| Book Notes / Rłfłrences Bibliographiques | Labour/Le Travail, 56

Book Notes / Rłfłrences Bibliographiques

M. Ann Hall, The Girl and the Game: A History of Women's Sport in Canada (Peterborough: Broadview Press 2002)
THIS IS MORE than a compilation of key female athletes in Canadian history, though it certainly lists many names and many highlights. Hall's real interest is the social influences that condition women's involvement in sports, with an emphasis on the barriers that impede their participation, particularly in competitive sports.
Hugh D. Hinman, Child Labour: An American History (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe 2002)
HINMAN FOCUSES on child labour throughout the 20th century, beginning with the lives and conditions of labour of children in a variety of jobs in the early 20th century, including farm workers, newsboys and other hawkers, sweatshop workers, miners, and workers in light manufacturing industry. He compares their exploitation with global child labour today, including the continued labour of children in the US in agriculture and the street trades.
Robert Michael Smith, From Blackjacks to Briefcases: A History of Commercialized Strikebreaking and Unionbusting in the United States (Athens: Ohio University Press 2003)
SMITH FOCUSES on the agencies and institutions that have provided or defended scabs, ranging from Pinkerton's to today's union-busting corporate lawyers. This book looks at union-busting from within a class-struggle framework, and provides a contrast to Stephen Norwood's gender-studies approach in Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth Century America, which relies on psychological explanations to answer the age-old question of why anyone would agree to be a scab, much less a scab herder.
P.W. Singer, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (New York: Cornell University Press 2003)
WHILE ROBERT MICHAEL SMITH deals with industrial mercenaries, P.W. Singer's subject is the more traditional military mercenary, as reincarnated in an age of high technology. He is concerned with American and European "business organizations that trade in professional services intricately linked to warfare." (8) These corporate mercenaries are involved in "combat operations, strategic planning, intelligence, risk assessment, operational support, training, and technical skills." (8) Some of the most oppressive regimes in the world hire them to run or at least advise their military. They direct military operations throughout much of Africa, in Croatia, Bosnia, Chechnya, Azerbijan, Armenia, Kazakhstan, and Indonesia, as well as serving the military needs of the drug cartels in Mexico and Colombia. They run or support most of the policing in the Gulf States, doing the training and strategic planning. They run amok in post-invasion Iraq, and they have a long history of forebears. Mining firms in the Congo in the early 1960s hired them to win the secession of Katanga from Kwame Nkrumah's progressive regime. What's missing here however is analysis of the relations between these firms and the American and European administrations. Are these examplars of military capitalism simply independent trans-national actors oppressing the masses in return for returns for shareholders, or are they products of national state, especially US, imperialist strategies?
Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926–1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press 2002)
THIS WELL-ILLUSTRATED book traces the worldview of Communists and fellow travelers as depicted in the visual arts through a period of ever-changing party positions. Hemingway observes that much of the art of the Third Period (1928–1934) was predictable and dogmatic, while the Popular Front period that followed evinced far more creativity. He tries to probe the class position of visual artists, as perceived by the artists themselves, and their notions about the importance of art to workers' lives and to revolutionary change.
Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies, Why Do People Hate America? (London: Icon Books 2002)
LET US COUNT the reasons! This is a primer on American history and the American imperial present that shows the straight line between American destruction of Native societies, imperial expansion into Mexican territories, imperialism, and McDonaldization of the world. It is not however an anti-American tract. The authors make clear that a relatively small number of people run the US, manipulate its formally democratic form of government, and leave millions of their own citizens in want.
Robert J. Alexander, A History of Organized Labor in Brazil (Westport: Praeger 2003)
ALEXANDER BEGINS with the early days of Brazilian industrial development in the late 19th century, and the first efforts of workers to organize, and carries the workers' story to the present. Until the early 1920s, anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists dominated the labour movements of Brazil, with state-capture-minded socialists in a secondary role. But the emergence of the Communist Party of Brazil, with its initial tough-minded revolutionism and ties to the Soviet state shifted the balance towards the socialists. The Communists proved better able to maintain their organizations during the long years of fascist-inspired rule by Getulio Vargas from 1930 to 1945. This book is unfortunately too narrative and too vague for the general reader unfamiliar with Brazilian politics. It leaves unclear how Vargas, supposedly a fascist during his early reign, became the head of the Labour Party and leader of a moderately worker-friendly government from 1951 to 1957. The politics of the Goulart government, overthrown by the Americans in 1964, while apparently progressive, are not well explained. Generally speaking, the balance of class forces and the politics of various institutions are lost in a welter of personalities.
Richard D. Salvatore, Wandering Paysanos: State Order and Subaltern Experience in Buenos Aires During the Rosas Era (Durham and London: Duke University Press 2003)
SALVATORE LOOKS at the lives of the farmworkers on cattle ranches from the 1820s to 1850s, a period when feudalism and dependent peonage predominated. But the position of subalterns varied. Veterans in the civil war and their families received poor relief in the form of food subsidies, and this system spread throughout the rural areas. But the lower classes did not look only to governments for help; they also tried to take advantage of market conditions as best they could. Subaltern protests were not uncommon.
Juanita de Barros, Order and Place in a Colonial City: Patterns of Struggle and Resistance in Georgetown, British Guiana, 1889–1924 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 2002)
ORDER AND PLACE applies spatial models to an understanding of class struggles in post-slavery Guiana. It focuses on struggles over public places, looking at labour-related clashes, street gangs, and racial divisions during a period when a nominally free underclass strove to maximize its area of freedom, including control over areas of the city which it regarded as people's space not to be encroached upon by the imperial masters.
Thomas A. Kochan and David B. Lipsky, Negotiations and Change: From the Workplace to Society (New York: Cornell University Press 2003)
THIS "HUMAN RESOURCES management" book claims to be about the "management of change" and the "next generation of thinking," vague phrases with a marketing feel about them that should cause any critical reader to be suspicious. It does however approach issues that supporters of more democratic workplaces will find of interest: union nominees to boards of directors; work-place justice; the need to promote greater gender equity. But, underlying it all, is a management-friendly philosophy that seeks to justify and reinforce intensification of labour (disguised in the language of work teams) and top-down control (disguised in a populist critique of trade union's limitations).
Carl Freedman, The Incomplete Projects: Marxism, Modernity, and the Politics of Culture (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press 2002)
FREEDMAN PROVIDES Marxist Freudian analysis of a range of cultural artifacts from MASH* to the British television series, Upstairs, Downstairs. Along the way he discusses Stanley Kubrick's 2001, James Ivory's A Room with a View, and the work of detective writer and sometime Communist Dashiell Hammett. A.F.

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