Revolutionaries

Revolutionaries Read Free Page B

Book: Revolutionaries Read Free
Author: Eric J. Hobsbawm
Tags: History, Non-Fiction, Philosophy, Politics, PURCHASED
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is that it has little to contribute to its subject. Its basic stereotype is rather like the Victorian one of ‘the trades union’, and it therefore illuminates those who hold it more than communism.
    Mr Newton’s rather ambitiously named
The Sociology of British Communism
1 demonstrates, to the satisfaction of anyone ready to be convinced, that the witch-hunting school has no visible bearing on the British Communist Party. This CP does not consist, and has never consisted to any substantial extent, of deviants or alienated minorities. In so far as its social composition can be discovered – and Mr Newton has collated what information is available – it consists primarily of skilled and semi-skilled workers, largely engineers, builders and miners, and of school teachers who come largely from the same family backgrounds. As in the case of so-called ‘traditional radicalism’, it is ‘not supported by uprooted or unattached individuals, but on the contrary by individuals who are closely connected with their community and its radicalism’. It does not consist of ‘authoritarian personalities’ similar to fascists, and indeed the conventional myth that the two ‘extremes’ interchange easily has little basis in fact.
    Its activities did not and do not conform to the sociologist’s pattern of ‘mass movement’ (‘direct and activistic modes of response’ in which ‘the focus of attention was remote from personal experience and everyday life’). Whatever the ultimate aims of the party, its militants, in the unions or the unemployed movements between the wars, were passionately concerned with practical matters such as improving the condition of the workers here and now. There is not even evidence that the CP is any more oligarchic than other British parties, that its members pay less attention to inner-party democracy, or have a notably different attitude to their leaders.
    In brief, Mr Newton establishes at some length what everyone who has actual experience of British communists knows. They are, sociologically speaking, much what one would expect an activist working-class elite to be, sharing notably ‘the persistent attempt at self-improvement through self-education’ which is familiar to any student of the cadre of working-class leadership at all periods of British history. They are the kinds of people who have provided labour movements with leadership and a cutting edge at most times. Mr Newton implies that they are in this very like the Labour Party activists, and that the chief reason for the unusual smallness of the British CP is that (until recently) the Labour Party expressed the views of most politically conscious British workers quite satisfactorily. In this he is almost certainly right, though there has always been a working-class left which found it inadequate. This ultra-left is the subject of Mr Kendall’s book.
    The real question is whether it has constituted or constitutes a ‘revolutionary’ movement. In so far as the CP is concerned, what is at issue is not its subjective commitment to a fundamental social change, but the nature of the society in which it pursued and pursues its objectives, and the political context of its activities. For the young ultras of 1969, whose idea of revolution is, if not actually to stand on a barricade, then at least to make the same sort of noise as though standing on one, it is plainly not revolutionary and has long ceased to be so. But the question is more serious than that. How far can any party be functionally revolutionary in a country in which a classical revolution is simply not on the agenda, and which lacks even a living tradition of past revolution?
    Walter Kendall’s enquiry into the left of 1900–21 raises this question in an acute form. 2 The author himself sometimes appears to get lost in the intricacies of sectarian history and spends too much time on the argument

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