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 site 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].

A piece about the Bund’s Arkadi Kremer, the ethical content of his socialist politics, and where it fits in the history of Marxist thinking about morality

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.

Here are some thoughts on ICI, and Amu Gib’s, results. To me, this feels too soon – I’m still too exhausted to think – but a scourge of opinions are already out there already. Please treat this not as anyone’s official draft, but something intended to start a conversation.

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.

Many anarchists thinkers in the 1880s and 1890s haradical 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.

It was summer 1986, and the kid in front of me in the backroom of his father’s Midlands shop was trying to explain the new game from its rulebook. Lawful creatures, he told me, try to tell the truth. “If a choice must be made between the benefit of a group or an individual, a Lawful character will usually choose the group. Lawful characters and monsters act in predictable ways.” Lawful monsters, I said, how does that make sense? He answered, “Lawful behaviour is usually the same as behaviour that could be called good.”

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.

Or, is it fair to be cross with a film that doesn’t want to be any good?

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.

From autumn 1970 till summer 1971, the beatnik poet, translator of Victor Serge, and future Marxist critic of the anti-psychiatry movement Peter Sedgwick was living in Queens, a borough of New York. One October evening, he left the Sociology class he’d been teaching to spend an evening with the city’s International Socialists. The reason Sedgwick looked that group up is that he was a member of a British political party of the same name, although one with a different history. The British IS was about 20 years old, having been sent up by Tony Cliff at the start of the 1950s, to spread the latter’s claim that Russia was a “state capitalist” society. The US group was a decade younger. It, like the Brits, had a Jewish founder (Hal Draper), but the American Marxists didn’t share state-cap theory. What united the members of IS were rather the common experience of a series of political struggles, both victories (the fight for Free Speech at Berkeley, the Peace and Freedom Party alliance with the Black Panthers), and set-backs (Eldridge Cleaver’s ill-fated Presidential bid in 1968).

What attracted people to the IS in the US was its very strong commitment to democracy (Draper’s “socialism from below”) and women’s liberation. Although IS had relatively few Black members before the end of the 1970s when they was boosted by the affiliation of a youth network Red Tide, members had an impressive record of supporting Black struggle.

The American International Socialists were “more removed from daily life” than the IS in Britain, Sedgwick wrote. He meant they had a shallower history of organising workers. About 30 members attended each IS meeting in New York – it wasn’t enough. All the comrades lived in Manhattan, rather than the suburbs where most workers lived. They were students and ex-students, too poor to afford the cars they’d need to drive around the factories. He found them “acutely sophisticated and seasoned,” better read in Marxist theory than their counterparts back home. Several shared a verbal tic of dropping the word “heavy” into conversation, using it as an exclamation, an adjective, or a noun (“we must send Sai, he’s one of our heavies”). The founder Hal Draper had been marginalised, Sedgwick noted. To join the group you needed to apply formally, and there was a minimum one-month waiting period before acceptance. Sedgwick enjoyed their “long, very good” internal documents. He liked the atmosphere of “fraternally controlled denunciation”, finding it “more pleasant” than the mood around the IS UK’s headquarters in London.

The American IS had begun in September 1964 as a student society at Berkeley, the Independent Socialist Club. A 1977 split produced the International Socialist Organization (for many years the affiliate of the British IS, now the SWP). In 1986, the IS merged into a new multi-tendency socialist organization, Solidarity which still exists today.

More than sixty years after IS’ foundation, Andrew Stone Higgins has published a book which collects together 26 memoirs of activism in the group. Sedgwick saw New York IS as relatively isolated from workers’ struggles. On that score, the group comes over as much better in Higgins’s book. There was a regular column devoted to union organising in the IS paper, Workers’ Power, from it came today’s Labor Notes. In 1975, members of IS founded a newspaper UPSurge for left-wing drivers, the following year (after huge public meetings in Detroit, Minneapolis, Kansas City and across the Midwest) they launched the rank-and-file group, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, which still continues today.

In July 1967, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale spoke at an IS-organised student rally; that December, IS’s Mike Parker and another revolutionary Bob Avakian founded the Peace and Freedom Party, arguably the first serious instance of black-white political alliance since the Civil Rights movement, half a decade before. In California, the party registered 120,000 voters. One participant Joel Geier describes IS, not without legitimate pride, as “unwavering in our devotion to the struggle and politics of Black liberation”.

Few contributors to the book have much good to say about the British IS/SWP, which spent the 1970s trading democracy for dogmatism. The latter did however have the sectarian street-smarts to present the split it engineered in the US group in 1977 as a political necessity. The International Socialists were committed to “industrialization”, the tactic of sending former student members to work in manual-working class jobs, but factories were closing, struggles becoming necessarily defensive. A tactic which might have been arguable in 1972 was five years later a route to demoralisation and bitterness.

Although the book has no end-point, nor could it (given that the network Solidarity continues to this day) the 1977 split was a hey movement in the group’s history. Before, it had experienced raid growth, which might in theory have continued until the group achieved something like the mass support of today’s Democratic Socialists. After 1977, politics was about holding on, achieving modest successes wherever members could find them.

The recipient of Peter Sedgwick’s letter about IS was a fellow socialist, the doctor and future participant in Rock Against Racism, David Widgery. The latter died young, in 1992. A fellow veteran of the 1960s wrote this as his obituary. “David was a creature of 1968. He revelled in 1968 … he enjoyed the sectarian arguments every bit as much as the revolutionary action. All his life he remained fascinated by the political events of that wonderful year … He was fascinated by some of the great workers’ battles of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He liked to see and hear the stories of these struggles from the participants’ own mouths … He was never in the slightest degree diverted by the message from professional politicians that the world could be changed from above, by educated people who understood the system. Change would come only if it were generated from below.” The same could be said of IS, and of the generation of activists who came of age in the 1960s not just in Britain or US but all around the world.

There is no red thread of continuity between generations; the organisations which were meant to play that role aged badly, taught habits of deference antithetical to the restless spirit necessary to revolutionary politics. Those of us who came later have had to learn through our own experiences of struggle, had to dream our own visions of revolutionary change. But, whatever mistakes they made, here were people facing many of the same problems as us, and we can learn from them.