Review: Rebels, Reds, Radicals

(Rebels, Reds, Radicals: Rethinking Canada's Left History by Ian McKay. Toronto: Between The Lines, 2005.)

Yep, that's right. Another book review. Except I'm not sure I feel able to review this one, even to the hasty and informal extent my other book-related posts actually count as reviews.

I ordered this book expecting a work of history, but I believe it is more appropriately labelled historiography -- it is a book about the study of history, not so much about the facts of the past themselves. Given my current work, it is a very useful read, and it has been very thought provoking. I expect that as my own work proceeds, I will read it again, though I'm not exaclty sure how the non-academic, social movement-focused, and fairly idiosyncratic way of approaching "left history" that has grown up in my project relates to the grand vision of this academic though still very accessible and quite well written book.

The book talks about how most efforts to look at left history in Canada are vertical: they take a particular institution, party, or individual and trace them through time. While this can bring to light a lot of useful information, it also tends to result in history that is partisan and sectarian, that passes judgment on its subject in a way that is not necessarily helpful, and that loses sight of the importance of context in shaping ideas and terms and actions and decisions.

For example, one of the interesting-to-me points made by this book was about the CCF: In Communist histories it is portrayed as hopelessly reformist in contast to the valiant and true bearers of socialism, the CP or whatever dissident Communist sect the author happens to belong to. In NDP (the CCF's successor party) histories it is portrayed as equally reformist, though not to attack it but rather to make it fit more comfotably in with the NDP's own politics. But the CCF was definitely socialist, unlike the more deliberately ambiguous NDP, and it had a lot more in common with the CP, despite obvious tactical differences, than either party or their latter-day partisans would want to admit.

I won't try and capture the nuanced, anti-sectarian, and pragmatic vision of "socialism" and "the left" elaborated in the book, but it was very encouraging to me. In fact, though I think of myself as having little time for sectarianism myself, the odd blog-based rant notwithstanding, it challenged me to be more self-critical of the ways in which I allow the legacy of division and difference on the left to cloud my own vision, and to be more active in challenging the tendency to naturalize certain conceptual divisions. A good example for me is the old "reform" vs. "revolution" debate, and the distinction between "social democratic" and "revolutionary" parties -- all of those terms have meant different things at different periods of history, the terms of the debates that happen around them now often have more to do with a distorted vision of the 1930s than they have to do with the current period, and the terms are often mobilized in ways that prioritize posturing rather than actual impact in challenging systems of power.

In outlining his approach to Canada's left history, which he describes as "reconaissance," the author emphasizes the importance of a horizontal rather than vertical approach which considers the broad sweep of social conditions and organizations and institutions in any given era. An important unit in this analysis is the "formation," a conglomeration of organizations and institutions and intelletual tendencies which, for a given period of time, plays a central role in how the broader left movement tries to challenge the dominant liberal structures of the state. He identifies five in Canadian history: the propagandistic socialism of the first two decades of the century; the CP-dominated period from 1919 to 1937; the "radical planism" of the CCF; the anti-hierarchical and nationally-focused leftisms of the New Left, which were expressed with particular importance in Quebec; and Canada's unusually positioned and particularly strong socialist-feminist movement from the late '60s to the early '90s. He hypothesizes the beginning of a sixth such formation via the anti-globalization/global justice activism over the last few years.

There is a lot about this scheme -- and I'm not doing it justice in how I summarize it above -- that I like. But I have my reservations as well. I agree that approaching history primarily by applying the analysis of today as if it were infallible, and as a scorecard which movements of the past can succeed or fail to meet and thereby be judged, is not necessarily helpful. As the author says in an example related to his own experience/identity, it is more useful to understand the conditions leading to the expulsion of gay men from leftist groups in Canada in the '70s in terms of the material and ideological conditions that led to that rather than just dismissing it with labels. While that's true, I am not clear how that is going to be carried through. For example, I can't imagine a left history with aspirations towards completeness failing to treat whiteness and white privilege as central themes to how the left in Canada has evolved, but there is absolutely nothing in the book that makes me think that those things will necessarily be assigned any importance under this framework. They may be, but there's no evidence to suggest it. How will a history that focuses on the formation or formations in a given era that are most successful in creating space for and driving counter-hegemonic activities deal with struggles that are urgent and real but that are completely disconnected from the dominant left, or have a distant paternalistic/oppressive relationship to it?

In any case, I'm keen to see. This book is intended as the first volume in what will probably end up being a fairly massive multi-volume history of the Canadian left by this author, and I will read them eagerly as they are released.

[Edit: For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

CLC Presidency

Carol Wall is running for the presidency of the Canadian Labour Congress at its convention in June. She is a long-time labour activist and co-author of Education for Changing Unions -- another one of the co-authors of that book is Joseph Geronimo, who is an interview participant in my social movement history project. If Wall were to win, she would become the first woman and the first person of colour to head Canada's central labour body. (Found via Rabble.CA.)

Review: Witness Against War

(Witness Against War: Pacifism in Canada 1900-1945 by Thomas P. Socknat. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987.)

As I've mentioned before, right now I'm reading a lot of books of Canadian lefty history for my work, and that means folks who drop by this blog will get a chance to read about those books whether they like it or not.

At the beginning of the 20th century, pacifism in Canada had two strands: the traditional peace churches like the Mennonites and the Dukhobours and the Hutterites, which for the most part disavowed participation in the broader society as well as participation in war, and the liberal peace movement, which was not necessarily pacifist in a strict sense but which participated in society and promoted things like arbitration and international agreements and disarmament to prevent war. The latter was related to the broader liberal reform movement, which was very much tied in with social gospel Protestantism in Canada.

World War I changed things, and most of the liberal reform pacifists had to either give up their pacifism or give up their liberalism. The majority chose the former, with even a number of the strongest pro-pacifist mainstream Protestant ministers before WWI becoming rabid war boosters, while a small minority retained their pacifism and realized that it needed to be tied to social radicalism to be relevant. The peace churches had their own struggles with respect to conscientious objection, but mostly did not shift their positions, though the Quakers, who have always been socially engaged, did shift towards greater participation and radicalism. After WWI liberal pacifism reconstituted itself and in the '20s there was again great antipathy towards war and great hope for international institutions to prevent it, but there was also a small but vibrant strand of socially radical pacifism which blossomed further in the '30s. Alas, the "natural" alliance between struggle for radical change and the pacifist position began to falter by the end of the '30s as many on the left felt that war was necessary to defeat the threat of fascism, initially in Spain and then more generally. By the time Germany invaded the Soviety Union, the rupture between left pacifists and the rest of the left was severe, and that plus restrictions by the state meant pacifist activism focused on things like conscientious objection, alternative service, support for refugees, and maintenance of civil liberties at home.

The most interesting part of this book for me was the evolving relationship between social radicalism and opposition to violence. It remains a contentious question -- if you look at the massive pro-peace presence on the streets in North America in the months leading up to the Iraq war, I think it is fair to say that the vast majority would fall into the "liberal reformer" camp of peace activists, who often are against particular wars, not against war, and whose ideas for the kinds of institutional changes needed to bring about peace are (to my mind) woefully inadequate; a smaller cluster of people around an anti-imperialism that refuses to problematize violence per se as a tool; others who preach a pacifism that is so concerned with avoiding conflict that, despite its words to the contrary, it effectively supports systemic injustice over overt conflict to remove that injustice; and a few souls who try to combine a staunch commitment to radical action with a powerful opposition to violence. None of these groups have all the answers and all can become puritanical and self-serving, but my gut is with the last even if my head doesn't always agree, and even if I refuse to condemn and at times might voice support for people who feel driven to armed struggle in the service of social change because of conditions that are completely alien to my own relatively privileged experience.

I don't think there's any hard and fast rule for how to navigate the challenges of that position. Indeed, I think it requires retaining an openness to dialogue and collaboration with all the groupings described above, especially the second one. I think avoiding puritanism and indulgence in your own privilege is key to holding it with any kind of integrity and political realism. At the same time, I also think that a refusal to acknowledge the impact of large-scale violence is just as much a betrayal -- the multi-generational legacy of the massive trauma created by war (whatever its source or intent) does not make building a liberatory society any easier, and having to go to war can make any society (or movement) fall victim to authoritarianism and centralization and curbs on civil liberties and so on.

Of course any attempt to build a radically or even moderately liberatory and just society here or anywhere in the world will face violence if it shows signs of being even somewhat successful, and we need to figure out how to respond to that -- that might sound ludicrous to some readers, but even a cursory inspection of history bears it out. The radicals of the 1930s, both pacifist and non, didn't come up with compelling answers, and I'm not sure radicals in diverse movements with various positions on the role of violence are much further along today in coming up with responses which get beyond "lesser evil" arguments. But then, struggle is never neat and easy.

[Edit: For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

European Constitution

I haven't really been following this issue, but apparently the French people voted "no" to the European constitution. Though the media has at times tried to portray the "no" forces as representing the xenophobic right, in fact the majority of votes against the proposed undemocratic constitution were from the left, and they were voting to oppose the further encroachment of neoliberalism on European life (and voting against the wishes and active campaigning of bureaucrats, big business, conservatives, liberals, and social democrats all). See posts at Feral Scholar, Direland, and Lenin's Tomb for more information...as it is put on the last site, it is "the best May the [French] left has had since 1968."

Review: The League for Social Reconstruction

(The League for Social Reconstruction: Intellectual Origins of the Democratic Left in Canada, 1930-1942 by Michiel Horn. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980.)

Since I graduated from McMaster University with a degree in biochemistry, the bulk of my productive activity has involved dealing with information and ideas, and producing articles, reports, radio shows, other media -- and now a book -- from progressive or radical perspectives. In other words, I'm a relatively privileged guy with aspirations both to radical politics and to doing intellectual work of various sorts.

The League for Social Reconstruction is therefore, in terms of identity if not in certain important aspects of analysis and focus, the story of at least one strand of my predecessors.

The League is characterized by this book as the first organization of radical intellectuals in Canada. I would be inclined to qualify this definition more carefully, because, for example, a centuries-ago coffee klatch of Mohawk matriarchs hanging out and engaging in informal theorizing about what to do about those uncivilized white folk wreaking havoc on The People would seem to me to qualify as both "radical" and "intellectual," as would lots of other oppressed people strategizing about their own liberation. But the LSR certainly seems to have been the first radical political organization of people whose place in the Canadian capitalist state/market was specialized intellectual work.

The LSR was a group mostly comprised of middle-class professionals, and was founded in 1932. Only a minority of participants were academics, and only a tiny fraction of Canadian academics ever showed any interest in getting involved, but a majority of the leading figures in the League fell into that group. The brutal impact of the Depression on the Canadian people, as well as the refusal of Canadian political and business elites to do anything resembling the New Deal in the United States, helped catalyze its formation. The group was partially modelled on the Fabian Society of earlier decades in Britain, and its purpose was to study and popularize ideas of democratic socialism in Canada. As Horn writes, "The LSR's ideas show Fabian, Marxist, Guild, and Christian socialist and reformist liberal influences as well as insights gained from domestic sources, especially the agrarian radicals of the prairie West."

The League was indepdenent of but very much intertwined with the CCF, Canada's first democratic socialist party of national scope, which was formally slightly younger than the League but which had roots in working-class labour and socialist politics that were much older. For the decade of the LSR's existence it served as the CCF's informal "brain trust." It was primarily LSR intellectuals that drafted the Regina Manifesto that was the founding document of the CCF. J.S. Woodsworth, the founding leader of the CCF and a sort of embodied spiritual centre to the democratic left in the Canada of that era, was also honourary president of the LSR. Frank Scott, one of the LSR's founders and core members, became national chair of the CCF in 1942, and the LSR's David Lewis became national secretary of the CCF in 1938 and years later was leader of the federal NDP while his son Stephen was leader of the Ontario NDP.

Along with strategic advice for the CCF, the LSR produced quite a few pamphlets and a few books. Most of these were too academic to acquire much attention from the bulk of the population and too simplified to get any acclaim as contributions to socialist theory beyond Canada's borders, but Social Planning for Canada, published in 1935, was treated with some seriousness by European and American socialists. But over its decade of existence the LSR produced many of the ideas that, through their popularization by the CCF and later the NDP, went into Liberal and Conservative Party platforms in the post-WWII years to create the imperfect Canadian version of the welfare state. Of course many other ideas could not so easily be adapted to the cause of liberal reform, in particular the nationalization of large sections of industry as well as the neutralist approach to foreign policy favoured by the League until after WWII had actually begun. The LSR's highly centralized vision for a future socialist Canada and lack of sympathy for the national aspirations of the Quebcois was one of the factors that ensured that its presence in Quebec never extended beyond anglophone intellectuals in Montreal.

Despite feeling a sense of connection with the LSR folks on one level, on many other levels the organization seems to be from a totally different world in both positive and negative ways. Michael Albert of ZNet has, in many essays and articles, decried the tendency of the left today to avoid having much in the way of vision. This the LSR had aplenty: They knew what they wanted and they knew how they wanted to get there. To modern libertarian socialist eyes they are shockingly naive, however. Their faith in centralized planning (as opposed to the participatory planning suggested by Albert and Robin Hahnel) is quaint. Their top-down, party-centric vision for how change happens is neither realistic nor liberatory. Their complete lack of awareness of the obstacles that a socialist party would inevitably encounter to the complete socialist transformation of the state once they were elected, both in terms of extraparliamentary violence by capitalist forces within Canada and economic and military intervention by the United States, is hard to believe (and a bit frightening). Their understanding of political consciousness and its transformation as being primarily intellectual in nature, and that all you need to do to bring about radical social change is skillfully articulate good ideas, should also make heads shake. And, as is not unexpected of privileged leftists, particularly from that era, their attention to race, gender, and sexuality was minimal, and in fact nonexistent for the last. Yet despite many facets of analysis that I would never want to replicate, and a basically uncritical relationship to the implications of their own privilege, there is still something inspiring about the League members' principles and their commitment to taking action to create radical change.

An interesting aside: At least two figures in the League had connections of interest to U.S. readers. Prominent LSR member King Gordon eventually left Canada and became editor of The Nation in the United States. And the LSR president in 1939-40 was Louise Parkin, sister of Claud Cockburn, who was father of Alexander Cockburn of CounterPunch and Patrick Cockburn, who does some good reporting from Iraq. And on the Canadian side, David Lewis' grandson is Avi Lewis, who has done some good progressive media work in his own right and is married to famous lefty author Naomi Klein.

Anyway, I hope I will again be able to increase the amount of time spent directly in organizing and activist activities as L gets older, but I know that the biggest part of my time will continue to be about ideas and words and media and so on -- that kind of work interests me and animates me, and I have the space and the privilege to try and do it in radically meaningful ways. Unfortunately, I am continually searching for what those ways might be. And although this book is interesting, if sometimes excessively attentive to mundane detail, and a significant chapter of left history in Canada, unfortunately it does not do much to help me in my own wrestling with the role of intellectual work, both analytical and creative, in creating a better world.

[Edit: For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Another Quote

Few tricks of the unsophisticated intellect are more curious than the naive psychology of the business man [sic], who ascribes his achievements to his own unaided efforts, in bland unconsciousness of a social order without whose continuous support and vigilant protection he would be as a lamb bleating in the desert.

-- R.H. Tawney, 1947

Quote

In the end of the day, having done all we can to mitigate or avoid an open holocaust, we peace-makers are exactly what the militarists say we are -- naive visionaries -- unless we are willing to kill war where it is born. That is the private ownership of machines [i.e. the means of production].

-- Canadian Student Christian Movement, circa 1935

Housekeeping

I had hoped I'd have time today to post a review of a book on the League for Social Reconstruction, an organization of socialist intellectuals in Canada in the '30s and '40s, but I'm afraid I haven't quite found time to finish reading it yet. My partner has been in San Diego at a conference since Saturday morning, so it has just been L and I, which has meant I have been otherwise occupied for a greater proportion of the time than usual. Also, at long last today I resubmitted the book proposal for my social movement history project, and sent out a long-overdue update to the project's email list. And tomorrow morning, L and I are taking the train to San Diego ourselves for a couple of days, and I doubt I'll be posting while I'm gone...but I will definitely finish reading the book, and start reading one about the history of pre-1945 Canadian pacifism!

Baby!

Less than an hour ago, one of my sisters gave birth to a 8 lb, 2 oz baby girl. The labour was quick, everyone is okay, the little one has a tuft of black hair on her head, and she as yet has no name. L now has two first cousins, a total I didn't surpass until I was 25 or 26 years old! Unfortunatley, we'll have to wait until July to meet her.

Blog Links Added

After finding them via Empire Notes, I have added links to Sonali Kolhatkar's Blog -- she's the host of Uprising Radio, one of my favourite shows on KPFK -- and to political conScience, the blog of her partner, Jim Ingalls.