Street Fighting Years- By Tariq Ali Verso 208pp £12.95

 

‘If the Vietnamese peasants can do it, why can’t we?’

Tariq Ali

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.

David Walsh

The dialectics of history have already hooked him and will raise him up. He is needed by all of them; by the tired radicals, by the bureaucrats, by the Nepmen, the upstarts, by all the worms that are crawling out of the upturned soil of the manured revolution. He knows how to meet them on their ground, he speaks their language, and he knows how to lead them. He has the deserved reputation of an old revolutionist, which makes him invaluable to them as a blinder on the eyes of the country. He has will and daring. He will not hesitate to utilise them and to move them against the Party. Right now, he is organising himself around the sneaks of the party, the artful dodgers.

Leon Trotsky

Statement of 1924 on Joseph Stalin's growing power base, in Stalin, An Appraisal Of The Man And His Influence (1966); also in Stalin's Russia 1924-53 by Michael Lynch, p. 18

All the parties of capitalist society, all its moralists and all its sycophants will perish beneath the debris of the impending catastrophe. The only party that will survive is the party of the world socialist revolution...

Leon Trotsky

Their morals and ours: and, The moralists and sycophants against Marxism (ed. 1968)

Street Fighting Years is the first part of a two-part biography.[1] By Tariq Ali, one of the best-known and one of the worst political opportunists and scoundrels ever to disgrace the workers' movement. This new edition from Verso covers Ali’s litany of betrayals throughout the sixties and beyond. This edition includes a new introduction, as well as the famous interview conducted by Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1971.

After Street Fighting Years was written, Ali was already looking for “greener pastures,”. He became a darling of the bourgeois media, a novelist and a political pundit. He told the Guardian in May 2010: “It’s a problem people have had to come to terms with at different times in history: what do you do in a period of defeat?”

Ali came from a high-class family in Lahore. His uncle was the chief of Pakistan’s military intelligence. Ali went to England to study at Oxford. In 1968, he joined the International Marxist Group 1968. The IMG was the British section of the Pabloite movement. This was a retched organisation that, according to David Walsh, specialised in “political provocation, with more than its share of ‘naughty schoolboys.’ Dressed in Mao caps and the latest gear, they would occasionally show up at picket lines or in working-class neighbourhoods. Mostly, they stayed on the university campuses. Their supporters helped produce journals such as the Black Dwarf and the Red Mole.”[2]

Ali’s book covers the decade of the 1960s and into the 1970s, which were years of political, social and economic upheaval both in Europe and around the world. That the Capitalist system was able to survive during this period was thanks to the Stalinist and social democratic parties, and the trade unions, which used their mass influence to control the struggles and lead them to defeat. Ali, in his book, provides a left cover for these organisations.

Ali dedicates his book to another fellow political scoundrel, Ernest Mandel. According to a statement by the Socialist Equality Party, Ali was Mandel’s disciple. The leader of the Pabloite organisation in Britain could not contain his enthusiasm for perestroika and its initiators. He dedicated his book, Revolution From Above: Where Is the Soviet Union Going?, published in 1988, to Boris Yeltsin. His moving tribute declared that Yeltsin’s “political courage has made him an important symbol throughout the country. Ali, describing his visits to the Soviet Union, informed his readers that “I felt really at home.” The policies of Gorbachev had initiated the revolutionary transformation of Russian society from above, Ali asserted. There were those, he noted cynically, who “would have preferred (me too!) if the changes in the Soviet Union had been brought about by a gigantic movement of the Soviet working class and revived the old organs of political power—the soviets—with new blood. That would have been very nice, but it didn’t happen that way.” Ali then offered a succinct summary of the Pabloite perspective, which combined in equal measures political impressionism, naiveté, and personal stupidity.”[3]

Ali’s treachery and outright stupidity were welcomed by other pseudo-left groups. Paul Foot, writing for the UK Socialist Workers Party, wrote in the Literary Review, “He may be a rotten Marxist, but he's the best raconteur the British Left has seen since the war. So spoke a sectarian friend of mine some fifteen years ago about Tariq Ali. I agree with both propositions. I will join sectarian battle with Tariq before this is over (where better than in the Literary Review, none of whose readers agree with either of us) but it is worth saying right away that there is no time of the day or night when any sane person would be sorry to see Tariq Ali and to talk with him. He laughs most of the time, especially at himself and his comrades. He is the most marvellous and melodious public speaker, with a deep love and care for the English language. What he is like speaking in his first language is beyond imagining.”[4]

Ali’s book catalogues all the major revolutions and political upheavals, but in a very cursory and superficial manner and without examining the major defeats and reasons behind several high-profile defeats.  Take France 1968, Ali writes, “In France, there was the largest General Strike in capitalism’s history and when the trade union bureaucrats went up to the workers and said ‘the bosses want to share a bit more of the cake with you’, the response from rank-and-file workers was ‘No! We want the whole bakery.” Ali played a not small part in the defeat of the French working class in the events of May-June 1968.[5]

Another revolution mentioned by Ali is the Portuguese Revolution. He writes, “In 1975, the Portuguese workers, peasants, students, soldiers and young officers brought society to the brink of revolution. They created a feeling that a fundamental change to society was possible and was within our grasp. And we felt that revolutionary change in Portugal would feedback, deepen and revive our movement across the rest of Europe.” Despite occasional setbacks and defeats, the period as a whole bred confidence in ordinary people and a deepening radicalisation that lasted up until about 1975.

These “occasional setbacks” are the bloody defeats of revolutions that swept throughout Europe and beyond. None more so than the terrible defeat that the Portuguese working class suffered and is still dealing with the aftermath even today.

On April 25 1974, a coup by lower-ranked army officers overthrew Portugal’s fascist Estado Novo government. The coup opened the way for a massive mobilisation of the working class, which had not been seen in Portugal before. It was one of the most important revolutions since the Second World War and caught the international bourgeoisie completely by surprise. It would take nearly two years to defeat the revolution. With relatively little violence or bloodshed, the Portuguese bourgeoisie could take back power at the expense of a few limited reforms. The popular front government established by the revolution, which contained a significant Communist Party presence under the leadership of Álvaro Cunhal, handed over power without a murmur from the numerous pseudo-left groups.

Despite his catalogue of betrayals, Ali is still lionised in the bourgeois press. When asked What do you think are the prospects for the left today? He writes

“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 the future. We need some type of home, not necessarily a formal political party, for the 200,000 who left Labour when Corbyn was marginalised and kicked out; a home to those from the Palestine and anti-imperialist movements; a home for the old and new left. I think we face a long period of rebuilding, there is no quick fix. But if we sit back and do nothing, things will only get worse.”[6]

As this answer shows, Ali has no qualms about ditching his radical past for a financially comfortable existence as a bourgeois commentator. There is no trace of his “brief spurt of leftism, which fizzled out by the late 1970s.

As David Walsh points out “Ali has never explained, anywhere, for any of his political peregrinations: 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.”

 

 

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[1] You Can't Please All: Memoirs 1980-2024

[2] The presence of Tariq Ali at the “Socialism 2010” conference- www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/06/tari-j18.html

[3] Perestroika and Glasnost in the USSR- www.wsws.org/en/special/library/foundations-us/56.html

[4] Paul Foot-Rotten Marxist, Nice Bloke Street Fighting Years

By Tariq Ali Collins 208pp £12.95

[5] www.counterfire.org/article/tariq-ali-memories-of-the-struggle-reloaded/

[6] www.counterfire.org/article/tariq-ali-memories-of-the-struggle-reloaded/

The Rise of Trump and the Crisis of American Democracy-The World Socialist Website-Mehring Books 2025

 "Hell is empty, and all the devils are here"

William Shakespeare-The Tempest

“I don't believe lies are something to stand on. I believe lies are something to build on.”

― Philip Roth, Our Gang

“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

― John Adams

“The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his "ideas" almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humour the sly cynicism of a country store. Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill.”

― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

In his introduction to this book Joseph Kishore makes the following point that the return of Donald Trump to power represents “the violent realignment of the American political superstructure to correspond with the real social relations that exist in the United States.”

He continues “Trump’s rise and return to power is not an aberration but the product of deep-rooted crises in American and world capitalism. His administration is carrying out a historic restructuring of the state, tearing apart the remaining democratic constraints on oligarchic rule, and preparing for global war.”

Why is this analysis made by the World Socialist Website so important. Because the analysis, published by the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) following Trump’s second election, not only traces the emergence of Trump, but the political forces also that enabled him, they provide an essential strategy for opposing his government.

While there is a violent realignment of the American political superstructure to correspond with the real social relations that exist in the United States a similar process taking place in the working class. The working class will need to realign its politics to meet head on the new challenge. Part of that process is a systematic study of the articles contained in this book.

Leon Trotsky was fond of saying that the motive force of history is truth and not lies. The correct and truthful analysis made by the World Socialist website has been met by a number of Pseudo Left organisations with hostility at the temerity of calling Trump a Fascist.

Alan Woods, leader of the Revolutionary Communist International (RCI), the successor to the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), published an article that starkly illustrates the complacent and anti-Marxist orientation of his political tendency. Revealingly titled “Trump victory: a kick in the teeth for the establishment,” the article echoes Trump’s fraudulent claims of being an anti-establishment figure while downplaying the immense dangers posed by a Trump presidency to the working class.[1]

Woods writes “The ruling class of America – firmly supported by the governments of Europe – was determined to keep him [Trump] out of office, by fair means or foul. After Trump was ousted in the 2020 election, everything was done to prevent him from standing again… All the numerous attacks against him rebounded and turned against those who were seen – correctly – as being involved in a conspiracy to prevent him from re-entering the White House.”[2]

The World Socialist Website opposed Woods complacency writing “This portrayal is false. The ruling class was not “determined to keep [Trump] out of office.” Significant sections of the financial and corporate elite, including billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, actively supported Trump, viewing his authoritarian and pro-business agenda as a means of furthering their own class interests. Others, like Jeff Bezos, have proclaimed their support for Trump after the election.” [3] The article went on to reiterate its position that Trump and his allies were fascists.

The writer Sinclair Lewis was well aware of people like Woods who downplayed the fascist danger writing “The tyranny of this dictatorship isn’t primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It’s the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessup’s, who have let the demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest.”[4]

While the development of an American fascist oligarchy is a new development the fear of an American oligarchy is not. In his book John Adams and the Fear of an American Oligarchy Luke Mayville shows that Adams who was the second American president spent most of his adult life warning about the development of an American Oligarchy. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson dated 2 September 1813 he writes. Now, my Friend, who are the aristoi.? Philosophy may Answer “The Wise and Good.” But the World, Mankind, have by their practice always answered, “the rich the beautiful and well born.” And Philosophers themselves in marrying their Children prefer the rich the handsome and the well descended to the wise and good.”[5]

While it is one thing to describe Trump and his gang as fascists it is another to set his dictatorship in the same context as the rise of Hitlerite fascism in 1933. David North, the chairman of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site and national chairman of the Socialist Equality Party (US), in his introductory remarks to the post-election online webinar “The Election Debacle and the Fight Against Dictatorship,” warned:

Now, it is not the position of the SEP and the WSWS that the accession of Trump to the presidency is the equivalent of Hitler’s 1933 victory. The United States is not Weimar Germany, and the transformation of the United States into a police state dictatorship backed by a mass fascist movement will not, whatever Trump’s intentions, be achieved overnight.  But it would be politically irresponsible, and contribute to the success of Trump’s aims, not to recognize the dangerous implications and real consequences of last Tuesday’s election. At the very least, it is necessary to take Trump at his word.[6]

Not all are inclined to take Trump at his word. In a recent collection of essays entitled Did it Happen Here, Perspectives on Fascism and America the British historian Richard Evan took Umbridge that Trump is a fascist, and his gang constituted an albeit small fascist movement.

He writes “The temptation to draw parallels between Trump and the fascist leaders of the 20th century is understandable. How better to express the fear, loathing and contempt that Trump arouses in liberals than by comparing him to the ultimate political evil? But few who have described Trump as a fascist can be called real experts in the field, not even Snyder. The majority of genuine specialists, including the historians Roger Griffin, Matthew Feldman, Stanley Payne and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, agree that whatever else he is, Trump is not a fascist.”[7]

It is perhaps a little surprising that a historian of Evans calibre should be so complacent and wrong. His solution to the crisis of American democracy is also wrong and sows’ dangerous illusions. He writes “Whether the US and its citizens succeed in preserving democracy and its institutions depends largely on whether they succeed in identifying what the real threats are and developing appropriate means to defeat them. Imagining that they are ­experiencing a rerun of the fascist ­seizure of power isn’t going to help them very much in this task. You can’t win the political battles of the present if you’re always stuck in the past.

It is recommended that those workers and youth who recognize that Trump is threatening dictatorship, and is a fascist should carry out a thorough a study of the analysis made on the World Socialist Web Site and especially the articles contained in this book and prepare themselves for the coming momentous battles.

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[1] Trump victory: a kick in the teeth for the establishment-https://marxist.com/trump-victory-2024.htm

[2] Trump victory: a kick in the teeth for the establishment-https://marxist.com/trump-victory-2024.htm

[3] Alan Woods, leader of pseudo-left RCI, hails election of Trump as “kick in the teeth” to US ruling class.wsws.org

[4] Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

[5] John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 2 September 1813- founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-06-02-

[6] Alan Woods, leader of pseudo-left RCI, hails election of Trump as “kick in the teeth” to US ruling class

[7] Why Trump isn’t a fascist- https://www.newstatesman.com/world/americas/north-america/us/2021/01/trump-fascist

Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian Michael Braddick Verso, pp. 320, £35

Marx “Men make their history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.

Karl Marx

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

Marc Bloch

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

Karl Marx, (1843)

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

Leon Trotsky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As “Simon Jenkins wrote “Michael Braddick is a true Braudelian. He is a historian not of who, what and when but of how and why. From Stonehenge to Brexit and Danegeld to coronavirus, his concern is for the setting of history, its intellectual and physical environment, and “the capacity of British people to use political power to get things done.”[4]

Although Braudel had strengths he also had very deep-seated weaknesses. As the Marxist writer Ann Talbot points out, “If Braudel’s approach to history has its strengths, it also has disadvantages. These relate to two areas-historical change and socio-political history. Braudel was a conservative historian who, although living in a country whose name was synonymous with revolution, was averse to change, particularly sudden changes of a revolutionary character. He attempted to develop a form of socio-economic history that did not rely on Marxist concepts and stressed continuity rather than change.”[5]

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

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

As Ann Talbot asks in her excellent obituary of Christopher Hill, “What any serious reader interested in history or politics wants to know is, when we read Hill’s books, are we reading the work of an apologist for the Stalinist bureaucracy or of someone who was genuinely struggling to make a Marxist analysis of an aspect of English history? It must be said that this is a complex question. Not everyone who was attracted to the bureaucratically degenerated Communist Party could be classified with the Webbs. The most gifted and outstanding representatives of the British intellectual elite, whether poets, novelists, scientists, musicians or historians, associated themselves with the Communist Party because the old institutions of church and state had lost their hold over the imaginations of the young while the Soviet Union seemed to embody all that was new, modern and progressive.”[6]

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

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

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

This so-called Marxist-humanist current produced “Peoples History” As Ann Talbot succinctly puts it “the Communist Party sponsored a form of “People’s History,” which is typified by A.L. Morton’s People’s History of England in which the class character of earlier rebels, revolutionaries and popular leaders was obscured by regarding them all as representatives of a national revolutionary tradition. This historical approach reflected the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to internationalism and their attempts to form an unprincipled alliance with the democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis countries. People’s history was an attempt to give some historical foundation to the policies of Popular Front—the subordination of the working class to progressive sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of political action to the defence of bourgeois democracy—which supplied a democratic facade to the systematic murder of thousands of genuine revolutionaries, including Trotsky. It was the approach that Christopher Hill was trained in, along with E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, who were part of the Marxist Historians Group and came under the influence of Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr.” Hil was enough of a Marxist is not completed absorbed by Morton’s Peoples History genre, but he did keep Morton’s national approach to historical questions. And the influence of the popular front politics and national outlook of Stalinism stayed with him most of his career.

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

[3] What is History? (1961)

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

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

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

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

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

Comment on the Daily Telegraph review of John Rees's book, Fiery Spirits Christopher Thompson

 Let me begin by agreeing that the origins of large-scale petitioning on political and religious matters can be found in the records of the movement for a Presbyterian settlement for the Church of England in the 1580s. This was the precedent for the later petitioning activities in the early to mid-Stuart period. However, petitioning itself was common at all levels of English and Welsh society on local and other matters by then. Recognising that such appeals were one of the common features of bargaining between the Crown, the Privy Council and other organs of the State and Church at that time is appropriate. Charles I's critics in the 1620s and again by 1640 utilised such means.

We can see this in the coordinated petitions submitted to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640 and later in and after November 1640 when the Long Parliament met. The leaders of the so-called 'Junto', men like the 2nd Earl of Warwick, Viscount Saye and Sele, the 2nd Lord Brooke, John Pym, Oliver St John and others, understood the importance of exercising pressure on the King and his advisers to secure what they regarded as essential concessions.

Valerie Pearl showed in her 1954 D.Phil. thesis and her 1961 book based on her thesis how these men worked together with their radical allies in the city of London to bring popular demonstrations, charges against recalcitrant proto-Royalists and petitioning to this end. These activities were not necessarily as spontaneous as figures like Brian Manning and Christopher Hill supposed. Take just one example: the M.P.s for London. Cradock and Venn were well known to Warwick and the others from their involvement in the activities of the New England and Massachusetts Bay Companies: Samuel Vassall was one of Warwick's tenants; Isaac Pennington was, like Warwick, one of the supporters of Samuel Hartlieb’s activities.

Owen Rowe was Warwick's brother-in-law from 1625 to 1645. Warwick had important connections with seamen and shipbuilders in London stretching back to the mid-1610s and onwards to the end of 1648. The Providence Island Company's financial affairs throw a revealing light on the connections of these peers and gentlemen with mercantile figures before 1640 and, indeed, in later ventures after the start of the Civil War.

I ought to add that ascribing the term 'revisionist' to John Rees creates a problem since this is the description usually applied to those historians who, from 1976, undermined and replaced the older Whig and Marxist explanations for the events of the 1640s. Perhaps, I may be allowed to add the heretical thought that the English Revolution or the Great Rebellion (or, as I prefer to call it, this 'grand soulevement') took place against the background of a significant improvement in the position of the larger landowners since 1600, as W.R.Emerson argued and which, were I a Marxist, might explain why these conflicts began and why the post-1649 settlements failed and the Restoration took place.

 

 

 

 

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-William is published on 13 Mar. 2025 by Macmillan (£22).

 

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

 “It still feels exciting and important to spread this tool around the world and improve people’s lives.”

Sarah Wynn-Williams

“move fast and break things”

Mark Zuckerberg

I must insist upon the masses, and their integrity as a whole. I have great faith in the masses. The noble character of mechanics and farmers—their curiosity, good temper, and open-handedness—the whole composite make. Significant alike in their apathy, and the promptness of their love—I know they are sublime. Before we despair we have to count them in—after we count them in we won’t despair.

Walt Whitman- Democracy

“ The character of the new Trump government marks a violent realignment of the state to correspond with the nature of capitalist society itself. The world’s richest individuals and corporations control resources on an unfathomable scale, with a growing number of centibillionaires whose personal wealth exceeds the GDP of the world’s 120 poorest nations. In the United States, the three wealthiest people now collectively control more wealth than the bottom 50 per cent of the population combined”

WSWS Editorial Board Statement

To a certain extent, you can see why Meta, formerly Facebook would want to ban this book and gag the author from publicizing it. Both actions by Meta failed and backfired spectacularly as the book has sold in the millions.

Careless People is an interesting if limited expose of Facebook. An organization that has been called pretty accurately a ‘diabolical cult’. Wynn-William spent seven years at Facebook and her 400-page book is a pretty damning indictment. The first thing that strikes one about the leading players on Facebook is the stunning level of hypocrisy and duplicity. Williams cites Facebook’s number two Sheryl Kara Sandberg’s 2013 book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.

Sandberg casts herself as a feminist icon however the reality is a little different. Her advice to pregnant working women – “Don’t leave before you leave” – meaning that the mother should work herself to death just before the baby is born. As one reviewer said, “It doesn’t occur to her that Lean In feminism might serve as a fig leaf covering self-exploitation and soul-depleting workaholism.” Wynn-Williams, among others, was also bizarrely invited by Sandberg to sleep in her bed presumably to have sexual relations.

Having said that before Sandberg treated her like a piece of crap Wynn-Williams exhibited a large degree of political naivety and outright fawning over Sandberg and Facebook in general writing “Until this moment, it had never occurred to me to see Sheryl as a celebrity or be awestruck by her... But now I can see how she’s sprinkling some of her stardust, whatever that magical quality is that she has that makes you forget to focus on the substance of the meeting at hand and instead wonder what it is she’s doing differently that makes her better than you.”^[1]

The book’s title comes from F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness.” As a useful analogy for the “Careless People” at Facebook, it only takes one so far. While Zuckerberg and his cohorts were indeed amoral, stupid, reckless and devoid of any principles they were representatives of an oligarch that has now captured the White House in America and is launching attack after attack on the working class. Significant protests against Trump’s attacks on immigrants and escalating deportation operations have erupted across the United States. Student leader Momodou Taal has been targeted by the Trump administration who have tried to have him deported for speaking out against the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

As Robert Reich correctly states “Mark Zuckerberg, the second-richest person, has followed suit, allowing Facebook to emit lies, hate and bigotry in support of Trump’s lies, hate and bigotry. All three of these men were in the first row at Trump’s inauguration. They, and other billionaires, have now exposed themselves for what they are. They are the oligarchy. They continue to siphon off the wealth of the nation. They are supporting a tyrant who is promising them tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks that will make them even richer. They are destroying democracy so they won’t have to worry about “parasites” (as Musk calls people who depend on government assistance) demanding anything more from them. When billionaires take control of our communication channels, it’s not a win for free speech. It’s a win for their billionaire babble”.^[2]

Or to put it more precisely as a statement by WSWS Editorial Board does “ The character of the new Trump government marks a violent realignment of the state to correspond with the nature of capitalist society itself. The world’s richest individuals and corporations control resources on an unfathomable scale, with a growing number of centibillionaires whose personal wealth exceeds the GDP of the world’s 120 poorest nations. In the United States, the three wealthiest people now collectively control more wealth than the bottom 50 per cent of the population combined”.^[3]

This type of wealth is becoming increasingly incompatible with Walt Whitman’s beloved idea of Democracy. But this political and economic situation largely passes Wynn-Williams by. She is completely indifferent to the assault by Oligarch Zuckerberg's Facebook on the Socialist movement. The orthodox Marxists of the WSWS.Org have faced the brunt of Facebook’s wrath and censorship. What is not mentioned in Wynn Williams's book is that Facebook was and still is engaged in an escalating campaign of internet censorship targeting the socialist left. Entire Facebook pages were taken down, and individual accounts were permanently disabled, without any explanation given or recourse allowed.

Facebook began its systematic censorship of the WSWS.Org after the January 6^th 2021 attempted coup by Trump and his supporters. As Kevin Reed points out “It could not be clearer that the entire US ruling establishment is attempting to utilize the events of January 6 as justification for shutting down progressive, left-wing, anti-capitalist and socialist political organizations and publishers on social media platforms such as Facebook. The subsequent shutdown of groups, pages and accounts—including the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) at the University of Michigan and leading members of the Socialist Equality Party in the US—by Facebook that began on January 22 is part of this strategy”^[4]

Wynn Williams's book is a well-written but somewhat limited insight into the lives of Facebook Oligarchs. For a far more precise and revolutionary insight into the rise of the oligarchs one should purchase a copy of the newly released book from Mehring books.com entitled The Election of Donald Trump: The insurrection of the oligarchy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] Careless People by Sarah Wynn-William

[2] Three billionaires: America’s oligarchy is now fully exposed-Guardian Online 

[3] Socialism against oligarchy, fascism and war- wsws.org 

[4] Facebook’s “depoliticization” aimed at censorship of left-wing and socialist organizations- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/02/10/poli-f10.html