Showing papers in "American Communist History in 2003"

United States & comparative communist history: bibliography 2002

Abstract: The subject of this annual Bibliography is United States and Comparative Communist History. The level of coverage for the United States is extensive. Coverage of comparative Communism (i.e. Communism in other countries and international Communism), is somewhat more selective. Anti-Communism is covered selectively, with more emphasis on its interaction with Communism than its nature as a movement/ideology per se. Coverage of related topics, i.e. the labor movement, Marxism, other strains of American radicalism, etc., is highly selective and largely limited to items relevant to American Communism. Coverage of current reportage (newspapers, news weeklies, journals of opinion, Internet/www discussion lists, etc.) is also highly selective, and largely avoids partisan commentary and exchanges. For more timely coverage see the Newsletter of the Historians of American Communism and the recently established (2003) Historians of American Communism Discussion List (h-hoac@h.net.msu.edu—to subscribe: http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/ hoac). Items cited are from the calendar year in the Bibliography’s title, with two exceptions—Internet/www items, where publication/creation date information is often unavailable or indeterminate (however, the date of bibliographer’s site visit will always be provided), and older items not cited in previous years’ ACH Bibliographies. Selected informational annotations are provided, principally where a work’s title does not convey essential (chronological, geographical, name or subject) information. The Bibliography is organized into 10 format -based sections, listed below. Within each section (if the number of entries is sufficiently large), the citations are organized into two sub-sections, United States and Comparative, each arranged alphabetically. There is no index. Suggested entries are always welcome, especially those for archival, electronic, non-print, and unpublished materials, and for those more ephemeral, esoteric, or tangentially relevant items which are unlikely to be retrieved through the standard bibliographies, databases, or indexes. Please provide a full citation (for Internet/web items this includes a URL) and a one-sentence annotation where the title does not directly convey the item’s relevance to ACH.

Rethinking the historiography of United States communism

Abstract: (2003). Rethinking the historiography of United States communism. American Communist History: Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 139-173.

The history of American communism and our understanding of Stalinism

Abstract: (2003). The history of American communism and our understanding of Stalinism. American Communist History: Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 175-182.

Soviet Military-Industrial Espionage in the United States and the Emergence of an Espionage Paradigm in US-Soviet Relations, 1941-45

Abstract: (2003). Soviet Military-Industrial Espionage in the United States and the Emergence of an Espionage Paradigm in US-Soviet Relations, 1941-45. American Communist History: Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 21-51.

Communist history: seeing it whole. A reply to critics

Abstract: If beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder, writing on Communism and its history is clearly an aesthetic feast. There is of course a transparent political accounting for the variety of tastes in this area, but there is no denying their divergences, as the responses to my “Rethinking the Historiography of United States Communism” indicate. Both Melvyn Dubofsky, an old friend and former teacher, and James Barrett, whose company and commitments I have shared since we were both graduate students, find me hard on New Left-inspired historical writing on Communism and kinder to an older traditionalist/institutionalist school, the originator of which was Theodore Draper. But they both sidestep why it is that I have accented certain texts and react to them the way I do, coming at this question of seeming “preference” from a very different set of sensibilities and political judgements. John Earl Haynes, associated with the 1990s revitalization of the Draper project, does not spend time splitting hairs about my likes and dislikes. He sees my essay as an exploration of how both so-called New Left revisionist and Draperesque traditionalist orientations have misunderstood the nature of Communist history in the US. In this he is quite right. That said, Haynes insists, unlike Dubofsky and Barrett, that the “chief target” of my “historiographic criticism” is Theodore Draper, and that I avoid serious critique of New Left-inspired scholarship because it is “not worthy” of the effort. In this I think he has misread me. The only offshore comment, that of John McIlroy, who writes as a somewhat unorthodox Trotskyist, seems rather uninterested in the New Left vs. traditionalist opposition that preoccupies US scholars. But he tilts discernibly toward a defense of Draper. Finally, if Dubofsky insists in seeing in my essay a devil discovery of Stalin, McIlroy wants to expand the naming of evil by placing Zinoviev at Uncle Joe’s side. So the cartography of critique to which I must reply is one in which the boundaries of difference criss-cross and the terrain shifts. No short response can do justice to this rough mapping of positions, but let me start with what I perceive to be the most common area of concerned skepticism regarding my article. It is of course a highly charged and obviously politicized realm,

Rethinking the historiography of United States communism: a comment

Abstract: Bryan Palmer’s critical commentary on the historiography of American Communism is eloquent and persuasive and I fully endorse the core components of his argument. Absent or insubstantial in many studies, both traditional and revisionist, a singular casualty of historical amnesia, Stalinism matters. A proper understanding of American Communism demands an account of its political refashioning from the mid-1920s. Moreover, Palmer’s important rehabilitation of the centrality of programmatic disjuncture opens up what a simplistic dissolution of Stalinism into a timeless, ahistorical official Communism closes down: the existence of and the need to historicize different Communisms, the reality of an “anti-Communism” of the left as well as of the right, the possibility of rediscovering yesterday and tomorrow a revolutionary internationalism liberated from Stalinism which threatened not only capital but organized labor, working-class freedoms and any prospect of socialism. In this note I can touch tersely on only two points: the issue of continuity and rupture in the relationship between the Russians and the American Party in the 1920s and the question of how alternative Communisms handled the problem of international organization.

The devil is not in the details: he is Stalin!

Abstract: In “Rethinking the historiography of United States Communism,” Bryan Palmer explores and explicates the older and the newer scholarship about Communism in US history. Although he focuses on only a part of the history of Communism in the US, the years from the emergence of a separate and independent Communist movement in 1919 to the end of the depression decade, the scale and scope of his historiographical coverage are remarkable. He covers nearly every publication and scholar on the subject. Palmer also establishes why the two decades between 1919 and 1939 were the most decisive in the history of the Communist Party, USA, and its putative allies. Palmer insists, much like the majority of younger, revisionist scholars whose work first began to appear in the 1980s, that Communism had its origins in US soil, yet he diverges from their interpretations by asserting that the CPUSA evolved into a political organization that took its orders from overseas. Palmer appreciates the two volumes that Theodore Draper wrote covering the history of Communism in the US during those crucial two decades as well as the contributions of such Draper disciples as Harvey Klehr and John Haynes. He credits them with understanding that Communism was primarily about politics, ideology, and proletarian internationalism. Palmer is far less kind to the revisionists, to those who value culture over politics, the local and quotidian over the international and ideological, the personal above the institutional. He concedes that those who have written about individual Communists, focused on more local or regional histories, recorded the oral histories of Communists and former Communists, and studied the impact of Communism on culture have added appreciably to our knowledge of radicalism in the United States. Such scholarship, Palmer is quick to point out, has properly credited Communists with risking much to promote racial justice and the rights of labor, indeed as acting well in advance of others and more aggressively to advance such causes. But he minces no words in rebuking those scholars for refusing to acknowledge that Communism was primarily a political movement to promote proletarian revolution in the United States and around the world, and for neglecting how the Soviet Union, after Stalin gained power, required all other Communist parties to follow the line set in Moscow.

Poison or cancer? Stalinism and American communism

Abstract: Bryan Palmer’s thoughtful and scholarly essay focuses needed attention on the origins and first decade of the Communist movement in the United States. He contends that this period determined the essential nature of the movement and not its experiences in its heyday of the 1930s or later, the period examined by the overwhelming bulk of historical studies; and on his chief point Palmer is surely correct. There was, to be sure, a great deal more going on in the 1930s and later and, consequently, much more material for doctoral dissertations and journal articles. Even so, the origins and first decade of the movement have been neglected by any measure; and in terms of determining the essential nature of the American Communist movement, whatever struggle, debate, and doubt there was existed only in this earlier period. After the ouster of Lovestone, Gitlow, and their followers in 1929, the direction of the CPUSA had been set and the changes in bearing that followed were only zig-zags about the base course. The CPUSA had its greatest impact on American history in the 1930s and 1940s, but what it did and how it did it in this later period was decisively shaped by the prior decade. Palmer also takes the view that the development of the American movement in the 1920s must be understood in direct connection with “a transformation of the Soviet revolutionary process over the course of the 1920s” that resulted in “a Stalinization that reversed the very meaning of revolution not only in Russia but around the world.” He writes from a Trotskyist or, perhaps more precisely, a Cannonist point of view. The malign nature of capitalism in general and in America is taken as a premise and revolution is assumed as a historical and moral necessity. In his view the Bolshevik seizure of power in November of 1917 was not a coup but a matter of Lenin, Trotsky, and the other Bolsheviks having “made a revolution.” Regretfully, however, a variety of factors combined to frustrate the promise of a new socialist society which would, quoting Joseph Freeman, “abolish poverty, ignorance, war, the exploitation of class by class, the oppression of man by man.” Palmer points to the difficulties Bolsheviks faced in making revolution in an economically backward society, the Tsarist heritage of autocracy, the “class dominance of the peasantry,” the drain on resources of World War I, the hostility of capitalist nations, the civil war, the “necessity of institutionalizing an apparatus of re-

The Wondrous Tale of an FBI Bug: What It Tells Us About Communism, Anti-Communism, and the CIO Leadership

Abstract: (2003). The Wondrous Tale of an FBI Bug: What It Tells Us About Communism, Anti-Communism, and the CIO Leadership. American Communist History: Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 3-20.