First Published: Canadian Revolution No. 5, April-May 1976
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Malcolm and Paul Saba
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I would like to respond to the article in CR, issue no. 3 by Mobilisation on the history of the Communist Party. It seems to me that the article is a good beginning to a discussion, which must continue if we are to understand adequately the contributions made by the CPC, in the fight for the defence of working people and the struggle for socialism in Canada. This is not merely a theoretical/historical problem. It bears analysis and reflection both as a guide in present and future work, and as a documentation of many mistakes and shortcomings–some painfully glaring, others agonizingly subtle–to which we must address ourselves, if the results of the next fifty years of struggle are to be any more fruitful than the last. It is for this reason that I welcome the Mobilisation article and hope that there will be more articles, from the same and other sources, which can help us to understand both the successes and failures, and the theoretical and objective motivations for the policies of the CP.
What follows is my own first contribution to this discussion. Like Mobilisation, I put it forward not as a definitive work on the subject. Rather, it is a series of themes or trends around which I believe much of the discussion of the CPC–could profitably take place. I will also try to address myself to several points of conflict between the Mobilisation analysis and my own.
The Mobilisation article correctly points out that CP trade union policy in the early twenties was based primarily on Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism (which was a pamphlet aimed at ultra-leftism in the trade union and parliamentary work of European communists). It should be added that W.Z. Foster, who became leader of the CPUSA, had begun to articulate at the same time (indeed several years before) the same ideas as Lenin, specifically with regards to trade union work in the United States. (See Foster, William Z., American Trade Unionism, International publishers, New York, 1947, pp. 5.0-83). Foster’s experience in the Industrial Workers of the World had convinced him that organizing “ideal” unions outside the mainstream was fruitless, and that the major result of this tactic was to give reactionaries an open field for their own policies and ideology in the AF of L. Interestingly, Foster argued that in Canada the One Big Union was totally analogous to the Wobblies in the U.S. He therefore agreed with the policy of the Workers’ Party towards the OBU, which was one of withdrawal.
Here there are two points to ponder. The first is whether the OBU was in fact exactly the same kind of organization as the IWW. I would question this assumption. A good argument can be made that the Wobblies were a straight anarcho-syndicalist organization, but there is ample evidence to show that while anarchism was one of the major theoretical trends in the OBU, it certainly was not the only one. Anarcho-syndicalism, Christian Socialism, social demoCRacy and a developing Marxism-Leninism can all be found as relatively consistent ideological trends in the material distributed by the OBU. Second, the Workers’ Party not only withdrew its militants from the OBU, but actively worked to end the misery of the then (1922-3) gravely-ill labour centre. Foster spoke twice in Winnipeg in 1922, trying to convince OBU members to re-affiliate with the AFL.
Let me take exception to one specific point made by Mobilisation in this regard. They state:
“This position (the opposition of the WPC to the OBU and the call to militants to return to the AFL.) did not take into account one essential element: the foreign domination of Canadian Unions, a situation that would normally have led to a massive struggle to build a progressive and autonomous union movement.”
I think Mobilisation here underestimates the WP and CP and therefore allows them the “luxury” of ignorance. It is not true that the WP “did not take into account” foreign domination of Canadian unions. Rather, during the twenties, their analysis was that the links of Canadian locals of the AF of L and American “internationals” were less important than Canadian militants’ and communists’ work “inside the mainstream”, as both Lenin and Foster had suggested. The CP-led Trade Union Educational League took as a major plank in its platform a call for Canadian autonomy of the unions, but along with this position went a warning that autonomy did not mean secession of Canadian locals from the AF of L “internationals” or the “weakening of international bonds in any way”. (Tim Buck, Steps to Power, p. 36)
This is an extremely important point. The CP position on autonomy for Canadian unions (that this was to be effected organizationally within the AF of L) was not an oversight. Rather, it was policy developed in response to two analytic/theoretical assumptions. First, that “boring from within” was in general the correct trade union policy for communists; and second, that to the extent that the Canadian locals were “dominated” by the internationals, this could be solved within the AF of L organizations themselves.
The CP policy was soon to change with the establishment of the Workers’ Unity League. This national trade union centre operated in fundamental contradiction to the very basis of CP union policy from 1922-29 and from 1935 to the present day.
There were three important motivations for the establishment of the WUL. The first was the fact that despite mounting pressure from rank-and-file workers, the AF of L unions were still unprepared to organize industrially. This not only split CRaft workers from each other, but denied millions of mass-production workers the elementary defence of a trade union. Communist militants who opposed this reactionary position during the latter years of the 1920’s were inCReasingly being expelled from local unions, executives and labour councils all over Canada. This inability to function within the AF of L unions was the second precipitating factor in the birth of the WUL.
But the most important reason that the policy of “boring from within” was in large measure abandoned was the change in analysis of the Communist International towards the world political and economic situation.
This caused a reversal as well in the attitude towards reformist socialists and labour bureauCRats by Communists all over the world. I will leave it to more expert minds to judge whether the decisions of the international to view social demoCRats as the major enemy of the working class (between 1929 and 1935) was a correct one. I have my doubts. Nevertheless, the important point to be made in terms of the CPC is that this change in the International’s approach was in large measure responsible for the formation of the Workers’ Unity League in Canada.
An interesting footnote to this period, which throws much light on the character of the Communist Party of Canada and its leadership, is that some Communist militants continued to work inside AF of L unions as long as they weren’t expelled. It is my belief that many of the CP trade union leadership worked better within the “established” union movement. For this group, the WUL experience was not a comfortable one; and when, in 1935, the Party decided to abandon the WUL (again in response to a change in the international line) these same people were eager to get back to “boring from within”. Observers often forget that at the dissolution of the WUL, its members re-entered AF of L unions, at a time when there was no guarantee that industrial unionism, in the form of the CIO, would triumph. I have spoken to workers in WUL unions at the time, people who were rank-and-file CP members and others, who related their shock and bitterness at having to give up what they described as their “democratic” and “militant” WUL unions to meekly re-enter AF of L unions on poor terms. These same workers related to me the trouble more senior CP leaders had in convincing them of the “correctness” of the move.
The Mobilisation article mentions the fact that, in its early years, the CPC analysis of Canada’s economic position was that “the principal contradiction was situated between the Canadian people and British imperialism”. While this is partly true, it obscures an important debate which took place in the Party between 1928 and 1932. A significant group, including Tim Buck and Stewart Smith, were beginning to develop an anti-imperialist line (although very unsophisticated and muddled) towards the U.S. Buck foresaw a situation in which British imperialism would be defeated and then American domination would have to be attacked. There were also predictions of inter-imperialist wars between the U.S. and Britain.
Opposing all this talk of imperialism were a group, several of the leaders of which studied at the Lenin School in the late twenties, who argued for a more classical view of Canada as a maturing capitalist country. This was the theoretical foundation for the campaign of Bolshevization in the CPC during the late twenties–which was to effect the orientation of the Party towards the ethnic national groups which made up the bulk of its support.
An important factor this debate points to, and research confirms, is that there was a constant debate inside the Party on all these issues–the nationals question, mass work, etc. The implications are not at the moment clear. Much work needs to be done on the subject. But one thing is certain. Research into what didn’t become policy as well as what did, can be a profitable approach.
The ethnic groups which were organizationally affiliated with the Party until the late twenties, and since then have retained important informal ties with the CP, were another complicating factor in the Party’s development. Most of the members and supporters of the CP from the early 20’s (at least until the war years) were recent Ukrainian, Finnish, Jewish and other Eastern-European immigrants. For many of these people, the attraction of the Communist Party was a combination of two factors. First, the Party was the centre of militant trade unionism in Canada, unchallenged at least between the demise of the OBU and the rise of the CIO, and these people were almost 100% working class.
Second, and in many cases more important, these immigrants saw in the victory of the revolution in Russia, a promise that the national and cultural oppression suffered by their peoples in Eastern Europe would come to an end. So, in many cases, their loyalty to the Party depended more on the ups and downs of Soviet national policy than it did on the successes or failures of the CP’s policies in Canada.
In terms of the growth of the CPC, this factor was crucial, both because on an individual basis, membership support was often based on factors over which the CPC itself had little control, and because on an organizational level, the Party had to take into account the positions of the various ethnic mass organizations.
As for the question of union militancy–it is clear that at least some of the most important trade union leaders of the Party joined in the middle twenties precisely because the Party was the only centre of militant trade union activity. It is questionable whether some of these people were ever Communists.
This situation was duplicated during the pre-war and World War II years, when the Party (except for the 1939-41 period) took the lead in the anti-Fascist struggle. The Party attracted tens of thousands of supporters and thousands of new members during this period. But again, their membership was based on other than strictly class issues. It is no wonder then, that when the attacks of the Cold War period came, the CP was unable to withstand them.
Let me add just one more quibble with the Mobilisation article. The attitude of the CPC towards the fledgling Co-operative Commonwealth Federation is mentioned–but only in the post-1935 context. What is interesting, and not mentioned in the Mobilisation article, is that before 1935 the CP attitude towards the CCF was anything but friendly (as it became after the period of the United Front opened in 1935). On the contrary, Stewart Smith authored under the pseudonym of George Pierce a seething attack on the CCF.
This book was written within the framework, previously mentioned, of seeing social democrats as the most serious enemy of the international working class. Here was a perfect example, as Mobilisation correctly points out, of when “the Party leadership tailed after the international communist movement”.
These then are some areas to which our energies might be directed in our studies of the Communist Party of Canada: trade union policy; the ethnic national groups and mass work; left and right struggles in the party; the national question; relationship to the international movement. There are of course others.
I look forward to seeing the discussion continue in the pages of CR.