The "Right Side of History"?

“Be on the right side of history” is an aphorism that has become all but meaningless through overuse. But even if it had not had its meaning wrung from it by social-media saturation, it ought to be retired.

The notion of a “right side of history” implies a singular, teleological process called “history”, automatically carrying itself out. In this perspective, human moral judgement consists of positioning ourselves appropriately on the “right side”.

The slogan usually carries the implication that, whilst a particular cause may be unpopular or controversial now, it will eventually come to be seen as having been right — and those who opposed it will be regarded, in retrospect, as having been on the “wrong side of history”. That can be an important form of galvanisation and encouragement for those engaged in struggles against the odds. But that very notion indicates the flaw in the formulation. A cause or idea moves from being widely regarded as wrong to being widely regarded as right not because of the teleological unfolding of history, but because people fight against prevailing consciousness and common sense to establish a new common sense, and make concrete, material gains in struggle.

The idea of history as an inevitable dualistic struggle between “right” and “wrong” — or, put another way, good and evil — is a fundamentally religious one. These ideas jar with politics that stress the centrality of human agency. As Frederick Engels put it: “History does nothing, it ‘possesses no immense wealth’, it ‘wages no battles’. It is humanity, real, living humanity that does all that, who possesses and fights; ‘history’ is not, as it were, a person apart, using humanity as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of humanity pursuing its aims.”

As well as implicitly de-emphasising human agency, the “right side of history” formulation has another flaw. It is a reductive simplification, flattening all of history into a binary conflict between “right” and “wrong”.

During the furore around antisemitism in the Labour Party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, supporters of Corbyn would regularly circulate a photo of Corbyn being arrested on an anti-apartheid protest in the 1980s, accompanied by the assertion that Corbyn had “always been on the right side of history”. The implication was: he was right then, despite facing arrest, and he’s right now. Quite why having been active in the struggle against apartheid in the 1980s provided inoculation against antisemitism in the 2010s was not clear. The suggestion seemed to be that being on the “right side of history” is an innate moral condition, carried in the soul of an individual. Therefore, whichever side such a person is on necessarily is the “right side”, simply by virtue of them being on it.

In fact, even causes now overwhelmingly regarded as having been morally right were not flat, but characterised by internal contestation. Within the anti-apartheid struggle, the militant black workers’ movement in South Africa struggled for class independence, and political and ideological conflict took place between the Stalinists of the South African Communist Party, who had significant influence in the movement, and non- and anti-Stalinist leftist currents. Contending political forces promoted differing visions for what a post-apartheid society should look like.

Or, to take another example, the women’s suffrage movement. Working-class suffrage fighters who saw the demand for the vote as part of a wider struggle for social equality, including against class exploitation, clashed with middle and upper-class advocates, who wanted to limit the movement’s horizons to demanding “Votes for Ladies”.

One can, if one chooses, dismiss these conflicts as pettifogging in-fighting that distract from the struggle of the movement as a whole for a singular aim — the end of apartheid, women’s suffrage, or whatever. But to do so cannot but imply endorsement of whichever faction happened to have hegemony in a given movement, a hegemony often stemming from class privilege, and sometimes enforced by suppression of internal critique and dissent.

It might be countered that class-struggle historical materialism, which can also be named using the imperfect shorthand “Marxism”, has its own binary, which provides a grand narrative of history: labour versus capital, or, in the pre-capitalist world, exploited versus exploiter. When The Communist Manifesto proclaims that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”, is it not simply substituting the religious binary of good and evil for a binary of boss and worker?

It is certainly the case that Marxism argues class is the constitutive social relation in human history, and that a struggle between classes exists. But that is a structural analysis (“scientific”, in Marx and Engels’ terms), not a moral one. Marxists do not advocate siding with the workers because we believe the working class’s social position as an exploited class automatically imbues it with a higher morality. Rather, we see workers’ struggle as the social force that can dismantle a society built on exploitation and equality, and construct in its place a society built around the pursuit of human and ecological need.

The belief that our society should be built around human and ecological need, rather than around a drive for profit, is an ideological claim, one that must be fought for and won, and then re-won whenever it is driven back, rather than something impelled into the universe by the divinity of “history”.

Attendees at anti-war and pro-Palestine protests in recent years may have seen placards, produced by the Islamic Human Rights Commission, bearing the slogan “Choose The Right Side of History” emblazoned over a photo of the deceased Ayatollah Khamanei, the “Supreme Leader” of a brutally oppressive regime. Days before this placard was widely seen on a Palestine Solidarity Campaign demonstration in January 2026, the Ayatollah’s regime had slaughtered thousands of protesters. If that is “the right side of history”, we have lost.

“History” does not have divinely ordained “right” and “wrong” “sides”. Rather, history is the struggle to determine what is right and what is wrong. Our morality is embodied not in the passive performance of where we stand, but in the conscious choices we make about what is right and wrong and, vitally, what we do, in relation to those struggles.