James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928

James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928 PDF Author: Bryan D. Palmer
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252092082
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 577

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Book Description
Bryan D. Palmer's award-winning study of James P. Cannon's early years (1890-1928) details how the life of a Wobbly hobo agitator gave way to leadership in the emerging communist underground of the 1919 era. This historical drama unfolds alongside the life experiences of a native son of United States radicalism, the narrative moving from Rosedale, Kansas to Chicago, New York, and Moscow. Written with panache, Palmer's richly detailed book situates American communism's formative decade of the 1920s in the dynamics of a specific political and economic context. Our understanding of the indigenous currents of the American revolutionary left is widened, just as appreciation of the complex nature of its interaction with international forces is deepened.

James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928

James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928 PDF Author: Bryan D. Palmer
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252092082
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 577

Get Book Here

Book Description
Bryan D. Palmer's award-winning study of James P. Cannon's early years (1890-1928) details how the life of a Wobbly hobo agitator gave way to leadership in the emerging communist underground of the 1919 era. This historical drama unfolds alongside the life experiences of a native son of United States radicalism, the narrative moving from Rosedale, Kansas to Chicago, New York, and Moscow. Written with panache, Palmer's richly detailed book situates American communism's formative decade of the 1920s in the dynamics of a specific political and economic context. Our understanding of the indigenous currents of the American revolutionary left is widened, just as appreciation of the complex nature of its interaction with international forces is deepened.

James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States, 1928-38

James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States, 1928-38 PDF Author: Bryan D. Palmer
Publisher: Historical Materialism
ISBN: 9781642597783
Category : Communism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A magisterial study of the politics and practice of the American Trotskyist movement in its heyday.

Fiction, Crime, and Empire

Fiction, Crime, and Empire PDF Author: Jon Thompson
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252062803
Category : Crime in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Reading fiction from high and low culture together, Fiction, Crime, and Empire skillfully sheds light on how crime fiction responded to the British and American experiences of empire, and how forms such as the detective novel, spy thrillers, and conspiracy fiction articulate powerful cultural responses to imperialism. Poe's Dupin stories, for example, are seen as embodying a highly critical vision of the social forces that were then transforming the United States into a modern, democratic industrialized nation; a century later, Le Carré employs the conventions of espionage fiction to critique the exhausted and morally compromised values of British imperialism. By exploring these works through the organizing figure of crime during and after the age of high imperialism, Thompson challenges and modifies commonplace definitions of modernism, postmodernism, and popular or mass culture.

Cyber-Marx

Cyber-Marx PDF Author: Nick Dyer-Witheford
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252067952
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
In this highly readable and thought-provoking work, Nick Dyer-Witheford assesses the relevance of Marxism in our time and demonstrates how the information age, far from transcending the historic conflict between capital and its laboring subjects, constitutes the latest battleground in their encounter. Dyer-Witheford maps the dynamics of modern capitalism, showing how capital depends for its operations not just on exploitation in the immediate workplace, but on the continuous integration of a whole series of social sites and activities, from public health and maternity to natural resource allocation and the geographical reorganization of labor power. He also shows how these sites and activities may become focal points of subversion and insurgency, as new means of communication vital for the smooth flow of capital also permit otherwise isolated and dispersed points of resistance to connect and combine with one another. Cutting through the smokescreen of high-tech propaganda, Dyer-Witheford predicts the advent of a reinvented, "autonomist" Marxism that will rediscover the possibility of a collective, communist transformation of society. Refuting the utopian promises of the information revolution, he discloses the real potentialities for a new social order in the form of a twenty-first-century communism based on the common sharing of wealth.

Revolutionary Teamsters

Revolutionary Teamsters PDF Author: Bryan D. Palmer
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004254862
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
Minneapolis in the early 1930s was anything but a union stronghold. An employers' association known as the Citizens' Alliance kept labour organisations in check, at the same time as it cultivated opposition to radicalism in all forms. This all changed in 1934. The year saw three strikes, violent picket-line confrontations, and tens of thousands of workers protesting in the streets. Bryan D. Palmer tells the riveting story of how a handful of revolutionary Trotskyists, working in the largely non-union trucking sector, led the drive to organise the unorganised, to build one large industrial union. What emerges is a compelling narrative of class struggle, a reminder of what can be accomplished, even in the worst of circumstances, with a principled and far-seeing leadership.

Marxism and Historical Practice (Vol. I)

Marxism and Historical Practice (Vol. I) PDF Author: Bryan D. Palmer
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004243860
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 542

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Book Description
The two volumes of Marxism and Historical Practice bring together essays written by one of the major Marxist historians of the last fifty years. The pieces collected in Volume I, Interpretive Essays on Class Formation and Class Struggle, offer a stimulating, empirically grounded survey of North American collective behaviour, popular mobilizations, and social struggles, ranging from a rich discussion of ritualistic protest like the charivari through the rise of the Knights of Labor in the 1880s to campaigns against neoliberal labour reform in British Columbia in the early 1980s. What emerges is Palmer's sustained reflection on long-standing interpretive historical problems of class formation, the dynamics of social change, and how popular social movements arise and relate to law, the state, and existing cultural contexts.

Working Hard for the American Dream

Working Hard for the American Dream PDF Author: Randi Storch
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 111854157X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Working Hard for the American Dream examines the various economic, social, and political developments that shaped labor history in the United States from World War I until the present day. Presents an overview of labor history that also considers women workers, ethnic America, and post-World War II workers Incorporates the most recent scholarship in labor history Takes the story of labor up to the present day in a readable and accessible manner

People Wasn't Made to Burn

People Wasn't Made to Burn PDF Author: Joe Allen
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1608461327
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
This story of a grief-stricken man’s murder of a landlord is “nothing less than a reinvention of the true crime genre” (The Nation). In 1947, James Hickman shot and killed the landlord he believed was responsible for a tragic fire that took the lives of four of his children on Chicago’s West Side. But a vibrant defense campaign, exposing the working poverty and racism that led to his crime, helped win Hickman’s freedom. With a true-crime writer’s eye for suspense and a historian’s depth of knowledge, Joe Allen unearths the compelling story of a campaign that stood up to Jim Crow well before the modern civil rights movement had even begun. Those who witnessed the Great Recession’s deteriorating housing conditions and accelerating foreclosure crisis will discover a hauntingly similar set of circumstances contributing to the Hickman case—giving this little-remembered story profound relevance in today’s political atmosphere and the tension surrounding rampant wealth and racial inequality. “[A] remarkable book . . . a horrific portrait of the inhumane conditions in which blacks were forced to live in post-WWII Chicago.” —Chicago Tribune

Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth

Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth PDF Author: Thomas Alter
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252053273
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 462

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Book Description
Agrarian radicalism's challenge to capitalism played a central role in working-class ideology while making third parties and protest movements a potent force in politics. Thomas Alter II follows three generations of German immigrants in Texas to examine the evolution of agrarian radicalism and the American and transnational ideas that influenced it. Otto Meitzen left Prussia for Texas in the wake of the failed 1848 Revolution. His son and grandson took part in decades-long activism with organizations from the Greenback Labor Party and the Grange to the Populist movement and Texas Socialist Party. As Alter tells their stories, he analyzes the southern wing of the era's farmer-labor bloc and the parallel history of African American political struggle in Texas. Alliances with Mexican revolutionaries, Irish militants, and others shaped an international legacy of working-class radicalism that moved U.S. politics to the left. That legacy, in turn, pushed forward economic reform during the Progressive and New Deal eras. A rare look at the German roots of radicalism in Texas, Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth illuminates the labor movements and populist ideas that changed the nation’s course at a pivotal time in its history.

Dissenting Traditions

Dissenting Traditions PDF Author: Sean Carleton
Publisher: Athabasca University Press
ISBN: 1771993111
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
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.