The British Communist Party: A Historical Profile. By Henry Pelling. (New Yok: The Macmillan Company. 1958. Pp. viii, 204. $3.75.)

This article explores a commonly ignored aspect of Japan–North Korean relations: the Japanese factor in the making of Korean socialism. Korea was indirectly influenced by the Japanese Jiyuminken Movement, in the 1910s–1920s serving as a stepping-stone for the creation of a Japanese Communist Party. Wartime mobilization policies under Japanese rule were continued and expanded beyond the colonial era. The Juche ideology built on tendencies first exhibited in the 1942 Overcoming Modernity Conference in Japan, and in the 1970s some Japanese leftists viewed Juche as a humanist Marxism. Trade between Japan and North Korea expanded from 1961 onwards, culminating in North Korea’s default in 1976, from which point on relations soured between the two countries. Yet leaders with direct experience of colonial rule governed North Korea through to the late 1990s.

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Popular Politics and Electioneering between the Wars

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474425612.003.0006 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Malcolm Petrie

Keyword(s):

Communist Party ◽

Political Stability ◽

Popular Politics ◽

Political Extremism ◽

Mass Democracy

Disruption and rowdyism at political meetingswas a feature of Victorian and Edwardian electioneering. The advent of mass democracy, and the rise of Communism in Europe, ensured that such behaviour came to be portrayed as evidence of political extremism and a threat to political stability. As a result, Labour candidates, keen to position their party as one capable of governing for the nation as a whole, distanced themselves from popular electoral traditions now synonymous with a confrontational, and unacceptable, politics of class. Heckling, rowdyism and disruption came, by the 1930s, to be associated primarily with the Communist Party.

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Nation, Locality and Radical Identity

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474425612.003.0002 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Malcolm Petrie

Keyword(s):

Working Class ◽

Communist Party ◽

The Political ◽

Central Control ◽

Election Campaigns ◽

Labour Movement ◽

General Elections ◽

Political Left ◽

National Model ◽

Selection Of

Concentrating upon the years between the 1924 and 1929 general elections, which separated the first and second minority Labour governments, this chapter traces the rise of a modernised, national vision of Labour politics in Scotland. It considers first the reworking of understandings of sovereignty within the Labour movement, as the autonomy enjoyed by provincial trades councils was circumscribed, and notions of Labour as a confederation of working-class bodies, which could in places include the Communist Party, were replaced by a more hierarchical, national model. The electoral consequences of this shift are then considered, as greater central control was exercised over the selection of parliamentary candidates and the conduct of election campaigns. This chapter presents a study of the changing horizons of the political left in inter-war Scotland, analysing the declining importance of locality in the construction of radical political identities.

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