“Who ARE these guys?!” Politics, Passions, Peculiarities, and Polemics in the Historiography of British Communism
Reading John McIlroy’s and Alan Campbell’s dissection of recent writings on the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) by Kevin Morgan, Nina Fishman, Andrew Thorpe, Matthew Worley, and others reminds me of a scene in a cinematic classic, one of a handful of Hollywood’s last unique and great ‘‘Westerns,’’ Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. As Newman and Redford, train robbers with a conscience and a populist sense of the poor’s right to the ample and ill-gotten gains of the rich, try to elude those who want them captured and brought to bourgeois justice, they are pursued, relentlessly, throughout the western hemisphere. In spite of some imaginative efforts and a willingness to seek out escapes to what must have appeared to them ‘‘the ends of the earth’’, Newman and Redford cannot shake those who are ‘‘on their trial.’’ Looking down from a mountainous perch, and seeing once again that they are being meticulously ‘‘tracked,’’ Newman turns to Redford and says in exasperation, ‘‘Who ARE these guys?!’’ Morgan, Fishman, Thorpe, and Worley must ask themselves the same question. The team of McIlroy and Campbell have turned from being their collaborators in the writing of Communist history into something of a nemesis. The historiographic impasse that has developed in Britain parallels that which has long exercised an influence in the United States, pitting so-called ‘traditionalists’ (liberal anti-Communists who accent the institutional history of the Party and understand its politics, determined in Moscow and narrowly conceived, to be the prime consideration in their commentary) against seeming ‘revisionists’ (New Left-inspired advocates of the relative autonomy
How Can We Write Better Histories of Communism?
The fall 2018 issue of Labour/Le Travail establishes how scholarship on the Communist Party of Canada (cpc) remains a vital field of study in the history of the working class. Three of the four articles published address discrete components of cpc experience. C. Scott Eaton provides a fresh reading of the Canadian Labour Defense League’s campaign (1931–36) against the repressive Section 98 of the Criminal Code, the Winnipeg General Strike–era criminalization of radical activities and associations used in 1931 to jail Tim Buck and seven other Communist leaders. Solidarity unionism in the Niagara Peninsula is explored in Carmela Patrias’ discussion of immigrants and Communists in the decades reaching from the Great Depression to 1960. Finally, Ron Verzuh revisits a chapter in the Cold War history of Canadian trade unionism, offering a detailed look at how a 1950–52 United Steel Workers of America raid on the Communist-led Local 480 of the International Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union polarized and transformed Trail, British Columbia.1 All of these essays make important contributions. On their own terms they are examples of useful additions to our knowledge of histories where ethnicity, class struggle, state power, repression, and the politics of dissent intersect. In this commentary I highlight a particular interpretive issue that arises from these articles and other recent scholarship relating to how we understand
Urban Identities and Catastrophe: Izmir and Salonica at the End of the Ottoman Empire*
Two huge fires dramatically influenced the urban development of Salonica and Izmir, in 1917 and in 1922, respectively. These catastrophes occurred after the Ottoman Empire fell, and Salonica and Izmir had shifted into new national contexts. The fires mainly destroyed the districts that were transformed during the late‐Ottoman period. These districts became the cosmopolitan façades of modern Izmir and Salonica. The post‐fires' tabula rasa provided an opportunity for Greek and Turkish politicians and European planners to change the urban identity of both cities. Moreover, the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 transformed their multicultural societies also. Reconstruction plans had been thought to de‐Ottomanize and remove the previous idea of the towns and their multiplicity, interpreting new cultural and nationalist feeling. Here, I emphasize how modernity was interpreted before and after the fires, and point out contradictions between ideological aspects of planning and how the first urban districts were built during the 1920s.