Canada's New Brain-Trust

...Any Socialist must be vaguely anti-American," Professor McNaught maintains, but he fails to mention whether a Socialist must be anti-Communist...

...Indeed, although his essay deals with foreign policy, Korea, Hungary, Tibet and East Berlin are not even mentioned, let alone the domestic tyrannies of Communist regimes...

...Its author, Kenneth McNaught, begins with an able summary of the history of Canadian external relations, but after a few pages he launches into a philippic against Canadian participation in NATO and in the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), replete with ill-tempered anti-American jibes...

...Less happily, several contributors speak of "creative living" and the promotion of a sense of "common purpose and mutuality" as Socialist goals — unpleasantly hortatory phrases which are too reminiscent of the moral smugness that, in contrast to the dogmatism of European Marxism, has always been the besetting sin of AngloSaxon Socialism...

...In form, Social Purpose is a collection of 17 independent essays by social scientists on the faculties of the major Canadian universities...

...Preoccupation with domestic problems has often made Socialists appear parochial and inept when contemplating the world scene...

...Once having left their own areas of competence, they fall back too readily on the cliches of contemporary social criticism...

...He and his fellow-contributors to Social Purpose clearly see themselves as an academic "brain-trust" to the New Democrats...

...And Socialist parties in several Western countries have been badly split between neutralists and qualified supporters of the Western alliance in the cold war...

...author, "Population and Society" As Michael Oliver indicates in his preface, Social Purpose for Canada is intended to suggest comparison with an earlier volume, Social Planning for Canada, which appeared in 1935 shortly after the creation of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) party...

...Nearly all the authors are declared supporters of the New Democratic party, the phoenix recently arisen from the ashes of the old CCF...

...Yet a new emphasis is apparent in the economic essays, and in the others too...

...Several are acutely sensitive to the dangers of top-heavy bureaucratization posed by public ownership and central planning, and suggest corrective remedies...

...A more sympathetic attitude toward Canadian federalism, reflected in the decisions of the New Democratic party convention, is evident, especially though not exclusively in Pierre Trudeau's essay on the special situation of Quebec...

...A concern with corporate power and how to limit it enables the authors to go beyond Galbraithian perspectives and the restriction of Socialist goals to greater economic and educational equality within the framework of Keynesian policies and the welfare state...

...This will disappoint not merely those Socialists who cling to the emotional commitments of the past, but also the kind of person who takes a "let's you and him fight" attitude toward politics...

...The economy continues to receive the most attention, the result, perhaps, of the flourishing state of economics as a discipline in Canadian universities, as well as of the fact that Socialism has always been primarily—happily, not exclusively—an economic doctrine...

...The militant crusading tone and denunciatory fervor of earlier Socialist manifestos are distinctly lacking...

...It is right and necessary to deplore the terrible dangers of the crude, monomaniacal anti-Communism of important segments of American opinion, but glossing over the realities of Communist totalitarianism at home and expansionism abroad is another matter altogether...

...The contributors to Social Purpose are too sensible and knowledgeable to indulge in a rhetoric of radicalism that can be little more than a willful gesture in the absence of rational analysis of the ills of contemporary society...

...Inevitably, the tides of history that have washed over Canada and the world since the 1930s, modifying and transforming the Democratic Socialist heritage to which the authors are committed, account for some marked differences between Social Purpose and its predecessor...

...The authors, although usually too polite to say so, appear to have pondered the failures of the CCF...

...The maximization of equality and democracy are still seen as major Socialist goals, but material equality —"the economic problem"—is not given precedence over equality in the distribution of social power, which is so clearly denied by the dominance of corporate business over much of our lives...

...In fact, Oliver was elected Chairman of the party at its founding convention last August...

...They nevertheless avoid the opposite danger of giving too much attention to attractive programs to place before the electorate: This is an "idea" book, not a party platform...

...None bothers to make out a case for the inevitability of depressions under contemporary capitalism, and the reality of some equalization of incomes in the past two decades is conceded...

...The predominant themes throughout are an insistence on the need for greater investment in public services such as education, which has been so forcefully argued in the United States by John Kenneth Galbraith...

...Well-worn complaints about "mass society," "organization men" and "false material values" are all that do service for a social philosophy...

...complaints about the role of advertising on cultural as well as on strictly economic grounds...

...Canadians are urged to resist "the deceptive blandishments of the American brand of democracy" as if American democracy were a fraud like, say, the Soviet system of controlled elections...

...The Achilles' heel of Democratic Socialism in recent years has been foreign policy...

...Their joint product, therefore, deserves to receive a good deal more attention—in Canada at least—than the usual academic symposium on public affairs...

...More venerable and familiar Socialist complaints about the inequality of incomes, the special plight of the industrial worker and the small farmer, and the allegedly unavoidable instability of a capitalist economy subject to a "boom-bust" cycle, are relegated to second place...

...Yet the book's intended relevance to the objectives of Canada's newest party may account for the absence of that rare and valuable quality: a sense of Utopian imagination...

...The single essay dealing with foreign policy in Social Purpose for Canada disastrously confirms these weaknesses...

...fostered "monopoly capitalism" in Europe by supporting Christian Democratic parties, and that German militarism is still a threat to world peace...

...Pragmatic" and "realistic" are the honorific adjectives most frequently invoked...

...Thus all of the writers who touch on the subjects of total nationalization of private enterprise and highly centralized economic planning reject them as desirable goals...

...Fortunately, McNaught's views do not appear to be shared by the other contributors and failed to make much headway at the convention of the New Democratic party...

...Few display much originality or vision when attempting a total assessment of contemporary society or an estimate of its possibilities that goes beyond what appears attainable through the instrumentality of a political party...

...There is unanimity on the necessity of flexibly adapting Socialist policies to the Canadian scene...

...Socialism today requires first of all viable new ideas for which passion and dedication to dissent or "nonconformity," to use the cant phrase, are no substitute...

...and a concern with the degree to which the preponderant social power of great business corporations violates democratic values...

...If the lack of radical bombast is praiseworthy, the prosiness and comfortable expertise of most of the authors are not...

...We are told that after World War II the U.S...