“But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavour toward better understanding.”

― Marc Bloch

Marx “Men make their history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.

Karl Marx

“There is an ancient, evolutionary-liberal epigram: Every people gets the government it deserves. History, however, shows that one and the same people may, in the course of a comparatively brief epoch, get very different governments. The secret is this, a people is comprised of hostile classes, and the classes themselves are comprised of different and, in part, antagonistic layers which fall under different leadership; furthermore, every people falls under the influence of other peoples who are likewise comprised of classes. Governments do not express the systematically growing “maturity” of a “people” but are the product of the struggle between different classes and the different layers within one and the same class, and, finally, the action of external forces – alliances, conflicts, wars and so on.”

Leon Trotsky

It is not an understatement to say that Mike Braddick’s latest book is not an easy read or, for that matter, easy to review. Written for an academic rather than general audience, Braddick appears to go out of his way to make his History of Britain difficult to read. The book is not set chronologically but jumps all over the place.  

As Simon Jenkins writes, “Braddick’s abandonment of chronological narrative and his academic abstractions can be hard to follow. He races back and forth from the Ice Age to gross domestic product and from the Vikings to Covid-19. We return to Stonehenge three times and the Roman empire at least four. Chapter headings such as “Organisational Capacity and the Changing Limits of the Possible” can make it hard to know quite where it is that we have dipped our toes. I like such sweeping generalisations that econometrics is “the new Christianity”, though I am not sure where it gets us.”

Braddick is a gifted historian, and his work is usually well worth reading, but this book is really hard work. From the first page, it is hard to gauge Braddick’s historiography, and the book’s title does not help. It appears far too much a concession to an empirical way of thinking and a philosophical outlook uniquely British. I doubt any European historian, male or female, would be caught dead with such a title to their books.

A major disappointment is Braddicks tackling of revolutions. Both bourgeois and proletarian hardly get a mention. The bourgeois revolution of the 17th century, Braddicks speciality, hardly warrants a mention.

Braddick appears to be heavily influenced by the French historian Fernand Braudel[1] who championed the idea of the longue durée. As “Simon Jenkins writes “, Michael Braddick is a true Braudelian. He is a historian not of who, what and when but of how and why. From Stonehenge to Brexit and Danegeld to coronavirus, his concern is for the setting of history, its intellectual and physical environment, and “the capacity of British people to use political power to get things done”.[2]

I am sure that Braddick would acknowledge that Braudel had strengths and very deep-seated weaknesses. As the Marxist writer Ann Talbot writes, “If Braudel’s approach to history has its strengths, it also has disadvantages. These relate to two areas-historical change and socio-political history. Braudel was a conservative historian who, although living in a country whose name was synonymous with revolution, was averse to change, particularly sudden changes of a revolutionary character. He attempted to develop a form of socio-economic history that did not rely on Marxist concepts and stressed continuity rather than change.”[3]

While raising his cap to certain Marxist concepts, Braddick is not Marxist. On page 10, he uses the following quote from Karl Marx “Men make their history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language. Thus Luther donned the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789 to 1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman republic and the Roman empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793 to 1795. In like manner, a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language. He can freely express himself in it only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in using the new.”[4]

One would like to say that Braddick’s use of Marx guides the whole book, but that would be a lie. It is hard to understand why he used the quote in the first place because the historiography of this book is a million miles away from Marxism. While many reviewers have said that Braddick’s book opposes previous nationalist readings of British history, it appears to be a “deconstruction”, not just of British history but also of the discipline of history itself, as he seems to dispense with many historical concepts that historians have developed in the last three centuries.

---

[1] www.oxfordreference.com

[2] Ideas made us: The resilience, so far, of our political institutions. Aug. 20, 2021

TLS. Times Literary Supplement(Issue 6177-

[3] Europe Between the Oceans by Barry Cunliffe- ww.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/10/book-o09.html

[4] The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte(Braddick uses only part of the quote I reprint it in full)

To what extent you could describe the conference as a success is hard to say. What is undoubtedly true is that it was a significant historical event drawing many historians of the Early Modern period and general members of the public. The conference was a counterblast at all the revisionist historians who not only attack Hill but believe his writings have no bearing on today’s historiography.

It is a regret that more young people did not turn up because Hill certainly had something to say to this generation. His insight into deep insight historical questions would help them navigate some very choppy seas.

It is not within the realm of this short article to review the contents of the conference. While I understand organising it was a logistical nightmare, perhaps given the importance of the subject, it should have been spread over two days. You would not have the embarrassing spectacle of the main speaker being told to cut it short because the hall was only booked till 5 pm. I am sure that the papers presented will end up in a book.

If Penguin, who have the rights to the book TWTUD had any sense, they would re-issue it with a new updated forward. Mike Braddick would be a good choice for an introduction. Braddick, as was mentioned in the meeting, is working on a biography of Christopher Hill. It is quite staggering that this will be the first biography of this great historian.

A personal highlight was finally meeting the superb historian Rachel Hammersley. It is the first time I have been able to offer my condolences over the loss of her husband, the equally magnificent historian John Gurney. As she mentioned to me, John would have been in his element. Before he passed on, John published a fantastic paper on Gerrard Winstanley. A nice touch would have been for Rachel to read and present the paper at the conference.[1]His death robbed the world of a very good historian who, in my mind, would have gone on to even great things.

It would have been interesting to know John’s thoughts on Michael Braddick’s assertion that Hill was a dialectical materialist. Perhaps a more pertinent question is the one posed by Ann Talbot her obituary of Christopher Hill[2] Talbot who asks, “What any serious reader interested in history or politics wants to know is, when we read Hill’s books are we reading the work of an apologist for the Stalinist bureaucracy or of someone who was genuinely struggling to make a Marxist analysis of an aspect of English history? It has to be said that this is a complex question”. It is a deep regret that the subject was not mentioned at a conference of this importance. This is hardly surprising given that no orthodox Marxist historian or politician was invited to the conference, let alone asked to give a paper. A Marxist historian may be requested when the sixtieth anniversary of the TWTUD Conference is organised.

---

[1] Gerrard Winstanley and the Left -John Gurney-Past & Present, Volume 235, Issue 1, May 2017, Pages 179–206,

[2]“These the times … this the man”: an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html

“They ravage, they seize by false pretences, and all of this they hail as the construction of empire. And when in their wake nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace.” 

Tacitus’ Agricola

“We must first gain complete power if we want to crush the other side completely,”

Adolf Hitler

“When I recognised the Jew as the leader of the Social Democracy, the scales dropped from my eyes. A long soul struggle had reached its conclusion.”

(Mein Kampf).

“Fascism has opened up the depths of society for politics. Today, not only in peasant homes but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside of the twentieth century the tenth or the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms. The Pope of Rome broadcasts over the radio about the miraculous transformation of water into wine. Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man’s genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance, and savagery! Despair has raised them to their feet; Fascism has given them a banner. Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the physiology of National Socialism.”

From What Is National Socialism? by Leon Trotsky.

The publication of this book could not be more prescient as the possibility that once more German tanks could roll into Russian soil for a second time. A book that examines the bankrolling of the first fascist onslaught against the former Soviet Union, is very timely.

In Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany’s Wealthiest Dynasties, published in late May of this year by Dutch financial journalist David de Jong shows that the current German ruling class owes its power and wealth to the Fascists and their billionaire supporters during the rise of the Nazi era.

Adolf Hitler at a reception of the laureates of the national awards for science and art in 1938 Germany. To his left stands Ferdinand Porsche, one of the co-founders of the Porsche sports car company. (Ullstein Bild / Getty Images)

De Jong’s book differs from previous books on Nazi billionaires in that it examines five oligarch families unfamiliar to the general reader. Also, given that the book’s author is still relatively young, he may be forgiven for targeting his book at today’s generation who do not know about these Nazi billionaires. Many of whose Nazi past has only recently become public.

The book is a forensic study, densely researched, it took De Jong took four years to research. He carried out archival research throughout Germany, the EU, and the US using various primary sources – diaries, memories, newspapers – and academic studies on the families. The result is a  fast-paced and extremely readable book. De Jong’s book stands on the shoulders of other works such as the 1985 work, German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler, by professor Henry Ashby Turner Jr., whose book has been the standard text on Hitler’s early relationships with the German bourgeoisie.

De Jong is no Marxist, but it is hard not to draw the main thrust of his book that these  Nazi Billionaires financed Hitler’s dictatorship to prevent a revolutionary uprising of workers in Germany. These billionaires are as much responsible for the mass destruction and mass murder as the Nazi dictatorship. As Ela Maartens and Verena Nees point out, “Most survived the denazification process unscathed—or, as Ferdinand Porsche wrote to a friend, “I was entbräunt [denazified] free of charge.” Only a few, like Krupp and Flick, were convicted, albeit released a short time later. Friedrich Flick was convicted at Nuremberg of using forced and slave labour, bankrolling the SS and looting a steel factory. But he was released in 1960 and eventually became the controlling shareholder of Daimler-Benz, then Germany’s biggest car manufacturer. Deutsche Bank bought the Flick conglomerate in 1985, turning his descendants into billionaires. Even the old leadership personnel were reinstated despite their Nazi past. The Quandts family also survived denazification unscathed. Günther Quandt was classified as a “Mitläufer” (a passive follower) after one and a half years of captivity in American camps. Like the other Nazi-era corporate patriarchs listed by de Jong, except for Friedrich Flick, he was never brought to trial.”[1]

De Jong shows that even before the Nazis came to power, they cultivated a very intimate relationship with the growing number of billionaires who saw the Fascists as a bulwark against the revolutionary movement of the German working class. As early as 1931, they met with Nazi leaders at the Kaiserhof Hotel in Berlin. August von Finck, son of Wilhelm von Finck, a Bavarian banker, promised over five million Reichsmarks to arm the SA “as a stay against a putsch, which might devolve into civil war.”

While many thoughts go through the readers’ minds reading this book, one overriding thought is how the hell Germany’s richest business dynasties, which made fortunes by supporting Adolf Hitler’s Nazi dictatorship eight decades later, are still not being held accountable, let alone punished. German companies, such as  BMW and Porsche, and others that own US brands, such as Krispy Kreme and Pret A-Manger, have blood on their hands.

De Jong states, “What struck me was this is a country that’s so cognisant of its history in many ways, but seemingly the most economically powerful actors do not engage with that. That was why I wrote the book, and it’s an argument in favour of historical transparency. You have BMW and Porsche, particularly the families that control them, conduct this whitewashing or leaving out of history where they celebrate the business successes of their founders or saviours but leave out the fact that these men committed war crimes.”I never got an answer whether it’s because they are afraid it would hurt the bottom line or share prices of the companies to be fully transparent about the history or whether it’s just because they derive their entire identity from the successes that their fathers and grandfathers had and, by being transparent about them, it’s kind of disavowing their own identity. It’s probably a combination of both.”

From the standpoint of historiography, De jong’s book is a rebuff to the current wave of historical revisionism that has taken a very malignant form. Led by the right-wing political commentator and convicted criminal  Dinesh D’Souza, who stupidly wrote that Nazis were called  “National Socialists,” that the fascist movement was a left-wing movement and that Adolf Hitler was a product of “statism” gone wrong. Not only does De Jong’s book counteract this infantile historiography, his book, while not downplaying politics and ideology, concentrates on the importance of economics in the rise of German Fascism. For a long time, most historiography on the rise of German Fascism has focused on politics and ideology to the detriment of research into the significance of economic issues in the rise to political prominence and power on the part of the National Socialists.

Asa Adam Tooze writes, “The originality of National Socialism was that rather than meekly accepting a place for Germany within a global economic order dominated by the affluent English-speaking countries, Hitler sought to mobilise the pent-up frustrations of his population to mount an epic challenge to this order. Repeating what Europeans had done across the globe over the previous three centuries, Germany would carve out its imperial hinterland; by one last great land grab in the East, it would create the self-sufficient basis both for domestic affluence and the platform necessary to prevail in the coming superpower competition with the United States… The aggression of Hitler’s regime can thus be rationalised as an intelligible response to the tensions stirred up by the uneven development of global capitalism. These tensions are, of course, still with us today.”[2]

To Conclude De Jong has performed a vital public service with this book. He states “I think people should be more aware of these histories and history in general, particularly when it comes to consumption and the continuing whitewashing of history by these consumer brands and families that control them.”. I heartily recommend this book, and it continues to get a wide readership.

Further reading

1.    Why Are They Back? Historical Falsification, Political Conspiracy, and the Return of Fascism in Germany Paperback – March 31, 2019, by Christoph Vandreier

2.    The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany-Leon Trotsky  1st edition-3.    Paperback (December 31 1971)

---

[1] Nazi Billionaires by David de Jong: How Hitler’s financiers are still in business- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/11/02/nazi-n02.html

[2] Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, Allen Lane: 2006, 832 pages, now available in German translation

 “He had achieved nothing. He would leave behind him no books, no paintings, no discoveries. He had created no school of thought, political party, or disciples. Why had life been so hard? He had not preached, he had not taught; he had remained what he had been since birth – a human being.”

“let’s put God—and all these grand progressive ideas—to one side. Let’s begin with man; let’s be kind and attentive to the individual man—whether he’s a bishop, a peasant, an industrial magnate, a convict in the Sakhalin Islands or a waiter in a restaurant. Let’s begin with respect, compassion and love for the individual—or we’ll never get anywhere.

Anton Chekhov

“In those difficult days, people wanted only the truth, however difficult and cheerless it might be. And Bogariov told them this truth.” 

Vasily Grossman

A work not only of considerable literary significance but also an important historical document. As a new world war is brewing in Ukraine, and the vilest nationalism, xenophobia and historical lies are being promoted by the ruling classes everywhere, works like this will help reconnect the generations that have to wage the revolutionary battles of today with the socialist traditions of 1917.

—Clara Weiss, World Socialist Website

“There are also other aspects of Grossman’s work that are becoming important today. During the last 20 years, the Anglophone world has gradually recognised that the second world war was fought between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and that the Western allies played a secondary role in it. There are many, many reasons why Grossman seems more relevant today than when I was first translating him over 40 years ago.”

Robert Chandler

In September 2022, The Immortal People, the Soviet author Vasily Grossman’s first of three superb novels chronicling the Second World War, was published with a new English translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler. The recent re-publication of the Soviet writer Vasily Grossman’s book reflects a renewed surge of interest in his books. Grossman has a journalist’s eye for detail coupled with a novelist’s empathy. His work has been compared to that of Erich Remarque and Stephen Crane.

Perhaps the most significant thing about this extraordinary new translation by Robert Chandler, who called Grossman’s political stance “revolutionary romanticism”, is that it contains never before-published passages from Grossman’s original manuscript. It, therefore, represents the complete edition of this work published so far in any language, including Grossman’s native Russian. As Claire Weiss correctly states, “The result is a work of considerable literary significance and an important historical document.” Weiss’s interview with Robert Chandler can be seen on the wsws.org.[1]

Grossman’s novel opens with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The fact that the Nazis could overrun large swathes of the Soviet Union was down to the fact that The Red Army and Soviet people had been left completely unprepared for the Nazi invasion. According to Weiss, Stalin had not only rejected dozens of warnings of the impending attack but had also murdered the leadership of the Red Army and large portions of its ranks in the Great Terror of 1936-1938.

Weiss states in her book review, “As a result, the Red Army of 1941 was poorly led militarily and politically, and vastly under-equipped to confront the highly sophisticated weaponry and mass assault of German imperialism. In the first months of the war, millions of Red Army soldiers were captured—about two million of them would be starved to death by spring 1942—and many more were killed and wounded on the battlefield”. [2]

The book is a fascinating look at the brutal nature of the Nazi invasion and the extraordinary sacrifice of The Red Army and the Russian Working Class. Grossman includes many important and politically fascinating characters. Such as the political commissar, Bogariov; the commander Babadjanian; and the soldier Ignatiev.

Bogariov doesn’t appear to be modelled on any particular individual but is probably an amalgam of many people met by Grossman. The Marx-Engels Institute mentioned in the book was a refuge for many oppositionists to the |Stalin regime. Mikhail Liftshitz and the Hungarian philosopher and literary critic György Lukács carried out work there. While Lukacs and Lifshitz managed to survive, many leading Bolsheviks, such as Isaak Rubin, were shot in 1937, and the leader of the Institute, Ryazanov, suffered the same fate. Grossman was aware of what was happening and added characters such as Bogariov, who opposed the Stalin regime.

As Clara Weiss writes, “Bogariov is a former employee of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, devoted to the legacy of Lenin and the early Russian socialists, who now take to the art of war as much as he did to the writings of Marx and Engels. Bogariov becomes the embodiment of what good political leadership means for Grossman. In what can only be read as a blatant rebuke of the Stalinist effort to dull the population and the soldiers into unconsciousness in the face of the immense dangers they were facing and of the bureaucracy’s constant lies during the war, Grossman writes, “In those difficult days, people wanted only the truth, however difficult and cheerless it might be. And Bogariov told them this truth.”  [3]

One might add that Grossman told the truth, and his novels, including Stalingrad and Life and Fate, were in opposition to the Stalinist falsifications of this history. As Weiss points out, the material also provides a sense of how the soviet bureaucracy’s constant political and historical lies impacted the cultural and socio-political climate at the time. To fully appreciate the book, the reader will need to familiarise themselves with what Weiss says was the “political and ideological crackdown by the Stalinist bureaucracy of the 1930s. “[4]

To conclude, Grossman’s books should be a must for every worker and young person and should be on every university reading list. Grossman, although long overdue, is correctly seen as one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century. His best works are regarded as masterpieces. Grossman states, “I wrote the book out of love and pity for ordinary people, and I still believe in them.” Despite living through what the poet Osip Mandelstam called the “wolfhound century”, Grossman retained this sentiment to his dying day.

---

[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/11/02/ljhh-n02.html

[2]The People Immortal: Soviet writer Vasily Grossman’s first novel about World War II-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/14/auih-o14.html

[3] The People Immortal: Soviet writer Vasily Grossman’s first novel about World War II-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/14/auih-o14.html

[4] The People Immortal: Soviet writer Vasily Grossman’s first novel about World War II-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/14/auih-o14.html

The next article after this diary will bring up 400 articles on this website. I started this website in 2008 to post some of my essays from my degree at Birkbeck university. Still not sure how to celebrate. Either get drunk or write an article.

The Christopher Hill Conference is only a week away. One of many talking points will be Michael Sturza’s new book, The London Revolution 1640-1643: Class Struggles in 17th Century England[1]. Recently Sturza took to the pages of Academia.EU to attack, albeit mildly, my review of his book and to launch a far more nasty attack on Chris Thompson[2]. I will write a longer reply to Sturza in due course. I do not know Sturza personally, so he was within his right to attack my review in the public domain. Knowing what was “misleading” about the review would be nice. Most important is Sturza’s incapacity to understand why Hill could not tackle and oppose the onslaught of the Revisionists on anything that smacked Marxism.

The answer is to be found, not as Sturza suggests, because Hill “was unable to effectively defend the Marxist viewpoint due to the flaw in his analysis”. This is just not accurate. Firstly to tackle the Revisionists, you would have to expose their political outlook, something Hill could or would not do.

According to Norah Carlin, Hill and Manning must take some blame for the rise of revisionism. On the surface, it would seem that Carlin had a contradictory attitude towards Hill and Manning, which is not the case. Carlin praises Hill and Manning for their work on the English bourgeois revolution and says that any new historiography should incorporate much of their best writings.

However, their contribution does leave much to be desired when taking on the revisionists’ attack on Marxist historiography.  The SWP saw these two as bulwarks against the revisionist onslaught. At best, this was a lousy piece of judgement. At worse, they sacrificed a struggle against revisionism over a closer relationship with these two historians who were in one way or another closely tied to the apron strings of the Communist Party.

If you examine Hill’s role, to his credit, he did, albeit to a lesser extent, play a role in the “storm over the Gentry” debate. His defence of Tawney is still worth reading today. In many senses, this was a missed opportunity to do some severe damage to the anti-Marxists. The fact that Roper could walk away from this debate mostly unscathed merely emboldened further hostile attacks on Marxist historiography.

Gifted as a historian as Hill was, he did not understand the need for a consistent struggle against revisionism. This stems not from his understanding of history but his complete lack of Marxist political consciousness. When the SWP did try to prompt Hill into a more active role in the struggle, the results were not good. In an interview with John Rees and Lee Humber, this question was asked, How do you see the development of the debate around the English Revolution over recent years? Would you agree that the revisionists have taken some ground?

Hill’s answer was, “they have made a lot of useful points, but the younger generation of historians is now attacking their more extreme views. Although the revisionists had all sorts of useful ideas, they had a narrow political approach in that they tried to find the causes of the English Revolution solely in the years 1639–41. This assumes what you are setting out to prove. If you look just at those years, it’s a matter of political intrigue, not long-term causes. I think people are reacting against that now. The better of the revisionists are themselves switching around a bit. John Morrill, for instance, who thought everything depended on the county community and localism, is now taking a much broader point of view. And Conrad Russell has become aware that long-term factors must be considered – he doesn’t like it. Still, he recognises that religion has some long-term effects on what happened in 1640, a rather elementary point, but he left religion out altogether in the early days. Now he’s bought it in. He still leaves out the cultural breakdown in the society of that period, but he is moving a bit. I think a consensus will arise, and there will be another explosion in 20 years. These debates occur regularly –since 1640, people have been arguing about what it was all about”.

Some interesting new releases caught my eye this week.

Jonathan Healey’s new book The Blazing World has just been released and has received extensive reviews in the bourgeois media.

Lucy Hutchinson and the English Revolution was published in 2022. Having just been able to borrow a copy from the London Library, I will look to review it later.

I am currently working on a review of the excellent book by Vasily Grossman, The Immortal people.

Penguin’s republication of Eric Williams’s 1944 book Capitalism and Slavery is welcome. Another possible review in 2023.

---

[1] See my review-https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-london-revolution-1640-1643-class.html

[2] See last two articles on this website.

First of all, let me make it clear that I am not now and never have been a “revisionist”. I am actually a critic of the work of Conrad Russell, work which I believe to be fundamentally wrong although not for the reasons Mr Sturza holds. Secondly, he will find in Valerie Pearl’s 1961 book on the City of London from 1625 to 1643 careful research that shows that the violence in the streets of London reported in Royalist news books was more carefully controlled and organised than figures like Brian Manning or Christopher Hill believed.

(The fall of the Bastille in Paris is irrelevant in this context.) I have indeed read Mr Sturza’s book which offers a commentary based on secondary works rather than original research into the sources for the early-1640s.   The protagonists on both sides in the events of the 1640s were drawn from all sections of English (and Welsh) society but this was not a “class-based” society in the Marxist sense at all. 

The English Civil Wars were ‘un grand soulevement’ – ‘a great uprising’ in English – more analogous to the revolt of the Low Countries post-1566/7, to the French Wars of Religion from 1562 to 1598 and the Frondes of 1648-1653 and the Revolt of the Catalans in 1640 rather than to any Marxist paradigm based on the Russian Revolution of 1917. Mr Sturza is perfectly entitled to elaborate his hypothesis but it has almost no credibility amongst contemporary academic historians. He may be surprised too to learn that I am not a reactionary in any sense.

(As this critique of my review of Michael Sturza’s The London Revolution 1640-1643: Class Struggles in 17th Century England[1] is in the public domain I will publish it here and will reply to Sturza’s article which first appeared on Academia.EU at a later date.)

Christopher Thompson uses Livesey’s favourable but somewhat misleading review of my book to launch an anti-Marxist diatribe rejecting the idea that social class analysis could possibly be credible. His flat denial of Revisionism’s compatibility with Thatcherism, “This contention is completely untenable,” is spoken like a true Revisionist and illustrates why he and I are mostly talking past each other.

It is not clear that Thompson has read my book. He simply repeats tired claims that various bourgeois historians have “proved” the case against Christopher Hill and Marxism. Thompson is right on one point at least: Hill did try to answer his Revisionist critics. It is Livesey who falsely ascribed to me the claim that he didn’t. But Hill was unable to effectively defend the Marxist viewpoint due to the flaw in his analysis. This left him vulnerable to attacks by Revisionists, who took prodigious advantage of Hill’s weakness to deny any revolution that ever took place in England.

The actual history of the period proves otherwise, despite Thompson’s offhand dismissal that “mob activities and riots were much less important than figures like Hill or Manning, or Sturza supposed.” One might ask whether the the fall of the Bastille, and the further role of the Sansculottes in the French Revolution, were also of such little import. After all, Paris was not all of France. Such attempts by bourgeois conservatives and Revisionists to deprecate mass action of the oppressed, and write social revolution out of history, are the signpost of their reactionary bias. Thompson is not the first to assert that because Christopher Hill made errors, Marxist class analysis is thereby invalidated. Readers of my book can decide for themselves.

---

[1]See my review at https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/search?q=michael+sturza 

I first came across Christopher Hill in the Hilary Term (January to March) of 1963 when I attended lectures he gave in the dining hall of Balliol College, Oxford. These were based on the material he later published in 1964 in his book, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England. I was very surprised by his delivery of these lectures given in a rather flat, even-paced voice punctuated by copious quotations from printed sources and accompanied by an interpretation of this period in a form of soft determinism. Rather disconcertingly, every two or three sentences he would sniff as if to punctuate his remarks.

It was more of a surprise to me in October, 1965 when he was assigned as my supervisor by the History Faculty Board for my prospective work on the 2nd Earl of Warwick. At our first meeting, he enquired after my social background and about my watch, which was one of the very first to provide the date as well as the time, and what it had cost. I was then sent off to the upper reading room of the old Bodleian Library to begin working through the Reports of the Historical Manuscripts Commission and the State Papers Domestic which were on the open shelves. But that was really all the advice he offered on where to find he sources for my research. Unfortunately, he was not acquainted with the manuscript sources available in the Bodleian, in the Public Record Office then in Chancery Lane, London or in the Manuscript Department of the British Museum: he had heard of county record offices but had not, to the best of my knowledge, ever visited one. In a supervisor of a thesis on early to middle seventeenth century history, this was a serious handicap. The old saying that undergraduates were taught while postgraduates taught themselves was never more true than in my case.

I usually saw Christopher Hill in his office in Balliol once a term. He sat in a chair that hung by a chain from the ceiling and gently swung from side to side as he listened to what I had to report. But he remained resolutely silent even when I had nothing more to say. I found this silence rather alarming and only learnt later that it was apparently an old Oxford teaching technique aimed at encouraging pupils to be more forthcoming about their findings. Unfortunately, Christopher Hill knew very little indeed about the Stuart peerage and landowners and, unlike Hugh Trevor-Roper, the Regius Professor of Modern History, had few positive suggestions to offer about the direction of my research or the contents of my draft chapters. From that point of view, it was an unproductive process. Once a week in term time, on Monday evenings to the best of my recollection, postgraduates assembled in his room together with female undergraduates from St Hilda’s College invited by his wife, Bridget, met to consume a barrel of beer the Hills provided. I went to a couple of these but was so deafened by the noise that I stopped going.

The last time I saw Christopher and Bridget Hill was at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California in January, 1997 when I had the good fortune to hold a fellowship there. We were all refugees from bitterly cold weather in England. He was characteristically robust in denouncing the Prime Minister John Major’s government as “bloody awful”. There was little doubt either in my conversations with both of them that he had been wounded by the attacks of Mark Kishlansky and, much earlier, by Jack Hexter on his methods and findings. Bridget Hill confided to me that she was worried about his health since he had recently completed a new introduction to the Calendar of State Papers Venetian which she thought had taken a lot out of him. (On her own health problems of which I later learnt she said nothing.) By then, of course, he was in his mid-eighties and was treated with considerable deference by other scholars then at the Huntington Library. After that, apart from one or two letters I sent to their home in Sibford Ferris in Oxfordshire, our contacts ceased.

Chris Thompson

“the day I joined the militia…he was probably a Trotskyist or an anarchist, and in the peculiar conditions of our time, when people of that sort are not killed by the Gestapo, they are usually killed by the GPU”.

George Orwell

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” ― George Orwell, 1984

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” ― George Orwell, 1984

D J Taylor’s book is a useful but somewhat politically limited biography of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.  Orwell’s book and his previous masterpiece Animal Farm are correctly seen as “key texts necessary for an understanding of the twenty-first century.” Taylor concentrates mainly on the making of the novel, trying to find out how and why Orwell wrote it.

Orwell took five years to write his last book and was already very ill during its gestation period. Written in seclusion on the windswept Isle of Jura, off Scotland’s coast, he died less than a year after it was published in 1949. Taylor writes, “By writing about the terrors that obsessed him, he had got them out of his system. 1984 is a devastating analysis of the corruption of language and dystopian horror world…and more.”

Taylor believes that Orwell’s idea for 1984 came from his study of The 1943 Allied leaders’ Tehran Conference, which according to Taylor, gave “his consciousness a decisive kick.” Maybe it did, or perhaps it did not. But Taylor misses the point. Orwell’s 1984 attempts to come to terms with Stalinism’s betrayal of the Russian and Spanish revolutions. To give his book clarity and accuracy, Orwell carried out extensive research. One important influence was Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We.[1] Orwell did not live to see how important the book would become. It sold over 40 million copies and is as contemporary today as when it was written.

Orwell died in January 1950. One consequence of his early death was that he could not defend his work or prevent it from being used by right-wing ideologues in Europe and the United States for their ideological crusade. As was said in the opening of this review, Taylor’s biography of 1984 is useful but limited. The same can be said about his biography of Orwell despite winning the Whitbread Book Award in 2003.

Missing from both books is an accurate political evaluation of George Orwell himself. Orwell was part of a generation of workers and intellectuals who moved sharply to the left in the 1930s in response to the Depression, the rise of Nazism in Germany and the growing struggles of the working class. While Orwell looked to the Soviet Union for leadership, very early on, Orwell saw that the Stalin regime had nothing to do with Socialism and was betraying the ideals of the 1917 Revolution.

From the late 1930s onwards, he described himself as a Democratic Socialist, but he was mostly a centrist politically wavering between reform and revolution. He detested inequality and, on numerous occasions, favoured the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system. This sentiment was expressed in his book 1984, and Orwell’s main character Winston had a broadly sympathetic and hopeful attitude towards the working class or, as he says, the “proles.”

In the book, he believed the “proles were the only hope for the future. If there was hope, it MUST lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated.” If only they could somehow become conscious of their strength needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose, they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened. They had a “vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill…the future belonged to the proles.”[2]

Orwell was never a Marxist but was influenced by Marxist writers such as Leon Trotsky. I have not been able to ascertain if Orwell read Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed, but he certainly knew what was in it. But as Fred Mazelis writes, “Orwell was always ambivalent about the genuine legacy of the October Revolution which Trotsky represented. His identification with the working class was based more on emotion and sentiment than scientific conviction. He associated with centrists like the Independent Labour Party in Britain and the POUM in Spain. The ILP called for “left unity,” adapting to the Stalinists and criticizing Trotsky’s merciless critique of Stalinism as “sectarian.” In Spain, the POUM played a similar role, giving crucial support to the Popular Front government, which turned around and suppressed it. At the same time, the Stalinists assassinated the POUM leaders because they could not tolerate any independent left-wing working-class movement.”

Orwell’s Animal Farm was his second attempt at reckoning with Stalinism, his first being the book Homage to Catalonia. At 120 pages, the book Animal farm can be read on many levels. As John Newsinger points out, “The politics of the book were pretty straightforward: a capitalist farmer had been quite properly overthrown by the worker animals, and an egalitarian socialist system had been introduced on the farm. The pigs had then betrayed the revolution with the revolutionary Snowball (Trotsky) driven out and the dictator Napoleon (Stalin) establishing a murderous police state”.[3]

Right-wing ideologues have attempted to portray the book as anti-revolutionary. Orwell refutes this slander saying, “I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job. The turning point of the story was supposed to be when the pigs kept the milk and apples for themselves (Kronstadt). If the other animals had had the sense to put their foot down, then it would have been all right…What I was trying to say was, “You can’t have a revolution unless you make it for yourself; there is no such thing as a benevolent dictatorship.”[4]

Several short-sighted and stupid ideologues, both left and right, saw that the novel’s police state had an uncanny resemblance to Stalin’s USSR and accused Orwell of being an anti-communist but as Richard Mynick points out, “Orwell was too clear-sighted to conflate Stalinism with socialism (writing, for example, “My recent novel [‘1984’] is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism…but as a show-up of the perversions…which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism.”[5]

Despite having serious political differences with Leon Trotsky, there is no doubt that Orwell respected and was heavily influenced by the writings of Trotsky. As Jeffrey Meyers writes in his not-too-friendly essay on Trotsky and Orwell, “In May 1946 Orwell tried to persuade his publisher Fredric Warburg to publish the English edition of Trotsky’s Life of Stalin (1941): “I have read a good deal of it, mostly the bits dealing with Stalin’s childhood, with the civil war and with the alleged murder of Lenin” by Stalin. The earlier parts were “particularly interesting because they demonstrate the difficulty of establishing any fact about a public figure who has been a subject for propaganda. It might be worth trying to get a little more information about the circumstances of Trotsky’s assassination, which may have been partly decided on because of the knowledge that he was writing this very book.”[6]

To conclude, the discussion about Stalinism and the betrayal of revolutions has little interest for Taylor, which is certainly reflected in this book. His main concern is literature and culture. As Newsinger correctly points out, “Taylor’s achievement in his volume is to construct an Orwell who is acceptable to the literary establishment, someone non-threatening, irredeemably one of them. As far as he is concerned, two of the major influences on Nineteen Eighty-Four were Orwell’s rat phobia and the totalitarian horrors he had experienced at his prep school St Cyprian’s!”.[7]

It is not in the realms of possibility in this review to give justice to what was Orwell’s legacy. His most important work concerned the question of what Stalinism was and how to fight it. His most important books satirized the Stalinist political regime and warned of the dangers of totalitarianism. If you ignore the rubbish about him being a reactionary defender of the status quo or even an anti-communist, a systematic study of his most important works reveals a far more nuanced and complex individual. He was very much a product of his time. An old Russian proverb[8] once said, “It sometimes happens to eagles that they descend lower than chickens, but chickens never succeed In mounting as high as eagles”. George Orwell remains an eagle.

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel)

[2] 1984, George Orwell

[3] https://socialistworker.co.uk/socialist-review-archive/nineteen-eighty-four-and-all/

[4] Letter to Dwight Macdonald,George Orwell

[5] A comment: Revisiting George Orwell’s-1984-wsws.org

[6] https://orwellsociety.com/orwell-and-trotsky/

[7] https://socialistworker.co.uk/socialist-review-archive/nineteen-eighty-four-and-all/

[8]In criticizing Rosa Luxemburg Lenin once quoted two simple lines from a Russian proverb: “It sometimes happens to eagles that they descend lower than chickens but chickens never succeed In mounting as high as eagles”, and he added, “she was and remains an eagle”.

David Caute’s new book is a well-written and deeply researched account of the widespread British Secret Service’s covert surveillance of British writers and intellectuals in the last century. Caute’s work on official documents held at the National Archives shows the massive surveillance of anybody deemed a threat to National security. MI5 opened Letters, tapped phones, private homes were bugged, and hundreds of people were under constant surveillance by Special Branch agents.

Those watched included journalists, academics, scientists, filmmakers, writers, actors, musicians and, in some cases, the ordinary public. Caute lists more than 200 victims, but the figures will be much higher as more files are released to the National Archives.

MI5 spied on such prominent figures as Arthur Ransome, Paul Robeson, J.B. Priestley, Kingsley Amis, George Orwell, Doris Lessing, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, Dorothy Hodgkin, Jacob Bronowski, John Berger, Benjamin Britten, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Kingsley Martin, Michael Redgrave, Joan Littlewood, Joseph Losey, Michael Foot and Harriet Harman.

So wide-ranging was the surveillance that even Winston Churchill’s cousin Clare Sheridan who was sympathetic to the Russian revolution, was investigated. According to writer Alan Judd, she was never a Communist, but “she got herself to Russia, lived in the Kremlin and sculpted busts of Soviet leaders, including Trotsky, Zinoviev, Dzerzhinsky and Lenin himself. She subsequently had a relationship with the pro-communist Charlie Chaplin and survived attempted rape by Mussolini. She travelled the world broadcasting anti-British views and was monitored by MI5 until they concluded that she was neither a spy nor a security threat but merely ‘extraordinarily indiscreet’ and had a passion for international mischief-making’. She was later reconciled with her cousin, spent time at Chartwell during the second world war and converted to Catholicism.”[1]

MI5 was set up in 1909 and was tasked to look into “activities designed to undermine or overthrow parliamentary democracy by political, violent or industrial means”. MI5 came into its own during the first world war. Its use of the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) against perceived revolutionaries, pacifists, democratic socialists, and anti-war activists. Members of the Independent Labour Party, such as Fenner Brockwaycame in for special scrutiny.

MI5’s task became especially acute when in 1917, the Bolshevik revolution occurred, which threatened to escalate into a worldwide revolution. The spectre of the socialist revolution haunts the secret service even today.

As Caute shows in his book, most people investigated and labelled subversive were no such thing. One such figure mentioned by Caute is the writer Arthur Ransome who, although was sympathetic to the Russian revolution and interviewed both Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, was never a revolutionary as this quote from his book Six Weeks in Russia shows, “I should have liked to explain what was the appeal of the revolution to men like Colonel Robins and myself, both of us men far removed in origin and upbringing from the revolutionary and socialist movements in our own countries. Of course, no one who was able, as we were able, to watch the men of the revolution at close quarters could believe for a moment that they were the merely paid agents of the very power which, more than all the others, represented the stronghold they had set out to destroy. We knew the injustice being done to these men to urge us in their defence. But there was more to it than that. There was a feeling, from which we could never escape, of the creative effort of the revolution.”[2]

In the post-war period, Caute’s book shows that the CPGB (Communist Party of Great Britain) took up a large part of MI5’s spying activity. All its leading cadre and large numbers of the CPHG (Communist Party Historians Group) were under constant surveillance. Caute believes the CPGB was not revolutionary and harboured no plans to overthrow capitalism.

According to the Trotskyists of the Socialist Labour League, who opposed Stalinism from the left, they were “a group of embittered doctrinaires without roots or perspectives or the ability to learn from their mistakes; 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 dominated by whichever faction happens to be in control in Moscow.[3]

Caute’s study of the Communist Party Historians Group highlights a historian’s difficulty in using and writing about these documents. It is not just a question of saying how and why people were spied upon, but any study must place the spy’s actions in the social and political context of the time. As Madeleine Davis writes:

“The release of MI5 files on Thompson and Hilton added to those of prominent party intellectuals already available, provides a fresh set of primary sources for and a renewed opportunity to consider these issues in their context, while the Thompson material has extra significance given the continued embargo on his papers.14 These files present problems as sources for historians interested in the human subjects of surveillance rather than its techniques and policy contexts. The secret, partial and incomplete nature of the material, retention or redaction of documents, and the difficulty in many cases of cross-checking against other sources limits their usefulness.

Although some triangulation is possible against the CPGB’s archive, awareness among prominent communists of extensive surveillance provoked counter-measures, including selective record keeping. It reinforced a culture of secrecy and mistrust. Thus while the volume of MI5 personal files now available has started to generate a significant literature drawing on both sets of primary sources, 15 investigation of the motives of those involved in the 1956 crisis needs also to draw on a substantial specialist secondary literature. Especially relevant is work emerging from the ‘biographical turn’ in communist historiography and work that examines both the CPGB’s cultural analysis and the party’s internal culture to illuminate the complex and contradictory reality of Zhdanovism’s implementation and contestation in the British party.”[4]

In the Chapter, The BBC Toes the Line Caute shows that MI5’s vetting of BBC staff was well-known, but the spy agency’s surveillance of independent television was not so much. In 1969, MI5 agents were particularly interested in Granada TV’s World In Action. Although not a Trotskyist, one of the high-profile journalists, John Pilger, had a large dossier on him. MI5 concluded that there was “no evidence of a conspiracy” at the programme and reported that any interest from the Communist Party of Great Britain had “diminished.” As one file claims. “Communists are less influential than Trotskyists, who, however, are too disunited to be able to execute a joint plan.”

Caute’s view of Trotskyism neatly dovetails that of MI5. Although a significant amount of time was spent by MI5 infiltrating many Psuedo left groups claiming to be Trotskyists, Caute, like MI5, thought the Trotskyist movement to be disunited. Perhaps this explains Caute’s ideologically light-minded attitude towards state penetration of the Trotskyist movement and certainly accounts for its lack of coverage in his book.

In March 2000, an article appeared on the WSWS.ORG called Was there a high-level MI5 agent in the British Workers Revolutionary Party?. Caute does not mention anything about this grave matter. As the article’s author David North explains: “A former agent for the British Security Service (known as MI5) has alleged in a sworn statement that the agency received reports from a high-level spy inside the Workers Revolutionary Party during the late 1960s. The ex-agent, David Shayler, is currently living in exile in France, where he has fled to escape prosecution for his exposure of state secrets. In his February 18 affidavit, Shayler asserts that the spy provided MI5 with reports of financial support given by John Lennon to the WRP. Shayler recounts that he was shown portions of an MI5 file relating to the agency’s surveillance of Lennon, whose socialist and anti-imperialist sentiments angered the British ruling class. The affidavit states that the material “concerned Lennon’s support for the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP), a Trotskyist organisation. According to the file, a source in the WRP had reported that Lennon gave tens of thousands of pounds sterling to the WRP in the late 1960s and also provided some funds to the Irish Republican Army at around the same time.”[5]

If David Caute has any information, he must publicise it. As North points out, all those committed to democratic rights in Britain and internationally must call for the identification of the MI5 agent inside the SLL/WRP. This is important not only to expose the individual (or individuals) involved but to educate a new generation of socialists about the dangers posed by state infiltration and provocation.

---

[1] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/people-of-little-interest-mi5-s-view-of-left-wing-intellectuals/

[2] Six Weeks in Russia in 1919 Paperback – 10 Sept. 2010

[3] Cited in Gerry Healy and His Place in the History of the Fourth International, David North (1991), Labor Publications, p. 30.

[4] Edward Thompson, MI5 and the Reasoner controversy: negotiating“Communist principle” in the crisis of 1956

[5] Was there a high-level MI5 agent in the British Workers Revolutionary Party?. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2000/03/lenn-m02.html