Introduction to the Dowson Archive

January 1, 2026

https://archive.org/details/rossdowson?tab=collection

The Ross Dowson Archive covers the period of Canadian Trotskyism from the late 1930s until the 1990s. Ross Dowson was a leader in the united Canadian Trotskyist movement from the period of WWII until 1973. He was the key organizer, activist, and theoretician of the movement at that time as well as having been the Canadian representative to the Fourth International.

Ross Jewitt Dowson was born in 1917. His anarchist father passed on to him a lifelong love of books and radical ideas. As a young man, he witnessed the brutality of the Depression, the failure of the capitalist system and the efforts by workers to resist the degradation and poverty imposed on them. At the age of 17, he told his mother that he would dedicate his life to becoming a professional revolutionary. He kept his promise.

This archive, a product of many years of detailed work, is now freely accessible to the public, current and past activists, and researchers of Canadian Marxism alike, in an easily navigable format. It contains a written record of the main documents, both external and internal, of the movements Dowson headed. Dowson aligned himself with the ideas of the co-leader of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky, for the rest of his life—socialist democracy, anti-Stalinism, rejection of sectarian politics, internationalism, and the need for an organization of steeled revolutionists acting as the memory of the working class and addressing the class as a whole.

Dowson had one overwhelming and urgent imperative—to live each day of his life to build a socialist Canada in a socialist world. He never regarded the demands of the frugal lifestyle that he chose as a sacrifice. Instead, he saw his political activism both as an opportunity and an obligation that he dutifully fulfilled and that gave him a lasting measure of satisfaction.

Dowson was a worker and intellectual who possessed a unique and innovative mind. He and his comrades methodically dissected a wide variety of news items every day and reviewed them periodically to assess and anticipate developments that would affect political events and the needs of the working-class. Along with them, they would then develop a class struggle program and build an organization of workers and their allies to campaign to implement those demands. It was this method that enabled him to anticipate the anti-capitalist dynamics of Canadian and Quebec nationalism and to popularize expressions that summarized the political demands of broad, social protest movements such as “End Canada’s Complicity” in the anti-Vietnam war movement and “Every mother a willing mother, every child a wanted child” in the pro-choice movement.

Ross’ most significant contribution to revolutionary politics in Canada was his effort to link his organization to the fate of the broad left and trade union movement in Canada. The groups that Ross headed were fully committed to the NDP as Canada’s labour party—a position that gave Ross’ militant class struggle politics broad resonance and influence. It resulted in his supporters spurring the NDP into taking clear left-wing positions on various issues, such as was the case with the Waffle Manifesto. These achievements are all documented in these archives.

This archive provides a glimpse of the high level of energy and consistency in Dowson’s political life:

• support for the Spanish Republican revolutionists between 1936 and 1939;
• the campaign in favour of financial payments instead of demeaning food vouchers to unemployed persons during the 1930s;
• opposition to compulsory conscription of soldiers as low-paid railway workers in 1944;
• several campaigns for Mayor of Toronto including achieving 20% of the vote in 1950;
• playing a key role in the unification of the world-wide Trotskyist Fourth International at its Reunification Congress in 1963.

Dowson was instrumental in building an organization, the League for Socialist Action/Ligue Socialiste Ouvriere, that played a critical role in:

• the anti-Vietnam war movement and the women’s movement, the student power movement and the Quebec nationalist movement in the 1960s and 1970s;
• litigating against the RCMP Security Service, which massively contributed to the abolition of the spy agency, and which he succeeded in his claim that they had defamed him by calling him subversive;
• speaking, writing and organizing to build an organized left inside the CCF and later, the NDP, over a period of close to 60 years.

The Archive’s documentation includes correspondence, journals of the movement (both in English Canada and Québec), internal documents having to do with policy, political decisions, and political principles. The most critical positions associated with the movement during Ross Dowson’s leadership are those of the centrality of and orientation to Canada’s labour party, i.e. first, the CCF, and second, the NDP.

Other key positions include:

• Québécois self-determination,
• Indigenous self-determination,
• women’s liberation/feminism,
• international solidarity with colonial and semi-colonial countries,
• the right of self-determination of minorities within states,
• being a component of the Fourth International and its democratic centralism,
• international solidarity with the American Socialist Workers Party,
• and solidarity with small nations against imperialism,
• developing insight into the anti-US imperialist roots and progressive dynamic of Canadian nationalist sentiment,

while giving critical support and unconditional defence to the Soviet Union and other satellite workers states and for struggles for socialist democracy within them.

The sense of defeatism characterizing the left following the historic defeat of the Stalinist detour by a resurgent neoliberalism following 1989 has erased the lessons of the events that preceded it for many activists. This Archive restores the memory of these historic events and therefore may be considered guideposts to those aspiring to revolutionary transformation as socialism reasserts itself as an irrepressible force to be reckoned with in the dawn of a new age of capitalist crises. It also stands as an informative guide to academic researchers interested in the history and politics of Canadian Marxism.

Creators and organizers,

John Darling
Cliff Orchard
Harry Kopyto
Gord Doctorow