Movement for a Socialist Future: MSF

The British ruling class always deny their own revolutionary history and Prime Minister Tony Blair joined the deception with a vengeance in his speech to the Labour Party conference last month.

He offered the following summary of British history: "From the Magna Carta to the first Parliament to the industrial revolution to an empire that covered the world..." But there is a crucial watershed missing from this myth of uninterrupted peaceful progress – the great English revolution of 1640 by which the bourgeoisie established its rule.

Blair went on to quote John Milton, describing him as "our great national poet of renewal and recovery". In reality, Milton was an extreme revolutionary who supported the overthrow of the feudal state. His ferocious anti-clericalism and anti-monarchism made him Cromwell’s choice to write the ideological justification for the beheading of King Charles I. His essay Eikonoclastes was distributed by the revolutionary government, sending a shiver of fear through every royal court and bishop’s palace in Europe.

Milton denounces monarchy as an irrational system of government, based on superstition and oppression. He justifies the execution of the King because true liberty can only be established by knocking down idols and establishing the rule of reason.

Blair’s "great poet of renewal and recovery" was, in fact, the great poet of revolution and regicide!

To justify his own nationalism, Blair quoted Milton’s description of the English people as: "A nation not slow or dull, but of quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point that human capacity can soar to."

But Milton was first and foremost a Protestant internationalist. On a journey to Italy before the revolution he met and admired philosophers and scientists like Gallileo, and saw how their lives hung by a thread, because of the threat they posed to the feudal Catholic church, and its kings. In The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates he writes that it was the task of the English "first to overcome those European kings which receive their power not from God but from the Beast". The English "had the honour to precede other nations who are now labouring to be our followers".

Blair said "change is in the blood and bones of the British", but in Milton’s view it was revolutionary change.

Further on in the passage quoted by Blair is a description of revolutionary London: "Behold now this vast City, a city of refuge, the mansion house of Liberty... The shop of war hath not there more anvils and hammers waking, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed Justice in defence of beleaguered Truth, than there be pens and heads there... the people, or the greater part – more than at other times – wholly taken up with the study of the highest and most important matters to be reformed, disputing, reasoning, reading, inventing, discovering things not before discovered or written... All the Lord’s people are become prophets."

Definitely nothing like New Labour’s party conference!

"Hell is poverty on earth", said Milton, and in Comus, he writes:

If every just man that now pines with want

Had but a moderate and beseeming share

Of that which lewdly-pampered luxury

Now heaps upon some few with vast excess,

Nature’s full blessings would be well-dispensed

In unsuperfluous even proportion.

Which sounds suspiciously like a call for the redistribution of wealth.

Milton narrowly avoided the executions that followed the restoration of the monarchy, and saw himself as the last repository of the revolutionary spirit.

In his last poem, Samson Agonistes, like Milton, the biblical Samson is blind and living under the rule of the Philistines, but refuses to worship in their temple:

Shall I abuse this consecrated gift... by prostituting holy things to idols..? The chorus challenges this high moral tone: Yet with this strength thou serv’st the Philistines - idolatrous, uncircumcised, unclean. But Samson replies: Not in their idol-worship, but by labour, honest and lawful to deserve my food, of those who have me in their civil power.

In his excellent life of Milton, first published in 1977 and recently reissued in paperback, the historian Christopher Hill refutes the charge that the English revolutionaries were killjoys, who banned art and pleasure.

In fact there was a great flowering of art, music and writing in the revolutionary period, and a passion for music, good food and good company echo throughout Milton’s poetry.

It was actually the 17th century equivalent of the National Lottery and cable TV that the revolutionaries detested. Milton wrote that the state’s intentions "in plucking men from their soberest and saddest thoughts, and instigating them by public edict to gaming, jigging, wassailling and mixed dancing" was "to prepare and supple us either for a foreign invasion or domestic oppression...to make men governable".

Millenium Mandelson be warned!