Firearms & the Fortress

Firearms & the Fortress offers a new theory of historical materialism. It also considers the path to a better society, using 'communism' as shorthand for a world in which everyone is treated as an end, not a means.

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It begins by challenging Karl Marx, arguing that history is primarily driven by 'the means of securitisation' (how people secure things against theft) rather than 'the means of production.' It contends that securitisation is a more plausible shaper of social relations than production, and a better way of explaining history's ongoing violence.

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It also considers the different ways in which critics have used the term ‘capitalism’, before proposing a new definition designed to explain more effectively why it often intuitively seems so malign.

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The book’s second part considers the way forward. It begins by looking at Marx and Engels’s 10-point programme in The Communist Manifesto, before proposing ten tentative points of its own. Much of the ensuing discussion about how to progress is framed by the dialogue between prefigurativism and vanguardism.