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

This collection of twelve essays is dedicated to the memory of one of its authors, the outstanding historian of the 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 the journal, Labor: Studies in the Working-Class Experience of the 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, the essays attempt to put the current economic crisis into historical perspective while simultaneously trying to identify the “particular historical moment in the history of global capitalism.” (p. 3)

The collection is broadly organized into four sections: “Depression and Working-Class Lives” (three essays); “Economic Dislocation as Political Crisis” (two); “Social Welfare Struggles from the Liberal to the Neoliberal State” (three); and “Workers and the Shakeup of the New World Order” (four). Essays range in coverage from nineteenth-century Toronto’s dispossessed (Heroux and Palmer) to Soviet Workers during Stalin’s Terror (Goldman) to international comparisons of workers’ struggles in the Great Depression and during the 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, the varieties of Marxist analyses in the 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, the British Marxist-inspired working-class history as developed over the past forty years. Or, as the editors put it, “the challenge for historians of labor is to be truly cognizant of the political economy debates that help us explain crisis without losing sight of the human lives and the costs for workers and their communities” (p. 10).

How well the authors deliver on this laudable intent is probably best left to readers of the volume to assess for themselves as the range covered in chronological and national terms defies this reviewer’s competence, but I would draw attention to the 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. Its major contribution probably lies in its demonstration that “wage-lessness and waged employment are not oppositions, then, but gradations on a spectrum traversing desire and necessity that encompasses many possibilities for the proletarianized masses” (pp. 20–21).

Alvin Finkel’s contribution is an unusually ambitious effort “to trace and compare workers’ and especially workers’ organizations’ responses in North America, South America, Europe, and Australia during the Great Depression and the crisis of capital accumulation that has been more or less steady since 1975.” (p. 113) After a remarkable march through the secondary literature covering the interaction of workers’ movements and the development of welfare states around the advanced capitalist world, Finkel concludes: “The working class’s ability to fight back and perhaps eventually to replace capitalism with worker-run socialist systems does not follow any exact prescriptions. But high rates of union density, a past history of insistence upon social-wage programs as worker entitlements that cannot be tampered with … and a broad sense of working-class solidarity all help in the struggle” (pp. 133–134). He ends with the perhaps surprising note that more nations possess those attributes now than they did in 1929 and hence there may be more potential for successful working-class resistance.

The final Canadian contribution is Newfoundland historian Sean Cadi-gan...