For A Working-Class Culture in Canada A Selection of Colin McKay’s Writings on Sociology and Political Economy, 1897-1939

This book sets out to present the economic and social writings of Colin McKay, a pioneer Marxian sociologist and economist in Canada (and no relation to the author), and to place McKay in the context of the international socialist tradition. The manuscript takes the form of an extensive biographical essay, five substantive sections that present and examine McKay’s thought both thematically and chronologically, and a concluding essay that places McKay’s thought in the context of contemporary discussions with regard to the “decline of Marx” in the late 20th century. Colin McKays’s life and work determines the scope of the manuscript, but since this “life and work” extended to subjects as varies as the limitations of Kantian philosophy and the design of North Atlantic schooners, the book is rather less narrow than it might appear at first.

Table of Contents

1. Preface
2. Introduction by Lewis Jackson and Ian McKay
3. WRITINGS OF COLIN MCKAY
4. Part I. If Christ Came to Montreal: A Liberal Christian Progressive Looks at Society, 1897-1906
5. Part II. Evolutionary Sociology and Applied Ethics: The Struggle for a “Working-Class Culture,” 1907-1914
   1. i. Capitalism As A System
   2. ii. The Need for Sociology
   3. iii. Economic Determinism and Trade Unionism
   4. iv. Working-Class Culture
   5. v. Trade Unionism and Labour Politics
6. Part III. Capitalism in the Maritimes, 1900-1935
   1. i. Economic Consolidation and the Resource Industries
   2. ii. The Workers of the Maritimes
7. Part IV. “The Mad Master of the Modern World”: Capitalism in Crisis, 1919-1939
   1. i. The Marxian Framework
   2. ii. Causes and Dimensions of the Economic Crisis
   3. iii. An Army of False Prophets
   4. iv. The Death of Liberalism and the Emergence of “State Capitalism”
   5. v. The Scope of Possible Reforms
8. Part V. The Struggle for a Better World: Industrial Unionism and the Struggle for Socialism, 1919-1939
   1. i. Trade Unionism
   2. ii. Labour Politics
   3. iii. The Struggle for Industrial Democracy
   4. iv. Optimism of the Will
9. Afterword
10. Bibliography
11. Index of Proper Names
12. Subject lndex

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