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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Cy Gonick, A Very Red Life: the Story of Bill Walsh (St. John's: Canadian Committee on Labour History, 2001) |
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FOR 20TH CENTURY Canadian socialists, the crucial political question was how to organize the working class for collective action to both meet its immediate needs and reform or supersede the capitalist state. For Montréal-born Bill Walsh, the answer was a 34 year commitment to the Communist Party and a lifelong commitment to the union movement. A political activist and union militant, from his conversion to Marxism-Leninism while a factory worker in the Soviet Union in the early 1930's to his final career as an independent union consultant and labour arbitrator, Walsh submerged his life in organizations devoted to defending working-class interests and achieving socialism. |
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Cy Gonick's political biography of Bill Walsh provides a revealing account of an activist's life: his day-to-day engagement in many of the formative political and union struggles and events that took place in Ontario from the 1930's to the 1970's and the personal rewards as well as the frustrations involved in reconciling principles and beliefs with the constraints and demands of working within the Communist Party and unions. Returning to Canada in 1932, Walsh was convinced the lines were clearly drawn. The working class faced a deepening economic crisis with devastating rates of unemployment and state repression. Only the Communist Party appeared to be resolutely committed to organizing the working class, both unemployed and employed, militantly defending working-class interests, challenging state repression in the streets, and joining in the world-wide struggle for socialism; the promise of the future. |
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As a Communist Party organizer in the 1930's, he participated in activities to mobilize the working class to demand immediate reforms such as improved relief and non-contributory unemployment insurance, protest government inaction, elect Communist candidates, and combat both the rise of fascism in Europe and its Canadian exponents. Through the party he also became a union organizer, playing a leading role in organizing drives in the 1930's to form unions in the garment industry in Fenelon Falls and Hamilton, the rubber industry in Kitchener, and the auto industry in Windsor. For Bill Walsh each party activity, whether resisting evictions, organizing demonstrations or forming unions, was a step towards the inevitable triumph of socialism. Success depended upon unity and loyalty to the working-class movement and the Party, they were one and the same. Confident that he and his comrades "had their 'hands on the throttle of history'," Walsh "lived and breathed" the Party. (82) He accepted its leadership's role in defining party policy and party discipline. Disagreements with the party leadership over political strategies or the terms of a collective agreement to end a strike and moderating his political views to form alliances in union organizing drives were the inevitable price of participation in a worker's movement. |
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The 1939 Soviet-German non-aggression pact and the party leadership's reversal of its support for a war against fascism with the declaration that Canada was engaged in an imperialist war confounded Walsh. Characteristically, however, his first priority was to continue his union work and he did not openly question the party leadership. Similarly, when after internment and battlefield service in the Canadian Army he was unsuccessful in his attempts to raise concerns about party policy with Tim Buck and other party leaders, he chose to throw himself into union activities in Hamilton where he helped organize the 1946 strikes that laid the foundation for post-war collective bargaining in Canada. For the next twenty years he served as a United Electrical Workers representative in Hamilton, again subordinating his espousal of socialism to building the union and achieving gains through collective bargaining while resisting raids and purges of Communists from the labour movement. |
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When the 1956 Khrushchev revelations
rocked and divided the Communist Party, leading to a mass exodus
of members from the Party, Walsh could not envisage a viable political
alternative; he advocated reform rather than dissolution of the
Party. Once again he devoted his energy to union activities, including
preservation of the independence of Local 598 of the International
Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers of Sudbury, the target of
a Steelworkers raid in 1962. But, by the mid 1960's long-standing
conflicts with C.S. Jackson, president of the United Electrical
Workers (UE), culminated in a dispute over
an organizing drive. Walsh resigned in 1965 and embarked on a new
career as a union consultant specializing in contract negotiations.
In 1967 a strike in Hamilton involving both the Draftsmen Association,
which had hired Walsh as its negotiator and UE
precipitated a public attack on him by CS Jackson and a charge by
the local party committee that his conduct was "detrimental to the
Communist Party and the best interests of the working class." (235)
Walsh could not accept this personal betrayal and with a spirited
refutation of the charges resigned from the Party. Continuing his
work as a union consultant, he worked for Mine-Mill, the Canadian
Union of Postal Workers, and the Letter Carriers of Canada, ending
his lifetime of work as an advocate for labour as a union nominee
on arbitration boards. In 1969 he joined the NDP, attracted by the
Waffle Movement's attempt to revive socialist principles, serving
on the Ontario Waffle steering committee and working in its Labour
Caucus. |
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Cy Gonick's political biography of Bill Walsh is a revealing chronicle of a lifetime of unswerving devotion to the working-class movement and socialism. Together with recent scholarly work on the diversity and scope of the day-to-day political activities of Communist Party members, it contributes to a more balanced understanding of the party's relationship to the working class, its role in political mobilization and the formation of unions. The history of the party is richer and more complex than the machinations of a party leadership following the twists and turns of Comintern doctrine or the Soviet Union's foreign policy. It also provides an on-the-ground participant's perspective on the formation of the Canadian union movement; the challenges of organizing drives and negotiating first collective agreements, and the CCF's role in purging Communists from leadership positions in unions and the Canadian Labour Congress, whatever the cost to the union movement. Above all, it is a testament to a socialist's enduring commitment to improve workers' lives. |
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Arthur Ross
Ryerson University
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