Left Transnationalism

The Communist International and the National, Colonial, and Racial Questions

Oleksa Drachewych, Ian McKay, Oleksa Drachewych, Ian McKay

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780773558731
• eBook ISBN:
  9780773559943
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: History

In 1919, Bolshevik Russia and its followers formed the Communist International, also known as the Comintern, to oversee the global communist movement. From the very beginning, the Comintern committed itself to ending world imperialism, supporting colonial liberation, and promoting racial equality.

Coinciding with the centenary of the Comintern's founding, Left Transnationalism highlights the different approaches interwar communists took in responding to these issues. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars on the Communist International, individual communist parties, and national and colonial questions, this collection moves beyond the hyperpoliticized scholarship of the Cold War era and re-energizes the field. Contributors focus on transnational diasporic and cultural networks, comparative studies of key debates on race and anti-colonialism, the internationalizing impulse of the movement, and the evolution of communist platforms through transnational exchange. Essays further emphasize the involvement of communist and socialist parties across Canada, Australia, India, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Latin America, South Africa, and Europe.

Highlighting the active discussions on nationality, race, and imperialism that took place in Comintern circles, Left Transnationalism demonstrates that this organization - as well as communism in general - was, especially in the years before 1935, far more heterogeneous, creative, and unpredictable than the rubber stamp of the Soviet Union described in conventional historiography.

Contributors include Michel Beaulieu (Lakehead University), Marc Becker (Truman State University), Anna Belogurova (Freie Universitat Berlin), Oleksa Drachewych (University of Guelph), Daria Dyakonova (Université de Montréal), Alastair Kocho-Williams (Clarkson University), Andrée Lévesque (McGill University), Lars T. Lih (Independent Scholar), Ian McKay (McMaster University), Sandra Pujals (University of Puerto Rico), John Riddell (Ontario Institute of Studies in Education), Evan Smith (Flinders University), S.A. Smith (All Souls College, Oxford), Xiaofei Tu (Appalachian State University), and Kankan Xie (Peking University).

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration and Sources
• INTRODUCTION Left Transnationalism?
• PART ONE Orientations
• 1 “Revolutionary Social Democracy” and the Third International
• 2 The Russian Revolution, National Self-Determination, and Anti-Imperialism, 1917–1927
• 3 Origins of the Anti-Imperialist United Front
• 4 Transnationality in the Soviet Challenge to British India, 1917–1923
• PART TWO Transnational Personal Relationships
• 5 Los poputchiki
• 6 The Transnational Experience of Some Canadian Communists
• 7 Between the Comintern, the Japanese Communist Party, and the Chinese Communist Party
• PART THREE Race and Colonialism
• 8 Anti-Colonialism and the Imperial Dynamic in the Anglophone Communist Movements in South Africa, Australia, and Britain
• 9 Race, the Comintern, and Communist Parties in British Dominions, 1920–1943
• 10 The Comintern and the Question of Race in the South American Andes
• 11 Various Forms of Chineseness in the Origins of Southeast Asian Communism
• PART FOUR National Questions
• 12 “Young” and “Adult” Canadian Communists
• 13 “It Is Better to Retreat Now Than Be Crushed Altogether”
• 14 Henri Gagnon, Tim Buck, Stanley Ryerson, and the Contested Legacy of the Comintern on the National Question
• 15 Nationalism and Internationalism in Chinese Communist Networks in the Americas
• CONCLUSION Future Avenues for the Study of the Comintern and the National, Colonial, and Racial Questions
• Contributors
• Index