The battle for revolutionary history

The plaque commemorating 17th century Leveller leader Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, unveiled in a Wapping churchyard yesterday, appropriately comes at a moment when a modest civil war has broken out about the country’s history.

Rainsborough, one of the ablest and most courageous officers in Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army, was murdered by Royalists in 1648, at the siege of Pontefract Castle.

His was killed a year after the famous Putney debates in which he and others put forward an Agreement of the People. Tensions between the democratic forces and the emerging new ruling class were at their sharpest. During the debate, Rainsborough made this epic, revolutionary statement: 

For really I think that the poorest he that is in England have a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore truly, Sir, I think it clear, that every man that is to live under a Government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that Government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that Government that he hath not had a voice to put Himself under.

 The Levellers’ demands were not realised during their lifetimes, but they put down a daring and far-seeing marker, to be partially realised in the form of parliamentary democracy.

Naturally, a period when Parliament and the Crown fought it out on the battlefield, ending with Charles I losing his head in 1649, is not exactly what education secretary Michael Gove wants to emphasise.

He has come under heavy fire for his new history curriculum, which is viewed by many as “too prescriptive and Anglocentric”. Enter radical historian Tristram Hunt, Labour MP for Stoke on Trent Central.

In yesterday’s Observer, Hunt lampooned pro-imperialist, ultra-conservative and ultra-successful historian Niall Ferguson. Ferguson, now a Harvard professor, who last year supported Mitt Romney’s election campaign, recently had to deny that he was homophobic. Ferguson had indeed made a personal attack on the economist, and old Labour idol, John Maynard Keynes which linked his sexuality to his ideas.

There can be no doubt that Ferguson has played a key role on the ideological front, with his histories of money, global finance, the role of the British Empire as well as in setting up the elite private New College of the Humanities in London.

Hunt is right to highlight the crucial importance of history in British public life and that the school history curriculum is, as Gove himself has said, “an ideological battleground for contending armies”.

Hunt goes on to praise the post-war schools of largely Marxist historians. For the first time writers like E.P. Thompson, Asa Briggs, Christopher Hill and Raphael Samuel provided an alternative narrative, based on the underbelly of historical change.

They played an important political role, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s, by revealing the social forces driving historical processes and the role of the masses in shaping change.

Hunt bemoans the “worrying conservative consensus” about “our national past”. And naturally the main media, which is indeed dominated by people like Ferguson and David Starkey, with their unashamed pro-capitalist political agenda.

This is not news. Marx pointed out long ago, that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”

But should we be like rabbits in the headlights – terrified by the fact that the media and education is dominated by the ideology of those in power? Of course not. The notion that the ruling elites and their ideologists like Ferguson can brainwash us is a pathetic cop-out.

As one comment on Hunt’s piece says: “Information has proliferated so extensively that it no longer matters what people with agendas select or omit, the full story is only a few clicks away on the internet, and no statement can be made by a prominent individual without it being challenged.”

We should take courage and inspiration from 17th century revolutionaries like Rainsborough and continue his work by supporting the Agreement of the People for the 21st century.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win

Unfinished business of England’s October Revolution

In the early days of October some 365 years ago, the Levellers movement began drafting two documents that would become the political high points of the English Revolution which had developed out of the war between King Charles I and Parliament.

The Case of the Armie Truly Stated was published on October 15, 1647 and by the end of the month, the Levellers had also produced An Agreement of the People for a firm and present peace upon grounds of common right.

Astonishingly, for the times, the New Model Army led by Oliver Cromwell had yielded to pressure to allow for a Council of the Army to meet. It was made up of officers and rank-and-file soldiers, whose representatives were thenceforth known as Agitators.

With the army camped at Putney and Charles I held prisoner, the civil war seemed over. What the two documents set out was a constitutional settlement that had no place for monarchy or the House of Lords. Moreover, they emphasised that power should lie with the people and that the vote be given to all “free men”, with parliaments elected every two years.

These earth-shaking documents came before the Council of the Army at stormy debates held at a church in Putney that lasted from October 28 until November 9. The Case of the Armie Truly Stated declared:

Whereas all power is originally and essentially in the whole body of the people of this nation, and whereas their free choice or consent by their representers is the only original or foundation of all just government, and the reason and end of the choice of all just governors whatsoever is their apprehension of safety and good by them, that it be insisted upon positively, that the supreme power of the people’s representers, or Commons assembled in Parliament, be forthwith clearly declared.

The Agreement stated:

That the power of this, and all future Representatives of this Nation, is inferior only to theirs who choose them, and doth extend, without the consent or concurrence of any other person or persons, to the enacting, altering, and repealing of laws, to the erecting and abolishing of offices and courts, to the appointing, removing, and calling to account magistrates and officers of all degrees, to the making war and peace, to the treating with foreign States, and, generally, to whatsoever is not expressly or impliedly reserved by the represented to themselves.

What the Levellers put on the table were questions that still resonate today about the relationship between rulers and ruled, between property and politics, the independence of the legal system and the nature of power and the state.

It was Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton whose response at Putney summed up the bourgeois nature of the revolution that brought an abrupt end to absolute monarchy and created the social conditions for the subsequent emergence of capitalism.

Ireton said the vote was rightly restricted to those who have “a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom”, namely “the persons in whom all land lies, and those in corporations in whom all trading lies”. He added that “liberty cannot be provided for in a general sense if property be preserved.” Sounds very much like the corporatocracy that rules Britain today!

Although representation through the vote was eventually conceded (but not completely until 1929), the sovereign power of the people mooted by the Levellers (and the proto-communist Diggers) remains as out of reach as ever.

The English Revolution of the 1640s erupted because the relationship between the state and the people had broken down in an irretrievable way. You could argue that the existing relationships between the capitalist state and the people is equally fractured. The state rules for and on behalf of corporations and banks and against the people.

Occupy London working groups are holding a series of events as the New Putney Debates this month and next, and on November 17, an Assembly will be held in London to work on a new Agreement of the People. Both events provide opportunities to complete the unfinished business of England’s October Revolution.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Meanwhile, back in the real world

The establishment have milked it for all it’s worth but tomorrow, after the last stage-managed event surrounding that diamond jubilee is over, for the vast majority of the population it will be back to reality with a bang.

For the jobless teenagers bussed in from Bristol, Bath and Plymouth to sleep rough and work for nothing as stewards during the Thames procession on Saturday, it will be back to grinding poverty and a total absence of a worthwhile future.

For the unemployed it will be another week of fruitless searches for jobs; for those with disabilities, it will mean fending off intrusive medical tests (run by a private company on a pay-by-results contract) intended to force them into menial jobs.

For tens of thousands of homeless households tomorrow will mean another night in temporary accommodation, disrupting children’s education and making it impossible to bring up a family in a sustainable way.

For public sector workers, it’s the start of another month of jobs cuts and increased pension contributions deducted unilaterally on the orders of the ConDem government. And another year of a pay freeze while food prices, in particular, continue to soar.

For those lucky enough to have jobs, Wednesday will for many see a return to a hostile work environment where management makes sure everyone knows their place, getting to work on an overpriced, overcrowded transport system.

An unprecedented, co-ordinated state operation, incorporating the media and led by the BBC, has driven reality into a corner in favour of relentless pomp and pageantry that has gone on for hour after hour, day after day.

No matter that people are being slaughtered by the Assad regime in Syria, or that the Obama administration is using drones to execute at will in Pakistan, or that the global economy is irreversibly heading for a second, far worse crash. More important, beacons are being lit across Britain, loads of boats are struggling down the Thames and some pop stars are holding a concert outside Buckingham Palace.

The last few days have seemed virtually authoritarian in atmosphere, with a contrived “celebration” organised to mark what? The fact that a privileged woman, a huge landowner with several palaces, immense wealth, including a hidden collection of masterpieces, has held an unelected position for 60 years.

Discredited politicians have tried to use the occasion to create a sense of flag-waving Britishness that died with empire and is not particularly supported by the citizens of Wales and Scotland, let alone the minority population in the north of Ireland.

The ConDem government, perhaps the most despised in recent history, no doubt hopes that the queen’s diamond jubilee has taken some of the attention away from its austerity policies which have helped to deepen the recession triggered by the financial crisis of 2007-8.

Of course, the monarchy is not the all-powerful ruler who cites divine authority from God. That period of history ended with the execution of Charles 1 by Cromwell’s parliamentary forces in January 1649.

But it symbolises the fraudulent nature of what passes for democracy despite the immense struggles of the Levellers of the English Civil War, the radical movement of reformers of the late 18^th century, the Chartists of the 19^th century and the Suffragettes of the 20^th century.

Present democracy is little more than a show, a façade behind which corporations and financial institutions, markets and bond dealers, call all the shots. The monarchy is part of that theatre, with Her Majesty’s government the accomplices who direct the state to give big business what it wants and needs.

A fresh constitutional settlement is urgent to meet the aspirations of a disenfranchised majority of working people, replacing the power of the corporatocracy. Such a democracy could never include an unelected, hereditary head of state but would instead express the power of those whose labour actually makes society possible. Tomorrow is as good a time to start on this project as any.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor