History and the anti-capitalist movement (2003)

What I want to argue here is that history, the study of the past, is something that can be of direct use to radicals in the anti-capitalist movement today. I understand that faced with this argument, many grass-roots campaigners may respond with some caution. Anti-capitalist activists may justly argue that their time is better spent protesting outside the next meeting of the International Monetary Fund, organising in the communities or at work. Today's generation of activists knows its enemy, and is confident of itself. Surely it does not need to waste its time tracing old controversies through the archives. So what can such political activists learn from the study of history?

          I will give two arguments in this paper. The first argument is simply that history is an act is pleasurable in itself. Pleasure should matters to activists. One of the common-sense beliefs of the Seattle generation is precisely the idea that no action should happen unless that activity is something which feels good in itself. This has been a recurring argument across different generations of the dissident left, ever since Stalinism and allied traditions defended themselves through the claim that the ends justified the means. Stalin's supporters maintained that Russia was progressing towards socialism. This great goal justified terror in the meantime. Their critics replied that the argument was miscast. Properly speaking, there was no division between the way an action was conducted and its outcome. If Russian society was being built on the basis of the state repression of the people, then in the outcome could not be democracy or socialism. Pleasure is an indicator, then of a right path chosen.

In the past dozen years, Bob Black's 'Groucho' Marxism has also been founded on a similar claim, that radical democratic activism must be enjoyable or it will lose its challenging, political edge.  Members of the anti-Criminal Justice Bill group in Britain, the Advance Party, came up with their own formula, 'We might prefer putting on parties to angry demonstrations, but that's because that's what we do best.'

          So why is history pleasurable? One book that attempts to answer this question is Raphael Samuel's Theatres of Memory. Samuel's argument was not restricted to archive-based, published, conventional history. Instead, his interest was in much the broader fields of heritage, preservation and collective memory. His book is a statement of affection addressed to local hoarders and collectors, photographers, song-writers, stand-up comics, archivists and historical novelists; family historians, archaeologists, map-makers, and antiquarian illustrators; the sort of people who have organised children's theatricals, open-air museums, battle re-enactments, radio programs and TV-fantasies. If all these diverse people could be said to be in some important sense historians, then there must be something enjoyable which motivates them all to continue. Samuel suggests that many people share a common sense of tradition, indeed that this sense is especially common among those who are engaged in changing the world. We do not merely wish to know that there is such a tradition, but also what place we occupy in it. No matter how vague or how general, such knowledge allows us to make sense of our surroundings.

In his book, Raph Samuel gave a whole series of examples to show how heritage has provided assistance and confidence to the post-war protest movement, composed as it has been of radical socialists, deep greens, single-issue campaigners and the like, 'The Body Shop emerged from Brighton counter-culture', he wrote, 'the Campaign for Real Ale from beer-swinging radicals. Covent Garden, in its present form, sprang from a "community" agitation in which the newly radicalised students of the Architectural Association played a big part.' Heritage was not essentially 'left' or 'right', 'progressive' or 'green'. Instead, Samuel's argument is that the popular memory of the past has been a place contested by all manner of traditions.

The most compelling argument in defence of history is simply the utilitarian claim that knowledge must be better than ignorance. Everyone alive tries, in some sense, to act upon their environment. Such action is more effective when it is combined with reflection. The 'really useful knowledge' that political activists are looking for in their-day-today work, can be divided into two ready halves. Sometimes it is useful to know the history of your own cause, of the people who have tried something similar, whether they succeeded or failed. At other times, it is useful to know something of the other side, of the movements of wealth and power, prestige and capital. Either knowledge of your own side, or knowledge of your opponent, can be useful when it comes to building a stronger movement. Let me give one example of each process.

          Firstly, knowledge 'for'. The West Indian Marxist C. L. R. James is considered today to have been one of the most impressive socialist writers, and also one of the finest black radicals of the twentieth century. His most famous book, The Black Jacobins, the opened up the story of the great slave revolts, and transformed the way in which we think about the emancipation of the slaves. What made him an activist? Clearly his experience of life, his knowledge of the terrible poverty of the Caribbean, and his experience of British colonialism all played their part. Another important moment was James' trip to England in March 1932. Living in Nelson, in Lancashire, James took an active part in the local Labour and trade union movement. As he records, 'My labour and socialist ideas had been got from books and were rather abstract. These cynical working men were a revelation and brought me down to earth.'  But the trigger, the final push towards political activism came from reading Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution.

Something happened which I found among the Marxists whom I got to know. They read the Marxist documents and then read some of the classics of European literature, fitting them into Marx's historical scheme. Not me. As I read Trotsky's book I was already familiar with all the references to history and literature that he was making. I was able automatically and without difficulty to absorb his argument and the logical line that he presented.

Before James encountered this book, his activism was passive. He rejected the existing condition of things, but had no confidence that the people could change the world. He had clearly read widely and had immersed himself in art and literature, but had little knowledge of the radical movement. Knowing something of the history of one revolution, convinced James that further change could be achieved.

          Second, knowledge 'against'. If there is a tradition of dissent, it follows that there must be a tradition of the maintenance of authority. The rich and powerful have interests as much as anyone else. They are only distinguished by their greater ability to make their interests count. It seems to me that radical activists would do well to know as much as possible of the history of business, of the state and of the ruling class. The better that activists understand how authorities have operated in the past, the better equipped they will be to fight unjust authority in present.

Anyone who is awed by the power of the secret state should read Christopher Andrew's recent book, The Mitrokhin Archive, which tells the history of the Russian KGB.  The Russian police-state had unparalleled access to people and resources, yet almost every one of its schemes failed. The KGB plotted at different times with and against Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, John Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Almost all of these operations seem comical now, as does the KGB's attempts to thwart the defected chess player Viktor Korchnoi by sending a hypnotist to distract him! Although the intention of the authors was no doubt to play up the world-shattering conspiracies of the Russian state (and thus to legitimise increased defence spending in Britain and America), the actual impact of the book is to show how ineffective most state-sponsored conspiracies have actually been.

          Most studies of authoritarianism have tended to show the same results: that the great tyrannies have been inefficient, disorganised, incomplete, that they have depended on the acquiescence of small groups of men. Knowing what we do now, every one of them appears more vulnerable than it did at the time.

          To conclude then: I hope I have convinced you that history has a role to play in the movement. It is a form of writing that compliments the work of activists. History is fun. History is useful. It provides those in the movement with a sense of how we got here. History shows up also the tyrannies and the weaknesses of those that we fight.