English Experiences: was there a Problem of Nationalism in the Work of the British Marxist Historians' Group?

In the 1940s and 1950s, the British Communist Party brought together a remarkably talented school of historians, including Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Victor Kiernan, A. L. Morton, George Rudé, John Saville, Edward (E. P.) Thompson and Christopher Hill. This generation transformed the way in which history was written, pioneering a new approach of 'history from below', the idea that the past could be studied through the records of the lived experiences of ordinary people. Christopher Hill's accounts of the English revolution, E. P. Thompson's William Morris and his Making of the English Working Class, and Eric Hobsbawm's books, Age of Revolution, Age of Capital, Age of Empire and Age of Extremes, remain some of the most powerful works ever written from within the Marxist tradition. The novelty of the group can best be seen in contrast to what preceded them. Much mainstream history writing was obsessed with a narrative record of great events. The choice of key dates was itself an embedded record of constitutional history. In Carlyle's Tory history, the past was dominated by the deeds of great men, heroes who imposed their will on the age. For the nineteenth century Whigs and Peelites, history was a sober record of modest constitutional advance. If Stubbs or Freemen were to be believed, then the function of the mediaeval historian was primarily to record the charters upon which later liberties were based.
Before the Marxist historians, the left had been guilty of its own obscurantism. Eric Hobsbawm writes that before 1946, 'there was no tradition of Marxist history in Britain.' This is too simple - it neglects a small but important group of texts published in England or available to readers in the 1930s and before. Any list would have to include at least Karl Marx's, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution and C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins, published in London in 1938. Yet it would be true to say that the majority of earlier left-wing histories, especially those written from within the Communist Parties, had tended to describe the past simply in terms of the succession of new classes and new ways of organising production. According to this model, within each society production grew until it could advance no further. There was then a revolution and a new society came into being. Class societies grew and declined independent of what people did to organise against them. This earlier style of crudely economic history writing can be seen in many different books, but here I will name just one, Theodore Rothstein's From Chartism to Labourism (1929). Rothstein's book was in many ways a powerful history of the origins of the British labour movement, but it treated capitalism simply as an economic system, and was consequently one-sided and remote from the actual experience of what social relationships actually felt like. At one stage, Rothstein went as far as to argue that the rise and fall of industrial strike movements could be traced in a neat inverse pattern to wages. As real wages rose, the number of strikes necessarily fell, and vice versa. From such a fatalistic 'Marxism', it followed that socialists should wait until the level of protests inevitably rose and capitalism finally collapsed under the pressure of its own contradictions. The role of historians was to simply discern the working-out of such grand economic processes, which were beyond the power of human beings to change.
In contrast to those writers who went before them, the British Marxist historians were more sensitive to the role of ordinary people in making history. E. P. Thompson's 'poor stockingers, Luddite croppers and obsolete hand-loom weavers' represented a generation of protest between the Levellers and Chartism. Christopher Hill, John Saville and Edward Thompson's festschrift for their mentor Dona Torr, gives a sense of the egalitarianism that motivated the work of the group as a whole. 'She made us feel history on our pulses', they wrote, 'History was not words on a page, not the goings-on of kings and prime ministers, not mere events. History was the sweat, blood, tears and triumphs of the common people, our people.' Such an approach was exciting, dangerous and new.
Yet the work of the British Marxist historians was a total package. Alongside the moments of clear intellectual advance, there were other passages in which development of an argument was perhaps less unambiguously benign. In a recent collection of historical essays, one younger historian Sam Ashman has accused the group of failing to transcend the limitations of the British Communist tradition in which they were nurtured. The charge is that the Communist Party of Great Britain adapted its Marxism to hostile political trends, including social democratic reformism and British nationalism. The leading members of the historians' group are praised for having broken from the Communist Party in 1956, but Ashman suggests that the nature of their break 'was only partial and left them with a number of theoretical and political weaknesses'. These claimed weaknesses include such theoretical gaps as a misunderstanding of Marx's model of base and superstructure, and also the practical flaws of 'Populism', 'Nationalism' and 'Pessimism'.
It is the middle claim that concerns us here. Marxism is described as a tradition of revolutionary internationalism. By contrast, the historians saw politics in terms of what Ashman describes as 'national roads to socialism'. They accepted the claim that no transformation could take place except within the framework of the nation-state. Therefore they accepted the linked claim that the working class could only triumph by attaching its demands to those of the middle classes. Then, having accepted all these points at the level of political theory, the group read back this strategy into the choices of previous generations. The result was an anachronistic reading of the past, in which certain historical possibilities were neglected, because they tended to out-step the boundaries placed by the historians. For Ashman, Christopher Hill's 'Norman Yoke' essay is a case in point. This legend claimed that pre-1066 England had been some sort of classless utopia. Written as a narrative account of the use of such myths, Hill described them as a form of nationalism, but one whose goals were redistributive, and certainly left-wing. Hill is accused of internalising the logic of the Norman Yoke, and accepting such radicalism as good sense for past times and his own. At the end of her piece, Ashman allows herself a few words to the jury.

The great strength of the Historians' Group was that it linked theory and practice together, albeit in a distorted, Stalinist way. But Stalinism left its mark on the group's writing of history. Those who did break with Stalinism never replaced it with an alternative rounded theoretical tradition - instead their rejection of Stalinism left them theoretically weakened. Socialists today stand in great debt to them but we must also reject their theoretical and practical limitations.

It should be observed that such critique was no doubt intended as a corrective of previous accounts. The majority of the writers who have examined the work of the British Marxist historians, have written in a much more favourable vein. For example, Bill Schwarz's well-known 1981 essay, 'The "people in History' identifies a similar strand of populism in the work of the group. Like Sam Ashman, Bill Schwarz portrays the Comintern adoption of the Popular Front, as a key moment in the origins of such Marxism. Yet in his account, this motif is a source of strength. Throughout his article Schwarz describes 'the democratic traditions of the national popular', or praises 'popular, democratic traditions', or writes that 'the Party and its Historians' Group held the commitment to people, nation and the historic struggle for democracy.' In his essay, Schwarz seems to elide at least three distinct social realities. (1) The 'people' are associated with (2) the 'nation', by which the author really seems to mean the state. Then the nation is associated with (3) 'the historic struggle for democracy', the movement to reform the state (1842, 1866), which has also been at times a struggle to overthrow it (1839, 1919). There seems to be no conceptual space in such an account for any idea at all of a contradiction (or even any possible contradiction) between the interests of the people and their rulers. Schwarz's essay was a landmark study of the group. His reading is broad, his comments intelligent and nuanced. Yet we can detect in his essay the hints of a jargon which was itself formed in the same crucible of the Popular Front.
In order to verify Ashman's criticisms, we need to make certain distinctions in the ways in which the British Marxist historians actually used the concept of the nation. To describe the history of certain 'nations' does not necessarily make you a 'nationalist'. But to accept the necessity or virtue of nationalism, or to argue these ideas back in time, anachronistically, would be nationalistic. The contrast between the Marxist historians and other left-wing traditions needs to be sharpened, if it is to be convincing. What about the other Marxist historians beyond Christopher Hill? At its end, the paper returns to the central claim - that nationalism corrupted the work of the British Marxist historians - is this true?

Hill, Thompson, Morton: Different uses of 'the Nation'

In her article, Ashman cites various books and papers as evidence of nationalism in the work of the group. One has already been mentioned - Hill's essay on the Norman Yoke. Hill is accused of possessing too much fondness for his source. This is explained in terms of the determining influence on the group of 1940s-era British Communism:

This political approach is also present in Christopher Hill's 1958 essay 'The Norman Yoke', Hill, in which he shows how English radicals from the 17th century well into the 19th century tended to see the ruling class as an alien group as a result of the Norman Conquest. This alliance is then used to justify a populist alliance of all classes against foreign rule.'

The critique is implied in the tense of the last verb. Ashman's point is not that the Norman Yoke was a populist alliance - that would be a neutral reading of Hill's work - but that Hill was still using the myth in our present time. This paper shall say more about that criticism shortly.
A second piece of evidence concerns Eric Hobsbawm's labour history. Ashman interprets him as arguing that the one goal of plebeian politics was to elect a reformist party, which then would conquer power through the state. She cites Hobsbawm on the working class, 'The effective framework of their class consciousness was, except at brief moments of revolution, the state and the politically defined nation.' This argument is associated with the claim that there would have to be separate national roads to socialism. The workers in Britain could only prosper through the advance of a left-wing government. But what if Labour showed no interest in governing, in a socialist way? In Hobsbawm's politics, Ashman suggests an answer - the people should be dissolved and another elected in its place. Such was the politics of the late 1970s social contract, socialism was expressed as working-class self-sacrifice. Left-wing patriotism was the most that could be asked for, no matter how attenuated the left-wing content was. In Eric Hobsbawm's history, our critic detects the affirmation of a certain strand of British Communist politics, as well as a closing-off of all more interesting possibilities that another historian might detect.
Ashman's third piece of evidence is taken from another of the leading figures of the group. This time it is Edward Thompson, who is criticised for portraying England herself as a potential site of socialist politics and a barrier against reactionary values. One of Thompson's speeches against the Common Market is cited, from 1975.

One can glimpse, as an outside chance, the possibility that we could effect here a peaceful transition - for the first time in the world - to a democratic socialist society ... The lines of British culture still run vigorously towards the point of change when our traditions and organisations cease to be defensive and become affirmative forces: the country becomes our own.

More than twenty-five years later, it would be easy to scoff at such lines. The test of such peaceful transition came under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan in 1974-9, and failed. More to the point, Thompson undoubtedly exaggerated the potential radicalism of the British national tradition - when it was ever true that Conservatives began at Calais? Ashman also quotes Thompson defending the English idiom of his own literary interests:

Take Marx and Vico and a few European novelists away and my most intimate pantheon would be a provincial tea party: a gathering of the English, the Anglo-Irish. Talk of free will and determinism, and I think first of Milton. Talk of man's inhumanity, I think of Swift. Talk of morality and revolution, and my mind is off with Wordsworth's 'Solitary'. Talk of the problems of self-activity and creative labour in a socialist society, and I am in an instant back with William Morris.

This passage is more nuanced that the one cited previously. Following Sam Ashman, we could criticise E. P. Thompson's style. But E. P. Thompson's deliberate claiming of the tag 'provincial' was intended to signal irony to his readers! Our historian (knowing that he was on weak ground) waved to the audience, and having waved, moved on.
There are other instances of 'nationalism' in the work of the British Marxist historians. The following examples are taken from the work of Dona Torr, a historian whose work I have discussed elsewhere. Torr's main work was a life of the British trade unionist Tom Mann. In her biography, Dona Torr stressed Tom Mann's 'English' qualities, but it would be perfectly easy to see this assessment as reducing the stature of Tom Mann, an internationalist who had built socialist parties and trade union on at least three continents. In another essay, Dona Torr described Karl Marx's Capital as a 'a history of England and much that lay behind its inspiration came from the first visit of Engels to England in 1842'. Certainly, Capital did include a history of the development of capitalism, and that process did take place in a systematic way first in England. Yet Capital was many other things as well. In such passages we can detect a reduction of the historical record - a healthy desire to rephrase Marxist ideas in an English idiom, being transformed into something else - and the hints of a pact between socialist and nationalist history, in which nationalism has the upper hand.
As well as Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson and Dona Torr, there were other figures associated with the historians' group. Among the first was A. L. Morton whose book, A People's History of England, was republished at the end of the Second World War. The resulting 1946 conference was the moment at which the CP History Group took form. There were already a number of talented individuals listed in the notes of the first meeting, including Dona Torr, Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm. But who was the man whose book had occasioned the gathering? Leslie Morton was fascinated by the national myths of the English, writing studies of the King Arthur stories, naming Malory as the poet of feudalism's decline. In his book The English Utopia this interest extended to the 'land of Cockaygne' a peasant utopia without quarrel or strife, where the food is plentiful, indeed it even serves itself. It would not be too harsh to suggest that Morton's socialism elided the notion of the 'Common people' with the 'Common English people', so that the former had no independent meaning without the latter. It was the politics of socialism in one country - in its Western European form - expressed on the historical terrain.
A. L. Morton was never part of the inner circle. Properly speaking, he belongs to an earlier generation of socialist writers. He can only be included if we accept the claim that the Marxist historians were a broad group whose edges were never clearly defined. Indeed if we do accept this broad definition, then we could certainly include in membership of the group several writers who were influenced by its ideas, but who were nor part of the inner circle. One such would be Sidney Pollard, a founding member of the Society of the Study for Labour History, a veteran member of the Communist group at the LSE, and like Hobsbawm a refugee from 1930s Europe. Pollard's most impressive book, Marginal Europe argues that industrialisation has happened in regions, not at the level of the nation. It also suggests that European history is a narrative of growing economic integration, culminating in the defeat of the state. By any test, the argument of the book is regionalist and internationalist, not nationalist. But such politics do not necessarily make Pollard a model Marxist, or even a model Marxist historian. One surviving colleague, Peter Mathias suggests that over the course of his life, Sidney Pollard gradually lost interest in socialist theory, 'Commitment to a generalised Marxism was never … apparent in his mainline work in economic history, particularly [not] in his later writings.' You could search Pollard's last ten books for a sustained discussion of any of Marx's theories, but you would be searching in vain.
Ashman signals out for criticism several former members of the CP historians' group. But if we could consider their work as a totality, then it is likely that at least some writers would escape censure. One example might be Victor Kiernan, whose research into the history of European empire in Africa suggests a more critical reading of British history. The historian of African liberation Basil Davidson is another such internationalist. He was linked by influences and generation to Thompson, and yet Davidson's sympathy with colonial revolt was even more obvious than Kiernan's. One problem lies in distinguishing between these different uses, between Thompson's ironic bêtises, and Torr's lapse into myth, or at the edges, between Morton's anachronism and Pollard's indifference to the nation state.

Nationalism in historical practice

One of Ashman's most basic claims is that Marxists should not be nationalistic. Yet this claim is initially abstract, in at least two ways. First, it lacks a sense of the distinctions commonly made in socialist theory between different nationalisms. It is not true that either Karl Marx or the early 'classical Marxists' of the 1880s and 1890s, accepted that all nationalisms were equally bad. At the danger of some simplification, we could say that (1) Marx and the classical Marxists were generally opposed to nationalism. (2) Yet most classical Marxists distinguished between a 'nationalism of the oppressed' and a 'nationalism of the oppressor'. (3) Although it was felt that Marxists should support the national movements of oppressed minorities, this was by no means a universal rule. In terms of Britain, the key distinction was that contained within point two. Post-war historians could hardly maintain that Britain was a colony. Instead, it had been the world's major imperial power through the nineteenth century. In that sense, the critique is right - you would expect 'Marxist' activists to meet all expressions of British nationalism with scepticism or contempt.
Second, Ashman assumes that what is true of political practice is necessarily true of historical practice. This latter point is not unfair, because at several stages of their activist and historical careers, many of the Marxist historians themselves employed a similar, 'political' logic. Take for example Dona Torr's account of the famous controversy between Christopher Hill and Jurgen Kuczynski, concerning the 1640 revolution in Britain. This is how Torr remembered the argument in a letter to Brian Pearce:

We have certainly achieved something since the almost incredibly difficult struggles of 1940 to get anything in the LM [Labour Monthly] disagreeing with PF [Kuczynski] and the refusal to publish anything on the testimony of the Eng revolution of 1640 or to accept it in the category of bourg. rev. Among the other failures of the chair was that of omitting to pay a tribute to Christopher for his pioneer work in this sphere. We all owe it to him in the first place and it was a victory for politics as well as theory

The last sentence places an emphasis on politics and theory as if they had a defining limit on history, which is undoubtedly how many members of the group were trained to think.
Yet political activism and history writing are different professions - they do possess different rules - and the tensions between them do need to be explored. The normative rules of Marxist discourse on national identity become much more complex when the person is no longer simply writing 'for' or 'against' the British nation, but is engaging with ideas of different political origin and in a different time. The last point is especially important. Could Sam Ashman be accused of policing the attitudes of previous generations, from a desire to solve the problems of her own generation? In a different context, Christopher Hill has argued that historians should be wary both of 'a patronisingly moralistic attitude towards the past' and 'a collusive adoption of earlier standards.' The historian needs two tests, writes Hill, 'that of his own age and that of the age about which he or she writes':

I do not myself think it right to hate God's enemies, because (among other reasons) I do not think any universally acceptable definition of 'God's enemies' can be found. Perhaps it could not be found in the 17th century, but many supposed it could, including Milton and Bunyan. 'The heroic Samson', Milton declared, 'thought it not impious but pious to kill those masters who were tyrants over their country.' … That men disagreed about who were God's enemies shows that standards were already changing. In some ways the 20th century historian is better informed about what was happening in 17th century England than men and women who lived there.

Some of these issues can be illustrated by looking again at Christopher Hill's essay on the Norman Yoke. In her piece, Ashman cited this paper as evidence of Hill's 'populism', suggesting that Hill had followed his source material, in using the myth to justify an alliance of all classes against foreign rule. Hill's essay engaged with the radical myth that that Saxon Britain had been some form of democratic or classless utopia, which had been destroyed with the invasion of the Normans in 1066. Hill defined the myth as follows:

Before 1066 the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of the country lived as free and equal citizens, governing themselves through representative institutions. The Norman Conquest deprived them of this liberty, and established the tyranny of an alien King and landlords. But the people did not forget the rights they had lost. They fought continuously to recover them, with varying success. Concessions (Magna Carta, for instance) were from time to time extorted from their rulers, and always the tradition of lost Anglo-Saxon freedom was a stimulus to ever more insistent demands upon the successors of the Norman usurpers.

So did Hill accept this as a true insight to be applied in the present day? The essay claimed not. At the end of his piece, Hill wrote that the myth had become an anachronism. The revolution of steam, rail, and the cities had changed the face of Britain. The working class was increasingly industrial and urban, and it sought newer, more 'modern' banners, around which to rally. The enemy was no longer a Norman aristocracy, but the capitalist class. In Hill's words, when the working class became conscious of its strength, 'the backward look was replaced by socialist theories, which put the golden age in the future'.
The claim that Hill's work was contaminated by nationalism rests not on the intention of its author, but on the more subjective terrain of the impression left on the reader. Ashman seems to argue that Hill's essay is so characterised by sympathetic study of the sources, that the reader loses track of where Hill is speaking, and where the seventeenth-century radical begins. Nor indeed would this be an unusual reading of Hill's work. Conservatives have often claimed that Hill's interest in the milieu of sixteenth century radicalism was symptomatic of an unbalanced sympathy for the radicals of past generations. To use his own terms, it would not be 'moralistic' to accuse Hill of over-stepping the mark in detecting a proto-British Communism in the myth of the Norman Yoke, nor indeed would be it be unfair to detect hints in his work of 'collusion' with past values. But if we accept the idea of unconscious intention, we rapidly find ourselves in a world possessing more grey areas than white or black. So let us ignore for a moment the justice or otherwise of Ashman's critique of Hill's essay. What is perhaps more interesting is the underlying logic of her charge. At the base of her argument, the following rules can be identified. (1) A trueborn Marxist historian 'could' discuss British nationalism, but (2) the same historian 'should not' concede to nationalism. (3) Their work 'might' consider examples of British nationalism, but (4) it 'should not' dwell too lovingly on its subject. These suggestions are self-evidently tentative.

Moonlight or Moonshine?

We need to understand the moment at which the British Marxist historical project was launched. The organisational record of the group dates back to 1946, as has already been indicated. In his account, Bill Schwarz describes 'the romantic ardour' of the mid-1940s left, 'Fascism had been defeated, a radical and popular movement generated in the War symbolized the aspirations and potential for social reconstruction, and to these young Communists history mattered.' But the political roots of such Marxism go back to the transformation of Communist Politics in the middle of the 1930s. Victor Serge used the phrase 'Midnight in the century' to describe the period between Adolf Hitler's victory in 1933, and his eventual defeat. The rise of fascism was a challenge to the left, whose militants became Hitler's first victims. The Comintern also faced the task of explaining why it was that the members of the German Communist Party had refrained from co-operating with the Socialists to stop Hitler, preferring to target their fire on the social-democratic left. This policy of identifying potential allies as 'social fascists' was widely identified as a prime cause of the defeat. In 1934, French Communists began to explore the idea of unity with the moderate left. Next this process was expanded to include even right-wing elements, the liberal parties and some conservative forces. Across Europe, the Popular Front was born. The broadest possible alliance was agreed - up to the fringes of fascism itself.
For the critics of the Popular Front, the policy was an extraordinary step to the right. George Orwell, for one, condemned 'the nauseous spectacle of bishops, Communists, cocoa-magnates, publishers, duchesses and Labour MPs marching arm in arm to the tune of Rule Britannia'. Yet for its champions, the new line enabled Communists gained from this opportunity to reconnect to pre-Marxist socialist traditions, which had been unduly neglected. In France, the change of policy could be observed - neatly - in the choice of songs played at Communist rallies. The Internationale was now considered unplayable; in its place came the Republican Marseillaise. In Britain, the cultural politics of the Popular Front was expressed in the form of historical pageants. May Day parades were lead off by men and women carrying the symbols of Britain's folk-history - a story which might have had less 'progressive' meaning in other countries such as Ireland. Raphael Samuel reports that Communists 'set about deliberately fostering a sense of democratic heritage, and in these "March of History" pageants which the Party organised in 1936, Cromwell's portrait was borne proudly aloft along with those of John Ball and Wat Tyler.' Such politics continued, with further twists and turns, reaching its high-point in the wartime anti-fascist alliance of 1941-5.
For most of the historians, the Second World War was a moment of validation. Previous political choices were proven to be correct. Afterwards, many members of this generation would return to this period, and find in it a set of lessons, which could guide their hand through later turmoil, of personal, political or historical origin. E. P. Thompson, a savage critic of the Communist Party's 'diabolical and hysterical' Marxism, never expressed anything but nostalgia and praise for the wartime conduct of the British Communists:

I recall a resolute and ingenious civilian army, increasingly hostile to the conventional military virtues, which became - far more than any of my younger friends will begin to credit - an anti-fascist and consciously anti-imperialist army. Its members voted Labour back in 1945: knowing why, as did the civilians back home. Many were infused with socialist ideas and expectations wildly in advance of the tepid rhetoric of today's Labour leaders ... Our expectations may have been shallow, but this was because we were overly utopian and ill-prepared for the betrayals at our backs.

In this passage, you can detect the clearest, most personal expression of Thompson's distinctive leftism - the idea that the people of the war-time anti-fascist alliance were the generation against which any later politics should be judged. But note as well the tone of generational malaise, the sense that such left-wing patriotic values had no place in 1970s Britain, and made little sense, even to the younger generations of the left.
One problem of the Popular Front was that its politics - including left nationalism and reformism - were not adopted tactically, but strategically. However we judge them in 1941, they continued to guide the British CP from the years of gold through the years of bronze. Under their influence British Communists warned Labour not to stand against the Tories in 1945, telling workers that it would be selfish to reject Winston Churchill after his wartime victory. The continuing nationalism of the post-war British Communist Party was not just a retreat from Classical Marxism; it was a decline from the standards of its own past. The Communists welcomed Jamaican immigrants on the Empire Windrush in 1948. But they opposed the immigration of 'fascist Poles' and Eastern Europeans to Britain. Harry Pollitt's book, Looking Ahead, combined left wing rhetoric with nationalist attacks on migration. 'Does it make sense that we allow 500,000 of our best young men to put their names down for emigration abroad when at the same time we employ Poles who ought to be back in their own country?' Similarly, the 1951 version of The British Road to Socialism combined left attacks on the Labour Party with an unpleasant and anti-Marxist chauvinist streak.

The Communist Party declares that the leaders of the Tory, Liberal and Labour parties and their spokesmen in the press and on the BBC are betraying the interests of Britain to dollar imperialism. Our call is for the unity of all true patriots to defend British national interest and independence.

It is only right then to criticise the nationalism of the leading Communist politicians. But do we apply the same standards to the historians? Does Ashman even succeed in establishing that the historians deserve to be considered in the same light?

The reluctant host

In order to understand the distinctive historical politics of the group, we need to understand the politics of Edward Thompson. Most contemporaries regarded him as the standard-bearer of this generation. It was Thompson who edited The Reasoner, together with his friend John Saville. It was Thompson who led the exodus of the historians from the Communist Party in 1956. His great book, The Making of the English Working Class represented the politics of the first New Left on the historical terrain. Its publication was a historical moment, in its own right. It was Thompson again, who faced-down Althusser and his British disciples, in a series of set-piece intellectual debates, which did more than anything to establish the fact of a distinctive British Marxist historical tradition. In his 1973 essay, 'An Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski', Thompson asked a typically rhetorical question, 'Why should one maintain allegiance to the [Marxist] tradition at all?' His answer is worth quoting - not least because it contains the fullest contemporary statement of identification with the group. ' In my own case', he wrote, 'the choice presents no difficulty':

Marxist historiography was never, in Britain, deformed beyond recovery, even when failing to make a clear intellectual disengagement with Stalinism. We had after all, the living line of Marx's analysis of British history - in Capital, in Marx and Engels' correspondence - continually present to us. To work as a Marxist historian in Britain means to work within a tradition founded by Marx, enriched by independent and complementary insights by William Morris, enlarged in recent times in specialist ways by such men and women as V. Gordon Childe, Maurice Dobb, Dona Torr and George Thomson, and to have as colleagues and scholars such scholars as Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, Eric Hobsbawm, V. G. Kiernan ... I could find no possible cause for dishonour in claiming a place in this tradition.

We find ourselves therefore seated once again at E. P. Thompson's 'provincial tea party', and on the terrain of his claim (cited earlier) that all the best insights of Marxism were previously implied in the works of Morris, Milton, Wordsworth and Swift. We have already found this passage cited by Ashman, and without additional comment. Its nationalist phrasing is surely evident. We have already observed the irony of Thompson's claimed provincialism, but what sort of defence is that? True words can accompany jest. More context is required.
Edward Thompson's defence of a distinctively British Marxism was made most explicit in two linked articles, 'The Peculiarities of the English' and the 'Open Letter'. Both were written as intellectual broadsides, the first in reply to Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn's thesis of British exceptionalism, the second as a response to signs that Kolakowski, a prominent anti-Stalinist dissident, was blaming the entire political left for the privations suffered in Eastern Europe. While the reference to provincialism dates form the latter source, its roots belong properly to the former. Nairn had made the claim that Britain had never experienced a successful bourgeois revolution. The result was felt on the level of ideology, in 'English separateness and provincialism; English backwardness and traditionalism; English religiosity and moralistic vapourising, paltry English "empiricism"'. We know from the text several reasons why these charges struck Thompson as harsh - because the tone reminded him of that Stalinism which he had rejected in 1956; because Nairn and Anderson wrote as if there had been no space for revolutionaries in all of British history; because they raised the question of what Thompson and his like had achieved in all these years? Such indeed was the situation of Thomson's party, 'I belong to an emaciated historical tradition, encapsulated within a hostile national culture which is itself both smug and resistant to intellectuality and failing in self-confidence; and yet I share the same idiom as the culture which is my reluctant host.' The task that Thompson set himself was to find the evidence of roots - to recognise both marginality and its antithesis. Having found the latter, he could then fight back, against outsiders, and against the scepticism of his host.
So how did he reply to the charge of nationalism? E. P. Thompson's complex polemic compelled him to adopt two quite different strategies. First of all, Thompson announced that Britain was no different from other European countries. The story of different national histories demonstrated ample evidence of inter-connection. In their history, Nairn and Anderson had created 'hermetic divisions between national cultures which are quite unreal (one thinks of Hobbes, Hume and Rousseau, Coleridge and German philosophy)'. London was a centre of European culture, Europe (like Britain) a home of progress and reaction alike. These passages were to be read deadpan. Second, Edward Thompson played with the Nairn critique. Was it so bad to be English, he asked? The logic of his argument required him to assert that revolutionaries had played a proud role in British history, and were genuinely part of British culture, English idiom. Here we find Thompson loudly asserting his national roots. 'Other Countries ... have not always and in every respect done Better than the British, despite their vertical intelligentsia and their hegemonic proletariat'. It was in these passages that we find the irony, here the scorn.
In the lonely hour of the last resort (whose sounding Thompson professed never to hear), the two polemical strategies adopted by our historian were ultimately incompatible. If all national cultures were inter-linked, then why bother to defend Britishness? On the other hand, if British culture was so happily amenable to Marxist influence, then how had this benign context developed alone? Indeed if Britain was so far in the van of socialist advance, then how and why had these diverse critics acquired the temerity to find her in the rear? Undoubtedly, Thompson had the better of the skirmish - his account succeeds in humbling Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson. But there hints of a nationalist infection in his account, which emerged because his history was expressed in part on that terrain.

Adopting Invented Tradition

One problem with marking E. P. Thompson down as a nationalist, is that so much of his politics were expressed in an internationalist form. The obvious example is his campaigning work for the international peace movement. By the mid-1980s, Thompson's preferred instrument was END, the European Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. We could also cite his support for movements of the oppressed in the Third World, including above all India. Thompson's was not a British nationalist. His politics were generous, egalitarian and sincere. The same could not quite be said for Eric Hobsbawm. For while Thompson's commitment socialist humanism drove him to leave the British Communist Party in 1956, Hobsbawm remained, becoming the leading strategist of the party. His position compelled him to adapt to a certain realpolitik. In his political interventions, Hobsbawm was used to justify a political drift to the right, making him in one view '[Neil] Kinnock's favourite Marxist'. There was undoubtedly a cynicism to Hobsbawm's treatment of the national question, a scepticism which while political in origin, was historical in expression.
Some of the problems of Eric Hobsbawm's approach can be seen in his treatment of the wartime alliance 'Against the Common Enemy' which forms the centre of his major twentieth-century narrative, The Age of Extremes. Hobsbawm argues that the 'astonishing unity of opposites, Roosevelt and Stalin, Churchill and the British socialists, de Gaulle and the French Communists' was made possible by a previous common support for Republican Spain. The problem was fascism, the solution was the widest possible anti-fascist alliance. But socialists and conservatives did not make natural bed-fellows. Unity gave a political veto to the right - the Communists could not honestly applaud liberal or nationalist politicians, if they were simultaneously plotting the transformation to a workers' state. What happened to the goals of the Spanish and then European Communists, when they discovered that 'revolution … was not the issue: the defence of democracy was'? The short answer - for Hobsbawm - is that the movement acquired a higher understanding of socialist tactics:

It reflected a deliberate shift from an insurrectionary to a gradualist, from a confrontational to a negotiating, even a parliamentary, way to power. In the light of the Spanish people's reaction to the coup, which was undoubtedly revolutionary, Communists could now see how an essentially defensive tactic, imposed by the desperate situation of their movement after Hitler's accession to power, opened perspectives of advance … arising out of the imperatives of both wartime politics and economics. Landlords and capitalists who supported the rebels would lose their property; not as landlords and capitalists but as traitors.

We can observe in Hobsbawm's argument, a slippage from revolutionary socialism into left-wing nationalism. From now on, 'Landlords and capitalists who supported the rebels', were to be distinguished from true patriots, and not just in Spain. We could just as present the Popular Front as a diminution of socialist politics. Nationalism became a central category of all Communist discourse, squeezing out the prior knowledge that rejected patriotism as a scoundrel's game. Linked to this political weakness, a certain historical blindness follows. For in that phrase, 'Communists could now see', we see the deliberate mystification of a historical moment. If 'Communists' is meant to include the whole far left, then what has happened to the revolutionaries, outside of Spanish Communism, including the anarchists, the POUM and other forces? Other witnesses have taken a different view. George Orwell observed that the victims of repression in Spain were not the 'landlords and capitalists', but the workers of Barcelona, who were less willing than the Communists to regard self-sacrifice as the means to transform defence into attack. In his account, it is May 1937 which represents the moment at which such Communism triumphs. The police occupied the Barcelona telephone exchange, and dozens were killed, in order to prevent the revolution from getting out of hand. Such real disputes must be obscured from Hobsbawm's history, for they challenge an account in which one higher knowledge triumphs without dirtying its hands.

Conclusion

At the end of the paper, it is perhaps most useful to conclude by following Sam Ashman in describing the work of the British Marxist historians as a dual project. The relationship of the different parts remains in question, but the outlines of the analysis given by our critic are surely correct. On the one hand, the historians were dedicated to studying the lives of ordinary people. This determination brought them to the study of previous neglected peoples' lives. Yet many of these writers would not raise their heads (intellectually) above the parapets of the nation, and study experiences beyond the borders of their own state. Having limited their interests in this way, the majority of the British Marxist historians then demonstrated a linked tendency to search back into the past - looking for evidence of the continuous march of British labour - and ignoring evidence of social processes pointing towards a different egalitarian outcome, beyond their own time. There were of course, a few exceptions. But in order to understand the politics and the history writing of the British Marxist historians, then it is best to see that many members of the group were trained to believe that there was no contradiction between a socialist and left-wing national politics. Subsequent generations may or may not think the same.