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Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Ian McKay, Rebels, Reds, Radicals: Rethinking Canada's Left History (Toronto: Between the Lines 2005)

THE PRESENT POLITICAL conjuncture in Canada is not one of optimism and inspiration on the Left. The promising upsurge of activism that began after the "Battle of Seattle" subsided after 9/11 and the large anti-war protests of 2003 did not reignite it. Opposition to neoliberalism and war persists, but (except in Quebec) it is mostly diffused and inactive.

It is in this inauspicious moment that Ian McKay's Rebels, Reds, Radicals appears. A compact paperback, its contents are anything but diminutive. This is a book brimming with big ideas about the history of the Canadian Left that raises issues about the nature of the Left itself. It is also an introduction to Realms of Freedom, McKay's forthcoming multi-volume history of the Canadian Left, an ambitious work that, on the evidence provided by this book and other writings, will be a very important contribution. The series in which Rebels, Reds, Radicals is the first title, Provocations ("concise works advancing broad arguments, written by authors deeply immersed in their fields"), is a valuable project of Between the Lines.

Rebels, Reds, Radicals is not a history of the Canadian Left, although its final chapter, "Mapping the Canadian Movement," offers a sketch of this history as McKay sees it. Rather, the bulk of the book presents an original theoretical perspective on the Left, the liberal order it has opposed (here McKay draws on his "The Liberal Order Framework" published in Canadian Historical Review in 2000), and how to conceptualize the Left historically.

The opening pages of Rebels, Reds, Radicals make it very clear that this is not a study of the history of the Left considered as something separate from the urgent concerns of many Canadian readers in the early 21st century: ecological crisis, social inequality, HIV/AIDS, the hollowness of life in a society of all-pervasive commodification. McKay makes the case that these and other affronts to humanity are interconnected social phenomena that, contrary to the neoliberal mantra that "There is No Alternative," can be changed. "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." (7) He sees leftists as involved in the struggles of their times and projecting what he calls, following Zygmunt Bauman, concrete utopias, "thought-experiments in living otherwise," (7) and proposing how these possibilities could be achieved. He then turns to Marx, with a discussion of Marx's idea of the "realm of freedom." Marx, he suggests, has been important to every significant section of the Canadian Left since the 1890s, with the meaning of "Marx" shifting as leftists in different periods have engaged with his ideas, so that "Marx" is best thought of "as a dynamic and changing cultural code." (15) From his reading of Marx, McKay derives a concept of realms of freedom as "a way of understanding and extending the democratic spaces that we are able to experience in the daily world" (17) in capitalist society. These spaces are often small, but when they are larger they cause people to ask profound questions about society.

Viewing the history of the Left as a history of people creating such spaces of freedom is part of McKay's alternative to the dominant idea that the Left is "the dead, unlamented pipe dream of the twentieth century" (23) and to what he calls the sectarian and sentimental or scorecard approach to the history of the Left, in which writers defend the correctness of a particular political tendency. Instead of these two perspectives, McKay argues for a respectful, sympathetic, and critical treatment of all left-wing currents, with the Left understood as "those pushing for radical democracy." (25) McKay writes that most but not all leftists have been socialists, and refuses to engage in disputes about which was "real" socialism or Marxism, writing that political "species" are not "fixed essences" (34) across time, so that, for example, Communist politics in 1921 were not identical to Communist politics in 1935. The history of the Left should be understood as "related to and informed by working-class history" (39) but always distinct from it, just as class is but one of many paths to the Left.

Central to the perspective presented in Rebels, Reds, Radicals is a conceptualization of "the peculiarities of Canada itself" (50) as a highly successful liberal order; the latter should not be confused with capitalism, since political rule in capitalist societies need not be liberal. A Gramscian notion of hegemony as a deep process is important for McKay, for whom liberal order provides a way of understanding the nature of hegemony in Canada.

Rebels, Reds, Radicals proposes writing the history of the Left not to produce syntheses but to carry out reconnaissances that will reveal "little-explored realities" and "help a re-emergent Canadian Left see its history more clearly and define its present more strategically." (83) Key concepts for reconnaissance include matrix-events that rattle hegemony, moments of refusal, and supersedure when realms of freedom open up, moments of systematization that follow them, and, emerging from these, Left formations. These formations are new mass collective subjects, each of which is composed of formal and informal organizations and a distinctive politics and cultural field. Reconnaissance entails the comprehension of "how each worked as a system of thought and structure of activism for the people involved in it." (130) A formation's degree of success can then be evaluated in terms of "the long-term structural changes" in liberal order "that can plausibly be traced back" (79) to it.

The book's final chapter presents the formations of Canadian Left history —social evolutionaries (c. 1890–1919), mostly-Communist revolutionaries (c. 1917–1939), radical planners (c. 1935–1970), the New Left (c. 1965–1980) and socialist feminism (c. 1967–1990), with a sixth formation of global justice currently in emergence — followed by a few pages on the NDP. It concludes with a salutation to the Canadian Left as "one of the most impressive progressive forces in the world." (216)

Rebels, Reds, Radicals is one of the most thought-provoking works written about the Left in recent years and unquestionably the most challenging theorization of the Canadian Left to date. It is written in a lucid style, with verve. It has many highly commendable features that deserve emulation. These include the decision to write for a broad audience, an appreciation of the need for theoretical development, an undisguised and passionate commitment to Left politics and to intellectually rigorous, anti-dogmatic investigation that sheds new light on Left histories and yields "knowledge for a political purpose," (83) a rejection of writing histories of political currents structured by assumptions of continuity, a recognition of the diversity (in the genuine sense, not the liberal multiculturalist meaning) of who was and is the Left, and attention to the specificities of Canada and Quebec. Rebels, Reds, Radicals contains many suggestive insights about Left history, and will leave readers eager for the arrival of Realms of Freedom.

Yet this praise must also be tempered with major reservations, for Rebels, Reds, Radicals is also a problematic and frustrating work. I will register seven concerns. First, it is not essentialist to note that the concepts of the Left and socialism used are inadequate and not clearly distinguished. To include recognition of "capitalism's injustice" and "the need for social transformation" (32) in the ideas that make one a leftist excludes moderate leftists who do not accept either. If we say that the Left is "those pushing for radical democracy," (25) what of leftists who dreamed of creating a society along the lines of the USSR, China, or another Stalinist state? The problem is also visible in the identification of the fifth Canadian Left formation as socialist feminism; I would argue this was a Left feminism many of whose participants were socialists of one kind or another.

Second, the relationship between liberal order and capitalism is unclear and the strong emphasis on the former is questionable. McKay at one point (82) suggests that the liberal order is political and capitalism economic, but the very existence of separate political and economic spheres is a feature of capitalism and both need to be theorized as specifically capitalist. A related third point is that the book barely touches on who it is that exercises hegemony in Canada; pursuing this would lead to the issue of the dominant class and its many forms of rule.

The concept of Left formation has promise, despite its echo of Foucauldian archaeology. That said, my fourth concern is that it is not clear from Rebels, Reds, Radicals how the relationship between a Left formation and the class(es) and other social groups in which it is located or in which it seeks to root itself will be addressed. It is problematic to neglect the social-historical in favour of the political-cultural dimensions of the Left's history, and to understand a Left formation we need to analyse its actual activities in the paid workplace, community, and household realms.

Fifth, I believe that evaluating the success of a Left formation only in terms of its effects on liberal order is a deeply flawed approach because it implicitly limits the Left's horizons to altering this order. This has unfortunate implications for Left renewal today, at least for anyone who believes that it is absolutely crucial for humanity that we pose the question of whether capitalism and the forms of oppression interwoven with it can be overcome. This stance of Rebels, Reds, Radicals is connected to its social theory. All historical writing involves social theory (implicit or explicit conceptions about humans and their social contexts). In this case there seems to be an agnosticism about the sources of social power in liberal capitalist societies and, consequently, a refusal to draw theoretical conclusions from careful historical study about the possibility of progressive anti-capitalist change and about what kind of left-wing activity is most likely to win gains within such societies (I do not mean to suggest that Rebels, Reds, Radicals has no political orientation: it opts for a "war of position" perspective inspired by a reading of Gramsci). This agnosticism and refusal will greatly weaken the ability of histories informed by this perspective to contribute to Left renewal.

Although theorists can be read in many ways, what is written places limits on defensible interpretations, and my sixth concern is with how McKay reads Marx (and, to a lesser extent, Gramsci). One example is "realm of freedom." In quoting the passage on this from Capital, McKay omits its concluding sentence, which makes it plain that Marx saw the realm of freedom as beginning outside the sphere of necessary work (even if revolutionized), and thus as something quite different from McKay's term "realm of freedom." Similarly, in the Communist Manifesto the gravediggers of capitalism are the working class, and not "radical activists and critics." (96) The point is not that one must accept Marx's (or anyone else's) concepts, but that they deserve to be treated more carefully.

Finally, outside the central argument of Rebels, Reds, Radicals there are a host of interpretations and judgements that are highly debatable, ranging from the description of consumption choices as "small-scale acts of resistance" (20) to the concluding claim about the importance of the Canadian Left in global perspective. And "Nancy Ritchie" (209) is an amalgam of the names of two different union women.

It has been a long time since I read anything that made me think about the Left as a historical phenomenon in the way Rebels, Reds, Radicals did. The importance of what this book sets out to do demands that it be read in Canada and beyond, with careful attention to its accomplishments and weaknesses.


David Camfield University of Manitoba

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