The Communist Party Historians’ Group (CPHG) holds a paradoxical role in twentieth-century British intellectual history. It produced some of the most influential historians, including Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, E.P. Thompson, Dorothy Thompson, Victor Kiernan, John Saville, George Rudé, and Raphael Samuel. Their archival expertise, literary creativity, and methodological innovations have significantly shaped social history and the “history from below” approach that persists today. However, they produced their work within the political context of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), whose agenda was influenced by the Stalinist bureaucracy’s nationalist leanings. Therefore, a thorough analysis of the Group should focus not on their “Englishness” or cultural perspectives but on the CPGB’s political program, which Stalin himself drafted, approved, and modified.
Gregory Billam’s article, “‘Bringing history to the people’:
the Communist Party Historians’ Group and the national-radical tradition,
1946–1956,” offers a valuable analysis of the CPHG. Using minutes from the
Labour History Archive in Manchester, correspondence with Saville, Grant,
Hobsbawm, and others, along with internal Party documents, Billam skilfully
reconstructs the Group's intellectual history with thorough archival detail.
His research enriches our understanding of the Group’s early meetings, their
discussions on Thomas More, the Levellers, Chartists, and Tom Mann, and their
attempts to connect historical struggles to contemporary political initiatives.
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However, the political inferences he makes from this
material are fundamentally incorrect. They are based on a methodological
assumption that the historians’ nationalism was merely a benign academic stance
rather than a political reflection of the Stalinist agenda. Billam’s main
argument is that both the CPGB leadership and the Historians’ Group championed
a “national-radical tradition,” but with contrasting motives: the Party
leadership used it as a tool, whereas the historians genuinely believed in it
throughout their lives. He argues that their views largely aligned and that the
relationship between the Group and The British Road to Socialism “was not an
uneasy alliance.”
This is correct only in a limited sense because the
historians did not oppose the Party’s nationalist shift. However, Billam sees
this convergence as a matter of scholarly mindset rather than political
agreement. In truth, the alignment he describes was intentional, stemming from
a common ideological base: nationalism, which was grounded in the Stalinist
bureaucracy’s rejection of global socialist revolution and its promotion of
socialism in one country.
To understand why the CPHG adopted the national-radical
tradition, it helps to place their work in the larger context of the
international communist movement's transformation after 1924. Stalin’s rise to
power in the Soviet Union significantly shifted the Comintern’s focus. The
revolutionary internationalism championed by Lenin and Trotsky, which viewed
the October Revolution as the start of a global socialist uprising, gave way to
a nationalist ideology that prioritised the Soviet Union's interests over
international working-class solidarity. This shift had major implications for
communist parties worldwide. The CPGB, like other Comintern sections, had to
reinterpret Marxism through a national perspective, framing socialism not as a
global overthrow of capitalism but as the result of a developing national
tradition.
Billam’s earlier research on CPGB nationalism from 1935 to
1945 reveals how profoundly this perspective influenced the Party’s political
culture. His doctoral thesis on “national communisms” in Britain and Australia
also indicates that post-war communist parties aimed to adapt Marxism to fit
their local political and cultural contexts. However, in his article on the
Historians’ Group, he treats the Group’s nationalism as an independent academic
development rather than a reflection of broader ideological shifts.
The CPHG’s commitment to the national-radical tradition was
driven by a political goal, not mere historical curiosity. Their initial
meetings planned a series on “historic British Communists,” from Thomas More to
the Chartists and Tom Mann, to give the CPGB a meaningful historical narrative.
This work connected medieval and early modern struggles with the Party’s
current agenda, portraying socialism as the natural outcome of England’s
constitutional evolution rather than the result of international revolutionary
efforts. This approach was aligned with The British Road to Socialism, which
depicted socialism as a parliamentary transition facilitated by alliances with
“progressive” segments of the bourgeoisie.
Billam recognises this convergence but incorrectly
attributes its cause. He claims that historians genuinely believed in the
national-radical tradition, whereas the Party leadership used it strategically.
However, this distinction does not hold up under examination. As Party members,
the historians operated within a strictly controlled ideological framework, and
their so-called “convictions” were shaped by the Party's political line. Their
collective silence on issues like the Russian Revolution, fascism's rise,
Stalinist degeneration, the Moscow Trials, and the Spanish Civil War was not
due to scholarly disinterest but was driven by political necessity. Addressing
these topics honestly would have meant confronting Stalinism’s record and
Trotsky’s critique, a task impossible within the CPGB.
Billam’s mistake is to view the historians’ nationalism as
merely a cultural preference rather than a political stance. He sees their
emphasis on English radicalism as an aspect of “Britishness,” confined to Great
Britain, rather than part of a broader global story. However, this
“Britishness” was more than just a cultural perspective; it was the ideological
expression of Stalinism in Britain. The historians’ nationalism was not a
simple deviation from Marxism, but rather the way Marxism manifested in Britain
under Stalinist influence.
The CPGB’s achievements, including its pioneering social
history, recovery of popular movements, and methodological innovations, should
be viewed within this political framework. While their contributions are
genuine, the CPGB's ideological limits shaped them. Billam’s archival research
enhances our knowledge of the Group’s internal dynamics, but his interpretive
lens conceals the key political process that led to the convergence he
discusses.
A Marxist analysis must start with the contrary assumption:
that the historians’ nationalism was not merely academic but a political
embodiment of the Stalinist agenda. Their support for the national-radical
tradition stems from ideological motives, not personal disposition.
Acknowledging this is essential to grasp the true strengths and weaknesses of
the Communist Party Historians’ Group.
The British Road to Socialism: A Programme of National
Retreat
Gregory Billam’s article briefly notes that The British Road
to Socialism (BRS) was “a Soviet-sanctioned national strategy.” This downplays
the significance. In reality, the programme was drafted following Harry
Pollitt’s talks in Moscow, with Stalin personally reviewing, modifying, and
approving the final version. The BRS was neither an organic outcome of British
political conditions nor a creative Marxist adaptation to local circumstances.
Instead, it reflected the Stalinist bureaucracy's foreign policy: a
nationalist, parliamentary, and explicitly anti-revolutionary stance enforced
on Communist parties across the West.
By the late 1940s, the Soviet bureaucracy ceased pretending
to support world socialist revolution. Its main focus shifted to safeguarding
its privileges and maintaining stability within its sphere of influence. The
Cominform instructed Western Communist parties to act not as revolutionary
leaders but as pressure groups against U.S. dominance. Their role was to defend
“national independence,” oppose NATO, foster patriotic feelings, and portray
the Soviet Union as the peacekeeper. The BRS represented the British expression
of this strategy.
All that Billam outlines stems from this political base. The
historians weren’t independently uncovering a distinct national radical
tradition; they were laying the cultural and historical groundwork for the
CPGB’s new stance. Rodney Hilton’s call for the Group “to mobilise the
patriotic instincts of the people” against the Tories and Labour’s right,
accused of “selling” Britain to Washington, wasn't a quirky detour. J.R.
Campbell’s statement that the CPGB was “the patriotic British party above all
others” wasn’t just rhetorical flair. Pollitt’s foreword to A.L. Morton’s
centenary history, depicting Stalin as a modern Cromwell, wasn’t a personal
whim. These were ideological expressions of a political agenda: replacing
internationalism with nationalism and framing the defence of Britain as a
socialist duty.
Billam considers the historians’ notion of Britishness and
the Party leadership’s anti-American stance as two forms of a single “national
radical tradition.’ In contrast, a Marxist perspective begins from a different
assumption. The belief in a continuous national lineage from John Ball through
the Levellers and Chartists to King Street is not a factual discovery but a
political narrative. Morton’s idea of a ‘glorious succession' culminating with
“the Communists today” illustrates this point. The British working class does
not follow a ‘national road’; instead, it is part of an international class
whose struggles during these years were centred not in London, but in Berlin,
Budapest, Korea, and across colonies. The nationalist sentiment among
historians was not merely scholarly bias; it reflected the ideological agenda
pushed from Moscow.
Billam’s portrayal of the Popular Front is arguably the
weakest aspect of his article. He echoes Hobsbawm by calling it a “moral and
political awakening” and “the glue that held the Group together.” He cites
Hobsbawm’s statement “we were always
instinctively Popular Fronters” without
offering critical analysis. This represents a notable methodological mistake.
The Popular Front was not merely a mood or cultural attitude; it was a
strategic move decided at the Seventh Congress of the Communist International
in 1935, which placed the working class under the influence of the
"democratic” wing of the bourgeoisie.
In Spain, the Popular Front disarmed the revolution, opening
the path for Franco’s victory. Meanwhile, in France, it redirected the 1936
general strike to support the Third Republic. Trotsky warned that such
alliances risked suffocating the revolution under the guise of defending
democracy. The Popular Front served as the ideological tool through which
Stalinism shifted from internationalism to nationalism and from revolutionary
politics to class collaboration.
The pageants, “marches of English history,” and slogans like
“communism is English” reinforced this policy culturally. Billam records these
events carefully but never explores their purpose. They weren’t about ‘moral
awakening’ but served as tools of class collaboration. They offered cultural
and historical justifications for aligning with “progressive” bourgeois forces,
supporting parliamentary gradualism, and moving away from revolutionary
politics. The Popular Front acted as the ideological link between Stalinist
nationalism and the historians’ cultural aims, providing the framework for the
Group to build a usable national history for a broad popular alliance.
Billam’s archival research indicates that the Historians’
Group was closely connected to the CPGB’s political activities. Their
gatherings were not merely academic but served as forums for political debate,
aimed at generating content for Party education, propaganda, and cultural
initiatives. Their emphasis on medieval and early modern England, such as the
Peasants’ Revolt, the Levellers, the Diggers, and the Chartists, was driven not
just by scholarly curiosity but by political intent. These movements were
strategically portrayed as forerunners of constitutional reform, national
progress, and democratic development, aligning with the narrative the BRS
promoted.
The Group’s silence on key twentieth-century events such as
the Russian Revolution, fascism’s rise, Stalinist decay, the Moscow Trials, and
the Spanish Civil War was deliberate. It was politically motivated because
openly addressing these topics would have entailed confronting Stalinism’s
record and Trotsky's critique of it, which was impossible within the CPGB.
Billam’s interpretation masks this political truth. By viewing the historians’
nationalism merely as a cultural trait, he separates their work from the
political agenda behind it. This creates a depoliticised narrative in which the
historians are seen as independent thinkers who coincidentally shared the
Party’s nationalist stance. In reality, their nationalism was an ideological
manifestation of the Stalinist program.
The alignment between the CPGB leadership and the
Historians’ Group stemmed from a shared political stance, not personality,
“Englishness,” or academic interest. It stemmed from Stalinist nationalism,
encapsulated in the doctrine of socialism in one country and outlined in The
British Road to Socialism. While Billam’s archival research provides valuable
insights, his interpretive approach masks the key political force behind the
phenomena he discusses. A Marxist perspective must start from the view that the
historians’ nationalism was not harmless but reflected an imposed political
agenda from Moscow.
The Missing Opposition: Trotskyism and the Crisis of 1956
A notable omission in Gregory Billam’s article is the lack
of discussion about Trotsky and the Fourth International. This is a significant
oversight because it omits a crucial part of understanding British communists’
stance toward Stalinism from 1946 to 1956. The Historians’ Group did not
operate in isolation within a confined sphere of English radical thought,
old-fashioned interests, or internal CPGB disputes. Instead, it was part of a
worldwide movement shaped by the political fallout of Stalinismeffects that
only Trotsky and the Fourth International analysed, predicted, and fought
against.
Writing a history of the CPGB’s ties to Stalinism without
mentioning Trotskyism omits the only clear alternative perspective. It portrays
Stalinism merely as a flawed version of Marxism rather than as a political
counter-revolution examined by the Left Opposition in real time. Additionally,
it treats 1956 as a psychological shock rather than a significant political
event. Consequently, Billam’s account misses the key category that would
explain the rupture he discusses.
Billam focuses on those members of the Historians’ Group who
went on to the New Left and The New Reasoner: Thompson, Saville, Hilton,
and others. He treats their departure from the CPGB as the surfacing of
“existing disagreements and dissent.” But this interpretation collapses once
the Trotskyist alternative is restored to the frame.
One of the Group’s own members, Brian Pearce, joined the
Trotskyist movement. So did Peter Fryer, the Daily Worker’s
correspondent in Budapest, whose dispatches on the Hungarian workers’ councils King
Street censored. Their trajectory raises the question Billam avoids: was the
crisis of 1956 merely the expression of long‑standing irritation with CPGB
bureaucracy, or was it a political confrontation with Stalinism itself?
Pearce and Fryer’s break was not moralistic. It was
political. They concluded correctly that the events of 1956 confirmed Trotsky’s
analysis of the Soviet bureaucracy as a parasitic caste hostile to workers’
democracy and international revolution. Their departure was not a drift into
cultural radicalism but a turn toward the only Marxist current that had
explained the degeneration of the Soviet Union and the betrayals of the
Communist Parties.
Billam’s silence on this trajectory is not accidental. It is
methodological. To acknowledge Pearce and Fryer would require acknowledging
Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism and therefore recognising that the Historians’
Group’s nationalism was not a benign scholarly preference but the ideological
reflection of a political programme imposed from Moscow.
The Silence of the Minutes: Political Rupture, Not
Administrative Gap
Gregory Billam’s note about the Historians’ Group’s minutes
suddenly vanishing in December 1956 and reappearing in 1963 reveals more than
he admits. He dismisses this gap as an archival issue, a mere interruption in
the record that hampers historical continuity. In truth, this silence signifies
the collapse of a political structure.
The Group didn't just cease meetings; it disintegrated
entirely. The 1956 crisis shattered the ideological basis of what the Group had
been. For ten years, the Historians’ Group functioned as the cultural and
historical extension of the CPGB’s Stalinist ideology. Its research provided
the historical context for The British Road to Socialism, the national-radical
tradition, and the Popular Front, framing socialism as the natural outcome of
English constitutional development, parliamentary reform, and patriotic unity.
However, this foundation fell apart because of the repercussions of the
Hungarian workers’ councils.
The Hungarian Revolution of October–November 1956 was not
merely a "disturbance" or a tragic misinterpretation, nor just a
misguided revolt against socialism. It was a workers’ revolution, the most
significant instance of proletarian self-organisation since early Soviet
history. The workers’ councils showed, through their actions, that the working
class could dismantle a Stalinist regime from the ground up. They revealed that
the bureaucracy was not the safeguard of socialism but its destroyer.
For the CPGB, this was a crisis of survival. For the
Historians’ Group, it was a seismic political shift. Their nationalism,
celebrating English radicalism and tracing a native lineage ending with the
CPGB, relied entirely on the belief that the Soviet Union embodied socialism,
even if imperfectly. When that belief shattered, their entire ideological
framework collapsed. The Group’s lack of comment after December 1956 is thus a
clear political response, not merely an administrative one. It signifies the
point at which the historians could no longer uphold the narrative they had
built over ten years.
The minutes do not resume until 1963 because the Group
itself was effectively non-existent, with its members dispersed. SomeThompson,
Saville, Hilton, moved towards the New Left, trying to salvage a moralised,
humanist socialism from the wreckage. Others, such as Hobsbawm, remained loyal
to the CPGB and spent the following thirty years justifying its rightward
shift. A few, Brian Pearce and Peter Fryer, definitively broke with Stalinism
and joined the Trotskyist movement, recognising that the events of 1956
confirmed Trotsky’s view of the bureaucracy as a parasitic caste opposed to
workers’ democracy.
Billam’s account cannot explain this rupture because he
considers the Group’s nationalism a purely scholarly viewpoint rather than an
actively held political ideology. If nationalism is seen simply as a cultural
preference, then 1956 might be viewed as a psychological shock. However, if
nationalism is interpreted as the historical expression of Stalinist politics
in Britain, then 1956 represents a political reckoning when the Group’s
ideological basis was revealed as unsustainable.
The quietness of these minutes speaks volumes, serving as
the most powerful evidence. It captures the fall of a project that couldn't
withstand the clash between Stalinist beliefs and real working-class
conditions. This silence signals the end of the false hope that the CPGB’s
national strategy aligned with Marxist principles and marks the end of
historians’ efforts to legitimise it. The group's silence symbolises a crumbling
political structure.
The Myth of Pre‑1956 Dissidence
One of the most valuable contributions in Gregory Billam’s
article is his challenge to the retrospective myth, promoted above all by Eric
Hobsbawm, that the Historians’ Group was “at war with Stalinism” from its
inception. This myth has shaped much of the secondary literature, especially after
the New Left’s emergence, where the Group is often portrayed as a proto‑dissident
enclave within the CPGB. Billam’s use of the minutes exposes how little
evidence supports this view.
The minutes record grumbling about Emile Burns, irritation
about King Street’s vetting procedures, and frustration that history was
treated as “an interesting appendage” rather than a central component of Party
education. But grumbling over organisational methods is not opposition to a
political line. Bureaucratic annoyance is not ideological dissent. On the
fundamental questions of the national road to socialism, the Popular Front, and
the “Two Camps” thesis, the minutes show agreement, not resistance. The Group
did not oppose the CPGB’s nationalist turn. It provided its historical
justification.
The historians’ construction of a national‑radical tradition
stretching from John Ball and the Levellers through the Chartists to the CPGB was not an autonomous scholarly project. It
was the cultural expression of the Party’s Stalinist programme, codified in The
British Road to Socialism. The Group’s work supplied the usable past for a
political line that substituted nationalism for internationalism and
parliamentary gradualism for revolutionary strategy. Their pageants, pamphlets,
and tercentenary celebrations were not dissident gestures. They were
ideological labour in service of the Party’s nationalist orientation.
This is why the Group’s minutes contain no serious
discussion of the Moscow Trials, the purges, the Nazi–Soviet Pact, the
suppression of the Polish workers, or the bureaucratic degeneration of the
Soviet Union. These were the era's defining political questions, and the Group
avoided them entirely. Their silence was not accidental. It was political. To
confront these issues honestly would have required confronting Trotsky’s
analysis of Stalinism, and that was impossible within the CPGB.
Hobsbawm’s later claim that the Group was “instinctively
anti‑Stalinist” is therefore untenable. His own political trajectory
underscores the point. He remained in the CPGB until its dissolution in 1991,
long after every other major Western Communist Party had abandoned the
Stalinist tradition. He ended his career as Neil Kinnock’s “favourite Marxist,”
a position that speaks less to dissidence than to the Party’s long‑term
accommodation to Labourism. The Group’s reputation as a centre of principled
opposition rests largely on what some of its members did after 1956:
Thompson’s moral revolt, Saville’s break, Hilton’s turn toward the New Left, not
on their conduct before.
Billam’s narrative, however, reproduces a softened version
of this mythology by focusing almost exclusively on the New Left trajectory. He
treats the Group’s post‑1956 dissidents as the natural continuation of earlier
tendencies, rather than as the product of a political rupture. In doing so, he
obscures the alternative path taken by figures like Brian Pearce and Peter
Fryer, who broke not toward cultural radicalism but toward the Trotskyist
movement. Their trajectory reveals that the crisis of 1956 was not merely the
surfacing of “existing disagreements” but a confrontation with Stalinism itself
a confrontation that exposed the bankruptcy of the nationalist programme the
Group had spent a decade elaborating.
By ignoring the Trotskyist alternative, Billam inadvertently
reinforces the myth he seeks to dismantle. The result is a narrative in which
the Group appears as a site of latent dissent that blossomed in 1956, rather
than as an ideological apparatus of the CPGB that fractured under the pressure
of a political crisis it could not explain.
The truth is simpler and more politically consequential: before 1956, the Historians’ Group was not a centre of dissidence. It was a centre of Stalinist nationalism. Its later reputation is a retrospective construction, and Billam’s account, despite its archival strengths, ultimately leaves that construction intact.
Identity Politics and the Academic Detour
When Gregory Billam turns to the limitations of the
Communist Party Historians’ Group, he does not ground his critique in
internationalism or in the political programme that shaped the Group’s work.
Instead, he adopts the now‑standard academic charge, drawing on Priya Satia,
Stuart Ward, and others, that E.P. Thompson’s working class was “white, male,
and British‑born,” and that the Group neglected “transnational bonds” and
imperial history. This framing is familiar, but it is analytically weak. It
mistakes the symptom for the cause.
The historians did neglect the empire. Saville admitted it.
Hobsbawm admitted it. But they did not neglect it because they paid
insufficient attention to race or gender. They neglected it because they shared
the CPGB’s nationalist programme. A perspective that treats the British nation
as the framework of socialist politics will inevitably produce a history that
stops at the white cliffs of Dover. If socialism is imagined as the culmination
of a national‑radical tradition stretching from John Ball to the Chartists to
King Street, then the empire becomes an external appendage rather than a
constitutive part of British capitalism. The problem is not insufficient
diversity. The problem is nationalism.
Identity‑based critiques obscure this political root. They
replace the question of class and programme with the question of
representation. They ask who is included in the narrative rather than why the
narrative is structured as it is. In doing so, they reproduce the very
nationalist framework they claim to challenge. If the problem is that
Thompson’s working class was “white and male,” then the solution becomes adding
more identities to the story, a broader, more inclusive national narrative. But
this leaves the nation itself intact as the organising category. It does not
challenge the political assumption that history should be written within
national boundaries.
Billam’s suggestion, following Stuart Ward, that we should
“rethink Britishness as a global category of analysis” is a perfect example of
this conceptual cul‑de‑sac. It expands the aperture of the national frame but
does not abandon it. It produces a globalised nationalism rather than an
internationalist analysis. It treats the nation as the inevitable horizon of
historical understanding, even when stretched across continents.
The Trotskyist movement insisted on the opposite premise:
the working class is international, and socialism cannot be achieved within
national boundaries. This perspective was not an academic alternative. It was a
political one. It explained why the CPGB embraced nationalism, why the
Historians’ Group constructed a national‑radical tradition, and why their
history remained bounded by Britain. It also explained why the crisis of 1956
shattered the Group: the Hungarian workers’ councils revealed that the working
class could overthrow a Stalinist regime from below, exposing the bankruptcy of
the national road to socialism.
Identity‑based critiques cannot grasp this political rupture
because they miss the political structure that produced the Group’s narrowness.
They treat nationalism as a cultural lens rather than as the ideological
expression of a political programme. As a result, they misdiagnose the problem
and propose solutions that leave the underlying framework untouched.
The answer to the Historians’ Group’s narrowness is not to
diversify the national narrative. It is to abandon the national narrative. It
is to start from the international class struggle, precisely what the
Trotskyist movement insisted on throughout this period. Only then does the
Group’s nationalism appear not as a failure of representation but as the
ideological reflection of the CPGB’s Stalinist programme.
Identity politics cannot resolve this contradiction because
it cannot see it. It critiques the surface while leaving the structure intact.
A Marxist analysis begins from the opposite point: the nation is not the
framework of socialist politics, and any history built on that assumption will
reproduce the limits of the programme that shaped it.
The Limits of the Identity Critique
Billam’s adoption of identity‑based criticism leads him into
a conceptual cul‑de‑sac. He argues that the Historians’ Group’s nationalism can
be corrected by “rethinking Britishness as a global category of analysis.” This
formulation, borrowed from Stuart Ward and others, reflects a broader academic
trend: the attempt to rescue national frameworks by expanding their cultural
boundaries. But widening the frame does not change the structure. It merely
produces nationalism with a broader aperture.
The problem is not that the Historians’ Group’s working
class was “white, male, and British‑born.” The problem is that the Group’s
working class was national. It was conceived as the subject of a
national road to socialism, not as part of an international class whose fate
was being decided in Berlin, Budapest, Korea, Algeria, and across the colonial
world. The nation bounded the Group’s historical imagination because the nation
bounded the CPGB’s political programme. Their history stopped at the white
cliffs of Dover because their politics did.
Identity‑based critiques obscure this political root. They
replace questions of class and programme with questions of representation. They
ask who is included in the narrative rather than why the narrative is
structured as it is. In doing so, they reproduce the very nationalist logic
they claim to challenge. If the problem is framed as insufficient diversity, the
solution becomes adding more identities to the story- a broader, more inclusive
national narrative. But this leaves the nation itself intact as the organising
category. It does not challenge the political assumption that history should be
written within national boundaries.
Billam’s suggestion that Britishness can be “rethought
globally” exemplifies this conceptual impasse. It expands the cultural scope of
the national frame but does not abandon it. It produces a globalised
nationalism rather than an internationalist analysis. It treats the nation as
the inevitable horizon of historical understanding, even when stretched across
continents.
A Marxist analysis begins from the opposite premise: the
working class is international. Its struggles, defeats, and victories cannot be
understood within national boundaries. The decisive events shaping the fate of
the British working class in the mid‑twentieth century did not occur in
Westminster or Trafalgar Square. They occurred in Berlin in 1945, in Korea in
1950, in Budapest in 1956, and across the colonial world as anti‑imperialist
revolutions erupted. The CPGB’s nationalist programme, codified in The British
Road to Socialism, severed British workers from this international context and
replaced it with a mythologised national‑radical tradition.
The Historians’ Group reproduced this framework because they
shared it. Their neglect of empire was not a failure of representation but a
political consequence of the Party’s nationalist orientation. Britain bounded
their history because Britain bounded their politics.
Identity‑based critiques cannot resolve this contradiction
because they cannot see it. They critique the surface while leaving the
structure intact. They treat nationalism as a cultural lens rather than as the
ideological expression of a political programme. As a result, they misdiagnose
the problem and propose solutions that leave the underlying framework
untouched.
The answer is not to diversify the national narrative. The
answer is to abandon it. Only by rejecting the nation as the organising
category can the history of the working class be restored to its proper
terrain: the international class struggle.
Internationalism and the Trotskyist Alternative
Only the Trotskyist movement insisted throughout this period
that the working class is international, that socialism cannot be achieved
within national boundaries, and that Stalinism represented a bureaucratic
counter‑revolution against the internationalist programme of October. This
perspective was not an academic alternative. It was political, the only
coherent analysis of the CPGB’s trajectory and the ideological work of the
Historians’ Group.
Trotsky’s critique explained why the CPGB embraced
nationalism. Stalinism’s doctrine of “socialism in one country” severed the
Soviet Union from the international class struggle and transformed Communist
Parties into instruments of the Kremlin’s foreign policy. In Britain, this
produced The British Road to Socialism, a programme drafted in Moscow
and amended by Stalin himself. The CPGB’s nationalism was not a cultural
preference. It was the political expression of a bureaucratic caste defending
its own interests.
Trotskyism also explained why the Historians’ Group
constructed a national‑radical tradition. Their work was not an autonomous
scholarly project. It was the cultural and historical justification for the
CPGB’s nationalist turn. By tracing a lineage from John Ball to the Chartists
to King Street, the Group provided the usable past for a programme that
replaced international revolution with parliamentary gradualism. Their
nationalism reflected the Party’s political line.
Trotskyism explained why the Popular Front subordinated
the working class to bourgeois democracy. The Popular Front was not a moral
awakening, as Hobsbawm later claimed, nor a cultural sensibility, as Billam
implies. It was a strategy adopted at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in
1935, subordinating the working class to the bourgeoisie's “democratic” wing.
In Spain, it disarmed the revolution. In France, it channelled the general
strike back into the Third Republic. The Historians’ Group’s pageants,
pamphlets, and celebrations of English constitutionalism accompanied this
political strategy.
Trotskyism explained why the British Road to Socialism
presented socialism as parliamentary reform. The BRS was the British
articulation of Stalinism’s nationalist programme. It rejected revolutionary
politics, embraced constitutionalism, and imagined socialism as the culmination
of a national tradition. The Historians’ Group supplied the historical scaffolding
for this programme. Their nationalism was not benign. It was ideological labour
in service of a political line.
Finally, Trotskyism explained why the 1956 crisis
produced rupture rather than reform. The Hungarian workers’ councils
demonstrated that the working class could overthrow a Stalinist regime from
below. They confirmed Trotsky’s analysis of the bureaucracy as a parasitic
caste hostile to workers’ democracy. For the CPGB, this was an existential
crisis. For the Historians’ Group, it was a political earthquake. The Group’s
minutes fall silent because the ideological foundations of their work
collapsed.
Billam’s article cannot explain these phenomena because it
excludes the only framework that can. Without Trotskyism, the CPGB’s
nationalism appears as cultural preference, the Historians’ Group’s project
appears as scholarly temperament, and the rupture of 1956 appears as
psychological shock rather than political reckoning. The result is a narrative
in which nationalism is widened, not abandoned; dissent is moralised, not
politicised; and Stalinism is criticised, but never understood.
A Marxist analysis begins from the opposite point: the working class is international, Stalinism is a bureaucratic counter‑revolution, and any history written within national boundaries will reproduce the limits of the programme that shaped it.
Restoring the Missing Alternative
Gregory Billam’s article is built on impressive archival
foundations. His reconstruction of the Communist Party Historians’ Group’s
internal life its minutes, correspondence, debates, and cultural work is
meticulous. He recovers forgotten discussions, illuminates organisational
tensions, and situates the Group within the broader cultural politics of post‑war
British communism. As empirical scholarship, his work is a genuine
contribution.
But the interpretive framework he builds on top of this
material is politically anaemic. It lacks the conceptual apparatus necessary to
explain the very phenomena he describes. By excluding Trotsky and the Fourth
International, Billam removes from view the only Marxist analysis capable of
making sense of the CPGB’s nationalism, the Historians’ Group’s cultural
project, and the political meaning of the 1956 crisis.
The consequences of this omission are visible throughout his
narrative. Nationalism appears as scholarly temperament rather than as the
ideological expression of Stalinism’s doctrine of “socialism in one country.”
The construction of a national‑radical tradition appears as intellectual
enthusiasm rather than as the cultural labour required by The British Road
to Socialism. The Popular Front appears as moral sensibility rather than as
a strategy of class collaboration the Comintern adopted in 1935. And the
rupture of 1956 appears as administrative discontinuity rather than as
political reckoning.
Billam’s narrative therefore flattens political
contradictions into cultural ones. It treats the CPGB’s nationalist turn as a
matter of “Britishness,” the Historians’ Group’s narrowness as a matter of
“representation,” and the crisis of 1956 as a matter of “dissent.” But these
were not cultural phenomena. They were political outcomes of a political
programme imposed from Moscow, justified by the Popular Front, codified in the
BRS, and shattered by the Hungarian workers’ councils.
Only Trotskyism provides the framework capable of explaining
this trajectory. Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism as a bureaucratic counter‑revolution,
his insistence that the working class is international, and his critique of the
Popular Front as the ideological mechanism of class collaboration illuminate
every major feature of the CPGB’s post‑war politics. They explain why the Party
embraced nationalism, why the Historians’ Group constructed a national‑radical
tradition, why the BRS presented socialism as parliamentary reform, and why
1956 produced rupture rather than reform.
Billam’s exclusion of this framework is not merely an
interpretive choice. It is a conceptual limitation. Without Trotsky, the CPGB’s
nationalism becomes inexplicable, the Historians’ Group’s project becomes
depoliticised, and the crisis of 1956 becomes unintelligible. The result is a
narrative in which the political disappears into the cultural, and the
ideological disappears into the archival.
A Marxist analysis begins from the opposite point. The
historians’ nationalism was not benign. It was the ideological reflection of a
political programme imposed from Moscow. The crisis of 1956 was not the
surfacing of “existing disagreements.” It was a political reckoning with
Stalinism itself. And the silence of the Group’s minutes after December 1956
was not an archival gap. It was the documentary imprint of collapse.
To understand the Historians’ Group, we must restore Trotsky
to the frame. Only then does the Group’s trajectory its formation, its work,
its nationalism, its rupture become intelligible as part of the broader history
of Stalinism and the international class struggle.
Articles and Bibliography
I. Stalinism, the CPGB, and The British Road to
Socialism
- Pollitt,
Harry. The British Road to Socialism. London: Communist Party
of Great Britain, 1951; revised editions 1952, 1958. Essential primary
source. Drafted after consultations in Moscow; amended by Stalin.
- Callaghan,
John. Cold War, Crisis and Conflict: The CPGB 1951–68. London:
Lawrence & Wishart, 2003. Useful for the Party’s post‑war
nationalist orientation and the internal handling of 1956.
- Morgan,
Kevin. Harry Pollitt. Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1993. Documents Pollitt’s Moscow consultations and the Kremlin’s direct
role in shaping CPGB strategy.
- Billam,
Gregory. “‘Bringing history to the people’: the Communist Party
Historians’ Group and the national radical tradition, 1946–1956.” Contemporary
British History (2026).
- Billam,
Gregory. National Communisms: The CPGB and CPA, 1935–1945. PhD
thesis, University of Sheffield, 2020. Shows the depth of CPGB
nationalism before the Historians’ Group even formed.
II. The Communist Party Historians’ Group
- Hill,
Christopher. Puritanism and Revolution. London: Secker &
Warburg, 1958. Classic example of the national‑radical tradition in
historical form.
- Hobsbawm,
Eric. Labouring Men. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964. Contains
essays shaped by CPGB cultural politics.
- Saville,
John. “The Communist Party and the Historians.” Socialist Register
(1970). Saville’s retrospective account is revealing but politically
evasive.
- Samuel,
Raphael. The Lost World of British Communism. London: Verso,
2006. Memoiristic but invaluable for the cultural atmosphere of CPGB
intellectual life.
- McIlroy,
John, and Alan Campbell. The Communist Party of Great Britain and
the Historians. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2019. Sympathetic
but detailed; useful for triangulating Billam’s claims.
III. Popular Front Strategy and Stalinist Nationalism
- Trotsky,
Leon. The Spanish Revolution (1931–39). New York: Pathfinder
Press, 1973. The definitive Marxist critique of the Popular Front.
- Trotsky,
Leon. “The French Revolution and the Popular Front.” In The Crisis
of the French Section. Explains how Popular Frontism channels
revolutionary energy into bourgeois democracy.
- Kershaw,
Ian. “The Popular Front and the CPGB.” Journal of Contemporary
History (1978). Shows how Popular Front strategy shaped CPGB
cultural work.
- Morgan,
Kevin. Bolshevism and the British Left. London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 2006. Documents the CPGB’s adoption of Popular Front politics
and its cultural consequences.
IV. 1956: Hungary, Khrushchev, and the Collapse of CPGB
Ideology
- Fryer,
Peter. Hungarian Tragedy. London: Dennis Dobson, 1956. Primary
source from the Daily Worker correspondent whose dispatches were
censored.
- Pearce,
Brian. “The 1956 Revolt in the CPGB.” Labour Review (1957). Key
Trotskyist account from a former Historians’ Group member.
- Saville,
John, and E.P. Thompson. The New Reasoner (1957–59). Documents
the moral‑humanist revolt of the New Left.
- Anderson,
Perry. Arguments Within English Marxism. London: Verso, 1980. A
devastating critique of the CPGB’s theoretical and political limitations.
- Black,
Lawrence. “The 1956 Crisis in the CPGB.” Twentieth Century British
History (2009). Useful for the organisational fallout and
membership collapse.
V. Trotskyism and the Marxist Critique of Stalinism
- Trotsky,
Leon. The Revolution Betrayed. New York: Pathfinder Press,
1972. The foundational analysis of Stalinism as a bureaucratic counter‑revolution.
- Deutscher,
Isaac. The Prophet Outcast. London: Oxford University Press,
1963. Biographical but indispensable for context.
- Cliff,
Tony. State Capitalism in Russia. London: Pluto Press, 1974. Alternative
Trotskyist analysis; useful for understanding post‑1956 debates.
- Birchall,
Ian. A Rebel’s Guide to Trotsky. London: Bookmarks, 2007. Concise
introduction to Trotsky’s political method.
- Alexander,
Robert J. International Trotskyism, 1929–1985. Durham: Duke
University Press, 1991. Comprehensive reference for the Fourth
International’s development.
VI. Identity Politics, Empire, and the Academic Turn
- Satia,
Priya. Time’s Monster: How History Makes History. London: Allen
Lane, 2020. Representative of the identity‑based critique Billam
adopts.
- Ward,
Stuart. Britishness Since 1870. London: Routledge, 2004. Source
of the “global Britishness” concept Billam invokes.
- Hall,
Catherine. Civilising Subjects. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2002. Important for empire studies, though politically distinct
from your argument.
- Cooper,
Frederick. Colonialism in Question. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005. Useful for critiquing “transnational”
approaches that retain national frameworks.
VII. Archival Sources
- Labour
History Archive and Study Centre (LHASC), Manchester. CPGB files,
Historians’ Group minutes, correspondence of Saville, Grant, Hobsbawm.
- Marx
Memorial Library, London. CPGB pamphlets, cultural materials, Daily
Worker archives.
- International
Institute of Social History (IISH), Amsterdam. Trotsky papers,
Fourth International documents.
[1]
Billam, Gregory. “‘Bringing history to the people’: the Communist Party
Historians’ Group and the national radical tradition, 1946–1956.” Contemporary
British History (2026).
