THE STUDY OF THE WORKING CLASS and commitment to its causes is central to what this journal is about. Three men who made significant contributions to working-class life over the course of the last century, but whose personal efforts, sadly and to our collective loss, came to an end in the year 2000, merit our attention.

      Marcel Pepin, a vibrant voice in the modern history of Québec’s union movement and former leader of the Confederation of National Trade Unions (CNTU/CSN), died 6 March 2000. Few trade unionists in Canada have exercised the influence of Pepin, who was one of three major leaders of the historic 1972 Common Front general strike in Québec’s burgeoning and critical public sector. Jailed for his defiance of back-to-work legislation, Pepin announced the rise of labour militancy that would be associated with Québécois workers and their leaders throughout the 1970s, and served notice that capital and the state now confronted a powerful presence in French Canada, where the realization of class exploitation was heightening with awareness of national oppression. We offer below a brief obituary in his honour, a tribute to Pepin’s place in the history of Canada’s and Québec’s class struggle by Michel Rioux, "La fidélité, l’affair de toute une vie."

      On 15 June 2000 another advocate of Canadian workers, especially those incarcerated in homelessness and poverty, Norman N. Feltes, died. Feltes, a marxist literary theorist with an acute sense of the significance of an Althusserian reading of "texts," was one of many dissidents who left the United States in the 1960s to take up residence in Canada as a protest against their society’s politics and culture. A former US Marine, Feltes served in Korea before utilizing the GI Bill to pursue graduate studies in English at Dublin and Oxford. Returning to the United States, Feltes began what would prove a life of protest, marching in southern civil rights campaigns and turning his opposition to the imperialist policies of the United States in Vietnam. In 1969, convinced that the country of his birth gave him no other option, Feltes came to Canada where he found a niche in York University’s English Department. There he produced two rigorously terse texts on the production of the Victorian novel, Modes of Production of Victorian Novels (1986) and Literary Capital and the Late Victorian Novel (1993), before retiring in 1996. He then commenced a labour of love, an exploration of determination and historical process, This Side of Heaven: Determining the Donnelly Murders, 1880 (1999). It was a reflection of Norman’s intellectual venturesomeness that he shifted scholarly gears so seemingly effortlessly, crafting a brilliantly iconoclastic ‘reading’ of an event well-known in Canadian historical and literary circles – the tale of the ‘Black Donnelly’ murders near Lucan, Ontario – in ways that totally recast the meaning of what had taken place in that quintessential central Canadian locale, Biddulph Township.

      Writing was not all that Feltes did in his retirement years. Outraged by the ways in which Mike Harris’s Tories were assailing the poor, Feltes was drawn to the protest politics of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), and he lent his analytic insights, his Marine training and discipline, and his considerable compassion and openness to new perspectives to the cause of the homeless, in whose interests he gave his boundless energies and enthusiasm. He organized, he rubbed shoulders with new friends and became a common site in new parts of Toronto frequented by the poor, he travelled to protests, he was arrested. And he thought, and struggled to write in ways that would force people to consider OCAP’s significance. We offer here a tribute to Norman from John Clarke, a leading figure in OCAP, as well as one of Feltes’s last intellectual undertakings, an important paper first written for a conference in Cuba, and published posthumously in this issue. "A New Prince in a New Principality: OCAP and the Toronto Poor," will no doubt prove a controversial statement, and we regret that Norman is no longer alive to engage those who might disagree with his views. But the essay has already struck chords in some quarters, where its message of alternative ways of organizing on the left, and its implicit demand to rethink how we conceptualize "labour" has proven stimulating. ¹

      Jack Scott was a revolutionary of the 20th century who had hope for the 21st. He no doubt understood, however, that others would be making history in the new millennium, and his contributions had already been made. He died as the century closed, on 30 December 2000. Born in Belfast in 1910, having celebrated his 90th birthday, Jack’s longevity and independence – he managed his own household until the end – were striking, especially when it is recognized that for much of his life Jack worked physically-exacting, poorly-paid jobs that did not give him access to the best nutrition and health care. A life-long communist, Scott was also deeply committed to labour history. At first he read and lectured, especially to comrades in various political tendencies with which he was affiliated or which he founded and led, such as the Communist Party of Canada or the Progressive Worker Movement of the 1960s. Student leftists and Maoist groupings in the 1970s found his talks particularly stimulating. And in this period, with Jack now able to ‘retire’ from the demands of physical labour, he started to do historical research on the history of class struggle in Canada, producing a series of studies with the Vancouver-based publisher, New Star Books. Politically-poised and popularly-pitched, Scott’s labour history writing was also prolific: four volumes appeared between 1974-1978, covering the origins of working-class struggle in Canada up to 1899, the Industrial Workers of the World in British Columbia, and two volumes attacking the imperialist agenda of the American Federation of Labor in Latin America and Canada. Enthused by the youthful anticapitalism of the ‘globalization’ protests of the last years of his life, Jack Scott died as part of a generation of the Canadian revolutionary left that had linked the upheavals of the Great Depression of the 1930s to the street battles of Seattle and Quebec City in our time. His life is remembered here in a collaborative statement produced by Bryan D. Palmer drawing on notes provided by Al Birnie and Ralph Stanton.

      Marcel Pepin, Norman N. Feltes, and Jack Scott – three figures from the diversity that is Canada, they were historically separated by geography, culture, origins, language, politics, and the sociology of everyday life, which meant they earned their livings, developed their contributions, and made their mark in decidedly different ways. Yet they all expanded our appreciation of working-class life and struggle, and like countless other men and women of their and our times they have touched us in their commitment to the cause of labour. We mourn their passing by thanking them for the gifts they bestowed upon us, by celebrating their lives, and by continuing the work that they all believed in so passionately.

Marcel Pepin:
La fidélité, l'affaire de toute une vie

Michel Rioux

MARCEL PEPIN AURA FAIT de la défense des «moins bien nantis», ainsi qu’il les appelait, l’affaire de toute sa vie. Et, en cela, il aura été fidèle à ses origines ouvrières et fut au Québec, pour les siens et pour sa classe, un des grands défenseurs dans ce siècle des idéaux de justice et de liberté qu’il a servis avec tant d’ardeur et de constance et qu’il a pratiqués durant les quelque 50 années de sa vie publique.

	Marcel Pepin 1926-2000

      Décédé le 6 mars 2000 des suites d’une longue maladie, Marcel Pepin continuait pourtant d’exercer au sein de la société québécoise une autorité morale exceptionnelle, même s’il avait quitté l’avant-scène depuis près d’un quart de siècle. Celui qui, en 1965, à la présidence de la Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux (CNTU/CSN), avait pris le relais d’un Jean Marchand engagé dans l’action politique fédérale avec les Pierre Elliott Trudeau et Gérard Pelletier, allait imprimer au mouvement syndical québécois un virage marqué du côté de la radicalisation de l’action en faveur des plus démunis de la société.

      Pour Marcel Pepin, l’action syndicale a été sans conteste d’essence révolutionnaire en cela qu’elle doit viser à transformer radicalement les rapports sociaux dans le sens d’une plus grande justice. Il en fit l’affaire d’une vie.

      Si l’expression «payer de sa personne» a toujours un sens, on ne voit pas à qui elle pourrait mieux s’appliquer qu’à lui. À ses yeux et dans son quotidien, il n’y avait pas de tâche trop ingrate, ni de gestes trop humbles, dans le service des autres, service auquel il s’est consacré de toutes ses forces. Mais cet homme, qui respirait la force et inspirait dans son entourage le courage d’aller toujours plus loin, était en réalité un timide pour qui chaque geste public posé représentait un effort. D’ailleurs, cette force et ce courage dont il a fait preuve à tant d’occasions, il les tirait, n’en doutons pas, de cette conviction chez lui si profonde que ce n’est que dans l’action, et par l’action, que peuvent être transformées les conditions d’exis-tence des hommes et des femmes. Et cet homme, qui se faisait fort de ne laisser percer aucun signe de faiblesse, devenait soudain d’une étonnante fragilité quand il lui arrivait d’évoquer le souvenir de son père, fendeur de cuir dans une petite entreprise de Joliette, rentrant à la maison durant la Crise après avoir perdu son emploi.

Marcel Pepin aura fait de la fidélité aux siens, à sa souche, à sa classe, une règle de vie.

      Dans une allocution prononcée au cours de la campagne électorale fédérale, en octobre 1993, devant des militants d’un groupe communautaire de l’Est de Montréal, dans son style direct et concret il avait lancé un appel:

Quand une infime partie de la population, qui jouit de privilèges liés aux connections politiques, continue de vivre en vase clos sans connaître la réalité qui est celle du monde ordinaire, quand il n’y a pas de jobs, quand les gouvernements mettent tous leurs efforts à inventer des manières de prendre en défaut les hommes et les femmes qui ne travaillent pas parce que ce sont nécessairement des fraudeurs, il me semble que celles et ceux qui ont encore une voix dans ce pays doivent se lever et dénoncer cette situation !

    S’il y a une chose que ma vie syndicale m’a apprise, c’est que les solutions durables aux problèmes de société viennent rarement d’initiatives individuelles mais qu’elles sont plutôt le résultat d’un effort collectif, d’un mouvement organisé. Il faut admirer et soutenir celles et ceux qui tentent de soulager la misère et la pauvreté au quotidien, dans toutes sortes d’organismes qui se dévouent pour le bien-être des moins bien nantis. Mais il faut aussi mettre tous les efforts pour que la lutte à la pauvreté, pour que le combat pour le respect des hommes et des femmes dans notre société deviennent la lutte et le combat des gouvernements qui n’agiront, on le sait, que lorsque tous ceux et toutes celles qui croient profondément qu’il est possible de changer le cours des choses conjugueront leurs efforts.

      L’essentiel de sa pensée politique et sociale se trouve dans cet appel.

Il y avait du Sisyphe chez ce pessimiste qui, paradoxe encore, n’abandonna pourtant jamais l’idée que les choses pouvaient être changées par l’action des hommes. Sa vie tout entière en témoigne. Il avait hérité de Gérard Picard, président de la CTCC de 1946 à 1958, cet art de la négociation qui lui faisait rechercher constamment l’espace qui pourrait conduire à un progrès. Les témoignages concordent là-dessus: ces talents auront servi les intérêts des travailleuses et des travailleurs au nom desquels il parlait à la table de négociation.

      Je le revois encore revenant du bureau du premier ministre Robert Bourassa, aux petites heures du matin, en juin 1976. Jubilant, il venait d’arracher les quatre semaines de vacances après un an pour tous les employé-es de la fonction publique. Il avait plaidé l’égalité de traitement, que l’on occupe une fonction plus élevée dans la hiérarchie ou encore que l’on soit «moppologiste,» ainsi que les employeurs désignaient avec un certain mépris les travailleurs préposés à l’entretien. On retrouve d’ailleurs une constante dans les négociations qu’il a menées, qu’elles aient été conduites dans de petites entreprises ou qu’elles le fussent dans les Fronts communs du secteur public: le relèvement des conditions de salaire des moins bien nantis. Ce n’était pas toujours évident de convaincre les plus hauts salariés de renoncer à des augmentations de salaire légitimes pour dégager suffisamment d’espace pour que les travailleurs au bas de l’échelle reçoivent davantage. Il l’aura réussi à plusieurs reprises, sachant toucher ce qu’il y a de meilleur dans l’être humain. L’exemple le plus percutant fut certes le 100 $ par semaine, dont il convainquit tout le monde de la nécessité et de la possibilité de l’atteindre.

Avec les autres grands bâtisseurs du Québec moderne, il avait de l’État et des responsabilités qui doivent être les siennes une grande idée.

      Pour Marcel Pepin, tout affaiblissement de l’État ne pouvait se traduire que par le renforcement des forces du capital, dont le moins qu’on puisse dire est que le bien commun demeure le dernier des soucis. Il ne croyait pas aux nouvelles vertus qu’on dit contenues dans la décentralisation et dans ce sens, il aura été jacobin jusqu’au bout. Ces derniers temps, rien ne l’attristait davantage que ce refus d’intervenir, ce refus d’exercer tout le pouvoir qui demeure encore entre les mains d’un gouvernement, qu’il décelait à Québec. Quelques jours avant son départ, il tentait de me convaincre de l’urgence pour le Québec de poser des gestes spectaculaires pour affirmer ses compétences. Comme, par exemple, rapatrier unilatéralement la caisse de l’assurance-chômage, qu’un euphémisme de mauvais aloi nomme maintenant, à tort cependant, assurance-emploi.

      Curieux paradoxe encore chez cet homme, qui savait prendre des risques et qui en a pris un grand nombre en négociation, dont plusieurs ont profité aux travailleuses et aux travailleurs : ce n’est qu’assez tard dans sa vie active qu’il est devenu convaincu de la nécessité de la souveraineté pour le Québec. Il craignait par-dessus tout que ce ne soit le petit peuple, «le monde ordinaire», qui fasse les frais de ce changement, la bourgeoisie ayant toujours, selon ses termes, les moyens de s’en sortir de toutes façons. Mais quand il arrivait à la conclusion qu’une chose devait se faire, Marcel Pepin mettait à sa réalisation toute son énergie créatrice et toute sa force de conviction. C’est ainsi qu’un de ses derniers gestes publics aura été de publier, avec deux anciens présidents de la CSN, Norbert Rodrigue et Gérald Larose, un texte dénonçant ce projet de loi dit de la clarté déposé par le gouvernement Chrétien.

Autre paradoxe: ce pragmatique dans le détail était un idéaliste dans le tout. Il avait fait de la CSN sa maison, sa famille, sa raison d’être. L’engagement syndical n’a jamais été pour lui autre chose qu’une vocation.

      À l’occasion d’un colloque organisé par l’Université du Québec à Montréal sur les 75 ans de la CSN, Marcel Pepin avait affirmé clairement:

Il faut opposer un NON retentissant à toutes ces entreprises qui visent à déchirer le tissu social québécois, qui forcent le nivellement du Québec par le bas, pour en faire une copie conforme de ce qui se passe ailleurs, sous le couvert de la mondialisation. Il faut continuer d’agir avec toute la vigueur nécessaire pour préserver l’ensemble des originalités qui caractérisent le peuple québécois.

    Jamais la CSN ne doit baisser la garde, abandonner le combat pour la justice, lâcher ce parti-pris pour les plus démunis qui a été chez elle une préoccupation historique.

      Il en aura bousculé des idées reçues, et en aura fait trembler plus d’un, du côté des possédants, des gouvernements et des entreprises. Porté par la certitude que l’action syndicale en était une d’essence révolutionnaire, il aura forcé le mouvement syndical à rejeter une certaine forme de corporatisme et à élargir ses revendications de sorte que celles et ceux qui n’ont pas la chance d’être membres d’un syndicat puissent quand même bénéficier de l’action syndicale. Il aura introduit dans le syndicalisme de son temps cette idée qu’à des droits sont accolés des devoirs.

      Il avait officiellement quitté le mouvement CSN il y a vingt ans pour aller enseigner à l’Université de Montréal. Mais la CSN ne l’avait jamais quitté et tout ce qui la touchait lui était d’un grand intérêt. Il s’inquiétait de ceci; il applaudissait à cela. Il ne ménageait pas les conseils et ses interventions discrètes, dans plusieurs conflits qui semblaient impossibles à résoudre, ont provoqué souvent d’heureux dénouements.

Ainsi, sa dernière intervention dans une instance de la centrale syndicale fut un plaidoyer magistral en faveur de la syndicalisation, lors du congrès de mai 1999. Applaudi à tout rompre par les quelque 2 000 délégué-es présents, Marcel Pepin avait exhorté les militantes et les militants à consacrer plus de temps et d’ardeur à l’élargissement du syndicalisme.

Je n’exagère pas, quand je soutiens que, par la syndicalisation, des hommes et des femmes se donnent le moyen de se faire respecter, qu’ils se donnent un instrument pour se faire entendre, non seulement dans l’entreprise, mais aussi dans la société, sur les diverses questions qui intéressent le monde du travail et les classes populaires.

    Un droit véritable, c’est un droit qu’une société proclame et protège, un droit dont on fait la promotion, un droit dont on facilite l’exercice, enfin, un droit considéré au même titre que les autres droits à la base d’une société démocratique. Mais peut-on dire qu’au Québec, aujourd’hui, le syndicalisme soit véritablement considéré comme un acquis positif, comme un agent dont on ne saurait se passer dans un système démocratique? Je vous livre mon sentiment tout net: c’est loin d’être le cas, encore aujourd’hui. Le syndicalisme n’est encore que toléré au Québec! Et si on lui accorde une certaine place, c’est celle qu’il a réussi à arracher par un rapport de forces auquel les pouvoirs politiques et économiques n’ont pu résister.

    Si le droit de se syndiquer était pleinement reconnu, ne croyez-vous pas qu’il cesserait de s’exercer dans la clandestinité ? Ne croyez-vous pas qu’on lèverait les obstacles à sa réalisation ? Les délais indus, ça peut représenter la mort de l’accréditation, surtout dans les milieux où une main-d’œuvre peu payée est très mobile. Et la mort de l’accréditation, c’est en quelque sorte la mort d’une espérance, l’espérance de sortir de l’exploitation, l’espérance d’améliorer ses conditions d’existence et celles de sa famille, l’espérance de conquérir un minimum de respect dans son travail.

      Aux responsables politiques, il disait avoir des questions à leur poser :

A-t-on le droit, au Québec, d’accepter, sans mot dire et sans réagir, de laisser tuer l’espérance quand des hommes et des femmes veulent se syndiquer ? Est-on d’accord pour bâtir une société dans laquelle des hommes et des femmes voient leurs efforts de syndicalisation anéantis, leurs tentatives échouer ? Est-on d’accord pour qu’au Québec, il faille encore trop souvent payer de son emploi la volonté de se syndiquer ? A-t-on peur à ce point de voir arriver au monde trop d’hommes et de femmes libres, libres parce que capables de parler d’égal à égal avec leur employeur ? Pendant combien de temps encore le droit d’association devra-t-il s’exercer dans la clandestinité ? Est-ce le genre de société qu’on veut bâtir ? Quand on invoque la globalisation, la mondialisation et quoi encore pour se faire l’apôtre de la sous-traitance, est-ce qu’on se rend compte que c’est un appel à l’appauvrissement qu’on lance?

      S’adressant directement au congrès, il avait terminé par ce pressant appel:

Vous êtes les témoins que le syndicalisme représente un extraordinaire espace de progrès et de liberté. Vous n’avez pas le droit d’accepter qu’il demeure le fait de quelques privilégié-és. Battez-vous pour être plus nombreux encore à vous battre pour le respect, la justice, l’équité, pour un meilleur partage de la richesse, pour la démocratie.

Jusqu’à la fin l’ont accompagné cette lucidité et cette mémoire qui faisaient l’admiration de tous ceux qui le fréquentaient. Il savait tout. Il écoutait tout. Il lisait tout. Du sport à la politique, des luttes syndicales aux grands enjeux économiques mondiaux, tout l’intéressait. Rien ne lui plaisait davantage que l’art de la conversation. On voyait alors à l’œuvre un esprit vif, subtil, qui retournait les situations dans tous les sens, interrogeant son interlocuteur même s’il possédait depuis longtemps les réponses, le tout servi avec cet humour qu’on pouvait trouver quelque peu caustique parfois, mais qui me semble le propre de ceux qui aiment trop les êtres pour ne pas refuser d’en prendre l’exacte mesure.

      On dit de ce pays du Québec qu’il perd des géants dont il n’aurait pourtant pas les moyens de se passer. Sans conteste, Marcel Pepin en est un.

Norman Feltes:
An OCAP Appreciation

John Clarke

SOON AFTER NORM discovered that he was dying, he told me that he was quite ready for the event and intended to "die like an historical materialist." He admitted that he would have to work up some notes on just what that involved, but one tentative notion was to "go" on the same day as our June 15 March on the Ontario Legislature. He actually died in the early hours of June 16 with the dust having barely settled on an event he realized would be a turning point for us.

	Norman N. Feltes 1932-2000

      During the last few years of his life, taking a route not exactly standard for retired English Literature professors, Norm threw himself into the work of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP). The members of OCAP loved and respected him more than I can say. He valued his place in the organization because he found in it the serious struggle that he saw as the vital factor necessary to translating theoretical insights into meaningful practice. Because of his academic background, Norm agonized far too much about the legitimacy of his contribution. This uncertainty was utterly groundless because we all appreciated him as a comrade and respected greatly his courage and determination.

      This is not to say that Norm’s background never showed. We all laughed a great deal at his expense at the time when the police were called to intervene at one of our actions and he held the door open for them. On the bus to and from our Parliament Hill Ottawa protest, Norm was beside himself at the raucous behaviour of some ‘squeegee kids,’ whom the driver complained were going to cause an accident or worse. Norm, his sense of disciplined protocol violated, tried to quiet the crowd, and was teased mercilessly by the rowdy ranks. He took it all in stride, and with the return trip to Toronto, the homeless hungry and destitute, Norm bought the bus lunch at a roadside stop. He was the only one with a credit card.

      One of our members once told Norm that he was too polite and should learn to tell people to "Fuck off." After he had been diagnosed with cancer and was in the hospital, a social worker came by and suggested he should think positively about the possibility of recovery. Norm explained that his condition was obviously terminal and his ability to face this was far more important to him. When she persisted with her stupid advice, Norm looked her in the eye and said, "I’m told that my social conditioning makes it almost impossible to tell people to ‘fuck off’ but today could be the day."

      The truth is that Norm, by way of his own modesty and the admiration he had for the poor people around OCAP, did actually underestimate the contribution he was able to make exactly because of his academic training. He brought a body of knowledge and a method of analysis into our activism that was enormously important. His study of the "housing question" in the downtown east area of Toronto armed us in our struggle against developers, yuppie colonists, and the forces of gentrification. Once he had decided to betray his own class, the skills he brought over with him came in very useful.

      Without taking away anything from what I have just written, however, Norm’s greatest contribution was the degree to which he embodied courage and compassion. He cared about the victims of the war on the poor, he hated those waging that war, he loathed the system that produced them, and he was ready to stand up and be counted when the time came to fight back. When our "Safe Park" for the homeless was broken up by the cops, Norm intervened to defend another OCAP member. He was taken to the 51 Division, where he spoke out against the overtly racist treatment of a black prisoner. Though his charge was relatively minor, and would have usually resulted in a quick release, the police relatiated to Norm’s accusations of their racist misconduct with the vindictive claim that he had refused to sign his conditions of release. They shipped him off to the Don Jail in an act of retribution. Norm had never seen conditions like those in the decrepit Don, and he found the experience quite disturbing. Visibly upset and irate in his protests, Norm was judged at risk by the jail’s medical staff, who worried about his blood pressure. They tried to convince Norm, whom they recognized as someone with the wherewithal to "pull some strings" through lawyers and the like, to do what he could to get himself "sprung." Norm insisted that he would "come out when his comrades did."

      At a Memorial for Norm last summer, his son Nick said that he hoped we would not be offended if he let it be known that the "starting point for me is the love between my father and my mother." It was not very surprising that someone raised by Norm Feltes would feel that way. His desire to contribute to working-class struggle and social revolution could find its expression in justified confrontation and could prompt painstaking analysis. At root, however, it was compassion, love, and a desire to elevate the human personality that shaped Norm and his life. That life points the way forward and, in OCAP, we will never forget him or lose sight of those things that he left us.

  Bryan D. Palmer (with notes from Al Birnie and Ralph Stanton)

IT IS MAY1927. Imagine yourself not quite seventeen years old. You have voyaged to Québec City from Belfast on the transatlantic Cunard liner, the SS Montcalm. Born poor and having spent a part of your youth living through the ravages of World War I, marginalized by your religious identification as a Methodist dissenter in a society torn asunder by the sectarian extremism of Orange Protestantism and militant Catholicism (meaning that you were usually being shot at from both sides), you were a person who did not quite fit in your homeland which, moreover, offered little in the way of steady wages and material security. Canada seemed a better prospect. And so you find yourself on the Québec City wharves, where the winter’s snow is still piled fifteen feet high. You have barely seen snow in Ireland. "What the hell kind of country is this? Where have I come to?" you ask yourself with trepidation. There is $20 in your pocket, but you have no idea of where to go or what to do, and not a person to turn to for help or support.

	Jack Scott 1910-2000

      This was Jack Scott’s introduction to Canada, and it was not an auspicious one. For two years and then some Jack worked in various casual employments, earning little more than his room and board. He became a loudmouth on the job, learning that it got you some respect from the boss. Eventually he was attracted to the Communist Party of Canada in the early 1930s, although, as he confessed, he could not have told you the difference between "communism and rheumatism." But he liked "the oddballs," the soapboxers who aroused the crowds with talk of revolution and rights. Moving to Toronto, Scott widened his circles of left involvement, rubbing shoulders with those who devoured theory, history, and criticism, appreciating the literary culture of revolutionary marxists, including the book collector, Robert S. Kenny. Soon he was educating himself as a marxist, attending Party schools, and, most importantly, organizing the unemployed and the unorganized. For Scott, the 1930s were an apprenticeship in revolutionary activism, and he was a Workers Unity League organizer whose territory encompassed the western Ontario centres of Sarnia, London, Brantford, Kitchener and a host of adjacent towns. He met the woman who would be his first wife, a Finnish radical whose anglicized name was Ann Walters, and was centrally involved in the Ontario On-to-Ottawa Trek, industrial organizing in Toronto, and a series of jobs that took their toll on his body: at the end of the decade Jack was a tough, but tapered, 114 pounds.

      His slight weight kept him out of the armed forces for a time when war broke out in 1939, but eventually, his persistence in volunteering recognized, he was accepted. During the war Scott distinguished himself by his bravery and was awarded the French Croix de Guerre, an honour the Communist Party celebrated publicly even though Jack’s volunteering early in the war effort had gone decidedly against the Party grain. Indeed, upon his return to Canada at war’s end Scott was finding the Party less and less to his liking. Unable to break from it politically, he escaped what he considered the suffocating atmosphere of the Party centre in Toronto, as well as personal difficulties associated with the breakdown of his shortlived marriage to Ann, by travelling west, and securing union work in Yellowknife and Trail. By the 1950s Jack was settled in Vancouver and remarried, his new wife Hilda having a daughter from a previous relationship. The political times were difficult, there being few openings for communist activity in the Cold War climate of post-1945 Canada, and Jack’s domestic circumstances were exacerbated by a prolonged illness suffered through by Hilda.

      With the upturn in radicalism associated with the 1960s, Jack shifted political gears, breaking from the Communist Party (he was actually expelled, his notification of termination dated 11 August 1964 and signed by Nigel Morgan), founding the Progressive Worker Movement, working with the Canada-China Friendship Association, and playing a forceful role in various labour struggles, the ongoing student radicalism that began to take specific organizational turns in the 1970s (in which Jack figured centrally on the Maoist trajectory), and the nationalist breakaway union mobilizations of bodies such as the Canadian Association of Industrial, Mechanical, and Allied Workers, founded in 1964.

      The 1960s and 1970s were perhaps Jack Scott’s highwater mark as a figure on the revolutionary left. Profiled in a Weekend Magazine article in 1973, Scott was described as "the most radical man in Canada." With the Progressive Worker Movement winding down, however, the 1970s saw Jack’s influence shift. He became increasingly prominent as a speaker and a writer, and it was in this decade that he produced his labour history. An influential co-authored essay in what was perhaps one of the best-known New Left publications of the time, Gary Teeple’s edited book, Capitalism and the National Question in Canada (1972), explored the issue of international unionism and class collaboration in Canada, a topic Scott would later extend to 1978 book length studies of the American Federation of Labor’s influence in both Latin America and Canada. His first two New Star books of 1974 and 1975, however, were probably his best known works, precisely because they seemed to chart new paths of intellectual and political possibility. Sweat and Struggle: Working Class Struggles in Canada (1974) introduced the then-subterranean history of labour rebellion in 19th-century Canada, while Plunderbund and Proletariat: A History of the IWW in British Columbia (1975) outlined a pivotal chapter in revolutionary organization on the west coast. Scott’s prodigious writing project of this period is made all the more noteworthy given his regular trips to China over the course of the decade (on one of which, in 1974, Hilda died, her ashes buried at Peking’s cemetary of the revolutionary martyrs).

      Jack Scott’s later years were relatively quiet. Throughout the 1980s he followed international events closely, taking a great interest early in the decade in Poland’s challenge to the Soviets, and he involved himself in protests such as the British Columbia Solidarity upheaval of 1983. Now a white-haired figure known to most groups and tendencies to the left of the New Democratic Party, he remained connected to the broad left through his continued working at the cooperative outlet, Spartacus Books, but he indulged non-political passions, such as an appreciation for soccer, more. He had no real "family" to speak of, and no "party" with which to affiliate, but a contingent of "comrades," many of whom he had educated in the politics of revolution, and many of whom were young women in the 1960s whom he treated in admirably-affectionate and non-sexist ways, remained his close and loving friends.

      Jack Scott outlived one of those bourgeois politicians whom he respected as a class enemy, Pierre Eliot Trudeau. The "nation," an entity increasingly constructed by the media, "mourned" Trudeau’s passing with the nostalgic grandeur of a bourgeoisie ashamed of its current class program, devoid as it is of ideas and aspirations beyond a mere looting of the gains workers and their allies have wrestled from capital and the state over the course of the last sixty years. This class impotence translates into an ever-more-transparent bourgeois project of retrenchment, a backward-driving "primitive accumulation" in which all that Canada’s ruling elite can offer is the cut-back and the take-back. Trudeau, at least, was made of more imaginative stuff, and for all that Scott reviled the best of Canada’s bourgeois leaders, he would have regarded the Liberal statesman of the 1960s and 1970s as the tragedy of bourgeois rule, rather than, like today’s Chretin, its farce. The Jack Scotts of Canada’s labour past need a society that will mourn their passing with a genuine appreciation of revolutionary continuity. When we have that kind of "nation," something that Jack lived his life to build will have been accomplished.