Lawrence Parker reviews Nina Fishman’s ‘Arthur Horner: a political biography’ (Vol 1 1894-1944; Vol 2 1944-68), Lawrence and Wishart, 2010, pp608, £22.50 each.

While writing this review, my attention was drawn to a Doncaster Socialist Workers Party resignation letter that has recently been circulating on the internet. In the letter, the branch draws attention to a conflict between an SWP member who was a full-time Unison branch secretary and the rest of his SWP branch: “In a general sense, he has not developed the combativity and self-activity of the working class. Furthermore, he does not relate to the most advanced workers. He neither distributes party leaflets nor sells Socialist Worker. This is not to castigate, but to recognise that he been floundering for some time. We find it reprehensible that when we contacted the centre to warn about his behaviour, our concerns were not taken seriously.”^[1]

Of course, it is common in opportunistic circles to put such occurrences down to personal antagonisms, foibles and so on, or, even worse, to suggest that trade union leaders will inevitably sell out their principles, as they climb the greasy pole of officialdom (the SWP once banned its comrades from taking full-time union posts). A more plausible explanation is that trade unions have a structural position in capitalist society in relation to wage labour and can thus exert a more powerful pull than a tiny political sect. But such reports also point to something else: namely a deep-seated failure of political culture primarily lodged in the experience of 20th century ‘official’ communism.

One can find very similar sentiments about communist trade union officials expressed scores of times in the archives, records and publications of the ‘official’ CPGB. Yet such recognition is unfamiliar territory for comrades from Trotskyist backgrounds, raised on the idea that the main contradiction of the ‘official’ CPGB arose from its fealty to Moscow. Now, this is a very large part of the truth but, in organisations such as the SWP in particular, it means that the domestic actions (and actions is the operative word for these excitable comrades, considering the mass nature of much CPGB activity down the years) escape closer scrutiny.^[2]

The career of Arthur Horner (1894-1968), foundation member of the CPGB, later the first general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and significant public figure in post-World War II Britain, is one of the biggest keys that allow us to unlock this decayed political culture in communist organisations.

The author of this empathetic two-volume biography, Nina Fishman, unfortunately passed away in December 2009. Although I have some big differences with Fishman over her political interpretation of Horner and the CPGB’s history, it is fair to say that this is a magnificent piece of research and one that will be used by historians for many years to come. Politically, Fishman had ended up with the Democratic Left (DL), the organisation set up by members of the CPGB’s Eurocommunist faction that attempted to liquidate the party, while clinging on to its host body’s substantial financial assets. (Fishman’s father had been a member of the Communist Party of the USA and she had been a member in the UK of the rather odd British and Irish Communist Organisation – which now operates under a variety of other organisational non de plumes). Theoretically, Fishman had unconvincingly defended what she called a ‘realist’ perspective, where communist activists were understood in light of the ‘real’ (usually British) events and personalities that shaped them, as opposed to (an apparently ‘unreal’) ‘essentialist’ perspective that looked to the impact of the emergence and consolidation of Stalinism to explain the CPGB.

Straw men

In fact, setting up the debate in these ‘straw men’ terms was nonsense. Serious historians would look to map out precisely how Stalinism impacted on the CPGB through its personalities, activity, oppositions and so on. To take an example from my own experience of researching the ‘anti-revisionist’ CPGB oppositions of the 1960s, it was clear that the fault lines between China and the Soviet Union created an opening for revolutionary oppositions in the ‘official’ communist movement; and the Chinese ideological stance set a certain sectarian template for future developments. But that macro perspective needs setting against more micro events and personalities before it can tell us what actually happened.

It is clear that Fishman’s time in the DL marked her writings on the CPGB. This ‘realist’ vein tended to gently prise the CPGB away from the world communist movement in the form of the Soviet Union and other regimes, which had become distasteful for the Eurocommunist luminaries of the DL, despite the gestation of their ideology in the unpopular popular fronts of the 1930s.

The amorphous, fluffy political boundaries of the DL also impacted on what Fishman marked out as a research agenda for the CPGB: “Further research is likely to show that, at the municipal and community level, party activists continued to make positive contributions: a radical, progressive, democratic aspect of CPGB life which has been insufficiently emphasised by historians. Particularly in the new towns and suburbs of south-east England, these activists played important roles in politicising, greening and socialising new working class communities. In the same way, communist union activists continued to play a vital part in the definition of trade union culture and politics – not just in the suburban-industrial girdle around London, but in the Midlands, the west of England, the south coast, Yorkshire and Lancashire. These aspects of the CPGB’s history remain palpably under-researched and largely unacknowledged.”^[3]

By implementing this ‘positive’ agenda, the CPGB would appear in history books as a benign forerunner of the Eurocommunists and DL, rather than what it was – a revolutionary organisation and a component of a world movement that had been slowly strangled by Stalinism.

Unsurprisingly, Fishman looked askance on such judgements: “To argue that the CPGB did not concentrate on revolutionary aims and did not seek to organise politically, qua party, at the workplace seems to me irrelevant, because at least since 1926 the CPGB had never seriously attempted to do either of these things.”^[4] So it is pointless to make these qualitative judgements on the CPGB as to its lack of revolutionary credentials, because the CPGB did not concentrate on revolutionary aims.

This circular argument only reduces things to what was and thus leaves the historian as the prisoner of a set of ‘official’ communist myths. I am not complaining about this partiality (although it is not to my political taste), but arguing that Nina Fishman had a perspective that was intensely political in its outcome, even though it appeared under the fluffy guise of ‘getting a fuller picture’ of the CPGB.

Fishman’s position also leaves one with the thorny question of why the CPGB continued to produce revolutionaries from an undoubtedly toxic environment. Why, for example, did the issue of ‘revisionism’ raise its head at the party’s immediate post-war congress in 1945, as sections of the CPGB attempted to wrestle with a leadership that had yanked the organisation, disastrously, and at times absurdly, to the right (hailing the Yalta agreement as a signal of world peace and arguing for a continuation of the wartime national government were two of the more grotesque examples)? Thus, with gentle prodding, Fishman’s empty schema can only be maintained by ‘official’ communist mythology.

‘Responsibility’

Moving back to Arthur Horner, it is clear that Fishman’s vacuous ‘positive’ research agenda for the CPGB has left its mark on her analytical approach.

Thus, the first words of her introduction read: “Arthur Horner was the British communist who exerted the greatest influence on the course of British history. As vice-chairman of the Mardy lodge and member of the South Wales Miner’s Federation executive, he achieved fame across the British coalfields during the eight-months-long miners’ lock-out in 1926. Elected president of the SWMF in 1936, from then on he took a leading role nationally in the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain. After playing an outstanding role during the Second World War in ensuring the maintenance of coal supplies, while at the same time defending miners’ working conditions and pay, in 1946 Horner was elected general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers, the successor organisation to the MFGB. After the coal industry was nationalised in 1947, Horner took the lead in ensuring that the new National Coal Board was a success: his sense of social democratic responsibility meant the he was always concerned about producing enough coal for the nation as well as the interests of union members” (Vol 1, p19). It is this patriotic social democrat whom Fishman appears to revere (the nauseating phrase “social democratic responsibility” recurs throughout the second volume of the biography).

The CPGB, by contrast, is often depicted as an interloper or antagonist to a man who wanted to do his patriotic duty by ensuring the nation had its coal in war and peace. She writes: “Despite his profound attractiveness as a human being and his unquestionably impressive achievements, Horner had one significant failure as a man of action. From 1947, at the age of 53, he declined to resolve the contradiction between his social democratic behaviour as a trade union leader and his continuing membership of the British communist party” (Vol 2, p965).

There is a reason why Horner stayed with the CPGB (beyond Horner’s close personal relationship with Harry Pollitt and his family’s ties to the party) that Fishman seems oblivious to. Put simply, the rightward trajectory of Horner was the rightward trajectory of the CPGB’s leadership and the world ‘official’ communist movement. Yes, there were tensions, but ultimately these proved to be tensions over nuances, not fundamental differences of strategy.

Of course, such judgements will not be contentious for most readers, who probably have some kind of ‘macro’ perspective on the shift of the CPGB away from the revolutionary politics of its foundation. But it would be double Dutch for the likes of Fishman, hobbled by a ‘micro’ ‘realist’ perspective and concerned to flesh out the ‘positive’ contribution that CPGB members made to the life of the nation. So all we are left with once more is the tired mythologies that the ‘official’ CPGB itself trotted out year upon year.

To flesh out this point, let us consider the period after 1951, when a Conservative government came to power. From 1947 the impetus of the cold war pushed the CPGB into a more critical stance toward the Labour government, although Horner had retained the party’s earlier emphasis of ‘produce or perish’ and its attendant hostility to militant trade union action. As Fishman outlines, Horner wanted to carry on this “social democratic responsibility” by safeguarding cooperation between the NCB and NUM under a Conservative government not intent on wholesale reversal of Labour’s nationalisation programme. Other party and leftwing mining activists, with the encouragement of the CPGB’s leadership, were championing wage militancy and expecting the King Street HQ to pull Horner into line.

This scenario eventually led to bitter conflicts in the South Wales area of the CPGB, as well as in the NUM. Throughout this period, CPGB leaders such as Pollitt and JR Campbell were grappling with the almost impossible task of keeping their organisation together (so that CPGB militants stopped coming to blows with ‘responsible’ CPGB miners’ leaders opposed to unofficial militancy such as Horner, Will Paynter and Alf Davies) and making sure that party agitation for militancy in the coalfields stayed on track. In practice, Pollitt and Campbell (along with leading party figures working in south Wales such as Idris Cox) avoided open conflict with Horner because, according to Fishman, they were wary of being pulled even further leftwards by having to denounce Horner’s ‘rightism’ (Vol 2, pp802-68).

Now all of this is very interesting and it put Horner, increasingly reliant on alcohol at this stage in his career, under intense personal pressure, as he tried to juggle with his twin commitments to the NUM and the CPGB – usually resolving such issues, it has to be said, by keeping the party at arm’s length. These conflicts are important to Fishman because they allow her to illustrate her thesis of patriotic responsibility (Horner) versus unpatriotic irresponsibility (coalfield militants). In fact, thinking about this problem in a ‘macro’ fashion, the various constituent actors in these political rows had little dividing them strategically.

It is rather telling that Fishman makes only a few passing references to the adoption of The British road to socialism. When she does, she downplays its significance and paints Horner at a distance: “Horner’s tentative rapprochement with the CPGB since the Conservatives’ election had been evidently ruptured by his high-profile argument in favour of social democratic responsibility on March 14 1952. There is no evidence that he attended the 22nd party Congress in mid-April 1952. Along with five other veterans, including Joe Scott, Cox and Tamara Rust, he was not on the recommended list for election to the CPGB executive committee … The political content of the congress bordered on the mundane. Although delegates formally approved The British road to socialism, they did so without enthusiasm. Evidently, few delegates viewed the new programme as the answer to the party’s increasing political marginalisation” (Vol 2, p838).

Such passages are perhaps the ultimate indictment of Fishman’s analytical method and its inability to draw broad relationships. The BRS, with its emphasis on CPGB cooperation with the Labour left by ‘legislating’ socialism through parliament, was, in fact, the strategic document par excellence of “social democratic responsibility”. It was the theoretical codification of the practice of the likes of Horner and Pollitt in World War II and the post-war Labour government. The only thing that had been lacking was a couple of thousand more Arthur Horners.

The fact that Horner did not attend a rubber-stamping party congress is neither here nor there in the bigger scheme of things. The parameters of the BRS could contain advocates of unofficial action just as it could contain Horner’s emphasis on production drives. None of the participants in the CPGB squabbles over unofficial militancy in 1952-53, did, to the best of my knowledge, step outside the parameters of the BRS. In fact, the various critiques of the CPGB’s reformist strategy were largely being produced by residential and not workplace branches in the post-war period.

‘Third period’

What Pollitt, Campbell and Dutt did for the CPGB’s overall reformist political trajectory Horner matched in relation to his reformist ideas for the trade union movement. In doing so, Horner was undoubtedly helped by the crass way in which sections of the CPGB (leadership figures such as Pollitt ducked and dived) applied ‘third period’ politics to the British trade unions.

The ‘third period’ relates to the policies of the parties of the Comintern during 1928 and 1935, and relied on an objectivist schema to suggest that the proletariat would be pushed toward revolutionary politics by worsening conditions under capitalism. The job of organisations such as the CPGB was to denounce the existing organisations of the labour movement and, in some cases, split from them and form new unions free of reformist taint.^[5] This international shift matched the Soviet Union’s move away from the ‘new economic policy’ to the more aggressive policies of industrialisation and collectivisation.

In terms of British politics, the illiterate theoretical framework of the ‘third period’ has had the unfortunate effect in the ‘official’ communist movement and its various Trotskyist shadows of a number of babies being thrown out with the dirty bathwater, and not always for the most scrupulous of reasons (please note that I am not a follower of the likes of Mike Squires and Matthew Worley, who have attempted to rehabilitate the legacy of the CPGB during these years).

In relation to the trade movement, for example, one of the attacks made on figures such as Horner was on the basis of his ‘right legalism’: ie, a commitment to the existing bureaucracy of the labour movement as against ‘unofficial’ rank-and-file movements.^[6] In some circumstances, and certainly in relation to Horner’s development as a trade union leader, this would be an entirely legitimate criticism to make, given that trade unions are bourgeois institutions, albeit ones based on the working class, whose job, ultimately is to regulate class struggles and thus discipline the working class inside the boundaries of wage labour.

A big problem with the ‘third period’ was the berserk, sectarian manner in which this was applied, whereby the CPGB often tried to rhetorically swerve the existing labour movement, with predictably disastrous results. But it was these results that informed the subsequent intellectual climate inside the ‘official’ communist movement. Thus we had the bizarre formation in the 1980s of an opposition faction inside the CPGB which coalesced around the Morning Star and the idea that it was the job of communists to defend everything that trade unions and trade unionists did.^[7] And this idea is still a dominant one among most shades of today’s revolutionary left.

As detailed by Fishman, Horner had a miserable time of it during the ‘third period’, after stubbornly – and correctly – opposing the new line in relation to the Labour Party and the trade unions. Horner, the CPGB’s leading miner, was actually expelled by the organisation’s politburo for his opposition in February 1930 before the Communist International political secretariat ordered the CPGB to desist. As Fishman notes, “Given Horner’s high public profile, the Comintern’s directive was expeditious and prudent” (Vol 1, p215).

Toxic reformism

By February 1932, as the debate around ‘right legalism’ rumbled on inside the CPGB, Horner was himself in jail for obstructing bailiffs with other unemployed miners in Mardy. Horner used his time inside to conduct a forensic analysis of his time in the workers’ movement. Along with Volume I of Capital, Horner also came under the influence of Karl von Clausewitz’s On war.

Fishman writes: “Incorrigible rebel [Horner’s autobiography] recorded three examples of Clausewitz’s impact on Horner. First: ‘I read it [On war] with very great interest … Clausewitz taught that if you enter into active struggle you can succeed only if you adopt the principle of inflicting the greatest degree of damage on your opponents, with the least possible hurt to your own forces … Sometimes it would be necessary to fight a defensive battle … But when it came to fighting back we had to be sure that if we attacked we were in a position to win.’ The second reference was in his description of a dispute that he had conducted as Federation agent in the Anthracite, culminating in a substantial wage increase without a strike, ‘my first application of the Clausewitz principle … ’” (Vol 1, p241).

Thus Horner adopted Clausewitz as part of what he saw as a more scientific practice of trade union politics, as opposed to the failures of the 1920s: “He recognised that the approach of his militant mentors, fighting every industrial conflict at maximum strength to inflict maximum damage, had not yielded the results he had expected. During the British mining conflicts of the 1920s, inspired by the Russian Revolution, he had refined this strategy into a total war doctrine, which stressed the importance of vigilant organisation and total mobilisation. He argued persuasively that the unions’ defeats, including the 1926 miners’ lock-out, were due to their failure to marshal sufficient force with sufficient energy and commitment. Intellectual honesty had compelled him to acknowledge that this approach had produced a succession of failures and defeats.”

But what Horner had actually produced was a science of bourgeois trade unionism and not a science of communist organisation and trade unions. It is clear that the trade union has displaced the CPGB as the strategic point of his analysis and Horner made no attempt to ask what a trade union actually was and what role it played in capitalist society. Seen through this prism, Horner’s emphasis on keeping the resources and strength of the trade union together at all costs blunted his horizons and turned him not just into a ‘right legalist’ enemy of unofficial strikes and rank and filism, but a seeker of deals with ‘progressive’ forces from among the capitalist political classes who could aid him – and who had a vested interest – in keeping his ‘own’ bourgeois institution intact.

In short, Horner developed a toxic reformist perspective that was the natural ‘trade union’ adjunct of what became the BRS, with its disregard of the leading role of the CPGB in favour of a reliance on the Labour Party to deliver socialism. Despite tensions down the years it was this ideology of bourgeois trade unionism that sustained scores of CPGB members working in trade unions throughout the post-war period and helped blind them to the dead-end reformist strategy of the party.

Decaying

In contrast to Fishman’s positive assessment, we can lament Horner’s development for what it was – decayed politics inside a decaying CPGB – but we should also be clear that probably only a communist could produce and sustain this kind of strategic and, within its own limited terms of reference, intellectual approach to the trade union movement. The CPGB was not a political sect (although paradoxically it was woven around sect shibboleths) as we might understand the phrase today, but, although limited geographically and sectionally, the most important section of the advanced part of the British working class.

Fatally and, sometimes, opportunistically, most of the contemporary left fails to understand the BRS for what it was: ie, the CPGB doing what the Labour left would have been incapable of doing and writing a rounded and strategic programme for the practice of parliamentary reformist socialism. The likes of Horner and other CPGB miners and trade unionist leaders also set out their practice inside a conservative reformist perspective of maintaining and defending trade unions from left and right that their non-communist counterparts would come to rely on.

This how Vic Allen described Will Paynter, Horner’s successor as general secretary of the NUM: “He was a communist, but he gave high priority to his union. His job was to present union policy, to act as the servant of the NEC, and this he did meticulously, even though, in many instances, the views he presented were contrary to his own. Inadvertently, but unavoidably, the brilliance of Will Paynter served to consolidate the power positions of those who comprised the majority of the NEC who were contemptuous of his politics and who opposed and contained him by their majority position. He did for them what they were incompetent at doing for themselves.”^[8]

Fishman paints a similar picture of Horner, although in even more gushy excitable prose: “His public role was to act as an outstanding spokesperson for the union, never evading unpalatable facts or trying to deny NUM members’ responsibilities and duties to the wider community. In broadcasts, interviews and meetings, he transmitted his supreme confidence that his members were committed to producing as much coal as they were able; his audiences – politicians and the wider public – believed him. People were reassured by his persuasive rhetoric, even though they continued to endure the domestic discomfort and economic dislocation which coal shortages continued to cause.

“Horner had achieved celebrity status as the miners’ spokesperson during the war and he continued to attract media attention in the post-war period. His convincing performances and well-constructed arguments ensured that the Conservative opposition and successive Conservative governments continued to treat the NCB as a successful nationalised industry, and did not try to make either coal or the NUM a political football” (Vol 2, p962). Thus, Horner has become the outstanding spokesperson and leader of the NUM bureaucracy, doing for them what they were incompetent at doing for themselves.

After Horner had become embroiled in a dispute with NUM president Will Lawther in 1948 over the strike of French miners (Lawther had made a statement opposing the strikes; Horner told a CGT conference that Lawther had no authority to speak on such matters and suggested British miners would support it), Horner was reprimanded over this sensitive issue in the light of a burgeoning cold war.

However, the leadership of the NUM did not ultimately make Horner chose between his union and the CPGB, partly because in practical, if not in emotional, terms, he had already chosen the NUM, but also because the leadership needed his practical and intellectual abilities. Fishman writes: “Although the [NUM’s] Watson subcommittee report flatly rejected Horner’s insistence that he had made a unique contribution to the union, [Sam] Watson knew that Horner’s assessment of his significance was accurate. He apparently used his influence to ensure that there was no anti-communist crusade inside the NUM. The subcommittee report was duly circulated to area executives, but there is no evidence that any of them took any action as a result. The South Wales area executive did not discuss it – evidence of a de facto consensus between left and right to put the incident behind them and pre-empt any local outbreaks of internecine political conflict” (Vol 2, p775).

Nina Fishman, of course, views what Arthur Horner became in largely positive terms. Unfortunately, her ‘micro’ perspective precludes her from seeing the broader contradiction. By distancing himself from the CPGB and avoiding its disciplines, Horner was, ironically, at one with the reformist trajectory of the organisation and played a leading role in mapping the boundaries of this perspective in relation to the trade unions.

Nevertheless, this is a fine labour of research, marred by an analytical framework that is shallow and, at times, banal.

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Notes

1. See averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com/2010/07/doncaster-swp-why-we-resigned.html
2. Consider Chris Bambery’s largely sympathetic account of the CPGB’s domestic activity in this book review from 1995: pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/sr187/bambery.htm
3. N Fishman, ‘Essentials and realists: reflections on the historiography of the CPGB’: www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/chnn/CHNN11ERF.html
4. Ibid.
5. Two such ‘red’ unions were formed in 1929: The United Mineworkers of Scotland and The United Clothing Workers.
6. This ‘right legalism’ came to be referred to as ‘Hornerism’ inside the CPGB.
7. This faction was the forerunner of the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain.
8. VL Allen The militancy of British miners Shipley 1981, p121.

David Douglass reviews Mike Pentelow and Peter Arkell’s ‘A pub crawl through history: the ultimate boozers’ Who’s who’ Janus, 2010, pp368, £16.99.

This is the most amusing, interesting and informative view of history I have come across. Told through the pub signs of Britain, it is recalled through their characters and names. Trivia has never been so fascinating! As the title suggests, this is a pub crawl with a mission; it is boozing after knowledge and the authors have embarked upon their quest with dedication.

Two hundred pubs are selected, each one visited and its wares sampled, as Pentelow and Arkell discover the history that lies behind those signs and names. Customers and bar folk, landlords and landladies are in a number of cases engaged in the discourse of research. Many a local knows the story of the pub, knows the history of the sign and the character it depicts; still others hold surprising ongoing connections to the figure on the swinging board outside, and demonstrate deep local connections between past and present – myth, legend and fact.

Here we have heroes and heroines, the great and good, the poor and the lowly, engineers, highwaymen, pirates, wise women, kings and pretender kings, politicians, prostitutes, courtesans, revolutionaries, wartime heroes, sportsmen, poets, artists, authors, diarists and musicians. There are performers of all sorts, from all manner of platforms: from stage to parliament, from shipyard slip to flickering movie screen. Figures from the sea and maritime legend, the authors and preachers of tracts, religions and philosophies. Leaders of revolts and resistance from near and far.

The authors have trekked across these islands from north to south, from Ireland to the Channel Isles, from Scotland to the industrial Midlands. They even go as far as Germany and the USA, in search of locally based heroes who staked their claim to fame in distant lands.

This book is not for the coffee table. No, it is for the car glove compartment, for the ‘What to do and where to go’ information stack. It is a drinking historian’s map and compass, guaranteed to keep you chuntering over your beer and happily engaged for many a year. It might also end up as an untimely tribute to the fast-vanishing local – the country pub, the street corner pub, hubs of countless communities through decades and centuries. They are now falling faster than the trees of the Amazon, and if the recession deepens, and the war on drink and weekend binges begun by New Labour continues, many others are destined to follow them.

This book, an essential publication for social historians, is, perhaps not surprisingly, written by two revolutionary socialists. Mike Pentelow is a long-time progressive journalist and member of the NUJ for 40-plus years. He recently authored Norfolk red: the life of Wilf Page, countryside communist (Lawrence and Wishart, 2009). As for Peter Arkell, he has been a radical photographer since 1970 and was well known during the miners’ 1984-85 Great Strike for his fearless journalism alongside Ray Rising at the hot spots of our picketing operations. They produced the dynamic photo history Unfinished business.

The authors are to be congratulated for this unique take on history and for telling their stories in such a novel and thought-provoking fashion.

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Arthur Bough reviews Nicole Robertson’s ‘The co-operative movement and communities in Britain, 1914-60′ Ashgate, 2010, pp268, £55.

For today’s generation, growing up in a world dominated by Tesco, it’s impossible to understand how important the Co-op was in working class life. When I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, the Co-op was ubiquitous. I grew up in a small mining village. The high street was two or three hundred yards in length, but in that short distance, there were two Co-op shops: a grocery, and a butcher. Half a mile away, in the next small settlement, there was another Co-op store, combining both grocery and butchery. The only other stores were the corner shops, which amounted to nothing more than the front room of a terraced house, and several small shops selling clothes, sweets and tobacco, and a fishmonger. But it was the Co-op which formed the centre of everyone’s shopping experience.

It was not just shopping. Our coal was delivered by a Co-op coalman and our milk by a Co-op milkman. The Co-op even had its own money – milk was paid for with blue, plastic ‘milk cheques’. Every so often, the Co-op laundry collected my father’s greasy overalls to be cleaned. At the end of the 50s or very early 60s, just after the village cinema closed down, the Co-op took over the premises, and established a supermarket, which was a retailing innovation at the time.

In the towns adjoining the village, there were larger Co-op stores, which sold drapery, or furniture and electrical goods, as they started to become available. There was even a separate Co-op TV and electrical repair store. For most of the 1950s, I had a lot of second-hand clothes, but, on the occasions I can remember being taken to buy new clothes, it was up to the main Co-op emporium. When my sister left school, she went to work in the offices of the North Midland Co-op, which had its headquarters a couple of miles away. It’s this history of the Co-op – its heyday – and its impact on working-class lives that Robertson’s book details.

The co-operative community

The book focuses on retailing. It deals with the co-op as a movement, including its political and educational activities, intended by its leaders as a means of establishing a co-operative community, but it is perhaps an indication of the failure of that goal that these other activities are refracted through the lens of the retail business. The idea of community goes back to Owen, who envisaged a system of communes exchanging with each other. The utopian followers of Owen framed this in terms of dropping out of capitalist society, but, in fact, the co-op developed necessarily within capitalism, whilst presenting an alternative to it.

Robertson sets out several things necessary, such as playing fields, public buildings, churches, schools, shops, etc. The co-op provided almost all these things. She provides a powerful image on p30:

“The new town centre has some fine shops bearing nationally known names, but Co-operative House is the largest and most prominent. At night, the word ‘Co-operative’ in white neon lights can be seen from a good distance away. There is also a clock similarly illuminated. The pleasant mass of Co-operative House dominates the centre of this brave new town.”^[1]

We should not underestimate the degree to which these visual symbols affect us.

For nearly all the period under review, there was no welfare state. The co-op effectively was the welfare state, the difference being that it was the creation of workers themselves rather than the creation of capitalists – contrary to myth, the welfare state is largely the brainchild of Tory Neville Chamberlain^[2] – but, as with the other such creations, remains capable of being reformed, democratised and brought under their control.

The co-operative movement has been largely ignored by the labour movement and historians. In my own study of co-ops, I noted that fact, and gave some suggestions as to why that is. The labour movement has been based on the statist ideologies of Lassalle and Fabianism.^[3] And for historians, it is always the heroic event or the history of institutions that make more attractive subjects than the gradual social processes going on within society. As Robertson also suggests, the Co-op focus on the consumer (often a woman) rather than the producer (often seen as a man) partly explains it.

There has been some work done on the role socialist organisations played in providing alternative culture and lifestyles for workers. Some work has been done, for instance, in relation to organisations such as the Plebs League, and the establishment of the National Co-operative Film Archives has enabled further research in this area. Further work by feminists is opening up other areas, such as that of the Co-operative Women’s Guild.

It is difficult to speak of a single co-op history; the individual societies were vastly different, ranging from a few thousand, up to the largest like the London Co-op, which had 1.2 million members in 1957.

There is a wealth of evidence in the book of workers creating their own alternatives from the ground up. Marx spoke about the few willing hands who established the co-operative factories, providing a lesson indeed.^[4] It was no less ordinary workers who established by their own efforts co-op societies that grew and prospered. By the mid 20th century there were 12.5 million co-op members.

The St Cuthberts Co-op in Edinburgh was established in 1859 by joiners and cabinetmakers. By 1960, it had over 100,000 members, 80 grocery stores, 75 bakeries, 28 fruit shops and nine tailors, and was involved in activities from dairies to wallpaper shops. The Leicester Co-op was established in 1860 by seven weavers. By the 1950s it had over 80,000 members and a branch in every one of the 400 square miles it covered. The Birmingham Industrial Co-op was set up in 1881 by 25 mainly railway workers. By 1960, it had almost 400,000 members. The London Co-op was formed by mergers in 1920-21 of the Stratford Co-op, established by railwaymen, the Edmonton Co-op established by tramwaymen, and the West London Co-op, again established by railwaymen.

The Co-op was innovative. In 1942, it pioneered the first self-service store in Britain. It was able to use its centralised buying, and its own production to an extent that, at the beginning of the last century, it threatened the existing department stores. Even in architecture it created its own style of art deco buildings.

And it was natural that from the start they should have more of a role than just being a shop. Robertson quotes the services provided from aid given to members during times of hardship (such as sickness and unemployment) to an array of needs for special occasions, such as wedding day. Robertson details how, prior to the welfare state, the Co-op provided extensive welfare support for its members. It set up funds to cover hardship and illness to cover medical costs, and convalescence, and such funds continued to be provided even when times were hard, and not just to members.

The Co-op provided sports facilities for its workers. It led the way in introducing paid holidays for workers, and in introducing the 48-hour week when most other workers were working a 50-60 hour week. It had funds for its workers to cover long periods of illness, and to cover the costs of their convalescence. Even after the NHS was established, the Co-op continued to provide its members with medical equipment, for example. Similar welfare support covered death, and in areas like South Wales community projects to relieve distress caused by colliery closures. It was able to provide support through credit, even though this contradicted the original principles of the Rochdale Pioneers, who had opposed credit because they did not want to encourage workers to get into debt. Workers settled their accounts when they were paid, not when they shopped. But, as with credit unions, members were not allowed to simply continue to run up debts. Their debts were discussed, and they were advised on reducing them.

Yet there was a gap between the vision of the leadership and activists, and the concerns of the majority of members. The leadership and Owenite organisations had a view of increasingly self-sufficient co-operative communities developing and of education, etc resulting in growing numbers of co-operators. It never happened. The majority were happy to remain passive beneficiaries of the Co-op – consumers of what it had to offer rather than activists, as with the trade unions or Labour Party. This is inevitable from a view of socialism that emphasises the idea that workers can have things done for them, provided to them, rather than that workers have to be actively involved in providing for themselves. And the Co-ops did provide for almost every need. They became involved in hairdressing, sweet shops, fish and chip shops, jewellers, opticians, funeral directors, coal dealers and pharmacies in the inter-war years. After the war, they expanded further into removal services, wallpaper shops, dry cleaning, and electrical goods.

The aim was to create an “integrated economy from bakers shop to flour mill, from tea table to tea plantation”.^[5] But this entailed an inevitable contradiction. The interests of consumers were paramount. The protection and fair treatment of those it employed was part of its ethos, but its employees remained wage-workers. What confronted them was still capital. That it was capital owned by other workers did not change the fundamental social relation of labour to capital in the way it is changed where the workers themselves own their means of production.

This is a problem that a socialist society would face. Where the means of production are owned by the state, each group of workers is confronted, so long as commodity production continues, by capital, and their relation to it remains that of wage-workers. That it is a workers’ state owning the capital would not change that relation. The fundamental economic relation would be that of state capitalism. This is why Engels says he and Marx envisaged that co-operatives would play a major role for a prolonged period, with the state acting only as a holding company retaining the deeds, so that property could not be privatised, rather than exercising active ownership and control.^[6]

Consumers’ co-ops do have a role to play. It is possible producer co-ops might use monopoly power to make monopoly profits. Consumer co-ops can act as commissioning agents to counterbalance such power, and at the same time formalise connections between workers as producers and consumers. One of the areas where this is probably important is in the provision of services such as welfare.

A strong point illustrated by Robertson is the co-op’s natural tendency to internationalism. That is so not just because of its concept of ‘community’, but also because the same economic forces that drive capital to expand, and create deeper and more extensive links, operate on co-operative property too. As early as the 1850s the Co-op had extensive international links, through which it learned the latest technology and techniques. Co-operators from around the globe came to the Co-op College at Stanford Hall, and that helped to reinforce the ideology of internationalism.

The Co-op and the fight against capital

Robertson shows how World War I was important for the Co-op. It pressed for food rationing, and set up its own systems prior to the government doing so. In the aftermath there was widespread profiteering, and price-fixing, causing rapidly rising prices. This set the Co-op model in stark contrast to capitalist business. A cartoon in Co-operative News of December 14 1918 showed a co-operative St George killing a capitalist dragon with the caption, “The people’s co-operative fight with the capitalistic menace”. And that difference had been shown in the standing committee on trusts’ Report on the soap industry (1921), which concluded that there had been widespread profiteering by the soap manufacturers, whilst “The Co-operative Wholesale Society has generally taken the lower of the two costs, which is the exact reverse of what other soap makers have done.”

The Co-op played an important role in the Workers National Committee set up in 1914, providing it with figures for food and other prices. The London Co-operative Society also worked with the London Trades Council and Labour Party to form the London Food Vigilance Committee, which set up committees in 30 districts and organised a 50,000-strong demonstration in Hyde Park. Such activities show how the transitional demand for a sliding scale of wages could be practically implemented.

But it was important for another reason. When the government did introduce rationing, the Co-op was discriminated against by the private traders who controlled the quotas. Lloyd George brought influential businessmen into government, but the Co-op was excluded. The competition against capitalist property meant it must inevitably have to engage in politics. In May 1917, the Co-op congress made that decision. A focus was excess profits duty, which classed the ‘divi’ – the dividend Co-ops paid to their members/customers – as profits, even though the increases in divi were due to rising prices.

The bosses and government had no difficulty seeing the Co-op as part of the labour movement, even if sometimes it appeared the trade unions did not. In 1919, fearing a miners’ strike, Lloyd George wrote to Bonar Law: “The miners I happen to know are relying upon the co-operative stores to feed them. The great co-operative supplies are outside the mining areas. They ought not to be removed. Once the strike begins, it is imperative that the state should win. Failure to do so would inevitably lead to a soviet republic.”^[7]

During the 1919 railway strike co-ops supplied food to the strikers. The shopworkers union in 1921 devised a plan to get supplies to members of the Triple Alliance, in case of a strike, via a national strike food committee, made up of the alliance, the co-operative movement and its employees. Co-op societies would be urged to move stocks lying at railways and in warehouses, “so that stores can be in our hands before the government commandeers the larger accumulation of supplies”. In case of shortages, committees would rely on the wartime experience of co-ops in organising rationing.

The unions did not often reciprocate. They continued to place their funds in capitalist banks, and when the General Strike was underway, the Co-op was given no dispensation. As it encouraged its workers to join unions, it was in fact harder hit than private retailers, who opposed unions and used scab labour. Yet retail societies contributed £48,000 to national appeals, food and clothing worth £131,000 was handed over, and trade union credit of nearly half a million pounds was extended. It was alleged that £400,000 was transferred from the USSR to the Miners’ Federation, through the Co-operative Wholesale Society.

When the Tories attempted to prevent a repeat by introducing the Trades Dispute and Trades Union Bill in 1927, the central board of the Co-operative Union noted that “capitalist interests that have demanded this bill from the government are the same business and political interests that are striving to hamper the legitimate development of co-operation” and called upon “all co-operators to assist the trade unions in every possible way to defeat this reactionary measure”.^[8]

In the 1930s the Co-op Union organised support for the National Unemployed Workers Movement and the hunger marches, even though they were ignored at a national level by the trades unions and Labour Party.

But the Co-op had to compete with other retailers. When it was strong it could lead the way. The more capitalist retailers grew, however, the more it had to adopt similar practices to them. So worried was it that its workers would use their own membership to dominate the boards and raise wages that it introduced rules to prevent them having full voting rights. But it was precisely becoming worker-owned and -controlled that could have saved them. It was the employees who could have the new ideas and dynamism that would have provided the competitive edge.

It is also necessary to understand that trade union bureaucrats have an incentive to oppose co-ops. Trade unions are there to bargain within capitalism, and it is from that role that the bureaucrats earn their living. The whole point of a worker-owned co-op is to establish non-capitalist property, and thereby to end the system of wages and wage bargaining. The function of the union bureaucrat disappears.

A similar problem existed with the Labour Party, for the same reason. Labour was set up to bargain for better conditions within capitalism. Although the Co-op Party had close links with Labour, there was always a friction based on that different ideology. Moreover, Labour basically thought that the Co-op should just hand over its money.

The difference was highlighted with the 1945 government. the Co-op always felt that Labour governments did nothing to promote the co-op movement or ideals. They were excluded from the Economic Planning Board. The idea of social, as opposed to state, ownership divided the two, and the aspect of democratic control implicit in Co-op ideals played no part in Labour’s ideas about nationalisation. That was marked when the Co-op colliery was transferred from workers’ hands into the hands of the capitalist state, as part of the nationalisation of mines, and similar threats were raised against the Co-op’s industrial insurance business. As Peter Gurney puts it, it led Co-op leaders to believe “their own distinctive form of economic organisation would be snuffed out because of Labour’s preference for bureaucratic and statist alternatives”.^[9]

In the same way that Marx describes how capital traps workers – and, the more affluent they become, the more trapped they are, dependent on it for the continuation of those wages – so this dependence on the capitalist state reproduced that relation, whether it was as employees of it or as effective serfs dependent on welfare.

That is why Marx, in the programme of the First International argued for direct taxes: “Because indirect taxes conceal from an individual what he is paying to the state, whereas a direct tax is undisguised, unsophisticated and not to be misunderstood by the meanest capacity. Direct taxation prompts therefore every individual to control the governing powers, while indirect taxation destroys all tendency to self-government.”^[10]

The co-op and an alternative culture

Robertson deals at length with the way in which the Co-op attempted to promote the idea of community through its work in other areas, such as education, sport and leisure. The extent of all these was dependent upon the size and success of the retail society in the area, which funded the activity.

Again, it was the nature of a consumer Co-op which limited the potential for this activity. The vast majority of members did not participate in Co-op democracy, and were mainly just interested in low prices and the divi rather than Co-op philosophy. Most of the store managers shared that outlook, and, as already pointed out, the workers in the stores had no reason to view their position as much different from that of any other worker.

The Socialist Workers’ Sports International was formed in 1920 with the aim of educating “a new and healthy generation which will propagate socialism, fight capitalist exploitation, fight against war, fight for peace of the world and for the political, economic and cultural emancipation of the working class”.^[11] The co-operative movement was encouraged “to use sporting activities as part of its ideological advancement, arguing that ‘by the provision of adequate sports facilities and the stimulating of sports participation the movement can hasten forward the Co-operative Commonwealth’” (p79).

The Co-op initially organised sports activities for its workers, not members. That changed in 1948, when it was agreed that the newly formed National Co-operative Sports Association should also be for members. As with many aspects of Co-op activity, there was no uniformity. Many of the smaller societies provided no facilities at all. An argument against extending facilities to members had been the logistical problem of catering for so many people over wide areas.

The answer was to focus on specific groups, particularly the young, who it wanted to socialise into its community. Whilst annual events such as Co-operators Day and International Co-operators Week provided family events, which demonstrated that the Co-op was a central part of working class communities, emphasis was placed on youth events. This was linked to Education. The Co-operative Educator argued that activities on Co-op-owned playing fields showed that the Co-op was more than just a trading concern.^[12]

From 1923, the annual Summer Carnival was designated International Co-operators Day, and continued to draw large crowds into the 1960s and 70s.

At a time when holidays were becoming common for workers, societies organised outings, buying their own transport. Some bought country estates, which were leased to the Workers Travel Association as holiday homes. The larger stores played a part too, because they increasingly had space set aside for eating, drinking and socialising, both during shopping and for evening activities. The Co-op halls were central to working class life – hired out not just for weddings, funerals and dances, but to trade unions and other labour movement organisations. Turnbull and Southern describe them as “an alternative working class power base to the local middle class establishment.”^[13]

In 1950, the Birmingham Co-op Dairy attracted 3,000 to its Sports Day. The society only employed 7,000. However, as Robertson points out, in Britain it faced much more competition from commercial leisure than in the rest of Europe. The reasons for participation were no doubt different from the motivations of the leadership and activists, just as was the case in regard to consuming other goods and services. With rising affluence, and the growth of consumerism in the 1950s, the Co-op found it was losing young people to these commercial providers.

The Rochdale Pioneers established a library and reading room above their premises and, from 1852, a proportion of the surplus was devoted to education. It was the only education available for workers in the 19th century. Even in the 20th century it remained important. The education committee of the Birmingham Society wrote: “We realise that without trading, our educational work could not be done, but there is another side to co-operation. The movement stands for human betterment. We seek to provide food for the mind.”^[14]

Again it depended on the size of local societies, and again the spread of a consumerist attitude – this time the consumption of education provided by the capitalist state – undermined co-operative education, just as it undermined other forms of independent working class education. Ownership and control passed from the workers to the capitalist state. Where the churches took advantage of state education to finance their own schools, the Co-op did not. It did not see itself as an alternative to state capitalist education, but as an adjunct to it.

Marx and the First International had been wholly opposed to the idea of state education. Marx described it as “wholly objectionable”. The only role for the state, they argued, was in setting general guidelines. In a speech to the International Workingmen’s Association in 1869, Marx spoke of the system in Massachusetts, where the establishment of education was the responsibility of townships. He seems to have favoured this idea as a means of keeping the government out, but argued the need for national standards and inspection, as with the Factory Acts.^[15] The IWA in its programme tied education to the employment of children, and argued that the cost of the education should be defrayed out of the products of that labour.

Marx was also totally opposed to the instruction of children in schools in anything that could be open to class interpretation: “Nothing could be introduced either in primary, or higher schools that admitted of party and class interpretation. Only subjects such as the physical sciences, grammar, etc were fit matter for schools. The rules of grammar, for instance, could not differ, whether explained by a religious Tory or a free thinker.”

Everything else they would learn from adults as part of their daily lives at work. That is they would learn the lessons of class struggle from adult workers. From this perspective co-operative education tied to worker-owned co-operative production makes sense, particularly as Marx argued the need to tie education to productive activity, which he saw as being vital to raise working class children way above the level of the children of the bourgeoisie.

The determination of Co-op educators was exemplified in London during the war: “For a period we were stunned by the avalanche of human misery and, with homes, classrooms and meeting places destroyed, the hard work of many, many years seemed to have come to an inglorious end. But, within a few weeks, there arose from the ashes new life, new hopes, and with commendable courage, Guild Youth branches, choirs and classes began to re-form. The need for co-operative education is greater now than ever before; we must ‘Build for tomorrow’.”^[16]

The Co-op Union maintained education for members in the forces, devising correspondence courses for members and employees alike, and subjects included the co-op internationalist alternative to war. The problem was the lesson that a consumer Co-op gave in practice: that by owning capital and employing workers it was possible to acquire goods and services cheaply, and to make a surplus. That was a lesson capitalists had learned long before. This is one reason that Marx and the First International had argued: “We recommend to the working men to embark in co-operative production rather than in co-operative stores. The latter touch but the surface of the present economical system; the former attacks its groundwork.”^[17]

They were not the only organisation doing that. From the early part of the century there had been a movement for independent working class education that sprang from the Plebs League and developed into the National Council of Labour Colleges (NCLC). They stood for no compromise with bourgeois education, and against the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA), which had been set up by sections of the liberal bourgeoisie to head off rising working class self-education, just as the emerging welfare state acted, as Marx put it, to destroy “all tendency to self-government”^[18] – which is why he had demanded that the state keep its hands off the Workers’ Friendly Societies set up for that purpose.

State education was indoctrinating the workers’ children; the WEA sought to do the same thing with adult workers. Nevertheless, a continual struggle existed to win the TUC for independent working class education against the ability of the WEA to offer ‘professional’ lecturers, and considerably more resources. The Co-op worked with both the NCLC and WEA, though many activists believed that this undermined the Co-op’s own ideas.

As early as the 1930s the Co-op was also providing specific education for women. The Co-operative Women’s Guild helped members develop a range of skills. George Barnsby describes it as “a school of democratic action and empowerment for working class women, starting typically with a young, timid, inexperienced housewife and taking her through confidence-building stages until many were capable of speaking before mass national audiences and taking national and even international positions within the co-operative and labour movement.”^[19]

Peter Gurney says that by 1930 the revolutionary potential of the Co-op had gone. In the post-war period, the rise of consumerism, and the greater strength and competitiveness of increasingly large stores, meant that the basic model of the consumer co-operative was undermined.

The weakness of Robertson’s book is that, although as a history it reveals some of the problems and weaknesses of consumer co-operatives, it does not really discuss the lessons or solutions. I have tried to do that as part of this review. One of the usual criticisms of the statist left against co-ops is that they cannot compete with private capital. The co-op clearly did. Established by small groups of workers in the most unfavourable conditions, the retail co-ops grew to dominate the retail space and acquired millions of members. And they expanded into production and wholesaling. Even today, the Co-op is the biggest farmer in Britain.

Globally, the number of co-ops has continued to grow over the last century, and they employ more people than multinationals, as well as dominating production or distribution for certain products in a number of countries. In Britain, however, the retail Co-ops lost their dominating position. But for a socialist to account for that simply by saying that it was due to the rise of consumerism is inadequate. The question would be, why could the Co-op not adapt to cater for that consumerism?

In part, I think the rise and fall of the retail co-ops is similar to the rise and fall of the USSR. The economy of the USSR grew extremely rapidly, when the things it had to do were quite straightforward. It began to fail when it went past that stage, and had to accomplish more complex tasks, particularly responding to consumer needs. Partly that was due to its continued primitiveness, partly to the attempt to prematurely plan a complex economy, partly to the lack of democratic workers’ control of production.

The co-op was established initially to deal with the problems of the adulteration of workers’ food and profiteering. By supplying good-quality products at low prices, it met workers’ basic needs and grew rapidly. In the absence of a welfare state it was able to succeed in providing some measure of worker-owned services in education and welfare. Its success in basic food retailing enabled it to expand into other retail areas.

But there was no requirement for the members of a consumers’ co-op to involve themselves in its running. They did not do so, and this enabled the management to increasingly exercise control as a bureaucracy. In a producer co-op, there are decisions that workers have to make every day, and so a culture of involvement, and democracy develops automatically. To the extent that such a co-op has to operate in a market, the individual workers as owners have a vested interest in ensuring that its production meets consumers’ needs, and that production is carried out efficiently. Again there is a necessary involvement of workers in participating in management and decision-making within their company. The retail co-ops prevented their own workers from exercising that role.

A wider history needs to look at the experience of other forms of co-operatives, in particular the worker-owned producer co-ops. At least in this book there is some discussion of workers’ self-organisation, whether it be in relation to co-operatives, or in relation to independent workers’ education. That is a beginning.

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Notes

1. Quoting C Fox, ‘The Corby story’ Agenda 1956.
2. simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neville_Chamberlain
3. www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1966/twosouls/5-lassalle.htm
4. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/10/27.htm
5. J Bailey The co-operative movement London 1952.
6. revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv1n2/englletr.htm
7. C Wrigley Lloyd George and the challenge of Labour Hemel Hempstead 1990.
8. Kettering Co-operative Magazine May 1927.
9. P Gurney The battle for the consumer in post-war Britain London 2005.
10. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1866/08/instructions.htm#07
11. G Elvin, ‘The progress of the workers’ sports movement’ in Co-operative Wholesale Society People’s Year Book 1936.
12. Co-operative Educator July 1920.
13. J Turnbull, J Southern More than just a shop Preston 1995, p43.
14. Wheatsheaf, Birmingham, May 1939.
15. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1869/education-speech.htm
16. LCS quarterly report, education section, December 7 1940.
17. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1866/instructions.htm#05
18. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1866/08/instructions.htm#07
19. G Barnsby Socialism in Birmingham and the Black Country 1850-1939 Wolverhampton 1998.

Mike Macnair reviews Henry Heller’s ‘The bourgeois revolution in France 1789-1815′ Bergahn Books, 2006, pp172, £20.13; and, David Parker’s (ed) ‘Ideology, absolutism and the English revolution: debates of the British communist historians, 1940-1956′ Lawrence and Wishart, 2008, pp285, £18.99.

PART ONE.

These two books are – in different ways – approaches to the bourgeois character of two great revolutions: the British in the 17th century and the French in the late 18th and early 19th. These parts of history, thanks to the ‘national curriculum’, have not been commonly taught in schools for decades. So a very oversimplified summary of the political course of events may be helpful in grasping what the books are about.

It is also necessary to discuss, in an equally oversimplified way, the books’ intellectual contexts. The result will be rather seriously long for a book review, and will be in two parts: but will hopefully encourage readers to read the books. Henry Heller sees the French revolution as directly relevant to the present problem of proletarian revolution. This is in any direct sense false; but indirectly the theoretical historical problem of the character of the revolutions is sharply relevant to modern working class politics.

Britain

In 1637 the Stuart government’s attempt to impose an English-style prayer-book on the Scots kirk led to a riot in Edinburgh – often said to have been triggered when market trader Jenny Geddes threw her stool at the officiating minister at a service in St Giles’ cathedral. The protests against the new prayer-book snowballed into a Scots Presbyterian revolution against the regime, and a Scots invasion of northern England (secretly supported by some English ‘puritan’ oppositionists) – the ‘bishops’ wars’. The attempt to defeat the Scots by force broke king Charles I’s financial ability to rule without parliamentary taxation. Meanwhile, in the Battle of the Downs in 1639 the fleet of the Dutch Protestant republic smashed that of the Spanish Catholic monarchy in violation of English territorial waters, contemptuously shrugging off an English squadron that looked on helplessly. This was an English military humiliation, as well as a catastrophic defeat of the Spanish.

The ‘short parliament’ of April-May 1640 failed to solve the fiscal crisis, and neither did fresh elections: the ‘long parliament’, beginning in November 1640, demanded so much that in 1642 the king resorted to civil war.

The two civil wars of 1642-46 and 1648 ended with the defeat of the king’s armies, and in 1649 the trial and execution of the king, proclamation of the Commonwealth, or English Republic, and abolition of the House of Lords. To win the wars, however, the parliament and the ‘puritans’ had to call into action the lower orders: beginning with mass mobilisations in London from 1638 on, and sharply moved forward with the creation of the ‘New Model Army’ in 1645, which broke with gentry-raised and gentry-controlled units in favour of a more organised army, based directly on ideological commitment. The result was the beginning of the independent, politico-religious self-expression of these lower orders; Levellers, Diggers, Ranters and so on; and, in the later 1650s, Quakers.

The leftwards dynamic of the army was arrested by the forcible suppression of the Levellers in 1649, but the elites – gentry and merchant patricians in the towns – wanted more ‘restoration of order’. The 1650s saw a military coup by leading general Oliver Cromwell and his associates, who tried various methods to govern the country – and, after Cromwell’s death, a brief restoration of the republic.

The civil wars produced a new and more effective army and navy, backed by a new and more effective tax and finance regime. Both the republic and the Cromwellian regime displayed aggressive exploitation of these resources: the Commonwealth conquered Ireland (1649) and Scotland (1650-51) and fought a naval war with the Dutch Republic (1652-54), and the Cromwellian regime fought a war with Spain (1655-59) both in the Caribbean, where the English seized Jamaica, at sea, and (in alliance with France) in what is now Belgium.

In 1660 the monarchy was restored, but with two fundamental changes. First, the principal non-parliamentary sources of royal revenue – the king’s feudal rights over gentry landowners and the right of ‘purveyance’ or compulsory purchase of goods for royal use – had been abolished by the Commonwealth. They stayed abolished and were replaced by a parliamentary excise tax. Second, the ‘prerogative’ courts of star chamber and high commission and the ability of the privy council to act as a court within mainland Britain had been abolished in 1641 before the outbreak of civil war. They stayed abolished, and the remaining ‘courts of equity’ (the chancery and similar courts) became subject to appeals to the House of Lords. The effect was to take away the principle that the king, as ‘fountain of justice’, could set up new courts to overrule the existing courts.

Charles II’s brother, James II, set out to create toleration of Catholics and a right to appoint them to the army and the universities (this was the road to suppression of Protestantism, which had previously been taken in Poland, France and some other continental states). To do the job he was also driven to reassert the old idea that the king was above the law and could create new courts. When James’s queen became pregnant (and gave birth to a son in June 1688), James’s Protestant opponents called in the Stadtholder William of Orange and the Dutch army, and raised a new revolution against James to back the invasion.

James’s rapid capitulation and exile made 1688 appear – falsely – a ‘peaceful’ and ‘top-down’ revolution: besides substantial mass mobilisations in England, there was full-scale civil war in Scotland and a Catholic revolution in Ireland, requiring a full-scale Anglo-Dutch invasion to suppress it.

But, though there was no civil war in England in 1688, the consequences were profound. The state was restructured into constitutional forms which to a considerable extent it retains to this day. England now became a major player in a European war. And to fund this war the Bank of England and the London money markets were invented, imitating the Netherlands. The period after 1689 saw an explosive growth of capitalist enterprises of all sorts.

Britain now rapidly surpassed the Netherlands as a global power. Just over 100 years separate the revolutions of 1688 and 1789; for 40 of those years Britain and France were at war. Four times between 1689 and 1763 Britain and its allies fought and defeated absolutist France in global wars. In the 1763 treaty ending the Seven Years War, the French were finally driven to expel the Stuart exile government from France, completely abandoning the aim of restoring the Stuarts in England. Finally, in 1776 the outbreak of the American revolution or war of independence (1776-83) allowed a little more French success. The result, however, was the creation of another republic in the US – and by the late 1780s the effective bankruptcy of the French state.

France

With bankruptcy the only alternative, the government of the French Bourbon king, Louis XVI, in 1788 called for a meeting of the estates-general, which had not met since 1614, with the aim of obtaining agreement to a plan to impose taxes on the nobility and clergy, who were tax-exempt.

When the estates-general met in May 1789, the situation rapidly ran out of the royal government’s control. The Third Estate asserted its own character – as the only elected estate – as representative of France as a whole, calling itself successively the ‘Commons’ (imitating Britain), the ‘National Assembly’, and finally the ‘Constituent Assembly’. The king’s decision to form a new government hostile to this assembly triggered more action: a Paris prison, the Bastille, was seized by mass action; in the countryside, peasant uprisings began to drive out the nobility and overthrow their feudal claims. The assembly formally abolished feudal rights and adopted a ‘Declaration of the rights of man and citizen’. A mass demonstration, reinforced by the ‘National Guard’ militia forced the king and his family to move to Paris, crippling attempts to mount a military resistance. Church property was nationalised.

In June 1791 the king attempted to flee to army supporters at Varennes, but was caught and brought back to Paris. In response, the king of Prussia and emperor of Austria asserted their willingness to take action to “to place the king of France in a position to establish, with the most absolute freedom, the foundations of a monarchical form of government”. The Prussians invaded France in July 1792. The war began with French defeats. In response, a Paris insurrection purged the assembly of its right wing, and Louis XVI was arrested. On September 20 the Prussians were defeated at the battle of Valmy. The next day a newly elected convention declared the abolition of the monarchy and the creation of a republic. Louis was put on trial in December and executed in January 1793.

The execution of the king triggered further wars of intervention, interval revolts in the west (the Vendée) and south, and a further radicalisation of the regime. The ‘extreme’ Jacobin party made a coup against the ‘moderate’ Girondins and proceeded to very extensive mass mobilisation, terrorism against internal opponents and war-centralisation of the economy. By the end of 1793, it became clear that the French revolutionary armies were able to stand off both external enemies and internal revolts, and in the first half of 1794 they had further successes. In July 1794 the Girondins made a counter-coup against the Jacobins – ‘Thermidor’ – and turned the weapon of terror against them.

The French armies were able from 1794 to go on the offensive, conquering the Netherlands and invading Spain in 1795; forcing Spain and Prussia out of the war; successfully invading both the Rhineland and Italy in 1796; and forcing Austria out of the war in 1797. Meanwhile, the convention constitution was replaced by the openly oligarchic directory (1795). This in turn gave way in 1799 to a coup by the successful general, Napoleon Bonaparte, who set himself up as ‘first consul’ and from 1804 emperor.

War with Britain in effect continued until 1813, with a brief interlude in 1802-03. The British constructed a series of European coalitions against the French, all of which were defeated, with Napoleon’s empire spreading further and further across Europe. Finally, Napoleon overreached by invading Russia in 1812, leading to the disastrous retreat from Moscow. The ‘sixth coalition’ was then able to defeat the French armies, and restore the Bourbon monarchy – twice, since in the ‘hundred days’ in 1815, Napoleon was restored until he was defeated at Waterloo.

But as with the English restoration in 1660, the French restoration left the king as a partially limited monarch: there was a constitution and a representative assembly with limited powers, and the revolution’s changes in government, armed forces, taxation and the legal system were left intact. In the revolution of 1830, the Bourbon monarchy was replaced by a more clearly constitutional regime, the Orléanist or ‘July’ monarchy of Louis Philippe. This in turn fell in 1848 to a short-lived Second Republic – overthrown in 1851 by a coup by its own president, Louis Bonaparte, who created the Second Empire (1851-71). In spite of Marx’s characterisations in The class struggles in France and The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, there is no real retrospective doubt that the Second Empire, though politically dictatorial, was a fully capitalist regime. Indeed, there is little real doubt that the Orléanist monarchy was already a bourgeois regime.

Marxism and the revolutions

There are striking similarities between the overall political patterns of the English and French revolutions.

The financial bankruptcy of the old regime leads to a government appeal to a representative institution to supply taxes. The representatives demand reform, initially starting with quite conservative ideas. The attempts of the monarchy to take back control result on the contrary in increasing radicalisation. The need of the opponents of the monarchy to fight a civil or international war produces broad mobilisation, extreme radicalisation and transformation both of the military and of the basis of taxation. There is a reaction of the possessing classes back from this radicalisation, issuing in oligarchy and military dictatorship. Military-fiscal transformation spills over into external aggressive war. There is internally or externally enforced restoration of the monarchy with more limited powers. Finally, this period of monarchist restoration is itself overthrown and followed by capitalist constitutionalism. Some of these similarities were already noticed at the time of the French Revolution.

Marx and Engels in 1850 reviewed a pamphlet, titled Why did the English revolution succeed?, by the former Orléanist prime minister, François Guizot, who drew the comparison from a bourgeois standpoint.

They comment: “M Guizot does not think it worth mentioning that the struggle against Louis XIV was simply a war of competition aimed at the destruction of French naval power and commerce; nor does he mention the rule of the finance bourgeoisie through the establishment of the Bank of England under William III, nor the introduction of the public debt, which then received its first sanction, nor that the manufacturing bourgeoisie received a new impetus by the consistent application of a system of protective tariffs.”

Marx and Engels further note: “M Guizot finds it superfluous to mention that the subjection of the crown to parliament meant subjection to the rule of a class. Nor does he think it necessary to deal with the fact that this class won the necessary power in order finally to make the crown its servant. According to him, the whole struggle between Charles I and parliament was merely over purely political privileges. Not a word is said about why the parliament, and the class represented in it, needed these privileges. Nor does Guizot talk about Charles I’s interference with free competition, which made England’s commerce and industry increasingly impossible; nor about the dependence on parliament into which Charles I, in his continuous need for money, fell the more deeply, the more he tried to defy it.”

And: “The English class of great landowners, allied with the bourgeoisie – which, incidentally, had already developed under Henry VIII – did not find itself in opposition, as did the French feudal landowners in 1789, but rather in complete harmony with the vital requirements of the bourgeoisie. In fact, their lands were not feudal, but bourgeois property. On the one hand, they were able to provide the industrial bourgeoisie with the manpower necessary for manufacturing, and on the other they were able to develop agriculture to the standards consonant with industry and commerce. Thus their common interests with the bourgeoisie, thus their alliance with it.”^[1]

In this article is found the core of an understanding of the English revolutions of the 17th century, which was also present in Karl Kautsky’s ‘Revolutions, past and present’ (1906),^[2] in Trotsky’s Where is Britain going? (1926),^[3] and thence in AL Morton’s A people’s history of England (1938) (though, of course, neither Kautsky nor Trotsky is cited by Morton) and in the Communist Party historians, whose early internal discussions are collected by Parker.

There was another and simultaneous strand of Marxist interpretation, which looked to the early plebeian movements and utopian communists of the English revolutionary period as precursors of the modern socialist movement, beginning with Marx in 1847: “The first manifestation of a truly active communist party is contained within the bourgeois revolution, at the moment when the constitutional monarchy is eliminated. The most consistent republicans – in England the Levellers, in France Babeuf, Buonarroti, etc – were the first to proclaim these ‘social questions’.”^[4] Similar treatments can be found in Engels’ Socialism: utopian and scientific; in Eduard Bernstein’s Cromwell and communism (1895),^[5] in EB Pashukanis’s ‘Revolutionary elements in the history of the English state and law’ (1927)^[6] and in CLR James’ ‘Cromwell and the Levellers’ in 1949,^[7] and so on.

More generally, however, Marxists treated the French Revolution as the archetype of the bourgeois revolution – and, indeed, as the archetype of revolution in general. From Marx’s interpretation of the early stages of the French Revolution came the slogan of ‘permanent revolution’;^[8] and the Bolsheviks repeatedly compared themselves with the Jacobins and worried and argued about ‘Thermidor’ and ‘Bonapartism’ as affecting their own revolution.^[9]

The idea of the French Revolution as the archetype of the bourgeois revolution is the underlying ground of the concept of failed or imperfect bourgeois revolutions, as applied by Marx and Engels to Germany in 1848; and from there to the rival conceptions of ‘uninterrupted’ and ‘permanent’ revolution developed in Russia and applied to the world outside western Europe by Stalinists, Maoists and Trotskyists.

Finally these conceptions reacted back to the point at which Britain, extraordinarily, could be claimed to have had an ‘imperfect bourgeois revolution’: whether this idea was to justify pursuit of popular frontism in the form of hoping for the aid of ‘anti-monopoly capital’ to bring in ‘advanced democratic capitalism’ in the British road to socialism; or in the form of tailing the nationalists, of Tom Nairn’s ‘break-up of Britain’.

Bourgeois histories

‘Mainstream’ or academic history in the 19th century by and large shared the understanding of Marx and the Marxists that the English and French revolutions were bourgeois revolutions – or, to avoid the obnoxious language of class, that they were revolutions which ended feudalism and brought in economic, political and religious freedom. Opponents of this view were mainly opponents of the results of the revolutions: Catholic writers, and ‘legitimists’ nostalgic for the Bourbon monarchy, ‘Jacobites’ nostalgic for the Stuart regime.

The Paris Commune of 1870, and – more sharply – the Russian October revolution in 1917, changed this pattern fundamentally. On the one hand, the regimes of western Europe made major concessions to the proletariat, especially moves towards universal suffrage and steps towards welfarism. On the other, it was generally understood that under extended suffrage, the state had to intervene through the academy and the school to defend itself against the possibility of the emancipated lower orders not deferring to their ‘betters’.^[10]

There was extended, deliberate promotion of the ‘gradualism’ argued by Britain’s Fabians, Eduard Bernstein in Germany and similar trends. The idea of revolution as such became the object of furious polemics; but also of ‘denaturing’, so that, for example, Karl Kautsky’s The labour revolution (1925) – at least as translated in Allen and Unwin – proposes social transformation without any political revolution at all. In Britain, Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig interpretation of history (London 1931) became a ‘foundation book’,^[11] so that any British academic historian in the last 60 years is obliged to give at least token nods against the danger of ‘Whig history’. Going along with these general polemics went radical denial of the character of either the English or the French revolutions as really involving economic, social or class transformation.

Meanwhile, there have been plenty of other transitions to capitalism: and at first sight not all of these involved political revolutions. Certainly, not all these revolutions took ‘English’ or ‘French’ forms. Take, for instance, late 19th century Germany: pretty probably to be interpreted as capitalist, unless we are to accept Arno Mayer’s Persistence of the old regime (New York 1981); but if there was a revolution, it was largely ‘from above’.

1989-91 has changed the terms of debate once again. On the one hand, the fall of the USSR has re-enabled liberal denunciation of socialism, communism and the idea of working class rule as merely and necessarily utopian. This polemic holds as strongly against Fabianism as against Marxism; and not even the great crash of 2008 has sufficed to dislodge it from mainstream political and economic thought. On the other hand the ‘velvet revolution’ in Czechoslovakia in 1989 has rehabilitated the idea of revolution as a way to achieve … capitalism. There has been a succession of attempts to reproduce the phenomenon: ‘colour revolutions’.

In this context, the economic and social revolutionary character of the English and French revolutions has been reasserted. On the Marxist side, Ellen Meiksins Wood’s The pristine culture of capitalism (London 1991) asserted that the English revolution was more bourgeois than the French. From academic history, Hilton L Root’s The fountain of privilege (Berkeley 1994) argued for a radical difference between 18th century England and France before the revolution from a neoclassical economic perspective; Tim Harris’s Revolution (London 2006) has asserted the revolutionary character of 1688, and Steve Pincus’s 1688: the first modern revolution (New Haven 2009) carries the argument to a more systematic level. Paul R Hanson’s Contesting the French revolution (Oxford 2009), while making the necessary token anathemas against Marxist “economic determinism”, agrees that the French revolution had social grounds (chapter 2) and that the social layer that gained most from it could be called a bourgeoisie (p196). The character of the events as social revolutions, not just political upheavals, is back on the historians’ agenda.

Heller

Heller’s book uses this opportunity, together with a mass of recent detailed academic research on French economic and social history down to and during the revolution, to try to place the ‘classic Marxist’ account of the revolution back on the agenda. It is not a detailed narrative history of the revolution. Nor is it a book which attempts to engage the issues which either the forms of the bourgeois revolutions themselves or the ‘mainstream’ critiques of the ‘classic Marxist’ account pose for Marxist theory of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, of the nature of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or of the state and revolution.

Rather what is on offer is an empirical polemic against the ‘revisionist’ interpretation of the French revolution as not a bourgeois revolution. Heller’s summary in the introduction of the line he is arguing is simple. The pre-1789 ancien régime was feudal, but with capitalism growing up within its interstices (p3). 18th century France saw an expansion of capitalist trade and agriculture – upsetting the traditional life of the peasantry and also producing a significant proletariat. An economic crisis at the end of the 18th century “proved to be the spark that set off a revolution”. Then “The overall expansion of the role of profit in the economy and growth in the numbers, wealth and confidence of the bourgeoisie made it possible for this class to take political advantage of popular upheaval in order to wrest control of the state from the dominant classes of the ancien régime … The legal, cultural and institutional changes set in place during this period set the stage for the further development of a capitalist economy and society in the 19th century” (p1).

In chapter 1, ‘Questioning revisionism’, Heller points out that – as I have said above – the idea that the French revolution was a bourgeois revolution did not originate in Marx (pp10-11), but also that Marx saw the revolution as the prototype of the future proletarian revolution (p11). But first Anglo-Saxon, and more recently French, historians, have mounted a series of attacks on the theory: French capitalists lacked class-consciousness and were integrated with the nobility (pp13-15); the revolution was really a process of centralising state formation (p15); the liberal revolution was good, but the Jacobin phase totalitarian (pp15-16); the redistribution of the land blocked capitalist development (p16); the revolution was really the product of a rootless intelligentsia (pp16-18); there was no significant capitalism in 18th century France (pp21-22).

The main body of the book defends this general line against the objections and alternatives offered in the ‘revisionist’ accounts discussed in chapter 1. Heller spends two chapters (2 and 3) discussing what he identifies as a rise of capitalism and of wage labour in the 18th century French economy. The following chapters discuss (4) the revolutionary crisis, (5) the economy in the revolution down to 1799, (6) the directory and (7) the Napoleonic era.

By and large (though not completely) the empirical polemic works. The book is well worth reading as a lively critique of the various revisionist attempts to deny the class character of the French Revolution, and a summary of (some of) the relevant evidence.

However, there are two striking omissions in Heller’s account. The first is the absence of immediate state context – state insolvency – of the revolutionary crisis, which is explained rather by a deepening economic crisis, leading to a mass movement. Flowing from this absence of the crisis of the state as such is the absence also of the geopolitical context: that is, the repeated defeats of absolutist France at the hands of bourgeois-parliamentarist Britain and the European coalitions assembled by the Anglo-Dutch alliance in the 1690s-1700s and by the British in the 1740s and again in 1756-63; and the costs of the illusory French ‘victory’ of 1783, both as trigger for state insolvency and as providing in the US an immediate model of revolution not tied directly to Protestantism, as the Dutch and English revolutions had been.

The second omission is smaller: a single, but significant absence. David Parker, the editor of the second book under review, is also the author of a major Marxist treatment of the French ancien régime and its decline and fall, Class and state in ancien régime France (London 1996). Parker’s reading of the French economy in the 18th century is sharply different from Heller’s, since, where Heller sees interstitial capitalist development, Parker sees agricultural regression and sharply limited industrial and commercial growth, both resulting from the persistence of statised forms of feudal relations of exploitation. Also, unlike Heller, Parker does integrate into his account the financial strains imposed on the French monarchy by geopolitical confrontation with capitalist Britain.

Outside this book, Heller’s general political commitments – as far as they can be found from some superficial web-surfing – look broadly ‘official communist’. In 2006 he published a ‘popular history’ account of the cold war, with Monthly Review Press: from the blurb and reviews, the book largely charges the cold war to US imperialism’s strategy for containing other, national, revolutions.^[12] True enough, but representative, without more, of a political alignment. His 2009 review in Monthly Review of Vijay Prashad’s The darker nations: a people’s history of the third world (2008) charges Prashad with “failure to engage sufficiently with the two communist giants [the USSR and China]” and “dismissive treatment of revolutionary Cuba”.^[13]

Revisionist (in his own terms, ‘post-revisionist’) author William Doyle argues in a review of Heller’s book that, like the legitimist advocates of Bourbon restoration in 19th century France, Heller “has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing”.^[14] In some respects this is wrong, but in two ‘official communist’ respects it is true. The first is that Heller’s interpretation of the French Revolution writes out the geopolitical confrontation with England, because Heller wants to suppose that the bourgeois revolution was a national process rather than an international one with national phases or aspects. After all, the French revolution is to be the prototype of the proletarian revolution (p11); and this, too, is to be a matter of national roads to socialism growing out of national contradictions.

The second respect in which Heller “has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing” is related. It is, of course, true that Marx and Engels in the 1840s saw the French Revolution as the prototype of the proletarian revolution. By the period of the First International, and still more by the beginning of the Second, this line had shifted. It is notorious on the left that Engels’ 1895 introduction to The class struggles in France was toned down to make him appear to be a reformist. It is nonetheless true that even in the non-toned down version, Engels rejects explicitly the idea of making a principle out of the forms and figures of 1789 – barricade struggles and so on. And at the end of the introduction he offers a very different model of the future revolution: the sacking of the pagan Roman emperor’s palace by mutinous troops allegedly influenced by Christianity. Universal military training and service, in this model, is to work alongside universal suffrage to subvert the capitalists’ control of the armed forces.^[15] The army is to be infiltrated by socialist ideas and broken up by its internal contradictions: as, in the event, happened in Russia in the course of 1917.

Engels’ imagination of the proletarian revolution may, of course, be as problematic as the earlier image of the proletarian revolution as a better French Revolution. That is not the point. It is that clinging to the image of the French Revolution as a national revolution triggered by internal contradictions and economic crisis, and of the French Revolution as a model for the proletarian revolution, makes it harder for us to think proletarian revolution in the 21st century.

mike.macnair(at)weeklyworker.org.uk

Click on the image below to order David Parker’s (ed) ‘Ideology, Absolutism and the English Revolution: Debates of the British Communist Historians, 1940 – 1956.’

Click on the image below to order Henry Heller’s ‘The Bourgeois Revolution in France, 1789-1815.’

Notes

1. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/02/english-revolution.htm
2. www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1906/xx/revolutions.htm
3. www.marxists.org/archive/trosky/britain/wibg/index.htm
4. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/10/31.htm
5. www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bernstein/works/1895/cromwell/index.htm
6. www.marxists.org/archive/pashukanis/1927/xx/english.htm
7. www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/1949/05/english-revolution.htm
8. RB Day, D Gaido (eds) Witnesses to permanent revolution Amsterdam 2009, pp1-2.
9. Analogies between Bolsheviks and Jacobins began from the Menshevik camp in 1903-04 and the analogy was embraced by Lenin in One step forward, two steps back: www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1904/onestep/q.htm. A few other examples: JV Stalin, ‘The international character of the October revolution’ (1927): www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1927/11/06.htm; C Rakovsky The ‘professional dangers’ of power (1928): www.marxists.org/archive/rakovsky/1928/08/prodanger.htm; Trotsky, ‘The workers’ state, Thermidor and Bonapartism’ (1935): www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1935/02/ws-therm-bon.htm
10. Eg in relation to English literature, C Baldick The social mission of English criticism 1848-1932 Oxford 1983.
11. Though its own author effectively abandoned its arguments in his later career: see Oxford dictionary of national biography.
12. H Heller The cold war and the new imperialism: a global hisory, 1945-2005 New York 2006.
13. www.monthlyreview.org/090323heller.php
14. www.h-france.net/vol7reviews/doyle.html
15. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1895/03/06.htm

PART TWO.

Against the state, not just the ruling class

This is the second part of my review of Henry Heller’s The bourgeois revolution in France and David Parker’s Ideology, absolutism and the English revolution.^[1]

In the first part^[2] I gave schematic outline narratives of the political events of the English and French revolutions, of Marxist readings of these revolutions, of the way in which the Marxist claim that these were social revolutions became – especially after 1917 – the object of furious pro-bourgeois academic polemics; and of the fact that after 1989-91, with neoliberalism in the ascendancy, revolution to bring in capitalism has once again become a positive for pro-bourgeois academics, so that the resistance to seeing the English and French revolutions as social revolutions has massively weakened.

This provided the context for my review of Henry Heller’s attempt to reassert a ‘traditional Marxist’ interpretation of the French Revolution. In spite of its strengths, I argued that Heller’s book remains trapped by the ‘official communist’ conception of national autonomy and purely ‘national roads’ to revolution; and also by an ‘early Marxist’ and Bolshevik use of the French Revolution as the essential model not only of a bourgeois revolution, but also of a proletarian revolution.

Communist Party historians

The same points are relevant to David Parker’s collection of the internal discussions of the British Communist Party Historians Group in the 1940s-50s: these, too, are texts framed by the deep assumptions of ‘national roads to socialism’ and other aspects of ‘official communism’.

Some of the texts, indeed, are considerably more self-consciously Stalinist than Heller’s arguments. Thus it is striking to read Christopher Hill polemicising against posthumously condemned Soviet historian, MN Pokrovsky, on the ground that “Pokrovsky, by ante-dating the bourgeois revolution, in fact played into the hands of Trotskyism” (p134);^[3] or Brian Pearce, later to become a Trotskyist, quoting Stalin’s History of the CPSU (Short Course) as an authority on the range of possible modes of production recognised by Marxism (p99).

But Ideology, absolutism and the English revolution is a very much more theoretical book than The bourgeois revolution in France and asks more interesting questions. It is, as already indicated, a collection of the internal discussion documents and stenographic minutes of meetings of the early modern section of the British Communist Party Historians Group in the 1940s-50s. The Historians Group was a remarkable constellation of people later to be stars of the British academic history profession. Maurice Dobb, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, Eric Hobsbawm, VG Kiernan and George Rudé are only a selection of the best known names among them: Parker’s appendix 4 provides biographical information on many more, not all equally prominent, but often equally intellectually productive.^[4] The book provides a partial record of debates within the early modern section. As a result, we see this group of historians debating, in explicitly Marxist terms, issues most of them continued to grapple with – in less clearly Marxist terms – throughout their subsequent careers.

It would be a mistake to suppose that this is merely an accident of history – that the old CPGB, then at its height (with above 50,000 members in 1942-43^[5]) happened to collect a bunch of historical stars, who then ‘naturally’ rose to academic eminence. The point is the opposite. Contrary to modern far-left orthodoxy, a party does not exist to fight for a systematic theoretical position (‘Cliff state capitalism’, ‘permanent revolution’, etc) but to fight for a concrete political programme. But the existence of a real party, as opposed to a sect founded on a theoretical dogma, facilitates theoretical education and theoretical production, by bringing together people with common concerns and common basic ideas, but also substantial differences. Both theoretical education and theoretical production work by dialectic in its old sense: that is, through the confrontation of different positions, forcing the debaters to elaborate and defend their ideas, and those who participate to ‘raise their own game’ in order to intervene.

Stalinist theory was (and is) a corrupted form of Marxist theory. As theory it was mutilated by police interventions in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its satellite parties and in the Soviet and satellite-state universities in defence of the narrow sectional interests of the state and party bureaucracies. Both theoretical claims and simple facts were arbitrarily altered to suit the immediate political and ideological projects of the ruling clique. But Stalinised ‘Marxism’ nonetheless constantly made theoretical appeals to the writings of Marx and Engels. And, though the ‘classical Marxist’ authors of the Second International were off limits and Bolsheviks who had fallen into disfavour even more so, the ‘classical Marxist’ tradition could to some extent be accessed through Lenin’s contribution to these debates.

Hence, debating the application of Marxism (even in its Stalinised form) to British history forced the participants in the History Group’s discussions to ask real and fundamental questions, and to think and argue considerably more rigorously than their Liberal, Tory and Christian-socialist contemporaries. Parker quotes Hill as describing the discussions as “the most stimulating intellectual experience I have ever had” (p9). These debates thus stand at the root of the participants’ remarkable subsequent intellectual productivity.

They also provide a standing rebuke both to the banal dogmatism of much of the intellectual production of the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Party (England and Wales), the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain, and many smaller groups, and to the cacophony of occasionally valuable, but invariably talking past each other, character of the theoretical interventions of both individual members of groups outside their party framework, and various ‘independent’ Marxist theorists. We need a party not just for immediate political action, but also to do theoretical education and production effectively.

I do not mean by any of this to endorse in an unqualified way the actual arguments of the debates reported in Ideology, absolutism … ; nor those of the participants in their subsequent work. More on this below. Moreover, it would almost certainly have been more educational if the open debate in Labour Monthly in 1940-41 had continued or been restarted, rather than the participants debating purely internally in the Historians Group in 1946-50, with public debate re-emerging only in a non-party forum after the foundation of the left academic history journal Past and Present in 1952.

The starting point

Parker provides an extremely useful introduction to the documents. He reviews issues of methodology and the ‘empiricism’ of the group, making the point that their use of Marx was mainly dependent on the schematic outline of historical materialism in Marx’s Preface to the Contribution to the critique of political economy and on Engels’ correspondence in the 1890s which had been translated by Historians Group member Dona Torr; they were less concerned with working out the general theory of historical materialism as a framework than with confirming or correcting Marx’s and Engels’ specific historical claims.

In this context, he passes some comment on the later critics of the communist historians as a school (pp9-26). He also provides linking material in relation to the documents and comments on the subsequent evolution of the academic historiography of the issues they addressed (pp26-47), dealing separately with the question of the relations of production in agriculture (pp47-53) and concluding with a brief retrospect (pp53-60).

The immediate trigger of the discussions reported in Ideology, absolutism … was the question of a revision of Morton’s A people’s history of England (1938). But also involved was a brief public controversy, caused by the publication in 1940 of Hill’s The English revolution 1640. Hill argued up-front for an analysis of 1640 as a bourgeois revolution directly analogous to France 1789. This argument was the subject of a sharp critique by German exile communist Jurgen Kuchynski in the party’s journal Labour Monthly. Kuchynski argued that Tudor England was already capitalist – Parker quotes him as saying that Queen Elizabeth I was “the most prominent capitalist in capitalist bourgeois society” (p32) and 1640 a response to an attempted feudal counterrevolution. Kuchynski was then attacked as a reformist gradualist in Labour Monthly contributions by Torr and Douglas Garman. The party’s ‘leading intellectual’ R Palme Dutt drafted a fence-sitting summary of the debate, plainly intended for publication, which is the first document in the book – but did not, in the end, publish it (p33). Hill’s 1947 ‘Theses on absolutism’ (document 2) were markedly influenced by the earlier debate: in particular, characterising the Tudor and Stuart monarchy as ‘absolutist’ was in a sense a way of dodging Kuchynski’s objections to Hill’s earlier characterisation of 16th and early 17th century English state and society as still feudal.

Behind this debate lies – immediately – the Pokrovsky ‘debate’ in the Soviet historical profession in 1929-31, in which Pokrovsky was attacked for postulating a distinct period of ‘merchant capitalism’. Hill and Pearce produced a summary of the Pokrovsky ‘debate’ as an intervention in the discussion (document 3) and a translation of a report of a 1940 discussion of the issue in the Russian Academy of Sciences (document 4).

Behind the Pokrovsky debate in turn is the fact that Marx and Engels at various points gave very different dates for the appearance of capitalism. These range from the medieval Italian city-states to the 16th century reformation and the enclosures of Tudor England, to the revolutions (as in the 1850 review of Guizot, quoted in the first part of this review), to something closer to the ‘industrial revolution’ of later 18th to early 19th century Britain (or even, in the Afterword to the second German edition of Capital Vol 1, to the revolutions of 1830 and the 1832 Reform Act). Indeed, they also wrote of 18th-19th century English politics as involving a compromise between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy.

These variations, in turn, raise issues about how Marx’s and Engels’ specific historical comments relate to (a) the outline sketches of historical materialism in The German ideology and Preface to the Contribution to the critique of political economy, in the Anti-Dühring, and in Engels’ correspondence in the 1890s; and (b) the account of capitalism in Capital, Vols 1-3 (and perhaps Marx’s other economic manuscripts published after his death).

As to the first issue, the problem of dating the rise of capitalism requires either (i) a mode of production intermediate between feudalism and capitalism (‘petty commodity production’, or Pokrovsky’s ‘merchant capitalism’, or something else), or (ii) a very large degree of interpenetration of modes of production in historical social formations. The second option does not fit well with the broad schematic outlines of The German ideology, Preface to the Contribution to the critique of political economy and Anti-Dühring, unless the dialectical interpenetration of opposites is to be analysed as interpenetration of past and not-past on the largest possible scale. In this case, moreover, the result can quite properly be said to pose the question of ‘reformist gradualism’ versus ‘revolutionary politics’. I do not think it actually supports ‘reformist gradualism’, because of the role of the state (see below) but this political question is legitimately involved.

As to the second issue, the reason for the attack on Pokrovsky probably lies buried in the Kremlin archives – or perhaps irretrievably in Stalin’s head. Given the period – contemporaneous with the ‘left turn’ and forced collectivisation – it is reasonable in part to suppose that the explicit claim that Pokrovsky underestimated the progressive role of the state and the possibilities of ‘class struggle’ voluntarism (quoted in document 3, pp81-82) was a genuine element of the motive. In addition, though Pokrovsky was aligned with the Stalin faction, the logic of his theory was – as Boris Kagarlitsky has shown by developing it – radically inconsistent with the idea of socialism in a single country. By way of corroboration, the Nazi, Klaus Mehnert, had some evidence for his claim that Stalin wanted to get rid of Pokrovsky’s school textbook on Russian history because it was too classical-Marxist and hence insufficiently nationalist.^[6]

But the pretexts for the attack on Pokrovsky were primarily alleged inconsistencies with Marx’s discussion of the separation of the labourer from the land in Capital Vol 1, chapters 27-29, and of the history and role of ‘merchant capital’ in Capital Vol 3, chapter 20. As with historical materialism, this issue is again one of pure and impure forms. Marx was explicit in the Preface to the first German edition of Capital Vol 1 that he used English examples because:

“The physicist either observes physical phenomena where they occur in their most typical form and most free from disturbing influence or, wherever possible, he makes experiments under conditions that assure the occurrence of the phenomenon in its normality. I have to examine the capitalist mode of production, and the conditions of production and exchange corresponding to that mode. Up to the present time, their classic ground is England … Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonisms that result from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results. The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.”^[7]

In reality, of course, this project of abstracting to the pure logic of capital broke down in the course of the writing of Capital Vol 1. The second half of the book is heavily historical and displays the historical development of capitalism. The drafts which became Capital Vol 2 and 3, which originally antedated the completion of Capital Vol 1, and are both (mainly) more abstractly addressed to ‘pure forms’, were left unfinished. Instead – after the period of intense political activity round the First International and the Paris Commune, and work on the French (1872) and second German (1873) editions of Capital Vol 1 – Marx turned his research attention to attempts to address dialectical logic through mathematical problems, to the ‘historical materialism’ problems of the ethnographical evidence for pre-class society and the historical evidence for pre-capitalist property relations.^[8]

More on these issues, too, below. For the present enough has been said to show that the debates reported in Ideology, absolutism … revolved around issues which were current before and remain live for Marxists today.

Ideology

Documents 18-26 concern ‘ideology’ – or more particularly the relationship of the bourgeois revolution to (a) religion, and in particular Protestantism and its Calvinist sub-form; and (b) the ‘scientific revolution’ and the secularisation of political thought after 1660, with contributions from Hill (documents 18, 21 and (with Clark) 22, Stephen Mason (documents 19 and 20), Kiernan (23), Roy Pascal (25), Mervyn James (26) and another set of minutes of oral discussion (24).

Parker presumably placed the issue of ideology first in the title of the book and in the introduction because, as he says, the section “endeavoured to deploy the base-superstructure model in a non-mechanistic non-reductive fashion” and “this aspiration was probably better fulfilled in the series of discussions on ideology than in the prior discussion of the state …” (p26).

I have followed him in discussing it first, but for the opposite reason. The concept of ideology is very often deeply muddled in Marxist arguments, primarily due to the assumption that there is a single ideology apt to a particular class, rather than – I think more likely – a mass of competing ideological fashions, thrown up as a sort of spume on the surface of the waves of class and political struggles, at the most superficial possible level.

On the other hand, it is also in my personal opinion quite severely problematic to treat religion simply as ‘ideology’ or as a variant of ideology. This is not only for the reason discussed in Jack Conrad’s Fantastic reality^[9] – that religion is more a way of interpreting the world than just a form of class apologetics – but also because religious redistributive institutions fail to be considered as part of the material division of labour – ie, the base – and clerisies in feudalism are direct extractors of the social surplus product in parallel with, not within, the military landlord class.

The papers and discussion on ideology in the book seem to me to be interesting but unfruitful precisely for these reasons. On the one hand, the participants themselves recognised in the course of the discussion that the immediate connections between classes and ideas they began by seeking were schematic. On the other, the failure to integrate the role of clerisies into the definitions of feudalism offered in the absolutism discussion (below) meant that the significance of the Protestant reformation as connected to the rise of capitalism by being a change in the mode of extraction of the social surplus product was missed. (In the French Revolution this job was done by secularisation, and by state seizure and sale of church property, and in the Japanese ‘Meiji restoration’ by seizing the lands of Buddhist monasteries and sects and creating directly state-controlled Shinto institutions.^[10])

Absolutism

Ideology may have been more interesting to Parker as a practising early modern historian; the state and absolutism are more politically interesting. The debate on absolutism is (largely) contained in documents 1-17.^[11] Parker observes (pp 33-47, 56-58) that this debate was quite seriously confused, starting with Hill’s initial claim that the Tudor and Stuart regime was properly to be called ‘absolutist’, which is utterly opposed to modern views of the Tudor regime. It is certainly true that it is a confused debate.

Kiernan offered counter-theses to Hill’s (document 5) on lines not far distant from Kuchynski. These are a brilliant and suggestive sketch of an interpretation of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in England, but were open to severe political attack on the grounds (1) that they violate the dogma that the state must be the state of a single class; (2) that they violated the condemnation of Pokrovsky; and (3) that by downplaying the historical significance of 1640 they opened the way to the Whig and Tory interpretations of a (uniquely English) prolonged, gradual, constitutional development.

Pearce and Hilton offered critiques of Kiernan’s definition of feudalism, which they argued failed to focus sufficiently on the mode of extraction of the surplus from the primary producers; a return to this focus would make visible feudal relations of exploitation continuing into the 16th and perhaps the 17th centuries (documents 6 and 7). Kiernan, presumably responding to the condemnation of Pokrovsky, defended an interpenetration of merchant capital and other forms of capital (document and this was criticised by Dobb on the basis of the line of his Studies in the development of capitalism (London 1946) – that merchant capital did not tend to overthrow feudalism. Document 9 is a restatement by Kiernan of his position on the Tudor state, and document 10 another attempt by Hilton to define feudalism.

Documents 12-14 are the protocols of the oral discussions. These largely repeated what was in the oral documents, but also showed a fairly strong majority for (broadly) Hill’s line. In his summing up in the third discussion Hill emphasised the deviationist modern political implications he saw in Kiernan’s argument: it was a stages theory which lost sight of the fact that there had to be a decisive moment of transfer of political power from one class to another; it was dependent on Pokrovsky, who ‘played into the hands of Trotskyism’; it promoted English exceptionalism and gradualism.

Under this battering, Kiernan at the end of the third meeting withdrew his theses – but afterwards wrote a ‘postscript’ (document 15) which maintained quite a lot of his specific points as caveats to Hill’s line. An ‘official line’ asserting the orthodoxy of Hill’s line, and condemning deviations, etc (without directly naming Kiernan or his supporters), was then published in July 1948 in Communist Review (document 16).

But Kiernan’s objections had not wholly disappeared from view. Document 17 is a text by Dobb on the early 17th century economy, which is quite cautious both about the persistence of feudal relations of production (largely eliminated) and about the role of merchant capital (composed of several distinct strata with different economic characteristics).

‘Merchant capital’

The questions of the role of ‘merchant capital’ and of agrarian relations in this discussion fed into the Dobb-Sweezy debate on the transition to capitalism, started by American communist economists’ criticisms of Dobb’s Studies, and which continues to this day in the form of the ‘Brenner debate’.^[12]

I have discussed the ‘merchant capital’ issue in the second part of my review of Kagarlitsky’s Empire of the periphery,^[13] and will repeat here only two basic points in that discussion. The first is that Marx’s comments on merchant capital in Capital Vol 3, chapter 20 are in fact self-contradictory (not in a dialectical sense), with the result that the orthodox Stalinist critique of Pokrovsky was unsound, and that Kiernan’s notes on the point are preferable to Dobb’s response.

The second is that, once we recognise that late medieval shipping capital transformed use values by transporting goods in bulk, employing free labour in ship construction, as sailors and on the docks, the idea of isolated national transitions from feudalism to capitalism, or isolated national bourgeois revolutions, breaks down. The medieval Italian city-states, thrown up by small-scale bourgeois (in the old sense of urban) revolutions against feudal rule, created a capitalist bulk-goods transit trade as well as financial structures to back this trade and their states.

Their imitators elsewhere in Europe failed to achieve full sovereignty, and many of the Italian city-states degenerated back to feudalised state forms (signoria) through internal coups. The feudal monarchies intervened in the city organisations through state legal controls (and the occasional use of force) to subordinate them to the state, and intervened in shipping and manufacture by creating royal-sponsored monopoly organisations serving to ‘divide and rule’ and to make the relevant capitalists dependent on the king for their privileges.

But both the bulk-goods transit trade and Italian technical innovations in warfare tended to undermine feudalism as a system of production and exploitation, to monetise the European economy and to force (feudal) state centralisation for the effective conduct of war.

Protestantism, combined with resistance to feudal state centralisation, in the late 16th century produced the Dutch revolution. The Dutch republic rapidly became an imperialist capitalist state (centred on shipping) and operating on a world scale (with colonies in Java and South Africa and an attempt to take over Brazil, and ‘factories’ ranging from what is now New York, through India, to Japan). The Dutch republic then played an important part – as role-model, as rival and finally in 1688 as direct military intervenor – in the English Revolution.

1689-1714 saw the new English bourgeois state replace the Netherlands as the capitalist military ‘lead state’ and equally global imperialist operator, with the Netherlands afterwards (like Britain today) playing the role of a subordinated financial centre. The image of British parliamentarism, prosperity and so on, and Britain’s victories in global wars with France, finally wrecked the French monarchy and created the conditions for the French revolution.

The process is a prolonged transition from feudalism to capitalism, and an interrupted one; but overall it is an international process, not purely national. And the decisive steps in this international process involve revolutions: the forcible overthrow and reconstruction of states.

Absolutism revisited

Parker’s critique of the discussion centres on the issue of ‘Tudor absolutism’ as a misconceived starting point because Tudor England was not ‘absolutist’. This is not quite so clear. The problem is, at least in part, that the category of ‘absolutism’ is severely confused in Marx’s and Engels’ discussions of the transition from feudalism to capitalism and in subsequent Marxist (and other) uses of the term. Under some readings, absolutism is an early stage of capitalism, or at least of capitalist impact on feudalism, and this is reflected in some of the arguments in Ideology, absolutism … But Parker himself debunks this view – at least for French absolutism – in his Class and state in early modern France (London 1996), arguing that the French absolutist state was, precisely, a state which endeavoured to preserve feudal aristocratic and clerical rights and dominance.

‘Absolutism’ is in origin – as ‘absolute monarchy’ is in its use by early modern writers – a legal-theoretical doctrine which holds that in any legal system there is a sovereign who is both the creator of the law and not bound by the law – princeps legibus solutus in the Latin tag. This doctrine is, in fact, medieval in origin, having been created between the 12th and the 14th century out of a combination of late Roman imperial legal sources with the Christian theology of miracles (god’s ‘absolute’ power overriding his ‘regulated’ power).^[14]

The doctrine was already present in 15th century England, when it was used to justify the creation by the king of new courts using new forms of procedure, the ‘equity’ and ‘prerogative’ courts, which had powers derived from the king’s ‘absolute power’ to override the decisions of the existing courts and their ‘due process’. It became much more used in heavy-duty legal and political argument towards the end of the 16th century and in the early 17th – which is also, in fact, the same period in which the French state was remodelled as ‘absolutist’ in its juridical theory and began to rely heavily on the creation of new courts and new offices.^[15]

These comments are at some distance from the conventional Marxist historical usage of ‘absolutism’. This refers not to the legal doctrine, but to the creation of professional military forces (at the expense of the individual military capabilities of the feudal nobility drawing on their followers), a centralised judicial system and salaried civil state bureaucracy. It was this model of ‘absolutism’ which was read by Pokrovsky as the political regime of ‘merchant capitalism’ – and by many Marxist and non-Marxist authors (including some comments from Marx and Engels) as the political regime under which capitalism developed.

The problem is that – as Parker, among others, demonstrates – very little of this model of ‘absolutism’ was present in the archetype absolutist state, ancien régime France. A professional army existed, but its officer corps remained dominated by the aristocracy, and the offices in the ‘bureaucracy’ were jurisdictions which the king sold to individuals, on which they expected to profit from fees – an arrangement which, though monetised, is far closer to the offices granted out by medieval kings than to a modern state bureaucracy. Jurisdiction, far from being centralised, became increasingly plural and complex, as new courts with overlapping jurisdictions were created and offices in them sold, while old courts remained in being. The litigant depended primarily on contacts close to the king to provide personal favours, making planning investment for long-term profit – except by buying offices – difficult.^[16] Though French royal taxation pressed enormously heavily on the lower classes, it actually realised a much lower share of the social surplus product than 17th century Dutch taxation or English taxation after 1689.^[17]

Once we see this French shape, the Tudor and early Stuart regime looks markedly less different from French absolutism, precisely because French absolutism looks less ‘modern’. There is a basic difference: no standing army in England. But no ability in Tudor England either of the great lords to win military victory against the crown by mobilising their retainers, unlike the 15th century. That is the lesson of the 1537 ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’ and the 1569 rebellion of the northern earls. The opposite was true in the late 16th century French wars of religion: the great nobles could defeat the central state. And, as Parker showed in his The making of French absolutism (London 1983) the Huguenot (Protestant) cause in France ultimately failed because of its dependence on the Protestant nobles, and the Protestant nobles’ commitment to the monarchical state. Conversely, the Dutch Republic did maintain a large standing army – but did not, in order to do so, create a centralised bureaucracy.^[18] The model of absolutism in terms of monopoly of violence has little descriptive and less analytical or predictive power.

In contrast, juridical absolutism – personal monarchy as the principle shaping the state order – had real effects on the economy. This is apparent both from Parker’s treatment and from the evidence discussed in Root’s Northite institutionalist The fountain of privilege (Los Angeles 1994). Conversely, the overthrow of personal absolutism and the creation of a ‘rule of law’ regime which could give ‘credible commitments’ that tax income was mortgaged in the first place to payment of state debt, facilitated an enormously rapid flowering of shipping, financial and manufacturing capital – successively in the Netherlands from the 1590s; in England first from the 1650s and more rapidly and completely from 1689; and in France from the 1790s.^[19]

State forms

It seems, then, that the theoretical mistake of the Historians Group in the debate on absolutism was to fail to see that the class nature of the state is given by the structural forms of organisation of the state – by the constitutional order. These forms subordinate it to a class.

It does not matter that that class and the social relations of production of which it is bearer are emergent rather than absolutely dominant when they create the new state, as was true of the bourgeoisie in the Netherlands in the late 16th century, Britain in the 17th or France in the late 18th. Nor does it matter if that class and the social relations of production of which it is the bearer has declined to the point that it is hard work to find evidence of them as anything more than parasites associated with the state – as was true of the feudal landlord class and the clerisy in the Netherlands in the late 16th century, or Britain in the 17th. France in the late 18th century is a little different, but still within the same framework: the state had successfully preserved both aristocracy and clerisy as very prominent features of French society, but they were so fragile that they were swept away in a few months.

The structural forms of the state tying it to a class can survive, for prolonged periods, the decline of the class that gave birth to this state. The state will then hold back economic and social development (and military capability) in order to preserve ornamental parasitic remnants of the class that gave it birth, and of the social relations of production of which this class was bearer. This is not just true of feudalism (European absolutism and Tokugawa Japan), but also of pre-feudal societies, as in the later Roman and Byzantine empires, and more spectacularly in the endless reconstructions in China of state forms originally constructed in the Ch’in dynasty as a system of exploitation through state penal slavery.

The result is that social revolution is revolution against state forms; not, primarily or in the first instance, against the old exploiting class and the classical forms of the social relations of production, of which this class was bearer. This class and these social relations of production have (usually) already been massively undermined by gradual decline, and turned into parasites on the state. Overthrowing the state forms therefore leads them (mostly; some relics usually remain) to fold up like a house of cards. And it opens the way for a quantum leap forward in the development of the new relations of production.

This is as true of capitalism today as it was of previous class societies. The corporation is a statised form of capitalism; capital is increasingly dependent on state subventions (not just bank bail-outs, but privatised monopolies, ‘private finance initiatives’ and all the rest of the crap). And the decline of the legitimacy of capitalism, and the desire to avoid tax (like senatorial aristocrats in late Rome or French nobles and clerics) results today in the capitalists calling themselves employees and their distributions of profits to themselves ‘executive compensation’, ‘salaries’ and ‘bonuses’.

Conversely, as the French Huguenots failed because of their dependence on friendly nobles who in turn were loyal to the monarchical state, so the workers’ movement is at present paralysed because it has adopted for its own organisations the model of the capitalist state: the independent executive (trade union, Labour, SWP, etc bureaucracy), state secrets and raison d’état (the ‘confidentiality’ of the bureaucracy); and ‘rule of law’ parliamentarism (that the ranks cannot directly sack their representatives, but only pass resolutions through increasingly stage-managed conferences).

At this point we can see that if the Historians Group had gone down the path of inquiry into the structural forms of the late-feudal absolutist state, they would have committed a heresy against Stalinism far more serious than Kiernan’s ‘Pokrovsky-ism’. Because if we see the state as tied to a class by structural forms, not by the social or economic dominance of that class, it at once becomes apparent that the USSR was neither socialist nor, after its very early years, a dictatorship of the proletariat or proletarian state.

We thus come back to the question of the influence of ‘official communist’ conceptions on the Historians Group, with which I began this second part of the review. We also return to the linkages between the theoretical historical question of the bourgeois revolutions and the question of the proletarian revolution. The points at issue are simple. First, the bourgeoisie acts and has always acted on an international scale. In order to take power away from the bourgeoisie it will be necessary to overthrow its international state system.

Second, the fact that the transition from feudalism to capitalism was prolonged, interrupted and in some respects ‘gradual’ does not in the least support ‘gradualism’ or Fabianism in politics. The state forms tie the state to the old ruling class. The state therefore intervenes in the economy to promote relics of the old ruling class and artificial forms of the old economic order. It intervenes in the organisations of the rising class to tie these organisations to the old state forms. By doing so it can paralyse them and prolong its own life and that of the ornamental-parasitic form of the old ruling class attached to it.

These state activities can lead to what Marx and Engels called “the mutual ruin of the contending classes” (Communist manifesto). Or they can hold back social change for extremely long periods. The overthrow of the state and creation of new state forms, in contrast, can “set free the elements of the new society with which the old collapsing … society itself is pregnant” (Civil war in France), leading to a rapid leap forward in social development.

The choice is clear.

mike.macnair(at)weeklyworker.org.uk

Notes

1. Henry Heller The bourgeois revolution in France 1789-1815 Bergahn Books, 2006, pp172, £20.13; David Parker (ed) Ideology, absolutism and the English revolution: debates of the British communist historians 1940-1956 Lawrence and Wishart, 2008, pp285, £18.99.
2. ‘Models of revolution’ Weekly Worker June 3.
3. On Pokrovsky see also my two-part review of Boris Kagarlitsky’s Empire of the periphery: Weekly Worker April 2, 9 2009.
4. One of the participants Parker was unable to trace, G de N Clark, 1922-1972, has an obituary in (1972) Industrial Law Journal 3-4. He moved from history teaching in the early 1950s to legal practice as a paralegal in workplace accidents, qualified as a lawyer, and went on to law teaching at University College London from 1964; as a legal academic he was a major mover in the Industrial Law Society. Besides extensive writing in the field of labour law, he co-authored with William Cornish Law and society in England 1750-1950, published 17 years after his death (London 1989), which was the first book to attempt a systematic socio-economic analysis of the legal developments in its period and has become a standard reference point used by general historians of the period for ‘law and society’ issues; though Cornish wrote the bulk of the text as it appeared, in his preface he says that the analytical scheme of the book was the product of joint work with Clark.
5. A Thorpe, ‘The membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain 1920-1945’, (2000) 43 Historical Journal 777-800, table 1 at p781.
6. K Mehnert Stalin versus Marx Frankfurt 1941 (translated EW Dickes, London 1952). Mehnert, of course, thought Stalin was right to reject Marxism on this front.
7. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p1.htm
8. Already in 1876 – Engels to Marx, May 28 1876: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1876/letters/76_05_28.htm
9. JC Publications and November Publications, 2007.
10. SM Garon, ‘State and religion in imperial Japan’ (1986) 12 Journal of Japanese Studies 273-302 at p277 cites M Collcutt, ‘Buddhism: the threat of eradication’ in MB Jansen, G Rozman (eds) Japan in transition: from Tokugawa to Meiji (Princeton 1986), pp143-67.
11. In a small weakness in production of the book, the running-head ‘Ideology’ begins at document 17, which is the last of the documents of the absolutism debate printed; it is headed with a repeat of the chapter head ‘Absolutism’ and there is no chapter head ‘Ideology’, which should appear between documents 17 and 18.
12. R Hilton (ed) The transition from feudalism to capitalism (London 1976) collects essays from the Dobb-Sweezy debate; TH Aston, CHE Philpin (eds) The Brenner debate (Cambridge 1985) essays up to that date from the Brenner debate; perhaps most recently, P Hoppenbrouwers (ed) Peasants into farmers? (Turnhout 2001).
13. Weekly Worker April 9 2009.
14. K Pennington The Prince and the law 1200-1600 Los Angeles 1993.
15. M Macnair, ‘Equity and conscience’ (2007) 27 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 659-681, at 660-61, 667-69, has short summaries of the connection, and a quick overview of comparable developments elsewhere in Europe; more detail on the English legal politics of the new courts in A Cromartie The constitutionalist revolution Cambridge 2006, chapters 1, 2, 7, 8; C Brooks Law, politics and society in early modern England Cambridge 2008, chapters 1, 2, 6, 7. On France, to Parker’s book add MP Breen Law, city and king New York 2007.
16. MP Breen Law, city and king New York 2007, note 11; HL Root The fountain of privilege Los Angeles 1994.
17. For the French/English comparison, see Parker cited above; for the Dutch, MC ‘t Hart The making of a bourgeois state Manchester 1993.
18. MC ‘t Hart The making of a bourgeois state Manchester 1993, n13.
19. Netherlands: J de Vries, A van der Woude The first modern economy Cambridge 1997; England: S Pincus 1688: the first modern revolution Yale 2009; France: Heller examined in the first part of this review.

David Harvey, Marxist academic and author of the newly published The enigma of capital, spoke to Mark Fischer.

Many commentators, from both Marxist and non-Marxist standpoints, predicted the current capitalist crisis. But have there been any features that surprised you?

Something that has surprised me about the way this crisis presents itself is the extremely parochial way that people are looking at it. It is viewed as if it is only happening in their own backyard – and even then only in parts of their backyard.

In the United States some are saying the crisis is over, because the stock market has revived. Implicit in that is a class bias in the definition of a crisis. It means capital is doing all right. But what, for example, about unemployment and underemployment – a disaster affecting close to a fifth of the American population?

So where does this idea about the end of the crisis come from? It’s surprising it has any currency at all. It is as if people truly believe the financial press when it equates a rise in the stock market with the end of crisis. In truth, the crisis is actually broadening and deepening. So what surprises me is how clear and unambiguous the nature of this crisis is and – paradoxically – the inability of people to grasp what is happening and why, even when it is staring them in the face.

You tend to see the wellsprings of crises in multiple contradictions, in a variety of limits to the functioning of capital itself as an alienated social form. Do you think that has been borne out by the form the current crisis has taken?

The way my analysis works is that, in the same way that capital shifts the crisis around geographically, so the crisis moves from one manifestation to another. At one stage of its development, the crisis can look like a profit squeeze, because capital is weak relative to labour.

Now nobody sane would attribute the current crisis to the idea that labour has too much power. I have not heard greedy unions blamed this time around, as opposed to in the 70s. At that time, you could say the crisis really was in the labour market and in shop-floor discipline.

Since then we have had the mass disciplining of the working classes by offshoring and by technological change. If that ‘peaceful’ process did not work, people like Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and general Pinochet were ‘invented’ to do it violently.

You can discipline labour, but that produces a deficit of effective demand. The question then arises, how are you going to sell your product when wages aren’t rising? The answer opted for was – give everyone credit cards. So the debt economy is created, households become more and more in hock. But to manage that process you need financial institutions, which start to manipulate the debt. So we are now presented with an effective demand problem, against the backdrop of a problem of financial power.

The crisis this time therefore has a different manifestation. My argument has always been that you cannot go to one single-bullet theory of crisis. You always have to look at its dynamic development, moving from one manifestation in one sphere to another. At one moment, it can appear like an underconsumption problem (there is discussion about underconsumption at present, which I think is a serious problem). It moves on and presents itself as a profit-squeeze problem. Then it appears as the falling rate of profit (which has a narrow, technical meaning in conventional Marxist theory, although profits can fall for all sorts of reasons, including the lack of effective demand). I see the notion of crisis as being spread throughout the system.

In this context, I am very interested in some of the language Marx used in the Grundrisse, where he talks about limits and barriers. As an incredibly dynamic system, capital cannot abide limits on its development. It converts those limits into barriers, which it transcends and circumvents.

I think the theory of crisis has to be rewritten around this idea of a movable crisis form. I call it a movable famine, as opposed to a movable feast. One minute it is a credit famine, the next a famine in the labour market. It can also be shortages of raw materials, so there can be a limit imposed by nature, which has to be transcended by technological change. We have seen this happen historically many times.

My theory of crisis is very much about this movement – in The enigma of capital I make it much more explicit and, I hope, much easier for a mass audience to understand. It was my intention to bring out some of the central ideas from rather complicated books in a simpler way that helps illuminate what is going on around us and demonstrates the various forms in which crises can occur.

What we can say with certainty is that crisis is endemic to the system. We are going to come out of this crisis in a way that prepares the ground for the next one, unless we get rid of capitalism altogether. Which I think is a project we should all resuscitate – for the near, not distant, future.

The timetable for that depends on what stage you think capitalism is at. Does it still have progressive work to do in developing the productive forces, the world market and a global working class, or is it in decline?

I think it is always a bad idea to talk about the final stages or decline of capitalism. Capital has been a very fluid and very inventive system. It has been a permanently revolutionary force in history. Therefore the revolutionary transformations that are internal to capitalism are still capable of reconfiguring the world in radically different ways. They may not be ways that you and I would welcome, or produce a world we would want to live in.

So can capitalism survive for a protracted historical period? The answer is: yes, it can, but at what price?

For instance, I think growth for growth’s sake is becoming much more of a problem. Capital is about the production of surplus value, which means you must always end up with more value. More value has to be circulating than can easily be absorbed into the system. It is an expansionary force.

Capitalism has been so hegemonic – economically and culturally – that we automatically think that growth is good and unavoidably necessary, irrespective of the social, political and environmental cost. When we have zero growth we have a crisis by definition: everyone panics and prioritises getting it started again. The minimum growth people talk about as desirable is 3%. Historically since 1750 or so, capital has grown at the average rate of around 2.25% per year. What we are looking at then is 3% compound growth. Ask yourself what that means in terms of profitable investment opportunities.

In 1970, given the total volume of goods and services, it meant you had to find new possible investment opportunities for $0.4 trillion each year. Now it would take $1.5 trillion. By 2030, we’re talking about $3 trillion of new investment opportunities. We are locked into a logistical process where it begins to look less and less possible to find profitable outlets for this surplus.

Since the 1970s, capital has been encountering difficulties as a result. It has actually been investing not in making real things that people need, but in asset, property or stock markets. Such markets have a peculiar Ponzi character. Someone starts the ball rolling by investing in the stock market. Share value goes up and up, so people think, ‘This is a good way to make money – I’ll invest too’ and it goes up even further. The same fragile process is true of property markets.

An asset market does not clear in the same way as a market in tangible goods like, say, automobiles; they have a very different character. Yet more and more capital has been invested in such markets, so we have these asset bubbles. When the new economy of the 1990s, based on electronics, crashed, people went into the property markets, while the very rich went into art markets and that sort of thing. The economy is less and less organised to make real things that are useful to people. More and more it is about investing money in schemes which make money, without actually doing anything else.

The point I am making is that we have reached what I call an inflection point in the history of capitalism, where sustaining a 3% compound growth indefinitely is becoming less and less feasible. What that implies is that we are facing an historic choice. We can organise to get rid of capitalism, or capitalism can keep on inventing new, ever more intangible asset markets which peak, bubble and burst. The big one they are talking about these days is carbon trading. You can invest in weather futures. We are living in this world of incredible, notional, fictional investments.

While people are starving or trying to live on two dollars a day, others are making incredible amounts of money trading in such fictional investment markets. Just last year, five hedge fund managers had personal incomes of $3 billion each in just one year. Meanwhile, in Haiti you had a spiral downwards into ever more terrible poverty, even before the earthquake came along. You have to question what kind of world we are living in.

So, yes, capital can last, the capitalist class can preserve itself and even thrive – they are in fact getting extremely rich through this crisis. However, at some point people are going to look at this increasing class polarisation, say enough is enough and do something about it.

Is enough capital being wiped out to avoid a new crash in the near to medium term?

It is very hard say. When I say capital moves crises around, it does not mean we can see where it is going to move to next. I was a little surprised when Greece erupted and suddenly became the big problem. But it signals that to some degree the banking sector and the financial institutions are being stabilised. They have been stabilised by state power bailing them out. So the crisis has been shifted – from the banks to sovereign debt. Now we are seeing that for Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland. And I think sovereign debt could be a testing issue for Britain too in the not too distant future.

There will be questioning of the sovereign debt of the United States. One of the really fascinating things about the US is that if you were to add up all the debt there – federal, state, corporate and individual – 40% of that is wrapped up in the mortgage market. This is why the crisis was focused there.

I don’t know where the crisis will move to next, but one of the places I would actually worry about is China. I am not an expert on that country, but everything I hear about it, such as property prices doubling in Shanghai last year, indicates there are problems brewing. They have a property boom going on, just like the one in the United States and here in Britain over the last 10 years.

One of the ways they are averting a crisis is through massive investment in urbanisation. Some of it is solid infrastructures – high-speed rail, new highway systems, public works and so on. The rest of it is property development. China is roaring along at 10% growth and everyone says that China is coming out of the crisis. But actually the way it is doing so looks very dangerous to me. I would not be at all surprised to see a real retrenchment there – particularly if the United States insists on a shift in exchange relations and thus brings disequilibrium into the market. So I would watch very carefully what is going on in east Asia. It is a place where another round of the crisis could begin – in the very place where it seems capitalism is recovering at the moment.

Are you encouraged by the political response of the left to the crisis?

I find the left is very conservative sometimes. There are some real problems with its analytical framework for interpreting this crisis. One of the aims of Enigma is to try and lay out an alternative.

There is a theoretical problem to be addressed and I see some attempt at that, which is encouraging. But there is the question of the popular response and the degree to which we can build upon mass anger. The historical pattern I would look to is 1929 in the United States and the stock market crash. Social movements didn’t really get into motion until 1933. The initial reaction to a crisis is to sit tight and hope it goes away. But by 1933 Roosevelt had to do something. Whether he wanted to or not, he had to act, because he was being pushed by very articulate leftwing forces. It was a powder keg waiting to blow. We are in the early stages of this process.

The legitimacy of the system is being propped up by stories that we are coming out of the woods: because the stock market has recovered, the worst is over. I am saying that it is almost inevitable that when a crisis hits people hang onto what they have. It is only when people become convinced that they cannot hang onto it any more that you start to see a political movement arising. I see it beginning in some places. Its potential is very exciting, but it is up to Marxists to articulate what the excitement and energy should be used to fight for.

This flags up the question of agency. In the contemporary world, does it remain the working class? After all, you talk of ‘social movements’ in the 1930s US, but at the core of that was the Communist Party, which stressed the unique role of that class.

This question of agency has to be rethought. I have never been happy with the general depiction in a lot of Marxist thinking of the working class as the agent – particularly when the working class is limited to the factory worker. For me, you would have to incorporate all the people who make the railroads, the cities, etc. It is not simply about the production of things: it is also about the production of spaces.

I have always thought that the general aura surrounding the proletariat in Marxist thinking is too narrow. I wanted it to be much broader, to be much more inclusive of all the people who are working on everything, everywhere – some of whom are easier to organise than others. To me this is very important as a first step, but the second thing is that it is not simply about being exploited in the workplace.

In the Communist manifesto, Marx and Engels talk of people being exploited in their living space by landlords and retailers. So we have to take into account this ‘second round’ of exploitation, but beyond that there is also the continuation of primitive accumulation – or what I like to call accumulation by dispossession. It is not primitive any more: it is ongoing. It is a very important part of what capital is about: people who lose their pension rights; people who get forced off the land.

Over the last 30 or 40 years there has been a tremendous assault upon the remains of peasant societies and you have had an incredible response, with movements such as the landless peasant movement in Brazil, with its very vibrant, very Leninist kind of organisation.

So what we have to think about is combining these much broader workforces. For instance, what about the workforce employed in banking? Some of the strongest unions right now are, of course, the state service unions. So how do we think about all of that as part of a much broader agency?

Then there is the politics. You have traditional political parties, but a lot of the faith in them has diminished over the years. We may want to try to resuscitate that faith, but we have to face the fact that right now they are not in a position to take a vanguard role and lead us out of the woods. They can be part of a more general uprising or solution, but I do not see them as being at the heart of it.

Then you have the NGOs. I am very sceptical about them. They can create spaces where things can happen, but revolution by NGO? Forget it. They are too much in hock to their donors, most of whom have an agenda of trying to integrate people into capitalism.

Take something like micro-finance, which is one of the big ways in which we are going to supposedly solve the problem of world poverty. But what it really consists of is a huge, exploitative industry, set up by Washington institutions, which is sucking wealth out of the poorest people in the world. The financial institutions are making rates of return of around 30%, 40%, in some cases 100% on micro-finance through bleeding these very, very poor people dry. When you criticise them, they say, ‘Well, it is better than the local moneylender, who charges 1,000%.’

Subprime lending was also a very good example: it was extracting wealth from relatively low-income populations. Even before the crisis hit, the African-American community in the States had lost $30-$40 billion-worth of assets through predatory subprime practices. So I think we have to take accumulation by dispossession into account when we think about ‘agency’. It has created a huge population of very discontented people, who are angry at capitalism not because of their work situation, but because they have lost their assets to capital.

I ask how we can construct an alliance which is really going to go for the jugular. For me agency right now is a question mark – I do not have a clear theory of it. I know it has to be broader and bigger than the traditional notion of the proletarian revolution. That is one of the things we have to really think about and work on.

There are things happening. In the final calculus, if you had a vast survey and asked everybody in the world, ‘Are you happy with the way capitalism is working?’ I think you would find the overwhelming majority would say ‘no’. Then you would say, ‘Let’s do something about it’. It is my fantasy that you could do that. Everyone would say, ‘Yes, what do we do about it?’ Then the question of agency will resolve itself through social movement.

Historically, when you look at actual movements, you will find they are much broader than the traditional notion of the proletariat. I did a lot of work on the Second Empire, Paris and the Paris Commune. I always find it interesting that of the first two pieces of legislation passed in the Commune one was a worker issue – about night-time work in the bakeries – and the other was a living-space issue: a moratorium on rents.

If you look at who participated in the Paris Commune, it was far broader than just the industrial working class. There were a lot of stonemasons, and precisely the people I have been talking about, along with the discontented and alienated middle class – Gustave Courbet, the painter, and so on. If you look at any revolutionary movement, it is generally a mix of individuals who have come together in some way or other. There is a big issue as to whether the movement has to have a pre-existing form of organisation, in the form of a political party, which then seizes the moment and guides.

I think in 1968, for example, the Communist Party in France held back the revolutionary movement, rather than helped it forward. I cannot say the answer is that there has to be the creation of a political party. A political party would need to do the right things, the right way and make the revolution happen. But if you look at the history of political parties, it has not always been the case. I veer between thinking maybe we would be better off going with a more spontaneous theory of revolution, like the sort that Henri Lefebvre talks about. This sort of uprising has worked in many instances, including the Paris Commune, which was not organised by a political party.

I wish I had a neat formula to solve that problem, but I do not. I think at this point in history you have to look at concrete examples. The revolutionary movement in Bolivia has very definite characteristics, very much based on the activism of ethnic groups. It also incorporates certain values that I think someone in Sweden may find a bit repressive and obnoxious. You have got to think about how on earth you are going to enter into alliances of some kind across these configurations – so the Bolivarian movement can unite with, say, Die Linke in Germany, with the Maoists in Nepal and in north-east India. How can you bring all of that together? That is again something that needs a lot of thought and consideration.

A danger of spontaneity is that, although it sounds very democratic, it can lack accountability, which is an essential aspect of democracy. You talk in your book about a defining democratic aspect of future society being social command over surplus. But that implies majority decisions, arrived at through democratic discussion. This is impossible without institutional forms and a culture of democracy today, not simply after the insurrection. To start to make radical incursions on the right of capital to rule us in the here and now, it seems to me we need something more weighty than simply spontaneity. A party, in fact …

One of the things I have tried to do in the book is talk about processes of transition. I used Marx’s way of talking about the transition from feudalism to capitalism to illustrate what I thought would be needed to go from capitalism to communism.

One of the things that became apparent to me is that Marx actually has a theory of what I would call co-revolution. The way I modelled this, based on what he wrote in Capital, is to say there are seven ‘moments’. There is a technological/organisational moment, where change must happen; there is the relation to nature, which becomes unsustainable and must change; social relations, which have to change; there are production forms and labour processes, which have to change; there is daily life, which has to change; there is mental conceptions of the world, which no longer fit and must change; and institutional arrangements, which have to change.

I got this from a footnote in chapter 15 of Capital, which talks about the way in which capital consolidated its power by coming up with new technological forms. When you look at this account, Marx suggests that no single one of those moments, as I have dubbed them, is actually the main trigger, the most powerful cause. All of them were co-evolving.

Therefore my theory of revolution would say that you have to think of a co-revolutionary movement across all of those moments. How do we change technologies and social relations at the same time and what is the relationship between those transformations? What is humanity’s relationship to nature and how does that co-evolve with other spheres? How do the social processes of production relate?

What I set out to do was to show how revolution is not simply a political movement. One of the incredible things about capitalism is that it has been permanently revolutionary. Just think about those seven elements and how they were constituted in Britain in 1970. What were the technologies back then and how have they changed since? Nobody had cellphones, nobody had laptops – there has been an astonishing change in technology. But look at what that has done in terms of social relations; there are tremendous changes and challenges connected with that. Look at what it has done to our relationship to nature. Then there is the dramatic institutional change – the rise of new institutions like the international banks. The whole configuration of those elements looked completely different in 1970.

Capitalism is constantly changing such elements. If you compare 1930 to 1970, what you will see is a co-revolutionary movement going on inside capitalism all the time. My argument would be that a revolutionary movement has to see the contradictions and tensions between different elements and use them. Sometimes you can have silent revolutions – what Gramsci talked of as passive revolutions – which are just as important, it seems to me, as storming the barricades in spontaneous movement. But those revolutions take a lot of patience and you need special skills. My special skill is trying to alter people’s mental conceptions of the world, but I know perfectly well that that is not going to revolutionise the whole thing.

The revolutionary movement is very important. Marx talked about the transition from feudalism to capitalism – it took a considerable time; battles were won here and lost there. But the question was, who won the war? At the end of the day, the capitalists. By setting up new institutional arrangements the capitalists captured and transformed the state, came up with new technologies, changed social relations and daily life. So I am thinking of a revolution of long duration, needing individuals committed to it, who at the same time see themselves in alliance with others. The people who are concerned about the relation to nature need to be in alliance with those who are concerned about social relations.

The instant of a revolution, of a revolutionary change of government, is just one moment in that process that can succeed or not succeed. In many ways the problem with revolutionary transformations, including the one that was associated with 1917, was that there was no real theory of revolutionary change and how the dynamic of revolutionary movement was going to be kept going, and to me that is the most important thing.

Do you see a rise in interest in Marxism?

When I put Marx’s Capital on the web for my course, I was very surprised: there have been close to a million hits and that is being reproduced all over the place in other forms. So my personal response is that there is much more interest than was the case in the early 1990s, when everyone was declaring Marxism was dead and I was teaching a class of about seven bored students – people who could not find another class to go to.

But now it has come back big time, and quite possibly it will lay the basis for a future generation to start to think about the world differently.

David Harvey The enigma of capital and the crises of capitalism Profile Books, 2010, pp256, £14.99. Click on the image below to order this book (currently at the reduced price of £7.49).

David Bates reviews Dave Renton’s ‘Colour blind? Race and migration in north-east England since 1945′ University of Sunderland Press, 2008, pp286, £10.95.

For over half a century, immigration has rarely been far from the top of the political agenda in the UK. In a culture which places such emphasis on ideas of national pride and superiority, this should perhaps come as no surprise – after all, it is no coincidence that the discourse of ‘border controls’ often draws directly upon British history in its invocation of invasions, conquests and the defence of Britain’s national frontiers against the barbarous foreign hordes. But what is the story on the ground? In Colour blind? Dave Renton sets out to examine the responses of working class communities in the north-east of England to the arrival of newcomers from other parts of the UK and far beyond.

Appropriately for a book about the north-east, Renton’s emphasis is firmly on class – namely, the making and remaking of a working class which absorbs workers from a huge array of cultures and nations and moulds them into a hybridised mass of people – many of whom share a common local and regional identity, with a staunchly working class underpinning. The process is not always straightforward, and the class dimension not always obvious, but the message is clear: integration is best achieved when it comes from below, as ordinary people the world over come to share the same friends, workplaces and eventually the same accents.

As Renton observes, “In so far as the region has been open to migrants, this welcome has been decisively shaped by existing cultures of occupation and class” (p215). Indeed, this focus on the importance of class lends Colour blind? an insight often missing in studies of migration and settlement, many of which concede too much ground to what Renton describes as ‘identity politics’ and the reproduction of ‘racialised’ thinking. It is here that Renton’s background in Marxist studies of fascism and anti-fascism comes into its own, as he is able to demonstrate how bonds of friendship and class solidarity have historically been able to cut across the divisions of ‘race’, ethnicity and religion in some of the UK’s former industrial heartlands.

The key contention of the book is that the warmth and hospitality for which the north-east is supposedly renowned stems from its distinct class character, with a predominantly industrial and coastal economy, giving birth to a population which was made up of predominantly skilled and semi-skilled manual workers. This in turn spawned a culture, Renton argues, which was largely receptive to incoming workers, regardless of their faith, nationality or skin colour, provided they were willing to demonstrate the same strongly working class virtues as the established population. The north-east was a place where, according to regional historian David Bean, working class virtues were the norm – honesty, kindness, humour and durability were to be found in the very fabric of north-east society.

Lest this sounds overly romantic, Renton is sufficiently vigilant to question whether the notion of ‘north-east exceptionalism’ is in fact a myth or reality. As is so often the case, what the author seems to suggest is that it is a partial truth, largely dependent on underlying structural factors. Indeed, it is argued that the decay of heavy industry and the declining influence of the organised working class “reduced the social basis for welcome”, diminishing the layer of activists willing to intervene in class-based community campaigns and destroying many of the bonds of solidarity enjoyed by workers of different nationalities in north-east communities: “Unemployment and underemployment,” comments Renton, “were hardly likely to encourage feelings of solidarity towards new arrivals.”

Nevertheless, there have been many examples of largely successful integration throughout the region’s history. Middlesbrough, for example, is a relatively young town which practically owes its existence to immigration, as workers from all over the UK, Ireland and the world flocked to the area for jobs in the ‘frontier’ town’s emerging ironworks in the 19th century. By 1871, one in five males on Teesside were Irish-born. There were periodic tensions between the different communities: Renton tells of how divisions between English and Irish ironworkers, fuelled by opportunistic employers, often resulted in both sides losing out, particularly in the ‘Great Strike’ of 1866 when differential pay cuts were imposed on both. Other historians point out that within a few generations the Irish in the north-east were very well integrated and, as Roger Cooter comments, “The proof for this must surely rest with the social, economic and political advancement of the Irish themselves” (p60).

Elsewhere, miner and trade unionist Jack Lawson remembers Bolden Colliery, near Sunderland, as “a typical example of the way in which the county of Durham had become a sort of social melting pot, owing to the rapid development of the coalfield during the 19th century” – one where a dozen different accents, dialects and languages eventually gave way to a common culture and a Mackem/Geordie lilt. The idea of a “melting pot” is not one that many people would necessarily associate with County Durham, where only 1.2% of the population belong to an ethnic minority, according to the 2001 consensus (compared with 2.4% in the rest of the north-east and 8.7% in England and Wales). But Lawson’s testimony is enlightening, for it reminds us that immigration is not always about crossing national borders, and also that migration fuels and is fuelled by rapid capitalist expansion and retraction.

Indeed, the story of migration and resettlement is woven into the history of the working class. As the numerous examples in Colour blind? show, it makes no sense from a rational Marxist perspective for some sections of the class to call for others to be expelled once expansion slows down, or to call for the capitalist state to throw up borders to keep newcomers out. The organisation of migrants into cultures and formations that emphasise the emancipatory potential of working class unity is what holds the key to successful integration – and to the struggle for improved quality of life for all, migrant and host alike. One example of this comes from as far back as 1866, when hundreds of seamen struck for higher wages in ports along the River Tyne. It was a strike in which black seamen were heavily involved, prompting one journalist to observe: “Whatever may be the feeling of the people of America or elsewhere against colour, it is not participated in by our tars, who walk arm in arm with the coloured men” (p34).

Yet the question of class and cultural identity is a complex one. To what extent do people consider themselves as workers rather than principally or exclusively as English, Poles, Pakistanis, Muslims, Hindus, Catholics or any of the myriad identities at play? The struggle to reinforce class identity as a means of cutting across ethnic and communal divisions is a recurring theme in the history of the north-east. Renton quotes a British-Indian youth, who says of his father: “He sort of wants to keep me Indian, you know, which I don’t like. I would like to think that I’ve got no nationality, you know, I’m just a human being” (p128). As Renton points out, narrow and communal identities – including white and British – have been all too easily reproduced down the generations, particularly from the 1980s onwards with the breaking up of the industrial proletariat and the onset of ‘identity politics’. Renton does not explore this debate in too much detail, although much has been written elsewhere about the role of identity politics and official, state-sanctioned multiculturalism in maintaining structural inequality and disadvantage.^[1]

Often when migrant groups cling to old identities in their totality it is in response to the hostility they face from the wider community. Hence the formation of the first self-mobilised community organisations in the 1950s and 1960s, long before ‘race relations’ legislation was implemented as a means of preventing discrimination against newcomers. As Renton explains, “One way to understand the process is as one of repeated attempts at state-building. While the economic functions of the state were provided from within north-east society (or from within Britain as a whole), the cultural and representative institutions of the region were frequently closed to new migrants … New arrivals in the region established religious, cultural, welfare and educational organisations, feeling that existing provisions were inadequate for them” (p80).

As time went on, however, these organisations came to be seen by the British establishment as a key means of managing troublesome minorities as part of a project in which anti-racism was gutted of any meaningful political content. The official policy of multiculturalism was formulated by governments from the 1980s onwards as a response to the persisting racial inequalities highlighted by anti-racist campaigners and to the ‘racial’ violence which broke out in British inner cities during the same period. This form of multiculturalism – which saw government and local authority funding directed to the aforementioned voluntary cultural organisations – not only ignored the economic, cultural and institutionally racist dimensions of existing inequalities, but actually fostered their entrenchment, including the patriarchal chauvinism of unelected ‘community leaders’ patronised by the state.

Although Renton only alludes to the fact, other writers have described this as a form of ‘internal colonialism’ actively fostered by the British ruling class. Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis, for example, have noted that the first generation of British ‘race relations experts’ received their training in the colonies of the British empire, where “they ruled through a stratum of local leaders and chieftains without too much intervention in the ‘internal affairs’ of those they ruled.”^[2] This was eventually reflected in the race relations institutions and practices implemented by British governments in the post-war era. Ubmerto Melotti has characterised the form of multiculturalism practised in Britain – which he refers to as “uneven pluralism” – as a particularist, ethnocentric extension of British colonial policy.^[3]

It is the long-established Yemeni community of South Shields on Tyneside, which offers perhaps the most fascinating example of these different processes at work. Renton tells of how journalists visiting the area in the mid-20th century marvelled at the extent to which the migrants and their descendents had adapted to north-east culture and spoke in ‘broad Tyneside’ accents: “They dressed, sounded and increasingly behaved like white Geordies” (p13). However, Renton does perhaps overestimate the extent to which South Shields migrants were assimilated at the cost of maintaining their own Arabic and Islamic traditions – not mentioned in the book, for example, is legendary visit in the 1970s of boxer Mohammed Ali – a figure whose political radicalism and proudly dissident Islamic identity struck a chord with the Tyneside working class, particularly its Arabic population.

The Yemenis’ integration was by no means an entirely smooth process. Settlement of the seafarers began in the 1890s and by 1918 Renton reports that there may have been up to 600 Arabs working out of North and South Shields. The Yemenis faced hostility early on, but nevertheless embraced aspects of English popular culture (for example, dances) and many married local women. In 1919, though, there were ‘race riots’ in South Shields involving Yemeni and white sailors – triggered, naturally, over an industrial dispute in which racism was deployed as a means of dividing a potentially united workforce.

These early decades of the 20th century also provide an early glimpse of what was to become a more pressing issue later on in the century with regards to the mobilisation of class and religion in the struggles for migrants’ rights: “A decade later,” writes Renton, “the Yemeni population of South Shields seems to have been divided between two different strategies to achieve success.” A significant minority of Yemenis in Shields identified with the Minority Movement, a CPGB-led organisation within the sailors’ union. On the other hand, the moderate and generally pro-government Western Islamic Association argued the case that the community’s principal need was the building of a mosque and the provision of more religious education (pp49-51). Although religious and class identities are by no means mutually exclusive, for socialists the fusion of class politics with religious politics can be problematic, to say the least, and the mobilisation of religious identities for political purposes can jeopardise the struggle for workers’ rights – as we have seen so often on the left in recent years.

All in all, in Colour blind? Renton has offered a concise, coherent and well-researched history of migration to the north-east, which adopts a class-based approach to the history of anti-racism and integration in the region. What conclusions can be drawn from the study? “The idea that the people of the north-east were always welcoming is no more plausible than its gloomier opposite, the idea that they were always hostile,” says Renton (p58). But if migrants did generally face less hostility than in other parts of the country – which is very possibly the case – it can confidently be said that this is largely attributable to its strongly industrial working class culture.

One lesson that we can draw from this is how important it is that the hegemonic struggle over the meaning of terms such as ‘integration’ and ‘community cohesion’ is won by forces that fill such concepts with progressive content – against, for example, the narrow bourgeois meaning given them by the establishment. We are for a grassroots integration that acknowledges no borders and strives to unite workers of all cultures in a radical political culture that is diverse but absolutely committed to the principles of workers’ rights, radical democracy and anti-racism. Only this can overcome communal division and the structural inequality it maintains.

Notes

1. See, for example, A Sivanandan Catching history on the wing: race, culture and globalisation London 2008.
2. F Anthias, N Yuval-Davis Racialised boundaries: race, nation, gender, colour and class and the anti-racist struggle London 1992, p158.
3. See U Melotti, ‘International migration in Europe: social projects and political cultures’ in T Modood, P Werbner (eds) The politics of multiculturalism in the new Europe: racism, identity, community London 1997.

Chris Gray reviews Richard Miles’s ‘Carthage must be destroyed: the rise and fall of an ancient Mediterranean civilisation’ London 2010, pp521, £30.

This book is an extremely welcome account of the history of Carthage from its foundation to the destruction of the city at the hands of the Romans in 146 BCE. Up to now the most accessible account in English has been BH Warmington’s Carthage (London 1964), a competent but rather pedestrian résumé of these historical events.

Miles’s work, in contrast, explores the Phoenician background in more detail – Carthage was a colony of Tyre – and contains observations of great value concerning Carthaginian relations with not only Rome, but also Greek culture. Refreshingly, Miles also succeeds in distancing himself from a blanket endorsement of Roman civilisation as the bearer of paramount values – or, alternatively, a dogmatic reversal of this position, in which Carthage appears as the maligned victim of an all-conquering Roman imperialism, which had no redeeming features whatsoever (see pp360-61). He succeeds in presenting both protagonists as open to criticism, which, indeed, is the only justifiable position for conscientious historians.

Human sacrifice

Criticism of Carthage has understandably often centred on the issue of human sacrifice, as practised there. This is in some respects a carry-over of the old Israelite propaganda against their Canaanite neighbours, as witnessed in the Old Testament, with its references to ritual such as that condemned in Leviticus xviii, 21, which ordains: “And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech”.

It must be recognised, however, that human sacrifice is a practice for which we have widespread anthropological evidence. The usual context is some kind of crisis in which the leader (king, chief) vows that he will sacrifice his child if that is what the gods demand. Thus in the Old Testament itself Abraham is commanded to kill his firstborn son, Isaac, and only at the last minute a ram is substituted (Genesis xxiii, 9-14). Analogously, Jephthah, campaigning against the Ammonites, vows to sacrifice the first person that he shall meet on his return, which turns out to be his own daughter (Judges xi, 29-40).

Similarly at the start of the Trojan War Agamemnon, faced with a contrary wind, sacrifices his daughter Iphigeneia in order that the expedition may sail. Even in Rome, where human sacrifice was frowned upon, when Hannibal was carrying all before him and threatening to detach the Italian cities from their allegiance, the citizens decreed that a man of Gaul and a Greek woman should be buried alive in the Forum Boarium, as Miles felicitously reports (p291).

Carthaginian practice is, therefore, not without parallel in the ancient world, but what seems indisputable is its comparative extent, wider than in many cultures. Curiously, it appears that we have here an example of colonial conservatism vis-à-vis the mother country.

Miles asserts that “it appears that the practice of molk sacrifice [cf Molech, Moloch] had completely died out in Phoenicia by the 7th century BC” (p69).

Contrastingly the tophet (child cemetery) at Carthage was, apparently, used from the mid-8th century BCE onwards (p70), and it contained not only infants who had died at a very young age of natural causes, but also a number of deliberate examples of child sacrifice, as witnessed by one inscription, which reads: “It was to the Lady Tanit Face of Baal and to Baal Hammon that Bomilcar, son of Hanno, grandson of Milkiathan, vowed this son of his own flesh. Bless him you!” (quoted p72).

To this evidence of a strain of cruelty in the Carthaginian character we may add the citizens’ readiness to crucify unsuccessful generals – Miles records several instances – but against this we can set the Romans’ enjoyment of gladiatorial contests, a ‘sport’ which grew out of a decision by certain Roman nobles that some of their slaves should be made to fight to the death.

The constitution

Miles does not give as detailed a picture of Carthaginian colonisation and exploration as Warmington, but he covers the essential ground (see pp82-90). As he observes, the Carthaginians appear to have got as far south as Cameroun, but only as a reconnaissance. This is impressive, but we should remember that some Phoenicians succeeded in circumnavigating the African continent in the 7th century BCE (see Herodotos iv, 42). The Carthaginians’ exploration voyages were essentially a spin-off from their colonising and commercial activities in the western Mediterranean, which they soon turned into something of a Carthaginian lake.

Miles is also good at describing the fluctuations of Carthaginian politics and the evolution of the city’s constitution. He correctly notes the oligarchic bias in the latter:

“From its earliest beginnings the city was ruled by an aristocratic cabal referred to as the b’lm [Punic was written without vowels, but we should imagine some such word as the Hebrew baalim], the lords or princes, who controlled all the important judicial, governmental, religious and military organs of state. At the apex of this hierarchy was a family whose wealth and power set them above fellow members of the elite at that particular time … From the last decade of the sixth century to the first decade of the fourth the supreme family was the Magonids” (p67).

The word for chief magistrate was sufet, which is cognate with the Hebrew word shophet, usually translated as ‘judge’. According to Warmington, “In the 3rd century sufets held office for only one year, and there were probably two at a time” (BH Warmington Carthage p144).

This would put them roughly on a par with the Roman consuls at that stage, and suggests a substantial ruling class of oligarchs. There was also a Council of Elders. With the collapse of Magonid power following military defeat in Sicily at the hands of Dionysios, tyrant of Syracuse, another elite family headed by Hanno gained the dominant position and a reorganisation of state offices was carried out, which may have included the establishment of the suffetes (to use the Latin plural) as chief magistrates – at any rate that is what Miles appears to indicate:

“During the early years of the 5th century a new constitutional body had been established: the Tribunal of One Hundred and Four. Made up of members of the aristocratic elite, it oversaw the conduct of officials and military commanders, as well as acting as a kind of higher constitutional court. At the same time the Council of Elders remained in existence, and may even have had its powers enhanced, with treasury and foreign affairs coming under its control. At the head of the Carthaginian state were now two annually elected senior executive officers, the suffetes, and a range of more junior officials and special commissioners oversaw different aspects of governmental business such as public works, tax-collecting and the administration of the state treasury. Panels of special commissioners, called pentarchies, were appointed from the Tribunal of One Hundred and Four; they appear to have dealt with a variety of affairs of state” (p130).

Colonisation

Miles also gives a good outline of the seesaw military struggles between the Carthaginians and the Greek colonial cities for control of Sicily. This lasted for some 250 years, always leading to the restoration of a form of balance of power, with the Carthaginians dominant in the west and the Greeks in the east. Then finally the Romans intervened, seizing control of the whole island.

The First Punic War (264-241 BCE) was triggered by Roman support of a group of mercenaries based at Messana in Sicily, who were under attack from Syracuse. These men first appealed to Carthage, and then asked Rome for help. Rome chose to block any aid from Carthage, which would, if given, have extended the latter’s political sphere of influence. In order to win the war the Romans had to develop a fleet: they did so, and they succeeded in winning several naval victories. It was the last of these that induced Carthage to ask for peace; the terms were harsh: the Carthaginians had to evacuate Sicily, set free all Roman prisoners and pay a war indemnity of 3,200 talents. An economically exhausted Carthage was forced to accept. Shortly afterwards, with Carthage embroiled in a conflict with her army of mercenaries seeking payment for their services, the Romans added insult to injury by seizing Sardinia and Corsica (both within the Carthaginian sphere) and demanding a further 1,200 talents as indemnity.

Carthage’s resurgence in the face of these disasters was led by Hamilcar Barca, who seized the opportunity to found a substitute empire in Spain. Miles has a particularly good description of these operations. In parallel, Hamilcar advocated the development of Carthage’s north African territories. As Miles writes, “The wealth of Spain was used not only to pay off Carthage’s war debts, but also to ensure the support of his army, the Popular Assembly and his own faction in the Council of Elders. Despite his absence from Carthage, Spanish gold and silver guaranteed Hamilcar’s political influence by proxy” (p218).

An integral part of these developments was the take-over of a number of metal mines by the Barcids, who organised the work along lines that the Athenians and their Roman successors would have found familiar: “Large numbers of slaves, controlled by overseers, did the manual labour. Underground rivers were redirected through tunnels and shafts, and new technology was used to pump water out of the shafts” (p219).

Hannibal’s elephants

Carthaginian expansion in Spain led to a further clash with the Romans and the outbreak of the Second Punic War, which, as everyone knows, was noted for Hannibal’s invasion of Italy via his celebrated crossing of the Alps.

Miles is once again excellent on this, especially as regards the elephants in Hannibal’s army. These were not, as one might suppose, the large African variety of the savannah, but forest elephants from the north – somewhat smaller, but still effective enough on the battlefield as an early form of tank. It appears that Hannibal also had at least one Indian elephant in his invading force. (The Carthaginians obtained their Indian elephants from Ptolemaic Egypt; the arrival of elephants in Hellenistic Greek armies was due to an initial gift from the Indian emperor, Chandragupta – known to the Greek historians as Sandrakottos – to Alexander).

Miles is to be commended, as I said, for avoiding pro-Roman prejudice in his work. Commenting on the stock Roman picture of the Carthaginians, he writes:

“It is worth reminding ourselves that these representations of impiety, faithlessness and greed were the product of [Roman historian] Livy’s perspective, fulfilling a particular Roman agenda in both justifying Roman aggression and defining Roman virtue. Despite Livy’s protestations to the contrary, the Carthaginians were demonstrably no less [he presumably means no more] faithless than the Romans during the Second Punic War, and many of the charges that Livy laid against Hannibal and his troops in fact served to deflect attention away from Roman breaches of good faith. Thus Livy doggedly portrayed the Carthaginian siege and capture of Sagunto (which had triggered the Second Punic War) as a prime example of bad faith on the part of Hannibal and his countrymen. By contrast, the Roman Senate’s failure to protect a sworn ally is completely glossed over” (pp360-61).

Mode of production

Richard Miles is not a Marxist, so it is useless for Marxists to complain if he does not ask or answer questions which interest them. It falls to us to tackle these issues. Chief among them is the question of the precise mode of production obtaining in Carthage – in particular in the period between the First and Second Wars, when Carthage entered its final expansionary phase. Fortunately we can refer here to the analysis developed by Stéphane Gsell, who wrote (in French) a history of ancient North Africa and also an important article on rural slavery in the Roman province thereof (‘Esclaves ruraux dans l’Afrique romaine’ in FE Adcock et al Mélanges Gustave Glotz Paris 1932, pp397-415).

Gsell notes that “we know vaguely that the Carthaginians had many slaves” (in the article cited) and discusses the extension of the city’s north African territory in the 3rd century BCE in his main work.

He writes: “Did the state declare itself the owner of the land in the whole of this conquered territory? This is what we don’t know. However, some Carthaginians obtained or acquired lands that became veritable private property … On these domains and perhaps also on others where the state would reserve for itself full ownership and exploitation rights there lived many slaves, employed as agricultural workers. Thousands of them took part in revolts at the beginning and in the middle of the 4th century. Carthage kept prisoners of war to cultivate the fields: that was the origin of a large part of the rural slaves. But we are not told if they had masters who bought them or if, on the contrary, the state would have remained the owner of these unfortunates, forcing them to work on public land or hiring them out for work on private land. We do not know if there were any free labourers on the Carthaginian nobles’ land, farmers paying rent in agricultural produce, like the coloni on the great African estates of the Roman epoch” (Histoire de l’ancienne Afrique du nord Vol 2, pp299-300).

It follows that we can only guess what the dominant mode of production actually was, but an educated guess, I would argue, is possible. Retention of native (ie, non-Carthaginian) labour seems unlikely: the Phoenicians were paramount slave dealers and it seems probable that there would have been dealers in Carthage quite prepared to sell to fellow nationals. Carthaginians as tenant farmers also appears unlikely: with alternative locations first in Sicily and then in Spain, there would have been counter-attractions, although it is possible that with a rising population certain of the poorer classes might have elected to support themselves in this way.

State farms operated by unfree labourers seem a distinct possibility, but the nobles may well have preferred private estates of their own. A famous Carthaginian agricultural treatise written by Mago in the 3rd century invited his fellow countrymen to live on such a farm (see Warmington, p155). (This work was translated into Latin following the final defeat of Carthage and used by Roman experts on agriculture such as Varro and Columella; unfortunately it has not survived). It seems likely, therefore, that Carthage was on the road to what could be characterised as a ‘mature slave society’, of which the classic example is Rome in the final two and a half centuries of the republic.

Such reasoning must be seen as speculative, and maybe that is why Miles refused to pursue the topic. But he has written a very useful book which, hopefully, will stir interest in this gifted Semitic people, a nation which gave the Romans the fright of their lives in the 3rd century BCE, when the dread shout arose in the city of Rome: “Hannibal ad portas!” (“Hannibal is at the gates!”).

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Andrew Coates reviews David Harvey’s ‘A companion to Marx’s Capital’ Verso, 2010, pp320, £10.99.

“Of course, we have all read, and all do read, Capital.” Louis Althusser’s opening words to Reading Capital (1968) were improbable to most Marxists then, and even more unlikely now.

Forty years on, in the wake of the worldwide financial crisis, anti-capitalism and Marxism have seen a modest revival, it is true. As the Communist manifesto observed, capitalism is “like a sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells”. But going through Marx’s critique of political economy ‘to the letter’ to find the bourgeoisie’s grimoire remains a minority taste. As David Harvey states, “a whole younger generation has grown up bereft of familiarity with, let alone training in, Marxist political economy”. This is not just an academic loss.

To Harvey movements that oppose capitalism need an “alternative vision”.^[1] If The enigma of Capital (2010) tries to show one, A companion to Marx’s Capital is its essential partner. The book explores the factory where Enigma is manufactured. Harvey’s aim is to “get you to read a book by Karl Marx called Capital Volume I, and to read it on Marx’s own terms”. Honed by years of lectures to an American graduate audience (replete with ‘gottens’), it is of greatest interest to those whose “practical engagements” demand a “strong theoretical base”.

Left readings

There are two main left approaches to Marx’s Capital. The first, largely academic, is taken by his critics. Theorists have taken Marx’s works to pieces so thoroughly, as in the writings of Jon Elster, Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst,^[2] that little remains but the concepts of forces and relations of production. From these, we get ‘post-Marxist’ theories of the total autonomy of politics, largely beyond any of the categories of Capital.

A second approach is that of a ‘return to Marx’. But it is of a very particular type. The ‘capital-logic’ school, which owes debts to the analysis of value by the early Soviet writer, II Rubin, is influential on the non-academic left. One theorist, John Holloway (Change the world without taking power, 2005), has his own reading of Marx. He maps the theory of commodity fetishism onto politics and states (‘form process’). The realm of “fetishised social relations” enwrap us in capital’s power to the extent that opposition has to begin (as the book does) by one big “scream” against the entire system. Anything less ends up propping up capitalism.

Harvey therefore does not write in a vacuum. Companion is not just an invitation to read Marx. He is obliged to defend some basic Marxist positions against the radical critics. The labour theory of value is justified as a necessary “material base” of production. Harvey states (repeating some classical views): “We need the concept of value as socially necessary labour-time” to stop us imagining that the economy of the market “arrives magically”, “facilitated by the magic of the money”.

Against analytical Marxists, who criticise Marx’s ‘flirtation’ with Hegelian terms, he is less forthright. There is no widespread use of Hegelian language or reliance on Marx’s (metaphorical) concept of the ‘negation of the negation’. While Harvey admires Marx’s ‘dialectical’ method, this largely refers to their ability to capture social development ‘in motion’, within an interlinked “totality”. Dialectics, he observes in the first chapters, enabled Marx to go beyond the surface or “appearance” of capitalism to discover its inner workings. We get a sense of the way the labour process is dynamically organised, how the circuits of capital are interrelated, how “space and time get set up and understood”, how machinery is deployed and the contradictions of commodity production develop. That lets us see the major contours of the modern capitalist world.

But this (loose) dialectics is only a tool. As for the analytical theorists, it is the capacity of Capital to offer accurate diagnoses of how capitalism operates that matters, not, as Harvey states in his concluding chapter, the “dance of dialectic”.

The ‘autonomist’ reading of Marx and its ‘great refusal’ of capital’s capacity to abstract is also addressed. Labour and technology are part of ‘metabolic’ processes bonded to nature. By their intrinsic character they imply hard effort. A demand for autonomous free play is not the pivotal point from where capital can be challenged.

Workers’ resistance takes a different form. It is directly related to conditions inside work. Class struggle may (by preventing destitution and preventing its tendency to throttle demand) help capital reach a better equilibrium. But such conflicts (for example, over the length of the working day) “can go beyond trade union consciousness and morph into more revolutionary demands”. Left unresolved, however, is exactly how class struggle can be related to politics, and can avoid being absorbed or quashed by the state and the bourgeoisie.

Piloting a voyage

In the journey through Marx’s work there can be few better pilots than Harvey. He unravels the most difficult chapters of Capital, on commodities, on the labour theory of value, to expose with clarity the process of surplus value extraction.

There is a constant effort to retain a critical awareness. So, in discussing the origins of money, Harvey casts doubt on Marx’s own historical beliefs (that they emerged directly from commodity exchange). Companion equally makes good use of modern theory to indicate the continuing importance of Marx’s fertile suggestions. Harvey claims (perhaps optimistically), for example, that Foucault’s works on ‘Panoptic’ labour discipline are compatible with Marx’s description of the regimenting of wage-labour in the first factories. The book equally sparkles with Marx’s literary allusions (from Balzac to Shakespeare), historical illustrations (such as the British 19th century Factory Acts and Chartism), philosophical debts (Hegel), political and ideological context (utopian socialism, Fourier, Proudhon, Owen, Cabet, Saint-Simon). Harvey gives due attention to the political economists Marx critiqued – Adam Smith, above all, though also Ricardo, Malthus and John Stuart Mill, whose writings are important for anyone wishing to go further into what Marx meant.

Readers of Companion (and Enigma) should be aware of the context. A radical geographer and critic of postmodernism, Harvey has become increasingly concerned to link his theoretical work to political conclusions. This appears throughout Companion. One central theme is how the crises of capitalism work out. While he adopts a multi-causal approach on this (considering underconsumption as well as the decline in profit rates), a central problem for capital is “overaccumulation” (a theme of the Communist manifesto). In Capital’s pages there are only indications of this problem, as the work stretched into further volumes (capital is reproduced generally though recurrent devaluations and crises of disproportionality continually upset the system). The important point is that overaccumulation means a lack of internal effective demand for products, and a reserve of idle capital. Rosa Luxemburg saw a resolution external to the existing circuits of capital reproduction. This lay in “the existence of some latent and mobilised demand outside the capitalist system”. Its use implied “the continuation of primitive accumulation through imperialist imposition”.

Harvey extends this insight into even wider economic and political arenas. Whether every feature of classical pre-great war imperialism defines the ‘highest stage’ of capitalism or not, these mechanisms, Harvey argues, still operate. He asserts that modern business continues to resolve its difficulties through seeking external outlets for its surplus goods and capital. It seeks to “solve its capital-surplus problem through geographical and temporal displacements”. This implies both a continuation of imperialism (through capital export), and the internal colonialisation of formerly non-market social institutions.

The process we call ‘globalisation’ is thus more unsettling than a networked world market, ‘immaterial’ (technological) production or other aspects of the transnational economic and political flows described in Toni Negri’s and Michael Hardt’s Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004). Classical colonialisation has been succeeded by endless economic and political shocks. Repressive political or directly military means are still used to open up new markets and dispose of people.

In New imperialism (2005) Harvey described the battering down of barriers to capital through the “enclosure of the commons”. Naturally he develops – from and beyond Marx – a host of forms relating to how the contradictions of capitalism develop and are (in phases) resolved, not to mention the spiralling complexities of the different “limits and barriers” of capital. But this element of his theory, extending the life of primitive accumulation to contemporary capitalism, is probably the most politically significant. It is the basis for both oppression and resistance. Or, as Companion indicates, “political struggles against accumulation by dispossession” are “just as important as more traditional proletarian movements”. Nor are the western heartlands unaffected: in Baltimore people are losing their homes because of the subprime mortgage crisis – “a vicious class war of accumulation by dispossession”. In these conditions, political strategies are needed “around the notion of class war”.^[3]

Today, while we see capital turning inwards to cannibalise formerly publicly owned and administered assets, the process is, Harvey has argued, helped by political means. A brief history of neoliberalism (2005) describes a similar process of dispossession at work. “The reversion of common property rights won through years of hard class struggle (the right to a state pension, to welfare, to national healthcare) to the private domain has been one of the most egregious of all policies of dispossession pursued in the name of neoliberal orthodoxy.” Neoliberal politics – Thatcher in Britain, Reagan in America – were about “the restoration or reconstitution of naked class power, locally as well as transnationally, but most particularly in the main financial centres of global capitalism.” Capital is turning in on itself, as ‘unproductive’ state functions are turned over to private contractors for private profit (though in Marxist terms this creates a conceptual difficulty – are they still ‘unproductive’ when all the surplus value comes from diverted taxation?).

We might also note that the neoliberals’ success in creating a permanent ‘reserve army of labour’ (the out-of-work or causally employed) is now accompanied by coercive dispossession of existing welfare rights, and forced labour (Workfare) to provide a flexible pool of employees and push down wages. This reminds us that primitive accumulation was accompanied by forceful measures to make those without property toil.

Class struggle

Companion is, then, not just a study aid. It has political ambitions. To illustrate how Marxist politics could operate Harvey focuses on Capital’s account of struggles over the working day. He updates this discussion of the tendency of employers to extend as far as possible the working day with descriptions of conditions in plants producing Wal-Mart goods today, and the loss of “class power” to alter them. But we are not clear – as we indicated in discussing autonomist thinkers – how far sufficient class power, if it reappeared, could be exerted to shape the legal framework of society or the state’s internal make-up.

Marx apparently never fixed an “equilibrium point” for class struggle that could tell us how far we can proceed in this direction. In which case Capital is a political route-map which indicates clearly the starting point (class struggle), but fails to signpost most of the paths (against or through the apparatus of the public power) through which the working class has to travel.

One example makes this difficulty plain. Harvey asserts that capitalist exploitation cannot be fought by appeals to human rights or “rights talk” generally. Exploitation and dispossession are acts of class power, which can only be met with class action. Yet when he discusses the struggle over the length of the working day and wages he cites accepted living standards as socially established ‘givens’ capitalists have eventually to accept. They evolve, as a wider, more prosperous standard of life is accepted as the absolute minimum.

Can we not see that ‘human rights’ are part of the independent ‘moral economy’ of the masses, which is the bedrock of movements for better conditions? If neoliberalism is based on markets and the norm of legal equality, what is there to prevent people from asserting their own moral universe in opposition? Marx may have been right to observe how the existing notion of rights corresponded to the apparent equity of (normal) exchanges in a capitalist society, while ignoring the underlying inequalities behind them. But the system cannot impose itself over all what Harvey calls our “species-being”. From that source come new demands that reach beyond existing society. ‘I know my rights’ may be a more intelligible starting point than Jon Holloway’s scream.

Marx^[4] and, influentially, Engels believed in forming mass working class parties. The classical Second International perspective is that the cause of labour proceeds by steady democratic expression. Is this fundamentally flawed by the existence of capitalist states ‘internally related’ to the process of accumulation? Is the state largely (as in Capital) concerned with maintaining certain essential functions of capitalism (law, money, communications and so on)? Are successful workers’ demands for a more active role (welfare, education, pensions, health) just doomed to make capitalism more stable? Are these ‘gains’ or half-victories – half-self-interested concessions that may be lost?

Clearly the main British political leaderships think that neoliberalism has won for the foreseeable future. In which case how and at what point will more radical class struggle be able to go beyond such a framework? Harvey explores in other writings the alliances beyond labour this may require, but more significant may be the way in which parties can be constructed.

This is a good point on which to conclude. A companion to Capital is more than excellent company. It makes us consider that it is not identities – national, religious or cultural – that primarily define how we live. It is capitalism. Its ever-present form is crystallised in money as a “radical leveller”. This “indicates a certain democracy of money, an egalitarianism in it; a dollar in my pocket has the same value as one in yours”. But revenues are not democratically distributed. Capital stands against labour; rents and surplus are extracted from the workers. Thus the “concept of class, in all its ambiguous glory, is indispensable to both theory and action”.

I want more money, I want my rights!

Notes

1. See his political conclusions on this at davidharvey.org/2009/12/organizing-for-the-anti-capitalist-transition
2. T Cutler, B Hindess, A Hussain, P Hirst Marx’s Capital and capitalism today London 1978; J Elster Making sense of Marx Cambridge 1985.
3. For discussion on these views see ‘Symposium on David Harvey’s ‘The new imperialism’, Historical Materialism Vol 14, No4, 2006.
4. See J Elster Making sense of Marx Cambridge 1985.

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Ben Lewis reviews the Labour Representation Committee’s ‘A people’s agenda: a pamphlet for the general election 2010’ pp12, donation.

The Labour Representation Committee has been stepping up its activity for the election. A campaign of the Labour left whose most prominent leader is John McDonnell MP, the LRC is unsurprisingly calling for a Labour vote across the board to ‘keep the Tories out’. However, it is simultaneously putting out its own message in the elections. In January it drew up a list of Labour candidates it deemed worthy of active support. More recently it published a short pamphlet outlining an alternative programme to that of the New Labour leadership

The LRC boasts 150 affiliated organisations, six national trade unions and around 1,000 members and the Marxist left must take it seriously. We in the CPGB will certainly be doing what we can to ensure that comrade McDonnell, together with other LRC candidates who oppose all cuts in public services and call for an immediate withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan, gets elected.

Like the far left, though, the Labour left is in a profound state of organisational and theoretical disarray. The LRC certainly seems to be bending over backwards to be generous in the list of candidates it deems particularly worthy of support. However, even with the inclusion of ‘socialists’ like Michael Meacher and Diane Abbott, the LRC list amounts to a mere 23 candidates. Although there was an increase in interest in the LRC when comrade McDonnell tried to challenge for leadership of the post-Blair Labour Party, his bid was easily quashed by the bureaucracy and he did not even make it onto the ballot paper.

Encouragingly, A people’s agenda states that it is “designed to generate a debate about how we organise society – a debate that will be lacking from the party political pantomime of the election campaign” (p12). In his introduction to the pamphlet, comrade McDonnell also calls for “your ideas and responses” for “the society we want” (p2). It is in this spirit that I offer my criticisms – not just in relation to the society we want, but the organisational vehicle we must forge to get there. Indeed, the left’s current malaise makes an honest and sharp debate about strategy and perspectives more urgent than ever.

A populist agenda?

The rather short pamphlet consists of a brief commentary on different policy areas that the LRC has highlighted in order to offer an alternative to the “prescription” of “the three major parties”: “cuts to your local services and to your pay – and quite possibly to your job too” (p2). The headings of the various sections – ‘An economy in whose interests?’; ‘Public services, not private profit’; ‘Care’; ‘The world of work’; ‘Politics for all’; ‘Treasuring our environment’; ‘Peace’; and ‘Freedom for all’ – give a good indication of the LRC’s remedies: ie, fairly standard left Labourite fare.

The main thread running through the pamphlet is the theme of ‘us and them’. The front cover shows a banner reading “We won’t pay for their crisis’ in front of Big Ben, and throughout the text the attacks on our pay, jobs, conditions and services are contrasted to the profits of the banks and big corporations.

However, in the absence of any commentary on the dynamics of the capitalist system and its ripeness for a higher form of society, the pamphlet risks falling into the trap of left populism. Thus many supportable demands – free, secular education, nationalisation of the banking sector, a massive council house-building programme, repeal of the trade union laws, decriminalisation of drugs, etc – sit alongside platitudinal statements, beginning “we need”. We need “a decent standard of living” (p8), an (unspecified) “living wage” and “a society which guarantees meaningful employment for everyone”, where “everyone participates and feels like they have a voice” (p9).

This populism is also evidenced in the discussion of the crisis, which is blamed not on the destructive capitalist system of reproduction itself, but the “global financial institutions and the subservient governments that deregulated the world over” (p3). The reader is reminded: “You didn’t cause this recession, you didn’t fail to build enough housing for the past 30 years, you haven’t cut taxes for the wealthiest and increased inequality” (p2).

Maybe the economic crisis might have been averted if the UK government had not “operated predominantly in the interests of global capital” by “liberalising markets, deregulating and privatising” (p3), or if it had made “big business pay their fair share” (my emphasis, p4). However, just how any British government operating as part of the current global order and subservient to the US imperial hegemon could have invested “not in speculation, but in the goods and infrastructure our society needs” is not dealt with.

Instead, we are offered catch-all statements like “The economy we want cannot be detached from the society we want. The only way to deliver social justice is through an economy driven by delivering for people, not for profit” (p3). Neither capitalism as a system (let alone its declining laws and the conscious turn to finance capital in the 1970s) nor the socialist alternative (or the means to achieve it) is specifically named.

In the absence of this, the pamphlet appears to suggest that the alternative lies in the good old days of the social democratic consensus, welfarism and a “Real Labour Government” managing British capitalism to “deliver the changes we need for our society” (p2).

‘Real Labour’

All of the demands in the pamphlet could technically be achieved by a left Labour government at the helm of the British monarchical democracy. But can we really hold up the Attlee government of 1945 as an example of ‘socialism’?

Indeed, this is the very most that social democracy was able to achieve: state capitalist management of the economy from on high: welfarism to limit and regulate the capitalist law of value. All this was done not as a way overcoming that law, but of upholding it.

Moreover, if that is the perspective of the LRC, then it seems to be stuck in a Keynesian time warp These are not the halcyon days of the 1950s, when it was strategically necessary for the capitalist classes of Europe to adopt the social democratic consensus, when the state negatively anticipated some of the measures that would be taken in socialist society in order to fend off the influence of ‘socialism’ in the USSR and its satellites. Although the state still plays an enormous role (and has continued to do despite Thatcher) in propping up capitalist pseudo-markets, this era is over. There can be no going back.

We are now going through a period in which the capitalist class is gearing up for an enormous attack on the remaining vestiges of the economic and political gains made by our class in the last century. We are in for a long period of stagnation, if not slump. So a more likely scenario than the LRC’s “Real Labour Government” à la Clement Attlee is an administration resembling the national government of 1931-35, when Labour’s Ramsay McDonald, in alliance with Conservatives and Liberals, joined forces to defend their system against the working class.

This underlines a more general point. At a time when the perversion of capitalist accumulation and expansion for expansion’s sake stands exposed, the left should not be harking back to a time when it could hope to administer capitalism more ‘fairly’. We should be patiently arguing for a solid alternative vision of society, where democracy flourishes and the prerogatives of the market are consigned to the dustbin of history. Such a vision requires a radical democratic programme acting as a dynamic road map to achieve it.

This is the pamphlet’s main shortcoming. Whilst making the correct observation that “democracy should mean more than signing away your vote every four or five years” (p9), there are no concrete demands to address this deficit at all, such as the age-old Chartist demand of annual elections, or the call for MPs to be instantly recallable and receive only the average skilled workers’ wage. There is some stress on local democracy, but again this is restricted to sound bites: everyone “should feel a sense of ownership about the decisions made in our workplaces, in our communities and in our nation” (p9). The absence of high politics really underlines the narrow vision being outlined. Can we talk of socialism coming into existence through the existing state machinery of the British military-bureaucratic apparatus – the House of Lords, the House of Commons, the monarchy, MI5/MI6, the standing army, etc? To ask the question is to answer it.

Internationalism and peace

The LRC has quite a good record in terms of international solidarity campaigns, having played a positive role in campaigns like the Iraq Occupation Focus and Hands Off the People of Iran. This is reflected in some of the very good demands in this pamphlet – the immediate withdrawal of occupying troops from Afghanistan, reparations to both Iraq and Afghanistan (a demand I think the workers’ movement should take more seriously than looking to jail Tony Blair) and the scrapping of Trident.

The main flaw in the ‘peace’ section is that it does not mention imperialism as a phenomenon necessitating war, sanctions and aggression. So, while it is quite correct to comment that “Our society should not be launching wars of aggression” (p10), this appears to overlook the fact that there is something intrinsic to “our society” and the way it is organised which is inexorably bound up with wars of aggression: the hierarchy of states, or imperialism.

This is why it is dangerous to talk of promoting a “foreign policy based on human rights, cooperation and justice” (p10) without breaking from the imperatives of the system. Maybe the LRC comrades think that a “Real Labour Government” would be able to do this. History begs to differ though. Every Labour government, even in the heady times of the late 1940s, loyally served British imperialist interests.

The European Union is only once fleetingly mentioned, and here only in relation to immigration legislation that enables foreign workers to be paid less for doing the same work (p8). But Europe as an issue needing more serious discussion – what should we say about the EU parliament, the commission, etc? Is it really possible to conceive of road to socialism within Britain alone? The absence of a call to scrap all immigration controls – a precondition of effective class unity – is also disappointing.

Overcoming Labourism

All in all, while A people’s agenda leaves a lot to be desired, it contains numerous demands which intersect with ours, and clearly it is in the interests of our movement to engage with the LRC campaign and urge a critical vote for those Labour candidates who meet our conditions on cuts and Afghanistan. But the pamphlet lacks any viable vision of working class rule and socialism. There again, given that it is written by left Labourites, this is hardly surprising.

What is surprising is that purported ‘Marxists’ and ‘revolutionaries’ ape these utopian perspectives, seeing it almost as their god-given duty to stand on variants of these politics. The platforms of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, Respect, the Scottish Socialist Party and the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty are almost identical in their outlook: a standard shopping list of economic demands that vary in their radicalism, but next to nothing on what has traditionally been a hallmark of orthodox Marxist programmes – a set of demands that challenge how we as a class are ruled, both in the workplace and community and at the level of the state apparatus.

Worse, our forlorn ‘Marxist’ comrades in Tusc labour (pun intended) under the same illusions as the LRC that it is possible to establish a ‘real’ or old Labour Party capable of serving working class interests. Even if the Tusc campaign for a Labour Party mark two stood a chance of getting anywhere (it does not precisely because the actual Labour Party still exists – and could even swing far to the left after a period of opposition), then it will end up going exactly the same way as the Labour Party of the 20th century. Unless you begin with a programmatic commitment to overcoming capitalism, as opposed to managing it, you will set off along the long and winding road which culminated in the party of Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson and Gordon Brown.

Our task is to overcome Labourism through joint work and patient argument aimed at programmatic unity within a party of Marxism (and in my experience the LRC has been a slightly more responsive environment than projects like Respect). We should not sow illusions in Labourite perspectives, but make clear that it is a project which reduces the working class programme to demands for a ‘fairer’ share under a capitalism presided over by her majesty’s imperial Labour government. The ‘clause four socialism’ of old Labour was always a mere sound bite aimed at keeping in check a British working class inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The ruins of the Socialist Alliance and Respect highlight the folly of Marxists pretending to be Labourites. Tusc will go the same way. It has to. The left has to live up to the enormity of the tasks ahead, get its act together and offer a viable, qualitatively different, programmatic alternative for our class.

This is the debate we need. And we need it now.

Click here to download a free copy of this pamphlet: http://l-r-c.org.uk/news/story/lrc-launches-a-peoples-agenda/

Mike Macnair reviews P Blackledge, N Davidson (eds) Alasdair MacIntyre’s engagement with Marxism: selected writings 1953-1974, Brill (Historical materialism series), 2008, pp443, £89.

This book was an interesting project, but is less interesting as a product.

Alasdair MacIntyre is an eminent moral philosopher. He is chiefly famous for After virtue (1981), which argues that modern moral and political philosophy, whether utilitarian or Kantian, is fatally flawed due to the loss of the idea of human virtue shared by the classical philosophers (especially Aristotle).

Since After virtue, the influence on MacIntyre of the medieval theologian, Thomas Aquinas, who offered a Catholic-Christian interpretation of Aristotle’s ideas, has become more explicit. MacIntyre’s 1995 retrospective view of his earlier work printed at the end of this book makes clear his adherence to the Roman Catholic church and its generally ‘Thomist’ (after Aquinas) approach to moral questions.

Before this evolution, however, MacIntyre had a varied political history. Marxism: an interpretation (1953), extracts from which begin the book, is a left-Anglican Christian critique of Marxism, retaining Marx’s moral critique of capitalism, while rejecting his predictive claims. This approach was fairly conventional for its period, but distinguished by the fact that the author was at the time a member of the ‘official’ Communist Party.

After the Hungarian uprising of 1956, MacIntyre was part of the ‘new left’ group of intellectuals who broke with the CP without (in the short term) moving to the right. Like several others from this milieu he passed to Trotskyism in the form of Gerry Healy’s Socialist Labour League (later the Workers Revolutionary Party) (ppxxvii-viii). His membership was, however, short-lived (1959-60), as he resigned when some of his co-thinkers were expelled for “contravening the correct procedure for forming a tendency” (pxxxii). From here MacIntyre went to Tony Cliff’s Socialist Review/International Socialists (now the Socialist Workers Party) and more or less directly onto the editorial board of its new journal International Socialism (pxxxv). He remained with IS until summer 1968, when he resigned abruptly (pxlv).

The editors explain this last break partly by a drift towards the spontaneist anti-partyism of Cornelius Castoriadis’s Socialisme ou barbarie, and partly by an increasing belief that the supposed ground of the ‘party concept’ in the common interests of the proletariat as a class was flawed. In MacIntyre’s developing view, the proletariat was irretrievably fragmented, so that revolutionary organisations inevitably became mirrors of managerialism (ppxlv-vii). MacIntyre now crossed the Atlantic to work at US universities, wrote savage critiques of Marcuse, and of the US student left influenced by Marcuse and similar authors, and drifted into a life simply as an academic moral philosopher, albeit with a certain limited attachment to the left; and in turn, via After virtue, moved to Thomism and the Catholic church.

This sort of history is a very long way from being unique. Many thousands of people who have been involved with the Marxist left at one time or another have ended by drawing the conclusions (1) that the proletariat is incapable of ruling, and (2) hence that the left inevitably reproduces the hierarchies of capitalist bureaucracy. An early example is Robert Michels’ Political parties: a revolutionary syndicalist when he wrote the book, Michels ended as a Nazi sympathiser and his book (later) became a standard text of the cynical ‘realism’ taught in US university political science departments.

Against this background, MacIntyre’s trajectory towards Catholic intellectual production is in a sense less immediately toxic than Irving Kristol’s or Christopher Hitchens’ neo-conservatism. But this is, of course, Trotsky’s famous choice between the axe murderer (Kornilov, Kristol) and the poisoner (Kerensky, MacIntyre). The long-term influence of After virtue in the academy is towards the rehabilitation of violently conservative-Catholic versions of Thomism and, alongside these and as a result, the legitimation of ultra-conservative forms of political islamism and – from the Protestant camp – ‘creation science’ and ‘dominion theology’. MacIntyre’s shift to Aristotelianism/Thomism, in other words, was an early harbinger of an ongoing long-term shift of ‘high ideological production’ onto a conservative-religious terrain.

Whatever one makes of his subsequent evolution, MacIntyre was a provocative and influential writer in the ‘new left’ period, and wrote publicly for both the early SLL and the early IS, though he was clearly not a central intellectual producer for either. So Blackledge’s and Davidson’s project, to print a selection of MacIntyre’s writings between 1953 and 1974, ought to be illuminating.

Lifeless

The selection principle (ppli-liii) is that the pieces should be about (1) Marxism as theory or (2) uses of Marxist theory to analyse the contemporary world. The editors have excluded the technical philosophy published in academic journals, even where it adverts to Marxism, and have also excluded very short book reviews.

The result is, however, surprisingly lifeless. MacIntyre’s 1995 retrospective somehow seems more illuminating of his intellectual evolution than his political writing at the time.

Perhaps this is partly a function of the selection. The extracts from the 1953 Marxism: an interpretation are not substantial enough to give a full sense of the argument. The book reviews are obvious ephemera and, though a biographer could legitimately draw inferences about the evolution of MacIntyre’s ideas from nuances of expression and argument in them, they cannot really be taken as making substantial theoretical claims. The same is true, and more so, of the public political journalism commenting on British and world affairs: stylish but wholly ephemeral. The obituary of C Wright Mills (1962, chapter 25) has the same character.

Equally ephemeral in rather different ways are several other pieces. ‘On not misrepresenting philosophy’ (1958, chapter 3) is a short defence of Wittgenstein against Ernest Gellner’s 1958 polemic against analytical philosophy, which was presumably included in the book solely because it appeared in the Universities and Left Review rather than in a conventional academic journal. ‘Marxists and Christians’ (1961, chapter 18) was written at the low point of Christian political influence in Britain and assumes that this is a permanent development. ‘The new capitalism and the British working class’ (1962, chapter 24) is similarly a bog-standard piece of ‘new left’ over-theorisation of the superficial features of British capitalism in the 1950s-early 1960s. ‘Marx’ (1964, chapter 31) and ‘Recent political thought’ (1966, chapter 35) are entries in ‘background books’ for undergraduate students. As all such pieces inevitably are, they were rapidly superseded by new Marxist and Marxological scholarship.

To take all these items out would leave a much thinner book. It would still leave behind several substantial pieces. ‘Notes from the moral wilderness’ (1958-59, chapter 5) is a critique of withdrawal from active or organised politics as a moral response to Stalinism. It relates this response to the moral ‘anti-foundationalism’, ultimately based on Hume, which is still dominant among British academic philosophers. It relates it also to Stalinism as a scientism which claims that social development is predictable, and therefore claims peculiar authority for ‘experts’. Later, like most ‘new leftists’ MacIntyre shifted the blame for Marxist scientism from Stalin to Engels; it was still a core element of his critique of the left in 1973.

‘The new left’ (1959, chapter 9) is a defence of the ‘new left’ against Cliff Slaughter from the SLL’s theoretical journal Labour Review, a rare example of public disagreement in the SLL press. ‘What is Marxist theory for?’ (1959-60, chapter 10) is a series from the SLL’s weekly The Newsletter, arguing for the value of theory in the class struggle and for the ‘Marxist movement’ as unifying intellectuals and workers. ‘Freedom and revolution’ (1960) is again from Labour Review, an analytical-philosophical defence of a concept of freedom which makes proletarian revolution and also justifies democratic centralism. ‘Breaking the chains of reason’ (1960, chapter 14) is back to the ‘new left’ milieu, a piece written for EP Thompson’s edited collection Out of apathy: it polemicises against scientism and mechanical determinism in the social sciences.

‘Rejoinder to left reformism’ (1961, chapter 19) is from International Socialism. It is a reply to Henry Collins’ ‘The case for left reformism’ published in the same issue of that journal.^[1] Collins, also an ex-CPer, rehashed Eduard Bernstein’s arguments. MacIntyre, in response, put at the core of his argument that “The reformist’s mode is one in which the self-activity of the working class is necessarily minimised. The self-activity of the working class is revolutionary, for it marks a total break with both the economic and the political systems of capitalism, which rely on the passive acceptance of their alienated role by the workers. And socialism is self-activity as a total form of life” (p191). The editors report that the IS leadership found MacIntyre’s response inadequate and commissioned an additional article by Kidron (p196, note 7).

‘Prediction and politics’ (1963, chapter 27) elaborates on the critique of ‘Engelsian’ ‘scientism’ and determinism, which was already present in ‘Notes from the moral wilderness’ and ‘Breaking the chains of reason’. The editors tell us (p161, note 7) that rather than engage MacIntyre’s arguments directly, Cliff insisted on IS reprinting Hal Draper’s 1947 ‘The inevitability of socialism’ as ‘part supplement and part reply’ to MacIntyre.^[2] Draper’s arguments on chance and determinism in this article are obviously philosophically naive, and MacIntyre must surely have found them so; but he did not respond in print. After this date the book contains only one substantial contribution from MacIntyre to IS, an entirely conventional IS discussion of ‘Labour policy and capitalist planning’ (late 1963, chapter 30). Down to 1965 he continued to contribute book reviews, but from then until 1968 he was merely a name listed among the editorial board.

Omissions

On the other side of the coin, the editors’ self-denying ordinance against using MacIntyre’s writing in academic journals leads to omitting some politically interesting pieces.

Most immediately significant to MacIntyre’s political evolution are the book Marcuse: an exposition and a polemic (1970), and MacIntyre’s sharp polemic against the student left and against the democratisation of higher education in the same year in a review of books by Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol, by Immanuel Wallerstein and Sven Lundstedt.^[3] MacIntyre’s political evolution is also developed in two pieces from the early 1970s, ‘Praxis and action’ (1972 – an extended and unusually substantial book review) and ‘Ideology, social science and revolution’ (1973), which elaborates and gives analytical philosophy grounding to the argument mentioned above, that revolutionaries are inevitably bureaucrats in the making.^[4] MacIntyre’s brutal 1979 review of Baruch Knei-Paz’s The social and political thought of Leon Trotsky (1978)^[5] shows his residual relation to Trotskyism, even after his clear political break with the far left in 1970-72, better than the two pieces on Irish politics printed in the book (chapters 45 and 46). More generally, it certainly flattens the picture of MacIntyre to omit his continued and explicit commitment to analytical philosophy as a neutral method throughout his engagement with Marxism, given the history of Marxist critiques of this method (and analytical critiques of classical Marxism).^[6] So too does the omission of the fact that MacIntyre continued to write as a (sort of) Christian believer while successively a member of the SLL and of IS, in, for example, Difficulties in Christian belief (1960) and some of his academic book reviews.

This is not in any way to say that either Christians or analytical philosophers cannot be communists or members of communist parties: communism is a commitment to a political programme, not a commitment to a particular theory. But in MacIntyre the combination seems to have involved a sort of split personality: it is only in the 1953 Marxism, an interpretation and the 1968 rewritten version of this, Marxism and Christianity (after he had left IS), that the two MacIntyres – Christian and analytical philosopher on the one hand, leftist on the other – are really brought into engagement with one another. He does not seem, from this collection, to have engaged much with his political comrades’ errors (from his academic point of view) in philosophy or religion, and neither did his political comrades engage with his academic philosophy or theology.

There does, in fact, appear to be a common thread in MacIntyre’s ‘engagement with Marxism’ between Marxism: an interpretation in 1953 and ‘Ideology, social science and revolution’ in 1973 (both in the writings in this book and in some of the unused writings of the same period). This is the rejection of ‘Stalinist’ (later called ‘Engelsist’) scientism, which is a common feature of ‘new left’ thought. In MacIntyre’s writing it extends beyond rejection of absolute determinism to rejection of the idea that the ability of Marxist theory to make predictions about social dynamics (however much they may be conditional) is useful: Marxism remains merely a guide to action in the sense of an ethical critique of the subordination of the proletariat (and for that matter of the colonies). The attempt to make predictions is condemned both as leading to false predictions (unsurprising in the 1950s-60s), but also and more fundamentally as asserting the authority of experts: ie, capitalist, reformist or Stalinist bureaucracy.

The mistake this approach involves is a complex one, too complex to be addressed in this book review. The ‘new left’ rejection of ‘scientistic’ versions of Marxism is more commonly from a Hegelian standpoint based on the ‘young Marx’ of the 1840s;^[7]MacIntyre also relied on the ‘young Marx’, although he remained not a Hegelian, but an analytical philosopher. However, at the end of the day MacIntyre falsified all of his own line of argument on this front by adhering to the Catholic church. The reason is that the Catholic church is a beautiful demonstration of the fact that bureaucratic hierarchy and the authority of ‘experts’ is not the product of the attempt to do predictive social science.

The boot is on exactly the other foot. Making predictive claims, which are therefore falsifiable, on the basis of theory, is what makes theory potentially democratic: it is possible to disagree with the argument, to disprove it, and to change minds. There is nothing, except time and the social division of labour, to stop everyone in the world becoming sufficiently ‘expert’ in – for example – political economy to make rational judgments about economic choices. The authority of the Catholic clergy is precisely not subject to this sort of potential control: if everyone in the world became a priest, monk or nun, that would be the last human generation; and only one man (sic) can be pope.

Open debate

There is one other thing to be learned from this book. I said earlier that communism is a commitment to a political programme as a basis for common action, not a commitment to a particular theory. The point is that we may arrive at common political choices through different theoretical routes, so that it is inappropriate and sectarian to demand agreement to a theoretical position (‘permanent revolution’, ‘state capitalism’ and so on) as the basis of membership in a common party organisation. That does not mean, however, that we should not discuss and argue about theory. Theoretical views inevitably inform political choices. Discussing and arguing about theory can produce better choices. It also functions to educate party activists, the readers of the party press, and – indirectly – the wider working class; and by doing so facilitate their making their own arguments and their own choices.

I make this point because the ‘new left’ mostly walked out of the CP in disgust after 1956 rather than trying to organise a fight and getting expelled. MacIntyre then spent about a year in the SLL before disagreements became intolerable: the Healy group was, of course, a dogmatic sect. He moved to the IS. Here he was still in disagreement with core theoretical ideas of the Cliff group. But these disagreements were never openly discussed in the group’s press: Kidron wrote in effect against some of MacIntyre’s arguments in his response to Collins, but not directly; Cliff had IS reprint Draper as an indirect response to MacIntyre’s ‘Prediction and politics’, but there was no direct response.

The underlying problem was that if Healy and his co-thinkers were dogmatists on the theoretical issues, Cliff was a philistine. In fact, ‘Cliff state capitalism’ is a philistine response to the theoretical problem of Stalinism: allowing Cliff to take moral distance from Stalinism without really addressing the theoretical problems the phenomenon of Stalinism posed (and poses) to Marxists.

It is hardly surprising that the ‘openness’ of IS in the 1960s on this philistine basis turned, in the 1970s, to the dogmatism and bureaucratic control of the SWP. Neither dogmatism nor philistine refusal to engage directly with theoretical difference really accepts that this difference and debate is a necessary element in the political life and educative role of a communist party.

mike.macnair(at)weeklyworker.org.uk

Notes

1. Available online at marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj/1961/no006/collins.htm
2. marxists.org/archive/draper/1947/12/inevitsoc.htm
3. 75 Am J Sociol pp562-64.
4. (1972) 25 Review of metaphysics pp737-44; (1973) 5 Comparative Politics pp321-42.
5. 84 Am Hist Rev pp113-14.
6. For example, in a review of B Mitchell Faith and logic (1957) in (1959) 9 Phil Quarterly 90-91, at the end; or in the 1970 critique of Marcuse.
7. I have addressed some different aspects of the issue in ‘Darwinism and Marxism’ Weekly Worker December 19 2002; ‘Hegelian pitfalls’ Weekly Worker July 31 2003; ‘Classical Marxism and grasping the dialectic’ Weekly Worker September 11 2003; and ‘Against philosopher kings’ Weekly Worker December 11 2008.

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