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A league of his own

Stuart Macintyre’s final volume
by
April 2022, no. 441

The Party: The Communist Party of Australia from heyday to reckoning by Stuart Macintyre

Allen & Unwin, $49.99 hb, 422 pp

A league of his own

Stuart Macintyre’s final volume
by
April 2022, no. 441
Jim Healy’s funeral procession (State Library of New South Wales, PXA 593 [v.38], Courtesy SEARCH Foundation, from the book under review)

Stuart Macintyre was in a league of his own as a historian of communism. That’s not just a comment on his status as a historian of the Communist Party of Australia, whose first volume, The Reds (1999), took the party from its origins in 1920 to brief illegality at the beginning of World War II, and whose second, The Party, covering the period from the 1940s to the end of the 1960s, now appears posthumously. It applies equally to his stature in the international field of the history of communism. There are plenty of Cold War histories of the communist movement, written from outside in severely judgemental mode. There are also laudatory histories, written from within. But when The Reds appeared, it was, to my knowledge, the first history of a communist party anywhere that succeeded in normalising it as a historical topic, that is, writing neither in a spirit of accusation or exculpation but with critical detachment and scrupulous regard for evidence and its contradictions.

Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 'The Party: The Communist Party of Australia from heyday to reckoning' by Stuart Macintyre

The Party: The Communist Party of Australia from heyday to reckoning

by Stuart Macintyre

Allen & Unwin, $49.99 hb, 422 pp

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Comment (1)

  • Before coming to Australia as a migrant in the early 1960s, I heard about the CPA from communist adults in my city of Glasgow. In my ignorance (I was very young), I thought that when I came to Australia I would be living in a worker's paradise. Decades later I had the pleasure of meeting some elderly members of the once thriving party and was also fortunate to attend a talk by Stuart Macintyre, who was very impressive. I will buy this book.
    Posted by Fay Kennedy
    25 July 2022

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