People, Resources, and Power: Critical Perspectives on Underdevelopment and Primary Industries

Maurice J. Scarlett is a geography professor at the Memorial University
of Newfoundland.

People, Resources, and Power is a production of the Gorsebrook Research Institute of Halifax and consists of a collection of articles, most of which were previously published in New Maritimes. After a brief editorial introduction the articles are arranged by sector: agriculture, fishing, forestry, mining, and energy. A concluding summary contribution by Rick Williams attempts a synthesis. The editors are Gary Burrill, managing editor of New Maritimes, and Ian McKay, an editor of the same journal and social historian at Dalhousie University. The contributors are diverse, including journalists, trade unionists, university faculty, and activists; many have practical experience in the industry about which they write.

Partly, no doubt, because of their origin, most contributions are devoted to the economies of the Maritime provinces, but two — on St. Lawrence fluorspar mining and on the sinking of the Ocean Ranger — have a Newfoundland focus. A few are a little out of date, as is to be expected in a collection of re-issues, but overall this is not a major problem. Where it is most glaring, in the chapter by Brian O’Neill on the Nova Scotia offshore, an author’s footnote partly remedies the defect.

The overall thrust of the contributions is polemical and anti-establishment. Rick Williams discusses four major themes: the need to understand how regional capitalists have adapted to underdevelopment to gain wealth and power; the role of the state in shaping and perpetuating underdevelopment; the role of primary industries; and the difficulty of primary producers in attempting to organize and “to resist the intensifying threats to their industries and ways of life.” But though underdevelopment is the overriding fact of economic life, the real threat appears as the indigenous capitalist class, creating its own favourable environment by undermining trade unions, exploiting local workers, and tightly controlling the life of the region.

Polemical and tendentious much of this certainly is. But it is saying things that need to be more generally known, understood, and allowed for if we are eventually to deal effectively with problems of regional underdevelopment: the cases are unique but the problems are universal. There is a place for such a radical political economy and this volume deserves to be widely read.