4

_ ers,

By FRED WILSON

ess than three months after

Soviet power had been

declared in Russia, the front
page of the B.C. Federationist, the
newspaper of the B.C. Federation
of Labor, carried a small but con-
spicuous story. It ran down one
column with a headline no larger
than the body type of a modern
newspaper. To a casual observer,
this story was just a filler.

But it far from that. It was plac-
ed very purposefully, and with full
cognizance of the controversy it
would stir.

“‘Lenine Scores Fake
Socialists,’’ the small headline
read: The story followed: ‘‘Nikolai
Lenine, who has been made an in-
ternational figure by the recent
events in Russia has this to say
about certain misleaders within the
ranks of the general socialist move-
ment:

“And it is not only the ‘honest’

- reformists which is our danger, but

men of the type of Kautsky in Ger-
many, Axelrod in Russia, Hynd-
man in England, etc., who mouth
sugared phrases of Marxism which
prostitute its spirit. Men who are
revisionist in tactics while talking
revolutionary jargon.” ;

The pointed remarks hit their
target directly. For the entrenched
leadership of the Socialist Party of
Cananda, the most influential left
wing grouping in the B.C. labor
movement at that time, the Ger-
man intellectual Karl Kautsky was
“the greatest living authority on
Marxism.”

Those same Socialist Party lead-
with their dogmatic, narrow
understanding of “‘true Marxism,”
were not yet sure how to greet the
“events in Russia’’ which had ush-
ered in the world’s first worker’s

state. i ego ;
«Nikolai Lenine,’’ Lenin, was

still barely, known. And the above

“quote was perhaps the first actual

q

statement by Lenin (if it is a true

¢) to be read in B.C.

“German agent”’ and murderer, it
was known that the leader of the
Russian revolution had split with

tsky and the Second Interna-
tional, although the reasons were

unclear. :
But as those reasons came into

* focus, they redefined the spectrum

of political thought. As everywhere
around the world “for or against
Lenin’’ became the dividing line in
the socialist movement. And as the
lines were drawn and crossed over
in the following months and years,
the shape of B.C.’s labor move-
ment took form.

The social democratic leaders of
the trade union movement today
would balk at the thought, but their
political heritage is very much root-
ed in the battle of ideas, “for or

inst Lenin,”’ immediately after

aries stood up and displayed their
conquest before the world, Lenin’s
shadgw engulfed the working class
movementof this province.

Five years later it was the follow-
ers of Lenin who stepped out of the
shadow, emerging victorious over
the old reformist, craft unionists,
and having dealt a decisive blow to
the destructive influence of syndi-
calism.

The first mention of Lenin, or of
the successful Russian revolution,
to occur in the B.C. labor press was
Dec. 14, 1917 in the Federationist.
Joe Naylor, the miners’ leader
from Cumberland and president of
the B.C. Federation of Labor, re-
produced a clipping from the “‘dai-
ly press;”” which he said, ‘‘throws
an interesting light upon the terror
that is being created in the camp of
plunder by the Russian revolution
and the turns things are taking in
that country.”

“* “Any government,’ the writer
stated, ‘that thinks it can treat with
Lenine in the traditional manner is
mistaken, for Lenine and his fol-
lowers have no desire to represent
the Russian interest, but solely the
interests of the international prole-
tariat...””

Reports like that were helping
some in the labor movement to
make up their minds about the
Russian revolution. As Naylor
commented, ‘‘Every reader of the
Federationist and other labor and
socialist papers knows full well that
the bonafide socialists of this coun-
try have been more or less skeptical
as to the doings in Russia. But I cer-
tainly hope that the daily press is
for once speaking the truth about
the doctrines of Lenine.”’

For the next six years the ‘‘Fed’’
was one of the most passionate
supporters of Lenin in North Am-
erica. Its pages each week were fill-
ed with news about the vast
changes sweeping Russia, and al-
though it stayed above the internec-
ine squabbling which was ripping
the Socialist Party apart, the paper
worked steadily for the creation of
a Leninist force in the B.C. labor
movement.

The Socialist Party newspaper,
the Western Clarion, which with
about 2,500 readers had some-
where less than half the circulation
of the Federationist, reserved com- -
ment on the revolution until
March, 1918 when it warned stern-
ly against equating Marxism and
Bolshevism. A month later, how-
ever, it switched its position and
congratulated the Bolsheviks.

There were those, of course,
who from the beginning were bit-
terly opposed to the revolution and
what it represented, embodied in
Lenin. The Vancouver Trades and
Labor Council under the leader-
ship of Percy Bengough in 1918 be-
gan publishing the B.C. Labor
News. Published less frequently
and with a smaller circulation, this
paper too filled its front page col-
umns with comment on the revolu-
tion in Russia, although not a

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In Apne!

FOR OR

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ey

GAINST

April 22 marked the 110th anniversary of the birth
of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov — Lenin. The leader of

the world’s first socialist revolution,

he was

teacher and inspirer of millions all over the world,
not least in British Columbia. “When the Russian
workers stood up and displayed their conquest to
the world, Lenin’s shadow engulfed the working
class movement of this province.”

Positive word could be found.

The aftermath of the revolution
and the mass opposition to the war
had given rise to a new wave of mil-
itancy and radicalism in Western
Canada, however, which was
sweeping aside Bengough and the
conservative TLC leaders. In De-
cember, 1918, the Vancouver
Trades and Labor Council itself
called the first general strike in
Canada, a 24-hour work stoppage
to protest the murder of Ginger
Goodwin.

Increasingly at odds with TLC
leadership in Ontario, the western
radicals convened the Western
Canada Labor Conference in Cal-
gary, March, 1919. With 250 dele-
gates from local unions between
Victoria and Winnipeg it was the
largest trade union convention to
that time in Canada. The confer-
ence was filled with revolutionary
fervor and declared itself in ‘‘full
accord and sympathy with the aims
and purposes of the Russian Bol-
shevik and German Sparticist revo-

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| NOT OTN | IGNORES THE
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‘  \ipalty Prem Storkes of \Uses Steam Raller on Sx

Jeet Introduced by
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lutions.”’ June 1, 1919 was the date
set for a general strike around the
demands of a six-hour working
day, removal of all restrictions on
working class organizations, and
immediate withdrawal of the Allied
interventionist armies from Russia.
But by May, the Winnipeg General
Strike had erupted, marking a new
high in labor militancy and action.

If the spirit of Lenin and the
Russian revolutionaries imbued the
rising working class movement of
1918 and 1919 in Western Canada,
it could not be said that his ideas or
tactics were in any way yet a guide
to action.

The western radicals sensed in
Lenin the objective of their strug-
gle, but tactically they were more
under the influence of the syndical-
ist International Workers of the
World (IWW) and the Australian
syndicalist movement. The syndi-
calist idea was a simple one: spurn
all contact with politics and organ-
ize along industrial lines. When the
masses of workers are organized,
fold arms and strike, and the sys-
tem would collapse.

Men like the Australian fire-
brand Jack Kavanagh, William
Pritchard, E. R. Midgely and Al-
bert Wells in Vancouver were cap-
tured by syndicalist theory and they
helped lead the fight at the Calgary
Labor Conference for the whole-
sale defection from the interna-
tional unions and the Trades and
Labor Congress in Canada and for
the creation of the ‘One Big
Union.”

For the most part the Western
leaders of the One Big Union were
ardent supporters of Lenin and the
Russian revolution, and the result
was an odd mix of ideas. In 1920,
the Federationist had given over a
page to the ‘‘Lumber Camp and
Agricultural Workers Department
of the OBU,” and in December of

that year, half of the page was
devoted to a depiction of the
‘Structure of Soviet Russia.”

Later, in 1922 when the Lumber
Workers Industrial Union of Can-
ada, then disaffiliated with the One
Big Union, voted in convention,
with but two dissenting votes, to re-
quest affiliation with the Moscow-
based Red International of Labor
Unions,”’ the Federationist warmly
welcomed the decision (the paper
claimed that the LWIU was the
first union in North American ac-
tually to apply for membership in
the Red International) and it term-
ed the international body ‘‘A One
Big Union of the international pro-
letariat: An OBU which takes in all
trade unions all over the world
without breaking them up.”’

By 1922 the breakaway syndical-
ist union had been reduced to 5,000
members mostly in the Winnipeg
area. It had been extremely de-
structive, sapping the most militant
workers from the established un-
ions and leaving the TLC in the
hands of Bengough and the craft
unionists.

Labor historians have offered
numerous reasons for the demise
of the One Big Union — its awk-
ward, unwieldy organizational
structure, its utopianism, and the
fierce attacks it faced from both
employers and the TLC.

But perhaps the chief reason for
the decline of the One Big Union
has been largely omitted from most
accounts. By 1921, Leninism had
galvanized the left wing in the Ca-
nadian labor movement, and many
of the syndicalist leaders had turn-
ed their backs on the One Big
Union and had joined the
Worker’s Party (Communist Par-
ty).

The first major article by Lenin
to appear in print in B.C. was
“Political Parties in Russia,”
which ran in the Federationist Feb.
18, 1918. It was later published as a
pamphlet by the Socialist Party.

In January, 1919 another article
by Lenin, ‘‘The International Rev-
olution,”’ a speech delivered to the
All Russia Soviet Executive Com-
mittee in 1918, was also published.

Throughout early 1919 a series

of public debates on the Russian
revolution, sponsored by the
Socialist Party, was held in Van-
couver at the O’Brien Hall. A pack-
ed meeting in January provoked
the headline “Keen interests of
workers in Bolshevism striking
demonstrated.”” And in February,
the hall was packed once again to
hear a ‘‘Debate on Bolshevism’’
between W. A. Pritchard of the
Socialist Party and I. W. Makov-
ski. William Bennett was chair-
man.
In July of 1950, the Federation-
ist printed another article quoting
Lenin at length. ‘‘Lenin Says Take
Political Action,” it was headed,
and it rapped the syndicalist ideas
preventing trade unionists from
getting involved in political activ-
ity. ‘‘Anti-parliamentarianism is
one of the Communistic children’s
diseases against which I have often
had to fight,” it quoted Lenin.

The most powerful impact
Lenin was to make on B.C. labor’s
movement followed soon after
when the Federationist’s editor Al-
bert Wells decided to serialize Len-
in’s pamphlet ‘‘Left Wing Com-
munism — An Infantile Disor-
der.’’ Well’s decision was undoubt-

‘edly influenced by the raging de-

bate in the Socialist Party at the
time over affiliation to the Third
(Communist) International. In
fact, Wells cited the debate over af-
filiation, and that Lenin ‘‘is a
master of working class tactics’’ as
reasons for publishing the articles.

The serialized edition of the
pamphlet ran for seven issues and
Tim Buck claimed in Lenin and
Canada that the circulation of the
See FOR or AGAINST page 17

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—MAY 2, 1980—Page 9