Harvey J. Kaye’s The British Marxist Historians, published in 1984, 1995, and 2021, remains the definitive scholarly overview of the CPHG tradition. It covers figures like Raphael Samuel, Maurice Dobb, Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and, to some extent, George Rudé and others. This work is a thorough and rigorous piece of intellectual history that deserves recognition for its quality. Nevertheless, it also exhibits certain blind spots tied to its political stance, and a Marxist critique should honestly acknowledge both its strengths and limitations.
A careful reader would first want to know what Kaye Gets Right. His true contribution is to show the coherence of the British Marxist historians as a group: they not only shared an organisation, the CPHG, established in 1946, but also a common set of intellectual issues, methodological stances, and political motivations. These elements led to a distinctive and impactful body of historical scholarship. Kaye rightly highlights their collective challenge to bourgeois historiography, especially the Whig tradition, which assumed class conflict was incidental rather than fundamental to British social history, as a significant intellectual achievement.
Kaye clearly emphasizes their core methodological perspective: a materialist approach to history that focuses on class relations and economic structures. However, what sets them apart from simple economic determinism is their emphasis on the agency of historical actors, acknowledging that workers and peasants are active participants in history rather than merely passive recipients of structural forces. E.P. Thompson’s remark in the preface to The Making of the English Working Class that class is not just a structure or category but something that happens exemplifies this attempt to integrate structure and agency. Kaye correctly identifies this as the central theme guiding much of the group’s most impactful work.
His treatment of Rodney Hilton’s work on medieval peasantry is especially insightful, showing how Hilton used a rigorous Marxist framework to analyse feudal class structures and peasant uprisings in English medieval history. This approach engages productively with continental debates over the shift from feudalism to capitalism. The discussion about that transition, involving Dobb versus Sweezy, along with subsequent contributions by Hilton, Hill, and others, stands as one of the most important intellectual exchanges in 20th-century Marxist historiography. Kaye presents this debate clearly and fairly.
However, this is the point where Kaye’s account falls short. Despite his sympathy and scholarly effort, Kaye fails to fully address the key political context that influenced the tradition: the Communist Party Historians Group was created, educated, and ideologically limited by British Stalinism and the Comintern’s Popular Front policies. This is not just a minor detail; it is the crucial political backdrop that accounts for both their accomplishments and the inherent structural constraints of their work.
Kaye recognises that these historians were members of the Communist Party and views 1956 as a pivotal moment. However, he considers Stalinism mainly as a political atmosphere that influenced their work, which they partly escaped through their scholarship, rather than as a coherent political agenda that left identifiable distortions in their historical narratives. Ann Talbot offers a more pointed critique of Christopher Hill: she notes that the CPHG historians developed their approach within what she correctly calls “People’s History,” a nationalist historiography that “obscured the class nature of earlier rebels, revolutionaries, and popular leaders by viewing them all as part of a national revolutionary tradition.” This, as Talbot argues, directly reflected “the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to internationalism, and their efforts to form an unprincipled alliance with the supposedly democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis powers.”
This Popular Front framework, promoting socialism within a single nation and prioritising cross-class national alliances over the working class’s internationalism, was intentionally designed rather than accidental. Launched by the Comintern in 1935, it was a strategic approach grounded in a nationalist ‘people’s history,’ exemplified by the CPHG. By framing the history of the English Revolution as a uniquely English revolutionary tradition connecting ‘freeborn Englishmen’ from Winstanley to the Chartists and the Labour movement, it aimed to legitimise Popular Front politics. This approach sought to cultivate a sense of a progressive national tradition capable of uniting different classes toward shared democratic goals.
When evaluated against that standard, British Marxist historians form a significant yet highly compromised tradition. The political context of Popular Front nationalism often limited their ability to make authentic scholarly contributions. They tended to avoid the crucial political issues of the twentieth century, such as the Moscow Trials, the nature of Stalinism, and the Fourth International—particularly at times when these questions were unavoidable. After 1956, their shift toward empiricism, culturalism, and postmodern pluralism reflected an ongoing theoretical and political deadlock. This impasse stemmed from breaking away from capitalism’s subordination but never developing a revolutionary program capable of transcending it.
Kaye surprisingly does not dedicate a full chapter to A.L. Morton in his book, despite Morton being the founder of the CPHG (1903–1987), author of A People’s History of England (1938), and a key figure in establishing the Communist Party Historians Group. This group, formed in Britain in the late 1940s, included notable scholars like Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Maurice Dobb, and Dona Torr, and produced some of the most influential historical works of the twentieth century. However, a fair assessment of their legacy must acknowledge the contradiction that these historians operated within and under Stalinist political regimes.
Recognising this tradition’s achievements is vital. Challenging the dominant “Whig interpretation of history,” which sees Britain as a land of peaceful, gradual progress and organic class harmony, Communist Party historians emphasised that British history was primarily shaped by class struggle and genuine revolutions. This marked a major advancement in historical scholarship. Christopher Hill identified the mid-seventeenth-century crisis as a true bourgeois revolution, not merely a constitutional misunderstanding. Likewise, E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class gave voice to ordinary workers, saving them from condescension and obscurity. These contributions are valuable and continue to deserve recognition.
Ann Talbot explains the Communist Party attracted “minds of the very highest intellectual calibre’ because the traditional institutions of church and state had lost their grip on young intellectuals’ imagination. At the same time, “the Soviet Union seemed to embody all that was new, modern and progressive.” These individuals were not foolish or mere careerists; they were talented people drawn to Marxism during a period of profound social crisis. They found at the party a link to the influential intellectual legacy of Marx and Engels, even if it was somewhat distorted.
However, a rigorous analysis must avoid evasion. Morton’s People’s History of England exemplifies the political distortion that Stalinism brought into this historical tradition. As Talbot directly states: “The Communist Party sponsored a form of ‘People’s History,’ exemplified by A.L. Morton’s People’s History of England, where the class nature of past rebels, revolutionaries, and popular leaders was concealed by viewing them all as part of a national revolutionary tradition.”
This nationalist framing was driven by more than just an intellectual stance. It reflected the historiography of Popular Front politics, the Stalinist approach of the 1930s and 1940s, which placed the working class under the influence of seemingly progressive sections of the bourgeoisie under the guise of anti-fascism. By creating a continuous, fundamentally national tradition of popular resistance—stretching from Wat Tyler and John Ball to the Levellers and Chartism—Morton and the Group provided a usable historical mythos for a politics that had already forsaken internationalism and the independent mobilisation of workers. The Popular Front needed a history that enabled the “people” to unite across class divisions against a shared national foe; Morton’s history fulfilled this need.
This critique extends beyond superficial comments to address fundamental methodological issues. The tendency to blur class distinctions, prioritise national over global concerns, and trivialise past revolutionary efforts as a vague “people’s legacy’ all originate from the Stalinist bureaucracy’s opposition to Trotsky’s doctrine of permanent revolution and international worker solidarity. In this context, ‘people’s history’ serves as the historical analogue to the Moscow Trials, providing a supposed “democratic’ facade for the systematic betrayal and execution of genuine revolutionaries. Talbot insightfully characterises the group’s approach to Marxism as ‘Jesuitical,’ highlighting their ability to compartmentalise—embracing a scientific Marxist perspective while being limited by Stalinist constraints, akin to Jesuit scientists operating within the boundaries set by the Church, but not beyond.
A key aspect often overlooked in the book is Dona Torr’s significance. She truly deserves to be rescued from historical neglect. Dona Torr (1883–1956) occupies a unique and sometimes defining role within the Communist Party Historians Group. Unlike more prolific writers such as Hill or Thompson, she is regarded as the intellectual maternal figure of the tradition—someone who profoundly shaped its viewpoints, methods, and political stance. Acknowledging her contributions is essential for a comprehensive understanding of the Group’s achievements and the notable limitations they faced.
Torr belonged to an earlier generation than the younger historians she mentored. Born in 1883, she was shaped by the pre-war socialist movement and became a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920. A dedicated scholar with excellent language skills, she spent many years as a translator and editor at the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow. There, she produced English editions of Marx and Engels’s selected correspondence and other texts, thereby forging a direct institutional link to the Stalinist leadership. Her role was not that of a peripheral ally but of someone whose academic work was closely integrated into the bureaucracy’s effort to shape and control the Marxist canon.
Her most notable historical contribution was *Tom Mann and His Times* (Volume 1, 1956), a biography of the famous syndicalist and labour organiser published shortly before her death. Only one volume was completed, which is somewhat symbolic of its unfinished nature. Nevertheless, her influence on the Historians Group was more prominent through her role as a teacher, mentor, and political guide to emerging scholars than through her publications.
Ann Talbot’s analysis of Christopher Hill explicitly highlights Torr, along with Maurice Dobb, as the key figure who transmitted the Stalinist political perspective to the Group. Hill, Thompson, Hilton, and Hobsbawm all “came under the influence of Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr.”
This framing is both precise and significant. Torr was not merely an experienced scholar sharing craft knowledge; she served as the conduit through which a politically skewed interpretation of Marxist historiography was passed on to the next generation.
What did this specifically mean? The main distortion was the subordination of internationalist class analysis to a nationalist “people’s history” framework. Torr’s intellectual background, shaped by her years in the Stalinist cultural sector and her involvement in Popular Front politics, inclined her to adopt this framework rather than a true Marxist approach.
The “people’s history” perspective, evident in Morton’s book and throughout the Group, obscures the class nature of historical figures by positioning them within a continuous national tradition of popular struggle. Even the Tom Mann biography illustrates this bias: Mann was a true working-class leader of international significance, but focusing solely on his story within the British radical tradition overlooks the internationalist elements of his politics and his ties to the syndicalist movement.
Hobsbawm: The Most Revealing Case
Kaye shows great respect for Hobsbawm and considering the vastness and productivity of his scholarly work, that respect is well justified. However, Hobsbawm was more than just a historian who was a member of the Communist Party. His Stalinism was not just an incidental aspect of his life; it fundamentally shaped his political conclusions.
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) was the most internationally recognised member of the Communist Party Historians Group and, from a Marxist viewpoint, its most influential and politically insightful figure. His lengthy career, numerous publications, sustained membership in the Communist Party until 1991, and later role in guiding the British Labour Party’s ideological transition toward Blairism make him more than just a prominent nineteenth-century historian. Hobsbawm exemplifies the strong connections between Stalinist politics, historical distortion, and the ongoing suppression of revolutionary consciousness within the working class.
An honest evaluation of Hobsbawm starts with his dealings with the Socialist Labour League and Gerry Healy. The clash between the SLL and Hobsbawm was a key political debate in the postwar history of the British left, with stakes that turned on whether the working class would rise from the 1956 Stalinist crisis with a revolutionary Marxist leadership, or whether that energy would be reintegrated into the existing bourgeois political system. Hobsbawm and Healy clearly exemplify the two main opposing sides of this debate.
The Hungarian Revolution of October 1956 and Khrushchev’s “secret speech” at the 20th Congress of the CPSU earlier that year created the most significant crisis British Stalinism had ever encountered. When Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian workers’ uprising—organised around authentic workers’ councils reminiscent of the October 1917 soviets—thousands of CPGB members faced political upheaval. Among them were leading figures from the Communist Party Historians Group. The pressing questions raised by 1956 were: What is the meaning of Stalinism? Where did it originate? And what should be the future course?
The response to these questions was not merely academic; it determined whether one aimed to rebuild the revolutionary movement on true Marxist principles or drifted into liberal, nationalist, or reformist politics cloaked in terms like “humanism” and “democratic socialism.” As detailed in the document “The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Britain),” Gerry Healy’s faction, “The Club,” which operated within the Labour Party, was uniquely equipped for this moment.
It was the only political group in Britain capable of explaining why Stalinism evolved as it did, because it was the sole tendency that defended Trotsky’s critique of the Soviet state’s degeneration against both Stalinists and Pabloite revisionists within the Fourth International. Healy himself had been expelled from the CPGB in 1937 for questioning the Moscow Trials and spent the subsequent two decades developing a small but theoretically grounded Trotskyist cadre, fighting on two fronts: against the Stalinist bureaucracy and against the Pabloite tendency within the Fourth International that sought to liquidate independent Trotskyist organisations into the mass Stalinist parties.
In 1956, Healy and The Club acted with remarkable energy. They issued pamphlets, distributed copies of Trotsky’s “The Revolution Betrayed,” and Healy personally travelled across the country, meeting dissident CPGB members and urging them to seek a full account of Stalin’s crimes and to study the true history of the Soviet Union. When Peter Fryer, the Daily Worker correspondent whose reports from Hungary had been censored and suppressed by the party, distanced himself from the CPGB, Healy arranged for the publication of his “Hungarian Tragedy” as a widely circulated pamphlet. During the special CPGB congress in April 1957, The Club published a daily bulletin. The Labour Review was reintroduced in January 1957 to foster deeper discussion on the Stalinist crisis and the future of socialism. According to the SEP’s Historical Foundations, Healy’s group was “the only tendency to make any gains from the crisis in British Stalinism.”
The clash between the Trotskyist movement and dissident CP intellectuals, including members of the Historians Group, crystallised during the Wortley Hall Conference in April 1957, organised by the Socialist Forum. This significant event united a wide range of the British left to debate the implications of 1956 and future directions. David North’s political biography of Cliff Slaughter offers an in-depth account of the proceedings and their revelations.
Barbara Slaughter, who was present with Cliff Slaughter, remembered Healy’s speech: “Healy stated that ‘This is the moment to read books. It’s the time to uncover the true history of the Russian Revolution.’ There was no theatrics; he was very composed and self-assured… It seemed he had been waiting for a situation like this for decades.” The Newsletter quoted him as saying: “This is the season for reading books, not burning them. Let’s avoid pre-labelling. Let’s discard demagogy. Don’t elevate anyone to a ‘pedestal.’ Read and explore all perspectives.”
The reaction from the CP Historians Group environment was revealing. John Saville, a leading member of the Historians Group and a close associate of E.P. Thompson, advocated for an essentially nationalist response to the crisis. He argued it was essential to “stop talking hot air and develop a body of Marxist ideas that genuinely resonate with the British working class. This required studying our own workers’ movement and its history, about which there was far too little knowledge.” The SLL’s Newsletter responded sharply: “the real issue facing the socialist movement in 1957 was not a lack of knowledge about events in Manchester or Liverpool in the 1820s, but what had occurred within the Russian Communist Party in the 1920s.”
This exchange highlights the core political divide. The CP Historians Group tradition—represented by Saville’s ideas and, in different contexts, in Thompson’s *New Reasoner* and eventually the *New Left Review*—aimed to address the crisis of Stalinism by focusing on specifically British working-class traditions. This approach intentionally disconnected contemporary socialist politics from the broader revolutionary heritage of Bolshevism and the Left Opposition. E.P. Thompson, who collaborated with Saville in the *New Reasoner*, went further, writing in the *Newsletter* that “positions and attitudes which are labelled ‘Trotskyist’ tend toward the petrification and perpetuation of sectarian division.” As North notes, he remained “a bitter opponent of Trotskyism.”
Hobsbawm’s Position at the Crossroads
Where did Hobsbawm position himself in this context? Unlike Thompson, Hill, and Saville, Hobsbawm did not resign from the Communist Party after the Hungarian repression. He remained—not due to naïve loyalty to socialist ideals, but because, as Ann Talbot’s analysis of his autobiography highlights, he held a deep, considered political belief in the Stalinist structure as a social-order tool rather than an agent of revolution. His admission—that he had “the instincts of a Tory communist “and his joy at Militant’s later expulsion from the Labour Party are not anomalies but consistent signs of a coherent political identity formed during the Popular Front era and never relinquished.
This means that Hobsbawm occupied a position even further removed from the SLL than the Thompson-Saville milieu. While Thompson and the New Left at least formally broke with the CPGB and attempted to construct a “humanist” Marxism outside it, however inadequate and anti-Trotskyist that project remained, Hobsbawm remained openly inside the party. His political function, as both Talbot and North demonstrate, was to provide the Stalinist apparatus with a scholarly and prestigious intellectual face precisely at the moment when it was most vulnerable to the challenge from the Trotskyist left.
The SLL’s Labour Review identified this tendency with precision. The relaunched journal described what kind of Marxist movement it intended to build: “Not a coterie of well-meaning university Dons and writers who have something to say on every subject except the class struggle taking place under their noses; not a party paying lip-service to Marxism but in fact dominated by whichever faction happens to be in control in Moscow.” This formulation — the “university Dons and writers” who could say everything except what mattered about the class struggle is a direct political characterization of the Historians Group milieu, including Hobsbawm.
Cliff Slaughter, himself a former CP member who had joined the Trotskyist movement precisely through the Wortley Hall confrontation, became the SLL’s primary theoretical voice in this polemic. His essay “The ‘New Left’ and the Working Class,” published in Labour Review, identified the core problem of the emerging New Left with clarity: their “effort to direct Marxism away from its concentration on the class struggle as the driving force of history.” He wrote: “It is around the concept of class that the drift from Marxism is concentrated, despite the lip-service paid to Marxism. There is not a scrap of Marxism in any approach to class which does not have class conflict at its core.”
This was a direct theoretical challenge to the historiographical tradition of which Hobsbawm was the most prominent representative. E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class — which would appear in 1963 — was already being gestured at in the New Reasoner discussions: the idea that working-class consciousness was formed primarily through cultural and national experience, through the “peculiarities of the English,” rather than through the international dynamics of the class struggle. Slaughter recognised this for what it was: not an enrichment of Marxism but its dissolution into a form of left nationalism, leaving the working class politically disarmed.
The second most important critique of the politics of Hobsbawm came from David North’s landmark essay “Leon Trotsky and the Fate of Socialism in the Twentieth Century: A Reply to Professor Eric Hobsbawm” North begins his reply saying, “In the course of his long professional career as a historian, he has written many valuable scholarly works. The volumes he devoted to the French Revolution and the development of capitalism in the nineteenth century were thoughtful and sensitive studies.” Hobsbawm’s great “Age of…” tetralogy — The Age of Revolution (1962), The Age of Capital (1975), The Age of Empire (1987), and The Age of Extremes (1994) brought a genuinely sweeping Marxist-influenced analysis of modern world history to a mass readership. His work on banditry, pre-industrial popular protest, the invention of tradition, and nationalism contained real scholarly insights. For whole generations of students, his books provided an entry point into serious historical thinking about capitalism, class, and social transformation.”
These accomplishments merit recognition. However, as North’s direct response to Hobsbawm clarifies, they cannot be separated from or used to justify the deep and ultimately politically harmful distortions of his ideas and public role. Hobsbawm himself admitted that, as a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, he intentionally avoided writing about the Russian Revolution and the twentieth century because “the political line of his party would have prevented him from being entirely truthful.” As David North directly states in his reply: “Why he chose to remain a member of a party that would have forced him to tell lies is a question he has never convincingly answered.”
This confession is more damning than any external criticism. It is Hobsbawm who wrote brilliantly about the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic era, the formation of the labour movement, and the age of capital, and who then, when it came to the central historical questions of his own lifetime, imposed a Stalinist political censorship on his own mind. The same pattern identified by Ann Talbot in the Group as a whole, the “Jesuitical partition” of the intellect, the pursuit of historical science up to the precise point where the bureaucracy drew its line, is openly acknowledged by its most eminent member.
What this means concretely is that in a historian who lived through the Russian Revolution, the rise of fascism, the Moscow Trials, the Hitler-Stalin pact, the Second World War, the Cold War, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and the collapse of the USSR, the most important half of the historical record was either falsified or suppressed in the service of Stalinist politics. And when Hobsbawm finally did write about the twentieth century at length, in The Age of Extremes and in his essay collection On History, the result was precisely what David North’s reply demolishes in forensic detail.
North identifies this as a form of “ultra-deterministic, super-objectivist and fatalistic” historical method that is entirely alien to genuine Marxism. The exposure is incisive. Hobsbawm’s argument runs as follows: the Russian Revolution was, like a natural catastrophe, essentially “uncontrollable”; Lenin’s aims and intentions were “irrelevant” to what the revolution ultimately became; the USSR’s future course was “more or less prescribed” by 1921; and therefore “the rest is speculation.” The Left Opposition, Trotsky’s analysis, the political struggle within the Communist Party during the 1920s — all of this can be set aside. In a 300-page book centrally concerned with the place of the October Revolution in twentieth-century history, Trotsky’s name appears precisely once.
North’s reply is devastating on the methodological point. He writes that Hobsbawm’s position amounts to “starting, and ending, with ‘who won.'” But as North explains, historical materialism does not reduce history to a record of accomplished facts. It examines the contradictory and conflicting elements within the historical process — including the alternatives that were defeated. The struggle of the Left Opposition against the Stalinist bureaucracy “happened.” The murder of thousands of genuine Bolsheviks in the Moscow Trials “happened.” Trotsky’s analysis of the bureaucratic degeneration of the workers’ state “happened.” To exclude these from the historical record because, since Stalin won, there was no point in examining the defeated alternatives is not historical realism — it is apologetics.
The political implication is explicit: if the Stalinist dictatorship was the only plausible outcome of October 1917, then the entire Bolshevik seizure of power becomes historically indefensible. Hobsbawm, North argues, provides “not only an apology for Stalin — ‘objective conditions made him do it’ — but also vindicates the classical liberal bourgeois democratic argument against revolution as an instrument of social change.” By stripping revolutionary parties of any meaningful historical agency, by reducing them to passive vehicles of “uncontrollable” objective forces, Hobsbawm arrives at a historical philosophy that, whatever its intended register, tells the working class: do not attempt to consciously transform society, because history will do with your revolution what it will, and the outcome may be monstrous. This is not Marxism. It is its negation dressed in Marxist language.
Thompson’s Anti-Theoretical Turn
E.P. Thompson presents a different but related problem. Kaye is perceptive about the extraordinary qualities of The Making of the English Working Class — its recovery of artisan radicalism, its insistence on workers as self-making historical agents, its humanist challenge to a certain kind of structuralist Marxism. But Thompson’s later trajectory — culminating in The Poverty of Theory (1978), his polemic against Althusserian structuralism — represents not a deepening of Marxism but a retreat from it. Thompson’s rejection of theory, his empiricist elevation of “historical experience” as the final arbiter against theoretical “models,” was politically connected to his rejection of the revolutionary party and of the ICFI’s insistence on theoretical and political continuity. The attack on Althusser was conducted, whatever Thompson’s intentions, in terms that could equally be used against any systematic Marxist theory, including Trotsky’s. Kaye generally agrees with Thompson’s anti-Althusserian stance and discusses the controversy mainly from Thompson’s perspective. However, the ICFI contends that Thompson’s empiricism—his focus on specific English historical experiences rather than “continental” theoretical ideas—mirrored the nationalist bias evident in post-1956 New Left culture. The “English revolutionary tradition” that Thompson sought to defend ultimately aligned with the British national-state framework rather than a global socialist-revolutionary outlook.
Raphael Samuel and Populism
Raphael Samuel was a somewhat younger figure in this milieu, a student Communist and one of the most energetic organisers of History Workshop, which grew out of the Ruskin College adult education tradition in the 1960s. Samuel became the driving force behind History Workshop Journal (founded in 1976), which sought to democratise historical inquiry, recover the histories of ordinary workers, women, and people with low incomes, and challenge the elitism of academic historiography. His posthumous Theatres of Memory (1994–1998) is his most ambitious intellectual legacy.
Kaye’s account largely ends before Samuel’s most characteristic later work, but the trajectory is instructive. As we discussed previously, Samuel moved from the serious history-from-below of his early research toward an increasingly postmodern celebration of “popular memory,” “theatres of memory,” and the democratic plurality of historical consciousness. Theatres of Memory (1994) represents a Samuel who has essentially dissolved the Marxist analytical framework into a cultural-democratic pluralism that could coexist — as it in fact did — with a sympathetic account of British heritage culture. The class analysis that gave History Workshop Journal its initial power became increasingly optional, then marginal, then absent.
This trajectory from Marxist historiography through cultural studies to postmodern pluralism reflects a deliberate shift tied to a specific political movement. After breaking away from Stalinism in 1956 without adopting Trotskyism, this movement lacked a clear theory of the state, imperialism, or revolutionary strategy. Without these core ideas, the focus on history-from-below naturally evolved into a popular academic trend—populism—that valorised ordinary people’s experiences while leaving the exploitative capitalist system unchallenged in analysis.
Raphael Samuel warrants special attention because his career exemplifies both the authentic energies and the significant political boundaries of the CPHG environment. His initial focus on recovering the history of artisans and the working class — including coal miners from Headington Quarry, navvies, and workshop artisans — represented earnest history from below. Additionally, his vigorous efforts to establish the History Workshop as a truly participatory organisation were impressive.
Samuel gradually shifted from Marxist political economy to celebrating popular culture, memory, and “unofficial knowledge,” ultimately merging class analysis into a form of general populism. ‘Theatres of Memory,’ which focuses on heritage, nostalgia, and the use of the past in modern British culture, exemplifies this development at its most advanced and problematic stage. While the analysis of popular memory and heritage is engaging, it lacks a theoretical framework for the state, imperialism, or revolutionary strategies. This approach aligns more with cultural studies than Marxism. Additionally, Samuel’s later work shows a nostalgic attempt to rehabilitate his own Communist past—not by embracing Trotskyism or confronting Stalinism, but by recalling a sense of working-class culture and solidarity.
Maurice Dobb and the Debate on the Transition to Capitalism
The debate over the shift from feudalism to capitalism, centred on Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946) and Paul Sweezy’s critical reply in Science & Society (1950), is among the most important theoretical disputes in twentieth-century Marxist history. It tackles the key questions of how and why capitalism arose — issues that are not just historical but essential for understanding social change, class struggle, and the essence of capitalism. To analyse this thoroughly, one must place it within the larger political and intellectual framework from which it originated.
Maurice Dobb (1900–1976), a Cambridge economist and longtime Communist Party member, was a key figure in shaping the CP Historians Group’s theoretical foundations, alongside Dona Torr. His book, *Studies in the Development of Capitalism*, was an ambitious effort to trace, from a Marxist perspective, the extensive historical process by which European feudalism gave way to capitalism. While it remains a significant work despite some flaws, it demonstrates a serious engagement with Marx’s political economy and the specific social changes involved.
Dobb argued that capitalism primarily arose from the internal contradictions and class conflicts within feudalism, rather than from trade expansion and merchant capitalism as earlier theories proposed. He highlighted that the key cause was the crisis of feudal production relations. Under feudalism, surplus extraction from peasants depended on economic coercion—lords wielded their monopoly on violence and legal authority to impose rent, services, and dues. This system was inefficient and prone to crises as lords increased exploitation to maintain revenue amid demographic and economic challenges, and peasant resistance grew, eventually rendering the system unsustainable. The decline of serfdom, especially in Western Europe, then opened the path for a new mode of production based on wage labour.
According to Dobb, the key social change was the rise of a class of petty commodity producers—including artisans, yeomen farmers, and small manufacturers—who broke free from feudal dependence and eventually formed the foundation of a capitalist class. Capitalism emerged from within the feudal economy, gradually evolving as small producers expanded and combined to become wage-earner employers. This explanation is primarily endogenous, meaning capitalism developed from the internal dynamics of feudal class relations rather than from external influences such as trade or commerce.
Sweezy’s Challenge: The Role of Trade and Merchant Capital
Paul Sweezy’s 1950 response in Science & Society, subsequently collected in the symposium volume The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (1954) alongside replies by Dobb and contributions from Rodney Hilton, Kohachiro Takahashi, Christopher Hill, and others, mounted a challenge that exposed real tensions within Dobb’s framework while ultimately pointing in a less satisfactory theoretical direction.
Sweezy contended that Dobb’s endogenous explanation underestimated the extent to which external influences shaped the decline of feudalism. He referenced Henri Pirenne’s argument that the resurgence of long-distance trade from the eleventh century was key in dissolving feudal ties. The rise of a monetary economy, the increase of towns as commercial hubs outside the feudal structure, and the growth of merchant capital all created external pressures that unsettled the feudal order — pulling peasants and lords into market dynamics that gradually weakened serfdom and personal dependence.
According to Sweezy, the period between the end of feudalism and the rise of capitalism featured a unique “pre-capitalist commodity production” phase. This stage was neither fully feudal nor entirely capitalist, but dominated by merchant capital and characterised by market-oriented production without widespread wage labour. He viewed this as a vital transitional period that Dobb’s model had overlooked.
The key point is this: if you trace the origins of capitalism mainly to the growth of trade and merchant capital, you inadvertently shift your focus from labour exploitation in production to circulation and exchange. As Beams demonstrates through his examination of Marx’s critique of Proudhon, Marx clearly argued that modern monopoly and competition emerge from the fundamental forces of capitalist production, rather than from an inherent market logic.
Merchant capital penetrating a feudal economy can weaken and destabilise existing relationships without necessarily leading to capitalism. As Marx explained in *Capital*, “The commercial capital, when it holds a dominant position, is everywhere an obstacle to the real capitalist mode of production.” It may act as a force for exploitation without creating the distinct social relations of capitalism, such as widespread wage labour and the constant pressure to innovate in production methods.
The Wider Debate: Hilton, Takahashi, Hill, and the Brenner Thesis
The Science & Society discussion expanded into a wider international debate, with several members of the CP Historians Group participating. Rodney Hilton, the group’s expert in medieval history, strongly endorsed Dobb’s focus on internal class struggle and peasant resistance as the main forces behind the decline of feudalism. His later research on the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and medieval English agrarian society provided detailed historical support for the idea that feudal contradictions arose internally. Hilton emphasised that peasant efforts, such as reducing rents and services, expanding common rights, and gaining personal freedom, were crucial to this process. Serfdom was a decisive historical force in its own right, not a mere symptom of larger structural processes.
Kohachiro Takahashi’s contribution added a comparative perspective, suggesting that Japan’s experience—where merchant capital integrated into a feudal society yet yielded outcomes distinct from those of Western European capitalism—supported Dobb’s argument that the nature of agrarian class relations, rather than trade alone, was the key factor. This comparative approach laid the groundwork for a significant later development in the discussion: Robert Brenner’s research in the 1970s.
Brenner’s intervention, known as the “Brenner Debate,” was sparked by his 1976 article in Past and Present and served both as a development and critique of the Dobb framework. Brenner argued, counter to Sweezy-influenced “commercialisation” explanations and demographic determinist views like those of Michael Postan, that the primary factors influencing different historical trajectories—such as capitalism in England, refeudalisation in Eastern Europe, and ongoing peasant proprietorship in France—were not trade expansion or demographic pressures.
Instead, he focused on the specific nature of agrarian class relations: land ownership, the power dynamics between lords and peasants, and the types of surplus extraction these relations enabled. England’s unique path to agrarian capitalism was shaped by landlord control of land, tenant vulnerability to market forces, and the development of large, consolidated farms using wage labour, the outcomes of medieval class struggles.
Brenner’s work sharpened and extended Dobb’s internalist emphasis while also revealing the implicit political tensions. His insistence on the specificity of class relations countered any mechanistic or teleological reading of the transition — any suggestion that capitalism was simply the “natural” outcome of expanded trade or demographic recovery. But it also raised uncomfortable questions for the CP Historians Group tradition: if capitalism’s origins were so deeply rooted in specific and contingent agrarian class relations, what became of the seamless progressive national narrative — from Peasants’ Revolt to Levellers to Chartism that underpinned the “people’s history” framework?
Any honest evaluation of this debate must consider the political environment in which Dobb operated. Like others in the Group, Dobb was politically shaped by the Communist Party and the Stalinist apparatus. His book, *Studies in the Development of Capitalism*, was published in 1946 — the same year the Cold War began to solidify, and the Popular Front alliance during the war was breaking down into open inter-imperialist rivalry. Ann Talbot’s analysis for WSWS of the CP Historians Group highlights the core distortion that Stalinist politics introduced into their historiography: the substitution of an internationalist class analysis with a nationalist “people’s history” approach, and the masking of the class nature of historical struggles behind a persistent national revolutionary narrative.
Dobb’s work faces criticism, though more subtly than Morton’s explicitly nationalist people’s History. His focus on the small producer, the yeoman farmer, the craftsman, and the emerging petty bourgeoisie implies a political stance: it sees the progressive social force not in the revolutionary workforce but in a “middle” layer between the feudal aristocracy and the rising proletariat. This aligns with Popular Front policies, which aimed to forge cross-class alliances around a “progressive” petty bourgeoisie against the “reactionary” landlord class, instead of promoting working-class independence from both.
Rodney Hilton: The Group’s Medieval Specialist
Rodney Hilton (1916–2002) was the leading expert in medieval English history within the Communist Party Historians Group. His work consistently reflected the group’s strong methodological principles while also highlighting the political limitations faced by its members. At the University of Birmingham, where he taught from 1946 until retirement, his research focused on medieval agrarian society, peasant movements, and the evolving feudal class struggles—primarily in England.
Hilton’s key publications include A Medieval Society: The West Midlands at the End of the Thirteenth Century (1966), Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (1973), The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (1975), and Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism (1985). Throughout his work, Hilton maintained a consistent focus: showing that medieval peasants were not merely passive victims of feudal oppression but active agents in history, whose resistance, organisation, and quest for freedom were central to dismantling the feudal system from within.
The Peasants and the Class Struggle
Hilton’s main contribution was to challenge traditional medieval historiography by emphasising that class struggle is key to understanding medieval society. His analysis of the 1381 English Rising—the Peasants’ Revolt led by Wat Tyler and John Ball—showed that medieval peasants possessed a sophisticated political awareness, clear demands, and the ability to act collectively. Ball’s well-known statement — “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” — reflected Hilton’s view of a genuinely egalitarian ideology rooted in the material realities of feudal exploitation, rather than merely religious or millenarian ideas.
Hilton and the Transition Debate
Hilton’s contribution to the Dobb-Sweezy debate, through his essay in the Science & Society symposium and his later work, strongly aligned with Dobb’s focus on class struggle as the key factor in overcoming feudalism. While Sweezy emphasised the external influence of merchant capital and trade, Hilton argued that the internal dynamics of the feudal relationship between lords and peasants—such as disputes over rents, labour obligations, and villeinage conditions—were crucial to explaining the collapse of feudalism and the rise of capitalism.
This was more than a methodological choice; it was a solid historical argument. Hilton’s in-depth understanding of the English medieval countryside demonstrated, through empirical evidence, that the decline of feudalism in the 14th and 15th centuries was directly linked to increasing peasant resistance, their capacity to leverage demographic crises to better their conditions, and ultimately the end of serfdom. This was driven not by a broad expansion of trade but by the particular balance of class forces within the English countryside.
Simultaneously, the same limitation we discussed earlier regarding Dobb applies here: Hilton’s analysis mainly focused on the English context, specifically the dynamics of the English manor and village community. The broader international framework — linking English agrarian change to the wider European and global context of primitive accumulation, colonial exploitation, and the Atlantic slave trade — was never fully incorporated into his work. This reflects a common limitation of the entire Group: their adherence to a national perspective, shaped by the Popular Front politics that Dona Torr and Maurice Dobb had passed on to the next generation, which even limited their most thorough scholarship.
1956 and Hilton’s Response
Unlike Thompson and Hill, Hilton remained in the Communist Party after 1956. This is a significant biographical fact. His response to the Hungarian Revolution and Khrushchev’s secret speech was to stay, which, in this crucial respect, placed him closer to Hobsbawm than to Thompson. He did not experience 1956 as a decisive political rupture requiring a reconsideration of the fundamental framework. This is consistent with the character of his historical work: Hilton was among the Group’s most consistently “orthodox” members in his political affiliations, less inclined towards the cultural and humanist departures that characterised Thompson’s trajectory, and thus less subject to the kind of crisis of conscience that forced some of the Group’s intellectuals to confront their relationship to Stalinism more directly.
This is a significant biographical detail. The historian who remained in the party after the Hungarian workers’ uprising was suppressed made a political decision, perhaps not fully conscious or articulated, but real, that maintaining organisational continuity with the Stalinist system takes precedence over the political clarity that honest engagement with those events would demand. In Hilton’s case, this decision did not lead to obvious distortions in his medieval scholarship, which was removed from the immediate political debates of 1956. However, it implied that the political context in which he worked — and which influenced the “people’s history” tradition he helped develop — was never subjected to the critical examination required by a true break from Stalinism.
Kaye’s conclusion highlights the importance of the Group’s legacy—such as “history from below,’ recovering class formation, and emphasising the working class as a historical agent—which remain vital for revitalising the socialist left. He views their work as a tool to counteract both postmodernist doubts about historical agency and Thatcherite claims of ‘the end of socialism.” There is real value in defending historical materialism against postmodern ideas that dissolve class analysis. The same fundamental limitation as the tradition he champions: it. The text is situated within a social-democratic and Popular Front political context. The group’s focus on “history from below” is not aimed at creating an independent revolutionary party for the working class. Instead, it serves as cultural and intellectual backing for left-wing activities within bourgeois democratic institutions — primarily, the Democratic Party in the American setting where Kaye operates. The radical democratic tradition, drawn from Thompson, Hill, and others, is used by Kaye to justify progressive-patriotic politics, similar to Sanders’ approach of “reclaiming the American tradition.” The ICFI sees this as a means of subordinating workers to the ruling class.
The Communist Party Historians Group produced genuine intellectual achievements against the dominant tide of conservative and liberal academic historiography. Their insistence on class, on revolution, on the agency of ordinary people was real and valuable. But their political formation within Stalinism imposed an indelible nationalist distortion on their work, prevented serious engagement with the history of the Fourth International and the fight against the Moscow Trials, and ultimately left them without the theoretical and political resources to develop beyond populism and culturalism when the Stalinist framework itself collapsed.
Kaye’s British Marxist Historians is a valuable survey and remains a useful starting point for anyone studying this tradition. But it cannot provide what a genuinely Marxist assessment requires: an evaluation of the CPHG tradition against the standard of the political continuity of Marxism, not merely its intellectual achievements. That standard is provided by the Fourth International and its history by the fight of the Left Opposition against Stalinist falsification, by the defence of the October Revolution against both Stalinist bureaucratism and bourgeois reaction, and by the sustained theoretical work of the ICFI.
Notes
“These are the times … this is the man”: an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill- www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
The Historians’ Group of the Communist Party-Eric Hobsbawm-www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/the-historians-group-of-the-communist-party.
The New Left Must Look to the Working Class Gerry Healy Labour Review Oct- Nov 1959
An Unreasonable Reasoner Editorial Labour Review Vol 3 No 2 March April 1958
Leon Trotsky and the Fate of Socialism in the 20th Century: A Reply to Professor Eric Hobsbawm, by David North, 3 January 1998.
A Trumpet of Sedition 