The Fate of Labour Socialism: The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and the Dream of a Working-Class Future by James Naylor (review)

The "received" version of the history of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (ccf), James Naylor argues, presents a misleading account of the origins of the party, the character of its early socialism, and the efforts of its members to meet the challenges of Depression, war, and fascism. Based on a "simple binary of reform and revolution" (169) – and too often written by non-historians lacking "critical distance" (7) from their sources – its "progressivist narrative" (9) is rooted in Cold War preoccupations and essentially offers teleological justification for the party of social democratic reform the ccf became after 1945. Thus, it presents a "benign" (71) picture of those ccf pioneers who can be credibly cast as "prescient advocates" (7) of the liberal welfare state. It canonizes the saintly James Shaver Woodsworth and the pragmatic proto-social democrats of the League for Social Reconstruction (lsr) as the ccf's "brain trust." And it presents a harshly skewed picture of those who refused to surrender their revolutionary vision of a Canada transformed by socialism. Rather, the received history of the ccf dismisses this latter group of socialist stalwarts ("labour socialists," as Naylor calls them) as "quixotically marginal and historically doomed." (141)

In re-telling the story of (certain aspects of) the ccf in the 1930s and early 1940s, Naylor's passionately combative The Fate of Labour Socialism does not deny that by 1945 labour socialists were barely hanging on to their "dream of a working-class future," but it shows them – and their "current of Labour Socialism" – more respect and restores their agency. Labour socialists, Naylor insists, not only formed the ccf's "activist core," (8) but were influential – even at times, hegemonic – organic intellectuals (in a fairly typical intervention, he admonishes one political scientist for suggesting that the lsr gave the Manitoba ccf "intellectual content and leadership," a notion, he points out, that would have "appalled" (95) the working-class autodidacts of the Winnipeg Independent Labour Party). Though the bulk of his coverage focuses, understandably, on the provinces where labour socialists were most numerous and carried most weight (Ontario, BC, and Manitoba), he attempts throughout to present a geographically comprehensive portrait. The only region to suffer notable and possibly avoidable neglect is the Maritimes.

The book is organized chronologically (by and large). Chapter 1, "The Legacy of Labour Socialism," runs from the mid-1920s until the ccf's formation in 1932. It shows how "a current of self-identified working-class socialists who had determined to build specifically socialist organizations, independent of the organized trade unions and the Communists" (63) emerged and developed, and spurred on by the social problems and political possibilities thrown up by the Great Depression, began to seek national expression. Most were members of local or provincial Independent Labour Parties (ilp) or, in Alberta, sections of the Canadian Labour Party (clp); some were "Marxists of the Third Way" (as described by Peter Campbell) or moving in that direction by turning their ilps, in Ontario and BC, into explicitly socialist parties; a few, Trotskyist and Lovestoneite exiles from the Communist Party of Canada (cpc), still had a foot in Leninism. They were united less by doctrine than by an intense class identity, sometimes reinforced by Marx and Engels' conception of the proletariat as a "universal" class with the unique power to create a classless society and sometimes simply by fear and loathing of the middle class; by ethnic identity (almost all were British or of British descent and highly attuned to British Labour politics, though inspired more by the British ilp than the "irredeemably reformist" (301) Labour Party); and by deep commitments to working-class political independence and to "making socialists" through independent working-class education. Naylor emphasizes that in their hands this important practice, inherited from pre-1914 socialism, went "far beyond the rote study of texts from a narrowly Marxist tradition." (40...