Restoring Stalinism to communist history

From the late 1920s into the 1960s Stalinism dominated British Communism. It transformed the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) into a Soviet satellite and reformist hybrid. Policy swings animated by Russian policy compromised the CPGB’s work in the trade unions. They facilitated adaptation to trade unionism and accommodation with labourism, although these tendencies were periodically challenged. This article assesses the writings of Nina Fishman. A self-styled ‘revisionist’, Fishman sidelined Stalinism, located the dynamics of the CPGB’s union intervention in British culture, party leaders’ conscious economism and disregard of bureaucratic centralism. She applauded their move from revolutionary politics to reformism. Her delineation of the development of British Communism and dismissal of Soviet hegemony is conceptually and evidentially flawed. Marxist conceptions of Stalinism, trade unionism and economism provide a superior means of understanding British Communism than Fishman’s inadequately evidenced assertion of the CPGB’s independence, trade union loyalism and revolutionary pragmatism