Published in 2013 E P Thompson and English Radicalism is a
collection of essays to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of E.
P. Thompson's most famous book, The Making of the English Working Class. Manchester
University Press has produced a stylish and very well designed book cover that
reminds one of a Soviet propaganda poster from the 1920s or 30s.
The book has been warmly received Sheila Rowbotham called it
an "eloquent set of essays manages to address, both sympathetically and
critically, the many and varied aspects of Thompson's life, as a historian, a teacher,
a poet, a political activist, a Marxist and libertarian, and an Englishman and
a cosmopolitan.
Thompson's legacy is hugely relevant for the troubled times in
which we now live.' [1]Mary
Kaldor, from the London School of Economics and Political Science, called it "A
major book on Edward Thompson, who died 20 years ago, is an important reminder
of the loss of English radicalism and the need to revive it."
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 held 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[2].
Lastly, Monthly Review Press has just released E.P. Thompson and the
Making of the New Left: Essays & Polemics Carl Winslow (Editor)
It is impossible to examine every chapter of the book, and it
is certainly impossible in a review to discuss every aspect of E P Thompson's
work as a politician and historian, some of this will be done in a review of
Carl Winslow's new book on Thompson mentioned. The fact that his work is still
being translated all over the globe that new books about his life and work
appear almost daily is testimony alone to his historical and political
significance.
Thompson was a natural teacher. He had a passion for
teaching. Whether you agreed with his politics or his interpretation of
historical events he sought to imbue in his student a passion for history and
learning. He had a partisan approach to education in that it should have a social
purpose.
John Rule, in his Biography of E P Thompson for the Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography, said "ith
his postgraduate students his relationship was excellent. They remember with
affection a painstaking and inspiring mentor, and most became lifelong friends.
With the university itself, relations were more strained. Resources for the
centre were short of his expectation; undergraduate teaching took up much time,
as did boards and meetings, leading him to complain that little time was left
for writing. His writing was itself undergoing a shift. The Making carried
marks of having been written by someone not fully bound by academic
conventions. It is invective, for example in its infamously hostile depiction
of Methodism as 'ritual psychic masturbation,' could be immoderate. He had a
blind spot when it came to quantification, and a glimpse of his feelings
towards some academic tendencies is exemplified in a passage which summarizes
the average worker's share in the benefits of the industrial revolution as: 'more
potatoes, a few articles of cotton clothing for his family, soap and candles,
some tea and sugar, and a great many articles in the Economic History Review".
Given the number of books, papers, lectures, and conferences
examining every aspect of Thompson's life and writing it is extremely
disturbing that none of it has been given over to an Orthodox Marxist criticism
of his work both in politics and history. It would appear that an orthodox
Marxist critique of his work is still a taboo subject and has been largely
airbrushed out of history. Given the current climate of hostility to genuine
Marxism in academia, this is not a major surprise. For the sake of balance and
the historical record and more important historical truth, an orthodox Marxist
position should be given space in future books on Thompson.
Thompson spent most of his academic career distancing
himself from life inside the British Communist Party. His criticism of
Stalinism was not from an orthodox Marxist position; instead, he advocated a type
of "socialist humanism". Thompson at an early age rejected the
classical Marxism of Leon Trotsky despite later breaking with Stalinism it is
clear that Thompsons' subsequent historical and political writings were still retained
baggage from his Stalinist past.
While the Communist Party of Britain did attract a large
number of historians, it was still an appalling training school and Thompson
never entirely abandoned all that he learned there. An orthodox biography of
Thompson is long overdue. The purpose of this review is to examine certain
aspects of Thompson's work mentioned in the book. Therefore the chapters
discussed will not flow in numerical order.
Michael Newman discusses what is perhaps the most
significant period in Thompson's life. From 1956 it is clear that the
crisis that developed within world Stalinism over Khrushchev's semi-secret
denunciation of some of Stalin's crimes impacted profoundly on Thompson and
other historians that were around or in the Communist Party Historians group.
Newman is correct to point out that with the development of
Khrushchev's speech the crisis of the Communist Party brought about a
realignment of radical politics. Thompson's answer was to reject a path towards
Orthodox Marxism represented by the Fourth International, he instead created
the first New Reasoner and later the New Left Review (NLR).
Newman's description of the NLR as an "Internationally renowned
organ of Marxist scholarship" was way off beam. A useful work,
Intellectual Radicalism after 1989: Crisis and Re-orientation in the British
and the American Left by Sebastian Berg (2017), traces the evolution of left
academia following the collapse of Stalinism.
Among the many responses to the collapse of Stalinism, perhaps
one of the most stupid came from G. A.
Cohen, Canadian-British philosopher and "analytical Marxist," who
said "It is true that I was heavily critical of the Soviet Union, but the
angry little boy who pummels his father's chest will not be glad if the old man
collapses. As long as the Soviet Union seemed safe, it felt safe for me to be
anti-Soviet. Now that it begins, disobligingly, to crumble, I feel impotently
protective toward it." What can one say about this pathetic comment—except
that it has nothing whatsoever to do with Marxism?[3].
The orthodox Marxists or Trotskyists in the Fourth
International which was led in Britain by Gerry Healy of the Socialist Labour
League (SLL), saw the crisis within the British Communist party as an
opportunity to insist on the counter-revolutionary nature of Stalinism. Healy
went on an offensive to win the most important cadre from the breakup of the
Communist Party. Those figures who had not been entirely corrupted by the years
of lies and calumny of the Stalinist regimes throughout the world were won to
orthodox or classical Marxism. Cliff Slaughter, Tom Kemp and Peter Fryer.
Suffice to say Thompson was not one of them despite Newman's
attempt to portray Thompson as being at the centre of a "Marxist revival."
Marxists inside the SLL were hostile to the New Reasoner's politics but were open
to debate. In an article from Labour Review October –November 1959 edition
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.
Healy did not mince his words when he said "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 some
new ideas that they have developed independently. This new development on the
left reflects a particular phase in the elaboration 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 advance 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."
During the early years of Thompson's magazine the New
Reasoner, it was clear that he did not intend to have a debate with the
Trotskyists. Despite Healy trying to secure 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." 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 throughout its history.
At the same time that Healy sought to clarify the issues
involved in the crisis of world Stalinism Pseudo Left groups such as the
Socialist Workers Party started to muddy the water and tried to argue that
despite Khrushchev's speech, there was "a process of self-reform"
going on and that under pressure from the working class Stalinism would move in
a revolutionary direction.
Thompson would get a warmer reception from groups such as
the British SWP who broke from the Fourth International in the early 1940s. The
SWP also sought to profit from the crisis in world Stalinism. The New Left was
courted by the SWP, and some of its leaders spoke at numerous SWP events. The
SWP has for the last 50 or so years sought to give these emigrants from
Stalinism a left cover and justified their reformist and nationalist adaptation
and orientation.
According to SWP member David Mcnally E P Thompson, "was
the greatest Marxist historian of the English-speaking world and had a "political
commitment to freeing Marxism from the terrible distortions of Stalinism, a
commitment which originated in the battles of 1956 within the official
Communist movement" [4].
Thompson founded the New Reasoner in 1957 along with
historian John Saville. The group was made up of ex- and current members of the
CPGB, a varied group of common elements which left the Fourth International, and
members of the Labour Party. The group was characterized by its opposition to
the orthodox Marxists represented by the Fourth International.
Thompson was avowedly hostile to its international
revolutionary perspective and sought to imbue his new publication with an "English
Marxist" tradition. As Kate Soper writes that Thompson rejected orthodox
Marxism, and in its stead, he offered up a form utopian socialism entitled
socialist humanism. To distance himself from orthodox Marxism, he entered into
a series of reckless, stage-managed and convoluted polemics against a series of
academics, intellectuals who in one form or another had been mistakenly labelled
Marxists.
It is not in the realm of this review to go into detail
Thompson's polemics, but an evaluation of Thompson's socialist humanism is
overdue. Firstly it must be said that this theory has nothing to do with
Marxism. Thompson's critique of Stalinism had as one writer said a "certain
sense of vagueness." For Thompson Trotskyism was just another "variant
of Stalinism."
Despite McNally's glorification of Thompson, he makes an
interesting point when he noted that Thompson had a " lackadaisical
attitude toward scientific rigour. 'For all its moral and political
fervour, there was something remarkably imprecise about his attack on
Stalinism. Thompson described his as a 'moral critique of Stalinism' - and
there is much to be said for that.
Whatever its limitations, revolutionary socialists can only applaud a critique that refuses to countenance slave labour camps, show trials, mass murder, a police state regime of lies and crimes against human rights, as authentic forms of socialism. But alongside the vigour of moral denunciation, one needs a clear analysis of the nature of the regimes at issue. At no time did Thompson offer the latter."
Whatever its limitations, revolutionary socialists can only applaud a critique that refuses to countenance slave labour camps, show trials, mass murder, a police state regime of lies and crimes against human rights, as authentic forms of socialism. But alongside the vigour of moral denunciation, one needs a clear analysis of the nature of the regimes at issue. At no time did Thompson offer the latter."
At no stage of his chequered history did Thompson and his
friends in the New Left advocate the need to build a Leninist-type party. To do
so would as Thompson believed would lead directly back to Stalinism. The New
Left explicitly rejected Lenin's theory of the vanguard party, which it blamed
for the development of Stalinism. On this matter, Thompson invited a
former Stalinist turned Labour Party bureaucrat Eric Heffer to write an
article in the New Reasoner in 1959, Heffer's views fitted in nicely with
Thompsons when he wrote that "The 'Vanguard corresponded to a given
historical need but is not essential today: in fact, it is a definite hindrance".[5]
E.P. Thompson and his New Left Review colleagues sought to
imbue every article he wrote with the spirit of a new "humanist"
version of Marxism. As Julie Hyland points out "In the ensuing decades, it
acted as a meeting place for Stalinist-influenced historians and other
academics and members of the pseudo-left groups such as the United Secretariat
of the Fourth International. Its various authors offered combined advocacy of
Western Marxist philosophies, the Frankfurt school, French structuralism,
Maoism, anarchism, post-modernism, and various other petty-bourgeois theories
of student radicalism.[6]
As Theodore Koditschek writes Thompson began a "lifelong
engagement with the politics of socialism and Marxism." It should be clear
that Thompson's Marxism had nothing to do with the "dogmas of orthodox
Marxism as Koditschek puts it... "Class rather Classes is a highly
misleading phrase.
Thompson's rejection of a historical materialist method in
examining historical phenomena underpins his most famous work the Making of the
English Working Class. The book is deeply flawed in the absence of any
materialist understanding of the development of the working class.
Despite the popularity of the book, Thompson's methodology
has caused significant damage. His use of the history from the below genre is now
being revitalized by a growing section of historians, and radical groups such
as the British Socialist Workers Party.
History from below or people's history genre has become
increasingly popular during the current social, economic and political turmoil
caused by the latest crisis facing the capitalist system. It is not to say that
this genre does not have its merit. Books that are written well can add to our
understanding of complex historical events or processes.
But books and more precisely the historians who have written
essays using the methodology either underestimate or deliberately leave out not
only the origins of this type of history but the politics of such history
writing.
Perhaps the most damaging aspect of the genre is its disdain
for an understanding of the role consciousness plays in history. To be more
precise how that knowledge comes about. It is one thing to rescue the working
class from the past it is another to understand not only where it came from but
how and where it gets its ideas from.
Stuart Hall, who collaborated with Thompson on the New left
project writing in NLR in 2010, shared Thompson's downplaying of the need for
historical materialist understanding when it came to the origins of the working
class. "We had a deep conviction that against the economism of the
Stalinist, Trotskyist and Labourist left alike, socialism was a conscious
democratic movement and socialists were made, not born or given by the
inevitable laws of history or the objective processes of the mode of production
alone." [7]
If historians like Hall had bothered to read Marx properly
then maybe they would not be so free with their labelling Thompson a Marxist
who did not adhere to the basic tenents of Marxism espoused in the German Ideology.
Marx believed that “the production of
ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with
the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real
life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage
as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental
production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion,
metaphysics, etc., of people. Men are the producers of their conceptions,
ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite
development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to
these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than
conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life process. If
in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera
obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their actual life-process as
the inversion of objects on the retina does from their natural life process.
In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from
heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not
set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought
of, imagined, conceived, to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real,
active men, and by their actual life process, we demonstrate the development of
the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process.
The phantoms formed
in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material
life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises.
Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their
corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence.
They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material
production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real
existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not
determined by consciousness but consciousness by life. In the first method of
approach, the starting point is consciousness taken as the living individual;
in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living
individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their
consciousness. This method of approach is not devoid of premises. It starts out
from the real premises and does not abandon them for a moment. Its premises are
men, not in any fantastic isolation and rigidity, but in their actual,
empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions. As
soon as this active life-process is described, history ceases to be a
collection of dead facts as it is with the empiricists (themselves still abstract),
or an imagined activity of imagined subjects, as with the idealists”.
Nina Power's chapter examines Thompson's conception of class.
Thompson tended to romanticize the working class, which in turn led to his
glorification of spontaneity. He admitted to having an empirical outlook. Many
writers fell over themselves to praise the book. The Making of the English
Working Class "was a highly influential work that contributed significantly
to a revolution in the way history was studied, not only in Britain but in many
countries. Instead of viewing history solely regarding kings, courtiers,
aristocrats and politicians, historians began to consider the perspective of
the ordinary people". "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".
When you cut through the hyperbole written about Thompson's
conception of class in the book, it is clear that Thompson and others were
hostile to socialism is based on the working class.
As Paul Bond puts it, His "Marxism" was an
ideology purpose-built to meet the requirements of the "left"
petty-bourgeoisie, discontented, looking for "space," but tied by a
thousand strings to the existing order".[8]
To conclude, it is tough in a short review to estimate
Thompson's politics and historical preferences, let alone his place in history.
He is a historian worth reading and his books will be read by future
generations looking for answers to complex political and historical problems of
our day. If they read his books with the understanding that he was closer to
Stalinism than he was to Marxism, they will be better off for it.
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/P-Thompson-English-radicalism/dp/0719088216
[2] http://manyheadedmonster.wordpress.com/
[3] Intellectual Radicalism
after 1989: Crisis and Re-orientation in the British ...
By Sebastian Berg
[4] E P Thompson: class
struggle and historical materialism by D Mcnally Issue 61 of International Socialism
Journal Published Winter 1993 Copyright © International Socialism
[5] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/03/05/hall-m05.html
[6] Embittered row between UK
Labour Party leader Ed Miliband and Daily Mail over his father, Ralph-by Julie
Hyland 2013- http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/10/08/mili-o08.html
[8] Cultural theorist Stuart
Hall (1932-2014): A political career dedicated to opposing Marxism by Paul Bond
5 March 2014 http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/
