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.
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.
(This is a loosely edited transcript of the above book event. This transcript was done by Christopher Thompson. I include in this publication some comments made by Thompson.)
Houseman’s Thanks everyone for joining today. Thanks for giving up your Saturday night. We are joined today by Michael Braddock, who is the author of a new biography of Christopher Hill, which is out now from Verso. Braddick has written many books before, including a biography of John Lilburn, Common Freedom of the People. God’s fury, England’s fire. Most recently, a useful history of Britain, the Politics of Getting Things Done. What drove his work? What motivated? And also, I suppose, what motivated you to write his biography? Thanks.
Braddick: Can I just say thanks so much to you for your interest in Hill and for giving up your Saturday night to come and hear about him? So Chris Hill was born in 1912 in York, son of a very prosperous solicitor, and brought up a believing and devout Methodist with the extreme principled view that you should have serious thoughts about the world, and you should act on them to make the world a better place. And that was one of his first important intellectual inheritances, I think, because he lost his faith in the thirties, but he retained that seriousness about living an examined life, leading a life that was serious about how the world could be better and trying to act on that. Although he did spend a lot of time pondering how he could act helpfully in the world.
He lost his faith and gained his Marxism in a process that’s not very clear. But he became a convinced Marxist while an undergraduate at Oxford, and he graduated in 1934. Should know that. But didn’t join the communist party immediately. He had reservations about the communist party strategy.
He went to the Soviet Union between 1934-36 and came back convinced that he should join the communist party, partly because of what he’d seen in the Soviet Union and partly because the CBGB had changed its political strategy in a way that made it an easier party home for him. He remained a member of the CPGB for nearly twenty years. He left in nineteen fifty-six, fifty-seven. Prompted not by the invasion of Hungary, but by the refusal of the party to allow free internal discussion of the invasion of Hungary. It was he who left on the point of inner party democracy.
And the second part of that was that he didn’t think the party had allowed them to discuss the implications of Khrushchev’s secret speech, which had been made in secret but published by the CIA quite widely. Both of which made him think that the communists had been misled by the party, had been misinformed by the party, and that the daily work of the party’s paper had deliberately suppressed information that was critical of the Stalinist line. So I laid it at that point because he was an intellectual Marxist and a communist, but he was a communist only for those twenty years. And it was a political strategy that he took up in ’36, and he dropped it in ’57. And it’s a distinction that isn’t much honoured in liberal commentary on Hill.
He’s routinely referred to interchangeably as a communist or a Marxist, but his membership of the party was a strategy. And understanding why he took it on and left it is important for understanding his politics. By the time he left the party in ’57, he’d been a fellow of Oxford College. He went to Balliol in 1931 and left in 1978. Not a standard Marxist career.
He had two years in Cardiff in the late 1930s. He had four years, I think, of military service. But he was in Balliol for his whole life. Down to ’56 and ’57, he’d been doing a lot of work for the party, a lot of publication for the party and party, for explaining Marxism, setting out what a Marxist history might look like. And also, I’m sorry, write or I’m sorry, writing apologies for Stalinist, Russia and Stalinist policies.
Out of the party, he then pursued a freer career, I think, an intellectually freer career to pursue the implications of his intellectual Marxism. Having dropped the political strategy of the CBGB, he was freer to explore the implications of Marxism for his understanding of the world. And there, I got very interested in the relationship between the British left and the British past, and how, at each phase of his writing career, you can see him in dialogue with the contemporary world, trying to understand the past for the present that would equip us better for the future. And in the forties and fifties, that was mainly about the state and reform of the state and political economy. In the early sixties, it was about science and progress, how progressive ideas, but particularly scientific ideas, could be set free.
That’s a lot to unpack there, but he did think of politically progressive ideas as scientific in the same way that an understanding of the natural world could be scientific. So he had a view of, you know, scientific progress in the early sixties. Sixties. In the late sixties, he was master of writing, letters to the undergraduates to explain why they couldn’t have a condom machine in the college, while writing the world turned upside down, this glorious celebration of personal freedom and personal liberation. So in the late sixties, he was very interested in the possibilities of personal liberation from a Marxist perspective.
And then in the eighties, he wrote about the experience of defeat as the shadow of Thatcherism came to lie over the aspirations he’d been pursuing really for a whole political career. He began to write about seventeenth-century radicals and their experience in the Restoration. What is it like when the world turns against you, and what do you do about your ideals, and how do you nurture them and keep them alive for better times? So, it’s an interesting life in several ways. And there is that paradox I kind of alluded to, the difficulty of reconciling a life as a fairly, you know, well, as a very assiduous Oxford Tutor, undistinguishable, really, in his practice from his liberal colleagues in Oxford.
Braddick: He behaved as an Oxford Tutor was expected to do. And then as a master of a college, balancing and representing all the interests in a relatively conservative institution. And doing all that while pursuing this radical career in writing. And one final thought about life is, as I said at the very start, he became a convinced Marxist, also carrying from his Methodism a view that you should act on your beliefs to improve the world. And the way he thought he could do that was by writing.
Writing was for him a way of improving the world, equipping people with a different past to give them a different sense of the present and a different idea about the possibilities of the future. That’s what he thought he could contribute to the improvement of society. And he wrote to the communist party leadership, I think, in 1949, saying, I know this is a smallish backwater of activity, but it’s the one where I can make a difference. And he juxtaposed it directly with what he’d done leafleting at the factory gate, campaigning and by-elections and so on. But he felt that, as a posh guy with a posh Oxford accent, what he could do for the movement was to develop a radical past on which people could draw in thinking about the present and charting a radical future.
You’ve kind of mentioned that, you know, to suppose about what drew him to history in the English past, but why, particularly, was the English Revolution? What was it about the English Revolution that appealed to him? And how did his, you know, how did his kind of communism and his Marxism affect how he viewed that particular struggle, particularly in that early period? Yeah. So I think it was taken for granted at the time, and he used the term, ironically, that England was the top nation until the First World War.
Bradick: And the understanding that was to understand the first bourgeois state, the state that had the first bourgeois revolution, the first industrial revolution, the first urbanized mass society. So it wasn’t a sort of little Englander patriotism that made him concentrate on England. It was thought that it was the first bourgeois society, and understanding how the first bourgeois society evolved and came about and became supported by, you know, all the structures that support a bourgeois society. You were learning something important for the history of the whole globe. And so he spent a lot of time arguing that the seventeenth-century crisis in England was a bourgeois revolution, and a precursor to the better-known bourgeois revolution in France.
And that was one of his major academic concerns was to establish the view that we should view the seventeenth-century crisis as a bourgeois revolution. Why did he do that’s one set of one kind of answer to your question, but another one is that his departure from Methodism was associated with a strong view that bourgeois culture was experiencing its death throes. And, if you wanted to understand what would come next, you needed to understand the birth of bourgeois culture. And he understood that not just as the institutions of economy and society, but also the way that bourgeois culture shapes the family, shapes the transmission of property, gives us, social roles that are necessary to sustain the structures of a bourgeois life and how those bourgeois expectations of us as individuals are ultimately really constraining. They’re inventions of the human mind, but we experience them as cages.
And he felt a deep sense of personal alienation in the 1930s. So there are these various ways in which you wanted to understand the origins of bourgeois alienation from ourselves, bourgeois structures, the behaviour of bourgeois states only fifteen, twenty years after the war to end all wars were about to pitch, obviously, on route to yet another one that would be even more destructive and awful. And it was the madness of bourgeois civilization in the thirties and its dissatisfactions that made him interested in the origin interested in the origins of bourgeois society, and he thought they lay in England in the seventeenth century. So it mustn’t be a kind of narrow patriotism. It’s a real thought that, for this for that question, England was the place to study.
That, you know, if you’re looking at the kind of origins of the bourgeois British state, British society, that’s very different from what I think most people, if they’ve approached Hill. They’ve approached the world, and the world has turned upside down. Here’s a kind of great book on, from the late sixties. Is that right? Seventy-two.
Seventy and, you know, which looks at the kind of bubbling undercurrents of radicalism, religious, political, social, yeah. In that revolutionary moment, you know, the moment that kind of bourgeois England emerges, there’s also this kind of undercurrent. You know, what drew him to that? And, you know, what were the conclusions that he drew from it? Did that change his view of the revolution generally or of the kind of that period?
Braddick: Well, it so here’s a problem for the biographer. He never said. And when he did, I’m fairly sure that he weeded out his papers. I think I know that he weeded out his papers and didn’t want people like me, you know, poring over them after he’d gone. So there’s a difficulty in actually answering the question, but the the reconstruction I do in the book is to say that he had always been interested in personal liberation and alienation and his Marxism was ultimately a humanist Marxism about how a fairer society would set us free as individuals to flourish in ways that are healthier than are demanded by a bourgeois society.
So I think that had been his concern from very early on, but he didn’t get around to writing it because he got sidetracked into explaining the origins of the bourgeois revolution in England, which I think was not in retrospect where his interest lay, but it was critical to his heart the whole architecture of his life that there was a bourgeois revolution. And so, World Turned Upside Down is now his most-read book, but in the eighties, probably his most influential book. Well, no. This isn’t quite true, but as influential in the eighties was a book called The Century of Revolution, published in 1961, which set out the case for the bourgeois revolution in the whole cultural sense. So, I think he turned he turned to, and the world turned upside down.
And in the early seventies, he was commissioned to write that book. There are there was an enterprising publisher behind it. But I think it allowed him to say something that had been on his mind, really, for forty years. And another interesting point in writing the biography rather than just the history of his work is that in those years, that was the high point of student rebellion in Oxford. And he was in his day job having to deal with radical figures including Alex Callinicos who, Edward Heath visited the college, and Callinicos and Simon Sedgwick Gell were now allowed to say, I think, I’m being recorded, Allegedly, allegedly, two people went into the common room where Ted Heath was going to be entertained and wrote fuck Heath on the wall, you know.
And they were sent down and so on. So, he was dealing with this and occupations and rent strikes. So, radicalism in Oxford was pale back in Paris with Exeter and Essex, and certainly LSE and pale by comparison to Paris. But still, as the head of the college, he had to deal with this. And, it’s very interesting that in his day job, he was kinda holding the line for college respectability and saying you really mustn’t say rude words about the prime minister while he was writing The World Turned Upside Down.
And literally, there was a fantastic exchange over the condom machine that the students had installed without the permission of the senior members of the college. And the senior members then said, You’ve got to take it out because it’s an offense to our moral sensibilities. And anyway, you can buy condoms in Norwich now, it’s not very far to travel. And the students took it. And anyway, it had to be, they said we can take it down, but the London Rubber Company can’t come and collect it for a while.
And they said, right. We’ll take it, and it will go in the dean’s room until the London Rubber Company can collect it. And Dean and Hill had to represent all this with a straight face, saying, you know, it’s a moral offense to some members of the college to have a condom machine. They’re available elsewhere. And on the other hand, he’s writing the world turned upside down, which is all about this tremendous effusion of sexual and other forms of personal liberation.
And, it was dramatized on the South Bank by Keith Dewhurst as an, you know, example of radical theatre and theatre that could change the world. And it was put on by a company that was famous for living a, you know, a liberated life and, allegedly. And so Hill was completely in favour of all this liberation. Although I think he thought, you know, some student politics were a bit, you know, tokenistic and gestural politics rather than substantial politics. But basically, he was behind it all.
But in his day job, he was having to maintain the respectable front. And I think it’s critical to his personality that he did it. He felt, I, you know, I have this duty. This is my role. This is my job.
It’s not me. It’s the job I have to do. But really, there’s a me off stage that’s interested in all this liberation stuff. Yeah. Sorry.
Very long rambling. No. No. That was fascinating. I think, you know, I think it’s a testament also to the book itself.
So your chapter on Balliol. I didn’t think I’d be so interested in the internal politics of Balliol, your college, but it Yeah. You know, it is kind of fascinating and shows a lot about Hill as a person as well as a writer. I think you get from that. I also wanted to ask about, you know, he left the communist party in ’57.
Braddick: Yeah. Not with some of the others, EP Thompson, Raphael Samuel, and others who left the year before, directly after or around the events of Hungary. This was about inner party democracy. It was a year later at the special congress, right, in ’57, that he left. I was quite in quite involved, right, with the congress held internally at the communist party about the question of democracy.
Right? But before that, he was very involved with the communist party historians’ group. Yeah. I want to ask about you know, this is an incredible collection of historians who shaped the study and the writing of history in mid-century Britain. Ralph O Samuel, EP Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Victor Kiernan, and Yeah. Chris Piel and others, and many others. You know, what was it about the communist party that, you know, first of all, kind of nurtured or allowed these historians, right? But what also what did their what did those historians get from both the group of historians around the communist party, or the communist party itself?
Braddick: Yeah.
The party had turned in the late thirties to a kind of Popular Front strategy that they should build a progressive alliance for change and abandon a kind of class-based conflict. And the only way to achieve change was through class conflict. And what it allowed us to do was build a progressive alliance alongside the core revolutionary ambition. And it trended towards a ref a reformist ambition. And that made it easier for intellectuals.
And so in the late thirties, Margot Heinemann has a very nice chapter on this. The communist party developed a culture strategy, radio, TV in the post-war period, drama, art, visual art, literature, and history to try to build a progressive consciousness and to give people resources to develop a progressive consciousness. And so there is a relatively free hand then for writers and artists to pursue their creative individualism within the service of the party. It was a very creative moment, and some great writing and great history came out of it. And so there’s a cultural committee, and then the culture committee had us, effectively a subcommittee, the historians group.
And the historians group was set up with two aims in mind. One was that AL Morton had written a classic history of the people’s history of England, and it was being revised. And the party wanted to give him advice on how to revise it. And the second thing was that Hill had written in 1940 a kind of manifesto for his view of a bourgeois revolution that had caused controversy about whether it was properly Marxist or not. And so the second focus was to discuss whether Hill’s account of the bourgeois revolution was properly Marxist. And it sounds, you know, terribly sort of restrictive thing, you know, as if the dogma is going to be imposed. But actually, it was an open question about how Marxists should think about the bourgeois revolution and how Marxists should think about sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century England. And it attracted a generation of people who were turned off by an extremely conservative university curriculum and school curriculum that was the story of kings and queens and the doings of great men and, had a kind of liberal continuity to it, that nothing ever unpleasant had happened in Britain, and no change had ever required any unpleasantness. And, we’re not like the foreigners. So there was this attempt to recover a kind of radical history of the British past and the way that ordinary people had shaped the conditions of their lives and how understanding the radicalism of ordinary people would help you understand the British past, but it also give the radicalism of ordinary people a present and a future.
So there was a kind of progressive ambition behind it. But it was quite an open-ended, quite open. And the key thing for the party, I don’t know if you were going to ask me about this, the party regarded such issues through the lens of democratic centralism. The idea being that you had a democratic discussion until a line was reached, and then the line became the line, and you fell in line with the party line. And on all these issues, rigorous debate was thought necessary so that the party could develop a line.
So that lots of people misunderstand, I think, the role of the party here. They think the party was commissioning a history from these people. But actually, the party was trying to foster a debate about Marxists that would lead to a line that the party could then adopt. And democratic centralism was exactly the issue in ’57. And, you know, we’ll talk about that later, I suppose.
But in the early post-war period, it was giving these people a lot of freedom to think about how they might reconfigure an understanding of the British past. But they were very concerned that it should meet academic standards. It wasn’t simply party-political history. It was that it should be rigorous history, better than liberal history, living by academic standards more rigorously than liberal history, and thus be better history and give a good basis on which Marxists could think about the present and the future.
You’ve kind of alluded already to his influence, particularly in the kind of sixties and seventies, right? You know, he was you know, there were plays put on of his history books, you know, his books were taught widely across the curriculum. I think at a kind of level, looked at, you know, the three universities were kind of the defining or one of the defining kinds of interpretations of the English revolution at the time. And what was that like for him to be, you know, he was a very private man. He was very kind, you know, he was, you say quite shy, quiet, you know, he wasn’t, very false. What was it like for him to have been this?
And, also, I suppose, what was it like culturally to have this kind of, you know, the dominant narrative of this pivotal moment in history to be one that was explicitly a Marxist reading?
Braddick: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think he was extremely private and modest, and I think he felt he was putting himself at the service of his readers. You know?
I’m, you know, I don’t think he, I don’t think there was much ego involved in being such a big figure for him. I think it was that he, you know, I’m being of help here. And that was important for him because he wanted to be helpful, and he came from a family of Methodist activists in York. Some of whom had been very active in charity. You know, we might think of their activism differently now, but the missionaries and some people wanted to change the world.
So I think it was really important for him to feel useful in the world, and I think he took that seriously, took that responsibility seriously. And I think it was also a tremendous relief because in the early fifties, in particular, well, in the late thirties and then again in the early fifties, communists found it very hard. Communist men party members and Marxists at large found it very hard to get university employment. And several people had jobs and lost them, and it was thought to be political. And Hill was always on their side.
And he said to one confidant in the fifties that he or in the sixties that he only kept his job because Balliol, you know, Balliol just doesn’t care what the outside world thinks. You know, he’s one of our chaps. So, he benefited from Oxford’s privilege, and I think he took all that quite seriously. And at the very end of his career, he worked in the Open University, where lots of former comrades had ended up because they had been pushed out of universities in the fifties. They’d gone into adult education, gone into the Workers’ Education Authority, and that had been the obvious place to recruit people for the OU in the seventies.
And so the CPGB was reunited, really, in the Open University in the eighties. But there were very few. Kiernan wrote to him. Kiernan had a job in Edinburgh, but Kiernan wrote to him saying there’s no point in going for x or y job because, you know and and Rodney Hilton or Hill’s very first article was published under a pseudonym. And Hilton said that was because if you knew this was in ’38. And Hilton said if he’d published this with his name on that would have, you know, it would have been a serious problem for his career.
That’s when he first set out a Marxist interpretation of the seventeenth century. So he was, I think, conscious of his privilege and anxious that he should make that privilege a benefit to other people. And he wrote letters. I can’t remember who it was, but he wrote in defence of someone who’d lost a job. I think it might have been that Arblaster was not given a job at Manchester, having been there for two years.
I think it was Anthony Arblaster. But he anyway, he wrote to him and said no. I remember writing this. I’ll just tell you what he says. He says, it’s outrageous that a heretic should be debarred from doing their job because of their heresy alone.
You know, show me that by being a heretic, I’m doing the job badly, then you’ve got a case. But you cannot dismiss people simply for their heresy. And I think he felt tremendously protected, and he felt a real responsibility to the wider movement, as, you know, the guy in a position. Yeah. He goes in the seventies from that, you know, position of, you know, being at the top of his field.
In the nineteen-eighties, there was a very different reaction to his work. Right? You know, it’s kind of belated in some ways, but it, you know, it’s a fierce reaction. Yeah. You know what happened in that moment and to him in particular, but also, you know, because I think it ties so closely with a political moment in Britain.
Braddick: The Thatcherite, yeah. Yeah. Moment Yeah. Yeah. Affected Hill incredibly.
Yeah. And it hit here also I I don’t want to talk about me, but I entered the story a little bit here because this is part of why I want to write the book that my elder brother and sister read Hill at A level. I didn’t. And when I went to university in 1981, I was only four years younger three years younger than my elder brother. But when I went in ’81, we were given Hill, as this is the wrong idea.
So Hill was the object of revision, not the oracle anymore. And it had happened quickly, in the early Thatcher years. And it’s taken a long time to disentangle, I think, a political critique of Marxism and what was claimed to be a Marxist domination of the British universities. And as you know, we hear it still, you know, British universities are centres of progressive heresy, to disentangle that from some technical problems with Hill’s work, which are genuine. So, I think there is a generational effect in history writing.
Each generation does better work than its predecessor, and that is certainly true that Hill, and particularly his economic history, doesn’t cut the mustard anymore, you know, and you wouldn’t do economic history the way Hill did it. So, for a long time, it was difficult to say that sort of thing without being identified with a political program against the kind of history he was trying to promote. So, one aim of the book is to try to disentangle history from politics. And my view is that, you know, if history is simply writing your politics, why do history? Why not just state your political position?
And if history isn’t a test of your politics and isn’t making you think and examine your politics, then there’s no point in doing it. But in the eighties, I talked about the Education Act and the national curriculum and how the battles over that were directed particularly against this progressive history, and people should be taught the greatness of Britain. And, you know, all this nonsense about slavery, we should forget about that and talk about democracy instead. In the national curriculum, the national curriculum was forming people for the next stage. So, it’s exactly the politics that he’d set out to challenge.
And he was at the heart of those political debates, saying, Mrs Thatcher knows nothing about history. You know, this is just, authoritarian state trying to input trying to mark its homework. But at the same time, people who were actually on the left and quite sympathetic to left-wing causes were saying, you know, some of these books don’t work very well, and we should be doing this work differently and a bit better. So, at the time and coming back to what I said to start with in ’81, when I started, I was confronted with this, and I couldn’t unpick what was going on here. Whether I was being told Hill was wrong because I was being taught by Thatcherites, or am I being told that Hill is wrong because you can do this another way better?
And that’s but it it it so that’s sort of a personal way of putting it. But what happened to him in the eighties was that he became conflated with a general attack on leftism and progressivism, the values of the sixties, the world turned upside down, and dismissals of Israel did come from there. But also, from a, you know, academic critique that we should do this differently and better. Yeah. I always find it interesting that Hill was the one who kind of bore the brunt of that.
Yeah. Whereas someone like Hobsbawm, who remained in the party, never you know, there was you know, it was very much kind of still accepted. There still is, I think, in the kind of establishment, yeah. In a different way. Yeah.
Braddick: Yeah. So, I didn’t know. I know I’m going to name drop here. I know Sir Keith Thomas a bit. And I didn’t realize there was a higher honour than being Sir Keith Thomas, but in fact, there is, as being a companion of honour.
And I knew it because Keith Thomas became the companion of honour at the same time that Elton John did. And then Hobsbawm was a companion of honour. You know, it’s the highest thing the establishment can do for you. And I find I do find it hard to judge because one of the things that got him in trouble was that he never although he said to the party, I’m renouncing Stalinism, and I’m not renouncing you because you’re Stalinist, he would give comfort to the capitalist press by saying it to the capitalist press. He would never sell out his former comrades by doing it in public.
So he had this repentance, but it was a quiet repentance. And he was beaten with that through the eighties and nineties. Unrepentant Stalinist, you know. Ferdinand Mount said, having an unrepentant Stalinist as Master of Balliol, you might as well have a recently convicted paedophile. He said that you know.
And he wasn’t an unrepentant Stalinist either. And somehow, Hobsbawm escaped that. Hobsbawm stayed in the party. He was, I don’t know, quite how he did it, except that he’s less concerned with the national story. Yeah.
He’s not in those national curriculum debates. He talks about Europe in his early career, then he’s a global historian. It’s less offensive to an establishment view of the British character, yeah. Then Christopher Hill said, you know, it hasn’t always been, respectful and deferential and, you know, and people haven’t always just abided by the rules of the game that they’re given. And I suppose by undercutting the story of the English revolution, you are implicitly or explicitly even kind of undercutting the story of the British establishment.
Now this is, you know, this is the kind of start of where we are now. There’s something kind of by going directly there, you’re kind of going to the roots of this. Right? Yeah. Yeah.
So this is my kind of interest actually, but the eleven years in the post-Roman history of Britain, where we had a republic, and we call it the interregnum, the period between kings. And it ends in a restoration, although what was restored was nothing like what had been overthrown. So, there’s this meta-narrative that’s just kind of drilled into us by the very naming of the events. And, to undercut that is to undercut the position of the establishment, I think. So, I think he’ll, I mean, he probably couldn’t have complained actually because he wanted to undercut.
He wanted to be a threat to the establishment. He wanted his writing to destabilize these comforting stories. But then in the end, you know, when the boot was firmly on that foot, I mean, he did suffer, I think. So I think, you know, if he kind of suffered that kind of revisionist moment, seems we’re in a different moment now both I mean, politically, may maybe not actually, but intellectually in terms of the study of English revolution, I think we’re in a very different moment now particularly than the eighties and nineties where it was at its kind of peak. Yeah.
And I think that was a factor in you coming to this book now? And also, I suppose, how is and how should we think about Hill’s work today? You know, how is it received in the field, and how should we, as kind of general readers, or how should we approach Hill’s work?
Braddick: Yeah. So, I didn’t know Chris Hill, but I’m no Chris Hill.
Whatever that John f Kennedy quote is. I mean, I wouldn’t compare myself to it at all, but in terms of, you know, importance or influence. But I do want to try to get a post-hill story going about the English revolution because for forty years students have been taught not that, not that, not that, not that. And I sense an appetite among the students I teach, not many nowadays, but for a more constructive, progressive engagement with the seventeenth century and the events of the seventeenth century. So I think there’s a moment coming.
I don’t think I’m not sure I can deliver. I can pose the question, I hope, about what we should say about all this. I am writing a book about the 1650s, and I’m in Oxford. Normally, I suppose.
But, I taught a graduate class in Oxford this year on the Marxist historians, and there’s an appetite among graduate historians. One of the students said to me, we’re the generation of no alternative, you know, and they’re looking back to this generation of progressive thinkers, not just in, history, but, you know, progressive art and they’ve they’re interested in Frankfurt School and how you can have an authentic culture that’s not just, commercial stuff squirted down the Internet at you. And they’re returning to Hill more than the new left, actually, interestingly. But Hill and Hobsbawm, Thompson in particular, are fascinated by it. I realize I’ve written about the wrong Marxist historian.
But there, they’re looking for inspiration not to reproduce and recapture that moment, but for inspiration that might lead them to the birth of a new moment. And I feel we desperately need it, you know. The left hasn’t had a game to put up against the rise of the light. And yeah. So, I think that there’s an appetite for it.
And the English Revolution. Historical consciousness about the English Revolution could be part of that. But I’m afraid I know, it’s beyond me to provide it. I’m afraid. Yeah. But I do hope that, you know, this brings people to heal to the question and prompts people to think about what the new line new hope could be.
I was thinking about this, particularly this kind of political moment and the political moments that you say he was kind of responding in his work to this political moment. My favourite work of Hill’s is the experience of defeat. Yeah. You know, which I think sadly feels very, very kind of relevant again now. You know, it’s about the kind of experience of Milton and other revolutionaries after the Restoration.
You know, what happened to them? I don’t want to ask you necessarily about that, but do you have a favourite work of Hill’s? What is the one that you would know, you want to return to if you still feel the kind of pull?
Braddick: I’ve become so, I would like to say about that, though. He, Bunyan, was really important to Hill very early in life, and it comes from his Methodism.
And there’s a lot of fair talk about in a book in the media, as the war was breaking out. And he wrote love letters daily to a woman from the barracks, and they’re very moving. And they reveal a lot about his views on love, marriage, authenticity, sex, and politics. Because she was a liberal, he kept correcting her politics. Marriage didn’t laugh.
But overshadowing him was the thought that he was going to die. And he reached Bunyan in that moment, too. And the thing in Bunyan he drew on was, he said it then, and he said it again in the eighties. We dare not despair. We betray our ideals.
We betray our ideals if we despair. So the one thing we must not do is despair, and it’s struggle which will keep the faith alive and keep the ideals alive. So all that is, I was going to use the word elegiac for that, but it’s very it’s poignant, isn’t it? And it’s about his own experience and so on. But there is at the core of it this thing, okay, young uns, the one thing you mustn’t do is despair.
Yeah. My favourite book, I’ve become very interested in, he actually, this is relevant to his affair with Sheila Grant Duff, who was very conventionally bourgeois and thought that since she was in love with another man as well as Hill, she shouldn’t sleep with Hill. And Hill thought she shouldn’t be hung up on these bourgeois values, and he didn’t mind. So he urged on her the importance of leaving Andrew Marvel’s ode to his coy mistress, you know, with the thought that they were going to die. And, you know, why give in to these bourgeois values?
You know, we must run before the sun. But it made me very interested because he said it was that poetry that first led him to the English Revolution. It’s people living in a society, whose values they feel uncomfortable with. And I like that writing of his. He read at the time he read T.S. Eliot in particular, and Eliot was expressing the sense of personal alienation that you have to live within these bourgeois expectations, and they do violence to who you are. And Hill got very interested in that dynamic in seventeenth-century literature. And so I like the Milton book, because he’s talking about the conflicts that Milton feels, in the society in which he’s required to live and how that does violence to who he is. I don’t know if that’s my time of life, but I’ve been more drawn to that kind of he. he was interested in what’s often said about him is that he’s a determinist and he’s not interested in people, but it’s untrue.
You know, he’s very interested in the experience people have of dislocation from that society. And that’s the writing I’ve become more interested in. I, ironically enough, started my career writing about the state and transformation and so on. And I’ve ended up writing a biography, and it’s similar. Hill got more interested in subjectivity, I think, and the conflicted subjectivities we have as a result of the structures in which we live. So that’s my answer.
Yeah. That’s a great answer. I think you’ve probably been talking enough.
Comment by Christopher Thompson
I have been very puzzled to read the transcript of Michael Braddick’s interview at Housman’s Bookshop in London earlier this month. It was part of the process of promoting the biography composed by Braddick (All Souls College, Oxford) and was, I suspect, given in front of an audience sympathetic to Hill’s beliefs and career. What appears to me to be a problem in the talk is the connection drawn between the appearance of ‘revisionism’ in early to mid-17th-century historiography and the rise of Thatcherism in British political life. The criticisms of Marxist and Whig historiography associated with Conrad Russell, John Morrill, Kevin Sharpe and others came into print in the mid to late 1970s under the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan.
Russell’s essay on Parliamentary politics was published in 1976, as was John Morrill’s book on the Revolt of the Provinces. Kevin Sharpe’s edited volume of essays appeared in 1978. None of them could remotely be described as apostles of Thatcherism. Nor, indeed, could the essays that were to be found in The Journal of British Studies and the Journal of Modern History across the Atlantic in 1976 and 1977, respectively. One of Lawrence Stone’s most distinguished postgraduate pupils at Princeton at that time told me relatively recently that Stone had been unaware – ‘blindsided’ was his word – by developments in the United Kingdom. In Hill’s case, despite the origins of ‘revisionism’ amongst former and current Oxford University-trained historians, he had been completely unaware of the developing reaction against his soft determinism and Marxist preconceptions. Well before the Conservative victory in the 1979 General Election in Britain, Hill and Stone had ceased to make the historiographical weather. Dismissing ‘revisionism’ as a form of antiquarian empiricism, as Stone did, or repeating the analytical claims of the 1960s as Hill tried to do, simply did not work. Both had been sidelined by then.
Housman’s Bookshop interview extract earlier this month.
In the nineteen-eighties, there was a very different reaction to his work. Right? You know, it’s kind of belated in some ways, but it, you know, it’s a fierce reaction. Yeah. You know what happened in that moment and to him in particular, but also, you know, because I think it ties so closely with a political moment in Britain.
Braddick: The Thatcherite, Yeah. Yeah. Moment Yeah. Yeah. Affected Hill incredibly.
Yeah. And it hit here also I I don’t want to talk about me, but I entered the story a little bit here because this is part of why I want to write the book that my elder brother and sister read Hill at A level. I didn’t. And when I went to university in 1981, I was only four years younger three years younger than my elder brother. But when I went in ’81, we were given Hill, as this is the wrong idea.
So Hill was the object of revision, not the oracle anymore. And it had happened quickly, in the early Thatcher years. And it’s taken a long time to disentangle, I think, a political critique of Marxism and what was claimed to be a Marxist domination of the British universities. And as you know, we hear it still, you know, British universities are centres of progressive heresy, to disentangle that from some technical problems with Hill’s work, which are genuine. So I think, there is a generational effect in history writing.”
How Socialists Might Inspire a Broad Section of the Working Class to Fight Once Again For Socialism. Some preliminary comments
“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out and, seeing a better country, sets sail.”
Oscar Wilde
Socialism is not an empty word to me. It means different things to different people, but for me, it is about a better world. In this world, there is no war, poverty, manmade diseases, oppression, manipulation and exploitation. Humans enter into a completely different set of relations where they associate freely to decide what is needed, how it should be produced and how it is distributed. We (the people) democratically control the vast resources of the world and set them to work for the benefit of the many. As Wilde comments, there is a place here for Utopia, Imagination and Vision.
How this new world might come about in the 21st century is problematic but not impossible. Utopian thinkers have been given little respect in the Marxist movement of the 20th century and this one and I believe they should re-examine Marx’s relationship, Lenin’s relationship also to this. Marx and Engels had huge respect for the Utopian Socialists and Lenin thought that not enough “useful dreaming” occurred within the party of what a future society would look like. What Marx did not respect were the sterile sects that followed the great Utopian thinker. There is confusion and a misunderstanding of Marx within some sections of the Marxist movement and what passes as the Revolutionary Left.
The world is a crazy and irrational place. But what is particularly crazy is this, and this really is what has been taking place. Ask a Socialist what Socialism looks like, and they won’t be able to tell you. They might say, “We don’t have a blueprint for Socialism”, “It is not our job to prescribe this sort of thing but to be fought out by the workers themselves”. This is a terrible state of affairs, and if socialists don’t have a clue about what a future society will or could look like, then how the hell is the working class going? This is the product of an objectivist outlook very common in sectarian organisations and has nothing in common with a dialectical philosophical outlook that Marx, Engels or Lenin used.
Speaking about a better world should not be a taboo subject. Speaking about the ills that we face under this system of commodity production where a ruling class exploits without the blink of an eye, what could be done to replace this and how to replace it should be given priority and a hearing. What we are facing right now and what we have lived through these past 30 years is crazy. It has been one crisis, war, disaster or scandal after another. The average person is absolutely fed up and is crying out for leadership and political representation that reflects their wishes, and that is up to the task of inspiring the working class and leading it to victory. Right now, we don’t have that.
The nineteenth century was imbued with an entirely different spirit, as we see in Oscar Wilde’s work. We see it in William Morris, too. Morris was even brave enough to write the novel “News From Nowhere” which wants to express some ideas about what a future society might look like. Where are our modern day equivalents to Wilde and Morris? They don’t exist. But I anticipate a renewed interest in these writers. Just like Gerrard Winstanley was rescued from obscurity, other writers and thinkers will hopefully be rescued. I hope to be a part of that rescue mission. But what does it have to say to us in the 21st century?
The human spirit is a tremendous force that can endure and overcome, but it has to be imbued with hope. I want to say that where there’s a will, there’s a way, but the reverse is also true. Where there’s a way, there will more likely be a will. The socialists are not showing the way or giving inspiration because they choose to look away and engage in constant debates and arguments that the working class doesn’t give a shit about. The working class has no time to wade through 1000 pages of some tract without immediate alleviating wisdom. It is too worn down to constantly hear about the betrayals and losses right now. That’s for the revolutionary to bring to the working class.
In all the jobs I’ve had, they are front-facing with members of the public. I do not see myself as separate from them, for I know I face the same struggles. I don’t shy away but want to understand the patient in my chair and ask how has this disease process taken hold, what is the aetiology of this and the pathogenesis of that? When we understand the enemy, we have a chance at treatment, but the success of that will depend on many things and will depend on how inspired the patient is and how confident they are at winning. Without hope, my patient may not be fair too well!
The socialist movement is no different. The last great movement we had that was guided by a belief in a better world was in the ’60s. Where are the equivalents of Martin Luther King and JFK? Where are our musicians that are equivalent to Jimmy Hendrix, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain or Tupac? Where are the equivalents of Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein or Oppenheimer? Where are they? Where are the Historians that are equivalent to Hill or Thompson? What about new Orwells, Steinbecks or Millers? We have lost something, and it was a faith, passion and vision that the future could be different. There is a total malaise around this, with the Marxist movement also contributing by failing to correct this by keeping a vision of a better future alive by examining how the productive forces could be used creatively to meet real wants and needs. Whatever your politics or beliefs are is not my concern. All I can hope for is that I am read with an open mind and given the basic right to express an opinion. One thing I can agree on is the question of dead dogs. A whole load of dead dogs also lie on the bodies of Utopian thinkers that have been placed there by so-called Marxists. They ignore these thinkers, unlike Marx and don’t know how to deal with them. The movement is sterile now and impoverished due to adaptation to objectivism and ignoring the subjective factor. Marxists have to win over both hearts and minds and if it chooses (the revolutionary Marxist movement) to ignore the heart of humans.
Then fascism will appeal more confidently as it knows better how to exploit repressed emotion. It’s not a game anymore, and just like Orwell talks about in The Road to Wigan Pier, we still have the same problems. The working class is not attracted to asceticism or sectarianism, nor am I. What I propose to do in my writing is rescue some branches of thought and ideas, give them a hearing and try to appeal to those that are more thoughtful.
I recently contacted a revolutionary party and asked what socialists would do about the dark web. I wondered what the banking system would look like under socialism. I have received no reply, and it must have been three months ago that I wrote in. I have questions that are not being answered. I am not surprised that they are not being answered, but I’m surprised that I might have to answer these myself. I know I don’t have all the answers but I sure know I will have to try and find some. There was also something that troubled me recently. It was a podcast and the host (posturing as a revolutionary) commented on someone liking Ska music and that that should be seen as a red flag. How the movement will attract the working class when it holds such prejudices is cause for major concern. They will remain a closed club, and Orwell knew this all too well.
As mentioned, I would like to rescue some thoughts, writers and thinkers from a pile of dead dogs and start to assimilate their thoughts and answer some of my very own burning questions. A burning question for me is why was it that Gerrard Winstanley was able to cut a path to a revolutionary road and his peers didn’t quite get there. What was peculiar to Winstanley that was absent in others? The same can be applied to Lenin. Why was Lenin able to see further? What is it about these human personalities and their experiences that enabled and gave birth to this? I believe the world is knowable and I believe that coincidence is just the measure of our ignorance. There is a reason for everything even if we don’t fully grasp what those reasons are right this moment, the searching shouldn’t stop. It is not enough for me to say that it was just the genius of Winstanley. I would love to examine the genesis of his thought, but his collected works are £300, and I don’t have that spare. What is interesting to me is that he replaced the word god with reason. I believe that since he married the daughter of a surgeon, being around the medical profession at that time had some bearing on him. It is a special profession with its Hippocratic oath and scientific method. It is also a profession that was not alienated from its own labour, and there was no division in the surgeon but a unity of manual and intellectual labour working for the greater good. This gave them a certain outlook that was quite separate and peculiar to other branches of activity. It is just a theory and yet to be fully explored, but Winstanley was different and I don’t see it just as an accident in that it can’t be explained. This is just my opinion, of course. Thanks for reading, and serious comments are welcome. This is just a piece of prose, and footnotes can be provided. I am just interested in getting things down on paper at this stage.
Some of the thinkers and trends I would like to comment on in the future or have an interest in reading are as follows: Wiliam Morris, Erich Fromm, Freud, William Blake, The State of my Profession, The NHS, Trump, state of reason, the cultural level, P Diidy, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, John Potash, Shaun Attwood, John Wedger, the dark web, the Cabal/Illuminati, Q-Anon, Maggie Oliver, Judy Mikovich, Anthony Fauci, Andreas Moritz, Dr Robert Malone,Marcuse, Hegel, what appeals to me most about Marx’s thought. The Salem Witch Hunts, children’s literature, Anna Freud, Bruno Bettleheim, Marshall Berman and Oliver James. I will want to express what I have found interesting in their thought and why it is so. I can reflect on myself and ask what is piquing my interest. What is it that I am relating to?
Here’s an example: I believe and live by this as closely as possible. I don’t allow much into my house that I don’t find beautiful or useful. I hate waste, and I hate junk. William Morris was the same. Having been around art and design, I can relate well to Morris in what he has to say, and I would like to discuss his relevance but also ask why I am like this, too. Over the past 18 months since my child left to study a degree in chemistry I have had much freedom to explore and listen to many podcasts and spend more time socialising. There are trends and things happening in our world that I have not had the chance to explore or knowledge of. They should not be dismissed but given a hearing by the widest possible audience. I don’t know what I believe regarding some of it, as there isn’t enough evidence yet to make an informed conclusion, but I have been astonished by some of the things I have learnt. The question isn’t wheter it is true or not but is a fight to get access to information that will verify such questions. I will argue that revolutionaries should be a part of that fight if only they would listen. I write……………………….. to be continued.
I would like to draw attention to a paragraph from Christopher Hill’s “The World Turned Upside Down.”
“Each generation, to put it another way, rescues a new area from what its predecessors arrogantly and snobbishly dismissed as “ the lunatic fringe.” Hill goes on to thank many people for their work, for without them and their work, subjects such as alchemy, astrology and natural magic can now take their place as reasonable subjects for rational men and women to be interested in. Further still, Hill says
“Historians would be well-advised to avoid the loaded phrase “lunatic fringe”. Lunacy, like beauty, maybe in the eye of the beholder. There were lunatics in the seventeenth century, but modern psychiatry is helping us to understand that madness itself may be a form of protest against social norms and that the lunatic may in some sense be saner than the society which rejects him”.
With that being said by such a respected historian, I hope that what I wish to discuss will be given the same respectful and open-minded treatment as Hill is urging for here, as there is much to be gleaned and learnt if one could just drop the arrogance and snobbishness. Hill echoes Erich Fromm here, who was a Freudo-Marxist who thought that when his patients were experiencing psychosis, they were fleeing into this peculiar state of thinking because they were escaping the insanity around them. In other words, the patient retreated into this state because they were sane but couldn’t square themselves to the conditions they were experiencing because the patient was actually more sane and found it intolerable. The protest couldn’t be expressed outwardly but was turned in on itself. It has to go somewhere, and that disturbance is felt within the psyche.
Now, just for a minute, think here. Out of all the words Hill has written, this chimes with me and out of all the other other possible paragraphs I choose this. That’s not an accident. Christopher Hill is good company to be in, and I’ve only just started to read him in the past 4 weeks. I have talked to many people in my life due to the work I have undertaken and come up against some very difficult positions and attitudes. They have to be understood, not dismissed outright. It won’t lead to anything new by dismissing it. Back in the 90’s, I was lucky enough to visit the Hayward Gallery, where the Prinzhorn collection was being exhibited. When the pieces are examined, and you know what you are looking at, Hill makes even more sense. The Prinzhorn Collection is for another time. But it is a collection of over 5000 pieces of art drawn by inpatients of psychiatric institutions. It is troubling what is being expressed visually but it finds expression nonetheless and is not as insane as one might think.
I have just received John’s comment on my WordPress website [1]. “ How does publishing through Amazon (of all of places) square with the general view here? The simple answer to this question is that publishing on Amazon does not square at all with my politics. From the age of sixteen, I considered myself a Marxist, and I will eventually die a Marxist.
If it has escaped John’s notice for a long time, it has been impossible for a revolutionary Marxist to be published. The Writer George Orwell, who was not a Marxist, found it very difficult to find a publisher for his book Homage to Catalonia. Orwell was savvy enough to know that “Freedom of the Press” had been “ Something of a fake because, in the last resort, money controls opinion”.
This was true in Orwell’s time and is even more true today. Unless you have access to a revolutionary Marxist party with its own printing press, you will not get published. No small or big publishing house will publish an orthodox or classical Marxist. The use of Amazon as an avenue to get my work published and reach a large audience does not endorse Amazon as a capitalist enterprise.
It may have escaped John’s notice, but all publishing houses, big or small, are run on capitalist lines. To accept or decline an offer from one of these or to publish on platforms such as Amazon does not mean one denies one’s politics it is but a means to an end. If every author turned down the opportunity to be published because the publishing company was a capitalist nothing of worth would have been published. John’s argument is false, and I do not accept it.
The publication by Mehring Books of Sounding the Alarm: Socialism Against War by WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North is extremely prescient. The election of a fascist as president will be a trigger point for a massive escalation of the attacks on the working class.
As Joseph Kishore points out, “Trump’s reelection signifies the violent realignment of American politics with its underlying social reality: a society dominated by staggering inequality and ruled by a capitalist oligarchy. This realignment is expressed not only in Trump’s appointments but in the Democratic Party’s swift accommodation to—and even embrace of—the incoming regime. Trump is assembling a government that epitomizes the naked rule of the rich. Each appointment reflects two overriding criteria: personal loyalty to Trump and an unwavering commitment to a program of war, repression and social counterrevolution.”
This new book contains the speeches delivered at the International Committee of the Fourth International’s Online May Day celebrations from 2014 to 2024. In the foreword, King’s College historian Thomas Mackaman writes, “This volume consists principally of the speeches with which David North has opened the May Day rallies of the past ten years. Also included are essays related to the May Day events written by North. This compilation merits careful study for those who wish to understand the causes of imperialist war and how to fight it. The central theme of North’s speeches is that the struggle against militarism and war must be revolutionary, i.e., only through the overthrow of capitalism by the working class in a world socialist revolution can the drive toward catastrophe be stopped. There is no other way.”[1]
North’s use of the Marxist method is an antidote the the rubbish that has come from writers and historians over the last twenty years. The sharpest expression of this reaction came from the pen of Francis Fukuyama, whose essay entitled “The End of History?” was published in the journal The National Interest. He wrote: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.[2]
North replies, “ Fukuyama’s analysis combined bourgeois political triumphalism with extreme philosophical pessimism. It might have been appropriate for the publisher to insert in every copy of Fukuyama’s book a prescription for Prozac. If the existing capitalist reality was, for all intents and purposes, as good as it could get, mankind’s future was very bleak. But how realistic was Fukuyama’s hypothesis? Though he claimed to draw inspiration from Hegel, Fukuyama’s grasp of dialectics was extremely limited. The claim that history had ended could make sense only if it could be demonstrated that capitalism had somehow solved and overcome the internal and systemic contradictions that generated conflict and crisis.”[3]
The speeches in this volume are not just a testament to the power of the Marxist method but give us a perspective and a guide to fight. The book deserves the widest readership.
Despite being subtitled “The Untold Story of Gerry Healy”, this book contains nothing new and is a rehash of all the old lies and slanders that have been heaped on Healy and the Trotskyist movement for decades. The historian Thomas Carlyle was fond of saying that he had to clear a large pile of dead dogs off the body of Oliver Cromwell to reach the real person underneath. The same could be said of Beatty’s book. However, once all the dead dogs have been removed from this book, all you are left with is a worthless pile of crap.
While Beatty’s book is probably his own work, Pluto Press must be held accountable for publishing this hack work. As David North writes, Beatty’s book is a political hit job, not a scholarly biography. There are many questions about the writing of this piece of hack work. There is good reason to believe that Mr. Beatty is not the sole author of this work and that he had substantial assistance in collecting this mass of odoriferous material. As it is published by Pluto Press, which is affiliated with a political tendency hostile to the International Committee, one can reasonably assume that it provided Beatty with substantial support in the “researching” and writing this volume.”
I did ask Pluto Press for a review copy and was granted one by James K, to whom I gave my address. The book never arrived. The non-arrival coincided with the publication of David North’s review on the World Socialist website.
Pluto Press, who are largely made up of renegades from Marxism, has its own axe to grind against orthodox Trotskyism. It gave free rein to the political scoundrel Paul Le Blanc to write on the back cover saying, “’Displaying scant sympathy for Gerry Healy, the substantial groups that Healy led, and the Leninist-Trotskyist traditions that Healy claimed to represent, Aidan Beatty nonetheless produces a very readable, meticulously documented take-down that will be seen as a “must-read” source on left-wing politics from the 1930s to the dawn of the twenty-first century.’
This book is so bad it is difficult to know where to start. Writing a biography is an extraordinarily complex and time-consuming event. Writing a political biography is an art form. At 148 pages long, Beatty’s piece of art barely rises above second-grade level. There are many examples of excellent biographical writing. Currently, I am reading Bernard Crick’s biography of George Orwell[1]. It took Crick ten years to write. Whether Crick agrees with Orwell’s politics or not, it is a superb read and deserves every plaudit it has got. Honestly, Beatty is not fit to tie Crick‘s shoelaces.
The Marxist writer David North writes, “ Historians who undertake the arduous task of writing a serious biography—among the most difficult of genres—often introduce their work with an effort to explain to their readers why they embarked on a project that usually requires years of intensive research. When the subject of study is a political figure, the interactions of the individual and the epoch in which they lived are immensely complex. There is a profound truth in the adage that a man resembles the age in which he lives more than he resembles his father. A vast amount of work is required, not to mention a command of the historical landscape and intellectual subtlety, to understand the historically conditioned personality, psychology, motivations, aims, ideals, decisions, and actions of another human being.
Whether the writers admire or despise their subject, they are still obligated to understand in historical terms the person about whom they are writing. When the author genuinely admires his subject, they must still retain a critical distance that avoids a descent into hagiography. The great biographies of political figures—Samuel Baron’s study of Plekhanov, J.P. Nettl’s two volumes on Rosa Luxemburg, and Isaac Deutscher’s Trotsky trilogy—managed to maintain an objective attitude toward subjects for whom they clearly felt great empathy. Perhaps even more challenging was the task confronting Ian Kershaw, who devoted years of work to the study and explanation of the ideological, political, and psychological motivations of one of the worst mass murderers in history, Adolf Hitler.”[2]
The Psuedo Left community has welcomed Beatty’s book. Jacobin’s David Broder, from the main pseudo-left journal of the pro-genocide Democratic Party, interviewed DSA member Aidan J. Beatty. Beatty was allowed free rein to spew out his slanderous allegations against Gerry Healy and the British Trotskyists that they employed violence against political opponents and party members.
Beatty writes, “There is quite a notorious incident in 1966 when Ernie Tate, a Northern Iridefenceer of the International Marxist Group, was very violently attacked by a group of Healy’s supporters outside a party meeting in London; Healy was present for this and essentially supervised the assault. The attack was bad enough that not only was Tate hospitalized, but Healy was later forced to appear at a meeting with Isaac Deutscher and apologize. This assault was unplanned, but as I say in the book, “Healy propagated an aura of total ruthlessness but could benefit from that aura, since potential followers believed he was ruthless, in a kind of feedback loop. One former member told me that he never questioned that the party had to be structured in a very top-down, authoritarian manner because that would be needed to carry out a revolution in Britain. In general, I think many people who stuck with Healy accepted the verbal and physical abuse because they believed it was necessary to maintain discipline or because the revolution was more important than their own personal well-being.”[3]
Beatty supplies no new evidence and repeats every slanderous accusation against Healy and the SLL. David North replies to this piece of garbage history, “Libelous” is the appropriate word. Healy and the Socialist Labour League went to court to demand that two publications that had printed the allegations—Socialist Leader and Peace News—retract the story and issue a public apology to Gerry Healy. “A conscientious historian, adhering to the appropriate standards of scholarship, would have carefully researched all available sources to uncover what actually occurred in 1966. But Beatty is not a principled scholar. His book is anti-Trotskyist hack work”.[4]
Beatty’s biography relies heavily on oral history. However, his interviews are all with former members of the SLL/WRP who have personal axes to grind or are renegades from Trotskyism, such as Tariq Ali, who is an outright political scoundrel with a history of betrayal as long as my arm. Beatty’s interviews were not conducted critically, and the majority, if not all, testimonies in the book are unreliable. North says, “ The relation of the interviewee to the subject must be carefully appraised. The historian must be able to distinguish between flattery and slander, between facts and gossip, and between truth and lies. The historian must determine whether the claims of one or another interviewee are reliable, whether they are supported by evidence of a more objective character, i.e., documents”.
Suffice it to say Beatty did not ask me for an interview, which I would have refused and told him where to go. On a personal note, I joined the WRP in 1982/83. I think my probation period was nine months, a record inside the Trotskyist movement. The first few years were difficult for me, and I left just before the split occurred. I had no idea how politically sick the WRP was at the time. Perhaps the highlight was being taken to Vanessa Redgrave’s house just before the split. She was supposedly downsizing and wanted to get rid of her Library. I paid her a lot and got many books, including the proof copy of One Long Night: A Tale of Truth by Maria Joffe, translated by V. Dixon. If Mr North is reading this article, I would like to donate it to your Library where it belongs.
After the split, I joined the Minority and had the best time of my life, politically speaking. As Lenin was fond of saying, “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” That is exactly what happened during the split.
I only met Healy twice. He was cordial and polite. The first time was at an international Workers’ school in Derbyshire before the split. There was a lot of confusion there, and I left early. It was probably the worst decision of my political career as I missed the opportunity to meet and talk to the international comrades from the ICFI. I heard Healy speak three times twice before the split and once after it. Despite the political degeneration that was taking place, Healy was still a fantastic speaker. To see him in his prime would have been a sight to behold. The third time I heard him was after the split. He was a broken man, both physically and politically. He was the leader of the Marxist Party, and they held a public meeting in London. The ICFI wanted to tape the meeting and had planned an intervention. During Healy’s speech, I cannot remember what he said a member of the French section of the ICFI got up and accused Healy of capitulating to Pabloite opportunism. Suffice it to say you could have heard a pin drop. Unfortunately, my tape machine hidden inside my jacket ended, and a very audible click was heard. I was immediately manhandled out of the meeting by a phalanx of goons, and my machine was stripped of its tape. Before Professor Beatty rips this story out of context and uses it to justify his lie that Healy was a violent maniac, I would like to say that at no time in my albeit brief time in the WRP did I feel threatened or witness any violence towards me or others.
This brings me to Beatty’s motive for writing such a book. It must be said Beatty’s book is not the only diatribe written against the Trotskyist movement. Beatty’s soulmate in anti-Trotskyism is John Kelly, who is still an avowed Stalinist and has written two books recently.[5]
Beatty’s book is different in the respect that it is factionally motivated. North explains, “ What then is the connection between Beatty’s so-called Healy biography and his denunciation of the SEP and WSWS in the Epilogue? It is a dishonest attempt to link Healy’s abusive behaviour in the 1970s and 1980s to the Marxist class-based politics of the Socialist Equality Party.
Beatty writes: “The SEP has its roots in the Workers League that had once been led by Tim Wohlforth and closely influenced by Gerry Healy. Developing the ideas it learned from the WRP, the SEP’s privileging of class over all else has ended up not just downplaying race and gender, but outright sexism and racism.” [6]
North says, “By this point, the political motivations underlying Beatty’s book become all too clear. He is writing not as a historian but as a political flack for the Democratic Party. He denounces the SEP for its “ultra-leftist perspectives on current events and bad faith attacks on the recent crop of democratic socialist politicians, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez especially, but also Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.” What he calls “bad faith” is the well-known Marxist critique of the middle-class political agents of imperialism.
The last words of this article should be from David North. “Whatever the truth may be, one thing is certain: with the writing of this miserable book, Mr. Beatty has dealt a blow to his professional reputation from which it will never recover. Despite the tragic character of his final years, Gerry Healy will be remembered as a significant figure in the history of the British working class and the international struggle for socialism. All that he contributed to the defence of the revolutionary perspective against the betrayals and crimes of the Stalinists and social democrats over many decades will not be forgotten. But unhappily for Beatty, the fate of books and their authors are inextricably linked. The evil men write lives after them. This is the book for which Beatty will be remembered.”.
[1] George Orwell: A Life Paperback – 30 July 1992
[2] Biography as demonology: Aidan Beatty’s The Party is Always Right: The Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/18/nizy-s18.html
[3] The Damage Gerry Healy Wrought-Jacobin.com/2024/09/gerry-healy-trotskyism-wrp
Normally, I would not be caught dead writing about, let alone reviewing, a book by a murderous and racist parasite such as Prince Harry, but something caught my attention. It was not anything written in the book but in a tweet from Harry’s ghostwriter.
The tweet quoted our royal genius saying, “Whatever the cause, my memory is my memory…. There is just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as in so-called objective facts.” The quote would not have looked out of place in George Orwell’s 1984 or Harry’s friend Donald Trump.
But as John Adams, the second US President, once said in 1770, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”[1] The ghostwriter and editor did not oppose this garbage is extraordinary.
As one writer said, “This crime is compounded if ghostwriters are complicit and editors are lazy or amoral. Every memoir should be put through a fact-check in the interest of credibility, not only so that readers are not misled but also that the other people and events featured in it are given a fair deal. Spare has not been fair, and there could be several reasons why it remains riddled with inaccuracies, putting a question mark on the gamut of his claims and complaints.”
When it comes to making things up as he goes along Prince Harry is an amateur. Certainly, the most damaging attack on the concept of historical truth has come from what I term the post-modernist school of historiography. It would not be an understatement to say that post-modernist historians have been extremely hostile in academia to the concept of historical truth. The last few decades have witnessed the emergence of post-modernism as the dominant force in university life. This philosophical and historical outlook has replaced what passed for Marxism inside universities all over the world.
The chief characteristic of the post-modernists is the use of debatable philosophy, to blur over the difference between truth and lies, and in doing so, commit a falsification of history. The practice of lying about history has been taken to a new level by the various schools of post-modernism. It would not be an overstatement to say that the impact of this school of history has been as David North put it “nothing short of catastrophic”.
There is, of course, a connection between the falsification of history and the attack on the struggle for objective truth. One of the most outlandish post-modernist thinkers and an opponent of objective truth is the German Professor Jorg Baberowski b (1961)[7]. A student of Michel Foucault, Baberowski describes his method of work in his book (The Meaning of History)
“In reality, the historian has nothing to do with the past but only with its interpretation. He cannot separate what he calls reality from the utterances of people who lived in the past, for there exists no reality apart from the consciousness that produces it. We must liberate ourselves from the conception that we can understand, through the reconstruction of events transmitted to us through documents, what the Russian Revolution was. There is no reality without its representation. To be a historian means to use the words of Roger Chartier to examine the realm of representations”.
Accepting this premise that truth is not objective but relative sets a very disturbing precedent. Aside from the moral and intellectual damage this may do to the individual historian, this kind of false philosophy will poison the well that future young historians and people interested in history have to drink out of.
The logic of this philosophy of history is that truth is whatever goes on in someone’s head. Smoking is good for you, and hard drugs are not dangerous. Hitler is misunderstood and was a good guy. No person who wants to function and live effectively cannot do without some sense of truth’s objective correspondence to reality. I believe that Objective truth is possible but not without a struggle. The first stage in that struggle is telling the truth about history.
A Trumpet of Sedition 