7 October 2026
The Communist Party Historians Group and the journal Historical Materialism hold a special place in the mythology of the academic left. The former is recognised as the origin of “history from below,” while the latter is regarded as the leading platform for Marxist scholarship in the English-speaking world. Their reputations rest on genuine intellectual accomplishments, such as uncovering plebeian agency, exploring new archival sources, and emphasising that ordinary people are active participants in history rather than passive subjects. However, reputation is not history, which calls for critical assessment. When scrutinised, both institutions appear less as examples of Marxist continuity and more as representations of a political tradition that systematically distorts Marxism, namely, Stalinism and its enduring influence in academic circles.
The connection between the two is intentional, highlighting a deeper historical issue that was never fully addressed: the Stalinist bureaucracy’s betrayal of the October Revolution and the long fight against that betrayal, led by Leon Trotsky and the Fourth International and avoiding this issue, either by repression, displacement, or moralising, shaped British Marxist historiography from the 1940s onward. As a result, the scholarship became detailed and impressive but often avoided fundamental principles, providing rich empirical insights yet lacking political clarity.
The Communist Party Historians Group formed after World War II, when the Soviet Union’s influence was at its peak, and the Popular Front approach was central to the global communist movement. Its prominent members, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, George Rudé, E.P. Thompson, Victor Kiernan, and Raphael Samuel, were highly talented scholars. However, their work was aligned with the CPGB’s political agenda, which aimed to forge a national “radical tradition” compatible with the British Road to Socialism. Re-examining groups like the Levellers, Diggers, and Chartists was politically motivated; it aimed to portray socialism as the natural outcome of England’s constitutional evolution rather than as a result of an international revolutionary fight against capitalism.
This orientation had notable consequences. The major questions of the 20th century, such as the Russian Revolution, fascism’s rise, Stalinism’s decline, the Moscow Trials, and the Spanish Civil War, were largely sidestepped. Addressing these events honestly meant confronting Stalinism’s crimes and Trotsky’s analysis of them, which was impossible within the CPGB. As a result, avoidance became a key feature of the Group’s historiography. Even the 1956 crisis, which undermined the CPGB’s moral authority, led to disillusionment but offered no clear theoretical insights. Those who left the party did not turn to Trotskyism but to the New Left, which promoted a moralistic “socialist humanism” that condemned Stalinist crimes while still opposing revolutionary Marxism.
Founded in the 1990s, Historical Materialism inherited this unresolved legacy. It claims to be pluralist and non-sectarian, serving as a forum for various Marxist research approaches. However, its core principle is not to maintain Marxism’s continuity but to promote its academic fragmentation. The journal encompasses value-form theory, Political Marxism, Open Marxism, social reproduction theory, and numerous attempts to reconcile Marx with identity politics; all coexist without resolving their contradictions. While open to debate on many issues, it excludes the crucial question of which political tendency best represents Marx’s continuity in opposition to Stalinism and social democracy.
The result is a Marxism without a party, strategy, or historical responsibility. The trajectory from the Historians Group to Historical Materialism reveals a clear social layer: intellectuals oriented not to the working class as an independent revolutionary force but to the institutions of the trade union bureaucracy, the Labour Party, NGOs, and the academy. Their achievements deserve study, but their political evasions demand critique. This introduction begins that balance sheet.
A Product of the Popular Front
The Historians Group, founded in 1946 under the auspices of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), brought together Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, Dorothy Thompson, Rodney Hilton, Victor Kiernan, George Rudé, John Saville and Raphael Samuel, under the mentorship of Dona Torr. Their archival skill, literary talent and historical imagination were extraordinary. But talent does not determine political orientation, and the Group’s work was shaped from the outset by the political line of the party it served. The CPGB was not a neutral intellectual environment; it was the British section of a Stalinist movement whose theoretical framework, strategic orientation and historical narrative were determined by the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy. The Historians Group inherited not only the party’s organisational discipline but also its ideological boundaries.
That line was the Popular Front and, from 1951, the British Road to Socialism: a nationalist programme of parliamentary transition in alliance with “progressive” sections of the bourgeoisie. The Historians Group provided this programme with a historical genealogy. Their search for a native “radical tradition” stretching from the Peasants’ Revolt through the Levellers and Chartists was not simply antiquarian enthusiasm. It was a political project: to present socialism as the culmination of English constitutional development rather than the product of an international revolutionary struggle against capitalism. The English working class was to be imagined not as the subject of a global revolutionary process but as the inheritor of a peculiarly national democratic lineage. This was a profoundly conservative reinterpretation of Marxism, subordinating class struggle to national tradition and revolutionary internationalism to parliamentary gradualism.
Their selective historical focus was revealing. The Group concentrated overwhelmingly on medieval and early modern England, and on the 18th and 19th centuries. The decisive questions of the 20th century- the Russian Revolution, the rise of fascism, the Stalinist degeneration, the Moscow Trials, the Spanish Civil War- were left largely untouched. This was not an accident of scholarly interest. To confront these events honestly meant confronting the record of Stalinism and Trotsky’s analysis of it. That confrontation was politically impossible within the CPGB. The party’s official narrative presented the Soviet Union as a socialist state, Stalin as the defender of October, and Trotsky as a counter‑revolutionary. Any serious engagement with the Left Opposition, the theory of permanent revolution, or the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet state would have directly challenged the CPGB’s ideological foundations.
The avoidance of the 20th century was therefore not a gap but a strategy. It allowed the Historians Group to pursue a form of Marxist scholarship that appeared radical while remaining politically safe. By rooting their work in the distant past, they could explore class conflict, popular mobilisation and revolutionary upheaval without ever touching the explosive questions of their own time. The English Revolution could be studied; the Russian Revolution could not. The Chartists could be celebrated; the Left Opposition had to be ignored. The result was a Marxism that was historically adventurous but politically domesticated.
Even when the crisis of 1956 shattered the moral authority of the CPGB-Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, the Hungarian Revolution, the exposure of Stalin’s crimes- the Group did not undertake a reckoning with the political foundations of their work. Thompson and Saville broke with the party, but not with the ideological framework that had shaped their historiography. They turned instead to the New Left, whose moralistic “socialist humanism” rejected Stalinism’s brutality while retaining its hostility to revolutionary Marxism. Hobsbawm remained in the CPGB until its dissolution in 1991, and his later work, most notably The Age of Extremes, continued to dismiss Trotskyism as historically irrelevant.
1956: A Crisis Without a Reckoning
The events of 1956-Khrushchev’s Secret Speech and the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution- shattered the Historians Group and exposed the political foundations on which their scholarship had rested. The revelations of Stalin’s crimes, delivered from the podium of the 20th Congress, and the brutal crushing of workers’ councils in Budapest, produced a crisis of conscience within the CPGB that no amount of theoretical evasion could contain. Thompson and Saville launched The Reasoner in defiance of the party leadership, demanding a reckoning with Stalinism and the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet state. Hill, Hilton, Rudé and others left the party. Hill’s minority report on inner‑party democracy, which called for open discussion of the Soviet experience, was rejected outright.
These departures are often mythologised as an awakening, a moment when the Historians Group broke free from Stalinist orthodoxy and rediscovered Marxism’s authentic spirit. They were nothing of the kind. Those who left did not turn to the one tendency that had foreseen, analysed and explained the crimes now reluctantly acknowledged in Moscow. They did not seek out the writings of Trotsky, who had exposed the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union in The Revolution Betrayed and warned that Stalinism represented not the continuation of October but its negation. They did not engage with the programme of the Fourth International, which alone had defended the principles of revolutionary internationalism against the Stalinist bureaucracy’s nationalist distortions.
Instead, they turned to the New Left: a diffuse, moralistic “socialist humanism” that rejected Stalinism’s crimes while retaining its hostility to the revolutionary party and to Trotskyism. The New Left offered a way out of the CPGB without confronting the political roots of its degeneration. It replaced Marxist analysis with ethical protest, class politics with cultural critique, and revolutionary strategy with moral indignation. It was a movement defined by what it refused to examine: the class nature of the bureaucracy, the international character of the working‑class struggle, and the decisive role of leadership in revolutionary situations.
Thompson’s later polemic The Poverty of Theory (1978), directed against Althusser, is emblematic of this trajectory. It is often celebrated as a defence of historical agency and empirical craft against structuralist abstraction. But it was not a reckoning with the political foundations of Stalinism or with the bureaucratic caste that had usurped power in the Soviet Union. Thompson defended moral agency, but he did not confront the bureaucracy’s class roots. He rejected Stalinism’s crimes, but he did not examine the political programme that had opposed those crimes from the beginning. His hostility to Trotskyism remained intact, and with it the theoretical blind spot that had shaped the Historians Group from the outset.
Hobsbawm, for his part, remained in the CPGB until its dissolution in 1991, and his later work showed it. The Age of Extremes treats the Soviet experience as a failed but understandable experiment, while dismissing the Left Opposition as historically irrelevant. The bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet state is presented not as a betrayal of October but as an unfortunate deviation within an otherwise legitimate socialist project. In the 1980s, Hobsbawm became the leading theoretician of Eurocommunism, providing the intellectual rationale for the rightward drift that culminated in Blairism. His arguments that the “forward march of labour halted” supplied the ideological justification for abandoning class politics and embracing parliamentary centrism.
The crisis of 1956 produced disillusionment but not clarification. It was a political rupture without a theoretical reckoning. The Historians Group fractured, but the underlying political questions remained unexamined. The avoidance of Trotskyism persisted, now refracted through the New Left’s moralism and Eurocommunism’s pragmatism. The central problem of the 20th century- the betrayal of the October Revolution by the Stalinist bureaucracy- was displaced rather than confronted. The result was a historiography that remained brilliant in detail but evasive in principle, rich in empirical recovery but impoverished in political clarity.
1956 should have been the moment when British Marxist historiography broke decisively with Stalinism and rediscovered the revolutionary internationalism of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. Instead, it became the moment when the academic left retreated from revolutionary politics altogether. That retreat would shape the intellectual landscape for decades, culminating in the academic pluralism of Historical Materialism and the political disorientation of the contemporary left.
Historical Materialism: Marxism Without a Party
Founded at the London School of Economics in the 1990s, Historical Materialism presents itself as non‑sectarian and pluralist, a home for “Marxist research” of every variety. Its conferences and book series attract hundreds of academics, graduate students and activists, and its pages host debates ranging from value‑form theory to social reproduction, from Political Marxism to Frankfurt School critical theory. On the surface, it appears to be the intellectual centre of contemporary Marxist scholarship in the English‑speaking world. But appearances are not politics, and the journal’s self‑presentation conceals a deeper continuity with the tradition from which it emerged.
In a crucial sense, Historical Materialism is the heir of the trajectory shaped by the Communist Party Historians Group. The Group’s focus on the transition from feudalism to capitalism ran through the Dobb–Sweezy debate of the 1950s, the founding of Past & Present, and into the Brenner debate of the 1970s. “Political Marxism,” the school associated with Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood, has been one of the most heavily discussed currents in Historical Materialism. The journal inherited not only the thematic preoccupations of the earlier generation- class formation, agrarian capitalism, the origins of bourgeois society- but also its political evasions. The central historical problem of the 20th century, the betrayal of the October Revolution by the Stalinist bureaucracy, remained unexamined.
The journal’s core is not the ongoing tradition of Marxism but rather its academic specialisation. The division of Marxist theory into various subfields such as value-form theory, Open Marxism, social reproduction theory, critical theory, cultural Marxism, and the ongoing debates between Marx and identity politics demonstrates more political confusion than scholarly depth. These different approaches coexist without efforts to reconcile their contradictions. The journal’s diversity does not produce a unified perspective but highlights a refusal to face a critical question: which political vision truly continues Marxism beyond Stalinism and social democracy?
This refusal is not accidental. It is the ideological expression of a social layer whose relationship to Marxism is academic rather than revolutionary. The journal’s pluralism is a form of political agnosticism, a way to avoid the historical responsibility Marxism demands. Debate is welcome on every question except the one that matters: the political continuity of Marxism through the Left Opposition and the Fourth International. The result is a Marxism without a party, strategy, or historical accountability.
This pluralism has political consequences. The milieu around the journal repeatedly embraced the “broad left” formations of the past decade: Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, Corbynism in Britain, the Democratic Socialists of America in the United States. Each was presented as a new opening, a revival of socialist politics, a break with neoliberalism. Each ended in the subordination of the working class to the capitalist state. Syriza’s imposition of austerity, in direct violation of its electoral mandate, was the most brutal example. Podemos became an auxiliary of the Spanish state; Corbynism collapsed under the weight of its own parliamentary illusions; the DSA integrated itself into the Democratic Party. After each defeat, there was no accounting, no theoretical reckoning, no confrontation with the political lessons. Only the next conference panel followed.
The journal’s political evasions reflect its class basis. The trajectory from the Historians Group to Historical Materialism expresses a definite social layer. The first generation was formed within the apparatus of a Stalinist party; the second within the university. What unites them is an orientation not to the working class as an independent revolutionary force but to the institutions of the trade union bureaucracy, the Labour Party, the NGOs and the academy. Their Marxism is not a programme for revolutionary action but an academic specialisation.
“History from below,” in its later academic form, became a celebration of popular culture and local resistance that sidestepped the question of political leadership. The recovery of plebeian agency, once tied to the Popular Front’s nationalist project, became a methodological fetish. The working class appears as a collection of localised struggles, cultural practices, and micro‑resistances, but never as a unified revolutionary subject. Leadership disappears; parties disappear; programmes disappear. What remains is a Marxism of fragments, a politics of gestures, a historiography of permanent smallness.
Yet the history of the 20th century demonstrates nothing so clearly as leadership’s decisive role. As noted earlier, the working class did not lack militancy in Germany in 1923, China in 1927, Spain in 1936, or France in 1968. The Stalinist and social democratic parties that held its allegiance betrayed it. The tragedies of the century were not failures of spontaneity but failures of leadership. To ignore this is to abandon modern history’s central lesson.
The academic left’s refusal to confront Marxism’s political continuity is therefore not a theoretical oversight but a class position. It reflects the interests of a social layer whose relationship to the working class is mediated through institutions that seek compromise, not revolution. Historical Materialism is this layer’s intellectual expression: pluralist, eclectic, politically evasive, and ultimately hostile to the revolutionary programme that alone represents Marxism’s continuity.
UCL Historian Waseem Ahmed and the Academic Afterlife of “History from Below”
The slogan “history from below” has become one of the most fetishised and unexamined clichés of contemporary academic historiography. It promises a radical inversion of historical narrative, away from kings, states, and elites, toward the lived experience of ordinary people. But slogans are not politics. Over the past half-century, the academic institutionalisation of “history from below” has produced a genre that is ethically earnest, empirically rich, and politically evasive. It is a radicalism of sympathy rather than strategy, a politics of moral witness rather than revolutionary agency.
Waseem Ahmed, a historian affiliated with UCL and involved in subaltern, microhistorical, and local resistance studies, exemplifies this development. His work is rigorous, compassionate, and attentive to marginalised voices. However, it also mirrors the academic left’s political retreat since the 1970s, marked by a pullback from class analysis, revolutionary leadership, and the 20th century’s key historical issue: the Stalinist bureaucracy’s betrayal of the October Revolution.
Ahmed’s 2026 article “Against Pessimism” provides insight into this environment. It is thoughtful, grounded in archival research, and focuses on Tony Benn’s moral clarity and the experiences of activists politicised during Corbynism. Ahmed reconstructs Benn’s speeches, including an unpublished 2008 address from the global financial crisis, to advocate for renewed activism and optimism within the British left. The article is humane, historically aware, and politically genuine. However, these strengths also highlight its limitations.
The initial boundary is the scope of parliamentary socialism. Ahmed’s optimism centres on the potential for a “new left-wing electoral project,” reflecting the Corbynite belief that electoral realignment can replace revolutionary leadership. Benn’s platform- public ownership, repealing anti-union laws, and democratic control of industry- is seen more as a moral stance than a strategic move for working-class empowerment. The Labour Party’s consistent betrayals of the working class, including efforts by its own bureaucracy to undermine Corbyn’s leadership, are mentioned only briefly. The structural role of Labour as a bourgeois workers’ party rooted in the working class but committed to the defence of capitalism is left untouched.
The second limitation involves replacing the concept of class with sentiment. Ahmed eloquently discusses despair, hope, and political dedication. However, pessimism is not just a state of mind; it is a material condition. The demoralisation of the working class stems from decades of setbacks, deindustrialisation, and the lack of a revolutionary party capable of leading a fight against capital. Without addressing this gap, “optimism” becomes merely a feeling rather than a viable strategy. Benn’s moral clarity is clear, but the crucial questions- why Benn’s politics failed and what organisational form can prevent such failures- remain unanswered.
The third limitation is the lack of leadership as a historical factor. Ahmed’s expanded scholarship, like many modern “history from below’ approaches, documents small acts of resistance: negotiation, evasion, symbolic protests. While valuable, these cannot replace revolutionary politics. The tragedies of the 20th century- Germany 1923, China 1927, Spain 1936, Indonesia 1965- show that the working class does not fail because of a lack of militancy. Instead, it fails because Stalinist and Social-democratic parties betray it while remaining loyal. Despite its moral earnestness, Ahmed’s article does not tackle this core issue. It views leadership as a moral trait rather than a tangible force.
Ahmed’s work lacks the Trotskyist view of history. It omits key concepts like the theory of permanent revolution, the analysis of Stalinism as a bureaucratic caste, and Marxism’s continuity through the Left Opposition and the Fourth International. Without these, “history from below” turns into a moral effort instead of a revolutionary one. It recognises agency but sidesteps power dynamics; it amplifies voices but neglects programmes; it respects resistance without emphasising victory.
Intellectual Lineage: From the CP Historians Group to Subaltern Studies to UCL
The British Marxist historians Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton, and George Rudé popularised “history from below” as part of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s Popular Front strategy. Their recovery of plebeian agency was real and often path‑breaking, but they framed it within a nationalist “radical tradition” that substituted English constitutional development for revolutionary internationalism. This framing was not incidental; it was a political necessity imposed by the CPGB’s orientation toward parliamentary alliances and national‑popular narratives.
The CP Historians Group emerged in the late 1940s and 1950s, as the CPGB tried to reconcile Marxism with the British Road to Socialism. The Party’s programme insisted that socialism could be achieved through parliamentary means, in alliance with progressive sections of the bourgeoisie, and without a revolutionary rupture. This required a sanitised Marxism- one that celebrated national traditions, emphasised continuity, and avoided the explosive questions raised by the Russian Revolution and its bureaucratic degeneration. The historians’ task was to produce a usable past for a reformist strategy.
Thus, “history from below” became a way to be radical without being revolutionary. Hill’s celebration of the “English Revolution,” Thompson’s moralised working‑class culture, Hilton’s medieval class conflict, and Rudé’s crowd studies all recovered popular agency. Still, they did so within a framework that reaffirmed national development rather than international class struggle. Their work avoided the decisive questions of the 20th century: the nature of the Soviet bureaucracy, the suppression of the Left Opposition, the lessons of the Spanish Civil War, and the catastrophic consequences of Stalinism for the international working class. This avoidance was political, not accidental.
The CPGB could not confront Stalinism without confronting its own historical role as an appendage of the Soviet bureaucracy. It could not analyse the bureaucratic degeneration of the USSR without undermining the authority of the very state to which it was organisationally and ideologically tied. As a result, the CP Historians Group developed a Marxism that was rich in empirical detail but impoverished in revolutionary content. Their work foregrounded agency but backgrounded leadership; it celebrated resistance but avoided the question of power; it analysed class but not the political organisations through which class struggle becomes decisive.
This contradiction shaped the entire trajectory of “history from below.” The method’s emphasis on local agency, cultural forms, and everyday resistance was valuable, but it also substituted for confronting the strategic problems of revolutionary politics. The tragedies of the 20th century- Germany 1923, China 1927, Spain 1936- demonstrate that the working class does not lose because it lacks militancy. It loses because its leadership betrays it. Yet leadership, programme, and betrayal are precisely the categories absent from the CPGB’s historiographical tradition.
In this sense, “history from below” was never simply a methodological innovation. It was a political adaptation: a way to maintain radical credentials while avoiding the revolutionary conclusions that follow from a serious engagement with Marxism. The CP Historians Group produced important scholarship, but it also helped institutionalise a form of left‑wing history that is ethically earnest, empirically rich, and strategically evasive- a legacy that still shapes the academic left today.
By the time we reach Ahmed’s generation, “history from below” has ceased to be a methodological insurgency and has instead become an academic common sense. University departments, funding bodies, and peer-reviewed journals teach, cite, and institutionalise it. But this institutionalisation has come at a cost: the method’s political content has been hollowed out. What once emerged from the Communist Party Historians Group as a politically charged attempt to recover plebeian agency has been transformed into a professionalised genre- ethical, meticulous, and politically evasive. It is a method without a programme, a sympathy without strategy, a radicalism without revolution.
This transformation is not simply intellectual; it is social. The academic left of the late 20th and early 21st centuries occupies a distinct class position. It comprises university‑based researchers, NGO professionals, cultural theorists, and graduate‑school radicals whose political experience has been shaped not by mass workers’ movements but by identity politics, cultural studies, and episodic protest. In this milieu, “history from below” becomes a safe radicalism: a way to express solidarity with the oppressed without confronting the strategic questions of revolutionary politics. It lets scholars celebrate agency while avoiding the problem of power; catalogue resistance while ignoring leadership; recover voices while neglecting the organisational forms through which those voices become historically decisive.
Ahmed’s work stands squarely within this lineage. His scholarship is humane and attentive to marginalised actors. He reconstructs local struggles, everyday negotiations, and symbolic acts of defiance with care and sensitivity. He belongs to a generation of historians who have inherited the ethical seriousness of Thompson and the archival curiosity of Rudé. But he has also inherited their political limits, magnified by the post‑1968 retreat from class politics and the collapse of revolutionary movements in the West.
In Ahmed’s writing, class appears, but not as history’s organising principle. It is one variable among many: culture, identity, locality, rather than the structural antagonism between labour and capital. Resistance appears, but in fragmentary form: micro‑politics, everyday refusal, symbolic gestures. These are important, but they are not substitutes for revolutionary strategy. Leadership, programme, and betrayal- the decisive categories of 20th-century Marxism- are largely absent. The tragedies of the working class in the last century were not caused by a lack of agency but by the treachery of Stalinist and social‑democratic leaderships. Yet this problem is almost entirely missing from contemporary “history from below.”
In this sense, Ahmed’s work is not an aberration but a symptom. It reflects the broader political retreat of the academic left: a turn toward cultural radicalism and away from revolutionary Marxism. “History from below” survives, but only as a method stripped of its original political purpose. The task today is to restore that purpose to reconnect the study of popular agency with the struggle for revolutionary leadership and international socialism.
Waseem Ahmed’s Contribution: Strengths of the Genre
Ahmed’s scholarship does have genuine strengths. He is a meticulous historian of marginalised actors, committed to reconstructing ordinary people’s lived experience. His work exemplifies the best impulses of “history from below”: the insistence that the oppressed are not passive victims but historical agents. He excels at recovering voices buried in local archives and oral histories, tracing everyday acts of resistance, critiquing elite narratives, and attending to cultural forms, rituals, and vernacular political expression. Above all, he humanises his subjects. They are not inert objects of domination but thinking, feeling participants in history. These qualities matter. They offer a humane corrective to elite historiography and refuse to treat the oppressed as mere sociological data.
But strengths do not eliminate political limits. Indeed, they often mask them. Ahmed’s work reflects the broader political retreat of the academic left, a retreat that has shaped the evolution of “history from below” from a politically charged intervention into a professionalised genre of permanent smallness. In his writing, class appears, but not as the organising principle of social struggle. It is one variable among many- culture, identity, locality- rather than the structural antagonism between labour and capital. This displacement is not accidental. It reflects the post‑1968 intellectual climate in which class was dissolved into discourse, culture, and identity. The result is a Marxism in which the working class is present as experience but absent as a revolutionary subject.
Resistance, too, appears in fragmentary form. Ahmed catalogues micro‑politics: negotiation, evasion, symbolic gestures, small acts of refusal. These are important, but they are not substitutes for revolutionary politics. The cumulative effect is a historiography in which resistance is everywhere, but victory is nowhere. The oppressed resist, but they do not win; they endure, but they do not overthrow; they negotiate, but they do not seize power. This is the political unconscious of contemporary “history from below”: a world in which agency is ubiquitous but strategically inconsequential.
The decisive question of political leadership- the role of parties, programmes, and betrayals- is almost absent. Yet the tragedies of the 20th century demonstrate that the working class does not lose because it lacks militancy. It loses because Stalinist and social‑democratic parties betray it while holding its allegiance. Leadership is not an optional category. It is the fulcrum of revolutionary history. Without it, “history from below” becomes a catalogue of struggles without outcomes, movements without direction, and sacrifices without strategy. Ahmed’s work, like much contemporary scholarship, treats Marxism as an analytical toolkit rather than a revolutionary programme. The result is a Marxism without a party, without strategy, without historical responsibility.
These limits reflect the modern academic left’s class position. Since the 1980s, the decline of mass workers’ movements has severed intellectuals from organised working‑class politics. Radical scholarship has been absorbed into universities, NGOs, and cultural institutions, where it is rewarded for ethical critique rather than revolutionary strategy. Cultural analysis replaces revolutionary politics; moral radicalism replaces programme. The orientation toward broad‑left formations- Syriza, Podemos, Corbynism- has repeatedly subordinated the working class to the capitalist state, producing cycles of hope and defeat. In this context, “history from below” becomes a safe radicalism: sympathetic to the oppressed, critical of elites, but detached from the struggle for political power.
Ahmed’s work lacks the Trotskyist conception of history. Absent are the theory of permanent revolution, the analysis of Stalinism as a bureaucratic caste, the decisive role of leadership in revolutionary situations, the international character of working‑class struggle, and Marxism’s continuity through the Left Opposition and the Fourth International. Without these, “history from below” becomes a moral project rather than a revolutionary one.
The task today is not to abandon “history from below” but to repoliticise it, reconnecting the study of popular agency with the struggle for revolutionary leadership and international socialism. We must understand the oppressed not only as historical actors but as potential rulers of society. We must analyse their struggles not only as expressions of resistance but as moments in a broader fight for political power. We must explain their defeats not only in terms of repression but also in terms of leadership, programme, and betrayal.
Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, The Revolution Betrayed, and the programme of the Fourth International remain indispensable foundations for such a project. They restore the missing categories of contemporary historiography: class as the organising principle of history, leadership as the decisive factor in revolutionary situations, and internationalism as the only horizon adequate to the modern working class. To repoliticise “history from below” is to reconnect it with these foundations, moving from sympathy to strategy, from moral witness to revolutionary agency, and from small acts of resistance to the conquest of power.
The historical conception that guided the Fourth International stands in direct opposition to both traditions examined here. Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, The Revolution Betrayed, and the theory of permanent revolution are not artefacts for seminar discussion or intellectual ornamentation for academic Marxism. They are the theoretical foundation for the political education of a new generation of workers and youth confronting war, inequality, and the threat of dictatorship on a world scale. Trotsky’s work is not a contribution to historiography in the conventional sense; it is a strategic intervention into the central crises of the twentieth century, and it remains indispensable for understanding the crises of the twenty‑first. It restores what both the CP Historians Group and contemporary “history from below” have abandoned: the primacy of class struggle, the decisive role of leadership, and the international character of revolution.
Bibliography
1. Gregory Billam and the Communist Party Historians’ Group
- Billam, Gregory. “‘Bringing history to the people’: the Communist Party Historians’ Group and the national-radical tradition, 1946–1956.” Contemporary British History (2026). This article examines how the CP Historians’ Group mediated Cold War pressures, shaped the national‑radical tradition, and contributed to early “history from below.”
- Billam, Gregory. “‘Uncomradely and Un-Communist’: Breakdown in the Communist Anglosphere? The Communist Party of Great Britain and Communist Party of Australia Debate, 1947–1948.” Labour History Review 88.1 (2022). Prize‑winning essay analysing ideological fractures within the Communist movement.
These two works are essential for understanding the CPGB’s intellectual milieu and the political pressures shaping early social history.
2. Core Works of the CP Historians Group
These texts represent the foundational corpus of British Marxist social history:
- Christopher Hill. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (1972).
- Christopher Hill. The English Revolution 1640 (1940).
- E.P. Thompson. The Making of the English Working Class (1963).
- Rodney Hilton. Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (1973).
- George Rudé. The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848 (1964).
- John Saville. The Consolidation of the Capitalist State, 1800–1850 (1994).
- Victor Kiernan. The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes to Other Cultures in the Imperial Age (1969).
- Maurice Dobb. Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946).
These works exemplify the strengths and political limits of the CPGB’s Popular Front Marxism.
3. Subaltern Studies and Post‑1968 “History from Below”
To situate Ahmed’s work within the broader intellectual lineage:
- Ranajit Guha. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983).
- Ranajit Guha (ed.). Subaltern Studies I–VI (1982–1990).
- Partha Chatterjee. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (1986).
- Shahid Amin. Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922–1992 (1995).
These works mark the shift from class analysis to cultural and discursive frameworks.
4. Contemporary Academic Marxism and “History from Below”
Ahmed’s scholarship belongs to this milieu:
- Waseem Ahmed. “Against Pessimism.” History Workshop (2026). A reflection on Tony Benn, Corbynism, and socialist memory.
- Anne C. Bailey. “The 1619 Project and Bringing History to the People.” History News Network (2020). A defence of public history and democratic access to historical narrative.
- Marcus Rediker. The Slave Ship: A Human History (2007).
- Peter Linebaugh & Marcus Rediker. The Many‑Headed Hydra (2000).
These works represent the modern, ethically charged but politically cautious form of “history from below.”
5. Trotskyist Foundations (Essential for Your Conclusion)
These texts form the theoretical basis for revolutionary Marxism and the critique of Stalinism:
- Leon Trotsky. History of the Russian Revolution (1932).
- Leon Trotsky. The Revolution Betrayed (1936).
- Leon Trotsky. The Permanent Revolution (1930).
- Leon Trotsky. In Defence of Marxism (1942).
- The Fourth International. The Transitional Programme (1938).
- David North. The Heritage We Defend (1988).
- Vadim Rogovin. Was There an Alternative? (1993–1998).
These works restore the categories absent from both CPGB historiography and contemporary academic left scholarship: class as the organising principle, leadership as decisive, and internationalism as the only adequate horizon.
6. Additional Secondary Literature for Context
Useful for framing Ahmed’s work within broader historiographical debates:
- Raphael Samuel. Theatres of Memory (1994).
- Sheila Rowbotham. Hidden from History (1973).
- Eric Hobsbawm. Interesting Times: A Twentieth‑Century Life (2002).
- Harvey J. Kaye. The British Marxist Historians (1984).
- Stathis Kouvelakis. Philosophy and Revolution (2003).
- Ellen Meiksins Wood. The Retreat from Class (1986).
