ABSTRACT
An examination of the politics of social movements during the present era of restructuring may seem somewhat misplaced in a collection celebrating Harold Innis. His influential and substantial research on staples production has been criticized precisely for being dehumanized and deterministic (Berger 1976:98). This critical assessment of his work, however, is both superficial and misleading. It is true that Innis did not believe that political actors had unrestrained political agency. They were not ‘free’, in other words, to realize all political outcomes. Instead, Innis conceived of political actors as operating within a historically specific field of constraints imposed by, among other things, international power structures and the force of previous decisions, particularly those relating to economic development strategies. Innis advanced a relational and diachronic vision of the links between staples exploitation, political institutions, cultural forms and political action. He envisioned each phase in a historical series of staples exploitation as a complex web of social relations which cumulatively have ‘left their stamp’ on Canadian society and politics (Brodie 1990: ch. 3). Innis's conception of these structural and temporal factors, in turn, revealed the margins, ‘invariably narrow, in which men [sic] were free to make their own history’ (Berger 1976:102).
