Vancouver
I have wondered what this Dumont group has to do with me, since I never worked at Dumont and have not kept in touch with many people that I knew then. I’m as fond of nostalgia as the next person but this didn’t seem to be my nostalgia. Still, I did feel something and now Ken and Steve (by way of Ken) have convinced me that it is more about the politics of the time and what people have done since, so …
I began at UofW in September 1967 and was not involved in anything much that year other than discovering dope and playing guitar with Phil Elsworthy. I started to become more aware of the world with the riot in Chicago at the Democratic Convention and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and so was ready to hear something the next Fall. There were a lot of speakers and other stuff but my first political involvement was at the occupation of the Campus Centre. I remember Stuart Saxe saying that if you agreed that it should belong to the students then you should stay for the occupation. I had never been challenged to make word and deed agree before and decided to stay. Thus, I became part of that rag-tag group known as the RSM. We signed up with the Wobblies as we certainly weren’t Marxist-Leninists and wanted some form of organization. Roddy bugged everybody for decades to pay their back dues. I still have my little red book somewhere. I’m lucky to have known those people and have lived those years.
From some influence, we adopted a slogan each year or so to orient our actions. Perhaps they came from OUS or CUS I don’t know. The first that I can recall was “class struggle in the classroom.” We were encouraged to confront professors and attempt to influence the students toward more radical thinking. I remember confronting Jan Narveson in a class of over 200 students with my knees shaking and making it all up as I went along. Scott Arnold told me later that he would have supported me if he’d known what I was talking about. Cyril came in to the final lecture by a McLuhanist communications prof and a bunch of us followed along. The prof was talking about the distribution of finite resources and Cyril built his case on the Marxist notion that resources could be expanded and so it wasn’t a zero-sum game between classes. All in all, a half-century later the environmentalist zero-sum game seems closer to the truth. Lots of others confronted their professors. There were radical caucuses in most departments, but I don’t recall any other stories any more. It culminated in a sit-in at the library. One of the demands that we achieved and which I still think is important was access by the community to the university library.
After that, it was the rather pretentiously named “student-worker alliance” which mostly consisted of strike support at Continental Can and other places that always seemed to require getting up at 4.00 in the morning and driving off into the dark. This laid the basis for the energetic support of the Dare and Peterborough Examiner strikes a bit later. I think that we can say that we made a difference there.
The RSM women formed a separate caucus—which caused a lot of debate pro and con. Then, in coordination with others from Toronto organized the 1970 protest at the Miss Canada pageant at Waterloo Lutheran University (as it was then) in front of national tv. The women’s caucus was in charge and us guys were only allowed to be foot soldiers. They bought a few tickets and were going to rise inside to sing Solidarity Forever when a candidate was moved (by prior arrangement) to defect to the protest. The rest of us were to make enough noise outside to be heard inside. I was outside when Betty Burcher came out. The ushers had taken note of the tickets but not collected them, so she collected up the tickets and came outside to redistribute them. That was done a few times and so we ended up with quite a lot of people inside so that when we rose to sing they had to stop everything and wait. There’s a panel in SFU’s downtown campus that commemorates this event as part of the background of the SFU Women’s Centre to this day.
By then a lot of people had decided to leave the university and take their activism elsewhere, though some stayed on and many were involved in the debates that surrounded the founding of Integrated Studies. The worker-oriented newspaper On the Line took up a lot of our planning, writing, and distributing. It probably lasted only a few months but taught a lot of lessons that led to the founding of Dumont. Mainly, that the high cost of typesetting was difficult for us to raise. I tried selling the paper outside several factories and had little luck. I had worked in a factory and could relate to how they felt coming off a long shift. It was a shower and a beer that they wanted not a long studenty analysis of capitalist power dynamics. I gave a lot of papers away and so did others. How to pay for it was the big issue and some bright sparks came up with the idea to set up a typesetting shop to support the paper. From an outsider’s perspective it seemed as if the energy for political activities was then mostly drained off by internal issues at Dumont. Though I know that Dumont supported many good left-wing publishing activities afterward. It’s surely the most long-standing institution that the RSM effected.
I was away travelling and working abroad for most of 1973 and into 1974. When I had left the local political scene seemed overcome by a sense of malaise—except for the overwhelming work and debates going on at Dumont. I was fed up with organizing meetings for lots of new projects where very few ever came to fruition. It seemed to have become all talk. When I left I swore to myself that I wouldn’t be involved with any more projects that I didn’t think would actually happen.
The last hurrah was in summer 1974. I was involved with an OFY-funded project on temporary farm workers. Terry Moore, David Robertson, David Cubberley, Mel Rotman, and more of the usual suspects were involved. 12 of us I think. Finally we split into 2 groups: I was with the one on the political economy of food in Canada—which produced a corporate map of the ownership structure of Weston’s that was suppressed by the Montreal Gazette. I remember a consultation with Leo Johnson where he generously shared his method of estimating surplus value with me. The other was a photo-journalism project on the farmworkers themselves. The last was published in The Chevron and a local paper called The Kitchener-Waterloo Free Press that we started up that summer.
Then, in early September 1974 I left KW and began graduate school at York. It was an intense few years in which I learned a great deal that has stayed with me in broad outline ever since. As Ken often says, we were lucky to have been young in that time.