The 1960s, that memorable decade of the gorgeously good, the basically bad and the truly ugly, which seems like only yesterday to this survivor, has now become history-as-usual. Which means, since history is written by the winners, that those of us who were the unwashed back then risk being taken to the cleaners one more…
Mel Watkins
Mel Watkins is a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. McGill-Queen’s University Press recently published Staples and Beyond: Selected Writings of Mel Watkins, edited by Hugh Grant and David Wolfe. He remains a political activist, most recently as a member of the Maher Arar Support Committee.
Articles by
Mel Watkins
Growing Up Communist
A political thinker recalls his unsettling Toronto upbringing in a Stalinist home December 2004
On a day in May 1969, I first met Jim Laxer. Almost by chance, I heard of a meeting that was about to take place in Toronto, called by Laxer and Gerry Caplan, to talk about the future of the NDP. I was a supporter of the NDP but, having only recently returned from Ottawa where I had worked for the Liberal Walter…