Writing on Ed George's New Reading Marx Blog

A Farewell to the Vanguard Party or a Return to Leninism? (2003)

Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

At the Third Congress, in 1921, we adopted a resolution on the organisational structure of the Communist Parties and on the methods and content of their activities. The resolution is an excellent one, but it is almost entirely Russian, that is to say, everything in it is based on Russian conditions. This is its good point, but it is also its failing. It is its failing because I am sure that no foreigner can read it. I have read it again before saying this. In the first place, it is too long, containing fifty or more points. Foreigners are not usually able to read such things. Secondly, even if they read it, they will not understand it because it is too Russian. Not because it is written in Russian—it has been excellently translated into all languages—but because it is thoroughly imbued with the Russian spirit. And thirdly, if by way of exception some foreigner does understand it, he cannot carry it out. This is its third defect. I have talked with a few of the foreign delegates and hope to discuss matters in detail with a large number of delegates from different countries during the Congress, although I shall not take part in its proceedings, for unfortunately it is impossible for me to do that. I have the impression that we made a big mistake with this resolution, namely, that we blocked our own road to further success. As I have said already, the resolution is excellently drafted; I am prepared to subscribe to every one of its fifty or more points. But we have not learnt how to present our Russian experience to foreigners. All that was said in the resolution has remained a dead letter. If we do not realise this, we shall be unable to move ahead.

"We Still Have Much to Learn from the Seventeenth Century" (2003)

Sat, 02 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Following as it does from that of Rodney Hilton last June, the recent death of Christopher Hill at the age of 91 marks the passing of another important member of that remarkable levy of twentieth-century British Marxist Historians (prominent in whose ranks stand, amongst others, Maurice Dobb, Eric Hobsbawm, Victor Kiernan, George Rudé, Dorothy Thompson, E P Thompson, Raphael Samuel, John Saville and Raymond Williams). Born into a northern English Methodist family, Hill began to read history as an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was to remain, with the exception of one year in Moscow in 1935, and two years teaching in Cardiff, for his entire academic life, finally successfully standing for the position of Master, which he held from 1965 to 1978. By graduation, he had already joined the Communist Party: he was to remain a member until the exodus precipitated by the crisis of 1956, finally leaving in 1957. Hill, however, uniquely among this pantheon, was able to win an unprecedented hearing and an acceptance within mainstream academe on his own terms as a serious historian in his own right; unlike, for example, E P Thompson, who shunned the pursuit of academic glory, preferring in its place a lifelong commitment to active politics (for which he deservedly won the respect of generations of footsoldiers of the left), or Hobsbawm, whose florescent reputation these days is rather more of the Sunday-supplement variety. In fact, such was Hill’s mainstream prestige within British – or rather English – academia that his interpretation on his speciality subject – seventeenth-century England, or, to put it another away, the English Revolution and civil war – although not nowadays accepted as the near orthodoxy it once was, is still for many entering the fray of debate around this period a necessary starting point, even if a starting point from which to develop a critique. Thus any assessment that is drawn up of Hill’s intellectual career must take account of both of the elements that make up the double-handed adjective “Marxist historian”: how did Marxist theory affect Hill’s work, and to what degree was he as a historian successful in developing a Marxist account of English-British history within a non-Marxist, if not actively anti-Marxist, academic milieu?

Revolutionary Socialists and the National Question: Five Draft Points (2003)

Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

1. Nations as such do not exist (apart from in the minds of nationalist theoreticians) other than in the form of national consciousness and national movements; national existence itself is a function of national movements and national consciousness, and not the other way round.

What is a nation? A nation, in the sense in which the word is commonly used and understood, refers to group of people which is demarcated off through the special and unique—“national”—qualities they share and embody; special qualities—comprising British-ness, Spanish-ness, German-ness, and so forth—which are not ultimately reducible to such tangibles as language, territory, or political institutions, but which take the form of the “national character” that the people both embody in the present and have embodied since time immemorial. For each nation thus understood the world is divided into “them” and “us”: us-ness being defined by the special foundational qualities of our own national character, and them-ness by their absence, which is, for each nation, the one thing that all other nations have in common. Nations do not therefore treat other nations with equanimity: being national does not signify being an equal member of a brotherhood of nations but precisely being different from all the other nations put together. The lack in other nations of that which makes us what we are not only makes us unique but also frequently marks us off as superior, and often our superiority over the rest of the other nations comes from the fact that we have been chosen by God as special: with alarming frequency, the native tongue of each nation is quite literally the language of heaven.

On "Stalinism" (2002)

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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The problem with coming up with a simple definition of Stalinism is that—since the term has been used to talk about such diverse elements as ideology, political practice, political parties and movements, forms of state governance and so on—to avoid a definition that is hopelessly unwieldy and ridiculously over-inclusive an a priori decision as to what exactly the term is to be applied has to be made, a decision which methodologically logically requires in turn some sort of definition. This elemental tautology lies at the heart of the great bulk of discussions on the nature of Stalinism. This lack of methodological clarity is only compounded by the fact that the very term itself has passed into the vernacular of politics as a term of abuse, applicable to anyone one doesn’t like, especially anyone with an “authoritarian” bent: thus not only was Gerry Healy a “Stalinist” in his pomp, but so was Tony Blair and in turn Margaret Thatcher too. Does the term have any value then? I am going to argue that it does, but what I intend to do here is try to return an analytical content to it, and to strip it of its pejorative force. A subsidiary objective of mine will necessarily be to argue strongly against the increasingly common view that the question of “Stalinism”—or, more accurately, the matters to which the label “Stalinism” is, not always fortuitously, applied—is now an historical rather than a contemporary one—a view which has been very much current within USFI circles over the last ten years or so. I shall suggest that an account of how the concept of Stalinism has been dealt with by ostensible non-Stalinists over the years raises questions acutely relevant to the kind of political clarification that revolutionaries need in the here and now and will need in the at least foreseeable future.

The Bolsheviks, the National Question and the Civil War (2002)

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The policy of Bolshevism on the national question, having ensured the victory of the October revolution, also helped the Soviet Union to hold out afterward notwithstanding inner centrifugal forces and a hostile environment.

—Leon Trotsky

During a debate on the national question in an internet forum, I was challenged on a comment I had made to the effect that “the Russian Revolution would not have taken place if it had not been for the positions of the Bolsheviks on the national question.” The objections that were raised were these:

"The Secret of the Forest is the Trees" (2001)

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The principle is not: Whoever wants to be a nation is a nation. It is just the opposite: A nation simply is, whether the individuals of which it is composed want to belong to the nation or not. A nation is not based on self-determination but on pre-determination.

—Friedrich Meinicke

A nation is […] a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future. It presupposes a past; it is summarised, however, in the present by a tangible fact, namely, consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life.

The Debate on the Bourgeois Revolution Revisited (2001)

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, some French historians have called for an end to the discussion of the causes and meaning of the French Revolution, declaring it to be ‘terminated’. But an occurrence that raises such fundamental philosophical and moral questions can never end. For the dispute is not only over what has happened in the past but also over what may happen in the future.

—Richard Pipes (The Russian Revolution 1899-1919 (London: Collins Harvill, 1990), xxiv.)

Marx and Engels and the National Question (1999)

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There are two ways to look at Marx and Engels: as the creators of a brilliant, but in its deepest essence, thoroughly critical, scientific method; or as church fathers of some sort, the bronzed figures of a monument. Those who have the latter vision will not have found this study to their taste. We, however, prefer to see them as they were in reality.

—Roman Rosdolsky

Benedict Anderson, the author of one of the most suggestive theoretical examinations of modern nationalism of recent years, offered the judgement that for Marxism nationalism represents an “anomaly”, and has, as a consequence, been “largely elided, rather than confronted”, theoretically speaking. This is evidently not intended to mean that the broader Marxist tradition—that movement incorporating not solely the theoretical explications of Marx and Engels themselves but also the practical experiences of subsequent generations of Marxists—has not concerned itself with the question of nationalism. Far from it, for the writings of Communists of such diverse outlooks as Kautsky and Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, Luxemburg and Bauer, are littered with endeavours to address the incidence of nationalism as both a theoretical question and as a practical difficulty as it presents itself to Marxist revolutionary politicians. The problem rather appears to be that there is no apparent direct lineage between the latter body of work and a “classical” framework of Marxist theory—as there is (naturally after having made allowances for theoretical discrepancies of a partial nature and the necessary evolution and development of concepts), in relation, say, to the inner mechanisms of the capitalist economy, or to the historical origins and functional operation of the modern state. Further: upon examination, it is not clear whether there is within “classical” Marxism itself even the elements of an essential notional framework upon which it is possible to develop, build and expand a coherent theoretical discourse; at first sight all we are able to discern are a series of fragmented and mutually contradictory references, apparently guided more by pragmatic considerations than by a framework of ‘scientific’ principles, and, after the passage of more than a century, ostensibly as of little use in the explanation of the modern world as is, say, the theory of “felicific calculus” of Bentham.

Notes on the "Nairn-Anderson Theses" (1997)

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What follows is an initial and provisional assessment of the strengths and weaknesses, ellipses and omissions, and contemporary relevance of the series of texts that have come to be known as the “Nairn-Anderson Theses”.

The key tenets of the “Theses” in my view can be broken up into the three following essential themes.

More (pdf, 125 KB): Notes on the “Nairn-Anderson Theses”