On the Historical Unity of the Canadian and U.S. Working Class Movement. By: Jude Gamache

8/17/2024

On the Historical Unity of the Canadian and U.S. Working Class Movement. By: Jude Gamache

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There has been much discourse on the position of the recently-launched American Communist Party on the unity of both Canada and the United States in one organizational field. There has been no shortage of terms used by both rightists and leftists to describe the ACP; Politsturm International has used the term “social-chauvinists” (albeit in a completely incorrect fashion), while Maoists have usually referred to the ACP in similar terms. Canadian “leftists” are quick to denounce the ACP’s reconstitution “as the official Communist Party of the current territory of both the United States and Canada” as a renewed version of Manifest Destiny, which will be shown to be an exaggeration.[1]

Unsurprisingly, these critiques are usually unfounded, restricted to very limited evidence, and based on a limited understanding of Canada’s place within both the class struggle and Marxist history. The objective of this concise article is not to present a comprehensive political history of Canadian-US Marxism, but to elaborate on the undeniable correctness of the current position of the ACP: that the most advanced form of American Marxism will indeed be an organization that encompasses both Canada and the United States.

Through an analysis of early Canadian socialism, we find a situation which developed nearly identically to that of the United States. Utopian socialists—Owenite experiments—which can be traced back as early as 1829 in Canada, emerged in the United States just years prior, primarily in the form of the Nashoba Community and Frances Wright.[2] Wright would incidentally be one of the figures who “took a leading part in the early anti slavery agitation,” which often took the form of the Underground Railroad, an escape avenue for slaves from the South to the Northern states and the Canadian border, where slavery was phased out by the 1830s.[3]

As the Civil War neared, an early introduction of scientific socialism to the United States appeared, which laid the foundations for an American understanding of the postbellum labor movement which engulfed both Canada and the United States. German immigrants in New York City, usually political refugees from the 1848 Revolutions, first studied Marx in the North American context within the Central Committee of United Trades, with a later Communist Club being formed in 1857.[4] Following the efforts of Joseph Weydeymeyer in the Civil War, who was a contemporary of Marx, socialism further emerged with F.A. Sorge’s management of the First International in New York, and later the formation of the Workingmen’s Party of the United States, which later became the Socialist Labor Party of America by 1878.[5] The Great Strike of 1877 is generally regarded as a turning point in American labor history, as it was the first time in which labor organized at the ‘national’ level; it is of no coincidence that the mobilization of the Canadian working-class occurred in the 1870s at the same time, particularly in the form of the strike of the Typographical Union in Toronto.[6] Indeed, just prior to the Great Strikes of 1877, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers—an American trade union—had won a strike on Canada’s Grand Trunk Railway.[7]

The labor movement which emerged in Canada during the 1880s scarcely distinguished between Canadian and American workers. The Knights of Labor organized in Canada and were particularly active in Ontario, while the American Federation of Labor’s predecessor (1881-1886) was named during its founding 1881 convention as the “Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada.”[8] Although many major strikes in the United States—such as the Pullman Strike of 1894—were often limited to the United States, it is equally true to make to argue that said strikes were not present in the U.S. South, and therefore cannot be used as evidence to state that the situation of Canadian labor was isolated along ‘national’ lines. Carlos Garrido has excellently made the observation that American Marxism was not fully developed until the 1930s when W.E.B. Du Bois synthesized the class struggle of African-Americans with the American struggle; perhaps we should go one step further: American Marxism cannot reach its full theoretical insights until the Canadian Question is properly understood.[9] To do this, one must first be introduced to the historical development of scientific socialism in Canada proper.

Indeed, Marx and Engels themselves had discussed the Canadian Question. In a 1867 letter from Marx to Engels, discovered by Professor Mark Leier in 2017, Marx referred to the birth of the formal—but not independent—Canadian state in 1867 as a bourgeois project, therefore mirroring the impact of the Civil War on the United States:

“This centralization will of course give the capitalists the organized state power they require to expand across the entire territory of British North America. We will doubtless see in Canada the same process of primitive accumulation we have seen wherever the capitalist mode of production asserts itself.”[10]

Twenty-one years later, Engels, while visiting Montreal, observed that Canada, through its growing industrialization in the 1880s, was not developing into a national economy, and was instead converging towards its incorporation into America:

“Here one sees how necessary the feverish speculative spirit of the Americans is for the rapid development of a new country (if capitalist production is taken as a basis); and in ten years this sleepy Canada will be ripe for annexation — the farmers in Manitoba, etc., will demand it themselves. Besides, the country is half-annexed already socially — hotels, newspapers, advertising, etc., all on the American pattern. And they may tug and resist as much as they like; the economic necessity of an infusion of Yankee blood will have its way and abolish this ridiculous boundary line.”[11]

The insistence that “the farmers in Manitoba, etc., will demand it themselves” lends credence to the argument that the incorporation of Canada into the American class struggle will indeed be a struggle from below, rather than merely a forced annexation (i.e. through invasion).

The first organization to lay claim to both the United States and Canada was the North American Federation of the International Working-Men’s Association, though this organization quickly split up, especially in light of the dissolution of the First International in 1876.[12] The Socialist Labor Party did not spread to Canada immediately following the 1877 Strike, though that is of no surprise when considering the fact that the SLP was mostly limited to recent German immigrants; in fact, by 1883, the SLP only recorded 1,500 members in the U.S., and were unable to seriously influence American politics.[13] As the SLP grew in strength during the 1890s, and even endorsed a brief period of activity within the American Federation of Labor, Philips Thompson, who was introduced to Marxism by the American socialist Henry George, established the Labor Advocate newspaper in Toronto.[14] The Labor Advocate’s message spread American scientific socialism among Canadian intellectuals, and eventually led to the introduction of the first socialist organization to run in Canadian elections, which was also U.S.-based: “The U.S.-based Socialist Labor Party (SLP) established the first general network of socialist organizations in Canada, ran the first socialist candidates at the municipal and provincial levels in Ontario, and even in 1901 adopted a Canadian constitution.”[15]

By the late 1890s, the dual unionism of the SLP and its sectarian attitude towards politics resulted in the formation of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) at a Unity Convention in 1901; the main benefit of the SPA was its attitude towards trade unions, with Eugene V. Debs, often at the head of the SPA, having contributed to the American Railway Union in 1894.[16] Although the Industrial Workers of the World, founded by segments of the SPA and SPL, also engaged in dual unionism, it was not merely a sectarian trade union center as it engaged in the organization of previously unorganized industries in the West such as the influential Western Federation of Miners. During the first decade of the 19th century, Canada also experienced the birth of its “evolutionary Marxist” party, the Socialist Party of Canada (SPC). The SPC emerged in 1904—just three years after the formation of the SPA—from similar circumstances; just months prior to the formation of the SPC in December, 1904, the Western Clarion—Canada’s main socialist newspaper at the time—emphasized that Canadian Marxists were taking influence from the development of the American class struggle and system:

“To study the development of this system no better field can be found than this western continent, more especially the United States. With next to no feudal bonds to break, and with a virgin continent possessed with unlimited resources at its disposal this system has grown up through all the stages from tottering infancy to doddering senility almost within the memory of men now living.”[17]

The Industrial Workers of the World, formed at a 1905 convention where Bill Haywood and Eugene Debs were present (multiple Canadians were also at the convention), contributed to the unionization of both American and Canadian unskilled workers on the basis of American working-class solidarity. The “Free Speech Fights,” waged by the IWW against censorship, were conducted not only in Spokane, Washington, but also notably in Vancouver, British Columbia, where IWW organizers would often cross the border while engaging in their work.[18] A renowned and lifelong Canadian Communist, Tom McEwen, later recounted: “In these key industries, each in the process of tremendous expansion, the anarcho-syndicalist ideology was carried widely among the workers first by the IWW and later the OBU.”[19]

The revolutionary impact of the end of the First World War served as an enormous impetus for the formation of a working-class movement and Party on a continental scale. Although both the SPA and SPC opposed the First World War, they denied its revolutionary implications, and instead chose to take a far more conciliatory path. Jack Ross has made a serious attempt to defend the mainstream SPA line during the war, though he admits that SPA leaders such as Victor L. Berger were merely the “loyal opposition” to the AFL leadership, including Samuel Gompers. Ross only brushes off the 1914 Colorado Coal Strike, where mainstream unions affiliated to the AFL practically engaged in open battles with the Colorado National Guard, as having “played out tragically for the [right-wing section of the] Socialist Party in Montana,” despite the fact that the strike effectively disproves his position on the implications of “revolution.”[20] In Canada, the situation for Marxists developed in a similar manner: while the Socialist Party of Canada opposed the war,—with the exception of J.H. Burroughs and E.T. Kingsley—they did not accept the implications of the October Revolution, despite having a majority of SPC members vote in favor of affiliation to the Third International.[21] The Communist breakaways from the socialists occurred consecutively; in America, the break occurred at an Emergency Convention of the SPA, where John Reed and his associates formed the Communist Labor Party, while Louis Fraina and his associates—the two parties would later merge—had founded the Communist Party of America.[22] The original section of self-proclaimed Canadian Communists formed a Central Committee in Toronto in 1919, and were in close contact with the main center of American Communist activity in Detroit, where Agnew Swigach had discussed the implementation of Bolshevism in North America.[23]

Interestingly, the main leaders of the trade union sections of both the Canadian and U.S. Communist Parties throughout the 1920s were both later the long-time leaders of these parties: namely Tim Buck of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) and William Z. Foster of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Born in England and having moved to Canada in 1910, Tim Buck had early conversations with Foster, who convinced him that the ‘North American Syndicalism’ of the IWW was limited as it did not understand the political struggle.[24] As a machinist, Tim Buck had temporarily moved to Detroit, and later recalled that his experiences working in the U.S. were quite formative in his thought:

“I attended two AFL conferences, one in Detroit, and one in Chicago. [...] they did open my eyes to trade unionism as a great social movement rather than just as a movement of tradesmen or a movement that belonged only to the people who belonged to unions.”[25]

In Canada, although there was an early “Central Committee” of Bolshevik sympathizers, the vast majority of Canadian Communists, including Tim Buck, joined the United Communist Party or the Communist Party of America: “we decided to join the Communist Party of America, to set up a Canadian section.”[26] William Z. Foster, a former member of the SPA, IWW, and even a Syndicalist League of North America founder, finally settled with the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL), where he would play a fundamental role in massive industrial union organizing campaigns by 1919, especially the 1919 Steel Strike.[27] As the TUEL organized within both the U.S. and Canada, Foster frequently dealt with subjects of the Canadian labor movement, such as the syndicalist One Big Union which sweeped the Canadian West during the time of the 1919 labor upheavals.[28] In 1922, when Foster sent a report to Grigorii Zinoviev who was high up in the Communist International at the time, the report dealt with both the activities of left-wing trade unionists in the U.S. and Canada; in fact, Foster directly referred to both the U.S. and Canadian working-class as “American”:

“The present situation offers a wonderful opportunity for the growth of sentiment in favor of the policies of the Red International of Labor Unions, which in the United States and Canada is represented by our organization, the Trade Union Educational League [...] If such wonderful headway has been made with such meagre resources it is only a striking evidence of the extreme readiness of the American workingmen for many policies of the Red International of Labor Unions. [...] The winning of such a commanding position in the American labor movement is a goal well worth accomplishing.”[29]

Even the struggle against Trotskyism and the Right-Opposition took on a wider North American dimension. Jack Macdonald, who was the formal leader of the CPC throughout most of the 1920s, conspired with Jay Lovestone (a prominent CPUSA member) and the theory of American Exceptionalism, and arranged a plan to dissolve the CPC into a reformist organization.[30] The fact that Macdonald had accepted the theory of “American Exceptionalism” in the first place signifies the approach of the CPC at the time. It is well known that the Trotskyists, composed primarily of Maurice Spector in Canada, the editor of the Party newspaper, The Worker, were also engaging in a simultaneous campaign across North America. C.E. Ruthenberg, the Secretary of the CPUSA in 1926, traveled to Toronto that year to report on the dangers of Trotskyism, whereafter Tim Buck took the leading role in the expulsion of Maurice Spector.[31]

By the late 1930s, the activities of the CPC and CPUSA took on increasingly ‘national’ forms, although the two parties remained heavily intertwined through the organs of the Third International. From 1928 to 1935, revolutionary industrial unions were launched in the United States and Canada; in the U.S., the Trade Union Unity League led the charge in industries abandoned by the corrupt labor bureaucracy of the American Federation of Labor.[32] In Canada, the Workers’ Unity League led the CPC to the greatest heights that the Party had ever experienced; from 1935-1939, both the U.S. and Canadian communist parties merged their union organizations into the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the AFL in some cases—both multinational, rather than national, trade union centers. Stephen L. Endicott regards the main accomplishment of the Canadian revolutionary industrial unionism of the Third Period as having been the contribution of the foundations of the CIO in Canada, as an extension of the American trade union movement.[33] As is evident, even by the 1930s with the advent of the CIO, the U.S. and Canadian working-class movement was largely unified in one American struggle. But what changed this, and what has contributed to the current nationalism found within the Canadian left?

World War Two forced the Canadian Party into significant compromises with the Canadian state. In 1940, before the Invasion of the USSR, Communists were arrested en masse across Canada under the War Measures Act. Later, once released, the Communist Party of Canada had been officially banned as an organization, and was instead reformed into the Labor-Progressive Party in 1943. Just as Earl Browder had advocated for the liquidation of the CPUSA, many who were pursuing a nationalist line within the Canadian Party—which was heavily pushed by the state in the post-war period—were retained within the Party organizations. Tim Buck himself became convinced of the necessity for a nationalist position in opposition to what they identified as U.S. imperialism; this line was particularly damaging as it led the Party to problematic political stances, such as collaboration with the Liberal Party of Canada, even when in opposition to the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, Canada’s main social-democratic party until the 1961. Ironically, this was a position similar to that pushed by Trotskyist Maurice Spector and Jack Macdonald in the 1920s, which advocated for a national liberation struggle against British imperialism:

“Was Canada still a colony of British imperialism with its ‘made-in-England’ constitution, the British North America Act (BNA) and many other symbols of colonialism, then and now, still intact? If so, argued the MacDonald-Spector leadership, then the co-ordinated struggles of the Canadian working people should be directed against British imperialism per se and not against a subordinated Canadian capitalist class.”[34]

Despite the defeat of a liquidator faction at the 1957 Party Convention under J.B. Salsberg, Tim Buck and the Party never reversed their Canadian nationalist line which had been adopted since the 1940s.[35] One must only look to the publication titles of Tim Buck’s most popular books published after 1945: Lenin and Canada, Canada and Her People, Our Fight for Canada, New Horizons for Young Canada, etc. Another factor which must be considered is the enormous rise of public-sector trade unionism in Canada, at least since the 1970s. Public sector unions tend to be Canadian-only unions, while many blue-collar unions are still organized under the international system (see United Steelworkers, Teamsters etc.)

The Declaration of the American Communist Party asserts that the “American nation has objectively entered into contradiction with the form of the United States of America itself.” This is a theoretical development which has consistently been implied through struggle (as has been shown here, through the fact that America transcends the U.S. state boundary), but is only being theoreticized on now. If anything, it’s clear that now, more than ever, theory and history must meet the needs of these new projects, and that discussions of the U.S. and Canadian working-class must be united into one through new research.

Citations

[1] “Summary of the American Communist Party,” American Communist Party, July 21, 2024, https://acp.us/info;

[2] Ian Mckay, Rebels, Reds, Radicals: Rethinking Canada’s Left History, (Toronto, Canada: Between the Lines, 2005): 145-146.

[3] Morris Hillquit, History of Socialism in the United States, (New York, United States: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1903): 69.

[4] Hillquit, History of Socialism in the United States, 160-170.

[5] Sean Cronin, “The Rise and Fall of the Socialist Labor Party of North America,” Saothar 3, (1977): 21.

[6] Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877, (New York, United States: Pathfinder, 1977): 10-11.

[7] Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877, 24.

[8] Sean Cronin, “The Rise and Fall of the Socialist Labor Party of North America,” 23.

[9] Carlos L. Garrido, Why We Need American Marxism, (Carbondale, Illinois: Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2024): 2, 7, 39, 40, 44.

[10] Karl Marx to Engels, London, England, July 21, 1867, in Karl Marx reflects on the subject of Confederation, ed. Mark Leier, https://activehistory.ca/blog/2016/09/09/karl-marx-reflects-the-subject-of-confederation/

[11] Engels to Sorge, Montreal, Canada, September 10, 1888, in Marx-Engels Correspondence 1888: Engels to Sorge, ed. Leonard E. Mins, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1888/letters/88_09_10.htm

[12] Hillquit, History of Socialism in the United States, 199.

[13] Hillquit, History of Socialism in the United States, 214; Sean Cronin, “The Rise and Fall of the Socialist Labor Party of North America,” 22.

[14] Ian Mckay, Rebels, Reds, Radicals, 148.

[15] Ian Mckay, Rebels, Reds, Radicals, 150.

[16] Jack Ross, The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History, (Lincoln, United States: University of Nebraska Press, 2015): 49-59.

[17] “Modern Industrial and Political Institutions,” The Western Clarion, June 18, 1904.

[18] Mark Leier, Where the Fraser River Flows: The Industrial Workers of the World in British Columbia, (Vancouver, Canada: New Star Books, 1990).

[19] Tom McEwen, He Wrote For Us: The Story of Bill Bennett, Pioneer Socialist Journalist, (Vancouver, Canada: Tribune Publishing Company, 1951): 105.

[20] Jack Ross, The Socialist Party of America, 152.

[21] Ian Angus, Canadian Bolsheviks: The Early Years of the Communist Party of Canada, (Trafford Publishing, 2004): 1-24.

[22] Jack Ross, The Socialist Party of America, 225-229.

[23] Ian Angus, Canadian Bolsheviks, 40.

[24] Tim Buck, Yours in the Struggle: Reminiscences of Tim Buck, (Toronto, Canada: NC Press Limited, 1977), 38-39.

[25] Tim Buck, Yours in the Struggle, 50-52.

[26] Tim Buck, Yours in the Struggle, 91.

[27] William Z. Foster, American Trade Unionism: Principles, Organization, Strategy, Tactics, (New York, United States: International Publishers, 1947), 33-50.

[28] William Z. Foster, American Trade Unionism, 68.

[29]William Z. Foster to Zinoviev, Unknown location, December 16, 1922, in Report on the Labor Situation in the United States and Canada, ed. Tim Davenport, https://www.marxists.org/archive/foster/1922/1216-foster-reporttoci.pdf

[30] Tim Buck, Yours in the Struggle, 131.

[31] Ian Angus, Canadian Bolsheviks, 178-179.

[32] William Z. Foster, American Trade Unionism, 174-180.

[33] Stephen L. Endicott, Raising the Workers’ Flag: The Workers’ Unity League of Canada, 1930-1936, (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2012): 300-327.

[34] Tom McEwen, The Forge Glows Red: From Blacksmith to Revolutionary, (Toronto, Canada: Progress Books, 1974).

[35] Karen Levine, “The Labor-Progressive Party in Crisis, 1956–1957,” Labour/Le Travail 87, (2021): 161-184.

Author

Jude Gamache is a History student attending the University of British Columbia. He is not a member of any political organization, and specializes in the study of both the American and Canadian working-class and political left in history. He is always looking for peers to engage in new projects, specifically areas of labor and left history. Contact: [email protected]

On the Historical Unity of the Canadian and U.S. Working Class Movement. By: Jude Gamache

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