Class War in Canada (2011)

Book Reviews from issue 22 of the World Socialist Review

The Impossibilists -- The Socialist Party of Canada and the One Big Union, Selected Articles 1906-1938. Revised edition with added material. Includes Ginger Goodwin's writings. Perfect bound book, 90 pages, US $14.00 

Peter E. Newell, The Impossibilists: A Brief Profile of the Socialist Party of Canada. 404 pages, US$18.95.



These two recently published books deal with our companion party in the World Socialist Movement, the Socialist Party of Canada. The SPC is the only one of the companion parties to have become a mass movement.

The articles brought together in the first of these books include reports of organizing work as well as theoretical and polemical pieces. Of particular interest are the critiques of the USSR and its Leninist followers in the “Comical” Party of Canada.

Included in this edition are the writings of Ginger Goodwin. Widely known in Canada up to his death in 1918, Goodwin was an organizer both for the SPC and for the United Mine Workers Union. For a number of years he was also vice president of the Federation of Labor of British Columbia.

Up until 1918 Goodwin was classified as unfit for military service due to lung conditions related to coal mining, but he was called up for active service after he organized several strikes in the Nanaimo coal mining region. Convinced that he had been set up, he avoided conscription by escaping to the woods outside of Cumberland, BC. On July 27, 1918, Goodwin was shot without warning by a Mountie* as he was walking to his cabin. Goodwin was and continues to be a legend among the workers of British Columbia. Since the 1980s a yearly gathering of workers has been held in Cumberland, B.C. to honor his memory.

The One Big Union (OBU) was founded in 1919 as an industrial union similar to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) but based on socialist principles. Like the SPC and Karl Marx, the OBU saw class struggle as a constant in capitalist society, but unlike the IWW it did not regard itself as prefiguring the new society.

The OBU started off with 40,000 members in Canada and another 30,000 in the US. Its creation shook the American Federation of Labor to its core. The OBU gained its members through the withdrawal of union locals from existing Canadian and American unions. In 1919 the US Western District of the International Longshoremen’s Association voted to leave the ILA and join the OBU. Similarly, there were serious moves for the Washington State and Montana State AFLs to switch to the OBU.

In 1923 the OBU led a strike of 120,000 textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Other areas where it was strong were the San Francisco Bay Area and the important mining region centered in Butte, Montana.

By 1925 the OBU was washed up in the United States, but in Canada it remained a national union until 1956, when it took its 16,000 members into the merger of the Canadian AFL and CIO federations.

The second book under review is a history of the Socialist Party of Canada by Peter E. Newell. The author is a member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB) – another companion party of the World Socialist Movement.

The book provides a chronological account of the SPC, both during its heyday between 1912 and 1925 and following its rebirth in the early 1930s. The research is impeccable and dispels some of the myths that have been spread about the SPC by Leninists of various stripes. This work will be of great value to labor historians as well as to socialists.

However, we still need a third book on the SPC that would provide an organizational history – an account of how the party was established and organized, how it grew, how it approached issues, and how it interacted with the OBU and other workers’ organizations. For example, although I have been researching the history of the SPC for over a dozen years, I only recently discovered that the SPC organized an unemployment movement in Toronto.

FN Brill

Landed with Tony Blair! (1996)

Book Review from the September 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Impossibilists: Selections from the Press of The Socialist Party of Canada And One Big Union, 1906-38. edited by L Gambone (Red Lion Press £4).

It is easy to forget that before the formation of the Socialist Party of Great Britain in June 1904 there had already been in existence the Socialist Party of British Columbia, founded in 1901, but having an organised existence going back to 1895. The early history of this, our companion party in canada, is brought to life by the re-publications of a volume of reprinted articles from the Western Clarion, the SPC's first journal, as well as other journals of the period which came out of this broadly impossibilist tradition.

A few words are in order about this term "impossibilist". It emerged, of course, as a term of political abuse. Socialists who stood for the end of capitalism and no compromises along the way were seen to be demanding the impossible. Interestingly, before anyone ever used that word there was another term which was popular: possibilism. The so-called possibilists emerged in France in the early 1880s, and they were the reformists, tired of trying to bring about socialism and nothing less, who imagined that the best possible option would be to chip away at the edifice of capitalism bit-by-bit, reforming it until it looked like socialism. Over a century has passed since these undoubtedly sincere people embarked upon their futile course and everywhere reformist gradualism has ended in the most abject failure. A hundred years of demanding "the possible" or "something now" has landed the Labour Party with Tory Blair! So, if we who refuse to settle for anything less then real real socialists are impossibilists, perhaps it is time for our fellow workers to be rather more practical and demand "the impossible".

The articles which are reprinted give modern readers a good flavour of the clarity of analysis and vision of our early North American comrades. Warren Atkinson's Western Clarion article of 1906 exhibits prescient recognition of the capitalist nature of so-called public (i.e. state) ownership; Rab's 1918 article on dialectical thought is as relevant today as ever it was; John Tyler's 1919 Red Flag article deals with the myth of the Bolsheviks' "socialist revolution" (as do others in the volume), and there is also material written by Charlie Lestor during his "One Big Union" period—before he joined the SPGB. Article after after in this volume leaves the reader saying "they were right all along". And there is no shame in consistency when it is attached to validity and honest principles.

Gambone provides a useful, though incomplete, bibliography at the back, and there is a basically sound introduction, only marred by the biased sulkiness in the brief reference to the current Socialist Party of Canada. Small though it may be, at least it still exists as a relatively active party, which is more than can be said for the other movements mentioned which have expired in the course of the century. Has it ever occurred to Gambone, and those like him who celebrate the revolutionary past of the SPC/SPGB tradition while deriding its present existence, that history is of little use unless it teaches you what you should be doing now? For anyone who has come into contact with our ideas in recent years (or recent decades, for that matter) this is an invaluable guide to a hitherto under-publicised part of our past.

Steve Coleman