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The article reviews the book, "Trotskyists on Trial: Free Speech and Political Persecution since the Age of FDR," by Donna T. Haverty-Stacke.

At the current conjuncture, histories of Canadian Communism seem analytically stalled in a fruitless (if inadequately addressed) historiographic impasse, ordered by oppositions: Moscow domination vs. local autonomy; authoritarianism vs. the pursuit of social justice. We need to confront these experiences, not as dichotomies, but as related phenomena, developing our histories of Communism around more totalizing appreciations that encompass both sides of a seemingly divided logic of classification. Having myself tried to see beyond the limiting oppositions of the extant historiography, I will explore how certain historians seem unwilling to look past the conveniently counter-posed analyses of two existing schools of thought, labelled traditionalists/revisionists in the United States and essentialists/realists in the United Kingdom. As distortions of my own writing suggest, we have reached a point where it is both appropriate and necessary to be more rigorous and fair-minded in our characterization of the historiography. --Introduction

Daniel Drache has moved me to do what I have always avoided: respond to those who have distanced themselves from the interpretive direction of what they almost uniformly refer to as "the new labour history". The appearance of his article, "The Formation and Fragmentation of the Canadian Working Class: 1820-1920", in Studies in Political Economy no. 15 (Fall, 1984) - supposedly a socialist review that has, in the past, offered Marxist labour histories a warm, if critical, reception - was, for me, the last straw. --Author's introduction

This essay is an attempt to outline recent trends in the criminalization of working-class lives. It casts the net broadly, both historically and geographically, situating capitalist austerity's recent turn to mass incarceration in the United States and Canada in early 19th-century poor law sensibilities. What is happening now differs from the workhouse regime of industrial capitalism's new poor law, of course, but it has undoubted connections to this older regime of regulation. The new new poor law of our times is part of a long history of how dispossession has been pivotal to capitalism's project of uninhibited accumulation and suppression of those driven to defiance and dissent. It reveals how, as profit declines in the productive sphere, incarceration itself can be made to pay. The new new poor law is fundamental to contemporary capitalist political economy as the politics of austerity, the dismantling of the welfare state, and an assault on working-class entitlements and trade unionism are complemented by the rise of a prison-industrial complex. Driven by class antagonisms and racialized scapegoating, the new new poor law inevitably draws into its sphere of influence public-sector workers employed in the criminal justice system. It also unleashes intensified grievances of the incarcerated, stimulating the birth of movements of protest in which prisoners and proletarians search out ways of making common cause.

The article reviews the book, "Waiting for the Revolution: The British Far Left from 1956," edited by Evan Smith and Matthew Worley.

The article reviews the book, "Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties," by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener.

Rebellious youth, the Cold War, New Left radicalism, Pierre Trudeau, Red Power, Quebec's call for Revolution, Marshall McLuhan: these are just some of the major forces and figures that come to mind at the slightest mention of the 1960s in Canada. Focusing on the major movements and personalities of the time, as well as the lasting influence of the period, Canada's 1960s examines the legacy of this rebellious decade's impact on contemporary notions of Canadian identity. Bryan D. Palmer demonstrates how after massive postwar immigration, new political movements, and at times violent protest, Canada could no longer be viewed in the old ways. National identity, long rooted in notions of Canada as a white settler Dominion of the North, marked profoundly by its origins as part of the British Empire, had become unsettled. Concerned with how Canadians entered the Sixties relatively secure in their national identities, Palmer explores the forces that contributed to the post-1970 uncertainty about what it is to be Canadian. Tracing the significance of dissent and upheaval among youth, trade unionists, university students, Native peoples, and Quebecois, Palmer shows how the Sixties ended the entrenched, nineteenth-century notions of Canada. The irony of this rebellious era, however, was that while it promised so much in the way of change, it failed to provide a new understanding of Canadian national identity. A compelling and highly accessible work of interpretive history, Canada's 1960s is the book of the decade about an era many regard as the most turbulent and significant since the years of the Great Depression and World War II. --Publisher's description

Working Class Experience is a sweeping and sympathetic study of the development of the Canadian working class since 1800. Beginning with a substantial and provocative introduction that discusses the historiography of the Canadian working class, the book goes on to establish a general framework for analysis of what ultimately is a social history of Canada. Dividing the years into seven periods in the evolution of class struggle, it beings each chapter with an assessment of that period's prevailing economic and social context, followed by an examination of the many factors affecting the working class during that period. Written in a colourful and sometimes irreverent style, Working Class Experience focuses on the processes by which working people moved, and were moved, off the land and into the factories and other workplaces during the Industrial and post-Industrial Revolutions in Canada. Drawing on much recent work on contemporary capitalism, Working Class Experience offers a significant explanation of the malaise in current labour and management relations and speculates on its significance for progressive change in Canadian Life. --Publisher's description

Analyzes the crisis in Canadian Communism triggered by international developments including Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of the crimes of the Stalin era made in a "secret speech" in February 1956, and the Soviet Union's intervention later in the year to crush the revolt in Hungary. Calls attention to Karen Levine's article, "The Labor-Progressive Party in Crisis, 1956-1957, " published in the same issue, that was originally written as an undergraduate essay at the University of Toronto in the late 1970s.

1983's powerful Solidarity movement, which for a time seemed capable of deflecting the Social Credit government of British Columbia from its neo-conservative course - or even toppling it - instead died with a whimper. In Solidarity: The Rise and Fall of an Opposition in British Columbia, the first book-length account of this pivotal point in the province's history, Bryan Palmer concludes that it was not Social Credit tactics, but the nature of Solidarity's leadership which foreordained the defeat. --Publisher's description

This article offers a preliminary theoretical statement on the law as a set of boundaries constraining class struggle in the interests of capitalist authority. But those boundaries are not forever fixed, and are constantly evolving through the pressures exerted on them by active working-class resistance, some of which takes the form of overt civil disobedience. To illustrate this process, the author explores the ways in which specific moments of labour upheaval in 1886, 1919, 1937, and 1946 conditioned the eventual making of industrial legality. When this legality unravelled in the post-World War II period, workers were left vulnerable and their trade union leaders increasingly trapped in an ossified understanding of the rules of labour-capital-state relations, rules that had long been abandoned by other players on the unequal field of class relations. The article closes by arguing for the necessity of the workers' movement recovering its civil disobedience heritage.

The article briefly reviews "Not One of the Family: Foreign Domestic Worker," edited by Abigail B. Baikan and Daiva Stasiulis, "The Ethics of the New Economy: Restructuring and Beyond," edited by Leo Groarke, "Working: Images of Canadian Labour, 1900-2000 = Travailler: Images de la vie ouvrière au Canada, 1900-2000," by Laszlo Barna, "Working People: An Illustrated History of the Canadian Labour," 4th edition, by Desmond Morton, "Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth," by Marilyn Waring, "Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour," by Maria Mies, "Rocking the Boat: Union Women's Voices, 1915-1975," by Brigid O'Farrell and Joyce L. Kornbluh, "Organized Labour and American Politics. 1894-1994: The Labor-Liberal Alliance," edited by Kevin Boyle, "The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890s: Essays on Labor and Politics," edited by Richard Schneirov, Shelton Stromquist, and Nick Salvatore, "Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century," 25th anniversary edition, by Harry Braverman, with a new introduction by John Bellamy Foster, "New Approaches to Disability in the Workplace," edited by Terry Thomason, John F. Burton, Jr., and Douglas E. Hyatt, "The State of Working America, 1998-99," edited by Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and John Schmitt, " Island Stories: Unravelling Britain, Theatres of Memory," v. 2, by Raphael Samuel, edited by Alison Light, with Sally Alexander and Gareth Stedman Jones, "Shaping History: Ordinary People in European Politics, 1500-1700," by Wayne Te Brake, and "The Maquiladora Reader: Cross-Border Organizing Since NAFTA ," edited by Rachael Kamel and Anya Hoffman.

[E]xplores the human dimensions of plant relocation, sordid corporate practices, and ultimately, the corrosive cultural effects of corporate boosterism. A vivid, hard-hitting expose of big business in a small Ontario community. --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1960s," by Maurice Isserman.

This article reviews the book, "The Retreat From Class: A New 'True' Socialism," by Ellen Meiksins Wood.

This article reviews three books: "People's History and Socialist Theory," edited by Raphael Samuel, "East End Underworld: Chapters in the Life of Arthur Harding," edited by Raphael Samuel, and "Rothschild Buildings: Life in an East End Tenement Block, 1887-1920," by Jerry White.

[This book] is a study of continuity and change in the lives of skilled workers in Hamilton, Ontario, during a period of economic trans­formation. Bryan D. Palmer shows how the disruptive influence of devel­ oping industrial capitalism was counterbalanced by the stabilizing effect of the associational life of the workingman, ranging from the fraternal order and the mechanics' institute to the baseball diamond and the "rough music" of the charivari. On the basis of this social and cultural solidarity, Hamilton's craftsmen fought for and achieved a measure of autonomy on the shop-floor through the practice of workers' control. Working-class thought proved equally adaptable, moving away from the producer ideol­ogy and its manufacturer-mechanic alliance toward a recognition of class polarization. Making ample use of contemporary evidence in newspapers, labour journals, and unpublished correspondence, the author discusses such major developments in the class conflict as the nine-hour movement of 1872, the dramatic emergence of the Knights of Labor, and the begin­nings of craft unionism after 1890. He finds that the concept of a labour aristocracy has litlle meaning in Hamilton, where skilled workers were the culling edge of the working-class movement, involved in issues which directly related to the experience of their less-skilled brethren. More remarkable than the final attainment of capitalist control of the work­ place, he concludes, are the long-continued resistance of the Hamilton workers and their success in retaining much of their power in the pre­-World War I years. --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "The Red Thread: The Passaic Textile Strike," by Jacob A. Zumoff.

Working Class Experience is a sweeping and sympathetic study of the development of the Canadian working class since 1800. Beginning with a substantial and provocative introduction that discusses the historiography of the Canadian working class, the book goes on to establish a general framework for analysis of what ultimately is a social history of Canada. Dividing the years into seven periods in the evolution of class struggle, it beings each chapter with an assessment of that period's prevailing economic and social context, followed by an examination of the many factors affecting the working class during that period. Written in a colourful and sometimes irreverent style, Working Class Experience focuses on the processes by which working people moved, and were moved, off the land and into the factories and other workplaces during the Industrial and post-Industrial Revolutions in Canada. Drawing on much recent work on contemporary capitalism, Working Class Experience offers a significant explanation of the malaise in current labour and management relations and speculates on its significance for progressive change in Canadian Life. --Description at Goodreads

An illustrated, life-and times portrait of Mike Davis (1946-2022), the American writer, activist, urban theorist, and historian.