Samuel was
not an orthodox historian by any stretch of the imagination. Anyone studying
Samuel's archive at the Bishopsgate Institute would see that his note-taking
and working methods were chaotic at best. According to Florence
Sutcliffe-Braithwaite ‘ Each thought or reference to a source was written or
pasted onto a single side of a loose sheet of paper. It might be the source
itself – an advertisement, a jam-jar label or an extract from a Xerox – it
mattered only that it was attributed and sub-headed under a theme. Then the
notes were filed in groups. Scholarly prestidigitation allowed the pages to be
constantly reshuffled so that new combinations of ideas appeared,
presuppositions might be overturned, and surprising connections thereby be
generated. All that was needed was reams of rough paper, scissors and a pot of
glue, phalanxes of lever-arch files, and a hole-puncher.’[1]
His method and traits were learnt from Beatrice and Sidney Webb, progenitors of Fabian socialism, who developed it in the late 19th century. Samuel would have absorbed not only their note-taking style but a large chunk of their politics. But his work revitalised popular and local history, encouraged collective research methods, and brought working-class memory, oral testimony, and archival recovery into historians' practice. These are enduring gains. The recovery of workers' lived experience helps counter the abstractions and elitism of bourgeois historiography.
Before
founding the Universities Left Review, Samuel was a member of the British Communist
Party. He left two years after Kruschev’s secret speech. He was a very young
member of the Communist Party Historians Group. The CPHG arose inside and
around the British Communist Party and the wider milieu of Communist and labour
politics between the 1930s and 1950s. Its best‑known
members—E.P.
Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill and others—produced influential work that
challenged bourgeois and Whig traditions of national history and insisted on
the agency of popular classes. The group’s scholarship should be read against
the background of the political orientation of the Stalinist bureaucracy—its Popular Front politics, its
nationalism and its accommodation to bourgeois forces—which indelibly affected
the intellectual formation and institutional constraints faced by historians
working within or alongside the Party.
The CPHG did,
however, make enduring contributions to socialist historiography. It overturned
Whig teleology, insisted that ordinary people make history, and enriched
archival and methodological practice. These were advances that Marxists should
defend and extend. However, the group's political roots in a Stalinist‑influenced party had concrete consequences. The Communist
Party’s “People’s History” orientation and Popular Front
politics tended to domesticate class conflict, subordinating proletarian
independence to alliances with liberal or petty‑bourgeois
currents. The result was, at times, an apologetic stance toward state
bureaucracy and a reluctance to carry the political implications of Marxist
analysis into the present.
Raphael Samuel and the
Universities Left Review
Samuel was a
leading British Marxist historian and a central figure in the post‑war “history from below” movement. He helped found the
History Workshop and was associated with the small‑circulation left journals and intellectual networks that
emerged in Britain in the 1950s and 60s, among them the Universities and Left
Review (ULR). ULR (1957–60) brought together student radicals, young intellectuals
and some socialist critics of the university and the Labour Party. It aimed to
radicalise university life and cultural debate, critiquing orthodox academic
history and promoting popular and labour history.
Samuel's
main collaborator on ULR was Stuart Hall. Hall’s political and intellectual
trajectory—from the Universities and Left Review (ULR) and the New Left to
Cultural Studies and his later role in Marxism Today was the product of
definite class formations, political realignments and the changing social
position of layers of the intelligentsia after World War II. Hall’s work cannot
be treated as an abstract contribution to theory divorced from the social
interests it expresses.
As Paul Bond
writes,‘ Hall’s central theme was the repudiation of the class struggle as the
axis of social development, as this assumes that the working class is the
decisive agent of political change. Instead, he argued for a turn to the
cultural sphere. This was not a Marxist appraisal or critique of culture, but
the elevation of “culture” as an arena contested by different “agencies”.
Longtime Pabloite Tariq Ali wrote that Hall said, “half-joking to friends that
his cultural studies project was politics by other means”. That indeed it was:
a project that replaced class as the central political factor by race, gender,
sexual orientation, nationality and other “sub-cultures” and “identities”,
making it impossible, in the end, to address capitalist exploitation. Instead,
the struggle had to be conducted in every supposedly “relatively autonomous”
sphere. The logic led to garden-variety single-issue, bourgeois-reformist
politics, as an article Hall co-authored last year made clear: “Mobilising
resistance thus requires alliances of a sort which only a multi-focused
political strategy can hope to construct”.[2]
From a
historical‑materialist standpoint, the
importance of Samuel, Hall and their ULR project lies less in any single
programmatic contribution than in the social position they occupied: a layer of
petty‑bourgeois intellectuals reacting to the crises of post‑war capitalism and the limitations of established reformist
politics. Their cultural interventions—renewed attention to working‑class experience, local history and culture—were progressive in exposing
bourgeois narratives and recuperating popular memory. Yet, understood in class
terms, this milieu tended to substitute cultural critique for a political
orientation to the working class as a revolutionary subject.
Samuel was
in the Communist Party at the same time as the founder of People's History,
A.L. Morton. As Ann Talbot brings out in her essay on Christopher Hill,
"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.’ [3]
The ULR and
similar currents reflected objective social forces: a post‑war expansion of higher education, the growth of a
politically conscious intelligentsia, and the fragmentation of the labour
movement. These social origins explain both the strengths and limits of the
project. Samuel’s cultivation of popular history responded to an objective
weakness: official historiography ignored the working class. But the
limitations were also objective: petty‑bourgeois layers, detached from a
sustained orientation to working‑class organisation, are prone to
turning working‑class culture into a form of moral
critique rather than mobilising it as the basis for revolutionary political
independence.
The lessons
of Samuel and the ULR are twofold and complementary. First, recovering working‑class history and culture is necessary: it combats bourgeois
erasure, builds pride, and strengthens class identity. Second—and decisive—cultural work must be subordinated to
political orientation: it must be used to connect workers to a programmatic,
internationalist Marxist perspective and to build rank‑and‑file organisation and a revolutionary
party. Without that link, cultural renewal risks becoming an appendage of
liberal reformism or of petty‑bourgeois radicalism.
Workshop of the World
Raphael
Samuel’s essays, collected in this book, came under the rubric of a “people’s
history”. They include material often associated with the idea of Britain as
the “workshop of the world”. They do offer rich documentary and cultural
evidence about working‑class life, memory and resistance.
Samuel’s micro‑histories become instruments for understanding how material
conditions, class formation and consciousness interact.
He helped
institutionalise a new historical practice—through the History Workshop
movement and collections of oral histories and local studies—that shifted
attention away from great men and state archives toward popular culture, labour
traditions and everyday life. This intervention broke important ground: it
democratised history, widened the sources, and made working-class experience
visible in ways that conventional academic histories often ignored. Yet, from a
classical Marxist and Fourth International standpoint, Samuel’s legacy is both
positive and limited.
Samuel’s
History Workshop arose in the 1960s and 1970s amid rising labour militancy and
intellectual currents that critiqued elitist historiography. He collected oral
testimony, household economies, popular ritual, and the souvenirs of everyday
life. This expanded the archive, exposed working‑class
creative resistance and revealed how consciousness is formed through struggle,
culture and community. These contributions are invaluable for socialists
building working‑class memory and confidence.
But Samuel’s
practice frequently stopped at descriptive recovery. While he emphasised the
autonomy and creativity of popular traditions, he often treated culture as an
end in itself—celebrating particularisms and local solidarities without always
linking them systematically to the political organisation required to overthrow
capital. In moments where the transformation of society is the question,
empirical cultural history must be integrated with an analysis of capitalist
accumulation, state power and the strategy of revolutionary organisation.
Samuel
emerged in the same milieu that produced the 1960s New Left and the cultural
turn in history. That milieu included significant intellectual currents hostile
to classical materialism — strands of the Frankfurt School, post-Marxist and
post-structuralist thought.
The
domination of this school of thought meant the working class paid a heavy price
for this fragmentation of the working-class perspective. Samuel’s work, while
recuperative of working-class sources, often stopped short of linking that
history to a program for working-class political independence. Samuel’s
practical insistence that historians listen to workers, use oral history, and
develop local archives advanced the working class's capacity to know itself.
This recuperation of proletarian experience strengthens historical
consciousness when it is anchored in a materialist understanding of class
relations.
At the same
time, Samuel’s culturalism and the New Left milieu into which he was embedded
often moved away from a rigorous classical Marxist method. The petty-bourgeois
currents of the New Left tended to relativise class as the central subject of
history and to prioritise cultural, identity, or therapeutic frameworks over an
analysis anchored in production and property relations.
Robert Tressell and the
Early Socialists
There are
two chapters in the book that I want to pay particular attention to. Robert
Tressell (Robert Noonan), author of The Ragged‑Trousered
Philanthropists, occupies an important place in the cultural and political
formation of British working‑class socialism. His novel gives an
unsparing depiction of artisan and factory life, petty‑bourgeois illusions, and the corrosive ethics of capitalist
wage relations.
But to
situate Tressell historically and theoretically, it is important to locate him
within the longer trajectory from the early socialists and utopian currents to
the emergence of scientific Marxism and the revolutionary program defended by
the Marxists. Socialists like Fourier, Owen, Saint‑Simon, and later various British and French reformers raised
vital moral and institutional objections to capitalist misery. They exposed
capitalism’s
inhumanity and proposed cooperative or communal remedies. Tressell’s literary moralism continues that
tradition. His vivid exposé of exploitation aimed to awaken sympathy and spur
reform among his readers.
Tressell’s
milieu in Edwardian Britain was artisans, small contractors, and a growing
industrial proletariat showing both the objective development of capitalist
productive forces and the subjective unevenness of working‑class consciousness. Tressell’s novel contributes to shaping
consciousness but cannot substitute for organised, political working‑class activity.
Origins of People’s History
Samuel’s
essay on People’s History is probably one of his finest. Under the guise of the
People’s History genre, it reopened questions long suppressed by institutional
historiography: ritual, popular politics, communal solidarities, and the
cultural forms that sustain working-class life.
People’s
history—often called “history from below” was not merely a literary genre but a
social product rooted in class relations. From the standpoint of the
materialist conception of history, historical consciousness arises out of
concrete social practice: collective labour, struggle, deprivation and
organisation produce memories, traditions and forms of political culture. As
Plekhanov stressed in tracing the emergence of the theory of class struggle,
ideas about history flow from changes in property relations and social
development; historians who ignore class obscure the motor forces of social
change.
In Britain,
after World War II and especially from the late 1960s, Raphael Samuel and the
History Workshop movement institutionalised the turn to popular and cultural
history. They emphasised archives of everyday life, oral history and collective
memory, seeking to make the working class visible within historical narrative.
This cultural recovery reflected real social processes: the postwar
restructuring of capitalism, renewed political radicalism among students and
workers, and a crisis in the authority of traditional elites.
There is a
progressive side to the genre in that, correctly applied, it undermines the
bourgeois monopoly on the past, restores agency to workers and oppressed
groups, and supplies documentary armour for organising—stories of strikes, self‑organisation and mutual aid that can inspire present
struggles. Recovering these experiences helps politicise layers of working
people by showing that social change was made by ordinary people, not by
abstract “great
men.”
However, when detached from a dialectical, class‑struggle method, people’s
history can become an end in itself: localist nostalgia, culturalism, or
therapeutic memorialising that fails to connect the past to present class
relations and the necessity of a revolutionary program.
Raphael Samuel’s
Theatres of Memory, 1994
Samuel did
not write many books but concentrated on essay writing. He only wrote one
sole-authored book in his lifetime, Theatres of Memory (1994). A second volume
of Theatres of Memory, titled Island Stories: Unravelling Britain, was
published in 1998, after his death.
As Samuel
McIlhagga points out, ‘It is perhaps a unique feature of British intellectual
culture that its greatest Marxists have more often been essayists than authors
of lengthy theoretical treatises. The self-contained responses to a specific
political or historical problem, or the witty corrective to dominant
orthodoxies, are well suited to a nation whose intellectual elite are as closed
and coherent as Britain’s. When E. P. Thompson wrote “The Peculiarities of the
English,” his breathless polemic seeking to correct a dismissive attitude to
the radicalism of his country’s history found in the work of the Marxist
writers Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn, he was pitting himself against two
thinkers whom he knew personally and who edited a journal to which he, too, had
contributed.[4]
Samuel’s was
a new orientation which drew on Marxist themes of class, labour, and social
conflict. Still, he combined them with a broad culturalist sensibility and an
emphasis on the historian as activist-organiser. From the standpoint of
classical Marxism, this combination has both strengths and weaknesses. It
should be pointed out that Samuel was not a classical Marxist.
Raphael
Samuel’s Theatres of Memory (1994, ed. with Paul Thompson) was a foundational
intervention in the study of popular memory, oral history and the politics of
historical representation. Samuel recasts history as a living, contested
cultural terrain: memory is staged, rehearsed and institutionalised in
festivals, museums, songs, local traditions and archives. There are similarities
and major differences between Samuel's work and E.P. Thompson's. Thompson (The
Making of the English Working Class) developed a class-formation method that
treated class as a historical process: classes are made through concrete
struggles, economic relations and political experience, not by sociological
labels or algebraic categories. Thompson insisted on grounding consciousness in
workers' material conditions and lived struggles.
Samuel, on
the other hand, followed a culturalist tradition, i.e., history-from-below,
collective memory, institutions, everyday life, shifting attention to the
cultural forms, practices, and repositories through which people experience,
narrate, and reproduce social life — oral tradition, rituals, popular politics,
festivals, literary tastes, and memory.
These two
contending historiographical approaches clashed in 1979. According to Florence
Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, "The 1979 History Workshop staged a rehashing of
what was already one of the most vituperative disputes on the New Left, between
E.P. Thompson and the advocates of ‘theory’. Thompson ripped into the other
speakers, Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson. The atmosphere, as Sophie
Scott-Brown describes in her excellent 2017 biography of Samuel, was already
bad. The Ruskin student collective organising the conference wasn’t keen on the
theoretical preoccupations of many academics in the History Workshop editorial
collective; some members had already suggested forming a breakaway workshop to
get back to the study of labour history. After Thompson’s blow-up, the final
plenary session was quietly cancelled. Samuel, who probably took this decision,
was essentially a Thompsonian: he defended a focus on ‘real life experience’
and empirical work, which he suggested could ‘do more for our theoretical
understanding of ideology and consciousness than any number of further
“interpellations” on the theme of “relative autonomy”. (A dig at
Althusserians.) Samuel pointed out that, like ‘any other intellectual
artefact’, theory isn’t timeless but ‘has its material and ideological
conditions of existence’. But he wasn’t entirely a sceptic, arguing that good
history required a ‘theoretically informed’ understanding of language, and that
socialism required a serious analysis of ‘bourgeois ideology’.[5]
The dispute
between E.P. Thompson and Stuart Hall was not merely an academic quarrel about
sources or style. It expresses two antagonistic tendencies in the British left:
Thompson’s historical‑materialist, class‑formation method, which locates class consciousness in
concrete economic relations, struggles and political experience, and Hall’s culturalist turn, which relocates
political explanation in culture, identity and “articulations” of meaning.
Contemporary relevance
Samuel’s
method of reconstructing working-class experience: oral histories,
rank-and-file reportage, and cultural memory are weapons against ideological
amnesia. Culture can strengthen class identity, but without a program that
explains how capital reproduces itself, and without organisation to transform
class interests into political power, cultural mobilisation risks becoming
either reformist co‑optation or nostalgic particularism.
The dialectic here is crucial: cultural consciousness both expresses and shapes
class struggle, but it is itself transformed by objective changes in production
and by political leadership.
From the
standpoint of classical Marxism, Raphael Samuel’s recovery of popular memory is
an essential resource—but it must be subordinated to a revolutionary program.
Marxist historiography does not merely collect fragments of working‑class life; it explains how those fragments arise from class
relations and how they can be mobilised for socialist transformation. This
rejects both bourgeois culturalism, which divorces culture from economics, and
reformist populism, which equates cultural recognition with systemic change.
[1]
Ladders last a long time-www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n10/florence-sutcliffe-braithwaite/ladders-last-a-long-time
[2]
Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014): A political career dedicated to
opposing Marxism-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/03/05/hall-m05.html
[3]
"These the times ... this the man": an appraisal of historian
Christopher Hill-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
[4]
Why Raphael Samuel Matters-https://jacobin.com/2024/05/raphael-samuel-workshop-of-the-world
[5] Ladders last a long time-www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n10/florence-sutcliffe-braithwaite/ladders-last-a-long-time
