EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Discordant Comrades: Identities and Loyalties on the South African Left By Allison Drew. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2000. 282p. $74.95

Courtney Jung

American Political Science Review, 2002, vol. 96, issue 1, 236-237

Abstract: Drawing on a wealth of new information made available by the opening of the Comintern archives, Drew sheds the light of hindsight on the relationship between the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) and, in turn, the Soviet Comintern, the South African liberation movement, and the white and black trade union movements in the first half of the twentieth century. This rich book makes a unique contribution to our understanding of ties between the Comintern and its satellite parties as well as the early history of the South African antiapartheid movement. There are only two other major books on this period of party history, and both are memoirs of party members who try to establish a particular version of the record. Drew contests the teleology of their accounts of communist party history and instead weaves a contingent narrative that identifies major turning points that narrowed the possibility for a radical reorientation of the party (p. 281). It was not inevitable that the party would split and finally dissolve in the way it did—other outcomes were possible, almost until the end. That they were not taken was the layered result of personal and ideological rivalries and party alliances that made socialism, and socialists, perpetually weak and vulnerable in the context of South African politics.

Date: 2002
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:96:y:2002:i:01:p:236-237_31

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Political Science Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:96:y:2002:i:01:p:236-237_31