This book offers a fascinating insight into some of
the early debates inside the History Group of the Communist Party of Great
Britain, whose members included Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton and Eric
Hobsbawm. In essence, these people made an outstanding contribution to
historical studies. The debates they initiated formed the theoretical basis for
academic research that is continuing, in particular, the work on the nature of the English civil war and revolution in the seventeenth century, and on the
development of capitalism in Britain.
This book focuses on the debates of the
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century section of the group and their work on
ideology and absolutism. It reproduces original documentary material - single
contributions, reports and minutes - from the debates, and also includes an
informative introductory essay as well as useful notes and appendices.
An important proviso before reading David Parker's
book is for the reader to have at least a rudimentary knowledge of the writings
of the British Communist Party and most importantly a firm grasp of the
differences that occurred in the Soviet Communist Party in the early 1920s
between Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky. A basic understanding of the debate
over the adoption by the CPSU of Stalin's theory of Socialism in One country as
opposed to the internationalist theory of Leon Trotsky would also help.
One of the main weaknesses of Parker's book, which is
well researched and useful is that it tends to present the only side of the
debates that occurred between 1946- 56. There tends to have a pronounced
nationalist feel to the book. Leaving the developments that took place in the
former USSR out of the equation is a little like doing a history of the Bible
and leaving Jesus out.
The historians and significant intellectuals that
occupied the British Communist Party Historians Group (CPHG) in the 1940 and
1950s played an important and dare I say leading role in the study of British
and World history throughout the 20th century. It is significant that in London's
National Portrait Gallery there used to hang a painting which has been
described as "of seven people arranged on either side of a low table in a
book-lined study". They were historians, members of the editorial board of
the journal Past & Present, which arose from the British Communist Party's
Historians' Group".
Eric Hobsbawm, Edward and Dorothy Thompson,
Christopher Hill, Victor Kiernan, George Rude, Raphael Samuel and Rodney Hilton
to name a few were all moulded by the early strategic experiences of the 20th
century, the depression of the 1930s, the Second World War and of course the
Russian revolution. "For some, the group was, if not exactly a way of
life, then at least a small cause, as well as a minor way of structuring
leisure. For most it was also friendship," said Eric Hobsbawm.
The first seventy-odd pages provide the reader with a
valuable introduction to the book. In this Parker attempts to give a picture of
the relationship between the historian's group and the Communist Party and its
leading figures such as R Palme Dutt (See his Document 1 1940 Amended Draft The
English Revolution 1640). It is evident from Parker's book that there were
significant differences between the historians on the class nature of the 17th
Century English Revolution but also on other wide-ranging subjects.
The first major fault of the book is that you get no
feel for the times the historians began writing in. These historians, in
particular, were not writing in some academic vacuum. It should, therefore, be
noted the historians and Hill, in particular, began writing their books and essays
amid the Moscow Show Trials instigated by Stalin against all the old
Bolsheviks.
Leon Trotsky, one of the chief defendants in the
trials, had this to say "It is time, my listeners; it is high time, to
recognise, finally, that a new aristocracy has been formed in the Soviet Union.
The October Revolution proceeded under the banner of equality. The bureaucracy
is the embodiment of monstrous inequality. The revolution destroyed the
nobility. The bureaucracy creates new gentry. The revolution destroyed titles
and decorations. The new aristocracy produces marshals and generals. The new
aristocracy absorbs an enormous part of the national income. Its position
before the people is deceitful and false. Its leaders are forced to hide the
reality, to deceive the masses, to cloak themselves, calling black white. The
whole policy of the new aristocracy is a frame-up.' And "But it remains an
incontestable historical fact that the preparation of the bloody judicial
frame-ups had its inception in the "minor" historical distortions and
innocent" falsification of citations. The bureaucracy found it
indispensably necessary to adapt Bolshevism to its own needs. This could not be
done otherwise than by corroding the soul of Bolshevism. To the revolutionary
essence of Bolshevism, the bureaucracy gave the name of "Trotskyism."
Thus it created the spindle on which to wind in the future its falsifications
in all the spheres of theory and practice".[1]
None of this drama and the other main historical
events that would impact on the lives and writings of the CPHG is touched on by
Parker. Why? It is apparent to any person who has studied the period that the
Popular Front Policy pursued by the Stalinists was an old millstone around the
necks of the CPHG and would have a profound effect on the Communist Party
History Group in the future. Yet again nothing is mentioned by Parker of this.
Parker also fails to mention Leon Trotsky at all in the book.
Trotsky, after all, was the joint leader of the
Russian revolution and wrote considerable amounts on this policy. His writings
on the Spanish Civil War are some of his best. "The theoreticians of the
Popular Front do not essentially go beyond the first rule of arithmetic, that
is, addition: 'Communists' plus Socialists plus Anarchists plus liberals add up
to a total which is greater than their respective isolated numbers. Such is all
their wisdom. However, arithmetic alone does not suffice here. One needs as
well at least mechanics. The law of the parallelogram of forces applies to politics
as well. In such a parallelogram, we know that the resultant is shorter; the
more component forces diverge from each other. When political allies tend to
pull in opposite directions, the resultant proves equal to zero". Continue
"A bloc of divergent political groups of the working class is sometimes
completely indispensable for the solution of common practical problems. In
certain historical circumstances, such a bloc is capable of attracting the
oppressed petty-bourgeois masses whose interests are close to the interests of
the proletariat. The joint force of such a bloc can prove far stronger than the
sum of the forces of each of its component parts.
On the contrary, the political alliance between the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie, whose interests on basic questions in the
present epoch diverge at an angle of 180 degrees, as a general rule, is capable
only of paralysing the revolutionary force of the proletariat." Civil war,
in which the force of naked coercion is hardly effective, demands of its participants
the spirit of supreme self-abnegation. The workers and peasants can assure
victory only if they wage a struggle for their emancipation. Under these
conditions, to subordinate the proletariat to the leadership of the bourgeoisie
means beforehand to assure defeat in the civil war."[2]
It does not take a tremendous leap of faith to work
out that the origins of the concept of "history from below"
instigated by the CPHG owe a lot to the Popular Front policy. That historians
such as Hill, Rude and Morton were influenced by it was evident. Leslie Morton's
work, a People's History of England, was the founding book of the group.[3]
From the beginning, there was a contradiction between
the avocation of Popular Front politics and the historian's group writing about
Democratic groups such as the Levellers in the vein of history from below. The
CPHG group tended to glorify an unbroken historical line of English radicalism.
This outlook permeated E P Thompson's Making of the English Working Class,
which portrays the English working class as inherently radical and therefore
not needing a scientific perspective. A leading member of the Group, Dona Torr,
decided to position Tom Mann in her study Tom Mann and his Times, as a figure
that "was a late representative in a story of England's long-running
struggle ".
For Ann Talbot "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 modern leaders was obscured by regarding them all as
representatives of a national revolutionary tradition. This historical approach
reflected the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to
internationalism and their attempts to form an unprincipled alliance with the
supposedly democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis countries. People's
history was an attempt to give some historical foundation to the policies of
Popular Front—the subordination of the working class to supposedly progressive
sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of political action to the defence
of bourgeois democracy—which provided a democratic facade to the systematic
murder of thousands of genuine revolutionaries, including Trotsky. It was the
approach that Christopher Hill was trained in, along with E.P. Thompson, Rodney
Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, who were part of the Marxist Historians Group and
came under the influence of Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr". [4]
One striking aspect of the group was that none of
them specialised in twentieth-century history. More specifically, the
experiences of the Russian revolution were never to be explored by the group
apart from one book by Christopher Hill, which in reality was an apology for
Stalinism. Again according to Talbot "In more recent areas of history, as
in politics, the control of the Stalinist bureaucracy was too great to allow
the free development of Marxist thought and whether deliberately or not they
all avoided venturing into the modern arena". As Matt Perry correctly points
out, the group had absolute academic freedom on the subject of English history
pre 20th century because the CP had no official line on that period of history.
Hobsbawm was acutely aware that broaching the subject
was largely taboo according to him "it raised some notoriously tricky
problems". According to one essay on the CPHG a study of the journal Our
History between 1956 and 1992 showed there was not a single article dealing
with any part of Soviet history. Having visited the Marx Memorial Library to
check this statement out, I can say there was one article by Monty Johnson on
Leon Trotsky in 1992. It is still a poor record nonetheless.
Eric Hobsbawm was the de facto leader of the groups.
It would be fair to say that for good or bad Hobsbawm's writings have shaped
the world-historical view of a generation of students, academics and laypeople.
He was born in 1917 in Alexandria, under the British protectorate of Egypt,
just twenty years after the death of Marx. Hobsbawm was part of an
extraordinary group of historians that took on many of the characteristics of a
political party. It had membership subscriptions, a secretary and a chairman.
He was the only one of the CP historians to write on the 20th century and the
taboo subject of the Russian revolution. But this was done mainly after the
group had collapsed.
Hobsbawm has gone on the record to say that he "wasn't
a Stalinist. I criticised Stalin and I cannot conceive how what I've written
can be regarded as a defence of Stalin. But as someone who was a loyal Party
member for two decades before 1956 and therefore silent about a number of
things about which it's reasonable not to be silent - things I knew or
suspected in the USSR. Why I stayed [in the Communist Party] is not a political
question about communism, it's a one-off biographical question. It wasn't out
of the idealisation of the October Revolution. I'm not an idealiser. One should not
delude oneself about the people or things one cares most about in one's life.
Communism is one of these things and I've done my best not to delude myself
about it even though I was loyal to it and to its memory. The phenomenon of
communism and the passion it aroused is particular to the twentieth century. It
was a combination of the great hopes which were brought with progress and the
belief in human improvement during the nineteenth century along with the
discovery that the bourgeois society in which we live (however great and
successful) did not work and at certain stages looked as though it was on the
verge of collapse. And it did collapse and generated awful nightmares ".
According to the Marxist writer and expert on Leon
Trotsky David North Hobsbawm's writing on the Russian Revolution mainly
portrays the revolution as being "doomed to failure" and a "fatal
enterprise." It leads to the assumption that the breakdown of the Soviet
Union was the "Shipwreck of Socialism."
North admits Hobbawm has produced some excellent work
but," the subject of the Russian Revolution is dangerous territory for
Professor Hobsbawm, for in this field his scholarship is compromised by his
politics.
Hobsbawm once confessed that as a member of the CPGB he had avoided
writing about the Russian Revolution and the 20th century because the
political line of his party would have prevented him from being entirely
truthful. Why he chose to remain a member of a party that would have compelled
him to tell lies is a question to which he has never given a convincing answer.
At any rate, it would have been best for him and no loss to the writing of
history, had he continued to limit himself to events before 1900".[5]
Here lies the tremendous contradiction at the heart
of the group. Despite this handicap, it would be fair to say that without the
fear of interference from the Stalinist bureaucracy the CPHG historians did try
to examine "the early plebeian movements and utopian communists of the
English revolutionary period as precursors of the modern socialist movement".
This was done by the CPHG largely in the spirit of Marx who in 1847 said "The
first manifestation of an active communist party is contained within the
bourgeois revolution, at the moment when the constitutional monarchy is
eliminated. The most consistent Republicans – in England the Levellers, in
France Babeuf, Buonarroti, were the first to proclaim these 'social questions'."
It was correct for the early Marxists to look at the
first plebeian movements as precursors of the modern socialist movement. What
needs to be clarified is what a modern socialist movement looks like. The CPHG
historians alongside numerous radical groups did tend to glorify the
spontaneous circulation of the "middling sort" and to link it to
working-class struggles today as if there was some unbroken radical and
democratic thread that would supersede the need for a scientifically grounded
need for a revolutionary party.
To his credit, Parker also attempts to establish what
kind of 'Marxists' were in the history group. He says their attempt to apply
orthodox Marxist theory i.e. Historical Materialism to a study of the English
Revolution was no easy task. He reviews other issues of methodology and the 'empiricism'
of the group. However, on this subject as with others, the biggest problem of
the book is not so much what is in it as to what has been left out.
The group's use of Marx was mainly mined from his
work on historical materialism mostly from his Preface to the Contribution to
the Critique of Political Economy. The group relied heavily on Engel's'
correspondence in the 1890s which was translated by Historians Group member
Dona Torr. Despite the attempts at absorbing the Marxist method, the group was
also prone to a type of empirical methodology which would primarily stem from
the influence of Stalinism.
This methodology was confirmed by E P Thompson, who
described the group's approach as "quaintly empirical." I am not
condemning all the work of the historians as empirical that would be inaccurate
as they produced some of the most outstanding historiographies of any generation,
but it does show the handicap they were working under.
David Parker's collection of the internal discussions
of the British Communist Party Historians Group in the 1940s-50s provides only
a partial record of debates within the group despite this you get an inkling on
the tremendous ideological pressure that was exerted by the CPGB and the Soviet
Communist Party on the CPHG. Parker refuses to believe that Stalin's theory of socialism
in a Single Country which ran in contradiction to Trotsky's theory of an international
revolution had a profound impact on the history writing and research of the
history group. Stalin's writings also had a significant impact on the History
group. Hill for instance sided with Stalin over the debate on Pokrovsky. The
Stalinist's in the late 1930s used the controversy over Pokrovsky to attack
Trotsky. Again Parker mentions none of this. His portrayal of the debate over
Pokrovsky is one-sided.
If Parker did not understand the role, Stalin played
Leon Trotsky did "In what way did Stalin's theoretical work express
itself? In nothing. All he did was to exploit his fellow-traveller theorists,
in the interests of the new ruling caste. He will enter into the annals of the
history of "thought" only as of the organiser of the greatest school
of falsification. But for this very reason Stalin, more truly and
comprehensively than anybody else, expresses the ideological physiognomy of the
new ruling stratum. Each theoretical formula of anti-Trotskyism (whether it
involved Zinoviev, Bukharin or Pokrovsky) became at the very next stage an
intolerable burden to the new masters of the situation. Official "theory"
is today transformed into a blank sheet of paper on which the unfortunate
theoreticians reverently trace the contours of the Stalinist boot. Retreating
with seven-league strides from its Bolshevik past, the bureaucracy at first
devoured at each successive stage its own theoreticians. Nowadays that is no
longer adequate. The bureaucracy cannot be reconciled with anything but the
destruction of the entire old generation of Bolsheviks. Such is the
consummation of the Soviet Thermidor!"
The English Revolution has been written quite
extensively down the years by many of the great Marxist thinkers. Parker's book
gives the reader a chance to evaluate to what extent the CPHG applied orthodox
Marxism to their studies of the English Revolution. It must be said that some
did a better job than others.
In 1850 Marx and Engel's reviewed a pamphlet,
entitled why did the English Revolution succeed? It was written as a polemic
against the historian M Guizot in it they said Guizot "finds it
superfluous to mention that the subjection of the crown to parliament meant
subjection to the rule of a class. Nor does he think it necessary to deal with
the fact that this class won the necessary power in order finally to make the
crown its servant. According to him, the whole struggle between Charles I and
parliament was merely over purely political privileges. Not a word is said
about why the parliament, and the class represented in it, needed these
privileges. Nor does Guizot talk about Charles I's interference with free
competition, which made England's commerce and industry increasingly
impossible; nor about the dependence on parliament into which Charles I, in his
continuous need for money, fell the more deeply, the more he tried to defy it."
"The English class of great landowners, allied with the bourgeoisie –
which, incidentally, had already developed under Henry VIII – did not find
itself in opposition, as did the French feudal landowners in 1789, but rather
in complete harmony with the vital requirements of the bourgeoisie. In fact,
their lands were not feudal, but bourgeois property. On the one hand, they were
able to provide the industrial bourgeoisie with the manpower necessary for
manufacturing, and on the other they were able to develop agriculture to the
standards consonant with industry and commerce. Thus their common interests
with the bourgeoisie, thus their alliance with it."
One of the most important points made by Marx and
Engel's is that England passed from what amounted to a feudal country into the
early stages of a bourgeois country in the 17th century. This analysis was a common coin amongst other Marxist thinkers of both the 19th and 20th centuries.
In Karl Kautsky's 'Revolutions, past and present' (1906), and also in Trotsky's
Where is Britain Going? (1926). Trotsky wrote "In the England of the 1640s
we see a parliament based on the most whimsical franchise, which at the same time
regarded itself as the representative organ of the people. The lower house
represented the nation in that it represented the bourgeoisie and thereby
national wealth. In the reign of Charles Ist it was found, and not without
amazement, that the House of Commons was three times richer than the House of
Lords. The king now dissolved this parliament and now recalled it according to
the pressure of financial need. Parliament created an army for its defence. The
army gradually concentrated in its ranks all the most active, courageous and
resolute elements. As a direct consequence of this, parliament capitulated to
this army. We say, "as a direct consequence," but by this, we wish to
say that parliament capitulated not simply to armed force (it did not
capitulate to the King's army) but to the Puritan army of Cromwell which
expressed the requirements of the revolution more boldly, more resolutely and
more consistently than did parliament.
"The adherents of the Episcopal or Anglican,
semi-Catholic Church were the party of the court, the nobility and of course
the higher clergy. The Presbyterians were the party of the bourgeoisie, the
party of wealth and enlightenment. The Independents and the Puritans
especially were the party of the petty bourgeoisie, the plebeians. Wrapped up
in ecclesiastical controversies, in the form of a struggle over the religious
structure of the church, there took place social self-determination of
classes and their re-grouping along new, bourgeois lines. Politically the
Presbyterian party stood for a limited monarchy; the Independents, who then
were called "root and branch men" or, in the language of our day,
radicals, stood for a republic. The half-way position of the Presbyterians
fully, corresponded to the contradictory interests of the bourgeoisie – between
the nobility and the plebeians.
The Independents" party which dared to
carry its ideas and slogans through to their conclusion naturally displaced the
Presbyterians among the awakening petty-bourgeois masses in the towns and the
countryside that formed the main force of the revolution".
Hill's absorption of Marx (we do not know if he
studied Trotsky)and application of Historical materialism enabled him in the
words of Ann Talbot identify "the mid-seventeenth century crisis as a
revolution, which in the case of Britain overthrew the rule of one class and
brought another to power. Secondly he recognised that revolutions are made by
the mass of the population and that for a revolution to take place the
consciousness of that mass of people must change, since revolutions are not
made by a few individuals at the top although the character of their leadership
is crucial at certain points. These achievements were considerable at the time
and are of continuing relevance today when historians increasingly reject any
severe economic or social analysis and argue that revolutions are nothing but
the work of a tiny group of conspirators".
Perhaps the most important discussion that took place
and which dominated all the groups was the discussion over the transition from
Feudalism to Capitalism.
Christopher Hill's essay The English Revolution of
1640 was the catalyst for a wide-ranging and divisive battle within the groups
and beyond. Some 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." [6]
As I said earlier, Parker downplays the influence
that the CPSU had on politics and actual discussion inside the CPHG. In
reality, the official line on all "revolutions" was dictated directly
or indirectly by Joseph Stalin. The fact that Parker uncritically presents
quotes from his work in his choice of documents is a testament to this.
Stalin's position as advanced in 1924 was that
socialism could be built in the Soviet Union using its national reserves. Not
caring that this position would have catastrophic consequences for the
socialist revolution internationally and according to David North "represented
a fundamental revision of the perspective that had guided the Soviet leadership
and the Communist International under Lenin. This divorcing of the prospects
for the Soviet Union from the development of the world socialist revolution
likewise constituted a frontal assault on the theory of permanent revolution,
upon which the October Revolution of 1917 had been based".
Stalin's position on the October revolution was
primarily a Menshevik one in that the revolution could not leap over the bourgeois-democratic
stage of its development and called for limited support to the bourgeois
Provisional Government. He opposed Trotsky's theory that the tasks of the
bourgeois-democratic revolution could only be achieved by the working class
taking power and building their state. How did this theory interfere with the debate over
Hill's position? One of the more overt attacks on Hill's conception of the
revolution was by Victor Kiernan who argued that the revolution of 1640 "was
not a decisive turning point" because it was spread over several
centuries. While it is true the revolution was spread over centuries the denial
of a watershed has less to do with the debate over the transition from
feudalism to capitalism and more to do with the political line of the CPGB at
the time. During the high point of the discussion, the Communist Party of Great
Britain adopted its "British Road to Socialism" which saw the
development of socialism as a purely national event that happened gradually
rather through violent revolution.
Another remarkable aspect of the transition debate
was the fact that a number of the arguments marshalled against Hill by his
fellow historians were adopted in some form by early and current day
revisionist historians. Conrad Russell refused to believe that a
revolution took place during the 17th century. German Stalinist Jurgen
Kuchynski described the 1640 revolution somewhat bizarrely as an attempted
feudal counter-revolution. Kuchynski also put forward that Tudor England was
already capitalist. In his book, Parker quotes him describing Queen Elizabeth I
as "the most prominent capitalist in capitalist bourgeois society"
(p32) His theory is not a million miles away from several revisionist
historians who contend that the 1640s saw a "noble's revolt" against
the monarchy.
Debates took place over the correct Marxist usage of
the term feudalism. It took a long while before Hill's definition was accepted.
Hill explained his reasoning "I use the word feudal in the Marxist sense,
and not in the more restricted sense adopted by most academic historians to
describe narrowly military and legal relations. By "feudalism" I mean
a form of society in which agriculture is the basis of economy and in which
political power is monopolised by a class of landowners. The mass of the
population consists of dependent peasants subsisting on the produce of their
family holdings. The owners are maintained by the rent paid by the peasants,
which might be in the form of food or labour, as in the early days, or (by the sixteenth
century) in money. In such a society, there is room for small handicraft
production, exchange of products, internal and overseas trade; but commerce and
industry are subordinated to and plundered' by the landowners and their state.
Merchant capital can develop within feudalism without changing the mode of
production; a challenge to the old ruling class and its state comes only with
the development of the capitalist mode of production in industry and
agriculture". [7]
This leads me to another debate over the term
Merchant capital. One of the charges against Pokrovsky was that he believed
that merchant capitalism was a mode of production and therefore Merchant
capitalist was the prominent motor force of the revolution. They made up the
most relevant section of the bourgeoisie. Pokrovsky was wrong, but this is not
the place to analyse his theory suffice to say that his conception of merchant
capitalism came under ferocious attack inside the Soviet Union. Stalin saw it
as a threat to the theory of socialism in one country theory. He was labelled
mistakenly a Trotskyist which he was not. It did not seem to bother the
Stalinists that Trotsky opposed Pokrovsky theories as essentially ill-defined
and borrowed from Marx and was taken out of context.
In his history of the Russian revolution, he wrote "Pokrovsky
has published an article dedicated to my book: 1905, which demonstrates –
negatively, alas! – What a complicated matter it is to apply methods of
historic materialism to living human history, and what a rubber-stamp affair is
often made out of history even by such deeply erudite people as Pokrovsky. The
book which Pokrovsky criticises was directly called out by a desire to
establish historically and justify theoretically the slogan of the conquest of
power by the proletariat, as against the slogan of a bourgeois-democratic
republic, and also that of a democratic government of the proletariat and the
peasantry ... This line of thought produced a very great theoretic indignation
on the part of no small number of Marxists, indeed an overwhelming majority of
them. Those who expressed this anger were not only Mensheviks but also Kamenev
and Rozhkov (a Bolshevik-historian).
Their point of view in broad outlines was
as follows: The political rule of the bourgeoisie must precede the political
rule of the proletariat; the bourgeois-democratic republic must be prolonged
historic schooling for the proletariat; the attempt to jump over this stage is
adventurism; if the working class in the West has not yet conquered the power,
how can the Russian proletariat set itself this task? etc., etc. From the point
of view of this pseudo-Marxism, which confines itself to historical mechanisms,
formal analogies, converting historic epochs into a logical succession of
inflexible social categories (feudalism, capitalism, socialism, autocracy,
bourgeois republic, dictatorship of the proletariat) – from this point of view
the slogan of the conquest of power by the working class in Russia must have
seemed a monstrous departure from Marxism. However, a serious empirical
evaluation of the social forces as they stood in 1903 – 05 powerfully suggested
the entire viability of a struggle for a conquest of power by the working
class. Is this a peculiarity, or is it not? Does it assume profound characteristics
in the whole historical development or does it not? How it does come that such
a task arose before the proletariat of Russia – that is, the most backward
(with Pokrovsky's permission) country of Europe?
If Parker is planning another book on the subject, he
could no better than a systematic study of the debates in the Former USSR. This
work would have shed a not unsubstantial light on this theme of the CPHG.
Parker's book is not an easy read. For the casual reader, it is almost a
nightmare. But for a careful, methodical and political nuanced reader it is a
window of opportunity to carry out some serious study of a crucial period.
Parker only really presents one side of the debate. However, David Parker's
book is an important but flawed contribution to this discussion.
[1]
Leon Trotsky --The Stalin School of
Falsification-Foreword to the American Edition
[2]
Leon Trotsky Writings on the
Spanish Revolution- Pathfinder Press.
[3] Morton's book was first published
in the 1930s. The Communist Party Historians Group first began to meet after
the war to inform the argument of the second edition.
[4] "These the times ... this is
the man": an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill Ann Talbot.
[5]
Leon Trotsky and the Fate of
Socialism in the 20th Century A Reply to Professor Eric Hobsbawm By David North
3 January 1998
[6]
Document 12 (1947) the Basis
and Character of Tudor Absolutism
[7]
The English Revolution of
1640 C Hill
