The Historiography of the Communist Party of Great Britain

Britain has always had a strong tradition of Marxist and Communist writing despite the fact that, politically, the Communist Party of Great Britain often fared less well than many of the Communist parties of the European continent, such as those in Italy and Span, for instance. Founded in 1920, the Communist Party of Great Britain sent several MPs to Westminster but never gained mass popularity. Ultimately, great masses of members left the party in the wake of Russia’s tyrannical involvement in the Hungarian uprising of 1956. Finally, the party ceased to exist in 1991. Yet, within, that period, and especially in the years 1940 to 1980, the influence, popularity and prominence of writers who were members of the Communist Party of Great Britain, was felt with notable effect on the British Labour Party and indeed much of British society. It is important to recognize the strong socialist tradition (also influenced by Marx and Engels) that existed before these Communist writers. It is also important to mention the recent writing about the CPGB since the vast troves of material that have become available to historians with the decease of Communism in the Soviet Union, wherein a debate rages as to the degree of subservience of the CPGB to Moscow during its existence. In exploring these themes, this paper shall explore how socialist writings paved the way for British Marxist writers. It shall then explore the significance of the Communist Party Historians Group and two of its most prominent members, before finally considering the impact of Soviet Russia and Maoist China upon British Marxist historiography.

In his book, The Relevance of British Socialism, former English Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, points out that “British socialism is essentially democratic and evolutionary”. Interestingly, he mentions Karl Marx only once in his book. Yet, despite this, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels did, of course, have a direct impact on socialism (with a small ‘s’) in Great Britain. Karl Marx, in fact, wrote his famous Das Capital in the British Museum in London, England. Meanwhile, Engels’ short work, Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 exposed the poor conditions of British workers and was an important influence on the creation of the Fabian Society in England. Members of the Fabian Society included many well-known and popular writers of the day, who identified themselves as socialists. Some of the most famous members of Fabian Society include the likes of H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

The Fabians were more interested in gradual change than the communist revolution and indeed many were involved in the founding of the British Labour Party in 1900, a party which had affiliated itself with the Second (Socialist) International in 1908. Lenin himself initially wanted the Communist Party of Great Britain to join forces with the Labour Party. Indeed, he saw the Labour Party as “the first step on the part of the really proletarian organizations of Britain towards a conscious class policy and towards a socialist workers’ party”. However, despite Lenin’s wishes that the parties join, the Labour Party was unwilling to affiliate and so remained separate. (The CPGB, however, did co-operate with Labour so as not to undercut the vote on the left.)

Thus, in the end, the Communist Party of Great Britain, rather than joining with Labour, grew as a separate institution from splinter groups, including the Social Democratic Federation that was founded by businessman, and friend of Marx, H.M Hyndman, as well as the artist William Morris and Eleanor Marx, Karl Marx’s daughter. However, despite this, there was always an important link between the two parties. For instance, George Orwell’s views on, and investigations into, poverty in England (as we see, for example, in his book The Road to Wigan Pier) led to his being placed under surveillance by Britain’s Special Branch as a dangerous revolutionary subversive. Indeed, Orwell was deeply affiliated with many communists, despite finally turning away from communism after the Stalinist suppression of the anarcho-syndicalists in the Spanish Civil War. He famously wrote, “As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents”. In Britain as elsewhere the influence of Marxist historiography (that is, the writing of history in line with Marxist principles, has been strong, while the example of the Communist party system as controlled by the Soviet Union has been heavily criticized.

In discussing the historiography of the British Communist Party of Great Britain, it is essential to consider the Communist Party Historians Group. The CPHG, a historical writing group, was a subdivision of the Communist Party of Great Britain, running from 1946-1956 (when the group broke up over the invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union). It was comprised of some of the greatest and most influential Marxist Historians in Britain at the time. Academics such as Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson, were important members as were Eric Hobsbawm, Raphael Samuels, as well some major non-academic thinkers such as A.L. Morton and Brian Pearce.

The writers of the Communist Party Historians Group contributed to what is now a very important aspect of history – social history, 'history from below'. This branch of historical study focuses not on the past grand achievements of kings and dukes, but rather upon the ordinary lives of ordinary people. The writers often focused on the seventeenth or nineteenth centuries, considering how the social conditions of these times influenced historical and political outcomes. It must be noted that the writers within the group were ambitious, creative and determined. They embraced an original methodology needed to embark on this new form of historical study, in order to draw out in-depth stories of characters often only briefly mentioned in previous history books. 


In 1952, some of the members of the CPHG established the prominent journal of social history, Past, and Present. The journal was itself very influential in the advancement of social history into the major subject it has now become. In fact, Past and Present, along with many works written by members of the CPHG are conventionally believed to exist among the 'origins of modern British social history'.

There are three main identifiable themes running through the works of CPHG writers. The first is the promotion of a revolutionary tradition. Indeed the writers often championed "the native radicalism and rebelliousness of the English 'common people'" with the intention of inspiring contemporary socialist and communist activists. The second was an approach to history from the viewpoint outlined in the works of Marx and Engels. These works rejected 'Great Man Theory', a 19th-century concept which states that one can plot the main events of history in terms of particularly charismatic and intelligent men and instead focused upon social conditions. Indeed, many members of the CPHG mentioned or paraphrased lines that appear towards the beginning of Marx's 1852 essay: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past". The third theme is the rejection of an over-determination of history. For instance, in Poverty of Theory, E.P. Thompson, responding to Althusser, states that his deterministic approach to history disallowed any possibility of rebellion.

After the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, the CPHG, like the Communist Party of Great Britain generally, lost many members. However, the group continued to release a quarterly journal and remained extant until the CPGB's disbanding in 1991. After the party broke up, the CPHG reopened under a new name, the Socialist History Society. Thus the great influence of the CHPG lives on through the SHS's biannual journal. However, the influence also continues through the ever more popularized study of social history.

One of the major members of the CPHG was Christopher Hill, a popular and highly respected historian, who wrote extensively about the English Civil War. Hill focused on class relationships and the economic infrastructures behind them. Stunkel states that one of Hill’s most distinguishable features is his abandonment of “the rigidity of dialectical materialism as a law (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) … while the role of class relations and economic forces in historical change was retained”. In terms of a historical approach, this allowed for a less deterministic outlook, enabling more room for subjectivity and the idea that there could have been different outcomes.

Christopher Hill later criticized Communist Party bureaucracy and wrote a Minority Report, a work which advocated measures that would free the Party from the Soviet Union’s oligarchical and “irresponsible” control. Not only was Hill’s Report critical of the Political Committee that controlled the Executive Committee – pointing out that a large majority of those members were financially dependent upon the party – its final accusation was directed at its subservience to Soviet policy, “a subservience that had disastrous consequences for the Party:” “A growing minority believe that the uncritical support given by the Executive Committee to Soviet policy divides, discredits, and isolates the Party, identifies Communism in the minds of British people with the denial of personal freedom and with certain indefensible policies and renders ineffective the Party’s efforts to combat anti-Soviet tendencies.” Hill, in turn, resigned from the party.

E.P. Thompson marks another prominent communist historian who, again, ultimately took great issue with the Communist Party of Great Britain. In the introduction of his 1990 book, Keith McClelland writes about Thompson’s, “The Making of the English Working Class (1963) – his best known and most influential book. McClelland states that, since its publication, it has had enduring importance as an account of Britain’s “working class and its cultural and political formation in the first industrial nation”. Writer William H. Sewell further highlights the significance of Thompson’s writings, within the corpus of British communist historiography. He states that “The Making of the English Working Class effectively set the agenda for an entire generation of labour historians”.

Sewell goes on to recount his own personal experience of revelation at first reading Thompson when studying as a graduate student at Berkeley in 1964. “I was already dissatisfied with the narrow focus of most existing labour history … [But] Thompson’s version of working-class history included not only trade unions, socialist doctrines, and real wages, but popular political and religious traditions, workshop rituals, back-room insurrectionary conspiracies, popular ballads…anonymous threatening letters, dog fights…trade festivals…beggars’ tricks…and so on in endless profusion. For me, and for a whole generation of young historians, the horizons of working-class history – and of history in general – were suddenly and enormously expanded…This revolutionary enlargement of the scope of working-class history has been Thompson’s greatest achievement.”

E.P. Thompson raises the question – addressed by many historians over time – what is the role and function of the intellectual? Keith McClelland says that Thompson identifies himself “as a kind of interlocutor of history, one through whose gaze the real meaning of the past will be disclosed”. In Thompson’s book, William Morris, McClelland says that Thompson “articulated many of the central concerns of the generation of Marxist historians to which he belongs: the place of the moral in socialism; the distinctiveness of an English tradition of socialism, and ambiguity about the status of the literary.” Finally, McClelland also states that Thompson’s book on artist and activist, William Morris, revealed some contradictions in contemporary Marxist politics. “If it was a book whose concerns broke out of the rigidities of Stalinism, it also affirmed the desirability of Soviet Communism.” Like Hill, Thompson ultimately resigned from the party over the issue of Soviet control.

Neal Wood’s book, Communism and British Intellectuals goes far in analyzing the Soviet Union’s influence on British Marxist historiography. Wood writes about and considers, at length, the discussion that took place in the letter columns of the Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker, in March 1956. (This is just prior to the Twenty-Fourth National Congress of the CPGB and just after the Soviet invasion of Hungary.) Wood reports that between the dates of February 29 and March 29, 1956, there were nearly sixty letters printed in the newspaper both about the situation relating to the Hungarian uprising and also concerning the rising tide of anti-intellectualism within the Communist Party. “About one-third were pro-Stalin…The other two-thirds of the letters were critical either of Stalin, of the USSR or of the CPGB and its leaders.” Notably, the one major communist writer who remained with the Communist party was Eric Hobsbawn.

The rift between the Soviet Union and Maoist China, which grew more pronounced during the 1950s and 1960s had an impact on the Communist Party of Great Britain; it created further divisions in the party. As Keith Laybourn writes, “Chinese Communism, with its emphasis upon the involvement of the whole community in the process of agricultural and industrial production, rather than the Soviet emphasis upon the role of the expert and heavy industrial development, had produced conflict with the Soviet Union from the time of the Great Leap Forward in 1958”. There was a small Pro-Chinese splinter group within the Communist Party of Great Britain, which gained some popularity, chiefly amongst Asians who had immigrated to Britain. (This was chiefly led by Michael McCreery, a New Zealander, who, in 1963, formed the Maoist group, the Committee to Defeat Revisionism for Communist Unity. ) Moreover, in general, the Sino-Soviet split, in turn, encouraged further rifts between Moscow and the British Communists.

In conclusion, it is apparent that Marx and his theories had a profound effect on British politics and that his ideals, even though changed by an insistence on democracy, were embraced by substantial portions of the British left. These included many socialist writers and journalists. They also included a very influential group of historians who profoundly influenced the way history was taught and presented. As this paper has shown, the Soviet Union and Maoist China impacted the way communist writers approached their work. It has also highlighted how socialist writers laid the groundwork for Marxist historians to become prominent forces in British writing. Furthermore, we have seen how the Communist Party Historians Group and some of its most famous are clearly very significant when it comes to the study of British communist writing and how they, boldly, undertook a creative approach to the study of history. All in all, British Marxist history has played a significant role in both the study of politics and history itself.

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