Dreams of a red dawn

>> Communist revolution hits east-end Montreal, or maybe not

by Craig Segal

If the bristles of Patrice Legendre's beard could sing, their song would sound like the communist jingle you heard as a kid: "If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning, I'd hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters all, all over this land."

Except that Legendre's bristles would substitute that wimpy hammer for a blazing Molotov cocktail. That's because Legendre and his small communist clan want to start a revolutionary communist party out of their high-ceilinged east-end headquarters on de LaSalle. And they're ready to use violence to turn the world red.

"We don't have a pacifist ideology," says Legendre, a robust 41 year old in paint-flecked wingtips. "And we don't think we'll have a big change in Canada without violence. The confrontation between classes will get bigger, and it won't happen democratically."

Legendre, an unemployed father of three, occupies all his free time working for the revolution. He spends 40 hours a week talking to labourers, writing for The Red Flag and going to demonstrations. He says he's been arrested 15 times since 1980--all for the cause, of course.

"The social problems are getting worse. The uprising is getting closer," Legendre says. "The bourgeoisie will experience a period of crisis and they'll turn against the workers. And the workers aren't going to take it."

That may be, but serious communism as a mass movement has been dead in Montreal since the 1930s. That was when Fred Rose stormed down St-Laurent with a pack of 100 angry Finns, Ukrainians, Jews, Slavs and French Canadians singing songs of the Russian Revolution. And people like Lea Roback helped make communists "a seasoned and integral part of the labour movement," as Merrily Weisbord writes in The Strangest Dream.

Years later, Montreal communists turned capitalists. Norman Nerenberg and Arnold Issenman, members of a wing of the Communist Party of Canada, bought up much of the McGill ghetto and would soon be fighting their old cronies to tear it down to build an apartment/hotel/shopping complex. The battle went down as the Milton-Park Affair, Canada's largest citizen-developer battle.

Communism turned beatnik in smoky '60s dives like Bicycle Bob Silverman's old café, the Seven Steps Bookshop, where a young Bob Dylan would eventually play. So, if the movement seems a relic of nostalgia, doesn't that mean communism has been put to pasture?

"Many people say communism is dead," says Legendre, who dreams of a classless world where the state and family have been abolished. "We're going to create something new."

Legendre says there are signs that capitalism is dying all over the world. "At the big protests against globalization, people carry anti-capitalism banners. I haven't seen that for 20 years.

"The state can't protect the workers anymore because the state is run by companies," adds a female comrade who fears using her real name because she works for a "big capitalist."

"Capitalism is no longer possible. It's a life of misery for the majority of the people." :



Legendre and his comrades are holding nine meetings that will lead to a kind of communist superbowl, November 25-26. For information, e-mail Legendre at redflag37@hotmail.com, or call 854-4890.

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