Radical history online – a list of collections

I am very interested in the growing amount of radical literature from around the world that is being scanned and digitised. As there are so many and from many different places, I thought it would be useful to make a list. All of those that are included are free to access (there are others that require some form of subscription). If there are any that I have missed, do let me know, either by commenting below or sending me an email.

African Communist

AKP M-L Historie (Norwegian Maoism)

Amiel and Melburn Trust Internet Archive

Anarchist Library

Anglo-Soviet Journal

Anti-Apartheid Movement

Anti-Fascist Action

Archibald Gorrie collection (Leicester centred activism)

Assorted Soviet stuff

Assorted communist stuff (via Socialist Truth – Cyprus)

Australian Left Review

Australian Marxist Review

Banned Thought (collection of global Maoist literature)

Big Flame

Black Liberation Front (UK black power)

Black Panther Party

Broadsheet (NZ feminist magazine)

British Pabloism

Bulgarian Politburo Archive

Bulletin of the 1955 Bandung Conference

Comintern Online Archive

Communist Review (Australia)

Communist Party of Australia pamphlets (from State Library of Victoria)

Daily Worker (USA)

De Waarheid (paper of the Dutch Communist Party)

Die Rote Fahne (paper of the German Communist Party)

Digital Innovation South Africa (including Communist Party and ANC material, as well as Searchlight South Africa)

Direct Action (IWW Australia)

Documents in Revolutionary Socialism in Canada

Early American Marxism 

Entdinglichung (German left history)

Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!

Freedom archive (US and international material from 1960s-80s)

Freedom newspaper (London)

Gay Left

High Times (Australia)

Independent Voices (US Alternative Press archive)

Industrial Worker (US IWW newspaper)

International Labour and Radical History Pamphlet Collection (Canada focused)

International Socialist (Australian newspaper 1910s)

International Times

Israeli Left Archive

Iranian Left Archive

Irish Democrat

Irish Left Archive

Koori History

La Bataille Socialiste (French)

Labour Monthly

Labor Star (British Columbia)

Libcom

Library of the Free (German anarchist focus)

Living Marxism (RCP)

Mao Projekt (German far left)

Marxism Today

Marxists InternetArchive

Movimento Reorganizativo do Partido do Proletariado (Portguese Maoism)

Oz (Sydney)

Oz (London)

Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya

Political and Rights Issues and Social Movements collection

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine historical documents

Reason in Revolt

Reassembler, diffuser les archives de révolutionnaries (French Trotskyist archive)

Red Action

Red Army Faction

Red Mole Rising

Revolution (Australia)

Revolutionary Communist Group publications

Revolutionary Democracy (Indian Stalinism)

Rudé Právo (paper of the Czech Communist Party)

Socialisme ou Barbarie

Socialist Standard Past & Present  (SPGB)

Solidarity! Revolutionary Center and Radical Library (US)

Soviet Photography

Spare Rib

Sparrow’s Nest (UK anarchist and Nottingham centred activism)

Splits and Fusions (British Trotskyist history)

Tandana (Asian Youth Movement)

The Communist (Australia)

The Communist (USA)

The Digger (Australia)

The Leninist

The Living Daylights (Australia)

Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Southern Africa

University of Alberta World Communism in the 20th Century Collection

Wits Historical Papers (includes material on Communist Party of South Africa and ANC)

Workers’ Star (Communist Party of Australia – Perth newspaper)

Workers’ Weekly (Australia)

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Communist Party of Australia’s Rupert Lockwood on the Common Market (c.1961)

In the early 1960s, Britain first tried to join the Common Market. The British Labour Party, the trade unions and the Communist Party opposed this, arguing that it was creating a supranational capitalist entity that served no purpose for the British working class (or the other working classes of Western Europe). This can be seen in the literature on the Common Market by the Communist Party of Great Britain produced in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The Australian labour movement and the Communist Party of Australia also opposed Britain’s entry into the Common Market. In the early 1960s, CPA journalist Rupert Lockwood wrote a pamphlet for the Sydney Branch of the Boilermakers’ Society that outlined the Communist-influenced trade unions’ position towards the Common Market.

As part of my endeavours to make some of the more hard-to-find resources on leftist history, I have scanned and uploaded a copy of this pamphlet. In the era of Brexit, I thought it would be interesting to revisit this pamphlet of an earlier era of ‘Euroscepticism’ on the international left.

Archiving the left – CPGB’s ‘Racism: How to Combat It’ (1978)

In 1978, the Communist Party of Great Britain produced two pamphlets dealing with anti-racism and anti-fascism. One was A Knife at the Throat of Us All: Racism and the National Front by National Organiser, Dave Cook. The other was Racism: How to Combat It by the CPGB’s National Race Relations Committee. Cook’s pamphlet outlined the history and theory of racism and anti-racism in Britain, with particular reference to the threat posed by the National Front. The pamphlet produced by the NRRC was a much more practical document, outlining the various ways in which Communist Party members and other labour movement activists could participate in anti-racist actions in a variety of settings.

Coming soon after the revised British Road to Socialism, which pushed for a greater emphasis on the new social movements, these two pamphlets outlined the importance of anti-racism and anti-fascism was for the CPGB in the late 1970s. However as my forthcoming book shows, it was difficult at times for the Communist Party to integrate itself into the anti-racist movement, even though the Party had a long history of anti-racist campaigning.

As part of the efforts by various people to digitise the ephemera of the global left, I have scanned a copy of the NRRC pamphlet, which can be found here.

Some highlights from the CIA’s recent document dump online

This week, the Central Intelligence Agency uploaded more than 12 million documents onto its online library, allowing access to previously unavailable declassified material ranging from the 1940s to the 1990s. There is a lot of interesting material for researchers to wade through, but here are some of my initial highlights:

1. A 1949 report on the communist movement in Australia.
2. A 1949 report on the communist movement in New Zealand
3. A June 1956 report on the fall out amongst Western Communist Parties after Khrushchev’s Secret Speech in February 1956
4. A 1957 report on Titoism and World Communism
5. A 1958 report on the Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference held in Cairo in 1957 (just after the Suez Crisis).
6. A 1976 report on the emerging ‘Democratic Kampuchea’ regime in Cambodia
7. A 1981 report on the states that supported terrorist movements in Europe and North Africa/Middle East
8. Two reports on the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party from July and November 1983
9. A 1984 report on the relationship between Australian Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke and the trade union movement.
10. A 1985 report on terrorism in Western Europe

These are just the tip of the metaphorical iceberg, so if there’s any documents you think are particularly interesting, leave a comment below and I might try to compile a further list soon.

Starting a discussion about self-archiving political movements and the international left

I have been in discussions with various people over the last few months about how movements ‘remember’ themselves and how they engage with their ephemeral history. I am interested in how these movements have often self-archived their materials and what they have done with these materials – are they open to researchers and people interested interested in the history of these movements? Some organisations and movements (as well as certain individuals) have donated their historical papers to various university archives or museums. These are valuable to researchers, but still privilege those who can gain access – usually academics and independent researchers who can afford to do archival research on site.

However some organisations and enterprising researchers are overcoming these obstacles by scanning and digitising the materials of the various progressive and left-wing movements across the Anglophone world. Sites such as the Marxist Internet Archive have been scanning many American, Canadian, British, Irish and Australian documents from the international communist movement, including various Trotskyist and anti-revisionist groups. A number of institutions across the globe have followed, such as the University of Wollongong’s Communist Party of Australia journals, the collection of South African radical material digitised by DISA, the Anti-Apartheid Movement collection at Oxford University, and the Amiel and Melburn Trust collection of British new left journals and the CPGB’s Marxism Today. As well as these institutional initiatives, others are digitising their historical documents at the grassroots level. This can be seen with the Red Mole Rising website, which is archiving online the materials of the International Marxist Group, the Irish Left Archive, the Red Action archive and the Anti-Fascist Archive, amongst others.

The wonderful thing about these online archives is that they are democratising the research of these movements. Anyone with a computer and an internet connection can now access these documents, without incurring the costs of doing archival research. This is particularly helpful for those conducting research internationally. The downside is that these initiatives are often costly in terms of equipment and labour, with individuals having to volunteer a lot of their time and effort to provide these resources for others. Also by relying on the efforts of individuals with access to certain collections, there are significant gaps in what is available online. For example, I would like to see more stuff from Militant and the Workers Revolutionary Party made available.

It is exciting to be conducting research in this era of increased digitsation, but there are limits to what we can access at the moment. More people need to get involved – either providing original documents, or offering their services in the scanning process, or by helping out with the costs of hosting the websites (particularly as Scribd and Dropbox are increasingly used to hold these large file depositories).

At the same time, many original activist documents are languishing in people’s attics, basements, garages and other storage areas. These need to be located and preserved. If you have a collection of left-wing ephemera stored away somewhere, do try to find it and think about donating (or selling or at least, lending) it to people who can digitise it and preserve this (often obscured) history.

I hope this starts a discussion about how historians and activists can work together to help ensure that the documentary history of the international left is not overlooked.

How to navigate the Comintern archives online: A guide for the non-Russian speaker

In 2015, the Russian government made freely available the scanned papers of the Communist International that had been digitised in the 1990s. Access to this digital archive was limited to a number of universities in Europe, as well as the Library of Congress in Washington DC. The new portal made the thousands of scanned documents free to view, but the portal is only navigable in Russian. This post is an attempt to help people navigate the Comintern archives without knowing Russian.

There are two ways to try and find relevant material using the archive – browse and search.

Start with this URL: http://sovdoc.rusarchives.ru/#main

To browse

On the home page of the archive, choose the third from the left link along the top that says “Документальные комплексы”.

This should lead to a page with four options. Click the second link.

This will bring a long list of links in Russian organised by fond (for example, Ф.495. Оп.3.) If you use the LOC guide, you can try to locate specific fonds. For example 495/3 is the fond of the ECCI Political Secretariat.

Once you click on this link, you will find a page describing the fond. In the bottom left hand corner, there is a hyperlinked number.

Once you click on this link, you will find links broken down by individual file. For example, Дело 1, 2, 3, etc. In the 495/3 fond, there are 513 individual files.

If you have a reference for a particular file in a book/article/thesis, it will usually say something like RGASPI 495/3/1. This is the level that each reference is broken down to usually.

Included in each link is a short title of the file in Russian. For example, the first link (495/3/1) is “Protocols and materials to the minutes of the Political Secretariat of the ECCI meeting”. On the right is the date scope for the file.

Once you click on a link, it will take you a page with further information about the file.

In the bottom left hand corner, it will have the words “Количество графических образов” (number of graphic images) and a hyperlinked number.

If you click on the hyperlinked number, you will be taken to an image gallery, with an individual thumbnail for each scanned page, organised into pages of 20 thumbnails.

If you click on a thumbnail image, it will bring up a gallery where you can easily browse through each individual page. However each page of 20 has its own browsing gallery.

Remember that the various bodies of the Comintern were based in several European cities, such as Moscow, Berlin and Brussels, so the documents are in several languages, including Russian, German, French and English.

To search

To search requires a little ingenuity. To find the search bar, once again, choose the third from the left link on the top on the archive’s home page.  As you can only search in Russian, I use a translation tool (such as Google Translate) to translate possible search terms into Russian and then cut and paste into the search bar.

This can be hit and miss, but if you keep it broad like ‘Ireland’, ‘Australia’ or ‘imperialism’, for example, then you will find some stuff. Some of the fonds listed are not currently available, due to some arrangement between the Russian government and Yale University, but most stuff from the 495 series is available.

Once the links to each file come up, follow the above steps to view each individual image.

Printing/Saving

As these images are all JPGs, they can be individually saved by the viewer. Once downloaded, I have found that printing from those saved images is the best way.

Happy archive exploring! If these steps are helpful, please let me know. If anything is unclear, let me know also.