Tom Blackburn

Add friend

https://newsocialist.org.uk/author/tom-blackburn

https://www.goodreads.com/tomblackburn

Tom’s Bookshelves

to-read‎ (140)
currently-reading‎ (1)
read‎ (1654)
did-not-finish‎ (0)
imperialism-and-anti-imperialism‎ (508)
history‎ (445)
biography-autobiography-memoir‎ (275)
labour-and-radical-history‎ (249)
united-states‎ (237)
marxism‎ (212)
essays‎ (210)
race-and-racism‎ (185)

labourism-and-social-democracy‎ (155)
philosophy‎ (137)
israel-palestine‎ (99)
political-economy‎ (99)
communism‎ (95)
latin-america‎ (86)
ireland‎ (85)
art-culture-literary-criticism‎ (81)
sociology‎ (77)
fascism-and-anti-fascism‎ (69)
favorites‎ (67)
neoliberalism‎ (66)

feminism‎ (56)
parapolitics‎ (47)
democracy-and-workers-control‎ (46)
conservatism-and-the-right‎ (44)
africa‎ (42)
media‎ (39)
education-and-pedagogy‎ (36)
trade-unionism‎ (33)
architecture-housing-urbanism‎ (32)
class‎ (32)
crime-policing-prisons‎ (31)
liberalism‎ (31)

ideology-hegemony-power‎ (28)
mena‎ (27)
europe‎ (26)
organising-and-strategy‎ (26)
ecology-and-ecosocialism‎ (23)
anarchism‎ (20)
fiction‎ (20)
nationalism‎ (20)
local-govt-municipal-socialism‎ (18)
work-and-anti-work‎ (18)
india‎ (15)
inequality-and-poverty‎ (12)

Stats | More…

Tom is Currently Reading

Tom Blackburn is currently reading

The Alienation Effect: How Central European Emigres Transformed the British Twentieth Century

by Owen Hatherley (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: currently-reading, history, architecture-housing-urbanism

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Aug 11, 2026 08:08AM

“Yet when the masses turn (as turn they will one day) and try to end the tyranny of centuries, not only the tyrants but all ‘civilisation’ holds up its hands in horror and clamours for ‘order’ to be restored. If a revolution carries high overhead expenses, most of them it inherits from the greed of reactionaries and the cowardice of the so-called moderates. Long before abolition the mischief had been done in the French colonies and it was not abolition but the refusal to abolish which had done it.”
― C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

19 likes

“Pious references to the Labour Party being a ‘broad church’ which has always incorporated many different strands of thought fail to take account of a crucial fact, namely that the ‘broad church’ of Labour only functioned effectively in the past because one side – the Right and Centre – determined the nature of the services that were to be held, and excluded or threatened with exclusion any clergy too deviant in its dissent.”
― Ralph Miliband, Class War Conservatism: And Other Essays

4 likes

“The present condition of the world, if accepted as it is, if approached with anything short of determined impatience to change it utterly, renders every value meaningless. Two-thirds of the people of the world are being robbed, exploited, deceived, constantly humiliated, condemned to the most abject and artificial poverty and denied as human beings. Furthermore, if this condition is accepted – or even more or less accepted with the qualification that there should be a few reforms, a little restraint and a little more foreign aid – it is quite clear from the evidence to date that the condition will become even more extreme. Imperialism is insatiable. It can modify its methods but never its appetite.”
― John Berger, Art and Revolution: Ernst Neizvestny, Endurance, and the Role of the Artist

tags: imperialism

0 likes

“From Marx, I received the concept of what human society is; otherwise, someone who hasn't read about it, or to whom it hasn't been explained, it's as though they were set down in the middle of a forest, at night, without knowing which way north is, or south, east or west. Marx told us what a society is and the history of its evolution. Without Marx, you can't formulate any argument that leads to a reasonable interpretation of historical events - what the tendencies are, the probable evolution of a humanity that has not yet completed its social evolution.”
― Fidel Castro, My Life: A Spoken Autobiography

5 likes

“One of the fruits of the long predominance of labourism is precisely that the party of the working class has never carried out any sustained campaign of education and propaganda on behalf of a socialist programme; and that Labour leaders have frequently turned themselves into fierce propagandists against the socialist proposals of their critics inside the Labour Party and out, and have bent their best efforts to the task of defeating all attempts to have the Labour Party adopt such proposals. Moreover, a vast array of conservative forces, of the most diverse kind, are always at hand to dissuade the working class from even thinking about the socialist ideas which evil or foolish people are forever trying to foist upon them. This simply means that a ceaseless battle for the ‘hearts and minds’ of the people is waged by the forces of conservatism, against which have only been mobilised immeasurably smaller socialist forces. A socialist party would seek to strengthen these forces and to defend socialist perspectives and a socialist programme over an extended period of time, and would accept that more than one election might have to be held before a majority of people came to support it. In any case, a socialist party would not only be concerned with office, but with the creation of the conditions under which office would be more than the management of affairs on capitalist lines.”
― Ralph Miliband, Class War Conservatism: And Other Essays

3 likes

More of Tom’s quotes…