Lexington and Concord: A Marxist Appraisal

Daniel Lazare 

A quarter of a millennium ago, “embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard round the world” at Lexington and Concord.  What are Marxists to make of a battle that occurred in a pre-industrial era on the edge of what is commonly referred to as the civilized world? 

A good place to start is Lenin’s “Letter to American Workers,” published in Pravda in August 1918: 

The history of modern, civilized America opened with one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few compared to the vast number of wars of conquest which, like the present imperialist war, were caused by squabbles among kings, landowners or capitalists over the division of usurped lands or ill-gotten gains.  That was the war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery, in the same way as these ‘civilized’ bloodsuckers are still oppressing and holding in colonial slavery hundreds of millions of people in India, Egypt, and all parts of the world. 

Plainly, Lenin wanted to draw upon America’s revolutionary traditions in order to persuade workers to oppose US intervention in the Russian Civil War.  But what stands out about his letter is how much it got wrong. 

Lenin’s ostensible colonial slaves not only held some 460,000 people – 21 percent of the population as of 1770 – in real slavery, but were otherwise some of the happiest and freest people on earth.  Thanks to widespread property ownership, 60 percent of white males had the vote, three or four times the figure in England and Wales.  White Americans consumed three or four times as much meat as British laborers, twice as much milk, and a third more butter, with the result that Americans who enlisted in the Revolutionary War were more than two inches taller than their British opponents.[1]  This is why some 20 percent of Hessian troops deserted upon landing in the New World.  Why risk your life for George III when you can melt into a countryside that was far freer and more abundant than anything at home? 

Oppressed is therefore the last word to describe colonial Americans.  To be sure, social tensions were rising as economic acceleration from the 1760s on led to a growing gap between rich and poor.  But the process was still in its infancy and hardly compared to Paris where a few years later thousands of desperate poor people would riot over the price of bread.  

An 1842 newspaper interview with a certain Captain Preston, a 91-year-old veteran of the battle of Concord, summed the problem up.  Why, his questioner wanted to know, did he go to war? 

“Did you take up arms against intolerable oppressions?”

“Oppressions?  I didn’t feel them.”

“What, were you not oppressed by the Stamp Act?”

“I never saw one of those stamps.  I certainly never paid a penny for one of them.”

“Well, what then about the tea tax?”

“I never drank a drop of the stuff; the boys threw it all overboard.”

“Then I suppose you had been reading Harrington or Sidney and Locke about the eternal principles of liberty?”

“Never heard of ’em.  We read only the Bible, the Catechism, Watts’ Psalms and Hymns, and the Almanac.”

“Well, then, what was the matter?  And what did you mean in going to the fight?”

“Young man, what we meant in going for those redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to.  They didn’t mean we should.”[2] 

Colonists fought not for change but for a return to the status quo ante.  Rather than revolutionaries hoping for a great leap forward, they were restorationists seeking to turn the clock back prior to 1763 when Britain had begun tightening up imperial controls after decades of benign neglect.  

Any number of historians have wrestled with the problem of American restorationism.  They range from the Prussian-Austrian diplomat and writer Friedrich von Gentz, who argued in 1800 that the American Revolution was no revolution at all, to Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote in 1833 that Americans were born into a natural state of liberty, and Louis Hartz, whose classic 1955 study, The Liberal Tradition in America, said that Americans had little to rebel against because they lived in a country in which feudal oppression had never taken root.  But the most outstanding is Robert R. Palmer (1909-2002).  Best known on the left for his 1941 study, Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of Terror in the French Revolution, his real masterpiece is a two-volume work published in 1959-64 whose aim was to get to the bottom of “American exceptionalism” by probing political developments elsewhere in the world from 1760 to 1800.  

Entitled The Age of the Democratic Revolution, it examines, among other things, an aristocratic revolt that broke out in France in 1787, two years prior to the storming of the Bastille, and another revolution that broke out two years later in Brussels.  The first was the culmination of trends underway since the death of Louis XIV in 1715 in which aristocrats tried to claw back privileges that an increasingly powerful and centralized monarchy had taken away.  By the 1780s, wrote Eric Hobsbawm, the aristocratic counter-offensive had reached the point where “four quarterings of nobility were needed even to buy a commission in the army,” meaning that one had to prove that all four grandparents were aristocrats before landing a spot in the officer corps.  Hobsbawm went on: 

[A]ll bishops were nobles, and even the keystone of royal administration, the intendancies [i.e. provincial governorships], had been largely captured by them.  Consequently, the nobility ... undermined the state itself by an increasing tendency to take over provincial and central administration.[3] 

A breaking point occurred in 1787 when Louis XVI, the Sun King’s great-great-grandson, tried to impose taxes on the nobility in a last-ditch effort to stave off bankruptcy.  But aristocratic law courts known as parlements refused to go along on the grounds that no one could tax the nobility other than the nobility itself.  In invoking what it said were ancient constitutional principles, the nobility’s ultimate goal according to Palmer was to return France to a bygone era “in which the King ruled over a confederation of provinces, each guarding its own liberties and exemptions in taxes and administration, and each carrying on its own affairs through its own churchmen, its own nobles and gentry, and its own opulent dignitaries....”[4] 

The upshot was a restorationist revolt not unlike that of Massachusetts a dozen years earlier.  The revolt was serious business.  In June 1788, it led to “the day of the tiles” in the alpine city of Grenoble, an outbreak of fighting in which townsfolk shouting, “Vive le parlement,” showered rooftiles on royal troops below.  But what is perhaps most remarkable about the revolt is the attitude of the Third Estate, which was entirely in favor.  Observes Palmer: 

It is one of the puzzles of the Revolution that class animosity, or antagonism between noble and non-noble, should have been so little in evidence in 1787 and much of 1788.  The Parlement of Paris, despite all that could be known of it from its own published remonstrances, enjoyed a wide popularity with both Third Estate and nobility at this time.  There were of course exceptions ... [but] most politically conscious persons of the moment were concerned mainly with absolutism, and would admire any group of men that stood up against arbitrary and non-responsible government.[5] 

La Journée des tuiles en 1788 à Grenoble, 1890 painting by Alexandre Debelle (Musée de la Révolution française)

French sans-culottes lined up in support of the nobility in much the same way that America’s embattled farmers lined up in support of Virginia grandees like Washington and Jefferson.  

The other event that Palmer scrutinizes is the so-called Brabant Revolution of 1789.  The Austrian Netherlands, as Belgium was known, was “a European China,” in the words of one historian,[6] a country that had been in a state of near-suspended animation ever since a local duke had pledged to respect local traditions and institutions in return for a grant of power over the country as a whole.  Known as the “Joyous Entry” of 1356, the result more than four centuries later was an assemblage of provincial assemblies, guilds, churches, monasteries, and whatnot little changed from the high Middle Ages.  Now under the control of the Habsburgs, it was a prize possession that Joseph II of Austria, the very model of an “enlightened despot,” set out to modernize.  Joseph expected his subjects to be grateful; after all, who could say no to efficiency and reform?  Instead, peasants, artisans, and nobles joined forces against an unprecedented assertion of imperial authority that threatened to overturn everything they knew and understood. 

Once again, to paraphrase Captain Preston, local people had always governed themselves and always meant to, yet distant imperial authorities in Vienna didn’t mean they should.  Self-government was again understood as loyalty to ancient institutions and opposition to interference from abroad. 

But then came Act II.  In Brussels, conservative opponents of Habsburg interference parted ways with modern-minded reformers like the lawyers Jan Baptiste Verlooy and Jan Francois Vonck, both of whom supported Joseph II’s reforms even while opposing the royal absolutism behind them.  Soon, traditionalists were denouncing Verlooy, Vonck, and others as radical intellectuals seeking to lead the people astray with “detestable philosophe-ism.”[7]  “Vonckists” were soon forced into exile. 

A similar rupture occurred in France.  After siding with the aristocracy against the crown in 1787-88, the Third Estate – otherwise known as sans-culottes, people too poor to afford fancy knee britches – reversed course in mid-1789 and sided with the crown against the aristocracy.  As nobles fled abroad by the hundreds, Louis XVI was re-dubbed the “citizen king .... the father, the brother, the friend of all the French” after donning the tricolor revolutionary cockade and leaving his palace at Versailles so he could be with “his” people in Paris.  It was a fiction that all sides maintained until June 1791 when the royal family tried to escape to Austrian lines.[8]  The flight to Varennes, the town a hundred miles or so from the German border where Louis was arrested, profoundly discredited the moderate faction known as the Girondins and left the sans-culottes no choice but to turn against the monarchy as well.  With the revolution now as anti-royalist as it was anti-aristocratic, Louis’s execution in January 1793 marked the start of its most radical stage. 

Louis XVI wearing the tricolor hat of the revolution

Rather than a continuation of the aristocratic revolt of 1787, the radical stage that the Jacobins ultimately ushered in was its antithesis.  As for America, an Act II arrived there as well, although the process took a bit longer.  Washington’s victory at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781 clinched the power of the Virginia ascendancy.  Six years later, a new constitution strengthened the neo-aristocratic “plantocracy” all the more by granting slaveowners a broad range of privileges such as extra representation in the House and the Electoral College, veto power in the Senate, and indirect control over the White House and the Supreme Court.  As a result, nine of America’s first 15 presidents were slaveholders while the rest lined up in support.  When an abolitionist avant-garde went on the offensive in the 1820s, planters used their constitutional advantages to push the Fugitive Slave Act through Congress and the Dred Scott decision through the Supreme Court, both of whose purposes was to wipe out opposition and establish a pro-slavery dictatorship over the nation as a whole.  

The strange rhythms of American political development thus served to prolong the revolution’s Girondin phase by some “four score and seven years.”  When the dam finally broke, Radical Republicans used their control of a rump Congress to ram through legislation that pro-slavery forces had bottled up for years.  In addition to a military draft, these included a national bank (the slaveowner Andrew Jackson had overthrown an earlier version in 1832), tariffs (which the export-oriented plantocracy had also opposed), and land grants and loans to build the first transcontinental railroad, another project that the anti-industrial South had fought to a standstill.  Comparisons with the Jacobins were duly noted.  A British journalist described the Radical Republican leader Thaddeus Stevens as “the Robespierre, Danton, and Marat of America, all rolled into one,” while a northern newspaper compared the abolitionists to “the ‘Committee of Twelve’ of the days of the Reign of Terror.”  Congressman Clement Vallandigham of Ohio, leader of the antiwar Democratic Party faction known as the “Copperheads,” warned in 1863 that the war would produce “universal and social revolution, anarchy and bloodshed, compared with which the Reign of Terror in France was a merciful visitation.”[9]  

Engraving by Jean-Joseph-François Tassaert, c. 1800. Musée Carnavalet, Paris. The scene depicts the Insurrection of 2 June 1793, when over 80,000 armed Parisians and National Guardsmen besieged the National Convention, demanding the arrest of 22 Girondins.

Indeed, Republicans and Jacobins were clearly on the same track.  Faced with widespread domestic insurrection, they responded in broadly similar ways, i.e. by centralizing political power, taking control of national finances, and mobilizing industrial production, particularly that of armaments.  The Americans even imposed an income tax just as the French had in 1790.  Republicans emulated the Jacobins in ideological terms as well.  Previously, Jefferson had been seen as the great champion of American democracy while Hamilton was seen as an economic royalist who was hostile to the people and to the French Revolution too.  “All honor to Jefferson,” Lincoln wrote in 1859.  But now attitudes began to shift.  As Palmer notes, French revolutionaries were suspicious of Jefferson, whose famous statement that “mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body” marked him as an enemy of the sans-culotte urban masses.[10]  His friendship with the Marquis de Lafayette also rendered him suspect since Lafayette, a defender of the monarchy, had gone over to the counter-revolution just a few days earlier. 

Alexander Hamilton

Hamilton, on the other hand, was a familiar social type as far as bourgeois French revolutionaries were concerned, a progressive banker and industrialist much like the Belgian-Dutch bankers Édouard de Walckiers, Balthazar-Élie Abbema, and Jean-Conrad de Kock, who were in France at that moment lobbying to extend the revolution to their home countries.[11]  Even though Hamilton was less than comfortable with the prospect, Jacobins thus saw him as one of their own.  This was a view that Republicans now adopted since Jefferson viewed states’ rights as a check on federal power while Hamilton stood for centralization and the martialing of national resources.  Since that was what the Union most needed, his star rose while Jefferson’s fell.  

Thaddeus Stevens

Which brings us back to Lexington and Concord.  Given the convoluted nature of subsequent events, what are we to make of embattled farmers who set the process off?  Were they progressive, reactionary, or what? 

The answer is complex.  Even in Virginia, America had never had a European-style hereditary aristocracy, although planter dynasties like the Randolph and Lee families came close.  But the concept was utterly alien to a Puritan New England dominated by tradesmen, laborers, farmers, and a budding merchant class.  Consequently, social revolution was almost completely absent, which is why New Englanders found it so easy to place themselves under the control of lofty Virginia planters.  Rather than undermining American conservatism, the constitutional arrangements that crystallized in the 1780s reflected and reinforced it.  Palmer is worth quoting at length on how American “revolutionaries” tried to keep change to a minimum: 

Pennsylvania and Georgia gave themselves one-chamber legislatures, but both had had one-chamber legislatures before the Revolution.  All states set up weak governors; they had been undermining the authority of royal governors for generations.  South Carolina remained a planter oligarchy before and after independence, but even in South Carolina fifty-acre freeholders had a vote.  New York set up one of the most conservative of the state constitutions, but this was the first constitution under which Jews received equality of civil rights – not a very revolutionary departure, since Jews had been prospering in New York since 1654.  The Anglican Church was disestablished, but it had had few roots in the colonies anyway.  In New England the sects obtained a little more recognition, but Congregationalism remained favored by law.  The American revolutionaries made no change in the laws of indentured servitude.  They deplored, but avoided, the matter of Negro slavery.[12]  

The contrast with France could not be more striking.  The very opposite of restorationist, the revolution was an attempt to make society anew.  When informed of the fall of the Bastille, Louis XVI asked: “It is then a revolt?”  To which the Duke de Liancourt replied: “No, sire, it is a revolution.”  In other words, it was not a revolution in the old sense of revolving back to some pre-existing golden age, but a new kind of revolution seeking to advance into a bold bright future.  The French Revolution, Palmer wrote in a subsequent work, entailed: 

...the ‘invention’ of revolution itself, the launching of the belief – or, as some would say, ‘myth’ – that human problems would be solved by a vast phenomenon in world history known as ‘the revolution.’  No one had made any such supposition before 1789, not even those Frenchmen who, in the curse of events, became revolutionaries.[13] 

The French Revolution was so revolutionary that it revolutionized revolution itself.  If 1789-94 marks the start of the modern political world, then “the shot heard round the world” was a final expression of the ancien régime, one that left the old order exhausted – and the French monarchy in particular burdened with debt from its intervention on the American side – but made no attempt to overthrow it.  It was progressive to the degree that it created a national arena for northern bourgeois development.  But it simultaneously strengthened the southern plantocracy by showering it with constitutional privileges and protections.  Civil war became inevitable the moment the Constitution was ratified in 1788. 

What followed in 1861-65 was thus a repudiation of the same sort that followed the flight to Varennes.  Where one generation of revolutionaries strengthened slavery, another overthrew it.  Where one ushered in a decentralized federation, the second consolidated control.  Whereas the Gettysburg Address echoed Jefferson’s rhetoric in the Declaration of Independence to a degree, it gave it a new twist.  It called for “a new birth of freedom,” and while vowing that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” it did so in a manner that implied a new concept of popular self-rule in which democracy would no longer be checked and divided to the point of self-nullification,  but consolidated so that ways, means, and ends – of, by, and for – would all be unified.  

A successful bourgeois revolution in the 1860s would have required a Jacobin-style clean sweep.  Instead, the minimal reforms of the 1780s led to renewed minimalism by the end of the 1860s.  “Up to now we have witnessed only the first act of the Civil War – the constitutional waging of war,” wrote Marx in August 1862.  “The second act, the revolutionary waging of war, is at hand.”  The forecast would prove tragically incorrect.  Reconstruction was cut short, the Constitution was put back on its pedestal, and southern Confederates were returned to power.  Since blacks now counted for five-fifths of a person for purposes of congressional apportionment as opposed to three-fifths before the war, the white southern ruling class wound up with more seats in the House and more votes in the Electoral College than previously while still depriving black Americans of the vote.  The conservative democracy that issued forth once national unity was assured was heaven for bankers and industrialists in that it provided for a strong legal framework, absolute guarantees for private property, a total absence of financial regulation of just about any sort, plus a rich and variegated consumer market.  But it was hell for workers and racial minorities. 

This is the same conservative democracy that is now in an abject state of collapse.  Congress has been gridlocked for a generation, corruption is rampant, and economic polarization is shooting through the roof.  Institutions like the Senate, the Electoral College, and the Supreme Court have never been more unrepresentative.  Workers’ revolution is more urgent than ever amid war, economic crisis, and a growing dictatorship.  But bland and patriotic celebrations of events like Lexington and Concord will do nothing to bring it about; instead, only the most ruthless criticism will do.  What Marx said about Germany in 1843-44 goes double for the US in the 2020s: 

Criticism dealing with this situation is criticism in hand-to-hand combat. ...  It is a question of permitting the Germans not a single moment of illusion or resignation.  The burden must be made still more oppressive by adding to it a consciousness of it, and the shame made still more shameful by making it public.  Every sphere of German society must be described as the partie honteuse [shameful portion] of German society, and these petrified conditions must be made to dance by singing to them their own melody.[14] 

All institutions and events that have contributed to this disgraceful situation must be presumed guilty until proven innocent.  Instead of restoration, America needs a real revolution to drive society forward. 

---

[1] Eric Vriesen, An Essay Examining the Living Standards of American Colonists, English Workers, and American Plains Indians in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Kingston, Ontario: Queen’s University, 2011), 19, 26, available at https://www.econ.queensu.ca/sites/econ.queensu.ca/files/student_papers/270.pdf.

[2] Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People (New York: New American Library, 1972), vol. 1, p. 284.

[3] E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 (New York: New American Library, 1962), 78-79.

[4] R.R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2014), 343.

[5] Ibid., 340.

[6] Janet L. Polasky, “Traditionalists, Democrats, and Jacobins in Revolutionary Brussels,” The Journal of Modern History 56, no. 2 (June 1984), 228.

[7] Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, 248. 

[8] E.L. Higgins, The French Revolution as Told by Contemporaries (New York: Cooper Square, 1975), 155.

[9] James M. McPherson, “Some Thoughts of the Civil War as the Second Revolution,” Hayes Historical Journal 3, no. 5 (Spring 1982).

[10] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1954), 165.

[11] Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, 416.

[12] Ibid., 174.

[13] R.R. Palmer, The World of the French Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 3.

[14] Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’ (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), 133-34.

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Review: Adolescence, a four-part series on Netflix

Sam Tissot

05.04.2025

Adolescence is a gut-wrenching social drama in line with the best traditions of social realism in British film-making and TV. The series, created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham and directed by Philip Barantini, broke all previous records for an audience of a streaming program in the U.K. Fictional but inspired by real events, the series takes on a subject that plagues modern societies: violent anti-social behaviour among school age children. While in the United Kingdom this is most common in the form of knife crime, the same fundamental forces are ultimately at work in phenomena like America’s school shooting epidemic. Nor are such incidents limited to the Anglosphere, shown tragically on April 24, when a young girl in the French city of Rennes was killed in a knife attack at her school. 

Jack Thorne

Adolescence is filmed across four one-shot episodes. With this one-camera and one-take approach the show feels at times more like a drilled theatre production than a TV release. The style combined with sharp dialogue creates great moments of build-up and tension across the series. The viewer is left in awe of how the crew and actors were able to pull off the take so seamlessly. However, the acting is so engaging that the viewer’s attention is quickly brought back to the narrative. 

Each episode focuses on a particular aspect of the aftermath of the murder of a young girl at the hand of the show’s protagonist, a 13-year-old named Jamie (Owen Cooper). The first deals with Jamie’s arrest and charging with the crime. The second deals with the efforts of two police officers (Ashley Walters and Faye Marsay) to gather evidence about the murder weapon at Jamie’s school and their attempt to understand Jamie’s motives through interviews with his schoolmates. The third, and perhaps most striking, is an interview between Jamie and a psychologist (the brilliant Erin Doherty) that takes place six months after the crime. In the final episode, we see how Jamie’s parents (Stephen Graham and Christine Tremarco) struggle to come to grips with their son’s crime and their own responsibility 13 months on from the incident. 

Stephen Graham and Christine Tremarco in Adolescence (2025) photo:Netflix

The series has rightly been adulated in reviews, both for the quality of its production and its unapologetic look at British society. Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer even stated that the show should be shown in every classroom in Britain. 

Many reviews from leftwing outlets, for example that of the Revolutionary Communist Party (formerly the International Marxist Tendency), have focused on the series’ exposure of the rise of sexist views among young men in Britain. While this is certainly an important dimension of the show and its subject matter, as well as of contemporary British society, focusing solely on this aspect ultimately provides a one-sided view of the complex and deeply troubled society sensitively portrayed by Adolescence. 

The implication is that if the problem is just that young men have bad ideas and they come from social media, then we can just ban sexist influencers like Andrew Tate and put on a few more “sexism awareness” sessions in schools. Voila! The problem will disappear. This is the sort of one-sided view that goes hand-in-hand with various reformist remedies for the scourge of sexism and violence gaining ground among young people in Britain and across the world. This sort of reasoning likely lies behind Starmer’s support for the wide circulation of the show. 

However, it misses the whole point of what makes Adolescence so powerful and why young people should see it. What Adolescence achieves, and what makes it such a striking piece of artwork, is to shed light not on the consequences of a few unhealthy ideas, but on the whole sick society that creates and encourages them. It gives a multi-dimensional picture of the social crisis facing youth (inclusive of both young men and women) and adults, whether they be parents or teachers. 

In its crossfire are not just sexist attitudes, but the normalisation of violence, the mental health crisis of youth, bullying and the general coarsening of modern society. As co-writer Stephen Graham, who also portrays Jamie’s dad, explained in an interview with Netflix: 

One of our aims was to ask, “What is happening to our young men these days, and what are the pressures they face from their peers, from the internet, and from social media?” And the pressures that come from all of those things are as difficult for kids here as they are the world over. 

Explaining how the fictional story is inspired by true events, Graham continued: 

There was an incident where a young boy [allegedly] stabbed a girl. It shocked me. I was thinking, “What’s going on? What’s happening in society where a boy stabs a girl to death? What’s the inciting incident here?” And then it happened again, and it happened again, and it happened again. I really just wanted to shine a light on it, and ask, “Why is this happening today? What’s going on? How have we come to this?” 

The troubling questions raised by Adolescence, regularly suppressed by the ultra-sanitized British media, can only be properly answered through a consideration of the myriad forces pressing on young people and their origin. The series’ central strength is in showing how an incident such as a violent murder of a young girl cannot be reduced to the one-sided explanations commonly offered up in the media. 

Throughout its four episodes, Adolescence touches on themes such as the objectification of women, under-aged porn consumption, cyber bullying, social inequality and normalisation of violence. The show acknowledges the particular risks of granting unsupervised young people to the internet and social media etc., but unlike many analyses of contemporary ills it does not treat these issues in an isolated and de-contextualized manner. Instead, it charts, in a British setting, the effects of the general coarsening of social relations that has been seen in every corner of the globe as social inequality has skyrocketed accompanied by government austerity and the increasing marketisation of sex, increased social isolation and the promotion of violence. These are the same anti-social pressures that have led to the scourge of school-shootings in the US and the major rise in sexual crimes seen across many major countries. 

Children’s exposure to harms, particularly online, have skyrocketed in recent years. A US survey of 10 to 17 year-olds performed by commonsensemedia.org found that 75% of male respondents reported seeing pornography, with female respondents reporting 70%. The average age of first exposure among respondents was just 12. Other studies have put the number of underage male porn viewers at 93%. In 2015, the global industry was estimated to be worth $97 billion and has undoubtedly grown leaps and bounds since then. 

A recent feature on John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight revealed online sports gambling, illegal until a few years ago in most states and now embraced by major sports leagues in the US, is increasing massively among underage teenagers in the US. The US industry posted $11 billion in revenue for 2023, a 42% increase from 2022. This is without considering the proliferation of de facto gambling disguised in various ways on various popular video games such as Minecraft, Call of Duty and Fortnite. 

Body image is another important issue afflicting young people and we see in Episode 3 how Jamie’s self-perception has been warped by exposure to unrealistic beauty standards. Boys and girls, often prepubescent, browse Instagram or Tiktok and compare themselves to adult fitness influencers and models. Young women feel like they need to look like an airbrushed Victoria’s Secret model and young men feel like they are failing unless they look like steroid-riddled body builders. Of course, this isn’t a new issue since magazines and TV have given previous generation plenty of reasons for self-loathing, but the rise of social media has provided fertile ground for a massive increase in product placement and endorsement through promotions targeting each individual’s desires or, in many cases, insecurities. 

Teenagers also face a world in which violence is increasingly normalized. While many pearl-clutching conservatives love to square the blame solely on video games (they may indeed play a role), children live in a world where extreme violence saturates screens. This has been the case since at least the 1990s with 24-hour news reporting on the latest results of the US-led coalition’s “shock and awe” tactics in the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. One generation on, one of my seminal memories as a teenager was seeing Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi lynched on the BBC News. Often, I would also retreat to my room and stumble across various ISIS or drug-cartel execution videos on the internet. All of these things became very normal. A decade later, young people need only open Instagram, X, or Google to watch children being blown to bits by US and European-made bombs in Gaza or raw footage from the front lines in Ukraine. For an increasing number of young people, violence is just part of everyday life. Should we be surprised that trivialized violence translates into an increase in horrific crimes perpetrated against teenagers and young children? 

While the precise extent of these social ills vary from country to country and study to study, it is clear that the general trend is toward a generation of youth with addiction issues, a warped self-perception, and desensitization to violence. This is great for the profits of porn and gambling companies, perhaps even the recruitment rolls of the military. But what does it mean for social relations? 

The third episode shows how such forces have shaped Jamie’s psyche. In a discussion with a clinical psychologist -- Briony Ariston, played by The Crown's Erin Doherty – we watch how, six months after the incident, Jamie’s psyche is broken down. He reveals not just his retrograde attitude toward women, but his warped notions about normal sexual behavior for a 13-year-old boy, his belief that he is ugly and unsuccessful, in sharp contrast to his appearance as a regular looking and rather intelligent young man, and his profound anger at life and society. Why does an intelligent young man develop such a horrific view of himself and his social peers? 

Owen Cooper and Erin Doherty in Adolescence (2025) Photo:Netflix

One incident has generated particular attention. In one much discussed moment Jamie expresses his belief in the 80/20 dating principle promoted in the “manosphere” online. This is the notion, inspired by the Pareto principle, that 80 percent of women are only interested in 20 percent of men. Many reviews have focused on a debunking of this theory, for example here and here. In fact, there is evidence from studies of likes on dating apps that suggest women are in fact more selective than men in “liking” or “swiping” potential partners, although whether this translates to inequality when it comes to actual dating is less clear. Even if there was some truth to this distribution of sexual interest, we still have to ask how a young man comes to believe such inequality is the natural and necessary state of things. 

Young men and women are hardly immune from their surroundings. In a society and political system that encourages and defends extreme inequality as humankind’s natural state (“There is no alternative,” as Margaret Thatcher infamously declared), should we be surprised that so many youth believe that the 80/20 dating principle is the norm? The same follows for many other ahistorical ‘truths’ promoted as the natural way of things both with regards to dating and wider life in the 2020s. It is one example of how the justification and normalization of social inequality has led to a warped notion of gender relations. 

The question of the inhumane nature of modern schooling, as well as what kids consume at home, is also raised in Adolescence. Throughout episode 2, one is struck by the chaos that reigns in Jamie’s school, described by one of the police officers investigating the case as little more than a “holding pen.” The classes are overcrowded, and teachers are clearly overworked. Many are trying to make the best of a bad situation. Others such as Mr. Malik, played by Faraz Ayub, are apathetic at best. 

However, the picture painted of Jamie’s school is not just the result of teacher shortages and chronic underfunding but flows from a wider cultural crisis. Students are disinterested, more concerned with getting one up on each other and picking on anyone lower on the social ladder, than with any sort of intellectual development. When a student does step out of line, and we are given the impression this occurs constantly, they are shouted out by a teacher or even intimidated physically until they stop. 

Even while acknowledging schools were hardly perfect in previous generations and in some ways much worse, the series shows a relatively run-of-the-mill school in northern England in a deep crisis. How did we get here? 

State (or public in non-British English) schools in capitalist society are increasingly unable to engage with the children they have been charged with educating. This is clearly taking its toll on young people. Children are valued if they excel in exams while at the same time are often discouraged from pursuing their own interests. And those poor bored souls who “misbehave” – or rebel -- are punished and belittled, reinforcing the very behaviour for which they are being castigated. Many bourgeois politicians talk of schools as simply institutions for developing skills that can be later used in the workforce. The rest of a students’ humanity can go by the wayside as long as they are employable down the line. 

History shows us other models of education are possible such as Summerhill or Montessori schools, or indeed fascinating experiments in the early Soviet Union that were subsequently suppressed with the rise of Stalinism. However, under increasingly authoritarian capitalist states in which conformity and discipline are the order of the day, such alternatives are never given the resources and support needed to flourish. 

In contemporary society, there are the wider cultural and political issues which have developed a culture of apathy and nihilism among young people. Uninspired and uninterested, these children are harried across their teenage years to prepare for standardised examinations. Many of them don’t see the point in putting in the work and they can hardly be blamed for this. Even if they aren’t already dismayed by the prospect of taking on a mountain of debt to attend university, they struggle to imagine a worthwhile future amid the climate crisis, rising inequality and the rise of authoritarianism. 

In most cases this sense of hopelessness is only reinforced in the education system. As we’ve seen above many teenagers have sex and violence crammed down their throats. Then, even when pre-pubescent, they see themselves as failures if they do not have the sexual prowess of a Casanova or the body of a Kim Kardashian. Then when they are bored and uninspired in the classroom they are disciplined, reinforcing their feelings of worthlessness and driving them further into the comfort of their warped fantasies and anti-social behavior. 

Surrounded by such hopelessness, is it any wonder that crypto-scammers, life coaches and various alpha-male or ‘trad wife’ influencers are captivating young people? To many, these tales of mostly illusionary success or life-satisfaction must seem like the only way out.  Add to this a sublimation of all of societal ills derived from efforts to rip off and exploit your fellow humans and you have unhappy, uninterested kids with increasingly deranged fantasies about how they can break out of this restrictive cycle of existence. 

The police officer’s description of a “holding pen” may even be an understatement. The picture we get of Jamie’s school is that it is a breeding ground of anti-social and self-destructive behaviour, of which Jamie’s murder of his classmate is just the most extreme expression. Adolescence makes it clear that it is no accident that a bright young man like Jamie is capable of such a horrific crime when most of his day is spent in the modern schooling system. There is something much deeper going on here than a few irresponsible teachers or cuts to school budgets. 

None of this absolves Jamie of individual responsibility for this crime, nor shifts the primary blame to his teachers or parents, but it shows the impossible situation facing insecure children, terrified parents and exhausted teachers as they try to navigate the social and political challenges of 21^st century life. 

Of course, a fictional dramatisation cannot be expected to provide answers to such profound issues. However, in forcing the audience to reflect on these questions in such a striking and emotive manner it makes clear crimes such as Jamie’s and other social ills afflicting youth will not and cannot be solved with a quick fix or a clever policy. Ultimately we are given an image of a society, our own society, where moral values, children’s physical and mental health and social relations as a whole have been severely degraded. 

The show’s creators have produced a piece of art that raises fundamental questions about the society we have created how that is refracted through its most sensitive layer: its youth. Not everyone will end up caving in to societal pressures as did Jamie, but every young person is forced to deal with them whether they like it or not. Whether the show’s creators are conscious of it or not, the multifaceted and rich portrayal of these social ills suggests the only way to address our cultural crisis is the complete overhaul of capitalist society and the perverse effect it has on the development of its youth.

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May Day 2025

May Day in 2025 saw over 1000 May Day rallies and marches in the United States, a number unprecedented in recent years.  There is no estimate yet of how many people participated but judging from the turnout in downtown New York, which some people estimated to be at least 10,000, the total must have been in the hundreds of thousands. 5051, the loose organization of volunteers behind many of the rallies said that  600,000 volunteers had signed up for May Day.  There were also demonstrations throughout the world on this May Day.

Paris

Turin

Berlin

Istanbul

Los Angeles

Manila

I went down to the May Day rally in downtown Manhattan, in front of Foley Square.  I was last here for a political event two years ago when Donald Trump was on trial in Criminal Court. Trump was also featured prominently in today’s rally, but otherwise the two events were like night and day. In 2023 there was an atmosphere of celebration that gripped the crowd who came down hoping to see the then former President being humbled by the judicial system he tried to overthrow. The only problem was that he was not being indicted for his orchestration of the attempted coup of Jan. 6 but instead on a very tenuous legal case cooked up by his Democratic Party opponents.  While there was never any question that Trump engaged in fraudulent business practices and paid hush money to cover up an affair with a porn star, the case was expanded for political reasons and Trump was eventually convicted on 34 felony counts. But it turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory.

Now move forward to May 1 2025, and while Trump is once more the number one target of the demonstrators, hardly anyone now remembers the 2023 legal case. He is now, once again, ‘President Trump’, and his actions in his first 100 days since retaking power have unleashed a broad and growing and determined resistance movement.  These crowds are not celebrating but are expressing their anger.  Unlike 2023, there is an awareness among the demonstrators that we are living through a historic turning point in the history of the American Republic, one that could spell the end of its 250 years of existence.  That being said there is also a great deal of confusion about what must be done to defend democracy, the working class, immigrants, the public institutions of health, the arts and culture against the unprecedented assault emanating from Trump. Nevertheless, the large and energetic turnout on May Day provides us with grounds for optimism about the outcome of the battle.

Here are some photos of the event in New York.

 

Here is the transcript of an interview I conducted with one of the participants, Alex L:

Alex L.

[AS] Hi. Could you, tell us a little bit about yourself and why you're here?

[AL] Sure. My name is Alex L. I'm here, with the, Association of Legal Advocates and Attorneys, which is UAW local 2325. And, I'm here because it's International Workers' Day, and we're turning out to support unionized workers of all kinds.

[AS] Have you participated in May Day activities in previous years? And what about your union?

[AL] I have. Our union has turned out for May Day, in previous years, but, honestly, I think this year is probably the biggest turnout of all, and it also feels like the most urgent time to be in the streets.

[AS] What do you know about the history of May Day?

[AL] Well, I know a little bit. I know it dates back to, the late eighteen hundreds and, some of the violent clashes between, police and workers, particularly, in Chicago.

[AS] Well, you know, it was about the eight-hour day.

[AL] Eight-hour day. Exactly. Then we have unions to thank for that.

[AS] And do you also know that it was widely celebrated as the holiday of the socialist movement, not just the workers' movement?

[AL] Yes. Right, exactly.

[AS] What do you think about the idea of socialism today? Do you think it's still relevant?

[AL] Well, I think there's a place for socialist thinking. You know, I myself have never, been affiliated with any actually, socialist organizations, but I have a great deal of sympathy for, the emphasis that they place on human welfare, over profits, and, you know, decentralized decision-making, which I think is really essential if we're going to take care of everybody. We need that kind of outlook.

[AS]  And where do you see the current situation in the United States, namely the threat to democracy?

[AL] Well, it's certainly under attack right now. There's no doubt about it. I think not just this country, but a lot of countries around the world are undergoing a dangerous shift toward authoritarianism. But, days like this remind us that there are plenty of people who are, up in arms about it. We're not going to just let it happen quietly. We're going to push back. And so, you know, being an optimist, I believe that we will push the pendulum back. It's going to take a lot of struggle, and it's going to take some time.

[AS] And how do you envision that struggle?

[AL] Well, I think it's going be a lot of non-violent demonstration like this. It's going to be a lot of organizing, exercising electoral power. It's going to require boycotts, economic actions. It's really going to require a wide range of things to show that the status quo, if you're in business as usual, are just not as helpful anymore.

Washington D. C. march with giant Declaration of Independence

Jackson, Mississippi

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