Marxist historians on Brexit: neither the EU or Little England but internationalism?
The journalist and broadcaster Aditya Chakrabortty raised on twitter in 2019 what the attitude of the British Marxist Historians, EP Thompson, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Raphael Samuel et al would have been to Brexit. I think the drift was that it would have varied.
We do know what E P Thompson’s attitude to the 1975 EEC Referendum was
Thompson was given space in the pre-Murdoch Sunday Times to present the case for leaving what was then the EEC.
He made some very serious points.
Thompson argued that ‘going into’ Europe was humbug for four reasons:
1 He argued ‘we are there already’ Britain is part of Europe as commonly defined.
2 Secondly he argued that the 1975 EEC was not Europe. It should also include ‘Warsaw, Prague and Belgrade (as the EU now does)
3 He noted that the Common Market defined Europe at its ‘crassiest’ level ‘a group of fat rich nations feeding each other’
4 He suggested that the EEC defined ‘introversial white bourgeois nationalism’ as internationalism.
Again this then was not in Socialist Worker or the Morning Star but the Sunday Times.
He went on to suggest, returning to his earlier theme that the Euro-Stomach would soon find the need to ‘Euronate’ and this would be done over the British working class.
Yet Thompson was too good an historian and a left-wing theorist not to understand that there were weaknesses in remaining ‘English’
In his open letter to Leszek Kolakowski (1973) Thompson compared himself to the great bustard, grounded and unable to fly with wider intellectual developments. Rather he saw himself as part of a distinctively English tradition which as he noted had strengths and weaknesses:
But I cannot fly. When you spread your wings and soar into the firmament where Kierkegaard and Husserl, Heidegger, Jaspers and Sartre and the other great eagles soar, I remain on the ground like one of the last of the great bustards, awaiting the extinction of my species on the diminishing soil of an eroding idiom, craning my neck into the air, flapping my paltry wings. [13] All around me my younger feathered cousins are managing mutations; they are turning into little eagles, and whirrr! with a rush of wind they are off to Paris, to Rome, to California. I had thought of trying to join them (I have been practising the words “essence”, “syntagm”, “conjuncture”, “problematic”, “sign”) but my wings grow no bigger. If I were to try I know very well that with my great bulk of romantic moralisms, my short-sighted empirical vision, and my stumpy idiomatic wings, I would fall – plop ! – into the middle of the Channel.
I belong to an emaciated political tradition, encapsulated within a hostile national culture which is itself both smug and resistant to intellectuality and failing in self-confidence; and yet I share the same idiom as that of the culture which is my reluctant host; and I share it not only through the habits of a writer but out of preference. This, if I am honest, is myself, my sensibility. Take Marx and Vico and a few European novelists away, and my most intimate pantheon would be a provincial tea-party: a gathering of the English and the Anglo-Irish. Talk of free-will and determinism, and I think first of Milton. Talk of man’s inhumanity, I think of Swift. Talk of morality and revolution, and my mind is off with Wordsworth’s Solitary. Talk of the problems of self-activity and creative labour in socialist society, and I am in an instant back with William Morris – a great bustard like myself, who has never been allowed into the company of such antiquated (but “reputable”) eagles as Kautsky or Plekhanov, Bernstein or Labriola – although he could, if given the chance, have given them a peck or two about their gizzards.
Well, that is what I am, and it is a ludicrous predicament. It is an excuse for any amount of silence. Holding for too long, and with too few companions, to an unregarded position breeds – as this letter has already shown – symptoms identical to those of egotism. I have become too much aware, in my silence, of the motions of my own mind; too detached from the thought around me into which my own argument can never be inserted; too stubborn in resistance to assimilation.
Unfortunately E.P. Thompson died aged 69 in 1993 so we cannot know what his thoughts on the 2016 Referendum might have been or the subsequent Brexit.
His criticism of what is now the EU is clear, but his concern at being isolated from wider European culture suggests that he had in mind the pursuit of a European unity of a rather different kind. That of solidarity and socialism.
I sense he was someone who disliked centres and centralism. He clearly was no enthusiast for the then EEC but he lived in his later years at Wick Episcopi just outside Worcester (I also lived in the City in the late 1970s) and made clear his dislike of London and a preference for the provinces. Perhaps that tells us something about both Brexit votes and where he would have stood on the matter.
Indeed Eric Hobsbawm in a speech in 2007 remembered why he and his family came to Britain in the 1930s rather in this vein:
For my older relatives from central Europe, the fact that Britain was provincial, boring and predictable, that nothing much happened here, was one of its major attractions. Happy the country, they said, where the headline: ‘Crisis’ was about Test Matches, not the collapse of civilisation
(Richard J Evans, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History 2019)
Neither the EU or Englishness but internationalism might be a summary of all this, but there are many qualifications and nuances along the way. Brexit as fashioned by Cummings, Farage and Johnson is a very blunt tool
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