Canadian Bolsheviks: The Early Years Of The Communist Party Of Canada Paperback – Oct 30 2004

The following is the major part of a review of the first edition, which appeared in the November 6, 1981 issue of the Militant, a socialist newsweekly. It was written by Jacquie Shilman.

Canadian Bolsheviks traces the first dozen years of Canadian communism. Ian Angus uses internal party documents, contemporary articles, and interviews with participants gathered from seven years of research to paint a vivid picture of the birth, development, and degeneration of the Canadian Communist Party....

The Canadian Communist Party was formed in 1921 in a period of tremendous social upheaval and revolutionary ferment. The victory of the Bolshevik-led revolution in Russia in 1917 was an inspiration to workers around the world, including in Canada. Malcolm Bruce, a socialist union militant who became a founding member of the party said of the revolution's
impact on Canadian workers: "It was like a bolt out of the blue . . . there was a great uplift amongst the working class. At least they saw that the working class rose in their might and took over the power of a powerful nation and they wondered if it couldn't be done here."

Labor papers and left journals printed articles by Bolshevik leaders Lenin and Trotsky, as well as accounts by immigrants from Russia, popularizing the revolution. A widespread debate took place in the labor movement on the meaning of the Russian revolution for Canadian workers.

In 1919 the growing labor movement tested its strength. In May, the Winnipeg Trades and Labor Council called a general strike in support of metal and building trades workers. This began a wave that swept across the country. Angus lists thirteen other cities that had general strikes as well as several major strikes in other centers.

In Winnipeg, the Strike Committee ran the city and for more than forty days nothing moved unless it was ''by permission of the Strike Committee."

The ruling class moved to crush the strike. They mobilized the Royal North West Mounted Police, army, and local police, and even passed a special government law permitting the deportation without trial of naturalized citizens "suspected of sedition."

Out of these experiences the most farsighted participants founded the Communist Party of Canada (CPC).

It soon became the largest party on the Canadian left. With the help of the Communist International,
under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, they fought against the sectarianism that had plagued the left up until that time. They developed strong roots in several industrial unions and widespread influence in the labor movement across the country.

One of the best chapters is entitled, "From Leftism to Leninism: To the Masses!" It describes some of the young Communist Party's experiences in promoting independent labor political action, its support of labor party developments which proved to be early, localized suggestions of the labor party the Canadian union movement as a whole was to form forty years later, the New Democratic Party. This chapter also outlines the CPC's attitude to the One Big Union movement (OBU) that came out of the secession of the western labor movement from the Trades and Labor
Congress of Canada in 1919.

The example of the coal miners of the coal-rich Cape Breton area of Nova Scotia provides an inspiring illustration of the role of the party in one of the most militant sections of the working class.

In 1921 the Nova Scotia miners, like most of their union brothers of the day and the majority of industrial unionists in Canada today, belonged to a union which spanned the U.S.-Canadian border. Through bitter struggle with the coal bosses, the government, and the cops, they succeeded in organizing the mines solidly into District 26 of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW).

In 1922 the Communists recruited a broad layer of the leadership of these miners. With the aid of this "new kind of party" they led some heroic struggles and scored significant victories.

Their militant tactics brought them into conflict with UMW President John L. Lewis, who twice threatened to revoke the district's charter. While these miners are perhaps best known for their move to affiliate the district to the Communist International's Red International of Labor Unions-- a decision they pulled back from, on the recommendation of the Communists, in the interests of unity-- it was actually their solidarity strike with striking steelworkers that caused Lewis to disband the district.

One year later when the district was readmitted to the UMW the effective leadership of the Communists paid off- the locals had been kept intact and were ready to resume battle with the companies.

In following chapters Angus contrasts this "intelligent militant leadership" of the young CPC with the bankrupt Stalinized leadership of the party in the late 1920s and '30s as it led miners in a suicidal zigzag course, first out of the UMW into rival "red unions" and then back. These moves were not dictated by the needs of the workers themselves, but by the twists and turns of the policies of the privileged bureaucratic caste that had gained a stranglehold on the revolution in the Soviet Union.

The central theme of Canadian Bolsheviks is the ongoing struggle to build a working class revolutionary party in Canada. The experiences of these pioneers in the first years of the CPC hold many lessons for workers today. And many of these same leaders continued to struggle to build a Leninist party, even after the degeneration of the Communist Party. In 1934 Maurice Spector and Jack MacDonald established the Workers Party of Canada which affiliated to the Fourth International when it was founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938. Max Armstrong and Malcolm Bruce joined the Trotskyist movement after World War II.

Only one of the party's initial leaders, Tim Buck, remained with the Communist Party as it degenerated from a sizable revolutionary party to a bureaucratically run Stalinist sect.

American workers will find many insights to their own history as well as a wealth of information about the struggles of their co-workers across the 49th parallel in Canadian Bolsheviks.

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I also recommend "Land, Labor, and the Canadian Revolution" in New International no 6: The Second Assassination of Maurice Bishop;First Ten Years of American Communism: Report of a Participant;The History of American Trotskyism, 1928-38: Report of a Participant;Revolutionary Continuity: the Early Years, 1848-1917; and Revolutionary Continuity: Birth of the Communist Movement 1918-1922.

And for a Marxist look at today's world, Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium and Capitalism's Long Hot Winter Has Begun, New International, No.12, 2005. (New International Series).