Widgery, 1973 (image: Michael Gray)

The piece that follows comes from a talk I gave back in the spring at the Marx is’ Muss conference in Berlin. I was together in a panel with a member of the RAR organising committee, the artist and designer Ruth Gregory.

This afternoon, I will celebrate one activist, who helped to shape Rock Against Racism. I mean the doctor and writer, David Widgery. Born in 1947, he contracted polio at 9. He spent months in a hospital bed, with the other children “crying ourselves to sleep at night”. Widgery joined the peace movement. He wrote for the school students’ U Magazine. He read the novelist Jack Kerouac. He interviewed the beat-poet Alan Ginsberg. He travelled through the United States during the 1965 Watts riots. He wrote for and edited the counter-culture magazine Oz.

The times in which Ruth, David and their comrades built Rock Against Racism were not easy. Labour formed a government in 1974. At its start, unemployment stood at around half a million. For 40 years, governments had tried to keep everyone in work. Labour liked unemployment. Ministers hoped it would weaken the unions. By early 1976, unemployment was over a million. It remained over a million for as long as Labour stayed in office. Remember the Sex Pistols’ song, ‘God Save the Queen’. It repeats the lines, “No future no future” and “No future for you”. Eighteen times, the song says, “No future.” David Widgery wrote, “Whole regions of Britain are slipping off the industrial map. British Leyland, Dunlop, Massey Ferguson, Singers, British Shipbuilding have announced major closures. Go to Liverpool or Wigan or Skelmersdale and see the despair in the faces.”

Workers were suffering. The newspapers blamed immigrants. Racists murdered 31 black people in Britain between 1976 and 1981. The photographer Syd Shelton was another activist in RAR. He says, “Looking back, we forget how racist this country was and how unpopular anti-racism was as well.”

After the long, complicated, rock operas of Led Zeppelin or Queen – punk was simple. The best part of punk was the idea that anyone could make music. One fanzine, Sideburns, told its readers where to put their fingers to make an A, an E, and a G. “This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band.” The fascists saw in punk a movement they could infiltrate. Punk was amphetamine quick. It was three-chord repetitions. It cut out of Rock music all black influences. Members of the entourage of the Sex Pistols wore swastikas, as if the symbol could be a fashion statement. When the Clash sang ‘White Riot’, the first listeners could tell whether it was a racist or an anti-racist song. The rise of punk was an opportunity for anti-fascists. It was also a threat. It wasn’t just about breaking the laws of the state, but also the social values which held together the stale social democratic culture of the time. It was the counterpart in the 1970s to those “subversive” cultures Gramsci had seen, 50 years earlier, fall one after another under the sway of fascism. Punk could easily have gone to the right had it not had a bunch of people intervening and shaping the movement.

In August 1976, blues musician Eric Clapton stopped a concert. He gave a speech supporting Enoch Powell, the former Tory MP. Red Saunders wrote a letter, “Come on Eric ... Own up. You’re rock music’s biggest colonist ... We want to organise a rank and file movement against the racist poison music.” That became Rock Against Racism.

“We want Rebel music, street music,” David Widgery wrote, “Music that breaks down people’s fear of one another”. He demanded different kinds of songs that no-one had written. “Crisis music. Now music. Music that knows who the real enemy is.”

Rock Against Racism produced a magazine, Temporary Hoarding. The first issue contained a poster showing a family watching the National Front on TV. “Don’t sit back and watch it ... smash racism!” The paper showed lines of police behind riot shields. It celebrated musicians playing live. The images were new. They were different.

For 50 years, the British left had wanted to copy the Russian Revolution. For 10 years, they’d been trying to copy the May Day general strike in France. This was something new. It was different. It was workers, it was students, and it was something else and something new. It was young people who had grown up in tower blocks. It was about putting culture in charge.

Widgery wrote, “The problem is not the new fascists from the old slime”. When fascists went into a black community the people could defend themselves. The problem was the state. “The bigger danger is the racist magistrates with the cold sneering authority.” It was, “the immigration men who mock an Asian mother as she gives birth to a dead child on their office floor.” It was, “policemen for whom answering back is a crime.”

Rock Against Racism spread beyond Britain. There were RAR concerts in the United States. In Ireland, France, Belgium, Sweden, Holland, Germany and Norway. 50,000 people joined a Rock Gegen Rechts festival in Frankfurt in 1979. Anti-fascism felt like a quick march. By mobilising culture, it seemed, anti-fascists could defeat fascists everywhere.

After 1981, it became harder. Thatcher won, Reagan and Mitterrand. Anti-fascism was now a slower battle - town by town, venue by venue. A slog. Music became something that anti-fascists did. It was part of our shared collective knowledge. It was how we built movements. The cultural anti-fascism of the 1970s brought the masses into politics. The cultural anti-fascism of the 1980s was about defending counter-cultures from attack.

In the 1970s, new technologies gave people a new freedom to make music. The consumers of culture became its producers. Widgery wrote that the “general trend” of the 1970s was “towards conservatism”. But those downtimes were “punctuated by repeated radical outbursts”. He told the generations who came after that they shouldn’t try to copy the 1970s. “The dole demoralises, constant policing intimidates, no money’s no fun. The 1970s had been like the 1930s, a time of sweet tea and Hollywood movies. Palliatives for depressed people.

Rock Against Racism won a political victory, he wrote, against history. RAR succeeded despite the rise of what we now call neoliberalism. The book Widgery wrote about this period he titled Beating Time. Sometimes movements have to fight under conditions which are unfavourable. Even in down times, you can still to make history.

The culture politics of today are different from the 1970s. But what hasn’t changed is the same basic calculation. In any society, the same numbers of people will support the left and the right. If the left are going to win, we will need to bring more people onto our side.

That means talking to people who don’t care about politics. We need to find a way of moving them into action. One way to change the balance of forces is by looking to culture. “In periods of prolonged recession,” Widgery wrote, “culture becomes more, not less, important.”

Thanks for reading this piece. This Substack is a leisure operation; I write it in my spare time. I have no intention of charging for content: I want to keep everything here free. But if you enjoy my pieces and want to support the writing, buy one of my books. One of them, ‘Never Again’, is the fullest history of anti-fascism in the 1970s, including RAR, the Anti-Nazi League and all the other movements besides.

After my illness last year, I didn’t think I would ever return to work. The illness cost me something; I’d been feeling for many months a tiredness so heavy that it demanded an explanation. After my diagnosis, I was in hospital for six weeks. Chemotherapy, I endured by sleeping at it and the hot summer gave me a further excuse to rest. When I woke, I was so stiff that I couldn’t reach down to pick up my shoes from the floor. And yet, after all of that, a year later I’m going back.

Being at work will mean that I write less. And yet I love writing, it’s one of my greatest joys. There’s nothing better than that feeling of intense focus, of stepping away from your waking mind, of giving up all the tension in your body the pain the self-defeating, needle of always-expanding internalised production. It’s nine in the morning, why haven’t I produced anything yet, why haven’t I shared it with the world? When I write for myself, that’s the pressure I’ve been feeling on my shoulders, on the back of my neck. I breathe in, I concentrate. I let myself go…

Writing is a trap. The way it’s mediated, you have no choice. Writing often (which I do) means writing literally, it means never finding the most satisfying words. Writing often means having more words to offer than my audience will read. At work, I’ll be writing less. It will be good for my readers and good for me if - for some short time - I’m mute.

It’s not as if lawyers are wordless. I’m too much of an introvert to be looking forward to all the law’s endless performing. Yes, Your Ladyship, No Your Honour. I do believe though that I have unfinished business: employers I mean to frustrate, personnel managers I intend to undermine, landlords whose business I plan to expose.

Being ill disturbed me. It shorted, deep in my brain, some circuit of whose presence I wasn’t aware beforehand. Often, when you talk to people who’ve lived through the menopause, they describe a feeling in which for decades life itself has been a story of them doing the emotional work so that others can be happy. Midway through the menopause, my friends carry such a degree of pain in their own bodies that they can’t play the role of nurturers as they did before. More than that, they don’t want to. Several have described this emotion to me of no longer worrying what friends or parents or children think. For quite a number, it’s been a liberation. Cancer was, for me, a similar freeing.

I’ve stared at the charts, sat calculating my own mortality. I’ve been for many afternoons this year incontinent, I’ve walked through London’s daylight streets, my clothes stained within my own shit. I have humiliated myself but afterwards – it wasn’t so bad.

A great deal of what you see in British courts over the past five years is conformism based on fear: lawyers’ unwillingness to be shouted at, to look stupid. Think what it’s like if you’re a migrant, if you’re trans, if you want to stop Israel’s war or our complicity, the worst bullies in Britain aren’t Starmer or Farage or the crowd summoned onto the streets by Robinson. It’s the middle aged men in violet robes, horsehair on the head.

As I head back to work, any fear I felt has been lifted. Think of the nastiest things they could do; I’ve been there already – suffered worse and lived.

When you write the history of the last hundred years, there’s always a source if you just dig deep enough. People leave traces, them or their friends, there’s such an abundance of written material. Go back further, though, and it’s different. There are people who held Archimedes’ lever in their hand and used it to change the world, left no trace in the archives. As a historian, you look for them, search everywhere you can for evidence of them speaking in their own words. You look and find nothing, what endures is silence.

Jane Wenham was one of those people who did indeed turn the world upside down. A poor woman, middle-aged, she lived in Walkern in Hertfordshire. In 1700, 800 people lived there. In March 1712, a court found Wenham guilty of witchcraft and sentenced her to death. The court petitioned the Queen for her sentence to be reprieved. Wenham’s pardon marks the end of 120 years of witch-hunting in Britain. James I, Matthew Hopkins, ducking stools, thumb screws, the needles the witchfinders used to search for moles or scars, all that grisly equipment of social harm – all lost their purpose, in an instant. For another 20 years, there were no witch trials; if the convicted would be pardoned, what was the point? In 1735, the Witchcraft Act repealed all the laws by which doing magic had been a criminal offence – the 1542 law making witchcraft an offence, the 1563 Act prohibiting the conjuring of spirits, the 1604 legislation making capital punishment the only sentence available for summoning an evil spirit.

Our cliches about the past make the early modern period seem a time of ignorance and superstition, when anyone was willing to fall for impossible claims. We know the name of King James I’s book Daemonologie, we assume that when he became King of England his idea of witches as beings of immense magical power was universally accepted. But even in the 1590s, sceptical pamphlets were circulating – Daemonologie was written to refute the likes of the Dutch physician Johann Weyer or the English Puritan, Reginald Scot. Already, James’s name was circulating as a potential successor to Elizabeth; part of the case against was that he was unreliable, credulous, likely to be a bad King he even believed in witches. James complained of Weyer and Scot’s “damnable opinions” that there was no such “thing as witchcraft”. For a century the sceptics were silenced; by the early eighteenth century, their voice was a clamour. Wenham’s case helped to shape that abolitionist majority.

The events of Jane Wenham’s prosecution were little different from other witchcraft trials. They began, as so many prosecutions did, in the household. The case began in the home of a clergyman Godfrey Gardiner and his wife Deborah. Their young servant Anne Thorne had recently dislocated her knee and was sat alone in the kitchen. Walking into that room, the Gardiners found Thorne stripped inexplicably to her undergarments. Thorne then ran out of the house, returning with twigs bundled in her apron. Mrs Gardiner saw a rationality in Thorne’s otherwise incomprehensible behaviour. Obviously, a witch must have possessed her.

Gardiner said they should summon the witch, which could be done (everyone knew) by burning in a fire objects cursed with the witch’s dark magic. She took Thorne’s twigs and thrust them into the flames. As she did, a figure knocked at their door, Jane Wenham. The bad timing was not all that told against Wenham. Everything else suggested that she was obviously the malefactor, being poor, elderly and already the subject of gossip.

Wenham had come under suspicion after she asked Matthew Gilston, the servant of a rich farmer, for straw. He refused, after which various of Gilston’s masters’ horses and cattle died. Gilston confronted Wenham, calling her a witch. She approached the local magistrate, seeking compensation for slander. He referred the case to the priest, the same Reverend Gardiner who employed Anne Thorne. Gardiner had fined Gilston the modest sum of a shilling. Wenham then made the mistake of saying that she was displeased with his decision, “If she could not have Justice here, she would have it elsewhere.” Where was this somewhere else? She would not say. Gardiner, annoyed at having his justice questioned by an insolent villager, insisted that Wenham’s words had been a confession of her own guilt. No possible construction could be put on them other than that she was intending to appeal to Satan to intervene.

By choosing to knock on Gardiner’s door – at the very moment that his wife was looking for a witch to blame – Wenham condemned herself to trial. In the face of a united front of hostile worthies, Wenham acted calmly. She insisted that she had no magic. She offered to submit to the tests of swimming or searching. She recited the Lord’s Prayer but (the Gardiners claimed) stumbled over the words. Anne Thorne now joined in the accusations, saying she had been visited by cats with Jane Wenham’s face. Other animals of the same species were seen appearing in the village without explanation, calling and crying. Wenham was sent for trial, charged with conversing “familiarly with the Devil in the shape of a cat”.

Sir John Powell was the judge at the trial, which was heard at the assize in Hertford. Wenham maintained her innocence, declaring that she was a “clear woman”. Powell appears to have been sympathetic to the defence. After one witnessed accused Wenham of flying, the judge is supposed to have said that there was no law against that. When Thorne proved her distress by collapsing in a fit, rather than adopting the prosecutor’s suggestion that the case stop and everyone pray for her recovery, the judge remarked, “She will come to herself.”

The jurors reached a guilty verdict and the law obliged the judge to sentence her to death. Powell adjourned the sentence, however, rather than activate it. He sent the verdict to the Crown requesting a pardon, and Wenham was reprieved four months later.

Witchcraft’s Retreat

To understand why Wenham was pardoned, we need to grasp how different blocs of opinion had been shifting in the 50 years since the end of the revolution and the restoration of the monarchy. A useful way to think of how anyone ruled in this period is to imagine society divided into three large blocs of opinion. To keep on ruling, any fraction of the ruling class needed the active support of two out of three of Puritans, Anglicans and Catholics.

During the Civil War itself, the Puritans had tended to believe in witchcraft; one of their number had been the self-appointed Witchfinder Matthew Hopkins. After 1649, however, they turned against the witch-craze. Published in 1669, John Wagstaffe’s The Question of Witchcraft Debated, claimed that the very idea of witchcraft was “absurd”. Lodowicke Muggleton, the former Ranter, published in 1669 A True Interpretation of the Witch of Endor. Its argument was that evil belonged in mind of the sinner. Should a witch believe that they could speak to animals, they were the victims of a vivid imagination. John Webster was a priest in the New Model Army. Working after the restoration of King Charles as a physician, he settled in the Lancashire town of Clitheroe. His 1677 book, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, made a similar case that witchcraft was a fantasy. He wrote that, “A devil within us is more to be feared than a devil without.” He denounced, “The false doctrine of Witchmongers, that make us watch for the Devil where he is not.”

Anglicans did still believe in witchcraft. Their pamphleteers argued that belief in dark magic was an essential part of their faith, without it, people would tend not to believe in anything, not the aristocracy, the church or the King. In 1672, Meric Casaubon published A Treatise Proving Spirits, Witches and Supernatural Operations. The greatest evil Casaubon wrote was “atheism”, which meant “not believing the existence of spiritual essences, whether good, or bad”. Doubting the reality of witches, he wrote, was no different from doubting in angels. Another Anglican Joseph Glanvill published in 1681 Saducismus Triumphatus (Atheism Refuted), arguing that a failure to accept the possibility that witchcraft was real was but the first step towards disbelieving benign authority. “Those that dare not bluntly say ‘there is no God’ content themselves (for a fair step and introduction) to deny there are spirits or witches.”

These arguments were unlikely to appeal to many Catholics. Anglican pamphleteers ignored them, argued for an understanding of the world in which there was no source of evil save for the devil (Catholic cosmology was just busier than that). The idea that witchcraft was needed to prevent everyone becoming an atheist was too narrow thread to sustain a majority belief.

As late as 1712, society was still shaped by the revolution’s defeat. Supporters of the established church and members of the Hertfordshire gentry allied in demanding that Wenham hang; they felt entitled and confident to do so in part because history had vindicated them. She was a Puritan, aged over 70, a member of a generation who had been raised high by Kings Charles’ execution, then thrown low when the monarchy returned. Her allies were people from the same milieu as her, former supporters of the Parliamentary cause and their ideological descendants. They could not win the battle of ideas or transform England into a democracy, but the Puritans could – and did – lead a successful rearguard action on Wenham’s behalf and against the crime of witchcraft, a superstition in which they no longer believed.

From Walkern to England

On the granting of a pardon to Jane Wenham, she was dragged into the long-standing conflict between Anglicans and Puritans. When Anne Thorne was in the Gardiners’ kitchen, the latter were entertaining a young, ambitious, gentleman - Francis Bragge, the grandson of local squire, Sir Henry Chauncy. Bragge was destined for a career in the established church and took the Gardiners’ side. Bragge borrowed from Glanvill the opinion that witchcraft was true and that a belief in it was the base on which stood loyalty to church and throne. Wenham, he said, had lived a life of “idleness and thievery”. The accused woman, Bragge claimed, had been heard often “swearing and cursing”: she had “the character of whore”. While he did not suggest that dissenting opinions were in very case proof of Satanism, Bragge observed that Wenham was a dissenter. He sought to make a nasty joke out of the fact that the accused woman was a Puritan, “a wicked old Witch is of a sudden become a precious Saint.”

Puritans responded. The Protestant Post-Boy published articles in her defence. A fresh pamphlet appeared, The Impossibility of Witchcraft, its author leaning heavily on the arguments of John Wagstaffe. Bragge replied with further pamphlets insisting on Wenham’s guilty. He took part in a heated debate with a sceptical London dyer in an alehouse in Derby.

Six years after her trial, the Reverend Francis Hutchinson approached Wenham. Hutchinson had a Puritan uncle. He felt no compelling bond of loyalty requiring him to back his fellow priests. Hutchinson already had a draft copy of a manuscript criticising beliefs in witchcraft, which he regarded as “the worst corruptions of religion and the greatest perversions of justice”. Now he needed cases to make his book compelling. Wenham agreed to speak to him.

In his eventual narrative of the court proceedings, Hutchinson began by praising Sir John Powell, Wenham’s judge. He called Wenham “pious” and “sober”. He had asked her to speak the Lord’s Prayer and she had had no difficulty in speaking the sacred words, “though with such little errors of expression, as those that cannot read are subject to”.

Hutchinson described how Wenham now lived, “soberly and inoffensively”. He called her a “pious sober woman”. He reminded his readers that Wenham done right in the face of a false accusation. Called a witch by Gilston, she turned to the law for protection. He did something which no commentator had done before, using Wenham’s poverty and marginality in eighteenth century society as an argument to support her innocence. “I verily believe that there is no one that reads this but may think in their own minds, that such a storm as she met with, might have fallen upon then, if it had been their misfortune to have been poor.”

Wenham triumphed because of her own personal obduracy and because of the solidarity given to her by dissenters in her village and by their allies in London. Penal laws introduced after Cromwell’s death excluded dissenters from public office, military posts, even university education. They were a despised and dissident minority. Even as they won the argument over witchcraft, they were suffering losses in other areas of life.

Conventionally, the story of Jane Wenham ends with her vindication at the hands of Hutchinson. Out of her case, her built a claim that all the great witchcraft trials in history had been based, as hers had been, on lies, “The principles that the witch-finders have proceeded upon,” Hutchinson wrote, “are unnatural, contradictory and absurd. If the premise be proved false, who but a madman will believe the conclusion?”

We can imagine Hutchinson, as he sent his book to the printers, fearing laughter and humiliation. He was an Anglican siding with the dissenters, an uncomfortable place to stand. In epochs of King James and King Charles, no-one would have dared to commit these thoughts to paper. Even after he wrote, others continued to make the case that witchcraft must be real – the novelist But Hutchinson’s points were fast becoming the consensus.

When Hutchinson visited Wenham, she had left Walkern, travelling 18 miles to the south and east, to Gilston. Colonel John Plumer had offered her a home on his estate, where she remained until his death in 1719. When Hutchinson met her, she was an old woman. His account of their meeting was brief; at no point does he explain why she agreed to speak with him. She had no reason to give him permission to tell her story and yet she chose to.

The only way to make sense of her contribution is to see it as an act of trust on her part. Others had written about her, filling in their accounts with guesswork making her an object of evil, the Devil’s willing assistant. Hutchinson was offering to put her case in print. Over the years that followed it became ever harder to believe in her, or any of the accused witches’, guilt.

Thanks for reading this piece. This substack is a leisure operation; I write it in my spare time. I have no intention of charging for content: I want to keep everything here free. But if you enjoy my pieces and want to support the writing, buy one of my books. There’s lots of them.

Following on from my post yesterday, here are the top 25 - the best-written, most complex, most interestingly anti-fascist novels I can think of. Am interested, as ever, in what would make any reader’s top 10.

25 T. Mehmood, Hand on the Sun (London: Penguin, 1983)

A generation young British Asians suffer racism at school and in the city before leading their own resistance movements, written by one of the defendants in the Bradford 12 trial. A good introduction to the Asian Youth Movements of the 1970s.

24 G. Walters, The Traitor (London: Headline Books, 2002)

Nazis capture John Lockhart and offer him his freedom on the terms that he agrees to lead a unit of British fascists within the Waffen SS.

23 C. J. Sansom, Winter in Madrid (London: Macmillan, 2006)

Three friends part – Sandy to side with the fascists in Spain, Bernie to join the International Brigades, while Harry tries to play a neutral role.

22 M. Kneale, The Cameraman (London: Atlantic, 2023)

Cinematographer Julius Sewell is dragged into his fascist family’s 1934 roadtrip, where they intend to meet their idols, Mussolini and Hitler.

21 S. Carson, Crooked Cross (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1934)

The story of a British diplomat, Michael, and his friends the Klugers in Bavaria. Over the course of the novel and its two sequels The Prisoner and A Traveller Came By, members of the family are disenchanted by unemployment, fall prey to dark cynicism, join the Stormtroopers. Their friends are sent to concentration camps because of their Jewish heritage, while others escape from Germany and find themselves in England. There, they are attracted to, but also repelled by, anti-fascist protests. Recently re-issued and reviewed in the LRB.

20 S. Townsend Warner, After the Death of Don Juan (London: Chatto and Windus, 1938)

Allegory for the Spanish Civil War. An aristocratic libertine has vanished – his servant says, dragged to hell – in his absence, will the villages be able to irrigate their land?

Sylvia Townsend Warner, 1930

19 A. Cartwright, Heartland (Birmingham: Tindal Street Press, 2009)

England are in the World Cup, the BNP are competing in local elections. Who will win the football match between rival white and Muslim teams?

18 R. Warner, The Aerodrome (London: Penguin, 1941)

Metaphorical novel, portraying a huge aerodrome dedicated to cleanliness and purity, which stands in contrast to the protagonist Roy’s debased village. Roy is disenchanted from his family and infatuated by the Air Force’s promise of freedom from the past.

17 P. McGrath, The Wardrobe Mistress (London: Penguin, 2017)

A widow, Joan, discovers that her dead husband was a secret participant in Oswald Mosley’s postwar Union Movement.

16 E. Ambler, Cause for Alarm (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938)

Spy thriller. English engineer abroad, Nicholas Marlow, must choose between competing Soviet and German to infiltrate the Italian arms industry on their behalf. Probably the best Ambler. Treats the Soviet agents as very writers since have done – gregarious people, of the same generation as the English protagonist, and shaped like him by a deep commitment to socialism and to a more equal future.

15 N. Mitchison, We Have Been Warned (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936)

Addresses topics of women’s freedom including free love, contraception, abortion and rape. At the book’s end, the socialist and anti-fascist protagonist sees a vision of the future in which an attempted socialist revolution is followed by a victorious fascist coup. The discussions of taboo topic makes this an important read, but the book itself is a bit of a mess.

14 F. Tilsley, Little Tin God (London: Collins, 1939)

A young London bank clerk, Carl, tyrannises his family by hitting his young son and boasting to his wife Jean of the triumph of German power under fascist rule. She tries to leave him, only on each occasion to be defeated and return to appeasing her husband. Alongside Swastika Night, one of the few 1920s or 1930s anti-fascism to take seriously fascism’s misogyny.

13 H. Slater, The Heretics (London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1946)

The author, previously Chief of Operations for the International Brigade, describes the use by the Republican side of spying, censorship and violence learned from the Soviet secret police. Excoriating in its anger at how Spain was defeated from within.

12 H. V. Morton, I, James Blunt (London: Methuen, 1942)

German victory in WWII. A retired tradesman living in southern England writes a diary, recording his resistance to the Nazi state and its efforts to convert the English into fascists.

11 L. Deighton, SS-GB (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978)

The most important of the Hitler-wins detective stories. Shaped by a subtle social democratic sensibility in which the British rich are deeply venal and untrustworthy.

10 M. Schaefer, Children of the Sun (London: Granta, 2010)

Puts Susan Sontag’s famous essay ‘Fascinating Fascism’ into fiction, imagining a left-leaning journalist who becomes erotically obsessed with 1970s Nazis Nick Crane.

9 J. Coe, The Rotters Club (London: Viking, 2001)

Satire set in Birmingham in the 1970s, against a background of Irish terrorism and threatened redundancies in the city’s car plants. A group of school students are pulled into punk and Rock Against Racism, while some of their former friends are attracted by the National Front.

8 C. Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (London: Hogarth Press, 1939)

Story of a writer’s time in 1930s Berlin alongside singer Sally Bowles, Jewish language student Natalia and gay holiday makers. “I am a camera with shutter open”, the protagonist writes, “quite passive, recording not thinking.” Inspiration for the 1972 film, Cabaret.

7 A. Huxley, Point Counter Point: A Novel (London: Chatto and Windus, 1928)

The first recognisable anti-fascist novel published in Britain, despite the surface cynicism with which the author addresses very many 1920s scenes – painters, musicians, writers as well as politicians. Well worth revisiting for its discussion of the ethics of anti-fascist violence. Also contains an extraordinary pre-emption of the future fascist career of Oswald Mosley who, on the book’s publication, was still a young and loyal left-leaning Labour MP.

6 F. Griffin, October Day (London: Secker and Warburg, 1939)

Cable Street, the anti-fascists are wining, and an unemployed worker needs to get over his mental block preventing him from taking a council – union – job. Do that, and he’s likely to be reconciled with his wife. Vivid second cast of fascists, police and Communists.

5 M. Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (London: Macmillan, 1961)

An Edinburgh schoolteacher and fascist binds around her a group of young girls. One of her apostles goes to fight for Franco in Spain. Will another of them betray her? Was originally published in the same magazine and at much the same time as Hannah Arendt’s reports on the trial of the Nazi, Adolf Eichmann and shares with them a fascination with the figure of the second rank person who devotes themselves to a fascist leader.

4 C. Dane [W. Ashton], The Arrogant History of White Ben (London: Heinemann, 1939)

At the end of an inconclusive European war, a gardener builds a scarecrow, a child puts a mandrake root in it, and a kind of monster is born. A truly strange book.

3 H. Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (London: Faber and Faber, 1990)

A love letter to South London and to the music of David Bowie, seasoned with months spent in the avant-garde theatre world of the 1970s. While the protagonist Kareem has to deal with far-right-inspired racism, he finds in his friendship group people with a much more committed and thought-out idea of how to stop the fascists.

2 M. Constantine [K. Burdekin], Swastika Night (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937)

Hitler has won, his descendants have won, fascism is triumphant everywhere. Weird and wonderful in the style of Bellamy or Morris’s nineteenth century forward-looking utopia, except that this is a world where all hope has been smashed. Grasps a key dynamic of fascism which so many contemporaries missed – its attack on women’s independence.

1 K. Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (London: Faber and Faber, 1989)

A butler has made the great mistake of his life; giving away the possibility of a relationship with the woman he loves, in order to serve a master who was a war-time appeaser, friend of Oswald Mosley, and advocate of German rearmament.

Thanks for reading this piece. I write this Substack in my spare time. I have no intention of charging for content. That said, if you enjoy my pieces and want to support the writing, buy one of my books. A good one to start with might my book, ‘12 Authors Take Sides’. It’s a history of the anti-fascist novel and was published by Routledge this week (you can get 20% of the cover price if you use a code, “26SMA2”).

The following list excludes short stories, translations, autobiographies with no meaningful content as fiction, books with an enemy which was a bit like fascism but not fascism really, stories set in fascist Italy or Nazi Germany which don’t take that setting seriously, stories with Nazis in where they are just fanatical antagonists, and stories where fascism or anti-fascism is a minor theme. I have also excluded, more obviously, fascist fan-fic, novels written by supporters of fascist parties, novels which portray fascists and anti-fascists as both being equally valid and desirable alternatives. A book won’t have made this list unless it treats the ideas of the fascist characters as significant or unless their anti-fascism makes a meaningful, and positive, difference to how they live. As for how I’ve valued different books, it’s a combination of personal opinion, admiration of technique, of literary or genre qualities. Feel free to tell me that there’s some work you know and love that I’ve missed.

50 N. Blake [C. Day Lewis], The Smiler With the Knife (London: William Collins, 1939)

Spy novel. A secret society, the English Banner, plot to hand over Britain to Nazi Germany, but are foiled by journalist Georgia Strangeways with the help of cricketer Peter Braithwaite (a cultural politics which seems almost inconceivable today).

49 C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (London: John Lane, 1945)

Christian anti-fascist fiction. I guess you could call it urban fantasy. The protagonist, a clairvoyant Jane, forms an alliance with the Druid Merlin to defeat a group of fascist scientists, the “National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments”. The head of the N.I.C.E. police, “is based on real-life fascist, Mary Allen.

48 R. Warner, The Professor (London: Boriswood, 1938)

A Professor of Greek and Latin literature is appointed Chancellor of his country, which shares a border with a fascist neighbour. The Professor tries to uphold liberal values against fascism. An early exploration of much the same themes that Warner would address better in The Aerodrome.

47 R. L. Finn, Return to Earth (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1945)

In an East End bomb shelter, the characters debate the politics of the war, of the death camps. Scenes from Cable Street. One character Hirst is a Hitler sympathiser, others include a refugee and a rabbi.

46 C. P. Snow, The Light and the Dark (London: Faber and Faber, 1947)

The story of Roy Calvert, an Oxford academic who becomes a favoured guest of the Nazis. Conveys that frequent sense people had, a self-delusion of greatness, which turned some people in the 30s to the right.

45 C. Isherwood, Mr Norris Changes Trains (London: Hogarth, 1935)

A comedy. The innocent William Bradshaw lives in Berlin with the Communist Mr Norris and his outcast friends and watches on in bafflement as Norris goes over to the Nazis.

44 J. Thomas, White Riot (London: Arcadia, 2023)

In Hackney in 1978, activists from Rock Against Racism mingle with the police. Novel integrates factual details borrowed from histories of the period.

43 E. Butler, Without Apology (London: Cassell, 1968)

The memoir of George Maudesley, an MP who becomes a wartime collaborator with Hitler. Slow and verbose - reflecting the narrator’s own pomposity, but does a good job of conveying a certain kind of gentry, centre-right sensibility that fully supported appeasement.

42 A. Armstrong and B. Graeme, When the Bells Rang - A Tale of What Might Have Been (London: George G. Harrap, 1943)

The inhabitants of a Kent village hold out against the threat of German invasion. Deserves a place on the list for its early novelisation of something that would late become a trope: how would England survive a Hitler victory?

41 G. Household’s Rogue Male (London: Chatto and Windus, 1939)

A British sportsman tries to assassinate Hitler. German spies seek revenge. Book celebrates a conservative vision of English patriotism, loyal to the countryside to the army and to the state and yet, in its own way, determinedly anti-fascist. Variously credited as an inspiration to James Bond. Reminds you that not all anti-fascist novels have to be left-wing.

40 A. Calder-Marshall, Pie in the Sky (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937)

Popular Front novel of depression-era England – told from above and from below. The main characters include a factory boss and his son who is attracted to fascism and uses his position to bed his women employees.

Arthur Calder-Marshall, 1934

39 D. Raymond, A State of Denmark (London: Hutchinson, 1970)

England is ruled by an all-powerful dictator, Jobling. Richard Watt is his enemy, a former journalist, now exiled to live in the Italian mountains. Conveys what it was like to live in a former partisan district of Italy in the 70s.

38 Sarban (J. W. Wall), The Soud of His Horn (London: Peter Davies, 1952)

British prisoner of war Alan Querdilion is sent a century into the future where he discovers a Nazi-controlled world and its local leader, Reich Master Forester, Count von Hackelnberg.

37 L. Jones, We Live (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1939)

Autobiographical novel. Political organiser Len works as a miner, takes part in the General Strike, before deciding to leave and die for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War. The latter cause becomes the consummation of both individual and collective awakening, while fascism is present as an outside antagonist and an inner tendency towards elitism which Len must resist.

36 N. Fountain, Days Like These (London: Pluto, 1985)

A journalist, John Raven, buys some photographs in a junk shop, and is sent by them in search of a far-right conspiracy. Part of a brief effort on the part of Pluto to sign up a generation of crime writers to left publishing. Author had been a long-term housemate of all-round leftist good guy, David Widgery.

35 E. Ambler, Uncommon Danger (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1937)

Journalist Kenton meets a Soviet defector in a train and is dragged by him into a spy conflict, pitting fascists in Italy, Germany and Romania against the journalist and his Soviet allies. An early Ambler Popular Front spy novels, those that he wrote later go deeper into this ideas of the USSR as a force for good.

34 P. D. James, The Children of Men (London: Faber and Faber, 1992)

Christian narrative of anti-fascist resistance. No child has been born anywhere in the world for 25 years. In England, the dictator Xan Lyppiatt oversees a fascist government.

33 R. Harris, Fatherland (London: Arrow 1993)

Best-selling detective novel set following a Nazi victory in WWII. Derivative of SS-GB, save with one tweak - the action takes place not in Britain but Germany.

32 T. Mehmood, While There is Light (London: Comma, 2003)

Saleem returns to his parent’s home in north Punjab, while a police-extracted confession names him as a leader of a Youth League fighting racism in early-80s Bradford. Good on the tensions between Mehmood and white anti-fascists.

31 S. Goodman, England Belongs to Me (London: Low Life, 1994)

It’s 1977 and Derek, a young skinhead and Chelsea fan falls in love with a punk, Suzi, before going on to take part in Rock Against Racism gigs.

30 E. Ambler, Epitaph for a Spy (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938)

Combined detective and spy story. A stateless man Vadassy must decide which of the residents in his hotel is the fascist who has been spying on French naval bases.

29 P. Hamilton, Hangover Square (London: Constable, 1941)

The alcoholic protagonist George is obsessed with two fascists, Netta and Peter, who share with him a lifestyle of drunken evenings in Earl’s Court and unsatisfying weekends in Brighton. In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings the non-serving civilians can do something heroic while their country is at war; here, by contrast, they are squalid.

28 S. Smith, Over the Frontier (London: Jonathan Cape, 1938)

Stream-of-consciousness novel with a John Buchan-style setting: Pompey Casmilus travels to Germany, where anti-fascists recruit her to take part in a dreamlike war.

27 B. Moss, Chains (London: Bachman and Turner, 1978)

Autobiographical novel of a man who had been a Communist apparatchik then resigned in 1956, before becoming one of the leaders of the anti-fascist 62 Group. Sympathetic to all new forms of the left as they emerge. A short recruitment scene is arguably the most detailed account of how the Group was established to be found in any source of any kind - fictional or factual.

26 R. Warner, The Wild Goose Chase (London: Faber, 1937)

Three brothers, an upper-class twit, a hopeless intellectual and a revolutionary, join a dangerous quest in search of a wild goose. They arrive at a sealed-off town, a lurid fascist dictatorship. George, the youngest, succeeds in leading the people to revolt. Has a deep, abstract, quality – broadly similar to the attack on realism that you see in interwar modernist paintings.

Thanks for reading this piece. I write this Substack in my spare time. I have no intention of charging for content. That said, if you enjoy my pieces and want to support the writing, buy one of my books. A good one to start with might my book, ‘12 Authors Take Sides’. It’s a history of the anti-fascist novel and was published by Routledge this week (you can get 20% of the cover price if you use a code, “26SMA2”).

This piece returns to an argument I’ve made elsewhere, that fascism is “a specific form of reactionary mass politics”. And that if you read the history of interwar Marxist theories of fascism then whoever you begin with (Trotsky, Gramsci, Bordiga, Guérin, Thalheimer or Zetkin, whoever…), all address this same, central, analysis. In this piece, I want to think through something that definition leaves implied. If fascism is one kind of reactionary mass politics, then there must be other kinds of reactionary mass movements. What are their rules of motion; what makes them unlike fascism? Before getting to the core of the argument, here are some quick points by way of definition to help you see the problem. By “reactionary”, Marxists meant that fascists wanted to reduce equality and bolster capitalism, and were extreme inegalitarians, believing in bolstering white people’s social power over black, men over women, etc. Such ideas alone weren’t unique to fascism but are a part of all right-wing movements, even if (during the last 80 years) the main political form carrying them, conservatism, has promoted a slower transformation than the one sought by fascists.

As for “mass politics”, this is to compare fascism to other styles of mobilising (e.g. at times in European history centre-right parties have held millions of members in local activism). Marxists saw fascism was like other kinds of right-wing politics but grasped that it went much further, through mass demonstrations, mass burnings of opponents’ books. Fascism treated its supporters as participants in a struggle through which they could change the world.

The “specific” forms of fascism were the things which tend to populate political scientists’ definitions today: the leadership cult, an ideology of national rebirth, etc. Marxists acknowledged that these were new, and distinctive, but tended not to centre their definition on them. Rather, the key elements of fascism were its combination of reactionary and mass politics. Fascism was better at sustaining these two elements than any competitor on the right, of which there were many, it kept them in balance. This mixture of unstable and (another recurring insight) contradictory impulses helped to explain fascism’s rapid growth.

Non-Fascist Mass Movements

(1) Military dictatorships, whether fascist-aligned or not. When the Communists of the 1920s including Zetkin wanted to draw a distinction between Mussolini and similar-seeming politicians, this was the group on which they focussed. So, following the defeat of a Soviet Republic in Budapest in 1919, Miklós Horthy became the country’s Regent, a position he held until 1944. Horthy was reacting to a revolution that had taken control of Budapest. He sent soldiers against the Hungarian masses. But his violence was reactive; it was intended to restore those who already exercised power in Hungary. His allies were the owners of large rural estates and of factories, bankers, the members of the pre-existing ruling class.

Such movements could share a similar reactionary ideology to fascism but did not share its commitment to popular mobilisation. And what was true of Horthy has been true of a huge number of people like him since: from Piłsudski to Salazar and Franco (pictured), and from them to the generals in postwar Greece, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt…

(2) Reactionary mass movements of revolutionary origin. Another way to think of fascism is as a product of an “age” in which history radicalises to the right, giving energy not just to Mussolini or Hitler but also to conservatives, elitist reactionaries, military rulers, etc. Alongside ages of counter-revolution, there are also “ages of revolution”, eg Britain in the 1640s, France in 1789, Russia in 1917. At the end of the Russian Revolution, a form of counter-revolutionary politics emerged from within. Its leader, Stalin was reactionary compared to what went before, made homosexuality criminal again, introducing a family code intended to push people back into private relationships and used antisemitic language against his opponents. At the moment of transformation in Soviet society – at the end of the 1920s – the regime was able to mobilise large numbers of young people in favour of a vaguely described cultural revolution, which saw the replacement of old party cadres by new people, public denunciations, etc.

The reason why it is mistake to compare this period to fascism, despite the presence of both reactionary and mass elements in this group, is that all of this history took place in a wildly different relationship to the underlying dynamics of revolution and counter-revolution. Stalin had been a revolutionary, he was the product of a profound social revolution, in relation to which he was using the state to bring its democratic and transformative component to an end. Hitler, by contrast, was a counter-revolutionary and fought against the revolutionaries with all its energy from his first entry into politics. He was doing different tasks.

(3) Things which aren’t fascism because of their place in the global balance of power. Fascism emerged into a world where imperialists were still colonisers. It stood for the continuation of empire. So much so, that even when leaders emerged in colonised countries who were offering their services to fascism (e.g. B S Moonje and V D Savarkar in India) the movement’s European leaders showed little interest in them. Hitler insisted that he would rather India remained under English rule than be led by pro-fascist Indians. Fascists fighting colonialism wouldn’t be a mere paradox, they would be people failing to understand fascism’s core purpose.

In the 1960s, the right through James Gregor had a version of its own “gotcha” argument; fascism was a verbally militant, top-down force, which argued for national transformation. Therefore, weren’t the true fascists the likes of Marcus Garvey, the Panthers, etc? But that argument was always meant as a provocation, not even Gregor (who had previously written for European fascist press) believed it. There is every difference in the world between nationalisms which seek to challenge global inequalities, and those whose purpose is to bolster them.

All that said, it’s my hunch that one of the differences between global reactionary politics in the 1920s or 1930s and today is that we now have a larger set of regional powers, which may be weak in relation to the global hegemon but are dominant sub-imperialisms in relation to the states around them. So that, e.g. it has been much easier for a Russia, an India, a Hungary under Orbán to contribute to a growing rise of reactionary advance, than it would have been to play an active role as a global fascist starting in the 1920s in India or Africa.

(4) Reactionary politics with less of a mass movement. These are, basically, in the same place as my category (1) above, except that a broader set of social movements also fit into it. Part of our present “age of fascism” is that some rulers are willing to defy the historic institution of bourgeois democracy (e.g. Trump in the US) and are willing to cancel unwelcome election results, ignore Congress, etc. Alongside them, belong forms of politics which really are by all their basic assumptions conservatives (e.g. Reform in Britain). The latter get radicalised by their relationship to Trump, become more and more reactionary.

If politics was a series of disconnected national units, just a matter of Farage in Britain, Le Pen in France or Meloni in Italy, none of these figures are committed to mass politics. None of them would come close to fascism. The awkward question though is, what would they become if they were governing when a global hegemon gave up on democracy?

(5) Mass movements with reactionary politics but less coherent ones than fascism. This again is quite a broad group. The parties which belong in Paxton’s Five Stages of Fascism (eg the Klan in the US) belong here. They did mass politics and were reactionary. They had, in fact, a developed reactionary programme which took in many elements. But for most participants this was about being reactionary in just a single way (typically racism) rather than an elaborate form of politics capable of challenging egalitarian views in every aspect of life. For a long time, Pegida in Germany or the Tommy Robinson’s movement belonged here. I’m open to an argument that the latter has become more reactionary over time, because he needs to find new allies and because of the global advance of ever more reactionary forms of politics.

(6) Bonapartists. Arguably the original of this kind of politics, Napoleon III, fitted in my category (2) above – he emerges out of the 1848 revolution, and this is why Marx writes at such length about Bonaparte’s support being the petty bourgeoisie and the peasants, not the workers, as it should have been had the movement been headed in a good direction.

The distinction between such politics and fascism is that, in Bonapartism, the leader is capable of going for years while neglecting the base before summoning it back onto the streets when needed (Trump does this too, in relation to MAGA). This marks Bonapartists as different from fascists. The latter keep on mobilising the base, sustain the mass meetings even in power, indeed generate new examples of them (e.g. the anti-Jewish pogroms which became widespread only after Hitler is already in power). The regime may even turn on parts of the base which acquire too much power (e.g. the NSDAP in 1934) but, when they do that, they will not stop mobilising the membership again afterwards. This is what I mean by saying fascism sustained a uniquely balanced combination of mass and reactionary elements. The more that combination is kept going, the more supporters are making demands of the regime, the more likely that the party radicalises in power and you reach the fascist end point of jailing opponents, cancelling elections, initiating genocides and inter-imperialist wars.

Bonapartists, by contrast, are more interesting in being in power than changing the world; they stop mobilising the power and govern – eventually – in pure domestic policy terms not so different from all the more cautious electoral right-wing parties.

This Sunday, I’ll be speaking at Skin Deep’s conference in London on “faith”, by which the organiser mean both religion and its secular counterpart - the belief in the people around us which radicals need to keep going through defeats. A friend of mine Mike said atheists should leave religious people alone. This piece is a counter-argument.

In May 1641 Parliament killed one of King Charles I’s favourites, the Earl of Stafford; later the same month they abolished the Court of Star Chamber. If you want to grasp today’s slogan “No Kings” and the memory on which it draws here’s the place to start with the tyrant Charles, the dregs of his kind, old, mad, despised and violent too. The Chamber had become a weapon to punish Charles’ Puritan opponents. This is the part of the story that people can’t grasp if they assume that the religious people were sat on one side of the table and those who fought to change the world on the other. It’s better to go back to that quote from Marx, not “the opium of the people”, but what he wrote next. Religion is the general theory of this world, he says, religion is its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic, its point of honour, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement its, universal basis of consolation and justification. The struggles of the 1640s were wars about who would lead services about where altars were situated about the content of sermons. To make sense of them, think of power, authority and wealth, all plaited together in a single weave.

The King’s first victim was the clergyman John Bastwick, the second victim the medic Henry Burton, the third the lawyer William Prynne. They’d written books saying the bishops were secret Catholics. The King would never forgive, Prynne who’d said actresses were all whores contaminated by the sin of sex-work - the Queen (another actor) corrupted too. For Bastwick, Charles said it was punishment enough to chop off his ears. Burton lost his too. Prynne lost them and more, Charles insisted on more, so they branded on his cheek the initials “S L” – for seditious libel.

Victim four was John Lilburne, 23 years old, from Sunderland. He’d bee prenticed to a cobbler then come back from Holland, he’d smuggled pamphlets from the war there (which was his generation’s Spain in 1936). Chief Justice Banks was on the bench, the King waiting for a guilty verdict. Lilburne was accused of importing into England ten thousand copies of Puritan tracts, Bastwick’s text among them. Banks said, “How do you plead?” The Judge was expecting guilty or not guilty not caring which. Planning already the sentence and thinking of the good meal of beef he had waiting for him at home. At that point, the trial not even started, Lilburne confounded him. He said I won’t swear on the Bible, I won’t blaspheme, no wretch - not for you.

Banks had Lilburne flogged down Ludgate Circus. He made the king’s executioner beat him along the Strand, striking him with a knotted chord. They came to Trafalgar Square where Banks ordered the hat removed from Lilburne’s head, the sun beating down. The executioner whipped him on Whitehall. He dashed the weapon against his flesh on Downing Street. Banks assumed Lilburne would obey when they came to the end of Old Palace Yard. But Lilburne never stop asserting his innocence. Placed in the pillory, he pulled from his pocket copies of the banned pamphlets. He distributed them to the crowd. The executioner stuffed a gag so deep in Lilburne’s mouth that he bled. Back to prison he went for more torture, he was jailed, no date set for the trial. I see him now taking up his quill in prison saying the Good Old Cause had martyrs enough what it needed was fighters. He wrote for the London apprentices, imagining a world without tyrants. My God he wrote in whom I did trust was higher and stronger then my selfe who strengthened and enabled me not only to undergo the punishment with cheerfulness but made me Triumph-

Lilburne was an alchemist, he had the gift of taking a base metal (pain) and turning it into rebellion’s gold. And he said with a holy disdain to insult over my torments. I wish I’d achieved a tenth of what Lilburne did, the soldier he became in the New Model Army, cursed by the King, by the Judges, by Cromwell. Sky-pilot you said? The curse of autocrats I’d call him, bold even with those on his side too. It was God who gave Lilburne strength. Be like Jesus, his religion said – hadn’t He suffered too?

If you enjoyed the piece here are the details of where I’m speaking on Sunday – feel free to come along and join in the discussion

The inspiration for this talk was Robert Chapman’s idea of health fascism, and their argument that the far right grows by idealising a lost past of individual and collective health. That left me wondering if the left has our own notion of “health communism”.

Obviously, there’s the book of that same title, which came out with Verso in 2022. But I feel that, in their account of communism as an antidote to capitalist ill-health Adler-Bolton and Vierkant write as if they’re starting out from first principles, as if the key question was what health communism would be, if there ever had been such a theory. Their narrative abuilds up to the story of the Socialist Patients’ Collective, patients at the psychiatric hospital of the University of Heidelberg. It’s a lovely work of history from below, an account which needed to be reclaimed because it was unknown. Here, I’m arguing something slightly different, that mainstream Bolshevism always had a vision of a future society which would be unlike capitalism in part because it would maximise the opportunities of everyone involved to live as fully as possible. There’s nothing missing, nothing lost, the idea of the good society as producing healthier and happier people was always there.

A good way to think about Health Communism is through Alexandra Kollontai’s short story, Soon. Kollontai (pictures above, with dark hair, central) became Socialist in the 1890s, was a leader of the Bolshevik’s women’s organisation. Written four years after the October Revolution, the tale imagines a gathering 50 years after the revolution. It may be that, as I go through that story, there’ll be some people reading this who find Kollontai’s utopia intriguing and others who find it alienating. Either reaction is fine. The reason why Marx and Engels were vague about the detail of Communism is they wanted it to be a democratic society drawn up by billions of people. (An idea utopia drawn up 100 years old will have its weaknesses. In just the same way, any plan we draw up will probably strike the generations of the future as hopelessly inadequate. That’s fine - that’s why the wager’s made not on us but on them).

The event is a Xmas party and the people in Kollontai’s commune want a fir tree. To get it, they have to negotiate with another body, the collective in charge of the forests. One good idea the story introduces is that health is, in part, about people’s relationship to nature. And, the wilder that nature is – probably – the more liberating it will be to spend time there. This is one of the big differences between health fascism and Communism. When Mussolini saw a swamp, his first thought was to drain it and create land for commercial farming. Health Communism more likely to get pleasure from nature that is just nature, that’s left wild, unkept, a dozen different species unintegrated into any supply chain.

This is a society of future technology; Kollontai’s commune have gone beyond electricity. They’re futurists. Fine. Honestly, it’s hard to be techno-utopians in an age of AI, when it feels like the medical advances are so nakedly about targeting the illness suffered by particular groups of older, affluent people, in an epoch when it feels like every advance is about profit rather than addressing people’s needs. But that’s something any movement of millions will have to recreate.

The people live in “Commune Ten”. It isn’t the most individual name, but at least there’s some sense of place. In my vision of health communism,, I’d have an even stronger sense of the city in which they live. Comrades will know Mike Davis’s essay “Who will Build the Ark?” where he sees the city as a place of “great urban parks, free museums, libraries, infinite possibilities for human interaction”. Those kinds of city, Davis argued, could survive global warming, they could also build the health infrastructure we need.

“The young people were healthy, their bodies were supple and strong … There was not one sick, pale, or exhausted face.” Kollontai responding to the war, the flu epidemic of 1918, the civil war and the general starvation. She’s saying life didn’t have to be like that. And she’s right, it didn’t.

If there’s one part of her essay I’m unsure about it’s really this – I mean some of what we think of as health is just the random allocation of conditions. Even under communism, people will carry difference in our bodies. People will get tired. We’ll all still need other people to care for us. Hopefully, we’ll get more care.

“Everyone,” Kollontai writes, “works at their own vocation for two hours a day,” which is enough for the running of the commune. The rest of the time the individual is free to spend her time as she enjoys. This would have been the part of her piece which would have seemed most utopian to readers in other countries. Five years before she wrote her piece, a working hour of 70 hours a week had been normal in Russian cities.

The promise of taking back time runs head-on against the way capitalism works. Capital exhausts us with demands, overwhelms us, categorises people who’s bodies can’t put up with that pressure as unhealthy, impaired or disabled. Communism says slow down the clock, let people contribute what they can. Give everyone what we need.

Of all the ideas in Kollontai’s piece, the one which appeals to me most is that vision of communism, as getting back time. As people in this room may know, last year, I was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer. I spent two months in hospital, had my body pumped full of drugs. My body was tired, like I’d aged two decades in a year. But such is the way, capitalism tells us to be productive, that for me, being ill, was also a kind of liberation. Suddenly, everyone wanted to see me. They made the time to see me. While I was being treated, I had a picc line. I used to go to this one room in the Macmillan centre at UCH where they cleaned my line, took my bloods. It was the best care I received all year, because the nurses who worked there was to do unpredictable work. tasks in-between. You couldn’t set them targets. They gave care slowly and well.

(I’m not saying that every illness, every disability, gets its own balancing compensation. That’s the most patronising idea I can imagine) What I am saying is that being ill isn’t always simply a bad thing. And that Kollontai was right – under communism time will belong to us again.

“People do not live in families but in groups according to their ages.” Commune 10 swaps the nuclear family for collective relationships. Communes would address isolation, loneliness. As for the family, we saw in Covid how everything was shoved back into the private family, food, care across generations, medical treatment. Rebuilding collectivity is a strategy for more sharing, a better life.

One of the children speaks to an elder, saying, “Grandad, I know what the word ‘capitalist’ means. Another says, “We saw money in a museum. Did you have money, Grandad? Did you carry it in a little bag in your pocket?

She’s referring there to the plans the Bolsheviks had in 1919, their dreams under war conditions of abolishing money.

“There had been hunger and exhaustion.”

Again I’d read that as a promise to her readers, a reminder of the conditions that they’d all been living through, and a pledge not to go back to the.

“You must have been very unorganised and ignorant,” someone in the new generation says.

By that word “organis[ed]”, she means planning. Not the bureaucracy of the Five Year Plans. But something deeper rooted in community. The people of Commune Ten could, if they liked, choose to build more houses, libraries, theatres, youth clubs, recording studios, landscape parks, merge their district with the nearby lands under conservation. They could have small-scale factories and work with their hands, they could devote their lives to a craft if they wanted. They could organise their lives how they wanted. People would have live longer in that kind of system, be better protected against illness.

“Our tasks are on an even larger scale.” Kollontai concludes. Under the future for which we’re fighting, they will indeed be.

The points I take from Kollontai’s short story are these:

-Different ideas matter more to different traditions. Revolutionary and counter-revolutionary ideas don’t exactly mirror each other. Marxists do, or used to, have a treasury of compelling things to say about economics; fascists never have. It’s likely that health matters more to counter-revolutionaries than it does to communists; what counts for us isn’t the health but the communism

-Probably, our notion of health will be less about the past and more about the future

-Expanding that, health fascists promise that their plans will help the individual. Think of the tech millionaire Bryan Johnson and the money he spends to reverse ageing. Or Elon Musk, and his 14 children. The health at the end of health communism is an idea of a better society. We will create conditions for all will flourish. But the payoff from those dynamics are generational. The beneficiaries won’t be us, won’t even be the people who fight the revolution but those who come after.

Three experiences inform this piece of writing: words Mike Kidron told an interviewer in 1964 (“not Trotskyist but Trotskyist-derived”), a piece a friend of mine Colin wrote last year (“how did these revolutionary socialists become so similar to the Stalinists of their youth?”), and words another lefty spoke to me an event last weekend (“I do like your comrades, but I’m not sure you agree about everything” Like, how’s that a problem?)

I’ll always be a certain kind of leftist, that way of looking at the world goes as deeply in me as my gender my Jewish heritage the class I was born into or where I learned to read and write. I’d been following politics since 1981 and learned my causes (Benn, Toxteth) from TV. When the miners struck I was too young to raise money and living in the wrong part of the country and what would have I have done anyway like I was eleven. But here were my people the ones I believed in so that’s where I began.

Socialism 68-style seemed as good a word as any because I’d seen the people who were going to change the world knew reasons they’d have for changing it understood the solidarity you needed to take on the state and the tactics which followed; so go now make your protest permanent. Those politics made sense to me like the allies any strikers would find, Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, the Southall Youth Movement, the GLC. All were capable of being folded into one perspective: let the right ideas emerge from within (some daring too) and workers can change everything.

Call it by its founder’s name, Lev Davidovich Bronstein. The clever part was the year-zero perspective it gave us on the left don’t be afraid of defeats they’ll be the means to recovery don’t be scared of losing East Germany Poland Hungary Romania Albania those were top-down states anyway, state capitalism, societies run by secret police. So interrailing through Europe in 1990 I crossed the Soviet border when there wasn’t a border any more slept on people’s floors in Latvia 1991 chatted with refugees on trains through 1992 Serbia to Kosovo, shells thumping as I crossed, to Macedonia. My tradition taught me that old ways of living needed to fall too, the caste of officials in the unions who resisted the anger of rank and file and beneath them a certain kind of left-wing patriarchy meaning the old white suited folks of the movement, the tank-drivers, the people who held back the boundaries of the acceptable left and brought us back to Labour each election cycle. They denied all hope of Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg’s ideas winning they kept protest within limits, the top table at the end of A-to-B protests. On the path ahead there could be no paving stones only beaches.

But what’s my generation’s record, what have we achieved to justify the claim that ours was a reform project? We said the left we’d create would avoid those mistakes our movements bolder but there’s been so many more A-to-Z marches/speaker lists. Because the party has its allies in the united front so you must grant all the self-important people their five minutes on the platform (fame!). Today’s leaders are worse even than their counterparts of 40 years ago at demanding solidarity for their chosen cause disdaining it when the state criminalises anyone to their left.

Sure talk Marx talk Lenin talk all the Luxemburg you like but the words are cheap if the causes you build are movements of self-policed people the ones who do the work allowed no chance to speak. Tell me we’re under attack tell me be quiet for the sake of the unity, sure, we’re in a fight but the culture in which I grew up was one which used to respect that obligation to overthrow if needed rather than let dull organising keep on. I’m saying I understand why people who joining the movement now see exhausted forms see 1968-style as the problem no solution.

I know that when you write for lefties, you’re supposed by the end to give the reader something to cheer. We needed to learn, and we did, hooray! But I’ll end instead with a list from the past year the moments which heartened me: Sophie Lewis at the ICA, the two hundred folks who canvassed for Amu Gib, the Greens winning in Gorton and Denton, stories in books the old rogue Willi Münzenberg manufacturing the scene on the Paris balcony where Ellen Wilkinson could pledge her love to Rajani Palme Dutt and to the world revolution. When I realised it was Paris I smiled (my grin so round, did it make me a bad comrade?). The women in Makerfield who voted against Reform not for Labour’s sake but for their own. Best of all, the friends who sat with me when I was ill. I’d like to call that a revolution even though it’s mine no-one else’s, but that’s I guess that’s how shared experience begins. Agree on nothing save revolution. It doesn’t need a label, the stories we share will be ours alone and therefore different, all of us scared, wounded, resisting. From all our heart-squeezed hopes, something new.

Thanks for reading this piece. This Substack is a leisure operation; I write it in my spare time. I have no intention of charging for content: I want to keep everything here free. But if you enjoy my pieces and want to support the writing, buy one of my books. There’s lots of them.

In September, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor will be bringing out the above, this year’s big book on fascism. Given Klein’s well-earned public reputation, as well as the genius of her book Doppelganger, this book is likely to be popular with activists. For people who want to get a taste of its contents; there’s the piece they wrote for the Guardian a year ago. Astra Taylor also gave a smart, impressive, interview in March to launch the podcast ‘Let’s Fight Some Fascists’.

The great strength of the book will be that it notices a definite ratcheting up of social cruelty. Even if you just compare the far right of a decade ago to its present incarnation, undoubtedly the right is now more open about what it’s doing and much more direct in its promises to hurt the people it hates. One site in the UK which done an exemplary job of tracking this, in recent weeks, is the Substack, Anti-Capitalist Musings. In relation to Southampton, Belfast, and Makerfield, its author has shown how much more common it is for supporters of the British right to pledge, openly, their support for national socialism. Think of someone like Rupert Lowe, the patrician leader of Restore Britain, widely seen by voters as a nicer, less threatening, alternative to Nigel Farage. And then you look at its Twitter account, the promises to make a “vast number of people” leave Britain “millions and millions”, its advice to rioters on how to throw bricks at the police but stay “OUTSIDE of prison”, its talk of “third world migrants attempting to behead us in the street”. No-one on the British right talked like this a year ago, no right-wing MP has ever been this blatant. And then you look beyond Lowe to the online billion- and trillionaires and how they talk.

Although there are good reasons to be excited about Klein and Taylor’s book, to feel that here at least is someone reacting to the crisis we’re in – I do also want to register early some doubt I have about the central metaphor. I agree with their assessment of the cruelty of the right, what I don’t want to see is people using the book to say that the right has already made the world they want or that it’s too late to stop them.

The specific idea I want to challenge is that the right must win because we’re living in an epoch of technological innovations which lean right and can’t be resisted. Let’s take the paradigm case of such malign inventions, AI. For more than seven years the boss of OpenAI, Sam Altman, has been claiming that Artificial Intelligence is such a powerful weapon that it has the potential to destroy the world. “I try to be upfront,” he said. “Am I doing something good? Or really bad?” When he first started saying that AI had this potential, his company was valued at $1 billion – the sum recently invested in it by Microsoft. Today it’s value is rushing towards $1 trillion. In that time, AI has done some modest harm, it has used up significant amounts of water and electricity, and contributed to long-term global warming. It hasn’t made your toaster smart. It hasn’t trained an army of robot dogs to resist human beings and start World War IV. Altman is talking up its destructive potential, by doing so he has done a lot to make himself richer and less, so far, to make society collapse.

In their Guardian piece, Klein and Taylor collected a series of predictions from plutocrats. They are right that the drive to annihilate is new compared to (say) the language Bill Gates was using 20 or 30 years ago. At one time, tech was going to have us all sharing ideas; now it’s about rent-extraction – stealing as much as possible.

Klein and Taylor are right again to see in the boss class’s indifference to suffering an echo of past authoritarianisms. Think of the early symbols of Italian fascism: the hand grenade (the symbol chosen by fascists when they first stood for office), the death’s head. Fascists glorified in images of other people’s death – even of the fascists’ own martyrdom. Some of their menace came from the way that fascist cadres seemed willing to risk vast amounts of cruelty, in contrast to most of their opponents, who would comprise if that meant life kept on.

But, in the same piece, Klein and Taylor were vague as to what this “end times” description attached to. Are they saying something small and uncriticisable (i.e. that fascism has flourished at a time when business was using end times marketing) or something large (i.e. that Trump and his cabal really are jeopardising the future of the plant on a short timescale - so that the end times will be upon us soon)?

There’s a passage is Peter Gay’s great book Weimar Culture, in which he looks back on the 1920s and early 30s left and reprimands those people - his people - accusing them of “easy pessimism, which saw the Republic as doomed from the start [and] helped to fulfil the prophecies it made.” I get the distress, I share it. I just think it’s worth going a little bit more slowly and stressing at every possible stage that we aren’t in the fascists’ full dystopia yet. It’s possible to recognise both that the other side’s plans have radicalised and that we are still in the game to resist them.

In relation to AI, I’m on the side of the people who call it snake oil, who say that we don’t need the data centres, that they’ll waste vast resources of water and electricity if built, who’re summoning onto the streets of the US already crowds of people to make sure that those factories-machines-prisons are never built. If the anti-data cebtre protests succeed, we won’t get to the 2026 equivalent of Blake’s dark Satanic mills. They’ll fail. The business-politics link-up which is central to End Times, won’t happen. I’m not promising that the green and the pleasant will win, I’m saying only that there’s still a gap between our enemies’ plans and what they’ve done.

I’ve been reading perhaps the most sophisticated instance of an interwar anti-fascist taking seriously the metaphor of end times. It’s Victor Serge’s 1945 novel of France’s fall to Hitler’s armies, Last Times. Serge was living France when the Germans occupied. Their conquest of Paris, his book treats as the ending of a cycle of human optimism which had begun with the Revolution in Russia in 1917. Few of his characters offer any resistance to the German invasion. On public transport, people share “whispered remarks about the Jews and the foreigners”, in the bars, drinkers complain about “the immense plot of Jewish finance, Bolshevism, popular fronts.” Everywhere, you can find people willing to put “the fault” for the catastrophe on “the circumcised”. Several of his characters fantasise about the possibility of defeat and the chance to join the killers, “This international rabble, this nest of Jews … I’d sink the lot of them in the middle of the ocean, like plague-ridden rats, yes, friend, like rats!”

Yet in Serge’s book, there’s always a conflict. You can’t have end times so long as there are humans still living and hoping in any significant number for a post-fascist future. One of his characters, Jacob Kaaden, is detrmined to escape the approaching German troops. At one point, he is infuriated by a drunk friend Cherniak. Kaaden says to him, “[I]f Paris dies, if Europe is dead, the world is going to explode? We are the first to realise it. And I didn’t promise you a place in my car just to hear you whine. I warn you that if this goes on I’ll throw you out in the middle of the countryside, no matter where. We’ll hold firm as long as is necessary. The ‘last of the last’ at the end of this story, who’ll be kicked to death one day by his own bodyguards, is named Hitler.”

Fascism couldn’t have lasted, and didn’t. Not only because of the 20 million Russians who offered their lives to save the world from Hitler. But, more basic still than that, because dictatorship offers nothing to those it imprisons, turns sympathisers repeatedly into its opponents. Whether we are heading to Hell exactly or “just”(!) some mid-way approximation to it, that same calculation applies.

Thanks for reading this piece. This Substack is a volunteer operation; I write it in my leisure time. I have no intention of charging for content: I want to keep everything here free to read. But if you enjoy my pieces and want to support the writing, I’d urge you to buy either a copy of my new book ‘Revolutionary Forgiveness’, which was published last month by Haymarket, or it’s the rise of the far right that interests me, there’s my book, ‘The New Authoritarians’, which was published by Pluto in response to Trump’s first term.

The Hungarian György Lukács became a Communist under the influence of the Russian Revolution and defended that decision along ethical lines. He had been born in 1885 into a wealthy family. His father, the director of the Hungarian General Credit Bank. Lukács himself lived first in Hungary, then moved to Germany in his mid-twenties. Between spring 1910 and autumn 1911, he was living as a student, reading furiously. He cared for a friend dying of consumption, Leo Popper. Lukács’ writing in this period explores themes of “death in life,” of tragedy - and his own patent guilt at survival. When his lover Irma Seidler, a painter, died by suicide in May 1911, these thoughts became still more intense. His essay “On Poverty of Spirit” fictionalized his response to her death and his urge to flee “life’s infinite misery.”

Lukács identified with the SPD and despaired of it. When Lukács he one reformist, Ludwig Franck, speak at a meeting, Lukács left the hall. “A socialist who wants to defend the constitution!” Elsewhere he wrote, “The only possible hope would be the proletariat and socialism,” but “socialism does not appear to have the religious power capable of filling the entire soul - a power that used to characterise early Christianity.”

Before 1917 Lukács had a romantic view of life. His thinking was an unstable mix of religious and political forms, with more of messianic Judaism and Catholicism than anything that could meaningfully be termed socialism. He dreamed of capitalist society being torn down. Who would overthrow the old order, he could not say.

Democratising Ethics

In 1918 Lukács addressed the question of what was to be done in the first of two major essays. It was written to mark the anniversary of Russia’s October Revolution. Lukács’s goal was to assess Marxism against the challenge of ethical thinking. In that essay, he chose ethics over revolution. “Bolshevism as a Moral Problem” began by rejecting the standard criticisms of the October Revolution, borrowed by Western critics from Russian social democrats in Russia, such as the Mensheviks’ insistence that a minimum set of economic conditions were required before socialism could be built. Against that reasoning, Lukács argued that will itself was a historical factor. The one ground on which Communism could fairly be judged, he argued, was morality. The choice to support the revolution or not “has to be an ethical one.”

The moral decisions of movements are, he argues, decisions of thousands of individual people. Lukács was echoing the novelist Dostoyevsky and absorbing his essential message: If you want to create a better society, then you must find a means of achieving it that leads genuinely in that direction. If the acts you choose are deceitful, you will not spread the intense democracy on which Communism depends. And the same applies to murder and torture. None of these are routes to socialism; they lead only to new forms of autocratic state power. On that basis, he rejected the October revolution. “Bolshevism rests on the metaphysical assumption that the bad can engender the good or, as Razumikhin says in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, that it is possible to lie our way to the truth.” He concluded, regretfully, the better alternative to political engagement was self-sacrifice and renunciation.

The importance of “Bolshevism as a Moral Problem” is not its conclusion, which Lukács was to revise in a second piece written a mere few weeks later. What matters is the argument. A socialist politics, Lukács argued, required a Marxist method. The means chosen to achieve socialism were indivisible from the ends. Amongst the many virtues of this move - beyond the obvious, that it is true and wise on its own terms - is that it democratises politics. It says to the individual activist that they are the representative of their movement. That they can be held accountable within it. That they, by their actions, will make that politics seem credible or desirable to other people, and that what they do, as a member, counts.

I really can’t emphasise strongly enough, how bold and important I think this move is. It takes you away from parliamentary socialism, from liberalism, from all forms of socialism from above. It insists that each and every person is not merely the recipient of politics but can, at key moments of their lives, shape the people around them.

We know Lukács disliked the conclusion of “Bolshevism as a Moral Problem” because he returned to the same question two months later. Through autumn and winter 1918–19, Lukács signed declarations calling for self-determination for the former peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and briefly joined a pacifist movement, the Knights of Europe. His second piece, ‘Tactics and Ethics,” was written between January and March 1919, by which time he had joined the Communist Party. In this second essay, Lukács argued that Communists distinguished themselves from other political traditions in that they had a “philosophy of history,” which held that a revolution led by workers was merely the prelude to the total transformation of society and the creation of a utopia without inequality or oppression. Anything in Communist tactics that brought this end closer to being was correct.

Previously, he had argued that the social could not be privileged over the individual since means produced ends. A party telling itself that it was possible to lie its way through to the truth would produce a society of lies. In ‘Tactics and Ethics’ Lukács restated this argument, insisting that every moral compromise would be fatal to the achievement of socialism, “The class struggle of the proletariat is not merely a class struggle” it was “a means whereby humanity liberates itself.” He then went even further, stating openly something only implicit before, that only people make choices - not parties. “The question of whys and therefores,” Lukács wrote, “has no meaning except in relation to the individual.” So how then might the individual change the world? Lukács wrote of the “mutual dependence” of the tactics of movements and the choices of individual. Socialists cannot prefer means to ends or ends to means, they must choose both. Means produce ends; more than that, means were ends.

Action was a choice; so was inaction. “Everyone who is at the present time for Communism is therefore obliged to bear the same individual responsibility for each and every human being who dies in the struggle, as if he himself has killed them all. But all who ally themselves to the other side, the defence of capitalism, must bear the same individual responsibility.” The individual must act, Lukács wrote, as if their action or inaction could “chang[e] the world’s destiny.” Such an intense moral standpoint was possible only at a time of “class consciousness”, only when hundreds of thousands of workers shared a sense of the “world-historical mission” of the working class. He added that moral choices were not just about what had happened but also about what might be. To choose a cause after it had been victorious and once its rule was secure was to make no real choice at all: “It is only in the realm of the possible that moral, responsible action, truly human action is itself possible.”

A revolutionary could not be “faultless,” but in a “tragic situation,” caught between world war and revolution, the moral standard had to be one of “sacrifice.” A Communist must be prepared to sacrifice themselves should the “world-historical situation” compel it.

What did he mean by sacrifice? Lukács named two linked figures from history and literature who on this account embodied the correct spirit. One was Boris Savinkov, an advocate of the revolutionary transformation of Russia and supporter of the killing of that country’s royal tyrants. Savinkov helped plan the assassination of Vyacheslav von Plehve, the Russian minister of the interior, in May 1904. Following the Russian state’s massacre of two hundred demonstrating workers in Saint Petersburg in January 1905, Savinkov helped plan the killing of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia, a leader of the counterrevolution. Savinkov then conducted a daring escape from imprisonment, swapping clothes with one of his wardens. Lukács noted Savinkov’s dictum that “the ultimate moral basis of the terrorist’s act” was “the sacrifice for his brethren, not only of his life, but also of his purity, his morals, his very soul.” Lukács could not endorse that formulation; its adoption of immoral acts was too brazen. He argued that Savinkov’s approach, when combined with a world-historic mission, and a commitment to sacrifice on the part of the protagonist, might be moral.

His second model was the widow Judith, hero of Friedrich Hebbel’s drama of the same name. In the biblical Book of Judith, the protagonist saves Israel by approaching the army of the Assyrian king Nebuchadnezzar with a fictional story that she intends to betray her compatriots. In fact, Judith has deeper concerns. Jerusalem is under siege, its water supplies cut off. Judith has prayed to God for guidance and is determined to save her people. Nebuchadnezzar’s commander Holofernes allows Judith into his tent, where she remains for four nights. On the last evening, Judith attacks and cuts off Holofernes’s head with his own sword.

Lukács’s writing represents the possibility of a breakthrough. The great virtue of ‘Tactics and Ethics’ is that it invites activists to take moral choices seriously. It insists that the end of a fairer society can come about only if we make choices in ways consistent with an intended end. Taking that approach seriously would be both life-affirming and life-consuming. As they participate in violent acts, the revolutionary figures that Lukács envisages claim the right to sacrifice themselves, even by dying in civil war or being captured by a hostile state.

Since Lukács’s essay was written, various Marxists have seen it as a model example of the relationship between ethical and political theory. In 2022, John Bellamy Foster devoted a major essay to it, in Monthly Review, treating this work as the key to Lukács’s later political engagements – some of which were base, and some of which were heroic (not least his support for the 1956 uprising in Hungary).

Good outcomes from unjust acts?

Lukács’ contemporaries heard him articulate versions of the argument – simplified only slightly, for public consumption. Victor Serge, a fellow Comintern agent, recalls one of their conversations in the mid-1920s, during which the philosopher told him, “Marxists know that dirty little tricks can be performed with impunity when great deeds are being achieved, the error of some comrades is to suppose that one can produce great results simply though the performance of dirty little tricks.” This was the same theme as the one which had been exploring in 1918 and 1919, the im/possibility of act unethically and yet rightly.

His friend Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, largely written in 1918-9 uses him as the basis of the central character “Naphtha”, a Jesuit priest and an arch immoralist, who is also a Communist, a supporter of the labour theory of value, and an advocate of the abolition of all classes. “What our age needs, what it demands,” Naphta insists, “is – terror.” Lukács, who always denied any similarity between Naphtha and himself, dubbed the character a “fascist”, which saved him from having to confront the fairness or otherwise of the model.

In my last piece for this site, I wrote about the murder in 1916 of the Prime Minister of Austria, Count Stürgkh, by the golden boy of Austrian socialism, Friedrich Adler. While Lukács’ two pamphlets do not name Adler at any point, there is a good case to be made that this killing was exactly the sort of moral act about which the philosopher was writing.

Lukács’s essay was drafted in response to a question posed by another writer, the left-wing economist and radical politician Karl Polanyi, who also edited and published Lukács’s essay. Polanyi had asked: Was the world war just another power struggle, with one form of domination and oppression succeeding another, or an opening for an epochal change leading to lasting democracy and peace? Adler also contributed to the same collection.

Lukács’s models were, in both cases, tyrannicides. So was Adler – in killing Stürgkh he targeted an individual who had overseen his country’s turn to war, and had on his hands therefore the blood of hundreds of thousands or millions of people. All three are instances of the trolley problem so beloved of Hollywood movies; the argument that by using limited violence against a single target you can thereby prevent the suffering of large numbers. And yet the trolley problem is, as its name suggests, intended to be a dilemma.

If you run the history on from October 1916 by two years, then the consequences of the act seem benign. A revolution breaks out, the workers defeat the war, Adler was liberated from prison. Speed on until the late 1920s, however, and the consequences look quite different. At the University of Vienna, gentile students rioted against Jewish and Socialist students repeatedly from 1920 onwards – smashing property in 1920, hospitalising nine people in 1923, with further attacks in 1925 and 1927. In that latter year, one sequence of killings began in January with three nationalists shooting supporters of the left-wing Schutzbund, one of them aged just 8. When the nationalists were acquitted, on grounds of self-defence (for shooting a child…), a crowd gathered outside the Palace of Justice. The police fired on those left-wing protesters, killing 89 of them.

At the start of the war, Austrian society had been able to pretend that you could keep war at certain distance. Even if soldiers were dying somewhere else; in the cities people would keep on living regardless of the fighting. The apparent peacefulness of civilian life was a lie. And yet it enabled people to keep on living without acting in relation to one another with the same violence that was universal just a short distance away. Adler’s act brought the violence of the war back into society. The returning shock of his action was always more likely to mean that other people would use the violence more effectively than him or other socialists. Revolutionaries should want the killing of another human being to be such a stark, impassable, barrier that even fascists respect it. A great deal of suffering will follow if we cross over it first.

The Martyr as Hero

Any number of authors since 1918 have proposed forms of political radicalism that are based on self-sacrifice. One example is Terry Eagleton’s recent book, Radical Sacrifice. Published in 2018, it is the finale of a series of books, a one-man Christian-Marxist dialogue. Eagleton argues that any revolution depends on an idea of the revolutionary. Such a figure is a tragic hero, whose politics are expressed through suffering, capture, confinement, and physical pain. Christ is the best-known example of such an insurgent. “What is revolutionary about the death of Jesus,” Eagleton writes, is that “it lays bare the barbarism of the ruling powers.” His book aims to vindicate the recurring figure of the political martyr, destroyed by the establishment of his day and thereby becoming the means for the destruction of that ruling class and for the creation of a new and different society.

Strictly speaking, Eagleton is defending a different sort of figure from Lukács / Adler. His is a much easier and more admirable model – the person whose only moral act is one of self-renunciation. Think of the Climate Change protester who sprays red paint over the front of offices owned by an oil company. In Britain, today, a gudge will demand their conviction, insist that they suffer a term of imprisonment longer than they’d get for beating a fellow human being. But everyone knows that our anti-protest laws go too far. Each of us, in our innermost moral judgments, understand that damaging property is a limited wrong.

I will defend anyone who damages property for the climate or for Palestine (quite a lot of the last 6 months, I have been doing just that). Eagleton’s point isn’t that we should support and ally with them, but that they are the model of the revolutionary, its Platonic ideal type.

It is true that revolutions can, in principle, be sparked by acts of self-sacrifice that encourage others to resist. That, after all, was the consequence of the Easter uprising of 1916, once the British occupiers determined to shoot Patrick Pearse and James Connolly, convincing hundreds of thousands of Irish people of the need for independence. But this is an unusual path to revolution; the French Revolution of 1789 did not begin with a martyrdom, nor did the Paris Commune of 1871, nor the Spanish Revolution of 1936.

We may also ask whether this approach is as Marxist as Lukács thought. Eagleton draws a link between his idea of self-sacrifice and Marx’s writing about the proletariat, in particular the passage in which Marx spoke of the working class as “a class with radical chains … a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it.” Eagleton glosses Marx as saying that because workers own no property, they cannot be assimilated into capitalism and are therefore more likely to be open to upheaval through self-sacrificing acts.

I do not accept this as an accurate statement of what Marx thought after 1843 or argued in the remaining forty years of his life. Marx’s considered hopes in the workers were not based on what they lacked (money) but on what they possessed―social power. His revolution is not primarily an act of mass suffering and destruction; rather it is a positive act, affirming all the processes in society that already point toward the future. It is based on the slow collectivisation of production and social reproduction - the patient accumulation of resources by humanity so that simply by sharing resources more fairly we could for the first time satisfy people’s needs without having to produce anything more than we do already.

It can feel as if the model toward which the conclusion of Lukács’ second essay points is not in fact Marxist Communism, no matter how loudly Lukács insists that this is what he is contemplating. Rather, it is the Russian peasant socialist tradition of exemplary individuals risking their lives to kill a cruel tyrant. The one historical figure Lukács cites as a model is Boris Savinkov, and he was a Narodnik, not a Marxist. Faced with the actuality of insurrection in 1917, Savinkov joined the counterrevolution.

By contrast, the moral agent at the end of The Communist Manifesto is not the exemplary person taking her moral example to the people, but the worker whose role in production gives her the chance to change everything. What is key to the worker’s role is their typicality. We might think of the worker as a nurse or a teacher, as someone involved in other words in dynamics of social reproduction. The Marxist offer to them is that their work might be organised collectively in the future and by circuits of care that would be more robust and better because they were free of market discipline. We would end the childcare costs, the privatisation of schools and of psychiatric care, and all the other degradations of capitalism. By withholding her labour, the worker proves the system could not run without her and that her boss needs her far more than she needs him. To solve the climate crisis, we must break the power of capital. We must disassemble the circuits of production and change what we choose to extract and to make. There is no force in society capable of the needed transformation other than the global working class. A martyr will not save us.

Thanks for reading this piece on Marxism and ethics. This Substack is a volunteer operation; I write it in time which I’m not spending working. I have no intention of charging for content: I want to keep everything here free to read. But if you enjoy my pieces and want to support the writing, I’d urge you to buy a copy of my new book Revolutionary Forgiveness, which was published this month by Haymarket. (This piece is based on a chapter of that book, although I’ve quite a lot of new material to it). The book draws together a much wider set of ideas, not just Marxology, and is a much broader assessment of the ethics of revolution.

Another early Marxist whose life illustrates some of the dilemmas of Marxist ethical thinking is Friedrich Adler. Friedrich’s father Victor Adler (1852-1918) had founded in 1889 the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SAPD). Victor chaired that party until his death of a heart attack in November 1918. Victor was a neurologist and worked in a research team which sought to understand the physical operation of the human brain. Victor drafted the SAPD’s first declaration of principles. Courts convicted him 17 times under Austria’s Anti-Socialist laws, and he spent a total of 18 months in prison. In 1906, the Habsburgs conceded universal male suffrage; by 1907 the SAPD was the largest party in the Austrian Parliament. Victor was a popular figure within the party. He leant his name to countless defence campaigns, local protests, individual applications for citizenship. He helped a large number of people and asked for little in return. He was also, in contrast to his son, a moderate Socialist. In 1914, he accepted the arguments of the Austrian state that their country was blameless. He believed that Austria was fighting a good war, a defensive reaction to the tyrant, Russia.

Victor’s son Friedrich Adler (1879-1960) was the prodigal son of Austrian Marxism. He studied maths and physics in Zurich. He completed a PhD alongside, and shared rooms in the same house as a fellow militant leftist, Albert Einstein. Each of the two scientists absorbed the ideas of Ernest Mach. The latter had developed his own proto-theory of relativity. Adler’s first article on the Marxists.org website is a 1908 defence of Mach’s philosophy. Adler might have become a Professor of Physics but he refused to compete against Einstein. The latter was no more than four months his senior but – Adler insisted – a far greater scientist. Later, having returned to Vienna, he became a journalist and a full-timer for the SAPD.

One friend, four months his junior, was the Russian émigré and fellow writer, Leon Trotsky. The two men met in August 1914, to discuss the murder of the French pacifist, Jean Jaurès. Friedrich, he recalls, as “Thin, of quite a good height, slightly stooping, with a fine brow [and] the imprint of a perpetual thoughtfulness on his face.”

Trotsky wanted to know whether the authorities were planning to let the Russian exiles remain at liberty. Victor urged his son to go to the police headquarters. There, he and Friedrich demanded to speak to the chief of the political police. The latter warned Trotsky that if he was still in the city the next day, he would be caught by an order requiring all Russians and Serbs to be detained. If he didn’t intend to spend the next five years in prison, he needed to leave. Trotsky fled to Switzerland.

In April 1915, Friedrich published an article in the Austrian Socialist paper, Der Kampf. He called the International “impotent” and demanded its rebirth as a movement against the war. The workers needed a new “International of the Deed”.

On 21 October 1916, Friedrich Adler shot and killed the Austrian Prime Minister, Karl von Stürgkh. The latter was sitting in the dining room of the Meissl and Schadn Hotel. Adler’s act was a protest against the state of emergency imposed by the Habsburgs and a rejection of absolutist rule and war. Here, what I’m interested in is how Adler justified the act, and how other Marxists understood it. As I will show in a later post, the most important work of Marxist political ethics was written just two years later. It appeared in a collection of essays put together by Karl Polanyi on the political meaning of the war. That essay was not written by Adler but by a Hungarian Socialist, György Lukács. Friedrich Adler contributed to the same collection and his act of violence hangs over Lukács’ arguments.

The decision to kill Count Stürgkh was a desperate act, whose intended purpose was to take Austria out of the war. As he fired his revolver, Friedrich declared: “Down with absolutism, we want peace!” His was a solitary measure, denounced by all sides in Austria, even in the SAPD press. (In Germany, Vorwärts said his act was the “Deed of a Maniac”). Adler told his police interrogators, “I do not intend to defend myself.” He fired his revolver, he said, “as an opposition against the capitalistic society of mass murder.” He described his act as a self-sacrificing one. “As I carried the assassination out I did so with the knowledge that thereby my life would be ended.”

On trial for his life, Friedrich Adler refused to seek clemency. A military court tried him. He was well aware that the tribunal “could pass no other sentence than death by hanging”. He promised that in his closing speech he would say nothing to dissuade his judges from that sentence. One matter did cause him to pause, however – the irony was inescapable. His indictment included the words, “The use of murder as a political weapon can hardly be a subject for discussion among ethical people, in an ordinary state of society”. But how was the state proposing to deal with his own case, except the use of murder as a political weapon? What was war, if not the state instructing vast number of its citizens to kill other people? And what, anyway, had been ordinary about Austria in 1916?

On 25 July 1914, a week before Adler had spoken to Trotsky, Austria had declared martial law. The liberty of the press came to an end, as did jury trials. The same system had continued from that point onwards – this was the absolutism against which Adler had been protesting. Appearing before a judge, he knew he had no possibility of an acquittal. Before a jury, Adler said, he might have had a chance. Stürgkh was the politician who had introduced martial law. “We live in a state,” Adler said, “whose absolutism is unequalled in the whole world.”

Part of the evidence that the prosecutor had put on the record concerned the isolation of Adler within his party. That was true, the defendant said. It was also true that he had not discussed the act with anyone else. “There were good reasons why I should not do so.” He had “hesitated to burden my friends with a responsibility that, in the end, only one would have to bear, to make them too the victims of persecution.”

“I have, all my life, been a revolutionist”, Adler said. “We Socialists have always looked upon the world from the point of view of the class struggle – until the war began.” With that until, he was speaking of his father and the other socialists who had supported the war. Socialists had “subordinated everything else in the whole world to this highest point of view.” The purpose of his action, he insisted, had been to bring his “comrades” back to their old “programme”. He described the anguish he had felt on 5 August when it became clear that the SAPD press would support the war. “Thus I came into constant conflict with my party and my friends.” It was the party’s loss of contact with the working class which had driven him to individual action. “I simply wished once more to give the revolutionary spirit a place in our movement.” Each and evert socialist, he told the court, “must be willing to sacrifice his life.”

“The question of the murder,” he said, “was a real moral question to me.” He continued, “I have always believed that the killing of a human being is something inhuman, but I was convinced that we are a living in a barbaric age, that we are forced to kill.”

The socialist press reported Adler’s speech. He was sentence to death, but the monarch commuted his punishment to 18 years in prison. On the outbreak of revolution in Germany and Austria in November 1918, the court granted an amnesty. He chaired the workers’ council in Vienna.

Radical movements today often make heroes of people who risk their safety for a great cause. Those are the politics of blowing up a pipeline, of Just Stop Oil, of Palestine Action. By invoking the certainty of his own punishment Adler’s was situating himself in that tradition. In ethical theory, however, his act belongs somewhere else. It was a self-sacrificing act and also a morally offensive one. Killing a person is a different kind of act from destroying a machine.

Marxists had spent the previous 30 years criticising previous generations of terrorists. They criticised the assassination of Russia’s Tsars, said that those involved turned the people into an inert mass, who required rescuing by heroes. But this isn’t how most anti-war Socialists responded to Adler’s act. They tended to ignore his individual culpability. The explained his violence by referring to the killing going on all round him. The state had tried to make all acts of dissent impossible. No wonder, they argued, that Adler had responded with violence of his own. In his newspaper Nachalo (The Start), Trotsky claimed Adler as a fellow anti-war activist: “[Adler] took his socialist duty seriously. He resolved to shout to the proletarian masses with all his might that the road of social patriotism is the road to slavery and spiritual death. He chose the means for this which seemed to him the most effective. Like the pointsman on the permanent way who opens his own vein and signals the danger ahead with a handkerchief soaked with his own blood, Fritz Adler turned himself and his life into a warning detonator in front of the deceived and sapped masses.”

Liberated from prison, Adler joined the SAPD, became as moderate in time as his middle-aged father had been in 1914. As the years passed, the Bolsheviks grew less willing to eulogise his wartime bravery. In My Life, Trotsky calls the killing, “an outburst of opportunism in despair.”

Wartime bombs destroyed the Meissl and Schadn Hotel. Readerws can be reassured that the Vienna bourgeoisie can again dine in a restaurant of that name. New premises opened under that brand in 2017. Einstein spoke to gatherings of Marxist physicists and mathematicians. One od his talks on Causality to a Marxist Workers’ School in 1930 has since been republished. In 1932, with Hitler on the verge of power, Einstein was one of the signatories to a public statement. He urged the Socialists and Communists to ally against their enemy.

Thanks for reading this piece on Marxism and ethics. This Substack is a volunteer operation; I write it in time which I’m not spending working. I have no intention of charging for content: I want to keep everything here free to read. But if you enjoy my pieces and want to support the writing, I’d urge you to buy a copy of my new book Revolutionary Forgiveness, which was published this month by Haymarket. It draws together a much wider set of ideas, not just Marxology, and is a much broader assessment of the ethics of revolution.

Over the last five years, I’ve been writing about forgiveness – not all forgiveness though, rather one minority strand of that practice, of a particular and unruly sort. Two events made me interested in forgiveness. One was the 2013 crisis on the British left, when one of our largest groups was sundered by a leader who was accused of sexual violence against the members. The leadership declared him innocent,. Why persecute a middle-aged man, they said, why not leave him on the organisation’s payroll, playing records and giving his talk on Jazz. “You aren’t going to take away his record collection, are you?” The question of forgiveness was however no more than the vaguest of hypothetical possibilities in that conflict, since the party never admitted the extent of the allegations against him, while the man expressed no regret, refused to apologise, used his friends to orchestrate the cover-up which they thought was the best way to protect his reputation.

Five years later, a second scandal broke out, one which impacted more deeply on my book – the Corbyn antisemitic crisis. Many of the press complaints were made in bad faith, originated with the same people who have now identified Reform’s far-right leader Nigel Farage, probably the worst anti-Jewish racist to have led a Westminster party, as their pick for PM. I did think I’d seen among casual acquaintances a mindset close to antisemitism, an ignorance about what most British Jews thought combined with an indifference to the thought of antagonising them. I wrote that most of the culprits deserved a good conversation, through which they could be taught to comment more slowly and reflectively. One reviewer doubted that I or other leftitst would extend this generosity of spirit to those guilty of other forms of prejudice. Beyond the obvious retort, that critic seemed to have spent no time with any feminist (or disabled or trans) activist… or asked them about the patience they needed to get through 24 hours in the company of men, cis people, etc – I found myself asking a different question, namely what do or should socialists think about forgiveness.

Clearly, we’re facing a context problem – that most political discussions now takes place online, a medium unremittingly hostile to forgiveness, and one which the right tends to dominate. At this point in the discussion, people usually blame social media. Certainly, it’s a space which crushes dialogue, encourages people to look for simple refutations: “X person is bad for Y reason”. It encourages speakers to comment quickly and thoughtlessly, like you might in a discussion in the pub. It turns informal speech into written documents. It provides a treasure trove of forgotten words, frozen there, for anyone to find later and denounce.

But this version of “social media” isn’t the only possible form of quickly-transmitted text. The internet now isn’t the same as what it was a quarter of a century ago, or what it will be at a similar point in the future. Our communication is degraded in part because of the dominance rich bosses of increasingly destructive opinions hold over tech, and in part because global politics have moved as far to the right as at any point in the last 80 years. There are no worse moralists in global politics than Trump, Farage, Netanyahu. The more they win, the more they seek to recreate society in their own image; the sooner we need a backlash against them.

Some socialists say that people on the left don’t have a morality, we don’t need one. If you want to, you can trace that approach back to Marx, and his suggestion that Communism abolished morality. The thing is, almost every left-wing project has some kind of map of utopia, that better future society towards which we are always tending. Marxism certainly has one, that world where scarce resources are allocated “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. And, if your party or your campaign tries to tell its audience that how you get to an intended utopia doesn’t matter, that it can include even lying or worse, then people stop believing your future is any better than where we are now.

The other main approach is been to say that the left are in fact better people than the right. That we’re more polite, more cautious, better at following society’s rules. In Britain, the politician who’s gone furthest with that way of resisting populism is Keir Starmer. In 2022, one of his supporters Lisa Nandy promised that as Prime Minister he would govern as “Mr Rules,” he would introduce a good, respectful, kind of politics after the chaos of the Conservatives.

The problem, there, was that no-one can promise to be good all the time – the idea is impossible, excessive, only sets people up to fail. Nor was it wise to think that people would accept, for any length of time, people who used “obedient” as a synonym for “good”. That’s why Labour has had such difficulties as a result of the Epstein affair and what is has revealed about the appointment of Peter Mandelson as Ambassador to the US. Leading figures in government got doing good and upholding the law confused. They made a shortlist for the post of George Osborne, who as Chancellor made the budgets balance, and Peter Mandelson who as EU Trade Commissioner helped to get one sets of laws (EU competition regulations) to connect to another (global trade rules). In the desire to be good, and to obey the law, they couldn’t see what Mandelson and Osborne had in common – they were both politicians who would happily allow a millions benefits claimants to starve. Voters understood this, and his appointment hangs over the government like a bad stink they can’t remove.

We need an alternative both to populism, and to these misguided tactics to resist it. My interest is in revolutionary forgiveness; i.e. when the victims of a social wrong take back power from their oppressors and only afterwards accept them. The sequence is crucial if justice is to be done. Their might be reasons for the oppressed to be compassionate after they have destroyed the citadels of the rich and replaced those who occupy them – but there’s no good case for forgiveness before then.

No one should tell the poor to prove their righteousness, we should want them to rule. In my book, I explain why they should respond to their former tormentors with kindness – because, at the end of a successful revolution, we want even the former oppressors to be free. You cannot have a society of generalised social justice if a significant minority are sundered from it. The conflict between justice and forgiveness is not absolute or unanswerable, but it is real. More than anything, I want the workers to bring down our present rulers and to govern in their place. That is why I insist on sequence. The first thing which must happen is a revolution. Let the workers be victorious, they can then be magnanimous in power.

In speaking of revolution and forgiveness together, I’m trying to connect the individual’s search for justice and the pursuit of a better society. By revolution I mean a social revolution, as opposed to a mere political revolution. I mean that a class of powerless people – workers, women, the victims of racism or any other subordinate group – should take power. When I talk of individuals and their relationship to their oppressor, I am interested in the turning of the world upside down which happens when the victim of that private wrong secures justice.

One of the messages of my book is that there is a connection between revolutions in the small and the large. We are all familiar with the situation of the bigot who is attracted to racism, sexism, etc., because it suits their material interests - the man who starts watching Andrew Tate because he likes the idea of the women around him being passive, childlike, serving people. Something similar, I’d argue, works the other way around. A social revolution is the oppressed taking power: it is a story in million of people’s lives all at once, the highest expression of a shared desire for justice. I am writing both for person already conviced that a social revolution is a political necessity, and for the individual victim who wants to visualise them achieving redress against an oppressor. That two-person 1917 may not be a “revolution” in the sense of the mass of people taking to the streets. It is a revolution, though, for the victim.

I’m not suggesting that revolutionary forgiveness, on its own, could be any sort of alternative to the wretched moralism of our moment. That diminishing of politics, I argue, is a symptom of the ascendancy of the right. Social media’s current form seems compelling because Trump’s allies control so many of the papers, stations and social media sites from which we get our news. They connect with deeper social phenomena. People are being told, all the time, that we don’t have power – that new technology is coming, in more threatening forms than ever before. That all we can do is look after ourselves, and forget the wellbeing of most people.

But his approach, and allies’ way of doing politics, won’t last forever. The fire terrifies people who’ve been his allies, the fury exhausts those who voted for him before. The people who believe in a different set of values would be wise to offer our wavering opponents the possibility of reconciliation – something the right would never offer us.

One part of getting to that future might involves learning to distinguish people who’ve done real harm, from ones who’ve lesser mistakes which they are willing to admit and are able to remedy. Listening out for instances of the latter and encouraging them could be part of our collective resistance.

[My new book, Revolutionary Forgiveness, is published by Haymarket this month].

May in the global lefty reading calendar is the month to work through Molly Crabapple’s new book on the Jewish Bund. Launched four weeks ago before a crowd of 500 people at the New York Public Library, the author is touring her book round the US jus now, before Crabapple speaks at a Na’amod event in Bethnal Green at the end of this month.

It’s not difficult to see why readers want to find out about the Bund. The alliance with Israel has an impact on every country that supports the genocide. Politicians don’t like to be reminded that their hands are stained with innocent blood. Our states turn more authoritarian to make it impossible for anyone to bear witness to mass death. The people who order the killings justify them in the name of Jewish safety; tens of thousands of Jewish people – in Britain, Germany and the US – insist that Israel does not act in their name,

Founded in Vilna in 1897, the General Jewish Labour Bund was for decades one of the largest parties in the socialist movement. It was also a collective of anti-Zionist Jews. The “here” of Crabapple’s title is a reference to the group’s idea of doikayt or “hereness”, that the Jews of Eastern Europe belonged where they lived, that they would fight for freedom and safety in the places where they lived. That they would continue to spread their message in gleeful antagonism to all their enemies. Crabapple defines this idea in radical rejection of Zionism. She pairs the Bund and the Zionists in a single relationship of mutual rejection, in which the two antagonists had to and did fight each other to (metaphorical, political) death. The Jews were fated to be advocates of sharing or selfishness, self-protection or genocidal war. The Bund is the path, her book argues, that history did not but should have taken.

This piece won’t be a review of Crabapple’s book, what I want to pick up on rather is a single individual and a single reference in her book. About 30 pages in, she refers to the Bund’s early theorist Arkadi Kremer and his obscure pamphlet, ‘On Agitation.”

When I read Crabapple – like most readers, I suspect – the Bund was a novelty to me. I certainly hadn’t read any of Kremer’s work for myself. But on reading hers, I turned to him. I found something there, which surprised and intrigued me.

Crabapple treats Kremer as preceding and inspiring Lenin’s What is to be Done. Certainly, his books precedes the better-known work. But, Lenin’s discussion of Kremer is brief. He refers to the latter in passing as an “early” social democrat (there was an eight-year gap between Kremer’s and his books), and “truly useful”, but belonging to a generation whose Marxism was flawed and one-sided because it did not imagine workers playing any larger role in the coming revolution than by participating in economic struggles.

This simplifies what Kremer was arguing, almost to parody. The gist of ‘On Agitation’ is rather that socialist parties need to stand by the workers, helping them to formulate economic demands, as a bridge towards persuading them of the necessity of a still-wider conception of the future which would include a revolution to topple the Tsarist state. As Kremer writes, “The struggle aroused by [economic] agitation will train the workers to defend their own interests, increase their courage, give them confidence in their strength, a consciousness of the need for unity, and ultimately it will place before them the more important questions.”

Kremer description of politics as “more important” than economics gives the lie to Lenin’s categorisation of him as advocating a purely economic Marxism.

I’ve called this piece, ‘The path not taken’. What I’m getting at is something preset in Kremer’s writing, but more implicit than express. Over preceding articles, I’ve argued that Marxism does have an ethical content but that it was largely invisible to socialists of a post-1917 sort. Broadly, the more determined that leftists were to call themselves “Marxist”, the more they tended to argue that either Marxism had no ethical content, or that it could be seen only in Marx’s vision of an alternative Communism society. The task of revolutionaries was to achieve the good society. The measure of their success was in whether they built socialism. Or, I suppose, if they lived in an epoch of defeats where that was impossible – which most people did – then the measure of their success was did they make the bosses and the politician squirm. Either way, the appropriate scale on which to measure them was the level of society. Did they build unions, parties, or other institutions by which workers could exercise power?

What’s interesting about Kremer and ‘On Agitation’ is that his work supposes a much smaller scale. Really, it imagines just two people. There is a revolutionary and there is a worker. (Perhaps the worker is a group of worker, but this does not change the dialectic). The role of the former is to create that relationship, to shape it and be shaped by it.

“We must choose the right moment to begin the struggle, we must know what methods of struggle are most appropriate to the particular conditions. Information of this kind requires constant contacts with the mass of workers on the part of the agitator, requires that he constantly interests himself in a particular branch of industry and follows its progress … to ascertain the most keenly felt grievance in the life of the workers, to ascertain the moment when a particular grievance should be advanced, to know in advance all the possible ramifications. ... Knowledge of this kind can only be given by life: theory can and must only illuminate it for him.”

The goal of the relationship between worker and agitation was to establish an “organised workers’ army” (this, Lenin would have called the party). It could agitate other workers and teach them “to oppose exploitation with the strength of organisation”.

Successful agitation “brings with it a faith in their own strength, it teaches the workers the practical concepts of struggle, it prepares and promotes individuals who were hitherto lost in the mass and gives to other workers an example of how to fight.”

Kremer treats socialism as embodying, ultimately, a simple message - that workers have the power change to society. He describes how to get there, through agitation, in other words through a style of politics which is self-replicating. Agitation shows workers their potential power; they raise demands against their employer and the win. It is self-actuating in the sense that people who have had victories, and gain confidence from there, are actually more powerful than those who have not. In winning on a small scale, workers learn they could win everything.

At no point in ‘On Agitation’ does Kremer consider negative tactics. For example, would it be wise to teach a worker to tell lies? Should an agitator encourage a worker to bring her factory out on strike – telling them, that all the other workplaces would strike too, if the agitator has done no work to prepare that strike wave? And they are gambling on the hope of something happening which they do no in fact believe will come about?

That possibility is never considered, because it would run against the whole approach the author is describing in which the purpose of agitation is to teach a worker their own strength. If you bring about a victory through a lie, then the success of that deceit would be the lesson worth leaning. Kremer doesn’t want agitators to be schemers or manipulators, or to fulfil any of the weird roles which Bolsheviks would later play in the right-wing imagination as devious people bringing trouble into what had been a peaceful relationship.

You could compare his method to that of an adult teaching a child to walk. The adult walks ahead. The child follows. If the adult walks too far ahead, they lose they child. So, they must bend their pace to that of the younger person. The child might squat, stare in fascination at the ground below them. The adult needs to give time to this process. If they are as smart as the child (admittedly, most aren’t), they might learn from their child’s fascination with their surroundings, their ability to see the world anew. They might grow downwards.

The ethics of workers learning to self-actualise are simple, plain and benign. In the 1960s, such libertarian socialists as Maurice Brinton would write about workers’ “Meaningful action” in terms which expand on and develop Kremer’s point. It is “whatever increases the confidence the autonomy, the initiative, the participation, the solidarity, the equalitarian tendencies and the self-activity of the masses and whatever assists in their demystification.”

This idea is present, to an extent, in Kremer’s pamphlet. What’s striking is that in the intervening 70 years very few Marxists at all had anything like this idea of individual ethics. In my previous post, I tried to explain why several generations of activists displaced this way of thinking onto the social level.

In another piece, I’d like to write about some of the few theorists who did try to imagine what it would look like when we speak of the individual making history. The point is that none of them had read Kremer or saw his pamphlet as a useful starting point. They started from other places, their work was harder and its outcomes less fruitful for doing so.

There are many things ICI did of which we should feel proud. We raised the profile of issues which other parties in Islington neglected, Peter Bedford Housing Association’s attempt to evict 69 tenants, the 43 redundancies at Capital City College. Amu’s candidacy received positive coverage in the Islington Tribune, the Mirror,Novara and Inside Time. This is probably the single best thing we achieved, breaking the press silence around the Brize Norton case.

ICI candidates signed up to a manifesto which covered an extraordinary range of topics – from access to water to justice in Sudan. Over the five weeks of the extended campaign, and adding up everyone who participated, something like 200 people took part in our leafleting or canvassing. On Saturday, when we met up to debrief, there was an incredible feeling of collectivity.

Our worst-performing candidate secured 4.7 percent of the vote in her ward. Our best-performing candidate Amu secured 18.9 percent (569 votes in an election where 3016 voters cast three votes). For a new political party, which had never before stood in an election under the banner of ICI, these were satisfying results.

We met vanishingly few people who’d read our leaflets – perhaps a dozen across the whole borough. For most people, this was a national election, a chance to vote against Labour, and for a rival national party. The relatively few papers who did cover Amu’s candidature were overwhelmed by the dozens of stories in the papers, every day, about Labour the Greens. In electoral politics, as in a supermarket, capitalism narrows the choices, gives you a few brands, leaves barely any imaginative space for the outsider. 

Canvassing, however, did make a difference. The votes obtained in our most-canvassed ward – Finsbury Park – tallied almost exactly with the pledges we received in advance. Those came from door-to-door conversations. We found several hundred people who were both angered with Labour and unsure what candidate best suited them. When we told them about Amu’s history, the Brize Norton protest, Prisoners for Palestine – voters were willing to put their trust in us. Our best chance of a breakthrough would have been an even larger group of canvassers.

In Finsbury Park, Amu’s achievement has been overshadowed by the success that the Greens had in getting two paper candidates elected in a congested election where 9 candidates secured between 500 and 1300 votes. We negotiated an election pact with the Greens, which that party’s local leadership was unable to deliver. Short of negotiating next time in public, signing it publicly, holding the Green leadership to a deal from which they couldn’t be overturned without securing great personal loss of face; I don’t know what else we could have done differently.

Islington is a single borough but it’s now one with two different election systems; in the north, the Greens won two thirds of the councillors. In the South, Labour won all but three out of 27 seats.

We had a decision to make in late January when we learned Amu was interested in standing for election in January, and after our AGM had approved them as a candidate. A significant part of the old ICI leadership decided that Amu was too radical a candidate. We were told: “Muslims won’t vote for a non-binary candidate”, that voters in Finsbury Park were only interested in “talking about potholes”, were sent messages warning our canvassers that Amu would “die in prison” if they stood.

Unfortunately, the decision to be principled and choose Amu cost us the support of the self-appointed Corbyn organiser in Islington, and then Corbyn himself. None of our 9 candidates were supported by Your Party (although YP backed 3 candidates who were urged to leave ICI and stand against us). Just two of our candidates were allowed to use Corbyn’s images in our material. Our candidates in Islington North had no access to the voter data gathered by Corbyn when he ran in 2024.

None of us, when we chose to join ICI, expected the negativity we faced from the Corbyn camp. The obstacles we faced in Islington weren’t any different from the national machinations. The only thing which marks them out is how incredibly self-defeating they’ve been, even from the perspective of standing Corbyn as a candidate again. Corbyn's closest allies alienated dozens of people who’ve learned how to campaign and could have used those skills to help him.

Over the last 40 years, people who write about Marx have reached a consensus that he had a worked-out, if subtle, theory of how to live. Norman Geras’s book Marx and Human Nature argues that Marx wanted people to have access to food, water, clothing, shelter, rest, conditions of good health, and a chance to express themselves. Marx’s hatred for the conditions under which people worked was “a moral indictment” of capitalism. In 2024, Vanessa Wills’ Marx’s Ethical Vision portrayed communism as a future in which everyone can satisfy their desires for creative self-expression. In her words, “To be a communist is to seek to approach the world from the perspective of the species and to adopt the active furtherance of humans’ well-being and creative potential as one subjective aim.” She continues, “In capitalist society, this is an inherently ethical posture.” Being a communist, I would say – building on those arguments – compels you to take sides. With your camp, it is worth behaving morally, acting in ways to advance the project. The need to do so is clearest when people betray a left-wing cause; their negative example makes it less likely that anyone else would side with their chosen causes. But being a communist shouldn’t be about just what you give up, it’s a positive injunction too. Acting ethically means behaving in ways which give the people around you a sense of their power to change the world: it’s about what you say, what you write and what you do.

This piece isn’t about Marx’s ethical vision. Here I’m interested in something else. I want to show readers that the claim Marx had an ethical vision is at odds with the way in which most Marxists have understood their own politics. For a century after Marx’s death, almost every writer who tried to follow him believed that Marxism was a view of life which deliberately indeed sensibly refused to ask if there was any such thing as a good life. There were a very few exceptions, to who I’ll return another time. Here, though, I’m interested not in the very few people who were attentive to Marx’s ethical vision, but the large majority who were convinced that he had no such thing. If you could put them in a room for an hour with a well-educated political activist, informed and non-dogmatic, who’d been alive in Marx’s time and in the 30 years following, and asked Geras or Wills to justify their approach to them, probably that listener would have met their arguments with baffled incomprehension. To say that Marx had a social ethics was to contradict some of the most common, obvious, and attractive features of his politics. Why would anyone accuse Marx of saying there was a good life (the listener would ask), when he said repeatedly that he believed no such thing?

To understand why people thought Marx rejected ethics, it’s worth starting with the Communist Manifesto, by some way the best-translated and widest-read of his works. There, Marx and Engels seemingly insist that there is no absolute stance of moral goodness outside of people’s own constantly-changing lives: “Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality.” To the worker, they wrote, “Law, morality, religion, are … so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.”

In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels rejected one route by which ethics might enter socialism, through religion. Those who try to “give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge”, they insisted, were in every case the worker’s enemy. Yes, they acknowledged, Christian had on occasion spoken out against private property or the state. But Christian Socialism, they continued, was a contradiction in terms, nothing “but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.”

Across all the millions of words Marx wrote all through his lifetime – politics, journalism, theory – any reference to morals is almost always negative. Any person who asserts their belief in morals is almost always a moralist, in other words a person who announces their goodness as a first step towards either doing acts of cruelty or making excuses for them. Marx and Engels repeatedly accused moralists of hypocrisy and bogus piety, of placing in front of the working class moral rules (do not kill, do not steal…) as if these were timeless instructions which applied irrespective of context and using them as excuses for keep the rich high and the poor low.

In the last two decades of Marx’s life, the dominant form of left politics in Britain and Europe was “Republicanism”. All the great Republicans of the day insisted that radical politics was about living ethically. In Britain, the leading Republican thinker and politician was the Radical MP, Charles Bradlaugh. Identified in the press as someone who wanted to abolish the Royal Family, and a supporter of the Paris Commune (despite the many times Bradlaugh had distanced himself from either cause), Bradlaugh saw the route to workers’ self-emancipation as coming through their individual acts. Since classical economists had proven, beyond questions, that wages existed in a fund which could not be increased, one of the best ways for workers to improve the general lot was through individual emigration. With fewer mouths to feed, each remaining worker must – as a matter of supply and demand – have more to live on. Bradlaugh supported contraception as a means to smaller families and better-paid work. He supported the temperance movement and its plain, obvious, good sense demand that workers should spend less on alcohol. If they did, they could buy more food. To Karl Marx’s surprise, his wife Jenny attended Bradlaugh’s talks. She told him that the radical was a “tower of strength to the working-class movement.” Marx’s contrary view was that Bradlaugh was a fraud, man of “grotesque vanity”, a “huge self-idolater”. In a world which treated emigration, contraception and temperance as moral causes, Marx rejected all three.

Bradlaugh’s counterpart, in European politics, was Victor Hugo. His 1862 novel, Les Misérables, had been a publishing sensation – for it, he was paid one of largest advances in history, 300,000 francs, equivalent to 100 kilos of gold or about £11 million in today’s prices. There, Hugo argued for a fusion of radical politics (the revolutionaries on the barricades) and morality (his protagonist Valjean stands for forgiveness, the antagonist Javert for resentment). In 1867, Hugo promoted an International League for Peace and Freedom. Its founding conference in Switzerland overlapped with the first International’s own launch congress, in the same country, in the same month. Hugo’s weakness, Marx insisted, was that he believed there might be “community of morals” between “different classes with opposed interests”. This, Marx insisted, was impossible. “Deprive V. Hugo of these garments” (his misplaced belief that classes could co-operate) and “all that remains is a moral sermon.”

When Marx died, the message which his followers spread was that he had been the greatest economist of his age. He had proven two essential facts about the economic system. The first was that capitalism was based on stealing from workers. Nothing could be produced without labour and labour never received its fair price. The other was that capitalism was a chaotic and crisis-ridden system, always tending to break down. Marx had discovered, as Engels set at his graveyard oration, “the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production”. The most important word in that phrase was present-day – the system was doomed, would necessarily be overthrown, sooner rather than later.

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, most nearby and rival traditions on the left adopted a stance of allowing Marx an intellectual hegemony within his own chosen sphere of economics, while saying simultaneously that a full understanding of politics could not just be about how the economy functioned, it also needs to take in politics and ethics.

So the anarchist philosopher Mikhail Bakunin offered to translate Capital into Russian, called the first volume “magnificent”. And when Bakunin and his allies sought to distance themselves from subsequent Marxists, they did so through observing that anarchism had a highly developed theory of social ethics, a subject Marx’s followers had neglected, just as they had wrongly assumed that some sort of state must continue for long after the revolution. Anarchism meant living by a series of moral precepts, such as that the community should be free to manage its own affairs, or that the individual anarchist must at all times be among the masses, fighting and suffering with them and for them. “In fighting established society,” the Italian libertarian Errico Malatesta wrote, “we counter the individualistic morality of the bourgeois, the morality of strife and competition, with a morality of love and solidarity, and strive to establish institutions that live up to how we think of relations between people.”

When Marxists argued back against the anarchists, they tended to accept this framing. Perhaps, they made more than their adversaries did of the concession that Marx had been right about economics. Economics mattered a lot, they would say. On occasion, they pointed out to the anarchists that the latter had confusions of their own: were they truly individualists; did they really believe in the propaganda of the deed, weren’t the anarchists, even on their favoured ground of ethics divided into hostile camps? But most scientific socialists (as they saw themselves) accepted the argument that Marx made no claim to ethics.

Similarly, when Eduard Bernstein began his revision of Marxism, and started formulating his idea of reformist socialism, the core of his critique was that the Marxists had learned from their founder useful (if incomplete) views of the economy but had neglected his morals. “To him who is unable to detect in works like Das Kapital appeals to human sympathy and morality, the rules of the International may be a proof that there was even with Marx a question of morality and justice, of duties and of love of man.” The approach which people take today of finding the ethical in Marx is a move other people made 130 years ago – its results were pro-war socialism, participation in capitalist governments, an approach of making peace with empire. The desire for a more ethical socialism delivered us Tony Blair (he even had his own moral philosopher, the unfortunate John Macmurray) – the Iraq war.

Again, when revolutionary socialists of the 1890s and 1900s (such as Kautsky or Luxemburg) sought to rebut Bernstein, they did so without challenging the framing of economics versus ethics. Bernstein, they replied, was wrong to say that capitalism could continue without crisis. In so far as they challenged revisionism as a strategy for achieving social justice, their critique operated at the level of society. To win justice, you needed a revolution. To bring about that revolution, socialists needed to keep it as an immediate goal rather than something postponed to the indefinite future. One thing that was lost was any idea of how the individual, through their own political and practical choices, might contribute towards to this social goal.

There is a passage which often seems to me to encompass all that’s wise about 1917-era Marxism. It is John Reed’s account of a conversation he witnessed in the days leading up to the October Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World. Reed was in St Petersburg, in the days directly preceding the uprising. He watched as a tall young man “with a supercilious expression, dressed in the uniform of a student”, criticised a pro-Bolshevik soldiers. The student called Lenin a traitor who’d betrayed Russia. “Now, brother,” the soldier replied, “you don’t understand. There are two classes, don’t you see, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.”

For over a page of Reed’s book, the dialogue continues. The former called the Communist, “silly”, “ignorant”. The soldier replied, “There are two classes…” The student called him a “fool”, declared his own revolutionary good faith. Did the soldier know how heroically the student had fought Tsarism? “Two classes,” the soldier said, “And whoever isn’t on one side is on the other…”

In Russia, the Communists were the people fighting with greater determination than anyone else on the side of the workers and against the rich. That, and for peace. That was combination enough. When Reed recalled this encounter, he wasn’t describing the soldier or the student just as two individuals, but as the representatives of opinions held by millions of Russians. The soldier’s stubbornness wasn’t being a personal quality, but an explanation for why the Communists were winning. They succeeded because they made their theory understandable to huge numbers of people. Part of doing so involved stripping Marxism of all its unnecessary complications. They put forward a socialism with classes but without genders or races or nationalities, without Marx’s interest in the metabolic rift, and without ethics.

At later periods, this rejection of ethics would cause Marxists many difficulties. In the 1950s, for example, liberals complained that Marxism was wrong because it privileged means over ends. It isn’t easy to reject that critique if you insist there’s no ethics in Marx. In the last 15 years, this way of thinking has led socialists into some awful arguments. But the people who insisted on Marx’s opposition to ethics weren’t daft. It is the easiest and most natural reading of his work. If you thought of Marxism as a “classical” way of thinking, as something like the golden ages of Greek mythology, which could only degrade over time from gold to silver to bronze – then you’d want to protect it from outside influences.

All the people arguing for an ethical socialism seemed to be outside Marxism - and all the critics within.

___

(If you’ve enjoyed this piece, do check out my book Revolutionary Forgiveness, which comes out with Haymarket next week).

One of the most powerful claims made by second wave feminism is the idea that the personal is political; in other words that the choices all of us make about who we live with, how we live with them (who cooks, who cleans, who keeps the house going) are political. They determine how resources are allocated – time and money. They shape the rest of society.

The slogan is obviously a good and wise one. But merely announcing it misses a more interesting question still. Why is that, prior to 1969, no one else except for feminists had seemingly noticed this obvious point? Or, to put the same question differently, why don’t conservatives, socialists, liberals, Marxists, anarchists, environmentalists have their own equivalent theory in which the individual ethics of how people should live reflect their general attitude towards life, or contribute to an idea of how society should be organised?

Here, to my mind, are three reasons why this void space, this absence of analysis, is worth noticing:
-Since the ancient Greeks, most political philosophers had assumed that there was some basic connection between private lives and public values – that there was a good way of living (“ethics”) which joined them up. It’s relatively recently that this stopped being a universal assumption, and became something that only a few people believed,
-In the contemporary world, you find lots of people drifting, under the pressure of events, towards an automatic, ethical, perspective – e.g. talking to a green councillor earlier this year, she described to me how their chats had filled up with people asking “Can I still vote Green if I eat meat / spend my holidays flying abroad?” It was just obvious to people that the their decision to join a party could or should have consequences for the rest of how they lived
-Vast amounts of politics in every country takes place through people on one side of a political divide saying to people on the other side (in effect) that they object to that party, because the things it’s leaders do are morally awful. If leaders are fair game for moral critique, does the same thing apply to the parties themselves? Do people say “I won’t vote for Reform because their voters are racist?” Or “I won’t vote for a left-wing party because their supporters are all woke scolds?” I think voters do think like that – even though quite a lot of how politics works invites you not think through the implications of these statements: if you are going to be a leftist, do you have to lead an anti-racist life? If you are a right-winger, who hates being told what to think, does that mean you should support people who are being bullied by the state, like migrants, or trans folks – do you extend “live and let live” to them? If not, why don't they get the freedom you want for yourself?

In other words, for our discussions to take the shape they do, one of the things which becomes hidden and no-one can talk about is the politics of personal life.

I think there are two kinds of reasons at work. One you could call “tradition specific”, the other is more general.

In the history of eg conservatism there have been lots of times when people who were serious about centre-right political theory tried to jot down their philosophy of life (ie both politics and ethics). Sometimes in political theory, often in other places. EG if the hobbits in the Lord of the Rings, do a very good job of standing in for a certain kind of benign, Catholic, small-town small-state 1950s conservatism – defined against big societies, industrialism, modernism, militarism, expanded police, etc. Some people (Roger Scruton) kept that tradition going past 1980. To my mind it collapses as a credible way of thinking at the moment that conservatives accepted neoliberalism. That destroyed any plausible conservative ethics since the answer was going to be that a good life is whatever the market wanted. And the market is an impersonal hivemind from which the individual is, by definition, excluded.

Lots of anarchists thinkers in the 1880s and 1890s had been radical ethicists – if this tradition collapses, which I think it does, that’s for the reason that there are just too many big defeats to deal with: the rivalry with illegalism, with Communism, the allure and collapse of anarcho syndicalism, the failure of anarchism to reestablish itself as a mass tradition till about the 2000s and when it does people are just interested in different things

Tomorrow, I’ll get to the Marxists - the individual writers who tried to write an idea of individual ethics into their socialism – the large number of people who did this in an obviously bad and annoying way – and the few worth considering.

In terms of (social) liberalism and parliamentary socialism, I reckon the reason people give up on an idea of the good life – as a task facing individual liberals and socialists – is to do with what these traditions decide they’re for as the c20th century goes on. They’re ways of shaping voting decisions, which means that the question of ethics applies essentially to leaders only. At the moment you vote, you allocate power to other people. You’d like them to do good things with it, you hope that they will, because they share the same broad politics as you. But if in 1900 those traditions had a strong sense of training and moral purpose as a task facing the individual, by 2000 they have in both cases abandoned it.

This I think, is the general trend – it’s political democracy, and the idea of representation which we associate with it – which tends to evacuate the content out of what were, in an earlier period, traditions with a lot to say about ethics. The second wave feminists spotted that gap – but it’s an absence, whatever view of politics you believe. It’s a legitimate criticism of every other way of doing politics that they dodge the issue of how you want people to live.

(Finally, a parenthesis. If anyone enjoys these pieces which I've been posting, I’m trying to explain in them the things which I don’t say directly in my book on Revolutionary Forgiveness, but make up the context around it – the “why” of why I wrote it, rather than the book’s contents exactly).

Most people have a political morality. There are principles we use to decide when the people in charge of our society are heading in a direction which you could call “bad but tolerable”, and when things are so bad that you need to be shouting out in protest.

I’m not going to set out here what those ethical guidelines are, not least because they vary so much from person to person. The point I want to make is just that they exist, whether we acknowledge them or not, and a vast amount of the ordinary, invisible, way in which politics just happens is through people pointing to this or that particular behaviour and saying we shouldn’t put up with it.

Yesterday, Starmer’s ex-Chief of Staff Morgan James McSweeney was giving his evidence, and Emily Thornberry questioning him. McSweeney presented himself as the victim of his former “confidant”, Peter Mandelson, who’d told him that his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein was a mere “passing acquaintance”. When it became clear that Mandelson and Epstein had been in a years-long alliance, McSweeney said, “it was like a knife through my soul”.

I doubt McSweeney’s evidence will win him a great deal of sympathy. On his own account, he was lobbying for Mandelson’s appointment as the best way to solve a problem. Labour had to pick an ambassador to work with Trump. McSweeney said he’d gone to America to sound out who to appoint, and came back wanting Mandelson. He wanted someone who’d lie like Trump does, who’d steal like the US President. And this has been Labour’s default position ever since Trump became President. Trump said Europe not the US should pay for the Ukraine war, Starmer asked hom how much we should pay? Trump said he’d put tariffs on every country which traded with the US, Starmer asked if he would put tariffs on British goods first. He wouldn’t send British warships to Iran, but he did allow Trump to send US airplanes from the bases here. In all those ways, and in picking an ambassador, Starmer was changing the Labour Party, making it more amenable to the populists. So what if Mandelson lied to McSweeney? “Willingness to tell Dreadful Lies” was an essential characteristic on the job description McSweeney had drafted for him.

Last week, Labour MP Antonia Bance was in the news for the tweet I’ve posted. There, she’s making the case for Labour’s attitude to immigration, and to politics generally. The party has changed the immigration rules so that if a person comes to Britain, we take away their phones, their jewels, we refuse to let them work. We keep them in abandoned military bases, sometimes in condemned hotels, three or four people to a room. We give them food, but after that we don’t allow them to spend more than £10 a week to live. We control their lives. We make them about as miserable, more or less, as a prisoner on remand. Labour has decreed that these prisoners – because that’s what they are – should have to wait for 20 years before being told they can stay here permanently. Being a refugee, in other words, should be treated as a crime roughly twice as bad as killing somebody.

Bance says not to worry. Yes, Labour in government is cruel. The party is punishing people for doing nothing wrong. But, not to worry, since all that is needed is several years of more bad decisions then, soon enough immigration will be “fixed” and Labour can introduce the “cost of living” policies of which MPs could be proud. On social media, you can see lots of people criticising Bance for underestimating how deeply the press is committed to using immigration to make Britain worse – it’s been their main obsession since the Smethwick by-election, and that was more than 60 years ago. But the cynicism of her messages goes deeper than that. It’s in the idea that you can spend years talking in public like you’re an advocate of violence, cruelty, racism – and then magically recover, put on a red cardigan, and the real red “you” reappears unchanged.

A scunner can be a feeling of dislike or contempt. It’s a sense of repulsion, causing you to flinch. It’s the person whose behaviour brings out that feeling in you. Not being a scunner is just about avoiding that absolute minimum level of stupid, self-serving, self-destructive behaviour that will cause other people to walk on the other side of the street to avoid you.

Most people, I reckon, have a moral intelligence that’s keener than Bance’s. They understand you can’t govern Britain that way without making yourself something different, without becoming the sort of person for whom lying and cruelty are just what you do.

So far, everything I’ve been describing has been negative – what not do to. How to use that sense of political ethics as a positive force, that’s something I’ll come back to.

If I couldn’t yet imagine what “lawful evil” would look like, I was just 13. I wasn’t the Prime Minister.

I’ve written elsewhere about how the big cultural politics of the last 20 years puts the left into difficulty. Our enemies are violent, cruel, brazenly corrupt. Social democratic parties have responded by saying that where the right is chaotic we’ll defend the law. We need to defer to society’s rules. If we have to choose between being good and lawful, it’s the second virtue which matters most.

But suppose that you were living in the US in 2026 and you wanted to resist Trump. Imagine that that government introduced a new law – say, one permitting masked officials to kidnap migrants and put them in camps. They are the government, they can makes through Presidential decrees. The opposition’s commitment to upholding any lawful authority means that it can’t unambiguously resist something which most people see as wrong.

Think youself into the position of the people in Britain in 2024 who wanted to choose an official representative – an Ambassador – who’d articulate all their hostility to the Trump regime. But there’s no point choosing a representative that the US government will hate and refuse to meet. Because the most important thing is to uphold the law, you end up picking candidates for Ambassador who are between between your regime’s Lawfulness and the US government’s Chaos. Someone like George Osborne, who as Chancellor made the budgets balance, or Peter Mandelson who as EU Trade Commissioner helped to match one sets of laws (EU competition regulations) to another (global trade rules). A way of viewing the world in which all that matters is Law v Chaos, misses the other thing Mandelson and Osborne had in common – they were both politicians who would insist a million benefits claimants must starve, if that would enable a single rich person to eat oysters with their champagne. Lawful Evil, you might say.

If all that politics involves is a battle between Law and Chaos, and Mandelson was a bad choice, then the only logical explanation for your bad decision is “process”. You pretend there exists a rule that no one can be made US ambassador without security clearance. You the Prime Minister were deceived by some underling who failed to follow this law. Until people push back, saying that a) that the law never existed, or never as a black and white rule, and ii) if the law was real, then the people pushing to breach it were you, or your own closest followers, who had already announced the appointment of Mandelson as Ambassador before you’d asked anyone to clear him.

The attempt to create a “Mr Rules” personality as the antithesis to rightwing populism produces the sorts of process arguments in which British politics is stuck; politicians debating whether Starmer has broken his own rules. There is no Judge to make that decision - only Parliament can - but if Labour wins that's because it has a majority not because it was right. As a question of law, the issue never gets resolved - each further day withotu a resolution makes our Prime Minister looks smaller and nastier. If he wasn’t such a stickler for the law, he wouldn’t be so doomed now.

Three weeks ago, Circus Film Studios brought out a feelgood comedy ‘Mother’s Pride’ about a pub-owning family. Mick Harley (acted by comedy veteran Martin Clunes) is the landlord of the Somerset pub, The Drovers Arms. His business is in debt, needing to raise £10,000 or someone, presumably the bank, will repossess it. Over the road, a rival business The George Inn is thriving. Its owner, Pritchard, is posh, smarmy and willing to cheat to put the Harleys out of business. Mick’s son Cal, a musician, returns home to help his father. When he appears, Mick, who is mourning the loss of his wife Sarah, Cal’s mother, punches him. A second son, James (acted by James Buckley), spends his days Morris dancing with pub layabout Paxman (Mark Addy). Cal – a non-drinker – brews two fresh-tasting pints in honour of his late mother, and to give the Harleys something to sell now that their pub’s beer taps have been disconnected by the bailiffs. The film builds to a climax, a Campaign for Real Ale-run competition in which - if the Harleys win - they’ll save the business and the family.

The film took £700,000 in its first weekend, was still in the top-10 highest grossing movies in Britain last weekend, when I saw it in a near-empty cinema in Islington. I wanted to watch it becomes the reviews had been mediocre, and because of its landlord’s-eye-view of a failing rural pub. Critics’ opinions were so hostile that I found myself wondering if it was a harbinger of a collective lurch rightwards in British cultural politics. Often, when a country is about to take a turn for the worst, that lurch rightwards is pre-empted in the field of art, specifically in popular culture. Think of Britain in the late 2000s, and the success of Harry Potter and Downton Abbey. Our collective reward for accepting that art without dissent and telling ourselves maybe the nobs weren’t as bad as we’d always thought was David Cameron, George Osborne, and Boris Johnson, the devastation of the welfare system, cuts so deep to benefits and wages that 15 years later they still haven’t been reversed.

There are things about the film which do point in a troubling direction – viewers are excpected to root for a family who own a business. The Harleys’ friends are tippex-white. Every relationship in the film is relentlessly straight. The pub owners’ liberation is guaranteed only at the end of the film when a friendly venture capitalist appears from nowhere, like a god descending from the machine, offering to invest in The Drovers Arms. That last plot line – though quickly and glibly done – is especially galling, who did the authors think has been closing Britain’s pubs? The country’s largest pub business is called Stonegate, it owns nearly one in ten of all public houses, including the brands Slug & Lettuce, Yates’s and Walkabout. Stonegate’s owner is TDR Capital, headquartered in the Cayman Islands. Economist Lauren Leek has studied the phenomenon of pubs closing. “The map of pub death”, she writes, “is a map of where extraction was profitable and reinvestment wasn’t.” Meg Leonard and Nick Moorcroft, the writers of ‘Mother’s Pride’, want the film’s viewers to believe that private equity is the pub’s friend – when it is that industry’s worst enemy.

The message to which the plot is aiming is one of kindness. Mick needs to learn to forgive Cal; Cal needs to take ownership of the way he abandoned the village. Mick needs to honour his dead wife’s memory. The film is aiming for a message of gender equality – if it fails to deliver on that ambition, that’s because the characters are thin, the story delivered without a single surprising moment, and at a pace which sacrifices the characters to the plot. And this is what makes I hard to review it as a cultural artefact. Quite a number of the scenes in the film are well-shot. Clunes does a good job of being a curmudgeon who tones down his negativity from 10 to 7 without ever ceasing to be the person who he was when the film began. Jonno Davies’ is meant to be likeable as Cal, and delivers. When other family members want him to interact with a room of music-loving adolescents, his agoraphobia is believable. James Buckley, too, puts in a decent performance as Jake. Josie Lawrence was underused, but it was a joy to see her, all the same. I didn’t laugh much, but I did cry once. The overwhelming sense I had, on leaving the cinema, was of a good cast meaning well, fighting against the limits of script. Diluted Faragism it really wasn’t – this was escapism-lite, politics-lite, culture-lite. In getting cross with the film, don’t I make myself look ridiculous – why tilt at the middlebrow?

Yeats’s poem, ‘The Second Coming’ imagines a moment of transformation, Christ’s second coming – or, the birth of some other “rough beast”. As this uncertain rapture nears, “the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” It’s the line directly before, which speaks to out moment, though: “The best lack all conviction”.

This is the world in 2026. We have all just lived through a genocide. The best gave money to the starving, encouraged their friends to participate in that collective endeavour. The worst tried to close down all discussion of those killings. The Palestinians suffered a collective trauma as bad as that suffered by the Jews of Europe between autumn 1939 and summer 1941 – similar in terms of the main cause of death (hunger), as bad in terms of relocation, shooting, collective punishments. Those opposed to the war used half-hearted metaphors years out of date “apartheid” – and found that the killers had allies in our state, in our political systems, in the press and online for whom even this honesty was too much. The intense worst were able to choke off any discussion of the war, even the small acts of private solidarity.

On 28 February, the states which had grown bored of the genocide spread their habits of killing to Iran and Lebanon. A week later, ‘Mother’s Pride’ was in our cinema. I understand a piece of art so brave that it can match the despots of our age with an intensity equal to theirs (‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’). I understand that culture which says that people are suffering, they need something to help them escape. To be led away from our screens, deliberately – that could be an act of kindness. The work of art I can’t understand is the one that know the horrors are going on and is incapable of either seeing them or looking away. That’s what I mean by banality; that’s what I mean by the absence of conviction. And while, in this piece, I’m criticising ‘Mother’s Pride’, I mean as well to criticise myself. What have I done, relative to my skills, to make the authors of genocide afraid; what have you done, my reader? We all living through a moment which anaesthetises the best of us, leaves us stumbling to speak, while the advocates of cruelty are broadcast everywhere. Mick needs to learn to forgive Cal – but who’s going to forgive those of us who failed to resist?

Presenters on the Kermode & Mayo film podcast discussed whether the film was any good. Simon Mayo said, “If you want to watch a show, en famille, then maybe, you know, this is going to be fine.” Mark Kermode, always the voice of the avant garde, was less enthusiastic, “Martin Clunes could do this in his sleep. And it is exactly what you think it is. Honestly, I didn’t think it was any good.” Interviewed for the show, Martin Clunes sought to sell the production to them and to any potential viewers. “There are a lot of English films, like ‘The Full Monty’ as well, people down on their uppers and conquering adversity.”

‘The Full Monty’ is the right comparison: released nearly 30 years before in 1997, it provides the model for scenes in the newer film – in the original, a promotional film from city’s heyday highlights Sheffield’s thriving steel industry, a narrative immediately undercut by images of its more recent decline. The 2026 film plays at the same point in the narrative a quick television clip mourning the recent weekly loss of previously-viable pubs. The 1997 film, like ‘Mothers’ Pride’, employed the talents of comic actor, Mark Addy. But his character in the earlier film was more satisfying. There, he played a Sheffield steelworker Dave who had been made redundant in one of several generations of plant closures. Together with his friend Gary, he steals scrap metal from abandoned mills to supplement his benefits. In 1997, viewers were being asked to worry about workers without money, in 2026, we were being asked to feel sorry for a pub owner. Gary seems women outside queuing to watch a make striptease act, and persuades Dave to join him in recruiting their own group, which recruits gay and black members as well as Gary and Dave’s former foreman. They practise their dancing, building up to a final show at which they debate whether they should be willing to go completely naked for their audience – it’s that prospect of honest nudity which gives the film its title.

Both ‘Mothers’ Pride’ and ‘The Full Monty’ are films about men and fatherhood. But the earlier delves deeper into these themes. Dave doesn’t want to perform on stage, thinks he and his friends will be a laughing stock, but is talked round by his wife Jean. She says she’ll enjoy the evening and be proud of him. In that way, the film offers a redemptive narrative for men in working class jobs who could have been broken by Thatcherism. The film says, in effect, that if they makes their partners’ lives a joy they will live a life worth celebrating. ‘Mothers’ Pride’ celebrates superficially a similar idea that dads can do could by being proud of their male offspring, but the message is weaker, partly because the film is shallower, the writing worse, there are no stakes, no viewer is ever left in doubt that Mick will sell his son’s Cal’s beer, or that it will win the competition and save the family business.

Between the two films, Mark Addy’s part in particular is compressed. In the 1997 film, he was a complex figure, ashamed of his weight, humiliated by the loss of his job, baffled when his wide encourages him to strip. It’s easier, actually, to think he’ll stay apart from the other dancers, destroy their moment of validation than that he’ll risk himself on stage. So, when he changes his minds and rejoins the group – a viewers is likely to his change of heart as something to celebrate. In 2026, his character Paxman is the village oaf – a diminished Falstaff – his most memorable line a threat to bailiffs threatening to take away Mick’s jukebox: “Leave that where it is or we’ll shove these sticks where the sun don’t shine, and I don’t mean Bristol.”

Among many other things, ‘The Full Monty’ is celebration of a certain kind of pub culture, one with social democratic politics. Between scenes set in the Job Centre, and two-up two-down Northern homes, two crucial scenes are set in the local working men’s club, a world of drinking and collective disinhibition – a place where truths are told. Gary realises the potential power of a striptease act outside a working men’s club. At first, he is affronted to see his venue, a man’s drinking place, given over to women, “Cheeky buggers. It’s a bloody working men’s club. No decent woman would be seen dead in there.” But these comments only highlight Dave’s misery about being without work and his dependence on his wife. “Jean would,” he says, “It’s her money, isn’t it?” They break into the club, hide in the women’s toilets (another sign of how unemployment emasculates them), while Jean’s friends tease her, invite her to dump her depressed and apathetic partner. She says, “I couldn’t do that to Dave. Not even if I wanted to. But it’s like he’s given up. Work, me, everything.”

Later in the film, Dave tells Gary he can’t perform their strip routine in public. “I try dieting. I do try. Seems I spent most of me fucking life on a diet. What if four hundred women turn round and say... ‘He’s too fat’.” His account of joblessness and depression is compelling. Near the film’s end, he is in the very depth of misery when Jean tells him she has found our about his Gary’s intended plan, which he has been keeping a secret from her. She is relived at least to know he hasn’t been having an affair. Dave tells her not to worry, he has no intention of humiliating himself on stage. “Jeanie, who wants to see this dance?” His wife answers, “I do.” She gives him permission to enjoy himself in public – for his sake and hers too.

Thirty years ago, mainstream cinema was capable of dealing with topics of race, sexuality and class. Even simple entertainment could speak to the moment, carry the possibility of collective renewal. A generation has passed, and we’ve lost that ability.