Marxist Historians (only) (2022)

Book Review from the December 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The British Marxist Historians. By Harvey J. Kaye, Zed Books, 2022

This is an update to a book first published in 1984. It’s a study of an influential group of academic historians, but there are wider lessons to be learned. They were mainly active in the second half of the twentieth century. Kaye’s survey is mainly confined to the following writers and books.

Maurice Dobb in Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946) wrote on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. For Dobb the ‘bourgeois revolution’ of the seventeenth century provided the necessary foundation for the later Industrial Revolution. Dobb emphasised the role of class struggle in this process.

Rodney Hilton focussed on feudalism and the English peasantry. For instance, in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 there emerged a ‘positive class consciousness’ which ‘was initiated from within peasant society.’ Hilton argued that ‘one of the most important if intangible legacies of mediaeval peasants to the modern world is the concept of a freeman, owing no obligation, not even deference, to an overlord’ (Bond Men Made Free, 1973).

Christopher Hill wrote extensively on the English Revolution of the seventeenth century, though probably his best work is Reformation to Industrial Revolution: A Social and Economic History of Britain, 1530-1780, (1969). The English Revolution was ‘the world turned upside down’. In Hill’s account: ‘Levellers called for political democracy, Diggers for communism, Ranters for free love. Others called in question the common law, the Bible, the existence of heaven and hell, God and the devil’ (John Bunyan and the English Revolution, 1979).

Eric Hobsbawm wrote on workers, peasants and world history. Industry and Empire (1969) is a commercially successful social and economic history of Britain from 1750 to the 1960s. His examination of the development of the modern world, what he called ‘the long nineteenth century’, is divided into three phases: The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (1962), The Age of Capital, 1848-1875, (1975), and The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (1987). These books probably made Hobsbawm Britain’s most famous ‘Marxist’ and historian.

E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) is one of the biggest selling non-fiction books in Britain. It is still widely used as a school and university textbook. His statement on the role of the historian was Thompson’s contribution to an understanding of class:

‘I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan . . . from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties.’

In William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1955) Thompson defended what he called ‘Morrisian-Marxism’. According to Kaye, this is ‘a Marxism transformed by the concerns and values represented in the work of William Morris’. The Poverty of Theory (1978) is Thompson’s attack on the then growing popularity of interpreting Marxism as a form of structuralism.

Kaye pulls together a useful survey of some key Marxist historians and how they grappled with Marxism and history. The trouble was, and remains, their politics. Their collective contribution as historians has been called ‘history from the bottom up’, but their politics can be termed ‘politics from the top down’, and it calls into question their understanding of Marxism. All the above historians were at one time members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).

After the suppression of the uprising in Hungary by the Russian military in 1956 all the above resigned from the CPGB – except Hobsbawm and Dobb. Hobsbawm remained in the CPGB until its break-up in 1991. As a cheerleader for the CPGB and the Russian empire, Hobsbawm defended the leading role of the party advocated by Lenin, and dismissed the view that the emancipation of the working class had to be the work of the working class itself – the cornerstone of any Marxian politics. Thompson later tried to justify his CPGB membership by claiming it was part of a ‘Popular Front’ against fascism. But he did not appreciate that his CPGB membership would lend legitimacy to Stalin’s reign of terror. His concern for the lives of ordinary workers did not extend to the working class in Russia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Later in life, after Thompson had joined the Labour Party, he rebuffed an approach by the Socialist Party to discuss ‘Morrisian-Marxism’.

Lew Higgins

Eric Hobsbawm: Historian and Leninist (2012)

From the November 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

The death of Eric Hobsbawm on 1 October marked the end of a generation of left-wing historians who, while advancing historical materialism, rejected Marxian politics by embracing Leninism.

Prominent amongst this group were E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill and Rodney Hilton, but the list also includes Maurice Dobb, A.L. Morton, Dorothy Thompson, John Saville, Victor Kiernan, Raphael Samuel and George Rudé. They entered the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and were active in the Communist Party Historians Group. Despite their political shortcomings, in the decades following the Second World War their work was part of a challenge to the arid, high-political history of ‘great men' that had previously dominated the academic study of history. Some went on to be active in the founding of the Society for the Study of Labour History and were part of the rise of social history ‘from below’ as an established academic subject. They produced works of historical scholarship which sometimes received a warm welcome from Socialists eager to absorb scholarship with a historical materialist perspective. Some of the work of this group of historians will continue to be a rich resource for socialists. If only they could have applied their historical materialism as rigorously to their own times as to their respective periods of study, perhaps they would not have politically affiliated to Leninism.

Hobsbawm, like many of the Communist Party historians who later rose to prominence, was radicalised during the inter-war years, pinning his hopes for the future on the Soviet Union. Nonetheless most of them left the Communist Party after the Russian repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, already disillusioned by the dawning realisation of the horrors of Stalin’s Russia and ongoing state repression. Hobsbawm was unusual in that he did not leave the Communist Party but remained a member until its collapse and to some extent continued as an apologist for Bolshevism until his death.

Hobsbawm was no unrepentant Stalinist, being an advocate of Eurocommunism in the 1970s and a supporter of Neil Kinnock’s reform of the Labour Party in the 1980s, but he retained a sense of the Soviet Union having been a worthy experiment gone awry. In his memoirs he wrote that the “dream of the October Revolution is still there somewhere inside me . . . I have abandoned, nay, rejected it, but it has not been obliterated. To this day, I notice myself treating the memory and tradition of the USSR with an indulgence and tenderness.” (Interesting Times, p.56) In an article in the Guardian (14 September 2002) Hobsbawm said, “In the early days we knew a new world was being born amid blood and tears and horror: revolution, civil war, famine … Thanks to the breakdown of the west, we had the illusion that even this brutal, experimental, system was going to work better than the West. It was that or nothing.”

But it wasn’t that or nothing. As a member of the CPGB Hobsbawm supported the Soviet Union because it represented the hopes of those who mistakenly believed that a brutal form state capitalism could transform itself into a genuinely socialist society. As such he was an opponent of the Socialist Party, which then as now, seeks to establish socialism on the basis of real common ownership and democratic control of the means of living without a ‘transition period’ involving state capitalism. In one of his articles, originally published in New Left Review, Hobsbawm wrote on the subject of H. M. Hyndman and the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and referred to the Socialist Party of Great Britain as a “wholly irrelevant conventicle”. For a historian known for his grasp of detail, however, he wrongly stated the date of the formation of the party as 1906 instead of 1904. Doubtless this is because, like most historians who dismiss the Socialist Party out of hand, he had never taken the time to seriously examine its historical background or record.

The article went on to call for a reassessment of the SDF which had previously been scoffed at by left-wing historians. The SDF, argued Hobsbawm, had demonstrated longevity, had a proletarian character and had many left-wing workers that passed through it. It was characterised not by sectarianism but by an understandable intransigence (although, as a good Bolshevik, Hobsbawm remarks that the SDF was “quite unable to envisage … the problems of revolt or the taking of power.”). Hobsbawm’s qualified acknowledgments of the achievements of the SDF are all equally applicable to the historical place of the Socialist Party of Great Britain in British working-class political life. But one thing rules it out of contention for inclusion in the historical record of socialism in Britain for left-wing historians – it did not feed into the formation of the CPGB in 1920 but opposed it. For Hobsbawm, the SDF had historical credentials as part of a political exercise of looking for British native antecedents of the CPGB. The Socialist Party has stood for socialism as understood by Marx – non-market and non-state – and was therefore anti-Bolshevik. Because of this, the Socialist Party has been ignored or summarily dismissed by historians of communism and the labour movement who have generally been Leninist, Trotskyist or Labourite.

Disappointment with the realities of the Soviet Union led many of Hobsbawm’s contemporaries in the CPGB to ultimate political disillusionment and subsequent trajectories into other variants of left-wing politics. Whilst that generation of historians has itself become history, the Socialist Party still carries on the political task ignored by them – that of trying to begin to make the Socialist revolution that the Bolshevik revolution in Russia could never have achieved. That task necessarily involves an understanding and rejection of the strategy of the insurrectionary seizure of the state and the establishment of state capitalism as a route to Socialism. Today Socialists still have much work to do to recover the words socialism and communism from their association with state capitalism and the brutality of the political strategy supported by Hobsbawm.

CSK

Pity about the politics (2011)

Book Review from the April 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Hobsbawm: History and Politics. Gregory Elliott, (Pluto Press, 2010)

Once upon a time, the teaching of history in Britain was a fantasy world in which the emphasis was on the doings of kings and queens, statesmen and Prime Ministers, the role of Empire and ‘facts’ to be learned by rote. About 60 years ago this began to change and to some extent this can be attributed to the thinking of Karl Marx and his insistence that history had to be understood in its material contexts – that is, how wealth was produced, the parts played by social classes and the technology they used.

E.J. Hobsbawm along with other notable historians of this period such as E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hiil and Rodney Hilton produced works informed by Marx’s theory of history. Hobsbawm gained critical and commercial success with The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848, (1962), The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 (1975), The Age of Empire: 1875-1914 (1987) and The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (1994). These and other works of Hobsbawm have been reprinted many times and have gained him a reputation as probably Britain’s best known historian and Marxist.

However, when it comes to Hobsbawm’s politics a very different picture emerges. Hobsbawm, Thompson, Hill and Hilton were at one time all members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). But whereas Thompson, Hill, Hilton and many others saw the error of their ways – especially after the suppression of the uprising in Hungary by Russian military in 1956 – and resigned, Hobsbawm remained in the CPGB until its dissolution in 1991. As a cheerleader for the CPGB and the Russian empire, Hobsbawm defended the leading role of the party advocated by Lenin, and dismissed the view that the emancipation of the working class had to be the work of the working class itself – the cornerstone of any Marxian politics. Even now, aged 93, he is still unapologetic about his political beliefs. Hobsbawm the historian had some interesting things to say, but his politics remain anti-Marxist.

Lew Higgins