In August 1969 I was approached by Bret Smiley who is now a leader of the Revolutionary Marxist Group a neo-trotskyist organisation in Canada and by Ralph Stanton the son of a revisionist lawyer in Vancouver, to participate in a new left group at UBC called Campus Left Action Movement (CLAM) whose organ was the Barnacle.
The basis of unity in this organisation was some abstract statement about U.S. domination of Canada and student power. But right from the beginning the real practical programme of CLAM was to collaborate with the IWW Black Cross in order to sell cheap food and radical literature at lunch hour. During this period the Internationalists had a regular literature table opposite ours and were there daily. Approximately once a week they had a mass democracy with very often some 100 people participating, discussing and giving their views on various questions. These meetings and the activities of the Internationalists were very often the subject of discussion within CLAM where numerous slanders were spread against the Internationalists, such as they were sectarian and speaking “Peking” English.
It was at this period of time that Jack Scott took his critical view toward Peking Review and began popularising his trip to China in 1967, how he had offered criticism that “Peking Review didn’t have sufficient grasp of the English language” and that Peking Review couldn’t be understood by the Canadian people. At the same time this same slander was being made against the Internationalists.
CLAM was organised to oppose the growing influence of the Internationalists and as the student wing of Progressive Workers Movement (PWM) and Jack Scott. This particular guidance by PWM was given by Gabor Mate who attended all the CLAM meetings and reported back to PWM. It was Mate himself, who pushed the line that we were under discipline not to speak to the Internationalists. The only discipline of CLAM was that it not talk to the Internationalists and co-operate only with the IWW. During this period of time Jack Scott published a number of pamphlets through the IWW including one which carried an anti-China, anti-communist photograph and inscription. At no time was there a repudiation by Jack Scott or his supporters of this pamphlet and its attack against Chairman Mao and the Chinese people. Rather it was considered by them as a funny joke.
The major program of CLAM at this time in February 1970, was a festival of the oppressed, in which they invited a leader of the Seattle Chapter of the Black Panther Party to speak at UBC on the revolutionary movement in the U.S. In attempting to organise a Quebec and Canada Week they brought together all of the dregs of the Canadian movement: Mathews, Steeles, Michel Chartrand, Stanley Ryerson (a revisionist historian), from the FLQ and Jack Scott. This was their main practical activity of the year – to promote all of these anti-Marxist-Leninist individuals and groups.
Jack Scott as I recall set his main concentration on the army, labour history and popularised the IWW, the OBU in the working class movement. In the spring of that year there was a demonstration organised by some Trotskyists. PWM went to this demonstration with a slogan, “U.S. Get Out of Canada and Get Out of Vietnam.” The Internationalists at this demonstration participated under the slogan, “Escalate People’s War”, and were attacked by the Trotskyists in this demonstration. Immediately after this the followers of Jack Scott popularised a story that it was the Internationalists who had provoked the violence at the demonstration and that they were sectarian, etc.
Also in the spring of 1970 I went to a number of meetings that were called in order to establish a so-called independentist community newspaper. Jack Scott was the ideological and the political leadership of this development which ended up being called New Leaf. It had a very short existence and Scott never actually participated in the daily organising of the paper. Behind the scenes he promoted his lines and in the same way he had quite a lot of influence in the Canadian Electrical Workers which later became the Canadian Association of Industrial and Mechanical and Allied Workers Union.
In October 1970, when the War Measures Act was declared (an intrusion of the Canadian armed forces by the state) there was a meeting at UBC set up to protest this action at which myself and Jack Scott were speakers. At that meeting Jack Scott presented an historical perspective of the War Measures Act. He put forth examples in B.C. where the armed forces had been used against workers without talking about the entire question of the dictatorship of the capitalist class or the colonial subjugation of Quebec and the nature of the British North America Act. Instead he gave abstract, intellectual presentation. Shortly after the War Measures Act, I had a conversation with a member of the PWM who told me that the only members of the PWM who were left were the members of the Central Committee. I have had contact with a number of people with PWM and the effect of that organisation and the refusal of Jack Scott to oppose revisionism in practice and the anarcho-syndicalist line he promoted was that these individuals either went into various forms of self-cultivation, alcoholism, mental instability or opportunism such as one individual who is now a doctor and number of others who are trade union bureaucrats. The effect of the leadership of Jack Scott in PWM was quite devastating both in terms of the split and disunity in the student circles in UBC and in the working class movement with the concoction of the Canadian union movement. The effect of his line was to divert a large number of people away from revolutionary activity.
In the spring of 1971, there was a conference called (Indo-China Women’s Conference), and two individuals of the PWM participated along with members of the Voice of Women and Women’s Liberation Movement. These people found certain documents that showed that the Revisionist Party of Canada had control of the Voice of Women and had given instructions to them on every detail of the conference. Those members of PWM introduced this as a fact and then proceeded not to wage battle, any battle, against the revisionist control of the conference and actually helped the revisionists strengthen their control. When the Quebec-Canada week was organised at UBC one of the main speakers was Michel Chartrand. As a result of this national programme in which CLAM participated, Michel Chartrand was able to strengthen his influence in Quebec, where it had been quite minimal before this tour. It is quite clear that this activity at UBC organised by CLAM which was supposed to support the Quebec people actually helped to undermine their struggle as well as spreading the maximum amount of confusion amongst the students at UBC as to the relationship between Canada-Quebec.
In 1971 there was an attack by a fascist on the literature table at UBC and in February 1971 the AALAPSM waged a struggle against the lackey administration and some Zionist agents who were doing propaganda against the Palestinian people. Through both of these events the role of Jack Scott and his followers was to say that the progressive students were the ones who were causing the violence and it was their unreasonable rhetoric which lead to these fascist attacks.