To watch the video go to: https://springmag.ca/lets-rent-a-train-the-league-for-socialist-action
By Gary Kinsman
Thanks to everyone who worked on and participated in this film. It took many years of work and it was great for me to see people from my often distant past. There were some great sections on activist organizing. I was a member of the youth group of the League for Socialist Action (LSA) called the Young Socialists in the early 1970s but by 1973 I had left it to become part of the Revolutionary Marxist Group (RMG). I was interviewed for close to an hour and a half for this film but only appear for a moment in the set up for the LSA support for the We Demand! gay rights demo in August 1971.
At the same time the film is fundamentally flawed in my view by being very white and despite my many critiques of the RMG — and the Leninist form of organization — it was very anti-RMG in how it was put together. For instance, the documentary entirely ignored the RMG’s work against the deportation of Leonard Peltier and Rosie Douglas and against racist immigration laws and how RMG women played a leading role in starting International Women’s Day in Toronto.
It neglected the major problems of the LSA deciding to destroy the Toronto Women’s Caucus in the early 1970s to build a single-issue repeal the abortion law campaign and the reason why many long-time gay/lesbian members (including Brian Waite and John Wilson who are interviewed in the film) left the LSA in the mid and later ’70s when it adopted an anti-queer position refusing to say that “gay is just as good as straight” which led many LSA people to describe gay liberation as “peripheral” to the “class struggle.” For more on this and the RCMP surveillance of the LSA and the RMG see our book The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation, pp. 272-286. See: https://www.ubcpress.ca/the-canadian-war-on-queers
By ending abruptly in 1977 before the fusion of the LSA and the RMG to form the Revolutionary Workers’ League and the struggles that then ensued the documentary also distorts what took place. I hope much more can be done documenting left histories and not only of Leninist types of organization. I hope to get back to working on the histories of autonomist Marxist and feminist organizing in ‘Canada’ in the 1970s in the New Tendency, the Struggle Against Work Collective, the Windsor Labour Centre, Wages for Housework, Wages Due Lesbians and more once the 3rd edition of The Regulation of Desire comes out this fall.