All these titles are referencing the phrase whose origins stem
from the sentiment espoused by veterans of Cromwell's New Model Army and other
supporters of the English Republic like John Milton. The Good Old Cause was the
name given, retrospectively, by the soldiers of the New Model Army, to the
complex cause that motivated their fight on behalf of the Parliament of
England.
For such a little book, Morgan manages to cram an awful lot
of work into it. Morgan examines the work of a group of very important
Communist Party historians and some others who were outside the formal group.
Like many of their generation, these intellectuals were drawn to left-wing
politics in the early part of the twentieth century.
The historians and significant intellectuals that occupied
the British Communist Party Historians Group (CPHG) in the 1940 and 1950s
played an important and dare I say leading role in the study of British and
World history throughout the 20th century. It is significant that in London's
National Portrait Gallery there used to hang a painting which has been
described as "of seven people arranged on either side of a low table in a
book-lined study". They were historians, members of the editorial board of
the journal Past & Present, which arose from the British Communist Party's
Historians' Group".
Eric Hobsbawm, Edward and Dorothy Thompson, Christopher
Hill, Victor Kiernan, George Rude, Raphael Samuel and Rodney Hilton to name a
few were all moulded by the early strategic experiences of the 20th century,
the depression of the 1930s, the Second World War and of course the Russian
revolution. "For some, the group was, if not exactly a way of life, then
at least a small cause, as well as a minor way of structuring leisure. For most
it was also friendship," said Eric
Hobsbawm.
Again given the brevity of the book Morgan attempts to
examine the work of people like Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, Margot
Heinemann, Arnold Kettle, Raymond Williams, E P Thompson, and Victor Kiernan.
As Morgan correctly points out, there were of course not
just "Communist intellectuals", in the CP writing about history, a
significant number of workers were drawn into their circle.
Morgan does not dwell too much on the output of the
historians on their chosen historical field but their attitude to the use of
literature as a way of understanding the past. In some ways, the use of
literature to help explain complicated historical events was groundbreaking. However,
even today, there is a hostility amongst many in academia to the use of literature
to understand history or historical events.
The historian who perhaps was most open to the idea of using
poetry, literature etc. to understand the past was Christopher Hill. Certainly
in later life Hill made use of varied literary forms of poetry, fiction, plays,
sermons, diaries, and letters. Also in later life Hill started to use the genre
of "history from below" adopted by the Communist Party. While this
type of historical study does retain some uses, I am inclined to agree with Ann
Talbot's evaluation of this type of historical enquiry when she wrote: "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 Torr.[1]
There is a positive side to this type of history that
introduces to the wider working class figures from history that they would
under normal circumstances not get to meet. The Communist Party Historians
Group (CPHG) wrote about figures such as Milton, Bunyan, Defoe, William Blake,
Shelley and William Morris. A modern working class will not be able to make a
revolution without a study of these figures and others. It must also learn
about previous struggles such as the Peasants' Revolt, groups such as the Levellers
and Diggers of the English revolution. It must have an intimate knowledge of its
revolutionary figures such as the Digger Gerrard Winstanley and the Leveller
pamphleteers.
Morgan also mentions "popular dreams and myths of a
Utopian past" which are also important in helping the working class to
understand that it is a revolutionary class.
Hill's work is important in that it sought under tremendous difficulties
to answer important questions such as why were the radicals such as the
Levellers etc. were defeated. Hill was one of the few historians who understood
the difficulty these revolutionaries faced when mounting a revolution as Hill
says "I think it is right to say that the revolution was not planned. One
of the things that should be made more of is that no one in England in the
1640s knew they were taking part in a revolution. American and French
revolutionaries could look back to England, the Russian revolutionaries had an
ideology of revolution based on English and French experience, but no one in
England could draw on such experiences. The very word revolution emerges in its
modern sense in the 1640s. So that the English revolutionaries are fumbling all
the time, they have not got a Rousseau or a Marx to guide them. The examples of
the Netherlands and the French Huguenots were discussed in the 17th century as
religious or nationalist revolts. The only text they could look to was the bible,
but of course, the bible says such different things that you can get any theory
out of it so that it proved unsatisfactory. One of my arguments in my new book
is that it was the experience of its uselessness as an agreed guide to action
in the 1640s and 1650s that led to its dethroning from its position of absolute
authority. That was a major problem for the English revolutionaries; they had
no theory to start from.[2]
My difference with Morgan is that while a study of these figures
is important, that does not mean that there is an unbroken thread of radical
struggle that workers can tap into. The working class must take a critical
approach to all historical phenomena. This radicalism does not replace the need
for a conscious revolutionary party along the lines of the Bolsheviks to take
power.
One question Morgan does not ask is how to characterise
these historians. Ann Talbot asks of
Hill but could be said of other CP historians "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 has to be said that this is a complex question".
Despite many caveats, this is an important little book, and
it is hoped many workers interested in the past put it into their library.
[1] "These the times ...
this the man": an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
[2] John Rees and Lee
Humber-The good old cause an interview with Christopher Hill- From
International Socialism 2 : 56, Autumn 1992, pp. 125–34.Transcribed by
Christian Høgsbjerg.
