Volume 48 part 2 (August 2003)

Summaries

Allison Drew, Bolshevizing Communist Parties: The Algerian and South African Experiences
In 1924 and 1925 the Comintern introduced its policy of Bolshevization. A goal of Bolshevization was the creation of mass-based communist parties. In settler societies this meant that the local communist party should aim to be demographically representative of the entire population. This article traces the efforts of the communist parties in Algeria and South Africa to indigenize, seeking to explain why their efforts had such diverse outcomes. It examines four variables: the patterns of working-class formation; the socialist tradition of each country; the relationship between the Comintern and the two communist parties; and the level of repression against communists in both societies. The cumulative weight of the variables in the Algerian case helps to explain why communist activity in the 1920s - including the communist party's ability to indigenize - was far more difficult in Algeria than South Africa.

Brigitte Studer and Berthold Unfried, Private Matters Become Public: Western European Communist Exiles and Emigrants in Stalinist Russia in the 1930s
This article looks at the experiences of foreigners in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, focusing on the divide between the public and the private. For Party members it was assumed that nothing could remain private or personal. In sessions of Acriticism and self-criticism@, even intimate questions had to be put in the open, since a Party member's private life had to be exemplary. From a gender perspective, it is interesting to note that the leading reference for the public handling of private affairs in the Party forums was the equality postulated between women and men, or more precisely between female and male Party members. In that sense, these discussions can be interpreted as tools in the hands of women to stigmatise Anon-Communist@ male behaviour, that is behaviour that degraded women. But the official attention given to private matters also served other means. For the Party leadership these spaces of discussion proved instrumental for disciplining the Party members. And this in a particularly effective way inasmuch as the persons concerned participated in the process. Despite the assumed gender equality, however, the Soviet notions of private and public were not only constantly changing but also highly gendered. During the terror, women and men became victims in different ways, thereby also highlighting their different social positions and functions.

Christine Collette, "Friendly Spirit, Comradeship and Good-Natured Fun": Adventures in Socialist Internationalism
This essay compares and contrasts two British organisations, the Workers' Travel Association (1921-1966) and the British Workers' Sports Association (1930-1957). It considers their motives, their relationships with the Labour movement domestically and internationally and how far they were able to maintain the international activities to which they aspired.

Joseph Melling, Managing the White Collar Union: Salaried Staff, Trade Union Leadership and the Politics of Organised Labour in Post-War Britain, c.1950-1968
The policies pursued by British trade unions, and especially by the white collar unions in the second half of the twentieth century remain the subject of vigorous debate. Many writers have contrasted the egalitarian principles of these institutions and the radical rhetoric of their leaders with the narrow sectional interests which they served in practice. This article offers an alternative approach to such accounts in suggesting that rhetoric and practical behaviour were not contradictory but complementary features of union recruitment and bargaining in the period 1950-1968. The building of white collar unions required the officers to think in imaginative ways, deploying a rhetoric and a logic of professional expertise as well as communicating with a diverse and demanding constituency of members. The relationship between the governance of the white collar union and the politics of the British labour movement was also a subtle and dynamic one in this period of growing state regulation. Jenkins used the resistance to incomes policy as a recruiting sergeant among staff concerned with the erosion of differentials. The most successful white collar union of the late twentieth century evolved a range of recruiting and bargaining models that were grounded on the hard historical experience of the post-war years as well as the rhetoric and marketing talents of its charismatic General Secretary.