What Would Burgess Say?

A Prophet Is Not Without Hono(u)r

I wrote this thinking about Mamdani and Glastonbury. The Big Takeaway: Anthony Burgess predicted mass movements that challenge the power of the state, the rise of Islam. Will they combine to destroy society?

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Anthony Burgess was a novelist, composer, librettist, and a lot of other things, but mostly I think of him as a visionary provocateur.

Because Hollywood casts a long shadow, the totality of his contributions has been overshadowed by a slim little book he wrote in the early 1960s, A Clockwork Orange¹, but his mid-1980s works offer his most enduring and original ideas. Chief among them is that Britain—not America—is the world’s true societal laboratory. In 1985, written in 1978, Burgess lays out a profoundly disturbing picture of Britain as the petri dish of modernity, where welfare, unionism, multiculturalism and Islam are the stress tests not only of modernity, but humanity itself. Burgess asks not how much ruin there is in a nation, but how much can humanity bear before it deforms completely.

Britain as Experimenter, America as Amplifier

In these works, Burgess flips the accepted American post-war cultural triumphalism right on its ass. America, often mythologized as the frontier of freedom and innovation (the Beats! the Hippies!), is actually a mere cultural loudspeaker, amplifying trends rather than initiating them. It is the old mother culture, Britain, that is the place where ideologies are created, lived, legislated and then handed off to Junior for worldwide consumption.

To Burgess, America was centrifugal, theatrical, global-facing—projecting force and culture outward—while Britain remained centripetal, neurotic, domestically obsessed with maintaining internal order. Its origins lay in the class system with the upper classes controlling the working class through culture, the royal family, and the Church.²

In 1985, this tension is everywhere. Burgess doesn’t imagine Britain caught in ideological battle with foreign powers; he imagines it collapsing inward, under the weight of labor disputes, cultural frictions, and institutional fatigue. There can be no American Burgess, because in a collapsing America, he would be writing about militias. In Burgess’ UK, the drama is not military, it’s municipal.

Trade Unions and the “Syndicalist Nightmare”

One of Burgess’s bolder speculations in 1985 is his vision of a Britain overwhelmed not by Big Brother but by Big Labor. He imagines a “syndicalist nightmare,” where trade unions wield more control than Parliament itself. At the time, this wasn’t pure fantasy: the Winter of Discontent had recently paralyzed the country, and union power felt, to many, like an unaccountable fourth branch of government.

This is Burgess’ one misstep. History outpaced him. Thatcherism, the defeat of the miners in 1985, and most important, the broader currents of globalism hollowed out this union-driven future. Containerization, automation, technological change could not be stopped. Even the giant union’s membership figures plummeted, and the political narrative shifted.

Trade Union membership

That said, I don’t think that Burgess’ focus on unions invalidates his core theory. One axis can fall away, leaving new variables to dominate.

Burgess may have fixated narrowly on trade unions, but his broader anxiety—that organized groups could outmuscle traditional state authority—holds. They have simply mutated.

Instead of syndicalist nightmares, we now see forms of horizontal, networked group action—social movements, digital collectives, even populist surges—that reshape political and cultural norms from the ground up.

Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter, or…. why not MAGA? It’s the gravitational pull, not the vessel. These non-bureaucratic, visceral, movements mobilize identity and grievance rather than labor, but the effect is familiar: a challenge to institutional authority from below, or beside.

The organizing logic is still there, but it’s less centralized, more agile, and harder for the state to contain or co-opt. Even mass civil disobedience or decentralized hacktivism could be seen as part of the same lineage Burgess glimpsed, just evolved beyond his institutional lens.

So perhaps his mistake was not in fearing collective force, but in assuming it would stay tethered to 20th-century labor structures. If 1985 reads unions as the looming giant, maybe the 21st-century update is more of a many-headed hydra—chaotic but still capable of challenging the state’s monopoly on force. MAGA to the right, Antifa to the left… now what?

And where is this template originating—the US or the UK?

Multiculturalism and the Rise of Islam

Where Burgess was most clairvoyant—and only very slightly off-key—was in his anticipation of Islam’s growing role in British life. In 1985, he conjures a London “abound[ing] with mosques and rich Arabs,” their influence stretching from the high streets to the schoolrooms (Part II, p. 128).

His emphasis on wealth missed the mark. The cultural shift came not from oil elites but the demographic heft of working-class immigrants from South Asia. Not Mohammad Fayed but many Mohammads from Bradford, Birmingham, and Manchester, chartering buses to ferry thousands of Mohammads to London to demonstrate for Hamas. Still, Burgess’ central point was sound: Britain’s future would be shaped by Islam and the non-Islamic response to Islam.

1985 came out before the first Rushdie fatwa, before 9/11, before “Islamism.” At the time, the projections about Islam were largely met with indifference or bemusement. His depiction of a mosque-dotted London influenced by “rich Arabs” seemed to critics like one of Antony Burgess’ patented eccentric flourishes—out of step with the Britain they saw in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Islam simply wasn’t a central concern in the cultural or political discourse of the era, and critics were far more focused on his Orwell riffs or his dystopian spin on labor relations.

It’s only now that Burgess’s prescience looks less like provocation and more like prophecy. And even now many refuse to see it.

Conclusion: Burgess as Prophet of the Profoundly Disturbing

Burgess’ “petri dish” thesis doesn’t rest on flawless granular prediction but on seeing through the tired trope of “Britain, the fading power.” The UK’s soft power, amplified through the daughter culture (America) is immense. It was and is the incubator of the modern condition. Britain is where the world’s grand social theories get field-tested.

Even his missteps—like misreading the future drivers of Islam in Britain or overestimating the permanence of labor power—only make the theory more vivid. The lab doesn’t always produce the results you expect. That’s the point. But Britain’s the place to look if you want to see the future of the modern world. Right now, the central nervous system of Islam is in Britain, with its energized Muslim population, English language skills, and tech savvy. Not Cairo, not Saudi Arabia.

England.

Burgess and Dick Cavett, 1971

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Tomorrow: more about Mamdani and Glastonbury, with Burgess in mind.

1. “Hastily written,” according to him, not one of his favorites, and butchered by the American publisher, who chopped off the final chapter showing Alex’s redemption.

2. We can see this control today, with the “two-tier” justice, arresting white women for Facebook posts.