“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”

Tom Paine

“The sensible way to proceed — I think this is how Marx and Engels proceeded — is to develop a methodological view: historical materialism or dialectical materialism, whatever you want to call it. Then, you approach any material with that framework in mind, but you have to be able to go where the material leads you. Engels warned that you cannot start forcing the historical material into a ready-made format. I took that approach with my book. Of course, I had read a great deal of secondary material, but I wanted to go where the historical archives and contemporary material would take me. I did not wish to influence my work, nor did I intend to engage in debates with other Marxists or currents, in order to determine where history would go. After you have done that, you can demarcate it and illuminate it by — in a relatively minor way — dealing with other currents and approaches. What makes something Marxist is that it is the application of that method. “

John Rees

John Rees’s Fiery Spirits offers a new perspective on the English Revolution.  Fiery Spirits establishes Rees as the leading contemporary continuator of the Marxist tradition, initiated by Christopher Hill and Brian Manning in writing the history of the 17th-century English revolution.

The latest book complements both Rees’s PhD thesis and his The Leveller Revolution, as well as his most recent publication, Marxism and the English Revolution. Rees is a gifted historian, and his latest book is well-written and thoroughly researched. It neither downplays nor overplays the Fiery Spirits, presenting a relatively objective assessment of their role in the English Revolution.[1]

Like the great historian Christopher Hill, Rees is sensitive enough to his historical sources to detect the social currents that brought people of diverse social backgrounds into struggle against the king, and well-grounded enough in history to identify new and revolutionary ideas in the curious and archaic guise in which they appeared. The Fiery Spirits, who were some of the revolution’s ideologues, ransacked the Bible and half-understood historical precedent to justify some theory that explained their actions.

Rees’s new perspective centres on a small group of highly influential MPs. These “fiery spirits” played a significant role in shaping the course of the English bourgeois revolution, which ultimately led to the establishment of an English republic. Through their radical parliamentarianism, combined with mass protest, these revolutionaries pushed the revolution forward to its conclusion.

Rees is careful not to elevate these Fiery Spirits above the role played by Oliver Cromwell, who was, after all, the leader of the English revolution. As the Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky once wrote, “ Cromwell was a great revolutionary of his time, who knew how to uphold the interests of the new, bourgeois social system against the old aristocratic one without holding back at anything. This must be learnt from him, and the dead lion of the seventeenth century is, in this sense, immeasurably greater than many living dogs.”[2]

One of the main tasks Rees had was to rescue these “Fiery Spirits” from what E.P. Thompson once wrote was the “condensation of history”. They have been buried under a large number of dead dogs, and it is to Rees’s credit that he has rescued them. Henry Marten, Peter Wentworth, Alexander Rigby, and others deserve their place in history, and this work traces the radicalism of these Fiery Spirits in some cases back to the reign of Elizabeth I.

Dominic Alexander makes an interesting point in his review of Rees’s book: He writes, “In one sense, this partial continuity is evidence of how deeply the causative factors of the English Revolution were ingrained in the nation’s history. The conflict was not, as many revisionist historians have tended to argue, a mere accidental product of contingent events and personalities. The Fiery Spirits is, however, not so much a riposte to that vein of argument as it is a response to a more interesting one about the autonomy of the political sphere in the unfolding of the Revolution. The long pre-history of the parliamentary opposition faction is one proof that even granting the relative independence of the political sphere, causation there also runs deep into the history of early modern England”.[3]

Rees’s book presents a relatively orthodox Marxist understanding of the English bourgeois revolution and its leading actors. It is therefore perhaps surprising how little Rees uses the work of Leon Trotsky; there is no direct quote of Trotsky in any of Rees’s latest books. For any Marxist, Trotsky should be the basic starting point for any analysis of revolutions and their actors.

Trotsky writes, “The English revolution of the seventeenth century, precisely because it was a great revolution shattering the nation to the bottom, affords a clear example of this alternating dual power, with sharp transitions in the form of civil war. The English Revolution of the seventeenth century, precisely because it was a profound revolution that shook the nation to its core, affords a clear example of this alternating dual power, with sharp transitions in the form of civil war. Initially, the royal power, resting on the privileged classes or the upper echelons of these classes – the aristocrats and bishops – is opposed by the bourgeoisie and the circles of the squirearchy that are closely associated with it. The government of the bourgeoisie is the Presbyterian Parliament supported by the City of London.” [4]For Rees, this “dual Power began in the very early part of the 17^th century.

The hallmark of a good book is that even seasoned readers who have studied this period for ages can learn something new. Rees presents new material that highlights the extraordinary level of factionalism and revolt that preceded the outbreak of revolution. From an early period, the Fiery Spirits led this rebellion. As Alexander writes, “The connections between the activities of the radicals in the Commons and the popular movement became, as Rees shows, the key dynamic driving events in the years 1640-1. The fiery spirits were indeed a minority in the Commons. Still, the weight of popular support behind their moves, such as Henry Marten’s during the struggle over the attainder of the King’s chief advisor Earl Strafford, meant that, as in this instance, ‘the course of events proceeded on the path that Marten advocated, not that which Pym still trod’ (pp.163-4). Indeed, during this confrontation, which led to Strafford’s execution, Pym lost control of parliament. Popular mobilisations against Strafford made the difference; one MP wrote, ‘unless this Earl be sacrificed to public discontentment I see not what hopes we have of peace’ (p.165).[5]

The Great historian E. H Carr was fond of saying, “Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.” This maxim should be applied to Rees. The Fiery Spirits is, without doubt, a significant addition to our understanding of the English bourgeois revolution. It contains new detailed research and reinterprets significant episodes and stages of events. Rees recalibrates our understanding of the revolution from a historical materialist standpoint. However, to what extent you could describe Rees as a revisionist is open to conjecture.

When I asked AI this question, its reply was “while John Rees engages with historical revisionism to some extent, his primary framework is that of Marxist historiography, which is distinct from the broader category of revisionist historians who challenge traditional interpretations.”  Not much help.

There is something Jesuitical about Rees’s ability to write history from a relatively orthodox Marxist perspective while retaining the political outlook of a pseudo-left. He appears to retain the ability to compartmentalise his mind and pursue a scientific Marxist approach to history, up to the point where his radical politics, to some extent, draw the line. He is perhaps aided by an approach that was further encouraged by the extreme specialisation of academic life, which enables him to concentrate on very narrow areas of history that never bring him into direct conflict with his political organisation, Counterfire, on political questions.

Speaking of which, in a previous article, I wrote this: “Rees was a member of the SWP before leaving to found the Counterfire group in 2010, as a significant split from the SWP. Counterfire specialises in providing a platform for the remnants and detritus of pseudo-left politics. The group is thoroughly convinced of the power and longevity of capitalism and is hostile to the working class and genuine socialism. Counterfire and Rees’s occasional use of Marxist phrases, and even rarer references to the Russian revolutionaries Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, are for the sole purpose of opposing the independent political mobilisation of the working class on a revolutionary and internationalist programme. Counterfire’s self-proclaimed “revolutionaries” are bitterly opposed to the orthodox Marxism represented by the World Socialist Web Site, the Socialist Equality Parties, and the International Committee of the Fourth International. “[6]

While I do not personally subscribe to Rees’s political outlook, I can nonetheless recommend this book as highly as his previous work. Rees is a historian well worth reading, and it should be interesting to see what he is working on next. As Ann Talbot wrote about Hill which equally applies to Rees “A historian that stands head and shoulders above his detractors and his books deserve to be read and reread, and if with a critical eye, it should always be with the knowledge that his limitations and faults as much as his great historical insights and innovations are the product of his time. He may be bettered, but never dismissed, and only bettered by those who have studied him closely.[7]

---

[1] https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/10465/1/HIS_thesis_Rees_Thesis_2014.pdf

[2] Two traditions: the seventeenth-century revolution and Chartism-https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/britain/ch06.htm

[3] https://www.counterfire.org/article/the-fiery-spirits-popular-protest-parliament-and-the-english-revolution-book-review/

[4] Chapter 11 of The History of the Russian Revolution (1931)

[5] https://www.counterfire.org/article/the-fiery-spirits-popular-protest-parliament-and-the-english-revolution-book-review/

[6] https://atrumpetofsedition.org/2024/09/18/marxism-and-the-english-revolution-john-rees-whalebone-press-2024-15-00/

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

I think that the celebration of 1640—and especially of 1649—did something for the Party in giving it confidence in a non-gradualist tradition to an extent that it is difficult for the younger generation perhaps to realise.

Christopher Hill

“Thus, as far as he is a scientific man, as far as he knows anything, he is a materialist; outside his science, in spheres about which he knows nothing, he translates his ignorance into Greek and calls it agnosticism.”

Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

This is the first book-length semi-biography of the Stalinist intellectual A. L. Morton (1903–1987). It follows hot on the heels of biographies of Raphael Samuel: A Portrait of a People’s Historian (ANU Lives Series in Biography) by Sophie Scott-Brown, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History by Sir Richard J. Evans, and, recently, Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian by Michael Braddick. All four were members of the Communist Party Historians Group.

It is striking that Palgrave has Morton as a pioneer of the study of Utopianism rather than Marxism. Indeed, Morton was pretty much a pioneer of utopianism, radical history, and English national identity. However, he is best known for his works A People’s History of England (1938) and The English Utopia (1952). Crossley’s book is extensively researched, making use of Morton’s archive held at the Marx Memorial Library in London. His book includes archival work carried out at The National Archives of recently released secret service files.

It is undisputed that Morton was one of the most important influences on a whole generation of historians, both inside and outside the Communist Party. As Eric Hobsbawm relates:

“Our achievements were not insignificant. First, there is little doubt that the rise of ‘social history’ in Britain as a field of study, and especially of ‘history from below’ or the ‘history of the common people’, owes a great deal to the work of the members of the group (e.g. Hilton, Hill, Rude, E. P. Thompson, Hobsbawm, Raphael Samuel). In particular, the serious concern with plebeian ideology—the theory underlying the actions of social movements—is still largely identified with historians of this provenance, for the social history of ideas was always (thanks largely to Hill) one of our main preoccupations. Second, the members of the group contributed very substantially to the development of labour history.

Third, the study of the English Revolution of the seventeenth century was largely transformed by us; and though this is largely due to Hill’s ‘dominant position in the field of Revolutionary studies today’, Hill himself would be the first to agree that the debates among Marxist historians on the Revolution and his work, from 1940 onwards, played a part in the development of his views. The historiography of the English Revolution today is by no means predominantly Marxist; on the other hand, but for the Marxists, it would certainly be very different. Fourth, members of the group have influenced the general teaching of history through the often very popular general textbooks which they have written, as well as through other works. In this respect, A. L. Morton pioneered the way with his People’s History, which still remains the only Marxist attempt to write the entire history of Britain (or rather England). Fifth, the journal founded in the worst days of the Cold War by a group of Marxist historians, Past & Present, has become one of the leading historical journals in the world. Though it was never Marxist in the literal sense, and even dropped its sub-title ‘a journal of scientific history’ in 1958, the initiative, and to some extent the general stance of the journal, originally came from the Marxists, and their contribution to it was therefore crucial, at least in the early years when it established its standing. These are not negligible achievements. They justify recalling the ten fruitful years which began with Leslie Morton’s desire to consult other Marxist historians for the second edition of his People’s History. At all events, if no one else reads this memoir with interest or profit, one thing is certain: it will recall a part of their past to the middle-aged and ageing survivors of the Historians’ Group of 1946-56, wherever their paths have since taken them. [1]

As Crossly writes, “A People’s History of England is probably the first Marxist history of the nation. It explains the transformation from ancient forms of societies through the rise and fall of feudalism and on to capitalism, the rise of the working class, and the potential for a new era of socialism. For Morton, these transformations in England were the product of competing class interests and technological advances. The book stood in stark contrast to the usual histories of the nation, focused on its supposed great individuals.”[2]

Morton’s book is well written and not without merit. Crossley is correct when he says that Morton’s work was guided by the political needs of the Communist Party’s popular front campaign. But for too long, this work has been labelled Marxist. As this quote from Raphael Samuel shows, it is not a historical materialist approach but borders on mysticism at times:

“This version of people’s history invoked the authority of Marx, but it borrowed freely from the positivist sociology of Spencer and Comte as well as, in another direction, from Darwinian biology. Folk-life studies in this period were conducted in the same spirit, using the comparative method to situate myths in an evolutionary grid. The deterministic vision is no less apparent in the ‘folk psychology’ of Wundt – a kind of historical ethnography of mental characteristics and in those various theories of mass behaviour which make the individual a compulsive creature of instinct. The most deterministic history of all was that of human geography, which explained the character of peoples by reference to geography, climate, and soil.”[3]

Or to put it more precisely as Ann Talbot does “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 rary 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.”[4]

Crossley is correct to point out Morton’s gifts and range of subjects. However, like other members of the CPHG, there were two subjects that he could not write about: one was the Russian Revolution, and the other was the rise of Stalin. A discussion on the work of the great Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky was also taboo. As Ann Talbot points out

“ There is something Jesuitical about the relationship of these historians to Marxism. They seem to have been capable of partitioning their minds and pursuing a scientific Marxist approach to history up to the point where the Stalinist bureaucracy drew the line, like the Jesuit scientists who would pursue their investigations as far as the Church authorities permitted, but no further. It was an approach that was further encouraged by the extreme specialisation of academic life that enabled them to concentrate on very narrow areas of history that never brought them into direct collision with the bureaucracy on political questions.”[5]

Eric Hobsbawm justified their actions saying, “There are several reasons why, by and large, our work as historians did not suffer more from the contemporary dogmatism. First, it must always be remembered that even during the most dogmatic Stalinist period, the authorised versions of Marxist history were concerned with genuine historical problems, and arguable as serious history, except where the political authority of the Bolshevik Party and similar matters were involved. While this patently made it a waste of time to debate, say, the history of the Soviet Union—except to discover new citations with which to embellish official truth—it left substantial scope for genuine analysis over the greater part of the human past. Indeed, the debates of Soviet historians could be reasonably integrated into such a discussion, and the work of some of them which survived from earlier periods (such as that of E. A. Kosminsky on feudal England) or was published during these years (such as B. F. Porshnev’s study of popular risings in France) was respected and influential outside Marxist circles, even when not accepted. Moreover, communist intellectuals were encouraged (if they needed any encouragement) to study the texts of Marx and Engels as well as of Lenin and Stalin; nor was there (according to Stalin himself) an obligation to accept all of them as literal truth. In brief, the received orthodoxy both of historical materialism and of historical interpretation was not, except for some specific topics mainly concerning the twentieth century, incompatible with genuine historical work. “[6] David North wrote a reply about Hobsbawm’s craven capitulation, writing:

The Russian Revolution is dangerous territory for Professor Hobsbawm, for in this field his scholarship is compromised by his politics. Hobsbawm once confessed that as a member of the CPGB, he had avoided writing about the Russian Revolution and the twentieth century, because the political line of his party would have prevented him from being entirely truthful. Why he chose to remain a member of a party that would have compelled him to tell lies is a question to which he has never given a convincing answer. It would have been best for him, and no loss to the writing of history, had he continued to limit himself to events before 1900.”[7]

Despite Morton’s criticism of what he called “naïve utopianism” in his book The English Utopia (1952), Morton was guilty of idealism and could easily be described by Marx if he were alive today as a Utopian Socialist, not a Marxist. The English Utopia (1952) traces what Morton believes was an unbroken thread of radicalism. The book charted the history of utopian thinking and utopian literature about peasant hopes, the rise of bourgeois thought, and the emergence of socialism. Just like his book A People’s History, Morton’s book on Utopia continued the CP’s popular front politics and supported the CP’s reformist British Road to Socialism. Morton saw the CP as the inheritors of English radicalism. Morton also wrote the book to counteract what he saw as an attack on England’s pure radical tradition from what he termed US Imperialism’s interference in British history. Crossley writes:

“Morton’s criticisms of American imperialism were sharp and unambiguous, and that they turn up in the final editing of The English Utopia meant that Morton wanted them to be taken seriously. Indeed, we should see such criticisms as part of the heightening of CPGB criticisms of American imperialism and accompanying cultural dominance (e.g., through cinema, comics, books, philosophy) as Morton was finishing off the book.4 In April 1951, the National Cultural Committee of the CPGB ran a conference on the American threat to British culture, with the proceedings published in a special edition of Arena. As well as attacking the malign influence of American culture, an accompanying emphasis in this era was to promote English and British cultural traditions, radical or otherwise. The work of the Communist Party Historians’ Group was tied up with this agenda, not least with its sharp focus on English and British history. In his role as chair of the Historians’ Group, Rodney Hilton wrote in support of the Cultural Committee. He suggested that the culture of the ruling class was in “utter decay” and dependent on the “American imperialists”. He likewise embraced the task of exposing American bourgeois culture while promoting a progressive patriotism to oust the “bastard patriotism” of the ruling class.”[8]

To a large degree, Morton has been largely forgotten by historians. While I am all for rescuing Historians from what E. P Thompson called “The Condescension of Posterity”, I am not sure we desperately need to reclaim Morton’s legacy as Crossley wants to. What is Morton’s legacy? He was undoubtedly a skilled historian, and most of his books are worth reading, but he was no Marxist. At best, he was a Utopian socialist and at worst, he was a Stalinist who stayed in the British Communist Party and slavishly supported and justified every betrayal.

---

[1] The Historians’ Group of the Communist Party-Eric Hobsbawm-www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/the-historians-group-of-the-communist-party.

[2]labourhub.org.uk/2025/04/02/remembering-a-l-morton-historian-of-english-radicalism/

[3] An edited excerpt from Workshop of the World: Essays in People’s History by Raphael Samuel, edited by John Merrick

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

[5] www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html

[6] The Historians’ Group of the Communist Party-Eric Hobsbawm-www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/the-historians-group-of-the-communist-party.

[7] Leon Trotsky and the Fate of Socialism in the Twentieth Century: A Reply to Professor Eric Hobsbawm- http://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/04.html

[8] A. L. Morton’s English Utopia and the Critical Study of Apocalypticism and Millenarianism-by James Crossley- https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/14/11/1339

“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

“A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have taken up residence in the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’ which I described in connection with my critique of Schopenhauer as ‘a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity.

Georg Lukács’

“Why did the German Revolution fail to lead to victory? The causes for this lie wholly in tactics and not in objective conditions… In 1923, the working masses realised or sensed that the moment of decisive struggle was approaching. However, they did not see the necessary resolution and self-confidence on the side of the Communist Party.

Leon Trotsky

“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

“Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.”

Bertolt Brecht, referring to Arturo Ui (representing Adolf Hitler), in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941)

Grand Hotel Abyss is a useful, if somewhat idiosyncratic, examination of the Frankfurt School. The founding of the school was in direct response to the failure and betrayal of the German revolution of 1918/23. Leon Trotsky posed the question :

“Why did the German Revolution fail to lead to victory? The causes for this lie wholly in tactics and not in objective conditions… In 1923, the working masses realised or sensed that the moment of decisive struggle was approaching. However, they did not see the necessary resolution and self-confidence on the side of the Communist Party.”[1]

The so-called “Marxist intellectuals”, centred around the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, drew extremely pessimistic conclusions from the defeat of the German revolution. To a man, they blamed the working class for the defeat, not the German Communist Party. As Jeffries puts it: “It was as if the proletariat had been found wanting and so had to be replaced as revolutionary agent by critical theorists.”[2]

Grand Hotel Abyss – takes its name from the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács’s derisive term for the Frankfurt school :

“A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have taken up residence in the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’ which I described in connection with my critique of Schopenhauer as ‘a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered.’ (Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, Neuwied 1962, p. 219).

The fact that Ernst Bloch continued undeterred to cling to his synthesis of ‘left’ ethics and ‘right’ epistemology (e.g. cf. Philosophische Grundfragen I, Zur Ontologie des Noch-Nicht-Seins, Frankfurt 1961) does honour to his strength of character but cannot modify the outdated nature of his theoretical position. To the extent that an authentic, fruitful and progressive opposition is stirring in the Western world (including the Federal Republic), this opposition no longer has anything to do with the coupling of ‘left’ ethics with ‘right’ epistemology.”[3]

This book is a group biography. The early part of the book describes the origins of the school. From the very beginning, the school was financed heavily by sections of the German bourgeoisie. As Bertolt Brecht once quipped, “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,”. These financiers had such a significant influence on the institute that the words “Marxism” or “revolution” were not mentioned in the early papers issued by the institute’s members. It is fair to say that the Institute for Social Research was compromised from the start.

Economist Henryk Grossman dominated the school’s early work. As the Marxist writer Nick Beams explains “In 1929 Henryk Grossmann publication of his book The Law of Accumulation and the Breakdown of the Capitalist System explained that it was the “great historical contribution” of Rosa Luxemburg that she adhered to the basic lesson of Capital and sought to prove that “the continued development of capitalism encounters absolute economic limits.” The problem with Luxemburg’s analysis, however, was that it shifted the crucial contradictions of capitalism from the sphere of production to the sphere of circulation. “Realisation” was not the problem for the long-term development of capitalism. Rather, the problem was the insufficient extraction of surplus value to sustain capitalist accumulation, which expressed itself in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.[4]

It is extraordinary that the Institute had little or no contact with the two main parties of the working the Social Democratic and Communist parties. Towards the end of the 1920s, the work of the institute came to be dominated by one of its leaders, Max Horkheimer.[5].

As Martin Jay writes “In one of the very few concrete political analyses Horkheimer wrote during the pre-emigration period, “The Impotence of the German Working Class,” published in 1934 in the collection of aphorisms and short essays known as Dämmerung (the German word means both dawn and twilight), he expressed his reasons for scepticism concerning the various workers’ parties. The existence of a split between an employed, integrated working-class elite and the masses of outraged, frustrated unemployed produced by capitalism in its current form, he argued, had led to a corresponding dichotomy between a Social Democratic Party lacking in motivation and a Communist Party crippled by theoretical obtuseness.”

The SPD had too many “reasons”; the Communists, who often relied on coercion, too few. The prospects for reconciling the two positions, he concluded pessimistically, were contingent “in the last analysis on the course of economic processes…. In both parties, there exists a part of the strength on which the future of mankind depends.” At no time, therefore, whether under Grünberg or Horkheimer, was the Institute to ally itself with a specific party or faction on the left. In 1931, one of its members characterised its relationship to the working-class movement in these terms: “It is a neutral institution at the university, which is accessible to everyone. Its significance lies in the fact that for the first time, everything concerning the workers’ movement in the most important countries of the world is gathered. Above all, sources (congress minutes, party programs, statutes, newspapers, and periodicals) … Whoever in Western Europe wishes to write on the currents of the worker’s movement must come to us, for we are the only gathering point for it.[6]

Horkheimer was the father of “Critical Theory”. Most, if not all, leaders of the Institute, including  Adorno, had no faith in the revolutionary capacity of the working class. Rolf Wiggerhaus writes “None of them [the leaders of the Frankfurt School] put any hopes in the working class…Adorno expressly denied that the working class had any progressive role to play.” (The Frankfurt School—Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, MIT Press, 1992, p. 123)

“The Frankfurt School transformed Marxism from a theoretical and political weapon of the proletarian class struggle into a form of supra-class cultural criticism, expressing the political pessimism, social alienation and personal frustration of sections of the middle classes. Max Horkheimer and his closest collaborator, Theodor Adorno, reverted to philosophical traditions that Marxism had opposed—the critical theory of Kant, the “critical criticism” of the Young Hegelians and various forms of philosophical subjectivism from Schopenhauer to Heidegger.

Traumatised by the experience of National Socialism, they denied the revolutionary potential of the working class. Contrary to Marx, in whose view the development of the productive forces blew apart capitalist property relations and unleashed an epoch of social revolution, in their opinion, the development of the productive forces plunged society into barbarism and solidified capitalist rule. “The powerlessness of the workers is not merely a ruse of the rulers, but the logical consequence of industrial society”, they claimed, and further: “The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression”. The only way out of this social dead end was critical thinking: “It is the servant which the master cannot control at will”. The revolutionary subject, therefore, according to these theorists, was the “enlightened individual” and not the proletariat.”[7]

This leads me to another leading member of the Institute, Walter Benjamin. Benjamin, although a gifted writer, led a torturous life and committed suicide at an early age. He too succumbed to the pessimism of the age and, like his co-thinkers, opposed orthodox Marxism and wrote off the working class as a revolutionary force for the overthrow of capitalism.

Before his death, he wrote the following: “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.”[8]

As Bernd Rheinhardt writes “Some time after writing these lines, Benjamin, fleeing the Nazis, took his own life in 1940. His situation was desperate, stranded on the French-Spanish border, he anticipated his 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.”

It is safe to say that Benjamin was not the only one of the Frankfurt School who had a pessimistic outlook stemming from an incorrect perspective regarding the rise of German fascism. The leading representatives of the Frankfurt School lived most of their adult lives in a state of political prostration.” The maestros of ‘critical theory’ and the “negative dialectic” were, when it came to political analysis, incompetent and perennially disoriented. The rise of fascism and defeats of the working class in the 1930s shattered whatever confidence they may have had at some time in the possibility of socialist revolution. Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer and Adorno—published in 1947 and generally considered the founding philosophical statement of the Frankfurt School—pronounced the downfall of all prospects for human progress.”

The analysis on the Frankfurt School by the Fourth International and particularly one of its leaders, David North, has come under sustained attack by several pseudo-left organisations and individuals, such as Javier-sethness who writes.

“In his “Marxist Critique” of The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism, and The Politics of the Pseudo-Left, David North, a high-ranking member within the Trotskyist Fourth International, chairman of the U.S. Socialist Equality Party (SEP), and editor of the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), reprints polemical essays (2003-2012) voicing the response of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) to the heterodox theoretical suggestions made by fellow travellers Alex Steiner and Frank Brenner to incorporate greater concern for psychology, utopia, gender, and sexuality into the ICFI’s program. Whereas Steiner and Brenner sought to open the Fourth International to the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School and Wilhelm Reich’s sex-pol approach, North repudiates any such suggestion as beyond the pale and communicates his revulsion with the Frankfurt School as an alternative to Marxism-Leninism. To rationalise his dismissal of Critical Theory, he rather baselessly ties its legacy to the rise of postmodernist irrationalism. North essentially claims any left-wing intellectual “deviation” from the ICFI’s Trotskyism irredeemably to espouse “pseudo-left,” “petty bourgeois,” “anti-Marxist,” even “anti-socialist” politics. To sustain such fantasies, North presents a highly dishonest, even unhinged analysis of the Frankfurt School theorists and theories.”[9]

There is not much point in answering this facile argument, and doing so would only encourage further stupidity, and I am pretty sure North can defend himself against this infantile attack.

While Jeffries’ book is well researched and readable, it suffers from a major weakness. At no time does he examine what orthodox Marxists have said on the subject of the Frankfurt School. North’s book is not mentioned, and I doubt Jeffries has read any of the articles in it or, for that matter, contacted any leading writers from the World Socialist Website.

Also, the most important Marxist of the 20^th century, Leon Trotsky, gets no mention. Trotsky wrote numerous articles and pamphlets on Germany in the fire of events. The German edition of his writings on Germany, published in the 1970s, contains 76 articles written between 1929 and 1940, the overwhelming majority in 1932 and in 1933. Unlike members of the Frankfurt School, Trotsky aimed to change the course of the Communist Party. With a correct policy, this party would have been able to stop the rise of National Socialism and prevent Hitler’s victory.

The thinkers of the Frankfurt School — Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas, Benjamin, Wellmer, Marcuse — were all for theorising capitalism and barbarism and thought little about changing it. The residents in the Grand Hotel Abyss were about theory, not action.

---

[1] Trotsky, Leon, 1972, The First Five Years of the Communist International, Volume 1 (Monad Press), www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/ffyci-1

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/03/grand-hotel-abyss-frankfurt-school-adorno-benjamin-stuart-jeffries-review

[3] Preface to The Theory of the Novel- http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/theory-novel/preface.htm

[4] Marxism and the political economy of Paul Sweezy- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2004/04/ps3-a08.html

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Horkheimer

[6] The Creation of the Institut für Sozialforschung and Its First Frankfurt Years- http://www.marxists.org/subject/frankfurt-school/jay/ch01.htm

[7] From the student movement to the Greens- http://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/foundations-ger/23.html

[8] On the Concept of History-https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html

[9] The Marx and Philosophy Review of Books-marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/8113_the-frankfurt-school-postmodernism-and-the-politics-of-the-pseudo-left-review-by-javier-sethness/

“I’m literally a communist, you idiot.”

Ash Sarkar

If it is possible to place a given person’s general type of thought based on his relation to concrete practical problems, it is also possible to predict approximately, knowing his general type of thought, how a given individual will approach one or another practical question. That is the incomparable educational value of the dialectical method of thought.

Leon Trotsky

“Every sociological definition is, at the bottom, a historical prognosis.”

Leon Trotsky

A recurring theme written about by both left and right-wing contemporary writers, politicians and historians is that the working class has all but disappeared and is no longer the revolutionary force it once was.

Another theme so beloved by the right-wing has been the concept of “the end of history.” In January 1992, Francis Fukuyama, at the time a neo-conservative academic and a former US State Department official, published The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama wrote:

“All countries un­dergoing economic modernisation must increasingly resemble one another: they must unify nationally based on a central­ized state, urbanise, replace traditional forms of social organiza­tion like tribe, sect, and family with economically rational ones based on function and efficiency, and provide for the universal education of their citizens. Such societies have become increas­ingly linked with one another through global markets and the spread of a universal consumer culture. Moreover, the logic of modern natural science would seem to dictate a universal evolu­tion in the direction of capitalism.“[1]

In a counter article, the Classical Marxist David North wrote, “It is painful to read the gloating stupidities that were churned out by Western academics in the wake of the demise of the Soviet Union. Seemingly every journal devoted to politics, current affairs or culture felt obliged to publish a special issue devoted to the supposed rout of socialism. The word “End” or “Death”, or “Fall” or a synonym had to be included somewhere in the title.”

In Minority Rule, Ash Sarkar attempts, admittedly somewhat badly, to refute both premises mentioned above. Although Sarkar has described herself as  “Literally a Communist”,[2] Like some other pseudo-lefts before her, she uses Marxist phraseology but in reality has no faith in the revolutionary capacity of the working class, saying that they have succumbed to the right-wing media offensive and have abandoned the class war for the “culture war”, her term, not mine. Sarkar’s other thesis, which complements the first, is that fears of minority rule of one kind serve to legitimate minority rule of another sort. This thesis is hardly new or Marxist.

Sarkar cultivates the image of a “sassy social commentator”. She has a large online presence, boasting over half a million followers across her social media platforms, not bad for a so-called Communist. She is well paid for her services. Bloomsbury published Minority Rule, with a “major deal”, which means they paid her a hefty advance. She is a senior editor at Novara Media,[3] . Teaches at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, and writes for The Guardian and The Independent.

I am at a loss to find another avowed Communist who has been allotted so much space by so many bourgeois media outlets. She has been compared to the political scoundrel Tariq Ali. Like Ali, she has become a useful Pseudo left safety valve in times of trouble. Perhaps one should compare her treatment to that dished out against the orthodox Marxists from the World Socialist Website that have recently come under sustained attack from Google and other bourgeois media.[4]  

In a book that is over three hundred pages, it is difficult, if not impossible deal with every pearl of wisdom emanating from the pen of Sarkar, but a few are worth discussing. On pages 24 and 25, she describes a conference in Liverpool at which Roger Hallam was one of the main speakers. Hallam is the leader of XR, which single-handedly failed with its perspective to reverse the degradation of the planet. XR proposes the same model of capitalism with a green environmental tinge, backed up with protests, promoted by successive Green and similar parties worldwide. Sarkar then somewhat incredulously compares Hallam with Leon Trotsky, both she believes are wounded revolutionaries.

In the book, she offers limited criticism of so-called “Left-liberals” who have promoted identity politics. Sarkar’s offer up a somewhat confused understanding of the term herself. It is clear from the book that Sarkar is not completely hostile to “identity politics” or the growing number of pseudo-left organisations that promote it as a means of dividing the working class. She writes, “Identity has become the dominant preoccupation for both the left and the right”.

I somehow doubt that Sarkar has read any thing from the World Socialist Website but in his foreword to the book The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Psuedo lefts editorial Board Chairman David North provided a concise “working definition” of the pseudo-left and it preoccupation of identity politics  as follows: 1) It is “anti-Marxist, rejects historical materialism, embracing instead various forms of subjective idealism”; (2), It is “anti-socialist, opposes the class struggle, and denies the central role of the working class and the necessity of socialist revolution in the progressive transformation of society”; (3) It “promotes ‘identity politics,’ fixating on issues related to nationality, ethnicity, race, gender and sexuality in order to acquire greater influence in corporations, the colleges and universities, higher-paying professions, trade unions and in government and state institutions, to effect a more favourable distributions of wealth among the richest ten percent of the population”; and, (4) “in the imperialist centres of North America, Western Europe and Australasia, the pseudo-left is generally pro-imperialist, and utilizes the slogans of ‘human rights’ to legitimize, and even directly support, neo-colonialist military operations.”[5]

According to her Wikipedia page, Sarkar has many political influences. Her main one appears to be the radical, pseudo-left artist and writer Franco “Bifo” Berardi. According to Sybil Fuchs, “Berardi is a philosopher, writer, media activist and long-standing critic of capitalism. He was expelled from the Italian Communist Party in the 1960s because of alleged ‘factionalism.” He is considered to be the leader of Italy’s anarchist movement. In the 1980s, he worked with Félix Guattari in developing an alternative psychoanalysis, and in the ’90s, he promoted so-called cyberpunk. His most recent book, Futurability (2017), was published by Verso Press. In 2009, he wrote a counter-manifesto to the famous Futurist Manifesto authored by Filippo Tomaso Marinetti in 1909.”[6]

Despite her yelling at the top of her voice that she is a Communist, it was her support for Jeremy Corbyn that showed her real political colouration. Like all pseudo-lefts, she threw her lot in with Corbyn’s election campaign. She writes in her book, “In hindsight, I was self-deluding and hubristic; I got swept up in the fantasy of what a socialist government could be like. There were far more people in the country who weren’t like me than those who were.”[7]

As the real Marxist Chris Marsden wrote “Corbyn was advanced by Britain’s pseudo-left groups such as the Socialist Workers Party and sections of the Labour and trade union bureaucracy as proof that the rightward lurch of the Labour Party, beginning in the 1970s, encompassing Neil Kinnock’s betrayal of the miners’ strike of 1984-85 and culminating in the New Labour government of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown could be reversed. Corbyn promised an end to austerity, Thatcherite free-market nostrums and war crimes such as Iraq in 2003.

The enthusiasm generated saw Labour claw back in the 2017 election some of the 5 million votes lost under Blair and Brown between 1997 and 2010. But this recovery has collapsed, amid growing disenchantment among those who backed Corbyn and abstention and a shift to other parties by workers who see no reason whatsoever to remain loyal to Labour.”[8]

While everyone is allowed to be wrong once, and Sarkar did renounce her membership, it only goes to show that despite all her bravado and so-called “Communism”, she could not see past her nose and see what a stinking political corpse the Labour Party was and is.

Although Sarkar correctly states that “the politics we’ve got are a reflection of the balance of class forces within society”, she fundamentally underplays one of those “class Forces”, Fascism. Whether in the UK in the form of Farage or the fascist in the White House in the guise of Donald Trump whom she calls a Popular Nationalist. Even after 300 pages of so-called political analysis, she says next to nothing in the book about the dangers of fascism.

In his introduction to the book The Rise of Trump and the Crisis of American Democracy, Joseph Kishore makes the following point that the return of Donald Trump to power represents “the violent realignment of the American political superstructure to correspond with the real social relations that exist in the United States. He continues, “Trump’s rise and return to power is not an aberration but the product of deep-rooted crises in American and world capitalism. His administration is carrying out a historic restructuring of the state, tearing apart the remaining democratic constraints on oligarchic rule, and preparing for global war.”

Sarkar is not a Marxist but a glorified pseudo-left. She is opposed to the development of an independent socialist movement of the working class. To build this movement, an unrelenting struggle against all forms of pseudo-left and opportunist politics is needed.

---

[1] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, January 1992)

[2] During a heated TV debate about Trump and Obama on ITV, she said: “I’m literally a communist, you idiot.”

[3] novaramedia.com/

[4] An open letter to Google: Stop the censorship of the Internet! Stop the political blacklisting of the World Socialist Web Site!- http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/08/25/pers-a25.html

[5] www.wsws.org/en/special/pages/pseudoleft.html

[6] Documenta 14 exhibition in Kassel, Germany: The censorship and defaming of art-   www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/09/06/docu-s06.html

[7] Minority Rule Adventures in the Culture War – Ash Sarkar

[8] UK general election result confirms protracted death of the Labour Party-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/12/19/poll-d19.html

This is the second book of a two-part memoir from the renowned political scoundrel Tariq Ali,[1]

The book is a bit of a car crash from an editorial standpoint. Hoping from different subjects and containing significant family memories. Born into a prominent family in Lahore, Ali’s uncle was the chief of Pakistan’s military intelligence. Ali remained heavily tied to the Pakistani ruling elite.

He was friends with Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. In his 2008 book, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, Ali wrote, “I knew [Benazir Bhutto] well over many years. The People’s Party needs to be re-founded as a modern and democratic organisation, open to honest debate and discussion, defending social and human rights, uniting the many disparate groups and individuals in Pakistan desperate for any halfway decent alternative, and coming forward with concrete proposals to stabilise occupied and war-torn Afghanistan. This can and should be done.”

From a political standpoint, given that Ali has been involved in countless major political betrayals, his use of the phrase “You Can’t Please All” for his book title exhibits a tremendous degree of cynicism on his part.

The book reels off several key political events without revealing Ali’s political involvement, such as the revolutionary upsurges of 1968–1975. He was an eyewitness in Moscow to the fall of the Soviet Union. His book on the subject is dedicated to Boris Yeltsin. He became close friends with the bourgeois nationalist Hugo Chavez.

The narrative is littered with anecdotes, reflections, notes and stories. It contains several portraits of fellow Pabloites, such as Ernest Mandel and Pseudo-left intellectuals, and collaborators who founded and relaunched ​New Left Review: E. P. Thompson, Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn.

You Can’t Please All has been heavily reviewed in all major bourgeois media outlets. On the whole, the book has been met with favourable reviews. Pseudo-left groups such Counterfire have been especially fawning with Chris Bambery writing “ Reading You Can’t Please All, I was reminded of a saying we have in Scotland that someone is a ‘Man O’Pairts’, as one definition puts it, ‘ an all-rounder, broad in knowledge and at the same time practical.’ Tariq Ali is certainly that: an agitator, a historian and a theorist; novelist, playwright and film-maker; gourmet, cook and a traveller; debater and polemicist and more. “[2]

Ali began his early political life in the International Marxist Group, the British section of the Pabloite United Secretariat, whose fundamental opposition to Trotskyism centred on its rejection of the counterrevolutionary role of Stalinism and the need for a political revolution in the Soviet Union, instead attributing to the bureaucracy a progressive political mission.

In the book, Ali mentions his enormous political debt to his friend and mentor, Ernest Mandel. Mandel (1923 –1995) was the long-time leader of the revisionist United Secretariat. Born in 1923 in Frankfurt, Germany, he joined the Trotskyist movement in Belgium after the outbreak of the Second World War. Following the war, and still in his early twenties. His early life was dominated by his opposition to the theory that Stalinism had a progressive role to play in revolutionary politics. He renounced his previous opposition to Stalinism because of the emergence of Pabloism in the late 1940s.[3]

Max Boddy makes these central points: “ Mandel’s embrace of Pabloism did not flow from an incorrect economic theory, but the reverse. His economic analysis was based on his rejection of the revolutionary role of the working class as the gravedigger of capitalism. Mandel adapted to the restabilisation of bourgeois rule after the immediate post-war crisis. He put forward that the contradictions which led to the breakdown of world capitalism in 1914, and which propelled the working class into revolutionary struggles, had been overcome. Mandel sought to provide the economic justification for the rejection by Pabloism of the revolutionary role of the working class. He claimed capitalism had reached a new stage, in which the imperialist powers had resolved the inner contradictions that resulted in the barbarity of the early 20th century. He initially referred to this new period as neo-capitalism.”[4]

Ali’s political life in the International Marxist Group was supplemented by his involvement with the radical magazine New Left Review and the Pabloite publishers Verso. NLR’s origins lay in the merger of Universities & Left Review, run by ex-Stalinist Raphael Samuel and Cultural theorist Stuart Hall[5] alongside E.P. Thompson’s The New Reasoner. Apart from Perry Anderson, the majority of the founding members of the NLR were members of the IMG.

The orientation championed by the ULR and The New Reasoner was not towards the working class but to the radicalisation that was taking place inside the universities, and young people were the prime target of the editors.  While rejecting a revolutionary Marxist perspective, they sought to attract young people to the magazine on an entirely utopian socialist basis. Their uncritical absorption of the method of the Frankfurt School theorists meant, in essence, that Samuel and the ULR shared the same theoretical premise that the working class was not an agency for revolutionary change. They instead took on board critical theory, which saw the “emphasis moved from the liberation of the working class to broader issues of individual agency.” E.P. Thompson also shared this orientation.

The Marxists inside the Socialist Labour League and its publication Labour Review conducted a fight against the left radicalism of Samuel, Hall and E P Thomson. It opposed the various ideological trends that emerged from the collapse of Stalinism; these trends became known as “Western Marxism”. Foremost amongst them was the publication New Reasoner, which in 1960 became the New Left Review. Founded by former CPGB historian E.P. Thompson, its supporters claimed to be developing a “humanist” and English version of Marxism that repudiated Lenin’s theory of the vanguard party, which was blamed for the emergence of Stalinism.

The SLL’s Brian Pearce warned of the dangers of founding the New Left Review without thorough assimilation of the struggle waged by Leon Trotsky against Stalinism. Pearce warned of the dangers of an uncritical attitude by the ULR editors towards their past affiliation to Stalinism and their hostility towards the orthodox Marxist in the SLL. He writes, “Nothing could be more dangerous today than a revival of the illusions which dominated that ‘old Left.’ One of the chief sources of the confusion and worse in ‘new Left’ quarters, and in particular of their hostile attitude to the Socialist Labour League, is to be found in the fact that though these people have broken with Stalinism they have not undertaken a thorough analysis of what they repudiate, have not seen the connection between the contradictory features of Stalinism at different times or even at one time, and so they remain unconsciously open to influence by false ideas absorbed during their period in the Stalinist camp”.[6]

During the entire 800 pages of this book, Ali never explains anywhere any of his “political peregrinations”. As David Walsh writes, “ Why he supposedly adopted Trotskyism in the late 1960s, or why he abandoned it some years later; why he wanted to disrupt Labour Party activities at one moment and later tried to install himself as a member. He embodies the French expression, “Before 30 a revolutionary, after 30, a swine!”—except, in his case, the swinishness developed early on and just grew.”[7]

Ali still plays lip service to political events and is rolled out at meetings and conferences to deliver his political pearls of wisdom, but in reality, he is merely looking for “ greener pastures” and has become a major bourgeois commentator and gun for hire. When asked in an interview what the left can do today, he comments.

“Starmer is dreadful. I’m in no doubt that his policies will create a space that, at the moment, the far right will try to fill. We need to respond. But we can’t simply do what we did in the past, in the same ways. In the 1970s, the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism were vital, but the world has changed, the situation is different, and we need appropriate responses.

It won’t be easy, but you know it wasn’t always easy in the 1960s and 1970s. It took time to build the anti-Vietnam War movement. We were constantly under surveillance and harassment from the state.

Over the last few decades, we have witnessed the growth of dynamic movements, like Stop the War. Today, the struggle around Palestine has brought large numbers into action. The horrors of Gaza, the complicity of the Western governments in the slaughter, and the scale of the resistance movement on the streets will shape a generation.

But we need to think about organisational outcomes, establishing networks and rebuilding a progressive political alternative.

For the left, the Labour Party is finished. We should encourage the small number of left Labour MPS (especially those who had the whip removed) to work with the Independent MPS and together to try to offer an alternative vision and voice for me aside and said, “Look, I’ll tell you what the problem is. This isn’t Spain, which is part of Europe. This is a country far away. So, just transporting you guys over for political propaganda would cost us a lot of money, and we don’t have that much. Then, we have to make sure that you guys are protected. Because this isn’t a war fought with rifles, the Americans are bombing us all the time, they will kill some of you.”[8]

As David Walsh writes, it is the response of a middle-class freebooter who has lost his audience. Now officially “a former Marxist,” Ali had even less responsibility toward the working class than when he was a member of the International Executive Committee of the “United Secretariat” of the Pabloite “Fourth International.”

Notes

1.   Ernest Mandel, 1923 –1995- A critical assessment of his role in the history of the Fourth International- This collection of three lectures by David North places United Secretariat leader Ernest Mandel’s political contributions in the context of the struggles within the Fourth International during and after World War II. Mehring Books- $3.00

2.   The Heritage We Defend 2018 edition of the foundational 1988 work by David North, chairman of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site, contains a new preface, photo section, and an extensive glossary.

3.   Mr Tariq Ali’s Radical Mumbo Jumbo- Workers Press March 7^th 1972 https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/workers-press-uk/n707-mar-07-1972-Workers-Press.pdf

---

[1] keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2025/04/street-fighting-years-by-tariq-ali.html

[2] www.counterfire.org/article/you-cant-please-all-memoirs-1980-2024-book-review/

[3] See The Heritage We Defend- David North, Mehring Books.

[4] The ICFI’s exposure of Ernest Mandel’s “neo-capitalism” and the analysis of the global economic crisis: 1967–1971- http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/09/09/rvtn-s09.html

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

[6] Some Lessons from History: The Left Review, 1934–1938

(November 1959) https://www.marxists.org/archive/pearce/1959/11/left-review.htm

[7] UK’s Stop the War Coalition: A bogus antiwar movement in the service of the Labour Party-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/11/30/stwc-n30.html

[8] Rashid Khalidi The Neck and The Sword Interviewed by Tariq Ali-New Left Review May\June 2024https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii147

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

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

Marc Bloch

“We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.”

Karl Marx, (1843)

“The ‘great’ national historian Macaulay, vulgarises the social drama of the seventeenth century by obscuring the inner struggle of forces with platitudes that are sometimes interesting but always superficial.”

Leon Trotsky

Michael Braddick is to be commended for writing the first and only biography of the Marxist historian Christopher Hill. Having said that it is a little surprising that the Pabloites at Verso book publishers want Hill to be known as a radical historian rather than a Marxist one. Whether Braddick protested over this is unknown to me but throughout the book he clearly believes Hill was a Marxist from an early age.

The book is professionally written and researched. If Thomas Carlyle looked to clear Oliver Cromwell’s reputation from under a pile of dead dogs Braddick had to do the same with Hill. By any margin this is a significant and ground-breaking book. Although given the statue and importance of Hill, it is still hard to believe this is the first biography of the great man.

As Braddick correctly portrays Hill was a mass of political and social contradictions he was both a Fellow of the British Academy and the Master of Balliol College, Oxford, a paid-up member of the British Communist party and gave lectures at the British Socialist Workers party summer schools on a regular basis.

Braddick had his work cut out in examining and placing Hill in the context of the time. With his fifteen books and dozens of articles, Hill fundamentally changed how we understood the English Revolution and popularised the theory that there was a bourgeois revolution in 1640s England. Hill’s theory came under sustained attack from the Stalinists inside the Communist Party of Great Britain. Hill’s essay The English Revolution of 1640 was the catalyst for a wide-ranging and divisive battle within the groups and beyond. Stalinists which included leading historians inside the group and leading members of the central committee of the Communist party took exception to Hill’s characterisation of the English Revolution as ‘Bourgeois.’ They, therefore, opposed the conception that the 1640s revolution represented major a turning point in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Anyone who sided with Hill’s position was accused of “Hillism.”[1].

Hill influenced how a generation of students and general readers saw the English Revolution. Although his viewpoint that the events of the 1640s constituted a revolution was rejected and attacked by a group of revisionist historians and writers. Undeterred Braddick still believes that general readers and academics still must define their position on the period from his perspective.

Hill’s reluctance to take on the revisionists politically did not stop the Pseudo lefts in the SWP from using Hill to try a launch an unsuccessful struggle against them. The historical revisionism that struck the study of the English Revolution began in earnest in the 1960s. Its central aim was to refute both the Whig and Marxist interpretation of the English Revolution and, in doing so, conceal the true political and class nature of the Revolution. John Rees was a former member of the Socialist Workers. Party (now a member of Counterfire). At the time he was a member of the SWP and like all Pseudo Left organisations, the SWP was extremely reluctant to take to the battlefield against a coterie of revisionist historians. The SWP would sooner wait till it set up a connection with left-leaning historians, such as Hill and Brian Manning and let them do the fighting. To say the results of this policy were mixed was an understatement.

In an article John Rees wrote in 1991, “We have waited some considerable time for Christopher Hill to enter the lists against the revisionist historians of the English Revolution. Of course, Hill has taken the occasional pot-shot at the revisionists in articles and lectures, some of which form the basis for this book. But generally, he seems to have stayed a little aloof, cultivating a disdain which still lingers in this book’s introduction, where he claims, ‘We should not take these fashions too seriously: they go in cycles, and it is no doubt my age that makes me a little sceptical of latter-day “revisionist” historians who try to convince us that there was no revolution in 17th century England, or that if there was it had no long-term causes or consequences.[2]

Before reading any history book one should always take on board the great E H Carr’s maxim “Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.”[3] Braddick is not a Marxist historian and is heavily influenced by the French historian Fernand Braudel who championed the idea of the “longue durée.”

As “Simon Jenkins wrote “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.”[4]

Although Braudel had strengths he also had very deep-seated weaknesses. As the Marxist writer Ann Talbot points out, “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.”[5]

Throughout the book Braddick constantly grapples with the conundrum of what was Hill politically. Braddick uses the term Marxist without really examining precisely what that means. Hill was never an orthodox Marxist and was never remotely close to Leon Trotsky or the Trotskyists inside the Fourth international who defended Marxism from its Pabloite and Pseudo Left revisionists. As Ann Talbot writes “The fact that Hill was not among the most politically advanced elements of the party—those who then joined the Fourth International—is a greater tribute to them than it is a criticism of him. His work showed him to be a better historian than he was a political thinker.”

I somehow doubt that Braddick contacted or looked at the work of the Marxists of the World Socialist Website. If he, had he would have found an excellent and thought-provoking essay on Hill by Ann Talbot.

As Ann Talbot asks in her excellent obituary of Christopher Hill, “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 must be said that this is a complex question. Not everyone who was attracted to the bureaucratically degenerated Communist Party could be classified with the Webbs. The most gifted and outstanding representatives of the British intellectual elite, whether poets, novelists, scientists, musicians or historians, associated themselves with the Communist Party because the old institutions of church and state had lost their hold over the imaginations of the young while the Soviet Union seemed to embody all that was new, modern and progressive.”[6]

One thing that does surprise me is that a historian of John Rees’s expertise was not invited to write a major review of Braddick’s book. Rees did a review for his political organisation Counterfire.[7] Rees tends to imply in this quote below that Hill and the Communist Party historians Groups adoption of Peoples history and the so-called Marxist-humanist current was a valid part of classical Marxism. He writes:

“Hill’s Marxism was certainly formed originally in the 1930s while he joined the Communist Party. Even then, the historians within the Communist Party were certainly not a pale reproduction of Moscow orthodoxy. In part, they were simply more deeply engaged in the study of their various periods and were producing material in greater depth than could be covered by the generalities of the orthodoxy. This part of the review I have no qualms about. It is this part that I have an opposition to. He continues:

“This was not necessarily a hostile counter position. Generalisations and specific research can often interact in productive ways: generalisation is amended by specific findings, and specific findings altered when placed in a general context. However, that may be, by the time Hill and other members of the Communist Party Historians Group (CPHG) left the party in 1957 in the wake of the Russian invasion of Hungary, they were also being shaped by the so-called Marxist-humanist current of that time. This current had deep roots in Marx’s method, in particular the early writings then for the first time becoming widely available. It obviously was adopted, and methodologically defended, by Hill’s friend and comrade Edward Thompson. It was also common coin for Hill, Rodney Hilton, Victor Kiernan, Brian Manning, and other former members of the CPHG.”

This so-called Marxist-humanist current produced “Peoples History” As Ann Talbot succinctly puts it “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 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 progressive sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of political action to the defence of bourgeois democracy—which supplied 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.” Hil was enough of a Marxist is not completed absorbed by Morton’s Peoples History genre, but he did keep Morton’s national approach to historical questions. And the influence of the popular front politics and national outlook of Stalinism stayed with him most of his career.

Overall Braddick’s book has been met with serious and mostly favourable media responses. One ridiculous and dissenting voice appeared in the form a review entitled A Stalinist chump at Oxford, the Civil War historian who misjudged his own times by Richard Davenport-Hines in the TLS (Times Literary Supplement) He writes:

“Four years ago, Braddick published an ambitious study of political agency, spanning the period from Neolithic to Brexit Britain, entitled A Useful History of Britain: The politics of getting things done. It is a compelling study of people outside ruling institutions mustering their organizational strength, preparing themselves for action and maximizing their collective force to achieve social and material change: every chapter bears Hill’s traces. Braddick’s epigraph for his Useful History – Marc Bloch’s remark that “a man may wear himself out just as fruitlessly in seeking to understand the past, if he is totally ignorant of the present” – would serve Hill equally. He misjudged the conditions in which he lived the first half of his life, and therefore interpreted the past in terms that could be skewed or incomplete.”[8]

To justify is hack work he enlists other historians to do his dirty work saying “There was formidable criticism of Hill’s method, and especially of his arrangement of research notes by predetermined categories. “Whatever Christopher Hill reads seems to provide him with additional support for views he already holds,” Keith Thomas noted. Briggs judged that his “highly dubious categorization” was essential to his work’s “creative richness.” John Morrill reproached him for neglect of archival sources and original letters. Others objected that he plucked quotations out of context, omitted material that contradicted his arguments and made excessively bold jumps in his conclusions.”

Davenport- Hines’s hack review aside Braddick’s excellent biography not only situates Hill’s life and work in its historical context but looks to rescue Hill for a new generation of readers. As Ann Talbot said “As a historian he stands far above his detractors and his books deserve to be read and reread, and if with a critical eye, it should always be with the knowledge that his limitations and faults as much as his great historical insights and innovations are the product of his time. He may be bettered, but never dismissed, and only bettered by those who have studied him closely.”

[1] Document 12 (1947) the Basis and Character of Tudor Absolutism-Ideology, Absolutism, and the English Revolution: Debates of the British Communist Historians, 1940-1956 (2008) David Parker-Lawrence & Wishart.

[2] Revisionism refuted-https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/rees-j/1991/xx/engrevrev.html

[3] What is History? (1961)

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

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

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

[7] Christopher Hill redux- https://www.counterfire.org/article/christopher-hill-redux-book-review

[8] https://www.the-tls.co.uk/lives/biography/christopher-hill-michael-braddick-book-review-richard-davenport-hines