Labour at the Lakehead: Ethnicity, Socialism, and Politics, 1900-35 by Michel S. Beaulieu (review)

Michel Beaulieu’s main achievement with Labour at the Lakehead: Ethnicity, Socialism, and Politics, 1900-35 is to bring a neglected region into the history of pre-World War II Canadian socialism, communism, and industrial unionism. This history of the left at the Lakehead, “located at the geographic centre of Canada” (2), blurs the distinction that historians have often made between the Western and eastern-Canadian labour movements. Beaulieu examines the interactions between numerous ideologically and ethnically distinct “socialist” groups (a somewhat inappropriate label since the second half of the book focuses on communism and syndicalism) dedicated to the “transformation of society into one that was more equitable for the working masses” (62). He argues that ethnicity simultaneously “strengthened and weakened the left.” It allowed for the diffusion of left-wing ideas beyond “their working class bases,” but could also be a fragmenting force, “as each ethnic group . . . was likely to develop its own distinctive vocabulary of socialism” (7). Ethnic divisions at the Lakehead helped prevent the emergence of a revolutionary working-class party with mass support, but Beaulieu is nevertheless impressed by the persistence and dynamism of the left in this time and place.

Organized chronologically, this study follows attempts by the Socialist Party of Canada, Social Democratic Party of Canada, One Big Union (OBU), Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and Communist Party of Canada (CPC) to establish themselves in the vanguard of left politics at the Lakehead. The first part of the book focuses on early socialist organizing prior to World War I and introduces the myriad personalities and ideologies vying for the support of the unskilled workers of the coal docks and lumber camps in and around this growing east-west grain terminus. Complicating the story at the Lakehead were layers of conflict within and among the city’s main ethnic groups that often corresponded to ideological differences. The fracturing of the left along ethnic lines often resulted in electoral defeat for socialist and Independent Labour Party candidates at the hands of the traditional parties. Still, in spite of frequent setbacks, the two decades before World War I were notable for an increase in union membership and in involvement by non-English-speaking workers in left politics at the Lakehead.

In spite of the energy of the socialist movement at the Lakehead, the confluence of state repression during and after World War I and the inspiring events in Russia in 1917, which politicized many Finns, failed to produce anything like the revolt witnessed in Winnipeg (and, to lesser degrees elsewhere) in 1919. Beaulieu reminds us that this failure to follow in the steps of the Winnipeg strikers did not reflect a deradicalization of Lakehead workers, but instead the failure of the OBU and IWW to agree on a path toward a tolerable society for workers. Following the collapse of the OBU, the IWW would spend the next decade arguing the same question with the ascendant CPC, which, unlike the OBU, was able to offer a coherent theory and praxis to rival the IWW’s brand of pragmatic, revolutionary syndicalism.

Beaulieu provides many examples of solidarity between the CPC and IWW between 1925 and 1935, especially in the lumber camps, where communists and syndicalists fought a number of strikes together. But success in the larger task of building a workers’ party based on the unskilled, unorganized, and unemployed appears to have been largely contingent on directives from Moscow. Many Finns simultaneously belonged to or supported both the CPC and IWW, and Lenin’s early insistence that communists co-operate with non-communist trade unions (even when, as at the Lakehead, those unions were syndicalist!) appealed to many in the Finnish community. However, the Comintern’s subsequent turn toward a policy of Bolshevization alienated many Finns and Ukrainians whose semi-autonomous language associations provided the bulk of CPC members at the Lakehead and only served to strengthen...