Raphael Samuel (1934–1996) was a leading figure in post-war British historical culture. He was a Marxist/Stalinist-trained intellectual, a founder member of the History Workshop movement and the journal History Workshop, and a powerful advocate for what became known as “history from below”, the study of the social and cultural lives of ordinary people rather than ruling elites.
Samuel was not an orthodox historian by any stretch of the imagination. Anyone studying Samuel’s archive at the Bishopsgate Institute would see that his note-taking and working methods were chaotic at best. According to Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite ‘ Each thought or reference to a source was written or pasted onto a single side of a loose sheet of paper. It might be the source itself – an advertisement, a jam-jar label or an extract from a Xerox – it mattered only that it was attributed and sub-headed under a theme. Then the notes were filed in groups. Scholarly prestidigitation allowed the pages to be constantly reshuffled so that new combinations of ideas appeared, presuppositions might be overturned, and surprising connections thereby be generated. All that was needed was reams of rough paper, scissors and a pot of glue, phalanxes of lever-arch files, and a hole-puncher.’[1]
His method and traits were learnt from Beatrice and Sidney Webb, progenitors of Fabian socialism, who developed it in the late 19th century. Samuel would have absorbed not only their note-taking style but a large chunk of their politics. But his work revitalised popular and local history, encouraged collective research methods, and brought working-class memory, oral testimony, and archival recovery into historians’ practice. These are enduring gains. The recovery of workers’ lived experience helps counter the abstractions and elitism of bourgeois historiography.
Before founding the Universities Left Review, Samuel was a member of the British Communist Party. He left two years after Kruschev’s secret speech. He was a very young member of the Communist Party Historians Group. The CPHG arose inside and around the British Communist Party and the wider milieu of Communist and labour politics between the 1930s and 1950s. Its best‑known members—E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill and others—produced influential work that challenged bourgeois and Whig traditions of national history and insisted on the agency of popular classes. The group’s scholarship should be read against the background of the political orientation of the Stalinist bureaucracy—its Popular Front politics, its nationalism and its accommodation to bourgeois forces—which indelibly affected the intellectual formation and institutional constraints faced by historians working within or alongside the Party.
The CPHG did, however, make enduring contributions to socialist historiography. It overturned Whig teleology, insisted that ordinary people make history, and enriched archival and methodological practice. These were advances that Marxists should defend and extend. However, the group’s political roots in a Stalinist‑influenced party had concrete consequences. The Communist Party’s “People’s History” orientation and Popular Front politics tended to domesticate class conflict, subordinating proletarian independence to alliances with liberal or petty‑bourgeois currents. The result was, at times, an apologetic stance toward state bureaucracy and a reluctance to carry the political implications of Marxist analysis into the present.
Raphael Samuel and the Universities Left Review
Samuel was a leading British Marxist historian and a central figure in the post‑war “history from below” movement. He helped found the History Workshop and was associated with the small‑circulation left journals and intellectual networks that emerged in Britain in the 1950s and 60s, among them the Universities and Left Review (ULR). ULR (1957–60) brought together student radicals, young intellectuals and some socialist critics of the university and the Labour Party. It aimed to radicalise university life and cultural debate, critiquing orthodox academic history and promoting popular and labour history.
Samuel’s main collaborator on ULR was Stuart Hall. Hall’s political and intellectual trajectory—from the Universities and Left Review (ULR) and the New Left to Cultural Studies and his later role in Marxism Today was the product of definite class formations, political realignments and the changing social position of layers of the intelligentsia after World War II. Hall’s work cannot be treated as an abstract contribution to theory divorced from the social interests it expresses.
As Paul Bond writes,‘ Hall’s central theme was the repudiation of the class struggle as the axis of social development, as this assumes that the working class is the decisive agent of political change. Instead, he argued for a turn to the cultural sphere. This was not a Marxist appraisal or critique of culture, but the elevation of “culture” as an arena contested by different “agencies”. Longtime Pabloite Tariq Ali wrote that Hall said, “half-joking to friends that his cultural studies project was politics by other means”. That indeed it was: a project that replaced class as the central political factor by race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality and other “sub-cultures” and “identities”, making it impossible, in the end, to address capitalist exploitation. Instead, the struggle had to be conducted in every supposedly “relatively autonomous” sphere. The logic led to garden-variety single-issue, bourgeois-reformist politics, as an article Hall co-authored last year made clear: “Mobilising resistance thus requires alliances of a sort which only a multi-focused political strategy can hope to construct”.[2]
From a historical‑materialist standpoint, the importance of Samuel, Hall and their ULR project lies less in any single programmatic contribution than in the social position they occupied: a layer of petty‑bourgeois intellectuals reacting to the crises of post‑war capitalism and the limitations of established reformist politics. Their cultural interventions—renewed attention to working‑class experience, local history and culture—were progressive in exposing bourgeois narratives and recuperating popular memory. Yet, understood in class terms, this milieu tended to substitute cultural critique for a political orientation to the working class as a revolutionary subject.
Samuel was in the Communist Party at the same time as the founder of People’s History, A.L. Morton. As Ann Talbot brings out in her essay on Christopher Hill, “The Communist Party sponsored a form of ‘People’s History’, which is typified by A.L. Morton’s People’s History of England, in which the class character of earlier rebels, revolutionaries and popular leaders was obscured by regarding them all as representatives of a national revolutionary tradition. This historical approach reflected the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to internationalism and their attempts to form an unprincipled alliance with the supposedly democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis countries.
People’s history was an attempt to give some historical foundation to the policies of Popular Front—the subordination of the working class to supposedly progressive sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of political action to the defence of bourgeois democracy, which provided a democratic facade to the systematic murder of thousands of genuine revolutionaries, including Trotsky. It was the approach that Christopher Hill was trained in, along with E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, who were part of the Marxist Historians Group and came under the influence of Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr.’ [3]
The ULR and similar currents reflected objective social forces: a post‑war expansion of higher education, the growth of a politically conscious intelligentsia, and the fragmentation of the labour movement. These social origins explain both the strengths and limits of the project. Samuel’s cultivation of popular history responded to an objective weakness: official historiography ignored the working class. But the limitations were also objective: petty‑bourgeois layers, detached from a sustained orientation to working‑class organisation, are prone to turning working‑class culture into a form of moral critique rather than mobilising it as the basis for revolutionary political independence.
The lessons of Samuel and the ULR are twofold and complementary. First, recovering working‑class history and culture is necessary: it combats bourgeois erasure, builds pride, and strengthens class identity. Second—and decisive—cultural work must be subordinated to political orientation: it must be used to connect workers to a programmatic, internationalist Marxist perspective and to build rank‑and‑file organisation and a revolutionary party. Without that link, cultural renewal risks becoming an appendage of liberal reformism or of petty‑bourgeois radicalism.
Workshop of the World
Raphael Samuel’s essays, collected in this book, came under the rubric of a “people’s history”. They include material often associated with the idea of Britain as the “workshop of the world”. They do offer rich documentary and cultural evidence about working‑class life, memory and resistance. Samuel’s micro‑histories become instruments for understanding how material conditions, class formation and consciousness interact.
He helped institutionalise a new historical practice—through the History Workshop movement and collections of oral histories and local studies—that shifted attention away from great men and state archives toward popular culture, labour traditions and everyday life. This intervention broke important ground: it democratised history, widened the sources, and made working-class experience visible in ways that conventional academic histories often ignored. Yet, from a classical Marxist and Fourth International standpoint, Samuel’s legacy is both positive and limited.
Samuel’s History Workshop arose in the 1960s and 1970s amid rising labour militancy and intellectual currents that critiqued elitist historiography. He collected oral testimony, household economies, popular ritual, and the souvenirs of everyday life. This expanded the archive, exposed working‑class creative resistance and revealed how consciousness is formed through struggle, culture and community. These contributions are invaluable for socialists building working‑class memory and confidence.
But Samuel’s practice frequently stopped at descriptive recovery. While he emphasised the autonomy and creativity of popular traditions, he often treated culture as an end in itself—celebrating particularisms and local solidarities without always linking them systematically to the political organisation required to overthrow capital. In moments where the transformation of society is the question, empirical cultural history must be integrated with an analysis of capitalist accumulation, state power and the strategy of revolutionary organisation.
Samuel emerged in the same milieu that produced the 1960s New Left and the cultural turn in history. That milieu included significant intellectual currents hostile to classical materialism — strands of the Frankfurt School, post-Marxist and post-structuralist thought.
The domination of this school of thought meant the working class paid a heavy price for this fragmentation of the working-class perspective. Samuel’s work, while recuperative of working-class sources, often stopped short of linking that history to a program for working-class political independence. Samuel’s practical insistence that historians listen to workers, use oral history, and develop local archives advanced the working class’s capacity to know itself. This recuperation of proletarian experience strengthens historical consciousness when it is anchored in a materialist understanding of class relations.
At the same time, Samuel’s culturalism and the New Left milieu into which he was embedded often moved away from a rigorous classical Marxist method. The petty-bourgeois currents of the New Left tended to relativise class as the central subject of history and to prioritise cultural, identity, or therapeutic frameworks over an analysis anchored in production and property relations.
Robert Tressell and the Early Socialists
There are two chapters in the book that I want to pay particular attention to. Robert Tressell (Robert Noonan), author of The Ragged‑Trousered Philanthropists, occupies an important place in the cultural and political formation of British working‑class socialism. His novel gives an unsparing depiction of artisan and factory life, petty‑bourgeois illusions, and the corrosive ethics of capitalist wage relations.
But to situate Tressell historically and theoretically, it is important to locate him within the longer trajectory from the early socialists and utopian currents to the emergence of scientific Marxism and the revolutionary program defended by the Marxists. Socialists like Fourier, Owen, Saint‑Simon, and later various British and French reformers raised vital moral and institutional objections to capitalist misery. They exposed capitalism’s inhumanity and proposed cooperative or communal remedies. Tressell’s literary moralism continues that tradition. His vivid exposé of exploitation aimed to awaken sympathy and spur reform among his readers.
Tressell’s milieu in Edwardian Britain was artisans, small contractors, and a growing industrial proletariat showing both the objective development of capitalist productive forces and the subjective unevenness of working‑class consciousness. Tressell’s novel contributes to shaping consciousness but cannot substitute for organised, political working‑class activity.
Origins of People’s History
Samuel’s essay on People’s History is probably one of his finest. Under the guise of the People’s History genre, it reopened questions long suppressed by institutional historiography: ritual, popular politics, communal solidarities, and the cultural forms that sustain working-class life.
People’s history—often called “history from below” was not merely a literary genre but a social product rooted in class relations. From the standpoint of the materialist conception of history, historical consciousness arises out of concrete social practice: collective labour, struggle, deprivation and organisation produce memories, traditions and forms of political culture. As Plekhanov stressed in tracing the emergence of the theory of class struggle, ideas about history flow from changes in property relations and social development; historians who ignore class obscure the motor forces of social change.
In Britain, after World War II and especially from the late 1960s, Raphael Samuel and the History Workshop movement institutionalised the turn to popular and cultural history. They emphasised archives of everyday life, oral history and collective memory, seeking to make the working class visible within historical narrative. This cultural recovery reflected real social processes: the postwar restructuring of capitalism, renewed political radicalism among students and workers, and a crisis in the authority of traditional elites.
There is a progressive side to the genre in that, correctly applied, it undermines the bourgeois monopoly on the past, restores agency to workers and oppressed groups, and supplies documentary armour for organising—stories of strikes, self‑organisation and mutual aid that can inspire present struggles. Recovering these experiences helps politicise layers of working people by showing that social change was made by ordinary people, not by abstract “great men.”
However, when detached from a dialectical, class‑struggle method, people’s history can become an end in itself: localist nostalgia, culturalism, or therapeutic memorialising that fails to connect the past to present class relations and the necessity of a revolutionary program.
Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory, 1994
Samuel did not write many books but concentrated on essay writing. He only wrote one sole-authored book in his lifetime, Theatres of Memory (1994). A second volume of Theatres of Memory, titled Island Stories: Unravelling Britain, was published in 1998, after his death.
As Samuel McIlhagga points out, ‘It is perhaps a unique feature of British intellectual culture that its greatest Marxists have more often been essayists than authors of lengthy theoretical treatises. The self-contained responses to a specific political or historical problem, or the witty corrective to dominant orthodoxies, are well suited to a nation whose intellectual elite are as closed and coherent as Britain’s. When E. P. Thompson wrote “The Peculiarities of the English,” his breathless polemic seeking to correct a dismissive attitude to the radicalism of his country’s history found in the work of the Marxist writers Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn, he was pitting himself against two thinkers whom he knew personally and who edited a journal to which he, too, had contributed.[4]
Samuel’s was a new orientation which drew on Marxist themes of class, labour, and social conflict. Still, he combined them with a broad culturalist sensibility and an emphasis on the historian as activist-organiser. From the standpoint of classical Marxism, this combination has both strengths and weaknesses. It should be pointed out that Samuel was not a classical Marxist.
Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory (1994, ed. with Paul Thompson) was a foundational intervention in the study of popular memory, oral history and the politics of historical representation. Samuel recasts history as a living, contested cultural terrain: memory is staged, rehearsed and institutionalised in festivals, museums, songs, local traditions and archives. There are similarities and major differences between Samuel’s work and E.P. Thompson’s. Thompson (The Making of the English Working Class) developed a class-formation method that treated class as a historical process: classes are made through concrete struggles, economic relations and political experience, not by sociological labels or algebraic categories. Thompson insisted on grounding consciousness in workers’ material conditions and lived struggles.
Samuel, on the other hand, followed a culturalist tradition, i.e., history-from-below, collective memory, institutions, everyday life, shifting attention to the cultural forms, practices, and repositories through which people experience, narrate, and reproduce social life — oral tradition, rituals, popular politics, festivals, literary tastes, and memory.
These two contending historiographical approaches clashed in 1979. According to Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, “The 1979 History Workshop staged a rehashing of what was already one of the most vituperative disputes on the New Left, between E.P. Thompson and the advocates of ‘theory’. Thompson ripped into the other speakers, Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson. The atmosphere, as Sophie Scott-Brown describes in her excellent 2017 biography of Samuel, was already bad. The Ruskin student collective organising the conference wasn’t keen on the theoretical preoccupations of many academics in the History Workshop editorial collective; some members had already suggested forming a breakaway workshop to get back to the study of labour history. After Thompson’s blow-up, the final plenary session was quietly cancelled. Samuel, who probably took this decision, was essentially a Thompsonian: he defended a focus on ‘real life experience’ and empirical work, which he suggested could ‘do more for our theoretical understanding of ideology and consciousness than any number of further “interpellations” on the theme of “relative autonomy”. (A dig at Althusserians.) Samuel pointed out that, like ‘any other intellectual artefact’, theory isn’t timeless but ‘has its material and ideological conditions of existence’. But he wasn’t entirely a sceptic, arguing that good history required a ‘theoretically informed’ understanding of language, and that socialism required a serious analysis of ‘bourgeois ideology’.[5]
The dispute between E.P. Thompson and Stuart Hall was not merely an academic quarrel about sources or style. It expresses two antagonistic tendencies in the British left: Thompson’s historical‑materialist, class‑formation method, which locates class consciousness in concrete economic relations, struggles and political experience, and Hall’s culturalist turn, which relocates political explanation in culture, identity and “articulations” of meaning.
Contemporary relevance
Samuel’s method of reconstructing working-class experience: oral histories, rank-and-file reportage, and cultural memory are weapons against ideological amnesia. Culture can strengthen class identity, but without a program that explains how capital reproduces itself, and without organisation to transform class interests into political power, cultural mobilisation risks becoming either reformist co‑optation or nostalgic particularism. The dialectic here is crucial: cultural consciousness both expresses and shapes class struggle, but it is itself transformed by objective changes in production and by political leadership.
From the standpoint of classical Marxism, Raphael Samuel’s recovery of popular memory is an essential resource—but it must be subordinated to a revolutionary program. Marxist historiography does not merely collect fragments of working‑class life; it explains how those fragments arise from class relations and how they can be mobilised for socialist transformation. This rejects both bourgeois culturalism, which divorces culture from economics, and reformist populism, which equates cultural recognition with systemic change.
[1] Ladders last a long time-www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n10/florence-sutcliffe-braithwaite/ladders-last-a-long-time
[2] Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014): A political career dedicated to opposing Marxism-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/03/05/hall-m05.html
[3] “These the times … this the man”: an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
[4] Why Raphael Samuel Matters-https://jacobin.com/2024/05/raphael-samuel-workshop-of-the-world
[5] Ladders last a long time-www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n10/florence-sutcliffe-braithwaite/ladders-last-a-long-time
A Trumpet of Sedition 