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Cathy Porter, author and translator, educated at London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies and Cambridge University, has published over twenty books on Russian history, culture and politics, most recently Larisa Reisner. A Biography (2nd ed., Brill/Historical Materialism/Haymarket, 2022), shortlisted for the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize, and its accompanying volume Writings of Larisa Reisner, her six books, translated with Richard Chappell, again for the Historical Materialism Book Series. Author of Alexandra Kollontai. A Biography, first published in 1978, she is also a translator of Kollontai’s fictional trilogies Love of Worker Bees and A Great Love. This interview was originally published in About Narration (1975): Materials, Comments, Interventions, Edited and introduced by Sezgin Boynik and Tom Holert, Rab-Rab Press, 2025

Spectacular society

The following text is based on an intervention at the conference Historical Materialism Paris: Conjuring the Catastrophe / Combating the Catastrophe, held from 26 to 28 June 2025. 

Richard Löwenthal (1908-1991) was a German Jewish writer and political scientist. In the Weimar Republic he belonged to the Communist youth movement and then to a revolutionary splinter group called the Leninist Organisation, also known as New Beginning. He helped organise underground resistance to the Nazi regime before he was forced into exile. He published a series of critical essays on fascism and Stalinism, which he interpreted as twin totalitarian efforts to repress class struggle. Eventually arriving in London, he aided the British war effort and helped broker peace between German Social Democrats and leftwing splinter groups in exile. After the war, he worked as a correspondent for Reuters and the Observer, covering developments in world communism. Eventually he resettled in West Germany, where he was named professor of political science at the Free University of Berlin. One of his students there was the New Left leader Rudi Dutschke. By the 1960s, however, Löwenthal had evolved from revolutionary socialist into defender of the democratic establishment.

Nepal has been in the news. Gen Z agitators, who began agitations following a ban on several social media platforms, were rooted in public anger at corruption and display of wealth by government figures and their families, and complaints about mismanagement of public funds. This is hardly the full story, which needs to be discussed at length. What is significant however, is that these agitations come after a protracted period of government by various parties and Prime Ministers claiming to be communist.

There is a cruel historical irony in Israel’s ferocious genocidal war on the besieged Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank: the brutal suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto by the Nazi Wehrmacht in 1943 was one of the most tragic episodes in the genocide perpetrated against European Jewry during the Second World War. Yet the Jewish state invokes the Holocaust, the most morally powerful trope of modern times, to legitimate its formation and thereby its violent dispossession of the Palestinian people in 1947-1949, which the revisionist Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has deemed ‘ethnic cleansing’, an ongoing lethal project that has accelerated since 7 October 2023.[1] Characterising Israel as a European colonial settler state, a characterisation first elaborated by the French Jewish scholar Maxime Rodinson in June 1967,[2] this article traces Israel’s invocation of the Holocaust as ‘myth’, i.e. as state legitimation, and considers how this has impeded criticism of Israel’s relentless dispossession of the indigenous inhabitants of historical Palestine. The issue here, of course, is not the fact of the Holocaust, but of its representation and manipulation.

It is perhaps the most dramatic and iconic scene of the October revolution. At the Second Congress in Petrograd, the Bolshevik Trotsky points his finger at the exit and thunders to the Menshevik Martov: ‘Go! You are miserable bankrupts who belong in the dustbin of history.’ And Martov and the Mensheviks leave, with fateful consequences. Later, the arresting phrase ‘dustbin of history’ (along with many equivalents!) becomes part of the English language (in North American English, the word ‘dustbin’ occurs only in this celebrated phrase).

In October 1994, I opened one of those light blue Royal Mail International Aerogrammes that periodically crossed my desk in times past from friends in the United Kingdom. This one was from John Saville, of whose support and generosity I had been the beneficiary since our first meeting at a gathering of “Commonwealth Labour Historians” in 1981.

If the contemporary European far right were to rewrite The Communist Manifesto, they would likely begin their account of contemporary “globalist” ills with that very statement. For the far right, transmisogyny expresses a form of righteous violence against a world where things have gone out of joint. In 2022, at the height of alt-right culture wars, Nick Adams—a self-proclaimed “alpha male,” endorsed by Trump and one of the manosphere’s many internet trolls—tweeted: “It starts with Fortnite and boneless wings. It ends with gender pronouns and communism.” The statement is as absurd as it is tragic, and, I regret to say, it synthesises perfectly how the contemporary far right maps the operations of the spectre of gender onto society.

Karl Marx’s 1852 work The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte opens with the famous remark that men ‘make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please.’[1] He goes on to argue that whatever happens in the present time arises from and is a reaction to a political past. Recollecting and interpreting the past for present purposes requires a language. Such a language is not naturally given but needs to be socially constructed. What is more, its vocabulary and grammar stem from linguistic legacies of past ideologies. Marx draws in this regard an analogy, comparing acquisition of a political language with mastering a natural language:

[This article is based on an unpublished manuscript by Farrell Dobbs, his Schematic on Party History.[1] Quotations from the Schematic begin each section of the article.]

Recently, the High Court in England ruled that only those deemed biological females are legally recognised as women. In Hungary, gender identity recognition has been effectively abolished. In the US, illegalisation of abortions and attacks on the LGBTQI+ community are intensifying, under the auspices of religious groups. Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention dates back almost four years. Recently, the Greek Prime Minister declared that there are only two genders, as biology dictates.