Kmflett's Blog

Ive been sorry to read that Michael Rosen is unwell and the London Socialist Historians and myself have sent Michael best wishes for a speedy recovery. This is not least because Michael has so far only published one volume of his memoirs. As I note below there is clearly material from this period for a companion volume as well as volumes covering subsequent periods. We very much hope for a continuing supply of history from Michael

(From 2017)

Michael Rosen is known as a poet, author, broadcaster and of course socialist activist. He also has a beard and supports Arsenal.

His new memoir, They Call Me Pisher, is out from Verso and is of course fascinating reading. At the London launch Rosen noted that much material had been edited out before publication and it would indeed be interesting to see the author’s cut of the book as it were.

One thing that Rosen is perhaps not particularly associated with is socialist history. However the book contains a fascinating vignette of the early period of History Workshop in Oxford, where Rosen was at college.

Rosen was clearly far from happy with the stultified air and archaic content of some of the lectures he attended at Oxford but found History Workshop to be an exciting new development in the months before the May events in Paris in 1968.

Rosen notes that some people,though not himself, felt senior figures broadly associated with the movement such as E P Thompson, Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm were ‘infected’ by Stalinism but that Raphael Samuel, who ran the Workshop at Ruskin, had a base of working-class, trade union focused, students who were doing interesting research.

He suggests ‘this was a new history that drew on some of the work that sat on our shelves at home, in the fading red covers of the Left Book Club’.

One might argue that it was and it wasn’t. While people like Thompson and Hill drew their politics from that time, and the Popular Front politics of the mid-1930s Communist Party, they too were part of the upheavals of the late 1960s. Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down or Thompson’s work on the moral economy and riots were not the kind of thing that the Left Book Club would have been likely to have approved of.

Rosen writes of his participation in History Workshop events but connects their wide-ranging nature to the mood of the times. He argues that at the LSE occupation the whole college had become like a ‘permanent’ History Workshop with questioning of the traditional content of the courses.

Then came May 1968.