Canadian Marxists and the Search for a Third Way by Peter Campbell (review)

humanities 333 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 debate unavoidably combines both self-interest and appeal to impartial standards. Much political philosophy written today oddly abstracts from any real understanding of the practice of democratic politics. This has contributed to the puzzling difficulty that philosophers have experienced in trying to come up with a satisfactory answer to the question of the sources of political legitimacy. Democratic Legitimacy is a welcome antidote to this trend. It is not a perfect book. Barnard=s writing is a bit cluttered, and sometimes gets in the way of the ultimately quite commonsensical positions he is arguing for. And the book does not reflect an up-to-the-minute knowledge of contemporary political theory. In particular, Barnard frustratingly fails to engage with the writing of other political philosophers, such as Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, who share his impatience with the lofty abstraction of much contemporary political theorizing. But these are comparatively minor failings when measured against the book=s many virtues. It deserves a wide readership. (DANIEL WEINSTOCK) Peter Campbell. Canadian Marxists and the Search for a Third Way McGill-Queen=s University Press 2000. x, 304. $34.95 In political economy, the term >third way= usually implies a middle course between centralized planning and a capitalist market. Peter Campbell uses the term in an altogether different sense. For him, the >third way= refers to a strategy of working-class struggle that avoids both the vanguard orientation of Marxist-Leninists and the parliamentary-electoral preoccupations of social democrats. Campbell regards both forms of organization as flawed: through their commitment to institutionalized leadership, they discount the educational significance of political activism and thus ultimately curtail the potential for self-organization by class-conscious workers. In terms of classical Marxism, Campbell=s >third-way= is reminiscent of the ideas in Rosa Luxemburg=s famous essay, The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (1906). Campbell refers to Luxemburg, but his focus is the history and practice of >third-way= Marxism in the Canadian labour movement, which he examines through the often inspiring (but also occasionally disappointing) political biographies of four outstanding Canadian activists: Ernest Winch, William Pritchard, Arthur Mould, and Robert Russell. What united these men, despite individual eccentricities and continually changing political affiliations, was a strategic-philosophical conviction that the highest purpose of leadership is to inspire workers, through their own experience, to emancipate themselves. 334 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 The setting for this book is the turbulent rise of the Canadian labour movement in the political and trade-union struggles that culminated in the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, in the period of receding class struggle that accompanied efforts to launch One Big Union during the 1920s, in the crucial depression decade of the 1930s, and beyond to the early days of the Cold War. Campbell explores Canadian unionism and socialist politics through the careers of these four >leaders,= who, paradoxically, distrusted all leadership, including their own, in the spirit of Marx=s dictum that the educators themselves must be educated. As a study in Canadian labour history, this book is a carefully researched , eloquently written, and historically significant contribution to the self-understanding of the political Left in Canada. While it is not a work of political philosophy, it situates within a Canadian context a philosophical dilemma that recurs throughout Marxist literature. Virtually every great Marxist thinker, including Marx himself, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Kautsky, Lukács, Gramsci, Korsch, Pannekoek, and countless others, at one time or another struggled with the practical-philosophical issue of how to >lead= in such a manner that the >led= would become capable of selforganization in a society free from exploitation and domination. Campbell imparts substance and proximity to these historic and sometimes abstract debates by playing them out practically in the lives and struggles of his four principal subjects. While Campbell obviously admires Winch, Pritchard, Mould, and Russell, he also remains fully aware of their personal flaws, philosophical limitations, and political miscalculations, criticizing them for sacrifice of family and for culture-bound insensitivity to issues of race and gender. At...