Henry Noel Brailsford was among the most talented socialist
journalists and writers in Britain during the first half of the twentieth
century. He was linked to the Independent Labour Party, a strand of ethical,
Nonconformist socialism that positioned itself to the left of the Labour
Party's main faction but remained politically allied with it. Brailsford wrote
extensively on topics like foreign affairs, imperialism, and international
politics. His major work on the seventeenth century, The Levellers and the
English Revolution, was left incomplete upon his death and was published
posthumously in 1961, edited by Christopher Hill.
Brailsford engaged with the Levellers with sincere empathy
and thorough scholarship. He restored the coherence and importance of their
political agenda, the Agreements of the People, which calls for manhood
suffrage, the abolition of tithes and excise, religious toleration, and legal
equality, and positioned them as the most advanced democratic movement produced
by the English Revolution. His respectful treatment of figures such as John
Lilburne, Richard Overton, and William Walwyn as serious political thinkers,
rather than merely eccentric sectarians, marked a significant contribution.
Brailsford demonstrated that the Levellers were not just agitators but were
working to establish a constitutional basis for a democratic republic, an
effort with few global precedents at the time.
Hill edited Brailsford's posthumous volume on the Levellers,
creating an apt collaboration as his research complemented and expanded
Brailsford's focus on the radical plebeians of the revolution. A prominent
figure in 20th-century Marxist historiography of the English Revolution, Hill's
work was thoroughly reviewed by Ann Talbot of the WSWS, who emphasised its
complexities following Hill's death in 2003. His ideas were influenced by the
Marxist Historians Group of the Communist Party, which included renowned
scholars such as E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton, and Eric Hobsbawm.
His main contribution was challenging the dominant Whig
interpretation of British history, which presents a comforting myth symbolised
by the Trevelyan family's country houses, owned by the National Trust, and
suggests that Britain experienced a uniquely peaceful and gradual political
development without revolutionary upheaval. Hill contended that the events of
the 1640s were a true bourgeois revolution, with one ruling class overthrowing
another, driven by the mass population whose awareness was significantly
changed. As Talbot points out, "these achievements were considerable at
the time and remain relevant today, especially as historians increasingly
dismiss any serious economic or social analysis."
Hill's The World Turned Upside Down (1972) examines, more
deeply than Brailsford, the radical groups such as the Diggers, Ranters, and
early Quakers—highlighting how these marginalised factions advanced social
change that the propertied classes leading the revolution could never permit.
However, Hill's perspective was heavily influenced by the Stalinist politics in
which he was educated. As Talbot points out, the Communist Party promoted a
"People's History" that maintained a primarily national outlook
aligned with the Popular Front, thereby subordinating the working class to
supposedly progressive bourgeois forces. This resulted in a key limitation:
Hill never placed the English Revolution within its broader international
context, nor did he examine how the ideas of English revolutionaries connected
to continental Enlightenment thought. He also retained a romantic attachment to
specifically English radical traditions. His later interest in radical sects
during the Restoration period, long after their revolutionary importance had
faded, reflects this nationalism's desire to portray a continuous English
revolutionary tradition rather than explore how revolutionary ideas spread and
evolved across national borders.
Hill notably avoided the twentieth century almost
completely. As Talbot observes, among the Marxist Historians Group, Hill
focused on the seventeenth century, Thompson on the eighteenth, Hobsbawm on the
nineteenth, and Hilton on the Middle Ages, none of whom specialised in their
own era. This was intentional. In recent history, Stalinist politics exerted
too direct a control; engaging honestly would have led to conflicts with the
bureaucracy. Hill's sole engagement with the twentieth century, a 1947 study of
Lenin, is marked by repeated dismissals of Trotsky as a "Westernising
theoretician", a point Talbot rightly criticises as his weakest and most
politically dishonest aspect. He could not fully pursue his true Marxist
instincts where the bureaucratic line was drawn.
Trotsky's 1925 work, 'Where Is Britain Going?', surprisingly
predicted many of Hill's key insights about the English Revolution. It emphasised
two major revolutionary traditions in British history, the revolution of
Cromwell and Chartism, which Whig gradualism tends to overlook. Trotsky saw
Cromwell as a revolutionary bourgeois leader who suppressed the Levellers when
they threatened to go beyond the limits of capitalist property.
Whether Hill independently drew these conclusions from Marx
and Engels or was subtly influenced by Trotsky without acknowledgement, his
most important historical work aligns with them. The tragedy is that his
political background prevented him from realising that the essential lessons of
the English Revolution, namely, that the bourgeoisie betrays democratic goals
whenever property is at risk and that only the working class can finish the
democratic tasks left incomplete by the bourgeois revolution, are highly
relevant to the twentieth-century challenges faced by Hill and his generation.
Hill and Brailsford
Although they came from different political backgrounds,
both aimed to rekindle the revolutionary-democratic spirit of the
seventeenth-century English Revolution, challenging a conservative and
complacent mainstream history. Brailsford was driven by an ethical socialist's
moral commitment to the oppressed, while Hill applied the Marxist analysis of
class structures. Collectively, their work exemplifies the pinnacle of the
British left-wing historical tradition focused on this era.
Their shared limitations are also instructive. Both remained
confined within a nationally bounded framework and did not fully explore the
global implications of the English Revolution, such as its role in the Atlantic
world, its links to the Dutch Republic, or the ideas that would later influence
the American and French Revolutions a century afterwards. Moreover, for
political rather than purely intellectual reasons, neither could apply the
lessons of seventeenth-century revolutionary history to the revolutionary
challenges of their own time. Trotskyism, however, broadens this horizon in a
way neither the ILP nor the Stalinist tradition allowed.
The Levellers and the
English Revolution
Brailsford's book focuses on the Levellers, a radical
democratic group that emerged from the New Model Army and London's artisan and
petty-bourgeois classes during the revolutionary upheavals of the 1640s. Led by
John Lilburne, Richard Overton, and William Walwyn, the Levellers produced
important documents, especially the Agreement of the People, which
advocated for manhood suffrage, freedom of conscience, legal equality, and the
abolition of monopolies and tithes. Their efforts broadened the scope of the English
Revolution towards its most leftist and democratic ideals.
Brailsford's account is a passionate and richly detailed
narrative that takes these men and their ideas seriously as historical actors,
not merely background colour to the drama of Cromwell and Parliament. In this
sense, the book is a real contribution to understanding the social depth of the
revolution. Brailsford's socialism was rooted in the parliamentary, Fabian, and
ethical-socialist traditions of British labourism. He never broke from the
framework of reformism, the perspective that capitalism could be gradually
transformed from within through parliamentary pressure, trade union
organisation, and moral persuasion of the ruling class.
Trotsky's analysis of the British labour movement, set out
in Where Is Britain Going? (1925) was a direct critique of
this entire tradition: Trotsky argued that the ILP and the labour bureaucracy
were incapable of leading the working class to power precisely because they
refused to make the political break with bourgeois institutions.
Brailsford's approach is limited by the tradition he comes
from. As an ethical socialist and ILP liberal, he admired the Levellers mainly
for their constitutional and democratic demands, viewing them as early
forerunners of liberal democracy rather than fully understanding the class
dynamics behind their position. He focused on the moral strength of their
arguments rather than on the social forces that enabled or hindered them. While
he recognised that Cromwell and the Grandees suppressed the Levellers, he did
not fully analyse why the bourgeois revolutionary leadership felt compelled to
do so. This gap is not a personal shortcoming but a reflection of the ethical
socialist tradition's tendency to moralise history rather than examine its
material basis.
John Rees and the
English Revolution
John Rees is arguably the most influential and skilled
historian to employ a Marxist historiographical approach to analyse the English
bourgeois revolution. His work highlights the strengths of Hill and Brailsford
but also points to their political shortcomings. Rees, a longtime member of the
Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and co-founder of Counterfire, authored key works
such as "The Algebra of Revolution" (1998) and notably "The
Leveller Revolution" (2016), which explores themes similar to
Brailsford’s. He provides an earnest scholarly view of the English Revolution
from a leftist perspective. Nonetheless, from a Marxist/Trotskyist standpoint,
both Rees and Counterfire operate as a pseudo-left, projecting a radical front
while subordinating working-class political independence to broad front
tactics, such as Coalitions like Stop the War, which link workers with
bourgeois-liberal and establishment forces. Rees has played a key role in this
strategic orientation.
As a result, despite his competent historical scholarship,
Rees's political actions often undermine the very lessons of the English
Revolution, such as the idea that the bourgeoisie betrays its revolution when
the plebeian masses push beyond property boundaries, and that the working class
needs its own independent political leadership. Brailsford deserves better than
to be pressed into service as a respectable ancestor for Counterfire's brand of
left reformism. He was a serious socialist grappling with real questions. The
tragedy is that the tradition he inhabited, sincere in its individual
representatives, was organically incapable of providing the revolutionary
leadership the working class required.
The Levellers and the
struggle for Socialism Today
The Levellers' experience offers deep lessons for today's
working class. The key lesson is that, regardless of how radical the democratic
demands are during a revolutionary crisis, they cannot be achieved unless the
working class or its equivalent seizes political power directly. While the
Levellers controlled the army and had street support, they lacked a party and a
clear program to challenge the bourgeoisie for state control as a unified
class; they merely pressured it. Cromwell understood this dynamic, which
allowed him to outmanoeuvre and ultimately dismantle them.
Engels, in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, summarised the
main lesson from the entire bourgeois revolutionary period: the ideological
forms through which class interests manifested such as Puritanism, natural
rights theory, and millenarianism were merely the historical guise in which
emerging class forces presented themselves The Levellers, by demanding
"freeborn rights," articulated the revolutionary democratic
aspirations of the emerging plebeian classes in a language accessible to them.
The Diggers, led by Gerrard Winstanley, went even further, explicitly
communalistic in their demands, occupying common land and arguing that true
freedom required the abolition of property itself. Brailsford's book touches on
this dimension, though Winstanley is not its central focus. From a Marxist
standpoint, the Diggers represent the most historically prescient current of
the English Revolution, expressing in embryonic and utopian form the communist
impulse that would only find its scientific foundation two centuries later with
Marx and Engels. In this respect, readers would do well to examine John
Gurney's work on the diggers and Winstanley.
'The Levellers and the English Revolution' is Brailsford's
most significant work historically, showcasing both his strengths and
limitations. His strengths are notable: he vividly portrayed the Levellers as
historical figures, reconstructed the Putney Debates with remarkable clarity,
and took their radical democratic agenda seriously at a time when mainstream
historiography overlooked them. On the other hand, his limitations are also
evident: his framework was rooted in a liberal-democratic lineage, viewing the
Levellers as precursors to parliamentary reform, rather than employing a
rigorous Marxist analysis of the class forces that drove and limited the
English bourgeois revolution.
The Levellers and the English Revolution is a crucial and
accessible book about a highly intense yet often overlooked phase in the
history of class struggle. Brailsford's work should be read alongside Trotsky's
Where Is Britain Going?, Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down* and God's
Englishman, as well as Engels's analysis of bourgeois revolutions in Socialism:
Utopian and Scientific. It shows that major revolutionary upheavals often
produce unforeseen forces, and their success hinges on political leadership
capable of completing the revolution. This remains a vital lesson for the
working class in today’s revolutionary movements.
