"I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the
Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the
"Utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott,
from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may
have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been
backwards-looking".
The Making of the English Working Class
Even a basic internet search for the name E. P. Thompson
brings forth a wealth of material by and about the historian. It is without a doubt
that he played an extremely important part in the intellectual, social and
political life of hundreds of thousands of people over the last half-century.
He was an extremely capable historian, and his work has provided us with
valuable insight into the problems of mankind's historical development.
A cursory read of Hamilton's book reveals that Thompson was
not only a historian of note but was a political animal. Unlike many of his
co-thinkers in the Communist Party Historians Group Thompson wrote major
polemical essays concerning political events during the 20th century.
Hamilton's book is not an orthodox biography. It
concentrates heavily on Thompson's political career to the detriment of his
historical writings. The book's title The Crisis of Theory stems from Hamilton's
belief that Thompson's break with Stalinism in 1956 was a 'crisis of theory' Whether
it led Thompson away from the working class and Marxism is a moot point as he
was never an orthodox Marxist in the first place. The fact of the matter is that he was never close
politically to the working class and was never close to an orthodox Marxist
position or group. We shall see later in the review that he was opposed virulently
to orthodox Marxism.
Scott Hamilton's book is largely an extension of his PhD
dissertation covering Thompson's The Poverty of Theory. Hamilton spent a
significant amount of time studying the writings and letters from the archive
of Hull University. He offers an extremely friendly account of Thompson's
polemical battles.
The book has appeared at the same time as a veritable
cottage industry of material relating to the life and work of E P Thompson. It
is after all fifty years since Thompson published his seminal work The Making
of the English Working Class. Harvard University will be holding a
conference on the book. Birkbeck University held a conference entitled
The future of 'history from below: an online symposium, papers from the
conference can be found at the many-headed monster blog. A new collection
of essays called E. P. Thompson and English Radicalism by Roger Fieldhouse
(Editor), Richard Taylor (Editor) will be published by Manchester University
Press (1 December 2013) in celebration of the anniversary of Thompson's book
The Making of the English Working Class.
Hamilton's book The Crisis of Theory is an interesting
addition to our attempt to understand Thompson's place in history. Hamilton has
taken great care to try and locate Thompson's life and work in the context of
broader political, social and events.
Even though this is not an orthodox biography, he still had
the foresight to do this. Also, to his credit, he has not created a hagiography. However, this is not to say that the book does not have several political
shortcomings and not a few mistakes, for instance, Thompson went to Cambridge,
not Oxford as Hamilton said and perhaps worse several historians are misnamed
and their books assigned to the wrong authors. Like all good semi-biographical books, Hamilton's takes us
through Thompson's life chronologically. He and his brother Frank were drawn at
an early age to the British Communist Party. Hamilton's evaluation of this
period is very useful.
He makes clear that the two brothers joined an extremely
nationalistic party. Thompson joined at a time when the British Communist Party
had broken from orthodox Marxism and had adopted Stalinism as its political
orientation. One thing that perturbs me about Hamilton's evaluation of Thompson's
early politics is his tendency to romanticize the Thompson brothers national
outlook and in the case of Frank, a case of outright racism. During the Second
World War Frank Thompson lamented that "it is humiliating, just sitting around
while Yanks, the Chinks and the Russkies teach us how to fight".
E P Thompson did not join a Marxist party. It was clear that
Thompson came back from the war a convinced Stalinist. He made no statement
condemning the Moscow Trials and subsequent executions of leading Bolsheviks at
the hands of Stalin and his supports in the Soviet Union. No statement was made
in defence of the Russian working class which had its entire revolutionary
leadership destroyed by Stalin. At his time of joining the British CP, he had broken from
any traces of Marxism. It is perhaps a major weakness of the book that it does
not discuss this period. Especially the conflict In the Soviet Party between
Stalin and Trotsky.
Thompson at an early age rejected the orthodox Marxism
represented by Leon Trotsky despite later breaking with Stalinism it is clear
that Thompsons' subsequent historical and political writings to a lesser extent
were still imbued with Stalinist influences. It was a very bad training school
and Thompson never entirely abandoned all that he learnt there.
Thompson's adoption of the theory of the Popular front would
mould his thinking up until he died. The most finished example of this was his
making of the English Working Class. As he said the Making "I am seeking
to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete"
hand-loom weaver, the "Utopian" artisan, and even the deluded
follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.
Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new
industrialism may have been backwards-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".The same could be said about Thompson.
The book is a significant piece of history and deserves its
high place in the historiography of English history. However, the book has a
too heavy emphasis on the subjective nature of class consciousness and not
enough of the objective. Furthermore, Thompson in one preface to his book tends to
right off completely the revolutionary capacity of the English working class
when he says "Causes which were lost in England might occur in Asia or
Africa, yet might be won."
It may be true that Thompson sought in his political
writings to distance himself from his Stalinist past but in his historical
writings, this is not the case. This separation was almost Jesuit, like. Thompson's use of the concept of "history from below"
owes a lot to the Popular Front policy used by the Stalinists in the 1930s. He
was not alone in using the concept nearly all the Communist Party historians
including Hill, Rude and Morton were influenced by it.
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
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 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 Torre".[1]
For Thompson and others, there was never 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. As Talbot says above the CPHG group tended to glorify an unbroken
historical line of English radicalism. This outlook permeated E P Thompson's The
Making of the English Working Class, which portrays the English working class
as inherently radical and therefore not needing a Marxist 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".
This downplaying and in some cases the outright hostility to
a scientific Marxist study of these radical groups is expressed in several
pseudo-left groups today. The largest group being the Socialist Workers Party
(SWP). When the SWP review any book by the members of the CPHG, there is a
tendency to glorify the attachment these historians had to 'Marxism'.
As Paul Blackledge writes "Edward Thompson's masterful
The Making of the English Working Class (1963), has had an undoubtedly positive
effect on historiography, the pressures of academic specialization have also
led to the production of an awful lot of dross. Saville has stood out against
this tendency, and for that, he is to be congratulated. Indeed, his background
in both Historians? Group and the New Left seems to have left him incapable of
following the traditional historians? Path of finding an archive and mining it
for information irrespective of any meaning that might be attached to the
published results. So, where contemporary historiography is torn by a debate
between postmodernists and empiricists, Saville practices the kind of Marxist
historiography that overcomes the opposition between theory and facts. Against
the postmodernists, his work is steeped in a serious examination of primary
evidence; against traditional empiricist history, his Marxism provides him with
a vantage point from which he can justify his research method".[2]
E P Thompson
described the CPHG approach as "quaintly empirical". I am not
condemning all the work of the historians by raising this point that would
be facile as they produced some of the most outstanding historiographies of any
generation, but it does show the handicap they were working under.
Thompson's methodology would lead him to periods of great
elation and periods of abject pessimism. Hamilton, to his credit, gives
numerous examples of this. He believed that Thompson had 'an uneasy mixture of
catastrophism and hyper-optimism' (p. 159).
Hamilton does not go into detail regarding Thompson's
role inside the CPHG. Despite having a close working relationship with Christopher
Hill. Hamilton seems to believe that Thompson was not close to the group. It is
strange that Hamilton makes little of this relationship. Hill appears only once
in Hamilton's index.
One reviewer queries this "there are certain problems
with Hamilton's analytical scheme. One may ask, for instance, why the
definitive moment of Thompson's life (1936–46) is not extended to 1956. His relationship
with Communist writers and historians of the period from 1946 to 1956 played a
crucial role in Thompson's Popular Frontism. Hamilton omits from his account
the most influential group in Thompson's life, the Historians' Group of the Communist
Party of Great Britain. Dona Torr, the guru of the Historian's Group and
Thompson's mentor, is never mentioned. Yet, it is highly unlikely that Thompson's
William Morris and The Making of the English Working Class would have been
written without her influence". He and Hill quit the Communist Party in
1956, and Thompson's view of the 17th Century revolution shares some
similarities with Hill's, however, Thompson's view diverged from Hill's over
the timing of the transition from feudalism to capitalism".
Thompson's view that there was an "epochal"
bourgeois revolution in England in the 17th century came under heavy criticism
from his onetime colleague Perry Anderson. The reply to Anderson's criticism of
Thompson evaluation of English history took the form of a book-length polemic
called The Peculiarities of the English.
Anderson wrote "The notion of an 'epochal' bourgeois
revolution in Britain, stretching from the 12th to the 19th century, is a
Ptolemaic hypothesis. It implies that capitalism can only be introduced by a
classical bourgeoisie—a view parallel to the belief that socialism can only be
introduced by an industrial proletariat. Both are incorrect. History has what
Ernst Bloch calls a certain 'aperity', which allows several possible agents for
a single process. [128] This interpretation restores the civil war to its
pivotal role in modern history, without characterizing it crudely as a 'bourgeois
revolution'.[3]
It is not possible in the space of this review to go into
great of this debate, but some points can be made. It must be said that
Anderson's position is remarkably close to a large number of revisionist
historians in the field of early modern English history who in one way or
another downplayed the significance of the English revolution.
Another thing is Anderson's use of the work of J H Hexter
against Thompson. Hexter was a very right-wing historian who attacked Marxist
historians such as Christopher Hill with a ferocity that would not have looked
out of place in a boxing match. Anderson says "One cannot help wondering if Thompson
has kept up with the literature on the subject since that date. Has he, for
instance, ever looked at Hexter's devastating essay The Myth of the Middle
Class in Elizabethan England? Is he even aware of Hexter's famous critique of
precisely the notion of an 'epochal' bourgeois revolution? His text is innocent
of the smallest echo of all this. He would surely have shown more misgivings in
pronouncing the English landowners of the era of Lord North a 'true bourgeoisie'
if he had assimilated the lessons of this body of work. He would also have been
less surprised at the stress laid in our essays on the pre-eminence and
perdurance of the English aristocracy (in the sociological, not the titular
sense) well into the 19th and 20th centuries".
Having read Hexter's essay, I am not sure it is all that
devastating. And to use it against Thompson is Anderson's right but he should
have chosen his friends in this argument with a little more care. To give Thompson his due, he knew a little more about the
English revolution than Anderson. Having said this, I do not give him a blank
cheque. More work needs to be done on his differences with Christopher Hill.
If the time spent in and around the Communist Party was
Thompson's first critical period of influence. His involvement with the New
Reasoner/New Left projects was undoubtedly his second most critical time. After his resignation from the CP Thompson was one of several
left-wing intellectuals who founded the New Reasoner which was the forerunner
of the New Left Review. The latter journal is still published today. In reality,
the New Reasoner was a home to anybody who was opposed to orthodox Marxism.
While Hamilton's book concentrates on Thompson's polemic
against other political rivals such as Louis Althusser, Tom Nairn and Perry
Anderson to name a few, it says nothing on Thompson's attitude to the orthodox
Marxist groups at the time such as G Healy's Socialist Labour League.
Maybe this is an error that will be corrected by Hamilton in future projects.
If Hamilton had spent a little time at the British Library
which contains a number of the Socialist Labour League theoretical journal
Labour Review it would have given him a much closer approximation of Thompson'
political and for that matter historical proclivities. Marxists inside the SLL were hostile to the New Reasoner's
politics (Thompson's earlier magazine), but the SLL was open to debate. In an
article from Labour Review October –November 1959 Healy was mindful of the
sharp polemics that Thompson had been involved in and sought in his article
called – "The New left Must Look to the Working Class" to open a
debate with Thompson and his supporters.
Having said that Healy did not mince his words when he says "What
strikes one immediately on reading E P Thompson's article is that he entirely
omits the working class; consequently there is no attempt to analyze the
relationship between the left of today and the working class. One would imagine
that the New Left had just arrived and existed in a world of its own. The
opposite, of course, is the case. The New Left is not just a grouping of people
around several new ideas that they have developed independently. This new
development on the left reflects a particular phase in the development of the
crisis of capitalism, which for socialists is the crisis of the working-class
movement. Like movements among intellectuals and students in the past, the
recent emergence of the new left is the warning of a resurgence of the working
class as an active political force in Britain. The crisis, which is the basis
of such action finds its first reflection in the battle of ideas."[4]
From the early origins of Thompson's magazine New Reasoner,
it was clear that he did not intend to have a debate with the Orthodox
Trotskyists. Despite trying to have cordial relations with Thompson and his
supporters, it became increasingly clear that Thompson did not see the
Trotskyist's around Healy as being a part of the working class. Healy's
response was to say that "Comrade Thompson seems to have cast away all the
luggage, he was equipped within the Communist Party except-one soiled old
suitcase labelled anti-Trotskyism".[5]
That analysis of Healy despite his subsequent political
degeneration is as true now as it was then. Thompson's response to the SLL was to
accuse it of factionalism. An epithet I might add that has been levelled at the
Trotskyist movement since time immemorial.
We live as then in stormy political times, an examination of
the differences between Healy and Thompson would greatly strengthen the book. To conclude this review, it was never my intention at this moment to go into
fuller detail of the disputes which occurred in the left during Thompson'
lifetime. That will be done in much greater detail when I write further on E P
Thomson. My main criticism of Hamilton is that he omits whether deliberately of
by accident this history which does a disservice to an otherwise competent
book.
[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
[2] https://isj.org.uk/a-life-on-the-left/
[3] https://newleftreview.org/issues/I35/articles/perry-anderson-socialism-and-pseudo-empiricism
[4] The New Left Must Look to
the Working Class Gerry Healy Labour Review Oct- Nov 1959
[5] An Unreasonable Reasoner
Editorial Labour Review Vol 3 No 2 March April 1958
