Labour / Le Travail
Issue 84 (2019)

poetry / poésie

Ballad: To Vote “Yes” Always for the Winnipeg General Strike!

George Elliott Clarke

Prologue; or An Introduction to (Bourgeois) Political Economy

Gussied-up moneybags, penny-pinching

Misers and gimlet-eyed moneylenders,

The pin-stripe suit vampires, and happy-hour

Cannibals, the well-dressed and sulky prudes,

The scumbag Molochs, plumped-up parasites,

Plutocrats whose bureaucracy renders

Democracy bankrupt Kleptocracy—

Where workers are monetized (sweat’s worth gold,

But sweat seldom overpowers gold, seldom

Outweighs the treasured, troy-ounce brick of gold);

Where workers hoard ale and bosses hoard gold;

Where landlords hound renters to cough up coins,

And won’t be buffalo’d, can’t be appeased;

Where vip’s sphincters fart excuses—

Such muck to mull over, so-so mouthfuls,

As personages talk trash and write garbage,

Spit out bullshit and write up filth, and ink

A shady vocabulary, pre-emptive

Propaganda (a.k.a. Censorship),

Malarkey sarcastic as meat-eaters

Denouncing vegetables; all to brand

Toilers as insufficient citizens,

Inefficient subjects, yet optimal

Troops, cops, who preserve Private Property,

For “God Saves the King”; but the poor are poor

Cos they fail to work and/or fail to save:

Such is the policy analyses

Of broadsheets and the tabloids’ headline news—

The blood-red blues of the Yellow Press—just

A lot of dirt; to back war profiteers

Who count corpses; to back conspirators

Fixing bread prices behind boardrooms’ oak doors;

To back Acts that frame Labour as boss-ruled

Employees, as ready cannon-fodder,

As consumers; and to back the preachers

Who tell the poor the Word of God is bread

Enough, to feast on prayers, become well-fed

On thou-shalt-nots, well-versed in black-robed cant—

That lyrical, Latinate patina,

Bamboozling, sidelining, maligning,

Casting the downtrodden as slobs, crooks, drunks,

Addicts, hoboes, having only themselves

To blame, being so unfriendable,

Being so unlettered, who need accept

Insistently sour lectures, th’animalish,

Crude grunts of lawyerly gangsters, those who

Parade as legislators, and whose laws

Foster prejudices, invent outlaws….

Each perceptibly a bottom-feeder—

Big cigars in the big mouths in big heads—

The bastoods, lisping poisonously, next

Adding claptrap, just buttered up bullshit—

Cant’s pure pollution, noxious, toxic plumes—

Whatever obscures or overshadows

Incomprehensive pay cheques and budgets,

Incomprehensible Austerity,

Reprehensible scandals, boondoggles—

The supply-and-demand of meatless soup,

And saltless gruel, of wine gone vinegar,

So that drones chew fried cabbage, boiled cabbage,

Roots, chestnuts, beans, fibrous rubbish, porridge,

Fried potatoes, boiled potatoes, naught else!

And—as “junk”—bunk in ziggurats of rats,

In cells, in trenches, in hospital wards….

But what else can be expected under

Capital’s robber-baron rule, wherein

Fiends constitute the State, and institute

Destitution? These wheeler-dealers tout

Prostitution, laissez-faire predators,

Debauched, sewage-stuffed brains, assholes and schmucks

(All as durable as hard, cold, Old Cash)

As blue-blood, blue-chip Establishment. Well,

The bourgeois State is the workers’ prison,

Pitting the well-heeled gainst the sans-culottes,

The bare-assed, whose toggery is ripped rags.

Here Capital pens the laws and cuts the cheques

For politicos; and proletarian

Efforts to better their lives, to evolve

Beyond the struggle to breathe and eat, seem

Tantamount to touching off Civil War.

Winnipeg: The Strike, May-June 1919

Revolutionary, she’s always been—

Winnipeg, the Prairies gilt capitol;

Thus, the Gold Lad capping her province’s

Parliament mirrors Paris’s Bastille

Statuary, the proud symbol of folks

Evolved insurrectionary, who claimed

Liberté, Égalité, Charity—

Which is also what Louis-Riel’s Métis

Sought in Winnipeg, when, to win Freedom,

They rebelled—ructioned—so unstoppably

Versus John A. Macdonald, they founded

Manitoba. True: Their next Rebellion

Got put down and Riel got hanged, but no one

Could deny the Paris Commune brought home—

The example that 1870

Set for the Prairie Paris: The Bastille,

The Rebellions, The Commune, all foretold,

Or foreshadowed, credibly, Winnipeg’s

General Strike, the Class War dividing

Crescentwood mansions and North End hovels,

The Grain Exchange and Vulcan Iron facing

Down plebes wanting One Big Union (no more

Waffling about Wobblies) and enough dough

To raise enough daily bread; and the State

To not side with dollars always; to not

Be swayed by the leaden, g-force of gold,

Or gold gone ferocious, gone to lead shot;

And to grant the “returned men”—the veterans—

Reprieve from Empire’s flag-waving jackals—

Their suspect accretion of War Booty—

(And who just shipped 5,000 Canuck troops—

Against their will—to far Vladivostock

To stop The Bolshevik Revolution;

To shoot down Lenin and prop up the Czar!)

Winnipeg’s workers want to overturn

The norm: The underbelly starved and sucked

By the overhead, the underdog whipped

By the overseer. That’s what’s ballyhooed!

No more are syndicates vindicated!

Thus Winnipeg’s work-force now strikes against

The pirates’ Reich, to strike down their thieving!

To strike down a Gothic Dystopia!

Suddenly, the telephones lose perfume:

The Hello girls are warbling “Nyet!” Plugs pulled!

Milk carts and bread carts retire their horses

Until the Strike Committee lets em clop

Foodstuffs from door-to-door to sustain homes

Because half of household addresses house

A striker. Now, firefighters light cigarettes;

Streetcar drivers ride bikes; mailmen sing out

Messages, cry news; cooks desert kitchens;

Waiters toss away their aprons; barbers

Set down their clippers; railway men stay home.

Suddenly, there’s no post, no telegrams;

No streetcars, no taxis, no newspapers:

30,000 Winnipeggers refuse toil!

Here’s the Paris Commune reborn (prelude

To Paris in May 1968):

It’s a prairie-fire-style revolt that sparks

Mirror flare-ups across the Dominion.

Who can tamp em down? Who can stamp em out?

It is cinematic pyrotechnics!

(The people—united—are a wildfire!

The masses—ignited—are a firestorm!)

For a week or so, maybe two, the workers

Wield Power, are farmers, are doctors, are cops,

Are teachers, are artists, are clerks, are free—

To dream, to imagine Utopia.

Now cometh Andrews into History—

Plus his Citizens Committee of One

Thousand—a plague of tycoons and grifters

Who fired city cops who refused to fire

On strikers. Instead, goons—frank thugs—got badged

As “special constables,” gangbangers bought

To bash heads with baseball bats, bring on drums,

Bugles, brandish guns, bring on bloodshed, yells.

Lewis machine-guns got shipped in, sights set,

Propped up all over, and even aimed out

The opera house—in case strikers won’t yield.

Andrews’ yellow-bellied, jaundiced, Yellow

Press spews dank, dingy lies, slimes the strikers

As Bolsheviks. Andrews warns Ottawa

That Winnipeg nurses now a Canuck

Soviet. Is Regina next? Or ports—

Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, or

Vancouver? What city’s safe from Contagion?

When workers cease to be “loyal subjects”—

Subjugated to Crown and Cross and coin—

What lot of aristocrats doesn’t risk

Becoming a lot of suicides leaping

From skyscrapers—or Fraud convicts rotting

In jail? That’s what’s at stake! So Andrews must

Cartoon the strike leaders as “seditious

Conspirators,” who must be, with gusto,

Handcuffed and speedily deported. Where?

Britain! Where Marx refuses to play dead….

As vicious as are Andrews’ anti-strike

Measures (notably The War Measures Act),

The Strike Leaders corrode—canker—their base

By spewing vitriol against “aliens”:

Spitting spleen and spite versus that diverse

Exodus outta Europe, that shipped Jew,

German, Ukrainian, Pole, and Briton,

To Winnipeg, thus “imperilling” vets’ jobs,

Became divisive vilification

Serving Andrews well, who condemned the Strike

Leaders themselves as “alien scum,” needing

To be kicked out quick, kicked back to England.

Soon his de facto, provisional State

(Whose only good was fertile defecate)—

Saw ten Strike Leaders cuffed and charged and caged,

While Federales marched guns through the streets.

Thus, when strikers assembled to protest

Mass arrests, the North West Mounted Police

Rampaged, trampled, struck, as if Medieval

Inquisitors, or as if pursuing

Riel—forerunner radical—his ghost

Risen incarnate at Saint-Boniface.

And coppers slew two strikers right stone-dead.

(Right stone-dead, two strikers, the cops shot down.)

Plus bullied and clobbered and shackled some

Dozens, so that the Strike—stymied—stalled, stilled.

But Diplomacy must fail against Death:

To have won would have meant non-stop ruction….

Wisdom is perpetual Consciousness

Of History, so History’s always

In the present-tense and the first-person.

So History demands that we extend

The General Strike—if Utopia

Be true Equality of citizens;

Once we strike down the bankers’ State;

Once we complete what Winnipeg began.

How to cite:

George Elliott Clarke, “Ballad: To Vote ‘Yes’ Always for the Winnipeg General Strike!,” Labour/Le Travail 84 (Fall 2019): 17–23.