[Marxist historians in Britain — like E. P. Thompson and Eric
Hobsbawm — sparked a revolution in understanding the role of working
people in making history. Their work is still fresh and vibrant today.
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MARXISTS CHANGED HOW WE UNDERSTAND HISTORY  
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Alfie Steer
November 14, 2022
Jacobin
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_ Marxist historians in Britain — like E. P. Thompson and Eric
Hobsbawm — sparked a revolution in understanding the role of working
people in making history. Their work is still fresh and vibrant today.
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Marxist historican Eric Hobsbawm,

 

Review of _The British Marxist Historians _by Harvey J. Kaye (Zer0
Books, 2022)

While the culture warriors of the populist right like to believe that
Marxism dominates our universities and cultural institutions, in
truth, its contemporary presence is rather marginal. Few academics
today would describe themselves uncritically as “Marxists.” Fewer
still would feel themselves bound by any party line. In the discipline
of history in particular, the Marxist approach is now frequently
criticized as economically deterministic, failing to account for human
agency, and reducing complex historical developments to the
unchangeable processes of economic systems. In the crudest
interpretations of Marx’s writings, all ideology, law, politics,
culture, and civil society is reducible to the makeup of the economic
base; the study of historical development becomes an unchangeable
science, accessible with only a Marxian understanding of economic
exploitation.

While this approach may be one held by the most dogmatic, and least
insightful, of Marxist theoreticians, it was passionately challenged
by some of the most influential historians of the twentieth century.
First clustered around the Communist Party Historians Group, the
British Marxist historians (among their leading lights Maurice Dobb,
Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, and E. P. Thompson)
held mighty ambitions both in the world of historical scholarship and
political activism. They aimed to transcend the vulgar
base-superstructure model that had held back Marxist theory, to
enlarge the concept of class in our understandings of the past, and to
recover the forgotten struggles and ideas of the working classes. As
Harvey Kaye’s new edition
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his classic 1984 study demonstrates, the British Marxist historians
were the authors of an important theoretical tradition far more
nuanced than detractors admit, one that can teach us much both about
the study of history and its value to radical politics today.

As Kaye demonstrates, the British Marxist historians made
contributions both scholarly and political. At the most basic level,
they expanded the horizons of historical research, writing, and
understanding. For too long history had been limited to the study of
ruling political elites, military campaigns, or diplomatic intrigues.
The lives of the ordinary people seldom registered. In expanding the
traditional scope of historical research, the British Marxist
historians sought to uncover the more complex and representative
“social totality” of the past. Maurice Dobb, for example, pushed
the study of economic history to a more encompassing definition of
capitalism as a historically specific social relation, deploying the
beginnings of an interdisciplinary approach that now dominates
academia. This push to broaden history’s scope in turn led to the
tradition’s most politically potent concept: history from below.

By focusing on the work, lives, and ideas of ordinary people, the
British Marxist historians rediscovered the political agency and
intellectual creativity of the working and peasant classes of the
past. Far from the passive victims of epochal changes (the decline of
feudalism, the rise of capitalism and imperialism, to name a few) the
working classes, from the medieval to the industrial age, were
redefined as influential historical actors, however limited by the
exploitations of class relations and the domination of state power.

Rodney Hilton
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definitions of “feudalism” away from being simply a system
experienced by a handful of elite members of the ruling class, to
something that affected the lives of the everyday peasantry, and
motivated their own doomed, but no less influential, rebellions. The
English Civil War, for Christopher Hill, was an English revolution,
simultaneously laying the foundations for the future development of
capitalism, while also mobilizing a failed democratic revolution whose
leading actors (the Levellers, Diggers
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and Ranters) produced revolutionary ideas ranging from mass democracy
to a form of early communism to even free love. In his studies of
precapitalist southern Europe Eric Hobsbawm
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the “primitive rebels
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of Robin Hood–style banditry, while also defending the rationality
behind the Luddite machine breakers in industrial Britain. Finally, in
his magisterial study
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the “making” of the English working class, E. P. Thompson
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both the radical ideas of the Jacobin clubs and religious dissenters,
but also the “moral economy [[link removed]]”
enforced by riotous mobs on the streets of London.

This push to broaden history’s scope, and recover a forgotten world
of working-class agency and radicalism, was matched by a desire to
overcome the inadequate base-superstructure model that had defined
classical Marxism. Far from being economic determinists, the British
Marxist historians rejected a static, ahistorical analysis of class
stratification, instead seeing “class” as a form of social
relationship between human beings, developed over time, frequently
contested through bitter struggle. Class was not a mere economic
category, but a historical phenomenon played out in our social lives
and cultural formations, in practices, rituals, ideas, and values.
Through the concept of class “experience,” the British Marxist
historians elucidated a way in which class struggle and exploitation
shaped the social consciousness, recognizing the essential importance
of the material without abandoning human agency.

This reconceptualization forms part of what Kaye defines as the
Marxist historians’ “Theory of Class Determination,” with class
struggle played out simultaneously in the social, economic, political,
and cultural realms, defined as the motor of history.

While the “class determination” of the British Marxist historians
may have come at the risk of excluding other forms of oppression, the
subsequent development of other “histories from below” has borne
the direct influence of this original tradition. From women’s
history, flourishing in the work of socialist-feminist historians
like Sheila Rowbotham
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Alexander
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to the growing work on black British history, to microhistory or oral
history, the discipline’s focus has been wrenched from the hands of
kings, knights, and clergy. While not always possessing the same
explicit ideological commitment as the Marxist originators, the shift
away from the elite to ordinary people, their day-to-day lives, work,
even emotions, is an indelible and potentially irreversible change of
focus.

As Kaye emphasizes throughout, the British Marxist historians were not
mere armchair intellectuals, but also politically active, in some
instances to the detriment of their scholarly output. They all played
some role in the democratic opposition within the Communist Party of
Great Britain (CPGB), and many would lead the foundation of the
British New Left after 1956. E. P. Thompson wrote and campaigned
passionately against nuclear weapons and the encroachment of ancient
civil liberties during the Cold War. Christopher Hill would remain a
supporter of numerous left-wing causes and publications well into his
eighties. Ironically, the most popular of the British Marxist
historians, and indeed one of the best-selling historians of all time,
Eric Hobsbawm, was both the tradition’s most economically
deterministic, but also its most ideologically moderate (despite his
lifelong membership of the CPGB). By the 1980s, his warnings that the
“forward march of labour” had halted because of major changes in
Britain’s class composition bore a major influence on Labour’s
painful process of ideological moderation, culminating in New Labour.

While political differences naturally emerged as the decades wore on,
all the historians profiled by Kaye articulated a form of libertarian
socialism rooted just as much in the folk heroes of England’s
radical past, ranging from Wat Tyler to William Morris
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as the writings of Marx and Engels. As such, the rediscovery of old
struggles and radical ideas provided new sources of ideological
inspiration and even a new radical national identity for the British
left.

As academia remains a flashpoint in the culture wars, a reappraisal of
the role of the “academic-activist” is a timely one, and the
historians Kaye outlines in this book (Thompson in particular) appear
as archetypal examples. They were also, to some extent, beneficiaries
of a more benevolent age. Academic jobs were well-paid and plentiful
in the postwar era as universities expanded and student numbers
boomed. A vibrant adult and workers’ education movement provided
further opportunities outside of the conventional “elite”
universities. Now, the chronic casualization of academic labor leaves
historians so overworked and time-starved that finding the time to
write or research, let alone politically organize, appears a
near-impossible task. In such unpromising times, a rediscovery of the
multitudes who came before and fought against exploitation and in
defense of their ancient liberties could provide a far more direct
source of inspiration than even the Marxist historians could have
initially imagined.

_Alfie Steer [[link removed]] is a doctoral
student at the University of Oxford, researching the history of the
Labour left from the late 1980s to 2015._

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* Historiography
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* Marxist history
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* Eric Hobsbawm
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* E.P. Thompson
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* Karl Marx
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