A personal library assembled over fifty years is more than a collection of books. It is a material record of intellectual and political development. Moving it to new premises marks the beginning of another stage in a writing project rooted in the history of Marxism, the Trotskyist movement, and the struggle to understand the great revolutionary experiences of the working class.
Over the coming months I will begin packing up my library
and moving it into premises more commensurate with its size. A conservative
estimate puts the collection at around 2,000 volumes, accumulated over half a
century. What might appear from the outside as the relatively mundane business
of boxing books, moving shelves and reorganising a workspace has inevitably
assumed a more personal and political significance.
To dismantle a library is to excavate one's own intellectual
history. Books encountered decades ago reappear. Forgotten arguments return.
The circumstances under which particular works were bought suddenly return.
Each shelf corresponds to a period of life and, in my case, to a stage in a
political development that began in a London comprehensive school during the
1970s and proceeded, through more than one false start and political dead end,
towards Marxism and Trotskyism.
I never assembled the library primarily for possession's
sake. I have never regarded myself as a bibliophile in the conventional sense.
These books were acquired because I wanted to understand something: why society
takes the form it does, why capitalism has survived despite the suffering and
inequality it produces, why revolutionary movements have succeeded or failed,
why Stalinism arose in the Soviet Union, and above all how the experiences of
previous generations of workers and revolutionaries bear upon the problems
confronting the working class today. That process began not with Marx, Lenin or
Trotsky, but with the novel.
Pimlico Comprehensive and the Working-Class Novel
The first books I bought seriously were set texts at Pimlico
Comprehensive School when I was 16. Among the writers I encountered were Alan
Sillitoe, Carson McCullers, Keith Waterhouse, Shelagh Delaney and Stan Barstow.
They occupy only a small physical space in a library that subsequently expanded
into thousands of volumes, but their intellectual significance was
considerable.
These writers emerged from, or sought to represent, social
worlds largely excluded from the respectable version of post-war society.
Sillitoe's factory workers, Delaney's Salford, Barstow's West Riding and the
lonely and marginalised figures inhabiting McCullers's American South opened up
experiences remote from the official culture presented by newspapers,
television and the political establishment.
For a working-class teenager, the effect was considerable.
Literature revealed that the experiences surrounding you could themselves
become the subject of serious art. But it simultaneously raised problems it
could not resolve. Why were people's lives organised in this way? Why did some
possess wealth and power while others sold their labour merely to live? Why did
class determine so much about an individual's possibilities?
The best of these novels registered the human consequences
of class society with extraordinary sensitivity. Still, literature by itself
could not provide a scientific explanation of the social relations producing
those consequences. That required an encounter with history and politics. Those
first books were therefore instrumental in my movement towards the left. Half a
century later, they remain on my shelves.
Militant, Stalinism and Trotsky's History
Once politics became a serious interest, my book-buying
accelerated dramatically. The Militant Tendency, then operating within the
Labour Party, maintained an extensive book catalogue, and I began ordering from
it with considerable enthusiasm. I eventually spent more than £1,000, a
substantial sum at the time. The scale of my purchases evidently attracted
someone's attention because two young Militant members were eventually
dispatched to my door to recruit me.
My membership lasted approximately six months. The promise
of socialism attracted me. What proved inadequate was Militant's political
perspective, centred on transforming the Labour Party into an instrument for
socialist change. The organisation treated the existing labour movement as a
vehicle through which socialism would somehow emerge, rather than subjecting it
to the historical and political examination its own record demanded.
The books survived my membership. Most remain in the
library. I subsequently joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, searching
again for a political organisation capable of explaining capitalism and
providing a strategy for its overthrow. That experience lasted another six
months. It was enough. There is perhaps some historical justice in the fact
that, while the library contains materials from virtually every other period of
my political development, it contains no books from my brief membership of the
Stalinist Communist Party.
The decisive intellectual influence of these years came from
an entirely different political tradition. At 17 I read Leon Trotsky's History
of the Russian Revolution. Few books I have encountered subsequently have
equalled its impact. Here history was no longer presented principally as the
actions of governments, ministers and celebrated individuals. Trotsky
reconstructed revolution as a living process in which millions of human beings
entered history consciously.
The events of 1917 emerged neither as a conspiracy nor as
the inevitable outcome of impersonal forces. The Russian Revolution was
presented as an immense confrontation of classes, parties and programmes, in
which objective conditions created revolutionary possibilities but political
leadership ultimately determined whether those possibilities were realised. Trotsky's
work demonstrated what Marxist historical writing could achieve. It united the
reconstruction of events with an analysis of the class forces underlying them
and, above all, with an understanding of the decisive role of revolutionary
consciousness and leadership.
The implications extended far beyond 1917. If the October
Revolution represented the working class's conscious seizure of power under
Bolshevik leadership, then Stalinism could not be identified with Bolshevism.
The bureaucratic regime that subsequently emerged required a historical
explanation. Trotsky provided that explanation through his struggle against the
degeneration of the Soviet state and the nationalist doctrine of "socialism
in one country". Reading the History was therefore decisive in
making me a Marxist. It also gave me an intellectual starting point for
understanding why the crimes committed under Stalin represented not the
fulfilment of October but its bureaucratic betrayal.
The WRP, the Redgrave Books and One Long Night
The library's next major expansion came after I joined the
Workers Revolutionary Party in 1982. My period of candidate membership lasted
an entire year, which I have sometimes thought might qualify as a minor record
in the history of revolutionary politics. I bought extensively during these
years, and much of that material remains in the collection. The books from this
period have acquired an additional historical significance because they belong
to the years immediately preceding the crisis that erupted in 1985 inside the
WRP and the International Committee of the Fourth International.
One of the largest single additions to my library came
shortly before that split. I was told that Vanessa Redgrave was moving house
and needed to dispose of a substantial quantity of books. I bought many of
them. These volumes now occupy a peculiar position within the collection.
Whatever their original provenance, they became part of my own intellectual
history at precisely the point when major political questions concerning the
history and programme of the Trotskyist movement were coming sharply to the
surface.
Among the books I value most highly is a proof copy of Maria
Joffe's One Long Night. Joffe, widow of the Soviet diplomat and Left
Oppositionist Adolph Joffe, endured decades of imprisonment and persecution
under Stalinism. Her memoir belongs to the documentary record of the
destruction of the revolutionary generation associated with October and of
those who continued to resist bureaucratic reaction.
Such books matter because the struggle over historical
memory is itself political. Stalinism could not consolidate its rule by
physically destroying its opponents alone. It had to falsify the historical
record, erase individuals from revolutionary history and transform the October
Revolution into something compatible with the interests of a privileged
bureaucracy. Trotskyism survived under extraordinarily difficult conditions
because it defended not simply particular individuals or organisational
traditions, but the international socialist programme upon which the Russian
Revolution had been based.
A library containing this literature is therefore more than
an accumulation of political texts. It preserves traces of struggles that the
defenders of the existing order, including its Stalinist and reformist
representatives, repeatedly proclaimed finished. They were not finished.
Birkbeck, the English Revolution and Historical Writing
The library's largest sustained expansion began with my
studies at Birkbeck and the completion of my degree in 2003. At that point
another strand of intellectual development became central: the
seventeenth-century English Revolution.
I had written a dissertation on the subject which, with the
benefit of hindsight, was not particularly good. But dissatisfaction can
sometimes have more productive consequences than satisfaction. The attempt to
find somewhere for my essays eventually contributed to the creation of my
website and, from there, to a much more sustained programme of historical
reading and writing.
The consequences for the bookshelves were dramatic. Probably
around half of the present collection, roughly a thousand books, dates from
this broad period. The shelves expanded to encompass the English Revolution,
the Civil War, the Levellers and other radical movements, the development of
Parliament, religious and political conflict, and the immense historiographical
controversies surrounding the seventeenth century.
But the subject could never be confined to the seventeenth
century itself. Serious study of the English Revolution raises fundamental
questions about historical interpretation. Was it a revolution? What social
forces produced it? What relationship existed between political and religious
ideas and the material interests of contending classes? How should we
understand the Levellers and other radical currents? What was the upheaval's
international significance?
Behind these questions lay the still larger issue of historical materialism. The study of history is never politically innocent. The assault upon Marxist interpretations of the English Revolution did not take place independently of the broader ideological offensive against Marxism during the closing decades of the twentieth century. Historical controversies reflected, in mediated form, the political climate produced by the defeats of the working class, the degeneration of the old labour organisations and eventually the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
My library's expansion consequently followed the development
of these controversies. Books led to other books. Footnotes opened previously
unknown arguments. Historiographical disagreements demanded investigation of
the political assumptions underlying apparently specialised academic disputes. What
began with a relatively poor undergraduate dissertation gradually became a
continuing engagement with the relationship between historical scholarship and
contemporary politics.
Books as the Material Record of a Political Development
Seen together, the 2,000 volumes therefore amount to
something quite different from a conventional private collection. The Sillitoe
and Delaney volumes bought as a schoolboy belong to the discovery that
working-class experience could become a legitimate subject of literature.
Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution belongs to the discovery
that those experiences could be scientifically understood as part of the
historical struggle of classes. The literature accumulated through Militant,
the Communist Party and the WRP records the search for a political movement capable
of acting upon that understanding. The books acquired after Birkbeck record
another development: the attempt to write history rather than consume it.
False starts marked that journey. Some books were
undoubtedly bought and deserved to remain unread, and others were read more
carefully than they deserved. Political development never proceeds in the
straight line imposed upon it retrospectively. One investigates tendencies that
lead nowhere, accepts arguments subsequently rejected, and only gradually
acquires the historical experience necessary to distinguish what is essential
from what is secondary. The value of a serious political library lies partly in
the fact that it preserves these stages rather than concealing them.
Artificial Intelligence and a New Stage
The most recent development introduces another element into
this history. Artificial intelligence has altered the technical conditions
under which an individual can undertake historical and political research. Like
every major technological innovation under capitalism, AI is developing within
definite class relations. Corporations and governments approach it, above all,
from the standpoint of profitability, labour displacement, surveillance,
competitive advantage, and the intensification of exploitation. There is
nothing inherently emancipatory about technology operating within capitalist
property relations. But a Marxist response does not consist of recoiling from
technological development. The productive forces created by capitalism
repeatedly come into conflict with the social relations within which they
develop. The task is to understand both technology's emancipatory potential and
the class interests that determine its present use.
For an individual engaged in historical research, the
possibilities are already considerable. Vast quantities of material can be
searched and compared far more rapidly than previously. Bibliographical trails
can be followed more efficiently. Arguments drawn from different periods and
historiographical traditions can be related to one another. Research that once
required weeks of preliminary investigation can sometimes be organised in a
fraction of that time. That does not abolish the necessity for knowledge. On
the contrary, the ability to evaluate material becomes more important. A
machine can locate relationships between texts, but it cannot substitute for
the political and historical understanding required to determine which
relationships matter, which claims withstand examination and what social
interests underlie competing interpretations.
After fifty years of reading, that distinction is crucial. For
the first time, I feel able to research and write articles at a level
approaching the political and historical understanding accumulated through
decades of reading and political experience. AI has not produced that
understanding. The books did. Political experience did. Historical study did.
The technology makes it possible to mobilise that accumulated knowledge with a
speed and breadth that were previously extraordinarily difficult for an
individual writer working largely alone.
The Library as a Working Archive
This is the significance of moving the library. Over the
coming months, the books will be packed, transported and reorganised in a small
office where they can function properly as a working research collection. The
change is practical, but it also marks the start of a new stage in the
website's development. The intention is not to preserve the collection as a
monument to fifty years of reading. Libraries become intellectually useless
when they become mausoleums. Books justify the space they occupy when they
continue to be read, questioned, compared and used.
The shelves that began with Sillitoe, Delaney, Barstow and
McCullers at Pimlico Comprehensive eventually acquired Marx, Engels, Lenin and
Trotsky; the documentary history of the Russian Revolution and its
degeneration; the literature of the Fourth International; materials from the
WRP years; and an extensive collection dealing with the English Revolution, its
radical movements and the historiographical battles through which its meaning
has been contested.
What links them is not uniformity, because they contain
writers representing every conceivable political and historical standpoint.
What unites the collection is the struggle to understand history. Moving 2,000
books will be physically exhausting. But politically and intellectually the
move represents precisely the opposite of winding things down. It prepares me
for more work. The books accumulated through fifty years of reading are no
longer simply the record of how I arrived at my present standpoint. Properly
organised and combined with the possibilities opened by new technology, they
can become the working archive for a considerably expanded programme of
historical and political writing.
The journey that began with working-class novels read at
Pimlico Comprehensive, passed through the first encounter with Trotsky's
History of the Russian Revolution, the experiences of the revolutionary
movement, and decades spent studying the English Revolution, therefore
continues. Packing the library is not an act of putting the past away. It prepares
for what comes next.
