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On the 90th anniversary of the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike

Ian Angus | May 21st 2009

Historian Jim Naylor responded to Ian Angus’s article at the Winnipeg Mayworks event: Rekindling the Spirit of 1919. Read his article and Ian’s response here.

Canadian mythology holds that this is a peaceful country. There¹s no class struggle here, we never had a revolution. The Canadian way is discussion, compromise and mutual respect. We have evolution, not revolution. But if Canada is such a peaceful place, how to explain the revolts, rebellions, uprisings and pitched battles that dot our history? How can they explain Mackenzie, Papineau, Riel, Poundmaker, and other rebels whose actions have disrupted the peaceful flow of Canadian development?

The process of explaining away these inconvenient exceptions has generally taken place in two stages. At the time of the event, and for some time after, the rebels are portrayed as criminals, often as insane criminals, who deserve to be punished. Later, when the events are safely distant, historians re-interpret the rebellion as the result of unfortunate misunderstandings, but it eventually led to the advancement of the liberal values of discussion, compromise and mutual respect. We¹ve seen this pattern again and again — the stories of William Lyon Mackenzie and Louis Riel are cases in point.

The same thing has happened with the Winnipeg General Strike. At the time, and for years afterwards, it was portrayed as an attempted Bolshevik coup, led by foreign agitators. Its leaders were arrested, and many were deported, even though they were Canadian citizens. Strikers were shot in the streets.

More recently, the history of the Winnipeg General Strike has been rewritten by social democrats who describe the strike as just an attempt to win collective bargaining. The strikers were misunderstood heroes and the government response was reactionary and repressive, but only because it didn’t understand.

But glory be! Despite those unfortunate misunderstandings, the strike led to the creation of the CCF, which led to the NDP, the ultimate party of discussion, compromise and mutual respect. Unfortunately for the social democratic interpretation, most of the leaders of the 1919 strike wave were not social democrats 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.

Toward a New Kind of Party

Far from leading directly to Canadian social democracy, the strikes of 1919 led a majority of Canadian socialists to recognize the need for a new kind of party. Here¹s how they described it in 1921: “It will be a party of action, seeking contact with the workers, a party in which the theorists and doctrinaires as such will find small place, a party of the workers, and with them in their daily struggles against capitalist oppression, seeking always to build up a united front of the working class for Industrial Freedom and Emancipation from wage slavery.” (The Workers Guard, December 17, 1921)

That view — that revolutionaries must participate in the struggles of workers and the oppressed — is today almost universally accepted in the revolutionary left, at least in words. But it was not a common view in the socialist movement in Canada or elsewhere in the world a century ago. Left wing organizations typically treated political action and economic action as separate, unrelated activities. Socialists promoted socialism, which meant organizing educational programs and running in elections, while unions and other organizations dealt with day-to-day issues.

The Socialist Party of Canada

In Canada, that approach was exemplified by the Socialist Party of Canada. Before the war, it was by far the dominant party on the left in western Canada, with about 3,000 members in the four western provinces. The SPC viewed itself as a revolutionary Marxist organization. It prided itself on its doctrinal purity. It was for socialism, and nothing less. The party’s leading spokesman, E.T Kingsley, argued that the conflicts between employers and workers were not part of the class struggle at all-they were mere “commodity struggles,” disputes over the division of wealth in capitalist society, and hence of no interest to socialists.

The March 1919 Western Labor Conference, which voted to create the One Big Union as a competitor for the very conservative Trades & Labour Congress, was dominated by Socialist Party members. But — and this is the key point — the Socialist Party as a party played little or no role. Throughout the 1919 labor revolt, when general strikes were underway in a dozen or more cities from Vancouver BC to Amherst NS, the SPC¹s weekly newspaper was largely devoted to the same routine expositions of Marxist theory it published before and after the strikes.

So, while Socialist Party leaders played a central role in leading the Winnipeg Strike and in parallel strikes across the country, they did so as labour 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. If it is not to be a brief, symbolic act of protest, a general strike must raise, if only implicitly, the question of control of society. The bread and milk wagons carrying “By Permission of the Strike Committee” placards were symbolic of this.

Even more significant was the fact that the police voted to strike, and only remained on the job because the Strike Committee asked them to. The strike radically undermined the ability of the ruling class to rule in Winnipeg. Basic day-to-day decisions about the functioning of the city were being made, at least in part, by the Strike Committee.

But the leaders of the 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.

Again and again they exhorted the workers to “Do Nothing,” to stay off the streets, to avoid parades and demonstrations. The pro-strike parades that did take place were organized not by the Strike Committee but by veterans’ organizations. While the strike leaders urged calm, the capitalist class was preparing to attack — because they recognized what was at stake. The “Citizen’s Committee of 1000” stated its view in no uncertain terms: “This is not a strike at all, in the ordinary sense of the term‹it is Revolution.

“It is a serious attempt to overturn British institutions in this Western country and to supplant them with the Russian Bolshevik system of Soviet rule. “Winnipeg, as a plain matter of fact, is governed by the Central Strike Committee of the Trades and Labor Councils.” The spokesmen of the ruling class deliberately overstated the amount of conscious planning involved in the supposed Bolshevik plot, but their statements show that they understood the dynamics of the crisis. Revolutionary Strategy

The general strikes of 1919 exposed, as nothing else could, the Socialist Party’s total lack of a revolutionary strategy. In the greatest social crisis Canada has yet seen, the Socialist Party was passive. Above all, there was no preparation for the clash with the state that would inevitably come, so the arrest of a small number of leaders effectively defeated the strike.

The labour revolt of 1919 raised entirely new questions for the Canadian left. The socialist movement had long restricted itself to educational activities, to “making socialists.” The transition from capitalism to socialism was a matter for the far distant future. The assumption most socialists made was that their movement would grow until it encompassed a majority of the population, and then take power peacefully, through parliamentary means. Now they saw the possibility of a transition to socialism that would result from a revolutionary crisis in which the working class would suddenly rebel against the established order. In Winnipeg, the ruling class demonstrated that it would not be passive in face of such a challenge to its power.

The Canadian left had never considered such matters. Raising them meant adopting a new approach to socialist politics. By the end of 1919 there were underground communist groups in most Canadian cities, affiliated to one or other of the two competing Communist Parties in the United States.

In May 1921, the Canadian communist groups, including some that were working within the Socialist Party, united to form the Communist Party of Canada. By the end of 1921, a majority of the Socialist Party had been won over. The SPC itself went into rapid decline, eventually dissolving in 1925.

Two Lessons of 1919

The experience of 1919 taught Canadian revolutionaries two lessons: First, that workers power is possible in this country — it existed, in embryonic form, in Winnipeg in 1919. Second, that a new kind of party is needed to make that possibility real. Joe Knight was a Socialist Party leader, a key organizer of the left-wing triumph in the western labour movement in 1918-1919, and a founder of the One Big Union. In 1921, he attended the congress of the Communist International in Moscow. Here is an excerpt from the speech he gave there, which I think summarizes the real lessons of Winnipeg very well. First, he explained the significance of the strike: “All the workers joined the strike, even government employees, postal and telegraph employees. They all participated in the big general rally and in the strike, which lasted seven weeks. A situation was created in which we were only one step away from taking power. Nothing was done in Winnipeg except by order of the strike committee. The strike committee was no less powerful than the state itself. Of course, Winnipeg is not all of Canada. But had the struggle in Winnipeg gripped all of Canada, it would certainly have led to the revolution.”

And then he discussed the relationship between revolutionaries and mass organizations such as unions: “We must work from within, participate in their struggles, win their trust, and then seek to be elected by them to the most important positions in the movement. So I totally agree that we must go into the trade unions. And I will add that we in the trade unions must maintain as close a connection with the Communist party as possible, because its goal is not to be active as a political and industrial organization, but rather to build a great, unified revolutionary army of the workers of the world to overthrow capitalism.”

The leaders of the 1919 strikes drew those lessons 90 years ago. Their insights are still valid today.

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