Bucking Conservatism PDF Download

Author: Leon Crane Bear
Publisher: Athabasca University Press
ISBN: 1771992573
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

View

Book Description
With lively, informative contributions by both scholars and activists, Bucking Conservatism highlights the individuals and groups who challenged Alberta’s conservative status quo in the 1960s and 70s. Drawing on archival records, newspaper articles, police reports, and interviews, the contributors examine Alberta’s history through the eyes of Indigenous activists protesting discriminatory legislation and unfulfilled treaty obligations, women and lesbian and gay persons standing up to the heteropatriarchy, student activists seeking to forge a new democracy, and anti-capitalist environmentalists demanding social change. This book uncovers the lasting influence of Alberta’s noncomformists---those who recognized the need for dissent in a province defined by wealth and right-wing politics---and poses thought-provoking questions for contemporary activists.

Author: Keith Douglas Smith
Publisher: Athabasca University Press
ISBN: 1897425392
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 335

View

Book Description
Canada is regularly presented as a country where liberalism has ensured freedom and equality for all. Yet as Canada expanded westward and colonized First Nations territories, liberalism did not operate to advance freedom or equality for Indigenous people or protect their property. In reality it had a markedly debilitating effect on virtually every aspect of their lives. This book explores the operation of exclusionary liberalism between 1877 and 1927 in southern Alberta and the southern interior of British Columbia. In order to facilitate and justify liberal colonial expansion, Canada relied extensively on surveillance, which operated to exclude and reform Indigenous people. By persisting in Anglo-Canadian liberal capitalist values, structures, and interests as normal, natural, and beyond reproach, it worked to exclude or restructure the economic, political, social, and spiritual tenets of Indigenous cultures. Further surveillance identified which previously reserved lands, established on fragments of First Nations territory, could be further reduced by a variety of dubious means. While none of this preceded unchallenged, surveillance served as well to mitigate against, even if it could never completely neutralize, opposition.

Author: Jason Foster
Publisher: Athabasca University Press
ISBN: 1771991992
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204

View

Book Description
In October 2005, Jason Foster, then a staff member of the Alberta Federation of Labour, was walking a picket line outside Lakeside Packers in Brooks, Alberta with the members of local 401. It was a first contract strike. And although the employees of the meat-packing plant—many of whom were immigrants and refugees—had chosen an unlikely partner in the United Food and Commercial Workers local, the newly formed alliance allowed the workers to stand their ground for a three-week strike that ended in the defeat of the notoriously anti-union company, Tyson Foods. It was but one example of a wide range of industries and occupations that local 401 organized over the last twenty years. In this study of UFCW 401, Foster investigates a union that has had remarkable success organizing a group of workers that North American unions often struggle to reach: immigrants, women, and youth. By examining not only the actions and behaviour of the local’s leadership and its members but also the narrative that accompanied the renewal of the union, Foster shows that both were essential components to legitimizing the leadership’s exercise of power and its unconventional organizing forces.

Author: Paul Kellogg
Publisher: Athabasca University Press
ISBN: 177199245X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440

View

Book Description
Just north of the Arctic Circle is the settlement of Vorkuta, a notorious camp in the Gulag internment system that witnessed three pivotal moments in Russian history. In the 1930s, a desperate hunger strike by socialist prisoners, victims of Joseph Stalin’s repressive regime, resulted in mass executions. In 1953, a strike by forced labourers sounded the death knell for the Stalinist forced labour system. And finally, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a series of strikes by new, independent miners’ unions were central to overturning the Stalinist system. Paul Kellogg uses the story of Vorkuta as a frame with which to re-assess the Russian Revolution. In particular, he turns to the contributions of Iulii Martov, a contemporary of Lenin, and his analysis of the central role played in the revolution by a temporary class of peasants-in-uniform. Kellogg explores the persistence and creativity of workers’ resistance in even the darkest hours of authoritarian repression and offers new perspectives on the failure of democratic governance after the Russian Revolution.

Author: Ingo Schmidt
Publisher: Athabasca University Press
ISBN: 1926836871
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341

View

Book Description
"Despite the market triumphalism that greeted the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet empire seemed initially to herald new possibilities for social democracy. In the 1990s, with a new era of peace and economic prosperity apparently imminent, people discontented with the realities of global capitalism swept social democrats into power in many Western countries. The resurgence was, however, brief. Neither the recurring economic crises of the 2000s nor the ongoing War on Terror was conducive to social democracy, which soon gave way to a prolonged decline in countries where social democrats had once held power. Arguing that neither globalization nor demographic change was key to the failure of social democracy, the contributors to this volume analyze the rise and decline of Third Way social democracy and seek to lay the groundwork for the reformulation of progressive class politics. Offering a comparative look at social democratic experience since the Cold War, the volume examines countries where social democracy has long been an influential political force--Sweden, Germany, Britain, and Australia--while also considering the history of Canada's NDP, the social democratic tradition in the United States, and the emergence of New Left parties in Germany and the province of Québec. The case studies point to a social democracy that has confirmed its rupture with the postwar order and its role as the primary political representative of workingclass interests. Once marked by redistributive and egalitarian policy perspectives, social democracy has, the book argues, assumed a new role--that of a modernizing force advancing the neoliberal cause." -- Publisher's website.

Author: Heather Cox Richardson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190900911
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

View

Book Description
Named one of The Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction While the North prevailed in the Civil War, ending slavery and giving the country a "new birth of freedom," Heather Cox Richardson argues in this provocative work that democracy's blood-soaked victory was ephemeral. The system that had sustained the defeated South moved westward and there established a foothold. It was a natural fit. Settlers from the East had for decades been pushing into the West, where the seizure of Mexican lands at the end of the Mexican-American War and treatment of Native Americans cemented racial hierarchies. The South and West equally depended on extractive industries-cotton in the former and mining, cattle, and oil in the latter-giving rise a new birth of white male oligarchy, despite the guarantees provided by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and the economic opportunities afforded by expansion. To reveal why this happened, How the South Won the Civil War traces the story of the American paradox, the competing claims of equality and subordination woven into the nation's fabric and identity. At the nation's founding, it was the Eastern "yeoman farmer" who galvanized and symbolized the American Revolution. After the Civil War, that mantle was assumed by the Western cowboy, singlehandedly defending his land against barbarians and savages as well as from a rapacious government. New states entered the Union in the late nineteenth century and western and southern leaders found yet more common ground. As resources and people streamed into the West during the New Deal and World War II, the region's influence grew. "Movement Conservatives," led by westerners Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, claimed to embody cowboy individualism and worked with Dixiecrats to embrace the ideology of the Confederacy. Richardson's searing book seizes upon the soul of the country and its ongoing struggle to provide equal opportunity to all. Debunking the myth that the Civil War released the nation from the grip of oligarchy, expunging the sins of the Founding, it reveals how and why the Old South not only survived in the West, but thrived.

Author: Vilmond Joegodson Déralciné
Publisher: Athabasca University Press
ISBN: 1771990112
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 390

View

Book Description
When Joegodson Déralciné was still a small child, his parents left rural Haiti to resettle in the rapidly growing zones of Port-au-Prince. As his family entered the city in 1986, Duvalier and his dictatorship exited. Haitians, once terrorized under Duvalier’s reign, were liberated and emboldened to believe that they could take control of their lives. But how? Joining hundreds of thousands of other peasants trying to adjust to urban life, Joegodson and his family sought work and a means of survival. But all they found was low-waged assembly plant jobs of the sort to which the repressive Duvalier regime had opened Haiti’s doors—the combination of flexible capital and cheap labour too attractive to multinational manufacturers to be overlooked. With the death of his mother, Joegodson was placed in his uncle’s care, and so began a childhood of starvation, endless labour, and abuse. In honest, reflective prose, Joegodson—now a father himself— allows us to walk in the ditches of Cité Soleil, to hide from the macoutes under the bed, to feel the ache of an empty stomach. But, most importantly, he provides an account of life in Haiti from a perspective that is rarely heard. Free of sentimentality and hackneyed clichés, his narrative explores the spirituality of Vodou, Catholicism, and Protestantism, describes the harrowing day of the 2010 earthquake and its aftermath, and illustrates the inner workings of MINUSTAH. Written with Canadian historian Paul Jackson—Joegodson telling his story in Creole, Jackson translating, the two of them then reviewing and reworking—the memoir is a true collaboration, the struggle of two people from different lands and vastly different circumstances to arrive at a place of mutual understanding. In the process, they have given us an unforgettable account of a country determined to survive, and on its own terms.

Author: Maxwell Foran
Publisher: Athabasca University Press
ISBN: 1897425139
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 285

View

Book Description
"Expansive Discourses is a historical analysis of the complex relations between the City of Calgary and the various land development companies in the three decades of turbulent growth following World War II. As the first book to examine the relations between municipal governments and land development companies, it makes a valuable contribution to Canadian urban historiography." -- from publisher.

Author: Matthew McManus
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030246825
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 277

View

Book Description
This book is designed as a timely analysis of the rise of post-modern conservatism in many Western countries across the globe. It provides a theoretical overview of post-modernism, why post-modern conservatism emerged, what distinguishes it from other variants of conservatism and differing political doctrines, and how post-modern conservatism governs in practice. First developing a unique genealogy of conservative thought, arguing that the historicist and irrationalist strains of conservatism were ripe for mutation into post-modern form under the right social and cultural conditions, then providing a new unique theoretical framework to describe the conditions for the emergence of post-modern conservatism, The Rise of Post-modern Conservatism applies its theoretical framework to a concrete analysis of the politics of the day. Ultimately, it aims to help us understand the emergence and rise of identity oriented alt right movements and their “populist” spokesmen particularly in the United States, the United Kingdom, Hungary, Poland, and now Italy.

Author: Eric Boehlert
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743299167
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353

View

Book Description
The first book to demonstrate that, for the entire George W. Bush presidency, the news media utterly failed in their duty as watchdog for the public. In blistering prose, Eric Boehlert reveals how, time after time, the press chose a soft approach to covering the government, and as a result reported and analyzed crucial events incompletely and even inaccurately. From WMDs to Valerie Plame to the NSA's domestic spying, mainstream fixtures such as The New York Times, CBS, CNN, and Time magazine too often ignored the administration's missteps and misleading words, and did not call out the public officials who betrayed the country's trust. Throughout both presidential campaigns and the entire Iraq war to date, the media acted as a virtual mouthpiece for the White House, giving watered-down coverage of major policy decisions, wartime abuses of power, and egregious mistakes -- and sometimes these events never made it into the news at all. Finally, in Lapdogs, the press is being held accountable by one of its own. Boehlert homes in on the reasons the press did not do its job: a personal affinity for Bush that journalists rarely displayed toward his predecessor, Bill Clinton; a Republican White House that threatened to deny access to members of the media who asked challenging questions or voiced criticism; and a press that feared being tainted by accusations of liberal bias. Moreover, journalists -- who may have wanted to report accurately on the important stories -- often found themselves at cross-purposes with media executives, many of whom were increasingly driven by economic concerns. Cowed by all of these factors, the media abandoned their traditional role of stirring up meaningful public debate. Boehlert asserts that the Bush White House never subscribed to the view -- commonly held by previous administrations -- that a relationship with the press is an important part of the democratic process. Instead, it saw the press as just another special interest group that needed to be either appeased or held at bay -- or, in some cases, squashed. The administration actively undermined the basic tenets of accurate and fair journalism, and reporters and editors accepted their reduced roles without a whimper. To an unprecedented degree, journalists too often stopped asking uncomfortable questions of people in power. In essence, the entire purpose and pursuit of journalism was sacrificed. Riveting in its sharp denouncement, supported by dozens of glaring and troubling examples of journalistic malpractice, Lapdogs thoroughly dissects the press's misconduct during Bush's presidency and gives voice to the growing public dismay with the mainstream media.