Stuart Macintyre and Australian communism

Book review: The Work of History: Writing for Stuart Macintyre

“…Contributions by Ann Curthoys (2022), Peter Love (2022) and, in particular, Frank Bongiornio’s (2022) extended and nuanced mediation on Stuart’s analysis of the Australia labour movement and how to conceptualize its history, appear to reinforce that judgement. I was struck by the persuasive and provocative chapter by Terry Irving (2022) on Stuarts’s communist historiography. While Irving’s comments are not aimed at Stuart’s biography of Paddy Troy – expertly discussed by Bobbie Oliver (2022) – he highlights some unresolved difficulties in writing about communism while keeping its antagonistic relationship with capitalism (communism as originally a militant form of anti-capitalism) from becomingly unfocussed and increasingly ambiguous.…”

“…The issue that Irving thinks is inadequately addressed is how do we evaluate the Communist party, arguably the most significant and successful anti-capitalist political force in Australian history, without questioning how its theory, tactics, and objectives, set out in its founding documents were without much ado systematically abandoned? How to explain its postwar accommodation and then final capitulation to political reformism (Irving 2022: 57-62)?…”