This Dark Night: The Life of Emily Brontë by Deborah Lutz Bloomsbury Continuum 28 May 2026
I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will" Jane Eyre.
“The wind I hear it sighing, with autumn's saddest sound; withered leaves all thick are lying, as spring-flowers on the ground. This dark night has won me to wander far away; old feelings gather fast upon me.”
The Complete Poems of Emily Bronte Volume 1
The present splendid brotherhood of fiction-writers in England, whose graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together, have described every section of the middle class from the “highly genteel” annuitant and fundholder who looks upon all sorts of business as vulgar, to the little shopkeeper and lawyer’s clerk. And how have Dickens and Thackeray, Miss Brontë and Mrs Gaskell painted them? As full of presumption, affectation, petty tyranny and ignorance; and the civilised world has confirmed its verdict with the damning epigram that it has fixed to this class that “they are servile to those above, and tyrannical to those beneath them.”
Karl Marx: The English Middle Class
Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) stands as a significant novel in English literature, deserving of detailed analysis for its emotional and psychological complexity as well as its social themes. Paul Bond notes in a review of Emerald Fennell's new film adaptation that Wuthering Heights reveals "an almost organic expression of this devastating personal impact which has definite social roots in property relations." This view is essential for a comprehensive understanding of Brontë.[1]
Emily Brontë (1818–1848) stands out as a significant figure in English literature. An important question for any detailed biography is: how did a daughter of a clergyman, largely living in solitude on the Yorkshire moors, create Wuthering Heights? This novel wields deep emotional and social influence and continues to engage readers nearly two centuries later. As Bond observes, the novel's main strength lies in its "wild intensity" and "almost organic expression of devastating personal impact, rooted in social property relations." Wuthering Heights is more than a gothic romance or a story of doomed love; it is a novel where love, cruelty, ambition, and destruction are intricately connected to land ownership, social class, and social exclusion.
Heathcliff's tragedy extends beyond psychology. As a child, he specifically envies Edgar Linton, saying, "I wish I had light hair and fair skin, and was dressed, and behaved as well, and had a chance of being as rich as he will be." His vengeance involves property issues, mortgage debt, strategic marriage, and inheritance schemes. Brontë insightfully recognised that in bourgeois society, passion and property are closely linked rather than opposites.
The Danger of Biographical Reduction
Deborah Lutz's focus on Emily Brontë's life to understand her work is insightful. However, it risks falling into the trap of literary biography, which often explains a work through the author's psychology or personal details, reducing a great novel to a reflection of its creator's inner world. This approach is individualist and idealist. In contrast, a materialist perspective asks different questions: What historical and social circumstances made Wuthering Heights possible? What was the Brontë family's social class? They were educated and cultured but faced economic insecurity, were dependent on the church, and lived amid the rough industrial capitalism of the West Riding of Yorkshire. What did Emily observe about the harsh changes capitalism was bringing to the English countryside and its inhabitants during the 1830s and 40s?.
Lutz’s earlier research on Brontë certainly deserves attention. Her two publications on Brontë form part of Victorian studies that concentrate on either "material culture" or "thing theory." While this perspective offers significant benefits, it also faces limitations when detached from class analysis. Lutz’s "Paperwork" essay provides valuable insights and, in some respects, exemplifies a genuinely materialist approach to scholarship. By analysing physical elements of Emily Brontë's writing, such as the cost of paper in the 1830s and 1840s, the rag trade, the underdeveloped paper industry, and the tax on paper that wasn’t lifted until 1860, Lutz connects Brontë's poetic expression to tangible economic factors. The Brontës were not working in a detached, artistic realm; instead, they operated amidst material shortages. Small scraps, recycled Latin exercise pages, and meticulous handwriting all mirror these material conditions.[2]
The paper's main components were linen and cotton rag, with persistent rag shortages increasing costs; the manuscript's link to the rag-and-bone trade and working-class clothing provides solid historical context for good literary scholarship. For instance, Charlotte's concern that her “The Professor manuscript” might be reused as lining in leather trunks or butter barrels highlights the vulnerability of intellectual work within capitalism, even among Victorian middle-class authors.
Lutz's concept of "thing theory," along with material culture studies, haptic reading, and phenomenology, remains firmly rooted in bourgeois academic discourse. It focuses on objects and their meanings but does not fully explore the social relations involved in their creation. Collectors and workers gathered raw materials, such as rag cloth, which were processed into paper at early industrial sites, including paper mills. The challenges faced by the Brontës were not only personal or aesthetic; their status as daughters of a clergyman living in Haworth also shaped them. In this industrial region of Yorkshire, the wool trade had already transformed the landscape and affected the lives of the working class.
The article "Relics and Death Culture' highlights Terry Eagleton's Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës* (1975), which is arguably the most comprehensive analysis of the Brontës so far. Eagleton views Heathcliff's transformation from a social outsider to a vengeful landowner through the lens of the conflicts between early capitalism and bourgeois values. Myths of Power is among the most frequently referenced works of Marxist criticism in the Anglo-American academic world. It warrants serious consideration and critique. While it offers valuable insights into class contradictions in the Brontë novels, its broader theoretical framework aligns with Althusserian structural Marxism, ultimately distorting both the literary works and the Marxist approach it claims to represent.
The most significant contribution of the book is its argument that understanding the Brontës requires considering the unique social and historical context of mid-19th-century England. This includes the struggles between agrarian and industrial capitalism, the unstable status of the lower gentry and middle classes, and how ideas of personal passion and romantic ideals helped to interpret and obscure those economic and social conflicts.
Eagleton's interpretation of Wuthering Heights is particularly insightful. He sees Heathcliff as a symbol of the contradictions within a capitalist system that produces its own monsters: brutalised by the class system as a foundling, Heathcliff then exploits the logic of property and wealth accumulation to exact revenge on those who degraded him. As Paul Bond pointed out in his critique of Emerald Fennell's flawed film adaptation, Brontë's deep passion often manifests in complex ways through themes of land ownership and household dynamics — aspects Fennell, aimed at a narrow upper-middle-class audience, completely misses. Eagleton, however, understands this. He views Emily Brontë's novel not as a timeless romantic story but as a piece deeply rooted in real class conflicts and brutality, to borrow Bond's words. On this crucial issue, Eagleton is largely correct, and his analysis surpasses the more simplistic liberal-humanist criticism that previously dominated academia.
However, this is where the critique must become more precise. Althusser explicitly influenced Eagleton's 1975 theoretical framework, drawing on Louis Althusser's structuralist reinterpretation of Marxism, his concept of "ideological state apparatuses," and his idea of literature as a practice that creates a particular "aesthetic effect" by revealing ideology at its boundaries. This framework introduces a significant distortion into what might otherwise have been a straightforward historical-materialist criticism.
Althusserian Marxism was not a step forward from orthodox Marxism but a step back. By viewing ideology as a relatively independent "level" of social structure governed by its own internal logic rather than the conscious actions of individuals in specific historical contexts, Althusser disconnected literature from the real class struggles. In Eagleton's interpretation, this results in a critique that is formally Marxist but essentially structuralist: texts are examined as systems of signs and ideological conflicts, while the actual historical context—such as the particular stage of English capitalism, the working-class political movements, and the social struggles over religion, gender, and reform that shaped the world of the Brontës falls into the background.
Lutz's "thing theory" offers an alternative perspective, highlighting the non-commodity nature of relics and their resistance to circulation. However, this approach serves more as a complement than a replacement. Eagleton's core argument is that Wuthering Heights reflects the tensions and brutalities of a society in transition to capitalism, and that the intense, destructive love between Catherine and Heathcliff can only be understood in light of these social contradictions.[3]
One aspect of the "Paperwork" essay that warrants further thought is its treatment of Brontë's secrecy and isolation. Lutz carefully describes how Brontë concealed her poems, even from her sisters, in a tiny script "meant to conceal even as it revealed," and how the small size of the writing served as a form of privacy. This is a significant and compelling point. However, a Marxist perspective would question: what social conditions compelled an exceptionally talented woman to hide her inner life so completely? The Brontë sisters had to publish under pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell to avoid potential dismissal. Emily's intense privacy was not merely a personal eccentricity or aesthetic preference; it was influenced by the societal position of women in Victorian bourgeois society, their exclusion from public intellectual participation, and their confinement to domestic roles. The "prison house" of the body, a recurring motif in Brontë’s poetry, was not merely a romantic or mystical image; it also embodied the tangible social restrictions women faced in mid-19th-century England.
Lutz's The Life of Emily Brontë extends this materialist-biographical approach across Brontë's whole life, centred on what Lutz calls the "nine objects" of The Brontë Cabinet (her 2015 work). This is a richly researched and readable approach to biography, and it avoids the worst tendencies of romantic mythologization to which Brontë biography is prone. But the limitation remains: the social and class framework stays underdeveloped. The Haworth that the Brontës inhabited was a specific place in a specific moment of capitalist development, the factory system, Chartism, and the condition of the working class in Yorkshire, and this context appears only at the periphery of Lutz's scholarship.
What Makes The Brontës Endure
Wuthering Heights is rooted not only in a harsh landscape but also in a real social world marked by class division and savagery, which must be reflected in the passions of our everyday lives. It, therefore, stands as a genuine and remarkable work of art. Should this benchmark be applied to any biography of Emily Brontë? Does it help us understand how a real person, shaped by specific material and social circumstances, created a piece of art that surpasses those conditions and resonates with universal human experience? The reader needs to ask whether Lutz's biography meets this standard by situating Brontë's remarkable inner life within the tangible context of Victorian England, including its class conflicts, treatment of women, religious hypocrisies, and economic instability among the educated poor. If it does, then it warrants serious engagement. Conversely, if it indulges in romantic myths about a solitary genius communing with nature, it will reveal less about Brontë than her novel already does.
The Brontë Sisters
The Brontë sisters—Charlotte (1816–1855), Emily (1818–1848), and Anne (1820–1849) hold a unique place in English literary history. Rather than serving as passive defenders of Victorian society, they acted as its passionate, often anguished critics. Viewing their work through a Marxist lens does not reduce it to merely sociological commentary; instead, it highlights why their art remains profoundly impactful: because it reflects, whether consciously or not, the genuine social contradictions of their era. Moreover, their greatest works explore universal truths about human experience that go beyond the specific context of their time.
The Brontës wrote during the 1840s, a decade characterised by revolutionary upheaval across Europe and severe social crisis in Britain. The Chartist movement, the first large-scale working-class political movement, was challenging the foundations of the British establishment. Ireland faced famine, while the Industrial Revolution generated immense wealth and profound poverty simultaneously. In 1854, Karl Marx recognised this social unrest in literature, noting that Charlotte Brontë, along with Dickens, Thackeray, and Gaskell, produced work that reveals more political and social truths than all the speeches of politicians, publicists, and moralists combined.
The Brontës were neither aristocrats looking down on society nor comfortably bourgeois. They were the daughters of a Yorkshire clergyman, forced into the fragile and humiliating role of governesses—educated women with refined sensibilities who had to sell their intellectual labour in households that viewed them with barely concealed disdain, neither fully servants nor equals. This sense of class ambiguity, caught between refinement and labour, permeates all their writing.
Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre
Jane Eyre (1847) fundamentally explores the dignity and independence of an individual who has nothing, no family, property, or social standing, in a society that judges worth solely on those criteria. Jane, an orphan, is sent to a charity school where harsh religious piety disguises cruelty. Her later role as a governess places her in a socially vulnerable position, which Charlotte experienced in her life. The novel is "rich with sharp social critique and disdain for the hypocrisy of organised religion and for social norms that corrupt genuine human relationships", created during a period marked by mass strikes and Chartist protests that challenged the British political system.
The governess's role highlights a broader social contradiction: while educated women are rising, they are still prevented from gaining independent economic power due to bourgeois property systems. Jane's famous statement, “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will,” is not merely romantic. It represents a rebellion against Victorian societal norms that viewed women as the property of their fathers, brothers, or husbands. Charlotte's novel underscores that this rebellion is justified. Jane's moral integrity, inner life, and independence are valued more than Rochester's inherited wealth and social rank.
The novel doesn't fully resolve this contradiction. Jane inherits wealth and marries Rochester, becoming equal again through the divine destruction of his past life. Charlotte wasn't a socialist, and we shouldn't interpret her as such. Yet, her strong focus on Jane's human dignity, along with her sharp critique of class hypocrisy, the parasitic aunt, the sadistic clergyman, the sycophantic social climbers, embodies a rebellious intensity that explains why the book has been adapted into film more than twenty times. Such passionate depictions of injustice remain compelling across generations.
The Brontës wrote from a specific social background, the provincial petty bourgeoisie, daughters of a clergyman on the Yorkshire moors, and their work thoughtfully explores issues of social constraint, passion, moral independence, and the oppressive influence of class society on personal growth. Wuthering Heights, especially with Heathcliff's origins in poverty and his revenge against the class system that harmed him, reflects significant social tensions that deserve deep literary-historical analysis.
The Pseudo Lefts and the Brontë sisters
A genuine Marxist view of the Brontës emphasises the historical and class factors that shape their work. This includes the effects of the Industrial Revolution in northern England, the strict constraints faced by educated women of their social class, and the tension between Romantic individualism and Victorian social norms. Rather than simply portraying them as proto-feminist icons for identity politics, a common approach among the pseudo-left, it's important to analyse their literature in its historical context. The Socialist Workers Party’s (SWP) cultural coverage often focuses more on political trends, such as feminism and anti-racism, than on literary analysis. True appreciation of great literature requires understanding it within its historical framework and recognising its universal, enduring artistic value, guided by the Marxist tradition of thinkers such as Mehring, Plekhanov, Trotsky, and others.
The Socialist Workers Party's portrayal of the Brontë sisters, detailed in the article "The Brontë sisters strove to be judged on their own terms," exemplifies the pseudo-left's approach to culture. Instead of genuinely engaging with the literary and historical significance of the Brontës' work, the SWP primarily depicts them as women fighting against male bias, reducing three of Victorian England's most renowned writers to symbols supporting a modern identity-politics agenda. The sisters are portrayed as proto-feminist tools in today's cultural conflicts—rather than as complex artists shaped by their specific historical and social contexts, whose work must be appreciated for its full complexity and depth.[4]
They engage in what could be described as "the worst kind of narrow-minded, ahistorical moralising.' The Brontës wrote during the 1840s, a decade marked by revolutionary upheavals across Europe, the same period when the Communist Manifesto was published, and Chartism reached its zenith in England. The West Yorkshire moors were not just an isolated, romanticised countryside; they were adjacent to industrial towns and symbolised the struggles of capitalism's rise. Viewing their work solely as a narrative of gender oppression fails to recognise the broader social and historical contexts that imbue it with greater significance.
When the SWP discusses the Brontës, it's not truly about them. Instead, it reflects the SWP's own concerns and frustrations, using three deceased Yorkshire writers as a convenient mirror. Had the Brontës been studied earnestly, they would have been more beneficial to the working class than to the SWP's aims. Trotsky valued literature highly and believed that great art, even from writers without revolutionary views, could elevate the human experience and expand understanding. The SWP, with its shallow focus on identity politics and political allegiance to Labour, cannot engage in this way. It reduces the complexity of the Brontës' work to a simple morality tale, women versus patriarchy, that conveniently aligns with its current political stance. This diminishes both the Brontës' legacy and the interests of the working class.
Emily Brontë's 'Wuthering Heights' is one of the most socially charged novels in English. The story centres on Heathcliff, a foundling of likely Irish or Romani origin, rescued from the streets of Liverpool, whose life is wrecked by a rigid class system that strips him of status and keeps him apart from Catherine. His quest for revenge embodies the anger of the oppressed, a fierce rebellion against the wealth-based social order. The novel is less about romance and more about how a class-based society corrupts and destroys individuals. Understanding this core is essential, and no focus on 'gender' or identity politics can replace it.
Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre presents a layered exploration of independence. Jane's notable assertion, "I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will", is often seen as a feminist statement today. However, it is rooted in a complex social context: Jane's independence is continually influenced by her class status as a governess, one of the most precarious roles in Victorian society educated yet without property, neither servant nor lady. Charlotte's own life experience informed her understanding of this contradiction. Anne Brontë, often the most neglected of the three, wrote The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a direct, unflinching account of a destructive marriage and a woman's struggle for legal and economic independence. It was considered so scandalous that Charlotte suppressed its republication after Anne's death to understand why requires understanding the property laws and social structures of the time, not merely projecting contemporary feminist categories backwards.
Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights
Charlotte's work is immediately social in tone, whereas Emily's explores deeper themes. Wuthering Heights (1847) remains one of the most outstanding novels in English literature. Its intense passions are not isolated but are linked to property, social class, and inheritance in every aspect. The emotional core of Heathcliff and Catherine's relationship cannot be understood without its social context. Catherine's decision to marry Edgar Linton rather than Heathcliff is not merely a betrayal of love; it reflects a preference for social status over genuine feelings, ultimately damaging both.
Emily excels at showing how capitalist property systems, such as land ownership, estate inheritance, mortgages, and foreclosures, are not just backgrounds but vital to human passion. Heathcliff's revenge is carried out through property dealings: he acquires Wuthering Heights through Hindley's gambling debts and employs marriage alliances to control Thrushcross Grange. The personal and societal are deeply intertwined.
What makes Wuthering Heights so difficult to simplify or shallowly adapt, as in Fennell's version, is that Emily neither romanticises passion nor the social structures that distort it. The novel demonstrates “hope in the possibility" of a better future, without suggesting such hope is easily within reach. Fennell's mistake highlights that by stripping away the novel's exploration of property relations, class dynamics, and the second generation of characters—who reveal Heathcliff's self-destructive vengeance—the adaptation reduces the story to mere "adulterous hot sex" and "sado-masochistic sexual cruelty."
What sets Brontë apart from a sentimental romantic novelist is her firm stance against letting passion escape its social boundaries. Catherine's well-known statement — "he's more myself than I am... if all else perished, and he remained, I should continue to be, and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger" — is not just romantic fancy. It reflects a love born under social marginality and class conflict, a connection built to defy Edgar Linton's comfortable, property-owning respectability. Nonetheless, Catherine also marries Edgar, knowing that "it would degrade her" to marry Heathcliff — not due to lesser love, but because social class restricts living outside its rules. Brontë here understands something that pure romance overlooks: the tragic distortion of human beings shaped by social forces beyond their control.
The second half of the novel, often overlooked in adaptations, is just as important. It shows Heathcliff's revenge reaching its final stage, with the younger characters (Hareton, Cathy, Linton Heathcliff) caught in the same social cycle. Brontë reminds readers that "primordial passion plays out often inarticulately in the mechanics of land ownership and household establishment," as Bond notes. Even the ending—where Heathcliff's desire for revenge wanes and Hareton and young Cathy find a tentative hope—is not purely about redemption. As Bond explains, it is a "novel of hope in the possibility" that human relationships can go beyond brutality—though not guaranteed, it offers a glimpse.
We should honestly acknowledge the limits of the Brontës' social perspective. They were not advocates of socialism or revolution. Their critique of class society is primarily moral rather than structural. The resolution in their novels usually points to a reformed or tempered bourgeois society, such as marriages between equals and personal redemption, rather than a radical overhaul of social relations that create inequality. They did not, and could not, articulate the collective action of the working class. The Chartist movement, shaking Britain at the time, appears only as a backdrop, not as a social force they recognised as significant.
This is not a condemnation; it is a recognition of the historical horizon within which they worked. The Marxist tradition has always insisted that even artists who do not consciously embrace a revolutionary perspective can produce works of great social truth when they are genuinely committed to depicting reality. Engels himself said that Balzac, a legitimist and Catholic, taught him more about French society than all the historians and economists combined, precisely because his artistic honesty compelled him to depict the contradictions of his world even against his own political sympathies. The same is true of the Brontës: their artistic integrity and their refusal to prettify the cruelties of class and gender in Victorian England produce works of enduring power.
The Brontë sisters are more than just great writers; their brilliance is deeply linked to their social context and their honest confrontation with it. The enduring relevance of their work—evidenced by how often Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre are adapted into films, studied, and widely debated—lies in their ability to portray the genuine human toll within a society driven by property, class, and the subjugation of women. This reflects "a real world of class distinction and savagery that must find reflection in the passions of our daily lives." The conflicts they identified remain unresolved; in fact, they have worsened and spread under mature capitalism. That is why their work remains relevant today.
From a Marxist standpoint, Wuthering Heights is a work of critical realism in the tradition that Engels admired in Balzac: an author who, regardless of her conscious intentions, captures the real social forces and contradictions of her time with pitiless honesty. Brontë had no programme of social transformation, but she had the artist's ability to perceive and render the devastation that class society inflicts on human beings — their loves, their psychologies, their possibilities. She shows us a world where the most profound human connection is crushed not by fate or natural evil, but by property, inheritance, and class power. That is an achievement of lasting significance, and it is why the novel remains, as Bond writes, "visceral and astonishing... rooted not just in a brutal landscape, but in a real world of class distinction and savagery that must find reflection in the passions of our daily lives."
[1] Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights: Is this all that we can expect?
[2] Emily Brontë’s Paper Work-Deborah Lutz Victorian Review
Vol. 42, No. 2 (Fall 2016), pp. 291-306 (15 pages)
[3] Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture- Cambridge University Press 2015
05 January 2015
[4] socialistworker.co.uk/reviews-and-culture/the-bronte-sisters-strove-to-be-judged-on-their-own-terms/
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.
[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Middle_(TV_series)
[2] Based on a True Story, Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald
The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr by Martin Luther King Jr Abacus Paperback – 6 April 2000
“I sometimes wonder what I would have done if I hadn’t received the phone call, whether I would have written something that was more mine,” Carson reflected. “The best-selling book that I’ll ever publish is the Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. I can hardly take credit for piecing together his words. I’ll always know that Martin Luther King will always outsell anything I write, and his writings and speeches will be more lasting. But look, if you have to be overshadowed by somebody, it might as well be Martin Luther King.”
Clayborne Carson
“Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of enslaved Negroes who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.”[1]
Martin Luther King
“Here comes that dreamer!” they said to each other. “Come now, let’s kill him and throw him into one of these cisterns and say that a ferocious animal devoured him. Then we’ll see what comes of his dreams.”
Genesis 37:19-21
The theory of race, specially created, it seems, for some pretentious self-educated individual seeking a universal key to all the secrets of life, appears particularly melancholy in the light of the history of ideas. To create the religion of pure German blood, Hitler was obliged to borrow at second hand the ideas of racism from a Frenchman, Count Gobineau [4], a diplomat and a literary dilettante. Hitler found the political methodology ready-made in Italy, where Mussolini had mainly borrowed from the Marxist theory of the class struggle. Marxism itself is the fruit of the union among German philosophy, French history, and British economics. To investigate retrospectively the genealogy of ideas, even those most reactionary and muddleheaded, is to leave not a trace of racism standing.
Leon Trotsky
Clayborne Carson, PhD, was commissioned by Martin Luther King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, to be the editor of the massive collection of papers that King had left behind. The majority of these papers were held in the King Centre for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. When Coretta Scott King initially selected him for the project in 1985, Carson estimated it would take around 20 years to complete, a deadline that has long passed. It will take several historians to complete the task. The King family will direct the long-term project of editing and publishing Dr Martin Luther King Jr.'s papers.
Even a historian of his statue must have baulked at the prospect of this challenging task being handed to him by the King family. The offer to edit the King archive came out of the blue. Carson had not written a single word on King, but jumped at the chance. However, from the start, the role caused difficulties for Carson as he was based at Stanford and wanted to stay there. Coretta King wanted him to relocate to Atlanta, where most of the papers were located. However, a happy compromise was made.
The work has taken him well into the 21st century (Vol. 6 of the Papers was published in 2007. Clayborne Carson has not finished editing the complete set of Martin Luther King Jr.'s papers. While he has edited and published seven of the planned fourteen volumes, he has stated that the whole project will likely not be completed in his lifetime.[2]
“I sometimes wonder what I would have done if I hadn’t received the phone call, whether I would have written something that was more mine,” Carson reflected. “The best-selling book that I’ll ever publish is the Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. I can hardly take credit for piecing together his words. I’ll always know that Martin Luther King will always outsell anything I write, and his writings and speeches will be more lasting. But look, if you have to be overshadowed by somebody, it might as well be Martin Luther King.”[3]
The work done by Carson on this book is to be commended because it now enables us to lift the large number of dead dogs that have been placed upon the historical reputation of Martin Luther King Jr. As Helen Halyard wrote, “King was unquestionably one of the most powerful orators of twentieth-century America and a man of great personal courage. He was able to give voice to the passionate strivings of millions of people to throw off the shackles of racial discrimination. Unlike those in today’s official civil rights leadership who seek to cash in on his memory, King was an honest man, not driven by financial gain.”[4]
From an early age, King knew he was living on borrowed time and that sooner or later his life would be taken. Perhaps that’s why he crammed so much into his short thirteen-year political career, which has filled his archive with so much documentation. King, during his short life, was reviled, spied upon, and in the end was assassinated. Over the last five decades, King's courageous struggle for social equality has been politically undermined, and King himself has been turned into a harmless icon.
King was an essential part of what was a mass movement which fought against racial discrimination and in defence of democratic rights for both blacks and whites. However, as Helen Halyard correctly wrote, “ the leadership was characterised by a petty bourgeois class makeup and a thoroughly reformist political outlook and program. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference was based on the perspective that racial equality and social and economic justice for Black people could be achieved without challenging the existence of capitalist property relations or the existing government institutions. From the Montgomery bus boycott through to the marches into Cicero, Illinois, King and the SCLC's strategy was to mobilise nonviolent demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience to pressure the government into enacting reforms.”[5]
There is no denying King's leadership played an immense role in the struggle for civil rights, and some limited reforms were achieved, notably the enactments of 1964 and 1965, which established the legal groundwork for a new era of civil and racial equality in America. However, a lot has happened since the 1960s, and a balance sheet is in order since King’s assassination in 1963.
The limitations of the victories achieved by the movement he led are more apparent today than ever. An objective assessment is warranted to critically examine the political program that guided his movement. King rejected both Marx and Marxism from an early age, writing, “With all of its false assumptions and evil methods, communism grew as a protest against the hardships of the underprivileged. Communism in theory emphasised a classless society, and a concern for social justice, though the world knows from sad experience that in practice it created new classes and a new lexicon of injustice.”
King was not a revolutionary, but he did have socialist sympathies. He understood that for the civil rights movement to win, it had to have the collaboration of the American working class.
He recognised that under capitalism, workers were being oppressed regardless of the colour of their skin. Writing in 1958, King drew on his own working experiences, when he witnessed “economic injustice firsthand, and I realised that the poor white was exploited just as much as the Negro. Through these early experiences, I grew up deeply conscious of the varieties of injustice in our society.”
King’s turn to the working class, which probably got him killed, would be an anathema to the current leadership of the struggle against racial and social inequality. The leadership that is responsible for the New York Times' 1619 Project have made it clear that they want no part of Martin Luther King and his “left turn”[6]
As Tom Mackaman and Niles Niemuth point out, “the universal Enlightenment principles King fought for and defended are under vicious assault. It is striking that in the 1619 Project, the Times’ initiative to write the 'true' history of America as rooted in slavery and racism, King’s contribution to the fight for equality is totally ignored. This doesn’t represent a different interpretation of facts or a mere oversight, but an outright historical falsification.[7]
To his credit
Eminent historian Professor Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, opposed and criticised the 1619 Project. In an interview for the World Socialist website, he noted that the ideals of the American Revolution and the Enlightenment played a key role in the civil rights movement and King’s own role as a political leader. “One way of looking at the founding of this country is to understand the audacity of a few hundred white male elites getting together and declaring a country—and declaring it a country based on the notion of human rights,” Carson explained. “Obviously, they were being hypocritical, but it’s also audacious. And that’s what rights are all about,” he noted. “It is the history of people saying, ‘I declare that I have the right to determine my destiny, and we collectively have the right to determine our destiny.’ That’s the history of every movement, every freedom movement in the history of the world. At some point, you have to get to that point where you have to say that, publicly, and fight for it.”[8]
2025 marks the fifty-fifth anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.It is perhaps remarkable still that the questions raised by the struggle of King and the civil rights movement have lost none of their urgency in the past five decades. There must be a serious discussion of this period to understand our present predicament.
As Patrick Martin says “The world we have today is not the outcome that King would have desired, nor does it represent the strivings of the millions of working people and youth—white as well as black—who joined in or were inspired by the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Those aspirations will only be carried forward through the emergence, at a far more politically conscious level, of a new mass movement of working people to challenge the capitalist system as a whole.”[9]
Notes
1. The King Centre-thekingcenter.org/what-we-do/king-library-and-archives/
2. www.archives.gov/research/mlk
3. King-Jonathan Eig
[1] www.npr.org/2010/01/18/122701268/i-have-a-dream-speech-in-its-entirety
[2] www.archives.gov/research/mlk
[3] Clayborne Carson: Looking back at a legacy-news.stanford.edu/stories/2020/08/clayborne-carson-looking-back-legacy
[4] Thirty years since the assassination of Martin Luther King-www.wsws.org/en/articles/1998/04/mlkz-a04.html
[5]Thirty years since the assassination of Martin Luther King
[6] See www.wsws.org/en/special/library/nyt-1619-project-racialist-falsification-history/00.html
[7] Martin Luther King Jr. and the fight for social equality
Tom Mackaman, Niles Niemuth 23 January 2020.wsws.org
[8] An interview with historian Clayborne Carson on the New York Times’ 1619 Project-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/01/15/clay-j15.html
[9] www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/04/king-a07.html
Cancelled Lives: My Father, My Scandal, and Me by Blake Bailey-Skyhorse- April 2025-192 Pages
“Canceled Lives tells the whole sad story and the personal pain Bailey suffered. His publisher had no right to do what they did to him. This book, about accusations of terrible behaviour and their effect on a book and its author, goes beyond memoir and reveals the profound harm such assertions can cause. It deserves a wide and discerning audience."
Martin Garbus, Prominent First Amendment Lawyer
“I heed the cry of the women insulted and injured. However, I am also anxious about the nature of the tribunal that is adjudicating these charges. As a civil libertarian, I am anxious because there doesn’t seem to be a tribunal. What I see instead is a publicised accusation instantly followed by peremptory punishment.
Philip Roth
“The history of my discontent, as I remember it”
Philip Roth
“The purging of Bailey’s book sets a sinister example, intended to intimidate artists, biographers and scholars alike. The message being sent is clear: any influential figure who rubs up against establishment public opinion can be denounced and dismissed in like manner.”
David Walsh
When Blake Bailey’s excellent 900-page biography of the writer Philip Roth was published in 2021, it should have been the standard work on Roth’s life for some time to come. Unfortunately for Bailey, we were already amidst the #MeToo movement's vilification of Roth, his work and worldview. Roth was cognisant of the fact that some women had been abused, saying, “I heed the cry of the women insulted and injured. But I am also made anxious by the nature of the tribunal that is adjudicating these charges. I am made anxious, as a civil libertarian, because there doesn’t seem to be a tribunal. What I see instead is a publicised accusation instantly followed by peremptory punishment.”[1]
Bailey became a casualty in this war against Roth for essentially defending Roth’s right to his worldview. Bailey fell afoul of his publishers' “morals charge” after accusations of sexual abuse were levelled at him via social media. Some of Bailey’s former eighth-grade students at Lusher High School in New Orleans came forward with allegations that he had groomed them for sex. Two women, including one of his former students at Lusher, subsequently accused him of rape.
Although no formal charges were made against Bailey, it did not stop his so-called friends in the literary scene, who “fell over one another”, disassociating themselves from Bailey. His biography was then pulped by his publisher, W.W.Norton, an act that is akin to book burning carried out by the Nazis in the 1930s.
As David Walsh wrote, “ In a significant act of censorship, with chilling implications for democratic rights, publisher W.W. Norton has announced its decision to “permanently” remove Blake Bailey’s biography of American novelist Philip Roth (1933–2018) from print. Several individuals have accused Bailey of sexual wrongdoing, including rape, dating back to 2003. None of them has come forward with any evidence to back up the claims. Bailey’s 880-page book, well-received critically and considered one of the essential works of the year in its field, will be pulped. Norton also reported its dropping of Bailey’s 2014 memoir. In a statement dripping with hypocrisy, Norton’s president, Julia A. Reidhead, asserted that “Mr Bailey will be free to seek publication elsewhere if he chooses.” Overnight, Bailey has become a “non-person.” he has ceased to exist.[2]
Most of Bailey’s friends and fellow writers stayed silent when he was made a “non-person. It was not until the World Socialist Website marshalled some resistance that people started to speak out. Several prominent writers, historians, and film people contacted by the WSWS condemned W. W. Norton’s treatment of Bailey. Novelist, memoirist and short-story writer James Morrison wrote, “Even if Blake Bailey were charged, tried, and convicted of a crime, it would still be indefensible for W. W. Norton to pulp his book. Can American readers not have the option to think for themselves? The “#MeToo movement” might have accomplished something if it had facilitated the prosecution of cases involving harassment or assault. Still, it has resulted in something like its opposite: a bizarre spectacle of social panic, moral shaming, and public burning, based on unfounded accusations in the media. Norton’s cancellation of Bailey’s book is not the action of a free institution in a democratic society. It is the procedure of craven functionaries deep in a politburo.[3]
Author, editor and blogger Kathleen Spaltro said, “Thomas Aquinas clarified that the aesthetic value of art has nothing whatever to do with whether the artist is a good person. The artist may be a good person, or not, but that is the moral question faced by the artist as a person, not as an artist.
Film critic, film historian and author Jonathan Rosenbaum: Cancel culture, perhaps the most poisonous and befuddled offshoot of “political correctness,” is a totalitarian expression of impotence, not any real exercise of political power. It’s a way of saying that because one can’t defeat racism or misogyny or abuse in the real world, at its sources, one can pretend to defeat it symbolically, by canceling words, sounds, images and other forms of communication, thus pretending that the people and communicators one disapproves of can be “canceled” (i.e., ignored and suppressed). It’s an insult to the principles of free expression that can only be practised by defeated bigots who’ve given up on free expression and democratic processes, and by gamblers who prefer to cheat.”
It took a while for Bailey to understand what had happened to him. Canceled Lives is his attempt to process and collect his thoughts and to answer his detractors. Patrick Mullins describes the new book's journey: “Originally titled Repellent, it was scheduled to be published in April 2023. Speaking circumspectly, Bailey has explained that the executors of Roth’s estate, Andrew Wylie and Julia Golier, objected to the inclusion of Bailey’s conversations with Roth in the manuscript, arguing that the publication of these exchanges, which supposedly made up the bulk of the book, would violate the agreement Bailey signed as Roth’s authorised biographer. And so Repellent was reworked, becoming Cancelled Lives, and Bailey’s dealings with Roth were transformed into an account of his father’s death braided with chapters narrating Bailey’s disgrace.”[4]
There are many themes running through Canceled Lives. One being Bailey’s sexual activity. Bailey was no angel, and some of his relationships were questionable at best. There seems to be a period in his life where his penis did most of the thinking, but this does not mean he deserved what happened to him.
He writes, “The worst of what I was accused of wasn’t true. I did nothing illegal and nothing vicious. I’m not a rapist, I did not deliberately groom anybody; these were long-time friends. You have enterprising reporters calling hundreds of your former students, hundreds of the people you’ve mentioned in your acknowledgements. People, for various reasons, are eager to get their shots”.
A strong theme of the book is death. Bailey discusses the life and early death of his older brother, Scott, who committed suicide in his early thirties after a life of drug addiction and crime. Bailey harshly describes Scott’s suicide as doing “himself and his loved ones a favour ”. Bailey spent a significant amount of time researching his book on Roth, so much so that he must have ended up with deep feelings for Roth.
He tells how he witnessed Roth’s final moments alongside Roth’s former lovers and closest friends surrounding his hospital deathbed. It is not surprising that the book provides little information about his relationship with Roth. Given how much he had to process in his own life and to come to terms with so many devastating attacks on him. Perhaps it is just as well, as he was while Roth was still alive, unable due to disclosure limitations imposed by the Roth estate on Bailey.
As Walsh intimates in his work on Bailey, most of the attacks on Bailey are less about his sexual proclivities and more to do with the fact that he wrote a perceptively objective biography of Roth and, in the end, defended both Roth and his political worldview against his detractors in the #MeToo movement.
In a recent video call, David Walsh spoke with Bailey about his new book, "The Sexual Witch Hunt," and democratic rights, as well as briefly discussing the subject matter of his various biographies. Bailey thanked the World Socialist Website for its support, saying, “You could be speaking for me, and you did, after everything blew up. I was enormously grateful for the courage of it. Very few people spoke up. People wrote me private notes expressing their outrage, or at least chagrin, about how viciously and relentlessly I was attacked. But I can’t think of anyone offhand who was as outspoken publicly as you were. And if I didn’t say it emphatically enough before, let me say now that I was very grateful for that.[5]
It is striking that the Trotskyist movement has been left to lead the defence of Bailey and his democratic rights in the pages of the World Socialist Website. The campaign to defend Bailey has cut across the right-wing attack on him led by the #MeToo movement. It is worth noting that the movement has been ably assisted by numerous pseudo-left media organisations that have joined the attacks on both Roth and Bailey. These so-called leftists have shown their support for banning books and removing them from bookshelves. The next logical step for these organisations will be to join the book burning.
Bailey’s new book, Cancelled Lives—My Father, My Scandal, and Me, is a stunning response to his detractors and slanderers, and it deserves a broad audience. Unlike too many of the #MeToo victims, Bailey has decided to fight and set the record straight. This is an entirely welcome and healthy development, a contribution to the cleansing of the cultural atmosphere. Bailey has the right to see the world as he sees fit.
[1] www.the-tls.com/lives/autobiography/canceled-lives-blake-bailey-book-review-nat-segnit
[2] Book-burning comes to America-https:ww.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/29/bail-a29.html
[3] Writers, biographers protest W.W. Norton’s decision to “permanently” remove Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth from print-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/05/04/bail-m04.html
[4] Okay, you’re hired-insidestory.org.au/okay-youre-hired/
[5] A conversation with Blake Bailey, Philip Roth biographer and author of Cancelled Lives: My Father, My Scandal, and Me: “I said ... I’m not going to take this lying down”
Lady Sings the Blues by Billie Holiday (Penguin Modern Classics) Paperback – 29 Nov. 2018
"I've been told that no one sings the word 'hunger' like I do. Or the word 'love'."
Billie holiday
"Holiday's voice, no matter how the Dufty/Holiday interviewing process went, is as real as rain.
David Ritz
The government has failed us; you can't deny that. Anytime you live in the twentieth century, 1964, and you're walking around here singing We Shall Overcome, the government has failed us. This is part of what's wrong with you — you do too much singing. Today, it's time to stop singing and start swinging. You can't sing up on freedom, but you can swing up on some freedom. Cassius Clay can sing, but singing didn't help him become the heavyweight champion of the world; swinging helped him achieve that title.
Malcom X[1]
"If the anger of the exploited ever mounts high enough in the South, it now has its Marseillaise."
Samuel Grafton[2] On the song Strange Fruit
Lady Sings the Blues is a brutally honest warts-and-all autobiography of Billie Holiday, the legendary jazz singer. Holiday died on July 17, 1959, at the Metropolitan Hospital in East Harlem, New York City, due to complications of chronic drug abuse. Holiday had an unbelievably difficult childhood. Born on April 17, 1915, in Baltimore, Maryland. Her mother, Sadie Fagan, was 13 years old, and her father, Clarence “Pop” Holiday, was just 15. Her birth name was Eleonora, which she later changed to Billie.
Holiday grew up fast, surviving an abusive childhood; her mother did loads of different jobs, including prostitution. She grew up in Baltimore and Harlem brothels. It has been said that she had a limited vocal range but went on to be a unique singer with an “unsettling emotional wallop”. While it is tempting to see Holiday as a victim, that is not how she saw things. Her memoir was written with help from William Dufty, and according to David Ritz, "Holiday's voice, no matter how the Dufty/Holiday interviewing process went, is as real as rain. She is open about her sexual abuse, her forced imprisonment, her heroin addiction, and in a minimal way, her struggles of being African American before the development of the Civil Rights Movement.
Some facts in the book have been disputed.[3] John Szwed argues in his 2015 study, Holiday, Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, that most of the book is accurate; however, Holiday's co-writer, William Dufty, was allegedly pressured to suppress material due to the threat of legal action. Writing in the New Yorker Richard Brody said "In particular, Szwed traces the stories of two important relationships that are missing from the book—with Charles Laughton, in the nineteen-thirties, and with Tallulah Bankhead, in the late nineteen-forties—and of one relationship that’s sharply diminished in the book, her affair with Orson Welles around the time of Citizen Kane."[4]
Her untimely death at the age of just 44 ended the career of one of the most important jazz vocalists of the 20th century. While the re-release of her autobiography by Penguin in 2018 went some way in reestablishing her importance. However, the release of the 2015 film by Lee Daniels, The United States vs. Billie Holiday, was a significant misrepresentation of Holiday. According to John Andrews, writing in the World Socialist Website, the film “dishonoured” her work and was a “seriously misguided effort”.
He writes, “The film was populated with historical and entirely fictional characters, blended haphazardly with actual and fabricated historical events, replete with sloppy mistakes and anachronisms too numerous to catalogue. One prominent example from the film: methadone was not used to treat heroin addiction until some years after Holiday died.”[5]
Naturally, Holiday’s autobiography suffers from a substantial fixation on race; this is not surprising given how much racial abuse she suffered, but it is largely divorced from the social struggles of postwar America, as expressed in both the growing civil rights movement and official, state-sponsored anti-communism. Given Holidays' limited political understanding, she cannot place her life struggle within the broader aesthetic developments of that tumultuous period, not only in jazz, but also in film, literature, and art.
"Strange Fruit"
One of those broader aesthetic developments is Holiday’s relationship with the song Strange Fruit. In her 1956 autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday suggests that she worked on the song together with Abel Meeropol. Holiday’s economy with the truth has circulated for decades, with Holiday even claiming that the song was written for her and that she had a hand in writing it herself. Meeropol always denied this claim. David Margolick and Hilton Als, in their work Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song, said that her account “may set a record for most misinformation per column inch". Even stranger was Holidays' response when challenged about the song in her ghost-written book; she said, "I ain't never read that book."
“Strange Fruit” is not an easy song to listen to and requires several listens to appreciate its complexity. Peter Daniels, in his article “Strange Fruit, believed it was the original protest song. “It is simple, spare, but effective poetry. At a time when political protest was not often expressed in musical form, the song depicted lynching in all of its brutality. The three short verses are all the more potent for their understated and ironic language. The juxtaposition of a beautiful landscape with the scene of lynching, the smell of magnolias with that of burning flesh, the blossoms more typically associated with the Southern climate with the “strange fruit” produced by racial oppression—this imagery conjures up the essence of racist reaction. Racism in America stands indicted and exposed by these lines, with no need at all for a more didactic or agitational message.[6]
Meeropol was a member of the American Communist Party from 1932 to 1947. When Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for espionage, he and his wife adopted their two sons; both children took the surname "Meeropol" In 1937, he published “Bitter Fruit” in the New York teachers’ union journal. The song was Meeropol’s response to seeing a photo of a lynching. Like many of his generation, he was radicalised by the Russian Revolution, the threat of fascism, and the Great Depression.
Holiday cannot be faulted for not undertaking a more detailed examination of the issues surrounding “Strange Fruit”. Holiday does not even begin to understand why the poorest section of the white working class would turn their desperation into racist atrocities. The book does not probe the class roots of racism as a means of dividing the working class. Any limited gains made by the black working class were made possible by the militancy of millions of black workers in the industrial struggles of the 1930s.
Also absent from the book is Holiday’s comprehension of the role played by the American Communist Party and its Popular Front politics. The holiday does not mention that socialists and communists were on the front line of the struggle for racial equality.
As Daniels points out, “There was a tremendous contradiction inherent in the work of artists, writers and intellectuals who the CP influenced in the 1930s and ’40s. On the one hand, as part of a leftward-moving working class and intelligentsia, they were attracted by the promise of the Russian Revolution. They articulated, to one degree or another, anger at capitalist exploitation and oppression, as well as hopes for social equality and socialism. Most of this layer, however, identified the Russian Revolution with the regime in the Kremlin. Only a minority agreed with the socialist opposition to Stalinism articulated by Leon Trotsky. Meeropol was one of the majority on the left who aligned with the CP during this period. The creative work of these individuals could not help but be influenced by their blind obedience to the Soviet bureaucracy and its reactionary political stance.[7]
Since the release of the 2018 Penguin version of Lady Sings the Blues, interest in Holiday seems to have waned a little. It is hoped that, with the current protests against the fascist Trump administration, interest in the holiday and the song "Strange Fruit" will begin to take hold. There has already been a limited revival of interest in the music, as evidenced by the many more recent recordings. Her autobiography has significant weaknesses, but it is worth reading, and Holiday, after all, was one of a kind.
[1] library.gayhomeland.org/0008/EN/malcolmx_speech_1964.htm
[2] www.theguardian.com/music/2011/feb/16/protest-songs-billie-holiday-strange-fruit
[3] www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Billie-Holiday-s-bio-Lady-Sings-the-Blues-may-2469428.php
[4] The Art of Billie Holiday’s Life-www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-art-of-billie-holidays-life
[5]Great jazz vocalist dishonoured by The United States vs. Billie Holiday—Can’t we do better? www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/07/06/unit-j06.html
[6] "Strange Fruit": the story of a song-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/02/frut-f08.html
[7] "Strange Fruit": the story of a song-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/02/frut-f08.html
Careless People by Sarah Wynn-William is published on 13 Mar. 2025 by Macmillan (£22).
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
“It still feels exciting and important to spread this tool around the world and improve people’s lives.”
Sarah Wynn-Williams
“move fast and break things”
Mark Zuckerberg
I must insist upon the masses, and their integrity as a whole. I have great faith in the masses. The noble character of mechanics and farmers—their curiosity, good temper, and open-handedness—the whole composite make. Significant alike in their apathy, and the promptness of their love—I know they are sublime. Before we despair we have to count them in—after we count them in we won’t despair.
Walt Whitman- Democracy
“ The character of the new Trump government marks a violent realignment of the state to correspond with the nature of capitalist society itself. The world’s richest individuals and corporations control resources on an unfathomable scale, with a growing number of centibillionaires whose personal wealth exceeds the GDP of the world’s 120 poorest nations. In the United States, the three wealthiest people now collectively control more wealth than the bottom 50 per cent of the population combined”
WSWS Editorial Board Statement
To a certain extent, you can see why Meta, formerly Facebook would want to ban this book and gag the author from publicizing it. Both actions by Meta failed and backfired spectacularly as the book has sold in the millions.
Careless People is an interesting if limited expose of Facebook. An organization that has been called pretty accurately a ‘diabolical cult’. Wynn-William spent seven years at Facebook and her 400-page book is a pretty damning indictment. The first thing that strikes one about the leading players on Facebook is the stunning level of hypocrisy and duplicity. Williams cites Facebook’s number two Sheryl Kara Sandberg’s 2013 book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.
Sandberg casts herself as a feminist icon however the reality is a little different. Her advice to pregnant working women – “Don’t leave before you leave” – meaning that the mother should work herself to death just before the baby is born. As one reviewer said, “It doesn’t occur to her that Lean In feminism might serve as a fig leaf covering self-exploitation and soul-depleting workaholism.” Wynn-Williams, among others, was also bizarrely invited by Sandberg to sleep in her bed presumably to have sexual relations.
Having said that before Sandberg treated her like a piece of crap Wynn-Williams exhibited a large degree of political naivety and outright fawning over Sandberg and Facebook in general writing “Until this moment, it had never occurred to me to see Sheryl as a celebrity or be awestruck by her... But now I can see how she’s sprinkling some of her stardust, whatever that magical quality is that she has that makes you forget to focus on the substance of the meeting at hand and instead wonder what it is she’s doing differently that makes her better than you.”[1]
The book’s title comes from F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness.” As a useful analogy for the “Careless People” at Facebook, it only takes one so far. While Zuckerberg and his cohorts were indeed amoral, stupid, reckless and devoid of any principles they were representatives of an oligarch that has now captured the White House in America and is launching attack after attack on the working class. Significant protests against Trump’s attacks on immigrants and escalating deportation operations have erupted across the United States. Student leader Momodou Taal has been targeted by the Trump administration who have tried to have him deported for speaking out against the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
As Robert Reich correctly states “Mark Zuckerberg, the second-richest person, has followed suit, allowing Facebook to emit lies, hate and bigotry in support of Trump’s lies, hate and bigotry. All three of these men were in the first row at Trump’s inauguration. They, and other billionaires, have now exposed themselves for what they are. They are the oligarchy. They continue to siphon off the wealth of the nation. They are supporting a tyrant who is promising them tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks that will make them even richer. They are destroying democracy so they won’t have to worry about “parasites” (as Musk calls people who depend on government assistance) demanding anything more from them. When billionaires take control of our communication channels, it’s not a win for free speech. It’s a win for their billionaire babble”.[2]
Or to put it more precisely as a statement by WSWS Editorial Board does “ The character of the new Trump government marks a violent realignment of the state to correspond with the nature of capitalist society itself. The world’s richest individuals and corporations control resources on an unfathomable scale, with a growing number of centibillionaires whose personal wealth exceeds the GDP of the world’s 120 poorest nations. In the United States, the three wealthiest people now collectively control more wealth than the bottom 50 per cent of the population combined”.[3]
This type of wealth is becoming increasingly incompatible with Walt Whitman’s beloved idea of Democracy. But this political and economic situation largely passes Wynn-Williams by. She is completely indifferent to the assault by Oligarch Zuckerberg's Facebook on the Socialist movement. The orthodox Marxists of the WSWS.Org have faced the brunt of Facebook’s wrath and censorship. What is not mentioned in Wynn Williams's book is that Facebook was and still is engaged in an escalating campaign of internet censorship targeting the socialist left. Entire Facebook pages were taken down, and individual accounts were permanently disabled, without any explanation given or recourse allowed.
Facebook began its systematic censorship of the WSWS.Org after the January 6th 2021 attempted coup by Trump and his supporters. As Kevin Reed points out “It could not be clearer that the entire US ruling establishment is attempting to utilize the events of January 6 as justification for shutting down progressive, left-wing, anti-capitalist and socialist political organizations and publishers on social media platforms such as Facebook. The subsequent shutdown of groups, pages and accounts—including the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) at the University of Michigan and leading members of the Socialist Equality Party in the US—by Facebook that began on January 22 is part of this strategy”[4]
Wynn Williams's book is a well-written but somewhat limited insight into the lives of Facebook Oligarchs. For a far more precise and revolutionary insight into the rise of the oligarchs one should purchase a copy of the newly released book from Mehring books.com entitled The Election of Donald Trump: The insurrection of the oligarchy.
[1] Careless People by Sarah Wynn-William
[2] Three billionaires: America’s oligarchy is now fully exposed-Guardian Online
[3] Socialism against oligarchy, fascism and war- wsws.org
[4] Facebook’s “depoliticization” aimed at censorship of left-wing and socialist organizations- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/02/10/poli-f10.html
The Starmer Project—A Journey to the Right by Oliver Eagleton Published by Verso, £12.99
“Starmer and his enforcers in Labour headquarters have taken extraordinary steps to cleanse the party of socialist influence… The opportunities for building a progressive power base within the party…are negligible.
Oliver Eagleton
“Thus the Labour Party is a ‘capitalist workers’ party’.”
― Vladimir Lenin
In that country (Great Britain], the ruling class of which is oppressing and plundering the whole world more than ever before, the formulae of democracy have lost their meaning even as weapons of parliamentary swindling. The specialist best qualified in this sphere, Lloyd George, appeals now not to democracy, but to a union of Conservative and Liberal property holders against the working class. In his arguments, no trace remains of the vague democracy of the ‘Marxist’ Kautsky. Lloyd George stands on the ground of class realities, and for this very reason speaks in the language of civil war. The British working class, with that ponderous learning by experience which is its distinguishing feature, is approaching that stage of its struggle before which the most heroic pages of Chartism will fade, just as the Paris Commune will grow pale before the coming victorious revolt of the French proletariat.
Leon Trotsky
“When people write they mostly forget to reach deep into their selves, to relive the importance and truth of the subject.”
(Rosa Luxemburg, Letter to the Seidels, 1898)
The election of Sir Keir Starmer, to the British state's highest office, is a mark of acceptance by the British establishment, that Starmer and his new Labour government will look after their interests.
Oliver Eagleton's new book on Starmer is a useful if politically limited examination of Starmer’s rise to power. Starmer began his political career under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. Eagleton shows that Corbyn was instrumental in Starmer’s political development and rise to power.
Incredible as it may seem Starmer began political life with a reputation as a “lefty lawyer”. He was a member of the Pseudo Left group Socialist Alternatives.[1] And wrote articles on the 1986 Wapping Strike. Starmer has been portrayed in the media as a defender of human rights. But as Eagleton points out, this is a carefully cultivated image. Starmer early on "was motivated by ambition” and steered “a careful course between good-cause legal campaigning and collaboration with the security services”.
When the Haldane Society sent Starmer to investigate allegations of police brutality in Northern Ireland, Starmer became friendly with British troops. Starmer's support for the British army and police led to the extreme right MP Ian Paisley, saying that Starmer “gave us the tools and the arguments and the defence lines to allow us to say that water cannon are necessary or plastic bullets are allowed…and all police officers in Northern Ireland carry a gun… His lasting legacy is that you can have all these accoutrements to policing provided they meet human rights guidelines effectively, and he provided…the arguments for doing that and the legal cover to do it”.[2]
During his time as director of public prosecutions—Starmer was head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) from July 2008. He worked closely with the Tory government and implemented their spending cuts with great efficiency. But it was during his close collaboration with the United States government that Starmer came into his own.
As Ian Taylor writes “he also began strengthening the CPS’s role within the British security state Starmer began to regularly liaise with the United States National Security Agency and the Specialist Operations Directorate of London’s Metropolitan Police on CPS “work” overseas. This was significant given the international “War on Terror” being prosecuted by the US and Britain. Eagleton quotes an unnamed member of the CPS’s international division: “We made sure what we were doing was most relevant to Britain’s international objectives.” This involved “building up the counter-terrorism capacity of overseas security services” in countries such as Yemen, Somalia, Kenya and Afghanistan.8 Eagleton also finds evidence that Starmer liaised regularly with Eric Holder, the attorney general in Barack Obama’s administration, who advised on “how the CPS could best advance US counter-terrorism objectives in Africa and the Middle East”. He argues the CPS under Starmer “agreed to act as a proxy” for the US State Department in countries “reluctant to accept direct US interference”.[3]
Perhaps the most despicable action of Starmer was his involvement in the pursuit and prosecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange at the behest of the US government. Among many attacks carried out by Starmer on Assange was the overseeing of the destroying of documents relating to the Swedish government's prosecution of Assange on trumped-up rape charges. As Chris Marsden relates “It was revealed by the excellent journalism of Stefania Maurizi that, in 2011, the UK Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), then under the direction of one Sir Keir Starmer, had destroyed correspondence with Swedish prosecutors relating to Assange. One line which did survive was from a British CPS lawyer advising Swedish investigators not to question Assange in the UK”.[4]
Starmer’s political career began in earnest in the 2015 general election when he was elected in the safe London seat of Holborn and St Pancras. Starmer was appointed shadow minister for immigration by Corbyn. Later, he would be instrumental in the denigration and removal of Jermy Corbyn as a labour leader.
The recent election of a Labour government with Starmer as Prime Minister is the culmination of a long process whereby the Labour Party has now been fully transformed into the UK’s leading bourgeois party. The current Labour government's share of the national vote was just 33.8 per cent. Labour takes power with the lowest share of the popular vote of any incoming government in British history. Thomas Scripps writes “Sir Keir Starmer takes his place at the head of a Labour government on a collision course with the British working class. He owes his “landslide” victory entirely to the hatred with which the Conservative government of the last 14 years was viewed, the thoroughly undemocratic first-past-the-post system, and the fact that widespread left-wing sentiment has found no organised socialist expression.”[5]
Instrumental in Starmer's coming to power were the various pseudo-left groups. In another article on the World Socialist Website, Laura Tiernan writes “Britain’s Socialist Workers Party (SWP) used its “Marxism 2024: a festival of socialist ideas” on July 4-7, to promote former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as the figurehead for a new pseudo-left alliance against Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government. During the election campaign, the SWP called for a Labour vote, urging “everyone to use their vote on Thursday to smash, exterminate and snuff out the Tories. Then dance on their grave. These bombastic statements indict the SWP as a defender of Starmer’s Labour government, which is—no less than the Tories—an open party of genocide, war, austerity and anti-immigrant racism.”[6]
Suffice it to say this type of analysis is not to be found in Eagleton’s book. Despite Eagleton saying “Starmer and his enforcers in Labour headquarters have taken extraordinary steps to cleanse the party of socialist influence and the opportunities for building a progressive power base within the party…are negligible.” his solution is to “develop multiple groupings, and “then to cultivate this various flora and enable their cross-pollination”. His solution is so vague and thoroughly bankrupt and must be rejected by the working class. Workers must develop a revolutionary solution to the problems they face. Their starting point for a struggle against the Labour government should be a thorough examination of the articles on the World Socialist Website(wsws.org).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Alternative_(England_and_Wales
2. https://isj.org.uk/knight-shift/
[3] Knight shift: Keir Starmer and Labour’s move to the right -https://isj.org.uk/knight-shift/
[4] Julian Assange and the fight against imperialist war-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/03/25/ymiy-m25.html
[5] Build the socialist opposition to Starmer’s right-wing government!-wsws.org
[6] Socialist Workers Party “Marxism 2024” festival promotes Jeremy Corbyn as leader of a “left” regrouping-wsws.org
Spare: by Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex Hardcover – Bantam first edition (10 Jan. 2023)
Normally, I would not be caught dead writing about, let alone reviewing, a book by a murderous and racist parasite such as Prince Harry, but something caught my attention. It was not anything written in the book but in a tweet from Harry’s ghostwriter.
The tweet quoted our royal genius saying, “Whatever the cause, my memory is my memory…. There is just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as in so-called objective facts.” The quote would not have looked out of place in George Orwell’s 1984 or Harry’s friend Donald Trump.
But as John Adams, the second US President, once said in 1770, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”[1] The ghostwriter and editor did not oppose this garbage is extraordinary.
As one writer said, “This crime is compounded if ghostwriters are complicit and editors are lazy or amoral. Every memoir should be put through a fact-check in the interest of credibility, not only so that readers are not misled but also that the other people and events featured in it are given a fair deal. Spare has not been fair, and there could be several reasons why it remains riddled with inaccuracies, putting a question mark on the gamut of his claims and complaints.”
When it comes to making things up as he goes along Prince Harry is an amateur. Certainly, the most damaging attack on the concept of historical truth has come from what I term the post-modernist school of historiography. It would not be an understatement to say that post-modernist historians have been extremely hostile in academia to the concept of historical truth. The last few decades have witnessed the emergence of post-modernism as the dominant force in university life. This philosophical and historical outlook has replaced what passed for Marxism inside universities all over the world.
The chief characteristic of the post-modernists is the use of debatable philosophy, to blur over the difference between truth and lies, and in doing so, commit a falsification of history. The practice of lying about history has been taken to a new level by the various schools of post-modernism. It would not be an overstatement to say that the impact of this school of history has been as David North put it "nothing short of catastrophic".
There is, of course, a connection between the falsification of history and the attack on the struggle for objective truth. One of the most outlandish post-modernist thinkers and an opponent of objective truth is the German Professor Jorg Baberowski b (1961)[7]. A student of Michel Foucault, Baberowski describes his method of work in his book (The Meaning of History)
"In reality, the historian has nothing to do with the past but only with its interpretation. He cannot separate what he calls reality from the utterances of people who lived in the past, for there exists no reality apart from the consciousness that produces it. We must liberate ourselves from the conception that we can understand, through the reconstruction of events transmitted to us through documents, what the Russian Revolution was. There is no reality without its representation. To be a historian means to use the words of Roger Chartier to examine the realm of representations".
Accepting this premise that truth is not objective but relative sets a very disturbing precedent. Aside from the moral and intellectual damage this may do to the individual historian, this kind of false philosophy will poison the well that future young historians and people interested in history have to drink out of.
The logic of this philosophy of history is that truth is whatever goes on in someone's head. Smoking is good for you, and hard drugs are not dangerous. Hitler is misunderstood and was a good guy. No person who wants to function and live effectively cannot do without some sense of truth's objective correspondence to reality. I believe that Objective truth is possible but not without a struggle. The first stage in that struggle is telling the truth about history.
[1] https://www.amdigital.co.uk/insights/blog/boston-massacre-1770
Free—Coming of Age at the End of History, Lea Ypi. £20.00
“I got to Marx from Hegel and Kant. A lot of people asked, ‘How could you be interested in Marx, given your family background?’ My mother was completely obsessed with worry . . . But for me, it was hard to say, ‘I’m turning back because my family wouldn’t like this.’ I wanted to explore these ideas. For me, Marx is neither a saint nor the enemy, in a way.”
Lea Ypi
“One of the things people misunderstand about the book is that they think I’m trying to compare Socialism and capitalism and trying to say one was worse than the other . . . But you are not comparing like for like.”
Lea Ypi
The first thing that strikes you about this book is the sheer volume of praise and recommendations before one has even read a word, four pages, to be precise. Either this is the work of a budding genius, or quite a few people have lost their intellectual sanity.
The second thing about the book is the title- Free—Coming of Age at the End of History. A cursory look inside the book will tell you that this is not a philosophical memoir. It is barely a political memoir. The title alludes to the neoliberal champion Francis Fukuyama. In his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man.
Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History uses a loose version of Hegel’s idealist phenomenology. Fukuyama announced that the tired march of history had arrived at its final station—a US-style liberal bourgeois democracy based on the unfettered capitalist market. This was the summit of human civilisation! This theme was elaborated in countless variations by gullible and impressionistic petty-bourgeois academics, always anxious to be on what they take to be, at any given moment, the winning side of history. Whether Ypi, now a political philosophy professor at LSE in London, believes this is the “End of History” as we know it remains to be seen.
She has, however, become a darling of the petty-bourgeois left. The British Socialist Workers Party(SWP) believes she is an “avowed Marxist. In the review by Gareth Jenkins, he writes, “If you believed in ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow’ during the Cold War, what’s not to like about Lea Ypi’s autobiography? “.
The SWP professes to be a Marxist organisation. Still, one wonders how many of its members have been taken to lunch at an expensive restaurant by the Financial Times, the leading financial organ of the British bourgeoisie, or had a whole-page interview as Lea Ypi was given in the same newspaper.
The book is not without merit. It is well-written and shows what life was like growing up in Stalinist Albania. The book is written through the eyes of a young person growing up trying to make sense of the world around her. At one point, she writes, “I never asked myself about the meaning of freedom until the day I hugged Stalin.” However, this “avowed Marxist” has little or no understanding of the complex phenomena of Stalinism, How it arose and how to combat it. I doubt also she has read any of the works of Leon Trotsky. While criticising her former society for contradicting the Marxist idea of freedom, she opposes the conception of Socialism if “brought about by the right people, with the right motives, under the right circumstances, and the right combination of theory and practice”, would succeed.
Any reader looking for a worked-out revolutionary solution to mankind's problems should perhaps give this book a miss. Her course at the London School of Economics starts with the premise that “Socialism is above all a theory of human freedom, about how to think about progress in history, of how we adapt to circumstances, but also try to rise above them. Freedom is not sacrificed only when others tell us what to say, where to go, and how to behave. A society that claims to enable people to realise their potential, but fails to change the structures that prevent everyone from flourishing, is also oppressive.”
The goal of human freedom and a free society, which many great revolutionary thinkers wanted, cannot be achieved by having some vague notion of behaving better or having a mild critique of capitalism and then hoping for the best. It can only be completed in the words of Nick Beams, “if the tyranny of global capital and its rule through the “free market” is overturned. It must be replaced by a social system in which the productive forces, created by the intellectual and physical labour of working people the world over, are harnessed by them to meet their needs”.
