Raphael Samuel, The Lost World of British Communism, London: Verso, 2006, pp224. ISBN: 1844671038.

Raphael Samuel (1934-1996) was both a socialist and a historian. These two aspects of his life, political and academic, were closely connected. Born into a communist family milieu, he was educated at the progressive King Alfred's School and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was taught by Christopher Hill. Already as a young man, Samuel was a member of the Communist Party Historians' Group, alongside much older figures including Hill, E P Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm. Like many of these historians - Hobsbawm was one of the exceptions - he left the CPGB in 1956 and was then prominent in the New Left. A founder of the History Workshop movement at Ruskin College, where he was a tutor, he played a major role in the establishment of the History Workshop Journal. Much of his historical work was produced in interaction with adult students, often from working-class backgrounds.

The Lost World of British Communism is a series of pieces originally published in New Left Review in the mid-1980s. It is a series of essays, rather than an academic work, and is based more on Samuel's memories than on archives. Even when he uses historical materials, these are mainly published sources - a reminder, perhaps, that not even British communist archives were properly accessible to researchers in the 1980s. Samuel's tone is personal, close to political journalism, and nourished by a lively memory. More than an academic contribution to the history of British communism, this is a major contribution to the field of autobiographical narratives written by former British communists, especially intellectuals. There is an extensive literature of this type in French, written by ex-activists, and these have provided a fruitful source of data for social scientists and historians. Bernard Pudal's discussion of the autobiography of the former French communist leader Gérard Belloin is a good recent example. [ 1 ]

Even so, though Samuel's is not a conventional academic account, his essay could perhaps have been more personal and less general, and the information provided about his own life is not really the main story. Rather, it is the party itself, not Raphael Samuel, that provides the book's main character, with Samuel writing as a dependable witness seeking to describe the construction of a communist mentality around certain vividly depicted values and practices. This demonstrates the richness of the marxist historiography which Samuel learned from the party. It also sheds much light on the everyday life experience of a young communist activist of the time, notably through cultural activities such as song, cinema, etc. The communist mentality Samuel depicts is not so far removed from the French one. For the most part there is the same sense of history and the same set of references inherited from the Soviet influence.

Two points are particularly worth emphasising for those studying British communism in a more comparative perspective. The first is the way in which British communism seemed to be nourished by the outside world. Contrary to a more simplistic way of depicting the communist mentality, Samuel paid attention to the impact of British (and English) culture on the political culture expressed by the CPGB's followers. British communist sensibility was thus composed of national norms and the party's norms, and Samuel stressed that behavioural norms of the time were not always so specific to the CPGB. By the same token, his attention to the period preceding the party's formation to explain its subsequent forms and norms is heuristic in character. Samuel's view is of interest because he doesn't examine the party in itself, but within the context of the whole of British society. The comparison with the Labour Party, as the dominant British working-class party, is present in all the essays.

The second point is that the essays provide another autobiographical piece about the British marxist historians, which may be compared with recent discussions around Eric Hobsbawm's Interesting Times. [ 2 ] Samuel too as a young man belonged to the Communist Party Historians' Group, which displayed enormous energy and acquired a great intellectual influence from 1946 to 1956. Whereas in France intellectuals were under strict party control, [ 3 ] in the small British communist party historians enjoyed greater autonomy of work. This freedom led to a rich marxist historiography which could be then be pursued from outside of the party's own ranks, as it was by a number of ex-communist historians after 1956. Samuel may in some sense be regarded as a communist (or a socialist) without a party. This would have been more difficult in France, where one could not be considered a communist except as a member of the party.

In Samuel's case, what is also surprising from a French point of view is the absence in the work of a marxist historian of any serious economic or social treatment of the communist party. Instead he produces a cultural or political history of communism at the expense of the socio-economic analysis one might expect to find at the heart of a marxist approach. In Samuel's essays, the CPGB's decline is linked more to a cultural revolution than to social change, for example through the increase of individualism and the undermining of collective ties. This is arguably one of the volume's limitations, and further social contextualisation would be necessary to appreciate more fully the reasons for the decline of the communist party. At the forefront of Samuel's essays there is the perception of decline as seen by a specific social group, namely intellectuals and academic communists. For working-class activists, on the other hand, things could well have been very different. The autobiography is a type of document typically written by intellectuals or leaders, and in both France and the UK the result is the presentation of mainly intellectual points of view about the crisis of communism. Alongside the analysis of this kind of autobiography, Samuel might well have made more use of interviews with rank-and-file activists and drawn more widely on historical data to understand the complexity of communist life.

Raphael Samuel was professor at the University of East London at the time of his death. He established a centre there, now called the Raphael Samuel History Centre, which is dedicated to promoting historical enquiry, especially East London history. This not just an academic centre, and is committed to taking history into the wider community. With all their strengths and limitations, the Lost World essays exemplify Samuel's approach to the writing of history and provide a fitting memorial.

Julian Mischi

Notes

1. Bernard Pudal, 'Gérard Belloin, de l'engagement communiste à l'auto-analyse', in O.Fillieule (ed). Le désengagement militant, Paris, Belin, 2005, pp155-169.
2. Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, London: Penguin edn, 2002. For the French debate around this historian, see Revue d'Histoire Moderne & Contemporaine, special double issue, 2006, pp53-4.
3. Frédérique Matonti, Intellectuels communistes, essai sur l'obéissance politique, La Nouvelle Critique (1967-1980), Paris, La Découverte, 2005.