British Communist Research Articles

British Communists and the Palestine Conflict, 1929–1948

During the 1930s and 1940s, the Communist Party of Great Britain was a significant force in Britain on the left-wing of the labour movement and among intellectuals, despite its relatively small membership. The narrative it provided on developments in Palestine and on the Arab nationalist movements contested Zionist accounts. After the 1941 German attack on the Soviet Union, the party, to gain the support of the Jewish community for a broad anti-fascist alliance, toned down its criticism of Zionism and, in the immediate post-war period, to accord with the Soviet Union's strategic objectives in the Middle East, it reversed its earlier opposition to Zionism. During the 1948 war and for some years thereafter it largely ignored the plight of the Palestinians and their nationalist aspirations.

The Establishment of Intellectual Orthodoxy and the Stalinization of British Communism 1928-1933

The Establishment of Intellectual Orthodoxy and the Stalinization of British Communism 1928-1933

Recent Controversies in the History of British Communism

Susan Bruley, Leninism, Stalinism and the Women's Movement in Britain 1920-1939, New York, Garland. 1986: pp. 324: ISBN 0824019121 Nina Fishman, The British Communist Party and the Trade Unions 1933-1945, London, Scolar, 1995; pp. 300; ISBN 1859281168 Kevin Morgan, Against Fascism and War. Ruptures and Continuities in British Communist Politics 1935-1941, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1989; pp. 336; ISBN 0719030781 Neil Redfern, Class or Nation. Communists, Imperialism and Two World Wars. London, Tauris Academic Studies, 2005; pp. 287; ISBN 1850437238 Andrew Thorpe, The British Communist Party and Moscow 1920-1943, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000; pp. 320; ISBN 0719053129 Matthew Worley, Class Against Class. The Communist Party in Britain between the Wars, London, IB Tauris, 2001; pp. 256; ISBN 1860647472

E. P. Thompson and Redical Romanticism

As I have reread The Making of English Working Class and numerous other texts by Thompson, I find myself thinking in terms of blindness and insight, not in absolute deconstructive binaries employed by Paul de Man, but rather to signify inescapable process in which insights we manage to gain are purchased at price of being blind to other aspects of reality they do not permit us to see. Thompson's The Making of English Working Class is incalculably rich in narrative, with vivid, novelistic characterization and description, but, as many have noted, it is poor in historically relevant statistics. Thompson's handling of Romanticism from his 1955 book on William Morris to his later work on Thelwall and Blake consistently mined a vein of radical Romanticism that he called Romantic revolt, thereby neglecting more nationalistic and counter-revolutionary areas of Romanticism. Thompson's eloquent and passionate opposition to Stalinism and what he called variously Marxist Platonism, idealism, and theoreticism produced some of best political writing since George Orwell, but perhaps because of events of his own life--the tragic death of his brother, a Communist, at hands of Bulgarian fascists in 1944; personally satisfying experience he enjoyed working with fellow Communists on construction of a Yugoslavian railroad in 1947; and his leaving British Communist Party in 1956 after suppression of Hungarian Revolution--he was ungenerous and unsympathetic to anarchist and opponents of Stalinism who repudiated Stalin and sometimes even entire Bolshevik Revolution much earlier than 1956. Premature anti-Stalinists found little favor in Thompson's writing, which harshly criticized Orwell himself in interesting but not wholly persuasive essay, Outside Whale (1960). Before I go any further, however, I must say, first, blindness/insight dialectic applies to everyone, including myself, and, second, my recent review of Thompson's work has convinced me that he is a great writer who still has much to teach us about Romanticism, history, and politics. Thompson's The Making of English Working Class (1963), one of founding texts of British cultural (Stevenson 2), made an important mark in Romantic studies in two ways: by supplying a unique historical context for and by linking Romanticism with process of working class's own making. Near very of The Making of English Working Class, Thompson concludes that working-class political culture countered laissez-faire policies with intelligence and moral passion in ways parallel with but separate from the great Romantic criticism of Utilitarianism. The Romantics and Radical craftsmen who opposed annunciation of Acquisitive comprise an early 19th-century (832). In a later writing he linked working-class movement with Romantic critique as a revolutionary resistance to economic man (Poverty of Theory 294). According to Thompson, then, at moment of Industrial Revolution working class did two things: it registered a Romantic, ultimately utopian protest against utilitarian cash-nexus governed by naked instrumental reason, and it created strong organizations and a tough-minded political culture capable of struggling against capitalism on numerous fronts and for long haul. In replying to New Left Review editors who found working class insufficiently revolutionary, Thompson countered that the workers, having failed to overthrow capitalist society, proceeded to warren it from to end with unions, cooperatives, political associations, and other institutions that survived and produced meaningful reforms (Poverty of Theory 281). The radical Romanticism that Thompson links with working-class culture shares utopian protest against Economic Man that The Making of English Working Class describes in such moving detail. …

British Communists and the Palestine Conflict, 1929-1948

British Communists and the Palestine Conflict, 1929-1948

The Hungarian Uprising and a Young British Communist

The Hungarian Uprising and a Young British Communist

Late Modern

Books reviewed:William Godsey Jr., Nobles and Nation in Central Europe: Free Imperial Knights in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1850.Sudhir Hazareesingh, The Legend of Napoleon.William Anthony Hay, The Whig Revival, 1808–1830.Kevin Binfield (ed.), Writings of the Luddites.Matthew Cragoe, Culture, Politics, and National Identity in Wales 1832–1886.Michael Partridge, Gladstone.David Bebbington, The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer and Politics.Paul Ward, Britishness since 1870.Alan Sykes, The Radical Right in Britain: Social Imperialism to the BNP.Miles Taylor and Michael Wolff (eds.), The Victorians since 1901: Histories, Representations and Revisions. The Catholic Church and Russia: Popes, Patriarchs, Tsars and Commissars.Dennis J. Dunn, The Catholic Church and Russia: Popes, Patriarchs, Tsars and Commissars.Margaret Stieg Dalton, Catholicism, Popular Culture, and the Arts in Germany, 1880–1933.Richard E. Frankel, Bismarck's Shadow: The Cult of Leadership and the Transformation of the German Right, 1898–1945.Benjamin Carter Hett, Death in the Tiergarten: Murder and Criminal Justice in the Kaiser's Berlin.Peter D. Stachura, Poland, 1918–1945: An Interpretive and Documentary History of the Second Republic.Joanna Olczak‐Ronikier, In the Garden of Memory: A Family Memoir.Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, The Somme.Philip Williamson and Edward Baldwin (eds.), Baldwin Papers: A Conservative Statesman, 1908–1947.Meda Ryan, Tom Barry: IRA Freedom Fighter.Gerard O’Brien, Irish Governments and the Guardianship of Historical Records, 1922–72.Harold James, The Nazi Dictatorship and the Deutsche Bank.David Cesarani, Eichmann: His Life and Crimes.Martin H. Folly, The Palgrave Atlas of the Second World War.S. P. MacKenzie, The Colditz Myth: The Real Story of POW Life in Nazi Germany.Hans Erich Nossack, The End: Hamburg 1943.Mark Harrison, Medicine and Victory: British Military Medicine in the Second World War.Thomas Lane, Victims of Stalin and Hitler: The Exodus of Poles and Balts to Britain.Y. Michal Bodemann, A Jewish Family in Germany Today: An Intimate Portrait.Geoff Andrews, Endgames and New Times: The Final Years of British Communism, 1964–1991.

The Superterranean World of British Communist Historiography

The Superterranean World of British Communist Historiography

“Who ARE these guys?!” Politics, Passions, Peculiarities, and Polemics in the Historiography of British Communism

“Who ARE these guys?!” Politics, Passions, Peculiarities, and Polemics in the Historiography of British Communism

Studying Their Own Nation Without Insularity? The British Marxist Historians Reconsidered

Contemporary interest in social history owes much to the work of a generation of British Marxist historians, including Edward Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill and Rodney Hilton, who popularized the idea of history from below. A key concept in their work was that of the “people.” The populism was no accident, but can be explained in terms of debates within interwar Marxism, and the adoption by the British Communist Party after 1935 of the Popular Front tactic. It was also no single strand but a family of rhetorical devices. Populism was employed differently by Thompson and Hobsbawm, let alone by the other members of the group.

From Syndicalism to Seattle: Class and the Politics of Identity

In the first half of the twentieth century the labor movement promoted the notion of separate working-class values and interests—evident for example in American and European syndicalism, British interwar Communism and Australian interwar Laborism—and was thus identifiable as a social movement. Like the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, this prewar identity politics successfully mobilized imagined political communities. By contrast, the retreat from emphasis on class difference and the turn to “equality of opportunity” politics, which Raymond Williams identified at midcentury and warned against, demobilized and weakened the labor movement. With class-based inequalities increasing from the 1970s, the decline of working-class identity politics ensured that the discrepancy between the objective importance of class and its subjective significance became especially marked. However, a newly forged identity politics of the world's economically exploited has recently reemerged in the movement against corporate globalization. From syndicalism to Seattle, we have witnessed the rise, retreat and resurgence of class identity politics.

Communist in SOE: Explaining James Klugmann's Recruitment and Retention

James Klugmann spent two and a half years working on the staff of the Yugoslav Section of SOE. One of the most active and overt British communists of his generation, he has long been accused of having exploited that post to manipulate operations and policy in the interests of the communist cause. With reference to SOE and MI5 records, this study reveals how he was able to join and remain in SOE in spite of his pre-war profile as a leading student activist of the left.

Book Reviews

Books reviewed: Decline of the Public: The Hollowing‐Out of Citizenship, by David Marquand. Polity. 176pp. £45 and £14.99. Endgames and New Times: The Final Years of British Communism 1964–1991, by Geoff Andrews. Lawrence & Wishart. 264 pp. £15.99. Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, by Niall Ferguson. Allen Lane. 384 pp. £20. Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City, by Tristram Hunt. Weidenfeld and Nicholson. pp. 432. £25. From Bevan to Blair: Fifty Years Reporting from the Front Line, by Geoffrey Goodman. Pluto Press. 286 pp. £18.99. Obscure Scribblers: A History of Parliamentary Journalism, by Andrew Sparrow. Politico's. 238 pp. £20. The New Labour Reader, edited by Andrew Chadwick and Richard Heffernan. Polity. 352 pp. £17.99 and £60.00. The Progressive Manifesto. New Ideas for the Centre‐Left, edited by Anthony Giddens. Polity. 224 pp. £14.99. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. Norton & Co., 2004. xviii+567 pp. £6.99. The Sacred and the Sovereign: Religion and International Politics, edited by John D. Carlson and Erik C. Owens. Georgetown University Press. xvii+284 pp. £19.50. Free World: Why a Crisis of the West Reveals the Opportunity of our Time, by Timothy Garton Ash. Allen Lane. 308 pp. £ 17.99. William Pitt the Younger, by William Hague. HarperCollins. 652 pp. £25.

Maurice Wilkins (1916–2004)

Maurice Wilkins (1916–2004)

What is the purpose or goal of a presidential address?

What is the purpose or goal of a presidential address?

The historiography of British communism: An alternative reading

This is the contribution The Historiography of British Communism: An Alternative Reading of MTS 31 (2004).

Turning Off the Power:The Electrical Trades Union and the Anti-communist Crusade 1957–61

The following article traces the history of the collapse of one of British communism's most successful interventions into the British trade union movement: its domination of the leadership of the Electrical Trades Union (ETU). This domination ended, catastrophically and ignominiously, with a civil trial at the High Court in 1961. The article analyses how a combination of forces, including institutional anti-communism, bureaucratic trade unionism and the party's own strategy, interacted to produce such a debacle.

British Communists, the British Empire and the Second World War

For a few years after its foundation in 1920 the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) attempted, energetically prompted by the Comintern, to work in solidarity with anticolonial movements in the British Empire. But after the Nazi victory in Germany the Comintern's principal concern was to defend the Soviet Union and the liberal democracies against the threat of fascism. British communists criticized the British Government for failing to defend the Empire against the threat from its imperial rivals. After the entry of the Soviet Union into the war in 1941 they vigorously supported the British war effort, including the defense of Empire. This was not though simply a manifestation of chauvinism. British communists believed that imperialism was suffering a strategic defeat by “progressive” forces and that colonial freedom would follow the defeat of fascism. These chimerical notions were greatly strengthened by the allies' promises of postwar peace, prosperity and international cooperation. In the last year or so of war British communists were clearly worried that these promises would not be redeemed, but nevertheless supported British reassertion of power in such places as Greece, Burma and Malaya. For the great majority of British communists, these were secondary matters when seen in the context of Labour's election victory of 1945 and its promised program of social-imperialist reform.

Critical Reflections on Recent British Communist Party History

Critical Reflections on Recent British Communist Party History

Rethinking British Communist Party Women in the 1920s

Rethinking British Communist Party Women in the 1920s