The Poor in the English Revolution-1640-1649

"For really I think that the poorest he that is in England bath a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore, truly, Sir, I think it is clear that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his consent to put himself under that government. "

Colonel Rainborowe – New Model Army Soldier-Putney Debates

"the necessitous people [the poor] of the whole kingdom will presently rise in mighty numbers; and whosoever they pretend for at first, within a while, they will set up for themselves, to the utter ruin of all the nobility and gentry of the kingdom."

Quoted in Christopher Hill The English Revolution 1640

"thus were the agricultural people, firstly forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary for the wage system."

Karl Marx [Capital]

"This Commonwealth's freedom will unite the hearts of Englishmen together in love, so that if a foreign enemy endeavour to come in, we shall all with joint consent rise to defend our inheritance, and shall be true to one another. Whereas now the poor see, if they fight and should conquer the enemy, yet either they or their children are like to be slaves still, for the gentry will have all. Property divides the whole world into parties, and is the cause of all wars and bloodshed and contention everywhere." When the earth becomes a common treasury again, as it must, then this enmity in all lands will cease."

Gerrard Winstanley, Digger Leader

When it comes to the matter of the poor during the English Revolution, there have primarily been two trends in the English Revolution historiography. The first is either to ignore them entirely or to place them in the forefront of the leadership of the English revolution alongside radicals from previous centuries representing an unbroken thread of radicalism that goes right up to the present day. I do not claim that there was no "revel, riot and rebellion" during the English Revolution, but the English revolution was made by the bourgeoisie, not the working class which was still in its infancy.

There was, however, a significant radicalisation of the poor during this time. As Christopher Hill points out "Against the king, the laws and religion were a company of poor tradesmen, broken and decayed citizens, deluded and priest-ridden women, . . . there rode rabble that knew not wherefore they were got together, tailors, shoemakers, linkboys, etc. on the king's side. .all the bishops of the land, all the deans, prebends and learned men; both the universities; all the princes, dukes, marquises; all the earls and lords except two or three; all the knights and gentlemen in the three nations, except a score of sectaries and atheists".[1]

It was these sectaries and atheists that conservative thinkers like Richard Baxter sought to warn the ruling elite about when he wrote "A very great part of the knights and gentlemen of England . . . adhered to the king. And most of the tenants of these gentlemen, and also most of the poorest of the people, whom the others call the rabble, did follow the gentry and were for the king. On the Parliament's side were (besides themselves) the smaller part (as some thought) of the gentry in most of the counties, and the greatest part of the tradesmen and freeholders and the middle sort of men, especially in those corporations and counties which depend on clothing and such manufactures…Freeholders and tradesmen are the strength of religion and civility in the land, and gentlemen and beggars and servile tenants are the strength of iniquity".[2] 

Baxter was one of the most politically astute commentators on the English revolution. His writing expressed a general fear amongst the ruling elite of growing social unrest.

It is not in the realm of this essay to examine every single piece of historiography connected with the poor during the English revolution. It is however hard not to disagree with the words of Lawrence Stone who described the history of the 17th century as "a battleground which has been heavily fought over…beset with mines, booby-traps and ambushes manned by ferocious scholars prepared to fight every inch of the way".

A large number of these ferocious scholars have ignored the radicalisation of the poor during the English Revolution or when they did comment on it was done so coupled with a persistent attack on Marxist historiography, with figures like Christopher Hil and Brian Manning taking the brunt of this assault.

While it is clear that up until the late 1960s, there appeared to be a consensus amongst historians studying the English revolution that a study of the poor had to be linked with socio-economic changes that were taken place in the 17th century.

The late 1970s, saw this disappear and was replaced with a consistent attack on Marxist historiography. During an interview by John Rees and Lee Humber, the left-wing Christopher Hill was asked this question "There is a marked trend to separate various aspects of the revolution, so that cultural development is seen in isolation to, say, economic ones, a trend which is part of a much wider debate taking in the arguments around postmodernism. Would you agree that this is also a great challenge to the economic and social interpretation of history?.

Hill's answer was "Yes, all this linguistic stuff of the literary historians ignores the social context. I think that is a very unfortunate phase that literary criticism seems to be going through. I had thought that one of the good things of the last few decades was the way historians and literary critics seemed to be coming together on the 17th century and producing some sort of consensus. This is now in danger with all this linguistic guff. I suppose it is quite difficult for people trained in one discipline to take on board the lessons learnt in others, but any new consensus will have to be one based on looking at society as a whole including literature and religion".[3]

As the Marxist economist, Nick Beams also points out "One of the most frequently employed caricatures of Marxism is the claim that it argues that ideology is just a cover for the real economic motivations of social actors. Accordingly, Marxism is "disproved" by the discovery that individuals act, not according to economic motives but based on powerful ideologies. Marxism does not deny that historical actors are motivated and driven into action by their ideological conceptions, and it does not claim that these ideologies are simply a rationalisation for the real economic motivations. However, it does insist that it is necessary to examine the motives behind the motives—the real, underlying, driving forces of the historical process—and to make clear the social interests served by a given ideology—a relationship that may or may not be consciously grasped by the individual involved".

While it is essential to understand what motivated the poor to "revel, riot and rebellion" it is even more critical to understand the relationship between the poor and its leaders, which on this occasion during the English Revolution were the various radical groups such as The Levellers and Diggers and to a certain extent the Ranters.

As Leon Trotsky wrote "In reality leadership is not at all a mere "reflection" of a class or the product of its free creativeness. A leadership is shaped in the process of clashes between the different classes or the friction between the different layers within a given class".[4]

The Levellers, while being sympathetic to the poor, their perspective of bringing about deep-seated change was hampered by their class outlook that being of small producers, conditioned by their ideology. This contradiction caused some tension between their concern for the poor and their position of representatives of small property owners. They had no opposition to private property, and therefore they accepted that inequalities would always exist, they merely argued for the lot of the poor to be made more equitable. As John Cooke, a regicide and sympathetic to the Leveller cause explained 'I am no advocate for the poore further then to provide bread and necessaries for them, without which, life cannot be maintained, let rich men feast, and the poore make hard meale, but let them have bread sufficient'.[5]

In order to overcome their contradiction, knowing full well that they could not come to power through the presently constituted electorate or through the control of the army, the Levellers attempted to find not a a revolutionary solution to their problem but a constitutional one.

A draft constitution produced in 1647 called the Agreement of the People declared that the state had broken down in civil war and must be reformed based on certain fundamental 'native rights' safeguarded even from a sovereign parliament: religious toleration, no tithes. The attack on Parliament as sovereign went against one of the most fundamental reasons for the war in the first place. The agreement amongst other demands, called for biennial parliaments, franchise reform, only those who contracted into the new state by accepting the agreement were to have the vote.

While this was extremely radical for the time 'freeborn Englishmen' excluded servants and the poorer sections that did not constitute 'the people'. As Christopher Hill wrote: "The Leveller conception of free Englishmen, was thus restricted, even if much wider, than that embodied in the existing franchise. Their proposals would perhaps have doubled the number of men entitled to vote. However, manhood suffrage would have quadrupled it. The generals, generally horrified, pretended at Putney that the Levellers were more democratic than they were".[6]

The generals deliberately exaggerated the radicalism of the Levellers in order to label them extremists and to mobilise their supporters against them. Oliver Cromwell correctly recognised that if the franchise was widened, it would threaten his majority in Parliament. As Hill explains 'Defending the existing franchise, Henry Ireton rejected the doctrine "that by a man being born here, he shall have a share in that power that shall dispose of the lands here and of all things here". The vote was rightly restricted to those who "had a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom". Namely, the persons in whom all lands lies and those incorporation's in whom all trading lies.'[7]

The other substantial leadership of the poor came from the Diggers. Hill, in his seminal study, The World Turned Upside Down, believed that Winstanley and his Diggers, "have something to say to twentieth-century socialists". In this, he meant that they were an anticipation of future struggles. Hill was cognizant that despite their radicalism, the social and economic conditions had not yet matured for them to carry out a "second revolution" which would have seen the overthrow of Cromwell and broader use of the popular franchise.

John Gurney, who was perhaps the foremost expert on the Diggers recognised the leader of the Diggers Gerrard Winstanley was one of the most important figures to appear during the English Revolution commenting "the past is unpredictable.' So it has proved for Gerrard Winstanley. For all but one of his 67 years, he lived in obscurity, and then he died forgotten. Generations of historians passed over him either in silence or derision. He entirely eluded the notice of the Earl of Clarendon in the 17th century and of David Hume in the 18th. Even the Jacobin William Godwin, the first champion of the Civil War radicals, judged his exploits' scarcely worthy of being recorded', and S.R. Gardiner's comprehensive history of the Commonwealth contained only two references to him, one a bare mention of his name.

Then in the early 20th Century, Winstanley was rediscovered, and he has exerted a magnetic pull on left-leaning intellectuals ever since. He is variously credited as the father of English communism, socialism or environmentalism, depending on which is seeking paternity. His notice in the Victorian DNB was a scant 700 words; in the new DNB, it has ballooned to more than 8000. Now he has been canonised by the publication of an Oxford edition of his complete works, the second complete works in a century, more than have been accorded either Hobbes or Locke".[8]

While the Diggers were far more radical in their perspective for the poor, they shared the same class position as the Levellers. No matter how radical their ideas at no point could they overturn class society through revolution. The only class that could have achieved their aims was still in its infancy.

Historians such as John Gurney are a rare bread today in that his study of the poor was done so from a relatively left-wing standpoint. While Hill and Manning tended to dominate the study of the poor during the English revolution, there were a group of historians that were less incline to support a Marxist interpretation of the poor but were sufficiently influenced to carry out important work.

One of many historians that fit the above criteria was D.C. Coleman. While not being close to Marxism was undoubtedly influenced by left-wing historians such as Hill.

Coleman was a multidimensional historian according to his obituary he  "was sceptical about politics and thought religion was largely nonsense. He realised that people were subject to the motivation of a variety of sorts and that economic rationality could provide only a partial explanation. He made use, therefore, of economic theory, but did not regard it as the be-all and end-all in the attempt to explain human social behaviour over time, the essence of what he thought economic history should be about.[9]

Coleman points out in one of his writings that early capitalists were conscious that profit could be made by exploiting the large and growing working class. Coleman quotes J Pollexfen who writes, 'The more are maintained by Laborious Profitable Trades, the richer the Nation will be both in People and Stock and ... Commodities the cheaper".[10]

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Coleman's research was his publishing figures on the levels of poverty which are stunning. The levels of child labour that would not look out of place in a third world country today, stating "If the economists and social pamphleteers wanted a larger body of labouring poor, there is no lack of evidence that in mere numbers the poor already formed a very substantial part of the total population. Contemporary comment upon the numbers of poor stretches back into the sixteenth century, at least, and forward into the eighteenth. To Bacon, labourers and cottagers were 'but house beggars'; to a writer of the 1640's it. Seemed reasonable to suppose that 'the fourth part of the inhabitants of most of the parishes of England are miserable, poor people, and (harvest time excepted) without any subsistence', the comprehensive and well-known investigations of Gregory King in the 168o's and 1690s tell an even grimmer tale. He classed 23 per cent of the national population as 'labouring people and out servants' and a further 24 per cent as 'cottagers and paupers', estimating that both groups had annual family expenditures greater than income".[11]

Another historian worth reading is Steve Hindle; he is especially important and essential reading. Hindle's work should be read in conjunction with that of Hill and Manning.

His work on the Levellers backs up my earlier assumption that while Levellers such as John Wildman were sympathetic to the poor, there was also a fear that the levels of poverty and a dearth of food could get out of hand. Wildman states 'The price of food [is] excessive', wrote the Leveller John Wildman from London in 1648, 'and Trading [is] decayed'. It would; he thought, 'rend any pitifull heart to heare andsee the cryes and teares of the poore, who professe they are almost ready to famish'. 'While our divisions continue, and there be no settlement of the principles of freedom and justice', he insisted: trading will but more decay every day: Rumours and feares of Warre, and the Army coming now into the City, makes Merchants unwilling to trust their goods in the City, and exchange beyond sea falles, and there will be no importing of goods, and then there will be no exporting and so the staple commodities of the kingdom which maintains the constant trade, will not tend to the advantage of the labourers, and then most of the poore in the kingdom which live by spinning, carding, & will be ready to perish by famine".[12]

Wildman was echoing a common fear and worry amongst sections of the lower middle class that the impact of the failed harvests of 1647-1650. According to Hindle "Wildman was accordingly convinced that 'a suddain confusion would follow if a speedie settlement were not procured'.

Hindle goes on "Wildman's vivid analysis of the relationship between harvest failure, economic slump, political crisis and popular protest is proof enough that those who lived through the distracted times of the late 1640s were well aware of the interpenetration of economic and constitutional dislocation. It is surprising, therefore, that historians have made so little attempt to take the harvest crisis of the late 1640s seriously".

Another famous exponent of regional studies of the poor is A. L. Beier. One of his studies was Poor relief in Warwickshire 1630-1660. Beier presented in this essay a view that was supported by a significant number of historins that the study of the regional poor was an important part of a wider national study of the poor.

Beier warned about trying to read too much into these local studies, but a study of such areas as Warwickshire was legitimate. He writes "It would, of course, be dangerous to generalise from the example of one county to the whole of England, but the degree of typicality of Warwickshire and Professor Jordan's findings are encouraging. To study other counties from this point of view may yield interesting comparisons and the discovery of new variables, particularly if areas are found where relief administration in fact collapsed. More generally, however, and assuming that poor relief did not collapse in England during the Interregnum, of what significance was its continued functioning? First, it is clear that the devolution towards local control which took place in this period did not mean collapse or even falling efficiency in administration whether the sort of zealous efficiency characteristic of the Puritan rule was continued after I660 is another question deserving of study.[13]

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[1] Christopher Hill-The English Revolution 1640- https://www.marxists.org/archive/hill-christopher/english-revolution/

[2] https://www.marxists.org/archive/hill-christopher/english-revolution

[3] John Rees and Lee Humber-The good old cause-An interview with Christopher Hill- https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj2/1992/isj2-056/hill.html

[4] The Class, the Party-and the Leadership-https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/xx/party.htm

[5] Unum Necessarium:John Cooke, of Graies Inne, Barrester.http://famineanddearth.exeter.ac.uk/displayhtml.html?id=fp_00502_en_unum

[6] The Century of Revolution: 1603–1714

[7] Christopher Hill-The English Revolution 1640- https://www.marxists.org/archive/hill-christopher/english-revolution/

[8] Gerrard Winstanley and the Left-John Gurney-Past & Present, Volume 235, Issue 1, May 2017, Pages 179–206, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtx017

[9] Professor D. C. Coleman-Obituary-https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-professor-d-c-coleman-1600207.html

[10] Labour in the English Economy during the 17th Century-https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0289.1956.tb01570.x

[11] Labour in the English Economy during the 17th Century-https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0289.1956.tb01570.x

[12] Dearth and the English revolution:the harvest crisis of 1647–50-By Steve Hindle-https://www.huntington.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/dearth-and-the-english-revolution-echr.pdf

[13] A. L. Beier Poor relief in Warwickshire 1630-16601 – Past and Present 1966

Raphael Samuel and the Universities and Left Review 1957-1959-A Case of Historical Neglect

This literature review attempts to make a political and historical evaluation of Raphael Samuel's time at the ULR (Universities and Left Review) from the theoretical standpoint of orthodox Marxism or to be more precise a historical materialist viewpoint. No such study has been made before as most of the previous historiography of the ULR has been made by historians and writers who shared similar theoretical positions to the people they were writing about.

It is encouraging that the last few years have seen an increasing interest in Samuel's work. A television documentary looking at his interviews with East End people is being worked on.

Sophie Scott-Brown is currently researching an intellectual biography called Reading the Times; Raphael Samuel and the Politics of History Production in Late Twentieth 20th Century. The book when published looks like it will be written from a postmodernist standpoint. A genre which seems still to dominate modern-day history writing.

Any evaluation of Samuel must take into consideration his 'membership' of the New Left during his time at the ULR. The historian Michael Kenny has pointed out there are very significant "methodological problems facing those trying to interpret the history of the New Left in Britain."

One problem cited by Kenny is the shortage of written documents of its early years. Although this is not a problem with Samuel's time at the ULR because the archives at the Bishopsgate Institute have hardly been touched. Although one question does present itself in the fact that there has been no fully documented history of cultural studies and no single archive.

Having said this hopefully the research being carried out by The Raphael Samuel History Centre will seek to resolve this issue. In many ways, it is a fitting tribute to the work of Samuel that the centre is promoting and encouraging participation in historical research and debate not only in his work but of others.

While sources well-mined by other historian's will be used other sources decidedly unused by other historians will be searched. These will be the three archives at the Bishopsgate, The Ruskin College Papers, The Universities and Left Review Papers and the Raphael Samuel Papers.

Early days

In November 1956, the historian Raphael Samuel sent a letter to Stuart Hall suggesting they set up a magazine called 'New University Left,' Hall accepted the idea, but the magazine was to be called Universities & Left Review. To gain support for the publication which would orientate not towards the working class but to students, former CP members, fellow travellers, and various other left-wing radicals Samuel sent letters to these forces appealing for money and articles.

The appeal to ex-Communist Party members would have been logical since he had resigned from the party over Khrushchev's secret speech in 1956. 1956 was, without a doubt, one of the most critical years in the history of the 20th century. Khrushchev, who was a willing partner in Stalin's murderous purges of the 1930s, was forced to make a measured and insufficient revelation of Stalin's crimes in his "Secret Speech" of February 1956. The exposure of the Stalin's crimes caused thousands of party members to leave the party virtually overnight. The CPGB (Communist Party of Great Britain) also lost a significant number of its high-profile historians such and E P Thompson and Christopher Hill who both left the party.

Samuel was a teenager when he joined the CP and the CPHG (Communist Party Historians Group). "Like many Communists of my time, I combined a powerful sense of apartness with a craving for recognition, alternating gestures of defiance with a desire to be ordinary and accepted as one of the crowd. If one wanted to be charitable, one might say that it was the irresolvable duality on which British Communists find themselves impaled today."[1]

Samuel had a very romantic view of his time in the CP and had a tendency to see those times through very rose-tinted spectacles. His book The Lost World of Communism was devoid of any political analysis of the CP. Its betrayals are not mentioned. It is perhaps a little strange that he had a disdain for the undisciplined nature various left groups and publications but would later found one of them. Samuel missed the time when Stalinism had political control over the working class.

Samuel also seems to have been blind to the fact that there were significant disagreements inside the Communist Party over strategy and global politics. He indeed does not touch upon the struggle between Leon Trotsky's Left Opposition and Josef Stalin and stayed silent on Stalin's murderous purges of the 1930s.

Historical Phenomenon

Samuel was part of a historical event. Born in 1934 he had a relatively comfortable childhood and was educated at a private school. During his late youth, he would have been schooled by his mother who was in the Communist Party about the defeat of Nazi Germany, continued global economic depression and the Second World War. His teenage years would be defined by the constant rise of Stalinism, the further betrayal of the Russian Revolution, and the rise to global eminence of American capitalism.

Post-1945 America began its dominance of Britain and Europe who had been bleed dry by the Second World War. America saw its role as rescuing Global Capitalism. The Revolutionary struggles that broke out during this period were betrayed by a combination of Stalinism and Social Democracy.

British capitalism did not take its minor role in global events lightly. When Britain sought to exploit the situation thrown up by the Suez crisis in 1956 its military invention was sabotaged by the US. It was only able to maintain its global position by allying itself with the US albeit in a very junior position.

Aside from the odd article from non-members of the ULR the global economic and political implications of the rise of American imperialism mostly passed the editors of the ULR by. Although this cannot be said of its work regarding Stalinism. The editorial board of ULR which consisted of Stuart Hall, Gabriel Pearson, Ralph Samuel and Charles Taylor shared the view that Stalinism was the logical outcome of the Marxism. One historian Eric Hobsbawm who stayed in the CP shared that view[2]. The ULR's editorial position was best summoned up by Charles Taylor: who said 'Stalinism did not just add itself to Communism, it was not an obvious element deflecting the mainstream of Communist development. In every real sense, it has grown out of Communism". [3]

This hostility towards orthodox Marxism was not shown towards the British Labour Party. In fact, the ULR's orientation towards the Labour Party was to try and push it in a left-wing direction. To do this the Universities and Left Review published some documents such as 'The Insiders', a study of 'the men who rule British industry' in 1957. The ULR also published others outside the magazine who shared their view. Samuel published an article by John Hughes and Ken Alexander entitled A Socialist Wages Plan. Samuel called them the "New Left's most influential contribution to Labour Party thought'."

Another orientation championed by the ULR was towards the radicalisation that was taking place inside the universities, and young people were the prime target of the editors.  While rejecting a revolutionary Marxist perspective, they sought to attract young people to the magazine on an entirely utopian socialist basis. Their uncritical absorption of the method of the Frankfurt School theorists meant in essence that Samuel and the ULR shared the same theoretical premise that the working class was not an agency for revolutionary change. They instead took on board critical theory which saw the "emphasis moved from the liberation of the working class to broader issues of individual agency."

Labour Review and the Socialist Labour League

The ULR was not the only magazine around in 1957 that sought to gain political ground from the breakup of the Communist Party. A magazine of an entirely different political calibre was founded by Gerry Healy's the Club forerunner of the SLL (Socialist Labour League) called Labour Review.

Healy's initial response to the ULR was friendly, and he sought a dialogue with them and other New Left groups. The ULR's hostility to Trotskyism soon became apparent. Samuel said "There has been an incredible mushrooming of inner-party groups. On the ultra-Left—the dissidence of Dissent—a dozen 'vanguard' parties, and as many tendencies and groups, compete for the honour of leading a non-existent revolutionary working class". [4]

Healy was not only rebuffed by the ULR, but E P Thompson's New Reasoner was equally hostile towards the SLL leaving Healy to state that a "Comrade Thompson seems to have cast away all the luggage, he was equipped within the Communist Party except one soiled old suitcase labelled anti-Trotskyism."

The knockback from the ULR did not stop the orthodox Marxists or Trotskyists in the Fourth International from doubling their efforts to gain from the crisis within the British Communist party. Healy continued to believe that Stalinism was a counter-revolutionary force. The SLL won prominent figures such as Cliff Slaughter, Tom Kemp, Peter Fryer and Brian Pearce out of the CP.

Pearce's article warning of the dangers of founding the New Left Review without thorough assimilation of the struggle waged by Leon Trotsky against Stalinism was prescient. Pearce warned of the dangers of an uncritical attitude by the ULR editors towards their past affiliation to Stalinism and their hostility towards the orthodox Marxist in the SLL.

"Nothing could be more dangerous today than a revival of the illusions which dominated that 'old Left.' One of the chief sources of the confusion and worse in 'new Left' quarters, and in particular of their hostile attitude to the Socialist Labour League, is to be found in the fact that though these people have broken with Stalinism they have not undertaken a thorough analysis of what they repudiate, have not seen the connection between the contradictory features of Stalinism at different times or even at one time, and so they remain unconsciously open to influence by false ideas absorbed during their period in the Stalinist camp".[5]

History from Below

An interesting topic for a PhD dissertation would be how much of Samuels academic writing or to be more precise, his philosophy of history was influenced by his philosophy of politics. It is beyond dispute that his academic work can only be rightly seen as part of a broader anti-communist response.

In his essay Class and Classlessness, Samuel attacks Hall over his belief that class that society was becoming a thing of the past. Hall believed that class was something only the Trotskyists talked about. However, Samuels understanding of class was not from the standpoint of an orthodox Marxist. He never saw the working class as a revolutionary class even in his days of the CP.

He did not deny that the Working-class did have a radical history. However, his view history was shaped by the politics of the Communist Party. They were radical in a historical sense hence his interest in the "people's history" genre but not to the extent they could overthrow capitalism.

The historical genre of "People's History" was very much a product of the Communist Party. The first example of this type of history within Britain was A.L. Morton's People's History of England. According to Morton the rebels, revolutionaries and modern leaders he wrote about were representatives of a national revolutionary tradition.

As Ann Talbot points out "This historical approach reflected the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to internationalism and their attempts to form an unprincipled alliance with the supposedly liberal capitalists against the fascist Axis countries. People's history was an attempt to give some historical foundation to the policies of Popular Front—the subordination of the working class to supposedly progressive sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of political action to the defence of bourgeois democracy—which provided a democratic facade to the systematic murder of thousands of genuine revolutionaries, including Trotsky. [6]

Another by-product of Samuel's position regarding class was his work in the early development of Cultural Studies. Samuels avocation of People's History and Cultural Studies would colour his work until the day he died.

The early issues of the ULR were given over to discussing the theoretical merits of Cultural Studies, Hall, and Samuel each borrowed conceptions from the Italian left-winger Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci's notion of "cultural hegemony" was used as a guide for political activity.

Gramsci's attack on economic determinism, his hostility towards Trotsky's theory of the Permanent Revolution and his acceptance of the nationalist character of Stalinism was very attractive to Samuel and Hall.  As Gramsci would say "To be sure, the line of development is toward internationalism, but the point of departure is 'national' —, and it is from this starting point that one must begin." [7]

From the beginning, Cultural Studies became part of an attack on revolutionary Marxism. Samuel's academic and political writing would seek to shift social criticism away from class and onto other social formations. Such as identity politics and the early stages of gender studies.

Hall believed that a consumer boom which the working class had bought into meant that the old outdated class-based analysis could no longer be valid during this period. The wealth produced by the boom created what he termed a "people's capitalism." In an entirely extraordinary statement Hall elaborated his position further "This journal has no political 'line' to offer: it cannot have, for it seeks to provide a forum where the different fruitful traditions of socialist discussion are free to meet in open controversy. 

It tries to reach beyond any narrow sectional appeal in the search for new ideas and new writers. Can we bridge the gap between the Thirties and the 'Fifties? Do new ideas, new writers and new readers in fact exist? This is the calculated risk we take. If this Review can attract serious attention and avoid the bankruptcy of labels and pigeonholes, it will have achieved the purpose for which it has been started" [8]

Hall and Samuel's new readers and writers would not come out of the working class but would come from pseudo-left radicals and utopian socialists. One such figure was Herbert Marcuse (1898 –1979) Marcuse welcomed the New left and especially welcomed the groups such as the ULR that adopted the new Cultural Turn.

According to Marcuse, "The New Left was concerned with the emancipation of imagination from the restraints of instrumental reason. In opposition to the alliance between realism and conformity, the forces of the New Left created the slogan: "Be realistic, demand the impossible." This is where the high aesthetic component of the movement originated: art was seen as a productive emancipatory force, as the experience of another (and ordinarily repressed) reality.[9]

Marcuse who was a neo-utopian theoretician concurred with the figures inside the ULR that the working class should no longer be regarded as a revolutionary class. That it was a political or even backward mass. Like Hall, he believed that it had been bought off by capitalism and was too intimately connected to capitalist society to be revolutionary. The working class had become consumed by the mechanisms of consumerism and the domination of the media.

Marcuse, who was a pupil of Martin Heidegger and a member of the Frankfurt School was seen as the "Father of the New Left," went even further than Hall or Samuel in putting forward that there was a "proto-fascist syndrome in the working class."

Marcuse also believed that "The "revolution" would not be made by the working led by a vanguard party along the lines of the Bolsheviks in 1917. Like Samuel, he saw other social forces such as the intelligentsia, social fringe groups or guerrilla movements as the motor force of the revolution. The revolution would not be brought about by the class contradictions of capitalist society, but by the critical thinking of a progressive elite. The changing of attitudes towards social, culture and sexual habits would be a precursor to the successful transformation of society and the precondition for the social revolution.

Conclusion

Despite a plethora of material written about the ULR and the early New Left from a Stalinist or left radical standpoint nothing outside of few articles from the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League exists of an examination of the ULR from an orthodox Marxist perspective. The archives held at Bishopsgate have hardly been touched and evaluated. Using these files, I will seek to achieve an entirely new understanding of Raphael Samuels early political and historical life.

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[1] New Left Review, No.154 (November/December 1985), p.53.

[2]See David North-  Leon Trotsky and the Fate of Socialism in the Twentieth Century,

[3] C. Taylor, Socialism and the Intellectuals, Universities and Left Review 1/2, 1957.

[4] Samuel Raphael, The Lost World of British Communism Verso 2006

[5] Some Lessons from History: The Left Review, 1934–1938(November 1959)

[6] "These the times ... this the man": an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill-By Ann Talbot 2003

[7]  Stephen Gill: Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations, Cambridge 1993

[8] Universities & Left Review Spring 1957 Vol.1 No 1

[9] The Failure of the New Left? * by Herbert Marcuse

At the Raphael Samuel Archive

I must admit it was by complete chance that I discovered not only the Raphael Samuel archive but now the New Left Review archive at the Bishopsgate Institute. I must say upfront the archive at Bishopsgate is a wonderful resource.

Head of the Archive Stefan Dickers and his staff make the archive a very good place to study. I will use the archive at least up until my dissertation on Samuel’s time at Universities and New Left is written. I must admit with such a good resource it is mightily tempting to do a biography of him. There is a complete dearth of biographies of the Communist Party historians.

The first few files of the archive concentrate on the early days of University and New Left (ULR). Samuel it would have seem spent most of his time sending begging letters to everyone under the sun for money and articles for the new project.

The letter to Michael Foot the then Labour MP is indicative of the fact the new journal still wanted to remain tied in some way to the coattails of the Labour Party. Samuel I believed after 1956 joined the Labour Party.

While working at the archive sometimes the best moments are meeting other people who are working on the Samuel archive. A special mention goes to Florence who is working on a documentary on East End lives.

Finally, while talking to Stefan he told me of a very disturbing matter. According to Historical Association “Archive material dating back to the first decades of the twentieth century of the internationally renowned labour movement college, Ruskin College, Oxford has been destroyed and material constituting its radical history has been dispersed. The integrity of the material in the college as an archive of working class history no longer exists. Sadly, this process of destruction and dispersal has not finished”[1]

[1] http://www.history.org.uk/resources/public_news_1607.html

The Struggle for Historical Truth

Historians do not work in a vacuum. Each one presents whether consciously or unconsciously a perspective, ideology or at least a moral attitude towards the history they study or put another way "When you read a work of history, always listen out for the buzzing. If you can detect none, either you are tone-deaf, or your historian is a dull dog".[1] Does this moral or ideological entanglement with history rule out the possibility of a struggle for "true objectivity" or historical truth I do not believe so?

An objective attitude towards history has been closely associated with the Marxist movement. It is in the basic DNA of a Marxist Historian to present their work with the understanding that he or she must at all times tell the truth or more importantly understand that their study of history is the reenactment of an "objective process".

Following on from this, can we then treat the study of history as a science with its laws? It is very difficult to argue if not impossible to say that it is a pure science in the sense of the type of laws uncovered by physicists, chemists and mathematicians. Having said that any professional or amateur historian worth his or her salt should work in the archives or library with the same devotion and accuracy as a chemist or biologists working in the laboratories.

A historian who understands that history has its laws and carries out a systematic and honest study of these laws can not only give us a deeper understanding of past events but can in some way anticipate future historical events.  The use of counterfactual history is a very useful historical genre. Again it should go without saying that the historian must approach their research in archives with honesty and integrity.

While it should be taken for granted that a historian in order to attempt to recreate the past must have "empathy and imagination", the historian must study the past with a doggedness and intellectual objectivity. Historians are not machines. A famous criticism of the historian Christopher Hill was that he was a Rolodex historian in other words picking pieces of history that fitted his ideology.

I do not believe this was an accurate charge against Hill, but a historian must be disciplined enough not to allow his imagination to run riot. The presentation of facts is not without controversy. It should be noted that "facts" themselves are products of the ideological, social, cultural and political currents of the time.

In seeking a more objective understanding of history, the historian must be disciplined. He or she no matter how talented do not know everything there is to know about their area of expertise. It is not possible to know every fact. The point I am making is that the historian must present an honest piece of work and not let this frustration lead to a short cut in their work or more dangerously lead to outright falsification of history. By doing this, the historian will have a greater understanding of their role in the presentation of facts.

The historian Edward H Carr was a great believer that the historian had a "dialogue between the past and the present". While it was the duty of every good historian to present this dialogue in a readable form, he or she had to be extremely careful and not to fall into the trap of treating their topics of research as if they were organically linked to the present day. It would be completely wrong to treat figures such as Oliver Cromwell or Napoleon Bonaparte as contemporaries. It should not need to be said that they lived in completely different times to people from the 21st century.

The French historian of feudal society, Marc Bloch, who wrote the book, The Historian's Craft noted "In a word, a historical phenomenon can never be understood apart from its moment in time. This is true of every evolutionary stage, our own, and all others. As the old Arab proverb has it: 'Men resemble their times more than they do their fathers.'

It is one thing to seek to be more objective; it is perhaps another thing to achieve it. In the 20th century, a significant number of historians who have sometimes been mislabeled Marxist had sought to interpret Marxist theory and apply it when studying the past. The historian that has perhaps been most identified with the application of the Marxist method to the study of history certainly as regards the former Soviet Union is Edward Hallett Carr ((1892 –1982). Carr was not a Marxist, although he certainly was not a Stalinist.  Carr, while being a determinist, sought to present a more objective presentation of history. Philosophically he was closer to Hegel than he was to Karl Marx. He was heavily influenced by the English Hegelian philosopher and historian R G Collingwood.

The historian, R.G. Collingwood, said, "the historian must re-enact in thought what has gone on in the mind of his dramatis personae".[2] Carr's groundbreaking book What is History was heavily influenced by Collinwood. That a historian should spend so much time propagating the need for a philosophy of history was not a thing that many English historians had felt the need for. It is a bit strange because the book sold in the hundreds of thousands all over the world.

Carr's book, on the whole, was warmly received amongst the general reading public amongst historians it was another matter it led to a very public and polarized debate. The British historian Richard J. Evans correctly points out that the book provoked a revolutionary change in British historiography. Even amongst its critics, the book was cited by the Australian historian Keith Windschuttle, as one of the "most influential books written about historiography, and that very few historians working in the English language since the 1960s had not read it".

Carr believed that the first obligation of a historian was, to tell the truth. By this, I do not mean that the historian must swear on the bible, but he has a duty not to falsify evidence to fit in with his ideology. When a historian deliberately falsifies history to fit in with his or her ideology, then other historians and political writers must expose it. A recent example of this falsification can be seen in Robert Service's biography of Leon Trotsky. Service's book was a collection of distortion, lies and half-truths. Character assassination was dressed up as a biography.[3]

Service would have done well to head the advice of one of the better American historians of the Russian Revolution, Leopold Haimson (1927–2010), when he said "The original source of the significance of any truly original and important historical work is to be traced—first and foremost—to its author's original selection of primary sources on which he elects to focus attention in his research. To this, I would add that its essential value will ultimately depend on the degree of precision and insight with which these sources are penetrated and analyzed". I doubt Service has read this book.[4]

Not all historians agree with the premise that historical study would be better served with a more objective understanding of its historical laws.  It would not be an overstatement to say that in defending a more objective attitude towards the study of history, Carr ploughed a very lonely furrow. His book What is History was a response to an attack by Isaiah Berlin.[5] Berlin accused Carr of being a determinist for ruling out the possibility of the accidental or counterfactual history. Berlin correctly chastised Carr for this historical blind spot, but his attack on Carr was more to do with his perceived view that Carr was a Marxist.

Berlin, after all, had a reputation for going after any historian who was left-wing whether or not they were a Marxist. His "historikerstreit" with the historian Isaac Deutscher is one such example of what was a nasty vendetta.

So in researching this essay, it has not been difficult to find historians who in some way, disagree with the premise of historical truth or objectivity. The last three decades have seen an escalation of attacks on the concept of historical objectivity.While the historian G E Elton was seen as a critic of Carr he upheld the view that the historian and his study of history should be separate from the present or put another way – the historian "should not be 'at the centre of the historical reconstruction' and should' escape from his prejudices and preconceptions".

His 1967 book The Practice of History Elton attacks Carr for being "whimsical" with his divorce of "historical facts" and the "facts of the past". He stated Carr had "...an extraordinarily arrogant attitude both to the past and to the place of the historian studying it"[6] Hugh Trevor-Roper is another historian who attacked Carr's philosophy of history.  Roper like Berlin had a habit of attacking left-wing historians so it would probably best to take his criticisms of Carr with a hefty pinch of salt

He was heavily critical of Carr's dismissal of the "might-have-beens of history". He believed that Carr had a lack of interest in examining historical causation. He also accused Carr of not looking at all sides in the debate. He believed that Carr's "winner takes all approach' to history was the mark of a "bad historian". While it is important to look back at what historians have said in the past about a subject, it is equally important not to dwell too long to the detriment of what has been written recently or at least in the last few decades.

Certainly, the most damaging attack on the concept of historical truth has come from what I term the post-modernist school of historiography. It would not be an understatement to say that post-modernist historians have been extremely hostile in academia to the concept of historical truth. The last few decades have witnessed the emergence of post-modernism as the dominant force in university life. This philosophical and historical outlook has replaced what passed for Marxism inside universities all over the world.

The chief characteristic of the post-modernists is the use of debatable philosophy, to blur over the difference between truth and lies, and in doing so, commit a falsification of history. The practice of lying about history has been taken to a new level by the various schools of post-modernism. It would not be an overstatement to say that the impact of this school of history has been as David North put it "nothing short of catastrophic".

There is, of course, a connection between the falsification of history and the attack on the struggle for objective truth. One of the most outlandish post-modernist thinkers and an opponent of objective truth is the German Professor Jorg Baberowski b (1961)[7]. A student of Michel Foucault, Baberowski describes his method of work in his book the (The Meaning of History)

"In reality, the historian has nothing to do with the past, but only with its interpretation. He cannot separate what he calls reality from the utterances of people who lived in the past. For there exists no reality apart from the consciousness that produces it. We must liberate ourselves from the conception that we can understand, through the reconstruction of events transmitted to us through documents, what the Russian Revolution was. There is no reality without its representation. To be a historian means, to use the words of Roger Chartier, to examine the realm of representations".

This is pretty dangerous stuff from Baberowski. If this methodology becomes the norm in a historical study, it denotes an anything-goes approach that does not require the historian to tell the truth. For that matter, it also means that reality does not exist outside the historian's head. Therefore, history has no objective basis. He sees history only in terms of his subjectivity. Why bother with a history that tries to show the economic, political or social conditions at the time.

He continues "A history is true if it serves the premises set up by the historian." It is clear from this statement that he believes that it is all right for a historian to falsify his work in order to best serve the reader of history. This lying about history can bring about a fundamental and dangerous change in the way history is served to the public. The most extreme example of this fraudulent narratives is the lying about the crimes of Nazi Germany.  It is no accident that Baberowski is a leading figure in the attempt to rehabilitate Hitler.

The study of history is a battleground. "The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living," wrote Marx. According to Baberowski, we cannot learn anything from history. He pours disdain on any approach that seeks to understand the future.  A more objective approach is just a dream. This leading spokesman on the "subjectivist school" states "The fact that we could learn from history is an illusion of days gone by… The claim (of the historian) to show how things were having been proved in reality to be an illusion. What the historian confronts in the sources is not the past… the past is a construction.  Truth is what I and others hold to be true and confirm to each other as truth.... Therefore, we must accept that there are multiple realities; that it depends on who talks to whom about what and with what arguments".[8]

To conclude If we accept this premise that truth is not objective but relative, it sets a very disturbing precedent. Aside from the moral and intellectual damage, this may do to the individual historian, this kind of false philosophy will poison the well that future young historians and people interested in history have to drink out of.

The logic of this philosophy of history is that truth is whatever goes on in someone's head.  Smoking is good for you, and hard drugs are not dangerous, Hitler is misunderstood and was a good guy. No person who wants to function and live effectively in the world cannot do without some sense of truth's objective correspondence to reality. I believe that Objective truth is possible but not without a struggle. The first stage in that struggle is, to tell the truth about history.

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[1] What is History E H Carr?

[2] Reading Architectural History-By Dana Arnold

[3] The American Historical Review discredits Robert Service's biography of Leon Trotsky

[4] Socialism and historical truth- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/03/17/lect-m17.html

[5] Isaac and Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic Paperback 2015

by David Caute

[6] The Practice of History, Sir Geoffrey Elton

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B6rg_Baberowski 

[8]Jörg Baberowski, The Meaning of History, Munich 2005,