Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Varon, Jeremy

One possible part of the explanation is that the Canadian experience was
also different with regard to the composition of the immigrant waves. Long after
British emigration to the US had receded, Scots, Ulster people, and English work-
ers were still coming in large numbers to Canada. This shaped the relative volatil-
ity of the reaction because these immigrants were harder to objectify. While they
were certainly not welcome, they looked and acted more like most Canadians and
often even had familial relations to them. They still caused unemployment and
helped to lower wages, Canadian Labour argued, but they blended in more easily.
Canadian Labour could be quite nasty, but they never seemed to match
U.S workers’ penchant for anti-immigrant invective and violence. Riots ran the
Chinese out of one industrial town and mining camp after another throughout the
US West; the only serious Canadian riot caused embarrassment to many. Canadian
labour turned a skeptical eye toward Italian and Slavic “new immigrants,” but their
reaction paled in comparison to that in the US where the newcomers were classed
as distinctly inferior “races” and viewed with contempt by native born workers and
organizers. As in the US, the so-called “new immigrants” were held to be un-orga-
nizable. Instead, they poured into unions and launched many of the revolts in
both countries in the First World War era. In the US this caused employers and
the government to lose a bit of their enthusiasm for immigration. Canada had its
own Red Scare with a close equation between the foreign born and radicalism, but
immigration soared in the twenties, even as it plummeted in the US American pro-
ductivity might also have been significant. While the US economy was expanding
throughout the twenties, the proportion of workers in manufacturing was actual-
ly shrinking. Canadian industries were relatively more labour-intensive and might
have suffered more from any drastic reduction in the supply of unskilled workers.
When Canadian immigration was finally cut off in the early Depression,
this had little to do with Labour’s efforts and more to do with massive unemploy-
ment and increasing social unrest. Again, calls for immigration restriction intensi-
fied amidst economic decline. David Goutor’s study of the roots of these senti-
ments reminds us that a great deal remains at stake in the challenge of creating a
multi-ethnic labour movement.
Jim Barrett
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Jules Boykoff, Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United
Sta t e s (Oakland: AK Press, 2007).
Having read extensively on the history of US government repression of political
dissent, I received a rude awakening to the thing itself when, protesting the
Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in 2000, I saw police round up
dozens of demonstrators in the now-famous puppet house. They were put on
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dangerously hot buses, packed into tiny jail cells, psychologically and physically
brutalized, and indicted for things they had not even planned to do. The tragedy
of Philadelphia, methodically planned by national and local authorities, was
reprised in the even more vicious assault on protestors of the proposed Free Trade
Area of the America’s in Miami in 2003, and, with greater subtlety, the mass arrests
of those at the Republican National Convention in New York City in 2004.
To anyone involved in or who has tracked such episodes, a disturbing
reality is apparent: that repression, which played a notorious role in the response
to the social movements of the 1960s, has made a comeback, and must figure
anew into the calculations of dissidents of all kinds. In this light, Jules Boykoff ’s
Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States is a great service, both to
dissidents and to our besieged democracy.
Intent to “shine a light on the underbelly of US history,” Boykoff shows
that repression is a constant in state responses to dissent. (10)  To organize his
study, Boykoff ’s parses repression’s differing forms, from “direct violence” to
“public prosecutions,” “infiltration,” and “harassment arrests,” and documents
their application at different points in the American past. He also broadens our
understanding of repression—favoring, in fact, the more capacious term “sup-
pression”—to include not just actions of the security apparatus, but those of the
media, who affect social movements by how they frame the issues and the move-
ments themselves. In short, Boykoff wisely includes discursive hegemony in his
understanding of state power.
Boykoff implicitly addresses two communities. One is those scholars of
social movements who have intermittently described state tactics in their narratives
of individual movements but have not, by and large, factored suppression into
conceptual models of social movement dynamics. Suppression, Boykoff asserts,
matters, and should not be seen as an idiosyncratic quality of American state
power. Boykoff also enriches our sense of how and why it matters by, in the first
instance, defining suppression as “a process through which preconditions for dis-
sident action, mobilization, and collective organization are inhibited by either rais-
ing their costs or minimizing their benefits” (12). Significantly, this model sees the
“why bother” attitude among dissidents, often adopted as they see their actions
ridiculed or ignored, as an effect of suppression. Boykoff ’s insight is especially
illuminating with respect to opposition to the Iraq war. Peaking before the war
even start e d , the movement withered and bogged down—one may arg u e — l a rge ly as a
result of the indiffe rence of the Bush administration and, eve n t u a l ly, the media, to it.
The second, presumed audience is contemporary dissidents. Boykoff
provides them a trove of evidence that that state has used and will use suppressive
tactics, as well as a valuable inventory of the state’s arsenal. Activists would do well
to look for and actively combat its use against them. However obvious, this imper-
ative has been repeatedly ignored (e.g., four years after the Philly RNC, officials
again used the pretext of fears of violence to conduct mass, illegal arrests and pro-
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tracted detentions, so as to get protestors off the streets and preserve the partisan
media spectacl e ) . B oy ko ff ’s study, wh i ch lays suppression bare, o n ly compounds the
“ fool me twice” quality of a c t iv i s t s ’ subsequent neglect of s t ate and media mach i n at i o n s.
The book’s dual voicing, however, also creates problems. Chiefly, it con-
tributes to a “neither fish nor fowl” cast to the book that may leave scholars and
activists alike disappointed. With respect social movement studies, Boykoff most-
ly provides a taxonomy of different kinds of suppression; he offers, as a result, lit-
tle specific guidance as to how suppression can be operationalized as an analytic
variable. His descriptive/schematic approach, moreover, provides little sense of
change over time, either with respect to what ideologies drive suppression and
which tactics are favored in what circumstances. And there is no good reason, in
a study on suppression as constitutive of state power, to restrict oneself, as
Boykoff does, to the suppression of the political left. Perhaps an account of the
suppression of the right by the American state, or an analysis of suppression by
left wing regimes, would cause Boykoff to broaden or reshape his model.
Finally, Boykoff proceeds from a flawed premise: that in democratic
societies raw physical power is both rare and largely unnecessary, given the effica-
cy of forms of soft power; in “totalitarian” societies, by extension, repression
functions through direct violence. But in totalitarian societies as well, suppression
often works through the voluntary servitude to or complicity with power, whether
in the form of ideological compliance, inertia, the lure of personal gain, fears of
personal disadvantage, and so on. Boykoff ’s model is antedated, and makes no use
of what has been learned about power’s operation since the collapse of the Soviet
Union and the socialist bloc.
With respect to the activist audience, the problems are more straightfor-
ward. First, Boykoff spends so much time labeling and documenting suppression
that he offers little in the way of overt advice on how to combat it. Activists must
draw practical lessons largely by inference. By the same token, his synopses of his-
toric episodes of suppression remains too clipped to be viscerally compelling.
Indeed, the devil is often in the details, and thicker historical descriptions of state
power would likely do more to awaken in readers the sense of horror and “emer-
gency” Boykoff clearly favors.
Finally, there are weaknesses in Boykoff ’s presentation that may trouble
equally academics and activists. Boykoff ’s most original section is an analysis of
media coverage of global justice protestors, both those at the World Trade
Organization meetings in Seattle in 1999 and at the World Bank/International
Monetary Fund meeting in Washington, DC in 2000. Chiefly, Boykoff contests
the research of other scholars asserting that provocation at least attracts media
attention and that this attention, even if initially negative, at least gives publicity
and legitimacy to the protestors’ cause. Boykoff ’s content analysis of “prestige
media” suggests that their coverage remained largely negative, mitigating or alto-
gether voiding the benefits of attention.
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One could easily conclude from Boykoff that protestors should play by
the rules, as provocation yields little apparent gain given the power and practices
of the media. This is an extremely awkward lesson, given Boykoff ’s militant com-
m i t m e n t — evident especially in the book’s last section—to radical ch a n ge.
Boykoff seems, in short, stuck by his own research with a case for moderation.
But one can also challenge his core analysis. Whatever Boykoff ’s data, the global
justice movement’s critique of neoliberalism quickly moved from the margins to
the mainstream. Indeed, ample evidence indicates that the neoliberalism is now in
real trouble, for which demonstrators on this and other continents can likely take
significant credit. By this long view, the breaking of Starbucks windows in Seattle
may still have been effective.
Boykoff ultimately falls prey to the danger of imputing too great a power
to his object of analysis. Trained on the suppression, he is scarcely able to under-
stand how and why state and elite hegemony sometimes fails, whether in the case
of neoliberalism or the Iraq war. As a corollary, he gives dissidents too little cred-
it in understanding structures of power and adapting their protest to these struc-
tures. Hyperconscious of media tropes, the Billionaires for Bush styled themselves
during the 2004 campaign in deliberate contrast to leftwing archetypes. Packaging
their serious message in glamourous and abjectly clever political theatre, they resis-
ted dismissal as a dangerous fringe or shaggy nay-sayers. The result was incessant
and remarkably favorable coverage; four years later, their critique of class domina-
tion has found at least mild ex p ression in the populist rhetoric of a new election cycl e.
Boykoff misses the dynamism not only of social movement actors but of
the media context in which they exist. The web and various forms of user-gener-
ated content have provided unprecedented means for creating multiple and alter-
nate narratives, of proliferating different facts and frames. This greatly compli-
cates the work of ideological hegemony, if not limits the power of the weapons
of suppression Boykoff describes. To be sure, there is something refreshingly “ o l d
s ch o o l ” about his attention to state and media rep re s s i o n ; but at times the ap p ro a ch is
so “old sch o o l ” as to risk the subtle miseducation of those he means to enlighten.
Jeremy Varon 
Drew University
Gerard J. DeGroot, The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a
Disorderly Decade (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).
There are so many books now appearing about the 1960s that some are bound to
be dreadful. This one is not the worst, because the author does not seek, as some
n e o c o n s e rvat ives do, to rep u d i ate pra c t i c a l ly eve rything intere s t i n g. ( B i l l
Kaufman, noted paleconservative, is among the most insightful, stressing anti-cor-
porate localism and opposition to military globalism that young people in parts of
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Jules Boykoff, "Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States" (Oakland: AK Press, 2007)

Lenskyj, Helen Jefferson

Kathy Davis, "The Making of Our Bodies Ourselves: How Feminism Travels Across Borders" (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007)

Kawashima, Ken C.

most glaring example is Table 6.1 in “A Theatre of the Libido,” in which he “out-
lines 100 numbered examples of erotic commercials”, indicating with an asterisk
those he has “designated ‘hot’”, defined as “full of sexual hunger and sexual ten-
sion” (205-212). While he deserves credit for being upfront about the selective
nature of his case studies, it still does not always work.
A World Made Sexy is nevertheless an interesting read, and much of my
criticism stems from the ambitious nature of Rutherford’s project. Ultimately, A
World Made Sexy is a thought-provoking but frustrating study. Delving deeper into
some of its organising assumptions, and particularly into the complexities of
American attitudes toward sexuality in the 1950s through the 1970s, would have
done much to expand our understanding of the interrelated histories of consump-
tion and sexuality in the West. As it stands, A World Made Sexy emphasizes ‘liber-
ation’ at the expense of a more detailed historical analysis.
Robin Grazley
Queen’s University
Elyssa Faison, Managing Women: Disciplining Labour in Modern Japan
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
Shortly after the Tokugawa bakufu was overthrown in 1868, the primary task of the
new Meiji State was to build a “Rich Nation and Strong Army” to prevent Japan
from becoming a European or American colony, and to industrialize the nation as
quickly as possible in what would become, in effect, Japan’s first bourgeois revolu-
tion. The industrial revolution in Japan, which took place especially in the 1890s,
was carried out, first and foremost, in the textile industry—where Japan’s first car-
tels were formed—and predominantly on the backs of young, female workers.
Paralleling the industrial slogan of ‘rich nation, strong army’ was the gendered slo-
gan of ‘good wives, wise mothers’ (ryosai kenbo). The latter slogan was a dominant
discourse of the Meiji period’s state-building project that ideologically equated the
nation-state to the concept of the family. The most important contribution of
Elyssa Faison’s book, Managing Women:  Disciplining Labour in Modern Japan, is that
she shows how this gendered discourse combined with an ideology of the nation,
and was put into institutional, disciplining practices in the textile industries of
Japan’s industrial factory system during the interwar period.
Faison’s book, which will become a valuable contribution to labour and
gender studies in the field of Modern Japan, argues that disciplinary techniques,
especially in the cotton spinning factories, were vehicles for coding factory women
not as workers, but rather as women in need of being ‘cultivated’ as ‘ideal women’.
These discourses, which Faison shows to have directly affected women’s bodies,
materialized most clearly in on-the-ground practices initiated by the cotton spin-
ning and silk reeling factories especially after night work was abolished in 1929,
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primarily as a means to prevent factory women from organizing other female
workers. The important point that Faison makes is that the legalized abolition of
night work in 1929 was the basic condition that allowed factories to identify, and
then to seek to control and discipline, the free time of female workers outside of
production. Factories subsequently set up their own educational (including phys-
ical education, e.g., calisthenics) amenities, often within the complex network of
worker dormitories, which normalized the ideology of the ‘good wife, wise moth-
er’, and which contributed to a general criminalization of labour activist women.
These discourses, however, were countered by organized struggles led by factory
women, especially in the cotton factories. Worker’s Schools for Women, such as
the Kyoai Jojuku, sought to “enlighten” factory women with counter-discourses that
emphasized proletarian consciousness instead. The counter-discourses con-
tributed to the political organization and militancy of many female factory work-
ers. The strikes at Tokyo’s Toyo Muslin and Osaka’s Kishiwada Spinning factories,
which Faison analyzes in detail, are powerful historical demonstrations of the lim-
itations of these discourses and ideologies. Lastly, Faison shows how the gendered
discourses surrounding Japanese female factory workers differed significantly from
the ethnicization of female factory workers from the colonies of Okinawa and
Korea. Faison’s writings on how Okinawan women were treated differently from
Korean women in the factories, and how quasi-welfare/policing institutions such
as the Soaikai coded the labour market through ethnicity, were particularly fasci-
nating, though this was clearly not her primary objective.
The problems that Faison’s book raises are important. First, we can see
historically how the problem of ‘free time’ of workers not only becomes a target
of institutional and ideological state apparatuses to control the everyday lives of
workers, but how “free time” itself becomes highly gendered discursively. What
is at stake here, then, is how to better understand the problem of reproduction
politically and culturally, not only in terms of the economy of reproducing labour
power as a future commodity, but in terms of the specific strategies adopted and
carried out by the industrial factory system to eliminate the possibility of the rad-
icalization of female factory workers. Faison’s analysis demonstrates that the
strikes led by factory women show the limitations and weaknesses of these very
strategies. Second, through the example of the Toyo Muslin strike, we see how
gendered discourses tended to quickly morph into discourses that increasingly
connected practices of labour disorder to questions of sexuality. Discourses of
sexuality, morality, and codes of the heteronormative family often made their
appearance precisely to counter the radicalization of women workers.
Lastly, Faison’s book allows us to pursue more methodological questions
that arguably bring Foucault and Marx together in one analysis. While Faison did
not always highlight this methodological aspect, it is clearly there in her analysis of
the intermingling of labour, sexuality, nation, and gender. In short, there is ample
room for one to further specify historically and methodologically the precise rela-
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tionship(s) between discourse/power, on the one hand, and ideology, on the other.
My one criticism, however, is that Faison’s emphasis on disciplinary techniques,
and the relations of power that accompany them, tended to de-emphasize prob-
lems of expropriation (in the countryside, where most of the factory women came
from) and exploitation. For it is precisely in the relationship between expropria-
tion and exploitation that one could fruitfully combine the methods of Foucault
and Marx. More specifically, what is lacking in Faison’s analysis is a rigorous analy-
sis of the recruitment process whereby the factory women became factory women
in the first place.
The question here is how to think the problem of exploitation from the
perspective of the recruitment process itself; in other words, prior to the process
of exploiting the surplus labour time of the female workers in the production
process. From what I have read in Janet Hunter’s Women and the Labour Market in
Japan’s Industrializing Economy (2003)—a book which does not pose the relationship
between gender, nation, and sexuality with the same analytical rigor—and from
what I know about the interwar day labour market, where day workers identified
and struggled against what they called “intermediary exploitation” (or chukan
sakushu) stemming from recruitment practices, the textile recruitment process also
seems equally exploitative, but again in this ‘intermediary’ sense. Intermediary
exploitation specifically translated into distinctions between formal and real wages,
and into a highly differentiated economy of ‘commissions’ represented by and
remunerated to recruiters who exploited the vulnerable position of workers in the
sphere of circulation, i.e., outside of production. How this problem of interme-
diary exploitation, endemic to the recruitment process, may be connected to the
codification of female workers as ‘ideal women’, or to the recoding of nation and
sexuality, is something that neither Hunter nor Faison take up. While I understand
how difficult it is to access this problem in the archive, it nonetheless points empir-
ically and theoretically to some limitations in contemporary historical analyses of
the interwar labour market that need to be addressed if we are to really understand
the historicity of the struggles by female factory workers in Japan.
Ken C. Kawashima
University of Toronto
Robert Service, Comrades!: A History of World Communism (Cambridge,
MA.: Harvard University Press, 2007).
With the passage of time since the collapse of Soviet power in Europe and the
opening of long closed Russian archives, the world is ready for a sophisticated, fair
and readable survey of world Communism with an understanding of context and
a feel for nuance. Such a volume would serve an invaluable role in introducing
neophytes to this rich, textured and highly contested history. Along comes
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Elyssa Faison, "Managing Women: Disciplining Labour in Modern Japan" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)

Conolly-Smith, Peter

Tom Goyens, Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New
York City, 1880-1914 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2007).
Tom Goyens’s study of New York’s German anarchist scene from 1880 to 1914
seeks to explore not only the movement, its ideological underpinnings, press, and
players, but also the physical and ideological spaces within which they thrived. It
was in the smoky back rooms of taverns and saloons, Goyens writes, as well as in
lecture halls, reading rooms, and in parks throughout Greater New York that
German anarchism found its full expression. Goyens aims to show how German
“radicals inscribed anarchism in … urban space,” and he does so by “mapping”
the movement’s geopolitical “topography” (2, 7).
Judged by this intriguing and ambitious thesis, Beer and Revolution delivers
both more and less than it promises. More, in that Goyens offers also a rich por-
trait of the complex ethnic culture of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
anarchism in New York. Its characters include the familiar (Emma Goldman,
Alexander Berkman, and of course the indefatigable German firebrand Johann
Most, longtime editor of the anarchist newspaper Freiheit), but also less well-
known figures: Austrian anarchist Josef Peukert, for example, “Most’s arch-enemy
for life” (114). So blinded was Peukert by his animosity towards Most that he
refused to heed his rival’s warnings regarding a police spy whom he unwittingly
allowed to infiltrate the smuggling operation that delivered Freiheit into Germany,
resulting in the arrest and death behind bars of chief smuggler Johann Neve (128-
33). Other controversies causing strife within the movement included the 1884-
85 “firebug” affair, in which overzealous Most followers set their heavily insured
tenement buildings on fire in order to donate the insurance money to the cause, a
scheme that claimed the lives of a woman and two children and that cost Most
much support for his refusal to denounce the perpetrators (119-21). Such
episodes as well as the sometimes-obscure figures who played roles in them are
well described, with an eye for telling detail.
Also commendable is the manner in which Goyens navigates the com-
plex history and ideological subtleties of the movement. Although he claims “not
[to] present an intellectual or philosophical treatise on revolutionary anarchism”
(7), he ably walks the reader through the movement’s historical and ideological ori-
gins from the Marx-Bakunin rift leading to the latter’s expulsion from the
International in 1872 to the later tension between Bakunin’s collectivist- versus
Kropotkin’s communist-anarchism. Goyens deftly traces the origins of German
anarchism, its historical roots in the German socialist movement, the impact of
B i s m a rck ’s 1878 Antisocialist Laws (whose expulsion clause led to a fl ow of
radicals to New Yo rk via London), and the growing rift between Germ a n
socialists and the so-called Social Revolutionaries later associated with anar-
ch i s m . He pers u a s ive ly argues that similar developments in the United Stat e s
led to a comparable state of a ffa i rs there. Th ro u g h o u t , his command of t h e
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m i nutiae of a n a rchist history as well as his ex h a u s t ive reading of the anarch i s t
p ress is impre s s ive.
Where Goyens falls short of his own stated goal is precisely in the map-
ping of the New York movement’s geopolitical space announced in the introduc-
tion. Despite an effort to do so in the opening chapter — in which he invites the
reader “to follow the German anarchist inside the beerhall … and proceed into the
back room to join a discussion” — the promised “topography” of anarchism
never becomes vividly clear. Notwithstanding Goyens’s claim that his focus is “as
much on places and spaces as on ideas and ideals”, he proves himself a more able
historian than a geographer (34-35, 7). Indeed, there is an element of tedium to
the demographic statistics and street addresses crowding his “Radical Geography”
chapter. Although the argument he makes about German anarchist meeting
spaces is persuasive — in a nutshell, that they “mirrored the anarchist sensibility”
(37) — the spaces themselves, even the best-described (including the editorial
offices of Freiheit and Justus Schwab’s famous beer hall on the Lower East Side)
rarely take on clearly discernible contours.
This is partially the case because the spaces are as obscure as German
anarchists themselves, and most have long disappeared. Also, the oft-persecuted
movement was itself frequently on the move, an element of impermanence that
complicates the task of mapping the loci of anarchists’ experiences. In a much
later, excellent chapter on “German Anarchists’ Political Culture in New York,”
Goyens acknowledges this transience and, with far greater success, maps German
anarchists’ experiential orbit by exploring recreational groups and activities includ-
ing picnics, outings, rifle clubs, and music and theater performances. It is in this
as well as in his concluding chapter, charting the final decline of the movement on
the eve of World War I, that Beer and Revolution breaks new ground, offers new
research, and thereby earns its place alongside the works of Paul Avrich, Bruce C.
Nelson, and other staples of anarchist historiography.
Peter Conolly-Smith
CUNY-Queens College
Susan Thistle, From Marriage to the Market: The Transformation of
Women’s Lives and Work (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
Thistle traces the demise of the domestic sphere over the past century and a half,
focusing particularly on the implications of the transformation in women’s relation
to the paid labour market since the 1970s. She argues that as women entered the
workforce, the social, political, and legal supports for domestic labour collapsed.
Likening women to landless peasants and pre-industrial labourers, Thistle suggests
that women lost their traditional “way of life” (25). This loss, she argues, created
new hardships as the gendered division of labour broke down. In a discussion
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Tom Goyens, "Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880-1914" (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2007)

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Marco Armiero (Ph.D. in Economic History) is a Senior Researcher at the
National Research Council, Italy. After two short periods of research at the
University of Kansas and Brown University, in the last years he has been working
at the Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University, at the Environmental Science,
Policy and Management Department at UC Berkeley, and at the Bill Lane Center
for the Study of the North American West, Stanford University. He has written
two books and several articles on the environmental-social history of natural
resources, on environmental conflicts, and on environmental historiography. With
Stefania Barca, he is the author of the first Italian university textbook in environ-
mental history, Storia dell’ambiente. Una introduzione (Roma: Carocci 2004). In
English, he has published several essays and edited the book Views from the South.
Environmental Stories from the Mediterranean World (19th -20th cent.), (Napoli: CNR,
2006). He is especially interested in the relationships among social history, environ-
mental history, and political ecology. Naples is his home town.
Nancy Bouchier and Ken Cruikshank are members of the Department of
History at McMaster University. They are currently working on a SSHRC-funded
social and environmental history of Hamilton Harbour/Burlington Bay. With the
support of the Wilson Centre for Canadian History, they recently wrote and nar-
rated the documentary film, The People and the Bay: A History of Hamilton Harbour.
Jim Clifford is a PhD Candidate (ABD) in the History Department at York
University. He is currently working on a dissertation on the environmental and
social history of the Lower Lea River Valley and West Ham. He is one of the
organizers of the September 2008 symposium, "Active History: History for the
Future," at Glendon College in Toronto.
Wilko Graf von Hardenberg holds a post-doctoral fellowship in history at the
University of Trento (Italy), funded by the Provincia Autonoma di Trento. He
received his PhD in geography from the University of Cambridge (UK) in 2007
with a dissertation entitled “Fascist Nature. Environmental Policies and Conflicts
in Italy, 1922-1945.”
Peter A . M c C o rd e a rned his Ph.D. in American History from the Unive rsity of
C a l i fo rn i a , R ive rside in 2003, and he also holds an MA in Economics from the
U n ive rsity of Wi s c o n s i n , M a d i s o n . He has taught Wo rld and American History
and conducted re s e a rch at a variety of i n s t i t u t i o n s, i n cluding the Unive rsity of
Redlands and the Unive rsity of N eb ra s k a , L i n c o l n . C u rre n t ly he is a Vi s i t i n g
Assistant Professor at the State University of New York at Fredonia, where he
continues to research the history of environmental and political thought.
Left History 13_1 (final)  9/24/08  9:44 AM  Page 7
Paolo Pelizzari is now doing a PhD in the history of institutions and society in
contemporary Europe at the University of Milan (Italy). He graduated in contem-
porary history at the University of Florence (Italy) and worked then as researcher
for the Istituto Storico della Resistenza in Toscana and for the Casa della Memoria
in Brescia (Italy).
C atriona (Cate) Mort i m e r- S a n d i l a n ds is Canada Re s e a rch Chair in
Sustainability and Culture in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York
University. She is completing a project on the intersections of sexual and environ-
mental history, which will also include a monograph on Canadian lesbian writer
and activist Jane Rule (1931-2007).
Left History 13_1 (final)  9/24/08  9:44 AM  Page 8


About the Contributors

Clifford, Jim

The Urban Peropherpy and the Rural Fringe: West Ham's Hybrid Landscape

M. Reimers, David

Graham Russel Gao Hodges, "Taxi! A Social History of the New York City Cabdriver" (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2007)

A. Pelz, William

tionship(s) between discourse/power, on the one hand, and ideology, on the other.
My one criticism, however, is that Faison’s emphasis on disciplinary techniques,
and the relations of power that accompany them, tended to de-emphasize prob-
lems of expropriation (in the countryside, where most of the factory women came
from) and exploitation. For it is precisely in the relationship between expropria-
tion and exploitation that one could fruitfully combine the methods of Foucault
and Marx. More specifically, what is lacking in Faison’s analysis is a rigorous analy-
sis of the recruitment process whereby the factory women became factory women
in the first place.
The question here is how to think the problem of exploitation from the
perspective of the recruitment process itself; in other words, prior to the process
of exploiting the surplus labour time of the female workers in the production
process. From what I have read in Janet Hunter’s Women and the Labour Market in
Japan’s Industrializing Economy (2003)—a book which does not pose the relationship
between gender, nation, and sexuality with the same analytical rigor—and from
what I know about the interwar day labour market, where day workers identified
and struggled against what they called “intermediary exploitation” (or chukan
sakushu) stemming from recruitment practices, the textile recruitment process also
seems equally exploitative, but again in this ‘intermediary’ sense. Intermediary
exploitation specifically translated into distinctions between formal and real wages,
and into a highly differentiated economy of ‘commissions’ represented by and
remunerated to recruiters who exploited the vulnerable position of workers in the
sphere of circulation, i.e., outside of production. How this problem of interme-
diary exploitation, endemic to the recruitment process, may be connected to the
codification of female workers as ‘ideal women’, or to the recoding of nation and
sexuality, is something that neither Hunter nor Faison take up. While I understand
how difficult it is to access this problem in the archive, it nonetheless points empir-
ically and theoretically to some limitations in contemporary historical analyses of
the interwar labour market that need to be addressed if we are to really understand
the historicity of the struggles by female factory workers in Japan.
Ken C. Kawashima
University of Toronto
Robert Service, Comrades!: A History of World Communism (Cambridge,
MA.: Harvard University Press, 2007).
With the passage of time since the collapse of Soviet power in Europe and the
opening of long closed Russian archives, the world is ready for a sophisticated, fair
and readable survey of world Communism with an understanding of context and
a feel for nuance. Such a volume would serve an invaluable role in introducing
neophytes to this rich, textured and highly contested history. Along comes
Left History 13.1 219
Left History 13_1 (final)  9/24/08  9:49 AM  Page 219
Comrades! filled with clear, readable and, at times, even witty prose. Despite this
advantage, Comrades! sadly is not able to meet even the most minimal expectations.
The author is conservative to the point of being reactionary, but this is not the
problem. After all, everyone is entitled to their own point of view.
If Stalin’s monstrous mockery of Marxism was a tragedy, Service’s inabil-
ity to present the most relevant facts accurately is a farce. Ironically, this book is
soviet-centric, seeing every Communist movement as a mere appendage of the
Kremlin. According to Service, this is unavoidable. Blinded by his own prejudices,
Comrades! drips with the type of anti-communism most prominent during the
1950s Red Scare. Anyone who shows the slightest sympathy or understanding of
Communism is subject to dismissal, if not outright character assassination. For
example, Issac Deutscher is not simply a historian with whom Service disagrees,
but rather a “useful propagandist” for Trotsky (374). A leader of the French
Communists is not only wrong about the Soviet Union, he is “an ageing poodle
who had usually trotted obediently down the line” (466).
At times, the author appears to be downright quirky as when he seems
obsessed with Russian secret police wearing leather coats. A casual reading might
led one to believe that the popular resentment against the various agencies ulti-
mately known as the KGB was based on their wearing of leather coats (101).
Would Russian citizens have been more friendly towards the Cheka if they wore
cloth coats? Of greater import than such personal idiosyncrasies is the stream of
factual errors that afflict Comrades! Particularly ill informed when discussing any-
thing outside his Russian specialty, Service lets flow a stream of factual errors that
one could not excuse even in an undergraduate paper written by an unusually
dense freshman.
Space does not allow a full recounting of all these mistakes, but the fol-
lowing examples leap out. Service presents Chile’s socialist President Salvador
Allende as the head of a Communist government (2-3). Italian Marxist Antonio
Gramsci, who was born in Sardina, is put forward as a Sicilian who died in prison,
when in fact he died after his release (92). The German Communist Party is
blamed for an uprising in January 1918 (that never took place) almost a year before
they were formed (86). Comrades! has philosophy professor Herbert Marcuse
teaching at the wrong campus in California. Marx and Engels are not spared this
reign of error as they are made to stand “forth as the destroyers of democracy”
(32). It is, according to Service, a straight line from “Lenin to Pol Pot and Fidel
Castro” (4). Can one imagine the howls of outrage if a left-wing historian began
with Adam Smith and then proceeded to draw a straight line to Hitler, Mussolini
and the massacre of a million Communists in Indonesia?  
Comrades! is so deeply flawed as to be useless as a text on this complex
and important subject. Although the factual errors alone disqualify this book as a
serious history, Service also appears perversely to accept Stalin’s belief that
Communist movements can only be judged by their usefulness to the Soviet
Book Reviews220
Left History 13_1 (final)  9/24/08  9:49 AM  Page 220
Union. The idea that there were any indigenous sources of non-Russian commu-
nism is dismissed when it is not ridiculed. Furthermore, this is asserted rather than
factually supported. One wonders if decades of researching Stalin’s Russia has
caused the author to (unconsciously) adopt the Stalinist school of historiography.
Even the language used in the conclusion reminds one of the insults heaped upon
Stalin’s enemies. Readers learn that communism is a “Plague Bacillus” whose
mutation has given us Hitler, Mussolini, Saddam Hussein and bin Laden (481-482).
This reads like one of the more vicious speeches given at Stalin’s Moscow Show
Trials.
Tellingly, this work compares Communism unfavorably with fascism and
Nazism. After all, claims Service, look at the “limited nature of the changes in
society made by Hitler and Mussolini” (486). No doubt this statement would
come as a great surprise to the millions who suffered and died in places whose very
names conjure up horror: Dachau, Buchenwald and Auschwitz, to mention but a
few. Service would do well to remember that one can be anti-communist without
being an apologist for fascism. Many non-communists, although not Service,
understood that ‘limited changes’ was not what either German Nazism or Italian
fascism were about.
The tens of millions of people who thought that by being in the
Communist movement they were fighting and dying for a better world deserve
better. Even granted that at times they may have been mistaken, betrayed or
manipulated, still, they saw many things more clearly than the author of Comrades!
They saw the devastating nature of poverty and the soul numbing aspects of
oppression. True, non-Russian communists may have not always practiced
democracy, yet in their gut most knew freedom was more than being able to decide
which faction of the ruling class would administer the state apparatus. They were
often wrong and some may have even worn leather coats, but what they really
wanted was a better world. They believed, as German communist poet  Bertolt
Brecht put it: “Change the world, it needs it.”
William A. Pelz
Institute of Working Class History
Left History 13.1 221
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Robert Service, "Comrades!: A History of World Communism" (Cambrdige, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007)

Summers, John H.

The Epigone's Embrace, Part II: C. Wright Mills and the New Left

Cain, Mary Cathryn

Race, Republicanism, and Domestic Service in the Antebellum United
States

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