Eight Dialectical Theses on Writing the History of the Revolutionary Left

Theory  •  November 12, 2026  •  Bryan Palmer

The revolutionary left, as a collectivity of individuals, movements, and parties, has always been dedicated to changing the world, and doing so for the better. This holds regardless of which people, campaigns, and organizations on the revolutionary left we are studying and writing about. Especially in times past, the dedication, sacrifice, and ongoing engagements that constituted this commitment to changing the world were often extraordinary. From at least the time of the Haymarket martyrs in the United States in 1886, and throughout the history of revolutionary struggles of anarchists, socialists, communists, and dissident communists in the 20th and 21st centuries, this effort to change the world, to rebuild it anew, however flawed and whatever its failures and successes, has been met with repression and reaction. Lives have been given for causes that we all embrace, and much has been lost, as well as what has been won.

Writing the history of this effort to change the world necessitates approaching those who struggled to overturn basic structures of exploitation and oppression and should commence with an understanding of the advanced humanity that, at is core, always animated the revolutionary left. Without a feeling of regard for those involved in the project of swimming against the stream to realize true human emancipation and reverse the tide of destruction and debasement that has flowed in the wake of capitalism and colonialism, subordination, and dispossession, no substantive history of the revolutionary left will be written.

Recovering lost histories of those who sought to change the world, bringing them back from their times and relating them to ours, is why, it seems to me, this history of the revolutionary left is important. How has the historiography measured up on this score? In general, I would say, rather well. To take the example of Canadian writing on the Communist Party (CP) of Canada, for instance, an older, partisan historiography, written by overt critics of the CP, has largely been displaced by a more sensitive accounting, in which the treatments of the movements and activism of Communists has been handled relatively sensitively. The histories of anarchism and dissident communisms of various kinds is, at the moment, too underdeveloped to allow a discerning assessment on this front to be made. The lack of such study is perhaps a reminder that these movements, minority traditions overshadowed by the soldiers of the International, to borrow William Rodney’s title, is an indication of neglect that speaks to the problem of addressing the revolutionary left with the kind humility that I am highlighting. Much recovery is still called for.

If we start from a base line of regard and respect, however, we cannot check our critical faculties at the entry-ways of analysis and recovery. Regard for past revolutionaries and respect for what they struggled to achieve is mandatory, but so too is an informed and sober reflection on how they erred, what strategic and tactical blunders served not to advance the cooperative commonwealth and a society organized around the production for use not for profit but to stall the socialist project of collectivized humanity. This is not an easy task. For it demands not only a serious scrutiny of what happened and why but an understanding of just what the historicized and contextualized criticisms of practices and programs were.

A serious exploration of just why the Soviet Union attracted the support of so many progressive and radical Canadian workers, intellectuals, and others, as well as the loyalist ranks of the CP, will come to grief on the shoals of misunderstanding why other dissident groups on the revolutionary left drew back from the Soviet experiment. No history of Canadian communism can be written without cognizance of how Stalinism, certainly embedded in the Communist International since the mid-to-late 1920s, exercised such a pernicious influence on those class struggle militants and progressive intellectuals, artists, and fellow-travellers who all-too-often made up a contingent of supporters blinded by the light of 1917’s accomplishments to the detriment of seeing the darkness unfolding within the Russia Communist Party, with deleterious consequences for the entire world. You cannot write successfully about the Communist Party’s periodization in the 1930s and its shift from Third Period adventurism, which contained important class struggle initiatives, and the about turn of the Popular Front and its class collaborationist impulse unless you appreciate criticisms that were developing alongside these developments, even if these alternative prescriptions had far less impact than those of the Comintern. Trotskyism’s history, yet to be written in Canada, will not be successfully undertaken unless the issue of schism and factionalism is confronted, and positions of all sides are given their due. This demands understanding complex social movements, in which political programs differentiated individuals of strong wills, deep commitments, and varied talents. How this is addressed, moreover, can never rest, as is sometimes the case, on oral reflections and testimonies, as useful as they may be.

The respect, indeed reverence, accorded old leftists interviewed by younger left historians in oral interviews needs to be balanced with an archival reconstruction of events they recall and comment on, and the issue is not one of letting the subject speak, without question or challenge but rather bringing the history alive, warts and all. Documentary records often establish that memory is quite often selective, and certainly on occasion, self-serving. When I interviewed William Krehm, a Trotskyist with an embittered historical relationship with Maurice Spector, when they were both active in the Communist League of America (CLA) in Toronto in the early 1930s, Krehm denied ever being involved in the CLA, claiming his affiliation was always with the B.J. Field group that departed the mainstream American Trotskyist movement led by James P. Cannon in the mid-to-late 1930s. Yet I had seen letters from Krehm and relating to Krehm written by CLA leaders earlier in the 1930s. Tyler Wenzel’s history of Krehm and the Field group will hopefully help put the record straight on this aspect of Canadian Trotskyism. But none of this can be done without a willingness to balance respect and humility in the face of the struggles of militants of the past, with an even-handed willingness to raise questions about where wrong turns were taken and why. If this respect and humility before the actions of the Communist Party is often present in recent left-leaning histories of the CP, my assessment of this obligation to not leave error unrefuted is more jaundiced. Perhaps the only historian writing on Communism in Canada who has struggled relentlessly to present this kind of balance is the writing – scattered in many articles – of John Manley. But even Manley, confronted with the dilemma of valuing the Communist Party and its historic role in Canada and presenting a critique of its failures and flaws, opted for a contradictory presentations of this problem: in one article he outlined what the Party and its ranks did so well, in another where they lapsed into Stalinist quagmires.

“A bourgeois nihilism exists in the exaggerated … rejection of the past, but not a proletarian revolutionism,” wrote Trotsky in Literature and Revolution (1924). “We Marxists live in tradition,” asserted Trotsky. He decried the literary theorists who, in waging their merciless war on “bourgeoisdom,” proclaimed themselves “destroyers of tradition” and “found their way to the Academy.” In our times, we have witnessed just such a series of intellectual movements against the tradition of historical materialism and notions of Marxism, even the concept of class, as a metanarrative undermining understanding of the complexity of human relations. This, in a nutshell, was the linguistic turn, the embrace of postmodernism and its imperatives to do away with all past conceptions of historical determination, jettisoning as well the revolutionary left, both as a historical actuality and as a possible architect of social transformation. Old positions were tossed out the window in a feverish embrace of new fads, most of which have proven barren of interpretive capacity. In history programs today, this worship of the recent registers in reading lists and PhD comprehensive fields. Who reads older works, rather than gravitating to newer discussions. In labour history, if it survives as a field, who reads the traditional studies, John R. Commons, for instance? The question is rhetorical. Younger scholars are not challenged to read what has gone before them.

And yet there is another side to this need to walk in the footsteps of those who have gone before us, especially as it relates to the revolutionary left. Marx wrote famously that “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” (1851) Is the weight of the nightmare a consequence of paths taken that were honorable and politically necessary but that ended in defeat because of the countervailing power of repression, or is the nightmare generated because of routes of resistance not followed when they should have been. There is nothing dishonorable in the case of the former, while the latter is cause for more concern. In either case, the necessity is to understand the traditions of the revolutionary left, to live within them as examples, and to establish and appreciate principles, holding to them in circumstances that may change and demand adaptation but that seldom demand an outright repudiation of traditional values and the perspectives and programmatic orientations they called forth. William Z. Foster earned his nickname Zig-Zag because his history in the Communist Party, after his days as a revolutionary syndicalist and imaginative architect of major mobilizing campaigns in the era of World War I class upheaval seemed a record of abandoning one tradition after another in the face of pressures to adapt to Comintern directives. He was against dual unionism, mechanically, in one period, only to be for it, mechanically, in another. Some called this “making the turn.” Others assailed it for repudiating principles.

Traditions, principles, priorities, and programs are central to the history of the revolutionary left and must, of course, be addressed in any attempt to write about this left in a serious way. The dualism of regard for those involved in the revolutionary left and critical engagement with the history of this fractured current can only seriously be addressed in hindsight. Hegel’s counsel that it is only with hindsight that a true assessment of historical developments and periods can be attained of course applies to understandings of the revolutionary left. There were times when revolutionary organizations and their cadre needed to orchestrate a shift in tactics, even strategies. But how did such shifts relate to actual revolutionary leftist principles, which hopefully had some staying power through the thick and thin of political economy’s changing contours.

Judgement, then, very much comes into writing the history of the revolutionary left. Was a decision to change the Communist International’s position on World War II between 1939-1941 justified, or was it yet another sorry zig-zag related to Stalin’s abandonment of world revolution as a principled strategic direction of the Communist International, replacing it with a fixation on the narrow foreign policy interests of the Soviet Union? Were the New Communist Movements of the 1970s right to follow policies of industrializing cadre, sending them into factories and workplaces to cultivate left-wing caucuses but miring them, too often, in isolated settings, uprooting them from familiar surroundings in which their skills and organizational acumen might well have had a better political bite? What was the role of revolutionary leftists in the mass upheavals that greeted the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and that generated, at first, considerable mainstream trade-union opposition, almost of all of which was dissipated in a sorry denouement as the labour officialdom turned the tap of class struggle politics on, only to turn it off as militancy beneath them peaked? How did this process relate to the changing political economy of capitalism in this period, as the rate of profit declined in those western nation states over-ripe for a socio-economic transformation, ushering in an era of austerity, deindustrialization, and global reconfigurations of power? Historians writing on the revolutionary left have an obligation not to avoid judgements but to rather to present them forthrightly.

It is not always easy to make such evaluations, especially given how traumatic some of the changes and struggles of the recent past have been. The further one goes back in history, however, the murkier things often become. The history of the revolutionary left is inevitably written out of the present, and this is all to the good. We write the past to inform our present and to change the future for the better. Yet there is a danger in subordinating the revolutionary left of past times to our present, which can be a place – materially, intellectually, culturally, and politically – remarkably different than those times inhabited by dissidents of the past. In this, those of us studying the revolutionary left could usefully take a page out of the novel of a now-forgotten writer, and certainly an author with no connection to the revolutionary left, L. P. Hartley, whose opening line in The Go-Between (1953) highlighted that historical contexts often differ remarkably from our own.

Writing the history of the revolutionary left as though it was ordered by the same set of assumptions, premises, and convictions as our own civil society and sociability networks is one way of bypassing the necessity of engaging with the revolutionary lefts of the past in ways that both address these movements with regard and confront their strengths and weaknesses fairly. Issues of race and gender, especially, animate the current left, but revolutionary lefts of the past may well have approached these crucial spheres of life under capitalism and colonialism quite differently than we do. The delicate balance of engaging with such areas without writing of them in the complexity of their pasts in ways that impose upon the cadre of movements and parties otherworldly expectations, totally out of character with their time place, is difficult, of course. And the reality of the past being different than the present is not one that should excuse racism and misogyny. There were always those, especially those on the revolutionary left, who thought beyond the limited horizons of their time. Indeed, this has always been a characteristic of revolutionists. So, charting the nature of their visions, and how they often transcended the constraining limitations of their present is vital to any history of the left. Yet, lifting such revolutionaries out of their time and place, demanding of them adherence to our present sensibilities, making them into versions of ourselves, is destined to produce an interesting history of ideologies but unlikely to result in histories of sophisticated understanding of the past.

In what is possibly his best, if not most lauded and celebrated book, the Marxist literary theorist Fredric Jameson opened his discussion of narrative and the literary cannon with the exhortation, “Always historicize!”, declaring this “The one absolute… ‘transhistorical’ imperative of dialectical thought.” It goes without saying that this goading is also the only way to address the history of the revolutionary left in ways congruent with the theses I have been elaborating. Treating the movements, parties, and personnel of the revolutionary left with regard and realist critique, situating them in the complexities and differentiations of the past, demands contextualizing them historically. This means placing them not in our present but in the ensemble of relations – economic, cultural, social, and political – of specific times and places. To write the history of the revolutionary left, then, is not only about that left, or even about other lefts and their perspectives and priorities, which likely differed significantly from the left being studied. It is also about the society as a whole, its political economy, its structures and policies of governance, its cultural aesthetics and social norms.

Historicizing is not about hiving off the revolutionary left but rather about placing it within its milieu, which it was committed to changing. This means appreciating difference as well as understanding commonalities and limitations. In this sense, I have a profound disagreement with Ian McKay’s approach to the revolutionary left, in which he congeals different components of that left in a homogenizing of their opposition to the bourgeois order they confronted. Historicizing the left is not about reducing E.T. Kingsley of the so-called impossibilist current of the Socialist Party of Canada to the same political orientation as James Shaver Woodsworth, a Fabian/Christian socialist, because they belonged to a left formation that supposedly had more in common with each other than with the bourgeoisie. Similarly, linking Tim Buck and David Lewis in a like left formation united by their commitment to the planned economy misses how much these representatives of the Communist Party and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation were at loggerheads. Imposing on the revolutionary left presentist admonitions to create a big tent movement of socialists won’t cut it historically, nor is it likely to take us anywhere in the present, except toward unproductive illusions.

Lenin, a theorist of the revolutionary left unrivalled in the twentieth century, indicated just how much he, like Trotsky, lived in tradition, drawing on Goethe to indicate the relation of theory and practice, with the latter vibrant in its living expressions, the former prone to a dull, even ossifying, aging. We are all historians, whether we recognize it or not, guided by theoretical frameworks and conceptions, the politics of which are undeniable, even as they may well be deliberately obscured. That said, our historical reconstructions of the revolutionary left, while originating in alignments theoretical and political, must utilize all of the empirical evidence at hand to revise and reconstitute abstractions, generalizations, theories, and political positionings. This is the purpose of writing histories of the revolutionary left. Rather than obeisance, we owe those revolutionary movements we study the respectful recognition that their past can inform our present and hopefully change our future. But to do this we must learn not only from successes but also from failures. The meaning of the revolutionary left lies in how its history can make a common cause with the creation of a better world. In this, the lessons learned are green with life in ways that our preconceptions, theoretically and politically, can never quite match. In our times, I fear, an inattention to the history of the revolutionary left or an attention to it scaffolded on evasions, too often leads us into cul-de-sacs. How many times have I looked at contemporary left movements and asked, “Must we really discover the wheel all over again?”

If there is no need to rediscover the wheel, there are many spokes to ponder. A final thesis on the study of the revolutionary left is that we have yet to really probe the many dimensions of its experience historically. Marx was never one to shy away from anything that left its imprint on human experience, nor should we in our study of the revolutionary left. The ideas, struggles, organizational structures and intrigues, pastimes, and everyday activities of the revolutionary left remain to be studied in ways that will reveal much about society. This will, as well, reveal much about those who considered themselves living outside of the dictates of possessive individualism, however much they were actually inside the structures of political economy and the aesthetics and animating norms and values associated with it. Marx’s method and the entirety of his orientation placed an accent on understanding totalities. We should do no less, despite the impulse, so prevalent in academic training, in the imperatives of publishing, in the inclinations of many researchers among us, and even in the pressures of activism and the immediacy of its concerns, to narrow our vision and limit the canvas on which we paint our pictures of the past. Let us write histories of the revolutionary left in ways that highlight not its constrained presence but rather its expansive sense of possibility, in which nothing human is alien to it. •