Guerrilla History - The British Marxist Historians w/ Harvey J. Kaye

Episode Date: December 23, 2022

This episode of Guerrilla History is with Professor Harvey J. Kaye about his book The British Marxist Historians, the first and most complete study of the work of the British Marxist intellectuals Maurice Dobb, Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, and E.P. Thompson, and has just gotten released as a new edition from Zer0 Books.  A fascinating conversation about a fascinating group of characters! Harvey J. Kaye is Professor Emeritus of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay.  In addition to The British Marxist Historians, he written numerous other books including Take Hold of Our History: Make America Radical Again, Thomas Paine and the Promise of America, and The Fight for the Four Freedoms.  He can be followed on twitter @harveyjkaye Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory  We also have a (free!) newsletter you can sign up for, a great resource for political education!

You don't remember Den Van Boo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to guerrilla history. the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history

and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm your host, Henry Huckamacki. Unfortunately, only joined by one of my co-hosts today. We have Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan, long-time no-see. Hi, Henry. It's good to be back with you yet again. Today we've done a couple of things, but it's always great to talk.

Yeah, the previous time that I saw Adnan today was about 30 minutes ago. So a little bit of an inside joke. Unfortunately, we're not joined by our other usual co-host, Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast, but he'll be back very, very soon. So do not worry, listeners. We are joined today by actually a longtime friend of Adnan's and mine, Professor Harvey J.K., who I've known about for many years at this point, but I've personally known since basically the start of the pandemic. So hello, Professor Harvey J.K. Welcome to guerrilla history. It's funny, given all the, all the times we talked about, maybe we could finally get together. I would not have imagined that we would be doing a show

together in which were, what, are we eight, nine, ten? How many, how many hours apart are we right now? We are eight hours apart at the moment. Eight hours apart. Okay. And yeah, thanks for having me, Henry. Of course. And the joke is that when the professor and I first became, you know, familiar with each other, we were only about a hundred miles apart because I was at my parents' place in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Harvey JK is at this point a professor emeritus of democracy studies at the University of Wisconsin Green Bay. But at this point, of course, I'm living in Russia. So I'm a little bit farther away from you these days than I was then professor.

But it's an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Oh, finally, long overdue, I must say. The topic today is going to be actually a pretty old book. I mean, not old in the grand scheme of things, but it's not a. a new book by any means. It's your book, the British Marxist historians, which has just been reprinted, republished by zero books. So I'm very happy that we're going to get to talk about this book today. The first question that I want to open with is, you know, this book came out in the mid-80s, and then it's been republished now. The current political climate and the current,

you know, consciousness of the people is very, very different than it was at that period of time. When the book first came out, we're talking about being in the midst of Reaganism, Thatcherism. Today, while of course we still have clown shows like the current British political climate going on and, you know, the perpetual clown show that is the United States' political climate, we do have much more of a sense that the general public knows what socialism is than almost any time in the past. So I'm wondering why at this juncture, in time, you felt like it was the right time to republish a book on the British Marxist historians? That's a really good question. And I really thank you for asking that. And I'll just want to point out to people that this is the third edition, actually.

The second appeared in 1996, which may also help explain how Eric Hobbsbaum wrote the forward when Eric has been, has passed away more than a decade. to go. Or at least that's my vague recollection of his passing. So it was, there was Reaganism, and then there was Clintonism. Okay. So we went from Reaganism, which was the right-wing version in some ways. That meant neoliberalism plus conservatism. And then we had Clintonism, which was neoliberalism unleashed. Okay. And now, of course, we're with Biden, and I will tell you that it's on any given day he comes across as if indeed he listens to Bernie Sanders. On another given day, when you look closely, it's like he can't fully shed the neoliberal politics

that characterize his decades in Congress. So here we are, these three different moments. Now, one of the things to remember is that a book begins before its publication. So the movement towards the book began, I'll speak both personally and politically, intellectually, beyond my own person, really did begin back in the mid-70s when I was working on my dissertation and which is what came to be titled, the political economy of seniorialism. I was really interested in what was originally a debate in Latin American studies on, you know, rooted in the question of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. That's the best way of putting it.

And in Latin America, the question had, not been phrased exactly like that, but the left development people, okay, the radical development people, such as Andr Gunder-Frank, had argued that the problem in Latin America, and he followed basically, and by the way, this was following the more liberal version of analysis of the Andean countries, even Brazil, of dual societies. That was their argument. These were dual societies, a modern and a backward society. And Ander-Gunders, Frank, who, of course, basically is the godfather to Emmanuel Wallerstein's modern world system. Can I assume, guys, that these references mean something to people who are listening?

Oh, yes. We had an episode, if the people have been listening, on world system theory and Andro, Frank, and dependency theory. Oh, okay, great. And I had gotten, I had actually got, this is, if you don't mind this personal story, I actually gotten fairly, I got deeply embedded. in the And the Andge and Frank dependency theory kinds of work, I thought it was because it was radical. It sounded exciting.

And I went, I actually went down to Mexico with a group of students, my second year doing the Ph.D. Well, first year doing the PhD and the second. And when I came back, I found I had a new office mate in the sociology department at LSU. And this office mate was a master's degree student who, by the way, played first-string tackle in football at Texas A&M. He was a big guy. We became really close friends and nobody messed around with me because he was that kind of big guy. Anyhow, I was telling him about my dissertation since he was really fascinated as a brand new graduate student. And he said to me, just stop from him.

Would you explain to me what exploitation means? And I fumbled the question so badly, at least I felt that I did, that I figured I'm in trouble. This dependency theory does not address exploitation. Okay. So rather disgruntled with myself, I walked off campus. I went to an old, not old, I went to a bookstore where they were old and new books being sold. I have a feeling the owners might have been radicals left over from the old left and somehow remained in Louisiana despite the politics of the state. And I discovered the work of Eugene Genovese. And Genevici was the great Marxist historian of slavery in the South. He eventually went on to become a conservative

and something of a reactionary, but he actually never gave up the sort of basic ingredients of Marxian questions. But I was reading his work off the shelves. Eventually, I bought them and read them all the way through. And I thought, man,

this whole question of class and class structure and class struggle and exploitation, the word exploitation became ever more easily defined in my brain, you know, one class living off the labor of another class, simple, straightforward.

And I thought, Jesus. I'm going to write to Genovese. I'm going to tell him my project about landlords and peasants in Spanish America, both in Mexico and the highlands of South America, and my interest in peasants' struggles and how they emerge, all that kind of stuff. So I wrote to him and he wrote back and he was, and I told him exactly what I've been doing. And he wrote back and he said, first of all, forget André Gunda Frank. Forget it. Okay. Stop reading that stuff. Just go read the British Marxist historians, and he laid them all out. Read these fellows. Now, I didn't have time to read the massive amount of work that would have required, but I actually read

into them. And I'm especially fascinated by Maurice Dobbs' studies in the development of capitalism and also Rodney Hilton, given his work on peasants in the medieval years in Europe. And in the end, in fact, I wrote a decidedly unusual dissertation for LSU. It was a decidedly political economic, Marxist kind of dissertation, titled, as I think I may have said before, the political economy of seniorialism. It was my argument that in fact, okay, that in fact the Latin American relations of expropriation represented its own, if you like, mode of production to use that classic term. And that, all of which, by the way, had begun with a professor, lecture I had had at the University of London when I was doing my master's degree there who asked me, could I

define the difference between an agricultural worker and a peasant? And he sent me home for the Christmas break with land tenure studies to look at and answer the question, are most Latin American rural laborers, peasants or workers? And that posed to me a question that really led later, because I was working in international relations on my master's thesis. This was a side kind of study. I was a minor, minor subject. So, you know, I came to that kind of work. And but when I was, when I finally landed a position here at the University of Wisconsin Green Bay, when in a department that was then called social change and development, and I was teaching the kinds of things I knew, I thought, well, you know, I've got time and I don't have the money to travel to Latin America.

I've got time. And I really threw myself into the writings of the British Marxist historians. And how long do we have on this? Because I would like to tell this little story. Oh, we've got all the time you've got to give us. Okay. Well, my, I had a very, very, I have, but I haven't seen him in some years, a very close friend who was teaching French and Russian at St. Cloud State University. His name was Bill Langan.

And he was very close to Fred Jamison, the great Marxist literary theorist. And every summer, or every, you know, almost every summer, they organized for the Marxist Literary Group of the Modern Language Association, a summer institute of one to two weeks at St. Cloud. And they would get, you know, maybe 50, even sometimes up to 100 people from around the country and around the world to come to the summer institute. And I had originally been teaching at St. Cloud on a one-year contract. And Bill said to me, Harvey, you have got to come this summer.

Because he knew my affection for the whole question of British Marxist historians. And he and I were constantly debating, well, for lack of a better way of putting it, historicism on my part, versus structurally. structuralism on his part as a literary theory person. It was, if you like, what we could summarize as E.P. Thompson versus Louis Althusser, okay? He said, you've got to come this summer because Stuart Hall is coming to speak, okay? The previous time, I think they had Terry Eagleton. I mean, it was this sort of lineup they did every one Brit had to come, they said.

So I went, and Hall hadn't arrived yet, and we went to the July 4th, fireworks in St. Cloud. When we got back, and I was staying at Bill's house, a bunch of us, well, maybe several of us, were in Bill's kitchen. And Bill, as a student of Russian language and who regularly took students to Russia, he pulled out a bottle of vodka from the freezer. And he poured vodka. I don't know how many, I don't know, I don't want to exaggerate, but I was drinking a fair bit of vodka that night. And it was late enough so that we got a call, it must have been like 12.30 at night by that time. We got a call from England from Stuart Hall in Birmingham. So they must have been like seven hours, I think six hours, you know, something like that apart.

He had woken up early because he had to warn Jameson and my friend Bill Langen that he could not come to the States for this event because the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham was receiving budget cuts. And he was about to move to the open university, and he didn't want to abandon his younger colleagues until he could resolve the crisis. So they, you know, they said, okay, we understand, don't worry. And they sat down and Jameson was saying, God, who's going to talk on this whole British debate about, you know, history versus structures and all that? And little did I realize, though, I saw it happen, Bill leaned over. You raised your hand. No, I didn't. I swear, no, I believe me, I did not. I had never spoken publicly

on the subject. And these literary theory people were all, except for Jameson even perhaps, they were all structuralists. Jameson was still sort of imbued with a Frankfurt school kind of sensibility. So, but Bill, my buddy, leaned over and whispered in Jameson's ear, Harvey can do it. So Jameson leans over to me and he says, so how did you like to talk on the British Marxist historians and that kind of stuff? And I, I, I, I, I, I had too many drinks, and I said, oh, yeah, oh, yeah. And now I can't, I'll be honest, I don't know if I was due to talk then the next morning

or like 24 hours later. The point is I had very little time to prepare. But I went to work, I laid out this talk I was going to give, and on the morning that I was due to talk, I think I was scheduled for 10 o'clock. At 9 o'clock, I don't know if everyone know this name. I didn't really know that much about her. Giatry Spivak was due to open up,

that day's proceedings. And she had just returned from Paris, and she was sort of the walking post-structuralist. That's the best way I can put it. I mean, she was armed with post-structuralism. Now, you should understand that structuralists and post-structuralists did not necessarily get along. I don't think even, the structures weren't even familiarized with post-structuralism at that

moment. And she spoke, and frankly, I didn't understand a word. not a word. And I'm not convinced that the structuralist understood a lot of it either. And unless they knew French, because she threw a lot of French words in as well.

And when they finished, she finished, they were very sweet about her. And they, maybe because she had a really reputation as being able to take you down. And so they were fairly gentle with her. So then it's my turn to speak.

And everybody understands English, well, my English anyhow. So I deliver this talk. and I can tell you, and I do not exaggerate, when I finished the Q&A, I felt like I had been mass spat upon, okay? I mean, mass spat upon. So I got up thinking, okay, I didn't, I wasn't physically spat upon, but that's the way I felt.

And I walked off ready not to have lunch with any of them, okay? But then Jameson just grabs me. and he said, I loved your talk. And if you'd do me the favor of writing it up, I'd like to publish it in social text. I don't know if it exists any longer social text, but at the time it was the Jameson and Company Journal. And it planted itself in my head, the thought of doing that.

So I came back to Wisconsin and did my teaching and all of that kind of stuff. And the next, and I decided to apply for a summer National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship to be part of a summer seminar on labor and the industrial revolution, had nothing to do with Latin America, had nothing to do with anything other than I wanted some summer money and I wanted to take my family back east to visit with my parents and it was being held at the Institute for Van Study in Princeton. And I thought, well, you know, we go to England because my wife is British. I can read up my, oh, I say England, but her father was Scottish and mother was Welsh. And I wanted to, I said I was going to spend the

summer reading Welsh labor history. But I had published enough so that the director of the seminar man named Bill Sewell Jr. just said, this guy's okay. I'll bring him in. So I got selected for the seminar. When I got to Princeton, what's that? I'm holding up his logics of history. I think it's a great book. I don't even know that book. Is that Bill Sewell? Yeah, Bill Sewell Juniors, Logics of History, Social Theory and Social Transformation. That makes sense. That's a kind of, Funny, I don't know it. I'm apologizing to you and to build, in fact. So when I got there, and the way it worked,

the very first day of the group meeting, he said, I'm going to just meet with each one if you want to want to talk about the projects you're each going to work on. I think there were, I can't remember, there were 12 or 20 of us in the group, okay? And most of them had a real connection to questions of labor, industrial revolution,

all that kind of stuff. Mine was avocation as opposed to it. Okay. And I sat down and Bill, because he did French history, he may have heard through the grapevine about this talk that I gave. And he said, you know, I heard you gave this talk last summer. Would you be willing to drop your project and just write up a paper on the British Marxist? And I thought, absolutely. You know, this is finally a moment to do that.

But the idea that maybe I would send it to Jameson. So I worked out of that summer. Bill's – and then I delivered it to the group, and Bill called me a side. after one. He said, that's just not going to work. And I said, what? He said, it's got to be a book. So when I got back to Green Bay, this is a very convoluted story, I got back to Green Bay, and I went into the library, I love libraries. I went to the library where the new bookshelves were, and I saw the selection of books titled Theoretical Traditions in the Social Sciences, edited by Anthony Giddens. And I thought, oh, this is interesting. And I thought, you know, I submitted my

article, my essay, my paper, I had submitted it to the Canadian Review of Sociology. That was it. But they warned me it's going to take at least six months to hear back, okay? And it wasn't because the mail went slow. It's just, that's the kind of turnaround time. I mean, academics are just like crazy. So I sent, I thought, what the hell? And I took the paper and I sent it to Giddens and I said, do you think this has any value? And within a couple of weeks, without even asking, did I want one, he arranged a contract for me with McMillan books, which later, by the way, shifted because he left McMillan, he was given an imprint titled called Polity Press, which was at Basil Blackwell publishing at the time. And thus I shifted radically from Latin American studies and all that to becoming, at least for the years ahead, history and social theory, historiographer of the British Marxist historians. So now, but I wrote it, and I've left out the key factor, Henry, so I apologize.

I've just told my early life, a young adult story. It's a kid. It's a good story. The key thing was that historians my age, which at that point was what, born in 49, so I was like 30 years old, 30 year olds. Okay. At that time, in Britain, were the ones who were waging the attacks on the British Marxist historians. And I jokingly used to say that this was this was the sons going after the fathers in order to lay claim to Cleo the muse, that kind of thing. Okay. But seriously, they were just

devastating in their criticisms. And I thought, first of all, they just don't get it. Okay. They just don't get it. And what I meant by they just don't get it is that to my mind, having come out, One of the reasons I did, I turned to the British Marxist and Eugene Genovese was that the theories that prevailed in social science regarding, for lack of a better way of putting it, inequality, class relations, why do struggles emerge and all that had little connection to history and they were a historical and character. I'm not sure you'll know what I mean, maybe Henry II, by when I say modernization theory, okay, it was like, you know, it's all predetermined stages. you had to go through. You know, God forbid there was any struggle that said, fuck modernization. We're going to go straight to socialism or anything like that, right?

Or for that matter, we're going to go straight to industrial capitalism and skip over this role of playing servants to the ruling classes of Europe, whatever it might be. So these folks were now developing the structuralism, which seemed so brilliant, like brilliant analysis, but there was no dynamism. There was no human agency. There was no appreciation that real people had literally suffered exploitation and out of the suffering had already been engaged in class struggle.

So the formula of the past, you guys probably know, in Marxism, not Marx himself, but in Marxism, was class structure, class consciousness struggle. And what the British historians effectively showed whether they were theoretically trying to do it or not was exploitation, class struggle, out of that emerges a class with a sense of itself, consciousness of itself, okay? Not necessarily the one that we might all want to predict or project, okay, because they too have their history, they have their understandings, okay? I mean, that's a whole thing we can get into sometime about what's the role. of intellectuals. That would be a good one sometime. Okay. But having said that, what the British historians were doing is they were literally taking, not taking for granted anything. They wanted to understand class struggles and their emergence and what that might entail in real British history. Now, the other thing is that they were themselves members of the Communist Party. Okay. They were

members of the Communist Party in the 30s, and after the war, they formed the Communist Party. Party historians group. And the Communist Party had expectations of the kinds of questions you would ask and also the way in which you would ask. But they did in their own way stay inside the understandings of the party, but they also broke with those understandings. They did not apply the formula that had been sort of laid down both by Lenin and even more effectively Stalin. Okay. And by the way, in fact, some of their more ardent members of the party were the ones who encouraged them. Donator, for example. Maurice Dao, who, you know, was a member of the Communist Party and in a part of a milieu at

Cambridge, which is curious because it was Keynes and Robinson and all them. And he was the Marxist of this milieu. But they really were interested in class struggle. And why were they interested in class struggle? Ultimately, because they couldn't, they weren't writing about the 20th century. In essence, they were sort of forbidden to do so in terms of the party's rules and regulations. Like, you know, you're going to do history. You're not going to start telling us about British class struggle. But they really were trying to figure out the nature of class struggle, which they were going to, you know, in their own fashion influence in the 20th century. So these, my counterparts in Britain were going after them. And I just got pissed. I used to

tell people, I don't write a book unless I'm pissed off. So I got angry. In fact, it was funny. when I contacted these historians, I had a feeling they thought I was one of that generation that was going to come after them, that I would interview them and then, you know, go after them. And I really did explain to them that I was not at all interested in structuralism, or at least in defending the idea, that I was really interested in questions of class struggle. And I did meet my counterparts over there, the ones who I, and we became kind of friendly. When I was at Birmingham, a few of them were actually living in the Birmingham area. I mean, it was very collegial, I could tell you that.

Different, and you might say, their relationship to some of their elders, but they were good guys. Anyhow, so that's where it stems from a kind of personal thing out of the dissertation. It stems from the political moment. And you can imagine, I left out the fact that the class war that we've seen waged by capital, These past 45, almost 50 years, if you go back to when in this country the Powell Memorandum was written, or when David Rockefeller went before a group of bankers and warned them that they were under siege and it was time for them to figure out how to respond to it. I mean, it was really earlier than the mid-70s. It really emerges in around 1970s, 71, the sense that they have got to do something to, how they put it, tempered democracy. They had to suppress this democratic upsurge that they were experiencing.

And by the way, they were right. They did have to. I mean, but they did so very so effectively. And the tragedy was that the diverse forces on the left never really cohered in the kind of broad, progressive, potentially socialist kinds of politics that came. By the way, I mean, it doesn't matter how we define socialism. I don't care if it's social democracy or socialism. The kind of politics that came out of the 60s was definitely heading in the direction. direction of social democracy.

Okay. And the coalition that might have emerged never happened, and it was exactly what they feared, and thus they preempted the emergence of that thing. But it's also the case that basically a lot of folks on the left just didn't know how to talk to the working class at all very effectively. And, you know, there was a really leadism, which was actually, you know, evident even in the best of the movements of the 60s. Sorry, is that? Okay. Oh, that's fascinating. You know, all that background, it really evokes this time where, you know, there was a lot of historical contestation, a lot of methodological questions and debates, you know, in the air. And that's what I think that I could just add, if I just add that in response to, I think you said, Henry, that today, of course, there's a, there's a greater sympathy or even empathy or the sense of, boy, wouldn't it be good if we had some kind of social democratic at the least kind of America as Bernie, in a Bernie Sanders-like fashion. That's true, but it's also the case that there was much more energy among socialist and Marxist intellectuals than, okay, than there is now.

I'm not saying it was better. I just think there was more energy there, okay? With all due respect to the likes of Jacobin and other kinds of efforts, it's just my sense. That's an interesting observation to make because, Well, what it points out to is that there have been very different, maybe as a consequence of some of those structuralists and post-structuralists that you were mentioning, were critiquing this previous generation that was doing real kind of Marxist-inspired historical study, that some of the other kinds of concerns and approaches and methodological elaborations that took place in academia went really far away from what you. You identify as an important nexus here of the relationship between sociology or the discipline of doing social scientific study of societies and historical analysis to, you know, more of this literary kind of understanding, this other linguistic structural and linguistic discourse analysis and so on. in some ways, as a result, that has robbed or drained away. You might say this real fruitful relationship between thinking about social transformation in the past.

And so what you pointed out in this book, and I think this is what I'd like to hear a little bit about, maybe as you reflect about why there's so much more intellectual energy than compared to now in terms of Marxist analysis, is that. This group of British Marxist historians, and I guess just for the readers who may not know the names of the people that you most focus on, I'll just list them briefly, that Maurice Dobb and the transition to capitalism, Rodney Hilton, was a medievalist, studied English peasants, Christopher Hill, who was an early modern English historian of the English Revolution, Eric Hobsbaum, who's hard to categorize, but, you know, all over the place, and E.P. Thompson on the English, working class, that they made a contribution, in your view, to Marxist and, well, social theory, really. And so maybe you could talk about that. That's one of the outcomes of their, you know, dynamic orientation. Yeah. Okay.

So, and I'll just say that it does become the case, though my generation, that the work that they did truly shaped a whole generation of social historians. in the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, India, and other parts of the world whose languages I don't read, okay? I mean, it really, really is the case. I mean, just to say what's even funny now is in this country, people know me for my work on Thomas Payne and FDR and all that kind of stuff. But if I leave the United States, at least it used to be the case, it was my work on the British Marxist, historians. And, you know, whether I was, by the way, I haven't left the United States enough lately, but, you know, whether it was Brazil, I would always get invitations from all

over the world years and years after the book, you know, anything you could, any chance you could come and talk about the British Marxists. Well, here's, this is the importance to me, the contribution. First of all, their focus on class struggle to me was absolutely essential. As a challenge, I never usually use this term, but I'll make, I will use it. To bourgeois, bourgeois historians, bourgeois social scientists. In other words, historians, for like a better word, liberal historians, social scientists, all of them were smart intellectuals doing good work. But as, I guess it was Searight Mills who said so much of social science after Marx, and he referred especially like to Max Weber, Emil Durkheim, who he also had tremendous respect for. But he said so much of what made their work at all, in many ways, exciting, even though it might have been misguided. was that it was a debate with Marx's ghost. Because how many times as a social theorist actually become a political, revolutionary, radical figure? So with Marx, you have Marx the intellectual, and you've got Marx, the author of, to my mind, still the greatest work of all of his writings

that he did with Engels, the Communist Manifesto. I mean, I mean, I just think it's a brilliant, brilliant essay. Absolutely. And you quote the first line here in your new preface, and that is one of my very favorite lines. It's really the opening, and it just has such an announcement. The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Right. And that was their working hypothesis. Right. They began with that as their working hypothesis. And as a consequence, they actually, for example, let's take medieval studies. You're medievalist. Yeah. Don't hesitate to correct me as I go through. Oh, no. This is going to be good. Okay. And by the way, as an undergraduate at Rutgers, I actually did.

a minor in medieval stuff, but I actually focused a little too much on monasticism. I had been listening to Gregorian Chance to study, and I thought, ah, this would be interesting. I'll look into this stuff. I had no intention of being either monastic or celibate or anything like that, okay, for the record. Okay. So the working hypothesis, medieval studies. The greatest medievalist to my mind. I don't expect you to defer to this. Okay. Anand. But is Mark Bloch? Okay. Oh, I'm with you. I'm with you. Okay. Okay. I love that. By the way, I don't know if you know, you know, his personal story. He was a very heroic figure. Yeah. He was in the French resistance and, you know, executed in Leon. That's right. He was, he escaped, though, from a concentration camp. Uh-huh. Rejoined resistance, recaptured and then they executed him. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, he fought, he had, he fought in the First World War. Right. And then he enlisted in middle age or older in the second. And he got, he was rescued, I guess, at Dunkirk and made it to England and, you know, decided no, he's French and he's got to go back. He, I think he expected some kind of resistance to emerge or at least some kind of, you know, troops to to emerge. And then he takes up residence back in Paris. He turned down offers to come to the new school for social research. and I think maybe other places as well

and he stayed, which of course would ultimately compel well, the Vichy folks sent him south to Leone and then the story we just recounted. Anyhow, so Mark Block was great, okay? But the one of the things about Block

is that you come away with it, really getting a, and this is classically French, you get a structure in your mind of what the medieval world is about. And of course, we're all taught if we spend any time with a medieval historian,

you know, that medieval understanding was a society of orders, right? I mean, it's the lords, the priests, and the peasants, okay? And they each have their function in this medieval order. So, in fact, which generally left out townsfolk, but that's neither here nor there right now. And so what Hilton is saying is that it completely misses the whole dynamism of any particular region of medieval Europe

and what's going on. And our peasants really just bowing to that, Catholic preached order? Or are they not, right? And how do you explain, he said, how do you explain the risings in his focus on in England? How do you explain like the English rising of 1381, known as the peasant rising? How do you explain other risings that ensue later? Now, keep in mind, there were other medieval historians who paid attention to that, but they generally wrote them off as millennial, what do they call millennial movement, millennia, you know, millinarians, right? That's right, yeah.

You know, and basically crazies, okay, or folks who maybe ate the wrong mushrooms, those kinds of things. Oh, yeah. And I read, I have to say, I just have to say here, you know, one of the great historians of the Crusades, this guy, Jonathan Riley Smith was like an ultra-conservative. Uh-huh. This is the kind of thing he did in an early article about some of the popular movements that absurd during the Crusades is they started talking about like mold on grain because. Because, you know, you can't. Because you can't have like these people actually questioning Catholic theology with their own real world experience. Yeah. Yes. No, exactly. And by the way, just as a sidebar to that, Catholic thought, okay, can be turned inside out and become a very revolutionary force as anyone who studied Latin American movements can tell you, okay? Well, as Marx himself even sort of suggests, you know, in his work, he says, okay, before they had real kind of objective scientific kind of analysis, religion is the, you know, cry of exploitation. I mean, it can be very radical. Yeah. Right. And in the English rising of 1381, I will come back to this other point. English rise, well, I'm actually, we're on the point. It doesn't matter. The English rising of 1381, you have the two leaders. It's what Tyler, who's a peasant, and John Ball, who's a cleric.

And basically, and that movement was fascinating. And it took Rodney Hilton's work to reveal how fascinating it was. I mean, this was a movement of peasants and tradesmen, not merchants. Right. Peasants and tradesmen. They actually had a vision of the England that they were fighting for. You can't get much more class conscious than the vision they had. They would eliminate landlordism.

And they would only, they did allow for one lord on the earth, and that would be the king, because they always ever you know people generally believe the king wasn't the guy who was exploiting them directly exactly the images in the hollywood film his advisors yes right that's right yeah and and you know we we've got to avoid the hollywood version that it's always the king the king the king the bastard but in fact as much as he may have been a son of a bitch the point was it was the it was the more immediate oppressors that you were going to try to go at you you were going to okay so so he reveals all of this hilton And he compels us to actually understand that, first of all, we don't know everything.

And we have, you know, Marx talked about even the educator needs to be educated or philosophy. What is it? Something like that. And so basically, one has to open one's mind to the possibilities that there are other ways of understanding, you know, what radicalism is about. So, anyhow. So just a brief aside for the listeners that are interested in the Peasants Revolt, we do have an episode on the Peasance Revolt with Taylor Genovese. So if you are interested in the rising of 1381, as Professor Harvey J.K. is talking about, just go back in our feed on wherever you get your podcasts.

You can find that. It's titled the English Peasants Revolt of 1381 with Taylor Genovese. So just that aside. No relation to Eugene Genovese, right? Not as far as I know. Taylor is a friend of mine. He's never mentioned that he is related to Eugene Genovese. Maybe he just doesn't want to confess it, but who knows?

I mean, based on Eugene Genovese's later career, that would be, you know, understandable, but he has never mentioned it to me personally. So I'm going to operate under the assumptions. You know, in spite of where Genovese ended up going, his trajectory, I will always have a soft spot in my heart for the man, because he really did turn me on to intellectually to what I needed to know, I thought. And moreover, he didn't leave it at that when they founded the journal Marxist perspectives, which survived through 10 very good issues and then didn't die because it was unpopular, died because of Genovese's own ego and desires. He put me on the advisory board. In fact, he would go around saying that this is a journal to enable folks who were even in

Louis, you know, young Marxist in Louisiana wouldn't feel isolated, I think he used to put it. But by the time the journal started, I was not in Louisiana any longer, just for the record. which is not a knock on Louisiana. It's politics aside. It's a wonderful place to have fun, eat good food, and enjoy good music. Okay, having said that, so I don't know what let me to meet. Well, okay, so it's the structure is all of a sudden becoming more dynamic. And, of course, in relation to the transition, I mean, if you're going to believe class struggle matters at all,

you're going to try to figure out how was it that feudalism is, if not actually transnational, ascended by the class struggle, at least how is it subverted and weakened and transformed in a way that a new kind of, if you like, set of relations of exploitation or as Brenner would say, relations of extraction emerge and that these new relations of extraction compel a new kind of economic and political activity, okay, and so on and so forth. So anyhow, one of the things that they clearly discovered along the way, way is that the base superstructure model was irrelevant to them in the classic form of the economic base and the political and cultural superstructure. I once read by way, there was

a historian. It might have been Alexander Gershchenkren or somebody like that who I think actually said, yeah, Marxists allow for the base because they really don't want to talk about it and they figure if they just leave it on the side and say everything's determined by it, they can get on to what they're really interested in culture and politics. That was some observation. But what's notable is that as Marxists themselves too often pursued it, I think it's a consequence in part of Engel's work. It's a consequence of people trying to simplify their arguments for non-Marxists. It's also a consequence of Stalinism. It's a consequence of a whole host of things that what they discovered was that how could you possibly understand these relations

of extraction, relations of exploitation, as simply economic when they're not? Okay. I mean, how do you, how is it that one class lives off of the labor of another class? There's a young economic historian years ago who didn't write a lot of stuff afterward. He moved more into academic administration. The name was Fritz Sturton Weaver. And I read his dissertation, which was on the southern economy. He was trying to explain southern economic backwardness. And he took a decidedly Marxian approach. And he had a lot of, line in there. And shit, I used to keep it on my wall. It was like, it takes a great deal of work and effort to maintain a system in which some people do the work and others enjoy the benefits. And so, in other words, you have to ask you, what does it take to, what does it take to create these social relations of production? And there are no social relations of production, which are not in, which are not necessarily at one of the same time, you know, construed by, constructed by law, by custom, by forces of order, by the needs of the workers themselves.

I mean, they're far more complex than anything we can define as economic, because economic generally gets reduced to the money, like even the wage relationship. If we call it, you know, the wage relationship, people think, well, you just mean the transfer of, you know, I pay you, you do the work. But it's far more than that. I mean, we know that exploitation means that, as they said, the class struggle is going to emerge and how are you going to keep them in their place? So what does that require?

What does that mean? Well, law requires preachers on Sunday, requires schools not talking about such things. I mean, sorry, I'm being a little simplistic. No, I think that's a really good point because, you know, that is sort of, if we just go back to that feudalism example, is like the Lord Vassal relationship, right? is of course an unequal one, and it was seen as very much part of the gift economy. It's a barter in-kind relationship. It's all framed by social bonds and relations of loyalty and the oath of service. And similarly between the Lord and the serf, you know, there's this kind of whole host of social and cultural relationships that buttress it that everyone thinks when you have the transition to capital. that what happens is, is that all of that is purely abstracted away, and we don't have.

It's not embedded in those social relationships when in fact, actually, it's just those social relationships have transformed and they're not as visible, you know, to us looking back at it. So I think that's the point that you're making that these historians really seized upon is that in order for that base economic, you know, set of relations of production to actually continue to perpetuate itself to it had to there was going to be struggle happening so how was it you know able to manage those points of conflict and so on that obviously comes in social and cultural ideological relations that are have to be which are not merely super structural but embedded in the very experience itself right right and the word experience was fundamental to

their work, okay? That one of the things that, and this again was what also led me to them, along with Genovese, was the sociologist C. Wright Mills, who basically saw history and sociology as the only, the only effective way to do either one was to just treat them as the

same kind of thing. E.H. Carr said the same kind of thing. And the point is, and by the way, Anthony Ginnz was trying to say it, but he always got hung up as a social theorist because he didn't talk about history at all. Other than by the way of Marx's Weber and Durkheim as intellectual figures.

I'm talking about the book Capitalism and Modern Social Theory, which is a classic for teaching social theory. But it's the case that how can you understand class experience, how can you understand class struggle? How can you understand coming to consciousness if you don't see it through the course of time? Time was the element missing, utterly missing, experience, utterly missing from structuralist.

arguments okay that that's at least my recollection i haven't read that stuff in 40 well i mean i think altuzer you know himself just sort of like completely flattened history says it's totally irrelevant i mean you know he went so extreme in that structuralist anti-historical analysis of marxist theory that you know it led to um not only reactions like e p thompson you know really taking um a very serious uh look in the preface to the making of the English working class. I think one of the brilliant pieces of writing from a theoretical perspective is his account that you also talk about here in this book of it being a process, not just a static structural condition. And also on the other side,

the analytical Marxists, who also really disliked. Oh, yes. You know, they really disliked you know, that French, you know, Altusarian school, but they also wanted to maintain this very abstracted analytical structural view, like G.A. Cohen and people like that. Yeah, right. Right. Now, I never met Gerald Cohen. That's, that was his first. That is his first. That's right. Yeah, that's right. I've never, I never met him. And I can tell you that there are people who, I remember when my book was announced to coming out again, Ben wanted me to debate. debate, you know, I would be E.P. Thompson or whatever else, and he'd be GA Cohen. And I thought, I don't want to do that. I mean, I'm going to do Ben's podcast in a few weeks, but I'm hoping we're

not going to spend their time debate. But maybe talking to you guys now, I've had to be a little more analytical as I think maybe you'll equip me for all. We're prepping you, Harvey, for the historian side on that. So this is, of course, Ben Burgess has given them an argument. And he really likes G.A. Cohen. In fact, I did have a little preliminary discussion with him about it on his show, and we didn't really get into it, but I did express some sense of the E.P. Thompson perspective on this and dissatisfaction with this very abstracted philosophical approach to theory as historians, and as these British Marxist historians, you keep showing us. We're profoundly aware, there's something about the unfolding of experience in time that is not

grasped when we just talk about it in these abstract conceptual. You know, I'm going to, if I could pose a question here, okay, this is, I've often, I've often asked myself, this is the case. So why do I do all this? Whatever I've done, you know, why did I write about landlords and peasants? Why did I, why did I become fascinated by the arguments of the British Marxist historians? Why did I turn to Thomas, by the way, the British historians, one by one, as I spent time with them, said, you've written enough about us. Now go write some American history. They need that kind of perspective, okay, which is very sweet of them. And thus I ended up moving into the stories of American radicals and Thomas Payne, my childhood hero. And ultimately to the Roosevelt experience, because I thought that, in fact, the struggles of the 30s were either subordinated to, you know, in people's minds. It was either going to, it's all FDR, which is not. my view, and every wants me to talk like that. And regarding the so-called, you know, not so-called, the actual greatest generation,

they also got celebrated as war heroes, which may well are, you know, I'm not denying their fight against fascism, but what makes them truly great is they didn't only do that. They also literally transformed the United States in a progressive direction for all their faults and failings. We don't need to go over that here. Well, anyhow, so I've asked myself, why do I do this? Why do I do all this stuff, okay? And I can tell you that what really ultimately I realized is that it isn't just because I think, I know the stories need to be told.

I know that literally historical consciousness and memory plays a significant part in political action. And for too many years, intellectuals who call themselves Marxists and want to see radical transformation are getting stuck on questions that, to be honest, I think are fucking irrelevant. Okay? The question is, how do you engage? How do you engage the folks who you believe in pursuing their own emancipation, emancipate all of us? Okay. Is it really base in superstructure question?

Does it really, is it merely, I always think of it. analytics as anal somehow. Okay. And no, I mean, it's the idea of under, I mean, if we're going to, I mean, that's one of the reasons I was so fascinated by Antonio Gramsci. I mean, he was always my intellectual, within the, if you like, the communist tradition of intellectuals, he was the one alongside of Marx who spoke to me, okay, because he, you know, he wrote his prison notebooks to try to come to grips with what did we do wrong, what needs to be done, what's the role of the party, what's the role of intellectuals. And what's curious is that he's clearly, he's riding in a way so that, you know, the fascists

who are literally controlling his everyday life won't necessarily see it as meaningful. You know, can prison guards make sense of that even in Italian? Okay, maybe, maybe not. But it's also the case, and people don't quite appreciate it. He didn't want to be seen as literally rejecting Lenin, but he was. He was rejecting Lenin, okay? I mean, it was an utter denial that literally the, that you needed intellectuals and you needed a Vanguard party to make history.

And he was doing that because he really got back to that idea of Marx about even the educator needed to be educated. And it isn't that, I don't believe for a moment that working people are only capable of some kind of limited trade union consciousness. Look, there was a really great labor historian in the United States passed away several years ago who was very, very, very, very close to Edward Thompson. And I actually met him and we became friends

because we were both in England for a year back in 86, 87, and Edward had us both over to the house at the same time. But this man was Edward's generation, not my generation. David Montgomery. And he wrote a book called Workers Control in America. And one of the things about David is he actually spent time working in factories. I don't know if he was an organizer or just literally a working class kid who had to make

his way up before he went on to a Ph.D. And he explained, he actually said an interview at a time, he said, I learned the possibilities of sort of, you know, democratic transformation in the workplace and possibilities, you know, a real, you know, class struggle by watching workers themselves in their capacity to organize themselves, okay? The question was whether or not they would be able to, you know, link to a larger moment. So, I mean, he really saw, he wasn't kidding. He believed not for a moment that intellectuals in any way were superior or empowered more so than working people themselves were capable of empowering themselves.

And so the question is if intellectuals are going to be, you know, activists at the same time, and I don't think I'm truly an activist, but I do my best. I think it's how do we talk to these people and what do we have to learn for them and how do we articulate possibilities that resonate? in their own experiences and aspirations. And you can't do that. Sorry, I'm a little, I have two disciplines. I've never been terribly crazy about. One is psychology and the other's philosophy. And mostly because I don't understand philosophy well enough,

but Victor Kiernan and one of the other great British Marxist historians once, I once said to, he once said, what are you reading? And I laid out all the works of history. We had become good friends by the time. And I was editing a few, I ended up editing a few volumes of his writings. And one of the volumes I was working on was poets, politics, and the people, which is a collection of his writings on literature and how they link, and he used literature in many ways to offer a criticism of Thatcherism. It was really great stuff. He actually publicly called Margaret Thatcher more of a traitor than the traitors at the 30s communist spies, okay?

That was in the London Review of Books, by the way. And the piece is included in the, it's somewhere over here, in the collection that I edited. Anyhow, so I told, I confessed to Victor that I only read literature and fiction that was related to whatever historical work I was doing. And he said, I could hear him all the way in Edinburgh, Scotland, I'm sure he was going, you know, like tut, tut, tut, you know what, and he wrote back and he said, philosophy, I can understand you're ignoring. he said everything philosophers have written of consequence you can reduce to half a page and that's pretty much marks who wrote it okay and then he said then he said harvey historian without literature is like a man without a shadow and my he put me in my place i can tell you okay so uh i don't know what led me to say that but there you know but that's very interesting because it's about the uh sense of

expression in culture and language that might appeal and make sense to people's experience that a lot of leftist-Marxist theory hasn't done a great job, you know, of doing. And it reminds me a little bit of a quote from Walter Benjamin that you used in the beginning of this, that describe, of your new edition's preface that describes, it seems to me, a little bit of what you're after with using history to inform these kinds of public consciousness and workers' consciousness. They, you know, because the question is, well, what's the value of really talking about the past, right?

And you quoted here, only that historian will have the gift of fanning, the spark of hope in the past, who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins, and this enemy has not ceased to be victorious. And of course, we know the victors always write the history, but the point here is that the investments in the past are clearly important to the right. Why? Why is it so important for them to deny CRT or create the boogeyman that there might be some other narratives of U.S. history? It clearly has contemporary political relevance. So that that what you just were saying made me think about this quote and the project of both this book, but also your subsequent work, like what you're trying to do with history.

And this is a history podcast. Something that comes to my mind with regard to using things from the past and informing the working class, it also reminds me of another episode that we previously did also with Taylor Genovese on art in the working class, the translation that he did of Bogdanov's work from you know, 19, whatever, 15, I believe it originally came out something along those lines. And Taylor translated it into English. And this, this conversation that you were just having, Adnan, sounds very much like some of the debates that were going on between Bogdanov and Mayakovsky in terms of like, what is worth salvaging from the past? What is

worth, you know, utilizing in the present? And what should we be doing in terms of, you know, utilizing these components from the past versus creating an entirely new form of art in itself in order to inform the working class of what their role within society should be within our conception of what the working class in society should be, you know, a dictatorship of the proletariat, what, you know, the role of, you know, these various different things are. So it's a very interesting conversation and something that, again, the listeners can go back and listen to that episode that we did on art and the working class. when that came out.

You just foster a whole bunch of thoughts in my head. So first of all, I've often struggled with the thing you just referred to. And I can tell you that I've come to the conclusion that basically all of the treasures, I'm going to sound little bit, all of the treasures of human civilization are not, will be the property then of working people when the truly Democratic transformation occurs. That's the way to look at it. Why? Because their ancestors are the ones who gave all too much so that those things would happen. It emerges out of their own labors even if not directly. But that's not the point. I want to also refer to something else. Hearing you say it,

I have to tell you, I don't know if you guys would agree on it. So I believe that Marx used the term dictatorship of the proletariat as an ironic statement. I don't think he meant it for a moment. I think he did it just as a shock kind of thing is better than say ironic. I think that he really absolutely meant that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the ultimate democracy. Oh, absolutely. I think that I wouldn't say ironic for sure. I would disagree with that.

I was thinking shock, absolutely, because he's framing a dichotomy here between a dictator. of capital versus a dictatorship of the proletariat, using that same terminology to show what current society is already constituted as, you know, we believe that we're living in a democracy. You have to understand that even within a capitalist, you know, quote unquote democratic system, you are living in a dictatorship. It is simply a dictatorship of capital. And that by framing it in that way, rather than, you know, this is capitalist democracy, no, it is dictatorship of capital. Well, what would be the antithesis of a dictatorship of capital? It would be a dictatorship of the proletariat until, of course, you supersede that and end up with an entirely classless

society. And I disagree with you, but that will never resolve the question. But I will tell you that I had a conversation one evening with Rodney Hilton. And I said, one of the problems as well of structural analysis is it tends to be an analysis of is either yes or no. It's either it is it isn't. And we failed to consider the dynamics underway. And I said to him, what if Marx came back to life? And this was, remember, I was there in Britain in 19, this was, this conversation took place in the spring of 1987, some months before the Thatcherites smashed labor once again in a general election. And he said, what do you mean? And I said, well, look, we have seen the, we've seen the struggles. We've seen the creation of social democratic life. We have here, you have here

in Britain national health care. Okay. I mean, there are incredible transformations that have already taken place within the context of, for lack of a better way of putting it, sure, it's still capitalism. I said, but we, it, why do we assume it's an all or nothing kind of thing? Why can't we assume that we've literally begun to create the makings of socialism? Okay. And he said, he said absolutely agree with you and that should be your next book which i didn't do okay and i think that on the i think people i think look i the word social you and i we all know the word socialism has been until recently you know forget it in the united states and and i still think that bernie should have just said i'm a social democrat or an fDR democrat to win the election

if he could if he could have done so but i think that if we fail to consider if we fail to appreciate what transpired in the legacy of the New Deal, we were utterly, we were cynical and utterly incapable of literally defending and enhancing it. And that's the mistake, those are the kinds of mistakes we make. Okay. Social Security was created. Workers were empowered. I mean, those kinds of things. And, you know, the left generally, to some extent, they scorn the whole experience. And literally, they should have been the paramount defender. because the only way you save democracy in any of its forms is by enhancing it. And the more that we ourselves can identify with the progress of these past 200 years or so,

the more likely we are to be appealing to, attractive to, engaged by and heard by working people. That's, by the way, I've never put it quite so bluntly, but that's what I think. No, and I totally understand the perspective that you're coming from. And, you know, there is, of course, the counter narrative, the more Leninist perspective of, you know, even if you're living in a society that has these very, you know, firm welfare protections, has a lot of worker participation within decision making within their industry that you're still operating within an imperialist system, you know, exploiting the third world. That's, you know, one perspective, another perspective would be. But you know what? But you know what? I'm going to tell you a story when I was in grad school, when I was working on the Ph.D.

So I was in a course basically on development. And it was both for students who were like sociologists who were going to be working in programs in Louisiana, as well as the rest of us who might have had an interest in international development questions. And I started talking in exactly the terms you just spoke. Exactly the terms you just spoke. And one of my closest friends who was a liberal, no more than that, okay, said to me, If you really do believe what you just said, then you should not be working on landlords and peasants in Latin America. You should be working specifically on how the hell you get American working people to change this government because the change will take place, given the power structure of the world, you might say, is going to demand changing here.

And it's not, it's, if you start talking about imperialism to the American working people, sure, those who might have been immigrants from the Caribbean or anywhere else, they might grasp it. But you've got to figure out a language and it means you're going to make history that doesn't depend upon literally, if you're like, speaking to people in utterly alien terms. That's what I've learned from all this. And by that, I'm not arguing with you about it. I understand. No, no, no, I understand that. And I just wanted to, one other thing to throw all. there is that again you know in terms of and i'm not saying that you're wrong in any in any case i know

that you understand that this is just you know comradly pushback from a different perspective is that you know uh you also would have people saying that okay your perspective is that the method of achieving ultimate democracy socialism is that you would continuously enhance democracy other people would utilize utilize the quote from marks regarding the uh the paris commune in terms of you know you can't utilize ready-made state machinery from a capitalist system in order to achieve true liberation, socialism and communism. You have to dismantle the ready-made state machinery and rebuild from, you know, another, a new system entirely. And, you know, again, I understand your perspective. This is not an argument. I'm just putting that out there as a counter narrative.

And I'm not looking to argue about specifically about that. But, and I was listening so closely to you, I forgot what I was going to say, just so you know. Okay. If you don't mind, I'd like to ask a question about the book to try to kind of refocus us because, you know, we could, we could, you know, beat it around the bush for forever. You know, you mentioned Kiernan and he's somebody that you mentioned in passing throughout the book, but didn't devote a specific chapter on. So the question is kind of related to that. So in the book, you focus on various of the British Marxist historians, but there are some very important ones that were left out. Like Donator, for example, you mentioned a little bit earlier and is mentioned. Yeah, she has this, if you like, mentoring role is the best way. Right. So this is the question that I have is, you know, how did you, because she has a very important role. It's not the same role, but it is a very important role.

And so the question is, and I kind of know what you're saying, because you are trying to thread these people together in a way that is not really done outside of your work that I've seen anyway in terms of all of these individuals. working within a similar theoretical frame, the question would be, how did you develop your selection criteria for who you were going to be doing these chapters on and who was going to be kind of kept aside, used in passing, omitted almost entirely, you know, what was the selection criteria and how did you methodologically go about creating this framework that you were then going to thread together into a more theoretical conception of what they were doing? Okay. There are three things I went into this process, this experience. One is the fact that I was coming out of the transition for feudalism to capitalism question. Okay. The second one is the fact that I really was interested in this question of history from the bottom up as fundamental to this class struggle analysis, okay, that these weren't just followers, these peasants and workers, and artisans and slaves in sense of Genoese.

So I really was going to, that was imperative to me. And the third one, there was something else I was going to say, oh, Jesus. Well, and the other one had to do with the advice I was given. I should say there's a fourth one. The fourth one is a book contract gives you only so much space. That's important, okay? And I could tell you that sounds like a trivial, but it is not. book contracts are issued with a number of words specified.

So when you're thinking about that, you have to think, well, I can't do it all. Okay. And let's hope I live long enough to do more. Okay. Which you did in another collection. Which I did as the education of desire. So what happened was my original intention was to include someone who was not in the book in the end. And that's Raymond Williams, the Marxist,

literature prof at Cambridge who came out of a Welsh working class background and whose work fascinated me. And I can tell you, I read all of his work. I read his novels. I mean, I really was prepared to take him on. I even tried to reach out to him to try and interview him. But fortunately, I would actually say, because he really wasn't part of the historians group, which is the Communist Party historians group is the experience out of which they all came that mattered, you might say, as an intellectual tradition. The other thing was that Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, and Edward Thompson all were very gracious in saying, yes, when you come over, let's get together. In Thompson's case, he said, I'm terribly busy, but when you arrive in London, call me,

and if I'm, if I can, I will have you come out to the house and spend a couple of days with Dorothy and me. Rodney Hilton immediately said, come up to Birmingham. Christopher Hill said, come to Oxford. We'll spend an afternoon together lunches on me. And when I told Christopher the plan for the book, and I think I was already in part working on it, he said very bluntly, Raymond Williams was never one of us. And he didn't mean he was never a Marxist. Okay. What he meant was he was not in the historian's group. There actually was a literary group that existed within the Communist Party intellectual framework. But these folks that I was focused, they were in the Communist Party Historians group. And so I bowed him. But he also said to me, what about Kiernan and

Rudey? Victor Kiernan. Now, Kiernan, I could tell you, was intellectually fundamental to the group. In some ways, he actually was, as you challenged me a moment ago, I believe he was almost a conscience of the group in some respects regarding questions of British imperialism, because that really was his interest, imperialism. Rude was very much a part of the group, and at the outset, what my decision had to do with the fact that he worked half in French history, his fame is based more on his work on the French Revolution. perhaps than even on his study of 18th century Wilkes movements, the Wilkite movement. Okay, so the point here is that, and then fundamentally I come back to the thing, I only had so many words I was allowed. And I promised Christopher Hill, I would go on to include them. Now, I can tell you, as I think I said in one of the prefaces, that there was a, there is an

absence. It isn't just donator. There were women who made contributions, but they, but perhaps. Perhaps because all too many women have to spend a certain part of their time in those days in particular, however liberated a group of historians might seem to be, okay, they were not as productive in their writing and so on and so forth. I mean, Christopher Hill's wife, Bridget Hill, was a really fine historian. In fact, when they came to visit me and spoke to my students and hundreds of students, people came from all over the state of Wisconsin to hear them, Bridget, gave the better talk because she had learned how to lecture. Christopher had spent his almost entire career at Oxford and he was a man noted for, you know, you'll come up to my rooms and

we'll have our tutorial. Okay. But one on one, Christopher was unbelievable. I mean, I could have spent innumerable hours with him. So anyhow, so yes, there was the absence of women in that respect. Another absence was, of course, the absence on their part of addressing the presence of non-white Anglo-Saxon. Well, I mean, they did, each of them did not fail to attend to women in their work. The better question is why it was only by the time of the 18th and 19th, eventually in their work they didn't get to write histories of the 20th century other than Hobbsbom. But why was it that it was so white the histories, okay? You think it might well have developed. And I'd have to go back and look at the making English working class to see to what extent he might have found a way,

given the question of abolition, you know, the end of, you know, the emancipation and abolition in England. But anyhow, I mean, they did what they did. They were of a generation. They, in their own lives, I have little knowledge of their having been in any fashion racially inclined, you know, racially minded, so on and so forth. But it is interesting, though, is that they did pioneer and inspire quite a lot of interesting histories from below. And when you say from below and from the bottom up, we also think of subaltern, like the subalterns. Sorry, you know what, half hour ago is going to mention the subaltern studies, right? Absolutely.

You'll go take it away, yeah. Oh, yeah. Just to say that, like, obviously the subaltern history working group that has really done. so much to look at the history of colonialism through, you know, from the perspective of the colonized is analogous in some ways because, of course, they were also very interested in them as workers, as peasants in India, British India, was to look at, you know, how the history of exploitation that, you know, when you look at the English making of the English working class and bondsmen made free how some of those perspectives and approaches and methodological insights

could be applied for liberatory history in the anti-colonial struggle. So while they didn't themselves necessarily always talk about it, and I have to say I always found, you know, Hobbsbaum's kind of more world historical discussions, maybe a little thin when you really got to the texture of the non-Western world, maybe better in Latin America. because he did spend time there and he did, you know, take an interest. But that was much remedied by the work by non-Western historians or historians who were interested in, you know, British Empire from the perspective of the colonies. And that was methodologically very important, but drew inspiration clearly from the British Marxist group. Yeah, well, and in those terms,

I could tell you, I mean, the fact that it was Genevici who put me on to the British Marxist. I, you know, I knew of Hobbesbaum from my undergraduate readings in history. I actually knew of Rudey from that work, but I associated him with the French story more than the English story, which also was one of the things that made me discriminate when I was having to choose among them for the book. But

Genovese, when he was telling me, read them, what he really was saying, I read them, you should read them. He could never, he would never have been able to write for whatever faults we later came to see in the work. Roll Jordan Roll,

had not been the case that he read those historians. And for that matter, I don't even think he could have written the political economy of slavery without attention to Dobb and the transition from feudalism to capitalism question. Yeah, no, their impact, I mean, in fact, this you might find interesting. To this day, well, the book was translated, okay, was translated into Spanish, first in Spain, then when that license ran out, It came out two years ago in a new Argentinian translation. I have been, I'm literally this past few years, I've been giving Zoom lectures to Brazil on the British Marxists. And I was really done a major interview alongside of Marcus Rediker.

He and I were both interviewed by this Argentinian journal that was short-lived, but fabulous online journal. Revista de la Futura or something like that. So the interest in these historians is really tremendous. And the last couple of years, I've gotten more followers on Twitter, I think, as a consequence of the Spaniards and the Portuguese stuff that I don't speak Portuguese, but that kind of stuff. And then on top of that, India, I mean, you brought up the subaltern studies. I mean, in South Asia, the interest is phenomenal. By the way, it was also translated into Turkish.

Oh, interesting. Turkish translation published. There is a strong tradition of Marxist historical work in the Turkish Academy. Yeah. And then early on, there was a translation made the left in Taiwan on the British Marxist historians. And then after they did the translation, they didn't publish it. I've always had this feeling that the Chinese had already hijacked or pirated the book and was making its way around in some kind of pirated editions, and they just didn't know

if they could market it effectively. Anyhow, similarly, I think there were chapters translated in Russia that were making their way around. I can't read Russian, so I never discovered them. I can tell you that I didn't realize it was a Turkish translation until a Turkish friend said, oh, did you know? And I'm telling you the short version of the story. And then McMillan contacted them, and I finally got, they sent me copies.

And one last thing. Oh, go ahead. This is definitely, this, two moments that really amazed me. We're talking 19, the fall of 1985. Yeah, 85. And Christopher Hill and Bridget Hill are here staying with Lorna and me and our daughters at the house. So they, and they're going to give lectures at the university. and Christopher and Bridget and I went into the university

and I went into my office and I grabbed my mail and it was an you left this amazing 1985 fall I had an invitation would I ask would I be willing to accept an invitation to come to South Africa to a Boer University Wow Yeah yeah now keep in mind there was the academic boycott And I said to Christopher my God what do I do

and he said, well, I've already signed the boycott, but I bet if you contact the ANC representative here in the States, he will tell you go, okay? Take you, that he'll tell you to go. So I sent back my aunt, and by the way, oh, that was typed. They didn't say what I, no, they actually didn't say what I would be lecturing on, handwritten under the type. In other words, so that this would come to me,

but not go in the file at the Bauer University, was we use your book, the British Marxist historians, in our teaching. This is at the Boer University. And I kept thinking, wow, there are these things going on, and we just don't quite grasp them. If the most reactionary of universities is doing that kind of stuff, okay. And then the other one, hold on, the other one was, sorry, the other one was funny, and if I remember, I'm going to interrupt you and tell you, but go ahead. Absolutely.

Absolutely. Well, I did want to just ask a little bit about, and you've been so generous with your time, Harvey, but I did want to ask a little bit. Well, as you know, the only thing that remains for me today is David Feldman's show tonight. Right, exactly. Me too. Yeah, I have no idea what I'll discuss. But at any rate, that's how it goes. But what I wanted to ask also was just about the influence, you know, usually when we see kind of these new approaches of from below or at least a different approach than that old, you know, kind of political and cultural great men kind of, you know, history that, you know, the British Marxists were reacting against. But the other side, and of course you mentioned Mark Block at the very beginning, was the Anald School. And now that was both, that was a radically, radically

reorienting approach to history, but yet it wasn't something that contributed the same to my mind, theoretical rigor and productive analysis in this Marxist vein, because they weren't Marxists, they didn't have the kind of same kind of coherence in terms of the key theoretical questions they wanted to discuss and debate. What they had was more an approach. Let's look at, you know, peasants and other people, and we'll look at environmental and geographical factors, and we'll reorient from political history and legal history to social history. And that, of course, has been enormously influential. But I wondered how you would compare, in some senses, the sort of legacies of the British Marxist historians and this Anal school coming from Mark Block and then

later Brodell. Well, that is a, boy, that's a damn good question. And I'll tell, you know, one of the reasons, this is interesting, if you look at the French historiography of the, of those same period of, say, the 50s, the 60s, keep mind, Mark Block and Luciam Fev, they're the, they're the real founders of or the godfathers of the Annal school, in all tradition. In the pre-war period. And the pre-war, right, in the pre-war period. And Block, of course, dies in 19, is executed.

And Brodell, in many ways, is the air. He's the one who sort of, you know, brings it back. And I believe Brodell spent much of the war in a, in a, in a job. German, in a prison of war camp himself. He did. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He wrote his classic work, which was his dissertation, the, you know, the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip the second, you know, the draft of it. Right. And for anyone listening, let me make it clear. Braddell's work is a masterpiece of literature at the least, okay, to take in this ecological space. Okay. It's not. just the Mediterranean. It's the Mediterranean world and consider the tributaries, both material and otherwise, into that Mediterranean world. No, it's an absolutely wonderful work.

And that, by the way, Wallerstein's modern world system has got one foot in the Andrugendur Frank and one foot in the Annal school. I mean, it's the Annal people who generate Wallerstein's work, really. And when I was at University, well, what's it called, State University New York, Birmingham for this big conference on the modern world system, the key guest was Brodell. It was Wallerstein and Brodell talking, which tells you a great deal about the real intellectual source of Wallerstein's model. Well, here's the thing. There is also parallel to An al-School, this other tradition that comes out of the French Revolutionary History, historiography.

So you had the great George Lefev, probably the greatest of the French Revolutionary historians. Then you have Albert Saboul. Okay. And by the way, there's a crossover. George Rudei comes out of the Communist Party Historians Group.

He's Marxist historian. And he's also doing this work on the crowd in the French Revolution, which will be his classic. And in the archives, three men come together. It was Albert Sabul, Richard Cobb, the English historian, and George Rudey.

Rude is not a French name, by the way. His father was Norwegian. His name was Rude. Okay. But in English schools, especially boys' schools, they made a mockery of it. So he added the Rude, which gave it a kind of sex appeal almost, right? Okay. So the three of them would stay.

George told me these stories about how. they would allow themselves to be locked in the archives late at night. And in a certain hour, they'd have to sort of find their way out by climbing out windows. Well, George Lefebbb, the great historian of the French Revolution, he called them his three musketeers. Okay?

And Richard Cobb was not a Marxist. Sebel and Rude were Marxist. But Sebel was just this, he was one of these historians who worked on police in the French Revolution and crime. And as it was said, Cobb had no theory, but he just was fascinated. He would go down every alleyway that he could find in the archives in order to create this picture of police and criminality during the French Revolution. So anyhow, so you get the Annal school, which creates literally, I mean, they truly get their own center.

I can't say it in French, but they're housed together, you know. And they create, they send people all over the world from their school. and I came to know a few of them really great historian some of them actually were both Marxists and Brodellians which was an interesting mix well

Brodell's legacy if people really pay attention is it's a real materialist history it's because the idea of the long deret okay

do you know the historian Joan Wyn You know that name? Yeah, yeah. Joan Wallach, Scott, Joan Wallach, I mean, she was married. I don't know if she dropped a name or what, but okay. I was in a seminar with her that summer in labor and the Industrial Revolution. And I was a, I guess, a snotty new PhD, and I, she used this phrase long duet regarding

something about the history of journeymen in, it would be 18th or 19th century of France. And I said to her afterward, I said, I'm sorry. I think you're using Long-Doray in an inappropriate way. And she said, what do you mean? I said, well, the Long-Durray, first of all, wouldn't concern itself with journeymen. They'd concern themselves with trade. And I said, Brodell was talking over a stretch of time

that extended well beyond, you know, any kind of economic era into this grand thing. She didn't like my question. Anyhow, but having said that, so it's really an almost ecological history when you read it And given the times in which we live, we could probably all use a good dose of reading Brodell and reflecting on the significance of it. Also, some of them actually, there's Pierre Villar, who I think has been, was a part of the school, but decidedly a Marxist. And then I also want to say, then there's one historian, Carlo Ginsburg.

You know what I mean? Oh, yes, yes. The cheese and the worm. The cheese and the worms, right? Right. But if you read them, you could see the influence of Thompson in a way. in the way they're doing it, though they've gone even more cultural, perhaps, in some fashion. So, in other words, there were those of the next generation who I think found themselves both influenced by the British, or at least by Thompson, okay, and maybe Hilton and Hill, and also by their elders, Brodell and the others, you know.

Right. Yeah, no, it's interesting. It's a fascinating. You know, I really thank you for asking that question because I used to delve into this question. Back in the late 80s, I was fascinated by the genealogy of these different, you know, historiographical schools. Because I really had imagined my career forever after was going to be as a historiographer. But all because of it, but those historians really said to me, no, you got to go right. And also, I was the other thing, if you don't mind my mentioning on this podcast, you know, I've done a lot of work on questions of the use and abuse of history, history and memory, as may be evident. And I was going back and forth between Britain and the United States because of my wife and because of the work.

And I was here, and I was in Britain, I was hearing a British version of Reaganism. And I was in the States, I was hearing an American version of Thatcherism. And they shared in their emergence as political figures and then successful in the sense they won elections that they grabbed hold of the past, literally, so effectively that they spoke to their fellow citizens as if they were the articulators of their respective nations past. But that articulation denied anything that had to do with the struggles of working people, the degree to which the progress made in any fashion had to do with the struggles of slaves and workers and women and, you know, And that that's so angered me that I wrote a book called The Powers of the Past, which was all about Thatcher, Thatcherism, Reaganism and the use and abuse of the past.

So once that began to happen, I think that's when they started, these guys kept saying to me, oh, no, you got to move over into that American story. And that's what you're, the rest is history. The rest is history. Oh, wonderful. Professor, I know you've been very generous with your time, but I do have one more question. No, no. You've been generous letting me use so much of your podcast to recall and these things. This is okay. I'm sure the listeners will love it because I know I am. And, well, listeners, if you don't love it, who cares?

Anyway, this is the second episode. Do you go back and edit yourself after we do this? I just want to know. A little bit. Or you treat everyone as a friend who's listening, which is good, by the way. Wow. Everybody who's listening is a comrade. but you know sometimes they have to get over themselves a little bit i'll be honest okay so uh that's a

real uper attitude good for you yeah well you know i have to get over myself too sometimes i it's it's just true everybody has to get over themselves anyway uh i do have one more question on my end that i want to throw out there to kind of wrap up you know the things that i was thinking about when looking through the book, which is real versus perceived theoretical breaks between these historians. And I'm going to pull out just a very brief quote from early on in the book and then perhaps expand on it a little bit before I give it to you. You say this book. I have a story prepared.

I'm reading your mind. Good, good, good. You say this book was therefore written in opposition to the current tendency to treat these historians separately and the derived assertion that there is a theoretical break in their work somewhere between Dobb and Thompson. So, you know, as we're talking about historiographic schools or history, it's late at night, it's midnight. I know, I have the story for you, Henry. I already have the story.

I'll just, I'll set you up for it then. So, you know, we think of these schools as being like, by and large, you know, they have these kind of central feces that they go with. But, you know, every, every practitioner has their own niche that they fill in. And in this case, there is a definite, like within the popular consciousness, there is, perceived actual theoretical breaks between them, especially post 56, 1956, post 56, there's, there's, you know, even more breaks, both in terms of like how they orient themselves with regards to the Communist Party. Obviously, most of them, yes, most of them leave, but a couple of them do say, stay, right?

You know, so like, this isn't obviously a real break. Like, they did break apart in terms of the party. But even theoretically, after 56, some people would perceive that there became. breaks theoretically and ideologically to some extent between these individuals, you know, despite them remaining Marxists. So the question for you is, you know, like, we have these perceived breaks, these understood, you know, as far as, you know, this is like a popular conversation to have in society. Like, there is these perceived breaks and rifts theoretically between these practitioners, but you show that

you know, most of these perceived breaks, perhaps, are not the case. So if you would like to expand. Okay, well, first of all, yeah, this is interesting. First of all, I'll tell you a story. And then I'll put it into the larger perspective of the arc of the Communist Party Historians Group and then the continuing work through the 60s, 70s, and so on. So when I, I'm never again, I arrived at Wicapisopi. This was the Thompson's home, having already talked.

to Christopher and Rodney, and neither Christopher nor Rodney, to my surprise, had any reservations about my argument of this kind of intellectual school. The word school, I'm not sure I use the word school when I was talking to them. That seemed to emerge when I tried to find a shorthand for what they were about. And also because the Annal school existed as a school, so to speak. So I thought, well, here's the British Marxist school. Okay. So I arrived this house and it was just from the moment I arrived it was like Edward and I sort of knew each other somehow

it was really remarkable so that night we had this long conversation over dinner and drinks the three of us that night we stayed at home for dinner the next night they took me out and and I was trying to explain to them

that you know because they generally were antagonistic to the generation of historians of my age who weren't always historians. In fact, they were, in many cases, social science, philosophy, and so on. And Edward didn't say anything, but he actually reminded me

of just how much Christopher Hill's influence there was upon his work. And I actually said to him, yeah, I don't think you could have written the making of the English working class had it not been, this is a strange reference I'm not going to make, Christopher Hill's work specifically,

on Puritanism, and it had to do with the fact that Hill's work on a sort of Marxist approach to the Puritan question, and you get Thompson's work on Methodism, and it's clear there's a real relationship there. Okay, having said that. So it's getting pretty late, and had a beautiful old house that was really in not great shape, but I had a bedroom up on the second floor. They had a bedroom there, too. And I go into the bedroom. And after about 20 minutes, I should have been tired and worn out, but my mind is just spinning having had the conversation. There's a knock on the door.

And I get up, and Edward says, just come with me. And we go into this other, I think we actually may have even gone down. He went into this room where he was looking through his very old papers. And he said, tomorrow I'm going to just hand all of these to you to go through. But that's something I want you to see right now. And he handed me a review that he wrote, maybe in like, 1940 as a student at Cambridge of Maurice Dobbs, whenever studies in development, in other words, it was like this whole argument of transition. And he was heartily embracing Dobbs' thinking. And I can't, what year was it? I can't remember what year the Dobbs book actually came out. But there had already been discussions inside of certain corners. And he knew of it. And the point was that he wanted to let me know that I was definitely correct in seeing this as a singular. tradition. And what's interesting is

Thompson himself had said to me, I don't know if I don't call myself a Marxist any longer. He said, maybe I'm a post-Marxist, something like that. Because his primary concern at that point was that there might be nuclear war. He was now literally the leader and spokesperson for the campaign. It was no longer the campaign. It was now the European Nuclear Disarmament Movement. And as much as his sympathies were definitely with the left, he thought that the primary question for anyone of good conscience was to do everything in their power not to allow a nuclear war to break out. Similarly, I also say Christopher Hill, who would never have said a bad word about Dob or Donator.

He, in many ways, Christopher was the oldest of the historians, I think at the time I was working on them. that I dealt with. And he just had this incredible affection for them, but had little doubt of his own trajectory as emanating for that. But now here's the thing I want to say to you. So they're in the Communist Party historians group from, say, 46 after the war. A few of them having come back as veterans, combat veterans. And they're in the party in the party and then 56, okay, the revelations and the invasion of Hungary. And a few of them, well, actually most of the group, especially Thompson and Hilton, especially Thompson and Hilton, to some extent Hill, but especially Thompson and Hilton,

are part of this dissenting group that emerges. They're outraged, okay, and they're demanding action on the part of the party against the Soviets. You know, a declaration, basically. And it doesn't come and they're ejected, but they're also on their way out anyway. They're out of the party.

And a year later, Hill leaves the party. And Kiernan leaves the party probably around the time Hill does. Some of them are really resistant to the idea of leaving the party. Okay. Had to do loyalty.

And, you know, these are your, they've been your comrades, you've come through the Depression and the war together, so on and so forth. And as you probably know, the only one who never really left the party was Hobbs Bowl. And I'll never forget the conversation. I really think back to the conversations that we had and what he said to me. But having said that, but if you think about it, what transpires in 56 is before their major work. So all of the work I'm referring to of major significance as a legacy for next generations of historians is coming after the Communist Party Historians Group. And not a one of them would have failed to tell me that they were shaped and made by the Communist Party Historians Group experience. whether it was Thompson who left the party

but did not leave his comrades, you might say, who were in the historians group. And don't forget, in the course of that 50s, they had created, when I was entering the profession, one of the three most important history journals in the world, past and present. Okay, which was not a party journal, okay, but it definitely was found.

it came out of the energies of the Communist Party historians group, but it brought in others as well. I put it at the top. It's my favorite journal. I put it at the top. It's the best journal. It's so good. And I mean, it's that kind of thing. And, you know, there are other journals that then emerge that carry on that kind of tradition. And I think actually transcend past and present, in interest to me at least and in asking certain kinds of questions. Pass and present just got a bit stayed for my purposes. Yeah, later on. But, like in this era that was just in that era oh god absolutely and in fact i mean then over here in this country it was it was basically the marxist communist journal science and society which provided some of the best intellectual arguments and served as a vehicle for that transition

debate uh to continue i mean that's why i said to you that even in the 70s and such there was this incredible dynamism on the intellectual left even if there were divisions by party, you know, like the Trotskyists and the, you know, the communists as a, probably less, by that time, as the committees of correspondence is emerged in the United States. Lots of stuff. Jeez, I think about that now. Hell, I remember when I came to UW Green Bay. This is, you love this. The head of the business program was interviewed by the campus newspaper. And they must have asked him, well, what do you, what do you think about the, you know, the, you know, the. The leftists over in the, you know, they were referring to the program that I was in. And the business of where I said, you can't have a university without a Marxist or more. How's that? I mean, he didn't say, it's terrible. He said, you can't have a university without a Marxist or more.

A bygone era, I would say. Yeah, interesting. But then again, you get at a certain point, well, Bill Clinton said, we're all Eisenhower Republicans now. Somebody went said to me, well, look, you know, we're all Marxists now. We all understand that class matters, that you know, you can't study history without some kind of material understandings and so on. But it's not, but you and I, the three of us, we know it's not so simple. Not so simple. Yeah. Well, I have to say, I mean, this has been to me just such a fascinating and pleasurable conversation, Harvey, to go through talking about

the British Marxists, these connections with other historical and historiographic schools and movements and your own long time history with these people and observations, it's really been fascinating. And we didn't even talk about Henri Perrin, which someday I want to have a good conversation. Well, yeah, I mean, you know, and when we do, I want to make it clear that it was so much fun to read people whose work I didn't agree with. Right. Right. Okay. I mean, to think that there were those figures who just devoted their lives to these

kinds of arguments. In fact, that's what worries me now, that on the one hand, I don't have the time to get myself deeply embedded in those arguments any longer because of my interest is just so decidedly political right now. But it's also the case that at the time, these historians, when they were doing their work, they didn't see the divide between arguing about the transition and the question of how do we make socialism in Britain. And so can I, and I'll reverse that and just let everyone know that my biggest concern is that the left has abandoned questions of history. And if only, it matters if only because, well, first of all, it matters because if we abandon and everybody else is going to hijack it. But the other thing is, they're going to hijack it because they're going to shape popular understandings of history.

And if we're not in a position to enable people to understand why they feel it, they do it. This, can I make this my closing argument? Look, my concern is that we're failing to appreciate that even if we don't see evidence of class in the, you know, in that sense, the class war is not, it's on. The class struggle, it just goes on. And if we have to understand that the empowerment that's possible by way of historical understandings is that these folks who are engaged in this stuff can see that they're not. alone neither today or for that matter generationally and there are ideas and experiences that might well inform them i can tell you that chris smalls when i did his podcast a couple of years ago i can't

remember whenever it was that he launched a podcast for a while one of the things i said to him is we were talking actually about wisconsin and what happened to boston i said to him you know you're going to be in a prime role as time unfolds this is well before success in his warehouse he was already fired obviously and I said but you might find real value in looking back both in terms of educating yourself but also in terms of what it might afford you

in empowering you and I can tell you and I was very pleased to know that one of the ways in which they proceeded with their organizing for all of the things people talk about well they used food to create sense of community all that they were all reading about organizing

in the 30s So, you know, I mean, all I can tell you is who on the left, if it turns its back on the historical experiences, it might give us a kind of historical memory and consciousness and just ideas that we don't previously have as a way of speaking to working people who still feel, look, I'm 70, I just turned 73, but I remember when I was your age. I remember when I turned 50, and I went into class that day, my big lecture course, and I said, allow me to explain to you why history matters, and I don't want you to think names, dates, and places. And I said, I'm 50 years old, and it dawned on me this morning that if you took, how many of me would it take laid out head to toe? Or, you know, like take 30 years of everyone to get back to the American Revolution. and I said to them someday

you're going to hear yourself say things that you know your parents would have said to you and you're going to and ask yourself this if you carry that imprint so much that you hear yourself saying things

that they would say ask yourself why is it the case that you're not also carrying things from two or more generations that have been passed through so maybe you still carry this kind of deep cultural memory even and you don't even have to be from a generation that came over on the Mayflower or it was here for the revolution you've been in this milieu in this country and you get imbued with the sense that you are an American and that means that you should that you're a radical at heart and I think that we on the left should take seriously the idea that people are anxious worried and feeling like Why do I feel this way?

And what can I do about it? And that's why you speak to them of the fact that they're heirs to a promise and they're heirs to a tradition and there heirs to a sense of what it means to be, an American or a citizen of the world or whatever else. Anyhow, sorry, I will stop now. Thank you. No, and I just want to say that I agree with the notion that we need to be, and I'll use your book title, taking hold of our history and also taking hold of revolutionary theory,

but we have to be conscious that we are not the only ones that are trying to take hold of history. We are not the only ones that are trying to take hold of theory. We are not the only ones that are trying to take hold of revolutionary history and revolutionary theory either. I mean, this goes back to, of course, I'm going to pull out Lenin again, State and Revolution. You know, we talk about, let me just get this. Not one of my favorite books. I do want to do. I know it's not, but I like it.

So I'm going to quote it because this is. I'm going to go grab the prison notebooks in a moment. So, yeah, we have today the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement concur in the doctoring of Marxism. I came in halfway through a quote. They omit obscure or distort the revolutionary side of this theory. It's revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social chauvinists are now Marxists.

Don't laugh. Hey, by the way, can you copy and paste that and send it to me? I kind of like it. Absolutely. I'll give you the wider context for that as well. I did cut a little bit off of the beginning and a little bit off of the end of that. But I just love, you know, all the social chauvinists are now Marxists. And then in parentheses, don't laugh. I'm your guest. You want me one more moment then. Of course. Okay. This is Marx 1843. So our election crime must be reform of consciousness, not through dogmas, but through the analysis of mystical consciousness. that is not clear to itself whether it appears in a religious or political form. It will then be clear that the world has long possessed the dream of a thing of which it only needs to possess the consciousness in order really to possess it.

It will be clear that the problem is not some great gap between the thoughts of the past and those of the future, but the completion of the thoughts of the past. Finally, it will be clear that humanity is not beginning a new work but consciously bringing its old work to completion. That's in honor of my medieval historian friend, Adnan Hussein. Excellent. Not to create a civil war between you. Just kidding.

Okay. No, seriously, thank you guys. Thank you very much. How can people find out more about your work and where they can follow you, Harvey? Okay. They can follow me on Twitter at Harvey, J-K-H-A-R-V-E-Y, initial J-K-K-K-K-A-Y, If they go on, you know, if they go to the Moyers & Company website, which is no longer adding new stuff to it, but if they go there, quite a few of my things during the years of Trump and Obama were posted there by invitation of Bill Moyers. If you want to see all my books, go to Amazon, but buy it maybe at Red Emmys or McNally Jackson or Powell's books or wherever.

right so people should get a hold of thomas pain in the promise of america the fight is a book that i want to cover in yeah i want to do the thomas pain book at some point yeah oh i'd love to do the thomas pain book i absolutely would that that book not to upset you henry but that's my love letter to america i know i know professor you know i love you as well like you know we have some disagreements but i absolutely adore you so don't you know when you have to give me heads up when you come back to the UP. By the last thing, one last thing, you don't have to include. You can edit this out, Henry.

So one of my greatest pleasures is driving up through the UP to Maconaw, okay? Because I love the whitefish at Maconaw at a place called Scalawag. Did you ever go to Maconough City to eat at Scalowags? I've been in Magnais City a few times, but you know, that's still in the Lower Peninsula, and I like to stay in the U.P. No, no, I understand. I would stay in the North Carolina. I would stay.

You'll get better white fish at a place called Gustafsons, just west of St. Ignis. You know, I stayed in St. Ignis one time rather than go down to the lower edge. Do me a favor. We'll leave the same, by the way. Send me a link to that place. It's like a gas station that's got all kinds of smoked fish and stuff. I mean, the most typical upper peninsula place ever. Can they serve it to me there?

Of course. You can get anything you want there. Gustavsons is great. You can sit down and eat there? Gustavsons, no, if you go across. the street, there's a great pasty place. Well, pasties I can get down in Escanaba. Ah, yeah.

Well, anyway, this is, sorry, we're boring. Adna, you've never been to the UP? I have never been to the UP, but I've heard of Door County and, you know. Oh, that's Touristville. Oh, I mean, North Corny is beautiful. I know. There's no debate. Door County is beautiful, but that is touristville.

It is absolutely beautiful. But I will say, I always used to say to my wife, I much prefer driving up to Escanaba. It's just partly it's, it's a little more haunting. It's a little more proletarian. It's a little more. Go to Calumet. I've been to Calumet. Calumet is, that is the most haunting city in America.

It is. It really is. I mean, if you want like proletarian history and haunted present, Calumet is the place. Yeah. No, no, absolutely. I knew somebody who grew up there as a little boy, he's passed away since. Yeah. We'll leave this end.

Why not? Maybe the listeners want to take a trip. to Calumet. In any case. A colleague of mine, John Shelton, labor historian, really good. Yeah, I know John. Oh, you do?

Okay. I mean, a little bit, a little bit. This past summer, we were supposed to drive the two of us. I wanted to show him Calumet, and I feel bad we didn't make it. But maybe we'll get there next summer. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, Adnan, tell the listeners how they can find you and your other podcast. On a different shore of the Great Lakes than the UP here in.

I'm Kingston. We have MSGP hosts a podcast. I'm the host of called The Mudgellis, M-A-J-L-I-S. And if you're interested in the Middle East, Islamic World, check us out. And, of course, follow me on Twitter at Adnan A. Hussain. Absolutely. And I highly recommend that. The Mudgellus is a great podcast. Just make sure you don't get the one from radio-free Central Asia slash the CIA. As for me, listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck, 1995, H-H-U-S-E-S. Z-K-1-995. You can follow Gorilla History at Gorilla underscore Pod, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A-U-L-A-U-R-R-I-L-A-U-R-I-L-A. You can get our free newsletter to your inbox, again, free, GorillaHistory. G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A.

I keep emphasizing the two R's. And lastly, you can help support the show and keep us up and running by joining us on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash guerilla history. again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And until next time, listeners, Solidarity. I'm going to be able to be.