Eric Tucker and Judy Fudge, eds., The Class Politics of Law: Essays Inspired by Harry Glasbeek (Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing 2019)

While the book is not divided into sections, the thought that has gone into placement allows certain themes to develop organically. Non-biographical chapters fall into two broad categories. First, the authors explore the use of law as a tool of reform to address specific problems in the style of Glasbeek’s early writing. Second, more theoretical chapters use Glasbeek’s class-based approach to the law as a way to envision its revolutionary potential and address corporate criminality.

Of the first group, Neil Brooks discusses potential reforms to the tax system to address the increasingly corrosive effects of income inequality. Keith Ewing’s “The Changing Workplace Revisited” discusses problems with the Wagner Act and the bureaucratization of the union movement, and encourages trade unions to refashion themselves as a political force. Finally, in “Regulating to Prevent Workplace Violence,” Katherine Lippel argues for a new frontier of workplace health and safety with the recognition of mental health and stress by employers as a legitimate field of government regulation. These chapters may seem less overtly radical than Glasbeek’s current thinking; Brooks himself states early in his paper that Glasbeek would “undoubtedly urge something much more transformative.” (45) Although perhaps erring on the side of reform rather than revolution, all three of these chapters are firmly in the tradition of Glasbeek’s transformative thought. They present material solutions to the failings of the law, which has not kept pace with the changing political realities of neoliberalism. They also envision that redress happening within the realm of law and legislation, which is part of what made Glasbeek’s approach so bold – the law contains the tools for its own reform. Fudge and Tucker wisely group these papers in succession (chapters three, four and five), which allows for a clear development of this theme.

If chapters three through five show specific uses for the law as a tool of class empowerment, then chapters six, seven and nine show us why that tool must be used for broader societal transformation. Tucker and Fudge show that Glasbeek recognizes assaults in the form of workplace accidents and deaths as “evidence of war” against workers. (7) Class conflict provides a way to understand Glasbeek’s advocacy for the use of the law on a conceptual level as a tool of and for the working class. The second group of essays likewise contain this theoretical struggle for the law. In “Corporate Killing Personified,” Steven Bittle, Steve Tombs, and David Whyte recognize that the laws enacted after disasters such as at the Westray mine have by and large left corporations unpunished for their lethal wrongdoings. Nonetheless, like Glasbeek, they refuse to cede the law to its most common use, as a tool of corporate interests and property. And although Bryan Palmer’s article on the first Smith Act trial and the rule of law centres on a specific historical moment, focus is also given to how the corporation can be brought to heel. Palmer’s comparison of E.P. Thompson’s belief in the law as a tool of the masses to Glasbeek’s own is one of the highlights of the book, and brings together its essential message: “Law, then, matters, and how and why it matters, for Marxists, involves complex, historicized understandings of contested social relations. These can never really be appreciated analytically if law is simply written off as nothing more than an instrument of class rule.” (174)

Laureen Snider’s chapter, “How Do I Discipline Thee: Let Me Count the Ways...” while future-oriented, is markedly less optimistic, which is one of the central aspects of Glasbeek’s outlook. Snider ends on a somewhat fatalistic note that things have not progressed, and that resistance is evaporating. Whereas the factory acts provided a modicum of protection for workers in the nineteenth century, increasingly the law, the state and even technology are tools of increasing oppression. The market rules, efficiency is the sole determinant of conditions, and the academy is complicit. The academy is even more the focus of Julian Sempill’s article; his argument for demystifying academic language and broader use of vernacular socialism is connected to Glasbeek’s recent works, which seeks an audience beyond the academy.

Not all the chapters are as obviously connected thematically to the rest of the book, although they are valuable. “Working Time, Dinner Time, Serving Time: Labour and Law in Industrialization” by Douglas Hay is an interesting work of social history, and is in some ways an effective segue into Palmer’s lengthy discussion of E.P. Thompson, but its connection to the law as a remedy is somewhat tenuous. In the same way, Christine Sypnowich’s article, “Cultural Heritage, the Right to the City, and the Marxist Critique of Law,” although it does attempt to connect to aspects of Glasbeek’s thought, feels somewhat tertiary.

What at first glance may seem a disparate collection is in fact a rather elegant representation of Glasbeek’s approach to the law. In the first pages of The Class Politics of Law, Fudge and Tucker state that this book was meant as a celebration of Glasbeek’s career, and this book does that by showing how impactful and indeed revolutionary his way of thinking has been.

Graham Coulter

McMaster University

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/llt.2021.0011.