"Within sound of the drum" : currents of anti-militarism in the British Columbia working class in the 1930s
Date
1991
Authors
Frogner, Raymond
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Abstract
The decade of the 1930s was a period of considerable social upheaval. In the industrialized western world, the structural weaknesses of international monopoly capitalism were revealed by the collapse of interrelated markets and financial reserves. A consequence of this collapse was the renewed radicalism and militancy of the international working class. Similarly, in BC the Depression had a hot-house effect on working-class consciousness and fostered a minor renaissance in working-class organizations and cultural activities. Working-class activists voiced a disparate collection of principles of dissent. One of the most powerful was the principle of anti-militarism.
The anti-militarism working-class activists expressed was an essentially inchoate set of ideas. It grew from what might appear to be an amalgam of disparate experiences in 1930s, BC. The provincial and federal governments constructed an effective web of reaction in the face of working-class dissent. Relief camps, parsimonious relief and purposeless, make-work projects formed a structure of social control. Sedition and immigration law combined with militia to forcefully silence dissent. Finally the state supplied political and economic stirrups for the reactionary right to mount a private vigilante campaign against left-wing dissent. Many working-class activists identified this as incipient fascism. These statist reactionary elements were rooted in the capitalist economic system. When working-class organizations voiced critiques of the economic system they experienced this reactionary complex. They described this experience with the language of anti-militarism.
Though working-class anti-militarism was a product of the domestic material experiences of the working class, a parallel current of dissent was voiced by a collection of radicalized liberal pacifists. Thomas Socknat has identified the social origins of this pacifism. Like working-class anti-militarism, Socknat traces the taproots of this growing socialist/pacifist alignment of the 1920s and 1930s to the experience of the First World War. There were similarities in that radical pacifism called for social justice and a redistribution of wealth to perpetuate peace, but working-class anti-militarism had a materialist foundation unlike radical pacifism. This pacifism, though founded on a critique of the political economy, lacked a well defined activist agenda. This was obvious by the mid-1930s when state confrontation was a necessary part of radical dissent.
The differences between the two groups have not been examined. This thesis traces the social origins of antimilitarism in the material experiences of the 1930s working class. With the origins identified, one can look at certain events and working-class organizations with a fresh perspective. Until now historians have described the League Against War and Fascism and to a lesser extent the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion as merely groups of enlightened workers joining under the auspices of the Communist International. I maintain this is a caricature of the workers involved in these groups. Only when one examines the discrete experience of the BC working class in the Depression can one understand why, for example, Vancouver supplied more volunteers per capita to the Spanish Civil War than any occidental city. And only then can one appreciate the radical potential expressed in these currents of anti-militarism. Instead of unity on the principles of peace and antimilitarism, the BC left remained divided in the 1930s. The byzantine politics of leftist dissent in BC subsumed the energies of many activists. Since the CCF, the political organ of radical pacifism, lacked an activist agenda, Communist Party of Canada groups were left to exploit a source of radical solidarity not of their own creation. Though the domestic social scene of 1930s BC inspired anti-militarist dissent, working-class militants were left to express their activism in international-oriented organizations.