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This essay is an attempt to outline recent trends in the criminalization of working-class lives. It casts the net broadly, both historically and geographically, situating capitalist austerity’s recent turn to mass incarceration in the United States and Canada in early 19th-century poor law sensibilities. What is happening now differs from the workhouse regime of industrial capitalism’s new poor law, of course, but it has undoubted connections to this older regime of regulation. The new new poor law of our times is part of a long history of how dispossession has been pivotal to capitalism’s project of uninhibited accumulation and suppression of those driven to defiance and dissent. It reveals how, as profit declines in the productive sphere, incarceration itself can be made to pay. The new new poor law is fundamental to contemporary capitalist political economy as the politics of austerity, the dismantling of the welfare state, and an assault on working-class entitlements and trade unionism are complemented by the rise of a prison-industrial complex. Driven by class antagonisms and racialized scapegoating, the new new poor law inevitably draws into its sphere of influence public-sector workers employed in the criminal justice system. It also unleashes intensified grievances of the incarcerated, stimulating the birth of movements of protest in which prisoners and proletarians search out ways of making common cause. Cet essai tente de décrire les tendances récentes en matière de criminalisation de la vie de la classe ouvrière. Il jette les bases largement, historiquement et géographiquement, en situant le virage récent de l’austérité capitaliste vers une incarcération de masse aux États-Unis et au Canada, au début du 19e siècle à l’égard de la loi sur les pauvres. Ce qui se passe actuellement diffère du régime de travail de la nouvelle loi sur les pauvres du capitalisme industriel, bien sûr, mais il a des liens incontestables avec cet ancien régime de réglementation. La nouvelle loi sur les nouveaux pauvres de notre époque fait partie d’une longue histoire montrant à quel point la dépossession a été au centre du projet du capitalisme d’accumulation sans entrave et de suppression de ceux qui sont poussés au défi et à la dissidence. Elle montre comment, lorsque le profit diminue dans la sphère productive, l’incarcération elle-même peut être payée. La nouvelle loi sur les nouveaux pauvres est fondamentale dans l’économie politique capitaliste contemporaine, car la politique d’austérité, le démantèlement de l’État social, l’assaut contre les droits de la classe ouvrière et le syndicalisme sont complétés par la montée d’un complexe pénitentiaire. Poussé par des antagonismes de classe et des boucs émissaires racialisés, la nouvelle loi s’inscrit inévitablement dans sa sphère d’influence sur les travailleurs du secteur public employés dans le système de justice pénale. Elle libère également les griefs intensifiés des incarcérés, stimulant ainsi la naissance de mouvements de protestation dans lesquels les prisonniers et les prolétaires recherchent des moyens de faire valoir leur cause commune.

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.

This contribution to the Workers of the World forum makes the case for the need to historicize workers’ experience, doing so in a particular kind of Marxist way. In this historicization, class must be conceived broadly, with the accent placed on the critical importance of processes of dispossession and the ways in which this historical divorcing of producers from relationships to the means of production inevitably leads to particular kinds of class conflicts. How these conflicts are conceived and written about, even when they seemingly do not lead to clear-cut clashes of adversarial class interests, can play a role in sustaining and widening class struggle. It is this class struggle which ultimately remains a decisive agent in social transformation.

To expand dissident communism’s influence in 1934 Trotsky urged his supporters to join the French Socialist Party. A fusion of the Trotskyist Communist League of America (Opposition) led by James P...

Canadian Studies and the project of knowing ourselves have a long history. The initiative took a leap forward in the 1970s with the release of the Symons Report and the development of Canadian Studies programs and departments in a number of Canadian and international universities. By the 1990s, however, interest in Canadian Studies was flagging. The situation has not improved of late. This essay touches on the many reasons behind the current waning of interest in and support for Canadian Studies: economic, political, socio-cultural, and intellectual. It addresses interdisciplinarity, a foundation of the Canadian Studies project, showing how this refusal to contain knowledge within traditional academic disciplines was at first embraced by area studies but is now generalized throughout scholarly research. This has made the appeal of Canadian Studies less novel than it once was. Yet there are also corresponding developments, such as Indigenization, that reveal the extent to which new knowledge of Canadian experience can be gained through interdisciplinary research. For this research to flourish, and for the potential of Canadian Studies to be realized, scholars and others must defend old achievements in order to keep alive the possibilities of new advances in learning and of knowing ourselves more thoroughly.

Few Canadian socialist intellectuals have had the national and international impact of Leo Panitch. This brief tribute to his many accomplishments outlines the shifting nature of his intellectual c...

Since the 1990s, labor history has been presented as “in crisis”. This negative evaluation is an overstatement. It has nevertheless prodded historians, often productively, to rethink the basic orientations of working-class history. This survey article explores three recent pathways to a “new” labor history: the turn to transnational and global study; the “new” history of capitalism; and the study of slavery as unfree labor. These new approaches to labor history highlight an old dilemma: how the structured determinations of laboring life are balanced alongside dimensions of human agency in understanding the complex experience of the working-class past. It is argued that we need to consider both structureandagency in the researching and writing of labor history. If an older “new” labor history accented agency, new pathways to labor history too often seem constrained by “mind forg’d manacles” that limit understandings of workers’ past lives by emphasizing structure and determination.

“A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism,” wrote Marx and Engels famously in 1848.2 It was a statement guided by an optimism of the will. Over the course of the next half century, so...

Few figures on the left have managed to so define a field of study that their absence would seem incomprehensible to anyone looking at research and writing in the area. It is the accomplishment of ...

This chapter takes a close look at turn-of-the-twentieth century Toronto, offering an account of mass distress that considers how the poor, waged and unwaged, were subjected to state-based regimes of disciple and how they struggled to fight back. By the time Toronto had embarked on its Age of Industry in the 1870s and 1880s, major enterprises employed almost thirteen thousand workers in a population of roughly eighty-five thousand. Decades of socioeconomic differentiation and dislocation had served as the primitive accumulation that fueled the Queen City's material development. Economic crises, devastating in their human toll, punctuated the 1830s, the 1850s, and the 1870s, and would close the century in the 1890s.

This paper situates E. P. Thompson and the attraction and influence of his major study, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), within his insistence on constructing...

This essay reviews three recent works that address the importance of the writings and theory of Karl Marx: Peltz's Karl Marx: A World to Win, Eagleton's Why Marx was Right, and Hobsbawm's How to Change the World. It considers a revival of interest in Marx against the backdrop of contemporary crisis, suggesting that the works reviewed offer those uninitiated in Marxism, those unconvinced by its theories and arguments, and those unrepentant about their acceptance of much-criticized Marxist claims much to consider. Throughout the essay the reciprocities of analyzing the world and changing it are underscored, as indeed they are in all three of the works reviewed.

Fifty years is a long time for books to remain central to a field. It is a tribute to Theodore Draper that his two volumes on the origins of communism in the United States, The Roots of American Co...

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.