Rebels, Reds, Radicals

Rethinking Canada’s Left History

Ian McKay

• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781771135368
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In this brilliant and thoroughly engaging work Ian McKay sets out to revamp the history of Canadian socialism. Drawing on models of left politics in Marx and Gramsci, he outlines a fresh agenda for exploration of the Canadian left.

In rejecting the usual paths of sectarian or sentimental histories, McKay draws on contemporary cultural theory to argue for an inventive strategy of "reconnaissance." This important, groundbreaking work combines the highest standards of scholarship, and a broad knowledge of current debates in the field. Rebels, Reds, Radicals is the introduction to McKay's definitive multi-volume work on the history of Canadian socialism (volume one, Reasoning Otherwise: Leftists and the People's Enlightenment in Canada, 1890-1920 is now available).

ONE
Realms of Freedom,
Realms of Necessity

IN 1998 THE PLANET’S two hundred wealthiest residents had a net worth equal to about 41 per cent of the total world population. A very few favoured individuals—Bill Gates, the principal owners of Wal-Mart, and the Sultan of Brunei—together enjoyed accumulations of wealth equal to the national incomes of thirty-six of the world’s most impoverished countries.

Meanwhile about 1.3 billion people around the world were making do on the equivalent of about one U.S. dollar a day. In Canada, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, poverty increased dramatically from 1990 to 1995, particularly in metropolitan centres. In large cities the general population grew by 6.9 per cent between 1900 and 1995; those with living standards below the Statistics Canada poverty line increased in numbers by 24.5 per cent. Women in Canada are still the poorest of the poor: their pre-tax incomes amount to 62 per cent of men’s incomes; they make up a disproportionate share of the population with low incomes—2.4 million in 2001 compared to 1.9 million men. At the turn of the twenty-first century, more than a decade after the House of Commons unanimously passed a dramatic resolution to “seek to eliminate child poverty by the year 2000,” about one in every six Canadian children was—according to the state’s own statistics—impoverished. At least four out of every ten renter households were paying more than 30 per cent of their monthly incomes on shelter, leaving them little left over for food, transportation, or other basic necessities.¹

In the first decade of the new century, global warming proceeds at a faster pace than at any time during the past four hundred to six hundred years. Since the beginning of the twentieth century the mean surface temperature of the Earth has increased by about 0.6 degrees Celsius; about half of that warming has taken place in the past forty years. The impact on the Arctic has been striking. Scholars report a 40 per cent reduction in the thickness of the ice pack and new ailments such as lungworms in muskoxen. The global sea level rose faster in the last century than it did in the previous three thousand years. With continued global warming, billions of people face unimaginable calamities. The glacier-fed rivers of the Himalayas, which supply water to one-third of the world’s population, are likely to flood. Latin Americans confront the prospect of a severe water shortage.²

The forty-two million people who have contracted HIV/AIDS confront, as did the twenty-two million already killed by the disease, crumbling health-care systems and a profit-oriented pharmaceutical industry. In 2003, one country—the United States—voted against a United Nations resolution calling for open access to drugs to meet this “global health emergency.”³

Globally a vast engine of accumulation transforms almost every human activity into a dollars-and-cents proposition. Across North America cities are penned in by look-alike malls, full of commodities designed to slake recently invented consumer desires. In multiplex movie theatres and supersized grocery stores, consumers are enveloped by a system of goods and services that doubles as a system of meaning and transcendence. Yet all too often there is seemingly no clear purpose or direction to everyday life: activities seem geared to means and not to ends, to fragmented rather than integrated experiences, to an eternal “present” and not to any history or future. Struggling for something beyond the shopping mall, North Americans grasp at the occult, countless schemes of self-improvement, new diets, “nature”—all of which require further trips to the shopping mall.⁴

This general state of affairs, we are told again and again, every day, by a hundred voices and in a hundred ways, is the only way things can possibly be: all of these massive patterns are beyond human control; you might try to change one or two details, you cannot change the big picture; to imagine a radically different world that does not generate patterns like the ones we are now seeing is to succumb to a delusion.

This “delusion”—that another world is possible— is traditionally called the left.

THE REAL UTOPIA

To be a leftist—a.k.a. socialist, anarchist, radical, global justice activist, communist, socialist-feminist, Marxist, Green, revolutionary—means believing, at a gut level, “It doesn’t have to be this way.” Vivre autrement—”live otherwise! Live in another way!”— was a slogan used by one Quebec radical group in the 1970s. Reasoning Otherwise was the slogan of William Irvine, the legendary Prairie socialist. Words like these are inscribed on the heart of every leftist.

Of course, every one of the social problems of the day—from growing inequality to global warming—has its own story. It is properly addressed by its own experts. Such problems cannot simply be lumped together. Each demands its own response. So why not just do what is pragmatically possible, and tackle one issue at a time?

Just so. Living otherwise means engaging with the life-and-death, down-to-earth issues as they present themselves. Living and reasoning otherwise mean the mobilization of resources to handle the emergencies of everyday life.

Yet many people engaged in these emergencies are forced to the conclusion that living otherwise demands more than pragmatic, one-issue-at-a-time responses. Consider the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Suppose, instead of some grandiose scheme of ridding the planet of the disease, you just settle for a more modest objective: reducing the projected death toll over the next few decades, say, from forty-two million to ten million. You come up with the most practical, common-sense ways of doing so: making drugs as effective as possible, promoting the use of safe sex, attacking the other ailments that facilitate the spread of AIDS, and fighting the stigma often attached to people living with the disease. Quite soon you will find yourself up against people who are actively working against you. The Catholic Church will fight you on “moral” grounds about the human rights of gays and the legitimacy of contraception. Pharmaceutical companies will fight you economically on producing free and effective medicines. The U.S. government, the mightiest in the world, will fight you on both fronts. How are you going to make an effective difference, if your struggle necessarily means working in a world dominated by these forces?

Or suppose, instead of some revolutionary vision of humanity living in a harmonious balance with the rest of nature, you settle for a more modest objective— say, a 50 per cent reduction in carbon-based air pollution over the next ten years. You come up with the most practical, common-sense proposals for doing so: reducing emissions of carbon dioxide, switching 3 5 per cent of the power grid to alternative energy sources, cutting back on coal-burning generating plants, exploring new energy sources such as wind or solar power. Even though you can argue that every human has a long-term interest in the success of these modest proposals, you will quite quickly find yourself up against people who are actively working against you. Automobile manufacturers will fight your demand that they make only less-polluting cars. Powerful oil companies will hire advertising firms and scientific consultants to discredit you. And, once again, the U.S. government will oppose even the most pragmatic, down-to-earth measures—even if many of its own scientific experts are convinced that a capitalist system reliant on fossil fuels is one that is riding for a fall.

Do what is possible, one issue at a time? Of course—there’s no realistic alternative. But you will most likely soon reach conclusions about the patterns of opposition and support that shape each and every one of these issues and connect them together. You may well decide that the persistent general relations behind that specific pattern also need to be understood and changed. You will start to see not just a random pattern of problems, but a system underlying them.

Every leftist, at some level, believes and acts on this insight: there are ways of explaining not just the individual problems but the connections between them. Once grasped in thought, these connections have to be transformed in reality. To tackle even one problem— eliminating HIV/AIDS, preventing global environmental meltdown—means struggling to puzzle out why that problem arose in the first place. As soon as you start pursuing the process of figuring each problem out, and connecting it with other problems, you have started down the road to leftism. You will be led, step by step, to a recovery of the down-to-earth historical explanations of why such patterns emerged and why large groups of people respond to them in such different ways.

To struggle against each of these problems means that you think alternatives are possible. War, mass starvation, death from disease, global environmental devastation—maybe these are aspects of life that have always been and always will be with us. Maybe they reflect unchangeable human nature. Maybe they reflect the Will of God. Maybe they are part of an unstoppable process of evolution. Once you start trying to change these patterns, even in the most direct and down-to-earth ways, you are acting on a different conviction. You are saying, in your own way, that humanity’s future is not completely predetermined. Collectively, human beings have the ability to shape different destinies for themselves.

You are also saying that some futures are better than others. We humans face strategic choices. A world without hunger, disease, poverty, war, environmental degradation, the subordination of women and gays, and wars fought in the name of nations and religions would be better than our present-day world. To be a leftist means thinking that human beings could organize themselves in such a way that these evils would be at least diminished if not ultimately eliminated. To be a leftist means throwing oneself into the problems of the present in the gamble that these problems are not just eternal aspects of the human condition.

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has developed these simple insights into a brilliant distillation of the project of the left, which in most recent human history has gone under the name of “socialism.” (I’ll get back to that word, which I use in its broadest possible sense, later.) Bauman sees socialism as a kind of “utopianism.” As soon as many leftists hear that word, their backs go up. Isn’t that just what their enemies have always said—that the left is full of idealistic daydreamers, people clinging to a childish dream of “heaven on earth”? But Bauman doesn’t mean that kind of “utopianism.” What he means is that leftists typically put forward visions of the future that are radically different from the conditions of present-day reality. “Utopias” in this sense are aspects of culture in which “possible extrapolations of the present are explored.” They are, in a sense, thought-experiments in living otherwise.

In general, Bauman says, leftists are more inclined to realism than to romanticism. When they draw upon their experiences in solving particular issues, they have been surprisingly down-to-earth. When leftists use Utopias, they are doing so as a technique to “help to lay bare and make conspicuous the major divisions of interest within a society.” Their Utopias are present-day expressions of the “other world” that human collective action might make possible. Although Utopias generally address society as a whole—”here’s a future that would be good for all of us”—they actually work to reveal that society is made up of very different groups with radically different interests.

“In other words,” writes Bauman, “utopias relativise the future into a bundle of class-committed solutions, and dispel the conservative illusion that one and only one thread leads on from the present.” Against the many people who say, of a given social problem, “Well, that’s just human nature” or “That’s just the way things have always been” or “The poor ye have always with you,” concrete Utopias suggest that things that seem to be just “natural” parts of life are actually the outcome of history and politics—of the forces and choices people made, perhaps many generations ago, that still shape our world today. Utopias “portray the future as a set of competing projects, and thereby reveal the role of human volition and concerted effort in shaping and bringing it about.”⁵

No law in the universe lays down that some Torontonians and Montrealers live in cardboard boxes and others in 5,000-square-foot houses equipped with plasma-screen television sets and hot tubs. No inescapable logic rules that many Aboriginal Canadians in the north are required to have a life expectancy far lower than that of Euro-Canadians in the south. These are matters of history and politics. Consequently, they are within the limits that every one of us inherits from human choices made in the past.

In considering the HIV/AIDS pandemic, for example, critics might argue that it is “Utopian” to think that the population of the world could mobilize its resources to save a majority of the estimated forty-two million people living with the disease. After all, to date, heavy evidence indicates that the most powerful, rich, and priestly people in the world are against making that happen. Yet other conflicting indications also exist. There is Stephen Lewis, for example, the one-man left-wing crusade for justice for Africa. There is the 1980s legacy of brave struggle on the part of the gay communities—historically among the most despised and outcast minorities in North American society—fighting for dear life against historic patterns of indifference and prejudice, much of it found in the conventional left. Most impressively, there is emergent grassroots activism in Africa itself, with some notable victories in some states. In North America’s gay communities in the 1980s huge victories were won when an oppressed community took up a life-and-death struggle and linked it to a more general vision of freedom. We can project from the reality of corporate greed, indifference to the poor, and religious and official prejudice and inhumanity; or we can project from a reality of successful grassroots activism that has already changed lives from San Francisco to South Africa.

With global warming, for example, it is certainly possible to project into the future the continuance of current practices, which might quite possibly spell the end of human life on the planet. These practices are deeply rooted in how most Westerners, living in the world’s dominant capitalist economies, make their living. A realistic “utopian” projection of a more balanced, long-term approach begins with a scientific understanding of biology, physics, and chemistry, with explorations of the Earth’s atmosphere, with an understanding that human beings, as animals, confront real limits to what they can or should do if they want to survive on this planet. Neither “projection” is unscientific, but the second, Bauman would say, is an example of a “concrete utopia.” Just to point out that human beings have a collective interest in survival that global capitalism may be placing at risk is to “portray the future as a set of competing projects.”

To be a leftist, then, means an immersion in urgent day-by-day struggles and a willingness to see the connections linking them together. But it also means introducing into the world a vision of the future and producing a logical program for its realization. It means defending that vision against constant hostility. Projecting a “utopia” into the present means understanding all the forces—such as those organized by class, gender, race, sexual orientation, nationality—that are likely to fight against it, even if the Utopia in question is just a modest proposal for cleaner air that would bring even the left’s enemies healthier and longer lives.

When Karl Marx, in the posthumously published third volume of Capital, considered this concept of the “real Utopia,” he used the term “realm of freedom.” Marx was an ardent democrat, back when democracy was a far-fetched and disreputable revolutionary idea. He despised the world of privilege and elitism and scorned liberals who talked non-stop about the rights of individuals without realizing that none of these individuals and none of their “inalienable” rights could exist apart from society. Today Marx and the Marxists are often depicted as crackpots urging their followers into a mad “lovers’ leap” into an unknown future. (And many of the twentieth-century regimes supposedly based on Marx’s ideas were guilty as charged.) But when you actually read Marx, you will find the opposite message. Marx spent a lifetime reasoning otherwise. His message to people who needed to believe without evidence and without doing the hard work of analysis was in accord with his own personal motto: “Doubt everything.”⁶

Marx fully described his “real Utopia” in his masterpiece, Capital, and—if you can get past some of his dated Victorian expressions—his words resonate today.

The realm of freedom really begins only where labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends; it lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his needs, to maintain and reproduce his life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all forms of society and under all modes of production. This realm of natural necessity expands with his development, because his needs do too; but the productive forces to satisfy these expand at the same time. Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis.⁷

Like so much in Marx, it is a passage that you could spend a lifetime pondering. Those who have written about it disagree with each other. I see in it an approach very similar to the one described by Bauman: it is possible to live otherwise, but keep your feet on the ground. In any imaginable future there will be fields to be ploughed, dishes to be washed, diapers to be changed, folks to look after. Yet even as we carry out all the mundane tasks that keep body and soul together, we can still live otherwise. Even as we do the things we need to do to survive, we can manage things collectively more rationally than we now do. We can invest the everyday world with meaning and purpose. But alongside that realm of necessity—notice, Marx says “beyond” but not “above”—there begins another realm, the “true realm of freedom.” In that realm the development of human creativity—building relationships, making music or drawing pictures, doing philosophy, birding, quilting, playing hockey—is an end in itself.

Marx is not talking about a “dualistic vision,” in the same way that some Christians view heaven as the complete opposite of a sinful and troubled Earth. He is talking about an Earth transformed. The realm of freedom is not rem...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Realms of Freedom, Realms of Necessity
• 2 Redefining the Left
• 3 Liberal Order and the Shaping of Resistance
• 4 The Strategy of Reconnaissance
• 5 Mapping the Canadian Movement
• Notes
• Index