Stanley Brehaut Ryerson
Encyclopedia
Stanley Brehaut Ryerson was a Canadian
historian, educator, political activist. There is very little information available concerning his parents, but Ryerson was born in 1911, into a well-off middle class family in Toronto
. Ryerson could trace his paternal lineage back to Egerton Ryerson
, the “Pope of Methodism
” in nineteenth century Toronto, and to William McDougall
, one of the Fathers of Confederation
; and, on his mother’s side, he was related to Louis Antoine Brehaut de l’Isle, French Commander at Trois-Rivières in 1638.
in Paris
in 1931. While attending classes towards a Diplomes d’Etudes Superieures with a thesis on the writings of Sicilian peasant-realist novelist Giovanni Verga
, Ryerson involved himself in communist activities. While travelling through Europe, he experienced the political turmoil within Spain and Italy during the early depression years, and while in Paris he took part in the funeral procession of the last survivor of the Paris Commune
of 1871 a Z. Camelinat. On this day in 1932, while marching with 200,000 others to Pere Lachaise cemetery, Ryerson felt a fierce wave of connection with the French Left. His experiences in Europe affected his vision of the capitalist world and he would write:
"the realization that the cultural values of art and literature were being turned by capitalism into what I can only describe as spiritual onanism and the discovery that communism, by solving the material problems of society, was the only path to a future creative renaissance, was the first impulse."
Europe was the scene of his birth as a communist; Canada was the scene of his growth into a renowned historian and communist intellectual.
, at least in the 1930s and 40s lacked a connection to the Canadian middle class
as well as intellectual
s; with his return to Canada, Ryerson would become a symbol of the party’s appeal to this segment of society. Ryerson “was not the only traditional intellectual to join the CPC, but he was one of the first and undoubtedly was to become the most important.” The Communist parties of Great Britain and the United States of America, as well as many other nations, could count numerous artists and intellectuals as members from the 1930s on; but in Canada, Ryerson was a lonely figure. His position within the CPC, including his rapid rise in the party hierarchy and his presence on the Central Committee
(CC) until 1969, was assured by his unique position; a position that allowed him to play a role within the “political history of Canadian Communism unlike that of his American and British counterparts.” He was a middle class school boy from a privileged background in an overwhelmingly proletarian organisation, and as such his presence within the CPC did not always meet with approval. But, his education made him an asset for the party, one that would come in handy in the years to come.
historian and it was here that Ryerson was too find his voice. The Canadian bourgeoisie’s dismissal of Communism generally states that it is an alien importation and as such has no basis within Canadian society. By stressing the progressive nature of the Canadian past, the CPC hoped to prove the validity of its existence within Canadian society. During this period, numerous articles and pamphlets were published by the CPC, but it was not until the 1937 publication of Stanley Ryerson’s 1837-The Birth of Canadian Democracy, that the full Marxist analysis of the on the 1837 Rebellions would appear. 1837 should be viewed as a work of Marxist historiography
written for a working-class audience and not for academia; since Ryerson wrote this book so it could be used as a weapon in the struggle of working people to build a qualitatively different and better world. Ryerson’s rationale for writing this book, as was the rationale for all his works, can be best summarised as an exploration of Canadian history with the hopes of educating the working-class, in a sense it was an exercise in the raising of class consciousness.
The choice of the title for this book is in itself an interesting by-product of the 1930s Popular Front
activities of the CPC. Dedicated to the soldiers of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion
fighting in the Spanish Civil War
in defence of Republican Spain
, this book was written in the hope of redefining the context of revolution. Ryerson referred to the cause of 1837 as the cause of democracy; his decision to place the word in the title of his book, was done with the hope of suggesting that this referred “to both bourgeois liberalism that will supplant the remnants of feudal oligarchy and the ultimate vision of equality in the classless society brought about by the proletarian revolution.” Doyle contended it was Ryerson’s aim to redefine “democracy,” and the way in which we refer to the events of 1837 and the idea of revolution in general.
Tim Buck
along with Sam Carr
and Charles Sims fled Canada for the safety of New York where they would reside under the protection of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). The leadership of the now underground party was placed in the hands of an Operations Centre, which was headed by Stewart Smith
, Leslie Morris
, and Stanley Ryerson. This new leadership decided upon a slogan for the CPC’s anti-war protests: “Withdraw from the British Empire
.” Signalling a more radical approach to their anti-Imperialist
protesting, the Operations Centre authorised Stanley Ryerson to write and publish two pamphlets in Quebec. French-Canada, A Nation in Bondage and French-Canada and the War, described the French Canada as a subjugated nation held in colonial slavery to English Canadian rulers, who were acting as surrogates for the real rulers in Britain. This new approach to the issue of French Canada enabled Ryerson to develop close contacts among important nationalists who opposed the war. With the German invasion of the Soviet Union
in July, 1941 the CPC’s stance on the war changed quickly. Now that they supported the war, Tim Buck called Ryerson, Smith, and Morris before a CC meeting held on January 22 and 23, 1943. During this meeting, Buck assailed the position of Ryerson, which had become the position of the CPC during their anti-war period. According to Buck, “English-Canada as a nation does not oppress French-Canada, nor impose inequality upon it. The national inequality from which the workers and farmers of Quebec suffer, is a heritage of the past.”
published, Ryerson’s French Canada: A Study in Canadian Democracy. Within the pages of French Canada, Ryerson set out his vision of their continuous fight for freedom in the face of colonial servitude. He also emphasised the common aims of French and English Canadians in the pursuit of freedom in the capitalist and colonial systems. Although researched and mostly written while Ryerson was occupied with the direction of the underground party, French Canada was a careful and provocative analysis of Quebec’s social and political history.
French Canada aimed at encouraging the development of a sense of national pride and unity among Canadians during the years of World War II
. Ryerson put forth a socio-economic analysis of the Quebec and in turn educated most English-speaking Canadians about a region they knew very little about. As a sequel to 1837, Ryerson’s French Canada revealed “the militant spirit of democracy among French Canadians” in the hopes of uniting “them with their Anglophone compatriots.” Ryerson did follow a certain “great man” approach to history when, in the early chapters, he emphasized the heroes “who struggled for self-determination and/or Canadian unity”; this approach was complemented by an emphasis on “the Quebec masses and their rise out of feudal subjugation toward political power.” Very much the Historical Materialist, Ryerson viewed the previous administrations of Quebec as working with representatives of English Canada and international capitalism to keep Quebec in economic subservience. Ryerson believed, “The Toronto Tory and the Quebec corporatist meet on common ground: hostility to the democratic peoples’ movement, [and] denial of our democratic heritage.” Following on his contentions laid out in 1837, Ryerson viewed the failure of English Canada to recognise their connection to French Canada and to fight hand in hand for the fullest democratic rights of the minority nation only served to deepen the power of reactionary influences and limit Canadian democracy and unity in general.
French Canada was a by-product of World War II
and should be viewed as such. It was full of optimism about the prospects of an Allied
victory in the war against international fascism and a transformed world capable of bringing about the complete elimination of the conditions that gave rise to fascism and to the prospect of war. Although this book is full of optimism about a possible future world, Ryerson did not envision a Communist future for Canada and instead placed the LPP as an important part of post-war Canada, but not a defining movement or a dominant party. Ryerson’s vision did not come to pass, but his analysis of the political perspicacity of working-class Quebec was groundbreaking as it came during a time when most writers tended to view “Quebec as either a quaint or lamentable anachronism.” French Canada gave its readers a remarkably modern and hopeful image of French-Canadian society.
. He wrote “Marxism holds that it is the people who make history-their labor and their struggles and their dreams; and that these are understandable and have meaning when seen in their real setting….” He added, “Labor, production, the real relationships of living society: this is the point of departure for historical materialism….Thought and feelings, ideas and passion and imagination have their being in a material world, are conditioned by it, work upon it.” Ryerson’s approach to history is that of a man who sees the struggles and ideas of people as the driving force behind history. He did not believe they operate within a vacuum but within a given social system. Ryerson recognised the interplay of freedom and necessity within the development of history “as it is in the best Marxist historical writing.”
Following on the tradition of viewing his writings as a mode of class consciousness, The Founding of Canada was written very much as a popular Marxist introduction to Canadian History. This book offered very little new material and was instead more of a shifting in emphasis for Ryerson. This shift in emphasis stemmed primarily from Ryerson’s interest in prehistory and Soviet anthropology; this shift in emphasis is best illustrated by the six chapters on pre-European-contact Canada. This work was not a complete shift of emphasis; Ryerson still dealt with the issue of exploitation and freedom. He believed “[t]he weight of ‘official’ historiography has hitherto been heavily on the side of efforts to smother the facts of exploitation,” and because of this “[t]he idyllic patriarchal picture of these times that has become traditional, is a piece of flagrant deception.”
Unequal Union has been seen as the more adventuresome of these two works. It focused on only 60 years, rather than the 300-year scope of The Founding of Canada, and it discussed more deeply the events after the War of 1812
leading up to the expansion of confederation in 1870. In this work, Ryerson turned to an analysis of land and land-holding as he recognises the importance of land to the colonial ruling-class. Gregory Kealey felt Ryerson overextended himself in his argument that the land-monopoly represented a “sort of commercialised feudalism” which “loomed as the dominating problem before the Canadas.” But Ryerson’s analysis of the 1837 Rebellions held true for Kealey, as he agrees with the classical Marxist formulation, that “potential production forces were stifled by dominant property relations; and as long as the latter couldn’t be broken down progress remained illusory.” Therefore, the rebellions of 1837 were an effort to break the “rule of a landlord-merchant oligarchy,” blocking the development of industrial capitalism.
The notion of Freedom has been of paramount concern for Ryerson, whether it is the freedom of French Canadians or the freedom of the working class in general, Ryerson has consistently built his arguments around the notion of freedom. In his philosophical work, The Open Society: Paradox and Challenge, published in 1965 outside of the CPC’s press, Ryerson discussed his vision of an open and free society. The crux of his argument is found in the issue of freedom; he saw the past as “an evolution of people in society, marked by harsh conflict of contending classes and national forces, generating a progression toward greater freedom.” The driving force behind all of society is the nature of class existence and each struggle the oppressed class wages brings it closer to freedom. According to Ryerson, and many other Marxist thinkers, the ability to breakthrough to a more open society will come about from the “dispelling of the fog of false consciousness, [the] gaining for ourselves a true recognition of the real nature of the existing social structure.”
where he taught French studies at Sir George Williams University. Ryerson had been working very closely with the CPC and in 1935 he was elected to the Central Committee (CC) and was elected provincial secretary in 1936. He held his position at the College for three years until his secret was discovered; all the while working and writing under the pseudonym of E. Roger to protect his job, his politics would lead to his eventual non-renewal in 1937. Ryerson’s next academic position would not come for 35 years, a year after he parted company with the CPC, he would accept a position in the History department at the Université du Québec à Montréal
, and “at age 58, he commenced the academic career he had sacrificed in the 1930s.”
in 1968. During his 35 year tenure in the CPC, Ryerson was routinely asked to augment his historical writings in order to meet the prevailing philosophy at the time. After the internal party crisis between 1956 and 1957, Ryerson was forced to write an article stating his previous books and articles had given “a rather idealised treatment of the bourgeois democrats Lafontaine and Baldwin.” Blaming this on “liberalism,” he essentially turned his back on his earlier beliefs concerning 1837 and sought to align himself with the new revisionist tendencies within the CPC that came about during the post-Stalin debate. Ryerson’s beliefs concerning Marxism-Leninism
differed greatly from that of the CPC of the late 1950s and early 1960s. His vision was brought to the forefront when in his article In France: “The Week of Marxist Thought”, he agreed with the leader of the French Communist party who argued:
"that among the shoals to avoid, …, is the narrow, ‘cramped conception of Marxism-Leninism simply as a position to be defended, a fortress to be held, with every portcullis closed while one peers out over the battlements at all who are not ‘our people’ wandering on the distant plain’"
This sentiment did resonate with the leadership of General Secretary Leslie Morris
, who viewed the sentiments of the Popular Front
in a much more favourable light than would be seen under the leadership of William Kashtan
; it was under the stifling leadership of Kashtan that Ryerson made his final break with the CPC.
As a Party intellectual, he was in the minority when compared to other communist parties in the world; but, his dedication to a Marxist analysis of History and Canadian society was unsurpassed within the CPC. His early education was founded on the study of literature, but his time in Paris in the early 1930s would forever change his life and transform him into an Organic Intellectual of the working-class. His rationale for delving into historical and political writing can be found within the pages of Open Society. In reading 1837, French Canada, The Founding of Canada, and Unequal Union, we, the reader, find Ryerson’s journey to "dispel the fog of false consciousness". At the very heart of his writings, are the class struggle and the raising of class consciousness through the written word.
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
historian, educator, political activist. There is very little information available concerning his parents, but Ryerson was born in 1911, into a well-off middle class family in Toronto
Toronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...
. Ryerson could trace his paternal lineage back to Egerton Ryerson
Egerton Ryerson
Adolphus Egerton Ryerson was a Methodist minister, educator, politician, and public education advocate in early Ontario, Canada...
, the “Pope of Methodism
Methodism
Methodism is a movement of Protestant Christianity represented by a number of denominations and organizations, claiming a total of approximately seventy million adherents worldwide. The movement traces its roots to John Wesley's evangelistic revival movement within Anglicanism. His younger brother...
” in nineteenth century Toronto, and to William McDougall
William McDougall (politician)
Sir William McDougall PC CB was a Canadian lawyer, politician and one of the Fathers of Confederation.Born near York, Upper Canada...
, one of the Fathers of Confederation
Fathers of Confederation
The Fathers of Confederation are the people who attended the Charlottetown and Quebec Conferences in 1864 and the London Conference of 1866 in England, preceding Canadian Confederation. The following lists the participants in the Charlottetown, Quebec, and London Conferences and their attendance at...
; and, on his mother’s side, he was related to Louis Antoine Brehaut de l’Isle, French Commander at Trois-Rivières in 1638.
Ideological origins
To fully understand his commitment to communism one must look towards his period of study at the SorbonneUniversity of Paris
The University of Paris was a university located in Paris, France and one of the earliest to be established in Europe. It was founded in the mid 12th century, and officially recognized as a university probably between 1160 and 1250...
in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
in 1931. While attending classes towards a Diplomes d’Etudes Superieures with a thesis on the writings of Sicilian peasant-realist novelist Giovanni Verga
Giovanni Verga
Giovanni Carmelo Verga was an Italian realist writer, best known for his depictions of life in Sicily, and especially for the short story "Cavalleria Rusticana" and the novel I Malavoglia .-Life and career:The first son of Giovanni Battista Catalano Verga and Caterina Di Mauro,...
, Ryerson involved himself in communist activities. While travelling through Europe, he experienced the political turmoil within Spain and Italy during the early depression years, and while in Paris he took part in the funeral procession of the last survivor of the Paris Commune
Paris Commune
The Paris Commune was a government that briefly ruled Paris from March 18 to May 28, 1871. It existed before the split between anarchists and Marxists had taken place, and it is hailed by both groups as the first assumption of power by the working class during the Industrial Revolution...
of 1871 a Z. Camelinat. On this day in 1932, while marching with 200,000 others to Pere Lachaise cemetery, Ryerson felt a fierce wave of connection with the French Left. His experiences in Europe affected his vision of the capitalist world and he would write:
"the realization that the cultural values of art and literature were being turned by capitalism into what I can only describe as spiritual onanism and the discovery that communism, by solving the material problems of society, was the only path to a future creative renaissance, was the first impulse."
Europe was the scene of his birth as a communist; Canada was the scene of his growth into a renowned historian and communist intellectual.
In the Communist Party
The Communist Party of CanadaCommunist Party of Canada
The Communist Party of Canada is a communist political party in Canada. Although is it currently a minor or small political party without representation in the Federal Parliament or in provincial legislatures, historically the Party has elected representatives in Federal Parliament, Ontario...
, at least in the 1930s and 40s lacked a connection to the Canadian middle class
Middle class
The middle class is any class of people in the middle of a societal hierarchy. In Weberian socio-economic terms, the middle class is the broad group of people in contemporary society who fall socio-economically between the working class and upper class....
as well as intellectual
Intellectual
An intellectual is a person who uses intelligence and critical or analytical reasoning in either a professional or a personal capacity.- Terminology and endeavours :"Intellectual" can denote four types of persons:...
s; with his return to Canada, Ryerson would become a symbol of the party’s appeal to this segment of society. Ryerson “was not the only traditional intellectual to join the CPC, but he was one of the first and undoubtedly was to become the most important.” The Communist parties of Great Britain and the United States of America, as well as many other nations, could count numerous artists and intellectuals as members from the 1930s on; but in Canada, Ryerson was a lonely figure. His position within the CPC, including his rapid rise in the party hierarchy and his presence on the Central Committee
Central Committee
Central Committee was the common designation of a standing administrative body of communist parties, analogous to a board of directors, whether ruling or non-ruling in the twentieth century and of the surviving, mostly Trotskyist, states in the early twenty first. In such party organizations the...
(CC) until 1969, was assured by his unique position; a position that allowed him to play a role within the “political history of Canadian Communism unlike that of his American and British counterparts.” He was a middle class school boy from a privileged background in an overwhelmingly proletarian organisation, and as such his presence within the CPC did not always meet with approval. But, his education made him an asset for the party, one that would come in handy in the years to come.
Marxist historian
Ryerson’s major contribution was as a MarxistMarxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
historian and it was here that Ryerson was too find his voice. The Canadian bourgeoisie’s dismissal of Communism generally states that it is an alien importation and as such has no basis within Canadian society. By stressing the progressive nature of the Canadian past, the CPC hoped to prove the validity of its existence within Canadian society. During this period, numerous articles and pamphlets were published by the CPC, but it was not until the 1937 publication of Stanley Ryerson’s 1837-The Birth of Canadian Democracy, that the full Marxist analysis of the on the 1837 Rebellions would appear. 1837 should be viewed as a work of Marxist historiography
Marxist historiography
Marxist or historical materialist historiography is a school of historiography influenced by Marxism. The chief tenets of Marxist historiography are the centrality of social class and economic constraints in determining historical outcomes....
written for a working-class audience and not for academia; since Ryerson wrote this book so it could be used as a weapon in the struggle of working people to build a qualitatively different and better world. Ryerson’s rationale for writing this book, as was the rationale for all his works, can be best summarised as an exploration of Canadian history with the hopes of educating the working-class, in a sense it was an exercise in the raising of class consciousness.
The choice of the title for this book is in itself an interesting by-product of the 1930s Popular Front
Popular front
A popular front is a broad coalition of different political groupings, often made up of leftists and centrists. Being very broad, they can sometimes include centrist and liberal forces as well as socialist and communist groups...
activities of the CPC. Dedicated to the soldiers of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion
Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion
The Mackenzie–Papineau Battalion or Mac-Paps were a battalion of Canadians who fought as part of the XV International Brigade on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Except for France, no other country gave a greater proportion of its population as volunteers in Spain than Canada. The...
fighting in the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
in defence of Republican Spain
Second Spanish Republic
The Second Spanish Republic was the government of Spain between April 14 1931, and its destruction by a military rebellion, led by General Francisco Franco....
, this book was written in the hope of redefining the context of revolution. Ryerson referred to the cause of 1837 as the cause of democracy; his decision to place the word in the title of his book, was done with the hope of suggesting that this referred “to both bourgeois liberalism that will supplant the remnants of feudal oligarchy and the ultimate vision of equality in the classless society brought about by the proletarian revolution.” Doyle contended it was Ryerson’s aim to redefine “democracy,” and the way in which we refer to the events of 1837 and the idea of revolution in general.
In leadership
Following the outlawing of the CPC in 1940, General SecretaryGeneral Secretary
The office of general secretary is staffed by the chief officer of:*The General Secretariat for Macedonia and Thrace, a government agency for the Greek regions of Macedonia and Thrace...
Tim Buck
Tim Buck
Timothy "Tim" Buck was a long-time leader of the Communist Party of Canada...
along with Sam Carr
Sam Carr
Sam Carr was an organizer for the Communist Party of Canada and, its successor, the Labour-Progressive Party in the 1930s and 1940s. He was born Schmil Kogan in Tomachpol, Ukraine in 1906 and immigrated to Canada in 1924, living in Winnipeg and Regina before settling in Montreal in 1925...
and Charles Sims fled Canada for the safety of New York where they would reside under the protection of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). The leadership of the now underground party was placed in the hands of an Operations Centre, which was headed by Stewart Smith
Stewart Smith (politician)
Stewart Smith was a long-time leading member of the Communist Party of Canada. He also served on Toronto City Council for a period in the 1930s and 1940s....
, Leslie Morris
Leslie Morris
Leslie Tim Morris was a Welsh-Canadian politician, journalist and long time member of the Communist Party of Canada and, its front group, the Labour-Progressive Party....
, and Stanley Ryerson. This new leadership decided upon a slogan for the CPC’s anti-war protests: “Withdraw from the British Empire
British Empire
The British Empire comprised the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom. It originated with the overseas colonies and trading posts established by England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. At its height, it was the...
.” Signalling a more radical approach to their anti-Imperialist
Imperialism
Imperialism, as defined by Dictionary of Human Geography, is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationships, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." The imperialism of the last 500 years,...
protesting, the Operations Centre authorised Stanley Ryerson to write and publish two pamphlets in Quebec. French-Canada, A Nation in Bondage and French-Canada and the War, described the French Canada as a subjugated nation held in colonial slavery to English Canadian rulers, who were acting as surrogates for the real rulers in Britain. This new approach to the issue of French Canada enabled Ryerson to develop close contacts among important nationalists who opposed the war. With the German invasion of the Soviet Union
Operation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa was the code name for Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II that began on 22 June 1941. Over 4.5 million troops of the Axis powers invaded the USSR along a front., the largest invasion in the history of warfare...
in July, 1941 the CPC’s stance on the war changed quickly. Now that they supported the war, Tim Buck called Ryerson, Smith, and Morris before a CC meeting held on January 22 and 23, 1943. During this meeting, Buck assailed the position of Ryerson, which had become the position of the CPC during their anti-war period. According to Buck, “English-Canada as a nation does not oppress French-Canada, nor impose inequality upon it. The national inequality from which the workers and farmers of Quebec suffer, is a heritage of the past.”
Attitude towards French Canada
Later that year, the re-constituted Labour-Progressive PartyLabour-Progressive Party
For the Labour-Progressive Coalition Government in New Zealand see the Fifth Labour Government of New ZealandThe Labor-Progressive Party was the legal political organization of the Communist Party of Canada between 1943 and 1959....
published, Ryerson’s French Canada: A Study in Canadian Democracy. Within the pages of French Canada, Ryerson set out his vision of their continuous fight for freedom in the face of colonial servitude. He also emphasised the common aims of French and English Canadians in the pursuit of freedom in the capitalist and colonial systems. Although researched and mostly written while Ryerson was occupied with the direction of the underground party, French Canada was a careful and provocative analysis of Quebec’s social and political history.
French Canada aimed at encouraging the development of a sense of national pride and unity among Canadians during the years of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. Ryerson put forth a socio-economic analysis of the Quebec and in turn educated most English-speaking Canadians about a region they knew very little about. As a sequel to 1837, Ryerson’s French Canada revealed “the militant spirit of democracy among French Canadians” in the hopes of uniting “them with their Anglophone compatriots.” Ryerson did follow a certain “great man” approach to history when, in the early chapters, he emphasized the heroes “who struggled for self-determination and/or Canadian unity”; this approach was complemented by an emphasis on “the Quebec masses and their rise out of feudal subjugation toward political power.” Very much the Historical Materialist, Ryerson viewed the previous administrations of Quebec as working with representatives of English Canada and international capitalism to keep Quebec in economic subservience. Ryerson believed, “The Toronto Tory and the Quebec corporatist meet on common ground: hostility to the democratic peoples’ movement, [and] denial of our democratic heritage.” Following on his contentions laid out in 1837, Ryerson viewed the failure of English Canada to recognise their connection to French Canada and to fight hand in hand for the fullest democratic rights of the minority nation only served to deepen the power of reactionary influences and limit Canadian democracy and unity in general.
French Canada was a by-product of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
and should be viewed as such. It was full of optimism about the prospects of an Allied
Allies
In everyday English usage, allies are people, groups, or nations that have joined together in an association for mutual benefit or to achieve some common purpose, whether or not explicit agreement has been worked out between them...
victory in the war against international fascism and a transformed world capable of bringing about the complete elimination of the conditions that gave rise to fascism and to the prospect of war. Although this book is full of optimism about a possible future world, Ryerson did not envision a Communist future for Canada and instead placed the LPP as an important part of post-war Canada, but not a defining movement or a dominant party. Ryerson’s vision did not come to pass, but his analysis of the political perspicacity of working-class Quebec was groundbreaking as it came during a time when most writers tended to view “Quebec as either a quaint or lamentable anachronism.” French Canada gave its readers a remarkably modern and hopeful image of French-Canadian society.
Intellectual evolution
For Ryerson, an understanding of social relations was paramount if one was to garner an understanding of history; his encounter with Innis’s materialism led Ryerson to the charge that equated Marxism and economic determinismEconomic determinism
Economic determinism is the theory which attributes primacy to the economic structure over politics in the development of human history. It is usually associated with the theories of Karl Marx, although many Marxist thinkers have dismissed plain and unilateral economic determinism as a form of...
. He wrote “Marxism holds that it is the people who make history-their labor and their struggles and their dreams; and that these are understandable and have meaning when seen in their real setting….” He added, “Labor, production, the real relationships of living society: this is the point of departure for historical materialism….Thought and feelings, ideas and passion and imagination have their being in a material world, are conditioned by it, work upon it.” Ryerson’s approach to history is that of a man who sees the struggles and ideas of people as the driving force behind history. He did not believe they operate within a vacuum but within a given social system. Ryerson recognised the interplay of freedom and necessity within the development of history “as it is in the best Marxist historical writing.”
Following on the tradition of viewing his writings as a mode of class consciousness, The Founding of Canada was written very much as a popular Marxist introduction to Canadian History. This book offered very little new material and was instead more of a shifting in emphasis for Ryerson. This shift in emphasis stemmed primarily from Ryerson’s interest in prehistory and Soviet anthropology; this shift in emphasis is best illustrated by the six chapters on pre-European-contact Canada. This work was not a complete shift of emphasis; Ryerson still dealt with the issue of exploitation and freedom. He believed “[t]he weight of ‘official’ historiography has hitherto been heavily on the side of efforts to smother the facts of exploitation,” and because of this “[t]he idyllic patriarchal picture of these times that has become traditional, is a piece of flagrant deception.”
Unequal Union has been seen as the more adventuresome of these two works. It focused on only 60 years, rather than the 300-year scope of The Founding of Canada, and it discussed more deeply the events after the War of 1812
War of 1812
The War of 1812 was a military conflict fought between the forces of the United States of America and those of the British Empire. The Americans declared war in 1812 for several reasons, including trade restrictions because of Britain's ongoing war with France, impressment of American merchant...
leading up to the expansion of confederation in 1870. In this work, Ryerson turned to an analysis of land and land-holding as he recognises the importance of land to the colonial ruling-class. Gregory Kealey felt Ryerson overextended himself in his argument that the land-monopoly represented a “sort of commercialised feudalism” which “loomed as the dominating problem before the Canadas.” But Ryerson’s analysis of the 1837 Rebellions held true for Kealey, as he agrees with the classical Marxist formulation, that “potential production forces were stifled by dominant property relations; and as long as the latter couldn’t be broken down progress remained illusory.” Therefore, the rebellions of 1837 were an effort to break the “rule of a landlord-merchant oligarchy,” blocking the development of industrial capitalism.
Analysis of nation and class
Ryerson showed how the concepts of “nation” and “class”, as used by Marxist historians, can aide in an understanding of Canadian problems. He did not attempt to place Canadian history into a preconceived framework of ideas. Instead, he sought to bring the role of ‘class’ and ‘nation’, and persons and personalities, into the forefront of discussion instead of allowing them “to disappear behind a cloud of economic factors.” For Ryerson, the complexities and contradictions of Canadian history can be best analysed through the lens of class conflict rather than idealistic theses of most bourgeois historians. Throughout these two volumes, Ryerson emphasised the state of subjugation inherent within both French and English colonial administrators. This two volume work, Ryerson explained modestly, was intended as “a preliminary breaking of ground, suggesting a line of approach to a re-interpretation of this country’s history”. These volumes are more scholarly in style and documentation, as they were “addressed less to a working-class readership and more to academic historians and other well-informed readers.”The notion of Freedom has been of paramount concern for Ryerson, whether it is the freedom of French Canadians or the freedom of the working class in general, Ryerson has consistently built his arguments around the notion of freedom. In his philosophical work, The Open Society: Paradox and Challenge, published in 1965 outside of the CPC’s press, Ryerson discussed his vision of an open and free society. The crux of his argument is found in the issue of freedom; he saw the past as “an evolution of people in society, marked by harsh conflict of contending classes and national forces, generating a progression toward greater freedom.” The driving force behind all of society is the nature of class existence and each struggle the oppressed class wages brings it closer to freedom. According to Ryerson, and many other Marxist thinkers, the ability to breakthrough to a more open society will come about from the “dispelling of the fog of false consciousness, [the] gaining for ourselves a true recognition of the real nature of the existing social structure.”
Academic career
Ryerson paid a price for his commitment to the CPC and his analysis of Canadian history. Upon his return to Canada from his studies in Europe, he took up party work in August 1934 in MontrealMontreal
Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...
where he taught French studies at Sir George Williams University. Ryerson had been working very closely with the CPC and in 1935 he was elected to the Central Committee (CC) and was elected provincial secretary in 1936. He held his position at the College for three years until his secret was discovered; all the while working and writing under the pseudonym of E. Roger to protect his job, his politics would lead to his eventual non-renewal in 1937. Ryerson’s next academic position would not come for 35 years, a year after he parted company with the CPC, he would accept a position in the History department at the Université du Québec à Montréal
Université du Québec à Montréal
The Université du Québec à Montréal is one of four universities in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.-Basic facts:The UQAM is the largest constituent element of the Université du Québec , a public university system with other branches in Gatineau , Rimouski, Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec City, Chicoutimi, and...
, and “at age 58, he commenced the academic career he had sacrificed in the 1930s.”
Breaking with the Party
His decision to leave the CPC in 1971 was primarily based upon his experiences within the Party from 1956 (the year of the Hungarian Revolution) up to, and after, the Soviet invasion of PraguePrague Spring
The Prague Spring was a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia during the era of its domination by the Soviet Union after World War II...
in 1968. During his 35 year tenure in the CPC, Ryerson was routinely asked to augment his historical writings in order to meet the prevailing philosophy at the time. After the internal party crisis between 1956 and 1957, Ryerson was forced to write an article stating his previous books and articles had given “a rather idealised treatment of the bourgeois democrats Lafontaine and Baldwin.” Blaming this on “liberalism,” he essentially turned his back on his earlier beliefs concerning 1837 and sought to align himself with the new revisionist tendencies within the CPC that came about during the post-Stalin debate. Ryerson’s beliefs concerning Marxism-Leninism
Marxism-Leninism
Marxism–Leninism is a communist ideology, officially based upon the theories of Marxism and Vladimir Lenin, that promotes the development and creation of a international communist society through the leadership of a vanguard party over a revolutionary socialist state that represents a dictatorship...
differed greatly from that of the CPC of the late 1950s and early 1960s. His vision was brought to the forefront when in his article In France: “The Week of Marxist Thought”, he agreed with the leader of the French Communist party who argued:
"that among the shoals to avoid, …, is the narrow, ‘cramped conception of Marxism-Leninism simply as a position to be defended, a fortress to be held, with every portcullis closed while one peers out over the battlements at all who are not ‘our people’ wandering on the distant plain’"
This sentiment did resonate with the leadership of General Secretary Leslie Morris
Leslie Morris
Leslie Tim Morris was a Welsh-Canadian politician, journalist and long time member of the Communist Party of Canada and, its front group, the Labour-Progressive Party....
, who viewed the sentiments of the Popular Front
Popular front
A popular front is a broad coalition of different political groupings, often made up of leftists and centrists. Being very broad, they can sometimes include centrist and liberal forces as well as socialist and communist groups...
in a much more favourable light than would be seen under the leadership of William Kashtan
William Kashtan
William Kashtan became general secretary of the Communist Party of Canada in January 1965, several months following the death of Leslie Morris. The delay in his assuming the position was due to the opposition of Tim Buck to his appointment....
; it was under the stifling leadership of Kashtan that Ryerson made his final break with the CPC.
Views on Ryerson
The general criticism of Ryerson is that his work continually failed to transcend the CPC’s ideological passivity when it came to their relationship with Moscow. Kealey sees these arguments as being based upon a belief that Ryerson’s understanding of Marxism was severely limited by the many Stalinist distortions people generally see in Soviet philosophy disseminated during Ryerson’s time in the CPC. It is true, that party work affected his intellectual work; his choice of material was in many respects dictated by the political atmosphere of the day. But, this does not mean he substituted party beliefs for his own in every respect. Ryerson was a dedicated Communist, who saw within the CPC the best vehicle for advancing the cause of Communism and the betterment of the working-class. His decision to follow the general line, and in some instances deny his true beliefs, is unfortunate but should not be viewed from outside of their historical realities. During the era of the Popular Front, Ryerson wrote in a manner that befell that era and during the time of the Democratic Front he stridently put forth arguments seeking the destruction of Fascism as it was, in his eyes, the best way forward for the working-class. The removal of Ryerson from his intellectual and historical “context denies him recognition as the major pioneer of Marxist historical writing in Canada;” and it also denies the very nature of Ryerson and his role in Canadian society.As a Party intellectual, he was in the minority when compared to other communist parties in the world; but, his dedication to a Marxist analysis of History and Canadian society was unsurpassed within the CPC. His early education was founded on the study of literature, but his time in Paris in the early 1930s would forever change his life and transform him into an Organic Intellectual of the working-class. His rationale for delving into historical and political writing can be found within the pages of Open Society. In reading 1837, French Canada, The Founding of Canada, and Unequal Union, we, the reader, find Ryerson’s journey to "dispel the fog of false consciousness". At the very heart of his writings, are the class struggle and the raising of class consciousness through the written word.