Advanced search
Refine search
- NLR
- Sidecar
Marx and History
“We are here to discuss themes and problems of the Marxist conception of history a hundred years after the death of Marx. This is not a ritual of centenary celebration, but it is important to begin by reminding ourselves of the unique role of Marx in historiography. I . . .” read more
In Memoriam: Proletariat Party, 1882-1886
“Men who stood on such a high intellectual plane as those four—Kunicki, Bardowski, Ossowski and Pietrusinski—who met death for an idea with heads held high, and who in dying encouraged and inflamed the living, are clearly not the exclusive property of any particular party, group or sect. They . . .” read more
The Hurricane That Shook the Caribbean
“In the wake of the Depression, a series of labour rebellions ripped through the British Caribbean archipelago like a powerful hurricane. Starting in St. Kitts in 1935, unrest and strikes rapidly moved southeasterly to St. Vincent, St. Lucia and Guyana. After a year of relative calm, the cycle . . .” read more
E.H.Carr--A Personal Memoir
“In valedictory speeches, and in one or two obituaries of E. H. Carr, the authors—independently of each other—described him as enigmatic. This struck me, and I asked myself why this very English historian seemed so enigmatic to some of his close professional colleagues. In Britain he became, towards . . .” read more
Placing Women’s History in History
“‘Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question; . . . How does it feel to be a problem?’ Thus writes not Simone de Beauvoir, but W.E.B. DuBois. He is speaking, not of women, but of black people—a black male intellectual—within a white world. . . .” read more
Reconsidering the Spanish Civil War
“As oral history broadens its field of study, and in particular as it moves into the field of political history, it cannot elude the task, bounden on materialist historiography, of providing a causal knowledge of the processes it is studying. At first sight this may not seem obvious. . . .” read more
Roots of British Communism
“The historiography of the British labour movement in the twentieth century has been dominated by a Whiggish concern with the rise and consolidation of the Labour Party and the emergence of trade unionism as an estate of the realm. Even Marxist historians have found it difficult to escape . . .” read more
The House of Windsor
“Genuine socialists have always detested the Windsor monarchs. They appear to confront a nation sucked into helpless crown-worship, without a single ounce of decent republicanism in its make-up. While they dream of communism, the country has not advanced out of this old feudal rhapsody. The ‘serious’ bourgeois Sunday . . .” read more
The Separation of the Economic and the Political in Capitalism
“The intention of Marxism is to provide a theoretical foundation for interpreting the world in order to change it. This is not an empty slogan. It has—or ought to have—a very precise meaning. It means that Marxism seeks a particular kind of knowledge, one which is uniquely capable . . .” read more
Secularism and British Marxism
“It was Raphael Samuel who last persuaded me to contribute to New Left Review eighteen years ago, and I am prompted by his essay on ‘British Marxist Historians’ (nlr 120) to do so again in the form of some comments on his discussion of the relationship between . . .” read more
Looking Forward: History and the Future
“The annual lectures of which this is the first are intended to commemorate David Glass. He was my friend, and the friend of others in this room who don’t need this occasion to recall him in the presence of his inseparable partner, Ruth Glass. He was also one . . .” read more
Presentation of Deutscher
“The essay which follows is the first that Isaac Deutscher wrote in Polish (under the pseudonym ‘Ignacy Niemczycki’) after leaving the country of his birth in 1939. It appeared in February 1942 in the Polish literary weekly WiadomoŚci Polskie (Polish News) which was published in London by a . . .” read more
Individualism and the English Peasantry
“Alan Macfarlane’s principal objective in The Origins of English Individualism is to prove that there was no peasantry in England during the middle ages and that attempts to describe the development of capitalism as a consequence of the emergence of capitalist relations of production from a pre-capitalist peasant . . .” read more
Beyond Actually Existing Socialism
“‘Communism is not only necessary, it is also possible.’ The quiet words carry a major historical irony. For what has now to be proved, before an informed and sceptical audience, is indeed possibility. And this not only in the reckoning of strategic or tactical chances, which in these . . .” read more
British Marxist Historians 1880-1980 (Part I)
“Marxism is often discussed, both by its partisans and its critics, as though it was a closed system which, once elaborated, could be said to exist more or less independently of historical time. Marx and Engels’ own texts are given a privileged status, and even when there is . . .” read more
The Sexual Division of Labour in Feudal England
“The creation of a political economy of sexual divisions has undoubtedly been one of the most significant intellectual outcomes of the recent feminist revival. The call in the early seventies for the development of an historical and materialist (though not always Marxist) account of sexual division, oppression and . . .” read more
Infrastructures, Societies and History
“This essay—which summarizes the basic theses of my forthcoming book of the same title—seeks to provide a clear and concise formulation of my provisional conclusions on two key issues in the social sciences: the notions of ideology and class. In it, I shall deal successively with four problems: . . .” read more
The 'Crisis of the Seventeenth Century'
“‘It is clear that the seventeenth century—with a world-economy larger than it had been in the sixteenth—saw a new division of wealth, under the banner of a many-sided competition, unfettered by loyalty, ferocious and premeditated, since decline and stagnation were poor counsellors: nothing was yielded, everything taken that . . .” read more
Bukharin’s Last Years
“The beginning of 1936 did not yet seem to presage any tragedy, either for Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin or for our country as a whole. It is true that Kirov’s assassination, and a number of closed political trials, at one of which Zinoviev and Kamenev were sentenced to long . . .” read more
On the Origins of Capitalist Development
“Robert Brenner’s article in nlr 104 concerns a number of issues that have been the subject of debate within Marxism. Its focus is the explanation of the origins of capitalism, and related but not identical to this is the analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. . . .” read more
Comment on Brenner
“When I read Robert Brenner’s article, I rubbed my eyes in wonderment. It was a long time since I had last looked at the debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism in which I participated along with Maurice Dobb and others some thirty years ago (recently re-issued . . .” read more
Reply to Sweezy
“Readers will have to judge for themselves whether or not I have mischaracterized Paul Sweezy’s arguments. I do not think my understanding of his case is idiosyncratic. Other writers, most recently John Merrington in his ‘Town and Country in the Development of Capitalism’ (nlr 93, September–October 1975, . . .” read more
The Modes of Production Controversy
“Marxist writing on development and underdevelopment, which barely a decade ago was largely confined to the shrill critiques of a few voices crying in the wilderness, seems well and truly now to have ‘taken off’. Indeed, the growth of this new (or rediscovered) paradigm has been such that . . .” read more
The Alternative in Eastern Europe
“I would like to start by discussing my book’s point of departure and purpose. Its original title was ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Socialism as it Actually Exists’—perhaps somewhat old-fashioned. Now this is simply the subtitle. It is deliberately reminiscent of Marx’s celebrated analysis of social formations, . . .” read more
The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism
“The appearance of systematic barriers to economic advance in the course of capitalist expansion—the ‘development of underdevelopment’—has posed difficult problems for Marxist theory. There has arisen, in response, a strong tendency sharply to revise Marx’s conceptions regarding economic development. In part, this has been a healthy reaction to . . .” read more
The History of Russia Under Stalin
“Roy Medvedev’s Let History Judge is a unique document, providing a moving account of events in the ussr during the Stalin era by someone who, even if he did not experience everything he recounts directly, nevertheless lived through it all. Thus, the most immediately striking feature of . . .” read more
The Feudal Economy
“An English version of Witold Kula’s book has been long overdue. Although its Italian translation has been available for some time, the book has not been as well known to western readers as it deserves. Such glimpses of its contents as have been vouchsafed to some European scholars . . .” read more
Rosa Luxemburg: A Re-assessment
“In an essay which she wrote in 1903 (‘Progress and Stagnation in Marxism’), Rosa Luxemburg showed how certain of Marx’s texts are discovered or forgotten according to the stage of the struggle of the proletariat. The same analysis may be applied to her own political and theoretical legacy: . . .” read more
Introduction to 'Memories for the Future'
“It is often forgotten that the October Revolution, the Spartacist rising, or the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party are all events within living memory. The targets of Lenin’s polemic in ‘Left-wing Communism’ are not all dead. Even the editor of Pravda whose line was implicitly repudiated by . . .” read more
Town and Country in the Transition to Capitalism
“The centrality of the town-country relation in the transition to capitalism in the West and more basically the equation of urbanism with capitalism and progress were already explicitly formulated in the earliest theories of the origins of capitalism—those of 18th-century political economy. For the proponents of the new . . .” read more
Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution
“John Foster’s Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution is a remarkable contribution to English historiography. It represents both a continuation of, and a stark contrast to, the impressive tradition of social history which has grown up in Britain in the last two decades. If the best work of . . .” read more
What Is the Historical Past?
“Albert Soboul’s work on the Parisian Sans-Culottes in the Year Two of the French Revolution begins with the victory of the Montagnards over the Girondins, a bloodless political triumph despite the fact that it was won with the support of the armed people of Paris: ‘On 2 June . . .” read more
Warriors and Peasants
“Georges Duby is not only the most interesting medievalist writing in France today, but one whose total scholarly production over the last 20 years has given him a European pre-eminence. He is best known in this country for his Rural Economy and the Life of the Countryside in . . .” read more
Marxist History, a History in the Making: Towards a Dialogue with Althusser
“The trade of history has something in common with the detergent industry: in both, novelty is frequently passed off as real innovation. But there is also a difference: in the former business, brand-names are very poorly protected. Anybody can call himself a historian. Anybody can add ‘Marxist’ to . . .” read more
Presentation of Vilar
“The theoretical work of Louis Althusser has by now attracted a wide range of comment and criticism in Western Europe. Most of this discussion has centred on the philosophical significance of Althusser’s oeuvre, with some reference to the political implications of his characteristic philosophical themes. In England, Marxism . . .” read more
1936: Revolutionary Committees in Spain
“Tajos is a small mountain village near Málaga; in 1936 it was one of the few socialist strongholds in a predominantly anarchist province. When, on 18 July 1936, the military rose to overthrow the Republic, a revolutionary committee was formed in Tajos as in every village and . . .” read more
Victorian London--Unending Purgatory
“‘Rome and her rats are at the point of battle . . .’ There were moments when late 19th-century London bore a close resemblance to the Rome of Coriolanus, torn by class conflict and watched by waiting enemies; and Victorians were brought up on Livy and Plutarch. As . . .” read more
Appeasement’s Epigones
“A declaration of intent by Franklin Reid Gannon, (author of The British Press and Germany 1936–1939) reads, ‘It is one of the great ironies of the period, and perhaps the major conclusion of this study, that appeasement was in fact the product of a crisis of the liberal . . .” read more
The Age of Don Quixote
“Masterpieces have a date. Today, too many theories in flight before history make the history of thought into ‘a discontinuous series of singular totalities’. But those who are not alarmed by the future dare savour to the full the draught of concrete history which every masterpiece distils for . . .” read more
The Purges Recalled
“For quarter of a century I. S. Poretsky (or Ludwik or Eberhard or Ignace Reiss) was one of the most prominent secret agents of the ussr. Now, after more than 30 years of ‘withdrawal and reflection’—according to the preface—his widow writes the tragic story of his life . . .” read more
Problems of Communist History
“We are today at the end of that historical epoch in the development of socialism which began with the collapse of the Second International in 1914 and the victory of the Bolsheviks in October 1917. This is therefore a suitable time to survey the history of the Communist . . .” read more
The Pathology of English History
“A recent survey in the Times Literary Supplement suggested that the writing of history in England was on the verge of a renaissance. This is only another way of saying that the progress of British historiography in the last 100 years provides a spectacular case of arrested intellectual . . .” read more
The Spanish Background
“The Iberian peninsula has problems but no solutions, a state of affairs which is common or even normal in the ‘third world’, but extremely rare in Europe. For better or worse most states on our continent have a stable and potentially permanent economic and social structure, an established . . .” read more