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The Anglo-Marxists
Edwin A Roberts, The Anglo-Marxists: A Study in Ideology and Culture, (Rowman & Littlefield, New York), 1997, 269pp.
This is a text which, so far as I know, has not come to the attention of researchers here into the history of British communism or the British left in general — I was wholly unaware of it before coming across it quite by accident in a second-hand bookshop, and various people I spoke to had never heard of it. It deserves though to be better known, for it constitutes, whatever its merits or defects, part of the growing historiography of the CPGB.
The term 'Anglo -Marxism' is not encountered very often but when employed is usually taken as referring to the trend initiated by the New Left Review and associated particularly with Perry Anderson as a seminal figure. Roberts, an American political scientist, however has a novel argument. He attempts to demonstrate that a theoretical school, appropriately designated as Anglo-Marxism, was developed by Communist Party intellectuals between the thirties and the fifties. Its main feature, he claims, is that it recast native English philosophical traditions in a Marxist idiom largely independent of the stalinist political matrix in which the school was formed.
Remarkably enough it is not the well-known Historians' Group of the forties — who as Harvey Kaye has argued convincingly, form an Anglo-Marxist school of historiography — that Roberts focuses his attention upon, but less-renowned figures such as J D Bernal the scientist and more obscure ones still, like the philosophers John Lewis and Maurice Cornforth. The broad framework in which he places them is that of English empiricism, stretching back from Bacon, Hobbes and Locke in the seventeenth century to Wittgenstein and the Oxford linguistic philosophy of the twentieth. 'What they seem to share are common insights drawn from their origins in a distinctly Anglo-Saxon cultural paradigm'. (p9)
In the opening sections of his analysis Roberts follows fairly closely the interpretation advanced by Stuart Macintyre in A Proletarian Science. This argues that British Marxism and the Communist Party were originally the creation of workers who drew their theoretical inspiration from an indigenous tradition of separate (and separatist) working-class adult education continuing a strong infusion of Darwinism and Comteism, in which the writings of the now forgotten Joseph Dietzgen were esteemed as second only to those of Marx. it was displaced and superseded however once control of the Party's theoretical and intellectual agenda fell, with Comintern encouragement, to the university-educated Palme Dutt in the Party leadership and to academically-trained writers and propagandists. As Roberts expresses it, Soviet-style Marxism-Leninism took over from the native prewar 'impossibilist' tradition; but subsequently, so he tries to demonstrate, such Marxism-Leninism was given an English academic inflection.
Roberts develops his thesis (literally — the book is a written-up PhD) at length to argue that the very talented individuals with whom he deals constituted a recognisable and distinctive school of Marxism- Leninism. He contends that behind the variety of fields to which they applied Marxist theory — general science, biology, philosophy, literature — their thinking, 'a unique and creative school of thought' (p.56), was informed and dominated by a distinctive empirical and scientistic approach implicit in the English philosophical tradition. To this they tried with greater or lesser success to assimilate the dialectical categories of Marxism — or else simply ignored them. Their Marxism was thus of a wholly different temper to the Hegelian variety of Lukács or the Frankfurt school. 'To study Cornforth's and Lewis's works is to study an Anglo-Marxism, not just Marxism with an English voice' (p.104).
It must be acknowledged that in the dimension of individual intellectual biography the book is an interesting and thought-provoking exercise and that Roberts succeeds in rescuing from theoretical oblivion and the enormous condescension of posterity thinkers like John Lewis and Maurice Cornforth who, cramped by their Stalinist intellectual heritage (even while trying to transcend it), may have made no great contributions to Marxist theory — but even so had serious and significant things to say. Discussing Cornforth in particular, his insights into this philosopher's relationship to linguistic philosophy are often acute and penetrating
Nevertheless in any overall sense Roberts's attempt must be regarded largely as a failure and his concept of a distinctive Anglo-Marxist school as being a highly dubious one. It may perhaps be possible to maintain that these intellectuals were influenced by a cultural climate of English empiricism - certainly there is a prima facie case of this sort to be made, but that is a much more modest claim. The Anglo-Marxists has a forced and strained quality to it, the impression given is that the evidence is being shoehorned into a preconceived conceptual framework rather than the conclusion emerging out of the evidence, and that the connecting argument between the specific chapters is extraordinarily weak. Roberts finally goes on to maintain that while the 'school' fell apart following 1956 and the Marxism of the Andersonian New Left Review was a very different animal, the latter's fading credibility later on 'opened the way for the resurrection (unintentionally) of the [alleged] Anglo-Marxist tradition ... at the hands of scholars, such as Cohen, Geras, Callinicos...' (p274) These three, (the last two particularly) would doubtless be astounded to find themselves numbered in the company that Roberts has been examining throughout his volume.
It is possibly a minor point to note that the proof-reading of the text is deplorable and the number of typos astonishing, but there are also many significant factual errors. Among them, there is complete misunderstanding of the outlook of that early sectarian splinter, the SPGB; Willie Gallacher is assigned to the wrong political party prior to joining the CP; a J. MacLean (John MacLean)? makes an appearance, who supposedly became a high-ranking party member. More trivially, I myself am quite inaccurately designated an official party historian.
In short, while there is most surely an informative text to be written exploring the collective odyssey of the CPGB's major intellectuals in the context of their party and professional careers, this is clearly not that one, but instead remains an acute disappointment.
