Book 53

Revolutionary Teamsters

by Bryan D. Palmer

Published 1 January 2013
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.

Book 99

The two volumes of Marxism and Historical Practice bring together a wide range of essays written by one of the major Marxist historians of the last fifty years. Collected in Volume II, Interventions and Appreciations, are articles and reviews capturing the breadth of Palmer's interests as a radical historian. Cultural forms and representational productions are analysed; political readings of historiography and pioneering historical practice provided. Themes as diverse as the analytic and political contributions of Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson, the conflicted legacies of American Trotskyism, and the representation of class politics in Scorsese's Gangs of New York are covered.

Book 232

In James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States, 1928-38 Bryan D. Palmer provides a deeply-researched and elegantly-written account of a revolutionary movement that recasts understandings of working-class militancy and the Comintern-affiliated communists so often depicted as a decisive force in 1930s radicalism.