The World Turned Upside Down-Christopher Hill Conference

 

The English Bourgeoisie Did Not Always Love its Monarchy.

 "A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre; Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police spies.

The communist Manifesto-Karl Marx

"The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history's clock, it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendour never to be seen again."

Barbara W. Tuchman-August 1914

"if the King were in the body of the enemy, he would as soon discharge his pistol upon him as upon any private man," and if they did not think likewise, they ought not to enlist under him."

Oliver Cromwell

"The attempt to minimise or eradicate the history of republicanism in England in the seventeenth century is one of the British establishment's most important and longest-running projects. Unlike in the United States and France, where the revolutions of 1776 and 1789 have become a celebrated part of the national story, the English Revolution is systematically marginalised in the British education system and public life."

Georgi Plekhanov

God save the Queen, She's not a human being, and There's no future And England's dreaming

God Save the Queen-Sex Pistols

Why was the life of Elizabeth II the cause of so much love and adoration? It begs the question, what exactly was her contribution to humanity? After all, she lived a long and privileged life. She was a billionaire with more money than most people can dream of and belonged to a family that deeply sympathised with the Nazis. Remember Prince Harry wearing a Nazi uniform. Or the picture in the tabloid press of members of the Royal family giving Nazi salutes.

As for the funeral, as Chris Marsden says, it takes place amidst the spectre of war and revolution.[1] Marsden's excellent article delves into history to expose the absurdity of the whole affair. Speaking of a previous royal funeral, that of  Edward VII, the American historian Barbara W. Tuchman says in the book The Guns of August,  "The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history's clock, it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendour never to be seen again."

Another article on wsws.org examines the bourgeoisie's sudden deep love affair with the royals. Joseph Scalice's scathing article points out that  "Monarchy is an institution of colossal stupidity, a barbaric relic of the feudal past; its persistence is an embarrassment to humanity. Founded on heredity, shored up with inbreeding, intermarriage and claims of divine right, the monarchic principle enshrines inequality as the fundamental and unalterable lot of humanity. It maintains this lot with the force of autocratic power."[2]

Although the English bourgeoisie buried "the ghosts of its republican ancestors long ago", that time was the 17^th century when things were different. Then the  English bourgeoisie killed a king, established a republic and got rid of the house of lords, a tad different from today's fawning over a bunch of crooks, child traffickers and Nazi lovers.

The English bourgeoisie does not like to be reminded of its revolutionary past. As the Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov wrote in his extremely perceptive essay:

"The attempt to minimise or eradicate the history of republicanism in England in the seventeenth century is one of the British establishment's most important and longest-running projects. Unlike in the United States and France, where the revolutions of 1776 and 1789 have become a celebrated part of the national story, the English Revolution is systematically marginalised in the British education system and public life. England passed through her revolutionary storms in the seventeenth century, and there were then two revolutions: the first led, among other things, to the execution of Charles I, while the second ended with an animated banquet and the rise of a new dynasty.

But the English bourgeoisie, in the evaluation of these revolutions, manifests very divergent views: while the first, in its eyes, does not even deserve the name 'revolution' and is simply referred to as 'the great rebellion, the second is given a more euphonious appellation; it is called 'the glorious revolution. The secret of this differentiation in evaluating the two revolutions has already been revealed by Augustin Thierry in his theses about the English revolutions. In the first revolution, the people played an important role, while in the second, the people participated hardly at all. When, however, a people mount the stage of history and begin to decide the destinies of their country according to its power and best understanding, then the higher classes (in this case, the bourgeoisie) get out of humour. Because the people are always 'raw' and, if the revolutionary devil begins to pervade it, also becomes 'coarse', the higher classes have a way of always insisting upon politeness and gentle manners—at least they demand these of the people. This is why the higher classes are always inclined to put upon revolutionary movements if prominently participated in by the people, the stamp of 'rebellions'.[3]

It is not only the English bourgeoisie that would like to see the English revolution buried along with its brief republican past. As Leon Trotsky wrote, many historians have sought to " vulgarise the social drama of the seventeenth century by obscuring the inner struggle of forces with platitudes that are sometimes interesting but always superficial." These historians have not exactly covered themselves in glory over the death of Elizabeth II.

Historian Clive Irving who is not exactly a Marxist called the funeral a 'façade' and said that the Royal Family should 'atone' for slavery. Irving said the Royal Africa Company, founded by Charles II in 1666, "concealed a very evil enterprise which was shipping slaves from Africa to the Caribbean colonies.'Not exactly calling for a Marxist insurrection to replace the Monarchy, but this did not stop the torrent of abuse he received from several sycophantic historians

"Zareer Masani, a historian and author, responded to Irving's comments by saying: 'His comments are pretty old hat because these kinds of comments have been made about the Monarchy for the last decade by Black Lives Matter and those sorts of groups. I don't see anything new. The Empire was overall very positive for most parts of the world. There were mistakes and violence in pockets, but on the whole, it was a benevolent institution which gave most of the world foundations for modern nationhood and economy. I don't think it has anything to apologise for.'

Perhaps the most stupid and crass comment came from one historian who wrote, "'The British crown stand above politics and outside politics, both domestic and international.[4] At last, the Queen has a fitting epitaph.

Working people need to wake up and smell the coffee, the Monarchy is no friend of the working class. In Requiem For a Dream, Hubert Selby Jr writes, "Eventually we all have to accept total responsibility for our actions, everything we have and has not done. I suspect there will never be a requiem for a dream, simply because it will destroy us before we can mourn its passing”. 

 

Notes

Edward VII – King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India (1841-1910)

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[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/09/19/srjc-s19.html

[2] The adulation for Elizabeth II: The capitalist class celebrates the principle of monarchy-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/09/17/pers-s17.html

[3] George Plekhanov-The Bourgeois Revolution-The Political Birth of Capitalism

[4] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11231847/Queens-funeral-Historians-slam-royal-biographers-comments-state-funeral-fa-ade.html

Review-Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris-Hutchinson Heinemann-1st edition (September 1st 2022)

 

"There are ideal series of events which run parallel with the real ones. They rarely coincide. Men and circumstances generally modify the ideal train of events so that it seems imperfect, and its consequences are equally imperfect. Thus with the Reformation, instead of Protestantism came Lutheranism."

The Mystery Of Marie Rogêt" (1842) by Edgar Allan Poe.

"If one man is fated to be killed by another, it would be interesting to trace the gradual convergence of their paths. At the start, they might be miles away from one another, and yet eventually, we are bound to meet. We can't avoid it."

Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate

It is perhaps an understatement to say that Robert Harris is a remarkably versatile and clever writer. He has written numerous books on wide-ranging subjects such as Ancient Rome and The Second World War and a book set 800 years in the future. Titles including 'Fatherland', 'Munich' and 'An Officer and a Spy.

His latest narrative-driven book examines one of the most contentious periods in British, if not world history, The English Revolution. It is well-written and researched.

The book covers Charles I execution and the subsequent pursuit of two leading regicides who signed the king's death warrant. Colonel Will Goffe and Edward Whalley were exiled to America in 1660, where they were welcomed with open arms by many colonists who were Puritans and had supported their political stance against the king. Both men were high-ranking soldiers in the New Model Army, and Whalley was Oliver Cromwell's cousin. Both played an important part in the successful English revolution.

Harris's book treads an already well-trodden path. The last few years alone have seen numerous books on the subject covered in his book.[1]The book appears well researched, but Harris, like many other historians, has found a dearth of information about what Walley and Goffe did in America. So like all good writers, he makes things up and employs a method favoured by the 18^th-century writer, poet and philosopher Novalis, who wrote, "There are ideal series of events which run parallel with the real ones. They rarely coincide. Men and circumstances generally modify the ideal train of events to seem imperfect, and its consequences are equally imperfect."[2]

Regarding historiography, the book is part of a new wave of studies, both fiction and non-fiction, concentrating on different aspects of the Royalist cause in the 17^th century.

Not all historians are fans of narrative-based historical writing. When C V Wedgwood produced her splendid book A King Condemned-The Trial and Execution of Charles Ist, it was criticised by some historians. In the foreword of  the 2011 edition, Clive Holmes said: "Wedgwood's relationship with academic historians was not an easy one, and the immediate reception of this work by the professionals in their flagship journals was cool and even condescending."

While Harris's invention of the character Richard Naylor is legitimate and interesting, one can't help feeling that Harris is trying to persecute the two regicides again. He seems a bit miffed that they escaped the so-called royal justice of Charles II. Further hostility came from the pen of the Guardian newspaper, Andrew Taylor writes, "It's not easy to make Whalley and Goffe sympathetic to a modern sensibility. They were hardcore Puritans who believed that only the elect would go to heaven, that their aggressively righteous ends justified their often ruthless means and that the world would end in 1666."[3]

Just like their modern counterparts, the late 17th  English bourgeoisie would rather forget their revolution of the 1640s; hence The 1660 Act of Oblivion(the title of the book), which was an act of parliament that was supported by Charles II to draw a line under the events of the 1640s and pretend they never happened.

'The wounds of the brutal civil war are still visible on men's bodies": the execution of Charles I in Whitehall, London, 1649. Illustration: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

But it cannot be denied that the killing of the king had, as Ann Talbot recounts, "a profound revolutionary significance entailing a complete break with the feudal past. Although the monarchy was later restored and the triumphant bourgeoisie was soon eager to pretend that the whole thing had been a dreadful mistake, no monarch sat quickly on the throne after that event until quite late in Victoria's reign".

Also as Christopher Hill put it so well, "In 1660 passive obedience was preached in all pulpits; a King was brought back "with plenty of holy oil about him," because this was necessary for Parliament, for the possessing classes, threatened by social revolution from below. A white terror was introduced by the returned émigrés, and an attempt was made to drive from political life all who did not accept the restored régime in Church and State (the Clarendon Code, the Test Act). Educational advances, like the purge which had made Oxford a centre of scientific research, were reversed. All this broke the revolutionary-democratic movement for the moment, though it fought back again in the sixteen-seventies and -eighties. In 1662 a Presbyterian minister, who had been deprived of his living by the Restoration, wrote in words that recaptured the fears of many respectable members of the possessing classes at that time: "Though soon after the settlement of the nation we saw ourselves the despised and cheated party ... yet in all this, I have suffered since, I look upon it as less than my trouble was from my fears then ... Then we lay at the mercy and impulse of a giddy, hot-headed, bloody multitude."[4]

Harris's book, albeit fictitious in parts, shows that this manhunt dominated the reign of Charles II. While sanctioning what amounted to judicial murder, the regime was hardly a picture of stability. The longer the show trial went on, the more nervous Charles and his ministers became and recognised the growing danger of rebellion. Charles II made one mistake in giving a public funeral to one of the regicides. Over twenty thousand people attended, testifying to the still considerable support for Republican ideas.

Conclusion

One of the difficulties of writing about this period of English history is that, as one writer put it, "intricacies of religious faith and faction can seem distant and abstruse to a modern audience". But Harris's book is timely as the United Kingdom is living through a period of constitutional upheaval and faces the distinct possibility of breaking up. Act of Oblivion is an enjoyable read and has a ring of authenticity. It is pointless recommending this book, and Harris's books sell in the millions, but it is a good read.

Notes

1.   The Indemnity and Oblivion Act 1660 was an Act of the Parliament of England (12 Cha. II c. 11), the long title of which is "An Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity, and Oblivion". This act was a general pardon for everyone who had committed crimes during the English Civil War and subsequent Commonwealth period, with the exception of certain crimes such as murder (without a licence granted by the King or Parliament), piracy, buggery, rape and witchcraft, and people named in the act such as those involved in the regicide of Charles I. It also said that no action was to be taken against those involved at any later time and that the Interregnum was to be legally forgotten.

 

 

[1] See Charles I's Executioners -Civil War, Regicide and the Republic By James Hobson- Pen & Sword History-Published: 4th November 2020. https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2021/04/charles-is-executioners-civil-war.html andKillers of the King - The Men Who Dared to Execute Charles I Hardcover – Charles Spencer 11 Sep 2014 352 pages Bloomsbury Publishing - ISBN-13: 978-1408851708-https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2014/10/killers-of-king-men-who-dared-to_23.html

[2] The Mystery Of Marie Rogêt" (1842) by Edgar Allan Poe

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/sep/08/act-of-oblivion-by-robert-harris-review-regicides-on-the-run

[4] The English Revolution 1640- https://www.marxists.org/archive/hill-christopher/english-revolution/

Commentary on The London Revolution Review

I am afraid that Sturza’s account of the events of the 1640s and your analysis of its merits (and faults) is not correct, Keith. First of all, the historiography of this period is wrong. The problems with a materialist or Marxist explanation were apparent well before the rise of so-called ‘Revisionism’ in the mid-1970s. The debates over the fortunes of the gentry between Tawney and Stone on one side and Trevor-Roper and J.P.Cooper on the other had stimulated a raft of research into the condition of landowners In many counties across England but also the growth of county studies and the hypothesis first advanced by Alan Everitt about the importance of localism in the ensuing conflicts.

John Morrill cut his historical teeth in this area and has never, to my knowledge, subscribed to the view that the English Civil War or Revolution came as a bolt from the blue.) In Cambridge, the work of Peter Laslett and the CAMPOP group called into very serious question whether any classes in the Marxist sense existed at all.

The idea that capitalist merchants and farmers had come by 1640 to find themselves temporarily aligned with the interests of artisans and peasants against the Caroline regime, which was Christopher Hill’s view in 1940, does not hold water if only because the early Stuart monarchs were keen on promoting economic innovation, new industrial inventions and overseas trade: if you look at the papers of Lionel Cranfield or Arthur Ingram (or those of Sir John Bankes in the Bodleian Library), you will see what I mean.

There is certainly no evidence whatsoever that, as a result of the events of the 1640s and 1650s, the rule of one class was replaced by that of another, whatever Ann Talbot claimed. The larger landowners were predominant after 1660 as they had been before 1640. (W.R.Emerson’s account of the growth of large landowners’ fortunes is better than that of Lawrence Stone in 1965 or 1972.) Nor should it be forgotten that Valerie Pearl and Keith Lindley have shown how closely aligned the groups in the Long Parliament were to their allies in the urban area of London: mob activities and riots were much less important than figures like Hill or Manning, or Sturza supposed.

Furthermore, London was not the entire kingdom: beyond its bounds, there were important groups of supporters of the Long Parliament in counties, towns and villages, just as there were neutrals and supporters of the Royalist cause. The links between landowners, their tenants, allies and supporters in the countryside were critical too in the Long Parliament’s military victories by 1646 and the period between 1648 and 1651.

I should add that Christopher Hill did not fail to take on the ‘Revisionists’. If you look at his Open University A203 course, England: A Changing Culture 1618-1689 (Block 3, Pp.72-78), you will see one of his attempts to reply to Conrad Russell’s post-1975  work. In fact, ‘revisionism’ had a long pre-history stretching back into the 1960s and was over by the early-1990s. It was not the product of a capitalist attack on the working class, nor did it have any links with Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan’s political views. This contention is completely untenable. 

Similarly, the grounds for thinking that what happened in the British Isles or in England in the 1640s was a ‘bourgeois revolution’ are not tenable. Those events can be more clearly seen as comparable to the revolt of the Low Countries or the French Wars of Religion in the second half of the sixteenth century, the revolts of Portugal and Catalonia in 1640 or the Frondes in France in the years between 1648 and 1653. ‘Les grand soulevements’ in these places and times never fitted into the framework postulated by Marx, Engels and their successors. Marx et al. asked interesting questions but their answers were never convinced.

C Thompson

 

 

 

 

The London Revolution 1640-1643: Class Struggles in 17th Century England-Michael Sturza-The Mad Duck Coalition, New York, 2022. 230 pp., $25

 

"The 'great' national historian Macaulay vulgarises the social drama of the seventeenth century by obscuring the inner struggle of forces with platitudes that are sometimes interesting but always superficial."

Leon Trotsky

"The dreams of a Milton, a Winstanley, a George Fox, a Bunyan, were not realised; nor indeed were those of Oliver himself: 'Would that we were all saints'."[1]

Christopher Hill

"English academics always hated revolutions so that there is an in-built pleasure in being able to get back, as some of them tried to do, to saying nothing important had happened. French, Russian and American historians have accepted revolutions as part of their tradition, whereas we've always hushed ours up and transferred it to the Glorious Revolution of 1688."[2]

Christopher Hill

 The London Revolution 1640-1643 does not contain any new research from previously used new primary archival sources. It, however, stands on the shoulders of previous work and provides the uninitiated with a useful summary of the main points of the English revolution.

Sturza's defence of the concept of an English revolution is to be welcomed, as is his attempt to explain the English Revolution from the standpoint of a historical materialist outlook. As Frederick Engels so eloquently put it, "The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in men's better insights into eternal truth and justice, but changes in the modes of production and exchange."[3]

The book offers a basic understanding of the main historical events for the reader new to the English revolution. But its main task is to highlight the revolution's fundamental political and class character. Many of the main revolutionary figures of the English Revolution were moved, as Sturza outlines in the book, by definite social, political and economic ideas. Still, their ideas were often cloaked in religious form. Many varied social currents brought people of diverse social backgrounds into a struggle against the king. They sought to understand the new and revolutionary ideas in the curious and archaic guise in which they appeared. They turned to the only source available to understand these ideas, the Bible.

Sturza's book pays considerable attention to the works of previous Marxists while also examining current historiography, which has been dominated over the past few decades by revisionist and post-revisionist ideologues. Sturza correctly explains that revisionism was an academic articulation of capitalism's attack on the working class. Reagan-Thatcher's right-wing agenda was enforced by a violent assault on the working class. The high point of this assault in the UK was the year-long civil war conducted by the British police against the coal miners' strike of 1984-85.

The English revolution was not the only revolution under attack from the revisionists. The French, Russian and, very recently, the American Revolution have all come under sustained attack from revisionist historians.

What makes Sturza's book different from the previous historiography, according to Alan Wallis, professor of history at New Jersey City University, is that "unlike most other writings on the English Revolution, the English Revolution was driven by petty-bourgeois artisans under militant Puritan leadership rather than the moderate gentry in the House of Commons, as is usually claimed by historians who deny or ignore the importance of leadership in carrying out any successful revolution. Sturza illustrates how the protests and street battles in the early 1640s foreshadowed the Civil War, which many historians have presented as an inexplicable bolt from out of the blue."[4]  

One of those historians who thought the revolution was a bolt from the blue was the dean of revisionism, John Morrill. Morrill's essay 'Revisionism's Wounded Legacies' neatly encapsulated his opposition to any theory that remotely smacked of revolution or Marxism, prompting one colleague to ask him if there was ever a civil war in the first place. Morrill explained that his Revisionism "was a revolt against materialist or determinist histories and historiographies."[5].

However, Morrill made one insightful remark in that essay in that he correctly states that every historian writing on the English revolution had to define their attitude to the work of Christopher Hill. The same must be said of Sturza. Christopher Hill, whose astonishing early book, The English Revolution 1640, had defined the English revolution as a bourgeois revolution, has achieved widespread acclaim and, to some extent, has not been bettered.

In it Hill writes, "England in 1640 was still ruled by landlords and the relations of production were still partly feudal, but there was this vast and expanding capitalist sector, whose development the Crown and feudal landlords could not forever hold in check. There were few proletarians (except in London), and most of the producers under the putting-out system being also small peasants. But these peasants and small artisans were losing their independence. They were hit especially hard by the general rise in prices and were brought into ever closer dependence on merchants and squires. A statute of 1563 forbade the poorer 75 per cent of the rural population to go as apprentices into the industry. So there were three classes in conflict. As against the parasitic feudal landowners and speculative financiers, as against the government whose policy was to restrict and control industrial expansion, the interests of the new class of capitalist merchants and farmers were temporarily identical to those of the small peasantry and artisans and journeymen. But the conflict between the two latter classes was bound to develop since the expansion of capitalism involved the dissolution of the old agrarian and industrial relationships and the transformation of independent small masters and peasants into proletarians."[6]

Hill was extremely sensitive enough to his historical sources to understand and write about the social currents that brought people of different social backgrounds into a struggle against the king. From early in his career, he identified new and revolutionary ideas in the curious and archaic guise in which they appeared. These ideologists of the revolution used the Bible to find a precedent for their actions.

As Ann Talbot explains, "Hill's achievements were twofold. Firstly he identified the mid-seventeenth century crisis as a revolution which overthrew the rule of one class and brought another to power in the case of Britain. Secondly, he recognised that the mass makes revolutions of the population and that for a revolution to occur, the consciousness of that mass of people must change since a few people at the top do not cause revolutions. However, the character of their leadership is crucial at certain points. These achievements were considerable at the time and are of continuing relevance today when historians increasingly reject any serious economic or social analysis and argue that revolutions are nothing but the work of a tiny group of conspirators.[7]

Sturza spends a lot of this book attacking Hill. In his conclusion, he chides Hill for not taking on the revisionists, but as Ann Talbot points out, Hill was a better historian than a political thinker. Also contained in the book's conclusion is Sturza's assertion that the English revolution was a "bourgois revolution from below and that petty-bourgeois artisan craftworkers, shopkeepers, early manufacturers, domestic traders and mariners…provided the horsepower of the revolution.'

Sturza's formulation is confusing and not an orthodox Marxist position. He would have done well to read and then quote the Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky for a clearer understanding of how the revolution unfolded and how the social forces within it related to each other. Trotsky writes:

"The adherents of the Episcopal or Anglican, semi-Catholic church were the party of the court, the nobility and of course the higher clergy. The Presbyterians were the party of the bourgeoisie, the party of wealth and enlightenment. The Independents, and the Puritans especially, were the party of the petty bourgeoisie, the plebeians. Wrapped up in ecclesiastical controversies, in the form of a struggle over the religious structure of the church, there took place social self-determination of classes and their re-grouping along new, bourgeois lines. Politically the. Presbyterian party stood for a limited monarchy; the Independents, who then were called root and branch men or, in the language of our day, radicals, stood for a republic. The halfway position of the Presbyterians fully corresponded to the contradictory interests of the bourgeoisie -- between the nobility and the plebeians. The Independents' party, which dared to carry its ideas and slogans through to its conclusion, naturally displaced the Presbyterians among the awakening petty-bourgeois masses in the towns and the countryside that formed the main force of the revolution. Events unfolded empirically. In their struggle for power and property interests, both the former and the latter side hid behind a cloak of legitimacy."[8]

To conclude, The English bourgeois revolution is a complex subject, and one book does not do it justice. However, despite its limitations, Sturza's book gives the reader a good introduction to the topic. Further criticisms of the book will follow in a postscript to this review. Comments on the text and this review are welcome.

 

   

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[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html

[2]https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj2/1992/isj2-056/hill.html

[3] Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

[4] https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewer/19991_alan-wallis/

[5]Revisionism's Wounded Legacies-John Morrill -Huntington Library Quarterly

Vol. 78, No. 4 (Winter 2015), pp. 577-594

[6] The English Revolution 1640- www.marxists.org/archive/hill-christopher/english-revolution

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

[8] Two traditions: the seventeenth-century revolution and Chartism- https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/britain/ch06.htm

Some Thoughts on the Notting Hill Carnival of Vanities 2022

The UK's Notting Hill Carnival returned to London's streets after a two-year absence caused by the coronavirus pandemic. My first thought is why given that a deadly virus is still around and putting people in hospital and killing thousands, would two million people turn up to an event that, by its very nature, would spread the virus and cause untold suffering and possibly death to vulnerable people who will in the future come into contact with persons who went to the Carnival?

If that was not bad enough, footage has emerged on the internet of people packed so tight on the street that it constituted a threat to safety. To escape being crushed, people climbed over railings and into basements to avoid the surge of people. The scenes were reminiscent of the Hillsborough disaster, only thankfully without the death toll.

Quite what attracts people to this event is a mystery. While I grant you the costumes are pretty, and some people have a bit of fun, the experience must be pretty bad for the majority. With an all-time high of 38 gigantic sound systems, you would have thought the music would have been of a high calibre. However, this was not the case. The fact that no musicians of any world renown would be caught dead performing at Carnival is telling.

Secondly, having experienced being close to a fifty-foot sound system, one is completely numb and deaf after only a few seconds. It is also very difficult to appreciate the musical vibes when you are sky-high after breathing in gallons of nitrous oxide. So far, thousands of large gas canisters weighing in total 4 tonnes have been collected from the streets. Hospitals expect to have to treat a large number of young people for nerve damage.

It is also hard to fathom why people think it is their democratic right to have fun, dance, drink, and take drugs while the victims of the Grenfell fire have still not received justice. The RBKC council and the organisers of the Notting Hill Carnival paid lip service by holding a 72-second silence but still allowed the Carnival to go ahead. At the same time, the ashes of over 72 people remain in the tower block, which can be seen in full view of people dancing and parading in the streets. The reason for this is not hard to fathom. The Carnival has become big business.

The presence of companies including Red Bull and Virgin Atlantic have meant the Carnival has become not only a money spinner for big business, but several small organisations and even residents have monetised the event out of all recognition from its earliest anti-racist and anti-capitalist origins.

As Dr Razaq Raj writes , "the commercialisation of Carnival began with the sponsorship of Lilt in 1995, a tropical fruit-flavoured soft drink manufactured by Coca-Cola, in which it became the Lilt Notting Hill Carnival; this arrangement continued in 1996 and 1997 (Carver, 2000). The Carnival was sponsored by Virgin Atlantic in 1998 when Nestle (who were meant to sponsor the event) withdrew their support  (BBC News, 1998). Western Union Notting Hill Carnival became the festival's name in 1999 when Western Union sponsored the event. Notting Hill's commercialisation highlights the event's growth since its humble beginnings. It is symbolic of the conflict between the political and radical past to the present day organised and funded event. The commercialisation of Carnival highlights its growth but also critical problems for the event and carnival management. The conflict between the radical past and conservative operations of Notting Hill Carnival presents the main questions as to the future purpose of Notting Hill Carnival. Has this cultural event that acted as a political vehicle for the community fallen victim to the Western capitalist society?[1]

Carnival 2022 was a sanitised and unpolitical event. The Carnival has become so far removed from its origins that it is unrecognisable from its early days as a vehicle of protest against racism and slavery. In historical terms, sixty years is not a long time. Sixty years ago, the fascists were openly marching on the streets of Notting Hill, and the fascist leader Oswald Mosely was holding meetings on the Goldborne rd.

As the Marxist writer, Cliff Slaughter wrote in 1958, "The race riots in Nottingham and London came like a bolt from the blue to most ordinary men and women in Britain, just as they did to the Press, that self-styled watchdog of the public conscience. The Observer, usually more far-sighted than most newspapers, spoke of the race riots as something which seemed a cloud no bigger than a man's hand a few days earlier. So long as we look only at the surface of social life and try to deal with each question separately as it arises, we shall continue to find ourselves bewildered by events like the race riots. But they are no nine days wonder. Every worker in the country must clearly understand this.

Every member of the working class must endorse the condemnation by the Trades Union Congress of racial discrimination and violence. But this is not enough. Only if we can trace the social roots of racial conflict shall we be able to weed them out and those who profit from it with them. The starting point for the working class must be unity and solidarity against the employers and their political representatives—in the first place, the Tory Party. All the problems the working class now faces—growing unemployment, the housing shortage, rent increases, the rising cost of living, attacks on wages and working conditions, and, above all, the threat of an H-bomb war—can be solved only by the unity and determined action of the working class. It is no accident that the steady growth of unemployment over the last year has been accompanied by an insidiously growing campaign around the slogan 'Keep Britain-White'."[2]

The problems faced by the working class in 1958 are the same but on a much higher scale, unemployment, the housing shortage, rent increases, the rising cost of living, attacks on wages and working conditions, and, above all, the threat of nuclear war. These issues and more will not be solved by a few dances on the street or by sniffing a gas up your nose. Young people especially need to think about the choices they are making now. They do not have too much time.

 

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[1] Exploitation of Notting Hill Carnival to increase community pride and spirit and act as a catalyst for regeneration. Dr Razaq Raj

[2] Race Riots: the Socialist Answer- From Labour Review, Vol. 3 No. 5, December 1958, pages 134-137. www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/slaughter/1958/12/race.htm