The herd of elephants in the room

A review ofA L Morton and the Radical Tradition by James Crossley (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), £109.99

Arthur Leslie Morton is best known as the author of A People’s History of England, first published by the Left Book Club in 1938. It had a tremendous impact at the time. By the 1980s, it had sold over 100,000 copies in Britain, been published in the United States and translated into 13 languages, including Russian. Indeed, the book was actually “given Soviet approval”.1 It was reprinted as recently as 2014. This was not Morton’s only contribution, as James Crossley’s study A L Morton and the Radical Tradition makes abundantly clear. Morton’s works on William Morris, William Blake, Robert Owen, the Ranters and much more were all valuable. His importance was such that in 1978, Lawrence & Wishart—the publishing house of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CP)—brought out a collection of essays in his honour, Rebels and their Causes: Essays in Honour of A L Morton, and in 1990, a collection of his writings, History and the Imagination: Selected Writings of A L Morton, edited by Christopher Hill and Raphael Samuel. All this is explored in Crossley’s massive study in almost 400 pages of text—but what is missing is any serious discussion of Morton’s relationship with Stalinism. This cannot go unchallenged. Why was someone as admirable as Morton an apologist for Stalinist tyranny for so many years, turning a blind eye to mass murder, slave labour camps and the privileges of the bureaucratic ruling class, first in the Soviet Union and later all over Eastern Europe?

Morton was born in July 1903, privately educated and went to study at Cambridge University in 1921. His radicalisation had already began when, aged 17, he read Jack London’s The Iron Heel. After he graduated, he taught at Steyning Grammar School but lost his job for supporting the General Strike in 1926. Subsequently, he went to teach at Summerhill, the progressive school, where there were already a number of CP members teaching. He finally joined the CP in 1929, when it was in the process of embracing the sectarian Third Period turn, and by 1934, he was working at the Daily Worker. For a time, he was the paper’s named proprietor, a role that had earned his predecessors jail time.2 He expected that this might be his fate as well. To secure such a job, Morton must have been on board with the party’s sectarian turn. However, as Crossley points out, throughout this period, he had a friendly relationship with the right-wing poet T S Eliot,
writing for his magazine, the Criterion. In July 1935, he even reviewed a book by Karl Radek, discussing his notion of revolutionary journalism. What Crossley does not mention is that this same Radek soon became a victim of Stalin’s Great Terror, one of 17 Old Bolsheviks put on trial in January 1937, the second of the Moscow Trials. Thirteen of the accused were shot, but Radek saved himself, if only temporarily, by naming a number of future victims as Trotskyist-Fascist
conspirators, among them Nicolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov. He was sentenced to ten years in a labour camp but was later beaten to death on Stalin’s orders in May 1939. This is not just some sort of peripheral detail but is essential if we are to understand the history of the CP and the political universe it inhabited.

To be fair, Crossley does note Morton’s amusing comparison between “Trotskyist” conspirators and the Guy Fawkes conspiracy and, more
seriously, his denunciation at a party meeting in St Pancras in September 1936 of the “recent Trotskyist attempt to assassinate Stalin”. Here, he denounced “TROTSKY as a traitor and betrayer of the working class and
[Grigory] Zinoviev and [Lev] Kamineff as the paid agents of Hitler”.3 In effect, he was celebrating the torture and murder of many of the leaders of the Russian Revolution while working on A People’s History of England. The Moscow Trials were—it has to be insisted—not something Communists were ashamed of, tried to keep quiet about, but were very loudly celebrating at meetings, in the Daily Worker and in pamphlets. One last point worth making is that if a Stalinist regime had taken power in Britain, Morton’s praise of Radek in a magazine edited by T S Eliot would probably have cost him his life, executed for confessing to being a “Trotskyist-Fascist”.

Morton left the Daily Worker in 1937 and, as we have seen, published his A People’s History of England the following year. By now, the CP was wholeheartedly championing the popular front turn, and his book can be best seen as a popular front history of England. Nevertheless, the book broke much new ground and is still worth reading today.

How did Morton respond to the 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact that abruptly ended the popular front turn? How does Crossley deal with Stalin’s sudden alliance with the Nazis that continued up until the summer of 1941? He writes of “the local and international contradictions, complications and confusions faced by the [CP] in 1939-41”.4 This is hardly an adequate account of Stalin’s decision to ally with Hitler. As for Morton, he later described this period as a time when “the Party was in a bit of confusion”, once again something of an understatement, but for his own part he contemptibly toed the new party line. He enthusiastically supported the Russian invasion of eastern Poland, claiming it countered Nazi aggression whereas, of course, the partition of Poland had been agreed with the Nazis as part of the Pact. Presumably, he also supported the Russian invasion of Finland at the end of November 1939, although Crossley does not mention this. Morton’s hostility to Britain’s Imperialist War was so ferocious that apparently on one occasion at a public meeting, he called for Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill to be lynched.5 Once Germany invaded Russia, the CP rallied to the British war effort overnight, embracing an “intensified version of the popular front” and “downplaying domestic class antagonism”.6 In fact, the CP urged workers to work harder and longer and under no circumstances disrupt production by industrial action, regardless of provocation, because the fate of the Soviet Union was at stake.

Inevitably, Morton was to celebrate the Russian war effort in near eschatological terms. He was, of course, far from alone in this. The Hitler-Stalin Pact was soon forgotten and for much of the left, with the CP leading the way, Stalin became a great hero, “Uncle Joe”. The horrors inflicted on the people of Russia and Eastern Europe by Stalin during the so-called Great Patriotic War have never been acknowledged by the Communists and their sympathisers. The regime continued to rule by terror throughout the war, not least the criminalising of surrendering to the Germans, with family members back home punished for the crime and, of course, the execution by their own side of tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers.7 The Red Army executed more of its own troops than all other states put together. This was just one aspect of the grim reality of the Eastern Front in the Second World War.

Once the war was over, Morton was involved in setting up the CP Historians’ Group, which was to nurture the likes of Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, John Saville, Raphael Samuel and E P Thompson. Indeed, by now, he was “established as one of the leading Communist intellectuals” and an inspiration to the younger generation of historians.8 In 1952, he published his The English Utopia, another book still very much worth reading, though notable for its attacks on George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is condemned with considerable ferocity. Having earlier declared that “Marxism and the [Soviet Union] are as legitimate targets for satire as any others”, Morton goes on to condemn Orwell’s book as “the last word to date in
counter-revolutionary apologetics”. According to Morton, Nineteen Eighty-Four was an attempt by Orwell to convince “his readers that any attempt to realise socialism must lead to a world of corruption, torture and insecurity. To accomplish this no slander is too gross, no device too filthy.” The book was an act of “degeneracy”.9 As Crossley puts it, “it is difficult to see how he could have been clearer in his contempt for what Orwell represented”.10 What Crossley does not confront, however, is that for those people living under Communist rule, both in the Soviet Union and across Eastern Europe, “socialism” actually was “a world of corruption, torture and insecurity”. Stalin’s murderous “Titoite” purges that were sweeping across Eastern Europe at that time do not seem to have troubled Morton unduly and are not discussed by Crossley. In fact, Morton wholeheartedly endorsed the Stalinist regimes installed in power across Eastern Europe, visiting Romania in the autumn of 1953 and lecturing in East Germany in October 1956. Of course, there is something positively obscene about Morton proceeding to proclaim about English Utopianism that “[t]he fantasies of Cockayne, the project of [Francis] Bacon, the anticipations of Ernest Jones, are in effect being translated into facts in the Stalin Plans which are now changing the face and the climate of the [Soviet Union]”.11

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956, when the working class rose up against their Communist oppressors and was slaughtered by Russian troops, was to shatter all this, with perhaps a third of the party membership leaving in disgust. Morton, however, remained loyal: in Crossley’s words, he “remained a believer in the Soviet project”.12 Indeed, he was a member of a CP delegation that visited the Soviet Union in November 1956, and, after his return home, he spoke in defence of the regime at a number of branch meetings. According to a police report, he “showed that his sympathies were on the side of Soviet Russia and appeared to be always ready with reasons why such method etc had to be used”.13 After the brutal crushing of the Hungarian Revolution, he still regularly visited Eastern Europe, in 1967, for example, lecturing for five months in Czechoslovakia. As far as he was concerned, this was socialism and the CP was presumably going to install a similar regime in Britain, courtesy of the reformist “British Road to Socialism” programme, which the party had adopted in February 1951, with Stalin’s approval, of course. Morton celebrated this embrace of reformism by the party he had joined as a revolutionary as “the culmination of centuries of thought and action”, “the clearest and most practical plan for revolution which has yet been placed before the movement in our country”, albeit a peaceful revolution, because in “Britain…such a peaceful transition is possible” and so on.14 There is something profoundly tragic about someone of Morton’s intelligence, talent and commitment to the working class spending his career as an apologist for Stalinism—and Crossley entirely fails to confront or illuminate this. There is a herd of elephants in the room.

John Newsinger is the author of several books, including The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire (Bookmarks, 2013) and Chosen by God: Donald Trump, the Christian Right and American Capitalism (Bookmarks, 2020).

Notes