E. T. Kingsley: A Biographical Sketch

On 15 October 1890, Eugene T. Kingsley’s life changed dramatically and irrevocably. The political trajectory of the North American working class would change as well, even if Kingsley was not cognizant of his destiny. He was working as a brakeman on the Northern Pacific’s remote Spring Gulch railway line in rural Montana, which had just been admitted to the Union as a state in November 1889.7 This was sparsely populated frontier country, and the Northern Pacific transcontinental line had only been completed through Helena in 1883.8 Kingsley, nearly thirty-four and a married father of two young boys, was injured when he fell between two moving cars. He had set the brake after being directed to ride upon flat cars to slow them down. Unfortunately, a defective draw bar caused the train cars to separate by about five feet. As it was night, Kingsley did not realize the cars had separated until it was too late and he was run over by the train after falling between the cars, causing severe injury to his legs.9 He was rushed to the Northern Pacific Railroad hospital in Missoula, Montana, where his left leg had to be amputated between the knee and hip and the right leg between the ankle and knee.10

During his recuperation in the Missoula hospital, Kingsley began to read Karl Marx. Parallels between his own life circumstances and the dangers of capitalism may have propelled the man toward the left, but evidence to illuminate details of his political awakening is unfortunately scarce. What we do know is that Kingsley soon became an active member of the SLP, led by Curacao-born immigrant Daniel De Leon.11 Known for their rigid “impossiblist” politics and relentless opposition to the capitalist system, the De Leonists had a pronounced influence on Kingsley’s political outlook and conceptual universe. Kingsley was soon engaged in public speaking on the street corners of San Francisco, where he had migrated after growing estranged from his family. In due course, he became a party organizer and ran for the US House of Representatives on the SLP ticket in 1896 and 1898. His meandering personal and political path would take him first to Seattle, where he became active in the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL), then Vancouver Island in 1902, and finally Vancouver, where he became a founder and leader of the Socialist Party of Canada, running three times for the federal House of Commons and three times for the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia. One of the most prominent socialist intellectuals and organizers of his day, Kingsley’s life story merits scholarly attention beyond the fleeting glimpses it has been accorded to date.

We hope that this collection of Kingsley’s writings and speeches serves to rectify this omission, illuminating the contribution of Kingsley and the British Columbia school of socialism as well as the tenacious capacity of disabled people to rise above adversity and demonstrate an ability to lead. We acknowledge and appreciate the financial contribution of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, as well as the contributions made to the project by a number of research assistants and archivists.

Kingsley’s Intellectual and Political Universe

How might one situate Kingsley’s ideas within the constellation of early twentieth-century socialist thought? Prior to 1917, the ontological categories of what constituted socialism did not have the same valences as the commonly understood distinctions between social democracy and Stalinism. The political program that Kingsley championed is uncompromisingly radical. While historians have largely ignored or caricatured the legacy of the SPC, the hitherto lost writings and speeches in this volume portray a political position situated to the left of the social democratic current embodied in the Second International prior to the First World War. In many ways, Kingsley’s views and those of the British Columbia school were more closely aligned with Marx’s First International than they were with later socialist formations. One might argue that the SPC’s politics, of which Kingsley was a leading exponent, signalled an early attempt to grapple with the contradiction identified by the legendary socialist Rosa Luxemburg. On the one hand, political demands raised by trade unions and social democratic parties are seen as preparing working-class people to take power and control their own destiny. A failure to intervene in the day-to-day class struggle could isolate a socialist movement that ignored this tactical arsenal on grounds of revolutionary orthodoxy. On the other hand, the political impact of successfully winning reforms such as minimum wages, hospital insurance, or workers’ compensation is often that of dampening the class struggle and increasing the hegemonic power of the bourgeoisie and its state.12

This conundrum was later addressed by revolutionary militants such as Leon Trotsky, who formulated the Transitional Program that posed a series of demands that deepen the class struggle and make socialist organization and its challenge to the state more viable.13 Paul Le Blanc usefully notes that the Transitional Program encompasses three types of demands: (1) immediate demands concerned with defending living standards and working conditions; (2) democratic demands relating to freedom of expression, legal equality, and the right to self-determination; and (3) transitional demands that have support among the working classes but cannot be implemented without seriously disrupting capitalist accumulation.14 Due to Kingsley’s emphasis on educating workers to fight to destroy capitalism in one fell swoop, the notion of transitional demands is unlikely to have appealed to him. Nonetheless, while seen as overly simplistic today, Kingsley’s thought contains an earnest desire for uncompromising social transformation that is admirable. To probe this further requires an examination of Kingsley’s political antecedents.

American socialist Daniel De Leon was undoubtedly a major theoretical influence on Kingsley. This should come as no surprise, as Kingsley was the California State Organizer for the De Leonist SLP in the 1890s. De Leon, in an 1896 address at Boston’s Wells’ Memorial Hall, outlined his understanding of socialism. He argued that a central distinction between reformist socialism and the revolutionary socialism to which he ascribed was the centrality of organization. He stated that individual freedom goes hand in hand with collective freedom and that socialist organization was key to realizing this objective.15 This line of socialist thought helps to explain Kingsley’s lifelong commitment to building a centralized, organized political party, rather than adhering to more spontaneous formations such as the One Big Union movement, which galvanized Canadian workers in the aftermath of the First World War. De Leon also placed importance on fostering a militant minority capable of carrying forward the struggle of the masses.16 Finally, as Frank Girard and Ben Perry note, De Leon grew increasingly skeptical of unions, which he saw as reformist organizations that distracted workers from the goal of overthrowing capitalism and creating a socialist commonwealth.17 Kingsley’s unusually dismissive attitude regarding the futility of trade unions may be attributed to some degree to his tutelage at the feet of De Leon. Other impossiblist political formations influenced by De Leon—including the doctrinaire Socialist Party of Great Britain, whose origins may be traced back to 1904 when it set out its Object and Declaration of Principles—have espoused similar ideas to this very day.18 Ultimately, Kingsley’s SPC pursued a dual approach, using elections to create publicity for the party while also emphasizing the importance of workers’ struggles on the ground.

In contrast, Lenin famously criticized impossiblism in his noted work “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, which set out to consider the international relevance of the successful Bolshevik Revolution. Writing in 1920, Lenin argued that participation in parliamentary bodies was vital given the state of class consciousness and that socialists had to consider the overall state of working-class consciousness, not simply the ideas held by the most militant workers.19 With respect to the particular situation in Britain, Lenin convinced many De Leonists in the SLP and other socialist parties active in Britain to ultimately join what became the Communist Party and to engage in contestation in Parliament. Where the British De Leonists lacked a strategic approach and tended to improvise tactics on a case-by-case basis, Lenin offered a more dynamic approach for socialists to emulate based on the Russian experience.20 Despite Kingsley’s own personal trajectory to the Federated Labor Party (FLP), this was also the path followed by many members of the SPC into the Communist Party of Canada, suggesting that there were in fact certain key affinities between Leninism and impossiblism, such as a focus on militancy and a dismissal of reformism.21

Interrogating Kingsley’s “Impossiblism”

E. T. Kingsley was the most prominent figure in the formative phase of the Socialist Party of Canada and the prewar Canadian left—the party’s “real founder” and leader of “the British Columbia school” of socialism, according to Ross McCormack.22 His ideas extended beyond the western hemisphere, as evidenced in dozens of articles in the Australian labour press between the 1910s and 1940s expounding his Marxian perspective (a portion of which are reproduced in this volume).23 But Kingsley’s contribution has hitherto been touched on only in passing, never explored at length. When he is mentioned in the scholarly literature at all, he usually appears briefly in caricature form, his name cited abruptly and dismissively as a synonym for, and personification of, the “impossiblist” strain of BC socialism—the commitment to “one-plank” Marxism, “abolition of the wage system,” and strident opposition to “palliative measures,” reforms that would pacify workers and prolong capitalism’s inevitable collapse, postponing the transition to socialism. There is frequently a heavy tone of derision in the prevailing scholarly treatment of Kingsley (with a few exceptions, such as in the work of Dorothy Steeves and Ross McCormack), dismissing impossiblism as hopelessly naïve, elitist, and otherworldly.24 Political scientist Paul Fox, for example, takes issue with unnamed members of the SPC “who conducted its affairs as if it were a semi-private club of Marxist philosophers,” identifying a “puritanical obsession” and “a distinct element of intellectual snobbishness and arrogance amongst the brilliant leaders” who had no interest in forming a mass party (an outcome they achieved, according to Fox, by imposing an examination on scientific socialism on applicants for membership).25 The SPC’s decision to not affiliate with the Second International, on grounds that it was too heavily influenced by reformism, is also cited as exemplifying the party’s doctrinaire, otherworldly character. Other developments that Fox highlights include the expulsion of MLA Parker Williams and the suspension of founding member Ernest Burns, the catalyst for the 1907 split that resulted in the formation of the Social Democratic Party of Canada (SDPC).26

The scholarly focus on Kingsley’s “impossiblism” and dogmatism certainly has an evidentiary foundation in his speeches, published writings, and record of activism within the SPC and other left parties. Indeed, Kingsley’s contemporary and comrade D. G. McKenzie observed half-jokingly that “since Marx died nobody was capable of throwing light on [economic] matters except the editor of the Clarion, whoever we may happen to be.”27 A key factor that previous scholars appear to have missed, however, is the centrality of irony, humour, sarcasm, and hyperbole in Kingsley’s rhetorical and polemical style. This style was central to his public speeches and published writings and would become a defining element in his persona within the party and among the broader public in British Columbia and Canada. His style included outlandish barbs against audience members (whom he frequently referred to as “slaves”), cutting similes that would leave opponents speechless, and self-deprecating humour relating to his baldness and other qualities (though, importantly, never relating to his impairment as a double amputee). Kingsley himself acknowledged this rhetorical style, admitting at a socialist meeting in Nelson, BC, in 1906 that he had been accused of having a “nasty tongue,” conceding that “the charge was true” while explaining that “he had acquired it while working for wages and he intended to keep on using it as long as the wage system lasts.”28 A socialist in Fernie, BC, looked forward to being reacquainted with that “cheery old grouser” Kingsley prior to a 1908 convention.29

Working-class audiences in prewar British Columbia and Canada, familiar with Kingsley’s style, would have taken his words with a proverbially healthy grain of salt, looking to the underlying meanings of the issues he was raising while appreciating the lightheartedness, audacity, and fun he brought to the examination of serious social questions, which likely seemed patently absurd. “Kingsley yet stirs in his hearers the very emotions he affects to condemn,” a correspondent noted after hearing Kingsley speak in Vancouver in 1903. “Shame, anger, self-contempt and sudden hope, chase each other around the diaphragms of the men who listen to his scathing words, and a rising sense of conscious power makes them long to get their hands on the ballot.”30 This connection between Kingsley’s rhetorical wit and the intellectual depth of his political analysis was recognized by contemporaries who did not share his uncompromising beliefs. Grace MacInnis, daughter of Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) founder J. S. Woodsworth and hardly a member of the Marxian left in British Columbia, recalled a half century later (on the eve of her re-election as the lone woman in the House of Commons in 1968) that Kingsley had been a “particular idol” of her deceased husband, former CCF MP Angus MacInnis, “because of his incisive wit and his intellectual abilities.”31

An example of Kingsley’s supposed intellectual arrogance, emblematic of the attitude of a layer of SPC leaders, is cited by Ian McKay in his work on the early Canadian left, Reasoning Otherwise (2008). Writing in the Clarion in August 1908, on his way home from a propaganda tour across the continent, Kingsley declared, “Along the north shore of Lake Superior it is rock and muskeg, a combination shunned by every animal in the category, except that brilliant specimen, the wage-slave, who would cheerfully go to hell itself if its brimstone deposits could be used as a means of squeezing a little profit out of his foul carcass for his capitalist masters.”32 A literal reading of this passage leads McKay to conclude, like many other scholars before him, that the SPC “sheltered a number of hard-core individualists, self-made mavericks who prided themselves on their freedom to decide on a whole spectrum of issues. They were possessed not only of themselves but also of a substantial cultural capital attesting to their individual attainments. The SPC thus mirrored basic elements of the liberal order it was sworn to critique.”33

We do not reject the proposition that the SPC—like socialist groups the world over—probably included a disproportionate share of individualists and mavericks, being as it was a primary locus for dissent in the prewar era. We also accept that these qualities of individualism, which Kingsley possessed, were part of the cultural fabric of an order that he was pledged to destroy. However, we believe that a more nuanced approach is warranted, both to properly illuminate Kingsley’s life and contribution and to provide for an accurate understanding of the dynamics, motivations, and development of the early Canadian left.

The scholarly trend toward derision and caricature of Kingsley impedes, in our view, a rigorous analysis and critical appreciation of his approach to the complex issues that he and other Socialists confronted in the opening decades of the twentieth century. We therefore aim to avoid the common approach of conflating Kingsley’s entire contribution into a simplistic “impossiblist” and “doctrinaire” box, favouring instead a more nuanced look at his speeches, writings, and activism around specific issues—without ignoring patterns that potentially emerge in his words and deeds.

Another aspect of Kingsley’s political thought is worthy of mention. Fox and others have characterized Kingsley’s “impossiblism” as being hopelessly unrealistic, even elitist and unhelpful, by undermining efforts to improve conditions for workers in the near term either through trade union bargaining or through legislative changes and state programs. But we would put forward an alternate interpretation. Kingsley’s unwavering focus on the “one-plank” Marxist demand of overthrowing the capitalist system can be interpreted as extraordinarily hopeful and optimistic. In the face of sharp opposition within every organization to which he belonged, from the Great Panic of the 1890s in the western United States to the period of “capitalist consolidation” in the 1920s in British Columbia, Kingsley refused to accept that capitalism was the natural order of human relations. He displayed an enduring, unwavering optimism in the capacity of working-class people to transform their social relations of life and work by ending the economic and political primacy of private property. The political objective of “conquering the public powers, for the purpose of setting up, and enforcing the economic program of the working class”—which traced its lineage to the revolutionary turn of American socialists at the 1901 convention that gave birth to the Socialist Party of America—would be incorporated under Kingsley’s leadership into the political platforms of the Revolutionary Socialist Party of Canada (RSPC), the Socialist Party of British Columbia (SPBC), and the Socialist Party of Canada.34 Kingsley’s fundamental hope in the possibility of the socialist transformation of human society was evident in his first speech in Vancouver after the bloody suppression of the Winnipeg General Strike and police raids against his comrades that ended sympathetic strikes in Vancouver and other cities: “Nothing except temporary gains . . . had ever been won by the workers in a fight for better conditions,” Kingsley declared, asserting that the only lasting solution available to the working class was “[p]olitical action . . . to strip the ruling class of power.”35

The transition from the “humane sentimentalism” of earlier socialist groups to the “aggressive materialism” of the SPC was examined in a retrospective article in the Western Clarion a decade earlier, in the midst of the 1907 provincial election campaign. Foreshadowing political realignments that would occur in British Columbia a half century later—and that persist to the present day—the Clarion observed, “Signs are not lacking upon the horizon to show that the old Liberal and Conservative gangs of capitalist political humbugs will be forced in the near future, especially in British Columbia, to throw aside their pretense of enmity and unite against the advancing host.”36 While Kingsley’s SPC never approached political power, its concentrated electoral base in mining districts and its sustained propaganda efforts more broadly throughout the province would have a lasting impact on the political culture of the working class in British Columbia and beyond. As his comrade John Sidaway noted in an obituary of Kingsley following his death in Vancouver in 1929, “His influence as a leader of the Marxian group in Western Canada was to infect most Labor organizations to a greater or lesser degree with the class viewpoint. His favorite theme was the struggle of the slaves through the ages. The Paris Commune of 1871 was a subject which saw him at his best.”37

Kingsley’s Disablement and Class Location

Kingsley’s approach to socialism, variously described in previous studies as “extreme,” “doctrinaire,” and “impossiblist,” reflected his life circumstances as a double amputee, as well as his class location removed from the material relations and conditions of the wage-earning working class. There is no record of Kingsley being employed in what could be described as “ordinary” wage labour following his fateful service with the Northern Pacific Railroad Company up to 1890, beyond an elusive reference to his occupation as “librarian” in the 1900 US Census for San Jose, California (which could have referred to employment in a library operated by the SLP).38 In his work as an organizer for the SLP, and in his later work with the Nanaimo Socialist Club, the SPBC, the SPC, and the FLP, Kingsley earned income, but from entities that to various extents he led, frequently as a member of the organization’s governing committee. As a result, his material relations of life and work—and his relationship to the means of production—were distinct from those of a wage-earning worker employed in a capitalist industry. This has led McKay to remark that these “SPC cadres might be described as self-employed men,” while Mark Leier defines Kingsley and other SPC intellectuals as petit bourgeois rather than proletarian, having exercised a large degree of control over their own labour power. “Collective bargaining and reforms to ease relations between employers and employees [were] equally irrelevant to them,” Leier suggests.39

Yet it may well be that Kingsley sought out a role as a proprietor as an innovative form of self-accommodation for his impairments in a British Columbia that restricted employment opportunities for disabled men. This seems a common thread from his publishing work in the San Francisco SLP branch to his fishmonger business in Nanaimo and finally his successful printing business in Vancouver. As the manager dispensing work assignments and overseeing sales and relations with customers, Kingsley would not have faced the kind of physical pressures that wage labourers experienced to meet daily Taylorist production standards and that he likely would not have been able to achieve.40 In a patriarchal world where dignity and self-respect for men was closely tied to remunerated wage labour, Kingsley may have turned to entrepreneurship as a way of levelling the field in a structurally ableist world.41 While one cannot retrospectively say that Kingsley was consciously articulating entrepreneurship as an explicit strategy to craft accommodations, he nevertheless clearly was a highly talented man who wanted to make a contribution. Kingsley’s involvement in private enterprise and his distance from the wage-earning working class was a matter for conjecture when the Victoria Board of Trade met after the First World War to discuss potential responses to a fiery lecture that Kingsley had delivered defending the Russian Bolsheviks. Potential responses ranged from the suppression of radical meetings to deportation. During that meeting, a member of the Board of Trade indicated that he had known Kingsley personally when he was based in Nanaimo two decades earlier and that Kingsley ran his business “along the most capitalistic lines.” According to the businessman, Kingsley “went over to the bigger field in Vancouver” and for a long time “had not done a stroke of real work, although he claimed to be spokesman for the workingman.”42

Regarding his disablement and physical appearance, Kingsley appears to have passed at times as able-bodied through the use of prosthetic limbs and a cane. For example, a detailed description of his personal characteristics by a Vancouver Daily Province reporter in 1908 gave no hint of Kingsley’s disablement:

He is a typical American, whose fifteen [sic] years’ residence in Canada has not spoilt his accent. He speaks in short sentences, and drives them at his audience with sharp forward jerks of his head. But the most curious of his mannerisms is the way, when wishing to make a point, he licks his first finger, for all the world like a baseball pitcher preparing the famous spit ball. Tall, and inclined to be stout, with keen small eyes, that seem to be continually raking his audience for possible hecklers, he is a good speaker with a forceful manner.43

However, Kingsley’s disablement also appears to have been common knowledge among many of his Socialist comrades as well as sections of the press and the public in British Columbia, as evidenced by his description in the Victoria Colonist in 1903 as “the legless wonder of Social Economics.”44 Ronald Grantham, writing a graduate thesis less than fifteen years after Kingsley’s passing, described him as “a crippled printer.”45 In an article and radio address three decades after Kingsley’s death, former SPC member Roy Devore described his physical appearance: “Due to a railway accident in his young days Kingsley was minus both feet. But he was a big man, a 250 pounder and his rugged physique coupled with an indomitable will kept him going. He was a masterly lecturer and deadly debater.”46

An important side note is Kingsley’s apparent silence on issues relating to workplace safety, injury, disablement, and compensation. While British Columbia’s labour unions and socialist parties would advocate consistently in the first two decades of the twentieth century for laws and programs to improve safety for workers and provide security for those who had been injured on the job, Kingsley’s name was never associated with these efforts in the hundreds of documents we have consulted. For example, in a speakers’ series hosted by the Vancouver Trades and Labor Council (VTLC) toward the end of the First World War, it was VTLC president James McVety, rather than Kingsley, who spoke to the topic “Industrial Accidents and Workmen’s Compensation.” Kingsley adhered to more familiar ground, in an address on “Capital, Labor, and the State.”47 Of course, this may have related to Kingsley’s strident adherence to “one-plank” Marxism, rejecting advocacy for workplace safety laws and compensation programs as “palliative” measures that would only prolong capitalism’s demise. However, given his personal experience of workplace injury and disablement, it is notable that Kingsley—the foremost orator and propagandist of British Columbia’s working-class movement in this era—shunned any association with issues so immediately connected to his personal experience. This suggests that he strenuously sought to avoid drawing attention to his disablement, avoiding advocating on issues that would draw the attention of comrades, the public, and opponents to his lived reality as a double amputee.48

While Kingsley himself never advocated publicly for workplace safety measures or programs to help workers who had been injured or disabled on the job, these themes figured prominently in the Clarion. Especially during Kingsley’s term as its editor, the paper frequently reported on industrial accidents in Canada and the United States. Many of these reports included some sardonic remark about the fact that no capitalists were injured and suggested that mine explosions, railway accidents, and all manner of other hazards were inherent to the capitalist system, in which workers’ lives are expendable.49 When twenty-three coal miners were killed in an explosion in West Virginia in 1905, an unsigned article in the newspaper commented that the cause of the explosion “was, of course, not due to any negligence of the company. Such affairs never are as capitalist concerns are proverbially more zealous in providing for the safety of employes [sic] than in making profit.”50 In discussing statistics on the deaths of rail workers involved in the coupling and uncoupling of cars (a task with which Kingsley was intimately familiar), another article—also unsigned—noted that the “property loss was the same” regardless of how many workers died, “as fortunately none of the cars or engines were injured.”51 When Canada’s Department of Labour released figures for industrial accidents in August 1906, showing that 111 workers had been killed and 280 seriously injured, the Clarion commented bitterly on “Canada’s slave market,” where “lives [were] cheaper than safety appliances.”52 “The list of capitalists killed and injured has been omitted, probably through an oversight,” the paper noted sarcastically.53

The Clarion under Kingsley’s editorship regularly took aim at state officials’ disregard for workers’ well-being—as, for example, when two miners were killed in an explosion at the Sullivan Mine near Cranbrook, BC. “The coroner decided that no inquest was necessary,” the paper reported, adding, “Of course not. Only two working-men killed, anyway.”54 Workplace safety was also an important legislative preoccupation for prewar Socialists in the province, with MLAs James Hawthornthwaite and Parker Williams forging the Workmen’s Compensation Act and revising the Coal Mines Regulation Act. This likely had more to do with the hazards facing coal miners in Hawthornthwaite’s and Williams’s Vancouver Island districts, however, than any personal intervention on the part of Kingsley.

The Clarion also contained occasional references to disability and dismemberment, though none was authored by Kingsley openly. In 1905, the newspaper carried a report on the death of a Winnipeg worker who had previously been disabled on account of having his feet frozen. Connecting a critical analysis of disability to capitalism and organized religion, the newspaper commented that “[a]ble-bodied men are walking the streets of Winnipeg by the score, unable to obtain a job; among these the poor cripple had no chance. It is these conditions that the church helps to perpetuate. The church must go.”55 Years later, in February 1919, in an article in the short-lived Labor Star, which he edited, Kingsley provided the one published reference we have found under his byline that explicitly relates to disability. In an article titled “Reconstruction,” Kingsley made the sharp observation that “pensions for disabled soldiers, homes and sustenance for cripples . . . will settle nothing, will change nothing. . . . The slaves will still be slaves, and the masters will still be masters, in spite of all the ‘reconstruction’ that stops short of revolution. . . . Though that may smack of ‘Bolshevism’ it may nevertheless be true.”56

We know little about Kingsley’s personal life during the quarter century that he lived in Vancouver. He appears to have been missed by the enumerators for the 1911 and 1921 federal censuses, perhaps because he was out of town on organizing tours for the socialist cause, perhaps because he avoided the watchful eye of the bourgeois state. City directories beginning in 1906 list his place of residence at a series of rooming houses in downtown Vancouver—on West Cordova, Richards, Seymour, Water, and West Pender Streets, clustered around the offices of the Clarion, the Federationist, and his printing plant at the Flack Building and the Dunsmuir Street Labour Temple.57 Mirroring the earlier pattern in San Francisco and San Jose, Kingsley usually lived within one or two blocks of his workplace—suggesting a rational adaptation to life as an double amputee by limiting daily travel distances (as well as hills and stairs). Until 1908, he appears to have ambulated on wooden legs, before acquiring a pair of more modern prosthetic limbs.58 He is recorded as being retired in the 1928 city directory and he died on his own in December 1929 in his apartment at 309 West Pender Street—one block from the Clarion’s long-standing headquarters.59 There is no record of any romantic relationship of any sort following his divorce from his wife in the early 1890s, and he appears to have had little contact with his two sons, with the exception of a possible 1913 visit with Percy.60 Kingsley appears to have devoted his life to the socialist cause he had advanced since at least 1894, apparently forging close friendships with several comrades including socialist lawyer Wallace Lefeaux, who is recorded as the personal contact on Kingsley’s death certificate, and Richard Parmater “Parm” Pettipiece, with whom he established a long-standing publishing relationship in relation to the Clarion and, later, the Federationist and Labor Star.61 Kingsley also appears to have had an affinity with Hawthornthwaite, the long-time SPC MLA for Nanaimo. We can make further inferences about his personal network from the identity of his business associates, for example, in a Port Alberni timber venture.62

The Collected Works of E. T. Kingsley

This volume contains the only official published version of Kingsley’s political thought, including a booklet that he published with Ontario-born typographer Parm Pettipiece and the Federationist Publishing Company in 1916 entitled The Genesis and Evolution of Slavery: Showing How the Chattel Slaves of Pagan Times Have Been Transformed into the Capitalist Property of To-day.63 Originating as an essay in a special Labour Day issue of the British Columbia Federationist newspaper in September 1916, it was subsequently published in booklet form “in response to widespread demand.”64 Even Kingsley’s erstwhile comrades in the SPC (which he had left following publication of the editorial “The Affirmation of ‘German Culture,’” reproduced in Part I of the present volume) acknowledged the value of the work. Bill Pritchard described Genesis as “short, pungent, very good.”65 The Winnipeg Voice newspaper suggested the pamphlet cleared up “much that has long confused, not only the workers themselves, but many others who have given thought to the vexations and anomalies of modern civilization.”66 To George B. Casey, a worker in Prince Rupert, BC, who wrote a letter to the Federationist lauding the pamphlet, it was “truly the best pamphlet that has yet found its way to my hands, and in my opinion you cannot push this work too strongly.” Casey had already “sold 100 to date,” during two evenings selling “the pamphlets around town,” and he expected to order an additional batch and “try and cover about a thousand square miles of this country with them.”67 The miners’ union in Phoenix, BC, in the southern interior ordered five hundred copies, while a writer from Berkeley, California, described the booklet as “a classic of proletarian philosophy,” emerging as society halted between “despotism or democracy,” and pledged to distribute one hundred copies.68

In Genesis, Kingsley issues a ringing call to political action—locating the wartime crisis of capitalism in ten thousand years of human history—and the basic structural conflict between slaves and masters. In the preface, he offers stinging commentary on the war effort, as well as on the apparent docility of workers, claiming, “The rulers of the world have frequently been siezed [sic] with fits of blood madness, that nothing could quell but a plentiful spilling of blood upon the part of their slaves. The slaves have always loyally come through with the goods when called upon.” He then shifts to the solution for resolving the war crisis and the larger structural crisis of capitalism: “the working class is the only factor in human society that has either the numerical strength or the justification to bring order out of chaos, by the abolition of its own slavery and the placing of the affairs of human society upon a basis that will make it possible for all people to live in fraternal peace, plenty and decency, in the common enjoyment of the fruits of their common labor.”69

Harking back to the Marxist doctrine that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself, Kingsley declares that “[t]he requisite knowledge to enable the workers to act intelligently in the coming crisis in human affairs, which ruling class madness and ambition is forcing upon us, must be gathered by the workers themselves against all of the intellectual forces marshaled in the service of the ruling class.”70 It was to this intellectual battle—the battle of ideas to advance the interests of workers and the ideal of working-class emancipation against the intellectual armour and apparatus of capitalist exploitation—that Kingsley devoted his life’s work from the time of his disablement in 1890 to his death on the eve of the economic crisis in 1929. The application of this approach could be discerned shortly after Kingsley’s arrival in British Columbia, in a retrospective article in the Clarion describing the support of Nanaimo coal miners for Socialist candidate Parker Williams in a 1902 by-election: “the battering-ram effects of sound economic teachings were speedily felt by the master class in this campaign. The roar of the revolutionary artillery of the proletariat was unmistakable in the result of the poll.”71

Kingsley’s sixty-page pamphlet walks the reader through the labour theory of value (the classically Marxist notion that human labour is the source of all wealth and capitalist property), from hunter-gatherer societies through the slave societies of antiquity and the serfs of feudal times to the capitalist wage labour of the industrial age. The work culminates in a ringing call for workers to focus the class struggle against their masters on “destroying the right of those masters to rule and rob,” by attacking their “property rights in the means of production,” suggesting that the only approach was a political one:

The class struggle is purely a political struggle. To gain control of the capitalist state is the goal aimed at, so that its guns, which are now trained upon the working class, may be spiked, as against that class. The state, with its terrific repressive powers, is the sole instrument upon which the capitalists rely for the continuation of their golden regime.72

Reflecting the contradictory tensions inherent in impossiblist ideas between campaigning for reforms and struggling against the state, Kingsley commented that in those countries where workers had attained the franchise, such as Canada and the United States, “they have the legal right to conquer the state for their own purposes.” In countries without the franchise “or where there are such restrictions placed upon it as to nullify their superiority of numbers,” workers are “justified in exercising their political power in any manner they choose,” Kingsley asserted—opening the door for extraparliamentary methods.73 The only barrier standing between the working class in Canada and their own emancipation was the docility of workers, he claimed, a characteristic common to slaves, which manifested itself politically in workers’ ability to discern their master’s interests and their corresponding blindness to their own interests.74 In a familiar swipe at what he perceived to be the distractionary character of reformism, Kingsley railed against labour’s “long struggle to obtain an amelioration of its conditions under slavery,” insisting that labour’s victory in the class struggle against capitalist exploitation would not be achieved through “petty squabbles over the amount of rations that shall be measured out to the slaves, or the length of time they shall tug in harness for their stipend.”75 Connecting “ten thousand years” of human slavery (which he described as a “hideous nightmare to the working class”) with present-day suffering by “millions . . . now being ground ruthlessly and recklessly into profit in the industrial torture chambers of modern slavery in order that a few already hog-fat capitalists may still further increase their fat,” Kingsley concluded with an expression of hope: “The only rainbow of promise on the social horizon presaging the coming of a better day is seen in the slowly but surely awakening of consciousness of the workers to the hideous wrongs that slavery has heaped upon them; and their stubborn determination to wipe it out.”76

In addition to The Genesis and Evolution of Slavery, this volume includes selected articles and speeches by Kingsley, highlighting themes and events of interest to the working-class movement at the time he lived—including the legacy of the Paris Commune, a favourite topic of Kingsley’s, the Spanish-American War of 1898, the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the Komagata Maru incident, the First World War, and the Winnipeg General Strike and One Big Union. Concepts including property, wages, profits, capital, political action, class struggle, machinery, and civilization are also interrogated at length. Kingsley’s 1906 Clarion article “A Question of Power” is emblematic of his political commitments and orthodoxy, showcasing both the eloquence of his critique and his unrelenting dogmatism. In discussing the controversial arrest of Western Federation of Miners (WFM) leaders William “Big Bill” Haywood, Charles H. Moyer, and George A. Pettibone on false charges relating to the murder of former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg, Kingsley denounces the rule of law.77 Employing his characteristic style and wit, he points out that the “entire affair has not been one of established legal procedure, but merely an instance of the brutal and conscienceless exercise of power.”78 Mincing no words, he states unequivocally, “Law is a grotesque farce, valuable only as a means of gulling those easily gullible ones upon whom human vultures prey.”79 This is not some mild postmodern deconstruction of the law. Rather, Kingsley vividly makes clear the class nature of legal regulation and the power that resides only in the working class to challenge the rule of law. As Kingsley remarks, the leaders of the WFM were “held by the power represented by the executive machinery of the State, with its ruffianly police, sheriffs, military and other cutthroats.”80

Some of the themes addressed in these articles and speeches include capitalism as systematic theft, the nature of wage slavery and its perpetuity in modern times, capitalism and the state, the relationship between capitalism and war, the nature of trade unions, and the importance of internationalism. The theme of political revolution can be seen as a red thread connecting the pieces throughout this volume. Works of Kingsley’s that were reprinted in the Australian press in the aftermath of the First World War, such as “Gold—The Sacred Ikon of Payment” and “The Pleasing Hallucinations of Wealth,” particularly highlight the nature of capitalism as theft of the labour produced by the working classes.81 The nature of wage slavery is discussed in articles that appeared in the Western Clarion during Kingsley’s 1908 cross-Canada tour (“In the Firing Line” and “Notes by the Way”) and pragmatic organizing speeches such as his 1903 remarks in Cumberland, BC, aimed at educating miners and ranchers in Vancouver Island’s Comox Valley about the class nature of society and the need for a revolutionary transformation of capitalism.82

In “The Worker’s Awakening,” Kingsley describes the state as the “sole bulwark of capitalist property.”83 He repeats this theme in “The Capitalist State,” written in 1911, in which he articulates his critique of the capitalist state as “the instrument or means whereby capitalist property maintains its sway and enforces its scheme of rapine and robbery upon its working class victims.”84 While modern Marxist theories of the state may be more subtle in light of the rise of the administrative state and the panoply of associated bureaucracy, Kingsley’s politics have the advantage of clarity and directness in proposing whose interests are reflected by the state and the need for class struggle. He painstakingly documents this principle through the history of the persecution of the WFM.85

With respect to war, Kingsley anticipated global developments in a prescient piece he authored in 1909. In “War Is Hell, for Workers,” he comments on the likelihood of a war between Britain and Germany and stresses that wage slaves have no interest in serving as cannon fodder in their rulers’ wars.86 He notes that modern wars have been wars of conquest and the workers should not allow themselves to support such an inglorious cause. A much more controversial piece is Kingsley’s 1914 editorial “The Affirmation of ‘German Culture,’” which led to his departure from the Western Clarion.87 In that piece, he denounces the militaristic culture of Germany and sides with the Western powers. An anomaly in his principled legacy of supporting internationalist working-class emancipation, it may reflect his contempt for German intervention during the Paris Commune in 1871. In “Killed and Maimed in Peace as in War,” written during the First World War, Kingsley returns to form, condemning the carnage imposed by industrial accidents and capitalist war.88 In “Fighting Now and Paying Later,” he illustrates how the ruling class makes workers pay the costs of its wars.89 Kingsley also gave speeches opposing conscription and calling for workers to go on strike to prevent it until a referendum could be held on the matter.90

On the question of trade unions, Kingsley’s defiant stance, grounded in an appreciation of the fundamental contradiction between capital and labour, is consistent throughout his writings over the years. In an unsigned 1903 editorial clearly reflecting Kingsley’s distinct writing style, “A Small Flutter,” Kingsley indicates the reformist nature of trade unionism and his principled opposition to compromise. For him, trade unionism and working-class self-activity were fundamentally different ontologies.91 In “Hunting with the Hounds,” a piece appearing in Kingsley’s short-lived publication Labor Star in 1919, he sharply criticizes the president of the Trades and Labor Congress, Tom Moore, for his reformist betrayals of the working class including his attendance at a banquet with manufacturers held at the Ritz-Carlton.92

Internationalism is a consistent theme in Kingsley’s writings. Apart from his opposition to war, Kingsley also wrote about the Russian Revolution. In his 1917 article “The Wolf in the Capitalist Sheepfold,” he favourably quotes Trotsky and defends the Bolshevik Revolution and its conquest of political power over the propertied classes.93 With his characteristic style and wit, he lambastes the craven capitalist class for sapping the “life blood of the producing class.”94 Similarly, in a 1919 speech at Nanaimo’s Dominion Hall, Kingsley defends the creation of soviets and the provision of new agricultural policies designed to diminish the distinction between urban centres and rural areas.95 Another insightful example is his short remarks regarding the Belfast General Strike of 1919, demonstrating solidarity of workers across continents.96

To be sure, there is a degree of repetition in Kingsley’s writings and speeches, given his sustained focus on a class-struggle perspective and a longue durée approach tracing class struggle across the ages from the Spartacan revolts against the Roman Empire to the working-class struggle against capitalism at the time he was writing and speaking. We have endeavoured to be discerning in our selection of writings and speeches in this anthology, aiming to include works that highlight fresh themes or subject matter or that intersect with key moments in the political history of the working class in Canada, the United States, and beyond. We hope that readers will be generous in tolerating a degree of repetition in the interests of capturing original insights from Kingsley’s words that would otherwise be lost through the omission of these speeches and writings from this collection.

There is some indication that Kingsley intended in the late 1910s to compile his writings into a collected work, but the final product does not appear to have materialized.97 This may reflect the time pressures of the flurry of organizing and propaganda work that Kingsley undertook on behalf of the socialist movement between 1918 and 1920, as president and organizer of the FLP of British Columbia, extending the message of constitutional Marxism to a wide spectrum of working people angered by the war and the constraints imposed by the postwar consolidation of capitalism. In those years, as Kingsley surpassed sixty years of age, he undertook dozens of lectures from Vancouver Island to the interior of British Columbia and Alberta—a remarkable feat in light of his physical impairment, one that mirrored a previous extended speaking tour from the Crowsnest Pass to Quebec in 1908.98 We have provided a partial inventory of Kingsley’s public speeches and lectures from his first political involvement with the SLP in San Francisco in the mid-1890s until his final confirmed public speeches during his campaign to be Member of Parliament for Vancouver in 1926. We hope that this information conveys the breadth of Kingsley’s political reach, as well as the impressive efforts of a double amputee to convey his ideas to a wide audience in support of a cause to which he was fervently committed.

Does E. T. Kingsley’s theoretical and rhetorical contribution merit resuscitation, or should it remain buried for posterity? While we acknowledge limitations in Kingsley’s ideological and political lens, we believe that a proper, rigorous, and thorough appreciation of his ideas is beneficial from the standpoint of scholarship as well as in light of political considerations. An appreciation of Kingsley’s intellectual contribution can shine a powerful interpretive light on the response of a layer of working-class people and left-wing organizations to industrialism and capitalism in turn-of-the-century Canada and the United States. Resuscitating Kingsley’s ideas and those of the British Columbia school can also provide a fresh perspective to respond to current and future challenges—informing analysis and social movement responses to ongoing limitations of the capitalist structuring of human and social relations in the twenty-first century. It is our view that this process of resuscitation is timely and overdue.