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”.

The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered by Chris Hayes Scribe UK : ‎ 13 Feb. 2025 :336 Pages

Chris Hayes is one of the more articulate voices on the “left.” His 2025 book, The Sirens' Call, is well written and at times thoughtful. However, his politics are mostly characteristic of the petty‑bourgeois layer that passes for the contemporary media “left”: critical in tone, reformist in content, and ultimately subordinate to the interests and institutions of the ruling class.

Hayes—formerly a prominent host on MSNBC and a widely read public intellectual—has for years occupied a political position that illustrates the contradictions and dangers of the media “left.” His arguments, style and role function not as an organ of working-class struggle but as a channel by which layers of the petty-bourgeoisie and professional-class radicals are integrated into the interests and strategies of the capitalist state.

Readers familiar with Hayes's other books and media work will know that he operates within a media and institutional milieu whose social base is the upper strata of the middle class—journalists, academics, think-tank professionals, and professional managers. As far as  I can tell, Hayes is not linked to or is a member of any radical party, but for the sake of clarity, it would be safe to say that he is from the same social layer as other “pseudo-lefts”:

Hayes' early career was spent within a network whose executives, shareholders, and advertising base are embedded in the capitalist class. As a recent article on the WSWS leading broadcasters and columnists “operate in effect as the public faces of their respective firms” and must conform to corporate priorities to keep their platforms and fortunes” Hayes’s career has largely been spent making criticisms acceptable only up to the point where they do not threaten corporate clients, advertisers, financial interests or imperialist foreign policy He is a prime example of how individual dissent is tolerated so long as it stabilises, rather than challenges, the system. I doubt we will see Hayes on the barricades anytime soon.

During Hayes’s former program, he often performed the ritual of exposing outrages (inequality, racism, corruption), but the structural constraints of corporate ownership limited the reach of those critiques. The result is a media ecology where “critical” voices reinforce, rather than rupture, the legitimacy of capitalist institutions by confining debate within narrow parameters. Hayes’s style—moral passion, policy technocracy, and denunciations of right-wing reaction—fits this social function. He channels legitimate anger at inequality into policy reforms, electoralism, and crusades within the bounds of bourgeois democracy. This can radicalise public sentiment, but simultaneously diverts class anger into institutional remedies that leave capitalist property relations intact.

The political consciousness of media commentators like Hayes does not develop in a political vacuum. Their professional positions are secured by corporate media conglomerates, venture capital, and advertising markets embedded in global capitalism. The need to retain access to funding sources, advertising revenue, and elite networks naturally inclines such figures toward compromises with state and corporate power. The result: a politics of “reform” that is simultaneously anti‑Trump, pro‑liberal intervention, and protective of the neoliberal order’s basic rules.

The same political outlook that guides Hayes’s media work is carried into his books. No more so than in The Siren's Call. Hayes knows his audience. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, he knows his song before he starts singing. The Siren’s Call, like much of the punditry produced within the corporate media, performs an important political function: it channels popular anger and democratic anxieties into narratives that stop short of challenging the economic and class foundations of society. His audience is politically conscious but still embedded within the institutions of the bourgeois state and corporate media. This book is written to diagnose social problems accurately enough to win credibility—unequal power, corrupt elites, erosion of democratic norms—but then it prescribes solutions that leave capitalism fundamentally untouched.

To sum up, the siren call that Hayes and his Pseudo-Left friends offer—reform, managerial solutions, moralism—must be answered by a socialist perspective capable of ending capitalist rule.

The Housing Crisis in Kensington and Chelsea

One rule I have regarding this website is that I never talk about my personal situation or problems. That changed yesterday when we received an email that our attempt to stay in our parents' council flat had been turned down for the third time. Our story is that in 2008, we moved back into the family rental flat to look after our ailing parents. The flat had been in the family since 1976. When my father passed, we stayed in the flat to look after my mother, who was in no fit state to be left on her own.

Our first attempt to stay in the property was unsuccessful. Due to Kensington and Chelsea’s archaic and discriminatory housing policy, we were unable to succeed in the property. So insensitive were the council that when my dad passed in 2016, he had not yet been buried before they sent a notice to quit the property to my mother, who was not even on the tenancy. This was challenged by us and rectified.

When my mother passed away at the beginning of this year, we again asked for succession. Again, we were turned down, so we asked for a discretionary tenancy based on the fact that this was the family home for over 50 years, and that we had not only lived in the property for over 15 years, but we had also contributed to rent and council tax, both accounts were in our name. We spent a significant amount of money on decorating the flat. We fed, clothed, and cared for her even when she had her stroke that led to her passing. Yesterday, we received a letter stating that the council has refused our discretionary tenancy request, giving no reason, and that we must leave the property within two weeks, or they will take legal action to remove us. Aside from the cruel and unjust decision, the council never visited or spoke to us about our needs at any stage. No alternative housing arrangement has been made or discussed.

Having researched the housing crisis in the borough, I somehow doubt that ours is an isolated case. Kensington and Chelsea is one of the wealthiest boroughs in the United Kingdom. At the moment, there is a massive housing boom, but it is only catered for the mega-rich. Next door in the borough of Hammersmith is the former BBC Television Centre in White City, which has been redeveloped into high-end, exclusive residential apartments and luxury lifestyle areas. These areas now feature private clubs, high-end fitness facilities, restaurants and high-security residences, leading to descriptions of them as "playgrounds for the rich."

In Kensington and Chelsea, there is a severe shortage of affordable housing, with over 2,900 households waiting for social housing. It has the second-highest rate of use of temporary accommodation in the capital. The borough has a high rate of households with children in temporary accommodation, with nearly 30 per 1,000 households. There are calls for the council to take action against over 600 homes that have been left empty for more than two years.

The housing crisis is not confined to London; it is a national crisis of huge proportions. A recent article shows that “Across the UK, rents have increased by 40 per cent since the COVID pandemic began in 2020, and mortgage repayments by 40-60 per cent. Housing stress affects 67 per cent of the population—45 million people, struggling to pay rents or mortgages, cutting back on food and heating, or facing eviction and foreclosure. Up to 4 million people are on the waiting list for social housing, with 1.3 million of these waiting more than a decade. 400,000 people are homeless, sleeping on the streets, in hostels and shelters or sofa surfing. Up to 2 million children live in substandard and unsafe accommodation, including 1.5 million in England (one in six children). One million children live in homes with a Category 1 hazard, defined as “serious risk to health or safety”.Multi-occupancy accommodation with renters crammed together, and young people forced to lodge with their parents into their late 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s, is the new normal. Older adults in the private rental market face a nightmarish future.[1]

As I said in the opening paragraph, I am loath to go public with this. However, this council has given me no choice but to. My MP Joe Powell has been contacted about this case. We will seek advice from the Citizens Advice Bureau and will take legal action to prepare for the Council's impending court action.

 

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[1] The socialist answer to the housing crisis in Britain- www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/04/16/mpru-a16.html

Paul Weller: Dancing Through the Fire: The Authorised Oral History: Dan Jennings (Author), Paul Weller (Contributor) 11 Sept. 2025 Constable Publishers

I'm always looking for something. Not in an unhappy way. I like to try different things. I don't want to be morbid, but I'm not getting any younger.

Paul Weller

"Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

Walt Whitman

I get labelled as just being about one thing, but there are lots of layers to what I do.

Paul Weller

Dancing Through the Fire is the authorised oral history of one of the world’s most important musical figures: Paul Weller has almost Dylanesque managed to reinvent himself from the stunning rise of The Jam to the stylish reinvention of The Style Council. Since disbanding the Council, he has had a spectacular decades-long solo career. Weller, alongside Lennon and McCartney, remains among only a handful of artists who have topped the UK album charts in five consecutive decades. This excellent oral history by award-winning broadcaster and journalist Dan Jennings features over 200 hours of interviews with Weller’s family, bandmates, collaborators, and industry figures.

A study of Paul Weller’s career (from the Jam and Style Council to his solo work) and Dan Jennings’ use of the oral history genre will provide the reader with a rich entry point of how popular music reflects class formations, political currents and the shifting role of intellectuals and artists under capitalism.

The Modfather and Working-Class icon Paul Weller’s post‑punk and Britpop-era work reinforces a British working‑class identity, nostalgia, and dissent. Weller’s politics and music were grounded in the post‑war British political economy of deindustrialisation, youth unemployment, Thatcherism, and the music industry’s structural shifts toward commodification, consolidation, and global markets.

Understanding Weller through disciplined oral history equips readers to recognise how culture both expresses and can obscure class interests. Today’s struggles — precarious labour, austerity, environmental crisis — require cultural work that mobilises artistic forms for political education and organisation. A critical study reveals how artists may ally with bourgeois institutions (such as parliamentary politics and corporate sponsorship and how autonomous working‑class cultural forms can be revived.

One of the most important songs from Weller’s punk days was A Town Called Malice. Released in 1982 by the Jam (written by Paul Weller, recorded with Style Council musicians), the song emerges in the wake of late-1970s deindustrialisation, rising unemployment and the political consolidation of Thatcherism. These processes transformed the British working class—through mass redundancies, the decline of long-term industrial employment, and the expansion of precarious, service-sector labour—altering both objective class positions and political subjectivity.  

The pun names the locality (town) as a social relation: not merely a site of decline but a product of hostile economic restructuring. “Malice” anthropomorphises the systemic violence of capital’s restructuring—plant closures, wage cuts, rising rents—making structural brutality feel like an intentional social agent. The title functions ideologically: it mobilises resentment but frames it as a local pathology rather than an expression of class conflict.

The song captures the accelerated proletarianisation of entire layers: young people forced into wage dependency or precarious work, losing access to transitional education and apprenticeship pathways. The affective register—disorientation, fatalism, yearning—reflects a class composition with fractured organisation and weakened industrial solidarity. The lyrics’ focus on private emotional response rather than collective remedy points to the present limits of working-class political organisation under Thatcherism.

The song’s upbeat Motown-derived groove and horn lines give it a buoyant, danceable surface while the lyrics narrate decline. This contradiction of form and content is dialectically significant: an uplifting groove can broaden appeal (embedding class grievances in popular culture) but can also aestheticise suffering, sedating political urgency. The adoption of black popular forms—soul and Motown references—connects British working-class musical practice to international proletarian cultural traditions. Yet, here it is largely cosmetic rather than explicitly solidaristic.

Jenning’s book runs to well over 700 pages, but it is well worth the read. As you can see from the picture, I bumped into Weller recently. Had a brief but memorable conversation. He was kind and polite. I look forward to his next piece of work. Jennings's book is a masterpiece and reflects Weller's genius.

Sisters in Yellow: Mieko Kawakami (author), Laurel Taylor (translator), Hitomi Yoshio (translator), Pan Macmillan, 448 pages, 2026

For someone still at such a tender age, Mieko Kawakami is a stunningly good writer. She is a novelist, poet and essayist whose internationally acclaimed works — notably Breasts and Eggs, Heaven, and Paradise — probe gender, class, bodily experience and social alienation in late‑capitalist Japan.

Heaven, an early work on school bullying and the social formation of suffering; then Breasts and Eggs, which raised questions of reproduction, women’s labour, precarity; and Paradise, the moral and existential problems faced by Japanese women. All her previous work has themes of work, family economy, institutional violence, and bodily commodification. These are all acute portrayals of class stratification, gender oppression, marketised bodies and private suffering under neoliberal Japan.

Kawakami exposes how Japanese neoliberal capitalism commodifies bodies, care and intimacy, producing isolation, mental distress and precarious survival strategies. Her work demonstrates how private suffering is socially produced rather than merely individual pathology. She highlights the intersection of gender oppression and class exploitation in everyday life.

While the reader is free to read Kawakami as they like, reading Kawakami through a Marxist lens develops the capacity to see private affliction as a social product and to analyse cultural form as ideology.

Sisters in Yellow is a 2023 novel by Mieko Kawakami, translated into English by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio, and was published in March 2026. The title and the bar's name ("Lemon") refer to Hana's obsession with a feng shui belief that the colour yellow attracts wealth and financial security. Kawakami has described the novel as an exploration of a Breaking Bad-style story without the typical "macho drama."

It's a crime-infused story about friendship, betrayal, and survival in 1990s Tokyo, following 15-year-old Hana and her older friend Kimiko as they open a bar called Lemon, which becomes a haven but leads them into a world of crime and desperation. The novel explores themes of poverty, female resilience, and the harsh realities of life on the fringes of society, blending social realism with thriller elements.

Kawakami often portrays the pressures of precarious labour, consumerist culture, and gendered norms. Sisters in Yellow registers social vulnerability through small, intimate details that encode larger class relations. Her book shows everyday scenes of work: casual, piecemeal paid work, and precarious hours. They are material signs of neoliberal precarity. Part‑time shifts, temporary cleaning/retail tasks, work that starts or ends at odd hours, or days lost to cancelled gigs. These concrete markers show labour organised in fragments rather than stable employment. It must be understood that fragmented labour time is not accidental but a mode of disciplining labour power — keeping wages low and workers on call so capital can extract more surplus. This corresponds to the global growth of informal and platform work, where “casual labour” and algorithmic scheduling spread precarious conditions. According to the latest statistics, over 2.1 billion workers are in informal work worldwide.

Kawakami is part of a formidable new generation of Japanese writers. Takiji Kobayashi’s Kanikosen (The Crab-Canning Ship), essays and short stories by proletarian writers, modernists like Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, and later novelists who grapple with imperialism and postwar capitalism.

A significant section of modern Japanese literature exposes how culture can conceal and reveal class exploitation, how nationalism and militarism are built into cultural forms. The recent resurgence of proletarian texts shows literature's capacity to rekindle class consciousness in periods of economic crisis—an opening for political work among youth and precarious layers.

Given that Japanese women have borne the brunt of neoliberalisation, it is not surprising that some of the most important modern Japanese writers are women. Female Japanese literature today often grapples with precarity, social withdrawal (hikikomori), ageing, and the collapse of secure employment—issues central to contemporary class struggle. Japan’s casualised labour market, suicides and social isolation show the objective conditions that many recent novels and short stories dramatise.

Readers interested in the class struggle, gender, and Japanese imperialism are encouraged to read Higuchi Ichiyō, Hayashi Fumiko, Miyamoto Yuriko, Hiratsuka Raichō, and Yosano Akiko. Higuchi Ichiyō — “Takekurabe / Growing Up” (short story). A compassionate, class‑conscious portrayal of poor urban youth and women’s constrained social options under early modern capitalism. A good entry point to Meiji-era class/gender conditions. Hayashi Fumiko — Diary of a Vagabond (Nomad’s Diary) and selected short stories. Hayashi’s work offers vivid, autobiographical glimpses into the itinerant, precarious lives of women in the interwar period and the underside of urban labour markets.

Miyamoto Yuriko — fiction and essays from the 1920s–1940s. Miyamoto was politically engaged with left movements, and her writing expresses proletarian themes and women’s emancipation, and connects with the politics of the day; her work is useful for seeing how committed women writers sought to fuse literary and political struggle. Hiratsuka Raichō — essays and Seitosha (Bluestocking) journal writings. As founder of Japan’s early feminist journal Seito (1911–16), Hiratsuka’s polemics illuminate feminist demands, cultural critique and their tensions with rising national politics—Yosano Akiko — poetry and essays. Yosano’s career illustrates the ambivalence of some feminist-modernist currents that combined emancipation rhetoric with nationalist sentiment; studying her work shows how gender politics can be co‑opted by imperialist ideology.

These writers retain a contemporary resonance and how patriarchy, precarity and imperialist expansion are mutually reinforcing: gender oppression is intensified by capitalist industrialisation and militarism; nationalism and imperialism can co‑opt feminist rhetoric; and working‑class women are often the most exposed to dispossession and colonial violence. Understanding these dynamics strengthens contemporary anti‑imperialist, feminist and socialist practice by identifying the material roots of ideological illusions.

Mieko Kawakami is one of the most important contemporary Japanese writers because her work combines rigorous attention to individual subjectivity with an unflinching portrayal of the social forces that shape and deform everyday life. Mieko Kawakami is important not because she offers tidy political answers, but because her art reveals how capitalism structures pain and possibility. Sisters in Yellow is a book I heartily recommend.

   

Author

(born 1976) is a celebrated Japanese author, poet, and former singer-songwriter known for her visceral exploration of the female body, economic class, and social ethics. Originally from Osaka, she worked as a factory hand and a bar hostess before gaining national fame as a blogger and eventually a novelist.

 

Football in Sun and Shadow-Eduardo Galeano-Mark Fried Translator- 156 pages, Paperback First published January 1, 1995- Fourth Estate

“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

“The world turned its back while Guatemala underwent a long Saint Bartholomew’s night. [In 1967,] all the men of the village of Cajón del Rio were exterminated; those of Tituque had their intestines gouged out with knives; in Piedra Parada, they were flayed alive; in Agua Blanca de Ipala, they were burned alive after being shot in the legs. A rebellious peasant’s head was stuck on a pole in the centre of San Jorge’s plaza. In Cerro Gordo the eyes of Jaime Velázquez were filled with pins… In the cities, the doors of the doomed were marked with black crosses. Occupants were machine gunned as they emerged, their bodies thrown into ravines.”

Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America:

“In victory, the players suddenly stopped looking like rich, pampered superstar athletes and became, instead, innocent young men bright with the realisation that they were experiencing a great moment in their lives.”

- Salman Rushdie, in a New Yorker article ‘The People’s Game’

“...So please, be tolerant of those who describe a sporting moment as their best. We do not lack imagination, nor have we had sad and barren lives; it is just that real life is paler, duller, and contains less potential for unexpected delirium.”

- Nick Hornby, in Fever Pitch

THE 2026 World Cup is now only two months away. Before even a ball has been kicked, the joy millions take from the “beautiful game” will be literally stomped upon by the “foul, for-profit priorities, violent classism and discrimination” that characterise world football. That other shame on the game, the European Super League episode, which revealed oligarchic designs to turn clubs into cash machines, and the popular backlash exposed mass anger against billionaire rule.

The late Uruguayan author and activist Eduardo Galeano would have a field day writing about it and other football-related developments. Although I am pretty sure even Galeano would struggle with the modern game's growing commodification and gentrification. Kerry Olsen, although not in the same league as Galeano, writes in a recent Financial Times article:

“On the shores of Lake Como, where Roman emperors, silk merchants and Hollywood actors have long embodied discretion and excess, a once provincial football club is rethinking the game. After multiple bankruptcies and a 21-year absence from Italy’s uppermost football league, Serie A, Como 1907 now finds itself near the top of the ranks as the season closes. Just two years after it rejoined the league, a lucrative Champions League place lies within reach. Yet for some, the most striking part of Como’s recent turnaround lies beyond goals on the pitch.

Club executives have been positioning it less as a conventional football team dependent on match-day successes and more as a global lifestyle brand that has Lake Como — and fashion — at its heart. Under the club’s chief brand officer Rhuigi Villaseñor, a seasoned fashion industry creative director and club shareholder appointed in 2024, Como works with four high-profile brands on lines for fans, including Brioni for formalwear, Rhude on casual and streetwear, Hublot on luxury timepieces and Adidas on its technical kits, including a sailing collection called Lago di Como. The team also offers luxury lake experiences and has launched a private members’ club called, well, Club on the Lake.”[1]

Galeano’s Football in Sun and Shadow is not just a literary celebration but contains within it a social diagnosis. He records the joy, myth and cruelty of the game while exposing how class relations, commerce and power shape football. The task of the reader is to combine Galeano’s humanist impressions with a scientific, historical-materialist analysis so that feeling is linked to explanation and to strategy.

While the book contains aspects of romanticism, Galeano is no fool and understands that “Professional football does everything to castrate that energy of happiness, but it survives, that’s the best thing about it – its stubborn capacity for surprise. The more the technocrats programme it down to the smallest detail, the more the powerful manipulate it, football continues to be the art of the unforeseeable. When you least expect it, the impossible occurs: the dwarf teaches the giant a lesson, and a scraggy, bow-legged black man makes an athlete sculpted in Greece look ridiculous.”

Eduardo Galeano

While football fans in general live one game to the next, which is understandable but not forgivable, Galeano was not like that. One of his best traits as a writer and historian was his gift for “remembering the past of America and above all that of Latin America, an intimate land condemned to amnesia”.

Eduardo Galeano (1940–2015) was a Uruguayan historian, journalist and writer whose work reached a vast international audience with its powerful combination of literary form, historical narrative and moral indignation. He gave the people a voice and helped them understand the beautiful game and the world around them. His books — above all Las venas abiertas de América Latina (Open Veins of Latin America) and the three-volume Memory of Fire — synthesise colonial and capitalist plunder, anti-imperialist resistance, and the lived experiences of workers, peasants, and indigenous peoples.

Galeano is not a Marxist theorist in the academic sense. Still, his writings are an invaluable entry point for a reader's political education because they humanise structural analysis and help develop the historical imagination needed for revolutionary politics. Galeano’s work is a bridge to political activism. His use of the genre “People’s History popularized a deeper understanding of the history of exploitation. Galeano is an indispensable literary and political voice for understanding the lived experience of oppressed peoples in Latin America.

Galeano’s narratives show how the logic of profit, foreign control and local elites shape societies. Those themes remain central today as Latin America confronts revived imperialist competition, debt politics and resource conflicts. Galeano’s work is useful in that it connects past plunder to present-day phenomena — privatisations, debt conditionality, and geopolitical rivalry — and exposes why petty-bourgeois nationalist solutions inevitably fail the working class (through an analysis of the “turn to the left” and its limits).

For Galeano, football should be experienced as a source of joy, community, and identity, and fans should have their day in the “sun.” His writing is lyrical and humanising. Galeano lets us feel a child’s first contact with the ball, an old supporter’s devotion, or the sensory celebration of a goal. But he is cognisant that it also casts deep shadows of nationalism, commercialisation, state power, and the coercion of migrant labour. Galeano’s use of the genre of “People’s History is compatible and complements a scientific, historical-materialist method, which explains how the game’s social forms arise from capitalism’s development and political struggles. Galeano’s succinct critiques of commodification, nationalism, or corruption in football.

A recent example of how Modern football is dominated by criminality and transnational capital, debt, and financial instruments was a German football team's coach bus, which was hit by roadside bombs. On April 11, 2017, three explosive devices detonated as Borussia Dortmund’s coach left the team hotel, wounding a player and badly damaging the vehicle. From the outset, official and media narratives raced to pin a “terrorist” label on the attack. But the immediate need is to understand this event not as an isolated mystery, but as an expression of social and political forces—above all, the sharpening contradictions of capitalism and the state’s readiness to exploit fear for political ends.

The initial police rush to invoke an Islamist motive, and the subsequent exposure of inconsistencies in the so-called claim of responsibility, demonstrate how quickly the state and media attempt to frame such incidents according to preexisting agendas. As the WSWS reported at the time, investigators found letters at the scene purporting to claim the attack for the Islamic State. Yet, these letters contained linguistic oddities and demands that echoed far-right political positions—pointing to the possibility of deliberate misdirection or false-flag signals rather than a straightforward Islamist attack.

The attack happened two years after Galeano passed, but there is no doubt that he would have written that soccer had become a “sad voyage from beauty to duty.  When the sport became an industry, the beauty that blossoms from the joy of play was torn out by the roots.  In this fin de siècle world, professional soccer condemns all that is useless, and useless means not profitable.

Galeano gives us the sun — the passion and stories of the people. Galeano teaches sympathy for players and fans; however, Marxism teaches who profits from their passion. Combining the two gives revolutionary clarity: the fight to reclaim sport—its stadiums, clubs and culture—must be waged as part of the broader struggle against capitalist rule and for working-class democratic control.

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[1] Balls, boats and billionaires: Como 1907’s lifestyle brand aspirations- https://www.ft.com/content/dfd3320f-492c-478c-81f1-e1b47ec58d7f

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