This literature review attempts to make a political and
historical evaluation of Raphael Samuel's time at the ULR (Universities and
Left Review) from the theoretical standpoint of orthodox Marxism or to be more
precise a historical materialist viewpoint. No such study has been made before
as most of the previous historiography of the ULR has been made by historians
and writers who shared similar theoretical positions to the people they were
writing about.
It is encouraging that the last few years have seen an
increasing interest in Samuel's work. A television documentary looking at his
interviews with East End people is being worked on.
Sophie Scott-Brown is currently researching an intellectual
biography called Reading the Times; Raphael Samuel and the Politics of History
Production in Late Twentieth 20th Century. The book when published looks like
it will be written from a postmodernist standpoint. A genre which seems still
to dominate modern-day history writing.
Any evaluation of Samuel must take into consideration his 'membership'
of the New Left during his time at the ULR. The historian Michael Kenny has
pointed out there are very significant "methodological problems facing
those trying to interpret the history of the New Left in Britain."
One problem cited by Kenny is the shortage of written
documents of its early years. Although this is not a problem with Samuel's time
at the ULR because the archives at the Bishopsgate Institute have hardly been
touched. Although one question does present itself in the fact that there has
been no fully documented history of cultural studies and no single archive.
Having said this hopefully the research being carried out by
The Raphael Samuel History Centre will seek to resolve this issue. In many
ways, it is a fitting tribute to the work of Samuel that the centre is
promoting and encouraging participation in historical research and debate not
only in his work but of others.
While sources well-mined by other historian's will be used
other sources decidedly unused by other historians will be searched. These will
be the three archives at the Bishopsgate, The Ruskin College Papers, The
Universities and Left Review Papers and the Raphael Samuel Papers.
Early days
In November 1956, the historian Raphael Samuel sent a letter
to Stuart Hall suggesting they set up a magazine called 'New University Left,'
Hall accepted the idea, but the magazine was to be called Universities
& Left Review. To gain support for the publication which would
orientate not towards the working class but to students, former CP members,
fellow travellers, and various other left-wing radicals Samuel sent letters to
these forces appealing for money and articles.
The appeal to ex-Communist Party members would have been
logical since he had resigned from the party over Khrushchev's secret speech in
1956. 1956 was, without a doubt, one of the most critical years in the history
of the 20th century. Khrushchev, who was a willing partner in Stalin's
murderous purges of the 1930s, was forced to make a measured and insufficient
revelation of Stalin's crimes in his "Secret Speech" of February
1956. The exposure of the Stalin's crimes caused thousands of party members to
leave the party virtually overnight. The CPGB (Communist Party of Great
Britain) also lost a significant number of its high-profile historians such and
E P Thompson and Christopher Hill who both left the party.
Samuel was a teenager when he joined the CP and the CPHG
(Communist Party Historians Group). "Like many Communists of my time, I
combined a powerful sense of apartness with a craving for recognition,
alternating gestures of defiance with a desire to be ordinary and accepted as
one of the crowd. If one wanted to be charitable, one might say that it was the
irresolvable duality on which British Communists find themselves impaled
today."[1]
Samuel had a very romantic view of his time in the CP and
had a tendency to see those times through very rose-tinted spectacles. His book
The Lost World of Communism was devoid of any political analysis of the CP. Its
betrayals are not mentioned. It is perhaps a little strange that he had a
disdain for the undisciplined nature various left groups and publications but
would later found one of them. Samuel missed the time when Stalinism had
political control over the working class.
Samuel also seems to have been blind to the fact that there
were significant disagreements inside the Communist Party over strategy and
global politics. He indeed does not touch upon the struggle between Leon
Trotsky's Left Opposition and Josef Stalin and stayed silent on Stalin's
murderous purges of the 1930s.
Historical Phenomenon
Samuel was part of a historical event. Born in 1934 he had a
relatively comfortable childhood and was educated at a private school. During
his late youth, he would have been schooled by his mother who was in the
Communist Party about the defeat of Nazi Germany, continued global economic
depression and the Second World War. His teenage years would be defined by the
constant rise of Stalinism, the further betrayal of the Russian Revolution, and
the rise to global eminence of American capitalism.
Post-1945 America began its dominance of Britain and Europe
who had been bleed dry by the Second World War. America saw its role as
rescuing Global Capitalism. The Revolutionary struggles that broke out during
this period were betrayed by a combination of Stalinism and Social Democracy.
British capitalism did not take its minor role in global
events lightly. When Britain sought to exploit the situation thrown up by the
Suez crisis in 1956 its military invention was sabotaged by the US. It was only
able to maintain its global position by allying itself with the US albeit in a
very junior position.
Aside from the odd article from non-members of the ULR the
global economic and political implications of the rise of American imperialism
mostly passed the editors of the ULR by. Although this cannot be said of its
work regarding Stalinism. The editorial board of ULR which consisted of Stuart Hall,
Gabriel Pearson, Ralph Samuel and Charles Taylor shared the view that Stalinism
was the logical outcome of the Marxism. One historian Eric Hobsbawm who stayed
in the CP shared that view[2]. The ULR's editorial position was best summoned up by Charles
Taylor: who said 'Stalinism did not just add itself to Communism, it was not an
obvious element deflecting the mainstream of Communist development. In every
real sense, it has grown out of Communism". [3]
This hostility towards orthodox Marxism was not shown
towards the British Labour Party. In fact, the ULR's orientation towards the
Labour Party was to try and push it in a left-wing direction. To do this the
Universities and Left Review published some documents such as 'The Insiders', a
study of 'the men who rule British industry' in 1957. The ULR also published
others outside the magazine who shared their view. Samuel published an article
by John Hughes and Ken Alexander entitled A Socialist Wages Plan. Samuel called
them the "New Left's most influential contribution to Labour Party thought'."
Another orientation championed by the ULR was towards the
radicalisation that was taking place inside the universities, and young people
were the prime target of the editors. While rejecting a revolutionary
Marxist perspective, they sought to attract young people to the magazine on an
entirely utopian socialist basis. Their uncritical absorption of the method of
the Frankfurt School theorists meant in essence that Samuel and the ULR shared
the same theoretical premise that the working class was not an agency for
revolutionary change. They instead took on board critical theory which saw the "emphasis
moved from the liberation of the working class to broader issues of individual
agency."
Labour Review and the Socialist Labour League
The ULR was not the only magazine around in 1957 that sought
to gain political ground from the breakup of the Communist Party. A magazine of
an entirely different political calibre was founded by Gerry Healy's the Club
forerunner of the SLL (Socialist Labour League) called Labour Review.
Healy's initial response to the ULR was friendly, and he
sought a dialogue with them and other New Left groups. The ULR's hostility to
Trotskyism soon became apparent. Samuel said "There has been an incredible
mushrooming of inner-party groups. On the ultra-Left—the dissidence of
Dissent—a dozen 'vanguard' parties, and as many tendencies and groups, compete
for the honour of leading a non-existent revolutionary working class". [4]
Healy was not only rebuffed by the ULR, but E P Thompson's
New Reasoner was equally hostile towards the SLL leaving Healy to state that a "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."
The knockback from the ULR did not stop the orthodox
Marxists or Trotskyists in the Fourth International from doubling their efforts
to gain from the crisis within the British Communist party. Healy continued to
believe that Stalinism was a counter-revolutionary force. The SLL won prominent
figures such as Cliff Slaughter, Tom Kemp, Peter Fryer and Brian Pearce out of
the CP.
Pearce's article warning of the dangers of founding the New
Left Review without thorough assimilation of the struggle waged by Leon Trotsky
against Stalinism was prescient. Pearce warned of the dangers of an uncritical
attitude by the ULR editors towards their past affiliation to Stalinism and
their hostility towards the orthodox Marxist in the SLL.
"Nothing could be more dangerous today than a revival
of the illusions which dominated that 'old Left.' One of the chief sources of
the confusion and worse in 'new Left' quarters, and in particular of their
hostile attitude to the Socialist Labour League, is to be found in the fact
that though these people have broken with Stalinism they have not undertaken a
thorough analysis of what they repudiate, have not seen the connection between
the contradictory features of Stalinism at different times or even at one time,
and so they remain unconsciously open to influence by false ideas absorbed
during their period in the Stalinist camp".[5]
History from Below
An interesting topic for a PhD dissertation would be how
much of Samuels academic writing or to be more precise, his philosophy of
history was influenced by his philosophy of politics. It is beyond dispute that
his academic work can only be rightly seen as part of a broader anti-communist
response.
In his essay Class and Classlessness, Samuel attacks Hall
over his belief that class that society was becoming a thing of the past. Hall
believed that class was something only the Trotskyists talked about. However,
Samuels understanding of class was not from the standpoint of an orthodox
Marxist. He never saw the working class as a revolutionary class even in his
days of the CP.
He did not deny that the Working-class did have a radical
history. However, his view history was shaped by the politics of the Communist
Party. They were radical in a historical sense hence his interest in the "people's
history" genre but not to the extent they could overthrow capitalism.
The historical genre of "People's History" was
very much a product of the Communist Party. The first example of this type of
history within Britain was A.L. Morton's People's History of England. According
to Morton the rebels, revolutionaries and modern leaders he wrote about were
representatives of a national revolutionary tradition.
As Ann Talbot points out "This historical approach
reflected the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to internationalism
and their attempts to form an unprincipled alliance with the supposedly liberal
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. [6]
Another by-product of Samuel's position regarding class was
his work in the early development of Cultural Studies. Samuels avocation of
People's History and Cultural Studies would colour his work until the day he
died.
The early issues of the ULR were given over to discussing
the theoretical merits of Cultural Studies, Hall, and Samuel each borrowed
conceptions from the Italian left-winger Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci's notion of "cultural
hegemony" was used as a guide for political activity.
Gramsci's attack on economic determinism, his hostility
towards Trotsky's theory of the Permanent Revolution and his acceptance of the
nationalist character of Stalinism was very attractive to Samuel and Hall.
As Gramsci would say "To be sure, the line of development is toward
internationalism, but the point of departure is 'national' —, and it is from
this starting point that one must begin." [7]
From the beginning, Cultural Studies became part of an
attack on revolutionary Marxism. Samuel's academic and political writing would
seek to shift social criticism away from class and onto other social
formations. Such as identity politics and the early stages of gender studies.
Hall believed that a consumer boom which the working class
had bought into meant that the old outdated class-based analysis could no
longer be valid during this period. The wealth produced by the boom created
what he termed a "people's capitalism." In an entirely extraordinary statement Hall elaborated his
position further "This journal has no political 'line' to offer: it cannot
have, for it seeks to provide a forum where the different fruitful traditions
of socialist discussion are free to meet in open controversy.
It tries to reach
beyond any narrow sectional appeal in the search for new ideas and new writers.
Can we bridge the gap between the Thirties and the 'Fifties? Do new ideas, new
writers and new readers in fact exist? This is the calculated risk we take. If
this Review can attract serious attention and avoid the bankruptcy of labels
and pigeonholes, it will have achieved the purpose for which it has been
started" [8]
Hall and Samuel's new readers and writers would not come out
of the working class but would come from pseudo-left radicals and utopian
socialists. One such figure was Herbert Marcuse (1898 –1979) Marcuse welcomed
the New left and especially welcomed the groups such as the ULR that adopted
the new Cultural Turn.
According to Marcuse, "The New Left was concerned with
the emancipation of imagination from the restraints of instrumental reason. In
opposition to the alliance between realism and conformity, the forces of the
New Left created the slogan: "Be realistic, demand the impossible."
This is where the high aesthetic component of the movement originated: art was
seen as a productive emancipatory force, as the experience of another (and
ordinarily repressed) reality.[9]
Marcuse who was a neo-utopian theoretician concurred with
the figures inside the ULR that the working class should no longer be regarded
as a revolutionary class. That it was a political or even backward mass. Like
Hall, he believed that it had been bought off by capitalism and was too
intimately connected to capitalist society to be revolutionary. The working
class had become consumed by the mechanisms of consumerism and the domination
of the media.
Marcuse, who was a pupil of Martin Heidegger and a member of
the Frankfurt School was seen as the "Father of the New Left," went
even further than Hall or Samuel in putting forward that there was a "proto-fascist
syndrome in the working class."
Marcuse also believed that "The "revolution"
would not be made by the working led by a vanguard party along the lines of the
Bolsheviks in 1917. Like Samuel, he saw other social forces such as the
intelligentsia, social fringe groups or guerrilla movements as the motor force
of the revolution. The revolution would not be brought about by the class
contradictions of capitalist society, but by the critical thinking of a
progressive elite. The changing of attitudes towards social, culture and sexual
habits would be a precursor to the successful transformation of society and the
precondition for the social revolution.
Conclusion
Despite a plethora of material written about the ULR and the
early New Left from a Stalinist or left radical standpoint nothing outside of
few articles from the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League exists of an
examination of the ULR from an orthodox Marxist perspective. The archives held
at Bishopsgate have hardly been touched and evaluated. Using these files, I
will seek to achieve an entirely new understanding of Raphael Samuels early
political and historical life.
[6] "These the times ... this the
man": an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill-By Ann Talbot 2003
