Opinions

Remembering Spartacus

Kevin D. Annett

-OP Contributor

I was seventeen and restless in my
chains when I first saw the bright
red star over a ramshackle store-
front on Vancouver’s Hastings
street. It tugged at my heart, that
star, and led me up a hallway fes-
tooned with posters and procla-
matjons into a place crammed
with people and thoughts that
would forever change me.

Jack Scott was on duty that first
day, in the spring of 1973. He
scowled at me from behind a
newspaper with eyes that had seen
it all. I couldn't have known that
he was one of the founders of the
Workers’ Unity League and the
On to Ottawa Trek, back in the
dirty 30s—the names meant
nothing to me then. But his eyes
said it all.

I met a lot of veterans like Jack
at Spartacus Books: Men and
women who had led strikes when
' you could get killed for doing so,
people who had fought the whole
system with nothing but their
courage, and won. They began to
show me the real world, the one I
had sensed but ‘could never
describe. I heard their stories on
Friday nights, when the bookstore
held public forums that drew
hundreds of people: trade union-
ists, revolutionaries, refugees, and
just hungry men off Hastings
street looking for something more
than charity to feed on.

I was eager to learn, to join
whatever was the most radical
rejection of the stinking unjust
bullshit that lay around me. And
so I started working at the store
and organizing the Friday night
forums where anyone getting
screwed could speak and some-
how fight back.

What a splendid and vibrant
chaos those forums were! People
were unafraid back then, free to
shout their rage and march
together at the drop of a hat.
Nobody checked out reality on a
computer screen. Other people
and the flood of ideas, causes, and
leaflets that spilled out of us like
breath were enough.

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One Friday night we held a
forum on “The Future of
Socialism in BC.” The “S word”
wasn't a no-no in those days. We
were clear that workers needed to
take over the world, abolish capi-
talism and destroy the state. The
only issue was how to do it.

We hashed it over that night,
amidst shouts and _ speeches.
Harry Rankin, the mildly com-
munistic city alderman, gave the
main talk, and was roundly
denounced by the Trotskyites and
Anarchists in the hall for even
suggesting that one could use a
parliamentary system to do away
with the Beast. A fight broke out
and some chairs got broken. But
then we all went around the cor-
ner to the Lotus for a beer or two.

Another time, some Chilean
refugees showed up to speak
about their dream that had been
slaughtered after the military
coup of that bastard Pinochet. A
socialist named Hernan Ortega
spoke of how the workers had
taken over and run all the facto-
ries in his town for over a year,
without bosses—until the tanks
arrived.

Hernan and his friends gave me
the kind of soul jolt that comes
maybe once or twice in a lifetime:
a sudden awakening to the world
the way it is, not the way we
would like it to be. You cannot
overcome this thing called capi-
talism peacefully. The rich will
kill the entire world to hold onto
their wealth and power.

The suffering of those few sur-
vivors of a Holocaust set me on a
different road that I still trod, far
from the world I knew at seven-
teen. There have been few victo-
ries and many defeats on that
road, and my only consolation
has been that I’m still walking on
it with a few others, even today.
And it all began at Spartacus
Books.

The store’s namesake started life
like most people, in misery, as a
slave in one of the Roman
Empire’s stone quarries. But one
day he learned how to fight in the
arenas of death where polite
Roman society feasted, and he

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used what he had learned from
his oppressors to fight against
them and nearly overthrow
them, seventy-three years
before Jesus. But like his

fellow rebel, he ended up

impaled on a cross, along

with 6,000 of his fellow
slaves who had broken
free.

The Roman Pinochets did-
nt kill Spartacus. He's alive
today—in me, in my friends at
the Hospital Employees picket
line, in my buddy Arlene who
stopped traffic outside the
Vancouver cop shop for an hour
with twenty other people to
demand the release of their
friend. Because, like the book-
store that bore his name,
Spartacus taught me that we are
born in a world of wrong that can
only be made right by our action.

Spartacus Books is gone now.
After more than thirty years, and
a move to a smaller site, a fire
claimed it, and the echoes of
those passionate debates and calls
for freedom are silenced, for
now. But the spirit of the
dead always survives in the
memory of the living, as any
rebel or poor person can tell
you. And that spirit is honoured
and brought to life again when
we carry on the dream for which
so many have died.

I got to know Jack Scott, the
old communist and labour leader,
before he too passed on. Over a
beer one night, I asked if he
thought we'd see the revolu-

 

tion in our lifetime. Jack smiled
at me for once, and said simply,
“That all depends how bad we
want it.” Struggle and survive, O
rebels and poets.

Kevin Annet is a former United
Church minister who was fired
and expelled from the church in
1995 after he uncovered evidence
of murder and other crimes by
church officials at its Alberni
Indian Residential School.

He is now working as a coun-
selor and advisor to survivors of
west coast residential schools, and
teaches Canadian Studies at
Langara College in Vancouver.

Illustration by J.J. McCullough