1/16/2023 0 Comments Wild aloof rebel origin![]() ![]() The current impasse in United States communist historiography sets the followers of Draper, led by Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, against a fragmenting body of New Left-influenced scholars. Yet, ironically, Theodore Draper’s founding traditionalist texts of the late 1950s and early 1960s, on which so much liberal anti-communist scholarship as well as New Left writing builds, remain unsurpassed as sources on the origins of United States communism and are among the most accomplished studies of the revolutionary left in the 1920s, regardless of national setting. ![]() From the late 1970s, American communist historiography has pitted a traditionalist liberal anti-communism, stressing ‘foreign domination’, espionage, ‘Moscow gold’, undermining of ‘national interest’, the inflexible rule of Comintern dictate, and institutional and political concerns, against a rank-and-file-oriented social history of native American radicalism, much of which skirts rather lightly not only the international context of US communism and its birth, but also the entire question of Stalinism. United States communist scholarship has taken a slightly different trajectory. Their critics, in contrast, assimilate certain strains of older liberal anti-communism (Russian domination and a reification of democracy) with aspects of a programmatic Trotskyism that have never rested easily with a brusque repudiation of democratic centralism, the rejection of the primacy of the vanguard party, and skirting the significance of tested international leadership. For while both sides pay lip service to the importance of a ‘social history from below’, those who defend the communist record most aggressively and insist that it was much more than a ‘made in Moscow’ affair seem to congeal Stalinist, New Left, and even liberal positions. In this twisting of interpretive arms, the relative international strength of British communism and the weakness of American-style New Left-inspired scholarship within the United Kingdom has cast a particular shadow across recent writing on the British revolutionary left. An opposing contingent accents Russian dominance, harkening back to the writings of Henry Pelling, but does so with a marked attachment to the critique of ‘the revolution betrayed’. One side claims that communism must be studied as a movement of national initiative, in which the significant role of the Communist International and its bureaucratization and Stalinization over the course of the mid-to-late 1920s is secondary to the sociopolitical influence of indigenous leaderships, rank-and-file activism, layered complexities of motivation and experience, and local conditions in specific unions and other settings. In the United Kingdom, for instance, a war of position in communist historiography now divides established camps. New sources available from Russian archives and a post-1989 shift in the political climate have changed both the empirical foundations of writing in the field as well as the varied and contested meanings of scholarly engagement. THE HISTORY OF INTERNATIONAL COMMUNISM has recently been reborn. A Revived & Fractured International Historiography ![]()
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