Rebels, Reds, Radicals: Rethinking Canada's Left History (review)

This little book is an ambitious preliminary instalment in Ian McKay's plan for a multi-volume history of Canadian socialism. He starts with a withering critique of contemporary inequities and situates the Left as the bearer of a tradition of 'thinking otherwise' that continues to provide answers to the claim that there are no alternatives. Although the death of the Left has been a staple in the conventional wisdom, McKay takes the long view and suggests that Canada may well have had one of the more effective Lefts in modern history.

From its beginnings in the eighteenth century, the Left has been bound up with the idea of enlarging the 'democratic space' in society, particularly through the achievement of political rights and the extension of democratic ideals into the realms of social and economic citizenship. In this version of Left history as a progressive continuum, readers have long found it difficult to tell where the Left ends and socialism begins. McKay makes it clear that any meaningful socialism should be understood as a counter-liberalism that is defined by its opposition to the accumulation of private property as a social and moral good and by its conviction that an equitable society is a worthwhile and achievable human goal. He concedes that not all leftists have reached anti-capitalist conclusions, but he is optimistic about raising a historical tent big enough to accommodate all those who would challenge the dominant liberal order and share in the available alternatives. He goes on to suggest at least seven or eight 'paths to socialism' worth examining, ranging from the archetypal proletarianization model arising from the Industrial Revolution to the gender-based liberation movements of the late twentieth century. In surveying this history, he cautions the reader not to look for a 'scorecard history' that measures the batting averages of various groups on the left, or even a 'vertical' genealogy that excavates the 'roots' of any particular party; instead he proposes a 'horizontal' approach that explores the common contexts in which the history of the Left is embedded. There is so little Canadian historical literature following this prescription that McKay considers himself something of a 'scout' engaged in a mission of 'reconnaissance.' Yet by the time we reach the important last chapter, 'Mapping the Canadian Movement,' we are ready for his rough sketch of the successive dominant formations on the Left – the evolutionary socialists of the pre-1914 era, the working-class insurgents of the post-1917 period, the state planners of the 1930s and 1940s, the new liberationists of the 1960s, and the socialist feminists beyond that. McKay also has an eye on the current crises of globalization, environmentalism, and exterminism, but he is still waiting for evidence that the associated 'matrix-events' have produced enough 'commonalities' and 'fixities' to become the next 'new' Left. As the language in his sketches suggests, McKay has equipped us with a set of heuristic navigational devices for exploring the terrain.

The publishers have advertised this book as a 'provocation,' and McKay delivers on the promise. He writes in a wonderful spirit of engagement, where the present moment is a part of history and the answers to historical questions really matter. Like a latter-day Frank Underhill or Eugene Forsey, he writes an elegant intellectual prose studded with sharp, often witty, insights and original constructions – and slowed down sometimes by frustrating omissions or overstatements. For one, some readers may regret that the decision to pass over the history of radical democracy prior to the emergence of a distinctive socialist Left violates McKay's own injunction to be inclusive in canvassing the history of the Left. For their part, labour historians may find that the oppositional position of the working-class and its multiple forms of agency is given a rather subdued treatment once the age of insurgency has given way to that of industrial legality...