‘Against fascism, war and economies’: the Communist Party of Great Britain’s schoolteachers during the Popular Front, 1935–1939

2014 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 208-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Kavanagh
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Popular Front

Unions and the Popular Front: The West Coast Waterfront in the 1930s

1986 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 59-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Nelson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
The United States ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Human Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Patterns Of Behavior ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Made In

Recent discussions of the history of American communism have generated a good deal of controversy. A youthful generation of “new social historians” has combined with veterans of the Communist party to produce a portrait of the Communist experience in the United States which posits a tension between the Byzantine pursuit of the “correct line” at the top and the impulses and needs of members at the base trying to cope with a complex reality. In the words of one of its most skillful practitioners, “the new Communist history begins with the assumption that … everyone brought to the movement expectations, traditions, patterns of behavior and thought that had little to do with the decisions made in the Kremlin or on the 9th floor of the Communist Party headquarters in New York.” The “new” historians have focused mainly on the lives of individuals, the relationship between communism and ethnic and racial subcultures, and the effort to build the party's influence within particular unions and working-class constituencies. Overall, the portrait has been critical but sympathetic and has served to highlight the party's “human face” and the integrity of its members.

Odets, Clifford (1906–1963)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Filewod
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
The Moon ◽  
The Social ◽  
Group Theatre ◽  
Experimental Group

One of the foremost American playwrights of the first half of the twentieth century, Clifford Odets is best known for his social realist plays and screenplays, of which Waiting for Lefty (1935), Awake and Sing! (1935), Golden Boy (1937), and Rocket to the Moon (1938) have attained canonical status. A committed leftist and briefly a member of the Communist Party, his meteoric trajectory from actor in the experimental Group Theatre in New York to Hollywood screenwriter has been narrated, first by Harold Clurman in The Fervent Years and then by generations of subsequent critics and biographers, as the tragedy of a tormented and politically ambivalent visionary who struggled to reconcile his radical beliefs with the rapid celebrity that took him to Hollywood. During his later life, his reputation was tainted as a result of his voluntary if ambivalent testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the McCarthy inquisitions. Odets’ importance to theatrical modernism rests on his first play, Waiting for Lefty, which enacted the cultural politics of the Popular Front by absorbing the militancy of agitprop in the social humanism of dramatic realism.

Collective Security or Colonial Revolution? The 1938 Conference on Peace and Empire, Anticolonialism, and the Popular Front

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theo Williams
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Collective Security ◽  
Service Bureau ◽  
History Of ◽  
Socialist Movement

Abstract The 1938 Conference on Peace and Empire was emblematic of the deep divisions within the British socialist movement over the inseparable issues of fascism, war, capitalism, and colonialism. One grouping, around the Communist Party, the Labour Left, and the India League, espoused a reformist anticolonialism tied to a Popular Front of socialists and liberals and the collective security of the democratic powers against the menace of fascism. Another grouping, around the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and the International African Service Bureau (IASB), believed distinctions between ‘democratic’ and fascist colonialism to be flawed and instead advocated anticolonial revolution while rejecting what they saw as pleas to support colonialist policies under the guise of antifascism. This article advances three overlapping arguments. First, that the Popular Front strategy led Communists to promote antifascist alliances that necessarily diminished their anticolonialist activism. Secondly, that the IASB-ILP coalition was the most consistently militant anticolonialist force in Britain during the second half of the 1930s. Thirdly, that we need to more thoroughly integrate both the history of anticolonialism and the ideas and activism of people of colour into our understandings of inter-war British socialism.

The Comintern

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Vatlin ◽  
Stephen A. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Linguistic Communication ◽  
Policy Conflict ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
The Third ◽  
Soviet Foreign Policy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The essay falls into two sections. The first examines the history of the Third International (Comintern) from its creation in 1919 to its dissolution in 1943, looking at the imposition of the Twenty-One Conditions on parties wishing to join the new International in 1920, the move from a perspective of splitting the labour movement to one of a united front in the early 1920s, the shift to the sectarian ‘third period’ strategy in 1928, and the gradual emergence of the popular front strategy in the mid-1930s. It examines the institutions of the Comintern and the Stalinization of national communist parties. The second section looks at some issues in the historiography of the Comintern, including the extent to which it was a tool of Soviet foreign policy, conflict over policy within the Executive Committee of the Comintern (ECCI), and the relationship of ECCI to ‘national sections’, with a particular focus on the Vietnamese Communist Party. Finally, it discusses problems of cultural and linguistic communication within the Comintern.

Front Populaire, Front National: The Colonial Example

1986 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 32-43
Author(s):  
Irwin M. Wall
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
French History ◽  
National Front ◽  
Front National ◽  
Petty Bourgeoisie ◽  
The Right ◽  
Wage Increases ◽  
French Communist Party ◽  
Point Of Reference

The popular front strategy, by which the French Communist party (PCF) came to mean a tactical alliance of the left including the Socialists and the left-leaning elements of the petty bourgeoisie represented by the Radical party, was pursued only briefly by the PCF in the 1930s, from 1934 to 1936. This is ironic, since it is by the slogan of the Front Populaire that the period of the 1930s in French history was to be subsequently known and remembered. The popular front was actually a transitional strategy between the famous (or infamous) “Third Period” of Comintern history from 1928–34, characterized in France by the class-against-class policy, and the policy of Front National, in which the PCF pursued a policy of alliance with anyone, including the right, against fascism at home and abroad. The PCF launched the national front in August 1936, and although the slogan did not catch on and was withdrawn, the party pursued that strategy for the remainder of the period until the war. But it was the popular front that would be remembered as having resulted in a wave of social legislation following the Blum government's assumption of power in June 1936 and which has ever since become a point of reference for the PCF. The wage increases, rights to unionize, paid vacations, forty hour week and nationalizations remain accomplishments for the party, to be built upon in each successive experience of participating in, or supporting the French government.

Popular Front

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cécile Guédon
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
French Government ◽  
French Communist Party ◽  
French Section

An alliance of left-wing movements in France, the Popular Front (Front Populaire) won the May 1936 elections, leading to the first French government headed by a socialist prime minister, Léon Blum (1872–1950), from 5 June 1936 to 21 June 1937. After the anti-parliamentarian riots of 6 February 1934, which violently opposed fascist leagues to leftist organisations, the three main left-wing parties, Radical-Socialists, the Section française de l’internationale ouvrière (SFIO, the French Section of the Workers’ International) and the Parti communiste français (PCF, French Communist Party), joined forces, giving way in 1935 to one unified group to counter the rise of fascism in France.

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