Mike Haynes has been a member of the British Socialist
Workers Party (SWP) for many years. The political framework of *History and
Revolution* reflects the SWP's ideological roots, mainly shaped by Tony Cliff,
the party's founder. Understanding this context is crucial, and within this framework, the ICFI should offer clear and pointed criticisms.
The SWP is not a Trotskyist organisation. Cliff's concept of
"state capitalism"—which suggests that the Soviet Union under Stalin
evolved into a form of capitalism—was introduced in 1948 mainly as a political
strategy. This move aimed to help the SWP stay neutral during the Korean War,
rather than defending the Soviet Union against imperialist forces. It was more
an opportunist adaptation than a genuine Marxist analysis. The ICFI, led by
James Cannon and later Gerry Healy and David North, identified the Cliff
tendency as a revisionist deviation that split from the Fourth International,
rather than a true continuation of Trotskyism.
This political heritage influences how the SWP approaches
the history of revolutions. Since the SWP cannot defend the Soviet Union as a
degenerated workers' state—because Cliff's theory rejects that it was ever a
workers' state after Stalin—it lacks a clear explanation of what went wrong
with the Russian Revolution. The key contribution of the Trotskyist
movement—the idea that Stalinism was a bureaucratic degeneration of a genuine
workers' revolution, not its inevitable outcome—is missing from the SWP's framework.
Consequently, even sincere SWP historians tend to separate the defence of
Marxist historical method from their support for the political program of the
Fourth International. They can argue that revolutions occur for justified
reasons. Still, they fail to explain the betrayal of those revolutions, thus
preventing them from drawing the programmatic conclusions necessary for the
working class.
Refuting Revisionism champions a left-wing stance advocating
for revolutionary history and opposes conservative and liberal revisionist
narratives. It challenges figures such as François Furet on the French
Revolution, as well as Robert Conquest and Orlando Figes on the October
Revolution. While defending the revolutionary historical record against
bourgeois misrepresentations is crucial, a Marxist must also scrutinise the
underlying perspective to determine whether it truly presents a revolutionary
vision for the working class. When examined within the intellectual
and political landscape, this stance reveals significant issues.
This collection, featuring Bensaïd advising socialist youth
not to focus on studying the Russian Revolution, is edited by the International Socialist Tendency (with Haynes linked to the British SWP and Wolfley associated with the NPA/France Insoumise) and cannot offer that response. The IS
tradition has its own core issues with the Russian Revolution, having
historically rejected Trotsky's analysis of the USSR and fluctuated between
different forms of accommodation to Stalinism and social democracy.
Revisionism and the
English Revolution
The question regarding the English Revolution lies at the
crossroads of two major historiographical debates: whether the events of the
1640s truly represent a bourgeois revolution, and what influence the popular
radical movements — including the Levellers, the Diggers, and various sects had
in it. The "revisionist" school, which gained prominence in British
academic history especially from the 1970s onward, challenged the first
question by denying that a bourgeois revolution actually occurred. Scholars
like Conrad Russell and John Morrill maintained that the conflict was primarily
driven by royal mismanagement, court faction struggles, and religious
contingencies, rather than by profound structural class conflicts. They also
dismissed the idea of a rising bourgeoisie as a form of Marxist teleology.
This revisionist turn was a politically charged academic
shift. As Ann Talbot's excellent analysis of Christopher Hill indicates, the
critique of the idea of bourgeois revolution was intertwined with the broader
intellectual backlash following the working class's setbacks in the 1970s and
80s, which gained momentum after the fall of the USSR. The denial of the
revolutionary significance of the 1640s was part of a larger ideological effort
to eliminate the concept of revolution from historical study.
If we see the English Revolution simply as a
misunderstanding between the king and Parliament, the French Revolution as
nothing more than a panic among scared nobles, and the Russian Revolution as
just a Bolshevik coup, it becomes unlikely to believe that large groups of
people can purposefully overthrow an entire social system.
"Radicalism and
Revisionism in the English Revolution”
Geoff Kennedy's research on revisionism and the English
Revolution is a significant semi-Marxist critique of the rewriting of
17th-century British history in the late 20th century. His key contribution is
his essay, "Radicalism and Revisionism in the English Civil War,"
which appeared in the 2007 edited volume History and Revolution: Refuting
Revisionism published by Verso Books.
Kennedy's earlier works, like *Diggers, Levellers, and
Agrarian Capitalism* (2008), significantly advance the Marxist interpretation
of the English Revolution. He seeks to contextualise the radical movements of
the 1640s and 1650s—primarily the Levellers and the Diggers—within England's
transition to agrarian capitalism, heavily drawing on Ellen Meiksins Wood and
Robert Brenner's 'Political Marxism.' Although this approach is valuable, it
also raises critical questions from an orthodox Marxist viewpoint.
Kennedy emphasises the social and economic factors of the
English Revolution, challenging revisionist historians who mainly viewed it as
religious disputes, constitutional errors, or luck. Unlike revisionists such as
Conrad Russell, John Morrill, and others, Kennedy contends that the revolution
had a genuine class aspect, with radical movements representing actual social
conflicts arising from changes in land and farming relations in England.
His emphasis on the Diggers, led by Gerrard Winstanley, is
especially significant. The Diggers are among the most notable early examples
of communist ideas in history. Winstanley's belief that the earth should be a
shared resource for everyone, and that land privatisation is the root of
oppression. That true freedom involves low-income people working the land
collectively went beyond what the bourgeois revolution could accept or achieve.
Kennedy rightly sees the Diggers not just as religious eccentrics but as
representing the most impoverished groups in the English countryside, those
being driven out by enclosure and agricultural commercialisation.
The Levellers, including Lilburne, Overton, and Walwyn,
promoted a more advanced political agenda focused on the interests of artisans
and small producers: popular sovereignty, a written constitution, religious
toleration, legal equality, and manhood suffrage with some restrictions. Their
Agreement of the People was a truly revolutionary democratic document.
Kennedy's analysis of the connection between the Levellers and Cromwell's Grandees,
highlighted by the Putney Debates of 1647 and the suppression of the Leveller
mutinies at Burford in 1649, accurately identifies this as a pivotal moment in
the revolution's class dynamics.
Kennedy's theoretical
framework
Kennedy’s Political Marxism Framework, based on Wood and
Brenner's "Political Marxism," highlights the particularities of the
English transition to capitalism in agriculture. It focuses on the unique role
of the capitalist landlord-tenant-labourer relationship, the early commercialisation
of farming, and the dispossession of peasants through enclosure. This approach
is a significant improvement over simpler base-superstructure theories and
effectively links radical movements to specific social relations.
Nonetheless, the Political Marxism framework has certain
inconsistencies. Wood, for example, strongly resisted labelling the English
Revolution as a "bourgeois revolution" in the traditional Marxist
sense. She believed the bourgeoisie did not lead the revolution and that
capitalism in England developed primarily through agrarian, rather than
commercial or industrial, capital. This creates a paradoxical stance:
recognising the period's revolutionary nature while distancing it from the
classic Marxist classification. This stance is a partial concession to the
revisionist view, but it risks obscuring the global importance of the English
Revolution as the first major bourgeois revolution. As Engels stated in his
introduction to *Socialism: Utopian and Scientific*, it was the event that
first raised the banner of the modern bourgeoisie against feudal monarchy.
The Trotskyist view, as exemplified by Ann Talbot's
interpretation of Christopher Hill, emphasises the importance of a revolution's
fundamental social goals. It focuses on the mode of production it supports and the long-term interests at stake, rather than on whether participants explicitly see themselves as bourgeois revolutionaries or whether the bourgeoisie
directly 'created' the revolution in a narrow sociological sense. For example,
Cromwell didn't need to be a Manchester manufacturer to serve capitalism's interests.
As Trotsky noted, Cromwell was "a revolutionary leader of the
bourgeoisie" who used the New Model Army as a political tool, often
purging Parliament to advance his class's aims.
The Levellers and
Diggers: Historical Limits and Revolutionary Significance
From a Marxist perspective, Kennedy's work raises a crucial
question: what were the social and historical limitations of these radical
movements, and what can we learn from them? The Levellers primarily embodied
the interests of the petty bourgeoisie — small producers, artisans, and
yeomanry who aimed to engage with the rising capitalist system more equally,
rather than overthrow it. Their call for manhood suffrage explicitly excluded
servants and those on poor relief, representing the rural proletariat and the
most marginalised groups.
During Cromwell's Grandees' discussion at Putney, the
notable exchange between Commissary-General Ireton and Colonel Rainsborough
highlighted the class divide: Ireton defending property as fundamental to
constitutional rights. At the same time, Rainsborough claimed that "the
poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he." The
Levellers ultimately struggled with this internal conflict, torn between their
democratic ideals and their status as property-owning classes.
The Diggers aimed for common land ownership, representing a
true communist ideal. However, Winstanley's version was a utopian form of
communism by the dispossessed peasantry, not rooted in the scientific socialism
driven by capitalist development. In 1649, the conditions for a socialist
revolution, such as a modern industrial proletariat, socialised production, and a working class capable of seizing and managing the means of production, were
absent. This isn't a critique of Winstanley but an acknowledgement of
historical limitations. Engels highlighted this in "Socialism: Utopian and
Scientific," noting that many early communist ideas, from Münzer during
the German Reformation to the Enragés in the French Revolution and the Diggers
in England, voiced the hopes of classes unlikely to have a future in the
nascent capitalist system.
Kennedy and
Revisionism
Kennedy's focus on revisionism is a strong point in his
work. He rightly recognises that the political motive behind the revisionist school's denial of a bourgeois revolution is to naturalise capitalism by
dismissing the need for violent overthrow. This also aims to undermine Marxist
historical analysis during the 1980s-90s, when the ruling class was gaining
ground. This same drive contributed to the development of the "end of
history" idea and postmodern critiques of historical materialism.
Kennedy's support for the Marxist framework can be expanded
to include an international perspective. As Ann Talbot observed regarding Hill,
the limitation of the "people's history" tradition was its primarily
national focus. The English Revolution did not happen in isolation; it was part
of a broader European crisis in the seventeenth century. The ideas it
promoted—such as natural rights, popular sovereignty, religious toleration, and
constitutional government—contributed directly to the Enlightenment and inspired
later American and French revolutions. The Levellers' Agreement of the People
was a precursor to the American Declaration of Independence. John Locke
formalised the political ideas of the English Revolution into a framework that
American and French revolutionaries adopted. Viewing the English Revolution
solely through the lens of English agrarian conditions, as the Political
Marxism approach often does, overlooks its global significance as the initial
stage of the bourgeois revolutionary era.
Overall, Kennedy's chapter provides a serious and compelling
contribution. It defends the Marxist framework against revisionist
perspectives, recognises the social significance of radical movements, and
clarifies how agrarian capitalism shaped the revolution. Nonetheless, it is
somewhat limited by the views of the Political Marxism school, which often
dismisses the classical "bourgeois revolution" idea and interprets
the revolution too narrowly at a national level. The Trotskyist perspective offers
a valuable correction: the English Revolution was a key global event of
bourgeois change, whose full significance can only be understood in an
international context. Its radical origins—the Diggers and Levellers—also hint,
albeit prematurely, at the eventual overthrow of capitalism through deliberate
revolutionary action by the working class.
Daniel Bensaïd: The
Central Problem
The most notable figure in this collection is Daniel
Bensaïd, a leading theorist of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR) in
France and a key member of the Pabloite United Secretariat. In February 2008,
just months before this book was published, he spoke at a forum at Socialist
Party headquarters in Paris, alongside Henri Weber, a co-founder of the LCR who had long since
become a PS senator and European deputy, openly supporting the capitalist
market.
What did Bensaïd say at this forum? He didn't challenge
Weber's praise of "market freedom." Instead, he told the audience he
saw little chance for revolutionary socialism in the near future, citing the
influx of hundreds of millions of Asian workers into the global labour market as
a factor that would "permanently lower living standards"—a defeatist,
petty-bourgeois viewpoint that dismisses the revolutionary potential of the
global working class. Most tellingly, he told the Socialist Party crowd that if
young LCR members took a class on the Russian Revolution, "they're bored
silly," even though he's a contributor to a book supposedly meant to
defend revolutionary history!
This is no accidental contradiction. It reveals the core
dishonesty within the pseudo-left's engagement with Marxist history. Bensaïd
and the LCR/NPA tradition evoke revolutionary memory in theory but, in
practice, do everything to keep the working class subordinate to bourgeois
parties. They present the idea of revolution as a cultural relic, while
systematically undermining the revolutionary program as a dynamic political
goal. His description of himself at that meeting as a "Leninist rather
than a Trotskyist," along with his attempt to portray Lenin as merely an
opportunist, illustrates his aim to distance Lenin from the theoretical lineage of Marxism that Trotsky represented.
Lars T. Lih
Lih is a dedicated scholar whose work on Lenin,
especially *Lenin Rediscovered*, offers valuable insights into Bolshevism
as an autonomous movement rather than a caricature. His effort to rehabilitate
Lenin's *What Is to Be Done?* from decades of liberal and social-democratic
misinterpretation is noteworthy. However, Lih functions as a non-Marxist
academic historian; his focus is on illuminating history without linking it to
a current political agenda.
His main thesis in *Lenin Rediscovered* is an academically
respectable revision: he suggests that the interpretation of *What Is to Be
Done?* (1902) as a top-down, elitist plan for a vanguard party—where
professional revolutionaries impose socialism on a passive working class—has
been mistaken, especially in the West. Lih contends this is incorrect.
He contends that Lenin's ideas were not revolutionary leaps
regarding consciousness but were significantly shaped by German Social
Democracy—especially Karl Kautsky—and involved adapting traditional Kautskyism
to Russian conditions. The famous excerpt in WITBD where Lenin quotes Kautsky, asserting that socialist consciousness should be imparted to workers "from without" (von aussen), is, as Lih explains, not a groundbreaking innovation but rather reflects the common stance of the Second International.
Lih's work offers an important correction to right-wing
criticisms of Lenin. Yet, limiting the focus to this diminishes our
appreciation of Lenin's wider historical role: as the founder of the Third
International, a key figure in the October Revolution, and a successor to a
revolutionary legacy continued by Trotsky and the Fourth International, a legacy
that still holds significant relevance today.
Enzo Traverso and
Geoff Eley
Both are academics operating within the broad field of
"critical theory" and left-liberal historiography. Traverso's work on
violence, fascism, and European history is intellectually serious but embedded
in a Frankfurt School framework that, as David North has analysed in depth,
ultimately leads away from the revolutionary Marxist perspective. Geoff Eley, a
distinguished historian of European labour movements, operates within a broadly
social-democratic intellectual horizon — his work charts the decline of
the left without pointing toward the program needed to reconstitute it on
genuine socialist foundations.
Enzo Traverso is perhaps best known for his work on European
fascism, revolutionary violence, the Holocaust, and — most tellingly — his
concept of left melancholy. His book Left-Wing Melancholia (2016) argues that
the contemporary left is defined by mourning for a lost world of socialist
possibilities, dwelling in the ruins of defeated revolutions and collapsed
utopias. He draws heavily on Walter Benjamin's famous essay on the "left
melancholy" of the Weimar era, as well as on the broader Frankfurt School
tradition.
Traverso's observation highlights that many academic and
petty-bourgeois radicals are demoralised and disoriented. However, his
political conclusions and the intellectual framework he employs to interpret
this are deeply incompatible with Marxism. His notion of "left
melancholy" interprets the setbacks of the 20th century as indicative of a
fundamental rift between socialism and historical progress, implying that the
chance for a socialist revolution is either hidden or no longer attainable.
Traverso's deep engagement with the Frankfurt School deepens
this issue. As David North discusses in his book The Frankfurt School,
Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left, the Frankfurt School's
original premise was to abandon the revolutionary working class as a key driver
of change.
Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse, writing during the era of Stalinism and fascism, claimed that capitalism had subsumed the proletariat,
hindering its ability to lead emancipation efforts. This change led to a
greater focus on cultural critique, aesthetic theory, and philosophical negativity
rather than on the political mobilisation of workers. Traverso follows this entire
tradition. While his historical work is knowledgeable and occasionally
insightful on fascism and memory, its core principles fundamentally oppose the
Marxist agenda.
His interpretation of revolutionary violence and utopia also
leans towards a moral-aesthetic assessment that detaches from class analysis.
For Traverso, the issue of revolutionary violence mainly becomes an ethical and
aesthetic concern focusing on how we remember, mourn, and portray it rather than a political matter: considering
the class forces involved, the programs promoted or betrayed, and the
responsibility of particular political tendencies for specific defeats.
Geoff Eley and the
Retreat from Class
Geoff Eley is a prominent historian specialising in modern
Europe, with a focus on Germany and the European left. His notable publications
include Reshaping the German Right and Forging Democracy: The History of the
Left in Europe, 1850–2000. Eley also played a central role in the so-called
"cultural turn" in social history, which is linked to the journal
Social History. This shift is more controversially associated with a move away from E.P. Thompson's emphasis on class-based social history toward a focus on discourse, culture, and identity.
Eley's trajectory offers valuable insights from a Marxist
perspective. Initially, his work adhered to Marxist social history, focusing on
the German bourgeoisie, the Wilhelmine right, and the structural contradictions
of German capitalism. However, influenced by post-structuralism, Foucault, and
the "linguistic turn," Eley gradually shifted away from prioritising class as the main analytical category. His 1994 co-edited volume, 'Becoming
National,' along with later research on gender, identity, and recognition
politics, signified a significant move toward the cultural-theoretical issues
that had permeated much of academic social history by the 1990s.
This shift—from emphasising class analysis to focusing on
discourse and identity—was not merely a neutral change in approach. It mirrored
the broader intellectual retreat of the academic left following Thatcherism,
the decline of the labour movement, and ultimately, the collapse of the Soviet
Union. The common argument was that "class reductionism" was being
replaced by a more "complex" understanding of social dominance.
However, what was genuinely being forsaken was the fundamental theoretical
framework needed to understand capitalism and identify those with the power to
alter it. As the ICFI affirms, the working class remains the only force with
both the objective interests and the social influence to overthrow capitalism—a
truth no refined cultural critique can negate.
Eley's "Forging Democracy" offers a comprehensive
account of the history of European socialist, labour, and social-democratic movements.
Nonetheless, its evaluative lens is mainly social-democratic rather than
explicitly Marxist. It portrays Social Democratic parties as the rightful
representatives of workers' hopes, views the Bolshevik revolution and the
Communist International as problematic deviations, and remains silent on why
social democracy repeatedly let down the working class—from 1914 through the
Weimar era, the post-war welfare system, and beyond. The ICFI's
interpretation—focused on the crisis of revolutionary leadership and the
working class's subjugation to reformist and Stalinist bureaucracies—is not
apparent within Eley's perspective.
Critical Theory as an
Alternative to Revolution
Traverso and Eley, despite focusing on different aspects,
share common ground within a broader intellectual trend that emerged after the decline of academic Marxism in the 20th century. Both are dedicated
scholars who critically examine historical issues. They are not mere defenders
of capitalism. However, their approaches have shifted towards emphasising cultural critique, ethical considerations, and identity-focused history,
replacing the revolutionary Marxist agenda.
David North pinpointed this exact issue in his critique of
the Frankfurt School's political heritage. The complex pessimism inherent in
critical theory, emphasising the "administered society," the
colonisation of consciousness, and the seeming impossibility of direct
revolutionary action, served as the intellectual framework that led many
academic radicals to rationalise their detachment from real class struggles.
Consequently, as the WSWS pointed out in its critique of postmodernism and the
pseudo-left, there was a "flight from historical truth," in which
objective historical analysis was replaced by discourse theory, memory studies,
and melancholic aesthetics.
The true antidote is not a simplistic or mechanical form of
Marxism but the genuine tradition: the rigorous historical materialism
developed by Marx and Engels, further refined by Lenin's analysis of
imperialism and the state, and Trotsky's theories of permanent revolution and
revolutionary leadership crises. These theoretical tools do not foster
"left melancholy" because they offer an authentic explanation for the
setbacks of the 20th century—one that looks forward, emphasising the
importance of building the Fourth International, rather than dwelling on the
past with nostalgia.
A volume that assembles pseudo-left academics to
"refute revisionism" in the seminar room, while its most prominent
political contributor assures Socialist Party audiences that revolution is off
the agenda for the foreseeable future, is not a contribution to that fight. It
is, at best, a holding operation for a demoralised intellectual milieu that
seeks to preserve the cultural prestige of "revolution" while having
abandoned its political content.
Haynes and Wolfreys are responding to a genuine, politically
motivated revisionist attack. As David North explains in detail in The Russian
Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century, the USSR's collapse was
quickly followed by a surge of pseudohistorical literature claiming that the
October Revolution and the Soviet Union were the result of a criminal
conspiracy imposing an alien, unworkable dogma on an unsuspecting population.
History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism offers a valuable contribution to the fight against post-1991 historical falsification, and readers will find much merit in it. However, it faces distinct limitations stemming from the political and theoretical confusions within the SWP tendency. The ultimate Trotskyist response to anti-communist historical revisionism is not found in the SWP tradition but in the work of the ICFI. This includes David North's The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century, Vadim Rogovin's Was There an Alternative to Stalinism? series, and the ongoing publications of the World Socialist Web Site. These works unite the defence of the socialist revolution's historical truth with support for the political program of the Fourth International—without which such historical defence remains incomplete.
