This doesn't apply just to England. That was to grab your attention. The question i'm interested in is why 'the left' is so backward looking. When the Bolsheviks staged their coup in 1917, when Spanish anarchists seized control of Barcelona in 1936, when Castro launched his rebellion in Cuba, they weren't overly concerned about previous attempts at overthrowing the existing order, though they were aware of them. They were interested in the future. What they could do, what was possible. How to reconfigure society, change the present and the future.
I know we have to learn from the past, realise our mistakes etc, but it strikes me that we spend almost too much time doing that. Analyzing Kronstadt, reviewing the Spanish Civil War. I do all that myself. But should we be surprised that not many people are listening, or not hard enough to react positively?
Human thought is structured by meta-narrative. histography is an attempt by humans to understand a series of events which we experience both as ideologically recited in our texts and also as a series of signifiers in cultural production. Meta-narrative is necessary to comprehend a disparate series of events and contradicting information into a cohesive unified narrative that allows us to recall history outside of a schizoid and unordered recollection of details with no meaning that often contradict eachother.
Meta-narratives allow us to understand not only history but ourselves as individuals and political and moral actors within a context of a society. Afterall, without narrative history is simply some words on a piece of paper. I could give you a copy of Infinite Jest and call it a history of england and without some sort of mechanism to determine otherwise (an idea of what england is, some notion of truth, some method of filtering out what is/is not likely "true" in absence of being able to determine it by ones self absent external stimulation, an idea that this filter should determine what can provide details on a subject or not, ect) you would simply have to concede that the book I gave you was in fact infinite jest.
History allows us to not only understand that there was time before our sentient existences where people lived in this would, but that they acted and created the society that you live in and that how you as a result are expected to act as a historical subject.
There are of course many meta-narratives. "Materialist understanding of history" as a framework for a marxist political project of class struggle, the eternal re-occurance of the degeneracy creating hard men who create good times who create degenerates who create bad times who create hard men a la spengler, liberal "modernization theory" that as liberal institutions and capitalism become predominate, they remove violence and instability in a society thus creating some sense of historical progress not to a utopia but away from despotism and poverty. ect
But meta-narratives have to be constructed and to be constructed they not only need ideology but also raw material. As the wonderful professor Alec Ryrie of Gresham college points out in his brilliant series of lectures, an atrocity is almost never defined as such because of its death tool or brutality but because of it's utility in being remember as a political event. Recollection establishes identity, what one's grunges are, what one's forefathers celebrated and disdained.
History, or the the recollection of history, also has an intrinsically teleological function. As one looks back at history one can not help to think what could have done better and as a result by understanding history one is being remolded as a political actor. Of course the way one consumes history is molded by the context that one lives in which was formed by prior events (which ironically enough, are likely a quite different thing than "history" since even if you assume that what you know of history is accurate, there is no way that your knowledge isn't selective in terms of what your history books recall and what they forget). As a result there is a process by which one looks to a version of the past, molded by an actual past which is unknowable, and as a result further history is made but the history of the future is contingent on that unknowable past. Divine providence I suppose.
To answer your question more specifically the left recalls history in the context of it's organizations because it gives them identity through the conflicts they study and which sides they take.
Not necessarily a bad thing as it gives these organizations a cohesion which is something that the new social democratic movement that we see emerging will never have.
But the problem with this recollection of history is that these socialist organizations only recall the events that give them their identity and cohesion and the ones which form their friend/enemy distinction. These are important components of what creates a successful organization but they are insufficient insofar that they are at a scale which doesn't give practical lessons to the current socialist left.
I.E they are studying socialists who took political positions in the context of commanding mass parties which captured significant seats in parliaments and in some contexts armies. And of course any serious socialist should aspire to become that but as we simply have a few organizations whose only organizational function is to reproduce themselves and to recall their own historiography you very rarely get any serious study of how the organizations they look back on actually grew to their size or more importantly how more contemporary political campaigns and organizations succeed.
Because for the type of history that these organizations study to be relevant they need to also understand the nitty gritty of how organizations function. Because simply put almost no socialist organization has an institutional memory of how to successfully organize since most of them are multiple generations removed from when the worker's movement became its long decline. If you live in the United States we are even at the point where even our trade unions don't have the institutional memory of how to unionize as demonstrated by the humiliating defeat at Bessemer.
So to answer your question, the problem is not that these organizations are dedicated to understanding history, it is rather that they are dedicated to regurgitating their stories and reproducing their organizations to live another day. Mostly by intervening in whatever fashionable protest movement exists that according to marxist.com is apparently another herald to the inevitable revolution and will surely get us a few more dues paying members.
Yawn
What would really be quite valuable is a disciplined and dedicated cadre of socialists dedicated not to protest hopping or to recalling the broad strokes of lenin's polemics, but to the scientific study of politics, political intervention, campaigns organizations that succeed and ones that fail, and how do a small group of socialists become a larger one.
One won't get that from activist cliques or old sects nor from the infinite cesspit of meme sharing clout sharks on social media. But perhaps a dedicated network of socialists can cohere to study these questions in seriousness.
