Front Matter: Change and Crisis

Introduction to 2022 issue.

Ideas in Context: a Conversation with Frank Cunningham

Moderated by Elaine Coburn, Harry Glasbeek, Meg Holden, Charles Mills and Frank Cunningham presented a symposium on Frank's book Ideas in Context May 29, 2021 for the Society of Socialist Studies. Now shared here in written form, the symposium includes what may have been the last contribution of Charles Mills, a friend of half of a century to Frank, known for his generosity of spirit and his trenchant theorizing of racial justice (Mills 1997).

Free Trade

Reflections from the front lines of the free trade struggles.

Libre-Échange

En fraçaise.

Reflections on the Struggle Against the Free Trade Agreement (FTA), Three Decades On

Dr. William K. Carroll responds to questions posed by the Editors regarding his reflections on the struggle against the FTA, three decades on.

Canada's National Questions, Free Trade and the Left

It is now more than 30 years since the launch of the bilateral:anada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (CUFTA), predecessor to the multilateral North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the (now abandoned) Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). For a generation, these "free trade" initiatives provided an important part of the framework in which political movements developed in Canada, engendering debates and controversies which continue to this day. When a new moment of trade politics emerged with Donald Trump's challenge to NAFTA, some veterans from those earlier anti-free trade battles were unable to see the new, white nationalist terrain upon which Trump was operating. This article - organized principally around the author's own engagement with the anti-free trade movements of the 1980s - suggests that this inability to see clearly the new context of anti-free trade politics was rooted in the incomplete and contradictory left-nationalist theory which underpinned most anti-free trade politics of that earlier era. The article suggests that while there are national questions in Canada - in particular those associated with Indigenous peoples and with Quebec - the attempt to articulate a parallel "national question" in Canada as a whole has proven to be impossible.

Reflections on the Struggle Against the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (TFA), 30 Years Later

The implementation of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (CUSFTA) in January 1989 marked a decisive moment in the rise of neoliberalism as a political project in Canada. While the left, and socialist political economists in particular, played a central role in galvanizing the agreement and contributed in no small part to the demise of the Conservative government in 1993, the free trade agenda continued to move forward through the 1990s. This Special Issue revisits the history of struggles against free trade in Canada with two aims in mind: first to remember the coalitions through which opposition was organized, the mobilization of socialist critiques by activists and intellectuals, and the key events leading up to the adoption of the agreement. Second, drawing from this history to make sense of how things have changed over the past 30 years, as right-wing nationalists have increasingly taken the lead in opposing free trade, while neoliberals have sought to rebrand their project as ‘progressive’. How can those on the left effectively confront the project of free trade today while at the same time challenging both far-right nationalism and neoliberal globalization?

Confronting Power, Money, and Most Economists

The Canadian anti-free trade movement was a genuine ‘movement’ that originated locally in many different places throughout the country and was soon consolidated in a loose coalition at the national level. It was extraordinary for several reasons. First, it brought together a large number of groups that had never worked with each other before and their coalitions were strong and effective. Second, it was a movement based on class issues and was understood that way by its leaders and most of those who participated in it. Third, it democratized thinking and knowledge about economic policy, and this, in turn, meant that many groups and issues that were normally absent from a discussion of macro-economic policy, became central to the debate. Fourth, the anti-free trade movement grew in relation to the specific issues of regions and groups but the critical arguments that developed over time focused on the problems of having market mechanisms dominate both the economic and social spheres. This scrutiny and discussion of the market system itself has not been replicated in debates on any subsequent major policy issue.

Interview with C.B. Macpherson on the COVID-19 Pandemic

In 1983 (on the Centenary of Karl Marx’s death) the Canadian Society for Socialist Studies enlisted me to interview C.B. Macpherson about the continuing significance of Marx’s theories, and it has occurred that I might interview him again now about the relevance of his own views to the social and political ramifications of the current epidemic. A problem is that Macpherson died a few years after the earlier interview. However, luckily and likely in virtue of a just published book by me on his political thought, Macpherson’s ghost has agreed to the interview that follows.

C.B. Macpherson on Marxism and the Eighties

This is a reproduction of the Interview of C.B.Macpherson done by Frank Cunningham for Socialist Studies, 1983, pp 7-12.