Dissenting Traditions: Essays on Bryan D. Palmer, Marxism, and History

 

Book announcement

Sean Carleton, Ted McCoy and Julia Smith, eds, Dissenting Traditions: Essays on Bryan D. Palmer, Marxism, and History (Edmonton: Canadian Committee on Labour History and AU Press, 2021). Available on open access at: https://read.aupress.ca/projects/dissenting-traditions

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.

Introduction

  Sean Carleton, Ted McCoy and Julia Smith

 

Part I. Labour

1. Bryan D. Palmer, Labour Historian

  Alvin Finkel

2. Bryan D. Palmer, Social Historian

  Ted McCoy

3. Labour History’s Present: An Account of Labour/Le Travail Under Bryan D. Palmer

  Kirk Niergarth

 

Part II. Experience, Discourse, Class

4. Bryan D. Palmer and E. P. Thompson

  Nicholas Rogers

*5. On Polemics and Provocations: Bryan D. Palmer vs. Liberal Anti-Marxists

  Chad Pearson

6. Bryan Douglas Palmer, Edward Palmer Thompson, John le Carré (and Me): Workers, Spies, and Spying, Past and Present

  Gregory S. Kealey

 

Part III. Politics

7. Palmer’s Politics: Discovering the Past and the Future of Class Struggle

  Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin

8. The Hippopotamus and the Giraffe: Bolshevism, Stalinism, and American and British Communism in the 1920s

  John McIlroy and Alan Campbell

9. The June Days of 2013 in Brazil and the Persistence of Top-Down Histories

  Sean Purdy

10. Old Positions/New Directions: Strategies for Rebuilding Canadian Working-Class History

  Sean Carleton and Julia Smith

 

Afterword: Rude Awakenings

  Bryan D. Palmer

Selected Works of Bryan D. Palmer