Oleksa Drachewych and Ian McKay, eds. Left Transnationalism: The Communist International and the National, Colonial, and Racial Questions.

Abstract

What earlier generations perhaps knew as “proletarian internationalism” has during the past decade been rediscovered and reconceptualized within the framework of transnational history. The recent anthology Left Transnationalism: The Communist International and the National, Colonial, and Racial Questions, edited by Oleksa Drachewych and Ian McKay, is a vital addition to this emerging global field. The volume contains a substantial introduction and fifteen chapters written by leading international scholars. Rather than offering another general history of the Communist International (Comintern), the volume provides a distinct study of the Comintern’s relation to the national, colonial, and racial questions. The collection is based on the “Transnational Leftism” conference organized by the editors at MacMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, in September 2017. The Comintern (1919–1943) was during the entire Cold War period a source of major contention, and its history is still dichotomized between “traditionalist” and “revisionist” perspectives. The volume offers a welcome exit from the stalemate and locates the diverse histories of international communism as a part of a larger cultural turn that quickly has established itself as a cornerstone of new communist studies. The history of international communism naturally remains a highly contentious field, caught in the nexus between Soviet control “from above” and locally embedded grassroots activism; between communist anti-imperialism and Soviet imperialism; between idealism and Stalinist terror. In light of today’s profound transnational “historical consciousness,” a return to the simplistic Moscow-centered idea of a “transmission belt” model presents itself like a scholarly impossibility. Transnational and entangled history has revealed that transfers and circulations were a part of a complex transcultural, multidirectional, and multicentered process that crucially involved the translation of complex concepts and ideas that were received and interpreted in various national contexts. The present edited volume therefore needs to be lauded for its efforts to reframe such histories that examine how Marxists traversed through the world of the Comintern and engaged with nationalism, race, and the question of “national self-determination.” As the many contributions show, Comintern doctrine did not conclusively provide an answer to how communists should engage with bourgeois-nationalist groups in the colonial and semicolonial countries, how to best engage with the African Americans, or how to handle different European immigrant groups in the United States or Canada. They needed to integrate them in accordance to local circumstances.