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Article Excerpt
WHATEVER ONE MAKES OF IT, communism was one of the key political forces of the 20th century. At once a party, an international, a social movement and a system of government, to say nothing of a major pole of ideological and cultural attraction, the global extension of its influence helped define the "short" 20th century and was one of its characteristic expressions. The editors of the recent survey Le siecle des communismes characterize it in terms of diversity held together by a common project. (1) Even restricting ourselves to the period of the Comintern and Cominform (1919-56), and to oppositional communist parties in Europe and North America, striking variations in political effectiveness and social implantation are immediately apparent. Intersecting with different national cultures, which even in their purely legal aspects ranged from tolerance to terror, these can be grouped according to no single periodization or line of determination. Among the historiographical tools which this distinctively transnational phenomenon demands, those of the comparative historian promise particular insight and illumination. (2) As yet they have been only fitfully employed.
John Manley's comparison of the Canadian, British, and American communist parties is therefore especially to be welcomed. (3) Comparative studies even of two communist parties are rare. To range with assurance across three is an achievement commanding respect. Distancing himself from more polemical exchanges, Manley's measured treatment has the virtue of encouraging reflection on substantive issues. In this spirit, I want in this article to take up one of the central premises of his argument, namely the conceptualization of Comintern historiography in terms of a debate between "traditionalists" and "revisionists." (4) My argument here is that this traditionalist-revisionist dichotomy, even when sensitively presented, tends to reduce complex issues to a single historiographical cleavage defined by communist parties' relations with Moscow. Scholarship irreducible to this set of arguments may be oversimplified or misrepresented. Disproportionate attention is accorded issues that in reality are largely settled. Trivial differences are exaggerated, energies consumed that might better be channelled elsewhere, and conclusions offered adding little to what is already well established. Even sophisticated and mostly convincing narratives, like Manley's, come packaged with generalizations suggestive of the impasse in which this tradition of scholarship has become mired.
The alternative view presented here is from a British perspective, which is also a European perspective. I want to propose that the simple construction of orthodoxy and counter-orthodoxy constrains enquiry and may even mislead where the issues defining these categories are inadequately established. In rather casually employing these categories, Manley, in my view, neither accurately summarizes existing scholarship on British communism, nor sets out fruitful lines of future research. The high quality of his own research deserves better. Manley is kind enough to describe my own PhD, published in 1989, as the first important example of the revisionist approach in Britain. Other historians certainly have a better claim to such a title. Nevertheless, I want to take advantage of this characterization to show the trouble with revisionism from the standpoint of a putative revisionist, referring back to my original account as a sort of measure of what the challenge to an older scholarship actually represented.
Communist Studies and "Revisionism"
"Revisionism" as outlined by Manley is an international historiographical tendency that flourished earliest and most influentially in the USA. Its precondition was a clearly defined orthodoxy, dominant from the 1950s, emphasising the political subservience of communist parties to the Comintern. The sources of revisionism, conversely, were the "broadly radical perspectives of the 'new social history,'" and its apotheosis, apparently a book little noticed in Britain, Michael Denning's The Cultural Front. Manley confidently ascribes a substantial segment of the literature on British and North American communism to one or other of these schools. (5)
The use of such categories echoes, and has sometimes been linked with, their employment with somewhat greater elaboration in the cognate field of Soviet studies. The comparison, moreover, offers insight into the context and significance of such terms. The Soviet historians' debate is usually traced to Sheila Fitzpatrick's 1986 article, "New perspectives on Stalinism," which, despite disclaimers, was widely interpreted as a "New Cohort manifesto." (6) Against an academic backdrop of "Sovietology," it announced the arrival of historians in a field reputedly dominated by political scientists, and signalled to the wider historical community that the field of Soviet history was now open to serious enquiry. (7) At the same time, Fitzpatrick's was more specifically a manifesto for the social historian, and it is this that suggested parallels with an emerging social historiography of western communist parties. In the view of Geoff Eley, commenting in similar terms on both Soviet and Comintern historiographies, it posed the danger of social history at the expense of politics: communist history, as Eley put it, with the communism left out. (8)
How far there really existed a new cohort or revisionist school was debatable. Fitzpatrick's article outlined three alternative possible claims of the social historian regarding the Stalinist political system: that its control over society was less absolute than "totalitarians" had traditionally understood; that it responded to pressures and grievances on the part of "definite social constituencies," and that its policies were actually the produce of "initiative from below" on the part of these constituencies. (9) In Comintern terms, these alternatives could be translated respectively into suggestions of the limited reach of Comintern command structures, of the responsiveness of the Comintern to pressures and grievances from national sections, and the view that Comintern policies were actually initiated "from below," or independently, by national sections. These are by no means identical claims. Not only is it possible to hold to some version of the first of them while rejecting the third of them; in practice, almost every serious historian seems to adopt some variant of this position. This may perhaps be described as "post-revisionist"; it can hardly be regarded as undifferentiated revisionism. (10) When Fitzpatrick implicitly conflated these positions, putative cohort members virtually queued up to clarify their own rather different positions. Several repudiated the contraposition of social and political history. Some distinguished the centrality of state-society relations for Soviet historians from the "new" social history of other countries. Others described their work, not as the repudiation of high politics, but as a departure from top-down exclusivity to engage with both politics and society beyond the Kremlin. (11)
"Revisionism" was therefore a response to a specific historiographical context. Noting how Fitzpatrick's dispersed international cohort had come to adopt similar positions independently, Gabor Rittersporn ascribed this to the application in a field hitherto closed to such research of "commonly used methods of historical research" and "ordinary historical methodology." (12) The choice of such methods was less self-evident than this implied. Theodore Draper, for example, recalled in strikingly similar terms his own earlier ambitions in producing what have since become landmarks of American "traditionalist" historiography. So in a way did Henry Pelling in Britain. (13) Twenty years on, the application of what Rittersporn thought of as ordinary historical methodology has become relentlessly problematized. A schema of orthodoxy and counter-orthodoxy consequently seems less compelling than what one practitioner describes as "paradigmatic uncertainty," a plurality of approaches and the replacement of "simplicity and binary thinking" by complexity and nuance. (14) "Revisionism," if for the moment we borrow the term, meant the arrival in Soviet studies of historical disciplines that in the 1980s were most vigorously expressed in the new social history. To that extent the two agendas coincided, but the context and the period were specific.
One problem with the idea of revisionism was thus the confusion of genre, method, and argument. Even the claim of a "new" social history, or "history from below," does not take us very far. It must at least mean recognising the intrinsic interest and significance of grassroots experiences overlooked in much traditional historiography. It does not, however, have to imply a philosophy of history in which all lines of determination flow from the bottom up. An interest in the experience of the trenches does not mean regarding these as the "causes" of World War I. Nor need (or should) it preclude an interest in what these causes were. A bottom-up view of the Soviet terror may mean stressing the role played by tensions building up from the grassroots or the periphery. This is not, however, identical with history from below, whose interest in everyday life, conversely, must certainly include the everyday life of the terror as systematic oppression from above. The professed revisionist J. Arch Getty, in what another Soviet specialist, Stephen Kotkin, has seen as a self-criticism, actually combined a reaffirmation of method and genre with a retraction of some of the arguments which he based upon them. (15) It is little wonder that historians increasingly prefer less confusing signifiers--David Priestland, for example, proposes "intentionalists" and "structuralists"--while almost universally recognising that the debate between them has lost much of its original rationale. (16)
It is difficult to be sure how Manley's usages fit in with this. The revisionist debate provides his theoretical framework, and specifically in relation to the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) he identifies and to some extent takes issue with a group of British historians allegedly "strongly influenced by American revisionism." (17) As already indicated, my own Against Fascism and War figures prominently among the writings he mentions. Nevertheless, I must record with embarrassment that the only "revisionist" account of us communism with which I was familiar as I wrote it was Isserman's Which Side Were You On?, which I discovered at an advanced stage of writing up. The main acknowledged influence on my understanding of international communism was, rather, Fernando Claudin, whom Manley confusingly categorizes as a "traditionalist." (18) Andrew Thorpe, also classified by Manley as a revisionist, actually describes the localized perspectives of the "new" labour historians as "profoundly unsatisfactory." (19) It may be that Thorpe's work is more "revisionist" in respect of argument, and my own more revisionist in respect of method. If so, this merely underlines the term's inadequacy as a generic signifier. (20) Of the historians Manley mentions, only Nina Fishman has explicitly identified herself with a "revisionist" school of historians, specifically mentioning Fitzpatrick, and we shall see that even Fishman's revisionism was just as much directed at an orthodox communist narrative that Manley overlooks. (21) The relevance of revisionism to scholarship on the CPGB is altogether less straightforward than he appears to realize.
Fog Over the Channel
In part, this is an issue to do with Manley's strongly Anglo-American perspective. One of Eley's...
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