Maurice Spector, James P. Cannon, and the Origins of Canadian Trotskyism
Maurice Spector, James P. Cannon, and the Origins of Canadian Trotskyism Bryan D. Palmer A Revived & Fractured International Historiography THE HISTORY OF INTERNATIONAL COMMUNISM has recently been reborn. New sources available from Russian archives and a post-1989 shift in the political cli- mate have changed both the empirical foundations of writing in the field as well as the varied and contested meanings of scholarly engagement.1 National peculiarities abound. In the United Kingdom, for instance, a war of position in communist historiog- raphy now divides established camps. One side claims that communism must be studied as a movement of national initiative, in which the significant role of the Communist International and its bureaucratization and Stalinization over the course of the mid-to-late 1920s is secondary to the socio-political influence of in- digenous leaderships, rank-and-file activism, layered complexities of motivation and experience, and local conditions in specific unions and other settings.2 An op- 1See, for instance, John Earl Haynes, “The American Communist Party Records on Micro- film,” Continuity, 26 (Spring 2003), 21-26; Randi Storch, “Moscow’s archives and the new history of the Communist Party of the United States,” AHA Perspectives (October 2000), 44-50. 2Among a number of sources that embrace so-called ‘revisionism’ and could be cited see Kevin Morgan, “Parts of People and Communist Lives,” in John McIlroy, Kevin Morgan, and Alan Campbell, ed., Party People, Communist Lives: Explorations in Biography (Lon- don 2001), 9-28; Andrew Thorpe, The British Communist Party and Moscow, 1920-1943 (Manchester 2000); Thorpe, “Comintern ‘Control’ of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1920-1943,” English Historical Review, 113 (June 1998), 637-662; Thorpe, “Stalinism and British Politics,” History, 83 (October 1998), 608-627; Thorpe, “The Communist Interna- Bryan D.
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