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 the Communist Party of Canada.² This necessitates engagement with the experience of Communism, including appreciation of how leaders and the rank-and-file functioned. Addressing what was entailed in the Party and its members advocating for and affiliating with the Communist International (Comintern) is obviously important and, depending on the period, this means coming to grips with the meaning of Stalinism. All of this and more demands that writing on the cpc be scrutinized with care, particular texts situated judiciously on an interpretive grid that will understandably be crisscrossed with analytic possibilities. At the current conjuncture, histories of Canadian Communism seem analytically stalled in a fruitless (if inadequately addressed) historiographic impasse, ordered by oppositions: Moscow domination vs. local autonomy; authoritarianism vs. the pursuit of social justice. We need to confront these experiences, not as dichotomies, but as related phenomena, developing our histories of Communism around more totalizing appreciations that encompass both sides of a seemingly divided logic of classification. Having myself tried to see beyond the limiting oppositions of the extant historiography, I will explore how certain historians seem unwilling to look past the conveniently counter-posed analyses of two existing schools of thought, labelled traditionalists/revisionists in the United States and essentialists/realists in the United Kingdom. As distortions of my own writing suggest, we have reached a point where it is both appropriate and necessary to be more rigorous and fair-minded in our characterization of the historiography. We will only be able to work ourselves out of the analytic cul-de-sacs associated with understanding Communism's past if we engage with both the history and the historiography in new ways. These will refuse reductionism on the analytic plane at the same time that they grapple forthrightly with Stalinism and other vexing aspects of the history of Communism.

Communist Party Historiography: International Analyses of Opposition

There has long been a tendency in the international writing on Communism to slot research into two contrasting schools of interpretation. A traditionalist historiographic camp, associated in the United States with Theodore Draper, Harvey Klehr, and John Earl Haynes³ and in the United Kingdom with Henry Pelling and Walter Kendall,⁴ argues that Moscow and the Comintern determined and dictated the policies followed by national sections of the international communist movement. At its most mechanical and most Cold Warrish, scholarship written in this vein could present Communist parties as little more than puppets "whose limbs were manipulated mechanically by strings pulled from Moscow." At its best, however, this research and writing provided a solid foundation of empirical detail on Communist activities in specific national settings, gathered together important archival material, and supplemented a rich documentary record with interviews of relevant leaders. This...