Review of Fareed Zakaria’s Age of Revolutions: Liberal Illusions in an Epoch of Capitalist Breakdown
Zakaria’s polished, urbane, and superficially cosmopolitan narrative hinges on a core belief: that capitalism, despite its “excesses,” is the only sustainable social system, and that its occasional crises can be managed by wise elites. The book epitomizes the liberal-imperialist perspective that has long shaped the American establishment, even as the underlying material basis of that worldview crumbles.
The Meaning of Revolution in the Epoch of Capitalist Breakdown
The current political elite, exemplified by figures like Fareed Zakaria, claims we are in an “age of revolutions' marked by technological, cultural, and political upheavals. However, this recurring narrative in media and academia is a conscious misrepresentation, aiming to hide the true essence of the era: the collapse of capitalism and the return of global socialist revolution as the central issue of the 21st century.
Zakaria’s 2024 book, Age of Revolutions, exemplifies this approach. It simplifies revolution to a sequence of technological advances and policy issues, dismissing large-scale opposition to capitalism as mere irrational “backlash.” This isn’t genuine analysis but ideological distortion. It reflects the perspective of a ruling class that feels the ground changing beneath it and tries to numb public awareness before the next major social upheaval.
Later, we will observe that a Marxist view starts from a different premise: revolutions are not simply psychological responses to “progress,” but are the result of contradictions within capitalism itself. They occur when the advancement of productive forces clashes with existing property relations and state power structures. Unlike other theories, they are propelled not by elites but by the working class, which is the only social force capable of restructuring society based on rationality, democracy, and internationalism.
The meaning of revolution in history lies in the bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries, especially the French Revolution of 1789. These revolutions weren't driven simply by “ideas” or enlightened elites; rather, they were the inevitable result of a deep contradiction: the growth of capitalist production emerging from the decline of feudal society. For the bourgeoisie to expand the national market, establish modern law, or develop industrial production, they had to dismantle the aristocratic order.
The French Revolution clearly reveals the limitations of Zakaria’s framework. Events like the storming of the Bastille, the end of feudal dues, the radical actions of the sans-culottes, the Jacobin dictatorship, and Napoleon’s rise were not merely setbacks against progress. Instead, they represented class struggle in a society transitioning between modes of production. The Revolution was not carried out according to the wishes of “moderate” elites; it was propelled by the masses, whose material interests pushed them beyond bourgeois constitutional limits. The Terror was not an irrational derailment but a desperate effort by the revolutionary class to defend itself against internal counter-revolution and external invasion.
Zakaria’s narrative fails to explain these aspects because it does not include a concept of class, overlooks the role of the state as a tool of class domination, and ignores that revolutions stem from objective contradictions rather than elite mismanagement.
Revolution Without Class: Zakaria’s Historical Method
Zakaria’s view on “revolution" reveals his core ideological stance. Traditionally, in Marxism, revolution involves a fundamental change in social relations, a transfer of political power between classes, and the overthrow of outdated modes of production. However, Zakaria redefines the term by stripping it of class significance. To him, revolutions are mainly technological, commercial, or administrative changes—like the rise of global trade, digital technology, and market expansion. By grouping events such as the Dutch Revolt, the Glorious Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the internet into a single category, he blurs the line between revolutionary rupture and capitalist development.
This is not just an innocent analytical decision; it's a political strategy. By framing revolution as ongoing innovations within capitalism, Zakaria rules out any possibility of a true revolution against the system. History then appears as a tale of constant progress, wisely guided by elites, with only unlucky moments of 'backlash' disrupting it.
The “Progress and Backlash” Mythology
Zakaria’s core interpretive framework—that each phase of progress ultimately provokes a backlash—serves as a liberal morality tale. “Progress” is characterised by expanding markets, globalisation, and liberal institutions. Conversely, 'backlash' encompasses resistance or disruption of this process, such as working-class opposition to deindustrialisation, mass protests against austerity, anti-imperialist movements, and even right-wing populist responses.
This schema clearly serves an ideological purpose: it dismisses all forms of mass opposition to capitalism as irrational resentment. The working class protesting plant closures and social issues isn't defending their material interests; they're simply reacting with a 'backlash.' Likewise, populations resisting imperialist control aren't engaged in anti-colonial struggles; they are emotionally responding to “progress.' What Zakaria fails to recognise is that the ‘backlash’ he criticises is actually a consequence of the ‘progress’ he champions.
Zakaria’s framework conceals the basic truth that the social crises over the past fifty years—such as inequality, war, and democratic decline—are not just anomalies but inevitable results of global capitalism.
The Erasure of the Russian Revolution
No liberal perspective on “progress” can accept the Russian Revolution, which remains the most significant challenge to capitalism ever. Unsurprisingly, Zakaria minimises the October Revolution, seeing it as an example of excess rather than a crucial historical milestone. The revolution demonstrated that the working class could seize power, overthrow the bourgeoisie, and establish a new social order, alarming ruling elites across imperialist countries and shaping the entire 20th century. Yet, Zakaria considers it merely a “backlash"—a mass political uprising that got out of elite control. This reflects the Whig view of history in neoliberal guise: history as the gradual improvement of liberal capitalism, with regrettable deviations that must be managed.
The Real Contradiction Zakaria Cannot Resolve.
Zakaria recognises a real contradiction: the conflict between a globalised economy and a political system based on nation-states. However, he fails to see that this contradiction is an intrinsic aspect of capitalism itself. The worldwide integration of production clashes with the national structures of private property and sovereignty. This fundamental contradiction has led to major conflicts such as World Wars I and II, as well as to current trends such as trade wars, militarism, and geopolitical fragmentation.
Zakaria’s suggestion—improving international coordination and enhancing global governance—is unrealistic. The capitalist nation-state system cannot be unified through elite diplomacy alone. It can only be replaced by the international working class, which must act deliberately to reshape the world economy based on socialist principles.
A Book for a Frightened Ruling Class
Ultimately, Age of Revolutions serves more as a political tool for the ruling elite than an in-depth historical analysis. It aims to preserve a faltering system, justify its associated suffering, and weaken the rising efforts of workers. The document explicitly states: “It is an ideological document – a defence of a social order that has lost its historical raison d’être.” Currently, the global situation points to the beginning of a new revolutionary period: the world economy is facing persistent crises marked by stagnation, inflation, and the dominance of parasitic finance capital. Additionally, the nation-state structure is eroding, resulting in trade conflicts, shifting geopolitical alliances, and unprecedented military conflicts since 1945.
Democratic institutions are weakening as ruling classes resort to authoritarian tactics, censorship, and repression. Workers are starting to push back through widespread strikes across Europe and the Americas, as well as uprisings in the Global South. Technological advancements have reached a point where the rational and strategic organisation of the global economy is not only possible but essential to human survival. These are not just minor disruptions to be managed by enlightened elites; they reflect symptoms of a system that has fulfilled its historical role. The true “Age of Revolutions" is upon us.
The ruling class fears the word “revolution” because it senses that the conditions for a new revolutionary wave are maturing. It therefore attempts to redefine the term to mean anything except the transfer of power from one class to another. But the real age of revolutions lies not in the past but in the future. The contradiction between the global character of production and the national character of the capitalist state system cannot be resolved through diplomacy, regulation, or technocratic management.
Zakaria’s book is a symptom of a ruling class that senses its own fragility but cannot conceive of an alternative to its domination. It offers no serious analysis of the crises engulfing the world, only a plea for patience and trust in the very elites who have presided over decades of disaster. Against this liberal fatalism stands the Marxist understanding of history: that the contradictions of capitalism will give rise to revolutionary movements of the working class, and that the future of humanity depends on the conscious struggle for socialism.
One-Way Street and Other Writings -Walter Benjamin-Penguin 17 May 2016 £10.99
“The angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”
Walter Benjamin
"Even the Dead Won't Be Safe": Walter Benjamin
"Influential individuals can change the individual features of events and some of their particular consequences, but they cannot change their general trend, which is determined by other forces".
Georgi Plekhanov
"A great man is precisely a beginner because he sees further than others".
Georgi Plekhanov
"A rich old man dies; disturbed at the poverty in the world, in his will he leaves a large sum to set up an institute which will do research on the source of this poverty, which is, of course, himself."
Bertolt Brecht
In 1931, Walter Benjamin wrote in his diary that Bertolt Brecht “maintained that there were good reasons for thinking that Trotsky was the greatest living European writer.”[1]
Benjamin never met Trotsky but was clearly influenced by him, as these essays in One-Way Street show. The book is indispensable for readers of culture and politics. They combine literary form, philosophical insight and social diagnosis. Benjamin treats commodity society, urban life and mass culture as problems of cognition and political practice. Benjamin’s work is so contemporary that a systematic study of it prepares the reader to understand the crisis of culture under capitalism and what to do about it. Benjamin’s account of the commodification of experience, the loss of aura, and media’s role in shaping perception speaks directly to the age of digital capitalism: social media, algorithmic spectacle and the mass reproduction of imagery.
Born into a wealthy business family of assimilated Ashkenazi Jews in Berlin, Benjamin's formative years were spent in the shadow of the Weimar Republic, the crisis of European reformism and the rise of fascism.
As Leon Trotsky describes so beautifully, “The political situation in Germany is not only difficult but also educational, like when a bone breaks, the rupture in the life of the nation cuts through all tissue. The interrelationship between classes and parties—between social anatomy and political physiology—has rarely in any country come to light so vividly as today in Germany.
The social crisis tears away the conventional and exposes the real. Those who are in power today could have seemed to be nothing but ghosts not so long ago. Was the rule of monarchy and aristocracy not swept away in 1918? Obviously, the November Revolution did not do its work thoroughly enough. German Junkertum itself does not feel like a ghost. On the contrary, it is working to turn the German republic into a ghost.”[2]
Walter Benjamin’s work, especially the fragments gathered in One‑Way Street, his essays on mechanical reproduction, the Arcades Project and the “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, cannot be properly understood apart from the social and class dynamics of the Weimar Republic. A reader approaching Benjamin for the first time should see him as not an isolated intellectual or “aura‑minded” aesthete, but as a product of the crisis of German capitalism between the world wars: inflation, mass unemployment, the decomposition of bourgeois liberalism, the growth of mass culture and the political crisis that produced fascism.
The Weimar Republic (1918–1933) was a political shell overlying profound economic dislocations: wartime devastation, the burdens of imperialist indemnities, the crisis of international capitalism and the breakdown of pre‑war class compromises. These objective conditions shaped mass consciousness, German party politics and intellectual life.
As Plekhanov argued in his discussion of the role of the individual, historical circumstances give individuals their range of action—yet within those constraints, choices matter; neither voluntarism nor fatalism suffices. He writes, "Until the individual has won this freedom by heroic effort in philosophical thinking, he does not fully belong to himself, and his mental tortures are the shameful tribute he pays to external necessity that stands opposed to him".[3]
Benjamin’s perceptive fragments register both the objective sweep of history and the uncertain agency of cultural actors in that sweep. Benjamin’s analyses are a study of how capitalist social relations transform perception, memory and experience. His discussion of the “loss of aura” under mechanical reproduction and his montage‑style aphorisms in One‑Way Street register the ways commodity forms permeate everyday life—reducing experience to exchange, fragmenting historical consciousness, and producing the atomised subject susceptible to mass demagogy. Benjamin’s arcades and his attention to commodities are not mere literary motifs but critical categories for understanding how capitalist social relations shape consciousness and political possibility.
Walter Benjamin and Leon Trotsky
At the level of ideas and political practice, Walter Benjamin and Leon Trotsky represent two very different responses to the convulsions of early 20th-century capitalism. Placed within the materialist conception of history, their approaches flow from distinct social positions, class relations and political perspectives.
To understand their difference is to grasp how material conditions and class struggle shape theory, not merely by individual brilliance, which both of course had. The material conditions that produced both figures matter. Benjamin wrote amid the collapse of European democracies and the rise of fascism, a context that informed his aphoristic, crisis-lit reflections. Trotsky’s analysis emerged from active leadership in revolutionary struggle and the bitter experience of Stalinist counterrevolution—hence his sustained emphasis on the need for an international revolutionary party and the critique of bureaucratic degeneration.
Trotsky’s writings epitomise Marxist historical materialism and the dialectical method: theory as a scientific instrument for analysing capitalist contradictions and guiding revolutionary practice. His essays on culture—most famously Literature and Revolution and Culture and Socialism—argue that the working class must appropriate the accumulated achievements of past culture, master technique, and subordinate aesthetics to the objective task of socialist transformation while resisting crude reductionism.
Trotsky’s approach to technology was groundbreaking; writing in Culture and Socialism, one of the notes lying before me asks, "Does culture drive technology, or technology culture?" This is the wrong way to pose the question. Technology cannot be counterposed to culture, for it is culture's mainspring. Without technology, there is no culture. The growth of technology drives culture forward. But the science and broader culture that arise from technology give powerful impetus to its growth. Here, there is a dialectical interaction.”[4]
Benjamin, by contrast, was a philosophically rich and often melancholic critic whose writings—flashing with literary insight—tend toward allegory, aesthetics and a messianic conception of history. In works such as “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which is not in this book, he wrote The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. [5]
Benjamin emphasises interruption, memory and a theological-materialist image of history that foregrounds the ruins and suffering of the past. His thought is dense with literary metaphor and emphasises the ethical task of remembrance rather than programmatic political strategy. Crucially, Benjamin does not treat culture as epiphenomenal in a trivial sense. Cultural forms mediate class struggle; they can both mask and reveal social contradictions. But from a Marxist standpoint, these cultural phenomena are rooted in the material base. They must be understood as follows: changes in production, mass media, and social organisation produce new forms of ideology and temperament. This dialectical relation—base shaping the superstructure, and superstructural forms feeding back into class politics—must guide our reading of Benjamin.
Benjamin’s Attitude Towards Fascism
Benjamin’s writings were composed amid the disintegration of democratic institutions and the rise of fascist movements that exploited cultural resentment, myth and a politics of destiny. A political materialist account links cultural shifts to the left's organisational weaknesses. Trotsky’s warning that revolutions and counter‑revolutions hinge on party preparedness and leadership is instructive: cultural critique without programmatic and organisational content cannot substitute for political intervention. Benjamin’s diagnosis of the cultural terrain is thus necessary but insufficient on its own. It needs to be welded to a program that organises the working class to resist and seize power.
Benjamin had a fatalistic attitude towards the rise of fascism, expressed in this quote: “The angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”
Some time after writing these lines, Benjamin, fleeing the Nazis, took his own life in 1940. His personal situation was desperate; stranded on the French-Spanish border, he anticipated his own immediate arrest by the Nazis. On the one hand, the pessimistic viewpoint expressed in that citation stemmed from personal despair. At the same time, it was nourished by confusion arising from unresolved questions concerning the rise of fascism in Europe and the political degeneration of the Soviet Union under Stalinism.
Benjamin, who was familiar with Trotsky's writings, knew that Stalin had murdered almost all his left-wing opponents and had formed an alliance with Hitler. Nevertheless, among broad circles of intellectuals, some supported Stalin as the only way to avert the emergence of a fascist Europe. The extension of Stalinism into Eastern Europe after the war helped thwart layers of the intelligentsia from coming to grips with this issue. Benjamin did not end his life a supporter of Stalin. But his friends in the Frankfurt School certainly, and like Benjamin, had no faith in the revolutionary capacity of the international working class.
Benjamin’s work remains valuable for understanding ideology, media and memory in the age of social media, targeted advertising and spectacle. He offers the reader an indispensable tool for understanding how capitalist modernity shapes thought and feeling. It will take a classical Marxist to synthesise these insights with a rigorous, materialist account of capitalism’s laws and with a program for proletarian organisation and struggle.
NOTES
Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999)
The IIRE is working on a new collection of Trotsky's writings on fascism. This new translation of a 1932 article by Trotsky is part of this project. This article was originally published in the journal Die Weltbühne ('The World Stage'). Die Weltbühne was an important journal of the Independent intellectual left during the Weimar Republic. Cooperators and contributors included Carl von Ossietzky, Kurt Hiller, Erich Mühsam, Fritz Sternberg, Heinrich Ströbel, Kurt Tucholsky and others.
[1] Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), p. 477.
[2] Leon Trotsky: The German Enigma-https://www.iire.org/node/1003
[3] On the Role of the Individual in History-www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1898/xx/individual.html
[4] Culture and Socialism – 1927-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/10/cult-o23.html
[5] Theses on the Philosophy of History-
Murder in Notting Hill Paperback – Illustrated, August 31 2011 by Mark Olden Zero Books 205 pages
Mark Olden’s book Murder in Notting Hill is a well-researched and crafted investigation into the racist murder of Kelso Cochrane in 1959. Unsurprisingly, the killer was never caught despite being well-known in the area. Olden outs the killer in the book, saying, “After I began investigating the case in 2005, I learned that the killer’s identity was “the worst kept secret in Notting Hill”. Three people identified Digby to me as the man who struck the fatal blow. Two of them had been questioned by the police about the murder; the third was Digby’s stepdaughter, Susie Read. Breagan, who insisted he was innocent, told me that when the police detained him, he was placed in a cell next to Digby, where he was able to iron out a discrepancy in their stories – after which the police released them both.”
Cochrane’s murder is one of the first recorded racially motivated murders in the UK. Olden is an excellent journalist and, among other things worked at the BBC. While there, he worked on the BBC programme Who Killed My Brother? Broadcast in 2006, Which examined the Cochrane Murder. Much of the book is influenced by that programme.
While working at the BBC, he gained access to material that a layperson could only dream of. Olden supplemented his research with a significant number of interviews. Many of the people interviewed were speaking publically for the first time. They give a real sense of what it was like to live in Notting Hill in 1959.
As part of his research for the book, Olden spent significant time at the National Archive in Kew, London. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he found out that the Labour government and police were more interested in suppressing political opposition to the fascists and containing the riots in London and Nottingham than solving a murder.
Olden points out that there are remarkable similarities between the way that Kelso’s death was investigated and the investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence. On April 22, 1993, 18-year-old Stephen Lawrence and Duwayne Brooks were attacked by five racist white youths in Eltham, southeast London. Stephen was stabbed to death. It was only in 2012 that two men were convicted of Lawrence’s murder after a long and bitter campaign by his parents. It was only a small measure of justice. Cochrane never did get justice. His murder remains unsolved to this day.
During his time at the National Archives in London, it would be fair to say that Olden would have been astonished to find that the National Archives authorities would thwart his attempts to establish the truth behind the Cochrane murder by refusing to release papers about the murder until 2044/54 on spurious grounds it ‘could put at risk certain law-enforcement matters, including preventing or detecting crime, arresting or prosecuting offenders and the proper administration of justice’. It was all the more galling because the man named by Olden as the probable murderer was dead, but still, a state-led cover-up was in place.
Only after a bitter and long campaign by members of Cochrane’s surviving family and their lawyers did the Metropolitan police permit the National Archives to release the files that were originally to be opened in 2054. Even a cursory look at the new files showed that this was a premeditated murder by outright fascists. It would be naïve to think that after all this time, the police will bring the family justice that can only be achieved by the mobilisation of the one force that can achieve justice, and that is the working class black and white.
While Olden’s book cannot be faulted as a piece of journalism, Olden has no explanation as to what social, economic and political conditions gave rise to the growth of Fascism in London and Nottingham at the time and also how the fascists could be opposed and defeated. The only class that could have opposed the racists and fascists was the working class. However, Olden believes that the white working class was either passive or racist.
But as Cliff Slaughter explains so well in his article Race Riots: the Socialist Answer,[1]“So long as we look only at the surface of social life, so long as we try to deal with each question separately as it arises, we shall continue to find ourselves bewildered by events like the race riots. But they are no nine days’ wonder. Every worker in the country must clearly understand this. Only if we can trace the social roots of racial conflict shall we be able to weed them out and, with them, those who profit from it. The starting point for the working class must be unity and solidarity against the employers and their political representatives—in the first place, the Tory Party. All the problems the working class now faces—growing unemployment, the housing shortage, rent increases, the rising cost of living, attacks on wages and working conditions, and, above all, the threat of an H-bomb war—can be solved only by the unity and determined action of the working class. It is no accident that the steady growth of unemployment over the last year has been accompanied by an insidiously growing campaign around the slogan ‘Keep Britain-White’.
Slaughter goes on to explain the nature of fascism: “Fascism is a movement financed by big business which seeks support from the ‘middle classes’ and the most backward workers. Fascism’s real aim is to provide a mass basis for the smashing of workers’ organisations by a State machine which permits no democratic rights and rules with the whip and the torture chamber. To succeed, fascism must detach from the working class discontented elements who can be persuaded that something other than big business is their real enemy. This is why the fascists have recently returned to one of their favourite themes—racialism. Fascists were prominent in the Notting Hill riots and will cash in wherever they can on anti-coloured feelings. They will try to create a mob ready to use violence and to attack any scapegoat rather than the workers’ real enemy.”
Murder in Notting Hill is a good book. As a piece of investigative journalism, it is second to none. On the question of fascism, workers and youth need to look elsewhere to understand its rise and how to defeat it. As the great Marxist revolutionary and writer Leon Trotsky wrote, “Fascism comes only when the working class shows complete incapacity to take into its own hands the fate of society.”[2]
[1] Race Riots: the Socialist Answer, Labour Review, Vol. 3 No. 5, December 1958, pages 134-137.
[2] Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It
Review: Permanent Record by Edward Snowden - 352 pages- Macmillan-(17 Sept. 2019)
Edward Snowden
