Ian McKay

The Canadian passive revolution, 1840-1950

‘Passive revolution’, understood here as a specific moment of global capitalism, provides an indispensable key to Canadian history, especially that unfolding from the 1840s (when seigneurs, Tories, agrarian radicals and democrats were forcibly unified through a top-down, British-orchestrated administrative revolution) to the 1940s (when plutocrats, Liberals and Conservatives, trade unionists and social democrats were forcibly unified through the imposition of a top-down, Ottawa-orchestrated Fordist compromise). The ‘long Confederation’ of Canada, from 1841 to 1949, was in Marxist terms a social revolution, entailing the subordination of non-capitalist and proto-capitalist formations, through which northern North America was liberalised; yet this ‘active’ achievement of a liberal order was also ‘passive’ insofar as it constituted a strengthening of Britain’s imperial power; subdued, transformed and incorporated subaltern movements; and culminated in a new socioeconomic order that integrated Canadian producers into continental and global circuits of capital while denying them any de facto sovereignty over ‘their’ state.

Liberalism: Contradictions and Counterhistories

How might we imagine a leftism appropriate to the 21st century? Since the 1940s, one powerful way of grappling with this question has been to pose it in terms of the relationship between ‘liberals’ and ‘Marxists,’ often interpreted as rival inheritors of the Enlightenment project. Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History, which came out in Italy in 2005 and in English translation in 2011, appears at a particularly auspicious moment. Losurdo (b. 1941) is a prolific Italian philosopher whose writings include major studies of Hegel, Heidegger and Nietzsche (Losurdo 2001, 2004; see Thomas 2005) as well as controversial writings on communism (Losurdo 1999, 2006a, 2006b, 2007; see also Wolfe 2012.) He notes that he is writing a ‘counter-history’ – examining not ‘liberal thought in its abstract purity’, but actually existing liberalism with its triple paradox of ‘liberal slavery, liberal empire and liberal authoritarianism’ (Rooksby 2012: 3). He disdains three conventional escape-hatches liberals use when pondering their own history: a ‘vulgar historicist’ recourse to a vaguely described ‘spirit of the times’ (p. 79); the treatment of such enormities as coerced labour as mere holdovers from pre-liberal eras; and strategic minimisations of one period’s contradictions through invocations of their painless resolution in the next. Instead, looking at liberalism over a long run of about 250 years – there is little here post-1914, and almost nothing post-1945 – Losurdo exposes what he believes to be the tradition’s leading theme: its exclusivity. For Losurdo, liberalism can be defined in terms of its structuring ‘exclusion clauses’, whereby people of colour, labourers, and women were all shut out from full membership, each exclusion operating with its ‘peculiar characteristics’, but all of them working to restrict liberal freedom to a minority (p. 181). Liberal intellectuals often ‘spatialised’ the ideals they revered, defending liberty at the core of empire, yet justifying oppression and slavery in the colonies.1 Losurdo thinks such liberal boundary-drawing raises a point of philosophical significance. It was an ‘integral part’ of the ‘self-celebration of the community of the free’ that it should consider many of the excluded (especially colonised peoples without or 551268 CNC0010.1177/0309816814551268Capital & ClassExtended book reviews research-article2014

Feature review: Our awkward ancestors: Trotsky, Gramsci and the challenge of reconnaissance: Emanuele Saccarelli Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism: The Political Theory and Practice of Opposition, Routledge: London, 2008; 312 pp.: 9780415873383, £26.99 (pbk)

Socialists of the 21st century live in a world undergoing two connected and epochal capitalist revolutions: neoliberal globalization and environmental transformation. Spatially limited and temporally restricted approaches, i.e. the familiar liberal panoply of ‘practical’ and ‘partial’ responses to these interlocked revolutions, are transparently inadequate when measured against crises that challenge the sustainability of human civilisation. A new socialism that takes the survival of humanity itself as its categorical imperative must necessarily actualise Marx’s theoretical vision of a rational and just regulation of humankind’s metabolism with the natural world. Yet as soon as this socialist imperative is voiced, it is as quickly muffled by the bloodied weight of socialist history, with its failed states and post-Bolshevik disillusionment. In Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism, Emanuele Saccarelli captures something of this predicament when he writes that the ‘proverbial elephant in the room’ confronting leftists is the legacy of Stalinism: ‘Any reconsideration of Marxism seeking to do more than provide yet another interpretive riff on various texts must account for this reality’ (p. 11). One important term bearing on this mission, bequeathed to posterity by Antonio Gramsci, was ‘reconnaissance’ (Gramsci, 1971: 238, Q7§16): an accurate, rigorous and historically informed analysis of each country we hope to revolutionise and (by extension) the international socialist movement we hope to inherit, critique, and transform. It is a Gramscian metaphor that nicely unifies urgency, realism, and collectivism: there is a real world, understandable through shared categories of analysis and empirical explorations,