Marxism and Historical Practice: Interpretive Essays on Class Formation and Class Struggle. Volume I

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. Biographical note Bryan D. Palmer, Ph.D. (1977), SUNY-Binghamton, is Canada Research Chair in the Department of Canadian Studies, Trent University. His prize-winning monographs, edited collections, and articles on the history of labour and the left, and historiography and theory, have been translated and published in Greek, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and other languages. Among his many books are James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928 (UI Press, 2007) and the Brill-published Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truckers’ Strikes of 1934 (2013). Readership All interested in Marxist history and theory; social and labour history; history of the revolutionary left; class formation and class struggle; and history of Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom.