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

About the Editors

Sean Carleton is an assistant professor in the Department of History and the Department of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba. His research examines the history of colonialism, capitalism, and schooling in Canada. Ted McCoy is an associate professor in Sociology at the University of Calgary. He is a historian of punishment and has published on penitentiaries in Canada’s nineteenth century. His books include Hard Time (2012) and Four Unruly Women (2019). Julia Smith is an assistant professor in the Labour Studies Program at the University of Manitoba. She studies the political economy of labour relations in Canada and the history and politics of women’s labour activism.

Contributors: Alan Campbell, Alvin Finkel, Sam Gindin, Gregory S. Kealey, John McIlroy, Kirk Niergarth, Bryan D. Palmer, Leo Panitch, Chad Pearson, Sean Purdy, and Nicholas Rogers.

Reviews

A useful discussion of the fields of labour and radical history with a heavy emphasis on the relationship between politics and the practice of that history.

—James R. Barrett, Canadian Historical Review

Whoever is audacious enough to write Palmer’s biography will want two copies of Dissenting Traditions: one for their office, the other for their study. Rich in biographical and historiographical insights, it’s also full of hints, leads, and directional arrows.

—Donald Wright, Histoire sociale / Social History

Table of Contents

1. Acknowledgements
2. Introduction / Sean Carleton, Ted McCoy, and Julia Smith
3. Part I. Labour
   1. 1. Bryan D. Palmer, Labour Historian / Alvin Finkel
   2. 2. Bryan D. Palmer, Social Historian / Ted McCoy
   3. 3. Labour History’s Present: An Account of Labour/Le Travail Under Bryan D. Palmer / Kirk Niergarth
4. Part II. Experience, Discourse, Class
   1. 4. Bryan D. Palmer and E. P. Thompson / Nicholas Rogers
   2. 5. On Polemics and Provocations: Bryan D. Palmer vs. Liberal Anti-Marxists / Chad Pearson
   3. 6. Bryan Douglas Palmer, Edward Palmer Thompson, John le Carré (and Me): Workers, Spies, and Spying, Past and Present / Gregory S. Kealey
5. Part III. Politics
   1. 7. Palmer’s Politics: Discovering the Past and the Future of Class Struggle / Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin
   2. 8. The Hippopotamus and the Giraffe: Bolshevism, Stalinism, and American and British Communism in the 1920s / John McIlroy and Alan Campbell
   3. 9. The June Days of 2013 in Brazil and the Persistence of Top-Down Histories / Sean Purdy
   4. 10. Old Positions/New Directions: Strategies for Rebuilding Canadian Working-Class History / Sean Carleton and Julia Smith
6. Afterword: Rude Awakenings / Bryan D. Palmer
7. Selected Works of Bryan D. Palmer
8. List of Contributors

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