Communist Women in Canada: Revolutionary Bios

1927: left to right: F Custance, E Lawrence, B Buhay & A Buller

Marianne Breton Fontaine & Drew Garvie

In 1917, International Women’s Day in Russia helped to launch the Russian Revolution, which ended up inspiring working people around the world, including many working women in Canada.

The Communist Party of Canada (CPC) was founded in 1921 in Canada, in a barn in Guelph, Ontario under conditions of illegality. The Young Communist League of Canada was founded soon after in 1923. In this article Rebel Youth takes a look at some of the women that led the major struggles of their day and continue to inspire the struggle for full gender equality and for socialism.

80 years since the "On to Ottawa Trek"

Special to Rebel Youth

This spring and summer marked the 80th anniversary of the On to Ottawa Trek. Rebel Youth celebrates this militant struggle and ongoing struggles for work and wages. 80 years later capitalist crisis has again been used by a Tory government to attack the working class. Youth unemployment is reaching almost 20% in several major Canadian cities, and the majority of workers (a larger majority for youth and women) are not covered by Employment Insurance. With this in mind, we look back to past victories for inspiration today!

Salute to the YCL-LJC Convention

People's Voice Editorial
Issue: May 16-31, 2014

Presidium at 26th Convention of YCL-LJC

The May 24‑25 weekend will see a unique gathering in Toronto - the 26th Central Convention of the Young Communist League/Ligue de la jeunesses communiste du Canada. The editorial Board of People's Voice sends warmest greetings to YCL/LJC delegates from across Canada, who represent the revolutionary potential of youth to challenge the domination of big capital.

            The Young Communist League has never had an easy path in Canada. Yet the organization has played a critical, even leading role in many historic struggles. During the Thirties, YCLers were prominent in the On to Ottawa Trek and the Mackenzie‑Papineau Battalion which fought fascism in Spain. After WW2, Young Communists helped to organize workers in basic industries across the country, and to resist the integration of Canada into US imperialism's war machine. They played important roles in solidarity campaigns with the people of Vietnam, Cuba, southern Africa, Nicaragua and Palestine. YCL members were key activists in the progressive student movement, from the formation of the Canadian Federation of Students to the anti-tuition uprising of 2012 in Quebec. The YCL takes a principled stand against racism, sexism, homophobia, big nation chauvinism and other divisive ruling class ideologies.

The Soviet experience with socialism

Excerpt from Chapter Seven, "Building Socialism" from Canada's future is socialism, the Programme of the Communist Party of Canada

It is particularly important to assess the experiences and draw certain lessons from the development of socialism in the first workers’ state – the Soviet Union – and to understand why socialism was overturned, and capitalism restored, after more than seventy years. The question demands the most searching thought and discussion, for two reasons.

On the one hand, understanding both the great achievements of the Soviet people and the external and internal causes responsible for their grave setback can help Canadians in building socialism while avoiding the repetition of what went wrong there.

Secondly, the defeat of socialism in the USSR is a powerful ideological weapon in the hands of monopoly capitalism, which it uses in order to convince workers and progressive-minded people that socialism does not work. By negating socialism as the revolutionary alternative to capitalism, big business seeks to discourage the workers and weaken their class struggle, and instead lead them to find an accommodation with the prevailing capitalist order.

We reject the bourgeois contention that socialism is a failure, that it is an inherently inferior and unworkable alternative to capitalism. Socialism was weakened and ultimately crushed in the USSR (and in other former socialist countries) as a result of a complex combination of interrelated internal and external circumstances and contradictions which culminated in its defeat and the temporary victory of counterrevolution.

The October 1917 Socialist Revolution in Russia marked a genuine new dawn in human social development. For the first time in history, workers set out to build a new society free from exploitation and oppression. The Soviet Union scored many great social achievements, overcoming unemployment, illiteracy, starvation, homelessness, and deep alienation. Socialism in the Soviet Union transformed an economically and culturally “backward” country to one of the world’s leading powers, and made great advances in culture and science.

These achievements were all the more remarkable, considering the relentless imperialist pressures against the USSR throughout its history. In its unflagging efforts to crush socialism, imperialist powers twice undertook direct military invasions (in the first of which Canada participated). They applied harsh economic sanctions, and precipitated an immensely expensive and dangerous nuclear arms race to bleed the USSR white, while sustaining a prolonged ideological and propaganda war, and resorting to outright subversion and sabotage.

Internationally, the Soviet Union played the decisive role in the defeat of European fascism in World War II, championed the cause of decolonization, supported liberation movements throughout the Third World, and provided vital assistance to the newly emergent states. Its peace policy also restricted – though it could not entirely suppress – imperialism’s tendency to military aggression.
Socialism also benefited the working class in the advanced capitalist countries, greatly strengthening the pressure on the ruling classes to grant substantial concessions to working people in the form of labour rights, the forty-hour work week, unemployment insurance, women’s rights, health care, public education, and pensions.

The internal causes of the crisis and defeat of socialism in the Soviet Union were not rooted in the intrinsic nature of socialism, but rather involved distortions and outright departures from socialist theory and practice. They arose, in part, from the extremely difficult conditions under which socialism was built.

Pre-revolutionary Russia was a sprawling, but economically under-developed country. It had a massive peasant population, but a relatively small working class. Poverty and illiteracy were rampant. The First World War, and Civil War that followed, worsened the conditions which confronted the young Soviet republic. However, owing to the unslacking hostility of imperialism – not least, from Nazi Germany, which invaded in 1941 – it was necessary to bring about modern industrialization at a stupendous pace.

In large measure, the adverse objective conditions forced the Soviet government to accelerate the socialist transformation of economic and social life, rapidly jumping over many transition stages in building socialism which would have made for a much more balanced process of development. One of the serious errors was the failure to retain the independent character of Soviet trade unions as the self-defence organizations of Soviet workers.

In these conditions, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had to assume the task of comprehensively representing the leading role of the working class. The Soviet working class itself was battered and massively decimated by the two brutally destructive wars fought on Soviet soil, with the places of the fallen and the administratively promoted being taken by inexperienced new workers recruited from the countryside.

This partly explains, but does not justify, the way that the operations of the Party increasingly merged with the functions of the state, in particular with the administrative-bureaucratic apparatus which necessarily arose to centralize and tightly control the country’s scarce and depleted resources. Nor do these difficult conditions justify the serious violations of socialist legality, purges, and serious crimes against innocent people.

Important economic successes were achieved with central economic planning for several decades. It was not planning as such, but rather stifling rigidities and a myriad of other distortions in the principles of socialist construction, combined with external imperialist pressures, that undermined the ability of socialist societies to master the scientific and technological revolution.

As a result, the USSR and other socialist countries fell dangerously behind the developed capitalist countries in labour productivity and the material standard of living. This had destabilizing consequences.

The Party itself became ever more integrated into the administration of the state. The functions of the elected Soviets (people’s governing councils) became increasingly formal in character. Genuine popular governance with open criticism gave way to bureaucracy and commandism.

Over time, the political connection between the Party and the working class and people as a whole suffered. Inner-party democracy was also eroded, too often replaced by careerism and opportunism inside the Party.

Great strides were made in advancing the conditions of Soviet women, especially on the job. But sexist limits to the emancipation of women were allowed to pass unchallenged.

All these negative developments reflected a degeneration of the central role of socialist democracy in the construction of a workers’ state, and stunted the development of the political role of the working class and its allies in leading this transformation and the building of a new socialist society.

Indeed, the violation of socialist democracy and legality was a major factor in eroding the people’s participation in the government and in the state, and led to widespread cynicism and social alienation.

There was also a dogmatic ossification of theory which increasingly sapped the Party’s dynamism and prevented a real analysis of concrete conditions and problems in the building of socialism.

Serious theoretical errors resulted – in estimating the world situation, in underestimating the resilience of capitalism, in proclaiming the irreversibility of socialist advances and relying on a military balance of forces between socialism and capitalism, as well as errors and insensitivity.

For instance, the national question was proclaimed to have been fully “solved,” and socialism was all but declared to have eliminated the need for any ecological concern. The shutdown of public and inner-party debate on such questions adversely affected the foreign and domestic policies that flowed from these mistakes.

The most costly result of the stagnation of Marxist-Leninist theory was the weakening of the Party itself, including its ability to identify and combat the rise of bourgeois, reformist and openly counter-revolutionary ideology within and beyond its own ranks.

In the presence of these internal and external factors, opportunist and counter-revolutionary forces gained the upper hand within the leadership of the Party, and finally brought about the collapse of the Soviet system and with it the other socialist states of Europe. Since the collapse of socialism, working people in these former socialist countries face massive privatization and the theft of social property, mass unemployment and poverty, the drastic erosion of education, health care and other social rights, the rise of organized crime and corruption, and the rise of ethnic and racial hatred.

De-bunking the myth of the good old days - part 2

St Catharines auto plant workers, 1944

by Ryan Sparrow

This article is part two of a two-part series.

Racialised and gendered work is a common feature of the development of capitalism. The need for a super-exploitable vulnerable group of workers is beneficial to the big business community as it helps bring about a much lower floor of wages and working conditions.

In the post-war era, the overt racism and overt gender discrimination of workers was still around, although less prevalent.  Institutionalized racism and sexism, however, was still very widely practised.  Racialised and gendered labour therefore represented a super-exploited strata of the working class in the post-war era. This article continues from the historic framework of analysis and presents some examples.


Racism in Auto

Racialized male workers had a variety of differing experience which allowed for their discrimination in the labour market.  For example, in the auto industry of southern Ontario black male workers were segregated into certain jobs. The policy, when it came to hiring black workers, varied from employer to employer.

Chrysler, for instance, entirely prohibited black male workers from working on their assembly lines until they were forced to change their policies with the Ontario Fair Employment Practices Act in 1951. By 1953, a Federal Fair Employment Practices Act had also (officially) been put into effect.

Other auto manufacturers like Ford and McKinnon Industries were more accepting of black workers. But these workers faced other barriers within these companies, like being segregated into specific occupations based on racial stereotypes.

Genetic resistance to heat

According to sociologist Pamela Sugiman, foundry work was one of the racialised occupations since employers stereotyped black men as“…strong, robust, and muscular worker[s]…” who were more suitable for the job, while some even claimed that “…coloured men, in particular, could endure these excesses because of a genetic predisposition to withstand heat”.

Another racialised occupation in the plants was janitorial work as firms tended to employ black males for this line of work. It is important to note that while there was nothing formal about the segregation of employment for racialised workers in the Ontario auto industry, it was a widespread practice.

Aboriginal workers

The experiences of Aboriginal male workers confirm a pattern of racialised segregation in the labour market, where the shift from rural life in the prairies to wage labour is marked by both mismanagement and intentional exploitation.

Historian Joan Sangster for example explains that the “Fordist” economic arrangement completely excluded Aboriginal and Métis populations in the northern prairies and was a “… class accommodation that marginalized many working people, often on the basis of gender and race.”

The government intentionally created racialised labour segregation on behalf of private interests with acts of coercion like the “cessation of welfare payments as a means of forcing families to accept sugar-beet work”, Sangster writes.

Lower pay, bad jobs

Instead of the employers offering wages and working conditions to attract workers, the state intervened to provide a very precarious workforce for the growers. Further, the economic data points to systemic racism where  “…Metis and Indian households always earned less than white ones in similar geographical areas”.

Aboriginal communities had very unstable employment, according Jean Lagasse’s interviews of native peoples in the 1950s, holding many different jobs with the changing of the seasons. In the post war period, Aboriginal and racialised male workers were typically stuck in the lower rungs of the labour market, the secondary labour market and some in the subordinate primary market jobs.

Women workers and racism

Historically, the dominant patriarchal view of women was that they should be confined to domestic work, tied to a man with the state and employers encouraging such an arrangement. At the same time, capitalism has regularly relied on women's labour not just to reproduce and maintain workers but also in the working class. The trade union movement historically fought for a family/breadwinner wage; therefore even in the labour movement, women’s wages were seen as a secondary income.

Women from racialized communities had it hardest. There was not a single black woman employed in all of the 50 post-war United Auto Worker (UAW) organized plants in Windsor. The segregated labour markets also created segregated communities, with the newly formed suburbs housing a predominately non-racialised, white middle class community, while the city housed a more racialised workforce.

Maggie Holmes, a domestic worker describes how all the white males travel to the city during the morning and came back to the suburbs during the evening, while she and many other racialised domestic workers were going the opposite direction towards the cities. Their jobs were tough, often leading to aliments like arthritis.

Summary

While there was representation of white Anglo-male workers in all three labour markets, the experiences of racialised workers and women workers in the post-war era confirm segregated labour markets existed in Canada.

White women and racialised workers rarely went beyond the subordinate primary market.  Racialised women had faced the most discrimination in the labour market with very few examples of them advancing out of the secondary market for labour.

Ultimately, the configuration of the labour market in the post-war era provides an revealing insight into systemic racism and sexism today.

This article has been edited.

Bibliography

Acker, J,(1990). “Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations,”
                Gender & Society, 4, 2,139-158.

Edwards, E. (1979). Labour Re-Divided Part 1: Segmented Labor Markets. Contested Terrain: The              Transformation of the Workplace in the Twenthieth Century. Basic Books: New York.

Jacoby, S. M. (1984). The Development of Internal Labour Markets in American Manufacturing Firms. Internal Labour  Markets. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. 23-69.

Sangster, J. (2010). “Aboriginal Women and Work in Prairie Communities.  Transforming Labour: Women and Work in Post-War Canada. University  of Toronto Press: Toronto. 199-23

Sugiman, P. (2001). Privilege and Oppression: The Configuration of Race, Gender, and Class in Southern                Ontario Auto Plants, 1939 to 1949. Labour/Le Travail . Retrieved from         http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/llt/47/04sugima.html

Turkel, S. (2009). Studs Turkel’s Working: A Graphic Adaption. New York, New York: The New Press.

De-bunking the myth of the good old days: sexism, racism and the working class in Canada after WWII

The historic 1945 Ford Strike in Windsor

Special to Rebel Youth

This article is part one of a two-part series.

Racialised and gendered work is a common feature of the development of capitalism. The need for a super-exploitable vulnerable group of workers is beneficial to the big business community as it helps bring about a much lower floor of wages and working conditions.

In the post-war era, the overt racism and overt gender discrimination of workers was still around, although less prevalent.  Institutionalized racism and sexism, however, was still very widely practised.  Racialised and gendered labour therefore represented a super-exploited strata of the working class in the post-war era.

The Drive System

The history of discrimination of the working class in the Canadian "labour market" comes about from its very beginning. There were "preferred" labourers, and the male Anglo-white labour was given a privilege position within the industrial framework.  While the Anglo-white male labourer was indeed heavily exploited, the exploitation of racialised and female labourers was even greater.

At the turn of the century, the primary management method by which employers managed to increase productivity was the drive system. The drive system was used to increase the worker’s effort at the job by “…close supervision, abuse, profanity and threats” and hold down the cost of labour.

Toss an apple

During this period of time, the foreman was the supreme ruler on the shop floor, hiring was, at times, arbitrary – some employers tossing an apple to a crowd of workers and whoever caught it would work. At other times, hiring was rather nepotistic -- ie. the friends and family of employees being unfairly favoured. Many workers were hired for jobs based on ethnic stereotypes.

Due to the large amount of surplus labour supply, workers who the foreman found unsatisfactory or did not like could be removed with impunity. The foreman typically had the power to set wages too, so there could be many different wages for workers doing the exact same job.

HR is born

Eventually, as a response to the class struggle and growing pressure from the labour movement in Canada and internationally (including the gains by working people in USSR and socialist countries), as well as tighter labour markets, the capitalists were forced to replace this system with somewhat more equitable forms of management.

Human resource departments became more common and formal rules were established for firms as a way to retain employees. This process was not uniform, however.  Labour historians identify three distinct labour markets that emerged in the post war era. The three types of markets were not equally accessible for gendered and racialised workers.

Three categories of workplaces

The "secondary labour market" was the lowest. Comprised of small manufacturing, service, retail sales, and temporary office work, workers in the secondary labour market had very little control over the labour processes.  The secondary labour market jobs were also the lowest paid, the least secure, with very little union coverage and almost no seniority provisions.

Above the secondary was the "subordinate primary market." The jobs in subordinate primary market are more stable, have seniority, are more likely to be unionized, and have relatively higher wages. Work in the subordinate primary market includes jobs with major manufacturers, secretary jobs, and assembly line work.

The "independent primary market" employed workers in professional fields, like skilled trades, teachers, lawyers, consultants and technicians.  Independent primary labour allowed for even higher wages, benefits, and transferable skills making their working lives much more stable since they can transfer easily to other firms.

This article has been edited from the original essay. A full biography is presented in part two.