Maurice Spector’s “Labour and the Law in Canada” (1932)
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Maurice Spector helped create the Communist Party of Canada and served on the Executive Committee of the Communist International until he was dismissed on charges of Trotskyism. Less well known was that he was in law school when he began his career with the Communist Party, paused his studies for a decade, and returned to that project after his dismissal. He wrote a prize-winning essay in 1932, providing a rare glimpse into the state of labour law at the time from the Marxist-Leninist perspective.
Tyler Wentzell is the author of Not for King or Country: Edward Cecil-Smith, the Communist Party of Canada, and the Spanish Civil War, and a forthcoming volume on the League for a Revolutionary Workers’ Party. In a forthcoming piece in Labour/Le Travail, he provides a critical introduction to Spector’s 1932 essay, “Labour and the Law in Canada” which is reproduced in full.
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