"On behalf of the great mass of the public": the Citizens Committee of 1,000, constituted authority, and the capitalist state in the Winnipeg general strike

Throughout the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, ‘constituted authority’ served as a rhetorical banner under which the interests of the state and capital overlapped. Throughout the six-week walkout, representatives of all three levels of the state and members of the shadowy Citizens’ Committee of 1,000 repeatedly returned to the language of ‘constituted authority’ in order to illustrate what was threatened by the strikers. Tapping into post-war fears of ‘enemy aliens,’ Bolsheviks, and Soviet revolution, the Winnipeg Citizen, capital’s mouthpiece during the strike, was adept at conflating the goals of the strikers with those of an attempted revolution. Even when the Western Labour News, the newspaper of the strikers, emphasized that the strike’s goal was simply an increase in the standard of living conditions – one particularly blunt edition of the paper spelled out in clear terms “WHAT WE WANT” and “WHAT WE DO NOT WANT” – the Citizens’ Committee of 1,000 was particularly efficient at manipulating appearances so as to turn both public sentiment and that of various statesmen against the strike. In this manner, one effect of the General Strike was to expose the mechanisms of the democratic state in the early 20th century. Capitalists and statesmen comprised the upper echelons of Canadian society, and as such the democratic state consistently moved against labour in defense of capital. The ‘constituted authority’ that the Citizens’ Committee of 1,000 was so concerned with defending was the upper class’s ability to defend its interests at the expense of labour.