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The British Communist Party and the Trade Unions, 1933-45, by Nina Fishman. Aldershot, England: Scolar Press, 1995. 45.00. Pp. xiv, 380.
The economic history of interwar Britain is, in large measure, the two contrasting histories of north and south. One overwhelming reality was the devastation of the key sectors of the industrial revolution: coal and cotton, steel and shipbuilding. Mass long-term unemployment in the heartlands of these industries - the north of England, Scotland and Wales, Northern Ireland - provides the basis for a historiography of means tests and Hunger Marches, of a complex interdependency of fatalism and protest. Yet the 1930s, even before the expansionary impact of rearmament, can also be read in terms of economic growth and innovation. Production of motor vehicles, telephone equipment, radios and gramophones, and an array of consumer durables grew rapidly, spawning new industrial estates and generating new employment in (and migration to) London and the southeast, and to a lesser extent the Midlands. As in the case of political and cultural history, the 1930s were years of ambiguity and contradiction: alternative narratives may stress the growth of radical ideas, the emergence of a left-oriented intelligentsia, popular enthusiasm for anti-fascist resistance and the defense of the Spanish Republic; or the stabilization of conservative hegemony under a "national" government assisted by a right-wing press.
The history of the British Communist Party is conventionally viewed at least on the left - in terms of a combination of economic adversity and politico-cultural insurgency. In contrast to the extensive attention to intellectual currents, the relationship between Party and unions in the 1930s has not been systematically scrutinized. Against this background, the entry of the Soviet Union into the war in June 1941, and the Party's resulting escape from marginalization, are regularly treated as a decisive turning point in its achievement of industrial influence. The lack of attention to industrial politics in the 1930s has, until now, contrasted significantly with studies of the previous decade. These include L.J. Macfarlane's The British Communist Party: Its Origin and Development until 1929, Roderick Martin's 1969 account of the National Minority Movement, Communism and the British Trade Unions 1924-1933, and a variety of texts on the 1926 General Strike. The present work therefore fills a...