Workers in Hard Times: A Long View of Economic Crises, edited by Leon Fink, Joseph A. McCartin, and Joan Sangster

Abstract

in Hard Times: A Long View of Crises, edited by Leon Fink, Joseph A. McCartin, and Joan Sangster. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2014. 304 pp. $50.00 US (cloth). This collection of twelve essays is dedicated to memory of one of its authors, outstanding historian of US working class, David Montgomery who died in 2014. It stems from a conference held at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, in September 2011 that was sponsored by journal, Labor: Studies in Working-Class Experience of Americas. The three editors of this volume are in alphabetical order respectively Editor, Contributing Editor, and Associate Editor of Labor. As they tell us in their brief, sixteen page introduction, essays attempt to put current economic crisis into historical perspective while simultaneously trying to identify particular historical moment in history of global capitalism. (p. 3) The collection is broadly organized into four sections: and Working-Class Lives (three essays); Economic Dislocation as Political Crisis (two); Social Welfare Struggles from Liberal to Neoliberal State (three); and Workers and Shakeup of New World Order (four). Essays range in coverage from nineteenth-century Toronto's dispossessed (Heroux and Palmer) to Soviet during Stalin's Terror (Goldman) to international comparisons of workers' struggles in Great Depression and during current crisis (Finkel, Stein, Nolan, Edward Montgomery) and then to contemporary struggles in Newfoundland (Cadigan), China (Lu Zhang), and Greece (Wainwright). The editors and their authors try to bring together two relatively distinct traditions in Marxist-oriented discussions of capitalist crisis in historical perspective: first, varieties of Marxist analyses in political economy tradition represented by a range of thinkers from classical Marxism to contemporary figures as diverse as Frank, Wallerstein, Arrighi, Mandel through to Canadians Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin; and second, British Marxist-inspired working-class history as developed over past forty years. Or, as editors put it, the challenge for historians of labor is to be truly cognizant of political economy debates that help us explain crisis without losing sight of human lives and costs for workers and their communities (p. 10). How well authors deliver on this laudable intent is probably best left to readers of volume to assess for themselves as range covered in chronological and national terms defies this reviewer's competence, but I would draw attention to Canadian essays by Heroux and Palmer, Finkel and Cadigan. The first analyzes Toronto workers' responses to capitalist crisis from 1873 to 1925, building on an earlier, more theorized essay in Labour/le Travail (2012), which should be read as a companion piece. …