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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
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Beverly Boutilier and Alison Prentice, eds. Creating Historical
Memory: English-Canadian Women and the Work of History, (Vancouver:
UBC Press 1997)
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BRINGING TOGETHER a collection of essays
highlighting the lives and works of women engaged in the writing
and teaching of history over the century spanning the 1870s to
the 1970s, Beverly Boutilier and Alison Prentice address the creation
of historical memory both inside and outside the academy. Through
these portraits of the individual and collective efforts of "amateur"
and "professional" historians, the editors suggest that
because of the responsibilities and constraints associated with
gender, women viewed history from a different perspective than
male historians, addressed topics overlooked by men, and initiated
social, cultural, and regional studies well before these became
acceptable within the academy.
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Divided into four thematic sections,
the book traces what might be viewed as the "evolution"
of historical writing by women of Anglo-Celt background as they
moved from outside to inside the academy. The first section, "Community
Building," looks at the individual and collective efforts
of women engaged in writing nation-building history from a social
rather than political perspective; an approach that allowed them
to incorporate women into the story. Included are profiles of
two Victorian women, Agnes Maule Machar and Sarah Anne Curzon,
whose writings were influenced by their religious and social convictions,
and a study of the Ontario Womens Institutes involvement
in writing local histories. Despite differences, they shared a
common interest in creating a history that would inspire Canadians
to greater feeling for their country.
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The second section, "Transitions,"
profiles historians who, through study and adoption of professional
historical research methods, bridged the gap between "amateur"
and "professional" history, still working outside the
academy but gradually building links to the inside. Women living
within Catholic religious communities engaged in historical writing
in the course of their contemplative and record-keeping practices.
Like the Womens Institutes, their work was collaborative.
Individual women may have been prime movers; however, individual
authorship was rarely acknowledged in publications. Cloistered
women initially wrote to preserve historical memory within their
own communities. It was in their work as educators that they began
to expand their mandate. As their educational institutions strove
to gain standing and recognition in the broader community, these
women were required to go beyond the convent walls for training
in academic disciplines. This process inevitably helped to professionalize
their approaches to history, and also encouraged them to write
for a wider audience.
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Also operating outside of the academy,
Constance Lindsay Skinner and Isabel Murphy Skelton gained a degree
of professional respect and support from some male academics through
their personal affiliations and innovative combination of "scientific"
history research methods, combining cultural and social history.
Self-made and earning her precarious living by the pen, Skinner
scorned much about the academic world, yet depended upon and valued
her connections with those academics who recognized her talents.
Married to Oscar D. Skelton, well-known political economist and
senior public servant, Isabel Skelton was less financially strapped.
However, her desire to engage in research and writing was often
thwarted by family responsibilities. In spite of obstacles, Skinner
and Skelton produced works of originality in content and approach.
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The third section, titled "The
Academy," looks at women either within or on the edges of
the academy, articulating the challenges they faced in being accepted
into the history profession, regardless of training and talents.
Often receiving encouragement in undergraduate study or even at
the Masters level, women found that few professors encouraged
them to go further. The few Canadian women who did obtain doctorates
were almost always passed over for permanent faculty appointments.
Their options were to leave the country for better prospects or
stay for poorly paid sessional work. Others taught in public schools
or worked in archives. Not surprisingly, independent means and
freedom from family demands often determined whether and when
a woman historian could practice her craft.
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The last section, "New Departures,"
looks at the development of womens history as a category
of study within universities during the 1970s. The chapter suggests
that while some of the interest in womens history grew out
of the feminist movement, the relationship between women historians
and feminist activism is not a given, nor is it always a comfortable
one. The essay further suggests that in spite of gains women historians
need to be proactive to both maintain and improve the status of
women in their profession.
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In this collection of historiographical
essays, a number of themes emerge. The authors argue that women
have been involved in historical work for a long time, but that
the professionalization that occurred around the turn of the century
excluded women both from history and the writing of history. Because
gender shaped so much in their lives finances, responsibilities
to family, and restrictions in mobility, for example they
tended to write about events, people, and places within their
local areas whose experiences bore similarities to their work.
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Of the individuals highlighted
in this text, all had some parental encouragement and support
for their intellectual pursuits. These women initially engaged
in collective community history without constraints on their lines
of inquiry or methods. But when faced with the prospect of outside
critical attention to their work, the standards of male scholarship
imposed new rules. In the case of Womens Institutes, there
were internal differences as to how "professional" they
ought to be. In the case of the nuns, as members of their community
gained in academic training, their desire to shape their community
histories for an outside critical audience grew.
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While one of the express purposes
of the book is to "call into question the legitimacy of the
amateur/professional dichotomy as applied to the term historian,"
the implicit message is that progress is measured by womens
attainment of professional status. Contemporary tensions among
women making history inside and outside the academy are only briefly
addressed. This account does not go beyond the 1970s, however.
With the professionalization of womens history, one wonders
whether there is a danger of creating a new canon that excludes
"amateurs": minority women, feminist activists, and
those exploring family and community stories in non-academic ways.
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Nevertheless, this eclectic collection
of essays illustrates how women, because of their lived experience,
recorded history differently from men . In some cases, they initiated
new ways of approaching history through interdisciplinary methods
and erased the false boundaries of public and private worlds.
Without addressing the overtly political topics of male historians,
their act of writing women into history was sometimes political.
This collection does not pretend to be definitive. However, it
does point to the existence of a vibrant alternative stream of
Canadian historiography that grew alongside the professional male-stream
historiography and has yet to be fully explored.
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Sharon MacDonald
University of New Brunswick
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Gerald Friesen, Citizens and Nation: An Essay on History, Communication
and Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2000)
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I HAVE BEEN accused by western Canadian
friends of revealing my eastern Canadian sensibilities in my measurement
of distance. When asked the distance between Montreal and Toronto,
I answer five hours, a measure of time linked to my experience
with a specific form of technology, the automobile. The translation
of space into an experiential unit of the time required to drive
the distance gives vast space concrete meaning for me. A given
technology, in this case a car, orders my understanding of time
and space. This link between time, space, technology, and experience
is the focus of Gerald Friesens Citizens and Nation:
An Essay on History, Communication and Canada.
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Gerald Friesen has written a brave
and important book. It is a modern or perhaps more accurately
a postmodern and contemporary project in the older tradition
of national syntheses of W.L. Mortons The Canadian Identity
(1961) or Arthur Lowers From Colony to Nation: A History
of Canada (1946). The book addresses the question of why Canada
is a "public identity" and presents a version of history
emphasizing continuity with the expressed intent of being meaningful
to contemporary society. In Citizens and Nation, Friesen,
a University of Manitoba historian, proposes a radically different
thematic focus and periodization of Canadian history based on
the dominant mode of communication and culture. His chronology
introduces four overlapping periods bridging "time immemorial"
to the present. It begins with an era Friesen refers to as "oral-traditional,"
proceeds to a "textual-settler" period, continues onto
"print capitalism," and concludes with our contemporary
experience of "screen capitalism." The author is especially
interested in how these particular regimes of communication shape
the experience of space and time. Within each of these communication
and technological eras, Friesen focuses on an "ordinary"
individual or a group of ordinary individuals to explore his argument.
One of the attractive qualities of this temporal division is its
geographic flexibility, as these different communication systems
occur concurrently in diverse parts of Canada. This method of
periodization permits chronological overlapping to recognize the
variance of place. The dominant mode of communication for Elizabeth
Goudies Labrador of the 1930s is therefore very different
from the urban Vancouver experience of Phyllis Knight during the
exact same years. In addition to proposing a new narrative framework,
Citizens and Nations is also a study of Canadian historiography
itself. As the narrative of national history proceeds, Friesen
explores the ways in which English-speaking, Canadian historians
have attempted to create a synthesized national history from this
vast and diverse geographic space.
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Friesen begins his study with the
examination of a northern aboriginal family through Graydon McCreas
1983 National Film Board documentary Summer of the Loucheux:
Portrait of a Northern Indian Family. This unusual source
is used to explore the "oral-traditional" mode of Aboriginal
peoples to demonstrate how the oral story-telling tradition connects
to historical and contemporary concerns, causing problems of cultural
understanding for those ingrained with the notion of a clear differentiation
between empirical fact and myth. In his efforts to emphasize continuity,
Friesen recognizes Aboriginal people as one of the founding peoples
of Canada but acknowledges that their stories have not been integrated
into the myths of other Canadians.
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The second section, characterized
by what Friesen refers to as the "textual-settler" move
from an oral to a literate society, was marked by the arrival
of European immigrants and spanned the period from European contact
to the 20th century. Friesen uses the example of Elizabeth Goudie,
born in 1902 in Labrador, to represent the last generation of
"pioneers" which stretched according to place from the
17th to the mid-20th century. For this group of people, written
texts supplemented oral communication and Friesen makes an effort
to stress the many social, familial, and economic attributes this
group shared with Aboriginal peoples. While Aboriginals and settlers
shared a common experience of "natural" time and space,
Friesen acknowledges that important differences also emerged in
terms of the role of church, law, and government.
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The third section of the book,
organized under the rubric of "Print-Capitalist National
Societies," will likely be of greatest interest and the source
of greatest contention to readers of this journal. Here, through
the life of Phyllis Knight, a German immigrant whose memoir was
published as A Very Ordinary Life (1974), Friesen turns
his attention to themes such as the alienation of labour, waged
employment, gender, and ethnicity. Friesen also wants his readers
to see this period as a time when ordinary people responded to
new manifestations of time and space, such as waged work and technology,
and adopted strategies and tools to shape their economic, political,
and social worlds. In other words, common people learned to respond
through participation in the institutions of the state and shaped
society through associations such as political parties, unions,
and education. Friesen uses this period to present a historiographical
discussion counterposing "progressive social" and "conservative
political" streams of Canadian history. In a juxtaposition
of the formers emphasis on the transition "from feudalism
to capitalism" and the latters emphasis on the "convergence
of technological and political factors in the creation of the
modern Canadian state," he concludes that they are both "too
narrowly economic, and insufficiently cultural, to convey the
distinctiveness of the Canadian experience." (122) He closes
this argument with the assertion that both these historical traditions
are less relevant today and holds up the cultural turn as a potential
direction which would keep a history of Canada meaningful.
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The final section, entitled "Screen
Capitalism," allows Friesen to bring this story up to the
present. Expanding from oral interviews, Ken Drydens The
Moved and the Shaken: The Story of One Mans Life (1993)
and the memoirs of Simonne Monet-Chartrand, Friesen sees the recent
past coinciding with unprecedented technological changes in the
experience of time as space and the coexistence of "insecurity
and plenty." (168) In this section, Friesen emphases how
ordinary people face globalization, and cast doubt on both their
government and their own agency as citizens, expressing skepticism
about the capacity of any state to govern well.
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This is undoubtedly a clever and
thought-provoking study. It is a case where the enthusiastic reviewers
quotes on the back of the book do not exaggerate. Not surprising
for such an innovative book, I came away with unease. In the first
place, I remain uncertain about the intended audience. Although
it is written in an engaging style, it is not a volume likely
to displace popular (and traditional) general histories such as
Craig Brown et als An Illustrated History of Canada
or Desmond Mortons A Short History of Canada. The
context and narrative of this volume are not sufficiently filled
out or developed to be easily accessible for those unfamiliar
with the general narrative, debates, and themes of English Canadian
history. This book, which Friesen modestly refers to as an essay,
is more creative, more challenging, and for those grounded in
its debates, more interesting. I suspect that Citizens and
Nations with its origins in international communications theory,
economics, and politics will find its greatest, and perhaps most
influential audience in graduate courses.
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The book has other tensions. Friesen
adopts an intimacy with his historical subjects and refers to
them by their first name an easy familiarity I did not
share. The result was some ahistorical discomfort for me as women
such as Phyllis Knight and Simonne Monet-Chartrand became "Phyllis"
and "Simonne." The narrative strategy of focusing on
individuals succeeds as an engaging approach for highlighting
the "heroic" experience of ordinary Canadians, but this
emphasis on individuals is in conflict with the importance of
movements and communities to Friesens arguments and perhaps
even with the notion of a common culture. At the level of culture,
while the book is an important contribution to English-language
Canadian history, despite a conscious and well-meaning attempt
to include Francophone Québec, the bridge is uneasy. There
is a failure to differentiate the great disparity in international
power between the English and French languages in discussions
of globalization and communication. This is perhaps a missed opportunity.
Finally, and most significantly, I was not convinced that economics
and politics or class and gender are in any way less "relevant"
today for understanding the dramatic pace of change in the present
or the past. In the end, despite what he says, and based on what
he actually does in the book, I do not believe that Friesen believes
this either. While I concur with Friesens use of culture
and technology as the means to make history more meaningful to
the current generation of students of Canadian history, I maintain
that it is important to defend the importance of economics, politics,
class, and gender, especially as they were/ are shaped by culture
and technology.
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This is a book which must be read
by anyone seriously interested in Canadian (however you define
it) history. I do not think you have to adopt all of Friesens
conclusions or assumptions to benefit greatly. This is a synthesis
that manages to integrate the presence of Aboriginal peoples throughout
the entire narrative. The incorporation of time and space as changing
historical experiences and the way they connect to the experience
of citizenship has altered the way I see the past. What more can
you ask from a book?
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Suzanne Morton
McGill University
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Bob Russell, More with Less: Work Reorganization in the Canadian
Mining Industry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1999)
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BOB RUSSELL, a well-respected sociologist
whose earlier book was on employment issues, has produced an original
study of Saskatchewan mining and the reorganization it has undergone.
He interrogates his subject with a sophisticated understanding
of labour process, theory, and methods. For the most part the
book is accessible to a general audience but most suitable for
graduate students or other researchers. Senior undergraduates
would be challenged by the specificity of the debates and research
techniques. As a contribution to the scholarly community on work,
it is excellent. He uses novel evidence and intensive research
to power his analysis.
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The mining industry has been transformed
from a labour-intensive to capital-intensive production with the
mechanization of underground and automation of surface operations
(milling, smelting, and refining). This process has been underway
for some time and much of the attention dedicated to this industry
has focused on the political economy of equipment replacing people
in direct production, and the weakness of linkages to equipment
manufacture. The staples tradition has also focused on market
fluctuations for resource products. Bob Russell has chosen to
focus on work re-organization, including developments in managerial
strategies associated with new production systems. That is not
to say he has totally neglected the traditional issues. He notes
that the mines he examines are on the edge of underground robotics
since potash production lends itself to this, and rich uranium
deposits in highly risky areas provide enormous inducement. Computerization
certainly has a key role in the mills he examines. In common with
earlier work, he notes what he graphically calls "job hemorrhaging,"
indicating workers concerns about seniority and bumping-rights
in light of these forces.
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Russell organizes his analysis
around the paradigms of the transformations contained in the abstractions
of Fordism to post-Fordism and industrial to post-industrial work
as forms of industrial governance. His main finding, and title
for the book, is "More with Less," by which he means,
the common theme regardless of the managerial "packaging"
is more work for fewer workers who receive, relatively, less pay
for more work expected. His focus is on four mining companies
with five mine sites in Saskatchewan, four producing potash and
one uranium. These companies and mines provide a natural experiment
made messy by rapid corporate restructuring, including extensive
privatization of crown corporations. His mode of analysis is not
case studies but comparisons of sites and occupations. Russell
claims the comparisons come from variations in the cultures of
employment each provides with respect to the post-Fordist and
post-industrial trajectories.
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This mode of analysis is related
to the practices and implications for workers experiences
as derived from extensive questionnaire-based interviewing. The
unit of analysis is the workplace, not the community (as with
Meg Luxtons More than a Labour of Love, 1980).
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Russell analyzes the extent
of post-Fordism, characterized by competitive flexibility, leading
to an intensification of work effort whereby multi-skilling of
workers is at the expense of the de-skilling of jobs. Given the
range of cases in his comparison and rapid changes they undergo
over time, at best there is a hybridization of Fordist models
in use, as revealed by his comparison of five sites. Job reassignments
and job expansions are common experiences for the reduced workforces
at all sites.
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Post-industrialism Russell associates
with two processes: "the social division of labour (what
is produced) and changes in the technical division of labour (how
items are produced)." (10) His study allows him to investigate
only the second of these, which he equates to changing occupations
and their requirements (operationalized as operator versus maintenance
occupations in either mines or mills).
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He concludes: "The post-Fordist
firms and the post-industrial occupations in our study show no
more consistent propensity to adopt those practices that have
been singled out as being responsible for the reskilling of labour
than their counterparts. What then is behind the common trend
pertaining to skill that runs across both occupational categories
and employers managerial strategies?" (158) The common
answer is job expansion as expressed in multitasking. With this
insight, he casts new light on the complex concept of skill and
the labour process debates surrounding it. He also addresses implications
for production politics in the form of grievances, disciplining
workers, union activism, sabotage, and job harassment. One of
the most novel features is the remote mine at Key Lake which is
characterized by "radically spacialized industrial relations"
as workers shuffled in and out on two crews who work twelve-hours
shifts for a week at a time.
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More with Less is recommended
as a key reference work for those interested in post-Fordist and
post-industrial debates about labour processes, skill, and managerial
practices. It provides a strong base for these discussions and
reveals the complexity of theoretically-informed empirical research,
especially when the ground beneath our feet shifts so rapidly.
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Wallace Clement
Carleton University
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Gordon Hak, Turning Trees into Dollars: The British Columbia
Coastal Lumber Industry 1858-1913 (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press 2000)
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GORDON HAKS BOOK is a welcome study
about British Columbias forest industry during the 19th
and early-20th centuries. The work begins with the impetus for
substantial lumbering in British Columbia the 1858 gold
strike. It concludes in 1913 with the United States lowering its
tariff barriers to wood from Canada, thereby opening a new era
for provincial timbering. Largely an economic and political history,
Professor Hak corrects popular misconceptions, refines the staples
interpretive paradigm, and addresses the inadequacies of previous
provincial forest industry studies. Framed within a capitalist
paradigm, Hak weaves his history around the interrelated relationships
of market exchange, government and lumber company policies, timber
technologies, workers, and conservation impulses.
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Turning Trees into Dollars
opens with a sound introductory overview. Chapters 1 to 3 look
at the lumber industry from the perspective of mill owners. Chapter
1 shows the unfolding significance of local, continental prairie
West, and international markets in framing the provinces
timber industry until World War I, and the governments role
in shaping those three markets. The following two chapters focus
on the structure of the lumber industry. Hak finds that coastal
timber production was not so much characterized by monopoly capital
as by entrepreneurial capital, ownership instability, and a wide
variety in the sizes of mill companies. In terms of mill ownership,
Hak discovers a significant pattern of British control until the
1880s, after which central Canadian entrepreneurial and local
ownership became more pronounced. Paralleling the varieties and
decentralized nature of mill ownership was the volatile, competitive
nature of the industry that neither state aid nor trade associations
were ever able to surmount.
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The next three chapters examine
more closely the relationship between business and government
in framing commercial lumbering. Chapter 4 looks at the limited
role the Dominion government played in British Columbia forestry,
but the importance the provincial government exercised over the
provinces forest lands and industry. Retaining forest land
ownership, except for the railway belts, meant the provincial
government set the framework for the timber industry most directly
through timber leases and licenses. Hak shows how the government
also shaped the industry through such means as fire regulations
and log-scaling policies.
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Chapter 5 discusses early social
and political critics of forest use and practices in the province,
as well as how and why those voices gave way to a scientific conservation
movement in the 1890s. Here, as elsewhere in North America, the
conservation movement grew from utilitarian fears about a timber
famine, climate changes, streamflow, and the need to safeguard
urban watersheds. To turn-of-the-century forest conservationists,
waste created by timber theft, fire, and inappropriate cutting
practices would be replaced by wise, rational, scientific management
for sustained use. It was a position that the progressive wing
of the lumber industry could and did support in their pursuit
of stabilized markets.
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Chapter 6 largely explores the
maturation of the scientific conservation perspective and its
embodiment in the Forest Act of 1912. Rather than viewing the
Forest Act as a reform measure, however, Hak argues that the act,
and conservation measures in general, remained securely within
a dominant cultural paradigm where market imperatives and business
interests trumped biological considerations and where scientific,
technological, and political decision-making followed suit. Still,
Hak makes clear that although government and industrial lumbermen
allied by the early 20th century to increasingly structure a more
integrated and consolidated lumber industry in corporate hands,
independent logging companies continued to be a viable and significant
economic and political presence. Not until the 1930s would corporate
capitalism exercise hegemony over the British Columbia timber
industry.
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The final three chapters detail
the growing industrialization of the timber industry, and the
interplay between technology and labour in the production process
for both milling and logging operations. Hak shows that industrialization
not only increased production but speeded up labour exploitation
as well as job-related accidents. In addition, he delineates the
structure of the industrys job hierarchies, including its
ethnic and racial make-up; the marital status and the lifestyle
of workers; why there was a notable lack of union and political
activism among loggers and millworkers before 1913; and how and
why the scientific management of people and machinery proceeded
hand-in-hand.
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Like any study, Turning Trees
Into Dollars cannot be all things to all people. Some readers
will probably wish that Hak had been more attentive to environmental
history. To have more thoroughly discussed environment attitudes,
practices, policies, and consequences, and to have linked up more
concretely resource and labor exploitation would have significantly
strengthened the work. In addition, Hak could have done more with
railroads, which seemed here, as in the Pacific Northwest United
States, to be fitting symbols and agents of changes in the 1880s.
Although he does discuss government subsidization for the Canadian
Pacific Railway and the Esquimault and Nanaimo Railway, and the
role both played in timber holdings and regulations, railroads
did even more. The rails brought people, capital investment, new
technologies, and business forms of organization, increased market
access, and integrated British Columbia ever more tightly into
structures of power beyond the provinces borders. Finally,
other readers may be disappointed that although Professor Hak
claims that the United States Pacific Northwest offers parallels
to the British Columbia forest industry, his monograph does not
seriously pursue a comparative perspective.
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Nonetheless, Turning Trees Into
Dollars has achieved a great deal. Professor Hak set out to
provide a history of the timber industry in British Columbia from
the 19th to the early-20th centuries. He has done that, and in
the process has offered interesting revisionist interpretations.
Readers now have a sound preliminary work to Richard A. Rajalas
Clearcutting the Pacific Rainforest: Production, Science, and
Regulation (UBC Press, 1998), which
focuses on the post-World War I to 1965 era when corporate capitalists
used changing technologies, management structures, harvesting
practices, and influence over government forest policies to impose
a factory management system on regional forests and the lives
of workers. What Dr. Hak has accomplished will allow others to
build on his work, and hopefully begin to construct comparative
histories not only for the Greater Pacific Northwest but also
between Canada and the United States.
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Robert Bunting
Fort Lewis College
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Kerry Badgley, "Ringing in the Common Love of Good":
The United Farmers of Ontario, 1914-1926 (Montreal and Kingston:
McGill-Queens University Press 2000)
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IN SPRING 2001 thousands mobilized to protest
the Free Trade Area of the Americas conference in Québec
City. Following the "battle in Seattle" in 1999 and
protests in Europe, a new anti-capitalist current has arisen.
It is a current that includes some inspired by democratic socialism,
but mostly includes a new generation inspired by some form of
populism, radical liberalism open to refinement as either anarchist
or socialist.
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Kerry Badgleys study of the
United Farmers of Ontario (UFO) seems a
long way away from Seattle or Québec, but his study of
rank-and-file populism is clearly linked to the debates of the
new activism. In particular, Badgley focuses on the radical experimentation
of Ontario farm progressives in co-operation; the development
of an autonomous farm womens movement (the United Farm Women
of Ontario-UFWO); and the rise and fall
(due to the hegemony of traditional forces and a conservative
UFO leadership) of an independent UFO
politics through a brief provincial government (1919-1923); and
the election of 24 federal MPs in 1921.
To give force to his positive evaluation of the UFO
experience, Badgley examines rank-and-file members in three counties:
Lambton, Simcoe, and Lanark.
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There are a number of positive
features about this study. It is the first to seriously address
the local dimension of the farm progressive challenge to Canadas
bourgeois elites through co-operative enterprises, the
church union movement, and moral debates about prohibition and
betting; as well as from a spontaneous revolt against military
conscription in 1917 to develop an independent politics breaking
from the parliamentary clientelism of Conservatives and Liberals.
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This emphasis on the local has
the merit of stressing how central self-activity and self-organization
were in creating the energy and force to challenge bourgeois norms.
By studying the UFWO and the many local
farm co-operatives, Badgley also does a valuable service in stressing
that farm progressives had a substantive radical practice that
went beyond the more short-lived and contradictory politics of
the UFO.
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What is also to be welcomed is
Badgleys sharp posing of the arguments about the meaning
of the farm progressive movement then and now the first
mass break from bourgeois politics in Canada and the relevance
of direct democracy to any radical project today. In Badgleys
opinion, the UFO movement was "unconsciously
anarchist." For Badgley, what activists today can do is make
the core political principles of the farm populist experiment
a conscious challenge.
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As a Marxist, and as someone who
has studied the UFO through the leadership
of W.C. Good (one of three key figures in the movement along with
E.C. Drury, farm premier, and J.J. Morrison, provincial co-operative
secretary), I had a number of points for debate.
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First, Badgleys account of
the rise and fall of the UFO as a means
to examine local organisations in Lambton, Simcoe, and Lanark
needs to be fleshed out. Where does it fit with C.M. Johnstons
account of the UFO government or the stories
of the United Farmers Co-operative Company and the Ontario
federal farm progressive caucus from the Good study? How did local
UFO mobilization link with election results?
(Appendix R) There is a powerful dialectical relationship between
rank-and-file action and provincial leadership and structures;
one cannot be examined without the other.
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Secondly, in rightly stressing
the need for local studies of the farm progressive challenge,
Badgley appears to have omitted arguments about context and how
to make local choices to test that context. The central interpretive
argument about UFO leadership from my Good
study is that there were three (not two) currents: a reform
from above argument by E.C. Drury about making the UFO
a peoples party within existing market and parliamentary
rules; a radical reform from below argument by W.C. Good
to extend direct democracy methods in co-operation to politics
through the single land tax, free trade, modest government economic
intervention, and a transformed parliamentary system through a
variety of direct democracy reforms like proportional representation
and the single preferential ballot; and thirdly, a purely negative,
sectional argument by J.J. Morrison for occupational self-defence
through narrowly conceived co-operative action. Arguably, it was
Morrison who triumphed as the sole leader remaining after 1926.
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Badgleys accounts of local
activist initiatives in co-operation and politics appear to illustrate
all three of these tendencies as well as confirm how economically
and socially representative UFO membership
was. If anything, his local studies confirm anecdotal evidence
in leadership studies about the importance of the single land
tax to the most radical populists, the relative youthfulness of
UFO activists, and the importance of pro-Union
Presbyterians influenced by the Social Gospel.
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Another contextual question is:
why choose Lambton, Simcoe, and Lanark Counties? Badgley offers
two reasons: their geographical representativeness and available
evidence (the degree of local organization in Lambton, the only
extant club records being for Simcoe, and the number of local
papers in Lanark). However, as noted in the Good study, from a
farm production system point of view, there were four regional
farm economies in Ontario: the dairy belt (divided between eastern
and western Ontario Lanark being in the first); a mixed
livestock system (Lambton and Simcoe); a few specialized areas
such as the fruit farmers of Niagara or Prince Edward; and the
agro-forestry system of Northern Ontario. The selection of local
studies can be refined and tested further.
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Thirdly, what about interpretation?
Badgley does a good job in summarizing how Ontario historiography
has marginalized this mass, radical challenge to its dominant
political culture. But he has to simplify the Marxist narrative
and critique to deny there is a meaningful organizational and
social context for local responses, which included all tendencies
from Simcoe Countys F.W. Webster and his explicit
mention of anarchism to argue single land tax and radical electoral
reforms, to the mainstream co-operative and political practice
of most Simcoe UFO members who were led
by E.C. Drury locally, to the negative sectionalism of
Leslie Oke and the Lambton farm co-operative association.
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Despite these criticisms, this
is a valuable book for two reasons. First, the Ontario farm progressive
challenge was a radical, mass break from Canadian capitalist politics.
The farmers achievement is well worth repeated, careful
study from a variety of points of view.
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Secondly, the farm progressive
challenge was more than a break from bourgeois politics. It also
put forward a mass, democratic debate in practice on what will
replace it. As a Marxist, I have argued that the nature of that
break and alternative has to be class situated. A petit-bourgeois
populist movement did challenge for power but it did not conquer
it. Activists of the 21st century have to ask why.
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Robin Wylie
Douglas College
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Peter Campbell, Canadian Marxists and the Search for a Third
Way (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University
Press 1999)
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PETER CAMPBELL invites us to reconsider
the legacy of Canadian Marxists active in the first decades of
the 20th century. He asserts that these Marxists "comprised
one of the most important groups of thinkers and activists in
Canadian history." (4) Campbell is particularly interested
in those Marxists of this era whom he views as having defined
themselves through their rejection of both the revolutionary politics
of the Communist International and the gradualism of Canadian
social democracy. The defining feature of Campbells "Marxists
of the third way" was their commitment "to the heart
and soul of Karl Marxs historical materialism, his belief
that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of
the working class itself." (4) He believes that the important
"theoretical contributions" of these Marxists, especially
their analysis of the "relationship between worker self-emancipation
and the leadership question..." has been unfairly ignored
by historians of the left. (9)
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The perspective of Campbells
Marxists of the third way was rooted in British Non-conformism
and the gradualist, positivist mechanical Marxism of the Second
International. This was a Marxism that constructed revolution
as an inevitable product of the internal contradictions of the
capitalist order. Its adherents came to Marx through the classical
texts: Darwin, and Spencer, rather than Lenin. Campbell adds the
Hegelian Marxism of Italian Antonio Labriola, to this lineage.
Through Labriola Marxists of the third way were drawn to a theoretical
concern with ideas and consciousness as dynamics in the historical
process. A close study of the Marxism of members of the Socialist
Party of Canada reveals "a marked Hegelian and idealist influence."
(21) Campbell links the Hegelian Marxism of Labriola (and the
long shadow of Gramsci) with book notices contained in Cottons
Weekly and Hank Bartholomews columns in the Western
Clarion. Campbells claim that Marxists of the third
way bequeathed a distinct body of Marxist theory poses a number
of questions. What prompted them, rather than others in the Canadian
Marxist tradition, to theorize the logic of worker self-emancipation
and to evolve a voluntarist Marxism against the grain of existing
determinist accounts? How did they apply the classical texts to
their time? What evidence exists that the Hegelian legacy of Labriola
liberated these Canadian Marxists from the thrall of a doctrine
that posed few superstructural questions? How did their account
of proletarian revolution differ from that embraced by militants
who stood with the Communist International? Finally, did Campbells
Marxists evolve an idiom and inflection of their own making?
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Campbell advances his argument
through biographical accounts of the public careers and private
lives of Socialist Party of Canada (SPC)
activist William Pritchard, One Big Union (OBU),
and Winnipeg General Strike leader R.B. Russell, west coast labour
activist Ernest Winch, and Ontarios Arthur Mould. Campbells
selection of subjects turned on the question of whether their
"political practice" was "derived from theoretical
formulations in a conscious manner" and whether the activist
left a "significant body of personal correspondence or writings
in labour papers." (10) Such considerations were important
because Campbell intended to treat "consciousness as an historical
agent" and "to deal directly with Canadas Marxists
of the third way and their ideas, to take them seriously as thinkers."
(10) Despite Campbells claims, readers expecting a book
of close textual exegesis will be disappointed. This is not a
book preoccupied with theory. Campbells emphasis is on practice.
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In the case of Ernest Winch, for
example, Campbell explains that an account of Winchs life
provides an opportunity to "assess more thoroughly how effective
Marxists of the third way were at involving rank and file workers
in the process of creating a broad-based socialist movement, thereby
putting their theory into practice." (31) We learn a good
deal about Winchs career in west coast labour and labour
political organizations from 1910 to 1940. Yet the voice of Winch
is largely absent from this narrative. Rather than textual analysis,
Campbell offers speculation. On the fundamental question of the
utility of the general strike, for example, Campbell asserts that
Winch and other "Marxists of the third way supported industrial
unionism and the general strike as a response to the repression
of the capitalist state and the mobilization of the rank-and-file
workers, but they were skeptical about its long-term benefits."
(41) This finding is not disclosed and amplified through a consideration
of texts containing the theory of Winch and others on this question.
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William Pritchard is credited with
exercising great influence through "his ability to interpret
and critique capitalist society, present the case for socialism,
and convince workers of the need for education and organization."
(74) How did Pritchard theorize his practice as an intellectual
of the left? Though Campbell indicates a preoccupation with exploring
the "consciousness" of his subjects, he provides no
account of Pritchards theory of the role of intellectuals
in the process of worker emancipation and the passage to a proletarian
order. Pritchard supported a resolution at the Western Labour
Conference in Calgary endorsing "the system of industrial
soviet control" but, Campbell observes, everything Pritchard
said or wrote before or after 1919 suggested that he did not agree
with replacing parliamentary institutions with soviet-style government.
No explanation bearing on his theory as a Marxist of the third
way is offered for such apparent contradictions. Campbell contends
that Pritchard was convinced that constitutional action could
bring about socialism. What was needed was a "working-class
majority ready and able to accept the responsibilities of power."
(94) Yet, such an assertion discloses little about Pritchards
adaptation of the classical texts to his time. Campbells
account of Pritchards trial in the winter of 1920 incorrectly
claims that criminal charges against Pritchard and the other strike
leaders were based on "a spur-of-the-moment, trumped-up amendment
to the Criminal Code." (93) The charges were based on the
unamended Criminal Code in force in June 1919. Campbell seems
ultimately disappointed with Pritchard as theorist. He notes that
by the early 1920s, with the decline of the SPC, Pritchard "had
little else to offer in its place beyond an unquestioned belief
in worker agency that at times seemed more like a kind of religious
faith than the product of an historical materialist reading of
the state of the working class in Canada and elsewhere in the
1920s." (100)
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The road signs in Campbells
account of the political pilgrimage of Arthur Mould are ambivalent.
"It is not clear why" he became involved in the labour
movement. (136) His changing political affiliations are attributed
by Campbell to misplaced "faith he placed in J.S. Woodsworth
in the early 1930s, and in Joseph Stalin in the ensuing years...."
(167) Campbell offers the unflattering assessment that Mould was
"a man who sometimes overlooked or chose not to see that
he himself was at times incapable of the discernment he expected
from the workers themselves." (167) Existential rather than
theoretical imperatives appear to have settled his final turn
to the left. However, even here we remain on the terrain of speculation,
not theoretical exegesis. Campbell reports that Mould never provided
an explanation for his turn to Communism and that it was unclear
if he ever embraced Leninism. Still, he concludes that Mould embraced
Communism because in Moulds view the Communists were the
only party "making a serious attempt to put the ideas of
Marx and Lenin into practice." (160)
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The account of R.B. Russell centers
on 1919. Russell did not see the strike as a prelude to a proletarian
order. Russell "recognized the tremendous amount of educating
and organizing of the workers left to do." (188) Broadening
his argument, Campbell offers the view that for Russell, and other
Marxists of the third way, 1919 was "only a moment of revolutionary
potential in that much longer evolutionary process Marxists of
the third way saw as the basis of all change in the organic world
and in human society." (189) Yet on this important point
it remains unclear who would educate and organize the workers,
why education was needed, or how the education and organization
of workers would threaten capitalist hegemony and lay the foundations
of proletarian rule.
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Campbell asserts incorrectly that
Russell was singled out for special prosecution in 1919. Like
Pritchard, he was charged with seditious conspiracy under the
Criminal Code in place in June 1919 and arraigned for trial with
the other strike leaders. However, on 27 November 1919, the Crown
chose to try Russell separately because A.J. Andrews was concerned
that the available jury panel might be exhausted before a jury
was selected if the defence exercised all the peremptory challenges
at its disposal with eight defendants. Undaunted, the defence
sought to extend its number of challenges by having Russell tried
under the amended Criminal Code, assented to on 7 July 1919 and
in effect since 1 October 1919. Conviction under the amended code
could mean a sentence of twenty rather than two years for Russell.
The threat of a longer sentence entitled the defence to greater
peremptory challenges. The Crown rejected the defence bid.
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Marxists of the Third Way
does not achieve the ambitious goals set out by its author. Nevertheless,
it is a book well worth reading and thinking about. Campbells
preoccupations remind us of the need to interrogate the theory
bequeathed to the contemporary left and to consider how it has
shaped our understanding and interest or misunderstanding
and disinterest in the nature of capitalist hegemony. Such
introspection is essential in thinking about and accounting for
the historical possibilities and realities Gramsci alluded to
when he asked, "What can an innovatory class oppose to this
formidable complex of trenches and fortifications of the dominant
class?"
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Tom Mitchell
Brandon University
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Jim Egan, Challenging the Conspiracy of Silence: My Life as
a Canadian Gay Activist, compiled and edited by Donald W.
McLeod (Toronto: The Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives and Homewood
Books 1998)
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JIM EGAN, Canadas first gay activist,
died at the age of 78 on 9 March 2000. In 1949 Jim broke the silence
on gay rights in Canada when he started to write letters to newspapers,
magazines, and government committees defending gay men and lesbians.
At first, only the scandal sheets would accept his letters and
columns, but by the 1960s some of the more "respectable"
publications began to print them. Later, in the 1990s Jim and
Jack Nesbitt, his life partner, took the Canadian government all
the way to the Supreme Court in a major same-sex spousal benefits
struggle. This was the case that led the Supreme Court to declare
that the Charter of Rights includes sexual orientation protection.
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I met Jim a number of times throughout
the 1980s and 1990s and learned a great deal from him. This review
is written in memory of Jim, in celebration of his activism, and
to claim him as a working-class hero. In Challenging the Conspiracy
of Silence, gay historian Donald McLeod has skilfully woven
together a series of interviews with Jim, informed by Jims
own writings and other sources, to provide a rich and detailed
account of "the social and personal circumstances that allowed
Jim Egan to become Canadas earliest known public gay activist."(13)
In this autobiographical oral history Jims spirit comes
through loud and clear. For those who knew him Jim comes to life
in these pages as we again hear and feel his voice and passion.
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Jims early experiences were
very much working class in character. He was born in Toronto in
1921 and his father was a fine cabinet maker. He recalls excitement
when he went swimming naked with other young men in the Don River.
Jim remembers that "I certainly had that feeling that many
gays have that I was somehow different from the other boys."(17)
He became somewhat of a loner and as he describes it "an
absolutely omnivorous reader."(17) He became a largely self-taught
working-class young man. His mother, who became the main force
in his life when his father died, never questioned his reading
and he devoured Charles Dickens, H.G. Wells, and eventually discovered
Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, and other references to same-sex passion
and desire.
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When he was 13 or 14 Jim tells
us:
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I realized I was sexually attracted
to males. Id never heard the words "gay" or "homosexual."
I think it must be difficult for someone today to believe that
young fellows then had never heard these words, but it was certainly
true in my case and amongst the boys I knew in working class,
east end Toronto ... I became sexually active with some of the
boys on the street ... when I was thirteen, somehow or other,
... we started sexual experimentation with each other.... One
of the things I quickly discovered was that while they all liked
to fool around, they certainly did not want to talk about it.
And I realized fairly early on that it was something that could
not be discussed, but it was a fun thing that you could do anytime
the opportunity arose. (19-20)
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Here we get a sense that Jim in his youth may have been participating
in the type of largely pre-homosexual, working-class sexual culture
that George Chauncey writes about in Gay New York. At the
same time we get a sense of the early development of prohibitions
on homosexuality as a topic of discussion and form of identification
in working-class communities.
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When the war came, Jim tried to
join the Army but was rejected because of a corneal scar. He then
worked as a technician with the Toronto Department of Zoology
where he learned how to preserve animal specimens, and as an assistant
at Connaught Labs.
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He joined the merchant marine for
the last two years of the war. As in the experiences of many others,
and as Allan Berube describes in Coming Out Under Fire,
it was the war mobilization and its shifting of the contexts of
gender and sexual life that opened up new erotic possibilities
for Jim. He discovered the gay world in various ports that he
visited. For instance, he describes picking up an Army guy in
Piccadilly Circus in London in 1944 or 1945.
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In 1947 he came back to Toronto
and began to investigate the local gay world that had expanded
during the war years. Although he had many sexual adventures,
Jim wanted to meet another man and settle down. He met Jack Nesbitt,
a hairstylist, in 1948. Later, in 1949, Jim and Jack moved to
Oak Ridges to work for a man who owned a biological supply business.
This began Jim and Jacks love for living in more rural areas
that would often take them away from larger urban centres.
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The late 1940s and the 1950s were
a difficult time for many gay men with widespread police harassment
and entrapment and media coverage marked by silence on homosexual
experience in the mainstream media and heterosexist sensationalism
in the scandal sheets. Jim stresses that even though "there
was a homophobic climate during this period that cried out for
change, I think it is important to note that the situation was
not entirely bad."(43) Jims "fury" at the
heterosexism in media coverage is what propelled him into major
letter and article writing campaigns that took place in a series
of waves from 1949 until 1964. As he put it, "There were
never any articles published from the gay point of view, which
in my mind equalled a conspiracy of silence on the true nature
of homosexuality." (43) Jim set himself the task of breaking
this silence.
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While the mainstream print media
ignored his onslaught, some of the scandal sheets began to print
his letters and articles. He had a series of columns published
in True News Times called "Aspects of Homosexuality"
and later in Justice Weekly titled "Homosexual Concepts."
Jim wrote about the Cold War purges of homosexuals in the US
State Department, the Kinsey Report, and the "causes"
of homosexuality. In these columns Jim showed himself to be a
profound gay working-class intellectual. Jim had contacts with
the emerging homophile movement in the US
and continued his "omnivorous reading" of materials
relating to homosexual experiences.
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Although Jim later stubbornly resisted
the insights of social constructionist approaches to sexuality,
he was able to write to a Parliamentary Legislative Committee
in 1955 such powerful lines as: "The Negro problem
was created by the white majority; the Jewish problem
by the Gentile majority, and the homosexual problem
by the heterosexual majority who alone can take the necessary
steps to bring this problem to a speedy end."
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Jim was also very aware of class
divisions within the gay community. Here is his description of
the "levels" in gay life:
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Gay life in Toronto in the 1950s and
1960s was on a series of levels, with your opera queens and the
highly educated university types at the top, and the ribbon clerks
at Simpsons at the bottom. While there may have been a certain
amount of overlap, we didnt associate with anybody except
from what we might refer to as the "lower orders." And
I say that in the kindliest way, because we were part of it.(70)
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Jim also challenged class relations
within gay community formation when he assisted Sidney Katz in
1963 in his articles on the gay community for Macleans.
This public visibility for the gay community challenged the comfort
of some middle-class gay men who lived most of their lives in
the closet. A friend was asked to arrange a meeting for Jim with
a man "who was just oozing money, position, and power."
(84) Jim was asked to end his collaboration with Katz since "if
you keep on publicizing this the way you are, it wont be
possible for any gay man to be safe. People will begin to get
suspicious and gay men will be recognized as living a gay life."(84)
Jim, of course, refused to end his collaboration with Katz since
he had no investment in the relations of the closet and in contrast
he wanted more publicity for gay experience. This points to our
need for more historical work investigating class divisions and
struggles within gay communities.
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Jims impressive activism,
however, was at this time not actively supported by other gay
men and he laboured largely in isolation. As McLeod points out,
Jims activism "went in waves" often related to
the dynamics of his relationship with Jack and in 1964 his early
career as a gay activist ended when he and Jack decided to move
to British Columbia. (11) This interaction between activism and
our relationships is another area that needs much more focus in
our theorizing of activism.
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Challenging the Conspiracy of
Silence is a wonderful celebration of Jims life. Those
who are interested in Jims life of activism should also
consult: Jim Egan: Canadas Pioneer Gay Activist,
compiled and introduced by Robert Champagne (Toronto: Canadian
Lesbian and Gay History Network 1987); and David Adkin, Jim
Loves Jack: The James Egan Story (Toronto: David Adkin Productions
1996).
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Gary Kinsman
Laurentian University.
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Mary-Ellen Kelm, Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing
in British Columbia 1900-1950 (Vancouver: UBC
Press 1998)
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THIS WORK EXAMINES Aboriginal peoples
bodies as sites of attempted colonization in a number of ways.
The most interesting contribution that the author makes is in
examining multiple sites of the attempted colonization of Aboriginal
people. In her work, Kelm goes beyond attempted colonization as
a personal or institutional tool to include colonization as situational,
personal, institutional, and political, depending upon the perpetrators.
The least effective portion of her work deals with Aboriginal
peoples bodies as objects.
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In examining colonization as a
situational response to factors inherent in settler societies,
Kelm relies heavily upon oral histories and testimony provided
by Elders in First Nations located in the territorial confines
of British Columbia. In using Elders as historical sources to
draw from, the author establishes the veracity of oral traditions
as a given fact. This is valuable, respectful, and reinforcing
of the understanding that First Nation historical traditions and
the traditional preservation of histories are valid and useful
tools.
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While the first chapter of this
work does not rely heavily on these sources (dealing instead with
government-generated population and mortality rates, and hospital
admission information) the second chapter deals with the impact
of colonization on Aboriginal diet and nutrition. It is important
to note that Kelm examines not only the impact of colonial mentality
on policy development and the intrusive nature of this policy,
but she also makes sure that she addresses Aboriginal peoples
responses to the same. She writes of First Nation lobbying and
Aboriginal leaderships negotiations, petitions, and responses
(19, 47, 56, 152) in the face of attempted colonization. This
is an essential part of the story of colonization that has been
overlooked in many discussions of imperialism and its impact on
First Nations. By choosing to examine the political response by
Aboriginal leadership, Kelm demonstrates that the situational
response is as important as the sites of colonization. Importantly,
the story of colonization takes form not only in the recounting
of colonial history, but also in the reconstruction of Aboriginal
peoples personal and political responses to colonialism.
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Kelm also analyses colonization
as personal. Aboriginal peoples health and illness are examined
in terms of their impact on families, clans, and nations. (10)
In this way, the story of attempted colonization is not one that
details just the impact of disease and settler response to disease.
The work becomes broader and studies not just the pressure exerted
by health care and governmental officials on families but also
the familial response to these impositions. This effort is laudable.
The ripple effect of ill health and the political construction
of Aboriginal health extend to the people impacted by both. By
examining health policy in this context, Kelm is able to explore
the effect on Aboriginal people as a collective. In assessing
the ripple effect on the collectivity, Kelm handily defuses studies
of disease that either individualize its causes or consequences,
and/or attribute it to "cultural" factors divorced from
political context.
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In examining the personalization
of colonization, Kelm is able to scrutinize both the role of missionaries
and the benefit accruing to missionaries as a result of Aboriginal
illness. Faced with diseases Aboriginal cultures and doctors had
never before experienced, missionaries were able to make a name
for themselves with their "humanitarianism colonialism."
(146) More specifically, the author effectively establishes that
Aboriginal illness enabled missionary staff to administer spiritual
and medical assistance - with the end goal being the disruption
of the relationship between First Nation people and First Nation
medical practitioners. (104)
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The author examines not only the
role of individuals who earned their livelihoods from treating
Aboriginal illnesses but also the position of medical staff who
were "reluctant, even disinterested, colonizers." (135)
This is an essential contribution to the colonization dialogue,
particularly in an era when the attribution of responsibility
is so often linked only to intentional acts. Kelm observes that
action and inaction, and not intent, are essential components
of a colonial condition.
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Beginning with Chapter 2, Kelm
examines colonization as an institutional mandate. Initially,
she reviews health and ill health in the context of the reserve
systems impact on traditional foods. What follows is an
incredibly detailed discussion of the impact that the reserve
system had on Aboriginal peoples ability to maintain health
and fight foreign diseases. She addresses the poor soil provided
and the exclusion of cultivated gardens in the selection and allocation
of reserve lands. She also describes the impact that the immigration
of non-Aboriginal trappers, provincial legislation dissociating
water rights from land ownership, and fishery regulations had
on Aboriginal peoples ability to maintain the health standards
present in their communities prior to non-Aboriginal settlement
in their territories.
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Predominant in the discussions
of colonization via institutions is Kelms examination of
the role of residential schools (Chapter 4) in creating and perpetuating
illness in Aboriginal people. She writes that the establishment
of residential schools was "predicated on the basic notion
that First Nations were, by nature, unclean and diseased."
With this in mind, "residential schooling was advocated as
a means to save Aboriginal children from the insalubrious
influences of home life on reserve. Once in the schools, the racially
charged and gendered message that Aboriginal domestic arrangements
threatened physical, social, and spiritual survival was reinforced
through health education." (57) Clearly evident in this comprehensive
analysis are the high morbidity rate of Aboriginal youth in residential
schools and the attempted "salvation" of the First Nation
students who lived at the residential schools. Kelms approach
to this topic is an interesting one. She examines not only the
physical toll, but the emotional, cultural, and mental toll that
residential schooling took on First Nation students, their families,
and their communities. She draws our attention to the institutionalization
of racially and culturally determinative and imperial understandings
as they were entrenched in the residential school organizational
structure. From health education and its role in cultural invasion,
to the enforced application of western standards and its impact
on Aboriginal societal standards, Kelm leaves no stone unturned.
(62) She does not exonerate government or missionary societies
from our understanding of this bureaucratic brutality. Government
and missionaries are viewed as complicit with the residential
school bureaucrats in this imperial intrusion which killed one
quarter of the prairie First Nation students on residential school
rolls. (64)
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Colonization as political will
dominate Chapter 7 of this work. Disappointingly, the author is
not as able with this research as she is with the research related
to the role of missionaries and residential schools in the attempted
colonization of Aboriginal people. Perhaps it is because it is
difficult to gauge the impact of governmental policy from oral
sources or because the political will and manipulation of the
time is not evident in the records. In any event, Kelm seems unable
to make the link between governmental and political decision making
and policy, on the one hand, and the illness that swept through
First Nations between 1900 and 1950, on the other. She does condemn
the Department of Indian Affairs; Kelm states that the Department
did not hire adequate staff and that they did not actively recruit
experienced doctors. (129, 131) However, given the evidence related
to the federal governments obligation (treaty and/or fiduciary)
to provide health care, Kelm does not make a thoroughly convincing
case for the clear abrogation of responsibility by the settler
government.
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Referring in passing to a lack
of proactivity, Kelm never seems to make the link between disease,
ill health, and Aboriginal peoples deaths and the inactivity
of the government of Canada with much vigour. She refers to societal
responses as "a society that sought control through knowledge
and the creation of a colonizing archive of data, rather than
overt displays of force" rather than governmental
non-responses in attributing responsibility for Aboriginal peoples
health crises. (120) This tentativeness is unexpected and diminishes
the strength of the work evident in earlier chapters.
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There is, however, a significant
discussion of the role of departmental field matrons, which broadens
the readers understanding of the shifting perceptions related
to Aboriginal women/motherhood.
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Although she refers to disease
as differentially understood by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal
people, Kelm does review the attempted colonization of Aboriginal
people in light of the understandings that non-Aboriginal people
had and have about health and wellness. Disease is perceived as
situational and in a Western context, isolated from holistic health
and reviewed on a case-by-case basis. In addition, there seems
to be an ill fit between the intellectual acceptance of and personal
respect demonstrated towards Aboriginal healing. The author demonstrates
an implicit acceptance of the fact that Aboriginal medicine exists,
is effective, and is sometimes superior to Western medicine. However,
there are three notable "tells" that seemingly establish
that the author does not have a full understanding of the respect
that should be accorded to Aboriginal health research grounded
in Aboriginal understandings related to wellness and medicine.
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Just as some pictures and ceremonial
accoutrements are not to be photographed in Aboriginal traditions,
some stories are not to be related out of context. I am not certain
where this line should be drawn as my history and knowledge of
such stories may be unduly influenced by the fact that we had
to send our sacred traditions underground or risk losing them.
The fundamental understanding that comes from this is: if you
do not know the protocol, then do not take responsibility for
sharing the information. There are a few instances in this work
where I was uncomfortable with the degree of information provided
about sacred ceremonies. Because our education and health are
intricately tied together and are based on experiential and protocol-governed
teachings, those descriptions seemed contextually orphaned.
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Secondly, frequent references to
Aboriginal "witchcraft" in the context of a discussion
of medicine and curative and harmful powers de-legitimizes the
skill as something less than medicinal.
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The third point corresponds to
the monomania of Western medicine and its preoccupation with "curing
the disease." In the holistic tradition of most Aboriginal
societies, health was balanced with the alternative. Helpful powers
balanced with disruptive. Because the goal of Aboriginal health
was to live a good/balanced life, the eradication of one disease
is not good health. The work makes passing reference to this but
reviews and interprets health in the context of eradication of
disease. Perhaps, in the Aboriginal context, the disease is the
symptom and living out of balance is the disease. In any event,
while this imbalance is referred to, a detailed examination of
the Aboriginal understanding of health would have enhanced and
grounded the work. In many Aboriginal societies, disease is perceived
as animate and as an entity in and of itself. It is an indicator
of a larger problem. As well, there is some discussion and separation
of the human and non-human realm in this work. Perhaps the larger
understanding, and one which would have provided context for the
discussion, is that they cannot be separated effectively in an
Aboriginal conception of health. As the connection between past
and future is understood in a discussion such as this, so should
the link between elements and people.
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The metaphor of the "Aboriginal
body" seems difficult to reconcile with this understanding.
When Kelm writes that the "(c)olonial praxis has situated
Aboriginal bodies as particular sites of struggle," the reader
is also reminded that the western understanding of the division
of soul and body is one which does not necessarily have a correlate
in Aboriginal societies. (101) In fact, the division seems all
the more inapt as the missionaries, government officials, and
residential school staff members themselves were aware of the
tie between spirit and body and systematically broke down one
knowing the impact it would have on the other. The resultant intellectual
split between soul and body has a tendency to objectify just one
part of Aboriginality when the whole was detrimentally impacted.
While the theory of the construction of Aboriginal bodies as colonized
bodies is an interesting one, it is more relevant to the discourse
to examine the attempted eradication and suppression of Aboriginal
personhood and manhood. In this discussion, the body cannot be
separated from the spirit.
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Kelm makes some interesting comments
about Aboriginal economies and the effect that colonization has
had on them, linking this to Aboriginal peoples health.
This is a difficult concept to describe and to capture as there
has been little research done in the area. Further, her preliminary
discussion of Aboriginal womens work, its subsequent devaluation,
and the impact of this devaluation on Aboriginal health is intriguing.
(51) The economic subjugation of Aboriginal people as a result
of the implementation of the reserve system is also discussed
convincingly in this work. (55) In her discussion of "upward
mobility" of Aboriginal doctors Kelm states that "healers
gained little wealth with which to confirm elevated rank."
(88) In this discussion, Western standards of upward mobility
are applied and the result is an awkward analogy. Respect, integrity,
and honour are the currency with which mobility was purchased
in most traditional Aboriginal societies.
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Tracey Lindberg
Athabasca University
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Betsy Beattie, Obligation and Opportunity : Single Maritime
Women in Boston, 1870-1930 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens
University Press 2000)
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OVER THE PAST several decades, historians
of international migration have become increasingly aware, as
have their colleagues elsewhere, of the need to consider women
as distinct historical actors whose experiences did not always
mirror those of their kinsmen. Betsy Beatties book Obligation
and Opportunity contributes to this corrective effort by recentering
the narrative of Maritime out- migration to Boston in the decades
around 1900, a narrative formerly dominated by the male skilled
workers who relocated, on the women who made up as many as two-thirds
of all Maritime migrants to Boston during this era. (5-6) While
female migrants in the late-19th century sought work in Boston
in order to assist their families financially, Beattie argues,
the young women who retraced their steps in the early 20th century
envisioned this sojourn as an essential formative journey, an
opportunity for individual growth on the road to adulthood.
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In Part I, "The Vanguard,"
Beattie focuses on the Maritime women who migrated to Boston in
the final decades of the 19th century. These womens migration,
like that of their brothers, both stemmed from and contributed
to the regions economic decline in the decades following
Confederation. (31-32) But while men might primarily migrate to
help out the family, such migrations were not incompatible with
personal ambition and the simultaneous or subsequent fulfilment
of individual career goals. Not so for women: their journeys to
Boston revolved solely around their families economic need.
In this sense, seeking work in Boston was actually part of a larger
tradition of Maritime women seeking outside wages in order to
help their families cover expenses. As the increasing industrialization
of North America minimized young womens direct economic
contributions on the farm, with home production shifting to commercial
consumption and farms becoming increasingly specialized and mechanized,
farm daughters were no longer needed so close to home; moreover
they found fewer employment opportunities at home than in growing
urban centres like Boston.
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Boston provided an attractive destination
to Maritime women because of the abundance of positions available
in the domestic service, the type of work an earlier generation
would have done in neighbours homes in the Atlantic provinces.
Furthermore, Bostonians apparently found Maritime women to be
ideal employees; native born women shunned domestic service during
this era because of the long hours, and most Maritime immigrants,
unlike other Boston immigrants at the time, were Protestants who
spoke English with little or no accent. Working in private homes,
Maritime women could accumulate a considerable savings in a few
years, as compensation included both decent wages and room and
board. While the vast majority of Maritime women thus laboured
as maids or cooks, over one in six was a seamstress or worked
in a related industry during this era. (51) Although newspapers
back home were full of cautionary tales, often reporting that
only tragic consequences befell women who abandoned home for the
dangerous, distant, and foreign metropolis, women tended to disregard
these dire predictions of their fate; instead they relied upon
the more positive accounts they received from relatives or friends
who were already living in Boston.
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While this "vanguard,"
"the first group of single women to leave the Maritimes in
large numbers and go to work in Boston," went primarily to
help their families economically, the experience changed them
for life. (61) For these women from rural Maritime farming communities,
their years in Boston marked their first encounter with an urban
metropolis. When they later returned to their homes in the Maritimes,
brimming with tales of adventure and excitement in the big city,
their broadened horizons and new perspective on life were evident
, and they eagerly recounted their experiences to subsequent generations
for years to come. It was these stories of adventure, argues Beattie,
which fuelled a second wave of migration in the first decades
of the 20th century; it is this second wave of female migrants
that Beattie addresses in Part Two of the book, entitled "Eldorado."
In contrast to their mothers, aunts, and older sisters, personal
growth and outright adventure not familial economic need
were the primary motivating factors propelling female Maritime
migrants who sought work in Boston after 1900. These women were
often better educated than their predecessors had been; many of
them completed high school before leaving home, a fact which bears
evidence to their decreasing importance as players in the family
economy. Once in Boston, while some continued older patterns by
taking work as domestics or in the garment industry, an increasing
number took advantage of educational opportunities not available
back home, from nurse training programs to night courses in business,
another indication that family financial obligations were less
pressing for this generation of migrants. Many Maritime women
used these educational opportunities as a springboard into a professional
career. Still others, entering the various labour markers that
courted women to fill shortages in the early 1900s, became telephone
operators, clerical workers, and saleswomen.
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Beatties sources include
contemporary newspaper articles, labour bureau and census reports,
letters and diaries, as well as more recent interviews and written
accounts. But at the heart of her comparisons is her extensive
research in United States federal census manuscripts form 1880,
1910, and 1920. Using these manuscripts, Beattie has identified
the occupations of nearly every Maritime woman living in Boston
at the time of these three censuses. In addition to compiling
this data in superbly constructed tables within the text, she
includes a more detailed breakdown of every recorded occupation
for these census years in several appendices. Beatties maps
are also very informative and easy to read, though geographers
might criticize certain omissions: for example, none of her maps
includes a scale. The occasional photographs of young Maritime
migrants at work add a personal dimension to the stories that
unfold throughout the narrative, particularly the changing nature
of work itself for these women over time. Together, these sources
paint a multidimensional portrait of the lives and experiences
of Beatties subjects.
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As her introduction indicates,
Beattie is familiar with a large body of literature not only on
other women migrants to the United States during this era, but
also on women and work throughout the centuries. Although her
attempts to situate her subjects experiences within this
much larger historiography might strike some as ahistorical, because
of the ways in which she appears to essentialize the experiences
of women across time and space, at least she is drawing upon the
literature. A number of other studies of Canadian migrants to
the northeastern US during this era show
little awareness of the larger tradition of US
immigration studies, or of gender as a factor in migration and
work patterns. Beatties addition of women to the story of
this migration reinforces themes found in existing scholarship
of young peoples exodus from the Maritimes in conjunction
with economic stagnation. Yet her book provides a unique perspective
because it prompts a more accurate understanding of the experiences
of the majority of Maritime migrants, who, in contrast to the
subjects of previous stories on this migration, were female. Thus,
Beatties work is a valuable contribution, and offers one
more testimonial: failing to consider whether male and female
migrants experienced the migration process differently will leave
half the story untold.
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Florence Mae Waldron
University of Minnesota
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Paul Rutherford, Endless Propaganda: The Advertising of Public
Goods (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2000)
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RECENTLY, THE FOLLOWING unsigned classified
ad appeared in Torontos weekly alternative newsmagazine,
NOW: "SMOKERS
RIGHTS. Sick control-freaks led by white supremacists are
behind the brainwashing enforcement of non-smoking laws. If they
were so concerned about the pollution of air they would be making
a noise about the exhaust fumes and industrial wastes which are
at least 10,000 times worse & are the true killers of our
environment. Why else do you suppose that might be? Whatever happened
to Freedom of Choice? Or is that something exclusive to the rich?"
While this tangled tale of conspiracy and control in the public
space of Toronto seems particularly overwrought and poorly argued,
it does point to some of the responses occasioned by anti-smoking
regulations and advertising.
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In his new book, Endless Propaganda:
The Advertising of Public Goods, senior University of Toronto
history professor Paul Rutherford scrutinizes this field of "advocacy
advertising" or "civic advocacy" that is,
publicity promoting a "public good" such as smoke-free
workplaces and restaurants, or the elimination of drunk driving.
It includes, for Rutherford, advertising sponsored by governments
(a major player in Canada), political parties, corporations, and
organiz-ations, and which is directed at achieving "a drug-free
America, social justice and public health, a united Canada or
a sovereign Quebec, economic progress, unspoiled nature, world
peace, crime-free streets, and on and on." (5) He argues
that there has been an explosion of such advocacy since the 1960s,
and of the identification of "social risks" such as
pollution and AIDS, marking a clear break with the past. What
we are seeing, he contends, is the marketing of public goods along
the same lines as commodities. While Rutherford devotes some time
to discussing reactions to such advertising, including backlashes
to anti-smoking, drunk driving, and safe sex campaigns, his central
interest in Endless Propaganda is the impact of advocacy
advertising on the public sphere.
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Indeed, as far back as the 1930s,
a central (and pessimistic) strand of the massive scholarly literature
on advertising has been preoccupied with its erosion of democratic
life and discourse; by the 1950s, this had turned into an obsession
with media manipulation and propaganda. In recent years, the analysis
of advertising has become vastly more theoretically sophisticated
and wide-ranging, but troubling questions about what has happened
to the space of political discourse within advanced capitalist
societies have, arguably, become more pressing with the renewed
theoretical and practical interest in democracy. Rutherfords
project is located within this broad critical tradition and shares
much of its deep pessimism if not all of its approaches.
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Endless Propaganda is divided
into five parts, each part beginning with a short theoretical
excursion that serves to introduce some of the themes, arguments,
and interpretations that run through the discussion of the (mainly
televised) advocacy ads that follow. Some readers will find this
organization of the book particularly suited to its subject matter
and approach; others may find it episodic and at times frustrating
as the overall argument disappears under the weight of numerous
examples and theoretical tangents. Of the various theoretical
influences on the book, Habermas and Foucault are especially important.
The ads themselves, and Rutherford has researched an extraordinary
number of them, are from Canada, the United States, the UK,
and France with scattered references to other national contexts
such as Chile and Argentina. Despite this international focus,
the argument is not especially comparative and speaks largely
to the American experience.
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The books first part begins,
not unexpectedly given Rutherfords main focus of inquiry
here, with Habermass understanding of democracy, his famous
account of the public sphere, and his critique of advertising
and public relations. "Habermass Lament" serves
to introduce an historical discussion of the origins of advocacy
advertising in World War II and Cold War America as business sought
"to remedy the lamentable ignorance of ordinary Americans
about the virtues of free enterprise and the villainy of alternatives."
(28) A brief discussion of Gramsci on hegemony sets up two chapters
on the restoration of order following the serious challenges of
the 1960s to American poverty, racism, and imperialism. Examples
include the war on drugs and what Rutherford refers to as the
merchandising of law and order as "elites regained their
command over the shape of the symbolic universe which constructed
politics." (66) An outline of Foucauldian notions of power,
discipline, and governmentality forms the prologue to part three,
in many ways the core of Endless Propaganda. Here Rutherford
devotes a chapter each to contemporary health promotion campaigns
(smoking, drugs, AIDS); charity ads, especially
those focused on poverty in the Third World ("save the children");
and "administrative advertising," a loose category through
which he analyzes assorted attempts to "reconstruct citizens"
in ads directed at drinking, discrimination, and crime, among
other instances. (141) For Rutherford, these campaigns are all
about the "new paranoia," but I would have liked to
have seen here an historical discussion about the ways in which
they differ from, for example, all those paranoid and panic-inducing
films of the 1950s (many of which found their way into the schools)
about sex, venereal disease, drugs, dating, communism, the Bomb,
and the dangers of slovenly personal habits. This sections
concluding chapter draws on the examples of Benneton and the Body
Shop to argue that the moral appeals of advocacy advertising have
now invaded commodity advertising. Part four of Endless Propaganda
considers the themes of technological utopia and dystopia in advocacy
advertising by large corporations and the green movement and is
anchored by some considerations on the work of Paul Ricoeur. The
fifth and final part of the book invokes Baudrillard, not unsurprisingly,
for some concluding reflections on the staging of politics as
advertising, the suppression of debate and the general colonization
of the public sphere by propaganda and marketing.
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Can we get out of this place? After
all, propaganda may be endless, but popular tolerance for it isnt.
Rutherford spends some time talking about activists such as the
Vancouver-based Adbusters, practices such as "culture jamming"
and graffiti, and artists such as the celebrated American feminist
Barbara Kruger whose work operates in part through a critique
of contemporary advertising. In the last analysis, however, Rutherford
does not think such activist and artistic strategies are terribly
effective given the fact that real control of the media depends
on serious access to money and power. Many will agree with him
here; others might want to probe more deeply and ask how contemporary
social movements such as the Zapatistas have nonetheless managed
to gain significant ground through the international media. Relatedly,
there is no discussion at all in Endless Propaganda of
the fascinating ways in which international activists have used
the internet to get around some (certainly not all) of the limits
to debate in the corporate media and to form what some might argue
are alternative public spheres.
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More troubling is Rutherfords
account of "the populace" a rather passive and
undifferentiated lot who have learned that "tuning out"
propaganda and avoiding the electoral machine is the best that
can be made of a bad situation: "Increased propaganda, beyond
a certain point, will provoke neither compliance nor argument
but a collective turn-off, a psychic blindness and deafness that
resist efforts to sell any and all public goods." (255) As
in Baudrillard, there is, ultimately, No Way Out. This sense of
closure and pessimism is reinforced by an analysis of advocacy
ads that, in many cases, emphasizes a one-dimensional message.
Sometimes this works; Rutherford effectively points to the questions
and points of view that are systematically excluded from certain
campaigns such as those against drugs. Yet there is little sense
that ads, like other texts, might have multiple and unstable meanings,
or might be organized through more than one set of discourses.
Nor does he spend much time on advertising campaigns, such as
the recent one by a Canadian bank ("Can a bank change?"),
which are in part a response to sharp popular critique, in this
case of the banking sector. Sometimes, as in his discussion of
safe sex promotion, the analysis could have been much deeper and
more searching. Citing a journalistic account that claims that
"half of the nations 20-year-old gay men will contract
HIV during their lifetime," Rutherford
concludes that, "The extraordinary efforts to banish unsafe
sex from the gay community in the United States ultimately failed."
(113) Aside from the fact that both the statistic and the argument
are debatable, this analysis completely ignores the phenomenal
efforts by gay men and their allies to challenge the terms of
conventional public health discourse, to create explicit and erotic
safe sex materials, and to demand a say in setting AIDS
research and treatment agendas. In short, government anti-AIDS
campaigns (with all their serious problems) must be situated in
a broader context of deep contestation around how AIDS
is talked about in the public sphere. Despite the many thought-provoking
arguments throughout the book, Endless Propaganda at times
comes perilously close to a remaking of 1950s-style media manipulation
and conformity theory with Foucault, rather than the psychoanalytic
approaches popular in that decade, forming the chief theoretical
influence.
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Cynthia Wright
University of Toronto
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Bob Davis, Skills Mania: Snakeoil in our Schools? (Toronto:
Between the Lines 2000)
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BOB DAVISs 1995 book What ever
happened to high school history? Burying the Political Memory
of Youth: Ontario 1945-1995 made me a fan. In that book he
documented how history courses from 1949-1995 were replaced in
Ontarios curriculum by the "age of sociology"
courses. In contrast to this kind of history, Davis argued these
courses were devoid of content and societal goals worthy of studentss
consideration. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Daviss
latest effort, Skills Mania: Snakeoil in our Schools?.
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Daviss latest effort is divided
into eleven chapters and two appendices of course material from
his high school black history courses. The first three chapters
lay out his version of the skills philosophy and its threat to
democratic education while Chapters 4-11 focus on course examples
that combine content and skill in various disciplines. In his
introduction, Davis writes how this debate began.
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"The new curriculum advisors
said we should no longer teach history; we were to teach how to
do history (history skills), in case you ever needed it in your
job or wanted to do it in your spare time and one course
was enough for this shrunken purpose. This was my baptism as a
critic-in-embryo of the new skills education." (3)
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The debate whether skills or content
should guide education is as important as it is ancient. Socrates
and the Sophist school of Athens debated whether the goals of
education ought to be wisdom through reflection upon the content
of daily life or the cleverness to be gained in the skills of
rhetoric. While the Sophists sold certainty to students about
the worth of the skills they possessed, Socrates traded in doubt,
questioning the often unexamined ends to which people strove and
to which skills were applied. Daviss position in this debate
is clear.
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"... I object to ... the current
neglect of what these skills should be anchored in: content, conviction,
allegiances, real human beings and, in general, a commitment to
helping students understand history, learn about the world and
consider ways to make it a better place to live." (9)
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In Chapters 4-11 Davis offers classroom
project examples from his long experience as a teacher that combine
skills with meaningful content in history, English, psychology,
sociology, citizenship education, and elementary and high school
science. From these examples it is clear that Davis is an inspiring
teacher. His examples of lessons that artfully combine skills
and content, however, get lost in tangents harmful to his main
point. Chapter 4 for example deals with English. In this chapter,
starting from the beginning, we learn of an inspiring American
mentor getting fired from a southern US
school for handing out candy, a poem written by a student for
the mentor, the authors brothers disappointment with
a teachers feedback in the 1950s, reflections on past classroom
texts, before ending with a students exam answer to exemplify
the worthwhile work possible when students encounter stimulating
content. No specific examples of competing English curriculum
guidelines or objectives are examined, no understanding of the
subtleties of the debate are rendered. Rather, as with other chapters,
too much patience is asked of readers subjected to unrelated anecdotes
that diminish the authors examples to illustrate how skills
and content need not and should not be mutually exclusive.
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While Daviss book is an attempt
to "resist this eras claims that curriculum content
and student conviction be kept out of school," the existence
and extent of those claims remain unclear. (14) Davis quotes American
William Spady, a skill-centred education advocate from a 1993
Ontario conference address. Spady argued that school subjects
should be replaced by domains of competency: Verbal, Qualitative,
Technical, Strategic, Social, and Evaluative. (13) A cursory check
of Ontarios recently revised curriculum indicates that Spady
has been unsuccessful. Textbooks approved by the government of
Ontario for Grade 10, for example, include "Canadian history
in the 20th Century," "Civics," "Career Studies,"
"English," "Math," and "Science."
(www.curriculum.org) Davis quotes a 1990 government report, prepared
by 19 company presidents, 7 politicians, 5 academics, and 3 trade
unionists to further provide the reader with a sense of the eras
claims to which he is opposed.
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"With the advent of new information-based
technology and the shift to a more flexible and multi-skilled
workforce, employers are finding that generic workplace skills
are becoming increasingly important relative to job-specific skills.
Generic skills ... include analytical, problem solving, workplace
interpersonal skills...." (7)
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Course descriptions in Ontario
indicate that content and theory have withstood, thus far the
opinions of academics and business interests with majority status
on government committees that lack teacher representation. (www.curriculum.org)
Davis himself parenthetically acknowledges that "... many
teachers ... thankfully support the stress on topics." (34)
By failing to provide evidence for the existence and extent of
the skills mania that he opposes, Davis undermines his own argument
that a skills mania, rather than the well documented correlations
between socioeconomic status and school performance, threatens
accessible education. Unrestrained by a clearly defined debate
to address, at times Daviss claims are simply irresponsible:
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At its worst, then, collaboration in
group learning [in classrooms] may produce collaborators with
business who operate like collaborators did in World War II: the
tune is called entirely by the big piper youre collaborating
with. (34)
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Daviss book exemplifies a
need for the skills of scholarship. The book contains many claims
and few references. Among many examples, claims that CEOs
send their kids to private schools, "skills zealots"
are eroding meaning from education and "big corporations
which spend millions retraining staff in attitude shifts, will
cheerfully advise government that teacher retraining is an unnecessary
thrill!" leave readers unfamiliar with Daviss anecdotes
unconvinced. (7, 19, 186) Editorial sloppiness and poor writing
further undermine the persuasive quality of this work.
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"Now a very interesting thing
about Snow: I had forgotten what he said his original title was;
he was interested in things that really surprised me. It is shown
by this quote." (153)
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Fifteen pages later, the reader
is asked to "recall that he [Snow] had meant to title the
essay The Rich and the Poor." (168)
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The final chapter is the strongest
of the book. The weakness of the previous chapters are overcome
with a clearly focused question, "Why should we turn away
from the skills mania and what should we try instead?" Drawing
form Arendt, Einstein, Globe and Mail columnist Rick Salutin,
and educator Eleanor Duckworth, Davis argues that education must
be anchored
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"... in people, in their minds,
in their history, in their common bonds, in their lives as integrated
wholes...." (191) His kind of school would be one that "in
the words of radical Canadian educator George Martell ... educates
all students for personal integrity, challenging work, meaningful
citizenship and the pursuit of social justice." (202)
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Of course, many whom Davis would
consider "skills zealots" and "right wingers"
also believe in this vision for schools. The weakness of this
book is that Davis fails to document how schools are failing this
vision, to specify to what degree skills mania actually exists,
and to provide a balanced rendering of the debate so that readers
can themselves judge the state of affairs and measure what Davis
has to offer.
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Kent den Heyer
University of British Columbia
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L. Ian MacDonald, ed., Free Trade: Risks and Rewards (Montreal
and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press 2000)
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THIS EDITED VOLUME is a set of proceedings
from Free Trade@10, a conference organized by the McGill Institute
for the Study of Canada, held in Montreal, in June of 1999. The
editor of the volume claims to "provide a historical framework
for the ongoing discussion of economic and environmental issues."
Although the volume does indeed meet this lofty goal, it does
not do so in the way that was probably intended.
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Free Trade: Risks and Rewards
contains a dazzling array of contributors that is largely made
up of what could be considered the North American political elite.
The volume boasts several pieces featuring the views and opinions
of formerly and currently elected officials including George Bush
Sr., Brian Mulroney, John Turner, Michael Wilson, Bob Rae, Jean
Charest, Donald MacDonald, John Crosbie, and Pierre Marc Johnson.
There is also a strong representation of non-elected government
officials involved in the processes of continental economic integration
including such notables as James Baker III,
Simon Reisman, Carla Hill, and Clayton Yeutter. Moreover, the
Canadian business elite including Thomas dAquino (head of
the Business Council on National Issues) participated in the conference
and make contributions to the volume.
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While the list of members of the
North American political and economic elite is impressive, it
is unfortunate that in most cases, the calibre of these chapters
is unable to match the cachet of the names behind them. To be
fair though, it must be noted that the vast majority of these
pieces that laud the implementation of continental free markets
appear to be direct transcriptions of speeches that were delivered
at the conference. As a result, the celebratory, a-theoretical
"show and tell" is understandable, though still disappointing.
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More importantly and even more
telling is the general tone of the chapters coming from the policy-making
and business communities. Jim Stanford, one of the participants,
remarks at the beginning of his chapter that the primary purpose
of the conference seems to be "an opportunity for mutual
congratulation and back patting" rather than a serious and
critical discussion of the issues at hand. Pictures interspersed
within the volume of the "big-name" conference participants
reflect the victory of style over substance and are reminiscent
of a research centre brochure or high school yearbook. The book
is replete with references to the progressive vision of the political
leaders who pushed for free trade, clichés about the role
of political will in the process of realizing free trade, and
disdain for those who in any way questioned the prudence of a
free-trade deal. Perhaps most guilty of this unreflexive cheerleading
is dAquino, whose salute to Presidents Reagan and Bush and
Prime Minister Mulroney is almost enough to make the most seasoned
of sycophants blush. Mulroneys contribution is equally wince-inducing
as he attempts to justify his place in history as an economic
visionary way ahead of his time, to replace his current standing
as the most despised politician in Canadian history. This is not
to say though that the chapters by the policy and business communities
are completely without merit. In particular, Victor Lichtingers
(founding executive director of the NAFTA
Commission for Environmental Co-operation) short paper on NAFTA
and its institutional environmental safeguards comes across as
a beacon of honesty and critical engagement with the shortcomings
of North American continental economic integration.
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The chapters in the volume written
by academics and those involved in the trade union and other civil
society movements generally offer more sophisticated and compelling
explorations of free trade and its consequences for Canada. Many
of the contributors to the volume make reference to John McCallums
report regarding the economic consequences of free trade on Canada
which is included as an appendix. Michael Hart is able to give
some historical depth to the concept of free trade in Canada.
Jim Stanford and Gerald Larose give critical assessments from
the standpoint of Canadian workers of the impact of free trade
in Canada while Andrew Jackson emphasizes the differences between
the myth and reality of trade liberalization by zeroing in on
macro-economic indicators. David Schorr provides an interesting
assessment of the tensions between sustainable development and
the NAFTA system. Richard Lipsey and Guy
Stanley offer chapters that are as thought-provoking as they are
unabashedly pro-free trade and pro-neoliberalism. Stanley truly
distinguishes himself by being the only author in the volume to
devote sufficient attention to the ideology/praxis nexus. As a
result, these chapters make up for much of the analytical poverty
of the policy and business community contributions.
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The importance of Free Trade:
Risks and Rewards comes not so much from the merits of individual
chapters as from what the reader can take away in aggregate. This
volume not only provides a framework for ongoing discussions of
economic and environmental issues but also reveals the actual
framework within which issues are discussed among the North American
political and economic elite, or are defined as outside discussion
altogether. The problematic nature of this framework should be
quite apparent to the reflective reader. For example, most of
the contributors on NAFTA miss the point
that the legacy of this agreement is not free trade or its dispute-settlement
procedures but rather the Chapter 11 provisions which essentially
usurp popular sovereignty in favour of corporate profit. The inattentive
silence on this issue is almost deafening.
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This volume offers incredible insights
into who is allowed to speak with authority on the issue of free
trade. Unsurprisingly limited to the upper strata of North American
society, with a heavy bias towards American and Canadian authorities,
it is also predominantly men, with male contributors to the volume
outnumbering their female counterparts at over 14 to 1. This glaring
imbalance says much about the gender divisions that still exist
today. Furthermore, policy/corporate contributors outnumber their
civil society/trade unionist counterparts by almost 8 to 1, another
reflection of current asymmetries of power within North American
society. This volume also clearly illustrates that with a few
exceptions, free-market fundamentalism, the worlds newest
and most powerful religion, has a firm grip on the elite of North
American society.
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In brief, Free Trade: Risks
and Rewards meets and surpasses its lofty goal of providing
a framework for the exploration of economic and environmental
issues by revealing the current theory and practice in North American
trade. It is a must read for anyone interested in the history
of North American free trade and the history of neoliberalism
in Canada, particularly those who approach these issues from a
critical perspective. It offers important insights into how members
of the North American policy and corporate elite have constructed
a highly problematic discussion of free trade and its effects.
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Kyle Grayson
York University
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George Emery & J.C. Herbert Emery, A Young Mans Benefit:
The Independent Order of Odd Fellows and Sickness Insurance in
the United States and Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queens
University Press 1999)
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THE MIDDLE OF THE 19th century witnessed
the proliferation of "friendly societies" in North America
fraternal orders that provided insurance, typically sickness
and funeral benefits, along with their more general aims of promoting
friendship and character development among their members. These
societies grew substantially until the World War I era, at which
point most entered into a long steady decline during which their
insurance benefits became quite peripheral to the organization
if not discontinued altogether. The class composition of these
societies, and their role in working-class formation has been
much debated, but there are large gaps in the literature, with
very few studies examining any of these societies over any appreciable
period of time.
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A Young Mans Benefit
begins to address this lacuna. It is based upon a case study of
the Independent Order of Odd Fellows (IOOF),
the largest of the friendly societies with some 1.9 million North
American members at its peak in 1921. The Emerys do not attempt
to provide a history of the IOOF; their
focus is on the sickness benefit. From 1863 to 1929 this benefit
was a right of every member, at which point it became an optional
benefit with many IOOF local branches no
longer providing it. The central objective of the book is to elucidate
the reasons behind its decline. The authors aim in this
is explicitly revisionist in that they want to challenge existing
explanations for this decline and the pro-welfare-state
assumptions that underpin them (one of the authors is an economist,
seemingly of the neoclassical variety).
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Existing explanations point, in
varying combinations, to the unsound financial practices of friendly
societies, the Great Depression, and to competition from more
efficient commercial insurance and government programs. All, the
Emerys note, implicitly assume that the need for sickness insurance
was at least constant from the mid-1800s onward (the pro-welfare-state
assumption), and increased over an adults life span
since sickness tends to increase with age making it an "old
mans benefit." The Emerys concur that the incidence
of sickness increases with age, but contend that the need for
sickness benefits among friendly society members actually declined
with age, since they could turn to savings (self-insurance) and/or
the earnings of family members (family insurance) to replace the
income lost due to illness. Consequently, the sickness benefit
was really a "young mans benefit," and as the
Odd Fellows membership aged, internal support for the sickness
benefit waned and this explains its decline.
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The early chapters of the book
provide an overview of the beginnings of the IOOF
in North America, its internal organization and governing bodies,
and examine in some detail the people who comprised its membership
up to the late 1920s. Analysing the membership records of a number
of local branches in BC and Ontario in
the early 1900s, they show that in addition to being overwhelmingly
Protestant, white males (the code of laws were explicit on the
latter two requirements; women were confined to an auxiliary),
the IOOF membership was comprised primarily
of skilled workers and clerks/shopkeepers, although the relative
size of these two groups varied quite substantially among branches.
While never stating it explicitly, the intent here is to establish
the presumption that the typical Odd Fellows income was
sufficient to allow for the possibility of "self-insurance."
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They then turn to the IOOF
benefit system and the reasons for its decline, devoting most
of their attention to challenging the conventional explanations
for it. They allow that the benefit system did have some actuarial
shortcomings: it lacked a centralized pool of funds (each branch
was responsible for funding the benefit claims of its members),
and the IOOFs flat-rate dues structure,
the main source of revenue to fund the sickness benefit, precluded
use of "risk-based" assesments. Nonetheless, they argue
that the system was efficient; using volunteers (members) to recruit
members kept overhead costs low; the requirement that a designated
IOOF member (who could require evidence
of illness) visit claimants before any payment was made controlled
for moral hazard; and age-related initiation fees discouraged
older men (with a higher likelihood of sickness) from joining.
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This argument is reinforced by
a re-examination of key financial reports which purportedly showed
that many IOOF branches faced financial
ruin. This suggests that the danger was much exaggerated, as they
typically substantially underestimated branch revenue while overstating
the cost associated with the sickness benefit. The Emerys also
analyse the financial records of 27 local branches in British
Columbia between 1890 and 1929, all of which paid the maximum
allowed sickness benefit. Employing sophisticated actuarial techniques
to assess the financial status of these branches, they provide
evidence showing that all but two branches had sufficient funds
to cover claims, and that the probability of any of them confronting
financial ruin was extremely low. As for competition, they point
out that the IOOF faced few competitors
in its core "market" of skilled workers, clerks, and
shopkeepers prior to 1915, and most did not provide comparable
benefits. But, in any case, the IOOFs
sickness benefit began to decline much earlier, in the early 1890s
when branches were exempted from the decision (made at the start
of the decade) requiring them to pay a specified minimum benefit,
and the ensuing years saw further exemptions of various types,
as well as a steady decline in the real value of the average benefit
received by IOOF members.
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Finally, the Emerys examine the
membership records of six Canadian IOOF
branches roughly between 1895 and 1925 to directly substantiate
their argument that the real explanation for the decline of the
sickness benefit lies in its loss of support among the IOOFs
aging membership. To this end they employ a statistical technique
called cliometrics (quite appropriately I was assured by
a colleague well versed in it) to calculate a members probability
of leaving the IOOF for each year that
he remains a member. The analysis reveals that this probability
does increase (statistically) significantly with each year of
membership, and this, they contend, substantiates the claim that
the sickness benefit is really a young mans benefit.
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Unfortunately, it really doesnt.
To begin, a look at the actual data (Fig.6.1, 114) reveals that
the statistical finding is an artifact of the fact that the probability
of leaving increases so dramatically from year one of membership
until year five; from year six to 30 it steadily declines. Secondly,
this analysis tells us absolutely nothing about why members
left. The Emerys claim that it was because they no longer needed
the benefit, but they have no evidence of this. It is moreover
implausible; we are asked to believe, for example, that some 25
per cent of IOOF members, who overwhelmingly
joined while in their 20s, could, within five years of joining,
turn to their savings or their childrens income to replace
income lost to sickness. Indeed, when the authors looked at which
branches chose to make the sickness benefit optional in 1925,
they concluded that branches with "older" members (the
measure is indirect, but it is the authors inference) are
no more likely to have done this that those with "younger"
members. This may perhaps explain the odd location of this analysis
in the middle of the chapter on the financial status of the IOOF.
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At the same time, the Emerys
arguments that the decline of the sickness benefit cannot be attributed
to flawed administration, the rise of competitors, or financial
collapse, at least through to the mid-1920s, are quite persuasive.
How, then, might it be explained? Ironically, the book supplies
much of the answer. The more historical analysis of the IOOFs
benefit system shows clearly that the financial status of the
benefit system was an ongoing concern with a good number of branches
in some financial difficulty at any time. It would seem, as pro-welfare-state
analysts assumed, that the need of IOOF
members for sickness benefit repeatedly exceeded their financial
capacities to meet it. To their credit, the IOOF
made themselves aware of the problem, considered various alternatives
and invariably decided that the only practical way to deal with
it was to reduce the benefit in one way or another, solving one
problem by exacerbating another. The onset of the Depression can
only have made matters worse, but any analysis of the ensuing
trajectory of the sickness benefit would at least have to take
into account the growth of the welfare state and changes in the
class composition of the friendly societies.
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Donald Swartz
Carleton University
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Jo Ann E. Argersinger, Making the Amalgamated: Gender, Ethnicity,
and Class in the Baltimore Clothing Industry, 1899-1939. (Baltimore:
John Hopkins University Press 1999)
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JO ANN ARGERSINGER offers readers a refreshing
perspective on the growth and development of American unions during
the pre-World War II period. The book focuses
on the rise and fall of Baltimores mens clothing industry
and the endeavours of its ethnically and gender-divided labour
force to gain union recognition. The needle trades have a disreputable
history: low wages, economic instability, a reliance on immigrant
and female labour, and cut-throat competition between large manufacturing
firms and small contract shops. American historians such as Eileen
Boris, Steve Fraser, Alice Kessler-Harris, Susan Glenn, and many
others have written extensively on the same subjects. However,
what makes Argersingers study unique is the in-depth focus
on the needle trades in a city prominent in the industry.
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Argersinger is familiar with the
citys labour history. In New Deal in Baltimore, she
examined the citys unionization experiences during Roosevelts
New Deal. Now, she turns her attention to the garment industry.
The author sets out to examine the "interplay among politics
and reform, regional market shares and economic policy, and community
building and political mobilization in an urban setting."
(4) The central role of the Amalgamated in Baltimore makes it
an excellent choice for the study of the relationship between
the industrys economic vitality and the unions evolution.
Her research is based on evidence from union records, local newspapers,
government documents, and to a limited extent, trade publications,
personal papers, and interviews with some ACW
(Amalgamated Clothing Workers) leadership in Baltimore.
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The book begins with a look at
the needle trades during the late-19th century and ends with an
epilogue that outlines the present state of the garment unions
now shaped by conditions in a global economy. However, the main
focus of the study is on the mens clothing industry as it
gained prominence after World War I. Jo Ann Argersinger argues
that her approach is particularly well suited, examining "all
the processes attendant upon building a union even as it unravels
the complex connection affecting the workplace and the market."(5)
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These were the formative years
for the Amalgamated. The union arose in 1914 out of the rank-and-file
demand for industrial-based unions in the needle trades. Politically
the union was a strong supporter of the "new unionism."
As Steve Fraser, the biographer of long-time international union
President Sidney Hillman, pointed out in his book Labor Will
Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor:
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Hillman and the ACW
came of age at, and were shaped by, the momentous historical juncture
of two vastly different systems of work and social hierarchy.
On the one side stood the circumscribed intimacies of craft producers
and skilled labour, family enterprise, local industries producing
for local markets, immemorial customs, and personalized authority;
on the other, semiskilled operative, bureaucratic hierarchy, functional
management of anonymous corporations supplying far flung markets
with standardized products, and the impersonal regime of rules.(144)
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These systems of work and their corresponding social hierarchy
were reflected in two very different ideas of unionism and industrial
democracy: the craft unionism of the AFL
United Garment Workers (UGW) and the industrial
unionism of the ACW. Argersinger documents
the transformation as both forms of unionism played out during
these years.
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The ACWs
new unionism promised an inclusionary union where brothers and
sisters stood arm in arm against the harsh conditions set by the
employers in the trade. In the large production centers of Chicago,
New York, Baltimore, and Rochester, Hillman and the ACW
focused their efforts to rationalize labour relations and create
co-managed production standards that would establish industrial
peace and economic growth. In 1914, one of Baltimores largest
mens clothing companies, Sonneborn, offered Hillman an opportunity
to co-manage their factory. Jo Ann Argersinger depicts that moment
and then, as economic conditions in the industry declined, she
shows how the outcome of their efforts is placed in jeopardy.
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In Making the Amalgamated,
Arger-singer presents a detailed examination of the industrys
growth and decline, over one of the most interesting periods of
the Amalgamateds history. The study depicts the tensions
between the rank-and-file (mainly female) and the union leadership
(mostly male). In closely charting these tensions at a local level,
the author shows the interconnections between the local unions
successes and the industrys economic viability. By focusing
on the economic viability of Baltimores garment industry,
Argersinger is able to make visible the daily effect of the logic
of capitalist enterprise as it influenced ACW
union practices. This approach offers both an opportunity and
a challenge for the author.
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The books description of
union relations at an organizational level reveals the structural
restraints and situational opportunities provided in these years.
The authors description of how local trade unionists navigate
their way through the relations of power generated at the central
office of the union is invaluable. The organizational dilemma
posed by a fragmented labour force was/is a troublesome concern
for many unions and while it must be resolved at the local level,
union building was not just a local affair. Union rules were frequently
set by national leaders outside the local. The study of Baltimore
needle trades provides an opportunity to examine how the various
social relations of power, generated from different locations,
connect at a local level. The author describes these tensions
extremely well. However, the work is also restricted because Argersinger
does not focus on a larger analytical context to explain the tensions
she documents here. She does little to situate the union in the
larger Baltimore political/union community. Instead, her focus
remains squarely on the internal politics of the ACW
in Baltimore.
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This research becomes somewhat
problematic in the chapter, "Sisters in the Amalgamated."
Argersinger shows that while ethnic and gender differences served
as effective union recruitment tools, at the same time they "also
impeded the achievement of a larger unity within the union."
(71) However, the authors analysis of the actual circumstances
in which race and gender played a role in the shops is limited,
as both have little active voice. This is partially a result of
the limited range of her sources. She claims her "research
challenges those studies that suggest that all women responded
similarly to inequality in unions or that limit womens aspirations
to fantasias of mass culture or vision of home and hearth,"
(5) but in this chapter of the book her focus on the union movements
internal politics hampers Argersingers ability to provide
a larger analytical framework for working class gender dynamics
during these years. As the author documents womens fight
for separate locals, she argues that "Political, economic,
and social changes in the post war environment, along with the
concerns among union men about womens visibility in the
ACW, figured prominently in making separate
institutions more suspect and susceptible to rejection."(119)
Yet she provides only limited evidence to support this assertion
and does not analyse how separatist organizing strategies were
influenced by the predominant ideologies of the period. After
the defeat of womens locals, trade union women took advantage
of trade union education programmes to draw women into the union
community, making the programmes a central site of gender struggles
in the union. Did womens experience in separate locals facilitate
their work in the mainstream of the union? How did the transformation
of womens place in the larger society alter trade union
womens trade union strategies? If far more of Baltimores
needle trades women held skilled jobs than was true in other centers,
did this affect how women participated in the union there? Were
gender struggles in Baltimore played out any differently than
in New York or Toronto? Unfortunately, she does not provide insights
about how womens working-class culture contributed to womens
sense of themselves inside the union. Jo Ann Argersinger gives
the reader a rich descriptive narrative of womens experience,
but the book falls short of explaining ongoing male resistance
to womens equality in the ACW.
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The books strength lies in
its ability to show the complex relationships between the economic
viability of the needle trades and the unions success and
failure. The books focus on the internal politics of the
Amalgamated in the context of market changes makes it useful to
both labour and business historians. While the case study of the
Amalgamated in Baltimore offers a rich narrative of the tensions,
it fails to provide answers to the larger question it raises.
It will be up to future researchers to build on the rich history.
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Mercedes Steedman
Laurentian University
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James R. Barrett William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American
Radicalism (Chicago: University of Illinois Press 1999); and
Albert Vetere Lannon Second String Red: The Life of Al Lannon,
American Communist (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books 1999)
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SINCE THE DEMISE of the Soviet Union there
has been a small explosion in the volume of work published concerning
many aspects of Soviet-United States relations. Diplomatic historians
have been taking full advantage of the new opportunities afforded
by the opening of Soviet archives to write several rich histories.
However, access to documents previously unavailable has not only
led to more comprehensiveness but also made earlier simplistic
stories more complex. In some ways, following on the coat-tails
of these new diplomatic studies, there has been a smaller outburst
of published work detailing the history of American Communism.
New access to archives has also made these current histories of
American Communism not only richer but also much more intricate
than previously published work. Two recent publications within
this new genre of American Communism studies, James R. Barretts
William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism and
Albert Vetere Lannons Second String Red: The Life of
Al Lannon, American Communist, add much more to our understanding
of both American Communism and radicalism in the 20th century.
A comparison of these two biographies is useful because while
the two men occupied different levels within the American Communist
Party (CPUSA), both suffered similar lives
of hardship and persecution while remaining loyal to their ideological
roots.
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The first question that must be
answered in a review of James R. Barretts work on William
Z. Foster must be, why the need for a second major study of Foster
so soon after publication of Edward P. Johanningsmeiers
Forging American Communism: The Life of William Z. Foster?
Appearing in 1994, Johanningsmeiers study, taking advantage
of new access to Soviet archives, details, if somewhat ponderously,
Fosters significant impact on 20th century American Communism,
radicalism, and the labour movement. Although both historians
used many of the same sources, including Fosters papers
in Moscow, the answer to the question lies not so much in the
area of expanding our knowledge of the late National Chairman
of the CPUSA, but rather in the area of
emphasis. Stated quite simply, not only is Barretts biography
more readable than Johanningsmeiers, but it is also more
nuanced. The earlier of the two biographies states that the Cominterns
influence over Foster was important, but not perhaps as important
as Fosters roots stretching back to his early organizing
days and belief in a French version of syndicalism. While Barrett
partially agrees with Johanningsmeiers contention, he also
plainly states that the key to understanding Foster is to appreciate
the balance between the two forces that shaped much of his life:
directives from Moscow on one hand and uniquely American working-class
circumstances on the other. "In this regard, I differ from
Johanningsmeier, who argues, Once Fosters Communism
is grounded in the history of modern American radicalism the influence
of the Comintern becomes less important.... On the contrary,
the essence of Fosters radical experience lies precisely
at the juncture between these two great influences in his life."
(4) The difference is an important one and Barrett returns to
it throughout his work by frequently stressing the significance
of international Communist policy on Fosters thinking.
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Barretts biography of William
Z. Foster, as suggested by the title of the work, serves two main
functions. It is both a biography and a detailed account of the
American radicalism. Although the opening chapter of the book,
covering the years from Fosters birth in 1881 to his becoming
politically active in 1904, is rather bereft of significant detail
(both Barrett and Johanningsmeiere state that little has been
left to historians concerning Fosters early life), the remainder
of the work is replete with information. All of the stages and
ideological changes in Fosters life are chronicled: early
support of syndicalism and the Industrial Workers of the World
(IWW), effective organizing during and
after World War I (most notably during the Great Steel Strike
of 1919), support for the radical Trade Union Educational League
(TUEL), infighting with Earl Browder at
the highest levels of the CPUSA, falling
in and out (and in again and out again and finally in again) of
favour with Comintern, increasing alienation from the American
working class and the final days in Moscow before his death there
in 1961. Barrett suggests throughout that although Foster was
in many ways a complicated man, he found himself in increasingly
complex situations, especially after 1920. These were often caused
by the strain of trying to juggle directives from Moscow with
what best appeared to him for American workers. In his final years
Foster increasingly sided with Moscow and this would ultimately
lead not only to his isolation from the CPUSA
but also from his beloved American working class.
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Barretts work contributes
perhaps its most useful function to readers when it is fulfilling
its second purpose, providing a history of American radicalism
in the first half of the 20th century. As has already been stated,
one of Fosters main dilemmas, especially after 1945, was
juggling Moscow directives with the apparent need of American
workers. This, in a much larger sense, was also a major problem
for radical individuals and organizations throughout the United
States. The pervasive nature of the Red scare atmosphere that
dominated America in post-World War II
years did not lend itself to radical industrial organizing, something
that Foster had been committed to for much of his life. For American
unions and radicals this meant the choice of either becoming more
conservative or being left out in the cold. William Z. Foster,
according to Barrett, chose to remain loyal to his earlier strict
Leninist ideals while many key members of the CPUSA
and important American unions chose to move to the right. This
overall move to the right, leaving Foster and a few other radicals
isolated on the left, would have an enormously negative impact
on American workers in the years following his death in 1961.
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Barretts biography ultimately
avoids being emphatically sympathetic or unsympathetic towards
its main topics, Foster and American radicalism. Rather than provide
the reader with a clear bias, the strength of Barretts work
lies in its nuanced approach to complex subjects. However, perhaps
quite importantly, the author does provide a slight glimpse of
his biases in the conclusion. "If William Z. Fosters
life story can be seen as a tragedy, then we might ask ourselves
if it is not an American tragedy as well as a personal one. Many
of the problems that moved Foster in sometimes erratic political
directions are still with us. It is in the struggle to find solutions
to them that we continually create our own history." (277)
After writing such a well-balanced account, the author can perhaps
be forgiven for one small expression of personal opinion.
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Writing biography, as has been
suggested by many historians, poses certain unique difficulties.
If this is indeed the case then writing about ones own father
must bring with it its own set of distinct problems. The strength
of Albert Vetere Lannons Second String Red: The Life
of Al Lannon, American Communist, lies partially in the fact
that the author was unable to write such an unbiased biography
of his father. In a similar fashion to Barretts work on
Foster, Lannon describes his father not so much as a complex individual,
but rather as someone who often found himself in complicated situations.
The author never shirks his responsibilities as an historian and
chronicles several episodes from Lannons life that do not
throw an appealing light on his father. Referring to himself throughout
in the third person, the author manages to keep his own views
out of the story until the very end. However he does allow himself,
in a rather touching last chapter titled "A Sons Reflection,"
to bring his own unique perspectives to bear on trying to understand
Al Lannon as both father and Communist. This biography is only
strengthened by this somewhat unusual but distinctly insightful
last chapter.
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Written in a refreshingly straightforward
prose style, Albert Vetere Lannons biography chronicles
the life of a man who spent most of his days in poverty. From
his birth in 1907 until his death 62 years later, Al Lannon never
moved out of the ranks of the working class. He often fought passionately
for the rights of this same class. This also meant that he and
his family would endure considerable hardships until the very
end. Any negative feelings that Lannon may hold towards his father
concerning this situation are not revealed in the study. Al Lannon
was a committed member of both the National Maritime Union (NMU)
and the CPUSA, and even after 1945 remained
fiercely loyal to both Communism and his beloved Soviet Union.
During the Red Scare years of the 1950s Lannon would spend time
in prison for his political beliefs (thus the title of this biography)
and yet never wavered in his revolutionary commitment to radical
social change in America. Towards the end of his life he fell
out of favour with the CPUSA and apart
from a brief comeback at the CPs
1969 Los Angeles convention, spent many of his last years in political
exile. His health had been poor for some time and it would be
his eighth heart attack that would kill Al Lannon in 1969.
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Perhaps the primary significance
of both of these biographies is the simple fact that they disabuse
many of the Cold War myths that remain throughout American society.
The nature of domestic Communism during the Cold War era has been
hotly debated by historians for many years, and with new access
to Soviet archives the debate has recently taken on renewed vigour.
Al Lannon, while remaining loyal to the Soviet Union throughout
his life, fought courageously for American workers. In a political
climate far more hostile than the one many so-called radicals
find themselves in today, Lannon placed fighting for workers
rights above his own health, financial comfort, and maybe even
above his own family.
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The lives of Al Lannon and William
Z. Foster run parallel to each other on many levels. Both men
lived in poverty for much of their lives, travelled around the
country and worked at an early age, remained fiercely loyal to
the CPUSA and Soviet Union, and were persecuted
under the Smith Act (ill health alone prevented Foster from serving
prison time). But perhaps most importantly of all both Al Lannon
and William Z. Foster can be best remembered for fighting courageously
for the rights of American workers. The climate of the country
was often hostile as Lannon attempted to organize sailors in the
1930s and Foster steel workers in 1919, and yet both men were
successful in improving the lives of many.
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Albert Vetere Lannon and James
Barrett have written important biographies. Barrett has been able
to bring to life and add complexity to the story of a well known
American Communist. Lannon has done much the same for a lesser
known, but in many ways equally important person from the history
of 20th century American radicalism. Biography, for many years
ignored by labour historians in the United States, has been making
a comeback of sorts recently. If we are to understand the full
scope of the American experience in the 20th century, then there
must be a place for biography alongside studies of the rank and
file, labour organizations, and communities. These two works are
welcome additions to this most recent trend in working-class history.
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Steven Cotterill
West Virginia University
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Jessica Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists,
Anticommunism and the Cold War (Chapel Hill and London: University
of North Carolina Press 1999)
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PROFESSOR JESSICA WANGs book is the
most detailed and scholarly account of the sociopolitical relations
of science and the history of a critical period, 1945 to 1950,
which was to leave its imprint on the future and to become the
basis of our age of anxiety. Her book is an important contribution
to understanding the global problems of today.
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There is great merit in the authors
choice of the period 1945-1950 to analyse the relationship between
science and politics. With the dropping of the atomic bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 the future was forever altered
and the age of anxiety firmly established. As Robert Oppenheimer
later admitted, the scientists who built the bomb and supported
its military use had known sin. Professor Wangs book is
a major contribution to understanding the dynamics of that time,
the focus of a hysterical nativism against communism, and the
obsession with secrecy. In this period the roots of the future
were planted and the complex relations between science and politics
became the engine of history driving us into the troubled times
of the present. The communist target of nativism became a global
policy of the US to complete the ideological
cleansing of the world and globalize capitalism with the US
as the leader. In effect, the essence of nativism was globalized,
with Pax America to enforce it.
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The events of that critical period
led directly to the decades of the Cold War, the ultimate demise
of the Soviet Union , and the emergence of a unipolar world. It
conventionalized the huge nuclear arsenals of the US
and Russia, creating the ultimate threat to global survival. It
spawned the spread of civil nuclear power and, through its fatal
link with the military, it led to the current problems of nuclear
proliferation. The US became a global security
state dedicated to the continued containment of Russia and China
with operationalized programs to fight and win a nuclear war,
including the first use of nuclear weapons. It also led NATO
to adopt its global agenda. At the same time it spawned a world
movement dedicated to the abolition of nuclear weapons.
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America, born out of a revolution,
became the leading anti-revolutionary state in the world. Most
of us are familiar with the rampant anti-communism of the post-World
War II period quickly evolving to the period
of the Cold War and beyond the demise of the Soviet Union to the
policy of ideological cleansing in the 1990s. As the author states,
"Long before the onset of the Cold War, anti-radical nativism
was already a familiar part of American politics." (4) The
targets of these politics were radical movements, elements of
FDRs New Deal, and the labour movement.
Nativism is the ideology that rejects all foreign influence while
focusing on communism as the target of its venom. It demands unconditional
loyalty. Anything less is un-American. It places America first,
foremost, and forever, with its self-identification of being Number
One.
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It was the impact of the Great
Depression in the 1930s that radicalized both the labour movement
and elements of the scientific community and their organizations.
It was in this period that the American Association of Scientific
Workers (AASW), composed of scientists
on the progressive liberal left, was formed in the US
and Britain. They not only questioned the capacity of capitalism
to produce social justice, but organized in opposition to the
rise of fascism in Europe. That social elites like scientists
would identify themselves as a part of labour, i.e. scientific
workers, speaks directly to their left-wing ideology. Later, in
the period following the atomic bombings, the Federation of American
Scientists (FAS) emerged from an earlier
organization first appearing in the 1930s.Also the American Association
for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) was
formed and the new journal, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,
first appeared.
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It is of interest that decades
later a World Federation of Scientific Workers (WFSW)
emerged. This author participated in a failed attempt to form
a Canadian affiliate in the late 1950s following a visit by Professor
J.D. Bernal to Montreal. More recently, he attended the Millennium
Conference held at the University of Regina, August 2000, where
representatives of the 60-nation WFSW met
with Canadian and American delegates in the hope of attracting
affiliates from these latter countries.
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Professor Wang correctly identifies
a powerful theme in American social and political life. This is
the phenomenon of "nativism." The hysteria derived from
nativism, with its "Red scare" component is evident
in the case of the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. In part,
in sentencing them to death, Judge Irving R. Kaufman stated, "your
conduct ... has already caused, in my opinion, the communist aggression
in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000 and,
who knows, but that millions of innocent people may pay the price
of your treason." Later evidence proved that the information
supplied by the defendants was not critical to the Soviet nuclear
bomb program. Decades later, on the floor of the House on 8 June
1999, Congressman Dana Rohrabacker, responding to Energy Secretary
Hazel OLearys massive declassification of so-called
"secrets," stated "This is worse than the Rosenbergs....
This is someone who has a fanatical anti-American attitude, in
a position to hand over to our enemies secrets that put our young
people and our country in jeopardy.... Those who benefited most
were the minions of the Peoples Republic of China, the Communist
Chinese." This equates a rational process of declassification
with treason. The US is hysterical about secrecy. By 1999 they
had almost 90 million secrets in their classification system.
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The case of Dr. Wen Ho Lee came
after Professor Jessica Wangs book was published. In regard
to this case, C. Paul Robinson, director of Sandia National Laboratories,
described the magnitude of Lees alleged offence: "These
tapes could truly change the worlds strategic balance....
These tapes would allow the design of weapons that would kill
several million people if a single weapon was detonated in a city."
The claim about changing the worlds strategic balance is
so ridiculous as to be outrageous. Professor Wang provides us
with an early case of which this reviewer was unaware. In 1955
the US deported Tsian Henueshan, a Cal
Tech professor and one of the worlds experts in rocketry,
on the grounds of his friendship with a member of the American
Communist Party. Ironically, the excessive zeal of anti-communism
turned out to be a gift to China. Professor Henueshan became director
of Chinas ballistic missile development, now beginning to
haunt the US. The obsession with secrecy
combines nativism, the "Red scare," and even a strong
strain of racism that persists in American culture.
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An extreme example of nativism
was a statement by the late US Senator
Richard Russell, "If we have to start again with Adam and
Eve, then I want them to be Americans, not Russians, and I want
them on this continent, not in Europe." One might note he
didnt mean Canada or Mexico. This paranoid statement reflected
the organizational/judicial power of the House Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC) and the notorious Senate
hearings conducted by the infamous Senator Joseph McCarthy reviving
the witch hunts of Salem. The consequences were indiscriminate
purges and firings, loss of security clearances, withholding of
passports, and other arbitrary violations of civil liberties.
Guilt by association and suspicion was even extended to guilt
by exoneration. To be interrogated by Senator Joseph McCarthy
was a sufficient basis to infer a questionable loyalty to the
US. Un-Americanism became the house built
by nativism.
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The dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki created significant divisions among the scientists
involved. Even in advance of these events some scientists were
opposed and recommended a demonstration of the bombs power
to which Japan would be invited to send observers. The above divisions
deepened and became enmeshed in the politics of nativism. Professor
Wangs case studies of individual scientists involved in
this conflict provide a penetrating analysis of issues and events.
Divisions of understanding between scientists on the entire issue
of nuclear weapons persist to this day. Scientists like Albert
Einstein and Leo Szilard, who played a significant role in launching
the Manhattan Project, realized too late that they had been co-opted
by the military and the US government.
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I can recommend this book without
reservation, not only to students in the academic fields of the
history of science, political science, and social studies of science,
but to the millions of people concerned with the fate of the earth.
And particularly for practicing scientists, the lesson is powerful,
namely the perversion of their profession by the goals of the
establishment. "Faustian bargains" have a predictable
fate.
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F.H. Knelman
Victoria
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Paul Apostolidis, Stations of the Cross: Adorno and Christian
Right Radio (Durham: Duke University Press 2000)
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THEODOR ADORNO, a major 20th century philosopher
and critic, contends that as soon as culture is set down, a film
is made, or a symphony is performed, it becomes part of the culture
industry, an industry he links to capitalism. According to Adorno,
the best that can be said for the culture industry is that it
"celebrates its spirit" or rather that which "might
be safely called ideology." It is from this standpoint that
Paul Apostolidis, in his book Stations of the Cross: Adorno
and Christian Right Radio, takes aim at Christian right culture
in the United States.
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The book is based on the authors
analysis of about 80 half-hour broadcasts of "Focus on the
Family," a program which, since 1977, has dominated the Christian
radio airwaves south of Canadas border. It is important
to note, as Apostolidis points out, that Christian radio ranks
third in popularity, just behind country and adult contemporary
music stations. The host of "Focus on the Family" is
psychologist Dr. James Dobson, "the undisputed king of Christian
radio," and also a best-selling author and well-known leader
of the Christian right. Apostolidis contends that Dobson and "Focus
on the Family" has been instrumental in moving the political
debate in the US to the right not simply in terms of delivering
votes but also in terms of promoting an ideology which has significant
bearing on public policy. Dobsons prescriptions include
a ban on all abortions, the re-introduction of spoken prayer in
public schools, tax cuts, and rejection of human rights protection
for gays and lesbians. However, Apostolidis feels there is a need
to more fully understand the Christian right and to look behind
their public rhetoric. To do this, he examines the Christian right
culture in the context of the experiences of the post-Fordist
political economy.
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The most fascinating part of the
book concerns the fraying of health care provision and human services.
As in Canada today, in the US the state
has less of a commitment to social welfare programs than it did
a generation ago, bearing in mind the US
started out with a much weaker welfare state than Canada. A major
shift in policy was former president Bill Clintons putting
a stop to federal assistance for poor families with dependent
children, a social program which had endured for more than 65
years. George W. Bush has pledged that social services will be
provided by nonprofit and/or religious organisations and groups
of volunteers this despite the fact that many religious
organisations want to serve their own minions rather than the
general public. There is also the question about whether faith-based
services would indeed be accessible to non-Christians or those
who want nothing to do with religion. Apostolidis points out that
though the evangelical churches historically have been less concerned
with social mission and doing good works than the Catholic and
most Protestant churches, the fanfare generated by Christian right
television and radio programs, like "Focus on the Family,"
has created new programs and services within the evangelical culture.
For example, the "Focus on the Family" website advertises
a new social program: the World Wide Day of Prayer for Children
at Risk. The site (http://www.family.org/fofmag/sh/a0015800.html
22 May 2001) explains there are many homeless and hungry
children in India who need help and "simple as it sounds,
we can all pray" for them. Evangelical churches are encouraged
to set out tracts about the horrors of life in India, poster the
church with photos of needy children, and hold group prayer sessions.
According to "Focus on the Family," all these things
will help. Apostolidis maintains that this and other examples
of evangelical ministry are not benign. He says that Adorno and
Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) make the
point that good-hearted people who personally intervene in a situation
to "make curable individual cases out of socially-perpetuated
miseries" make human suffering a permanent feature of human
existence. For the misguided, the way to combat problems is on
a person-to-person rather than on a societal level. Evangelists,
like Dobson, epitomize love and understanding and at the same
time profess the scientific and professional expertise to solve
most social problems. Apostolidis argues that in the wake of the
decline of the welfare state, the well-meaning "heart of
gold" figure who promotes individual charity and "feels"
for the underprivileged dominates not only US
media culture but also the business culture. Further, quite often
these people spill over into the political realm, and that is
what has happened with the Christian right.
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Apostolidis argues vigorously against
the agenda and policies of the Christian right. He gives many
examples from the "Focus on the Family" broadcasts
which, mercifully, are not yet beamed into Canada that
the root of most social ills are mothers who go out to work or
gays, who have a "developmental disorder." Despite the
fact that more than 40 million Americans have no health care insurance,
the Christian right insists Americans should trust their doctors
expertise and professionalism and reject the tyranny of government,
with its high taxes and intervention into peoples lives.
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What can Canadians learn from Stations
of the Cross? Perhaps not to be complacent about the social
programs we still enjoy, such as medicare. The Christian right,
albeit much smaller than their US counterparts,
exists in Canada and when coupled with the Canadian Alliances
populist agenda is a formidable force against progressive social
change.
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Judy Haiven
Saint Marys University
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Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary
Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapter Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press 1998)
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SCHOLARS HAVE LONG acknowledged womens
role in the antislavery movement. In The Great Silent Army
of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement,
Julie Roy Jeffrey takes this truism and demonstrates the complexity,
variation, and evolution of female participation in abolitionism.
In a carefully researched study which goes beyond the customary
boundaries of New England and white middle-class women, Jeffrey
examines how black and white women lived out their commitment
to antislavery. The "what" of this phenomenon may be
familiar, but the details of "how" are illuminating
and challenge several aspects of received wisdom on this subject.
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Antislavery built on a long-standing
tradition of female benevolence, drawing strength from Quaker
traditions and successful British womens antislavery activism.
Nevertheless, in its Garrisonian form, America abolitionism was
a radical movement tinged with unsavoury connotations that often
deterred would-be sympathizers. Women had to be informed and then
persuaded to give whole-hearted commitment to activism on the
slaves behalf. By reading, attending lectures, and discussing
the issue, women underwent a moral awakening that bound them to
work for the enslaved. No sooner "converted" themselves,
these women undertook to bring family members and friends to the
same point of view. Jeffrey explores how "womens influence"
actually worked. Women included antislavery in family prayers,
proselytized relatives and friends, and permitted antislavery
to inform decisions about domestic consumption of slave produce.
They brought subtle and not-so-subtle pressure to bear on fence-sitting
pastors, sought the use of churches for abolitionist functions,
and when all else failed, separated themselves from pro-slavery
churches to join with like-minded friends in antislavery congregations.
In these ways, abolitionist women directed conventional behaviours
to unconventional ends.
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Women also undertook a wide range
of antislavery activities. Their role in fundraising underwrote
the economic survival of the movement. From small cent-a-week
societies in rural villages to the great antislavery fairs of
Boston and Philadelphia, women raised thousands of dollars for
the cause, encouraging supporting agents, newspapers, and pamphlets
to spread the word. Women sewed for fairs and for fugitive slaves.
They attended, sponsored, and even gave antislavery lectures.
They wrote and published antislavery tracts and fiction. Defying
social conventions and prejudice, some publicly "associated"
with African Americans in attempts to break down discriminatory
laws and practices. And by the thousands, they drew up, circulated,
and signed petitions to Congress pressing for legislative attacks
on the "peculiar institution."
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These activities changed women.
Fundraising efforts, especially the antislavery fairs, increased
their awareness of business and economics, as women dealt with
questions of efficiency, organizing production, pricing, and advertising.
Participation in female antislavery societies provided training
in organizational procedure and public speaking. Petitioning enhanced
their awareness of the political process and broadened their understanding
of participation. More importantly, participation in antislavery,
Jeffrey argues, constituted an important aspect of middle-class
formation. These experiences helped to define middle-class status
by exploring its boundaries particularly as they pertained to
women. Antislavery fairs, for example, repeatedly challenged gender
conventions. Sewing for antislavery raised few eyebrows, but what
happened when women sold these articles? Similarly, needlework
was a useful accomplishment, but when women embellished household
items with antislavery emblems, domesticity became politicized.
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Jeffrey explores womens response
to various turning points in the antislavery movement. Instead
of reiterating the role the woman question played in splitting
the movement in 1840, Jeffrey argues that the division actually
permitted antislavery to become more inclusive as it fostered
a range of womens activities, providing options to suit
those with different understanding of appropriate roles for women.
The Fugitive Slave Law re-energized many longstanding abolitionists
and also provided a propaganda opportunity that Harriet Beecher
Stowe and other women readily exploited. However, the focus on
the fugitive created tensions within female abolitionism. Emerging
middle-class values exerted a powerful influence on antislavery
literature and rhetoric that laid the groundwork for an image
of the thankful slave filled with gratitude for the efforts of
his, or more often her, white female rescuers. Such preconceptions
caused real difficulties when white abolitionists came into contact
with black abolitionists with their own priorities and agendas.
In addition, concerns were raised in white societies about whether
efforts expended on the fugitive left the fundamental problem
of slavery untouched.
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The conflict in Kansas and the
Dred Scott decision moved antislavery into the mainstream. As
abolitionism gained respectability, a second generation of female
abolitionists emerged and these younger women did not experience
the ostracism their mothers had risked. During the Civil War,
women continued sewing, fundraising, and petitioning but invested
these activities with new meaning as they attempted to steer the
national struggle toward emancipation. This proved problematic
after the war insofar as most abolitionists had no clear program
for what was to follow the end of slavery. Here Jeffrey might
have drawn a useful comparison to womens experience following
the achievement of suffrage. In 1920 a similar focus on a political
objective as a panacea also forestalled detailed consideration
of what the aftermath might bring, leaving campaigners at something
of a loss once their goal had been achieved. In this case, however,
African Americans became the victims of white antislavery success.
Indeed the abolitionist vision meant that there could be no post-emancipation
program. Although the paternalistic ethos of some white abolitionists
mandated continuing oversight of the experience of African Americans,
the liberal/bourgeois values that undergirded the movement required
freed people to be left on their own to stand or fall according
to their own devices.
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One of the strengths of Jeffreys
work is her determined effort to explore the distinctive experience
of African-American women in antislavery. Their different priorities,
different opportunities, and different modes of action not only
had different outcomes, they sometimes brought black women into
conflict with their white co-workers. Black women were permitted
to be members of some white antislavery societies if they conformed
to white standards of respectable demeanor. For black women, however,
respectability was a means to undermine prejudice and discriminatory
attitudes and not simply about establishing social position. In
contrast, Jeffrey notes, their white counterparts often seemed
much more concerned about slavery in the abstract than African
Americans in their midst. As a consequence, black women often
formed separate societies of their own. Jeffrey also points out
that given the economic circumstances of most black families,
black women undertook antislavery activities in addition to paid
labour and family responsibilities. The Fugitive Slave Law did
not divide black women; it increased the unanimity of the African-American
community because it put them all, free and fugitive, at risk.
Similarly, since the well-being of the race had always been a
priority for African-American women, they experienced no uncertainty
following the Civil War.
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Jeffrey brings nuance and complexity
to an oft-told tale and deepens our understanding of the dynamics
of protest movements in the process. This excellent study is marred
only by some peculiar editorial practices. In much of Jeffreys
account white women are referred to by their given names whereas
black women are designated by their surnames (including one instance
where Frances Ellen Watkins Harper is referred to as "Harper
Watkins"[233]). Whatever the logic, the result is jarring
both in the belittling of white women and in the sharp contrast
between the naming of black women and white women. This practice
is particularly puzzling in a work that succeeds so well in respecting
the specific experiences of different groups of women.
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Margaret Kellow
University of Western Ontario
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John H.M. Laslett, Colliers Across the Sea: A Comparative Study
of Class Formation in Scotland and the American Midwest, 1830-1924
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press 2000)
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FROM GLASGOW and Chicago alike, it is only
a small distance up the river from the cities of commerce and
industry to the country of coal a territory centred in
these cases on such mining towns as Larkhall, Wishaw, and Blantyre
on the River Clyde, and Braidwood, Streator, and Spring Valley
on the Illinois River. Building on a wealth of local research,
John Laslett has constructed a powerful comparative study that
includes assessments of economic growth, social structure, class
formation, and political behaviour. The selection of these communities
in the southwest of Scotland and the midwestern United States
was not accidental, as considerable numbers of Lanarkshire workers
participated in the movement of experienced coal miners to the
19th century American industrial frontier and settled in northern
Illinois; in 1870 almost half the miners in Illinois were British-born.
Yet this book is much more than a venture in comparative local
history or an account of the emigrant worker experience in North
America. Rather, this is an exceptionally well-conceived study
that uses the tools of the social historian to address major questions
concerning the similarities and differences in the process of
class formation in Britain and the United States. Rejecting essentialist
explanations for the divergent political traditions associated
with British and American workers in the 20th century, Laslett
invites us to explore the social and historical origins of the
acknowledged differences.
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The formation of the industrial
working class in the Lanarkshire coal towns in the decades after
1830 provides an important foundation for this discussion, for
Laslett clearly demonstrates the range of experiences and responses
that emerged in this environment and the historical contingencies
that gave rise to what are sometimes assumed to be inevitable
outcomes. The traditional artisan-collier, with his assumptions
about respectability, skill and independence, worked alongside
or in contention with less skilled semi-proletarianized workers
and newcomer-rebels from the countryside, Ireland, or the European
continent. Meanwhile, as the coal industry entered its boom period,
the coal operators introduced innovations in technology and social
control that fostered resistance, both at the workplace and in
the community. Out of this process came the occupational solidarity
that, in the long run, produced the militant unionism and political
activism often associated with the Lanarkshire coalfields. But
Laslett makes it clear that this was indeed a long-run development.
The class harmony ideology of the influential union pioneer and
Member of Parliament Alexander McDonald prevailed for decades.
From the 1870s onwards, however, this approach was challenged
by a new generation of leaders such as Keir Hardie, whose unionism
was premised on a recognition of the realities of class conflict.
This new unionism helped make the Miners Federation of Great
Britain the strongest union in the country, but plans to encourage
increased state intervention through an independent labour politics
were less successful. Laslett provides a useful reminder that
the participation of the coal miners in the political process
remained far from complete, as most coal miners could not vote
prior to the 1884 franchise reforms and even then the vote was
not extended to all male adult citizens until 1918. Hardie (and
others) failed to persuade the Lanarkshire miners to follow their
political lead until well into the 20th century. Although individual
miners were often elected to Parliament as Liberals and independent
labour politics had some success at the community level, Lanarkshire
failed to elect even one Labour MP to Parliament until 1918. The
impact of the Great War on British workers had much to do with
the change in perceptions, as did the broader class conflicts
in British society and the ongoing crisis of the Liberal Party
in this period. This proved to be an historic breakthrough, and
after the promise of mines nationalization was betrayed by the
state, the coal miners helped to carry the Labour Party to its
first taste of power in 1924.
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From this perspective on class
formation in southwest Scotland, developments in northern Illinois
appear to have been remarkably similar. The timing, of course,
was different, as the take-off period for this coalfield arrived
in the period of urban and industrial expansion after the Civil
War. Initially the American miners enjoyed better housing and
higher wages than their Scottish contemporaries, and this was
a factor in attracting emigrant coal miners to the American prairie.
However, the breakdown of ideals of class harmony was apparent
in both places in the 1870s and 1880s, and Laslett draws a series
of parallels between the local strikes of this period on both
sides of the ocean. In many respects the issues affecting workplace
and community experiences in both Scotland and Illinois proved
to be similar ones that involved rivalries between local and immigrant
workers, contests over workplace discipline and community institutions
and struggles for union recognition and state intervention. Growing
class polarization resulted in the formation of strong national
unions in both countries in the form of the Miners Federation
of Great Britain (1893) and the United Mine Workers of America
(1890), and both were engaged in a series of major confrontations
with the coal operators and the state in the following decades.
Moreover, in both countries the perceived threat of bureaucratization
in the unions was answered by rank-and-file revolts emphasizing
direct action and syndicalist ideas. Socialist influence was certainly
present among the coal miners in Illinois, who emulated the British
miners in electing socialists to local office and organizing co-operative
stores. But the political consequences of the formation of the
Labour Party (1900) and the Socialist Party of America (1901)
were ultimately dissimilar. While British miners had engaged in
a protracted struggle to achieve political recognition and win
the franchise, the political process in the republic had remained
relatively open for American trade unionists, or at least for
those who were male and white and in command of the language of
politics in America. This presented a difficult quandary for militant
unionists with social democratic ideas. The Illinois miners
leader John H. Walker, for instance, a Scotsman generally sympathetic
to Keir Hardie and a moderate socialism, nonetheless endorsed
pro-labour Republicans for state office and affiliated the Illinois
miners to the American Federation of Labors state federation
of labour, with its well known policy of non-partisanship. Walker
himself later ran for governor on a Farmer-Labor ticket in 1920,
but by that time with little prospect of success. Laslett argues
that the ultimate parting of the ways between American and British
political practice did not arrive until the time of World War
I, which exacerbated ethnic and cultural divisions within the
American working class and marginalized the socialists as a political
force. Meanwhile, the UMWA under the leadership
of John L. Lewis had succeeded in burying the programme for public
ownership of the coal industry, thus helping to reduce the expectations
that workers would direct at the American state. The success of
the Labour Party in Britain accordingly coincided with the collapse
of mass politics on the American left, symbolized by the failure
of Robert M. LaFollettes 1924 presidential campaign. While
this divergence was an outcome of considerable significance to
the history of both Britain and the United States, Laslett concludes
that there was nothing inevitable about it, and that the case
of the coal miners cannot be used to deny existence of class conflict
or class consciousness in American society.
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In all, this is a compelling study
that contributes new perspectives to the debates around such themes
as American exceptionalism and the failure of socialism in the
United States. While considering some of the perennial big questions
in the field, this is also a multi-dimensional discussion that
examines the significance of social and geographic mobility, standards
of living, temperance, education, gender, ethnicity, religion,
and race as contributing factors in each of the contexts. Without
qualifying his general argument, Laslett readily notes some of
the differences that were apparent only a few miles away in the
east of Scotland or the south of Illinois, and his approach accordingly
invites further comparative studies involving more local contexts.
There are some tentative references as well to class formation
in Germany and other countries, but, not surprisingly in a study
of this scope, there are only a few brief references to the Canadian
context in these pages not enough to make the index. Of
course, it is obvious that the characteristics of the Canadian
coal country have been shaped not only by complex local conditions
and regional variations but also by both British and American
influences; in some ways it may be more appropriate for comparative
studies in Canada to begin with inter-provincial rather than international
comparisons. Meanwhile, Laslett has written a model comparative
study that shows how stimulating comparative history can be when
it is driven by a vigorous historical intelligence and a thorough
command of sources. Moreover, at a time when social history is
increasingly caricatured as a record of historical irrelevance,
he has shown how the disciplined use of the methods of social
history can shed light on major themes in national history.
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David Frank
University of New Brunswick
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James Jaffe, Striking a Bargain: Work and Industrial Relations
in Industrial England, 1815-65 (Manchester: Manchester University
Press 2000)
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THIS BOOK is both a useful contribution
to the study of early industrial labour relations, and a symptom
of the current condition of labour history. Jaffes strength
as a researcher lies in his ability to penetrate the opaque surface
of the 19th century workplace. He is very adept at using a range
of scattered, fragmentary evidence to understand the underlying
relationships between employers and employees. In his first book,
on early 19th century Tyneside coalminers, he displayed these
skills to good effect. Now, in this present volume, he seeks to
apply his insights to the wider industrial field. Nevertheless,
at the level of argumentation, the relationship between the two
volumes is not entirely clear. Whereas the first book contended
that labour relations hinged on a "struggle for market power,"
this present volume argues that the entire system of collective
bargaining, generally regarded as a late-19th century innovation,
was already well developed by the early-19th century.
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Jaffe begins by taking issue with
the early-19th century political economists who assumed (with
scant evidence) that wages were set by the labour market. The
notion that capitalists and labourers were equally endowed rational
actors, each pursuing his self-interest, was nothing more than
a pious myth. This, of course, is hardly a new observation. But
whereas most labour historians of the 1970s and 1980s tended to
infer an inherent conflict of class interest (sometimes open,
sometimes hidden) from this fact, Jaffe draws a very different
conclusion. He acknowledges that the resources of capital and
labour were inherently "asymmetrical" but suggests the
relationship between them was generally co-operative and mutually
respectful.
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Jaffes aim, as he makes clear,
is not to offer any grand counter-narrative to the classical master
narrative of labours increase in organization and class-consciousness.
Nevertheless, he presents a series of concrete vignettes and situations
in which work militancy was nowhere in sight. So, far from producing
an intensification of class antagonism, the early industrial era,
as Jaffe depicts it, was an era of ever more effective class collaboration.
Even when their material interests came in conflict, capitalists
and labourers remained part of the same community of discourse.
Masters and men (Jaffe has little to say about women) could resolve
their disputes amicably because they were both fundamentally committed
to the same reciprocal notions of a fair days wage for a
fair days work.
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The great strength of Jaffes
approach (which is ultimately also its weakness) is the assumption
that social relations between capital and labour were sorted out,
provisionally, on the workshop floor. "Shopfloor bargaining,"
Jaffe concludes, "was an intrinsic element of work experience
during the late-18th and early-19th centuries. Its presence in
the workshop, on the factory floor, and down the pits cut across
the levels of skill, occupational specializations and regional
diversity." Previous historians, according to Jaffe, have
underestimated the significance and ubiquity of this shopfloor
bargaining because it was carried on through informal contracts,
codes, and conventions, because it did not leave much of a paper
trail, and because it lacked a visible, institutional base. The
result, he believes, has been to reinforce a distorted chronology,
which assigns class compromise and collaboration to the second
half of the 19th century, and depicts the early-19th century as
an epoch of class antagonism and strife.
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This, Jaffe believes, is too simplistic.
Collective bargaining, albeit of a more informal and intermittent
kind, can be found throughout the entire period of the industrial
revolution in England (Jaffe has nothing to say about Scotland
and Ireland). Given the complexity of the workplace rules, wage
rates, and local circumstances, industrial disputes should be
reinterpreted as narrowly framed encounters (often theatrically
scripted) over particularistic grievances, enacted by antagonists
who would ultimately appeal to the same rhetoric of justice and
equity. In a world where employers held the advantages of authority
and position, workers were still able to obtain redress of particular
grievances inasmuch as they retained de facto control over
the conditions of work. Both sides had an interest in resolving
disputes without strikes, violence, or lock-outs. Hence, they
were willing to use a wide range of intermediaries, from legally
empowered magistrates to informally chosen "honest brokers"
to break through otherwise intractable impasses. Arbitration,
Jaffe contends, was no new innovation of the 1860s. More
informal instances were ubiquitous throughout the entire 19th
century.
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All this is interesting and some
of it is novel. The question remains, however, what does it mean?
Rooted as his work is in the inherently contingent and evanescent,
Jaffe offers no assessment of the typicality of his examples,
or of how far his analysis might be extended to understand social
relations as a whole. But to introduce this wider perspective
is to see more clearly the limitations of his work. Relations
between labour and capital were not played out exclusively at
the point of production, and not all workplaces permitted grievances
to be peaceably redressed. The alienation felt by working people
was often reinforced by their precarious relationship to the market,
their abysmal living conditions, their strained family circumstances,
their exclusion from the polity, and their coercion by the state.
Inevitably such distress fed back onto their experience of the
labour process. To read Jaffes book, one might not even
realize that his subject was coterminous with the worlds
"first industrial revolution," an era of utterly wrenching,
rapid, and dramatic social and economic change.
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Yet, without considering these
larger processes and experiences, even his own examples cannot
be adequately understood. Consider, for example, his analysis
of the London publishing and Coventry ribbon trade. Jaffe is impressed
with the consistent commitment to retaining stable wages and prices
on the part of both masters and men. No less striking, however,
is the fragility of such arrangements in the face of shifting
economic conditions and outside competitors not party to the agreements.
Might the compositors adoption of a more aggressive bargaining
stance, with the onset of inflation in 1783, help us to understand
the more general political and social mobilization of the artisans
that began in this year? Jaffe notes the intervention of the Coventry
authorities to resolve industrial disputes in 1819 and 1831, when
existing agreements collapsed. Might this sudden elite commitment
to arbitrating industrial relations have something to do with
Peterloo and the reform crisis which loomed so large over these
two crisis years? Jaffe never even asked these questions.
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Throughout his book, from the Introduction
onward, Jaffe betrays a tone of extreme nervousness that anything
he might say will offend the reigning poststructuralist orthodoxy.
"Of course, postmodernists will have already smelled the
foul air of materialism and its representationalism and it would
be foolish to defend myself against such charges." (6) While
Jaffe will not dispute that the concept of class is still relevant
to his subject, he carefully avoids employing it anywhere within
his book. Instead he scurries industriously in search of more
flashy sounding frameworks game theory, the "gift
relationship," associational psychology, and magnetic fields
of force none of which bear much relationship to the actual
substance of his research.
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In one of his more interesting
theoretical digressions, Jaffe contends that Hodgskin was engaged
in an exercise in Brownian epistemological decoupling when he
claimed that "circulating capital was nothing less than co-existing
labor." (52). But then, a few pages later, Hodgskin
and Brown are dropped, as Londons compositors are re-inducted
into the "civilizing mission" which the language of
commerce entailed. (55) "Indeed Pococks commercial
humanism may accurately identify an important strand of
working-class ideology." (60) Here, one suspects, it is not
only the labourer who is trying to adjust to a world in which
commerce is hegemonic, but also the labour historian who is trying
to adjust to an historiography in which "discourse"
appears to be the only game in town.
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Theodore Koditschek
University of Missouri, Columbia
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Stephen Heathorn, For Home, Country, and Race: Constructing
Gender, Class, and Englishness in the Elementary School, 1880-1914
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2000)
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THE GOAL of this book is to illuminate
the role of English elementary schools between 1880 and 1914 in
instilling in working-class children a particular sense of national
identity and citizenship, a "national patriotism" infused
with conceptions of race and gender. As Heathorn puts it, his
purpose is "to suggest the way in which classroom reading
set the conceptual boundaries and shaped the imaginative experience
of the mostly working-class children of the English elementary
school." (216)
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To do this, Heathorn relies largely
on a content analysis of elementary school readers, and especially
of their treatment of history and geography. As he rightly observes,
history and geography were seldom taught as formal subjects in
English elementary schools in these years. But, to compensate
for this, the graded readers contained a considerable amount of
history and geography, usually presented in the form of story
and romance designed to appeal to children with what were assumed
to be rudimentary reading skills and little cultural capital.
In addition, Heathorn makes some use of school logbooks, with
their descriptions of lessons and school activities.
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The analysis of these materials
turns up no surprises. It is hardly news that schools in these
years as in later years also defined citizenship
in consensual terms, designed to smother differences of class
and culture in an ideologically constructed sense of national
citizenship, as defined in schools, emphasizing duty, service,
conformity, patriotism, and the like. Similarly, though Heathorn
has some useful things to say on this point, we have long known
that citizenship was defined in gendered and racialized terms,
with different roles and dispositions for boys and girls, and
emphasis on what were said to be the distinctive characteristics
of Englishness, especially when contrasted with all those whom
Kipling described as "lesser breeds without the law."
In this regard, Heathorn makes the valid point that the distinction
that is conventionally erected between civic and ethnic nationalism
is far too neat and tidy, especially in the years covered by this
study, when English schools infused their celebration of the British
heritage of freedom and self-government with a substantial dose
of Englishness. The suggestion was that, thanks to its Anglo-Saxon
"racial" heritage, England had a special propensity
for constitutional government and imperial rule.
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None of this is especially novel,
but Heathorn successfully fills in what had been a broad and overly
generalized picture with a mass of informative detail. Other studies
have investigated textbooks in history and other subjects, but
none to date has explored the readers in the degree of detail
contained in this book, and, as Heathorn rightly observes, it
was through these readers that teachers taught history and related
subjects to working-class children.
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What Heathorn does not explore,
however, is the extent to which these children actually believed
what their teachers tried to teach them. There is something methodologically
old-fashioned about the way this study was conducted. Heathorn
rightly rejects old social control notions of schooling, but his
investigation nonetheless seems to fall within that research paradigm.
Time and again one comes across phrases that say or imply that
working-class boys and girls were merely the objects of the schooling
they received. In Heathorns words, his book is "a study
of the means by which the English masses were taught their national
identity." (vii) It is "a study of how working class
individuals were directed to understand themselves as part of
a social whole." (x)
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It is not at all certain, however,
that working-class children so readily did what they were directed
to do or internalized what they were taught. They did not come
to school as empty vessels or as cultural vacuums; nor were they
all so illiterate as Heathorn seems to assume. They and their
parents had their own ways of seeing the world and of interpreting
their experience that were often in conflict with the officially
inspired views of citizenship and identity that the schools were
trying to teach. It could well be that children were more influenced
by their domestic and everyday surroundings than by anything they
were taught in the classroom. After many years of working in and
with public schools in Canada, I have learned to view with scepticism
any claims about the impact of schooling. Years ago I learned
that what teachers teach is not necessarily what students learn.
It is a commonplace of curricular research in the study of education
to distinguish among the curriculum-as-intended (the syllabus
and its associated resources); the curriculum-as-delivered (what
teachers actually teach, both knowingly and otherwise); and the
curriculum-as-experienced (what students actually learn). But
this kind of analysis is missing from this book. Here, as elsewhere,
Heathorn ignores what could have been useful insights to be gained
from educational theory and research.
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Nor is it at all certain that teachers
effectively taught what their programmes of study and classroom
readers required them to teach. As Heathorn recognizes, elementary
school teachers were not especially well trained or educated and
usually faced overwhelmingly negative working conditions, as evidenced
by large classes, lack of preparation time, inadequate resources,
and the rest. The result was that lessons could often be sterile,
boring, imaginatively and intellectually narrow, and little more
than exercises in imposed discipline. As H.G. Wells observed in
1921: "If you go into any school today, in ninety-nine cases
out of a hundred, you find an inexpert and ill-prepared teacher
giving a clumsy, vamped up lesson ... and a halting and faulty
discourse will be eked out by feeble scratching with chalk on
a blackboard, by querulous questioning of pupils, and irrelevancies."
(The Salvaging of Civilization 160-1).
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In such circumstances, schools
were unlikely to have accomplished all that much, especially when
the citizenship they tried to teach, based as it was on visions
of a consensual community set in a mythically romanticized ruralism,
flew so obviously in the face of the daily experience of working-class
children. Lessons in citizenship and identity, for example, did
not prevent children around the country joining the childrens
strikes of 1911, walking out of school in sympathy with their
striking parents and making their own pedagogical demands in addition
(no homework and the like). Surprisingly, this is an event on
which Heathorn is silent.
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Teachers themselves, often from
working-class backgrounds, did not always accept the version of
citizenship and identity they were expected to teach. They were
not merely transmitters of official ideology. They were variously
secularists, socialists, feminists, suffragists, and dissenters
of various kinds, and their training, no matter how meagre, often
opened their eyes to alternative ways of looking at the world.
In addition, as Heathhorn acknowledges, pedagogical orthodoxy
in these years was swinging to a child-centredness that emphasized
what was thought to be best for children, so that teachers increasingly
found themselves torn between the demands of the official syllabus,
with its emphasis on citizenship, and what they saw as desirable
pedagogical practice, with its emphasis on meeting the needs of
students.
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We do not know, and probably never
can, what proportion of teachers subverted, or at least modified,
the official curriculum, but such teachers certainly existed and
were probably more influential than Heathorn is prepared to allow.
Certainly, contemporary observers thought so. As one conservative
commentator put it in 1908, in a tract significantly titled, John
Bull and his Schools: "The Socialist leaders already
perceive what a splendid field the elementary schools afford for
their peculiar propaganda. What better career can they offer to
their sons and daughters than to enter the teaching profession
and in a discreet way play the socialist missionary?" Heathorn
concedes that some teachers resisted curricular orthodoxy, but
claims that most were "oblivious" to the ideological
messages conveyed in their teaching, or were in no position to
do other than what they were told. He provides no evidence for
such a conclusion.
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He refers to instances where school
boards, trades unions, socialists, and others objected to the
militarist or imperialist biases of citizenship exercises and
readers, but he tends to underestimate their impact, arguing that
school authorities were largely able to absorb such protests and
carry on undisturbed. In this regard, Heathorn might have paid
more attention than he does to those who not only dissented from,
but actively opposed, official curricular policies. One such,
for example, was Frederick Gould, a London teacher whose secularism
put him at odds with his employers, and who became a much published
and widely read apostle of secularist education, taking a particular
interest in history as a vehicle for a secularist and globally
oriented moral education, embodying a very different vision of
citizenship from that found in official curricula. He, and others
like him, such as Annie and Tom Higdon of the Burston Strike School,
do not appear in Heathorns pages, which as a result make
educational policy and school practice seem much more ideologically
monolithic than it was. Heathorn mentions a London headmistress,
Sophie Bryant, for example, as writing that schools should promote
social peace, and that "the duty of the citizen was to be
loyally obedient." However, Sophie Bryant was also a suffragist
and an Irish home ruler, who organized mock elections in her all-girls
school, even though women did not have the right to vote, precisely
as an exercise in feminist consciousness raising. Her example
suggests that the teaching of citizenship was more complex and
conflicted than Heathorn allows.
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In his conclusion, Heathorn comes
close to saying this, turning to two working-class autobiographies
to see to what extent their authors were influenced by their schooling.
Both in fact show students defying or distorting the official
messages they were taught in school, but Heathorn argues that
this very defiance indicates that schooling achieved its desired
effect. Examining a case where a group of boys converted a drill
exercise into a release of ribaldry, Heathorn notes than though
the boys turned the symbols and language of citizenship to their
own adolescent purpose, "they had to have first understood
the dominant meanings of the marching and the patriotic songs
in order to poke fun at them." (216)
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The argument seems too ingenious
for its own good. It seems obvious that to understand something
does not necessarily mean to accept it. Research on education
in the former Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc has shown that
students learned to master the officially imposed ideology they
were taught but that they did not internalize it. This distinction
between mastery and internalization is missing from Heathorns
book. It seems downright contrary to say that children who turned
official ideology upside down and who conspicuously mocked it
were nonetheless its products.
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Heathorn ends his book by suggesting
that the rush to the colours in 1914 shows that working class
schooling "was a key part of a certain kind of nation
building after all." (218) Perhaps so, and H.G. Wells
was later to blame history teachers and their teaching of the
"poison called history" for the militarist chauvinism
that made the Great War possible. But young men had many reasons
for enlisting. To the extent that working-class soldiers in the
Great War were patriotically motivated, it seems likely that their
patriotism sprang from many sources other than the schools, not
least from the mass circulation press, entertainment, and advertising.
And patriotism apparently had its limits, since the British government
found it necessary to introduce conscription in 1916. It is well
known that the common assumption in 1914 was that the War would
be short and that it would be a great adventure. In these days
of counter-factual history, it is interesting to speculate how
many men would have rushed to volunteer if they had known what
really faced them. In such a case, would school-induced citizenship
have been enough?
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Surprisingly, though he refers
to it briefly through a quotation, Heathorn makes no use of the
Gramscian concept of hegemony, though it would seem to be especially
appropriate in a study of this kind. As is well known, hegemony
is not a simple, top-down exercise by which dominant elites impose
their view of the world on society at large, but rather a process
of negotiation, resistance, imposition, subversion, and continuing
interaction among social groups and classes. Much of the most
fruitful work in curricular research in recent years relies on
some version of Gramsci and it is strange to see him so conspicuously
ignored in a study such as this. As it stands, Heathorns
book is not so much a study of the actual construction of citizenship,
but rather of what policy-makers hoped they could make it.
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This said, however, this book makes
a useful contribution to the history of education. Its value lies
in its empirical findings and in its exploration of classroom
materials that have been largely ignored until now. It deserves
to be read not only by historians of education, but by anyone
interested in the role and use of history in the schools, which
ought to mean all historians in these times of increasing public
debate about which and whose history should be taught in the schools
and what kinds of citizens it should aim to produce.
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Ken Osborne
University of Manitoba
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Walter Galenson, The Worlds Strongest Trade Unions: The
Scandinavian Labor Movement (Westport, CT:
Quorum Books 1998)
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OVER THE PAST four decades labour economist
and historian Walter Galenson has produced numerous books and
scholarly articles on the labour movements and industrial relations
systems in Asia and other regions and nations of the world, with
a particular emphasis upon the US. His
most recent book, published a year before his death in 1999, focuses
on Scandinavia. Strictly speaking, "Scandinavia" typically
includes only the three nations Galenson examines here, Denmark,
Norway, and Sweden (Given its strong historical, socio-cultural,
ethnic, and linguistic ties to Scandinavia, Iceland is commonly
included as one of the "Nordic" nations). However, it
is unfortunate that he did not elect to include Finland in his
comparative study. Finland is, of course, ethnically and linguistically
distinct from the other Scandinavian countries. And unlike the
other three Scandinavian nations, Finland is not a constitutional
monarchy. Nevertheless, in addition to its obvious close geographical
ties it forms part of the same peninsula linking Norway
and Sweden and has the same rugged topography and inhospitable
climate Finlands similarities with Scandinavia are
much more significant than its differences. Indeed, in some respects,
Finland is more similar to Sweden than is Norway. They are both
more industrialized, and with a greater emphasis upon high tech
industry, than elsewhere in Scandinavia. Finland was a province
of Sweden until 1809, when it was lost to Russia in the war against
Napoleon, and Swedish remains one of the nations two official
languages today. And, as in the other Nordic nations, a greater
degree of cultural uniformity and the dominance of Evangelical
Lutheranism as the official and most widely (if dispassionately)
embraced confession have served to attenuate the religious conflicts
that have sometimes rent other parts of Western Europe. Perhaps
most significantly, it is Finlands relatively strong labour
movement, lower levels of poverty, commitment to greater equality,
and highly-developed social democratic welfare state that have
prompted its inclusion in most comparative studies of the nations
of Europes northernmost region a group of countries
sometimes collectively referred to as "Norden" to highlight
their shared history and remarkably similar social and politico-cultural
traditions.
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The nature and efficacy of the
welfare state and social policy in the Scandinavian nations have
been the subject of several comparative studies, typically applauding
their achievement in social justice, but occasionally castigating
them as overly-bureaucratized capitalist, socialist, or corporatist
socio-economic systems. Galenson, instead, foregrounds and contrasts
the labour movements of Scandinavia. The eleven central chapters
of his study touch on several of the key dimensions of the Danish,
Norwegian, and Swedish systems of industrial relations, including
the structure of their trade-union movements, union policies,
the links between the major union federations and social democratic
parties, white-collar unionism, the relationship between blue-collar
and white-collar labour confederations, the role of women in the
trade union movement, and the changing nature of collective bargaining.
Not surprisingly, the author spends somewhat more time on Sweden,
where the labour movement has been strongest, has implemented
a number of very innovative policies and programs, and realized
the greatest gains. (And, where it presently faces the greatest
challenge from a powerful and well-organized capitalist class
and employer offensive). He is understandably impressed by the
incomparable strength and durability of the Scandinavian labour
movements relative to their counterparts elsewhere in the capitalist
world; while trade union density, for example, has experienced
long-term stagnation or decline in Britain, North America, and
much of continental Europe, it has continued to expand in Scandinavia
over the past two decades.
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Galensons book is centred
around two broad questions: (1) what accounts for the extraordinary
strength of the Scandinavian labour movements?; and, (2) what
lessons can labour movements in other nations learn from the Scandinavian
experience? Although the similarities among the three nations
are most striking, as Galenson points out, there are some noteworthy
differences too. Swedens population (just under 9 million)
is considerably larger than Denmarks (less than 5.5 million),
and twice the size of Norways. And, Sweden is more industrialized
than either Denmark or Norway, the least industrial of the three
nations. These factors have influenced the nature of their respective
labour movements, as evident in the varying rates of union density.
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Union density refers to the ratio
between actual union membership and potential union membership.
Some caution must always be exercised when comparing union density
rates cross-nationally because the issue of which organizations
should be treated as trade unions and who should be included as
a union member may be handled somewhat differently from one nation
to another. For example, some estimates of union density in Sweden
include retirees and the unemployed. This is quite logical. Although
they are not part of the labour force, they are still part of
the union and, in addition to unemployment benefits, may also
obtain information and advice about training programs, full-time
or supplementary part-time jobs, pension rights, and other programs,
as well as several other services, through their unions. However,
their inclusion can considerably inflate Swedens union density
rate. Thus, during the early 1990s, when Sweden experienced a
severe recession with very high levels of unemployment, its "gross"
union density rate was over 111 per cent. Union density rates
must also be distinguished from collective bargaining coverage
rates, which measure how many workers are under union contract
rather than the proportion of the workforce that is unionized.
For Sweden, the two measures are quite close, between 85 per cent
and 90 per cent. However, for some nations, such as France, the
union density rate (10 per cent) and the coverage rate (90 per
cent) differ dramatically.
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In the latter half of the 1990s,
trade union membership as a share of employed labour was
relatively high in Denmark (71 per cent), Norway (57 per cent),
and Sweden (90 per cent). Norways union density rate is
considerably lower than Denmarks and Swedens, but
it too has seen growth over the past two decades. However, it
is only Sweden that has experienced a decline in traditional (blue
collar) union membership. The high levels of unionization in Denmark
and Sweden, Galenson notes, have been encouraged and bolstered
by the early creation of voluntary unemployment insurance schemes
administered and managed by bodies closely affiliated with union
organizations, an approach known as the "Ghent system."
Norway had also introduced a Ghent system early on, but it did
not survive and was soon replaced by a compulsory, public unemployment
insurance system. Centralized bargaining was a key part of the
industrial relations system of all three nations but especially
in Denmark, where it was first established, and in Sweden, where
it has been most developed although it began to break down
in the early 1980s. All three nations have also introduced solidaristic
wage policies and have had some considerable success in reducing
wage differentials to a greater (Sweden) or lesser (Norway) extent.
Swedens exceptional gains here are closely related to the
early establishment and predominance of industrial unionism. In
Denmark, in contrast, where craft unionism remained quite strong,
the labour movement was more often beset by splits among skilled,
semi-skilled, and unskilled workers, and their respective organizations.
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Largely sidestepping the large
and expanding body of literature that points to a variety of cyclical,
structural, political, and/or institutional variables to try to
account for the decline of unions in recent years, Galenson instead
highlights three related factors to explain labour strength in
Scandinavia. First, he points to the early emergence of the Scandinavian
blue-collar confederations (the LOs) and
their long and close historical and organic connections to social
democratic labour parties. In the Swedish case, for example, the
social democratic party (founded in 1889) actually established
the LO in 1898 (not in 1902, as stated
on page 9). Second, he notes the success that these three nations
have had in organizing white-collar workers and professionals,
and in establishing separate white-collar confederations. In Sweden,
in particular, the blue-collar labour central played an instrumental
role here, helping white-collar groups to organize their own central
rather than attempting to incorporate them into its own ranks.
As Galenson notes, this was partly because the LO
did not want to dilute its programs and orientation with those
of white-collar workers, who were viewed as less radical and less
likely to support strikes, and partly because many white-collar
workers did not want to be part of a confederation (LO)
so closely tied to the social democratic party (SAP).
This was also the case in Denmark, if to a lesser extent, but
not in Norway, where the white-collar unions that were not absorbed
into the Norwegian LO have been weaker
and less accommodating. Outside of Scandinavia, of course, these
groups often remain largely unorganized or divided amongst numerous
organizations. Finally, Galenson acknowledges the very high levels
of female participation in the Scandinavian labour forces, the
role women have played in the unions, and the gains women have
made working within long-established labour organizations and
parties. This is in marked contrast with other nations, such as
Canada or the US, where the labour movements
have been much weaker and greater emphasis has been placed upon
setting up separate womens organizations.
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Galensons book provides an
excellent and informative overview of the Scandinavian labour
movements. However, including the introductory and recapitulatory
chapters, the book is only 153 pages in length. Most of the chapters
are very short (only 10 to 12 pages of text), leaving very little
space to actually explore what is unique about these labour movements
in any kind of depth, or to introduce much that is not already
familiar to those with an interest in Scandinavia. There is little
discussion of recent developments, including globalization, the
EU, the pronounced employer offensive (especially
in Sweden), rising levels of inequality, and the recent attacks
made on labour, the industrial relations systems, and the welfare
states or of labours response to these new challenges
(see e.g., Gregg M. Olsen "Re-modeling Sweden: The Rise and
Demise of the Compromise in a Global Economy," Social
Problems 43, 1 (1996) 1-20; and "Half Empty or Half Full?:
The Swedish Welfare State in Transition," Canadian Review
of Sociology and Anthropology 36, 2 (1999) 241-267). Galenson
also spends little space discussing the growing divide between
the social democratic labour parties and their long-time, blue-collar
allies or the emerging and widening splits within and among the
major labour federations. He does note that many of the more highly
skilled and highly educated workers and their unions have become
increasingly dissatisfied with solidaristic wage policies that
emphasize equality (a general reduction in wage differentials,
rather than equal pay for equal work) over social justice (fair
wage differentials given different levels of skill and education).
And, he suggests that this divide will make it harder to organize
more highly-skilled and educated white-collar workers in the future
if the old wage policy is supported. A similar problem in the
social policy field, however, was headed off when social democratic
governments oversaw the installation of a set of income-related
social programs on top of the flat-rate (and relatively modest)
universal benefits in order to maintain support for the welfare
state among higher-paid, white-collar workers.
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To his credit, Galenson explicitly
reminds us that the Scandinavian model(s) cannot be adopted holus
bolus or easily imported into the US
or any other nation. However, if we are to learn from this more
"labour-friendly" region of the world, Galensons
useful little book must be supplemented by other, more wide-ranging
studies (e.g., Mikko Kautto, Matti Heikkilä, Bjorn Hvinden,
Staffan Marklund, and Niels Ploug, Nordic Social Policy: Changing
Welfare States, (Routledge, 1999).
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Gregg M. Olsen
University of Manitoba
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Donna R. Gabaccia, Italys Many Diasporas (London:
UCL Press 2000)
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THIS IMPORTANT conceptualization and survey
of world-wide Italian migration in terms of transnational identities
and diaspora is part of the series "Global Diasporas,"
edited by Robin Cohen, University of Warwick. His own Global
Diasporas: An Introduction (1997), Nicholas Van Heers
New Diasporas: The Mass Exodus, Dispersal and Regrouping of
Migrant Communities (1998) as well as a study of the Sikh
diaspora by Darsan Singh Tatla have already appeared. In the announcement
of the series Cohen notes: "The assumption that minorities
and migrants will demonstrate an extensive loyalty to the nation-state
is now questionable." Nationalist politicians and ideologues
who have always questioned such loyalties often have turned migrants
and minorities into refugees. Thus the real question is: Why have
historians and other social scientists remained welded to the
ideology of nation states and of delimited ethnic groups rather
than looking at transcultural lives of migrants? Even everyday
language points in that direction. It is not accidental, Gabaccia
notes, "that the modern Italian word for country is the same
as for village (paese)." (3) Furthermore, as all of us know,
"citizenship" of a country conceptually derives from
"city-zenship," membership in politically active sections
of delimited urban populations.
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Gabaccia, who has long pursued
the study of international working-class movements, transcultural
immigrant lives, and transnational co-operation of diaspora groups
begins her narrative with a chapter on migration from the Appenines
peninsula from 1200 to the 1780s. Dynastic Europe nations
had not yet been invented was often divided by warfare,
but was unified by trans-European nobilities and trans-European
intelligentsias. Among the latter, "Italians" played
a particularly important role in science, architecture, and several
branches of high culture. "To feel Italian was to identify
culturally with civiltà italiana an
elite culture that had developed in and spread from Italy to Europe
between 1000 and 1600." (8) In the century from 1790 to the
1880s, a process of self-definition (my liberal translation of
"risorgimento") began and resulted in one Italian state
but two "races," northern (superior) and southern (lesser)
Italians. In consequence, Gabaccia raises the question whether
migrants formed one diaspora or two. She discusses the creation
of nationality in the diaspora "Italians made abroad."
As among all immigrant groups a contraction of the many local
cultures into one ascribed national category occurred. No receiving
society was able to distinguish between someone from Biella (Piedmont)
or from Cosenza (Calabria). The immigrants themselves did distinguish
by village, province, and the north-south dichotomy but needed
the larger "Italian" identification for projecting an
image of themselves to their immigrant neighbours as well as for
political clout. They had to homogenize their mutually unintelligible
dialects to even arrive at a common Italian language. Italian
national consciousness was made at home and abroad, and both variants
interacted, reinforcing or contradicting each other.
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Three chapters cover the global
labour migrations from the 1870s to the early 1920s with a major
break in 1914. Gabaccia first outlines the migrations. According
to official statistics, 16.6 million men and women left in five
decades, though many returned or, because of multiple migrations,
were counted more than once. They moved within a Europe-focused
global economy that had developed since the 16th century and in
the late 19th century developed from colonialism to imperialist
strategies of domination and accumulation. Colonies in Africa
were populated by migrants; former colonies, as independent states,
began to attract migrants from Europe: "To govern is to populate"
was a policy-guiding concept in Argentina. In a North American
historiographical perspective, Italian men and women have often
been described as "unskilled." Many, in fact, came as
highly skilled railroad workers, drilling tunnels, and laying
tracks. In particular, the immigrants spreading from Montréal
along railroads and to construction sites as far as the Rocky
Mountains are an example. Often these men had migrated to similar
jobs within Europe before crossing the Atlantic. Similarly, womens
work in the garment industry demands high skills, even if a gendered
labelling of jobs does not always accept this. Italian migrants
moved internationally to segments of labour markets accessible
to non-natives. In addition to their skills they carried with
them traditions of peasant rebelliousness, artisanal radicalism,
and urban labour organization. Both the socialist parties and
the Catholic Church developed institutions to advise prospective
emigrants and to aid them in their new locations. Ethnic entrepreneurs,
padrones, facilitated migrants insertion at their
destinations but also often bound them into relationships of economic
dependence.
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Migrants selected among destinations
and developed transcultural lives. Even if village relationships
were reconstituted by patterns of living and working, after migrations
such relationships spanned several continents. From the southern
town of Picinisco, to give only one example, one third of the
migrants worked in Paris, one third in towns and cities in England,
the last third in places as varied as Ireland, Scotland, Germany,
Sweden, Denmark, and Russia. (71) Members of a family or a community
spread across several states but remained in contact, returned,
left again. For purposes of mutual support and to ease the transition
to different social patterns they congregated in ethnic neighbourhoods.
To acquire an economic base they concentrated in particular niches
of labour markets. Thus "Italian" quarters and labour
market segments emerged, "national patterns in a world economy."
(74) Italian women made the transition to industrial work more
quickly than immigrant women, shunning positions as domestic labour.
The image of the male-controlled Italian wife staying at home
is another of the many clichés to which historians have
succumbed.
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Migrant men often worked in outdoor
occupations, living in boarding homes, bunkhouses, or camps. Some
migrated seasonally between harvest labour in Italy and Argentina,
for example. Construction workers destined for Canada delayed
arrival until the frost was off the ground. In Italian language
such lifestyles were described as of "outsiders" or
"beyond civilization." Seasonal or multi-annual migrants
wives remained in villages at home, a threat to traditional concepts
of social respectability since female sexuality was viewed "as
a powerful and potentially disorderly force." (85) When the
"men without women" (Harney) called for "women
who wait" (Brettell), communities emerged and patterns of
life incorporated several regional cultures (transcultural) within
the distant frames of states. Thus "international family
economies" emerged in which the real value of cash earnings
had to be known for the several locations of family life. Highly
informed accounting rather than vague images of opportunities
explain migration decisions of men and women, and decisions to
send children to seek waged work. For those who returned, however,
cash was turned into social prestige rather than into investments.
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Internationalism began with the
pan-European revolutionary attitudes in support of popular rule
of the followers of Garibaldi and Mazzini. Shifting from politics
to class and increasingly associated with socialism, anarchism,
and communism, a new labour internationalism posed a challenge
to the many nationalisms in the decades before 1914. "The
relative importance of class, nationalism, internationalism, region,
and religion varied enormously in the other Italies
that gradually coalesced from the satellites of Italys many
village-based diasporas." (107) Proletarian attitudes at
home "for us there are no frontiers" merged
with and were informed by those of political exiles from Italy,
who in turn were influenced by existing movements and radicalisms
in the respective host societies. Italian migrants in France could
join an established labour movement whereas in North Africa and
Latin America, especially in Argentina and Brazil, they had to
create labour movements. In North America, both Italian men and
women became involved in several of the AFL unions, those of the
garment trades in particular. Out of these activities "other
Italies" emerged, communities based on internationalism and
anti-clericalism. Ybor City, Florida, cigarworkers with their
connections to Havana, Manila, Hamburg, and many other craft-class
communities, provide an example, though their three major local
mutual aid societies remained centred on culture: Italian, Asturian,
Cuban. Everywhere "articulate" internationalism was
divided, however, along the ideological lines of the Left parallel
to the labour movement. Catholic priests reinforced a labour migrant
consciousness as well as an Italian-Catholic consciousness.
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In the 1920s and 1930s, states,
claiming the objective of creating monocultural nations, turned
hostile to immigration and, in particular in the case of the fascist
countries, hostile to emigration. While the slowdown of labour
mass migration was thus ideology-driven, its collapse came with
the Great Depression after 1929. The old labour diasporic communities
were now joined by political exiles, while some of the prominenti
supported the "new" state. Only in the late 1940s and
in the 1950s did mass labour migration resume, especially to Northern
Europe and to Canada. (Chapter 7) The take-off of the Italian
economy, however, first involved large internal south-to-north
migrations and, second, turned Italy into an immigration destination
with considerable in-migration from Northern Africa, sub-Saharan
Africa, and Asia, some of it undocumented.
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The Italian proverbs, "All
the world is a village," and "All people everywhere
are the same," emphasize the face-to-face global community.
However, at the same time, Italians across the world developed
cultures specific to everyday life and institutional frameworks
of the host societies. Donna Gabaccias study is a model
of a differentiated assessment of a global community of migrants,
since the 19th century mainly working-class migrants, on five
continents. Her knowledge is world-wide, the analysis penetrating.
No single disaspora emerged, but concepts of ethnic enclaves and
hyphenated cultures cannot capture the multi-faceted patterns
of migration, acculturation, and militancy. In her discussion
of the global, individual men and women remain in the centre.
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Dirk Hoerder
University of Bremen
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David Palmer, Ross Shanahan, and Martin Shanahan, eds. Australian
Labour History Reconsidered (Adelaide: Australian Humanities
Press 1999)
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THIS BOOK is dedicated to the memory of
a former South Australian Labor premier. And one of its innovatory
features is to shift the perspective on labour history towards
that neglected state by extending geographical coverage well beyond
the usual emphasis on Eastern Australia. The editors, David Palmer,
Ross Shanahan, and Martin Shanahan, all write from South Australia,
and the publisher is based at Unley. It very successfully shifts
the focus of this reconsideration of Australian labour history
towards the centre of the Australian continent.
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The chapters are grouped into themes
with numerous individual authors covering a large array of topics.
In their introduction the editors identify some features of a
distinctly Australian interpretation of labour history as an aspect
of a society and emerging culture with many features and multiple
"personalities." They provide a good background account
of the history of Australian labour, but focus their analysis
on the problems and possibilities emerging from the new form of
globalized capitalism. The founding and sustaining myth
of the political Labor Parties was their role in civilizing capitalism
and smoothing its periodic crises; the reality, as time passed,
was sometimes the deputing of Labor governments to administer
the same sorts of restrictions on workers earlier sought in the
name of capitalism. By the time of the Hawke and Keating governments
the pressures "to decide" were towards "deregulation,"
a process which accelerated wildly throughout the 1990s as Labor
fell out of office in the federal and state spheres of politics.
The impact on organised labour was extensive, but it helped to
broaden alliances and widen outlooks, and the effect on labour
historiography was towards the diversification of ideas well represented
in this book.
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The chapters which follow discuss
patterns and themes in the new labour history of contemporary
writing. These themes include culture, gender, and the Australian
worker; the political culture and organized labour; communities
of working-class people; myth and reality in Australian egalitarianism;
alternative identities based on colour or marginality, and the
place of intellectuals in relation to the working class and to
labour historiography. Some of the many authors in this collection
offer vignettes, and there are helpful summaries by the editors,
but the chapters are extensively researched. There are some typographical
errors here and there throughout the text, which detract from
an otherwise excellent and high quality book production.
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Part one of the book consists of
a study of the ethos of the Australian Workers Union by Mark Hearn,
and an essay on women and the professionalization of Australian
nursing, by Glenda Strachan. Both provide an excellent survey
of work in the field, and both cast their nets wider than the
conventional mainstream history. Henry Lawson, Australias
world-class short-story writer and poet, for example, is recognized
by Hearn as quite central to the creation of the bush myth around
which the Australian Workers Union developed. He also takes fully
into account the research of John Merritt that from the beginning
the shearers inclination to a radical industrial stance
in the shed, or workplace, never excluded their hopes and aspirations
to own a farm or make something of their lives outside and beyond
their work. William Lane, the radical socialist writer and editor,
whose literary personae "John Miller" and "Lucinda
Sharpe" symbolised the functional schizophrenia of the shearing
shed and industrial confrontationism, proceeded to lead his followers
on to the New Australia project overseas. Australia henceforth
remained behind for a time in such radical thoughtstreams, but
a continuing haven for the practical man and woman. The descent
of such activism and functional egalitarianism into the world
of nursing in the course of the 20th century nicely makes this
point of its wide acceptance in the community.
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Part two of the book looks at the
links between culture and labour institutions. David Palmer examines
the experience at Broken Hill and Mount Isa of union struggles
over safety problems between the two world wars. Chris McConville
compares waterfront unionism in Buenos Aires, Melbourne, and San
Francisco. Workers in such port cities had direct contact with
workers elsewhere and were consequently an advanced sector of
the union movement.
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In part three Bradley Bowden traces
the emergence of labour identity in Ipswich in the years after
1861. The second city of Queensland had a geographical proximity
to Brisbane which ensured that Labor representation finally followed
the growth of a sizable workforce based in mining and industrial
activities. Nevertheless, the hegemony of the old order remained
intact until 1912 and it was not finally broken until 1915. Wagga
Wagga, on the other hand, is presented by Warwick Eather as a
case study of the comeback of conservatism in a rural setting
and in the circumstances presented by the 1950s. The people of
Wagga Wagga believed that their city had become the social and
political capital of the Riverina, and warmed to the purge mentality
of the Menzies era, notwithstanding its earlier role in the creation
of the Labor myth.
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An interesting discussion of the
elements of myth and reality in Australian egalitarianism follows.
Like America, in some respects, Australia has often been seen
as a "classless" society, though this is perhaps more
a matter of perception than reality. Ross Shanahan discusses something
of the reality in terms of making and judicially enforcing the
idea of workplace agreements as contractual in the industrial
disputations of the 1890s and in the present era of "deregulation";
Martin Shanahan looks at the personal wealth of labourers prior
to World War I; and Glenn Giles looks at award restructuring and
changes in the workplace, a chapter which provides an interesting
challenge to the famous de-skilling thesis proposed by Braverman
and others.
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Part five begins the real divergence
away from traditional labour history in its discussion of identities.
Christine Nicholls and Ross Shanahan provide a piece on oral history
in central Australia, while Robin Haines looks at the expectations
and positive response of new arrivals to South Australia during
the last century; Desmond OConnor reviews the confrontation
between Italian and Anglo-Celtic workers in Adelaide during the
Great Depression, and Murray Couch reviews a research project
on Broken Hill.
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Just as the earlier chapters provide
an up-to-date survey of recent research, so too is part six of
the book at the forefront of labour history writing. Ray Markey
takes the history of the Labor Council of New South Wales right
up to the era of "deregulation"; Robin Gollan reviews
the writing of labour history from its acceptance as a scholarly
discipline in 1960 until recent times; Terry Irving and Sean Scalmer
look at labour historians as labour intellectuals, their efforts
and achievements amongst the "most ambitious and innovative"
achieved by Australias intellectuals; and Verity Burgmann
looks back in reflection upon her essay about the strange death
of labour history in Australia in its earlier circumstances.
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It seems now that the rumours of
Labors fall into the darkness of a deregulated world were
somewhat exaggerated and labour history has regained its elan
and something of its earlier standing. There is enough evidence
now available to suggest that the future of both labour and its
intelligentsia is bright enough for survival, even if in an election
year the policies of parsimony are to be slapped into reverse.
Whatever the outcome there, it seems likely enough that politics
will soon become more about people than just dry statistics, and
that history will reflect the change, as it did in decades that
were better than the 1990s.
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Frank Farrell
University of New South Wales
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Gerald Hunt, ed., Labouring for Rights: Unions and Sexual Diversity
Across Nations (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1999)
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THIS COLLECTION sets out a very ambitious
goal: to "explore the motivations toward, impediments to,
and outcomes of alliances between organized labour and sexual
diversity activists." (5) Part of the series Queer Politics,
Queer Theories, edited by Steve Phelan, Hunts collection
reaches beyond a single country, where such an exploration would
be daunting enough, given the range and diversity of issues, activists,
and unions typically encountered in each country. Instead, it
provides a broadly comparative perspective on these alliances
and their effect on workplace-based issues related to sexual orientation
across several countries, considered in three major geographic
configurations: North America, Europe, and a piece of the southern
hemisphere including the South Pacific, Australia, and South Africa.
The collection will appeal to those interested in the stories,
struggles, and history of ordinary people involved in gay and
lesbian liberation, organized labour, and the intersection of
the two. Readers will find this book to be wonderfully rich in
historical detail, refreshingly varied in both the analytical
approach and individual perspective of the contributors and
best of all decidedly readable.
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As with many comparative analyses,
the choice of what is being compared will be criticized. Some
will wish for greater depth, or "thickness," in looking
at individual countries and even individual unions. Others may
wish for greater breadth, to include accounts from Latin America
and the Middle East, where vibrant unionism often exists side-by-side
with institutional and societal oppression of gays and lesbians.
Leaving readers with an appetite for more information, however,
is hardly a shortcoming, particularly given that this collection
is the first scholarly foray into this (mine)field. Rather, the
international, comparative nature of this collection should be
seen as providing a great base and one might hope incentive
for future scholarly examinations that aim to improve both
the depth and breadth of our knowledge of this subject. On the
whole, the approach taken by Hunt is amply justified, both by
the "connectedness" of the individual scholarship, and
by the space limitations of a single volume (this one is 300 pages).
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Six of the fifteen chapters deal
with North America. The Canadian situation is addressed by Hunt
who provides an overview of the activity of umbrella organizations
and a number of case studies showing union leadership on sexual
orientation issues. Cynthia Peterson then traces the participation
of organized labour in the Canadian cases of litigation around
same-sex spousal benefits. Both chapters highlight the extent
and commitment of Canadas labour movement to issues of sexual
diversity.
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Each of the four chapters dealing
with the Unites States focuses on a distinct aspect of the relationship
between labour and queer activism. On the basis of a historical
review of the increasingly assertive involvement of organized
labour in fighting discrimination based on sexual orientation,
Christian Bain is optimistic about the future of the alliance
between organized labour and queer activism. Miriam Frank, who
analyses the phenomenon of gay and lesbian caucuses within unions,
is also generally optimistic about future activity. Desman Holcomb,
in explaining how even hostile administrations have been pressured
into providing benefits for domestic partners, highlights the
strategic importance of both formal and informal alliances between
gay and straight workers. After the optimism of the preceding
five chapters, Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller provides a "reality
check" by chronicling the indifferent response of organized
labour to the recognition of same sex marriage in Hawaii.
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Taken together, the US
chapters suggest that organized labours support of sexual
diversity is strongest when "equity" is framed narrowly
around benefit coverage and other issues traditionally associated
with workplace and collective bargaining. When the issues at stake
include much more controversial measures of equality (such as
marriage) the support of organized labour is much less enthusiastic.
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Jaqueline Leckies study of
the Pacific Islands emphasizes the cultural context in explaining
why unions are slow to recognize womens equality and have
remained silent on sexual diversity and associated legal rights.
Examining the situation in Australia, Shane Ostenfeld shows how
gay and lesbian movements have, for two decades, recognized that
unions were an important part of their struggle, how the response
of organized labour was "considered, incremental, and hotly
debated among members," and how Australia produced "arguably
the best developed relationship of this type in the world."
(181, 6) In the "new" South Africa, the first country
to provide full equality to gays and lesbians in a national constitution,
Mazibuko K. Jara, Naomi Webster, and Gerald Hunt show that, while
there may remain a considerable gap between constitutional pronouncement
and actual practice, coalitions between labour and sexual diversity
activists are forming. The need for those coalitions is great,
but the authors express cautious optimism that the widespread
recognition of equality as a cornerstone of the new social order
will, with quick and assertive action by sexual diversity activists,
come to be reflected within organized labour and then broader
society.
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The four-chapter section covering
Europe begins with a chapter by David Rayside in which he provides
a broad overview of activism across Europe, drawing on representative
examples from Britain, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. Despite
a high level of activity in three of the four countries (France
lags behind in the development of alliances and in political activism),
issues of sexual diversity have not assumed much prominence in
the new European Union. Ronald Holzhacker then provides a closer
look at Germany, showing that alliances between organized labour
and queer activists have only recently begun to offer the promise
of growth and influence. Drawing on extensive survey data, Phil
Greasleys chapter on Britain highlights a curious contradiction:
In the home of Queen Victoria, societal attitudes towards most
things sexual have remained somewhat conservative and the leadership
of British unions has tended to reflect that reality. Nonetheless,
a mutually beneficial relationship has developed between queer
activists and the labour movement. Perhaps the Thatcher era motivated
labour leaders to take their allies where they could find them.
Indeed, Fiona Colgan, in the final chapter on Europe, argues that
"Over the last decade, trade union interest in lesbian and
gay issues has increased steadily as has lesbian and gay participation
within trade union structures." (262) Her chapter is based
on a detailed case study of UNISON, the
largest public sector union in Europe (formed from the 1993 merger
of NALGO, NUPE, and COHSE).
Its long-standing recognition of gay and lesbian members and concern
for their representation adds to our understanding of how large
unions are able to integrate sexuality issues into the broader
context of workplace issues.
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In a mere ten pages, the editor
draws on the preceding chapters to reach for some broad conclusions.
He traces three related developments: the increasing strength
and stability of unions that emerged from the post-war settlement
and the later reversal of fortunes as neo-liberalism took hold;
changing demographics within the labour movement, and the strength
and visibility of the womens movement within the ranks of
organized labour. In addition to permitting some conclusions about
what accounts for the growing number of alliances between organized
labour and "sexual diversity activists" in the studied
countries, this review also challenges the social movement orthodoxy
that would characterize queer activism as "new" social
movement activity and labour activism as "old" (or traditional)
social movement activity.
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The book is a valuable addition
to a field of scholarship desperately in need of additional study.
The focus on the intersection of queer and union activity means
that the book could be used effectively in a variety of courses,
although the absence of both an index and a comprehensive bibliography
limits its usefulness as a reference book, a role for which it
is otherwise well suited. Nonetheless, Gerald Hunt has edited
a collection valuable to any university or college library. It
should also find a place in the personal libraries of anyone interested
in organized labour, workplace equity, social movements, or queer
history.
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Neil Thomlinson
Ryerson University
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Judith Glover, Women and Scientific Employment (London:
Macmillan Press 2000)
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I HAVE A SIZABLE collection of photographic
images of Marie Curie. In several she is looking directly at the
camera; her countenance is intelligent but there is no hint of
a smile. Her expression is dour even in pictures with her beloved
Pierre or her daughters. The historian of science Margaret Rossiter
has attributed Curies success in science to a strategy of
"deliberate overqualification and personal stoicism."
A century after her brilliant work earned her two Nobel prizes,
women still accept her approach as necessary to gain admittance
to the world of science.
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In Women and Scientific Employment,
Judith Glover examines the theoretical discourses that have framed
the issue of women in science and presents selected empirical
data to illustrate the continuing problem. Glover has focused
primarily on women in academic science as this is the data set
that has been available through university and government records
for many decades. Measures of persistence and promotion are readily
extracted. As Glover indicates, women scientists in the private
sector and women with lower levels of education employed in scientific
jobs are rarely captured in these data sets. Similarly, women
who are members of trade unions in university or government laboratories
are seldom mentioned in surveys of scientific employment or in
the type of secondary analysis performed by Glover. This gap makes
it difficult to assess the impact of trade unionism on womens
employment in science. Technology and trades organizations are
beginning to fill in this missing piece.
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Glover makes a distinction between
two types of feminization of the sciences: quantitative feminization
refers to increasing the numbers and proportion of women in science,
while vertical feminization refers to the movement of women into
top positions or high academic rank. She refers to these as measures
of "getting in" and "getting on," respectively.
Both are essential for monitoring employment equity in science.
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Glover has conducted research on
gender, science and technology, and on the representation of women
in scientific work for the European Union. She is presently Reader
in Sociology and Social Policy at the Roehampton Institute in
London, England. In this book she reviews the extensive international
work on the "problem" of women in science, and presents
the key authors, debates, and relevant employment statistics.
Although there are more than two dozen charts and graphs, this
is not a compilation of endless columns of raw data. Rather it
is an exposition and interpretation of informative comparisons
within and between countries. One chapter is devoted to analysis
of the situation for women in the United Kingdom. In a separate
chapter Glover presents representative data from the US
and France that parallel the British situation. She highlights
the differences and the striking similarities. In all three countries,
attrition between first and graduate degrees is markedly higher
for women than men. The comparative data also confirm that vertical
sex segregation remains rampant in academic science, even in disciplines
such as biology that have experienced a high level of quantitative
feminization sustained over many years.
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It is unfortunate that the most
recent data was more than five years old at the time of publication.
Although researchers in this field know how consistent the participation
rates are over time (and space!), science and education policy
makers want to believe that their efforts are paying off. They
are not content with last years numbers and often demand
the most current statistics.
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Glover pays considerable attention
to the lack of resistance by women scientists to their situation.
She outlines a variety of arguments about the socialization of
women scientists to relatively conservative values, and their
persistent belief in the fairness of systems of evaluation including
the mythology of the operation of an objective "scientific
method" in determining hirings and promotions within scientific
fields. Faith in peer review and objectivity remain almost untouchable
even in the face of evidence of their limitations. To those explanations
I would add that women scientists are highly educated, paid well
for interesting work (although not as well as their male colleagues),
and admitted to an elite professional class. In general they are
unlikely to think of themselves as oppressed by almost any criterion.
Involvement in "women in science" organizations or the
"womens caucus" within scientific societies is
viewed as suspect by many scientists, including women, and as
evidence for a lack of the requisite absolute commitment to science
and only science.
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Glover argues that it is time to
stop thinking of science as one giant monolith, and to start thinking
about discipline-specific exclusions of women and their causes.
An entire chapter is devoted to the particular case of physics
which has been largely refractory to efforts to increase participation
of women. For comparison, Glover presents Witzs study of
the exclusion of women from medical education and practice in
the 19th century. She argues that both power and knowledge accrue
to "disciplines" in the sense of the word used by Michel
Foucault: accepted techniques and paradigms within a discipline
serve to examine, control, and limit behaviour. Glover also presents
the work of historian David Noble on the Christian clerical origins
of universities, and the evolution of authority from the church
to science within the same institutions. Women were not just excluded,
but were viewed as the antithesis of the monastic life of the
mind. Glover acknowledges that one of her purposes in discussing
Nobles work is to bring it to the attention of more European
readers. It is unfortunate that the work of another scholar on
the issue of "getting on" in science was not addressed.
Gerhard Sonnert is the author of a substantial sociological survey
of successful American scientists entitled The Project Access
Study and published as Who Succeeds in Science? Sonnert
identified the ongoing accumulation of small disincentives as
an issue for women in science that alters their career over the
long term.
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In all of the chapters Glover presents
a critical review of a substantial body of literature in a clear
and concise manner. The reference lists at the end of each chapter
are extensive and useful to readers looking for the primary sources.
Glover makes extensive use of footnotes, and they provide insight
into her thinking and rich anecdotal evidence for her arguments.
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Glovers conclusions have
significant implications for both education and science policy.
In countries like the US, UK, and Canada,
large national programs and local grass-roots initiatives have
focused on increasing the participation of girls and young women
in science education and employment. Modest improvements in the
rates of entry into science and engineering have been observed
("getting in"), but enhanced persistence and success
("getting on") has been much more elusive. Glover contends
that these are separate issues with separate solutions and no
stoichiometric relationship.
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Finally, Glover is critical of
the assumption from feminist standpoint theorists that women will
change the face, agenda, and conduct of science. Such essentialism
ignores the larger players in science. In the time of Da Vinci
and today as well, scientific agendas have been set by the material
forces of capitalism. No wonder Marie Curie never smiles.
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Janice G. Dodd
University of Manitoba
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Anders Hayden, Sharing the Work, Sparing the Planet: Work Time,
Consumption, and Ecology (Toronto: Between the Lines 2000)
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ANDERS HAYDEN is commonly known as the
guy who works 24 hours a day for a shorter work week. As a staff
person for the Toronto-based 32 Hours campaign and as a volunteer
activist, no one has done more than Hayden in helping to build
political support in Canada for policies to reduce average working
hours. Now, with the publication of Sharing the Work, Sparing
the Planet, Hayden also makes an impressive intellectual and
empirical contribution to our understanding of this important
but complex issue. The book describes a holistic vision of progressive
social and economic policy reforms, rooted in reductions in working
hours combined with measures, especially ecological tax reforms,
to enhance the "eco-efficiency" of current economic
activity.
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Shorter working hours are commonly
advanced as a simple solution to unemployment. If there is a shortage
of job openings, then a shorter work week will spread available
work around to more people, thus reducing the incidence of unemployment.
Hayden is more careful than most shorter work-time advocates in
noting the limitations of this rather mechanistic argument. He
cautions that shorter work-time should not be seen as a form of
"collective austerity" that is, as a means of sharing
unemployment. Rather, a stronger campaign for shorter work-time
will be built by viewing it as a positive goal in and of itself,
as a means of capturing the benefits of technological development
and productivity growth in the form of increased leisure time
(rather than material consumption), and as a means of reshaping
our economic activities to become more harmonious with ecological
as well as economic priorities.
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Hayden also offers a careful critique
of what he terms the "productivist" trend in the shorter
work-time movement. It is often suggested that shorter working
hours can enhance hourly productivity (because workers are more
rested and less harried), thus delivering cost savings which can
largely or even wholly offset the cost to employers of the work-time
reduction. In this analysis, employers must be somehow irrational
not to see the win-win potential in reducing regular working hours.
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But for Hayden, this approach misses
the point on at least two grounds. One fundamental rationale for
reducing working hours is to shift our overall lifestyle away
from material consumption and in favour of leisure time. The productivist
argument inverts this to propagate shorter working hours as being
conducive to more output (and hence consumption). It also underestimates
the extent of employer resistance to demands for shorter work-time.
There are concrete economic factors behind the desire of employers
to impose longer hours on an ever-smaller group of well-paid "core"
employees, and the consequent polarization of working hours between
that core group and another group of underutilized peripheral
workers. This dominant trend in employment practices over the
past two decades reflects the socially destructive but powerful
bottom-line interests of employers; we should not be naïve
about the likelihood of winning them voluntarily to the cause
of shorter working hours in the face of these economic pressures.
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Indeed, the history of working-time
struggles indicates strongly that more progress on this issue
will result not from naïve appeals to employers that shorter
work-time can be good for them, as well. Rather, it will require
the adoption by workers of shorter work-time as an important goal
(in both collective bargaining and in broader political struggles),
and the successful mobilization of those workers and their allies
to impose that preference over the resistance of their employers.
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One especially useful feature of
Sharing the Work, Sparing the Planet is its detailed review
of the successes and failures of various concrete shorter work-time
initiatives, in Canada and numerous other countries (both industrialized
and developing). Both the politics and the practicalities of work-time
reduction initiatives can be very tricky, and Haydens international
overview gives us valuable and concrete insights. There are numerous
ways in which lifetime hours of work can be reduced a shorter
work day, a shorter work week, longer vacations, earlier retirement,
leaves for parenting or education and different approaches
tend to demonstrate different degrees of success in maintaining
worker support and stimulating new job creation. Haydens
Chapters 6 and 7 provide a dense, convenient, and invaluable primer
of "best practices" for anyone wanting to learn quickly
about the plethora of ways in which work time can concretely and
effectively be reduced.
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Like most economists, I still have
some difficulty with the broad ecological critique of economic
growth which underpins many of Haydens policy prescriptions.
Hayden is more careful and nuanced than many environmentalists
on this point, but he still tends to portray economic growth in
general as damaging to the goal of environmental sustainability.
I would argue that this approach, broadly shared within the green
movement, ultimately undermines the struggles for both shorter
work-time and environmental protection.
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In the first place, given the green
movements obsession with the measurement errors implicit
in conventional economic concepts (like Gross Domestic Product),
Hayden, like others, at times ironically conflates economic growth
with the production of what he calls "more stuff."A
full 70 per cent of Canadas GDP is
composed of services, not "stuff." Much represents the
value-added in the production of public caring services which
progressives value highly (and which Hayden himself wants to see
more of).
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To be sure, we need to think carefully
about how economic growth occurs, and what types of goods and
services are produced, in order to regulate and limit the environmental
consequences of that growth. Some types of economic growth are
grossly destructive of the environment (such as monster home suburbs,
sport-utility vehicles, and tar sands developments). Other types
of economic growth seem benign: like the caring services we need
more of. A few types are even environmentally beneficial, like
investments in emissions reduction or the construction of new
parks, expenses which show up in the GDP
as surely as any purchase of a new Ford Explorer.
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The challenge, I would argue, is
not to try to stop economic growth (which is the ultimate if often
unstated conclusion of the assumption that growth is generally
bad for the environment), but rather to radically regulate growth,
ensuring in particular that we get more public services consumption
and less private goods consumption. The GDP
can still grow, jobs can still be created, average incomes can
still rise, and human living standards will improve (in both material
and non-material ways). But the impact of economic activity on
the environment could be moderated significantly.
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This is a daunting challenge, admittedly,
especially in light of the growing and bleak evidence regarding
energy consumption and global warming. But on the other hand,
if we equate a green economy with a no-growth economy, then the
political constituency for a green economy is likely to evaporate
quickly. Average workers will quickly conclude (wrongly, in my
view) that ecological goals are incompatible with their legitimate
desire for a higher standard of living (measured correctly, and
not by how much "stuff" they consume). A no-growth economy,
far from constituting a green utopia, would in reality be marked
by growing poverty and inequality, a popular backlash against
both ecological rules and government in general, and a chronic
lack of real resources to dedicate to environmental goals (such
as improved infrastructure or the amelioration of environmental
damage). And it will take a lot more than Haydens environmental
taxes to bring about the necessary pro-environment regulation
of the economy. (To be fair he also discusses, albeit in less
detail, other possible forms of environmental regulation to promote
his goal of "eco-efficiency.") Environmentalists and
progressive economists need to do some networking about the limitations
of market price signals in bringing about desired changes in economic
behaviour, before we jump so enthusiastically on the "green
tax" bandwagon. In many cases, direct regulations of the
command-and-control type will be infinitely more effective than
the ecological tax reforms so popular with market-oriented reformers.
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More convincing and appealing to
me is Haydens clarion call to build a new cultural politics
which rejects the dominant ideology of consumerism. If we can
struggle against the commercial notion that ones happiness
is directly correlated with the amount of ones private consumption
(and generally with the most ostentatious and shallow forms of
that private consumption), then we will build a stronger basis
for all kinds of progressive goals. This new politics would clearly
assist in mobilizing support for shorter work-time, since the
assumed trade-off between material consumption and leisure time
will become less worrisome. It will also assist in the all-important
struggle against tax cuts, and to preserve popular support for
public forms of consumption (such as public or caring services,
parks, and public transportation).
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Hayden correctly identifies that
it will be a huge challenge to overcome the cultural factors contributing
to the "work-and-spend" mentality which dominates so
many Canadians lives. But this goal seems to me to be an
important prerequisite for future progressive success, on the
work-time issue and on many other issues as well, and Hayden challenges
us convincingly to take up the challenge.
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Working hours have become more
polarized in Canada over the last decade. Employers are demanding
the right to impose longer hours on a select group of core workers,
while other workers scrabble to find enough hours of work in part-time
jobs to survive. Right-wing governments, like the Harris regime
in Ontario, have targeted the rollback of existing work time-regulations,
inadequate as they are, as a major political priority. Anders
Haydens book couldnt have come at a better time to
help labour unions and other activists resist these regressive
trends, and seize the initiative once again in the fight over
time. I heartily recommend it for anyone with an academic or an
activist interest in this important issue.
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Jim Stanford
Canadian Auto Workers
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Norma Daykin and Lesley Doyal, eds., Health and Work: Critical
Perspectives (New York: St. Martins Press 1999)
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THIS BOOK is particularly relevant to paid
and unpaid workers struggling to have their voices heard concerning
unacknowledged health and safety related problems related to their
work. I read this book as I settled into a new work setting, amid
concerns from my fellow workers about the air quality in our sealed
work environment. At the same time, there were news broadcasts
about the struggle by Ontario firefighters to receive compensation
for what they believed were work-related cancers. In both cases,
despite reassurance from various scientists and officials, these
workers continue to believe that toxins in the air are causing
some of their health-related problems. This book provides a theoretical
framework, research methodology, and case studies for concerned
workers to use to investigate work-related risk, hazards, and
health concerns.
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Knowing Doyals earlier critical
work on women and health (1995), I looked forward to reviewing
this new edited collection, and I was not disappointed. Doyals
strengths in political economy and gender studies play a strong
influence in this book. The authors focus predominantly on womens
occupational health and safety issues. Most of the earlier chapters
are case studies that deconstruct and challenge traditional occupational
health and safety rhetoric and practice. The last few chapters
elaborate on the deconstruction of concepts and rhetoric, and
on participatory research.
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The authors make a consistent effort
to provide comparative analysis. They compare the situation for
women in various occupations, and the health risks of workers
in countries of the North and South. Special attention is paid
to the impact of global economic restructuring on all these workers.
The authors raise concerns about the resultant intensification
of work and "flexible" employment within industrialized
countries of the North. At the same time they caution against
any additional transfer of occupational risks to workers in the
South.
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Through various case studies, the
authors illustrate the failure of the top-down, biomedical approach
to adequately research work-related health problems. This book
promotes a more holistic, critical, and participatory approach
to occupational health and safety research, and provides examples
using case studies. I recommend that readers hoping to learn more
about participatory research check out the recent book titled
Uncertain Hazards (2000) by Sylvia Tesh. Her book complements
Doyal and Daykins book by providing insight on the values
that influence scientists. She illustrates how environmentalist
science is emerging as a result of a paradigm shift in society.
Societal understandings of risk are changing, and there is a growing
field of research that is informed by experiential knowledge.
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Within the book Health and Work,
some authors focus on the impact for paid and unpaid workers of
economic change, and of the changing definitions of work. The
authors call for the development of gender-sensitive health promotion
policies, with specific chapters on unpaid caregivers and domestic
workers, disabled workers, and sex workers. Current occupational
health notions ignore certain workers at risk, and prioritize
the health of some workers over others. For example, while nursing
journals acknowledge the physical and psychological stress on
paid care providers of HIV/AIDS patients,
they fail to discuss the risks that unpaid caregivers face in
their work. There is an insightful article on the shortcomings
of health promotion efforts regarding HIV/AIDS
in many sex workers. Researchers tend to blame prostitutes for
HIV transmission, while failing to acknowledge
the poverty that leads many girls and women into this form of
work, their appalling working conditions, and the health risks
that they face.
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I found the article on the problems
of epidemiological research particularly insightful. Workers are
subject to multiple exposures to toxins, and they change jobs,
making it difficult to trace these exposures. Exposures to toxins
and occupational health problems are frequently underreported.
There are disagreements among scientists on "acceptable risk"
levels, and among occupational health practitioners on the diagnosis
of health-related problems. There is in general a lack of resources
committed to occupational health and safety. Employers, governments,
and insurance companies often lack the political will to address
prevention, detection, and compensation issues.
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All of these problems are exacerbated
by economic restructuring. Work gets moved to sweatshops and private
homes, or subcontracted to smaller firms, which generally have
fewer health and safety precautions than large firms do. Risks
increasingly get exported to countries in the South where their
impact is greater because of double standards and weaker controls.
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Lay and professional researchers
seeking to investigate occupational health and safety issues can
learn from this books case studies. The last few chapters
elaborate more specifically on the postmodern approach of deconstruction
which guides this book. There are also more specific illustrations
of effective participatory research in Italy and Latin America.
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This book needs to be supplemented
by books by Tesh (2000), mentioned previously, as well as Phil
Brown and Edwin Mikkelson, No Safe Place: Toxic Waste, Leukemia,
and Community Action (1990), in order to prepare researchers
for the scientific debates that participatory research provokes.
The participatory research illustrated in this book has much in
common with the "popular epidemiology" approach which
has been very effective in documenting community health problems
due to exposure to industrial toxins.
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Ella Haley
Athabasca University
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Fred Magdoff, John Bellamy Foster, and Frederick H. Buttel, eds.,
The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment
(New York: Monthly Review Press 2000)
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THIS IS A TIMELY and useful book. It is
timely because we are in the midst of another major shake-out/restructuring
of agriculture on a global basis in a time of capitalist world
hegemony. Further, this restructuring, and related crises in the
food industry, has provoked deepening concern among the general
population over the unregulated and poorly researched applications
of biotechnology in the food system. This current of public concern
has contributed to the growing "anti-globalization"
movement, providing one of the conditions leading to the possibility
of a period of sustained politicization of large numbers of people
around the world.
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It is a useful book because the
thirteen chapters, each written by a leading scholar in the area,
provide a surprisingly comprehensive presentation of many key
issues in this most recent crisis in world agriculture, as well
as reminding us of central features of the historical context.
As a result, this reader could be useful in a wide range of social
science courses dealing with issues in political economy, the
environment, rural sociology, science and technology, class and
power, and the move to world free trade.
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The book is also an antidote to
the received wisdom not only in the media and politics, but also
among a depressingly widening circle of intellectuals that the
Marxist paradigm is dead and best consigned to the museum of historical
intellectual curiosities. Many of us continue to argue that the
Marxist scientific paradigm has never been so useful, nor has
it been so clearly relevant, than in these years following the
collapse of the Soviet Union and the breaking of the iron rice
bowl in China leading to the ascendancy of the global triumphant
capitalism, with its free market ideology and its brand of economic
pseudo-science. It is refreshing to read a book in which a group
of scholars, including many from a new generation of social thinkers,
demonstrate the urgent relevance of the Marxist paradigm in addressing
key aspects of the world capitalist system. Whether dealing with
issues of biotechnology, environmental collapse, modern social
structural transformation, sustainable agriculture, a farmgate-to-supermarket
analysis of the transnational capitalist food system, the Marxist
paradigm continues to clarify, to explain, to criticize, and to
pose, as always, the possibility of alternatives.
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As a whole new generation of activists
battle world capitalism, the resurrection, clarification, and
novel application of the Marxist paradigm is an especially important
intellectual task. And this time around, that task will be less
encumbered by the albatross of the distorting lens of the official
dogmas of the Soviet Union and of Maoist China. Only Cuba remains
of the 1917 promise in Russia, and the 1949 promise in China.
Yet Cuba remains a special case because its social experiment
was rooted in its own autonomous revolution and only turned to
the Soviet model in desperation during the relentless siege by
the United States. Cuba provides today not so much a demonstration
of the classical Marxist paradigm as an example of an alternative
approach to agriculture in a hostile world capitalist market.
As Peter Rossets chapter on Cuba demonstrates, Cuba found
itself in crisis after the collapse of the Soviet Union and a
loss of privileged, subsidized access to the markets of the Soviet
bloc. Blockaded by the US, deprived of the Soviet market, many
predicted Cubas ultimate collapse. That has not yet happened
partly because Cuba, out of desperate necessity and not for any
ideological reason, retreated to a strategy of sustainable agriculture.
As Rosset concludes,
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The Cuban experience illustrates that
we can feed a nations population well with a small- or medium-sized
farm model based on appropriate ecological technology, and in
doing so we can become more self-reliant in food production. Farmers
must receive higher returns for their produce, and when they do
they will be encouraged to produce. Capital-intensive chemical
inputs most of which are unnecessary can be largely
dispensed with. The important lessons from Cuba that we can apply
elsewhere, then, are agroecology, fair prices, land reform, and
local production, including urban agriculture. (212-213)
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Although I recommend the entire
book, there are a few gems worth noting. The editors overview
is excellent, characterized by clarity and force, providing a
unifying justification for what follows by weaving the diverse
strands of the book into the Marxist paradigm focused on "the
political economy of agriculture, food, and ecology." (8)
As the editors say,
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Capitalism presents us with the paradoxical
reality of a rapid growth of food production and perpetuation
of overproduction (relative to markets and income distribution)
on one hand, accompanied by the reinforcement of social exclusion
and thus the growth of hunger on the other. The latter is not,
as is sometimes thought, mainly a result of population growth
(which has generally been surpassed by the growth of productivity
in agriculture), but instead a consequence of the fact that the
immediate object of food production is not human sustenance and
well-being but the growth of profits. The coincidence of hungry
mouths with overflowing grain silos may seem to be a paradox,
but it is a paradox not of our analysis, but of capitalist agribusiness
itself. (9)
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The editors also affirm a commitment
to Marxs dictum, "Philosophers have only interpreted
the world, the point, however, is to change it," by always
insisting on a focus on the multi-faceted struggle to change the
system. This is best expressed when they conclude their overview
with these words:
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Those who wish to radically transform
the present agricultural-food system often focus on issues such
as the proper scale of agriculture, the question of whether food
should be organized in local or global systems, and the appropriate
technology to be adopted. Although all of these questions are
significant and we should emphasize the importance of relatively
small-scale (by todays standards), local production in agriculture,
using technology appropriate to a given set of social/historical/ecological
conditions it is well to remember that such issues are
essentially secondary under present circumstances to the question
of the commodification of agriculture (and indeed of nature itself)
promoted by the capitalist economy with only one end in mind:
the production of profits. "The moral of the tale,"
Marx wrote in Capital (vol. III, chapter 6, section 2),
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"is that the capitalist system
runs counter to a rational agriculture, or that a rational agriculture
is incompatible with the capitalist system (even if the latter
promotes technical development in agriculture) and needs either
small farmers working for themselves or the control of the associated
producers." (21)
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I have already exceeded the editors
thousand words and have only scratched the surface of a book packed
with thoughtful ideas and challenging analyses. Given my own work
on the agrarian petite bourgeoisie in Canada, I found Woods
article on the agrarian roots of capitalism, Lewontins chapter
on the proletarianization of farmers, and Araghis piece
on the peasant question on the cusp between millennia lucid and
controversial. But having satisfied the readers historical
and social structural curiosities, the book then challenges the
reader with the moving front edge of controversies in biotechnological
applications in agriculture. The editors have done an excellent
job in the selection of articles and/or the assignment of topics.
They have packed a great deal into what is really quite a short
and tightly edited manuscript.
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Though edited collections usually
find little sympathy from this reviewer, this book is definitely
an exception.
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J. F. Conway
University of Regina
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Catherine Panter-Brick and Malcolm T. Smith, eds., Abandoned
Children (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000)
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A GROWING LITERATURE on abandoned children
is enhancing our understanding of the extent, diversity, and ramifications
of abandonment. Catherine Panter-Brick and Malcolm T. Smith make
an important contribution to the field in Abandoned Children.
They bring together the work of eighteen contributors including
anthropologists, historians, psychologists, research officials,
and an economist. Those familiar with studies of abandonment and
those for whom this book is a starting point are well served by
the citations that conclude each article. Not only are the references
wide-ranging, but taken together they reveal a core of works which
anchor abandonment studies.
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In her introduction, Catherine
Panter-Brick explores the complexity of the books central
concept. She argues that the category of "abandoned"
children has emerged as "other" to the contemporary
Western idea that a proper childhood is domestic and dependent.
Today this can result in inappropriate cross-cultural interventions
that ignore existing self-help systems. For Panter-Brick, abandonment
is a social construct that must be examined analytically and empirically.
She further argues that abandonment studies must take into account
childrens perspectives and their agency.
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Four of the articles in the book
deal with the long-lived European foundling system that by 1850
took in an estimated 100,000 new children a year. Isabel Dos Guimarães
Sá examines the circulation of children in 18th-century
Portugal. Children sent as infants from the Porto foundling home
usually returned at age seven to be redistributed once again.
David I. Kertzer finds that children from the Bologna foundling
home had lives comparable to their non-foundling neighbours and
often integrated into the families and communities where they
grew up. Malcolm T. Smith delineates the costs of foundling care
in the Azores and concludes that high mortality rates were essential
to the functioning of the system. Had most of the children lived,
the system would have collapsed under its own weight. Pier Paolo
Viazzo, Maria Bortolotto, and Andrea Zanotto offer an overview
of the changing patterns of abandonment, care, and mortality of
375,000 children who passed through the Florence foundling home
over five centuries. Scare resources meant hard choices. The directors
at the Innocenti in Florence shortened the period they paid wet
nurses in order to raise their wages. This attracted more nurses
and meant the babies moved out of the home faster. Sadly, however,
the resulting decrease in infant mortality was offset by a correspondingly
higher weaning mortality.
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Together these four articles reveal
the market economy of the foundling homes that integrated city
and countryside. Wet nurses from remote rural areas, foster families,
and transport drivers who operated regular routes moving thousands
of babies, were all integral to the system. In addition, a multitude
of officials oversaw the elaborately regulated process. Children
were part of this market economy as well. Their labour repaid
their room and board when they were old enough to work.
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Two articles deal with children
and war. Eftihia Voutira and Aigli Brouskou outline the eerily
similar programs of the warring Greek Communists and Nationalists
who by 1949 had separated 50,000 children from their parents to
bring them up inculcated with "appropriate" ideologies.
While many eventually returned in a repatriation process that
continued into the late 1970s, they often failed to put down roots
where they had started and moved on to urban areas or abroad.
Helen Charnley looks at responses to the separation of children
from their families in the Mozambique war during the 1980s. She
argues that efforts to help the children should have derived from
indigenous community-based responses.
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Four of the articles are based
on fieldwork studies, primarily from the 1990s, with street children.
Tobias Hecht argues the term "street children" is an
oxymoron that homogenizes a diverse population. He estimates the
actual number of street children in Brazil is only half of one
per cent of the seven million claimed by UNICEF.
Rachel Baker and Catherine Panter-Brick study abandonment in Nepal
and conclude there is a need for longitudinal studies comparing
the later careers of street children with other local children.
Heather Montgomery turns her attention to child prostitutes in
a Thai community. She argues that it is the society and state
that provide no support for desperately poor families who have
abandoned these children.
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The final articles focus on refugee
children. Rachel Hinton studied Bhutan refugee camps in Nepal.
She found the children did not share their parents sense
of abandonment. Rather they exhibited resilience, adaptability,
and agency. Failure to recognize this can result in inappropriate
intervention. The volume concludes with Mia Flores-Bórquez
who, partly from her own experience, explores the sense of abandonment
felt by Chilean children in protracted exile in Britain. Their
sense of isolation was exacerbated, not alleviated, when their
families returned with them to Chile.
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The subject matter of the articles
in Abandoned Children is unquestionably disparate. The
editors have conceptualized "abandonment" in the broadest
possible terms. Is that the strength of the book or its weakness?
In fact, the articles do intersect, making the book viable as
a single entity. The historical and contemporary studies collected
here inform one another in multiple ways. There is a continuity
of themes in regard to abandoned children that transcends space
and time. Perhaps the most important of these is that, with rare
exceptions, "abandoned" children are working children.
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Helen Brown
Malaspina University College
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Paul Taggart, Populism (Buckingham: Open University Press
2000)
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AS A CONTRIBUTION to the Concepts in
the Social Sciences series, Paul Taggarts Populism
provides an insightful introduction to the concept of populism
and a very useful overview of some of the most important cases
of populist politics. For those who are familiar with populist
politics and the scholarly literature on populism, however, this
new monograph may prove disappointing. The series publisher, Open
University Press, promises that Taggart "provides a new definition
of populism." Unfortunately, there is little in Taggarts
attempt to define populism that is truly new. Nor are there any
significant new insights into the five cases of populist politics
that he reviews. Thus, while Taggarts Populism is
a very good introduction to the subject, and a worthwhile read
for scholars of populism, it does not substantially advance our
understanding of populist phenomena.
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Although the burden of Taggarts
Populism is to define a genuinely universal ideal type
of populism, over half of the book is dedicated to surveying many
of the classic cases of populist politics. He makes no pretensions
to comprehensiveness. Nevertheless, over the course of five chapters,
readers are introduced to a range of American populisms, the case
of 19th-century Russian narodnichestvo, Peronism and other
examples of Latin American populism, Alberta Social Credit, and
what has come to be called the new populism of the contemporary
radical right. Informative, but too often lacking in depth, this
survey of populist politics is uneven. Particularly disappointing
was the chapter on the populism of Alberta Social Credit. Less
than six pages in length, and relying almost exclusively on studies
published in the 1950s by C.B. Macpherson and John Irving, this
chapter never confronts the substance of the theoretically rich
and empirically informative debates regarding the character of
Social Credit populism and the relationship between this and other
cases of prairie populism in Canada.
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Taggart, unlike his predecessors
writing in earlier decades, is able to examine the new populism
as a contrast to earlier populisms. This is very valuable. It
would be an impoverished understanding of populism that did not
take into consideration the politics of the likes of Jean-Marie
Le Pen, Jörg Haider, Pauline Hanson, and Preston Manning.
Unfortunately, however, Taggarts treatment of the new populism
sacrifices depth of analysis for breadth. His discussion of new
populist parties ranges across nine countries France, Austria,
Germany, Scandinavia, Italy, Switzerland, Australia, Canada, and
America. Almost by necessity in a short monograph, many of these
cases receive no more than a few paragraphs of attention. In the
case of Canada, for example, only four paragraphs are dedicated
to the case of Preston Manning and the Reform Party. Then, to
make matters worse, this brief discussion references only a single
journal article on Reforms populism. This is insufficient
to the task of gleaning lessons about populism from individual
cases.
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It would be unfair to be overly
critical of Taggart for particular exclusions when the range of
potential populist case studies is so large. All the same, some
readers will find it striking that Taggart makes absolutely no
mention of an important and much written about case of populism
that shaped British politics for over a decade that is,
the "authoritarian populism" of Thatcherism. Not only
was this an important case of populist politics, but the unique
Gramscian theoretical framework that influenced much of the scholarship
on Thatcherism deserves to be considered more closely by Taggart
in his attempt to come to terms with the essence of populist politics.
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For those interested in this question
of defining the essence of populism, Taggart provides a concise
and useful review of almost a dozen approaches to defining populism.
Most, but not all, of these definitions characterize populism
as a defensive reaction against social and economic change and/or
the power of some sort of entrenched elite. Running through these
definitions are attempts to capture what populism is a reaction
against. It is argued, for example, that populism is against,
among other things: the established order, the social, political
and economic establishment, modernization, industrialization,
social differentiation, and entrenched liberalism. In place of
these evils, populism is said to offer moralistic nostalgia, a
defence of community as it was, small-scale production, and more
local politics.
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In the end, the one thing that
ties most of these definitions of populism together is an anti-elitist
exaltation of "the people." But, unlike many earlier
students of populism, Taggart argues that focusing on "the
people" is a "dead end because it is too broad"
and amorphous as a concept. (98) Taggart argues that the populist
commitment to "the people" is actually "derived
from a sense of heartland." (3) The "heartland,"
he explains, "is a territory of the imagination ... an evocation
of that life and those qualities worth defending ... that place,
embodying the positive aspects of everyday life." (95) For
Taggart, then, populism is a political commitment to advancing
the political interests of the "heartland."
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But there is more to Taggarts
populist ideal type than this. He draws six themes together and
suggests that, at bottom, populism can be characterized as follows:
(i) Populism is a reaction to a sense of extreme crisis; (ii)
It is a set of ideas that are hostile to representative politics;
(iii) It champions an idealized "heartland" within the
community. Moreover, he contends that (iv) populism is an ideology
that lacks core values because (v) like a chameleon, it adopts
the colours and values of its environment. And, finally, Taggart
argues that (vi) populism is episodic and self-limiting because
its hostility to representative politics creates insurmountable
institutional dilemmas for populist movements attempting to enter
and influence formal politics.
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For a variety of reasons, it could
be argued that populisms lack of core values, its chameleonic
character, and its self-limiting nature are observations about
populism that are not central, or essential, to the concepts
definition. The fact that populism is a reaction to "crisis,"
on the other hand, is potentially important to understanding populist
politics. Unfortunately, Taggart does little to theorize crisis
or to adequately clarify the link between crisis and populism.
Thus, what remains at the unstated core of Taggarts own
conception of populism is the championing of "heartland"
and the hostility to representative politics. Indeed, these two
themes dominate all three of the chapters that are dedicated specifically
to detailing the "characteristics of populism." In those
chapters, Taggart does a very good job exploring populisms
antipathy to representative politics and the institutional dilemmas
that flow from this. In the end, however, Taggarts primary
theoretical contribution is the significance he places on the
notion of "heartland."
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The usefulness of Taggarts
notion of "heartland" is that it provides a positively
defined continuity to "the people" of populism. Too
often "the people" is negatively constructed in contrast
to those social groupings that are demonized and excluded by populist
discourse. Too often, Taggart contends, the lines of exclusion
are clearer than the lines of inclusion. Unfortunately, in making
this important point, Taggart overstates the importance of focusing
on the positive content of the "heartland." He overplays
the need to disentangle populism from "the people."
He wants us to understand "the people" as merely a rhetorical
device that serves to express the soul and spirit of the "heartland."
At one level, this line of thinking is most useful, but Taggart
goes too far. Not only does he verge on suggesting that populism
and an objective "heartland" exists before "the
people," but in outlining the six themes that characterize
his populist ideal type, no direct mention is made of the fact
that most definitions of populism have highlighted that populists
challenge the power of some sort of entrenched interests.
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In suggesting that the "heartland"
can only be understood in relation to those aspects of the community
that are demonized and excluded by populism, one does not lose
all the positive content associated with the idea of "heartland."
It remains useful, in other words, to suggest as many have before,
that "the people" can only be understood in relation
to the "entrenched special interests." The people/heartland
and the demonized/special interests are, from this perspective,
simultaneously constructed. The notion of the "heartland"
retains its usefulness for understanding "the people,"
but it is no longer superior. One is not the device of the other,
and neither is objectively given.
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In the end, Taggarts Populism
is a very useful introduction to populism and the classic cases
of populist politics. While there is little that is truly new
in this monograph, it is a worthwhile read. Moreover, Taggarts
advocacy of the use of the notion of "heartland" to
provide a positively defined sense of "the people" of
populism is worthy of scholarly attention.
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Steve Patten
University of Alberta
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Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of
Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, Massachusetts and
London, England: MIT Press 2000)
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A WIDE READERSHIP, inside and outside the
academy, will welcome Susan Buck-Morss superb new book.
Lavishly illustrated with the iconographic debris of a disintegrating
Soviet Union, and studded with parallel examples from the rival
symbology of Fordist consumer capitalism, her study offers a profound,
scholarly, reflection on the "mass utopias" of 20th-century
industrialism, grasped at the moment of their disillusioned end-of-the-Cold-War
collapse. As the books title suggests, its focus is especially
on the official dreamworlds that faced one another, in complicity
as well as hostility, across the East-West (meaning Soviet-American)
divide. Other mass utopias are set aside, including the atavistic
nationalisms and fundamentalisms that have rushed to fill the
post-Cold War gap. It is indeed that gap itself which is her main
concern a disorienting ideological vacuum most palpable,
perhaps, in the rapidly becoming ex-"socialist" world
where the book (in a confessedly touristic sense) locates itself.
Many will already be familiar with Dialectics of Seeing (1989).
This earlier text brilliantly reconstructed Walter Benjamins
unfinished "Arcades" project (on the consumer culture
of Baudelaires Paris), and established Buck-Morss
both as an authoritative commentator on Benjamin and as a major
cultural thinker in her own right. Dreamworld and Catastrophe
seeks, in effect, to extend Benjamins dialectical investigations
into the imaginary of modern culture to another time and place.
The moment is similarly one of danger, similarly involves the
play of trauma and recollection, and similarly provokes reflection
on the place of the messianic in history. But the scene shifts
from Paris to Moscow, from les Galeries Lafayette and the
Hollywood dreamworld that fascism was about to shatter in the
1930s, to Soviet socialism at the hallucinatory moment of its
Gorbachevian disappearance 50 years later. This double transposition,
Buck-Morss makes clear, involves more than a mere updating. In
late 1980s Moscow new themes present themselves, including the
shift from modernity to postmodernity, the fate of the socialist
dreamworld, and the prior over-determination of the ideological
field, in both camps, by the binaries of the Cold War.
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All in all, Buck-Morss suggests,
the trauma of historical erasure that attended the Bolshevik Revolution
is repeating itself. Worse: the dreamer is awakening to another
dream already gone stale. This moment of extreme disillusionment,
at the same time, has a revelatory significance. The very process
of liberation in which the statues in which Bolshevism had attempted
to monumentalize itself are toppled, has, temporarily at least,
unhinged the collective memory. Alongside the rebuilt churches
and palaces of Russia, and alongside the eagerly embraced capitalist
signage pouring in, old images are welling up from the fading
"Communist" past itself. Discredited ones of propaganda
art, of Stakhanovite posters, of tractors, collective farms and
industrial mega-projects, of Mayday parades, and cults of Lenin
and Uncle Joe. But also images from before, from the Revolutions
springtime: the images of Vertov, Livitsky, Mayakovsky, Eisenstein,
of all the exuberant artistic experimentalism which, for a giddy
moment, and before being suppressed, had seemed to put aesthetics
and politics in the sublime service of one another. More recent
images swirl about too: of the post-World War II
space and arms race, of the ironising art of the Brezhnev years,
of Glasnost and Solidarnosc, and, finally, of those crazy juxtapositions
of global brands and Leninalia in the streetscapes of Moscow which
heralded, just as visibly as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the
"Soviet socialist" dreamworlds irrevocable fading.
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Despite, but also because of, its
Benjaminian inspiration, Buck-Morss disinterring of these
stratified layers of collective memory forgoes melancholy for
a soberly guarded hope. In the revolutionary art of the 1910s
and 1920s, even in its ambiguous corralling by the Party, she
sees an excess that points beyond the limits set by the actual
course of events, beyond those set, indeed, by the productivism
and techno-enthusiasm that such art shared with the whole industrial
age. The wager is that in the whole collision of images, and of
that past with this present, the utopian meanings
buried beneath the bones of Stalinism might become radiantly,
and shatteringly, accessible once more. At the same time, on the
basis of her Moscow and other encounters, she is honest enough
to note the refractoriness of East bloc progressive intellectuals,
however much in tune with the latest in Western critical thought,
to any such rekindling of left-wing hope. The Westerners in her
company which included Jameson, Derrida, and Lyotard were
constantly met by bafflement that such hope could still be entertained,
or that the equation of markets with freedom and democracy could
be seriously questioned.
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There is much here to ponder, not
only for historians, sociologists, and cultural theorists, but
also for all those who continue to aspire for a post-capitalist
future. How is the horizon of such an aspiration now to be imagined?
Or is the moral of the story that it should not be imagined at
all? There is the question too of the status of such questions.
For some, Buck-Morss very emphasis on the visual, the symbolic,
and the discursive will seem too culturalist. In the scene setting
Chapter 1, for example, the Cold War is itself presented as a
contest between two "imaginaries," each a kind of mirror
opposite of the other the heroic (collective) producer
vs. the happy (private) consumer a capitalist dreamworld
founded on the colonization of space confronting a socialist one
premised on the colonization of time. There is power in this analysis,
but is it enough? Actually, however, Buck-Morss anticipates the
"materialist" objection (which Adorno had made to Benjamin)
through the device of a "hypertext" that runs along
the foot of the page. Here, the rival imaginaries are related
not merely to one another, but to the material conditions of Fordism
and primitive accumulation, and to the further capitalist dynamic
which in the end undermines not only the islands of "actually
existing socialism" but the legitimizing myths which throughout
the 20th century helped sustain order on both sides of the Wall.
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Others (perhaps sniffily) will
note the books origins in the jet-setting alternative international
intellectual circle that gathered, behind the lines, to witness,
and discuss the implications of the Easts vertiginous demise.
It is a provenance which, as Buck-Morss frankly acknowledges in
her closing chapter, reveals all too clearly the political isolation
and social privilege of contemporary critical theorists. It also
reveals the aporias of critical theory itself once history (as
such theory may claim) has "objectively" dissolved the
revolutionary subject and stalled the transformist project. Under
the circumstances, the best that can be done, no doubt, is what
Buck-Morss herself does: that is to eschew the pretence of speaking
from nowhere, lay bare the immediate context, and critically reflect
on the biases that such situatedness may impart. This she attempts
in the last chapter, though its almost embarassing chattiness
(one is reminded at times of the Warhol diaries) risks a self-indulgence
that would undercut its serious intent.
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More seriously, perhaps, the books
self-reflection is more in evidence at the social-political level
than the conceptual. Here, indeed, one of the books great
virtues its conscientious effort to make widely accessible
and intelligible a most complex analysis is linked to a
weakness, or at least to a self-imposed limitation. It hides,
to a large extent, and especially at a second-order level, its
own conceptual workings. Buck-Morss makes explicit use of Benjamins
ideas (in Theses on the Philosophy of History) about "dialectical
images." But what precisely, in that appropriation, has been
retained and what rejected from the larger Benjaminian framework?
And with what theoretical and ideological consequences? What operation,
more widely, is Buck-Morss performing, and arguing for, on the
field of radical/critical theory itself? Meta-reflection on such
matters may be too esoteric for all but a specialised audience.
But it is presumably needed if we are to advance that critical
engagement with the categories of progressive thinking that the
books presentation of its rich historical material is otherwise
brilliantly calculated to provoke.
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Andrew Wernick
Trent University
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Peter Singer, A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution and Cooperation
(New Haven: Yale University Press 2000)
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IF YOU HAD ASKED an educated English gentleman,
towards the end of the 19th century, to name the most important
political philosopher of the century, the answer you received
would very likely have been: Herbert Spencer. The same question
asked of an educated American gentleman during this same period
would have produced the same answer. If anything, the American
response might have been a shade more enthusiastic even than the
British response.
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Spencer was, among other things,
a follower of Charles Darwin, and the core of his political philosophy
was an attempt to apply to society key insights garnered from
the Darwinian theory of biological evolution.
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On Spencers reading of the
Darwinian theory of evolution, featuring the principle of natural
selection, the biological principle of the "survival of the
fittest" could be extended in such a way as to justify a
laissez-faire marketplace society. Wealthy capitalists
prospered and deserved to prosper because they were the fittest
to survive, while the poor, being unfit, should be allowed to
perish. Or so Spencer argued. Indeed, government assistance to
the poor, in the form of social welfare payments, was likely to
do more harm than good by protecting the unfit from their deserved
fate. By allowing the poor to survive and procreate, one was defying
the natural order of things and weakening society. Little wonder
that Spencer quickly became as big a hit in early capitalist America
as he was already in middle-capitalist Britain.
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Those who make a pilgrimage to
Marxs monumental grave in Londons Highgate Cemetery
might notice, if they look carefully, a small unkempt grave located
almost opposite. On the small head-stone atop this grave, overgrown
with weeds and in danger of falling over, is carved the name of
Herbert Spencer. Spencer may have towered over Marx in life, but
in death the tables have been turned.
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Interestingly, although Karl Marx
himself had enormous admiration for the work of Darwin, as did
Marxs collaborator and close friend Friedrich Engels, the
Left has predominantly come to associate Darwinian evolution with
Herbert Spencers right-wing doctrine of social Darwinism
and its associated defence of the competitive marketplace.
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In this little book really,
a longish (60 page) essay the Australian philosopher Peter
Singer attempts to rehabilitate Darwin for leftists. If the Darwinian
struggle for existence has seemed more congenial to thinkers of
the right, the fault rests partly with Herbert Spencer, but also
with evolutionary biologists themselves, who until comparatively
recently have neglected the important role that co-operation can
play in improving an organisms survival prospects.
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The central political question,
according to Singer, may be simply put: "How can we build
a society that is co-operative and offers a strong safety net
for those who are unable to provide for their own needs?"
Singer argues that the answer to this question can be found by
modifying the insights of traditional Left thinking and blending
them with those of Darwinian Left thinking. Singer tries to persuade
his reader that the phrase "Darwinian left thinking"
is not an oxymoron. Despite the extreme brevity of his treatment
of this complex issue, Singer presents his ideas clearly and comprehensibly.
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Singer contends, then, that some
widely accepted traditional leftist assumptions need to be modified
in the light of what Darwinian biology has to teach us. We are
probably not capable of being transformed into the saintly altruists
of socialist day-dreams but, at the same time, we arent
necessarily doomed to remain the greedy egoists described by capitalist
ideology.
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Against the traditional Left, Singer
argues that it is simply unrealistic to suppose that human nature
can be perfected, or that either socialism or communism is capable
of ushering into existence a society in which all conflict and
competition between human beings will be absent. Equally, however,
it is unrealistic for the Right to imagine that most people are
incapable of responding positively to genuine opportunities for
co-operation.
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Our species evolved by a natural
process of competitive struggle, yes, but mutually beneficial
co-operation and individual sacrifice on behalf of group flourishing
have also been important evolutionary strategies. Evolutionary
theory, properly understood, shows that people can be motivated
by altruism as well as by narrowly self-seeking behaviour. If
society were organized under a different socio-economic system
it is likely that the prevailing balance could be shifted somewhat
away from competitive individualism, towards a more co-operative
and community-oriented kind of society. Notice how cautious this
claim appears to be: the balance can be shifted, but competition
may well turn out to be an inescapable and important part of human
nature. We are not infinitely malleable, carrying within our nature,
as we do, the evolutionary baggage of our spcies.
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Singer acknowledges that this is
a sharply deflated vision of the Left, but he offers it as
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a realistic alternative to utopian socialism,
and as a highly attractive alternative to the triumphant marketplace
capitalist ideology which currently holds sway in most western
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