Foreword E. T. Kingsley Canadian Marxism’s “Old Man”

A little more than a century ago, on 2 February 1919, a packed Federated Labor Party (FLP) forum at Vancouver’s Dominion Hall heard a socialist speaker address the challenges of the immediate post–First World War years. Monitored by burly constables and an ostentatiously decked-out military officer, the meeting opened with revolutionary song and a monetary collection for the cause. The chairman then rose and declared simply, “We’ll let the old man get started.” Eugene Thornton (E. T.) Kingsley was the “old man,” and the designation was one of respect, even reverence. His talks—regarded by some as the most influential among the speechifying contingent of early twentieth-century Canadian Marxists—were a bracing and restorative stimulant. “It’s as good as a tonic to hear Kingsley,” reported one ardent revolutionary in 1903.1

Times have changed. “Old men” of the left are not now always in particularly good odour. Those of Kingsley’s implacable and acerbic stripe, if there are any of them still willing to speak their mind on the class struggle as he did, are not usually held in high regard. In today’s progressive parlance, Kingsley would be written off as a “vulgar Marxist,” insufficiently attentive to the nuances of identity and the discursiveness of power. A disabled worker, having lost significant portions of both legs in an 1890 railway accident, Kingsley was not one to personalize his political program; he seldom if ever alluded to how capitalism maimed him. Instead, he preferred to address how the working class, as a whole, “paid in their agony and pains for everything that was done” under capitalism.2

The “old man” addressed collective suffering and demanded collective action and class-struggle solutions. Against the acquisitive individualism of capitalism he counterposed, relentlessly, the possibility of far-reaching transformation arising out of mass mobilizations of the working class, and all of those “real democrats” and “progressive elements” committed to “bringing this crazy ruling-class civilization to its finish.” The resulting society would be one where each would be provided according to their needs, while expected to contribute according to their abilities. Exploitation exorcised, all oppressions would take their place in the proverbial dustbin of history. On the ruins of a dismantled capitalism would arise “a structure . . . based upon freedom, upon real democracy, upon the rights of all men and women to live upon this earth upon the production and the fruits of their own toil without paying tribute to any rulers and masters.”3

The issues, as posed by Kingsley, were vulgar. His approach was singularly uncompromising, demanding the necessity of ending capitalism. He used humour and wit effectively, but never in ways that were so clever as to sail over the heads of his largely proletarian audiences, instead speaking in the vernacular and readily understood allusions of the working class. If Kingsley’s words were often blunt, they never meandered into pretence and postured sophistication. Vulgarity, in a now dated meaning of the word, was the “old man’s” métier, in the sense that virtually everything he said was characteristic of and related to the masses.

Kingsley would have been indignant at the ways in which bourgeois politicians of the late twentieth century cynically declared their adherence to the axiom that “it’s the economy, stupid.” Yet it was the economic inequality of history, evident in so much anguish, hurt, violence, and death, that roused Kingsley to his denunciatory best. Capitalism was robbery. It relied on exploitation—a theft of significant portions of the productions of labouring men and women—to keep the vast majority of people in a condition of thralldom. Kingsley, like Daniel De Leon, whom he followed for a time, repeatedly insisted that slavery defined human relations for centuries, from ancient Greece and Rome through feudalism in Europe and the plantation economies of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world to the profit system of waged employment.

Nor did Kingsley excuse the wage slaves, whom he pilloried for being complicit in their own subjugation and servitude. Even animals in their natural state, he suggested jocularly, played and gambolled and roamed about, never begging to be harnessed and put to work. “But the two-legged animal seems to insist” on being driven, demanding employment, Kingsley stated before a laughing crowd in New Westminster, British Columbia, in 1918:

The wage-working animal insists on a system of slavery and the penalty of slavery is work, work, work and keep on working. A mule will work only when he is driven to it by man and the two-legged slave and the mule make a fine team. This slavish condition has come down to us from the countless ages and most of us have not got the kick enough in us to get away from it.4

Kingsley’s major published political statement, the 1916 pamphlet The Genesis and Evolution of Slavery: Showing How the Chattel Slaves of Pagan Times Have Been Transformed into the Capitalist Property of To-day, commenced with just this kind of critique, railing against chloroformed wage slaves “meekly submitting to . . . [the] continuation of their crucifixion upon the altar of ruling class plunder.”5

Kingsley’s suggestion that workers are too often chained to their subservience by a consciousness less than combative, false in its denial of basic self-interest, would raise the hackles of modern sensibilities, ever attuned to the validity of any and all subjectivity. His likening of workers to slaves would not be countenanced in today’s political culture, where repudiation of class exploitation is muted and rightful rejection of racist oppression voiced loudly. To blur the lines between wage slavery and chattel slavery, at our present conjuncture, would be highly impolitic, understating a fundamental racialized differentiation and its manifold economic, social, political, and cultural consequences.6 On occasion, Kingsley could lapse into characterizations that modern leftists would find racist and chauvinistic. To the extent that Kingsley and the Socialist Party of Canada (SPC), with which he was associated, addressed the oppression of Indigenous peoples and women, they fell far short of adequate political formulations. On all manner of progressive stands associated with contemporary leftist concern with the special oppressions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability, Kingsley’s views, not to mention his political and personal practice, no doubt seem antiquated at best, inadequate in a benign judgment, even at times downright reactionary, necessitating not only distancing but rejection.7

Of Kingsley’s particular brand of revolutionary Marxism, designated in this volume the British Columbia school and long labelled “impossiblism,” denigration has been commonplace. Kingsley was impossiblism’s most vigorous advocate, revelling in its ultimatist dictates. No reforms could ever soften capitalism’s destructive essence or alleviate the inequalities, brutalities, and unfairness constituting its essence. Trade unions, whatever their leadership and orientation, were but pathetic defensive, palliative institutions destined to remain rooted in their capitalist confinements, always falling short of the only way of liberating their wage-dependent memberships, the laying low of capitalism itself. “Even the trade union organizations were part and parcel of this system of slavery,” Kingsley maintained; “when the system goes down, they would go down too. By their very constitution, ‘they can’t draw a revolutionary breath; I don’t care whether they call themselves trades unionists simple or O.B.U.’” Kingsley was even known to proclaim, “When I find a great mass of workers asking a handful of masters for favors, I get right down on my marrow-bones and pray they won’t get ’em.” Neither collective bargaining nor radical one big unionism, according to Kingsley, would alter the simple reality that, under capitalism, “the other fellow still owns the shop, the factory, the mill, and the mine—and beyond that, he owns you.”8

Yet, as the compilers of this collection of reports and summaries of E. T. Kingsley’s talks and instances of his writings argue, to simply quote the “old man” only to dismiss his seemingly doctrinaire views misses much. These reports routinely convey that Kingsley’s audaciously dismissive barbs, flung repeatedly at audiences he castigated as docile and uncomprehending, were actually warmly appreciated by those listening. They responded with laughter, an acknowledgement that there was something to Kingsley’s sardonic platform manner.

For all of the undialectical substance of Kingsley’s dismissals of trade unions, SPC militants whom he influenced were never, in the midst of struggle, entirely able to either walk away from established labour organizations or write them off categorically as a waste of time. They grasped that even as Kingsley had a point about the limitations of trade unions under capitalism, workers needed these defensive institutions to protect their economic well-being, however precarious, until such time as the political toppling of capitalism took place.

Not surprisingly, the Socialist Party of Canada, even at the height of Kingsley’s impossiblist influence, contained many trade union members; one estimate suggested anywhere from 60 to 90 percent. Working-class SPC locals in mining labour strongholds like Revelstoke were not always so enamoured of the “old man” that they would not unload on his more seemingly outrageous attacks on unions. It was not unheard of for comrades to call for Kingsley to be stripped of his post as a party organizer. As early as 1907 one commentator (albeit from a rival socialist organization) noted that Kingsley’s impossiblism rallied only a “few ranters . . . lip revolutionists but utterly incapable of any organized activity.” Even in strongholds of Kingsleyism like Vancouver, SPC figure R. Parmater Pettipiece pursued a policy of “permeation,” with revolutionaries working in the Trades and Labor Council managing to secure an endorsement for the Western Clarion, which Kingsley edited and published for a number of years. Among second-generation SPC members, like longshoreman Jack Kavanagh—whose membership in the party overlapped with but outlasted Kingsley, being an SPC organizer and a president of the British Columbia Federation of Labor—posed no contradiction.9

In the complicated programmatic tussle of impossiblism and the pragmatics of class organization and struggle, what emerges is an intriguing moment in the history of socialism when revolutionaries confronted the realities of capitalist social relations and the undeniable constraints that they imposed on the transition, recognized as a process of rupture, to an entirely new social formation. Kingsley, with his accent on trade union limitations in the grand unfolding of the political struggle of the working class for power, addressed one side of this equation. SPC figures like Pettipiece and many counterparts, among them J. W. Hawthornthwaite and Charles O’Brien, elected to provincial legislatures as firm advocates of law-making that would benefit workers and trade unions, took their stands on another. So too did SPC executive members of the United Mine Workers of America in the Crowsnest Pass, such as Frank Sherman and Clem Stubbs. Such revolutionary socialists were not so much hostile to trade unions as they were advocates of the fundamental Marxist position that, in the final instance, capitalism would only be displaced by the conscious act of political revolution. In this pre-Leninist moment, then, it was possible for a revolutionary socialist organization like the SPC, which had little conception of democratic centralism, to contain all of those committed to overthrowing the reign of capital and its servile state. This, they could agree, would be accomplished through the political mobilization of the working class, but it was possible that within this shared perspective there might be different perspectives and practices on offer toward working-class institutions like labour unions.

Kingsley’s politics were forged in the United States–based Daniel De Leon–led Socialist Labor Party (SLP), an organization he eventually departed in discontent. But Kingsley retained the red impossiblist stamp of the De Leonist milieu, which exercised an unmistakable, unrivalled influence on pre–First World War revolutionary socialists in English-speaking North America. Often said to have read Marx’s Capital during his hospitalized recovery from the railroad accident that left him a double amputee, Kingsley—in his speeches and what has been recovered of his writing—betrays little in the way of indication that the “old man” was indeed immersed in the intricacies of this long and complex text, of which few English-language editions were available in 1890, none of which circulated widely among the radicals of the era.10 Far more available in De Leonist circles, and more easily identifiable as influences on Kingsley’s thought, were Marx’s shorter didactic pamphlets, Value, Price, and Profit and Wage Labour and Capital, both of which were published in accessible editions by the SLP and the radical publishing house Charles H. Kerr.11 Certainly Kingsley’s 1903 Labour Day address in Phoenix, British Columbia, is congruent with this Marxist pedagogy.12

His break from the De Leonist SLP notwithstanding, Kingsley continued to bear the stamp of its doctrinaire revolutionary inclinations and training. He ended up parting ways with the SPC, to which he had contributed so much to bring into being and sustain. Aligning himself with the FLP and its propaganda organ, the British Columbia Federationist, Kingsley wholeheartedly embraced the Bolshevik Revolution. He declared in a December 1917 issue of the paper, where he quoted Leon Trotsky,

The dawn of a new dispensation is breaking. The sun of social revolution is piercing with its beneficent and life-giving rays the dark cloud of ignorance and reaction that has so long engulfed the world in the black night of slavery, superstition and human misery. The hour for human liberty has struck. All hail the Russian revolutionists who by their gallant actions have given cheer to their comrades of other lands and struck terror to the hearts of rulers and robbers of every clime.13

But Kingsley never joined the party of the Communist International, and he played no role in the Communist Party of Canada. In this he was not unlike many of his former comrades in the SLP and SPC, who remained, in Peter Campbell’s words, “Marxists of the Third Way,” reluctant to cast their lot decisively with the emerging international communist movement.14

In Kingsley’s case this may have been simply a matter of age and geographical distance from the centre of Canada’s Communist International–affiliated forces, concentrated as they originally were in central Canada and in the immigrant, foreign-language sections of distant cities like Winnipeg. Perhaps the difficulties of travel for a double amputee, which he had once willingly taken on, were more of a burden for Kingsley in 1919 than a few years earlier, when he relocated to Canada at the request of Vancouver Island’s revolutionary miners in 1902, or embarked on an arduous 1908 SPC agitational tour that took him as far east as Montreal, with stops throughout the prairies and Ontario.

By 1917 to 1921, when the issue of revolutionaries aligning with the Bolsheviks and the Communist parties they spawned throughout the world was perhaps the key question confronting Marxists, Kingsley was over sixty years of age. He had grappled with the rigours of disability for decades and was undoubtedly inclined to continue to till his revolutionary garden in British Columbia, as he saw fit. Somewhat irascible, and very much used to being a dominant figure, Kingsley, the “old man” of Canadian revolutionary socialism, would have been decidedly out of place among the twenty-two delegates attending the May 1921 clandestine meeting in a Guelph barn that led to the founding of the Communist Party of Canada. The SPC that Kingsley broke from eight years earlier sent two unofficial representatives to the gathering, Toronto’s William Moriarty being the main figure. Like most others constituting the underground communist gathering, he was almost thirty-five years Kingsley’s junior. Maurice Spector, a budding revolutionary Marxist intellectual, was a mere twenty-four years of age, compared with Kingsley’s sixty-five. Tim Buck, although not present at the Guelph summit, would go on to be the dominant figure in Canadian Communism in the 1920s and for decades after; he was born in 1891, again, roughly thirty-five years later than Kingsley. Canadian Bolshevism, in its first years, was an endeavour of the relatively young, with most leading figures being between the ages of thirty and forty. The senior woman among Canadian Communists, Florence Custance, and the leading proletarian with a background in the SPC, Vancouver’s Jack Kavanagh, were born in 1881 and 1879, respectively.15

Kingsley, the “old man” of Canada’s Marxists, had perhaps too many miles on his beleaguered body to take up the new metaphorical travels that an invigorated post-1917 Communism demanded. He would still traverse the province of British Columbia on behalf of the FLP in the years immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution, even venturing into Alberta’s mining camps and addressing a Calgary audience in 1919. But by the time Canada’s Communists were coalescing in 1921, Kingsley’s public speaking days were essentially over, reduced to a few talks in Nanaimo and Vancouver.

Recruits to the new Bolshevism who ventured into Kingsley’s Vancouver in the early 1920s often clashed with the old SPCers. The founding chair of the American Workers (Communist) Party, James P. Cannon, visited Vancouver in 1923 as part of a propaganda tour. He ran into opposition from the old impossiblists who first introduced him to the fundamentals of Marxist economics a decade earlier, during his days as a young Wobbly in Kansas City. Cannon relished crossing political swords with the Kingsleyites, writing to a friend, “I make a speciality of dealing with these ‘Scientific Socialists.’”16

Kingsley’s 1920s would not be a comfortable decade. In many ways, he had been left behind in the revolutionary movement, just as he has been left behind in all manner of ways by contemporary scholarship. Without a party, and with his platform seemingly exhausted, Kingsley went reluctantly to his retirement, mounting one last electoral campaign in 1926, no doubt beating the drums of capitalism’s evils with wit and withering critique but doing this, more so than at any point in his life, as a freelance figure, a Marxist maverick. His impossiblism had many critics, even at the height of his influence in the SPC, and it has not worn well over the decades. With the Bolshevik Revolution and the embrace of Leninism by a new generation of revolutionary socialists, Kingsley could be relegated to the antiquated ranks of those embracing all manner of left-wing disorders, perhaps unfairly so. A new era of disciplined party building, animated by appreciations of the necessity of united front activities and boring from within the established defensive institutions of the working class, had arrived. In order to take the class struggle to higher levels of possibility in the protracted war waged to defeat capitalism, the Communists of the 1920s challenged the Marxism of the late nineteenth century within which Kingsley came of age as an agitator.17 When the intransigent impossiblist died, in December 1929, the collapse of capitalism during the Great Depression was imminent. Kingsley’s powerful voice, relentless in its attack on the profit system in the years between 1900 and 1920, would be heard only faintly, echoing in the reminiscences of other old men and a few stalwart women, most of whom were outside of the Communist Party that would be regarded as hegemonic on the far left.

Benjamin Isitt and Ravi Malhotra, buttressed by a team of researchers, have done much to bring this intrepid voice back to us. Their deeply researched political biography of Kingsley, Able to Lead: Disablement, Radicalism, and the Political Life of E. T. Kingsley, is now complemented by this collection—a partial but nonetheless extensive compilation of the “old man” of Canadian Marxism’s writings and reports on his speeches. It reveals a politics of uncompromising anti-capitalism that, for all its deficiencies and blind spots, is an invaluable reminder that socialism’s making is necessarily about capitalism’s undoing. Kingsley’s entire political life turned on this fundamental insight, and when he died, aged seventy-three and essentially alone and largely forgotten, he had lived his life as a working-class revolutionary. His legacy to us is his insistent insight that capitalism was, by the turn of the twentieth century, long past its best-before date.

Kingsley’s refusal to countenance any thought that capitalism should continue must echo in our own refusals more than a century later. In a speech delivered in Victoria in 1919, entitled simply “The Machine,” Kingsley spoke words that resonate with us still. “The hour is drawing nigh when calamity will be upon us,” he thundered, “and all of you will be well advised to make all possible preparation to meet the situation. If you do not make a move, the horror which I dread so much will descend upon us without intelligent preparation. I see nothing but disorder, bloodshed, misery, suffering, and starvation awaiting.”18 How different are things today?

Bryan D. Palmer