Letter to the Financial Times

Dear Sir,

On November 23, 2021, your newspaper published an article entitled “Radiohead’s interactive ‘exhibition’ pushes music and games into new territory” by Tom Faber[1]

Faber’s article carried a quote from the rock band Radiohead lead singer Thom Yorke. Yorke said “ “When we first started thinking about it, we intended to build a physical exhibition in a central London location, on a Play Station blog. It was going to be a huge red construction made by welding shipping containers together, constructed so that it looked as if a brutalist spacecraft had crash-landed into the classical architecture of the Victoria & Albert Museum in Kensington. This astounding steel carapace would be inserted into the urban fabric of London like an ice pick into Trotsky. Jutting up into the grey English sky. And then – being constructed from shipping containers – we could ship it around the world… New York, Tokyo, Paris.

Yorke’s flippant and ignorant comment regarding the assassination of the Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky is bad enough, but as Faber did not comment or condemn it, I can assume that he and the Financial Times celebrate the Stalinist murder of Leon Trotsky.

The assassination of Leon Trotsky was the culmination of savage repression between 1936 and 1940 that targeted the socialist working class and intelligentsia. Within the Soviet Union, Stalin’s decision to eradicate socialist opposition to his regime resulted in approximately one million executions. The victims included the Trotskyist opposition and all those who had played a significant role in the October Revolution and the early years of the Soviet Republic. The Stalinist terror claimed the lives of major Soviet writers, scientists, and artists.

I demand you retract the article and issue an apology. I will, however, not hold my breath. Nor will I wait for you to publish this letter in your newspaper. This letter will be published on my website-atrumpetofsedition.org.

---

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/eb18c19a-d568-4436-991c-d4e302a3cdc0

More Years for the Locust: the Origins of the SWP Paperback – June 16. 2012 by Jim Higgins (Author), John Game (Foreword), Phil Evans (Drawings)

 

"Style is the Man",

A proverbial saying, early 20th century, meaning that one's chosen style reflects one's essential characteristics; earlier in Latin, and the French naturalist Buffon (1707–88) in the form, 'Style is the man himself.'

"Everyone has the right to be stupid on occasion, but Comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege".

Leon Trotsky

At the end of the film The Shawshank Redemption,[1] Andy Dufresne escapes from the prison in the night by crawling through the sewer pipe and escaping into a nearby river. Reviewing this book has a similar feel to it.

The author of this book Jim Higgins (1930-2002), began his political life as a member of the British Communist Party. He left in 1956 after reading Nikita Khrushchev's 'Secret Speech', which denounced the crimes of Stalin. Nothing is mentioned in this book about Higgin's life in the Stalinist Communist Party.

It is true that Higgins read "voraciously" the writings of Leon Trotsky but appears to have learnt nothing from then accept he did not agree with orthodox Marxism. Therefore it is a little strange that he joined Gerry Healy's The Club that became the Socialist Labour League and later the Workers Revolutionary Party. The Club played an important role in major industrial struggles and within the Labour Party, especially the movement in opposition to the development of the H-Bomb. In 1958, the youth paper Keep Left was relaunched monthly, and members were sent into the Labour Party's youth movement, the Young Socialists. Higgins almost immediately formed a faction against the leadership.

Although Higgin's book purports to be a history of the Socialist Workers Party(SWP), he spends an inordinate amount of time and space attacking the SLL and Healy, which makes me believe that Higgin's joined the wrong party by mistake. It seems pretty clear he was never a Trotskyist and retained much of his Stalinist baggage acquired during his membership of the Communist Party.

Higgins was thrown out of the SLL and joined Cliff's Socialist Review Group (founded in 1950). This group would later turn into the International Socialists, which later became the Socialist Workers Party. Cliff's Socialist Review came out of a factional struggle within the RCP. Before Cliff left the RCP, he had been a supporter of Max Shachtman's state-capitalist thesis. [2] Cliff was to build his tendency by recruiting from amongst disaffected RCP members based on their agreement with Cliff's revisionism of Marxism.

According to a Socialist Equality Party(SEP) perspective document, "Cliff was to argue that the Stalinist dictatorship was only the most finished expression of a new stage in the evolution of world capitalism, which was partially expressed by Labour's post-war nationalisations and those conducted by the newly independent colonial regimes. He placed the intelligentsia alongside the Stalinist bureaucracy as the midwife of yet another variety of state capitalism. The industrial working class had "played no role whatsoever" in the Chinese revolution, while in Cuba, "middle-class intellectuals filled the whole arena of struggle". From this, Cliff declared that Trotsky's Theory of Permanent Revolution was wrong because, "While the conservative, cowardly nature of a late-developing bourgeoisie (Trotsky's first point) is an absolute law, the revolutionary character of the young working-class is neither absolute nor inevitable… Once the constantly revolutionary nature of the working class, the central pillar of Trotsky's theory, becomes suspect, the whole structure falls to pieces."[3]

Higgins completely agreed with Cliff's attack on Trotsky's work. In an article written in 1963, Higgin's, agreed with his mentor and leader Cliff, saying, " The demise of British Trotskyism (and it died sometime before the corpse was formally interred) cannot be blamed only on its tactical inadequacies. However, it is true that with a more realistic appraisal of the world, they could have continued for much longer. But like Trotsky, they founded their attitude on an erroneous analysis of reformism and imperialism with a fundamental misappraisal of Stalinism. The characterisation of Russia as a counter-revolutionary abortion hid the fact of the profoundly capitalist nature of the Russian economy, its dynamism and its ability to survive. Far from being a shallow-rooted caste, the bureaucracy was, and is, an integral part of the Russian body politic".[4]

"Style is the man."

When I say "Style is the man", I do not mean Higgins wore bad clothes, which he did, but this book is not a serious history of the origins of the SWP or the early days of British Trotskyism. What passes for analysis from Higgins would not look out of place in the Beano or Dandy children's magazines.

Given the seriousness of his subject matter, Higgin's writes more like a  comedian or raconteur than he does a serious historian or political activist. He is, after all, dealing with historical issues in which millions of people lost their lives due to the betrayals of Stalinism and Social Democracy. Books like these should have a certain amount of gravitas.

To conclude, this book was written 20 years after Higgins had left serious political activity and is written to settle a few old scores rather than contribute to understanding the history of British Trotskyism. You would have thought that his editor at Unkant publishers would have had a word with him. His so-called history is unserious, lacking in any academic rigour and is the work of a "mock historian". Although talking about another ex Stalinist E.P.Thompson, this quote from Healy is apt for Higgins "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". His book is a product of that training.

 

Endnotes

1.   Higgin's papers are left with Senate House Library, University of London. They are well worth a look because they contain a goldmine of pamphlets etc., about the history of the Fourth International.

2.   The Heritage We Defend (30th Anniv. Edition): A Contribution to the history of the Fourth International-The work reviews the political and theoretical disputes inside the Fourth International, the international Marxist movement founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938. It is a devastating reply to former WRP General Secretary Michael Banda's document "27 Reasons why the International Committee Should be Buried Forthwith and the Fourth International Built." Contains a detailed and objective assessment of the political contribution and evolution of James P. Cannon, Trotsky's most important co-thinker in the US, as well as the evolution of the US Socialist Workers Party.The 2018 edition of the foundational 1988 work by David North, chairman of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site, contains a new preface, photo section, and an extensive glossary.

3.   Higgin's writings for what they are worth can be accessed here. https://www.marxists.org/archive/higgins/index.htm

4.   The SLL's Labour Review - https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/lr/

 

 

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shawshank_Redemption

[2]https://www.marxists.org/archive/shachtma/1947/05/debate.html

[3] https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/foundations-uk/16.html 

[4] Ten Years for the Locust-British Trotskyism 1938–1948-https://www.marxists.org/archive/higgins/1963/xx/10years.htm

Book launch of Vadim Rogovin’s Was There an Alternative?

Review: Paul Flewers and John McIlroy (editors) 1956: John Saville, EP Thompson and The Reasoner Merlin Press, 2016, pp450, £20.

"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". Gerry Healy

"I do not see class as a 'structure', nor even as a 'category', but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships. The notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship. And class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs.  E. P. Thompson

 E.P. Thompson had been dead for two decades and John Saville for 12 years. It is perhaps a little strange that in 2016 a book came out that republished for the first time three copies of the obscure The Reasoner journal that Saville and Thompson established during their split from the British Communist Party in 1956.

The essays in this book by McIlroy and Flewers largely provide Thompson and Saville with a Psuedo left cover for their anti-Marxist positions. This review will show that while breaking organisationally from the Communist Party, Thompson and Saville never broke from many of the ideological positions held during their time in the Communist Party, one of which was their hostility to Trotskyism.

In 1956 sections of the Stalinist bureaucracy turned on its commander in chief and partner in crime, Joseph Stalin. Kruschev's "secret speech" was hardly secret and was not so much a political break with Stalinism but a mechanism to deal with the raging political and economic crisis that gripped world Stalinism.

Khrushchev's speech was typical of a man implicated in all the major crimes committed by the Stalinist bureaucracy. One subject all the Stalinist bureaucrats agreed on was the correctness of the struggle against Leon Trotsky, the only leading Bolshevik not to have been rehabilitated by the Stalinists. Khrushchev said, "We must affirm that the party fought a serious fight against the Trotskyists, rightists and bourgeois nationalists and that it disarmed all the enemies of Leninism ideologically. The ideological fight was carried on successfully ... Here, Stalin played a positive role.[1]"

Khrushchev had a very limited understanding of the social forces he was inadvertently unleashing with his speech. Far from preventing revolution, he opened the floodgates. His response was the same as Stalin before him: to unleash terror on the working class worldwide.

Trotskyists inside Gerry Heally's Socialist Labour League welcomed the crisis inside the Soviet Communist Party. Healy sought to clarify the issues involved in the crisis of world Stalinism. However, Pseudo Left groups such as the British Socialist Workers Party muddied the water and argued that despite Khrushchev's Speech, there was "a process of self-reform" going on under pressure from the working class Stalinism would move in a revolutionary direction.

Thompson got a warm reception from the British SWP, who broke from the Fourth International in the early 1940s. The SWP, from its inception until the present day, has given 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.[2] "

It is perhaps an understatement to say that the speech caused mayhem in the British Communist Party. It lost over 9000 members, most of its important intellectuals, and nearly all its historians inside the Communist Party Historians Group. The leaders of the Communist Party of Great Britain attempted to deal with the crisis by suppressing any opposition occurring inside the party.

Historians John Saville and EP Thompson were among many who refused to bow down to the party line and issued the three magazines published in this book. Saville and Thompson resigned their party membership, saying, "We believe that the self-imposed restrictions upon controversy, the 'guiding' of discussions along approved lines, the actual suppression of sharp criticism - all these have led to a gradual blurring of theoretical clarity, and the encouragement among some communists of attitudes akin to intellectual cynicism when it has been easier to allow this or that false proposition to go by than to embark upon the tedious and frustrating business of engaging with bureaucratic editorial habits and general theoretical inertia" (p137).

While the Reasoner was critical of Stalin and some of his crimes, it said nothing about the persecution and murder of hundreds of thousands of left oppositions, including the state murder of most leading Bolsheviks, including Leon Trotsky. They stayed silent on the Show Trials and purges carried out by the Stalinist bureaucracy.[3]

Perhaps the worst aspect of this book among many is that it continues the lie that Thompson or, for that matter, Saville were Marxists. After leaving the party, Thompson cherry-picked which bits of Marxism he would use while rejecting orthodox Marxism. His criticism of Stalinism was not from an orthodox Marxist position; instead, he advocated a form of "socialist humanism".

After closing down The Reasoner, 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. It also attracted a varied group of people who had left the Fourth International and members of the Labour Party who wrote articles for the magazine. Most ex Stalinists from the Communist Party dropped out of politics altogether or found an easy life within the Labour Party and trade union apparatus.

Thompson was avowedly hostile to an international revolutionary perspective and sought to imbue his new publication with an "English Marxist" tradition.  Thompson rejected orthodox Marxism, and in its place, he preached a form of utopian socialism entitled socialist humanism. To protect his so-called Marxist credentials, he launched "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". Thompson held the belief that classical Marxism was sectarian. He believed that this "sectarianism" and "purism" dated way before the Russian Revolution.

While Thompson and Saville shared hatred of early classical Marxism, they reserved their most vitriolic hatred for the Trotskyist's inside the SLL. It must be said that the editors of this book share Thompson's attitude towards the Trotskyists inside the Socialist Labour League.                 

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. According to Stan Newens," When the April 1957 Communist Party Congress took place in Hammersmith Town Hall, many of them, including Gerry Healy himself, were outside selling journals and lobbying delegates."[4] 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.

Marxists inside the SLL were hostile to Thompson's politics but were open to debate. Healy was mindful of the sharp polemics that Thompson had been involved in and told Thompson that "The New left Must Look to the Working Class"[5].

While cordial in tone, 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 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 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."[6]

During the early years of Thompson's magazine, the Reasoner and later the New Reasoner, and later still the New Left Review, it is clear that he had no intention of debating 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 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.

This book is useful to future generations of revolutionaries only because it is an example of how not to build a revolutionary movement. It is important to study the history of the workers' movement both in Britain and internationally. Students and workers could do no worse than a systematic study of David North's The Heritage We Defend[7].

Postscript.

In 2014 several capitalist newspapers reported that MI5 had been spying on many members of the British Communist Party starting in the early 1930s. MI5 systematically followed, broke into their house and stole documents of a significant number of academic members of the Communist Party. MI5 even went so far as to plant large numbers of agents inside the Communist Party. One agent, Olga Gray, succeeded in becoming secretary to Harry Pollitt, Secretary-General of the Communist Party of Great Britain.[8] How much disruption was caused by these agents is a moot point. Madeline Davis seems to think not much. In her article, Edward Thompson, MI5 and the Reasoner controversy: negotiating "Communist principle" in the crisis of 1956, she downplays MI5 involvement in the aftermath of Kruschev's speech. My point is why is none of this mentioned in Flewer's and McIlroy's book.

 

 

 

 [1] Speech to 20th Congress of the C.P.S.U. https://www.marxists.org/archive/khrushchev/1956/02/24-abs.htm

[2] E.P. Thompson: class struggle and historical materialism-https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj2/1993/isj2-061/mcnally.htm

[3] See Vadim Rogovin’s 1937: Stalin’s Year of Terror-https://mehring.com/product/1937-stalins-year-of-terror/

[4] http://isj.org.uk/memories-of-a-seminal-year/

[5] Labour Review October –November 1959 edition,

[6] "The New left Must Look to the Working Class"

[7] The Heritage We Defend (30th Anniv. Edition): A Contribution to the History of the Fourth International-The work reviews the political and theoretical disputes inside the Fourth International, the international Marxist movement founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938. It is a devastating reply to former WRP General Secretary Michael Banda’s document “27 Reasons why the International Committee Should be Buried Forthwith and the Fourth International Built.”Contains a detailed and objective assessment of the political contribution and evolution of James P. Cannon, Trotsky’s most important co-thinker in the US, as well as the evolution of the US Socialist Workers Party.The 2018 edition of the foundational 1988 work by David North, chairman of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site, contains a new preface, photo section, and an extensive glossary.

[8] https://www.mi5.gov.uk/the-soviet-threat-between-the-wars 

What is History, Now? by Helen Carr and Suzannah Lipscomb Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 352pp, £20

 

"Great history is written precisely when the historian's vision is illuminated by insights into the problems of the present."

E.H. Carr, What is History? p. 37

"It used to be said that facts speak for themselves. This is, of course, untrue. The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context."

― Edward Hallett Carr

Facts … are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use – these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants.

E.H. Carr, What is History?

"every sociological definition is at the bottom a historical prognosis."

Leon Trotsky

You can never judge a history book by its cover. But you can judge a book by the blurb on the back cover, especially when the historians praising the book are broadly conservative ones.

While this new collection of articles contain E.H. Carr's original title of his world-famous book, I somehow doubt that he would favour the type of gender, racial or culturally-based historiography presented in this book.

The central theme of Carr's book was how to connect the writing of history with contemporary social, political and economic problems. As the historian, R.G. Collingwood, said: "the historian must re-enact in thought what has gone on in the mind of his dramatis personae."[1]

While the introduction to this new collection of essays is adequate, it leaves out the context and point of Carr's book, which was to answer an attack on him by the writer and philosopher Isaiah Berlin.[2] As Ann Talbot writes out, "The book was in large measure a reply to Berlin's essay Historical Inevitability, in which he had criticised those who believed in the "vast impersonal forces" of history rather than giving priority to the role of the individual and the accidental. (Berlin 1997) Berlin maintained that those who regarded history as a determined causal chain, in the manner of Hegel or Marx, denied the role of free will and the individual responsibility of history's tyrants for the crimes they committed. Both Carr and Berlin wrote with sparkling wit.

What was at issue was Britain's attitude to the Soviet Union and its place in a putative nuclear war. The counterfactuals that Carr had in mind were those that suggested that some other outcome had been possible in Russia, that the 1917 Revolution was not inevitable, that the Bolsheviks might not have come to power and that instead, the Provisional Government might have succeeded in maintaining its grip on events and managed to establish a parliamentary system. An ideological dispute of this kind is so very un-British that there is not even a satisfactory English word for it, so I will use the German word. What we have here is a very British Historikerstreit.

It was a dispute conducted in the most gentlemanly, oblique and mediated of terms, and both sides were more likely to appeal to the commonsense of the average Times reader than high theory, but a Historikerstreit it was nonetheless. The national peculiarities of the time and class should not lead us to suppose that theoretical questions were not involved any more than we should suppose that political questions were not involved simply because they remained, for the most part, unstated".[3]This kind of dispute, however gentlemanly, is a very rare occurrence in today's heavily sanitised academic world.

Despite being called a diverse set of essayists, what these historians write about has a common thread: they reflect a modern-day preoccupation with gender, race, and sexuality. Titles such as "Can and should we queer the past?", "How can we write the history of empire?" and "Can we recover the lost lives of women?" and a debate over the removal of statues set the tone for the rest of the book.

If the debate over removing a few reactionary statues were all there was, then that would be fine. The middle-class layer behind the removal of revolutionary figures has a far more right-wing and sinister agenda. In some cases, the demand and removal of progressive and revolutionary figures such as Abraham Lincoln are deeply reactionary and troubling.

There is nothing progressive in the destruction of statues and monuments that memorialise the American Revolution and the Civil War leaders such as Lincoln. As Leon Trotsky wrote, "for argument's sake, let us grant that all previous revolutionary history and, if you please, all history, in general, is nothing but a chain of mistakes. But what to do about present-day reality? What about the colossal army of permanently unemployed, the pauperised farmers, the general decline of economic levels, the approaching war? The sceptical wiseacres promise us that sometime in the future, they will catalogue all the banana peels on which the great revolutionary movements of the past have slipped. But will these gentlemen tell us what to do today, right now"?[4]

As Trotsky said, the study of history is important to make sense of the world. Although Carr was not a Marxist historian, he knew enough about Marx to know that people do not make history as they please. According to Marx, "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under the circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionising themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language".[5]

The first chapter by Peter Frankopan titled Why global history matters while not breaking any new ground is hard not to disagree with. Alex Von Tunzelmann's chapter is a little more contentious, examining history at the movies. I am afraid I have to disagree with Katrina Gulliver[6] when she says, "Tunzelmann takes the optimistic view that even inaccurate history might pique people's interest and lead them to engage with more meaningful sources".Bad history is what it is and should be opposed in both movies and academia.

It should be said upfront that I love historical movies. It would be hard to find a person that does not. It must also be said that most historical movies are simply misleading, lazy and, in many cases, an outright and deliberate falsification of history. Many historical dramas today are made by a  self-obsessed middle-class layer who, instead of wanting to change the social conditions for the bulk of the population, want to change the historical facts to suit their ideological prejudices. The result, in many cases, is dreadful movies that make them a pile of money.

One film mentioned by Tunzelmann is James Cameron's Titanic. By any stretch of the imagination, this is an extremely bad film. Titanic made close to one billion dollars and was lauded as a great film. As David Walsh wrote, "The response to Titanic is so great and so out of proportion to the quality of the film itself that one is forced to view its success as a social phenomenon worthy of analysis. This is not simply a film—it is virtually a cause. Its admirers defend it with fervour and admit no challenges and no criticisms—it is not simply a 'good' film or a 'wonderful' film. It must be acknowledged as 'the greatest film of all time.'[7]

It is hard to know where to start with Justin Bengry's essay, Can and should we queer the past?. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, there is either bad history or good history but no queer history. If only Bengry were talking about the study of homosexuality through the ages, this would be a legitimate field of study, but unfortunately, there is an agenda here. The promotion of so-called gender, race and sexuality is being pushed out not by the working class but by a self-obsessed section of the middle class. This is not about social equality or democratic rights. It is about money and power.

This modern-day campaign for want of a better word has nothing to do with left-wing politics and certainly has nothing to do with Marxism. It is the product of decades of ideological and political reaction. It has more to do with the politics of envy than it does with socialism.

Helen Carr's piece on the history of emotions promotes the "Cultural Turn" genre. Carr's use of this genre has more in common with writer and historian Stuart Hall than with her great grandfather. As Paul Bond perceptively writes in his obituary of Hall," Stuart Hall, who died in London February 10 at the age of 82, was the academic figure most closely identified with the growth of Cultural Studies in British universities. His obituaries have been fulsome. Cultural Studies originated as part of an attack on revolutionary Marxism, directed above all against its contemporary expression, Trotskyism. The academic field sought to shift the focus of social criticism away from class and onto other social formations, thus promoting the development of identity politics. Its establishment, in the final analysis, was a hostile response to the gains made by the Trotskyist movement in Britain from the 1950s onwards.[8]

Another genre covered in the book is 'history from below' –popularised by E. P Thompson and other leading historians in the Communist Party Historians Group. Lucien Febvre originally used the phrase in 1932, 'Histoire vue d'en bas et non d'en haut' roughly translated by Google as 'history seen from below and not from above. Perhaps the most famous book produced by this genre was E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. Despite containing some valuable insights, Thompson saw the development of the English working class from a purely nationalist perspective.

He also played down the deeply right-wing nature of the History from Below genre. As Ann Talbot writes, "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".[9]

When there are many essays in a book, there is usually a conclusion where the editors usually sum up what has been written by all the essayists. For some reason, this has not been done by these editors. Maybe there is confusion over what the hell to do with a rather large number of very conservative pieces of history.

So what is the general reader to make of this book. It is clear that it is a very conservative piece of work and that the essayists were carefully chosen to put forward complacent and largely reactionary historiography. If this is Edward Hallett Carr's legacy, I am not sure he would be too happy about it. Perhaps we should leave the last word to the great historian "the facts of history never come to us "pure", since they do not and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder. It follows that when we take up a work of history, our first concern should not be with the facts which it contains but with the historian who wrote it."

  

---

[1] What is History? (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 23 [back]

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_Berlin

[3] Chance and Necessity in History: E.H. Carr and Leon Trotsky Compared

Author(s): Ann Talbot: Historical Social Research , 2009, Vol. 34, No. 2

[4] Once Again on the “Crisis of Marxism” https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/03/marxism.htm

[5] The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx 1852- https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm

[6] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/don-t-ask-a-historian-what-history-is

[7] Titanic as a social phenomenon.www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/11/29/phen-n29.html

[8] Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014): A political career dedicated to opposing Marxism-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/03/05/hall-m05.html

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

The Making of Oliver Cromwell: A Conservative Retreat from Historical Truth

 Ronald Hutton’s The Making of Oliver Cromwell is the first part of a trilogy that explores a field already crowded with studies of the man who led England’s seventeenth-century bourgeois revolution. Hutton acknowledges this saturation. Since 1990, five detailed academic biographies and many popular accounts have been published. Notably, an experienced historian feels compelled, in the opening pages, to defend the need for yet another biography of Cromwell. This is not because of Cromwell’s endless complexity, but because traditional historiography has already explored the revolutionary aspects of the English Revolution extensively and offers limited new insights.

Hutton has produced a book that is technically accomplished, exhaustively researched in the secondary literature, and almost entirely without insight into why Cromwell mattered. This is the core of the issue. Hutton’s Cromwell is a figure stripped of historical necessity, severed from the class forces that produced him, and rendered intelligible only as a psychological curiosity or a military technician. The result is a biography that is not merely incomplete but fundamentally evasive a retreat from historical truth.

The Wrong Historian for the Right Subject

Hutton is a prolific historian of early modern England, but not one whose work has ever seriously engaged the political, social, or class dynamics of the 1640s. His reputation rests on studies of the Royalist war effort, the ritual year, paganism, and witchcraft subjects interesting in themselves, but far removed from the structural forces that produced Cromwell. This distance is not incidental. It shapes the book’s entire method.

Hutton views Cromwell primarily through his personal traits, psychology, and military skills. He sidesteps aspects like class, ideology, or social change, and is not familiar with revolutionary historiography. Consequently, he creates a biography of Cromwell that effectively depicts someone else- someone who never led a revolution, faced dual power struggles, or managed the tensions between a bourgeois leadership and a plebeian army. This isn't just about emphasising different details; it's a fundamentally different approach. Hutton’s portrayal of Cromwell doesn’t reflect who he truly was.

A Military Biography Disguised as a Study of Formation

The title suggests a focus on developing a revolutionary leader. However, as your document highlights, Hutton's account is mainly a military narrative that traces Cromwell’s progression from an obscure Huntingdonshire gentleman to England’s most formidable cavalry commander. The issue isn't the legitimacy of military history itself, but Hutton’s portrayal of Cromwell’s rise; he presents it more as a psychological phenomenon than a political development.

He consistently downplays Cromwell’s accomplishments, attributing them to luck, while claiming he takes credit for success. Describing Cromwell as “about 50 per cent saint and about 50 per cent serpent' sounds insightful but offers no real explanation. These characterisations simplify Cromwell’s complex nature, treating his contradictions as personal flaws rather than recognising their roots in his role as a bourgeois revolutionary leader reliant on a plebeian army he did not entirely trust.

The key question of how a man with no military background became the greatest general of his time is raised but not answered. Hutton admits that war radicalised Cromwell, but he fails to clarify how or why. The explanation is absent because the categories required to understand it class, ideology, dual power have been deliberately omitted beforehand.

The exclusion of Christopher Hill’s 'God’s Englishman' is surprising. Hill’s insights into Cromwell’s political and religious evolution are unparalleled, yet Hutton omits reference to it. This isn't just a scholarly oversight but a deliberate methodological choice. Hill’s work defies integration into a framework that dismisses the revolution's social dimensions.

The Levellers: The Omission That Condemns the Book

Hutton’s book notably omits the Levellers, leaving it incomplete and evasive. By ignoring this key element, it sidesteps the core conflict of the revolution’s final phase: the internal clash within Parliament between the Independent aristocrats and the common soldiers of the New Model Army. As one might say, "A book on Cromwell’s creation that leaves out the Levellers effectively chooses not to address the revolution’s central drama."

The Levellers were more than a fringe group; they expressed the political perspective of a faction within the army. Their demands, such as expanded voting rights, legal equality, and religious toleration, signified the most radical revolutionary stance. Overlooking them equates to dismissing the revolution itself. The Diggers are also often misunderstood. Hutton characterises them as a “junto,” relying on John Adamson’s elite-faction viewpoint. This is not genuine analysis; it displaces social conflict with elite strategies. Additionally, it ignores the interests of yeomen, small producers, and urban artisans, whom the New Model Army aimed to represent. This is a significant flaw, not a minor oversight.

Dual Power: The Category Revisionism Cannot Admit

To understand Cromwell is to understand dual power, the concept English revisionists have spent forty years trying to write out of the story. Trotsky’s analysis, drawn from the Russian Revolution but explicitly applied to the English case, remains the most penetrating account of the revolution’s structure.

The first duality involves the Crown versus a bourgeois Parliament supported by the City of London. The second, more distinct duality, is between the Presbyterian Parliament and the Independents-led New Model Army, organised through its own council of agitators. This second duality underpins Pride’s Purge, the King's trial, and the subsequent dictatorship. Cromwell’s skill was in navigating this complex power structure: he suppressed the Levellers when their demands threatened his settlement, yet relied on their popular energy to defeat the King and Presbyterians. Without recognising this duality, a biography cannot fully explain Cromwell; it can only describe him.

Revisionism as Ideology

Hutton’s omissions are deliberate, rooted in a revisionist historiography that gained popularity in the 1970s and 1980s. This perspective sought to challenge both the Whig and Marxist traditions by replacing social explanations with concepts of contingency, replacing class conflict with factional politics, and viewing revolutions as accidents. This focus on contingency, faction, and high politics largely strips away class content. As a product of this school, Hutton’s book confidently omits references to Hill, Manning, or Trotsky, not as a scholarly oversight but as a deliberate choice. Revisionism isn't neutral; it's ideological. It aims to depict the English Revolution as a mere civil war lacking social roots, a conflict without class struggle, and a crisis with no revolutionary potential. This perspective shapes how students and readers view history as a series of accidents rather than an arena of conflict.

In opposition to Hutton’s psychological reductionism, Plekhanov’s classic analysis of individuals in history provides the essential correction. Great figures are not mere accidents but arise from social conditions that demand someone to fulfil a specific historical role. Had Cromwell not existed, another individual from the same social strata- people from the godly, property-owning gentry with sectarian ties- would have stepped into a similar role. The revolution would still have needed to address the fundamental issue. Hutton misses this because he excludes the categories that would make this understanding clear.

Hutton’s narrative is well-crafted, demonstrating a strong command of detail and a competent reconstruction of battles and campaigns. It provides a clear, chronological military account for those interested. However, as an explanation of how an obscure man became the central figure in the first significant bourgeois revolution in European history, the book falls short. It does so by dismissing essential categories such as class, dual power, and ideological radicalisation needed to answer that question. There are two volumes left. Based on this one, there is little reason to expect a departure from the conservative historiographical stance that has spent decades separating Cromwell from the revolution that shaped him.

The issue extends beyond academia; it is inherently political. Depoliticising Cromwell equates to depoliticising the revolution, which in turn leads to a dehistorized view of history. This stance leaves a population unable to identify the driving forces behind their world. Hutton’s book is more than a flawed biography; it reflects a wider ideological retreat that shuns historical truth, class analysis, and the revolutionary tradition essential to understanding the modern world.

The English Revolution was the first great bourgeois revolution. It produced the modern state. It produced the conditions for capitalist development. It produced the political vocabulary of rights, representation, and sovereignty. And it produced, in the Levellers and Diggers, the first modern expressions of radical democracy and agrarian communism. To write Cromwell without this context is to write Cromwell out of history.

A Biography Without a Revolution

Hutton’s The Making of Oliver Cromwell offers a well-crafted military and political account. However, it does not serve as a biography of Cromwell as a revolutionary leader. Instead, it portrays Cromwell as a figure shaped by accidents, contingencies, and personal contradictions, seemingly detached from the social forces that influenced him. Hutton’s work “fails, because it has ruled out in advance the categories of analysis: class, dual power, the social content of religious radicalism, without which that question cannot be answered." This statement is true and definitive. Ultimately, Hutton’s biography omits the revolution, and without a revolution, it cannot fully explain the man who led one.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary and Contemporary Sources

• The Letters, Writings, and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. (Essential for Cromwell’s own political and religious vocabulary; widely used across Cromwell scholarship.)
• The Discovery of D’Ewes’s Long Parliament Diary. (Key contemporary parliamentary source.)

Classic Biographies and Foundational Works

• Gardiner, S.R. Cromwell’s Place in History (1897).
• Gardiner, S.R. Oliver Cromwell (1901).
• Firth, C.H. Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans (1900). (Still indispensable for narrative structure and early scholarly framing.)

Mid‑20th‑Century Studies

• Buchan, J. Oliver Cromwell (1934).
• Wedgwood, C.V. Oliver Cromwell (1939).
• Paul, R.S. The Lord Protector (1955).
• Young, P. Oliver Cromwell (1962).
• Gillingham, J. Cromwell: Portrait of a Soldier (1976). (These works shaped the pre‑revisionist consensus and remain valuable for narrative and military analysis.)

Marxist and Social-Historical Scholarship

• Hill, Christopher. God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (1970). (The most important Marxist study of Cromwell’s political and religious development; conspicuously absent from Hutton’s book.)
• Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down (1972). (Definitive account of radical sects, Levellers, Diggers, and plebeian politics.)
• Manning, Brian. The English People and the English Revolution (1976).
• Manning, Brian. The Far Left in the English Revolution (1971).
• Morton, A.L. The English Revolution (1949).
• Trotsky, Leon. The History of the Russian Revolution (1932), esp. Vol. 1, ch. on dual power. (Trotsky’s analysis is explicitly applicable to the English case and central to your review’s argument.)
• Plekhanov, Georgi. The Role of the Individual in History (1898). (Essential theoretical counterpoint to Hutton’s psychological reductionism.)

Revisionist Historiography (1970s–1990s)

• Russell, Conrad. The Causes of the English Civil War (1990).
• Russell, Conrad. Parliamentary History and the English Civil War (1983).
• Sharpe, Kevin. The Personal Rule of Charles I (1992).
• Adamson, John. The Noble Revolt (2007). (Adamson’s “junto” framework is directly relevant to Hutton’s interpretive choices.)
• Kishlansky, Mark. A Monarchy Transformed (1996). (Revisionist synthesis influential in curriculum debates.)

Post‑Revisionist and Recent Scholarship

• Morrill, John (ed.). Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (1990). (Includes major essays by Adamson, Woolrych, Stevenson, Davis, Sommerville, and Morrill himself.)
• Gaunt, Peter. Oliver Cromwell (1996).
• Coward, Barry. Oliver Cromwell (1991).
• Smith, D.L. Oliver Cromwell: Politics and Religion in the English Revolution (1991). (Useful for students; reproduces extracts from other historians.)
• Gaunt, Peter (ed.). Cromwell 400 (1999). (Quartercentenary collection of papers.)

Works on Radical Movements

• Wolfe, Don. Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution (1944).
• Rees, John. The Leveller Revolution (2016).
• Sabine, John. The Diggers and the English Revolution (1975).
• Hill, Christopher. The Diggers (1975).
• Foxley, Rachel. The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution (2013).

General Histories of the English Revolution

• Woolrych, Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660 (2002).
• Hutton, Ronald. The British Republic 1649–1660 (2000).
• Gentles, Ian. The New Model Army (1992).
• Elliott, J.H. Revolution and Continuity in Early Modern Europe (1978).

Biographical and Encyclopaedic Sources

• Morrill, John S. “Oliver Cromwell.” Encyclopaedia Britannica (2026). (Provides a mainstream biographical overview.)
• Collins, Jacquelin. “Oliver Cromwell.” EBSCO Research Starters (2024). (Useful for contemporary summaries of Cromwell’s political and military significance.)

Curriculum, Ideology, and Historiography

• Carr, E.H. What Is History? (1961). (Foundational for the argument that one must “study the historian before the facts.”)
• Samuel, Raphael. Theatres of Memory (1994). (On the politics of historical memory and curriculum.)
• Ferguson, Niall. Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003). (Relevant to the review’s discussion of conservative rehabilitation of imperial figures.)