Dissenting Traditions

Essays on Bryan D. Palmer, Marxism, and History

Sean Carleton, Ted McCoy, Julia Smith, Sean Carleton, Ted McCoy, Julia Smith

• Publisher: AU Press and CCLH
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781771993135
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The work of Bryan D. Palmer, one of North America's leading historians, has influenced the fields of labour history, social history, discourse analysis, communist history, and Canadian history, as well as the theoretical frameworks surrounding them. Palmer's work reveals a life dedicated to dissent and the difficult task of imagining alternatives by understanding the past in all of its contradictions, victories, and failures.

Dissenting Traditions gathers Palmer's contemporaries, students, and sometimes critics to examine and expand on the topics and themes that have defined Palmer's career, from labour history to Marxism and communist politics. Paying attention to Palmer's participation in key debates, contributors demonstrate that class analysis, labour history, building institutions, and engaging the public are vital for social change. In this moment of increasing precarity and growing class inequality, Palmer's politically engaged scholarship offers a useful roadmap for scholars and activists alike and underlines the importance of working-class history.

With contributions by Alan Campbell, Alvin Finkel, Sam Gindin, Gregory S. Kealey, John McIlroy, Kirk Niegarth, Bryan D. Palmer, Leo Panitch, Chad Pearson, Sean Purdy, and Nicholas Rogers.

PART I

Labour

1 Bryan D. Palmer, Labour Historian

♦

Alvin Finkel

Bryan D. Palmer is the most prolific and one of the most celebrated Canadian labour historians of the past half century. He is also the most controversial Canadian labour historian, a subscriber to “orthodox Trotskyism” while also a champion of history from below.¹ This chapter begins with a portion of the controversies because they provide important clues to Palmer’s location in the labour history canon. It is a canon that, in his case, embraces Canadian, American, and British labour history.² A discussion of his major labour works follows, informed by what these controversies reveal of Palmer’s approach to working-class history and how that approach has evolved over time. We finish with an interrogation of the long-term impact of Palmer’s research and analysis on labour history scholarship, particularly in Canada.

Palmer first became an object of controversy early in his publishing career as part of the first group of social historians of working people that emerged in the 1970s. He was a founding member of the journal Labour/Le Travailleur, and his article on nineteenth-century artisans was the lead article of the first issue.³ So Palmer was a predictable target for a campaign by traditional scholars of labour against “culturalism” in labour history. They used that term to refer to any discussion except in passing of ordinary or radical workers as opposed to successful labour institutions within capitalism and their leaders. Conservative labour historian David Bercuson, who would later pan Palmer’s book with Gregory S. Kealey on the Knights of Labor in the American Historical Review, was co-editor of the Canadian Historical Review when it invited the patrician social democrat Kenneth McNaught to comment on recent trends in labour history.⁴ It was the first time that the major historical journal in the country, which had never demonstrated much interest in the history of workers, chose to print such an article. McNaught was the sympathetic biographer of J. S. Woodsworth, the first leader of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, and can be viewed as more supportive of left-wing ideas and left-wing figures than his postwar cohort of academic historians.⁵ But, like most of the others, he was a Cold Warrior and an elitist who believed that the study of history must focus on the thoughts and actions of “great men.” An opponent of both Communists and the New Left, with its anti-hierarchical demands regarding universities and workplaces alike, McNaught was aghast at the socialist libertarianism of the Young Turks and their emphasis on an international and interdisciplinary Marxist literature. He granted begrudgingly that the new social historians of the 1970s had researched subjects that earlier historians had ignored and had added useful empirical knowledge. But he rejected their efforts to recast Canadian labour history from a focus on the progenitors of the modern labour movement that was well integrated into the capitalist system and parliamentary democracy toward both workers themselves and leaders and members of supposedly less successful, dissentient workers’ movements. His contempt for the new social historians of labour and the people whose stories they told is clear in this passage that extols economist H. Clare Pentland’s depiction of “the smart union leadership” of the 1930s and 1940s: “That smart union leadership was not the product of any autonomous working-class culture. It grew out of an increasing sophistication and education. And its goal was not to defend an Archie Bunker-charivari culture, but, rather, to liberate those who had been entrapped by the economic-cultural constraints imposed by political capitalists.”⁶

Disgusted that the social historians appeared to “accept an essentially revolutionary goal as the inner purpose of historical research and writing,” McNaught unsurprisingly singles out the social historian least reluctant to deny such a goal. Palmer, he writes, is the “most overt amongst the celebrants of ‘the rich and vibrant culture of the artisan.’” He dismisses Palmer’s evidence as “almost anecdotal” and then demonstrates the closed mind of those who insist on a history limited to great men and institutions by adding: “In a sense it fills in some of the interstices and provides a more detailed background than was previously available for understanding our social history rather than providing any convincing new interpretation of the role of the working class and its spokesmen.” Somehow the inclusion of the grassroots workers themselves changed nothing about the interpretation of working-class history. To add insult to injury, he complains about Palmer’s “turgid neo-Marxist theoretical framework.”⁷

By the time of the McNaught article, Palmer had already debated an even more dismissive critic of so-called “culturalism,” political scientist Terry Morley, who asserted a restrictive view of policy and society in which any discussion of working-class efforts to assert their right to control what they produced was “romantic.”⁸ But Palmer had bigger fish to fry as he inserted himself into a debate on the British Left regarding E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, the single most influential work for social historians of labour throughout the English-speaking world. An important group of left-wing British scholars was at war with alleged “culturalists” for a reason quite opposite to that of Canadian social democrats: they regarded culturalists as anti-revolutionary, anti-Marxist, and anti-Leninist. Their ranks included Perry Anderson, historical sociologist and editor of the influential New Left Review.

Palmer’s defence of Thompson, with whom he nonetheless had political disagreements, revealed much about his own approach to the history of the working class. In Palmer’s view, the debt that historians of working people owe to Thompson is “the significance and place of agency and experience.”⁹ Thompson emphasized “the process of class struggle.”¹⁰ Countering those on both right and left who viewed that focus on the bottom-up self-organization of working people as a rejection of broader social forces that had an impact upon working people, Palmer comments: “None of this should be taken to mean that class is essentially cultural, the political dimension of its existence obliterated, the objective aspects conditioning or setting the limits of its existence ignored.” Indeed, he argues that The Making of the English Working Class meticulously blends the economic, political, and cultural “history of common and not so common people, those living the experience of class formation.” The Thompson book rescued them at once from the right-wing structural functionalism of Cold War American sociologist Talcott Parsons and the vulgar Marxists who proposed theories of social change in which rank-and-file workers were pawns of forces bigger than themselves.¹¹

But for all his commitment to telling the story of rank-and-file agency while examining the economic and political forces within which that agency occurs, Palmer soon had his Canadian critics from among the social historians to add to his raging opponents on the right. The latter, little by little, abandoned labour history altogether, indirectly conceding victory to the social history group.¹² The social historians, though all to some degree influenced by Marxism and the New Left, were no more united than the British Marxists in whose debates Palmer did not flinch from intervening. An unspoken united front had been maintained against the institutionalists, as issues of control inevitably occurred over the Canadian Committee on Labour History (formed in 1970 as an all-inclusive subcommittee of the Canadian Historical Association to promote the sharing of research among historians interested in working-class history) and the CCLH journal, Labour/Le Travail (which first appeared in 1976 under the name Labour/Le Travailleur and then was renamed in 1984 because French-speaking women increasingly described themselves as travailleuses, rejecting an older convention that privileged masculine nouns when more than one gender was described).¹³

With the common enemy gone, the social historians of labour were free to air disputes among themselves. For the most part, like feminist historians in English Canada, who were increasingly also historians of the working class, labour historians preferred to minimize their differences. That was partly because of strong personal and professional friendships that their research and dissemination of research had created and partly because they remained united against the old guard of male establishment historians focused on “great men” and Whig history. Such unity seemed to many even more necessary in the era of neoliberalism that began in the late 1970s, and was characterized by a call for a partial return to an earlier stage of capitalism in which state interventions and non-interventions alike focused on creating a huge imbalance in the rewards won by capital over labour. That perspective gradually replaced the postwar compromise in which capitalism survived challenges from below by granting concessions to the working class and incorporating trade unions at least partially into the system. One-time welfarist liberals like Jack Granatstein, David Bercuson, and Michael Bliss became fierce neoliberals and poured contempt on scholars whom they regarded as radicals, which increasingly meant egalitarians of all kinds.¹⁴

The left, in turn, for the most part, dampened its expectations, including the academic left. Faced with austerity policies even from NDP governments and a labour movement that mostly responded with a deer in the headlights immobility to capitalist plans for neoliberal restructuring, many progressive scholars focused on saving what could be saved of postwar gains rather than on a forward program. The discursive turn, which tended to replace scholarship wedded to activism with an introverted “postmodernist” scholasticism, provided some solace for many. It provided a distance between the scholar and everyone else that allowed the former to gaze dispassionately on the latter, supposedly to explain mass attitudes and behaviours that New Left activists lacked the proper tools for understanding. Palmer, the orthodox Trotskyist, was not alone in rejecting any thought of anti-materialist analysis overtaking the “culturalist” project. While historical materialists might disagree in their explanations of working-class consciousness, all regarded the injuries of class as real and brutal rather than a product of discourses. While others were content with implicitly lamenting the abandonment of class conflict and social structures in favour of competing, floating discourses, Palmer waged an open battle with adherents of the postmodernist trend.

Palmer’s increasing willingness to make explicit his disagreements with other labour historians predictably produced some sharp responses. When Palmer’s second, renamed edition of his survey text on Canadian labour history appeared, Craig Heron, who had collaborated with Palmer in 1977 on an important...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I. Labour
• Part II Experience, Discourse, Class
• Part III. Politics
• Afterword: Rude Awakenings
• Selected Works of Bryan D. Palmer
• List of Contributors