Whatever may have happened recently to the Communist regimes Eastern Europe, Marxist historiography seems alive and defiant. Lenin's tomb may be under threat, but the historical certainties of Marxism lie undisturbed. 'Broadly speaking,' Peter Linebaugh tells us, 'the English Revolution was a conflict among three social forces. The bourgeoisie, led by Oliver Cromwell and organised in Parliament, aroused the English proletariat to make war against Charles I, the High Church and the aristocracy. Having vanquished them, Cromwell then turned against his erstwhile class ally, the many-headed multitude, which during the course of the struggle against the King had developed a movement of teeming freedom that was antithetical to the capitalist order that Cromwell and Parliament sought to impose.' Even twenty-five years ago that would have been considered a little crude. Today, after the revisionist history of the last two decades, the claim that the English Civil War was a class one seems the historical equivalent of Stalinism.

LRB 5 December 1991 | PDF Download