Historical Materialism and the Writing of Canadian History: A Dialectical View

Surveying the historical writing in Canada that has adopted the approach of historical materialism, this paper presents a new perspective on Marxist theory and its relevance to the study of the past. It both links Canadian historical materialist texts to a series of important international debates and suggests the significance of dialectics in the development of Marxism's approach to the past.Cet article examine l’écriture historique au Canada teintée de l’approche du matérialisme historique et présente un nouveau point de vue sur la théorie marxiste et sa pertinence quant à l’étude du passé. Il relie non seulement les textes matérialistes historiques canadiens à une série d’importants débats internationaux, mais il évoque aussi l’importance de la dialectique dans le développement de l’approche marxiste par rapport au passé

A Left History of Liquorice: What It Means to Write "Left" History

This article is part of a special Left History series reflecting upon changing currents and boundaries in the practice of left history, and outlining the challenges historians of the left must face in the current tumultuous political climate. This series extends a conversation first convened in a 2006 special edition of Left History (11.1), which asked the question, “what is left history?” In the updated series, contributors were asked a slightly modified question, “what does it mean to write ‘left’ history?” The article charts the impact of major political developments on the field of left history in the last decade, contending that a rising neoliberal and right-wing climate has constructed an environment inhospitable to the discipline’s survival. To remain relevant, Palmer calls for historians of the left to develop a more “open-ended and inclusive” understanding of the left and to push the boundaries of inclusion for a meaningful historical study of the left. To illustrate, Palmer provides a brief materialist history of liquorice to demonstrate the mutability of left history as a historical approach, rather than a set of traditional political concerns

Historiographic Hassles: Class and Gender, Evidence and Interpretation

Historiographic controversy in Canada has produced concentric circles of often quite charged disagreement. Two relatively new areas of Canadian historiography — the serious scrutiny of labour and gender and their significance in the past — have been central to ongoing challenges to historical interpretations and evidence. Some curious, largely unacknowledged chains link the critiques provided by working- class histories from the 1970s and 1980s to newer 1990s gender perspectives. A scrutiny of two major texts of gender history, Gender Conflicts edited by Franca Iacovetta and Mariana Valverde and Lynne Marks’s Revivals and Roller Rinks, reveals the tensions that connect as well as separate labour and gender historians. We need to reconstitute a dialogue, not through surrender, pique, overblown claims, or caricatures, but on the basis of parallel, if sometimes divergent, projects of modest accomplishment.La controverse historiographique au Canada a souvent jeté de très lourds pavés dans la mare. Deux domaines relativement nouveaux de l’historiographie canadienne — l’étude sérieuse de la vie ouvrière et du sexe et leur importance dans le passé — ont joué un rôle central dans la contestation continue d’interprétations et de preuves historiques. Des chaînes curieuses et largement inconnues font un lien entre les critiques issues des histoires de la classe ouvrière des années 70 et 80 et de nouvelles perspectives des rapports hommes-femmes des années 90. L’étude de deux textes majeurs sur l’histoire des rapports hommes-femmes, Gender Conflicts, publié sous la direction de Franca Iacovetta et de Mariana Valverde, et Revivals and Roller Rinks, de Lynne Marks, nous révèle les tensions qui unissent tout autant qu’elles divisent les historiens de la vie ouvrière et des rapports hommes-femmes. Nous devons reconstituer un dialogue, non pas par l’abdication, le ressentiment, des allégations exagérées ou les caricatures, mais sur la base de projets parallèles, quoique parfois divergents, d’accomplissement modeste

What\u27s Law Got To Do With It?: Historical Considerations on Class Struggle, Boundaries of Constraint, and Capitalist Authority

This article offers a preliminary theoretical statement on the law as a set of boundaries constraining class struggle in the interests of capitalist authority. But those boundaries are not forever fixed, and are constantly evolving through the pressures exerted on them by active working-class resistance, some of which takes the form of overt civil disobedience. To illustrate this process, the author explores the ways in which specific moments of labour upheaval in 1886, 1919, 1937, and 1946 conditioned the eventual making of industrial legality. When this legality unravelled in the post-World War II period, workers were left vulnerable and their trade union leaders increasingly trapped in an ossified understanding of the rules of labour-capital-state relations, rules that had long been abandoned by other players on the unequal field of class relations. The article closes by arguing for the necessity of the workers\u27 movement recovering its civil disobedience heritage