London Socialist Historians Group seminars Autumn 2020

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London Socialist Historians Group

Autumn Term 2020 Seminars

Revisiting some key issues & figures in socialist history

Oct 12^th Rhys Williams, Tom Mann and Australia: 1902 to 1909

Book (free) at the link below. Once the short form is filled in & submitted you will be e-mailed a link to the meeting details:

https://www.history.ac.uk/events/tom-mann-and-australia-1902-1909

Nov 9th Mark Hailwood, ‘Between 5 and 6 of the clock': Time-telling, Time-use and Time-discipline in Pre-industrial England'

Dec 7th Keith Flett, 150 years since the death of William Cuffay black leader of London Chartism in 1848. Has he been ignored by socialist historians?

All Seminars start at 5.30pm via Zoom

Registration details will be provided ahead of each seminar

The Autumn LSHG newsletter will appear during October. Contributions, complaints, letters and notices are all welcome preferably by early October - please contact Keith Flett at the address above for more info thanks 

London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter 70 (Summer 2020) now online

LSHG Summer Term 2020 Update on seminars, newsletter & activities

The Institute of Historical Research is currently closed and we are not able to hold seminars at the moment. Apologies to those who were planning to attend the last seminar of the Spring Term on Monday 16 March, Rhys Williams on Tom Mann in Australia, which I cancelled at short notice but I think prudently so. We plan to re-arrange the seminar for the next time Rhys, who is based in Australia, is in the UK.

The summer term LSHG Newsletter is here - see this comment piece on Covid-19 and these two reviews of works relating to the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820 and London during 1848 - perhaps a little later than usual as there are no seminars to publicise. It is hoped to resume seminars from October 2020 but obviously it is too early yet to be definite on that. We have a number of papers and speakers on a waiting list!

A range of virtual socialist history activities currently being undertaken and details of these are probably best checked by following the London Socialist Historians twitter account @LSHGofficial and by visiting our website, where every issue of the Newsletter back to 1997 is now on-line at our index

You will also find, sadly, a brief appreciation of Neil Davidson who died on 3rd February. Neil was associated with the LSHG for over 20 years: http://londonsocialisthistorians.blogspot.com/2020/05/neil-davidson.html

Finally there are some socialist history podcasts available on the IHR website. Below is a link to a seminar John Newsinger gave in November 2017 on Orwell and the left: https://www.history.ac.uk/podcasts/revolution-labourism-orwell-and-left

and a link to Kevin Morgan on The Left and the Cult of the Individual, an ever present source of discussion!
https://www.history.ac.uk/podcasts/left-and-cult-individual

There is plenty for socialists to be doing even in times like these but history remains a vital context to current events.

Keith Flett, LSHG Convenor

The Newsletter  - Letters, articles, criticisms and contributions to debate are most welcome. Deadline for the next issue is  1 September 2020 - please email Keith Flett on the address above for more info about contributing and the society.

LSHG Seminar - Tom Mann in Australia - postponed

LSHG Seminar

Rhys Williams on Tom Mann in Australia (1902-1910)


This seminar has now been postponed to later in the year due to the Coronavirus

LSHG Seminar - Martin Hoyles on Ira Aldridge - 17 February

Dear Comrades,

We are resuming our seminar series at the Institute of Historical Research.

Details of the first seminar are here:

London Socialist Historians Seminar

Martin Hoyles, 'Ira Aldridge, black actor in Victorian London'. 

Monday 17th February, 5.30pm, Room 304, Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, Malet St, London WC1. 

Free without ticket. Details contact Keith Flett on address above

Comrades may recall a previous seminar from Martin Hoyles on William Cuffay, the black leader of London Chartism in 1848.

Seminar report - The Slave Ship (2008)

Marcus Rediker, "The Slave Ship"

Written By: Seminar report
Date: January 2008

Published In LSHG Newsletter Issue 30: Lent 2008  

On Tuesday 6th November 2007, at an LSHG event jointly held with the Raphael Samuel History Centre at UEL, Marcus Rediker spoke about his new book The Slave Ship at the Institute of Historical Research.

Marcus Rediker’s session was chaired by John Marriott of the RSHC and it saw the Pollard Room packed to bursting with historians and activists keen to hear Marcus on his short British tour to promote the book.

Marcus began by noting that he planned to talk about a different maritime tradition, not one to celebrate, but one that used terror to enforce discipline and provoked resistance to it in the process.
The book had its origins in papers originally looked at in the Public Record Office 30 years ago and the idea to write it had crystallised in visits that Marcus had paid to the US Death Row prisoner Abu Jamal. A focus on capital punishment, race and terror led to consideration of whether it was possible to do the subject of slave ships justice and to live with the material over a number of years.

Marcus underlined that violence is central to the rise of capitalism and the slave ship was the epitome of this process. The great historian Walter Rodney had said that in the slave trade capitalism was naked.

The seminar was divided into three sections. Some background, a puzzle about the slave trade and a specific drama that Marcus had uncovered in the archives.

The Transatlantic slave database covering the period from the 1500s to the last voyage in 1867 shows evidence for 12-15 million African slaves of whom 15% died on the journey. There were quite small numbers of sailors, 180-200 thousand. A lot is known about the captains but little about life below decks. Marcus asked how documents written by oppressors could yield information here.

The puzzle was that in the huge literature on the slave trade and business records for 24 thousand voyages we know very little about slave ships. There are three volumes on the subject, none definitive, yet the slave ship was essential to the first phase of globalisation. Marcus asked why this was.

Turning to the drama, Marcus noted that WEB Dubois had called the slave trade the most significant drama in 1000 years of human history. They had descended into hell and on the slave ship a human drama was played out involving captain, sailor and slave.

The slave ship was an instrument of terror and captains ruled through the use of terror. Marcus referred to an archival document from 1791 he had uncovered about a sailor’s evidence to a Grand Jury regarding a charge against Captain James D’Wolfe for throwing an ill female slave overboard to her death. Marcus queried how a captain could be charged with murder when slaves had no rights and concluded that at this peak period of abolitionist agitation its influence had been felt amongst sailors similar to the way that anti-Vietnam war sentiment found its way into the army.

Marcus noted that the three forces to end the slave trade had been rebellious Africans, dissident sailors and middle-class abolitionists.

The Brian Manning Memorial Lecture (2005)

The Brian Manning Memorial Lecture

Written By: The editor
Date: April 2005

Published In LSHG Newsletter Issue 24: Summer 2005 

The first-ever Brian Manning Memorial Lecture will be given by Norah Carlin on Saturday 14th May 2005, and is entitled "'For liberties, justice and settlement': petitioning for revolution in 1648-9". It will be held at the Institute of Historical Research and begins at 1pm.

The Brian Manning Memorial Lecture is organised by the London Socialist Historians Group and is designed to follow the approach to history followed by the late Brian Manning.

Brian Manning's books and articles were dedicated to the study of England in the 1640s; to the Good Old Cause of republicanism; to Cromwell against King Charles, the Agitators against Cromwell, the Levellers against the New Model Army. He embodied a notion of socialist history with roots outside the academy, as a member of the New Left and CND in the 1950s, and the revolutionary left forty years later.

Each year, the Brian Manning Memorial Lecture will showcase the newest insights and the best research that builds on the same tradition of committed, activist history.

The Brian Manning Memorial Lecture will be followed by the Annual Members’ Meeting of the London Socialist Historians Group. Members of the LSHG are being informed about this separately, but it will be an open meeting and all are welcome to stay and participate.

Rosa Luxemburg and 1905 (2005)

Rosa Luxemburg and 1905

Written By: David Renton
Date: January 2005

Published In LSHG Newsletter Issue 23: Lent 2005 

The London Socialist Historians Group organised a seminar at the recent European Social Forum in London. It was held on the Saturday morning, with about fifty people in the audience.

Our title was 'Rosa Luxemburg and 1905'. We wanted to encourage discussion about Luxemburg, because we feel that her history has been neglected in recent years. We also wanted to draw attention to 1905, as we are rapidly approaching the hundredth anniversary of this year of mass strikes in Russia, when Leon Trotsky first came to prominence, and when workers in St. Petersburg developed the workers' council, or Soviet.

Stefan Bornost from the German paper Linksruck spoke first. He described how Luxemburg arrived in Germany, as a refugee from Poland, and how she came to prominence in the movement. He talked about her anti-war politics, and her commitment to the goal of revolution.

The second panellist was Colin Barker, who concentrated on Luxemburg's pamphlet on 1905, The Mass Strike. He described it as a work of social movement theory, and a rare piece of research, written from the inside, arguing for more movements of this kind. Luxemburg's key insight, Barker argued, was to perceive that in really big mass movements, the traditional divide between political and class issues tended to break down. The alternative to the bureaucratism of parliamentary politics, Luxemburg suggested, was the spontaneous uprising of the crowd. In his concluding remarks, Barker asked whether Luxemburg had in fact been right? Should not the events of 1918-9 and Rosa's death be taken as evidence of a failed strategy?

The final speaker was Richard Greeman, from the Victor Serge Centre in Moscow. He responded to Barker's concluding remarks by arguing that 1905 should represent the truth of a different model - one based on spontaneous uprising, the network rather than the party. There had been many 1905s, Greeman argued, or movements like it, including 1936 in Spain, 1956 in Hungary, 1968.

The subsequent debate concerned the utility of 1905 as a model for present-day socialist or anti-capitalist practice – with some people in the audience arguing strongly for more diffuse structures of organisation, and other speakers arguing for a more centralised model. Probably the sharpest comment came from Ian Birchall of the London Socialist Historians Group, who observed that when historians talk about spontaneity they usually mean that they haven't yet found out who did the organising.

Andrew Hemingway on Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (2002)

Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture

Written By: Andrew Hemingway
Date: September 2002

Published In LSHG Newsletter Issue 16: Autumn 2002 

Most readers of this newsletter will be aware of the IHR seminar on Comparative Labour and Working-Class History that Rick Halpern set up in 1991, and many will have attended it on occasion. From 1996 to 2001 I was privileged to act as Rick’s co-chair in organising this. Several of us who were regulars at the seminar had hoped to keep it going after Rick departed for the University of Toronto, but our experience over the last academic year has shown us that the series is unviable without a larger number of students working on labour and left history at the University of London. In the circumstances, the only sensible course was to fold it.

Despite its very different title, the new seminar on Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (MIC) builds on the experience of the CLW-CH series, which had incorporated a substantial cultural component in recent years. It is also intended to build on the success of the Marxism and the Visual Arts Now conference that was held at University College London in April 2002, and which I co-organised with Matthew Beaumont, Esther Leslie and John Roberts. MAVAN involved 160 people from at least 8 different countries over two and a half days. It sparked some quite fierce debate, and indicated a widespread and continuing interest in Marxism as an interpretative system among artists, art historians and critics. (The conference was sponsored by the journal Historical Materialism, which will publish a selection of the papers.) Within the new series we hope to explore some of the issue raised at MAVAN, but not just in relation to the Visual Arts.

The ‘culture’ in the title of the new series is understood in a broad sense (akin to Raymond Williams’s usage), and encompasses a wide range of symbolic practices that extend from the traditional fine arts to sports, popular musics, and television soap operas. Indeed, the relationship between high culture and popular forms is one of the issues that the series is intended to address. It is hoped that the seminar will bring together scholars interested in the Marxist tradition working across a whole range of disciplinary fields such as anthropology, art history, history, literature, sociology, and cultural studies. Its brief encompasses (inevitably) both theoretical and historical questions.

The organising committee of the MIC seminar includes myself, Warren Carter, Noel Douglas, Esther Leslie, and David Margolies. We have received a very positive response to our Call for Papers with more than enough to fill the programme for 2002-3 and take us through into 2003-4. But please spread the word or offer us a paper yourself. The programme for the Autumn Term is reproduced on page 2.

Our hope is that the new series will enjoy the mutually supportive relationship with the LSHG that the Labour and Working-Class History seminar did, and that many will want to participate in both. Within the Marxist tradition culture is not separate from politics: culture is political and politics takes cultural forms. This should go without saying, but it often seems to be forgotten. Thus although we will sometimes address specialist issues, we welcome the participation of non-specialists who may well have important knowledge or insights to contribute. We look forward to welcoming you!

Socialist History Seminars Spring Term 2020

The London Socialist Historians Group have announced details of seminars for the Spring Term 2020.

We have pencilled in these seminars for Mondays at 5.30pm in Room 304 Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, Malet St, London WC1.

These will be confirmed later depending on whether the IWGB dispute at Senate House reaches a satisfactory conclusion.

Socialist History Seminar Spring Term 2020

Monday 17th February Martin Hoyles, Ira Aldridge, black actor in Victorian London

Monday 2nd March tbc

Monday 16th March Rhys Williams, Tom Mann in Australia​

For more details please contact Keith Flett at the address above.

LSHG news and update

The IWGB boycott of Senate House continues and it would be fair to say that the University is being obdurate in terms of the legitimate issue of bringing outsourced workers back in-house on decent terms and conditions.

While the dispute continues it’s our job to offer solidarity. For that reason we will not be holding socialist history seminars at the Institute of Historical Research in the autumn term - a matter of regret as the IHR is not a direct party and remains the home of research history in the UK.

Historically these are matters we often talk about in seminars and it would be hypocritical to say the least to ignore them in the here and now. I have been working with others on alternative arrangements.

If supporters have ideas for speakers (and venues) do get in touch! Contributions, reviews, comments are welcome. I did attend the seminar convenors meeting in July presided over by the Director of the IHR Professor Jo Cox. I should underline that relations between the seminar and the IHR remain cordial and we hope to return there as soon as possible.

Professor Cox underlined the difficult situation the dispute had put the IHR in and its impact on staff, use and funding. While we understand the issues as above solidarity with outsourced workers must come first.

The IWGB dispute is part of a wider crisis in Higher Education underwritten without question by the activities or lack of them of the present Government.

Finally of course we supported the Climate Strike on 20th September, XR in October and will support future such actions.

Keith Flett for the London Socialist Historians Group

Upcoming seminars and events

LSHG SEMINAR - Monday 28 October 5.00pm Professor David Edgerton, Some Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the British Nation, Room S 8.08, 8th Floor, Strand Building, Kings College

Other events

Friday 1 November - 7pm 'Louise Michel, a French anarchist in London' with Constance Bantman and Martyn Everett - Housmans Bookshop, 5 Caledonian Road, N1 9DX - free, no booking required

Tuesday 12 November BUIRA IS Seminar on British and German Labour Unrest pre-First World
War BUIRA History of Industrial Relations Study Group. Labour Unrest pre-First World War: Germany and the UK Compared. 3.30pm for 4.00- 6.00m (Tea/ coffee from 3.30) Room tbc,
University of Westminster Business School, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS (opposite Madame Tussauds and nearly opposite Baker Street tube) The event is free and no need to register in advance but for further details , please email Michael Gold (m.gold@rhul.ac.uk) or Linda Clarke (clarkel@wmin.ac.uk).

Thursday 14 November 2019, 6.30pm, Bookmarks Bookshop 1 Bloomsbury Street, London WC1B 3QE, Launch of Treason: Rebel Warriors and Internationalist Traitors Edited by Steve Cushion and Christian Høgsbjerg

Friday 15 November, 6.30pm, Bookmarks Bookshop 1 Bloomsbury Street, London WC1B 3QE, Launch of Mohandas Gandhi: Experiments in Civil Disobedience by Talat Ahmed

Letters, articles, criticisms and contributions to debate are most welcome. Deadline for the next issue of the LSHG Newsletter  is 1 December 2018. Please contact Keith Flett on address above for more information

LSHG seminar - David Edgerton 'Some reflections on the rise and fall of the British Nation'

Socialist History Seminar Autumn 2019

Monday October 28th 5.00pm 

David Edgerton, 'Some Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the British Nation', Room S 8.08, 8th Floor, Strand Building, Kings College, London.

Hosted by the London Socialist Historians Group - for more information please contact Keith Flett on the email above - no need to book in advance. 

Map of building:

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/study/handbook/about/strandvwbmap.pdf

A recent Guardian article by David Edgerton

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/09/brexit-crisis-global-capitalism-britain-place-world

BUIRA IS Seminar on British and German Labour Unrest pre-First World War

BUIRA History of Industrial Relations Study Group

Labour Unrest pre-First World War: Germany and the UK Compared

Tuesday 12 November 2019

3.30pm for 4.00-6.00m (Tea/ coffee from 3.30)

Room tbc,University of Westminster Business School,35
Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS (opposite Madame Tussauds and nearly opposite Baker Street tube)

The event is free and no need to register in advance but for further details , please email Michael Gold (m.gold@rhul.ac.uk)
or Linda Clarke (clarkel@wmin.ac.uk).

Programme:

3.30-3.50pm:Tea/ coffee/ refreshments

3.50-4.00:Welcome:Michael
Gold and Linda Clarke (Chairs)

4.00-4.30:Ralph Darlington

Pre-First World War Labour Unrest and Women’s Suffrage Revolt: Never the Twain Shall Meet?

During the years immediately preceding the First World War, Britain experienced social unrest on a scale beyond anything since the first half of the 19^th century.
Both the women’s suffrage revolt for the vote (embracing suffragettes and suffragists) and the unprecedented labour unrest of 1910-14 (involving strikes in pursuit of higher wages, better working conditions and trade union recognition) utilised dramaticextra-parliamentary
‘direct action’ forms of militant struggle from belowthat represented a formidable challenge to the social and political order of Edwardian Britain.This
presentationre-examines the historical record to deploy both new and previously unutilised evidence to provide a detailed assessment of the interconnections between the women’s and labour
movements in this defining period of British history.

4.30-5.00: Joern Janssen

1910 Eight-week Lockout in the German Construction Industry: a Victory of Labour against Private Property

This presentation analyses the greatest industrial confrontation in German history, which ran from 15 April to 20 June 1910 and ended with the virtually complete defeat
of the construction employers’ federation on 16 June 1910 through the verdict of a tripartite court of arbitration. It consolidated a new stage in labour-property relations and the role of labour in the development of anonymous capital. This industrial dispute
was about a national framework agreement on collective employment relations and bargaining. It transformed employee organisation and divided the employers’ organisation, benefiting, on the one hand, the central sectoral industrial labour unions to the detriment
of trade organisations and, on the other, the anonymous corporations to the detriment of personal ownership of industrial enterprise.

5.00-5.30: General discussion

5.30pm: Close (followed by drinks until6.00pm)

The speakers:

Ralph Darlington is Emeritus Professor of Employment Relations at the University of Salford.He
is the author ofThe Dynamics of Workplace Unionism (Mansell 1994) and
Radical Unionism: The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary Syndicalism(Haymarket 2013), co-author of
Glorious Summer: Class Struggle in Britain 1972 (Bookmarks 2001), and is currently researching for a book to be published by Pluto Press onThe Labour Unrest 1910-1914.

Joern Janssen, born in Düsseldorf in Germany, studied architecture
in the 1950s and worked as an architect from 1960 to 1970. He was awarded his PhD in political sciences (rer. pol.) in 1973 and became a Professor in construction economics at the Fachhochschule Dortmund from 1972 to 1997. He was a Visiting Professor at the
University of Westminster 1997-2001, and since 1997 has been researching the history of labour-property relations.