“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
Index for Volume 4, 2005, American Communist History
Campbell, Alan and John McIlroy. A Peripheral Vision: Communist Historiography in Britain. Vol. 4, No. 2, December 2005, p. 125. ———. Some Problems of Communist History. Vol. 4, No. 2, December 2005, p. 199. Davis, Mary and John Foster. Why Were They So Afraid of Communist Influence? Vol. 4, No. 2, December 2005. p. 167. Devinatz, Victor G. The Communist Party’s Grassroots Labor and Political Activism Circa 1920 to 1960: Of North Carolina Tobacco Workers, Pennsylvania Anthracite Racials and the Cold War. Vol. 4, No. 2, December 2005. p. 247 (review essay). Eckstein, Arthur. Not Just Another Political Party. Vol. 4, No. 2, December 2005. p. 237 (review essay). Filardo, Peter Meyer. Dear Comrade Foster: The following is the autobiographical (personal, political, medical) history that I promised. . . Comradely, Claudia Jones (December 6, 1955). Vol. 4, No. 1, June 2005. p. 85. ———. United States & Comparative Communist History Bibliography, 2004. Vol. 4, No. 1, June 2005. p. 61. Foster, John and Mary Davis. Why Were They So Afraid of Communist Influence? Vol. 4, No. 2, December 2005. p. 167. Haynes, John Earl.Frissions of Familiarity. Vol. 4, No. 2, December 2005. p. 175. Haynes, John Earl and Harvey Klehr. The CPUSA Reports to the Comintern: 1941. Vol. 4, No. 1, June 2005. p. 21. Isserman, Maurice. Open Archives and Open Minds: ‘‘Traditionalists’’ versus ‘‘Revisionists’’ after Venona. Vol. 4, No. 2, December 2005. p. 215. ———. Rejoinder. Vol. 4, No. 2, December 2005. p. 233. Klehr, Harvey. Reflections of a Traditionalist Historian. Vol. 4, No. 2, December 2005. p. 225. ———. Response. Vol. 4, No. 2, December 2005. p. 235. Klehr, Harvey and John Earl Haynes. The CPUSA Reports to the Comintern: 1941. Vol. 4, No. 1, June 2005. p. 21. Laybourn, Keith. A Comment on the Historiography of Communism in Britain. Vol. 4, No. 2, December 2005. p. 159.
Aristocratic Century: The sinews of power: political
In his excellent book on the Secretaries of State, Mark Thomson offered ‘the paradox of continuing domination of the aristocracy and the simultaneous insignificance of the House of Lords, per se ’. It is true that, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, the supremacy of the House of Commons in financial matters was a wellestablished convention. The claims of the Commons to an undisputed control over money matters, which had been urged before the Civil War, were resumed immediately after the Restoration and a protracted dispute with the House of Lords began. In 1661 the Lords resolved that there were no precedents in history for this new claim by the House of Commons. In 1671, the Commons retorted that taxation ought not to be questioned by the Lords and in 1678 they reiterated that supply was ‘the undoubted and sole right of the Commons’ and ‘ought not to be changed or altered by the House of Lords’. The Lords' attempt in 1692 to assess their own taxes was also abandoned, though they retired under cover of a rather insubstantial smoke-screen that they maintained their power of amendment to be a ‘fundamental, inherent and undoubted right from which their lordships can never depart’. That established, they departed. Geoffrey Holmes quotes a nice example from 1702 when the bishop of Carlisle found himself the only peer answering to a money bill, ‘no other lord in the House regarded what was doing, this being only (pro forma) to preserve a seeming right to dissent from, or amend, any part of a money bill’.