John Rees is a recognised author, broadcaster, and political
advocate. He is part of the editorial team at Counterfire and was a co-founder
of the Stop the War Coalition. Lindsey German, a lifelong resident of London,
is a socialist writer and activist. She serves as the convenor of the Stop the
War Coalition and has previously run for Mayor of London.
John Rees and Lindsey German are key figures in Counterfire,
a British pseudo-left group that split from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)
in 2010. Both have played significant roles in organising the Stop the War
Coalition (STWC). They maintain that the coalition isn't about establishing an
authentic anti-war movement but aims to steer anti-war sentiment towards
support for the Labour Party and trade union leadership. The STWC
"functioned as a mechanism for capturing anti-war sentiment and bringing
it under the political tutelage of the trade union bureaucracy and a handful of
Labourites." This is the political environment influencing Rees and
German's historical work, shaping it in fundamental ways.
What the Book Does
A People's History of London explores centuries of the
city's radical and working-class history, including the Peasants' Revolt, the
Levellers, the Chartists, the Matchgirls' Strike, and the Suffragettes. It is
written in an accessible style and seeks to recover a tradition of popular
resistance. In this way, it offers a valuable introduction to events often
overlooked or misrepresented by mainstream bourgeois history.
However, the book's framework mirrors the political
constraints and deceptions of its authors. Several key points need to be
addressed. The "People's History" genre has a problematic history.
This tradition, exemplified by Howard Zinn's A People's History of the
United States, tends to oversimplify class differences among the oppressed,
replace materialist analysis with moral outrage, and celebrate struggle as an
end in itself. It fails to ask the crucial question: what program and party
are necessary to guide the working class to victory? The history of
London's radical movements is essentially a record of betrayed class
struggles, and understanding the reasons for these betrayals requires political
analysis, not mere romanticisation.
A major critique of Rees and German concerns their failure to
confront reformism and the Labour Party honestly. Their political view is
strongly aligned with the Labour left, including Corbynism and the STWC's focus
on figures such as Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Benn. This shows they are unable to
grasp key lessons from London's labour history: that the Labour Party was meant
to contain the working class within capitalism, that trade union bureaucracies
have often suppressed class struggle, and that London workers' setbacks are
mainly due to these betrayals.
The origins of the "People's History" genre are
rooted in a specific political context, rather than emerging from a vacuum. As
Ann Talbot's key essay on Christopher Hill underscores, the influential first
book in Britain was A.L. Morton's A People's History of England,
created by the Communist Party Historians' Group, which included Hill,
E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and Rodney Hilton.
Talbot highlights the political core of this: "People's
history was an attempt to give some historical foundation to the policies of
the Popular Front—the subordination of the working class to supposedly
progressive sections of the bourgeoisie." Essentially, the genre was
developed to support Stalinist politics, overlaying class distinctions with a
nationalist "people" narrative to justify class collaboration, rather
than promoting independent working-class politics.
This is not merely background; it forms the core genetic
code of the genre, shaping all works that carry the "People's
History" label, including Howard Zinn's influential *A People's
History of the United States* and E.P. Thompson's The Making of the
English Working Class.
Tom Mackaman's insightful obituary of Howard Zinn, a leading
figure in the genre, offers a sharp critique of its limitations. Mackaman
references Engels' view on what he called "old materialist"
philosophy: it "could not answer the question of what historical
forces drive the motives of individuals and groups in history." Engels
argued that "its conception of history, insofar as it exists at all, is
mainly pragmatic; it categorises people in history as noble or ignoble and
generally shows that the noble are often defrauded while the ignoble tend to
prevail."
This accurately describes the "People's History"
approach, which is fundamentally moral: the oppressed versus their oppressors,
resisters against the controllers, and the people versus the Establishment.
While names and dates may vary, the core narrative remains unchanged. It lacks
dialectical contradictions, fails to recognise historically progressive class
forces, and omits analysis of how material relations of production propel
social change through conflict. Instead, it depicts an endless cycle of oppression
and resistance without proposing a strategy to resolve or end either.
Mackaman highlights how Zinn's approach leads to significant
historiographical errors. Because Zinn views history through a strict moral
binary of villains and victims, he interprets the American Revolution and the
Civil War as two of the most objectively progressive events in global
history—as essentially elite conspiracies aimed at controlling popular unrest.
Abraham Lincoln is reduced to a mere "shrewd political operative,"
and Tom Paine is criticised for his association with a wealthy individual.
These misrepresentations are based not on evidence but on the moralising
framework characteristic of the genre.
Mackaman highlights a critical point: the "People's
History" genre originated from the revisionist academic work of the
1960s and 70s, which coincided with the rise of identity politics on American
campuses. This alignment is deliberate. Mackaman notes: "The new studies
emerged alongside the development of identity politics and the push for
affirmative action on campuses, as US liberalism, trade unions, and the
Democratic Party aimed to find a new base for their policies outside the
working class." This genre supported this political agenda by replacing
the working class—considered the revolutionary agent of history—with a diverse
array of oppressed groups whose resistance could be celebrated without
questioning the need to overthrow capitalism revolutionarily.
E.P. Thompson, alongside A.L. Morton and Howard Zinn, is a
key figure in the genre of A People’s History. This genre and Thompson's role
in it cannot be separated from his
political roots in the Communist Party Historians Group of
postwar Britain. Thompson, with Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton,
and others, was educated within a tradition influenced by Stalinist
politics—particularly the Popular Front strategy of the 1930s and 40s.
As Ann Talbot argued in her appraisal of Christopher Hill,
this school of history was not simply a scholarly tendency: "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."
In other words, "people's history" reflected the
historiographical view of Popular Front politics, portraying the working class
as subordinate to supposedly progressive bourgeois factions, cloaked in the
rhetoric of a unified "national people" fighting oppression. The
class struggle was transformed into an inspiring moral narrative, but one that
is politically benign: a legacy of "resistance" that avoids
advocating for revolution, challenging the need to overthrow the bourgeois
state, or calling for revolutionary leadership.
Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963) is
truly a landmark in scholarship. Its goal — to uncover the agency, culture, and
deliberate self-formation of the English working class during the late 18th and
early 19th centuries — led to outstanding empirical research. Thompson
emphasized that the working class was not merely shaped by industrial
conditions but actively shaped itself, challenging simple economic determinism.
His exploration of artisan radicalism, Methodist dissent, Luddism, and the
radical clubs of the 1790s deepened our understanding of how class
consciousness emerges.
But the political framework within which Thompson worked
imposed severe limitations. Like Hill, Thompson was drawn to identifying a
distinctively English revolutionary tradition — one running from the Civil War
to the emerging labour movement that was fundamentally national in character.
Talbot observes that both Hill and Thompson "had no interest in showing
the continental origins of many of the ideas that inspired the English
revolution," nor in tracing the genuinely international development of
Enlightenment thought, democratic theory, and working-class politics.
A true Marxist approach to history involves analysing the
leadership and goals of working-class movements, whether in London, the US, or
elsewhere. Unlike the "People's History" genre, it must examine the
class dynamics driving both victories and defeats, place national struggles in
the context of global class conflict and draw lessons for today's socialist
movement. It views the working class not just as victims to be pitied but as
the revolutionary force whose consciousness evolves through struggle, and whose
liberation depends on building an international revolutionary party.
The political role of the genre today. From a Marxist
perspective, the main limitation of this genre is its strategic emptiness.
While it can depict struggles, it cannot analyse their failures. It can praise
resisters but cannot determine what program or party would have led them to
victory. It can list the crimes of the ruling class, yet it cannot explain how
these crimes are perpetuated, specifically through the capitalist mode of
production and the state structures that sustain it.
Today, the "People's History" brand mainly serves
as a marketing term for pseudo-left ideology. When John Rees and Lindsey German
author a "People's History of London," they exploit the emotional
appeal of centuries of working-class resistance yet deliberately sidestep the
political conclusions such history implies. This genre permits them to praise
the Chartists, match girls, and dockers without addressing why these movements
were ultimately defeated. It also avoids recognizing the Labour Party and trade
union bureaucracy as the primary agents of class betrayal in the twentieth
century or advocating for a revolutionary party with a socialist agenda.
Notes
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working
Class (London, 1982),
[F. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in
England (Moscow, 1973),
