Stuart Macintyre's rich history of the Communist Party of Australia recaptures a lost political world

By Sean Scalmer, Associate Professor, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, The University of Melbourne

The crimson thread of communism runs through the work of the great, lamented Australian historian, Stuart Macintyre.

He joined the Communist Party of Australia in the early 1970s as a New Leftist student of formidably theoretical tastes, and he transferred that membership to the Cambridge University branch of the British party when undertaking his doctoral studies.

His prize-winning doctoral thesis became his first book, A Proletarian Science (1980), an examination of the history of Marxism within the British working-class movement from 1917-1933. Macintyre’s second book,…

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