Book Review: Thinking about Left history
Rebels, Reds, Radicals: Rethinking Canada’s Left History by Ian McKay
Review by Jim Naylor
Socialists are deeply conscious of history. As Ian McKay argues in his engaging and thought-provoking Rebels, Reds, Radicals, leftists are by definition “non-contemporaneous.” They are profoundly aware of living within history, struggling to understand the patterns and lessons of the past, and hoping to use this knowledge to guide its future course. The social world is malleable; capitalism has a history and therefore, can have an end. More than this, socialists are conscious of living within a radical tradition. There is a shared sense of comradeship with those who have gone before and a feeling that the challenges that radicals have faced in the past speak directly to us.
The problem, McKay suggests, is that leftists have not been particularly good historians, at least when it comes to exploring what we need to comprehend about Canada’s radical past. The stories of past struggles have been recounted in books and pamphlets written by activists and academics of all stripes. But are they helpful in building twenty-first century socialisms or, as he suggests, do they act as fetters on our understanding by uncritically replicating old labels and assumptions?
I’m sympathetic to McKay’s concerns. Radical history, even the best, is a minefield for the uninitiated. The language leftists use to describe themselves and their milieu: revolutionaries, reformists, communists, social democrats, anarchists, syndicalists, Trotskyists, Stalinists, and so on, are far from self-evident terms. And they are often used in an ahistorical, timeless sense. Far too many books, popular and academic, discuss the great twentieth-century struggle between social democrats and Communists (or in the Canadian context, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation/New Democratic Party versus the Communist Party of Canada/Labour Progressive Party) as if each of these traditions were frozen in time, unchanging decade after decade, unaffected by the changing material and intellectual worlds around them. Or they are allowed one shift, usually a great betrayal, such as the Stalinization of the Communist Party in the 1920s, or the abandonment of the ideals of the Regina Manifesto by the CCF in the 1950s as it morphed into the NDP.
These processes, of course, happened. But they are often presented in a manner that minimizes the great creativity of the left, and its great challenges. Besides targeting the intellectual carelessness reflected in assumptions that political labels carry timeless meaning, McKay decries the sectarian and sentimental character of this writing. Although we may quibble about the epithets, it would be hard not to concede his point. Overtly or not, histories have been written as polemical tools, to demonstrate that one’s own political tendency is not only right now, but was right in the past. Although often full of insight, the result is at best two-dimensional. Even academic literature tends to look at the past through the eyes of a single political tendency, and often reduce that tendency to a political strategy and program. And much radical history is written in a heroic genre, celebrating the role of individuals or organizations to build struggles and resist co-optation.
How do we write a more historical, and a more useful, history? The first step is to recognize the otherness of the past. Effective history recognizes that people in the past thought and acted differently than today. They lived in different worlds, read different books, and talked about ideas differently. And they came to their socialist conclusions differently. While McKay recognizes the validity of studying specific organizations or political currents, he urges us to write more generally, examining the paths that have been travelled by a very broadly defined “Left.” The liberal order, as Marxists would expect, has been challenged at the point of capitalist production, although class-based, workplace struggles account for only part of the story. Others became socialists through the fight against Tsarism in the Russian Empire, or because the “liberal order” perpetuated the national oppression of Quebecois or First Nations in Canada. Some came to reject capitalism because it came to conflict with their religious beliefs or because they drew socialist conclusions from their struggles for gender liberation. Still others came to socialism through international solidarity or simply because the irrationality of capitalism offended their notion of the possibilities of a better social order. Clearly, we are talking of broad, yet also historically specific, movements which shaped Canadian Leftisms. “Matrix-events” such as the emergence of monopoly capitalism, or wars and depressions, or the rise of the women’s movement, challenge fundamental questions about the social order creating new frameworks for understanding the world.
McKay undertakes what he calls a strategy of “reconnaissance,” attempting to probe each of these Left formations on their own terms, seeing what made them tick. By formations, he means something much broader than an organization or a single tradition, but rather what we might think of as an entire radical generation which would share assumptions about the world and about socialism. For instance, early twentieth-century socialists drawing not just on Marx, but on the political economist Henry George, the anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan and particularly the hugely influential sociology of Herbert Spencer, shared a social evolutionary view of the world. Although socialists had differences, debates drew on a shared language, and political activity revolved not so much around what we may consider either revolutionary or reformist politics, but around propaganda and education. Mastering the science of social evolution would result in fundamental change.
The success of the Russian Revolution challenged a second wave of socialists to develop a more activist idea of politics as well as new notions of the party. A third formation emerged in the 1930s, the product of both the Great Depression and Soviet industrialization. The role of the state, and of centralized planning by experts, took on a centrality that had been earlier lacking. These were features shared by the CCF and the Communist Party who, as much as they slagged each other, spoke a language each could understand. This became all the more the case as the language of comprehensive state planning and a Canadian nationalism supplanted an earlier language of class struggle for both tendencies. The breakthrough victory of the CCF in Saskatchewan and the strength of both the Communists and the CCF in the rapidly blossoming union movement, McKay suggests, marked the entry of the left into hegemonic politics.
The rise of a new left in the 1960s and 1970s represents a fourth formation, rooted in a response to the cold war and an identification with decolonization movements around the world. It explicitly rejected the old left’s assumptions, strategies and language. It was critical of the bureaucratization inherent in the third formation’s “planism” and thought more broadly about potential revolutionary agents and the meaning of radical democracy. The rise of a highly politicized national movement in Quebec, for instance, reflected a willingness to understand how other oppressions undermined liberal capitalism. McKay is particularly keen on focusing on Quebec as key to this formation. Interestingly, McKay identifies socialist feminism as a separate, fifth formation, reflecting a new way of thinking about socialism which explored the relationship between the “public” and the “personal” in ways that no earlier formation had done.
Each formation, then, lived within its own intellectual, social and political universe, although they overlapped and interacted with each other. These earlier formations each had its own set of notions about what socialism was, and how to act politically. McKay judges the effectiveness of these formations on their ability to act as a counterhegemonic force to the existing liberal order, to have their ideas, assumptions and hopes shared beyond their own, relatively small, numbers. He counterposes this to the “scorecard” radical history which measures individuals and organizations in the past by what they got “right,” versus their “errors” according to our definition. The point is well taken, although it is difficult to see how we can avoid recognizing that some organizations were more insightful than others, and that their programmatic or theoretical developments can continue to serve us. There are several other observations or statements that New Socialist readers may take exception to in this book, particularly around questions of political incorporation and organization. At times McKay seems to underplay the power of the hegemonic liberalism he describes so well. He celebrates the influence that socialists have had on public policy and culture but has to acknowledge that “every major leftism in Canadian history has ultimately been digested by the liberal order.” McKay’s promised three volume reconnaissance of the Canadian Left, of which this volume is a kind of theoretical introduction, will allow socialists to understand the processes that created and undermined the Lefts of the past. The result will be new insights and, undoubtedly, new disagreements and new debate. The Left can only benefit.
