Ronald-Joseph Gaudet

1948-2016

Ron Gaudet, a founding member and long-time supporter of the Trotskyist League, died in Toronto on April 26 at the age of 68. Ron’s many friends and former comrades gathered to celebrate his life on the evening of May 14.

Ron’s formative political experiences in the late 1960s and ’70s came in a period of significant youth radicalization and recomposition on the left. Originally from Prince Edward Island, he was won to Marxism while a student at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. In November 1969, he helped organize a demonstration in support of the Vietnamese Revolution against U.S. imperialism, which became one of the largest leftist protests ever in this small, largely conservative city. Ron identified strongly with struggles by the oppressed, and came to see that a perspective centred on mobilizing the power of the working class uniquely showed a road to social liberation.

Ron helped to form the New Brunswick Socialists, which in 1970 joined the youth group of the League for Socialist Action (LSA). But while the Fredericton youth were moving leftward, the leadership of the LSA—then the only self-professed Trotskyist group in Canada—was moving to the right, pursuing the pipedream of winning the NDP to socialism while adapting to Canadian nationalism.

The Fredericton comrades intervened in the small local NDP and the Waffle, a heterogeneous NDP left caucus, seeking to win others to a Marxist perspective. In the course of this work, Ron ran as the NDP candidate for mayor in June 1971. The Fredericton comrades then prepared several documents for a September NDP provincial convention. Ron wrote the resolution on women’s liberation, which called for equal pay for equal work, maternity leave on full pay, 24-hour child care centres and free abortion on demand. The main document, a manifesto titled “For a Socialist New Brunswick,” denounced the capitalist system and called to expropriate the capitalists without compensation.

Surprisingly, the convention voted narrowly to approve the manifesto. In response, the federal NDP leadership suspended the provincial party, with NDP leader David Lewis ranting that the document “may be Maoist, or Trots [sic] or simply old-fashioned Communism, but whatever it is, it isn’t New Democratic.” For his part, Ontario Waffle leader Mel Watkins called it “totally unacceptable” and “beyond the pale of social democracy.” Disgracefully, the leadership of the LSA’s youth group chimed in, suspending the Fredericton branch because its NDP work went against national LSA policy. The latter amounted to pursuing an ongoing political bloc with Watkins & Co.

Hounded by the LSA leadership, the Fredericton group was soon dissolved. But the New Brunswick events helped to cohere a left opposition in the LSA, leading to the formation of the Revolutionary Marxist Group (RMG) in 1973. The RMG was an unstable organization that lasted only four years, but its confused, centrist politics generated leftist opposition among members and sympathizers seeking a consistent Marxist program. This led to the formation of the first group of Spartacist tendency supporters in Canada in 1974. Ron, who had moved to Toronto, soon joined us and participated in the founding conference of the Trotskyist League the following year.

Ron only remained a member for a few years, but continued to support our work for decades thereafter. A postal worker, he was one of seven unionists subjected to a red-baiting witchhunt by the right-wing leadership of the Letter Carriers Union of Canada in 1984. He was later active in the Canadian Union of Postal Workers. Ron regularly attended Partisan Defense Committee events in support of class-war prisoners like Mumia Abu-Jamal and American Indian Movement militant Leonard Peltier.

Ron was of Acadian origin, and opposition to chauvinist discrimination against francophones in Canada helped to shape his worldview. In 1977 he wrote (as R. Gibsen) an article for SC outlining a Marxist approach to the fight against Acadian oppression that stands up well to this day. Affirming that “The vital democratic demand for equal language rights for all…takes on particular importance in the case of the Acadian French-speaking minority in New Brunswick,” Ron concluded:

“Descendants of the innocent victims of the mercantilist British-French colonial rivalry, the Acadians will only achieve complete social, economic and cultural equality in the wake of a victorious continent-wide proletarian revolution.”

—“The Acadians: Language Rights and Nationalism,” SC No. 15, April 1977

Ron dedicated himself at a young age to the fight to build the Marxist leadership needed to achieve such a revolution. It is for this, above all, that we will remember him.