Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Kropp, Phoebe S.

Living in Los Angeles: Places, People, and Politics

Pelz, William A.

nificance of the more ineffable resources of power—values, beliefs, perceptions,
information, communications—that were wielded by both sides and eventually
shaped the outcome of the 1988 plebiscite.
Perhaps Stern’s most important achievement in this book is to have inter-
preted this whole period as history. With scholarly rigor and an impressive array of
contemporary sources, he has stepped back from earlier accounts and produced an
analytical narrative driven by actors and events that is notably fresh, even when
most readers know how the story turns out. His consideration of Pinochet’s social
support and “battle to win Chilean hearts and minds”—a battle his regime “waged
and won, and then waged and lost” (1)—modifies many existing interpretations
(and offers new insight into continuities since 1988). Stern historicizes the human
rights movement, asking why its exposés “seemed to fall on apathetic ears” for so
long (138, cf. 196, 218), and shows why its moral appeals only gained traction later.
He not only uses contemporary press sources to great effect but also provides a
persuasive history of the media’s changing role through the period, as alternative
publications gradually reached a greater public. He goes a long way toward inte-
grating the varied international influences—often considered partially and for lim-
ited periods—that shaped national developments throughout these years.
In all, this is an impressive synthesis based on prodigious research. Stern
has provided an exemplary twenty-page essay on sources, and more than 90 pages
of endnotes are studded with insightful brief commentaries (e.g. on death-and-dis-
appearance and torture figures, 392-95). Some of the ‘Afterwords’ that follow each
chapter succeed better than others, and Stern’s stylistic insistence on a memory
vocabulary (“memory knots,” “memory voices,” “memory clock,” etc.) can some-
times be distracting, but these are cavils. His focus on social memory, which allows
him to consider the moral and subjective elements of human experience, together
with his historian’s sensitivity to indeterminacy and human agency make this a com-
pelling interpretation of how Chileans lived the Pinochet years.
Alexander Wilde
Universidad Alberto Hurtado
Sobhanlal Datta Gupta, Comintern and the Destiny of Communism in India, 1919-1943:
Dialectics of Real and a Possible History (Kolkata: Seribann, 2006).
This is a work of remarkable clarity that manages to steer between the rock of anti-
communism and the hard place of Stalinism while contributing a fresh approach to
a complex problem and understanding that the history of the Communist
International (Comintern) in India is a many-sided difficulty. Sobhanlal Datta
Gupta is not someone who attempts to hide his independent Marxist approach
from the reader. The author notes “this book is an attempt to explore the gray
Book Reviews212
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areas, the zones of silence, by discarding official Marxism as well as unabashed anti-
communism” (xxi). Moreover, the writer openly proclaims he:
will not be dismayed if the postmodern radicals who con-
sider Marxism as ‘passe’ and ideologies redundant find the
book useless and irrelevant. Such responses would simply
remind me of Schopenhauer, who once said, ‘Blessed is the
man who does not know how to think.’ . . .neither dogma-
tism nor scepticism will save the Left from the quagmire in
which it is enmeshed today, and for its survival it will have
to come to terms with history (xxi).
With this type of introduction, no one may claim that the author was shy about
sharing this approach or basic assumptions. In many ways, this is not a work for
the intellectually faint-hearted in as much as it is theoretically rigorous and awash
with detail. Despite that warning, it is a fascinating read for those interested in
Indian Communism. This book explores the ‘voices of difference’ on India that
were ignored by the Comintern and then by traditional Indian Communist history.
Gupta examines what did happen and what could have happened. He gives suffi-
cient discussion to the important role of M.N. Roy in early Indian communism
without reducing this period to a discussion of one individual. As concerns Roy,
the author notes the centrality of Roy’s hostility to Gandhi in the 1920s, a tradition
followed by R. Palme Dutt (42).
What follows the introduction is far from a polemical or purely theoreti-
cal work. Comintern and the Destiny of Communism in India begins with an insightful and
complete examination of the new historiography of the Comintern. Among the
various layers of analysis contained in this refreshingly unique section are: a
rethinking of the periodization of the history of the Comintern; a comparing the
monolithic character of the Comintern vs. the autonomy of the national sections of
the Communist Parties (CPs); following the opening of Soviet archives, an assess-
ment of the reliability of the archival information, mechanisms of control and sur-
veillance and Russification employed by the Comintern. One very practical ques-
tion this book addresses early on is howMoscow managed to control National CPs.
In South Asia, the Communist Party of India (CPI) found itself increas-
ingly under the supervision of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Then
there was the question of financial aid. The 100,000 Russian gold roubles given to
the small CPI in August 1926 did nothing to reduce Soviet influence. If the
Russians controlled the purse strings, the British supplied the ideology. There was
also the mechanism of persuasion or ‘propaganda’ when the Comintern would
place their materials in the press of the party being ‘educated’ as well as ‘Open
Letters’ from the Moscow center to the national parties. Furthermore, the
Comintern cultivated factions within each national party that were loyal to the
Comintern. In some situations, there might have even been coercion and intimida-
Left History 12.2 213
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tion. Behind it all was the domination of the Comintern by the Russians from the
very start, despite protests by Lenin himself (57-58).
Worse was to befall the fledgling movement as the fall of Bukharin meant
“the possibility of providing any alternative to Stalin’s understanding was perma-
nently closed” (123). Thereafter, the CPI was given a series of bizarre tasks during
the so-called Third Period, such as “fighting for a Soviet republic” while attacking
British Imperialism and native reformists, “especially the ‘Left’ wing!” (142). With
the rise of Dimitrov to leadership in the Comintern, Gupta points to the comple-
tion of the Comintern’s transformation into a tool of Soviet foreign policy. Yet in
all, Dimitrov was different from Stalin. He represented difference although not dis-
sidence in the Communist International. Meanwhile, back in London, the CPGB
did “well as nothing” on the colonial question during the period of 1935-1943. Still,
the British party “emerged as the spokesman of the Comintern in relation to the
CPI in the most crucial phase in the history of communism in India, namely, 1935-
1943, that is, the period of United Front and War.” (158).
To be sure, there were to be differences between the British conductors
of Comintern policy and the Indian comrades. Specifically, there were disagree-
ments about work in the army and the slogan of ‘Pakistan’ (221-223). Still, the
Comintern maintained control of Indian Communism, often through the persons
of the British CP, who had easier access to India than non-English Communists.
By the dissolution of the Communist International in 1943, the Communist Party
of India “had no role to play, the party was left with no choice, oriented as it had
become in a spirit of uncritical acceptance of the authority of Moscow” (226).
There were a number of outstanding Indian Marxists living in the Soviet
Union who could have played a major part in the growth of a radical movement in
their homeland. These individuals were caught up in Stalin’s purges and their mur-
ders further cemented the CPGB’s monopoly on the ‘Indian Question’. This devel-
opment had a profound impact on the shaping of the Indian Communist move-
ment. Thus, the problems of Russian Marxism had a global effect on the world’s
Communist parties through the instrument of the quick Russified Comintern.
Stalinism was, in the author’s opinion, evitable but rather made possibly by the fail-
ure of the other possible alternatives.
Still, this book is far from a catalog of left tragedy. Gupta ends with a
refreshing and provocative look at the possibilities of Indian Communism. Noting
how Rosa Luxemburg’s famous belief in the “freedom to think differently” had
been “foreclosed permanently” by the Stalin dominated Comintern, the author
says: “Time has come for all concerned people to acknowledge this bitter truth and
appreciate the necessity of rewriting the true history of Indian communism… The
book closes, cherishing this hope in mind” (306).
William A. Pelz
Institute of Working Class History.
Book Reviews214
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Sobhanlal Datta Gupta - Comintern and the Destiny of Communism in India,
1919-1943: Dialectics of Real and a Possible History

Doran, Christine

Steven Flusty, De-Coca-Colonization: Making the Globe from the Inside Out (New York
and London: Routledge, 2004).
Steven Flusty’s De-Coca-Colonization: Making the Globe from the Inside Out is a very
hopeful book about the possibilities for popular resistance to globalization. Or,
more correctly, it is a reinterpretation of the nature of globalization to show that it
is produced, rather than needing to be resisted, by people at the local level. At the
same time it also throws into dispute the accepted distinction between the global
and the local. As is already becoming clear, this book puts into question so many
of the taken-for-granted assumptions of the scholarly discourse surrounding glob-
alization that it becomes difficult to characterize its argument using the accepted
terminology.
It is no doubt partly for this reason, and also because of the author’s self-
confessed penchant for terminological inventiveness, that neologisms stud his
prose. In the course of her perusal, the reader becomes familiar with “flexism”, the
“metapolis” ,“globalities” and “de-coca-colonization” itself, to name but a few; as
well as such neo-phraseology as the “new world bipolar disorder”, and “prickly
space”. Though a little disturbing at first, such neologisms quickly register as both
novel and lively, apt as well as intellectually challenging.
This short book packs a powerful emotional impact. Its tone of buoyant
optimism is infectious, so the effect is uplifting and energizing. This is not to say
that the book is naïve or pollyannaish. The author writes about the darker side of
the globalizing world, the prevalence of gated communities in the United States and
elsewhere, of the increasing official surveillance of everyday life, about September
11 in New York and terrorism. But the emphasis remains on the creative potential
for people to shape and reshape globalities for themselves.
Essentially Flusty’s argument is that globalization is created by the activi-
ties of myriad individuals, acting either as individuals or within groups. Thus
agency and the power of creation reside in the hands of individuals, and individu-
als can make and remake globalization according to their own desires. By focusing
on the individual and the local, Flusty counters the dominant conceptualization of
global processes as by nature, big, inevitable, irresistible, overwhelming and
imposed from above. What Flusty is arguing for might be characterized simply as
‘globalization from below’ instead of ‘globalization from above’. This aligns his
work in some ways with that of Richard Falk, as in Predatory Globalization: A Critique
(1999), with its stress on the need to build transnational civil society as a founda-
tion for greater democratic governance.
Flusty’s argument raises some interesting methodological issues. The the-
oretical basis of his approach to globalization could be described as methodologi-
cal individualism. This refers to a method or approach within the social sciences
which explains social phenomena in terms of the interaction of innumerable deci-
sions and actions of individuals. It can be contrasted with methodological collec-
Left History 12.2 215
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tivism, which instead explains developments in society in terms of the behaviour of
collectivities such as classes, ethnic groups, or genders. The interesting thing about
the dominant discourse on globalization is that it has been closely connected with
the concepts of economic rationalism, neoclassical economics and the ideology of
the free market—all of which are theoretically grounded in methodological individ-
ualism. What Flusty has managed to do is to turn methodological individualism
against that dominant globalizing discourse. Flusty engenders a sense of individual
empowerment by placing decision-making about the future course of globalization
into the hands of individuals all over the globe. This “detournement” (a Flustyism),
or reworking, of individualism against the dark forces of “plutocratic corporatism”
(another Flustyism) is one of the reasons why this book is so intellectually stimulat-
ing as well as emotionally satisfying.
Flusty’s relationship with various systemic analyses of globalization, such
as Marxist approaches or neo-Marxist dependency theories, is therefore difficult;
and this is something he grapples with continually, but inconclusively, throughout
the book. He characterizes his own approach as “discursive materialism”. He
finally relies on Marx’s well-known dictum that individuals make their own history,
but not in circumstances of their own choosing. Flusty also gestures toward Michel
Foucault’s notion of micropolitics, seeing power not so much as external and sov-
ereign but as immanent in and emerging through day-to-day thoughts and actions.
Thus the dark forces of globalized plutocratic corporatism do exert undeniable
power, but Flusty emphasizes repeatedly that even these forces themselves are the
result of countless individual daily actions, and their dominance is neither inevitable
nor permanent:
There are multiple versions of the world at play on the
global field, and there are inarguably winners that claim the
lion’s share of the spoils…All remain engaged in continu-
ous, polyvalent, and dislocated struggles for control over
symbolic and literal terrains, all work to be concretized as
globalities with the power to influence (or refuse) the order
of the world…It remains instead a persistently viscous
planet, an arena where all manner of institutions and other
hybrid social collectivities advance incommensurable glob-
alities, plutocratic and otherwise, of their own devising
(131).
Strictly speaking, Flusty does not put forward globalization from below as an alter-
native to globalization from above, but as a counterpart.
According to Flusty, the social work of constructing globalization “is
done by the stuff of everyday life—its persons, spaces, artifacts, and, most impor-
tant, the practices that constitute their relationships” (4). Such quotidian minutiae
Book Reviews216
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 216
become the stuff of his analysis. To highlight global interconnectedness, he tells
stories about items of everyday life (or at least his everyday life): a barong shirt from
the Philippines, ordering a suit from Damascus, and the intriguing Meiji Yogurt
Scotch candies. “At its broadest my claim is that globalization is only because it is
woven through the planet’s social fabric from the ground up (or, much more cor-
rectly, from particular grounds outward) by everyday life’s hyperextension —the
increasing spatial reach of emplaced social relations” (4). To highlight the possibil-
ities of resistance, he describes in depth, for example, international resistance
against Nike as a corporation, and the Zapatistas uprising in Mexico from 1994 as
a movement against neoliberalism and globalization.
No doubt Flusty’s method and line of argument, his eclectic and rather
haphazard approach to theoretical underpinnings, will give little satisfaction to
committed theory builders who wish to explain the phenomenon of globalization
as a whole. Nevertheless, Flusty offers the reader hope for the future. His inspir-
ing anecdotes of multicultural mixing, his cheerful upending of the methodological
individualism of economic rationalism, provide a needed tonic against the psycho-
logical pains of life within the globalizing world.
Christine Doran
Charles Darwin University
Left History 12.2 217
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Steven Flusty - De-Coca-Colonization: Making the Globe from the Inside Out

About the Contributors
Vinayak Chaturvedi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at
the University of California, Irvine. He specializes in social and intellectual histo-
ry of modern South Asia. He is the author of Peasant Pasts:  History and Memory in
Western India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007) and the editor of
Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (London: Verso, 2000).
Daniel Fridman is PhD candidate in Sociology at Columbia University. He grad-
uated as Licenciado in Sociology at the University of Buenos Aires in 2002. His
research interests include boxing cultures in Latin America, economic sociology
and comparative ethnography.
Ben Holtzman is an editor and activist living in New York. His writings have
been published in Clamor Maga zi n e, Jo u rnal of Popular Music Studies,
Maximumrocknroll, Popular Music and Society, Radical Society and the collection,
Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization (AK Press). He
can be reached at benholtzman@yahoo.com
David Sheinin is Professor of History at Trent University and Academico
Correspondiente at the Academia Nacional de la Historia de la Republica
Argentina. His most recent book is Argentina and the United States:  An Alliance
Contained (University of Georgia Press, 2006). He is currently writing monographs
on the nuclear sector in Argentina and on human rights during the last Argentine
dictatorship.
Eric Strikwerda is a PhD candidate at York University. His dissertation deals
with the delivery and administration of unemployment relief in Western Canadian
cities during the Depression.



Contributors

Howell, Philip

Multitude is also filled with short anecdotes intended to illustrate the authors’ quite
grand arguments. These anecdotes sometimes fall short in that regard, coming off
as trite rather than illustrative. Finally, certain of the authors’ propositions are
inadequately thought through. Discussing the possibility of a global representa-
tive body, or global parliament, Hardt and Negri suggest that such a body might
be constituted via either Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or in terms of
‘civilizations’ (as opposed to simple population counts, which India and China
would dominate). These ideas are not explored, however, leaving it unclear how
multitude might organize itself at the level of institutionalized democracy. Finally,
Hardt and Negri end Multitude with the assertion that love, in fact, should be the
ultimate, guiding principle of multitude. As they define it, love is the joy brought
by “expansive encounters and continuous collabourations” (351). Perhaps, but
this definition lacks the power of theses concerning politics, desire and econom-
ics developed by, e.g., Deleuze and Guattari. Here, the power of capital is to pro-
duce desire. This desire is then taken as psychological, at which point it becomes
understood as unavoidable and demanding political and social management.
Discourses concerning ‘collabouration’ and ‘encounters’ seem a bit weak in the
knees by comparison.
To concentrate on such points, however, is to miss the ultimate value of
Multitude. This value is the text’s synthesis of a set of broad-based concerns with
social justice and contemporary geo-politics apprehended through theoretical
matrices encapsulating large swaths of Marxist, post-Marxist, and postmodern
theory. In this sense, Multitude—which should be read in conjunction with Empire-
—represents a work that goes a long way toward defining an early-twenty-first cen-
tury Zeitgeist. Its claims are contestable. As an attempt to develop a thesis con-
cerning the “general state of things” in our times, however, Multitude is nothing
less than indispensable.
Ben Dorfman—Aalborg University
Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease
in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003).
Prostitution, Race, and Politics covers the advent and elaboration of contagious dis-
eases leg i s l ation in four British colonies—India, the Straits Settlements
(Singapore), Hong Kong, and Queensland (Australia). The attempt to police sex-
ual relations in these key colonial sites centred on the regulation of prostitution—
the registration of prostituted women, their inspection for venereal disease, and
their sanitary detention if found to be in a contagious state. Pioneered in the early-
nineteenth century, this way of managing sexual relations across the gender, class,
and/or racial divides was by the second half of the century a systematic and char-
acteristic feature of British imperial rule. Modern medical science was accompa-
nied not only by the inevitable authoritarianism, but also by the ideology of racial
Left History 12.1 173
and cultural supremacy—notably by pitting European modernity against the back-
wardness of native peoples, cultures and environments. Sex thus became a racial
and imperial issue, p rostitution a phenomenon simu l t a n e o u s ly stimu l at e d ,
denounced, and regulated in the service of empire. This collusive and contradic-
tory sexual system was attacked and partially dismantled by liberal and feminist
‘repealers’, themselves not immune to racial arrogance or imperial sentiment, but
colonial contagious diseases legislation remained stubbornly in place well into the
twentieth century. Briefly reinvigorated by the crisis of the First World War, they
met their end only in the era of penicillin, the League of Nations, and British
imperial decline.
This is a history that has hitherto only been partially told, its constituent ele-
ments being dispersed in the various subfields of imperial, feminist, social, and
military history. We are perhaps only now able to combine archival analysis and
theoretical sophistication in such a way as to do justice to the significance of this
imperial sexual system. No one, in this regard, is more qualified to tell this story
than Professor Levine. What is particularly valuable in her work is the fact that
these four sites are contextualised within an overview of the imperial system.
Levine shows how colonial practice both contrasts to and acts as a constituent of
domestic regimes of sexuality. Even in the heyday of the Contagious Diseases or
CD Acts (1864-1886), there could be no equivalent for the far-reaching regulation
of sexuality found in the colonies, particularly where questions of race and colo-
nial authority were concerned; but at the same time it was this very opposition that
constructed the metropolis as a distinct legal and moral space. Professor Levine’s
comparative methodology is aligned here with the new imperial history’s transcen-
dence of the nation, its rejection of the separation of metropolitan and colonial
histories, and its commitment to thinking through the range of colonial/imperial
sites and spaces within the same conceptual framework. For the record,
Prostitution, Race, and Politics is a tremendous account of the sexual politics of the
later British Empire, meticulously researched and at the same time theoretically
and methodologically convincing. Invitingly interdisciplinary, it deserves to be a
more or less permanent fixture on reading lists for all historians of colonialism and
imperialism, gender, race and sexuality; and it will have about as long a shelf life
as anyone would sensibly care to predict.
All this has been said, however. Prostitution, Race, and Politics has been wide-
ly and favourably reviewed, and the paperback edition comes pre-garlanded with
praise; it hardly needs any further recommendation. This very belated review does
offer though an opportunity to consolidate assessment, particularly in the context
of the more timely responses. One thing to note in this respect—and this is the
first element of a properly critical appreciation of a brilliant book—is that it is
simply not correct to portray Levine’s coverage, as some reviewers have done, as
systematic, comprehensive, definitive even. Levine’s focus on explicit contagious
diseases legislation leads her for instance to downplay some colonial regimes in
Book Reviews174
which prostitution regulation was practised but not made explicit; whilst Levine
notes the fuzziness of regulationism’s legal basis, she treats law as perhaps too
abstractly solid, if that is not a contradiction in terms. Moreover, and perhaps
more importantly, it is disappointing that Ireland’s example, of a colonial site with-
in the metropolitan orbit, is again virtually ignored; this in turn points up the prob-
lematic basis of the colonial/metropolitan distinction that Levine otherwise makes
abundantly clear. One more thing: as one reviewer has rightly noted, the absence
of contagious diseases legislation in some, perhaps the majority, of British
colonies is a question that Levine’s selection of sites prevents her from properly
acknowledging and theorising. The conclusion should be, I think, without taking
anything away from Levine’s achievement, that the new imperial history must be
taken even further in its redrawing of the map of empire. There remains the need
for historians of sexuality to consider the empire as an interconnected whole.
The related question of geography and spatial analysis is a second area that
has divided reviewers and which remains ambiguous. Professor Levine would be
the first to admit that the concluding chapter on the imagination and institution-
alisation of geographies of sexuality is indicative rather than conclusive. At the
empirical level, much more could be said about the materialisation of sexual and
racial ideology. To give but one example, the racial segregation which has entered
into the very definition of the colonial city, is straightforwardly acknowledged, as
in the discussion of Hong Kong’s racially separated brothel districts. But this sex-
ual landscape was the outcome of more convoluted colonial negotiation than
Levine indicates. At a larger scale, too, Levine does not really describe the com-
plex and multi-scalar geography of sexuality politics within the British imperial
network. These are professional, parochial, and self-serving objections, but there
is nevertheless the danger of confirming, despite Levine’s best intentions, the ana-
lytical divide between metropolis and colonies. Levine is right to point to the
impossibility of taking either race or empire in a unitary way, but her selection of
colonial sites, and comparative methodology, may serve, at least for the casual and
inattentive reader, to reify colonial analysis. It will be a shame if the wealth of
detail in Prostitution, Race and Politics is reduced to simplistic appropriations and gen-
eralisations. It is a book that deserves by contrast close reading, re-reading and
constant critical engagement with its methodology and analysis. Levine has pro-
duced the fullest and most coherent account of the British colonial regulation of
sexuality, and Prostitution, Race and Politics will continue for very many years to
reward scholars willing to give it this kind of attention.
Philip Howell—University of Cambridge
Zwia Lipkin, Useless to the State: “Social Problems” and Social
Engineering in Nationalist Nanjing, 1927-1937 ( C a m b r i d ge : H a rva rd
University Press, 2006).
Left History 12.1 175


Philippa Levine - Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the
British Empire

What Is Left History?

Heer, Jeet

A Conversation with Tariq Ali

Sheinin, David

146 Reviews 
replica of Britain in what was usually an entirely different geographical and 
social context. Exactly like Rushdie's Saladin Chamcha, the inhabitants of 
these countries often ended up claiming to be "more English than the English." 
The contributors to The Revision of Englishness might have made more of what 
appears to be a strong connection between colonial and metropolitan experi- 
ences of Englishness, whether in terms of historical reality, artistic representa- 
tion or the interface between the two. If nothing else, such an approach might 
have given the collection a wider academic appeal. 
Such criticisms notwithstanding, The Revision of Englishness does consti- 
tute an often effective effort to analyse how various artists have attempted to 
deal with the question of what it has meant to be English in the postwar era. The 
essays are uniformly well written an4 for the most part, free of that academic 
jargon that can make literary criticism such a horror to read. The collection 
ends, suitably enough given its title, with a rousing call for a new sense of 
Englishness "resonant as a signifier for a 'civic' vision encompassing the local 
and global" (184). It is a beautiful dream, though, one suspects, not much more 
than that. 
Todd Webt-Brock University 
Peter Winn, ed., Victims of the Chilean Miracle: Workers and Neoliberalism 
in the Pinochet Era, 1973-2002 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 
2004). 
Peter Winn is on a mission. He is out to shatter the persistent fantasy of an eco- 
nomic miracle in Chile under the dictatorship of de facto president General 
Augusto Pinochet. Toward that end, Winn has assembled a consistently excel- 
lent collection of analyses. Beyond any reasonable doubt, he has laid waste to 
the claim that Pinochet brought prosperity to Chileans. Reason, though, has 
often had little to do with how the "miracle" argument has taken shape over the 
past thirty years. In fact, despite the strong analysis of Winn and others, it is 
likely that the miracle myth will have legs for some time to come. 
In 1973, after Pinochet led the Chilean military in a US CIA-backed coup 
d'Ctat he launched a two-pronged internal war against so-called Communist 
subversion. First, the dictatorship set about destroying political enemies by 
killing them, jailing them, driving them into exile, or forcing them into so- 
called internal exile in the South. Second, over the next decade and a half, the 
Chilean government dismantled government involvement in the economy wher- 
ever it could. This project boasted multiple components. In the 1970s these 
included the positioning of the "Chicago Boys" (University of Chicago-trained 
right wing economists) in positions of authority, the destruction of organized 
Left History 1 1.1 147 
labour, the sale of state-owned enterprises, and generous give-aways of state 
resources to foreign investors. After 1980, it also featured "pioneering" neo-lib- 
era1 initiatives that included the first system of private pension plans in the 
Americas (long since celebrated by Republican Party activists as an appropriate 
model for the United States). 
Well researched and powerfully argued, the chapters in Victims chart a 
common set of themes. They are declining working conditions, the impoverish- 
ment of working peoples, the weakening of class consciousness and class based 
politics, and the rightward shift of the political center in post-Pinochet Chile as 
a victory of dictatorship period economic policies. Despite the consistently 
high level of the collection, it might have been strengthened in two ways. First, 
each of the authors is based in the United States. This is not in and of itself a 
problem. But the debate over the Chilean miracle has been and continues to be 
deeply politicized in Chile. It has taken on a life of its own, intimately tied since 
1990 to the political contours of memory and justice around the Pinochet Era. 
In light of this, in light of Chileans remaining deeply divided still on the 
Pinochet legacy, and in light of a number of unique and rich contributions of 
Chilean authors to the debate, the collection would have profited from the inclu- 
sion of Chilean scholarship and the editor's having addressed the scholarly lit- 
erature on this theme as politics and ideology. Second, while the chapters con- 
cern a wide variety of workplaces and industrial sectors, there is almost no 
attention to aboriginal people as workers. This is especially disappointing in 
light of the political roles of the Mapuche, for example, in regard to the rise and 
fall of the dictatorship, and the places of indigenous peoples in Chilean socie- 
ty. 
Peter Winn's chapter on the Pinochet Era is masterful, the best overview of 
post-1973 Chile that I have read, and an excellent starting point for anyone 
interested in the links between state terror, social policy, and economics in 
Chile. Winn has also written a brilliant study of the decline of the Chilean tex- 
tile industry since 1973. A traditional stronghold of the political left and organ- 
ized labour, the textile sector was decimated by Pinochet Era state violence, and 
social and economic polices. With thousands of lost jobs, textile workers and 
factory owners pressed the post-Pinochet era democratic government for state 
aid. But dictatorship economic policies continued to hold sway through the 
1990s. In a climate of globalized trade and investment there was no help forth- 
coming. What was left of the Chilean textile sector after 1990 had all but van- 
ished by 2002. 
Unlike textiles, the Madeco metallurgical industry represents a strong 
measure of success for its having thrived under Pinochet to become a South 
American leader. But like similar Chilean success stories, according to Joel 
Stillerman, Madeco's rise was built on worker losses through declining wages, 
disappearing benefits, longer hours, weaker union representation, and a van- 
148 Reviews 
ished class solidarity that was common to many workplaces. There are similar 
results for seasonal fruit workers. But here Heidi Tinsman argues that dictator- 
ship policies had a more profound impact on women than on men. Her argu- 
ment is sophisticated. Pinochet's assault on organized labour led to a severe 
exploitation of women that was marked by much longer hours and poorly paid 
piece-work. At the same time, Tinsman contends that work and wages improved 
women's authority in their communities and homes, including the power in 
many situations to leave abusive relationships. Rachel Schurman's "Shuckers, 
Sorters, Headers, and Gutters" considers work in a new dictatorship-period 
export industry--seafood. Here an environmental problem is linked to declin- 
ing work conditions. While the state-supported fishing industry produced enor- 
mous exports, by the early 1990s a combination of domestic and foreign over- 
fishing had destroyed Chilean fish stocks. Workers not only confronted the low 
wages, job insecurity, and absence of benefits common to other sectors, but the 
industry itself was jeopardized by reckless inattention to the well being of fish 
populations. 
Ever since the late 1970s, there has been a steady stream of statistics 
flogged by economists dead set on "proving" that Pinochet's state terror was a 
"necessary" evil on the path to prosperity for all Chileans. There has never been 
any credible evidence for that claim. A range of scholarly analysis has long 
since highlighted growing poverty in Chile since the mid-1970s, associated 
with each of the Pinochet Era major economic ventures, from the gross mis- 
management of privatizations to the failed promise of private pension plans over 
the past few years for the first generation of dictatorship era retirees. But in the 
context of Chile's ongoing struggle to rid itself of the Pinochet legacy, and the 
strong ongoing presence of pro-Pinochet apologists in positions of authority, a 
deeply politicized and polarized argument around the "miracle" will continue, 
in spite of this edited tour de force and other important works showing the mir- 
acle for what it really was. 
David Sheinin-Trent University 
Mary Gluck, Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in 
Nineteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, Mass.: Haward University Press, 
2005). 
In Popular Bohemia, Mary Gluck aims to re-orient our historical and theoreti- 
cal understanding of modernism, in order to bring it closer to the "humble and 
neglected regions of popular culture and everyday experience" of the nineteenth 
century (2). In doing so, she sets her argument against that of scholars such as 
Matei Calinescu (Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, 
Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism [ l  982]), Andreas Huyssen (Ajier the Great 


Peter Winn, ed. — Victims of the Chilean Miracle: Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era, 1973-2002

Sarnoff, Daniella

Left History 11.2 157 
it as a "tremendous perversity?'(Frederick Smock, The Courier-Journal, 15 
May 2005.) Even the ultra-liberal Ellage Voice described Lolita as "three hun- 
dred pages of sex in the head," declaring in the end that it was simply "too 
many, and too much." (Jerry Tallmer, fillage Voice, 3 September 1958.) 
Despite all this, Devlin's work is quite fascinating and very readable. She 
has a keen eye for popular culture and she has done an excellent job explaining 
how psychoanalysis seeped into many areas of American culture after World 
War 11, be it in legal discourse, advertising, the stage, or the world of letters. 
Unfortunately, I cannot help but think that the father-daughter psychoanalytic 
paradigm, while certainly a unique and colourfUl feature of postwar American 
culture, was not as pervasive as Devlin would have us believe. 
Jason Reid-York University 
Helen Harden Chenut, The Fabric of Gender: Working Class Culture in 
Third Republic France (University Park: Penn State Press, 2005). 
Helen Chenut's The Fabric of Gender is both a chronological and thematic his- 
tory of the knitters of Troyes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 
While the title might make one envision a piece almost entirely focused on the 
dynamics of gender, it is, in fact, a full history of the life of the knitters in the 
proper spirit of both gender and class history. Gender is just one thread of this 
book, which is a balanced and thorough look at the social, political, and con- 
sumer lives of these industry-specific French workers in the Third Republic. 
The book is actually slow to get to gender, spending time setting up the con- 
text of workers' lives in the Aube, explaining the growth of the knitting and cot- 
ton hosiery industry (bonneterie), the history of family work on a local level, 
and the transition from merchant to industrial capitalism, particularly as prac- 
ticed by the mill-owners of Troyes. 
Looking at the knitting industry most intensely from 1900 through the 
Popular Front, Chenut touches on a number of themes, including: the political 
leanings and engagement of the knitters, employers' and workers' concerns, the 
feminization of the industry, and prevailing ideas of skill, technology, and con- 
sumer practices. She returns to each of these topics a number of times through- 
out eight chapters, and while the format is highly organized (as noted, convey- 
ing both a chronological tale and thematic telling) Chenut's format does, on 
occasion, mean the repetition (or re-setting up) of ideas addressed in previous 
chapters. 
Beginning with the strike of 190&generally perceived as a failure as 
workers' wage and hour demands were not met-Chenut explains the intenvov- 
en nature of working-class politics, class consciousness, and the local politics 
of Troyes and the Aube. It is not that gender or women were marginal to the 
158 Reviews 
story (indeed Chenut shows how essential women and female labour were to 
the knitting industry), but that in the pre-female suffrage world of Third 
Republic France, women's political power fell far short of their indisputable 
labour power-particularly in the knitting industry that they would come to 
dominate. Although women made up one half the adult labour force in Troyes, 
they had very little power in the industry or during the strikes of 1900 and even 
of 1921. 
Chenut conveys great detail about the organization of labour in the knitting 
industry and the technological innovations that account for the long-term gen- 
dering of skill and machine work within it. Chenut notes that men had always 
operated the knitting frame and that both the machine and the skill had been 
gendered as male by the late nineteenth century and would continue to be so 
sexed into the late Third Republic (7 1, 100, 166, 17 1). If the knitting frame and 
the skill to use it were considered male, women were most often connected to 
more painstaking jobs such as finishing work and seaming. The gendering of 
machines and skill, and tasks and tools, had their origins in the family econo- 
my and workshop of earlier times. Yet that hierarchy remained well into the 
twentieth century, even as women became the majority employed in the knit- 
ting industry. The gendering of tools and tasks is also what 'accounts for' the 
inequitable pay of men and women (men being higher paid), as well as the gen- 
eral lack of competition between male and female employment in the knitting 
industry. Because women's work was only partially mechanized, "women's 
work was less affected by technical innovation" and so was less threatened by 
technological developments (1 0 1). 
Chenut is also very detailed and informative in conveying the complicated 
relationship between mill-owners and workers, as well as the interactions 
between workers, their unions, and formal political parties in the Third 
Republic. Socialism and revolutionary syndicalism-Guesdists, the Parti 
ouvrier fran~ais, and the Socialist Party (SFIO)--became important forces in 
the development of an urban working class in Troyes (112-130). As the "pre- 
cariousness of work and extreme variability of wages" (101) continued to be 
knitters' prime labour concerns, the political parties of the Left helped the work- 
ers give voice to those anxieties. In theory, these political groups and their lead- 
ers aff~rmed the equality of the sexes; however, that theory was not put into 
practice (13 1). Women's status as "double proletarians" (at home and at work) 
was a challenge for socialist and syndicalist partie-a challenge that was not 
met (134). 
I was most taken with Chenut's discussion of consumer practices: workers' 
proclamations that they had a right to consume, the formation and operations of 
the Labourieuse workers' coop, as well as the meaning and evolution of the 
Fgte de la Bonneterie. The Fkte was the local ritual that celebrated the knitting 
trade. Although it had existed in some form for centuries Chenut looks at it from 
Left History 11.2 159 
1909 to 1938 and discusses some important alterations that illustrate the 
changes in the industry. The new Fite of 1909 was organized by mill-owners, 
not workers, and cast women workers in central symbolic roles. These changes 
conveyed both the feminization of the knitting trade as well as the power of the 
mill-owners and their interest in creating an industrial trademark for the town. 
There is less on the image of workers in national popular culture. The book 
has a short section on film that only addresses one example, and the discussion 
of books and theatre is similarly limited. Chenut does capture the different con- 
sumer roles of men and women, particularly the divergent ways that male and 
female workers chose to proclaim (or not) their membership in the working 
class. Men seemed to be more political in their fashion choices-wearing the 
cap (casquette) as a symbol of their class and masculinity-whereas the 
women's fashions of the interwar years afforded working-class women the 
opportunity to dress more like the bourgeois consumers of the knitted goods 
they produced (298-303). 
The interwar years, particularly the 1930s, would test the workers of Troyes. 
As owners cut wages and created part-time work the knitters of Troyes suffered 
unemployment and wage decline within the larger context of declining union 
membership and power. While Chenut sees the victory of the Popular Front and 
the strikes of 1936 as a triumph of worker mobilizations as well as a victory 
against fascism on both the local and national level, she emphasizes that these 
successes were ephemeral. 
Chenut clearly cares deeply about the place and people she has researched 
and that interest in their political, consumer, and work lives is infectious. She 
has written a book that can be read as a local history as well as a larger story of 
the social, political, and cultural transformations of the French working class. 
Daniella Sarnoff-Fordham University 
Raymond Jonas, The Tragic Tale of Claire Ferchaud and the Great War 
(Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2005). 
At the core of Raymond Jonas's succinct and engrossing book is the story of a 
young peasant woman from the Vendte who, from the age of three, claimed to 
have visions of Jesus in which he spoke to her, showing her his wounded heart. 
In late 1916, at the age of 21, Claire decided she would try to convince the 
President of the Third Republic to consecrate France to the Sacred Heart, there- 
by ensuring the nation's spiritual regeneration and its victory over Germany. 
Claire's mission would end in failure, meeting with rejection from the republi- 
can authorities and disapproval from the Vatican. As Jonas demonstrates, how- 
ever, it provides an excellent vantage point from which to explore the evolution 
of French Catholicism and the political culture of France during the First World 


Helen Harden Chenut — The Fabric of Gender: Working Class Culture in Third Republic France

Hudon, Christine

Bettina Bradbury and Tamara Myers, eds. — Negotiating Identities in 19th and 20th Century Montreal; Magda Fahrni — Household Politics: Montreal Families and Postwar Reconstruction

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