[lbo-talk] Canada: imperialist or vassal?

Marvin Gandall marvgandall at videotron.ca
Tue Oct 3 19:47:32 PDT 2006


Doug writes:


> [this was just posted to Lou Proyect's Marxism list - any reax from our
> Canadians?]
>
> For decades, one of the most important and divisive questions before
> Canadian socialists has been the character of their ruling class. Many on
> the left view it as a dependent bourgeoisie dominated by U.S.
> imperialism. Others argue that it is a fully imperialist ruling class.
>
> An authoritative new study of this question by Vancouver Marxist Bill
> Burgess was published today in Socialist Voice. The following excerpt
> indicates Bill's conclusions. For the full study, see
> http://www.socialistvoice.ca/SV-PDF/SV-95.pdf.
============================================== The research seems solid enough, but I'd like to see Panich or Ginden or someone on the other side of the debate reply. I've never been persuaded by the argument that Canada is, in effect, an exploited semi-colony of the US. As the study indicates, Canadian capitalists dominate the economy, and increasingly so as the relative share of manufacturing, where US subsidiaries were strongest, has declined over the past three decades. Of course, Canada's proximity to the US makes it more dependent on the US market and monetary policy, and NAFTA has accelerated the process of continental integration, but otherwise I don't see the physiognomy of Canadian capitalism and its dependence on the US superpower as being qualitatively different than that of second-tier EU countries like Spain or Italy or even of France, Germany, and the UK.

In general, I think the distinction between so-called "imperialist" countries like Canada and the EU and "semi-colonial" ones like China, Brazil, India, etc. is becoming increasingly meaningless with the spectacular rise of these emergent economies and the increasing interpenetration of global capital. The analytical power of these concepts derived from a time when there were multiple Western imperialisms of roughly equal strength exporting capital and competing for colonies and markets which made war between them inevitable. That's no longer the case, but I'm open to argument on this point also.



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