Communist History: An Annual Bibliography (2005)

American Communist History, 2007

The subject of this bibliography is the scholarly literature of communist history. For the USA coverage is extensive. For the rest of the Anglophone world coverage is selective, while coverage for the rest of the world is more selective still. Coverage of the formerly and presently communist countries is largely limited to works dealing with the communist parties of those countries. Anticommunism is covered selectively, with somewhat more emphasis on its interaction with communism than its nature as a movement/ideology per se. Coverage of related topics, e.g. the labor movement, Marxism, other strains of radicalism, etc., is highly selective and limited to items directly relevant to communism. For coverage of current reportage (newspapers, news weeklies, journals of opinion, Internet/World Wide Web discussion lists, etc.) see the Historians of American Communism Discussion List

2010

The International Bibliography of Journal Articles on Communist Studies. Issue 2009. Internationale Artikelbibliographie der historischen Kommunismusforschung. Bibliographie internationale d'articles concernant la recherches sur le communisme. Compiled by Gleb J. Albert and Bernhard H. Bayerlein (With contributions from Kostis Karpozilos and others) This bibliography is an attempt to bundle articles on the history of Communism and related topics published during the year 2009 in scientific journals and serials worldwide. The items are sorted by journal titles and issues. In case a journal published less than two articles on the relevant topics during 2009, these articles are listed under "Other journals". We have tried to make the citations as complete as possible, yet in some cases it was not possible to retrieve the page numbers. 708 journal contributions on the history of Communism and related topics have been investigated and retrieved for the year 2009, yet we are...

TABLE OF CONTENTS I. The Newsletter of the Newsletters: Communist Studies Newsletters -New issues/ Selected Items H-HOAC (Washington D.C.) • Aufarbeitung Aktuell (Berlin) • ICCEES Newsletter (Münster) • NewsNet (Philadelphia) • Alfred Klahr Gesellschaft Mitteilungen (Vienna) • Mitteilungen des FABGAB (Berlin) • Georgian Archival Bulletin (Tbilisi) .

Critical Sociology, 2011

This volume presents seven essays published between 1978 and 1995. All but the second essay (Chapter 2) focus exclusively on American communism and its anticommunist critics. Perhaps this should have been indicated in the title of the book, which is really about certain issues in the historiography of American communism. Brown's aim is to discuss the ideological conditions under which the history of the communist movement has been written. In Brown's view, anti-communism represents an ideological stance that insists upon understanding-really, misunderstanding, distorting-the communist movement as a force largely foreign, even alien, to the society out of which it has, in fact, emerged. The communist movement, in every country including the United States, has been a response to the class struggle of exploited against their exploitation, their exploiters, the capitalists, the capitalist state, and the capitalist system itself. An important characteristic of the "history of communism" has been the fact that this organic connection between communism and capitalism is denied. The communist movement is portrayed as a kind of "deviance," something that comes into American society "from the outside," as though the conditions of capitalism could not possibly have produced it. It is impossible to understand the history of communism accurately in this way. Brown exposes it as an ideologically loaded, class-biased construct, a way of "not understanding" communism by misunderstanding it. The result is a "history" that is more ideology than science (even "social science"): full of evasions, superficial explanations, and outright falsehoods. Brown believes that the communist movement has been produced by capitalist society. To understand it one has to understand the capitalist society that has produced it. This means one has to understand capitalism itself, especially in one's own country-in this case, in the US. A theoretical sociologist, Brown strives to demonstrate that historiography-the writing of history-and sociology-the study of society-cannot be separated. Sociology is, therefore, essentially an historical discipline in that it must be informed with an understanding of the society, which is its object of study, and no society can be understood without a deep historical knowledge of its development. However, bourgeois (that is, capitalist) sociology, along with economics and political science, have been developed in a manner so as to marginalize history, even dismiss it altogether. As a result, much historiography-including anticommunist historiography-has avoided discussions of sociology and economics. Once the intellectual obligation to root analysis of society in history has been conjured away, any accurate, scientific understanding of society is impossible. Arguably, this is the goal of the dominant schools of social science in a capitalist society. The result is a pseudo-analysis that presents itself as social science but is in fact biased towards capitalists in its very assumptions, deeply non-dialectical, and incapable of really understanding the historical origins and development of both communism and anticommunism.

American Historical Review, 2019

2002

Journal of Cold War Studies, 2000

This article reviews the huge Cold War-era and post-Cold War literature on American Communism and anti-Communism in the United States. These issues have long been the subject of heated scholarly debate. The recent opening of archives in Russia and other former Communist countries and the release of translated Venona documents in the United States have shed new light on key aspects of the American Communist Party that were previously unknown or undocumented. The new evidence has underscored the Soviet Union's tight control of the party and the crucial role that American Communists played in Soviet espionage. The release of all this documentation has been an unwelcome development for scholars who have long been sympathetic to the Communist movement.

end of communism