Canadian Bolsheviks:
A Critique from the SPC
This article, by a member of the Socialist Party of
Canada, was written in response to
Ian Angus’s May 2004 talk on the Winnipeg General Strike. Since
that talk was based on arguments he originally made in Canadian
Bolsheviks, we are including it with the reviews of that book. It is
posted here with permission of the author.
Bolshevik Bullshit
Ian Angus, author of Canadian Bolsheviks (just
re-issued) and a latter-day Canadian Bolshevik himself, gave a talk in
Toronto last May on "What Socialists Learned from the Winnipeg General
Strike" of 1919 (the full text can be found at:
http://www.socialisthistory.calfDocs/History/WinnipegStrike.htm).
In it he attacked the old Socialist Party of Canada for
adopting a non-interventionist attitude towards the strike. According to
him, instead of leaving the workers involved to plan and run the strike
themselves, the SPC should have tried to turn it into the Bolshevik
insurrection to seize power that the capitalist press of the time claimed
it was.
Despite the press’s Red-scare-mongering, the Winnipeg
General Strike was what it claimed to be: a strike to win collective
bargaining rights with local employers. And it had not been organised by
the SPC. There were a number of SPC members on the strike committee, but
they were there as workers directly involved in the economic side of the
class struggle alongside other workers who—the vast majority—were not
socialists, and they were aware that without a majority of socialists
socialism was not on the agenda and certainly couldn’t be the outcome of
the strike. Given this situation, all a socialist party could do—and what
the SPC did do—was to express and organise support while continuing its
policy of "education for revolution".
This position was not to Angus’s liking. The SPC, he said,
"failed to lead":
"While Socialist Party leaders played a central role in
leading the Winnipeg Strike and in parallel strikes across the country,
they did so as labor militants. The SPC as a party played a minimal role,
and the strike wave had no political strategy. That was a critical
weakness. A general strike by its very nature is a challenge to the
established order ... But the leaders of the Winnipeg strike, including
the socialists, failed to see the political implications of this. On the
contrary, they did their utmost to confine the strike to simple questions
of trade union rights and wages. They exerted every effort to avoid
conflict with the government."
Given that the strike was in fact over "trade union rights
and wages" this was the intelligent thing to have done. Any action to try
to overthrow the government, as advocated today by armchair Bolsheviks
like Angus, would have failed and resulted in widespread and senseless
bloodshed. As it was, the government decided to use its superior power to
make a stand in Winnipeg to try to stop the post-war labor unrest. They
arrested 8 persons who they considered to be the strike’s organizers and
put them on trial for seditious conspiracy, thus effectively breaking the
strike. All 8, five of whom, were SPC members, were convicted and sent to
prison.
According to Angus, "most of the leaders of the 1919
strike wave were not social democrats or liberals—they were revolutionary
socialists. And the experience did not lead them to the CCF—it led them to
build a new revolutionary party, the Communist Party of Canada."
This is not true, as far as the Winnipeg General Strike is
concerned. None of the 8 singled out by the government and sent to prison
joined the Communist Party. Nearly all of them tried to become Labor
politicians and some of them succeeded, A. A. Heaps, for instance,
becoming a federal MP for the CCF. Two later returned to the "education
for revolution" policy of the old SPC, Armstrong (after a spell as an MLA)
in the reconstituted SPC in 1931 and Pritchard (after a spell with the
CCF) in the World Socialist Party of the US.
Angus also claims that by the end of 1921 a majority of
members of the SPC had been won over to the idea of forming a Communist
Party in Canada on Bolshevik lines. Certainly, most members of the SPC of
the time were carried away (mistakenly, if understandably, in our view
today) by the coming to power of the Bolsheviks in Russia, but were
sufficiently clear-headed to reject, when it came to a vote, accepting the
21 conditions for affiliation to the Communist International. They took
the view that while Bolshevism was appropriate for Russian conditions, it
wasn’t for a developed capitalist country like Canada where a policy of
"education for revolution" remained valid. The formation of the Communist
Party—or Workers Party, as it was called—did contribute to the demise of
the old SPC in 1925. But in 1931 a number of former SPC members and others
reconstituted it as the present SPC, and without any illusions about
Bolshevism in Russia not just in Canada.
The real lesson of the Winnipeg General Strike, which
latter-day romantic Bolsheviks like Angus have yet to learn, was well
stated by Pritchard in an article on the strike’s 50th anniversary in
1969:
"Strikes may result in changes and even so-called
improvements but this is but superficial. This will continue until the
workers in sufficient numbers free themselves from the concepts of
this society, from ideas that bind them to the notion that the present
is the only possible social system, and recognize that under this
system ‘the more things change the more they remain the same’; that
even now in their struggles over wages and conditions, like the
character in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ they have to keep running in order
to stay in the same place. But the Winnipeg Strike will go down in
history as a magnificent example of working class solidarity and
courage." (Western Socialist, No. 3, 1969).
