Book Review: Different Class

[From the London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter 75 Spring 2022]

Different Class: The Untold Story of English Cricket

By Duncan Stone 

Repeater, January 2022 

978-1913462802 

300pp paperback 

Duncan Stone’s new book on the history of English cricket, will not be popular with the cricket Establishment. A discussion on Test Match Special seems unlikely, and while it’s quite early days I could find only two mainstream media reviews, both positive. These were in the Yorkshire Post and the Northern Echo and let’s face it, Yorkshire cricket has problems that need explaining. 

Stone did a Ph.D at Huddersfield and is a keen cricketer. We are talking here about grassroots cricket not the County structures let alone England. Yet without the former the latter struggle as the recent Ashes series underlined, again. 

The book looks at his early attempts to become a league cricketer in Surrey where, compared to the north of England, the cricket was organised on a relatively exclusive class focused basis. He looks at class discrimination in cricket from the bottom up and how this has to an extent, but only to an extent, changed over time. After all the majority of the current England red ball team attended public school as did the England Under-19 squad. 

Of course this point reflects the reality that facilities to learn the skills of cricket for teenagers are often only to be found at public schools now, so attendance, as for example in the case of Joe Root, was a matter of necessity, rather than privilege. The disappearance of school playing fields and the lack of cricket played in state schools, as well as the decline of company cricket facilities in recent decades, underlines the point.

 Stone then rightly overlays this with the rise of cricket competitions and leagues played by ethnic minority cricketers. These are separate to the existing leagues, again no doubt with discrimination being a key issue. Official efforts to integrate and promote players into the upper professional structures of English cricket, for example Chance to Shine, have perhaps been well intentioned but had relatively little impact. The recent revelations about Yorkshire cricket underline the point and one of the key reasons for it: racism. 

Stone’s conclusion argues that the ECB which runs English and Welsh cricket cannot be reformed. It has to be replaced and a body with different assumptions about cricket brought into being. Here Stone sees the dominant, conservative, history of cricket as a key issue. The assumption cricket is about fair play and gentlemanly conduct reflects a game with origins in the ruling class. Cricket’s future lies with the grassroots, where it is played between equals and which school someone went to or club they belong to is not a relevant issue. 

Stone’s book is an important historical intervention into a sporting debate that is touching on some of the key issues facing British society. 

Keith Flett

Book Review: Hijacking History

 [From London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter 75 Spring 2022]

Hijacking History How the Christian Right Teaches History and Why It Matters 

Kathleen Wellman 

Oxford University Press 

2021

ISBN 9780197579251 

This might well seem a peripheral subject of little real interest or concern, but anyone thinking that would be seriously wrong. The US Christian Right were crucial in the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency in 2016, were still right behind him in 2020 and are essential to the continuation of his hold over Republican politics in the USA. And as far as they are concerned, control of education is an absolutely vital concern. An important part of their concern is ensuring that the teaching of history is always Biblically informed. 

What prompted Kathleen Wellman, Professor of History at the Southern Methodist University, to investigate the history textbooks and curricula used in evangelical schools and to write Hijacking History was the decision of the State Board of Education in Texas to impose ‘ahistorical stipulations on teaching history’.   

She put herself forward as a reviewer of the textbooks and curricula that were being considered, but was turned down, whereas Mark Keogh, a former car salesman and now an ordained minister and Tea Party supporter was accepted! As she points out: ‘I was just one of many academics rejected’. 

She goes on to explain the likely reason for this rejection: the Christian Right saw ‘the historical profession as promoting positions antithetical to theirs, it identified historians as the enemy – left‐wing, Marxist, feminist, or anti‐American’. For the Christian Right, it was the Bible that explained the unfolding of history. She responded to this by examining the textbooks and curricula produced by three Christian Right publishers: Abeka Books, the Bob Jones University Press and Accelerated Christian Learning. These were, she tells us, ‘all long‐standing, conservative Christian publishers whose wares served the private schools that proliferated after desegregation but are now used by homeschoolers and in charter schools and private schools’. They all began publishing school materials in the 1970s and have thrived ever since. Accelerated Christian Education (ACE), for example, by 2013 claimed to serve some 6,000 schools in 145 countries.  

 A particular concern was to proselytise in Africa, but the organisation also had more than thirty schools, all private, using its materials in Britain and Ireland. Even more successful, Abeka, which is attached to Pensacola Christian College, produces material ‘used in more than 10,000 schools’ along with many thousands of homeschoolers. The College trains teachers and its publishing arm, Abeka, ‘has a massive presence online’. More than 50,000 homeschooled students in the US are enrolled in its Video Streaming academy. There are over a million children, both in school and at home, using Abeka textbooks and materials. Which brings us to the Bob Jones University Press (BJUP)! 

The BJUP was founded in 1973 as the publishing arm of a notoriously sectarian and racist so‐called educational institution, the Bob Jones University. Its vicious anti‐ Catholicism vied with its vicious racism with its founder, Bob Jones no less, on one occasion notoriously remarking that he would rather have a ‘nigger’ as President than a Catholic. This university notoriously banned black students right up until 1971, then required that they be married up until 1975, continued to ban mixed‐race married couples up to 1998 and inter‐racial dating up until 2000.   

This was all ‘on biblical grounds’. Indeed, as far as the first three of the university’s chancellors were concerned, Bob Jones I, Bob Jones II and Bob Jones III, segregation was biblically proscribed, ‘God intended racial segregation’. Successive right‐wing politicians, among them Ronald Reagan, have sought the endorsement of the Bob Jones University.  

 It is also worth noticing that our very own Ian Paisley, no less, was a member of the BJU board of trustees. And according to Wellman, the BJUP at present ‘has over a million pre‐college students using its textbooks’ and like both the other publishers she looks at also has offers online classes and materials.

 Wellman goes on to examine the textbooks and curricula materials these publishers have produced. As she puts it, what she lays bare ‘may astound historians unfamiliar with the religious right’s use of history’, indeed, ‘history as practiced by historians bears little resemblance to the polemical stances of these textbooks’.   

She goes on to emphasise how dangerous this is, warning how the Christian Right’s success ‘in undermining biology should heighten concern about deliberate distortions in history’. Her examination is absolutely first class, but there is only space here to briefly dip into her account, to highlight some of the low points so to speak. 

Abeka materials, for example, are very critical of the way the Roman populace were kept under control by a strategy of ‘bread and circuses’, but not for the reasons one might normally assume. Indeed not: it was the provision of ‘bread, an early form of ‘welfarism’ that undermined the moral fibre of the Roman people and helped bring about the fall of the Roman Empire! And this anti‐welfarism is brought more up to date when Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiatives are blamed for the US defeat in Vietnam. 

She looks at Abeka materials dealing with slavery and the Civil War where it is argued that ‘slavery bestowed the benefits of evangelization’ with the slaves learning that ‘the truest freedom is freedom from the bondage of sin’.  

 The horrors of slavery are effectively diminished with the Lost Cause myth remaining ‘salient’. As for the BJUP treatment of slavery, its textbooks actually ‘use biblical slavery as injunctions to present‐day employers and employees. The biblical master‐slave relationship…is invoked as a model for twentieth‐century American labour relations’ Which brings us to the Ku Klux Klan: while the BJUP textbook acknowledges its racism, it also ‘defends it as a force for moral improvement’.

The textbooks and curricula materials from all three publishers emphasise the benefits that the colonised peoples derived from Western Imperialism and colonialism, not least, of course, the activities of the missionaries. The exploitation, repression, suffering and hardship imposed on the colonised are relentlessly minimised. This is, of course, only to be expected, and the Christian Right is hardly alone in taking this stance.  

 More surprising perhaps was the vehement hostility towards the United Nations (UN) in Abeka materials. The UN is ‘a threat to freedom around the world’ and ‘contrary to the basic Judeo‐Christian concept of law which limits government’. Indeed, it is ‘a collectivist juggernaut that would crush individual freedom and force the will of an elite few on all of humanity’.   

This is, in fact, a commonplace of US Right. It is also interesting to see ACE materials supporting the military overthrow of the Allende government in Chile in 1973, with the ‘Chilean people begging the military to overthrow the government’. She writes of how ‘ACE notes with approval’ that the coup ‘was carried out with the support of the CIA’.   

One last point that is of particular importance at the present time is that these Christian publishers are anti‐ environmentalist. As far as Abeka is concerned, for example, ‘Environmentalism poses a direct threat to Christianity’ and ‘climate science violates the Creation Mandate’.  Never have such attitudes and prejudices   been more dangerous. 

There is so much more of interest in this volume. It deals with an important subject thoroughly and with considerable insight. Whether we like it or not the Christian Right is not going away and we must know our enemy. 

John Newsinger

Book Reviews: Unholy / The Spiritual Danger of Donald Trump

 [From London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter 73 (Summer 2021)]

Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind

Sarah Posner

ISBN 978-1984820443

Random House,

 New York 2021 

368pp Paperback

The Spiritual Danger of Donald Trump

Ed. Ronald J. Sider

978-1725271784 

Cascade Books,

 Eugene, Oregon 2020 

252pp Paperback 

The fact that Donald Trump was only elected President in 2016 (despite losing the popular vote) with the support of four out of every five white evangelical Christians who made up a third of his electoral support is quite well-known. But how has that support held up and how important were their votes in boosting his total in the 2020 election to the second largest vote for a Presidential candidate in US history. 

In 1984, Ronald Reagan polled over 54 million votes, in 2004 George W Bush polled over 62 million votes and in 2008 Barack Obama polled over 69 million. Donald Trump’s losing vote in 2020 was over 74 million, an astonishing total, and once again something like four out of every five white evangelical Christians voted for him. And, moreover, many evangelical pastors have taken up the claim that the election was stolen. 

Indeed, at the Trump rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol on 6 January 2021 proceedings were opened with a prayer from Trump’s spiritual adviser, Paula White, and many of those actually taking part in the attack were devout Christians convinced they were participating in a crusade to save America from Satanic secularism. Most of their pastors, it has to be said, subsequently condemned the violence, many of them blaming it on Antifa. 

This is so outside the experience of people in Britain, both Christians and non-Christians alike, that it is difficult to get to grips with, to comprehend: in the most advanced country in the world, millions of people believe in miracles as an everyday phenomenon, see great wealth as a blessing from God, and regard the country as in imminent danger of a Satanic takeover, a takeover which they believe will lead to the outlawing of Christianity and which will inevitably provoke God’s wrath. There is a long history of natural disasters being ascribed to a vengeful God punishing the country for tolerating abortion, homosexuality and other sins. Hurricane Katrina, for example, was variously blamed on a planned gay rights march in New Orleans or on the city being the birth place of Ellen Degeneres. 

Incredible as it might seem, for many people divine retribution is a real fear, something that will happen unless they do something about it and that something was re-electing Donald Trump as President. A good starting point for understanding this extraordinary situation, how it came about and its political implications is Sarah Posner’s new book, Unholy. 

Posner begins by recalling how sceptical she had been when Trump first announced his candidacy in June 2015. His constituency seemed to be the alt-right, appealing to them with his ‘cruel nativism and casual racism’. The fact that he ‘did not even try to tell a personal salvation story’ or display even ‘the most rudimentary Bible knowledge’ seemed to rule him out as the candidate of the Christian right, already a powerful force within the Republican Party. What she describes as her ‘aha’ moment came when she realised ‘that Trump was the strongman the Christian right had been waiting for’. While the Christian right might on the surface seem to be all about faith and values, its ‘real driving force was not religion but grievances over school desegregation, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, affirmative action and more’. Abortion should be in there as well of course. 

They saw Trump as someone who was not interested in compromise, but who would fight their corner, would save them ‘from the excesses of liberalism’. And under Trump, the Christian right became, for a while at least, ‘the most influential demographic in America’. For the Christian right, Trump was ‘God’s Strongman’. 

One thing she finds amazing is that even though Trump has had innumerable meetings with what John Fea has described as his ‘court evangelicals’, those pastors who will lay hands on him and bless him for the camera, ‘he hasn’t made more progress in speaking their evangelical language’. She puts this down to him being ‘a slow learner…a remedial student’. This is not altogether convincing. The fact is that Trump soon realised that to get and to hold onto their support, he only had to go through the motions of believing, holding up a Bible, for example, because their support, as she herself points out, was not really about religion. 

As she insists though, one man was crucial to reassuring the Christian right that Trump was to be relied on and that man was Vice President Mike Pence. He was his ‘Christian right seal of approval’. And, of course, Pence was crucial to filling the administration with stalwarts from the Christian right. Of particular interest is Posner’s discussion of the altright and its relations with the Christian right. She writes of how Steve Bannon was well aware that the alt-right was ‘too small to succeed electorally. That is why, he said, he aimed his film Torchbearer at another audience: conservative evangelicals and Catholics’. As far as Bannon was concerned, the alt-right ‘would be nowhere as a political movement without religious conservatives’. 

What Trump did was succeed in bringing the alt-right and the religious right together. A good demonstration of this was provided by the Charlottesville episode in August 2017. Here Trump performed what she describes as his ‘ongoing rhetorical dance with the altright’, reluctantly distancing himself but with a nod and a wink, but more astonishingly Trump’s Evangelical Advisory Board endorsed his stand with only one member resigning: the African-American pastor, A R Bernard of the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn [She corrects my mistaken belief that there were no resignations here]. This was in stark contrast to the protest resignations from his various business boards that led to their collapse. Those evangelical pastors who objected to the racism and fascism of the alt-right and urged some disassociation from them were marginalised. 

One other interesting aspect of the US alt-right that Posner reveals that was certainly new to this reader was their admiration for Enoch Powell! Posner is particularly interesting and informative on these people. 

Posner identifies the Republican operative Paul Weyrich as being historically ‘the most important architect of the New Right and the religious right’ with Mike Pence claiming him as both ‘a mentor and friend’. In 1973 he co-founded the rightwing think tank the Heritage Foundation, initially financed by the Coors family but quickly expanding its billionaire base. Today it has an annual income of $80 million. Weyrich saw white evangelical Christians as a political force just waiting to be mobilised behind the brand of hard right populism that he championed and in 1979 he, along with Jerry Falwell, had founded the Moral Majority, the first major Christian right political movement. 

Weyrich came from a Catholic background but had embraced the breakaway eastern rite Catholic Church because, in his opinion, Rome was becoming too liberal. He was always concerned about abortion and complained that the evangelicals did not take the issue seriously. As he pointed out, on one occasion, in 1970 Billy Graham had actually said that nowhere did the Bible even mention abortion! Weyrich always argued that this was an issue that the evangelical Christian right could mobilise around, but he was also absolutely frank in admitting that it was not this moral cause that brought the movement into existence. 

The great issue that provoked the likes of Jerry Falwell into political activity was opposition to the civil rights movement and the desegregation of schools. Today the Christian right itself claims that abortion was the issue that called it into being, but this is a myth. The Christian right came into existence in response to the desegregation of schools and the denial of tax relief to the hundreds of segregated Christian schools that had been set up in response across the South and West. Falwell himself ran a whites-only church (he had George Wallace speak to his congregation on one occasion) and had established a whites-only Christian school.

 In fact Falwell did not really show any interest in abortion as an issue until the end of the 1970s and into the early 1980s, until after the Moral Majority had been founded. As Posner points out, looking back on this period, Weyrich often complained of the difficulty he had getting abortion on the Christian right’s agenda.  Today, of course, no evangelical gathering takes place without a condemnation of the contemporary ‘Holocaust’ that is abortion, every year murdering millions of children, something that God will surely punish.

One of the most impressive features of Unholy is its exploration of alt-right and Christian right internationalism. Posner does not dwell on evangelical support for and involvement in Ronald Reagan’s murderous policies in South America, but instead focuses extremely productively, it has to be said, on more recent connections. The Viktor Orban regime in Hungary is regarded as in many ways showing the way forward.

There is also Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s ‘fascist president’, who speaks the same language as the US Christian right. When he visited the White House in March 2019, he had a meeting with evangelical pastors, led by Pat Robertson, who anointed him in the name of the Holy Spirit. Robertson called on God to ‘uphold him. Protect him from evil. And use him mightily in years to come’. As Bolsonaro told them, his middle name was ‘Messias’. All this was shown on Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network. 

Most interesting though is the Christian right’s fascination with the Putin regime which is credited with having restored Christianity in Russia, with having reinstated the pre-revolutionary ‘Holy Russia’ of the Tsars. Indeed, the likes of Weyrich have long urged an anti-Islamic alliance between Christian Russia and a Christian USA, something that Trump obviously found tempting. The Christian right ‘has enmeshed itself in the global wave of right-wing authoritarianism, and evinces admiration for the same nativist despots who have inspired the alt-right’. This is a compelling insight. 

Posner certainly has the measure of Trump and his evangelical allies. As she writes: the evangelicals ‘needed a savior; Trump was eager to oblige because of his bottomless need for a worshipful retinue. Trump and the religious right, then, are essential to each other’s success’. They have a ‘symbiotic relationship, in which Christian right leaders regularly glorify Trump, and Trump in return gives them carte blanche to radically reshape law and policy’. Their success in this respect, for which much of the credit or blame, must, one suspects, go to Vice President Pence, has left their adherents in a powerful strategic position inside the federal judiciary right up to the Supreme Court. 

This was always the deal. Trump’s judicial appointments are ‘his most lasting assault on America’s democratic institutions’, packing the federal judiciary ‘with nominees who have espoused extreme right-wing views on race, LGBTQ rights, abortion and religion and state issues’. Where the Christian right goes now that Trump is no longer President remains to be seen, but Posner is likely to be an essential guide in charting its progress [Her discussion of Christian right involvement on 6 January 2021 and of the recently formed Jericho March organisation is available online here]. 

 Of course, it is always important to remember when examining the evangelical right that while four out of five white evangelical voted for Trump, one in five did not. Not only that, but throughout US history white Christians have been involved in supporting just about every progressive movement there has been. One needs only mention Abraham Muste who played a leading role in the 1919 Lawrence Textile strike, allied with the American Trotskyists in the American Workers Party in the 1930s and played a leading role in the 1934 Toledo General Strike, one of the decisive class battles of the period. He went on to embrace pacifism and to play a part in both the civil rights movement and in the opposition to the Vietnam War. 

But what of contemporary evangelical opposition to the Christian rights’ idolatrous embrace of Trump?

Ronald Sider, in his edited volume, The Spiritual Danger of Donald Trump, has put together an interesting collection of responses, some of which are extremely powerful. One can, for example, only sympathise with Pastor Daniel Dietrich’s bemused outrage when he opens his essay, ‘Hymn for the 81%’, with the cold statement that ‘In 2016, 81 PERCENT OF WHITE EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANS VOTED FOR Donald Trump after hearing an audio recording of him bragging about sexually assaulting women’. He does not mention that a number of leading pastors actually phoned Trump after the release of the tape to offer him comfort and support! 

Dietrich goes on to chronicle the multitude of other abuses they have apologised for and reproduces his anti-Trump hymn in the text. Dietrich urges that Christians have to get involved in fighting ‘white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, sexism – all the ways in which people are treated as less than the Children of God that they are’. And there is much more along the same lines.

 Of particular interest for this reader was Stephen Haynes essay, ‘”If You Board the Wrong Train… American Christians, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Donald Trump’. This discusses the Christian right attempt, led by Eric Metaxas, to conscript Bonhoeffer, who was executed by the Nazis, in their cause. Metaxas is, of course, a leading Christian right ‘intellectual’, the author of the appalling Donald the Caveman children’s books, and is one of the founders of the Jericho March. As Haynes, an biographer of Bonhoeffer, argues, the evangelical right despite its attempted hijacking of Bonhoeffer is blithely recapitulating ‘the mistakes committed by German Christians in the wake of the Nazi Revolution’. 

He concludes his extremely interesting essay by insisting that the harsh reality is that Trump ‘has succeeded in Trumpifying American Christianity’. There are also useful essays by John Fea (‘What White Evangelicals Can Learn about Politics from the Civil Rights Movement’), by Christopher Pieper and Matt Henderson (’10 Reasons Christians Should Reconsider Their Support of Trump’) and more. One criticism is that there is not enough consideration of the so-called ‘prosperity gospel’ as preparing the way for Trump and effectively corrupting the evangelical movement. 

But let us end with Randall Balmer’s powerful ‘Donald Trump and the Death of Evangelicalism’. Balmer is a Professor of American Religious History and an ordained minister, the author of numerous books, and his considered assessment is that after a long illness in 2016 ‘Evangelicalism Died’ as a religious movement, note as a religious movement. He does, of course, add that a resurrection might still be a possibility, after all Jesus did raise Lazarus from the dead.

 John Newsinger

Review: Somerset Socialist Library

[From London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter 73 (Summer 2021)]

Some readers of the newsletter may be familiar with Dave Chapple, a veteran trade union activist but also a socialist historian. He has published a series of volumes in his Somerset Socialist Library mainly about the south-west. 

The link between activism and socialist history is of course one that particularly interests the LSHG since it’s a key part of our premise - robustly researched history influenced by the perspectives of political activism. 

One of Dave Chapple’s recent publications is a record of the life Keith Howard Andrews. He died at the age of 101 in 2008, and Chapple was privileged to be able to meet and interview him towards the end of his life when he still remained an active socialist. 

The book is a record of the life of a working-class socialist, and anti-imperialist. In the modern era, from the 1960s, Andrews might have ended up at University, become a student activist and led a life on the left of a rather different kind to the one he did. When Andrews grew up in the 1920s that choice was rarely available to working people. 

He led a life doing a range of jobs but at the core was his military experience. Again, to a modern generation, this might seem odd but at that time it was one of the relatively few opportunities for regular employment. Andrews was in Quetta, India and then Shanghai as a British soldier and the racism and class prejudice he experienced clearly did much to shape his politics. 

He ended up volunteering for the International Brigades in 1936 and was one of those who fought Franco’s fascists. Yet Andrews was not a soldier with a gun killing people. He was rather precisely the reverse. He was a medic who throughout his varied military service was dedicated to saving lives.

 Andrews was back in England from 1931 living in Kilburn. He had joined the Communist Party and did a range of jobs. He determined to go to Spain in August 1936 and was there until early 1938. His memories of the International Brigade may be of particular interest. On his return from Spain, as he was classified as an army reservist, he joined up again and found himself at Dunkirk. 

He survived the entire war, avoiding life threatening situations, partly through illness. After the war he eventually found work from the mid-1950s with the NHS in Somerset. He remained both a union activist and a Communist until he retired in 1972. 

Memoirs and biographies of working people flourished in the 1970s and 1980s from local and regional community presses. In the 2020s they seem again a comparatively neglected area. Dave Chapple’s record of Keith Howard Andrews’ life is a welcome reminder that accounts of working lives can recall a world we have lost, but also, in terms of union organisation and politics, a world we need to build anew.

 Keith Flett 

For more details and how to get a copy of this book see here: 

http://bridgwatertuc.blogspot.com/2021/02/dave-chapples-tribute-to-howard-andrews.html?m=1

Book Review - Before Windrush - West Indians in Britain

Before Windrush 

Asher & Martin Hoyles 

Hansib publications 2020 

156 pp ISBN 978-1912662296 

Black and Ethnic Minority people have been part of the British population since before the country was Britain (1707) yet traditional histories of the ‘our island story’ genre completely overlooked the point. Boris Johnson may not be quite on that page but he certainly is not keen on recognising the imperial and colonial framework that has made Britain what it is today. 

In recent times a good deal of work has been done to make sure that British histories are more inclusive, Peter Fryer’s Staying Power being one of the landmark volumes. It is though a work in perpetual progress. Black British history is there but it often requires significant research in the archives to review sources that others have looked at and never asked the question as to whether BAME people feature. 

This new book by Asher and Martin Hoyles adds to the history we do now have, and does so in interesting and innovative ways. Labour and socialist historians, aware that those who organised and represented working people are also often hidden from history, have in the post - 1945 period carried out significant research, a good deal of which can be found in successive volumes of the Dictionary of Labour Biography. No such resource for BAME people yet exists but the Hoyles’s book may be seen as a contribution towards it. 

Before Windrush focuses on immigrants of Caribbean origin to the UK reaching back to the eighteenth century - in other words the beginnings of modern society. It’s divided into various sections: slaves and servants, doctors and nurses, political activists, sportsmen and so on. Each section is proceeded by some lines of poetry from Asher and then gives succinct details of a range of people, some perhaps quite well known now, others less so. There are also pictures and photographs of some of those featured. This I think works well in bringing some of those covered to a more-than-one-dimensional existence on the written page, and of course such pictorial representations are very rarely seen. A figure who appears across the various sections of the book is the political activist, historian and cricketer CLR James, someone who made a major contribution to British life in the twentieth century, yet aside from a library named after him in Dalston remains comparatively unheralded. That in itself tells us why a book like Before Windrush is necessary and worth reading. 

Keith Flett

[From London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter 72 Spring 2021]

Book Review: Ira Aldridge - Famous Speeches

 Book Review from London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter 71 (Autumn 2020)

Ira Aldridge: Famous Speeches 

By Martin Hoyles 

Hansib Publications 2019 

ISBN 978-1912662029 

Paperback 280pp 

I was pleased to welcome Martin Hoyles back to speak to the socialist history seminar at the Institute of Historical Research on 17 February. Martin had previously spoken to the seminar on his book on the black Chartist William Cuffay, the 150th anniversary of whose death is being marked in 2020. On this occasion he came to speak on his most recent book on the Victorian black actor and activist Ira Aldridge. My review has been due or overdue for some months but I felt it would be more interesting all round to wait for the seminar and I think that it was indeed useful in being able to focus on the key focus and impact of the book. That is not just in terms of Ira Aldridge himself but also some wider points on historical research and what it can tell us. 

Ira Aldridge (1807-1867) was born in New York and learnt his trade as an actor in the early 1820s. However, fed up with racism and discrimination he managed to get to England and by October 1825 he had progressed to playing the lead role in a production at the Royal Coburg Theatre in London. The same theatre is still in use as the Old Vic. Aldridge played a variety of roles, often Shakespearian, throughout a lengthy career in both Britain and the rest of Europe and became an internationally acclaimed actor. Having played on over 250 stages he was certainly the most famous actor of the early Victorian period. He played the black roles of Othello and the Moor in Titus Adronicus. He also whited up to play Macbeth, King Lear and Richard III but did not whiten his hands. He played both male and female roles and in 20 years of touring England and Ireland had a considerable influence on nineteenth century acting. 

Martin Hoyles has researched Aldridge’s numerous stage appearances, who he played, where and when, and brought the information together in the book. The book is important for anyone interested in the history of theatre and particularly black theatre. But its interest lies much wider than that. Hoyles makes the historical links between Aldridge, progressive politics in the Victorian era and the impact of Aldridge’s legacy as one of the first internationally prominent black actors. While there is no evidence that Aldridge was connected with the Chartist movement between 1830 and 1861 he sent money back to the US to help free slaves and during the Civil War he donated 50% of his earnings to the fight against slavery. His role as a black actor playing Othello in 1833 was an influence on Parliamentary legislation to end slavery in British colonies. 

One of the first black actors to play Othello after Aldridge was Paul Robeson. Aldridge’s daughter Amanda gave voice training to Robeson before he played Othello in a production also featuring Peggy Ashcroft in 1930. CLR James, who also played Othello, saw Aldridge as an inspirational figure. A plaque to Aldridge was put up at the Old Vic in 2004 but, as Martin Hoyles points out, the battle to make his example and relevance to 2020 known continues, hence the importance of this new book. 

Keith Flett 

Book Review: The Cato Street Conspiracy

[From London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter 70 (Summer 2020)]

Cato Street, The Making of the English Working Class and English Exceptionalism


The Cato Street Conspiracy: Plotting, Counter-Intelligence and the Revolutionary Tradition in Britain and Ireland 
Edited by Professor Jason McElligott and Martin Conboy
Hardcover 216 pages
 ISBN 978-1526144980 Manchester University Press 2019

The 200th anniversary of the Cato Street Conspiracy was on 23 February 2020 and it sparked the publication of a volume of new research on it, which endeavours to rescue the conspiracy from the enormous condescension of posterity.

The phrase is appropriate because it reminds us that E P Thompson in his still-benchmark The Making of the English Working Class does write about Cato Street but sees it very much as in the shadow of Peterloo. For Thompson it was the mass peaceful protest of Manchester on 16 August 1819 rather than the attempt at armed revolt of London on 23 February 1820 that set the framework for how the working class political tradition developed.

Thompson may well have been right, but that doesn’t mean that the tradition of Cato Street didn’t exist. The Making is a book specifically about the English working class as the title says. There were good reasons for this. Thompson was meant to be writing a history that covered the period 1760 to 1960 and the Making, weighing in at around 1000 pages in the print edition, was the first chapter. Secondly Thompson’s research was focused on England, the West Riding and London in particular.

Thompson made the point specifically in the preface where he apologises to Scottish and Welsh readers and notes that he has dealt with Irish-only immigrants to England. Focusing specifically on Scotland he argues that ‘it is possible, at least until the 1820s, to regard the English and Scottish experiences as distinct, since trade union and political links were impermanent and immature’

Even if we allow this it remains, with the benefit of further historical research, a weakness and one that has become more evident in the fifty-plus years since the book was published. 

Thompson was no expert in the different but strongly related histories of the Scottish, Irish and Welsh working classes.

However, without adding in that history the importance of an event like Cato Street cannot properly be understood. Thompson does write briefly about the Scottish Rising of early 1820 which was very clearly related to Cato Street. He doesn’t provide detail on the various West Riding attempts at risings in March and April 1820, and doesn’t cover at all the far from insignificant impact of events in Ireland and the revolutionary tradition that had developed there from the 1790s.

We can say then, as perhaps we always should, that Thompson’s book, impressive though it was, represents work in progress and work that should still be in progress.

 Keith Flett

Book Review: A London Story: 1848

[From London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter 70 (Summer 2020)]

Rewriting the hidden revolutionary history of British working class politics



 A London Story: 1848
 By Catherine Howe
APS Books 2020
194 pp paperback
ISBN 978-1789960853

It is the 200th anniversary of the Cato Street Conspiracy. On 23 February 1820 a number of men met in a hayloft in Cato Street off Edgware Road in London. They planned to go to the house of Lord Harrowby in Grosvenor Square where they believed a cabinet dinner was taking place and murder those attending.

Following that they intended to announce a Provisional Government.

There never was a Cabinet dinner. The men had been misled and betrayed by a government agent, Edwards. The plotters were surprised by police and troops and one officer, Smithers was killed. Five of the conspirators including the leader Arthur Thistlewood were tried at the Old Bailey and hung on 1 May1820.

They are often portrayed as fantasists but while the method may seem extreme it is thought they had and expected considerable support if the plot had worked, not just in London but in the north of England and Scotland. Indeed March and April 1820 saw a series of attempted risings which the Government took very seriously.

Part of the London support were Irish labourers who were part of tradition of Irish political revolt dating back to the United Irishmen in 1798 and Colonel Despard who was hung for treason in 1803. Despard was a follower of Thomas Spence as were the Cato Street conspirators.

As E P Thompson noted in The Making of the English Working Class those who were possibly engaged in underground revolutionary activity did not leave much in the way of records of their activities, for understandable reasons.

Catherine Howe’s book is about London Chartism in 1848 not Cato Street but she puts a case forward for the same tradition.

While the book tells an historical story rather than representing research history it is solidly based in terms of references to primary and secondary sources.

The key point is what the author makes of those sources in terms of putting forward an understanding of the events of the first 8 months of 1848 in London Chartism.

February 1848 had seen a revolution in France and this began to spark large scale Chartist activity in March in Trafalgar Square and Camberwell in South London. The culmination of this phase of protest was the gathering on Kennington Common on Monday 10 April 1848.

There then followed a reorganisation of Chartism and a series of demonstrations in June 1848. The Chartist leader and friend of Marx and Engels Ernest Jones was arrested following a speech he made at Bishop Bonners Fields in East London.

The putative rising centred on Seven Dials in central London in August 1848 was the crescendo of the Chartist reaction to the French events earlier in the year. Historians have disputed whether William Cuffay, a leading black Chartist, was centrally involved as the authorities claimed he was. Howe’s account does place him firmly amongst the conspirators.

Again this is a matter of interpretation rather than specific evidence. Cuffay was the leader of London Chartism and the organiser on the day of the Kennington demonstration. Northern Star reports of the Chartist delegate meeting held around that event show Cuffay to be considerably more militant than the national leadership and he may well have been reflecting the temper of London Chartists in that respect.

David Goodway’s book on London Chartism in 1848 argues that the attempted rising at Seven Dials marked the conclusion to a conspiratorial radical politics dating back 50 years and more.

Catherine Howe adds a further dimension to the issue by looking at the activity of Irish radicals, central to British working class politics throughout the nineteenth century but often overlooked by historians. E P Thompson’s classic account of this period of course refers specifically to the ‘English working class’, but that included many Irish workers.

Some recent historical research, not least around Cato Street, has started to put back the Irish tradition of revolt into British radical politics and Howe is very much on that page.

Chartist attempts at revolution in 1848 ended in failure and as Howe notes, history is written by the victors. Yet it is important to understand that there was a revolutionary working-class tradition in Britain and one that the state took very seriously.

Keith Flett

Book Review - 60 Years of Struggle

A world we have lost?

Written By: Keith Flett
Date: April 2008

Published In LSHG Newsletter Issue 31: Summer 2008 

60 Years of Struggle: History of Betteshanger Colliery By Di Parkin Pub: Betteshanger Social Welfare Scheme 2007 166 pp Paperback ISBN: 978-0955755002

Someone who was 16 in 1985 at the end of the last great British miners strike is now approaching 30, and in the intervening period most of the British mining industry has disappeared. There are only a few thousand miners left in Britain.

So mining and miners, a hugely significant part of Britain’s industrial past, are now moving from the current into history.

Di Parkin has produced a history of Betteshanger pit in the Kent Coalfield which closed in 1989.

The book is produced as a memoir for the many ex-miners and ex-miners’ union activists who are still around and will find a ready readership there. It provides some quite detailed labour-process and industrial history of the Kent mines and of union struggles based on this that will be hugely interesting to those who were involved. Dave Harker’s new book on the Shrewsbury pickets [to be reviewed next issue] is in a similar vein.

But the test for both books is whether they reach beyond their core readership and engage with younger generations who have little memory of mining or miners.

Here Parkin’s book raises wider issues that should ensure that.

The Kent Coalfield was the last major UK one to open in the 1920s with Betteshanger operational from 1928 and was significant because it was the only source of coal south of the Thames — potentially vital for the London market. It attracted to it miners from all over the UK who had been victimised during the General Strike. It started with a tradition of political militancy and that’s how it continued and ended up as well.

It also seems to have attracted, on Parkin’s account, a breed of exceptionally hard nosed pit managers as well so class struggle was guaranteed virtually from day one.

The militant reputation of Betteshanger is explained by Parkin in two phrases ‘sod it’ and ‘rag up’. When miners had had enough of a dictatorial pit manager they simply walked off the job.
Parkin hints that while these walk outs were usually sanctioned by the union the real power was amongst rank and file miners rather than the union machine.

Hence Betteshanger was a rich source of new industrial tactics. There were two stay down strikes in its history when miners refused to leave the mine and the pit also lays claim to being one of those that launched the flying pickets during the 1972 miners strike when miners successfully picketed power stations and oil refineries.

Most startlingly for the modern reader many of these strikes actually won.

Perhaps the most famous strike of the lot was the one in 1942 again over bullying pit managers. As this was war-time the strike was actually illegal and the strikers were taken to Court, fined, and in the case of the NUM officials at Betteshanger, jailed.

It did not work. The miners did not return to work and in due course the Government had to intervene, cancel all the fines and release the jailed officials. The bullying pit managers were stood down.

It was a magnificent episode in British labour history but it also raised a significant question. The NUM branch at Betteshanger was run by the Communist Party, or at least by those who had CP politics. A little more on who these men were and what their background was in the book would have been useful in terms of their relationship to the CP.

Even so of course, the CP in 1942 was backing the war and increased production. Yet it did not condemn the Betteshanger strike. Parkin suggests that the CP in order to be elected as NUM officials could not afford to oppose the action of miners whatever the CP line was.

However there was a tension between the industrial and political lines of the CP that might have been explored a little further.

Parkin’s book is a compelling read — I finished it on a single train journey — and one that deserves a wide audience, both old and young.

Book Review - The Restless Generation (2008)

‘This is musical Mau-Mau’ – Jeremy Thorpe, 1956

Written By: John Burton
Date: April 2008

Published In LSHG Newsletter Issue 31: Summer 2008 

The Restless Generation: How rock music changed the face of 1950s BritainBy Pete Frame Pub: Rogan House 2007 512pp Paperback ISBN: 978-0-95295-407-1

Post-1945 Britain saw something unknown for a generation – slowly rising working class aspirations and living standards. By the 1950s, as Pete Frame says ‘having been liberated from war and austerity ... youngsters were ready, willing and able to indulge themselves ... no longer little adults waiting to become big adults, we luxuriated in a teenage world’.

Into that world came Rock and Roll and its cousin skiffle, (whose British origin in 1949 is traced by Frame to a tin hut round the side of a pub in Cranford, up a tributary of the Thames) the ‘bastard offspring of New Orleans-style jazz’.

The mention of the hut is enough to suggest that this book may be packed with tiny detail. It is. (Frame was, after all, the author of various ‘Rock Family Trees’ where you could find out exactly who played what with whom and when, if you were so inclined.) He has interrogated almost ninety people to create this story. It starts with the jazz and blues enthusiast Ken Colyer, the man from that tin hut who jumped ship to play with the jazz greats of New Orleans before being deported to rejoin the early English trad-jazz and skiffle scene with Chris Barber, Lonnie Donegan and others.

The new music inspired thousands of hopefuls to pick up guitars, banjos, washboards or whatever. We meet many famous names as they come together (and split) in coffee bars, clubs and theatres. We see bizarre attempts by their managers to insert them into variety theatre shows (flagging because of the spread of TV), billed along with acrobats, ventriloquists and unfunny comedians before realising that most of the audience only wanted to rock. For similar reasons abysmal British covers of great American singles were produced with zero excitement and session musicians ‘squarer than an Oxo cube’.

When the film with Bill Haley Rock Around the Clock was released in 1956 it stuck ‘a dagger into Britain’s staid way of life’ according to Frame. ‘What mattered was the music . . . and the insight into the milieu surrounding it. How American teenagers dressed, spoke, behaved, danced. . . Hundreds wanted to start bands.’ There were street disturbances in east London after jiving fans, jeering at the police, were ejected from cinemas, many being fined for insulting behaviour. Rank dropped Sunday showings. Watch Committees and local councils banned the film across Britain as cinema seats were slashed, fire hoses and fireworks set off, post-film audiences danced in the streets and police were attacked. Although only about 60 people were prosecuted, the media reaction was as if the entire teen population had gone berserk.

The arrival of Elvis Presley and Heartbreak Hotel was just too much for BBC Radio’s Head of Light Music. Presley and Haley were ‘freaks at the bottom of the gimmick noise barrel.’ Equally vicious were some music journalists. Jazz critic Steve Race wrote in Melody Maker

‘... the current craze…. is one of the most terrifying things ever to have happened to popular music... let us oppose it to the end.’

Too late. Elvis was wild, young, beautiful and sexy. He wasn’t this year’s model, says Frame. He was this generation’s model.

Riding to Rock and Roll’s defence came an unlikely hero: Labour MP Manny Shinwell, 72. After denouncing the censorship, he said in a near-Marxist moment on radio, found by Frame in the BBC archives

‘… there’s something happening to the youth of the nation; they’re trying to free themselves, they want more liberty, more freedom. They resent the routine, being in a rut, getting up in the morning, being clocked in, being liberated only when the employer decides they can be liberated… Therefore I don’t worry when they do a bit of jiving.’

That’s it exactly. Pete Frame has done a great job telling his story of alienated youth seeking expression (not overtly political, but rebellious) and the moral panic that they triggered. (Elsewhere in this Newsletter Gerd-Rainer Horn writes of cultural rebellions of 1956 onwards preparing the ground for the political rebellions of the sixties and seventies.)

There’s a useful timeline but no footnotes or chapter titles and the index isn’t brilliant. The prose is that of a dedicated rock journalist, not an academic. But even if you don’t want the small details of the artistes and repertoire, there’s still enough material buried here to conjure up the world of stuffiness and grey-flannel boredom that the musicians and their fans fought against in the 1950s.

Book Review - The Failure of a Dream (2008)

The ILP: Issues for Today

Written By: Christian Hogsbjerg
Date: January 2008

Published In LSHG Newsletter Issue 30: Lent 2008 

The Failure of a Dream The Independent Labour Party from Disaffiliation to World War II Gidon Cohen (London, I.B.Taurus & Co 2007) 274 pp ISBN: 978-1845113001

In July 1932 at a special conference in Bradford, the Independent Labour Party [ILP] voted to disaffiliate from the Labour Party in protest at the betrayals of the disastrous Labour Government of 1929-31, and pledged itself to build a socialist alternative. As Gidon Cohen notes in this authoritative and comprehensive new history of the ILP during the 1930s, ‘this was the most important Left-wing split in the history of the Labour Party.’

Yet, as Cohen also demonstrates, the subsequent decline of the ILP in size (from about 16,000 members in 1932 to under 3,000 by 1939) and influence in comparison to the Labour Party and Communist Party during the 1930s was a more complicated and uneven process than most historians have acknowledged. For example, the ILP managed to retain a national profile and organisation, and after the General Election of November 1935, emerged with four MPs in Glasgow on top of its several thousand members and thirty or so councillors. From where we are today, that looks quite impressive for a Left-of-Labour organisation.

Nor was the decline and fall of the ILP somehow inevitable, the unavoidable consequence of socialists attempting the impossible by trying to build a radical left political alternative to the Labour Party. Rather, Cohen suggests, attention needs to be given to ‘external elements, structures and behaviour beyond the control of the ILP’ which limited the potential space for the Party to grow – as well as internal political questions which the failure of the ILP to answer or settle resulting in it failing to take those opportunities that existed. Perhaps he might have explored the culture of the ILP in more depth, and explored some of the reasons why it was attractive to some of the most remarkable intellectuals in Britain during the 1930s from George Orwell to George Padmore. Nor does Cohen, it seems, attempt to develop an explicitly Marxist analysis - Trotskyist historians for example are criticised for tending ‘to assume rather than demonstrate both the appropriateness, and particularly the implications for the ILP’s strategy of Trotsky’s characterisation of a centrist Party, standing between “Marxism and Reformism”’.

Nevertheless, Cohen’s book is quite comprehensive, exhaustively researched and thus important for anyone interested in the political landscape of 1930s Britain. It also retains some relevance for today, particularly for those who have followed recent events in the Respect Coalition. The ILP ultimately failed to realise its dream of building a socialist alternative, in part because fundamental socialist principles were at times subordinated to pressures from pacifist and parliamentary currents in the Party.

The ILP resolved the inevitable tension between reformists and revolutionaries inside the organisation during the 1930s decisively in the favour of the Parliamentary Group around the charismatic Scottish firebrand James Maxton. The Parliamentary Group abused the power it wielded over the democratic structures of the ILP even, famously at the 1936 national conference in Keighley, blackmailing the General Secretary of the Party by threatening to resign from the Party if conference did not abandon its militantly anti-imperialist position with respect to Mussolini’s barbaric war in Ethiopia and adopt a pacifist non-interventionist position instead. That conference saw also the banning of ‘factions’ – which in practice meant the tiny Trotskyist Marxist Group around CLR James – while the Parliamentary Group remained as unaccountable and overbearing as ever.

In contrast to the sad fate of the ILP, Respect has not allowed its democratic structures to be abused at the whim of the ‘Parliamentary Group’ around George Galloway. Galloway has accordingly done what Maxton only threatened to do and split off with his supporters to form a new organisation. Quite how Galloway’s decision helps to build a democratic socialist alternative to New Labour remains unclear, but some comfort might be taken from the fact that those staying with Respect look as though they are at least trying to learn something from the history of the ILP.

Book Review- New Approaches to Socialist History (2008)

Writing Socialist History

Written By: Gerd-Rainer Horn
Date: January 2008

Published In LSHG Newsletter Issue 30: Lent 2008  

New Approaches to Socialist History Edited by Keith Flett and David Renton (Cheltenham, New Clarion Press, 2003) pp. viii, 175 Paperback ISBN: 978-1873797419 Hard cover ISBN: 978-1873797426

This volume contains ten individual contributions that were first presented at a conference held in London in May of 2000. The authors belong to a network of academic and “barefoot” historians founded in 1993: The London Socialist Historians Group (LSHG). The LSHG sees itself as an organization standing in the tradition of the British History Workshop movement. Launched in 1966, the History Workshop gave voice to new topics, themes, and approaches to the practice of history, revitalized by the energies and determination of the 1960s New Left. Whether the LSHG will be able to reach the prominence and public presence of the History Workshop remains to be seen.

This anthology is a purposefully diverse assembly of articles addressing topics in a wide variety of national contexts between 1820 and 1972. Showcasing the LSHG’s view of “socialism” as a mix of mutually interacting influences—including, most notably, individuals, political parties, social movements, and contingency and social class the articles should be read as detailed case studies. They exemplify the interplay of historical forces that, singly or combined, create the multiplicity of specific historical contexts that, although geographically specific, can ultimately be compared.

A brief presentation of individual topics in chronological order makes clear that there is no specific thematic link uniting the various articles. Neil Davidson draws attention to the law of uneven and combined development behind the first “regional general strike in the history of capitalism,” the 1820 industrial action in southwest Scotland. Andrew Dawson untangles the various influences affecting Philadelphia workshop owners faced with the issues surrounding the US Civil War.

Craig Phelan elucidates the realities and the myths behind the U.S. Knights of Labor and their charismatic leader, Terence Powderly. Paul Grist points to some important birth defects at the cradle of the British (Independent) Labour Party, with the example of Bradford, West Yorkshire. Ian Birchall investigates the early history of the Red Trade Union International, focusing on the role of Alfred Rosmer. David Renton clarifies some issues surrounding the strange political career of Sir Stafford Cripps, and Tobias Abse casts important doubts over the democratic credentials of the icon of Eurocommunism: Palmiro Togliatti. Anne Alexander sheds light on the uneasy relationship between nationalism and communism in immediate post-World War II Egypt. Finally, Dave Lyddon and Ralph Darlington summarize their findings on a pivotal moment in recent British labour movement history, first published as Glorious Summer: Class Struggle in Britain 1972.

These individual pieces of research are usually well presented, mostly devoid of “movement” jargon, and, for the most part, without an unnecessarily polemical edge. The sole piece that attempts to do too much is the opening chapter, in which the author purports to draw lessons from two centuries of social movement action in less than ten pages. All the other articles can be read with great profit.
This reviewer wishes the LSHG an increased public (and even commercial) success.

Book Review - Western Marxism and the Soviet Union (2008)

The "Russian Question"

Written By: Ian Birchall
Date: January 2008

Published In LSHG Newsletter Issue 30: Lent 2008 

Western Marxism and the Soviet Union A Survey of Critical Theories and Debates since 1917 Marcel van der Linden (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007_ XII + 380 pp ISBN 978 90 04 15875 7 € 89.00; US$ 125.00

Readers of a certain age will recall debates among Young Socialists or student leftists about whether Russia was “state capitalist” or a “degenerated workers’ state”. Sometimes it seemed no more significant than a confrontation between Arsenal and Spurs supporters.

Yet the debate was profoundly serious, since it raged among Stalin’s victims, who needed to know why they had been defeated, and by what. In Victor Serge’s magnificent novel of 1930s Russia, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, three men awaiting arrest and probable death disagree whether their bodies will fertilise “Socialist soil” or “State Capitalism”. Since the Russian experience is still used to vilify the idea of socialism, the debate remains relevant.

Most earlier accounts of the debate were written from a partisan standpoint. Fortunately Marcel van der Linden, Research Director of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, has now produced a comprehensive scholarly account of the arguments. He begins with the polemics between Kautsky and Trotsky in the aftermath of 1917, and continues to the collapse of the Soviet Union and such recent writers as Sapir, Chattopadhyay and Resnick & Wolff.

Van der Linden gives a fair account of each position, so that each argument may be judged by its strengths, not its weaknesses. Trotsky, Pannekoek, Korsch, James, Dunayevskaya, Cliff, Bordiga, Shachtman, Deutscher, Mandel, Djilas, Kuron and Modzelewski, Bettelheim and Ticktin are all studied in some detail. There is consideration of the assorted versions of the theory that Russia was neither capitalist nor a workers’ state (“bureaucratic collectivism” etc.), and this current is shown to originate with Lucien Laurat and not, as often claimed, with Bruno Rizzi. A comprehensive 44-page bibliography will be invaluable to all future researchers Van der Linden confines his study to Russia, not covering the related debates about China, Cuba, etc. It would have been interesting to know when North Korea first acquired its status as a “workers’ state”. As Bruce Cumings shows in The Origins of the Korean War (Princeton NJ, 1981-1990), the North Korean state was established by the United States State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee, thus making the working class and the revolutionary party equally nugatory.

Van der Linden’s conclusion is brief, modest and relatively agnostic. Doubtless it will not satisfy those with axes to grind, and since I have one, I shall grind it.

He claims only two advocates of the state capitalist theory, Cliff and Bettelheim, “took an approach compatible with an orthodox definition of capitalism”. Cliff is criticised because his “approach forces him to reduce competition essentially to the arms race… That, however, is still in conflict with orthodoxy. The arms race … did not involve mainly commodities produced for an open market, and therefore cannot be considered as trade based on capitalist competition.”

This seems less than fair to Cliff. To insist that accumulation was driven by competition was indeed retaining an essential element of Marxism; to abandon that would mean departing from the very core of the Marxist analysis. To observe that in the twentieth century competition might take forms never envisaged by Marx involved a simple recognition of the facts. The combination of the essence of Marxism with an acceptance of the changing nature of reality was the very heart of Cliff’s method.
But such reservations are trivial in face of van der Linden’s achievement, which will stand as the definitive treatment of the question for some time to come.

Book Review - A Socialist at War (2007)

A Socialist at War

Written By: David Renton
Date: September 2007

Published In LSHG Newsletter Issue 29: Autumn 2007 

A Socialist at War: With the Pioneer Corps Harry Ratner London, Socialist Platform, 2007 118pp + iv ISBN 0-9551127-96 

Harry Ratner is already the author of one volume of autobiography, Reluctant Revolutionary, in which he tells the story of his 24 years of political activity as a Trotskyist, beginning in 1936 and ending in 1960. One charm of that book lies in Ratner's account of becoming a socialist. A sixteen year old Jewish boy, the product of a definite lower middle-class upbringing, he came to Marxism via a loose, ethical socialism and membership of the Labour Party. He might have become a Stalinist, save that the Trotskyists met him first. To imagine this happening in 1970 or 1980 would be to make the story seem more commonplace than it was. Ratner joined the Militant Group in London at a time when it had just a few dozen members. Within four years he would be carrying out clandestine activities in wartime Paris. Following the German occupation of Belgium, Ratner was instructed to return to England in order to shelter a prominent Trotskyist fugitive Pierre Frank.

In England, Ratner determined to volunteer for the army. He, like his comrades, knew that the previous 1914-1918 war had ended with Europe in a revolutionary ferment. If the same result was to occur a second time, that could only happen as a result of people joining the army and attempting to convince rank and file troops of the need for insurrection. The next five years of Ratner's attempts to contribute towards that goal are the subject of A Socialist At War.

Much of Ratner's story is a familiar narrative: of parade grounds and time on leave, of long marches and of grumbles about officers or food. As well as telling of his own experiences, however, Ratner also takes care to put the events of his service in the context of the regiment in which he served. The Pioneer Corps were uniformed soldiers tasked with the labouring activities necessary to keep an army in the field: dock construction, the laying of railways, building ammunition and storage depots and hutted camps. Pioneers were recruited from the British colonial territories of Africa, from Palestine, from Jewish emigrants living in wartime in Britain and from the defeated armies of Czechoslovakia and Republican Spain. While the soldiers were regarded by High Command very much as inferior troops, for Ratner, they appear to have provided an easy home.

One episode from 1941 conveys something of the disdain of the officers for their men. Under attack by German land forces at Kalamata in Greece the commanding officer, a Brigadier Parrington, informed his German counterpart of his intention to surrender the following day. Other officers, perhaps realising that a Pioneer force largely composed of sundry anti-fascists would suffer worse than Brigadier Parrington in the Nazi camps, staged a covert rebellion, encouraging their troops to disperse rather than acquiesce in their own capture. Many thousands did escape in this fashion. (It is a pleasure to mention that the Colonel Renton praised by Ratner for this small act of insubordination was recorded in the stories of my childhood as my roguish Great Uncle Fritz).

A consensus among historians holds that the army was radicalised. A Socialist At War shares this perspective, discussing initiatives such as soldiers' newspapers and the Army Bureau of Current Affairs, the army's plan to boost morale by offering lectures as to the likely shape of the post-fascist world. The increasing self-confidence of men who had served under fire culminated ultimately in the proto-mutinies of 1944-1948. There was a growing audience for Ratner’s leaflets and newspapers. After the Normandy landings, for example, he was able to find a group of co-thinkers in his regiment, who met to plan what they would do if they were ordered by Churchill to disarm the Resistance. "Whether anything would have come of this effort", Ratner writes, "if it had come to the crunch is hard to say."

Ratner's memoir adds to a story told elsewhere, by Al Richardson, Andrew Davies and Richard Croucher among others: of how the 1939-45 war did enough to persuade thousands of people of the necessity of a different economic order, but ended with that ambition unachieved.

Book Review - Framing the Early Middle Ages (2007)

Framing the Early Middle Ages

Written By: Dominic Alexander
Date: September 2007

Published In LSHG Newsletter  Issue 29: Autumn 2007 

Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800 Chris Wickham Oxford University Press 2005 990pp. ISBN 978-0199212965

The centuries between 400 and 800 are exceptionally difficult and tantalising, with a fragmentary evidence base that has led to many wildly differing interpretations of political, property and social structures, particularly in Western Europe. Chris Wickham has succeeded in presenting a highly compelling characterisation of post-Roman societies. His project of ‘framing’ the period is to lay a solid basis of understanding of the economic and property structures of these societies, through a comparative assessment of the evidence, written and archaeological, from Ireland to Egypt, Anatolia to Mauretania. The book is broken up into sections on states, aristocracies, peasantries and finally systems of exchange. The comparative approach produces great dividends in highlighting the patterns that remained in some regions, and what was thus clearly lost in others.

State, aristocracy and bulk exchange remained in the East, but became regionalised, where in the west various degrees of collapse clearly did take place. Wickham therefore, while giving due weight to arguments for continuity with the Roman period, does not let us imagine that the Roman world somehow remained intact into the seventh or eighth centuries. The archaeological evidence for Britain in comparison with elsewhere certainly lays to rest any notion that any large scale political units remained by the middle of the fifth century. His characterisation of the collapse of class society into tribal structures in Britain is particularly strengthened by comparison with parts of western North Africa, where from different starting points, a similar process was played out.

The strength of Wickham’s ‘frame’ is to lay out clearly the interpretative problem of the early Middle Ages. The collapse of the Roman Empire had left a mosaic of different regional and even local responses, with the peasantry often emerging with considerably fewer economic obligations to aristocracies or states, and the latter with commensurately less secure coercive power. Indeed, in some areas, the Asturias in Spain, Britain on a larger scale, and in smaller ‘leopard spots’ across Europe, society had returned to a ‘peasant mode of production’.

The history of the sixth to tenth centuries is thus clarified as a process of the rebuilding of aristocratic power, and therefore the re-subjection of peasantries to new structures of exploitation. In some societies, Ireland and Denmark, which had lain outside the Roman sphere, Wickham convincingly outlines the different cases for the fitful development of the property structures that could form the basis for class societies, and aristocracies, to emerge.

Wickham does not see a fundamental distinction of type between the mode of production of the Roman Empire and the various feudalisms that emerged from it, arguing that tribute, tax and rent are too mutable to provide the basis for fundamentally different economic structures. Indeed, for seventh-century England, it is not possible at all to define the renders made to kings, churches and aristocrats as clearly tax, tribute or rent. Difficult questions still remain however. It is easy to see in Mauretania how the collapse of the Roman system allowed the re-emergence of tribal structures that had not entirely been lost, but less easy to see why Roman Britain should suffer such a catastrophic collapse, while northern Francia apparently retained enough of a stable basis for aristocratic property and economic complexity to survive. The reasons for the different fates of the east and west are therefore also not fully resolved. This is not to say that Wickham does not provide important arguments towards these problems. Despite the modest claim of the introduction, that the book is not concerned to produce a new synthesis, it does represent something impressively close to that. Further questioning of the great problems of the early medieval period will need to proceed from the imposing research lucidly explained in this book.

Book Review - 1956 and All That (2007)

1956 and All That

Written By: Ian Birchall
Date: September 2007

Published In LSHG Newsletter Issue 29: Autumn 2007 

1956 and All That Keith Flett (editor) (Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. ISBN 9-781847-181848

1956 was an important turning point. The Suez adventure reshaped British imperialism’s place in the world; the Hungarian rising reshaped the British left. In these twelve papers, taken from a London Socialist Historians’ conference in February 2006, Keith Flett has collected some valuable material about the events of that year. Taken together with Revolutionary History 9/2 (“Remembering 1956”) and the various articles in International Socialism 112, these provide a valuable resource, both to counter the myths of mainstream history and to encourage further research.

Nigel Willmott’s opening chapter usefully places the Hungarian rising in an international context – though one wonders if his claim that the USA at this time was a “reluctant imperialist” would have received much credence in Guatemala. He also stresses the importance of the workers’ councils – crucial when one recalls that Eric Hobsbawm recently wrote a major article on Hungary in which workers’ councils got no mention. (See London Review of Books, 16 November 2006 and subsequent correspondence.) From the narrower standpoint of the writings of CLR James Christian Hogsbjerg links Hungary to the struggles in the colonial world. Stan Newens recalls the Trafalgar Square demonstration against Suez and how he distributed 6000 leaflets defending the Hungarian rising and calling for industrial action against Suez.

Most of what has appeared in Britain about Suez takes a British viewpoint. Anne Alexander gives a fascinating account of the Egyptian left at the time of Suez. She shows the courageous popular resistance, but also how Nasser manipulated the Communists – and how the Communists let themselves be manipulated. Mike Haynes makes a creative application of the theory of state capitalism in studying the Hungarian working class prior to 1956. Toby Abse analyses the role of Italian communist leader Togliatti in 1956 and demolishes claims that he was some sort of anti-Stalinist.

The other six papers all deal with the impact of the Hungarian crisis in Britain. Paul Flewers gives a carefully documented account of press reactions to the Khrushchev “secret” speech, examining the “rival schools of thought” which believed either that nothing would change in Russia, or that there would be real progress towards democratisation. Both were sadly inadequate. David Renton gives a useful account of the CP Historians’ Group, showing that it contained many different currents. Perhaps he underestimates the extent to which even the best of the group continued to work within a Popular Front framework even when they had broken with Stalinism.

Terry Brotherstone looks at the particular contributions of Brian Pearce and Peter Fryer, while two papers look at the work of Alasdair Macintyre. Neil Davidson examines his often forgotten Marxist writings of the early sixties, while Paul Blackledge looks at his views on the place of morality and freedom in Marxist thought. Alan Woodward considers the “libertarian” response to Hungary, under which label he includes both classical anarchists and the followers of Castoriadis in the Solidarity group. There is some interesting new material here - but I wonder how happy Alan would have been in Castoriadis’s “libertarian” organisation, which at one point proposed to expel anyone who missed two consecutive meetings.

Keith Flett’s Introduction takes up some other issues not covered in the collection, for example the New Left’s “disdainful” attitude to rock’n’roll, a topic deserving further study. I would take issue with his claim that Anthony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism showed the “first stirrings” of New Labour. Crosland was a right-winger in his day, but he believed in the redistribution of wealth and greater equality. Today he would be on the far left of the Labour Party.

Flett deserves our thanks for editing this valuable book. Unfortunately it could have been even better. A number of errors have been left uncorrected: the opposition faction in the Socialist Labour League took its name from Stamford in Lincolnshire, not Stamford Hill [71]; the Comintern was not dissolved when Russia entered the war, but two years later [100]; the Communist Party did not participate in the French Popular Front government of 1936 [125].

Inclusion in the index seems to have been decided in a purely random fashion, and there are far too many misprints. [If this is the standard of proof-reading provided by “Cambridge Scholars”, God help the rest of us.] But don’t let these nitpicking criticisms from a born pedant put you off buying this very useful little volume.