Canadian Dimension | Articles

The Rise of the Native Rights-Based Strategic Framework

Clayton Thomas-Muller — 2013-05-23T17:32:46+00:00

Years ago I was working for a well-known Indigenous environmental and economic justice organization known as the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN). During my time with this organization I had the privilege of working with hundreds of Indigenous communities across the planet who had seen a sharp increase in the targeting of Native lands for mega-extractive and other toxic industries. The largest of these conflicts, of course, was the overrepresentation by big oil who work— often in cahoots with state, provincial First Nations, Tribal and federal governments both in the USA and Canada—to gain access to the valuable resources located in our territories. IEN hired me to work in a very abstract setting, under impossible conditions, with little or no resources to support Grassroots peoples fighting oil companies, who had become, in the era of free market economics, the most powerful and well-resourced entities of our time. My mission was to fight and protect the sacredness of Mother Earth from toxic contamination and corporate exploration, to support our Peoples to build sustainable local economies rooted in the sacred fire of our traditions.

My work took me to the Great Plains reservation, Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold to support a collective of mothers and grandmothers fighting a proposed oil refinery, which if built would process crude oil shipped in from a place called the tar sands in northern Canada. I spent time in Oklahoma working with Sac and Fox Tribal EPA under the tutelage of the late environmental justice warrior Jan Stevens, to learn about the legacy of 100 years of oil and gas on America’s Indian Country—Oklahoma being one of the end up points of the shameful indian relocation era. I joined grassroots on the Bay of Fundy, in an epic battle against the state of Maine and a liquidified natural gas (LNG) producer who wanted to build a massive LNG terminal on their community’s sacred site known as Split Rock. The plant, had it been built, would have provided natural gas to the City of New York for their power plants.

I worked extensively with youth on the Navajo reservation in America’s Southwest, who were fighting the Peabody Coal mining company, trying to stop the mining of Black Mesa, a source of water and a known sacred site in the Navajo Nation. On the western side of the Navajo Nation, I worked to support Dine/Navajo who were fighting an attempt to lift the ban on uranium mining, which would have seen the introduction of a dangerous form of uranium mining called in situ or “in place” extraction that could’ve poisoned precious ground water resources in the desert region. Uranium had already left a devastating legacy on the Dine/Navajo in the ’40s and ’50s. I worked in the Great Lakes at a community of Walpole Island (Bkejwanong First Nation) to stop an oil company from drilling for oil in their community—a place where First Nations peoples harvest for wild rice, muskrat and fowl gains. It had also become a place of local economic importance as ecotourism from American duck hunters also providing income to the community. Walpole Island was already dealing with the impacts of 60 petrol-chemical facilities within 60 km of their nation. I worked to support groups in Montana’s Northern Cheyenne and Crow Indian reservations who were fighting massive expansion of Coal Bed Methane in their region. The encroachment was decimating local ground water resources. I worked in Alaska and was a co-founder of the powerful oil-busting network known as Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands (REDOIL) that was created to take on the corrupt Alaska Native Corporations and big oil who had been running roughshod trying to start development in fragile places like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). I worked with groups in British Colombia’s Northeast, where natural gas companies were ripping apart the landscape with massive gas developments in the region. I worked in dozens and dozens of other territories and places across the globe, many not mentioned in this story.

During my five years as an IEN Indigenous oil campaigner (2001–2006) I learned that these fights were all life and death situations, not just for local communities, but for the biosphere; that organizing in Indian Country called for a very different strategic and tactical play than conventional campaigning; that our grassroots movement for energy and climate justice was being lead by our Native woman and, as such, our movement was just as much about fighting patriarchy and asserting as a core of our struggle the sacred feminine creative principal; and that a large part of the work of movement building was about defending the sacredness of our Mother Earth and helping our peoples decolonize our notions of government, land management, business and social relation by going through a process of re-evaluating our connection to the sacred.

In the early years I often struggled with the arms of the non-profit industrial complex and its inner workings, which were heavily fortified with systems of power that reinforced racism, classism and gender discrimination at the highest levels of both non-profit organizations and foundations (funders). It was difficult to measure success of environmental and economic justice organizing using the western terms of quantitative versus qualitative analysis. Sure, our work had successfully kept many highly-polluting fossil fuel projects at bay, but the attempts to take our land by agents of the fossil fuel industry—with their lobbyist’s pushing legislation loop holes and repackaging strategies—continued to pressure our uninformed and/or economically desperate Tribal Governments to grant access to our lands.

The most high profile victory came during the twilight of the first Bush/Cheney administration when our network collaborated with beltway groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council and effectively killed a harmful US energy bill containing provisions that would kick open the back door to fossil fuel companies, allowing access into our lands. The Indian Energy Title V campaign identified that if the energy bill passed, US tribes would be able, under the guise of tribal sovereignty, to administer their own environmental impact assessments and fast track development in their lands. Now this sounds like a good thing, right? Well, maybe for Tribal governments that had the legal and scientific capacity to do so, but for the hundreds of US Tribes without the resources, it set up a highly imbalanced playing field that would give the advantage to corporations to exploit economically disadvantaged nations to enter into the industrialization game.

Through a massive education campaign and highly-negotiated and coordinated collaborative effort of grassroot, beltway and international eNGOs—as well as multiple lobbying visits to Washington DC, lead by both elected and grassroots Tribal leaders—we gained the support of the National Congress of American Indians who agreed to write a letter opposing the energy bill to some of our champions in the US Senate, most notably the late Daniel Akaka who was Hawaii’s first Native Senator. Under the guidance of America’s oldest Indian Advocacy group he would lead a vote to kill the energy bill in the Senate. This was my first view into the power of the Native rights-based strategic and tactical framework and how it could bring the most powerful government on Earth (and the big oil lobby) to their knees. Of course upon the re-election of the Bush/Cheney administration we lost the second reincarnation of the energy bill and the Title V was passed.

What I learned in those battles was that unique priority rights—the fiduciary obligation governments have to Native Americans—defined by the our sacred treaties, trust relationships and other unique legal instruments— Native American and First Nations peoples have an important tool. We are the keystones in a hemispheric social movement strategy that could end the era of big oil and eventually usher in another paradigm from this current destructive time of free market economics.

The challenge would be to get people with power, both real and falsely perceived, to understand this reality. It is a task not easily accomplished. For example with the passing of the US energy bill under the second US Bush/Cheney administration the US climate movement began to ramp up its attempts to have the administration pass a domestic climate bill. A massive investment by Washington DC focused on strategies developed by the foundations and individual donors, most of it was earmarked to policymakers instead of building an inclusive movement for climate justice that would take into account this environmental and economic justice frame in the struggle to force the US to lead the world in emissions reductions.

This movement saw the rise of mega-labour/eNGO coalitions like the Blue/Green Alliance, Apollo Alliance and mega-eNGO groups like 1sky and 350.org. Citizen groups like the US Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG) received millions of dollars to try and organize people to put pressure on President Bush, and later President Obama, to adopt some form of climate policy. However, the strategy screamed that age-old saying “what goes around comes around”…again. There would be no climate bill under Bush and, to the surprising of the people who voted for him, no climate bill under Obama (yet).

The groups that ended up receiving resources from that limited pot of climate funding did what they did best, which was to invest in top-heavy policy campaigns. It did not focus on mobilizing the masses to get out in the streets; to target and stop local climate criminals or build a bona fide social movement rooted in an anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-oppressive foundation to combat the climate crisis. Instead, it kept the discourse focussed on voluntary technological and market-based approaches to mitigating climate change—like carbon trading and carbon capture and storage. I would argue that this frame is what kept this issue from bringing millions of Americans into the streets to stop the greenhouse gangsters from wrecking Mother Earth. Groups like the Indigenous Environmental Network, Southwest Workers Union and others fought tooth-and-nail to try and carve out pieces of these resources to go towards what we saw as the real carbon killers, which were local campaigns being lead by Indigenous Nations and communities of colour to stop coal mining, coal-fired power and big oil (including gas).

During the early hours of the Obama administration there was a massive effort to “green” the economic stimulus, this was a package of job creation funding that was to be doled out by the Obama administration to counter the Great recession, which had crippled the US economy. I had the opportunity to sit with some of the leaders of some of the biggest NGOs and foundations at a New York City roundtable, including members of the Obama White House team—high profile individuals like former Green Jobs Csar, Van Jones, and Energy Action/Mosaic Solar founder Billy Parish were also in attendance. At this table I told a story.

In the ’80s and ’90s America was in the grips of a recession, groups rose up from all sectors to create a strategy to combat the crisis. Alliances were formed between the trade unionists and the NGOs and social justice groups. When the negotiated target of funding was in sight and congress was about to write a check, groups became divided, and what was plentiful turned to scarcity and in the end AmeriCorp was born. Unions, NGOs and social justice groups, and more importantly, the unity they had created, was shattered. There were political games and divisive tactics used by those in power who used race, class and gender politics to divide a movement. I said that we were in the exact same moment in time, that we were seeing big oil ram through an energy bill loaded with corporate welfare for the 1% during the collapse of Americas middle-class and the stalling of a US climate bill, would impact the most vulnerable to our rapidly destabilizing climate—poor communities of colour and Native American communities.

America’s wealth, and more directly, America’s energy infrastructure was built on our backs. Efforts should be made to invest locally first—from training green jobs workers locally to using local building materials to producing energy locally— which would close the financial loop will help revitalize Native America’s strangled economies, making them less vulnerable to volatile external costs while maximizing the positive impact of the new green revolution.

A green jobs economy and a new, forward-thinking energy and climate policy would transform tribal and other rural economies, and provide the basis for an economic recovery in the United States. In order to make this possible we had to encourage the Obama Administration to provide incentives and assistance to actualize renewable energy development by tribes and Native organizations and our allies.

I made the argument that we could use the attributes of a predatory economic paradigm, that had disproportionately targeted our communities, to flip the script on our enemies and that Native Americans, with our unique rights-based and trust relationship with the US government. It could be a strategic and tactical asset to a diverse social movement trying to lobby for an economic stimulus bill that would actually help empower the most vulnerable while not exacerbating an ecological crisis. For this to work we would have to make moral agreements and not, under any circumstances, be denied. On the table was $750 million earmarked for green jobs and the task at hand was to determine how to equitably share the pot. In the media, the numbers of jobs created versus the amount of workers unemployed went from one million to five million and then back to one million and again. Once we got to the point where congress was ready to write a check, we saw the downfall of mega groups like the Apollo Alliance and the absorption of the 1SKY by 350.org. Many groups who started off at the table fell, one by one, with the first being groups representing racialized constituencies. Meanwhile in Indian Country, tribes saw congressional allocations from this economic stimulus packaged in the billions (rightfully so) and kept on keeping on.

The point of the story was that if we could truly understand the aspects of our struggle that kept us united, and more importantly, understand what our unique contributions to a successful social movement paradigm, we could effectively expanded the pot from 750 million dollars to billions. By converging struggles in a solidarity framework rooted in anti-racism, anti-oppression and anti-colonialism and by creating economic and political initiatives uniting urban and rural centres, we could wield a power never seen by our oppressors and actually gain economic independence and community self-determination. We could develop economies that didn’t force people to have to choose between clean air, water and earth, or putting food on the table. I did not attend this meeting to ask for handouts, but rather as an ambassador of a strategic framework that I had come to know as the Native rights-based approach, which could be used to bring to an end what Native American activist, author and Vice Presidential candidate, Winona LaDuke described as “predator economics” and what activist and author, Naomi Klein rightfully describes as “shock doctrine” economics.

Little did I know that all of these experiences were preparing me for what would be one of the biggest battles of my life. During the IEN Protecting Mother Earth Summit in 2006 in Northern Minnesota, three woman from a small, mostly native, village called Fort Chipewyan, Alberta came to share their Dene peoples struggle—years later it would be known as the most destructive industrial project on the face of the earth, the tar sands mega-project. These three woman were related to each other and represented three generations of one prominent family in Fort Chip known as the Deranger clan. They listened to the dozens of stories told in the energy and climate group about the injustices happening because of oil companies and complicit governments across Turtle Island. They told us about a project so large, so devastating that you had to see it to believe it. They spoke of a wild west of sorts, one of the last bastions of Earth were big oil was ramping up, and they spoke of the deaths in their community from rare cancers, auto-immune diseases and boomtown economics that plagued people living downstream from the tar sands. They said was that we needed to go up to Fort Chipewyan and help.

I was taking time off from organizing and living in Ottawa with my wife and newly born son, Felix. My lifetime mentor and friend Tom Goldtooth, Executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network took this invitation from the Deranger matriarch Rose Desjarlais very seriously. IEN immediately organized a fact-finding mission in the Athabasca region of the tar sands with our Native energy and climate director, Jihan Gearon, and Rainforest Action Network campaigner, Jocelyn Cheechoo, from the James Bay Cree in Northern Quebec. I was invited because of my experience in fighting big oil across Turtle Island.

When we flew into Fort McMurray, the boomtown in the heart of the tar sands, I was immediately struck by how much it reminded me of Anchorage, Alaska. That was the only other city I had ever been to that also reeked of oil money. The town had an infrastructure to support 35,000 people but was literally busting at the seams with a population of 75,000. Most were men between the ages of 18–60 and all working directly or indirectly for the tar sands sector. We took a tour of the infamous Hwy 63 loop to Fort McKay Cree Nation that carves though man-made desert tailings ponds so big you could see them from outer space. We marvelled at the 24-hour life of the city and the incredible traffic jams at shift change. I think what struck me most was the level of homelessness in a town where there was six-figure salary for anyone who wanted it. To see the tar sands themselves was devastating, to fly over endless clear cuts, open-pit mines and smoke stacks surrounded by pristine Cree and Dene peoples homelands was gut wrenching. When we drove through and walked in the tar sands the smell of bitumen filled our noses and lent to the trauma that locals live with every day.

We got on a bush plane at the Fort McMurray airport and flew to Fort Chipewyan, we flew the route of the Athabasca River—a critical life path of the people of that land, a source of water, fish and transportation and a spiritual connection to a past. We were told of how the river had changed, become poisoned, was no longer safe and how every year the water levels became lower due to industry use. When we got to Fort Chip we were well taken care of, and we met many elders, the elected leadership and youth who all told the same stories of hardship, the untimely sickness and death, and the destruction of a subsistence way of life—all by the tar sands. We heard about the history of the peoples going out into the Athabasca Delta and on to Lake Athabasca for food and medicine and how that was becoming impossible due to the massive regional contamination by industry. Again, we were told that we needed to help local grassroots people magnify this scandal to the world by amplifying their voices as the face of the issue.

After we took in the horrifying science fiction of the tar sands—and more importantly the power, beauty and resiliency of the people of this land they call Athabasca—Tom Goldtooth asked me to build the Canadian Indigenous Tar Sands Campaign. The first thing we did was raise funds for an action camp in Fort Chip where we could do a proper power mapping and skill share with community members who were leading local campaigns and wanted to scale them up. Our first action camp had around 15 community members, including tar sands warriors and climate movement folk hero’s like former Mikisew Cree Nation Chief George Poitras, local Dene activists Mike Mercredi and Lionel Lepine, Melina Lubicon Massimo, a Lubicon Cree activist, and Eriel Deranger, a Dene woman also of Fort Chipewyan.

We brought in resource people from the NGO sector. With the direction of local Indigenous leaders we organized a series of workshops on Aboriginal Law, organizing, campaign planning, power mapping and the Native rights-based approach. The outcome of the camp formed directives to launch a Native-lead campaign to stop the expansion of the tar sands; to utilize a treaty and Aboriginal rights-based framework; to ensure that Indigenous peoples on the front line where the face of the campaign; to raise the human health impacts as a moral issue; to follow the money financing the tar sands and to target those controlling it. Also, we were to advocate in the non-profit industrial complex that a meaningful proportion of funding and resources earmarked for tar sands work go directly to First Nations.

What came next would consume most of my waking time on Mother Earth for the next seven years. When IEN launched our tar sands campaign we knew that this issue was about to become one of, if not the most, visible campaigns on the planet. The local grassroots peoples were engaging with the most ruthless, powerful, well-resourced and just plain old evil corporate entities on the face of the planet. We knew that these companies had bought every level of colonial government, and many were in bed with our own First Nations governments. But we knew that if executed properly we would see victory. This multi-pronged campaign would contain elements of legal intervention, base-building, policy intervention (at all levels of government, including the United Nations), narrative-based story-telling strategies in conventional and social media, civil disobedience and popular education and a whole lot of prayer and ceremony.

Again, I found my self at a table of funders and eNGO directors discussing a massive campaign that would impact every segment of our society including our bio-sphere. I found myself viewed by my peers as without power and that perhaps I was at the table for handouts rather then with something to offer. The same old tricks of top-heavy, policy-focussed pitches by the usual suspects happened again. And I found myself repeating the need to take the time to understand and work in solidarity with the Native rights-based strategic framework. I talked about how in the last 30 years of Canadian environmentalism there had not been a major environmental victory won without First Nations at the helm asserting their Aboriginal rights and title. This included many of the victories that those in the room counted in their own personal careers. I argued passionately that we should agree on the fact that we needed to dedicate meaningful resources this approach and the decision would mean the difference between a fight lasting years or decades. During that meeting the facilitator representing the collective of foundations and donors that had contributed to a pot of money to fund anti-tar sands work became noticeably frustrated with our platform and things escalated to a point where he was yelling and swearing that our IEN campaign was “in the way” of plausible strategies that were actually going to work. Once the chastising was over I proceeded to say “Well, now that I know where your coming from and you know where IEN is at, how much of this funding are we going to get?” We walked out of that meeting with 50 000 dollars seed money to start our campaign.

From that moment to now, our Indigenous heroes, or should I say “‘She’roes” have successfully built an international movement to stop the Canadian tar sands. Supported by thousands of Native and non-Native allies, the campaign is now active in the United States, Canada and Europe with hundreds of First Nations, unions, NGOs, private-sector companies, municipalities, foundations and individuals participating and elevating First Nations and our rights-based strategic approach as the keystone to the campaign. Part of this success was achieved through some seriously gutsy moves, one being a visit of high-profile Hollywood director, James Cameron, to tour the tar sands right when his blockbuster movie Avatar had become the highest grossing film in history.

Cameron’s tour was done at the time when IEN was pushing hard for our Keystone XL campaign to be funded. It was an uphill battle since everyone knew that pipeline fights historically have usually been defeats. We had done an analysis on the viability of victory in a Keystone XL campaign for the funders, this was due to the fact that we were one of the only groups that had taken on the Keystone number one pipeline. Our analysis told us a couple things; in the US, the Oglala aquifer would be the primary ecological card, as millions depended on this source of water and the pipeline was right through the heart of it. We knew that the dozen or so US Tribes could be educated to use the power of their unique rights-based approach to fight the pipeline. We also knew that no one in the USA, especially in the heartland of the Dakota states, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas knew what the tar sands were. We knew by bringing James Cameron to the tar sands, and by having him talk about the human rights scandal unfolding in First Nations communities, during a time when Avatar was on every theatre screen on the planet would be huge boost to our cause.

Jim Cameron came, he saw, he met with the tar sands industry, the Alberta government and with First Nations. He made a lot of promises about direct support of the legal strategies of First Nations against the oil sector and the government of Canada. As an avid supporter of technological remedies, he did not condemn the tar sands, he spoke highly of nuclear energy as an alternative—as well as the emerging theoretical carbon capture and storage technologies. What he did do, was to say in front of the international press “I did not make Avatar until the technology was available for me to tell the story right, and the Canadian government should not develop the tar sands until they have the technology to not poison and kill First Nations people with cancers.”

Avatar part two and three are set to come out in 2015, I have a feeling that Cameron and his commitments to First Nations about directly funding the rights-based strategic framework are yet to be tested. The fallout from his visit was every newspaper, television, computer and smart phone in America was comparing the story of Avatar to the real-life situation unfolding between First Nations in the tar sands. The result was the emergence of the Keystone XL campaign as the lightning rod of the US environmental movement, a fight that’s still raging today and it was done through the lens of human rights.

The tar sands campaign of IEN started at a time when direct community funding was in the tens of thousands but over time and through pressure it is now in the millions. We’re still dealing with a non-profit industrial complex that is its own worst enemy. But Harper’s corrupt, totalitarian federal government—with their extremism—is pushing a larger base of non-Native allies to our side of the equation.

With the current Harper government and the passing of recent omnibus legislation, Canada has seen 30 years of environmental, social and economic policy thrown out. In response, we seen the rise of Idle No More, a catchy social media and education campaign launched—again by First Nations woman—and the result was a quickening of Canadian reconciliation with its own violent history of colonization as well as the rapid politicization of tens of thousands of Indigenous peoples occurring not just in Canada, but in all occupied lands across Mother Earth. Left without a pot to piss in, the conventional non-profit Industrial complex and their supporters are trying to figure out their next steps in dethroning Harper, a daunting task after the unsuccessful bid to elect the New Democratic Party in British Colombia.

The one area the Harper government has not been able to stack the cards is the courts, and a Native rights-based tactical and strategic framework—supported by labour, NGOs, students and other social movements scaled up to the proportions of the 1960s US civil rights movement—is what’s going to not only dethrone Harper, but is the last best effort save our resources from Canada’s extractive industries sector and the banks that finance them. This rights-based approach has been tested time and time again, it is enshrined in section 35 of the Canadian constitution, it has been validated by more then 170 supreme court victories, it is validated by all of the Indian treaties, it’s validated by the United Nations declaration on Indigenous Peoples, it’s validated by the ILO convention 169 and many, many other legal instruments. The racism that Idle No More has met in the media reminiscent of a 1950 Mississippi era toward Native peoples and our winning rights-based strategy has driven even the most conservative of Canadians to our side and even toppled some of the biggest architects of the free market neoliberal agenda such as the infamous US-trained lawyer and mentor to Canadian Prime Minister Harper, Thomas Flanagan. We have come too far as Indigenous peoples to give up who we are, we have always been kind and again we will share the wealth and abundance of our homelands with our relatives from across the pond. Instead of lessons on how to survive the harsh winters of our lands, today we are offering lessons on how to be resilient and to overcome the oppression from the archaic oil sector and in our own government who have lost their minds with power.

We are faced with tremendous odds, the end of the era of cheap energy, the loss of ecosystems to sustain unfettered economic growth and, of course, the global climate crisis. We must understand that these are all symptoms of a much larger problem called capitalism. This economic system was born from notions of manifest destiny, the papal bull, the doctrines of discovery and built up with the free labour of slaves, on stolen Indian lands. We have much to do in America and Canada to bring our peoples into a meaningful process of reconciliation. I have learned that our movement is very much lead by woman, this is something I am very comfortable with given the fact that I am a Cree man and we are a matriarchal society. There is a powerful metaphor between the economic policies of this country Canada and the USA and their treatment of our Indigenous woman and girls. When you look at the extreme violence taking place againsts the sacredness of Mother Earth in the tar sands for example and the fact that this represents the greatest driver of both Canadian and US economies, then you look at the lack of action being taken on the thousands of First Nations woman and girls who have been murdered or just disappeared, it all begins to all make sense. It’s also why our woman have been rising up and taking power back from the smothering forces of patriarchy dominating our economic, political and social and I would say spiritual institutions. When we turn things around as a peoples, it will be the woman who lead us, and it will be the creative feminine principal they carry that will give us the tools we need to build another world. Indigenous peoples have been keeping a tab on what has been stolen from our lands, which the creator put us on to protect, and there is a day coming soon where we will collect. Until then, we will keep our eyes on the prize, organize and live our lives in a good way and we welcome you to join us on this journey.

Clayton Thomas-Muller is a member of the Mathias Colomb Cree Nation also known as Pukatawagan in Northern Manitoba, Canada. Based out of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Clayton is the co-director of the Indigenous Tar Sands (ITS) Campaign of the Polaris Institute as well as a volunteer organizer with the Defenders of the Land-Idle No More national campaign known as Sovereignty Summer.

Clayton is involved in many initiatives to support the building of an inclusive movement globally for energy and climate justice. He serves on the board of the Global Justice Ecology Project, Canadian based Raven Trust and Navajo Nation based, Black Mesa Water Coalition. Clayton has travelled extensively domestically and internationally leading Indigenous delegations to lobby United Nations bodies including the UN framework Convention on Climate Change, UN Earth Summit (Johannesburg, South Africa 2002 and Rio +20, Brazil 2012) and the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Clayton has coordinated and lead delegations of First Nations, Native American and Alaska Native elected and grassroots leadership to lobby government in Washington DC, USA, Ottawa, Canada, and European Union (Strasbourg and Brussels).

He has been recognized by Utne Reader as one of the top 30 under 30 activists in the United States and as a “Climate Hero 2009” by Yes Magazine. For the last eleven years he has campaigned across Canada, Alaska and the lower 48 states organizing in hundreds of First Nations, Alaska Native and Native American communities in support of grassroots Indigenous Peoples to defend against the encroachment of the fossil fuel industry. This has included a special focus on the sprawling infrastructure of pipelines, refineries and extraction associated with the Canadian tar sands.

Clayton is an organizer, facilitator, public speaker and writer on environmental and economic justice. He has been published in multiple books, newspapers and magazines and appeared countless times on local, regional, national and international television and radio as an expert advocate on Indigenous rights, environmental and economic justice. He has been a guest lecturer at universities, conferences and seminars around the world. He is also a member of Canadian Dimension’s editorial collective.

Follow Clayton Thomas-Muller on Twitter: @creeclayton

BC’s Election Stunner: Five Lessons for the Left

Murray Dobbin — 2013-05-22T13:03:40+00:00

The NDP’s stunning loss in B.C. is being deconstructed, dissected, analyzed and mourned over not only here but across the country. Every pundit and political junkie, including me, thought the NDP would win, even after their lead suddenly dropped. But unfortunately, most of the analysis won’t be very helpful for those individuals and organizations hoping and fighting for a better country.

Just as we are trapped in an arcane excuse for democracy (it was never meant to be democratic, it is designed to manage capitalism), we are also trapped in the same paradigm when it comes to figuring out why elections are won or lost. We sit down, list off a half dozen reasons, we agree and disagree, refine the answers and gradually move on to some other disconnected political element of the universe.

It’s not that the reasons aren’t important. So long as politics is done this way the players (98 per cent of citizens are just observers) have to learn how they screwed up the game. For those not already immersed in the tortuous autopsy of the NDP loss here are a few factors.

Vote split.

In B.C., if the left vote is split at all, the NDP loses. This time around the Greens were competing vigorously (it is B.C. after all) with the NDP in many progressive ridings and in 13 seats the combined Green and NDP votes would have defeated the Liberal candidate. (The final tally: Libs 50, NDP 33, Greens 1.) But it’s never that simple — not all Green voters have the NDP as their second choice and some wouldn’t vote at all if there was no Green candidate.

Reversal on pipeline process.

Another issue related to the Green/NDP contest was possibly the single mostdamaging to the party. In the final two weeks of the campaign Dix reversed himself on the Kinder Morgan pipeline which would bring more tar sands goop to the port of Vancouver. He came out against it after saying he would wait for a review to be completed. It was meant to take thewind out of the sails of the Greens but instead it put wind in the Liberals’. It played perfectly into Clark’s singular focus: the economy and who would manage it best. It seemed to confirm that Dix (the notorious memo back-dater) could not be trusted and wasn’t concerned about the economy.

Outcampaigned.

But in general, the NDP just ran a lack-lustre campaign with no real vision — just a shopping list of things they would do (some of them very good). “Change for the better” was a deliberately cautious slogan but seemed designed for insomniacs. In this case the whole was less than the sum of its parts.

The Liberals, despite being saddled with an unpopular premier, ran a brilliant campaign — if winning at any cost was the name of the game, which it is. Relentlessly negative messaging and fear mongering ground people down — those who didn’t buy into the fear were equally likely to bedisgusted with the process and simply tune out and stay away from the polls. Turnout was a record low. Dix, who I think would have made an excellent premier, was vulnerable on the trust and character issue for the memo back-dating and failure to pay a Skytrain fare. Small stuff in the larger scheme of things, but turned into defining charcteristics by tens of thousands of repetitions on radio and TV.

Combining the trust issue with the decades old right-wing attack on the NDP’s economic “credibility” was enough to make some people doubt that change would be for the better after all. The economy is always the NDP’s Achilles heel. The party tends to stay away from the broad issue out of fear the media will eviscerate it. But ignoring the economy just makes the Liberal attacks a self-fulfilling prophecy: it takes the NDP out of the game and makes people wonder why they don’t talk about it. The facts, of course, suggest the Liberals were criminally irresponsible on the economy — from the BC Rail scandal to the obscene giveaway of hydro resources, to the gutting of government revenue with tax cuts to their friends.

Positively ill-advised.

But the NDP barely mentioned those facts and chose instead to turn the other cheek — and become a punching bag for Liberal assaults. The party decided to run a positive campaign and this is really the lesson of the election loss. A friend wrote to me saying running a positive campaign is like “bringing flowers to a gun fight.”

Don’t get me wrong. You can design a campaign that projects a positive vision of the future but two things about the NDP’s approach doomed it failure. First, you can’t run a positive campaign in a month. It takes time to engage people in a vision of the future, even one they agree with. Secondly, the NDP tied one hand behind its back by failing to hold the Liberals to account for the horrible, destructive policies they implemented over twelve long years.

Presumably, the election brain trust, led by Brian Topp the quintessential back-room boy, (now teamed up in a consulting firm with Ken Boessenkool, a former Harper confidante) decided that this would be “negative.” Nonsense. It was in fact grossly irresponsible not to put the Liberal record front and centre. If you want to contrast yourself with your opponent how do you do that without talking about what their record is? The Liberals’ vicious attacks on Dix cannot be likened to exposing the Liberals for what they actually did to the province. People have notoriously short memories — and the Liberals rode them to victory.

Party system.

Perhaps the real dilemma facing the left is the nature of party politics itself. A tiny percentage of people belong to the NDP and Green parties and even within these parties there is little in the way of continuous engagement, political education, and social activity that is so critical to building community. This is where the failure of the month long, list-of-promises, positive campaign is rooted.

In Saskatchewan where I come from, Tommy Douglas and the CCF (the precursor of the NDP) wonpower in 1944 in a province totally dominated by a Liberal, pro-business party machine for decades. It won a landslide victory in a media atmosphere of absolute hysteria (headline: CCF will seize farms), fear-mongering and blatant lies. The CCF held power for 20 uninterrupted years. How? It started out as a movement and retained that character for many years afterward. It was deeply rooted in community. People felt ownership of it and its policies and out of that came government programs that met the expressed needs of the people. And that, in turn, brought enormous trust in government.

People’s distrust of government now runs so deep that it will take years of trust-building to regain some democratic equilibrium.That means a totally different kind of politics and a totally different kind of political party. Progressive parties run by brain trusts, engaging in politics as a game, will ultimately lose. For them progressive policies are simply pieces on a chess board, not part of a larger vision. And the longer this style of politics goes on, the more institutionalized and inward looking such parties, including the NDP, become.

When Preston Manning founded the Reform Party in 1989 he said that if it hadn’t achieved power in 20 years he would dissolve it and make room for something else. It actually happened sooner than that, of course. Manning wasn’t married to any political party, even his own. He was committed to changing the world. Just a thought.

Harper stokes resentments in discreet class war

Linda McQuaig — 2013-05-17T19:39:02+00:00

The willingness of much of the Canadian media to go along with the Conservative narrative about Stephen Harper’s “moderation” has allowed the prime minister to wage a discreet class war against working people without attracting too much attention.

Canadians don’t like Harper’s anti-worker agenda — when they notice it. That’s why there’s been such a public outcry since the temporary foreign worker program was exposed as a mechanism by which the Harper government has flooded the country with hundreds of thousands of cheap foreign workers, thereby suppressing Canadian wages in the interests of helping corporations.

Apart from this clumsy fiasco, the Harperites have been adroit at keeping their anti-worker bias under the radar. Instead, they’ve directed their attacks against unions, portraying them as undemocratic organizations run by “union bosses” who ignore the interests of ordinary workers.

It’s revealing that this harsh critique of unions largely comes from business think-tanks and conservative politicians — folks who aren’t generally known for championing workers’ rights but who apparently can’t sleep at night at the thought workers aren’t being well represented by the people they elect to run their unions.

Of course, the real reason Harper attacks unions is because they’ve been effective in promoting the interests of working people over the past century. By establishing norms for higher wages and benefits in the workplace, and by pushing governments to implement universal social programs, unions are largely the reason we have a middle class in this country.

But Harper has long aspired to crush union power — as his hero Margaret Thatcher did in Britain. Thatcher’s legacy is severe inequality in Britain, just as Ronald Reagan’s anti-unionism promoted extreme inequality in the U.S. Canada is rapidly catching up to both.

Since winning his majority, the prime minister has increasingly given vent to his anti-union venom. Last fall, he brought in a bill placing an onerous and unnecessary financial reporting burden on unions, while sparing professional and business associations a similar burden.

Breaking the back of public sector unions is key to any plan to smash labour power in Canada, since the public sector is much more unionized — 75 per cent, compared to just 16 per cent of the private sector — and therefore better equipped to withstand attacks.

So Harper’s latest salvo — legislation enabling the cabinet to intervene in collective bargaining at Crown corporations — is aimed at revving up his campaign against public sector unions.

Business think-tanks, like the Fraser Institute, are helping out by generating papers showing that pay is higher in the public sector.

That’s true; that’s what collective action achieves. But the difference is not dramatic, and is mostly due to higher public sector wages for women and minorities in low-paid jobs. This is offset by generally lower pay for public sector professionals and managers, compared with their private sector counterparts, notes Andrew Jackson, senior policy adviser to the Broadbent Institute.

But harping on the allegedly overpaid public sector allows the Harper team to do what it does best: drive a wedge between people. Harper hopes to stoke resentments in struggling private sector workers, duping them into thinking the big rewards have gone to public sector workers rather than to where they’ve actually gone — into corporate coffers and CEO pay.

There are raw emotions at play here. Knocking down public sector workers a peg or two might provide satisfaction to private sector workers who’ve seen their own wages and benefits eroded, and yet have to pay taxes that fund public sector salaries.

The problem is that once the powerful public sector unions are gutted, there won’t be much left of the Canadian labour movement, leaving workers not much better protected than their predecessors in the early industrial era who risked their lives battling for the right to unionize.

Of course, without unions, working people will be able to rely on new tools like … well … social media.

As Harper draws on the full resources of the state to ramp up his class war, workers can count on tweeting any of their concerns or sharing Facebook photos of their friends working longer hours for less.

This article originally appeared in the Toronto Star. Used with permission.

Defeating Harper from Below

Editorial — 2013-05-14T16:40:08+00:00

Fast-paced changes over the previous four elections have transformed Canada’s federal political landscape. The Liberal Party’s vote has been halved and the Bloc Québécois suffered nearly as badly. The NDP made spectacular, if still precarious, gains under Jack Layton, with a historically unprecedented showing in Québec. Only the Conservatives’ advance from official opposition in 2004 to majority government in 2011 seemed inexorable.

The swaggeringly pro-capitalist, neoliberal and militarist Harper juggernaut makes enquiring into its limits seem impertinent. So, prima facie, do developments elsewhere. The 2008 financial crisis, the greatest crisis of neoliberalism, appeared to reinforce the power of capital everywhere. Austerity — turbo-charged attacks on welfare, labour and public services — rules throughout the Global North.

However, a longer historical perspective appears more encouraging.

The New Right — exemplified by the Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney governments — arguably peaked in the 1980s. And even then, it never captured hearts and minds. New Right governments were formed on a minority of the vote magnified into a majority of seats by the Anglosphere’s first-past-the- post electoral systems. Of course, the intellectual, political and electoral disorientation of social democratic parties helped enormously.

By the 1990s, however, social democratic governments like those of Blair, Clinton and Schroeder acceded to power, having made themselves “electable” again not by reconstituting a coherent politics of the Left but by stealing New Right’s ideological clothes. They extended neoliberalism’s life at the price of hollowing out their own social base. Thereafter parties of the right returned to power only on the basis of an even shallower electoral achievement. Republicans won only one election of the six held since 1988; the British Tories have failed to win a majority since John Major’s in 1992. And the Canadian Conservatives won one in 2011, their first since Mulroney’s second win in 1988.

The New Right faces two fundamental problems. First, neoliberalism has never worked materially for enough people to consolidate the New Right electorally. It failed to produce growth without blowing asset bubbles which took income and wealth inequality off modern-day charts. This failure has led right parties to deploy all manner of other instruments — notably racism disguised as policy discussions on immigration, and in Canada on aboriginal issues too — to shore up its support and divide the opposition.

The second contradiction of the New Right is between the social conservatives without whom it cannot fight elections and the social liberals without whom it cannot win them. Harper has attempted to deal with this by gagging social conservative candidates, MPs and cabinet ministers, a practice which regularly runs into highly public trouble.

The Harper Conservatives achieved their majority in 2011 as passive beneficiaries of factors not of their making. Even so, the best they could do was just shy of 40 percent of those voting. Nevertheless, until the electoral system changes, Harper can continue to win majority governments with little popular support and a plurality of votes.

It might be tempting for those of us on the independent Left to fiddle with electoral manoeuvring to finally oust the Harper Tories. We leave that to others. This is not our function. Our job is to work with indigenous, environmental and other social movements to campaign against the Harper government’s efforts to dismantle the gains of the past and stifle dissent and to expose the Harperites as a class government representing only the interests of the 1 percent. This is the main reason Canadian Dimension has not been among the advocates of an electoral coalition aimed at defeating Harper — an initiative which was in any case dead in the water with the election of Justin Trudeau as Liberal Party leader. Rather than fighting Harper on the thin turf likely to be mounted by the NDP and the Liberals, we on the independent Left need to organize ourselves to join vigorous fightback mobilizations while pushing forward for structural change toward a more just society. That can mean campaigning door-to-door with flyers, holding teach-ins or organizing public assemblies or mass meetings, and using various forms of social media. It can also mean taking part in walk-outs or other forms of civil disobedience, or work-ins such as protesting closures or cutbacks in hospitals. And it can mean joining strikes against mounting user fees, such as the courageous Québec student strike against tuition hikes, or organizing days of action against austerity similar to Ontario’s Days of Action against the Mike Harris government back in the 90s, or like the political strikes going on all over southern Europe. Putting our backs into blockades might be the best tactic to halt environmentally devastating resource extraction. There is a lot to take on beyond the ballot box, both before and after 2015!

Québec Solidaire congress reaffirms the party’s independence from the neoliberal parties

Richard Fidler — 2013-05-07T16:36:48+00:00

I had to balance my agenda this past weekend (May 3-5) between two events: the congress of the Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, held here in Ottawa; and the Ninth Congress of Québec Solidaire, held at the University of Quebec in Montréal (UQAM).

The following are some notes on the latter event, which I was able to attend on the final day, Sunday, when some important decisions were made by the more than 600 delegates. This was the largest congress to date for this party, founded in 2006, which doubled its membership to 14,000 during the past year in the wake of the student upsurge. My account is supplemented by some additional details on the proceedings of the previous two days provided by QS delegate Marc Bonhomme and media reports.

A major objective of the congress was to update and supplement the party’s platform in the 2012 Quebec election, in anticipation of another election expected within the next year or so, as the Parti Québécois government lacks a majority in the National Assembly.The congress also had to update the party’s financial structure to correspond to new party-finance legislation; elect a new president of the party; launch the next phase in the party’s process of adopting a program; and draw a balance-sheet on its experience in attempts to negotiate electoral alliances with other pro-independence political parties.

‘Credibility’ and pipelines

Heading into the congress, party leader Françoise David told the media that QS had to ensure its platform in the next election featured “credible” economic proposals — code for moderate measures that do not offer a perspective of going beyond capitalism. She repeated this message in her opening remarks to the congress. David and her fellow QS MNA Amir Khadir then followed up with a news conference featuring the party’s Green Plan, unveiled in the 2012 election, which won plaudits from environmental activists but was consistent with a “green capitalist” orientation — even though the Green Plan was not on the congress agenda!

The congress did in fact effect a minor re-orientation, although not necessarily along the lines David was proposing. It approved stronger measures to counter tax evasion; greater support for French-language training and integration of non-Francophone immigrants; increased access to government information including establishment of a national (Quebec) public high-speed digital network; secondary and tertiary transformation of resources by “local enterprises…making government assistance conditional on compliance with social responsibility and tight environmental criteria within a perspective of transition to promote self-managed and socialized enterprises”; improvements in teachers’ working conditions and democratization of the universities; increased support to the homeless and increased independent monitoring and control of the police including, of course, repeal of repressive legal constraints on demonstrations. (Québec solidaire already agitates for dropping the thousands of charges laid against demonstrators during the past year.)

The congress also agreed to launch an ecology campaign later this year. It will focus on a number of themes including the need for the construction of mass public transit facilities, which would gradually move toward providing transit free of charge to users. And in the debate on the party’s definition of its political objective in the forthcoming election, the delegates voted that QS present itself “as a party prepared to govern, defending the common good [bien commun], and the only alternative to neoliberal policies.” A proposal to define the platform as “reasonable” (code for “credible”) was rejected. A nuance, but signifying unease with David’s formulation, some delegates told me.

An emergency resolution, adopted in the closing moments of the congress without much debate, calls on the party to “support citizens’ efforts to have an extensive and open debate on Quebec’s pipeline projects.” This refers mainly to various proposals, unopposed by the PQ government and the other parties, to bring tar sands products into and through Quebec. These projects, strongly opposed by Quebec environmentalists, have not been addressed so far by the QS members of the National Assembly. Furthermore, some of their recent statements have left the door open to support of oil and gas development in the Gulf of St. Lawrence — although the QS Green Plan opposed this development and called for “an exit from petroleum” for Quebec.

New QS president favours ‘a party of the streets’

Four candidates contested the election of party president, to be co-spokesperson with Françoise David. (Under the male-female parity rule in the QS statutes, the party president now had to be a male.) The candidates’ platforms, which were debated in the weeks leading up to the congress, reflected somewhat distinct views on how each conceived the party’s course in the immediate future. Delegates elected Andrés Fontecilla on the first ballot, which means he got more than half the votes (the actual count was not disclosed). Fontecilla had campaigned on a relatively left platform that emphasized the need for the party to avoid parliamentary opportunism and give greater emphasis to its extra-parliamentary and extra-electoral activity as a “party of the streets” as well as the ballot-boxes.

Fontecilla is of Chilean origin. He came to Quebec while still in his early teens, his family fleeing the Pinochet dictatorship. A self-professed “child of Law 101,” like other immigrant children after the mid-1970s required to attend French public schools, he is a fluent orator with just a trace of a Castilian accent in his speech. A well-known social activist, with a background in the student movement and Latin American solidarity, Andrés won 24% of the popular vote as QS candidate in Laurier-Dorion, a multi-ethnic riding in downtown Montréal, in the last election. He summarized his approach in a pre-congress article (my translation from the French):

“…the parliamentary struggle and the electoral activity it involves are but one aspect of the equation. They must be complemented by the mobilization of broad social sectors and by the development of an organizational culture within the party….

“Our party aims, ultimately, to ‘go beyond capitalism.’ Although Québec Solidaire has not fully defined this concept, our project implies some fundamental transformations in our economic and political system with a view to achieving greater redistribution of our collective wealth and a deepening of our democracy.

“This ambitious program cannot be adapted to shortcuts aimed at obtaining more seats in the National Assembly. Our election victories must therefore count on a thoroughly deliberate support from an electorate that desires not only to get rid of a government at the end of the race but to build another, radically different Quebec.

“The best guarantee of development of our program is found in its radicalness and originality. These orientations reduce the possibilities for electoral alliances with other parties, but they enable us to stay the course. In the middle and longer term this will pay off since the electorate will see clearly that our proposals are not diluted in an exclusive search for more deputies.”

In his victory speech at the congress, Fontecilla (who addressed the delegates as “comrades,” a term not often heard in QS), pointedly emphasized the importance of joining in the struggle against petroleum development in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the various pipeline projects.

No electoral agreements with the neoliberal parties

A QS congress in March 2011 had debated and rejected proposals from party leaders David and Khadir, among others, that the party try to negotiate “tactical” electoral agreements with the PQ or the Greens (Verts) that would have each party refrain from running candidates against the others in selected ridings, and thus facilitate the election of QS MNAs. The issue arose again in December 2012, when the QS National Council mandated the party’s National Coordinating Committee (the party executive) to probe the possibilities for political and even organizational rapprochement with Option Nationale (ON), a new independentist party originating in a 2011 split from the PQ. By then it was already evident that an agreement with the PQ was a pipedream, and in any event the current PQ government’s right-wing drift was already alienating even large sections of its base.

This congress received a report on the overture to the ON, based on three formal meetings between ON leaders and a QS delegation that included Françoise David, and the attendance of two QS leaders at the recent ON congress. The report concluded that “it would appear premature… to end the discussions,” while conceding that an electoral agreement for the next election seemed to be ruled out. It found that while the two parties might agree on sovereignty, electoral reform, free post-secondary education and a few other issues, ON “is not a party that will fight social injustice” and is indifferent or hostile to feminism. And its independentism is essentially a remake of the PQ’s “neither left nor right” version — that is, the neoliberal status quo.

After a general debate on electoral alliances the QS congress delegates voted by a substantial majority to reject any alliance with another political party while remaining “open to any common action and collaboration with any group that concurs with our platform.”

Greater dependence on state funding

The debate on party finances was imposed by two problems.

On the one hand, the QS national office and structures are heavily indebted from expenses incurred during the last three election campaigns, although the local riding associations are mostly debt-free. The QS National Council in December decided that two-thirds of the state election expenses rebate would henceforth go to the national office, the remaining one-third to the local associations. It also established a committee to look at longer-term solutions and report to this convention.

On the other hand, the new PQ government’s election financing reforms — ostensibly motivated by the recent revelations of massive corruption resulting from under-the-table payments to the big-business parties under assumed names and straw men, in circumvention of legislated limits on corporate political contributions — have (inter alia) limited per capita voter contributions to parties to $100 a year and abolished the tax credit. But they raise state subsidies to recognized parties to $1.50 per voter from the previous 87 cents, while making further state funding contingent on how much a party receives in voter contributions, the amounts per voter increasing the more contributions the party receives.

The combined effect of these legislated reforms is to make the party much more dependent on state funding and its electoral results. This will inevitably reinforce pressures on the party to adapt its policies, actions and election platforms to whatever it deems most acceptable to the broadest layers of its potential electorate.

I won’t go into detail on the specific proposals debated and adopted at this congress, in part because I was not present at the debate. However, I am told the committee’s proposals were largely accepted, although many local associations understandably complained that the greater centralization of finances in the national office would restrict their already-limited autonomy at fund-raising efforts. And it will require closer membership scrutiny of spending decisions by the national leadership, which has already displayed its penchant for mass media exposure, often at the expense of political clarity.

Debate opens on feminism, family and sexual diversity

This convention also launched the party debate on the fourth stage of debating and adopting a more comprehensive program for the party. This stage will be devoted to developing the party’s underlying approach and proposals on feminism and issues related to it, including the situation of women in the party and the continued implementation of parity representation of men and women at all levels of Québec Solidaire. Like the previous stages of the program adoption, party members will be encouraged to involve non-party activists in the debate.

The participation notebook for this phase — labelled “For a Feminist Society of Solidarity: Women, Families, Sexual and Gender Diversity” — was introduced at this congress, in a discussion held mid-way through the proceedings. In coming weeks and months, further materials will be circulated, an educational camp will be held, and then proposals from the ranks will be presented for debate, following which (in May 2014) a congress will be held to adopt a program.

Any observer of Québec Solidaire will be impressed by the strong presence of women in party structures and debates and other activities. For example, QS is the first party in North America to present a full slate of candidates in recent elections that was 50% or more composed of women. This is a unique feature of the party, and a major factor in its success so far in establishing a solid presence in Quebec’s political landscape. It contrasts very favourably with the dismal record of so many “left of the left” parties of the past, mainly of Stalinist orientation but including more than a few of Trotskyist or related origins. The UK Socialist Workers Party is only the latest of these ersatz “Leninist” parties to suffer ignominy over the arbitrary and authoritarian actions of its male-dominated leadership.

Some of Quebec’s relatively large Maoist (“Marxist-Leninist”) parties of the 1970s imploded in the early 1980s in part as a result of a belated feminist challenge among their membership, and a fair number of QS leaders learned from that experience — not least Françoise David herself, who went on to become a leader of the Quebec Women’s Federation and initiator of the March for Bread and Roses and later the World March of Women before participating in the foundation of Québec Solidaire. But, as many QS women will tell you, there are still some major challenges to be met in educating the party as a whole on the question of feminism and women’s liberation. This promises to be a rich debate.

Boston and Venezuela: Terrorism There and Here

James Petras — 2013-05-06T16:42:24+00:00

Two major terrorists’ attacks took place almost simultaneously: in Boston, two Chechen terrorists set off bombs during the annual Boston Marathon killing three people and injuring 170; in Venezuela, terrorist-supporters of defeated presidential candidate, Henrique Capriles, assassinated eight and injured 70 supporters of victorious Socialist Party candidate Nicolas Maduro, in the course of firebombing 8 health clinics and several Party offices and homes.

In the case of Boston, the terrorist spree resulted in one further fatality — one of the perpetrators; in Venezuela, some of the terrorists are under arrest but their political mentors are still free and active — in fact they are now presented as ‘victims of repression’ by the US media.

By examining the context, politics, government responses and mass media treatment of these terrorist acts we can gain insight into the larger meaning of terrorism and how it reflects, not merely the hypocrisy of the US government and mass media, but the underlying politics that encourages terrorism.

Context of Terrorism: From Chechnya to Boston: A Dangerous Game

Chechnya has been an armed battleground for over two decades pitting the secular Russian State against local Muslim fundamentalist separatists. Washington, fresh from arming and financing Muslim jihadis in a successful war against the secular Soviet-backed Afghan regime in the 1980s, expanded its aid program into Central Asian and Caucasian Muslim regions of the former Soviet Union. Russian military might ultimately defeated the Chechen warlords but many of their armed followers fled to other countries, joining armed, extremist, Islamist groups in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and later Egypt, Libya and now Syria. While accepting Western, especially US, arms to fight secular adversaries of the US Empire, the jihadis’ ultimate goal has been a clerical (Islamic) regime. Washington and the Europeans have played a dangerous game: using Muslim fundamentalists as shock troops to defeat secular nationalists, while planning to dump them in favor of neoliberal ‘moderate’ Muslim or secular client regimes afterwards.

This cynical policy has backfired everywhere — including in the US. Fundamentalists in Afghanistan took state power after the Soviets pulled out. They opposed the US, which invaded Afghanistan after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and have successfully engaged in a 12-year war of attrition with Washington and NATO, spawning powerful allies in Pakistan and elsewhere. Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan serve as training bases and a ‘beacon’ for terrorists the world over.

The US invasion of Iraq and overthrow of President Saddam Hussein led to 10 years of Al Qaeda and related-clerical terrorism in Iraq, wiping out the entire secular society. In the case of Libya and Syria, NATO and Gulf State arms have greatly expanded the arsenals of terrorist fundamentalists in North and Sub-Sahara Africa and the Middle East. Western-sponsored fundamentalist terrorists were directly related to the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington and there is little doubt that the recent actions of the Chechen bombers in Boston are products of this latest upsurge of NATO-backed fundamentalist advances in North Africa and the Middle East.

But against all the evidence to the contrary, Chechen terrorists are viewed by the White House as “freedom fighters” engaged in liberating their country from the secular Russians…perhaps after the Boston terror attack, that appraisal will change.

Venezuela: Presenting Terrorism as “Peaceful Dissent”

The candidate of the US backed and financed opposition, Henrique Capriles, has lived up to his reputation for violent politics. In the run-up to his failed candidacy in the Venezuelan presidential election on April 15, his followers sabotaged power lines causing frequent national blackouts. His supporters among the elite hoarded basic consumer items, causing shortages, and repeatedly threatened violence if the election went against them. With over 100 international observers from the United Nations, European Commission and the Jimmy Carter Center there to certify the Venezuelan elections, Capriles and his inner circle unleashed their street gangs, who proceeded to target Socialist voters, campaign workers, health clinics, newly-built low-income housing projects and Cuban doctors and nurses.

The “white terror” resulted in eight deaths and 70 injuries. Over 135 right-wing street thugs were arrested and 90 were charged with felonies, conspiracy to commit murder and destroy public property. Capriles, violent political credentials go back at least a decade earlier when he played a major role in the bloody coup which briefly overthrew President Hugo Chávez in 2002. Capriles led a gang of armed thugs and assaulted the Cuban embassy, arresting legitimate Cabinet ministers who had taken refuge. After a combined military and popular mass movement restored President Chávez, Capriles was placed under arrest for violence and treason. The courageous Venezuelan Attorney General, Danilo Anderson, was in the process of prosecuting Capriles and several hundred of his terrorist supporters when he was assassinated by a car bomb — planted by supporters of the failed coup.

Though Capriles electoral propaganda was given a face-lift — he even called himself a candidate of the “center-left” and a supporter of several of President Chávez’s “social missions,” his close ties with terrorist operatives were revealed by his call for violent action as soon as his electoral defeat was announced. His thinly veiled threat to organize a “mass march” and seize the headquarters of the electoral offices was only called off when the government ordered the National Guard and the Armed Forces on high alert. Clearly Capriles’s terror tactics were only pulled back in the face of greater force. When the legal order decided to defend democracy and not yield to terrorist blackmail, Capriles temporarily suspended violent activity and regrouped his forces, allowing the legal-electoral face of his movement to come to the fore.

Responses to Terror: Boston and Venezuela

In response to the terrorist incident in Boston, the local, state and federal police were mobilized and literally shut down the entire city and its transport networks and went on a comprehensive and massive ‘manhunt’: the mass media and the entire population were transformed into tools of a police state investigation. Entire blocks and neighborhoods were scoured as thousands of heavily-armed police and security forces went house-to-house, room-to-room, dumpster-to-dumpster looking for a wounded 19-year-old college freshman. A terror alert was raised for the entire country and overseas police networks and intelligence agencies were involved in the search for the terrorist assassins. The media and the government constantly showed photos of the victims, emphasizing their horrific injuries and the gross criminality of the act: it was unthinkable to discuss any political dimensions to the act — it was presented, pure and simple, as an act of political terror directed at ‘cowering the American people and their elected government.’ Every government official demanded that anyone, even remotely linked, to the crime or criminals face the full force of the law.

On the other hand and coinciding with the attack in Boston, when the Venezuelan oppositionist terrorists launched their violent assault on the citizens and public institutions they were given unconditional support by the Obama regime, which claimed the killers were really ‘democrats seeking to uphold free elections.’ Secretary of State Kerry refused to recognize the electoral victory of President Maduro. Despite the carnage, the Venezuelan government did not declare martial law: at most the National Guard and loyalist police upheld the law and arrested several dozen protestors and terrorists; many of the former — not directly linked to violence — were quickly released. Moreover, despite the internationally certified elections by over 100 observers, the Maduro government conceded the chief demand for an electoral recount — in the hope of averting further right-wing bloodshed.

US Media Response

All the major Western news agencies, including the principle ‘respectable’ print media (Financial Times, New York Times and Washington Post) converted the Venezuelan political assassins into ‘peaceful protestors’ who were victimized for attempting to register their dissent. In other words, Washington and the entire media came out in full force in favor of political terror perpetrated against an adversarial democratic government, while invoking a near-martial law state for a brutal, but limited, act of terror in the US. Washington apparently does not make the connection between its support of terrorism abroad and its spread to the US.

The US media has blocked out discussion of the ties between Chechen terrorist front groups, based in the US and UK, and leading US neoconservatives, including Rudolph Giuliani, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adleman, Elliott Abrams, Midge Dector, Frank Gaffney and R. James Woolsey — all leading members of the self-styled ‘American Committee for Peace in Chechnya’ (re-named Committee for Peace in the Caucasus after the horrific Beslan school massacre). These Washington luminaries are all full-throated supporters of the ‘war on terror’ or should we say supporters of ‘terror and war’ (“Chechen Terrorists and the Neocons” by former FBI official Coleen Rowley 4/19/13). The headquarters and nerve center for many ‘exile’ Chechen leaders, long sought by Russian authorities for mass terrorist activities, is Boston, Massachusetts — the site of the bombing — another ‘fact’ thus far ignored by the FBI and the Justice Department, perhaps because of long-standing and on-going working relations in organizing terrorist incidents aimed at destabilizing Russia.

Former Presidential candidate and New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, after the bombing, stated that Chechens ‘were only focused (sic) on Russia’ and not on the US (his Chechens perhaps). Interpol and US intelligence Agencies are well aware that Chechen militants have been involved in several Al Qaeda terrorist groups throughout South and Central Asia as well as the Middle East. The Russian government’s specific inquiries regarding any number of suspected Chechen terrorists or fronts have been given short shrift — apparently including the activities of one Tamerlan Tsarnaev, recently deceased.

(As a historical aside (and perhaps not unrelated), the Boston-based FBI was notorious from the 1970s through the 1990s for protecting a brutal gangster hit man, James ‘Whitey’ Bulger, as a privileged informant, while he murdered dozens of individuals in the New England area.)

The Deeper Meaning of the War on Terrorism

US support for Venezuelan terrorists and their political leader, Henrique Capriles, is part of a complex multi-track policy combining the exploitation of electoral processes and the clandestine funding of NGO’s for “grass roots” agitation of local grievances, together with support for direct action including trial runs of political violence against the symbols and institutions of social democracy. The versatile Capriles is the perfect candidate to run in elections while orchestrating terror. Past US experience with political terror in Latin America has had a boomerang effect — as evident in the Miami-based Cuban terrorist engagement with numerous bombings, gun-running and drug trafficking within the USA, especially the 1976 car bombing assassination of the exile Chilean Minister Orlando Letelier and an American associate on Embassy Row in the heart of Washington, DC — an action never characterized as ‘terrorism’ because of official US ties to the perpetrators.

Despite financial, political and military links between Washington and terrorists, especially fundamentalists, the latter retain their organizational autonomy and follow their own political-cultural agenda, which in most cases is hostile to the US. As far as the Chechens, the Afghans and the Al Qaeda Syrians today are concerned, the US is a tactical ally to be discarded on the road to establishing independent fundamentalist states. We should add the scores of Boston victims to the thousands of US citizens killed in New York, Washington, Libya, Afghanistan and elsewhere by former fundamentalist allies of the US.

By siding with terrorists and their political spokespeople and refusing to recognize the validity of the elections in Venezuela, the Obama regime has totally alienated itself from all of South America and the Caribbean. By supporting violent assaults against democratic institutions in Venezuela, the White House is signalling to its clients in opposition to the governments of Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador that violent assaults against independent democratic governments is an acceptable road to restoring the neoliberal order and US-centered regional integration.

Washington has demonstrated no consistent opposition to terrorism — it depends on the political goals of the terrorists and on the target adversaries. In one of the two recent cases — the US government declared virtual “martial law” on Boston to kill or capture two terrorists who had attacked US citizens in a single locale; whereas in the case of Venezuela, the Obama regime has given political and material support to terrorists in order to subvert the entire constitutional order and electoral regime.

Because of the long-standing and deep ties between the US State Department, prominent neo-con leaders with Chechen terrorists, we cannot expect a thorough investigation which would surely embarrass or threaten the careers of the major US officials who have long-term working relations with such criminals.

The White House will escalate and widen its support for the same Venezuelan terrorists who have sabotaged the electrical power system, the food supply and the constitutional electoral process of that country. Terror, in that context, serves as its launch pad for a full scale assault against the past decade’s social advances under the late President Hugo Chávez.

Meanwhile, in order to cover-up the Chechen-Washington working alliance, the Boston Marathon bombing will be reduced to an isolated act by two misguided youths, lead astray by an anonymous fundamentalist website — their actions reduced to ‘religious fundamentalism.’ And despite an economy in crisis, tens of billions of more dollars will be allocated to expand the police state at home, citing its effectiveness and efficiency in the aftermath of the bombings while secretly sending more millions to foment ‘democratic’ terror…in Venezuela.

Justin Trudeau, Boy King

Murray Dobbin — 2013-05-06T15:51:43+00:00

There is no accounting for political judgment when it gets caught up in irrational euphoria. The overwhelming victory of Justin Trudeau in the Liberal Party’s leadership race demonstrates just how impoverished the state of our political culture has become. Did the polls — almost completely meaningless at this stage of the political process — so addle people’s discernment that they could not see what was in front of them? In a stunning failure of imagination 80 per cent of those casting ballots effectively declared: We think a pretty face and a famous name is all we need to win and more importantly, all the country needs to lead it.

Justin Trudeau is allegedly 40 years-old, but his persona is one of a perpetual adolescent who can’t be taken seriously, because he doesn’t take the world seriously. He’s spent his life avoiding anything truly challenging and seems addicted to having a good time — to the exclusion of disciplined political work. His intellectual capacity, whatever it was, is now so atrophied that it seems clear he rarely engages on his own in serious analysis or thoughtful consideration of important political and philosophical questions.

Trudeau’s interview with Peter Mansbridge — one of the few situations where his advisors weren’t holding his hand and telling him what to say — should terrify all those who voted for him. In one (250 word) answer, to a question on the Boston terror bombing, Trudeau repeated the teenagers’ favourite phrase “you know” eight times and “I mean” four times. This level of political immaturity and inarticulateness is normally expected of people who devote virtually no time to thinking about politics. Here’s an excerpt — Trudeau’s answer to the question what would Trudeau do if he were prime minister. Read it and weep.

“First thing, you offer support and sympathy and condolences and, you know, can we send down, you know, EMTs or, I mean, as we contributed after 9-11? I mean, is there any material immediate support we have we can offer? And then at the same time, you know, over the coming days, we have to look at the root causes. Now we don’t know now whether it was, you know, terrorism or a single crazy or, you know, a domestic issue or a foreign issue, I mean, all of those questions. But there is no question that this happened because there is someone who feels completely excluded, completely at war with innocents, at war with a society. I mean, yes, we need to make sure that we’re promoting security and we’re, you know, keeping our borders safe and, you know, monitoring the kinds of, you know, violent subgroups that happen around.”

“Violent subgroups that happen around”? Who talks like this? It is hard to imagine that Justin’s father ever talked like this — even at age five. This is a man revealed as one who may well be incapable of mature political behaviour let alone good political judgment. Harper smacked him around like a cat playing with a mouse before tiring of the game and finishing it off.

It’s not just the content of the response, which is bad enough, but the inability to express coherent thoughts. Trudeau seemed to be mistaking a ruthless mass murderer for a violent kid who grew up in a bad home. His response is so far removed from what the vast majority of people feel about the issue that you have to wonder what, exactly, informs his opinions. The most rudimentary political instincts should have kicked in even if his advisors failed him.

And this wasn’t a momentary scrum with a few reporters. This was an interview with Peter Mansbridge — the most valuable showcase any Canadian political leader can be provided. Liberals know that Stephen Harper will spend millions, if he has to, to define who Trudeau is before Trudeau can. This was Trudeau’s big opportunity to define himself as a man of substance, with a vision, and someone who could represent Canada on the world stage.

Apparently we need to go elsewhere for Trudeau’s substance and it seems he wants us to accept the theme from his leadership campaign and post-victory musings: that he is dedicated to Canada’s middle class. More than half of Canadians identify themselves as belonging to the middle class, and there is no doubt that the middle class has suffered, “hollowed out” since the 1980s. In 1972, 56 per cent of all income went to the middle 60 per cent of Canadian families; in 2006 it was just 53 per cent. In the 1970s, 30 per cent of middle class families needed two incomes to maintain that status. Today that figure is 70 per cent. Since the early 1980s the middle class has gained virtually nothing from economic growth.

What accounts for this dramatic decline in the class of people who used to define the nation? In a word, globalization, and the public policies which stem from it and helped create it. Amongst those policies are free trade; lowered labour standards; passive acceptance of de-industrialization; the weakening of labour vis-à-vis capital through cuts to EI and welfare; the virtual abandonment of industrial policies to promote high paying jobs; the use of “temporary” foreign workers; cuts to the “social wage” which includes post-secondary education; and the transfer of wealth to the uber-rich from the middle class.

All of these policies have been eagerly embraced by the Liberal Party ever since Jean Chretien reneged on his 1993 election promise to revisit NAFTA. Paul Martin’s singular economic policy was trade; he deliberately maintained high unemployment through most of the 1990s to “discipline labour” (including the middle class), cut government revenue by $100 billion over five years, gutted the UI program and abandoned the federal role in the provision of social welfare and effectively put an end to universality as a principle for post-secondary education and any new social programs.

In an article in the Globe and Mail, Trudeau does manage to identify some of these trials of the middle class: “While the economy has more than doubled in size in the past 30 years, middle-class incomes have gone up just 13 per cent.” But nowhere does he criticize his Liberal predecessors’ policies which created this situation. He commits to a new “national focus” on education, yet not funding for it. But it was Paul Martin’s unprecedented spending cuts which precipitated the huge increases in tuition fees and massive student debt.

What Trudeau seems unwilling to admit is that the slow demise of the middle class is the result of corporate globalization and to revive middle class fortunes means a direct challenge of all of globalization’s elements. Will he reverse any of these classic Liberal policies and if so which ones? Will he oppose any further trade deals? Will he try to re-industrialize through a massive renewable energy strategy? Will he revive the federal government’s previous role in funding universities? Will he reverse the gutting of EI? Will he tax wealth?

Don’t hold your breath. The real Trudeau is the empty vessel interviewed by Peter Mansbridge, and that means the party is in the hands of the same hypocritical apparatchiks who wrote — and then casually betrayed — the rosy promises in Jean Chretien’s 1993 Red Book. Welcome back to the future.

Jack deserves better than ‘Jack’

Arash Azizi — 2013-05-01T17:56:23+00:00

There are things to expect and things not to not expect from political TV biographies. They are rarely going to be cinematic masterpieces and there will always be those grumbling about how they haven’t portrayed every single historical detail or have failed to ‘accurately’ resurrect this or that political figure. These complaints are mostly misplaced as they come from those who don’t really understand the medium and what it is meant to achieve.

So trust me when I say, it is not as an over-demanding NDP stalwart or someone who knew Jack Layton that I count Jack, the CBC biopic made about his life, as a great disappointment. This film is such a failure that it’s horrible or even, as Rick Salutin had it, ‘painful’ to watch. One has to agree with Salutin that this is no less than a ‘video crime.’

Jack is so hastily written and put together that it feels like a high school project and not a very good one either. The story revolves around Layton’s 2011 campaign that led to the historic Orange Crush and perhaps two-thirds of the scrip depicts the campaign. Brad Lavigne, NDP’s national director, and his counterpart in the Conservative camp are awkwardly given central roles in the script as they become somewhat friendly while meeting in the bars during the campaign. (How does that contribute to telling the story of Layton’s life is not clear.) Another anchor of the story is Jack’s relationship with his wife and fellow NDP Member of Parliament, Olivia Chow.

Some of the only watchable parts of the films are at the beginning when we see Jack as an idealist city councillor fighting for AIDS awareness in 1985. It is around that time that he mets Chow (played by CBC in-house Sook-Yin Lee) at a fundraiser and they quickly fall in love. Jack and Olivia spending their first ‘date’ in a meeting with AIDS victims and their chat on the way home do well to portray the political-activist bond that glued them together and made them into one of the most prolific political couples in Canadian history.

After that, a lot of great things happens for Jack and Olivia but Jack simply starts to disintegrate into a series of unconnected short vignettes about different important points in Layton’s life and his relationship with Chow. The film uses flashbacks to depict these moments but in such an amateurish manner that it could serve as a course on ‘how not to use flashbacks’ for film students. We only see a depiction of ‘moments’: When he learns that he has lost the Toronto mayoralty race, When he is successfully elected leader of the NDP, when he finds out about Olivia’s thyroid cancer. There is no attempt to weave this together to give us picture of Layton the politician, Layton the man or Layton the partner (to Chow.) All we get is Layton the caricature, presented in fragmented episodes.

Neither Rick Roberts nor Lee come close to resurrecting Layton or Chow. Roberts’s awkward smiles, for instance, don’t even begin to do justice to the sneaky, playful Layton we all knew. Lee has her moments (especially early on) and might have been able to do a better job in a different scenario but with the wooden role she is given in the script there is no room to bring to life the clever, boisterous and ultra-active Chow that we know. The only other portrayed characters of historical or political interest are a few NDP staffers. As if the only part of Layton’s life interesting enough to be depicted on the screen was internal meetings with Party staffers. Other than Chow, not a single Member of Parliament, from the NDP or other parties, are depicted. Nor are any of the Prime Ministers or Party leaders that Jack had to battle during his career. The film writers had much material to work with: Layton’s days of studying under the well-known philosopher Charles Taylor at McGill; His association with Red Tory urban leaders like John Sewell and David Cromby; His behind-the-doors crafting of a coalition with Liberal leader Stephane Dionne and Bloc leader Gilles Ducepe (already the subject of an award-winning and readable memoir by Brian Topp) that catapulted Canada into a grave constitutional crisis. Yet none of these are even hinted at. As if Layton stood outside the history of his time, whereas, in reality, he did much to shape it.

There are a few theories going around, some of them of the conspiratorial kind, as to why this film is so horrible. This author thinks it’s the haste with which it was made that is to be blamed. The same is true about a couple of books that have come about Layton; quickly put-together collection of personal eulogies about how much everybody loved the deceased political leader. Jack Layton, however, deserves better than this. The story of his life, as it happens, cries out for biographies. Neither his political career nor his personality ever fit ready-made boxes. He was a street-happy activist that always looked for mild, pragmatic, ‘within-the-system’ solutions but never lost his hopeful idealism or much-silenced socialism. He resurrected a dormant NDP into a household name again but also gave much power to the type of people depicted in Jack and the full effect his legacy on the NDP are yet to be seen. The manner of his death, so public and such a short time after the political earthquake he caused, made sensationalized hagiographic reactions like those underlying Jack all but inevitable. But, when a bit of time passes, Layton’s life can be the subject of much better works, whether book-length written treatments, feature films or documentaries. This is the least he deserves.

Arash Azizi is a journalist and activist, based in Toronto.

May Day 2013

Ingo Schmidt — 2013-05-01T16:18:53+00:00

Stock markets around the world have made up the losses they incurred during the 2008–09 financial crisis and the workers of the world are paying the price for this recovery. Fiscal stimulus packages and bank bailouts that helped to contain the crisis left governments with deficits that are now being used as a pretext for spending cuts and layoffs in the public sector. At the same time, rising unemployment has had a dampening effect on wages. Losing a decently paid job to join the ranks of the working poor is very common these days. The pervasive feelings of social insecurity amongst workers is the greatest in decades.

Not surprisingly, then, inequality within and between countries is on the rise almost everywhere. Yet, redistribution from the bottom to the top does not create an equal level of misery that would allow different kinds of workers to recognize each other as equals easily and would recruit them into a common front against capital automatically. Quite to the contrary: rising inequality also deepens the divisions between male and female workers, white- and non-white workers, and Canadians and immigrant workers. These divisions within the working-class allow capitalists to pit one group of workers against another and, by doing so, keep the general redistribution machine going. Redistributing incomes toward the corporate sector boosts not only stock prices but corporate profits too. Massive government intervention during the financial and economic crises saved the free market agenda.

Neoliberal Cracks

Still, things are not the same anymore. Rising stock prices should not deflect attention away from the frailness of economic recovery since 2009. Though still at a very high level, growth in China is slowing, economies in the U.S., Brazil and Japan are stagnant while Europe is back in recession. Thanks to redistribution of incomes from the poor to the rich and generous government support, private corporations are awash with cash.

But the corporations see no reason to invest in production capacity and employment in the face of already existing over-capacities and little prospect of aggregate demand increases that would boost consumption any time soon. Putting money into the stock market under such conditions is more a means of hoarding than the anticipation of the economic prosperity to come. Austerity and the downgrading of workers have not been enough to restore business confidence.

Financial investors and corporate CEOs have at least two reasons to be concerned about the future. One is that the ruling class, in the form of the policy elites in governments, central bankers, and the heads of international organizations, is deeply divided about strategy.

Central banking doves, such as at the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan, think unlimited amounts of cheap money are the only way of re-booting economic growth; while hawks, such as at the Deutsche Bundesbank or the Bank of China, warn the only effect of near-zero interest rates and quantitative easing is ballooning money supply that will feed into inflation. Concerns about inflation are grossly out of touch with the realities of stagnating economies in which companies would price themselves out of the market if they asked customers to pay more.

However, the hawks have a point by arguing that unlimited supplies of money do not automatically lead to higher sales of consumer or investment goods. For these hardcore neoliberals, pushing down wages, social and ecological standards would provide an incentive to companies to increase investment spending. Of course, that has not been the case. Otherwise, the onslaught on jobs and wages that followed the 2008/09 crises would have led to an economic boom rather than stagnation.

The frailty of the economy is precisely the reason why central bank hawks have not had it their way. Everyone who is not a die-hard believer, or who does not want to produce an economic collapse, understands that cheap money from the central bank may not trigger economic activity but that jacked up interest rates would push the economy into the abyss.

However, if stagnation continues while stock prices go up raising fears of another asset price bubble, it is conceivable that the boards of central banks will either change direction or will be unable to reach consensus. For the time being, the hawks accept the extremely lose monetary policies in return for fiscal retrenchment.

But this policy matrix has recently been questioned. While the European Union Troika (of the European Central Bank, the IMF and the European Commission) prescribes draconian austerity measures to crisis-ridden countries of its southern periphery and the U.S. government is paralyzed by its attempts to reign in its deficits, the IMF admits that the cuts it helped impose on Greece as part of the Troika ‘bailout’ pushed the country further into crisis.

The IMF Chief, Christine Lagarde, is now running all over the place urging governments to delay further spending cuts to avoid crashing an already fragile world economy. The political stalemate over U.S. fiscal policies, with moderate Democrats wanting to relax the austerity agenda and Republican hawks pushing for even more cuts, is setting a precedent for the policy impasse that is likely to beset other parts of the world.

Growing Doubts

The possibility of political paralysis is not the only issue that plagues capitalist investors. Another concern is cracks in the neoliberal ideological consensus that underpinned the free market agenda for over thirty years, and successfully integrated via market discipline workers into a new collective bargaining regime governed by the maintenance of firm level competitiveness.

The mantra of ‘trickle-down economics’ was never particularly persuasive at a theoretical level, but it was at least something to believe in and it justified the massive restructuring in companies and the welfare state to increase the rate of exploitation in workplaces. And it was central to making other views, such as with socialist alternatives, look even less persuasive.

After the 2008–09 crisis and the mobilization of public funds for the protection of private profits, capitalists and government policy-makers changed their tune from the trickle-down promises of income gains in the future from restraint now to only promises of endless austerity and cuts into the future. This was an open declaration of ‘class war from above.’

This is why the slogan, ‘We’re the 99%,’ resonated so widely. It got even people who never reflect on anything political or economical to think about class. And it wonderfully captured the bailing out of the banks and the corporate classes with public funds, while calling on sacrifices in income and public services from everyone else.

Austerity is the only policy game in town at this point in the core capitalist countries. But it has growing doubters amongst ruling elites and is deeply resented by the working classes. In the zones of severe crisis, the free market ideology is losing even more credibility, as in the case of the Southern European states. An upsurge in right-wing populism in many countries, from the American Tea Party to Golden Dawn fascists in Greece, is one of the expressions of the deep crisis of legitimacy that is befalling neoliberal capitalism in the midst of continuing economic crisis and another sharpening of economic inequalities.

A New Uprising of Workers?

Another sign of uprising is, however, more promising. This is the series of mass protests and strikes, from the Arab Spring to the Wisconsin labour rebellion to dockworkers in Hong Kong, and on to some of recent signs of new electoral strength for the Left, such as in Greece by Syriza.

Less spectacular but potentially very significant are the efforts of Walmart and McDonald’s workers to unionize. During the heyday of neoliberalism, the McDonaldization of work became a synonym for the downgrading of union jobs with decent pay and benefits into precarious low-wage work. The majority of the working poor that companies such as McDonald’s employed are women. In the 1970s, the women’s movement fought for equal pay in unionized workplaces and an expansion of public services that would allow them to enter the workforce. Beginning in the 1980s, more and more women began working the double shifts in low-wage occupations and unwaged household work. Companies such as Walmart, but also others like Starbucks, were seen as unorganizable and were vanguards in downsizing the working-class as a whole by creating new gender imbalances.

The same is true for the sweatshops that Chinese communists opened up for capitalist super-exploitation and whose lower-than-Walmart-wages are widely seen as benchmarks for global wage setting. Yet, Chinese workers have recently become among the most combative despite vigorous attempts by the Chinese state to prevent independent union organization and coordination amongst workers.

Still, vast numbers of work stoppages, local in scope and hindered by the lack of independent unions, won at least some wage gains. These gains are lagging far behind productivity increases, so the shift from wages to profits continues in China as in much of the rest of the world. At the same time, though, they help alleviate lifting considerable numbers of workers out of the most miserable conditions of poverty.

So far, Canada has neither seen mass actions like the Wisconsin labour rebellion or recurrent general strikes in Southern Europe nor high numbers of local struggles like in China. Struggles, such as the one at Porter Airlines, are the exception rather than the rule of working-class life in Canada. There continues to be constant attacks by private and government employers, ranging from plant closures, demands for concessions and the use of government deficits to cut the public payroll.

The introduction of right-to-work laws in Indiana and Michigan has inspired provincial and federal governments to follow suit. Divided by jurisdictions, unionized workers all across Canada are facing the same challenge of defending their incomes and working conditions. Government and private employers’ success in portraying union-workers as overpaid and lazy makes a fightback to such efforts extremely difficult. Organized labour will have to convince the wider public that the attack on unions is an attack on all workers. The union movement will need to draw non-union and unemployed workers into its ranks to win the coming battles against right-to-work legislation.

A general global labour resurgence cannot yet be claimed. The fact that workers all over the world are paying the price for the capitalist crisis clearly indicates that unions and the working classes are still on the defensive. The discontent with neoliberalism, and capitalism more generally, however, is spreading. Resistance continues to pop up in new, unexpected locations almost weekly. Alternatives to austerity are in high demand and, indeed, alternatives to capitalism in any number of forms are gaining attention. And workers, increasing numbers of them unemployed and with precarious livelihoods, are willing to fight for them.

These struggles have yet to yield much in the way of material gains. Many have been short-lived, defeated or co-opted, the Egyptian revolution being the most prominent. These setbacks also provide hard learned lessons about the need to develop more resilient and deeper organizing and mobilizing strategies in the future. There may be an alternative to austerity and capitalism, and a significant advance to the receptiveness of socialist ideas in Canada and North America. But it’s a challenging road to get there.

Ingo Schmidt is a political economist teaching at Athabasca University in Alberta.

This article originally published by the Socialist Project.

Change the System, Not the Climate

Climate Space, World Social Forum 2013 — 2013-04-29T18:38:09+00:00

The capitalist system has exploited and abused nature, pushing the planet to its limits, so much so that the system has accelerated dangerous and fundamental changes in the climate.

Today, the severity and multiplicity of weather changes – characterized by droughts, desertification, floods, hurricanes, typhoons, forest fires and the melting of glaciers and sea ice – indicate that the planet is burning. These extreme changes have direct impacts on humans through the loss of lives, livelihoods, crops and homes, all of which have led to human displacement in the form of forced migration and climate refugees on a massive and unprecedented scale.

Humanity and nature are now standing at a precipice. We can stand idle and continue the march into an abysmal future too dire to imagine, or we can take action and reclaim a future that we have all hoped for.

We will not stand idle. We will not allow the capitalist system to burn us all. We will take action and address the root causes of climate change by changing the system. The time has come to stop talking and to take action.

We must nurture, support, strengthen and increase the scale of grassroots organizing in all places, but in particular in frontline battlegrounds where the stakes are the highest.

System Change Means

Leave more than two thirds of fossil fuel reserves under the soil, as well as beneath the ocean floor, in order to prevent catastrophic levels of climate change.
Ban all new exploration and exploitation of oil, tar sands, oil shale, coal, uranium, and natural gas.
Support a just transition for workers and communities away from the extreme energy economy and into resilient local economies based on social, economic and environmental justice.
Decentralize the generation and ownership of energy under local community control using renewable sources of energy. Invest in community based, small-scale, local energy infrastructure.
Stop building mega and unnecessary infrastructure projects that do not benefit the population and are net contributors to greenhouse gasses like, mega dams, excessive huge highways, large-scale centralized energy projects, and superfluous massive airports.
End the dominance of export-based industrial forms of food production, (including in the livestock sector), and promote small-scale integrated and ecologically sound farming and an agriculture system that ensures food sovereignty, and that locally grown crops meet the nutritional and cultural needs of the local community. These measures will help to cool the planet.
Adopt Zero Waste approaches through promoting comprehensive recycling and composting programs that end the use of greenhouse gas emitting incinerators – including new generation hi-tech incinerators – and landfills.
Stop the corporate capture of the economy and natural resources for the profit of Transnational Corporations.
Dismantle the war industry and military infrastructure in order to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of warfare, and divert war budgets to promote genuine peace.

With these measures we will be able to achieve comprehensive employment for all because built into this systemic change there will be more and better quality jobs than currently exist within the capitalist system. With these measures we will be able to build an economy that serves the people and not the capitalists. We will stop the endless degradation of the earth’s land, air, and water and preserve the health of humans and the vital cycles of nature. We will avoid forced migration and millions of climate refugees.

Democratic Control

System change requires an end to the global empire of transnational corporations and banks. Only a society that has the type of democratic control over resources which is based on workers (including migrant workers), indigenous and women’s rights and respects the sovereignty of the people will be able to guarantee economic, social and environmental justice. System Change requires a break from the patriarchal society in order to guarantee women’s rights in all aspects of life. Feminism and ecology are key components of the new society that we are fighting for.

We need a new system that seeks harmony between humans and nature and not an endless growth model that the capitalist system promotes in order to make more and more profit. Mother Earth and her natural resources cannot sustain the consumption and production needs of this modern industrialized society. We require a new system that addresses the needs of the majority and not of the few. We need a redistribution of the wealth that is now controlled by the 1 per cent. And we also need a new definition of wellbeing and prosperity for all life on the planet under the limits of our Mother Earth.

While there will still be a battle inside the international UN climate negotiations, the main battlegrounds will be outside and will be rooted in the places where there are frontline struggles against the fossil fuel industry, industrial agriculture, deforestation, industrial pollution, carbon offsets schemes, and REDD-type carbon offsets projects, all resulting in land and water grabbing and displacements taking place all over the world.

The United States, Europe, Japan, Russia and other industrialized countries, as the main historical carbon emitters, should implement the biggest emissions reductions. China, India, Brazil, South Africa and other emerging economies should also have targets for emission reductions based on the principles of common but differentiated responsibility. We do not accept that on behalf of the right to development several projects for more unsustainable consumption and exploitation of nature are being promoted in developing countries only to benefit the profits of the 1 per cent.

False Solutions

The fight for a new system is also the struggle against false solutions to climate change. If we don’t stop them they will disrupt the Earth’s System and deeply affect the health of nature and all life. We therefore reject techno-fix “solutions” like geo-engineering, genetically modified organisms, agrofuels, industrial bioenergy, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, hydraulic fracturation (fracking), nuclear projects, waste-to-energy generation based on incineration, and others.

We are also in opposition to those proposals that want to expand the commodification, financialization and privatization of the functions of nature through the so-called “green economy” which places a price on nature and creates new derivative markets that will only increase inequality and expedite the destruction of nature. We cannot put the future of nature and humanity in the hands of financial speculative mechanisms like carbon trading and REDD. We echo and amplify the many voices that are urging the European Union to scrap the EU Emissions Trading Scheme.

REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation), like Clean Development Mechanisms, is not a solution to climate change and is a new form of colonialism. In defense of Indigenous Peoples, local communities and the environment, we reject REDD+ and the grabbing of the forests, farmlands, soils, mangroves, marine algae and oceans of the world which act as sponges for greenhouse gas pollution. REDD and its potential expansion constitutes a worldwide counter-agrarian reform which perverts and twists the task of growing food into a process of “farming carbon” called Climate Smart Agriculture.

We must link social and environmental struggles, bring together rural and urban communities, and combine local and global initiatives so that we can unite together in a common struggle. We must use all diverse forms of resistance. We must build a movement that is based on the daily life of people that guarantees democracy at all stages of societies.

Many proposals already contain key elements needed to build new systemic alternatives. Some examples include, Buen Vivir, defending the commons, respecting Indigenous territories and community conserved areas, the rights of Mother Earth – rights of Nature, food sovereignty, prosperity without growth, de-globalization, the happiness index, the duties to and rights of future generations, the Peoples Agreement of Cochabamba and others.

We have all long hoped for the possibility of another world. Today, we take that hope and turn it into courage, strength and action – that together, we can change the system. If there is to be a future for humanity, we need to fight for it right now.

Signed by the facilitators of the Climate Space:

Alliance of Progressive Labour, Philippines Alternatives International ATTAC France Ecologistas en Acción Environmental Rights Action, Nigeria ETC Group Fairwatch, Italy Focus on the Global South Global Campaign to Dismantle Corporate Power and end TNCs’ impunity Global Forest Coalition Grassroots Global Justice Alliance Grupo de Reflexão e Apoio ao Processo do Fórum Social Mundial Indigenous Environmental Network La Via Campesina No-REDD Africa Network Migrants Rights International OilWatch International Polaris Institute Transnational Institute

The myth of Vladimir Putin’s progressivism

Louis Proyect — 2013-04-23T18:42:26+00:00

For that segment of the left that thinks more in terms of hegemonic blocs and geopolitical chess games between imperialism and “anti-imperialist” states than classes, Putin is something of an exemplar. Immanuel Wallerstein, perhaps its most respected and principled representative, made the case for Putin in a July 15, 2007 Commentary titled “The Putin Charisma“:

Yes, he has upset a good portion of the intelligentsia, but there is every indication that he is quite popular with most Russians, unlike some other presidents of major states today. It seems that Russians see him as someone who has done much to restore the strength of the Russian state, after what they see as its humiliating deterioration during the Yeltsin era…He has opposed United States plans to install antimissile structures in Poland and the Czech Republic, and has gotten support for his stand (if quiet support) from Western Europe. He has used control of gas and oil exports from Russia itself and from both Central Asian and Caucasian countries not only to obtain greater rent for Russia (and thereby greater world power), but more or less to impose his terms on energy issues on Western Europe.

I imagine that most supporters of Putin on the left would make a case something like this:

1. Oil Populism:

He has taken advantage of Russia’s oil rentier status to fight the poverty and inequality that was a legacy of Yeltsin’s oligarchy-friendly rule. While by no means a socialist, he has something in common with Hugo Chávez who embodied the same economic policy. MRZine, a major outlet of hegemonic bloc theory, published a talk by Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov that obviously took him at his word:

It should be no surprise that Russia today is making use of its natural competitive advantages. It is also investing in its human resources, encouraging innovation, integrating into the global economy, and modernizing its legislation. Russia wants international stability to underpin its own development. Accordingly, it is working toward the establishment of a freer and more democratic international order.

Sounds almost Bolivarian, doesn’t it?

2. Anti-Imperialism:

Russia, along with China, is standing up to American imperialism in places like Libya and Syria. Of particular interest is Putin’s steadfast resistance to jihadism wherever it rears its ugly head, especially in Chechnya. For this sector of the left, political Islam has become as much of a bogeyman as it was to people like Paul Berman and Christopher Hitchens in 2003. The very same “foreign fighters” who went to fight the American occupation in Iraq are now shunned as tools of American imperialism. Russia Today, an English-language news service funded by the government, is widely considered to be a friend of the left, especially those predisposed to the global chess game analysis. An April 20, 2013 piece by Eric Draitser, who blogs at stopimperialism.com, made the case for the Russian government:

As more information comes out regarding the alleged bombers and their ideological leanings, there will undoubtedly be a propaganda assault to shape this narrative in the interests of the United States and the West. Talking heads will be on television twenty four hours a day explaining to Americans why Chechnya is such a hotbed of terrorism, asking how something like this could happen, etc. The truth is however, Washington has perpetuated the conflict through its propaganda machine that will now be employed to once again turn friend to enemy. Perhaps, instead of being the world’s greatest purveyor of terror, using it as a weapon to achieve geo-strategic objectives, the United States should actually work with peaceful nations such as Russia to combat terrorism worldwide.

3. Standing up to foreign meddling

Probably the thing that endears Putin to this sector of the left above all is its willingness to suppress the NGO’s that have foisted “color revolutions” on unsuspecting victims everywhere. Unlike other heads of state, Putin has had the balls (the word certainly applies) to shut them down, an act that gladdens the heart of Global Research, a long-standing member of the global chess-game tendency. On July 14, 2012 they published an article by Veronika Krasheninnikova, a staff member of a Russian think tank, that cheered Putin’s crackdown:

In fact, the multibillions of Western funding have profoundly distorted Russian civil society. A marginal pro-American group of NGOs that was pumped up with US dollars like a bodybuilder with steroids — it has gained much muscle and shine. Those few Russians willing to serve foreign interests were provided nice offices, comfortable salaries, printing presses, training, publicity, and political and organizing technology which gave them far more capacity, visibility, and influence that they could possibly have had on their own. Money and spin are the only means to promote unpopular ideas, alien to national interests.

On the other side is the silent majority of people who are squeezed out of the public space. In Western, and also in Russian media, civil society turns out to be represented by Ludmila Alekseyeva (The Helsinki Group) and Boris Nemtsov and Gary Kasparov, rather than by a worker from the Urals, a teacher from Novosibirsk or a farmer from Krasnodar Region.

Yesterday I had the very great fortune to attend a film screening of “Winter Go Away,” a documentary on the 2012 Russian elections that was co-directed by 10 filmmakers, including Anna Moiseenko who was there to speak about the film in the Q&A. Poet and revolutionary Kirill Medvedev, who I have discussed before, was also there to speak about the current situation in Russia.

I can only say that this film is an eye-opener, even to someone like me who has defended Pussy Riot against Putin and tries to keep up with the Russian left. (The film shows the feminist punk rockers being dragged out of the church.) Basically the documentary demonstrates how radical the opposition to Putin was. Despite the pro-capitalist leanings of some of the major opposition figures—from multibillionaire candidate Mikhail Prokhorov to the aforementioned Gary Kasparov (he should stick to chess)—the rank-and-file of the movement are exactly the same kinds of people who occupied Zuccotti Park. Indeed, some of the chants you hear on the demonstrations are directed against Russian capitalism. You see young people heading toward the protests wearing Guy Fawkes masks, etc. The protests have been erroneously described as upper-middle-class temper tantrums funded by George Soros. It takes a huge amount of brass for some leftists to make such an attack when the Putin rallies are staged affairs that make the Republican Party’s look Bolshevik by comparison. Putin’s slogans were mind-numbingly nationalistic, with his well-heeled supporters chanting “Russia, Putin, Victory” at rallies.

One of my favorite scenes in the film is an interview with one Matvey Krylov who has just been released from prison for throwing water at a government official. The interviewer can’t seem to wrap his head around the question of someone going to prison for throwing water at another person. After repeatedly asking Krylov to explain what happened, the young man—who looks just like the sort of person who would have been found camped out in Zuccotti Park—tells him to Google his name. That will tell him all he needs to know. I followed this recommendation and discovered to my delight that my good friends in Chto Delat, a left-wing artist’s collective, has a report on their website:

The Moscow Times November 1, 2011 Water Stunt May Earn 2 Years in Jail Alexey Eremenko

An opposition activist faces two years in jail for splashing water in the face of a prosecutor who jailed his comrades and allegedly threatened to kill him, the Agora rights group said Monday.

Dmitry Putenikhin, a member of The Other Russia, attacked Alexei Smirnov outside Moscow’s Tverskoi District Court on Friday shortly after it jailed five people, including three fellow activists, for participating in Manezh Square rioting last December.

The verdict has raised eyebrows because the riots were racially charged, while The Other Russia is not a nationalist group. Critics say the authorities chose the organization as a scapegoat.

Putenikhin, also known under the alias Matvei Krylov, did not flee after the attack, explaining to journalists that his actions were “improvised.” A video released by RIA-Novosti showed police brutally detaining him and three other people minutes after the attack.

During the Q&A, I described the agenda of the global chess-game left to the speakers. Kirill’s response was most edifying. He said that the idea of Putin somehow having a continuation with the “anti-imperialist” USSR is embraced by both the “civil society,” Perestroika wing of the anti-Putin opposition as well as some elements of the Putin camp, except that the former group places a minus where the other group puts a plus.

But what really gave me pause to reflect was his explanation of the driving forces of the opposition to Putin. While people like Kasparov were still stuck in the perestroika mode and limited exclusively to issues such as freedom of speech (as important as they are), the grass roots of the movement has been driven to take action by the neoliberal policies of the Putin regime, especially in health care and education.

The light bulb went on over my head. Wasn’t this the same scenario that played out in Libya? The pro-Qaddafi left was stuck in a time warp that viewed the dictator in the same light as the mid-80s, the head of an oil rentier state dispensing royalties to the masses in a paternalistically dictatorial fashion. When a movement broke out against Qaddafi, who had imposed neoliberal policies for the better part of 20 years, his defenders made the same kinds of arguments being made on Putin’s behalf today.

Just as I have done for Bashar al-Assad and Muammar Qaddafi before him, I did a search in Nexis (access to which is one of my most valued benefits as a Columbia University retiree) for articles on Putin’s economic policies.

The first significant report of Putin’s intentions appeared in the NY Times on April 2nd, 2000.

The victory of Vladimir V. Putin in the presidential election last Sunday has focused attention on an opulent Moscow building known as Aleksandr House, where a team of liberal-minded economists and other experts has been quietly drafting Mr. Putin’s blueprint for Russia.

German O. Gref, head of the Center for Strategic Research and master of Aleksandr House, confidently predicted this week that by late May Mr. Putin will be ready to release ”a breakthrough scenario envisaging the most radical reforms,” from an overhaul of Russia’s cumbersome tax code to a streamlining of its infamous bureaucracies.

With the exception of tax reform, the contents of the program are still vague and, on critical issues like land reform, still under debate. But the Aleksandr House team—which includes some of Russia’s best-known pro-market reformers—has already firmly established itself as the beachhead of liberal economics in the coming Putin administration.

Four years later, on March 16, 2004, Putin’s aims became clarified as the Guardian reported:

Despite the self-acclaimed miracle of Russia’s economic growth, most citizens still live in grinding poverty and a tenth can barely feed themselves. What little is known about Mr Putin’s domestic plans suggests he does not want to bridge this gap through a greater welfare state but through harsh market reforms.

Professor Oksana Gaman-Golutvina, of the Academy of State Service, said: “Mr Putin represents himself as a left-wing politician, but in reality he is rightwing. This is the master stroke of his PR. He wants to reform communal services, education and health, in a most libertarian way.”

Mr Putin will reduce VAT and the social security taxes companies pay for each employee, theoretically creating more jobs. Students will have to pay for more of their education, patients for more of their health care.

Rail fares and utility prices will rise astronomically as franchises are sold off.

Roland Nash, the chief strategist at the Renaissance Capital bank, said the reforms would “hit the average Ivan in the pocket.”

Hmmm. Obama is on record as admiring Ronald Reagan. I wonder if he has been studying Vladimir Putin’s presidency in light of this:

Mr Putin represents himself as a left-wing politician, but in reality he is rightwing. This is the master stroke of his PR. He wants to reform communal services, education and health, in a most libertarian way.

Blood Along the Border

Dawn Paley — 2013-04-22T16:47:12+00:00

Saul Reyes Salazar is a man who understands loss.

In January 2010, his sister Josefina was shot in the head, following a botched kidnapping in their hometown of Guadalupe los Bravos, across the border bridge from Tornillo, Texas. She was, at the time, one of the best-known activists in the Juarez Valley, the agricultural region that follows the Rio Grande river east of Ciudad Juarez.

In the years before her death, Josefina became one of the strongest critics of the Mexican army’s role in policing the drug war. Five thousand soldiers entered Juarez and the Valley in May of 2008, bringing along with them a wave of murders and kidnappings. Miguel Ángel Reyes Salazar, Josefina’s son, was kidnapped by soldiers in August 2008, and released a month later. Following his kidnapping, Josefina didn’t back down. Not until she was killed, that is.

The Reyes Salazar family came together and declared that Josefina’s killing was not a coincidence. She was killed, they said, because of her political activities. Eyewitness testimony fed the family’s suspicion. Before he pulled the trigger, one of Josefina’s assassins said, “You think you are tough because you are with the organizations,” according to someone who saw the killing.

Seven months passed, and Saul’s brother Rubén was murdered in Guadalupe. His body was shot through with 19 rounds from an AK-47. According to Saul, Rubén had been the loudest voice calling into question the official story that Josefina’s killing was a random act of violence.

That year, the Reyes Salazar family celebrated Christmas and the New Year as best they could, in a haze of sadness and mourning. Then, in February 2011, tragedy struck again. Saul’s sister, Magdalena, and his brother, Elías, were kidnapped, together with Elías’s wife, Luisa Ornelas. All three were kidnapped from Guadalupe.

The remaining siblings set up a protest camp at the State District Attorney’s office in Juarez, demanding the safe return of their disappeared family members. They stayed for two weeks, during which time the house of their mother, Sara, was set on fire while she was out. Once the family moved their protest to Mexico City, the governor agreed to meet with Sara Reyes Salazar. Shortly thereafter, the bodies of Magdalena, Elías, and Luisa were found in shallow graves. All exhibited signs of torture.

The news devastated the family. Leaving behind their houses, cars, and possessions, Saul and his wife, together with their children, decided to leave Mexico for good.

I met Saul in an El Paso café on a windy weekday morning. We set up the appointment through his attorney’s office — even in the US, the Reyes Salazar family takes great precautions. I was familiar with his family’s story, and knew that around 30 of his relatives had sought amnesty in the US, which Saul, his wife and kids had been granted.

Clearly, Saul Reyes Salazar knows about loss. In less than two years, four of his siblings and his sister-in-law were brutally murdered. He lost his home and his livelihood.

From time to time, Saul speaks to the media about his family’s plight. But there is so much more that goes unsaid.

Before the killings and kidnappings started, before former president Felipe Calderón launched a war on drugs with US backing, before 10,000 soldiers and police arrived in Ciudad Juarez, the Reyes Salazar family was known for other things.

They helped organize a massive campaign against a proposed nuclear waste dump in Sierra Blanca, Texas, a small town near the border that already received much of New York City’s human waste. Sierra Blanca, a small town known mostly for a migration police checkpoint that has landed numerous celebrities in jail on drug charges, is located 15 km from the US-Mexico Border. The drought-ridden desert region is economically depressed and most of the population is of Mexican descent. Resistance to the nuclear cemetery, as opponents dubbed it, began in Texas and quickly spread to northern Mexico.

“In Mexico, [our family] participated by trying to wake up peoples’ environmental consciousness, and building acts of resistance. Like closing the US-Mexico border for one hour during one day – we closed the whole border, all international bridges were closed for more than one hour, all of them. With participation from other groups, we did a walk called ‘The Walk for Life,’ from El Paso, Texas to Sierra Blanca, a bi-national walk. Americans walked on the American side, and Mexicans on the Mexican side,” reminisced Reyes-Salazar.

The March 21, 1992 border blockade protesting the nuclear waste dump was and remains the first time every US-Mexico border crossing – from San Diego to Brownsville – was closed by activists. The bi-national organizing around Sierra Blanca led to the cancellation of the project and a promise that it would not be revived.

Sierra Blanca was just one of the struggles embraced by the Reyes Salazar family, whose success came from combining innovative organizing methods with their vast social network in the border area. They fought against the illegal disposal of contaminants, the pollution of water in Ciudad Juarez (located upstream from the Valley), and the use of outlawed chemicals by maquiladoras operating in Mexico.

Many of these struggles were precursors to what we now call environmental justice struggles. Community organizers, including members of the Reyes Salazar family, worked on combatting environmental racism, the exposing of poor people and people of color to dangerous toxins and hazards ignored by the general population.

“Today, there’s pretty much no one who talks about this, but the Juarez Valley is still contaminated by a 100 km canal that carries Juarez waste water, the farming lands are contaminated by chemicals by various maquilas who dump their chemicals in the waste, there’s oil from the mechanics shops, and of course all of the human waste from all of the houses in Ciudad Juarez end up in the Valley, which is basically the septic tank of Juarez,” said Saul.

Reyes Salazar estimates that in the state of Chihuahua alone, 40 activists have been killed since December 2006, something he likens to an ideological cleansing of environmental and human rights activists in the state.

Saul and his family are no longer active in environmental movements. Instead, they are scraping by in their new lives in Texas, forced to live with the devastating impacts of the drug war every day. Their family has also become an unfortunate example of the fate that can befall activists in Mexico-at-war.

“The violence, the situation we’re living, has made many organizations go dormant. It’s made us go on pause, no?” said Felix Leonardo Pérez Verdugo during an interview in Juarez in late 2011. Pérez Verdugo is a member of the Ecological Council of Ciudad Juarez. He also participated in the fight against Sierra Blanca. “Sure, some groups are working, but it’s not like before. I think there is a kind of fear, a fear of going out and participating,” he said.

Although homicide rates have fallen since we talked over a year ago, there is little proof that environmental organizing has re-emerged, despite ongoing ecological problems linked primarily to water and contamination.

The experience of returning to Juarez and crossing to El Paso to talk to Saul Reyes Salazar reminded me of the last time I had interviewed people who had lost multiple family members to state violence, in Rabinal, Guatemala. There, survivors of massacres that took place in the early 1980s continue to grieve and suffer the massive losses inflicted on their families during the internal conflict.

According to Guatemalan writers active at that time, the violence inflicted against the people of Rabinal and elsewhere prevented participation and organization on the community or group level.

According to a group of critical writers attempting to understand terror in Guatemala in the early 1980s, “With domination through terror, in addition to the physical elimination of those who oppose the interests of the regime, there is also the pursuit of ‘the control of a social universe made possible through the intimidation induced by acts of destruction… (and with) acts of terror, there is an overall impact on the social universe —at a social and generalized level— of a whole series of psychosociological pressures which impose an obstacle to possible political action.’”[1]

Thirty years have passed since then, but there is no doubt that the Reyes Salazar family has been terrorized, along with hundreds of thousands of others throughout northern Mexico – terrorized by the army and terrorized by criminal groups. And while the terror has failed to generate silence, it has certainly caused a slow-down of organizing along the US-Mexico border.

Before we get up from the table at the café, I asked Saul who it is he would fear, should he go back to Mexico. “The government, the drug trafficking cartels, because attacking the government means attacking their associates,” he said.

I then asked him if he ever thinks about moving back to Mexico, back to his hometown, which is so close to the border he can see it across the river from Texas.

“Going back to Mexico, for me, would probably be, with everything that I have said there, and here, the surest way for me to die,” he said.

Dawn Paley is an investigative journalist from Vancouver, BC. More of her work can be found on her website at dawnpaley.ca, or follow her on twitter @dawn_.

This story was originally published by towardfreedom.com. Used with permission.

[1] Gomis, R. Romillo, M., Rodríguez, I. “Reflexiones sobre la political del terror: El caso de Guatemala.” Cuadernos de Nuestra América. Vol 1. 1983. La Habana. Cited in: Equipo de Antropologia Forense de Guatemala. Las Masacres en Rabinal: Estudio Historico Antropológico sde las massacres de Plan de Sanchez, Chichipate y Rio Negro, 1997. 2nd Edition. 1997. Guatemala. P. 154.

Politics and the Personal Dimension

Dennis Pilon — 2013-04-19T16:44:10+00:00

There is a line between our fully public selves and whatever we might not wish to divulge to just anyone. Just where that line is, or what might constitute “personal” for any given person or time, is not fixed. Money, religion, politics, sex: there is always something. To “get personal” means risking something: the exposure of our unfinished selves. The personal is like a hanging thread, to pull on it risks an unravelling that cannot be effectively gauged in advance.

We often hear how “the left” has ignored this or that issue, but that does not appear to be the case for CD. As issues rose in public consciousness, they also increasingly appeared in the magazine. In some cases, CD appeared behind the curve, only coming to feminism in the 1970s, but in others it was well ahead, as with sex and sexuality. For instance, Brian Mossop’s “Confessions of a Commie Fag,” published in 1980, was a gutsy political coming-out story given how marginalized gay and lesbian political activists were at the time.

From the beginning, biography work has remained consistently excellent. The personal is about stories, and they are fascinating: of sexual abuse, of uncomfortable sexual fantasies, of particular struggles, of living our politics, or just of lives lived.

At different times, CD tried to push the boundaries of left commentary on the personal, as with Gad Horowitz’s experimental and controversial advice column in the late 1980s. But mostly CD seemed satisfied to remain topical on the personal dimension, changing with the times, reflecting both the reticence and occasional boldness of the general public itself in dealing with personal issues. Whether it was Larry Zolf joking about the oppressive socialists in his hometown of Winnipeg, or Gad Horowitz relating his experiments with psychedelic drugs, or Brenda Austin-Smith sharing the frustrations of her experience of a miscarriage, the stories gave readers a real person to relate to and identify with.

Over 50 years, CD explored the personal dimension in a number of ways. Different articles attempted to analyze how people experience oppression/ inequality on a personal level (Tanya Lester, “Growing up Female,” 1980), or critiqued bad social theories that purported to explain personal behaviour (Louis Feldhammer, “Sex, the Liberal Ethic and the Zoological Perspective in the Social Sciences,” 1969–70), or explored the personal angle in popular culture like movies, music, and books (Varda Bursyn, “Hollywood’s Seductive Illusion,” 1980). Different contributors attempted to relate the personal experiences of different identities: gender, race, sexuality, indigeneity (Taiaiake Alfred, “Pathways to an Ethic of Struggle,” 2007); or, as in the ongoing series “The Personal Dimension,” the magazine featured people recounting their own personal experiences (among many others, Gregory Baum, Mel Watkins, Varda Burstyn and Francois David). As a fetish of “personal empowerment” arose in the 1970s and 1980s, CD writers critically assessed the counterculture, psychology and alternative lifestyle fads (Cliff Andrew, “Forty Dollars’ Worth of ‘Come Alive,’” 1981).

The personal dimension has also had its share of heated debate, particularly where some might transgress accepted left opinion or the goals of different movements collided (e.g. the women’s and sexual liberation movements). And, all along, CD featured biographies of international leftists, obituaries of key Canadian activists, and testimonial accounts from people about their efforts to make the world a better place, including how their lives as activists have affected their personal lives.

This article appeared in the March/April 2013 issue of Canadian Dimension magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW to get a refreshing and provocative alternative delivered to your door 6 times a year for up to 50% off the newsstand price.

The end of CIDA - Planned and Predictable

Pierre Beaudet — 2013-04-15T15:08:24+00:00

The 1950s was a time of momentous change in the world. Europe was rebuilding after having barely escaped the horrors of fascism. Africa and Asia were throwing off the yoke of colonialism. In the Americas, movements for social justice and democracy were springing up.

The United Nations, once a dream, became a reality. Within this tumult and thirst for change, the idea of international development and co-operation emerged while the U.S. and the USSR realized that peace could not be assured through old colonial practices. Many countries, not yet known as the Third World, demanded the end of the pillage of their natural resources.

Finally, in the 1960s, Canada decided to get on board. Public opinion was clear — the devastating poverty affecting three-quarters of the world’s population was morally and political untenable.

A man of vision, Pierre Gérin-Lajoie, was named to head the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and he arrives on the scene ready to give new impetus to the nascent movement. A former Minister of Education during Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, he believed that international development was everyone’s business and gave CIDA a clear mission — to participate in the development of impoverished countries.

Throughout those years of exciting change, CIDA and a wide group of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), brimming with energies and ideas, became well-respected partners throughout the Third World. At the UN, Canada plays a leading role as the champion of development, arguing that rich countries should devote 0.7% of their GNP to the world–wide fight against poverty.

But the Cold War between superpowers heated up a few decades later. In the early 1980s President Reagan began a program of re-militarization of the United States. In Canada a conservative tide brings government policy “back into line.”

And then CIDA aligned itself with the World Bank who wanted to “tame” those Third World countries that were viewed as recalcitrant and difficult.

Serious conflicts erupted with those NGOs that wanted to take seriously the necessity to struggle against poverty, a position that was incompatible with the neoliberal “recipes” imposed upon poor countries. In the 1990s, and in line with this austerity push, the Liberal government slashes the CIDA budget by 30 % in the name of deficit reduction.

Popular organizations and NGOs vigorously protested. The NGOs took the position that you’ve got to save the baby (CIDA) but throw out the bathwater. In other words, there had to be a refocusing of energies on the fundamental mission of CIDA, the struggle against poverty. NGOs and other partners organize a world-wide campaign which meets with some success. In 2000, the UN General Assembly, adopts the Millennium Development Goals program, re-launching a modest but important program to address some of the most dramatic problems such as extreme poverty, lack of access to education and healthcare and women’s rights.

A big step backwards

In 2006, Stephen Harper and the Conservatives formed a minority government. His close advisors had a number of projects up their sleeves. One of them was to do away with CIDA, which was viewed in the same light as the CBC, the protection of the environment and of culture, and the redistribution of wealth between provinces, that is, as holdovers from days gone by and best forgotten.

In 2007, a Senate committee proposed the abolition of CIDA. Then, in 2010, the world reacted to this home-grown devaluation of Canadian international involvement. Canada’s candidacy for a seat on the UN Security Council was strongly rejected by an overwhelming majority of countries, a humiliating defeat, but not an unexpected one, given the government’s neo-conservative international agenda.

With a majority Conservative government in 2011, the ideological attacks increased. The government went after a number of NGOs that the conservatives considered “radical”, most notably Alternatives and Kairos, two organizations who had the misfortune to say out loud what many experts in the field were saying privately. Partnership programs, which allowed civil society groups to develop projects with public monies, were gutted. Soon afterwards, the Harper government closed down Rights and Democracy, a far from radical group, but which committed the “crime” of declaring that the Palestinians have rights equal to other groups.

At the same time, a review took place of CIDA funding of projects. The poorest country recipients, notably those in Africa, were cut off. Seemingly by accident, these were the same countries where commercial relations with Canada were limited and the presence of Canadian companies minimal.

Not surprisingly, other countries became “privileged” partners and it’s in these nations where we find Canadian companies, especially mining interests, becoming involved. By reducing Canadian government contributions to international development to unprecedented low levels, (less than half the .07% target promised in the 1970s), Canada earned a dubious accolade from the OECD being cited as an example for all rich countries not to emulate.

And things did not get any better. CIDA, on orders from Minister of International Cooperation, Julian Fantino, attempted to co-opt various NGOs to burnish the image of Canadian mining companies in Africa and Latin America. Meanwhile, other groups were no longer funded, to the delight of an array of “evangelical’’ NGOs, mostly based in Alberta, which received generous grants to “convert” the poor and to do battle against such supposed perversions as homosexuality. All the principles upon which CIDA was built have now been effectively dismantled.

The end of an era

Within the international development community, there are no illusions about the merger of CIDA with the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT). The government’s perspective is clear. The mission of the department is to defend the economic and political interests of Canada abroad. There is no longer any mandate to “fight against poverty.” International development now becomes s a sub-department of DFAIT and will strictly adhere to government dictates. The same thing has happened in New Zealand where a conservative government has made cuts that virtually destroyed development aid in that country.

It is true that the Conservative government in Ottawa may well continue with a few programs. Emergency humanitarian aid continues to grow, not unexpected given the scale and impact of the political exclusion and increasing militarization carried out by the Canadian government. Tragically, there will no shortage of victims requiring such assistance, given the ravages of the world-wide “war without end,” supposedly against terror, led by the United States and assisted by their willing “friends” such as Canada. One should not, however, overlook a little noticed feature of the political landscape that has escaped this neoconservative onslaught.

Canadian society has changed. Strong ties of solidarity have been established between NGOs, grass roots movements, as well as with certain universities and some municipalities. This important sector, formerly funded in part by public monies through CIDA, will continue its work and could become even stronger and, critically, more independent.

In Tunis, at the end of March of this year, thousands of NGOs met at the World Social Forum, including an impressive contingent of groups from Quebec and Canada. On the Forum’s agenda was the struggle against poverty and the fight for peace and dignity for the world’s people. This means confronting injustice and combating militarization. Organizations will also be working to design and put into practice a model of truly sustainable development, which means resisting the pillaging of the planet by multinational petroleum and mining interests. A new world-wide web of co-operation is being built and it will challenge the oppressive neoconservative juggernaut.

This article first appeared in Le Devoir in Montreal on March 23rd, 2013. Translated by John Bradley Pierre Beaudet is a Professor at the School of International Development and Global Studies Program at the University of Ottawa

CD and Feminism: Chronicle of a Movement Defining Itself

Stephanie Ross — 2013-04-12T13:24:50+00:00

Over its 50 years, Canadian Dimension featured some of Canada’s most well-known and thought provoking feminists, activists and scholars, the majority of whom straddled the line between academia and activism. This was fitting for a magazine that has made such a dedicated effort to mobilize knowledge in ways that activists can use in their struggles. Historian Joan Sangster credited CD with being one of a handful of magazines emerging in the 1960s that provided a space for socialist feminists in the face of a labour movement only very slowly beginning to embrace basic principles of gender equality, and a feminist movement often dominated by the concerns of middle-class women. CD’s coverage of feminism was most vibrant when the movement itself was vital, engaged in concrete struggles and actively debating the best strategic ways forward. CD’s coverage and framing of feminist issues over the years provides a fascinating chronicle of the complexity of the wider feminist struggle in Canada as well as of the Canadian left’s engagement with that struggle. CD’s exploration of a series of debates within feminism — about work and class, race, racism and white privilege, reproductive rights, sexuality, sexual violence, and the issue of male allies — indicates a commitment to engage activists in thoughtful discussion, to challenge unspoken assumptions, and to work through sometimes uncomfortable disagreements.

Clearly influenced primarily by socialist feminist analysis, CD focused especially on the political economy of women’s oppression; the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy, socialism and feminism; and the struggles of women to transform workplaces, economic and social policy, and working- class and left organizations (whether unions or parties) in feminist directions.CD also covered the struggle for reproductive rights in a sustained way, asserting that women’s right to control their own bodies was “a basic demand of the women’s movement” (Gordon and Gavigan, March 1975) and “every bit as important a part of the socialism we want to build as, say, workers’ right to control the workplace” (editorial, “Reproductive Choice,” November 1983). Further, the magazine did not limit itself to class issues, and engaged early and extensively with other dimensions of women’s identities, including race, aboriginality, age, disability and sexuality.

Throughout, CD contributors and editors showed themselves remarkably sensitive to the different experiences of and inequalities between women, and to the need to resist middle-class solutions as addressing all women’s needs and interests.

Moreover, CD never asserted a clear editorial policy line on the “correct” approach to feminist issues. This openness allowed a full airing of the real intellectual, political and emotional challenges that needed to be worked through for feminist commitments to gender equality to take root and become “common sense” on the left. It also helped that strong and powerfully articulate feminist voices were always present, able to challenge the limits of defensive reactions to difficult issues. And CD also allowed for iconoclastic thinkers to puncture what superficial consensus may have developed, always requiring its readership to deepen and make more complex its understanding of gender politics.

CD’s engagement with feminism since the late 1960s reflected the struggles that characterized the impact of feminist ideas and practices in the academy, in progressive movements, and in personal lives and relationships. Because feminism sought to undo centuries-old patriarchal practices that implicated all our institutions and our own subjectivities, the process of that undoing inevitably involved conflict and controversy. The articles and debates that appeared in CD’s pages provide a chronicle of a movement defining itself, and often at odds with itself. Historically, the pivotal role played by many CD contributors in the feminist struggles taking place in the economic, political and cultural spheres renders their contributions of particular significance, and the magazine truly provides a living archive of a vibrant and dynamic era.

The Motor Force for Historical Regression or Advance

James Petras — 2013-04-10T16:42:52+00:00

One of the most important and yet most neglected determinants of the outcomes of the economic crisis and resultant deepening of social inequalities and immiseration is the class struggle. In one of his most pithy metaphors, Karl Marx referred to class struggle as ‘the motor force of history.’ In this essay we analyze the central role of class struggle, its impact and reflection in economic decisions and, most especially, the different methods and forms, according to the particular classes engaged in class struggle.

Having clarified the types and methods of class struggle, we will turn to the specific results of class struggles in different regions and countries: the different policies adopted as a result of class struggle reflect the balance of class power at both the national and regional level.

In the last section, we will compare and analyze a series of case studies of class struggles, highlighting the particular class configurations of power, the changing nature of class struggle (CS) and the concrete contingencies, which need to be taken into account in order for the ‘class struggle from below’ to effectively counter-act the class offensive from above.

The Two Faces of the Class Struggle: ‘From Above and Outside’ and ‘From Below’

Too often writers conceive of class struggle as actions taken by workers for working class interest, overlooking the equally significant (and in our epoch even more important) class struggle organized and directed by the ruling classes via the state.

The entire panoply of neo-liberal policies, from so-called austerity measures to mass firings of public and private employees, to massive transfers of wealth to creditors are designed to enhance the power, wealth and primacy of diverse sectors of capitol at the expense of labor. To paraphrase Marx: class struggle from above is the motor force to reverse history — to seize and destroy the advances secured by workers from previous class struggles from below.

Class struggle from above and the outside is waged in boardrooms, stock markets, Central Banks, executive branches of government, parliaments and Congresses. Decision makers are drawn from the ruling class and are in their confidence. Most strategic decisions are taken by non-elected officials and increasingly located in financial institutions (like the International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank and the European Commission) acting on behalf of creditors, bondholders and big banks.

Class struggle from above is directed at enhancing the concentration of wealth in the ruling class, increasing regressive taxes on workers and reducing taxes on corporations, selectively enforcing regulations, which facilitate financial speculation and lowering social expenditures for pensions, health and education for workers families. In addition, class struggle from above is directed at maximizing the collective power of capital via restrictive laws on labor organizations, social movements and public workers’ collective bargaining rights.

In other words, class struggle penetrates numerous sites besides the‘workplace’ and the strictly ‘economic sphere’. State budgets over bailouts are sites of class struggle; banks are sites of class struggle between mortgage holders and households, creditors and debtors.

The fact that class struggle from above usually precludes public demonstrations is largely because the ruling class controls the decision-making institutions from which to impose its class policies. Nevertheless, when institutional power bases are fragile or under siege from labour, ruling classes have engaged in extra-parliamentary and violent public activity such as coups-d’état, appointed technocratic regimes, and engaged in lockouts, financial intimidation and blackmail, as well as mass firing of workers and cooption of collaborators within the political class.

In time of severe crisis, the ruling class nature of political institutions and policies becomes transparent and the class struggle from above intensifies both in scope and depth. Trillions of dollars are transferred from the public treasury to bailout bankers. Hundreds of billions in social cuts are imposed on workers, cutting across all sectors of the economy. During depressions, the class struggle from above takes the form of an all-out war to save capital by impoverishing labour, reversing decades of incremental income and benefits gained in previous class struggles from below.

Class Struggle from Below

Working class struggles from below range from workplace strikes over wages and social benefits, to general strikes to secure social legislation (or to defend past gains) or to prevent assaults on living standards. In critical moments, struggles from below lead to social upheavals in the face of systemic breakdowns, destructive wars and autocratic rule. The methods, participants and results of class struggle from below vary greatly, depending on the socio-economic and political context in which class conflict ensues. What is striking in the contemporary period is the uneven development of the class struggle between countries and regions, between workers in the imperial creditor countries and those in debtor neo-colonial countries. The class struggle from below is especially intensifying among some of the more dynamic capitalist countries in which workers have experienced a prolonged period of intense exploitation and the emergence of a new class of ruling billionaires linked to a dominant one party elite — cases of China and South Africa.

The Class Struggle, Capitalist Crisis: The Ruling Class Offensive

In time of capitalist crisis with declining economic wealth, growing threats of bankruptcy and intense demand for state subsidies, there is no basis for sharing wealth — even unequally — between capitalist, bankers, creditors and workers, debtors and rentiers. Competition over shrinking resources intensifies conflict over shares of a shrinking pie. The ruling class, facing a life and death struggle over survival, strikes back with all the forces — state and private — at its disposal to ensure that its financial needs are met. The public treasury exclusively finances its debts and stimulates its recovery of profits. Ruling class warfare defines who pays for the crisis and who benefits from the recovery…of profits. The crisis is, by turn, a temporary threat to the capitalist economic system and then, in the course of recovering from the crisis, a political economic and social pretext for a ruling class general offensive aimed at reversing labor and social advances over the past half century: Capitalist class warfare dismantles the social safety net and undermines the entire legal and ideological underpinnings of welfare capitalism. Austerity is the chosen term to mark the ruling class’ seizure of the public treasury on its own behalf — without any regard for its social consequences. Austerity is the highest form of class struggle from above because it establishes the arbitrary and unilateral power of capital to decide the present and future division between wages and profits, employment and unemployment and the returns to creditor states and the interest and principal payments of neo-colonial debtor states.

As crisis deepens among debtor nations so does the ruling class intensify its class war on the workers, employees and small business classes. First, the creditor imperial states, (in Europe the Troika -the European Commission, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank) overthrow the constitutional order by seizing control over state power. Then they proceed to decree macro and micro socio-economic policies. They decree employment, wage and fiscal policies. They decree the present and future allocation of state revenues between imperial creditors and local workers. Class warfare goes ‘global’: Regional organizations, like the European Union, which embody formally equal members, reveal themselves as imperial organizations for concentrating wealth among the dominant banks in the imperial centers.

Class Struggle from Below in Time of Crisis

The organizations of the workers — trade unions, pensioners’ associations, etc. — are ill-prepared to confront the open and aggressive all-out war of the ruling class. For decades they were accustomed to collective bargaining and occasional strikes of short duration to secure incremental improvements. Their parties, labour or social democratic, with dual loyalties to capitalist profits and social welfare, are deeply embedded in the capitalist order .Under pressure of ‘the crisis’, they abandoned labor and embraced the formulae of the ruling class, imposing their own versions of austerity. Labour was abandoned; the working classes were on their own — without access to the state and without reliable political allies. The trade unions, narrowly focused on everyday issues and their immediate membership, ignored the mass of unemployed, especially the young unemployed, workers. The class struggle from below lacks the leadership, vision, organization and state resources, which the ruling class possesses, to launch a counter-offensive. Class struggle from below was, at first, entirely defensive; to salvage fragments of labor contracts, to save jobs or reduce firings. The fundamental problem in the ongoing class struggle is that the trade unions and many workers failed to recognize the changing nature of the class struggle: The total war strategy, adopted by the ruling class, went far beyond pay raises and profit reports and embraced a frontal attack on the living, working, housing, pension, health and educational conditions of labor. The politics of social pacts between labor and capital was totally discarded by the ruling class .It demanded unconditional surrender of all social demands and seized the executive prerogatives of the state to enforce and implement the massive re-concentration of income and political power.

Under these conditions, prevalent throughout Europe and the US, what can be said of the class struggle from below? More than ever the class struggle has developed unevenly between the new imperial creditor centers and the debtor working class regions. The most advanced forms of struggle, in terms of scope, demands and intensity, are found in Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy and, to a lesser degree, France and Ireland. The least advanced forms of working class struggle are found in the United States, Canada, Germany, England, Scandinavia and the Low Countries. Among the BRIC countries, class struggle is intensifying in China and South Africa and, to a lesser degree, in India, Russia and Brazil.

The issues raised in each region are significantly different: In China the working class is demanding socio-economic changes and is securing positive improvements in wages, working conditions, housing and health programs via ‘offensive’ class struggles. In Brazil, the working class has lowered poverty levels and unemployment. In South Africa, mining workers, despite bloody massacres by the state, have increased wages and salaries.

For most of the rest, the class struggles are defensive and, in many cases,unsuccessful efforts to defend or lower the loss of employment, labor rights, social insurance and stable employment. The most intensive militant working class struggles are taking place in countries in which the offensive of capital – the ‘class struggle from above’- has been most prolonged, widest in scope and deepest in terms of the cuts in living standards.

The working class struggle has been weakest among the Anglo-American countries where traditions of class struggle and general strikes are weakest. Their trade unions have shrinking memberships; the trade union leaders are closely linked to capitalist parties and there is a very weak or non-existent political identification with class solidarity, even in the face of massive transfers of state revenues to private wealth, and earnings from workers to capital.

Class Struggle: Case Studies

The most sustained and successful advances in social welfare and public services over the past decade have occurred in Latin America where the crisis of capitalism led to militant, broad-based class movements, which overthrew neo-liberal regimes, and imposed constraints on speculative capital and debt payments to imperial centers. Subsequently, nationalist resource-based regimes re-oriented state revenues to fund employment and social legislation. The sequence of popular revolts and political intervention, followed by the election in most cases of nationalist-populist regimes, ameliorated the crisis and sustained policies incrementally advancing working class interests.

In Southern Europe, in contrast, the collapse of capitalism led to a capitalist offensive, led by imperial creditors. They imposed the most retrograde neo-colonial regimes, engaged in savage class warfare — while the organized working class fell back on defensive strategies and large scale social mobilization within the institutional framework of the existing capitalist state. No political offensive, no radical political changes and no social offensive ensued. Movements that do not move forward, move backward. Each defensive struggle, at most, temporarily delayed a new set of social reversals, setting in motion the inexorable advance of the class struggle from above. The ruling classes have imposed decades of debt payments while pillaging budgets for the foreseeable future. The result will be the lowering of wage structures and social payments. New employment contracts are designed to concentrate greater shares of wealth in the hands of the capitalist class for foreseeable future. The policies, imposed via the class struggle from above, demonstrate that welfare programs and social contracts were temporary, tactical concessions — to be definitively discarded once the capitalist class seized exclusive prerogative powers and ruled through executive decrees.

The financial classes of the West have been bailed out and profits have returned to the banks, but the stagnation of the ‘real economy’ continues. The working classes have, in thought and via militant action, realized that collective bargaining is dead. The state, especially the foreign/imperialcreditor-banking state, holds power without any electoral mandate or claim to broad representation. The façade of parliamentary-electoral parties remains as an empty shell. Trade unions, in the most militant instances, engage in almost ritualistic mass protests, which are totally ignored by the imperial ruling class bankers and their local political collaborators. The Troika dons ear plugs and blindfolds while chanting for greater austerity for workers; in the streets, the mantra of the destitute — Basta —echoes in executive palaces.

Final Reflections on the Two Faces of Class Struggle

Unfortunately the ruling classes, especially of the imperial countries, have taken Karl Marx’s dictum that ‘class struggle is the motor force of history’ in a much more consequential manner than the labour movement and its bureaucratic officials. They are better students of Marx.

Taking up class struggle from above and the outside as their main strategic weapon, the ruling classes have launched the most comprehensive, intensive assault on the working class in modern history. They have reversed decades of social legislation and wage and employment gains. They have dramatically lowered living standards and established a new framework to perpetuate and deepen the transfer of wealth for decades to come.

Those, namely labour and the left, who refused to recognize class struggle as the central pivot for political action, have been struck dead on the head. The sustained class-struggle from above shows no limits and no constraints: every social right is denied and every economic resource is subject to large-scale, long-term pillage. A new radical ruling class ideology has emerged proclaiming that everything of value should be taken and will be taken and relegates the peons to eat crow.

Despite being confronted by this new extremist ideology and practice, the practioners of class struggle from below continue to engage in the same methods appropriate to other ‘pragmatic,’ ‘consensual’ times of limited struggles with incremental gains or loses. The failure to recognize the radical changes is structural and congenital. The labour movement refuses to face new class/realities, ones they had failed to anticipate and a reality they have categorically rejected. Class struggle according to the most up-to-date speeches of the ‘labour bureaucrats’ was superseded by modern pragmatic understandings of the common interests of labour and capital.

What is radical and dramatic is the massive entry of decisive new social class actors. They include the rise of non-elected officials to decisive positions of power, forming the “Troika” (the European Central Bank, the IMF, the EU), the equivalent of imperial viceroys, engaged in pillaging the economies of debtor countries; a mass of unemployed youth representing over 50% of workers under 25 years of age; a large sector of low-paid temporary workers not covered by social or labour legislation; a majority of downwardly mobile middle classes, especially among public sector employees and professionals — in the process of being ‘proletarianized’ — losing job tenures, pension benefits,facing rising retirement ages; bankrupt small business people (‘petty bourgeois’) facing unemployment, loss of assets and savings; and downwardly-mobile skilled and semi-skilled workers facing firings, cuts in salaries and wages as well as social benefits.

The deteriorating conditions of these social classes cannot be altered by workplace trade union activity or by collective bargaining — only a political solution, a change of political regime — can shift economic resources from debt payments to productive job-creating investments. The so-called Eurozone is, in reality, a mini-empire of tributary vassals and imperial states — reforming empires has been historically demonstrated to be a futile enterprise.

The political class, as currently constituted, which supports or operates as opposition within the imperial framework, is organically incapable of reversing the changes resulting from the ruling class offensive. The historical legacy of the ruling class offensive and the emergence of new systemic fault lines demands new political movements reflecting the weight of the new dispossessed classes: the specific demands of the downwardly-mobile middle class, businesspeople and workers; the desperate demand for jobs by the vast army of unemployed youth with no future. What is to be done? Clearly parliamentary dissent and electoral politics provide no answers to those millions losing homes, to those losing businesses. There are tens of millions who have never known any employment. Only action directed at mobilizing the unemployed to paralyze the circulation of goods and services; only collective action directed at preventing foreclosures of mortgage holding households; only demands for public works to provide jobs; only factory occupations can save jobs; only worker takeovers and running of factories can provide alternatives and build support for regime change, a political revolution and a break with the tributary empire.

In the short run there can only be international solidarity among the workers in the vassal states: the workers in the imperial states — the U.S., Germany, the Nordic states and the UK are still bound and tied to their respected ruling classes.

Calling Foul on Canada

Andrea Levy — 2013-04-05T21:26:15+00:00

When it comes to environmental neglect, Canada is outdistancing the competition. We have earned six consecutive “Fossil of the Year” awards, a dishonour bestowed by a coalition of 700 NGOs upon the country that contributes most to impeding progress on UN climate change negotiations. And while the “Colossal Fossil” designation may be a tad facetious, there is no hint of humour in the recent ranking of Canada as an environmental delinquent by the Conference Board of Canada.

That mainstream economic policy think tank just issued its biannual environment report card evaluating 17 wealthy countries on their performance in 14 different areas. Canada came in 15th, with only the US and Australia registering a poorer performance. We were rated dead last on greenhouse gas emissions, on energy intensity (the ratio of energy production and use to GDP), on the Marine Trophic Index (a measure of the health of fish stocks), on VOC emissions, and on municipal waste generation. We were second to last on water withdrawals as well as on nitrous oxide and sulphur oxide emissions.

So Canada is already down there among the class dunces in environmental studies, and the Harper government is busy securing our future as an environmental vandal with its relentless demolition of environmental regulation and research and its unscrupulous allegiance to the agenda of the oil and gas industry. Another recent story has confirmed – unsurprisingly – the extent to which Harper & Co. do the bidding, to the letter as it were, of the fossil fuel companies.

Greenpeace used access to information laws to obtain a copy of a December 2011 letter sent to Environment Minister Peter Kent and Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver by the Energy Framework Initiative (EFI), a who’s who of fossil fuel traffickers including: the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, the Canadian Petroleum Products Institute and the Canadian Gas Association. Their letter urges the government to modify (read vitiate) a series of environmental laws on the grounds that the basic approach of prohibiting harm embodied in existing legislation is “outdated.”

In a notable bit of business doublespeak, they write: “environmental legislation is almost entirely focused on preventing bad things from happening rather than enabling responsible outcomes. This results in a position of adversarial prohibition rather than enabling collaborative conservation to achieve agreed common goals.” We get the drift.

The existing laws explicitly targeted in the letter are the National Energy Board Act, the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, the Fisheries Act, the Navigable Waters Protection Act, the Species at Risk Act, and the Migratory Birds Convention Act. What do these laws have in common? In the interest of environmental protection they all posed some obstacles to pipelines and mines, and they were all undermined by the Harper government in the wake of that letter. When it comes to fossil fuel floggers, Harper’s motto is “ask and ye shall receive.” Of course, the letter must also be set in the larger context of a gargantuan lobbying effort on the part of the petroleum pushers. In a December 2012 report examining the unprecedented scale and strength of that lobby and documenting the cozy relationships between key lobbyists and government, the Polaris Institute concludes: “The Canadian state is in the process of being fundamentally altered by the petroleum industry through lobbying. Consequently, the role of the state is being rejigged to operate in favour of the resource sector and the petroleum industry in particular, thereby increasingly transforming the political order of Canada into that of a petro state.”

The fossil-fuellers’ pipeline to the PMO and other spheres of government augurs the ongoing weakening of environmental regulation, relegating Canada to the status of a rogue state when it comes to environmental protection and climate change mitigation.

Let’s hope Greenpeace’s Keith Stewart is borne out in his belief, expressed in a January 9 blog post, that “when governments become cheerleaders for industry, Canadians step up to protect the environment themselves. The result is that the harder the Harper government tries to push through new tar sand mines and pipelines, the stronger the opposition becomes.”

How Martin Luther King’s legacy speaks to our Canadian reality

Simon Black — 2013-04-04T20:55:53+00:00

n April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Most Canadians, even those with little knowledge of American history, will know King as a leader of the African-American civil rights movement, a Christian minister and a proponent of non-violent civil disobedience. And many will be acquainted with the public address with which King is most closely associated, the I Have a Dream speech delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. in August 1963.

The version of King commemorated on the third Monday of January each year in the U.S. — the version Canadians will be familiar with — is that of a prophetic, revolutionary voice tamed and made safe for an America — and a world — still characterized by racial, economic and social injustice. As African-American philosopher Cornel West has said, “Martin has been deodorized, sanitized, sterilized by the right wing and neo-liberals to such a degree that his militancy is downplayed.”

On April 4, 1967, a year to the day before his death, King departed from his message of civil rights to deliver a speech against America’s war in Vietnam. Standing at the pulpit of Harlem’s historic Riverside Church, King denounced the war, connecting his government’s military adventures abroad to the failure of the war on poverty at home. The programs designed to house the homeless, feed the hungry and provide jobs for the unemployed — “the real promise of hope for the poor” — were starved for cash as the war effort was ramped up.

As King said that day, “I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”

He argued that America must “undergo a radical revolution of values” for “when machines and computers, profit and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

King’s criticism of U.S. imperialism, his commitment to ending poverty, and his belief that the promise of civil rights could not be fulfilled without economic and social rights did not endear him to a broad swath of the American public. In the months before his death, his disapproval rating stood at 74 per cent; among black Americans it was 55 per cent. In the wake of his Beyond Vietnam speech, some mainstream civil rights leaders distanced themselves from King, fearing he had aligned himself too closely with the radical left of the Black Power and peace movements. The Washington Post declared: “King has done a grave injury to those who are his natural allies … and … an ever graver injury to himself.” In denouncing the war, he had denounced a president — Lyndon Johnson — who had taken political risks in supporting civil rights legislation. Financial contributions to King’s civil rights organization dried up. “I’d rather follow my conscience, than follow the crowd,” King replied.

This is the King we seldom hear from today, the King who called for a “radical revolution of values.” His message is a moral beacon, a light whose source may have been the black church, a prophetic Christianity forged amid the struggle against American apartheid more than 40 years ago, but it illuminates the dark corners of Canadian democracy today.

In Canada, we have spent $11.3 billion on the mission in Afghanistan, yet in the latest federal budget there was little for the 3.2 million of our fellow citizens who live in poverty.

We can afford to spend upward of $25 billion on new fighter jets to patrol the skies, but do not have the money to address the crisis of affordable housing that leaves so many Canadians homeless or precariously housed.

We live with racial inequalities — for example, racialized Canadians are three times more likely to live in poverty than other Canadians and in Toronto black males are three times more likely to be carded by police — yet do little to address institutionalized racism in our labour markets and criminal justice systems.

One in five aboriginals lives in poverty and many live without access to basic necessities such as electricity and clean water. Schools on reserves face funding gaps between $2,000 and $3,000 per student each year compared with provincial schools. Yet we have a prime minister who is more eager to greet two visiting pandas from China than First Nations youth who have trekked some 1,600 kilometres to Parliament Hill.

Too many of our political leaders have become well adjusted to injustice. Too many are willing to sacrifice equality and dignity for all on the altar of free markets and the national security establishment.

In that same speech at the Riverside Church, King said, “These are revolutionary times … people all over the globe are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wombs of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born.”

From the Arab Spring to the global movement to end violence against women and girls, from anti-austerity protests in Europe to Occupy Wall Street, from rebellions of urban youth in France and the U.K. to indigenous struggles in the Americas, once again people are on the move the world over. We are waiting for new systems of justice and equality to be born.

At home, student protests in Quebec, union demonstrations for labour rights and, perhaps most important, the Idle No More movement, have questioned a social and economic order that benefits the few at the expense of the many.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a world free from poverty, racism and militarism is a universal one. His is a legacy worth wrestling with as we forge the path to a more just society.

Simon Black is a researcher at the City Institute at York University and a member of Peel Poverty Action Group.

** This article originally appeared in the Toronto Star**

Modern Day Slavery

Alyssa McMurtry — 2013-04-03T17:18:15+00:00

Noé Arteaga’s employers fired and deported him to Guatemala after he stood up for his rights as a migrant worker in Canada.

Temporary foreign workers come to Canada on a visa with their employer’s name on it. They cannot change employers if a problem arises. Workers are also often dependent on their employers for transportation, housing and food.

Arteaga and his 70 colleagues worked on a tomato farm in Quebec.

One day in the summer of 2008 a worker became sick. This worker was mentally and physically ill and needed urgent medical attention. He was too sick to work and his supervisors kept the man on a bus while everyone else was working in the fields. Arteaga organized a mini-strike. He told his employers that he and a group of men would not work until they took the man to a hospital.

The man went to the hospital but Arteaga’s employers were angry, he said.

A few weeks later Arteaga refused to work on a day that he was supposed to have off.

The next day the consulate called and told him that he lost his job and had to go home. Within 12 hours he was at the airport.

“I presented a little problem and they cut me just like that. This is why migrant workers are so beneficial to farmers,” Arteaga said. “Even if they get paid the same as Canadians they are too scared to say anything and if they do, they’re gone.”

He did not get severance pay and had to pay for his flight home.

Arteaga returned to Canada under refugee status. He was the first Guatemalan migrant worker to file a claim against his employers in Quebec.

More than 300,000 temporary foreign workers were in Canada in 2011. This number tripled since the year 2000, according to a report by the Metcalf Foundation called “Made in Canada.” Temporary workers have come to Canada to work in an array of industries. Fourteen percent of all workers came from the Philippines. The majority were women working as nannies. The men, chiefly those from Central America, most often worked in agriculture, according to data from the 2006 census.

Few laws assist these workers and they are often unaware of their rights, said Stan Raper, the national coordinator for Agricultural Workers Alliance.

“I’ve seen people living in garages with pesticides and chemicals. I’ve seen people sleeping on cardboard on the floor. I’ve seen housing with air and water quality issues. I’ve seen people living in barns. It’s pretty disturbing,” Raper said.

Each year, officials must inspect the housing before the provincial government approves, according to the Foreign Agriculture Resource Management Service.

Farmers in the Niagara region are increasingly cutting costs, said Jane Andres. She lives in the Niagara region and organizes community events for migrant worker. Canadian farmers in the region are less able to compete with fruit from the United States and Africa where labour is cheaper, she said.

“When workers are getting abused you really have to look at the lives of the farmers,” she said.

“It’s hard here but I really can’t complain,” said Maximo Paul Lira, a Mexican worker who has returned to Canada for 10 seasons to work on farms in Southern Ontario. Each season has lasted around eight months. Every winter he has returned to Mexico.

He has continued to come back because in Mexico he could not make the same amount of money and support his family.

“If I could get residence I would, just so I would be free,” he said. “Here the bosses are super demanding and I just have to tolerate it. I can’t quit or say anything.”

Arteaga did speak up and his employers deported him. Now he’s an outspoken critic of the program.

“It’s modern day slavery,” he said. “You are tied to your employer and if you don’t like what is happening there are thousands of people ready to take your job. They dispose of the workers, just like they did to me.”

Arteaga said the economic conditions in Guatemala have been bad. His younger brother still wanted to come to Canada as a temporary worker.

From Corporation to Crisis

Mel Watkins — 2013-03-29T15:48:16+00:00

The authors tell us this book has been “a long time in the making.” It has been well worth the wait.

The dust jacket bears endorsements, fulsome even by the necessities of the medium, from four distinguished scholars and writers, David Harvey among them. Living next door to the United States, bearing the fullness of its embrace, can be an advantage in understanding global capitalism. Panitch and Gindin have understood the early intrusion of the American-based multinational corporation into the Canadian economy and polity as being the quintessence of subsequent American imperialism world-wide — American Manifest Destiny results in the Canadianization of the globe, which may or may not make you feel proud — and made of that insight, and all it contains, this excellent book.

In the latter part of the 19th century, the then dominant British Empire was of a dual nature: the traditional imperialism of conquest and the novel imperialism of free trade. The rising American Empire toyed with conquest among the remnants of the Spanish Empire, but triumphed with free trade as it morphed into freedom to invest abroad for the multinational corporations which the Americans were creating faster than in the rest of the world. We know all this to our peril from today’s so-called free trade agreements, which are really Charters of Rights and Freedoms for corporations.

The consequences for global political economy have been deep and pervasive. To invest abroad requires guarantees of that investment, which have to be given by the “host” state. The terminology is revealing: the receiving country must be a good host, treating the guest with due deference, and even cleaning up after any mess that is made. The internationalization of the corporation compels the spread of those policies, pioneered within the United States, namely, the internationalization of the state— a fuller integration, a deeper, more pervasive intimacy than that required by the free trade of yore.

Still, as Panitch and Gindin are at pains to demonstrate — it takes up many good pages in this book — in the nature of imperialism the bottom line is the role of the “home” state, of Washington, where actual ownership and control resides, to practice and to push pro-corporate policies. The American state must demonstrate its capacity and willingness to maintain what passes for order while restructuring the world in America’s image, managing crises, particularly financial, and containing labour and the left.

So it is that Panitch and Gindin properly insist that today’s neoliberalism is not about the withering away of the state, but about its active role in the care and feeding of the corporation. Unions must be kept in their place, or the class struggle inherent to capitalism could get out of hand. National liberation movements, even chatter about economic nationalism, must be stifled. (Environmentalists likewise: this we certainly know in Canada in the age of Harper.) Not only are multinational corporations persons, as is regularly ruled by the US Supreme Court, they are huge, giant persons lobbying your government and mine, making these their government.

The other major part of the story told in truly impressive detail is that of the American-led management of international finance. If the corporations are yours, it makes sense to be the world’s banker and the American dollar the world’s currency, and making that happen is hard work. The London-led system of finance had been radically undermined by the Great Depression and the Second World War. It was necessarily rebuilt under American auspices. It was not without its problems, even its crises, but American leadership proved sufficient to their resolution and none toppled American dominance.

We are taken up to and through the crisis of 2007/8. It’s the kind of crisis that left activists are wont to insist is a clear sign of the weakness of capitalism, the better to rally for the struggle. Panitch and Gindin are rather inclined to be impressed by the ability of Washington to contain the damage and put things back on an even keel.

What does surprise this reviewer is the authors’ willingness to describe “new financial instruments” like those infamous derivatives as “crucial to globalization,” the better to hedge against the escalation of risk. There is some truth to this, but overall it runs counter to much of the commentary by progressive economists about manic exuberance, about how risk is increased rather than decreased. It imagines that what is inherently uncertain about the future (Donald Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns”) can be dealt with by pretending it is assessable risk that can be insured. We were told by the great Keynes himself, who our authors otherwise treat with great respect, that there is genuine uncertainty that can only be dealt with by greater caution.

In a book that already packs so much into its more than 400 pages, it may seem ungracious to point out what is missing but it is odd, to say the least, that there are no more than passing references to the Pentagon and the CIA and the role they play in making the globe safe for the American corporation. Isn’t all that arms spending helpful in keeping the doors open for American corporations, and has it not at some points, like the Cuban missile crisis, even put the whole project and the lives of millions — and the very existence of the American empire and hence of this book — at risk?

Our authors are dismissive of the challenge from China. There is some merit in that position. There is still a lot of fight left in that old dog of Western imperialism. Yet the role of China in the past has been consistently underestimated in the West. Perhaps we should bear that in mind when judging its future.

A review of such a stimulating book as this one must end on a positive note. Unlike too many of the academic scribbles in the social sciences these days, this book is refreshingly light on theory into which the facts must be crammed, and laws to which they must therefore conform. It is a demonstration of how far a historical materialist framework rooted in Marx can take us once the search for immutable laws and certain truths is abandoned. It deserves a wide readership, inside and outside the academy.