Blood, Sweat, and Fear

In this provocative volume, Jeremy Milloy, a postdoctoral fellow at the Frost Centre for Canadian and Indigenous Studies at Trent University, suggests that labor historians (and, by extension, historians generally) should consider violence as a central category of analysis. By looking at violence, he argues, historians can better understand social relations and workplace cultures. He sees violence simultaneously as a material reality, which is experienced by North Americans and embedded in economic and social contexts, and as a discursive practice, which comprises a complex group of cultural discourses constructing the experience of these realities. (p. 16) Milloy argues that while violence has always been a fundamental part of industrial capitalism, the nature and understandings of violence have changed dramatically over time. Historically, he says, workers, unions, employers, and communities saw workplace violence as a byproduct of a collective struggle for dignity and better conditions in work and in workers' lives. Mass actions including strikes such as those in Haymarket Square (1886) and in Pullman (1894) were collective responses to an ongoing class war. During the mid-twentieth century, however, unions, employers, and workers “stopped fearing class war and began fearing the lone gunman ‘going postal’” (p. 7). Violence at work did not disappear, but “the prevailing mode of violence by workers moved away from collective violence toward individual violence” (ibid

Capitalism · Criminology · Indigenous · Political science · Sociology · Canadian Identity and History · Gender Studies · Law