Voices of Thunder: Radical Religious Women of the Seventeenth Century Naomi Baker, Reaktion Books, £16.99

 "The women of the property-owning class will always fanatically defend the exploitation and enslavement of the working people, by which they indirectly receive the means for their socially useless existence."

Rosa Luxemburg

Naomi Baker's new book is to be commended as she has rescued a significant number of radical Women of the seventeenth century from what E.P. Thompson once called the “enormous condescension of posterity”.[1] History and Historians in general have not been kind to women who were radicalised during the English Revolution. There is a dearth of material on women’s struggle. No major biography exists of two of the most important Leveller women, Katherine Chidley and Elizabeth Lilburne.

Baker is a senior lecturer in English Literature at the University of Manchester. Her new book is well written and is a meticulous examination of women who not only had to battle against their male counterparts but also had to struggle against the violent attacks of the English aristocracy and sections of the bourgeoisie who refused to accept their democratic right to protest against social inequality and tyranny.

Radical Religious Women of the Seventeenth Century is set within the context of the long political crisis of the 17th century, which saw commercial expansion, the rise of towns and manufacturers, a crisis of monarchy and landed privilege, and produced an explosive alignment of forces. As Frederick Engels shows,

“When Europe emerged from the Middle Ages, the rising middle-class of the towns constituted its revolutionary element. It had conquered a recognised position within medieval feudal organisation, but this position, too, had become too narrow for its expansive power. The development of the middle-class, the bourgeoisie, became incompatible with the maintenance of the feudal system; the feudal system, therefore, had to fall.”[2]

As Engel correctly states, the seventeenth century was a period of social and economic upheaval in which religious dissent fused with emerging political and social currents. The decomposition of feudalism led to the emergence of new classes and struggles. The rapid growth of sects like the Quakers and Ranters, which fueled peasant and urban uprisings, was bound up with transformations in production and class alignments.

Women such as Anne Hutchinson, Margaret Fell,  Lady Anne Conway, Katherine Chidley, and the many unnamed women who participated in sects (Quakers, Ranters, Levellers’ sympathisers, and radical Baptists) played vital roles in contesting clerical and state authority, defending popular religious autonomy, and advancing early arguments for conscience, equality and popular rights. Their struggles are best understood as part of the bourgeois revolutions and the awakening of radical thought, which began with the Reformation and culminated in the 1640 English bourgeois revolution.

Religious sects took full advantage of the world turned upside down, undertaking radical pamphleteering and mass mobilisation. This created political spaces where women, both poor and rich, could express themselves as radicals, preachers, writers, and organisers. Baker believes there was no single “school”; women appeared across all economic, political, and social tendencies, but upon reading the book, it seems a significant number were protesting against social inequality. As Christopher Hill observed, the English Revolution helped many women both to establish their own independence and to visualise a total escape for the poorer classes. It was the poorer classes that suffered the greatest degradation regularly through jail, torture, war and disease.

Margaret Fell was a Quaker who combined religious dissent with organisational work within meetings and through pamphlets, arguing for spiritual equality in ways that had political consequences. The Levellers included women like Katherine Chidley, who wrote, "Have we not an equal interest with the men of this Nation, in those liberties and securities contained in the Petition of Right, and the other good laws of the land? Are any of our lives, limbs, liberties or goods to be taken from us more than from men, but by due process of law and conviction of twelve sworn men of the neighbourhood”?[3]

Leveller women like Chidley supported petitions, military grievances, and political club activity; they pressed for legal changes and denounced arbitrary power. Ranters and some Diggers, though numerically smaller, pushed the limits of acceptable discourse, challenging sexual, familial, and proprietary norms. Large numbers of women-led relief networks, parochial committees and protests against price rises and conscription-like abuses, linking economic suffering to political demands.

These activities were expressions of class interests formed by material necessity: survival, defence of household livelihoods, resistance to arbitrary levies and enclosures. For many women, the fight for social and political equality would be their first involvement in politics. It can be said without contradiction that women like Katherine Chidley and Elizabeth Lilburne laid the basis for future struggles of working-class women, such as the suffragettes.

The phenomenon of radical religious women in the seventeenth century — sectarians, prophetic preachers, petitioners and organisers among Quakers, Ranters, Baptists and other sects should be grasped scientifically by placing it in the framework of historical materialism. These women did not act in a vacuum: their ideas, forms of organisation and modes of struggle were rooted in shifting modes of production, class relations and state power.

Marxism begins from the premise that the economic base shapes the ideological superstructure. Religious movements did not float free of material life; they arose from and reflect concrete social relations. As Karl Marx maintained, there is a dialectical relationship between the economic base and the ideological superstructure writing in the book A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy he makes the following point  “In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life.”[4]

Acts carried out by female radicals should be analysed dialectically: the religious idiom contained egalitarian content (an attack on hierarchical priesthood, the struggle for spiritual equality developed into political militancy, but it also carried conservative potential that confined it to moral appeals without linking it to collective economic struggle.

Naomi Baker's” interest in seventeenth-century radical religious women is commendable, but the struggle of these women should be treated as a social phenomenon rooted in material conditions. Individual biographies and religious language matter, but only within a historical‑materialist account that connects ideas to class relations, production, and the state.

Radical women who expressed religious language or organised through faith-based networks must be analysed in relation to the continuity of such traditions. Are the struggles of these women grounded just in the defence of household subsistence, wages, or communal relief, or do they articulate wider class demands? Seventeenth-century women were moved from religious protest to political action; their modern counterparts must be evaluated by whether their struggles advance class action or merely moral protest.

There is a Contemporary relevance to this book. For a Marxist, the emancipation of women is inseparable from the socialist revolution. Historically, religious radicalism only played a progressive role when it politicised oppressed layers and helped forge independent class organisations. But it becomes reactionary when it replaced class struggle with appeals to conscience, charity, or bourgeois courts. Thus, comparing Naomi Baker’s seventeenth-century radical women with today's radicals is useful only to the extent that it helps activists draw lessons for the upcoming socialist revolution.

  

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[1]  E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 12.

[2] Socialism: Utopian and Scientific- Friedrich Engels, 1880

[3] Women's Petition (1649)-From J. O'Faolain and L Martines, Not in God's Image (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), pp. 266-267.

[4] A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Uncle Tom's Children-Richard Wright-301 pages, Vintage Paperback, January 1, 1938

Richard Wright's Uncle Tom's Children is a collection of essays that brutally exposes what it was like to live in the United States as a Black worker in the early 20^th century.

Born in 1908, Richard Wright is by far one of the most important working-class writers of the 20th century. His major works, Black Boy, Native Son, and his essays are not merely literary achievements; they are social documents that analyse how material conditions, class relations, and racial domination shape consciousness and behaviour. Wright’s development from a Southern sharecropper’s son to a writer who engaged with Communist and socialist circles in the 1930s exemplifies the dialectical relation between objective social conditions and subjective formation: economic precarity, social exclusion and how the violence of Jim Crow produced a political sensibility that sought collective, systemic remedies rather than individualised responses.

Wright’s method is fundamentally Marxist in orientation, even if he did not always fully self-identify as an orthodox Marxist. This is evident in his attitude toward Leon Trotsky. Wright was strongly attracted to Marxist analysis and to anti‑Stalinist critiques. Many intellectuals of Wright’s generation viewed Trotsky, who combined a searching analysis of the Soviet degeneration with a firm commitment to working‑class internationalism, as a compelling theoretical and moral reference. Trotsky’s dialectical materialist method and his insistence that the proletariat must be politically independent of bourgeois and bureaucratic forces resonated with anti‑racist writers who refused to subordinate the struggle of Black people to existing parties and state apparatuses.

Wright was not a Trotskyist in the doctrinal sense of an allegiance to the Fourth International; rather, his attraction to Trotskyist ideas was of the intellectual and moral kind: Trotsky’s critique of Stalinism, his emphasis on world revolution, and his analysis of how class relations shape consciousness offered resources for Wright’s own attempts to understand the racial question within world capitalism.

His characters in Uncle Tom’s Children show that racism is not a metaphysical or cultural “essence” but a social relation rooted in property, labour markets and the political organisation of capitalist society. Bigger Thomas in Native Son is comprehensible not as an expression of immutable racial pathology, but as the product of exclusion, proletarianization, and the social powerlessness imposed by capitalist and racial rule. Wright adopts a materialist conception of history to understand the social, economic, and political problems facing both black and white populations. The black working class holds that ideas and racial ideologies arise from and reflect class structures and economic imperatives, not the other way around.

Like many intellectuals and workers, Wright’s formative years and his political maturation occurred amid the Great Depression, the growth of industrial labour militancy, the rise of the Communist movement in the United States, and the international polarisations of the 1930s and 1940s. These were years in which the boundaries between cultural expression and political struggle blurred: literature became a form of social investigation and a weapon for political education.

Wright’s involvement with left-wing circles, his brushes with Communist Party orthodoxy, and his eventual break illustrate the complex interplay among revolutionary aspiration, the bureaucratic limitations of existing organisations, and the need for a revolutionary strategy rooted in the working class. His later travels and expatriation in Paris also reflect the international character of his struggle.

Richard Wright’s literature—from Black Boy to Native Son—remains an essential starting point for any serious discussion of race, class and the social psychology of oppression in the United States. Wright wrote as a proletarian intellectual: his fiction and essays insist that the oppression of Black people is rooted not in a metaphysical “racial DNA” but in specific social relations—segregated labour markets, violent property relations and the structural violence of capitalism.

Wright’s work traces how poverty, wage labour, discrimination and the threat of racial violence shape individual psychology and mass politics. In Native Son, Bigger Thomas’s crimes are not metaphysical expressions of an immutable racial pathology; they are the social consequences of exclusion, desperate material conditions and systemic dehumanisation. Wright’s political development—his engagement with communist and socialist circles in the 1930s—further grounded his view that the fight against racism must be situated within the struggle against capitalism and private property.

It is a testament to his political foresight and integrity that his books are still widely read today and remain relevant. Wright’s insistence that liberation requires systemic change remains crucial as workers today confront mass poverty, racist policing, mass incarceration and an economy reorganised around austerity and profit. The ruling class weaponises racism to prevent working-class unity; Wright’s work shows the political cost of accepting explanations that dissociate race from class and capitalism.

Wright’s political insights have even greater resonance in today's debates, such as the controversy surrounding the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which presented a racialist view of historical developments. The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) critiqued the 1619 Project. Extensive documentation of this struggle can be found on the World Socialist Website.[1]

The SEP argued that the 1619 Project substituted racialist narratives for class analysis and treated racism as an immutable feature of American “DNA” rather than a historically specific product of capitalist development. Wright was not mentioned in the 1619 Project. For good reason, his materialist orientation not only cuts across the 1619 Project's racialist interpretation of history, but also offers an antidote: it compels us to analyse how slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, migration, and proletarianization transformed social relations and created class potentialities for solidarity, unionism, and revolutionary politics.

To summarise from the standpoint of contemporary political life, Wright’s life and work underscore the necessity of connecting literary and intellectual inquiry to an independent working-class political struggle. Richard Wright remains a living challenge to the politics of identity that divorces race from class. His materialist, proletarian humanism points the way: the liberation of Black people is bound to the emancipation of the working class as a whole. Only through a united, politically independent working‑class struggle can the social relations that produce racism be abolished. Richard Wright’s legacy is both cultural and political: he challenges fatalism, rejects racial essentialism, and insists that emancipation requires transforming the social relations of production. His work remains a vital resource as a class-based alternative to capitalism.

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[1] The New York Timesâ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History

David North; Thomas Mackaman-Mehring Books

Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir, Paperback by Norm MacDonald – 1 Jan. 1900, Random House

The only time having a cult following is beneficial is when you are actually in a cult…However, being a stand-up comedian with a cult following means that most folks hate your guts.

—Norm Macdonald

"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others".

Groucho Marx

“ I am humorous, but the law bids me write seriously. I am audacious, but the law commands that my style be modest. [. . . .] The universal modesty of the mind is reason, that universal liberality of thought which reacts to each thing according to the latter's essential nature.”

Karl Marx

 "To live outside the law, you must be honest". 

Bob Dylan

By any stretch of the imagination, Norm Macdonald’s Based on a True Story is not exactly a factual memoir. In fact, I would say there is hardly any factual basis for it, but it is a very funny read. As David Letterman said, “I have read Based on a True Story, and I believe it to be largely bullshit, but it is very, very, very funny!” It is not entirely made up of bullshit, but it is sprinkled with a few truths; however, most events do not hold much water.

Norm Macdonald (1959–2021) was one of the most important voices in late-20th and early-21st-century North American comedy: deadpan delivery, an appetite for subversion, and a tendency to take jokes into uncomfortable territory. For the reader studying Macdonald is not merely cultural nostalgia but an opportunity to sharpen critical tools: to examine how humour reflects class relations, ideological currents, individual psychology and the shifting political landscape of the ruling class and its institutions. It is fair to say that Macdonald stood on the shoulders of a long list of great American comics, including Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor, and George Carlin, to name but a few.

My introduction to Norm Macdonald was through the superb American Comedy The Middle.[1] I was unaware of his history on Saturday Night Live (SNL) or his groundbreaking stand-up comedy. When Macdonald was told he had a cult following, he replied in the book, “I quickly developed a cult following. That sounds pretty good, but the truth is it’s the last thing you want to develop. The only time having a cult following is a great thing is when you are actually in a cult. Then you get to be a cult leader, and life is milk and honey… everyone thinks you are God… you get to lie down with all the ladies from the cult… In a short matter of time, you become drunk with power and begin to lie down with the men, also, not because you want to, but just because you can. Yes, being a cult leader with a cult following is fine work if you can find it. However, being a stand-up comedian with a cult following means that most folks hate your guts.”[2]

Macdonald’s character in The Middle was Uncle Rusty. It is extremely difficult to determine Rusty’s social type. Certainly, he was, in the past, a worker, but he was a bit of a grifter and, at times, represented small-business conservatism, also exhibiting working-class insecurity. Macdonald’s work on The Middle is a masterful example of comedy, both in form and content. His comic timing, silences, and persona were a joy to watch.

Macdonald’s comedy exemplifies the tensions of a semi-petty-bourgeois cultural milieu whose ironic detachment both reflects and reproduces social atomisation. His recurring themes are scepticism of elites and a delight in subverting norms, but often a retreat into cleverness and anecdote. He offers a case study in how cultural forms can register genuine grievances without pointing to collective, class-based solutions.

The Middle sitcom captures the rhythms of precarious, small-town life under late capitalism: juggling low wages, shrinking public services, stalled upward mobility and the cultural weight of respectability politics. The Middle” (the ABC sitcom) and a character like “Uncle Rusty” function, in cultural terms, as a compact social text: they reflect and reproduce the values, anxieties and ideological compromises of a broad layer of American life — the suburban, small town and petty bourgeois milieu often called “middle America.”

Rusty and Macdonald, for that matter, were rebels without a cause. He certainly had an anti-authoritarian air. Rather than adhering to a strict ideology, his comedy and public persona focused on refusing to pander to audiences or authority figures, such as when he mocked the idea of "violent terrorists" respecting velvet ropes during the January 6th Capitol riot.

Through his character Uncle Rusty, Macdonald critiques cultural conservatism and populist resentment: he typically combines sharp jabs of humour aimed at elites with an affirmation of traditional family values, localism, and personal responsibility. This mixture can predispose audiences to see social problems as moral or personal failures rather than systemic contradictions. However, by framing Rusty’s flaws as quirks and resolving them within the family, the show channels potential political anger into private reconciliation and comic relief. This is a common function of mainstream sitcoms in stabilising social relations. At times, the character can expose managerial stupidity or precarity, offering openings for critique. The decisive question is whether those openings are developed into a class explanation or left as individual anecdotes; the show mostly expresses the latter.

As capitalism intensifies precarity, sitcoms like The Middle shape millions of impressions about who is to blame and what can be done. Understanding the show’s pedagogy helps organisers convert diffuse resentment into class consciousness by exposing the gap between individual coping and collective action.

Comedy is not a neutral amusement; it is a social form rooted in class relations and the material conditions that produce ideas, tastes and collective sensibilities. From a Marxist standpoint, comedy must be analysed as part of cultural production: its forms, audiences and effects are shaped by the economic base and the class forces that struggle within a given historical epoch. Historically, comedic forms reflect shifts in class power.

Carnival, farce and satire in pre-capitalist and early-capitalist societies allowed subordinate classes to mock elites—ritualised inversions that temporarily loosened hierarchy. Under capitalist commodity relations, new comic genres emerged (burlesque, stand-up, situation comedy), shaped by urbanisation, wage-labour rhythms, mass media, and the commodification of leisure. The avant-garde and revolutionary epochs produced satire and grotesque comedy that targeted bureaucrats, profiteers, and false consciousness; conversely, periods of reaction saw comedy co-opted to reinforce nationalist, patriarchal, and consumerist norms.

Today, comedy circulates globally through streaming platforms and social media, shaped by corporate algorithms and advertising imperatives. Many comedians occupy precarious economic positions while addressing issues—inequality, racism, surveillance—that concern working people. This contradiction produces both sharp, politically conscious satire and commodified “safe” humour that normalises neoliberal individualism.

The book has an overall tone of melancholy, of sadness, which Norm carried throughout his life. But he also carried an antidote to that in a sharp, rebellious comedy. Both the book and the TV series The Middle are worth reading and watching. Macdonald was a fine exponent of his craft.

 

 

 

 

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[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Middle_(TV_series)

[2] Based on a True Story, Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald 

Trotsky, The Passionate Revolutionary by Allan Todd Pen & Sword History Hardcover – 18 July 2022

 

I do not measure the historical process by the yardstick of one’s personal fate. ‘… I know no personal tragedy…In prison, with a book or a pen in hand, I experienced the same sense of deep satisfaction that I did at the mass meetings of the revolution.’

Leon Trotsky

Allan Todd wrote Trotsky: The Passionate Revolutionary (2022) to provide a more comprehensive, humanised, and nuanced portrait of Leon Trotsky, moving beyond the one-dimensional, often heavily biased, or overly academic portrayals in existing literature. Todd aimed to capture the intense, multi-faceted "passions" that drove Trotsky, including his revolutionary, intellectual, and romantic sides.

Alan Todd’s epithet “the passionate revolutionary” points to an honest and inspiring aspect of Trotsky. But passion must be understood dialectically as passion informed by scientific Marxism: programmatic rigour, historical analysis, and an international perspective. For workers studying revolutionary Marxism today, Trotsky’s life offers both an example of moral and intellectual courage and a method. His writings are responses to material realities. He sought to measure leaders and programs by their relation to class interests.

Todd rejects an overtly political or academic examination of Leon Trotsky’s life as a professional revolutionary. Instead, he explores Trotsky as a complete human being, covering not only his political and military roles (the 1905/1917 revolutions, the Red Army) but also his love of literature, personal life, and his relationships with his family and companions.

The book examines Trotsky's intellectual and literary side and his "passionate" personal relationships—including his relationship with Frida Kahlo and his long-term partner, Natalya Sedova—which are often overlooked in standard, purely political biographies. The book documents his "Passionate" Activism and how it fueled his revolutionary work, his ability to organise the Red Army, and his role as a leading opponent of Stalin.

As a teacher rather than a historian, Todd tends not to evaluate Trotsky from a political perspective. I have always believed that as a historian, you should orient research toward questions that matter politically, especially when you write a biography of such a political man as Trotsky. Since Trotsky remains politically contentious, many recent books are overtly polemical. There has been a massive revival of anti‑Trotsky falsifications in the post‑Soviet period. Todd’s book offers little more than a superficial or unsystematic rebuttal. While he does not recycle all the political slanders aimed at Trotsky, the author does not engage deeply with Trotsky’s primary texts, and it would appear that no archives have been consulted.

Having said that, Alan Todd’s portrait of Leon Trotsky as “the passionate revolutionary” does capture a truth, but that truth must be grasped in scientific, historical terms. Trotsky was not merely an energetic personality but a theorist and strategist whose ideas arose from concrete social struggles and the objective crises of early 20th-century capitalism. To understand Todd’s emphasis on passion correctly requires placing Trotsky’s life and ideas within the materialist conception of history, the dialectical method, and the programmatic legacy of the Fourth International.

Trotsky’s “passion” was inseparable from his commitment to revolutionary Marxism: the theory of permanent revolution, the insistence on the international character of socialist transformation, and the principled critique of bureaucratic degeneration. Trotsky’s writings and interventions on the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, on the organisation and strategy of the Red Army, and on the tasks of the working class under conditions of isolation, are not romantic gestures but scientific responses to concrete class relations and world-historical contradictions. His method treated political programs as the working out of objective social contradictions, not as personal rhetoric.

Trotsky lived through the decisive turning points of the capitalist and imperialist crisis: World War I, revolution, civil war, the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet state, and the rise of fascism. His theory of permanent revolution emerged from an analysis of how capitalist development and the world market shaped class alliances in backward countries; it insisted that the fate of socialist gains could not be separated from the international movement of the proletariat.

Equally important was Trotsky’s struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy. He understood Stalinism not as an aberrant personality cult but as the political expression of objective isolation and the defeat of working-class movements internationally.

This scientific content is often obscured by bourgeois or post‑Soviet revisionism that reduces Trotsky to caricature. Todd’s uncritical use of the historian Robert Service, who is one of the leading attack dogs of the Post-Soviet School of falsification, is problematic, to say the least.

Robert Service is a contemporary British historian best known for biographies of Soviet leaders, most notably his works on Stalin and Trotsky, and for a widely read history of world communism. For anyone committed to a scientific, materialist study of history, Service’s work must be examined critically: it is essential to understand both what he contributes (archival work and narrative synthesis for a broad audience) and where he fails, both methodologically and politically.

Historiography shapes political consciousness. Service’s approach illustrates how ostensibly scholarly writing can function as ideological weaponry either to rehabilitate bureaucratic regimes, as in his treatment of Stalin, or to discredit revolutionary leadership, as in his treatment of Trotsky.

David North writes: Trotsky: A Biography is a crude and offensive book, produced without respect for the most minimal standards of scholarship. Service’s “research,” if one wishes to call it that, has been conducted in bad faith. His Trotsky is not history but rather an exercise in character assassination. Service is not content to distort and falsify Trotsky’s political deeds and ideas. Frequently descending to the level of a grocery store tabloid, Service attempts to splatter filth on Trotsky’s personal life. Among his favourite devices is to refer to “rumours” about Trotsky’s intimate relations, without even bothering to identify the rumour’s source, let alone substantiate its credibility.

Trotsky once declared, as he defended himself against the slanders of Stalin’s regime: “There is not a stain on my revolutionary honour.” Service, however, portrays Trotsky as an individual without any honour. He attempts to discredit Trotsky not only as a revolutionary politician, but also as a man. Service’s Trotsky is a heartless and vain individual who used associates for his own egotistical purposes, a faithless husband who callously abandoned his wife, and a father who was coldly indifferent to his children and even responsible for their deaths. “People did not have to wait long before discovering how vain and self-centred he was,” Service writes of Trotsky in a typical passage. Service’s biography is loaded with such petty insults. Trotsky was “volatile and untrustworthy.” “He was an arrogant individual” who “egocentrically assumed that his opinions, if expressed in vivid language, would win him victory.” “His self-absorption was extreme. As a husband, he treated his first wife shabbily. He ignored the needs of his children, especially when his political interests intervened.”[1]

Although Todd does not go as far as Service in his hatred of Trotsky, the book contains numerous lies, misunderstandings, and outright political opposition to Trotsky’s politics and behaviour. The first thing that strikes you about Todd is that he has never been in or around a revolutionary party or movement. Otherwise, he would not have dared to print that Trotsky suffered from “Intellectual Overconfidence”. Despite recognising "the power of the written word", he spends some time arguing that this was his primary political weakness. He suggests that Trotsky overestimated the extent to which "clarity of ideas" would prevail within the Bolshevik Party.

As noted at the beginning of this article, Todd fails to situate Trotsky and his struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy within its broader social and political context. As I said, it is vitally important to study Trotsky’s writings as responses to material realities, measure leaders and programs by their relation to class interests, and organise political independence rooted in the international unity of the working class. Otherwise, you understand nothing about the political conflicts inside and outside of the Bolshevik Party during and after its rise to power. Certainly, he understands nothing of the objective basis that played a crucial role in Trotsky’s fall from power. If Todd believes that words are not as important as actions, why did Stalin have Trotsky murdered?

The assertion that Trotsky failed to identify Stalin as a serious threat early on is not only laughable but a lie. Trotsky did not simply “fail to see” Stalin as a threat in the sense of being blind to the danger. Rather, he identified early the growth of bureaucracy and the risks to the revolution. Still, he misjudged how quickly and effectively that social layer could consolidate power through control of the Party apparatus. That combination of correct diagnosis and political miscalculation shaped the tragic outcome.

Todd’s lack of political insight and historical knowledge leads him to assert that Trotsky’s so-called inability to build alliances was merely personal. While Trotsky’s difficulties in building long-lasting political alliances were real and consequential, they stemmed from objective class and institutional conditions within the Soviet state, from the social rise of a bureaucracy, and from the international isolation of the revolution, not from any perceived personal failings.

To sum up, it would appear that the central thesis of Todd's work is that Trotsky was a "literary" figure and that had the revolution not intervened, he would have remained so. Todd’s attempt at counterfactuals falls flat on its arse. Leon Trotsky was far more than a “literary figure.” While his gifts as a writer and polemicist were extraordinary, his historical role flowed from objective class struggles and particular material conditions. The October Revolution both revealed and required Trotsky’s capacities as organiser, military leader, strategist and theorist. Reducing him to an aesthetic talent divorced from politics misunderstands how theory, leadership, and social forces interpenetrate under capitalism and revolution.

 

 

 

AUTHOR: Allan Todd was a teacher, exam workshop leader, and senior examiner in 20th-century/Modern World History for over 25 years. He also lectured in Modern European and World History for the Extra-Mural Boards of Cambridge University and the University of East Anglia, and has written numerous GCSE, A Level, and IB History textbooks and revision guides, including Revolutions, 1789-1917.

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[1] In The Service of Historical Falsification A Review of Robert Service’s Trotsky: A Biography Socialistdemocracy.org/Reviews/ReviewTrotskyABiography.html

What The Rich Don't Tell The Poor: Conversations with Guatemalan Oligarchs Roman Krznaric-Paperback – 16 Feb. 2022

Krznaric’s book is a fascinating and valuable insight into the modern Guatemalan oligarchy. He examines the inner life of the oligarchy and how it has maintained its power and privilege for over three centuries. It is a groundbreaking work of political and sociological analysis based on wide-ranging personal interviews.

What The Rich Don’t Tell The Poor was written in 2006 and stems from Krznaric’s 2003 PhD thesis, The World View of the Oligarch in Guatemalan Politics.[1] However, due to political and literary differences with publishers, the book was not published in its original form until 2022. As Krznaric writes in the 2022 preface, although the book is ten years old and much has changed in Guatemala in the intervening years, the oligarchy remains in complete control of Guatemala’s political and economic life.

Guatemala is well known for its extreme wealth inequalities, which have been caused by centuries of economic and political domination by an oligarchy comprising around fifty families of European descent.  In this case, the term "oligarchs" usually refers to a small group of influential families (often called "las familias") that have maintained economic and political dominance since colonial times. As of 2022, approximately 245 individuals in Guatemala held an accumulated wealth of US$30 billion. The oligarchs dominate crucial sectors of the Guatemalan economy, including export agriculture (sugar, coffee, bananas), finance and banking, construction materials (cement), and consumer goods. Families such as the Herrera Family: Owners of Ingenio Pantaleón, the largest sugar production estate in the country, with significant interests in banking (e.g., Banco Agromercantil), the Castillo Family: A historically substantial family involved in the production of beer and other industries and the Novella Family: Major players in the cement industry for generations. These families and others make Guatemala one of the most unequal countries on the planet.

As Krznaric relates:  “Getting the oligarchs to speak openly was a challenge. Using all I knew about ethnographic and oral history interviewing techniques, I tried to be courteous rather than confrontational – a strategy that created an atmosphere which felt relaxed, unthreatening and conversational. I quickly learned that accusing them of violating human rights or exploiting workers made them clam up. However, encouraging them to share stories about their lives and experiences lowered their guard and led them to reveal much more about themselves. Rather than offering critical comments on the spot during the interviews, I found that I could defer my critiques until I was writing about them and interpreting what they said, as I do in What The Rich Don’t Tell The Poor.”[2]

Global context: Global Oligarchy and local oligarchy

The global charity Oxfam has recently released several reports that document what every worker knows: an accelerating concentration of wealth and power in the hands of an oligarchy whose fortunes have exploded even as mass poverty, precarious work and state austerity deepen. The charity’s data shows that billionaire wealth surged to a record $18.3 trillion in 2025, and that the wealthiest handful of individuals now own more than the wealth of billions of people.  The number of global billionaires recently increased by 30% to approximately 2,750 individuals, who together control more wealth than the planet’s poorest 4.6 billion people.

As Krznarics correctly states in the book, Guatemala’s oligarchy functions as an extension of global imperialist interests. Multinational agribusiness, mining and energy firms rely on local oligarchs to secure land, labour, and concessions. Yankee capitalism has historically backed Guatemalan oligarchs and their militarisation of Guatemalan life and carried out numerous coups to protect these interests, from the 1954 CIA overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz to more recent economic and political interventions. The oligarchs’ rule requires a combination of legal-clientelist institutions and outright coercion. They co-opt political parties, control key state ministries, and use the judiciary to neutralise opponents. When that fails, repression and violence are employed against organisers, Indigenous communities and trade-union militants.

The struggles of the Guatemalan working class against the oligarchs are not documented in the book. But these struggles are not isolated: the working class has challenged the supply chains and profit zones of global capital. Resistance to extractivism (mining and hydroelectric dams), land grabs for agro-exports, and labour discipline in maquilas strike at imperialist accumulation. International solidarity can disrupt investments, cut off supply-chain legitimacy and expose the complicity of multinational corporations and imperialist states. The global working class has an interest in supporting these struggles because they weaken the power of an oligarchy that helps sustain the world capitalist order and its wars.

Summary

Roman Krznaric’s book is a vital piece of journalism and provides essential insight into the world of the Guatemalan oligarchs. Krznaric’s suggestions for countering these oligarchs have profound weaknesses.  While addressing the moral and psychological gaps between wealthy elites and the poor, he argues that, to reduce inequality, workers and youth should challenge the oligarchs to change habits, broaden empathy, cultivate longer time horizons, and reframe public narratives so that disadvantaged people can adopt attitudes and strategies associated with success.

Krznaric’s approach is fundamentally an appeal to moral persuasion. He asks the wealthy to change hearts and minds — to exercise empathy, mentor, and open networks — relying on their voluntary moral action rather than on structural compulsion. He treats inequality partly as a deficit of habits and imagination among low-income people that can be remedied by teaching the “right” psychology and practices. These elements make the argument attractive to readers who prefer non-confrontational, reformist routes: it promises measurable improvements through persuasion, education and moral example, without directly challenging property relations or class power.

As Marxists point out, inequality is rooted in property relations, the extraction of surplus value and state power. Teaching better habits or eliciting elite empathy cannot change the class relations that produce mass poverty. Moral appeals to elites presuppose goodwill and avoid building an independent working class  

 

 

 

 

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[1] The World View of the Oligarch in Guatemalan Politics.A thesis submitted for the degree of PhD in the Government Department of the University of Essex, Colchester, UK 2003

[2] Want to Challenge the Elite? Then first Understand What Makes Them Tick. frompoverty.oxfam.org.uk/want-to-challenge-the-elite-then-first-understand-what-makes-them-tick/