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REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS
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Robert Gilpin, The Challenge
of Global Capitalism: The World Economy in the 21st Century
(Princeton: Princeton University Press 2000)
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ALTHOUGH GLOBALIZATION studies have shot
to the top of everyones agenda, many of the ideas and assumptions
about globalization are untrue, exaggerated, or just plain wrong.
Even the simplest idea that economic integration is a global phenomenon
has to be taken with a grain of salt. For instance, economic integration
despite the formation of trade blocs remains partial and uneven
and many countries are less integrated than previously, according
to conventional measures. Germanys degree of trade openness
measured by standard economic criteria of imports plus exports
actually declined from 1980 to 1998 from 28 per cent to 25.7 per
cent. Argentinas economy shared little in the competitive
drive to acquire new markets during the same period and rose 8
per cent to 11.7 per cent. The United States, the defender of
global free trade, saw its degree of trade openness rise minimally
from 10.4 per cent to 12.2 percent, hardly the success story of
global forces at work in todays world. To make matters more
complex, Japan was more trade dependent in 1980 than in 1998:
15.3 per cent in 1980 and 10.1 per cent in 1998. If globalization
is such a universal force, why is Japan, one of the worlds
leading trade nations, seemingly moving backwards? It is difficult
questions such as these that Robert Gilpin sets out to explore
in his marvelously synthetic work.
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None of these figures, as Gilpin
shows in his remarkable book, are adequate measures of globalization
but they raise the basic issue, which he addresses with erudition
and conviction, that while globalization is indeed the great transformative
force of our times, its future is anything but secure and may
indeed be reversible in many of its aspects because the system
of globalization is not well-anchored and there is too much friction
driven by US short-term policy needs. If
there is one overarching theme in Gilpins commanding study,
it is that when globalization rests only on a narrow economic
foundation, such as it does now, its political foundation could
collapse. After all, there are many imminent dangers facing the
world system at present, including rising poverty for many of
the globes citizens, under-consumption for many producers
because there is no link between increasing exports and rising
standards of living for all, an uncontrollable social deficit
from the absence of human rights and environmental and labour
standards, and, of course, always present, the siren calls of
protectionism. When he speaks of the challenge with a capital
"C," what he means is that the major powers need to
strengthen their economic and political ties so that the economic
system has a sustainable political framework. If they do not,
the global trading system cannot hold its course in its present
form.
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It is difficult to know whether
Gilpins answers are satisfactory to these compelling challenges
but his exploration of the contradictory forces of globalization,
as well as the system dysfunctionality generated by US
foreign policy interests, makes for compelling and informative
reading. From a policy perspective, Gilpin thinks of himself as
centrist within American elite circles, though many would see
him as much more to the right compared to the tough-minded, stinging
analysis of the World Bank that Stiglitz has delivered in recent
times or even the white-knuckled analysis penned by Sylvia Ostry
in many of her recent articles about the shortcomings of the WTO.
Nonetheless, he has few illusions that US
policy makers are likely to be the best guardians of the present
order because American foreign policy has abandoned a system of
multilateralism for what Gilpin dubs "geopolitical economic
regionalism." This is hardly a felicitous term but it conveys
one of his central ideas that the United States would very much
like to make the world "more like us" and this goal
has been and continues to be central to the administrations
economic strategy, whoever the president is. The fact that Washingtons
strong post-war commitment to a world order based exclusively
on multilateralism and nondiscrimination is now less evident than
ever as a policy fundamental means that its shift towards a unilateral
stance will increasingly create many problems for global governance.
The most important is that US style multi-track
strategy encourages rising US protectionist
pressures both from the Congress and many US-based
multinationals.
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Many non-American readers will
find Gilpins rigorous but balanced analysis of aggressive
unilateralism refreshing. If Gilpin is right that geo-economics
has replaced geopolitics in the post-Cold War world, American
governments will find it relatively easy to subordinate international
global commitments and US foreign policy
concerns to the exigencies of domestic politics. For the rest
of the world, this can only spell trouble, concern, and a high
degree of suspicion about US leadership.
If it is right to believe that the world trading system was right
to expect less and less from US foreign
policy from Clinton, it is a reasonable assumption that under
Bush it will be much worse. The world financial order is likely
to become much more unpredictable and unstable.
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There is a lot wrong with the global
trading system as we know it. The benefits are elusive and the
costs are borne by developing countries and low income groups
in the developed world. Theoretically, free trade is supposed
to raise prosperity for all but the asymmetric gains from open
trade prevent many countries from managing their own economies.
The stress on competitiveness has not led to less concentration
of power but rather the massive agglomeration of power in the
hands of private actors. Gilpin reviews the evidence and concludes
that even when technology allows firms to be more competitive,
wages have fallen for many skilled and semi-skilled workers instead
of rising as they should, according to trade theory, wherein all
will be better off if markets lead and governments follow.
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Theoretically, economists face
a double challenge. First, as Gilpin demonstrates, much of contemporary
trade theory is weak and confusing with regards to technological
change and the importance of domestic policies and institutions.
Secondly, contrary to what so many of the social scientists have
believed in recent times, institutions, domestic markets, and
macro-economic management of the economy remain the key levers
of economic well-being during times of global trade. This is why
Gilpins book is so informative and critical. In large measure
he escapes many of the current ideological wars and sees through
the distortions, which have framed the debates on globalization,
both on the left and the right. While he is not obsessed with
demolishing myths, he provides the reader with a powerful comparative
and critical account of the great debates on globalization. Among
the subjects covered are: the fragility of the global economy,
the second great age of capitalism, the insecurity of the trading
order, European and North American economic integration, Asian
regionalism, and globalization and its discontents. His book makes
for worthwhile reading and it is an excellent text from a US
liberal-conservative. Nothing should surprise us now that Gilpin
has remade himself as such a curious, open-minded scholar. After
all, in a post-Washington Consensus world changing places is the
norm and not the exception.
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Daniel Drache
York University
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Daniel W. Clayton, Islands of Truth: The Imperial Fashioning
of Vancouver Island (Vancouver: UBC Press
2000)
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I LIVE IN VANCOUVER, near the corner of
Bute and Georgia Streets, within sight of Burrard Inlet, and walking
distance from English Bay and Stanley Park. Almost anyone who
has the slightest familiarity with the city knows the area; and
depending on when they encounter it, theyll either be struck
by its natural beauty or frustrated by the interminable gridlock.
Were much less likely to think of it as a colonized landscape
unless weve read Islands of Truth, a book
that asks us to reconsider the reference points we routinely use
to locate ourselves in this space. "Vancouver," of course,
is named after explorer George, the intrepid captain of HMS
Discovery, whose 1792 cartographic voyages brought the
northwest coast into the ambit of British power; "Bute Street"
after John Stuart, third Earl of Bute, the whist-playing, horse
racing favorite of King George III, Vancouvers
patron and the man whose deeds are enshrined in "Georgia
Street"; and "Burrard Inlet" after Harry Burrard,
Vancouvers Royal Navy comrade from his days in the West
Indies.
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According to Daniel W. Clayton,
the otherwise unremarkable place names that make up the geography
of everyday life in my part of the world are implicated in the
ongoing extension of colonial power. In fact, he argues that they
were fundamental to the "imperial fashioning" of the
coast in the 18th and 19th centuries that is the subject of this
book. Cast as a contribution to post-colonial studies, Islands
of Truth is concerned with the connections between power and
knowledge; specifically with the linkages between western imperialism
and the knowledge produced by James Cooks scientific and
humanitarian voyages of "discovery" in 1778, the cartographic
expeditions of George Vancouver in 1792, and the intervening and
overlapping commercial capitalist exploitation of the region in
the maritime fur trade. Each of these contacts with the coast
and its peoples produced particular spatial and historical "truths"
about Vancouver Island, which were embedded and circulated on
maps, ledger books, contemporary and historical accounts of the
period, and in public commemorations. Examples of the "culture
of colonialism," these artifacts were embodiments of imperial
power and the means by which British sovereignty was extended
over aboriginal territory.
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While Cook, Vancouver, and the
fur traders all saw Vancouver Island with "imperial eyes,"
their visions were not as unified or as confident as we might
expect from such erstwhile and hardy adventurers. Nor did they
marginalize aboriginal peoples equally. In the three parts that
make up this book, Clayton outlines the multiple and differently
selective imperial visions at work on the coast, each stemming
from different historical and geographic circumstances. In Part
One, Clayton shows how the scientific and humanitarian mandate
of Cooks voyage created the space to acknowledge the humanity
of indigenous peoples while simultaneously confirming their inferiority.
As well, the nature of his mandate made it possible for Cooks
officer-scientists to raise fundamental epistemological questions
about the enlightenment project and its assumptions about the
possibility of knowing, and about the limits of human knowledge.
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In Part Two, we see how the maritime
fur traders who followed in their footsteps had no time for philosophy,
driven as they were by the narrower pursuit of pelts and profit.
Nonetheless, their sometimes violent encounters with Native peoples
generated a commercial knowledge of the coast that was also characterized
by a grudging recognition of aboriginal localities and differences,
and an acknowledgement of a sophisticated indigenous commercial
and political geography which pre-dated their arrival. The face-to-face,
"embodied" nature of maritime traders contact
with aboriginal peoples also gave rise to the same emotions among
them as it did Cooks officers: desire and fear; admiration
and disgust; and, above all, ambivalence. All of this privately-expressed
emotion stood in stark contrast to the scientific dispassion and
commercial bravado contained in official accounts.
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As is evident in Part Three, it
also contrasted with the imperial knowledge of the coast elaborated
in the wake of the Nootka Crisis, a conflict between Britain and
Spain over sovereignty of the northwest coast. Commercial knowledge
was important to the process of "imperial aggrandizement,"
but not in its original form. A detailed understanding of Native
differences, territories, and alliances may have been crucial
to guaranteeing traders profits but it was of little import
in the paper war between British and Spanish diplomats. To make
commercial knowledge serve the needs of the British imperial state,
politicians stripped it down and reworked it, obscuring the details
of contact and instead abstracting "grand synthetic statements
about profit margins and potential of the coast." (160) The
imperial knowledge that emerged from this process of abstraction
transformed the coast into a "mythical locality," the
first step in its appropriation from aboriginal peoples.
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George Vancouver played a crucial
role in this process of abstraction and appropriation. Dispatched
to conduct an exhaustive survey of the coast to establish Britains
claim to the region, rather than to engage its indigenous inhabitants,
Vancouvers contacts with the island that bears his name
were remarkably devoid of the face-to-face. The "dis-embodied"
nature of his engagement was reflected in his maps of the region,
which, incredibly, acknowledged Spanish place names but not aboriginal
settlements. Vancouvers charts subsequently made it possible
for diplomats, politicians, and colonial administrators to overlook
aboriginal ownership and sovereignty as they did in the 1846 Oregon
boundary dispute with the Americans, and in the settlement of
Vancouver Island in the second half of the 19th century. As such,
Vancouvers maps were the key to the "imperial fashioning"
of region, creating as they did an "anticipatory geography"
of colonization.
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This is an important and in many
ways, innovative book, one that is as empirically solid as it
is theoretically bold so much so that readers may find
its juxtapositions somewhat disconcerting. Canadian historians
are not used to reading the 18th-century arguments of Spains
chargé daffaires alongside the abstractions
of post-colonial theorist Gayatri Spivak. Nor have the pronouncements
of regional historians Frederic Howay and Walter Sage been scrutinized
using the insights of Homi Bhaba and Edward Said. As well as engaging
a complex body of social theory, dealing with the relationship
between culture and imperialism, Islands of Truth also
engages a number of more familiar historical debates. They range
from ones about the impact of the maritime fur trade on aboriginal
peoples, and the geopolitical machinations preceding the Treaty
of Oregon, to the role of historians in forging a provincial identity.
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Given this range of engagement,
it is perhaps not surprising that one of my concerns about this
book relates to its overall coherence. It is extremely difficult
to create a framework that is large enough to hold all of these
ideas and facts and at the same time maintain its own shape. By
and large, Clayton succeeds, but not always: the lengthy discussion
of aboriginal trading strategies at Nootka and Clayoquot Sounds,
as well as the discussion of the historiography of the maritime
trade and the diplomacy surrounding the Oregon Boundary dispute,
were not always as closely connected as they might have been to
mapping and power, the central preoccupations of the book.
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That, however, is a small quibble.
Beyond its substantive arguments, Islands of Truth is significant
because it invites historians to consider both the possibilities
and the limitations of post-colonial theory in shedding light
on the past. The questions, arguments, language, and voice of
Islands of Truth certainly bear the imprint of the authors
deep engagement with that rich and provocative literature
with one important exception: namely, its representation of aboriginal
peoples. Although they are present in Islands of Truth,
Native peoples exist mainly to disrupt the narrative of white
colonizers or to elaborate on them. For instance, Clayton contrasts
the well-documented accounts produced by Cook and officers about
first contact with the slim and translated ones attributed to
local aboriginal peoples. In addition, he fills in the outline
of maritime trade provided by the official record with ethnographic
and archaeological evidence.
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The results, as I have suggested,
are illuminating, and Clayton is careful to discuss the limits
of his evidence. I make this point not so much to criticize his
substantive arguments, but to raise a more general question about
whether or not post-colonial history is possible. Or perhaps more
constructively, to ask what kind of post-colonial history is possible?
How can historians grant aboriginal peoples the same subjectivity
they do Europeans? How can they represent the aboriginals as whole
people, ones who create elaborate and partial "truths"
of their own, who are possessed of the same doubt, ambivalence,
desires, fears, and prejudices that we grant to Europeans?
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If Islands of Truth provokes
us to think about the difficulties in producing a post-colonial
history, it also leads us to consider strengths and weaknesses
of one of its more specific approaches, namely its focus on the
imaginative dimensions of power. Claytons central premise
is that "colonialism does not start with occupation alone,
and it does not work solely on land; it also works with images
and representations, with imaginative geographies that precede,
and to a degree, anticipate colonialism." (166) While few
would take issue with the idea that images and representations
are forms of knowledge and hence power, some might ask how
important they were to realizing the imperial project and the
colonization which followed. Though Clayton acknowledges this
question, he doesnt answer it. Perhaps it is unanswerable.
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But there is another, equally important
and perhaps intractable question regarding the politics of an
approach that privileges the imaginative manifestations of power.
In focusing on the harms perpetrated by Europeans maps and
ledger books instead of their germs and guns, we can overlook
the materiality and the "embodied" nature of colonialisms
violence. Representations are themselves disembodied forms of
power, and perhaps in focusing on them almost exclusively, we
risk turning ourselves into latter day versions of George Vancouver,
producing academic abstractions which, like his charts, become
an unwitting part of colonialism.
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These musings about theory and
method are not meant to deny the importance of this book, but
rather stand as evidence of its power to engage readers. As should
be clear, Islands of Truth is a thoughtful and thought-provoking
piece of work that deserves a wide audience. Those who read it
will be well rewarded.
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Tina Loo
Simon Fraser University
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Joy Parr, Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral, and the
Economic in the Postwar Years (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press 1999)
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Peter Ward, A History of Domestic
Space: Privacy and the Canadian Home (Vancouver: University
of British Columbia Press 1999)
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WHY THE CURRENT allure of the domestic,
the home, the everyday? Is it a visceral reaction to the cool
impersonality and inescapable pervasiveness of globalization as
it designs and controls every aspect of our lives? Certainly a
recent spate of publications in the last couple of years, both
popular and scholarly, and across disciplines from architectural
history to literary theory invite us to reconsider our understanding
of private spaces in relation to intimacy, comfort, and desire.
Cheryl Mendelsons Home Comforts: The Art and Science
Of Keeping House (1999); Marjorie Garbers Sex and
Real Estate: Why We Love Houses(2000); Akiko Buschs
Geography of Home: Writings on Where We Live(1999); Routledges
edited collections, Rethinking Architecture (1997); and
Gender Space Architecture (2000), are examples of
such publications.
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In their studies, Peter Ward and
Joy Parr, eminent social historians from UBC
and SFU respectively (Parr participated
in Wards Science and Society seminar at Green College, UBC),
have turned their attention to Canadian domestic space and domestic
goods, though from quite different perspectives. Ward surveys
the evolution of Canadian houses the family home
over the past three centuries. He does not include domestic spaces
of the first nations, claiming, counter to archaeological evidence,
that "well never know very much about housing in Canada
before the eighteenth century." (8) As indicated by the subtitle,
he focuses on how privacy evolved in the home and how it was accommodated
through changing designs and attitudes during the centuries. Here
he is influenced by Witold Rybczynksis 1986 popular history
of the home in western society. Like Rybczynski, Ward sweeps broadly
through the 1700s to the present; Ward also sweeps widely
from one end of the country to the other; relying heavily on census
data and archival material photographs, architectural plans.
He begins with the ubiquitous one room dwelling, suggesting that
this is the oldest house type in Canada and we see its
reiteration in contemporary studio and loft apartments and in
the summer cottage or cabin. Specific family homes are described
in physical detail through floor plans and photographs; we learn
the size and number of rooms and the size of the families who
inhabit these houses.
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In explaining changes in the spatial
organization of domestic space and the subsequent effect on personal
privacy, Ward outlines technological innovations and advances
such as bathtubs, toilets, heating, lighting, thus providing the
general reader with valuable information. However, when he begins
to touch on wider social issues by, for example, reporting how
one observer noted that the modern generation gap might be a product
of electric light which facilitated the dispersal of the children
to their rooms, he retreats from further analysis, a recurring
and problematic pattern in the book. (51) I recognize that this
elegantly produced book, available only in hardcover, with substantial,
finely reproduced illustrations in the form of paintings, cartoons,
photographs, and floor plans, may be intended for a general rather
than an academic readership. Nevertheless, Ward evades what is
surely the most vital aspect of domestic space the lives
of the people especially the women, children, and servants,
habitually unacknowledged in historical accounts who inhabited
these spaces, were influenced by spatial arrangements, and themselves
affected their own spaces. Assumptions and myths about "family"
are facile; for example, Ward in describing a highrise in Hull,
Quebec in 1971, writes that the provision of cantilevered balconies
allowed single residents "the same access to the great outdoors
enjoyed by its happily married residents," an odd assertion.
(95) Rather like the stark lines of the house plans he provides
abundantly, the book remains an outline, deprived of human figures
and stories. Ward claims that, although we "have the written
record letters, diaries, reminiscences, travellers
accounts
which offer glimpses into the everyday experience
as social historians know all too well, many things we
wish to know about the past were thought too ordinary or unimportant
to warrant writing down." (61) But our literary history resonates
with lively descriptions of domestic life Susanna Moodie
and Catherine Parr Traills voluminous correspondence and
their publications, Roughing It in the Bush and Backwoods
of Canada in the 1800s are a case in point. Similarly, Gabrielle
Roys Bonheur doccasion (The Tin Flute), her
1945 social realist novel about a large and impoverished family,
set in the working-class district of Montreal, St. Henri, during
the Depression, contradicts Ward and the studies he cites that
"overcrowding was uncommon" in early industrial Montreal.
(18)
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Moreover, the question of gender
in relation to domestic space is only fleetingly referred to when
Ward claims, without duly examining or supporting his claim, that
"gender categories dont shed much light on the relations
between privacy and domesticity." (157) In his conclusion,
Ward expresses concern about how the new technologies internet
and fax invade and alter the privacy of the home, a pressing
issue and, like the role of gender in privacy and domesticity,
deserving of further elaboration and investigation.
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In her approach to domesticity
and the home through the specific context of the design, production,
marketing, and reception of postwar domestic goods such as washing
machines, refrigerators, and stoves, Parr suggests that the consumer
(a term she correctly subjects to analysis), in this case the
Canadian homemaker, did engage in a form of resistance to American
corporatization, offering a potential model for our own resistance
to the global market economy. In her introduction, Parr poses
a series of probing questions that elevate this study beyond an
outline of the production and marketing of goods into re-examination
of what is Canadian ("a caution of excess"), and of
the role of Canadian designers and Canadian women homemakers,
who through (twenty-three) interviews belie simple categorization
as passive sexual objects and consumers. To draw the diverse parts
of this wide-ranging and potentially unwieldy study into a coherent
theoretical framework, Parr asks: how do we understand the aesthetics
behind goods, how does contemporary technology constrain (or indeed
promote) how goods are made, and does government not only influence
access to possessions, but also influence the form of things?
And most importantly, she wonders, and here we return to my opening
query about the turn to domestic issues as a response to globalization:
"What can and do citizens do when, by gender, class, or nationality,
they have little influence over the shape of the material world
in which they must live?" (4) In order to begin to answer
these complex questions, Parr shapes her chapters as "closely
researched biographies of policies, institutions and objects."
(267) Thus, she first describes the continuation and consequences
of wartime controls and policies on Canadian domestic goods; for
example, in 1941, the Wartime Prices and Trades Board restricted
production of refrigerators, stoves, and electric washing machines
in order that fuels and metals be directed to the war effort.
In the postwar period, Parr documents the difference between
Canadian and American attitudes to consumption of domestic goods
in that Canadians (like the British) were apparently readier to
accept controls and the scarcity of goods than Americans. Parr
also discusses how designs for domestic goods evolved and the
role of institutions such as museums; she focuses on two important
Toronto exhibitions: Design in Industry (Royal Ontario Museum,
1945) and Design in the Household (Toronto Art Gallery, 1946),
exhibitions, which in terms of visitor interaction and of the
interplay between art and commodity, are surprisingly close to
current exhibition trends at, for example, the Tate Modern. Regretfully,
Parr points out that as "shapers of public taste and arbiters
of the new, museums in the interwar period lost precedence to
department stores, fairs and expositions." (42)
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In another subsequent chapter,
"Inter/national Style," Parr explores how Canadian designers
and manufacturers negotiated their own style between an
international modernism and a national, traditional, craft based
design, and between the small Canadian market and the overpowering
influence of American mass production. A specfic example of Canadian
indigenous design and materials is offered in "Maple as Modern,"
the story of the manufacture of maple furniture, practical, conservative,
durable. Parr reproduces the advertisement for an "Imperialist
Loyalist" living room set "tradition in the modern
manor" to illustrate this phenomenon; indeed as I write this
review, I look across at a maple Ruxton chest of drawers, purchased
for me by my parents in the 1960s, now used by our daughter, still
intact, and simultaneously modern and traditional. In other chapters,
Parr touches on economic theory and resources policies when she
outlines contributing elements to the understanding of the local
domestic goods market, elements such as borrowing, consumer credit,
installment plans, and the effect of competing power sources
natural gas and electricity on the manufacture of domestic goods.
Research and discussion of so many diverse and complex elements
pose the danger of diffusing Parrs focus on the ethical
and aesthetic aspects of domestic goods, but she continues to
avoid this pitfall and to draw upon this abundant material to
enrich the background of her thesis. Perhaps because of the density
of her argument and the copiousness of her documentation, there
are some editorial oversights that result in sentence errors (17
and 70, for example).
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Bolstered by data and responses
from twenty-three interviewees (a limited sample alas), Parr offers
fascinating "biographies" of three significant goods
the washing machine, the stove, the refrigerator. Her presentation
in "What Makes Washday Less Blue" of the continuing
postwar popularity of the wringer washer (and I do remember my
mother pulling sheets and her hand through the wringer,
and the ensuing puddles of soapy water on the cold concrete floor)
over the new, automatic washing machines in Canada, contrary to
American consumer trends makes a powerful and engaging case for
Canadian pragmatism, modesty, and compromise.
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By re-examining and revalidating
our domestic spaces and domestic lives, as Parr somewhat wistfully
concludes, "we too will make grounds for reasoned and resisting
hope ... in space the state and the market cannot readily claim
as their own." (270)
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Kathy Mezei
Simon Fraser University
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Mark Leier, Rebel Life: The Life and Times of Robert Gosden,
Revolutionary, Mystic, Labour Spy (Vancouver: New Start Books
1999)
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THIS IS A BOOK with laudable intentions:
to recover the complex life of a relatively unknown worker, and
more generally to kindle interest in British Columbias labour
history. As I read the book, I kept thinking guiltily that I ought
to be enjoying it more.
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Rebel Life is the biography
of Robert Gosden. He left England as a young man and came to North
America in the early 1900s. Gosden apparently spent much of his
working life in labouring jobs although Leier is chiefly interested
in describing his career as an activist in the labour movement.
The most intriguing aspect of Gosdens involvement with organized
labour was his role as a police informant from 1919 to the early
1920s. Readers of Labour/Le Travail will be familiar with
this chapter in Gosdens life, since Leier described it in
a 1998 article. Although the book gives some additional detail,
it does not alter significantly that earlier account.
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In the opening chapter of the book,
Leier poses the rhetorical question, "Who was this contradictory,
shadowy man?" (7) He answers that Gosden "was typical
of the migrant workers who did much of the work on the industrial
frontiers of North America. His story reveals the world of the
blanket stiff, the hobo, the rough worker." That may well
be the case, but the pages of Rebel Life tell the reader
very little about this world. In fact, the only vivid description
comes in a letter written by another individual, presumably included
to make up for the shortage of such detail from Gosdens
own life. (9) Leier returns to the significance of Gosdens
life in the fifth chapter of the book, repeating the claim that
it illuminates the world of the migrant male labourer. (133) He
also argues that it serves as a reminder of the oppression endured
by working people, that it offers "some glimpses of the shadowy
world of labour spy," and "reminds us that workers are
as important in our history as the politicians and business owners
who are more usually studied." (134, 136) The chapter concludes
that "Understanding his story helps us understand, to some
small degree, the working people who make the province and history."
(137)
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The last chapter of the book is
a wide-ranging discussion of Leiers research which shades
into a "how-to" guide for others interested in exploring
British Columbias labour history. I suspect it would be
of limited use to readers of Labour/Le Travail, but valuable
for novice researchers. An extensive bibliography of British Columbias
labour history is also included in the book, compiled by graduate
students at Simon Fraser University.
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Leier is confident that Gosdens
life is representative or illustrative of the experience of working
people. I am less sure. Much of the detail in the book concerns
Gosdens political activities, and the consequences of those
activities from 1910 to the early 1920s. In part, this reflects
the sources upon which Leier was forced to rely, but it also seems
to privilege the very processes that the author sought to subvert.
Gosdens biography only comes alive when he is on the stand
or writing reports for the police, implicitly contradicting Leiers
claims about the book.
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Although Leier writes well, I found
the story itself of limited interest. Missing is the careful detail
of Rolf Knights several studies of lives spent on the lower
mainland, Bill Whites boisterous prose, the insider accounts
of John Stanton, or the poignancy of Irene Howards life
of Helena Gutteridge. Nor does Gosdens life make any more
sense to me, having read the book, than when I first picked it
up. Why would a man, who until his death kept photos of Joe Hill
and Wesley Everest, act as a spy for a government intent on oppressing
working people? Rebel Life provides no real answer to that
question. Leier does attempt to explain Gosdens willingness
to betray his fellow workers, but his explanation is not very
persuasive. (see 102-104) Similarly, his assertion that Gosdens
biography "stands in for the millions of men and women in
BC and Canada whose lives go largely unrecognized
and unwritten" struck me as idiosyncratic. (137) This is
a man who urged governments to round up and jail labour activists,
who embraced the anti-semitic doctrines of Major Douglas, and
who ended his days a cranky survivalist carrying a sword-cane.
It is the atypical nature of Gosdens life that makes it
of interest, a career that runs in counterpoint to the activities
of more well-known labour figures of his day.
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The book includes numerous sidebars;
text that runs down the outer margins. The effectiveness of this
is questionable. Some of this material would have been better
placed within the body of the text, such as Leiers answer
to the question, "When Did Gosden Become a Spy?" This
runs in juxtaposition to the text for twelve pages, including
an excellent discussion of the trustworthiness of George Hardys
Those Stormy Years. (88-99) Another innovation of doubtful
value was placing the index in front of the 50-page bibliography,
rather than at the end. This does not make an index easy to use.
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Notwithstanding all of this critical
commentary, the book has considerable value. Leier is a good historian
and if Gosdens life is not all that he claims for it, his
biography does shed light on important episodes in BCs
labour history.
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Jeremy Mouat
Athabasca University
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Pat Armstrong, Hugh Armstrong, Ivy Lynne Bourgeault, Jacqueline
Choiniere, and Eric Mykhalouskiy, "Heal Thyself"
Managing Health Care Reform (Toronto: Garamond 2000)
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THIS RELATIVELY SHORT book of 146 text
pages primarily describes changes in health care during the 1990s.
One of the most significant contributions of this book to current
general knowledge of health care and the health system in Canada
is information provided on the rationale or basis for these changes.
Just as significant is the identification and description of concerns
about these changes. To date, these concerns have not been acknowledged
or recognized as legitimate.
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This book is primarily a critique
of top-down managerial reforms, reforms which have not taken a
grass roots participative nor shared governance approach. Although
it raises much food for thought, two issues reduce its impact.
First, and foremost, inconclusive evidence is offered. For instance,
this book has only 153 references. Much thus depends on the authors
ground in health care, yet no information is provided about the
authors background. A second issue is the books minimal
structure. This issue is illustrated by the catchy, but misleading
title of the book. The intent of this book, to inform the public
about health care changes that impact access to comprehensive
high quality health care and to raise public concern over both
ineffectual management and harmful reforms of the Canadian health
system, would be assisted through enhanced structural organization.
A more detailed description of the issues and key contributions
of this book follows.
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The introduction starts nicely
with a clear statement, a statement identifying much about the
thesis or purpose of this book: "This is a book primarily
about health care reform in Canada, and the consequences of these
reforms, particularly as they are assessed by registered nurses."
(1) Following this, the authors indicate, in considerable depth,
that health care reforms date back to World War II and that reforms
are global in context. One additional major point is made, that
the current model for health care reform is the private, for-profit
sector. Tied in are three tenets of change: 1) "integrated
systems ensure continuity of care," 2) "making providers
and patients accountable ensures that appropriate (quality) care
is delivered to the people," and 3) "health promotion
and disease and injury prevention ensures that people stay healthy."
(4-5) The introduction unfortunately presents the books
conclusions, as opposed to raising concern over the impact of
change, particularly change arising from poorly designed health
care reforms.
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The first chapter, as described
in the introduction, is intended to be a brief overview of the
"context for health reform, a context that sets the stage
for local initiatives. It outlines the development of welfare
states in the period following World War II, and explains how
we established a publicly funded health care system in Canada."
(3) The intent of the first chapter is later modified as it also
outlines "some of the pressures and influences to change
health care in Canada ... (as well as) the new paradigm dominant
in the international and national arenas." (8) Chapter one
presents useful information on the history of the health system,
with its origin said to be grounded in the charitable and caring
actions of women. Nursing is thus introduced. The ongoing significance
of the role of women in health care is said to be instrumental,
particularly around World War II, for shaping
the health system. This book advances a feminist viewpoint, a
viewpoint which is refreshing to hear after a concentrated focus
on the men who brought about our health system. Other influences
for creating a publicly-funded universal health system are briefly
explored, although it is unfortunate that the authors did not
ground the health system in the 1957 Hospital Insurance and Diagnostic
Services Act or 1966 Medical Care Act. Instead they cite the 1984
Canada Health Act for bringing hospital and medical insurance
together. Another issue is that the authors use the term "welfare
state." (17) This derogatory term may describe what will
be later understood as the golden years of public policy. These
golden years created single tier health and education systems,
and a social safety network for older persons, unemployed persons,
mentally infirm persons, and so on. It is also regrettable that
the authors are not more precise in their dates. For instance
when was "the new neoliberal paradigm ... with its faith
in a free economy and a strong state" introduced?
(17) This busy chapter also introduces the debt/deficit pressure,
limits of public care, technology pressures, health care as a
business, and models for health care reform. Efficiency and choice,
and efficiency and accountability are considered forerunners of
the neoliberal paradigm. This chapter, which was intended to have
an international focus, focuses on health and social developments
in Canada. Little evidence is presented of international developments
to show how pervasive this new business approach has become.
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The second chapter, as described
in the introduction, "examines more recent changes in Canada
that have fundamentally challenged the welfare state and the health
care services it provides." (3) This chapter begins with
a discussion of international agreements and then moves into a
discussion of downsizing and devolution. The federal government
is criticized for beginning the downsizing trend, with this trend
considered negative to women. Other sweeping statements are made,
and little evidence provided. At the same time, many of the concerns
that exist about health care reform are presented, and this in
itself is extremely important.
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The third, fourth, and fifth chapters,
as described in the introduction, were "designed as an initial
step to assessing these new ways (i.e. integrated systems, accountability,
and health promotion and disease and injury prevention) of managing
health care." (3) Much of the information for these chapters
comes from 10 group interviews with 39 registered nurses in British
Columbia during the month of October 1997. Although much was obviously
gained from these interviews, more recent interviews of nurses
and the public, along with the presentation of other diverse evidence
would be beneficial for validating nurse concerns about change.
In addition, an account of evidence which supports change would
be beneficial. For instance, hospital downsizing has lead to shorter
hospital stays, but not necessarily to poorer health outcomes
as a result of earlier discharges.
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The conclusion to the book, roughly
two pages in length, is a quick summary of the main points of
the book, namely that there are pressures for change, and that
"nurses support reform" but do not see these changes
as reform. (146) Perhaps the most important statement is the last
one in which they fear "an undermining of public health care."
(146)
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In conclusion, this book is an
important early and critical look, mainly from an insiders
(nurses) perspective, at health care changes during the 1990s.
This is a very relevant time to critically appraise health system
changes. Not only has much change occurred, but many more changes
will occur. Some future changes will correct inadequate planning
but others could continue to support casualisation and deprofessionalization
of the health workforce, the unfunded shift of care to the home,
and the continued introduction of a for-profit business model
into health care. The authors argue that not much good has come
of the 1990s changes. Continuing them would be even more detrimental
to the Canadian health care system.
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Donna Wilson
University of Alberta
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Margaret Hobbs and Joan Sangster, dir., The Woman Worker, 1926-1929
(St.-Jean, Terre-Neuve: Canadian Committee on Labour History 1999)
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DANS CE RECUEIL décrits
journalistiques, les historiennes Margaret Hobbs et Joan Sangster
rendent accessibles des textes qui jusquà maintenant
nétaient disponibles que sur du papier fragile et
déjà souvent émietté, au fond des
Archives nationales du Canada. Les spécialistes des mouvements
de gauche et de lhistoire des femmes leur en sauront gré
et y trouveront matière à illustrer les grandes
préoccupations non seulement des femmes communistes mais
aussi de toutes celles qui, critiquant lordre établi,
aspiraient à une société plus juste.
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À lété
1926 paraît une revue mensuelle denvergure nationale,
Woman Worker, lorgane de la Fédération
cana-dienne des Ligues des femmes ouvrières appelées
communément Ligues féminines. Celles-ci, présentes
surtout dans les communautés ethniques socialistes, au
début du siècle, prennent un nouvel essor après
la Grande Guerre, cette fois sous légide du Parti
communiste du Canada (PCC) qui les fédère
en 1924. En 1927, on en compte 37 de Glace Bay à Vancouver
en passant par Timmins et Montréal. La direction est confiée
à Florence Custance, une militante prestigieuse à
la tête du secrétariat des femmes du Parti communiste
du Canada. Les membres des Ligues sont loin dêtre
toutes des communistes, mais elles demeurent des recrues potentielles.
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Comme les écrits communistes
sont indissociables de la position officielle du parti à
ce point précis de son histoire, il convient de rappeler
les enjeux qui marquent les trois années de publication
du Woman Worker. Quand sort le premier numéro en
juillet 1926, le communisme prône encore une politique de
front commun, cest-à-dire de collaboration avec les
autres partis de gauche et dinfiltration dans les organisations
telles que le Parti ouvrier ou les syndicats internationaux du
Congrès du Travail du Canada. Au dernier numéro
de la revue, en avril 1929, le communisme est entré dans
sa Troisième Période dintransigeance et de
non-collaboration avec la gauche social-démocrate.
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Les Ligues, qui tentent de conserver
une certaine autonomie par rapport aux instances qui les dirigent,
demeurent ouvertes aux autres organisations qui défendent
les droits des travailleuses, ce qui leur vaudra de nombreuses
critiques de la part de leurs supérieurs. Le travail du
PCC auprès des femmes a fait lobjet
de critiques et de suggestions du Bureau féminin de la
Troisième Internationale comme de lExécutif
du PCC qui reprochent aux Ligues féminines
leur lenteur à se mettre à la page et à embrasser
la ligne de plus en plus stalinienne de la Troisième Internationale.
Leur orientation est jugée trop réformiste, on se
plaint du petit nombre d´ Anglo-Saxonnes ªparmi
leurs membres, on leur demande plus de militantisme et on les
accuse de négliger la lutte politique. En 1928, la mise
au pas vient de haut quand une lettre du comité dorganisation
de lExécutif du Comintern déclare : ´ les
Ligues féminines ouvrières doivent être guidées
par les fractions du parti sous le contrôle des organes
du parti et, en temps de luttes ouvrières, elles doivent
prendre une part plus active dans lorganisation syndicale
[communiste] des travailleuses.... La propagande des LFO
doit accentuer son caractère de classe, et les erreurs
impossibles récemment commises par le Woman Worker
{en février 1929} doivent être éliminées
par un strict contrôle du parti sur le leadership du mouvement
des femmes ª. Un encadrement aussi serré laissait
peu de marge de manoeuvre et il ne faut pas loublier en
lisant les textes.
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Comme nul nest à labri
de la rectitude soviétique, en mars 1930, quand se durcit
la ligne communiste, Custance elle-même, la seule femme
présente à la fondation du PCC
en 1919, tombe en disgrâce et fait lobjet dune
condamnation posthume pour déviation de droite.
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Une publication obscure pour les
non-spécialistes en histoire du communisme, The Woman
Worker aborde des sujets qui dépassent les questions
de parti pour souvrir sur les multiples défis qui
confrontaient les femmes de la classe ouvrière. Mise sur
pied par Custance, la revue sadresse tant aux ouvrières
quaux parentes douvriers. Des éditoriaux, chroniques
et lettres de lectrices, Hobbs et Sangster dégagent neuf
thèmes : le travail salarié et le mouvement
ouvrier, les lois protectrices, le féminisme et les réformes
sociales, la guerre et la paix, le travail sexuel, le mariage,
la famille et le travail domestique, le contrôle des naissances
et lavortement, la solidarité nationale et internationale
et les activités des ligues locales.
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Les chroniques du Woman Worker
révèlent une ouverture sur le monde rare dans les
revues féminines de lépoque. La solidarité
internationale revient dans plusieurs textes soit lors de la Journée
internationale des femmes le 8 mars, soit lors de la grève
des mineurs de Grande-Bretagne en 1926. LURSS
est représentée comme une terre despoir aux
lectrices pour qui ´ le paradis des travailleurs et
des travailleuses ª nest pas un cliché :
légalité des sexes y est officiellement reconnue,
les lois du mariage et du divorcee et légalité
salariale suscitent lenvi, la contraception et lavortement
sont légalisés. Partout, quelle que soit la question
traitée dans la revue, la perspective de classe lemporte
sur celle de genre. Les femmes communistes qui défendaient
les droits des femmes et dénonçaient les injustices
et la discrimination, se gardaient bien de létiquette
féministe réservée aux bourgeoises du Conseil
canadien des femmes.
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Cet ouvrage nest pas une
édition critique à proprement parler. Ce nest
pas le but des deux historiennes de rectifier les affirmations
que le passage des années et louverture des archives
nous ont appris à nuancer. Elles font cependant précéder
chaque section dune introduction qui établit le contexte
tant canadien que communiste des documents présentés.
Ainsi, par exemple, le chapitre sur la paix et la guerre met en
relief limportance du pacifisme chez les féministes
avant et après la guerre de 1914-1918, les liens et
les tensions entre le pacifisme des féministes comme Nellie
McClung et Agnes Macphail et celui des femmes communistes. Apparaissent
ainsi les différences fondamentales entre le pacifisme
essentialiste ou culturel des féministes comme Alice Chown
et le pacifisme de classe des communistes qui dénonce limpérialisme
et admet la violence de la lutte des classes.
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Lintroduction au chapitre
sur la prostitution énonce la position des femmes communistes
et la compare à celle des réformatrices préoccupées
par létendue du travail sexuel et surtout de la ´ traite
des blanches ª tant redoutée pendant les deux
premières décennies du siècle.
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Chaque introduction est suivie
dune courte bibliographie qui se limite exclusivement aux
ouvrages en anglais, même si six textes traitent du Québec
qui comptaient aussi ses Ligues féminines.
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Sil faut faire confiance
aux lectrices pour le choix darticles représentatifs,
on aimerait toutefois connaître le rayonnement de Woman
Worker quun document dans les archives du Comintern
situe à 1500. Il serait aussi pertinent de savoir quune
proportion du corpus total est reproduit dans ce volume.
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Pour les femmes de la classe ouvrière,
Woman Worker a, pendant quelques années, servi doutil
danalyse et dinspiration dans la lutte des classes.
Pour les étudiantes et étudiants daujourdhui,
la revue aide à mieux comprendre un pan dhistoire
trop souvent occulté des luttes ouvrières et féministes
même si les protagonistes renieraient lépithète.
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Andrée Lévesque
McGill University
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Sylvia Bashevkin, Women on the Defensive (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press 1998)
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MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN on the second wave
of feminism, but Bashevkin offers a fresh perspective on the fate
of the feminist movement following the successes of the 1960s
and 1970s. Her comparative study of the British, American, and
Canadian movements under the "neo-conservative" regimes
of Margaret Thatcher/John Major, Ronald Reagan/ George Bush, and
Brian Mulroney builds upon and extends the work of Susan Faludi
who wrote Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
in 1991. Bashevkins analysis of the treatment of feminist
issues in these three countries reveals that while womens
groups in the United States faced a more active opposition than
those in Britain and Canada, the philosophies of neo-conservatism
were inherently damaging to all of their goals. The politics of
reduced government, spending cuts, deregulation, tax restraint,
and individualism clashed with the level of state intervention
and regulation needed if the goals of the womens movement
were to be achieved and preserved. This conflict between philosophies
is the foundation of Bashevkins argument.
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Tracing the ideals and methods
of the feminist movement back to the activism of the 19th century,
the author notes in Chapter One that the strength of women has
been found in collective action. Only by pooling their resources
and individual strengths could womens goals be accomplished.
Governments were seen as the potential source of social good for
women as it was believed that only the state could impose and
enforce a female agenda. This belief in the need for the government
to play a positive role in equalizing society carried through
into the activities of second wave feminism and campaigns were
directed at influencing the state to exercise this available power
to generate socially beneficial policies. Bashevkin notes that
the collective pressure increased state intervention in terms
of access to education, equality in the workplace, protection
from violence, and financial survival upon divorce.
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However, such intervention was
antithetical to the neo-conservative philosophy and as shown in
Chapter Two, Thatchers policy decisions to privatize public
enterprises, cut welfare entitlements, and reduce the power and
influence of trade unions had indirect but major effects. Women
lost secure reasonably paid positions with the government and
tended to be the group most affected by changes in social entitlements.
With the loss of trade union power, the power base for those opposed
to neo-conservative policies was weakened. The situation was different
in Canada as neo-conservatives did not immediately proceed with
a policy of severe government cutbacks or employment reductions.
Rather, disputes with womens groups revolved around constitutional
issues and free trade, policies that women believed would lead
to a loss of equality rights and jobs. The situation in the United
States was more extreme. Conservative fiscal policies to reduce
government spending, taxes, and intervention were implemented.
In addition, the Reagan government supported the effort to impose
socially conservative policies that would have major impacts on
American women. The Equal Rights Amendment to guarantee constitutional
equality was defeated, efforts to eliminate equal opportunity
programs from the workplace were made through the courts and numerous
laws to limit abortion rights were pursued as the "moral
majority" moved to reinstitute the idealized family values
of the 1950s.
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In Chapter Three, Bashevkin goes
on to discuss the monetary consequences of the ideological battles
on women and identifies three effects: the"work crunch,"
the "spending crunch," and the "advocacy crunch."
The author suggests that the work crunch was most prevalent in
Britain given policies that eliminated government jobs and weakened
union rights, while the spending crunch was dominant in the United
States because of cuts to social services. The advocacy crunch
was most prominent in Canada when retaliation for feminist opposition
to government policy took the form of reductions in funding for
womens advocacy groups. While the first two effects may
be seen as the result of pursuing essential neo-conservative principles,
the Canadian governments action represented a direct attack
against feminist groups, not a side effect of policy implementation.
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The effects of neo-conservatism
are highlighted further in Chapter Four through the narratives
of fifteen women involved in various aspects of the womens
movement in their respective countries. These women faced different
pressures and fought against a variety of policies that impacted
on their personal areas of concern but a common theme emerged
in the stories. This theme was the amount of energy that had to
be expended to simply preserve and defend existing womens
rights. In other words, through the experiences of these women,
it is made clear that feminists were on the defensive and had
little time left over to pursue new goals.
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In Chapter Five, Bashevkin keys
in on the use of divisive tactics by supporters of neo-conservatism.
Rather than remaining passive when groups, such as feminists opposed
their policies, neo-conservatives took an aggressive stance, deriding
"special interests," and portraying them as self-interested
extremists without alternatives. By playing on class, racial,
and ethnic divisions within womens groups, a wedge was driven
among those supporting feminist issues. As a result, group cohesiveness
was weakened. Highlighting the lives of those women (such as Thatcher
herself) who managed to not only survive but succeed without special
rights also helped undermine the arguments of those opposed to
neo-conservative policies.
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Bashevkin brings her analysis forward
to the present in Chapter Six and discusses the changes that occurred
as more moderate successors took over the reins in the three countries.
She suggests that Blair, Clinton, and Chrétien pursued
social policies that were "less harsh and more inclusive,"
but that fiscal policies remained similar, if not identical to
those followed by their predecessors. (200) Therefore, women were
more likely to obtain positions of political power under these
new regimes but new social benefit programs remained rare and
the economic impact of spending cuts continued to hamper feminist
goals.
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In Chapter Seven, the author concludes
by summarizing the effects of the neo-conservative years. She
suggests that womens movements were attacked, divided, demoralized,
and impoverished and that the women involved were left with polarized
opinions, a weakened belief in the viability of collective action,
and a sense of exhaustion from fighting to preserve what they
could. However, the author believes that the experience has provided
valuable lessons that will be needed when the next wave of feminist
activism begins. Flexible tactics will be required, greater attention
will have to be paid to public opinion to avoid the appearance
of radicalism, and internal divisions will have to be healed.
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Overall, this book represents an
important contribution to feminist studies. The comparative analysis
is intriguing, and Bashevkins compilation of legislative
and judicial activity that occurred throughout the study time
frame points out factors deserving of greater study in each nation.
(Appendix A) The discussion of the historical progression of the
conflict between neo-conservatism and feminism is insightful but
perhaps a bit excessive in terms of reviewing philosophical ideals
and policy outcomes separatively rather than as a whole. Otherwise,
Bashevkin presents a well thought out and interesting view of
the trials faced by feminists.
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Sandra Rollings-Magnusson
University of Alberta
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Jacques Rouillard et Henri Goulet, Solidarité et détermination.
Histoire de la Fraternité des policiers et des policières
de la Communauté urbaine de Montréal (Montréal,
Boréal 1999)
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PUBLIÉ À LOCCASION
du 50e anniversaire de fondation de la Fraternité des policiers
et des policières de la Communauté urbaine de Montréal
(FPPCUM), Solidarité et détermination
retrace lhistoire de ce syndicat dont lorigine remonte
à 1918. Bien que louvrage ait été commandé
par la Fraternité, les auteurs soulignent, dentrée
de jeu, quils nont pas rédigé une histoire
officielle. Ils précisent aussi quils ont pu écrire
leur livre en toute liberté. Louvrage nen décrit
pas moins lhistoire de la FPPCUM
avec grande empathie. Pour lessentiel, il soulève
le dilemme auquel la Fraternité est confrontée depuis
sa naissance, tout comme dautres syndicats de policiers
sans doute : comment parvenir à concilier le devoir de
maintien de lordre auquel sont astreints les policiers avec
la mission première du syndicat qui consiste à travailler
à lamélioration des conditions de travail
de ceux-ci?
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Cette histoire de la FPPCUM
repose sur un travail de recherche imposant et minutieux, effectué
dans les archives du syndicat et celles de ladministration
municipale de Montréal ainsi que dans les journaux. Les
informations recueillies ont été organisées
de manière chronologique et regroupées à
lintérieur de cinq grandes périodes correspondant
aux différentes phases de développement du syndicat.
Les cinq chapitres du livre traitent chacun dune de ces
périodes. Le premier, couvrant les années 1918 à
1950, relate les débuts difficiles du syndicat jusquà
la reconnaissance du droit à la négociation collective.
Les années 1950 à 1965, étudiées dans
le deuxième chapitre, corres-pondent à une période
où lactivité de la Fraternité est dirigée
vers la fourniture de services à ses membres. Au cours
des dix ans suivants (chapitre 3), cependant, la FPPCUM
se radicalise, recourant notamment à la grève même
si cela lui est formellement interdit par le gouvernement provincial.
Le militantisme de la Fraternité demeure vigoureux entre
1975 et 1988 bien que cette décennie, traitée dans
le chapitre 4, soit marquée par une décroissance
des services de la police, désormais intégrés
dans la Communauté urbaine de Montréal. Intitulé
´ Une forteresse assiégée ª, le dernier
chapitre démontre comment, au cours de la période
1988-1998, le syndicat a travaillé à maintenir son
dynamisme malgré les nombreuses critiques de lopinion
publique à légard des policiers. Chacun de
ces chapitres est sensiblement organisé de la même
façon : on y traite de la vie interne du syndicat, des
relations avec les autres associations syndicales, de la conjoncture
affectant les policiers, des négociations de leurs conditions
de travail et des résultats de celles-ci.
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Comment donc résumer lévolution
du syndicalisme chez les policiers au cours de ces cinquante ans?
Un premier constat simpose : ceux-ci ont eu beaucoup de
difficulté à obtenir le droit de se syndiquer étant
donné la spécificité de leur fonction. Farouchement
opposées à lidée, les autorités
municipales estimaient que le syndicalisme risquait daffaiblir
la discipline dans les rangs des policiers, dabord considérés
comme des ´ serviteurs du public ª et des ´ protecteurs
de leurs biens et de la moralité ª. (p.54) Il nempêche
que ceux-ci ont définitivement obtenu gain de cause au
début des années 1940, dans un contexte par ailleurs
très favorable aux travailleurs. La situation particulière
des policiers les a cependant empêchés de pouvoir
saffilier à une centrale syndicale et la Fraternité
a donc dû faire cavalier seul. Les autorités craignaient
dans ce cas que les policiers se fassent dicter leur ligne de
conduite par des intervenants extérieurs à ladministration
municipale et aillent ainsi à lencontre de ses intérêts.
On sinquiétait aussi que laffiliation influence
le travail des policiers et les conduise à prendre parti
pour les grévistes appartenant à la même fédération
queux, plutôt quà assurer lordre
public. Bref, puisquils nont pu faire front commun
avec dautres syndicats ou centrales syndicales, les policiers
ont eu tendance à se replier sur leurs propres intérêts.
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Autre caractéristique marquante
de lhistoire de la FPPCUM, les policiers
ne disposent pas du droit de grève et ce, sensiblement
pour les mêmes raisons que celles énumérées
au paragraphe précédent. Par conséquent,
ceux-ci ne peuvent négocier leurs conditions de travail
quau moyen de larbitrage obligatoire. Cette procédure
force les deux parties à sentendre sur la fixation
des conditions de travail des policiers et, à terme, sur
leur renouvellement. En cas dimpasse, elles doivent avoir
recours à un tribunal darbitrage. Si cette façon
de procéder prive effectivement les policiers du droit
de grève et allonge la durée des négociations
au moment de renouveler les conventions collectives, elle va tout
de même leur permettre de faire des gains considérables
tant au niveau du salaire que des conditions de travail. Certes,
durant les décennies 1960 et 1970, marquées par
de nombreuses grèves, les policiers vont se sentir lésés.
Mais à partir des années 1980, alors que le recours
à la grève diminue considérablement et est
de plus en plus mal perçu par la population, ils vont mesurer
la position extrêmement avantageuse dans laquelle ils se
retrouvent. De fait, sans faire la grève et sans perdre
leur salaire, ils sont toujours assurés de pouvoir négocier
leurs conditions de travail puisque la procédure darbitrage
exige des deux parties, syndicale et patronale, den venir
à une entente. À terme, larbitrage va donc
représenter une protection significative pour les policiers
qui, contrairement aux autres catégories de travailleurs,
vont voir leurs conditions de travail saméliorer
constamment. À preuve, depuis 1950 lécart
entre le salaire annuel moyen des policiers et celui de la main-duvre
montréalaise na pratiquement pas cessé de
saccroître en faveur des premiers (voir tableaux présentés
aux pages 128, 252, 305).
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Pour cette raison mais aussi à
cause des pouvoirs quils détiennent de par leur fonction,
les policiers jouissent, depuis les années quarante, dun
rapport de force face à leur employeur qui leur est grandement
favorable. Bien que les auteurs de Solidarité et détermination
le reconnaissent dans de rares passages du livre, ils ont tendance
à sur-valoriser le caractère combatif du syndicat
pour expliquer la position avantageuse des policiers. Dans ce
cas comme dans certains autres, louvrage manque, à
mon avis, de distance critique. Cest particulièrement
vrai quand il traite des critiques qui ont été adressées
aux policiers depuis une vingtaine dannées à
propos de cas de ´ brutalités policières ª.
Certes, les auteurs ont raison de dire que les journalistes ont
eu tendance à grossir les événements pour
attirer des lecteurs, mais force est tout de même de reconnaître
que le problème existe et quil na pas été
résolu, ce que les auteurs ne font pas.
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En somme, il est dommage que J.
Rouillard et H. Goulet naient pas saisi loccasion
de cette histoire du syndica-lisme policier pour amorcer une réflexion
sur lévolution du rôle des policiers et de
leurs responsabilités sur le plan social. En insistant
essentiellement sur les conditions de travail des policiers, les
auteurs présentent un portrait dune Fraternité
surtout préoccupée par cette question. Tout se passe
comme si le syndicat navait pas aussi été
le lieu dune réfle-xion sur le travail même
de policier. Est-ce vraiment le cas? De même, est-ce à
cause de cette tendance des auteurs à mettre en valeur
le caractère combatif du syndicat, au détriment
dautres facettes de son histoire, que la question des loisirs
organisés par la Fraternité nest abordée
que par le biais de photographies et dans de rares encarts? Et
que dire de la place des femmes policières? Certes les
auteurs soulignent la difficulté pour elles de sintégrer
mais lanalyse nest pas très approfondie dans
ce cas non plus. Ces remarques nenlèvent évidemment
rien à la qualité du travail de recherche et de
synthèse effectué par les auteurs de Solidarité
et détermination. Cela témoigne cependant de
la difficulté de faire une histoire critique quand on répond
à une commande.
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Michèle Dagenais
Université de Montréal
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Richard White, Gentlemen Engineers: The Working Lives of Frank
and Walter Shanly (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999)
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WALTER AND FRANK SHANLY were two brothers
who aspired to the status of 19th-century gentlemen and who also
shared the occupation of civil engineer. Raised in a large Anglo-Irish
family clinging precariously to its gentry status, they emigrated
to Canada West in 1836 with the education and expectations befitting
their class. There, they settled on an occupation that, according
to the author, was already, in the years around mid-century, a
"distinct, self-conscious," and "fairly high-status
profession" which provided a respectable living for such
men who, he suggests, were more numerous than supposed.
(xii, 183) Whether one agrees with this thesis or not, the book
remains an interesting study of how these two particular gentlemen
fared in their chosen careers, including detailed descriptions
of the many and varied jobs they performed, both as civil engineers
and in other occupations. It is also a sympathetic account of
their personal achievements and failures in the 19th-century world
of work.
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The book falls into two parts.
The author describes the Shanlys social origins, family
life, and their introduction to civil engineering in the colony.
A chapter entitled "Learning on the Job" contains astute
and thoughtful commentary on that process. The brothers had already
acquired a knowledge of managing and accounting from their father,
an estate manager in Ireland; their classical education taught
them mathematical and writing skills. And from both sources, they
imbibed the gentlemanly notions of disinterested judgement and
impartial independence. To this foundation were added the particular
skills of a civil engineer through a variety of "unregulated"
but not "easily accessible" means. (56) Observation,
instruction, private study, and practical application on a daily
basis were the norm, in varying degrees of effectiveness depending
on the particular task, the general nature of the work, the inclinations
of supervisors to train their apprentices (in Franks case,
the advantage of having the constant guidance of his brother),
the opportunity to learn from contractors, suppliers, or other
workers, and above all, the availability of work.
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Another chapter on the brothers
work on the Grand Trunk Railway illustrates both this process
of learning on the job, and the engineering tasks they actually
performed in "laying out the route, designing the structures,
and supervising the construction." (62) During the first
phase, the Shanlys organized these jobs and reported to their
employers, the railways Board of Directors, in the capacity
of independent, consulting civil engineers. However, the necessity
for more capital financing, and consequent reorganization, brought
in C.S. Gzowski and Company as the major contractors. The Shanlys
were increasingly relegated to a subordinate position. Moreover,
Frank (though not Walter) now reported directly to Gzowski, the
contractor, and increasingly took orders for the actual performance
of his engineering work. White emphasizes the difficulties of
this confrontation between older and newer practices, and its
significance for understanding how the occupation was changing.
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The second part of the book is
an account of how the Shanlys turned their hands to many other
things than "pure" civil engineering in the years after
1855. Though White argues that "they always tended to see
themselves more than anything else as civil engineers," he
also admits that they never worked full time again in that independent
role that Walter for one, held to be the hallmark of the profession.
(101) Because of his extravagant spending habits, Frank never
extricated himself from financial trouble; his various endeavours,
from building the Hoosac Tunnel in Massachusetts with his brother,
to contracting and consulting work and (briefly) municipal engineer
in Toronto, earned him a precarious livelihood. Though bailed
out by Walter time and again, he died in 1882 under a heavy load
of debt.
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Walter Shanly continued to have
a more substantial career than his brother in every way. He was
briefly general manager of the Grand Trunk Railway; later he acted
as chief engineer on the Hoosac Tunnel; but his main focus in
engineering was on part-time consulting work. He also established
and helped to direct such profitable businesses as the Edwardsburg
Starch Company. Above all, he established a career in politics,
serving as a Conservative MP from 1863
to 1866 and again from 1867 to 1872.
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Though the Shanlys work lives
after 1855 are depicted as a departure from the occupation of
full-time engineering, it could well be argued that they exemplified
the typical career pattern of engineers in 19th-century North
America. Between them, they held a succession of jobs that included
a variety of activities: contracting, consulting in more or less
independent positions, working as municipal or corporate employees,
supervising, organizing, running a business, taking orders from
others in other words, performing tasks which became the
ill-defined but wide-ranging work of 19th-century engineers. As
civil engineers, they were also engaged in a changing occupation
that would become redefined beyond their original expectations.
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Though admitting the ambiguities
of the language of work and social class in the 19th century,
this book is an ambitious attempt to explain the nature of an
occupation and its shifting standing in the hierarchy of work
and profession. It is also an attempt to assess the changing fortunes
of a particular profession through the lens of biography. There
are limits to what can be generalized from two such unique histories,
as the author acknowledges. In particular, it is evident that
the Shanlys inherited the values of gentry society, and that they
entered the one branch of engineering in which they might hope
to remain gentlemen in their sense of the word. It was a world
shared by few other engineers.
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Nevertheless, this volume makes
a thoughtful contribution to the scanty literature on the subject.
It is also a good read, with appropriate maps and illustrations.
White has succeeded in providing some fine insights into the nature
of a 19th-century occupation as it was exemplified in the careers
of two uncommon engineers.
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W.P.J. Millar
London, Ontario
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Michael Dorland, So Close to the State/s: The Emergence of
Canadian Feature Film Policy (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press 1998)
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IN 1965, THE UNIVERSITY of Ottawa economist
Otto John Firestone wrote a report advising the federal government
on its proper role in encouraging the production of feature films
in Canada. Firestone wrote that producers of medium-budget films
should try to obtain 90 per cent of their economic activity from
exports, that is, from showings outside the country. If this were
accomplished, the economic status of feature films might be favourably
compared to that of nickel ore. When Canadian feature films were
as marketable as Canadian nickel, the argument went, their success
would be assured. The image of filmmakers as nickel miners gives
new life to the staples thesis, though perhaps not in the way
Harold Innis would have intended. In his historical account of
feature film policy in Canada, Michael Dorland discusses the logic
that gave rise to an image that, 30 years on, remains a telling
one.
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The book describes the "economy
of talk" by which a cultural product (the making of movies
in Canada) became an object of state discourse and action. His
study is rich in documentary detail, analysing a decisive shift
that took place in the history of feature film policy in Canada.
Before this shift, public policy options were relatively open.
The Canadian government could become involved directly, indirectly,
or not at all in the development of domestic feature films. Afterwards,
state involvement was to be disjointed, contradictory, and almost
exclusively limited to the indirect means of providing financial
support to "the industry." As I will suggest later,
Dorlands theoretical use of Foucault to provide a frame
for this event is problematic. But the book will be a key resource
for researchers and teachers because of its serious and unprecedented
attention to the historical trajectory of the feature film in
Canada in the context of state action.
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Dorland considers the critical
event in the development of feature film policy in Canada to have
been the establishment in 1968 of the Canadian Film Development
Corporation (CFDC). The CFDC
(later given its current name of Telefilm Canada) was established
just as cheaper and more portable equipment was giving filmmakers
in Canada an expanded view of what was artistically and economically
possible. The creation of the CFDC transformed
the field of the Canadian feature film. The CFDCs
mandate was to provide financing, initially through a revolving
loan fund, for the production of feature films in Canada. Establishing
a private production industry as the primary object of government
policy on feature films was decisive: "All the conflictual,
consensual, and paradoxical terms within which the Canadian feature
film would be discussed and rediscussed for the next twenty-five
years were in position, only thereafter to repeat themselves over
and over again, endlessly." (136, Dorlands italics)
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Until the 1960s, there had been
few institutions in the field of feature film production. The
handful that existed had only indirectly addressed the "problem"
of the Canadian feature film. Since its inception in 1939, for
example, the National Film Board (NFB)
had created a body of documentary short films that, while didactic
in its aims, had nonetheless served to stimulate interest and
debate about issues of Canadian culture and society and about
Canadian practices of documenting these issues in film. However,
the NFB has never attempted to become seriously
and directly involved in feature film production. In sympathy
with the NFBs orientation to the
documentary short, the Massey Commission (1951) was ambivalent
about the prospects for the Canadian feature. It claimed that
the NFBs releases, while modest in
budget and scale when compared to US features,
represented a distinctive response to the flood of US
features. Even so, the commission had in more general terms argued
that US cultural muscle should be met with
Canadian cultural muscle. Presumably this meant that someone should
be producing more Canadian feature films.
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Dorland argues that the creation
of the CFDC can be explained less as a
response to the Massey Commissions call for cultural development
than as an illustration of what states "do," which is
to establish sovereignty over their territory. He returns to a
theoretical point repeatedly, though in each case sparingly, which
is Foucaults notion of the "logic of governmentality
as delimitation." The territory to be delimited in this case
consisted of the economic, social, and political terms within
which a significant cultural product would be developed in Canada.
After 1968, the dimensions of the "Canadian cinema"
would be much narrower than they might have been and perhaps had
been. The articulation of a distinctive cinematic "voice"
was muted by the states notion of feature films as an "international
language." With impressive empirical rigour, Dorland shows
that this language had its roots in statistics, cost models, and
an export orientation.
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A crucial theme in Dorlands
book is that the state acts in ways that reflect its changing
knowledge. That knowledge the "paper world of the
administrative state" is often incomplete, contradictory,
or simply wrong. The book shows that it was at least unclear whether
a feature film industry, qua industry, existed at all in
1968. He cites government archives that suggest that by 1977,
the actual existence of such an industry in Canada still eluded
the top levels of government, except as it could be identified
as a creation of subsidies, loans, and grants. Such doubts did
not dampen the sustained efforts in 1968, 1977, and thereafter
to sustain "the industry."
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There was much to lose and much
to gain for Canadians in all of this. A nascent feature film industry
was severed from an organized core and critical mass of manual,
technical, and professional workers. With the establishment of
the CFDC, workers would be scattered in
small companies. These kinds of material stakes are not dealt
with in the book. Dorland never puts his finger directly on whose
interests were served by the events leading up to the establishment
of the CFDC. The closest he comes to discussing
real interests is in his summary of the differing aesthetic impulses
in Québec on the one hand and the rest of Canada on the
other: "Feature films emerged in the Canadian context diachronically
in not one but two languages at a time of rising contestation
and renegotiation of the political, economic, and cultural relations
between Canadas two founding language groups." (137)
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But how to account for difference?
Where is governmentality in Québec feature film policy,
or that of the other provinces for that matter? While most of
the support for feature film production continues to come from
the federal government, there are numerous provincial programs
in place as well and have been for some time. A comparative perspective
is needed to demonstrate why events unfolded as they did under
one regime rather than another. By dealing with ideology only
indirectly, Dorland fails to explain why certain discursive formations,
and not others, emerged in Canada in the late 1960s. France continued
to develop a distinctive cinematic voice during the same period,
in part with state support. Has the penetration of governmentality
in Canada exceeded what we would find in France?
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Exploring these questions would
add to our substantive knowledge of the Canadian feature films
history and possible future. Dorland has written a clear analysis
of how but not why an important cultural field was
constituted within the larger terrain of Canadas arrested
development.
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Marco Adria
University of Alberta
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Janet Irons, Testing the New Deal: The General Strike of 1934
in the American South (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois
Press 2000)
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THE GREAT TEXTILE STRIKE of 1934 was the
largest strike in American labour history, yet has never received
the attention that it deserved. This book begins to remedy that.
The events are crucial to understanding the nature (strengths
and limitations) of the formation of the CIO, the mythology of
the New Deal coalition, and help in shedding light on the contemporary
crisis of the labour movement in the United States.
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Southern working class militancy
goes back to the beginning of the 20th century. Textile workers
tried to organize, had occasional successes, but were most often
crushed. The title of this book is unfortunate because it distorts
the fundamental meaning of the strike, which was not about testing
the New Deal. In any case, the strike had origins in struggles
in 1929 and the early 1930s, predating the New Deal. If anything
was tested, it was the culture and politics of an old established
union, the United Textile Workers (UTW).
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The New England based textile industry,
in the early 20th century, began to feel the effects of a growing
southern industry, undercutting northern manufacturers with lower
wage scales. The southern mills blossomed in hill country because
of the early need to be based on fast-running streams for power.
With the development of electric motors, the industry spread geographically
and was no longer entirely rural. One consequence of this, not
discussed in the book, is that mills were not located in old plantation
territory with large African American populations. Only a small
minority of blacks worked in the mills at the lowest jobs and
pay scales and, apparently, did not play a significant role in
the 1934 strike.
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Southern textile workers had managed
to impose conditions on the mill owners that limited the degree
of exploitation on the job. This was achieved through a combination
of job actions and support from the local communities. This began
to change with the introduction of more advanced machinery during
the depression years and led to a struggle over the "stretch-out,"
a form of speed-up in which workers were forced to tend more and
more machines, often at the very limits of physical capacity.
This led to a significant difference between the union and southern
workers. The union was interested in regulating wages to limit
competition between the northern and southern mills and to manage
and stabilize a scattered and intensely competitive industry.
To do this the union had developed a philosophy of collaboration
with the manufacturers in rationalizing production, which of course,
involved not resisting the stretch-out. There were precedents
for the unions approach in the American Federation of Labor
(AFL). The garment unions in New York,
for example, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the International
Ladies Garment Workers, in the early years of the 20th century,
found it necessary to organize the employers in a wildly competitive
and gangster-ridden industry in order to establish a union presence.
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In the case of the textile union,
however, the leadership relied on the early New Deal and the codes
of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA)
to stabilize the industry and improve wages. Only belatedly did
they see the need to control production and limit the stretch-out.
What this book documents, although it does not state it with clarity,
is that the vaunted New Deal coalition for which so many on the
left are nostalgic these days, included the reactionary, racist
southern Democratic Party as an essential ingredient. Among other
things, it is why the Roosevelt administration maintained its
racism to the very end, including the refusal to support any anti-lynching
law. It is also why the NRA codes were
administered by authorities dominated by the employers who, together
with the politicians, were concerned with stability above all
and never seriously enforced the famous Section 7A, which gave
workers the right to organize.
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Irons notes that "In a statement
that would have made little sense to textile workers suffering
from stretch-out, Senator Robert Wagner, a dedicated workers
advocate, explained that under Roosevelts New Deal, efficiency,
rather than the ability to sweat labor ... will be the determining
factor in business success. Southern textile workers simply
did not see the world in this way. For them, the critical issue
was not efficiency but the fact that workers were losing their
jobs" [because of the stretch-out]. (51)
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"Government officials warned
labor leaders that it was going to be necessary for unions to
educate workers to channel their grievances through the new NRA
structures. As a practical matter this meant that labor should
not strike. Even Senator Wagner, an unflagging supporter of labor,
conceded that there was a problem with strikes if they were used
as an instrument of first resort. Industry and
labor cannot co-operate by means of the strike, he said
... in October 1933." (87) But employers had no intention
of co- operating. As a result, the resistance of southern workers
created a crisis in the New Deal and in the union.
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Thomas McMahon, President of the
UTW, decided on 31 May not to call a general
strike. "Southern workers responded by taking matters into
their own hands, staging walkouts in all four southern textile
states in June and July [1934]." (110) As had happened in
other industries, such as auto, in the 1930s, union leaders, not
having yet formed the institutional means to control the workers,
were forced to go along. The UTW called
a general textile strike to start on 1 September. UTW
Vice President Francis "Gorman never hesitated to make clear
at every possible opportunity that it was his membership that
was forcing him to take such a defiant stand. Grimly he announced
that the union had no alternative but to conduct the strike until
a settlement that was satisfactory to the workers was reached."
(119) But that is not what happened. About 421,000 workers were
out by the middle of the third week. Of these, over 170,000 or
just under two-thirds of the 272,000 southern textile labour force,
were southern textile workers. President Roosevelt appointed a
board, headed by the liberal John Winant, to take up the issues
raised by the strike. In late September the Winant board issued
a report that a new body would be created that would take up the
workers grievances. Nothing else was granted to the workers.
"The International was reportedly flooded by telegrams from
local unions opposing any settlement on these terms." (153)
But the unions executive board voted unanimously to accept
the proposal and end the strike.
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Instead of the end of the strike
leading to hearings and negotiations it was immediately followed
by a massive employer offensive against the union and the workers,
including the firing of strikers. A strike which had essentially
been won on the ground was lost at the highest levels of union
and government bureaucracy. The union as an institution crumbled,
with local after local disappearing. But the workers did not crumble.
"Sometimes worker resentment burst out in uncoordinated energy,
no longer under the auspices of the UTW.
The cotton textile industry witnessed ninety-four strikes and
lockouts in the last four months of 1934 and the first seven months
of 1935. In fact, more textile strikes took place in 1935 than
in any other year since 1921, and these strikes increased in frequency
every year thereafter until 1938." (162)
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Several questions have to be raised
which are not dealt with adequately in Irons book. The first
is the question of the culture of southern workers. Irons refers
to that frequently as one of the barriers to understanding between
the southern workers and the unions national leadership.
But most of what she describes as southern working-class culture
seems to be opposition to the stretch-out. But there was nothing
especially southern in that. Opposition to speed-up in any form
was universal in virtually all the labour struggles of the 1930s.
What made textiles different? The same is true of the element
of community support for the workers. It was similar to what happened
in Flint during the great sit-down strike against GM.
Local merchants and area farmers contributed to the workers
soup kitchens, etc.
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This failure to relate the strike
in southern textiles to other struggles around the country is
also reflected in another problem. The year 1934 was distinguished
by four major strikes. The textile strike was by far the largest
and in some ways the most important. The others were the west
coast strike of longshoremen led by Communists; the strike of
teamsters in Minneapolis and St. Paul led by Trotskyists; and
the strike at Toledo Autolite led by the socialist A.J. Muste.
These three strikes were victorious. Why did the textile strike
fail? One reason seems fairly obvious: in none of the victorious
strikes did anyone believe that the government was neutral, let
alone a friend. (This was before the Communists abandoned their
"third period" and moved to ally themselves with liberals
and the New Deal.) In addition, of course, the reactionary southern
element in the New Deal coalition was especially powerful on its
home turf in southern textiles. However, this element should not
be exaggerated. Workers did not get a free ride on the west coast
or the mid-west, even after Wagners National Labor Relations
Act was passed: witness the violence directed at steel strikers
in Chicago in the late 1930s.
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There is another element to the
strikes of 1934. Before the strikes Roosevelt was not concerned
about labour legislation. After the strikes it became important
to get workers off the picket lines and into some bureaucratic
system. That was the function of Wagners National Labor
Relations Act and the textile workers contributed to that, as
did San Francisco longshoremen, Minneapolis teamsters, and Toledo
auto workers.
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Much of the material necessary
to a fuller understanding of the struggles of 1934 is in Janet
Irons book. It would also be useful to glance at her earlier
article, "The Challenge of National Coordination: Southern
Textile Workers and the Strike of 1934," in We Are All
Leaders, edited by Staughton Lynd. There is another important
aspect of Irons work. After the crushing of resistance of
workers in southern textiles, it seemed as if even the memory
of the strike had been obliterated. It was difficult to get anyone
in the textile communities to talk about what had happened. Irons
succeeded in breaking through the silence using primary and secondary
sources and oral interviews with participants. It is a major and
very useful effort.
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Martin Glaberman
Wayne State University
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Kimberly L. Phillips, Alabama North: African-American Migrants,
Community, and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915-1945
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1999)
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ONE OF THE PARADOXES of interwar African-American
labour history over the last decade is that the most influential
studies have been about the South, the least industrialized and
unionized region of the United States. Nevertheless, the South
scholars, led by Robin D.G. Kelley, have pumped new life into
Black labour history by skillfully applying their understanding
of African-American society, culture, and politics to uncover
and understand the distinctive identities, perspectives, and activism
of Black workers. Now Kimberley Phillips has brought this methodology
North, to Cleveland, along with the Southern migrants who are
the subject of Alabama North.
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Phillips first four chapters
comprise a familiar narrative for those who have kept up with
recent scholarship on the Great Migration and its aftermath. She
interweaves insights from other social, labour, and cultural historians
to illuminate the story of the Black Alabamians and Georgians
who came to dominate Clevelands Black community during World
War I and decades after. We learn again of the complex web of
individual, familial, and communal values and exigencies which
impelled and shaped migration to the industrial North. We read
once more of the limits imposed on African Americans in the industrial
economy during the war, and their expulsion from it afterwards.
We rediscover the anxieties of a Northern citys tiny, but
established, pre-migration Black community which acted on the
newcomers threat to its precarious social position by condemning
the Southerners behaviour and culture and excluding them
from leadership or even inclusion in the citys existing
Black institutions.
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In many ways, then, this is not
a new story, but Phillips synthesis of others insights
on Black farmers and workers, the migration experience, and Northern
community building allows her to explain and subtly reinterpret
Southern migrants actions and Northern experience. For example,
by emphasizing that most if not all migrants had experience of
wage labour before moving North, and that indeed many had industrial
experience in Alabamas foundries or Kentuckys railroad
camps, she reveals that Southerners arrived in Cleveland with
not only a strong racial identity but also a developed class consciousness.
Their pre-migration experience as African Americans explained
their ambivalence or opposition to a labour movement whose first
priority in the North as in the South was always to protect White
workers privilege even when it opportunistically, and very
sporadically, welcomed Black workers. The Southerners experience
as workers, however, also precluded their co-operation with Black
elites who admonished them to co-operate with anti-union industrial
management. Instead, the migrants focused on self-organization,
engaging as always in the day-to-day resistance they had learned
in the South, and when possible, breaking out into open resistance
as Blacks and workers. Thus, Clevelands Black hotel
waiters and housekeepers who crossed the picket line, when members
of the Whites-only Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union
were locked out in 1930, did not see themselves as scabs; rather
they were union members who had organized themselves into the
National Association of Colored Waiters after being shunned by
their fellow workers whose job action to establish White supremacy
in the citys hotel workforce led to the lockout.
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The migrants distinct identity
and outlook unalterably reshaped the internal politics of Clevelands
Black community and the citys labour movement as the city
moved into the crucial years of the 1930s and 1940s. Creating
an urban culture utterly separate from the "respectable"
elite, and informed explicitly by Southern folkways, religion,
and institutions, Clevelands migrants solidified and expanded
their position in the citys Black community during the 1920s,
with a continuing stream of Southern arrivals bolstering their
ranks. From their strengthened position, the migrant community
forged a militant new politics to confront the Depression crisis.
Led by Alabama-born John O. Holly, migrants created and joined
the Future Outlook League (FOL), which
brought together thousands of Black Clevelanders, including aspiring
entrepreneurs, Communists, self-described "housewives,"
and industrial and service workers in a militant and confrontational
"dont-buy-where-you-cant-work" campaign.
Ignoring the condemnation and open opposition of the middle class,
which eschewed open confrontation with Whites, the FOLs
mass boycotts and pickets forced dozens of White-owned businesses
across the Black community to hire African-American employees,
and its organization of an Employees Union sought to protect
and expand its hard-won victories. During the war, the FOL
began to be Black industrial workers staunchest and most
effective ally when waffling CIO locals
proved antagonistic or unreliable in defending African-American
workers interests, and as a newly worker-oriented NAACP
and Black middle class struggled to shrug off their well-deserved
reputation for elitism. Thus the FOL won
national renown when it launched an ultimately unsuccessful but
nevertheless precedent-setting, class-action suit against major
defence contractors who refused to hire Black women. It also
pressured recalcitrant CIO leaders to support
African-American workers needed to win power struggles against
the AFL in defence industries. As everywhere
in the United States, only the shibboleth of anti-communism could
stop the labour movements incipient democratic interracialism,
spurred in this case almost entirely by the aspirations and activism
of Black Clevelands migrant majority.
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This book breaks new ground in
important ways. In no other Northern study have we read of such
an autonomous and militantly class-conscious Black working class
directing community life politically as well as culturally. Nor
have we had such a comprehensive and subtle examination of the
mutually ambivalent relationship of African-American workers and
the CIO, convincingly complicating the
analysis of apologists for the industrial labour movement. Further,
Phillipss work makes essential connections between cultural
expression and political activism, thus reorienting the proletarianization
model which has long dominated labour historys treatment
of Black migrants in the North. However, these strengths are sometimes
weakened by inadequate analysis. Too often Phillips fails to provide
the connections between the migrants culture and their activism
necessary to substantiate her argument. For example, she deals
at length with the migrants Southern-origin religious beliefs
and worship style but then never connects this apparently essential
element of their worldview to the shape their political and labour
activism eventually takes. In fact, she never explicitly demonstrates
why Clevelands workers activism is distinctively "Southern."
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Part of the difficulty is that
of editing and emphasis. While the first two-thirds of the work
provide a useful synthesis of the migration experience and a review
of Northern Black workers struggles during World War I and
the 1920s, it sometimes seems aimless and repetitive. Indeed,
it is not until the fifth chapter that Phillips begins to develop
her argument in earnest, and the meaning of the preceding chapters
becomes clear. Streamlining this lengthy prologue and offering
readers more regular signposts would lend her work even more significance.
Such editing would have also given her more room for analysis,
thus allowing her to connect her valuable insights on migrants
culture and religion more explicitly to their politics and activism,
which is, after all, the point of her work.
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In the end, however, Phillips has
broken new ground by bringing Black labour history North once
again, where it needs to arrive if we are to have a full understanding
of the 20th century, African-American community, and its heroic
geographic, political, and social journeys.
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Karen Ferguson
Simon Fraser University
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Frances H. Early, A World Without War: How US Feminists and
Pacifists Resisted World War I (Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press 1997)
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Rachel Waltner Goossen,
Women Against the Good War: Conscientious Objection and Gender
on the American Home Front, 1941-1947 (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press 1997)
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IN THEIR RESPECTIVE HISTORIES Frances H.
Early and Rachel Waltner Goossen explore womens resistance
to war and in so doing contribute vitally to the fields of peace
and womens history. The two books work together sequentially
in a way this reviewer found deeply engaging. Earlys study
of the feminists and pacifists of the Bureau of Legal Advice (BLA)
during World War I and Goossens work on women associated
with conscientious objectors (COs) of the
Civilian Public Service (CPS) during World
War II complement each other by showing
that the struggles of the BLA to expose
and improve harsh treatment of COs during
World War I helped lay the groundwork for the governments
improved treatment of the World War II
generation of COs.
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Both books also offer the opportunity
to view women who rejected wartime definitions of gender roles
and, instead, adopted positions of pacifist non-conformity. By
examining these womens defiance of the militaristic enterprise
of the state, Early and Goossen enrich our understanding of the
significance of gender constructs during war. In addition, they
share a dedication to non-violence with the subjects of their
histories and provide readers with an empathetic understanding
of the women and men who defied the requirements of patriotic
duty in the name of conscience or political justice. Thus, we
also learn about a different kind of courage, and confront the
unacknowledged costs of war to the brave women and men who dared
present or create alternative definitions of "duty,"
"patriotism," and "citizenship" as they envisioned
"a world without war."
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By reading the histories together,
one can also observe the striking differences between the groups
of resisters that are dealt with in both books. Early focuses
upon seasoned political activists of the World War I era, whose
resistance was shaped by a combination of feminism, socialism,
pacifism, and a concern for human rights. In contrast, Goossen
deals with religious pacifist women from the historic peace churches,
namely Friends, Mennonites, and Brethren. Thus, while both groups
of women resisted the war (in conjunction with men) there is a
contrast between those who confronted government and military
policies through their politics, and those whose religious beliefs
about state violence led them to aid their male counterparts as
"CO women." In a nutshell, we
see women in two war resister roles; on the one hand, there are
the secular, radical activists who sought confrontation with the
government, and on the other, religious, pacifist objectors, who
found themselves in opposition to the government because of their
faith.
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As scholars, Early and Goossen
have vigorously pursued the stories of their respective groups,
literally pioneering paths to information about people and topics
which have been ignored and neglected until now. Both historians
found that the women in the civil liberties movement and those
supportive of COs during World War II,
did not leave an extensive literature. They did not write memoirs,
and the men who did, usually ignored or underrated womens
work and contributions in their writings. Goossen even found that
while officials invited CO men to write
accounts of their time spent with CPS at
wars end in order to preserve this history, women who worked
at the camps or alongside the men at mental hospitals were not
asked to do so. Facing the familiar obstacles to exposing womens
pasts, including male-centered historical methods, both authors
engaged in widespread and in-depth archival research. To fill
in the gaps, they conducted interviews and Goossen sent out an
extensive questionnaire to CO women. The
respondents, mostly of the Mennonite Church, provided her with
a sufficient database for reconstructing this history. Early,
in endeavouring to uncover the activist work of BLA
women who seem as "if they had never been," learned
"to read between the lines and pay attention to what is not
recorded or stated explicitly." (18, 19) In addition, Earlys
use of feminist theory led to creative and imaginative insights
and analysis. All varieties of historians, peace activists, and
the educated public will learn much from these interesting historical
narratives, and further, scholars can benefit in significant ways
from their research methods and strategies.
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Early presents a history of the
BLA, a short-lived civil liberties advocacy
organization based in New York City. The BLA
was created to help individuals whose rights were violated by
repressive government policies and practices which fueled the
nationalist hysteria of the World War I era. Early faced the challenge
of unearthing an organization whose historical significance has
been overshadowed by that of the well-known and more mainstream
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Her strategy was to reconstruct the organizational history of
this mixed gender group, while also illuminating its connections
to the larger, feminist oriented, left-wing antiwar movement.
Indeed, she proves one part of her argument when she raises the
question of whether the BLA, composed of
left liberals and socialists and active between 1917 and 1920,
made a difference in protecting and promoting citizen rights,
challenging the power of the state, and building a peace culture.
To this query, her reply is clearly affirmative, as she demonstrates
the varied work and causes which BLA took
up, to challenge the requirements of war that exacted strict,
patriotic conformity from its citizens.
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Early presents the BLA
at work in the courts defending individuals, often the poor and
immigrants, charged unjustly with subverting the war effort and
unable to afford an attorney. Thus, readers learn of the case
of Samuel Nikition, a Russian immigrant carted off to jail after
a "patriot" beat him for not buying Liberty Bonds and
then sentenced to prison for six months by a judge moved more
by the spirit of the times than the letter of the law. Another
dramatic example is the case of Gertrude Pignol, a high school
German teacher, who lost her job after fellow teachers and the
principal charged her with a lack of patriotic enthusiasm. Early
also examines BLAs counseling work
with the families of draftees (the only group to do so free of
charge), whose breadwinners had been drafted in clear violation
of the law. She investigates its lobbying work in promoting humane
treatment for COs and political prisoners
during the war, e.g., pressure directed at the Secretary of War
ended the manacling of COs to prison bars,
and their amnesty after the Armistice. Another significant way
in which the BLA made a real difference
was the vital work of BLA lawyers in the
post-war Red Scare deportation hearings of labour radicals. Not
only did they successfully overturn deportation orders for 40
Wobblies, but also contributed to limiting the excesses of the
"deportation delirium."
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A World Without War is not
a dry organizational history. Early adds zest to the narrative
with her lively treatment of the main historical characters who
participated in these diverse activities as they worked tirelessly
during the three years of the BLAs
existence. Chief among these were lawyer Charles Recht (1887-1964),
a Czech immigrant and a Jew who did much of the legal work, and
Frances Witherspoon (1885-1973), an activist and radical who was
the executive secretary of the BLA.
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Early does a particularly fine
job in her portrayal of "Fannie May" Witherspoon. This
privileged, white Southerner and graduate of Bryn Mawr College
was a prime example of a Progressive period "New Woman."
Together with her life-long partner and sister activist Tracy
Mygatt (1886-1973), she participated in the heady Bohemian culture
of Greenwich Village of the 1910s, even as she honed her activist
skills in the suffrage, socialist, and anti-war movements. In
1917, she witnessed army recruiters arrest a Dutch man and whisk
him off to Bellevue Mental hospital "for observation"
after he asked Witherspoon some questions about the war. She determined
then to work to protect radicals, conscientious objectors, the
working class, the poor, and all who were denied their legitimate
rights by authorities. Soon after she found a new outlet for her
radical politics of Christian socialism, pacifism, and feminism
when she was asked to direct the newly created BLA.
Throughout her work, Early traces Witherspoons diverse work
for the BLA and reveals her talents for
administration, fund-raising, counseling, networking, and lobbying,
as well as manipulating the patriarchal system through skillful
negotiation in both personal and professional relationships.
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As part of her feminist approach
to this study, Early not only presents the personalities of the
BLA leaders and the political dimensions
of personal relationships, but also develops themes related to
gender issues. She argues that, at least until the fragmentation
of the left-wing after the Bolshevik Revolution, the privileged,
middle-class, white women who moved within the radical circles
of the anti-war and civil liberties movement considered themselves
progressive reformers as well as socialists, both liberal and
radical in their politics. According to Early, they took "the
privilege and inspiration of feminist foremothers" and pushed
beyond Progressive reform to embrace a "radical engagement
with the world." This "engagement" included a critique
of power relations within the capitalist liberal state, a recognition
of the need to organize marginalized, oppressed groups, and the
development of new social policies. Further, she asserts, that
while these women did not develop their civil liberties work in
overtly feminist terms, they did realise that in fighting for
the rights of "outsiders," they were working towards
their own liberation as women. While the latter assertion remains
more speculative than proven, Earlys argument helps to open
new avenues of inquiry about the nature of womens political
approaches during the 1910s, when feminism and anti-war activism,
mixed with socialist and pacifist perspectives, produced a "radical"
New Woman.
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Early develops her gender analysis
in a related direction when she creatively examines the role of
wartime gender politics and stereotypes. In particular, in her
chapter on the relationships forged between CO
men and their "feminist," women counterparts, Early
explores their alternative thinking about wartime constructions
of masculinity and femininity. She found that some of the male
political COs rejected the warrior identity
as the meaning of manliness and together with Bureau women hoped
to forge a new masculine identity, a non-violent "New Man,"
based upon pacifist values. Early asserts that feminist pacifists
understood that war is a gendered process, and that "state
power, warmaking, and manliness were all linked." Witherspoon
and other Bureau women also saw that the state portrayed women
as moral, patriotic mothers and helpless "beautiful souls"
who needed soldiers protection. While they kept some of
the maternal qualities in their dealings with male COs,
these women rejected the other aspects of wartime patriotic feminine
stereotypes. These men and women linked by their radical politics
and rejection of war "came to see that war could not be prosecuted
if men and women refused traditional stereotypes and roles."
(192) Early interprets their engagement in this process of self-definition,
as men and as women, and as citizens committed to social justice,
as part of their efforts and aspirations to create a culture of
peace.
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The project of building a peace
culture amidst a society mobilized for total war also engaged
men and women of the next generation who identified as conscientious
objectors during the "Good War." Rachel Goossen focuses
upon women associated with the COs of Civilian
Public Service. CPS, created as a Selective
Service program, was largely developed, and for the most part
administered and financed by the Mennonites, Friends, and Brethren
during World War II for those COs
who refused alternative service within the Armed Services. Of
the 100,000 men who claimed CO status,
about 12,000 entered CPS. They engaged
mostly in forestry, soil conservation, and mental health work
and although they received no wages or any support for their families,
their treatment was a significant improvement over that of World
War I COs who suffered greatly under military
control.
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Goossen intended to make visible
the participation of CPS women, who numbered
around 2000. She studied three groups of women, almost all affiliated
with one of these three historic peace churches. The largest group
included the "Camp Followers," the young women who moved
close to or even into the camps where their husbands, fiancées,
or boyfriends were working. Those who were mothers brought their
children. Goossen outlined these womens difficult, and at
times, precarious existence. They struggled to support themselves
(and their children), faced discrimination in employment and housing
as well as hostility from the larger communities, and some even
suffered alienation from their families. The second group included
the hundreds of nurses and dietitians who staffed the 151 CPS
camps, devoting themselves to the care of the men and boosting
their morale while providing important services for small wages.
The last group that Goossen describes consisted of the hundreds
of single college women who worked along with CO
men in mental institutions where their services were desperately
needed as a result of wartime labour shortages. These college
women identified as "C.O. girls," who sought out alternative
service to reflect their pacifist commitment. She ends the book
through a consideration of these womens more recent reflections
about the impact of their association with the CPS
upon their lives since World War II.
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While Goossen deserves much credit
for uncovering the participation of these women, and providing
excellent historical context, the narrative would have benefitted
from a more comprehensive treatment of their experiences. Adding
more of the womens stories and perhaps discussing more extensively
a few women and the various aspects of their daily realities would
have contributed a lively feature. Portraits of the womens
friendships and co-operative efforts at the camps and mental hospitals
would have enriched the picture of CO women.
Further, this reader was intrigued with the womens level
of commitment and longed for a more in-depth examination of their
belief systems and the nature of their pacifist faith. Such consideration
could have opened windows into the spiritual and philosophical
dimension of their experiences.
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In addition to identifying the
three groups of women and outlining their stories, Goossen basically
argues that while they entered their wartime pacifist roles with
very little practice or even interest in things political, the
varied experiences of standing firm in their pacifist commitment
and going against the tidal wave of enthusiastic public support
for "The Good War" in fact, politicized them. She uncovered
this "paradox" when she discovered that pacifist women
(and men) returned to "civilian life" to become part
of progressive causes for civil and human rights and social justice,
and supported anti-war and feminist movements of the 1960s and
1970s. As part of this argument, Goossen asserts that these women
initially held very traditional views about "womanliness,"
which were particularly reinforced within the patriarchal confines
of these peace faiths. Further, they found limited opportunity
for re-thinking gender stereotypes in their chosen work, which
reinforced traditional gender roles. This reinforcement of gender
roles, in fact, mirrored the experience of most of their more
patriotic sisters on the homefront. While Goossen found no evidence
of feminist attitudes or even rumblings about gender equity, resistance
to war profoundly raised their awareness of power relations in
a militarized democracy and eventually led them to engage in the
politics of reform.
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Without denying the value of Goossens
insight about CO womens awakening,
I think that a more incisive gender analysis would have added
a welcome level of complexity to Women Against the Good War.
What were the new dimensions of manliness and womanliness that
these comrades in war-resistance discovered and how might these
relate to their pacifism? What was the nature of their relationships
and how did some of them transform gender relations? These questions
might open gateways into understanding, for instance, the commitment
of "C.O. girls." They clearly represent "a first"
in womens opportunity to demonstrate almost officially their
refusal to serve the militarized state, similar to their brothers
"without arms." One wishes that Goossen might have considered
or even speculated about the meanings and implications of those
idealistic and intellectual discussions about post-war reconstruction
in which the young women and men engaged during their free time
while serving at mental hospitals. One wonders if they, like the
war resisters of Earlys history, imagined a peace culture
where new women and new men built a just and non-violent world.
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Goossen quotes a prayer that Eleanor
Roosevelt purportedly carried with her during World War II.
It stated:
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Dear Lord
Lest I continue
My complacent way
Help me to remember
Somewhere out there
A man died for me today.
As long as there be war
I then must
Ask and answer
Am I worth dying for?
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The women featured in A World
Without War and Women Against the Good War would no
doubt have answered no, and they would also point out that the
supplicant has raised the wrong question. For these women the
more relevant query would have been "How can we oppose the
killing, the maiming, and the cruelty caused by war?" Early
and Goossen do much to illuminate the historical significance
of womens war resistance, which has been obscured by the
dominant focus on battles and diplomatic wrangling, as well as
the efforts of male peace reformers. Even as women war resisters
endeavoured to end the multi-faceted violence of the militarized
state during World War I and II, these lucid, beautifully written,
and well-researched histories contribute to the ongoing project
of creating a peace culture.
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Anne Marie Pois
University of Colorado, Boulder
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Peter Thompson, Rum Punch and Revolution: Taverngoing and Public
Life in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press 1999)
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ON THE ONE HAND, this fascinating book
should have much appeal for historians interested in class or
the social history of alcohol. On the other, though, my guess
is that historians of the American Revolution will question the
authors argument that taverns changed the course of the
revolution in Philadelphia.
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Particularly for 19th-century North
America, it is commonplace to describe licensed public drinking
as a site of working-class culture. The saloon was the poor mans
club. Yet Thompson carefully and persuasively argues that the
18th-century Philadelphia tavern was no working-class saloon.
For at least two thirds of the century taverns were places where
men, and a few women, from all walks of life gathered to drink,
toast, sing, and argue. Just over half of the book examines the
regulation of taverns, the tavern keepers, and the customers in
order to explain this complex, diverse environment.
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The first taverns were modest affairs,
caves dug in the banks of the Delaware River. William Penn, the
citys founder, issued the first tavern regulations in 1683,
and by 1686 Philadelphia had six taverns. To encourage the development
of the city as a seaport, Penn believed that some taverns were
necessary. Yet he was concerned that they might promote immorality
and social chaos. Penns solution was to regulate them strictly.
Thompson believes that, for the most part, until the Revolution,
Philadelphias taverns were "subject to effective legal
authority." (24) He estimates that of the estimated 178 taverns
in 1769, 155 of them were legally licensed.
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Thompson emphasizes the key principles
that guided licensing magistrates for the better part of the century.
First, to discourage unlicensed establishments, the authorities
issued licenses fairly liberally. The number of licenses was usually
just below the demand for them, and licensed operators supported
the prosecution of unlicensed retailers. Thus, the regulated became
part of the states regulatory apparatus, which made regulation
more effective. Second, in theory at least, licenses went only
to those of good character, and class did not determine character.
Poor people could get licenses if the authorities believed they
were worthy. Moreover, Thompson says about 25 per cent of the
licenses were held by women, most of whom were probably widows.
Finally, and most important, the state regulated the price of
drinks and other services offered by the taverns. Price regulation
forced tavern keepers to appeal to a wide clientele to make a
profit. Despite the legal distinctions among "tavern,"
"inn," and "alehouse," Philadelphias
taverns were remarkably similar, and "the most telling differences
between taverns stemmed from the keepers personalities."
(73)
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As for the customers, respectable
women rarely went into taverns, and slaves, apprentices, and Indians
were banned by law. Beyond these restrictions, however, tavern
patrons were "socially and culturally heterogeneous."
(75) The rich, poor, and middling drank together. In the cramped
confines of most taverns, however, the atmosphere was far from
harmonious. Both conflict and consensus marked tavern sociability,
and patrons used toasting, treating, and singing to bridge social
and class distance.
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Beginning in the 1750s and accelerating
after the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, this diverse
tavern world began to fall apart. The local economy changed to
the detriment of wage workers, and greater extremes in wealth
and poverty created economic distance that was increasingly difficult
to bridge in the tavern. The first to leave were commercial Philadelphians
who now believed that "tavern sociability was antithetical
to efficient business activity." (106) They opened the Old
London Coffeehouse in 1754, and only those of similar background
were welcome. Many of the less affluent migrated to the Four Alls.
The sign on this tavern had these four paraphrased mottoes: the
king governs all; the general fights for all; the minister prays
for all; and, the worker pays for all. By the late 1770s, price
controls no longer were enforced, which allowed tavern keepers
to appeal to particular patrons and exclude others with high prices.
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Finally, diverse tavern culture
broke down in the intense debates over the American Revolution.
Here Thompsons arguments become more diffuse and speculative,
but they are interesting nonetheless. He asserts that during most
of the century Philadelphians believed that a mans character
could be measured by the way he spoke, behaved, and dressed in
taverns. A poor man of good character could offer opinions, even
political opinions, that might influence the more powerful who
sat across the table from him in the tavern. Tavern talk thus
gave the poor access to political power. Yet the American Revolution
provoked fundamental disagreements that could not be easily reconciled
in the tavern. These debates occurred as tavern patrons were growing
tired of mixed company. The results were profound. First, patrons
came to believe that if they did not share similar opinions, then
the tavern was no longer an appropriate place for political discussion.
Second, economic inequality led both poor and rich to judge each
other harshly in increasingly uncompromising moral terms. Character
was now more class based, and, most important, the rich could
disregard the opinions of the poor because those opinions came
from the poor. Finally, during the Revolution, political debate
moved from the tavern to more formal sites, such as newspapers
and committee rooms. Revolutionary leaders no longer listened
to the tavern talk of the poor, who lost the political influence
they once enjoyed. The paradoxical outcome was that "the
political culture of the newly independent democratic state was
less accessible than that of the oligarchic proprietary colony."
(143)
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This powerful conclusion places
a responsibility on the tavern that it probably should not have
to bear. One is left wondering how much political impact tavern
talk ever had. By his own admission, Thompsons heterogeneous
tavern was more a seething cauldron than a melting pot of political
ideas. In the changing economic circumstances of the Revolutionary
era the elites were finally able to leave and fraternize with
their own.
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Thompson also hints at important
cultural changes in his Epilogue. In 1791 Philadelphian Benjamin
Rush published The Drunkards Emblem, a condemnation
of heavy drinking, especially of spirits. These temperance ideas
had been circulating since mid-century. As Thompson notes, problems
associated with drinking led to the conclusion that the behaviour
of a man in a tavern said nothing about his character except,
perhaps, that he was a drunk. Many Philadelphians followed Rushs
advice and left the tavern for the coffeehouse and other venues.
This retreat from the tavern required neither a change in political
attitudes nor the American Revolution.
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Still, I do not want to end on
a churlish note. Rum Punch is an important, provocative
book that deserves to spark much discussion. I enjoyed it, learned
much from it, and recommend it.
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Robert A. Campbell
Capilano College
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Victor Silverman, Imagining Internationalism in American and
British Labour, 1939-1949 (Urbana and Chicago: University
of Illinois Press 2000)
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IN IMAGINING INTERNATIONALISM, Victor
Silverman has provided a detailed account of the metamorphosis
in international labour politics, which took place during the
1940s, a decade in which the dream of an international community
of labour and a new World Order of peace and prosperity began
to take shape, only to be crushed by an emerging Cold War. It
is a long overdue history of the birth of the two international
labour centres, which shared the second half of the last Century,
the recently-disbanded world Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU),
and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU,
the "winner" and current home of the international labour
movement).
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Silverman does a first-class job
of situating the origin of the WFTU in
a period when American and British workers had an overwhelming
sense that they could finally bring an end to the wars in which
fellow workers died while businesses and politicians profited.
Workers would play a leading role in this new World Order through
an international body of the working class, which would take over
from the impotent International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU)
and the Red International.
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In 1945, it was commonly assumed
that this body would be the WFTU, and that
the Soviet Union would be involved, as despite official postures
of outrage and fear, it was seen by many as a bulwark of working-class
politics. This was before political-economic interests transformed
the Soviet Union from brave ally to "evil empire," and
began to dictate the terms of a new US-centred
Order to the old imperial powers, including Britain.
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This was the internationalism that
was imagined by trade unionists who had just experienced the horror
of war and glory of resistance as well as the power that
comes with labour shortages that wars create. It was articulated
by national unions and bodies, but was expressed most clearly
by refugees and their Exile Unions in Britain, especially the
sailors, who were saved from mind-numbing patriotism by spending
their war years at sea.
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What makes Imagining Internationalism
particularly valuable is its detailed and scholarly approach,
which includes in-depth surveys of working-class opinion during
those crucial years. The book is highly critical of the part played
by the most influential labour bodies of the time: the American
Federation of Labor (AFL), the Congress
of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the
British Trade Unions Congress (TUC), and
the International Trade Secretariats. It exposes leadership styles,
political intervention, and manipulation even after 50
years have passed, such criticism had better be based on evidence
that is totally solid.
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There is no shortage of just this
kind of evidence; in fact, there is so much detail that Imagining
Internationalism is a rather difficult read. It will likely
see most use as a reference book. Themes appear time and again,
as Silverman describes yet another complex development, organizational
nuance, or personality that played a part in the death of the
WFTU. Almost a third of the book is devoted
to references that says a lot about its style.
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Having just completed 25 years
as a union staff representative, I was impressed by Silvermans
keen insights into the realpolitik of trade unionism. Todays
trade unionists may have never heard of the WFTU,
but they would have little trouble recognizing the characters,
organizations, the leadership styles, and the internal politics
that continue to describe unions today.
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Silvermans thesis is that
the dream of a truly inclusive international body was destroyed,
not by the conservatism or provincialism so often attributed to
shop floor workers, but by union leaders who could not distance
themselves from post-war British and American governments that
wanted the Grand Alliance with the Soviet Union dead and gone.
He provides ample proof that workers had achieved an unprecedented
degree of solidarity at the close of World War II,
which their politicians were compelled to recognize but
only for a while. A quote from a British woodworker best expresses
the disillusionment: "From the working-mans point-of-view,
not that anyone bothers about what the working-man thinks, except
perhaps his wife, the present situation of international affairs
is detached and incomprehensible; it does not belong to him, and
he wonders why, particularly as patriotism is evidently expected
to spring spontaneously from him .... Prophets of better times,
leaders of ideologies, democratic wizards of finance, have each
their turn in creating new hopes ... and soon our beautiful castles
of dreams come tumbling down, and history repeats itself, leaving
the working man out in the cold again." (49)
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The WFTU
lost because the politicians won, says Silverman. With the emergence
of the Cold War, leaders of the national centres and the international
trade secretariats could no longer accept the participation of
the Soviet trade unions, even though so many of their members
could. However, he also blames the Communists for being unable
to recognize and change their response to the unfolding Post-War
World. He identifies two underlying tendencies that would dog
the WFTU to its grave:
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1. The trade union movement became one
of the main battlegrounds of the Cold War; it was not simply affected
by it.
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2. Trade union leaders in the USA
and Britain identified too closely with the national and imperial
interests of their countries; they assumed that their survival
depended on it. As one result, colonialist attitudes and divisions
that dogged the IFTU outlived the War,
and the colonial regimes which spawned them. They were responsible
for the discrimination and lack of support experienced by refugee
trade unionists during the War (eg, the Exile Unions). Many, in
fact, focused their attention on international politics, further
distancing themselves from mainstream trade unionism in their
host countries.
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When all was said and done, however, inclusion of the Soviets
was the issue that sank the WFTU. It was
on this issue that working-class solidarity, strong at the close
of the War, was steadily fractured by three tendencies, all of
which continue to divide unionists to this day.
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The first was a split between "business"
and "political unionism." The former focused only on
"bread-and-butter" issues, while the latter insisted
on a broad agenda and lengthy debates, punctuated with revolutionary
language, over such issues as the socialization of the means of
production and support for revolutions (especially in former colonies).
The two sides were never able to "get it together, with the
result that internationalism" was steadily moved out of the
mainstream, and became something which only members with suspicious
motives and divided loyalties would talk about.
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The second was a debate over "free
trade unions," which reflected a split between those unions
which valued autonomy and freedom of action from outside bodies,
and those which were integrated into the state apparatus (even
if it claimed to represent the working class, as did the Soviet
Union).
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The rallying cry of free trade
unions lives on today in the liberal concept of "free
collective bargaining," and is just as full of contradictions
and ambiguities as it was during the decade when the fate of "internationalism"
was decided. As a matter of fact, union organizations on both
sides of the Cold War tended to support the world-view and the
agenda of their respective states; whether the AUCCTU
in the Soviet Union, the TUC in Labour
Party Britain, or the AFL in the United States. The fact that
the ICFTU emerged with this concept enshrined
in its name attests to the priority accorded to the debate at
the time.
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The third tendency was a dark suspicion
of factionalism, of groups that would use their foothold in a
union or labour central to promote an agenda that was separate
from, or even at odds with, the objectives of leadership. Most
distrusted were those who saw trade unions as "transmission
belts" for building the world revolutionary movement through
the Communist party. These were the ones that increasingly came
to be associated with internationalism and the WFTU.
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As internationalist sentiment shrank,
the Communists bolstered their own shrinking power base by focusing
their efforts on the WFTU and foreign affairs.
In the dying days of the CIO as a separate
organization, lower-ranked Communists were the ones to retain
ties with the WFTU secretariat, often over
the heads of formal CIO leadership. Within
trade unions, few things excite anger and distrust more than going
over the heads of elected leaders. Neither can this be dismissed
as mere political jealousy; such insubordination strikes at collective
discipline which is at the heart of trade union power.
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Fourthly, trade union solidarity
was riven by questions of jurisdiction who would be included
or excluded, and more importantly, who would have bargaining rights
for which group of workers. With the growing Cold War, the answer
tended to break on the issue of support or rejection of the WFTU.
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These days, "internationalism"
has taken on a decidedly negative meaning, as trade unions struggle
with free trade, multinational corporations, and the ascendance
of economic over social concerns. The national and local have
gradually assumed a status as "real," while the international
is seen as "foreign." As a result, the concept of "globalization"
has been too easily dismissed as an invasion of international
players into the realm of "legitimate" national affairs,
and labour has responded with questionable political alignments.
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In this regard, Silvermans
book could not be more timely, as it shows that unionists at the
close of the War had no trouble understanding the international,
national, and the local workplace as aspects of the same political-economic
reality against which they were bound in struggle (with special
qualification for the colonies). To quote Silverman, "The
commonly expressed idea of a New World Order implied
not only international reorganization, but also a reordering of
domestic class relations, workplace relations, and internal union
operations." (54)
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Fifty years later, the international
is no longer "real." In most union circles, it has been
banished to the realm of the "ideal," of interest only
to odd "political" types who have little better to occupy
their time. Reminiscent of Marxs First Thesis on Feuerbach,
the "real stuff" of unionism is the "dirty business"
of dealing with the employer in the framework of collective bargaining.
The "real" community of workers is the "community
of interest" defined by the bargaining unit, a legal construct
which denies commonality of interest between classifications of
workers who work side-by-side never mind workers of different
nations. Is it any wonder that "globalization" is so
hard to understand?
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Who killed the dream? Silverman
doesnt provide a simple answer. He leaves little doubt that
anti-Soviet leaders in both governments were involved, and that
union leadership could have been much more stalwart in facing
up to them. Working people in both countries indeed around
the world were expressing a powerful desire for peace and
democracy, but their American and British union centrals were
listening to organizational imperatives that made louder demands.
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British and American experiences
are described as two separate stories, as if the frame of reference
adopted for one had to be abandoned for the other. Perhaps more
than the Atlantic Ocean separates the two, but it would have been
satisfying to have a common framework applied to the study.
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On the American side, Silverman
challenges the popular notion that working people, and especially
trade union leaders, fell in behind the American State Department
and the authors of the Cold War. Using detailed surveys and exhaustive
references, he shows this not to be far from true.
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During the decisive decade, American
labour was divided between two centrals, the older American Federation
of Labor (AFL), primarily the voice of
craft unions, and the relatively new Congress of Industrial Organization
(CIO), the voice of the industrial and
emerging public sector and white-collar unions. The AFL
was squarely in the cold warrior camp, but it had always taken
a tough stance against Communists and international organizations
that allowed them. They always saw themselves in terms of "bread-and-butter"
issues, as against esoteric political debates; there was nothing
hypocritical about their position.
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The organization that changed,
according to Silverman, was the CIO, the
wing that had been more accommodative of Communists, both domestic
and foreign, and which had participated in the WFTU.
The CIO, not the AFL,
was also the central which had bought into the Rooseveltian world
view, with its pluralist philosophy and structures. The evidence
in Silverman is that they switched their stance on the WFTU
after it became clear that their central was in trouble because
of an increasingly unfriendly environment and in-fighting. Major
policy shifts became "memory lapses"; it is not a pretty
picture that Silverman paints.
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The American workers themselves
came much more slowly to the official view of the Soviet Union
as "evil empire." Even as the decade closed, with the
dream of unity in the WFTU all but dead,
American workers were expressing deep doubts about their countrys
role in the world, its stance towards the Soviet Union, and its
interference in incipient national struggles, such as the one
in Greece. And they were more concerned than ever about the prospects
of war.
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Silvermans conclusion is
solidly embedded in 1949, and it is as depressing as it is unfair
to the situation today. The ICFTU, for
example, may have "skeletons" in its past, but it is
questionable what they have to say to the reader about international
trade unionism today. The role and character of the worlds
labour bodies and the ICFTU have been changing
rapidly, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union deprived
the Cold Warriors of their major enemy.
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The dream of the 1940s was tied
to the WFTU. Half a century later, we face
a new "internationalism" in which organized labour is
having difficulty gaining any voice at all. Such bodies as the
United Nations and the WTO are only now
experimenting with the idea of including trade unions in their
discussions, and it is in these forums that the ICFTU,
the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD
(TUAC), and the International Trade Secretariats
are beginning to take an active part on behalf of the workers
of the world.
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Winston Gereluk
Athabasca University
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Deborah Thom, Nice Girls and Rude Girls: Women Workers in
World War One (London: I.B. Taurus 2000)
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Claire A. Culleton, Working Class Culture, Women and Britain
1914-1921 (New York: St. Martins Press 2000)
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PROPAGANDA POSTERS and pamphlets produced
in Britain during World War I featured a new heroine: the woman
worker. Whether pulling on her cover-all with a smile, or seriously
attending to the large industrial machine in her charge, the new
war heroine was "doing her bit" for the war effort.
The captions exhorted other women to do the same. Deborah Thom,
in Nice Girls and Rude Girls: Women Workers in World War One
and Claire Culleton in Working Class Culture, Women and Britain
delve behind the popular image of the female war worker, to argue
that public representation did not reflect the reality of womens
experiences as workers during the war, but instead was a strategy
to contain it. Thom and Culleton examine the public perceptions
and images of female industrial workers during the war, and how
women workers themselves responded to the dominant social imagery,
the realities and dangers of industrial work, and their identities
as workers. Although the authors have similar aims and discuss
overlapping topics, such as TNT poisoning
among workers, the cultural response to womens work and
pro-natalism, they diverge on the question of how womens
experience as workers can be accessed and understood.
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Government appeals for women to
join the workforce during the war were designed to appeal to a
sense of novel adventure and patriotism, yet underlying them were
negative contemporary images of womens paid work. As Deborah
Thom demonstrates, at the end of the 19th century, womens
labour was seen as a modern social problem. "Sweated"
female labour, or piecework done from home for pitiful wages,
was presented in the popular press and in public debates with
no less furor than the scandal over white slavery had been in
the 1860s, though with considerably more basis in fact. Pre-war
popular representations of working women thus emphasized their
weakness, as in photographs of the chainmakers strike of
1912, which depicted women marching in chains, while at the same
time documenting the industrial discontent among men and women
workers between 1907-1914. The outbreak of war and the need for
female industrial labour from 1915-1917 exacerbated pre-war tensions
among women workers, workers organisations, and the government.
Yet government propaganda presented an image of novelty that denied
womens industrial experience, and managed only to portray
womens labour as a patriotic duty to the State. Thom examines
in particular Government-commissioned photographs of womens
work taken by photographers, including Horace W. Nicholls, in
1915. Although the photographs document women in various poses
and groupings, the photographs chosen to be reproduced in booklets
were of single young girls in charge of huge machines. Thus while
the Government sought to emphasize the inexperience and heroism
of the patriotic wartime workers, depictions of a lone and frail
woman industrial worker recalled imagery of the sweated worker.
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Thom goes on to discuss how the
image of the female worker as a "sweated" worker was
reinforced by womens trade-union organisations and leaders.
The National Federation of Women Workers, founded in 1906, and
other smaller labour organisations, were dedicated to the campaign
against "sweated" female labour and the protection of
working women. Examining sources in the Tuckwell Collection at
the Trade Union Congress Library and the Imperial War Museums
Women at Work archive, Thom argues that the maternalism and autocratic
leadership of trade union organisations failed to protect wartime
women workers from the industrial danger of TNT
poisoning, though they encouraged supposedly protective measures
such as drinking milk before going on shift. In labour organisations
as in factories, womens traditional links to reproduction
were superseded by the demands of war. Thom also demonstrates
that while women workers responded to the dangers of TNT
work by changing jobs and absenteeism, they did not have the tools
to challenge the inadequacy of safety precautions in factories
themselves.
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Underlying Thoms analysis
is her assertion that the experience of women workers in World
War I is difficult to recapture, because the popular assumption
of novelty acted as an ideological filter through which womens
work was viewed. Even modern histories of World War I womens
work, she argues, have tended to reproduce uncritically the public
images of women workers and their attendant assumptions of novelty.
Thom aims to create an accurate picture of the experience of the
woman worker by comparing discursive evidence, in personal narratives,
with objective evidence such as statistics, while bearing in mind
the limitations of each. Statistics about womens work during
the war, she argues, are flawed, because they represent political
considerations that changed over the course of the war, as different
arguments about womens work were made according to whether
female labour was being recruited or demobilised. Personal narratives,
she adds, must be read in the context of how the information was
first elicited, as the process of selection of oral interviews
privileges certain aspects of the war experience, and memory is
both constituted by and constitutive of emotional responses. She
also makes a fascinating point about work experience being written
on the body, both in form of injury or strain, and in the sense
of "bodily memory" as women in interviews replicate
the motions of their work which they cannot describe, though this
is not elaborated upon. (74)
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Thoms interrogation of traditional
social history sources of World War I adds to the equivocacy in
the women workers accounts themselves. Oral history accounts
from women who worked at the Woolwich Arsenal during the war present
a profound ambiguity towards their war work experience and their
identity as workers. Thom argues that women almost always defined
themselves first in terms of family, then as workers, and that
women workers repeated the propagandistic rhetoric of the war
without irony. (159) She also warns against comparing womens
historical and psychological role in war with mens, as women
filling shells in the factory did not evoke the complex responses
of bereavement, guilt, and anger of men at the front. What is
left after Thoms series of qualifications is a curious absence,
with no clear way in which to approach the experience of the woman
wartime worker.
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In contrast to Thoms portrayal
of the ambivalent experience of womens war work, Claire
Culleton argues that the war gave women new industrial experience
and new pride in their capabilities and work. Culleton aims to
trace the transformative and emancipatory effect of World War
I on working women through their literary production, mainly in
factory newspapers and autobiographies. Like Thom, she examines
womens industrial work in wartime with its dangers, as well
as the relationship between womens roles as workers and
as mothers. Analysing primarily first person literary accounts,
she argues that the new opportunities for women in industrial
factories and the removal of the male head of the family gave
working-class women a perceived and actual unaccustomed freedom,
despite the negative cultural response to womens work and
the restrictions imposed by the draconian Defence of the Realm
Act.
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Claire Culleton is a professor
of English, and her book owes much to the literary history of
World War I. She positions her work as part of the feminist revision
of Paul Fussells masculinist conception of the literary
importance of World War I, by arguing for working womens
inclusion in the enterprises of modern writing. She traces the
development of irony in womens factory newspapers, which
she compares to the trench newspapers produced by the soldiers
at the front. She also argues that working-class womens
writing formed an "outlaw genre," negotiating their
identities from a position within the turmoil. These sources do
not show the middle class search for a self, because they must
show how the protagonist found a place within society, not apart
from it. How does this relate to historical position? The war
created a break with both social and cultural tradition, according
to Culleton, which "no longer permit[ed] the sentimentality
of hearth and home, and no longer nourish[ed] fin-de-siècle
literary styles or late Victorian cultural prescriptions."
(2) She discusses the lives, oral history narratives, testimonies,
and workplace writings of women workers during the war, how their
experiences and writings were affected by their class and status,
and vice versa, and how their writings affected and were affected
by emerging modernist sensibilities. Her ultimate aim is not so
much to assess womens experiences as workers, but to revive
the literary culture of working women during World War I.
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Since her analysis is textual,
Culleton does not interrogate her narrative sources in the same
way as Thom. She writes that oral history provides a purer and
more dramatic source than written sources, "precisely because
it comes from a person rather than a document, [and] brings this
historical moment to life." (87) Thus, she discounts critiques
that oral history must be tempered with the consciousness of the
fallibility of personal memory. (87) She also approaches newspapers
as a pure form of representation; "where [working womens]
accounts are not coloured by hindsight and reflection but are
spontaneous, preserving for us what Patrick Beaver calls the
thing itself: The slang, the jargon, the character of conversation...."
(118) For Culleton, experience is transparently available in historical
sources, and womens war experiences transformed postwar
cultural production and the politics of labour. Working womens
defiance was expressed in their writing and by the self-documentation
of their lives, and after the war they drew upon their new industrial
knowledge.
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One new area that Culleton examines
is the experience of wartime Irish women immigrants: how their
experiences differed from other Irish immigrants, and how their
motives for war work compared with those of English women. Irish
women who came to work in English munitions factories were prejudged
to be rowdy, boisterous, and untrustworthy by supervisors and
co-workers. Conflicts between English and Irish women workers
often arose, such as the rioting that broke out at the Hereford
shell-filling factory in 1917. During the confrontation between
English and Irish women, the Irish women wore orange and green,
sang Sinn Fein Songs and insulted the Tommies, while the English
women replied with similar insults. Physical violence subsequently
broke out at the dinner table and on a train platform, and the
situation was resolved by sending the Irish women back home within
a day of the outbursts. Culleton uses this example to successfully
question the patriotic motives of women war workers, and to address
geographical and ethnic divides among women workers.
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Ultimately Culletons book
is limited by its lack of historical context on womens work.
Her analysis, relying heavily on literary sources, requires a
more solid base in historical evidence, if her statements about
the fundamental societal and cultural changes occasioned by working
womens experiences and writings are to bear scrutiny.
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Deborah Thoms Nice Girls
and Rude Girls: Women Workers in World War One and Claire
Culletons Working Class Culture, Women and Britain, 1914-1921
are both interesting and thoughtful works on the history of womens
work during World War I. In fact, their analyses complement each
other. While Thom and Culleton use different sources, different
methodologies, and ultimately come to different conclusions, their
ultimate aim is the same. As Deborah Thom cautions against reproducing
the war-like rhetoric of "the battle" of the sexes in
social histories of the war, so Claire Culleton warns against
making the victimization of women the new mythology of war. Both
authors argue against the simplification of womens wartime
work, and each gives a new variety and insight into the ways in
which we approach their experience.
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Amy Bell
Queens University
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Michael Lavalette, ed., A Thing of the Past? Child Labour in
Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York:
St. Martins Press 1999)
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THIS COLLECTION seeks to provide "a
more historically grounded analysis of child labour as a structural
feature of capitalist societies" and, for the most part,
it succeeds in meeting this objective. (52) That it does so in
a way which reflects what is best in an edited collection only
reinforces my view that this is a most worthwhile book for historians
and sociologists, for educators and social workers, for policy
makers and activists. Indeed, the interdisciplinarity of the content
and the accessibility of the writing are welcome features which
only further serve to commend this book to our attention.
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The editor has exercised a strong
hand and this has produced positive results. Lavalette has written
a useful introduction and conclusion to the collection as a whole,
and shorter editors introductions to each of the books
three sections, "The Theoretical Context of Child Labour
Research," "Child Labour in British History," and
"Contemporary Issues." The introductions provide a useful
guide to readers, although there are spots where certain observations
become repetitive, at least for anyone reading the work from cover
to cover.
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The editor also has contributed
three of the ten chapters contained in the collection, including
the first two chapters which provide very clear and cogent review
essays on the theoretical debates in the field. The first chapter
deals with concepts of childhood and questions about childrens
rights and "voice" while the second takes up issues
related to the actual work of children within the context of the
family, state, and relations of production. Lavalette carefully
and fairly sets out major interpretations before interrogating
them. His balanced approach leads to the identification of the
strengths and weaknesses of various positions before he moves
on to suggest ways in which our understanding might be expanded.
For example, Lavalette scrutinizes the two dominant and competing
economic explanations for child labour that child labour
is the result of family poverty and most prevalent in declining
regions or, on the other hand, that children are a reserve army
of labour to be drawn on in expanding regions when more workers
are needed and finds them wanting. He suggests a more complex
analysis to take account of the empirical evidence now available
and urges a consideration of child labour within a wider set of
social relations.
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Four chapters in part two of this
book examine elements of the history of child labour in Great
Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries. To explore the continuity
or change question, some of the perennial debates about the development
and impact of social reform legislation are re-visited most helpfully.
Horrell and Humphries discuss the way in which the work of the
young is linked to industrialization and make the point that we
should not see children as an undifferentiated mass. Some children,
those who were orphans or living in poor, single-parent households,
were especially vulnerable to exploitation. However, argue Horrell
and Humphries, child labour policies were specifically manipulated
to provide young workers to those industries which otherwise would
have experienced labour shortages while, at the same time, denying
children access to work elsewhere. Kirby suggests that protective
legislation in the mining industry was either unenforceable or
that it arrived after many children had already been driven out
of the mines because the growing demand for coal and hence the
preference for coal fields, where there were deep seams of the
fuel, allowed for the introduction of new technologies that supplanted
child labour. It was not compassion but economic utility which
drove the demise of childrens work in the mines.
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In the third chapter in this section,
Lavalette argues that in the early 20th century child labour did
not disappear but rather was repositioned as "out of school
work" and hence marginalized or seen as merely supplemental
to school attendance. The so-called casual labour performed by
children was regarded as light work, as suitable training in the
work ethic, and as a healthy outlet for the young that would provide
them with real experiences that would aid in the transition from
school to work. The end result was that child labour was "deproblematized"
and disappeared as a social policy concern. Indeed, it is now
difficult for historians to understand the nature and full extent
of child labour in Britain for the 20th century and it is to this
problem that the chapter by Cunningham turns. Drawing on official
records and files for the period 1918 to 1970, Cunningham ably
demonstrates that the exploitation of working-class child labour
continued until the 1950s because protective legislation was easily
ignored, the government did not wish to interfere with those businesses
which relied on the work of the young, and gainful employment
was seen as an easy antidote to juvenile delinquency. In addition,
the hard work of young women on the domestic front went largely
unnoticed. Post-war reconstruction and prosperity led to changes
in the youth labour force in that large numbers of middle-class
boys and girls began to work part time. However, Cunningham concludes
that this shift in labour force structure did little to protect
the welfare, health, or safety of the young and that government
departments remain more concerned with the needs of industry than
the protection of the young.
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The last section of the book deals
with some contemporary issues but raises many of the same questions
addressed in the historical studies. Leonard looks at child labour
in the United Kingdom over the last three decades and confirms
both its ubiquity and its continuation in a narrow range of occupations.
She notes the persistence of low wages, job insecurity, and health
and safety concerns in the youth labour market and raises suggestive
observations about the gender and class dimensions of youth employment.
She argues for improved legislation to protect the young but does
so from a childrens rights standpoint that will be familiar
to those who have followed the career of the young Canadian activist,
Craig Kielburger, and his organization, Free the Children. McKechnie,
in his review of child labour in the United States, provides ample
evidence that the phenomenon is widespread in that country, that
much of the child labour is illegal, and that safety issues require
immediate attention. Like Leonard, he argues that industrialized
nations need to pay attention to child labour abuses at home,
as well as abroad.
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The final two substantive chapters
in the book contribute to the debate on the need for further protective
legislation with Cornwell, Graham, and Hobbs putting the case
for stronger government action and enforcement to protect children
from exploitation and Whitney arguing that existing regulations
are dated, petty, illogical, and unenforceable and that most child
labour is not harmful. He proposes "a more modern, national,
integrated approach" that would "empower" children
by allowing them to work but control employers by establishing
guidelines and rules for them. The goal would be to recognize
the importance of work for children and adolescents and to make
it possible for them to more easily combine schooling and paid
employment.
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It is one of the strengths of this
collection that it acknowledges and develops many of the key debates
around child labour. While it draws almost solely on British evidence
and data, this does not detract from the broader applicability
of the main lines of argument. We hear from both the child protection
and child liberation schools and are forced to consider our own
views on child labour in the context of global capitalism, a point
which is emphasized in Lavalettes conclusion.
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Overall, I recommend this collection
as it provides a useful and generally readable introduction to
the central themes in the historical and sociological research
on child labour.
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Rebecca Priegert Coulter
University of Western Ontario
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Soon-Won Park, Colonial Industrialization and Labor in Korea:
The Onoda Cement Factory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Asia Center 1999)
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THE ECONOMIC SUCCESS of Korea, until the
recent crisis, has drawn a great deal of attention among scholars
and policy-makers alike. In particular, its relation to colonialism
(Korea was under Japanese rule from 1910 to 1945) has been a topic
of heated debates in the West as well as within Korea. Yet most
of these discussions have focused on the business side and/or
the role of the (colonial) developmental state at the neglect
of another important aspect of Koreas industrial transformation
process, i.e. labour. Colonial Industrialization and Labor
in Korea fills this gap and thus will be an indispensable
addition to a growing body of works on colonial Korea.
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Parks case study of the Onoda
Cement plant (1917-1942) examines the first generation of Korean
skilled workers in Sûnghori of South Pyongyang province,
the second most developed province of that time. The Onoda Cement
Company was one of the largest enterprises in Japan, establishing
ten branch factories in Japan, five in Korea (including the Sûnghori
factory), six in Manchuria, and seven in other locations throughout
the Japanese empire. In her study, Park largely follows recent
revisionist scholarship that breaks with previous nationalist
paradigms by refusing to see colonial experiences in binary terms,
oppression and resistance for example, the essays in the
recent collection Colonial Modernity in Korea (1999), co-edited
by Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson. In particular, she seeks
to show how Korean workers were not simply victims or passive
recipients of colonial modernity but active participants in its
formation, having diverse experiences corresponding to their various
modes of participation.
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Park begins with a discussion of
broad socio-economic changes in Korea under colonial rule, setting
the stage for her case study to follow. Chapter One provides a
general discussion of the colonial working environment, demographics
of labour and labour markets, government labour policy, government-industry
relations, management-labour relations, factory working conditions,
and so on. If not original, this chapter offers an insightful
overview of colonial industrial policy and various labour issues
in Korea.
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Chapter Two examines the "labor-management
relations in the Onoda Sûnghori Factory" between 1917
and 1937, and is the core of this book. Analysing primary company
documents, personnel records of the branch factories, official
company histories, and personal interviews, this chapter looks
into various issues such as organizational structure, sources
of labour supply, educational levels of the workers, disciplining
of the workers, hierarchy among the workers, labour turnover,
wage and other compensation systems, and labour disputes in the
Factory. In particular it shows with an ethnography-like, rich
description, how the Japanese recruited, trained, disciplined,
and kept Korean workers. Koreans in their late teens and early
twenties were recruited and trained under older Japanese skilled
workers. Some of them were sent to the main factory in Japan for
intensive training and were treated as "a select Korean group
who could play an intermediate role between the Japanese and Korean
workers." (66) With most coming out of peasant backgrounds,
these Korean workers were eager to learn and readily adapted themselves
to the routines and regulations of factory life. Also largely
applying the labour-control techniques developed at the main company,
the management used both an "incentive system" as well
as "strict rules" to discipline Korean workers.
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However, the Factory fundamentally
maintained a segmented labour market; Japanese at the upper level
and Koreans occupying the lower. This practice belied their own
rhetoric regarding the labour-management system such as the seniority
system in promotion. After all, Korea was under colonial rule.
As a result, while this management system was quite effective,
some Korean workers revolted against the factory system, causing
a high turnover rate. In addition, discrimination and humiliation
were felt and experienced more strongly at social occasions. Even
when Koreans and Japanese were bound by common goals at the workplace,
this bond seldom matured into a broader social exchange. Japanese
maintained a fundamental contempt for Koreans as a colonized people
and Korean skilled workers had to endure listening to their Japanese
bosses ridiculing and insulting other Koreans who were characterized
as "a group prone to irresponsible behavior, hot-tempered
spontaneous violence, tardiness, and high absenteeism and turnover
rates." (105)
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Chapter Three looks at Korean labour
during the war years of 1937-45, with a special focus on how militarism
and war mobilization affected colonial industrialization and labour
issues. The colonial government stepped up its efforts to train
Korean technicians and skilled workers so as to fill the vacancies
created by the drafting of Japanese workers for war. While learning
modern skills and technologies, these Korean workers also held
a deep sense of bitterness regarding strict state surveillance
and control. This in turn instilled "a confused love-hate
attitude toward modernity." (160)
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Chapter Four investigates the colonial
legacy of industrial labour and labour relations. Due to data
limitations, Park generalizes from the single case of the Samchôk
branch, the only one in South Korea, to address the colonial legacy
of labour relations. Following the colonial period the Samchôk
branch, after years of political turmoil associated with liberation,
American occupation, left-right struggles, and war, eventually
became Tongyang Cement Company, a major company of its kind. And
the labour relations there over-politicization of labour
issues, the company union system, the labour-management council
system, strong government intervention in labour relations, and
police suppression were all inherited from the colonial
period, while they were practiced within the new American-oriented
legal framework of labour affairs.
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Overall, this book is very well
researched, rich in content, balanced in argument, and readable.
I find its discussion of the social and psychological aspects
of Korean labour particularly stimulating and intriguing. As the
only comprehensive book in English on colonial labour issues in
Korea, Colonial Industrialization and Labor in Korea is
an excellent addition to a growing body of English works on colonial
Korea and should be of interest to historians, political economists,
and historical sociologists of Korea and East Asia in general.
I would recommend this book for upper-division courses and graduate
seminars on Korea and East Asia dealing with Japanese colonialism,
especially colonial industrial issues.
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Gi-Wook Shin,
University of California, Los Angeles
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Tony Fitzpatrick, Freedom and Security: An Introduction to
the Basic Income Debate (London: MacMillan Press 1999)
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IN THIS VOLUME, Tony Fitzpatrick sets out
to explain the concept of a basic income or "BI";
assess its merits and weaknesses; and examine arguments that have
been made about it from different critical perspectives. A BI
is defined as "a guaranteed income paid periodically to each
citizen unconditionally, ie, regardless of work status, employment
record, willingness to work or marital status. Full, partial and
transitional levels of Basic Income can be envisaged." (38)
As a guaranteed income, it would be structured in such a way as
to avoid welfare and poverty traps. Thus, each increase in a dollar
of earned income would result in a much smaller curtailment of
an individuals benefit level (a low "tax back"
rate), so that she would always have an incentive to seek more
paid employment. While the author does not categorically endorse
the BI as a comprehensive alternative to
existing welfare states, he clearly has a favourable view of it,
especially if it is implemented in a relatively ample manner,
providing a guaranteed income level sufficient to live on. He
is well aware, however, that such a benefit would be costly, and
that only less ambitious variants might be politically feasible.
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The critical perspectives from
which the concept is examined include "the radical right"
(an apparent synonym for neo-conservatism), "welfare collectivism"
(mainstream supporters of the post-war welfare state), "socialism"
(proponents of democratic alternatives to market capitalism),
feminism, and "ecologism." Most of the volume consists
of an assessment of the BIs merits
from these various viewpoints. This discussion is highly informative,
based on wide reading from within each of these traditions, and
well argued. Even scholars who have worked in this area in the
past are likely to find these discussions valuable. Yet the volume
is also intended to be accessible for senior undergraduate students,
and should be readily comprehended by them.
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Fitzpatrick argues persuasively
that each perspective has given rise to a complex array of responses
to the BI. The radical right, for instance,
is attracted to the BIs work incentive,
but shrinks from the high taxes needed to fund it. It therefore
prefers a Negative Income Tax (NIT), which
would provide a selective benefit to those with very low incomes.
The guaranteed income level in this model would not be enough
to live on. Socialists might also be attracted to the partial
protection that the BI offers people from
the uncertainties of a market economy; but they would consider
the BI insufficient unless combined with
a more radical challenge to the private property system. Feminists
and ecologists also have complex views of the BI,
viewing it as desirable, or as serving to reinforce the existing
patriarchal division of labour and the productivist orientation
of capitalist economies, depending on the author and on the BI
version under discussion.
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This is a valuable book, but it
is not without its faults. There is a tension that runs throughout,
between two of its central objectives. The first goal was to explain
the BI, and assess its merits. Fitzpatrick
insists that the BI has attracted critical
acclaim from across the ideological spectrum, though always from
a minority at each point along it, and that this is one reason
why it deserves careful attention. The second was to examine the
BI from the various perspectives identified
above. The problem is that when authors in these different traditions
discuss something that resembles a BI,
they are often talking about quite different things. The recommendations
they make therefore are often of questionable relevance to a discussion
of a BI defined in the highly specific
terms that Fitzpatrick uses in the passage quoted above. The "radical
rights" NIT is not really a
BI, because it is selective. Other perspectives
are said to advocate a "social dividend" (socialists)
or a "participation income" (some welfare capitalists).
Yet these ideas clearly diverge from the BI
concept in important ways. Thus, the reader finds that the books
subject matter is really broader and more amorphous by its end
than it was advertised as being at the beginning. Fitzpatricks
case that the BI is a specific proposal
that has achieved ideologically diverse support remains unproven,
and, to this reader, implausible.
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In general, Fitzpatrick is well
aware of the fact that the debate about social security reform
is a deeply ideological one. Most coherent social reform proposals
imply a broad understanding of what a welfare state should accomplish,
what is right and wrong about existing measures, and a sense of
how the proposal in question would remedy what needs to be repaired.
Yet he is reluctant to acknowledge that this is true of proposals
of the type discussed here. The fundamental critiques of his own
concept of a BI, that he so carefully documents
in this volume, suggest that it is.
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The book also ends on a disappointing
note. There is no concluding chapter to pull the various elements
of the argument together and indicate what the authors considered
opinion is in light of all that went before. Fitzpatrick did a
very fine job of reviewing a wide range of views of income security
reform, and of making the most persuasive arguments available
to him in favour of these views. Having done this, he is unable
to provide any overarching insights about this debate. His own
preference for a relatively generous BI is left undefended, simply
one of many notions touched upon in the book.
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Non-British readers of the book
might also find it somewhat narrow in the range of empirical examples
discussed. For instance, there are some discussions of efforts
to develop and test guaranteed income schemes in Canada and the
United States, but these are very brief and leave some false impressions.
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Nevertheless, this is a valuable
book. It provides a comprehensive review of proposals for income
security reform from a wide range of perspectives. It is well
documented and based on a wide and careful reading of relevant
literatures. It is well worth consulting both by established scholars
of the welfare state and by newcomers.
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Rodney Haddow
St. Francis Xavier University
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Peter H. Russell, ed., The Future of Social Democracy: Views
of Leaders From Around the World (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press 1999)
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THE CURRENT CONDITION and prospects for
Canadian social democracy are not bright. In the past three federal
elections the NDP garnered between 7 and
11 per cent of the vote. In no other trio of consecutive elections
since the CCFs launch in the 1930s
has the party fared as poorly. Indeed, in the three elections
in the 1980s, the party reached what now looks like its apogee;
it secured a stable but respectable 19 to 20 per cent of the vote.
The story at the provincial level is more mixed but still disheartening
for social democrats. In Ontario, the NDP
lost two-thirds of its support between the beginning and the end
of the 1990s. A historian would ask: what happened and why? A
political thinker in the social democratic camp might want to
consider: what now?
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The Future of Social Democracy
is a Canadian book with an international flavour both in terms
of its contributors and its philosophical ken. This shortish collection
of essays brings together a star-studded cast: two Nobel Peace
Prize winners (Shimon Peres and Oscar Arias), three former premiers
(Frances Michel Rocard, New Zealands David Lange,
and Swedens Ingvar Carlsson), and two former premiers (Ontarios
Bob Rae and South Australias John Bannock). There are also
pieces by Ed Broadbent and Neil Kinnock. The former was a vice-president
of the Socialist International during his stint as NDP
leader and the latter was the leader of British Labour. That party
served as the ideological mentor and model for social democracy
in the English-speaking world in the first half of the 20th century.
Through much of the century Canadas social democrats predicted
and hoped for the shattering of the centrist Liberals as occurred
in Britain. The idea was that right-wing Liberals would drift
over to the Conservatives and that left-wing Liberals would make
common cause with and be absorbed by the CCF-NDP.
It happened in Manitoba and in some respects in Saskatchewan and
British Columbia. The scenario, however, eluded the party federally.
Now it looks like a pipe dream. If a merger or alliance develops,
the Liberal sponge will likely absorb the NDP.
Recent voting trends federally and in Ontario suggest as much.
This book inadvertently reinforces the view that something like
such a philosophical merger of left liberalism and social democracy
is well advanced globally.
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Many within and without the social
democratic world do not realise the longevity and diversity of
the social democratic movement. The Socialist International (SI)
is nearly a century and a half old and its fraternal parties now
operate in more than 140 states. (The Parti Québécois
once applied to join but was rejected on the grounds that only
one party per sovereign state could affiliate). All NDP
members are automatically affiliated with the SI.
The SIs approximate 100 million members
make it the worlds largest coalition of political forces.
In todays fast changing socio-economic order, one driven
almost to the point of addiction by neo-conservative nostrums,
social democracy appears passé. The contributors to this
collection are keen to extol social democracys past achievements
the deepening of democratic reform and the emergence of
social safety nets. What do they offer for the future and as an
alternative to the status quo? Are they merely custodians for
the welfare state? They insist that a New Left should project
a New Look: one not wedded to celebrating debt, centralization,
excessive regulation and taxation, welfare dependence, and public
ownership. They want to combat socio-economic instability and
to temper exploitation. But, a critic would note, so does contemporary
welfare liberalism.
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Some of the themes threading their
way through this book are: solidarity, improving education, social
justice and social rights, and the challenges of governing. Many
of the authors place their philosophy between two alleged extremes.
One is Marxism and the Old Left, which is dismissed as pseudo-scientific,
the other is the neo-conservatism of the New Right with its unbridled
free-market fundamentalism and the indulgence of selfish individualism.
The authors think they are singing from the same song sheet, but
they do so in discordant keys. Those from the antipodes embrace
the globalization of capital. They respond with "economic
rationalism," a socialism sans doctrine. "No
longer the exclusive representatives of working-class interests,"
writes Lange, "social democrats become managers, pledged
to enhance the working of the capitalist economy...." (106)
The word "socialism" is nowhere in Ariass contribution;
the sole reference to social democracy is an apologetic one, telling
us of his preference not to use it either. He refers to Plato,
Jesus, Moses, Paz, Mandela, and Blair and writes of "humanizing
globalization" and the need for a new ethical code "to
construct a cohesive society characterized by a rational and modern
form of capitalism." (64-65) The Canadians, as Broadbents
contribution and NDP policy confirms, are
less sanguine about globalization and "American-style capitalism."
(83) He critiques the WTO; none of the
others do. Bob Rae casts Edmund Burke as a reformer. Kinnock proposes
a world central bank to help civilize national and international
markets. Peres is quite taken with technological change, the breakdown
of territorial frontiers, the rise of scientific competition,
and international trading blocs. He unabashedly writes of "socialism,"
laments inequality, and decries the growing gap between the rich
and poor.
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All in all, the authors offer up
a smorgasbord of concerns, analyses, and prescriptions. One may
be either elevated or depressed by their sentiments. More than
ever the future of social democracy is wedded to the future of
capitalism. A crystallization of this books contents leads
to the following corporate mission statement: We social democrats
can do a better job of managing capitalism, of making it less
painful and dysfunctional. Alas, that is what all the capitalist
parties say too. Todays social democratic parties are empty
shells compared to their former selves. They carry the same partisan
labels but their socialist spirits have flagged. Parties like
Labour in Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, the CCF
in Canada, and Israels Mapai were never Marxist, but they
were socialist. That is less apparent of todays social democrats.
Socialists recognize that capitalism might not be defeated in
the foreseeable future, but if they are to regard themselves
as socialists they should continue to condemn it. On this
score, the authors in this collection are at best reticent, resigned
to managing and massaging capitalism, to giving it a more human
face. Britains "New" Labour and Canadas
New Democrats are remarkably similar to Clintons "New"
Democrats.
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Social democratic thinking is on
the point of merging with left liberalism in a world where the
whole political spectrum has shifted to the right. Contemporary
social democratic thinking is easily confused with welfare liberalism.
There is little critique of the capitalist framework, only a partisan
dispute over who ought to preside in its management. Original
socialist ideals have been tempered with a pessimistic cynicism
over achieving them. Social democrats have bought into Thatchers
TINA dictum, that "There is no alternative."
By downplaying their once visionary objectives, social democrats
perversely feed neo-conservatisms momentum. The core values
of socialism have been repressed. Perhaps they are in abeyance,
only temporarily in remission. Or, like a recessive gene, perhaps
they await a robust return in the future.
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Nelson Wiseman
University of Toronto
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Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCAs
70-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (Ithica, NY:
Cornell University Press 1999)
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THIS IS THE STORY of how RCA
set up business in and then moved its factories from Camden, New
Jersey (1929-1950), to Bloomington, Indiana (1940-1998), then
Memphis, Tennessee (1965-1971) and finally to Ciudad, Juarez (1964-
) where, as of this writing, it still produces consumer electronic
goods. Cowie convincingly deals with both the unique features
over time and place of these corporate relocations, and the commonalities
of workers struggles, management practices, union sell-outs,
and gender ideologies over the years. "Rather than offer
a dour tale of shutdowns, I redirect the emphasis toward a hopeful
story of plant openings in which sweeping transformations can
be traced to a myriad of seemingly minute changes among thousands
of unknown workers.... The new locales were always sites of tremendous
optimism for women and men eager to work for a living wage."
(11)
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The narrative takes us from the
foundations of RCA (Radio Company of America)
in Camden, NJ in 1929, through to the late
1990s. The story revolves around the never-ending search for cheap
labour, and Cowie shows how the so-called "new international
division of labor" framework in which it was embedded predated
the 1960s. For RCA in 1929, cheap labour
meant mainly young women and while the balance of power between
capital and labour varies with the state of local labour markets,
it continues to do so in many industries. By the 1940s, RCA
had moved to Bloomington, Indiana. The strikes of 1964-68 encouraged
management to relocate various facets of production, first to
Memphis (an unsuccessful venture for a variety of reasons, notably
the intersect of labour and race), and eventually and completely,
to Ciudad, Juarez, the center of the maquila industry.
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The central thesis of the book
is that as long as women workers remained "cheap and docile"
their jobs were relatively secure (Cowie explains the forced relocation
of RCA from industrial Camden to rural
Indiana in the 1940s in these terms). But, and this is a real
strength of the analysis, the issues of labour control, gender,
and worker militancy are played out within a wider context of
the increasing globalization of production in the second half
of the 20th century.
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The arrival of RCAs
TV production plant in 1946 turned Bloomington
into the "Color Television Capital of the World." Other
electrical corporations (for example, Westinghouse, GE,
Otis) flocked to Bloomington as Monroe County introduced right-to-work
laws and other business-friendly mechanisms. However, a combination
of labour shortages and intensified pressure on the line led to
new militancy in the 1960s. Cowie shows how the Taylorist "work
factor system" in RCA, with work factor
units of 1/10,000th of a minute, controlled every movement of
labour. (presumably not a misprint, 65) When Judy Cross began
working in the Bloomington RCA plant in
the 1960s she handled 800 sets per day; by the 1990s this had
increased to 1,700-2,100. (135) In the 1970s RCA
was considered one of the worst-managed companies in the USA.
It was briefly taken over by GE in 1986,
who sold the consumer electronics division to the French state-owned
Thomson (TCE) in 1987. Workers in Bloomington
were very happy to be saved from GE, and
Bloomington workers started to learn French. But over the following
decade TCE turned the screws itself and
eventually shut the plant down in 1998. The former French Socialist
Party boss of TCE negotiated a better-than-average
compensation package, leading Cowie to conclude that: "being
fired by Socialists may be better than the alternative."
(151) No comment!
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However, it is unlikely that anything
labour in the US could have done would have changed much. The
number of TV production workers in the
USA declined from 110,000 in 1966 to around
20,000 in the 1990s. Interwoven with these narratives is the complex
story of inter-union struggles in the US
and Mexico. Cowie documents in vivid detail how the leftist United
Electrical Workers (UE) lost out to the
rightist International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE)
in anti-communist upsurges in the 1950s and how the "official"
unions in Mexico fought unofficial workers representatives
and other unions. There is a particularly acute discussion of
the "Double Struggle" in Juarez, where workers were
forced to fight against both the company and corrupt union bosses.
Here the thesis that corporations consciously strive to prevent
their workers from developing collective class consciousness is
revisited. Commenting on COMO (the womens
organization in Juarez), Cowie argues: "While COMO
struggled to raise the collective consciousness of the young Juarez
workers, RCA and other maquilas sought
to keep turnover high enough to prevent the maturation of their
employees attitudes towards their jobs," especially
through the seniority system. (160) While there may well be some
truth in this argument, it ignores the ever-more important issue
of production quality for capitalist globalization. Going round
the electronics maquilas in the 1980s and 1990s it was impossible
to miss graphic evidence of the ubiquitous ISO
and corporate certification awards that confirmed a maquilas
place in the network of global production. Indeed, the caption
to the photo on page 173 suggests that Cowie may not entirely
appreciate the significance of the contradiction between managements
need to keep the workforce cheap and docile and its need for continuous
improvement through benchmarking and world best practices. One
of the methods used, which, again, Cowie notes but does not make
much of, is the attempt by the corporation to imbue pride in the
company and its products. Cowie comments: "For decades to
come, workers remembered that it was RCA
and World War II that pulled Bloomington
out of the Depression." (43) He documents the difficulty
of the work but also the excitement of making a new product (the
TV) and the workplace solidarity through
which was forged a special type of labour unity, exploited by
management through the metaphor of the "RCA
family." (52) There are benefits as well as costs for capital
when a workforce genuinely feels some sense of ownership of a
company and a factory and their products. The rapid and numerous
mergers and acquisitions that are so characteristic of capitalist
globalization have done much to destroy this, but some of these
attitudes remain, with their contradictory consequences for labour
and capital.
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While the least successful chapter
is the last, "The Distances In Between," it does raise
some interesting issues about space, place, and transnational
labour solidarity. All in all, this is a very refreshing read,
successfully melding the experiences of workers and bosses with
wider structural forces. The research is meticulous (readers should
not be put off by the momentary lapse that turns Jack Welch into
Jack Welsch), and scholars will benefit from the many archival
sources Cowie has trawled to excellent effect. This book deserves
to be read for many reasons, not least of which is that it really
does put flesh on the often rather bare bones of the debates around
the local effects of capitalist globalization.
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Leslie Sklair
London School of Economics and
Political Science
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William Corlett, Class Action: Reading Labor, Theory and Value
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1998)
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TYPICALLY, COMMENTATORS have addressed
the relationship of Marxism to poststructuralism in epistemological
and methodological which is to say, general terms,
too often arriving at conclusions, which, however well they resonate
in one quarter or another, lack theoretical specificity and rigour.
William Corletts Class Action is exceptional in this
respect, insofar as he wisely identifies labour (and also therefore
the labour theory of value and the priority of production for
Marxist analysis) as a key point of contention. Just as poststructuralists
and post-Marxists tend to radically de-emphasize the role of labour
in their political analyses, Corlett finds that the place of labour
is also elided in their underlying theories. Yet "loyalist"
Marxists cling too tenaciously to the tradition, thereby foreclosing
on a wide range of powerful and suggestive political and philosophical
alternatives. Corletts own approach is to focus on the specific
problems (social, political, theoretical) facing labour today,
and to choose among theoretical alternatives accordingly.
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Corlett begins in a strange place,
with a lengthy excursus on structuralist (Saussure, Benveniste,
Lacan) and poststructuralist (Derrida, Spivak, Deleuze, and Guattari)
theories of subjectivity and discourse. His intention is to show
that labour is so neglected today because it is not recognized
as an agent in the discourses of capitalist production. This exclusion
is in itself a complex one: "labors only possible access
to discursive positions in bourgeois society requires putting
its object [labour power] up for consumption ... [but] Labor is
objectified by capital at precisely the moment it attempts to
speak; the price of Labors access to the means of subsistence
is lack of access to the means of representation." (146)
Similarly, labourers can be recognized as citizens, as members
of the political community, but not as participants in production.
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Corlett delves into Chapter Six
of Capital in order to explain that when the labourer and
the capitalist famously disappear behind the door marked, "No
Admittance Except on Business," one of the things that takes
place is the usurpation of the labourers subject status.
This is how capital achieves its uncanny autonomy and appears
to become self-valourizing, and Corlett understands fetishism
as the acceptance of this illusory agency. But according to Corlett,
the simple reintroduction of the labourer into this scene is as
problematic as it would be revolutionary. Poststructuralists (Corlett
discusses Deleuze and Guattari in particular) take labours
lack of representation in discourse as proof of its contemporary
irrelevance unrepresented, labour literally ceases to exist.
"Loyalist" Marxists too often disregard such discursive
impediments entirely and, therefore, ultimately arrive at workerism
or revolutionary voluntarism.
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The problem that Corlett poses
for himself is how to represent labour while accounting for its
unrepresentability how to penetrate the veil of fetishism
without trivializing the obstacles that it continues to pose.
Following postcolonial theorists like Gayatri Spivak and Trinh
Minh-ha, Corlett seeks to move beyond the limits of the subject-object
designations. Because labour is not merely an object of capital,
yet cannot be represented as a subject, Corlett defines it as
"abject." What Corlett formulates is less a new definition
of labour than a non-definition "that does not exhaust Labors
possibilities," labour as "nameless properties, reserves,
and energy." (109, 217) On the basis of this shift from a
strict class definition of labour to a notion of indeterminate
and shared human potentials, Corlett recommends the incorporation
of the unemployed into workers movements: "Those selling
their labour-power can tell the real story only when they are
out of work; and being out of work usually means being denied
access to the means of representation." (168) Corlett suggests
a shift from workplace organizing to the building of broad coalitions
based around poverty, discrimination, and access to the means
of subsistence.
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Corletts approach clearly
problematizes a labour theory of value that would claim to represent
unproblematically labour in determinate form, or that would specify
labours task as the production of value. Through a close
reading of Althusser and Marx, Corlett attempts to show that Marxs
own political economy is not based on a determinate and quantifiable
conception of labour. Corlett contends that if Marx does seem
to objectify labour, it is only at "the highest level of
abstraction." (144) Following Althusser, Corlett suggests
that capital, not labour, is the object of Marxs investigation
in Capital, and therefore Marxs treatment of labour
therein is not the "truth" of anticapitalist struggle,
the most rigorous form of class consciousness, but only a portrayal
of labour as capital apprehends it. Accordingly, Corlett concludes
that the labour theory of value "conflates the distinction
between abstract and manifest levels of analysis." (126)
In its place he offers a "theory of labours value"
which seeks to acknowledge the ineluctable truth of capitalist
exploitation without participating in the reifying discourse of
value. This necessitates a theoretical practice, which cannot
guide but must be guided, by local activism, and in the last three
chapters of Class Action Corlett details this rearticulation
of theory and practice, and its role in a new kind of organizing:
"Radical theorists tend to operate as though theory were
the key to the oneness needed to stand together in counterhegemonic
struggle and that experience and practice are ... the fragmentation
that must be overcome." (191)
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Corlett stages a most instructive
encounter between contending approaches. In little more than 200
pages, he discusses in depth three issues that could each stand
alone: the nature of class in contemporary society, the theoretical
status of Marxs theory of value vis-à-vis
contemporary theories of representation, and the practical possibilities
for anticapitalist struggle today. While the argument that he
makes is unquestionably revisionist, Corlett operates by way of
Derridian "supplementation," appending his arguments
to existing claims instead of overturning them, and this subtlety
leaves open a great deal of room for productive debate and disagreement.
Corletts sensibility is broadly deconstructionist, and he
often draws his insights from what have become commonplaces of
poststructuralist theory, but the scrupulousness and specificity
of his argument, no less his commitment to and knowledge of Marxist
theory, mean that Class Action is mercifully free of the
generalities and liberties that so often mark comparative studies
of these two approaches.
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It perhaps need not even be noted
that the answers that Corlett offers are not the only ones. Deleuze
and Guattari, comprehensively critiqued by Corlett, are read well
but poorly served by Corletts subject-object framework and
his overriding focus on textuality. Corletts wide-ranging
argument can itself present a daunting obstacle to the uninitiated.
Corlett often spends more time working through problems than explaining
them, and it may be quite unclear to some readers why a book about
class and value theory must begin with a long discussion of structuralist
and poststructuralist theories of subjectivity, desire, and representation.
Corlett criticizes Marxists and post-Marxists both, and alludes
to problems with the concept of dialectical unity, yet he shows
that there is room for openness in Marx himself. Does this mean,
then, that Marx does not require supplementation in the same manner
as his followers? A more general statement on the issue of Marxist
methodology could resolve such ambiguities. Perhaps most pressing
in this respect are the critical references to Marxist uses of
history that are scattered throughout the book. Corlett follows
poststructuralists like Judith Butler and others in firmly resisting
the value of historicization for social analysis. Corlett may
underestimate the degree to which this, perhaps even more than
his critique of the labour theory of value, constitutes a sticking
point for his Marxist readers. Nevertheless, Class Action
remains among the most original, provocative, and rigorous of
books to address these contentious issues.
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Sean Saraka
York University
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David P. Shuldiner, Of Moses and Marx: Folk Ideology and Folk
History in the Jewish Labor Movement (Westport, CT: Bergin
& Garvey 1999)
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THE PURPOSE of Shuldiners study is
to explore the interplay between socio-political ideology and
ethnic/religious tradition among those in the American Jewish
labour movement who were active in the first half of the 20th
century. His study touches on a number of complex social phenomena,
including immigration, urbanization, secularization, assimilation,
and inter- and intra-cultural tensions, as well as on the political
phenomena of Communism, the labour union movement, and Zionism.
In relating these phenomena to a specific group of people and
a specific time-period, Shuldiner shows how the Jewish labour
movement adapted and redefined traditional religious and ideological
beliefs and practices in accordance with emerging secular and
socialist ideas. The aim of those in the Jewish labour movement
was to change the traditionalist way of life of immigrant Jews
without destroying the cohesive "essence" of Jewish
culture, however that essence might be defined.
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There is, of course, already a
body of work on the history of the American Jewish labour movement,
but Shuldiner is not treading a worn path. The value of his study
lies in his approach to the subject. As a folklorist, his particular
interest is neither the historical growth (and decline) of the
Jewish labour movement, nor its achievements or influences on
the larger labour movements and social-democratic politics of
the United States. Rather Shuldiner examines the cultural traditions,
the expressive forms and "folk ideology" (to use his
term), that both define and are defined by the movement. As a
folkloristic study, Shuldiners work adds an ethnographic
dimension to the work already done in this area.
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The authors ethnographic
approach allows him to explore the strategies by which activists
both divorced themselves from the traditional, conservative Jewish
culture transported from Europe, while attracting converts to
socialist and secularist ideologies of the New-World Jewish labour
movement. For example, in Chapter Two, Shuldiner examines how
the Jewish Labour Movement interpreted biblical and talmudic literature,
as well as the secular history of Jews in Europe, to further their
political end of radicalizing Jews. Thus, they interpreted the
story of Moses as a struggle for freedom from repression
Moses being a radical activist who fought against the conservative
forces of Egypt. Activists interpreted the understanding of Jews
as "people of the book" to mean that Jews were culturally
oriented towards intellectualizing their environment, and thus
towards social activism. Added to this particular sense of "Jewishness"
was the belief that Yiddish, the common language of many immigrant
Jews, allowed the growth of a universal, secular Jewish culture
called Yiddishkayt.
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The strength of these political
beliefs gave the Jewish labour movement both its foundation myths
and its ability to use sacred and religious traditions to attract
Jewish immigrants to their cause. Shuldiner correctly identifies
this strategy as a "folk ideology," seeing the beliefs
of those in the Jewish labour movement as grounded in the same
traditions as those of conservative Jews. As part of his ethnographic
approach, the author uses the transcribed words of those whom
he interviewed in the Jewish labour movement to express and elaborate
upon this folk ideology. In this way, Shuldiner shows that his
sense of the ideological strategies of the Jewish labour movement
is in accord with the beliefs of those who were actually involved
in the employment of these strategies.
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Shuldiner elaborates on the connection
between the conservatism of Jewish traditions and the dynamism
of social activism by examining the personal narratives of those
in the Jewish labour movement. Through ethnographic interviews,
the author allows his informants to "tell their own story."
But rather than being oral histories, these interviews reveal
a series of personal experience narratives that the informants
use to explain or justify their actions and beliefs. The stories
that Shuldiners informants tell concentrate on their early
lives and experiences within Jewish culture, their sense of cohesiveness
within the Jewish labour movement, their incorporation of key
religious and ethnic traditions into their secular lives, and
their continued activism in old age all of these stories
placing Shuldiners informants within the historical and
ideological framework of the Jewish labour movement. The author
is not the first to view personal experience narratives as parables
and exempla, but his ethnographic methodology allows the reader
to see how folk narrative works for those in a particular social,
political, and ethnic milieu.
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Following the same methodology,
Shuldiner explores other areas of traditional expressiveness,
showing how each was a negotiation between the old religious and
cultural Yiddishkayt of European Jews and the new secular and
humanist culture of the American Jewish labour movement. The authors
thesis is clearly seen in the transformation of Yiddish folksongs
and folksong motifs into ideological songs. The same transformation
occurred among Yiddish folktales, literature, and drama. But Shuldiner
shows that the Jewish labour movement also used untransformed
traditions the unadulterated folksongs and tales found in
Jewish culture in order to reinforce their ethnic identity
and their groundedness within the culture of the workers whom
they were attempting to influence.
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By far, Shuldiners clearest
example of the use of folk traditions for ideological purposes
is the "third seder" of the Jewish Passover ritual.
The traditional holiday of Passover is a celebration in which
Jews revisit the stories of Exodus, and where they can reaffirm
their commonly-held sense of religious and ethnic history. The
haggadah, or ritualized script recited at the Passover feast,
recounts the history of Exodus and draws lessons from it. A number
of groups within the Jewish labour movement held Passover celebrations
in which the religious parts of the ritual were excised, leaving
the historical and ideological parts of the ceremony. Through
his discussion of this "third seder," as well as three
appendices that reprint radicalized haggadahs, Shuldiner demonstrates
the conscious use of traditions for political ends.
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Beyond Shuldiners exploration
of the folklore of the Jewish labour movement, his study sheds
considerable light upon the divisions within the American Jewish
Community, and within the Jewish labour movement itself. As he
points out, the movement opposed the religiosity and conservatism
of much of Jewish culture. Many Jewish immigrants worked in sweatshops
owned by other Jews, so that their class struggle was as much
within Jewish society as with American society as a whole. Inside
the Jewish labour movement, there were struggles among those with
different takes on international Communism and Zionism, among
other ideologies. There have always been political and social
divisions within the North American Jewish Community, no matter
how monolithic Jewish society seems to the outsider. The conflicts
described by Shuldiner continue to play themselves out in modern
Jewish history (see, for example, the recent book: Samuel G. Freedman,
Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry,
[New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000].
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The use of ethnographic interviews
adds value to the exploration of any relatively recent social/political
movement, and Shuldiners ethnography is no exception. His
oral historical documents add weight to the print-based evidence
that both he and more conservative historians rely upon to investigate
the past. While ethnographic interviews are a mainstay of the
folklorist, they are still a somewhat questionable methodology
for many historians and political scientists especially
when they form the preponderance of evidence for a particular
thesis. Some may feel that individual interviews particularise
to too great an extent, and do not allow one to come to any general
conclusions about past events. Yet Shuldiners purpose is
to show how individual beliefs and memories support and add depth
to the more orthodox histories of the Jewish labour movement.
All historical movements are composed of individuals, and Shuldiners
approach allows the "ordinary individual" a prominence
lacking in many other analyses of labours struggle.
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The authors approach, however,
should be kept in perspective. His analytical sample is small
and particular. Most of his interviews were with Yiddish-speaking
Jews living in Los Angeles in the early 1980s who were involved
in the Jewish labour movement during the first half of the 20th
century. As such, his book is certainly a good history of one
aspect of the labour movement in California, and he includes some
interesting ephemeral sources in his discussion. But can his findings
be applied to the Jewish labour movement as manifested in New
York, Chicago, or Winnipeg? Perhaps, but further ethnographic
studies using Shuldiner as a point of comparison would answer
this question more definitively.
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It must also be pointed out
as the author is certainly aware that, beyond his regional
focus, his study examines only one sub-group of the North American
Jewish labour movement. My grandfather was also a part of the
Jewish labour movement, but he was neither a Yiddish-speaker nor
was he particularly interested in his Jewish ethnic roots. Rather,
he identified with other Hungarian immigrants both Jewish
and non-Jewish who joined the Communist Party and spent
their lives in union-organizing. The only story I know that relates
to his Jewishness was that he went to Detroit and asked, "Which
is the most anti-Semitic car-maker?" When he learned that
Cadillac had that reputation, he chose them as his target. To
what extent did he correspond to the kinds of people that Shuldiner
examines?
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Shuldiners book tells us
much about one sector of the Jewish labour movement that can only
be learned through good ethnographic research. In this respect,
his study is a model for future collaborations between the fields
of history, political science, and folkloristics.
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Michael Taft
University of Northern British Columbia
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Al Grierson, A Candle For Durruti (Austin, Texas: Folkin
Eh! Records 1999)
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WHEN I WAS AN UNDERGRADUATE I hosted a
folk music show on the campus radio station. It was not the coolest
"gig" going most programmers at the time were
more interested in Erics Trip or Nine Inch Nails, not Gordon
Lightfoot or Michelle Shocked but it did have its perks,
not the least of which was a near personal monopoly on the dozens
of new releases that arrived at CFRC-FM
on a monthly basis. It was this access to new material that I
valued most, not because it put me on the cutting edge (it didnt),
but because it provided me with a rare opportunity to tap the
wellspring of the folk music tradition: the rarely seen, unheard,
underground world of the independent singer-songwriter.
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I had a chance to do that again
recently when I listened to Al Griersons new disk, A
Candle For Durruti, an enjoyable 13-song romp through various
folk styles and the mind of an impressive musician and story teller.
Equipped with an acoustic guitar, harmonica, and an artists
knack for extracting extraordinary insights from ordinary things,
Grierson has produced a collection of memorable songs which explore
some of the age-old themes of folk music: love, politics, beauty,
betrayal, and commitment.
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Born in British Columbia and raised
in the west, Grierson worked on the Canadian Pacific Railway,
was active in both the labour and peace movements, spent time
honing his craft in England and Ireland, and studied Zen Buddhism
in the United States. He is also a published poet. Given this
background, it is perhaps not a surprise that A Candle For
Durutti, like his first CD, Things
That Never Added Up To Me: Songs of Love, War, Theology, Golf,
and the Great American Railroad released in 1995, blends literary
and historical sensibilities while, at the same time, retains
the authenticity, immediacy, and accessibility at the heart of
the folk tradition. Nowhere is this more obvious than on the CDs
title track, a lament for the death of both Buenaventura Durruti,
leader of the anarchist militia during the Spanish Civil War,
and the idealism of that revolutionary moment. (According to the
liner notes, the songs title was inspired by a friend of
Grierson who never passed a Catholic cathedral without lighting
a candle in memory of the famous anti-fascist.) "In a postcard
by Picasso, so defiant and serene, was the mercy of a mother as
grand as any queen. She had gathered all her children, with a
many different drums, and the power of her promise when the revolution
comes," Grierson sings, laying bare the sense of disillusionment
that followed Francos victory. "In the darkness and
disorder, in the fire of our fears, she had bound our broken bodies
in the rainbow of her tears. In the hour of our triumph, with
the promise to prevail, and another for the future in the hour
that we failed."
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But Grierson is no one-trick pony.
Indeed, what makes the disk such a joy to listen to is the way
it moves from serious to whimsical, sardonic to sorrowful. "Rick
Blaine Retires to Luckenbach Texas to Cultivate the Middle Way"
is a low-key, finger-picked, rumination on what happened to Casablancas
famous bartender after World War II ended. Evidently, he also
joined a Buddhist monastery late in life. Of the many songs that
explore the emotional wallop of love gained and lost including
"This Little Heart" and "Old Jack of Hearts"
"The Rose of Newfoundland," a Robbie Burns-style
ballad, stands out: it is romantic, but not trite. So, too, does
"Jesus Loves the Working Folks." In this talking-blues-style
song, Grierson returns to the musical and political ground he
has covered often as a labour activist fanning the flames of discontent
on picket lines and at protests in Canada and the US.
It is not a protest song in the traditional sense, but a wandering,
humorous send-up of a bill collector who, on Christmas day, "c[a]me
to rob us with a briefcase but he should have used a gun."
After making off with "Daddys suit and Mamas
shawl, the upholstery from the pickup truck and the paper from
the wall," the "stranger" is eventually taught
a lesson by Daddys class conscious hound dog, Daniel Boone,
who chases him from the house, tears his "satin" suit,
and propels him into an "outhouse on other side of town."
It is a victory for the "working folks," Grierson tells
us, an episode that, incidentally, "scared the living hell
out of poor old Joe Bob Denton who was quietly awaiting
the imminent revival of the Confederacy while keeping company
with a quart bottle of Christmas whiskey and contemplating the
aesthetic subtleties of the lingerie section of the fall and winter
1956 edition of the Sears and Roebuck mail order catalogue, may
it rest in peace."
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This line, and others like it,
is not meant to make light of the politics at play here; rather,
it serves to highlight the absurdity of the strangers antics
on that day and, in a wider sense, the class that he represents
and the class inequality that he profits from. In this regards,
"Jesus Loves the Working folks" is a somewhat subversive
Christmas tale, a combination of Utah Phillips and Dr. Seuss in
equal measure.
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A Candle For Durruti closes
with "Sisters Of the Road," a quiet, hymn-like song
dedicated to individuals who, on a day-to-day basis, provide comfort
to others, repair broken lives, help to lighten the load. Here
Grierson combines images of the road, the hobo ("Lying here
with rogues and thieves"), and the hard life ("Now at
time, youll stand alone, and your soul will grow hard as
bone") with a sense of the deeper, spiritual price that an
unjust society exacts from us all. "Nothing here is guaranteed.
Joy or sorrow, love or greed. Live the life youre meant
to lead. Youll reap the one youve sowed," Grierson
sings. "Heaven helps what heaven heals. And the morning sun
reveals, humble hearts in heavens wheels. Sisters of the
road." The song is mournful, but not maudlin, and by emphasizing
the dignity of everyday people and their ability to bring about
change, it provides a fitting denouement to this recording: "Praised
be love and thanks be said, for the roses and the bread, and the
sky above our heads, sweet nature has bestowed." The song
also left me with this simple, if somewhat unoriginal, thought:
No matter how much pop culture changes, or how debased country
music becomes, or how apolitical or ironic most performers are,
there are still musicians who turn an eye to the everyday, spin
their findings into a meaningful lyric, and, by doing so, shed
light on the hypocrisy, beauty, injustice, humour, and possibilities
of our society. Al Grierson is one of those people; I just wish
I had discovered him ten years ago.
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Andrew Parnaby
Memorial University of Newfoundland
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