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  • The Left in British Columbia: A History of Struggle by Gordon Hak
  • Mark Leier
The Left in British Columbia: A History of Struggle. gordon hak. Vancouver: Ronsdale, 2013. Pp. ix + 284, $21.95

As a stagnating economy, rising inequality, militarism, and environmental collapse have galvanized the left and led to the creation of new movements such as Occupy, Idle No More, and 350.org, historians are, increasingly, focusing on class, capitalism, work, and resistance to make sense of the past. Gordon Hak has crafted a comprehensive survey of the left in bc from the 1850s to the present, going beyond the usual alphabet soup of unions and socialist parties to examine feminism, environmentalism, the peace movement, struggles for same-sex rights, Trotskyism, and anarchism. While the author makes use of the insights of scholars since the “new labour history” of the 1970s and 1980s, the book is firmly based in political economy and collective politics in the streets, the union hall, the community, and the legislature.

The author has been influenced by Ian McKay’s call, made in Rebels, Reds, Radicals: Rethinking Canada’s Left History (Between the [End Page 659] Lines, 2005), to avoid partisan political “scorekeeping” when looking at the historical left. Unlike some who have taken McKay’s suggestion too much to heart, Hak is aware that the differences on the left often represent much more than sectarian squabbling, personalities, and the narcissism of small differences: they often represent very real splits in ethnicity, occupation, status, race, gender, region, and even class. Thus, he outlines commonalities of a broader historical left without subsuming everyone into an ahistorical “popular front.” He is charitable, but still renders judgments on the strengths and weaknesses of organizations and tactics while demonstrating how people who share much may still differ on important matters. His treatment of the movement for socialist, democratic, Canadian unions from the 1950s through the 1980s, for example, shows clearly how useful and fruitful it is to parse labour and the left with some care.

Hak’s earlier work, Trees into Dollars: The British Columbia Coastal Lumber Industry, 1858–1913 (University of Toronto Press, 2003) and Capital and Labour in British Columbia Forest Industry, 1934–74 (ubc Press, 2006), drew heavily on political economy, and this book too pays attention to the changing nature of the province’s economies. Thus, it avoids the common pitfall for much labour and left history written for a broad audience: that of telling romantic stories of martyrs and heroes, and battles lost and won, without context or explanation. Yet, The Left in British Columbia is also informed by E.P. Thompson, though not in the familiar way of rescuing stockingers from the enormous condescension of posterity. This is not cultural history or history from the bottom up. It is, instead, rooted in Thompson’s criticism of the “Pilgrim’s Progress” orthodoxy, in which the period is ransacked for forerunners, as in Canada’s case, of the welfare state, social democracy, and the industrial relations regime established by the Industrial Disputes Investigations Act and PC 1003. Hak points out, for example, that if the Industrial Workers of the World never posed much of a challenge to the moderate union movement, its vision of rank and file democracy still “has much to offer” and that “similar sentiments informed the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s … as well as the more recent anti-globalization and Occupy movements” (59–60). One need not agree with each of his assessments to appreciate that he has successfully walked a line between a doctrinaire account of events and politics and the approach, typified by Eugene Forsey in Trade Unions in Canada, 1812–1902 (University of Toronto Press, 1982) and others, of piling up “one damn thing after another” without analysis, judgment, or causation. [End Page 660]

The book is informed by the author’s detailed reading of bc labour and left history, including the wealth of unpublished theses produced by generations of graduate students, and his own research in particular areas, notably the logging industry and Vancouver Island. It is given an admirable depth by his broad reading of Canadian history and the historiography of international...

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