System Failure: The Breakdown of the Post-war Settlement and the Politics of Labour in Our Time (Notebook/Carnet‪)‬

IT IS DIFFICULT, in May 2004, to address a Canadian working-class and trade union audience and not begin with harsh words for what has recently happened in British Columbia. For the recent termination of the hospital workers' heroic struggle, which threatened a General Strike against the Campbell government's retrograde actions, is unacceptable. There was widespread support among west coast workers for militant action and a decisive stand, one that had been required and building for a number of years, but the labour bureaucracy, as is so repetitiously often the case, had no stomach for a fight. Union officials and the head of the BC Federation of Labour, who ended this battle in such an abrupt way and on terms that secured the working class so little when so much more could have been won, have dealt all of Canadian labour, including their own militant ranks, a severe blow, one all the more devastating because it comes from those who should be leading rather than capitulating. (1) This of course is not the usual assessment in the academic milieu from which I come. Most academics speak loudly of class struggle in their writings, especially if they are about the past, but excuse trade union leaders almost anything, retreating into rationalizations of how the ranks of workers' organizations are divided, unprepared for confrontations with capital and the state, and reluctant to sacrifice for a better society. I adhere to other views, and ones that can be located in the history of Canadian class struggle. When W.A. Pritchard addressed the jury in a 1919-1920 state trial, in which he and others involved in the Winnipeg General Strike were charged with seditious conspiracy, he articulated a sense of possibility concerning the Canadian working class and its relation to international developments and concerns: