Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

James Naylor. The Fate of Labour Socialism: The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and the Dream of a Working-Class Future.

2017; Oxford University Press; Volume: 122; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ahr/122.4.1200

1937-5239

T. Stephen Henderson,

Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

For a party of the left, Canada’s Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and its successor, the New Democratic Party (NDP), have enjoyed significant goodwill, if not necessarily electoral support, from Canadians. One of its most successful leaders, Tommy Douglas—the grandfather of actor Kiefer Sutherland—was chosen as the “Greatest Canadian” in a television poll in 2004, based in part on his role in helping to establish universal health insurance in Saskatchewan and, subsequently, Canada. The CCF/NDP has been called “the conscience of Canada,” so it is interesting that, according to James Naylor in The Fate of Labour Socialism: The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and the Dream of a Working-Class Future, the party began with a coup. The CCF was formed over the course of two conferences held in cities that were faltering during the Great Depression: at Calgary in 1932 and at Regina in 1933, where its foundational manifesto was approved. It was a federation of labor and farmer organizations from western Canada, working with the League for Social Reconstruction (LSR), a small group of middle-class social democrats. The Regina Manifesto, largely written by a university professor from the LSR, criticized the patent failures of capitalism, but committed the CCF to electoral politics and said very little about class. In the 1960s and 1970s, historians of the CCF focused on the manifesto, the LSR, and the Social Gospel tradition of the federation’s first leader, James S. Woodsworth. Sympathetic writers described earnest social reformers hoping to soften the features of capitalism and redistribute wealth through state ownership of key industries; cynics called the CCF “Liberals in a hurry” (9), suggesting that the naïveté of its members was the only significant difference between this social democratic party and Canada’s two liberal capitalist parties. Naylor makes a strong case that the CCF, at its heart, at least, was a working-class, Marxist movement, but that it was waylaid by reformers seeking election.