the road to revolution, we must say: not Moscow, but New York.”

Leon Trotsky

“The only class I am afraid of is our own”

J.R. Clynes, Labour Party Politician

"What I dreaded about the strike, more than anything else, was this; if by any chance it should have got out of the hands of those who would be able to exercise some control, every sane man knows what would have happened ... That danger, that fear, was always in our minds, because we wanted, at least, even in this struggle, to direct a disciplined army."

J.H. Thomas, Trade Union Leader

It is hard not to agree with the points made by the Socialist Equality Party in its comments on the 1926 General Strike anniversary: “There are few more bitterly contested and less clearly understood historical experiences than the general strike of 1926, despite it being a decisive moment in the history of the British and international working class.  What will distinguish the SEP’s meetings from the slew of commemorative articles and books on 1926 is an examination of the general strike primarily from the standpoint of the disastrous line pursued by the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) under the direction of the Communist International (Comintern), led by Joseph Stalin and his allies.”[1]

The Future in our Past: The General Strike, 1926/2026 is one of many slews published in the last few months. Described as a fresh, accessible history of the 1926 General Strike on its centenary – telling a story of working-class community then and now, “it is one of the better books on the subject. It tells the story of the 1926 General Strike on its centenary. It is a compelling on-the-ground account of how workers brought the country to a standstill for nine extraordinary days.

Callum Cant and Matthew Lee take us on a journey through a Britain living on its nerves, from the London docklands to the South Wales coalfields and the railways and warehouses of middle England. Winston Churchill, then Chancellor, feared that labour militancy presaged a Bolshevik-style revolution. The question of power hung in the air as rank-and-file militants pursued a chaotic, improvised and wildly uneven confrontation with the British ruling class. This is social history at its most immediate and relevant.

Both Cant and Lee write for the Notes from Below website. It is a working‑class repository of workplace testimony, petitions and grassroots labour reporting. It performs an important practical function: documenting the lived experience of workers, exposing employer abuses, and creating links between isolated shop‑floor struggles. For that reason alone, such initiatives deserve defence and engagement by socialists. But a class‑struggle analysis requires us to go beyond sympathetic description to evaluate the political and strategic implications of the material and the direction this sort of project advances.[2]

The reappearance of rank‑and‑file initiatives and worker blogs is a product of the deepening crisis of capitalism. As employers accelerate restructuring, automation and outsourcing, and as union bureaucracies increasingly organise class collaboration with management and the state, workers are forced to build their own communication platforms. This social reality accords with the need for independent rank-and-file initiatives and organisations.

Notes From Below primarily offers empirical materials: testimonies, minutes, and petitions. This is indispensable for breaking information blackouts and building solidarity. But empirical documentation by itself is not a political program. Lenin long argued that trade‑unionist economism — which confines politics to immediate economic demands and local grievances — will not by itself develop the conscious leadership required to overthrow capitalist rule; political consciousness must be consciously brought to the working class by a revolutionary organisation. Worker‑produced media can and should serve as a training ground for political education. Still, without explicit political independence and a program that links struggles to the need to overthrow capital, such projects can be outflanked by reformism and the trade‑union apparatus.[3]

So what are the lessons of the General Strike for today's struggles? Begun on May 3 and officially lasting nine days, it was the first and remains the only general strike ever to have taken place in the UK.

The action was launched in response to a massive attack on the wages of Britain’s 1.2 million coal miners, amid a period of widespread labour unrest. Overseeing the strike, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) was terrified by its revolutionary potential and worked to bring it to an end, succeeding on May 12 and enforcing a crushing defeat.

But material conditions alone do not determine outcomes. Political leadership and organisation do. As Chris Marsden explains in his lecture, the decisive factor in the defeat was not only the state’s preparation—organisations for strikebreaking, emergency powers and armed forces—but also the political line imposed by the Comintern under Stalin, Bukharin and Zinoviev. That line subordinated the Communist Party of Great Britain to an alliance with the Trades Union Congress via the Anglo‑Russian Committee, treating the TUC General Council and its “left” representatives as safe conduits for “revolutionary” influence rather than exposing and combating them. The result was a catastrophic political misorientation: the CPGB was transformed into a left‑ginger group for the bureaucracy at the very moment when the class struggle required independent revolutionary leadership.[4]

The general strike of May 1926 was not merely a historical rupture confined to its nine official days; it was a concentrated expression of the objective crisis of British capitalism and the political maturity (and immaturity) of the working class at that historical juncture.  The reader should note that a Marxist materialist analysis locates its significance in the interaction of social forces—the objective erosion of British imperialist power, the consequences of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, and the class relations that produced both immense industrial potential and profound political weakness.

The general strike objectively posed “which class shall rule?” The working class in 1926 had the industrial capacity to disrupt capitalist reproduction yet lacked a party capable of transforming industrial militancy into political power. As Marsden’s 1926 strike lecture emphasises, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and the Comintern-influenced Communist Party acted to contain and demobilise revolutionary potential. The result was a strategic defeat whose lessons include the catastrophic consequences when the labour bureaucracy or opportunist “lefts” substitute themselves for proletarian political independence.

A century later, objective conditions again make a general strike a live political possibility. Global capitalism is convulsed by stagnation, inflation, war and austerity. It is important to see the connection between the historical weaknesses exposed in 1926 and the present-day degeneration of unions and reformist parties. The trade union apparatus today often functions as a corporatist arm of capital, seeking to manage and suppress rather than lead independent working-class offensives.

The social weight of the working class, its international integration, and the development of rank-and-file initiatives create objective conditions far more favourable to revolutionary politics than those that existed in 1926.

1926 is not an exhausted archive; it is a living repository of lessons for 2026. Capital’s crisis, the bankruptcy of union bureaucracies and the emergence of rank-and-file militancy mean the objective possibility of a general strike—and with it, the political question of power—again stands on the agenda. The working class must learn from the past not to repeat its errors: organise democratically in the workplaces, coordinate internationally, and build the independent revolutionary leadership necessary to turn strikes into a socialist strategy. The future is written in the material contradictions of the present; the past supplies the lessons to read it.

 

 

Notes

 

The General Strike at the National Archives- www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/explore-the-collection/stories/the-general-strike/

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[1] Socialist Equality Party (UK) announces public meeting series on 1926 general strike-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/04/09/fhfg-a09.html

[2] https://notesfrombelow.org/

[3] See (Lenin, What Is To Be Done?).

[4]. The new pamphlet by Mehring Books (UK), “Trotsky, Stalin and the 1926 British General Strike: Lessons For Today”.