Gary Teeple – författare

Capitalism is the accepted, and so intellectually an almost invisible, way of life in Canada. Very little has been thought or published about Canada that uses a Marxist critique of capitalism and its dynamics, and this book aims to advance such thinking by analysing the reasons for the openness of the dominion to capitalist domination, first by Europeans and then by Americans, to labour domination from the United States, and to a sell-out policy in regard to its land and farms. The dependency of the Canadian ruling class on foreign capitalists is an important factor in Canada’s continued colonial-mindedness, and the rise of nationalism in Quebec is based on the inevitabilities of the class antagonisms set up by capitalism. The authors believe that it is only through such Marxist theory and practice that a way can be found for Canada to escape at last from imperialist exploitation and that a way can be found to shape a socialist future for the whole country.

The prevailing view of Marx''s early writings suggests that they comprise a set of disconnected works which share only the same author, that Marx was philosophically an idealist or Hegelian and politically a ''liberal'' or ''democrat'' throughout much of this period, and that he possessed no particular method of inquiry. Professor Teeple challenges these ideas in his exposition of the development of Marx''s critique of politics from the earliest published writings in 1842 to the end of this period in 1847.

Eschewing the search for Marx''s intellectual sources, and a narrow focus on any one of these early works, the author traces Marx''s intellectual development through a careful analysis of the texts,. He demonstrates an unmistakable continuity throughout the period, arguing that Marx consciously worked out his critique of politics from a well-defined starting point in his doctoral dissertation and the Rheinische Zeitung articles to a logical conclusion in The German Ideology. Each stop in this development, it is argued, not only formed an integral link but also remained in Marx’s eyes valid in itself.

The basis of this continuity is seen to lie in the method Marx employed. The author contends that Marx did possess and apply a method in a conscious and consistent manner and that the method evolved concomitantly with his ever-deepening grasp of the nature of politics and its premises. Indeed, to discover the nature of this method and how it develops is to discover the implicit unity or rationality underlying Marx''s early writings and to grasp fully their substance.

In a word, Dr. Teeple argues that from a critique of politics at the level of politics to a critique of the premises of politics, Marx pursued in these early works what he considered to be a scientific understanding of the nature of human development. The thrust of the author''s argument goes against the grain of accepted opinion, and for this reason alone the book will shed new light on Marx''s widely discussed early writings and should generate considerable controversy.

Liberal democracy is usually treated as an independent variable, as possessing the absolutes of democratic rule. Its variable forms, changing principles and practice, and conscious destruction by its own advocates, in particular the United States, however, suggest that it is not what it appears to be. This book argues that it is a dependent variable, the political form required by the changing configurations of national capital and their countervailing forces. The forms of liberal democracy have always shifted in concert with the mode of production as their premise.

The absolutes of liberal democracy, the author contends, have never been anything but the abstracted principles of the marketplace. Their nature has now become especially visible for what they have been because the premise as national capital development has changed, leaving liberal democracy as a form without its original content, and its present content out of keeping with a national jurisdiction. As a political form, it persists, but its role has been transformed from the regulation of national capital accumulation to the enforcer of the demands of global configurations of capital.

It is a role that its citizens implicitly understand, as revealed in widespread political cynicism, decreasing electoral participation, and declining legitimacy that require ever greater measures of deceit from political leaders and increased means of coercive social control, including militarized police forces and pervasive electronic surveillance. There can be no going back to the stage of national politics because the neoliberal content of liberal democratic policies represents the necessities of global capital. And it is the contradictions of global capital that define the character of early 21st century political conflict.