A personal library assembled over fifty years is more than a collection of books. It is a material record of intellectual and political development. Moving it to new premises marks the beginning of another stage in a writing project rooted in the history of Marxism, the Trotskyist movement, and the struggle to understand the great revolutionary experiences of the working class.
Over the coming months I will begin packing up my library and moving it into premises more commensurate with its size. A conservative estimate puts the collection at around 2,000 volumes, accumulated over half a century. What might appear from the outside as the relatively mundane business of boxing books, moving shelves and reorganising a workspace has inevitably assumed a more personal and political significance.
To dismantle a library is to excavate one’s own intellectual history. Books encountered decades ago reappear. Forgotten arguments return. The circumstances under which particular works were bought suddenly return. Each shelf corresponds to a period of life and, in my case, to a stage in a political development that began in a London comprehensive school during the 1970s and proceeded, through more than one false start and political dead end, towards Marxism and Trotskyism.
I never assembled the library primarily for possession’s sake. I have never regarded myself as a bibliophile in the conventional sense. These books were acquired because I wanted to understand something: why society takes the form it does, why capitalism has survived despite the suffering and inequality it produces, why revolutionary movements have succeeded or failed, why Stalinism arose in the Soviet Union, and above all how the experiences of previous generations of workers and revolutionaries bear upon the problems confronting the working class today. That process began not with Marx, Lenin or Trotsky, but with the novel.
Pimlico Comprehensive and the Working-Class Novel
The first books I bought seriously were set texts at Pimlico Comprehensive School when I was 16. Among the writers I encountered were Alan Sillitoe, Carson McCullers, Keith Waterhouse, Shelagh Delaney and Stan Barstow. They occupy only a small physical space in a library that subsequently expanded into thousands of volumes, but their intellectual significance was considerable.
These writers emerged from, or sought to represent, social worlds largely excluded from the respectable version of post-war society. Sillitoe’s factory workers, Delaney’s Salford, Barstow’s West Riding and the lonely and marginalised figures inhabiting McCullers’s American South opened up experiences remote from the official culture presented by newspapers, television and the political establishment.
For a working-class teenager, the effect was considerable. Literature revealed that the experiences surrounding you could themselves become the subject of serious art. But it simultaneously raised problems it could not resolve. Why were people’s lives organised in this way? Why did some possess wealth and power while others sold their labour merely to live? Why did class determine so much about an individual’s possibilities?
The best of these novels registered the human consequences of class society with extraordinary sensitivity. Still, literature by itself could not provide a scientific explanation of the social relations producing those consequences. That required an encounter with history and politics. Those first books were therefore instrumental in my movement towards the left. Half a century later, they remain on my shelves.
Militant, Stalinism and Trotsky’s History
Once politics became a serious interest, my book-buying accelerated dramatically. The Militant Tendency, then operating within the Labour Party, maintained an extensive book catalogue, and I began ordering from it with considerable enthusiasm. I eventually spent more than £1,000, a substantial sum at the time. The scale of my purchases evidently attracted someone’s attention because two young Militant members were eventually dispatched to my door to recruit me.
My membership lasted approximately six months. The promise of socialism attracted me. What proved inadequate was Militant’s political perspective, centred on transforming the Labour Party into an instrument for socialist change. The organisation treated the existing labour movement as a vehicle through which socialism would somehow emerge, rather than subjecting it to the historical and political examination its own record demanded.
The books survived my membership. Most remain in the library. I subsequently joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, searching again for a political organisation capable of explaining capitalism and providing a strategy for its overthrow. That experience lasted another six months. It was enough. There is perhaps some historical justice in the fact that, while the library contains materials from virtually every other period of my political development, it contains no books from my brief membership of the Stalinist Communist Party.
The decisive intellectual influence of these years came from an entirely different political tradition. At 17 I read Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. Few books I have encountered subsequently have equalled its impact. Here history was no longer presented principally as the actions of governments, ministers and celebrated individuals. Trotsky reconstructed revolution as a living process in which millions of human beings entered history consciously.
The events of 1917 emerged neither as a conspiracy nor as the inevitable outcome of impersonal forces. The Russian Revolution was presented as an immense confrontation of classes, parties and programmes, in which objective conditions created revolutionary possibilities but political leadership ultimately determined whether those possibilities were realised. Trotsky’s work demonstrated what Marxist historical writing could achieve. It united the reconstruction of events with an analysis of the class forces underlying them and, above all, with an understanding of the decisive role of revolutionary consciousness and leadership.
The implications extended far beyond 1917. If the October Revolution represented the working class’s conscious seizure of power under Bolshevik leadership, then Stalinism could not be identified with Bolshevism. The bureaucratic regime that subsequently emerged required a historical explanation. Trotsky provided that explanation through his struggle against the degeneration of the Soviet state and the nationalist doctrine of “socialism in one country”. Reading the History was therefore decisive in making me a Marxist. It also gave me an intellectual starting point for understanding why the crimes committed under Stalin represented not the fulfilment of October but its bureaucratic betrayal.
The WRP, the Redgrave Books and One Long Night
The library’s next major expansion came after I joined the Workers Revolutionary Party in 1982. My period of candidate membership lasted an entire year, which I have sometimes thought might qualify as a minor record in the history of revolutionary politics. I bought extensively during these years, and much of that material remains in the collection. The books from this period have acquired an additional historical significance because they belong to the years immediately preceding the crisis that erupted in 1985 inside the WRP and the International Committee of the Fourth International.
One of the largest single additions to my library came shortly before that split. I was told that Vanessa Redgrave was moving house and needed to dispose of a substantial quantity of books. I bought many of them. These volumes now occupy a peculiar position within the collection. Whatever their original provenance, they became part of my own intellectual history at precisely the point when major political questions concerning the history and programme of the Trotskyist movement were coming sharply to the surface.
Among the books I value most highly is a proof copy of Maria Joffe’s One Long Night. Joffe, widow of the Soviet diplomat and Left Oppositionist Adolph Joffe, endured decades of imprisonment and persecution under Stalinism. Her memoir belongs to the documentary record of the destruction of the revolutionary generation associated with October and of those who continued to resist bureaucratic reaction.
Such books matter because the struggle over historical memory is itself political. Stalinism could not consolidate its rule by physically destroying its opponents alone. It had to falsify the historical record, erase individuals from revolutionary history and transform the October Revolution into something compatible with the interests of a privileged bureaucracy. Trotskyism survived under extraordinarily difficult conditions because it defended not simply particular individuals or organisational traditions, but the international socialist programme upon which the Russian Revolution had been based.
A library containing this literature is therefore more than an accumulation of political texts. It preserves traces of struggles that the defenders of the existing order, including its Stalinist and reformist representatives, repeatedly proclaimed finished. They were not finished.
Birkbeck, the English Revolution and Historical Writing
The library’s largest sustained expansion began with my studies at Birkbeck and the completion of my degree in 2003. At that point another strand of intellectual development became central: the seventeenth-century English Revolution.
I had written a dissertation on the subject which, with the benefit of hindsight, was not particularly good. But dissatisfaction can sometimes have more productive consequences than satisfaction. The attempt to find somewhere for my essays eventually contributed to the creation of my website and, from there, to a much more sustained programme of historical reading and writing.
The consequences for the bookshelves were dramatic. Probably around half of the present collection, roughly a thousand books, dates from this broad period. The shelves expanded to encompass the English Revolution, the Civil War, the Levellers and other radical movements, the development of Parliament, religious and political conflict, and the immense historiographical controversies surrounding the seventeenth century.
But the subject could never be confined to the seventeenth century itself. Serious study of the English Revolution raises fundamental questions about historical interpretation. Was it a revolution? What social forces produced it? What relationship existed between political and religious ideas and the material interests of contending classes? How should we understand the Levellers and other radical currents? What was the upheaval’s international significance?
Behind these questions lay the still larger issue of historical materialism.
The study of history is never politically innocent. The assault upon Marxist interpretations of the English Revolution did not take place independently of the broader ideological offensive against Marxism during the closing decades of the twentieth century. Historical controversies reflected, in mediated form, the political climate produced by the defeats of the working class, the degeneration of the old labour organisations and eventually the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
My library’s expansion consequently followed the development of these controversies. Books led to other books. Footnotes opened previously unknown arguments. Historiographical disagreements demanded investigation of the political assumptions underlying apparently specialised academic disputes. What began with a relatively poor undergraduate dissertation gradually became a continuing engagement with the relationship between historical scholarship and contemporary politics.
Books as the Material Record of a Political Development
Seen together, the 2,000 volumes therefore amount to something quite different from a conventional private collection. The Sillitoe and Delaney volumes bought as a schoolboy belong to the discovery that working-class experience could become a legitimate subject of literature. Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution belongs to the discovery that those experiences could be scientifically understood as part of the historical struggle of classes. The literature accumulated through Militant, the Communist Party and the WRP records the search for a political movement capable of acting upon that understanding. The books acquired after Birkbeck record another development: the attempt to write history rather than consume it.
False starts marked that journey. Some books were undoubtedly bought and deserved to remain unread, and others were read more carefully than they deserved. Political development never proceeds in the straight line imposed upon it retrospectively. One investigates tendencies that lead nowhere, accepts arguments subsequently rejected, and only gradually acquires the historical experience necessary to distinguish what is essential from what is secondary. The value of a serious political library lies partly in the fact that it preserves these stages rather than concealing them.
Artificial Intelligence and a New Stage
The most recent development introduces another element into this history. Artificial intelligence has altered the technical conditions under which an individual can undertake historical and political research. Like every major technological innovation under capitalism, AI is developing within definite class relations. Corporations and governments approach it, above all, from the standpoint of profitability, labour displacement, surveillance, competitive advantage, and the intensification of exploitation. There is nothing inherently emancipatory about technology operating within capitalist property relations. But a Marxist response does not consist of recoiling from technological development. The productive forces created by capitalism repeatedly come into conflict with the social relations within which they develop. The task is to understand both technology’s emancipatory potential and the class interests that determine its present use.
For an individual engaged in historical research, the possibilities are already considerable. Vast quantities of material can be searched and compared far more rapidly than previously. Bibliographical trails can be followed more efficiently. Arguments drawn from different periods and historiographical traditions can be related to one another. Research that once required weeks of preliminary investigation can sometimes be organised in a fraction of that time. That does not abolish the necessity for knowledge. On the contrary, the ability to evaluate material becomes more important. A machine can locate relationships between texts, but it cannot substitute for the political and historical understanding required to determine which relationships matter, which claims withstand examination and what social interests underlie competing interpretations.
After fifty years of reading, that distinction is crucial. For the first time, I feel able to research and write articles at a level approaching the political and historical understanding accumulated through decades of reading and political experience. AI has not produced that understanding. The books did. Political experience did. Historical study did. The technology makes it possible to mobilise that accumulated knowledge with a speed and breadth that were previously extraordinarily difficult for an individual writer working largely alone.
The Library as a Working Archive
This is the significance of moving the library. Over the coming months, the books will be packed, transported and reorganised in a small office where they can function properly as a working research collection. The change is practical, but it also marks the start of a new stage in the website’s development. The intention is not to preserve the collection as a monument to fifty years of reading. Libraries become intellectually useless when they become mausoleums. Books justify the space they occupy when they continue to be read, questioned, compared and used.
The shelves that began with Sillitoe, Delaney, Barstow and McCullers at Pimlico Comprehensive eventually acquired Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky; the documentary history of the Russian Revolution and its degeneration; the literature of the Fourth International; materials from the WRP years; and an extensive collection dealing with the English Revolution, its radical movements and the historiographical battles through which its meaning has been contested.
What links them is not uniformity, because they contain writers representing every conceivable political and historical standpoint. What unites the collection is the struggle to understand history. Moving 2,000 books will be physically exhausting. But politically and intellectually the move represents precisely the opposite of winding things down. It prepares me for more work. The books accumulated through fifty years of reading are no longer simply the record of how I arrived at my present standpoint. Properly organised and combined with the possibilities opened by new technology, they can become the working archive for a considerably expanded programme of historical and political writing.
The journey that began with working-class novels read at Pimlico Comprehensive, passed through the first encounter with Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, the experiences of the revolutionary movement, and decades spent studying the English Revolution, therefore continues. Packing the library is not an act of putting the past away. It prepares for what comes next.
