Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

History

Bourgeois historians are engaged in a more or less permanent quest to 
explain historical phenomena in any terms but those of class struggle. They 
seize on real or supposed psychological quirks of individual rulers or 
leaders.

They look to isolated natural phenomena, like volcanic eruptions, 
earthquakes or errant meteors; blame it all on a plague of grasshoppers or 
an outbreak of typhoid; or, failing all else, look for a change in the 
weather.

All of these may be factors in major historical developments, but the 
overriding factor, the one that powers the process of development and 
change in society and the world, is the struggle between classes.

The struggle of the ruling class to impose its rule, to strengthen it and 
to extend it, and the simultaneous struggle of the class or classes that 
are ruled to break free of its rule, to overthrow its rule, this is the 
engine that drives historical processes.

Back in the days of socialist Eastern Europe, the GDR documentary 
filmmakers the Thorndykes made a film on socialism as a historical process. 
They called it The Old New World.

The first part of the film used the visual medium to set forth in terms 
anyone could understand the materialist concept of history. Unfortunately, 
there have been very few other films or television programs that used the 
potentialities of the medium to educate the people in historical 
materialism.

Bourgeois historians, however, are everywhere on television and with most 
of television under capitalist control it is logical that a colourful 
account of Henry VIII's marital difficulties will find an easier path to 
production than would a program on the rise of the merchant class.

And yet The Six Wives of Henry VIII, despite how important they 
loomed in court politics, were essentially a side-show. The main event was 
the consolidation of a strong central monarchy, which was only possible 
with the support of the emerging merchant class.

The merchants needed a strong central monarchy as much as the monarchy 
needed their support — and their money.

The three main characteristics of the 15th and 16th centuries in Britain 
were the development of the manufacture of woolen cloth, the agrarian 
revolution (in which common land was enclosed by landlords and nobles and 
the peasantry turned off it) and the development of seagoing trade with 
centres as distant as Muscovy.

Feudalism was giving way to a free market for the production and sale of 
commodities, the conditions out of which capitalism would necessarily arise 
in the 18th century.

"The Tudor monarchy rested on the fact that the bourgeoisie were were 
strong enough in the Sixteenth Century to keep in power any government that 
promised them the elbow room to grow rich, but not yet strong enough to 
desire direct political power as they did in the Seventeenth" — A L 
Morton, A People's History of England.

Morton points out that in the last third of the 16th century, "the English 
merchant class backed by the government was determined to break through the 
colonial monopoly that Spain had established in the West.

"This ambition was shared by other North European sea-powers, especially 
the Dutch It was only at the expense of Spain and Portugal that English and 
Dutch... commerce could grow, since in Spanish and Portuguese hands lay all 
the areas outside Europe which seemed at that time to offer any possibility 
of profitable trading.

"And for both England and Holland, small countries with no hope of 
expanding by land and with prosperous and pushing merchant classes, such 
colonial expansion was a condition of national development."

Morton, whose ground-breaking book should be in every working class 
activist 's library, goes on to observe that "the war with Spain, 
especially in its earlier stages, was less a national war than the struggle 
of a class against its class enemies at home and abroad.

"It was carried on mainly by the English merchant class both against Spain 
as the centre of the reactionary and feudal forces in Europe and against 
their allies in England, the Catholic section of the nobility.

"Their Protestantism was the religion of a class in arms. ... Religious 
fanaticism reinforced commercial interest to give them an enemy who was not 
only fought but sincerely hated, and it was in fighting Spain that they 
came to a consciousness of their own strength.

"Up to 1588 [the defeat of the Spanish Armada] the English bourgeoisie were 
fighting for existence: after that they fought for power. ... It was the 
merchants, with their own ships and their own money, who had won the 
victory and they had won it almost in spite of the half-heartedness and 
ineptitude of the Crown and Council.

"The victory transformed the whole character of the class relations that 
had existed for a century. The bourgeoisie became aware of their strength 
and with the coming of this awareness the long alliance between them and 
the monarchy began to dissolve.

"It might still need their support, but they no longer needed its 
protection. Even before the death of Elizabeth, Parliament began to show an 
independence previously unknown."

Now wouldn't it be great if television used its power to illustrate "that" 
story, rather than David Starkey's trivialisation: "Drake must have 
wondered if the Queen would still welcome her pirate subject.

"He was lucky. Elizabeth was fascinated by his adventures, and even more 
entranced by his loot."