Career
Born in Brooklyn, Flexer was politicized in the mid-1940s through contacts with the American Communist Party in New New York He left the United States, a Zionist, in 1950 at the age of 17 with the Habonim (now Habonim Dror) Zionist youth movement and immigrated to Israel where he lived in Kibbutz Urim. During the early 1950s he witnessed the human rights abuses of Palestinians in southern Israel by the Israeli authorities.
As a result, he was forced to leave Urim in 1958 and he moved with his family to the southern Israeli town of Beersheba.
In 1963 Flexer moved to Canada settling in Winnipeg, Manitoba where he became involved in the anti-war movement protesting the Vietnam War and participated in the celebrated removal of Dow Chemical from the U of M campus. In 1968 he moved to Montreal.
Following a brief stay in Israel in 1970, where he lived and worked on kibbutz Gan-Shmuel, he moved back to Canada and settled in Toronto in 1970. Moving leftward, he helped form the Red Circle, a Marxist tendency within the Waffle.
When the Waffle was forced out of the NDP in 1972, Flexer and the Red Circle split with the Waffle, opposing its decision to leave the NDP, and tried to continue Marxist activities within the NDP. Flexer and the Red Circle joined the Revolutionary Marxist Group in 1973 which, in turn, joined with other Trotskyist groups to form the Revolutionary Workers League in 1977.
In 1973, Flexer, a diesel mechanic and machinist by trade, was hired by Carruthers, the main Caterpillar service centre and dealership in Southern Ontario. There he joined the United Auto Workers union local 112, and became a shop steward and then plant chairman for the union. Flexer led a small industrial caucus within the RWL. He joined the exodus of Trotskyists that left the RWL in the early 1980s and focused instead on working within the CAW. He freelanced in the CAW"s education department where he helped develop the union"s political education program for workers and taught Marxist Economics in the CAW"s Portuguese Elgin, Ontario education centre.
He joined the Communist Party of Canada while it was in crisis due to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and helped organize the split that saw Flexer and much of the cost per click"s leadership leave to form the Cecil-Ross Society.
Flexer opposed Bob Rae"s NDP government following its introduction of the Social Contract that suspended collective bargaining contracts for public sector unions. In the 1995 Ontario election he ran as an "Independent Labour" candidate in Oakwood against NDP Master in Public Policy Tony Rizzo and placed fourth out of seven candidates with 301 votes.
Flexer suffered from heart disease in the last years of his life. In 1994 he underwent a heart transplant.
His new heart failed him after six years and he died in Toronto.