Steve 's life then and now

   This is not a true story but it could be.


"They're dead from the arse up,"Steve used to say about people who were conservative. Steve's life has been given over to struggles against such right wing people. He sure didn't all the battles he joined . But he tried to.
    To-day Steve's in his early 80's. He's working at a part-time job and trying to get his fellow workers to join a union. Sometimes his brown eyes get sad as he figures out the odds against his latest project. Then also at times like these, he grits his yellowed teeth. Meanwhile his thin grey hair, that was black at one time, grows thinner  and greyer. But he hasn't given up his struggle for social justice.
   Steve was born east of Winnipeg. he grew up in a working class Jewish family but never really got to know his parents. "They were dead by the time I was 16," he says.
    By now, it was the mid-1940's and World War Two had just ended. Steve had a high school degree and the only  job he could find was in a clothing factory. "It was a hellish place," he recalls. "Right in downtown Winnipeg."
     Steve wanted to go to university, but his rich relatives wouldn't give him a penny. So Steve trekked esatwards across Canada and ended up in Toronto. Somewhere in this big city he joined a picket line that was picketting for some social justice issue. Here he met communists, and soon joined the Canadian Communist Party.
   In l948 this was a brave or foolish thing to do. The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was already heating up. The two former allies and victors against the Axis powers were now enemies. And Canada sat firmly in the U.S. camp.
    "Soviet spies were unearthed in Ottawa of all places," write Robert Bothwell and J.L. Granatstein. "Civil servants, military officers and scientists betrated their oaths and turned wartime secrets over to Moscow."
    But Steve noted that wherever there was a social justice issue, communists were right there in the middle of the struggle. They fought for the jobless, the homeless and strikers. In short, they were for real. Steve liked their spirit.
     Steve met men and women who had hel;ped build the new industrial unions  in the forests, the auto factories and the steel mills. But now an alliance of businessmen, police, governments, opportunistic union members and goons drove  the left laening union leaders out of the unions they built. Now business-like unions took the place of formerly socially conscious ones.
     In Canada, on the Great Lakes industrial warfare broke out. The Liberal government of Mackenzie King brought in  a gangster from the United States named hal Banks. Banks's task was to smash the communist-led Canadian Seamen's Union or CSU. Steve got involved in this struggle.
     ...To be contined...