Robert Gilpin, The Challenge of Global Capitalism: The World Economy in the 21st Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2000)

ALTHOUGH GLOBALIZATION studies have shot to the top of everyone’s 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. Germany’s 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. Argentina’s 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 today’s 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 world’s 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.

      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 Gilpin’s 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 globe’s 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.

      It is difficult to know whether Gilpin’s 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 administration’s economic strategy, whoever the president is. The fact that Washington’s 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.

      Many non-American readers will find Gilpin’s 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.

      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.

      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 Gilpin’s 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.

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, they’ll either be struck by its natural beauty or frustrated by the interminable gridlock. We’re much less likely to think of it as a colonized landscape — unless we’ve 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, Vancouver’s patron — and the man whose deeds are enshrined in "Georgia Street"; and "Burrard Inlet" after Harry Burrard, Vancouver’s Royal Navy comrade from his days in the West Indies.

      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 Cook’s 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.

      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 Cook’s 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 Cook’s 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.

      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 Cook’s 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.

      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.

      George Vancouver played a crucial role in this process of abstraction and appropriation. Dispatched to conduct an exhaustive survey of the coast to establish Britain’s claim to the region, rather than to engage its indigenous inhabitants, Vancouver’s 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. Vancouver’s 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, Vancouver’s maps were the key to the "imperial fashioning" of region, creating as they did an "anticipatory geography" of colonization.

      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 Spain’s chargé d’affaires 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.

      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.

      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 author’s 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.

      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?

      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. Clayton’s 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 doesn’t answer it. Perhaps it is unanswerable.

      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 colonialism’s 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.

      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.

Joy Parr, Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral, and the Economic in the Postwar Years (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1999)

Peter Ward, A History of Domestic Space: Privacy and the Canadian Home (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 1999)

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 Mendelson’s Home Comforts: The Art and Science Of Keeping House (1999); Marjorie Garber’s Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses(2000); Akiko Busch’s Geography of Home: Writings on Where We Live(1999); Routledge’s edited collections, Rethinking Architecture (1997); and Gender Space Architecture (2000), are examples of such publications.

      In their studies, Peter Ward and Joy Parr, eminent social historians from UBC and SFU respectively (Parr participated in Ward’s 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 "we’ll 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 Rybczynksi’s 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.

      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 Traill’s voluminous correspondence and their publications, Roughing It in the Bush and Backwoods of Canada in the 1800s are a case in point. Similarly, Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion (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)

      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 don’t 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.

      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)

      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 Parr’s 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).

      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.

      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)

Mark Leier, Rebel Life: The Life and Times of Robert Gosden, Revolutionary, Mystic, Labour Spy (Vancouver: New Start Books 1999)

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 Columbia’s labour history. As I read the book, I kept thinking guiltily that I ought to be enjoying it more.

      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 Gosden’s 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 Gosden’s life, since Leier described it in a 1998 article. Although the book gives some additional detail, it does not alter significantly that earlier account.

      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 Gosden’s own life. (9) Leier returns to the significance of Gosden’s 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)

      The last chapter of the book is a wide-ranging discussion of Leier’s research which shades into a "how-to" guide for others interested in exploring British Columbia’s 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 Columbia’s labour history is also included in the book, compiled by graduate students at Simon Fraser University.

      Leier is confident that Gosden’s life is representative or illustrative of the experience of working people. I am less sure. Much of the detail in the book concerns Gosden’s 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. Gosden’s biography only comes alive when he is on the stand or writing reports for the police, implicitly contradicting Leier’s claims about the book.

      Although Leier writes well, I found the story itself of limited interest. Missing is the careful detail of Rolf Knight’s several studies of lives spent on the lower mainland, Bill White’s boisterous prose, the insider accounts of John Stanton, or the poignancy of Irene Howard’s life of Helena Gutteridge. Nor does Gosden’s 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 Gosden’s willingness to betray his fellow workers, but his explanation is not very persuasive. (see 102-104) Similarly, his assertion that Gosden’s 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 Gosden’s life that makes it of interest, a career that runs in counterpoint to the activities of more well-known labour figures of his day.

      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 Leier’s 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 Hardy’s 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.

      Notwithstanding all of this critical commentary, the book has considerable value. Leier is a good historian and if Gosden’s life is not all that he claims for it, his biography does shed light on important episodes in BC’s labour history.

Pat Armstrong, Hugh Armstrong, Ivy Lynne Bourgeault, Jacqueline Choiniere, and Eric Mykhalouskiy, "Heal Thyself" Managing Health Care Reform (Toronto: Garamond 2000)

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.

      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 book’s 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.

      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 book’s conclusions, as opposed to raising concern over the impact of change, particularly change arising from poorly designed health care reforms.

      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.

      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.

      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.

      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)

      In conclusion, this book is an important early and critical look, mainly from an insider’s (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.

Margaret Hobbs and Joan Sangster, dir., The Woman Worker, 1926-1929 (St.-Jean, Terre-Neuve: Canadian Committee on Labour History 1999)

DANS CE RECUEIL d’écrits journalistiques, les historiennes Margaret Hobbs et Joan Sangster rendent accessibles des textes qui jusqu’à maintenant n’étaient 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 l’histoire 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 l’ordre établi, aspiraient à une société plus juste.

      À l’été 1926 paraît une revue mensuelle d’envergure nationale, Woman Worker, l’organe 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 l’égide 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 d’être toutes des communistes, mais elles demeurent des recrues potentielles.

      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, c’est-à-dire de collaboration avec les autres partis de gauche et d’infiltration 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 d’intransigeance et de non-collaboration avec la gauche social-démocrate.

      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 l’objet de critiques et de suggestions du Bureau féminin de la Troisième Internationale comme de l’Exécutif 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 d’organisation de l’Exécutif 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 l’organisation 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 l’oublier en lisant les textes.

      Comme nul n’est à l’abri 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 l’objet d’une condamnation posthume pour déviation de droite.

      Une publication obscure pour les non-spécialistes en histoire du communisme, The Woman Worker aborde des sujets qui dépassent les questions de parti pour s’ouvrir sur les multiples défis qui confrontaient les femmes de la classe ouvrière. Mise sur pied par Custance, la revue s’adresse tant aux ouvrières qu’aux parentes d’ouvriers. 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 l’avortement, la solidarité nationale et internationale et les activités des ligues locales.

      Les chroniques du Woman Worker révèlent une ouverture sur le monde rare dans les revues féminines de l’époque. 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. L’URSS est représentée comme une terre d’espoir aux lectrices pour qui ´ le paradis des travailleurs et des travailleuses ª n’est pas un cliché : l’égalité des sexes y est officiellement reconnue, les lois du mariage et du divorcee et l’égalité salariale suscitent l’envi, la contraception et l’avortement sont légalisés. Partout, quelle que soit la question traitée dans la revue, la perspective de classe l’emporte sur celle de genre. Les femmes communistes qui défendaient les droits  des femmes et dénonçaient les injustices et la discrimination, se gardaient bien de l’étiquette féministe réservée aux bourgeoises du Conseil canadien des femmes.

      Cet ouvrage n’est pas une édition critique à proprement parler. Ce n’est pas le but des deux historiennes de rectifier les affirmations que le passage des années et l’ouverture des archives nous ont appris à nuancer. Elles font cependant précéder chaque section d’une 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 l’importance 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 l’impérialisme et admet la violence de la lutte des classes.

      L’introduction au chapitre sur la prostitution énonce la position des femmes communistes et la compare à celle des réformatrices préoccupées par l’étendue du travail sexuel et surtout de la ´ traite des blanches ª tant redoutée pendant les deux premières décennies du siècle.

      Chaque introduction est suivie d’une courte bibliographie qui se limite exclusivement aux ouvrages en anglais, même si six textes traitent du Québec qui comptaient aussi ses Ligues féminines.

      S’il faut faire confiance aux lectrices pour le choix d’articles représentatifs, on aimerait toutefois connaître le rayonnement de Woman Worker qu’un document dans les archives du Comintern situe à 1500. Il serait aussi pertinent de savoir qu’une proportion du corpus total est reproduit dans ce volume.

      Pour les femmes de la classe ouvrière, Woman Worker a, pendant quelques années, servi d’outil d’analyse et d’inspiration dans la lutte des classes. Pour les étudiantes et étudiants d’aujourd’hui, la revue aide à mieux comprendre un pan d’histoire trop souvent occulté des luttes ouvrières et féministes — même si les protagonistes renieraient l’épithète.

Sylvia Bashevkin, Women on the Defensive (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998)

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. Bashevkin’s analysis of the treatment of feminist issues in these three countries reveals that while women’s 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 women’s movement were to be achieved and preserved. This conflict between philosophies is the foundation of Bashevkin’s argument.

      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 women’s 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.

      However, such intervention was antithetical to the neo-conservative philosophy and as shown in Chapter Two, Thatcher’s 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 women’s 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.

      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 women’s advocacy groups. While the first two effects may be seen as the result of pursuing essential neo-conservative principles, the Canadian government’s action represented a direct attack against feminist groups, not a side effect of policy implementation.

      The effects of neo-conservatism are highlighted further in Chapter Four through the narratives of fifteen women involved in various aspects of the women’s 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 women’s 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.

      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 women’s 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.

      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.

      In Chapter Seven, the author concludes by summarizing the effects of the neo-conservative years. She suggests that women’s 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.

      Overall, this book represents an important contribution to feminist studies. The comparative analysis is intriguing, and Bashevkin’s 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.

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)

PUBLIÉ À L’OCCASION du 50e anniversaire de fondation de la Fraternité des policiers et des policières de la Communauté urbaine de Montréal (FPPCUM), Solidarité et détermination retrace l’histoire de ce syndicat dont l’origine remonte à 1918. Bien que l’ouvrage ait été commandé par la Fraternité, les auteurs soulignent, d’entrée de jeu, qu’ils n’ont pas rédigé une histoire officielle. Ils précisent aussi qu’ils ont pu écrire leur livre en toute liberté. L’ouvrage n’en décrit pas moins l’histoire de la FPPCUM avec grande empathie. Pour l’essentiel, il soulève le dilemme auquel la Fraternité est confrontée depuis sa naissance, tout comme d’autres syndicats de policiers sans doute : comment parvenir à concilier le devoir de maintien de l’ordre auquel sont astreints les policiers avec la mission première du syndicat qui consiste à travailler à l’amélioration des conditions de travail de ceux-ci?

      Cette histoire de la FPPCUM repose sur un travail de recherche imposant et minutieux, effectué dans les archives du syndicat et celles de l’administration municipale de Montréal ainsi que dans les journaux. Les informations recueillies ont été organisées de manière chronologique et regroupées à l’intérieur de cinq grandes périodes correspondant aux différentes phases de développement du syndicat. Les cinq chapitres du livre traitent chacun d’une de ces périodes. Le premier, couvrant les années 1918 à 1950, relate les débuts difficiles du syndicat jusqu’à la reconnaissance du droit à la négociation collective. Les années 1950 à 1965, étudiées dans le deuxième chapitre, corres-pondent à une période où l’activité 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 l’opinion publique à l’égard 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.

      Comment donc résumer l’évolution du syndicalisme chez les policiers au cours de ces cinquante ans? Un premier constat s’impose : ceux-ci ont eu beaucoup de difficulté à obtenir le droit de se syndiquer étant donné la spécificité de leur fonction. Farouchement opposées à l’idée, les autorités municipales estimaient que le syndicalisme risquait d’affaiblir la discipline dans les rangs des policiers, d’abord considérés comme des ´ serviteurs du public ª et des ´ protecteurs de leurs biens et de la moralité ª. (p.54) Il n’empêche 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 s’affilier 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 l’administration municipale et aillent ainsi à l’encontre de ses intérêts. On s’inquiétait aussi que l’affiliation influence le travail des policiers et les conduise à prendre parti pour les grévistes appartenant à la même fédération qu’eux, plutôt qu’à assurer l’ordre public. Bref, puisqu’ils n’ont pu faire front commun avec d’autres syndicats ou centrales syndicales, les policiers ont eu tendance à se replier sur leurs propres intérêts.

      Autre caractéristique marquante de l’histoire 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 qu’au moyen de l’arbitrage obligatoire. Cette procédure force les deux parties à s’entendre sur la fixation des conditions de travail des policiers et, à terme, sur leur renouvellement. En cas d’impasse, elles doivent avoir recours à un tribunal d’arbitrage. 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 d’arbitrage exige des deux parties, syndicale et patronale, d’en venir à une entente. À terme, l’arbitrage va donc représenter une protection significative pour les policiers qui, contrairement aux autres catégories de travailleurs, vont voir leurs conditions de travail s’améliorer constamment. À preuve, depuis 1950 l’écart entre le salaire annuel moyen des policiers et celui de la main-d’œuvre montréalaise n’a pratiquement pas cessé de s’accroître en faveur des premiers (voir tableaux présentés aux pages 128, 252, 305).

      Pour cette raison mais aussi à cause des pouvoirs qu’ils détiennent de par leur fonction, les policiers jouissent, depuis les années quarante, d’un 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, l’ouvrage manque, à mon avis, de distance critique. C’est particulièrement vrai quand il traite des critiques qui ont été adressées aux policiers depuis une vingtaine d’années 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 qu’il n’a pas été résolu, ce que les auteurs ne font pas.

      En somme, il est dommage que J. Rouillard et H. Goulet n’aient pas saisi l’occasion de cette histoire du syndica-lisme policier pour amorcer une réflexion sur l’évolution 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 d’une Fraternité surtout préoccupée par cette question. Tout se passe comme si le syndicat n’avait pas aussi été le lieu d’une 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 d’autres facettes de son histoire, que la question des loisirs organisés par la Fraternité n’est 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 s’intégrer mais l’analyse n’est pas très approfondie dans ce cas non plus. Ces remarques n’enlèvent 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.

Richard White, Gentlemen Engineers: The Working Lives of Frank and Walter Shanly (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999)

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.

      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 Frank’s 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.

      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 railway’s 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.

      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.

      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.

      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.

      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.

      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.

Michael Dorland, So Close to the State/s: The Emergence of Canadian Feature Film Policy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998)

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.

      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, Dorland’s 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.

      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 CFDC’s 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, Dorland’s italics)

      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 NFB’s orientation to the documentary short, the Massey Commission (1951) was ambivalent about the prospects for the Canadian feature. It claimed that the NFB’s 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.

      Dorland argues that the creation of the CFDC can be explained less as a response to the Massey Commission’s 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 Foucault’s 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 state’s 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.

      A crucial theme in Dorland’s 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."

      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 Canada’s two founding language groups." (137)

      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?

      Exploring these questions would add to our substantive knowledge of the Canadian feature film’s 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 Canada’s arrested development.

Janet Irons, Testing the New Deal: The General Strike of 1934 in the American South (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press 2000)

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.

      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).

      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.

      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 union’s 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.

      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.

      Irons notes that "In a statement that would have made little sense to textile workers suffering from stretch-out, Senator Robert Wagner, a dedicated worker’s advocate, explained that under Roosevelt’s 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)

      "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.

      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 union’s executive board voted unanimously to accept the proposal and end the strike.

      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)

      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 union’s 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.

      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 Wagner’s National Labor Relations Act was passed: witness the violence directed at steel strikers in Chicago in the late 1930s.

      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 Wagner’s National Labor Relations Act and the textile workers contributed to that, as did San Francisco longshoremen, Minneapolis teamsters, and Toledo auto workers.

      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.

Kimberly L. Phillips, Alabama North: African-American Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915-1945 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1999)

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.

      Phillip’s 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 Cleveland’s 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 city’s 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 city’s existing Black institutions.

      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 Alabama’s foundries or Kentucky’s 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, Cleveland’s 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 city’s hotel workforce led to the lockout.

      The migrants’ distinct identity and outlook unalterably reshaped the internal politics of Cleveland’s Black community and the city’s 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, Cleveland’s migrants solidified and expanded their position in the city’s 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 "don’t-buy-where-you-can’t-work" campaign. Ignoring the condemnation and open opposition of the middle class, which eschewed open confrontation with Whites, the FOL’s 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 movement’s incipient democratic interracialism, spurred in this case almost entirely by the aspirations and activism of Black Cleveland’s migrant majority.

      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, Phillips’s work makes essential connections between cultural expression and political activism, thus reorienting the proletarianization model which has long dominated labour history’s 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 Cleveland’s workers’ activism is distinctively "Southern."

      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.

      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.

Frances H. Early, A World Without War: How US Feminists and Pacifists Resisted World War I (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press 1997)

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)

IN THEIR RESPECTIVE HISTORIES Frances H. Early and Rachel Waltner Goossen explore women’s resistance to war and in so doing contribute vitally to the fields of peace and women’s history. The two books work together sequentially in a way this reviewer found deeply engaging. Early’s study of the feminists and pacifists of the Bureau of Legal Advice (BLA) during World War I and Goossen’s 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 government’s improved treatment of the World War II generation of COs.

      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 women’s 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."

      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.

      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 women’s 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 war’s 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 women’s 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, Early’s 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.

      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.

      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 BLA’s 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."

      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 BLA’s 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.

      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 Witherspoon’s 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.

      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, Early’s argument helps to open new avenues of inquiry about the nature of women’s political approaches during the 1910s, when feminism and anti-war activism, mixed with socialist and pacifist perspectives, produced a "radical" New Woman.

      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.

      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.

      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 women’s 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 women’s more recent reflections about the impact of their association with the CPS upon their lives since World War II.

      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 women’s 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 women’s 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 women’s 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.

      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.

      Without denying the value of Goossen’s insight about CO women’s 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 women’s 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 Early’s history, imagined a peace culture where new women and new men built a just and non-violent world.

      Goossen quotes a prayer that Eleanor Roosevelt purportedly carried with her during World War II. It stated:

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?

      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 women’s 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.

Peter Thompson, Rum Punch and Revolution: Taverngoing and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1999)

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 author’s argument that taverns changed the course of the revolution in Philadelphia.

      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 man’s 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.

      The first taverns were modest affairs, caves dug in the banks of the Delaware River. William Penn, the city’s 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. Penn’s solution was to regulate them strictly. Thompson believes that, for the most part, until the Revolution, Philadelphia’s taverns were "subject to effective legal authority." (24) He estimates that of the estimated 178 taverns in 1769, 155 of them were legally licensed.

      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 state’s 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," Philadelphia’s taverns were remarkably similar, and "the most telling differences between taverns stemmed from the keepers’ personalities." (73)

      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.

      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.

      Finally, diverse tavern culture broke down in the intense debates over the American Revolution. Here Thompson’s arguments become more diffuse and speculative, but they are interesting nonetheless. He asserts that during most of the century Philadelphians believed that a man’s 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)

      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, Thompson’s 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.

      Thompson also hints at important cultural changes in his Epilogue. In 1791 Philadelphian Benjamin Rush published The Drunkard’s 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 Rush’s 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.

      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.

Victor Silverman, Imagining Internationalism in American and British Labour, 1939-1949 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press 2000)

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).

      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.

      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.

      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.

      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.

      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.

      Having just completed 25 years as a union staff representative, I was impressed by Silverman’s keen insights into the realpolitik of trade unionism. Today’s 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.

      Silverman’s 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-man’s 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)

      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:

1. The trade union movement became one of the main battlegrounds of the Cold War; it was not simply affected by it.

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.

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.

      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.

      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).

      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.

      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.

      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.

      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.

      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.

      In this regard, Silverman’s 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)

      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 Marx’s 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?

      Who killed the dream? Silverman doesn’t 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.

      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.

      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.

      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.

      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.

      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 country’s 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.

      Silverman’s 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 world’s 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.

      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.

Deborah Thom, Nice Girls and Rude Girls: Women Workers in World War One (London: I.B. Taurus 2000)

Claire A. Culleton, Working Class Culture, Women and Britain 1914-1921 (New York: St. Martin’s Press 2000)

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 women’s 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 women’s work and pro-natalism, they diverge on the question of how women’s experience as workers can be accessed and understood.

      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 women’s paid work. As Deborah Thom demonstrates, at the end of the 19th century, women’s 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 chainmaker’s 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 women’s industrial experience, and managed only to portray women’s labour as a patriotic duty to the State. Thom examines in particular Government-commissioned photographs of women’s 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.

      Thom goes on to discuss how the image of the female worker as a "sweated" worker was reinforced by women’s 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 Museum’s 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, women’s 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.

      Underlying Thom’s 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 women’s work was viewed. Even modern histories of World War I women’s 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 women’s 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 women’s 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)

      Thom’s 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 women’s historical and psychological role in war with men’s, 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 Thom’s series of qualifications is a curious absence, with no clear way in which to approach the experience of the woman wartime worker.

      In contrast to Thom’s portrayal of the ambivalent experience of women’s 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 women’s industrial work in wartime with its dangers, as well as the relationship between women’s 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 women’s work and the restrictions imposed by the draconian Defence of the Realm Act.

      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 Fussell’s masculinist conception of the literary importance of World War I, by arguing for working women’s inclusion in the enterprises of modern writing. She traces the development of irony in women’s factory newspapers, which she compares to the trench newspapers produced by the soldiers at the front. She also argues that working-class women’s 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 women’s experiences as workers, but to revive the literary culture of working women during World War I.

      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 women’s] 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 women’s war experiences transformed postwar cultural production and the politics of labour. Working women’s 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.

      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.

      Ultimately Culleton’s book is limited by its lack of historical context on women’s 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 women’s experiences and writings are to bear scrutiny.

      Deborah Thom’s Nice Girls and Rude Girls: Women Workers in World War One and Claire Culleton’s Working Class Culture, Women and Britain, 1914-1921 are both interesting and thoughtful works on the history of women’s 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 women’s wartime work, and each gives a new variety and insight into the ways in which we approach their experience.

Michael Lavalette, ed., A Thing of the Past? Child Labour in Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: St. Martin’s Press 1999)

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.

      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 editor’s introductions to each of the book’s 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.

      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 children’s 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.

      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 children’s work in the mines.

      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.

      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 children’s 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.

      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.

      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 Lavalette’s conclusion.

      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.

Soon-Won Park, Colonial Industrialization and Labor in Korea: The Onoda Cement Factory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center 1999)

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 Korea’s 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.

      Park’s 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.

      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.

      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.

      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)

      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)

      Chapter Four investigates the colonial legacy of industrial labour and labour relations. Due to data limitations, Park generalizes from the single case of the Samch’ôk branch, the only one in South Korea, to address the colonial legacy of labour relations. Following the colonial period the Samch’ôk 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.

      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.

Tony Fitzpatrick, Freedom and Security: An Introduction to the Basic Income Debate (London: MacMillan Press 1999)

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 individual’s 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.

      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 BI’s 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.

      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 BI’s 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.

      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 right’s" 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 book’s subject matter is really broader and more amorphous by its end than it was advertised as being at the beginning. Fitzpatrick’s case that the BI is a specific proposal that has achieved ideologically diverse support remains unproven, and, to this reader, implausible.

      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.

      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 author’s 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.

      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.

      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.

Peter H. Russell, ed., The Future of Social Democracy: Views of Leaders From Around the World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1999)

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 CCF’s 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?

      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 (France’s Michel Rocard, New Zealand’s David Lange, and Sweden’s Ingvar Carlsson), and two former premiers (Ontario’s Bob Rae and South Australia’s 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 Canada’s 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.

      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 SI’s approximate 100 million members make it the world’s largest coalition of political forces. In today’s 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 democracy’s 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.

      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 Arias’s 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 Broadbent’s 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.

      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 book’s 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. Today’s 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 Israel’s Mapai were never Marxist, but they were socialist. That is less apparent of today’s 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. Britain’s "New" Labour and Canada’s New Democrats are remarkably similar to Clinton’s "New" Democrats.

      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 Thatcher’s TINA dictum, that "There is no alternative." By downplaying their once visionary objectives, social democrats perversely feed neo-conservatism’s 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.

Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA’s 70-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press 1999)

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)

      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.

      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.

      The arrival of RCA’s 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!

      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 women’s 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 maquila’s 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 management’s 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.

      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.

William Corlett, Class Action: Reading Labor, Theory and Value (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1998)

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 Corlett’s 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. Corlett’s own approach is to focus on the specific problems (social, political, theoretical) facing labour today, and to choose among theoretical alternatives accordingly.

      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: "labor’s 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 Labor’s 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.

      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 labourer’s 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 labour’s 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.

      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 Labor’s 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.

      Corlett’s approach clearly problematizes a labour theory of value that would claim to represent unproblematically labour in determinate form, or that would specify labour’s task as the production of value. Through a close reading of Althusser and Marx, Corlett attempts to show that Marx’s 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 Marx’s investigation in Capital, and therefore Marx’s 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 labour’s 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)

      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 Marx’s 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. Corlett’s 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.

      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 Corlett’s subject-object framework and his overriding focus on textuality. Corlett’s 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.

David P. Shuldiner, Of Moses and Marx: Folk Ideology and Folk History in the Jewish Labor Movement (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey 1999)

THE PURPOSE of Shuldiner’s 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.

      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, Shuldiner’s work adds an ethnographic dimension to the work already done in this area.

      The author’s 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.

      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.

      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 Shuldiner’s 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 Shuldiner’s 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.

      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 author’s 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.

      By far, Shuldiner’s 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.

      Beyond Shuldiner’s 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].

      The use of ethnographic interviews adds value to the exploration of any relatively recent social/political movement, and Shuldiner’s 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 Shuldiner’s 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 Shuldiner’s approach allows the "ordinary individual" a prominence lacking in many other analyses of labour’s struggle.

      The author’s 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.

      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?

      Shuldiner’s 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.

Al Grierson, A Candle For Durruti (Austin, Texas: Folkin’ Eh! Records 1999)

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 Eric’s 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 didn’t), 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.

      I had a chance to do that again recently when I listened to Al Grierson’s 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 artist’s 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.

      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 CD’s 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 song’s 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 Franco’s 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."

      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 Casablanca’s 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 "Daddy’s suit and Mama’s shawl, the upholstery from the pickup truck and the paper from the wall," the "stranger" is eventually taught a lesson by Daddy’s 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."

      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 stranger’s 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.

      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, you’ll 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 you’re meant to lead. You’ll reap the one you’ve sowed," Grierson sings. "Heaven helps what heaven heals. And the morning sun reveals, humble hearts in heaven’s 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.