The London Revolution 1640-1643 refutes the attacks of revisionist historians who would write the concept of revolution out of history. A defense and restatement of the Marxist view of the English Revolution and Civil War. Chronicles England’s history through the revolution in 1641 – 1642, which toppled the feudal political system, and its aftermath. It explores how London’s growing capitalist economy fundamentally conflicted with its decaying feudal society, causing tensions and dislocations that affected all classes in the early modern period. In contrast with most other works, this book posits that the fundamental driving force of the revolution was the militant Puritan movement supported by the class of petty-bourgeois artisan craftworkers instead of the moderate gentry in the House of Commons.
Our speaker, Michael Sturza, is a life-long socialist political activist. A native New Yorker who grew up in Brooklyn, he learned about radical politics from his father who had been active in the labor movement of the 1930s. In 1966, at the age of 14, he attended his first mass anti-Vietnam War rally with other students from his high school. In college, while actively involved in working class struggles, he studied Marxism, and, in 1974, graduated cum laude from the State University of New York at Buffalo.
In the following decades, while continuing to study Marxism and the history of labor and liberation movements, he remained a labor activist with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). Sturza continues to live, study, and write in New York City. Since his retirement in 2014, he has traveled a good deal, including a nine-week trip to London, York, Edinburgh, and Dublin. Among the places he enjoyed visiting were the Cromwell Museum in Huntingdon, and the National Civil War Centre in Newark. The trip reinforced his belief in the social nature of the English Revolution. It was revisionist historians’ attempts to excise the class basis of the English Revolution and Civil War that led him to the studies detailed in his work.
