"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
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.
[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
