1. The Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) [CPC(M-L)], one of the leading participants in that struggle, put forward Marxist-Leninist theory and the necessity to defend its purity as one of the important tools for uniting Marxist-Leninists anywhere in Canada within a single political party of the revolutionary proletariat.

 

2. The problems with this approach surface immediately the moment readers start to ask their own questions. For example: consider the readiness of the Rouges, the "liberal" political representative of the commercial classes in Quebec during the generation that came to prominence between the suppression of the Patriotes' rebellion in 1837 and the negotiations towards a Canadian confederal scheme of the mid-1860s, to abandon and distance themselves from the legacy of Louis-Joseph Papineau.

Ryerson explains this as the outgrowth of their class character as an exploiting bourgeoisie possessed of a small but definite power base (the Assembly of Lower Canada) and rising ambitions to assume their place within the projected transcontinental quasi-empire of the Confederationists.

The prevailing trend, however, which he fragments into disconnected isolated bits-and-pieces, was actually as follows: some definite leading elements from this same class had supported the Patriotes in 1837 with the aim of becoming agents of a preponderant American power, but repositioned themselves after the defeat as the willing French-speaking, Quebec-based agents of a reorganised British industrial-imperial power.

Meanwhile, a preordained schema imposed by Ryerson on the data of history necessitated presenting the Rouges as the spearhead of bourgeois-democratic striving for their own nation, home market etc. This in turn required explaining away the betrayal of the Patriotes' legacy as the aberrant behaviour or stand of isolated individuals. The entire work is rife with numerous similar examples.

3. Ryerson's most egregious finessing of this matter comes in his presentation (in Unequal Union) of the construction of railways in 19th-century Canada primarily as the starting-point for welding together a home market for the newly-cast "Dominion of Canada". While not false, this is seriously inadequate. Canadian railways in the nineteenth century were a project of British finance seeking an export outlet. The economic mission of the colonial statelet cobbled together in the 1841 Act of Union --- by what Ryerson insists is a national bourgeoisie trying to weld together a national home market --- was in fact to manage the servicing (through all manner of taxes, imposts, tariffs etc.) of the enormous burden of debt that this was going to load onto the backs of subsequent generations of new settlers.

4. In Unequal Union, Ryerson slurs over the contradictions that drive actual development. In the early 1970s --- after leaving the Communist Party of Canada, in which he had served on the Central Committee from the 1930s until the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 --- he wrote in the Preface to the second edition:

"It is the interweaving of two historic processes, the one proceeding from the British Conquest and its aftermath, the other form the pattern assumed by the Industrial Revolution in its penetration of colonial British North America, that set the terms for today's dilemma."

In the role and significance of the American takeover of the Canadian economy and its overwhelming of many areas of the polity and the culture, Ryerson saw mainly a continuation of the central pattern established under British rule and Canada's subsequent development as a self-governing country.

This characterization, while not technically incorrect, is once again seriously deficient. It fails to acknowledge the role of two circumstances driving development for much of the twentieth century which did not exist at the time of Canada's formation as a colonial extension of English bourgeois society: the contradiction between oppressed nations and peoples and imperialism, and the contradiction between the socialist camp and the imperialist camp.

With the rise of the socialist camp, the bourgeoisie completely abandoned any pretence of interest to defend or advance the nation. This meant in Canada that neither would the bourgeoisie defend Canadians' interests as a collective against the claims and attempts of the U.S. to annex various pieces of the economy and polity, nor could the bourgeoisie in Quebec any longer be looked to defend the interests of the Quebec people as a collectivity either.

Especially during the rise of the Parti Québécois under the leadership of Rene Levesque in the 1970s, the insistence of the Canadian government that the Quebec people had no legitimate collective interest in new arrangements with the rest of Canada served to mask the betrayal of the interests of the people of Quebec by their own bourgeoisie, even as the deepening contradictions on the world scale between oppressed nations and imperialism sharpened and re-stimulated interest among the Quebec people to affirm themselves.

Ryerson's comment that the U.S. takeover "modified", but did not remove, the operation of processes laid down earlier in Canada's history is thus both misleading and inadequate. By failing to point out the qualitative as well as quantitative dimension attaching to the increased U.S. annexationist pressure, such a position downplayed the peril confronting people in Canada.

5. During and following the First World War, U.S. investment rose rapidly in Canada, mainly on the basis of taking over industries started by British interests. U.S. business, industry and finance achieved economic supremacy in Canada after 1926. The total amount of capital invested in Canada but originating from the U.S. outstripped British sources for the first time. British finance never regained its top position.

This appeared at the time to indicate mainly a decline in British investment and financial commercial influence, rather than a U.S. takeover. Indeed, it was widely expected that Canadian sources of capital investment would eventually take up more and more of this part of the country's economic space.

 

This was not necessarily an illusion at the time. Sectors of light industry, textiles, sawmills, pulp and paper mills outside Quebec and food processing industry (outside the fisheries) were majority Canadian-owned. In Ontario, the centre of industrial manufacturing, the production and distribution of electric power was a government monopoly; the Prairie provinces and New Brunswick also set up "public power." While railways investments in the private sector remained overwhelmingly British, the rest of the railway system was in the public sector and controlled by the federal government through the CNR, a crown corporation.

At the same time, most heavy industry in Canada --- responsible for industrial production based on the most advanced techniques and engineering processes --- was concentrated in southern Ontario, and was controlled from the United States. Certain sectors, such as the productions of electric appliances, electric lights electromechanical devices and processes for industry, automotive products and auto parts, and the processing of fresh and frozen fish-blocks in the Maritimes were almost entirely, if not exclusively, U.S.-owned or -controlled.

In these conditions, whether the economic space for U.S. imperialist capital to occupy within the Canadian economy would widen or contract depended ultimately on whether either the revolutionary or the anti-imperialist forces within Canada were prepared to utilise the Anglo-American inter-imperialist contradictions.

At the end of the 1920s, British resentments over the emergence of U.S. supremacy were echoed by Anglo-Canadian elites linked to British interests. These were seen as "sour grapes" and dismissed --- an attitude much cultivated by Americans and in certain sections of the media in Canada at the time. Meanwhile, the onset of the Great Depression after the stock market crash of October 1929, and the increasingly alarming political deterioration on the European continent, dominated people's concerns and media attention. All this served further to obscure the developing nature of the U.S. role.

Awareness at this time of the United States as a neocolonial exploiter was weak to nonexistent. There was little or no suspicion in Canada that the U.S. could or would become as rapacious or as dictatorial within Canada as the British had been in the period of openly colonial rule. On the contrary, there were many illusions about Britain's allegedly democratic disposition towards Canada since Confederation, fuelling similar expectations of benign treatment from the U.S.

A considerable effort was expended to maintain this blind spot. After the 1935 election, won by the Liberals under the slogan "King or Chaos," the Canadian state was completely wrapped in U.S. imperialism's tentacles for the first time. The roster of alternatives to "chaos" cooked up under WLM King included: 

ITEM - Starting from his role in 1915 as the man who built a company union to destroy a powerful strike struggle in the Colorado mines, the Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, had long been essentially a paid agent in Canadian politics for the interests of the Rockefellers, at the time richest and most powerful capitalist family in the United States who had hired him for that Colorado job. Coupled with the people's ideological unpreparedness, a tremendous space opened for U.S. interests to expand throughout Canada as the Depression gave way to a weak, limited and partial "recovery." King himself frequently and deliberately portrayed the pro-U.S. shifts in Canadian foreign policy as "standing up to the British."

ITEM - Dr Oscar D. Skelton, King's deputy minister External Affairs, recruited Lester B. Pearson out of an academic career at the University of Toronto on the basis of such absurd claims.

ITEM - Pro-government media of the time presented each step of further abject subordination of Canadian interests to those of U.S. imperialism as expressions of the growth of Canadian independence. The King flackmeister and Vancouver Sun columnist Bruce Hutchison pasted together an entirely forgettable patchwork quilt of a book, The Unknown Canadian, from an entire collection of such tales.

ITEM - One of the leading pro-government intellects from the University of Toronto of the time, Dr Frank Underhill, worked alongside leading lights from the CCF to give "Left" cover and flavour to such notions in the pages of The Canadian Forum, of which Underhill was editor.

In Quebec, circumstances proved particularly favourable for such U.S. expansion. As a result of the rapid depopulation of the countryside during the Depression, there was a sudden availability of not only a pool of cheap labour but one containing thousands without any experience of, or sympathies with, trade union organisation. The Union Nationale provincial government under Duplessis was extremely eager for foreign investment, but hostile to the British-dominated financial houses in Montreal which were seen as having failed Quebec in its time of need following the stock market crash.

With American investors presented as economic saviours and creators of work and jobs, even as the Communist Party of Canada (CPC)/ Communist Party of Quebec / Labour Progressive Party rapidly expanded organising efforts among the industrial workers in town and countryside, U.S. imperialism nevertheless succeeded in insulating itself from direct attack in Quebec. When the Duplessis regime attacked the workers' strike struggles and imposed and enforced its notorious Padlock Law against trade unions, other mass organisations and the CPC, its role as a government on behalf of the employers was attacked. However, the role of U.S. imperialism still was not isolated.

Thus did the illusion continue to grow, unchallenged, that American imperialism was somehow democratic and exceptional, enabling it to secure still further its future growth within and domination of Canadian economic space.

6. The Duplessis regime, first elected in 1936, became a very special kind of beneficiary of the weak and partial recovery from the Great Depression.

 

American companies were taking advantage of cheap newly-urbanised labour from the Quebec countryside and its low level of trade union organization to invest directly in branch plants "next door", and thus virtually annexed to, the U.S. --- yet beyond the jurisdiction of pro-trade union legislation and regulation by the New Deal.

Indeed: this is one of the grounds on which the Canadian media mogul Conrad Black most loudly and fervently applauded that regime, otherwise notorious for its enthusiasm to trample people's rights, in his fawning biography "Duplessis".

Within what was essentially a predecessor of the maquiladora model which has rapidly expanded on the Mexican-U.S. border since the inauguration of NAFTA, the role of the Duplessis administration was to implement the special legislative protections which the NAFTA regime would replace with a form of extraterritorial rights for U.S. money and personnel.

At the time, Duplessis' Union Nationale government implemented this program along the lines of a corporatist model already developed by Mussolini. The main differences were that the Roman Catholic Church was much more prominent and trade unions in any form much less prominent in the Quebec version. Duplessis deflected criticism of his excessively pro-American posture from the Anglo-Canadian financial elites of St James Street in Montreal (Canada's financial center at the time) by dismissing them publicly as les anglais. He (and especially the Church minions of his party) deflected criticism "from below" of the ever-more-grinding exploitation and degradation of Depression conditions by blaming les juifs (the Jews).

Within such a balance of class forces, there actually arose a danger of overestimating the role and significance of the widening of mass democratic struggle against many aspects of the Duplessis. The communists had begun leading many such struggles under the banner of "building the anti-fascist united front". Simultaneously there arose the danger of underestimating the capacity of the reactionary bourgeoisie to maintain political space for "liberal-democratic" imperialism. Within the Communist International, Canadian and U.S. communists were repeatedly cautioned about these tendencies. However, as subsequent developments proved, the leadership did not have a clue as to the practical potential dangers in ignoring this advice.   

In Montreal, Communists were organising popular resistance to the worsening economic conditions in the immigrant and working-class districts. They were repeatedly and directly attacked by police goons and reactionary special legislation such as the Padlock Law. But within these conditions, a broad swath of what today we would call "middle strata" were also confronting a serious deterioration and erosion in their status and prospects. They became the seeding-ground for sustaining illusions about "liberal-democratic" imperialism.

These strata were especially vulnerable to illusions about how the U.S. having apparently avoided the European path of "dictatorship", of having apparently preserved formal "democracy" and seemingly even embarked on an extensive program of reforms, in the form of the New Deal.

Exceptionalist illusions would continue to flourish in these circles without hindrance, without anything being counterposed by those organising in the people's movements. Failure to mobilise there for, or in, anti-imperialist struggle left the fighting sections of the people encircled by a cordon sanitaire. Apolitical sections of the middle strata were gradually converted into a pro-imperialist reserve of the reactionary bourgeoisie.

7. This situation began to turn around with the founding of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) on 31 March 1970.

 

 

8. In capitalist countries other than Canada, the communist movement arose after, and as a repudiation of, the betrayal of the international workers movement by social democratic parties. During the First World War, instead of using the situation to mobilise the working class in their countries to overthrow the capitalist system, these parties had supported their governments going to war.

In Canada, there were isolated sects of workers and small local organisations which agreed with the positions of the Second International in favour of prosecuting the war. However, there was no organised movement or party at the national level. Uniquely among the capitalist countries, the communist party arose as a organizer of the class in Canada before any other party had formed on the national level addressing the interests of the workers and oppressed.

The party's working class base was overwhelmingly activist, coming from organisations like the Industrial Workers of the World. It had no intellectual wing. This in itself was by no means an entirely bad thing. In the conditions of that time, this meant it was not burdened with an organised component maintaining a vested interest to protect or propagate any of the counter-revolutionary theories then in vogue, especially those advanced by Karl Kautsky which condemned Lenin and the Bolsheviks seizing political power "prematurely".

At the same time, it still lacked a mass base. The non-revolutionary unions of the time were craft-based rather than industrial unions. The central reality to which the partisans of working class power were responding was the Bolshevik Revolution: the organisation of the working class as a revolutionary power with its own new kind of state, distinct from the trade unions, and surviving according to Lenin's successful strategy for retaining power in the hands of the class while fending off attempts at foreign intervention. What form should the workers' organised response as a class to these events take? This was very much the issue.

The struggle around this question led to a showdown in Calgary in 1919 between the anarcho-syndicalist elements in Canada, who wanted workers' power to be based on "one big union", and those who grasped the significance of the emerging Bolshevik model based on "Soviet power", i.e., the authority of the councils ("soviets") of workers' and soldiers' deputies, for the working class in Canada and other countries.

9. The "social gospel" was the ideology put forward by the bourgeois-liberal "Progressive" movement from the U.S. Many of its positions had also begun to be popularised in the 1890s, when the Progressive movement in the U.S. began participating in civic, state-level and national campaigns as a so-called "third party" alternative to the Republicans and Democrats.

The Progressives formulated the political and programmatic demands of the wealthiest and most powerful financial combines in the most deceptively pro-people terms. Thus, for example, the financial oligarchy needed to eliminate the trend launched by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The IWW's organising was already advanced especially among the most impoverished workers in the most dangerous employments, where large numbers of foreign-born were super-exploited alongside ruined, proletarianised men mostly American-born and already driven off their farms. The IWW organised economic resistance and even trade unions on the basis of equality of the workers without regard to national origins.

One of the largest groups of foreign-born workers were the Chinese. They had been left behind in America after the railway boom. Largely because of vast linguistic and cultural differences in their background, they remained the least-integrated with American-born or other foreign-born workers.

The political fronts for the financial oligarchy claimed to be seeking social peace. In reality, the financial oligarchy wanted the working class too split and divided to offer serious resistance. One solution that suggested itself was to criminalise being Chinese in America. This would bypass the obvious difficulty of the expense involved in simply rounding up and deporting Chinese. Also Chinese labour-power remained an attractively cheap, sub-standardly-priced, commodity. Instead of this approach, laws were passed declaring Chinese to be the source of opium use and opium smuggling: after all, reasoned the Progressives, what "civilized" society could be expected to tolerate such a practice?

Of course, there was not a word uttered about the extreme hypocrisy of this particular defence of "civilised" values. The British had fomented the Opium Wars and invented opium smuggling as a means first to penetrate China through Hong Kong and then to impose the so-called "Treaty ports" in the 1840s. The wealthiest and most prominent so-called "Brahmin" American families, such as the Lodges and Cabots, had accumulated their fortunes as a byproduct of extending the opium scourge into the Americas.

Thus did the Progressives inscribe on their banner a call to ban all further Chinese immigration in order to save society from further depredation at the hands of the opium scourge, while the leaders of the workers' organisations were encouraged to have the workers take out on the Chinese immigrant their resentments over the driving-down of the price of their labour-power by Capital.

 

No stone was left unturned to preserve the essential racism inherent in the informal Liberal-social-democratic alliance underpinning "Progressivism" in the U.S. and the "social gospel" in Canada, deployed so blatantly in the case of the Chinese. Even in the 21^st century, these elements continues to reduced the issue to the matter of the notorious "Head Tax", collected only from Chinese immigrants and not formally abandoned until the 1950s. Liberals and social-democrats could oppose the head tax because it was applied unequally --- but not its inherently racist justification or the ruling classes as the source of all such racist "logic" and programs.

 

The conditions of capitalist exploitation in American cities at the end of the 19th century duplicated those seen in London and other English cities back in the 1840s, against which Charles Dickens' novels had railed and Friedrich Engels and the factory inspectors appointed by the British House of Commons had reported. In many respects the conditions in America were even worse. The Progressives rode to the rescue, proposing to "cure" the problem by --- knocking down workers' "slum housing" to save society form the threat of infectious and contagious disease. (As to where the workers might live following the application of such "cures", the Progressives remained silent.)

 

Canada could not escape this wave of anti-working class "reformist" zeal. In 1918, William Lyon Mackenzie King made a bid to lead the federal Liberal Party on the basis of a 570-page program he entitled "Industry and Humanity", which was chock-full of many more proposals of this kind.

King had trained as a social worker in the 1890s at Hull House under Jane Addams, one of the leading Progressive reformers. He returned to Canada to take up an appointment as deputy minister of Labour. He became deeply involved in "progressive" approaches to handling what they then called "the industrial question", i.e., how to smash strikes so thoroughly that no worker would dare dream ever again of engaging in any form of collective economic self-defence.

His first signal achievement in this line was obtaining passage of the Industrial Disputes Investigation Act (IDIA). This legislation cleverly initiated the era of government-ordered conciliation. It asserted a right for the federal government to intervene to "compile data on matters in dispute between the parties", in industries designated as falling within federal jurisdiction, with a view to possibly recommending a resolution in any labour-management dispute where the workers had no trade union representation.

Before long, every industry with large numbers of foreign-born working alongside Canadians, in which there were frequent "labour-management" conflicts, got themselves added to King's list. The IDIA process effectively stripped workers in these enterprises of even a privilege let alone a right to strike in order to obtain a first contract.

As various students of Canadian labour history have pointed out, this was indeed probably the very intent and essence of the IDIA all along. One of the few loopholes available for organising a workers' union under the common law had been that the existence, or signing, of a contract --- e.g., between a company and representatives from its workforce --- amounted to an implicit mutual recognition by the contracting parties of one another.

King secured passage of a law supposedly intended to crack down on Chinese opium dens in the precincts of Vancouver. In fact the campaign for this legislation featured racist leaders of certain unions speaking in defence of a "Canadian standard of living", and against "cheap foreign labour" undercutting that "standard".

In Industry and Humanity, King took a giant step forward, building on his work setting up company unions for the Rockefellers at Ludlow in Colorado. He outlined a program of long-term, government-supported "collaboration and cooperation" between big-labour, big-business and big-government as a means of preventing strikes and assuring "labour peace."

Some right-wing syndicalists, including the Socialist Party grouping that Benito Mussolini had joined during the First World War, had been advocating similar notions for a decade. King's version became Liberal Party of Canada policy for the remainder of the 20th century. These same notions in the form known as "corporatism" served as official doctrine of the Italian Fascists under Mussolini's rule in the 1920s and 1930s. During a visit to Nazi Germany in 1937, King confided exultantly in his private diary (in an entry that his political secretary Jack Pickersgill suppressed when the diaries were later published) that Hitler had been implementing the program King had envisioned 20 years ago in Industry and Humanity.

In the name of achieving what some of them called "the new Jerusalem" (invoking the phrase of the English utopian poet William Blake), the "social gospel" and-or its proponents embraced one anti-human program after another. This included the so-called "eugenics" movement for "improvement of the species", a movement that was financially supported by the Rockefeller family and prominent U.S. financiers connected with financing the rearmament of Nazi Germany during the 1930s, such as President George W. Bush's grandfather Prescott Walker Bush. Under this banner, laws dictating the sterilisation --- for "their own benefit" as well as "improvement of the species" --- of so-called "mentally retarded persons" were instituted and applied in many American states, the province of Alberta, etc.

The "social gospel" fitted an essentially fascist agenda, but this relationship remained hidden for a long time. The Second World War crushed fascism into dust. With this, the open advocacy of eugenics and many other notions ended. Facts began to trickle out only in the 1960s, as students and a new generation confronted individuals who had practiced or advocated these forms of torture and demanded an accounting.

It would not be until 1933 that the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation --- the CCF --- was able to put down roots, sprouting thereafter all manner of spurious nostrums starting with the "social gospel". In the period preceding abandonment of revolutionary Marxism, probably one of the Communist Party of Canada's greatest yet least-heralded achievements of was its tenacious struggle for more than a decade to prevent the taking-root of Canada's very first political GMO.

 

10. These elements formed a political counter-revolutionary vanguard in the two years that passed between the founding of the OBU and the founding of the Communist Party of Canada. Eventually this stratum degenerated quickly into "police socialism", serving the forces of repression as its eyes and ears in the mass movement. From the late 1960s, their political descendants would return to the stage to undermine the work of the Internationalists and the struggle to establish the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist).

During the 1920s, there was straightforward RCMP undercover work against the party, but these elements assisted in a number of other ways. In many struggles over democratic rights in the immigrant communities where the communists were already organising, these elements also came to put themselves forward as "friends of the oppressed" who also happened to enjoy the privileges of Canadian citizenship, no records with the police, links to sitting MPs --- anything in which pro-communist activists might likely be deficient.

With the onset of the Great Depression, even with the advantages of full legality, above-board relations with the government and its political police from the so-called "Special Section" (SS), later the "Security Service", of the RCMP, and the backing of the corporate sector, the political counter-revolutionary vanguard made little headway. The Party emerged on a number of fronts as a definite force among the basic masses of the Canadian working people, especially in the struggles over unemployment relief and organising the unorganised.

 

Such were the conditions whereby, in 1933, the counter-revolutionary political vanguard was driven to organise the CCF as a nation-wide, liberal-labour, "non-" (i.e., anti-) communist social-democratic party.

11. V.I. Lenin pointed out in 1916 that the world was living in an "era of imperialism and the proletarian revolution". This is still the era.

 

Among other things, such a definition of the era makes clear that anti-imperialist struggle contributes in its own right to the transformation from capitalism to socialism.

 

Hence the continued existence, for example, of the "socialist camp" that existed up to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was not indispensible for anti-imperialist struggle to proceed, any more than a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary party was a pre-requisite for waging anti-imperialist struggle.

 

Although a period of revolutionary ebb has followed the collapse of the former "socialist camp", the era did not change. Its character was not liquidated. And the role of anti-imperialist struggle also has not changed.

 

Another important corollary of Lenin's definition of the era is that revolutionary struggle for, or in defence of, socialism includes and indeed must include anti-imperialist struggle. The role of revolutionary forces in anti-imperialist struggle is to provide clear theoretical and political orientation.

 

This struggle on questions of theory, sometimes referred to as the "battle of ideas", cannot be waged correctly or successfully in Canada without continuously assessing the conditions and changes among the external components of the balance of class forces. 

 

The key point from which the revolutionary forces start is the observation that today, even in a period of revolutionary ebb, the forces of imperialism remain weaker than the forces of the world's people. Evidence for this includes the inability of the U.S. to "have its way" in Iraq, the capacity of the Cuban people to withstand the 24/7 threat of U.S. invasion which has actually increased since the disappearance of the former socialist camp in 1991, the resolute rejection since 1994 by people in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea --- including even a UN-coordinated imposition of near-famine conditions --- of the nuclear blackmail that the U.S. has tried to impose, etc.   

 

Even in Canada, where each government strives to outdo its predecessor in licking the Yankee boot, the true popularity of the current U.S. imperialist program is seen in the extraordinary lengths to which the Liberal government has gone:

 

a) to conceal from its people the extent of the strategic support for American aggression in Iraq, and

 

b) in the government's readiness to use and even play up the "left wing" credentials of one of the opposition parliamentary parties in order to sideline the anti-war movement in general and sabotage its broadening into widespread  anti-imperialist struggle in particular.

 

12. The American steel trusts coveted the opportunities created by the demands for post-war reconstruction to plunder many of the former markets of British steel producers. The House of Morgan, the largest investment bank in the U.S. which organised the financing required to set up the trust structures which came to predominate in the American steel industry just before WW1, also managed most of the war debt of the British government.

The steel plant in Sydney NS had been integrated into the Halifax Shipyards. With the collapse of demand for shipping at the end of WW1, its future was looking increasingly vulnerable to a takeover that would annex the iron and steel industries of Cape Breton and Newfoundland to the Carnegie interests of U.S. Steel. An elaborate tactic was developed to push the leading stockholders to sell at a distress price.

In this case, the pressure point was in fact the coal mines owned by the British Empire Steel Corporation (BESCo), whose main continuous market was the steel plant. The instrument for transmitting this pressure in a form that would be welcomed by the BESCo management was the Indianapolis-based trade union central, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), which was desperately seeking to seize control of District 26 from the local revolutionary communist leadership.

For a number of years, this leadership stood its ground against BESCo and against John L Lewis, president of the UMWA. It enjoyed wide support throughout the communist and workers movements across Canada and within the Red International of Labour Unions, the trade union section of the Comintern. However, it made less headway when it came to building support among the non-proletarian working people either in rural Cape Breton or elsewhere in Nova Scotia. This weakness was effectively exploited by the Nova Scotia government on behalf of the rich and the so-called "forces of order" to isolate the "Bolshevik contagion" to the Sydney-Glace Bay corridor.

 

At the same time, there were weaknesses in the ideological position of the Communist Party of Canada which facilitated this marginalisation. 

There was little or no understanding of the inter-imperialist contradictions, where they were headed and how the workers could use them to deepen and broaden their struggle and further isolate the class enemy. This led to tactical concessions that masked even larger, more consequential strategic concessions.

 

Consider the position of the federal government when the mineworkers struck. The federal government hesitated to deploy troops against the workers in Cape Breton not just for one, but actually for two, reasons:

First, of course, they were worried about the loyalty that locally-raised troops would demonstrate if used in such a struggle, and they were loth not to raise the troops locally so as not to exacerbate contradictions with commanders of local militia.

But, secondly, the other crucial fact was that the Prime Minister, WLM King, was keen to do whatever it took to ensure that American steel interests could advance --- which meant doing everything to assist John L Lewis against District 26 --- whereas significant parts of his Cabinet, supported by the Nova Scotia government and the BESCo ownership group, wanted to use the situation to crush and eliminate unions of any kind in the coal fields, period.

Although there was certainly awareness of these facts as isolated truths, however, there was no appreciation of their actual political potential. Thus, the union leadership prepared and waged a defensive struggle.  But neither the union leadership nor the Communist Party of Canada combatted these contradictory tendencies politically, or mobilised support beyond the coalfields --- for Canadian independence, against further sellout etc. --- or otherwise divided the class enemy in advance of its mounting the attack. The issue was to mobilise the non-proletarian strata as an allied force; but consciousness of what role this could play was weak to non-existent. 

This had consequences. Eventually the Coady cooperative and credit union movement did indeed organise these sections of the people, especially in the fishery, and on an explicitly anti-communist basis.

The failure to appreciate, or lead the movement against, foreign dependency or dictate on the national scale increased the effects of the pressure from exceptionalist illusions, preparing conditions for more extensive conciliation and eventual capitulation.

 

 

 

13. Military space is an exception, in that its institutional form is co-terminus with all the forms available for people to participate.

 

14. There is some variety among the various permitted institutional forms and considerable overlapping of jurisdiction as well as many areas in which vacuums temporarily arise. Thus the political space in Canada is not at all co-terminus with its institutional components.

 

Most of the time, this made little or no apparent difference to outcomes in the political process. A great deal of activity in the political space was backstopped or openly dominated by the British Crown and its agents. Indeed, this remained formally the case until the Statute of Westminister in 1931. Before then, the official portion of the space was occupied by servants of, or collaborators with, British colonial and imperial interests. Afterwards, servants of, or collaborators with the interests of American corporations took their place. At the same time, however, this official portion of the political space could not, and did not, keep pace with the new and unanticipated demands of an expanding population of an increasingly variegated character as regards ethnic origin, mother-tongue, cultural background etc.

 

The American model marginalised the people from the polity by first formally defining them as the source of sovereignty --- but then filling the entire political space with institutional components whose legitimacy derives principally from their definition either in the federal Constitution and its amendments or in state constitutions. From this point, it was a simple matter to secure control of the institutional space thus defined, including all its offices, entirely and exclusively by the rich and the privileged. This was achieved by allowing private sources of wealth to be used or applied in unlimited ways for the purposes of capturing appointment to or control of these offices.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. The research and writing of these works started in the mid-1950s and finished in the mid-1960s. During that time, their author was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC). These volumes are not presented as the official line of the CPC on Canadian history. However, the party's publishing house, Progress Books, published them and retains rights as publisher over their content, including reproduction rights.

Between 1956 and the mid-1960s, the political line of the CPC on the struggle to achieve socialism in Canada underwent a fundamental shift. The notion that the working class would have to wield revolutionary violence to smash the capitalist state was banished. A declaration that socialism could be achieved in Canada on the peaceful and parliamentary road was substituted in its place. In this period, the theoretical justification for this position offered in CPC convention resolutions and other documents reflected the thinking of the leading group in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, led by Nikita Khrushchev before October 1964 and Leonid Brezhnev after.

The Soviet view had utterly abandoned the Marxist analysis of irreconcilable contradictions leading to a revolutionary rupture. Mikhail Suslov, leading ideologist for the group around N.S. Khrushchev, substituted various theses speculating about a possible tendency for contradictions between classes to diminish both under socialism within socialist countries, and even while the bourgeoisie retained power in capitalist countries. The Khrushchevites' notion that the social and political contradictions between fundamentally antagonistic classes might attenuate peacefully under certain special conditions, e.g., the danger of a final thermonuclear holocaust, found its echo in Ryerson's presentation of the relations between feudalism and mercantile capitalism throughout "The Founding of Canada".  The deceptiveness of this position, and consequent difficulty in isolating it as one of the central themes of the work, derive from one of two possible sources. Either there was a decision explicitly to avoid declaring such a theory, or at the very least there was a failure to appreciate its implications.   

On the eve of the October Revolution, in his classic "The State and Revolution", V.I. Lenin reaffirmed and re-established that the transition from the capitalist mode of social production to the socialist could not take place except by way of smashing the state apparatus of capitalism and imperialism using revolutionary violence. In this context, the Marxist position concerning the revolutionary character in general of each transition at every distinct stage of world-historical development, from one social mode of production to the next  was also reaffirmed and re-established.

Such transitions are fundamental precisely because they become irreversible. The irreversibility means that even if individual revolutions collapse or suffer defeat, the die is still cast as far as the future pattern of societal development as a whole is concerned. By definition, transitions of this kind cannot be evolutionary. That is, they cannot be completed or secured without violent collisions between the old and the new. Regardless of the fact that the tide has turned decisively against the old, in each specific circumstance, this conflict is a life-and-death struggle over which trend will prevail.

Ryerson's allegiance is nominally Marxist. But as his historical writing shows, in the context of a developed capitalist country such as Canada, he abandoned revolution or its historic prospect at this stage of history in favour of reformism. This abandonment was carried out in the teeth of ever-deepening revolutionary struggles against imperialist and colonial rule on the world scale.  Here lies the source of a fundamental conflict between Ryerson's responsibility on the one hand as an historian to tell the truth fully and frankly, with his responsibility as a Marxist on the other hand to account for development as the outcome, not of cringing in a bomb shelter waiting for The End, but rather of an irrepressible struggle between irreconcilable contradictions.

 

 

2.  Despite Ryerson's attempt to isolate the dynamics of the class struggles waged on the terrain of the New World from the conventional standpoint of the European colonisers, the  responses to the colonial system of the new social classes created in the process of the development of the capitalist social mode of production cannot be separated from the response of each of these classes to one another.

 

In Ryerson's view, the problem with conventional bourgeois historiography lay in its failure to isolate the responses of the new classes to the colonial system from their  responses to one another. He saw in this, however, only a suppression of the truth about something that was vital for the working and oppressed to know.

 

In fact, however, the problem lay in the incapacity of bourgeois historical method to comprehend:

 

a) that there were indeed two distinct but related processes at work (the response of the new social classes to their positions in the colonial system on the one hand, and their response to one another); and

 

b) that historical accuracy can only be approached by way of, first, an exegesis of each process separately, followed by a third step of synthesis in which the reality of the behaviour and outlook of a working class originating in alien, exogenously-stimulated acts of European settlement eventually became implanted and emerged objectively and unforced as the agency of its own further historical development.

 

Innis in particular, but also others specialising more narrowly on the West Country merchants, or the transatlantic slave trade or other individual pieces of the puzzle, left plenty of evidence "lying around" from which to begin to synthesise such an objective and unforced view. Unfortunately, no single atom in Ryerson's cranium seems ever to have encountered, or been affected by, dialectical and historical materialism as an actual method for examining and writing history in a scientific manner. He missed every one of the clues.

     

At the start of the 17th century, as certain as the rising of the sun tomorrow in the East, the merchants and the monarchy had fervently believed that the Newfoundland fishery was so perfectly suited to the needs and demands of merchant's capital that the possibility of development envisioning settlement seemed utterly precluded, and a recipe for gain without pain. Innis noted this --- as something fitting nicely into his own "Whig interpretation" of British history as the evolutionary unfolding of increasing human political and economic freedom ---but Ryerson identifies the source of the impulse to restrict settlement principally as a backward ideological artifact of feudal-monarchical outlook, completely bypassing why merchants as capitalists, not feudalists, could and would support and even insist upon such restriction. 

 

With the rise of intercolonial rivalry with France over control of North America, Newfoundland became locked in its course of development not only as the premiere, and monopolising, source of a single but highly lucrative staple product, but also a course of development that was inherently one-sided  and, inevitably, arrested. Innis recognises this downside, but serves up various liberal and ultimately unsatisfactory apologies for it; Ryerson pays this downside no attention whatsoever --- yet it is the key to the brutality of the merchants' yoke in Newfoundland over centuries.

 

The starting-point of the cycle that wound down to such a regressive conclusion, was, in its day, seemingly quite progressive. Innis and Ryerson agree on the progressive character of this starting-point; but where Innis tries to explain the colony's subsequent misfortune as that of a loser in the ever-stiffening international competition for ever-cheaper sources of protein, Ryerson counters with an ideological objection (to Innis' bourgeois liberalism) without undertaking what would be mandatory for any defender of dialectical and historical materialism, which would be to demonstrate how the later outcome was already foreshadowed in the starting-point and account for what happened by unravelling the steps and stages of the internal dialectical struggle between opposing tendencies.

 

The English dry fishery entailed the occupation of the shorelines and (especially in eastern, southern and southeastern Newfoundland) of the smaller bays and inlets that would later be known as "fishing rooms" and maintained by fishermen living permanently ashore, i.e., no longer coming out to Newfoundland only during the season. While those settling the "rooms" sought to annex the inshore fish supply and waters to the shore, the merchants operating fleets from the West Country strove in the opposite direction, to keep the shoreline annexed to the fishing waters. The acts of settlement, resisted by the authorities and subjected to all kinds of suppression by statute and brute force, could not be stopped. Innis sees in these differences only a difference of strategic aims among entrepreneurs and not the germ of what became a failed national struggle for independence; Ryerson does not see the dialectical struggle of opposites and therefore also fails to see the implications for any future struggle over  independence.

 

In fact, however, here was where a bitter class struggle was spawned against the dictate of merchant's capital. The merchants' retaliation against those defying their writ served from the outset to entrench the following two principles across the rest of the First British Empire (= the British colonial system before the Americans won their independence):

 

a) no further step would be taken in any English colonial enterprise in the new world --- be it exploration, investment or settlement --- that was not organised in advance to guarantee its backers a sizeable financial return; and

 

b) self-government was essential principally if not exclusively as the tool for establishing the supremacy of the possessors of capital and the subordination of all its servants, be they hired,  indentured or enslaved.

 

Innis is quite complacent about point (a), and silent about (b); whereas Ryerson acknowledges (b) only briefly in passing. And yet: it was precisely on the outcome of the struggle around the two principles taken together that the lives and livelihoods of Newfoundlanders would turn.

 

In Newfoundland's case the first principle --- "making colonies pay" --- was applied in such a way that the entire colony was subjugated for centuries by a clique whose sole interest was to catch codfish near its shores, dry it on its shores, and take it away to sell elsewhere and keep all the profit.

 

Outside Newfoundland, application of the first principle led (among other things) to Canadian capitalists annexing their interests and capital early to British banks and American industrial entrepreneurs so that Canadian colonisation would pay.

 

The second principle was applied inside Newfoundland in such a way that once the merchants controlling the sole means of livelihood in the colony obtained a licence from the British overlords to run a government, they used it to plunder everyone in the colony on the basis of stripping them of anything not anchored to the ground while reserving the protection of private property under the law exclusively to themselves.

 

Indeed, once the St. John's merchants acquired their own legislature under so-called "responsible government" after 1832, they immediately set about using it to foment sectarian Protestant-Catholic warfare and bloodshed in the outports and intensify police and judicial interference in people's daily lives as the price the fishermen and their families would have to pay for the privilege of supplying these merchants' every whim. As the colony recovered from the 1837 crash,  wages were briefly re-introduced in the fishery with the aim of attracting more fishermen to settle in the outports; after 1846, on the excuse that abolition of the English Corn Laws had raised the cost to the St John's merchants of importing necessaries from England, the Assembly abolished wages and converted the now-entrapped population into debt slaves dependent on merchant-scrip, a company store and the annual "tally" (debiting fishermen's accounts for merchant-rated "expenses" such that no cash ever reached the fisherman).

 

It was precisely in this, and 1,001 other, examples of petty oppression that  commercial colonisation in the Newfoundland fishery produced conditions of life which would remain static, extremely backward, impoverished and brutalised for centuries. Indeed, by the 19th century, in starkest contrast to the wealth and sophistication of the metropolises (such as London), living standards in colonial Newfoundland had fallen behind even the poorest rural districts of the British Isles.

 

This result, however, was exactly the opposite of what would happen in the New England and southern-plantation colonies, where commercial colonisation was pursued with zest up until the independence war but where attempts to restrict settlement were largely abandoned after the 1630s.

 

 

3. Notwithstanding the correctness of Ryerson's criticism of Innis for ignoring class and property relationships, the fact is that Ryerson consistently and repeatedly reifies --- freezes in time ---  class and property relationships. This creates a number of ahistorical and anachronistic distortions that lend many of his deductive-theoretical passages in both Founding of Canada and Unequal Union an unmistakably "forced" character.

 

On no matter is this more blatant than his discussions at various points of factors he says contribute to the development of a "home market" in Canada. In fact, what he has to say under this rubric is about "markets" neither in the sense understood by classical political economy nor neoclassical, conventional-bourgeois economics. Rather it is about the hunt for that endangered species, spotted less often than the sasquatch, known as the "Canadian national bourgeois" or "national capitalist". Like the bwana in charge of some National Geographic expedition to an unexplored African savannah, Ryerson has no qualms about dragging his reader through deepest pre-capitalist pre-modern Canada to announce sightings in the most unexpected places.

 

Starting in New France in the 18^th century before the Conquest, Ryerson cites wheat grain raised on Isle Royale [Cape Breton Island] near Fort Louisbourg being transported to and sold in New France, and iron being forged in the St.-Maurice valley north of Trois-Rivières for a contract to construct ships of the line at Sorel for the French navy, as examples of commodity exchange giving rise to a "home market". Of course, it becomes almost embarrassing to have to point it out, but the significant feature of a home market is not its locale. Rather, it is that it become self-sustaining. Subsidies from the Quartermaster of the King's Armies or frrom the Departement de la Marine in Paris, 4000 km distant on another continent, do not a self-sustaining institution make. It is just as embarrassing to have to add that a "market" where occasional bits of temporarily surplus produce, one-off specialty items (even if forged from cast-iron) and perhaps a few handcrafted items of general household utility turn up is neither a forbear of, nor bear any relationship whatsoever to, a marketplace supplied continuously with finished products from factory industry. Yet, these are typical of how Ryerson "forces" the analysis so that the available evidence can be cited as proofs of a "home market".

 

Extending his trademark mechanical "Marxism" into the era of Victorian industrialism, Ryerson expends prodigious energies in Unequal Union, concocting a "home market" for nascent "Canadian capitalists". A home market has to be invented to justify the rise of a local bourgeoisie not tied to Britain's apron strings. Now in this case there is indeed a home market, but Ryerson does not analyse the significance of the fact that a home market for domestic manufactures opened in Canada mainly as a fortuitous byproduct of the combined impact of English colonial protection within the contradictions of the North American context. Imported British manufactures and other finished goods were outrageously overpriced, while cheaper American substitutes remained shut out. Hence this "home market" originated in a temporary disjuncture. Here, and not in industrialisation, lay the origin of protective instincts within Canadian capitalism. Not surprisingly, this "home market" became neither entrenched nor a serious competitor against the pull of the external markets. Instead, it developed as a reserve of those whose position in the external market was unstable or not sufficiently secured.  

 

Throughout the nineteenth century, it was extremely expensive for farmers to move their products to markets either elsewhere in Canada or in the United States. The capitalist mercantile elements parasitising off the farmers' difficult condition, meanwhile, favoured protection. Such were the conditions in which farmers demanded free trade. Before the American Civil War, capitalists in Canadian industry who saw only very limited markets in Canada and Britain gambled everything on selling in the U.S. and  also supported free trade. Thus, the bourgeoisie was divided between annexationists and colonial protectionists. Opposed as a class to colonial protection, the farmers entered Canadian political life initially under the wing of the annexationist element.

 

The sections of the population that were objectively interested in national independence --- the working class and the native peoples --- were completely disenfranchised.  After the Civil War, U.S. markets for industrial goods became ringed on the one hand with many forms of protection and intent on the other hand on attaching Canada to itself as economic territory. Canadian industrialists responded by using the new colonial state machinery acquired under Confederation to develop a competing "National Policy" with protective barriers against U.S. goods --- coupled with a back-door invitation for U.S. investment to leap the barrier and establish enterprises within Canada.    

 

In the teeth of all this evidence (and much, much more) to the contrary, Ryerson wants there to be a Canadian bourgeoisie with some basis, e.g. a home market, of material interest in national independence giving rise to a Canadian proletariat. The bourgeoisie wanted "their own" state. But they wanted only such state machinery as the augmentation of maximum surplus-value in minimum time would require. This included only the most minimal restrictions on the source or basis of one's capital, and measures incorporating as part of "Canadian" law any special privileges brought by capitalists from any other part of the British Empire. Such was the "nationalism" of the Tory party under John A. MacDonald. The Liberals took up the cudgels for the pro-U.S. annexationist, farming and anti-British colonial elements whose interests were not being served by the Conservatives. However, over the actual principle of national sovereignty or independence there were no substantive differences within the bourgeoisie --- neither in the 1840s nor following the American Civil War --- because no section of their class contemplated or had any interest in such a thing.

 

Of course, formal democracy in Canada is bourgeois, stemming from the capitalist economic order already in place. But it was truncated and oligarchic by virtue of the colonial circumstances of its birth. So there has been no vesting of sovereignty in the people --- either in the 1830s, or the 1840s, or in 1867 or since --- and this polity cannot be categorised even formally as "democracy." The bourgeois parliamentarism of its provisions for self-government (in the form of so-called "responsible government") was never about even creating space for a rising capitalist class to advance a bourgeois democratic agenda à la the "classical" line of political-economic development seen in Great Britain. It was about retaining oligarchic domination that would keep the masses of the population without any independent voice.

 

In Canada, national sovereignty and independence have never been on the agenda of the bourgeoisie. On the world scale, until the Second World War, there remained various corners of the world in which the bourgeoisie defended or could still defend the interests of the nation against foreign imperialist pressure or dictate. But in Canada, from the outset of formal political independence following the American Civil War, the bourgeoisie ceased even potentially to be a class that could inscribe this on its banner and lead the fight for such a thing. Since the end of the Second World War, only the working class has been in a position to lead the struggle for genuine national independence and full economic as well as political sovereignty. This remains the case to date. Life under the continuously expanding U.S. imperialist dictate poses the profoundest questions in daily life of genuine national independence and sovereignty in this country, and the bourgeoisie spends more and more time and energy diverting the working class and people from taking these questions up for solution. 

 

Ryerson detaches the bourgeoisie in Canada from the world imperialist bourgeoisie --- of which it has formed a component part since the nineteenth century. His analysis does not appreciate the role and impact of the struggle of peoples and nations for their national and social liberation from the world imperialist system on the Canadian bourgeoisie as part of this international oppressor class. It is not now and has never been the case that the Canadian bourgeoisie "vacillated" or "wavered" on the issue of complete economic as well as political independence. Rather, such independence has never been in its interest as a ruling class.

 

Hence, it has never occupied either a potential or actual leading position on this question. Nor has it occupied a position where the working class could push or compel it to lead on this question. Either the workers take the lead and solve this problem or the country continues to sink into ever deeper economic and political dependence on foreign, mainly U.S., imperialism. This was also the case in the years preceding Great Depression before 1929, when British imperialism dominated the Canadian economy and polity, as well as throughout the interwar period when U.S. imperialism vied with British interests for control of the "commanding heights" of the Canadian economy, starting with manufacturing investment, and in 1926 overtook them. And it was a pattern that was already in place by the time --- the start of a 23-year depression in 1873 --- at which the narrative of Unequal Union breaks off.

 

 

4. In Unequal Union, Ryerson gives an interpretation of the failure of the 1837 rebellion in Lower Canada which reveals how far down the road to class conciliation he had gone. He ascribes the damage done the Patriote cause to the vacillation of certain mercantile and bourgeois elements, but blames the overall failure of the rebellion on "lack of unity", i.e. the refusal of most of the merchants to participate in any way, even passively, on the side of rebellion.

He ascribes the brutality of the British suppression to the counter-revolutionary paranoia of colonial rule, without pausing to ask how far the authorities went in getting Quebeckers to spy and report on fellow Quebeckers or any other oppressive features of colonial rule irrespective of the atmosphere that may have preceded the 1837 rebellion.   

British conquest and occupation in Quebec was repressive and anti-people. However, instead of specifying this unavoidable and bare-faced reality and examining its implications, Ryerson confines himself to questioning how democratic the Assembly of Lower Canada could be. His capitulation is all the more craven for being dressed up as an allegedly Marxist analysis of the balance of class forces in the Assembly.

 

 

5.  This calls for a more extended remark about English colonial brutality after Culloden.

Bourgeois historians admit to brutal military methods being deployed in North America during the eighteenth century. This is principally in connection with campaigns to suppress native peoples.

However, this admission glosses over some notable shifts in the particular tactics and approaches deployed by colonial forces in particular circumstances.

In this connection, the behaviour of English troops in North America after the British victory at Culloden needs further elaboration, especially the  treatment of native peoples and Acadian settlers in the middle third of the 18th century.

There were two very different kinds of colonial military intervention. On the one hand, there were the set-piece battles between the armed forces of rival English and French monarchies. The directing interest of these battles was that of the aristocracy. During such occasions, the interests of the bourgeoisie - the landlords and merchants in England - played little or no role in determining or implementing tactics on the ground.

On the other hand, there was an entirely separate class of deployments of armed force, whose modus operandi suggests a different directing interest. The Acadians and the Mi'kmaq were targeted and attacked according to the interests of a rapacious and acquisitive bourgeoisie, declaring its proprietary interest and deploying military force to terrorise and intimidate possible other pretenders and competitors into submission.

The first battle which provided a major dress rehearsal for this latter type of intervention was the campaign led by "Butcher" Cumberland, brother of King George II, against the Scots highlanders at Culloden in 1745.

In this campaign, the aristocratic interest was to defeat once and for all any further, future attempts by France to threaten the unity of the kingdom through Scotland. The bourgeois landlord interest was to seize the lands and territories of the traditional clans system as private property. This interest dictated deploying the most brutal treatment against the highlanders - gratuitous and excessive violence, torture, etc. The bourgeois interest was to disabuse the highlanders permanently of any further notion that these lands could remain outside the realm of private capitalist property or be permitted any kind of exceptional treatment any longer.

From that point, the scale of the victory that would stem from this collaboration and coordination of class interests transformed the English attitude towards deploying military force in general. Its usefulness for appropriating the rest of North America from the French was self-evident: it was especially useful for reforging and strengthening links between American colonists and the British troops deployed in their territory. The colonists soon sought and-or found ways of deploying these forces in the service of their own purely acquisitive interests --- against native populations, against New France, against Acadia.

The brutality deployed by such forces reflected the bourgeois view that colonial territory not already administered under British institutions represented property for the taking, as much a "free good" as the beaver or the codfish. Terror was considered a useful and necessary means for teaching interlopers the lesson not to mess with Britain or its colonists.

American historians in particular have achieved something of a coup over the generations in suggesting the behaviour of the English troops was excessive only in response to the irregular methods of warfare deployed by the native people. In this view, the evidently brutal treatment of the Acadians has always been treated as a "mistake" and a "tragedy," rather than the normal outgrowth of a conscious policy based in very definite class interests.

Bourgeois historiography for many years stressed the "professional experience" --- as "Indian fighters," or at Culloden --- of key members of the British military officer class despatched for service in North America. Generals Wolfe and Murray had been at Culloden. Col. Jeffrey Amherst, the main military advisor to Governor Lawrence in Nova Scotia, launched his career by putting smallpox in blankets traded to native tribes in Pennsylvania.  

But in fact the issue was not their professional-ism but rather their ruthlessness and readiness to commit themselves to any outrage in the service of the interests of private property. And it is on this point in particular, of all possible points, that Stanley Ryerson, professional historian and member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Canada, completely misses the significance of British military brutality in North America during England's "first empire."

 

 

6. Ryerson falls into the trap laid by the bourgeois historians when he reproduces the British colonial authorities' references to "Protestant" and "Catholic" before the Conquest as though this was a factor in the Acadians' plight. This is part of a larger error of interpretation concerning the material basis of Church-State relations following the Conquest.

In the context of refuting the establishment view among bourgeois historians as late as 1959 --- that the British Conquest had imposed "ordered and rational liberty" on les canadiens (F. Parkman) --- Ryerson stresses two points:

a) that various sections of Quebec society came repeatedly into conflict with the colonial administration erected by the conqueror over the British refusal to extend to Quebec either the rights to or forms of self-government which were long accepted and functioning effectively throughout the Thirteen Colonies; and

b) that beneath the colonial rulers' cant about preserving the rights of the population to their own (Catholic) religious institutions, what actually took place was that Church made itself available to, and was used by, the conqueror as a prop of its overall colonial aims and rule, especially its growing concern about the centrifugal, independence-minded tendencies throughout the Thirteen Colonies.

Later (especially in Unequal Union), Ryerson presents the Patriotes and the Rouges as inheritors of the oppositional trend that began in the 1760s. However, this interpretation subtly re-casts the "edge"of his initial characterisation of Church-State relations in Quebec following the Conquest, such that anti-clericalism in Quebec by the 19th century is increasingly viewed or explained as the opposition of a rising Québécois bourgeoisie to a feudal vestige or throwback.

There was an element of this opposition  which such a characterisation accurately described, but it was not, and could not be, accurate as a general description, because it lops off the historical origin precisely of the post-Conquest layer of contradictions between the Church and the Quebec people. This layer of conflicts was essentially anti-imperialist.    

Here we have yet another example of Ryerson's tendency to substitute "peaceful transitions" for contradictions of an irreconcilable class character. And once again, it serves not only to misrepresent class struggle in general, but also to conceal key features that would otherwise serve to account for the ongoing, essentially anti-imperialist, character of that social movement into the present day. In general, the most significant of these concealed and unexplained features is that of foreign colonialism and imperialism as entrenched elements of Canada's internal political and economic order. Ryerson misses in particular the fact that special role of the Quebec Church as a prop of the British-imposed colonial order at once served to entrench British colonialism in Quebeckers' lives, even as the hierarchs decked themselves out as the "protectors" of the "social," i.e., extra-parliamentary, non-governmental, interests of the Quebec people.    

The most enlighterned operators among the ruling elites deliberately substituted the Rouges' opposition to the Church's ongoing assumption of special privileges as a feudal vestige for the anti-imperialist opposition of the Patriotes to the Church hierarchy as traitors to the popular interest in full independence from colonialism. This ensured that the "opposition" thereafter became containable and "loyal" in the usual British mould. In this connection, it was extremely convenient that the Church, through the ultramontane elements of the hierarchy, kept up the pressure on the Rouges as "dangerous anti-clericals."