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Introduces the special volume that marks the millennium, including the painting, "Labouring the Millennium," by Ellison Robertson, commissioned by Labour/Le Travail and reproduced on the cover.

Argues in this concluding commentary that the Harper Conservatives have captured the political imagination, while those in opposition have not. Discusses the ideological turn to global neoliberalism, including in Canada, since 1975, as advocated by economist Milton Friedman; in this context, the Harper Conservatives are simply a leaner and meaner version of the trend. Takes note of the contested perspectives on the state and community. Points to social movements, such as the student movement in Quebec, that have attempted to push back. Concludes that the New Right must be challenged by a coherent left politics that is beyond the current party system.

The article reviews and comments on "Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s and 60s: A Memoir," volumes 1 and 2, by Ernest Tate.

The editor announces his retirement and reflects on his longstanding connection with the journal, first as a contributor, then as editor. Expresses appreciation for the work and support of others. Welcomes members of the Canadian Association of Work and Labour Studies to the editorial board as well as incoming editor Sean Cadigan.

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

The Canadian worker has been a neglected figure in Canadian history. Workers have contributed in many ways to the development of Canadian society, but the history of working people — their families, communities and work places — has only gradually become part of our view of the past and an important component of understanding how we came to occupy our present. --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

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.

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

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

The article reviews the book, "Civilization: From Enlightenment Philosophy to Canadian History," by Elsbeth A. Heaman.

At the "Challenging Labour" / «Le défi du travail» conference held at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, in October 2022, two plenary sessions invited scholars to engage in a dialogue on important historical and theoretical issues in the field of labour and working-class history/studies. One of these, on the entanglement of capitalism and colonialism, featured a paper delivered by Bryan D. Palmer and a response from hagwil hayetsk (Charles Menzies). These presentations are revised for publication here along with a rejoinder from Palmer in what is Labour/Le Travail's first "Forum" section. The aim of this section is to foster conversation, with scholars meaningfully engaging with each other's work across disciplinary, methodological, theoretical, or other kinds of differences in approach and understanding. The merit of this kind of dialogue is well demonstrated here by Palmer and hayetsk, and the editors would invite more such conversations for publication in this section in future issues. --Editors' introduction

Responds to hagwil hayetsk/Charles Menzie's paper, "Capitalism and Colonialism," published in the same issue.

V. 1. In the past decade Canadian history has become a hotly contested subject. Iconic figures, notably Sir John A. Macdonald, are no longer unquestioned nation-builders. The narrative of two founding peoples has been set aside in favour of recognition of Indigenous nations whose lands were taken up by the incoming settlers. An authoritative and widely-respected Truth and Reconciliation Commission, together with an honoured Chief Justice of the Supreme Court have both described long-standing government policies and practices as "cultural genocide." Historians have researched and published a wide range of new research documenting the many complex threads comprising the Canadian experience. As a leading historian of labour and social movements, Bryan Palmer has been a major contributor to this literature. In this first volume of a major new survey history of Canada, he offers a narrative which is based on the recent and often specialized research and writing of his historian colleagues. One major theme in this book is the colonial practices of the authorities as they pushed aside the original peoples of this country. While the methods varied, the result was opening up Canada's rich resources for exploitation by the incoming European settlers. The second major theme is the role of capitalism in determining how those resources were exploited, and who would reap the enormous power and wealth that accrued. The first volume of this challenging and illuminating new survey history covers the period that concludes in the 1890s after the creation out of Britain's northern colonies of the semi-autonomous federal Canadian state. ----------------------- V.2. Capitalism and Colonialism: The Making of Modern Canada 1890–1960 continues the examination of our nation’s past through a new lens, incorporating the scholarship of Canadian historians to portray a richly endowed and wealthy but very unequal first-world country. This second volume of Bryan Palmer’s history of Canada covers 1890 to 1960. Weaving together themes that include business, labour, politics, and social history, this account brings the experiences of Indigenous peoples into the centre of the narrative. Canada experienced extraordinary growth during these decades, notably after the Second World War when many Canadians quickly became far better off Yet vast inequalities persisted, Indigenous peoples experienced ongoing and often worsening deprivation, and ordinary people saw little or no real improvement in their lives. These realities set the stage for the interplay of reform, resistance and reaction that followed after 1960. Palmer examines the continuing role of capitalism and colonialism in structuring Canada in the period between 1890 and 1960 from capital’s conflicts and fragile ententes with labour, to the struggles of Indigenous Peoples and francophone Canada, and the changing role of Canadian capital internationally. Relying on the work of scholars who have produced a vast academic literature on a wide range of topics in Canadian history, Bryan Palmer offers a new history of Canada which reflects the knowledge and values of 21st-century Canadians. -- Publisher's description

The article presents a comparison of the working classes in Canada and the U.S. It states that a smaller low-wage manufacturing sector exists in Canada where workers are permanently trapped in poverty. The similarity of the levels and nature of unionization and attitudes toward social provisioning between the two countries are also mentioned.