The Canadian State: Political Economy and Political Power

The Canadian State is a powerful collection of essays. Leo Panitch’s theme essay, dealing with the theories of recent neo-Marxist thinkers such as O’Connor, Miliband, and Poulantzas on the nature and role of the state and sketching their relevance to Canada, sets the tone and interpretation of the whole work, which thus has a rare unity and cohesion. Reg Whitaker and Garth Stevenson provide papers offering profound analyses of the history and functioning of the federalized state in Canada. The twelve further contributors develop this theme, dealing with such topics as the aspirations of those behind the governments of Alberta and Quebec, relations between the government elites and Canada’s classes and ethnic groups, the management of the economy through budgets and welfare state policies, and the management of culture through education, the arts, and citizen participation. Together they illuminate various aspects of the way the bourgeois state organizes our society above all, for the accumulation of capital and legitimation of capitalism and, at times, uses coercion to these ends.

The work as a whole brings together Canada’s economics and politics in a new and penetrating way.

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