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Labour / Le Travail

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Volume 62, automne 2008

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Citer ce compte rendu (2008). Compte rendu de [Reviews / Comptes Rendus]. Labour / Le Travail, 62, 235–315.

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Robert B. Kristofferson, Craft ket for manufactured goods limited the Capitalism: Craftsworkers and Early extent to which capital could be profit- Industrialization in Hamilton, 1840–1870 ably invested. Relying heavily, but not (Toronto: University of Toronto Press exclusively, on the 1871 manuscript cen- 2007) sus, Kristofferson argues that smaller concerns remained viable, achieved In Craft Capitalism, Robert Kristof- greater productivity in industries where ferson offers a revisionist perspective on new technologies had not displaced craft the effects of early industrialization on production, and presented a “continued craftsworkers. Using Hamilton, Ontario, expansion of self-employment opportu- from 1840 to 1872 as a case study, he nities.” (57) By the 1870s roughly 85 to 95 contends that the combined and uneven per cent of Hamilton’s manufacturers, a nature of early industrialization presented proportion varying only slightly with the artisans with significant opportunities size of their operations, had risen to that for employment and self-employment. status from artisanal origins. The viabil- In their “transmodal position,” between ity of small concerns and the manufac- older craft production and emergent turers’ humble origins lead Kristofferson factory production, craftsworkers con- to conclude that “many, if not most, wage- structed “modes of understanding and earning craftsworkers still maintained experience influenced by capitalism but the hope, perhaps even the expectation, not fully of it or completely determined that they would one day move into mas- by its logic.” (242) Craftsworkers, argues tership or some other craft-based form of Kristofferson, were not dispossessed by independence.” (108) the early 1870s; nor did the Nine-Hours In the second half of the book, the Movement of 1872 express a new work- author argues that the background of ing-class consciousness rooted in their masters, their close shop-floor contact artisanal culture, as Gregory Kealey with and mentoring of their employees, and Bryan Palmer, among others, have and the ambitions of journeymen for argued. Instead, that movement consti- self-employment inspired a culture of tuted a generational, rather than class “master-man mutualism.” That culture debate within “mutualism” – that is, the combined residual elements, derived commonality of interests and aspirations from traditional craft relations, with accepted by masters and journeymen. emergent elements, inspired by mid- The first half of Craft Capitalism nineteenth-century industrial progress. explores the economic and social struc- As they had traditionally done, masters tures associated with early industrializa- and journeymen celebrated their “com- tion. Not unlike the conditions in many mon craft world” (120) at picnics, testi- other centres at the time, the limited monials, and parades, and even union and variable demand in Hamilton’s mar- events drew participation from employ-

Table of Contents for Reviews pp. 5–6. 236 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 ers. Manufacturers proudly emphasized, capitalism did stimulate workers’ class and were complimented upon, their self- awareness. More than that, however, his made success and continuing practical appreciation of the cultural significance craft knowledge. The public affirmation of self-employment warrants serious con- of the self-made business success pos- sideration, especially as presented in one sible during early industrialization was of the country’s major industrial cities. In just one theme in a broader new culture particular, the analysis of the discourse of self-improvement. Craftsworkers more on self-made success and self-improve- generally pursued self-improvement in ment does reveal the public context of practical skill, intellectual knowledge, personal ambitions. Still, there remains and moral responsibility as the founda- much that is overstated or uncritical in tion for a masculine independence. this study and much more that we would That the emergent cultural elements like to know about the social organiza- did not always rest easily with the resid- tion of early industrial capitalism. ual, Kristofferson maintains, was evident First, Kristofferson is probably cor- in the Nine-Hours Movement strike of rect in his contention that the status of 1872. Rather than the struggle of alien- master was a hope for many journeymen ated workers against exploiting employ- and attracted many British immigrants ers, the strike revealed that “what some to places, like Hamilton, where they masters and men considered the norms believed they could achieve a condition in of their mutualistic culture were diverg- life they saw passing at home. His proof ing.” (235) Disagreement developed not for that, however, is more inferential than over the broad objectives of the move- evidential. Rather than critically examin- ment in wanting self-improvement, but ing the immigration literature or diaries rather over the drastic means that a and correspondence of men following minority of craftsworkers took to achieve that ambition, or trying to calculate the that goal. The difference was generational probabilities of samples of artisans actu- and not one of class: an older genera- ally attaining that status, his conclusion tion, which understood its success as the rests mainly on the detailed investigation result of hard work, had little sympathy of the backgrounds of 233 industrialists for a younger generation’s impatience and listed in the 1871 manuscript census. unwillingness to follow the tried and true Their origins are taken as confirmation of way. Younger craftsworkers demanded the value and the reality of craft mobil- shorter hours as their right, which, they ity. That some might never have been felt, was justified by their contributions to able to secure master status or failed in modern industry and necessary for their their attempt is of little consequence for self-improvement as citizens in a “mod- Kristofferson, since “it is likely that the ern liberal economy and society.” (207) example of most large industrial employ- In the end, however, “the quick death” ers in the city having made the successful (217) of the movement demonstrated the transition from journeyman-for-some- lack of depth of real differences between one-else to master-of-their-own some- masters and men and the strength of what clouded this reality.” (89) “Likely” mutualism. and “somewhat” are two slippery qualifi- In one sense, Kristofferson’s argument ers for a lack of evidence. Regrettably, the is about timing, since he does concede success of some does not prove the aspi- that later, probably in the aftermath of rations or more importantly the accom- the depression of 1878 and certainly plishments of others. Indeed, one might by the 1890s, the alienating effects of argue that the success of some reduced r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 237 the chances for others, since opportuni- erty of a certain value, not all men could ties once open had become filled. vote until 1885, and even their right to Second, we do need to explore more petition was clouded by the reservations deeply the culture of “mutualism” in of the propertied about their limited mid-nineteenth-century society. Masters stake in the community. Yet, involved in and journeymen did assume reciprocal politics they were and journeymen filled dependence and obligations with one the crowds, and mobs, of election cam- another. However, even though the social paigns. We need to know more about the difference between the two could be con- political relationships between masters ceived partly as one of age, an employ- and journeymen and also to reinterpret ment relationship did bind the two the claims to rights and citizenship, as in together. Cultural values, social practices, the Nine-Hours Movement, of men who and non-monetary economic responsi- did not fully possess them. bilities may have qualified the master’s Fourth, Craft Capitalism presents power more – or, differently – than that mutuality only within its workplace of the capitalist employer, for whom the context. Voluntarism, whether in fire wage-labour contract simplified the com- brigades or the militia, filled another mitments made in employment. But the dimension of the craftsworkers’ non- master remained master and hired work- work lives and often engaged the prop- ers within the law of master and servant ertyless in the protection of the property – a concept unacknowledged in Craft of others. The responsibility to help one’s Capitalism (The author frequently terms fellow was rooted in a range of organiza- the relationship as one between “master tions and connections. How did churches and man,” a term that, if used at the time, and fraternal organizations facilitate the may have had an ambiguous meaning). itinerancy of journeymen, offering intro- Much more needs to be known about ductions and support for newcomers? the terms and conditions of journeyman How did various denominations police employment, and apprenticeship for that the relationships among their members? matter, another relationship unexamined More intensive study is needed of asso- in this book. ciational life. By not appreciating the power in rela- Finally, Craft Capitalism ignores ques- tions, the author takes newspaper reports tions of kinship and family and the contri- of the social interaction of masters and butions of women generally. How might journeymen and of self-made success journeyman status, and its implication of too easily at face value. Language and not being quite fully independent, affect the tropes of craft culture created, rather decisions to marry? How might the sav- than described, a social reality that could ings of brides or gifts from their families be manipulated for individual or group help to secure the independence of their interests. Professions of commonality and husbands? What obligations might a mutuality, for example, declared stan- master have to employ or train kin? dards against which subsequent, or past, (Note: The publisher must be faulted behaviour could be held accountable. for an error in the book’s sub-title printed Third, insufficient attention is devoted on the cover: “craftworkers” should be to the ways in which property structured “craftsworkers,” the term used through- the mutuality between master and jour- out the study.) neyman: the former possessed it; many Robert Kristofferson deserves our of the latter, most obviously the itinerant, gratitude for re-visiting an era in capi- did not. Without owning or renting prop- talist development and leading us to 238 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 reconsider mutualism and experiences beginning with the need for bc Hydro to of self-employment. His analysis replaces purchase electricity from private genera- the culture in conflict of earlier interpre- tors because of a ban on its own expansion tations with a consensual view, however, of capacity combined with responsibility that is unappreciative of power dynamics. to meet future energy needs; forecasts of David G. Burley electricity shortages; and the removal of University of Winnipeg alternative options for meeting demand. bc Hydro has had to commit to expensive purchase contracts for this extra power John Calvert, Liquid Gold: Energy so as to take on the risks of building elec- Privatization in British Columbia (Halifax tricity infrastructure that private inves- and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing tors might be unwilling to take on. 2008) Calvert devotes a chapter to a detailed examination of why private power costs Liquid Gold is a lucidly written, com- more and why those costs are likely to pelling book that has the reader wonder- escalate. He devotes another to why the ing, within a few pages, why on earth restructuring of the electricity system is politicians would so ardently seek to likely to deliver less security of supply. In implement electricity policies that are so the latter, the importance of public con- obviously not in the public interest. His trol of electricity resources is emphasized. introduction clearly lays out the many Without it private companies, many of ways in which electricity privatization which are likely to be foreign companies, in British Columbia has resulted in extra have the right to export electricity to the costs to ratepayers, not only in terms of us, even when this is not in the interests prices, but also security of supply, and of the residents of bc. environmental damage. Calvert reinforces his arguments with The reader is not left wondering long. the examples of Alcan and Cominco, The next chapter explains some of the smelting companies given the right to use forces driving privatization including the water resources to generate electricity. power of international trends, the lobby- Although this was originally for the pur- ing of right-wing think tanks and vested pose of supplying their own operations, interests, and the ideology of conserva- they have ended up being able to use what tive political parties. many regard as a public resource to make Calvert’s book covers the earlier nation- large profits by selling electricity on the alization of bc Hydro in the 1960s and cross-border electricity market. In this shows that it was not a socialist move but case, as is so often the case with electric- a pragmatic one intended to ensure the ity markets, competition among consum- infrastructure necessary for future indus- ers (including us consumers) has sent trial growth in the province. For years this prices up rather than competition among provided bc with one of the world’s most suppliers lowering prices. Also the pri- reliable, secure, and low-cost electricity vate rights granted to water threaten the systems, one that also paid handsome waterway environment by depriving it of dividends to the government. The public necessary water. ownership of bc Hydro and the lack of a In another chapter devoted to “Water formal electricity market did not prevent Resource Giveaway” Calvert shows that British Columbia from making advanta- the government “has been virtually giv- geous electricity trades with the us. ing away water rights,” often to a small He then shows how this has all changed, group of ten developers, some of them r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 239 foreign companies, so that all potential it has been emasculated. In his conclud- hydro-electric generating sites have been ing chapter, Calvert outlines just what licensed and the ability of the province to has been lost in this process. The benefits control its own water resources has been once provided by bc Hydro included bil- compromised. lions of dollars in income to the provincial Calvert examines the way that the government; low cost energy – subsi- government is also virtually giving away dized for disadvantaged residents as well land for the private development of wind as local industries; public ownership and farms, and heavily subsidizing them, with control of water and land resources; engi- no guarantee that the electricity gener- neering expertise and a commitment to ated will be available to bc residents in high engineering standards; a reposi- the future. The opportunity to develop tory of technological experience; plan- publicly owned wind farms that would ning capacity; a large maintenance staff; stay in public control, and so ensure they economies of scale; and control over the are beneficial to locals, has been lost. transmission system. The cost to locals of private electricity While my own book, Power Play, covers generation projects goes beyond govern- various cases of electricity privatization ment subsidies and the loss of public con- from around the world, Calvert’s focus trol of natural resources to include loss of is on the case of electricity privatization environmental amenity and the abandon- in British Columbia. However it is a case ment of planning processes. This argu- study that has many of the key elements ment is reinforced with two case studies of privatization found in other parts of of conflicts between local communities the world, and Calvert presents them in a and private power companies. way that makes them relevant far beyond In a separate chapter, Calvert shows British Columbia. In fact, before I got that just because energy is renewable, it half way through the introduction, I was does not mean that it is “green,” some- already thinking that this was a book that thing that seems to have been missed by should be read by those currently oppos- some of bc’s environmental groups which ing electricity privatization in my own have subscribed to the new energy poli- state of New South Wales in Australia. cies. However, renewable energy projects, Missing from the book, perhaps large and small, can have many adverse because of the focus on bc, are a few key impacts, especially if they are imple- aspects of electricity privatization and mented by private companies. Private deregulation that plague consumers, such companies can gain green credentials as price manipulation by private compa- because they are investing in renewable nies in energy markets. A list of abbrevia- energy but there are few environmental tions would be useful. The index is rather regulations to restrain how it is done. A rudimentary and unhelpful. major loss in the process of deregulating Calvert, an associate professor who and privatizing electricity generation has teaches public policy at Simon Fraser been the incentive to conserve electricity University, has produced an excellent because the market provides a conflicting resource for all those interested in the incentive to promote consumption and future of electricity supply, which should thereby increase profits. mean all of us. It would make an excellent British Columbia has not completely teaching resource. It is very well written privatized its electricity system as gov- and well referenced. ernments in some other parts of the world Sharon Beder have. bc Hydro is still publicly owned but University of Wollongong 240 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62

Susan Close, Framing Identity: Social the period’s conventions of portraiture. Practices of Photography in Canada Perhaps the photo escapes the strait- (1880–1920) (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring jacket of convention because it was cre- Publishing 2007) ated by women working at a lumber camp in British Columbia. Mattie Gunterman The most remarkable aspect of Fram- at the time made her living as a camp ing Identity is clear from the cover. It cook. So this image and a number of pictures three women dressed in clothes other companion photos in the book offer from the turn of the last century who a unique glimpse into this little exposed are “just foolin’ around” [as Cathy Jones aspect of working life. would put it]. One straddles a wood stove Indeed, this is a book that highlights as if it were a horse while the other two working women. In addition to Mattie help her keep her precarious balance. Gunterman, two of the women featured, All three women are filled with giddy Ruby Gordon Peterkin and Etta Sparks, laughter. Looking at this photo by Mattie were nurses during the First World War. Gunterman, you feel that you’re sharing a They chronicled their on- and off-duty joyful moment in the lives of these women lives while serving overseas. Geraldine a hundred years ago, and you realize how Moodie photographed Aboriginal people very rare that feeling is. in the North. Although these images do The absolute strength of this book is not locate the subjects in the actual situ- that it offers a female visual perspective ations of their work, they do offer what on the years 1880 to 1920. It focuses on is arguably a more authentic set of rep- four individuals from a time when very resentations than other male contem- few women, let alone the working-class porary photographers. Throughout, the women represented here, were able to publisher, Arbeiter Ring, has ensured gain access to the means of producing that the actual printing of the photos is of photographic images. That alone would high quality and they are carefully anno- make the book unique, but Susan Close tated so researchers can follow up on any places these photos in a social frame. “My images that are relevant to their work. research examines how Canadian women However, this is not a picture book. The used photography as a social practice to images serve as illustration for a number establish identity.” (x-xi) of concepts the author is exploring, and The text makes us look again at the many of these ideas are useful to labour images. Close’s varied background, rang- historians. First is a reminder that pho- ing from post-secondary teaching to tographs are not neutral signifiers – they visual literacy programs for inner-city are the result of a series of socially con- youth, brings a critical perspective that ditioned artistic choices. For example, does not let us stop at the face value of Close points out that it was a stylistic the photos. To return to the book’s cover, convention of 19th century photos that her analysis makes you realize that what portraits of upper-class individuals were appears to be a spontaneous image is, made with the subject gazing slightly off in reality, very carefully constructed. At camera, while lower-class people were the time, making such a photo inside a allowed, even encouraged, to look directly log cabin required extensive planning into the lens. Today, on television, people and equipment. Gunterman has gone are told not to stare at the camera, in order to extraordinary lengths to catch the to avoid that deer in the headlights look. moment, and, in seeking to create such Such small details are very important as an informal image, went against many of we attempt to reconstruct working-class r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 241 experience with respect. This book helps garet Cameron’s use of naked children to sensitize us to this layer of meaning. suggest allegorical innocence. However In addition, Close highlights the extent one chooses to interpret the images, they to which the technical demands of pho- show that the work was influenced by who tography a hundred years ago necessi- commissioned it and by the photographic tated that each image was in fact an act conventions of the day. of theatrical staging. She clearly shows Close also places Moodie’s work in con- that what was depicted inevitably repre- trast with her male contemporaries such sented a careful selection of both form as Edward Curtis, who were bound up in and content, the antithesis of today’s cell a set of imagistic preconceptions, partic- phone snap. This fact suggests a rich vein ularly about the “noble savage.” Moodie of visual analysis which filters archival was visibly able to generate a more inti- photo collections through the perspec- mate and natural relationship with her tive of the photographers. If we can subjects. The care which Close gives to identify which images were created by the issues raised by these images does pro- workers, we can gain a real insight into vide some models for historians working their worldview. outside their own cultures. However, it is A parallel concept which Close here that the book moves furthest outside explores is that of photo albums. As she its historical frame with Close introduc- points out, creating and maintaining ing examples of her own photos produced the family album was usually a task that collaboratively with an Aboriginal father fell to women. A close reading of these and son. While this is relevant to the dia- choices offers a glimpse into the priorities logue around the appropriation of imag- of women in another time. Again, this is ery in contemporary Cultural Studies, it potentially a valuable tool – working-class does less to advance the book’s efforts to history tends to leave a slimmer trail of provide historical context for images. written records. The analysis of domestic This points to the book’s major weak- visual records, such as photo albums, for ness for the Labour/Le Travail reader. It their insights, can only enrich working- is the expansion of a PhD at the Amster- class histories. dam School for Cultural Analysis, so its The materials on Moodie’s work grap- approach is framed within that disci- ple with the issue of white people “docu- pline’s concerns, rather than as history menting” Aboriginal life. To her credit, per se. The research overview provided in Close contextualizes this within the colo- this work does provide a primer in photo- nial frame, noting that Moodie was able graphic theory for those who may not be to photograph because she was married conversant with the area. However, some to a North West Mounted Police officer of the detailed arguments are more geared who was “cataloguing” the inhabitants of to those doing Cultural Studies work. the sub-Arctic regions. In a research coup Nonetheless, this is a valuable book Close uncovers a pair of photos showing which offers direct rewards through the a mother and child from Fullerton Har- images themselves and through the addi- bour. One, created for the Police Archives, tional insights that Susan Close provides shows the child naked. The other, retained along with suggested avenues for further originally by the photographer, has a com- exploration. position which is formally identical except Don Bouzek that the child is clothed in garments as Ground Zero Productions and decorative as her mother’s. Close sug- D. Active Productions gests that the image drew on Julia Mar- Edmonton 242 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62

Nancy Janovicek, No Place to Go: Local troubles that accompany regional divi- Histories of the Battered Women’s Shelter sions, including the municipality’s refusal Movement (Vancouver: ubc Press 2007) to pay for services for women who moved to the Thunder Bay area to escape abuse. Historian Nancy Janovicek has under- The feminist group that started Commu- taken the important task of outlining the nity Residences believed that they would history of establishing transitional hous- be advocating for assistance and referring ing (and services) for battered women women to existing services, but it became in Canadian small towns. Her writing clear that the services did not exist and is accessible, combining narrative from the group developed programs to fill the shelter activists with her interpretation void. This became problematic because the of the early documents from each of the women did not always agree about the pur- communities. This is a much needed pose of the centre. In order to sidestep the contribution to the scholarly knowledge local politicians and red tape, an activist about the battered women’s shelter move- bought a house and the group opened Faye ment, documenting the struggles to get Peterson’s Transitional House. Janovicek services for abused women and to frame indicates that the women running the ser- domestic violence as a public issue rather vices often felt they were taken advantage than a private one. of because their politics made it impossible The text is divided into chapters that to turn away a woman in need. This made deal with specific geographic locations, it more difficult to exert pressure on local examining the inception of services in each politicians to offer more services or to fund area. The first chapter outlines the open- existing ones rather than treating workers ing of Beendigen, an emergency shelter in the area of domestic abuse as volunteers for Aboriginal women moving to Thunder or quasi-volunteers. Bay, Ontario from their home reserves. The The third chapter discusses another chapter focuses on the importance of main- small northern Ontario town, Kenora. taining Aboriginal culture and heritage in Services there began with a rape crisis the shelter in order to assist the women line because the group wanted to be of without forcing them to assimilate. One ten- service to the local women. Their slogan sion discussed in this section concerns the was “we’re here to help” (61) but they did root cause of violent behaviour in domestic not identify with the women’s move- settings. Non-aboriginal feminists involved ment. The municipal government was with the shelter tended to understand family not sympathetic to the need for a tran- violence in terms of a power struggle that sitional house, which made it impossible stemmed from patriarchal relations while for the group to access federal policies. Aboriginal feminists insisted on viewing This chapter outlines the racial tensions, such behaviour through a lens in which the barriers put in place by local politi- the impact of colonial relationships was cians, and the difficulty of having femi- paramount. Aboriginal feminists tried to nist voices heard. In time, a shelter was show other feminists that for them women’s opened and operated by the local church, rights could not be separated from Native which caused tension with the local rights. The disagreements became pivotal women’s group. and divided the shelter activists. In the fourth chapter, Janovicek focuses In chapter two, Janovicek discusses on the western town of Nelson, bc. The another shelter initiative in Thunder Bay, centre established there was explicitly Community Residences. She explores feminist which caused some strain in the issues of jurisdiction and the funding the community and made some women r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 243 apprehensive about using it. The Nel- they experienced and therefore did not son centre was initially a good example deserve services, or a homelike atmo- of people with very different viewpoints sphere, and so on. Such attitudes were about violence and gender being able so consistent across the towns studied to work together. Some of the members that initially there was resistance from wanted to focus on consciousness raising local politicians and community mem- and to promote wife battering as a politi- bers either to fund places or to see wife cal issue, while other members wanted battering as an issue that people outside to offer services but ended up having to the home should be involved in. This volunteer due to lack of funding. In time, extended to the local politicians refus- the centre members stopped working ing to fund services, which reinforced together because of divergent politics. the notion that battered women did not The fifth chapter explores the beginning deserve aid. of a shelter in New Brunswick, Crossroads Like any work, No Place to Go: Local for Women/Carrefour pour femmes. One Histories of the Battered Women’s Shelter of the major issues confronted in this chap- Movement cannot answer all the possible ter is the exploitation of frontline service questions or offer a complete history. The providers who were asked to work for little book lacks a sense of the national political remuneration. The shelter worked as a col- context and provides few explicit compari- lective in keeping with feminist goals and sons with the responses of larger cities to to show the clients that equal relationships safe houses and transitional houses for bat- were possible and desirable. The living con- tered women. There is also too little analy- ditions of the shelter were deplorable and sis of racism here. Janovicek indicates her the shelter relied on donations to be able intention was to let the voices of women to stay open. Clearly the issue of domestic who actually used the services shed light violence was not viewed as a priority for on the racism and the shortcomings of the local politicians. This prompted the activ- available services. But her interviewees ists to turn their attention to promoting proved reluctant to discuss racism, and public awareness and fundraising. Janovicek did not find another way of rais- This book works to explain some ten- ing the issue. sions in the feminist movement. The ten- That being said, No Place to Go provides sion between ideology and desire to give an excellent history of the battered women’s services in a political climate where there shelter movement. Janovicek illuminates was little or no government funding for well the struggles of feminist groups both services became a huge issue for some to make supposedly private issues public as groups. In each community the issue of well as to analyze the root causes of vio- identifying as feminist or not comes up in lence against women and children. This the discussion. Many people had different text reminds us of a time when the issue of versions of what it meant to be a feminist, society’s responsibility to end abuse within from being an advocate, to an activist, to families was less than pervasive in the a volunteer, to a caregiver. These tensions media, classroom, or policy agendas. For caused trouble when women came asking these reasons, this would be an excellent for help to leave an abusive partner because text for undergraduate courses as an explo- of the ideological differences that separate ration of the way we were and the journey advocacy and volunteering services. to where we are and hope to move. Hope- Janovicek reminds the reader that fully others will build on Janovicek’s work prevailing beliefs at the time were that to hear the voices of the women accessing women were to blame for the abuse that these services and to compare the small 244 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 town movements with those in the larger feminist, and who have introduced busi- metropolis. ness management techniques to manage Cheryl Athersych anti-violence services. Adams suggests York University that because there are not enough women in power, there are no alternatives to patriarchal models that would enable Rebekkah Adams, Glass Houses: Saving feminist groups to maintain consensus- Feminist Anti-Violence Agencies from based models of governance, which she Self-Destruction (Halifax and Winnipeg: believes are necessary to promote egali- Fernwood Publishing 2008) tarian relationships among managers, staff, and clients. The second chapter Rebekkah Adams’s critique of gover- addresses organizational operation, and nance and internal conflict in anti-vio- criticizes the practice of hiring manag- lence agencies is based on twenty years ers who have not worked in the agency of experience as a front-line worker and instead of promoting workers from manager. Her central argument is that within the organization. Adams recom- grassroots feminist organizations have mends that anti-violence services need to been forced to abandon egalitarian and develop succession plans that train front- non-hierarchical forms of governance line workers to move into management because government funding made them positions. Thus, women will be able to accountable to the state rather than to develop a career within one organization the women’s movement and women and and anti-violence agencies will not lose children who are trying to leave abusive women with valuable experience to more relationships. Consequently, board mem- lucrative employment. Chapter three dis- bers and managers with more training cusses organizational administration and in business administration than in anti- makes recommendations for the creation violence work now run shelters and rape of family-friendly workplaces. These crisis centres, and they have abandoned include a pleasant physical environ- the feminist principles of the grass- ment, emotional care for employees, and roots movement to end violence against methods of communication that do not women. The book addresses important reproduce unequal power relationships. issues about conflict in anti-violence The final chapter presents solutions to agencies, but too often Adams makes the problems within shelters that range sweeping generalizations about board from the organization’s obligation to members, managers, and front-line work- provide for the basic health needs of the ers that ultimately undermine the useful- employees to the importance of build- ness of the solutions she offers. ing a feminist community that will sup- Adams is interested in healthy work- port anti-violence agencies. Each of these places, and believes that this is especially chapters states that if anti-violence agen- important for anti-violence agencies cies are openly feminist, then they will be because the nature of the work makes able to solve dysfunction within the orga- burn-out more prevalent in this career nization. Indeed, the underlying assump- than in any other. The book addresses tion of the book is that anti-violence three aspects of organizational health: agencies should be at the cutting edge structure, operation, and administra- of the development of woman-friendly tion. Chapter one is about organizational models of organizational health, and that structure, and is critical of board mem- this can only happen if they re-introduce bers and executive directors who are not feminist principles. r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 245

The intended audience for the book is not analyze the systemic reasons for the front-line workers, managers, and boards underfunding of shelters and the reluc- of transition houses and rape-crisis cen- tance to integrate feminist analysis into tres. Adams’s goal is to open up a dialogue management and government policy about the organizational health of anti- on violence against women. Without a violence agencies. Yet each chapter pits strong theorization of the relationship boards and managers against front-line between community services and the workers in a manner that is more likely to state, the analysis is riddled with con- prevent than to encourage debate. Board tradictions. She chastizes governments members and managers are uniformly for cutting funding to grassroots groups, described as authoritarian, anti-feminist, but at the same time contends that the and uninformed about violence against anti-violence movement has become women. Adams does admonish front- depoliticized because it is dependent on line workers who are not feminist, and it this “blood money.” (56) She argues that seems that these workers are those who the low wages that front-line workers have been hired recently. Veteran employ- earn are evidence of the devaluation of ees are described as the “soul-centres” women’s work, but also believes that the (42) of organizations. These “elders of the transition “from volunteer, socially con- vaw sector,” (87) she argues, are uniquely scious women to paid professional” (18) qualified to lead anti-violence agencies now prevents workers from taking politi- out of internal conflicts because most of cal action. Adams identifies problems them came to this work because of their that front-line anti-violence workers face, personal experience with violence. These but she rejects unions as an effective way broad generalizations about the motiva- to organize workers to demand better tions of board members, managers, and workplaces because they are inherently front-line workers over-simplify complex patriarchal and hierarchical institutions. relationships among individuals and the Even though her focus is on organiza- backgrounds of those who work at all lev- tional health, the weak theorization of els of these services. the influence of governments on grass- Adams does not explain her method- roots services results in analysis that ology. Her assessments of anti-violence seems to blame boards and managers for agencies are based on her own obser- the precarious situation of anti-violence vations, as well as informal interviews agencies. with her colleagues. While the insights Glass Houses is a passionate argument of front-line workers are valuable, it is about the need to maintain feminist not clear how representative they are. analysis in the anti-violence front-line The interviews appear to be focused on services, and the book offers insights into southern Ontario, where Adams has work conditions in some agencies. Yet worked. Thus, she does not provide suf- Adams’s argument that agencies need ficient analysis of the local contexts that to go back to the roots of the violence shape women’s activism. There is no evi- against women movement for solutions dence that Adams sought out advice from suggests that there were no conflicts workers and managers who did not agree within feminist services when they were with her evaluation of these services. poorly-funded grassroots organizations. Adams acknowledges that the current This is a romantic depiction of the history political climate threatens the survival of anti-violence services, and it occludes of anti-violence agencies, but she does the lessons that can be learned from the 246 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 very difficult compromises that shelter positions the Deserted Wives Act (1862) organizers made to ensure that the doors as an expression of this liberal ideal. Men of services stayed open. were supposed to be providers; this was Nancy Janovicek essential to nation building. Those males University of Calgary who reneged in this responsibility could be stripped of masculine prerogatives. By removing the aberrant husband of his Chris Clarkson, Domestic Reforms: rights to his wife’s property and allowing Political Visions and Family Regulation in his wife to assume his patriarchal role, British Columbia, 1862–1940 (Vancouver: the Deserted Wives Act implicitly refer- ubc Press, 2007) enced the ideal husband. Tellingly, under the Deserted Wives Act, all white men In Domestic Reforms, Chris Clarkson were equally regulated. No distinction has produced a tightly argued and com- was made between bachelors, fathers, plex analysis of family and welfare law and husbands. Women, however, were reform in early British Columbia. These essentially named, classified, and regu- reforms marked a departure from patriar- lated according to legislative categories. chal norms as the laws eroded husbands’ They were supported wives (basically control over property and increased seen as dependents), adulterous deserted their obligations to kin. Clarkson divides wives (perceived as being deserving of his analysis into three waves of prop- their fate), or virtuous deserted wives erty, inheritance, and maintenance law (regarded as entitled to the law’s protec- reforms, focusing on six main legisla- tion). Thus, while the first wave of - leg tive acts. He argues that each of these islation publicly defined white men as three waves reflects national visions and independent producers, it defined white classificatory regulation schemes, refer- women according to their dependence, ring to the three periods as “the yeoman fidelity, and reproductive capacity, in dream,” “a vision of mutualistic hierar- short by the role they played in relation to chy,” and “the conservation of child-life.” their husband or family. Although at first glance these three cat- The vision of mutualistic hierarchy egories appear as disparate ideals, Clark- replaced the liberal ideal with a sense son maintains that undergirding these of obligation, that is, mutual obligation national visions were common themes: among social classes. The state’s role was the promotion of class and gender inter- interventionist and paternalistic, doing ests of its proponents; a dedication to by legislation what men were not willingly economic development and economic doing in practice. The state, then, ensured growth; and the belief that liberal-cap- that working men received their wages italist economic development could be and that employers fulfilled their obliga- harnessed for the common good. It is tions. The worst abuses of the impersonal in his detailed analysis of the connec- liberal-capitalist order, according to the tions between these legislative acts and legislators, were thus ameliorated. Simi- his articulation of the linkages between larly, legal reforms in this era envisioned legislative reforms and broader political women as dependents: women and visions that Domestic Reforms makes its children’s needs were assessed by men, mark in Canadian historiography. and men’s control over family property The first wave – the yeoman dream – and earnings were revoked only if they idealized propertied, independent, and neglected their familial obligations. The self-determining masculinity. Clarkson national vision during this era was based r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 247 on corporatism, and reform-minded legis- for instance, that in the drive for wom- lation served as trickle-down apologetics. en’s equality women agitated for a full The third wave, the conservation of and equal array of individual rights for child-life, was rooted in middle class women. In so doing, they succumbed to mores and served a national vision, but it women’s individual aspirations which represents a reversal of power relations. strengthened liberalism and contributed Whereas the nineteenth century saw male to the fragmentation and atomization legislators regulate women according to of collective identities, thereby sabotag- their reproductive roles, in the twentieth ing the promise of a collective ideal. As century men were legally regulated based well, Clarkson presents the regulated as on gender according to their reproduc- having agency, as being resistant to legis- tive and supportive roles. Like women in lators’ efforts to remould individual iden- the previous century, these classifications tities and reshape society. Individuals – deserting, neglectful, non-supporting used the laws for reasons legislators had – were essentially character appraisals not intended. And it is in these examples, that rationalized their regulation. Male of how the law played out and how people obligation to support dependent kin responded to legislation, that Clarkson’s became entrenched in the law and it did technical and legalistic renderings come so through the rhetoric of child-saving as alive. One is struck by the personalities of nation building. Clarkson is firm on this the legislators and politicians (often one point. Legislation such as the Children of and the same) revealed in his analysis. Unmarried Parents Act was supported This linkage of legislators to specific acts not because of Canadians’ inherently and the relationships between bureau- charitable attitudes towards children or crats, judges, and the populations they because of the purely altruistic nature sought to regulate is a profoundly inter- of the organized women who promoted esting component of Clarkson’s work. the legislation, but because children were One can imagine dipping into Domestic portrayed as a national resource and the Reforms to study individuals and their state both owned and parented the chil- connections to the broader community, dren. Clarkson forcefully emphasizes the to examine particular legislative acts, to power of statist discourse through an look at certain time periods, as well as examination of arguments that were used reading it as a narrative whole. against specific reformist legislation. In Domestic Reforms is fully a British their critiques naysayers employed the Columbian history. Clarkson’s geographic same nationalist rhetoric as the promot- focus is mainly Vancouver, but he sheds ers; in fact, they upheld it and contributed light on other bc locales, such as Victoria, to it. As Clarkson maintains, the great New Westminster, Trail, and Quesnel. power of statist discourse is revealed His is a bc history in another sense. He in the broad reluctance to think in any provides a précis on bc historiography, terms other than the fictive community making ample use of pre-eminent bc of the nation and its fictive needs. historians such as Margaret Ormsby and But this is just to sketch the framework Jean Barman, and then connecting their of Domestic Reforms. It is so much more. works to relevant studies outside of bc, As an example, interspersed with his Canadian, American, and international. discussion of the three waves of reform Clarkson bridges legal history with polit- and six main legislative acts, Clarkson ical, social, and economic history, pulling traces the often unintended ironic con- in from a broad range of works as he sees sequences of the legislation. He argues, fit. This is a study that is rich in references 248 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 and at times these references threaten to leaders, extensive archival materials, overwhelm. In a similar way, Domestic the labour press, and secondary works. Reforms is, in parts, heavily theoretical. It succeeds very well in demonstrat- Clarkson wisely picks and chooses vari- ing continuities and changes affecting ous theories, for example state formation the labour movement in Saskatchewan theory, and is at pains to discuss not only throughout the period of non-Aboriginal the pros and cons of any given theory, but settlement in the province and in link- also its relevance to his analysis. Again, ing provincial labour, political, and social this theory can become dense and bur- history. But its analyses are limited by a densome, and one welcomes the respite populist approach which, while progres- provided by other approaches such as sive, downplays debates within the union individual portfolios. One has a vision movement about political and industrial of Clarkson energetically juggling all the strategies, and ignores discussions about elements of his broad vision, but at the changes in the composition of the labour same time managing to keep absolute movement over time and its impact on control of his intricate analysis. possible class strategies. In Domestic Reforms Clarkson chal- The book begins with a chapter on the lenges us to engage in multifaceted fur-trading period which the authors historical analysis, to widen our focus acknowledge is mostly based on the work in examining regulatory interactions of the excellent Saskatchewan labour beyond the courtroom, and to incorpo- historian and trade union activist Glen rate the findings of political, economic, Makahonuk, who died in 1997 at age 46 and social historians. This is an innova- of a brain tumour. Makahonuk’s work tive and compelling study, demanding in is reflected in other chapters as well and its complexity, and of interest to a wide one cannot help but think that had he multidisciplinary readership. lived a little longer that he would have Diane Purvey been one of the authors of On the Side Thompson Rivers University of the People. This chapter reflects both the strengths and the weaknesses of this book’s approach. On the one hand, it Jim Warren and Kathleen Carlisle, details every known strike of fur trade On the Side of the People: A History of employees in the area that later became Labour in Saskatchewan (Regina: Coteau the province of Saskatchewan, and Books 2005) denounces the Hudson’s Bay Company as an exploiter of workers. There is a short, Comprehensive histories of working but reasonable analysis of the Hudson’s people in Canadian provinces are few Bay Company’s strategy for organiz- and far between. This is certainly one ing its labour force, as well as its labour of the best, and deservedly won the Sas- relations strategies. What is missing is katchewan Book Award in 2006 for the any notion that there is a debate among best scholarly book that year. Researched scholars about the relative success of the and written by trade union activists, Company in dominating its labour force, with funds donated from both unions for example, in debates between geog- and progressive individuals, On the rapher Frank Tough, who sees the pau- Side of the People focuses on the evolu- city of documented strikes as evidence tion of the province’s trade union move- of largely uncontested bourgeois power, ment and on union struggles. The book and historian Edith Burley, who argues is based on interviews with trade union the opposite. This is populist history in r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 249 which every strike is a people’s victory for their militancy. But the conservative and there is no need to assess the overall craft unions are simply not discussed balance of social forces. in this chapter, creating a false sense of Excellent chapters follow on the work- a unified labour movement during the ers who built the cpr and their labour 1930s inspired by radical ideas. Warren struggles, and then the boom years, fol- and Carlisle do provide evidence that lowed by a bust, from 1892 to 1914 when labour radicalism was widespread dur- Saskatchewan became a major destina- ing this period and that it had an impact tion for immigrants and a trade union on electoral politics, with labour carry- movement, mostly craft-based, expanded ing every seat in a Regina council elec- quickly. The various political options that tion, and labour playing a key role in unionists chose are discussed but keep- the fledgling ccf. One would appreci- ing with a general strategy in this book to ate however a bit of analysis about how emphasize labour unity over labour inter- important labour was to the early ccf necine warfare, there is no suggestion of in Saskatchewan. Was that party indeed any clashes among those who supported labour-friendly in opposition and later rival ideologies of labourism, socialism, in government as some analysts suggest? and syndicalism. Or was it a petit-bourgeois party of farm- The chapter on the early post-war ers and small businesspeople, not espe- period could hardly escape a discussion cially different in most of its policies than of rivalries among movements with very Alberta Social Credit, as sociologist John different senses of what the objectives of Conway has argued? the working class should be and how to Warren and Carlisle are more forth- reach them. But it is an anemic discus- right about the split between craft union- sion. “obu ideas and Russia’s Bolshevik ists and industrial unionists that initially revolution were threatening enough to led to the break-up of the American provoke government repression, and what Federation of Labor and later the Trades had looked like a powerful new strategy and Labour Congress of Canada than to meet labour’s needs no longer seemed they are about earlier splits in the labour so promising.” (71) Nonetheless, the book movement. They outline the efforts of provides an even-handed account of the the Congress of Canadian Labour to obu’s efforts to organize coal miners in organize workers in the province. They the province, and gives a sympathetic also demonstrate the assistance that the biography of P.M. Christophers, the obu labour movement received in its efforts mine organizer from Alberta who made a to increase membership when the ccf valiant effort to organize the miners but government was elected in 1944 and, was ultimately defeated by the murder- influenced by David Lewis and other ous violence of the employers abetted by Ontario-based ccf officials, passed pro- the Saskatchewan provincial police. gressive trade union legislation that led, The chapter on the Great Depression among other things, to early unionization gives pride of place to leading Commu- relative to other provinces of most provin- nists both from Saskatchewan and from cial government employees. Though the outside the province who led the major province’s labour force was growing at a strikes of the decade, and organized the slower rate than the national average, its unemployed. The authors rightly note rate of unionization increased at almost that the popularity of many of these lead- double the national average between ers had little to do with ideology and 1946 and 1955. But the authors demon- much to do with the respect workers had strate that the ccf government was often 250 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 an employer like many others, unwilling accept their ndp government’s new anti- to bend to workers’ demands and cer- Keynesian, unabashedly pro-capitalist tainly unwilling to involve workers or policies. But there is little discussion of their unions in company management. what, if any, attempts were made to either Union militancy was often necessary to establish a political alternative to the ndp bring the ccf government to heel in deal- or to force that party to accept more pro- ings with its employees. gressive policies. Though the authors’ evidence suggests At the end of the book, the authors that the ccf government’s attitude to opine: “…despite organizational or philo- workers became less friendly over time, sophical differences, union people from they also make it clear that the unions the right and the left have a fundamen- continued to support the ccf and later tal bond in common. They are all on the the ndp. In part, this was because the side of the people.” (287) These are fine unions supported the social agenda of sentiments and a book that underplays the government, particularly its pio- the conflicts of the various elements of neering efforts in the areas of first hos- left and right in the trade union move- pital insurance and then medicare. But ment in favour of an approach in which the more important reason was that the workers are always united against their other government, on offer, the Liberal bosses makes these sentiments seem Party from the 1940s to mid-1970s, then valid. But the weakness of this otherwise the Conservatives until the mid-1990s, thorough and ambitious book is that it and now the Saskatchewan Party, has only rarely recognizes that competing always represented the most anti-union groups “on the side of the people” have elements of the business and farm com- not historically at all times felt that they munities. As the book makes clear, the should work together or indeed that they lot of workers and the strength of unions should not be at war with each other. Of suffered during the premierships of Ross course, striking a balance between sto- Thatcher from 1964 to 1971 and Grant ries of inter-class warfare and intra-class Devine from 1982 to 1991. Over time, warfare is always necessary in labour his- in any case, a small number of leading tory. But I think the book that will likely members of the labour movement came remain Saskatchewan’s chief account of to play significant roles in ndp govern- workers’ history for many years to come ments and to insure that labour was has underplayed the role of the latter in onside with the ndp at election time even defining the labour movement at various though between elections, large sections times. of the labour movement were contemptu- Alvin Finkel ous of ndp governments that appeared to Athabasca University cowtow to business demands at labour’s expense. Labour’s infatuation with the ndp Roland Penner, A Glowing Dream: ebbed in the 1990s because Premier Roy A Memoir (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Romanow and his Finance Minister, Shillingford Publishing 2007) Janice MacKinnon, followed neo-liberal policies that meant job cuts and service Roland Penner is the son of an atypical cuts for working people in Saskatchewan. but quintessentially Manitoban matri- Warren and Carlisle outline a series of monial match: his communist, ethnically mainly public worker strikes and empha- Mennonite father Jacob trained as a size the unwillingness of workers to land-surveyor in Czarist Russia, and his r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 251

Jewish mother Rose was a non-religious of the Manitoba cp’s membership – could and culturally engaged radical. Although never hope to get employment with any of they were born 200 kilometers apart in the banks, department stores, insurance Europe, they first met at a fiery “Red” firms, or trust companies. The eastern Emma Goldman lecture – on one of her Europeans, for the most part, were the five visits to Winnipeg – organized by foot soldiers in the struggles against the the anarchist branch of the city’s Radical established order but some of their chil- Club. Old World events had radicalized dren – notably Jews like David Orlikow, both parents; one witnessed a Cossack Saul Cherniack, and Saul Miller – came massacre of over 200 striking metalwork- to be major ccf-ndp actors. (The Ukrai- ers, the other rallied on Odessa’s docks nians, divided between the pro-Soviet in support of the mutinous sailors on the communists and the anti-Soviet Liberals, battleship Potemkin. Father Jacob broke remained largely aloof from the ccf-ndp with his conventional religious family until after the 1940s.) and, in 1921, became one of the 22 found- Penner’s book cover sums up his per- ers of the then underground Communist sonal political evolution. In one corner Party of Canada. He went on to serve of the front cover and on the back cover as a popular Winnipeg alderman for a are a hammer and sickle – he ran feder- quarter century. His vote totals progres- ally for the communist Labour Progres- sively increased and there is now a city sive Party at the height of the Cold War in park named for him. The title’s “glowing 1953. Inserted on the cover too is a photo dream” refers to the Penners’ inter-gener- of Penner being sworn into the 1981 ational commitment to social justice and ndp cabinet led by Howard Pawley,who equality. penned the book’s foreword. The cover’s The Winnipeg of a century ago was main photo, however, is of young, hand- a leftist hotbed where Marxist social some Penner in his army uniform during democrats, anarchists, syndicalists, evo- the Second World War; the air force, his lutionary socialists, labourists, Fabians, first choice, wouldn’t take communists. and other radicals mingled and circu- Penner, of course, only volunteered after lated in solidarity at political demonstra- Hitler’s 1941 attack on the Soviet Union; tions and events. The Russian Revolution before that, he and his communist com- and the Winnipeg General Strike led rades condemned the war, in accordance to a split between the “impossiblists” – with Stalin’s line, as an imperialistic enter- many of whom drifted into the cp – and prise. When father Jacob was interned the reformist, parliamentary socialists as a member of the outlawed cp during led by the likes of J. S. Woodsworth and the war, Roland’s 19-year-old brother future mla (elected from his jail cell) and Norman (author of The Canadian Left: mayor John Queen. Some radicals, like A Critical Analysis and Canadian Com- the syndicalists, saw their ideas eclipsed munism: The Stalin Years and Beyond) and many eventually gravitated into the delivered an impassioned speech to city social-democratic camp. council pleading that the father’s council What figures like Woodsworth and seat not be declared vacant. It appears as Queen had in common was their rela- one of the book’s appendices. tively high political cultural status as Norman inherited more of the Anglo-Saxons in a society marked by a father’s political genes and Roland was distinctive ethnic pecking order. It was bequeathed more of the mother’s cultural one where Ukrainians and Jews – who passions. One chapter, “My Life in Art,” constituted the overwhelming majority tells of Roland’s role as an impresario: he 252 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 brought Pete Seeger to Winnipeg for his a 1990 thank-you letter that he proudly first Canadian appearance and presented displays as an appendix. and promoted Miriam Makeba, numer- The book’s strengths include its acces- ous folk singers including Theodore Bikel, sibility as a light-hearted, breezy read, guitarist Carlos Montoya, a Mantovani- full of local colour, some of it scattered led concert, Stars of the Bolshoi Ballet, through the lengthy notes that, for one and the Obratsov Puppets. Penner also chapter, are frustratingly incorrectly worked as the manager of the People’s numbered. The historical range is impres- Co-op Bookstore that faded with the sive, as it should be for the memoirs of an cpc’s demise. octogenarian who still teaches in Mani- Penner entered Manitoba’s Law School toba’s Faculty of Law where he had also at a time when bc’s courts were uphold- served as dean. There are some factual ing that province’s Law Society’s right to errors however, including the dates of refuse to admit into practice law gradu- Lester Pearson’s prime ministership and ates who were Communists. Penner came when Manitoba’s first Communist mla to practice “poverty law” in partnership was elected. As the reader turns the with Communist alderman Joe Zuken. pages, she traverses much of twentieth- Disillusioned by Khrushchev’s revelations century Winnipeg’s political and cul- about Stalin and about the Soviet Union tural history and encounters a who’s who more generally, Penner left the cp in the of local leftists as well as establishment early 1960s and drifted in self-described personalities. Penner has become one of political limbo, although he never parted them, appointed as a member of both the with his socialist ideals. A law partner, Order of Canada and the Order of Mani- seeking a nomination, sold him his first toba. Students of labour may not be much ndp membership in 1977. At the nomi- interested in his labours as a member of nation meeting, however, Penner found the criminal defence bar, but he made an his partner’s opponent more compelling important contribution to social justice and voted for her! The shift to the ndp as the first chairman of the province’s among the Penners had been presaged in legal aid system. He also offers a chap- 1971 when Penner’s nephew Steve (whose ter titled “Unionism Was in My Blood” photo is among others in the extended where he says his most significant activ- Penner family, so extended as to occupy ity was representing the interests of the 16 pages in the book), contested a riding “lumpen professoriat” at the University of for the Ontario ndp. Manitoba. In 1981, Penner ran and won a riding Penner’s political odyssey encapsu- for the ndp. Pawley called on him to serve lates the story of Manitoba’s left in the as Attorney-General and he came to serve twentieth century. The children of turn- as government House Leader, head of the of-the-century, European-born radicals Treasury Board, Minister of Education, like his parents came eventually to hitch and minister responsible for the Liquor their cart to the social-democratic horses Commission and constitutional affairs. initially ridden by British-born social During his tenure, he endured Mani- democrats. With Ed Schreyer’s astound- toba’s turbulent 1983 French-language ing reorientation of provincial politics in crisis and participated in three rounds 1969, the ilp-ccf-ndp and Manitoba’s of constitutional conferences devoted to government had their first non-Anglo- Aboriginal issues as well as the negotia- Saxon leader and premier and its first tion of the Meech Lake Accord. For his cabinet in which the descendants of failed efforts, Brian Mulroney sent him continental Europeans were a majority. r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 253

Intermarriage, integration, moderniza- Canadian dollar.” (32) Similarly, Belaru- tion, and cultural assimilation have pro- sans from northwestern and central duced a society where one’s continental Belarus (primarily the five imperial prov- European ethnic origins no longer con- inces of Grodno, Minsk, Vil’na, Vitebsk, vey the stigmas of the past. Penner does and Magilev) were attracted to Canada. not explicitly develop this part of the In general, Kukushkin argues, that “… the story but it is there nonetheless, between Dnieper River emerged as the geographi- the lines. The left’s electoral victories in cal divide between the Atlantic and Russo- Manitoba have contributed mightily to Siberian migration systems…” (54) the province being the most successful in Secondly, Kukushkin makes a convinc- stanching the numerical decline of orga- ing case that unlike the selected groups nized labour’s ranks. of religious dissenters (Doukhobors and Nelson Wiseman Ukrainian Baptists, for example) and University of Toronto other oppressed minorities who were allowed to leave the Tsarist realm for religious/political reasons, these depart- Vadim Kukushkin, From Peasants to ing Ukrainian and Belarusan peasants Labourers: Ukrainian and Belarusan (for the most part) were “… drawn into Immigration from the Russian Empire to the vortex of transoceanic labour migra- Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill- tions …” (29) because of demographic Queen’s University Press 2007) pressures and the perceived economic opportunities abroad. Thus, Kukushkin’s Vadim Kukushkin’s monograph is an assertion that the stream of non-con- intrinsically interesting read and a much forming Slavs fleeing the Tsarist Empire appreciated tweaking of the standard were replaced by an increasing flow of historiography of Slavic immigration to ordinary peasant migrants is well taken Canada prior to World War I. Noting, and does much to undermine the notion quite rightly, that virtually nothing is that only religious dissenters and politi- known about Slavic labour immigrants cal activists were Canada bound. who came to Canada from the Russian More contentious perhaps is Kukush- Empire before 1914, (3) Kukushkin pro- kin’s lengthy discussion of how the Slavs ceeds to ameliorate this observation with from Russia’s Belarus and Ukrainian- a thorough overview of the 25,000 Ukrai- dominated territories west of the Dnieper nians and 9,000 Belarusans ( approximate River in general and Ukrainians in par- figures extrapolated by the author from ticular differed from the Galicians and the 1921 census) who emigrated from the Bukovynians of Austria-Hungary. Here, Russian Empire to Canada. Kukushkin’s thesis becomes a bit more The first valuable addition to our problematic – or at least needs to take into knowledge is Kukushkin’s identifica- account more precisely the timeframe. tion and analysis of the “mass peas- At the risk of simplifying Kukushkin’s ant exodus” from the ethnically diverse central theme unduly, the main differ- western regions of the Tsarist Empire. ence between Ukrainian immigrants Thousands of Ukrainians from villages from Russia and those territories ruled by in “Right Bank” Ukraine (which included the Hapsburg monarchy was that the lat- the provinces of Podolia, Volhynia, Kiev, ter were labour migrants, attracted by the Chernigov, Poltava, Khar’kov, as well as employment opportunities in the extrac- the Ekaterninoslav and Khotin district of tive and manufacturing industries of the Bessarabia) emigrated “… in pursuit of the Western hemisphere while the former 254 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 entered Canada mainly as agricultural- One major reason for such a state of ists. (4) This conclusion is based on the affairs was precisely the Dominion’s need approximately 2,800 files of Ukrainian for labour and the preference for Ukrai- (and Belarusan) migrants to Canada con- nians and eastern Europeans in general tained in the Likacheff-Ragosine-Mathers over other ethnic groups when it came to (Li-Ra-Ma) Collection (National Library the country’s labour requirements. Slavs of Canada) created by the Russian con- became the most eligible candidates in a sulates in Montreal and Vancouver. How- compromise between the industrialists/ ever, as these consular records indicate, entrepreneurs who considered Asiatics significant migration from “Right Bank” and southern Europeans (notably Italians) Ukraine and west-central Belarus began as the ideal navvies, miners, and general only in 1905 and in this comparative workers, and the Department of the Inte- analysis the time period is all important. rior which had grave reservations about In the Canadian context, the year 1905 the “quality” and “cultural acceptability” marks a watershed in Ukrainian (and of Asiatics and southern Europeans. Slav) immigration history to Canada. Wherever labour-intensive indus- Prior to 1905, Ukrainians headed for tries flourished, Ukrainians could be their allotted homesteads, their role in found. They worked almost exclusively the labour market being only an exten- at the lowest levels – as railway navvies, sion of agricultural settlement – a source underground miners, miners’ helpers, of temporary employment in order that ditch diggers, road builders and gen- they might procure capital to improve eral labourers in mills, foundries, and their financial position on the farms. meat-packing houses. The percentage Between 1905 and 1914, however, the of Ukrainian immigrants entering the pace of Canada’s “golden era” quickened industrial labour market rose steadily. In dramatically. Canadian entrepreneurs 1901–02, 25% stated occupations other suddenly cried out desperately for cheap, than farming; in 1903-04, this percent- unskilled workers. A response was read- age had increased to 40 and by 1914, over ily forthcoming from the Department of 54% were classified as general labourers. the Interior – a response which ensured To put this in numerical terms, out of a that Ukrainian immigration (whether total of 78,899 Ukrainian males (over- from the Austro-Hungarian or Russian whelmingly from the Austro-Hungarian Empires) would be significantly different Empire) who arrived at Canadian ports in character than earlier immigration. between 1906 and 1914, 44,029 stated Although theoretically the official their occupation as general labourers immigration policy adhered to the Sifto- while 32,834 were listed as farmers or nian principle of accepting agricultural farm labourers (figures were compiled settlers above all others, the economic from Canada, Sessional Papers, “Nation- boom dictated that a large proportion of ality, Sex, Occupation and Destination of Ukrainians/Slavs streaming into Canada Immigrant Arrivals at Ocean Ports for be general labourers. Indeed, the decade Fiscal Years 1906–1914”). or so before World War One saw the There was also a significant shift of creation of a Ukrainian/Slavic Canadian destinations from the Prairie provinces proletariat – a proletariat that became to eastern Canada. Almost all Ukrainian evident not only on the Prairies and immigrants entering Canadian ports British Columbia but in the mining and before 1905 named the Northwest as urban regions of Ontario, Quebec, and their destination; however, between 1905 Nova Scotia. and 1914 only about 58% intended to pro- r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 255 ceed to the Prairies. Obviously, eastern the southwestern part of Russia and the Canada (especially Ontario and Quebec) neighbouring Austrian provinces of Gali- became the new “promised land” for cia and Bukoyna which not only played a Ukrainians in search of work. Thus, the role in feeding information about Canada fact that Ukrainians (and Belarusans) to those living in Russian territories (34) from the Russian Empire were drawn but, one suspects, also in promoting the into the unskilled labour market in Can- exchange of fraternal interests, political ada between 1905–14 is not surprising ideals, and perhaps even patriotic feel- and does not really differentiate them, as ings of belonging to a particular nation- Kukushkin suggests, from those coming ality with distinctive qualities based on from Austria-Hungary during the same ethnicity, language, shared geographic time period. identities (boundaries notwithstanding), Kukushkin cites other differences etc. In other words, the mindset of the between those Ukrainians from the Rus- “West Bank” Ukrainians as a whole may sian Empire and their counterparts in not have been as contrary as Kukushkin Austria-Hungary that can be questioned. depicts to those who lived in Russian According to Kukushkin, the former territories bordering Austria-Hungary. considered themselves part of the “Rus- Until more definitive research and analy- sian nation” while the latter were more sis becomes available, the jury is still out “culturally autonomous” if not exactly – at least for this reviewer. nationally self-conscious. And indeed, Finally, a comment on the Russian in this regard, Kukushkin is critical of Empire’s porous border is in order that Ukrainian-Canadian historians for con- hopefully will not appear overly facetious. centrating on the “Ruthenian” immigrant If indeed Russia’s emigration laws were from Galicia and Bukovyna who adopted non-existent and the whole system was a nationalist orientation while excluding rife with “bureaucratic negligence and the “West Bank” Ukrainians as detrac- incompetence” which nullified sanctions tors – Russophiles, socialist/communists against emigrants, (59) why didn’t more who disrupted the “nationalist agenda.” leave the Empire? Certainly, conditions This observation, although probably on Imperial Russia’s western frontier valid to a point, may also be more per- were similar to those in Austria-Hungary ception than reality. That greater Rus- that engendered mass mobility. sian identity among the peasants was Kukushkin provides a partial answer in the direct result of the Tsarist policy of Chapter 4 with his discussion of “formal- Russification carried out in Ukraine (and ized” attempts to bring Russian labourers Belarus) and that these Slavs were gener- to Canada. Thanks to the pressure from ally Russophiles is an assumption that Russian steamship lines, that wanted to invites more investigation. Arguably, get in on some of the lucrative human national self-identity (and concomitant cargo business, St. Petersburg seemed national self-determination) was as quick amenable to a certain amount of emi- to re-establish itself in “West Bank” gration. Kukushkin notes that in 1906, Ukraine after the fall of the Romanov for example, the Grand Trunk Pacific monarchy as it had been in Austria-Hun- Railway Company sought to negotiate gary. Moreover, as Kukushkin points out, an arrangement with the Russian gov- thanks to the relaxed passport regime ernment on temporarily bringing 10,000 that existed in Russian territories adjacent navvies to Canada. (86) Canadian Pacific to the Hapsburg domain, there were “cul- was interested in a similar deal. Curi- tural and commercial linkages” between ously, these and other endeavours to 256 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 place “Russians” in Canada either failed it nevertheless brings some interesting or had very limited success. Kukushkin articles together into a single work and does not detail the reasons for the fail- contributes to the growing literature on ures but suggests that it was more due the Sixties. to the objections from Ottawa than St. In his introduction, Roussopoulous Petersburg. True, Canada had a far from explains the purpose of this collection: it “open-door” immigration policy; still, “is meant to focus and colour the emer- Canadian Captains of Industry did have gence of the New Left during the latter a fair amount of success in importing a half of the 20th century and into that of Slavic proletariat despite the Immigration our own. In doing so it will analyze the Branch’s continuing insistence that only legacy of the New Left of the 1960s and agriculturalists and female domestics the continuity that exists between the need apply. One cannot help but wonder past and today.” (7) In this way, the col- about the objections raised by vigilant lection is meant not only as a historical officials in the Imperial government who study but also as a guide for current and perceived that the Empire’s surplus peas- future political activism. Divided into ants were required for its own Siberian two sections, titled “Legacy” and “Con- hinterland. tinuity,” eleven different contributions Some critical comments notwithstand- comprise this collection. These cover ing, overall, From Peasants to Labourers a range of formats, including scholarly is a meticulously researched, carefully articles, interview transcripts, and a list crafted piece that makes an important of fugitive radicals from the period. Some contribution to the identification and of the contributions were written spe- analysis of Ukrainian and Belarusan cifically for this collection, but a number immigrants to Canada from the Russian have been published previously. On the Empire prior to 1914. one hand, this gives scholars access to a Jaroslav (Jerry) Petryshyn number of commentaries on the New Left Grande Prairie Regional College all in one location. On the other hand, though, some of the pieces are now quite dated and do not adequately address the Dimitrios Roussopoulos, ed., The New current political context upon which they Left: Legacy and Continuity (Montreal: are expected to reflect; articles written in Black Rose Books 2007) the 1990s do not, for example, address the post-9/11 world in which current social In recent years, the Sixties have and political activism takes place. attracted a great deal of scholarly discus- In these articles, both new and repub- sion and debate in Canada. This became lished, the authors emphasize the impor- clear in the summer of 2007 when a con- tance of participatory democracy to the ference on the period held at Queen’s legacy and continuity of the New Left. University brought together hundreds Thus, while the authors suggest a number of academics, former participants, and of different legacies, both positive and current activists to discuss the meaning negative, they almost unanimously agree and legacy of this period. The collection that the most important contribution edited by Dimitrios Roussopoulos on the was this notion of participatory democ- New Left contributes in important ways racy. The belief that people should par- to these debates. While it would benefit ticipate directly in making the decisions significantly from more critical analysis that affect their lives, the authors explain, of the history and legacy of the New Left, formed the basis of the New Left’s phi- r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 257 losophy and continues to be important unproblematically equate the New Left in the current social and political move- with the student movements of the 1960s, ments around the world. This discussion therefore privileging a primarily white, of participatory democracy is incredibly middle-class, male story of the period. important and contributes to our under- Recent scholarship has challenged this standing of the Sixties. definition and seeks to provide a more Former participants in the New Left inclusive understanding of the New Left. movement of the Sixties wrote the vast According to Van Gosse, in Rethink- majority of pieces that are included in ing the New Left (2005), for example, this collection. This is an interesting the New Left includes movements such strategy. It allows former participants to as the Civil Rights Movement, the early reflect upon their experiences and con- ban-the-bomb movement, the student sider through the lens of the present what movement, the anti-Vietnam War move- they hoped to accomplish and what they ment, the Black Power movement, the actually achieved. The best contribution Aboriginal and Chicano movements, of this sort is the article by Tom Hayden, second-wave feminism, and the gay lib- a founding member of the Students for eration struggle. This perspective, he a Democratic Society. At the same time, argues, provides a more inclusive history however, it is often difficult for partici- of the period rather than unnecessarily pants in past events to achieve the per- elevating one particular wing of the New spective necessary to fully analyze the Left. This collection would benefit from history and legacy of their activities. The a discussion of this new scholarship and three articles written by academics and further consideration of what the New activists who did not live through the Left actually entails. period provide a counter to these per- Another area where further critical sonal reflections, but the collection would analysis would be beneficial is in the dis- benefit from a more balanced approach. cussion of identity politics, which many In addition, all of the former participants authors in the collection argue was among who contributed to this collection are the (unfortunate) legacies of the New men, while the three non-participants Left. Their argument is that the political are women. This overlooks the important and social movements of the 1960s were contributions of women participants in rooted in something other than identity, the New Left; a much better gender bal- namely in a unified critique of “the sys- ance is required. tem.” It is only in the 1970s, they insist, This gender imbalance also reflects that the movement splintered into frag- one of the major shortcomings of the col- ments embedded in particular and sepa- lection, namely a general failure on the rate identities. This is by no means a new part of the authors to sufficiently explain position, but recent scholarship has chal- the New Left. The editor’s introduction lenged the notion of a unified movement defines the New Left as “an inclusive during the Sixties and the paucity of dif- politics including analyses and proposi- fering identities in the New Left itself. tions derived from or inspiring the vari- Leerom Medevoi, for example, argues ous movements and bearing a specific in his book, Rebels: Youth and the Cold reference to social, political and cultural War Origins of Identity (2005) that iden- change.” (8) As well as being rather vague, tity politics actually developed during the this definition does not adequately reflect 1950s when youth became, for the first the usage of the term “New Left” in the time, a separate and powerful political articles that follow. Most of the authors category. Furthermore, Stuart Hall and 258 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 others have argued for decades, drawing at the present time. While much more inspiration from the theories of Antonio critical engagement with the current lit- Gramsci, that identity is often central to erature on the Sixties would strengthen the development of social movements. this collection, it is nevertheless a useful Thus, rather than repeating a common work for scholars of the period and social assumption, which invariably privileges movements more generally. the Sixties movements over the social Roberta Lexier and political movements that followed, University of Alberta this collection could offer more critical engagement with the notion of identity politics and its role in the New Left. Steven High and David W. Lewis, These assumptions regarding the unity Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape of the New Left and the divisive identity and Memory of Deindustrialization politics that followed also find their way (Toronto: Between the Lines Press 2007) into the discussions of continuity in this collection. Many of the authors argue that More multimedia menagerie than the New Left connected a variety of issues monograph, Corporate Wasteland: The into a cohesive critique of society, which Landscape and Memory of Deindustrial- collapsed when various identities arose ization builds upon Steven High’s already by the 1970s. Yet, many of the authors impressive and extensive contributions argue that this unity has been restored to the subfields of deindustrialization, in the current anti-globalization move- transnational history, and public mem- ment, which, they explain, is also rooted ory. This book pushes the boundaries of in a wider analysis of society. While there a traditional study in dynamic new ways is no doubt a connection between the and furthers High’s reputation as one Sixties movements and the current social of Canada’s most innovative historians. activism, as many authors in this collec- Instead of focusing upon political econ- tion successfully point out, this analysis omy and protest, as he did in his award- overlooks the divisive nature of both the winning Industrial Sunset: The Making of New Left and of the new protest move- North America’s Rust Belt (Toronto 2004), ments. While many participants in both High, along with photographer David W. movements attempted to present cohesive Lewis, wants us to look at the meaning of critiques of society, there was rarely una- deindustrialization more broadly. nimity or agreement and such positions Paradoxically, this goal is to be achieved were subject to continued discussion and by “interrogating the cultural meaning of debate. In order to avoid mythologizing industrial ruins themselves.” High and the Sixties as a period of united activism, Lewis offer a unique, cross-border exam- much more could be done to analyze the ination of how crumbling buildings– the continued attempts to create agreement profoundly haunting and bizarrely beau- in the face of diverse and sophisticated tiful remnants of North America’s great positions. postwar industrial age – have taken on Overall, this collection contributes new meanings, new uses, and new forms to current discussions and debates sur- in the twenty-first century. In so doing, rounding the Sixties in important ways. High and Lewis utilize an engaging inter- In particular, the in-depth analysis of disciplinary approach, bringing together participatory democracy provides tre- textual arguments, oral histories, imag- mendous insight into the political and ery, and an interesting dose of cultural social movements both of that period and anthropology. In Corporate Wasteland, r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 259 the historian and the photographer take of class and race and the meanings of his- us on a dizzying journey, from the illicit tory in a post-industrial, post-modern adventures of “urban explorers” to the world, a result that has, interestingly, gar- wrenching stories of “I-95” auto worker nered High some sharp criticism from a refugees to the backwoods of franco- few in the ue world, who (we can see why) phone Ontario mill towns, weaving dislike his take on their activities. together these disparate people, places, The third chapter returns the book and images into a whole that is not always to more familiar ground: the politics of coherent, but certainly provides an eclec- memory and meaning in Youngstown, tic and eye-opening tour of North Amer- Ohio, the quintessential Rust Belt city. ica’s post-industrial mindscapes. In another strong chapter, High uses lit- The book is broadly divided into two erature, music, art, and the clash over the parts. Part One, “The Deindustrial Sub- memorialization of Youngstown’s descent lime,” is the text-heavy section of the book. into deindustrialization to help us under- Broken into three chapters of interpretive stand this wrenching transformation. essay, it begins with an essay on indus- In charting the community’s story from trial demolition that is a particular strong one of “defiance and resistance, to one of point of the book. High’s way of looking victimization and loss,” the book makes a at how the “secular ritual” of demolition solid contribution to the burgeoning field has become a reflection of transforming of commemoration studies and public “place” and postindustrial mores and dis- history. courses is succinct and penetrating. Aban- The second part of the book is devoted doned buildings, lilting smokestacks, and to alternative media and ways of look- crumbling grain elevators take on whole ing at the issue of deindustrialization. new meanings, as High illustrates how Oral histories are interspersed with these “contested symbols” can be seen not Lewis’s photos, creating a panorama of only as a channel from the past, but also as voices and images. These pages provide a an explosive exposition of contemporary unique exploration of a topic that breaks North Americans’ ambiguous connection from the usual academic methodology, to their industrial heritage. and are a refreshing departure. In tak- From here High quickly takes us to ing this chance, this section of Corporate the shadowy underworld of the “urban Wasteland is a little more uneven in its explorer” phenomenon, the “ue” life. approach: The fascinating story of the Modern-day non-treasure hunters, paper mill at Sturgeon Falls, with all of whose solitary professed goal is to “take its linguistic, class, social, and continen- only photographs, leave only footprints” tal cleavages, is significant enough to be as they surreptitiously invade abandoned an interpretive essay on its own, one that sites in search of adventure and experi- could easily fit into part one. The next ence, ues have somehow become the four chapterettes, “Gabriel’s Detroit,” quiet custodians of deindustrialization. “Deindustrial Fragments,” “King Coal,” In unraveling their stories, and particu- and “A Vanishing Landmark” are shorter larly that of the original urban explorer, pieces, the first two a collection of oral Torontonian “Ninjalicious” (a.k.a Jeff snippets, the last two brief pictorial Chapman), High explores how sites of essays. The range of locales covered in deindustrialization become a new kind these essays – Northern Ontario, Detroit of target – that of the dark tourist. This and the I-95 corridor, Cobalt, Hamilton, rumination unexpectedly becomes an and Windsor, Ontario, West Virginia, analytical lens by which to explore issues and Kalamazoo – are indeed fragments, 260 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 certainly stretching High’s and Lewis’s Sheldon Stromquist, ed., Labor’s Cold canvass. Still, the testimonies are suc- War: Local Politics in a Global Context cinct and sad, the images desperate yet (Urbana and Chicago: University of evocative. Illinois Press 2008) Both words and pictures in these chap- ters leave the reader wishing for more, Labor’s cold war provides a valuable either a bigger dose of the oral histo- and timely historical reinterpretation ries, or a grander tableau for more of the that goes to the roots of the Cold War as haunting images. This is particularly true it affected the American labour move- of the imagery. We can tell that Lewis’s ment and its allies. The case studies on images are stunning, deserving of their which its chapters are based tell about a own exhibition. Fortunately, those inter- concerted anti-communist crusade that ested can be satisfied on both counts. began to take shape across the U.S. dur- High’s oral histories can be accessed ing the closing years of World War II, and through the various archives he has help- in a few short years, was able to transform fully listed in the book, while Lewis’s the political cultures in the work and images have been displayed from Wind- community lives of the American work- sor to Kalamazoo, and continue to be ing class. Although what happened north exhibited on both sides of the border. of the border did not match the dedica- In the end, notwithstanding its frag- tion and nastiness with which this war mentary moments, the book is wholly was waged, aspects of these case stud- successful. Corporate Wasteland accom- ies would certainly be familiar to trade plishes what it set out to do – to expand union and community activists who sur- our understanding of deindustrialization vived the Cold War years in Canada. by delving through analysis, testimony, A good number of studies in recent and picture, into the very meanings of the years have examined the McCarthy- remnants of this ongoing process. High ism and Cold War that played out at the and Lewis have captured the essence national level and in us foreign policy. of deindustrialization, and have high- Labor’s Cold War marks a significant lighted one of deindustrialization’s most departure from these, in that is one of profound contradictions, that in city or the first (Robert Cherney et al., Ameri- country, on either side of the continental can Labor and the Cold War is another) border, we are surrounded by, and very to explore the manner in which this much the product of, deindustrialization. “anti-communist crusade” attacked trade Yet we rarely really see or understand the unions and social activists at the local complications of our industrial/deindus- level to turn back reforms they had been trial heritage, though it contextualizes building since the New Deal and the and shapes our world, and though it is early years of World War II. There are the always in our midst. As such, Corporate inevitable references to the junior sena- Wasteland is an important and unortho- tor from Wisconsin and national crusad- dox look at one of the great transforma- ers, to be sure, but throughout, the book tive events of the post-Second World War emphasizes the importance of local bat- period in North America, and fascinating tles, which inevitably shaped the charac- reading to boot. ter of the national war. Dimitry Anastakis In another significant departure from Trent University established historiography, this book takes the focus of the Cold War away from the conservative anti-reform forces r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 261 that ran rampant in McCarthy’s Amer- This episode is also one of several to ica. There can be no doubt of the enor- illustrate the extent to which liberal mous influence this well-organized and labour leaders would distance them- financed coalition exerted; in many ways, selves from a rank-and-file activism they it sponsored and supported the local cru- believed was too easily subverted by sades. However, the reader is left with communists. In all this, Walter Reuther the clear impression that the closest and emerges as a prominent figure with a perhaps most telling blows were dealt, single-minded commitment to fighting not by the avowed conservatives, but by communism, firstly in the uaw and then liberals in the trade unions and reform in the cio. At the same time as he spared movements who only a few years before no effort to rid the cio of its Communist worked hand-in-hand with Communists and progressive leadership, he became and left-leaning activists. known as a leading advocate for civil and The book describes, in fascinating labour rights, expanding the uaw’s Fair detail, not only how labour leaders and Practices Department and hiring new other liberals were fully incorporated staff, and revealing an important trait in into the Cold War agenda but also how the liberal anti-communist agenda: this their successes made the conservative was the best way to counteract the social onslaught possible. Leaving no stone justice propaganda of the Communists. unturned in their local organizations and James Lorence’s essay on the destruc- communities, the combined liberal and tion of the International Union of Mine, conservative forces split the fabric of the Mill and Smelter Workers in the South- American labour and social reform move- west is another such episode. The Union ment just when it was at the pinnacle of had become a primary vehicle for Mexi- its strength. A vibrant, well-organized can Americans’ struggle for social and movement with deep roots in workplace economic equality in both the workplace and community was transformed in a few and for such social causes as desegre- short years. gated housing. However, both became Former activists became more than the object of a hostile campaign by enemies; they became active participants employers and other conservative forces in campaigns to destroy or neutralize the in which afl- and cio- affiliated unions movements they helped to build. This is participated. Much the same pattern also perhaps best illustrated by David Lewis- appears in Kenneth Burt’s case study of Coleman whose case study describes the Latinos in California, whose fight for fair conversion of Shelton Tappes from one of employment and fair housing laws was the most active and respected organizers also lost when the “race card” was seized of the “black caucuses” in the early 1940s by anti-communist factions that suc- into a star witness for House Un-Ameri- ceeded in fracturing the movement. can Activities Committee (huac) inqui- In his study of anti-communist net- sitions in 1952. Tappes became part of a works on the Pacific Coast in the 1930s, crusade which transferred the leadership Martin Cherney draws on a massive for race equality from trade unionists base of research material that grew out and workers to middle-class leaders who of the legal and propaganda wars that emphasized integration over social and erupted over efforts to deport Harry economic justice. The “black caucuses” Bridges, Western Regional Director of he had worked so hard to build were the cio, on charges of Communist con- replaced by a “colour-blind” civil rights spiracy. Probably most shocking about movement. Cherney’s account is his description of 262 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 the expansive and overlapping espionage provided the banner for a witch-hunt in networks that operated from Portland which local loyalty oaths patterned after to Los Angeles, with informers from the those embedded in the Taft-Hartley Act American Legion’s ‘Red Squad,’ the Mili- were demanded of suspected radicals, and tary Intelligence Division, local Cham- inquisitorial tactics were employed to root bers of Commerce, and the Associated out communists and others whose causes Farmers of California. Even these elabo- might have been tainted by them. What rate spy networks could not have worked, is lacking, however, are the less dramatic however, without the ‘insiders’ in the cio accounts of the way officers were elected, and afl unions who made ‘pragmatic grievances contested, and bargaining choices’ to preserve their organizations mandates set. Local union culture includes and movements. social and athletic events, local awards While the stated intent of Labor’s banquets, and such, and the effects of the Cold War was to focus and explain the liberal anti-communist crusade must cer- transformations that took place at the tainly have been evident in these. local level during the Cold War, it doesn’t Probably the most successful, in this always succeed in maintaining this per- regard, is Lisa Kannenberg’s chapter in spective. In part, an account of national which she describes in some detail how developments is needed to explain local a progressive local of the United Electri- happenings. Even at that, however, more cal Workers in ge’s Schenectady plant could have been done to describe and became a target of the Cold War crusad- analyze the day-to-day political culture ers when it began to challenge the leading of the local union and to show how liberal role its company was taking in American anti-communism (and the not-so-liberal business’s attempt to stop the extension sort) played out on the shop floor or in the of wartime government planning into community. peacetime production, and to arrest the Christopher Gereis’s chapter on “Labor growth of reforms that had their roots and the Cold War in Occupied Japan” is a in the New Deal. The business lobby was case in point. It provides an eye-opening able to convince a large cross-section account of the process through which of the American workers that the route women workers, who were prime build- to liberty and the American dream was ers of a militant, class-conscious labour through free enterprise, and that plan- movement in post-war Japan became ning led by democratically elected repre- marginalized, and were finally trans- sentatives could only lead to tyranny. In formed into objects of a male-dominated the process, ue Local 301 became the tar- campaign that depicted the American- get of a coalition led by a newly-elected ization of Japan as a “Culture of Whores.” Republican Congress, the fbi, the courts, Although provocative and insightful, this the press, the Catholic Church, and of account is nevertheless more national course, corporate America. The cruelest than local in scope. cut, once again, came from the local’s Some of the more dramatic local activi- former allies in the cio, who engaged in ties stand out. Seth Wigderson’s chill- a left-wing purge that decapitated the ing accounts of the “Time of the Toad” American labour movement by eliminat- describes gangs of anti-communist work- ing some of the best organizers and issues ers who roamed uaw plants across the at the very moment the cio was position- us, attacking and physically evicting ing itself to organize in the South and suspected communists, peace activists, among white-collar workers. and social reformers. The Korean War A local focus is also retained by Rose- r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 263 mary Feurer in her account of the post- “The Wages of Anti-Communism” war campaign around the Missouri is perhaps the saddest chapter in the Valley Authority (mva). Closely tied book, as it shows how little regard the to the Communist-led United Electri- ruling class actually had for the labour cal Workers (ue) District Eight, whose and reform leaders it co-opted. It is clear President Bill Sentner was a giant among that the liberal anticommunists actually union leaders, the campaign insisted hoped to win (or preserve) acceptance that unemployment, labour supply, and from their new allies and the American housing availability be considered when- public, as well as economic benefits for ever wartime contracts were awarded, union members in the areas of wages, reflecting the widespread expectation hours of work, and security in return for that labour would play an integral role their role in the Cold War. They achieved in planning for mobilization as well as in some of these gains, as Wigderson and the conversion to peace-time production. others show; however, these gains were The “Murray Plan,” for example, called short-lived. It is truly remarkable how for a national tripartite planning board quickly the tide turned against the main- on which labour would be represented as stream American labour movement in an equal partner. the late 40s, with only a few of the more Of course, business and their friends in progressive and powerful locals holding government had no intention of allowing out until the early 50s. The death knell this, but in the extended fight to defeat the may very well have been sounded by Murray Plan, and the mva, it took the cio the Taft-Harley Bill in 1947, passed by representative Sidney Hillman, among the Republican majority that had been others, to pave the way for the near-total elected to Congress in 1946 in spite of the exclusion of labour. Hillman devoted his best efforts of the labour movement and efforts to a fight against the ue and other its many community allies. factions “tinged with red.” Once again, In the end, Labor’s Cold War leaves us while the mva campaign is outlined at with a sobering realization of the lengths length as a regional issue, it would have to which the economic and political elite been interesting to see what sort of dis- in the us and elsewhere are willing to cussions dominated local union relations go to beat back gains and destroy what- in these extraordinary times ever popular alliances workers are able What about the Communist Party to build. During and immediately after itself? There is surprisingly little discus- the Second World War, trade unionists, sion of its activities, even though it was community activists, communists, social the focal point of the liberal anti-com- democrats, civil rights leaders, and hous- munist attack. In a curious way, we are ing advocates were building on a vision of left with little more than the Cold War a more worker-friendly American society characterization of the cp subverting, that could arise from the depths of the dividing, and generally manipulating the Great Depression and ashes of a world movements they joined – there are, after war. The seeds of popular labour-com- all, a few dark references to reports made munity organizing were laid to rest in to the cpsu by American leaders after the late 40s, only to be revived in the civil successful organizing efforts. Although rights, anti-war, and democratic move- many of the most progressive trade union ments of the 60s and 70s. Unfortunately, leaders were Communists, very little is the American labour movement did not revealed about what role the Party actu- revive with them. The virulence – and ally played at the local level. success – of the liberal anti-communist 264 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 movement in writing this chapter of his- Americans – wrestled over gritty jobs, tory should never be forgotten by trade especially in winter when fewer were avail- unions or reform leaders anywhere. able, frustrations could easily have lead Winston Gereluk to racialized reactions. But they did not, Athabasca University despite employers’ transparent attempts at undermining Local 8’s demands that work be doled out fairly. Astonishingly, Peter Cole, Wobblies on the Waterfront: Wobblies, renowned for their erratic Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era management of both labour matters and Philadelphia (Urbana-Chicago: University membership grievances, thrived in Phila- of Illinois Press 2007) delphia during the Progressive Era. They stuck – and struck – together, through- Peter Cole’s Wobblies on the Water- out the Great War years, refusing to back front explores the rise and fall of Local down against federal strong-arming or 8, Philadelphia’s predominantly black employer intimidation. dockworkers’ union from the 1880s to the Cole effectively presses the point that 1920s. Cole successfully delves into the what worked – what paid the greatest complicated and at times vexing world of returns in Philadelphia throughout the longshoremen, and the bosses who ulti- IWW’s presence on the docks – was racial mately won the battle against unioniza- cohesion. African Americans formed tion. Wobblies on the Waterfront makes the majority of Local 8’s membership; the credible case that as a functioning accordingly, they held great influence unit and an interracial union, Philadel- over the union’s direction and the indus- phia’s Local 8 developed into an anom- trial actions that it advanced. For Cole, aly along the Atlantic seaboard but also black longshoremen, first Northerners, across the United States. Whereas New followed by West Indians and Southern- Orleans experimented with interracial ers by the turn of the twentieth century, unionization, internal and external pres- avoided racialized resentment from East- sures caused Louisiana longshoremen to ern Europeans and Anglo-Americans fall prey to Jim Crow conventions, even- who worked alongside them. Cole asserts tually souring even those most dedicated that Local 8 Wobblies’ insistence on racial to interracial union ideals. harmony spared turmoil on Philadelphia’s But where others buckled, Philadel- docks. While this is true to a certain phians stood their ground. Cole posits degree, perhaps he overlooks the impact that because black longshoremen made of rising wages and safer working condi- up from 40–60% of workers, white work- tions on maintaining peaceful relations ers, whatever their misgivings could nei- among Local 8 longshoremen. In other ther shut out black workers nor ignore words, so long as the Wobblies’ actions their will. The fact that African Ameri- delivered – higher wages, balanced job cans climbed their way up the Industrial allocation, shorter working hours, less Workers of the World (IWW) leadership, hazardous work – there appeared no need earning the respect of members white to fan the flames of hate. and black, helped solidify the voice and Cole’s central argument would have strength of unionized black longshore- packed greater punch if he had told us men. Cole makes the compelling argu- more about the workers themselves. We ment that in the case of Philadelphia know that by the turn of the twentieth docks, where men – recent immigrants, century, ever more black longshoremen American-born, and Southern African arrived from the South, driven to Phila- r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 265 delphia by the promise of job diversity and tactic is sometimes a disengagement higher wages. We can also infer that given from the actual people on the line, the their experiences with Southern segrega- men and women affected by the conse- tion, these new dockworkers would have quences of both the union and the bosses’ harboured a robust and well-founded resolve. We know that the lives of work- mistrust of whites. Longshoremen also ers fuelled the urgency of their demands. hailed from Ireland and various parts of It is precisely because they could not Eastern Europe, though mostly Poland survive on the meager wages earned on and Lithuania. Cole presumes a level of the docks that white and black workers racial ignorance from these migrants, bucked social convention, joined forces, arguing that they would not have sealed and walked off the job, bravely sporting their disdain for blacks until spending their union badge, an emblem that in time in the United States and no doubt itself could bring serious reprisal. rubbing up against that constituency Cole’s study would have been even when competing for work or affordable more satisfying if it had also told us what housing. But the truth is that immigrants workers did with their newly earned knew about race relations before arriv- rights. He tells us that Philadelphia Wob- ing; they would have witnessed Jim Crow blies remained committed to an interra- rules on the very ships that brought them cial vision; did that hold true off the job as to America. Even if European migrants well? What does it mean to fight for your were not well versed on the intricacies rights citing interracial cooperation but of American-style racial discrimination, then break off to segregated neighbour- they were seasoned in ethnic warfare, as hoods, pubs, and clubs? Put differently, in the case in Ireland or Poles’ disregard how did Philadelphia Wobblies translate for Germans. At its core, ethnic tension their interracial cooperative vision into is rooted in the same conflicts: compe- other aspects of their lives? Belonging to tition over land, work, religion, love, all a union, especially the IWW, was an all- easily transferable concerns. So Cole’s consuming identity, lived out in the way claim that they only learned about racism a “union man” spent his wages, did his once they were in America is not persua- shopping, cast his ballot. The Progressive sive. They knew about race – and white Era is, after all, a period of heightened privilege, however limited their access consumer activism, with African Ameri- to it – but only had to invest in Jim Crow cans acutely aware of Jim Crow’s impact ideology if and when it translated into on their lives, thanks to Garvey’s eco- measurable reward. On Philadelphia’s nomic nationalism model and “don’t buy docks, it did not; in New York and Balti- where you can’t work” protests. Where more, it did. And so long as upholding an did Local 8 make its social impact on interracial picket line drove wages up and Philadelphia, especially during the high the hours of work down, black and white watermark of de facto segregation in the longshoremen kept themselves in check, North? If they did not, does it undercut frustrating their bosses’ cabal with fed- Cole’s contention that Philadelphia Wob- eral agents in the process. blies left their Jim Crow caps at the pro- I wanted to know more, care more, be verbial union hall door? more invested in Ben Fletcher and other Telling the story of Wobblies is so often black operatives. For me, Cole stayed too like watching a train wreck in painfully close to a traditional model of labour his- slow motion. But not here. Philadelphia’s tory, moving from one labour action to Local 8 was organized and moved by a another. The cumulative effect of that vision that singled them out both from 266 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 their times and their fellow industrial Paul Frymer, Black and Blue: African unionists. Local 8 pulled off what even Americans, the Labor Movement, and bigger cities and larger unions could not the Decline of the Democratic Party deliver during the Progressive Era: they (Princeton: Princeton University Press adopted a radical interracial philoso- 2008) phy, squeezed higher wages from their employers, and increased their mem- Labour historians have confronted bership into the thousands during the the issue of racism within the labour heyday of union – but especially IWW movement in a variety of ways. Some – repression. They avoided the seductive look at racism as the product of capital- appeal of racialized union wrangling and ism, serving the best interest of employ- trusted the white and black men elected ers. Scholars of whiteness theory explore to guide Local 8; even with those men white workers’ engagement in racist jailed, the union’s strength grew fur- activity and how they benefited in many ther still. It should not be forgotten that ways from racism. Paul Frymer looks at white men held the line on racial equality racism from the realm of institutions. within the union’s ranks and went to jail Frymer examines the New Deal admin- for their convictions. And when blacks istrative state, the labour movement from and whites lead effectively separate lives the 1930s through the 1960s, the civil and viewed access to work as license to rights movement during that same time war under the banner of “white manhood period, and the federal court system. rights,” Local 8 charted its own model of In doing so he shows that institutions, how working against Jim Crow – at least rather than being neutral on the issue of on the job – returned its own guerdon. race, promote racism and the separation Black, white, American, and foreign born of labour rights and civil rights. found a middle ground on Philadelphia’s Black and Blue blames the failure to imposing docks just as elsewhere in the produce a labour movement devoted to country an ever greater divide kept blacks racial equality not on leaders of unions or and whites at each other’s throats, much civil rights groups, or the rank-and-file, to the profit of anti-labour bosses and but on the political system. He finds that governmental agencies. Quite simply, this failure is “the outcome of a political Philadelphia’s Wobblies stuck to their system that, in its efforts to appeal to civil guns, demanded better wages, and for rights opponents, developed a bifurcated the most part delivered on their promises system of power that assigned race and to members. All of this makes the story class problems to different spheres of of Philadelphia’s Local 8, a motley and government.” (2) The separation of these international crew of longshoremen who two issues during the New Deal lead to worked together against the rising tide of different strategies for labour and civil racial intolerance, one worth telling and rights activists and made it difficult to one told well in Peter Cole’s Wobblies on combine the two movements. the Waterfront. Frymer is a legal scholar and the Sarah-Jane (Saje) Mathieu strength of his book is his analysis of not University of Minnesota just court cases, but also why the legal system took on such importance for activ- ists, and how the federal court system was shaped. Frymer notes that the legal community often focuses on individual rights, rather than systemic inequality, r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 267 and he wants to challenge that bifurca- cessful in integrating unions, but it has tion. He also notes that “courts continue also antagonized the labour movement to be narrowly construed as consist- and weakened the power of unions, espe- ing only of judges and their decisions, cially by imposing heavy financial dam- rather than seen as a broader network of ages. Frymer uses this point to make the political actors, structures, and rules that argument that focusing on courts, rather comprise its organizational power.” (130) than politics, should be the main goal of Frymer continually drives the point home activists today. that racism cannot be blamed solely on Frymer’s chapter on “Labour Law and individuals, whether they be judges or Institutional Racism” is really the focus racist employers, because it is the insti- of the book. Here again Frymer discusses tutions that frame their actions and give theories of “whiteness.” He sees the these individuals power to behave in cer- importance of whiteness as a category in tain ways. that it holds workers accountable. But “it Frymer begins by analyzing the New takes a powerful and historical force that Deal administrative state, specifically the is deeply rooted in our nation’s ideologies, National Labor Relations Board (nlrb). institutions, and realities of power, and While it is well-known among labour discards it as something separate from historians that the Wagner Act excluded the ‘democratic’ functions of politics.” domestic and agricultural workers – who (102) He also finds fault in courts and were predominantly minorities – Frymer activists who present racism as irrational, takes his analysis of the shortcomings of which makes it easier to pretend it resides the National Labor Relations Act a step within individuals and not institutions. farther. He argues that the critical fault “By treating race and racism merely as an in the nlra is that it did not include any evil deriving from individual sickness, it civil rights measures, leaving legislation makes it difficult, if not impossible, for involving civil rights to evolve from insti- politics to regulate race and racism, and tutions outside of the nlrb. He points out denies the ways that our political institu- that politicians and civil rights groups tions are active in not just enabling but were well aware of this discrepancy, citing creating racist thought and behaviour.” letters from civil rights leaders to Robert (103) He argues against a focus on the Wagner protesting how the exclusion of individual psychology of racism in favour African Americans and of any racially of analysis that includes how institutions inclusive language in the Wagner Act themselves can be racist and promote could lead to the threat of unions operat- systematic inequality. How institutions, ing all-white closed shops. such as unions or courts, promote or Frymer also includes a chapter on the punish racist behaviour is critical if you relationship between the naacp and the want to understand individual psycho- labour movement. He focuses on Her- logical motivations. Understanding the bert Hill and proves that he tried to work failures of the democratic process is with unions, and only when that failed, essential to understanding the role that the naacp headed to the courts. Frymer the federal court system plays in securing argues that “legal strategies, for better civil rights. or worse, were necessary to integrate Frymer makes four main points about the labor movement.” (46) The naacp institutional racism. The first is that made efforts to try to integrate unions institutions can encourage racism by for thirty years before turning to legal rewarding racist actions, rather than action. These legal efforts have been suc- simply being impartial avenues for action 268 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 that just may happen to be racist. The sec- which promote the mistaken view that ond is that institutions give some people civil rights and labour rights are distinct. power, and those in power can in turn The failure of representative democracy shape the behaviours of the institution. to adequately protect minorities makes Thirdly, institutional factors help con- judicial action necessary. While provid- trol when racism is expressed and when ing labour historians with a new take on it is silent. Finally, not all racism is equal, the problems of labour rights and civil but must be looked at in an institutional rights, Black and Blue also challenges framework to see how it is important or activists to spend less energy on politics meaningful. (106) and more on using courts to make con- Black and Blue provides a brief intro- crete changes towards equality. duction to institutional racism and how it Heather Mayer has affected politics, civil rights, the legal Simon Fraser University system, and the labour movement in the twentieth century. At 139 pages, there is not much room to look at local circum- Randi Storch, Red Chicago: American stances or the actions of members of civil Communism At Its Grassroots, 1928–1935 rights groups or labour unions. Instead (Urbana and Chicago: University of Frymer focuses on major players like Rob- Illinois Press 2007) ert Wagner, Herbert Hill, and A. Philip Randolph. Frymer clearly announces his In the experience of the revolution- intentions and arguments, while giv- ary left there are those who have thought ing a few examples to back them up. It is it possible, indeed preferable, to create clear that he has read widely on African socialism in one country, a stand that has Americans and the labour movement. nothing to do, ultimately, with the unde- My biggest problem with Frymer’s book niable waging of revolutionary struggle comes from the title: African Americans, within national borders and their partic- the Labor Movement, and the Decline of ular political economies and cultural set- the Democratic Party does not accurately tings. Others, of course, have disagreed, reflect the scope of this brief examina- arguing forcefully that just as capitalism tion of institutions in the mid-twentieth is a global order, so too is socialism inevi- century. “The decline of the New Deal tably sustained, in the long run, not in iso- Democratic Coalition” may be closer to lation, but through extending the reach the mark regarding the book’s target, but of revolutionary transformation interna- even that topic is not adequately dealt tionally. Historians, too, have grappled with in the book. Frymer speaks more to with this issue, writing their histories of the problems inherent to the democratic communist possibility on canvases large process, rather than problems of the and small. But few have stated the case Democratic Party. as forthrightly as the historian of Chi- For labour historians, the value of Black cago’s communists in the tumultuous and Blue lies in Frymer’s understanding ‘Third Period’ years of 1928–1935. Randi that labour issues cannot be treated sepa- Storch concludes her study of the pivotal rately from other systems of inequality proletarian metropolis of United States based on race, gender, sexuality, citizen- revolutionaries with an unambiguous ship, etc. When race and class have been assertion that, “regardless of the historic treated as separate issues, the result has period, the story of America’s Commu- been legal institutions such as the nlrb nists is best understood when it is framed and/or laws like the Civil Rights Act, in a local context.” (230) r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 269

A reading of Storch’s book confirms departed from the aims of the Commu- what can be gained with such a per- nist International (Comintern/ci). Even spective. She tells us a great deal about within the seeming sectarianism of the where Chicago’s communists lived and Third Period, she claims, communists came together in political meetings and offered visions of alternatives that looked social circles. Particularly valuable are forward to the Popular Front, espe- her accounts of African American com- cially in their practical activities in the munists, and their struggles against rac- anything-but-red American Federation ism, both inside the Party and outside of of Labor unions. All of this convinces it; as well as the outline of communist Storch that American communism can- protest movements associated with the not be entirely explained by an overarch- unemployed and rent evictions in the ing emphasis on Stalinism, let alone the dreary early years of the Great Depres- insistence of Theodore Draper and his sion. Storch has researched assiduously contemporary advocates, Harvey Klehr in the Russian Archives to find hitherto and John Earl Haynes, that communism unappreciated evidence of Chicago com- in the United States was one-sidedly a munists, their ways of handling internal made-in-Moscow affair. disagreements, and how they negotiated One of the questions that Storch poses the challenges of organizing the unem- at the outset of her study relates to pre- ployed, the dispossessed, idealistic and cisely this point. How did the ranks anti-war youth, and industrial workers. of Chicago communists “understand In the pages of this book we find much the party line?” (4) Yet it must be said insight into how communists failed to that this question is never adequately adequately address women’s oppression addressed. On the one hand, it must be in the neighbourhood-and-family bound appreciated that this is an immensely circumstances most working-class difficult question to grapple with. On women existed within. We also confront the other, it is never going to be even Party figureheads’ mechanical treatment tentatively answered if historians do not of writers – Chicago was home in this seriously engage with the complicated period to aspiring literary talents such as interplay of Comintern degeneration and Richard Wright and Nelson Algren, both the ways this was handled in particular of whom traveled in circles highly sym- national sections, and how that was, in pathetic to if not aligned with the cp – turn, translated into thought and prac- seeking to turn their art to revolutionary tice at the local level. And this means, I purpose. would suggest, addressing Stalinism as Extolling the virtues of a ‘community something more than merely a particu- study,’ which is designated a method- larly brutal kind of Leninism. ology, Storch presents Chicago’s com- For all the strengths of this study, and munists as a complex and diverse body they are many, this interplay of what of dissidents nevertheless convinced, in Storch refers to as ‘the grassroots’ and her words, that “revolutionary change the significance of powerful structures of was surely right around the corner.” (30) directive influence, the ultimate author- She suggests that alongside reverence for ity of which was the Communist Inter- the Soviet Union and adherence to the national, remains underappreciated in ‘party line,’ Chicago’s communists also this book. One source of this may be brokered their own spaces of defiance the extent to which Storch accents spe- and difference, whereby orders could cific kinds of local evidence, highlighting be ignored and outcomes achieved that issues of everyday activity and proce- 270 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 dures of internal communist governance, differently than she does, and in the pro- rather than other kinds of printed sources cess raise questions that probe the content – such as the extensive pamphlet litera- of communist policies and the meaning ture and agitational material described of the specific ways in which grassroots so well in Laswell’s and Blumenstock’s activism and Party dogma and doctrine World Revolutionary Propaganda: A Chi- came together, rather than stressing, as cago Study (1939) – that might provide an Storch tends to do, their separation. entrée into the Communist Party’s pro- When this is done, it is perhaps the case gram, policies, and principles. My point is that Storch’s presentation of the history not to privilege one source over another, of the revolutionary ranks will look rather nor is it to denigrate Storch’s rich use of different. One measure of this isRed Chi- specific and previously unavailable archi- cago’s brief allusions to Trotskyism and val material relevant to Chicago, but to the emergence of a late 1928 Left Opposi- stress that all kinds of evidence should be tion among the city’s revolutionary ranks. marshaled if we are to achieve a rounded Not surprisingly, Storch’s understanding appreciation of communists in the past. suggests that in the give-and-take of the Beyond the kinds of evidence that activist street and communist sociability should be considered, there should also circles pressures to ostracize the much- be weight given to historical experiences denigrated, deviant “Trots” met with a already chronicled and subject to useful, if kind of benign nonchalance. But this often counterposed, discussion. Current view, once again, privileges particular debates, for instance, over the impact of sources and quite specific timeframes the Lenin School (which one of her major (late 1928/early 1929), managing to avoid African America figures, Harry Haywood, some rather obvious evidence/events that attended) in the making of communist would have inevitably cast the discus- cadre do not concern Storch, even though sion in a very different light. It invariably evidence she presents indicates that some relies on and alludes to local control com- Chicago communists gestured toward its missions, rank-and-file “decisions,” and importance. Thus, an African American ambiguities, rather than the hard-nosed, communist, David Poindexter, brought resolute power plays that were played out, up by Haywood on charges of following first and foremost, in New York’s Political Party directives inadequately, replied: Committee, from which came the expul- “If I soiled Communist principles while sions of national leaders such as James leading the unemployed, while fighting P. Cannon as well as his Windy City for relief, while standing at the citadel allies, youth leader Albert Glotzer and of power and demanding justice for the Chicago Federation of Labor mainstay, working class – while [voice rising] com- Arne Swabeck. One of their most active rade Haywood was studying at the Lenin comrades in the post-1930 Communist School, so be it, so be it.” Poindexter, a League of America (Opposition), Chicago black activist who was willing to partici- Trade Union Unity League/International pate in this ‘show trial’ and acknowledge Labor Defense activist, Joe Giganti, was the errors of his ways (“Comrades, I am recruited to Trotskyism precisely because guilty of all the charges, all of them”), of this heavy-handedness. What Storch remained in the Party. says about all of this is understated, to say This confirms, for Storch, “Commu- the least. A forceful argument could be nist principles” and a “unifying culture of made that she avoids the complex inter- beliefs and behaviours.” (64–65) But it is play of local, national, and international also possible to interpret all of this very developments, which included consider- r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 271 able violence against Trotskyists and an what they would have chosen them to be. extreme rhetoric of denunciation and Communists in Chicago, like advo- demonization that it is crucial to address cates of proletarian revolution anywhere, if the politics of the Third Period are to be are best studied and appreciated, then, as understood adequately. they saw themselves: they were men and In her vivid reconstruction of the women located in particular places and social, then, Storch sometimes loses sight battles, but linked, invariably, to wider of dimensions of the political. Whereas networks of cities, countries, and con- most New Left scholarship has gravitated tinents, all of which were galvanized by to the period of the Popular Front, Storch, class struggle and the need for the leader- who is drawn to this history of “mass” ship, direction, and inspiration that were communist influence and alignment with inextricably entwined in their beliefs, broad left/liberal forces of “progressive” commitments, and activities. Their meet- politics, studies the class-against-class ings and gathering places sang out with Third Period, rife with seeming sectari- the cry that “A better world’s in birth.” anism. She reads back into this ultraleft Local contexts are indeed important. But moment of the Communist Party the so too are these trees of particular experi- seeds of what she sees as Popular Front ence always situated within a larger forest. successes. Yet she never really gapples The communist chorus did not denigrate with the extent to which both the Third locale, but its refrain surely echoed the Period and the Popular Front were mirror need for a grand vision that reached past images of the Stalinist defeat of Lenin’s the limitations of specificity. and Trotsky’s Comintern, with its pro- ’Tis the final conflict, gram of world revolution. Once Stalinism Let each stand in his place, raised the banner of “socialism in one The International Soviet country” as the programmatic maxim Shall be the human race. of international communism, much changed, not only in the Soviet Union, Bryan D. Palmer but around the world. Trent University Choosing to see the history of commu- nism through the prism of locale, Storch limits our view of the kaleidoscopic com- Susan Gelfand Malka, Daring to Care: plexity that encompassed the particular American Nursing and Second-Wave and the general, the specificity of place Feminism (Champaign, IL: University of and the wider body of experience that Illinois Press, 2007) defined the modern revolutionary left from the moment that it emerged out of Three no-nonsense women are fea- the crucible of war and revolution in 1917. tured on the cover of Susan Gelfand Her research, offering so much, could Malka’s Daring to Care: American Nurs- only have been enhanced and deepened ing and Second-Wave Feminism. Dressed had she wrestled a little more rigorously in lab coats and gazing directly out at the with what a larger interpretive framework reader, this image of nurses is intended could have brought to her study. For the to diverge from conventional historical local, the national, and the international representations of nurses in wasp-wasted can, should, and indeed must be brought uniforms and white nursing caps. Mal- together in any analysis of communism ka’s book, similarly, aims to show that and the people who made it what it was nursing has undergone a transformation even if their actions were never entirely in the past six decades. She claims this 272 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 transformation was driven by a “veritable undertaken at hospital-affiliated schools tsunami of feminism” that changed the where students learned through on-the- education, work, and identities of nurses job training that was supplemented with in the United States by the end of the occasional lectures. Students often lived twentieth century. on-site in a dormitory, which fostered a The nursing-feminist relationship is sense of community. This sense of com- divided into two historical periods. The munity and nursing identity began to first, from the mid-1960s to mid-1980s, break down in the 1960s as student nurses was characterized by “equality femi- increasingly found the curfews and disci- nism” that sought social, political, and pline of hospital-affiliated schools restric- economic equality for women but some- tive. One particularly irksome ritual was times denigrated traditionally feminine “weigh-day” where students were subject occupations like nursing. This lack of to review of their physical appearance by respect for the profession is summed up supervisors. for Malka by a poster distributed by Pitts- Nursing began to open up to “under- burgh feminists asking, “Why a nurse represented populations” in the 1960s and not a doctor?” Despite feminists’ with the introduction of two-year Asso- apparent ambivalence toward nursing, ciate Diploma Nursing (adn) programs Malka finds that feminist analyses were in junior colleges. Up until this time being used by academic nurses to push approximately 97 percent of nursing for greater professional authority and graduates were white and 99 percent were autonomy in the 1960s and 1970s. In the female. adn programs exacerbated a second period, from the mid-1980s to the hierarchy within nursing, in which more late 1990s, nurses’ engagement with fem- skilled work was performed by Registered inism shifted and became more explicit. Nurses (rn), who were left to supervise Malka argues that Carol Gilligan’s In a entry-level adns and Licensed Practical Different Voice (1982) provided a “bridge Nurses (lpn). Some rns felt that adns and to feminism” for working nurses because lpns threatened their professional status it revalued feminine traits like nurtur- and autonomy and local nursing associa- ing and intimacy. The idea that nursing tions began to call for more university- was a “moral activity” appealed to nurses based training for all nurses. The adn/ who were increasingly “daring to care” lpn/rn division and the diploma/degree on their own terms. Malka concludes debate raise questions of accessibility to that nursing identity underwent a criti- nursing education. Malka tends to skim cal shift in the post-war era that paral- over such cases of discord and differ- leled changing ideas about women and ence. Two cases, one concerning segrega- women’s work. tion of black students at a nursing school Nursing education and hospital prac- in the south and the second, involving tice are Malka’s key sites of analysis. Fol- an incident that saw a lesbian-interest lowing Susan Reverby’s notion of a “great group banned from American Nurses transformation” that saw nursing shift Association conferences, require fur- from home-based care to hospital care in ther analysis. The author seems reluctant the twentieth century, Malka describes to criticize her subjects, and as a result as the “second great transformation” fails to consider the role that nurses may the move of nursing education out of themselves have played in gate-keeping hospitals and into colleges and universi- their profession. ties. Prior to this time nursing education Ultimately, the push for more univer- consisted primarily of three-year courses sity-based training was successful and r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 273 hospital diploma programs were gradu- post-1985 period nurses and doctors were ally closed. Nursing programs flourished also united by a common foe, managed within universities and led to the devel- care and Health Maintenance Organiza- opment of Masters and Doctoral pro- tions [hmos]. Nurses argued that hmos grams in nursing. Malka argues that such shifted hospitals’ priorities away from specialization is evidence of the success caring for patients toward managing of feminism because nurses were able patients. While many nurses felt disillu- to shed the image of “domestic servil- sioned by the new economics of caring, ity” and develop a more patient-centred others benefited from changing hospital nursing theory. This new “nursing model structures that saw nurses take leading focused on health not disease, the patient roles in patient care. hmos encouraged as a person, and the relationships pro- a “clinical pathways approach” in which moted by caring and cooperation.” (84) nurses were responsible for following a The shift away from hospital-based patient through their hospital stay. This education was accompanied by an approach saw nurses taking on more increasingly open struggle for auton- autonomous roles as administrators, omy by working nurses. In the immedi- managers, and patient advocates. The ate post-war era many nurses had been discussion of managed care is the most trained to participate in what Leonard compelling section of the book because it Stein called the “doctor-nurse game.” The explores the complexities and contradic- “game” was that “nurses provided help, tions encountered by working nurses. information, recommendations, and even Malka’s challenge is to demonstrate criticism, but in a covert manner that how feminism impacted nursing when never challenged physicians’ authority.” nurses didn’t necessarily embrace femi- (94) The development of nursing as an nism. Often her observations don’t go academic discipline had also opened the beyond noting that an individual person door for specialized nursing jobs, includ- was a feminist or acknowledged the influ- ing “Nurse Practitioners” who took on ence of feminism. A more in-depth anal- tasks like monitoring blood pressure and ysis might have considered the parallels heart rate in order to give doctors more between feminist activism and nursing time for diagnostics. Malka documents more explicitly. Differences within femi- an ongoing power struggle over such nism are also sometimes under-theorized. designations, with doctors sometimes Does “difference feminism” alone encom- attempting to limit, or retain the right to pass the nursing-feminist relationship? It supervise, nursing work. Here again, the is also unclear if and how nurses related author finds in nurses’ willingness to be to women’s health movement initiatives more aggressive and militant in staking such as Our Bodies, Ourselves, self-help out their ground, an indication of femi- culture, and abortion debates. Malka’s nist influence. claim that, after the 1980s, nurses prac- Though power struggles between ticed “caring feminism” is not convinc- nurses and doctors continued to occur ing because it is not clear how feminism in the post-1985 period, Malka believes informed everyday nursing work and that nurses were less willing to play “the identities, other than in “spirit.” game.” Citing a second Stein study, Malka Some of the lingering questions about argues that a growing emphasis on nurs- the nursing-feminist relationship relate to ing autonomy and expertise in hospitals the authors’ lack of reflexivity about her had put an end to the notion that nurses sources. Malka’s rich source base includes should be subservient to doctors. In the academic nursing journals, oral histories, 274 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62

“listserv” discussions, and school news- glamour, allure, care, service, and, by the letters, but she does not explain to the 1970s, sex appeal, so that stewardesses’ reader how she used these documents. The skill, drive, ambition, and sweat had to be reader must peruse the footnotes herself hidden in order for them to be considered to discover which sources are being used good at these “feminine” jobs. in any given section, and no framework is When passenger flights first began in offered to help the reader to understand the late 1920s, airline executives had to their importance. Where Daring to Care decide who would attend to their new does succeed is in its articulation of criti- customers. Barry describes the ways in cal shifts in the work and education of which airline executives’ gendered and nurses. Malka demonstrates that nurses raced assumptions played a large part, themselves drove developments in nurs- if not the only part, in determining who ing theory and practice in the past fifty would be best qualified for this new job. years. Nursing’s identity changed, from Black men, Barry argues, were the most being a “temporary training program for obvious choice. Traveling by air was not motherhood,” to a career requiring spe- that much different than traveling by rail. cialized skills and education. In this way, The job of “porter” had been created in Daring to Care provides a useful intro- the Jim Crow era when luxury meant, for duction to American nursing since the white passengers, being served by black 1960s, a period about which there is more men. Despite the similarities, airline to be written. executives decided against hiring porters Jenny Ellison because they thought black men would York University not be able to inspire the calm authori- tativeness crucial to winning over the first generation of largely white and male Kathleen M. Barry, Femininity in Flight: air travelers. Instead, airline executives A History of Flight Attendants ( Durham, thought young, white, military-esque NC : Duke University Press 2007) “stewards” would inspire the confidence black men could not. In the late 1920s, a Kathleen Barry’s fascinating study fleet of young, white men dressed in garb of the history of flight attendants offers reminiscent of the military staffed the another chapter in the story of women first commercial flights. They failed for and job-typing, a story that follows in several reasons, not the least of which the footsteps laid by Dorothy Sue Cobble, was that they posed too much of a threat Alice Kessler-Harris, Arlie Hoschild, to pilots who wanted to make clear who Ruth Milkman, Barbara Melosh, Nancy was superior on the aircraft. Gabin, and other historians who have If not black men or young, white mil- examined the ways in which women itary-like men, then who? Barry uses negotiated the prescribed gender roles industry publications, newspapers, jour- in which the “manly” goal was earning a nals, the Literary Digest, the New York reasonable wage. All of these historians Times, and other sources to demonstrate argue that women had to transgress what the ways in which the gendered expec- were decidedly “feminine” boundaries to tations of the 1930s structured the new gain economically. Barry’s work on flight job “stewardess.” The airlines turned to attendants demonstrates that this nego- young, unmarried nurses. Who better, tiation process was particularly difficult they thought, to instill calm in passen- for women whose very jobs were created gers than women trained to take care around “feminine” characteristics like of ill patients, serve them, and show the r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 275 proper deference to doctors? The idea upstart locals, most chartered by pilots’ took off! The original position was built unions, merged under the umbrella of around the combination of professional- the Airline Stewards and Stewardesses’ ism inspired by nurses and the nurtur- Association (alssa) representing 3500 ing, deferential, care-oriented qualities workers (there were a small number of inspired by ideas about femininity in the stewards employed by the airlines, many 1930s. of whom took on leadership roles within The professional status granted the their locals). alssa hoped to re-instill the position was fleeting. By the end of World professional status that was granted the War II, Barry explains, airlines dropped first generation of nurse-stewardesses the nursing degree requirement and were by demanding that the airlines and the subsequently flooded with applications Federal Aviation Administration (faa) from young women across the country. require stewardesses and stewards to By the mid-1940s, airline stewardesses obtain the same safety clearance pilots, had helped define a kind of youthful, co-pilots, dispatchers, flight engineers, adventure-bound femininity that was radio operators, and navigators received steeped in daring but still remained under the category “airmen.” The faa within the bounds of acceptable femi- responded that certifying stewardesses ninity. What the job lacked in pay it was would be an unnecessary burden, espe- made up for with what Barry calls the cially given the job’s high turnover, and “wages of glamour,” a concept she links the airlines refused to acknowledge stew- to David Roediger’s use of the “wages of ardesses’ safety role. alssa, as Barry whiteness” to explain the appeal of low- deftly describes, by fighting for profes- paid “whites only” jobs. Stewardesses sionalization, was taking on the inher- were additionally compensated by the ently discriminatory ways in which the relatively high status associated with the skill, prestige, and high pay associated job’s image and by the spill-over effect of with “professionals” were gendered male. serving passengers who were themselves By the 1960s, the jet age had resulted high status businessmen. By the advent in the further degradation of the job. of the jet age, however, glamour and sta- Not only were stewardesses required to tus could not make up for longer hours, serve twice as many passengers, the air- a strictly enforced age ceiling and weight lines exploited the glamorous image the requirement, and the increased sexual- job stewardess had attained by adding ization of the job. Stewardesses no longer a new twist in the context of the sexual felt it glamorous to serve over 100 pas- revolution: stewardess as sex object. As sengers several rounds of drinks and two the competition for passengers increased meals, walk an average of eight miles per among the major and regional carriers, shift, and attend to each businessman’s each airline tried to one up the other in unique needs, all while maintaining the terms of what its stewardesses had to image of a playboy bunny. In the years offer. With slogans like, “Hi, I’m Cheryl, after World War II, some stewardesses Come Fly Me,” to the fashion shows stew- turned to union organizing to improve ardesses were required to stage in flight, their work lives. each airline cashed in on sexual liberation Union-oriented stewardesses consid- by offering businessmen playboy bun- ered the afl-cio and its affiliates too blue nies for their pleasure. The mostly white collar, Barry explains, especially given stewardesses Barry describes challenged the wage of glamour that was central to discrimination in stages. In the early to a stewardess’s identity. By 1949, several mid-1960s, stewardesses employed what 276 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62

Barry calls the “politics of glamour” to flight attendants to break down those ste- challenge the airline industry’s age lim- reotypes but also because of the change its. In a widely publicized “Hey, Look in the customer base. The one shortcom- Us Over,” campaign, Colleen Boland, ing of Barry’s otherwise fascinating and the president of alssa, argued that age comprehensive study is the lack of a sus- was irrelevant, that “older” stewardesses tained analysis of the concurrent changes could do their jobs well and still look within the airline industry that may have good. Barry argues that the successful moved executives to give up the fight. To campaign allowed men and women to be sure, the sfwr constituted a move- “uphold equality in principle, while not ment within the airline industry that, in necessarily questioning familiar notions conjunction with the feminist movement of femininity.” of the 1960s and 1970s, helped to change By the 1970s and in the wake of the our very conception of femininity. By passage of Title VII, stewardesses turned the mid-to-late 1970s, however, white to the court system to dismantle sys- businessmen, while still a large propor- temic gender discrimination. Within tion of the flying public, were no longer the context of the women’s movement, the airlines’ only customers. Offering stewardesses organized Stewardesses businesswomen, fathers, mothers, and for Women’s Rights (sfwr) and, working grandparents the opportunity to fly with with sympathetic lawyers, proceeded on a a playboy bunny did not sell tickets; offer- case-by-case basis to gradually change the ing them a less sexualized flight atten- ways in which us courts and the Ameri- dant did and appealed to an increasingly can public defined discrimination. It was socially conservative American public. their skillful use of the courts, aided in Femininity in Flight is well written and the fight by the National Organization well researched. Kathleen Barry’s work for Women, that finally resulted in the furthers our understanding of the ways in legal recognition of objectification as sex which gendered assumptions structured discrimination rather than a simple busi- the workplace and how counter-assump- ness tactic designed to improve sales. tions helped, in this case, to restructure Barry tells a fascinating story about the the workplace in less sexually exploitive history of flight attendants and their suc- ways. Barry’s analysis of that restructur- cess challenging deeply rooted gendered ing helps us better understand the reac- stereotypes that were largely invented by tions by male trade unionists, pilots, the airline industry to maximize profit airline executives, and female steward- and then exploited by air travelers and the esses as they worked to remake the very public at large. Due to their success using feminine identity around which the Title VII to challenge these practices, job stewardess was created. The book is we use the term “flight attendant” now essential reading for historians and stu- rather than “stewardess,” flight atten- dents of the twentieth century in general dants are various heights and weights, and especially those interested in labour, are young and old, work on crews com- gender, and/or women’s history. posed of women and men of all colours, Lisa Phillips and are not objectified for profit. These Indiana State University are not small accomplishments. One wonders, however, if the current concep- tion of “flight attendant” is palatable to the airline industry and the flying public not only because of the valiant efforts of r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 277

Jamie L. Bronstein, Caught in the when compensation was anything but Machinery: Workplace Accidents and automatic. Bronstein’s exploration of this Injured Workers in Nineteenth-Century aspect of workers’ experience makes a Britain (Stanford: Stanford University major contribution by going beyond the Press 2008) question of legal liability and delving into the other options potentially available In this short but ambitious book Jamie to disabled workers and their families. Bronstein explores multiple facets of While it has been well known that some workers’ experience of workplace injuries workers obtained charitable assistance in nineteenth-century England, includ- from their employers, the public, or co- ing their access to compensation through workers, to my knowledge this is the first both legal and non-legal means, the cul- study that systematically examines the tural meaning of accidents, the relation full range of options. between work injury and the ideal of free The legal liability of employers for inju- labour, and the politics of legislated pro- ries to their employers is a well-worked tection and employer liability. In addi- field that continues to stimulate debate tion, she compares the English experience among scholars. The basic picture is clear. with that of American workers, focusing When faced with the unprecedented phe- on differences that she roots both in the nomenon of injured workers suing their timing of industrial development and employers for compensation, nineteenth- the greater role that the discourse of century judges in England and the United free labour played in shaping regulatory States constructed a trilogy of employer developments in the United States. As defenses that severely limited employers’ is to be expected in any book with such liability: voluntary assumption of risk, broad ambitions, Bronstein succeeds bet- the fellow-servant rule, and contributory ter in some areas than others. negligence. Bronstein’s primary focus is The first chapter provides a general on the development of the fellow-servant overview of the hazards associated with rule, but she would have been better the industrial revolution, focusing on served by putting voluntary assumption the dangerous conditions workers faced of risk at the center of her discussion. The on the railways and in coal mines and decision of Lemuel Shaw in the Farwell textile factories. While it is impossible case, which firmly established the fellow- to prove that industrialization quantita- servant rule, made it clear that the reason tively increased the level of risk to which why workers could not sue their employ- workers were exposed or the incidence of ers for the negligence of fellow servants work injuries, drawing on a wide range was that workers were presumed in law to of primary and secondary sources Bron- have assumed the risk of being injured by stein confirms the conclusion that other their co-workers. Thus it was the princi- studies have reached: “the [nineteenth- ple of voluntary assumption of risk which century] workplace posed large and pre- became the lynchpin of the common law dictable dangers to its inhabitants.” (8) of employers’ liability, the fellow-servant Moreover, she also finds that there was rule being one application of it. little thought given to questions of worker The centrality of voluntary assumption safety in the design of production. (17) of risk was firmly rooted in the laissez- The financial implications of work- faire, free-labour ideology that was sup- related injuries and deaths were substan- planting older paternalistic conceptions tial for surviving workers and dependent of employment. Within this emerging family members, especially in an era framework, workers were constructed 278 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 as free agents who negotiated over risk examination of the practices of public and wages, and so the fact that they were subscriptions in the aftermath of disas- working in hazardous workplaces gave ters and worker mutualism are similarly rise to the legal presumption that they focused on the first half of the nineteenth had agreed to assume the risk of being century. Although Bronstein is fully cog- injured in exchange for the wage they nizant of the limits of the “cold hand of received. Thus Shaw did not have to, and charity,” (32) and by no means romanti- did not explicitly reject the older idea that cizes its practice, in the conclusion to her employers owed a duty of care to their book she nevertheless wistfully notes the workers when they were injured, as Bron- decline of “the idea that one should then stein implies that he did. (23) For him, the send something to the families of the more important question was how those workers left behind….” (175) duties were re-allocated by the contract Bronstein’s most original contribu- of employment, the implied terms of tion is in chapter three, which inquires which were to be derived from political into the cultural meanings of work- economists’ idealized conception of the place accidents through a study of press operation of labour markets. As a result, reports, diaries, memoirs, sermons, and since in principle the legal substratum testimonies. Mainstream accident narra- of employer duties remained, employer tives reflected dominant cultural norms liability could be and was revived by judi- regarding appropriate gender behaviour cial or legislative narrowing or exclusion in the face of tragedy, the necessity of of the common-law defenses; new duties sacrifice, and the role of providence. As of care did not need to be imposed. a result, notwithstanding the extensive Bronstein’s exploration of non-legal coverage of workplace accidents and espe- paths to compensation is less cluttered cially disasters, and the vivid depiction of with the residue of scholarly debates the physical, psychological, and financial since this subject has not received nearly suffering they caused to workers and their the same attention as employer-liability families, these narratives did not produce law, making her contribution all the more widespread demand for either legisla- welcome and valuable. While there have tive reform to reduce hazardous work- been numerous references to employer ing conditions or for fairer compensation provision of compensation to injured laws. Bronstein finds, however, evidence workers, Bronstein provides the fullest that an alternative narrative was being survey of the practice, emphasizing the constructed in the nascent labour press combination of Christian zeal and utili- and in workers’ memoirs and testimony tarian calculus that supported employer before government inquiries. For male paternalism both in England and the workers, disablement deprived them not United States, particularly in the first just of the full use of their bodies, but of half of the nineteenth century. Although their social identity as breadwinners, so Bronstein notes that later in the century it was no wonder that the financial impli- corporate employers were less likely cations of work accidents loomed large in to provide voluntary compensation to their accounts. Notably, Bronstein pres- injured workers, (34) she does not actu- ents no evidence on white working wom- ally explore employer practices during en’s experience of work injuries. Perhaps this time period and consider whether this is because the evidentiary record is they were affected by the growth of silent, but it would be helpful to explain trade unions and the threat of legislative why women only appear in this discus- reform to employer-liability laws. Her sion as wives and mothers. r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 279

A recurring theme in the book is the claim that adult male workers’ embrace paradox of free labour. The construction of their free-labour status inhibited of workers as the juridical equals of their them from turning to law and the state employers and the legal presumption that for protection and compensation. Bron- workers voluntarily assumed the risk of stein presents little direct evidence for injuries from dangers in the workplace this proposition and underplays evidence that they knew or ought reasonably to of adult men asserting a right to bodily have known was premised on their sta- integrity that arguably contradicts her tus as free labourers who make rational claim. In particular, she does not discuss decisions about the trade-offs between the incidence of employer-liability litiga- pay and risk. But as Bronstein points out, tion by injured adult men, even in the face not all workers fit this model, particu- of rules that severely limited the likeli- larly children, women and, in the United hood of success. Nor does she address the States, slaves. Paradoxically, the degraded movement for factory legislation which status of women and children as persons protected adult men from unfenced who were not capable of making rational machinery and other hazards. The enact- choices benefited them legally and politi- ment of coal-mine safety legislation is cally through more favourable treatment acknowledged but explained as excep- in employer-liability suits and in the ear- tion, arising from the fact that colliers lier enactment of protective legislation. were subject to imprisonment for breach Bronstein wisely avoids the unproductive of contract and thus more cognizant that debate over whether the benefits of spe- they were not truly free agents. (120) cial protection outweighed the costs. What this ignores is that English work- More controversial is Bronstein’s dis- ers generally were subject to master and cussion of the ideology of free labour as servant laws that made their breaches of it related to adult white men. Bronstein employment contracts criminal offences argues that employers were inconsis- until 1875. In short, her conclusion that it tent when they claimed that workers’ was only by the 1870s that “working men free agency absolved employers of any realized that free agency could only take responsibility for hazardous working them so far” (124) seems to over-estimate conditions and the injuries that mate- the extent to which male English work- rialized from them, while they simul- ers were blinded by the ideology of free taneously described their workers as labour that was so ardently embraced habitually careless and thus the cause of by their employers and the majority of most workplace accidents. This is surely judges and politicians who shaped the problematic; it was precisely because of legal and political terrain on which their the belief that adult male workers were claims to a right to bodily integrity had to responsible for their own actions that be made. Workers often contested ideo- their carelessness made them morally and logical tropes, such as the “rights of free- legally responsible for the resulting inju- born Englishmen,” and made claims that ries in their employers’ eyes. Women and were unacceptable to their employers children were careless too, but that was under the same banner. This would seem understood to be a result of their nature to be an area in which more research is and so, unlike men, who were capable required before firm conclusions can be of behaving as rational market actors, drawn. women and children deserved protection The final chapter addresses the devel- from the state. opment of protective legislation and Even more problematic is Bronstein’s reform of the compensation system, with 280 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 the emphasis on the later. Like the com- stimulate further research into the extent mon law, this is well-traveled terrain and to which workers were prisoners of their Bronstein traverses it well, although her aspirations to be full and independent exposition stops somewhat abruptly with citizens or whether they developed alter- the passage of the Employers’ Liability native conceptions of citizenship that Act of 1880, which limited the employ- included a right to bodily integrity. ers’ common-law defenses, rather than Eric Tucker continuing to 1897 and the passage of York University a no-fault workers’ compensation stat- ute. Of course, the question of when to stop is always somewhat arbitrary, but Elizabeth Darling and Lesley in this case her decision undermines the Whitworth, Women and the Making English-United States comparison that of Built Space in England, 1870–1950 Bronstein wishes to make. It also con- (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited tributes to an element of confusion over 2007) what Bronstein means when she speaks of workers’ compensation. Is it common- This collection of essays, which origi- law reform or its replacement with a no- nated in the 2002 workshop of the Cen- fault compensation scheme? In either tre for Urban Culture at the University case, the differences in timing are some- of Nottingham, sets out to offer “inno- what shorter than Bronstein indicates. vative interpretations of the changing The first us employer-liability legislation vistas and material culture of day-to-day was enacted in Massachusetts in 1887, life” grounded in “historical description seven years after the English Act, and with a particular focus on architecture the first us no-fault statute was enacted and design.” (3) The contributors include in Maryland in 1902, five years after the scholars of art and design, an architec- English legislation (although widespread tural historian, an urban historian, two and constitutionally valid legislation was historians of modern Britain, and two not enacted in the us until 1910–1911). scholars of English literature. The essays Are these differences in timing as his- are organized roughly in chronological torically significant as Bronstein claims? order. There are two papers on Octavia Moreover, the analysis is not well served Hill; two on exhibits (the Loan Exhibit of by the book’s structure, which contains a Women’s Industries in Bristol in 1885 and long chapter analyzing English develop- the Ideal Home Exhibit in 1939); and sev- ments to 1880 followed by an epilogue in eral on the political impact of women on which comparisons are made on the basis housing reform. Most, although not all, of a very truncated discussion of Ameri- of the articles are about ways in which the can developments. working-class home could be improved. In sum, the value of the book is in some The collection does recapture the sense greater than the sum of its parts. participation of women in built culture. Bronstein’s examination of the paths to There is ample attention given to female compensation and of the cultural mean- luminaries such as the aforementioned ings of workplace accidents provides new famous housing philanthropist Octavia insights into nineteenth-century Anglo- Hill and the architect Sadie Speight. At American workers’ experience of the the same time, the suggestions of ordi- physical toll imposed on workers’ bodies nary women for improving domestic during the rise of industrial capitalism. As space are not neglected. For example Les- well, her discussion of free labour should ley Whitworth explores the brief contri- r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 281 bution of a Housewives Committee to the fridges and stoves, and tiled kitchens. Council on Industrial Design (1945–7) Clearly, not all of this could be achieved and Gillian Scott analyzes the influence because of the expense alone. The Dud- of the Women’s Co-operative Guild on ley Report recommended electricity and the Dudley Report on Housing (1944). In hot water, but ruled out fridges and cen- reclaiming the voices of women, high and tral heating. In other instances aesthetic low, these essays are very successful. recommendations betray a lack of deep One of the stated aims of the collec- understanding of the day-to-day lives of tion – to look at the material culture of working-class women. Elizabeth Darling everyday life – is less successfully real- describes “the House that is a Woman’s ized. To be fair, material culture is a slip- Book Come True.” Displayed at the 1939 pery term. But in the historical sense of Ideal Home Exhibit and designed by a using the physically concrete to reveal team of women, it featured light colours abstract aspects of the shared experience such as oyster-coloured walls at a time of the past, the essays are more uneven. when dark colours for paint and floor- One exceptionally fine contribution is ing prevailed. Darling notes that both the “Everything Whispers of Wealth and press and upper-class observers praised Luxury: Observation, Emulation and the new designs. But to historians of the Display in the Well-to-do Late Victorian home, the designs present an obvious Home” by Trevor Keeble. Drawing on the dilemma. Although the designers took diary of Emily Hall and letters of Maud care to include surfaces that were easy Messel, Keeble takes on the still con- to clean, they appeared not to appreci- troversial separate sphere construction. ate the reasons women usually opted for In Hall’s case he finds that in consider- dark colours. Aesthetics had nothing to ing an architect’s plans for an addition do with it. Coal-fired heating produced to her Kent home in 1869, Hall cared grey soot which was a ubiquitous prob- very much about her friends’ opinions. lem for housewives. Thus advice books Similarly, Maud Messel’s letters, 30 years for middle-class housewives typically later, reveal a great deal of description of cautioned women not to place the table- other people’s homes, often suffused with cloth for dinner on the table after clear- moral judgments linked to their decora- ing the breakfast dishes lest the cloth tion. Keeble posits, convincingly, that the turn grey by 5 o’clock. Pale colours for idea of home as a private sphere is “chal- the working-class home, however cheer- lenged by evidence of the participation of ful, would have added to the household others in the decoration and furnishing work. It was a problem not truly rectified of it.” (82) Strangely, given the impor- until the Clean Air Act of 1956. Similarly, tance of domestic things in defining mid- Karen Hunt’s “Gendering the Politics of dle-class gender, Keeble’s essay is the only the Working Woman’s Home” highlights contribution that examines middle-class the impracticality of some advice offered built space. to women. Hunt looks at the suggestions Most contributions focus on working- of socialist women such as Katherine class homes. Here it is striking that the Bruce Glasier in the Edwardian period. advice offered by women to other women In an effort to reduce the daily grind of (often via government committees) was household labour and to apply co-opera- frequently impractical. For example, the tive strategies to get the work done more Women’s Co-operative Guild advised the efficiently, one suggestion was using com- wartime government that women wanted munal kitchens and using washhouses hot water, central heating, electricity, with paid washerwomen. Hunt acknowl- 282 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 edges that these options were hard to The Parlour and the Suburb, to challenge sell to working-class women, but more modernity’s masculinity. Instead of con- of the historical context of these solu- tending – as do some recent theorists tions might have shed even more light on – that we must move beyond the male- them. After all, the Bath Act of 1846 had centric modern paradigm toward a more tried to move washing clothes outside the multi-gendered postmodernity, Giles home without success over sixty years argues that we must look at how women before. At that time, women complained experienced modernization. Between that they wasted time queuing and that 1900 and 1960 white middle- and work- they could not multi-task while doing the ing-class women in Britain formed mod- laundry if they had to take it out and pick ern subjectivities, just as much as did it up which lost them time to accomplish their male counterparts. Yet because other household work. Some of the laun- many of these women experienced mod- dry was stolen or lost. It is not at all clear ernization in the domestic sphere rather that any of these problems were differ- than in the world of waged labour, their ent 60 years later. Advice, just because it transformation has been overlooked. came from other women, was not neces- Arguing that intellectuals’ disdain for sarily good advice. the suburbs is predicated on a mascu- Ultimately, this is a readable collection line desire to escape what is perceived about housing and the contribution of as cloying domestic femininity, Giles women to it. It is very good at surveying states that scholars must probe the reali- the small contributions of often anony- ties behind the stereotypes of suburbia. mous women to housing reform between Whereas such thinkers as Stephen Tay- 1870 and 1950 and it points to areas that lor and George Orwell portrayed subur- might be further developed by historians ban women as “slovenly” and “lump[s] of of material culture. pudding,” respectively, suburban women Lori Loeb viewed their neighbourhoods as sites of University of Toronto modernity, where they could build better lives than the ones they left behind. (43) Urban working-class women who moved Judy Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb: to the new housing developments after Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity World War I especially saw the suburbs and Modernity (Oxford and New York: this way. With childhoods characterized Berg 2004) by crowded conditions, poor sanitation, outdoor privies, and in some cases disease in western thought, modernity has and abuse, these women welcomed subur- long been associated with masculinity. bia as a place where they could raise their According to such major writers as Mar- children in secure, stable, and healthy shall Berman, George Orwell, and even surroundings. They saw themselves as Virginia Woolf, a modern subjectivity modern, just as much as did the intellec- is only achieved once one leaves behind tuals who waxed poetic about their own one’s domestic, feminine safe haven and urbane resistance to conformity. strikes out into the urban unknown. Though they both moved to the sub- In this conception of modernity, to be urbs, bourgeois and working-class women feminine is to be outside modernity. It experienced modernity differently. For is to be irrational, overly-nurturing, and the first group, it involved a loss of status conformist. and a subsequent re-creation of identity. It is now time, suggests Judy Giles in Nineteenth-century middle-class women r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 283 prided themselves on being mistresses domestic modernization, The Parlour of their homes. Managing servants and and the Suburbs ends on a controversial children effectively, they drew status note. Arguing that feminists who came of from their dual employer-mother role. age in the 1960s and 1970s embraced the When twentieth century working-class masculine ideal of modern autonomy and women abandoned domestic service, hence devalued domesticity, Giles states middle-class women lost their mistress that it is time for feminists to re-evaluate status and became housewives. In an their positions on homemaking. To illus- effort to distinguish themselves from trate the need for this re-evaluation, she working-class wives, they began spend- offers an analysis of Betty Friedan’s The ing more time than their working-class Feminine Mystique (1963), which circu- counterparts on food preparation, home lated among British women in the sixties decoration, and needlework. Accord- and seventies. Friedan’s argument that ing to bourgeois women, these activities women must escape the suburbs and find demonstrated their inherent creativity, liberation in work and education rests on motherliness, and intelligence. Consum- the belief that domesticity is stultifying erism, too, became incorporated into drudgery. According to Giles, however, bourgeois women’s domestic roles. To be this is a specifically middle-class prem- a skilled homemaker was to be budget- ise. Working-class women did not feel the conscious and yet still able to decorate same need as their bourgeois counterparts one’s home and clothe one’s family with for a private life apart from their families. tasteful commodities. They also did not value formal education, Giles does not spend a lot of time on which Giles states is based on patriarchal women’s employment activities, but she western thought and not as empowering does suggest that working-class women’s as Friedan argued. Further, Giles shows abandonment of domestic service in that homemakers were not as passive or favour of more independent posts in fac- unsatisfied as Friedan posited. Not only tories, stores, and offices illustrated their did they frequently ignore the messages modern determination to take charge of of mass advertising, they also participated their destinies. Similarly, when working- in local, regional, and national social and class women moved from crowded urban political organizations. neighbourhoods into leafy suburbs, they For all of these reasons, argues Giles, believed they were abandoning poverty Friedan was wrong to argue that subur- and deprivation, and entering a more ban women needed to escape domestic- secure and healthy world. This was espe- ity to achieve liberation. Many suburban cially the case after World War II. In the women in fact felt liberated already, for late 1940s and 1950s, not only politicians in their modern homes they were able to but women’s groups embraced the idea pursue lives they found fulfilling. Instead of the citizen homemaker. They argued of castigating homemakers for their deci- that homemaking and mothering were sions to withdraw from paid labour and crucial activities that brought security, education, Giles suggests that feminists comfort, and morality back to British life. should attempt to understand these wom- According to Giles, working-class women en’s subjectivities. Perhaps it is in these relished their status as mothers of the women’s embracing of feminine moder- nation, seeing their nurturing work as a nity, rather than in feminists’ embracing way to contribute to the public good, and of masculine modernity, that we can find also as personally satisfying. a new direction for feminism. After its insightful exploration of In contending that the decision to stay 284 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 home and raise children might not be so feminists’ disdain for the home is prob- anti-feminist after all, Giles is wading into lematic because Giles tends to equate the treacherous waters of what the Amer- modernity with liberation, implying that ican press has recently and salaciously to perceive oneself as modern is to also dubbed the Mommy Wars. In these wars’ perceive oneself as liberated. Though it most sensationalist guises, stay-at-home might be true that some modern think- mothers “face off” against employed ers such as Orwell, Berman, and Woolf mothers about women’s proper roles in thought of modernity in this way, it is also modern life. Such depictions of battles true that many feminist scholars have between women are lurid attempts to sell now recognized modernity’s oppressive copy, and are anti-feminist in that they aspects, including its masculinity, and are pit women against women. At the same trying to move toward a more inclusive time, it must be recognized that many sensibility (though it remains to be seen North American women are divided on whether this sensibility will acknowledge this issue, as the fallout from Linda Hir- race and class privilege). shman’s book Get to Work: A Manifesto Moreover, Giles tends to downplay for Women of the World (2006) indicates. the oppressive aspects of homemaking. If Giles’s argument that British working- She acknowledges that isolated suburban class women saw staying at home as a homes can be sites of abuse and loneli- viable option that did not compromise ness, and she recognizes that the second- their participation in modernity is cor- wave feminist push for women’s entry rect, then perhaps she is also correct to into the workforce was caused by real suggest that second-wave feminists must experiences of deprivation and margin- re-evaluate their aversions to full-time alization. She does not however explore homemaking. these issues in depth. Giles also does not The difficulty here is that the evidence investigate what some feminists see as Giles provides to support this argument the main inequality in the male bread- is sometimes thin. Most of her analyses of winner/female homemaker family: the working-class women’s subjectivities rests husband’s ownership of a paycheque. It is on interviews with four women. Though true that many families work out various perceptive and insightful, this small egalitarian ways to deal with this issue, sample may not be representative of all from the wife’s handling of funds to joint British working-class women. Granted, it bank accounts. Yet it is also true that the is difficult to conduct historical research housewife’s power over family finances on subjectivities, for these are constantly depends on the husband’s endorsement shifting and often unrecorded. Nonethe- of this power. Due to her financial depen- less, Giles at times relies on assumptions dence, it remains to be seen whether instead of demonstrable findings, as she the modern western housewife is truly herself acknowledges in a discussion of liberated. the post-war citizen homemaker: “While Despite making some questionable there is no hard evidence that women’s arguments, The Parlour and the Suburbs aspirations for the future were directly does contribute to cultural studies schol- influenced by this rhetoric, it is possible arship. Rescuing British housewives from to speculate that many women invested the condescension of modernist intellec- their aspirations for self-identity in this tuals, and suggesting that modernization newly valorized role.” (134) occurred in both the city and the sub- Apart from issues of evidence, Giles’s urbs, it reveals that many British women criticism of what she sees as second-wave participated in modernity’s projects. The r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 285

Parlour and the Suburbs also displays a of these men were active in the lesbian/ tender sensitivity toward working-class gay liberation movement, the absence women’s aspirations and circumstances, of lesbians seems odd. Robinson makes and argues convincingly that bourgeois no use of recent historical work – Marc and middle-class white British women Stein’s City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves experienced modernization differently. springs immediately to mind – that Indeed, it is Giles’s forceful argument explores the complicated history of coop- that working-class women’s experiences eration and conflict between lesbians and must be integrated into broader narra- gay men, especially in the early, heady tives of modernity that is the book’s finest days of ‘coming together.’ achievement. Robinson is particularly interested in Donica Belisle demonstrating the reciprocal influence University of British Columbia of the left on gay liberation and of “lib- erational” (sic) movements on the left. One of those tasks proves easier than Lucy Robinson, Gay Men and the Left the other. Robinson shows how the exo- in Post-War Britain: How the Personal dus of gay men from the revolutionary Got Political (Manchester: Manchester left throughout the 1970s, a significant University Press 2007) loss for the left, represented a gain for gay lib in terms of political analysis and Full disclosure – I don’t know this activist energy. But to suggest, citing E.P. author but I have had a long-standing Thompson’s book on William Morris, fascination with the subject of her book: that nineteenth-century utopian social- the gay left in Britain. It’s not that there ism lay behind gay experiments in com- haven’t been home-grown moments of munal living during the early 1970s is a conjuncture between socialism and gay bit of a stretch. liberation in Canada. There have been, Robinson is on firmer ground when and the on-going work of sociologist Deb- tracing the impact of sexual politics on bie Brock promises to bring this impor- the left. She does so not just within the tant history into view. But nothing quite Labour Party and the Communist Party compares to the rich class traditions in of Great Britain, but also in the far-left Britain that gave rise to groups, such as groupings of Trotskyists, Maoists, anar- the Gay Left Collective or Lesbians and chists, and others. A relatively compre- Gays Support the Miners, and nourished hensive understanding of the class-based cultural productions like Lesbian and left is one of the book’s major strengths. Gay Socialist, Rouge, or the music of the Robinson dissects the divergent trajec- Communards. tories of 1970s Trotskyist groups, dis- Using the history of gay men’s often tinguishing the International Marxist tortured relationship to the left, Rob- Group’s concrete support for gay lib from inson’s broad interest is in tracing how what she regards as the more uneven the personal got political in the post- efforts of the Socialist Labour League/ war period. That world-changing slogan Workers Revolutionary Party and the – “the personal is political” – is usually International Socialists/Socialist Work- associated with second-wave feminism, ers Party. Robinson’s careful and never but the women’s movement, while not uncritical differentiations are a refresh- entirely absent here, is strangely mar- ing change from the tendency, particu- ginal. Ditto for lesbians. Robinson’s larly pronounced in gay politics, to regard focus is on gay men, but given that many the left as one monolithic mass. 286 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62

Throughout, Robinson contrasts the Club” with the acceptance of ordinary “workerism” of the organized left with the working people, if not of the trade union “identity politics” of the gay movement. leadership, in the industrial towns he She is keen to locate moments when the moved through as a labour activist. These two came into contact, such as during the are fragments of a specifically gay/work- massive 1971 demonstrations against the ing-class experience. I wish Robinson had Heath government’s anti-union Industrial explored them further, for they challenge Relations Bill. The London Gay Liberation what she designates as a disabling poli- Front included a statement opposing the tics “constrained by either class or iden- Bill in its list of principles, but when glf tity” (194) by highlighting how for some members joined IS-organized marches people, class, no less than gayness, is an against the Bill, they were asked to march identity. They also underscore the fool- at the back of the demonstration. For gay hardiness of trying to boil down an indi- men, this was a sign they weren’t wanted vidual’s social-political identifications to on the revolutionary voyage and after just one element. And for those quick to considerable effort at pushing far-left assign blame for reductionist conceptions groups to get with a gay-left program, of identity and politics on the Marxist left many jumped ship. For Robinson, while Robinson writes about, keep in mind that remaining more open to the left than Marx himself never understood things in many commentators, gay identity also this way. Workers were more than simply often trumps workerism. Robinson is the sum of their jobs and workplaces; for critical, for example, of the revolutionary Marx, workerist identity was a distort- left’s restriction of gay politics to work- ing effect of capitalism, something to be place issues, a tendency viewed as the transcended not reified. far-left’s failure to fully embrace a more For a book that follows how the per- expansive understanding of gay/lesbian sonal got political, Robinson is notably existence. But what is really so wrong restrained when examining how in these about addressing gay people as workers, neo-liberal times gay politics has become especially now that the days are long gone overly personalized and married to the when the glf or the Gay Left Collective marketplace. In the conclusion, she does included the struggles of working people note “the shrinking of the political agenda in their manifestos? into the minutiae of personal experience” Robinson quotes one gay man who and “the growth in consumerism over recalled how, despite the march organiz- politics in the gay community,” (188) but ers’ attempts to marginalize gay people, rather than develop these crucial points, he felt embraced by fellow IRB protestors, she gets sidetracked, ending with a long particularly Durham miners. This experi- discussion of youth voting patterns. In ence would be recaptured during the coal many ways, the early Gay Liberation mining strike of the mid-1980s for those Front had a clearer understanding of the involved with Lesbians and Gays Support dangers, cultivating the radical potential the Miners and the people of the mining of the personal as political all the while community of Dulais. Naturally Robinson remaining critical of its limitations. Rob- discusses this campaign, one I’ll admit inson quotes a certain Jeffrey Weeks who I still can’t read about without getting asked in 1972, “Can freaking out, trip- choked up. Equally moving is the career ping and political drag really subvert of Allan Horsfall, an openly gay, working- society? ... Can a long individual ego trip class man who during the 1950s orga- really contribute much to the downfall nized homophile groups and a “Buggers of capitalism?” Substitute gay marriage r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 287 for freaking out and ego tripping and the while she can acknowledge the value and questions remain as vital as ever. importance of studies that have posited In the end, I’m not sure how much, the powerful structural limitations that apart from her attention to the revolu- circumscribed women’s lives, she is also tionary left, Robinson’s book advances interested in demonstrating the ways the study of her subject. In terms of that women have managed to success- sources, it doesn’t uncover much new, fully navigate within those confines. relying primarily on previously avail- Locklin’s methodological approach and able oral histories and memoires. Her ultimate conclusions are both founded on use of “emblematic characters” (55) as the basic premise that women’s lives are an approach fails to satisfy; individuals far more complex than their gender alone are passed over too quickly to get a deep might suggest. “While studying women,” sense of their dreams and dilemmas. The she observes, “we must try to ignore book’s inclusion in Manchester Univer- the fact that our subjects are women.” sity Press’s “Critical Labour Movement (2) She suggests that this more broadly Studies” series (a press that apparently based perspective opens up new possi- lacks any copy editors to weed out the bilities for assessing women’s activities dozens of grammatical mistakes and and enables a different window into the poorly constructed sentences in this past. This approach was necessary from book) may serve a useful purpose in tak- a methodological perspective; Locklin ing these ideas to a new audience. As for acknowledges that her archival sources me, I suspect I’ll be returning to good old were weak when examined through the Jeffrey Weeks. lens of gender, but rich when assessed Steven Maynard from the perspective of work. It has also Queen’s University influenced her conclusion, namely that gender, while relevant, was not the only factor that shaped women’s work lives Nancy Locklin, Women’s Work and and identities. Rather, it was but one of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Brittany a complex series of layers that shaped (Aldershot: Ashgate 2007) Breton women’s work and identity during this period. Nancy Locklin’s work provides a The cultural specificity of Brittany detailed and nuanced analysis of women’s as a region is central to making her work and personal lives in eighteenth- case. Pointing out that Breton laws and century Brittany. Drawing on a wide vari- customs were different from the rest ety of source materials, from demographic of France, Locklin argues that Breton statistics found in head tax roles, to court women were exempt from some of the cases and personal correspondence, she more rigid constraints faced by French draws a broad picture of the activities women and enjoyed a more prominent of early modern Breton women. Locklin role in legal affairs. While women else- offers a careful reading which negoti- where had few, if any, property rights, ates the tensions between conventional for example, Breton laws and customs understandings of the constraints and ensured that women retained full control limitations experienced by early modern over their dowries for just over a year, had women and a broader interpretation that equal access to inheritances through a recognizes women’s resourcefulness and partible inheritance system, and, in the tenacity, even in the face of substantial case of unmarried woman property own- cultural and institutional barriers. Thus, ers, were able to designate other women 288 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 to inherit their property. Breton women tance system. She argues that this system also appeared to enjoy educational ben- gave women broader access to – and con- efits. Brittany had higher literacy levels trol of – resources, thus enabling them to than other areas and women had access take more prominent roles in the Breton to convent school educations as well as to economy and society. Such benefits were apprenticeships. Women could be trained particularly advantageous to single or by other women, and unmarried women widowed women. Indeed, while the activ- and widows had full authority over their ities of such women might have been lim- apprentices. In addition to this, a married ited by the economic or social situation woman active in a family business often of the region, there were no official legal received extensive training and prepara- barriers to their autonomy. Nevertheless, tion in order to ensure a smooth transi- she points out that authorities generally tion in the likely event of her husband’s held a limited view of women’s social and premature death. cultural role. Locklin organizes her research into Social custom and honour are the focus four sections. In the first, she offers a of the fourth chapter. As in the previous quantitative study of the women of Brit- chapters, Locklin is keen to demonstrate tany. In addition to looking at their mari- the slippages between the perspectives tal status, occupations, and households and prescriptions of cultural authorities, in both urban and rural environments, on the one hand, and the ideas and activi- she offers an overview of the various life ties of women, on the other. Thus, while stages for early modern Breton women. seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pre- The second chapter offers a detailed scriptive literature recommends women’s assessment of women’s work lives. Cen- almost complete seclusion in the private tral to this chapter is Locklin’s observa- sphere, women’s actual activities dur- tion that work was an integral aspect of ing this period included not only active Breton women’s identity. Equally impor- working lives, but also the cultivation and tant is her interest in outlining the nature development of a variety of networks and of that work. Locklin’s research suggests friendships. Such social networks pro- that women were engaged in a wide range vided women with opportunities to meet of work-related activities, many of which potential marriage partners, but also to were governed by a corporate guild sys- develop further work prospects; in other tem. More intriguing, however, is the fact words, such relationships enabled women that they operated both in conformity to make choices about their lives. Drawing with and defiance of these corporate a link between a woman’s legal situation structures. Women successfully initiated and her informal networks, Locklin sug- legal petitions for membership in guilds, gests that the various legal cases clearly organized into collective fronts when demonstrate the extent of women’s social necessary, and took prominent work activities: women were in contact with roles outside the guild system altogether. friends, neighbours, colleagues and oth- In some situations, notably the case of ers on a regular basis. They were, in many the bakers of Brest (the majority of whom respects, deeply involved and engaged were women), “the lack of a formal guild members of their communities and relied was essentially an advantage for women on neighbours and friends for support in working there.” (63) difficult times. Locklin recounts the sto- In the third chapter, Locklin examines ries of neighbours helping women friends the legal situation of Breton women, out- outwit legal authorities, either by cunning lining the merits of the partible inheri- or by force, and also observes that women r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 289 often roomed and worked together. This Nina Bandelj, From Communists is not to suggest that women always sup- to Foreign Capitalists: The Social ported one another. Indeed, Locklin’s Foundations of Foreign Direct research demonstrates quite the oppo- Investment in Postsocialist Europe site. For each woman who was helped by (Princeton: Princeton University Press a neighbour, colleague, or friend, there 2008) were also women who organized against other women. As Locklin suggests, “it was The end of the 20th century witnessed not uncommon to find women engaged in two parallel historical transformations: collective action against other women.” the fall of communism in Central and (136) What emerges from her portrait is Eastern Europe and an unprecedented a society governed by complex social and rise in global capital mobility. The inter- cultural norms and customs. section of these historic shifts provides As a whole, this book offers a detailed the empirical setting for Bandelj’s impor- perspective on women’s work and iden- tant comparative study of the factors that tity in eighteenth-century Brittany. The shaped patterns of foreign direct invest- author’s careful research opens up a new ment (fdi) in the postsocialist region window into the lives of Breton women, during the 1990s. Which countries were and offers valuable insights into the eco- more successful in attracting foreign nomic history of early modern French investment and why? What does this case women. However, I found myself troubled tell us about processes of capital mobility by Locklin’s insistence on the positive. in a global economy? While she is right to point out that women Bandelj begins with a state-of-the-art had numerous ways of negotiating the review of economic sociology, and brings conventions that limited their activities, this literature to bear on the novel ques- thus crafting viable lives for themselves, tion of foreign investment in the postso- her research also suggests that they were cialist region. From this literature, Bandelj also subject to stringent censure for over- derives a set of testable hypotheses about stepping – or appearing to overstep – the why patterns of foreign investment are bounds of acceptable behavior. Even in unlikely to follow neoclassical rules of the more promising legal environment economic exchange. Though at times of Brittany, where women enjoyed a vari- she oversimplifies what she calls instru- ety of benefits that were not available mentalist theories of market processes, to other French women, they still faced she nevertheless presents a cogent and social and cultural barriers that had a provocative alternative for understand- profound impact on their work and per- ing patterns of foreign investment. Spe- sonal lives. If the Breton case is unique, cifically, she argues that social structures, as Locklin argues, might this be a case of cultural understandings, and power rela- the exception proving the rule? Certainly, tions are more likely to shape decisions Locklin’s concluding statements are more about where to invest than means and ambiguous and guarded. I will look for- ends calculations about profits. ward to reading more regional studies in Bandelj convincingly argues that instru- the future. mental profit calculations are impracti- Sonja Boon cable in contexts of extreme uncertainty, Memorial University of Newfoundland which characterized the early years of the postsocialist transformation. During the 1990s, property rights, legal structures, and political alliances were volatile, mak- 290 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 ing it impossible for investors to calculate between investors and host countries on the potential risks and future returns the likelihood of investment. She finds of investments. Thus, decision-makers that existing social networks provide an had to rely on alternative mechanisms – important mechanism through which including social ties and shared cultural information flows encourage investment. understandings – when making decisions Once again she finds that social mecha- about where to invest. Importantly, Ban- nisms – rather than objective economic delj also considers constraints imposed characteristics – are the strongest indica- on Western investors by host countries. tor of foreign investment. She argues that, despite conventional wis- Finally, in Chapter 5, Bandelj uses a dom that global capitalists wield power detailed case study to explore the ways to invest wherever they wish, foreign in which social processes operate to investment is always relational and inves- constrain or encourage investment at tors must navigate potential cultural and the level of the firm. Her case study fol- political resistance to their efforts. lows a failed and subsequently success- The true strength of the book lies in the ful investment effort, and reveals the three empirical chapters, in which Ban- importance of social networks between delj tests these provocative theoretical foreign investors and firm-level actors in propositions using a range of compara- assisting – or, in some cases impeding – tive data, including various longitudinal investment attempts. Overall her analysis cross-country data sources as well as of the importance of cultural and politi- detailed case studies and interview data. cal ties in constituting market relation- In Chapter 3, the first empirical chap- ships shows the inadequacy of traditional ter, Bandelj examines how postsocialist profit-maximization explanations for states pursued varied cultural and politi- market transactions. cal strategies in order to legitimize for- The implications of Bandelj’s findings eign investment as a means of economic are far-reaching and challenge several development. Importantly, some states conventional assumptions about mar- were much quicker to adopt these strate- ket processes. For instance, while many gies and were more aggressive about insti- scholars have argued that states play a tutionalizing fdi due to differences in the declining role in the face of the increas- political commitments of ruling parties, ing power of global capital, Bandelj’s the strength of economic nationalism, analysis shows that states continue to the legacy of socialist era institutions, play a critical role in constituting foreign and varying pressures from transnational investment as a legitimate form of eco- institutions. Bandelj finds that not only nomic exchange. States legitimize for- did economic characteristics of coun- eign investment through formal policies tries play a minor role in predicting fdi, that encourage investments, as well as by but those states that that went further in facilitating investment through the estab- legitimizing fdi were more successful in lishment of national agencies. Impor- securing foreign investment relative to tantly, Bandelj shows that under certain many of their neighbors. conditions states may also constrain the In Chapter 4, Bandelj considers how efforts of foreign capitalists, reinforcing transnational social networks and exist- her argument that foreign investment is ing relations between countries contribute relational and dependent on the institu- to investment flows. Specifically, she tests tional, cultural, and political traditions of the impact of political alliances, migra- both sides of the exchange. tion and trade networks, and cultural ties Furthermore, her findings highlight r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 291 the importance of understanding the examining the status of organized labour social embeddedness of markets at every and other labour-related country char- level of the global economy. Some may be acteristics, Bandelj’s conclusion that fdi tempted to argue that the political tur- is not dependent on economic charac- bulence and economic uncertainty dur- teristics of host countries is somewhat ing the first years of postsocialism make undermined. her analysis of the social embeddedness Despite this omission, however, Ban- of markets exceptional and thereby non- delj more than convinces the reader that generalizable. However, dismissing this analyses of market processes are deficient case on these grounds would overlook the unless they consider the social and rela- critical contributions of Bandelj’s analy- tional basis of economic exchange. Ban- sis. Many scholars have identified inher- delj’s work shows that social processes are ent sources of uncertainty and instability far more than the backdrop upon which in a global economy. Thus, rather than market activities take place. Rather, mar- analyzing a unique exception to the rule, kets are themselves social constructions, Bandelj relies on the unique aspects of the constituted and reproduced by social postsocialist case to identify the critical structures, cultural understandings, and importance of social processes in repro- power relations. While the book is a must ducing the neoliberal global order. read for scholars of postsocialism, it will The primary weakness in an other- also be of interest to economic sociolo- wise exemplary study is Bandelj’s neglect gists and scholars and students of glo- of the impact of labour on the level of balization, capital mobility and foreign foreign investment in the postsocial- investment, economic change, and eco- ist region. Though Bandelj tests several nomic development. competing hypotheses in addition to her Christy M. Glass own to explain patterns of foreign invest- Utah State University ment, she does not thoroughly analyze the impact of labour. This omission is particularly puzzling for readers of this Nivedita Menon and Aditya Nigam, journal as well as for scholars of the Power and Contestation: India Since labour-related causes and consequences 1989 (Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood of global capital mobility. A prevailing Publishing; London and New York: Zed thesis for explaining patterns of foreign Books 2007) investment is that decision makers seek to lower labour costs by identifying states This book is a great introduction to the or regions with favourable labour laws, complex contradictions that make up low labour costs, high labour productiv- contemporary India. Power and Contes- ity, and weak trade unions. Countries in tation is part of the “World History of the Central and Eastern Europe vary a great Present” Series, which uses 1989 or the deal on all of these characteristics. Thus end of the Cold War as a turning point. an important test of this thesis would However, instead of looking for a grand consider the explanatory power of these narrative of contemporary global history, factors on patterns of investment. How- the series highlights the unique perspec- ever, Bandelj limits her test of country- tives and trends within individual coun- specific economic characteristics to gdp tries and regions as they unfold in the per capita and growth rates, inflation broader context of international devel- rates, infrastructural indicators, educa- opments such as democracy, terrorism, tion, and unemployment rates. Without nationalism, and globalization. 292 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62

The authors ofPower and Contestation lenge the notion of the “exceptionalism” claim that their analysis applies a combi- of India in terms of the great diversity nation of post-national and “New Left” that is evident in every dimension of this perspectives, with a feminist thread run- populous country. They connect this ning through the book. However, their purported Indian exceptionalism to the approach is also reminiscent of the Sub- dominant analytical framework, which altern Studies perspective, which focuses effectively denies the significance of on the discourses and rhetoric of emer- internal history and politics within “non- gent political and social movements, and Western” nations. The enduring caste regards the non-elites, or the subalterns, system, vast regional diversity in terms as agents of political and social change. of history, language, politics, and eco- In the best pre-postmodern tradition of nomics, and more recently the economic Subaltern Studies, so remarkably typified dynamism of its mammoth economy are by the likes of Sumit Sarkar and others, some of the factors making India a rich the authors present a critical, insightful, case study for those who study structures, and yet accessible description of India’s agency, and power within a globalizing present history. international system. However, more Many accounts of contemporary India often than not, this diversity is subsumed suggest that the multilayered complexity as inconsequential parts of a simplified of the country necessitates that we dis- overarching national identity, display- tinguish between various “India-s” that ing the unwillingness to engage substan- simultaneously coexist. To an extent, tively with the complexity of the political this is true when we consider the strik- structures within the country. Further- ing contrasts in India – for instance, the more, there is little acknowledgement or 260 million poor subsisting on less than understanding of the thousands of years a dollar a day coexisting cheek to jowl of historical continuity, which continues with an estimated 400 million who com- to affect internal processes and struc- prise an expanding and economically tures that shape India’s terms of engage- dynamic middle class. The other notable ment internally and with the world. For juxtaposition is the secular constitution instance, it is impossible to understand in a country of numerous faiths and an the contemporary political, economic, overwhelming Hindu majority, which is and social processes within India without also contending with the reality of vio- factoring in the role and evolution of caste lent sporadic religious clashes, growing structures, or the diverse and often vio- religious fundamentalism, and the politi- lent histories of linguistically, culturally, cization of religion and caste. However, and ethnically distinct regions within the authors question the apparent con- the “Indian Nation,” which in many sensus of scholars writing on India that cases have histories autonomous from it is a country defying generalizations the modern Indian nation-state. Most and forbidding optimism. In this era significantly, these continuities and com- of shrinking welfare states, increasing plexities are manifested in the subaltern income inequality, human mobility, vola- political tendencies, which are continu- tile financial markets, and major ecologi- ally defining internal conflicts and log- cal threats, the difficulty in generating ics, but are also resisting and reifying the generalizations and optimism is true for dominant narratives of the Indian nation any part of the world, whether developed and its history. These are not mere over- or developing. sights but serious limitations driven by a In the introduction, the authors chal- blinkered perspective, which leads to an r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 293 incomplete and superficial understand- as well as its points of intersection at the ing of the actors, processes, and outcomes global level. of changes and continuities unfolding The story of the survival and evolu- within large parts of the non-Western tion of democracy in India is particu- world and their impact elsewhere. larly insightful in this book. The authors Therefore, in a break from the domi- describe the processes and consequences nant perspective, the introduction of of the rise of the lower- and middle-caste the book contextualizes the period since vernacular (or non-Hindi speaking) elite 1989, not in terms of the end of the Cold in the 1980s and the 90s. These were War, but in terms of the momentous populist leaders who were able to mobi- changes within India. The collapse of lize vast peasant populations and came to the “Nehruvian consensus” is identi- occupy the ideological ground that sepa- fied as the turning point in contempo- rates the Left and the Right in India. The rary Indian history. This consensus was authors cast this period as being marked around an import-substitution industri- by “an explosion of accumulated demo- alization strategy (isi), a secular polity, cratic aspirations” (13) and an oppor- and a non-aligned foreign policy that had tunity for different marginalized forces guided Indian polity and economy since to regroup and make a decisive bid for independence in 1947. While it is easy to power in India. Instead of the simplistic link these changes to the demise of the notions of the urban-rural divide, the Cold War dynamics and to the “end of authors explain how these processes have history” thesis, the book displays how given rise to a conflict between moder- simplistic and ineffective this connec- nity, which refers to notions of rights and tion is in the absence of factoring in the sanitized public spaces, and democracy, internal moments, drivers, and causal or “political society” which refers to the relationships. point where politics meets the popular in The period from 1989 to 1992 witnessed all its messiness. a paradigmatic shift with the initiation of The selection of the themes and their the structural adjustment program, the organization in this book emphasizes a rapid rise of the Hindu nationalists, as departure from both the despairing crit- well as the exponential expansion of the ics of the plethora of problems in India Indian middle class and consumerism. as well as from the ebullient accounts of Nationally this was accompanied by the the miracles of “India Rising.” Therefore, decline of the Indian National Congress, instead of dwelling on the much-cele- the beginning of an era of political insta- brated economic reforms or the much- bility, and increased political mobiliza- maligned political chaos, it engages with tion at the regional levels. An interesting the building blocks of contemporary factor in the mix was the explosion of the India. The book demonstrates that these media in India. Currently there are more changes have little to do with the end of than 300 tv channels, with another 100 the Cold War, except of course that the to be launched before the end of 2008; end of the Cold War made it easier for 600 radio channels; and 60,000 news- countries across the world, including papers. All these numbers are grow- India, to abandon their failed isi pro- ing annually (http://articles.latimes. grams and shift to an export-oriented com/2007/may/18/business/fi-newspa- growth strategy, which was greatly accel- per18). Together, these factors are largely erated post-1989. propelling the transformation of politics, Chapter 1 describes the re-emergence society and the economy of the country of caste in public discourse in the 1980s 294 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 and the eventual revolt of the lower castes political discourse on secularism” (36) in the 1990s. It was evident by the 1970s as well as the vigorous momentum of that a secular and socially progressive the Hindutva movement. Chapter two constitution was not enough to undo the defines the key features of the Hindutva legacy of the hierarchical and exploitative ideology (“Hinduness” or Hindu cultural caste system in India. Many studies had nationalism), the political organization proved the overwhelming monopoly of a of the Hindu, Right and the intra- and small crust of upper castes in the public inter-community dynamics produced by services as well as confirmed the strong it. The portrayal of the dilemmas of the relationship between low-caste status diverse Muslim communities and the and poverty. These studies also showed non-malleability of the Hindu society are that this inequality was not only preva- particularly significant. Muslim commu- lent amongst the most marginalized, the nities are caught between the demands Dalits, but also large groups of “Other to politically close rank in the face of the Backward Classes” (obc), who constituted threat from the Hindu Right, and the nearly 60 percent of India’s population. need for social reforms, in which they The implementation of the Mandal share a common ground with secular lib- Commission Report in 1990, which eral politics. The resistance from within ensured 27 percent reservation in edu- the Hindu society, despite the meteoric cational institutions and public employ- rise of the Right Wing movement, on ment for obc populations, is often seen as the other hand is equally tenacious and the catalytic event, which reintroduced involves a host of organized and not-so- caste into public discourse. However, organized pressure groups. as the authors explain, the revolt of the The chapter contextualizes these ten- lower castes was in the making for over a sions by distinguishing between secu- decade and was linked to the alternative larism as a normative value and as a political formations in the 70s and the principle of statecraft. Nehruvian secu- 80s, which were led by the lower-caste larism was imposed from above – with peasantry. Caste had been banished from the state as well as the modernized upper public discourse within the “civil soci- castes/class being its agents – but with- ety” comprising the high-caste modern out accounting for the uncertainties of elite. Within the “political society,” caste democratic functioning in the “political remained a central category and an over- society.” This distinction allows India to arching paradigm. The chapter describes be seen as secular in the normative sense the complex relationships amongst dif- but provides space for the critique of ferent caste groups, their relationship the practice of secularism by the Indian with the Dalits, and caste’s impact on state and civil society. For instance, the electoral politics in India. While in some authors point to the manufacture of a Eastern regions, these politicized caste “secular Indian” identity, which conceals entities and coalitions have emerged as and marginalizes counter-currents such independent political forces, in some as the mass-based but often localized and Western regions, such as in the state of disparate movements against the exist- Gujarat, the obcs in particular have been ing development model, or majoritarian mobilized by the Hindu Nationalists to voices, such as those of the Hindu Right play a communal role pitted against the Wing, which has gained ground in many Muslim minority. regions of the country. The 1990s were also marked by the Chapter three traces the antecedents “transformation of the very terms of of the development model of capital- r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 295 ist industrialization through large-scale parate socio-political entities such as projects undertaken by the state as well feminist rethinking on sexuality and the as Indian businesses and corporations. emergent “Dalit Capitalism.” Nehru was once again the main architect The long, rich, and diverse history of of this development model in 1947 and the communist movement in India is it appears that this aspect of Nehruvian made more remarkable by the fact that it consensus has survived into the twenty- has managed to operate in a democratic, first century, partially aided by the pro- electoral context, while maintaining cesses of globalization. As the chapter its strong ideological character. While describes vividly, the enormous costs of this displays both the strength and flex- these projects are unevenly borne by the ibility of the Indian Left, as chapter five poor and the marginalized rural masses describes, the unprecedented political through dislocations, forcible land acqui- milieu of the 1990s presented dramatic sitions, ever-increasing indebtedness, opportunities and significant challenges and ecological destruction. While the whose significance was not fully appre- chapter traces this trend since the begin- ciated by the Left parties in India. More ning of independence, it notes a dramatic recently, the Indian Left has been divided increase in national and corporate proj- into an ideologically dogmatic old guard ects as well as in the resistance movement and an increasingly dominant reformist of those victimized by these projects in group whose goals and policies are no the 1990s. Despite the increasing resis- longer distinguishable from the neo-lib- tance of dispossessed groups in different eral agenda. On the other hand, interest- parts of the country, these policies con- ingly, this transformation has made the tinue to be strongly backed by the Indian Left parties more comfortable with the state, the elites, the corporate media, and mainstream and enabled their greater even the judiciary. The logic of corporate participation in national politics. globalization appears to be the driver of Where does this leave the struggle for this model of “accumulation by dispos- equality and justice for the masses who, session.” (69) according to the authors, are being tram- While breathless stories of the dra- pled under the juggernaut of corporate matic transformation of urban life in globalization? These struggles are taking India abound, chapter four goes beyond place within a new set of political artic- the usual explanations of the unshack- ulations, without banners, blueprints, led market and economic reforms. It dogmas, or populist leaders. The authors acknowledges the explosion of a series of refer to these political formulations as the new social, political, economic, and cul- “New Left,” (114) which includes the het- tural aspirations, and explores them as erodox Marxist groups of Western India, the “new economies of desire.” (83) The breakaway factions and individuals from authors point out that this new economy the mainstream and the Far Left, as well is not simply about pent-up middle class as a range of non-party movements. This consumption; it is equally about desire, category includes a remarkable diversity pleasure, and the unshackling of the of articulations from critical mainstream imagination, aided in good measure by political voices, to ecological Marxism, to the media explosion since 1991. Further- Maoist-inspired movements which rely more, instead of focussing on the generic on armed struggle, to citizens’ initiatives Indian middle class, the chapter describes and ngos organized around civil liberties the seminal effects of consumerism and and democratic rights, the urban poor, cultural globalization on seemingly dis- feminists, and even anti-nuclear and 296 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 peace movements. These are not simply existing power equations. In my opinion, manifestations of the dissatisfaction with therefore, unlike the insightful analysis the formal institutionalized political pro- of the “internal” rationale for the socio- cesses, but as the authors point out, this political and economic changes in India, new politics is confronting the very ide- the authors missed a great opportunity ology of the contemporary development to analyze the ideological and political model and the idea of the nation state’s basis of India’s complex relationship with sovereignty over its domain. China and Africa from “within.” These and a number of historical Finally, the brief conclusion further contingencies have made the project of highlights the continuing complexities of nation-building a fraught exercise for the present moment in India. It points to India. Chapter six outlines the complexi- the myriad and relentless contestations ties of the histories of the regions and to the power of Capital and Nation, while peoples residing within the geo-political reiterating the role of internal social and territory of India and their relationship political dynamics. Interestingly the only with the “Indian nation.” The historical link to “external” factors is presented accounts of the Northeastern states and in the increasing popular resistance to Kashmir provide telling instances of the corporate globalization. This conscious crisis of the nation-state. However, as the delinking from the “external” is a useful chapter points out, the perpetual anxiety corrective to the overwhelming major- of preserving the nation is pervasive and ity of contemporary historical accounts, the idea of India has been deeply con- where internal dynamics are invisible or tested since its emergence in the nine- rendered meaningless when they are over- teenth century. simplified or merged uncritically into a Unfortunately, this brilliant analysis dominant narrative. However, I believe appears to lose steam towards the end that the forces of change unleashed by of the book. Chapter seven is a very brief “globalization and growth” are signifi- and rather incomplete summary of Indian cant enough to deserve more than just foreign policy since the 1990s. The chap- one paragraph in the conclusion. The ter describes India’s changing relation- authors correctly point out that the elite ship with the us, Pakistan, and countries classes are the main beneficiaries of the in South Asia. The brief discussion of the economic turn. But the scope, scale, and idea of “Southasia” as a regional iden- speed of changes that contemporary tity as well as one that seeks to counter India is undergoing are momentous and Indian hegemony is the strongest part of involve far more than just the elite classes this chapter. However, this chapter sheds in terms of successes and failures. little light on “India in the World” despite Overall, it is a forceful book despite its title. The most puzzling omissions are its deceptively short length. Funnily, in India’s relationship with the superpower some ways, this book can be seen to dem- next door, China, as well as the consid- onstrate why many analysts leave the erable foreign policy momentum with its ever-changing internal political configu- mineral-rich ideological ally, Africa. rations and the confusing social milieu In the past decade, a large body of out of their studies of contemporary international political economy litera- India. It gives credence to the old and ture has been exploring the emergence popular adage that for every generaliza- of the “New Silk Road.” However, most of tion that is true of India, the opposite is these accounts are focused on economic equally true. While it is easy to regard relationships and/or their impact on the India as a case study of a baffling mine- r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 297 field where every core value is contested questions concerning the relationship including “Indian” and “secularism,” isn’t among law, society, and politics within that true for “Canadian” and “multicul- the context of processes of institutional turalism” too? Therefore, this book also change. Labour law is examined as a rela- shows that leaving these numerous and tively autonomous institutional field that complex contestations out of the enquiry interacts in complex and varying manners of international or domestic develop- with the industrial relations system. The ments can only produce bland, superfi- focus on the dynamic interplay between cial, and incomplete analysis. labour law and industrial relations allows Meenal Shrivastava for the presentation of important insights Athabasca University concerning state-society relations, par- ticularly the roles of state agencies in the regulation of economic relations and Guy Mundlak, Fading Corporatism: processes. In contrast to commonsense Israel’s Labor Law and Industrial claims about the current weakening of the Relations in Transition (Ithaca: Cornell state or its withdrawal from the economic University Press 2007) arena, Mundlak posits that the changing role of the state in liberal regimes is best Fading Corporatism offers an impres- analyzed in terms of basic transforma- sive in-depth analysis of the complex and tions in its mode of intervention in the dynamic relationship between labour economy. He convincingly demonstrates law and the industrial relations system that the shift from corporatist to pluralist in Israel. Mundlak examines in detail systems of interest representation con- the shift from a corporatist to a plural- notes in fact a significant strengthening ist regime of industrial relations that took of certain state agencies: those that are place in Israel over the last two decades, charged with the formulation and imple- focusing on the changing role of labour mentation of labour law as a mechanism law and its institutions in the regula- for the regulation of employment rela- tion of employment relations. Based on tions and the labour market. Offering rich empirical evidence and a persuasive ample empirical evidence for the increas- theoretical framework, the book provides ing prominence of particular domains of a nuanced analysis of the significant state intervention in the economic field, changes that occurred in the legal prin- the book is an important contribution to ciples, institutions, and mechanisms for current research on the transformation of labour market regulation, which consti- contemporaneous political economies. tute an important, but relatively under- After providing an overview of the studied, dimension of the transformation emergence and dynamics of corporatist of the Israeli political economy at large. organizations, institutions, and arrange- While focusing on the changing character ments in Israel, which recognizes the of labour law, its functions, and its modes significant particularities of the case, the of formulation and enforcement, the study moves to an analysis of the char- analysis highlights the changing power acter of, and the roles played by, labour relations among the actors in the field, law within the context of a corporatist and the changing rules that delineate and regime of industrial relations. The main govern the relations among them. claim here is that labour law has fulfilled Equally important, Mundlak uses the a foremost supportive role that enabled study of the Israeli case as a useful prism and facilitated the functioning of the cor- for exploring fundamental analytical poratist system. According to Mundlak, 298 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 the law’s scope and substantive interven- change in the role of law is the increas- tion in industrial relations were minimal, ing autonomy from the social partners as required by the basic principles of gained by the state agencies in charge of social partners’ autonomy and collective the labour legal system. This is accompa- bargaining. And yet, labour law’s role in nied by what Mundlak calls the “juridi- sanctioning and consolidating the funda- fication of the employment relationship,” mental institutional rules of corporatism which represents the key dimension of has been extremely important, particu- change in the role of labour law. In the larly by promoting the principle of con- emergent regime, statutory norms, rather centrated interest representation along than autonomous negotiation between class lines by centralist labour and busi- the social partners, function as the main ness organizations with broad and exten- tool to regulate industrial relations. sive memberships. This was especially Through its legal apparatus, i.e. the leg- salient in the role of law in strengthen- islature and the judiciary, the state speci- ing by various means the monopolistic fies and imposes norms and standards status of the Histadrut (Israel’s general that define the rights and obligations of workers’ association) as representative of both individual and collective actors in labour, and in making it extremely dif- the labour market, as well as the range of ficult for any other competitor union to legitimate and proper courses of action challenge it. The labour law’s support for open to them. It is clear, then, that the the Histadrut’s power position is a mean- transition to a pluralist regime does not ingful instance of a more general pattern, mean the withdrawal of the state from in which both legislation in the field of the field. Rather the contrary; as regula- industrial relations and adjudication by tor the state assumes a stronger role than the Labour Courts were guided by the under corporatism. principles of corporatism, and even dom- A most fundamental question is who inated by the interests of the corporatist gains and who loses from the transition partners. The conclusion is therefore that from corporatist to pluralist industrial in corporatist regimes the institutional relations. Here Mundlak presents a com- configuration, organizational patterns, plex picture that defies easy generaliza- and modes of interaction of the indus- tions and the commonly accepted axiom trial relations system are analytically, if that while corporatism is pro-labour, plu- not empirically, prior to labour law. ralism is necessarily pro-business. On the The heart of the book lies in the three one hand, the weakening of the Histadrut, chapters that address the weakening of the decline of collective and centralized the corporatist agents and institutional bargaining, the emergence of precarious arrangements and the concomitant forms of employment, and other com- emergence of a pluralist regime of indus- ponents of the pluralist regime certainly trial relations and labour law. The tran- tend to benefit employers. But, on the sition from corporatism to pluralism other hand, and this is the interesting connotes, Mundlak claims, a shift in the and challenging point, Mundlak notices relationship between labour law and the some significant developments that have industrial relations system. From being far less obvious effects. First, the juridi- a supportive and enabling device for a fication of industrial relations means well-institutionalized regime, labour law that the state guarantees by law certain is transformed into a key constitutive fac- rights, such as minimum wage and anti- tor of an alternative system of industrial discriminatory regulations, that under relations. A major manifestation of this the corporatist regime were not codified r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 299 at all or were contingent on the social between law and social relations under partners’ consent. Second, the pluraliza- varying political-economic regimes. For tion of the mode of interest representa- that and other reasons, Fading Corporat- tion and the entry into the field of ngos ism should be of great interest to schol- working on behalf of particular groups ars working in diverse fields, such as law of subordinated workers can enlarge to and society, industrial relations, political a certain extent the opportunity struc- economy, and institutional change. ture of outsiders who were excluded Zeev Rosenhek from the corporatist arrangements and The Open University of Israel were deprived from their benefits. This is particularly important in light of the type of split corporatism that emerged in Melanie Nolan, Kin: A Collective Israel, which was characterized by strong Biography of a New Zealand Working- exclusionary tendencies along citizen- Class Family (Christchurch: Canterbury ship, national, and ethnic lines. Mundlak University Press, 2005) does not argue that the openings created by the pluralist regime necessarily lead Melanie Nolan has written a carefully to fundamental alterations in the social crafted, highly readable, and intriguing hierarchies present in the labour market. history of the lives of five New Zealand His claim is rather that within a plural- siblings, the McCulloughs. Perhaps the ist framework of interest representation best known of the siblings was Jack, a it is institutionally easier to challenge skilled artisan, Workers’ Representative exclusionary practices, generally by legal on the Arbitration Court from 1908– means, than under the previous cohesive 1921, founder of the Christchurch Social- and exclusivist corporatist regime. ist Church, pacifist, journalist, Labour In the book’s last two chapters the Party member, and finally, member of the author places the case study within a Legislative Council from 1936 to 1947. In broad comparative perspective and spec- Kin, Nolan has returned to the life of Jack ifies its theoretical contributions, par- McCullough, whose political biography ticularly concerning the bi-directional was the subject of her ma thesis. Not con- causal relationship between labour law tent with the direction of New Zealand and industrial relations. As previously historiography concerning labour and noted, Mundlak’s analytical point of working-class history, however, Nolan’s departure is that law both reflects and collective biography of this working-class constitutes the social and economic family revisits an important debate about order. The notable contribution here is working-class formation, identity, experi- that he specifies the conditions under ence, and consciousness. which one or the other role of labour law Kin sets out to uncover aspects of receives greater weight: while it tends to collective working-class life that Nolan be reflective of industrial relations in cor- contends have been neglected by New poratist regimes, it is more autonomous Zealand labour and working-class his- and its impact is more constitutive in torians: moderate unionism; religion pluralist regimes. This general conclu- and temperance organizing; the role of sion illustrates that the relevance of the friendly societies and corporate wel- book goes well beyond the Israeli case. farism; patriotism; and finally, the rise of It offers a well-articulated and stimulat- the white-collar revolution that opened ing theoretical framework that can guide a path to working-class mobility into fruitful examinations of the relationship lower middle-class ranks. Nolan has 300 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 selected one of the McCullough siblings leaders of political labour movements or to represent each neglected aspect in trade unions. turn: respectively, Jack, Margaret, Jim, The operative terms in Nolan’s concep- Sarah, and Frank. Every chapter is a self- tual lexicon have sparked vigorous debate described thick description of one of the in the field since the publication of E. P. siblings, an attempt to explore the mul- Thompson’s The Making of the English tiple trajectories that contributed to the Working Class. Like Thompson, Nolan formation of working-class identity, at considers the relationship between expe- least among these Irish Protestant mem- rience and consciousness, class identity bers of New Zealand’s working class. In and class formation. Thompson’s formu- this way, Nolan takes aim at the “poli- lation of experience as the direct cor- tics first” approach that she considers respondence between social being and so dominates New Zealand labour his- consciousness so tightly compressed this toriography. Political histories largely relationship as to leave nothing to that privileging mass political organs of Lib- contested terrain of political struggle, not Lab, Independent Labour, and Red Fed least the struggle over meaning and expe- militant factions, have misrepresented rience. Nolan presses even further, to ask the dominant voice of working-class if it is still meaningful to talk of working- experience. Instead, a representational class experience at all. Instead, she offers history of working-class experience and a study of change and identity formation, identity formation requires that the lens one that avoids adopting a dominant be opened widely, to take account of the class view in favour of the study of mul- multi-relational features of working-class tiple identities, including those of gen- existence. This broader scope both com- der, aboriginality, and migration status. plicates and sheds new light on vexatious Following Stephen Jay Gould’s caveat in issues of class formation and the articula- Full House: The Spread of Excellence from tion of working-class consciousness. For Plato to Darwin (1996), Nolan rejects the example, Nolan disagrees with a favoured view of history – presumably one followed chestnut among historians of the radi- by those labour historians with whom she cal labour tradition, that New Zealand’s takes such issue – that would reduce a sin- egalitarian system of income distribution, gle factor to its essence, and then track its indeed the entire edifice of its welfare progress along a linear pathway through state, was a victory of militant work- chronological time. As she puts it, “both ing-class activism. In contrast, Nolan pattern and causal complexity command considers that these achievements are a place in historical scholarship.” (184) more accurately attributable to her more Who would disagree? Far from decenter- moderate and respectable working-class ing the ‘grand narrative’ of working-class “doers” who, whatever labour historians identity, Kin sets out to chart the diverse might think, doggedly pursued their own constituencies of belonging among the “dead ends” of labour history: the church, McCullough siblings, through a method- the friendly societies, patriotic societies, ology informed by micro-history, biogra- and employer welfarism. Nolan’s meth- phy, and case study. odology of collective biography compels Assessing whether or not this strategy the historian to acknowledge that a large succeeds in shedding light on her his- percentage of the working class was nei- torical subjects leads us to consider the ther militant nor socialist, neither atheist representativeness of each McCullough nor pacifist, and that few workers were sibling. It is here that Nolan encounters the challenge any historian must con- r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 301 front, the weight of her evidence. Jack that there was more to the story than McCullough kept a richly detailed diary Jack’s life alone. The increasingly popu- that totaled 37 volumes spanning the lar genre of collective biography has the years 1880 to 1925. The first chapter of advantage of permitting the historian Kin delves into Jack’s life, thus setting a to follow layered relationships among framework that leaves the reader wanting groups within the working class, an more insight into the lives of his broth- admittedly revisionist approach to the ers and sisters. Sadly, Jack’s sister, Sarah, writing of working-class history. How left few traces, few first-hand accounts representative are the McCulloughs? that were the equal of a journal so rich in Nolan recognizes the limitations posed detail, insight, personal hope, and politi- both by biography and case study when cal regret. She was a royalist, an ama- she acknowledges that, while each sibling teur vocalist whose performances were might not represent everybody, collec- featured in many patriotic fund-raising tively “they represented somebody, and concerts held throughout New Zealand a somebody that mattered.” (183) Each to rally support for World War One. trajectory is compelling, a richly detailed Sister Margaret was an activist with the account of the variegated and complex Christian Temperance Union, a devoted worlds of New Zealand working-class member of Timaru Trinity Church, and a existence. While Nolan may raise more volunteer with the Presbyterian Women’s questions than she answers, Kin follows Missionary Union. Here Nolan draws in the Thompsonian tradition by concep- on institutional records of church and tualizing class as a set of complex and at temperance organizations, mining the times contradictory relations, rather than quotidian details of fund-raising efforts, a fixed, singular identity. Structural forces weekly meetings, and at-home socials. of class are not permitted to overwhelm Brother Jim was an ardent proponent of the multi-faceted points of identity and municipal socialism, a member of the culture, as deeply grounded in gender, Independent Order of Oddfellows (ioof) race, and migration status, relations of who left municipal politics to take up empire and aboriginality, as they are in ioof work, eventually rising to become religion, pacifism, even patriotism and Grand Master; he was a pacifist haunted prohibition. Does class lose all specific- by the premonition of his eldest son’s ity as a central category of analysis? By no death in WWI, a premonition he recalled means. Nolan’s excellent study intersects from their last encounter. Brother Frank with current historiographical debates pursued a different course, leaving in New Zealand and elsewhere that are behind his working-class ancestry to join clearly as animated and multivariate as the rising white-collar world of consumer were the lives of this remarkable New capitalism. While the limits of biography Zealand working-class family. are not in dispute, the surviving record of Jennifer A. Stephen Jack’s siblings remains thin in contrast to York University the rich detail left by their more famous brother. Nolan tries to redress the imbal- ance by supplementing from Jack’s dia- Jan Lucassen, ed., Global Labour ries, such that whatever insight we do History: A State of the Art (Bern: Peter gain must still be interpreted through Lang 2006) Jack McCullough’s eyes. Nolan was drawn back to the The notorious debates of the early McCulloughs, driven by the perception 1990s about “the end of history” had 302 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 their echo in the field of labour history, Cassagnac’s Histoire des classes ouvrières, where a number of international journals “about to knock with the same energy at published discussions under titles such as the doors of the scholars as of the kings, “The End of Labour History?” and “What while saying to the former ‘we want to Now for Labour History?” One sequel to have our history’ and to the latter: ‘We that moment was a conference of labour want to have our bread.’” (39) historians from around the world spon- Labour historians are relatively well- sored by the International Institute of equipped to face the challenges, given Social History in November 2000, which the strong traditions of the field, which some years later has produced a substan- include its often permeable disciplinary tial anthology on “global labour history.” and methodological boundaries and its These pages include expressions of con- alertness to the larger social and politi- cern, even some cries of alarm, but on the cal world. A reading of this volume shows whole they convey more a sense of mea- that there are at least two or three ways sure than malaise, possibly a sign that to think of global labour history: first the sense of crisis has abated as the chal- as an accumulation of “local,” national, lenges facing labour history in the new regional, and even continental histories; century are identified. secondly as deliberately constructed There is a good sense of proportion studies of parallel sectors within the in the two introductory essays, which world economy, with a view to comparing emphasize the widening geographic and the differences and congruities of their conceptual scope of labour history over contexts. Beyond this there is also the time as well as the attendant practical need for investigations of explicitly global and theoretical questions arising from forces, including transnational commod- this extension beyond some of the more ity chains and labour markets, and inter- conventional paradigms of North Atlan- national activisms and organizations. tic capitalism. Marcel van der Linden Most of the contributions in this vol- notes the ways in which the ideal type ume fall in the first group, with attention of “free” wage-labour itself has always to the evolving genealogies and debates been qualified by numerous contexts and within more or less definable spatial conditions, both formal and informal, boundaries. For Canada and the United including those of family and household, States, for instance, Bryan Palmer makes reproduction and mobility, coercion and the case for a “selective but rigorous” incentive, individual and group contracts, (225) attention to the traditions of labour gendered and racialized experiences; he history scholarship in order to avoid argues that “capitalism could and can the pitfalls of postmodernist writing. In choose whatever form of commodified the “new” Russia, Andrei Sokolov warns labour it thinks fit in a given historical against “anti-scientific” approaches in the context.” (26) In a similar vein Jan Lucas- wake of the official “quasi-histories” (407) sen points out that the so-called “golden of the Soviet era and discusses oppor- age” associated with the labour history of tunities for a vast project of historical the industrial revolution was always lim- recovery for which new sources are avail- ited by its nationalism and periodization; able. In the case of China, Arif Dirlik dis- indeed when “a first attempt at writing cusses how the image of the archetypal global labour history” (50) was produced proletarian has given way to a compro- in 1837, there were already many centuries mised and fractured working class under of labour history behind it – “an immense steady assault from world capitalism. For social reality,” in the words of Granier de Japan, Akira Suzuki examines a legacy r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 303 of “authoritarian and status-based labor has long been a familiar site for historical relations” which has interacted with comparisons; while some recent studies “cycles of worker activism and accep- have made large national generalizations, tance.” (193) Meanwhile, historians of Ian Phimister demonstrates the need Africa (Frederick Cooper), South Asia for microstudies of local pit culture to (Sabyasachi Bhattacharya), Latin Amer- facilitate finer comparisons of manage- ica (John D. French), North Africa and rial strategies, community structure, the Middle East (Zachary Lockman) and and collective action. Only a few of these Australia, New Zealand, and the South chapters take up the explicit investigation Pacific (Lucy Taksa) identify a dynamic of global forces, but this theme is notable and multifaceted labour history that is in a study of dock work that draws on responsive to the articulation of differen- evidence from 30 countries on five con- tiated production regimes under the pre- tinents. Lex Heerma van Voss finds that vailing hegemony of capitalism. It is also dock workers have experienced several clear that in the case of Western Europe, waves of globalization (and de-globaliza- the locus classicus of industrialization, tion) over the past two centuries and that economic development divided as well as these have been accompanied by distinct united the working class; both conditions configurations in technologies of produc- continue to require historical explication, tion and labour relations on the world’s and as Dick Geary notes, “the simultane- waterfronts. Similarly, in a discussion ous co-existence of different identities on of railroad labour, Shelton Stromquist the part of workers” has been the basis examines international patterns in the for “a continuing story of solidarities and recruitment and deployment of tech- divisions.” (255) nology and labour and the organization The chapters in the second section of and assertion of working-class interests; the volume go a long way towards dem- at the same time he shows that a global onstrating the strengths of a comparative approach requires increased attention history that focuses on themes and sec- to additional factors often neglected in tors in comparable “local” settings. In the Eurocentric models, such as “the place of case of agricultural labour, for instance, an informal labor market sector within Prasannan Parthasarathi shows how a an industrializing economy, the interde- South Indian perspective undermines pendence of rural and urban locations the dichotomy of common and individ- of railroad labor, the household context ual land ownership as the basis for the of wage labor, the mingling of wage and dispossession and exploitation of rural non-wage work, and the racially segre- workers. A study of the place of domes- gated character of transnational, global tic labour in Indonesia, China, Malaysia, labor markets.” (631) and Hong Kong by Ratna Saptari shows This is a bulky volume, almost 800 variations in traditions and trajectories pages in length and in appearance per- while contributing to the “de-essential- haps easily mistaken for a definitive ref- ization of race, gender and class rela- erence work. There are maps, several tions.” (484) The practical problems of kinds of index, a cumulative bibliography constructing comparisons are addressed of works cited – but it is nonetheless a by Jan Lucassen in a study of brickmak- preliminary work of reconnaissance that ing in India and Western Europe that even features the occasional confusion finds similarities in the organization of in terminology, such as the locomotive work, including the prominence of family “engineers” who were not “machinists,” “gangs.” Implicitly at least, coal-mining (642) or the unintended malapropism, 304 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 such as “the tenants of historical materi- of our moment and offers us crucial alism.” (226) Participants in this anthol- intellectual resources in our attempts ogy have interpreted the mandate of the to understand the beast we must con- original conference and of global his- front. Perilous Passage is a global his- tory itself in different ways, but many of tory and in many respects perhaps one the essays are models of historiographic of the first truly global histories of our guidance and conceptual clarification. epoch to appear. The latter claim can Each contributes usefully to the emerg- be made because, unlike much of what ing agenda for a global labour history. comes under the label “global,” Perilous “Late” capitalism may have another cycle Passage does not pass off European his- to run, but as long as work remains part tory as global history. Bagchi, currently of the human condition, labour history Director of the Institute of Development will continue to fill a need. Studies at Kolkata University and author David Frank of numerous books on development eco- University of New Brunswick nomics and politics, challenges crucial ideas of the “European miracle” as one of the foundational themes of modern his- Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Perilous Passage: tory. He argues that “the European mir- Mankind and the Global Ascendancy acle was not beneficial to the Europeans of Capital (Lanham, MD: Rowman and themselves before the last quarter of the Littlefield 2005) nineteenth century” and therefore “the advantages reaped by the European rul- The last few decades have been wit- ing classes… were at the expense of the ness to a remarkable set of historical suffering of millions of people, in Europe, developments. On the one hand, a neo- the Americas, Africa and Asia.” (xiv) liberal or globalizing or imperial agenda For Bagchi, colonialism was not a side- has ravaged the welfare states and post- show of a capitalism that developed as a war labour-capital accords and we appear result of “freeing markets” within Europe, to be witnessing, especially after the fall but rather a centerpiece of early capitalist of the Soviet Union, an era of triumphant development, which relied much more global capitalism. On the other hand, as heavily on military power to coerce labour wealth inequalities aggravate and ecolog- and wealth out of subordinated nations ical crises accumulate, a growing global than is often remembered by political awareness among social justice activists economists and cultural theorists alike. has lead to massive anti-war sentiments Perilous Passage brings Asia, Africa, and being briefly displayed and a notion that the Americas into the narrative of capi- leaders of “free trade” agendas can no tal ascendancy as very few studies have longer meet in non-police state nations or been able to do. It reminds us that it was they will confront organized angry popu- not only European inventiveness – itself lar resistance. The traces of a promise of a supposed legacy of ancient forebears – a new global consciousness are discern- that laid the groundwork of modernism, ible in these latter developments. Such a but ruthless European aggressiveness consciousness will be needed if we are to aided by a few critical technological bor- succeed in the epic struggle against capi- rowings and innovations. Bagchi dem- tal that is unfolding. onstrates that, in virtually every nation Amiya Kumar Bagchi’s Perilous Pas- where it took root, early industrialization sage is a book that deserves our atten- lead to immiseration of locals, who only tion in this historical moment. It is born generations later were able to experi- r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 305 ence benefits. And military conquest was a particular emphasis on the importance always already a key feature in producing of education to human development, of the conditions of dominance conducive literacy and numeracy skills that give to capital accumulation. people an opportunity to make their own Bagchi convinced me that one curious destinies. reason for Europe’s triumph was in fact Bagchi’s Perilous Passage is a weapon its failure (a sort of grand version of the in the intellectual arsenal of social justice “loser wins” scenario Sartre enjoyed talk- activists everywhere, but offers particu- ing about); whereas in China and India lar resources to those of us engaged in empires brought huge swaths of people the anti-colonial element of the struggle and territory into comparatively peaceful against capitalism. “Colonial capitalism” circumstances, none of the European war- is in fact what we have witnessed being lords established intergenerational con- born and ascending in the last five hun- trol over their fractious opponents. The dred years; Perilous Passage may contrib- continual war frenzy fed by this failure ute to the development of a newer kind of ultimately thrust a pirate island nation, understanding that will allow us to begin England, to the forefront and established undoing the layers of injustice, ecological a culture of aggressive rapaciousness that destruction, and human immiseration would lead to many conquests, and pro- such ascendancy has created. vide the lands and labour and coerced Peter Kulchyski foreign “markets” that underwrote capi- University of Manitoba talist “development.” Bagchi is well read in social history, in an astounding range of regional his- Eric Toussaint, The World Bank: A Critical tories, in contemporary economics, and Primer (London: Pluto Press 2008) in social science scholarship; he brings a lifetime of voracious study to his text, and In the last ten years, opposition to it shows. Quality of life, for example, can corporate globalization has grown from be measured in early industrial periods large demonstrations against the World by using height as an indicator. Height Trade Organization, G8 meetings, and statistics are available because the mili- imf/World Bank Conferences to mass tary machines duly recorded them. They convergences intended to envision and strongly indicate social loss of height in bring about a different world at the World the industrializing generations in a vari- Social Forum and its various regional ety of different national contexts and incarnations. Eric Toussaint has been periods, from France to Japan. a part of that movement and evolution, Fundamentally, what matters to Bagchi in his work as the president of cadtm is human development: not the produc- (the Committee for the Cancellation of tion of ever-increasing goods and ser- the Third World Debt) Belgium. His The vices, nor the untrammeled accumulation World Bank: A Critical Primer is written of abstract wealth known as capital, but from within and for that growing global rather the development and distribution social movement. He makes an important of all the things people need in order to contribution to the analysis and critique be able to lead a materially secure life, of the World Bank (wb), and makes an and have the possibility of an intellectu- effective case for radically altering it. ally rewarding “good life.” As with earlier Toussaint begins the book with a his- work, for example his The Political Econ- tory of the bank’s founding at the Bretton omy of Underdevelopment, Bagchi places Woods conference and the evolution of its 306 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 operations over time. Among the interest- known, such as the imposed socializa- ing details brought to light are the negoti- tion of much of the private debt in many ations over the placement of the wb (New debtor countries as part of the Structural York or Washington?). There is much here Adjustment Program (sap). Of course, as to outrage even the most jaded of wb crit- the disastrous consequences of the Debt ics. An outstanding example of this is the Crisis and saps unfolded throughout the detail Toussaint provides of how the wb 1980s and 1990s, criticism of and resis- transferred debts from the colonial pow- tance to the wb and International Mon- ers that took out loans for the purpose of etary Fund (imf) policies grew around exploiting their colonies to those colonies the world. once they gained independence. The con- The World Bank has made gestures trast he provides of the wb’s treatment of towards reform as a reaction to these Chile under Allende and Romania under criticisms and Toussaint devotes some Ceauşescu is telling. Romania was given space to detailing the shortcomings of loans after Ceauşescu distanced Romania these. The Highly Indebted Poor Coun- from the Warsaw Pact after its invasion of tries (hipc) initiative had been meant to Czechoslovakia in 1968, while Chile was fully relieve the debt burdens of the forty cut out of any wb programs until after poorest debtor countries, concentrated Pinochet’s coup. According to legend this in Africa. By 2005, it had helped eighteen dichotomy brought a wb Vice-President countries reduce their debt in exchange to ask whether Allende’s Chile had not for imposing a set of policies designed been socialist enough. to privilege foreign investors at the He then presents a series of case studies expense of domestic taxpayers. He briefly that capture the main critiques he makes describes the replacement for the sap against the bank. In the context of the loans, the Poverty Reduction Strategy wb’s support for dictators he discusses Paper, as saps with civil society window- Brazil, Nicaragua, and Zaire in addition dressing. More detail here would have to Chile and Romania. Ensuing chapters been worthwhile. include even more detailed evidence of The final section provides both the legal the wb’s support for dictators in the Phil- justification for bringing suit against the ippines, Turkey, and Indonesia. Moving wb and the indictment. Toussaint lays on to analyze the Bank’s evolving theo- out the legal framework under which the ries of development, Toussaint contrasts wb could be sued as well as the reasons the path to development espoused by wb for doing so. The indictment is sweeping economists with that actually undertaken and well supported by the research in the by South Korea’s military dictatorships, earlier sections of the book. A legal offen- with full, if reluctant, wb support. sive is an interesting strategy for taking This is followed by a critical review of on the wb, and may be feasible on the the bank’s role in the lead-up and reac- merits, but the case isn’t made how and tion to the Debt Crisis of the 1980s. This why this strategy would be effective. Sup- role can be summarized as looking the plemental material includes a useful fact other way as the crisis was building, and sheet about the wb, an interview with the then using the crisis to impose its own author taken since the original publica- orthodoxy on wayward Mexico and many tion, and a comprehensive glossary. other countries. This part of the narrative The book’s greatest weakness is the will not be news to most readers, though translation. Overall, the translation is here too, interesting details come to rather choppy, so that in some instances a light. Many of these may not be as widely sentence says the opposite of what would r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 307 have seemed the natural meaning, or in operations will find some new informa- other instances is simply factually wrong tion here. It will serve as a useful source (as in the passage that says that the us Air of information for activists struggling Force mined Nicaragua’s harbours, when to reform or replace the international by most accounts the cia was respon- financial institutions and will be a valu- sible). This leaves the reader wondering able guide for those who wish to pursue if the argument, in some places weak or a legal strategy. missing pieces, might be more compel- Thomas Masterson ling and complete in the original. Another Bard College weakness of the book is that the argument is polemical in places where it need not have been. The author clearly grasps the Jay Winter, Dreams of Peace and details of the topics, but in some instances Freedom: Utopian Moments in the 20th ends the discussion with a bald assertion, Century (New Haven and London: Yale rather than by marshaling the evidence University Press 2006) he clearly has at hand. Finally, there is a sense in which Toussaint wants to have Jay Winter is a distinguished Yale Uni- it both ways. On the one hand, the wb, versity historian who has specialized on when it gets involved with a country, is a various aspects of the First World War force for us and, more generally, North- in European history. In this compact vol- ern economic interests at the expense of ume of 260 pages, he tackles a related, but the interests of the people of the country somewhat different topic: the thoughts in question. On the other hand, the wb and deeds of various “minor” utopian discriminates against countries that are intellectuals, politicians, and social move- opposed to the political and economic ments throughout the twentieth century agenda of the United States. For the latter that advanced moderate proposals for argument to hold any weight in light of peace, human rights, and democratic the proof provided for the former, Tous- international governance. These included, saint needs to provide some context in among others, the French banker and which the World Bank’s involvement has philanthropist Albert Kahn in the first positive effects. Otherwise, shouldn’t we decades of the century; us President be happy for those countries that ‘suffer’ Woodrow Wilson after the First World from the wb’s benign neglect? Toussaint War; René Cassin, a French jurist who may well be able to make this argument, helped draft the Universal Declaration of but it is left out of the book. Human Rights in 1948; Latin American Overall, this book provides an excel- liberation theologians in the 1960s and lent review of the Bank and its associated 1970s; and international human rights agencies in the broader context of the evo- advocates in the 1990s. Winter argues lution of the Bretton Woods institutions, that such minor utopians and their “plans the United Nations, and the international for partial transformations of the world” economy. It also lays out a comprehensive (2) represented significant “moments of institutional history of the World Bank, possibility” that need to be explored and drawing heavily on World Bank sources celebrated in contrast to “major” utopians as well as critical studies of its opera- such as Stalin and Hitler whose attempts tions. This is a well-researched book to change the world were wrought with that includes such a wealth of informa- totalitarianism and mass violence. tion and detail that even those who are Based on an exhaustive reading of sec- relatively well informed of the Bank’s ondary sources, elegantly written and 308 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 coherently argued, Winter sheds much- as “visions of partial transformations, needed comparative light on various of pathways out of the ravages of war, or twentieth-century reform movements for away from the indignities of the abuse peace and human rights. He finely crafts of human rights.” “Such imaginings,” he mini-biographies of minor utopians and continues, “sketched out a world very lucid analysis of their projects. By no different from the one we live in, but means unaware of the clear limits and from which not all social conflict or all contradictions of his subjects, Winter oppression had been eliminated.” (5) He nevertheless fails to adequately explain usefully takes stock of his guiding focus why most of the minor utopian projects on minor utopian projects throughout he studies failed to make a long-lasting the six substantive chapters, comparing impact. He downplays the links between and contrasting their diverse histories capitalism, imperialism, and many of the and arguing that though “such moments horrific wars and oppression most of his were almost always short-lived and were subjects aimed to counter through rather followed by defeat, disillusionment and timid liberal reforms within the system. despair did not prevent them from recur- Moreover, in his apparent haste to dis- ring. Visionaries returned; their impulse tance himself from anything smacking of was irrepressible. Though their immedi- “socialism” (considered a failed “major” ate achievements were meager or nonex- utopianism linked exclusively to Stalin- istent.” (167) ism), he completely neglects a host of Chapter 1 explores three different truly transformative moments in twen- visions of peace: the efforts of French tieth-century history linked to workers’ banker and philanthropist Alfred Kahn struggles and militant social movements. to create a comprehensive photographic Winter draws on two principal theo- record of the world’s people as a means retical propositions to explain the minor to bring humanity together and there- utopian project. The first is a version of fore prevent violent conflict; the liberal Marx’s dictum that holds that “Vision- pacifism of the entrepreneurs associ- aries imagine alternative forms of social ated with the Exposition universelle in life, but not in the way they think they Paris in 1900; and the social democratic do.” (7) In other words, envisioning a pacifism of Jean Jaurès and the Second future is an attempt to break from the International. Winter thoroughly dis- past while at the same time being firmly cusses the contradictions of such visions rooted in the limitations of the present. and how the eclipse of class and inter- The second is derived from German phi- national solidarity by nationalism, capi- losopher Reinhard Kosselleck’s notion talism, and imperialism resulted in the of how historical time is generated from slaughter of the First World War. This the tension between the “space of experi- chapter includes a fascinating account of ence,” that is, our understanding of past how the great African-American radical events and “the horizons of expectations” W.E.B. Du Bois was rebuffed by colonial- or how we “project that [past] experience minded us and European officials in his into the future.” (7) Thus, in a twentieth attempts to include an anti-racist his- century marked by horrific wars and col- torical perspective at the 1900 Exposition lective violence that effectively distanced universelle. historical experience from future expec- us President Woodrow Wilson’s tations, minor utopians emerged to offer attempt to broker a post-World War One alternative visions. peace through the self-determination Minor utopian projects are analyzed of nations and its defeat by the impe- r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 309 rial ambitions of all the major players we are by describing where we have not (including the United States) is the theme yet reached.” (99) Winter describes how of Chapter 2. The minor utopian vision Cassin’s role in the adoption of the Dec- studied in this chapter is the notion of laration by the United Nations in 1948 the “self-determination of nations” (and reaffirmed French Republican values its institutional expression in the League after the French government had shamed of Nations) and how it could act as a itself through its collaborationist alliance deterrent to war. The vision of Wilson with Nazi Germany. The Declaration also and his colleagues, however, was limited laid the ideological basis for the later cre- to whites (W.E.B. Du Bois was frustrated ation of the European Community and once again), the major European nations, the European Court of Human Rights. and the United States who never really Chapter 5 deals with the revolts of 1968 intended to disarm their imperialist in Europe and Latin America and how, in war machines. Strangely neglecting the Winter’s analysis, moral thinking con- explicit use of the concept of class, Win- nected with notions of liberation to create ter maintains that the visionaries of the another minor utopian moment. Particu- notion of the League of Nations – includ- larly noteworthy in this chapter are the ing historians, social scientists, and sections on liberation theology in Latin politicians – were imprisoned by liberal America and how the student rebellion morality – a set of unspoken values and in Germany in the 1960s was inextricably political attitudes “disseminated in their linked to the question of how to come to society” (56) – that prevented them from terms with the country’s Nazi past. Win- truly implementing self-determination. ter emphasizes that, while they failed in Hence, international politics in the 1920s their larger objectives, the ’68ards suc- and 1930s ended up as a thinly-disguised ceeded in shaking “the foundations both prelude to another horrific world war. of the university world and the wider Chapter 3 explores the 1937 World’s political world around it” (151) through Fair in Paris and its contradictory and their fusing of the ideas of direct democ- tension-ridden representations of war, racy and the emerging counter-culture. peace, and scientific prosperity. Elegant Most important for Winter is that 1968 descriptions of the built environment of was the last great blast of Marxism and the fair and the story of Picasso’s master- socialism whose ideas of workers’ libera- piece Guernica, which was included at the tion would be decisively eclipsed by the Spanish Republican pavilion, stand out in 1990s by movements centering on trans- Winter’s analysis. Once again, however, national human rights. the visionaries of peace were caught up in The final chapter of the book is entitled a series of contradictions between capi- “Global Citizenship.” Winter traces the talism, scientific progress, and efforts at development of notions of global human peace while barbarism was already rear- rights and governance through an analysis ing its ugly head in Nazi Germany and of a range of recent transnational devel- Franco’s Spain. opments including the arrest of Chilean The French World War One veter- dictator Augusto Pinochet in London in ans’ leader and prominent jurist, René 1998; the lawsuit of the Indian govern- Cassin, is the subject of Chapter 4. For ment against Union Carbide for the Bho- Winter, Cassin’s efforts to draft the 1948 pal disaster in 1984; the establishment of Universal Declaration of Human Rights the precedent of women’s rights in cases of are a prime example of a minor utopian rape brought against accused Serbian war project: “a mode of describing where criminals during the civil war in the ex- 310 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62

Yugoslavia; and notions of transnational respect is absence of discussion of the citizenship rights for immigrants. While Russian Revolution of 1917 itself which firm in his belief that the prerogatives of surely qualifies as a utopian moment. national state sovereignty remain solidly Since Winter’s focus is “minor” utopian in place, Winter concludes that global moments this can be forgiven (yet he fails citizenship as a minor utopia “stretch [es] curiously not only to mention that Wood- our sense of the possible…” (203) row Wilson acted against the interests of Winter is a superb researcher and a the colonized nations in his hypocritical fine writer with an eye for fascinating “self-determination” schemes, but also, details and vignettes. His argument is as David Fogelsong has brilliantly docu- tightly structured and logically coherent. mented, that he sent thousands of us What is very frustrating, however, is his troops and tens of millions of dollars to acceptance of “actually existing capital- anti-Semitic Cossack warlords to defeat ism” as establishing the limits of social the Bolshevik Revolution.) But even when change in the twentieth century. This he discusses the Republican and Popular extremely impoverished version of social Front governments in Spain and France, change is perhaps the norm in the liberal for example, he omits that these were academic establishment, but it is fair to also products of explosive revolutionary point out that his failure to contextual- movements from below which envisioned ize his minor utopian projects (and their an alternative world. Workers’ move- failures) within the social and economic ments and socialist ideas, which were structures of twentieth-century capital- central to many students and to libera- ism and imperialism and his neglect of tion theologians, are briefly mentioned many other utopian moments associated in the chapter on 1968, but are down- with workers’ and socialist movements played in favour of the supposed “moral” severely limit the power of his book. liberation envisioned by such activists. It should be no longer possible, if it ever And surely it is impossible to understand was, to dismiss every movement, party, 1968 without understanding the general and thinker associated with Marxism strike in France and the wider rank-and- and socialism because of the abomina- file movements of the 1960s and 1970s in tion of Stalin’s Russia. The straight line many countries that proved to be much drawn between Lenin and Stalin (and by more potent threats to the establishment extension other socialist movements in than student rebellion alone. By the same the twentieth century), as recent books token, it is instructive that Winter makes by Kevin Murphy and Lars Lih, among no reference to the Portuguese Revolution many others, have convincingly shown, of 1974–1975, the Allende government in was a shoddy byproduct of a Cold War Chile in the early 1970s, the overthrow historiography that was more about prop- of the Shah of Iran in 1979, the battle of ping up us state department versions of Seattle in 1999, the World Social Forums the past than about honest historical in the 1990s, and the continuing anti- research. Winter is far too sophisticated capitalist globalization movement. and competent to openly subscribe to Winter’s “minor utopians” are cer- this line of thinking, but one wonders tainly worthy of study, but with no clear why he almost completely dismisses uto- understanding of the limits of their pian moments linked to the powerful largely liberal reform projects, how they workers’ and socialist movements of the were circumscribed by capitalist power twentieth century. structures, and how they intersected The most flagrant negligence in this or contrasted with other more radical r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 311 movements this book leaves much to be ductory chapter does provide a historical desired. Small wonder that the favour- background linking travel and tourism to able blurb on the front cover of Dreams of European colonization and the growth of Peace and Freedom comes from Foreign holidays in the West (acquired through Affairs, a journal that has done its best to the struggle of industrial workers). Now- prevent any truly utopian challenges to icka discusses the major themes in the the horrors of war and collective violence historical evolution of tourism such as which continue unabated in the twenty- the Grand Tour, and Cook’s mass pack- first century. aged holidays. The only omission is the Sean Purdy role religious pilgrimages played in his- University of São Paulo torical tourism. It is in the substantive chapters of the book where Nowicka’s primary theme Pamela Nowicka, The No-Nonsense of “tourism as exploitation” is detailed. Guide to Tourism (Toronto: Between the Tourism has been an important eco- Lines/New Internationalist Publications nomic development strategy foisted on 2007) poor countries by a range of institutional actors including the International Mon- Writing critical material which is etary Fund, World Bank, and the United accessible to the public is no easy task. Nation’s World Tourism Organization Readable prose, brevity, and a willingness (unwto), boosted by the World Travel to abandon stifling scholarly conventions and Tourism Council (wttc), an increas- (e.g., endless, not always relevant cita- ingly powerful global industry asso- tions) escape many academic writers. ciation. In chapter two Nowicka begins There is also the challenge of dissemina- to take a sledgehammer to the power- tion, making the material readily avail- ful discourse of tourism as a warm and able to a broad readership whose critical fuzzy, eco-friendly form of “bottom-up” thinking is largely shaped by the whims economic development. Of particular of an uncritical mainstream media. The emphasis is the problem of “leakage.” No-Nonsense Guides published by the In many countries in the Global South, New Internationalist continue the long- over half of the tourist dollar leaves the established practice of producing radical region as airline companies and global educational material. These alternative hotel chains based in the North retain texts provide much greater depth than a significant revenues. The author puts a pamphlet but do not require the reader to human face on the problem with a num- commit to a 600–page treatise on a con- ber of inserts giving voice to workers in temporary political-economic issue. the margins of the tourism economy who A recent addition to the series is Pamela explain the struggle they have to make a Nowicka’s The No-Nonsense Guide to living in the industry. Tourism. Nowicka, an activist and jour- Chapters three and four honestly con- nalist, has written a concise, readable front perhaps the primary contradiction overview of contemporary tourism from complicating a radical perspective. Spe- a critical perspective. Despite the book’s cifically, there is no escaping the fact that brevity, the author manages to cover global tourism is driven by large numbers significant aspects of one of the fastest of workers in advanced capitalist coun- growing global industries. The work is tries “consuming” places, experiences, largely focussed on the post-war devel- and bodies in the Global South through opment of global tourism, but the intro- a number of unequal and precarious 312 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 exchange relationships. As Nowicka activity at all? As an academic who has notes, “to have traveled confers cachet.” travelled from Toronto to Boston, Oslo, (53) The cultural capital accumulated Quebec City, and Vancouver over a seven- through travel experiences does differen- week period, I must come clean with my tiate classes, but also positions all tour- own hypocrisy in this regard. To quote ists above the ‘Other’ who is dependent Augustine, “the world is a book and those on the visitor for his/her material well- who do not travel read only a page.” But as being. This dependency is translated into Nowicka has succinctly argued through- exploitation as tourism workers surren- out the text, “reading” the world in this der physical, emotional and, in growing manner comes with a very high price. A numbers, sexual labour to tourists for truly radical text must consider the pos- less money as they compete in a global sibility of a world with limited or no tour- tourism market. The exploitation is fur- ism as we presently know it. ther described in Chapter five as a form Nowicka’s No-Nonsense Guide is a use- of “new colonialism,” which is reproduc- ful work with a few conceptual limita- ing the periphery while doing significant tions, some of which have already been damage to the environment each time a noted. The most significant failing is the full passenger jet leaves the runway. treatment of the “tourist” as a generic, Chapter six explores how global tour- undifferentiated category. There are vari- ism and its oppressive power relations eties of tourists with significantly dif- remain a preferred and much touted form ferent travel motivations and resources. of economic development. The myths of Business travellers (who often combine environmental friendly development, pleasure travel with their trips) behave local control, and “peace through tour- differently than people visiting friends ism” are debunked. Despite the political and relatives (VFRs, a fast growing seg- efforts of ngos fighting against mega- ment of the tourist market given global resort tourism lead by transnational cor- migration). Similarly, mass resort tour- porations, such forms of (re)development ism is different from the “working holi- are dominating recently traumatized day” taken by many student travellers. In areas from New Orleans to Sri Lanka. part, this generic treatment stems from In the final chapter, Nowicka outlines the book’s conflation of global tourism an agenda for a “new tourism” which with North-South leisure travel. In fact, reaches beyond voluntary codes of con- global tourism remains a highly regional- duct and “ecotourism” rhetoric. Some ized phenomenon. For example, France is of the suggestions such as a fair-trade consistently one of the world’s most vis- regime which removes tourism from ited countries, with most tourists coming trade agreements and campaigns to edu- from Europe and North America. The cate tourists on why it is necessary to per- author does not address tourism relations haps “pay more” for informal activities in among rich countries, but I would sug- the destinations are warranted. Instead gest that similar exploitation exists, and of dismissing every souvenir seller as a this is especially evident in the number of charlatan or guide as a hustler, tourists immigrant workers toiling in the hotels should pay a fair wage. Actions such as an of New York and London. anti-sweatshop campaign for tourists are Another weakness of the text stems commendable. Nowicka fails, however, from its greatest strength. The author to address seriously the most difficult integrates few academic sources into question concerning her subject: should the book, referring a great deal to a sin- we continue tourism as a mass consumer gle edited collection. Instead, resources r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 313 are drawn from respected international There is now a twenty-year tradi- agencies and a number of ngos work- tion of activists, academics, and policy- ing to alleviate poor working conditions makers proposing alternative ways to in tourist destinations in the South. The measure well-being. Among the better author presents a wealth of statistical known attempts are the Human Deve- material clearly. Facts and figures are lopment Index (hdi), Marilyn Waring’s supplemented with a number of anec- work drawing attention to the neglect of dotes, cases, and vignettes offset from the women’s work in the gdp, Nordhaus and main text in boxes. The original voices of Tobin’s Measure of Economic Welfare, Raj, Shankar, and others highlighted in and other environmentally-focused indi- such boxes illuminate the real inequality ces such as the Genuine Progress Indica- experienced by tourism workers. tor (gpi). Mark Anielski is a part of this Overall, Nowicka has produced a pow- tradition. He worked on refinements to erful little book which meets the aspira- the gpi and applied the resulting index tions of the No-Nonsense Guide series. It to Alberta in a widely-publicized 2001 is written for a popular audience, but as report. He has worked in communities someone who has taught tourism devel- from Leduc, Alberta to Nunavut to Santa opment at the post-secondary level, I feel Monica as well as with corporations the work will serve as an excellent com- and with China’s Academy of the Social plementary text for any course which Sciences to carry out audits of well-being. examines tourism critically. I fear, how- The Economics of Happiness is a personal ever, that it will be largely overlooked by account that draws on this experience to many instructors who uncritically view promote his Genuine Wealth Model. tourism development as the best alterna- The subject is a worthy one. We need tive for poor people in the South. alternatives to the gdp to better focus our Steven Tufts collective efforts on improving people’s York University lives. And while there is no single “impro- ved gdp,” there is now a smorgasbord of alternatives available to accommodate Mark Anielski, The Economics of the differing goals of communities and Happiness: Building Genuine Wealth nations, and this is surely a good thing. (Gabriola Island, bc: New Society Anielski’s obvious energy and enthusiasm Publishers 2007) in adding to these alternatives deserve applause, but the Genuine Wealth model Gross domestic product has many that this book sets out is not one I can well-known shortcomings as a measure of support. Measurement is valuable only economic well-being. It ignores non-mar- if it is demonstrably objective, and the ket work such as housework and parental Genuine Wealth Model fails this test. childcare; it places no value on leisure; it is The book is personal and Anielski’s boosted by all kinds of spending including beliefs are clear throughout. Perhaps it is negative expenditures such as the costs because many of his beliefs left me cold of war; it deducts nothing to account for that I found myself arguing against much environmental degradation; it pays no of the book as I read. If you agree with regard to the distribution of income. And statements such as “In nature there is no those are only the economic shortcom- scarcity, only abundance, harmony and ings. When it is used as a measure of over- equilibrium” (60) or “true wealth ultima- all societal well-being, it ignores freedoms, tely comes as a gift from God” (66) – one rights, lifespan, and more. of the “fundamental tenets” at the “philo- 314 / l abour /le t r ava i l 62 sophical heart of Genuine Wealth” – you ills such as problem gambling, voter may like this book more than I did. participation, and obesity (for example) The early chapters review the faults of while not breaking out problems more the gdp and chart the use of gpi-inspired prevalent in the past (tuberculosis, innu- indices to construct an alternative index meracy, undernourishment) inevitably (single number) that better measures the produces a downward-sloping line. But overall health of a society, culminating the meaning of that line is not clear. in Anielski and colleagues’ 2001 report The Genuine Wealth Model goes asking “were Albertans in general better beyond providing aggregate measures for off today in terms of economic, social, countries and provinces, and the most health and environmental well-being interesting chapters of the book are those than they were in 1960?” (39) The report that document Anielski’s efforts to apply concluded that “to 1999, Alberta’s gdp his methodology to individual commu- (in constant 1998 dollars) increased by nities, organizations, and companies. over 400%, or 4.4% per annum, while the In these chapters there is no attempt to Alberta gpi Well-being Index declined at condense the observations into a single an annual rate of 0.5% per year... the best number and the outcome is more of an gpi Index was recorded in 1961 and the audit than a ranking. If the community lowest in 1998.” (43–4) itself gets input into the kinds of variables In constructing the Well-being Index, to be studied, then an audit of the kind he Anielski and his colleagues combined no carries out would be a great focal point fewer than 51 separate variables, from for discussion and policy debate. Given car crashes and suicide rates to timber the increasing use of social audits in such sustainability, and from hazardous waste areas as labour standards, environmental to economic growth and household debt. impact, and good citizenship, the discus- Each was rated on a scale of 0 to 100, sion around these initiatives is valuable. anchored by the maximum value over the Even here Anielski skirts some of the time period (100) and with a fixed zero difficult problems. The obvious danger at no incidence (of suicides/pollution in such engagements (especially when etc.). The index is an aggregate of these one is hired by corporations to evaluate numbers. their conduct) is that there is a conflict of A trap in designing such a complex interest between the roles of auditor and measure is that the index will reflect what client; yet this conflict is not mentioned. the designer expects to see, and unfortu- Anielski too often believes what people nately Anielski falls into this trap. There say of themselves. He accepts the claim is no indication of how the Alberta varia- that China is adopting “a society of mode- bles were selected but of his earlier work ration” (132] and following a socially and Anielski says, “I organized the available environmentally harmonious develop- indicators according to what I felt people ment agenda (xiaokang) because Presi- might intuitively say they would want dent Hu Jintao says so. The section on the more of and what they would want less of Bhutan monarchy’s promotion of Gross to improve their quality of life.” (39) Cur- National Happiness does not mention the rent social problems (divorce, obesity) expulsion of ethnic Nepalese from that are included while social improvements country or the undemocratic rule of the (dental standards, access to the arts for king who introduced the measure. His example) are omitted. The final index take on the European Middle Ages (5th gives equal weight to each indicator, so to 16th centuries) is that it was “an age of including separate variables for modern moderation.” (54–5) “There was a sense r e v i e w s / co m p t e s r en dus / 315 of the common good: that wealth was collective action problems, asymmetric something available to all citizens not to information problems, and power ine- be hoarded as private property. During qualities that too often prevent groups of this era work and the acquisitive efforts well-meaning individuals from acting in were encouraged, but miserliness was a constructive fashion. frowned upon.” Such rose-tinted vision In summary, the book is unfortunately does not help the effort to construct a missed opportunity. Anielski brings objective measures. experience and enthusiasm to the valua- The outlook of the book is one of pro- ble project of better measuring our well- gress-by-enlightenment. If only we could being, but his attempt fails by virtue of its recognize the shallowness of our cur- subjective approach and because he lets rent society and refocus on more spi- his own spiritual outlook interfere with ritual goals, we would move society in the act of measurement. that direction. In this Anielski has a lot Tom Slee in common with ideas of social entre- Waterloo, Ontario preneurship – business is fine, as long as well-meaning people are in charge. This ignores key institutional issues such as