What history is for: Essays in Honour of Professor John Foster
Ed Elaine McFarland and Jim Whiston, Manifesto, £12.50

JOHN FOSTER’s response to the title of this slim volume of a dozen essays which focus on his lifetime’s work over the last six decades might well be “praxis,” the Marxist term denoting that neither theory nor practice are intelligible in isolation from each other, but need to be tested by material reality. 

Unlike Hegel’s Idealism and rhetorical abstraction against which Marx & Engels unleashed “historical materialism” as a guide for the class conscious working-class struggle to replace the ruling class by the proletariat using its collective power and agency, dialectically, to create itself as a unified class for, and against, all others.

Unlike his older fellow Marxist historians, Eric Hobsbawm and EP Thompson, Foster has kept these insights alive by nailing himself since the 1960s to the Communist Party and the organised broad left movement based in Scotland as political activist, leader, strategist, intellectual, spokesperson, organiser, archivist and defender of the Morning Star and its readership. Indeed, the Morning Star only survived the 1980s through people like Foster, Mary Davis and Robert Griffiths.