This was not Marx’s meaning, in his own historical writing, yet the error vitiates much latter-day ‘Marxist’ writing

Moreover, abject ‘adjustment’ to suffering and want at times may indicate a sense of reality as impaired as that of the chiliast.

with an eye for Brechtian values – the fatalism, the irony in the face of Establishment homilies, the tenacity of self-preservation.

Luddism [...] was a form of direct action which arose in specific conditions, which was often highly organized and under the protection of the local community, and as to which we should be chary of generalization.

freedom of the press, of public meeting, of trade union organization, of political organization and of election, were either severely limited or in abeyance

To the founding fathers of the United States, breaking free from the trammels of precedent, it seemed sufficient to find certain truths ‘self-evident’.

even before Paine had adopted so truculent a tone, his writings had served as a touchstone to distinguish different emphases among reformers

It is sometimes less an argument than an affirmation, an imprecation, a leap of feeling.

They offered a direct negative to the homilies of ‘supply-and-demand’.

‘There is the great mistake’ – weavers, who wove cloth when they themselves were in rags, were forcibly educated in the vitiating error of the orthodox political economy.