The second of two articles commemorating the centenary of the British Communist Party is now available and should be of interest to all socialist scholars:
John McIlroy and Alan Campbell, ‘The Socialist Labour Party
and the leadership of early British Communism’, Critique: Journal of
Socialist Theory, 48, 4 (2020), pp. 609–659: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/Y2BHVVI5SXIJFQYYABRM/full?target=10.1080/03017605.2020.1850817
Starting from
the work of Walter Kendall, Ray Challinor, James Hinton and Richard Hyman, the
article addresses a long-standing historiographical issue: the role ex-members
of its main constituent organisations, the BSP and SLP, played in the early
Communist Party. It progresses past controversy by analysing the 19 former SLP
activists who sat on the CPGB Executive in the 1920s. It compares their impact
in the party with their comparators from the BSP. The article concludes that
the idea of competing political identities based on earlier allegiance
persisting into the 1920s has been exaggerated and fails to facilitate our
understanding of the development of British Communism between 1920 and 1928.
See also John McIlroy and Alan Campbell, A. (2020b).
The early British Communist leaders, 1920–1923: a prosopographical exploration.
Labor History, 62, 5–6 (2020), pp. 423–465:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/DAMMVDTIMTIICD4XW7I6/full?target=10.1080/0023656X.2020.1818711
