Rebels, Reds, Radicals by Ian McKay

Author:Ian McKay [McKay, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Canada, General, Social History
ISBN: 9781896357973
Google: Gc_yHAW03fIC
Publisher: Between the Lines
Published: 2005-01-15T00:38:06+00:00

FIVE

Mapping the Canadian Movement

ALTHOUGH THE Canadian left as a continuous, post-liberal, formation-generating force can be dated back only to the 1890s, anticipations of socialism can be found much earlier. Indeed, left ideas and activism in Canada go back more than 180 years— to at least 1829, when the ideas of Scottish mill-owner Robert Owen formed the basis of a colony established in Bright’s Grove, near Sarnia, Ontario. In New Lanark, Scotland, Owen had become the prophet of a new world, in a message delivered from the strife-ridden landscape of the Industrial Revolution. He pitched his model communities and philanthropic schemes to anyone who would listen. In North America, where Owen himself could be found promoting co-operative communities between 1824 and 1829, the Owenites fit within much broader patterns of “communist” community-building. In Canada, as it turned out, one Henry Jones (1776-1852), who had retired on half-pay from the Royal Navy, was converted by Owen’s schemes for villages of “unity and co-operation,” and Bright’s Grove was his project. The builders of the short-lived colony named Maxwell that Jones planted near Sarnia may well have been the first people in North America to call themselves “socialists.”1 That said, the experiment at Bright’s Grove was too exceptional, short-lived, and enigmatic to have exercised much lasting influence, even as a memory, on the Canadian left.

Much later, in 1900, Finnish socialists under the leadership of Matti Kurikka, a prominent Social Democrat and philosopher, established a Utopian socialist community at Sointula on Malcolm Island, British Columbia. The project may have attracted as many as two thousand people before it collapsed in 1904, partly because of disputes over free love—classically a difficult issue in intentional Utopian communities—and, probably more crucially, because of Sointula’s location, which did not allow for agricultural self-sufficiency but did require commercial ties with the burgeoning capitalist economy of the lower B.C. mainland.2

Maxwell and Sointula did not become models for more influential movements. In contrast to the United States, where there were scores of Utopian experiments in the nineteenth century, with an impact that lasted well into the twentieth, there would be no lasting “utopian formation” in Canada—and therein may rest a little-explored but historically significant difference between the divergent lefts of these two North American countries. In general U.S. socialism, in its many formations, often speaks in an apocalyptic “high diction” of cities upon the hill and saving all of humanity. Canadian socialism has always been significantly less inspiring in rhetoric and yet more durable as a pragmatic adaptation to a specific political order.

From these early beginnings until the present time, though, we can trace five major left formations in Canada, all of them forms of “socialism”—and with a sixth post-socialist left formation under construction today. In the earliest formation, 1890-1919, socialism was defined as the applied science of social evolution. Then, in a second formation, 1917-39, it became tightly defined as revolutionary seizure of power by a working class under the leadership of a vanguard party. In the long period of 1935

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