Alan Campbell and John McIlroy share headline findings from their research into the lives of the women who sat on the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain in its first two decades. In two recent articles, we examine a small group of women active in the labour movement who participated in the leadership of British Communism between the foundation of the Communist … Continue reading Communist women leaders in the 1920s and 1930s
Author: Kevin MorganThis is the abstract of an article published in Labour History Review (2022), 87, (2), 141-182. Read more. This paper examines the national congresses of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in the period of the Communist International (1919-43). Both in Britain and internationally, communist party congresses in this period lost any independent decision-making role and became a mechanism activated and controlled … Continue reading Bolshevization, Stalinization, and Party Ritual: The Congresses of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1920-1943
Author: Dirk Mathias DalbergThis is the abstract of an article published in Labour History Review (2021), 86, (3), 425-452. Find out more. Self-government is one of the most popular terms in left-wing political thought. In the second half of the twentieth century, it was used and discussed both in Western liberal democracies and in the communist bloc. The Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev used this notion from … Continue reading Self-Government in Late 1980s Czechoslovakia: The Slovak Philosopher Miroslav Kusý against the Communist Party
Professor Kevin Morgan pays tribute to the work of the leading Australian historian Stuart Macintyre Continue reading Tribute: a British perspective on Stuart Macintyre
Book: Dissenting Traditions: Essays on Bryan D Palmer, Marxism, and History Continue reading Essays on Bryan D Palmer, Marxism, and History
Two new articles report research into the backgrounds of the CPGB leadership in the 1920s using prosopography as an investigative tool. Continue reading A new investigation of the leaders of British Communism in the 1920s
Walter Citrine served as TUC general secretary from the time of the General Strike to the arrival of the post-war Labour Government. Though sometimes seen as a hardline anti-communist, his relationship with communism in the UK and internationally deserves a more nuanced understanding, as his biographer Dr Jim Moher explains Continue reading Walter Citrine’s dealings with communism and communists
With coronavirus lockdowns ruling out real-world events, the Society for the Study of Labour History took its 2020 annual lecture online, drawing members and non-members alike to their computer screens. The lecture was delivered by Professor Kevin Morgan of the University of Manchester, who took as his theme “The Communist Party Congress as a Syndrome of Political Ideals”. Watch the video below, or on the … Continue reading Video: The Communist Party Congress as a Syndrome of Political Ideals
Author: Patrick SmylieThis is the abstract of an article published in Labour History Review (2020), 85, (1), 59–83. Find out more. This article traces the history of communism in Belfast from 1945 to 1962. Beginning with an assessment of the local Communist Party’s strength and ambitions in the immediate post-war period, it examines rapid membership decline and deteriorating relations with the Northern Ireland Labour Party, suggesting … Continue reading Communism in Cold War Belfast, 1945–1962
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