Raphael Samuel (1934-1996) was part of that extraordinary crop of British Marxist social historians that emerged out of the crumbling world of the Stalinist British Communist Party – among them, E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and Eric Hobsbawm. He wrote a series of essays on the ‘lost world’ of British Communism during the 1980s, which were later published by Verso many years later in book form.
Reading it, I was struck, as ever, by the fact that Samuel’s experiences growing up in the milieu of the British Communist Party was no different from what I had experienced in the International Marxist Tendency during my brief membership of that disreputable cult. Just observe the following passage:
To be a Communist was to have a complete social identity, one which transcended the limits of class, gender and nationality. Like practising Catholics or Orthodox Jews, we lived in a little private world of our own, or, like some of the large or extended families of the period, ‘a tight…self-referential group’. A great deal of our activity – Communists of the period were nothing if not ‘politically active’ – for all the urgency of its occasions, might be seen retrospectively as a way of practising togetherness. We maintained intense neighbourhood networks and little workplace conventicles. We patronized regular cafes (Communists met in cafes rather than pubs: there was quite a strong inhibition against drink). We went out together on weekend and Sunday rambles. We took our holidays together, at Socialist Youth Camps (the one I remember best was in the New Forest), at Communist Guest houses, such as Netherwood, hiking with the YHA (hostels where the warden was rumoured to be a ‘sympathizer’ were a draw) or, if you could afford the £5, taking a week’s climbing holiday with the Workers Travel Association in the Lake District or the Trossachs. We had our own particular speech – a jargon which, for all my political enthusiasm, I was somehow never able to master, a sing-song rhetoric in speechmaking, not a rant, but a rhythmically-controlled address. Like freemasons we knew intuitively when someone was ‘one of us’, and we were equally quick to spot that folk devil of the socialist imagination, a ‘careerist’, a species being of whom I am, to this day, wary. Within the narrow confines of an organization under siege we maintained the simulacrum of a complete society, insulated from alien influences, belligerent towards outsiders, protective to those within.
Raphael Samuel, The Lost World of British Communism (London: Verso Books, 2006), p.13
Anecdotes like this are littered throughout the text. It is a very instructive read, and one which I strongly recommend to all those seeking to understand the strange phenomenon that is membership of a Communist cult.