“Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:

England hath need of thee: she is a fen

Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,

Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,

Have forfeited their ancient English dower

Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;

O raise us up, return to us again,

And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.”

William Wordsworth

“For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”

― John Milton, Areopagitica

“Milton, for example, who wrote Paradise Lost, was an unproductive worker. In contrast, the writer who delivers hackwork for his publisher is a productive worker. Milton produced Paradise Lost in the way that a silkworm produces silk, as the expression of his own nature. Later on, he sold the product for £5 and, to that extent, became a dealer in a commodity.”

Karl Marx

“Life is not an easy matter…. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.”

― Leon Trotsky, Diary in Exile, 1935

To say that this small book of just 47 pages has gone under the radar would be an understatement. A Google and Bing search has produced no mention, reviews, or even an image of the book cover. A scenario that would not look out of place in Stalin’s Russia or in George Orwell’s 1984. This is all the stranger since Andrew Milner is a significant scholar and has produced a substantial amount of work on John Milton.

John Milton (1608–1674) is best known for Paradise Lost. He was also a vigorous political writer (Areopagitica, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates) who defended freedom of conscience and republican principles in the English Revolution. For any reader, Milton’s work is historically and culturally useful. He illuminates the ideas and political disputes of the 17th‑century bourgeois revolution in England, the rise of parliamentary power, and the ideological roots of modern notions of liberty and censorship.

Milner is a member of the British Socialist Workers Party and a Marxist literary scholar who has situated John Milton’s poetry and prose within the political and social context of the English Revolution. In this small book, Milner seeks to show how Milton’s imagery, rhetoric and political tracts are bound up with the emergent class formations, religious conflicts and ideological struggles of seventeenth‑century England. He is primarily known as a literary and cultural theorist; his work deals with ideology, culture, and intellectual history. His work addresses ideology, aesthetics and the left’s intellectual history. That terrain is important because ideology shapes class consciousness, and the battle over ideas is a necessary front in the class struggle.

However, cultural analysis alone cannot substitute for a rigorous political-economic account of property relations, surplus appropriation and class power. Classical Marxism holds that consciousness is rooted in material conditions; therefore, cultural critiques must be integrated into analyses of the social relations of production and the balance of class forces. Milton’s poetry and prose are embedded in the English revolutionary conjuncture. His biblical epic and tragic forms are works where he questions authority, liberty, and social order. Milner reads Milton’s theological motifs as ideological representations tied to emergent bourgeois and republican tendencies, while also acknowledging the contradictions and ambiguities in Milton’s voice.

Milner’s body of work, including this book, situates the poet within the political and social convulsions of the English Revolution. For any reader, Milton’s poetry and prose are productive areas for analysing how class conflict, ideology, and revolutionary consciousness are represented, contested and mythologised in literature. Studying Milton through Milner’s revolutionary eyes teaches how literature both reflects and shapes class consciousness.

Socialist Workers Party

At this point, it is worth examining Milner’s politics. Milner, as was said, is a member of the British SWP, which does not represent orthodox Marxism. Along with comrades in the SWP, he belongs to a tradition that broke with orthodox Trotskyism in the mid‑20th century and developed the state‑capitalist analysis of the USSR (most associated with figures like Tony Cliff).

For Cliff and the International Socialism tendency, regimes that nationalised industry but retained wage labour and commodity production were analysed as forms of capitalism in which the state functions as the collective capitalist; thus, they rejected the Trotskyist formulation of a degenerated workers’ state and argued for an independent revolutionary strategy oriented to overthrowing bureaucratic rule. In the 2010s, it was riven by a political and moral crisis around leadership, internal democracy and allegations of sexual abuse. 

Although Milner’s book illuminates how bourgeois and petty‑bourgeois cultural forms mediate working-class experience, it still risks idealism if detached from concrete, empirical investigation of the organisation of production and the state. Some critics have argued that Milner collapses literary meaning into class interest, treating Milton as merely an ideological mouthpiece of a social class rather than a complex, contradictory subject. Perhaps a more serious charge, one in which the great historian Christopher Hill was also charged with, was cherry-picking passages or contexts that fit a class‑interest thesis while ignoring counter‑evidence in Milton’s prose and reception.

In the book, Milner cites Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson as early influences. It is entirely correct to look at the work of these major historians when it comes to evaluating John Milton.

Christopher Hill treated seventeenth‑century literature as part of a revolutionary conjuncture. Hill’s interpretive stance is class-centred and teleological. He reads Milton as embedded in the Puritan radical tradition. He locates literary production within the contours of political conflict, ideology, and mobilisation. This is the Marxist tradition in history that emphasises the structures and social forces that shape ideas—Milton becomes a voice within a contested social order.

Hill’s major contribution was to relocate the English Revolution from a narrow constitutional dispute among elites into a broad social and cultural upheaval rooted in class conflict. Works such as Society and Puritanism in Pre‑Revolutionary England and The World Turned Upside Down argue that the upheavals of the 1640s were driven by changing material conditions—agrarian transformation, commercial expansion, and the rise of new classes and layers within the population—thereby producing religious and political movements ranging from Puritans to Levellers and Diggers. Hill’s method was classic historical materialism: ideas and texts are treated as expressions of social forces and class interests rather than as autonomous abstractions.

Hill emphasised the dialectical interaction between structural changes and conscious political action: material crises opened space for radical ideas, which in turn reshaped social relations until countervailing forces produced new stabilisations. His sensitivity to popular religion, millenarianism, and the “culture of protest” made visible the agency of Milton’s political tracts—Areopagitica, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, and his numerous pamphlets—which must be read as ideological interventions in the convulsive politics of the 1640s and 1650s. Milton defended republican sovereignty, individual conscience and vehement opposition to censorship; his positions reflected a fragment of the emergent bourgeois‑republican current and the layers of intellectuals allied with parliamentary and anti‑royalist forces. His great epic, Paradise Lost, also encodes the metaphysical and moral anxieties of a society undergoing revolutionary reconfiguration.

On the other hand, E. P. Thompson, by contrast, insisted on the agency, experience and consciousness of social subjects. Where Hill stresses the structures and propensities of classes, Thompson recovers lived mentality: culture is both produced by and constitutive of working-class self-activity. Applied to Milton, Thompson’s method would press you to examine how Milton’s language and political interventions circulated among social groups, how readers appropriated or resisted his ideas, and how ideological formations were lived and transformed.

Andrew Milner’s work on John Milton situates Milton’s poetry and prose within the political struggles of seventeenth‑century England and the emergence of the modern public sphere. Milner shows Milton not simply as an isolated literary genius but as a political writer whose formal choices—pamphlet rhetoric, epic mode, religious imagery—intervene in class conflict, state formation and the struggle over free speech. Milner’s contributions to cultural theory enrich our understanding of ideology and intellectual history. Still, they cannot replace the scientific analysis of class, property and state that classical Marxism provides.

“The angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”

Walter Benjamin

“Even the Dead Won’t Be Safe”: Walter Benjamin

“Influential individuals can change the individual features of events and some of their particular consequences, but they cannot change their general trend, which is determined by other forces”.

Georgi Plekhanov

 “A great man is precisely a beginner because he sees further than others”.

Georgi Plekhanov

“A rich old man dies; disturbed at the poverty in the world, in his will he leaves a large sum to set up an institute which will do research on the source of this poverty, which is, of course, himself.”

Bertolt Brecht

In 1931, Walter Benjamin wrote in his diary that Bertolt Brecht “maintained that there were good reasons for thinking that Trotsky was the greatest living European writer.”[1]

Benjamin never met Trotsky but was clearly influenced by him, as these essays in One-Way Street show. The book is indispensable for readers of culture and politics. They combine literary form, philosophical insight and social diagnosis. Benjamin treats commodity society, urban life and mass culture as problems of cognition and political practice. Benjamin’s work is so contemporary that a systematic study of it prepares the reader to understand the crisis of culture under capitalism and what to do about it. Benjamin’s account of the commodification of experience, the loss of aura, and media’s role in shaping perception speaks directly to the age of digital capitalism: social media, algorithmic spectacle and the mass reproduction of imagery.

Born into a wealthy business family of assimilated Ashkenazi Jews in Berlin, Benjamin’s formative years were spent in the shadow of the Weimar Republic, the crisis of European reformism and the rise of fascism.

As Leon Trotsky describes so beautifully, “The political situation in Germany is not only difficult but also educational, like when a bone breaks, the rupture in the life of the nation cuts through all tissue. The interrelationship between classes and parties—between social anatomy and political physiology—has rarely in any country come to light so vividly as today in Germany.

The social crisis tears away the conventional and exposes the real. Those who are in power today could have seemed to be nothing but ghosts not so long ago. Was the rule of monarchy and aristocracy not swept away in 1918? Obviously, the November Revolution did not do its work thoroughly enough. German Junkertum itself does not feel like a ghost. On the contrary, it is working to turn the German republic into a ghost.”[2]

Walter Benjamin’s work, especially the fragments gathered in One‑Way Street, his essays on mechanical reproduction, the Arcades Project and the “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, cannot be properly understood apart from the social and class dynamics of the Weimar Republic. A reader approaching Benjamin for the first time should see him as not an isolated intellectual or “aura‑minded” aesthete, but as a product of the crisis of German capitalism between the world wars: inflation, mass unemployment, the decomposition of bourgeois liberalism, the growth of mass culture and the political crisis that produced fascism.

The Weimar Republic (1918–1933) was a political shell overlying profound economic dislocations: wartime devastation, the burdens of imperialist indemnities, the crisis of international capitalism and the breakdown of pre‑war class compromises. These objective conditions shaped mass consciousness, German party politics and intellectual life.

As Plekhanov argued in his discussion of the role of the individual, historical circumstances give individuals their range of action—yet within those constraints, choices matter; neither voluntarism nor fatalism suffices. He writes, “Until the individual has won this freedom by heroic effort in philosophical thinking, he does not fully belong to himself, and his mental tortures are the shameful tribute he pays to external necessity that stands opposed to him”.[3]

Benjamin’s perceptive fragments register both the objective sweep of history and the uncertain agency of cultural actors in that sweep. Benjamin’s analyses are a study of how capitalist social relations transform perception, memory and experience. His discussion of the “loss of aura” under mechanical reproduction and his montage‑style aphorisms in One‑Way Street register the ways commodity forms permeate everyday life—reducing experience to exchange, fragmenting historical consciousness, and producing the atomised subject susceptible to mass demagogy. Benjamin’s arcades and his attention to commodities are not mere literary motifs but critical categories for understanding how capitalist social relations shape consciousness and political possibility.

Walter Benjamin and Leon Trotsky

At the level of ideas and political practice, Walter Benjamin and Leon Trotsky represent two very different responses to the convulsions of early 20th-century capitalism. Placed within the materialist conception of history, their approaches flow from distinct social positions, class relations and political perspectives.

To understand their difference is to grasp how material conditions and class struggle shape theory, not merely by individual brilliance, which both of course had. The material conditions that produced both figures matter. Benjamin wrote amid the collapse of European democracies and the rise of fascism, a context that informed his aphoristic, crisis-lit reflections. Trotsky’s analysis emerged from active leadership in revolutionary struggle and the bitter experience of Stalinist counterrevolution—hence his sustained emphasis on the need for an international revolutionary party and the critique of bureaucratic degeneration.

Trotsky’s writings epitomise Marxist historical materialism and the dialectical method: theory as a scientific instrument for analysing capitalist contradictions and guiding revolutionary practice. His essays on culture—most famously Literature and Revolution and Culture and Socialism—argue that the working class must appropriate the accumulated achievements of past culture, master technique, and subordinate aesthetics to the objective task of socialist transformation while resisting crude reductionism.

Trotsky’s approach to technology was groundbreaking; writing in Culture and Socialism, one of the notes lying before me asks, “Does culture drive technology, or technology culture?” This is the wrong way to pose the question. Technology cannot be counterposed to culture, for it is culture’s mainspring. Without technology, there is no culture. The growth of technology drives culture forward. But the science and broader culture that arise from technology give powerful impetus to its growth. Here, there is a dialectical interaction.”[4]

Benjamin, by contrast, was a philosophically rich and often melancholic critic whose writings—flashing with literary insight—tend toward allegory, aesthetics and a messianic conception of history. In works such as “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which is not in this book, he wrote The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. [5]

Benjamin emphasises interruption, memory and a theological-materialist image of history that foregrounds the ruins and suffering of the past. His thought is dense with literary metaphor and emphasises the ethical task of remembrance rather than programmatic political strategy. Crucially, Benjamin does not treat culture as epiphenomenal in a trivial sense. Cultural forms mediate class struggle; they can both mask and reveal social contradictions. But from a Marxist standpoint, these cultural phenomena are rooted in the material base. They must be understood as follows: changes in production, mass media, and social organisation produce new forms of ideology and temperament. This dialectical relation—base shaping the superstructure, and superstructural forms feeding back into class politics—must guide our reading of Benjamin.

Benjamin’s Attitude Towards Fascism

Benjamin’s writings were composed amid the disintegration of democratic institutions and the rise of fascist movements that exploited cultural resentment, myth and a politics of destiny. A political materialist account links cultural shifts to the left’s organisational weaknesses. Trotsky’s warning that revolutions and counter‑revolutions hinge on party preparedness and leadership is instructive: cultural critique without programmatic and organisational content cannot substitute for political intervention. Benjamin’s diagnosis of the cultural terrain is thus necessary but insufficient on its own. It needs to be welded to a program that organises the working class to resist and seize power.

Benjamin had a fatalistic attitude towards the rise of fascism, expressed in this quote: “The angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”

Some time after writing these lines, Benjamin, fleeing the Nazis, took his own life in 1940. His personal situation was desperate; stranded on the French-Spanish border, he anticipated his own immediate arrest by the Nazis. On the one hand, the pessimistic viewpoint expressed in that citation stemmed from personal despair. At the same time, it was nourished by confusion arising from unresolved questions concerning the rise of fascism in Europe and the political degeneration of the Soviet Union under Stalinism.

Benjamin, who was familiar with Trotsky’s writings, knew that Stalin had murdered almost all his left-wing opponents and had formed an alliance with Hitler. Nevertheless, among broad circles of intellectuals, some supported Stalin as the only way to avert the emergence of a fascist Europe. The extension of Stalinism into Eastern Europe after the war helped thwart layers of the intelligentsia from coming to grips with this issue. Benjamin did not end his life a supporter of Stalin. But his friends in the Frankfurt School certainly, and like Benjamin, had no faith in the revolutionary capacity of the international working class.

Benjamin’s work remains valuable for understanding ideology, media and memory in the age of social media, targeted advertising and spectacle. He offers the reader an indispensable tool for understanding how capitalist modernity shapes thought and feeling. It will take a classical Marxist to synthesise these insights with a rigorous, materialist account of capitalism’s laws and with a program for proletarian organisation and struggle.

NOTES

Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999)

The IIRE is working on a new collection of Trotsky’s writings on fascism. This new translation of a 1932 article by Trotsky is part of this project. This article was originally published in the journal Die Weltbühne (‘The World Stage’). Die Weltbühne was an important journal of the Independent intellectual left during the Weimar Republic. Cooperators and contributors included Carl von Ossietzky, Kurt Hiller, Erich Mühsam, Fritz Sternberg, Heinrich Ströbel, Kurt Tucholsky and others.

---

[1] Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), p. 477.

[2] Leon Trotsky: The German Enigma-https://www.iire.org/node/1003

[3] On the Role of the Individual in History-www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1898/xx/individual.html

[4] Culture and Socialism – 1927-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/10/cult-o23.html

[5] Theses on the Philosophy of History-

Raphael Samuel (1934–1996) was a leading figure in post-war British historical culture. He was a Marxist/Stalinist-trained intellectual, a founder member of the History Workshop movement and the journal History Workshop, and a powerful advocate for what became known as “history from below”, the study of the social and cultural lives of ordinary people rather than ruling elites.

Samuel was not an orthodox historian by any stretch of the imagination. Anyone studying Samuel’s archive at the Bishopsgate Institute would see that his note-taking and working methods were chaotic at best. According to Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite ‘ Each thought or reference to a source was written or pasted onto a single side of a loose sheet of paper. It might be the source itself – an advertisement, a jam-jar label or an extract from a Xerox – it mattered only that it was attributed and sub-headed under a theme. Then the notes were filed in groups. Scholarly prestidigitation allowed the pages to be constantly reshuffled so that new combinations of ideas appeared, presuppositions might be overturned, and surprising connections thereby be generated. All that was needed was reams of rough paper, scissors and a pot of glue, phalanxes of lever-arch files, and a hole-puncher.’[1]

His method and traits were learnt from Beatrice and Sidney Webb, progenitors of Fabian socialism, who developed it in the late 19th century. Samuel would have absorbed not only their note-taking style but a large chunk of their politics. But his work revitalised popular and local history, encouraged collective research methods, and brought working-class memory, oral testimony, and archival recovery into historians’ practice. These are enduring gains. The recovery of workers’ lived experience helps counter the abstractions and elitism of bourgeois historiography.

Before founding the Universities Left Review, Samuel was a member of the British Communist Party. He left two years after Kruschev’s secret speech. He was a very young member of the Communist Party Historians Group. The CPHG arose inside and around the British Communist Party and the wider milieu of Communist and labour politics between the 1930s and 1950s. Its best‑known members—E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill and others—produced influential work that challenged bourgeois and Whig traditions of national history and insisted on the agency of popular classes. The group’s scholarship should be read against the background of the political orientation of the Stalinist bureaucracy—its Popular Front politics, its nationalism and its accommodation to bourgeois forces—which indelibly affected the intellectual formation and institutional constraints faced by historians working within or alongside the Party.

The CPHG did, however, make enduring contributions to socialist historiography. It overturned Whig teleology, insisted that ordinary people make history, and enriched archival and methodological practice. These were advances that Marxists should defend and extend. However, the group’s political roots in a Stalinist‑influenced party had concrete consequences. The Communist Party’s “People’s History” orientation and Popular Front politics tended to domesticate class conflict, subordinating proletarian independence to alliances with liberal or petty‑bourgeois currents. The result was, at times, an apologetic stance toward state bureaucracy and a reluctance to carry the political implications of Marxist analysis into the present.

Raphael Samuel and the Universities Left Review

Samuel was a leading British Marxist historian and a central figure in the post‑war “history from below” movement. He helped found the History Workshop and was associated with the small‑circulation left journals and intellectual networks that emerged in Britain in the 1950s and 60s, among them the Universities and Left Review (ULR). ULR (1957–60) brought together student radicals, young intellectuals and some socialist critics of the university and the Labour Party. It aimed to radicalise university life and cultural debate, critiquing orthodox academic history and promoting popular and labour history.

Samuel’s main collaborator on ULR was Stuart Hall. Hall’s political and intellectual trajectory—from the Universities and Left Review (ULR) and the New Left to Cultural Studies and his later role in Marxism Today was the product of definite class formations, political realignments and the changing social position of layers of the intelligentsia after World War II. Hall’s work cannot be treated as an abstract contribution to theory divorced from the social interests it expresses.

As Paul Bond writes,‘ Hall’s central theme was the repudiation of the class struggle as the axis of social development, as this assumes that the working class is the decisive agent of political change. Instead, he argued for a turn to the cultural sphere. This was not a Marxist appraisal or critique of culture, but the elevation of “culture” as an arena contested by different “agencies”. Longtime Pabloite Tariq Ali wrote that Hall said, “half-joking to friends that his cultural studies project was politics by other means”. That indeed it was: a project that replaced class as the central political factor by race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality and other “sub-cultures” and “identities”, making it impossible, in the end, to address capitalist exploitation. Instead, the struggle had to be conducted in every supposedly “relatively autonomous” sphere. The logic led to garden-variety single-issue, bourgeois-reformist politics, as an article Hall co-authored last year made clear: “Mobilising resistance thus requires alliances of a sort which only a multi-focused political strategy can hope to construct”.[2]

From a historical‑materialist standpoint, the importance of Samuel, Hall and their ULR project lies less in any single programmatic contribution than in the social position they occupied: a layer of petty‑bourgeois intellectuals reacting to the crises of post‑war capitalism and the limitations of established reformist politics. Their cultural interventions—renewed attention to working‑class experience, local history and culture—were progressive in exposing bourgeois narratives and recuperating popular memory. Yet, understood in class terms, this milieu tended to substitute cultural critique for a political orientation to the working class as a revolutionary subject.

Samuel was in the Communist Party at the same time as the founder of People’s History, A.L. Morton. As Ann Talbot brings out in her essay on Christopher Hill, “The Communist Party sponsored a form of ‘People’s History’, which is typified by A.L. Morton’s People’s History of England, in which the class character of earlier rebels, revolutionaries and popular leaders was obscured by regarding them all as representatives of a national revolutionary tradition. This historical approach reflected the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to internationalism and their attempts to form an unprincipled alliance with the supposedly democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis countries.

People’s history was an attempt to give some historical foundation to the policies of Popular Front—the subordination of the working class to supposedly progressive sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of political action to the defence of bourgeois democracy, which provided a democratic facade to the systematic murder of thousands of genuine revolutionaries, including Trotsky. It was the approach that Christopher Hill was trained in, along with E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, who were part of the Marxist Historians Group and came under the influence of Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr.’ [3]

The ULR and similar currents reflected objective social forces: a post‑war expansion of higher education, the growth of a politically conscious intelligentsia, and the fragmentation of the labour movement. These social origins explain both the strengths and limits of the project. Samuel’s cultivation of popular history responded to an objective weakness: official historiography ignored the working class. But the limitations were also objective: petty‑bourgeois layers, detached from a sustained orientation to working‑class organisation, are prone to turning working‑class culture into a form of moral critique rather than mobilising it as the basis for revolutionary political independence.

The lessons of Samuel and the ULR are twofold and complementary. First, recovering working‑class history and culture is necessary: it combats bourgeois erasure, builds pride, and strengthens class identity. Second—and decisive—cultural work must be subordinated to political orientation: it must be used to connect workers to a programmatic, internationalist Marxist perspective and to build rank‑and‑file organisation and a revolutionary party. Without that link, cultural renewal risks becoming an appendage of liberal reformism or of petty‑bourgeois radicalism.

Workshop of the World

Raphael Samuel’s essays, collected in this book, came under the rubric of a “people’s history”. They include material often associated with the idea of Britain as the “workshop of the world”. They do offer rich documentary and cultural evidence about working‑class life, memory and resistance. Samuel’s micro‑histories become instruments for understanding how material conditions, class formation and consciousness interact.

He helped institutionalise a new historical practice—through the History Workshop movement and collections of oral histories and local studies—that shifted attention away from great men and state archives toward popular culture, labour traditions and everyday life. This intervention broke important ground: it democratised history, widened the sources, and made working-class experience visible in ways that conventional academic histories often ignored. Yet, from a classical Marxist and Fourth International standpoint, Samuel’s legacy is both positive and limited.

Samuel’s History Workshop arose in the 1960s and 1970s amid rising labour militancy and intellectual currents that critiqued elitist historiography. He collected oral testimony, household economies, popular ritual, and the souvenirs of everyday life. This expanded the archive, exposed working‑class creative resistance and revealed how consciousness is formed through struggle, culture and community. These contributions are invaluable for socialists building working‑class memory and confidence.

But Samuel’s practice frequently stopped at descriptive recovery. While he emphasised the autonomy and creativity of popular traditions, he often treated culture as an end in itself—celebrating particularisms and local solidarities without always linking them systematically to the political organisation required to overthrow capital. In moments where the transformation of society is the question, empirical cultural history must be integrated with an analysis of capitalist accumulation, state power and the strategy of revolutionary organisation.

Samuel emerged in the same milieu that produced the 1960s New Left and the cultural turn in history. That milieu included significant intellectual currents hostile to classical materialism — strands of the Frankfurt School, post-Marxist and post-structuralist thought.

The domination of this school of thought meant the working class paid a heavy price for this fragmentation of the working-class perspective. Samuel’s work, while recuperative of working-class sources, often stopped short of linking that history to a program for working-class political independence. Samuel’s practical insistence that historians listen to workers, use oral history, and develop local archives advanced the working class’s capacity to know itself. This recuperation of proletarian experience strengthens historical consciousness when it is anchored in a materialist understanding of class relations.

At the same time, Samuel’s culturalism and the New Left milieu into which he was embedded often moved away from a rigorous classical Marxist method. The petty-bourgeois currents of the New Left tended to relativise class as the central subject of history and to prioritise cultural, identity, or therapeutic frameworks over an analysis anchored in production and property relations.

Robert Tressell and the Early Socialists

There are two chapters in the book that I want to pay particular attention to. Robert Tressell (Robert Noonan), author of The Ragged‑Trousered Philanthropists, occupies an important place in the cultural and political formation of British working‑class socialism. His novel gives an unsparing depiction of artisan and factory life, petty‑bourgeois illusions, and the corrosive ethics of capitalist wage relations.

But to situate Tressell historically and theoretically, it is important to locate him within the longer trajectory from the early socialists and utopian currents to the emergence of scientific Marxism and the revolutionary program defended by the Marxists. Socialists like Fourier, Owen, Saint‑Simon, and later various British and French reformers raised vital moral and institutional objections to capitalist misery. They exposed capitalism’s inhumanity and proposed cooperative or communal remedies. Tressell’s literary moralism continues that tradition. His vivid exposé of exploitation aimed to awaken sympathy and spur reform among his readers.

Tressell’s milieu in Edwardian Britain was artisans, small contractors, and a growing industrial proletariat showing both the objective development of capitalist productive forces and the subjective unevenness of working‑class consciousness. Tressell’s novel contributes to shaping consciousness but cannot substitute for organised, political working‑class activity.

                           Origins of People’s History

Samuel’s essay on People’s History is probably one of his finest. Under the guise of the People’s History genre, it reopened questions long suppressed by institutional historiography: ritual, popular politics, communal solidarities, and the cultural forms that sustain working-class life.

People’s history—often called “history from below” was not merely a literary genre but a social product rooted in class relations. From the standpoint of the materialist conception of history, historical consciousness arises out of concrete social practice: collective labour, struggle, deprivation and organisation produce memories, traditions and forms of political culture. As Plekhanov stressed in tracing the emergence of the theory of class struggle, ideas about history flow from changes in property relations and social development; historians who ignore class obscure the motor forces of social change.

In Britain, after World War II and especially from the late 1960s, Raphael Samuel and the History Workshop movement institutionalised the turn to popular and cultural history. They emphasised archives of everyday life, oral history and collective memory, seeking to make the working class visible within historical narrative. This cultural recovery reflected real social processes: the postwar restructuring of capitalism, renewed political radicalism among students and workers, and a crisis in the authority of traditional elites.

There is a progressive side to the genre in that, correctly applied, it undermines the bourgeois monopoly on the past, restores agency to workers and oppressed groups, and supplies documentary armour for organising—stories of strikes, self‑organisation and mutual aid that can inspire present struggles. Recovering these experiences helps politicise layers of working people by showing that social change was made by ordinary people, not by abstract “great men.”

However, when detached from a dialectical, class‑struggle method, people’s history can become an end in itself: localist nostalgia, culturalism, or therapeutic memorialising that fails to connect the past to present class relations and the necessity of a revolutionary program.

Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory, 1994

Samuel did not write many books but concentrated on essay writing. He only wrote one sole-authored book in his lifetime, Theatres of Memory (1994). A second volume of Theatres of Memory, titled Island Stories: Unravelling Britain, was published in 1998, after his death.

As Samuel McIlhagga points out, ‘It is perhaps a unique feature of British intellectual culture that its greatest Marxists have more often been essayists than authors of lengthy theoretical treatises. The self-contained responses to a specific political or historical problem, or the witty corrective to dominant orthodoxies, are well suited to a nation whose intellectual elite are as closed and coherent as Britain’s. When E. P. Thompson wrote “The Peculiarities of the English,” his breathless polemic seeking to correct a dismissive attitude to the radicalism of his country’s history found in the work of the Marxist writers Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn, he was pitting himself against two thinkers whom he knew personally and who edited a journal to which he, too, had contributed.[4]

Samuel’s was a new orientation which drew on Marxist themes of class, labour, and social conflict. Still, he combined them with a broad culturalist sensibility and an emphasis on the historian as activist-organiser. From the standpoint of classical Marxism, this combination has both strengths and weaknesses. It should be pointed out that Samuel was not a classical Marxist.

Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory (1994, ed. with Paul Thompson) was a foundational intervention in the study of popular memory, oral history and the politics of historical representation. Samuel recasts history as a living, contested cultural terrain: memory is staged, rehearsed and institutionalised in festivals, museums, songs, local traditions and archives. There are similarities and major differences between Samuel’s work and E.P. Thompson’s. Thompson (The Making of the English Working Class) developed a class-formation method that treated class as a historical process: classes are made through concrete struggles, economic relations and political experience, not by sociological labels or algebraic categories. Thompson insisted on grounding consciousness in workers’ material conditions and lived struggles.

Samuel, on the other hand, followed a culturalist tradition, i.e., history-from-below, collective memory, institutions, everyday life, shifting attention to the cultural forms, practices, and repositories through which people experience, narrate, and reproduce social life — oral tradition, rituals, popular politics, festivals, literary tastes, and memory.

These two contending historiographical approaches clashed in 1979. According to Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, “The 1979 History Workshop staged a rehashing of what was already one of the most vituperative disputes on the New Left, between E.P. Thompson and the advocates of ‘theory’. Thompson ripped into the other speakers, Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson. The atmosphere, as Sophie Scott-Brown describes in her excellent 2017 biography of Samuel, was already bad. The Ruskin student collective organising the conference wasn’t keen on the theoretical preoccupations of many academics in the History Workshop editorial collective; some members had already suggested forming a breakaway workshop to get back to the study of labour history. After Thompson’s blow-up, the final plenary session was quietly cancelled. Samuel, who probably took this decision, was essentially a Thompsonian: he defended a focus on ‘real life experience’ and empirical work, which he suggested could ‘do more for our theoretical understanding of ideology and consciousness than any number of further “interpellations” on the theme of “relative autonomy”. (A dig at Althusserians.) Samuel pointed out that, like ‘any other intellectual artefact’, theory isn’t timeless but ‘has its material and ideological conditions of existence’. But he wasn’t entirely a sceptic, arguing that good history required a ‘theoretically informed’ understanding of language, and that socialism required a serious analysis of ‘bourgeois ideology’.[5]

The dispute between E.P. Thompson and Stuart Hall was not merely an academic quarrel about sources or style. It expresses two antagonistic tendencies in the British left: Thompson’s historical‑materialist, class‑formation method, which locates class consciousness in concrete economic relations, struggles and political experience, and Hall’s culturalist turn, which relocates political explanation in culture, identity and “articulations” of meaning.

Contemporary relevance

Samuel’s method of reconstructing working-class experience: oral histories, rank-and-file reportage, and cultural memory are weapons against ideological amnesia. Culture can strengthen class identity, but without a program that explains how capital reproduces itself, and without organisation to transform class interests into political power, cultural mobilisation risks becoming either reformist co‑optation or nostalgic particularism. The dialectic here is crucial: cultural consciousness both expresses and shapes class struggle, but it is itself transformed by objective changes in production and by political leadership.

From the standpoint of classical Marxism, Raphael Samuel’s recovery of popular memory is an essential resource—but it must be subordinated to a revolutionary program. Marxist historiography does not merely collect fragments of working‑class life; it explains how those fragments arise from class relations and how they can be mobilised for socialist transformation. This rejects both bourgeois culturalism, which divorces culture from economics, and reformist populism, which equates cultural recognition with systemic change.

---

[1] Ladders last a long time-www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n10/florence-sutcliffe-braithwaite/ladders-last-a-long-time

[2] Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014): A political career dedicated to opposing Marxism-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/03/05/hall-m05.html

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

[4] Why Raphael Samuel Matters-https://jacobin.com/2024/05/raphael-samuel-workshop-of-the-world

[5] Ladders last a long time-www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n10/florence-sutcliffe-braithwaite/ladders-last-a-long-time