#cpgb

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Round 1: One Game ➤ Pokemon Gold/Silver (+ Janijani )

COLOR PALETTE GIF BATTLE | vs. [myself]

Round 4: One Antagonist ➤ Shadow the Hedgehog (+ Smoke )

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Round 3: One Female Character ➤ Ellie, The Last of Us (+ Toothpaste )

📚 THE HISTORY GROUP OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN: AN INTELLECTUAL POWERHOUSE

🔥 Universally recognized as one of the most extraordinary intellectual forums in 20th-century British historiography

⚔️ Operated for roughly a decade after World War II — until the 1956 crisis of the Communist movement shattered its cohesion and membership

🧠 Christopher Hill himself, 35 years after resigning his party membership, described it as the "most stimulating intellectual experience I have ever had" — from which "anything I have written since derives"

🏗️ The Group's 16th/17th century section was unquestionably its most dynamic and productive — generating over 40 discussion papers, totaling more than 110,000 words of extant debate material

📝 Papers ranged from a few hundred words to 9,500 words — the latter being Victor Kiernan's breathtaking synthesis on Calvinism and the transition from medieval to modern

🎯 Two dominant intellectual debates consumed the section: Absolutism and Ideology — both covered extensively in David Parker's 2008 volume published by Lawrence & Wishart

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 THE CAST OF INTELLECTUAL TITANS — AND WHO ACTUALLY DID THE WORK

🌟 Christopher Hill — the undeniable engine of the section's agenda; later wrote the seminal Century of Revolution, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution, works on Milton and Bunyan

🗡️ Victor Kiernan — Hill's most persistent and formidable intellectual adversary; his 1980 work State and Society in Europe 1550–1650 revisited virtually every disagreement from the section meetings

📖 Maurice Dobb — author of the epoch-defining Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946), which Hill declared rendered "nine-tenths of the discussion on Morton" obsolete

⚒️ Rodney Hilton — nominally a medievalist but drawn irresistibly into early modern debates by his obsession with the long transition from feudalism to capitalism

🔬 Stephen Mason — historian of science with a "glittering career" as medical chemist; his History of the Sciences (1953) was the section's first work to achieve international stature, revised in 1962 and reprinted 25 times by 1994

📜 Brian Pearce — the most influential figure in the early post-war years; shared with Hill and Dona Torr a passionate commitment to establishing the English Civil War as a bourgeois revolution

🏴 A.L. Morton — author of A People's History of England (1938); the proposed revision of this work literally prompted the formation of the group in 1946

📡 Eric Hobsbawm — nominally in another section; his 1954 two-part article on the "general crisis" of the 17th century in Past & Present generated one of that journal's first great collective debates

🎭 Dona Torr — the section's doyenne, quasi-official mentor and party liaison; Hill described her as "a cultural historian, very learned in English literature"; her unpublished papers revealed a dazzling range from Rosa Luxemburg to Sigmund Freud, Calvin, William Wordsworth, and Aristotle

🚶 The Rest of the 27 Contributors

🏛️ Kenneth Andrews — section secretary; later had a distinguished career studying Elizabethan privateering

🌾 Eric Kerridge — section secretary; published 10 articles on English agrarian history between 1951 and 1956; later challenged Tawney with his iconoclastic 1969 work on copyholders

🎬 Edmund Dell — future Minister of State

✍️ Iris Morley — historical novelist and ballet critic

📺 Louis Marks — one of Britain's most accomplished TV drama producers

📐 George Rudé — vastly overhyped by Harvey Kaye; in reality, his first and possibly only appearance at a section meeting was in April 1954, when he presented a suggestion from Georges Lefebvre about methodology

📰 THE FOUNDING TEXTS AND THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS

📘 The Preface to the Critique of Political Economy (Marx) — the fundamental theoretical text, not the Communist Manifesto as Harvey Kaye wrongly claimed

📬 Engels's late correspondence (1890–1894) — what Kiernan described as "a wonderful set of letters"; these letters famously established that historical materialism was NOT economic determinism

📗 Dona Torr's edition of the Marx-Engels correspondence — "absolutely central" and "everybody read" it; Hill confirmed: "all of us had been brought up" on her editions

🔑 Engels to Bloch (22 September 1890), cited by Hill in 1948: "economic development of society only ultimately determines the political superstructure and its ideology" — two errors to avoid: denying the economic origin of ideas, or imagining they fall from the sky like Newton's apple

🏗️ Torr in the Communist Review (1946): "the chief clue is the degree of correspondence or conflict between productive forces and social relations"

📚 The History of the CPSU (Short Course) — Andrews found it appropriate to extract its description of the Preface as "a brilliant formulation of the essence of historical materialism"

🧱 THE BASE-SUPERSTRUCTURE MODEL: NOT AN ECONOMISTIC STRAITJACKET

🎯 Harvey Kaye's famous misreading: that the British Marxist Historians' greatness lay in "overcoming the base-superstructure model with its tendency to economic determinism" — this is demonstrably wrong

🔩 Mary Fulbrook (1988) noted Hill's early work used a "crude" model of rising/declining classes that "apart from vestiges, subsequently disappeared" — also wrong

⚔️ Alaistair Machlachlan spent 400 pages arguing Hill's model was "not so much Marxist, as Leninist or Stalinist" — a claim unsustainable by the documentary record

🌊 Kiernan (1968): base and superstructure becomes a misleadingly mechanistic image "only at those times of upheaval and crisis" — not with the image itself, but with Marxism's preoccupation with periods of rapid transition "like picturing a river from a few waterfalls along its course"

🏛️ Hilton explicitly deployed the base-superstructure model in his 1978 crisis of feudalism essay, reprinted 1985 — no "accidental hangover"; confirmed by a separate 1985 article in New Left Review

🔁 Hobsbawm (1983) directly addressed problems in historical materialism and base-superstructure — concluded by stressing Marxism's success in transforming mainstream history so thoroughly "it is often impossible to tell whether a particular work has been written by a Marxist or non-Marxist"

💡 The Correct Reading

🏫 The 1954 School on Capitalism syllabus was structured around 11 sessions, each proceeding from economic base to political developments and ideology — the model was never abandoned, merely deployed non-reductively

📣 Hill (1950): Marxist historians "discuss Shakespeare, Milton, Hobbes, Bunyan, Purcell as well as Charles I and Oliver Cromwell: education, science and philosophy as well as industry, agriculture, trade"

💭 IDEOLOGY: THE SECTION'S MOST PRODUCTIVE DEBATES

🔥 Protestantism, Calvinism, and the Bourgeoisie

🏰 Hill's starting point: Engels's view that the German Reformation was the first of three decisive battles of the bourgeoisie against feudalism; English Puritanism was the second

⛪ Calvin's church, Hill argued in collaboration with G. de N. Clark, enabled the bourgeoisie to "lead the peasantry in an organized way" — he explicitly likened Calvin's organization, with its "vanguard of the Elect", to a modern revolutionary movement with "a kind of democratic centralism"

🗺️ Andrews and James: Hill oversimplified the relationship of social movements to the Reformation in the Netherlands and Germany

⚔️ Kiernan's devastating counterargument: Calvinism appealed in many countries to the feudal gentry and nobility, not just the bourgeoisie; it was "first and foremost the religion of the middling strata" urban and rural

🇩🇪 Roy Pascal defended Engels's view of the German Reformation — the eminent German Marxist scholar representing the more orthodox position

🇫🇷 Mervyn James on French Calvinism: "moderating and disciplinary, not revolutionary", weakened by association with the great nobility — a "remarkable piece" that anticipated conclusions Parker himself reached "some fifteen years later"

🔔 Hill eventually concluded (by 1961): Protestantism did not make men capitalists "nor vice versa", but bourgeois values of thrift, accumulation, and hard work were the "natural consequence of the religion of the heart" in a society where capitalism was already developing

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 By 1964, Hill's Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England brought the "middling sort" rather than the bourgeoisie proper to center stage — a direct result of the section's debates

🚫 What the Section Wisely Rejected: False Consciousness

🧩 The section was very little concerned with the notion of false consciousness or the "illusion of the epoch"

✅ Ideology was treated as an expression of real interests, sets of ideas through which people made sense of the world

📉 Christopher Caudwell's view (from Crisis in Physics) — that the ideology of a ruling class reflects conditions of the working class as seen by the ruling class — was largely rejected as inappropriate for the 17th century

📐 George Thomson (1952) in the Communist Review offered a highly abstract article on the "illusion of the epoch" — but the early modern section worked at a "much lower level of abstraction"

🏰 ABSOLUTISM AND THE TUDOR STATE: WHERE THE SECTION STUMBLED

⚡ The Kuczynski Controversy (1940)

📗 Hill's pioneering essay The English Revolution (1940) triggered an aggressive review in Labour Monthly by "P.F." — later identified as the German Communist historian Jürgen Kuczynski, who became Professor at Humboldt University

🔴 Kuczynski accused Hill of being "un-Marxist" for calling pre-1640 English society "essentially feudal"; claimed Queen Elizabeth was "the most prominent capitalist in bourgeois capitalist society"

⚖️ Hill's supporters attacked Kuczynski as a reformist gradualist who belittled class struggle

🔄 Kuczynski withdrew "counter-revolutionary" and substituted "reactionary" to describe early Stuart policies — a significant concession that a calmer atmosphere might have turned into common ground

📛 Palme Dutt, ultra-orthodox editor of Labour Monthly, was "either unable or unwilling" to recognize Hill's position; only under "considerable pressure" from Torr, Garman, and Hill did he produce an (unpublished) draft statement

🔮 Hill's 1947 Theses on Absolutism — Riddled with Inconsistencies

🏗️ Hill's position: the Tudor state was an absolute monarchy, not merely a feudal landowners' state; absolute monarchies arise en route to capitalism when the state achieves independence from evenly balanced feudal nobility and emergent bourgeoisie

🌾 Because English capitalism was largely rural, Tudor Absolutism had distinctive features: survival of Parliament, Common Law, importance of Justices of the Peace, failure to develop a powerful centralized bureaucracy

🚢 England's maritime character meant the Crown "never had a standing army at its disposal" — only a "private-enterprise" navy

✂️ Kiernan immediately pointed out that theses 5 and 6 amounted to admitting there was "no real absolutism in England" — no standing army, no police, no bureaucracy

💬 Kiernan, emphatically: "There is no stage of Absolutism in English history, which is in many respects unique"

🗺️ Kiernan's Brilliant Alternative Framework

💡 The Tudor regime's base was in the economically advanced southeast; its coercive machinery was directed against remnants of feudalism in the North and West

🪙 Personal serfdom having "effectively disappeared", the manor "survives only as the framework of land-tenures"

💰 Merchant capital "entered increasingly into productive processes" and modified the mode of production — could not be treated as simply parasitic

📅 The 1640s were "not a decisive turning point" — the bourgeois revolution was spread over several centuries; if the main phase occurred in 1642, "1485 should be seen as a necessary preliminary phase"

🧩 Kiernan did not maintain the Tudor state was bourgeois — only that it was a "mixed state, in which elements of the old feudal classes still existed, but in which the bourgeoisie was important"

🏆 Morton's Nuanced View: The One They Should Have Followed

📖 Morton in A People's History of England: the Tudor absolutism was "absolutism by consent" — a more enduring and empirically defensible formulation than anything in Hill's theses

⚔️ Morton: the monarchy was "too much the product of feudalism" to carry the revolution to completion; "once a certain point had been reached, and with a startling suddenness, its objective character underwent a complete transformation"

🏛️ Morton's explanation for England's lack of "true absolutism": lack of involvement in continuous land warfare meant no standing army; the middle classes "had been prepared to do almost anything for the Tudors except pay heavy taxes"

📜 Parliament had "begun as a check on the theoretically absolute power of the feudal king" but "become in time the guardian of the absolute right of the individual to the enjoyment of his private property"

⚔️ THE POLITICAL STAKES OF THE ABSOLUTISM DEBATE

🌏 Hill declared openly that the controversy was "of great political importance because the bourgeois revolution is still a real political issue in Asia, South East Europe, Spain and other parts of the world"

☭ Pokrovsky's error of antedating the bourgeois revolution led to reformism and the assumption that a "transfer of power is possible without a revolution" — diminishing the role of the Party

🚨 Kiernan's view was "dangerous", Hill charged, because it was "identical with the old bourgeois heresy that English development is in some sense peculiar, peaceful, non-revolutionary"

🔔 Marx and Engels acknowledged "peculiarities and difficulties" of England but "did not for that reason abandon the Marxist categories of analysis"

🏴 Kiernan was specifically accused of "abandoning all the revolutionary traditions of 1640 and of our own party"

🤔 Kiernan's Capitulation — Forced, Partial, and Largely Disingenuous

🗓️ January 1648 meeting: Kiernan formally withdrew his general thesis — but the minutes make absolutely clear the reasons were as much political as historical

🔍 Even in withdrawal, Kiernan raised "questions of detail" that were anything but detail: the need for precision about how institutions impeded new productive forces; "the degree to which bourgeois groups were forced into a revolutionary programme by the pressure of mass discontent"; his persistent view that "merchant capital being essentially parasitical is liable to be misleading"

🧮 Dona Torr declared the outcome a "good victory", writing to Brian Pearce: "we have certainly achieved something since the almost incredibly difficult struggles of 1940"

📊 THE POKROVSKY CONTROVERSY: SOVIET AUTHORITY AND ITS LIMITS

🔬 M.N. Pokrovsky (d. 1932): most famous Soviet historian of the 1920s; characterized the Absolute Monarchy as "the state form corresponding to the epoch of Merchant Capitalism" — a "dictatorship of Merchant Capital"

🚫 The CPSU formally rejected Pokrovsky's views via a joint resolution of the Central Committee and Council of People's Commissars (1934) — a "major turning-point" in Soviet historical studies

📝 Hill and Pearce provided the group with a résumé of the Pokrovsky controversy, which Hill then used to berate Kiernan about the dangers of gradualism and reformism

⚠️ Yet the Soviet historians themselves did not lend unqualified support to Hill and Andrews: "The historical facts do not confirm the view that the prerequisites for the rise of Absolutism must be sought exclusively in the strengthening of the popular anti-Feudal movement"

🏛️ Some Soviet historians denied the existence of English Absolutism altogether — vindicating Kiernan, not Hill

🌾 Kosminsky — the medievalist whose work on England influenced both Dobb and Hilton, particularly on peasant differentiation and the nature of feudal rent

📜 Arkhangelsky — Hill's view of the revolutionary significance of agrarian legislation of the interregnum "owed much to the inspiration of" this Soviet scholar

🌾 AGRARIAN RELATIONS: THE DEBATE NOBODY RESOLVED

🌻 Dobb's Sophisticated but Elusive Framework

🏗️ Dobb (1949): the petty mode of production had "to a large extent but still incompletely" emancipated itself from feudal exploitation; it was "in process of being penetrated by capital and subjected to capital"

💵 Money-rent payments of tenants "still bore many of the characteristics of feudal rent" and "had not completed the transition into capitalist rent"

🔑 The "fact that the dividing line between yeomen, or kulak-peasant, and the squirearchy became increasingly blurred" was "a crucial feature of Tudor England"

✊ These petty capitalists, together with "smaller capitalists associated with the farmer (e.g. the clothiers of provincial towns)", provided "the principal driving force of the bourgeois revolution"

😶 Yet when pressed by Brian Pearce, Dobb became evasive — saying anything further would be "woolly"

🌾 Hilton vs. Kerridge: The Great Agrarian Schism

⚒️ Rodney Hilton insisted the primary focus must be wage labour: "someone ought to show how and to what extent the exploitation in the countryside ceases to be by the extraction of feudal rent and becomes instead the extraction of surplus value"

📈 Eric Kerridge argued it was impossible to measure agrarian capitalism by the size of the proletariat given the available sources; focused instead on "the generation of capitalist tenant farmers", rising investment, and production for the market

❄️ Kerridge's contribution to the 1954 School on Capitalism received a "stunningly cool reception" — the scribe merely noting that "some doubt was thrown on the extent of capitalist farming"

📚 Kerridge's 1967 book argued for an "agricultural revolution" in the century from 1560 — controversial then, controversial now

🏡 Kerridge's 1969 book attacked Tawney's assumption that the English peasantry were "helpless victims of a relentless and remorseless agrarian capitalism" — arguing copyholders had substantial security of tenure by virtue of common law

🔬 Robert Brenner's persistent insistence that the market economy was "forced on peasants by their Lords" has been largely rejected by modern scholarship

💰 Modern scholarship: the precocious development of English capitalism may be attributed to a class of "lightly taxed and secure prosperous small capitalist farmers, farming 50–70 acres, who with their families constituted 12 to 15 per cent of the population"

🗺️ WHY THE TUDOR ABSOLUTISM DEBATE FAILED: A DIAGNOSIS

🔩 The state was treated as simply an instrument of the dominant class — preventing nuanced analysis of the state's own mechanisms, contradictions, and relative autonomy

📜 Olwen Stocker's short paper on the law was the only contribution devoted to a specific aspect of state activity — and it was never discussed; she pointed out that "the law courts in the sixteenth century came gradually under the influence of the bourgeoisie" and that Lord Chief Justice Coke "proclaimed as law rules that were favourable to bourgeois economic needs"

🏛️ This anticipated the non-reified concept of the state that would enable later Marxists to overcome the limitations of seeing the state as a simple reflection of class interest

🚫 Limited knowledge of European state formation was a crippling handicap; despite Pearce's insistence on "the importance of first understanding continental absolutism", the proposed discussion was pre-empted by the Reformation debate

🔫 The section failed to see that absolutism was essentially a product of warfare on unprecedented scale combined with internal contradictions of unstable feudal regimes — "a device for saving the feudal nobility from themselves" (Kiernan's ultimate conclusion in 1965)

🏴 Where capitalism was most advanced and precluded this possibility, there was no absolutism — England being the prime example

🔮 Gramsci's concepts would have enormously helped — conceptualizing "organic intellectuals" of the bourgeoisie, sharpening the division-in-the-ruling-class analysis, easing the definition of the bourgeoisie — but the section "never considered them", a fact Hill confirmed

📰 PAST & PRESENT: THE GREAT INSTITUTIONAL ACHIEVEMENT

🗞️ Launched by the Group in 1952 in the midst of the Cold War — within a matter of years acquired a reputation as the pre-eminent historical journal in the English language

🌐 Hobsbawm's "general crisis" article (1954) appeared in its pages, generating the first of the collective debates for which the journal has since become known

⚔️ Hill used it to provoke the "public controversy over the connections between science, Puritanism and capitalism" — including the celebrated exchange over William Harvey's political imagery in his work on the circulation of blood

🌍 Published in book form as Crisis in Europe, 1560–1660: essays from Past & Present (ed. T.H. Aston, London 1965)

🏅 THE REAL ACHIEVEMENT: EMPIRICAL, NON-DOGMATIC, ENDURING

🔬 E.P. Thompson described English Marxism as "quaintly empirical" — an accurate observation about the Communist historians' deep reluctance to devote time to abstract theory

📚 In 1953 the group decided to hold a meeting on historical materialism — apparently referring it to professional historians in Oxford; "if it took place it left no trace"

🎓 In 1955, it was Daily Worker journalist Peter Fryer — not the historians — who gave six lectures on Materialism as part of the Party's education programme

🌿 Mervyn James, from the 1970s onward, showed the way to a more complete picture of the Tudor polity — depicting the slow transformation of "the culture and values of the still conservative Tudor ruling class"; the great household "bounded by particularist values rooted in lordship, fidelity and service" giving way to domesticity, privacy, education, civic humanism — without a whiff of Marx or Engels, let alone Gramsci

🎯 E.P. Thompson's tribute, in the midst of his pugnacious onslaught on Stalinism and Althusserianism, is definitive: "I think it even possible that the English tradition of Marxist historiography may be able to stand comparison with that of any other" — naming Hill, Hilton, Hobsbawm, Kiernan, Dobb, Torr, and Gordon Childe

✅ FINAL VERDICT: WHAT THIS EXTRAORDINARY DEBATE ACHIEVED

🏗️ Reshaping the entire historical agenda of early modern English history — from Whiggish and religious interpretations toward the bourgeois revolution thesis

📣 Launching Past & Present (1952) — "the pre-eminent historical journal in the English language"

🔬 Pioneering a non-reductive, non-economistic Marxism that understood base and superstructure as a starting point, not a straitjacket

🌾 Generating productive debates on agrarian capitalism whose implications were worked out by Kerridge, Brenner, Whittle, Allen, and others across the subsequent half-century