By Paul Kellogg
After Seattle, everything has changed. Just ten years ago, we were told that "capitalism had triumphed," with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now papers as right-wing as the National Post are calling Seattle signs of a rage against capitalism.
The century is ending as it began. In the early years of the 1900s, massive workers' struggles exploded against capitalism. Seattle was again the place for one of these strikes, a 10 day general strike in February of 1919. Winnipeg was the site of another, a much longer general strike in May of 1919. These events contain many lessons for activists today.
When the twentieth century began, there was hope everywhere that it marked the beginning of a new era of peace, prosperity and progress.
But just a few years into that century, these hopes were dashed. An economic slump was followed by the terrible slaughter of World War One.
It was called the war to end wars.
What a lie this proved to be. Millions more people have died in wars this century, than ever before in human history.
But as the so-called "Great War" drew to an end, millions of workers and peasants began to rebel against a system of war and exploitation.
Russian workers rose up, overthrew the hated Czar and ended the war on the eastern front in 1917.
German workers rose up the next year, overthrew the Kaiser, and ended the war on the western front in 1918.
These revolutions inspired workers and the poor everywhere, including in North America.
It was to lead to the biggest explosion of working class militancy and radicalization ever seen in either the United States or Canada.
Seattle was the first flash point for the anger that had been building up during the war.
America entered the war late, in 1917. But its workers were asked to make enormous sacrifices.
In just over a year, four million men were sent into the army, and 100,000 were killed, almost twice the number killed in Vietnam.
The workers at home had to endure a wage freeze while prices skyrocketed.
The bitterness from war and privation exploded in Seattle in early 1919.
On January 21, 1919, 25,500 shipyard workers, organized in the Metal Trades Council, walked off the job seeking to protect the $1 an hour made by its skilled workers.
The conservative union leaders in the rest of the city would have done nothing about this strike, left to themselves.
But local after local, throughout the city, held membership meetings which voted overwhelmingly to strike in sympathy with the Metal Trades Council.
So on February 6, the strike became a general strike -- 60,000 workers on strike against capitalism.
If the union leaders could not prevent the strike, they succeeded in paralyzing it. They did nothing to build and generalize the struggle.
While they did nothing, the employers used the press to whip up a vicious red-baiting campaign, they pressured the government to send in the troops, and succeeded after ten days, in forcing the workers back to work.
But even though it was defeated, the strike electrified millions across the country.
It led off a massive strike wave which saw strikes shut down the steel, coal and meatpacking industries.
This labour upsurge pushed millions to the left.
It was north of Seattle, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, that an even bigger confrontation between labour and capital took place a few months later.
The general strike that shook Winnipeg in May and June of 1919, like in Seattle, began over very modest issues.
On Thursday May 15 1919, trade unions in Winnipeg began to walk out in a show of support for their co-workers in the building and metal trades.
The Metal Trades Council had struck May 2 for shorter hours (the nine-hour day!), a wage increase and union recognition.
The Building Trades Council had struck a day earlier over similar issues.
The economic demands were modest enough in a situation where, since before the war in 1914, wages had gone up 18 per cent, while prices had skyrocketed by 80 per cent.
But for the employers, economic issues were not the key. This was the first attempt by both the Building and Metal Trades Councils to coordinate bargaining for building and metal trades workers industry-wide.
Industry-wide bargaining gives the workers much greater power than bargaining shop by shop, plant by plant. It represented the same kind of drive for solidarity that was to re-emerge in the great industrial unionizing drives of the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) in the 1930s and 1940s.
The Winnipeg bosses wanted to stop industry-wide bargaining before it got started, so they refused even to negotiate with the two councils.
So the two trades struck, and on May 15, all 12,000 unionized workers in Winnipeg went on a sympathy general strike in their support.
Within a few days, they were joined by 15,000 wage-workers in Winnipeg who weren't in unions. Within days, 35,000 were on strike, virtually every working person in the city who, with their families, represented the vast majority of Winnipeg's 170,000 people.
"It wasn't just the trade unionists who threw down their tools and walked off the job," said Fred Tipping, socialist and one of the strike leaders.
"It was workers everywhere ... There was no strike pay for anyone, they had nothing to live on," and still they went on strike.
The scale of the strike cannot be explained by simple economics. Like in Seattle, this strike had the character of a revolt against capitalism. It was a sign of the massive radicalization sweeping North America and the world.
Even the police by a vote of 149 to 11, joined the strike!
But with that vote began a new dimension of the strike.
Workers' control
The police voted to go on strike, but stayed on the job at the request of the newly constituted Strike Committee.
This committee was composed of the executive of the Winnipeg Trades and Labor Council (TLC), five rank and file members of the council, and three delegates from each and every union in the city. As the strike progressed, it began to function more and more like the city's government.
At the request of the Strike Committee: waterworks employees went back to work to maintain sufficient pressure for domestic use; staff was supplied to hospitals; and after they met with the frightened (and temporarily powerless) members of the old City Council, milk and bread delivery carts made their rounds through the city with large signs on their doors -- BY AUTHORITY OF THE STRIKE COMMITTEE.
The Women's Labor League set up a kitchen financed by donations and collections taken at mass meetings to feed women strikers free and supply them with funds for room and rent.
Anyone without funds and with a ticket from the Strike Relief Committee was given free meals. Between 1,200 and 1,500 meals were served daily.
By authority of the Strike Committee, a daily paper, The Western Labor News was started up. Without the authority of the Strike Committee, nothing moved in Winnipeg.
In these events is one of the most significant lessons of the strike.
The working class downed tools and closed down the city of Winnipeg in defiance of their employers and the law.
And then, through their own committees, their own organizations, began to open the city up again.
For over a month, the city of Winnipeg was effectively under workers' control.
The employers counter-attacked by organizing "the Citizens' Committee of 1,000". It was comprised of the staunch middle class and the rich -- members of the Board of Trade, the Manufacturers' Association and the Bar Association.
The Committee of 1,000 represented Winnipeg's social, economic and political elite.
Their first tactic was to try and divide the ranks of the strikers. They called a meeting of war veterans (who looked like likely allies -- two months previously they had rioted and raided the Socialist Party headquarters in the city).
The Citizens' Committee tried to get the veterans to oppose the "alien, Bolshevik" strike.
Instead, the veterans used the meeting to declare their support for the strike and elect delegates to the Strike Committee.
What a magnificent moment -- soldiers in solidarity with workers' power.
Repression from the state
The employers failed at dividing the workers. But they succeeded in using every level of government to repress the strikers.
First the municipal government stepped in.
The Police Commission instructed the police to sign a pledge that they would not join any sympathetic strike or affiliate to any labour body.
None signed, all were fired.
Next the federal government stepped in.
Throughout 1918 the right of public employees to strike had been a hotly-debated issue.
Senator Gideon D. Robertson, acting on the authority of Tory Arthur Meighen (then Minister of Justice, soon to be Prime Minister), called a meeting of all postal employees, all of whom were on strike.
The postal workers boycotted the meeting. Robertson handed them an ultimatum to return to work on May 26, to never again take part in a strike, to sever all connections with the TLC -- or lose their jobs, their pensions and their right to ever again work on a government job. Only 16 returned to work.
A similar ultimatum was handed to women strikers at the Telephone Exchange with similar results.
Once the strike was defeated the government held true to its word -- 403 postal workers, 119 telephone workers and 53 firemen were fired.
Finally, the government resorted to force.
The fired municipal police were replaced by 2,000 vigilantes.
These armed scabs were reinforced by federal mounted police on June 6.
That same day, an amendment was passed to the Immigration Act by the government in Ottawa.
The amendment made it possible for Canadians not born in Canada to be arrested on charges of sedition, tried in secret without begin present at the enquiry and, without access to a regular court, trail by jury or appeal to any court or judge, be deported to the land of their birth.
The amendment (directed at the strike leaders, some of whom were British immigrants) was given the necessary three readings and given the Governor General's assent in ... 45 minutes!
In the face of a militant working class, the bureaucracy can move like greased lightning!
The incredible pressure from all levels of government began to take its toll.
On June 16, ten immigrant leaders of the strike were arrested.
June 21, 10,000 veterans massed to stage a silent, peaceful parade in support of the strike.
Armed with clubs, the mounted police charged the demonstrators, and were met by a hail of stones.
They charged again, guns blazing. One demonstrator was killed, and 30 were injured.
The 2,000 "special police", armed with clubs and baseball bats, finished the job.
The Western Labor News was banned, and on June 25, the Strike Committee called off the strike. One week later, it petered to an end.
The general strikes in both Seattle and Winnipeg showed clearly the massive anger against capitalism, and the need for a new political party to organize that anger.
This is clearest in the case of the Winnipeg strike.
Look at the anger.
In Toronto, a general strike of 15,000 workers broke out on May 30, in sympathy with the Winnipeg strike.
Between June 3 and July 3, 60,000 workers in Vancouver strike in sympathy.
Other general strikes took place in Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Regina, Prince Albert, Brandon, Port Arthur, Fort William and some smaller towns.
On May 28, a mass meeting was held at Maisonneuve market in the East End of Montreal.
A motion of solidarity with Winnipeg was put to the meeting. According to a newspaper account at the time:
"The motion was first put in French and then in English. When finally put to the meeting, it was passed without a dissenting voice and accompanied by deafening cheers."
But there was nothing to organize this magnificent sentiment for solidarity.
The employers were massively centralized, using the press, media, governments at all levels, and the violence of the police.
Our side had only the union machine. And the union leaders, like their counterparts today, were paralyzed in the face of a massive confrontation between the workers and the employers.
The best militants in both Seattle and Winnipeg and across North America, learned from this experience, and began the process of building revolutionary socialist parties.
Throughout the 1920s, until they were derailed by the rise of Stalin in Russia, these communist parties pulled together thousands of militants, fighting on the day to day issues of workers, but looking ahead to the necessary confrontation with the capitalist system as a whole.
We need to pick up the task which they began, and forge revolutionary socialist parties in both Canada and the United States.