Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Barman, Jean

166 Reviews 
Joan Sangster, Girl Trouble: Female Delinquency in English Canada (Toronto: 
Between the Lines, 2002). 
Girl Trouble is an important book. It is important for three reasons. First, Girl 
Trouble tackles a difficult topic: the ways in which girls and young women who 
are considered to misbehave have been treated. Second, Girl Trouble is method- 
ologically exciting. Third and very important, Girl Trouble gives us confidence 
to do activist history. Joan Sangster convinces us good history can, and should, 
speak to the present day. 
Misbehaviour verging on the illegal is captured in the concept of delin- 
quency. The concept is, Sangster points out, both subjective and gendered. 
Delinquency has historically been defined not by some objective measure but by 
how the dominant society, at particular points in time, considers we should lead 
our lives so as to ensure that persons in charge retain their authority into the next 
generation. "Definitions of youth misbehaviour and the creation of a criminal 
category - the delinquent - were and are established within a web of power rela- 
tions, reflecting the prevailing social definitions of what are perceived to be civ- 
ilized, appropriate, moral standards of behaviour" (13). Childhood is the time 
period in the life course intended for acquiring expected roles and for, moreover, 
accepting them as the normal order of things. Those who diverge need to be 
reformed as soon as possible so they might be set on their appropriate paths 
toward adulthood. 
Expected roles have been defined differently for men and women, boys and 
girls. Men were long assumed to be in charge, from the boardroom to the bed- 
room. Women were expected to await their orders whatever the venue. These 
gender assumptions have caused the concept of delinquency to differ between 
boys and girls. In general boys have been perceived to misbehave by virtue of 
not taking charge in appropriate ways, girls by overly doing so. Girls' expres- 
sions of independence have very often been sexualized. The female body, 
dressed or undressed, means 'trouble.' Overly independent girls are perceived 
as making themselves available, as 'promiscuous,' thereby preventing men in 
training from developing appropriate leadership in this as in other aspects of 
their lives. 
Girl Trouble examines the years 1900-1960 in Ontario (although the title 
claims a larger geographical sweep). Sangster first explores the role played by 
women's voluntary associations, in particular the Toronto and Hamilton Big 
Sisters, in encouraging girls to behave according to their lights. She then turns 
to the experiences of girls coming up before the law and to the likely conse- 
quence of their doing so in the form of institutionalization. 
A pithy chapter examines the ways in which Aboriginal girls became per- 
ceived as extreme cases of inappropriate behaviour. The book is particularly 
valuable for considering their circumstances within the larger context of all girls 
Reviews 167 
as opposed to setting them apart as somehow unique from all others. "Native 
girls usually came into conflict with the law for much the same reasons as other 
girls did" (1 5 1). Aboriginal girls may have been repeatedly put at one end of a 
behavioural continuum, but it was, all the same, a continuum as opposed to a 
dichotomy. As Sangster explains in respect to the book as a whole, "protection 
was always differentially applied according to class, and it could become racial- 
ized paternalism directed at Native girls" (3). 
Girl Trouble is interesting for its methodology as well as its content. 
Sangster's approach is meticulous, imaginative, and thought provoking. Girl 
Trouble provides an excellent example of careful yet innovative meaning mak- 
ing. The actual data Sangster uses is fairly prosaic, but by interspersing clear 
tables and figures and personal accounts she both holds her audience and under- 
lines her points. In explaining the workings of the courts, for instance, usually 
not the most exciting of tasks, she interweaves individual experiences to make 
the law, quite literally, come alive in terms of its function and uses. The sections 
on girls' range of responses to their circumstances are particularly remarkable. 
Sangster aims throughout the book at what she terms "a delicate balance" 
between "regulation and resistance, structure and agency" (5). Girl Trouble 
demonstrates firmly and convincingly that history need not be dull. 
Girl Trouble is also important for its activist approach. Sangster is con- 
cerned not just with making history come alive but with making it relevant to 
the present day. Particularly in her first and last chapters, she interweaves past 
assumptions and practices with those of today, emphasizing how we still create 
boundaries for our children to suit ourselves. She draws several times on news- 
paper accounts to demonstrate that notions from half a century and more ago 
have not disappeared from view. The downside is, of course, that in a few years, 
when the book will still be relevant for its historical analysis, sections referring 
explicitly to the year 2000 will also be in the past tense. This minor limitation 
does not prevent Girl Trouble from being an excellent model for all of us who 
are convinced that the stories of yesterday also belong to today and tomorrow. 
Jean Barman 
University of British Columbia 
Sharla Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave 
Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 
In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois described the "Priest or Medicine- 
man" as the "healer of the sick, the interpreter of the Unknown, the comforter 
of the sorrowing, [and] the supernatural avenger of wrong."' Healing, comfort- 
ing, and avenging are just a few of the roles that Sharla Fett, in Working Cures: 


Joan Sangster — Girl Trouble: Female Delinquency in English Canada

Freeman, Jo

The Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission

Wilson, Robert M.

Brad D. Lookingbill — Dust Bowl, USA: Depression America and the Ecological Imagination, 1929-1941; Brian Griffith — The Gardens of Their Dreams: Desertification and Culture in World History

Depatie, Sylvie

182 Reviews 
Colin M. Coates, The Metamorphoses of Landscape and Community in Early 
Quebec (Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2000). 
This book is a study of two neighbouring seigneuries, Batiscan and Ste-Anne- 
de-la-PCrade, situated on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River, half-way 
between Trois-Rivitres and Quebec. The first was the property of the Jesuits 
until it reverted to the crown in 1800. The second initially belonged to the 
Tarieu de Lanaudiere family before passing into the hands of the Hales in 1820. 
Coates examines a period extending from the seventeenth century, when the 
two fiefs were conceded (in 1639 and 1672, respectively), until the middle of 
the nineteenth. The author sets himself ambitious goals: he wishes to analyze 
not just the process of socio-economic change in the seigneuries, but also 
developments in the cultural sphere, of which, he writes, he "[takes] a broad 
anthropological view." Coates seeks among other things to "show how [the peo- 
ple of the seigneuries] tried to make sense of their lives and their surroundings" 
(4). He further claims that "in linking socio-economic structures and cultural 
meanings [the] study elucidates one of the key transformations in early 
Quebec: the growth of nationalist sentiment." (5). The book thus explores both 
familiar and less familiar areas; if, notably, the study of the rural dwellers' 
social perceptions, is very new, the tendency to link the birth of French- 
Canadian nationalism to the socio-economic evolution of rural society goes 
back nearly half a century. One can associate it with W.H. Parker and more 
recently with Fernand Ouellet, an historian who, incidentally, supervised the 
Ph.D. thesis at the origin of this book.' 
Coates's conclusions resemble in part his predecessors'. He too evokes a 
Malthusian crisis which apparently began at the beginning of the nineteenth 
century. But in contrast to these authors, Coates in the end sees this process 
more as differentiation than simply as impoverishment; it produced both a poor 
stratum and a local elite. After the Conquest of 1760, the latter group helped 
create a sense of community that had not existed previously. According to 
Coates, the French-Canadian nationalism formulated by colonial elites reached 
the rural population by blending with this local sentiment. 
This argument easily explains the presence of the term "community" in the 
book's title. What, then, about "landscape"? In his preface, the author explains 
that "[tlhe theme of metamorphoses of the landscape, from aboriginal territory 
to French small-scale agriculture, provides the compass which this book will 
use to explore the region's history" (xii). The book's thesis can be summarized 
thus: French colonists transformed the aboriginal landscape with their land 
clearance and their construction; they made a Europeanized agricultural land- 
scape that two British attempts to impose yet other changes did not fundamen- 
tally modify. The author refers here to the ironworks founded at Batiscan early 
Reviews 183 
in the nineteenth century on the initiative of British entrepreneurs and to the 
Hales' project of recreating an English landscape in their seigneury of Ste- 
Anne. Neither change having greatly altered what the French-Canadians had 
already wrought, Coates speaks of "the ultimate victory of the habitant land- 
scape over all others." (4) He goes on to describe this victory of the French- 
Canadian habitants' landscape in more sociological terms: "Even through a 
second wave of attempted British colonization of the St Lawrence valley, even 
in the face of military and political domination, the local French-Canadian 
society survived." (4) 
As the quotations clearly show, Coates's concept of landscape is a catch- 
all term of little explanatory value. At various points in the book, landscape can 
refer to way of life, power, social relations, economic investment, resource use, 
ethnic mix, culture, and (to use an anachronistic term), regional planning. It is 
difficult to avoid the conclusion that the notion of landscape serves here to give 
a semblance of unity to a study covering, with varying degrees of success, dis- 
parate aspects of the history of these two seigneuries. 
Hcnce Chapter 1 ,  entitled "Aboriginal Landscapes," deals superficially 
with the aboriginal way of life before moving on to the future that seventeenth- 
century French explorers imagined for the region, as well as to the fur trade. 
The following chapter, "Seigneurial Landscapes," presents the seigneurs, their 
relations with the state, and their way of laying out their domain. Coates con- 
cludes that under the British regime, the seigneurs were less present than earli- 
er (owing simply to non-residence in the Lanaudieres' case and a precarious sit- 
uation in the Jesuits'), leaving more room for the local elite, an idea the book 
returns to on several occasions without testing it explicitly. Chapter 3, 
"Habitant Landscapes," first presents seigneurial concession policies and peas- 
ants' resistance against this way of controlling their access to the land. Coates 
insists that more than the seigneurs, the peasants had an impact on land use, 
energetically clearing their properties and introducing European species of 
plants and animals. The wheat-oats-peas combination they adopted was, how- 
ever, modified late in the eighteenth century by the introduction of potatoes, 
which progressively replaced wheat. Following Ouellet's old schema without 
really taking issue with more recent  explanation^,^ Coates interprets this 
change as a sign of the impoverishment of the peasantry. The proof he advances 
in support of this argument is, however, unconvincing: the increase in the size 
of households as a sign of the difficulty of finding a competency for children 
desiring to leave home (an increase that could be read, on the contrary, as proof 
of the farm's capacity to support more people), the evolution of seigneurial rent 
payments in Batiscan (based on a deficient and ambiguous source), the rise of 
local wheat and pork prices (concerning products most habitants sold rather 
than bought), the subdivision of land (on the basis only of contemporaries' tes- 
184 Reviews 
timony rather than an empirical study of the phenomenon), and the marriage 
rate of men younger than 25 years, lower in older parishes than in more recent- 
ly-established ones (which Coates interprets as a sign of the increasing diffi- 
culty of setting up children on farms of their own, as if young people from older 
parishes did not seek out opportunities in newer ones). On the whole, this chap- 
ter devoted to agriculture and the evolution of peasant society does not add 
much to our knowledge. On the contrary, it returns to an old interpretation of 
the "agricultural crisis" that is now generally rejected. 
The author returns to the notions of impoverishment and the increasing dif- 
ficulty of finding land for children beginning toward the end of the eighteenth 
century in chapter 4, covering the family and marriage. For Coates, this turn for 
the worse explains the growing proportion of consanguine marriages, reflect- 
ing poorer families being forced to marry within a smaller circle. Elsewhere, 
however, the author presents the local elite, scarcely impoverished, as adopting 
precisely the same marriage pattern as part of its reproductive strategies. The 
slowing of out-migration early in the nineteenth centllry is also seen as a sign 
of the difficulty of placing children on fanns. "As a result," concludes Coates, 
"thc families of Batiscan and Sainte-Anne made sense of their world by draw- 
ing smaller and smaller boundaries around it." (74) Ouellet's old idea of the 
narrowing of the habitants' world-view at a time when wheat exports to 
England ceased, is presented here in a new guise. 
Chapters 5 and 6 represent the book's most useful contribution. Here the 
author studies local society and especially, its members' perceptions of it. 
Skilfully using the archives of the seigneurial and royal courts, as well as cor- 
respondence, Coates depicts a society whose hierarchical nature was reinforced 
by the judicial system. Habitants, be observes, won their cases much less fre- 
quently than the members of the elite. In general, though, ordinary people 
seemed to accept their place in the social hierarchy. They rarely sued their 
social superiors and when they demanded redress from a seigneur, it was not to 
contest their authority, but to incite them to take their responsibilities. 
Seigneurs on the other hand tended to reject all criticism from below and went 
to great lengths to consolidate their position at the summit of local society. 
From time to time, this brought them into conflict with parish priests, they too 
were very sensitive to perceived slights. Progressively, however, seigneurs lost 
influence as the local elite gained it. In the nineteenth century, the latter was 
able to foster a community spirit that was expressed in collective action to 
obtain schools and roads. Coates contrasts these campaigns with the earlier 
reluctance of the peasantry to contribute labour to road-building or money or 
materials to church construction. This contrast between an individualistic eigh- 
teenth and a more collectively-oriented nineteenth century is, however, more 
apparent than real. On the one hand, collective action in the later period sup- 
Reviews 185 
ported projects that were at least partly funded by government, while in the ear- 
lier period, peasants were expected to shoulder the entire burden of construc- 
tion and were understandably less enthusiastic. On the other hand, chapters 3 
through 6 present numerous examples of eighteenth-cet~tzyv collective action 
against seigneurs and curds. 
The last two chapters of the book are essentially descriptive and cover sub- 
jects already alluded to earlier: the brief (1 799- 181 3) period of activity of the 
Batiscan Iron Works Company and the Hale family's dream of scttling 
Protestants in their seigneury and creating around their manor house a pictur- 
esque landscape reminiscent of England. 
The Metamorphoses of 'L~mdsc~rpe and Cornmunit?/, then, elicits a mixed 
reaction. Its contribution to the study of socio-economic change is slight and 
tends to follow outdated interpretations; in the cultural sphere. where Coates is 
visibly more at ease, the social perceptions of the members of this community 
are traced with considerable success. This last aspect represents a new approach 
to the rural society of pre-industrial Quebec and makes the book well worth 
reading. 
Sylvie Depatie 
Universite du Quebec a Montreal 
W.H. Parker, "A New Look at Unrest in Lower Canada In the 1830s," Crtnotlitrr~ Hisroriccrl 
Review, XL, 3 (1959): 209-2 17; F. Ouellet. Jfisloire tcononliy~re t socirtle tht Qlrihec, 1760-IXSO. 
(Montreal: Fides, 1966), 639. 
For example, Serge Courville, "Le marchk des subsistances. L'exemple de la plaine de Montreal 
au debut des annees 1830 : une perspective geographique," R e ~ w e  d'hisloire d' I 'Anltriy~rr 
fiunqcrise, 42, 2 (automne 1988) : 193-239. 
J.K. Gibson-Graham, Stephen A. Resnick, and Richard D. Wolff, eds., Ci~lss 
and its Others (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 
J.K. Gibson-Graham, Stephen A. Resnick, and Richard D. Wolff, eds., Re/pr-e- 
senting Class: Essuys in Postmodern Marxism (Durham: Duke University 
Press, 200 1 ). 
Class and Its Others and Re/presenting Class are essay collections assembled 
by editors associated with the journal Rethinking Marxism: J.K. Gibson- 
Graham (a pen name for the combined efforts of Katherine Gibson and Julie 


Colin M. Coates — The Metamorphoses of Landscape and Community in Early Quebec

Little, Margaret Hillyard

Reviews 191 
Both collections would likely appeal to anyone pursuing history using 
poststructuralism in their analysis. I hesitate to call either collection Marxist as 
they break so thoroughly with Marx and Engels and rely instead on Althusser 
as the arbiter of the nature of Marxism. Neither text reveal Althusser as a lead- 
ing member of the French Communist Party or his Stalinist leanings which 
seems at cross purposes with their claims of anti-essentialism. I do recognize 
that the editors and authors in the collections are attempting to redefine 
Marxism. That I do not accept their redefinitions is largely immaterial to their 
project. As pointed out in the introduction to Rebresenting Class, "since it is 
not possible to establish 'objective' validity outside the frame of a particular 
analytic regime or project, the question of choice between different theories or 
entry points involves not which is more accurate or true, but the consequences 
of choosing one rather than another" (5). 1 would argue that the consequences 
of choosing their mode of analysis is to take a step backward in Marxist theo- 
ry leaving class struggle muted and obscured by jargon and over analysis not to 
mention offering little useful for workers' actual struggles. If the 1990s has 
taught us anything it is the actual, not imagined, brutal nature of capitalism. 
These collections may appeal to those wanting to know what is current in post- 
structuralist analysis, or what an anti-essentialist class analysis entails. Beyond 
that I could not recommend either book. 
John Henry Harter 
Simon Fraser University 
Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson, eds., Materializing Democracy: Toward 
a Revitalized Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 
To develop a collection assessing the status of American democracy is an ambi- 
tious project at best but one that is increasingly important as the U.S. and glob- 
al capitalist interests dominate almost every political agenda. I read much of 
this collection during the first anniversary of September l l th and was con- 
stantly reminded by media reports of memorial events that there was little space 
for real, critical debate about this important milestone in the world's most pow- 
erful democracy. Perhaps because of the September 1 lth context I was search- 
ing in this book for an analysis that would help me to understand how limited 
American democracy has become. I wanted some acknowledgement of how the 
discursive terrain has narrowed to virtually exclude all interests other than 
those of global capitalism. I wanted someone to address the increased polar- 
192 Reviews 
ization of rich and poor, of white and non-white citizens of America. I wanted 
someone to give a glimmer of hope by shining light on the international social 
protests which attempt to disrupt both the discourse and the practices of multi- 
national corporations and democratically-elected political leaders. With the 
exception of a few articles, I was gravely disappointed with the collection's 
ability to address the real crisis of American democracy and its impact on the 
world. 
To be fair, this is a collection of post-modern writings on democracy and I 
realize that it would not provide materialist analyses of the state of American 
democracy. The CO-editors clearly outline their purpose in the introduction: 
we will not describe democracy in the terms of total freedom, 
good leadership, nationalist cant, protective institutionalism, 
rational rule, happy communitarianism, rigid formalism, tran- 
scendental formlessness, smug liberalism, or First Worldism. 
Instead, the contributors treat democracy as a constructed cat- 
egory in order to understand what conditions of thought and 
practice make it more and less possible, more and less livable, 
more and less emancipatory. (Introduction, 8) 
Even from this post-modern positioning, I was ready for some insightful post- 
modern analysis which would provide me with further insights about the nature 
and limitations of contemporary American democratic culture. 
There are a number of overlapping themes which emerge in this collection. 
Several of the authors assess American culture in an effort to assess the demo- 
cratic health of the nation. They examine the historical legacy of Alexis de 
Tocqueville and Ralph Waldo Emerson and they also explore the importance of 
Will Rogers, Monica Lewinsky, and Princess Diana in the shaping of American 
democratic culture. 
Some of the authors addrcss the issue of exclusion from American culture. 
Joan Dayan explores the exclusion of prisoners while Richard Flores studies 
cultural imperialism along the Texas-Mexican border and the way Mexicans are 
used for their cheap labour but rejected as full citizens. 
I most appreciated the articles that dealt with the real world of politics - 
whether that be the Independent Gay Forum, neo-liberal discourse, or the paral- 
ysis of the academic Left. Herc, Lisa Duggan, Chris Ncwfield and Wendy 
Brown provide important contributions for how the Left needs to re-shape its 
politics in this new era. 
Duggan provides a very provocative and important analysis of the conser- 
vative nature of the Independent Gay Forum. She persuasively argues that the 
Forum's acceptance of same-sex marriage is not a liberating political position 
but rather one that privatizes and apoliticizes same-sex relationships. This pro- 
Reviews 193 
vides food for thought for those of us who want to allign with Left and Queer 
politics. The liberal pursuit of individual choice which is so often advocated by 
the Left does not begin to address some of the conservative elements which 
underly this important debate. 
Newfield provides new insights in his critique of neo-liberalism. He 
addreses neo-liberal claims that the market provides more choice.and more 
individual freedom. He argues that the Left has been too quick to capitulate to 
these neo-liberal claims. 
And Wendy Brown confronts the current paralysis of Left discourse with- 
in the halls of academia. She argues that the Left no longer has a vision of the 
future and she even admits that some of our "progressive" activities within the 
academy need to be revisited. She suggests that we academic Lefties have 
become defensive and moralistic because we lack a clear vision of the future 
we wish to live in. She uses her own experience within Women's Studies as an 
example of a lively, engaged, and liberating academic politics that has now 
become uncertain of its path. 
Together these 15 scholars of literary criticism, cultural studies, history, 
legal studies, and political theory provoke us to reassess the health of American 
democracy and to find it wanting: a vital debate which requires cross-fertiliza- 
tion from not just postmodernists but those who still engage in a materialist 
analysis as well. And the assessment would be even sharper if democratic 
scholars outside of the United States were invited to participate. 
Margaret Hillyard Little 
Queen's University 
Nicholas Griffin, ed., assisted by Alison Roberts Miculan, The Selected Letters 
of Bertrand Russell: The Public Years, 1914-1970 (London: Routledge, 2001). 
Biography is inevitably retrospective. What men and women do in their final 
acts often determines how we judge their earlier deeds - or even their lives as 
a whole. For some, this can be a blessing: Winston Churchill outlived the mil- 
itary and economic blunders of his youth to become England's fearless defend- 
er during World War 11, which is how he lives on in public memory. 
But for many others, the consequences of retrospective biography are 
much crueler. And few have suffered as grievously from this often pitiless prac- 
tice as the great English philosopher Bertrand Russell. Never mind his funda- 
mental contributions to analytical philosophy and mathematics, his Nobel Prize 
in literature, and his staggeringly prolific literary output. Despite his accom- 


Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson, eds. — Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics

Buse, Dieter K.

218 Reviews 
power relations that define them. Dominant discourses are constantly interpel- 
lating subordinate subjects and reshaping their identities and the ideologies of 
subordinate organizations. And while subordinate subjects or organizations 
may consciously take up dominant discourses for their own purposes, their out- 
look and identity may be changed unwittingly in the process. UFNUFWA 
members, then, may have used a variety of resources to build their movement 
and bolster their sense of resistance, but the dialectical interplay of ideologies 
in hierarchical societies suggests this was not a neutral process. 
These theoretical disagreements aside, Rennie's book is a welcome addi- 
tion to agrarian and Western Canadian historiography. It is the best analysis 
available of the rise and development of a Canadian farm organization. 
Jeffery Taylor 
Athabasca University 
Anne Lopes and Gary Roth, Men's Feminism: August Bebel and the German 
Socialist Movement (New York: Humanity Books, 2000). 
August Bebel's book Woman and Socialism (1 879) should be read by everyone 
dealing with women's, feminist, or gender history. One of the most reprinted 
(53 times by Bebel's death in 1913) and translated books of the late 191h and 
early 20th centuries, the study informs about the condition of and possibilities 
for women in Europe with special emphasis upon Germany. Before and after 
World War I, this book inspired many women and men to join movements of 
protest and to agitate for reforms. Today, despite many courses on the history 
of women and feminism, the book seems forgotten. Anne Lopes and Gary Roth 
provide a basis for its rescue from obscurity with Men's Feminism. Their impor- 
tant study finds "socialist men proved to be more consistent feminists than 
bourgeois women ... the socialist movement in Germany drew attention to fem- 
inist issues, like suffrage and sexual harassment, decades before bourgeois 
feminist groups were willing to follow suit." (3 1) 
Lopes and Roth challenge many of the historians' conventions as they 
illustrate the "historiographical switching" - I would add forgetting - of lead 
roles. They show that the initiation of action on female equality by proletarian 
movements has been forgotten and attribution for such roles given to middle 
class reformers. This can be exemplified by the emphasis upon J.S. Mill as 
opposed to Bebel. The former did not touch upon people's work world and thus 
could not explore, as Bebel did, such crucial issues as harassment, prostitution, 
Reviews 219 
and middle-class marriage conventions. Lopes and Roth demonstrate that the 
late 19th century social movements need to be revisited and our understanding 
of them revised. They maintain that "Bebel's feminism was all-present in the 
nineteenth century, [but] it has been altogether absent in the twentieth." (39) 
After a short chronology of people and issues related to Bebel's life, his 
seminal book and 19"' century women's movements, a lengthy note on transla- 
tion points to the problems in previous renderings. The authors illustrate the 
difficulties inherent in the term "feminist," which in German changed from 
being a term which applied to men who were insufficiently manly or overly 
compromising to becoming a word with many meanings relating to women's 
assertiveness. The three English translations of Bebel's book are analyzed, 
pointing to the inappropriate titles, such as Woman Under Socialism, and the 
use of male terminology instead of the gender-neutral language Bebel sought 
to employ. Lopes and Roth have re-translated some of the text. The authors note 
that while 53 printings exist only 8 were revised and expanded editions. 
Lopes and Roth think that "the history of men's feminism can be read from 
two distinct perspectives, of which the more usual emphasizes a history of men 
for and about men, the other a history in which the category of 'male' appears 
omnipresent but not quite so stable." (24) They emphasize the latter while leav- 
ing aside the "history of men's feminism from the perspective of women." 
In the chapter entitled "Reading Women," the authors argue that the style 
of Bebel's book sought to emulate the oral traditions common to the late 19th 
century workers' movements, namely verbal agitation and reading aloud. With 
many examples they illustrate "Bebel's reliance on images and metaphors con- 
cerned with combat, battle, struggle and heroes" (64) to demonstrate that 
"Bebel could never quite efface sensationalism and the proletarian traces of his 
own intellectual development." (68) Lopes and Roth note the three broad 
approaches to women and gender, namely in politics, knowledge, and sex. Most 
other authors have looked only at the political implications, though I have 
reservations about their assertion that "prostitutes are made into role models for 
all women." (73) Even if Bebel concluded that women demanded the "greatest 
possible economic independence" (73), prostitution hardly provided such inde- 
pendence and in Bebel's book the prostitutes' situations were compared prima- 
rily to that of women in arranged marriages. 
Bebel's early contact with and interest in the emancipation of women is 
traced to discussions in the worker's associations of the 1860s. Here Lopes and 
Roth add significant information on how and why Bebel became involved in 
the "woman question" as an advocate of female as well as male emancipation. 
They provide the specific context in which his ideas and ideology developed, 
from the "dual-gender union" in textile work to recruitment for cooperatives. 
They also review his part in the formulation of social democratic progtammat- 
220 Reviews 
ic statements, including the latter's ambiguous stance on complete emancipa- 
tion for women. They find two main themes, namely domesticity being less- 
ened as a role for women and gender equality being advocated un-equivocally. 
Having provided the background to Bebel's ideology of emancipation, the 
authors turn to Bebel's relations with women, specifically his wife Julie, his 
daughter Frieda, the feminist agitator Gertrud Guillaume-Schack, Bebel's 
translator Hope Adams, and the head of the socialist women's organization, 
Clara Zetkin. Though informed with crucial evidence from correspondence, 
this part of the study appears the weakest in an otherwise very strong book. 
Bebel's personal practice of equality is shown in the shift from paternalism to 
partnership with his wife, in child-rearing practices and in his choice of asso- 
ciates. But, the "common ground" with Guillaume-Schack is thin and the rela- 
tionship to Adams very tenuous. However, the Zetkin-Bebel relationship is cru- 
cial and a separate chapter is appropriately devoted to it. Lopes and Roth seek 
to "trace the development of a specifically socialist form of backlash against 
women's equality" (201) in Zetkin's approach. In contrast to other historians, 
they illustrate that "Zetkin was considered the leading female exponent of 
Bebel's ideas at the very time she transformed his doctrine into something other 
than what it had been." (201) Bebel's book offered a program for gender equal- 
ity; Zetkin pushed for suffrage but also protective legislation. With the latter 
she returned toward what Bebel had denied: the assumption that all women 
would be wives and mothers. 
This significant study should force a rethinking about men's and women's 
feminism. It certainly moves toward restoring one of the first and classic analy- 
ses of women history in the 19th century to its rightful place as a crucial and 
central text. 
Dieter K. Buse 
Laurentian University 
Thomas C. Jepsen, My Sisters Telegraphic: Women in the Telegraph Office, 
1864-1950 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000). 
Venus Green, Race on the Line: Gendeu, Labor and Technology in the Bell 
Systems, 1880-1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 
Writing for the journal Good Words in 1877, Anthony Trollope paid a visit to 
the Central Telegraph Office in London. The telegraph was then four decades 
old, and the wonder of its much-heralded capacity to speed human intelligence 


Anne Lopes and Gary Roth — Men's Feminism: August Bebel and the German Socialist Movement

Saraka, Sean

122 Reviews 
Setting aside tired old canards against the main alternative current to the "anti- 
revisionists" would have allowed for the more useful and interesting observation 
that these groups, despite their better analysis and political outlook, also suf- 
fered from many of the same tragic distortions of theory and practice that affect- 
ed Elbaum's trend. 
Despite its flaws, this is one of those very rare books that contains so many 
interesting reflections, explores the unknown underbrush of political history 
with such meticulousness, that it simply cannot be adequately conveyed in a 
short review. Max Elbaum's Revolution in the Air is radical history at its best - 
an informative, strongly argued treatment of a neglected strand of the American 
revolutionary socialist left. It proves that the growth and implosion of the new 
communist movement holds many lessons, both good and bad, for a new gener- 
ation of anti-capitalists coming to terms with familiar problems of globalism 
and war. 
Christopher Phelps 
Ohio State University 
Randy Martin, On Your Marx: Relinking Socialism and the Left (Minneapolis: 
University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 
Randy Martin's On Your Marx: Relinking Socialism and the Left will be 
received by some readers as a late contribution to a genre of academic studies 
on the fate of Marxism in the postcommunist world, studies which enumerate a 
standard set of challenges to the relevance of Marxism today - the rise of "new" 
social movements, the fall of the USSR, the decline of the "traditional" Left in 
advanced industrial states, and the emergence of poststructuralism - only to 
insist, in view of the theoretical or political inadequacies of some or all of the 
above, that Marxism is needed today more than ever. What now appears prob- 
lematic about such studies is less the predictability of their conclusions than the 
impossibly broad range of phenomena that they seek to address. A wide swath 
of social, political, and philosophical trends are too often assimilated to one 
another or otherwise treated summarily, at too general a level of analysis to pro- 
duce much more than an affirmation of entrenched positions. The same is true, 
certainly, of parallel postmodernist tracts in which Marxism itself serves as the 
bogey. 
On Your Marx is presented as precisely this kind of postcommunist perora- 
tion, from its punning title and pop art cover (featuring an off-center lithograph 
of Marx irreverently overlaid with hipster sunshades) to Martin's argument, 
which addresses questions surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union, the the- 
oretical challenge of postmodernism, and the political ambivalence of identity 
Reviews 123 
politics. Yet Martin's book deserves another kind of reading altogether, for in 
the midst of an argument that aims at the challenges of postcommunist history 
and Left politics today, Martin offers a series of specific theses whose relevance 
extends far beyond the limitations of the genre. 
Like many authors who address the postcommunist moment, Martin posi- 
tions himself in between the extremes of the debate: on the one hand, orthodox 
Marxism, which sees no need to argue for Marxism's contemporary relevance 
an4 on the other, postmarxist revisionism, which "sees no need to look back" to 
Marxism at all (xiii). While he is predictably critical of postmarxist assertions, 
Martin's position regarding Marx and Marxism is perhaps the more original. 
This book is subtitled Relinking Socialism and the Left, which is to say that 
Martin does not take for granted that Marxism is intrinsically relevant to con- 
temporary Left politics. Neither, therefore, does he dwell on the kind of 
abstruse theoretical issues that dominated the interparadigmatic debates of the 
late twentieth century. Rather, Martin undertakes to prove the contemporary rel- 
evance of Marx in a concrete political context, with a view to the contemporary 
"process of imagining political possibilities." "[Iln so much political reflection," 
he observes, "the presumption of familiarity [with Marx] substitutes for the 
work of making him known" (xv). His distinction between Marxism as a theo- 
retical doctrine and the concrete practice and politics of socialism allows Martin 
to restrict his focus to the ways in which the former can serve the needs of the 
latter. 
On Your Marx consists of three parts, each composed of several chapters, 
and each of which unfolds more or less independently of the others. In the first 
part, "Marx Among Others," Martin addresses the theoretical misconceptions 
attached to Marx's name and the theoretical challenge posed by postmodernism, 
and argues for his continued relevance on the basis of what he can offer to an 
analysis of globalization. Martin's argument here resembles that of theorists 
such as Fredric Jameson and Dav~d Harvey, who regard postmodernism as an 
historical symptom of late capitalism itself: Like Jameson and Harvey, Martin 
argues that globalization not only is emblematic of the manner in which the cap- 
italist subsumption of social processes continues to determine the range of 
sociopolitical possibilities available today, but also engenders the intellectual 
confusions which give rise to postmarxism in the first place. 
Earlier proponents of this argument have typically overemphasized the cog- 
nitive dissonance intrinsic to the postmodern condition, with a view to discred- 
iting their opponents in the academic struggle over postmodernism. Yet these 
claims have often had the corollary effect of positing globalization as a phe- 
nomenon wholly unthinkable in itself, both wholly negative in its consequences 
and wholly inimical to the critical framework of orthodox Marxism. 
Alternatively, Martin is able to integrate the historical experience of the present 
into Marxism itself, via a suggestive conception of the immanent quality of 
124 Reviews 
socialism. He points out that, according to Marx, "socialism is immanent to or 
an intrinsic feature of capitalism by virtue of the self-expanding socialization of 
labour" (19). The expansionary tendencies of capitalism expressed in global- 
ization are therefore less significant for the intellectual confusions that they 
might engender, than for the immanent potentials and relationships that they fos- 
ter. Accordingly, Martin presents Marx as the prime theorist of socialized labour, 
and especially of its current, fetishized form, in which the processes of produc- 
tion and circulation have become increasingly disarticulated. 
In the second part, "Rethinking the Crisis of Socialism," Martin dissects the 
reigning narratives of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Whereas the collapse of 
the USSR (and similarly, the marketization of China) has typically been taken 
as evidence of the practical failure of socialist principles, Martin's attempt to 
reconceptualize the relationship between capitalism and socialism leads him to 
interrogate the popular image of the fall of communism. He argues persuasive- 
ly that the USSR was free of neither the financial constraints of the global cap- 
italist system nor the internal contradictions of capitalism as a mode of produc- 
tion. As regards the former, Martin argues that, insofar as the USSR's financial 
ties to its client states evinced a set of priorities qualitatively different than those 
of its capitalist counterparts, and insofar as it suffered an inability to secure 
credit on global financial markets, the fiscal crisis that brought the end of the 
Soviet Union can only be understood as a prerogative of global capitalism itself. 
Therefore, he reasons, attempts to understand the successes and failures of actu- 
ally existing socialism can be complicated by its close relations to capitalist 
forms of economic production and capitalist measures of performance. 
Martin apprehends the difference between capitalist and socialist regimes 
not in terms of alternative forms of economy, but rather in terms of their "prin- 
ciple[~] of totalization" (107), the different kinds of social and political media- 
tion that each brings into play. The strict internal boundaries of capitalism, 
between individuals and between property owners, between the economic, the 
political, and the social spheres, are to be contrasted with socialism's attempt to 
redress the irrationalities of capitalist production via political mediation - in the 
case of China and the USSR, via the mediation of the Party. Martin presents the 
concept of the "ensemble," drawn from Marx's 7'heses on Feuerbach, to give 
positive content to the qualitative difference embodied in socialist political 
arrangements. One of the failures ascribed to socialism is an excess of state 
control and a dearth of individual autonomy: Martin argues that such concep- 
tions of autonomy originate in the "naturalization" of the bourgeois individual 
"as a transhistorical ideal . . . used to link self-possession with property" (xxv). 
Consequently, the concept of ensemble is necessary to express, among other 
things, "the desire for further sociality, rather than the imperative for more out- 
put" that is operative in socialism (84). In the final chapter of section two, 
Martin applies his critique of bourgeois individualism to the conception of local- 
Reviews 125 
ism that has emerged in the postcommunist era. He argues that the conception 
of atavistic "tribalism" which serves to explain regional conflict in the world 
today, while it posits the putative return of a premodern condition, in fact occu- 
pies the discursive place of socialism in a revisionist historical narrative that has 
suppressed any other alternatives to capitalist modernity. 
In the third and final section, "Left Turns," Martin contemplates the tactical 
challenges that face Left politics in the Anglo-American world today. 
Continuing his analysis of Left discourses of defeat from the previous section, 
Martin addresses the dominant conception of the middle class as the ideological 
centre of the political spectrum an4 in "Left at the Post," his final chapter, the 
general conditions for the revitalization of concrete socialist politics today. In 
both cases, Martin is guided by the notion that, for the Left, "[tlhe ways con- 
ventionally used to measure historical accomplishment are tied to institutions 
that no longer provide the orientation to politics they once had" (185). For 
example, while the discursive priority attached to the political claims of the mid- 
dle class and its vaunted political centrism have not declined, what has changed 
is the middle class itself: By tracking demographics and home ownership statis- 
tics in the United States, Martin reminds his readers that the notion of the mid- 
dle class as the broad centre of the nation-state has become increasingly attenu- 
ated. Similarly, the Left's attachment to the apparatus of the Keynesian social 
state has meant that it has read its own failure in the dismantling of that appara- 
tus, even while it has failed to recognize new instances of political mobilization 
in its own midst. 
Whereas many postmarxist commentators have attributed the inability of 
the Left to confront changing political conditions to the theoretical deficiencies 
of Marxism, Martin understands discourses of Left defeat as part of a broader 
trend of political cynicism. Accordingly, what is required is less a wholesale 
revision of core socialist doctrines, than the development of "a concept of the 
left . . . that resist[s] the temptation to undermine an appreciation of its own polit- 
ical practice" (190-1). In an analysis that recalls William Chaloupka's 
Everybody Knows: Cynicism in America (1999), Martin demonstrates how the 
Left's attachment to political institutions under siege primes a vicious circle of 
defeatism. Martin argues, for example, that the popular narrative of the failure 
of the Clinton health care reforms preempts any consideration of its broader 
context: 
Under the cover of debate, concentration and centralization of 
capital were promoted. The official discussions also proved 
. . . that universal coverage was unachievable. A democracy of 
this sort . . . teaches the lessons of its own failure without ever 
interrogating the principle of difference that it supports. The 
measurable disaffection from the terms of debate is then pub- 
126 Reviews 
licly mistaken for a retreat from the issue. The story is then 
retold of a distrust in those who govern that is said to deprive 
the state of its own powers of decision, and make the regula- 
tion of anything but the flows of capital impossible. 
"On closer inspection, however," he concludes, "the people's failure to embrace 
this form of regulation is not inconsistent with a desire for socialism" (196). 
Martin argues that, if socialism is "a way of imagining association rather 
than a fixed body of constituents" (213), then its successes and failures must be 
understood not in terms of fixed arrangements, but rather in terms of the devel- 
opment of its own social processes and modes of relationship. Consequently, 
the institutional reversals of the recent past constitute an incomplete account of 
socialist progress. Martin's attempt to disentangle socialist objectives from any 
fixed institutional embodiment leads him to a fluid and all-embracing concep- 
tion of socialism as a political constituency. "The left contribution to politics," 
Martin writes, "is, therefore, to be the conflict, the difference, the generativity, 
against the forces of normativity" (214). According to Martin, socialism stands 
for the "the difference principle in the regulation of society" (204), "a virtuali- 
ty, a horizon of expectation prior to any particular practical engagement, which 
is never exhausted by practice" (2 13). 
In the form of an extended defense of socialism, Martin offers a series of 
powerfully original arguments and concepts that serve equally as a critique of 
both Marxist orthodoxy and postmarxist scepticism. Similarly, while Martin's 
book is framed as a contribution to the debate between Marxism and postmam- 
ism, the originality and value of On Your Marx consists in its dissection of the 
concrete popular and academic discourses surrounding the decline of the left in 
the Anglo-American world. Martin's interrogation of contemporary themes 
through a series of transformations and contexts demonstrates his grasp of pres- 
ent political moment, as well as the strength of his underlying conception of 
socialism. 
Martin's stated intention is to facilitate an encounter between contemporary 
Marxists and their postmarxist critics. His strategy in this regard is a measured 
one: Marx is virtually the only thinker to receive repeated mention in On Your 
Marx, while other presences remain unacknowledged. The most prominent of 
these are Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, whose conception of flows, imma- 
nence, virtuality, and transindividuality appear to comprise much of the frame- 
work through which Martin rereads the socialist tradition. That Deleuze and 
Guattari are not named may indicate the extent to which Martin seeks to cir- 
cumvent epistemological wrangling or the suspicion with which readers might 
greet a more explicit effort at theoretical synthesis. Which is not to say that On 
Your Marx avoids contention: Postmarxist readers may still be alienated by 
Martin's claim that postmodernism and Marxism are not equivalent theoretical 
Reviews 127 
frameworks, but rather that "the former can be said to work within the terrain 
delimited by the latter . . ." (30). Marxists, for their part, may wonder at the basis 
of some aspects of Martin's reading of Marx. 
Paradoxically, then, the great strength of Martin's book is also its weakness: 
Having avoided the sterile presumptions of the literature of interparadigmatic 
debate, On Your Marx could nevertheless benefit from greater theoretical elabo- 
ration. Martin's book functions well as a reflection on contemporary political 
discourse, but his powerfkl synthetic framework deserves elaboration in itself. 
Martin states in his Preface that On Your Marx was originally to be a collabora- 
tion with Michael E. Brown, but that the two "decided to split the labor into sep- 
arate volumes, [Martin's] dealing directly with Mam and [Brown's] on some 
fundamental issues for theorizing today" (ix). Both the considerable strengths 
of On Your Marx, as well as its weaknesses, dictate that this companion volume 
should be much anticipated. 
Sean Saraka 
University of Toronto 
Errol Black and Jim Silver, Building a Better World: An Introduction to Trade 
Unionism in Canada (Halifax: Fernwood, 2001). 
Jeffrey Taylor, Union Learning: Canadian Labour Education in the Twentieth 
Century (Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing 2001). 
How do unions work and what do they do? These seemingly simple questions 
have produced countless labour studies publications, ranging from general intro- 
ductory tests to specialized and detailed historical and sociological studies.   his 
diversity is evident in two recent texts, which both examine how unions work 
and what is it that they do: Building a Better World, by Errol Black and Jim 
Silver, and Union Learning, by Jeffery Taylor. While Black and Silver construct 
a general overview of the roles and history of labour organizations in Canada, 
Taylor undertakes a detailed historical study of how the labour movement has 
developed a system of labour education, and how this system has simultaneous- 
ly shaped the development of the movement. Despite their differences, both 
texts provide informative answers to the questions stated above. 
Black and Silver begin Building a Better World by claiming that trade 
unions are a major force in our society. With this comment, they undertake to 
explain both the role unions play in Canadian society, and the ways in which 
unions themselves are organized internally. Through this exposition, they also 
take a briefjourney through Canadian labour history, exploring the labour strug- 
gles and labour politics of the past, in attempt to illustrate the historical trajec- 


Randy Martin — On Your Marx: Relinking Socialism and the Left

Franzmann, Tom L.

158 Reviews 
A final point: Thompson takes an interesting position on the rise of black 
political power in the city. She argues that this is a good thing; she urges us to 
see that blacks never before had the power that came with Coleman Young and 
other city leadcrs. Yet one can also argue that black political power in Detroit 
was more symbolic than real. Is black control of a city that was only a shadow 
of its former self, a city laid waste by years of capital flight, worth great pride 
or praise? One might claim that African Americans took power at the worst pos- 
sible moment, when memories of former glory were still fresh, but the trajec- 
tory of economic decline was well underway, and the new black leadership 
could be hit with much of the blame. Regardless of how one comes down on 
this question, Thompson's work is valuable for forcing us to think in fresh ways 
about this tragic story. 
John D. Skrentny 
University of California-San Diego 
Mark A. Lause, The Civil Wark Last Campaign: James B. Weaver, The 
Greenback-Labor Party, and the Politics of Race and Section (Lanham, 
Maryland: University Press of America, Inc., 2001). 
A troublesome aspect of U.S. history for Marxian analysis is America's failure 
to turn to socialism during the industrial surge of the late nineteenth century. 
Even the search for viable radical insurgencies during that period has borne lit- 
tle fruit, except for a Populist moment in the 1890s. And agrarian radicalism 
diverged from the working class upheaval called for in Marxist dogma. Lause 
re-examines the empirical record and finds a precedent actually existed prior to 
Populism. The Gilded Age did spawn class struggle, which produced a 
Greenback-Labor Party in 1880. Although the third party polled few votes, its 
very existence, according to Lause, indicates a dialectic was operative. The fact 
that the new organization was stillborn was not due to lack of potential mass 
opposition to plutocracy. Lause argues overt political repression preserved the 
two-party monopoly on public power. 
Lause's interpretation is not intended to supplant other scholarship, but his 
thesis does, in fact, challenge at least the emphasis of much earlier historiogra- 
phy. Most historians locate the G.L.P. within a model stressing entrenched par- 
tisanship, continuity across time, the centrality of national debates on currency 
reform, and the ebb and flow of other "greenback" parties both before and after 
1880. From this perspective, the "soft" money issue was primarily an intra- 
Reviews 159 
mural Democratic dispute. Third parties did not seek permanent independence, 
but tried to weaken major parties in order to win concessions. As part of that 
process, the G.L.P. contributed indirectly to Democratic-Populist fusion in the 
1890s and ultimate abandonment of the Gold Standard under Wilsonian 
Democracy. To forestall bolts, the two party system adjusted and reformed 
itself while preserving social order amidst prosperity. Interest-group politics, 
under the stewardship of educated experts, had worked. 
Lause rejects this scenario as a myth that re-interprets history to suit par- 
tisan agendas. The author claims the G.L.P. was radical in its personnel and pro- 
gram, and had little in common with third parties that sought fusion. The 
G.L.P., in his view, was not a progenitor of Progressive Democracy. Its leaders 
"feared rather than wanted to found such a world." Monetary reform was not 
even the impetus for insurgency. The G.L.P. was a broader revolt "against pol- 
itics as usual," the devaluation of citizenship, and the monopolistic threat of 
plutocracy. To illustrate his argument, Lause stresses national aspirations and 
that many insurgents joined for reasons other than currency reform. Even in the 
Midwest, the node of greenbackism, a frontier ethic of individualism and com- 
munalism, filtered through free labor ideology, was vital to appeals aimed at 
dissident Republicans. These converts expected the G.O.P. to abolish both chat- 
tel and wage slavery, and became disillusioned by the late 1870s. Instead of 
hard work and virtue bringing material rewards, the independence of producers 
was disappearing. A possible solution was an electoral realignment such as 
Republicans in the 1850s had spawned. 
Economic distress, discontent with government, and alienation from a 
Tweedle-DeeITweedle-Dum party system provided initial groundswells of sup- 
port for the new party, just as these conditions helped spawn other third party 
movements of the era. But the insurgents in 1880, according to Lause, were dif- 
ferent. They sought a permanent independent organization. They were more 
radical and became increasingly so due to an eclectic outreach to workingmen's 
and reform organizations more concerned about other issues than the debate 
over "soft" money. According to Lause, socialists were an important compo- 
nent of the G.L.P., not a fringe element. The national platform addressed cur- 
rency issues, but also included planks on woman's suffrage and public owner- 
ship of land, water, and air. And the greenback issue itself often was used as a 
vehicle to articulate broader social critiques on inequitable distribution of 
wealth. 
Lause points to Weaver's candidacy as evidence the G.L.P. was not fusion- 
ist-minded. Greenbackism made coalition with the G.O.P. unlikely. The choice 
of an ex-Republican to head the ticket was an obstacle to Democratic alliance. 
Weaver also was an ex-Union general. Selection of an ex-Confederate general 
as his running mate, according to Lause, shows the G.L.P.'s desire to overcome 
160 Reviews 
sectionalism, avoid "bloody shirt" debates, and create a national voting base. 
Much of the book documents abortive attempts to extend the G.L.P. beyond the 
Midwest. By appealing to blacks and calling for federal intervention into the 
South, Weaver alienated local Democratic leaders. The G.L.P. lacked funds and 
ultimately succumbed to intimidation and "bulldozing." The South was aban- 
doned, yet the party intensified its independent stance. The main issue now, 
though, was not greenbackism, but frauds perpetuated by the Democratic- 
Republican Party. 
Campaigning in the Northeast also was ineffective. Weaver still criticized 
"bulldozing" in the South, but now denounced similar Republican practices in 
the North. Greenbackism increasingly became more the form than substance of 
Weaver's message. But little grassroots support was mobilized except a few 
workingmen's groups. Fusionists in Massachusetts hindered the third party. A 
Union ticket emerged in Maine, much to Weaver's chagrin. The Union slate 
won, but the G.L.P. reaped little benefit when Democrats stole the credit. A 
beleaguered G.L.P. retreated to its midwestern base. Funding evaporated amidst 
last minute charges of scandal, despite Weaver's unprecedented disclosure of 
campaign finances. Election returns provided only a fraction of anticipated 
support and the party dissolved. Other third parties, according to Lause, would 
adopt the G.L.P. style, but not its substance. In this sense, then, the Weaver 
campaign was unique. America reached a turning point, began to turn, then 
failed to do so, or at least turned in the wrong direction. 
Lause makes a plausible case. Unfortunately, the monograph suffers some- 
what due to excessive sentimentality towards its subjects and from dubious 
dogma, such as claims that history repeats itself. The author is refreshingly can- 
did on these matters. But candor does not negate the fact that his book sets out 
to illustrate a theoretical model, rather than rigorously testing it. Lause makes 
his case by overemphasizing facts which buttress his argument, and marginal- 
izing contradictory evidence. The G.L.P. was more nationally oriented, inde- 
pendent-minded, comparatively radical in membership and inclination, and was 
suppressed, in part, by two-party oppression. But this reader remains uncon- 
vinced the party was, in the end much more than a regional grassroots organi- 
zation, that fusionist elements were not important, that radical influence was 
unambiguous, or that other factors were not also responsible for its demise. 
Perhaps this lacuna is why Lause hedges his thesis with disclaimers that it con- 
tests traditional historiography. 
The G.L.P., in fact, had national aspirations. Lause is correct. Yet, here, as 
elsewhere, the author sketches the party as envisioned in the form of what it 
wanted to become, rather than what it was. While it did try to expand its base 
with a broader platform, this attempt largely failed. In the end, the G.L.P. fell 
back upon its midwestern base constituency, among whom the currency debate 
Reviews 161 
was more salient. In fact, over two-thirds of the popular vote Weaver received 
was cast in that region (over 80% if Missouri and Kentucky returns are includ- 
ed). Lause also argues that the G.L.P. was more independent than other third 
parties. But "more" independent does not mean it was devoid of fusionist ele- 
ments. The Union slate in Maine, and less successful coalition bids elsewhere 
show a fusionist faction existed especially at local levels. Lause himself notes 
numerous individuals that abandoned the party over the fusion question during 
the campaign. Even if an independent course was pursued more analysis is 
needed to establish whether this decision was more a matter of choice or neces- 
sity. 
Lause mentions but does not develop the G.L.P.'s relationship to soft 
money Democrats, especially in the Midwest where the "Ohio Idea" was pio- 
neered. Was independence a matter of rejecting fusion, or was it due more to a 
lack of major party interest except in select localities? What is lacking is 
detailed and longitudinal examination of the issue niche in which the greenback 
debate evolved and the given context in which the two major parties prioritized 
and polarized on that question. 
LauseS study underrates the interactive nature of the independence and 
fusion tactics, as alternative options chosen upon the contingency of immedi- 
ate circumstances. Indeed, comparisons with the realignment of the 1850s 
might profitably consider the transition beginning with the Liberty Party in 
1840. That party also sought independence and met defeat. Later, alternating 
tactics, including temporary fusion with both minor and major parties, cleared 
a foundation for a new Republican Party. In each step of the process, though, 
the Liberty program was diluted. What began as a campaign to alleviate the 
plight of black Americans became concerned foremost with rights and liberties 
of white men, and hardly recognizable to the Old Guard. Perhaps a similar tra- 
jectory has application with regard to the transition from the G.L.P. to the 
advent of Populism and Progressivism. 
Lause emphasizes the centrality of radicalism, especially socialism, with- 
in the G.L.P.. Fair enough. But it also is true the radicals were not dominant. 
Lause stresses that free labor ideologues and socialists shared a common cri- 
tique of plutocracy, but also concedes disagreement existed over the role of a 
positive state. At one point, Lause contends the G.L.P. was ideologically 
diverse. Elsewhere, he condemns "comic book" versions of the past for under- 
rating radical unity. But were the radicals united and influential? Lause admits 
the Socialist Party did not abandon an independent identity, although it allowed 
members to affiliate with the G.L.P. But not all did. Some socialists viewed 
Weaver as a well-meaning, but misguided "brother," whereas some of them 
actually actively opposed the G.L.P. Although another group of more amenable 
socialists aided in securing radical planks in the platform, the confusing man- 
162 Reviews 
ner of their adoption made it possible for party spokesmen to ignore, waffle, or 
selectively interpret their meaning on the stump and in the press. To determine 
the relative clout of radicals, additional scholarship will need to apply more rig- 
orous methods and scrutinize a broader range of sources. 
Perhaps a broader sampling of the third party press might prove useful. 
Quantitative analysis of the background characteristics of convention delegates 
might also provide insights unattainable at present through anecdotal biogra- 
phical sketches and summaries of proceedings alone. Based on Lause's 
account, one might suppose the G.L.P. was misnamed, and should have been 
called the Labor-Greenback Party. Yet even the author concedes the most pow- 
erful faction, throughout the third party 'S short lifespan, was the "pragmatists," 
even if radical influence fluctuated and was magnified somewhat over time. 
Finally, one must question whether political repression alone was respon- 
sible for the G.L.P.'s collapse. After all, despite an independent vote of 1.6 mil- 
lion ballots in 1876, the third party in 1880 polled only a little over 300,000 
votes. Either the insurgency was miniscule and class struggle rather mute or, as 
Lause claims, the two major parties circumvented mobilization of the masses. 
Claims of bulldozing have merit, but such charges also were, in part, a face- 
saving gesture to explain abandoning efforts in areas where insurgency simply 
failed to woo support or funds. Lause argues for a declension in G.L.P. south- 
ern support, but one wonders what threshold ever existed to decline from. The 
G.L.P., moreover, may have committed tactical errors and blunders that also 
hastened their demise. 
For instance, Lause claims appeals to northern white wage earners neces- 
sitated that the party support black voting and women's suffrage. Yet, was such 
a course of action mandated? Republicans in the 1850s managed to combine 
appeals for white working class support in the North with minimal commitment 
to civil and political rights for blacks or females. The G.L.P. may have appealed 
to all classes initially to test the waters before focusing their message more nar- 
rowly at receptive audiences. Lause concedes black voters cast ballots in the 
South during the late 1870s and actually makes the confusing claim that the 
G.L.P. cracked the solid South before it was solid. It seems, then, that leaders 
opted to court black voters rather than having it forced on them. In any case, 
the debate between legitimist and purist within party ranks is left somewhat 
ambiguous in this study, other than coverage of the fusion issue. Even in the 
North, moreover, oppression was not always the preferred tactic of major par- 
ties. In some states, Democrats were amenable to fusion. G.L.P. independence 
and radicalism may have actually hurt the party among its core support in the 
Midwest. Lause, however, fails to provide any quantitative analysis of the 
G.L.P.'s social base, compare it to groups with similar demographic profiles, 
and thereby begin to ascertain how much potential greenback support was lost 
Reviews 163 
due to rigid adherence to independence, a broad platform, and rejection of 
fusion. 
Part of the problem is a stylistic choice to let the insurgents "speak for 
themselves." The approach minimizes distortion of their collective message. It 
becomes somewhat of a liability when analyzing the dynamics of party com- 
petition. Explanations for the G.L.P.'s failure are drawn almost solely from its 
adherents, and focus on mudslinging and bulldozing. Lause argues "context" 
over "partisanship," yet his own narrative indicates the latter was important. In 
a footnote, he relates that cultural regimentation also arrested the turn to social- 
ism. If he means it supplemented political oppression, which appears the case, 
then perhaps partisanship was important after all. Cultural regimentation also 
featured socialization into party subcultures. Maybe entrenched partisanship 
was a major obstacle for the G.L.P. In the South, for example, he attributes 
Democratic hostility to racism. While this factor was important, partisanship is 
also pertinent to explaining Democratic antagonism towards threats to its 
powerbase. Indeed, ritualistic behavior displayed at the unity convention indi- 
cates even the G.L.P. was not entirely free from the trappings of broader tradi- 
tional partisan cultures. 
Lause is rightly skeptical of pronouncements by victors, and his study is a 
valuable corrective to earlier treatments which overemphasized fusionist ten- 
dencies. Yet, the thesis is overdrawn, and thereby skews the third party profile 
towards radicalism, albeit an influential faction within the G.L.P., but not nec- 
essarily its defining element. Despite its national aspirations and desire to 
realign the electoral system, the G.L.P. achieved neither objective, nor is its 
demise necessarily traceable only to overt political repression. Indeed, its rise 
and fall may actually have contributed to spawning more fusionist-oriented par- 
ties in the future that sought to avoid its fate. A disjuncture may have occurred 
in 1880, but there may be more to the case for continuity than Lause concedes. 
Tom L. Franzmann 
Stillwater, Oklahoma 
Kenneth Warren, Big Steel: The First Century of the United States Steel 
Corporation, 1901 -2001 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 200 1). 
Kenneth Warren has written what will probably be seen as the definitive histo- 
ry of US Steel, or at least of its first 100 years. This is a book that is compre- 
hensive, detailed and, despite being heavily based on documents from US Steel 


Mark A. Lause — The Civil War's Last Campaign: James B. Weaver: The Greenback-Labor Party, and the Politics of Race and Section

Dorfman, Ben

Reviews 209 
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard 
University Press, 2000). 
Empire is an enormously attractive book if you are a postmodern communist 
(which I think I am, although I am not sure). In the text, capitalism is posed as 
an unqualified evil (satisfying the communist) and the decentered social order 
of the late 20th, early 21" century will be the source of its undoing (satisfying 
the postmodernist). Moreover, the revolution is a "will;" a postmodern-corn- 
munist undoing of capitalism must come. As Hardt and Negri pose it, the het- 
erogeneity of Empire, based in globalization and postmodern communication, 
is shadowed by a homogeneous labouring class that has been expanded by 
Empire's dispersed nature. It (the labouring class) has been given the tools by 
Empire - precisely high tech communication and unprecedented international- 
ization - through which it will overthrow its elusive master (Empire itself). 
Empire thus allows the reader to maintain the universalist, utopic dreams of a 
communist while seeing the diversity of the postmodern world as important to 
the realization of that utopia. 
At the center of this promised postmodern communism is the concept of 
Empire itself, which is supposedly separate from empires (note the lowercase 
"e") as we traditionally conceive of them. The difference is that Empire 
involves the renunciation of empire. In the wake of two world wars and the dis- 
solution of nineteenth and early twentieth century "new" empires, argue Hardt 
and Negri, discourse - be it official political, popular, or academic - has been 
oriented away from the right to dominate other identities and thus encouraged 
the egalitarian multiplying of world identities. This has been facilitated by the 
unique monetary conditions of the post-War world. Since the Bretton Woods 
treaty, Hardt and Negri posit, the spread of American style capitalist practices 
has encouraged the play to and creation of differences among groups and indi- 
viduals in order to diversify and expand capital markets. This has created the 
"cool" world of postmodernism - liberal and multicultural - that has been 
acknowledge by figures from Jameson to Lyotard to Baudrillard. Hardt and 
Negri emphasize its redeeming qualities. Empire has put liberation and free 
movement on the mind and into the practices and routines of many individuals 
around the world. It has also given them a degree of comfort to the idea of dif- 
ference at the levels of culture and communication - comfort that can only 
facilitate the fraternization and eventual solidarity of individuals and groups. 
Thus, Empire, insofar as it is equitable with capitalism (and specifically 
Americanism), is dubious. However, the new element of Empire, the renuncia- 
tion of constraint, makes it strangely productive, worth embracing, and intrigu- 
ing for leftists who also want to embrace the postmodern. 
210 Reviews 
After finishing Empire, however, I picked up my copy of The Communist 
Manifesto. Two quotes stuck out to me: 
The real fruit of the [proletarian] battle is not the immediate 
results, but in the ever expanding union of workers. This 
union is furthered by the improved means of communication 
which are created by modem industry and which places the 
workers of different localities in contact with one another. 
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world 
market given a cosmopolitan character to production and 
consumption.. .it has drawn from under the feet of industry 
the national ground on which it still stood. All old-estab- 
lished national industries that no longer work-up indigenous 
raw material but raw material drawn from the remotest 
zones; industries whose products are consumed not only at 
home, but in every corner of the globe.. . we have intercourse 
in every direction, universal interdependence of all nations. 
Marx suggests something very similar to Hardt and Negri - that the diffusion 
of capital-induced technological progress is ultimately good for the working 
class as those at the head of capital interests are unwittingly giving away the 
tools for their defeat. And while Marx may not have precisely been a contem- 
porary multiculturalist, one cannot get a better description of globalization and 
its relationship to culturally, or at least nationally, diverse people. 
At best, the comparison to Marx here only amounts to the charge that the 
ideas proposed in Empire are not new. A lack of newness is okay - generating 
new social and historical theories is hard, and valuable old ones are worth 
repeating. At worst, the comparison to Marx amounts to the charge of postur- 
ing. Hardt and Negri are not really postmodernists, nor do they give a post- 
modern infusion into Mam. Empire, insofar as it is commensurate with post- 
modernism, only incidentally provides the tools for liberation from it. Workers' 
class-consciousness and struggle to organize is still the basis for liberation. 
Communication - one of the supposed "postmodern" element of Empire - will 
not do alone: one still needs adverse material experience. That is to say that 
while making overtures to inhabiting and "liking" the postmodern, Hardt and 
Negri really oppose it. In truth, the point is overcoming and rejecting post- 
modernism's pleasures and "coolness," even thought the structural apparatuses 
that create them are useful to a certain extent. 
Such a stance in relation to the contemporary global order might be 
redeeming, duplicitous, or not about its real stance on postmodernism. I am, for 
example, tom over the postmodern renunciation (late 20th century) of the mod- 
Reviews 21 1 
ern (post-Enlightenment). It seems valuable to me when the modem is con- 
straining and conformist and not so valuable when it plays into an "Empirew- 
like regime itself. However, this tension between the modem and the postmod- 
ern reveals the central tension in the text. This is expressed in two quotes as 
well: 
... the concept of Empire presents itself not as a historical 
regime originating in conquest, but rather as an order that 
effectively suspends history and thereby fixes the existing 
state of affairs for eternity. 
Imperial corruption is already undermined by the productiv- 
ity of bodies, by cooperation and by the multitude's design of 
productivity. The only event that we are still awaiting is the 
construction, or rather insurgence, of a powerful organiza- 
tion .... Thus we wait only the maturation of the political 
development of [the multitude]. 
The point is essentially this: as Hardt and Negri pose it, Empire, is, on one 
hand, an unbreakable regime whose power might be counteracted from time to 
time, but never completely overturned. This is a postmodern proposition. It is 
the image of dispersed yet institutionalized power weaving its way essentially 
uncontradicted through networks of governmentality. On the other hand, 
Empire is on the verge of its collapse, needing only a push from a self-con- 
scious proletariat. This is a communist proposition. This is why, according to 
Marx, the proletariat needed to make the "forcible overthrow of all existing 
social conditions." Historical logic, though, does not allow for both. In fact, it 
only allows for one: Marx's idea. Revolution demands time and change. They 
alone provide the space in which new social forms, individual experiences and 
political institutions will take shape. Empire, then, in feeling compelled to 
make an overture to postmodernism, treads with one foot in the ahistorical. 
This may only be an affectation. However, it is an affectation that would deny 
the space for historical transformation that is necessary for the overthrow of 
Empire, or any other regime. 
This does not mean that Empire is not worth the read. Quite the contrary. 
In many ways, it gives us a similar mapping of the postmodern age as that pro- 
vided to the modern in Marx's The Communist Manifesto. Hardt and Negri lay 
out the contemporary social, economic, and political landscape of the world in 
large, comprehensive blocks. Their bold images of the postmodern (the 
"regime" and the stoppage of time) make us want to read more. But by only 
making an overture to the postmodern - an ultimately false gesture in its direc- 
tion - Hardt and Negri miss the possibility that a genuine joining of postmod- 
212 Reviews 
ernism and communism holds out: the ground to struggle against history 
whether we believe in its stoppage or not. If history is in motion, as Marx sug- 
gests that it must be for revolutionary change to occur, then we need to work to 
overcome what Walter Benjamin called "the one single catastrophe" that it has 
been. This becomes the reason, as Benjamin also put it, to "brush history 
against the grain," or change the course of historical time and events. Yet, post- 
modern stoppages of history do not need to be viewed as antithetical to this 
cause. They might also be viewed as a means to "brush history against the 
grain." They may provide us with an immanent experience of power, a "pres- 
ent-ness" for it, that would stand as a reason to resist it and rearrange it. Either 
way, we would be engaged in struggle, which seems to me to be the point. It 
seems to me that only in struggle may we "oppose the existing social and polit- 
ical order of things," as Marx put it. Surely Hardt and Negri would like to do 
that in George Bush's America and Silvio Berlusconi's Italy. Why not provide 
us with the largest number of means for doing so? 
Ben Dorfman 
Aalborg University 
Laurel Sefton MacDowell, Renegade Lawyer: The Life of JL .  Cohen (Toronto: 
The Osgoode SocietyNniversity of Toronto Press, 200 1). 
In a liberal democracy such as Canada, which professes to be ruled by law, 
lawyers are important and the ideology of lawyers important for the diverse 
roles they play both inside and beyond the law. A few lawyers have sought to 
extend law's frontiers, not in order to forge a new weapon for class warfare but 
to ensure that the fundamental, legal, and democratic rights of the working 
class are respected by the ruling class. Among the first and most important of 
them was the subject of this book, a lawyer who worked both within and against 
the system in order to changk it. Jacob Lawrence Cohen (1897-1950) was born 
in Manchester, England, and came to Canada in 1907. Called to the Ontario bar 
in 1918, within twenty years he had become Canada's most prominent labour 
and civil-liberties lawyer. J.L. Cohen did not so much invent labour law as 
invent the idea that law should serve labour's interests as well as management's; 
that workers had something significant to gain from law's hegemony. Cohen 
was a left-winger who not only acted for the Communist Party and trade union 
organizers, but also served as legal counsel for the new industrial unions, pro- 


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