Raising the Workers' Flag: The Workers' Unity League of Canada, 1930-1936 by Stephen L. Endicott (review)

The Workers' Unity League (WUL) occupies a storied place in Canadian labour history. In the bleak early years of the Great Depression, as jobs vanished, wages sank, and unions stood transfixed, "a small, but feisty organization" (ix) exploded onto industrial Canada and, by force of sheer political will, it seems, rallied an array of workers in heroic battle against some of the most recalcitrant employers in the country. Tales of these conflicts, particularly those in small centres such as Bienfait, Flin Flon, and Stratford, or in the woods of Vancouver Island or the mining communities of the Crowsnest Pass, are staples of labour history in this country and provide classic vignettes of class struggle at its rawest. The On-to-Ottawa Trek, the culmination of WUL organizing in the relief camps, represents in many a Canadian history survey the denouement of a narrative of social tensions stretched to the breaking point at mid-decade. Whatever one thinks of the wisdom of the WUL's actions, and historians' views are varied, the organization is credited with reigniting working-class resistance and with training a new generation of labour and political activists. Raising the Workers' Flag, Stephen L. Endicott's engaging and well-researched history of the WUL skilfully conveys the breadth and the intensity of the movement through its short history.

This is, though, a story with many challenges. The WUL was spawned and directed by the Communist Party of Canada and tied to the international Communist movement by its connection to the Red International of Labour Unions (RILU) based in Moscow. This opens up a large number of debates about the nature of Communism in the early 1930s, which Endicott both addresses and, in some important ways, evades. The construction of "revolutionary" dual unions was part of the Communist International's "third period" turn away from collaborating with other working-class forces and raises questions about the rationales for such a reorientation, the ways in which such decisions were made, and the efficacy of what even supporters of the turn would later acknowledge to be marked by sectarianism. While Endicott speaks to such debates, he does so in ways that are not always satisfying. By focusing strictly on the short period of the WUL's existence, he does not fully explore the wrenching twists in Communist policy and the expulsions of those who objected. The sectarianism implicit in the policy is, in Endicott's telling, reducible to inexperience or to personalities, particularly Lenin school wunderkind Steward Smith, whose heavy hand with comrades and his ready denunciation of working-class opponents as "social fascists" threatened to wreak "havoc" (29) in the party and beyond. Less clearly explained are the dynamics of a movement in which Smith would have so much traction. Still, Endicott's explanations of the assumptions and characteristics of debates in the party and the WUL are interesting and significant.

Endicott sees the WUL experience as a moment in which the Communists had a substantial impact. His identification with the movement blunts two key questions. The first is about democracy. He demonstrates that the WUL encouraged the broadest participation and discussion within its affiliated unions over a range of issues, although it is difficult to square this with a feeling that important decisions were already made within the WUL leadership. In the second, he decries sectarianism, yet he consistently dichotomizes the relationship between the party (the reservoir of "revolutionary" ideas) and an ill-defined and monolithic "social democratic" mainstream labour and reform movement. In fact, the Depression provoked a string of responses to capitalism that were often reflected in a growing radicalism in some established unions and in the labour parties that were regrouping into the new Co-operative Commonwealth Confederation. The collective dismissal of non-Communists did not serve the party very well in the 1930s and is not helpful to historians today.

Endicott is not entirely unaware of this...