Terrell Carver on The Frock-Coated Communist

From Marx and Philosophy's Review of Books (well worth a look), Terrell Carver has a pretty damning review of Tristram Hunt's 'biography' of Frederick Engels:

The tone – in my blunt and no doubt ‘academic’ judgement – is relentlessly trivial and trivialising, scornful and dismissive, anything-for-a-laugh and hypocritically judgmental...In sum, I did not like this book. And I do not like the genre. Calling it ‘popular biography’ is perhaps too kind. I’m not at all sure that turning lives into trivialising gossip and shock/horror sensation is really biography at all. It is more like the Anekdota of Procopius, his ‘secret histories’ of the Byzantine court – but at least he knew the people involved, had a stake in it all and took the risks. Let us hope that Hunt finds better things to do on TV than bring this book to a wider audience.

Speaking of Hunt now 'finding better things to do on TV', rumour has it that after making 'The Joy of Motoring' the new Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central is now working with Peter Mandleson on a TV programme entitled 'The Joy of Parachuting'. Speaking of Engels, Gareth Jenkins is doing a meeting on his life at Marxism 2010

On Tristram Hunt and Champagne Socialism

Sorry, back once more to Tristram Hunt, I'm afraid. Profuse apologies. When his biography of Engels was published in the US it was titled 'Marx's General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels'. In Britain, it appeared as the slightly less strident 'The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels'. However, dedicated followers of young Tristram might have noticed that the new Penguin edition now has the title 'The Frock-Coated Communist: The Life and Times of the Original Champagne Socialist'. Even the slightest whiff of revolution or class war has been safely removed from the title, something no doubt not unconnected to his current attempt to enter Parliament as a Labour MP.

Yet what is quite amusing about the new book cover is that the new title makes no mention of Engels's name itself - so one might think that the work was actually an autobiography of Tristram Hunt himself - 'the frock-coated communist', the 'champagne socialist'. It goes without saying that Tristram, close friends of Peter Mandleson, knows more about champagne socialism than revolutionary politics - or at least he certainly will once he is a Labour MP. Moreover, as a historian, I am a little dubious about the new claim that Engels was 'the original champagne socialist'. Not only is it more than a little insulting to the old man himself, can we be so sure that say, Robert Owen for example never once even tried champagne?

Edited to add: Guardian cartoonist Martin Rowson in a recent issue of Tribune on Tristram Hunt at the 1997 Labour Party conference (from here):

Seeing as how we’re stuck here kicking our heels in the crematorium car park until the hearse arrives, I might as well tell you a little story from the days when New Labour was in its pomp. It was at the 1997 Party Conference in Brighton, which for all the world was more like Versailles-sur-Mer for the duration of this week-long festival of Blairite self-congratulation. I was at some knees-up or other, in conversation with Tribune’s then editor Mark Seddon and my Tory chum, the journalist Peter Oborne, and we were, most likely, talking complete bollocks in the way you do when someone else is buying the drinks. Even so, we didn’t take too kindly to being interrupted by a tall, rather patrician youth who was gallumphing round the venue, repeatedly telling anyone who couldn’t make good their escape that, and I quote, albeit from memory, "Peter Mandelson is the most important fucking minister in this fucking government!"
Mandy was then Minister without Portfolio, so the youth’s assertions seemed slightly exaggerated, even though he was, we discovered, from the Young Fabians, then (and possibly still now, for all I know or care) a Mandelsonian glee club. Anyway, as he wouldn’t go away, and Seddon, Oborne and I had lost the thread of our conversation, I foolishly engaged with him, disputing his claims. What, I asked, about Gordon Brown? What, for that matter, about Derry Irvine? "Derry fucking Irvine?" he replied with contempt, waving his bottle of Mexican beer at me with what might, in different circumstances, have passed for menace. "Who the fuck’s Derry Irvine? And who the fuck are you anyway?" When I told him, the youth sneered "Martin fucking Rowson? So who the fuck’s Martin Rowson?"
By this stage Seddon had, I think, wandered off, but I was getting distinctly riled, so I gently took hold of the youth’s security pass hanging round his neck. Once I’d discovered his name, I’m afraid I played dirty. "Ah ha!" I exclaimed. "Tristram! Now there’s a name that rings down the annals of Labour History! A name to stand equal with Nye or Clem, eh?" At which point Dr Tristram Hunt, not yet a TV historian, sneered a final "fuck off!" at me and lurched away into the melee to annoy someone else.
And that would have been that, if a few minutes later he hadn’t returned, all smiles, to apologise. "Sorry! I didn’t realise who you were!" he said jovially, and thereby added being a creep to the already existing charge of being a drunken braggart and bully.
Well, good luck to him, though I can’t help feeling that the good people of Stoke Central deserve better. That’s not a reflection on either Dr Tristram Hunt or his many doubtless estimable qualities; but it still seems a shame that New Labour, even in its death throes, can’t quite kick the habit of treating the membership of the Labour Party as non-speaking extras, just there to provide some vaguely believable background atmosphere. Then again, in retrospect the kind of internal, backstairs courtier politics of the kind that has, for now at any rate, benefitted TV’s Tristram Hunt, is the only kind of politics New Labour has ever been really interested in, or actually any good at. Remember, the much vaunted "tough decisions" which Tony Blair would tell us he was so uniquely capable of making almost always rebounded on the Labour Party, on the rare occasions when they weren’t aimed directly at it in a pathology of serial abuse, in order to strip it of its rules, its principles, its policies and its dignity.
That, of course, was all necessary to make Labour electable. We all know that, don’t we?
But as I’ve said over and over again, New Labour’s greatest sin was that it turned a tactic into a strategy, which then ossified into principle. And where has that combination of rigid discipline and complete timidity got us? Apart, that is, from that bloke off the telly splitting the Labour vote in Stoke and heralding in the possible election of a Nazi? I write this the day before we all presume the General Election will be called for May 6th, and my heart sinks at the prospect. That’s not just because of the real prospect of the Tories winning, but because I find it so hard to convince myself that Labour deserves to beat them. Even when you factor out all the authoritarianism and croneyism, once more an election will be fought across a tiny ideological arc, on the one side by smirking Thatcherite throw-backs, and on the other ("our" side, God help us) by neo-Thatcherites who had a golden, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity fundamentally to change an economic system which had collapsed under the weight of its own repulsive contradictions, but instead saved it and then, yet again, grovelled at its feet.
Well, by the time you read my next column, it’ll all be over. Personally, I’d prefer it if everyone turned out to vote, and then spoiled their ballot papers; failing that, a hung parliament would do nicely, with the Tories winning badly, but well enough to screw things up for six months before another election consigns them to the political wilderness for another generation.
But who knows? Ooh look, here comes the hearse at last. Hey, shall we have a peek in the coffin to see who it is? My money’s on Tristram Hunt. No? No, you’re probably right. That would ruin the fun...

Remembering Engels, Forgetting Engels

Tristram Hunt has another piece plugging his forthcoming biography of Engels, The Frock-coated Communist, in History Today. It's not too bad actually, and suggests that Hunt's work will further illuminate the personality and help restore the humanity of Engels himself. He also defends Engels's relevance in the context of the barbarism of actually existing capitalism:

'Engels had a deep feel for the true human costs of capitalism; despite his own exploitation of the Ermen and Engels proletariat, he offered a moral critique of political economy that Marx found hard to rival. And today it is his voice that resonates most powerfully in those countries at the sharp end of global capitalism – most notably the emerging markets of Brazil, Russia, India and China. For here all the horrors of breakneck industrialisation – capitalism transforming social relations, destroying old customs and habits, turning villages into cities, and workshops into factories – display the same savagery which Engels recounted in 19th-century Europe. With China now claiming the mantle of ‘Workshop of the World’, the pollution, ill health, political resistance and social unrest prevalent, for example, in the Special Economic Zones of Guangdong Province and Shanghai appear eerily reminiscent of Engels’ accounts of Manchester and Glasgow. Compare and contrast, as the scholar Ching Kwan Lee has done, Engels’ description of employment conditions in an 1840s’ cotton mill –

"In the cotton and flax spinning mills there are many rooms in which the air is filled with fluff and dust … The operative of course had no choice in the matter … The usual consequences of inhaling factory dust are the spitting of blood, heavy, noisy breathing, pains in the chest, coughing and sleeplessness … Accidents occur to operatives who work in rooms crammed full of machinery … The most common injury is the loss of a joint of the finger … In Manchester one sees not only numerous cripples, but also plenty of workers who have lost the whole or part of an arm, leg or foot."

– with the testimony of a Chinese migrant worker in Shenzhen in 2000:

"There is no fixed work schedule. A 12-hour workday is minimum. With rush orders, we have to work continuously for 30 hours or more. Day and night … the longest shift we had worked non-stop lasted for 40 hours … It’s very exhausting because we have to stand all the time, to straighten the denim cloth by pulling. Our legs are always hurting. There is no place to sit on the shopfloor. The machines do not stop during our lunch breaks. Three workers in a group will just take turns eating, one at a time … The shopfloor is filled with thick dust. Our bodies become black working day and night indoors. When I get off from work and spit, it’s all black."

Friedrich Engels, a child of the Industrial Revolution, speaks now with remarkable authority and insight to our own global age of exploitation and immiseration. It is his impassioned criticisms of the market model in action which should echo down the decades. Engels is an essential part of our newly acknowledged truth.'

There is just one fatal flaw with Hunt's article summarising the life and work of Engels, and I suspect this flaw will also be found in his full biography. That is the simple truth - a truth unacknowledged by Hunt - that Engels did not just analyse and critique the capitalist system as though he was a professional sociologist - he was also a revolutionary activist who worked and laboured for its overthrow. As Tony Cliff noted, 'you cannot speak about Engels without remembering that Engels was a man of action:'

'You know what he was called in Marx’s family? He was called "The General". Why was he called that? The answer is that while Marx was writing many marvellous articles (during 1848), and so on, it was Engels who was there on the barricades. It was Engels who was fighting in the army. It was Engels, the man of action. And for the rest of his life he was a man of action.

Quite often, because he was a man of action, he lacked the clear picture that Marx gained through having been a little bit distant from events. I am not saying that theory develops just in direct relation to action. If you have a too direct relationship to the action, you do not have the distance. Marx had that distance; Engels sometimes missed it. For example, during the American Civil War, the fight between the North and the South, Engels thought that the South was going to win. Why did he think this? He put forward a whole number of reasons: the South was better organised (that is true); all the army colleges, like Sandhurst in Britain, were in the South; the best generals were in the South; the best officers were in the South; and there is no question that the South, to begin with, was doing better than the North. Yet Marx said, no question about it, the North is going to win. Why? Because wage labour is more productive than slave labour. Full stop! That is the first thing that you can notice. Therefore New York is more advanced than Texas, and therefore the North is going to win. Not only this. Look at the most oppressed section of society – the black slaves. Where did they run to and where were they running from? Did they head from the North to the South, or from the South to the North? From the South to the North. They preferred the North. So despite all Engels’ technical military expertise Marx was right about the war, while Engels was wrong.

...One good thing about Engels is that he was very active. This was when Marx was alive and, even more important, after Marx died. Between 1883 and 1895, the 12 years when he was on his own, you read again and again that revolutionaries and trade unionists from all over the world were contacting Engels to ask for advice. And Engels was absolutely generous in giving that advice. He was involved in the French socialist movement, in the German, in the Russian and, of course, in the British – in every mass movement.

He was not only an internationalist in word. He was an internationalist in practice, and you can see it from what he was reading. I have the list of what he read every day. He looked at seven daily papers, three in German, two in English, one Austrian, one Italian, and 19 weeklies in a variety of languages. Now Engels himself knew 29 languages. To read a language is much easier than to speak it. I do not say that Engels knew how to speak 29 languages, but he could read them, because he wanted to know what was happening. He wanted to know what the Russians were doing. There were only a few Russian socialists at the time, and you could not follow the movement unless you read Russian. So he studied Russian specially for that. Now that is an achievement.

His contribution and his devotion to the cause were absolutely astonishing. These can be summed up in Engels’ own words. This was his speech at Marx’s grave:

For Marx was above all else a revolutionary. His real mission in life was to contribute in one way or another to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being. Fighting was his element.

Now these words are exactly the words that fit Frederick Engels. Engels was a fighter. He was not an abstract scientist. His science was simply a weapon in the fight for socialism. The idea of unity of theory and practice is not, as it is sometimes presented, that someone writes a book – that is theory; and you read the book – that is practice. No. The unity of theory and practice is the unity of theory with the class struggle.'

Marx, Engels, Chartism and capitalist crisis

Marx is saying 'Revolutionaries should arm themselves with the ideas of Capital as well as a brick for the barricades.' Possibly.

Last September, just as Western capitalism began to go into economic crisis, the historian Tristram Hunt wrote a short piece for the Guardian about it (in part to cut the chances of himself personally suffering during the 'credit crunch' by shamelessly plugging his forthcoming biography of Engels, 'The Frock-coated Communist'):

"The American crash is superb and not yet over by a long chalk," Engels wrote in October 1857. "The repercussion in England would appear to have begun with the Liverpool Borough Bank. Tant mieux. That means that for the next three or four years, commerce will again be in a bad way. Nous avons maintenant de la chance." The conditions for revolution were ripe. With the capitalist mode of production in collapse, the working class would surely rise to the occasion. But two months into the crash the proletariat had still failed to realise its historic calling. "There are as yet few signs of revolution, for the long period of prosperity has been fearfully demoralising," Engels noted gloomily. And by the following spring, business had picked itself up again on the back of new markets in India and China.

Hunt's piece essentially seems written not only to give the impression Marx and Engels were given to expecting the final crisis of capitalism to hit every decade or so but also to reinforce the prevailing 'common sense' of our time - that the English working class will not fight during any economic downturn. Governments may fall in Iceland, general strikes may break out across France and Greece, and even factories may be occupied in Ireland but in England the proletariat simply will always somehow 'fail to realise its historic calling'. It is therefore timely by way of an antidote that the socialist historian Keith Flett, author of Chartism after 1848 is speaking in London on 16 March on 'Marx, Engels, Chartism and the capitalist crises of 1844 and 1858' at the Institute of Historical Research. For not only did both Marx and Engels feel vindicated by the way in which boom to slump seemed to be inherently built into the capitalist system as it developed, but, incidently, by the 1870s, Marx had already worked out that it was all but impossible to predict how deep and damaging any particular crisis of capitalism might be. Though the history of 'capitalist crisis' can be dated back to the 'tulip mania' of 1637, systemic crises were still a historically relatively novel phenomenon of capitalism in Marx's day, yet Marx could write to
Engels to say he had 'resolved to give up for the time being' trying to 'determine mathematically the principal laws governing crises'.

As for an antidote to the 'common sense' ideas of the ingrained passivity of the English working class one does not have to look far to see the growing signs of a mood for a fightback in workplaces and offices. Socialist Worker has a video of the moment car workers at BMW's Mini plant heard earlier today they would lose 850 jobs (with next to no notice of these redundancies for agency staff). According to Union sources, 'workers booed and threw apples and oranges at managers after being told they were losing their jobs. Agency workers leaving Cowley this morning expressed their fury at being given just one hour's notice of the redundancies. 'Class Struggle - It's a mini adventure' might be one possible slogan if trade unionists do decide to organise action in the face of this latest jobs massacre...

Should Prince Harry go (and get a job)?

As the compiler of the official Dead King Watch, you can imagine how often I am asked by journalists to comment on matters concerning the royal family. The recent controversy over whether or not Prince Harry should serve in Iraq is obviously a question which is close to my heart. According to many bourgeois historians - to pick one at random, say, Tristram Hunt, Harry should go as after the Royal Navy's hostage fiasco, a bit of 'gung-ho militarism' could restore a bit of 'lost mettle...a touch of Old Britain might not come amiss.'
The young aristocrat certainly symbolises the Old British imperial spirit alright - ever since he attended a 'colonials and natives' party (dressed in a tasteful German Nazi desert uniform and a swastika armband in the run up to Holocaust memorial day) - there have been no worries on that score. Whether the presence of Harry's 'gung-ho militarism' would have been enough to turn the tide in Iraq is more questionable. Yet the fact that Harry is not now due to go to Iraq does indeed raise some awkward questions, one of which Hunt did put his finger on - if Harry had gone, this would have shown 'not only that there remains a continuing connection between monarchy and militarism but that the wider royal family still has a purpose. For if he can't join his fellow Sandhurst cadets in the back of a Scimitar, what can he do?' Indeed - Harry is now 21 years old and despite the most privileged education he hasn't actually ever really had a job - though there is form here among the upper class and particularly the monarchy. But more to the point, the whole catastrophe of Iraq and the fact it is 'too dangerous' for Harry to go surely underlines the need to bring all the British troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan now - unless we really do want them all to come back in bodybags. Socialists in Britain need to be agitating through the Stop the War Coalition and making sure that if it is 'too risky' to send a rich braindead drink-sodden ex-Nazi little shit like Harry to Iraq, then it is also too politically risky for Brown to act as an imperial overlord and maintain New Labour's disastrous occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

All change at the Labour School of Falsification

A few commentators have noticed the change to the official Labour Party website since Blair's resignation and Brown's arrival - with 'New Labour - New Britain' replaced by simply 'Labour', but also interesting is the fact that the official Short Course History of the Labour Party - entitled 'Our History' - has temporarily vanished. All interested readers of the Party website get at the moment is What is the Labour Party?:

'Labour has only been in government for four short periods of the 20th century. However its achievements have revolutionised the lives of the British people. The values Labour stands for today are those which have guided it throughout its existence.

• social justice
• strong community and strong values
• reward for hard work
• decency
• rights matched by responsibilities.'

I like the vague commitment to 'decency' and 'strong values' (whatever they are), but those trying to then follow the following link: 'Our history tells you about the party's origins and achievements' are simply returned to the homepage.

No doubt the offical historians of the Party are hard at work as we speak - the last version of the Short Course History of the Labour Party is going to need a good deal of rewriting to be honest, praising to the heavens the Dear Leader Tony Blair while ignoring completely figures such as Keir Hardie and Nye Bevan. No doubt under Brown, such figures will no longer be 'unpeople' but be rehabilitated again - and it will be fascinating to see how Brown's historians describe Blair. Speaking of Brown's historians, this blog has always kept an eye on the career of Tristram Hunt, currently composing a hatchet job on Frederick Engels while angling for a career with New Labour as a MP. No doubt someone as subservient towards the powerful as Hunt could always be employed to come up with the necessary updated official history of the Party if that was required...indeed, I expect he would enjoy such a task...

Sasha Simic

There is some unbelieveable dross on the Guardian's Comment is free site sometimes - whether it is Tristram Hunt trying to tell us that Frederick Engels would have saluted the 'revolutionary genius' of the London Stock Exchange today as 'the trading of shares accelerated the concentration of capital' to Nick Cohen regarding Stop the War marchers as objectively pro-fascist and John Harris getting confused as to the purposes of anti-war demonstrations (despite the fact Britain is occupying two Muslim countries illegally and is joining the US in threatening war against a third).

What a relief therefore to read socialist Sasha Simic reporting from the World Social Forum in Kenya:

'I got a reminder of how the defeat of an imperial power can echo in the hearts of the oppressed. I was waiting for the march to begin clutching an anti-Bush poster to my chest. A middle-aged man in raggedy clothes on his way to the demo passed me, did a double take and moved towards me. He stretched out his hand and we shook. "My name" he said with pride, "is Vietnam".'

Rejoice! Rejoice! Britain has nothing to apologise for

Tony Blair is set to turn the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade next year into part of his 'feel good' farewell tour, where a grateful British public will hail the historic victories of Blairism. Rather than apologising for possibly the worst crime in British history - the slave trade - Blair wants us to 'rejoice' because eventually and reluctantly the British Government was forced to abolish it.

As Blair notes, perhaps with a trace of bitterness in his voice at the fact that his criminal Iraq war was declared 'illegal' by the former Secretary of the United Nations, 'It is hard to believe what would now be a crime against humanity was legal at the time.' He continues, 'I believe the bicentenary offers us not only a chance to say how profoundly shameful the slave trade was - how we condemn its existence utterly and praise those who fought for its abolition - but also to express our deep sorrow that it could ever have happened and rejoice at the better times we live in.'

It would of course be nice indeed if Blair really did praise the true heroes of abolition - the likes of Toussaint L'Ouverture and other leaders of slave revolts - or indeed the working class radicals and liberals in Britain - rather than simply praising British MPs like the Tory Wilberforce. Somehow I can't quite see Blair championing the Haitian war of Independence from British, French and Spanish colonial power - just as the Americans and British are getting their butts kicked in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Just as over Iraq, Blair expresses 'sorrow' and 'regret' over the 'disaster' - but explicitly appears to rule out an apology - as this inevitably would raise the question of blame and possibly reparations. And, just as over Iraq, as Gary Younge points out, an apology would inevitably undermine the 'necessary illusion' that Britain and 'the West' in general is superior to everyone else.

If Blair apologised for slavery - or indeed for Iraq - then it would undermine the Whig idea that Britain's past is one of the rise of 'democracy' and 'civilisation' and it would make people question New Labour's whole embrace of Victorian values on just about everything, from Gladstonian 'moral imperialism' abroad, to attacks on the 'feckless' 'undeserving' 'anti-social' poor at home.

Already New Labour historian Tristram Hunt has been wheeled out to try and explain to us why an apology would apparently be 'politically driven and devoid of historical context':

'William Wilberforce had no great affection for the African slave, but he had considerable regard for the spiritual state of England. He led the abolitionist crusade as part of his own evangelical vision for curtailing moral corruption. When Wilberforce's dogged certitude coalesced with a broader demand for political and social reform, the momentum towards 1807 was unstoppable. Ultimately it wasn't economics or security fears which ended the slave trade, it was public pressure and moral sentiment.

Which is why the 200th anniversary of abolition should be a moment of pride as much as guilt. The complexities of abolition mean that the kind of apology Tony Blair offered for the 1840s Irish potato famine - politically driven and devoid of historical context - does no service to the significance of abolition.'

After trying and failing to justify the lack of an apology as a historian, Hunt then simply gives the real reason why New Labour can't and won't apologise:'Any official apology on behalf of the British government would...be logically incoherent, it would unnecessarily goad middle England opinion and open up claims for reparations.' There we are - we can't tell the truth to [white] 'middle England' - because firstly they can't handle the truth and if we did tell them the truth their whole world would fall apart and secondly, it would cost us money that would be better spent on things like Trident nuclear submarines.

Yet without an acknowledgement that the British Empire did commit this historic 'crime against humanity', then the door is open for all sorts of myth making about British 'enlightened' rule and love of 'liberty'. As Professor James Walvin has commented: 'My worry about 2007 is that there will be such a euphoria of nationalistic pride that people will forget what happened before, which was that the British had shipped extraordinary numbers of Africans across the Atlantic.' His worries look well founded. After all the dominant traditional Oxford School of historiography about the slave trade - which Hunt represents - still rules in the academy as well as outside it. As the Trinidadian historian Eric Williams, author of the pioneering Capitalism and Slavery (1944), once pointed out, it seems at times that the only reason that the British engaged in the slave trade in the first place was so that they could have the glory of abolishing it. 2007, unfortunately, looks set to be one of those times.

Manchester against New Labour

My prediction about the 23rd September anti-war protest outside Labour Party Conference in Manchester I made back in July may have been a little out, but as 'Lenin's Tomb' reports, it was an excellent day out.

However, writing in today's Observer - a paper which all but ignores the protests - Tristram Hunt argues that it is not the 50,000 protesters who surged through Manchester's streets yesterday that represent the best traditions of 'Britain's premier socialist city'. Apparently following in the footsteps of the likes of slave abolitionists, Chartists, suffragettes, Pan-Africanists and even Frederick Engels, for Hunt it is none other than Tony Blair who is one of Manchester's 'true sons'.

This, Hunt notes, is because of the cities historic contribution to not only working class politics but also middle class Liberalism - 'the Manchester School' - which he describes as 'the free-market, less government liberals who did so much to define Victorian politics. Its heroes were Richard Cobden and John Bright, men who believed in the unalloyed power of commerce to deliver progress.' As Hunt therefore goes on to note, 'this cityscape of socialism and liberalism, of Peterloo and Free Trade Hall, provides an especially fitting backdrop for Tony Blair's last conference. For what has New Labour been other than an attempt to reunite those competing, progressive traditions under one banner?'

Well, I can think of quite a few things that New Labour has been other than attempt to 'reunite' socialism and liberalism actually. Firstly there is very little 'liberal' or 'socialist' about New Labour, which is inherently authoritarian, anti-democratic, and relentlessly anti-working class. Indeed, as someone pointed out to me this weekend, it would be amazing if New Labour moved left to discover 'One-Nation Toryism' let alone anything so radical as liberalism, social democracy or socialism.

Leaving aside Hunt's obscene idea that the spirit of Frederick Engels or other revolutionaries and rebels might be somehow found inside New Labour's Conference, what might the Liberals Richard Cobden or John Bright have made of Blairism?

Well, as a Quaker Bright was opposed to the aggressive foreign policy of Lord Palmerston and joined with Richard Cobden to campaign against the Crimean War (1854-1856). The two men were much abused by the press and some MPs even accused them of treason - and their anti-war stance cost them their seats in the 1857 General election. Even if Bright and Cobden were alive today and had joined New Labour because of its love of promoting capitalism, they would doubtless have been expelled from the Party like George Galloway and Clare Short for their opposition to Blair's warmongering.

Hunt does admits 'there is another Manchester' to the city of Liberals and socialists which is 'at odds with this pure Labour lineage. In Salford, powerful breweries and anti-Irish prejudice ensured a rock-solid Tory vote'. It is, I suspect, this racist Tory side of Manchester which New Labour - with its craven love of the rich and powerful and its simultaneous demonisation of the poor and powerless, whether Muslims or refugees - best epitomises. The true sons and daughters of Manchester were not to be found writing Conference speeches designed to appeal to Tory voters - but those on the streets demanding peace, justice, equality and an end to Blairism.

Niall Ferguson: The Historian as Warmonger

After glorifying the British Empire, Niall Ferguson, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and an unrepentant champion of American power around the world, is back with a new book, The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred. I say he is back but in fact Ferguson 'wrote' his latest book with the help of fourteen (count 'em) research assistants - and couldn't even manage to come up with the title himself. 'We struggled and struggled to find the right title. For a long time it was just 'The War'...In the end, it was one of the young creative hotshots at Penguin who came up with The War of the World, inspired perhaps by the Spielberg movie based on Wells's The War of the Worlds'. Perhaps that was the inspiration, yes.

Anyway, the Right wing pro- war press have already wet themselves in excitement. 'This is a big, bold and brilliantly belligerent book (the Sunday Telegraph), 'It is Niall Ferguson's masterpiece' (Penguin books), 'Ferguson more than justifies his lofty reputation in a book that fizzes with revisionist insights... it is wonderfully bracing, provocative stuff...Brilliant...revealing … something challenging, amusing or fresh on almost every page' (Daily Telegraph), 'Well researched, highly readable and occasionally deeply revisionist... Ferguson's writing is full of epigrams, witticisms and thought-provoking paradoxes and ironies,' (FT Magazine). The Times describes Ferguson as 'The most brilliant British Historian of his generation … he writes with splendid panache and seemingly effortless, debonair wit'.

Debonair wit - but also a profound modesty. Faced with such reviews Ferguson simply claims that 'The War of the World is the Everest of my career...the most important book I've written so far.' Surely such an eminent historian would not just say such a thing to boost sales, so what is it about? It is, in short, an overview of the twentieth century. Here is an extract:

'The hundred years after 1900 were without question the bloodiest century in history, far more violent in relative as well as absolute terms than any previous era. Significantly larger percentages of the world's population were killed in the two world wars that dominated the century than had been killed in any previous conflict of comparable geopolitical magnitude. Although wars between 'great powers' were more frequent in earlier centuries, the world wars were unparalleled in their severity (battle deaths per year) and concentration (battle deaths per nation-year). By any measure, the Second World War was the greatest man-made catastrophe of all time. And yet, for all the attention they have attracted from historians, the world wars were only two of many twentieth-century conflicts. Death tolls quite probably passed the million mark in at least a dozen others.* Comparable fatalities were caused by the genocidal or 'politicidal' wars waged against civilian populations by the 'Young Turk' regime during the First World War, the Soviet regime from the 1920s until the 1950s and the National Socialist regime in Germany between 1933 and 1945, to say nothing of the tyrannies of Kim Il Sung in North Korea and Pol Pot in Cambodia. There was not a single year before, between or after the world wars that did not see large-scale organized violence in one part of the world or another.'

*The Mexican Revolutionary War (1910-20), the Russian Civil War (1917-21), the civil wars in China (1926-37), the Korean War (1950-53), the intermittent civil wars in Rwanda and Burundi (1963-95), the post-colonial wars in Indochina (1960-75), the Nigerian Civil War (1966-70), the Bangladeshi war of independence (1971), the civil war in Mozambique (1975-93), the war in Afghanistan (1979-2001) and the on-going civil wars in Sudan (since 1983) and Congo (since 1998).'

We know this already - one might be thinking - after works like Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes. But why was the twentieth century so violent? Might it have had something to do with the domination of global capitalism around the world in the twentieth century, spread by powerful nation states? No, says Ferguson. No, no, no. Capitalism had nothing to do with it. As Tristram Hunt - yes, the Tristram Hunt - notes, 'the old textbook explanations of economic crises, class warfare, nationalism or ideological fervour' don't get a look in.

'According to Ferguson, the 20th-century bloodbath was down to the dreadful concatenation of ethnic conflict, economic volatility and empires in decline. Despite genetic advances that revealed man's essential biological similarities, the 1900s saw wave upon wave of ethnic strife thanks (pace Richard Dawkins) to a race "meme" entering public discourse. Across the world, the idea of biologically distinct races took hold of the 20th century mindset to deadly effect. Tensions along increasingly conscious ethnic faultlines (in regions such as the eastern edges of Germany) frequently spilt over into conflict during periods of economic volatility...When ethnicity and financial turbulence then occurred in the context of retreating or expanding empires - British, German, or Soviet - the capacity for bloodshed proved even greater. And, as a final thought, the 20th century witnessed not the triumph of the west, but its inexorable descent...The War of the World ends predictably with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and (inevitably) China.'

Here we get onto the real agenda of Ferguson - and see why he is so fetted by the rich and powerful in America and Britain. He is not only trying to feed off the popular race hatred of Muslims - he is also consciously stirring up new forms of racism against the Chinese. Actually, he is simply updating the notion of the 'yellow peril', tapping into fears that long haunted British colonial officials and arguing they should now give us new nightmares today. Tristram Hunt - incidently a member of New Labour - doesn't think Ferguson's thesis is racist at all - indeed he praises Ferguson's work as 'deftly paced', 'continent-crossing' and in 'good historical fashion'.

Ferguson spelled out how he sees the new century ahead in an article for the Telegraph earlier this year - entitled 'The Origins of the Great War of 2007' - 'the Great Gulf War' Here Ferguson brought together all the themes that concern him, spelling out the dangers of conflict if the West dropped its white man's burden of civilising the new barbarians:

'With every passing year after the turn of the century, the instability of the Gulf region grew. By the beginning of 2006, nearly all the combustible ingredients for a conflict - far bigger in its scale and scope than the wars of 1991 or 2003 - were in place...the breakneck growth of the Asian economies had caused a huge surge in global demand for energy... While European fertility had fallen below the natural replacement rate in the 1970s, the decline in the Islamic world had been much slower. By the late 1990s the fertility rate in the eight Muslim countries to the south and east of the European Union was two and half times higher than the European figure...This tendency was especially pronounced in Iran, where...by the first decade of the new century, a quite extraordinary surplus of young men. More than two fifths of the population of Iran in 1995 had been aged 14 or younger. This was the generation that was ready to fight in 2007...This not only gave Islamic societies a youthful energy that contrasted markedly with the slothful senescence of Europe. It also signified a profound shift in the balance of world population. In 1950, there had three times as many people in Britain as in Iran. By 1995, the population of Iran had overtaken that of Britain and was forecast to be 50 per cent higher by 2050...The ideological cocktail that produced 'Islamism' was as potent as either of the extreme ideologies the West had produced in the previous century, communism and fascism. Islamism was anti-Western, anti-capitalist and anti-Semitic...Prior to 2007, the Islamists had seen no alternative but to wage war against their enemies by means of terrorism. From the Gaza to Manhattan, the hero of 2001 was the suicide bomber. Yet Ahmadinejad, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq War, craved a more serious weapon than strapped-on explosives. His decision to accelerate Iran's nuclear weapons programme was intended to give Iran the kind of power North Korea already wielded in East Asia: the power to defy the United States; the power to obliterate America's closest regional ally.'

What to do about Iran?

'Under different circumstances, it would not have been difficult to thwart Ahmadinejad's ambitions. The Israelis had shown themselves capable of pre-emptive air strikes against Iraq's nuclear facilities in 1981. Similar strikes against Iran's were urged on President Bush by neo-conservative commentators throughout 2006. The United States, they argued, was perfectly placed to carry out such strikes. It had the bases in neighbouring Iraq and Afghanistan. It had the intelligence proving Iran's contravention of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. But the President was advised by his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, to opt instead for diplomacy.'

Peaceful diplomacy thus leads to war, predicted Ferguson:

'So history repeated itself. As in the 1930s, an anti-Semitic demagogue broke his country's treaty obligations and armed for war...As in the 1930s, too, the West fell back on wishful thinking... So in Washington and in London people crossed their fingers, hoping for the deus ex machina of a home-grown regime change in Teheran....This gave the Iranians all the time they needed to produce weapons-grade enriched uranium at Natanz. The dream of nuclear non-proliferation, already interrupted by Israel, Pakistan and India, was definitively shattered. Now Teheran had a nuclear missile pointed at Tel-Aviv. And the new Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu had a missile pointed right back at Teheran....The optimists argued that the Cuban Missile Crisis would replay itself in the Middle East. Both sides would threaten war - and then both sides would blink. That was Secretary Rice's hope - indeed, her prayer - as she shuttled between the capitals. But it was not to be. The devastating nuclear exchange of August 2007 represented not only the failure of diplomacy, it marked the end of the oil age. Some even said it marked the twilight of the West. Certainly, that was one way of interpreting the subsequent spread of the conflict as Iraq's Shi'ite population overran the remaining American bases in their country and the Chinese threatened to intervene on the side of Teheran. Yet the historian is bound to ask whether or not the true significance of the 2007-2011 war was to vindicate the Bush administration's original principle of pre-emption. For, if that principle had been adhered to in 2006, Iran's nuclear bid might have been thwarted at minimal cost. And the Great Gulf War might never have happened.'

If only the West can muster up the moral courage and willpower to wage war on Iran - then we would have global peace. This is Ferguson's argument - and his intellect and logic here is truly dazzling. Yet this racist pro-war fantasy underpins Ferguson's new book, and so The War of the World helps set humanity up for yet another bloody century of imperialism and war. Still, I expect Ferguson will do alright out of it, as wars sell racist pro-war books like his. It is not surprising to learn that Ferguson's next work will be a biography of, yes, you guessed it - Henry Kissinger. Given Ferguson's The War of the World is being made into a TV series, perhaps the same thing will happen to his biography of war criminal Kissinger. Then again, perhaps we don't need to see Ferguson on our TV screens praising warlords like Kissinger. After all, we already have a show called 'The Apprentice'.

What a Tristram!

In an article entitled 'Why be shy about our radical past?', the British historian Tristram Hunt once again demonstrates his oft-noted ability to completely misunderstand a question.

Hunt starts off brightly enough, noting the lack of respect in modern British culture for revolutionaries like the Levellers, and perhaps because he has just spent the day with Tony Benn and the Workers' Education Association he correctly puts part of the blame for this on New Labour:

'Last week saw a welter of commentary on Education Minister Bill Rammell's call for teaching 'British values' in schools. The left took it as a cue for more historical self-flagellation; the right for cultural triumphalism. Yet, disappointingly, what Rammell had, in fact, urged was the anodyne incorporation of "modern British cultural and social history into the citizenship curriculum". What he should have demanded is a vigorous exploration of our democratic heritage in schools and communities alike.'

Bill Rammell is a Blairite whose 'Third Way' between 'historical self-flaggellation' and 'cultural triumphalism' is er, cultural triumphalism but with a flaggellation of the historical record. Rammell wants kids to be indoctrinated with a pride in 'British values' in History lessons at school but then not go on to study History at any higher level. Things tend to get more murky then - as students might learn about the exact role that Britain historically played around the world as an imperial power. Worse, they might make a connection between the bloody History of British imperialism in the past and current events in Iraq and Afghanistan. This sort of knowledge does not help create a booming British economy, which is surely what 'citizenship' is all about...

Hunt, as a History lecturer, has his job in Higher Education to justify against the likes of Rammell, so he hits back and calls for 'a vigorous exploration of our democratic heritage in schools and communities alike'. Hunt then gives us a glowing portrait of this 'democratic heritage', and how the British ruling class prefer not to discuss it:

'Democracy has many fathers, but in its modern, Western variety, the British contribution is marked. From the Magna Carta to the Levellers' 'Agreement of the People' to the Chartists and Pan-African Conference, the British experience went on to influence democracy around the world. The US Declaration of Independence was partly born from the democratic ideals of the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution.

Yet the difference between us and them is that French and American officialdom nurtures its political heritage. Bastille Day, the Fourth of July holiday, even the veneration given to their written constitutions, point to a public culture which reveres and renews its democratic legacy. In Britain, we are close to amnesiac about the individuals who crafted our political freedoms.

Most of our major cities are replete with statues to generals, dukes and royals, but not to our democratic heroes. Outside his home town of Thetford, the great democrat agitator Thomas Paine is barely remembered. Our democratic sites are equally neglected. The Houses of Parliament contains the most pitiful account of its role in the development of democracy.'

Hunt is wrong about the Magna Carta being a 'democratic' document, but that aside he makes some useful if unoriginal points. Moreover, his prescription as to 'what is to be done' is not totally amiss:

'This contempt for our democratic past cannot be excused by an unwritten constitution. For, as historian Linda Colley has rightly pointed out, constitutional documents, from the Treaty of Union to the Catholic emancipation acts right up to the devolution acts of 1998, all exist in the archives. The challenge is to get them out into the public sphere. And, with them, the stories of struggle, triumph and disappointment they contain: the untold lives of Chartists, suffragettes and anti-colonial campaigners. For the history of democracy is far more than just the story of the ballot; it is also about the growth of public reasoning, a free press and liberal tolerance. This is the legacy which should be highlighted in our schools and museums.'

Yet then Hunt manages to make his fatal blunder, noting that the 'cultural memory of democracy' in Britain 'does not have to be a Whiggish narrative of ever- broadening freedom, nor yet a Marxist account of aristocratic and imperial intransigence. Rather, a complex, conflicting, yet ultimately progressive history of the ebb and flow of democracy and the people who made it happen.' There is a fundamental flaw to Hunt's vision, and it is not simply his dismissal of Marxism as only concerned with 'aristocratic and imperial intransigence'. Hunt's view of the past is trapped within the boundary of the nation state to the point where he reifys 'Britain', which is, after all, in Benedict Anderson's phrase an 'imagined community'. Hunt is concerned with 'our' radical past which is 'ultimately progressive' and 'democratic'.

This is a nonsense, and a dangerous nonsense. As one commentator on 'Comment is Free' immediately countered after Hunt had concluded:

'British Values: - Enslave the Blacks, destroy their land and rob their minerals. - Colonize the rest of the third world, steal their heritage, their treasures, oppress them when they try to resist. - After stealing every piece of art, mineral and human dignity from the indigenous people of your colonies, go back to Britain and declare that the colonialist era is over. - Dont take responsibility for leaving an enormous mess in the Middle East and a devastated Africa. - After committing some of the worst crimes against humanity, start criticize everyone around you and lecture them about morality with as much arrogance as possible.'

There is more than a grain of truth there. What is needed instead of Hunt's vision is a view of History which does not limit itself to fighting the battles over the past, the 'memory wars', within the territory of the nation state or even within an imperial identity such as 'Britishness'. The Right will always tend to win such battles - or rather the Left deserve to lose such battles over who are the real 'patriots'. What is needed instead - and here is where Hunt might learn a thing or two from Frederick Engels (of whom Hunt is currently writing a biography) - is a view of the struggles in the past for progress and democracy - class struggles -that are contextualised in terms of global history - history without boundaries. However, I have the feeling such an internationalist view of the past is just a little too, well, 'radical' for the likes of Tristram Hunt.

Edited to add: For an alternative to Hunt's 'bad History', perhaps check out the following links which I have been meaning to highlight for a while:
- Dave Renton's History of the Anti Nazi League, 1977-1981, When we touched the Sky
- Louis Proyect on Karl Marx and Imperialism
- Lenin's Tomb on Marxism, the bourgeoisie and capitalist imperialism

Tristram Hunt - what a...

...Blairite bastard. In the latest issue of the New Statesman, Cambridge University historian Tristram Hunt has an cover article 'Why Britain is great'. Hunt begins badly, talking in a racist fashion about 'Islamo-fascism claiming lives in London, Madrid, Amsterdam and elsewhere.' 'As I write, highly educated if wholly uncivilised human beings are travelling underground, trying to kill me. But their aim is to murder more than just me, or you. Despite the appeasing rationalisations of John Pilger - that it wouldn't happen if only we cut and run from Iraq, or if we stopped supporting Israel - these terrorists are engaged in an assault on our way of life. As the Prime Minister has rightly suggested, British values are the true target of the terrorists.'

So for Hunt, we are right back to the 'Blitz' again, with Muslims as Nazis, anti-war voices as 'appeasers of fascism', and Blair as Churchill. Oh dear. Its like a neo-con wet dream. But why then haven't we evacuated London as they did during World War II? Why haven't gas masks been issued? Why aren't British Jews fleeing to America for safety?

Hunt continues, arguing the left in England can no longer refuse to 'engage with the virtues of nationhood'. Here he invokes the spirit of Orwell's The Lion and the Unicorn (1940) to help him out. 'It was, of course, George Orwell who famously pointed out the prevarications of British intellectuals over patriotism. In his essays he ridiculed their embarrassed avoidance of nationalism while he revelled in England's invincible suburbs, its old maids, its pillar boxes and pigeon-fanciers.' A little unfair to Orwell it might be suggested. Orwell was a far more complex thinker than Hunt suggests - see for example Orwell's essay 'Not counting Niggers' in 1939, where he hammered the fact that those who celebrated 'Englishness' had to ignore those in British colonies in Africa, the Caribbean and Asia, who had a rather different view of what English 'democracy' meant.

Hunt's 'progressive' vision of Britishness 'beyond the conservative trinity of royalty, church and army' that he thinks we 'desperately need desperately to defend' is revealing. 'Like other western and non-western nations, we have a history of promoting the type of gender, racial and sexual equality reviled by misogynistic mujahids. From the Married Women's Property Act 1882 to the Race Relations Act 1976, Britain has progressively advanced the cause of personal equality.' What a Whiggish view of the struggle for equality! How progressive our politicians have been! How grateful we should all be! Forget the Chartists, the suffragettes, the civil rights movement in Britain - we are so enlightened as a nation we recognised black people as equals in law as early as...1976. And if Hunt thinks we are such an enlightened society, perhaps he should go and talk to the parents of murdered black teenager Anthony Walker in Liverpool. I am sure they will have a rather different view of 'Great Britain'.

Hunt describes 'a stirring list of progressive British attributes: political pluralism, rationalism and radicalism, nonconformity and anti-clericalism, representative democracy, technological inventiveness, entrepreneurialism, religious tolerance (seen to such effect in differing attitudes to the hijab in France and Britain) and moral internationalism, from the anti-slavery movement to Make Poverty History.' Fine - one wonders just quite how 'British' some of these are - are they not universal progressive values? For example, leave aside whether 'enterpreneauralism' is 'progressive, just how British is it? I am reminded of something George Bush once said: 'The problem with the French is that they have no word for "entrepreneur"'...

The hypocrisy of what Hunt is saying becomes apparent when he argues that 'Unfortunately, our otherwise progressive government has not always acted to protect these cultural traditions.' Too right. Perhaps he is referring to the Terrorist legislation, Shoot to Kill etc, all of which erode ancient civil liberties? But no, Hunt is referring to, er, Fox Hunting. 'The French newspaper Le Figaro rightly remarked on the irony of MPs outlawing fox-hunting - a historic component of British culture in art, literature and the very contours of our natural heritage - while happily allowing in Muslim clerics committed to destroying British values.' You what? The 'British' value of free speech can be torn up and destroyed if Muslim preachers attack British foreign policy in their speeches, but Fox Hunting epitomises 'the best of British'?

Hunt then makes possibly the most amazing statement in the whole article. 'By bending over backwards to accommodate the cultures and religions of migrant communities, we have been in danger of undermining the very ideals that attracted immigrants here to begin with. One of the few politicians brave enough to confront this dilemma has been David Blunkett...Blunkett himself has happily broken with the left's usual reserve on these matters, speaking of his patriotic ardour for English music, poetry, drama and humour.' Humour? David Blunkett? David Blunkett as cultural critic? Perhaps Hunt ought to be reminded of Blunkett's statement echoing Margeret Thatcher by talking of immigrants 'swamping' our culture. That was real funny. Perhaps Hunt ought to read more about Babar Ahmed - a British citizen in Belmarsh prison without having a fair trial because the US think he is a terrorist. Is this about the British values of 'fair play'? One wonders quite why anyone would want to come to Britain today...

Having celebrated David Blunkett, it is not surprising that Hunt goes on to echo racist fears about immigration and asylum. 'It is often suggested that a central component of Britain's history is its openness to radicals and insurgents. Turning the capital into "Londonistan" during the 1990s was, we are assured, no different from Victorian London welcoming in Marx and Engels. But the critical difference was that both of those men adored England. Engels loved English poetry - entertaining guests with his rendition of "The Vicar of Bray" - and chose the coast near Eastbourne as his final resting place. Marx was never happier than in sleazy Soho dens, walking on Hampstead Heath or retreating to the British Library.' Right, so migrant workers and political refugees can come to Britain, but only if they 'adore England'. How tolerant we are! But did Marx and Engels really 'adore England'?

Here is Frederick Engels on the English middle class, the class lauded recently on television by one Tristram Hunt. 'I have never seen a class so deeply demoralised, so incurably debased by selfishness, so corroded within, so incapable of progress, as the English bourgeoisie; and I mean by this, especially the bourgeoisie proper, particularly the Liberal, Corn Law repealing bourgeoisie. For it nothing exists in this world, except for the sake of money, itself not excluded. It knows no bliss save that of rapid gain, no pain save that of losing gold. In the presence of this avarice and lust of gain, it is not possible for a single human sentiment or opinion to remain untainted. True, these English bourgeois are good husbands and family men, and have all sorts of other private virtues, and appear, in ordinary intercourse, as decent and respectable as all other bourgeois; even in business they are better to deal with than the Germans; they do not higgle and haggle so much as our own pettifogging merchants; but how does this help matters? Ultimately it is self-interest, and especially money gain, which alone determines them. I once went into Manchester with such a bourgeois, and spoke to him of the bad, unwholesome method of building, the frightful condition of the working-peoples quarters, and asserted that I had never seen so ill-built a city. The man listened quietly to the end, and said at the corner where we parted: "And yet there is a great deal of money made here, good morning, sir." (Frederick Engels, The Condition of the English Working Classes, 1845 - here) Today Tristram Hunt makes a great deal of money by passing off racist lies about Muslims as intelligent comment, while praising a Government that wages criminal and disasterous wars that kill thousands of Muslims abroad. He certainly does the English middle class proud.