Inco's wildcat rebellion was ostensibly sparked by a group of young Newfoundlanders, all working at the Levack Mines and lodging together at the company barracks. When two of their number opened lunch boxes to munch on sandwiches before getting their daily work instructions, they were ordered by a shift boss to return to the surface. The pettiness of the arbitrary discipline, as well as accumulated grievances and the failure of contract negotiations to move forward, culmniated in a massive shutdown of the entire international conglomerate's Sudbury-region operations -- mines, mills, and offices...
[T]he wildcats often got even wilder as pent-up frustrations exploded in violence. The largest wildcat in the 1965-6 upsurge, the illegal walkout of thousands of Inco workers, was a key case in point. Workers in the Sudbury region had a long history of militancy, having fought a lengthy 119-day strike against the company in 1958. It ended badly, and to complicate matters union relations were embittered by a violent jurisdictional battle that pitted the [allegedly] communist-led International Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers Union against the United Steelworkers of America (USWA). The latter was successful in wrestling control of the huge Sudbury-area membership away from one of the few radical holdouts in postwar trade unionism. Some Inco workers' memories were nevertheless long in their recollection of the USWA's misdeeds. As contract negotiations faltered in the summer of 1966, the wildcat spread from one operation to another and eventually, outside of all official union control, it took on the trappings of a 'wartime military machine.' Illegal strikers used 'walkie-talkies' to communicate and threatened to disable a transport helicopter Inco was using to get supervisory personnel into company facilities. With provincial police appearing on the scene, the wildcatters armed themselves with lengths of pipe, baseball bats, steel bars, and ominous clubs. Roads were blockaded, hydro and telephone lines sabotaged, and a supply truck en route to the plant was stopped, overturned, and rolled down a hill. Shipments of nickel to the United States were stopped dead in their tracks. The Toronto Telegram reported that some pickets carried shot guns and were prepared 'to take on all comers.' One Steelworker officla confessed his wonderment at the wildness: 'I saw the Molotov cocktails, the guns, and the dynamite. The union lost control of the situation. Eventually we took truckloads of arms of one kind or another away from the picket lines.' When a settlement was finally reached, and the dissident wildcatters tamed, worker discontent was barely assuaged by the company's wage concessions, which saw increases of almost 30 per cent for skilled tradesmen, a bonus of five-week vacations on top of regular holiday time for all workers with half a decade of service under their belts, and greatly enhanced indemnity benefits for those unable to work because of sickness or accident.
-- Bryan Palmer, Canada's 1960s, pp. 226, 231
Friday, July 31, 2009
Long Quote: Past Rank-and-File Militancy Against Inco
In light of the current strike at Inco, I thought I would post this long quote describing major gains made through militant wildcat strike activity against the company in the mid-1960s -- this was in the context of militant workers at Inco still resenting the success of the more accommodationist Steel Workers in raiding Inco employees from the left-leaning and militant Mine Mill union, which until not long before represented all mine workers in the city; and in the context of a wave of wildcat strike activity across Canada lead by young workers in a wide variety of workplaces.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Stand Up For Walmart Workers and Free Speech!
EDIT: Almost all of the links were broken, but have now been fixed!
I received this email today asking people to speak up against current efforts by corporate giant Walmart to undermine efforts that support Walmart employees who wish to exercise their rights as workers. Please take a look and then spend the 30 seconds to send an email to Walmart in defence of free speech and the rights of workers:
Click on the link and register your opposition with Walmart now!
I received this email today asking people to speak up against current efforts by corporate giant Walmart to undermine efforts that support Walmart employees who wish to exercise their rights as workers. Please take a look and then spend the 30 seconds to send an email to Walmart in defence of free speech and the rights of workers:
Dear Friend:
As part of our effort to help Walmart workers join our union, UFCW Canada launched www.walmartworkerscanada.ca several years ago. The website is dedicated to providing Walmart ‘associates’ with the tools and knowledge they need to exercise their rights as workers in Canada.
Walmart is seeking a court injunction against www.walmartworkerscanada.ca that calls for significant changes to the website and threatens to undermine our ability to effectively communicate with Walmart workers.
UFCW Canada is confident that Walmart’s case is unfounded and we are maintaining the look, feel and messaging of www.walmartworkerscanada.ca.
On July 28, UFCW Canada launched a new campaign that calls on Canadians to contribute to the defence of their digital rights by challenging Walmart executives to immediately drop the injunction request.
Your organization can assist in this important campaign by posting the attached campaign-button on your website and by linking to www.walmartworkerscanada.ca/freespeech, which is a campaign page that provides activists with an opportunity to send a protest letter to Walmart executives.
To make sure a maximum number of people get the chance to participate in the campaign, please send the following message through your e-mail network:
Subject Line: Stand up for Walmart workers and free speech!
Message:
The campaign to empower Walmart workers needs your help.
Walmart is seeking a court injunction against certain aspects of www.walmartworkerscanada.ca, a website dedicated to providing Walmart ‘associates’ with the tools and knowledge they need to exercise their rights as workers in Canada.
Making sure the internet is a place where workers can freely learn about their rights and communicate with one another is a fundamental fight for us all.
Tell Walmart NO! to the court injunction and YES! to free speech by visiting www.walmartworkerscanada.ca/freespeech and sending a quick email to Walmart executives.
Also, don’t forget to join the SAVE the CIRCLE facebook group (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=100648979085&ref=search) and spread the word to all your friends.
It only takes 30 seconds and it makes a real difference
Thanks!
For further information about the campaign, please contact Derek Johnstone at the National Office (416.675.1104 ext. 2222 or derek.johnstone@ufcw.ca).
Thank you in advance for your consideration and assistance.
In Solidarity,
Wayne Hanley
National President, UFCW Canada
Click on the link and register your opposition with Walmart now!
Monday, July 20, 2009
Video: Sudbury Steelworkers On Strike
Check out this report from the Real News Network on the strike by Steelworkers employed by mining giant Vale Inco here in Sudbury and elsewhere in Canada:
Also, keep your eyes open for a journalistic article of some sort on this topic by yours truly, which I'm doing for a lefty newspapers/website (or, perhaps, for two of them)...it should be out within a week.
Also, keep your eyes open for a journalistic article of some sort on this topic by yours truly, which I'm doing for a lefty newspapers/website (or, perhaps, for two of them)...it should be out within a week.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Second Carnival of Feminist Parenting
Check out the Second Carnival of Feminist Parenting. This neat blog carnival includes a few posts that were submitted for the event, including my recent piece called "On Gendered Interests in Children," as well as a bunch of unsubmitted links related to feminism and parenting. Lots of interesting stuff!
If that isn't enough blog-based goodness about feminist parenting for you, you can also look back at the first edition of the carnival.
If you write about related things, please check out this page, which is a general description of the carnival and a link to the submission form. They didn't have a huge number of submissions this time around, so please think about putting some of your own work forward for the next one!
If that isn't enough blog-based goodness about feminist parenting for you, you can also look back at the first edition of the carnival.
If you write about related things, please check out this page, which is a general description of the carnival and a link to the submission form. They didn't have a huge number of submissions this time around, so please think about putting some of your own work forward for the next one!
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Two Examples of the Historical Erasure of Struggle
A primary focus of my reading and writing has for years been histories of struggle in the Canadian context. It is, therefore, hardly news to me that struggles against oppression and exploitation, and their crucial role in creating space of greater freedom and social justice in the present (and future), are persistently erased from the mainstream collective memory -- "the social organization of forgetting," a friend calls it. I rather like that phrase. I still manage to run across examples of this that make me shake my head, however. This post is to share two such examples that I have encountered over the last few weeks in writing a chapter based on stories from a few different interview participants who have been involved in indigenous struggles in urban areas. The fact that these are struggles waged by people who experience both racism and colonization is, I think, very much related to the this historical erasure.
Example One -- Grassroots Response to the White Paper
The first is a big one. It's possible, in fact, that I just haven't found the right sources, the ones that talk about it, and if so I would really like to be corrected. Though I suspect that if such sources exist, at least one of the things that I have found would reference them. In any case, I will proceed based on what I know.
In the late '60s, there was an upsurge in the cenutries-long process of indigenous anti-colonial resistance. It began, from what I understand, in the part of Turtle Island colonized by the United States and fairly soon spread to the part colonized by Canada. In part to preempt this, in 1969 the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau introduced a public policy document called the White Paper. This document, in the name of an individualistic liberal understanding of "equality," proposed to end any legal recognition of indigeneity -- reserve communities turned into ordinary municipalities, reserved land broken up into individually owned plots, denial or extinguishment of settler state recognition of Aboriginal and treaty rights, a complete folding into mainstream service provision, and a few other things. In response, there was vocal and extremely united opposition from across the many and diverse indigenous peoples colonized by Canada, which by 1971 had forced the Liberals to withdraw the proposals. Notwithstanding that it is commonly understood that the same basic assimilationist goals motivate the settler state's orientation to the peoples it is colonizing to this day, forcing it to retreat and regroup and creating space for indigenous survival and further resurgence were great victories.
Given the importance of this moment not only in the histories of indigenous peoples in northern Turtle Island but in the history of the Canadian state, I find it flabbergasting that there is no broad history of grassroots indigenous struggle, including in response to the White Paper, in those years. Most general sources that I have found on indigenous people in Canada that talk about those years have similar elements: they describe the White Paper and why the vast majority of indigenous people considered it cultural genocide; they talk about the important roles played in giving voice to that opposition by indigenous leaders and political organizations at the provincial and national levels; and they say virtually nothing about grassroots organizing in reserve communities and cities. Change is shown as being about interactions between leaders and the state, with strongly worded policy briefs playing a major role, and with no hint that leaders only exist because they are in dynamic relation with peoples that they may in some sense lead but that they do not control and that are themselves active agents in history. Ordinary people, and struggle as something ordinary people do, gets written out. I should add that I have encountered three important but narrow exceptions -- a biography of an important national leader in that era, a history of the period by a white feminist woman that includes a chapter that talks about a very partial slice of grassroots indigenous struggle, and a book by a radical Metis man that has a similar chapter on a different slice. But nothing even approaching an exhaustive, general examination.
I should add that I'm sure many indigenous communities have preserved the memories of those days in stories, as communities in longterm struggle tend to do, and really that's the most important thing. I also know there can be good reasons not to make such stories accessible to the oppressor. Nonetheless, I have a feeling that a lot of the reason for the absence of such histories has more to do with the ways in which mainstream institutions that produce historical narratives are funded, peopled, and organized. And I still cannot dismiss my sense that the cause of transformative social change is better served by trumpeting the stories of past struggles as far and wide as we can.
Example Two -- Mainstream Reporting of Indigenous Victory Over Children's Aid
The other example is much smaller. I spent a few days recently looking at old microfilmed newspapers in a Toronto library. Mostly it was the Winnipeg Free Press. I was trying to find material related to indigenous struggle with the Winnipeg Children's Aid Society in the late '70s and early '80s. Across Canada starting in the '60s and continuing in many places today, child welfare agencies have taken up the colonial role left by the receding residential school system -- that of stealing children from their families and raising them in ways that often weakens or even destroys their ties to their nations, their cultures, and sometimes even their very selves. In the early '80s, sparked by the tragic death of an 18 month-old in CAS care, a group of indigenous people -- mostly women -- waged a brilliant struggle against the CAS. They didn't get everything they wanted, but they were able to force significant changes in how child welfare worked, including the complete dismantling of the organization that had terrorized their families for decades and a new system that, while still deeply flawed, included more space for the urban indigenous community to protect its own children. As is always the case, this depended on cleverly working with other factors at play. CAS upper management was notoriously hostile to and lashed out at the merest hint of criticism, and as the indigenous community turned up the heat, relations between upper management and workers, between upper management and the board of directors, and between upper management and the provincial government seriously deteriorated. Add in a couple of sympathetic journalists (carefully cultivated), a family court justice doing a review of the system whose conscience did not allow him to downplay in his reports the damage done to indigenous people over the years, a related but separate process over the same years whereby Manitoba indigenous nations based on reserved land were taking direct control of child welfare in their territories, and an NDP provincial government that was hardly a close friend of indigenous people but whose electoral needs left some space for prodding in just directions.
Judging as best I can with white eyes and form this end of history, I would describe the coverage in the Free Press as somewhat inconsistent but good at some key moments. What is interesting, though, was its coverage some time after those key moments. As I said, one of the outcomes of all of this was that the Winnipeg CAS, after being ordered into a sort of trusteeship for a period of time by the province, was dismantled and replaced by half a dozen new organizations. For the occasion of the last meeting of the CAS trusteeship board and its final cessation of operations a month or two later, the Free Press had a total of two news articles and an editorial, each of which presented a summary of the events that had lead to this. Native people were mentioned exactly once, in one of the news articles, in a vague and short clause that said something about "criticism" from them, packed into a sentence about other things. The editorial and the other news article didn't mention indigenous people or grassroots struggle at all.
Certainly struggle by indigenous people in Winnipeg wasn't the only thing going on, and without other factors being as they were the outcome would probably have been different. But grassroots struggle by indigenous people was absolutely necessary to create that outcome. Yet it was (despite earlier coverage that wasn't bad) completely erased from that crucial first draft of history that is the daily newspaper as it was authoritatively setting the issue to rest.
Example One -- Grassroots Response to the White Paper
The first is a big one. It's possible, in fact, that I just haven't found the right sources, the ones that talk about it, and if so I would really like to be corrected. Though I suspect that if such sources exist, at least one of the things that I have found would reference them. In any case, I will proceed based on what I know.
In the late '60s, there was an upsurge in the cenutries-long process of indigenous anti-colonial resistance. It began, from what I understand, in the part of Turtle Island colonized by the United States and fairly soon spread to the part colonized by Canada. In part to preempt this, in 1969 the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau introduced a public policy document called the White Paper. This document, in the name of an individualistic liberal understanding of "equality," proposed to end any legal recognition of indigeneity -- reserve communities turned into ordinary municipalities, reserved land broken up into individually owned plots, denial or extinguishment of settler state recognition of Aboriginal and treaty rights, a complete folding into mainstream service provision, and a few other things. In response, there was vocal and extremely united opposition from across the many and diverse indigenous peoples colonized by Canada, which by 1971 had forced the Liberals to withdraw the proposals. Notwithstanding that it is commonly understood that the same basic assimilationist goals motivate the settler state's orientation to the peoples it is colonizing to this day, forcing it to retreat and regroup and creating space for indigenous survival and further resurgence were great victories.
Given the importance of this moment not only in the histories of indigenous peoples in northern Turtle Island but in the history of the Canadian state, I find it flabbergasting that there is no broad history of grassroots indigenous struggle, including in response to the White Paper, in those years. Most general sources that I have found on indigenous people in Canada that talk about those years have similar elements: they describe the White Paper and why the vast majority of indigenous people considered it cultural genocide; they talk about the important roles played in giving voice to that opposition by indigenous leaders and political organizations at the provincial and national levels; and they say virtually nothing about grassroots organizing in reserve communities and cities. Change is shown as being about interactions between leaders and the state, with strongly worded policy briefs playing a major role, and with no hint that leaders only exist because they are in dynamic relation with peoples that they may in some sense lead but that they do not control and that are themselves active agents in history. Ordinary people, and struggle as something ordinary people do, gets written out. I should add that I have encountered three important but narrow exceptions -- a biography of an important national leader in that era, a history of the period by a white feminist woman that includes a chapter that talks about a very partial slice of grassroots indigenous struggle, and a book by a radical Metis man that has a similar chapter on a different slice. But nothing even approaching an exhaustive, general examination.
I should add that I'm sure many indigenous communities have preserved the memories of those days in stories, as communities in longterm struggle tend to do, and really that's the most important thing. I also know there can be good reasons not to make such stories accessible to the oppressor. Nonetheless, I have a feeling that a lot of the reason for the absence of such histories has more to do with the ways in which mainstream institutions that produce historical narratives are funded, peopled, and organized. And I still cannot dismiss my sense that the cause of transformative social change is better served by trumpeting the stories of past struggles as far and wide as we can.
Example Two -- Mainstream Reporting of Indigenous Victory Over Children's Aid
The other example is much smaller. I spent a few days recently looking at old microfilmed newspapers in a Toronto library. Mostly it was the Winnipeg Free Press. I was trying to find material related to indigenous struggle with the Winnipeg Children's Aid Society in the late '70s and early '80s. Across Canada starting in the '60s and continuing in many places today, child welfare agencies have taken up the colonial role left by the receding residential school system -- that of stealing children from their families and raising them in ways that often weakens or even destroys their ties to their nations, their cultures, and sometimes even their very selves. In the early '80s, sparked by the tragic death of an 18 month-old in CAS care, a group of indigenous people -- mostly women -- waged a brilliant struggle against the CAS. They didn't get everything they wanted, but they were able to force significant changes in how child welfare worked, including the complete dismantling of the organization that had terrorized their families for decades and a new system that, while still deeply flawed, included more space for the urban indigenous community to protect its own children. As is always the case, this depended on cleverly working with other factors at play. CAS upper management was notoriously hostile to and lashed out at the merest hint of criticism, and as the indigenous community turned up the heat, relations between upper management and workers, between upper management and the board of directors, and between upper management and the provincial government seriously deteriorated. Add in a couple of sympathetic journalists (carefully cultivated), a family court justice doing a review of the system whose conscience did not allow him to downplay in his reports the damage done to indigenous people over the years, a related but separate process over the same years whereby Manitoba indigenous nations based on reserved land were taking direct control of child welfare in their territories, and an NDP provincial government that was hardly a close friend of indigenous people but whose electoral needs left some space for prodding in just directions.
Judging as best I can with white eyes and form this end of history, I would describe the coverage in the Free Press as somewhat inconsistent but good at some key moments. What is interesting, though, was its coverage some time after those key moments. As I said, one of the outcomes of all of this was that the Winnipeg CAS, after being ordered into a sort of trusteeship for a period of time by the province, was dismantled and replaced by half a dozen new organizations. For the occasion of the last meeting of the CAS trusteeship board and its final cessation of operations a month or two later, the Free Press had a total of two news articles and an editorial, each of which presented a summary of the events that had lead to this. Native people were mentioned exactly once, in one of the news articles, in a vague and short clause that said something about "criticism" from them, packed into a sentence about other things. The editorial and the other news article didn't mention indigenous people or grassroots struggle at all.
Certainly struggle by indigenous people in Winnipeg wasn't the only thing going on, and without other factors being as they were the outcome would probably have been different. But grassroots struggle by indigenous people was absolutely necessary to create that outcome. Yet it was (despite earlier coverage that wasn't bad) completely erased from that crucial first draft of history that is the daily newspaper as it was authoritatively setting the issue to rest.
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
Review: Reasoning Otherwise
[Ian McKay. Reasoning Otherwise: Leftists and the People's Enlightenment in Canada, 1890-1920. Toronto: Between The Lines, 2008.]
I struggle on a daily basis with the fact that any act of writing is inherently arrogant -- except for journal-bound confessions destined for no eyes but the author's, the act of writing, whatever its specific substance, contains within it the presumption that someone, somewhere will benefit from reading what is produced. This is true of the most humble and cautious blog post, and the more sweeping and grand the vision for a given writing project, the more presumption it embodies. Yet it is only through authorial risk and impertinence, through the bearer of a pen and a notepad tweaking the nose of that which is big and imposing, that we can come -- maybe, just maybe -- to understand the world in new ways.
Reasoning Otherwise is part of something that aims to be both sweeping and grand: a massive, multi-volume history of Canada's socialist left that seeks to stitch together new understandings and new visions of the historical landscape and turn the assumptions of previous efforts on their ears. This is the first substantive volume, a sequel to an earlier overview and theoretical preamble and antecedent to, as far as I understand it, at least two or three other big books we can look forward to in the coming years. This one deals with the left in the years before the rise of the Communist Party, territory that is not unexamined but that has received less attention in the Canadian context than in most places.
A to-me endearing feature of McKay's method, which he calls "reconnaissance," is that it explicitly refuses the pretense of being some sort of final, authoritative synthesis, but embraces its own incompleteness and semi-conjectural status, and is explicit about "accepting that, on issues big and small, the latest word is not going to be the last word" [2]. Yes, it does feel a touch disingenuous, because whatever caveats McKay expresses this will likely function as a definitive text on the left of that era for at least a generation, but I still have a lot of respect for the acknowledgment that any one effort to tell stories of the past will inevitably be partial.
Reconnaissance involves examining not a single figure or single institution but all of the messiness of the socialist left in a given era -- what McKay calls a "formation," which can encompass multiple, loosely related organizations, individuals, tendencies, parties, unions, publications, thinkers, and activists. It examines what is common through this potentially chaotic mix, as well as the contradictions it contains. It explicitly disavows "ancestor worship" by latter day leftists, as well as uncontextual and polemical put-downs. It tries to understand the discourse and actions of the left of a given era in the context of that era, and examine projects and choices on the basis of what was useful and what was not, in the name of supporting leftist self-reflection in the present day.
There is lots to like about this approach. I like the commitment to nuance and complexity. I like the interest in recreating not just a sequence of events but the feel of the period and of moments within it. I like the somewhat meandering feel the text has in parts. Like I said, I respect the acknowledgment of incompleteness. At the same time, it is perhaps even more important than with more conventional, less ambitious histories to read it with its incompleteness actively in mind. For instance, a key theme throughout the book is the influence of the master-narrative of evolution on all branches of the left in this era, filtered not only through a particular reading of Marx but through an even more powerful influence from a philosopher named Herbert Spencer, of whom I had not previously heard. This observation is an important insight into the "first formation" -- McKay's name for the pre-CPC socialist left in Canada -- and into early 20th century Canadian society more broadly. However, does it really deserve as much weight as this volume gives it? There is no way for me to judge without either tackling primary sources myself or having the opportunity to read other books that take up the same material in different ways, which of course have not yet been written.
In pre-1920 Canada, explicitly socialist organizations were small and few. They were mostly without deep roots in the trade union movement, in contrast with their European counterparts, though there were individuals (like Toronto's James Simpson) and moments (like some of the massive uprisings in Canada's coal fields) that were exceptions. Some called themselves "parties" and some ran candidates in elections, even winning seats from time to time, but they were not the sort of organization we might expect to be attached to that label based on later experiences with social democratic and communist mass-based parties. Their focus was largely educational; they wanted to "make" socialists. A couple of the key parties, especially the Socialist Party of Canada and the Socialist Party of North America, have been (ahistorically) labelled "impossibilist" by other writers -- they adhered quite stringently to "single plank" platforms which insisted that anything less than the full implementation of socialism was a compromise and a betrayal, and they routinely disparaged any struggles with any other goal. McKay reads this as a response to the power of liberal hegemony and its proven ability to reabsorb workers' struggles and workers' candidates into the liberal fold, and argues that, for all that many of the associated pronouncements come across as nothing less than utterly obnoxious to modern ears, this approach helped create space for the formation of a left that had a centre independent of the inexorable gravity of liberalism. At the same time, other groups mixed practical struggles and transformative end goals in ways that resist easy placement in twenty-first century categories. Though famous U.S. socialist leader Eugene Debs did disparage once such mixture by a group in British Columbia as "mixed pickles."
It was unclear to me, based on the initial overview book for this projected series, how the volumes of actual history were going to tackle race and gender. I had some concern that race in particular would receive less attention than it should. Happily, this is decidedly not the case in Reasoning Otherwise. However, though they are treated seriously and thoroughly, I still have some concerns about the book's approach to each.
I agree with the book's commitment to getting past polemic and point-scoring approaches to left history, and its commitment to presenting nuance and understanding it in the context of the era in which it occurred. A lot of the new-to-me information that was presented in service of building anti-polemical nuance was useful stuff. For example, it counters assertions I've seen made elsewhere that the male-dominated left was largely disinterested in or even actively opposed to women's suffrage. In fact, though the Socialist Party of Canada was not supportive (in much the same way that it was often cuttingly dismissive of, say, bread-and-butter labour struggles), the overwhelming commonsense among leftists, both women and men, was pro-suffrage. As well, though I have heard many times about the Komagata Maru, a ship carrying South Asian would-be immigrants that were the focus of popular hatred and government opposition that prevented them from landing in Vancouver in 1914, I had never heard about the (admittedly atypical and short-lasting) alliance between the folks on the ship and the Socialist Party of Canada. Nonetheless, there were recurring moments when its discussion of race and gender felt actively defensive. That would be a hard accusation to make stick, I'm sure, because there are also plenty of places where the book is very explicit about the ways in which the early 20th century left acted in oppressive ways. But even so, to my eye there were at least some moments where the text came across as more oriented towards defending the distant past from the polemics of the not-so-distant past than towards a nuanced and tough accounting for oppression and resistance around race and gender in the era in question. I don't think that had to be the case.
My discomfort with the chapter on racism included some of that concern but I also found the framework used for discussing race and racism unsatisfying in a more general way. I think to really nail down that dissatisfaction I would need to spend more time rereading and pondering than I am willing to, unfortunately. It has something to do with wanting to see more and different ways of relating everyday racism to histories of colonization; more and different ways of relating to critical race scholarship on historical shifts in the form of racism over time; more clarity on how race and racism limited the imagination and the political projects of white socialists; more exploration of racialization as a historical process, with greater clarity around that era's conflation of race and ethnicity in light of the broader historical trajectories of different; even a single mention of the left's relationship to African Nova Scotia; and probably other stuff. Not that there wasn't lots of useful stuff in there, but even more than the other areas tackled by this text, it felt like there was more to say.
There are other bits and pieces that deserve a brief mention. I was a bit surprised that more attention wasn't paid to the Knights of Labor, who largely preceded the period covered by this book and who weren't explicitly socialist, but whom I had thought were a pretty clear ancestor for worker radicalism in the settler society in Canada. The section on religion and the left was excellent. I liked the discussion of the Winnipeg General Strike, particularly the attention to the show trials that followed it, though I thought a bit more focus on the events of the strike would've been useful for readers who weren't already familiar with it.
My reservations notwithstanding, this is a very important book. And an enjoyable one. McKay could probably have accomplished his goals in fewer pages, but it was all interesting and the writing was clear, showed glints of humour, and shifted effectively among the many different scales and foci of attention. Those of us with an interest in the history of oppression and resistance in North America should read it with some healthy skepticism around its grander claims and in balance with other sorts of histories, but we definitely should read it.
[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]
I struggle on a daily basis with the fact that any act of writing is inherently arrogant -- except for journal-bound confessions destined for no eyes but the author's, the act of writing, whatever its specific substance, contains within it the presumption that someone, somewhere will benefit from reading what is produced. This is true of the most humble and cautious blog post, and the more sweeping and grand the vision for a given writing project, the more presumption it embodies. Yet it is only through authorial risk and impertinence, through the bearer of a pen and a notepad tweaking the nose of that which is big and imposing, that we can come -- maybe, just maybe -- to understand the world in new ways.
Reasoning Otherwise is part of something that aims to be both sweeping and grand: a massive, multi-volume history of Canada's socialist left that seeks to stitch together new understandings and new visions of the historical landscape and turn the assumptions of previous efforts on their ears. This is the first substantive volume, a sequel to an earlier overview and theoretical preamble and antecedent to, as far as I understand it, at least two or three other big books we can look forward to in the coming years. This one deals with the left in the years before the rise of the Communist Party, territory that is not unexamined but that has received less attention in the Canadian context than in most places.
A to-me endearing feature of McKay's method, which he calls "reconnaissance," is that it explicitly refuses the pretense of being some sort of final, authoritative synthesis, but embraces its own incompleteness and semi-conjectural status, and is explicit about "accepting that, on issues big and small, the latest word is not going to be the last word" [2]. Yes, it does feel a touch disingenuous, because whatever caveats McKay expresses this will likely function as a definitive text on the left of that era for at least a generation, but I still have a lot of respect for the acknowledgment that any one effort to tell stories of the past will inevitably be partial.
Reconnaissance involves examining not a single figure or single institution but all of the messiness of the socialist left in a given era -- what McKay calls a "formation," which can encompass multiple, loosely related organizations, individuals, tendencies, parties, unions, publications, thinkers, and activists. It examines what is common through this potentially chaotic mix, as well as the contradictions it contains. It explicitly disavows "ancestor worship" by latter day leftists, as well as uncontextual and polemical put-downs. It tries to understand the discourse and actions of the left of a given era in the context of that era, and examine projects and choices on the basis of what was useful and what was not, in the name of supporting leftist self-reflection in the present day.
There is lots to like about this approach. I like the commitment to nuance and complexity. I like the interest in recreating not just a sequence of events but the feel of the period and of moments within it. I like the somewhat meandering feel the text has in parts. Like I said, I respect the acknowledgment of incompleteness. At the same time, it is perhaps even more important than with more conventional, less ambitious histories to read it with its incompleteness actively in mind. For instance, a key theme throughout the book is the influence of the master-narrative of evolution on all branches of the left in this era, filtered not only through a particular reading of Marx but through an even more powerful influence from a philosopher named Herbert Spencer, of whom I had not previously heard. This observation is an important insight into the "first formation" -- McKay's name for the pre-CPC socialist left in Canada -- and into early 20th century Canadian society more broadly. However, does it really deserve as much weight as this volume gives it? There is no way for me to judge without either tackling primary sources myself or having the opportunity to read other books that take up the same material in different ways, which of course have not yet been written.
In pre-1920 Canada, explicitly socialist organizations were small and few. They were mostly without deep roots in the trade union movement, in contrast with their European counterparts, though there were individuals (like Toronto's James Simpson) and moments (like some of the massive uprisings in Canada's coal fields) that were exceptions. Some called themselves "parties" and some ran candidates in elections, even winning seats from time to time, but they were not the sort of organization we might expect to be attached to that label based on later experiences with social democratic and communist mass-based parties. Their focus was largely educational; they wanted to "make" socialists. A couple of the key parties, especially the Socialist Party of Canada and the Socialist Party of North America, have been (ahistorically) labelled "impossibilist" by other writers -- they adhered quite stringently to "single plank" platforms which insisted that anything less than the full implementation of socialism was a compromise and a betrayal, and they routinely disparaged any struggles with any other goal. McKay reads this as a response to the power of liberal hegemony and its proven ability to reabsorb workers' struggles and workers' candidates into the liberal fold, and argues that, for all that many of the associated pronouncements come across as nothing less than utterly obnoxious to modern ears, this approach helped create space for the formation of a left that had a centre independent of the inexorable gravity of liberalism. At the same time, other groups mixed practical struggles and transformative end goals in ways that resist easy placement in twenty-first century categories. Though famous U.S. socialist leader Eugene Debs did disparage once such mixture by a group in British Columbia as "mixed pickles."
It was unclear to me, based on the initial overview book for this projected series, how the volumes of actual history were going to tackle race and gender. I had some concern that race in particular would receive less attention than it should. Happily, this is decidedly not the case in Reasoning Otherwise. However, though they are treated seriously and thoroughly, I still have some concerns about the book's approach to each.
I agree with the book's commitment to getting past polemic and point-scoring approaches to left history, and its commitment to presenting nuance and understanding it in the context of the era in which it occurred. A lot of the new-to-me information that was presented in service of building anti-polemical nuance was useful stuff. For example, it counters assertions I've seen made elsewhere that the male-dominated left was largely disinterested in or even actively opposed to women's suffrage. In fact, though the Socialist Party of Canada was not supportive (in much the same way that it was often cuttingly dismissive of, say, bread-and-butter labour struggles), the overwhelming commonsense among leftists, both women and men, was pro-suffrage. As well, though I have heard many times about the Komagata Maru, a ship carrying South Asian would-be immigrants that were the focus of popular hatred and government opposition that prevented them from landing in Vancouver in 1914, I had never heard about the (admittedly atypical and short-lasting) alliance between the folks on the ship and the Socialist Party of Canada. Nonetheless, there were recurring moments when its discussion of race and gender felt actively defensive. That would be a hard accusation to make stick, I'm sure, because there are also plenty of places where the book is very explicit about the ways in which the early 20th century left acted in oppressive ways. But even so, to my eye there were at least some moments where the text came across as more oriented towards defending the distant past from the polemics of the not-so-distant past than towards a nuanced and tough accounting for oppression and resistance around race and gender in the era in question. I don't think that had to be the case.
My discomfort with the chapter on racism included some of that concern but I also found the framework used for discussing race and racism unsatisfying in a more general way. I think to really nail down that dissatisfaction I would need to spend more time rereading and pondering than I am willing to, unfortunately. It has something to do with wanting to see more and different ways of relating everyday racism to histories of colonization; more and different ways of relating to critical race scholarship on historical shifts in the form of racism over time; more clarity on how race and racism limited the imagination and the political projects of white socialists; more exploration of racialization as a historical process, with greater clarity around that era's conflation of race and ethnicity in light of the broader historical trajectories of different; even a single mention of the left's relationship to African Nova Scotia; and probably other stuff. Not that there wasn't lots of useful stuff in there, but even more than the other areas tackled by this text, it felt like there was more to say.
There are other bits and pieces that deserve a brief mention. I was a bit surprised that more attention wasn't paid to the Knights of Labor, who largely preceded the period covered by this book and who weren't explicitly socialist, but whom I had thought were a pretty clear ancestor for worker radicalism in the settler society in Canada. The section on religion and the left was excellent. I liked the discussion of the Winnipeg General Strike, particularly the attention to the show trials that followed it, though I thought a bit more focus on the events of the strike would've been useful for readers who weren't already familiar with it.
My reservations notwithstanding, this is a very important book. And an enjoyable one. McKay could probably have accomplished his goals in fewer pages, but it was all interesting and the writing was clear, showed glints of humour, and shifted effectively among the many different scales and foci of attention. Those of us with an interest in the history of oppression and resistance in North America should read it with some healthy skepticism around its grander claims and in balance with other sorts of histories, but we definitely should read it.
[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]
Saturday, July 04, 2009
Video: "The Colour of the Race Problem is White"
Here is a useful video of what appears to be an introductory seminar for university students on the basics of racial inequality and struggles against it called "The Colour of the Race Problem is White," given by author and activist Robert Jensen. It is pretty U.S.-centric in its detail and context, but the form of the argument transposes without much difficulty onto Canada.
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