For a new kind of history: a reconnaissance of 100 years of Canadian socialism.
THE CENTENNIAL OF CANADIAN socialism is upon us -- in 2001 if one focuses on the creation of the first free-standing pan-Canadian socialist organization, in 2005 if one selects the formation of the first party to attract the support and the votes of thousands of supporters.(1) It is symptomatic
Some General Reflections on Methodology and Historiography
What has been most sorely lacking in the writing of our socialist history is an adequate theorization of that project of liberal order that goes under the heading "Canada." No history of Canadian socialism is minimally adequate unless it understands the force of qualification the adjective "Canadian" exerts over the noun "socialism." "Canada" denotes a project of liberal rule in a territory secured by force of British arms and modeled primarily on British and American precedents, a project which became hegemonic in northern North America from the third quarter of the 19th century. Grasping that Canada is a project of deep liberalism is key to a new critical history of Canadian socialism. The innovation is to treat Canadian socialism(s) as a series of relatively autonomous experimental attempts to escape the liberal labyrinth. Before the 1940s, socialists were positioned as the liberal project's most serious and rigorous external critics, who contested its defining characteristics: the epistemological and ontological primacy of the individual, the structuring influence of private property, and the political subordination of the state to its functions of capitalist accumulation and bourgeois legitimation. The real reason for the anomaly of a relatively influential Canadian socialist movement in a continent otherwise quite hostile to a formal socialist politics lies not in the ideological convolutions traceable back to some supposed Tory tinge,(2) but rather to the conjunctural specifics of a new liberal "passive revolution"(3) in the 1940s, whereby a threatened liberal order transformed both itself (into a "new democracy" answerable to its "citizens") and many of its socialist adversaries (into "new democrats" comfortable with Fordism at home and American globalism abroad) in response to an apprehended social insurrection. What arguably set the Canadian experience apart from the American was the coincidence of socialist leftism with the first powerful "independentist" articulation of Canadian nationalism: socialists in Canada became, thanks to the passive revolution, "internal" to the Canadian project. Elements of socialism became central to the myth-symbol complex that legitimates both the existence of the Canadian state-nation and the Quebec state-within-a-state that, at least for the time being, it encompasses.
As Stuart Hall reminds us, hegemonic ideological formation, such as the liberal order in Canada, formulates its own objects of knowledge, its own subjects, is driven by its own logic, establishes its own regime of truth; it evolves its "space of formation" and constantly interrupts, displaces and rearranges its opponents. Relations of power are not, then, monopolized by the state, but affect the entire social body. Yet an ideology's transition to hegemony within the state is decisive, because it allows for the naturalization of particular readings of the social world. In the case of Canadian liberalism, the "liberal revolution" of the mid-19th century would gradually acquire precisely this self-perpetuating character, through a myriad of laws, an array of cultural institutions, and an implied philosophy of "individualism," applied not just to abstract thought but also to such seemingly unconnected realms as religious faith and material life. Liberalism involved not just a "political ideology" in the narrow sense but an entire approach to political economy and daily life. By reason of its holism and ambition, because from its inception it was based upon historic compromises with aliberal forces (such as the Catholic Church in Quebec), and because of its deep involvement in conflictual capitalist social relations, liberal order was never finally or perfectly "sealed": in the interstices of its commonsense have emerged a multitude of oppositional ideological formations, from various forms of nationalism to contemporary feminism. The most historically significant of these challengers to date, in terms of its impact on the state, has been "socialism," understood positively in this essay, following the lead of Margaret Cole, as a three-fold doctrine: "(1)the belief that any society founded on large-scale private ownership is unjust; (2)the conviction that a more equitable form of society can be established, one that will contribute to the moral and material improvement of humankind; and (3)the idea that social revolution is imperative" (with significant debate regarding whether such revolution necessarily entails violence).(4)
The very etymology of "socialism" suggests its profoundly adversarial relationship to liberal order.(5) To be a socialist in Canada means to seek to `de-link' the liberal concept of individuality from the socialist concept of species-being, to articulate new conceptions of the sociality of human beings, and to think of ways in which their "metabolism" with the natural world could be placed on a "rational basis." In less abstract terms, there has never been a historically significant Canadian socialism that was not preoccupied with establishing a relationship with the tradition of a (variously construed) "Marx," whose words have been read in Canada since the 1870s, but with very different emphases depending on the time, place, and access to appropriate texts. These various "Marxes" have all agreed that a full program of human freedom entails conscious, rational control over economic and social forces. "The main enemies of such freedom were the `blind forces' of the market; freedom would only be realized by rational planning, by liberating people from objective dependence on things and alienated social forces." Socialism aims to establish a society in which production is subject to the associated control of the producers, "not left to the mercy of the spontaneous decisions of millions of consumers and the calculations of thousands of capitalists."(6)
What would happen if we started to take these international definitions seriously in the writing of Canadian socialist history? For one thing, we would change the subject(s) of the history of Canadian socialism, to encompass a far greater diversity of people -- those of religious and cultural figures, the First Nations and visible minorities, feminists and environmentalists, Quebec nationalists and so on -- whose words and deeds can be linked directly to the post-liberal counter-logic of socialism. This would entail decentering the formal parties as the core of the "history of Canadian socialism." The parties are significant, but their significance lies in their being partial experiments in making socialism a thing of this world. Second, certain narrative conventions would be re-opened for scrutiny. Every socialist movement in Canada and every socialist has, by not realizing their full ambitions, compromised to some extent with the liberal order. Canadians are "liberals by default": it is what they become when their socialist powers of resistance are worn down. Quite apart from its coercive apparatus, which is never to be overlooked, the liberal historic bloc has persistently penetrated, fractured and fragmented the territory of the dominated classes and groups, making it difficult -- but never impossible -- to conceptualize alternative counter-hegemonic practices and discourses.
The existing historiography on Canadian socialism is extensive, varied and often superbly researched and written. Research tools, such as bibliographical aids and published primary documents, are easily accessible.(7) Collections of essays abound.(8) Collected writings and reprints of books from some prominent socialists have also appeared.(9) The major parties -- the Socialist Party of Canada,(10) the various Labour (and Farmer-Labour) parties,(11) the Communists,(12) the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation(13), and the New Democratic Party(14) have attracted serious scholarly attention. Much less studied, it would seem, have been the New Leftists of the 1960s in Canada,(15) and the Marxist-Leninist vanguard parties of the 1960s-1980s.(16) Even scarcer have been attempts to describe and theorize the history of these left movements taken together.(17) The co-operative movement has generated a large literature, some of which has focused on the often complex relationship between business-oriented pragmatism and socialist ideology.(18) Socialism in Quebec during the 1960s and 1970s, especially insofar as it touched upon the rise of nationalism and the history of the Communist Party among francophones, has generated an extensive library.(19) Political scientists have analyzed voting patterns and speculated on the more distant ideological forces contributing to Canadian socialism.(20) General thematic studies -- particularly on the questions of religious radicalism,(21) ethnic minorities,(22) feminism,(23) socialist leadership in the trade union movement(24) and the impact of the Cold War(25) -- have become much more significant in the past ten years. A recent, welcome trend has been to focus on the history of socialist ideas.(26) Biographies of leading Canadian socialists have been especially significant: the best of them are suggestive meditations on structure, agency and subjectivity in the context of one person's life-history.(27) The memoirs of many leading participants are also available, and many of them attain a high standard.(28) Although this is a field numerically dominated by partisans of the NDP, both Communists and, more recently, "independent Marxists" have also contributed major studies, which have sought to highlight the contributions of rank-and-file socialists and local groups in the manner of "history from below."(29)
The core deficiency of this literature is theoretical. It generally does not yield, beyond the "case studies" and "biographies" that are its preferred sites, much in the way of general (and politically useful) insights. By and large, these titles usher us into fondly recollected past worlds. Before 1975, this literature of exemplary figures and forward movements might have functioned well as inspiration. Now it seems a melancholy monument to old abandoned hopes, a vast resource for recrimination. It is not a literature that often asks, or demands that we ask ourselves, hard questions. Much of it is written with the conviction that empiricist induction, warm-hearted humanism and base-and-superstructure reductionism are all that sound socialist scholarship requires. Much of this literature should be critiqued not because it is present-minded (what else could a politically useful socialist history be?), but because it is presentist, because it abolishes the alterity of the past. Particularly among Marxists, but by no means confined to them, there has also been a related tendency to a form of teleological class reductionism, which sees "socialism" as a necessary outcome of "proletarianization" -- a belief that stands in an awkward relationship with the fact of the deep and tenacious roots of liberalism in the working class itself. And it is often also mechanical and simplistic: it reduces the dynamic grammar of hegemony to the passive and predictable reflection of underlying class interests. Many of these patterns can be related to "socialist triumphalism," a narrative pattern in which those at the end-point of socialism's necessary evolution could fortify themselves with the conviction that, as the first of the "true socialists," they were better positioned than anyone before them (or beside them) to "achieve socialism."
The more concrete failings of this literature flow from these underlying theoretical problems. It should hardly need saying that a fundamental fact of Canadian political and cultural life is the existence within the territory claimed by the Canadian state of two predominant linguistic communities or nations. But only the most diligent and focused reader of this literature would ever think that this fact was of much importance for socialists. Strange, but true -- there is not, in this vast library of titles, one major study of French/English relations on the Canadian left.(30) Does "our Canada" include "Quebec"? It does so fitfully, awkwardly, and marginally -- either by lumping Quebec and "French Canada" into "Canada as a whole," or by following the fashion in the (re-) writing of Canadian history, of simply regarding "English Canada" (read Ontario, and often just southern urban Ontario) as the essence of the country as a whole, or by following the parallel fashion in Quebec of projecting back into the past an independence from Canada that many aspire to see in the future.(31) This is poor history, but worse politics, because it will leave the coming cohort of radicals profoundly uninformed about a fundamental defining fact of the Canadian socialist experience, and subtly anesthetize them to the ambiguity and the danger of the intertwined "nation-building" projects to which both francophone and anglophone socialists have subscribed. And if the "Canadian" in the phrase "Canadian socialism" is radically undertheorized, so is the "socialism." We find a recurrent partisan pattern of treating one part as the whole. This is particularly the case with histories which take the NDP (which itself is generally and problematically presented as a necessary organic outgrowth of the CCF) as the only (or only worthy) exponent of socialism in Canada. What remains profoundly unexplored, on either side of the phrase "Canadian socialism," are relations with the hegemonic liberal order, without which "Canada" itself is inexplicable and the challenges facing its successive schools of socialists difficult to conceptualize. How many times have we told the story of radicals who betrayed the (transcendental) "true values" of the movement, as measured by a "revolutionary yardstick"? Or cynical and calculating governments which "skimmed off" the best of the socialists' demands? Of youthful high hopes replaced by middle-aged disillusionment? Of sell-outs to the bourgeoisie? Of the "failure" of this or that "socialist program" (often juxtaposed to the implied -- generally undemonstrable -- path to success had the counterfactual "correct path" been followed)? Both in left polemics and `high-brow' historical literature, these narratives work through a kind of symbolic violence to establish the credentials of the narrator as the person-who-knows. But from the standpoint of the critique of liberal order, not to mention at a time when such socialist epistemological certainty has at best an antiquarian charm, these narratives are not only stale and self-serving, but naive. All Canadian socialisms have failed, insofar as every one of them has failed to transcend the liberal order that is socialism's ground, context, and antithesis; and every Canadian socialist has necessarily made compromises with hegemonic liberalism, whether in daily life, in political tactics, or in cultural formation. This is at least a century-old recurrent pattern, which has affected tendencies, movements and individuals, both "opportunistic scoundrels" and "proletarian fighters." And yet, in another way, all Canadian socialisms have succeeded, at least to the extent of creating spaces of resistance, some of them extremely complex and durable, from which projections of an alternative humanity have attained reality-status. They have emerged, sometimes with dazzling speed, and attracted a mass following; and many have lastingly changed the terms of the project of liberal order itself. Whatever short-term polemical mileage can be derived from narratives of the "revolution betrayed" or the "pragmatic education of the idealists" or the "inevitable maturation" of the young hotheads, the sense of inevitability they create is profoundly defeatist. A less teleological and judgmental approach would reconstruct a variety of Canadian socialisms -- i.e., politico-discursive formations specifying distinctive problem-sets and solutions -- as plausible (or at least explainable) responses to the specific challenges posed by liberal order. Each socialism was, in a sense, a kind of experiment in post-liberalism. One is asked to give up the "bogus certainties" about history's final destination; one is put to work exploring the "conjunctural specifics," probing each socialism for its rational core, its "answers" to the recurrent problems liberal order generates for anyone who wants to live otherwise. The unilinear narratives, and perhaps especially those driven by Marxism-Leninism, can only lead to a stark choice between faith and empirical evidence. Post-orthodox, non-determinist narratives, on the other hand, may lead to a more optimistic conclusion. Like many Canadians before us, we daily encounter aspects of the liberal order that are irrational, unjust, and alienating -- aspects of social reality that cannot be definitively "sealed" by the ideological formation in which we are obliged to live. These fissures are open to alternative post-liberal interpretations. We socialists have everything to gain from a sympathetic and detailed understanding of all such interpretations, both internationally and in Canada.
An alternative approach to the "vertical bias" of socialist historiography would entail trying to work back from demonstrably significant texts -- texts that historical evidence suggests were read by many people -- to their conditions of construction. Socialists, often inspired by specific important trends or events, share, at a minimum, a common perception that liberal order is unjust and its replacement by a different system is possible and desirable. In archetypal forums -- programmatic texts and manifestoes, party congresses and public meetings -- socialists try to "reverse the discourse" on liberalism, to turn its language back on itself, to hold it to account against its own principles. There is, moreover, a dominant aspect of liberal order -- a "core problem" or "problems", or a "matrix-event" -- which above all others calls out for socialist analysis and activism. A "cohort" of such socialists can be defined by their preoccupation with this problem and by sharing significant common understandings of the ways in which it should be understood (if not necessarily how it ought to be resolved). The combination of "matrix-event," "cohort," "paradigm," and the specific parties and groups associated with them -- and usually an extensive cultural penumbra of institutes, schools, summer camps, concerts, books and so on -- can be termed a "political formation." I see four such formations in Canadian socialist history, with a fifth under construction today: the first, shaped pivotally by the transition from competitive to monopoly capitalism and by the rise of the theory of evolution, which flourished from c.1900 to c.1920, and which emphasized above all socialist education in the light of evolution's political message; a second, shaped pivotally by the Russian Revolution, which theorized the need for a socialist revolution guided by a proletarian vanguard party, which flourished from c.1917 to c.1935; a third, whose matrix-event was the Great Depression, which insistently advocated the national management of the economy, which flourished from c.1932 to c.1960; a fourth, whose matrix-events were the perceived collapse of American civilization and the Cold War disorganization of the "older lefts," which highlighted the overcoming of alienation through direct democracy by direct action, and which flourished from c.1960 to c.1975.; and a fifth, shaped decisively by neoliberalism and the rise of feminism and other new social movements, which is unfolding today.
The origins of such formations can be tied down, loosely, to particular periods -- yet doing so involves risks. There is the danger of simply repeating the older tropes of necessary progress, and the more subtle peril of forgetting that older paradigms of socialism are frequently (and often effectively) re-activated in subsequent periods. A formation shaped by a particular cohort and a particular matrix-event often persists beyond the two decades normally allotted a generation. An additional requirement of any theorization of socialism in Canada is that of confronting regional and national plurality: a pattern found in one nation or region cannot be casually generalized, without incurring the risk of oversimplification, beyond its borders. We need "horizontal" analyses that seek to re-create the complex networks which bound socialists -- and their parties, journals, social and intellectual networks -- in formations of alliance and antagonism unevenly developed across the Canadian sub-continent. The analytical outcome of a more "horizontal" approach to analysis would be a more inclusive narrative -- written in terms of major and minor figures, parties, currents, texts, and debates -- that seeks to track the socialist ideal in all its complex diversity. This would be a kind of history that makes it possible to imagine a socialist tradition that is both discontinuous and continuous: discontinuous in that it undoubtedly features "breaks" and "differences in focus" separating one formation from another, continuous in that it nonetheless persists in theorizing a "Canadian socialism" as an exit from a persisting liberal order. Each formation, then, was distinct; a socialist of the 1940s shared with fellow socialists, even those with whom he or she differed politically, a hierarchy of key problems and a language in which to discuss them, distinct from those which had predominated twenty years earlier. Yet, because all were concerned to chart a path out of capitalist social relations and liberal order in northern North America, all can be made, at least in our unapologetically present-mided historical imaginations, "alternative voices" in a continuing socialist conversation. Socialism as "Evolutionary Science," Socialism as "Revolutionary Praxis," Socialism as "National State Management," and Socialism as "Revolutionary Humanism and National Liberation," discussed through works of William Irvine, Maurice Spector, F.R. Scott/David Lewis, and Pierre Vallieres(32), are descriptive names I have applied to these formations.
The First Socialism: Evolutionary Science
The first Canadian socialist formation (c.1900 to c.1920) was dominated by those we can describe as "scientific evolutionists," and took shape under the shadow of two related developments: the rise of monopoly capitalism and of evolutionary theory. A tone of patronage suffuses discussions of this formation. In the 1920s, Maurice Spector, the most accomplished revolutionary writer of a new formation, looked back on the people he aimed to displace:
Although we live in an epoch of the collapse of Capitalism and the social revolution, it is not enough to proclaim the principles of proletarian dictatorship and workers' power if we hope to succeed in rallying the masses to fight for these principles. We must beware of turning these principles into abstract formulae. The Socialist parties on this continent have not in the past carried on consistent political activity. The S. P. of C. [Socialist Party of Canada] has mistaken a study circle for a political party and courses of lectures on Marx's Capital for revolutionary activity. The S.P. of A. [Socialist Party of America] and the I.L.P. [Independent Labour Party] have aped bourgeois respectability and considered electioneering as the highest form of political action. The Workers' Party wants neither the village chapel atmosphere of the S.P. of C. nor the `democratic' conceptions of the S.P. of A. The Workers' Party will strive to be a party of action -- a party of the masses. Revolutionary political activity to us means disciplined work in the labor unions, agitation in election campaigns, agitation from the floor of Parliament, mass demonstrations, organizations of the unemployed, and participation in the everyday struggles of the working class. For we realize that only through their mass experiences with the Capitalist dictatorship in the everyday struggle will the working class be rallied by its vanguard to the struggle for proletarian dictatorship. The struggle for power will inevitably grow out of the struggle for bread.(33)
Spector's caricature was vengeful, one-sided, and perceptive. Versions of it have proved extremely durable. In particular, many historians have described a passage from the village-chapel "Christian Socialism" of the early 20th century to more secular, often Marxist, socialism of the 1920s.
How, other than as a crude first draft, can the first formation be distinguished from the radicalism of the 19th century(34) or the revolutionary socialist praxis of the 1920s? The key, I believe, lies in the paramount status first-wave socialists accorded a theory of social evolution. First-cohort socialists ultimately felt themselves to be underwritten by the "inscrutable power" of Evolution, that great massive social and natural force that was simultaneously the process of change, the explanation of change, and the politico-ethical practices logically required by that change. The key idea was the inevitable adaptation of society to its environment. Herbert Spencer's "organic analogy" -- that is, that organic and social bodies shared the four fundamental qualities of naturally growing in mass, becoming increasingly complex, acquiring an ever-greater mutual interdependence of parts, and outliving as aggregatives the life-span of any individual -- unified this formation.(35) This socialism attained a certain "fixity" in certain small formal institutions -- the Canadian Socialist League (fd. 1901); the Social Democratic Party (fd. 1911); and especially the Socialist Party of Canada (fd. 1905), whose ideological rigour, modest membership figures, petit-bourgeois or "labour-aristocratic" personnel and distance from positions of power in both the labour movement and Canadian politics more broadly have led some scholars to dismiss its legacy as "impossibilist."(36)
Such evaluations seem limited in two respects. First, they underestimate the degree to which this first cohort of socialists, to a degree approached again only in the 1930s, focused on cultural straggle -- on the changing of minds, on building alternative sources of authority, and on connecting socialist insights into the economy with an ethical critique of capitalism. Measuring first-wave socialism strictly by the yardsticks of electoral success or trade-union influence downgrades this cultural straggle, which diffused socialist ideas through wide-ranging labour media. It also misses what was "first formationist" about much of the cultural work outside the parties -- in, for example, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Western Federation of Miners, and others. This was a pre-1914 ferment in Canada whose intellectual challenge to liberalism worried some of its stalwarts a good deal. Even O.D. Skelton, an academic far from the fray, felt he had to respond urgently to the claims of socialism.(37) Second, the role of evolutionary theory has been seriously misconstrued. There was no automatic connection between espousing a theory of social evolution and an enthusiasm for "evolutionary" (i.e. strictly parliamentary) socialism as it subsequently came to be understood. For many in this cohort, evolutionary sociological theory mandated a revolutionary social vision: radical socialists could pull from Spencer -- selectively read and filtered through Marx -- the message that to change capitalism one had to understand its laws, and that without social science, there could be no effective social revolution. The world of political economy analyzed in Marx's Capital, Vol. I, could then appear as a "case study" of a more general process of evolution in the social world. One could, and many did, arrive at "revolutionary" political conclusions via a journey through "evolutionary theory."
The applied sciences of the first-wave socialists were most often based on Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Herbert Spencer (especially The Study of Sociology), and the many authors published by the Charles H. Kerr and Company, of whom Karl Kautsky and Arthur M. Lewis (the author of Evolution Social and Organic) were among the most significant. In economics, the first-wave socialists focused on the labour theory of value, which proved the exploitiveness of capitalism and the increasing gap between rich and poor. Some were also attending to new economic historians, who demonstrated, to Canadian socialists' satisfaction, that world capitalism had impoverished workers, expropriated primary producers, and led civilization repeatedly to the brink of war. In general these socialists evinced slight interest in Canadian history as such. In anthropology, they were deeply impressed by Morgan's writings (often as they encountered them indirectly through Engels). First-wave Canadian socialists based their political hopes and dreams on the prospects of a socialist ascent to power -- which a surprising number of them described as a "revolution" led by the "working class" -- but most of them were then forced to confront the dilemma that the working class was a small proportion of the Canadian population. Socialism would come about primarily through a widespread process of working-class education and by "making socialists" through persuasion.
At the same time, first-wave socialism was characterized by interesting and symptomatic absences. In general, "Canada" as a category of analysis was, to our eyes, virtually absent: this cohort was fully immersed in a North Atlantic world of socialist discourse, and only a few spared a thought for the "peculiarities of the Canadians" or the "specific nature of the Canadian state." What we would today take to be a defining position for Canadian social democrats -- viz., a belief in the state's necessarily comprehensive involvement in planning and providing social services and economic development -- was noteworthy by its absence. It is in fact something of an oversimplification to see these first-wave Canadian socialists as working in "Canada" at all. They derived their theoretical sustenance from continental theory and their political strategies from both the United States and Britain, from whence many had recently come.
One could reference here the work of Colin McKay, who with George Wrigley could be called the co-founder of the Canadian Socialist League, and who drew explicitly on Spencer's Social Statics and from works of American Spencerian sociology to fashion a durable and sophisticated critique of the Canadian liberal order.(38) Or E. E. Winch, W. A. Pritchard, Arthur Mould, and R. B. Russell, whose "Marxism of the Third Way," expressed in such diverse institutions as the SPC, the One Big Union, the Communist Party, and the CCF, combined a belief in education with a drive to educate the working class to live up to its historical responsibilities.(39) Or A.E. Smith, whose transition from Methodism to Communism does not seem to have entailed a disruption of the "biological standpoint" from which he interpreted history and his own political activism.(40) But, arguably, the most influential and widely-read text from this first formation came from William Irvine (1885-1962), the Methodist-turned-Unitarian whose writings capture the flavour of the United Farmers of Alberta and "Radical Calgary".(41) Irvine's 1920 The Farmers in Politics(42) brought the Spencerian socialist(43) tradition into direct and fruitful contact with the largest mass movement of its time. Irvine's thought suggests the limitations of simply dismissing first-wave socialism for its supposed "vulgarity," "impossibilism," or "reformism," terms which are not so much erroneous as beside the point. At the core of Irvine's socialism was the conviction that radicals could scientifically interpret society in ways which accelerated the evolutionary progress of equality.
His work can be seen as an exploration of four great Spencerian themes. There is, first and fundamentally, the announcement of an epistemological break: a leap forward to a new scientific understanding of society. Just as in natural evolution, where "the higher an organism develops, the more complex its parts become," so it was in human society.
The human organism has developed from a simple splotch of protoplasm. Included in that organism are many parts, hands, feet, stomach, heart, eyes, ears, and brains, etc. All have special functions to perform. No one would think of arguing that the development of these various organs meant anarchy, that the hands would carry off the lungs, or the feet walk off with the nerves; on the contrary, it is well-known that in the pursuit of the purpose of the intelligence, every organ becomes of service, acting in co-operation for the well-being of the organism. Society is like the human body. Once it was a social plasm, the simple form. As it evolved, it developed many parts and functions, in the performance of which groups of people act as units. It would be insane, if it were possible, to throw a man into a chemical solution that would reduce him into his original protoplasm for the sake of sameness and primitive unity. For surely the unity of parts acting in harmony is higher and more admirable than the original bit of jelly.(44)
Second, Irvine, in company with some neo-Hegelian liberals, believed that the evolution of industrial society had attenuated the epistemological and ontological coherence of the individual as the primary unit of social and political analysis. Only if "the individual" were conceptualized as the specification of a function or group would a more equitable social order be conceivable. As one might expect, this fundamental change would come about organically: "society will embrace the new social order without any cataclysmic upheaval. We are gradually growing towards it. The old cells are dropping off one by one, and new cells are being formed. The stability of society while in the process of reconstruction has already given confidence to the diffident, and paved the way for further progress. The fear of destruction has been allayed, and conservatism in itself has ceased to be a virtue."(45) Third, the group, united on the basis of its specific material needs, will replace "the individual" as the molecule of the new post-liberal political order. In contrast to Spencer, in whose sociology class played no functional role, Spencerian socialists thought class was decisive. They believed (on structural-functionalist, organicist grounds) that only the subaltern classes -- specifically the working class for the SPCers, the farmers for Irvine and many other Prairie radicals -- could functionally usher in the new social order. And fourth, for all its "telescopic" distancing effect, Irvine's cosmic socialism used natural-scientific discourse as an ethical critique. In particular, the evolutionary concepts of "degeneration" and "atavism" were brought to bear on the questions of the hour.(46) Contrary to Spector, Irvine was not so much confusing the party with a study-group as he was oppposing the hypothesis that the party itself could functionally create the cultural preconditions of a new society.
For Irvine, democratic citizenship could be given an entirely new, post-liberal meaning, as the "socialization of responsibility."(47) With the collapse of the bankrupt two-party system, one was opened up to the possibility of the direct democracy of producers' groups, to a post-patronage, post-corruption political universe in which honest political debate and dialogue is possible. Irvine glimpsed, in "group government" -- a democracy in which government was answerable to producers' groups organized according to occupation, in an Canadian adaptation of the British concept of "guild socialism" -- a way of transcending the politics of liberal order. In this version of socialism, the language of liberal rights was turned against itself: against the merely formal rights of citizenship and party, one championed the real rights and responsibilities that would follow from function.
In his brief precis of the "socialism we have (thankfully) lost," Maurice Spector elegantly distilled what later generations would find rather "abstract" or "idealist" about first-wave socialism. Its "cosmic" evolutionary perspective did not easily combine with, and might even distract from, any strategic politics of socialist transformation. Concrete interventions in the present day were difficult to link to so general an evolutionary vision. But for self-proclaimed revolutionaries like McKay and radualist Fabians like W.F. Hatheway, eclectics like Irvine and "hard Marxists" like the DeLeonites, the theory of evolution was definitional. Evolution, which taught scientific as well as moral lessons, would vindicate them. Few attempts were made to adjust the ideology to the conditions of Canadian society; and there was a yawning void where later cohorts would expect to find a detailed strategic conception of how the party, the decisive place of integration where narrow corporate interests are translated into a disciplined class politics, would interact with its social base. Spector's brisk treatment of his predecessors alerts us to the ways in which they inhabited a very different ethical and political formation than the one he worked to bring into being.
From a 21st century perspective, however, Spector's disparagement seems less interesting than the first formation's often overlooked contributions. Many of Irvine's arguments have a contemporary feel, at a time when radical energies are once again being poured into the re-activation of the concept of citizenship.(48) Irvine was characteristic of the best thinkers of his formation in stressing the possibility that working people themselves could become their own educators. His "Spencerian" connections between seemingly disparate phenomena -- such as capitalism and environmental degradation -- have retained their interest. Most significant and valuable was Irvine's construction of a well-theorized and grounded counter-hegemonic challenge to liberalism at the level of political theory, in his deceptively simple call for group government -- an ingenious "Canadianization" of a British attempt to think through Marxist political theory in a non-Fabian, non-statist direction. This entailed a profoundly subversive "defamiliarization" of liberalism's claims to the mantle of "democracy." Irvine's subsequent political itinerary -- into the Ginger Group, CCF, and ultimately into the role of CP fellow traveler(49) -- would reveal the staying power of his post-liberal politics.
The Second Socialism: Revolutionary Praxis
Revolution is the keyword of the second socialist formation, dominated by a cohort which rose to prominence from 1917 to 1935 during a period in which the liberal order was challenged by the century's most severe crisis of capitalism. The Communists are certainly the most famous of the forces within the revolutionary formation which organized in this period; but it is a mistake to reduce this second socialism to them. The One Big Union, perhaps Canada's most original and intelligent counter-model to American business unionism, and its leader, R.B. Russell, considered themselves to be as entitled as the Communists to the mantle of vanguard revolutionaries; there was also a rival francophone attempt to organize a section of the Communist International in Quebec. Before the "solidification" of the party there were scores of revolutionary groups which have faded from the historians' view as the CPC has come to monopolize attention. Still, there is a certain merit to this focus on the CPC. The most lasting and memorable monuments to the period came from the Communists and especially from The Worker, the party's newspaper, wherein a discourse of heroic revolutionary praxis was richly developed. And, gradually, there came to be, around the Communists, a cohort of people who might dispute many of the CPC's specific policies, but shared much of its worldview. Such people exercised an influence well beyond their numbers, especially in the labour movement. In the interwar period especially, revolutionary analyses suddenly had a plausibility and an audience they had earlier lacked. The pivotal matrix-event was the Russian Revolution; closer to home, general strikes and "apprehended insurrections" from Vancouver Island to Cape Breton demonstrated the power of the working class. State violence and repression, exemplified by armed occupations of the coalfields and the imprisonment of radicals, as well as the development of a security apparatus, suggested the extremes which defenders of liberal order would countenance. There is a rich and abundant literature on what is perhaps the most researched period in the history of Canadian leftism.
But there has been little reflection on the implicit philosophy and sociology, the historical analysis, the cultural networks, and the shared language -- in a problematic word, "the paradigm" -- which influenced this second formation. Any such reflection here must be taken as preliminary. One is struck particularly by five new developments. First, for both the communist and non-communist left, the party as a disciplined and "professional" institution assumed a reality-status in this period it had earlier lacked. Second, the status of "revolution" also changed, from a word denoting a general "speeding-up" of social evolution, conceived in a very general or "cosmic" sense, to one that pertained to immediate political phenomena in actual countries, orchestrated by professional revolutionaries guided by specific theories.(50) (And after the revolution, a "dictatorship of the proletariat" -- the phrase did not originate in this period,(51) but it unquestionably achieved a new prominence in it -- would work to transform social life as a kind of "collective social scientist.") Third, there was, at the same time, a heightened socialist awareness of the relativity of any position. Even those who had studied a question minutely, and had a sound training in socialist theory, might disagree in their diagnoses. And since the new paradigm involved a far tighter interconnection between theory and practice, an intensified sense that "socialism" was not a "cosmic" tendency but an objectively definable future immanent in the present, an awareness of political "relativity" led not to "relativism" but to an intensified search for objectively "tree readings."(52) Fourth, a sharpened dialectical sensibility made socialist discourse less all-embracing and speculative and more empirical and historically specific; and "Canada" itself, with all of its internal contradictions, became, perhaps for the first time in socialist thought, something which was necessarily an important category. And fifth and finally, class analysis underwent a subtle shift. The historic bloc many socialists had theorized as necessary for the success of their movement (most commonly, the industrial working class) was now elevated to the status of the prime mover of the social world.
One field in which the distinction between the first and second formations was clear was the labour movement. Here a core text, whose lessons were not confined to Communists, was Lenin's Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, which was read in Canada as an injunction to Communists to struggle within the
labour movement, no matter how reactionary its leadership, and to take the leading role in "united fronts."(53) Although Lenin is nowadays almost as unfashionable a figure as Spencer, a full reconnaissance of Canadian socialist history would need to revisit his work carefully -- and especially to note the selective way it was appropriated and interpreted to address specific Canadian circumstances.(54) The major thinkers who influenced Communists -- Lenin above all, Trotsky, Bukharin, Luxemburg -- were all serious revolutionaries; many non-communists were reading John Strachey,(55) H.G. Wells, and G.D.H. Cole, all of whom could also be seen as professional, "credentialled" socialists. From the classical tradition of Marxism one retained The Communist Manifesto and Anti-Duhring, which was popularized under the revealing title of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific -- but both texts could be read in ways which suggested an unbridgeable chasm dividing the "new left" c.1925 from the "old left" c.1910.(56)
Any search for the matrix of assumptions uniting a second formation of socialists runs the risk of distortion -- of re-inventing a happy family of the left, when the evidence suggests precisely the opposite: parties locked in a bitter struggle for power and influence. The theses put forward by Leninism were, intentionally, not ones on which a middle ground could easily be found. "Vanguardism," the combined tactics of democratic centralism within and united front without, and the Communist emphasis on revolutionary mass terror, both before and after the inauguration of the dictatorship of the proletariat, were not subjects conducive to the achievement of a bland consensus. Communists themselves came to be deeply divided about them. The Canadian party was one of the last in the world to adhere to Stalin's leadership; by the early 1930s, among Marxist-Leninists, there were stark divisions between those who had accepted and those who had refused the party's transition to the new "ultra-left" line of 1928. Among non-Leninist Marxists, one also finds a plethora of perspectives.
So there is no point in looking for homogeneity. But is there then any plausibility to "horizontal" analysis? What defines a formation is not agreement on how to conduct politics, but rather a shared focus on a similar problem (in this case, the evident collapse of the capitalist world order), similar solutions (as suggested by the Soviet example, which drew enthusiastic support from most socialists), and a number of shared debates (in this case, most fundamentally, the question of how best to organize and run the party). The sheer energy the state poured into repression of the Communists, most notoriously under Section 98 and (in Quebec) the Padlock Laws, greatly enhanced the Communists' status as the left's true fighters. Their efforts to influence the labour movement made them, no matter how small their numbers, an inescapable presence on the left, especially in the largest cities and resource towns. That the CCF issued a "Regina Manifesto" resounding, at least in its opening and concluding passages, with words of "eradicating capitalism," suggested the impact of second-formation socialists (especially strong in British Columbia) on the party. That its leadership purged Ontario dissidents with a thoroughness that recalled "democratic centralism" at its most energetic, suggested the extent to which, bitterly divided as it was, the second formation also shared certain party-centred and "objectivist" insights into how to wage socialist politics. That J.S. Woodsworth, revered leader of the Ginger Group and subsequently of the CCF, published regularly in the Communist Maurice Spector's The Worker, and that he, William Irvine, and many others shared a high opinion of the Soviet Union, is also suggestive; so, of course, is the blunt critique Spector eventually published of Woodsworth's "misleading middle-class language."(57)
Without making any claim that he was typical, I think the writings of Maurice Spector captured many of the changes, both stark and subtle, that divided the second from the first cohort.(58) In the 53 articles signed by him in The Worker from 1922 to 1928 -- which is undoubtedly only a fraction of his contributions -- a new socialism announces itself. In them the word "revolution" occurs no fewer than 119 times. It was a time, for Spector, when it was imperative for revolutionaries to seize the moment, and transform the consciousness of the workers. Held back by "Social-Democrats" and "Labour Leaders," the workers of the world, shortly after the Treaty of Versailles, had been lulled with "pipe-dreams of Reconstruction" and the routine and inertia of the Second International. "The objective conditions for revolution were ideal. But the subjective factor -- the will of the masses -- was lacking. The opportunists, not the Communists, dominated the masses. There was the lesson of that crisis for us. If we had had strong Communist parties then, there would have been a different story to tell. That is tree, because having a strong Communist Party means that already the masses are giving their allegiance to Communism -- are coming under Communist influence."(59) What was bracing about this new discourse was its cold-water realism, its grasp on the present moment, its "non-telescopic" sense of political immediacy, its new kind of internationalism, and its explicit theorization of the need for revolutionaries to overcome the "subject/object" distinction. The Soviet Revolution, the Congresses of the International, the defeat of the revolution in Germany: these were experienced as events in our movement. And, for the first time in Canada, there was in this socialism a sustained emphasis on anti-colonialism.(60) At a time when the world was polarizing, between forces of revolution and forces of reaction, there was no room for compromise. It was time to choose sides, and there were really only two: revolution or reaction. At the time of the death of Ebert, leader of the German social democrats, Spector wrote a bitter obituary under the headline "Ebert Dies and Cheats Gallows," which revisited his role as a "notorious social traitor" who had assassinated Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. It was evidence not only of the new "language of politics" but also of Spector's whole-hearted internationalist attachment to the German Revolution,(61) which he thought had dramatic lessons to teach Canadians.(62) The fate of the "ultra lefts" in the Fisher-Maslow group within the KPD, who had seized control of the party in the wake of the failed revolution of 1922, and whose cardinal error had been to "neglect Lenin's teaching that `the actual struggle for power can begin only when the Communists have won over to their side a majority of at least the decisive sections of the working class'," was also instructive.(63)
Like the first-wave socialists, those of the second formation believed it was possible and necessary to integrate first-order apprehensions of the social world with much more abstract concepts. The difference between the two formations lay, in part, in rival constructions of "evolution." What for the first formation was a direct relationship between the evolution of the cosmos and the ultimate victory of the cause, was transformed by second-wave socialists into a relationship mediated by revolutionary activism, which, if it was undertaken correctly, would advance the pace of history." This was the logic of their unflinching support for the Soviet Revolution. For them, the social-democrats could never have mustered the wit and strength to fight the counter-revolution. Only the "heroism and vision of the Communist Party" could have defied "blockade, intervention and starvation." And with the conclusion of the period of civil war, when "military and political expediency had to take precedence over economic rationality," "the transition to Communism can be undertaken scientifically."(64) Irvine had written in The Farmers in Politics about the "Copernican Revolution" effected by Spencer's and Darwin's Theory of Evolution. Those who were fully integrated into the second formation believed, however, that the political `Copernican Revolution' had happened in Russia, and the role of Copernicus had been filled by Lenin.
Second-formation language constructed, in essence, a bi-polar universe. Dichotomizing categories (scientific socialism vs. utopian socialism, revolution vs. reform, proletariat vs. bourgeoisie, realism vs. sentimentalism) were given a new intensity. What was generally new in the second formation was its application of objectivizing categories to immediate political and economic circumstances. In the implied epistemology of The Worker, it was possible to determine, with a reasonable degree of certainty, the objective truth, and to apply this knowledge to day-to-day politics. When Spector spoke of the "working class" and its "interests," he did so from a position of epistemological security: it was possible for true Communists to define the interests of workers quite apart from the workers' own experience. Yet this vanguard sensibility should not be stereotyped. At its most subtle (certainly in Gramsci's thought, and at moments in Spector's) the "vanguard" could only be such if its relationship with its followers was fully dialectical, if its leadership functioned not as something "imposed from without" but rather as a kind of long-term proletarian memory bank and steering mechanism.
One of the most interesting distinctions of the second socialism was the construction of "Canada" as an important category of analysis. That there is more reflection on "national questions" in a paper of 1925 than in, say, one from 1910 was in part a reflection of the rise of Canadian nationalism in the 1920s; but it was also the paradoxical outcome of the second formation's internationalism.(65) Communists especially were required to adopt a non-Canadian "subject-position" -- to see themselves as part of a movement of revolutionaries throughout the world. Yet this very removal in the imagination required them to highlight Canada's specific position in that world. The Communist International demanded that they think in such terms; and, of course, Lenin's text on Imperialism provided a model of how such analysis should be undertaken. One was hence required to theorize the "peculiarities of the Canadians" by virtue of one's enrollment in the world working-class movement. For all its universalism, the new formation tended to advocate Canadian independence, carefully distinguished from the merely bourgeois independence advocated by Mackenzie King. And, even more ironically, their demographic situation required them to work out, in however early and contentious a way, and often very reluctantly, a politics which created more space for organized ethnic minorities than had hitherto existed in the Canadian socialist imagination.(66)
It is customary to explain the waning influence of this revolutionary cohort in terms of Stalinization, the Cold War and state repression, divisions between language minorities and the majority: all these and other explanations have their plausibility. From the perspective of the critique of liberal order, however, one might highlight other features of the situation as well. The politics of "industrial concentration" followed by the second cohort, and its focus on the trade-union movement, qualified its chance of an effective alliance with other subaltern groups and classes. In many parts of the country, Irvine's "universal class" of farmers was still predominant. There were of course places -- Toronto's Spadina, `The Main' in Montreal, North-End Winnipeg, east-end Vancouver, industrial Cape Breton -- where the revolutionary subject-position constructed by the discourse "touched down" to interpellate living human beings. The "red bases" were real, and their cultural legacy merits much closer study on the part of people today who would like to multiply "zones of resistance" -- but they were also fragile, demographically precarious, and widely separated from each other in a far-flung archipelago.
The counter-hegemonic strategy of building a "united front" of labour against capital sat uneasily with a classic Leninist strategy of "speaking troth to the erring" and ruthlessly exposing "middle-class language" and values wherever one encountered them. And if, until our own time, every Canadian socialism has been gender-specific, one might venture to say that there was a heightened masculinism in the tough-minded military language characteristic of the second formation. A rhetoric justifying armed force against the revolution's enemies probably convinced some workers, familiar themselves with the day-to-day violence of the capitalist workplace or the use of the military to repress strikes. Yet it must also have raised ethical qualms. The strategy of armed violence could also be, and was, critiqued for being fundamentally adventurist and unrealistic. The Communist discourse of realpolitik was to that extent self-refuting, given the gap between any "hard-boiled" assessment of the situation and the likelihood of a violent overthrow of the Canadian political system.
Perhaps most damagingly, the claim to have mastered an objective science of revolution was compromised by the eventual appearance of diametrically opposed readings emanating from the same science. There were very few empirical controls built into the party-centred model of knowledge; and little sense of experimental openness about the ways in which Marxist-Leninist formulae might be adapted and applied in a Canadian setting.(67) The new paradigm's very insistence on the "before-and-after" chasm separating the serious from the frivolous, the "real" from the "abstract" socialist, imposed a barrier to its successful recapture of enduringly powerful aspects of the first cohort's work. The second formation deliberately de-emphasized aspects of antecedent socialists, who were often dismissed as mere "social democrats" unworthy of serious examination. Paradoxically, this avoidance of the past de-Marxified the second formation's political economy, which in The Worker was subordinated to the class straggle. The ironic consequence was that, when capitalism actually did seemingly start to crumble, Marxist-Leninists were not easily distinguished from "new liberals" in their underconsumptionism, nor from mere bourgeois journalists in their sensationalist muckraking. And the overall contours of the "bourgeois state," or the "socialist state" which might replace it, were as radically undertheorized within this formation as they had been by the first. These were fundamental political, as well as theoretical, problems.
The Third Socialism: National State Management
A third formation, whose matrix-events were the Great Depression and the rise of fascism, gradually emerged from 1932 to 1935 and attained hegemony on the left in the 1940s, when it was swept up in the new liberal "passive revolution" that gave rise to the welfare state. If the contrasts between the first two formations seem relatively obvious, that between the second and third is almost counter-intuitive. The argument is that -- notwithstanding a fair degree of continuity in party structures and personnel, a continuing interwar "crisis of capitalism," and leadership disavowals of any discontinuity -- this formation marked a significant and enduring change in the language of Canadian socialism.
There is, of course, generally accepted evidence of discontinuity. There were many new political institutions that were either founded after 1932 or which changed their function and much of their language. No one disputes that a line can be drawn from post-war Farmer-Labour through the Ginger Group through to the CCF (fd. 1932/3): but here the argument would be that, nonetheless, the CCF of 1939 was in many respects radically unlike the Ginger Group of 1929, in its actual leadership, ideology and tactics. Similarly, no one would dispute that a vertical line of descent can be drawn from the post-war Workers Party of Canada through the Communist Party of Canada to the Labour-Progressive Party (fd. 1943): but here the argument would be that, nonetheless, the Labour Progressives of 1944, who had internalized the new Popular Front strategy enunciated by the Comintern in 1935, were also in many respects radically unlike the Communists of 1927. And, to go even further, the argument would be that both the CCF and Communists had changed in roughly the same ways: that a certain convergence within a common formation had occurred. For both parties, the question of the socialist state had become paramount -- a "convergence" in outlook that ironically inspired the left's most divisive internal struggle.
How should this "third language of socialism" be distinguished? By the rise of "state" and "nation" as paramount concepts. It was a period marked by the emergence of a galaxy of major new socialist stars: for instance, David Lewis, F.R. Scott, T.C. Douglas, King Gordon, among the CCFers, and Tim Buck, Stanley Ryerson, Tom McEwen, Norman Bethune, among the Communists. And certain events in this period have been generally marked: the CCF's near victory in Ontario in 1943 and its triumph in Saskatchewan in 1944, to form the first socialist government in North America; and the Communist Party's switch to a Common Front strategy in 1935, in line with a general Comintern pattern, its dramatic success in organizing the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion in its fight for Republican Spain, its electoral victory under the name of the Labour-Progressives in 1943 in a constituency in Montreal, followed swiftly by its debacle in the Gouzenko Spy Affair of 1945. The CCF has in particular been analyzed at length in both historical and social scientific writing, which has probed its seemingly anomalous existence on a continent where socialism of any sort has rarely been powerful. The pitched battles between CCFers and Communists in the labour movement are also well-documented, as are the federal government's efforts to use industrial legality to "edit out" radicals from the trade unions. Depending on who is telling the story, this is the time in which Canadian socialism actually began -- under the auspices of the CCF, which overcame the negative, divisive (and -- one sometimes reads between the lines -- foreign) influence of the Communists to eventually become the New Democratic Party in 1961, "the party that changed Canada"; or, conversely, it is the time in which Canadian socialism began to die -- as the Communists were ground down by the bourgeois state, aided and abetted by the unreliable social democrats, who consistently rejected calls for proletarian unity and in whose hands the socialist vision was travestied to one of merely contesting elections.
These are well-ordered historiographical rail lines, serviceable and much-travelled, and it would be folly to blow them up. The "separate socialist spheres" they describe must have existed to some degree. Yet, from the perspective of the critique of liberal order, neither the partisan perspectives of the warring parties nor the histories which rehash their point of view ask all the questions that need to be asked. The more interesting questions, from this perspective, lie elsewhere.
The charismatic aura which surrounds the great stars, especially the CCFers, suggests that they now figure in a nationalist myth-symbol complex, that they have become "national figures" and not mere leftists.(68) And this is deeply suggestive. Perhaps the domination of nationalist party-mindedness explains why critical examinations of socialism in the period have been so slow to come. One has the impression of a period overcrowded with scholars, when in fact there are many significant questions about it that are left to be resolved. For example, why did class and class struggle recede in socialist thought and analysis? Why did the nation loom so large? What was the general `left reception' of Keynes? Did a language of painfree modernity replace the earlier emphasis on dialectic and struggle? If so, why? Were the Labour Progressives just another name for the Communists -- or did the strategy of "Labour Progressivism" position its partisans in a different realm, somewhere between the CCF and the Liberals, with whom they were to some extent and in some places allied?(69) These questions of detail lead to a more general question of theory: how did the two major socialist parties relate to a general transformation of liberalism, the Fordist "passive revolution" which reshaped the Canadian political order in the 1940s and 1950s?
A provisional answer to this last question opens a path to a more complex understanding of this formation. Both parties could be re-interpreted as elements in this new liberal passive revolution -- simultaneously resisting and promoting a newly conceptualized managerial liberalism that had overtly learned from Keynes, and covertly from Marx, about the requirements of preserving power; and which had, in the Soviet Union, a countermodel drawing the support from many of Canada's sober-minded citizens. This was the epoch, precisely the one in which Stalin's terror reached its full fury, in which the third edition of Sidney and Beatrice Webb's Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? ditched its hesitating question-mark. The conventional dichotomizing strategy pitting Communists against CCFers -- the "revolutionaries" against the "democratic left," if one prefers -- misses some important things that a more horizontal, cohort-specific view opens up. In some respects, the CP unintentionally instructed the CCFers in the arts of party-building, political-economic analysis, and strategy.(70)
One can read "irony" but also a profound historical logic into the fact that, out of the fierce competition among political tendencies in the 1920s and 1930s, there did emerge a party of quasi-professional socialists who followed a strategy of "industrial concentration," with a strongly hierarchical leadership convinced of its superior ability to read the historical situation and act decisively in it. That party was the ostensibly anti-Leninist CCF, as shaped especially by David Lewis, the ardent Labour Bundist whose "parliamentary Marxism" was not as far removed from the perspective of the CP as he would later make it out to be.(71) The CCF, ostensibly the CP's "democratic antithesis," actually incarnated (at least after 1936 or so) certain important features of the vanguard party -- a canon of official, must-read literature, study cells, a hierarchical top-down national leadership, strict party discipline, and so on; one might even say it did so with more Leninist discipline than the Communists, who in their LPP heyday in the 1940s had attracted a substantial middle-class membership and were virtually allied with the Liberal Party. There were of course major differences between Spector's "vanguard revolutionary party" guided by Leninist theory, capable of disciplined mobilization, and so deeply integrated into the world revolutionary movement that it might be considered one of its battalions, and the "mass party" constructed principally by David Lewis out of the more decentralized and federal "coalition" framework of the CCF. But it is interesting to note certain symptomatic "horizontal" similarities.
Both the CCF and the CP, and many of the intellectuals and other figures active in this moment, marginalized an older language of class straggle and emphasized a new language of national management and consolidation. And this had the effect of taking both parties into new conceptual terrain, and making them both highly vulnerable to the new liberal politics of passive revolution. In a sense, they were both called upon to govern, at least in their imaginations, and -- for the Saskatchewan CCF at any rate -- ultimately in reality. In this period, and in marked contrast to anything before or after it, it was easy to get the impression that a weakened and discredited liberal order was being encircled by a world-changing matrix of socialist ideas and initiatives. And this was a period in which the charge of positivism habitually and often misleadingly brought to bear against all older traditions of Canadian socialist thought has a certain validity. Value-free science and state planning were esteemed as fundamental aspects of modernity: "science" could be organized "for the people." After the first socialism's belief in a truth imminent in a cosmic evolutionism, and the second's that the troth was revolutionary and dialectical, the third formation developed a new "positive" emphasis that the troth was "out there," empirically accessible to professional social scientists and economists.
It was the third formation, then, that wrestled most urgently and directly with the logic of the conventional liberal order, as encirclement, as temptation -- and as that which had to be defended against the more radical liberal despotism of fascism. The logic of this moment was complex and defies a unilinear reading. Yet, precisely because it is so bound up with the formation of the modern Canadian project, it has been systematically misrepresented. Often writers on the NDP have equated the CCF's socialism with the liberal Keynesian welfare state that the NDP (founded after the Canadian Labor Congress' 1956 revealing appeal to all "liberally minded" Canadians) has doggedly supported since the 1960s. One can readily understand why so many people, perhaps especially on the left of the party, have invested in this emphasis on seamless continuity. For some of today's mainstream New Democrats, it not only frees them from any guilt-by-association with Communists, but it also allows them to narrate their party's history as a tale of martyrdom in the interests of the nation: the CCF's proposals in the 1940s, short-sightedly opposed by a well-orchestrated cabal of fanatics, were really just reforms that led to the widely-accepted welfare state consensus. For their Marxist critics, the same thesis of continuity has often given them the soft-headed social-democratic "Other" from which their genuinely revolutionary project can be distinguished.
From the liberal-order perspective, neither reading captures what is most interesting about the 1940s. The most compelling statement of the third socialist formation can be found in Make This Your Canada (1943), authored by David Lewis and Frank Scott, which sold 25,000 copies in less than a year(72) -- making it one of the most widely-read socialist texts in Canadian history. Given Frank Scott's subsequent closeness to Pierre Trudeau and his eventual stature as an authority on the constitution, and David Lewis's leadership of the federal New Democratic Party from 1971 to 1975, one might expect this book to be a quintessential "social-democratic" expression of moderation, a call for a humane welfare state to redress some of the more problematic features of capitalism. It certainly emerges, not from the left wing, but from the powerful centre of the party, from two of its most respected and influential figures. In retrospect, both its authors, although awkward about the book, attempted to place it in welfare-state narratives.(73) What a fresh reading of Make This Your Canada surprisingly suggests is that it was, for all intents and purposes, a Marxist text -- albeit a Marxism shaped by the imperatives of the national management formation. True, there is an emphasis on the continuity of the outlook of the CCF with pre-1914 "democratic socialist analysis," in the text's one, somewhat dismissive reference to the record of "the tradition" on Canadian soil.(74) But the key point is that Make This Your Canada looks forward to a country in which capitalist ownership has been replaced by social ownership, and "the rapacious system of monopoly capitalism" replaced by a "democratic socialist society."(75) True, there is a small opening for the private ownership of small, non-monopolistic companies, and the door is left slightly ajar to the market as an indicator of consumer demand.(76) But these are qualifications in a pattern of a comprehensive socialization of the economy, as systematic a replacement of capitalist by socialist social relations of production as would be found in, say, some Eastern European countries after 1945.(77) Make This Your Canada does not even attempt to conceal its obvious indebtedness to the "the mountainous labors of Karl Marx," thanks to whom, according to the authors, socialism obtained a "positive programme for political action by the working classes for the purpose of supplanting capitalism by a new economic order."(78) This is no mere rhetorical flourish. The implied ontology and epistemology of Make This Your Canada were clearly drawn from Marx's base-and-superstructure model. The text represents the "forces of production" as the chief agents in breaking down whole economic systems (such as 18th century mercantilism), in passages which obviously echo Marx's 1859 Preface.(79) A "relentless logic" of events proceeds from the material base to the superstructure. History teaches that political revolutions follow swiftly on economic revolutions. We learn, when we read of the consequences of "technological revolution," that "nothing could stop the process of change, and states that did not adapt themselves more gradually, like England, were changed swiftly and violently, like France."(80) This was "technological determinism" of the first order. No less than second-wave socialists did Scott and Lewis believe it was possible to be objectively correct about the way the world was going. Herein lay the appeal of the CCF, which had understood that its "imaginative political programme" needs must be based on "a correct social philosophy" and a "fearless economic analysis."(81)
As one would expect, classes exist in the Marxist world of Make This Your Canada, but they are not the same entities one finds in Spector's The Worker. They are objective functions, not potentially revolutionary agents. The book's implicit sociology of trade unionism suggests a pliable movement whose quest for "labour unity", challenged by divisions of race, language, religion and "geographical isolation," called out for state assistance.(82) Similarly, there is an implicit critique of capitalist autocracy and the commodification of labour, but this is developed not via an in-depth critique of capitalism, but rather by way of noting "the undemocratic habits of big business."(83) The working class, although existing objectively within this text and endowed with its own interests, becomes a sociological category among many others: it was one of the "four major classes of modern industrial society" (the others were the white collar and professional workers, the farmers, "and, finally, the few who own and control the industrial and financial resources of the country."(84) There is "contradiction" within capitalism in Make This Your Canada -- but it is not the contradiction described by The Communist Manifesto. Decisive is not the struggle between classes, or between the forces and relations of production, but rather the moral and historical contradiction between a profit-oriented economy and the "objectives of a progressive society."(85) Similarly, "monopoly" and "monopoly capitalism" operate in the text, but -- as is generally the case with both Second and Third Wave Socialisms -- they are not rigorously constructed in terms of Marx's "mountainous labours" on the question of value. In short, this is a very Webbian Marx.
When Make This Your Canada comes to explain its own place in history, it does so in a way which erases prior knowledges, especially those developed by earlier autodidacts. Explicitly, the text invites readers to take up the subject-position of the frustrated "socially-minded production men," who are "offended by a system which frequently interferes with their production job."(86) It is striking that there is no parallel attempt to put the reader into the shoes of the frustrated worker on the assembly line.(87) In the "Canada" constructed by Make This Your Canada, there would be ample room for university-trained experts. Of course, formally, full sovereignty in the "new Canada" will rest with the people. On this point, Prime Minister-elect M.J. Coldwell's imagined "victory speech" upon the CCF's electoral triumph, which is presented to us as the text's moment of concrete utopianism, is clear. "It is not the C.C.F. as a party, but you as a people who have won power to-day. Because it is not physically possible for each one of you to be a member of the government, some of us are privileged to be the trustees of your power. But we in the Cabinet shall not forget, and you in the country must always remember, that in the New Canada which was born to-day, the government is the Board of Trustees for all the people -- that and no more."(88) These trustees of the "New Canada" will be closely advised by the National Planning Commission -- a "small group of economists, engineers and statisticians assisted by an appropriate technical staff." Lest this appear to be a government by bureaucrats, the text immediately adds: "Keeping the responsibility for planning in the hands of a democratic government is the guarantee that we shall have no totalitarian state nor a society dominated by `experts'."(89)
Yet in two respects Make This Your Canada is self-subverting in its position on the role of the expert in the New Canada. Again and again, it is the Soviet Union that shimmers before the reader as capitalism's Other. No other country or model comes close.(90) It is in the Soviet Union that "we" find proof of a post-capitalist society's ability to mobilize its population to meet a great purpose. "The Soviet Union is an example of a whole economy being run successfully on new lines."(91) It is in the "Russian" people that we can see a vast population embarked "upon a colossal plan of organized social revolution," which has already given them " a powerful new system capable of withstanding the onslaught of the world's mightiest armies."(92) There is almost a hushed reverential tone when Make This Your Canada describes "all the energies of a united people and the techniques of planning and production," turned to the one propose of defeating the Nazis.(93) These energies could be so mobilized because, the text implied, "successive national plans," based on the interests of "all her people," had brought the Soviet Union's techniques of planning and production to bear on the one overriding purpose of defeating the Nazi enemy. Such was the socially unifying effect of the Soviet system: "the people" felt the country belonged to them. They were right to think so. Given the number and the fervour of these pro-Soviet declarations, and the text's eloquent and symptomatic silences (no gulag, show trials, or cults of personality shadow its imagined Soviet Union) the reader could well imagine the New Canada would be something like the new Soviet Union, with the added plus of parliamentary government. The "democratic caveat" -- "We must recognize the truth of all this, and apply its lesson, at the same time that we remain determined to pursue our own democratic course and never to allow dictatorship of any kind to rule our country"(94) -- qualified but hardly undermined this Webb-like enthusiasm for a Soviet regime that had undertaken such feats of national state management.(95)
The text's attempted rebuttal of the imagined charge of "expert domination" and "regimentation" subverts itself in a second way. The reader is advised again and again that Canada's Depression miseries had receded precisely because a wartime government, acting under the force of circumstances, had had to implement planning policies it had once dismissed as utopian. Wartime planning had shown Canadians what to keep and what to remove in order to achieve justice and equality.(96) Since the text constructs as "models" both the Soviet Union and war-time Canada, its symptomatic silences on the question of how CCF planning was to be qualitatively different from that undertaken by Soviet planners or by the Liberal government's Ottawa Men are eloquent. There was merely the formal guarantee of "parliamentary sovereignty." The text walks the razor's edge, between an overtly post-liberal politics and capitulation to the managerial ethos of the liberal passive revolution.
Make This Your Canada is a celebration of a specific kind of socialist state: one in which a democracy is supplemented by comprehensive and systematic state planning, similar to (at least in general terms) the type of planning seen in both the Soviet Union and wartime Canada. In contrast to either first-wave or second-wave socialism, this expression of a third-wave socialism works with a construction of the social order that recognizes class only in a very general way: any sense of "the workers" taking control of the means of production and seizing the surplus value generated by their labour is missing. If the "master-thinkers" of the first wave were Kautsky and Spencer, and of the second wave Lenin and Trotsky, those of the third were Saint-Simon, Keynes, the Webbs, and (a certain Canadianized version of) Josef Stalin, who could all in various ways be seen as the architects of new and effectively managed states, the most successful of which was the Soviet Union.(97)
There is, in addition, something else that is new about third-wave Canadian socialist discourse as epitomized by this text: its emphatic and unabashed Canadian nationalism. It was in the very title: Make This Your Canada. "Nation" more than "class" is the key to its architecture. The "despair and irony of modern history"(98) described in this text was not the failure of the international proletarian revolution -- but the inability of Canadians to achieve any national purpose: "Canada, by her neglect of her unemployed, her depressed areas and her youth during the 1930s, provides a striking example of a state that was not a national community."(99) Make This Your Canada draws deeply from the language of national patriotism.(100) When he assumes the reins of office, the authors imagine, Prime Minister Coldwell will remind all Canadians that Members of Parliament are merely the trustees of the people; and the election of the CCF will mark the people's "final victory." Against the people are the people's enemies, the "claims and power of special privilege," "monopoly," the forces of cynicism and withdrawal. Indeed, anyone who disagrees with strengthening democracy is a reactionary "who denies the very cause for which we are fighting."(101) "The people" as constructed in this discourse and articulated to a more traditional socialist critique of capitalism is a category that treats as one the entire population inhabiting the territory claimed by the Canadian state. This is a call to construct a national-popular general will.(102) Maritime and western disparities are explained in terms of technological determinism(103) and to dwell upon them is to insist on differences that are less fundamental than others.(104) Differences of "race" and language pose graver difficulties. Writing the book in North Harley, in the Eastern Townships, Lewis and Scott, both English-speaking Quebeckers, acknowledged that there were "genuine differences of language, culture, tradition and religion" at play in Canada in the 1940s. Yet, clearly, these differences could not be allowed to disrupt the formation of a Canadian national subject-position. The language of self-determination had already been pre-empted by the text's prior commitment to a "Canadian" nationalism with parliament in Ottawa as its sovereign voice. The text becomes elusive and even incoherent at this point. And when translated into French, it did not say the same thing as it did in English.(105)
Because the CCF speaks for Canada, it has a claim to speak for Canadian sovereignty -- even to extend the effective sovereignty of a social democratic Canadian state into the "Canadian northland," this "last great North American frontier" which it will save, in a kind of Socialist Manifest Destiny, from the "robber barons" and for "the new era of democratic social planning"(106) It is nationalism, not socialism, which serves as the Other of capitalism. Leaving to one side the Conservatives and Liberals, whose ties to the capitalist class disqualified them from this task of national salvation at the outset, the obvious challenger to this left nationalism was the Communist Party. Lewis and Scott predictably scorn the CP as a party which had made no attempt to become a mass organization, bound as it was to a mechanistic and inherently divisive philosophy. Yet nowhere is the CP denounced for its Marxism, for its atheism, for its slavish pro-Sovietism, for its class militancy. These silences suggest a certain delicacy for the CCF. To undermine completely the legitimacy of the Communists' Marxist perspective could call into question the CCF's own privileged access, via Marxist theory, to what was essentially "Canadian."
The conventional account of the Canadian left's civil war tells half the story. The CCF, and many of its members, were both drawn to and repulsed by the Communist Party. Make This Your Canada is only superficially an anti-communist, and not at all an anti-Marxist, text.(107) Later CCF/NDP works, influenced especially by the Cold War, would absolutize the distinction between "social democracy" and "communism" -- but this, revealingly, is not a binary opposition set to work in Make This Your Canada. Subsequent historians sought to give the CCF-NDP an immaculate conception, and protect themselves from the Canadian equivalents of Joseph McCarthy; it followed that they would dwell lovingly on the anti-CCF rhetorical excesses of the Communists' "third period," and build up the Social Gospel into the primary motivation of the CCF (and no influence whatever on the CP). Those more sympathetic to the CP, or at least to the ideal of working-class revolution, have often repeated the same binary, simply reversing the "plus" and "minus" signs. But re-reading Make This Your Canada with some liberal-order questions helps destabilize these habitual responses. The priority announced in this text in 1943 was not the construction of a liberal-democratic welfare state. It was, rather, the construction of a sleek, efficient, modernized, centrally-planned socialist state, in which planning for social welfare was just one, not particularly crucial, aspect of the socialist program. In fact, the very idea of elevating partial welfare schemes into overall strategies for social change is explicitly critiqued and rejected in this text.(108)
Nevertheless, this welfare-state, addendum gradually came to be remembered as the whole program. In highly selective CCF-NDP invented traditions the entire rationale of the party is, and always has been, and always will be, the same: the provision to Canadians of compassionate and effective social programs through a liberal democratic regime. But, clearly, as we have seen, the paradigm of national management was never so narrowly bound. In its earliest, most radical expressions, it proposed an integral socialist state. One might argue that, even as their actual policies, in power and out, came to resemble less and less the sweeping plans outlined in Make This Your Canada, many of the newly-baptized "social democrats" remained (and some still do remain) within its conceptual universe. They champion an attenuated but still powerful post-liberal ideal of the Canadian state as a "national manager," an exalted conception of citizenship and equity, and an all-inclusive "democratic Canadianism." When they do this, they have recourse to a language of socialism that has otherwise been subordinated in their thinking and by their party to the hegemonic authority of post-1960 new liberalism.
The socialism articulated in Make This Your Canada, socialism as national management, would endure in various forms long after the 1940s, and well beyond the CCF. In many respects, and obviously with allowance for the need of the "vanguard party" to present itself as superior to social democrats and as unfailingly orthodox, it might be argued that the post-1935 Communist Party came to develop a parallel socialist discourse, in which nationalism, the management of the economy, and the restoration of harmony to the international order were seen as paramount. In this new style of Communist discourse, the Soviet Union was now represented, not as the exemplar of revolutionary working-class praxis, but rather as a fully rational, well-managed state, the true homeland of a scientific "modernization theory" (and a model for Ottawa to follow.) Similarly, as the CCF transformed into the NDP, it was perhaps less a matter of a movement succumbing to the iron law of party oligarchy, and rather more one of a "socialist model of national management" undergoing "realist" amendments. If Keynesian economic formulae and Swedish social welfare schemes allowed for "socialism" without the trauma of large-scale socialization, then what need of revolution, parliamentary or otherwise? Yet Lewis's continuing (if increasingly closeted) "evolutionary Marxism," his profoundly shrewd grasp of power within the trade-union movement as the nucleus of hegemony within the postwar left, his genius for making base-and-superstructure arguments politically and culturally acceptable, even under Cold War conditions -- all of these meant that positions that bore more than a passing resemblance to those of "Eurocommunism" would still surface in the NDP as late as the 1970s, inside and outside the Waffle,(109) and as late as the early 1980s within the Parti Quebecois, which named a different "people," "state" and "nation", but in ways that would have been recognizable to the authors of Make This Your Canada(110)
It was thanks to this cohort of state-building socialists, inside or outside the two main leftist parties, that "socialism" came to be written -- although not in indelible ink -- into the myth-symbol complex of the Canadian state-nation. Saskatchewan's brave government stood as an exemplar of Canadianism, not just of "prairie radicalism." There came to be a profound identification of social democrats with the project of renovating the Canadian liberal order, focusing especially on Ottawa as the proper carrier of socialist hopes and dreams. In sharp contrast to their marginalized comrades in the United States, third-formation socialists could honestly tell themselves that they were shaping a new Canadian state for a new Canadian people. And many of them commenced a long march through the federal and provincial institutions, a march which changed the marchers -- into new liberals and bureaucrats -- as much as it changed the institutions.
It would be hard to fix a "death date" for this third formation. Certainly, by the 1970s, when the CP was largely peripheral, no one was expecting that the election of an NDP government would transform the fundamentals of Canadian capitalism. The obvious "external pressure" was the Cold War and Canada's vulnerability to American ideological and military influences. But there also were three major internal contradictions. First, the marginalization of the First Socialism's project of "socialist education" and of Second Socialism's "class warfare" in socialist thinking, and especially the reliance on a professionalized labour bureaucracy as the way to secure the support (and the money) of rank-and-file workers, carried with it the risk of a profound alienation from working people. It was easy to succumb to the liberal-utilitarian temptation of substituting the "passive party" allegiance for the "active cultural struggle" envisaged by the earlier cohorts: the "political check-off" was one of the most powerful of the forces that changed the prospects of Canadian socialists. Second, as the grey and bureaucratic "socialism of administration" gradually came to resemble more and more the liberal order that contained it -- necessarily so, perhaps, at the level of subordinate provincial governments -- those who had once questioned liberal order were increasingly disposed to defend it. And third, and perhaps most crucially, by so fervently embracing the Canadian nationalist agenda, bedecking their pamphlets with maple leaves and their rhetoric with "the people," all with a discernibly centralist bias, the third-wave socialists were to find themselves unable to address the "other nationalism," that would arise in Quebec.
The Fourth Socialism: Revolutionary Humanism and National Liberation
These contradictions of conventional leftism, both social democratic and Communist, would be relentlessly exposed by a fourth formation, wherein a new paradigm of socialism evolved in the 1960s and 1970s. The matrix-event here was the Cold War, which simultaneously disorganized and discredited the older socialist forms and made the struggle against nuclear war seem a matter of human survival. Internationally, this "break" often announced itself without subtlety: an "obsolete communism" and a "sold-out social democracy" were overtaken by a New Left proclaiming a new emancipatory politics, a "socialism" of self-management, anti-imperialism, decolonization, and direct democracy. This and other aspects of the New Left were strongly influenced by American precedents, which influenced these leftists of the 1960s as strongly as British and Soviet models had moved their predecessors in the 1930s.
To simplify, New Leftism could be seen as a critique of, and alternative to, the first three formations. Against the Spencerian evolutionists' "necessary progress" was counterpoised the need to individually resist a looming nuclear disaster and the image of individuals heroically struggling against it. Against the Leninist "dictatorship of the proletariat" as a necessary phase of working-class revolution, this cohort drew from "actually existing socialisms" the conclusion that, unless the oppressed truly empowered themselves, a formal shift in the ownership of the means of production did not an emancipatory social revolution make. And against quasi-Keynesian strategies of socializing investment and managing the national economy, this cohort, often repulsed by consumerism and the "culture industries," would contrast the humanist critique of alienation made by the young Marx with the economism of his distant descendants, the state planners.(111) All three earlier socialisms were brought before the bar and asked: How does your project address what is really wrong with modern life -- the profound sense so many people have of being alienated from themselves, from their own products, from their own societies? How does your politics speak to the problem of spiritual suffocation in an oppressive, meaningless and ugly world? Or counter both superpowers' drive to exterminate humanity in a nuclear war? New Leftists -- only some of them happy to call themselves "socialist" -- identified new objectives, and marginalized old ones. Their goal was a future of de-alienated men and women realizing their full human nature. And if, for some working in this new paradigm, old theoretical concepts -- e.g., the decisive revolutionary working-class party as the instrument of socialist transformation -- remained in place, they were nonetheless often functioning in a different way: as anticipatory forms of a humanistic, emancipated society more than as functional requirements of systemic change.(112) For many others, oppressed Third World nations, ethnic groups, and (especially in the 1970s) women and sexual minorities came to play as central a role in strategies for socialist revolution as class. Freud became as significant as Marx.
If, for some, existing parties could integrate at least part of the new paradigm -- this was a major time of growth and ideological change for the NDP, which embraced New Left ideas to a surprising extent(113) -- for many others in the fourth wave the conventional Canadian left parties, and perhaps no parties, could do so. Rather than investing energies in political parties, one could turn to the Company of Young Canadians, the Student Union for Peace Action, the Student Christian Movement, or a host of community groups. This was a cohort attracted by a plethora of ideologies, from anarcho-syndicalism to left nationalism, whose basis of unity lay only in a humanistic critique of capitalism and the liberal order -- "the system" -- and an impatient sense that radical action could bring about its downfall. It was, finally, a formation that demarcated itself generationally, to an extent not really seen before in Canadian socialist history. The leading anglophone theoretical journal of this youth-oriented socialism was a Montreal publication called Our Generation.(114)
In some respects the history of Canadian socialism could be written with only glancing attention to the New Left. By and large Canadian New Leftists were sympathetic bystanders to movements organized by other people in other places. They were against the bomb and the Vietnam War. They were for the American Civil Rights and later the Black Power movements. They cheered on African and Latin American national liberation struggles, and occupied university campuses with "non-negotiable demands" familiar across North America and Europe. Yet, in another way, the impact of this cohort, in one specific respect, was massive, and reshaped the entire field of Canadian politics. This was because New Leftism and left nationalism coincided to contribute to a profound crisis of Canada itself. In anglophone Canada, left nationalism, whose socialist forms were evident in the emergent mass universities and in the left-nationalist "Waffle" movement within the NDP, integrated conventional nationalist themes carried forward from the days of Make This Your Canada with contemporary discourses of anti-imperialism, participatory democracy, and feminism.(115) But the place where the fourth formation became genuinely dominant within socialism was francophone Quebec.
Historians of Canadian socialism have conveyed a sense of francophone Quebec as being generally marginal to the organized socialist movement before the 1960s.(116) But after 1960, francophone Quebec, and more particularly Montreal, was the storm-centre of New Left politics in Canada. And herein lay, of course, a paradox. The New Leftism of Montreal unfolded on what was still formally Canadian territory, but in a post-Canadian, Quebecois "imagined space." It was constructed, in part, as a formation that rejected the active centralizing federal state imagined by Make This Your Canada.(117) Quebec became far more a nation than a province, and the Quebecois as a "new people" embraced left-wing programs with a speed that outrivalled the parallel "Canadian" upheaval of the 1940s. In part because of the "economic determinism" of the first wave and the "class reductionism" of the second, third-wave Canadian socialism rarely confronted the "national question" explicitly.(118) In the 1960s, faced with the matrix-event of Quebec's unquiet revolution, with its markedly socialist overtones, the bill for this long neglect came due -- with compound interest. It was impossible for English-Canadian leftists to reject socialist upheaval in Canada's largest province and city. Yet it was difficult to articulate -- to the community imagined by socialists in the 1940s -- a project within which the Canadian state was part of a "colonizing power" that had to be resisted and dismantled. For third-wave socialists who had wrapped themselves in maple leaves and identified whole-heartedly with the project of national state management, the Quebec Revolution posed a wrenching and multifaceted problem, because it inherently called into question the "Canadian subject position" with which Canadian socialists, both Communist and CCF, had identified since the late 1930s. The "falsely generic" Canadian, who just happened to speak English, was discursively represented as an arrogant colonizer against which the national liberation movement needed to assert itself. This unflattering description suggested that an anglophone third-wave socialist should liquidate a nation- and state-building subject-position for which sacrifices had been made for three decades. "Canada" had become, in part through the socialists' own activism and in large part through the passive revolution designed to contain it, a qualified kind of state-nation, unified not by ethnicity or a common culture, but by the activities of a shared federal state espousing a "new liberal" doctrine. And, practically speaking, to step outside this pan-Canadian political common sense was to court electoral disaster among anglophones, as both the Conservatives and New Democrats would discover with "Two-Nations" formulations in the 1960s. There seemed no easy "parliamentary road" to reconciliation. Yet to refuse any attempt to see onself as the "Other's other" was equally impossible. It meant writing off Montreal, rejecting the data documenting francophone economic and social oppression, and -- more dangerously -- distancing and withdrawing oneself from "fellow Canadians," thereby acknowledging the very difference of identities that one had initially been determined not to recognize.
To the conventional "factor" cited in Quiet Revolution historiography, a historian of Canadian socialism would want to consider additional elements: the political and conceptual lacunae of the earlier paradigms when it came to nationalism, the new openness of Quebec to the French left, the reception of the French Revolution of May 1968, and the relative weakness in Quebec of the partisans of the first three socialisms, who arguably might have diverted New Leftism into other channels (as was perhaps the case with the NDP in much of anglophone Canada). Arguably no other North American political jurisdiction came as close to a New Left political revolution, an actual crisis of the ruling political