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.

The second and concluding part of my list the best anti-fascist novels published in Britain over the last century.

Following on from my previous post, 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 other 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 blog 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.