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BOOKS

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It’s been 35 years since the militant Can-
adian Seamen’s Union was smashed by the
shipowners at the end of the worldwide
deepsea strike in 1951. And for many
members of the CSU it has been all those 35
years since they last saw each other.

But on Saturday, all the militant spirit,
and the solidarity that linked picket lines
around the globe, was there again as they
gathered for an historic reunion in Van-
couver. '

Most of them had been in their twenties,
some still teenagers, when they worked the
ships of the Canadian merchant marine, but
they came from across Canada, from as far
away as London, England, to launch a new
book detailing the history of the Canadian
Seamen’s Union.

“The CSU and its leadership gave me a
star to steer by and a faith to fight for, and
I've still got it today,” declared Bud
Doucette, former chairman of the CSU
strike committee in Europe, echoing the
sentiments of most of the standing-room-
only crowd at the Russian Hall Saturday.

The book that brought them all together
again was Against the Tide — the result of
13 years of interviewing, researching and
writing — by Jim Green. Now an organ-
izer with the Downtown Eastside Residents
Association, Green travelled across Canada
and corresponded with CSU members
around the world to obtain their recollec-
tions and experiences of their membership
in the CSU.

“We have waited a long time to have the
CSU story written. Let us help spread it to
the labor movement, and to the people of
Canada. It is a story worth telling,” said
Harry Davis, a long-time member of the
CSU and its last president from 1947-51.

Davis,who told the crowd that his “first
lessons in labor military were achieved in
British Columbia at the Harrison Mills
relief camp during the hungry Thirties,”
went on to outline the history of the Cana-
dian Seamen’s Union and the deepsea strike
of 1949.

“The CSU was militant because it had to
be,” he said. “Despite unprecedented vio-
lence used against us in the lake strike of
1948 we won the eight-hour day and the
three-watch system,” he said to applause.

It was in 1949 at the height of McCarthy-
ism that the shipowners decided to smash
the CSU. They made unrealistic demands:
the elimination of the union hiring hall, and
a clause giving the shipowners the right to
order any “‘subversives” off the ships.

“We were forced to strike. But we knew.
we were fighting for the maintenance of the
Canadian merchant marine, for jobs, jobs,
jobs,” he said.

The Canadian merchant fleet at the end
of the Second World War was the third
largest in the world, but the shipowners,
with the support of the federal government,
set about scuttling the fleet of 164 merchant
vessels. More profit was possible with for-
eign crews sailing ships under foreign regis-
try.
“Enter the SIU (Seafarers’ International
Union). There was no SIU on the east coast,
the membership on east coast vessels was
100 per cent CSU,” declared Davis.

“But the shipowners signed a backdoor
deal with the SIU with the help of the Cana-
dian government which played a shameful
and disgraceful role,” he said. “The signing
of this agreement was not only immoral, it
was illegal.”

The resulting strike spread around the
world to any port where a Canadian mer-
chant vessel was docked. It spread to New
Zealand with the crew of the Tridale on the
picket line, in Australia, South Africa,
Cuba, British Guiana and to Britain where
solidarity between British and Canadian
workers saw the docks shut down com-
pletely and troops brought in to unload the
ships. 4

“The shipowners were in a frenzy to des-

troy us. But you get a picture of the kind of »

democratic, rank and file organization we
had built when you consider that it was the
rank and file that had to run the strike,

Backdrop featuring logo of Canadian Seamen’s Union and facsimile of new book"
the CSU (painted by labor artist Fraser Wilson) frames three key players in the unio!
and the rendering of its history: author Jim Green, former president Harry Davis. 4

Progress Books’ Anna Larsen.

handle grievances, everything, thousands of
miles away from home. That kind of organ-
ization is hard to destroy,” said Davis.
The Canadian Seamen’s Union ceased to
exist asa legal entity in 1951 when the Cana-
dian Labor Relations Board declared that
the CSU did not meet the definition of a
union after leading a worldwide strike and
receiving international solidarity. All its
locals were decertified within six months.
Harry Rankin, introduced as the “next
mayor of Vancouver” received a thunder-
ous standing ovation from the crowd when

he summed up the sentiment of the eveniNe ia
saying “Jim Green has brought togeth®™
book that portrays real history, the isto
of the kind of men and women that pull |
this country. And we are all working fo! OF
day that this book will be a text in the sh”
system.”
Against the Tide, publis progres
Books in Toronto, at be obanes fromtle |
People’s Co-op Bookstore, 139] Commer |
cial Dr., Vancouver. It will be revie int |
subsequent issue of the Tribune.

—

Kampuchea’s true story

KAMPUCHEA: The Revolution Rescued.
By Irwin Silber, Line of March Publica-
tions, New York, 1986. Paper, $7.95.

Virtually ignored- by the media for
months, the Southeast Asian country of
Kampuchea was thrust into the news briefly
last week when the United Nation’s General
Assembly voted to demand the withdrawal
of Vietnamese troops and the “restoration
of Kampuchea’s independence, sovereignty
and territorial integrity.”

Like the same resolution adopted a year
earlier, it was history turned on_ its
head — for the resolution was spearheaded
by ASEAN countries, one of whose
members, Thailand, continues to harbor
the remnants of the Khmer Rouge army.
For 39 months, from April, 1975 to Janu-
ary, 1979, it was the instrument of Pol Pot’s
systematic extermination of three million
Kampucheans.

In the seven years since Vietnamese
troops assisted the forces of the National
United Front for the Salvation of Kampu-
chea (NUFSK) in overthrowing Pol Pot’s
genocidal regime, the country has moved
light years ahead in social and economic
progress. Never in its history has its sover-
eignty and independence been so assured.
Yet Canada, along with dozens of other
countries, continues to recognize only the
Pol Pot regime and the reactionary alliance
which seeks to reinstate it.

The continuing international debate over
Kampuchea and the progress that the
National United Front has made in bring-
ing new life to a country on the brink of
extinction are the themes of a useful new
book, Kampuchea: The Revolution Res-

10 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, OCTOBER 29, 1986

cued, by well-known U.S. left-wing journal-
ist Irwin Silber. Based on a tour he made of
the country in September, 1984, it is both an
informative sketch of the economic, social
and cultural direction the country has taken
since 1979 and a forceful polemic against
those — both in the White House and in
ultra-left circles — who oppose the coun-
try’s new course.

Ina way, Silber is an unusual source fora
book like this. For several years, he was on

- the editorial staff of the New York-based

radical paper The Guardian and was one of
the main players during the paper’s infatua-
tion with Maoism.

But as he notes in an introduction, the
events in 1979 in Kampuchea focused his
own disenchantment with Mao Tse-tung’s
thoughts. Having been an adherent himself,
his criticism of Maoism is sharpened — an
important point since, as he points out
“Kampuchea’s recent history (under Pol
Pot) provides one of the most concentrated
examples of Maoism in practice.”

In April, 1975, after the final defeat of the
U.S. in Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge were
successful in toppling the U.S.-backed Lon
Nol regime in Kampuchea (then Cambo-
dia) and establishing a revolutionary
government. But Pol Pot, having already
taken control of the Communist Party, pro-
ceeded to reorganize the people and the
economy along a fanatic, nationalist design
of peasant socialism.

Some 95 per cent of the population was
forced into 1,000 primitive collective farms;
the country’s industry, its scientific and edu-
cational institutions were dismantled. Of
the country’s seven million people, three
million were killed, either through syste-

matic murder or starvation, by the time
NUFSK, with Vietnamese assistance, had
ousted Pol Pot.

Silber focuses on the policies and ideol-
ogy which gave rise to those events, placing
them against the background of the com-
mon origins and struggle of the Communist
movement in Vietnam, Laos and Kampu-
chea — a movement which Pol Pot rejected
as part of his nationalist direction. By 1978,
Silber writes “the Kampuchean revolution
became a grim caricature of itself. . .(it was)
a nationalist deviation completely at odds
with Marxism-Leninism and international-
ism.”

Of interest are the origins of the
NUFSK — which was based in eastern
Kampuchea, drawn from secondary leader-
ship, including current president, Heng
Samrin, which had survived Pol Pot’s brutal
purges — and the successes scored by the
new government in winning broad support.
A key example is the current minister of
agriculture, Kong Som-Oi, a U.S.-trained
agronomist and former minister under
Prince Sihanouk who, although not a
Communist, agreed to join the government
to rebuild his country’s economy.

A particularly important contribution in
the book is the final chapter in which Silber
outlines a theoretical argument in support
of the Vietnamese action in Kampuchea
which, he contends, was a necessary part of
internationalism. Like much of the book, it
is an effective and forceful polemic aimed at
refuting political positions adopted by the
Chinese leaders and by various ultra-left
groups in the U.S.

There is one major omission in that Silber
never mentions that the Communist Party

i |
KAMPUCHEA

—_——

‘The
Revolution

Rescued

USA — or the Communst Patty the
Canada — stood up in support of
actions of the Vietnamese and NUP the
the time and have continued to supP°
Heng Samrim government in the 7 7.
since. That omission isn’t entirely reak
ing, however, since Silber, despite his with
with Maoism, still retains differet
the CPUSA. they
But whatever those differences 2% ‘chet
don’t figure in the issue of Kamp" pic!
And they don’t detract from a book ug!
UBC anthropologist Kathleeen “yall
Aberle rightly calls: “essential readin& 1g 2
students. . .of 20th century revolution® sn
— sean GP