Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. By Henry Braverman. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998. 338 pp. $19.00. Paperback

Milloy, Jeremy

Braverman's New World? Assessing the Labour Process In Recent Scholarship

Guard, Julie

and low and declining accumulation rates. The authors view this structural
decline as potentially quite ominous, which could prefigure the emergence of a
serious dollar crisis and the eventual demise of US global hegemony. The diag-
nosis of the structural causes of the crisis lends itself to several possible future
scenarios in a post-neoliberal social order:
A likely list of the developments that would stimulate new dynamics is as fol-
lows: (1) the weakness of the economic recovery and the likelihood of a new
contraction of GDP, (2) the threat of the repetition of a new episode of
financial perturbations, (3) a crisis of the dollar, and (4) the multiplication of
new symptoms of the lost economic pre-eminence of the US (237).
The only real criticism proposed is that the authors have inexplicably ignored
Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis, which has led many heterodox econo-
mists (and some orthodox economists as well) to describe the financial melt-
down as a “Minsky moment”. Similarly, Fisher’s debt-deflation theory of depres-
sions is only mentioned briefly. The arguments developed in this volume could
have been considerably reinforced by incorporating a Minsky-Fisher theoretical
framework. Despite these reservations, this volume is an original and critical
contribution to recent heterodox debates over the critical dynamics of neoliberal
globalisation and the growing literature devoted to the phenomenon of financial-
isation. Indeed, the impressive arsenal of statistical evidence deployed to support
the central arguments by the authors makes this volume essential reading.
Bill Lucarelli
University of Western Sydney
Janice R. Foley and Patricia Baker, Eds. Unions, Equity, and the Path to
Renewa l (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010).
Unions, Equity, and the Path to Renewal, edited by Janice R. Foley and Patricia Baker,
makes a useful contribution in support of the struggle to revitalize the union
movement, not least by disputing the argument that equity is a frill that unions,
currently under attack and preoccupied with the fight for their very existence,
can ill-afford. On the contrary, the contributors - who are remarkably consistent
on this point — argue that progress toward equity is essential to union renewal
and revitalization. Indeed, they insist that unions have lost much of their former
relevance largely because they have failed to support their female and racialized
members.
The book, like many others in the genre, is a collaboration between
union activists and activist scholars, an approach that links the experience of
Book Reviews108
Quark 15.2draft FINISHED.qxd  11/21/11  2:50 PM  Page 108
those who have struggled in the trenches with analytically informed research.
Chapters by three prominent women unionists, Miriam Edelson, Carol Wall, and
Marie Clarke Walker, remind us that women, including many women of colour,
have struggled for decades to advance equity within unions. They have formed
coalitions with community groups, organized women and workers of colour
within unions, and forced their unions to at least acknowledge the presence of
workers of colour. In a few cases, they have won structural changes, such as the
creation of executive positions for women and members of other equity-seeking
groups. But they point out that decades of work have led to only small improve-
ments, most change has been cosmetic, and all too often efforts to advance equi-
ty are resisted by union “brothers” who refuse to acknowledge the existence of
racism and sexism or to recognize and confront their own privilege.
Clearly, more effective strategies are needed, and this is where scholars
can help. In her chapter, Anne Forrest identifies a significant obstacle to change
in the decades-long complacency of the organized labour movement that, she
argues, has forsaken its role as the “sword of justice” in favour of defending the
relative advantages unions have won for their members. In the process, she con-
tends, unions have become vested interests, content to secure a “middle-class
lifestyle for the few” – mostly white men in blue-collar jobs - while dismissing
women, young, and racialized workers as inherently too hard to organize. The
cure for this decline, she proposes, is for unions to re-take their proper place at
the heart of social justice struggles, abandoning the institutions that privilege the
male industrial workers who no longer form the core of the labour movement.
Instead, they must wholeheartedly embrace an equity agenda that focuses on the
women, young and racialized workers who are concentrated in service and non-
standard jobs at the core of the economy and who represent the real future of
organized labour.
Having established that equity is essential, the book examines efforts by
members of equity-seeking groups, most of them women, to advance equity
within their unions. Most of the evidence is from public sector unions in
Canada, although several chapters consider the U.S., Britain, and Australia, and
there is some evidence from private sector unions. But regardless of differences,
contributors agree that neither union leaders nor government policies do much
to advance equity, that equity-seekers must take action within their own unions,
and that activists achieve the best results when they form coalitions, mobilize
members specifically around issues that affect them directly, and build alliances
with other social justice organizations in the wider community. Linda Briskin, in
her chapter, advocates cross-constituency organizing, in which issue-specific
groups collaborate but resist efforts by their leaders to amalgamate women’s and
other groups into single, overarching social justice committees. When they do so,
their efforts tend to bog down and members lose impetus and energy. Her con-
clusion that real rank-and-file energy emanates from coalitions of diverse groups
Left History 15.2 109
Quark 15.2draft FINISHED.qxd  11/21/11  2:50 PM  Page 109
resonates with those of the other contributors. Something close to a consensus
emerges among the contributors that equity seekers must mobilize among them-
selves, seek support from union leaders but retain their autonomy, and build
strength and solidarity through multiple coalitions with other social justice and
equity-seeking groups.
This collection, with its compelling argument that unions can no longer
afford to treat equity as an unaffordable luxury, but as critical to their survival, its
detailed analyses of the equity strategies that have failed, and its clear and
detailed accounts of those that have succeeded, makes a valuable contribution to
the literature on union renewal. Those engaged in the struggle to advance equity
in their unions would do well to read the book and consider its arguments; they
should encourage their union leaders to read it too.
Julie Guard
University of Manitoba
Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge,
MA, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010).
Each year my course on “Human Rights in Historical Perspective” begins with
an analysis of Adam Hochschild’s Bury the Chains (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), and
in particular its claim that the British abolitionist campaign was “History’s first
human rights movement”. The students usually decide that it was not, some
arguing that it was not the first, others that it was not a human rights campaign
at all. Columbia University historian Samuel Moyn would agree with the latter
group. In his thought-provoking book Moyn maintains that human rights as a
genuine global phenomenon only began in the 1970s, with 1977 the “break-
through year”.
Moyn launches his argument with a disparagement of the historiogra-
phy that has engaged in a “quixotic search for deep roots” of contemporary
human rights. Only very recently have historians (or philosophers, for that mat-
ter) sought to trace a consistent trajectory for human rights to the ancient
Greeks or Jews, to medieval Christians or Enlightenment scholars or eighteenth
century revolutionaries. In the course of his attack, Moyn confronts the prevail-
ing conventions in mainstream historical writing about human rights. Most con-
troversially, perhaps, he dismisses the impact of World War II and the Holocaust,
popularly assumed (with considerable academic support) to have generated a
reaction that led to the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
in 1948. Furthermore, he claims, non-governmental organizations had no real
hand in introducing human rights to the international agenda in 1945-1948, the
Declaration was not cross-cultural in formulation or principles, and it remained
Book Reviews110
Quark 15.2draft FINISHED.qxd  11/21/11  2:50 PM  Page 110


Janice R. Foley and Patricia Baker, Eds. Unions, Equity, and the Path to Renewal (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010).

Parnaby, Andrew

the following year. And Mills is also sound in showing how the more radical
members of Quebec’s feminist movement drew from decolonization discourse
and anti-colonial paradigms to elaborate their own critique of patriarchal norms
and practices by decades’ end. For those interested in brushing up on such
aspects of Montreal radicalism in the decade of the 1960s, Mills’ book is a good
place to start.
Alexis Lachaîne
York University
Martha Elizabeth Walls, No Need of a Chief for This Band: The
Maritime Mi’kmaq and Federal Electoral Legislation, 1899-1951
(Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010).
Using the Mi’kmaq as a case study, Martha Elizabeth Walls examines the creation
and imposition of federal electoral legislation in maritime Canada between 1899
and 1951 and the various ways in which indigenous communities accepted,
rejected, and deflected its assimilationist purpose. Indebted to colonial-era Indian
policy in the Canadas – which also sought the “gradual civilization of the Indian
tribes” – the 1899 amendments to the Indian Act aimed to replace indigenous
forms of governance, in all their variety, with a standardized band council sys-
tem. By electing their chiefs and councilors every three years under the auspices
of a local Indian agent, Walls recounts, the federal government hoped to accom-
plish in the realm of politics what reserve life and aboriginal schools sought in
the areas of economics and culture: the elimination of the Indian as an Indian.
It did not quite work out that way. While the new “triennial” system
enhanced the influence of superintendents and local Indian agents over local
political affairs – it was now possible for them to unilaterally depose an elected
chief – the Mi’kmaq themselves never fully succumbed to the letter or intent of
the new laws. Instead, as Walls demonstrates, a form of “political syncretism”
evolved on Mi’kmaw reserves, as communities across the region combined exist-
ing forms of indigenous governance (which in themselves had evolved over cen-
turies of encounter with Europeans) with elements of the new federal system to
defend and often expand the scope of their own autonomy. In the end, this
resistance, coupled with the absence of essential state resources (both financial
and human) to properly administer the new electoral legislation, not only under-
mined the law’s assimilationist objectives, but acted as a catalyst for contempo-
rary struggles for indigenous rights.
Developed over five tightly focused chapters, Walls’s argument is per-
suasive in many ways. To her immense credit, she situates her analysis of twenti-
eth-century Mi’kmaw politics in the deeper history of native-newcomer encoun-
Book Reviews130
Quark 15.2draft FINISHED.qxd  11/21/11  2:50 PM  Page 130
ters in the region, which stretch back to the late 1500s and early 1600s. In doing
so, Walls neutralizes the notion that a singular, static moment of authentic, pure-
ly Mi’kmaw politics ever existed, and conveys instead a portrait of constant
change and adaptation: political syncretism, in other words, had always been a
feature of indigenous life, whether the Mi’kmaq were negotiating with the
Abenaki, supporting the French, or fighting the British. Equally impressive is
Walls’s region-wide perspective, especially in the chapters dedicated to the trien-
nial system. With examples from Lennox Island (Prince Edward Island), Burnt
Church (New Brunswick), or Eskasoni (Nova Scotia) – to name but three – she
makes clear not only the diverse ways in which the Mi’kmaq responded to the
new federal legislation – from indifference to opposition — but also a host of
common issues that the new electoral system either called into being or drew to
the surface.
Yet for all its virtues – I might also have mentioned the book’s jargon-
free prose, well-chosen images, and relevance to contemporary issues – No Need
of a Chief for This Band was not entirely satisfying, for while it addresses a new
subject, it advances an overall argument that is by now familiar: twentieth-centu-
ry indigenous politics were defined, in large measure, by “resistance, accommo-
dation, and cultural survival.”(131) Indeed, as I turned the book’s last page, I had
the distinct sense that more could have been said, the analysis pushed further.
Numerous anecdotes presented in the text indicate that the struggle over the tri-
ennial system intersected with a wide range of other political issues fundamental
to Mi’kmaw life: territoriality, treaty memories, and the very definition of who
was and was not a Mi’kmaw person. That experiments in pan-Indianism and cre-
ation of new political regalia, such as the flag of the Grand Council, were taking
place at the same time suggests that a much deeper form of political reorienta-
tion – at the level of thought, even ontology — was taking place among the
Mi’kmaq as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth. The conceptual
categories of “resistance, accommodation, and cultural survival” capture part of
this process, but they don’t really capture it all. Perhaps an additional chapter
dedicated to a single community over a period of time, crafted with an eye
toward drawing the strands of these varied yet related political issues together,
was warranted.
My point here is not that Walls should have written a different book or
that I am ungrateful for the analysis that she did produce. Far from it: No Need of
a Chief for This Band opens up some important historiographical questions and
has obviously got me thinking. My point is simply that the argument advanced
by this book seems somewhat timid, in light of the evidence presented. That evi-
dence suggests a dynamic link between changes in political structures and
processes (on the one hand) and the (re)definition of individual and collective
identities (on the other). How that process actually took place in the Mi’kmaw
context remains to be fully explored; so, too, does a new way to conceptualize
Left History 15.2 131
Quark 15.2draft FINISHED.qxd  11/21/11  2:50 PM  Page 131
the relationship between the state, law, and indigenous people.
Andrew Parnaby,
Cape Breton University
David Frank and Nicole Lang, Labour Landmarks in New Brunswick
(Canadian Committee on Labour History, 2010).
Labour Landmarks in New Brunswick explores a fascinating but little known aspect
of New Brunswick’s cultural heritage - the tradition of commemorating the sac-
rifices and contributions of the province’s workers through the creation of
labour landmarks. (10) 
Crafted by award winning labour historians David Frank and Nicole Lang, with a
skilled team of assistants and supporters, it is the most recent offering of Labour
History in New Brunswick (lhtnb.ca), a community-university research alliance
devoted to fostering an informed public memory related to the history of work
in the province.
The authors explain that their study was inspired by the work of Archie
Green who, in the 1950s, first began to draw attention to “laborlore” and other
working class traditions that typically went unnoticed by historians and folk-
lorists. The present study is limited to one such form of expression – a selection
of markers that commemorate the experiences of work and workers in 20th
century New Brunswick. The book reads like a fireside chat, traveling across the
province, monument by monument, telling the story of how lives were lived,
how lives were lost, and how communities came together to ensure that their
history would not be forgotten.
Presented in ten brief chapters, in French and in English, Labour
Landmarks discusses memorials found in both public and private places, begin-
ning with those erected by families, by unions, and by other workers’ organiza-
tions. It goes on to consider markers that commemorate the history of work and
workers in the major high-risk sectors of the province’s traditional economy,
including firefighters and coal miners, railway workers and fishermen, mill and
forestry workers. A separate chapter examines the Labour movement’s “invented
tradition” of the April 28 “Day of Mourning” (67) and efforts to raise awareness
around the issues of workplace safety and the right to refuse unsafe work. (73)
The book includes 47 photographs of labour markers and of people
gathered at these sites for memorial ceremonies (62). These images are placed
throughout the book and are interpreted within the text, with photo credits
grouped together at the back, following a section of 72 explanatory endnotes.
The book concludes with a map and a list of 50 labour landmarks in the
Book Reviews132
Quark 15.2draft FINISHED.qxd  11/21/11  2:50 PM  Page 132


Martha Elizabeth Walls, No Need of a Chief for This Band: The Maritime Mi'kmaq and Federal Electoral Legislation, 1899-1951 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010).

Alamilla Boyd, Nan

the field from TsDKA and Dinamo have somewhat nuanced the early associa-
tions between the club and Soviet politics. Nonetheless, the club enjoyed a sec-
ond golden age during Khrushchev’s Thaw with the shining stars of Nikita
Simonian and Igor Netto. Success during the Brezhnev and Perestroika periods
was more sparse, a fact which, along with a weaker source base, may explain why
the author devotes to these eras a mere chapter.
In short, the history of Spartak is wonderfully integrated into the major
developments in Soviet politics, society and culture. But there are a few flaws.
First, the December 1935 invitation to Spartak by the French businessman
Bernard Levy to play in France could not be “in the best spirit of the Popular
Front” (79-80), as the Popular Front was elected only six months later. More
troublesome are the claims that Spartak’s image was much more cosmopolitan
than were those of the other clubs during the 1950s, solely for fielding a few
Russified non-Russians, and that the models of masculinity it spread were differ-
ent. In both cases the claims should be more grounded in evidence. The mas-
culinity issue almost disappears from the narrative after the Stalin period, proba-
bly due to lacunae in documentation. Also, given the depth of changes affecting
post-Soviet football for better and worse, it is difficult to understand why the
author deals with it in a mere two pages. Nonetheless, Edelman’s Spartak Moscow
is a labour of love that spans across decades and should set the standard for
much needed histories of Spartak’s competitors.
Jean Lévesque
Université du Québec à Montréal
Jessica Ellen Sewell, Women and the Everyday City: Public Space in San
Francisco, 1890-1915 (University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
Jessica Sewell’s readable and visually stimulating book examines the way women
traversed and domesticated a variety of urban and commercial public spaces at
turn-of-the-century San Francisco. In the process, women of all classes but par-
ticularly middle-class white women transformed the public sphere into a political
stage from which they ultimately demanded and won the right to vote.
Starting with historian Nancy Cott’s now classic notion of separate
spheres, Sewell examines a contradiction that middle-class women faced: relegat-
ed to home and hearth, women nonetheless increasingly occupied the public
sphere in ways that demanded negotiation and, finally, a redefinition of women’s
proper place in the urban environment. Sewell observes that tensions over the
mixed use of public space mark a difference between ideology and reality.
Matching ideology with “imagined landscapes” and reality with “experienced
landscapes”, Sewell draws from the theoretical work of Lefebvre and others to
Left History 15.2 141
Quark 15.2draft FINISHED.qxd  11/21/11  2:50 PM  Page 141
argue that the “built landscape” represents the often antagonistic compromises
women and men negotiated as they moved through the city in their daily lives.
Interestingly, Sewell argues that the built environment provides archival evidence
in itself for the negotiations that resulted in the modern city and the domestica-
tion of urban (counter-) publics. Through complex interactions, women trans-
formed the built environment, and by closely examining the evidence of every-
day life, Sewell provides readers with a new map of social change in the making.
Women and the Everyday City will be most interesting to historians and
social geographers, whose students will enjoy the book’s pointed gender analysis,
but its interdisciplinary methods, accessible prose, evocative images and cleanly
drawn maps make it appealing to a wide audience. In four tidy chapters Sewell
fleshes out the spaces of everyday life that women used to recreate the modern
city of San Francisco: sidewalks and streetcars; shopping districts downtown and
along San Francisco’s main streets; restaurants and cafes; and theaters, nick-
elodeons, and movie houses. In these chapters, Sewell draws from a rich variety
of sources, including drawings that trace the evolution of San Francisco’s munic-
ipal transportation system; etiquette guidebooks that instructed women how to
acknowledge social equals on the street while avoiding eye contact with inferiors;
archival photographs of elaborate department store interiors that evidence the
feminization of consumption; block-by-block city maps that document shifts in
the evolving use of commercial real estate both downtown and within neighbor-
hoods; and dining guides that helped women find affordable but respectable
places to eat while shopping.
Throughout, Sewell attends to class differences, noting that poor
women had fewer opportunities to use and re-purpose the downtown commer-
cial spaces that elite and middle-class women increasingly occupied. Poor women
occupied their neighborhood’s main street – the corner market, grocery, and
store-front nickelodeon – but it is not clear if the same significant change over
time that Sewell so effectively documents for downtown commercial spaces
occurred in San Francisco’s ethnic neighborhoods. Moreover, the first-person
narratives that Sewell artfully draws from to enliven her gendered analysis of the
built environment do not include any working-class women, and this weakens
Sewell’s comparative analysis. The wonderfully rich dairies of Annie Haskell, a
middle-class women without much means, provide a vivid counter-point, but
poor women remain silent in a book that often comes alive through the voices
of its historical narrators.
The time period Sewell examines, 1890-1915, gives readers a fresh look
at well-trod territory. By Sewell’s account, feminist activism was energized by
women’s use of the public sphere, and a splendid comparison of California’s
1896 and 1911 suffrage campaigns highlights how the urban transformations
Sewell documents enabled women to assert a new and “modern” political pres-
ence. Sewell’s chapter on the suffrage movement is the longest in the book, and
Book Reviews142
Quark 15.2draft FINISHED.qxd  11/21/11  2:50 PM  Page 142
in many ways it feels like a separate project, but Sewell’s analysis of the built
environment points toward middle-class women’s political machinations: “The
increased range of nonpolitical public spaces in which women could and did
move and act was an important aspect of their claim to political rights as mem-
bers of the public and their ability to make that claim” (127). Equally interesting
are the commercialized aspects of the public spaces Sewell documents. Women’s
movements toward direct political engagement seems dependant on women’s
occupation of commercialized public spaces. As a result, women, as consumers
and spenders, become valuable to the state in new ways during this time period,
but only in ways that women of means could experience. Drawing from a rich
trove of sources, Women and the Everyday City examines women’s political mobi-
lization from the perspective of the build environment; as such, it documents a
race- and class-specific movement that re-gendered the urban landscape and
expanded political entitlements for women.
Nan Alamilla Boyd
San Francisco State University
Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early
Baltimore, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).
Seth Rockman provides new clarity and validity to the vision that modern indus-
trial capitalism was built on the backs of poor, downtrodden, and largely anony-
mous masses. Scraping By is about the working poor in early America and the var-
ious ways in which impoverished families and individuals struggled to survive
during the early nineteenth century when urbanization and industrialization
began to transform the social and economic landscape. Readers are immediately
thrust into the ‘dirty work’ of early republic American capitalism, a rapidly
changing political economy where impoverished wage labourers, slaves, and
indentured immigrants ‘scraped by’ in unskilled, precarious, and exploitative
work. Compelled by the exigencies of survival and divided by gender, race, legal
status, and place of origin, a diverse workforce of labourers faced the daily grind
not yet guided by a coherent sense of “shared consciousness, identity, or poli-
tics” (11). The material conditions in which the working poor found themselves
were imposed by an unjust and exploitative market system that created and rein-
forced class distinctions, eventually giving rise to the American working-class.
During this early period, however, Rockman finds only disaggregated masses of
industrious people whose hard (and often dangerous) work collectively trans-
formed Baltimore into an economic powerhouse.
Rockman contends that the transition from slavery to wage work was
essentially incomplete and presented new problems whereby most wage labour-
Left History 15.2 143
Quark 15.2draft FINISHED.qxd  11/21/11  2:50 PM  Page 143


Jessica Ellen Sewell, Women and the Everyday City: Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915 (University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

Graham, Peter

and inequality that shaped the lives of impoverished workers and their families.
With these social and material realities in mind we have a fuller understanding of
the working poor before moving into subsequent discussions of their contact
with institutional sites of power such as state welfare, courts, and penitentiaries.
Finally, Rockman concludes with a discussion of the extent to which the advent
of the free market system and attendant commodification of labour coincided
with a reassertion of a commitment to slave labour. The strategic placement of
early chapters on material hardship and subjugation ahead of later chapters on
state welfare and punishment seems to chart the inevitable path toward which
this new political economy propelled those caught in its web. This organisational
structure forces the reader to grapple with Rockman’s larger contention that cap-
italism is an essentially oppressive system.
Scraping By is a provocative yet convincing work that outlines disturbing
parallels between slavery and wage work in the antebellum period. Rockman
shows how the commodification of labour in the modern capitalist system
entailed the purchase and control of human labour, accruing profit and advan-
tage to a concentrated few with financial means. By focusing on the plight of
subaltern workers in the early American republic, Rockman successfully demon-
strates how early capitalists controlled access to and movement within the mar-
ket system and in so doing, constricted opportunities to ameliorate extreme dis-
parities in wealth. Probably Rockman’s most important contribution is to reaf-
firm that the best indication of whether or not a given society is just is to con-
sider the condition of those at its foundation, which is to say, the material condi-
tion of working people. The poverty, toil, and anguish of early Baltimore’s work-
ing poor as sketched out by Rockman reveal a great deal about the nature of
American capitalism in the early nineteenth century.
Dustin Galer
University of Toronto
Daniel Burton-Rose, Guerrilla USA: The George Jackson Brigade and the
Anticapitalist Underground of the 1970s (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London:
University of California Press, 2010).
Between 1975 and 1977, the George Jackson Brigade took part in more than two
dozen bank robberies and bombings. Daniel Burton-Rose’s Guerrilla USA gives a
critical, but largely sympathetic account of this seven-member armed struggle
group based out of Washington State as they bombed targets ranging from the
prison industrial complex to strike-bound workplaces in an attempt to stir the
masses into action.
Laying the background for the introduction of the brigade, the book’s
Left History 15.2 145
Quark 15.2draft FINISHED.qxd  11/21/11  2:50 PM  Page 145
earliest chapters lend a whiff of inevitability to the brigade’s call to arms, spin-
ning the story of a largely pacifist left that is unable to step up to combat the
violence of the state. Burton-Rose uses the good sixties/bad sixties dichotomy,
but turns the valuation around, lauding the violence-coded action of the late
1960s. During the next decade, we are told that anti-capitalist activists faced
another narrow choice: “joining a party-building organization or one that con-
centrated on armed attacks against the government and corporations” (152)
Of course, this tome is dedicated to the latter. The largest portion of
the book is devoted to detailed portraits of two brigade members, Ed Mead and
Rita Brown, whose lives before the armed struggle are no less stirring. Both
grew up in rural environments, with single parents struggling to make ends meet,
and eventually wound up in prison (Ed for burglary and Rita for stealing money
from the envelopes she processed at the post office). There, they read books,
debated new ideas, witnessed injustice and even played the part of jailhouse
lawyer, a turn of events not unusual for left-wing prison narratives. But their
involvement with prisoner organizing, which included strikes and links with pris-
oner solidarity groups on the outside, became a catalyst for their left-wing mili-
tancy.
These biographies lend support to Burton-Rose’s thesis that the brigade
represented a departure from the composition, if not the practise, of its well-
known counterpart, the Weather Underground, which has been highlighted in a
movie and a half dozen books in recent years. While members of this group are
associated with a WASP elite, the brigade - named after George Jackson, a mem-
ber of the Black Panther Party and one of the Soledad Brothers - had a more
diverse membership. Yet the practical and theoretical implications of this differ-
ent composition remained unclear in the absence of a formal concluding chap-
ter.
Burton-Rose’s extensive oral interviews with former brigade members
lend the book an immersive atmosphere. From the excitement of a successful
bombing, to the airs of apprehension surrounding successive bank robberies, the
book retells exceptional events on a very human scale. This method of collective
biography suits the small, intimate world that the brigade members forced them-
selves to inhabit. That their personal and political relationships are more typical
of a small commune than a guerrilla army become especially apparent when
arrests reduce the active brigade to three people – two of them a couple. The
romanticism of taking on the corporations and the state cannot hold against the
endless days between bank robberies and bombings. Isolated from their left
community and confined to a safe house, board games, television and bickering
became their daily routine until they too are captured.
Consistent with the views of other North American guerrillas, the
brigade and its supporters expressed a strong disdain for the ‘do nothing left,’
decrying the inconsistency of only supporting armed struggle in the global south
Book Reviews146
Quark 15.2draft FINISHED.qxd  11/21/11  2:50 PM  Page 146
and affirming that Black and Native Americans surely support their armed strug-
gle. Mead, who opined that the brigade would “totally bypass the left,” summed
up the feeling of resentment: “There’s two kinds of people-there’s those doing
armed work, and they can take all the risks and make the sacrifices and we can
sit back and criticize them... [W]e can just go about our work and revolution is
some nebulous hope or passing fad” (200)
Burton-Rose’s lack of criticism of this armed work limited the book’s
appeal for me. Although the author disapproves of some of the brigade’s more
boneheaded moves, he appears to only sympathize with left-wing critics who
supported domestic armed struggle, like the Left Bank Collective or the Coven.
The book reaches its nadir on this score in a chapter centred on an underground
press article critical of the brigade. There, Burton-Rose records the criticisms of
members and supporters of the brigade, bookended with his own critique of the
article, which includes language and political arguments reminiscent of the circa-
1970s urban guerrillas he portrays.
I have to disagree with Burton-Rose. I do believe that it is easier to rob
banks and bomb buildings than to change people’s minds about capitalism and
organize workers. And despite claims for the brigade’s anti-vanguardism, I am
convinced that this is endemic to urban guerrilla struggle, whether Leninist or
not, as glimpsed at in the brigade’s dismissal of much of the left and in state-
ments like: “[N]o more mass meetings stalemating action” (179). But for all this
criticism, the book is a must read for anyone with a critical eye who wants to
change the world and avoid the dead ends of the past. As a communiqué by the
brigade put it: “There are two things to remember about revolution: we are
going to get our asses kicked, and we are going to win” (237) 
Peter Graham
Queen’s University
Barbara Foley, Wrestling with the Left:  The Making of Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
In August 1968, I took part in a bus drivers’ strike at the Chicago Transit
Authority, where I had a summer driving job. Picketing and rallies provided the
chance to speak with drivers I had known only casually. One was a Black man,
about fifty, who turned out to have been active in the great 1937 Flint sit-down
that unionised General Motors. “I worked with the Socialists”, he recalled.
“Communists, too. I was pretty much in with them, until I realised they cared
more about themselves than us”.
My friend’s comment reflects a collective intellectual shift by thousands of
young Black workers and activists attracted to the Communist Party (CP) in the
Left History 15.2 147
Quark 15.2draft FINISHED.qxd  11/21/11  2:50 PM  Page 147


Daniel Burton-Rose, Guerrilla USA: The George Jackson Brigade and the Anticapitalist Underground of the 1970s (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 2010).

Winter, Kari J.

Castillo, David R.

Imperious Freedom: The Tangled Narratives of Anti-Human Trafficking Discourse

Keene, Judith

This is a truly wonderful work that adds the type of texture that is so
often missing from historical studies. Of course, it can reasonably be argued that
Fair-Schulz may be making too much of a limited sample to make his case. Yet,
he argues forcefully to the importance of these individuals not merely as sym-
bols but as significant political and social actors. Moreover, he freely admits the
limitations of this first effort when he comments that further research “will pro-
duce a more rounded picture of the background, motivations, as well as patterns
of thought and behavior of this intriguing group of people.” (345) All the same,
this is a remarkable book using innovative methodology, solid research expressed
in clear prose on a little discussed but vitally important subject. One can only
eagerly look forward to this fine scholar’s future work.
William A. Pelz
Institute of Working Class History
François Maspero, Out of the Shadows; A Life of Gerda Taro. Translated
from the French by Geoffrey Strachan (London: Souvenir Press, 2008).
In this small book, François Maspero has restored Gerda Taro and her stunning
photography to view in full light. As Maspero says, he has rescued her from the
cruel fate of being always someone else’s shadow; never her own. The figure that
towered over Taro’s life and work is Robert Capa. Probably the finest war pho-
tographer of the twentieth century, Capa was Taro’s lover, compañero and part-
ner in their commitment as photojournalists to document the horrors of the
expanding Nazis movement and the heroism of those who stood against it.
Capa’s oft-quoted dictum, that in war photography, if the image is no
good the photographer is not in close enough, was one that Taro and Capa lived
by. The extraordinary power of the photographic images they produced is proof
of their principle: protagonist, photographer and viewer are immersed in the
immediacy of the events captured in the picture. Their photographs are a lasting
legacy to the Spanish civil war, instantly evoking that conflict. Taro’s early pic-
tures are optimistic and memorable: Catalan women undergoing military training
on the beach outside Barcelona; the beaming militiawomen off to the Aragon
front, in cap and uniform with Sam Browne belt and rifle as they farewell hus-
bands and children. And probably the most famous photograph of the war is
Capa’s “The Falling Soldier”, taken while he and Taro were filming on the
Cordoba front in September 1936. The militiaman’s head is flung back and the
rifle extended away in outstretched arm, he has been caught in the frame at the
very point of death. These are the images that signified Republican Spain then
and have continued to do so ever since. But of course the other inevitable and
terrible side of the Taro-Capa principle of war photography is that it required a
Left History 15.2 135
Quark 15.2draft FINISHED.qxd  11/21/11  2:50 PM  Page 135
limitless store of bravado and bravery from the person who keeps wielding the
camera despite the danger of being immersed in the swirl of battle. The peril
that underlay their principle is starkly evident in the deaths that separately over-
took them; Taro first and then Capa.
Taro was killed in Spain in July 1937. Her tragic death not only brought
an end to the vivid life of a vibrant young woman but it foreclosed the possibili-
ty of her future place at the centre of the new artistic movement that was mod-
ern photography. Shooting alone and on foot at the Brunette front, she was
caught up in the chaos of the republican military retreat. Hitching a ride on the
running board of a car, while continuing to film, she was sideswiped by an errat-
ically driven republican tank and fell under the tank’s moving tracks. She died
that evening in a field hospital set up in The Escorial. Gerda Taro was twenty-
seven years of age; her short life was like a brilliant thread woven through many
of the international events that marked European politics and culture in the
1930s. Capa was killed by a landmine in North Vietnam in 1954 as he filmed a
French army unit in combat in the first stage of the Vietnam War.
Born Gerta Pohorylle in 1910 in Stuttgart, Taro was raised in the com-
fortable middle class. Her parents, secular Jews, had emigrated to Germany from
Poland, eventually settling in Leipzig. Growing up in an environment that was
liberal and leftist, it was no surprise that Gerta and her brothers were drawn to
the anti-Nazi movement. In March 1933, she was arrested by the SA, accused of
distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets. After a week in prison, and with the interces-
sion of the Polish consul, Gerta was released and with the family’s blessing head-
ed to Paris where she moved into leftist German refugee circles. It was here in
1934 that she met the Hungarian photojournalist Endre Friedmann. He had
arrived in Paris after two forced relocations, first from Budapest to Berlin, where
he worked as photojournalist - his name made with his pictures of Trotsky - and
then again to Paris after the Nazi take-over. The two fell in love but also shared
energy and a political commitment to the anti-fascist cause. They were passion-
ately interested in the new modernist medium of photography. With Friedmann’s
tutelage Gerta showed a great flair for photography. It was her idea that they
change their names to make their work more saleable but, rather than gallicanis-
ing them, they adopted American-Hollywood -sounding names. Robert Capa res-
onates with Frank Capra the filmmaker and Gerda Taro and Greta Garbo have a
curious affinity. From spring 1936 their work was distributed under the name
“Capa and Taro”.
Maspero points out the difficulty of separating reality from the myths
that circulated around Taro after her death. She was appropriated by the French
Communist Party, and one can easily see why it would be so. She was a fitting
symbol: beautiful and high-spirited, but also talented and utterly committed to
the defeat of the extreme Right. After her death, the body was brought back to
Paris where an enormous funeral procession accompanied the coffin to Père
Book Reviews136
Quark 15.2draft FINISHED.qxd  11/21/11  2:50 PM  Page 136
Lachaise, her resting place close to that of the martyred communards. Although
many of Capa’s biographies have described Taro as a member of the
Communist party, Maspero argues that her politics was not Stalinist Left but her
personal charm and the obvious contribution of Capa’s and her photography
made her a valuable asset to the French left and to the Comintern front organi-
zations that flourished in mid 1930s. Her work appeared in Regards, in Vu and on
her first trip to Republican Spain she carried a press accreditation from Louis
Aragon, the founding editor of the Popular Front newspaper Ce Soir. The great
strength of Maspero’s book is the dense context in which he locates Taro and
Capa and their photographic output in the 1930s. The political groups that sur-
rounded Taro in Spain and in Paris are laid out with clarity as are his reflections
on the origins and development of the new medium of photojournalism and the
weeklies and magazines in which her work and Capa’s appeared.
François Maspero is a distinguished French publisher and writer whose
own life was marked by many of the events that a decade earlier influenced the
course of Taro’s story. Maspero’s parents were rounded up during the German
occupation: his father a distinguished Sinologist died in Buchenwald; his mother
survived Ravensbrük. As a young man he was part of the French Resistance and
after the war became a noted publisher of postcolonial literature, specializing in
writing about the Algerian war and the violence of French colonialism. Out of the
Shadows is beautifully written, a tribute to the translator, and enriched by
Maspero’s insight about Taro and Capa and the political and artistic surround-
ings in which their lives were played out. For anyone interested in art, politics
and culture in the 1930s, this is a must-read.
Judith Keene
University of Sydney
Djurdja Bartlet, FashionEast: The Spectre that Haunted Socialism
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2010).
FashionEast is the first comprehensive history of fashion in the East- European
socialist countries. This richly illustrated volume covers the whole life span of
socialism from after the Russian Revolution until the collapse of the socialist sys-
tem. Not only was the garment industry socialized but so too was fashion. It was
a state affair, which was controlled by experts and state officials. Bartlett relies in
her work mainly on written sources like fashion journals and women’s magazines,
but also uses other documents and official declarations. In addition, she has met
and interviewed many former fashion specialists in these countries. The first
hundred pages deal with Soviet fashion before the establishment of the socialist
bloc after the Second World War. She takes up, for instance, the well-known con-
Left History 15.2 137
Quark 15.2draft FINISHED.qxd  11/21/11  2:50 PM  Page 137


François Maspero, Out of the Shadows; A Life of Gerda Taro. Translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan (London: Souvenir Press, 2008).

Wolcott, David B.

Adam D. Reich, Hidden Truth: Young Men Navigating Lives In and Out
of Juvenile Prison (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
Adam Reich’s Hidden Truth is a unique mixture. On the one hand, it is a memoir
of the time Reich spent between 2001 and 2006 as a visiting teacher and in other
positions at the Rhode Island Training School (RITS), a correctional institution
for young offenders. During his time there, Reich—initially a Brown University
undergraduate and, later, an AmeriCorps volunteer affiliated with the Broad
Street Studio, a non-profit arts agency—ran writing workshops and helped
organize the publication of Hidden TREWTH, a magazine written by institution
residents. On the other hand, the book is also a sociological analysis of the cul-
ture of young offenders and of the institution. This element is constructed from
interviews with inmates, teachers, and administrators. A doctoral student at the
University of California, Berkeley, at the time of the book’s publication, Reich
interprets these accounts with a modern sociological perspective. The resulting
book analyzes contemporary young offenders through the lenses of sociological
theory and, in particular, masculinity.
Reich conceptualizes his analysis in terms of two competing models of
masculinity. He characterizes both as games in which young people seek to dis-
tinguish themselves. In the first, which he calls the Game of Outlaw, young men
struggle for money, power, and the respect of their peers through means such as
drug dealing and violence. Since the young people at the RITS—generally work-
ing-class or poor, disproportionately African American or Latino—have limited
access to conventional sources of authority such as high-paying jobs, they often
instead use crime to achieve status, or what Reich calls “outsider masculinity”
(25). For them, crime is an element of a cultural world in which loyalty to one’s
friends, obtaining money through illegal means, and the ability to inflict harm on
others all provide power and respect. In the second, which Reich calls the Game
of Law, young men struggle to gain status within the RITS. At the institution,
they could gain status—or “insider masculinity” (25)—by accumulating points
for good behavior and earning greater levels of institutional privileges.
For the young people involved, both games seem to represent a dead
end. Playing the Game of Outlaw got the young people involved confined to the
RITS in the first place. Even the ability to critique the Game of Outlaw in their
interviews did not stop young people from playing it. Playing the Game of Law
rarely gained young people much either. The institution itself had an incoherent
vision of how to reform young people, so youths who sought to cooperate with
it mainly just embraced its rules and discipline. Because the Game of Law was
based on the controlled conditions at the RITS, young people who were released
struggled to maintain this discipline without the structure that the institution
provided.
As an alternative to both games, Reich favors what he terms “critical
Book Reviews156
Quark 15.2draft FINISHED.qxd  11/21/11  2:50 PM  Page 156
practice” (22) by young people in which they use arts and writing to critique
social conditions. He argues that critical practice can help transcend both games,
resulting in less investment in constructed gender roles. In so doing, he suggests
that art and scholarship should have an activist orientation and can achieve real-
world changes. As a successful example of critical practice, he cites Harmony, a
young woman who was released from the RITS and returned as a teacher.
Anthony, the most frequently discussed example in the book, also represents
critical practice, contributing insightful material to Hidden TREWTH and work-
ing for the Broad Street Studio upon his release. Yet at least implicitly, Anthony
also represents the limitations of critical practice: he fled Rhode Island after
becoming a suspect in a burglary of the Broad Street Studio and a murder.
This book is thought provoking, but not entirely successful. Reich’s
analysis is most compelling when he focuses on the Game of Outlaw and how
young people use the game to achieve their visions of masculinity, even though
some are aware of the artificiality of the exercise. The analysis is somewhat less
compelling when dealing with the Game of Law. Reich is not entirely clear on
whether the Game of Law is a means of fitting into society generally or merely
an adaptation to the artificial circumstances of the RITS. In addition, Reich’s
advocacy of an activist role for art and scholarship might be off-putting for
readers who do not share this view. These reservations aside, Hidden Truth is still
a compelling read and a compelling analysis of why young people involved with
crime do what they do.
David B. Wolcott
Newtown, PA
Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the
American City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).
If I walk across the middle of a busy city street, there is a good chance that a car
will hit me. And chances are that motorists will call me a jaywalker, or something
worse. Onlookers might question why I risked my life by refusing to cross at a
nearby pedestrian crosswalk. City streets, after all, belong to motorized vehicles,
not other uses. Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City
uncovers the emergence of this dominant conception of the street over eight
decades ago.
Fighting Traffic examines the ways in which automobile interests, known
as “motordom,” reconceptualized the American city street as a car thoroughfare
and delegitimated other uses that had enjoyed customary rights. The shift was
not inevitable; rather, it was a “violent revolution” (2) that reached its height in
the 1920s. Norton employs a social constructivist framework to study the city
Left History 15.2 157
Quark 15.2draft FINISHED.qxd  11/21/11  2:50 PM  Page 157


Adam D. Reich, Hidden Truth: Young Men Navigating Lives In and Out of Juvenile Prison (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

De Groot, Scott

102
© Left History
15.2 (Summer 2011)
BOOK REVIEWS
David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital (London: Verso, 2010).
A Companion to Marx’s Capital is geographer and social theorist David Harvey’s
effort to guide a new generation of leftists through Karl Marx’s labyrinthine
Capital: Volume I. Few are as well equipped for the challenge. For some forty
years, Harvey has taught a lecture course on Marx’s protean masterpiece (avail-
able online at http://davidharvey.org/), and the Companion affords an opportuni-
ty to elaborate material originally presented orally. In addition to explicating
Capital’s key arguments, historical contexts, and interpretative minefields, Harvey
makes an impassioned case for the political indispensability of Marx’s conceptual
framework under conditions of twenty-first century neoliberalism.
The Companion is written in an engaging, often conversational tone at a
largely introductory level. It may not appeal to scholars already intimately famil-
iar with Capital, but provides sage guidance for those on the long road to learn-
ing Marx’s political economy and critical philosophy. While Harvey aims to facili-
tate a historically nuanced reading of Capital on its own terms, he is clear that
“those terms will inevitably be affected by my interests and experiences” (13).
Far from a liability, when Harvey introduces concepts from his geographical oeu-
vre – time-space compression, spatial fixes, creative destruction – to contextual-
ize or elaborate Marx’s arguments, the results are illuminating and pedagogically
helpful.
For Harvey, Capital is a fascinating literary construction, full of dramat-
ic metaphors of blood and necromancy, if at times shifting to a dull economistic
style and prone to repetition. More substantively, Harvey memorably character-
izes the text as a product of Marx taking three radically different conceptual
blocs – classical liberal political economy, German critical philosophy, and utopi-
an socialism – and “rubbing them together and making revolutionary fire” (4).
Of these blocs, liberal political economy takes centre stage; Marx works largely
within the propositions of the classical economists, such as Smith and Ricardo, to
show that a utopian laissez-faire situation would result not in generalized prosperi-
ty but increasing inequality and the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a
capitalist class. Capital: Volume I also proceeds within assumptions of a largely
closed system of production, generally ignoring macro factors in order to isolate
the internal basis of value under capitalism, namely surplus-value extracted from
labour.
Harvey wants readers to make up their own minds on specific debates
over Capital, for example, regarding the import of autonomist Marxist interpreta-
tions, or whether the labour theory of value can withstand contemporary refuta-
tion by economists. Nevertheless, for Harvey there are certain fundamental, non-
negotiable ways of understanding the text. Marx proceeds using a dialectical
Quark 15.2draft FINISHED.qxd  11/21/11  2:50 PM  Page 102
method that explores the internalization of a contradiction within a unity (for
example, the commodity as an embodiment of use-value and exchange-value),
which in turn generates further contradictions that need to be explored, thus
moving the inquiry from molecular components into an ever-larger system of
relations without arriving at any final synthesis. For this reason, Harvey gets
“impatient with people who depict Marx’s dialectic as a closed method of analy-
sis. It is not finite; on the contrary, it is constantly expanding” (63). Furthermore,
capital is not a stock of assets, a fixed quantity, or a thing. “Capital is process,
and that is that”; it is money put into circulation by capitalists to make more
money, and thus a defining characteristic of capitalism is constant motion and
the destruction of barriers to circulation (92). Harvey also regards the concept
of fetishism as fundamental to Marx’s critical method, as it captures how market
exchanges and the money-form conceal the social relations and labour condi-
tions under which commodities are produced and which constitute the hidden
source of their value (41).
The Companion does not refrain from criticizing its hero. Harvey faults
Marx’s discussion of the factory for inappropriately universalizing what was hap-
pening in Manchester. He charges that Marx does not adequately address the
reproduction of human life under capitalism, and regrets that Marx uses lan-
guage which can be interpreted as historically deterministic or teleological.
Furthermore, Harvey criticizes Marx for relegating “primitive accumulation” to a
past stage of history. Harvey prefers to call the process “accumulation by dispos-
session”, arguing that commons appropriation, slum clearance, privatization, and
so forth remain vital sites of capital accumulation, proletarianization and class
struggle in our own day (312). In general, Harvey is more convinced by Marx’s
logical and theoretical arguments than by his historical accounts.
The Companion is not an unassailable book. While eager to connect
Marx’s analyses to present-day globalization, environmental crises, and neoliber-
alism, there is far less concern with gender, which Harvey tends to equate with
women, and even less concern with race and sexuality. Seemingly unmoved by
poststructuralist and feminist critiques of his previous work by Doreen Massey,
Cindi Katz, and others, Harvey still reads as though all categories of difference
and inequality must be passed through the sieve of class-struggle to be politically
and analytically significant. Moreover, if Harvey’s invocation of Derridean
deconstruction is a bit shallow, his treatment of Foucault is reductionist and sur-
prisingly inadequate. For example, it is simply incorrect to suggest that “when
Foucault talks about the rise of governmentality, what he is really talking about is
that moment when people started to internalize a sense of temporal discipline”
(147). Governmentality in fact denotes forms of political rationality, reflections
on government, and techniques of conducting oneself and others with antique
historical roots.
Nevertheless, in its fundamental objective of guiding a new generation
Left History 15.2 103
Quark 15.2draft FINISHED.qxd  11/21/11  2:50 PM  Page 103
of leftists through Marx’s notoriously difficult Capital: Volume I, the Companion is
very successful. While I am not exactly convinced that “we have, in short, been
very much in the world of Volume I over the past thirty years”, it seems clear that
workers’ share of profits relative to capitalists have been diminishing, while cor-
porate monopolization, structural unemployment, economic crises, and social
inequality have been surging under contemporary conditions of neoliberalism
(246). Harvey is surely correct in insisting that the conceptual framework Marx
lays out in Capital offers indispensible insights into this dire political and econom-
ic situation. As such, Capital remains essential reading, and one would be hard-
pressed to find a better guide than David Harvey.
Scott De Groot
Queen’s University
Silvio Pons and Robert Service, Eds. A Dictionary of 20t h-Century
Communism, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
For many students of the Left, particularly those in the formative stages of their
academic career, the study of communism can often be overwhelming. Once a
topic is selected, one must become an expert not only on the subject in question,
but also the ways in which it interacts with larger national and international expe-
riences and narratives. This is complicated by what can seem like a never-ending
stream of abbreviations and acronyms, coupled with the reality that since the fall
of the Soviet Union the historiography of this field has become one of the most
dynamic in academia. It is with this in mind that A Dictionary of 20th-Century
Communism – advertised as “the first encyclopaedic reference work since the end
of the Cold War on international communism” – should be welcomed into the
historiography of the left.
Edited by established scholars Silvio Pons (University of Rome Tor
Vergata) and Robert Service (University of Oxford), A Dictionary of 20th-Century
Communism contains over 400 alphabetic entries which can be divided into three
distinct categories: leading political figures, organizations (political and otherwise),
and ideas or concepts. Entries range from concise biographical sketches to longer
multi-page articles detailing the main historiographical contours of contested top-
ics. What really makes this volume stand out is its commitment to re-write, or re-
think, entries vis-à-vis the enormous amount of information that has become
available since the opening of the Soviet archives (vii). A Dictionary of 20th-Century
Communism represents one of the most up-to-date sources of general information
pertaining to international communism available at this time.
For many the value of this work lies not just in the entries themselves,
but in the excellent indexes and references that are provided at the end of each
Book Reviews104
Quark 15.2draft FINISHED.qxd  11/21/11  2:50 PM  Page 104


David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital (London: Verso, 2010).

Franz, Kyle R.

of leftists through Marx’s notoriously difficult Capital: Volume I, the Companion is
very successful. While I am not exactly convinced that “we have, in short, been
very much in the world of Volume I over the past thirty years”, it seems clear that
workers’ share of profits relative to capitalists have been diminishing, while cor-
porate monopolization, structural unemployment, economic crises, and social
inequality have been surging under contemporary conditions of neoliberalism
(246). Harvey is surely correct in insisting that the conceptual framework Marx
lays out in Capital offers indispensible insights into this dire political and econom-
ic situation. As such, Capital remains essential reading, and one would be hard-
pressed to find a better guide than David Harvey.
Scott De Groot
Queen’s University
Silvio Pons and Robert Service, Eds. A Dictionary of 20t h-Century
Communism, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
For many students of the Left, particularly those in the formative stages of their
academic career, the study of communism can often be overwhelming. Once a
topic is selected, one must become an expert not only on the subject in question,
but also the ways in which it interacts with larger national and international expe-
riences and narratives. This is complicated by what can seem like a never-ending
stream of abbreviations and acronyms, coupled with the reality that since the fall
of the Soviet Union the historiography of this field has become one of the most
dynamic in academia. It is with this in mind that A Dictionary of 20th-Century
Communism – advertised as “the first encyclopaedic reference work since the end
of the Cold War on international communism” – should be welcomed into the
historiography of the left.
Edited by established scholars Silvio Pons (University of Rome Tor
Vergata) and Robert Service (University of Oxford), A Dictionary of 20th-Century
Communism contains over 400 alphabetic entries which can be divided into three
distinct categories: leading political figures, organizations (political and otherwise),
and ideas or concepts. Entries range from concise biographical sketches to longer
multi-page articles detailing the main historiographical contours of contested top-
ics. What really makes this volume stand out is its commitment to re-write, or re-
think, entries vis-à-vis the enormous amount of information that has become
available since the opening of the Soviet archives (vii). A Dictionary of 20th-Century
Communism represents one of the most up-to-date sources of general information
pertaining to international communism available at this time.
For many the value of this work lies not just in the entries themselves,
but in the excellent indexes and references that are provided at the end of each
Book Reviews104
Quark 15.2draft FINISHED.qxd  11/21/11  2:50 PM  Page 104
article. For example, those who are interested in the Catholic Church are provid-
ed not only with an informative entry, but are also directed to five related topics
that may be of interest within the volume itself. For those who want to engage
with the subject in a more in-depth manner, the authors provide a brief bibliogra-
phy of important scholarly works. In so doing, Pons and Service have made this
volume accessible to the general public while maintaining its value to scholars and
specialists in the field.
No matter how voluminous a work, however, there are bound to be
omissions. Scholars of the Canadian left will quickly realize that there is no dis-
cussion of the Canadian experience, be it in regards to personalities, organiza-
tions or ideas. The only time Canada is mentioned anywhere in the 921 pages that
make up A Dictionary of 20th-Century Communism is in regards this nation’s partici-
pation in the Grand Alliance against Nazi Germany (353). In a dictionary that
contains entries detailing the lives of Henry Pollit, Evgeny Preobrazhensky, and
Earl Browder, there is no reason that comparable space could not be made to
briefly address Tim Buck, Section 98 of the Criminal Code or the Communist
Party of Canada. Likewise, there is very little content pertaining directly to the
Communist Party of the United States of America or the American experience
outside of its interaction with the Soviet Union or other communist nation states.
Indeed, one of the problems facing this work is that there is still a ten-
dency for some contributors to write from a Soviet or Sino-centric point of view.
Important topics such as “Family” or “History and Memory” – both of which
have the ability to touch upon communist experiences in every corner of the
world – are addressed only from a Soviet perspective (317-320, 381-383).
Similarly the indexed links and recommended readings largely focus on nation-
states that were governed under the communist system. Those with limited sec-
ond language capabilities may also find the recommended readings frustrating, as
many of the monographs listed are available only in Italian, French or Russian.
Though students of the left in North America are likely to find little in
A Dictionary of 20th-Century Communism that pertains explicitly to the Canadian or
American experience, these omissions do not negate the important role that this
volume will play in the months and years to come as the go-to reference work for
scholars of communism in the twentieth century. Indeed, for those who are
already familiar with the historiography of communism in North America, this
work will likely be the first volume to which many turn when exploring the impli-
cations of the international communist movement on local and regional experi-
ences. I can only hope that if and when a second printing is undertaken, the edi-
tors see fit to reconsider the level of Canadian and North American content they
include.
Kyle R. Franz
Queen’s University
Left History 15.2 105
Quark 15.2draft FINISHED.qxd  11/21/11  2:50 PM  Page 105


Not a member yet