Afterword

Abstract

This concluding chapter, based on a series of interviews with 38 British and Dutch cradle communists who participated in an oral history project about communist family life, argues that the communist identity in Britain and the Netherlands was definitively shaped by these countries’ indigenous social, political, and economic circumstances. Furthermore, this chapter contends that there is a dissonance between the formal (i.e. official policies, directives, and party lines of the Dutch and British communist parties) and the informal (i.e. how these directives and policies were implemented by British and Dutch rank-and-file communists in the privacy of their own homes). It ultimately concludes that the communist ideology was not as all-encompassing as past scholars have argued.