Ol’ Bi ill

emphasizing in every line the need for a great powerful Canadian Marxist party to lessen defeat and extend the victories of his class. Class conscious to the last drop of blood, his pen wrote in anger against the monopolists, the CPR, the “Gentlemen Adventurers of England” (Hudson’s Bay Compa- ny), the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company, those whom the trained seals of the kept press call “builders”, the organized kil- lers of the Ginger Goodwins, Nick Zanchuks, the coal miners of Es- tevan — all the working class heroes who have fallen before the organized force and violence of ruthless monopoly.

For Ol’ Bill there was only one class of builders, the workers. The others were the drones, the para- sites, living and waxing fat and rich on the sweat and toil of labor. His Builders of British Columbia

Builder

nized that the time had come for bold re-examination and change.

The ruling class of Canada, as of other countries, was thrown into a frenzy of fear by the Rus- sian Revolution and the upsurge of working class organization and socialist agitation it produced in this country. That fear was re- flected in new repressive meas- ures, particularly the vicious Sec- tion 98 enected by the Meighen government during the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919. It was reflected in screaming headlines falsifying the news from Russia and distorting it beyond all recog- nition of the truth, just as today sensational headlines and twisted news reports present a false pic- ture of what is happening in the new democracies of Europe.

Bill Bennett and others set

- themselves the difficult task of

stands as a lasting tribute, not to literary design but to the cause of labor unity in the struggle for peace, jobs and security as pre- ludes to. socialism.

As far back as 1912, when the Nanaimo and Wellington miners were faced with the guns and ar- tilery of the militia, called in to back up the coal operators’ star- vation non-union policies, Ol’ Bill fought and worked for bigger unions, bigger, better and more militant unions; unions accepting Marxist-Leninist scientfic leader- ship in the struggle — not “dic- tated by Moscow’,’ as the kept press like to yelp, but from their own staunch class hearts and

‘elass needs. Ol Bill saw trade unions as a great vehicle of socia- lism wresting new wage and working conditions from their ex-

ploiters, raising the level of socia-..

list understanding and unity, nev-. er merely as instruments for col- lecting percapita and holding the workers in leash.

OV Bill loved the Communist party. To him it was meat and drink of life, the.guarantee of the Socialist Canada,-upon the thresh- hold ,of which he bade us a quiet goodbye forever. His proletarian heart — which found joy in being a Santa Claus to our children, | and a pillar of rock in our daily struggles is now still.

The party and the cause to which he dedicated his whole life to the last hour, shall build an enduring monument to his memory — a Socialist Canada abundant in the human values he loved, freed from all the sham and exploitation his

great working class heart hated and scorned.

; the government

combatting the lies and interpret- ing the news the daily newspapers either distorted or suppressed en- tirely. -

When the government banned the Western Clarion in 1918 they launched the Red Flag, and when issued instruc- tions to the post office to accept the Red Flag but not to send it out they changed the name to the Indicator. Through their writ- ings, through public meetings and study groups they broke down the barriers of distortion and pre- judice, spreading through the labor movement the profound sig- nificance of the new workers’

state that had come into being to ©

influence their lives and open a new era for their world.

Within the Socialist party itself the ferment created by the war and heightened by the Russian Revolution continued in argument

' and dispute, with the advocates

of an opportunist course waging

a losing battle against the mili- tancy of the rank-and-file, finally

‘to take refuge in the outright re-

fusal of the leadership to recog- nize the demand ‘of the member- ship for affiliation to the new Communist International.

e Bill Bennett was one of the 15 or 20 members of the Socialist

party, the OBU and the Workers’

Ex-Servicemen’s League, includ- ing Jack Kavanagh and Jack Clarke, who met in the Sullivan

of B.C.

Hall on Cordova street, Vancou- ver, in December, 1921, as a com- mittee to launch the new Workers’ party, which in 1924 became the Communist party of Canada. The achievements of the working peo- ple of Russia had demonstrated the need for a new type of party to carry forward the struggle for socialism. The Workers’ party was the organization created by Canadian workers to meet that need,

Twenty-two years later, in the Georgia Hotel, Vancouver, Bill Bennett was again one of a gath- ering, no longer numbered in tens but in hundreds, from which the new Labor-Progressive party was launched in. the communist tra- dition to which he devoted his life.

To tell the story of those inter- vening years one would have to - write a history of the old Com- munist party, for in a sense the story of the Communist party was

also Bill’s story. The one was a ©

bright facet of the whole.

His last years began to weigh upon Bill, greying his hair and

seaming the face that was fami-

liar to thousands of workers, in British Columbia and far beyond. . But if age limited ‘his capacity for work, it neither dimmed his youth- ful outlook nor corroded his view of Karl Marx’s theory as “only the cornerstone of the science which socialists must carry fur- ther in all directions if they want to keep pace with life.”

Until a few weeks ago, when ill-health forced him to close his typewriter for the last time, rea- ders of the Pacific Tribune still turned first to Ol Bill’s “Short Jabs”. Indeed, it was as Ol’ Bill that he was known to the remotest corners of the province among readers who had not missed his hard-hitting weekly column since its first appearance in the old B.C. Workers’ News in 1935.

In the socialist Canada of the future when the working people honor their pioneers who, in the words of Charles Mackay, “Aid the dawning, tongue and pen,” Bill Bennett’s name will be among those immortalized in the. stone and steel of new construction. But no monument can tower as high nor can endure as long as the inspiring example of the lifetime he devoted to the working people and their struggle for socialism.

Adapted from an article “Bill Bennett — Grand Old Man of Canadian Labor’, published in September, 1947, to mark Bill Bennett’s 50 years in the labor movement,’ '

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PACIFIC TRIBUNE—JANUARY 6, 1950—PAGE: 1o