Reflections on the Winnipeg General Strike and the future of workers’ struggles

Abstract

The Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 was a local working-class revolt that challenged the hegemony of capital in a moment of crisis for the ruling class in Canada. Although its particular scenario is unlikely to be repeated, the trajectories and consequences of capital accumulation and ecological crisis make a different historically-specific kind of class-wide upsurge a future possibility, and this affects the interpretation of the Winnipeg General Strike as a historical event.

Keywords:

• Canada
• class struggle
• history
• strike
• working class

Notes

Acknowledgements

I thank the journal’s reviewers for their comments, and Donald Swartz for editorial direction.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Quoted in Bumsted, “Was the Winnipeg General Strike,” 2.

2 Provincial Archives of Manitoba, MG 19, A 14–2, no. 54, Crown Counsel’s Address to the Jury (AJ Andrews KC), December 23, 1919, quoted in Kramer and Mitchell, When the State Trembled, 302.

3 This is obvious from the most recent major contributions to historical writing on the strike: Mitchell and Naylor, “The Prairies”; Kramer and Mitchell, When the State Trembled.

4 Bumstead, “Was the Winnipeg General Strike,” 7–8.

5 Penner, “Introduction,” ix. Morton presents the strike in a similar manner, although he emphasizes the radicalism of socialist supporters of the One Big Union. Morton, Working People, 119–24.

6 Rebeck, “Revisiting the Winnipeg General Strike.”

7 Schur and Chafe, “Nothing Radical.”

8 New light has been shone on these, including the degree of workers’ self-activity involved, by Bjørge, “The Workers’ War.”

9 Naylor, “The Winnipeg General Strike.”

10 There has been almost no research done on the actions and views of unionists and socialists with respect to Indigenous people at the time. To capture the reality of the working-class movement of the period, such research would need to explore primary sources in English, Ukrainian, and other European languages. Working with me, Saku Pinta has recently begun to search for coverage of Indigenous people in the socialist press in the first two decades of the century. Although there is little research on which to assess the validity of Owen Toews’ argument, he is correct to argue that workers of European origin generally “failed to transcend the racial terms of belonging imposed on the North-West by Canadian occupation.” His suggestion that “the supposed naturalness, inevitability, and desirability of Indigenous death and disappearance” (94) was pervasive is plausible. However, it is doubtful that many Marxist workers in Winnipeg, educated as many were in Frederick Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, with its extensive discussion of Lewis Henry Morgan’s research on Indigenous peoples, would have seen Indigenous genocide as natural and desirable, even if they might well have seen it as a tragic inevitable consequence of capitalist development. (Toews, Stolen City, 94).

Toews’ discussion of racism at the time is on less solid ground. That the strike did little or nothing to challenge the racial oppression of Black (or Asian) people is not in question. Nor is the fact that the dominant ideology of the period, which was a powerful influence on workers’ consciousness, was profoundly racist. But the claim that “strikers often resorted to anti-immigrant and anti-Black rhetoric” is not supported by the evidence presented in Stolen City, which at one point presents a racist line in an article in Western Labour News quoted in the Defence Committee’s long document reproduced in Penner, Winnipeg 1919, as the view of “strike leaders.” In my view, the suggestion that the vision of “Winnipeg’s industrial workers” “tended towards a racial socialist future whereby workers would gain control over the means of production via whiteness” and in which “Black, Chinese, and other people of colour… would remain dispossessed” is not sustainable as a generalization. (Ibid., 93 (emphasis mine), 93, 94). I concur with David Roediger that “to imagine ourselves in solidarity with social movements of the past challenges us to remember them as presenting both ways forward and ways in which broad solidarities have often been difficult and elusive.” (Roediger, Class, Race and Marxism, 183). In that spirit, an adequate consideration of the politics of racism and the working class in Winnipeg in 1919 would need to excavate the full range of actions and ideas of Anglo-Celtic workers, other Europeans, and (if possible) other members of the working class and assess them in their historical context. No doubt there was a white-supremacist strand of socialism rooted in the Anglo-Celtic layers of the working class. However, this was not the only or perhaps even the majority current among Left-wing workers.

It is worth remembering that, by 1913, the Socialist Party of Canada was opposing Asian exclusion from a perspective of working-class unity. (Creese, “Vancouver Workers Confront,” 37–38). Winnipeg SPC member and machinists’ union leader RB Russell challenged racism within and beyond his union. (Campbell, Canadian Marxists, 181–82). There were many like-minded radical socialist workers in Winnipeg who identified with the Communist International (Comintern) formed in March 1919, many of whom joined its Canadian section when it was formed in 1921. The Comintern’s politics were anti-imperialist, with its first manifesto championing “the emancipation of the colonies.” (Trotsky, “Manifesto of the Communist International,” 32). It would be a mistake to assume that the politics of the far Left in Winnipeg in 1919 were identical to those proclaimed in Comintern documents, and the far left was undoubtedly a minority current within the working class. But it is not far-fetched to suggest that many of its supporters were opposed to colonialism and their vision of socialism was not one in which people of colour would remain dispossessed even if the oppression of Indigenous peoples in Canada went unquestioned.

11 McKay, Reasoning Otherwise, 479.

12 McKay, Reasoning Otherwise, 469.

13 Penner, “Recollections,” 378.

14 Angus, Canadian Bolsheviks, 56. See also the description of the actions of Russell, the only SPC member on the strike committee, in Campbell, Canadian Marxists, 186–88.

15 These included sympathy strike action to support Winnipeg civic workers’ successful fight for collective bargaining and a vote for a general strike by Winnipeg unions in support of the city’s metal trades workers, both in the summer of 1918, a pan-Canadian letter carriers’ strike that summer that threatened to boil over into a regional general strike, a Calgary freight handlers’ strike in October for which CPR workers walked out in sympathy in a number of places in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Mitchell and Naylor, “The Prairies,” 178–82.

16 Mitchell and Naylor, “The Prairies,” 182–3; Naylor, “The Winnipeg General Strike.”

17 Heron and Siemiatycki, “The Great War, the State, and Working-Class Canada,” 27.

18 Sears, The Next New Left, 2.

19 Palmer, “1919,” 30.

20 Peterson, “One Big Union,” 65.

21 Mitchell and Naylor, “The Prairies,” 178–79. On war and class struggle internationally at that time, see Haimson, “Historical Setting” and Silver, Forces, 141–42.

22 Gramsci, Selections, 210.

23 This criticism of how “crisis” is often used should not be confused with the call to “observe crisis as a blind spot, and hence to apprehend the ways in which it regulates narrative constructions” in Roitman, Anti-Crisis, 94. Influenced by Luhmann, Roitman’s work implies, in spite of occasional disavowals, that crises of capital accumulation or of hegemony do not happen. Walby takes a different approach, but the way in which she draws on “complexity science” to theorize crisis in general terms as “a potential ‘tipping point,’ or ‘critical turning point’” in a system is not very illuminating. Walby, Crisis, 168.

24 Mitchell and Naylor, “The Prairies,” 216. On the ruling class and the strike, see Kramer and Mitchell, When the State Trembled.

25 Claims such as “the strike led to positive reforms, the rise of new forms of labour organization, and the birth of new political parties” are not uncommon. Aivalis, “It Inspires Us Still.” On the coming of industrial pluralism in Canada, see Fudge and Tucker, Labour Before the Law, 229–301 and the evidence in Bjørge, “The Workers’ War.” In 1919, only a few craft unionists and supporters of the kind of “responsible” industrial unionism practised by the officials of the United Mine Workers sought something like industrial pluralism. Fudge and Tucker, Labour Before the Law, 60–61, 70–71. While such people likely existed in Winnipeg, their influence in 1919 was negligible.

26 A Century of Solidarity. Manitoba Federation of Labour publication, 2019.

27 Weier, “The Year.”

28 I have analyzed unionism today in Canadian Labour in Crisis. On industrial pluralism specifically, see my “Sympathy for the Teacher,” and on bureaucracy, “What is Trade Union Bureaucracy?”

29 Maizlish, “What’s So New.”

30 Camfield, “What Happened to the Workers.’”

31 Noteworthy discussions include Harris, Kids These Days; Bertho, The Age of Violence; Crary, 24/7; Maynard, Policing Black Lives; Penny, Unspeakable Things; and Angus, Facing the Anthropocene.

32 Green, Taking History to Heart, 11.

33 Bertho, The Age of Violence, 87, referring to Hertog, Régimes d’historicité.

34 Eagleton, Hope Without Optimism, 133.

35 Löwy, Fire Alarm, 110, 111.

36 Arruzza, “From Women’s Strikes.”

37 McNally, Global Slump.

38 Roberts, The Long Depression, 114.

39 Roberts, The Long Depression, 12–14, 113–14, 235–71; McNally, Global Slump, 81–84.

40 Seymour, Against Austerity, 3.

41 McCormack and Workman, The Servant State; Camfield, “The Far Right.”

42 Moody, “High Tech, Low Growth.”

43 On capitalism and ecological crisis, see Angus, Facing the Anthropocene, and Malm, Fossil Capital.

44 Steffen et al., “Planetary Boundaries.”

45 Hubertus Fischer et al., “Paleoclimate Constraints,” 481.

46 Steffen et al., “Trajectories of the Earth System,” 8254.

47 Mann and Wainwright, Climate Leviathan, 132, 133.

48 Malm, “Revolution in a Warming World.”

49 Seymour, Against Austerity, 81–87.

50 It is important not to forget the level of working-class militancy between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s, especially in Quebec, where the upsurge of 1972 remains under-researched. See Éthier, Piotte, and Reynolds, Les travailleurs.

51 Aivalis, “It Inspires Us Still,”

52 Charest, “Social Blindness.”

53 Löwy, Fire Alarm, 44, 44–45. The strike was obviously not as catastrophic a defeat as the examples cited by Löwy suggest.

54 Löwy, Fire Alarm, 47.

55 Löwy, Fire Alarm, 49.

56 Naylor, “The Winnipeg General Strike.”

57 Löwy, Fire Alarm, 44, 44, 106.

58 Dick, “Deportation”; Smith, Let Us Rise!, 53.

59 Chaboyer and Black, “Conspiracy in Winnipeg.”

60 Chaboyer and Black, “Conspiracy in Winnipeg.”

61 Löwy, Fire Alarm, 47.

62 Clarke, “State, Class Struggle,” 123.

63 See Gordon, Cops, Crime and Capitalism, 29–50.

64 This can be inferred from the conclusion that a “party of a new type” was needed, drawn by socialists who formed the Communist Party of Canada. Angus, Canadian Bolsheviks, 103–4.

65 Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia, 222.

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David Camfield

David Camfield teaches in the Labour Studies Program and the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.