Canadian Dimension Feed

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.

Review: The No-Nonsense Guide to Global Surveillance

Scott Neigh — 2013-04-18T00:07:38+00:00

[Robin Tudge. The No-Nonsense Guide to Global Surveillance. Toronto: Between the Lines and London: New Internationalist, 2011.]

This will be a little review of a little book. It is a useful resource — part of a series of small, focused No-Nonsense Guides put out by Toronto publisher Between the Lines — but it is also one that has limits and should be read with a certain amount of caution.

There are two main strengths to the book. The first is its sense of urgency. Despite the problems with the book I note below, the ever-increasing amounts of data that are collected about each of us by states and by for-profit corporations, and the ever-increasing sophistication with which disparate pools of data are connected both to each other and to various mechanisms to regulate and discipline us, are not understood as broadly as they need to be nor treated with sufficient urgency even by some of those who have a sense of the scope of the problem. On that level, a bracing call to wake up already and pay attention to the issue is certainly welcome.

The other main strength of the book, and perhaps the one that matters more to me, is its usefulness as a piece of reporting and a collation of a great many sources. I did notice a few problems with referencing, but by and large it seems to make good use of reports (both establishment and dissident), scholarly research, and pieces published over the years in the mass media, as well as the words of whistle-blowers from within organizations that do various pieces of the work that the book describes. Moreover, bringing it all together into one volume helps give a sense of the scale of the problem and the sweep of its trajectory in a way that is easy to miss when all you see is an out-of-context article here and an isolated news story there. I think anyone looking to investigate further will find this book a good first stop in terms of tracking down important resources.

That said, there is lots that makes me more hesitant about the book too. For one thing, even before getting into the substance of its politics, despite being co-published by a Canadian publisher, the book has very little to say about how all of this has been implemented here. That would be nice to know about.

But there’s a lot more than that. The book is fairly narrowly focused on questions of surveillance, and is obviously written to appeal to people with a broad range of politics on other issues. While understandable from the perspectives of winning converts to a narrow cause and of selling books, I think that approach almost always leads to shoddy politics. In this case, the fairly singular focus on surveillance and the consequent state and corporate regulation and discipline leads to a fairly flat understanding of power. Thankfully it is robust enough that it recognizes private tyrannies (capitalist corporations) as well as public tyrannies (states), but it still is almost entirely organized around “freedom from” rather than a richer understanding of “freedom to” or of “thriving”, and that leads it towards … well, in some places, the flavour is almost right-libertarian, whereas in others it is a particular kind of U.S. American liberalism. And I think as urgent as surveillance is, as part of broader questions of power, oppression, and resistance, thinking of them only in terms of “freedom from” is dangerous and will likely create that freedom for people who are already privileged while merely reshaping the cage slightly for most of the rest of the people on earth.

In a related problem, it presents enforcing a “right to privacy” as the answer to surveillance, and “privacy” as an unambiguous good. While there are plenty of examples historically of strategically-deployed struggles for privacy winning gains for ordinary people, and I’m certainly not taking any absolute position against doing so now, it’s a lot more complicated than that. “Privacy” and how it is put together socially can be a component in a lot of gender and sexual oppression, for example. A more liberatory response to the issues raised by this book may struggle not for “privacy” but for a way of organizing our lives that does not depend on an axis between “public” and “private” as currently constituted.

There are points where the shallow, Cold War liberal or even libertarian rhetoric is thick enough to make you cough and splutter. For instance, in its potted history of surveillance — some of which is useful, mind you — it frames the world in terms of “communist” and “fascist” and “democratic”, which is itself a sign of simplistic liberalism to follow, and then it frames the surveillance/regulation problems of the first two earlier in the twentieth century as systemic while the excesses of the latter are blamed on the power hungry machinations of one man, J. Edgar Hoover, and it proceeds to pine for a time when the true principles of democratic freedom were more freely adhered to in the U.S. of A. While Hoover is someone who belongs in the ‘evil’ category in any just accounting of history, this framing ignores the reams and reams of work showing that liberal-democracy has also been systemically violent, nasty, and oppressive, from the get-go — it just organizes and distributes it all a bit differently.

I could do some more detailed dissection of the book’s limitations, but I promised a short(ish) review and I really have other work that I should be doing, so I’ll just note general themes. A particularly egregious one, given how surveillance and the disciplinary practices attached to it have played out in the last decade and more, is the seriously underplaying of the centrality of racialization and white supremacy in how surveillance is organized and experienced. Then there is the book’s tendency to not always be careful in distinguishing among what happens now, what theoretically could happen and probably will at some point, what technically could happen but probably won’t, what various political actors wish to happen and that may or may not actually happen, and what state/corporate/surveillance industry insider rhetoric claims in denial of the complexity and unevenness of how huge bureaucratic and technological systems inevitably function. The little hypothetical scenario with which the author opens the book is perhaps the most egregious example, but far from the only one. And while that kind of approach might help to produce a sense of short-term urgency, it can lead to misidentifying the problem. And, in fact, it can be one part of another larger problem with the book, that it consistently gives too much power to that which we struggle against and underemphasizes our capacity to make change through struggle. This can lead to a circumstance where dissatisfaction with the status quo is urgently felt but leads to little or no activity, and that is not a good thing.

This has not been as little a review as I intended. Sorry! In any case, the book’s urgency is important and the resources that it collects are useful, but read it with caution: Its political and rhetorical limitations nudge the reader towards a politics that will be woefully insufficient to truly address, in a just and liberatory, practices of surveillance and the oppressive and exploitative social relations in which they are embedded.

[Scott Neigh is a writer, parent, and activist based in Sudbury, Ontario. He is the author of two books looking at Canadian history through the stories of activists, which you can learn about here and buy here. He is also the host/producer of Talking Radical Radio. This review originally appeared on his personal blog.]

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.

Reflections on CD through five decades

Cy Gonick — 2013-03-29T15:40:49+00:00

What motivated me to start producing a magazine in the basement of my rented house in Winnipeg in the fall of 1963? I was 27 years old at the time, and knew nothing at all about how to run a business, let alone publish a magazine. I had no money, nor did I know anyone who did. Even worse, I barely knew anyone who might want to write for a magazine.

But it was precisely the last point that mainly motivated me. I had just returned home after spending the better part of a decade in the most intellectually alive city in North America. That was Berkeley, California, hotbed of American radicalism, the birthplace of the New Left on this side of the Atlantic. I had barely begun my political education and I desperately wanted to continue it. But for that you need to be part of a community of like-minded people. I prowled local bookstores, poked around libraries, attended some NDP meetings — and concluded that there was no Left intellectual community, at least none that I could discover. To be part of one, I had to help create it.

That’s how Canadian Dimension came to be. Readership grew from a hundred or so in the first year to a solid 3,000 by 1970. As owner and editor I stumbled along, learning on the go, getting some help here and there. Donations dribbled in; a marvelous art director came forward and gave Dimension its own unique look. Within a few years the magazine had begun to take shape around a few key issues that we sought to link together: American imperialism, Canadian independence, socialism, and self-determination for Québec. But Dimension’s ultimate validation came as young authors, a new generation of activist writers and public intellectuals, found a space in the magazine to exchange ideas about how to change the world, define their own thinking and in so doing redefine what Canada was becoming and what it could become. By 1970, young professors like Charles Taylor, George Grant, Gad Horowitz, G. David Sheps, Philip Resnick, John Warnock and Mel Watkins; graduate students like James Laxer, Stan Gray, Jim Harding; labour journalists like Ed Finn; and still others like middle-distance runner Bruce Kidd, Varda Burstyn, Stan Persky and Peter Usher had found in Canadian Dimension a space to share and debate their ideas. James Petras, who I had first met in grad school, sent articles to Dimension from day one, a practice he kept up long after he had become one of America’s notable radical writers. By then, too, CD had formed a collective and had long since moved out of my basement. In fact, it was when Al Finkel, who I had taken on as an assistant editor, began wearing gloves in my basement because it was so cold that we moved into our first office, a studio space we shared with Kelly Clark, CD’s designer and art director. About a decade ago, with the help of the internet, our editorial capacity expanded greatly, with a collective bringing together members from every part of the country.

In 1970, nearly 10 percent of CD subscribers were under 25 years of age and 36 percent were between 26 and 35. Another 25 percent were between the ages of 36 and 50, with 29 percent over 50. A survey ten years later, however, confirmed a troubling trend to which we had not paid sufficient attention. The average age of Dimension subscribers was rising. Nearly half were over 50; less than 20 percent were under 35. But it would be a few years before we started working on turning that tide.

1975 was the peak year for CD’s circulation. Hundreds of thousands of young Canadians, holding a powerful belief that a better world is possible, came into the movement for social change. Hungry for analysis and new ideas, they turned to Canadian Dimension as one of their sources. But soon the collapse of the anti-war movement, the New Left and the Waffle, and the defeat of the Allende experiment in Chile all took their toll on the movements — and just as quickly our readership dropped back to its core. By 1984 it sank below 4,000, dropping still and finally hitting bottom in the early 90s.

Canadian Dimension exists at the political margins of this country. It was never intended as a mass-circulation magazine. When people are in motion, however, the margin stretches and magazines like Dimension thrive. When, on the other hand, they are discouraged, quiescent and immobilized, the magazine suffers too. That is our political cycle. So, we picked up with the anti-globalization movement and fell back again after 9/11 and the criminalization of dissent. Predictably, our optimism and our creative juices have surged these past few years with Occupy, the Maple Spring and Idle No More — and we expect that our readership will follow.

One distinguishing feature of Canadian Dimension is that we’ve never been afraid to criticize ourselves or our friends. We’ve exposed union-bashing at Greenpeace, the Catholic Church’s complicity with anti-abortion terrorism, environmental organizations taking money from some of our biggest polluters. And we’ve debated racism on the Left, opposed sexism in the labour movement and criticized the NDP’s drift toward neoliberalism. And that’s just for starters. At one time or another, Dimension has managed to piss off just about every participant in civil society. Being independent has allowed us to take our shots and give space to activists to take theirs. At times we’ve paid a steep price for this independence. We’ve been boycotted, lost our charity number, sued and threatened with suits.

Through all the ups and downs, my commitment to radical politics and to this project of Canadian Dimension has rarely wavered. CD has been for me an unfailing vehicle for meeting exciting thinkers, exploring new ideas, confronting current developments, and developing the skills and the grit to survive in a tough industry on a tiny budget.

Capitalism is crisis-prone, driving a relentless assault on nature and humankind. There has to be a better way, call it what you may, to organize ourselves and live together. Magazines like Canadian Dimension are essential in charting that course.

Paul Rose’s tortuous path in search of Quebec liberation

Richard Fidler — 2013-03-19T18:54:59+00:00

Paul Rose, Quebec sovereigntist and socialist, died March 14 in Montréal, following a stroke. He was 69.

Notorious for his participation in the 1970 kidnapping and death of a Quebec cabinet minister, for which he spent 13 years in prison, Rose went on to become a trade union activist, the leader of the Parti pour la démocratie socialiste (PDS) — formerly the Quebec wing of the New Democratic Party — and most recently a founder of the Union des forces progressistes (UFP), which became today’s Québec solidaire.

Paul Rose was part of a generation of Québécois who radicalized in the wake of the Cuban revolution, African colonial liberation, the Vietnam war and the Afro-American upsurge, and who sought to apply the lessons of these liberation struggles to the reality of Quebec’s national oppression. But Paul Rose was most remarkable because in later years — in contrast to many of his former comrades — he sought above all to develop a political strategy that could fuse the cause of national liberation with that of proletarian emancipation independently of the Parti québécois, in a period when seeking to change the world usually meant swimming against the current.

A figure of controversy to the end, Paul Rose was the subject of sharply conflicting obituaries in the major media outlets. While reporters in the Globe & Mail and the Montreal Gazette sought to describe Rose’s life and political evolution in relatively objective terms,[1] the Francophone media[2] — addressed to an audience much closer to the action, and deemed more susceptible, perhaps, to identify with Rose — denounced him as little more than a “terrorist.” Most outrageous was a sneering column by Patrick Lagacé in the mass-circulation daily La Presse comparing Rose to a “bearded salafist,” the Shining Path guerrillas of Peru, and the Red Army Faction in Germany.

Not to be outdone, federal parliamentarians voted unanimously March 18 to register their “zero tolerance toward all forms of terrorism” and to condemn “any attempt to glorify a member of the FLQ convicted for such criminal activities.” The motion was aimed in part at Québec solidaire MLA Amir Khadir, who had tried unsuccessfully to get a motion through the Quebec National Assembly honouring the memory of Paul Rose.

Québec solidaire tribute

In a short obituary note, Québec solidaire expressed its condolences to Rose’s family and friends, as well as “to the progressives and independentists who had the pleasure to fight alongside him over many years.

“Throughout his life, Paul Rose remained convinced of the need to struggle for the national liberation and political emancipation of the Quebec people. After the tragic events of October 1970, he chose to conduct this struggle on the terrain of democracy and citizen involvement.”

That last sentence covers a lot of territory in a few words. Too few, in fact. Unfortunately, Paul Rose himself, to my knowledge, said little for public consumption about the evolution of his political views and affiliations over the years. He was an activist, a militant, much less a tribune. In his few public statements for the record, he seemed more concerned with establishing the continuities, not the changes. But both continuity and changes merit some consideration, in my view.

In a 2005 interview with the newspaper Unité ouvrière (cited in the Globe & Mail obituary, incidentally), Rose described the context in which he, his brother Jacques Rose and their associates came to political consciousness. “Before October [1970], we were all in the workers or student movement. The struggle that politicized us came from the whole process of democratization of education, access by working-class sons and daughters to education. Ultimately, this youth put into practice what it was learning, creating tools of liberation in the working class. These were the groups and popular clinics, the workers’ committees and neighbourhood citizens’ committees.”

But increasingly they found their activity obstructed by the enactment of repressive laws by governments and municipalities. In Montréal, for example, an anti-demonstration bylaw, emulated by other municipalities throughout Quebec, seemed to block legal political protest actions. The new political engagement of working-class youth was a matter of great concern to the state, said Rose. “Because as long as it’s just ideas, all right, but when these ideas become demands, and militant action, it is a danger to that authority.” Unable to identify with the legalistic electoralism of the newly formed Parti québécois, Rose and his associates opted for armed action.

Early influences

A major influence in Rose’s thinking, at the time, was a book written by Pierre Vallières, a talented journalist who, like Rose, had spent his childhood in Ville Jacques-Cartier, in the shanty town of Côteau Rouge where, as Pierre Dubuc writes, “the houses were built of sheet metal and the sewers were open pits.” In his own book L’autre histoire de l’indépendance, Dubuc — who was asked by Paul Rose’s family to handle media relations after his death — has described the salient ideas in Vallières’ book, Nègres blancs d’Amérique, “the White Niggers of America,” subtitled the “precocious autobiography of a Québécois terrorist.” His account bears lengthy citation.

“This book synthesized the anger and ideas of an entire generation of young rebels of the late 1950s who, during the following decade, would identify with the revolutionary decolonization movement — more particularly, the Cuban revolution — and promote a revolutionary solution to the Quebec question.Nègres blancs articulates this generation’s interpretation of the history of Quebec, perceived as a colony of hewers of wood and drawers of water. It likewise set out, albeit in a rudimentary and fragmentary way, the project of a socialist Quebec, although oddly enough the references were not Marx or Lenin but the economists Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy and André Gunder Frank of the U.S. magazine Monthly Review, which at the time had substantial influence in the Quebec left….

“Vallières’ great gift was to have brilliantly summarized our history and our condition as Québécois in that wonderfully evocative title, White Niggers of America. It was the reverse, the mirror image, of the discourse of the Anglophone oppressor and his arrogant “Speak White.” Vallières had grasped the very essence of our américanité, shall we say, to use an expression of our day. An américanité quite different from the myth of the Québécois as a model of the American frontier colonist.”

Nègres blancs was drafted in a prison in New York, where Vallières was incarcerated along with Charles Gagnon, a comrade in the “Front de libération du Québec” (FLQ).

“Vallières and Gagnon had been jailed for demonstrating in front of the United Nations on September 25,-26, 1966 to demand political prisoner status for their comrades jailed in Montréal and to publicize worldwide the struggle for national liberation of the Québécois. They had taken refuge in New York among groups of Black Panther militants after the police break-up of their FLQ network they had just set up.

“Vallières and Gagnon had met at the University of Montréal in the early 1960s. They had both participated in the magazine Cité Libre edited by Gérard Pelletier and Pierre Elliott Trudeau. In 1964, the two of them broke with Cité Libre and created the magazine Révolution québécoise, where they advocated Quebec independence but criticized nationalism and favoured workers’ struggles. In the fall of 1965, they opted for the FLQ and clandestinity.

“After a series of violent actions, including placing bombs at the Lagrenade factory and Dominion Textiles during labour conflicts, the network was dismantled by the police; Vallières and Gagnon fled to New York.

In an article published at the time, Vallières wrote that the task was to

“provide the people with the opportunity, the motivation and the material means (a) to rise up against the established authority, (b) to conquer state power and finally, (c) substitute a ‘new order’ in place of the old structures, the conquest of power or independence being simply a stage on the path of the political, economic, social and cultural transformation of the country.”

[…]

“Vallières identified three phases in this liberation struggle: ‘1. conquest of sufficiently extensive popular support for the idea of independence; 2. opening of a period of direct actions with the goal being to provoke an initial breach in the established order, to exalt popular passions, to oblige the regime to reveal itself publicly as it is, and to undermine the morale of the adversaries; 3. finally, the general offensive.’

“Vallières and Gagnon thought the situation in Quebec called for the opening of the second phase.

“This brief summary helps us to understand the general orientation of the FLQ of Vallières and Gagnon. We should note, by the way, that the Libération and Chénier cells in 1970 shared the same outlook.”

And it was the Libération and Chénier “cells” of the FLQ that initiated the October crisis: the first by kidnapping a British diplomat; the second (which included Paul and Jacques Rose) by kidnapping Quebec’s labour minister, Pierre Laporte.

October Crisis

The October Crisis dramatically confirmed the naiveté of Vallières’ analysis. It was not hard for the governments concerned to turn the tables on these tiny groups acting solely on their own initiative. The Trudeau government’s invocation of the War Measures Act, and the resulting arrests of hundreds of political activists, revealed the real relationship of social forces, chilling free speech and throwing the left on the defensive for a period. While members of the Chénier cell managed to negotiate their exile to Cuba, the Roses and their comrades were soon arrested and sentenced to long prison terms.[3]

For interesting examples of the response to these developments by revolutionary socialists, who always rejected the theories of “minority violence” propagated by these naïve ultraleftists, I recommend the readings assembled by the Socialist History Project under the heading “The October Crisis (1970),”. Socialists in both Quebec and English Canada worked to build committees to defend the direct victims of the War Measures repression, who included, in addition to Vallières and Gagnon, such figures as trade-union leader Michel Chartrand and the leader of the movement for defense of political prisoners in Quebec — all of them charged with sedition. And articles in our newspapers explained why Marxists opposed acts of individual terror as counter-productive to the necessary building of mass movements for social change.

The War Measures repression gave Pierre Trudeau and his counterparts in the Quebec government and Montréal’s civic administration a temporary advantage; for example, in the municipal elections held in the midst of the crisis Montréal mayor Jean Drapeau was able to crush the opposition FRAP (Front d’action populaire), a new labour-based municipal party.

However, the mass movement revived within the following year, and the early 1970s saw a radicalization of the labour movement around some important strikes. The major union centrals each adopted anticapitalist manifestos. And in 1972 the jailing of leaders of the three main centrals sparked a spontaneous general strike that shut down entire cities in some parts of the province. Opinion polls registered growing popular support for the pro-sovereignty Parti québécois.

The paths not taken by Paul Rose

Meanwhile, Pierre Vallières and Charles Gagnon both renounced their “FLQ” past, but went separate ways. Vallières, in L’Urgence de choisir,[4] published in December 1971, called on radicals to join the PQ. Gagnon, in an essay published a few months later, Pour un parti prolétarien,[5] denounced Vallières as a “traitor to the cause” and rejected not only the PQ but what he termed “the nationalist dead-end.” This document became the founding text of the En Lutte/In Struggle group, and its hostility to Québécois nationalism was also characteristic of the other “Marxist-Leninist” (Maoist) groups that thrived in Quebec during the following decade.

Imprisoned during this period, Paul Rose was unable to participate in this debate on the left.

In 1976 the Parti québécois was elected to government. Notwithstanding some major reforms such as adoption of the Charter of the French Language (Law 101), its record in office was soon to disappoint those like Vallières who had viewed it as the instrument of Quebec’s national emancipation.

In the early 1980s the various Maoist groups collapsed under the combined effect of the crisis of the nationalist movement following the defeat of the 1980 referendum on sovereignty; the retreat of the labour movement under the blows of the capitalist austerity agenda (the onset of the neoliberal period); the rise of the feminist and gay liberation movements; and the opening to capitalism of post-Mao China.[6]

Left unity

According to the Globe & Mail obituary, in 1982 “Mr. Rose was granted full parole.

He wrote for l’Aut’Journal and worked as an adviser for the Confédération des syndicats nationaux trade union.

He also joined the provincial New Democrats, which had split from the federal party over the issue of Quebec independence.

When Mr. Rose tried to run for a provincial seat in 1991, mortified federal NDP officials considered legal actions to force the Quebec party to drop New Democratic from its name.

The controversy became moot when the Quebec chief electoral officer ruled that Mr. Rose couldn’t run for office because of his murder conviction.

In his most recent notable activity, Mr. Rose gave a speech at a rally in support of last year’s student protests against increasing tuition fees. He was the leader of a fringe leftist party, the Parti de la démocratie socialiste.

This last paragraph is misleading. In fact, the PDS was the remnant of the Quebec NDP following its break with the federal NDP. And Paul Rose, as its leader in the 1990s, was an active participant in the effort to join with other groups on the left to found a new pro-independence party in 2002, the Union des forces progressistes (UFP), which in 2006 fused with Option citoyenne to form Québec solidaire.

Denise Veilleux, a Gatineau QS member who was previously a leading member of the PDS, toured Quebec with Paul Rose in the 1998 provincial election. Although the PDS vote tally was quite small (24,000), she tells me that some of the meetings were well-attended, as many people came out to see and hear Paul Rose, the infamous “felquiste” of lore.

National liberation and international solidarity

“The struggle for national liberation is a class struggle,” Paul Rose said in his interview with Unité ouvrière, “because it is the people and the popular classes that suffer the real oppression.”

Quebec nationalism, in contrast to the nationalism of those who support the Canadian federal regime, “is a nationalism of liberation. It’s a people being denied its existence, that is trying to find its place in the sun, in the same way as Palestine and Ireland. These are long battles of liberation waged by the popular classes….

“It’s not the degree of aggression and resistance that determines whether or not there is oppression….

“National oppression is the negation of a people’s existence and belongingness. And the only way to be in solidarity with all peoples is to exist. Existence is the beginning of solidarity.

“To exist autonomously, to regain control, to organize on the ground, that is what’s essential…. Human reality develops from the ground up, from the neighborhood, the city, the region…. Independence and full autonomy of peoples, that is where internationalism must be built, for internationalism can have no meaning if there are no nations.”

The Irish connection

“Ireland was always a source of inspiration for Paul Rose,” writes Pierre Dubuc. “In prison, he went on a hunger strike in support of the hunger strike of Bobby Sands.

“Bobby Sands, an Irish republican of the Provisional IRA, died in prison at the end of a 66-day hunger strike. During this period, he had been elected an MP at Westminster. His death resulted in riots in Northern Ireland and a demonstration of more than 10,000 persons. Margaret Thatcher, commenting on his death, used words similar to those of Patrick Lagacé concerning Paul Rose. ‘Bobby Sands is a criminal,’ she declared.

“During a visit to Montréal, Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, considered the political arm of the Provisional IRA, publicly thanked Paul Rose in a press conference for his gesture of support to Bobby Sands.

“During another visit to Montréal, Gerry Adams insisted on discussing once again with Paul Rose, in a private meeting I attended.

“Last summer, Paul Rose went to Ireland with his son Félix. It was his only trip to Europe. He was hosted by members of Sinn Fein and had the honour of being invited to a private pub where the only ones admitted are Irish revolutionaries who did time in prison for the cause.

“With a quite legitimate pride, Paul was pleased to relate to us that he was received with the greatest homage by his Irish comrades.”

Richard Fidler, March 19, 2013

[1] However, the Globe editors took a quite different tack. See “Paul Rose more deserving of being forgotten than being honoured.”

[2] With the notable exception of the nationalist daily Le Devoir. See “Paul Rose 1943–2013 - En désespoir de Rose.”

[3] Rose was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Pierre Laporte. However, it remains unclear as to whether he was present when Laporte was strangled while attempting to escape captivity. As the Globe obituary notes, “A 1980 Quebec government investigation [the Keable commission] concluded he wasn’t present….”

[4] Translated as Choose! (New Press, 1972).

[5] See The Political Journey of Charles Gagnon.

[6] For an historical overview and balance-sheet of this experience, see François Moreau, “Balance Sheet of the Quebec Far Left.”

Beware the Lies of March—What Shakespeare tells us about Hugo Chávez

David McLaren — 2013-03-19T02:32:06+00:00

I come to bury Chávez, not to praise him. Barak Obama says he was authoritarian. And the President is an honourable man. John Graham, former ambassador to Venezuela says he couldn’t manage his own economy. And he is an honourable man. Stephen Harper says he was undemocratic. And he is a Right Honourable man. So are they all, all honourable men.

And yet … Hugo Chávez gave people free education while others indenture their citizens. He put in place the most robust electoral system in the south. He narrowed the gap between rich and poor even while the gap grows wider in the north. Poverty, infant mortality, public debt—all cut by half.

His will, shall I read you his will? It is simple. To the people of Venezuela he gives them their own country’s resources, and the money earned from their extraction.

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar had Marc Antony to rehabilitate his reputation. His Richard III had no one. Shakespeare says the King was a murderer, a usurper, and a twisted tyrant. And Shakespeare was honourable man.

But Tudor generals dumped Richard under a Leicester parking lot and Tudor historians heaped upon the King’s corpse the kind of half-truths that pepper Shakespeare’s play.

[And yet}http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_III#Succession) … Richard reduced poverty and unemployment in the north of England. He opened the courts for the poor to air their grievances. He instituted bail for those accused of crimes.

Beware the Ides of March. Beware the lies of March.

Canada needs a NDP-Liberal-Green Coalition

John Ryan — 2013-03-10T20:21:02+00:00

Canada’s last three elections are proof positive that we have a flawed electoral system. Does it make any sense that recently it’s been impossible to get a government that reflects the views of the majority of our population? How is it that a little more than a third of the electorate can determine who forms Canada’s government?

There is no question that Canada has a dysfunctional political system in which the views of the majority of Canadians cannot be represented by a single political party. Although almost two-thirds of Canada’s voters in the last three elections opposed the platform, policies, and philosophy of the Conservative party, it is the Conservatives who have formed the government. The majority vote was split amongst four parties, thereby thwarting the predominant will of the people and making a mockery of democracy. And this may very well continue into the future.

In the 2011 election the NDP replaced the Liberals as the official opposition, pushing the Liberals into a definite third party status with only 34 seats, compared to the 103 seats for the NDP. The Bloc Quebecois were decimated, retaining only 4 seats, but the Green Party managed to obtain 1 seat.

As for the Conservatives, with an increase in overall vote from 37.6% in 2008 to 39.6% in 2011 (an actual increase of only 1.97%), it gave them 166 seats and a majority government. By having the opposition vote split amongst four competing parties, an increase of less than 2% of the overall vote enabled the Conservatives to elect an extra 42 members – beyond the 124 elected in 2008.

So what do we do? How do we get out of a system that seems to ensure an unending regime of Conservative governments – governments that do not have the support of the bulk of our population? In the best interests of Canada, it’s up to progressive-minded citizens to urge the NDP, the Liberals and the Greens to form a coalition. A groundswell of public opinion in support of this would force these competing parties to act responsibly, to set aside narrow partisan politics, and to establish a formal coalition. It’s only then that the majority of Canadians would be in a position to vote for a political entity that would reflect their views, values, and interests.

Coalitions are commonly formed after an election, but in Canada, at the present time, an agreement to form a coalition by the NDP, the Liberals and the Greens would have to be made before the next election. If a coalition of these parties could be established before the next election, a unique election strategy could be used that would produce dramatically different results.

In a coalition, the three parties would retain their individual identities, but would have to agree on a common platform or agenda, not on all matters, but only on some basic, fundamental issues. They would also have to agree on a strategy for the next election.

Although historically there have been some pro forma coalitions in Canada, federally and provincially, the concept by and large is somehow alien and unknown in Canada. This is despite the fact that coalitions have been the order of the day in many European and other countries – and have been proven to be eminently successful.

In the case of Canada, in 2008 there was an ill-fated attempt at a coalition between the Liberals and the NDP, but it was immediately discredited because of an initial colossal public relations blunder. Although the coalition was hammered out between the Liberals and the NDP and it was only these two parties that were signatories to the agreement, at the public announcement, in addition to the leaders of these two parties, with them at the table was Gilles Duceppe, the leader of the Bloc Quebecois. All that the leader of the Bloc agreed to do was to not vote against a Liberal-NDP government – he was in no way party to the actual coalition agreement. But there he was on the platform shaking hands with Stéphane Dion and Jack Layton!

Not surprisingly, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives immediately besmirched the coalition as the creation of a Separatist-Socialist cabal, plotted in backrooms in secret and to the surprise of the public – complete with photos of a smiling Duceppe, Layton and Dion – Dion whom they had long discredited as a loser. Although the coalition had a reasonable and sensible platform, this was totally ignored by the mainstream media which unanimously bombarded the public with Conservative propaganda on this issue. The coalition was stillborn and the new Liberal leader, Michael Ignatieff, instantly disowned it.

In light of this, after the necessary preliminary private discussions between these three parties, the actual procedure to form a coalition should be done openly and in public – leaving no surprises for anyone. This would make it difficult for the Conservatives to try to discredit an open democratic process.

Interestingly, an AngusReid Public Opinion Poll (Jan. 19, 2013) revealed that “29% would be in favour of an agreement between two parties to only run candidates from one of the two parties in ridings where vote splitting occurs [and] 41% support a formal agreement between the two parties to share power in a coalition government.” Considering that there has been very little discussion about a possible coalition and absolutely no official rationale for forming a coalition, the reasonably favourable public view of such a development is rather surprising. In fact, this bodes well for the emergence of a possible coalition on the Canadian political landscape.

A meaningful election strategy, equally in the interest of all three parties, would be an agreement to run all the incumbent candidates in the next election, NDP, Liberal and Green, without opposition from the other members of the coalition. Such a strategy would guarantee the reelection of every currently elected member. As for the seats currently held by the Conservatives and the Bloc Quebecois, the coalition should run a single candidate in each of these constituencies from the party that came in second in the 2011 election.

From Elections Canada data I have compiled a set of tables that provide the factual basis for a winning election strategy. On the basis of the procedures cited above, Table 1 shows that in the next election the NDP would be entitled to run 213 candidates, the Liberals 90, and the Green Party 2. However, Table 2 is of greater consequence since it shows that in the 2011 election there were 64 constituencies where the combined NDP-Liberal-Green vote exceeded the Conservative or the Bloc Quebecois vote. In the next election, a coalition candidate, from the party with the greatest vote, would have a strong likelihood of winning the seat. In this manner the NDP could theoretically win an extra 27 seats and the Liberals 36, but the Greens may not be able to gain any extra seats. Although the Greens came in second in one constituency in Ontario, the Conservative won by more than 50% so it would be difficult – but not impossible – for a coalition Green candidate to win the seat.

Table 3 shows that in the next election, with this strategy, the NDP could theoretically win up to 130 seats, the Liberals 70, and the Green Party could win 1 and maybe 2 – for a majority coalition government of 201 seats. In such a coalition it would seem reasonable that cabinet seats would be determined on the basis of the proportionate share of members in the government, with 65% going to the NDP, 35% to the Liberals, and perhaps the 1 Green Party member could be included.

On the basis of this rationale, in the next election the Conservatives could be reduced to 107 seats and the Bloc Quebecois would be totally eliminated, if they ran at all. This means that the number of Conservative members would be roughly proportionate to their share of the vote. However, there is another factor that must be taken into account and despite a coalition and the strategy that was put forth, the results of the next election will not be those portrayed in Table 3. In the next election there will be 30 new House of Commons seats and most of these will be in suburban Alberta and Ontario – where the Conservatives have been doing extremely well. How a coalition would deal with this situation is difficult to determine. Each party may run candidates in these areas, resulting in the inevitable vote split and almost guaranteeing that most of these seats would be won by the Conservatives. On the other hand, the coalition members may decide on some form of cooperation which could reduce the number of Conservative seats. Overall, this is an unknown factor.

But even if the Conservatives took all of these 30 new seats, this would give them only 137 seats vs the potential 201 of the coalition members. Again, to be realistic, the coalition would get less than their full potential, but they would be certain to win a majority government. And in this case, the biggest winner of all would be the Canadian people – it would be democracy in action where the majority of the population would have a government that would reflect the beliefs, values and interests of the bulk of Canada’s people.

To put the coalition proposal in perspective, for years the minority of Canadians on the political right languished in the wilderness because of a split in their political movement. However, after a series of misadventures, they finally coalesced into a single party—albeit with some alienation and disaffection in their ranks. Basically, their strategy worked—and although they continue to receive only somewhat more than a third of the vote, they managed to get two minority governments and the current majority government.

Although the people on the political right coalesced into a single party, this would be impractical and highly inadvisable for the NDP, the Liberals and the Greens – each has unique strengths and a distinct identity which could be preserved in a dynamic coalition. As stated previously, coalitions occur on a regular basis in Europe and in other parts of the world – so it’s time this happened in Canada. It should be recalled that when the Liberals and the NDP cooperated in the past, it was at those times that some important progressive legislation was passed. Undoubtedly, there will be opposition in each of the parties to a coalition suggestion. However, it should be possible to present convincing arguments that this would be in the best interests of both our country and these parties. For the Liberals, now being the smaller entity, there’s still the vivid memory of how the Progressive Conservatives were subsumed by the Reform/Alliance zealots. There’s also the practical worry that such a political realignment might result in a horse and rabbit stew, strongly smelling of NDP horse. But we are not talking about merger; we are talking about a coalition, so there would be no threat to a smaller party. Furthermore, at this stage, for these three political parties to be an effective political force, they need one another. And stemming from this, the three parties are in a position to exact compromises from one another.

Admittedly, an alternative to a coalition could possibly come about if the NDP managed to restage in Western Canada what they accomplished in Quebec in the last election – rising from 1 seat to 59. But there are no indications that such a dramatic development is in the works. Through good faith negotiations these parties should be able to agree that when they form a coalition government they would enact some form of proportional representation or a system of preferential voting – there are several systems to choose from. This should be the most crucial provision for all three parties. Another key feature for the coalition government should be to abandon any on-going commitments for Canada’s further integration into the U.S.A. and to withdraw from the Security and Prosperity Partnership which endangers Canada’s sovereignty. There should be no problem for them to agree to enact a national child care program (ideally it should be modelled on Quebec’s system) and a national policy to work with First Nations to resolve their crucial problems.

On matters of taxation, environment policies, and other issues on which the parties might disagree, there would have to be compromise, and because of necessity, an agreement of some type would have to be worked out.

The public should urge the parties to agree to put a halt to the obsession of lowering taxes, which reduces the quality of our social services. “Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society” (U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes). It’s taxes collected by governments that provide us with the wide array of social services and infrastructure, such as schools, medical services, libraries and parks, safe streets and livable cities.

As for NAFTA, if they had the courage, it would be highly advisable to abrogate NAFTA. Only then could Canada once again have an independent energy policy. When it’s in their interests, the U.S. simply ignores NAFTA rulings, e.g., softwood lumber. We would be far better off with the rules of the World Trade Organization – and this should not affect our trade relationship with the USA whatsoever. After all, the USA trades with the rest of the world – without NAFTA.

Aside from agreeing to enact progressive legislation, a NDP-Liberal-Green coalition would put an end to the possibility of any future Harper majority government. The grim fact is that the current Conservative majority, just part way through their term of office, has already managed to undermine Canada’s standing in the world and has done significant harm to some of our social and economic fabric. Another term in office could really do irreparable harm to Canada as we know it.

Because of Harper’s tight control over all communication from his party, he has been able to present a rather benign and innocent image. However, there is no reason to believe that the party has actually turned its back on its original raison d’être. In fact, the Reform-Alliance agenda is still the basis of the current Conservative Party. After all, in Stephen Harper’s own words he portrayed Canada as being “a second-tier socialist country, boasting ever more loudly about its economy and social services to mask its second-rate status” (National Post, December 8, 2000). With such an underlying philosophy, a further Conservative majority would pose an unprecedented danger to our country – and only a NDP-Liberal-Green coalition could prevent this from happening.

The Harper Conservatives have already killed off the Canadian Wheat Board, and next on their agenda they may dismantle and sell off the CBC. Of great concern they may legitimize Canadian and American private clinics to undermine Canada’s health care system. They have systematically proceeded to water down and undermine our environment regulations – and it seems they are prepared to allow the corporations, especially the oil and gas industry, to formulate our policies.

Since 2004 Canada had a sensible, fair and democratic procedure to fund political parties by means of a federal taxpayer subsidy of $2 per vote, but shortly after getting their majority the Conservatives enacted legislation to phase this out totally by 2015. The purpose of this subsidy had been to replace the reliance of political parties on corporate, union, and wealthy donors which inevitably gave them undue political influence. Without the subsidy Canada will end up like the USA where corporations and the top 1% pour in unlimited funds into election campaigns which has the effect of producing the best democracy money can buy. The responsible thing for a new coalition government would be to reintroduce a federal subsidy to all parties on the basis of the electoral vote.

On the world stage, Canada used to be regarded as a reasonably independent peace-keeping nation, but that’s now in the past. It seems that to ingratiate us to the U.S.A., we have performed as a first-class warrior state in Afghanistan and recently in Libya. As for the F-35 fiasco, an aircraft that the Conservatives initially stated would cost $9 billion has now mushroomed to $45 billion, with their spin machine still maintaining that they really didn’t mislead the public on its cost. However, aside from horrendous costs – money that should be spent on Canada’s infrastructure and other social matters – what’s this aircraft for? What has not been properly presented to the public is that this is a first-strike weapon of war, designed to cripple a sophisticated enemy’s defences – only Russia and China are in that category. Aside from preparing us to launch war, the F-35 is almost totally useless for Canada’s purposes. Canada desperately needs a new foreign policy – the country simply can’t afford another term in office with this government.

Given the dangers that lie ahead of us, the NDP, the Liberals and the Green Party should immediately start the process to form a coalition, which might take some time. Once a coalition is established, these parties would then be in a position to defeat the Harper government at the next election, and we could then get a government that would indeed reflect the wishes of the majority of Canada’s population.

Tables 1, 2 and 3 graphically support the argument for a coalition and make such a conclusion almost self-evident. Surely a government of this type would be in the best interests of Canada and its people. But can the leadership of these parties rise above short-term partisan politics? At a time when our country desperately needs this, are they capable of becoming statesmen?

By acting responsibly these parties could carve out an honourable place for themselves in Canada’s history. Most importantly, they could alter the course of Canada’s future – for the better.

John Ryan, Ph.D., is Retired Professor of Geography and Senior Scholar at the University of Winnipeg. He can be reached at jryan13 at shaw.ca.

Tables Sources: Compiled from Elections Canada data by John Ryan. These data are listed in a better format at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResultsbyridingoftheCanadianfederalelection,2011

Stompin’ Tom Connors: An Alternative Appreciation

Sean Carleton — 2013-03-08T14:48:58+00:00

“Because I believe in my country and because I write and sing about it, many people consider me a hero to Canadians and especially to the working class, but to me I’m only doing what I feel each proud citizen of this country should be doing. And that is to try and put in as much as he takes out. I guess it’s to the hard knocks of life that I attribute this conclusion.” —Stompin’ Tom Connors

There is a lot more to Stompin’ Tom Connors (9 February 1936 – 5 March 2013) than his brash patriotism, foot stomping stage antics, his famous boycott of the Canadian music industry, and his popular tunes such as “Bud the Spud,” and “The Hockey Song.” Stompin’ Tom is a controversial and complex figure; he is more complicated than recent popular celebrations of his life (a couple can be found here and here) have suggested. Stompin’ Tom Connors is worthy of an alternative appreciation.

A “Man of the Land”

On the afternoon of 20 June 2000, Stompin’ Tom received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Toronto. In a letter sent to Connors months earlier outlining the reasons why he had been chosen for the honor, University of Toronto President J. Richard S. Prichard explained:

“In your long career, you have given voice to the common people of Canada in a way unmatched by any other composer or performer of your generation. Your songs tell the stories of working Canadians who form the backbone of this country. Our prosperity is owed to the millions of Canadians who have seen themselves in your songs that have created heroic portraits of ordinary people, from truck drivers to farm workers. In each song, people can see themselves, their friends, or their neighbours.” (Stompin’ Tom and the Connors Tone. Toronto: Viking, 2000. 631).

Connors was understandably thrilled with the news: “Wow! What a letter, eh? I must have read that one over about ten times. And did I accept the offer? You bet your boots I did.” Indeed, Connors, wearing his famous black cowboy hat and iconic leather boots, was conferred with the degree to a standing ovation and “a lot of foot-stomping.” After the ceremony Connors stated, “It’s wonderful that the University of Toronto would give a feller like me a degree….I was brought up with…little opportunity for a good education or a good job or anything else…there’s an awful lot of people out there in the country today who were brought up the very same way.” Connors hoped that “people will see what’s happened to me today and they’ll say to themselves, ‘Damn it, if Stompin’ Tom can do it, we can do it too’.”

Connors’ compassion for the daily struggles of everyday Canadians illustrated in his response typifies why he was selected for the honorary degree in the first place. Stompin’ Tom Connors is arguably one of Canada’s most successful working-class troubadours. However, much of the coverage of Connors since his death on 6 March 2013 has focused on his patriotism and iconic cultural status while downplaying Connors’ working-class roots and the critical content of many of his songs, particularly his early work from the mid-1960s to his well-known, self-imposed exile from the Canadian music industry in 1978. Although Connors’ songs may fit awkwardly into the dissident folk tradition forged by such artists as Joe Hill, Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez, Joe Glazer, and Pete Seeger who often sought to inspire radical social change through song, Connors was, apparently, a proud member of the Toronto Musicians Union for over 50 years, and his songs shed important light on Canadians’ working-class experiences and vigorously defended the dignity of everyday working people.

Connors’ vision for what Canada could and should be in his songs embraced a working-class perspective on the country’s past and present. Connors advocated for a society in which the voices and stories of everyday people were listened to, respected, and understood—even celebrated. To be clear, the aim of this “alternative appreciation” is not to anoint Stompin’ Tom Connors as Canada’s working class hero; his politics were not necessarily progressive and he was certainly not promoting radical, systemic change. In addition, Connors’ gender and racial analysis (or lackthereof) in songs such as “My Little Eskimo” is cringe-worthingly problematic, to be sure. Yet, many of Connors’ songs can still be listened to and appreciated; they highlight the often ignored stories about the doldrums and dangers of work as well as the possibilities for fun, love, and leisure that make working life more bearable. The songs of Stompin’ Tom Connors are significant, then, because they reflect the experiences of working people.

Across this Land: The Songs of Stompin’ Tom and Canada’s Working Class Experience

It is impossible to separate the life of Stompin’ Tom from his songs. Tom Charles Connors was born to Isabelle Connors in Saint John, New Brunswick, on February 9, 1936. Tom’s father abandoned Isabelle early on and, after spending a short time in a low-security female prison, she took her son and hitchhiked across the Maritimes and central Canada. After spending six years on the road with his mother, a young Connors was taken by Children’s Aid and placed in an Orphanage in Silver Falls, New Brunswick for two years. Following an escape attempt in 1944, he was taken into foster care at the farm of Russell and Cora Aylward in Skinner’s Pond, Prince Edward Island. In 1949 he was moved to a vocational school in Saint John where he bought his first guitar from his then roommate and started writing songs in the style of Canadian country singers like Wilf Carter and Hank Snow. In 1952 Connors ran away for good and found work on a coal boat making runs between New Brunswick and Newfoundland. For the next decade he hitchhiked across North America carrying out a number of different jobs while writing songs about his experiences.

In his travels across Canada in particular, Connors developed an awareness about the toil of working people. He wrote “Tillsonburg” about one of the jobs he hated most: picking tobacco in the fields of southern Ontario. The song describes a period in Connors’ life when he “never had a nickel or a dime to show” and was subsequently asked to work in the tobacco fields of Tillsonburg, southeast of London. He was attracted by the promise of seven dollars a day and the possibility of a raise if he was good at picking tobacco. However, the lure of working in the fields soon wore off:

We landed in the field that was long and wide,

with one ol’ house and five more guys.

I asked them where to find the cigarette trees,

when he said “bend over,” I was ready to leave! …

With a broken back bendin’ over there,

I was wet right through to my underwear.

And it was stuck to my skin like glue,

From the nicotine tar on the morning due of Tillsonburg.

Connors soon had enough of the inadequate housing and physically demanding labour of tobacco picking and left as soon as he could make his escape, “I was down the highway and over the hill from Tillsonburg.” Connors concludes:

Now there’s one thing you can always bet,

if I never smoke another cigarette;

I might get taken in a lot of deals,

But I won’t go workin’ the tobacco fields of Tillsonburg.

Tillsonburg. My back aches when I hear that word!

(“Tillsonburg,” 1971).

The hard labour of working Ontario’s tobacco fields left a strong impression on Connors that formed part of his awareness of the hardships of manual labour.

While songs like “Tillsonburg” illustrate Connors’ disdain for hard, exploitative work, many of his songs also talk about the dangerous conditions at work faced by people daily. For example, Connors’ “Fire in the Mine” tells the story of a 1965 fire in the McIntyre Mine located north of Timmons, Ontario:.

There’s a fire way down in the mine.

It was February 2nd in the year of sixty five.

A miner’s life was taken in the carbon monoxide.

The gas had been created, way down a mile or so,

in the McIntyre hell fire, six thousand feet below. …

There’s a fire way down in the mine.

The smiles of hope now faded, many faces wore a frown.

Must we see our children hungry, must we have to leave the town?

Will they have to close the mines up, bringing trouble, strife, and woe,

or will they beat that gassy hellfire six thousand feet below?

Luckily, the McIntyre mine fire 1965 was not as destructive as the 1928 Hollinger mine fire which claimed the lives of thirty-nine miners in Timmons. Indeed, Connors does not end his song on a sour note:

There’s a fire way down in the mine.

Then at last it was all over, and the world may pass it by,

but the people up in Timmons, will always hear that awful cry

There’s a fire way down in the mine…

(“There’s a Fire in the Mine,” 1968).

Yet, “Fire in the Mine” provides a critical perspective on how the livelihoods of mining families were constantly being threatened by the dangers inherent in mining work.

Connors also wrote about the collapse of the Second Narrows Bridge, later renamed the “Iron Workers Memorial Bridge,” in Vancouver and the death of nineteen steelworkers in 1958. In the “The Bridge Came Tumblin’ Down,” a song that went to number 2 on the Canadian country charts in 1971, Connors told the story of industrial disaster:

There were seventy-nine men working

to build this brand new bridge

to span the Second Narrows

and connect up with the ridge.

Till a big wind hit the bridge,

and the bridge came tumblin’ down,

and nineteen men were drowned,

and the medical corps couldn’t be too sure

of the rest of the men they found.

In telling the story of one of Vancouver’s most deadly industrial disasters, Connors spoke highly of the strength, courage, and determination of the steelworkers:

It often makes you wonder

in strength, who has the edge?

The longest steel-beam structure

that spans the highest ridge,

or the men that built the bridge.

For the bridge came tumblin’ down,

and nineteen men were drowned,

but the other men came back again

to lay the new beams down.

While Connors celebrates the courage of the Vancouver steelworkers, he also offers a critique of the bridge-building project and asks commuters to remember the price paid by workers and their families for the convenience of a bridge:

Now if you’re ever crossing

this mighty bridge sublime

and nineteen scarlet roses

Pass before your mind.

Remember and be kind.

The bridge came tumblin’ down

and nineteen men were drowned

so you could ride to the other side

of old Vancouver Town.

(“The Bridge Came Tumblin’ Down,” 1968).

Connors wrote many songs about the dangerous conditions faced by workers but he also sang about working-class culture and of the ways people found to live life to the fullest outside of work. Perhaps Stompin’ Tom’s most famous song, “Sudbury Saturday Night,” is a good example of how he commented on the ways in which workers dealt with the pressures of working life:

Aw, the girls are out to bingo and the boys are getting stinko,

and we think no more of INCO on a Sudbury Saturday night.

The glasses they will tinkle when our eyes begin to twinkle,

and we’ll think no more of Inco on a Sudbury Saturday night.

Sudbury, of course, was a booming mining town run by Inco Limited and many workers were organized in the Communist influenced Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers local. Thus, references to “we’ll think no more of INCO” speaks to workers’ needs to go out and get drunk, or “get stinko,” to forget about the dangers of mining but also to talk and socialize. Connors also mentions women, presumably the partners of the miners (many women in Sudbury played crucial political roles in the community), as being out on the town, playing bingo, drinking, and having fun, probably escaping the pressures of their own work lives. Connors continues to paint the scene of the temporary escape of a Saturday night in a Canadian mining town:

Now when Mary Ann and Mabel come to join us at the table,

and tell us how the Bingo went tonight, we’ll look a fright.

But if they won the money, we’ll be flappin’ up the honey, boys,

‘cause everything is funny, for it’s Saturday tonight.

…

We’ll drink the loot we borrowed and recuperate tomorrow,

‘cause everything is wonderful tonight, we had a good fight.

We ate the Dilly Pickle and we forgot about the Nickel,

and everybody’s tickled, for it’s Saturday tonight.

…

The songs that we’ll be singing, they might be wrong but they’ll be ringing,

when the lights of town are shining bright, and we’re all tight.

We’ll get to work on Monday, but tomorrow’s only Sunday,

and we’re out to have a fun day for is Saturday tonight.

(“Sudbury Saturday Night,” 1967).

Again, “Sudbury Saturday Night” is both an amusing song about the momentary break from work as well as a subtle critique of life in a mining town, a combination making it a Stompin’ Tom classic as well as a fan favorite.

That “Sudbury Saturday Night” embodied a dissident element was made clear by what happened to Connors upon arrival in Thompson, Manitoba for a concert in 1972. When Connors got to the arena there was “a car with three of four important looking gentlemen sitting there waiting.” The three men approached Connors and welcomed him to Thompson on behalf of the mayor’s office. They gave Connors some souvenirs before stating, “We sure like your song ‘Sudbury Saturday Night,’ Tom and we would like to ask you a small favour?” The men continued, “Well, this being an INCO town, nice and quiet, you understand, and knowing how considerate you’ve always been in not wanting to stir things up and all, we would appreciate it if you wouldn’t sing that song tonight.” Tom responded, “Just a minute…I do understand you gentlemen correctly? You’re asking me to not sing ‘Sudbury Saturday Night’ on my show tonight?” Not really looking for an answer, Connors stated, “Look boys…This is a free country, even in Thompson, Manitoba. And if the INCO workers or anyone else in this town want to hear ‘Sudbury Saturday Night’ then this is the night they’re going to hear it.” Connors walked away and the men got in the car and drove off. Tom recalls that “the first song the audience shouted for me to do that night, and even before I stepped up to the microphone, was ‘Sudbury Saturday Night,’ I sang it immediately, and several times more before the show was over. There was absolutely no trouble at all, and the crowd loved it. And that was the record we sold the most of that night” (Stompin’ Tom and the Connors Tone, 220). Such an example illustrates how both Connors and his fan were aware of the fact that Stompin’ Tom songs spoke to the experiences of working people.

“The Singer”

Drawing on his own working experiences, Connors grew to love the land and appreciate the lives of the everyday people he met along the way. As an orphan and seasoned drifter, Connors developed a strong sense of community with those struggling to make a living. He shared food, booze, laughs, and stories with working people across Canada and eventually grew the confidence to write songs about his experiences, both good and bad. He wrote songs about truck drivers from Prince Edward Island and tobacco pickers in the fields of Tillsonburg, about industrial accidents like the collapse of the Second Narrows Bridge in Vancouver and the Reesor Crossing tragedy in Kapuskasing, and about sharing drinks and laughs with friends and family after work. Throughout his career, Connors used music to create and project his own vision of Canada that would gave working class people the opportunity live a life of dignity and relative happiness. Through his songs he constructed himself as a voice of everyday people. This is reflected in his song, “The Singer”:

Oh singer you must search

for your place on the earth

while the same for your nation is true.

So lift up the soul of your country

and a place will be found here for you.

But don’t go and run until your song has been sung

and the words of your soul has be said.

For a land without song can’t stand very long

When the voice of its people is dead.

…

You may pile up your gold

but the pride of your soul

is the small bit of hope you bestow

on the children who come this way tomorrow

in search of the right way to go.

So singer sing on

like the first ray of dawn

with your promise of day just ahead.

For the land without song

can’t stand very long

when the voice of its people is dead.

(“The Singer,” 1977.)

Stompin’ Tom Connors tried to “lift up” the “soul” of his country and, through upbeat and often humourous songs, he sang about the working lives of the people who make it run. As a result, Connors carved out a place, however controversial, for himself as a voice of working people in Canada.

Sean Carleton is a PhD Candidate in the Frost Centre for Canadian and Indigenous Studies at Trent University and is currently a visiting student at the London School of Economics and Political Science in London, UK.

Organized Labour and New Social Media

Brad Walchuk — 2013-03-05T17:06:58+00:00

There is little doubt that the Internet has changed our lives. More specifically, the rise of New Social Media (NSM) on the Internet, most notably Facebook and Twitter, have allowed Canadians to connect with one another in ways previously unimaginable. The exact number of Canadian users vary from source-to-source, but estimates consistently rank Canadians as world leaders in adopting Facebook, with almost 85 percent of Canadian Internet users now visiting the social networking site (upwards of 16.5 million people). Recent figures also show that Canadians are quickly taking to the micro-blogging site Twitter, with some reports showing that nearly 50% of Canadian Internet users utilize Twitter. In both cases, the percentage of Canadians using NSM is higher than the percentage of Americans using NSM. Regardless of the exact numbers and percentages, it is fair to say that Canadians are increasingly using NSM for personal and professional networking. But what does this mean for organized labour?

NSM offers a new and innovative way for unions to connect with existing members for the purposes of mobilization and education. It also allows unions to connect with perspective members, fellow unionists, progressive-minded Canadians, and offers the opportunity to reach a broader demographic that is either ambivalent toward unionism or outright unsupportive of it. These networking possibilities offer unions the potential to connect with and solidify an already supportive audience, but effective use of NSM also allows unions to put forward a counterweight to the conservative, mainstream media. Importantly, NSM also offers an innovative, and perhaps even essential, way to connect with young workers- both unionized and unorganized. A recent report by the British-based Union Solidarity International on Brazilian unions’ effective use of NSM found that “new media influences the ideas workers hold, and counteracts a lot of the negative propaganda in the media.” In short, the opportunities for positive engagement are endless. Most unions in Canada, it seems, are aware of this fact. The question, then, is how effectively are unions using NSM in their overall communication strategy?

Union	Members (000s)	Twitter Followers	Twitter%	Facebook Likes	Facebook %
CUPE	612	4429	.72	5262	.86
UFCW	340	1725	.51	3862	1.14
USW	245	n/a	n/a	231	.09
PSAC	192	3696	1.92	4499	2.34
CAW	192	899	.47	1066	0.56
OPSEU	130	3540	2.72	2409	1.85
CEP	115	1745	1.52	75	75
Teamsters	114	924	.81	199	.07
AUPE	79	695	.88	957	.17
ETFO	73	5836	7.96	5196	7.09

In much the same way that political scientist Tamara Small has found that Canadian politicians are underutilizing NSM as a part of their broader political communication strategy, the same can be said of the Canadian labour movement. The above chart lists ten of the largest unions in English-speaking Canada, ranked by total membership, as well as the number of Twitter ‘followers’ and Facebook ‘likes’ of each union (as of February 11, 2012). A separate column lists the percentage of each union’s total membership that ‘follows’ or ‘likes’ them.

The data certainly suggests an unequal use of NSM: some unions use it more than others and some unions more effectively than others, at least in terms of having a larger reach and more expansive network. The Facebook-Twitter split is relatively even, with 23 479 total Twitter ‘followers’ and 23 756 total Facebook ‘likes.’ The data also suggests that public-sector unions tend to have a wider network than their private-sector counterparts. What is noticeable, however, is the limited reach of all the unions in terms of how many of their members ‘follow’ or ‘like’ them. The ETFO, likely because of recent labour unrest in Ontario, has an especially wide reach compared to the other unions, though it is likely than many ‘followers’ include parents of elementary school-aged children. While it can be assumed that many people who either follow or like a union includes more than just dues-paying members, the fact remains that the reach over NSM for each of these unions in underwhelming, and that unions could use NSM more effectively for many of the important networking possibilities previously mentioned. Of course, the ‘numbers game’ only tells part of the story. If that were the case, Jack Layton would have become Prime Minister in 2008, having more ‘followers’ and ‘likes’ than Stephen Harper. Likewise, in 2011, he had more ‘likes’ on Facebook than did Stephen Harper. In short, the number of ‘followers’ or ‘likes’ is not necessarily indicative of success. For unions, however, NSM is not about winning an election (although it may be useful in mobilizing support leading up to a certification vote). As noted above, the power of NSM for unions is about mobilizing members, educating the public, managing and sharing a message, and acting as a counterbalance to the conservative, mainstream media. It is about reaching existing members and connecting with new ones. It is certainly about engaging young workers, and likely about much more. For all of these goals, the numbers is game is essential: the larger the network, the larger the reach. A union is in a much better position to effectively use the networking possibilities offered by NSM and harness its true potential if it has wider network: more ‘followers’ and more ‘likes.’ While unions are likely not in position to have the NSM presence as someone like Barack Obama (over 27 million Twitter ‘followers’ and over 35 million Facebook ‘likes’) or pop-star Justin Bieber (over 34 million Twitter ‘followers’ and over 51 million Facebook ‘likes’), they need to do much more to more effectively integrate NSM into their overall communication strategy. That said, the labour news aggregation site Labour Start has an estimated monthly reach of over 700 000, and roughly 100 000 of those are Canadian. This suggests that Canadian union supporters can have a strong on-line presence.

The suggestion here isn’t that NSM can—or should—replace existing mediums of communication, including face-to-face discussions with shop stewards, the phone tree, the union newsletter, the e-mail list, or the break-room bulletin board. After all, the sit-down strikes of the 1930s and 1940s, the strike wave of the 1970s, the Ontario Days of Action in the mid-to-late 1990s, and many other widespread and highly successful forms of collective action occurred prior to the existence of NSM. Despite that, unions should not overlook NSM or downplay its potential. It offers significant networking possibilities, and unions would be foolish to not incorporate them into their overall messaging and communication strategy. As Union Solidarity International has noted of the Brazilian unions’ approach to NSM, it “is used to enhance the unions’ communication, and is not seen as a replacement for branch meetings and newsletters. However, using e-mail, text messaging, Twitter and Facebook has enabled them to reach more people and give members a voice.” Canadian unions would be wise to follow the lead of their Brazilian counterparts and improve their presence and effectiveness on NSM. But how? As Internet-labour guru Derek Blackadder has noted, “we need to be reminded not just of the great things we’re doing, but the ways in which we’re falling behind.”

Where are Canadian unions falling behind? In a 2011 article in Our Times, Blackadder identified ten things for unions to keep in mind to have an effective web-presence. Two of these suggestions were “keep your website fresh” and “update social media regularly.” While unions generally keep their home pages updated (with some exceptions), the importance of routine and frequent Facebook and Twitter updates needs to be underscored. It is an area that some unions are struggling with. The CAW, for example, has not updated its Twitter main page since June 2009, and LIUNA launched its Twitter account in November 2012, but has not updated it since. As Blackadder has noted “a stale website means a stale union,” and when unions don’t update their NSM sites, people wrongly assume that “the conclusion is obvious: nothing is happening.” While the truth is that many important things are happening with both these unions, their lack of a Twitter presence represents a missed opportunity for networking, mobilizing, and educating.

In addition to keeping NSM sites (and traditional websites) fresh and updated with content, it is also important that unions update them with the ‘right’ type of content. Tamara Small and other political scientists have been critical of political parties and candidates for using their NSM as an “information dump.” What is meant by this term is that content posted on a traditional website or sent out in a press release is simply re-posted to Facebook or Twitter. While these ‘official’ releases are surely important, and offer some expanded reach, unions can do much more in terms of content on NSM. General posts by the union outside of the ‘official’ news release, a running commentary on issues of the day, and retweeting or sharing stories posted by progressive allies and rank-and-file members are all ways that unions can build their online profile. So too are posting and sharing YouTube videos and memes (pictures with clever or comedic text, prounced ‘meems’), and these are especially appealing to young workers. Regularly updated and innovative content is essential for gaining a presence in the world of NSM. Some unions are doing this better than others, and more work needs to be done in this area. CUPE and PSAC, however, are excellent examples of unions effectively utilizing NSM. In addition to frequently updated content, at CUPE’s recent national bargaining conference, the #nego2013 hashtag offered rank-and-file members, CUPE staff, CUPE leadership, and other labour-friendly allies at the conference and elsewhere across Canada to participate in the discussion and connect with one another around an important issue.

A major part of NSM’s value lays in its ability to generate two-way communication, a vital link between unions and rank-and-file members. One of Small’s criticisms of Canadian politicians is the degree to which their NSM strategy involves one-way communication from above (union officials), and in so doing excludes much of the potential of NSM. While organizations often prefer the one-way communication method to avoid getting tough questions or public criticisms, NSM, used properly can effectively negate the fear of anti-union approaches hijacking the page. Effective two-way communication also provides a meaningful link between members and their unions, and allows a forum for an important discussion of issues facing the labour movement. As Blackadder aptly noted: “Don’t be afraid of public interaction.” While unions often use NSM to post stories – seeing Twitter’s ‘home’ page and the Facebook ‘newsfeed’ as useful tools – tools such as Twitter’s ‘connect’ are important. Responding to queries from members, generating discussion, and providing a venue for dialogue on issues important to rank-and-file members is essential to an effective NSM strategy.

NSM also allows unions the ability to ‘follow’ or befriend rank-and-file members and other progressive allies. Commenting on their stories, retweeting or sharing their posts, and tagging them in photos or relevant new stories provides a meaningful connection that can engage and energize members. While this certainly takes time and effort, the potential payoff is important. NSM not only members the ability to connect with their unions, it also offers unions the ability to connect with their members. This two-way communication is often overlooked, yet vital to harness the full potential of NSM.

As telling example of the potential of NSM as part of a broader communication strategy is the success of the demonstration on January 26 at the Ontario Liberal Party leadership convention. This rally, designed to challenge the Liberals for the passage of Bill 115, was also inclusive of anti-austerity and anti-poverty concerns more generally, and drew estimates of 30 000 demonstrators. NSM was an important element of the Ontario Federation of Labour’s (OFL) communication strategy, and was popularized by the hashtag #J26 (if you don’t know what a hashtag is, you’re not using NSM correctly). The rally was publicized by a strong on-line presence, but also included traditional communication methods such as local planning meetings, publication in newsletters, the phone tree, face-to-face communication at the workplace, e-mail lists and phone trees, and other ‘traditional’ means of communication. That said, the importance of NSM to the widespread awareness and success of their rally cannot be understated, especially for a generation of young workers (unionized and unorganized) who are increasingly immersed in social media. The #J26 rally shows the potential of NSM as a part of a broader communication strategy.

Are you using NSM correctly? Does your union have a Facebook page? A Twitter page? It should. As Blackadder has warned: “Make Plans for a Post-Paper World.” Are you using these new forms of communication regularly? Updating them with frequent and innovative content? Do you ‘follow’ or somehow connect with rank-and-file members? Do you network with other unions, progressive workplace-based allies, labour-friendly politicians, anti-poverty organizations? Does your NSM strategy allow for two-way communication? Can members ask you important questions via NSM? Will you answer them? Will you let others weigh in on the discussion (some minor moderation of the page may be necessary)? Are your NSM pages open and do they facilitate two-way communication? If the answer to any of these questions is ‘no,’ your union should be re-evaluating its NSM strategy (or perhaps developing one in the first place).

How will your union increase its online presence? How will your increase the number of ‘followers’ and ‘likes’? How will you connect with a generation of young workers who see the Internet as the main means of communication? Following the above ideas should help. Dedicating resources—time, money, and staffing—will be essential. On Twitter, using the hashtags #canlab, #cdnpoli, #WeRallAffected and #solidarity in labour-related post are a start.

When it comes to NSM, the Field of Dreams strategy (“If you build it, he will come”) will not work. Simply having social media is not a social media strategy. Likewise, simply using social media—even on a regular basis—is not an effective social media strategy. Signing up for a Facebook and Twitter account is one thing, using them is another, but gaining an expansive network of engaged and mobilized followers is something entirely different. To reach a significant audience—more than the current reach of English-speaking Canada’s largest unions—it requires dedicated resources, frequent updating (and updating of the right sort), and meaningful two-way communication. To get a significant audience that is engaged, inspired, and mobilized requires even more resources, updating, interacting, and yes, some patience. A much more qualified Field of Dreams strategy is required: “If you build it, they will come, but you’ll have to work hard for it”). At the end of the day, though, they will come. Unions cannot afford to allow the opportunity to pass them by, especially not at the present time.

Brad Walchuk is an instructor with Brock University’s Department of Political Science.

While we mine for gold, others strive for justice.

Stephen Law — 2013-03-05T16:42:21+00:00

Canadians vie for it, want it, and when they play hockey, they demand it. Gold. For most Canadians it’s a medal they would like to see hanging around Sidney Crosby’s neck. But that gold, silver, nickel or bronze comes from somewhere, and invariably, when it is produced there is a cost, and not just the money required to purchase the bling.

Canada is host to the largest mining sector in the world. There are more mining companies based in Canada, then anywhere else. But, increasingly, while the stock price of gold and other metals continues to remain high and bring value to its shareholders, those who are caught in the entrails of the communities where mines are operating are paying a heavy price.

Adolfo Ich Chamán was leader in the community of El Estor, a town in eastern Guatemala. It’s a small community located on the shores of Lake Izabel. “Adolfo was a teacher, he worked with the school and the students, everyone knew him. That’s why he was a leader” explains his widow, Angelica Choc. It was because he was a leader, that human rights advocates allege he was killed by the private security firm that was hired to protect the interests of the mine.

In a precedent setting case, Canadian mining company, HudBay Minerals is being sued by a group of Guatemalans, including Choc, along with German Chub who was shot and paralyzed, and eleven women who were allegedly raped by the security forces who worked for HudBay. The attacks against the Guatemalans are tied to a land dispute at the heart of the conflict between a Canadian mining company and an Indigenous community in Guatemala.

While the company claims the communities are “illegal squatters”, the indigenous Mayan Q’eqchi’ assert they have a moral and historical right to reclaim the ancestral land that was taken from them during the Guatemalan civil war. According to Choc, “We didn’t invade the land, we have the right to live in dignity. It was an abandoned area, why have abandoned land when there are so many families that need it.”

Cory Wanless, a lawyer with Klippensteins law firm that has taken on the case on behalf of the Guatemalan plaintiffs, describes how Angelica’s husband was identified as a leader by the private security forces of HudBay and “brutally murdered, hacked with machetes, beaten and shot in the head.”

A public interest group has been monitoring the practices of mining companies, and according to Jen Moore of Mining Watch Canada, this case is important “because it represents an attempt to break through the wall of corporate impunity to obtain justice for people that were egregiously harmed in Guatemala, and to hold a parent company responsible for the actions it takes that have led to terrible violence abroad.”

HudBay had vigorously disputed the allegations in court and argued the case shouldn’t be heard in Canada based on jurisdictional grounds, suggesting it was more appropriately heard in Guatemala. Wanless noted that trying the case in civil or criminal court in Guatemala was not an option. “Guatemala is one of the most violent places on earth, one of the highest murder rates and low level of probability of conviction, 99.75% of which goes unpunished

Choc concurs, “We know very well and recognize that our authorities are corrupt and manipulated by money and impunity. Here in Guatemala, there is no justice. Whoever has money, has justice. We knew we wouldn’t be listened to in Guatemala.”

Just prior to the hearing, HudBay withdrew their objection and conceded that the case could be heard in a Canadian court. “I think it is a Canadian precedent that a Canadian mining company that’s been accused of human rights abuses will be heard in Canada.” Wanless declared.

While the one layer of defence has now been removed, the case now hinges on the role of a subsidiary company’s relationship to their parent business. Mining companies, often form partnerships, create junior corporations, or farm out their operations in other countries, to subsidiaries who work on their behalf. In the past this has buffeted the legal responsibility of parent companies, who have been able to argue that they are not responsible for the actions of the subsidiary. This is precisely the argument that HudBay has used.

Moore believes this is a smokescreen that has allowed mining companies to shirk their responsibilities. She asserts “the company knew there was serious possibility of risk”. Wanless also argues the actions of the private security firm can be tied to the decisions made in the corporate head office in Toronto “this is a management problem which the court will have to determine. What were the management decisions? Were they negligent in those decisions?”

According to Wanless, what has concerned Canadians who have paid attention to the abuses perpetrated by mining companies is “you can be a Canadian mining company hiring private security forces, not sure if they are trained, send them out and evict people from their homes. It is not surprising, and entirely predictable there could be problems and that there would also be total impunity.” Wanless also notes “When you look at mining companies, it is disturbingly common.”

The hearings took place March 4th and 5th, and a decision is not expected until sometime in June. Whether a precedent will be set, and Canadian mining companies will be brought to task will depend on a ruling by the Ontario Supreme Court. But for Angelica Choc ““I have hope in my heart. It is our right to be heard and get justice.”

Meanwhile activists protesting the activities of mining companies will be touring around the country, highlighting the need for greater scrutiny of companies that mine the metals that adorn the necklaces, watches and the rings on our fingers, covers our coins, and that has become the “gold” standard our athletes strive for.

Stephen Law is the author of Tailings of Warren Peace—a social justice thriller that explores life, death, corrupt mining companies and the communities struggling against them.

The NDP, poised for power but to what effect?

Richard Fidler — 2013-03-04T21:54:23+00:00

Fifty years after its founding, the New Democratic Party swept to Official Opposition status in Ottawa on May 2, 2011, propelled by the “Orange wave” in Québec where it captured an astounding 43% of the popular vote. Canada-wide, the NDP share of the vote increased from 18% in the previous federal election (2008) to 30.6%.

Winning 103 seats in the House of Commons, and coming second in another hundred or so constituencies, the NDP now became for the first time a “government in waiting” with a credible perspective of replacing the Harper Conservatives in 2015.

This historic breakthrough for the party was achieved despite the near-unanimous opposition of the big-business media: 31 Canadian newspapers editorially supported the Conservatives, while only one (the Toronto Star) gave the NDP a qualified endorsement. Although the Conservative vote had nudged up only slightly, to just short of 40%, Harper had clearly established the Tories as the hegemonic party of Capital.

But this hegemony came at a price. Capital in Canada has traditionally ruled through a system of alternance between Liberals and Conservatives, each ready to replace the other if defeated in Parliament or by the electorate. With the crushing defeat of the Liberals — now reduced to 34 seats, an all-time low for the party — the scenario was radically altered. Although the Tory government’s parliamentary majority is secure for the next four years, the alternance is now up for grabs.

For Canada’s ruling circles, this poses a dilemma. Should they bank on rebuilding the Liberals? Or should they start thinking of the NDP as an acceptable option at the federal level, as they already do in some provinces where the NDP has governed for many years?

Provincial office is one thing. But the central government, with its crucial jurisdiction over banking and finance, foreign affairs, the military, trade and commerce, criminal law and the senior courts and judiciary, etc. — and above all its role in protecting the territorial and institutional integrity of the state and forestalling any challenge by Québec to that integrity — that’s a somewhat different matter.

The NDP, created at the aegis of the trade unions in English Canada, has historically been viewed by Capital as a workers party and for that reason has never enjoyed the unalloyed confidence of big business — despite all the efforts of NDP leaders down through the years to neutralize and overcome that antipathy.

Moreover, under Jack Layton’s leadership the NDP had attempted in recent years to accommodate Québec’s historic concern for autonomy over matters of language and culture, and had even questioned Ottawa’s claim that it had the unilateral right to determine whether it would accede to a majority yes vote for sovereignty by the Québécois.

Canada’s rulers could find solace, of course, in the apparent fragility of the NDP’s new status. The electoral advance of this “political arm of the labour movement,” as it is generally seen outside Québec, comes at a time when the NDP’s organic ties to the trade unions are weaker than ever before in its history, and the social movements in English Canada that have traditionally looked to the party as a political outlet are largely fragmented if not demobilized. Furthermore, although its parliamentary caucus is dominated by Québec MPs, the QuébecNDP is historically one of the weakest sections of the federal party.[1] It would be a major challenge for this federalist party to consolidate these gains and build a strong base in a province where most of the left and progressive forces pursue the objective of an independent Québec.

The NDP’s 2011 advance might be dismissed as purely conjunctural, the result of a chance confluence of factors — not least, the collapse in popular support for the Bloc Québécois. Post-election opinion polls indicated that voters switching from the BQ to the NDP were motivated by fear at the prospect of a Harper majority and attracted by the NDP as a party with a social program similar to the BQ’s but — unlike the BQ —offering them the prospect of a socially progressive ally in the Rest of Canada that is sympathetic to the “Québec difference.”

But closer scrutiny reveals some longer-term shifts in the popular vote. Canada-wide, the Conservative vote in 2011 was just a couple of percentage points higher than in 2008, when the party’s vote was no higher than the combined vote in 2000 of the now-merged Conservative, Reform and Alliance parties. But the Liberals were in secular decline, their vote falling steadily from 40.8% in 2000 to 18.9% in 2011. Meanwhile, during the decade the NDP vote had consistently risen: from 8.5% in 2000 (1.8% in Québec) to 18.2% in 2008 (12.2% in Québec) followed by the surge to 33.1% in 2011 (42.9% in Québec). Whatever the explanation, the fact that more than four million voters — about twice as many as in 2008 — had turned, despite the media hostility, to a party of the broad “left” that traditionally ranked third or fourth in the federal Parliament, represented a huge collective protest against the right-wing thrust of politics in Canada.

The NDP is now positioned as the hegemonic opposition in Canada’s parliament and politics to the right-wing agenda of the Harper Tories. But the party’s problematic relationship to its core constituency, the organized working class in English Canada, and its historic difficulty in grappling with theQuébec national question, suggest that it is ill-equipped to contend with the major class and national confrontations that ultimately shape the course of politics in the Canadian state.

Social Democracy

Although today’s NDP is shy about its self-identification in its statutes as “socialist,” the party is a member of the Socialist International, a loosely organized alliance of parties that trace their historical antecedents back to the pre-World War I international workers and socialist movement — more specifically, in the NDP’s case, to British Labourism and a similar reformist but minority current in the Marxist SDP in pre-war Germany. This reformist current held that the working class could overcome its subordination without the overthrow of the capitalist state, through working for legislative reform within the state institutions, primarily Parliament.

In the early 20th century, socialist and labour militants were active in a variety of parties and trade unions, especially in Western Canada where colonization and urbanization were rapidly transforming an agrarian and resource-based economy. Some managed to win election to provincial or municipal office. Many identified as Social Democrats.

After the First World War, militants inspired by the example of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 joined in founding the Communist Party, responding to the Russian call for creation of a new, Communist International to replace the Social Democratic parties that had betrayed socialist internationalism by supporting the war effort of their respective countries.

While the revolutionary CP privileged on-the-job and extraparliamentary action, the reformist wing of the workers’ movement set its sights on electing worker representatives to parliament. During the 1920s a few were elected to the federal Parliament. These Labour MPs later combined with radical farmer MPs to form the self-styled “ginger group,” which comprised the pre-Depression parliamentary left.

In 1932, in response to the deep social crisis produced by the Great Depression, this parliamentary left issued a call for the formation of a new party that would unite and incorporate “the three major classes in the community whose interests are the same — industrial workers, farmers, and the middle class.” At a conference in Regina in 1933, they founded the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF).[2]

Although its founding document, the Regina Manifesto, famously proclaimed the CCF’s goal to be the “eradication” of capitalism, the party program privileged using state planning and administration, selective nationalization (“socialization”) of key industries, and progressive taxation to steer capitalism out of crisis and lay the basis for what came to be known as the welfare state. It was to be a parliamentary party, seeking election to government in Ottawa and the provinces.

Like most Social Democratic parties, the CCF sought alliances with trade unions. But although it self-identified as a “federation,” the party initially had no provision for representation or affiliation of unions as such in its structures. And the only province in which it elected a government, Saskatchewan in 1944, was primarily agrarian.

Until the late 1940s, the Communist party (CP) continued to be a fierce contender with the CCF for influence in the labour movement. Supporters of both parties were prominent in the leadership of the new industrial unions that mushroomed in the late 1930s and during World War II, although neither was hegemonic. Many union leaders, especially in the craft unions of the Trades and Labour Congress (TLC), were Liberals. And after 1942 the CP (now renamed the Labour Progressive Party) was informally allied with the Liberals in the prosecution of the war effort.

With the Great Depression still fresh in their memory, many working people radicalized during the war and a rapid increase in electoral support for the CCF was accompanied by a wave of union affiliation to the party. By 1944, about 100 local unions were affiliated, mainly in Ontario. However, these unions, with 50,000 members, constituted barely 7% of total union membership in Canada. In 1943, the Canadian Congress of Labour (CCL), representing the major industrial unions, voted in convention to endorse the CCF “as the political arm of labour in Canada.”

But the affiliation movement soon ground to a halt, and by 1952 the number of affiliated locals was down to 44, comprising just over 1% of union members. The party’s share of the popular vote declined sharply as Canadian politics shifted to the right.

Capitalism had entered a phase of unprecedented expansion. Economic prosperity, accompanied by the anticommunism of the Cold War, led party leaders to question the primacy of public ownership and state planning and to embrace the mixed economy and Keynesian fiscal policies as their fundamental mechanisms for completing the welfare state. In 1956, the Regina Manifesto was replaced by the Winnipeg Declaration. Capitalism was still “basically immoral,” the Declaration stated, but “in many fields there will be need for private enterprise which can make a useful contribution to the development of our economy.” [3]

This brought the program and policies of Canadian Social Democracy into much closer alignment with the changing needs of the capitalist system. Toronto socialist academic Bryan Evans, in a recent study of the NDP’s evolution, labels this transition a “refoundation” of Canadian social democracy: the expression of “a declassed and technocratic Keynesianism that signalled a retreat from class as the ideological and organizational centrepiece of its politics.”[4]

A labour party?

But the class struggle works both ways — and there was no evidence that Capital was leaving the battlefield. The working class still needed a political outlet it could call its own. In a parallel and not unrelated process, the trade union movement (many of whose central leaders were CCF members) was reorganizing its structures and perspectives in a process that would link it with the CCF in a new political party.

In 1956, the TLC and CCL had merged to form the Canadian Labour Congress, which now embraced a large majority of organized labour outside Québec, but included as well most of Québec’s “international” (U.S. based) unions. At its 1958 convention, the CLC (in close collaboration with the CCF leadership) called for creation of “a broadly based people’s political movement, which embraces the CCF, the Labour Movement, farm organizations, professional people and other liberally-minded persons.”[5]

As the formulation suggests, the goal was to create a broad party that could embrace major components of the Liberal party — like the CCF, routed in the 1958 federal election — in a recomposition of Canadian politics along left-right lines. Labour’s input would reflect the politics of the new labour congress — now purged of CP-led unions, embracing the Cold War anticommunist ideology, and domesticated by the constraints of a postwar industrial relations regime under which unions had won legal recognition in state-defined bargaining units but at the cost of restrictions on strikes and secondary boycotts, the substitution of grievance procedures in place of on-the-job action, and mandatory residual management rights clauses in all union contracts. With the unions increasingly focused on workplace bargaining and away from broadly-based solidarity struggles, the party — led by a core elite of experienced Social Democratic politicians inherited from the CCF — would advocate their legislative agenda and, if electorally successful, establish governments more amenable to labour’s interests.[6]

When the NDP was founded in the summer of 1961, the union affiliation provisions did not differ radically from the CCF’s. The new party was to be the “political arm of the labour movement,” all right, but the new relationship was structured to preclude union domination of the party. Unlike the British Labour Party, where unions received a vote for each affiliated member, the NDP gave the unions no block voting rights at party conventions or on the party executive. However, the unions were given representation in the party’s executive and on its federal council, as well as in the corresponding decision-making bodies in the provincial sections. And they were given special voting rights at party conventions using formulas that weighted their representation according to the number of union members. Affiliates paid dues to the party of about 20 cents per member per month.

Although the guarantees of posts for union officials in the party’s leadership bodies remain more or less intact today, the unions were less successful in their attempts to mobilize membership support for the party. In the first place, of course, labour political action in Québec followed a quite different course; the CLC’s Québec affiliate soon took its distance from the NDP and moved toward closer identification with the sovereigntist Parti québécois, as did the other major union centrals in Québec. But in English Canada, too, the affiliation movement soon faltered.

Although the number of affiliated union locals rose steadily during the 1960s and 1970s, most of this growth occurred during the party’s first two years; 1963 was the high-water mark, when 14.6 percent of union members were affiliated to the NDP. Since only 30% of the non-agricultural work force were members of unions, however, this represented less than 5% of the total work force. The pace of affiliation slackened thereafter. By 1979, almost 300,000 workers were affiliated to the party, but they accounted for only 7.3% of total union membership — barely above the highest level of affiliation with the CCF in 1944, when affiliated members constituted about 6.9% of the organized work force. And of the 730 locals affiliated in 1985, more than three quarters were located in Ontario; less than 2% were Québec-based.[7]

The party’s affiliation provisions reflected an underlying assumption that unionized workers had achieved a sufficient level of class consciousness that they would be susceptible to identifying the NDP with their interests as a social class, and determine their political allegiances accordingly. However, as numerous surveys have documented, there is no automatic link between employment and political views. The latter may be equally or more determined by one’s ethnicity, gender, overall social mobility, etc. And the NDP has never won consistent support from even a majority of union members, still less among the unorganized. At most, studies show, NDP affiliation provides a “cue” to union members that their union favours a vote for this particular party.

The NDP in government – Adapting to neoliberalism

Furthermore, the NDP itself has disappointed many who look to it as a means of achieving some meaningful improvement in their lives. The NDP has at various time formed the government in five provinces (British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and Nova Scotia) and one territory (Yukon). The historical record reveals a clear transition in the party’s politics from its original Keynesian framework to a somewhat incoherent social liberalism as successive NDP governments adapted to neoliberalism. In the earlier period:

Saskatchewan’s CCF government (1944-64) pioneered in establishing government-financed hospital care (a precursor of medicare), legislated limits on the work week, the highest minimum wage in Canada, collective bargaining for civil servants, and the creation of new Crown corporations. A later NDP government (1971-82) established more Crown corporations and used the revenues from increased resource royalties to fund new social programs and raise social assistance rates. The first NDP government in British Columbia (1972-75) established a government monopoly, the British Columbia Petroleum Corporation, with limited responsibility for marketing of natural gas and oil; a state auto insurance monopoly; increased mining royalties; improved income security for seniors and disabled; a pharmacare program; and increased support for public housing. In Manitoba, the first NDP governments (1969-77, 1981-88) pioneered an “equal pay for equal work” program to end gender-based pay discrimination and introduced anti-scab legislation and paternity leave.

These popular provisions strengthened the NDP’s electoral base in all three provinces, and bolstered the party’s progressive reform credentials, notwithstanding the occasional use of strike-breaking laws by all three governments, and cabinet support in Saskatchewan and Manitoba for Trudeau’s wage control program in the mid-1970s.

As the neoliberal onslaught gathered force, however, NDP governments shifted from Keynesianism to fiscal orthodoxy, an emphasis on competitiveness and capital accumulation, and an obsession with deficits and debt fighting.

In Saskatchewan the NDP, returned to government in 1991, lowered resource industry taxes and royalties, introduced fiscal austerity that closed some hospitals, capped social assistance rates and reduced the education budget, while allowing the minimum wage, once one of the highest in Canada, to fall to one of the lowest. The British Columbia NDP, returned to government in 1991 under Mike Harcourt, enacted some labour law reforms including anti-scab and secondary boycott provisions and mandatory first contract arbitration, substantially increased public sector wages, and raised taxes on corporations and high incomes. But Harcourt and his successors Glen Clark and Ujjal Dosanjh focused increasingly on deregulation, deficit reduction and tax cuts. Public service wages were frozen, social assistance eligibility tightened and overall per capita public expenditures were reduced by 2.2 percent. In the 2001 provincial election, the NDP was crushed; it was left with only two seats. The Manitoba and Nova Scotia governments, elected in 1999 and 2009 respectively, have pursued similar approaches focused on deficit busting and austerity.

It was Bob Rae’s NDP government in Ontario (1990-95) that provoked an open breach with and within organized labour that remains unhealed to this day. Faced with a ballooning budget deficit of almost $10 billion within one year, the government shifted toward public sector austerity. The Social Contract Act (1993) was “unprecedented both in the abrogation of collective bargaining rights and in the spending cuts sought.”[8] The Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL) responded by calling on affiliated unions to break their ties to the NDP; while a bloc of public sector unions and the Canadian Auto Workers moved to disaffiliate, another bloc composed of private sector unions instead called for continued support of the party.

The government’s defeat in 1995, and the election of the right-wing anti-union Conservatives under Mike Harris, led organized labour to rethink its exclusive reliance on electoralism as a political strategy. “This opened the door to an unprecedented embrace of extra-parliamentary activism within the ranks of organized labour. The Days of Action, a series of local general strikes, allied labour with a wide range of social justice movements” in resistance to the Harris government’s aggressive attacks on social programs and workers’ rights.[9]

Although the OFL eventually abandoned these extra-parliamentary tactics and renewed its relationship with the NDP, the CAW, some teachers’ unions, the Ontario government employees union, nurses and building trades unions instead launched an Ontario Election Network in support of “strategic voting,” effectively marking the re-emergence of a Liberal-Labour alliance that was sustained through subsequent provincial elections in 2003, 2007 and 2011. Between 2000 and 2003 union donations to the Ontario Liberal party surpassed union donations to the Ontario NDP![10]

The federal NDP under Jack Layton’s leadership, less controversially, fell in step with its provincial counterparts. The “corporate welfare bums” rhetoric of the 1970s, with its nods to public ownership, social policy enhancement and income redistribution, “has been replaced by an ideology that sees viable social programs as dependent on a well-functioning market economy.”[11] The party’s 2011 federal election platform called for tax incentives for small and medium-sized firms (to reward “job creators”), a modest increase in corporate tax that would keep it lower than the lowest U.S. corporate tax rate (to ensure “competitiveness”), and a host of modest reforms in health care, public pensions, public transit and housing strategies that would distinguish the NDP from the Harper Conservatives but had little to do with redistribution of resources and real power.

Needless to say, the party’s international policy was set firmly in the framework of the military, trade and investment alliances of global capitalism. For an end to Canada’s “combat involvement” in Afghanistan (a position the party adopted in 2006, four years after the first troops were sent). But no references to NATO, NORAD, or the numerous “free trade” agreements Ottawa has signed in recent years other than a call for Canadian companies to “abide by international human rights law and environmental standards when operating overseas.” The NDP would “maintain the current planned levels of Defence spending commitments.” On the environment it supported the Kyoto emission-reduction goals but promoted carbon taxes and said nothing about the Alberta tar sands, Canada’s major source of greenhouse gas pollution.[12]

The program rejected deficit financing (a staple of Keynesian economics) and Layton defended the Bank of Canada’s autonomy in setting monetary policy. To prove the NDP’s suitability to govern, Layton repeatedly referred to the “prudent” fiscal records of NDP governments in the western provinces.

Québec – A poverty of imagination

Firmly committed to working within the confines of capitalist state institutions, the NDP has been baffled by the Québec national question and the powerful movement it has spawned in opposition to the very state and structures with which the NDP so fervently identifies.

A major goal of the new party in 1961 was to make inroads into Québec, always infertile territory for the CCF. However, initial attempts produced only modest results. At the founding convention, a large Québec delegation — attracted by the promise of a new labour-based party — managed little more than to convince the party to substitute the word “federal” for “national” in its statutes and had to abandon the attempt to win recognition in the program of Québec’s right to self-determination. However, in 1963 delegates to the federal convention, impressed by the progressive dynamic of Québec’s Quiet Revolution, called for a “complete rethinking of our federal system and of the relations between the two nations which established Canada.”[13]

But in 1963, as well, the party’s fledgling Québec wing divided over differences on the national question; the majority went on to form an autonomous Parti Socialiste du Québec. By the mid-1960s, the PSQ was calling for adoption of a sovereign Québec constitution and the negotiation of a new “confederal” accord with English Canada, failing which Québec should proclaim its political independence[14] — prefiguring the “sovereignty-association” formula of René Lévesque when he broke from the Liberal party to establish the Parti Québécois. The PSQ was eclipsed by stronger independentist forces, the Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale and then the PQ, and disappeared before the end of the decade.

Québec sovereignty was neither then nor since a notion the NDP would willingly embrace, even as a prelude to association with Canada in some form of common state structure. As a result it was caught short by the rise and radicalization of a pro-sovereignty movement in Québec that largely isolated the party from labour and the left in the province.

The federal NDP, for a short period in the mid-1960s, supported special status for Québec as “the guardian of the French language, tradition and culture,” as did other federal parties. But when the Liberals shifted toward a new aggressive stand against Québec nationalism, the NDP backtracked as “Trudeau’s vision of individual rights, pan-Canadian bilingualism and official multiculturalism pushed the ‘two nations’ concept off the political landscape in Canada outside Québec.”[15]

When constitutional reform returned to the federal agenda, following the defeat of the 1980 referendum, the NDP’s approach was complicated by the insistence of provincial governments — including those headed by the NDP — that the process also address English Canadian regional concerns such as energy policy and Senate reform. NDP constitutional positions became increasingly incoherent as the party sought to balance regional demands with its general predilection for a strong central state.

Led by Ed Broadbent, the federal NDP supported Trudeau’s unilateral patriation of the Constitution with a new amending formula that deprived Québec of its conventional veto on constitutional change and a Charter of Rights that would reject parts of Québec’s language legislation and effectively gave the Supreme Court of Canada the power to overrule many other laws adopted by the National Assembly. Saskatchewan NDP minister Roy Romanow, drafting the final deal with Jean Chrétien through the “night of the long knives,” played an instrumental role in sabotaging the PQ government’s united front with provincial first ministers.

The federal NDP supported the 1987 Meech Lake Accord although its Québec section, led by Jean-Paul Harney, criticized Meech because it failed to accord meaningful recognition to Québec as a nation. During the three-year period for provincial ratification of the Accord, NDP support for it frittered away in the face of increasing public opposition outside Québec around a variety of issues but mostly centered on allegations that the Accord’s “distinct society” recognition of Québec would somehow abridge women’s and aboriginal rights and undermine the powers of the federal government. The Manitoba NDP drove a final nail into the Meech coffin when Elijah Harper, an aboriginal MLA, refused unanimous consent to the Accord in the legislature.

In the lead up to the Charlottetown Accord, the federal party and its three provincial governments followed different agendas. While the provinces (Ontario, Saskatchewan and British Columbia) differed among themselves on such questions as aboriginal self-government, a social charter, Senate reform, regional representation, etc., the federal party focused largely on process, arguing successfully for example for a series of regional conferences on the federal government’s proposals. The federal and Ontario NDP support for some degree of asymmetry in provincial powers proved to be a major bone of contention with the western NDP governments, which favoured equal provincial legislative powers. However, the final Accord, supported by all provincial governments, was quickly endorsed by the NDP’s Federal Council and the party agreed to join the Mulroney government’s campaign for the yes vote in a pan-Canadian referendum. This dismayed many party members, and feminists in particular helped mobilize left-wing opposition to the Accord. In the end, the Accord was defeated, not only in Québec where nationalists campaigned against it, but in many parts of English Canada.

In the 1995 Québec referendum, the NDP supported the No side just as it had in 1980, of course. But this time no one on the federalist side could credibly promise renewed federalism. And the NDP reverted to the view that economic growth and social programs could resolve the national question. However, the party was unable to evade the issue.

A Social Democratic Forum on Canada’s Future sponsored by the party in the late 1990s came up with a host of proposals for constitutional change, many of them later incorporated in the Sherbrooke Declaration, discussed below. But in 2000 the NDP parliamentary caucus voted with only two exceptions for the Clarity Bill, which makes Québec sovereignty following a successful “yes” vote contingent on agreement by the federal Parliament.

The Sherbrooke Declaration

When Jack Layton became federal leader, in 2003, he undertook to clarify and modernize the party’s thinking on Québec. In 2005, the party’s small Québec section adopted a document drafted at Layton’s request that is now commonly known as the Sherbrooke Declaration. Entitled in part “Federalism, Social-Democracy and the Québec Question,” it was subsequently endorsed by the federal NDP at a 2006 convention and is the most complete statement of the NDP’s current thinking on the constitution.[16] The document claims to offer “a new vision of federalism,” that will, if implemented, “allow Québec to embrace the Canadian constitutional framework.”

The NDP, it says, “recognizes the national character of Québec,” which “is based primarily, but not exclusively,” on a “a primarily Francophone society in which French is recognized as the language of work and the common public language,” a specific culture and sense of identity, a specific history and its political, economic, cultural and social institutions.

But it notes that Québécois efforts to “build a social and political project based on solidarity” have been “centered around the Québec State.” This concept, it says, “obviously contrasts with the vision put forward by a majority of people in the other provinces who see the federal government as their ‘national’ government and the provinces as playing a secondary role.” To enable these two “visions” of the state — the Québécois and the Canadian — to coexist, the Sherbrooke Declaration advocates “asymmetrical federalism,” which it says is “the best way to consolidate [conjuguer] the Canadian federal state with the reality of Québec’s national character.”

The NDP proposes that Québec must be allowed to opt out where the federal government intervenes in areas of exclusive provincial jurisdiction (as in health and social services, education, family policy, housing, municipal infrastructure, etc.) and in return to receive funding from the federal government in equivalent amounts. “No conditions or standards should be applied to Québec without its consent….” This appears to be a significant concession to the principle of Québec autonomy, although it is confined to areas in which Québec already has jurisdiction.

As the principal mechanism in its asymmetrical federalism, the Declaration falls back on an old stand-by in NDP constitutional discourse: “cooperative federalism,” which, it says, “must aim to combat the federal government’s unilateralism and ensure multilateral decisions and negotiations with a long-range outlook.” It would model its cooperative federalism on the Social Union Framework Agreement (SUFA), signed between the federal government and nine provinces — but not Québec — in 1999.

A notable feature of the Sherbrooke Declaration is its explicit recognition of “Québec’s right to self-determination,” which, it says, “implies the right of the people of Québec to decide freely its own political and constitutional future.” This can include sovereignty, but it “can also be exercised within Canada,” the Declaration notes. However, if Québec were to hold a vote on sovereignty “the NDP would recognize a majority decision (50% + 1)….”[17]

The Sherbrooke Declaration undoubtedly represents modest progress by the federal NDP in clarifying and improving its approach to Québec, notably in its pledge to recognize a simple majority vote for Québec sovereignty. However, a closer reading reveals some important ambiguities.

The statement is notable for its failure to address Québec demands for a change in its constitutional status, whether through reform or independence. It notes that most of the Declaration’s proposals can “be applied in the present context without formal constitutional reform.” In fact, the Sherbrooke Declaration can be read as an attempt to circumvent the issue of constitutional reform in favour of essentially administrative and bureaucratic approaches designed to “make federalism work.”

The NDP’s concept of “cooperative federalism” involves not a reallocation of powers but a never-ending process of policy and program negotiation between Québec and Ottawa and (in most cases) the other provinces and territories, negotiations in which Québec may and often does find itself alone arrayed against the other ten or more governments. The Declaration’s model is the SUFA, and it calls on the federal government to obtain Québec’s consent to the agreement “following negotiation and amendment” — which would presumably require consent of the other provinces as well, a process that failed in 1999. The Declaration provides no indication of how such consent might be obtained.

The SUFA, rejected by a PQ government, was criticized even by most federalists in Québec for its threats to Québec jurisdiction.[18] But a new SUFA, says the NDP, “must provide a framework for federal spending power” in areas of provincial jurisdiction. “Many Québec policies (CLSCs and other community health centres, early childcare, pharmacare, etc.) can be strengthened by the federal government.”

The document’s recognition of Québec’s right to self-determination must be read in this context. Legally formalizing how this right could be exercised “is not useful or necessary,” it says. It cites the Supreme Court statement, in its Secession Reference judgment, that the future of Québec is “ultimately a political question and not a legal one.” But the Supreme Court insisted that recognition of the legality of a Québec decision to secede would be contingent on achieving a “clear majority” on a “clear question” in a referendum — what constitutes “clear” to be determined, impliedly, by the other “partners” to the union, i.e. the federal government and the provinces. This language was incorporated in the federal Clarity Act, which in fact did formalize the process.

The Sherbrooke Declaration does not mention the Clarity Act or the NDP MPs’ support of that Act. The right of self-determination, it acknowledges, means that the Québec National Assembly should determine the content of the referendum question, but it adds that “in response to the results” of the referendum the federal government should “determine its own process in the spirit of the Supreme Court ruling and under international law.” Self-determination, by this interpretation, appears to be part of a strategy aimed primarily at avoiding its exercise!

The Sherbrooke Declaration limits its attention largely to demands (“special status,” “asymmetry,” “opting out,” “compensation”) that Québec has raised defensively as an oppressed minority nation primarily concerned with fending off unwanted federal intrusions on its vital jurisdictions. It is cast as a strategy for winning Québec acceptance of a federal union even before any constitutional guarantees of its national character have been achieved. It substitutes inter-governmental bargaining and accords for any form of popular participation (for example, the constituent assembly the party has occasionally proposed) that might re-conceptualize a genuine federalism.

The NDP cannot be faulted for recognizing the practical impossibility in today’s conditions of altering Québec’s status through constitutional amendment. But it shares some blame for this impasse, above all because the party has made little effort over the years to re-imagine the national question by engaging with labour and the left in Québec, and to educate around these questions in the Rest of Canada.

It is noteworthy that the NDP’s support of constitutional reforms opposed by unions in Québec has embarrassed its cothinkers in the CLC leadership. In 1993, following the defeat of the Charlottetown Accord, the CLC signed an agreement with the FTQ that essentially gave the Québec federation the status of an autonomous trade-union central in Québec. CLC and FTQ leaders then showcased the agreement, which postal union leader Jean-Claude Parrot says established a relationship of sovereignty-association,[19] as a model for Canadian federalism! During the 1995 Québec referendum, CLC leader Bob White “publicly declared that Québec had the right to self-determination and that, in the event that Québec did choose sovereignty, the rest of Canada would be obliged to calmly and reasonably negotiate the terms of secession.” And in 2000 the CLC broke ranks with the NDP parliamentary caucus by “taking a principled stand in opposition to the Clarity Act.”[20]

A new direction?

The NDP appears to have greeted its 2011 electoral breakthrough as proof that its overall course needs little amendment. No policy changes were proposed in either the June 2011 federal convention or in the seven-month long leadership contest following Layton’s untimely death. Some stumbling by MPs on issues of particular concern to Québec — the party’s initial indifference to Harper’s appointment of an auditor general and Supreme Court judge who were not bilingual — was attributed to simple negligence, while the award of a multibillion dollar shipbuilding contract to east and west coast contractors, overlooking Québec’s distressed shipbuilding facilities, went uncriticized by the parliamentary caucus. When the English media revealed interim leader Nycole Turmel’s membership in the Bloc Québécois and Québec solidaire, and pressured the party to outlaw such indications of sympathy for Québec sovereignty, the party did not defend her. There is a danger in this.

MP Alexandre Boulerice, who is a member of both the NDP and Québec solidaire, told Le Devoir[21] that he saw no contradiction in membership in both parties as the question of Québec’s status “will be settled in Québec.” While this is consistent with the Sherbrooke Declaration, it seems naive in light of the ample evidence that any yes vote or revival of the independence movement will be met with fierce resistance by Ottawa — for which the NDP and its members seem totally unprepared.[22]

Unfortunately, the NDP has no process by which programmatic issues like these can be debated and decided democratically by the membership as a whole. It publishes no journals, maintains no general media for internal policy debate, and conducts no ongoing education. It is typical for a three-day policy convention to spend less than a day in total on program debate, the rest of the agenda being devoted largely to official speeches, organizational matters and entertainment. At the base, the party is largely an electoral machine, a “party of the ballot box,” the membership mobilized solely for fund-raising and getting out the vote.

The last — and virtually only — major party debate on the NDP’s programmatic orientation occurred more than 40 years ago, when the “Waffle” organized around a Manifesto for an Independent Socialist Canada.[23] The Manifesto called for the NDP to become “the parliamentary wing of a movement dedicated to fundamental social change.” Echoing the anti-imperialist and participatory democracy themes of the youth radicalization of the Sixties, it sought to reconcile its Canadian nationalism with Québec nationalism, proposing to ally with Québécois in building a “united Canada” that alone could save the country from “American control.” At the 1971 NDP convention that elected David Lewis federal leader, the Waffle candidate Jim Laxer received about 40% of the delegate votes on the final ballot. But when its supporters began to organize for their views among workers in the steel and auto unions in the Ontario industrial heartland, the provincial NDP leadership, egged on by union officials, moved to ban the Waffle — effectively prohibiting party members from organizing around coherent policy positions that challenged what the party’s leadership considered their fundamental program. This bitter fight chilled debate in the NDP for many years afterwards.

In fact, the NDP suffers from a chronic deficit of rank-and-file democracy. Day-to-day policy, including on issues of major importance, is set by the parliamentary caucus or, where the party forms the government, the cabinet. Both the caucus and the cabinet can ignore decisions by other party leadership bodies; for example, in 2000 the federal caucus supported the Clarity Act despite the Federal Council’s opposition to it. And in recent years, federal legislation (supported by the NDP) banning union donations to parties and requiring the separation of federal and provincial parties has enhanced the institutional strength and independence of the caucus and the party leader by distancing them from the federal party’s traditional power brokers, the major unions and provincial NDP sections and leaders.[24] The federal NDP, like some provincial sections, has adopted a “one member one vote” (OMOV) system that accords no special status to convention delegates from affiliated unions. At the same time, of course, the party’s new dependency on public funding for political parties makes it less independent of the state.

Bay Street, the Alberta oil titans, and Canada’s ruling class as a whole can rest assured. With Thomas Mulcair at the helm, the federal NDP will likely continue the shift to the right that it was taking under Jack Layton. A former minister in Jean Charest’s Liberal government and before that an attorney for Alliance Québec, he had angered solidarity and union activists prior to his leadership bid by his support of Israel and of NAFTA. In 2008 Mulcair, along with Layton and his runner-up rival for the party leadership Brian Topp, was one of the architects of the coalition agreement with the Liberals led by Stéphane Dion. Although a formal pact with the Liberals is not now in the offing, there is no secret about NDP readiness to ally with Liberals if that will help ease their way into government. The party’s enhanced governmental prospects will no doubt attract a substantial layer of career politicians as resource personnel and potential candidates, bolstering opportunist tendencies within the party.

It must be acknowledged that the Harper government’s right-wing agenda leaves Mulcair and the NDP considerable space to manoeuvre in the centre of the political spectrum. Furthermore, they are under little pressure on the left from social movements or trade unions, especially in English Canada. Meeting just one week after the May 2011 election, the Canadian Labour Congress listed “connecting with the NDP” as just one of the five “strategic” political priorities in its Action Plan: to “maintain our historical … relationship of working with the New Democratic Party as the best choice of working people.” Hardly a ringing endorsement. However, the NDP has spoken out strongly in Parliament against the government’s legislation banning strikes and imposing arbitration on post office, airline and railway workers.

As for activists in the social movements, they clearly loath the Tories and greet the NDP’s victories but expectations are few that the party will qualitatively advance their causes. For many, an NDP vote continues to be a way to express opposition to the right-wing direction of Canadian politics. But it contributes little to building the needed culture of class solidarity that alone can point the way beyond capitalist oppression and exploitation.

Richard Fidler blogs at Lefe on the Left. A French version of this article, addressed to a Québécois readership, is published in the current issue of the left journal Nouveaux Cahiers du Socialisme devoted to “La question canadienne,” a critical analysis of the “Harper revolution.”

Notes

[1] In April 2011 the Québec NDP had only 1,700 members. As of mid-February 2012, the Québec membership was 12,266, still a distant third behind British Columbia and Ontario with more than 35,000 each. Total Canadian membership was 128,351, an increase of more than 40 percent from the previous year as a result of recruitment during the party’s leadership contest.

[2] By this point the CP had adopted the “Third Period” ultraleft sectarian line of the now-Stalinized Communist International and turned to denouncing the Labour MPs and social democrats as “social fascists,” the “third party of capitalism,” rejecting united action with them for common objectives. As a result, what was then the largest body of organized Marxists in Canada left the field to the reformist Social Democrats to lead this process of labour-socialist unity.

[3] Both the Regina Manifesto and the Winnipeg Declaration are published as appendices to Walter D. Young, The Anatomy of a Party: The National CCF, 1932-61 (University of Toronto Press, 1969).

[4] Bryan Evans, “From Protest Movement to Neoliberal Management: Canada’s New Democratic Party in the Era of Permanent Austerity,” in Evans & Schmidt (ed.), Social Democracy After the Cold War (Edmonton: AU Press, 2012), p. 45.

[5] Ibid., p. 22.

[6] See in particular Donald Swartz and Rosemary Warskett, “Canadian Labour and the Crisis of Solidarity,” in Ross & Savage (ed.), Rethinking the Politics of Labour in Canada (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2012), pp. 22-25.

[7] Keith Archer, Political Choices and Electoral Consequences: A Study of Organized Labour and the New Democratic Party (Montréal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1990), various chapters. Statistics on union-party organizational links are more elusive now, as a result of changes in the laws governing election and party funding. Federal NDP officials were unable to respond to my requests for more up-to-date information; however, it is unlikely that there has been any major increase in affiliation since the mid-1980s.

[8] Bryan Evans, “The New Democratic Party in the Era of Neoliberalism,” in Ross & Savage, op. cit., p. 57.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Larry Savage, “Contemporary Party-Union Relations in Canada,” 35 Labor Studies Journal 1 (March 2010), p. 15.

[11] Ross & Savage, op. cit., p. 58.

[12] http://xfer.ndp.ca/2011/2011-Platform/NDP-2011-Platform-En.pdf.

[13] Murray Cooke, “Constitutional Confusion on the Left: The NDP’s Position in Canada’s Constitutional Debates,” p. 3. A draft paper, available at http://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2004/Cooke.pdf. Quoted here with the author’s permission. Cooke’s paper is the most comprehensive critical review of the evolution of the NDP’s constitutional positions prior to the Sherbrooke Declaration. Useful accounts of the party’s relation to the Québec question in its early years may be found in Roch Denis, Luttes de classes et question nationale au Québec, 1948-1968 (Presses socialistes internationalistes, 1979); and André Lamoureux, Le NPD et le Québec, 1958-1985 (Éditions du Parc, 1985).

[14] Programme du Parti Socialiste du Québec, https://docs.google.com/document/d/129ZvA7-HKPWlBnjBaSIevlN89DB7kzZY-SGtlIfdZsU/edit.

[15] Cooke, op. cit., p. 9.

[16] To my knowledge, the federal NDP has never published the Sherbrooke Declaration, although it was frequently cited in the Québec media during the 2011 campaign. A few NDP candidates in Québec linked to it on their web sites. The version cited here was published bilingually by Pierre Ducasse when he ran unsuccessfully for the NDP in Hull-Aylmer in the 2008 federal election. http://www.pierreducasse.ca/IMG/pdf/DeclarationSherbrookeFR_V2.pdf.

English: http://www.pierreducasse.ca/IMG/pdf/DeclarationSherbrookeENG_V2.pdf.

[17] This commitment was reiterated in January 2013, when Toronto NDP MP Craig Scott introduced Bill C-470, An Act respecting democratic constitutional change. For a critique, see “The NDP revisits the Clarity Act.”

[18] See, for example, Claude Ryan, “The agreement on the Canadian social union as seen by a Québec federalist,” Inroads No. 8, May 1999, pp. 27-43. Appended to Ryan’s article is the text of the agreement. http://www.inroadsjournal.ca/archives/inroads08/Inroads8Ryan.pdf. The French text of the SUFA is available at http://csps-efpc.gc.ca/pbp/pub/pdfs/P97f.pdf (see Appendix III).

[19] My Union, My Life, Jean-Claude Parrot and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (Fernwood Publishing, 2005), p. 291.

[20] Larry Savage, “Organized Labour and Constitutional Reform,” 60 Labour/Le Travail 137-170, at pp. 168-69.

[21] May 7, 2012, p. 1.

[22] Boulerice told me in August 2012 that he and other NDP MPs have dropped any memberships they had in Québec solidaire. Federal leader Thomas Mulcair has indicated more than once his intention to establish a federalist provincial section of the NDP in Quebec that would compete with QS.

[23] http://socialisthistory.ca/Docs/Waffle/WaffleManifesto.htm.

[24] Murray Cooke, “Layton’s Legacy and the NDP Leadership Race,” The Bullet, September 22, 2011,accessed August 1, 2012.

Talking Radical Radio Has Launched!

Scott Neigh — 2013-02-27T18:30:37+00:00

I am thrilled to announce the launch of my new broadcasting/podcasting project, Talking Radical Radio. This weekly, half-hour show brings you grassroots voices from across Canada. It uses in-depth interviews that will concentrate not on current events or the crisis of the moment, but on giving people involved in a broad range of social change work a chance to take a longer view as they talk about what they do, how they do it, and why they do it.

If you happen to live in Sudbury, Ontario, you’ll be able to listen every Wednesday morning at 8 am on 96.7 FM CKLU. For most people, though, the best way to tune in is through the show’s page on the Rabble Podcast Network, part of Rabble.ca. The debut episode can be found here — it features an interview with Alex Diceanu of Steel City Solidarity in Hamilton, Ontario about that group’s experiments in using direct action tactics and a new sort of organizational form to challenge instances of wage theft by employers.

Upcoming coming episodes include Robin Folvik of Vancouver’s Graphic History Collective on March 6 and Gerald Wehatley of Calgary’s Arusha Centre on March 13. In the following weeks, look for Sheetal Rawal and Dilani Mohan of The Miss G Project based in Toronto, Ontario, talking about their eight-year struggle to get women and gender studies curriculum in Ontario high schools; Pastor Rhonda Britton of Cornwallis Street Baptist Church talking about organizing efforts in Halifax, Nova Scotia to keep a closed school building as a resource for the community; and an organizer with Winnipeg Cop Watch from Winnipeg, Manitoba.

If you think this is an interesting project, along with listening, there are other ways you might want to support it:

Suggest topics for future shows! Check out these criteria for participants and tell me about grassroots organizations, groups, projects, or initiatives doing interesting social change work in the Canadian context by emailing me at scottneigh(at)talkingradical.ca.
Get the show picked up on your local community or campus radio station! In the coming months, I will be working hard to get the show picked up by community and campus stations in different parts of the country, and if you are a volunteer, staff, board member, or avid listener of such a station, you can help me out. Again, be in touch at scottneigh(at)talkingradical.ca.

Capitalism Becomes Questionable

Richard D. Wolff — 2013-02-21T14:22:52+00:00

The depth and length of the global crisis are now clear to millions. In the sixth year since it started in late 2007, no end is in sight. Unemployment rates are now less than halfway back from their recession peak to where they were in 2007. Over 20 million are without work, millions more limited to part-time work, millions have been foreclosed out of their homes. Those who retain jobs suffer declining real wages, fewer benefits, reduced job security, and more work. This year of “austerity” began with an increase in the payroll tax rate for over 150 million wage-and-salary earners from 4.2 to 6.2 per cent (a 48% increase from 2012) — a far more significant tax event than the trivial — but wildly hyped — increase of taxes on those earning over $450,000 annually from 35 to 39.6 per cent (a 13% increase from 2012). Austerity deepens as Republicans and Democrats negotiate merely details of their agreements to cut government spending on social programs helping working people.

Between the crisis and today’s austerity policies lie the bailouts — a bought government’s program to aid mega-finance and other large corporations with unlimited funds unmatched by anything comparable for the mass of working people and smaller businesses. The bailouts worked for them, for the large corporations who secured them for themselves. For that reason, “recovery” blessed them while it bypassed everyone else. Now austerity policies shift onto the general population major portions of the costs of the crisis and the bailouts. The situation is so bad and US government complicity with capitalists at the people’s expense so exposed that the capitalist system is becoming questionable. Criticism challenges the last half-century’s treatment of capitalism as the absolutely best possible economic system, beyond any need for discussion or debate, justifiably implanted around the world by military force, etc.

First of all, this deep and long crisis undermines decades of confident assurances and predictions that another deep capitalist depression was no longer likely or even possible. Capitalism’s inherent instability overwhelmed and thus proved the futility of efforts to prevent its crises. Moreover, both conventional and extraordinary monetary and fiscal policies failed repeatedly to bring Europe, Japan, and the US out of the crisis. Central banks, international agencies, and national executives charged with economic responsibilities have, since 2007, spoken with assurance and met often, posed for media photos, puffed and threatened, made a few last-minute, stop-gap agreements, resolved to meet again and do more at the next meeting. However, the crisis continued for most people. In many places it has gotten much worse. All this challenges glib notions that capitalism’s highest authorities have the system “under control.”

Implicitly, at first, millions of people began to question whether capitalism does still “deliver the goods” as its defenders so long insisted. In the US, declining economic conditions for parents coupled with rising school debts and declining job prospects for their children suggest rather that capitalism “delivers the bads.” The widening inequalities of wealth and income that contributed to the crisis have in turn been further aggravated by it.

The old ideological mechanisms that for decades had persuaded most US citizens — that economic hardship was the result of individual decisions and personal failures — left growing numbers dissatisfied. The old scapegoats (immigrants, the poor, minorities, foreign powers, etc.) raised to deflect systemic criticism have been working less well than in the past. In their place, the notion is rising that today’s economic problems are systemic, that capitalism itself is the problem. Systemic criticism is returning into the public consciousness and into public debate in ways not seen in the US since the 1930s.

On the right, in the US and beyond, the questioning of capitalism has not yet found many strong voices. Instead, right-wing resentments about wealth and income inequality, crisis, bailouts for banks, etc. have so far been largely deflected and subordinated to increasingly implacable and violent oppositions to government, immigration, the poor, etc. These classic moves of right-wing ideology mobilize a broad coalition of traditional conservatives, nationalists, racists, religious fundamentalists, gun enthusiasts, and so on. In the US, they ally with funding sources among major capitalist interests in demonizing the government as the evil to be overcome. That alliance provides mass support for the austerity policies that private capitalists prefer. Attacking the demon government, especially when led by a black, Democratic President, is the basic Tea Party mantra.

In stark contrast, questioning capitalism is how portions of the left are finding access back into mainstream conversation in the US. They are developing new ways of asking questions and focusing criticism. They largely avoid the language, concepts, and imagery associated with earlier forms of anti-capitalism: traditional socialism, the USSR, China, and the marginalized, often sectarian groups who remain identified with those forms. Various sorts of anarchism and unorthodox Marxisms have surfaced and found followings on the left. Many of these diverse movements have formulated critiques of the crisis focused on its roots in capitalism. Capitalism, they stress, is a system that one could and should question.

The transition from implicit to explicit and widely disseminated left systemic criticisms of capitalism is an important achievement of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement since the autumn of 2011. Slogans about the 99% confronting the 1% have condensed a cacophony of very diverse critical attitudes toward the crisis, public policy, and the direction of US economics and politics. A powerful unifying theme has arisen. The cause of crisis, unjust bailouts, economic decline, and matching political dysfunction is also the central problem of our time. Extremely unequal distributions of wealth, income, and power are capitalism’s systemic products and likewise explain its problems, crises, and repeated failures to solve them. To get beyond capitalism’s instability, inequality, and injustice, system change is necessary.

In Europe, the same global capitalist crisis evolved differently. Inside the US, overt, mass opposition to the crisis or to government policy or to capitalism qua system has been rare. When it occurred, it flared up in short-lived explosions such as the Wisconsin public employee union actions against the governor and in OWS-related activities. By contrast, in Europe mass opposition became nearly continuous after mid-2010 as austerity policies were imposed and various combinations of labor unions, left political parties, and new and often independent social movements went into the streets. Europe has since experienced protests, strikes, mass demonstrations and general strikes coordinated nationally and sometimes continentally. These mass citizens’ actions have been larger, lasted longer, and been better organized than anything seen for at least half a century. As in the US, especially since OWS, the theme of anti-capitalism has been a notable and growing dimension of these actions.

Moreover, the explanation of the difference between European and US anti-capitalism and anti-austerity movements teaches some important lessons. In Europe after 1945, business and conservative efforts to destroy the labor unions and anti-capitalist parties and movements were far less successful than their counterparts in the US. Thus, as the current crisis led to austerity, Europeans opposed to austerity and to capitalism were far less disorganized and far less isolated from one another — and likewise less ideologically disarmed. They could and did mobilize millions for classic, visible street actions to advance their criticisms and demands. They could and did plausibly threaten effective electoral action as well.

In contrast, US history after 1945 displays a relentlessly effective destruction of those organizations whose alliance had forced the New Deal on the Roosevelt government. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the socialist and communist parties had then articulated a powerful opposition to austerity intertwined with serious anti-capitalism. Their opposition to austerity was successful. Very high taxes were imposed on corporations and the rich to pay for a major expansion of social welfare for the masses (social security, unemployment compensation, and a huge federal jobs program). The contrast between FDR’s expansive response to a collapse of the capitalist economy then and those of Bush and Obama now could not be starker. What the labor-left alliance of the 1930s failed to achieve, however, was any change at the micro-level of the capitalist system. Major shareholders and their boards of directors remained in full command and control of capitalist enterprises.

Once the Second World War ended, business and the rich used every possible weapon to roll back the New Deal. From the secured preserves of their corporate positions and wealth, they targeted the social forces (labor, socialists, and communists) that had succeeded in raising their taxes and expanding the powers of a mass-based government. One key strategy was to eradicate the socialist and communist parties as effective social movements; this was achieved in the name of intense Cold War anti-communism. The other key strategy pursued in tandem by business, government, the rich, and the political right entailed attacks on labor unions. Since the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, countless laws, regulations, and private campaigns contributed to a nearly continuous half-century decline in unions’ membership and social influence. If anything, the current crisis through 2012 has intensified that decline.

Thus, US opposition to austerity and capitalism since 2009 differed from European oppositions. The US left had been systematically disorganized, demonized as traitorous, and fragmented. To survive, those who did not abandon their previous political commitments altogether splintered into single-issue social movements (against racism, sexism, homophobia, environmental degradation, etc.). Many sought refuges in more or less safe social enclaves such as the academy, religious institutions, and the arts. When large demonstrations occurred they focused on single issues, minimized or excluded direct criticisms of capitalism, and marginalized or excluded advocacy of alternative economic systems.

For half a century, the capitalist system in the US enjoyed a free pass from the kinds of debates and criticisms that other systems in the US experienced. The educational, medical insurance, transportation, energy, and other systems comprising US society had hardly been damaged by those debates and criticisms. Indeed such debates and criticisms are widely believed to be signs of social health, indispensable to the improvement of those systems. In contrast, criticism and debate over capitalism as a system were considered taboo and replaced by celebration and cheerleading. Protection from criticism and debate enabled capitalism to indulge its darkest tendencies (deepening inequality, speculation, cronyism, corruption, etc.). Any component system within any society rots when kept immune from criticism and debate.

The economic crisis of capitalism since 2007 exposed that rot: the immense weaknesses and flaws that had accumulated over the previous half-century. Financial and other mega-corporations rushed to mobilize massive government assistance to save them from collapse. Clear to all, that rush mocked the previous era’s glib contrast of the private sector as efficient and the public sector as useless or worse. No political gridlock prevented the government from swiftly and nearly unanimously providing those mega-corporations with trillions in loans, guarantees, investments, and other forms of stimulus spending. Yet that same government could not end high and persistent unemployment (for example, by a federal jobs program), nor save millions from foreclosure (for example, by managing a transition from ownership to rental for those who needed that), nor stop real wages, job benefits, and job security from continuous decline (for example, by regulations preventing any declines from 2007 levels for the duration of the crisis). These and many other possible solutions, interventions in free-enterprise capitalism, were not considered, let alone examined and debated. The culture of capitalist dominance and the taboo on criticism of capitalism worked to ignore such solutions, not to mention the question of economic system change.

The same culture produced a left that is chronically disorganized (a condition often repackaged as anti-authoritarianism to disguise its impotence). It also produced a long left hibernation in a few safe social enclaves mentioned above. These afflictions rendered the left ill-equipped to recognize, let alone mobilize or lead, the US population’s increasing alienation from its economic and political leaders and institutions.

While it lacked organizational outlets, growing alienation from capitalism did stimulate mass changes in understanding, consciousness, and feeling. Anti-capitalist impulses and arguments expanded from the few marginalized locales where they had at least partially survived the Cold War. They became increasingly acceptable in public discussions that had formerly ridiculed and dismissed them when not simply excluding them as contemptible mixtures of ignorance and evil. Occupy Wall Street reflected and very significantly magnified that growing acceptance.

Yet another spreading realization provoked by the crisis put capitalism into question. Beyond the crisis (capitalist cycles mean that downturns eventually produce upturns), a suspicion of long-term decline hovers in the basic economic statistics as well as in mass sensibility. The suspicion concerns especially capital’s mobility. After all, western Europe and the US comprise zones where market conditions plus many decades of workers’ struggles eventually yielded high wages. Capital is now relocating to zones in Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere to profit from much lower wage levels. Describing the US and western Europe as “mature” economies reveals the contrast between their slowing growth and the rising growth in Asia, Latin America, etc. That contrast further reorients capital and production; it relocates growing markets and economic wellbeing abroad.

Many Americans know quite well how cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Camden, New Jersey, and countless others were plunged into decades of economic decline and social collapse in the wake of capital outflows to areas of greater profit. To how many other regions of the US might similar, long-term deterioration be coming? Rising profits for those who benefit from capital mobility versus falling incomes for those hurt by it are basic contributors to the ever-widening inequalities of wealth and income in the US and western Europe. Both regions face deepening domestic tensions and conflicts as departing capital undermines public and private resources.

Capitalism often rewards enterprises that maximize profit, growth, and/or market share and often punishes those that do not. Capitalism also mostly enables private capitalist enterprises to keep the profits from capital mobility while evading its costs. General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, their suppliers, and their investors were not charged to cover the costs of offsetting the damages to Detroit and its people that resulted from capital outflow. Those costs of capital mobility were socialized and dumped on the US public sector, and when taxpayers resisted covering the costs, the affected cities were devastated. Capitalism’s mobility of capital often delivers shock and awe; it terrorizes whole populations.

Citizens confronting the enduring crisis since 2007 increasingly wonder whether its depth and duration indicate problems deeper than business cycles. Capital mobility is one such deeper problem. Another is technical change: always praised because it can save work, in capitalism its adoption often benefits the few, while fewer workers labor longer and for less real income. As citizens wonder about controlling or limiting capital mobility as a national and social danger, they confront again the question of the economic system itself. As citizens wonder about controlling technical innovation so its costs and benefits are equitably shared, they confront a capitalism that does not work that way.

Early in their histories, rising capitalisms in Europe and the US experienced rapid growth. Bitter clashes often arose between workers and capitalists over who would benefit and how much from that growth. We are likely to have at least as bitter clashes now as struggles pit winners against losers in economic decline. In any case, the threats and risks of capitalist-driven decline and severe capitalist cycles in western Europe and the US put the system into question in ways not seen for many decades.

This article originally appeared in Monthy Review. Used with permission. Rotation image by Daquella manera. Used under creative commons licencing

Richard D. Wolff is Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and also a Visiting Professor at the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University in New York. He is the author of *New Departures in Marxian Theory (Routledge, 2006) among many other publications. Visit Wolff’s Web site at www.rdwolff.com, and order a copy of his new book Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism. His work is also featured on the new website: www.democracyatwork.info. His weekly radio program, “Economic Update,” broadcasts on several Pacifica Network stations including WBAI in New York City and KPFA in San Francisco. It is archived on rdwolff.com.*

Right of Return

Edwin Janzen — 2013-02-20T16:27:07+00:00

Bilbo Baggins is the main character in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, but contrary to what you’d think, the movie isn’t really about him. Nor is it about Gollum—neither because of his true delightfulness nor his long stewardship of the One Ring. (Gandalf, the consummate geopolitician, puller of strings—the guy Henry Kissinger thought he was—would likely agree.) This story is about dwarves—their tragic past, their tumultuous present and their hopes for the future against seemingly insurmountable challenges.

I am aware of post-colonialist interpretations of Tolkien where whiteness equates to goodness in an ivory racial hierarchy: elves at the top, then Numenorean-descended humans, then other white humans, then people of colour (Haradrim, “Easterlings”), then the orcs in the basement, representing the most visceral white fears and stereotypes. The Hobbits, finally—a humble race of wee, comfort-loving folks, though courageous when necessity calls—must be the English.

The dwarves complicate this easy picture. Tolkien’s dwarves were severe and remote, not unlike elemental incarnations of stone. Jackson dispenses with such alienating notions, replacing them with caricatures of good-natured masculinity: hairyness, gluttony, readiness for action. As well, however, the dwarves are human—more human, one could say, than Tolkien’s humans: proud and noble, on the one hand, yet thoroughly venal and greedy—even self-destructively so, as in the case of Thrór, Thorin Oakenshield’s grandfather, who came to “love gold too much.” They are shorter and usually uglier than humans, which, moving beyond masculine caricature, allows them to stand in for our darker psychological selves, racked by doubts and self-deprecations, ever feeling unequal to the challenges before us. They love feasting, drinking and music, to which we can readily relate—but probably most important, dwarves love industry. They are builders, miners, smiths, makers of tools, designers of engines. Though ruled by kings, they could easily become capitalists—or, indeed, socialists.

The dwarves are after gold and jewels—but what they want goes beyond economic growth and job opportunities. Bilbo, elucidating his reasons for sticking with the quest, puts it eloquently: Your home was taken from you. I want to help you get it back, if I can. The dwarves are exiles, refugees, driven from their homes by a superior military force (the dragon Smaug), which now occupies their homeland contrary to all law and justice—a war crime. Abandoned in their hour of need by the elf king Thranduil, their interests incongruent with the aims of bigger geopolitical players (Saruman, Elrond), they have few friends willing to help them. Bilbo is an activist.

Early on, Gandalf draws the key to Erebor from his robes and hands it to Thorin. A little later, the dwarves learn about a secret “dwarven door” into the Lonely Mountain, visible only on certain days when the moon is right. My thoughts ran to those elder Palestinians who, still resident in refugee camps sixty-five years on, continue to remember how they were pushed out in 1948 and still keep the keys to the houses they locked prior to their departure in an elder age. Let us hope that a secret dwarven door will also soon open for them—and, indeed, for all the world’s refugees and dispossessed.

Falling into a Burning Ring of Fire

David McLaren — 2013-02-19T05:24:17+00:00

The Ring of Fire. It sounds like something out of a Tolkien novel. Welcome to Mordor Ontario, an area of 5,120 square kilometres in the James Bay watershed chock full of nickel, copper, zinc, gold, palladium and chromium—especially chromium (the element at the centre of Erin Brockovich’s crusade).*

The Lords of the Ring are some 30 exploration companies, such as KWG and Noront, who have [staked over 31,000 claims]http://www.nan.on.ca/article/economic-and-resource-development-467.asp). Cliffs Natural Resources from Ohio is the principle mining company. They’re after chromium, a vital ingredient in stainless steel. But others are coming in, including the Chinese state-owned Sinocan Resources Corp.

The Crown, in this realm, has two heads—Stephen Harper and Kathleen Wynne. Ottawa has responsibility for some environmental oversight through the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, and Ontario collects royalties, or will, after the 10-year tax holiday it gives remote mines.

In fact, Ontario’s mining tax regime is so generous, compared to other provinces, it amounts to a subsidy. (Throw in the oil sands and the Crown gives more money to mining companies than it spends on First Nations’ health, education and housing.) The federal government’s recent omnibus bills have so severely crippled the Crown’s environmental regulatory muscle that you might as well hang a sign on the north that says “(Ring of) Fire Sale”.

For the Crown, the Ring is Ontario’s oil sands. Schedules are set to begin the first open pit mine in 2015. The urge is to do everything yesterday—punch in roads and railways to mine sites, dam the Attiwapiskat and the Albany Rivers for hydroelectricity, build a smelter that will require over 300 megawatts of power. Mount Doom, full steam ahead.

With all the hurry, the risk is not just environmental. It is that we will sell the Ring short—extracting the ore at a high cost, and selling the minerals at a lower price than we could get a decade from now.

The Ring straddles several major rivers in the north, and not one is protected by the new Navigable Waters Act. As the folks at Fort Chipewyan will tell you, if you’re downstream of a major extraction, you should worry.

The last line of common sense seems to be some 20 First Nations whose territories will be impacted one way or another.

They’re not opposed to the mines. As Chief Wesley of Constance Lake FN says, “We want development, but we also want to make sure that our lands, waters, wildlife, and our way of life are not destroyed in the process.”

The courts say so too, most explicitly in the Supreme Court’s 2004 decision in Haida-Taku. There it laid down the law—the Crown has a legal duty to consult First Nations on any proposal that might impact their rights and claims. And it must do so when it first becomes aware of plans for such projects. A flurry of court decisions after Haida-Taku has made the process pretty clear.

It’s not rocket science. If section 35 of the Constitution (which recognizes aboriginal and treaty rights) is to mean anything, those rights must not be diminished by projects, no matter how vital the Crown thinks they are to the nation.

Most treaties, either in their negotiation or in their wording, recognize the right of First Nations to hunt, fish and gather in their surrendered territories and Treaty 9 in north Ontario is no exception: “And His Majesty the King hereby agrees with the said Indians that they shall have the right to pursue their usual vocations of hunting, trapping and fishing throughout the tract surrendered.”

Of course there is this caveat: “…subject to such regulations as may from time to time be made by the government of the country, acting under the authority of His Majesty, and saving and excepting such tracts as may be required or taken up from time to time for settlement, mining, lumbering, trading or other purposes.”

But that does not negate Treaty 9 First Nations’ aboriginal and treaty rights “to pursue their usual vocations.” And how can those Constitutional rights be protected if the land is so polluted as to render them meaningless?

So, full consultation is required. But according to news reports and my own phone conversations, the Crown is shirking its duty. As Chief Eli Moonias (Marten Falls) puts it, “Visits from junior ministerial representatives telling us what is happening instead of asking us how we want to participate is not consultation or accommodation.”

If you’ve ever watched a wind farm or a gravel pit set up half a kilometre from your backyard, you’ll appreciate his frustration.

If I were a mining company, I wouldn’t wait around for the Crown to figure out what it’s supposed to be doing or where its allegiances lie. In my experience, a wise corporation will sit down early with First Nations, help them retain the independent expertise they need to fully evaluate the impact of the project, and hammer out an environmental agreement in which the Bands have a real say in how the project unfolds.

That’s not the end of it, of course. Some sort of benefits agreement must follow, just as Ottawa must negotiate benefits for Canadians when buying say, a fighter plane (perhaps that’s a bad example), or allowing US and Chinese companies to play in the oil sands (hmm).

In any event, benefits must be more than just the jobs that will disappear when the mine is closes.

There are some success stories. Agreements with First Nations have been negotiated and accommodations made. But these are mostly with exploration companies who come into an area, drill a few holes and then leave. The rubber meets the road when mining corporations come knocking.

So far, it doesn’t look promising. The Matawa First Nations have launched a judicial review of the federal government’s refusal to hold a full panel review of the environmental impacts of so many mining projects in the Ring. And the Neskantaga FN has vowed to thwart any attempt to build a road across the Attawapiskat River.

*Chromium, especially in its hexavalent form (also known as chromium VI), is a highly toxic and carcinogenic substance. The US environmental Protection Agency has found that even a small amount in drinking water can cause cancer. There is clear evidence for this assertion in a study by the National Toxicology Program on the effects of chromium VI on mice and rats. It is water-soluble and frequently found as a by-product of mining—in leach-water, mine tailings, slag piles and the dry grinding and smelting of chromite ore. The Canadian and Ontario limits for chromium in waste leachate is 5000 µg/L—the same as the US, but lower than other jurisdictions. It seems as though the chemical industry has been able to delay new guidelines in the US by somehow getting certain to cast doubt on the research the EPA has. Some of these scientists include those who testified chromium VI is not toxic in the suits against the company PG&E brought to court by Erin Brockovich.

David McLaren is an award-winning writer currently living in Neyaashiinigmiing, Ontario. His work with First Nations in Ontario has included facilitating consultations with corporations and government. More of his writing can be found at http://jdavidmclaren.wordpress.com/.

‘Quebec education summit – a public relations operation’

Richard Fidler — 2013-02-19T05:17:53+00:00

Following a meeting with Quebec premier Pauline Marois, the ASSÉ, the militant wing of the Quebec student movement, announced February 13 that it will boycott the Summit on post-secondary education that the Parti québécois government is holding later this month. The premier and her Minister of Higher Education Pierre Duchesne were clear that they rejected any proposal that university tuition fees be abolished and would continue to favour indexing fee increases to consumer prices.

“We will defend the option of free tuition and we will try to block indexation in the streets,” ASSÉ co-spokesperson Jérémie Bédard-Wien told a news conference. The Summit, he said, will simply serve to “legitimate decisions that have already been taken behind the government’s closed doors.”

“They tell us we can talk about free tuition at the Summit but it is not possible,” said ASSÉ co-spokesperson Blandine Parchemal. “They are still saying that free tuition is not affordable.”

The ASSÉ has produced a brief outlining the case it had planned to present at the Summit. Now it will present its case in a mass demonstration planned for February 26, following a one-day general strike of students when the Summit opens February 25.

The students have received some unexpected support from Jacques Parizeau. In an interview with Le Devoir, published February 12, the former PQ premier noted that free tuition was one of the objectives of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. It could easily be financed, he said, if the PQ government were to re-establish the corporate capital tax and set aside its “zero deficit” objective.

The following article by Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, a former co-spokesperson of the CLASSE, was published as an op-ed piece in Le Devoir on February 14. Nadeau-Dubois is currently appealing his conviction and sentence to 120 hours of community service for criticizing court orders limiting student strike activities during Quebec’s “Printemps Érable” last year. My translation from the French was originally published on rabble.ca.

One year after the Printemps érable – This Summit looks like a mere public relations operation

Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois

One year ago to the day, my colleague Jeanne Reynolds and I announced the start by the CLASSE of an unlimited general strike against the 75% increase in tuition fees announced by the Charest government. On February 14, 2012, there were barely 20,000 people who began to walk out. At that point we did not have the least idea that we were at the birth of what would become the greatest citizens’ mobilization in the history of contemporary Quebec. Where are we now, one year later?

In a week and a half, the Summit on higher education promised by the Parti québécois will open. It was presented during the election campaign as an opportunity to follow up on the important issues raised by the student movement in the spring of 2012, since it would go beyond the debate on the increase in tuition fees and address more generally the future of the Quebec universities. But with only a few days remaining before this exercise, it must be said that the PQ is unlikely to keep that promise.

Free tuition, a desirable and realistic project

By suggesting that free tuition is excluded from the possible scenarios, Minister Pierre Duchesne dismisses the position defended by a great many students and citizens last spring, and thereby undermines the credibility of his summit. The argument used by the minister and by the economist Pierre Fortin is revealing: they claim this measure would be too costly — because it would produce a 15% jump in university attendance! There is a price to having 27,000 more students attending school. This is a surprising admission, because it confirms the student movement’s argument that the level of tuition fees directly affects university attendance. And it also means that the Parti québécois government is prepared to voluntarily shut the doors of the universities to 27,000 people.

The never-ending argument about the government’s “ability to pay” is especially ironic given that it is the PQ leaders themselves who have tied their hands twice over: first, by their stubborn commitment to achieve a balanced budget as early as 2013, when the Conservative government in Ottawa (which can hardly be characterized as social democratic) has itself postponed that target by one year; and again by renouncing its own promises in relation to taxation (among them, to increase mining royalties and add another income tax bracket). On the one hand, this government voluntarily deprives itself of revenues, while on the other hand it claims it does not have enough latitude to open the university doors to 27,000 Québécois youth. No one, not even the ASSÉ, is claiming that free tuition can be established in two days. But can we not think of a plan for gradually reducing fees, even if it means in the short run opting for a freeze as a transitional step?

The need for a substantive debate

The last time we had some collective thinking about the Quebec education system was more than 50 years ago. At the time, the Parent report had set free tuition as a medium-term goal for Quebec universities, the freeze on fees being seen only as a step in that direction. Things have changed since then. The compromise of that day, between the need to stimulate economic development by creating a skilled labour force and the humanist principles of democratizing education and transmitting a common culture are today being eroded in favour of only one of these two poles, and we know which one. Between Guy Breton, who declares without flinching that “brains [must] correspond to the needs of companies,” François Legault, who “dreams” of “Silicon Valley, with Stanford and Berkeley universities,” and Line Beauchamp, who says “the curriculum must respond to the needs of the companies,” a quite reductionist vision of education is being fashioned, one that assesses the universities primarily from the standpoint of their participation in economic growth.

You need only go to a single student demonstration to know that the students are indignant, not only at the increase in tuition fees, but also at this overly economistic slippage by our educational institutions. While discussions of financing and accessibility have their place at the Summit, it is regrettable to find that while the debate gets carried away over accounting issues the most important questions are left in abeyance. There is so much talk about how to finance teaching and research that we forget to ask about their ultimate purpose. What interests should guide the research that is talked about so much? What should we be teaching in our universities, and how?

Instead of showing political courage by tackling head-on the crucial and controversial question of the role of the universities, the Parti québécois is again closing the window opened by the student movement, locking the debate behind some sterile technocratic issues. Instead of being a real time for collective thinking, as the university community has been demanding for many years, the much awaited Summit looks more and more like a mere public relations operation aimed at pasting a veneer of political legitimacy on a decision already taken — to index tuition fees and continue with the quiet privatization of the universities. It is disconcerting to see the indifference to the Americanization of the university system on the part of this government, which claims to defend the culture and political autonomy of Quebec. If the Parti québécois remains even minimally committed to the ideals of the Quiet Revolution, it must demonstrate this now by envisaging free tuition and tackling the whole issue of the university’s mission. Otherwise, it will have demonstrated that its discourse about youth and the future was just electioneering, and that we must now build a society based on social justice without it.

We are told it is utopianism to defend free tuition and university autonomy. But the utopia is to think that a community can flourish without providing its young people with the broadest possible access to learning and culture. The student movement is accused of dogmatism when it firmly defends its positions. But in my view what is dogmatic is the government’s refusal to envisage a social agenda that not too long ago was widely accepted among Quebec’s politicians. Now they talk about this concept as if it were a radical fad. If the students are being accused of building castles in the air, perhaps it is because the politicians long ago opted in favour of a policy of levelling down.

Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, a former co-spokesman of the CLASSE, is a graduate in History, Culture and Society at the UQAM, and now a philosophy student at the University of Montréal.

Black History Month: Celebration or tokenism?

Faisal Kutty — 2013-02-19T05:06:25+00:00

“I don’t want a black history month. Black history is American history,” says Morgan Freeman.

This month, you will see no shortage of functions organized by historical societies, libraries and schools. You may even catch the corporate giants sponsoring short vignettes on black history, or perhaps a rerun of Amistad, Roots orMalcolm X.

It’s Black History Month.

The celebration has come a long way since 1926, when Harvard-educated Carter G. Woodson founded Negro History Week. Woodson, popularly known as “the father of black history,” chose the second week in February to correspond with Abraham Lincoln’s approval of America’s 13th Amendment to its Constitution, abolishing slavery, and also with the birth of prominent black advocate Frederick Douglass.

Woodson’s goal was not only to educate his own community about its rich heritage, but also to make American society aware of black contributions. In 1976, during the U.S. bicentennial, the commemoration week was expanded in the U.S. to National Black History Month.

The now-defunct Canadian Negro Women’s Association first marked the month in Toronto in 1950. The city formally recognized February as Black History Month in 1978 after being petitioned by the Ontario Black History Society. The event was first officially proclaimed in Ontario in 1993 to mark the 200th anniversary of legislation introduced by lieutenant-governor John Graves Simcoe to prohibit the importation of slaves into what was then Upper Canada.

The celebrations are supposed to make a difference in the perceptions and attitudes of blacks and whites. Yet, since its inception, there has been a raging debate both within and outside the community on whether the month has had a positive or negative effect.

Many people look forward to this month, during which a marginalized people’s history is given prominence in the mainstream. There is a new-found appetite for anything about black history during these magical 28 days.

Others question its relevance and consequences. As Freeman points out, is black history not part of Canadian, American or world history? Why should it be condensed and highlighted only during this month? Indeed, some with conspiracy theory leanings even wonder out loud why the shortest month of the year was selected.

During our school years, we spend months, perhaps even years studying history. Yet how much importance is given to the history of blacks? On far too many school curricula, outside of this month, black history shows up once just before the U.S. Civil War, disappears and then reappears with the civil rights movement.

Even a cursory glance at the tremendous contributions of the black community is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to note that the accomplishments and contributions by this community have benefited all of us, not just members of one group. Minorities, and indeed all of us, owe a great deal of gratitude for the great civil rights strides advanced by the blood and sweat of blacks. Immigrants to Canada, for instance, owe a great debt of gratitude to William P. Hubbard. Hubbard, elected as the first black politician in Toronto in 1894, won another 13 consecutive annual elections as alderman in Ward 4. He fought for cheap hydro power, and stood up for Chinese laundry owners being forced out by rich, white laundry owners.

It’s not hard to understand the pride felt in having one’s history and contributions remembered and honoured. “We need such a month to help us arrive at an understanding of our ourselves as Canadian,” says Rosemary Sadlier, president of the Ontario Black History Society. Yet others question whether, in our increasingly multiracial and multi-ethnic societies today, it make sense to commemorate the history of only one particular people in a discrete and isolated fashion?

Should the history of all peoples not be celebrated and taught all year round. And by limiting the remembrance, study, and celebration to one month, are we not undermining and devaluing it?

Don’t get me wrong. It’s good that there is a month dedicated to acknowledge the achievements and contributions of blacks. Some time to remember is better than none at all. As Woodson wrote: “The achievements of the Negro properly set forth will crown him as a factor in early human progress and a maker of modern civilization.”

But this is just a first step. The whiff of patronization and complacency is too strong during this month. Some blacks sit back with a sense of pride, while the rest of us feel good for allowing “their” history to be told and recognized.

The celebrations have been going on for more than eight decades, and yet the cycle of racism has been remarkably consistent over that period. As Professor Tyrone Williams notes, “whatever ameliorating effects black history month was supposed to have had, the fact remains that it has failed to have any lasting impact on race relations in the United States.”

Agree or disagree with Williams and Morgan, suffice it to state that until the contributions of minority groups are the focal points of history books rather than footnotes, the need for Black History Month and other such remembrances will remain necessary.

Faisal Kutty, a lawyer, teaches at Valparaiso University School of Law in Indiana and Osgoode Hall Law School of York University. Follow him at Twitter@FaisalKutty. The article was originally published in the Toronto Star.

Brazeau, Harper and Idle No More

Murray Dobbin — 2013-02-12T21:41:08+00:00

The Brazeau affair — sad, repugnant and bizarre all at the same time — shines a light on two aspects of Canadian politics that desperately need some exposure.

One is what it reveals about the state of “official” Aboriginal politics and its relationship to the Canadian state.

The other, the almost exclusive focus of the media, is the grotesque hypocrisy of Prime Minister Stephen Harper regarding the Senate. The question most asked in post-Brazeau flame-out is how was it possible that Harper, the strategic genius and control freak (with a $10-million staff at his command), could have chosen this guy as a senator?

Did he set out to humiliate Aboriginal people by picking one of the worst possible candidates from amongst their spokespeople?

Maybe Brazeau was actually the best loyal Conservative Aboriginal person Harper and his war room could find. You do have to wonder what kind of Aboriginal leader would be loyal to a man and government so utterly contemptuous of First Nations people and their rights.

Or was it just simple racism — setting lower standards for Aboriginal representatives than for others?

After all, two other appointees seem just as sleazy as Brazeau in their unseemly greed regarding questionable expense claims. For the nouveau-elite pair, Pam Wallin and Mike Duffy, $130,000 a year for sycophantic support for Harper just wasn’t enough. And what does it say about journalism that these two former media titans have such casual disregard for the public good? That it never occurred to two former journalists that they might get caught is also bizarre. But I digress.

It is just not possible that Harper didn’t know of all the skeletons in Brazeau’s closet. Even though Harper says he doesn’t read Canadian newspapers, his loyal soldiers do, and there was a lot to read. Here’s what Harper knew when he appointed Brazeau:

The Porsche-driving former model was behind in his child support payments (even while making a six-figure salary with the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples [CAP]).

He was facing a charge of sexual harassment.

His organization was being investigated by Health Canada for financial irregularities tied to Brazeau’s three-year tenure as CAP’s executive director.

And he was a political pariah amongst other Aboriginal groups who complained bitterly to the government about CAP’s (budget: $5 million), legitimacy and membership. Brazeau helpfully reinforced that criticism later by describing his former organization as a “mickey-mouse club.”

His behaviour since being appointed suggests that the one thing a politician needs more than anything else is completely missing from Senator Brazeau: good judgment. But whether we look at the before or the after of his appointment, one thing seems clear — Harper’s alleged commitment to Senate reform remains illusory. After years of attacking the institution as a haven for cronies, he has turned his distaste for cronyism into a principle of governance (not unlike his commitment to rid Ottawa of its opaqueness).

Harper could have made better choices for senators, but he couldn’t help himself. So great is his contempt for democratic governance that he felt obliged to fill the senate with the ethically challenged and other losers. While others are decrying the descent into bathos, the Senate farce could be seen as just another arrow in Harper’s voter-suppression quiver. The more public disdain for government, in Harper’s calculations, the better.

The other revelation we can extract from this gong show is what it reveals of the relationship between Aboriginal groups and the government. Brazeau is just the worst example in recent memory of the abuse of the privileges available to those running formal Aboriginal organizations. One of the reasons that other groups complained loudly about Brazeau’s CAP is that the continued legitimacy and funding of these national (and provincial) groups depends on their good behaviour. Brazeau’s group (and his defamation lawsuit against them) threatens the delicate status quo.

The financial privileges and social status these organizations confer on their directors means they will fiercely defend their official status. Once they receive that status it is almost never rescinded. The groups long ago became institutionalized and bureaucratic but so long as they exist it is very difficult for other more democratic and grassroots groups to get established. This is one of the barriers the Idle No More movement faces: these groups guard their formal status carefully and are not amused by anything that challenges their legitimacy. But that, of course, is just what INM does. If these organizations (including most band councils) were doing their job, there would have been no national outpouring of First Nations anger.

That is one of the things that the movement will have to come to terms with early on. What will be its relationship with these compromised organizations? So far it seems there is no effort to engage these groups — and that is a good thing. They have been around for over 40 years and will not — indeed cannot — accommodate the kinds of demands INM makes nor can they become the organizations that reflect those demands. They have been defined by their financial relationships with the state and they are now more service organizations than political bodies capable of mobilizing their members for social justice.

But that doesn’t mean that INM can’t establish itself as an organized movement. Its legitimacy will come from its genuine connection with Aboriginal communities and its growing political capacity to demand that governments listen. Before the advent of government funding aboriginal organizations had real power — indeed that is why governments funded them in the first place. The lesson of 40 years of aboriginal politics is stark: you can take government funding but you have to hand over your power to get it.

The first Métis organization of the twentieth century, L’Association des Métis d’Alberta, (founded in 1932) fought for over 10 years for a land base — and succeeded. This was despite the fact that its membership was made up of some of the most destitute people in the country. There was no funding except from the pockets of the leadership. Its vice-president, Malcolm Norris, once pawned his watch to buy gas for a trip to a meeting in a remote community. And there you have the polar opposites of aboriginal leadership — unless you can imagine Patrick Brazeau pawning his Porsche.

What the Fraser Institute Report Really Says About Public Sector Compensation

Trevor W. Harrison — 2013-02-07T16:21:11+00:00

The Fraser Institute, in late January 2013, released a study comparing public and private sector compensation (wages and non-wage benefits) in Alberta. Release of the report is clearly meant to influence public debate about the province’s deficit leading up to the March budget. Much of the media, lacking time and perhaps expertise, quickly broadcast the report’s key message: that public sector workers are greatly more compensated than their private sector counterparts and its implication that the Alberta government should look at public sector compensation in order to deal with the province’s financial problems.

But is the argument valid? A careful reading of the actual report ([authored by Amela Karabegovié and Jason Clemens]http://www.fraserinstitute.org/research-news/display.aspx?id=19250) points to conclusions that are much more ambiguous, while ironically perhaps skewering a different target: the private sector itself.

The gift-wrapping on the report for the media and public suggests that it compares the compensation paid to provincial employees in Alberta with workers in the private sector and likewise with compensation paid in other provinces. But it does no such thing. Rather, it uses Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey data for April 2011 to compare all public sector workers (federal, provincial, and municipal) who reside in Alberta with private sector workers in the province. The report’s authors note this flaw in their data set, but rather too quickly dismiss the problem — a dismissal continued in media reports. This is not a minor flaw: 7 percent of those in the data set were federal employees, 48 percent were municipal employees, and only slightly less than 45 percent were provincial employees. In effect, the report compares three types of apples with oranges.

For the moment, however, let’s overlook this flaw. Does the report have anything really valid to say about public vs. private sector compensation in Alberta? Specifically, does the report show that public sector workers in Alberta have a clear advantage and that this “premium” is out of step with that found elsewhere?

Let’s first look at the report’s conclusions regarding wage compensation. I won’t bore readers with technicalities here. Suffice to say, however, that the examination is incomplete and leaves out some important considerations, such as where people live in the province. Or, when it compares Alberta with other provinces, failing to compare the cost of living. Finally, the report does not deal with what is referred to as “un- observables” in the data. In the case of public sector employees, part of the observed premium on wages may simply be – and likely is – the result of compensation for skills that are not captured in the data. The result is that the analysis of wage compensation is muddy and unconvincing.

What about non-wage compensation? Here again, the authors giveth and then quickly taketh away. First admitting that, “Unfortunately, individual data on non-wage benefits such as pensions, vacation time, health benefits, etc., is not readily available in Canada,” the report then makes much ado using a set of proxy measures: registered pensions, average age of retirement, and job loss.

The findings? First, that more public sector workers than private sector workers have some form of registered pension plan in Canada (88 percent vs. 24 percent), and that these results also hold true for Alberta (81 percent vs. nearly 22 percent). Pity private sector workers, I’d say.

Second, on retirement, the report shows that public sector workers in Alberta retire on average at an age older than their counterparts elsewhere in Canada and they do so only marginally before workers in the private sector. In short, the allegedly exorbitant compensation paid to public sector workers’ living in Alberta does not seem to have greatly encouraged or supported early retirement.

Third, the report finds that job losses in the public sector are also only marginally less than those in the private sector in Alberta. Perhaps, one wonders, because of the slightly earlier time of retirement?

In the bigger picture, the report paints not so much a negative portrait of public sector compensation, but rather a quite damning one of what is going on in the private sector, both in Alberta and Canada as a whole. Far from attacking public sector compensation – implying that the way to prosperity lies in lower compensation for public sector workers, we should be looking at the role of the private sector in hollowing out the jobs and lives of Canadian workers and their families. Every worker in Alberta and Canada deserves no less than good jobs, good wages, and retirement security.

Trevor W. Harrison is a political sociologist at the University of Lethbridge and Director of Parkland Institute.

2013: The year of the democracy coalition

Murray Dobbin — 2013-02-06T20:08:45+00:00

When historians write the chapter on the current period of social democracy in Canada they might well conclude that the worst thing that happened to it was the 2011 election when the NDP got 103 seats it hadn’t really earned. It was such an unexpected event that the NDP could not cope with it. You could see it in the euphoria of election night – the same night that the dismantling of the country (whose best government features the party could take much credit for) would begin in earnest with a Harper majority.

The delusion set in that night and it continues to today. While the party always talked as if it would become government it was always an article of faith – not reason. The election put that article of faith on steroids and the reward for the faithful was to be allowed to believe even more strongly. That blind faith will destroy social democracy in Canada and hand Stephen Harper the additional four years he needs to dismantle the country. After transforming the country in the post-war years into a modest social democracy without ever coming to power, the NDP’s false dream of actually coming to power threatens to wipe out its legacy. If that isn’t irony I don’t know what would qualify.

The only hope of delivering a fatal blow to the Harper Conservatives is a one-time agreement between the opposition parties focused on a single policy agreement: a coalition to defeat Harper in the House and establish proportional representation. Neither the Liberals nor the NDP seem at this point to be the least bit interested. The Liberals suffer from their own delusions: returning to their ‘natural governing party’ status of the past.

But those who vote for the NDP have always assumed that this was a party that actually put the country’s interests ahead of its own. Regrettably, everything we have seen from the party under its last two leaders belies this assumption. It was Jack Layton’s NDP whose preoccupation with political advantage handed power to Harper in the first place and facilitated his majority.

Three factors make it a virtual certainty that the NDP cannot win a majority or indeed anything close to it. First, the Harper Conservatives will out-spend the opposition by nearly two to one and much of that will be attack ads demonizing the opposition leaders long before the election is even close. Second, the thirty new House of Commons seats are almost all in suburban Canada (mostly Alberta and Ontario) where the Cons do extremely well – and the NDP doesn’t. Third, the Liberals will eat into NDP support no matter who they choose as leader. This is especially true as the NDP moves further and further to the centre – legitimizing the Liberals’ policies. And as the NDP moves right more of its traditional supporters will stay home – as tens of thousands already do.

It is clear from the polls that continued efforts to demonize Harper are not going to bear much fruit. The fact is that the media – which was so easy on Preston Manning and on Harper in his early days – has actually been pretty good at exposing the outrages of the Harper government. It has almost no impact on his ability to hold on to his core support. His long list of violations of the letter and spirit of democracy, his attacks on science, his grotesque foreign policy, his attacks on unions – all of it simply reinforces the anger of the 60% who have opposed him all along.

A recent Nanos survey revealed why Harper keeps his poll numbers high and the Liberals and NDP don’t. The poll shows that it is all about capturing a high percentage of those who would at least consider voting for you: “…45 per cent of Canadians would consider voting for the Conservative Party, compared to 49 per cent who said they would consider voting Liberal and 51 per cent who might cast their ballot for the New Democrats.” If translated into actual support any of the three parties could win a majority.

But it is Harper who is way out in front on this score, capturing (at 35% support) 78% of potential supporters (he got 90% in the election). The NDP manages just 57% (60% in the election) and the Liberals less than half. As long as these numbers hold, Harper will still be prime minister after the next election.

Another poll, by Ipsos Reid, will confound those who see Harper, his policies and politics as a threat to the country. On a whole range of questions, Harper gets 40% or more approval, enough to maintain his numbers despite all the bad press he has received – and despite the conviction of his detractors that he is the spawn of Satan. Forty-four per cent of Canadians think Harper’s majority government is “working well,” 45 per cent like the way Harper is “handling his job as prime minister,” 44 per cent share Harper’s “values” on where Canada should be headed, 48 per cent think Harper’s “approach to politics” has been good for Canada, and 44 per cent think Harper’s approach to politics has been good for Parliament.

Go figure. Or rather, the NDP and Liberals should go figure.

The Nanos poll suggests that the Conservatives have almost no room for growth except in Quebec – where they are actually losing support, not gaining it. In contrast the Liberals and the NDP have plenty of room for growth in virtually all parts of the country with over 50% east of Manitoba saying they would consider voting for either party.

Who will fare better at capturing their potential supporters? The NDP’s strategy does not seem to be focused on this goal. Its recent flip-flop on corporate rights agreements (so-called free trade), its refusal to address the issue of tax cuts and the $50 billion hole in annual revenue, its fear of challenging Harper on law-and-order issues all suggest they are trying to replace the Liberals. Instead of trusting its own supporters and potential supporters by providing a vision of the country that other polling suggests a majority support, the party seems engaged in micro-managing its policies and messages. If Tom Mulcair thinks this is the way to capture a greater percentage of those who would consider voting NDP he is in for a rude awakening.

The Liberals and the NDP don’t have to grow their support much to deny Harper a majority but neither of the parties will be strong enough to grab minority status for themselves. It is a truly sickening prospect to imagine, once again, these two self-interested parties allowing a Harper minority to continue its destruction of the country because they haven’t got the integrity or the guts to put the country first.

But as it stands today that seems, incredibly, to be where we are headed. Mulcair’s recent edict that only he will talk about potential co-operation has been seen as just another way of saying it’s dead. It calls for concerted action for the rest of this year to do everything possible to convince these parties to join with the Greens to save democracy and the country. A friend recently suggested that what is needed is a Voters’ Union to press for co-operation. It’s a great idea.

The only Liberal leadership candidate who has openly campaigned on co-operation with the other opposition parties is Joyce Murray. Like others, including Fair Vote Canada and other civil society groups – and even right-wing political pundit Andrew Coyne – Murray calls for uniting progressive voters behind a single candidate in enough ridings to ensure the Conservatives’ defeat.

The Liberal leadership contest allows for non-members of the party to vote through the creation of a “supporter” category: anyone willing “to affirm support for Liberal principles.” If thousands of Canadians signed up as supporters of Murray (she is also to the left of virtually all the other candidates who fall over themselves being pro-business) she could actually win.

As for the NDP, every progressive in Canada should be collaring their NDP friends (and emailing MPs) and giving them a wake-up call: ask them if they care more about their precious party than they do about their country. If their answer is unclear tell them the party will not get another cent from you until they get on side with a co-operation strategy. The next fundraising letter you get should remain unopened until this happens. This is the year to do it. By December we need to know that the Conservatives will be headed for the dust bin in 2015.

Dispossessing democracy

Sean Carleton — 2013-02-02T00:09:16+00:00

As Parliament resumes, Stephen Harper has made it clear that he remains committed to implementing Bill C-45 in the face of widespread social protest. But thanks, in part, to Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence’s hunger strike, Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples are now working together, through the Idle No More movement, to grow a strong oppositional alliance against the Harper government, and Bill C-45 has become something of a lightning rod for criticism.

Yet, there is still much confusion about why Bill C-45 is so problematic. To help clarify the case against Bill C-45, this article first breaks down the Conservative Party’s rationalization of Bill C-45 and then examines how the bill can be understood as a dangerous attack on democracy and a continuation of the Canadian state’s support for colonial and capitalist expansion and exploitation.

The mainstream media has worked hard to convince the public that Idle No More is an over-reaction by “special interest” groups to the perfectly reasonable omnibus Bill C-45, known formally as the Jobs and Growth Act, 2012. For example, Tom Flanagan — University of Calgary political scientist, Indigenous “expert,” Fraser Institute pundit, close advisor to Harper until 2004 — recently took to the Globe and Mail to defend the bill and explain to Canadians why they should support the legislation as well (see Tobold Rollo’s critique of the “Calgary School” of which Flanagan is most certainly a major player).

Flanagan uses the rhetoric of neoliberalism to justify the bill. In fact, he summarizes his main point in the title of the article: ‘Bill C-45 simply makes it easier for first nations to lease land.’ He claims that many communities have raised their standard of living by leasing parts of their reserves for commercial development including for “shopping centres, industrial parks, residential developments, casinos and anything else that might make money. Such projects create jobs and generate property tax revenues that first nations need to provide better services for their members.”

However, Flanagan asserts that because of stipulations in the Indian Act relating to the leasing of reserve lands — namely that such decisions must be agreed to by a majority of the community by referendum, at a meeting in which a majority of the community is present, or, if quorum is not reached, through the Minister of Aboriginal Affairs — such commercial deals are being slowed unnecessarily. Flanagan contends that “First Nations pursing economic development have complained for years that the slowness of these procedures caused extra expense and sometimes even the loss of lucrative projects to competing jurisdictions able to move more quickly.”

As a result, Flanagan argues that the Conservatives really passed Bill C-45 to help Indigenous peoples. While Bill C-45 makes extensive amendments to over 60 laws, he focuses on two crucial changes to the Indian Act: “(1) replacing approval by order-in-council by approval of the Minster of Aboriginal Affairs; and (2) replacing the requirements for a majority of a majority to simply majority rule.” He then rationalizes such tweaks thusly: “These amendments do not force first nations to do anything. They only make it easier for those who want to lease land to do so.” He does not, of course, explain how these changes effectively make it more difficult for those in Indigenous communities to oppose leasing treaty lands for capitalist development and to protect the lands and waters of traditional territories, which is a major concern of Idle No More.

Thus, in examining Bill C-45 we must keep firmly in mind political economy’s central guiding question: who benefits the most? From this perspective, Flanagan’s assertions — and the Conservative Party’s explanation of Bill C-45 in general — must be challenged on a number of fronts.

First, the changes sharply narrow the scope of democracy in Indigenous communities by removing a broad-based collective power and replacing it with the kind of majority rules mentality that can, for example, see a prime minister elected to a majority government with only 39 per cent of a popular vote in an election in which only slightly more than half of all “qualified” Canadians voted, as happened in the federal election of 2011. In fact, only 5 million out of Canada’s population of 33 million elected the Harper government. Such a decision-making system allows small groups in society to grasp power and wield it as if they have carte blanche — the Conservatives’ recent omnibus bills, of which Bill C-45 is but one, are an example of this in action.

Second, Bill C-45 was simply imposed without any consultation with Indigenous peoples themselves; it was a unilateral political change to treaty rights that violates previous contracts, and as such is simply unacceptable and, it could be argued, illegitimate. Nevertheless, Flanagan justifies the lack of meaningful discussion and dialogue with Indigenous peoples: “Consultation has become a shibboleth of our time. It is, indeed, an essential part of democracy, but it can also become a constraint on freedom.” Translation: if we ask the people what they want they might disagree with our plans for capitalist expansion and then we won’t be free to do whatever we want. This is not real democracy in action.

Third, Bill C-45 will, more correctly, increase the “freedom” of those pursing capitalist accumulation by removing democratic checks and balances in Indigenous decision-making. There can be no doubt that “freedom” has become the go-to watchword for today’s capitalist class and those who work on its behalf.

In essence, Bill C-45 will make it easier for particular groups in Indigenous communities, with corporate support of course, to push through controversial development plans that will, undoubtedly, benefit community members unequally. Thus, the consequences of Bill C-45 might be understood as yet another form of what geographer David Harvey has called “accumulation by dispossession,” that is the privatization of public lands or resources designated for common use to be used, instead, to generate profit for a small minority.

Instead of mobilizing a rough community consensus, which would require cooperation and compromise, smaller factions can now convince a majority of a minority of peoples present at a meeting to vote in favour of, say, allowing resource extraction to take place on protected lands or pipeline projects to be built over traditional territories. In short, the Conservative government, with its obvious ties to Alberta’s tar sands and resource development, does not want Indigenous communities to be able to block pipeline development or other resource extraction deals, as was the case in the 1970s with the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline project.

Bill C-45 must be understood as a direct attack on democracy in Indigenous communities and a deliberate attempt to open up Indigenous lands to capitalist development; the bill is about removing the barriers and obstacles to the freedom of capitalist accumulation. And as Alanis Obomsawin’s new film People of the Kattawapiskak River has pointed out, leasing Indigenous territories for capitalist accumulation is certainly not a panacea for Indigenous peoples’ problems. Indeed, Obamsawin shows how the Attawapiskat First Nations’ signing of an agreement allowing the De Beers company to operate the Victor Diamond Mine on traditional territory has not eliminated the sordid conditions for many in the community but has in fact exacerbated inequality, an inequality that people like Chief Spence are trying to draw much-needed attention to through their actions and support of the Idle No More movement.

The People of the Kattawapiskak River (Trailer) by Alanis Obomsawin, National Film Board of Canada

Now that Chief Spence has ended her hunger strike those involved at the grassroots of Idle No More are faced with the task of developing new strategies to grow the movement. Despite Harper’s insistence that Bill C-45 is here to stay, refocusing oppositional energy around the consequences of Bill C-45 and its connections to colonial and capitalist oppression could serve to bring different movements together to defend Indigenous sovereignty and treaty rights in particular and to oppose neoliberalism more generally.

Indeed, if securing increased freedom for capitalist accumulation is a central pillar of Bill C-45 then opposing it and other capitalist attacks (e.g. undercutting the power of public and private sector unions, changing EI provisions, underfunding health care, limiting refugee rights and protection, privatizing lands and resources etc.) must become a focal point of our struggles and, most importantly, guide our tactics and strategies in more radical directions moving forward.

Sean Carleton is a PhD Candidate in the Frost Centre for Canadian and Indigenous Studies at Trent University. He is currently a visiting student at the London School of Economics and Political Science in London, UK.

Whither the Quebec left and student movement after the ‘Maple Spring’?

Richard Fidler — 2013-01-29T23:57:05+00:00

The 2013 edition of the annual Socialist Register, a valuable publication, is devoted to “The Question of Strategy.” It contains 19 articles by more than 20 authors on the Occupy movement, new left parties and electoral strategy in Europe, the new progressive governments and movements in Latin America, and so on. Oddly, however, there is not a single article on the strategic lessons of the Quebec upsurge in 2012 and the massive student strike that shook the province for some six months, helping to bring down the Liberal government. A surprising omission, especially in view of the fact that two of the Register’s three editors are Canadians. There is not even a mention of the Quebec strike and its strategic lessons in the editors’ Preface, dated August 2012, written following the strike and in the midst of the Quebec election campaign.

Fortunately, a French journal, Contretemps, founded by the late Daniel Bensaid, recognized the importance of the Quebec struggle. In a recent issue (January 18) it published an interview with two Québécois — one of them a leader of this year’s strike, the other a leader of the 2005 strike — about the lessons they draw from these experiences. They also discuss the meaning of the election of the Parti québécois government and the role of the left party Québec solidaire and some of the problems they see in its relation to the student movement and other social movements.

The following is my translation of the interview, which was also published on the web site of Nouveaux Cahiers du Socialisme, a Quebec journal. The most recent issue of NCS, No. 8, Fall 2012, features a number of excellent articles analyzing “Higher education – Culture, commodity and resistance” from a critical left perspective.

Introduction

To answer the question in the title above, our French comrades of the journal Contretemps met with Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, former co-spokesperson for the CLASSE (the major student organization in the “maple spring”), and Eric Martin, a co-author of Université inc. (Lux Éditeur, 2011), research officer at the IRIS[1] and member of the CAP/NCS.[2] They were interviewed by Hugo Harari-Kermadec on December 15, 2012.

This interview is a prelude to an article in the next issue of Nouveaux Cahiers du Socialisme,[3] in which Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois critically reviews the student struggle of last spring, its original dynamic and its relation to the social movements and to politics.

Contretemps: What is the situation in Quebec since the victory of the Parti québécois on September 4, 2012?

Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois: Since the election we have been experiencing a certain return to reality, which is difficult for a part of the student movement. There is disappointment, since the mobilization, unprecedented in Quebec history, was not translated in the electoral results which were fairly tepid, with an electorate that was extremely divided by thirds. The Parti québécois [which won with a weak plurality] had promised some progressive but timid reforms. The increase in tuition fees has been cancelled (for the moment), the closing of a nuclear power plant has been announced, some nice measures in the first weeks. And since then we have gone from retreat to retreat. In terms of public policies, there is no change, and the PQ is again demonstrating its inability to be a real political alternative to neoliberalism. It’s sort of a return, not back to square one but not far from that. There is some disillusionment due to the fact that this movement was not immediately able to correct the direction in which Quebec was going.

Eric Martin: From the standpoint of the political consciousness of the youth, the movement launched some seismic waves, the full impact of which is not yet clear; it will be revealed in the long run. But it is the Parti québécois that proved incapable of reaping the harvest that the movement sowed in people’s minds. Thirty years ago, this party purported to carry the historic aspirations of the Quebec people and youth for emancipation, and proclaimed its proximity to the interests of the workers, its “bias in favour of the workers.” But in the end it showed it was incapable of seeing that an historic window had opened with the student movement, that the social crisis is deeper than education and poses the question of the future of Quebec, while the PQ did not even take advantage of what was being delivered to it on a silver plate. On the contrary, they closed the window, made some technocratic reforms, without any debate. And by retreating at the least reaction, because this government is very skittish media-wise. So the government is already discredited, and it will soon fall. What awaits us is the election of a right-wing party, either the return of the Liberals or, worse still, the Coalition Avenir Québec.

GND: The big promise of the PQ for education was to stop the fee hike and above all to open a sort of major summit on the future of higher education in Quebec, which would discuss all the options including free education. But what appears is a funnelling to consensus, and we know in advance what will come out: indexation of tuition fees to the cost of living and, worse still, the pursuit of commoditization of the education system with the establishment of quality certification [which guarantees the skills acquired by graduates].[4] So there will be a deal with the business interests: we don’t increase tuition fees but we will step up the commoditization process. The attack will be directed against costs, but also content.

EM: The PQ bought into the concept of the knowledge economy in the 1990s, with the performance contracts in the universities. So for this party there is a sort of continuity: “Regardless of what the kids in the street are saying, we take power and we get back to serious business, the paternalist technocrats know what is the right thing.” That’s the fine voice of the OECD. In what way is that party a party of change? No way!

GND: Many people were saying there might be some possibility with the conference on education: the last one was in the 1960s, it was time to inquire as to the role of higher education in Quebec. What is even sadder, or frustrating, is that one of the former student spokespersons was co-opted by the Parti québécois[5] and is now telling people that this summit is part of the continuity of the movement. He is selling the movement to the PQ.

EM: The most frustrating thing is the disconnection between the talk, the discourse, and the functioning of the regime. There may be a major joint effort, with lots of studies on the table to show that it should not be done, but it will proceed anyway. And ultimately, that is what this former spokesman does. In Quebec we cannot express a demand that can be objectified, be translated politically and institutionally. It is blocked by a duopoly, as in the United States.

How do you explain the fact that a student spokesman, Léo Bureau-Blouin, ends up as a candidate and is even elected, when there is a strong tradition of separation between parties and social movements?

GND: It’s the student left that is intransigent on that. The CLASSE,[6] unlike the moderate wing of the student movement, is completely impermeable on this, even intolerant with respect to anything that smacks of electoral politics, a position that is open to criticism. The [FEUC] spokesman who was co-opted by the power elite comes from the concertationniste [collaborationist] fringe of the student movement which defines itself as a student lobby and not as a social organization or union.

EM: So there is a danger that the radicalized students will become even more intransigent on this, which prevents any form of dialectic between the street and the ballot boxes. It is impossible, then, to make a link between the movement and Québec solidaire, the party that represents a sort of social-democratic left, which is the best we have: an organized left force with the ecologists, feminists, etc.

GND: In my opinion, there is a false opposition in Quebec, an “opposition d’entendement” [opposed frameworks of interpretation] between corporatist, concertationniste student organizations, which are in bed with the Parti québécois, and conversely a student left that refuses any dialogue, any link with political parties. To the point that when the election came, the CLASSE had a position of not taking a position: “We will not take account of the electoral context.” Which I find problematic, because it’s a denial of the circumstances in which the social movements are nevertheless evolving.

EM: This is an old problem in Quebec. For example, the national question and the social question are separated. The independentist movements don’t want to talk about social questions, to avoid divisions among them, and the social movement (the Marxist-Leninists in the 1970s, now the libertarian youth) view the national question as a monopoly of the bourgeoisie. So we don’t manage to link these questions together dialectically.

The student movement in fact managed to make some syntheses, and that was its strength, but it did not succeed in taking the next step. Without trying to condense the movement in the National Assembly, to give it a political and electoral translation.

‘The government’s intransigence favoured the more militant pole’

From a more individual point of view, are there some who have joined Québec solidaire?

GND: Yes, that’s the big irony: the separation is formal, and in reality there are some student activists who do join Québec solidaire. We saw this during the election: the position of the CLASSE congress, which said “we ignore the election and call for continuing the strike,” was rejected by the students who had mobilized for some months; starting with the first general assemblies when the new school semester began, they voted the opposite way: “There’s an election, we have an opportunity to overthrow the government, let’s go back to class.” So that was a major disillusionment, showing the gap between a certain far-left within the structures of the student movement and the majority of the militants, including some of the most active, for whom it was now time to translate the movement politically. So there was no organized translation of this attitude in the public space, which was very difficult for the CLASSE.

EM: The first-past-the-post electoral system puts a premium on strategic voting. Québec solidaire got 6%, well below its standing in the opinion polls, because in order to push the Liberals out people had to vote for the PQ as the party of alternance. But it was tweedledum and tweedledee. Since the student movement had in some ways cut itself off at the knees, and with the issue of strategic voting, the election of the PQ came quite naturally, without much effort. And because that party has since then exhausted the last symbolic capital remaining to it we are heading toward a victory for the right at the next opportunity.

The fact that the ASSÉ had majority support for the first time in the student elections, was that linked to the preceding mobilizations? Is this an indication of a stronger politicization of this student generation, even before the spring of 2012, with the ecologist or the altermondialiste [global justice] movements?

GND: I don’t know if we can say that. It’s explained more by some strategic factors, and by the student strike in 2005 against the same government, against a cut in student grants. At the time, that was the biggest strike in Quebec history, before being exceeded by the one this year. An eight-week strike, triggered by the militant fringe but reclaimed by the concertationniste fringe through the exclusion of the militant wing from the negotiations because it refused to denounce violence. An agreement was signed with the Liberals, putting an end to the strike, without consulting the striking students.

This fizzling out, in 2005, had an impact on the student organizations. The dominant university federation lost half its members within a few years. It was a shock for the entire student movement. During that time, the militant wing went after the student associations, one after another. And by 2012 the militant pole was a lot more solid, a lot more organized, a lot bigger than in 2005. From the outset of the strike, the CLASSE assumed its leadership role in the public space, on the campuses. Which meant that even the federations jumped into the dance, at the end of February, early March, when the CLASSE was already established as the majority force and continued to be in the way the strike was represented. It is really this configuration that explains 2012. And during the strike the militant pole continued to grow, and that is where we see the effect of the politicization: during the movement people were leaving the student federations and joining the militant coalition, association by association, because the CLASSE was present in the public space, on the campuses, advancing its ideas, its general political analysis, which went beyond the issue of blocking the fee hike, and this attracted a lot of new members.

EM: Another thing that is linked to that is proof by contradiction — concertation does not work. Its strength lies in the relationship to the state. These federations lobby, circulate petitions. But when the state itself decides not to negotiate, it’s as if the Prince is no longer listening to his advisor. That’s when they become de facto irrelevant, they jump. They have to confess their irrelevance, and to line up beside the CLASSE, and say “do something.” The government’s intransigence favoured the more militant pole, which is what the government wanted in fact: a confrontation, which could not occur with people who do not want one, who are basically lackeys.

GND: The student federations did not lead any actions during the strike, or demonstrations. There were dozens each day, perhaps 20 percent of them called or organized by the CLASSE. We had at least one big demonstration per week, there were several each day in the regions. And during that time the federations were saying “we want to negotiate”; it made them look totally ineffective.

EM: With the result that there is now a campaign of disaffiliation from the FEUQ.[7] They have lost all their members.

‘Québec Solidaire proved unable to take a clear stand’

Is the present respite being used to open a debate in the CLASSE on the lessons to be learned from the mobilization and the electoral follow-up?

GND: That’s one of the problems with the end of the strike. Since the CLASSE said “we’re continuing” and people went back to class, there was no call to end the strike. It came to an end slowly, over two or three weeks. There really wasn’t an end to the strike, and immediately afterward there was the election. Then the work of preparing for the summit began, we drafted briefs… and people said to themselves “it’s not over, there’s the summit, perhaps there will be indexation….” There’s a certain indefiniteness, so for now there is no real balance sheet. This inability to take a break, to conduct a review is a problem perhaps. A congress of the ASSÉ[8] was scheduled for January, but in the circumstances this has been postponed to the summer. So in theory there would be an opportunity to make an assessment this summer, but I don’t know if we will be able to do that.

The ASSÉ is returning to its usual form?

GND: Yes, the CLASSE was dissolved in October. It was a temporary coalition for the time of the strike. It had been founded like that in January 2011, with the explicit provision in its statutes that it would dissolve when the strike ended.

EM: But that’s a problem! In 2005, we experienced the same problem: we had created the CASSÉË,[9] which we dissolved after the strike, so it took years to rebuild a movement like that, which has now scuppered itself again. I am very critical of this. I think there should be a permanent structure like that. And the other problem is that once people leave the student movement they fall into a vacuum. There is Québec solidaire, a political party, and you will get active in it if you want to engage in electoral politics. But if you want to participate in a radical political movement, there is nothing outside the student movement. For adults, workers, there is nothing in between, apart from a few tiny communist or anarcho-communist groups. But that’s not where everyone will go to be active. And for the students, they have to re-form coalitions each time. It happens when an adversary appears, and when it falls the coalition falls apart again.

Did Québec solidaire not take account of the events to renew its forms of activism?

EM: That’s another problem. There were two main tendencies in Québec solidaire; the one I was in came from the Union des forces progressistes (UFP).[10] This Marxist tendency said “we have to organize the social movement.” But there were a lot of people in the other tendency, who came from the community movement, let’s say the citizen’s fringe, who were saying “We have to respect the autonomy of the community movement, so we should not interfere in the social movements.” That position has been dominant for a long time, which means that Québec solidaire has refused to play a role as organizer of the social movement, an initiator of coalitions. It has remained a sort of electoral tool, but not a force for actively unifying the left-wing forces. While the UFP was itself the result of an idea of a party-building process, which sought to merge the CP, the PS [PDS][11] and some small groups. This party-building project, as conceived by François Cyr, Pierre Dostie and Gordon Lefebvre, was unfortunately not translated into the way in which Québec solidaire now functions. There is an electoralist logic.

And on other current issues, like taxing the well-off, Québec solidaire has proved unable to distinguish itself: its interventions were not very firm, or are barely present. They are marginalized in the mass media but they don’t try, either, to organize the working class or the masses. The party is not voluntarist enough, aiming to organize people. [But] it is a good party, an immense progress compared with the 1980s and 1990s when we didn’t have a left party, nothing but the PQ.

It’s a purely electoralist party?

GND: No, we shouldn’t say that. It is a party that is still socially committed, but timid in its desire to present itself as the organizing pole. Moreover, there is a difficulty in going into the street. The idea of a party of the streets and the ballot boxes is not yet fully realized. Well, I am too hard. There are some difficulties in organizing the street, and the street has some difficulties joining the party. We have to understand that in Quebec there is a traumatism in the social movements, which is the experience with the Parti québécois. It emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as the first political vehicle for the Francophone working class, the majority in Quebec. It was an immense hope, that party. Many social movements bet everything on that party. Which explains why many people today find it hard to detach themselves from it. Even some people on the far left.

There was a first PQ government and they say it was a good one, but very quickly, beginning in the early 1980s, the PQ government turned against the unions, adopting a special law on the civil service to smash the unions’ power. That was a disappointment, a kind of traumatism, which explains the reluctance in the social movements to join a political party. Which now explains the difficulties Québec solidaire is having. And unlike France, there is no strong tradition of a left-wing party in Quebec. The UFP was the first experience, in the 1990s!

EM: And the reason is that in the 1970s and 1980s, there was an experience with a very dogmatic, Maoist communist party which ended up very badly for everyone, and it liquidated itself, at the time of the 1980 referendum.[12] So independence and Marxism died at the same time in Quebec.

As to the labour movement, it is stuck to the PQ because it has some difficulties in seeing concretely any other real force. Not in terms of principles: Québec solidaire, in terms of principles, values, has that. But from a pragmatic standpoint, the labour movement cannot support a party that has no chance of being elected. It’s a deadlock.

‘Radicalization is a process that occurs in struggle’

Has the international climate been a factor? Occupy Wall Street, the Arab revolutions, etc.?

EM: Yes, there was Occupy Montréal, just before the student strike, an occupation of the Place de la Bourse [in front of the stock exchange]. That was a sort of prelude, with its limitations: Occupy Wall Street was a sort of expression, a cri de coeur, that had some difficulty in translating itself into actions.

GND: Even more than that. Yes, the international climate of challenging neoliberalism had an impact, people in Quebec felt they were part of a kind of international wave; lots of people said that. A major influence in the terms, but not an organizational influence. The question of the 99% / 1%, a new way of talking about social classes…an imaginary that was taken up by the student movement.

But organizationally, I don’t think we should see a continuity. Those movements organized themselves through social networks, in a decentralized way, without formal structures. A horizontal organization that has its strengths, but which is not the mode of organization of the Québécois movement, which on the contrary functions like a trade union….

EM: … direct democracy but with a highly organized action structure.

GND: With a majority, not consensual, process. It is often written that the CLASSE was a horizontal network without an executive. Yes, there was an executive, which is an organ for execution of mandates, but not policy representation. There are delegates, but it is indeed an organizational structure. The movement wouldn’t have had that force if we did not have this organization.

But then how do you explain this radicalization as the movement developed?

EM: It’s the government’s contempt, 45 layers over and above what is permissible. It pisses in your face, and you end up saying “Shit, that’s impermissible”!

GND: There is also the duration of the movement, people experienced the system in their flesh and blood. One lesson that I draw from it is that radicalization is a process that occurs in the struggle, not through beautiful speeches. We are right. But it is not because we are right, that’s not enough to convince people. It’s not by sticking some ideas on the reality that we are going to convince people that things are not going well in the world. In the general assemblies [AGs], in some places, the strike votes were stronger and stronger! Which is contrary to logic; generally, the strike vote starts strong and then people steadily disembark. But in the CEGEPs[13] it was the reverse! There were people who were changing their minds! I remember leaving AGs that were full of green squares strewn on the ground. The green square was the sign of people who were for the fee hike. And people were taking them off during the AG. And when everyone got up, there would be 50 green squares on the ground because people had changed their mind. That shows a process of politicization through struggle. Some people who initially began the struggle with some (let’s say) social-democratic principles, or Judeo-Christian, of sharing, etc. Some good reasons, but not politically spelled out. And well, many of those people, having been on strike for six months, being beaten by the police every day, scorned by the mass media, living in oppression, radicalized a lot.

Also, there was the loss of legitimacy of the government, riddled by corruption scandals, which had backed down on the issue of shale gas, etc. And there was a sort of latent dissatisfaction, which the student movement was able to put into words. We gave a lot of people a cause, not on the campuses but to all those people who were dissatisfied and who joined in the casseroles protests. That’s always the challenge for the left: to put words on a dissatisfaction that is already there. People are well aware that things are not going as they should. The ecological crisis, the financial crisis…. People see in their everyday experience that there are problems, and the student movement was able to say, outside the campuses, “one of those injustices, which is part of the general logic, we can defeat it, come join us in the struggle.” It is this capacity to coalesce the frustrations, to channel, that enabled us to have, all at once, without any organization calling for it, a movement of the casseroles. It really was born on the social networks, and suddenly there were thousands of people in the street every night, throughout Quebec. Suddenly, some people who were there, who agreed with us, went through the door they had opened.

‘They realized that we were on to something, and they no longer knew how to react’

Is that where the social networks play their role?

GND: Exactly. Once the social movement had done its job, the foundations, as we say in Quebec, “partir la patente” [to get things going], the social networks helped to add some dynamism, some self-organization. That allowed all kinds of citizen initiatives, neighbourhood assemblies, to emerge….

EM: It freed up the potential for people to be creative. And there was no longer any control, it was no longer the student unions that were making the decisions. An organizational platform on which the spontaneity was built. People think spontaneity is at the beginning, but it’s the result.

GND: Yes, the student organizations were there to lay the foundations for the actions, but at some point the CLASSE was carrying out a national action each week, some regional mobilizations, coordinating the strike votes, intervening in the media, in a negotiating stance with the government… But all the rest, 90% of what was happening, was autonomous, decentralized and spontaneous. This was a novelty in Quebec; in 2005 the social networks had barely got going. It was a novelty, for us but also for the establishment and the media. They were unable to understand what was happening. They have an analytical framework that says politics is the state, the parties, the unions. And it’s all machines, it works “top-down.” And this time it was completely different. They even criticized us for it! “But you are not controlling your members!” A total lack of comprehension. I said, “But we have 100,000 members, what do you expect… But what are you talking about?” The funniest thing was the student federations, which were saying “We are controlling our members!” Well, there were not that many any more, but it was also not true, their members were coming to us!

That movement was outside the usual framework. In fact, I saw an interview with a Quebec reporter by a French TV network, which asked him to describe Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois. And this Quebec reporter, from a left-wing newspaper, who has a master’s degree in philosophy, replied: “He’s a young man, very articulate, blah blah, but his defect is that he has found a new form of langue de bois [wooden rhetoric], to avoid answering questions. He always claims he needs a mandate to speak! This is a new discursive strategy: he always says he has no mandate. He relies on this to refuse his responsibilities.”

EM: It’s the langue Dubois [laughter].

GND: And it’s not bad faith, it’s a failure to comprehend. For him, this could not exist. It could only be a discursive mystification. Another example: The minister asked me to order a truce to allow negotiations in peace and quiet. I replied: “First, I don’t have that power. Second, I don’t want to do it. Third, I will take your request, we will consult in our 80 AGs, give us a week and we’ll get back to you.” At that point, they hung up on me, on the state television [Radio Canada]. On the news program. One of the talking heads cut me off because, he says, I am refusing to answer the question. He was asking me repeatedly: “Do you agree to the truce?”

Another example. When the casseroles began, it was candy for the continuous news channels; they had helicopters flying over the city of Montréal, and everywhere, in all the streets, there were people banging their pots. And they called on one of the political commentators, a former federal minister. He says: “It’s very hard to describe, the student associations did not call these actions, it’s hard to see who is behind them.” Because obviously, there had to be someone behind them. “It may be a new form of … uprising.” He was having trouble articulating those words. “Popular uprising.” He was lost, wide-eyed. He did not understand. And they were afraid. They realized that we were on to something, and they no longer knew how to react.

EM: This door that was opened, the PQ is working to close it again. But things will continue to burrow from below, and the question is when will this energy that the people, or the youth, discovered for themselves is going to be used to do more than go beyond the bounds.

Endnotes compiled by Richard Fidler

[1] IRIS – Institut de recherche et d’informations socio-économiques.

[2] CAP – Collectif d’analyse politique.

[3] No. 9, to appear in mid-February 2013.

[4] See “Charest wants to transform Quebec into a “Right-to-Study State,” in this blog post.

[5] The reference is to Léo Bureau-Blouin, a leader of the FECQ, the federation of college students, who was elected to the National Assembly on September 4 as a PQ candidate.

[6] Coalition large de l’Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (CLASSE) – Broad coalition of the Association for student union solidarity.

[7] Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec, the university students federation.

[8] Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante, the permanent core body of the CLASSE.

[9] Coalition de l’Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante Élargie (CASSÉÉ) – Expanded coalition of the ASSÉ.

[10] See “Québec Solidaire: A Québécois Approach to Building a Broad Left Party (Part I).”

[11] Parti de la Démocratie Sociale (PDS), the name adopted by the Quebec NDP in the early 1990s when it separated from the federal New Democratic Party.

[12] Actually, both of the major Maoist parties, the Workers Communist Party (PCO in French) and En Lutte/In Struggle, collapsed quite suddenly soon after the referendum, around 1983.

[13] Collèges d’enseignement général et professionnel, midway between high school and university.

A plague of David Attenborough

Ian Angus — 2013-01-28T20:45:06+00:00

Last week, British broadcaster and naturalist David Attenborough devoted over a third of a widely reported interview to his claim that human beings are “a plague on the earth.”

“It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now.”

Attenborough cited Ethiopia as his only example of the natural world fighting back against the human plague.

“We keep putting on programmes about famine in Ethiopia; that’s what’s happening. Too many people there. They can’t support themselves – and it’s not an inhuman thing to say. It’s the case.”

In Attenborough’s view, Ethiopians are starving simply because there are too many of them. Since they haven’t voluntarily reduced their numbers, the natural world is doing so, by the “natural” method of mass starvation.

But let’s suppose that 50% of Ethiopians disappear today. That would take the country’s population back to its level in the 1980s. If Attenborough’s people-are-the-problem view is correct, hunger should not have been a concern then.

In reality, more than 400,000 Ethiopians died of starvation between 1983 and 1985, in one of the worst famines of modern times.

Clearly, reducing population would not make Ethiopia any less vulnerable to mass hunger.

Ethiopia actually produces much more food per person today than it did when the population was much smaller. According to Oxfam (PDF), the country is now is “just 2% from being able to supply an adequate level of food energy to all its citizens.”

Despite that, at least thirty million Ethiopians go to bed hungry every night.

The problem isn’t human numbers or food production, it’s an economic and political system that enriches foreign investors and a tiny urban elite, while nearly 80% of the people earn less than $1 a day. There’s lots of food, but they can’t afford to buy it.

Cruel irony: the hungriest people in Ethiopia are farmers. In the past five years, hundreds of thousands have been driven off their land with no compensation, while the government has leased millions of hectares to foreign corporations that raise export crops.

But in Attenborough’s populationist worldview, there are no land grabbers stealing land from subsistence farmers. There is no history of colonial exploitation, slavery, and war, no extreme inequality reinforced by neoliberal policies. There are no international speculators driving up food prices, no agribusiness giants exporting food to richer countries while millions starve. There are just people, and people are a plague.

Yes, there is a plague on the earth, but it isn’t people. It’s a social and economic system that puts profit before people, that treats food as a commodity instead of as a basic human right. So long as that system remains in place, hunger and poverty will continue, no matter what happens to birth rates.

Films about wild animals have made David Attenborough famous. It’s sad and appalling that he uses that fame to promote ignorance about human suffering.

Ian Angus blogs at Climate and Capitalism (where this article was originally published). He is a member of the Canadian Dimension Editorial Collective.

The High Stakes of Native Resistance

Geneviève Beaudet and Pierre Beaudet — 2013-01-25T21:54:10+00:00

The blossoming of the Idle No More movement signals the return of native resistance to the political and social landscape of Canada and Quebec.

With its origins in Saskatchewan in October 2012, this mass movement has taken on the federal government and more specifically the adoption of Bill C-45.[1] Its origins lay not in the work of established organizations such as the Assembly of First Nations (although the AFN supports the initiative), but in a grassroots mobilization that has arisen in several parts of the country. This process echoes other recent citizen mobilizations such as the student carrés rouges in Quebec and the worldwide Occupy movement.

Bill C-45 is perceived by native people as an attempt to further weaken their already limited powers to resist the invasion of their lands and the continuing exploitation of their natural resources. In the eyes of these communities, this adds to a long list of initiatives and legislation put forward to undermine their autonomy.

In neo-conservative circles, the existence of First Nations peoples is seen as an anachronism, best relegated to the past. Their future, if indeed they have one, lies in “assimilation” into Canadian society.

Even though this attempt at social erasure began prior to the election of the present government, the process of destruction of native culture and identity has intensified under the Harper government.

However, it would be an error to believe that this attack is driven solely by neo-conservative ideology. The present strategy of the Conservative government, one also shared by the economic elite, sees the occupation of the northern and western stretches of Canada as a key piece of a thoroughgoing re-tooling and refashioning of the Canadian economy, in which Canada, in the words of the Prime Minister, must become an “energy superpower.”

From this perspective one thing is clear — the native populations are in the way. Given this, it also means that it makes little sense to work towards resolving the horrendous health, housing, employment and education problems of Attawapiskat and elsewhere.

A conflict with deep roots

A brief look at the past is necessary to better understand the present crisis. At the beginning of the 16th century, the French colonists came into contact and conflict with native communities. These encounters provoked a long history of resistance by native peoples on both shores of the St. Lawrence. More through necessity than through choice, France was forced to come to an agreement, the Great Montreal Peace of 1701, to share the territory. This, in turn, led to the somewhat surprising Franco-Native alliance which then jointly resisted the British imperial forces.

But during the 18th century, the British forces prevailed and the process of colonization continued apace.

This economy was built upon the pillage of natural resources and the subjugation of the native and French-Canadian populations. Then, in 1837, came the revolt of the Patriotes in Quebec. This uprising, with republican impulses, demanded democratic reform and insisted that the native population have the same rights as all. But the British forces were too powerful and these promising efforts were defeated. The colonial power then proceeded to attempt to extend and consolidate its control over the western frontier, an area occupied by several important native communities, including the Métis of Saskatchewan and Manitoba. This resistance also suffered a bloody defeat.

In 1867, Canada emerged as a semi-independent state. The Anglo-Canadian elite, learning their lessons well from the Empire, adopted the imperial tactic of divide and rule. The subjugated peoples were in disarray and their elites co-opted into the colonial apparatus. The native populations were herded onto reserves after signing treaties under unfavourable conditions which provide few benefits.

Following the Second World War, the Canadian variant of capitalism aligned itself with a new empire — the American one this time, a growing colossus desperate for resources. This led to a series of megaprojects in the hydroelectric and oil sectors in the 1950s and 60s. At the same time, the Canadian state, under the rubric of “modernization,” moved to further reduce the autonomy of native communities, all the while refusing to address the colonial relationship imposed upon native peoples.

New clashes

In the 1970s, the federal state was challenged by the national and political movement in Quebec. The Parti Québécois wanted to build a Quebec nation, within the context of North American capitalism, but with local control of natural resources.

From the Quebec side, the relations with natives remained ambiguous. Both had aspirations to nationhood but the lines were never clearly drawn as to the question of the division of territory.

However, concessions were forced on all sides as the federalist forces in Ottawa had to be faced.

The native populations saw an opening and attempted to mobilize. And it was the Cree in Quebec who succeeded in opening a serious breach. They managed, in negotiating the James Bay Agreement, to obtain certain new powers, as well as financial resources, in exchange for allowing Quebec to develop important hydro-electric projects on their territory. This in turn sparked resistance by native peoples in the rest of Canada who looked to follow the Cree example and gain similar victories. But it was a no go in the West and in Ontario. Negotiations dragged on interminably and gains were minimal.

Following the defeat of the indépendantiste project in Quebec in the 1990s, new conflicts surfaced. The Oka Crisis was the start of a cycle of resistance in several native communities close to urban areas. Mass actions, such as the blockading of highways, spread throughout Ontario, Northern Quebec and elsewhere. At the same time, the development of natural resources became an imperative for Canadian capital, more and more in synch with its American counterparts. Native groups and the Assembly of First Nations had been pushed into a corner, leading to their opposition to the constitutional reform of Meech Lake from which they were excluded.

Finally in 2006, Stephen Harper undertook to recast the Canadian state and put in place a no-holds barred capitalism wrapped in religious rhetoric and social conservatism.

The First Nations have no place in this neo-conservative world. Territorial claims are off the table and the administrative framework for dealing with these communities had to be dismantled. To justify this abrupt and drastic change of course, the government, with the help of a compliant media, mounted a major campaign of denigration and defamation. However, the native people did not back down. A striking example of this resistance was the setting up of roadblocks by the Atikamekw Nation to deny access to companies seeking to exploit forest resources on their land.

From the native perspective

Today, native people occupy a special, but not wholly unique, position within the strategic framework imposed by the Canadian state. At least in theory, this reality leads one to think that a convergence between the native movement and popular movements, both in Canada and Quebec, becomes not only possible, but necessary. But there are serious obstacles to such a uniting of forces. Firstly, social movements are forced to work within the colonial reality established and maintained by the State and imposed upon native peoples.

Native demands are not limited to improving material conditions and obtaining certain rights. They also focus on the dismantling of the structures of oppressive relations. For their part, non-native populations, including the Québécois people, must come to accept that they are not the “owners” of the land. A lasting solution requires that these realities be the starting point for a genuine dialogue between equally sovereign peoples.

An ongoing struggle

It is clear that establishing such a dialogue between equals is not an easy task. Elites and state policies work to divide through demagogic attacks, outright lies and not so subtle co-optation. Nonetheless the recent history of struggles and solidarity work gives reason for some hope. We can point to the group Solidarity with Native People that has its origins in the Oka crisis or to the continuing efforts of the Ligue des droits et libertés. We should also be encouraged by, and learn from, the collaborative efforts of intellectuals, artists, native and non-native teachers who work to enlighten and teach, efforts that find concrete expression in publications such as Recherches amérindiennes, the annual Montreal First Peoples Festival, as well as in the numerous student initiatives at the Université du Québec campuses in Montreal and Val d’Or, and at Concordia University. All these efforts are important in changing the public perception of native people, this “invisible people,” to use songwriter and filmmaker Richard Desjardins’s depressing but apt description.

The Invisible Nation by Richard Desjardins & by Robert Monderie, National Film Board of Canada

But today we have to go further. Is this possible? The experience of the citizens of Villeray, a Montreal neighbourhood, is instructive. In the summer of 2010, a grassroots citizens’ group supported, in the face of opposition, the establishment of an Inuit residence in the neighborhood, an action that provoked a lively debate.

In similar fashion, but at a political level, Françoise David, a Québec Solidaire member of the National Assembly, came out, in December 2012, in public support of the Idle No More movement and denounced the Harper government policies as leading “to the erosion of environmental standards, to a frenetic speed-up of resource extraction, and to the non-respect of the sovereignty of First Nations.”

Listening to the native population is critical to making any progress. In the forthcoming issue of the Nouveaux Cahiers du socialisme, Dalie Giroux makes several key points: that natives have another conception of the world, one in which the presence of humans can not be separated out from the land (and the world) itself and that humans are part of a larger reality and co-exist in a relationship of mutual and ongoing dependence with other life (and non-life) forms. This “solidarity of necessity” echoes the Quechuas and the Aymaras peoples’ idea of PACHAMAMA which can be loosely, but not fully, translated as “Mother Earth.”

Diverse realities, including the human, non-human and the natural environment can not flourish within a framework of conflict. This idea, which seemed very esoteric until just recently, is being re-discovered in a world where the voice of native people is resonating louder and louder across the land.

*Pierre Beaudet is a member of the Nouveaux Cahiers du Socialisme collective and Geneviève Beaudet is an activist working on native rights issues. This article originally appeared on the Life on the Left blog.

Harper & Co.‘s failing math

Adam Davidson-Harden — 2013-01-25T19:39:38+00:00

Of course, we’re all familiar with the sometimes fawning, sometimes begrudging accolades for Harper & Co.’s tactical strategies: its PR manouevres, its playing of images, its essential ‘gaming’ of our political system. By attempting to jump on certain issues, policies and files with their own spin and aggressive marketing stance, they’ve tried to corner the market on uncritical pro-Israel supporters and military superfans. They’ve adeptly played the fear game in suggesting that if they don’t have complete fiat over economic and fiscal policy, the Canadian state will burn to the ground.

With its obvious base in the tar sands oil conglomerates (now interestingly supplemented by Chinese state capitalists) and its successful wooing of the Canadian ruling classes in the wealthiest families and corporate boards of directors, Harper & Co. has added its own stamp to the Canadian state through its ‘gamesmanship.’ From implications and associations with robocalling campaigns to the strategic assault on scientists and non-profit organizations that emanate messaging contrary to their own, Harper & Co. has proved willing and able to do anything it can to shout out over opposing voices and agendas, and where possible to snuff out those voices entirely. Add to this the slick, taxpayer-funded commercials celebrating ‘Canada’s economic action plan’ (whatever that is – ‘responsible natural resource management’ and the tar sands being oxymoronic) to downright smearing and ridiculing their opponents through Republican-style attack ads, and you get the general impression that the game is definitely on. Harper & Co. have successfully changed the political landscape, transforming it into a carnivalesque, prepackaged fearfest where anyone outside the clique is to be vilified, ridiculed or both. The Canadian public, by and large, was even prepared to swallow the prorogation of parliament itself on the basis of whatever half-baked scaremongering lines proferred. They play the old Wesleyan card on a regular basis, delivering fiery sermons from their pulpits and promising deliverance through only their brand of management.

When members of their inner circle have been implicated in wrongdoing, such as those making sweetheart, backroom deals to enrich constituents who support them under the guise of G8 meetings or otherwise, or in the case of cabinet ministers flaunting the will of parliament relating to support for American war resisters, or using the military as a private chauffeur, they still rebound. Time and again they manage to pry our well-tamed eyes away from the half-hearted mention of these alarms and remind us how assuredly prudent their management style really is.

Yes, it’s sort of a mantra-style, propaganda approach. And since May 2011, they’ve been able to bank on the coveted majority status in parliament to, without standing on ceremony, shove their agenda down our throats. As it turned out, this went too far….

When Harper & Co. killed the Kelowna accords upon first being etched in minority governmental stone, the whole matter was looked on a bit askance, but without too much shock. Morally outrageous, yes. Cold, yes. Wrong, yes. But all of this fit with the public’s perception of the Harper brand to that date.

Friends, let’s be clear (don’t they love that euphemism? They really mean ‘herd’ or ‘dollars’..). Attacking Indigenous peoples is callous. When more than 100 reserves lack proper water for sanitation or consumption, when health and education infrastructure for indigenous peoples is so disproportionately inadequate vis-à-vis that for non-Indigenous peoples, when child poverty is 60 persent more likely if you’re Indigenous, when the prisons house a disproportionately high population of Indigenous peoples…all of these uncomfortable facts add up with historical injustices and outrages to equal a cold, hard truth for Harper & Co. It’s bad press to gang up on Indigenous peoples. And voila! Some promoted young staffer or well-paid focus group yields the mother of pearls; A truth and reconciliation commission! A public apology! We’ll own the file! We’ll be untouchable! We’re the unassailable friend of indigenous peoples – we’ll steal the Liberal votes from right under their dysfunctioning noses!

Well, turn out Indigenous people of Turtle Island don’t want to be gamed.

Only Indigenous people of Turtle Island and thier various nations, cultures and communities have the moral wherewithal to disrupt Harper & Co.’s hitherto uninterrupted agenda. Protesters in Toronto at the G20? Toss ‘em in jail! Indigenous youth blocking a rail line? I don’t think so.

There’s that oh-so-uncomfortable and ever-present fact that our forebears really tried hard to destroy Indigenous people and cultures. Ripped children away from their families and attempted to forcefully eradicate their customs, culture and language, their sense of belonging on the planet. Couple this with the capitalist stampede over indigenous communities to exploit any and every natural resource (consultation? Whatever). No apology, no commission, nothing can ever come to account fully for the destruction that arrogant, racist, Canadians have inflicted on indigenous cultures that lived on Turtle island for thousands of years before we even imagined the place.

Everyone knows that.

And if they don’t, it only takes a cursory amount of education to arrive at the conclusion. Read some Jeanette Armstrong. Sheila Watt-Cloutier. Tomson Highway. Some Thomas King. Read Geoffrey York’s The Dispossessed. Or the book Stolen Continents. Chomsky’s Year 501: The conquest continues. It only really takes a few paragraphs. I grew up 40 minutes from Oka and it took until university, outside the curriculum, to come to grips with it. That’s when I met the remarkable Robert Lovelace, but that’s another story.

Harper & Co. were ever-so-prepared to ram their clever omnibus wrecking balls down our collective throats. Indigenous peoples are standing up and saying no. They’re calling on non-Indigenous people to do the same. For cultural self-determination. For climate justice, for inequality. For a better life for all, not just the wealthy.

Let’s stand up with them, because too much is at stake.

Stories from the front line of the victorious abortion struggle in Canada

Judy Rebick — 2013-01-25T19:23:37+00:00

Monday, January 28 is the anniversary of the deepest and most important victory the women’s movement in Canada has ever had. After almost 20 years of struggle, beginning with the Abortion Caravan in 1970, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the abortion law in a landmark decision citing women’s right to privacy — in effect women’s rights to control their own bodies.

When the judgment came down, I was standing with about 50 other supporters outside the Morgentaler Clinic on Harbord Street in downtown Toronto. Along with Dr. Henry Morgentaler, we had been battling Conservative governments at two levels, the cops and the anti-choice forces, including the Catholic Church, for eight years.

We had arranged for Carolyn Egan, who as a birth control worker had been one of the key people to initiate the fight in Toronto, to call us from Ottawa as soon as the judgment came down. There were a huge number of TV cameras and reporters waiting with us. And it was freezing.

A reporter whispered to me that the decision had come and that they had struck down the abortion law, based on a women’s right to control her own body. I didn’t believe her. We thought we might win on a technicality of equal access to a medical procedure but never on a fundamental rights issue. So I didn’t pass it along. Five minutes later we got the call. The scrum moved in, “How do you feel , Judy? Tell us how you feel.”

“I feel great!” I replied jumping about a foot off the ground. I don’t think I’d ever felt so much joy. After eight years of organizing, demonstrating, direct action, lobbying, fundraising and sometimes facing threats and violence, we had won. We had won in the highest court in the land and at that moment I felt no-one would ever be able to take it away.

By some serendipity, this historic anniversary falls on the international day of action called by Idle No More, another mass popular social movement that is making what the pundits think are impossible demands. We didn’t have twitter in those days so media couldn’t track day to day our support like they are doing now with Idle No More so they never knew that our support would ebb and flow depending on what was happening When we were under attack we could count on thousands to come out. Day to day it was about a hundred activists who kept things going. Even though we got tremendous coverage, and the media was supportive, they were just as skeptical as they are today about Idle No More.

I am reminded of the day in 1986 when I ran into an old friend Elly Alboim, who was Executive Producer of the National, in an airport. It was soon after the Court of Appeals in Ontario had rejected the jury’s verdict of not guilty and ordered a new trial. “You’ll never win this, Judy,” he informed me. “I’ve talked to the lawyers. There is no possible way you are going to win.” But we did win, thanks to the courage of Dr. Morgentaler and Dr. Scott and the mobilization of tens of thousands of women and men from every community, every social class and every walk of life taking to the streets, protecting the clinic with their bodies, writing a cheque, lobbying their representatives, attending a meeting, passing a resolution or just talking to their neighbours.

I got involved in the fall of 1981, when Carolyn and her co-workers called a community meeting with the idea of opening an illegal abortion clinic to challenge the law, along the model of Dr. Morgentaler’s in Montreal.

After a long struggle in Quebec, the PQ government had basically legalized abortion, refusing to prosecute any doctor who was performing abortions in safe conditions after two Catholic juries had acquitted Dr. Morgentaler.

The birth control workers realized that while white middle class women with connections had access to abortion under the 1969 law, poor women, immigrant women, rural women, young women, couldn’t get access. Even in Toronto, appointments for the limited hospital abortions were the luck of the draw. A lottery, we used to call it. You had to get on the phone and start calling at 8 am and keep calling, hoping to get through. Imagine the stress of a woman with an unwanted pregnancy not knowing if she would get through at all or in time for a first trimester abortion. CARAL, the Canadian Association for the Repeal of the Abortion Law, founded in 1974 had been lobbying to change the law, educating the public and raising money for Dr. Morgentaler’s court cases in Quebec but more was needed.

The birth control workers wanted to open a clinic like Dr. Morgentaler’s abortion clinic and build a movement to support it. At first Dr. Morgentaler, who had suffered a heart attack in jail in Quebec, didn’t want to open a clinic in Toronto. But eventually he relented. Even before the clinic opened we started organizing. The Ontario Coalition for Abortion Clinic (OCAC) was at first a coalition of pro-choice groups and others. We set out to build public support even before the clinic opened. A rally of 1,000 people at OISE with Dr. Morgentaler, June Callwood and others kicked off the campaign.

In the fall of 1982 we introduced a resolution supporting the legalization of free-standing abortion clinics (our basic demand) at the Ontario Federation of Labour convention . It was controversial and even some of the feminist activists in the OFL didn’t want it to reach the floor in case it undermined their resolution for special women’s seats on the OFL executive. We compromised by agreeing the pro-choice resolution would be introduced after the other one passed.

I’ll never forget that day. Every woman at the convention was up at the microphones. Even women who didn’t want to speak wanted to show their support. Some labour leaders argued against on the basis that it wasn’t a union issue and it would divide the labour movement. We had been working the convention all week, building support. The women at the mics showed by our presence that it was indeed a union issue.

Then Lois Bedard, whom everyone knew as a hard-bitten lefty who was usually railing against the leadership, talked about her son, also a union activist, who had recently died. He was hemophiliac. “I got pregnant again,” she explained to a hushed auditorium of 1,500 delegates. “I didn’t want my next child to suffer like he did. There was no legal abortions then, no effective birth control either. I went through three illegal back street abortions. Horrible experiences, so that no other child of mine would have to suffer.” Suddenly the morality of the issue came clear. Then the OFL President Cliff Pilkey gave up the chair of the meeting to come to the microphone and argue for the resolution. His mother had had thirteen children, ruining her life and her health. “Women must have the right to choose,” thundered Pilkey. “Women are part of this labour movement, so this is a labour issue.” That was the first turning point. The resolution passed by a large majority vote.

The clinic opened in June 1983 on Harbord Street in downtown Toronto. Dr. Morgentaler arrived in the afternoon. It was my job to escort him across the street. There was a huge bank of cameras and reporters who had been there all day waiting for something to happen. And then it did. Half way across the street, a man ran from the corner and grabbed Dr. Morgentaler. I pulled his hand off and Cheryl, another OCAC activist walking with us, ushered Henry into the clinic and safety. I pushed the man away as he raised his arm with a garden shear that I assume he intended to use on Dr. Morgentaler. I blocked him but he thought better of stabbing me and started to run down the street. It was the first time in my life that I understood the meaning of losing your temper. It was ridiculous to chase him but I was so angry I couldn’t think straight. Fortunately Cheryl, a psychiatric nurse, realized I was in a state of shock and once she had Henry safe she came outside, ran to catch up and yelled my name into my ear to stop me. Not a single reporter moved to help me. Not just the camera operators, I know they had to get the shot, but the print reporters. Our supporters couldn’t see what was happening over the media hordes. That was the day we were able to show that the anti-choice were fanatics and I think public opinion moved more to our side.

The clinic was open for about three weeks. It was an exciting time. Despite the dangers, women came in droves for their appointments. The police started following the women home to get “evidence” against the doctors. In the creative space that happens in a dynamic social movement, someone got the idea of having escorts and safe houses. The escort would drive each patient to a safe house first, inform her of her rights, perhaps share a cup of tea and then drive her home. That meant the cops couldn’t harass women when they were most vulnerable. An unexpected consequence was that the escorts became a solid front guard of the movement, always prepared to mobilize when needed. They had as much invested in the clinic as we did. At this point, the anti-choice was holding back waiting for the Ontario government and the police to act and arrest the doctors. Three weeks later they did.

Doctors Morgentaler, Smoling and Scott were arrested for performing illegal abortions. Dr. Morgentaler closed the clinic until the trial. Once again, like in Quebec, he was acquitted by a jury. In a bold summary, his lawyer Morris Manning said to the jury, “you can ignore the law, if you think it is unjust” and that is exactly what they did unanimously. Throughout the court case, Carolyn, Norma Scarborough from CARAL and I met with Henry and Morris to try and co-ordinate the legal case with the struggle in the streets. After the acquittal, Henry opened the clinic again. That’s when we had to deal with the anti-choice. As the Crown prepared their appeal, the anti-choice started regular demonstrations in front of the clinic harassing the women who were seeking a procedure. We had people out there every day too helping the women through the lines and keeping the anti-choice off the property. Direct action, we might call it today. Labour activists who knew how to hold a picket line helped us a lot.

Another turning point came when a CFRB reporter showed up at the door of the clinic. I wasn’t often there but I was that day. He was running two tape recorders. On one a tape played of a woman with an accent saying that Dr. Morgentaler had forced her to have an abortion when she didn’t want it. The other tape was running to record my response. I said I didn’t know about the incident but what I did know is that Dr. Morgentaler had an impeccable record and that there had never been a complaint against him. I was sure that there was another explanation. What happened later that day convinced me that we were going to win.

After he left, I met with the clinic staff and Henry. What had happened was that the woman had freaked out on the table while the doctor had already started the abortion. It was not possible to stop without great danger. The nurses tried to calm her and then finally at the end of the procedure she was fine, hugging the nurses and thanking them.

So what had happened?

Within an hour after the news hit, we got a call at the clinic. It was the cab driver who had picked her up. He explained that she was fine, talking to an escort who was traveling with her. It wasn’t until he was dropping her at her home when the police approached the cab that she got upset. We decided to see if a reporter would find him and Sheila Mannese from CBC reviewing the tapes (there were always TV cameras outside the clinic) found him herself. Within an hour, someone called from the police station telling us she was being pressured; then someone else from emergency at the hospital and then from immigration informing us that she was an illegal immigrant. It was that moment that I knew we would win. They couldn’t get away with lying.

All day we dealt with media. Our word against the Chief of Police. We said they had harassed her and forced her to make the complaint on pain of deportation. He denied it and said she had come on her own. On the evening news, there was the taxi driver, an unemployed actor as it turned out, telling the story. “She was fine, “ he said, “talking to the escort who invited her for a cup of soup the next day. They embraced, laughing. Then I dropped off the escort and took her home. The police showed up just as she was getting out of my cab and then she looked scared.”

The last turning point came when the Catholic Church decided to call out their troops. One Sunday, the priests were asked to give their sermon on the evil of abortion and call on all their constituents to demonstrate in front of the clinic in two week’s time. Every day of that week, Monday to Thursday, 2,000 people, including children from Catholic schools were bused in demonstrate in front of the clinic. There was media coverage night after night.

By this point, we had had many rallies but none of them had been bigger than 2,000. We didn’t think we could out mobilize them. CARAL was against having a counter demonstration. It would make us look weak they felt. OCAC discussed it and decided whatever numbers, we had to fight back. Otherwise our people would get demoralized. We called a counter demonstration on Friday. CARAL was furious but they pulled out all the stops trying to make to make the demonstration a success. It was at that moment that I learned something key about building a movement. Whatever differences we might have had, CARAL was committed to building the movement. Even though they were sure it was a mistake, they knew once we called it, they had to put everything into building it, even if it proved they were wrong.

Another unforgettable day. I was standing on the steps of Queen’s Park (they didn’t construct barricades in those days) watching wave after wave of people pour out of the subways. After every report of the Catholic protest, the media announced the time and date of our protest as balance. So all the people who had been quietly cheering Dr. Morgentaler in the privacy of their own homes decided now was the time to show their colours. Queen’s Park was full, people spilling out into the street, more than 15,000 people rallied and then marched to the clinic. Up until that march, the anti-choice thought they were a majority and I guess the government might have as well. That night it was clear, as Henry had always said, “the people are with us.”

The pro-choice movement was the broadest and most successful social movement I have ever seen in Canada. And while access to abortion is still not universal and back bench Conservatives have tried over and over again to re-criminalize abortion, that victory has stood the test of time. Today Canada is one of the few countries in the world to have no legal restrictions on abortion and women have the right to reproductive freedom, a foundational right for women’s equality.

Idle No More Visits The Sun

David Mclaren — 2013-01-25T18:49:04+00:00

You have to give Ezra Levant full marks for chutzpah. A week or so ago he met a hundred Idle No More protestors at the door of the Toronto Sun.

It was an interesting scene. The Sun had taken down its big logo from the front of its offices and police stood at the entrance. But there was Ezra, waiting, microphone in hand, and camera man at the ready.

He didn’t flinch when people began to chant, “Ezra, Ezra, you can’t hide, we can see your racist side.” He even managed to engage a couple of demonstrators in discussion. And no one could answer his question, “What have I said, exactly, that was racist?”

That’s probably because he hasn’t said anything that could be nailed down as racist. It’s the atmosphere that he and others in the public pulpit create. Like calling the Idle No More demonstrations terrorist acts or, if not quite terrorism, then certainly criminal for their trespass and mischief. Or, that if First Nations meet with the Governor General, it will break up the country (as Tom Flanagan wrote in the Globe & Mail).

There is some danger in creating a climate of intolerance. It tends to give permission for the violent among us to put words into action – something the Ipperwash Inquiry noted in their report on who and what killed Dudley George.

Neither hurling around the ‘R’ word nor criminalizing dissent will reconcile us. It hasn’t yet and it’s been 22 years since Oka, 17 years since Ipperwash, 12 since Burnt Church and Calendonia keeps going…and going…and going.

The confrontation between Ezra and Idle No More was a sad reminder that our dialogue with First Nations people really hasn’t got much further than an exchange of insults.

Sugar Man’s Sweet Kiss

Bryan Palmer — 2013-01-22T18:08:17+00:00

Imagine a shy man dressed in black, guitar slung over his shoulder, making his way to a waterside bar of questionable repute. There sits a motley crew of down-on-their-luck, up-on-their-illusions, out-with conventionality types. Wearing crumpled shirts, they spin tall tales and while away hours “drinking the detergents/That cannot remove their hurts.” His eyes shielded by trademark ebony sun glasses, this man’s soft voice slices seamlessly through the smoke and mirrors and haze of just another evening. Having completed what he regarded as his final soliloquy, imagine that this man then reaches down, lifts a gun to his head and pulls the lethal trigger.

Memory of this man fades. The bar where he ostensibly killed himself is gone. His records cannot be found. Yet this forgotten and forlorn man has become, astonishingly, a figure of legend halfway around the world. His bootlegged music echoes in the ears of youthful rebels, haunting lyrics seared into the consciousness of a generation.

This man was not an imagining. He actually lived, born in 1942, a few blocks from the center of downtown Detroit. Sixto Díaz Rodríguez was the sixth son of a hard-luck Chicano family. He is now destined — largely because of an unusually evocative documentary, Searching for Sugar Man, directed by Swedish filmmaker Malik Bendjelloul — to be forever known simply as Rodríguez.

“Good only for pick and shovel”

A Spanish jazz age pop tune, “The Hooked One,” bemoaned the extent to which Mexican Americans were moulded into proletarians. “Here they say I’m a camel/And good only for pick and shovel.” This lament continued, with worry registered that second generation Chicanos, ground down in the mill of acculturation, would forget their Hispanic heritage.

Rodríguez grew up in a Wolverine State snarl of coerced proletarianization and generational assimilation. His parents came to Michigan from Mexico in the 1920s, when work in fields and factories might be found. It was anything but easy, however. Rodríguez’s mother died when he was three. His father, unable to care for all of his children, reluctantly put Rodríguez in an orphanage. By this time, Mexican-Americans in Detroit carried the marks of class degradation on their bodies. They did the roughest and most poorly remunerated labour, often without the protections and securities of the newly established mass-production trade unions.

Rodríguez’s radicalism

The 1960s formed Rodríguez. “When I was writing those songs,” he told one journalist, “it seemed like a revolution was coming in America. Young men were burning their draft cards, the cities were ablaze with anger.”

Detroit’s tumultuous times: 1967–9. Race riots, wildcat strikes, League of Revolutionary Black Workers, Students for a Democratic Society manifestoes, anti-Vietnam War protests, marches, cries to “bring the war home.” Two Rodríguez albums surfaced out of the mayhem: Cold Fact (1971) and Coming from Reality (1972). Both were released by Sussex Records, a label owned by future Motown mogul Charles Avant.

Rodríguez’s razor’s edge is evident in “This Is Not a Song, It’s an Outburst: or, The Establishment Blues,” lyrics slicing through the entire edifice of capitalist political economy:

Garbage ain’t collected, women ain’t protected Politicians using people, they’ve been abusing The mafia’s getting bigger, like pollution in the river And you tell me that this is where it’s at.

As “The mayor hides the crime rate” and the electorate forgets “the vote date,” Rodríguez listens “to the news.” All he hears is “the Establishment’s blues.” Class grievance animates this searing commentary, as in the song “Cause,” which opens with the line: “I lost my job two weeks before Christmas.”

Rodríguez fused this class-ordered anti-capitalist sensibility with recognition of 1960s youthful rebelliousness. “I Wonder” gestured to a generation emerging out of the confines of sexual repression and double standards, recognizing newfound freedoms: “I wonder how many times you’ve had sex/I wonder do you know who’ll be next.” The sterile promise of desolate suburbs and the arbitrary authority of the patriarchal family are pilloried in “Inner City Blues.”

In what has become his signature piece, “Sugar Man,” Rodríguez provides a complicating commentary on drugs, acknowledging the mind-altering attractions of “jumpers, coke, sweet Mary Jane.” But he did this by underscoring, as well, how drugs fed the appetite of apathy:

While the Mafia provides your drugs, Your government will provide the shrugs, And your national guard will supply the slugs, So they all sit satisfied.

Early 1970s: Rodríguez eclipsed

Rodríguez failed to make it big. The albums died. Sussex Records dropped Rodríguez from their failing label. What happened?

One answer was that Rodríguez had fallen victim to the commonplace practices of the music industry of the time. There is truth enough in this, especially when Rodríguez’s uniquely outsider class–race place is factored into the equation. But there was another dimension to Rodríguez’s artistic disappearance. Rodríguez’s music was too late by a few years in a time when everything was moving so fast. He was uncompromising in his class-edged critique of capitalist power. This was increasingly less likely to be embraced as a more sceptical and reticent 1970s unravelled the tight knots of a youthful, defiant politics of intransigence associated with the generation of ’68. At the same time, “Woodstock Nation,” with its message of “peace and love,” was having trouble holding its head above a demoralizing demise. Too many “bad trips” shred the promise of an alternative, leaving the counterculture in nihilistic tatters.

Disco was around the corner.

The multi-racial, multi-ethnic working class

As Rodríguez left the music scene in 1974, he returned to a working class he had never really left. He laboured at the decrepit Dodge Main Chrysler plant for a time, but the antiquated factory was eventually wound down. What was on offer as Detroit work in this period was then reduced to the dust and drudgery of demolition, rebuilding houses burned out in 1967’s riot, or renovating domiciles that had been left to rot. It was backbreaking, largely unwanted toil on the lowest rung of the non-unionized construction industry.

The working class that Rodríguez embraces and symbolizes looks rather different in Searching for Sugar Man than conventional wisdom suggests. It is not so much fractured along racial and ethnic fault lines as it is a rainbow formation. Mexicantown, a Detroit neighbourhood not a stone’s throw away from where Rodríguez lived for 40 years, is now 50 percent Latino, 25 percent African-American, 20 percent white and 5 percent Arab.

Rodríguez’s wife, and the mother of his daughters, is of European and Native American ancestry. This makes Rodríguez’s children white, aboriginal and Mexican, or, to put it differently, quintessentially “American.”

Two of Rodríguez’s white co-workers talk of their work relationships with him in Searching for Sugar Man. Their astonishment that Rodríguez is a musician of mythical stature in other parts of the world, and their regard for his fundamental humanity, is generous and genuine, articulate and animated, always good-humoured and sometimes quite hilarious. This multi-racial, multi-ethnic working class élan, visible in so many Detroit watering holes at shift changes and on Friday nights, is a welcome reminder that not all workers conform to Archie Bunker-like caricatures.

Globalization from the bottom up

How did the Rodríguez revival happen? Answering this question entails excavating a kind of globalization from the bottom up.

Cold Fact found its way to South Africa in the early 1970s. The isolations and repressive containments of the apartheid regime boomeranged culturally, nurturing already-existing strains of rebelliousness among white youth and making it possible for an underground mythology to envelop an artist whom no one knew and who had dropped off the radar screen of the international music scene.

Rodríguez in 1970s South Africa personified drugs, sex and rock-and-roll, as well as an unmistakable oppositional undercurrent. A Mexican-American, he occupied uniquely accessible ground in the racially charged atmosphere of a South Africa in which conflict seemed invariably ordered along a black–white axis.

Soon this cult figure was taking on the trappings of an Elvis, surpassing in influence the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. But who was he? Where was he? What was he doing? No answers. He must be dead or in jail. There was wild speculation about grotesque onstage suicides, drugs and criminal behaviour. Rodríguez, never made familiar, wasn’t going to be forgotten, even if he could not be found. His listeners aged, but Rodríguez defined a part of them, constituting a “soundtrack to their lives.” Some had tattoos of his album covers sketched into their upper arms. Eventually, in the late 1990s, a journalist, Craig Bartholemew, and a hardcore fan, Stephen “Sugar Man” Segerman, began a methodical South African attempt to track down the phantom singer-songwriter. They launched a website, complete with a milk cartoon drawing of a “lost” Rodríguez.

Rodríguez’s daughter Eva (now married to a South African) happened onto “Sugar Man” on the internet. She sent an email: He lives! From there, things snowballed.

A series of hugely successful 1998 South African concerts were arranged, memorialized in a 2001 TV documentary, “Dead Men Don’t Tour.” Rodríguez was resurrected. Light in the Attic Records re-released his albums, starting in 2008, paying Rodríguez royalties for the first time.

As this was unfolding, Swedish documentary film director Bendjelloul went on a six-month global backpacking walkabout, searching for something he could sink his cinematic teeth into. What he heard of Rodríguez in South Africa seemed a fairy tale already scripted. Bendjelloul spent four years of his life on the film, scrounging funding where he could, financing production, in part, by self-sacrifice.

The kiss of life

All of this — South African tours, record releases and documentary film — means that Rodríguez is now finally widely known outside of South Africa and Australia (where he has also had a longstanding and committed following). The man formerly, and once again, known as Rodríguez has taken all of this in his peculiarly awkward, but nonetheless gracious, stride. “I’m a lucky man,” he says, grateful for what he does have, rather than resentful of what he never rightfully received.

When asked about the Rip Van Winkle-like nature of his story, Rodríguez replies, obviously bemused: “Yes, I suppose it does have a magical twist to it. But I was never asleep.” He is insistent that “the issues are as urgent today as when I first wrote those songs.” Rodríguez does not give us blueprints of how to organize resistance, as he would be the first to acknowledge. But as a poetic and metaphorical voice, his contribution is made in assurances that “this system’s gonna fall soon, to an angry young tune/And that’s a concrete cold fact.”

In “Cause” Rodríguez declares, “The sweetest kiss I ever got is the one I’ve never tasted.” Searching for Sugar Man is a precious gift. It gives anyone interested in social justice and a better world a very sweet, lingering kiss, one whose taste will last.

This article appeared in the January/February 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 Power of Idle No More’s Resurgent Radicalism

Murray Dobbin — 2013-01-21T14:30:20+00:00

The remarkable Idle No More movement is the biggest and most important national outpouring of grassroots aboriginal anger ever seen in Canada. Not since the late 1960s when Indians (as they then referred to themselves) and Métis confronted governments with demands for justice has such a dramatic and passionate expression of resistance been seen. As the movement continues to grow we can only speculate on what its longer term outcome will be. Many movements begin with such spontaneous explosions of pent up anger and frustration. The successful ones find their feet quickly and are able, through collective leadership, to focus their energy and passion on a unifying vision and on some organizational form to press for its realization. Idle No More will be no different.

It is up against formidable odds: not just the normal difficulties of any new movement but a ruthless Harper government which responds only to power and an entrenched aboriginal leadership which is completely dependent on that same government. It is a leadership which long ago made a deal with the neo-colonial devil: you pay us and we will pretend to lead while you pretend to listen. It has been that way for over 30 years and those entrenched leaders in the national organizations — and many at the band level — will do everything in their power to sustain the status quo, notwithstanding all their radical rhetoric of the past 10 days.

In the late 1960s social movements of all kinds were at their peak — students, labour, anti-poverty, women, farmers, anti-war and “native” groups were organizing and demanding recognition from provincial and federal governments. A common message was that Canada did not have a genuine democracy because so many people had no voice in government. They also had in common a level of independence long forgotten — they raised their own money from their members and got virtually nothing from governments. But because of that they struggled to be effective voices for their causes (the exception being labour which did not lack for resources). The government of Pierre Trudeau responded to the accusations of a flawed democracy with the Ministry of Secretary of State. I once interviewed Gerard Pelletier, the department’s long time head, and he said, and I paraphrase: “The Marxists said liberal democracy was a sham so we provided funding for marginalized groups so their voices could be heard.”

I think Pelletier was genuine in his motivation. But there were other elements of the state not so sanguine about handing radicals a bunch of money to be more effective. And for aboriginal groups there was a special, racially-based fear, rooted in past conflicts on the prairies. Here the money was to be used to deflect aboriginal radicalism and channel the movements into relatively harmless activities.

That wasn’t so difficult to do. The funding was targeted. With limited core funding there was money for salaries for the elected board members of Métis and Indian organizations but, for example, no money for the political education of their members or money to mobilize them. Then governments began to hand over housing money to groups to administer — effectively making them part of the state structure and setting them up to take the flak when things went sideways. The radicalism disappeared (though the rhetoric did not) in a few short years.

There were voices counseling rejection of any government largesse. One of those voices was Malcolm Norris (the subject of a book I wrote in 1981: The One-and-a-Half Men: The Story of Jim Brady and Malcolm Norris, Métis Patriots of the Twentieth Century. Just days before he died in 1967, Norris was approached by an Alberta Métis leader seeking his advice on numerous issues. Norris told her: “I don’t want to talk about that. The only advice I have is to resist government funding. If you can do that all other issues will sort themselves out democratically.” It was prophetic advice from an exceptionally gifted and sophisticated leader. But the temptation was too great. The money began to flow in the early 1970s.

While all other social movement groups were under the purview of the Secretary of State, Treaty Indians were the responsibility of Indian Affairs. In the late 1970s their organizations were pressing the government on economic and social issues. They ran up against a Trudeau government which was preoccupied with constitutional questions. Increasingly, they were told to frame their demands in constitutional terms if they wanted to be heard. It was in taking this advice that First Peoples gradually became First Nations. That decision, taken over a period of years, had several effects. The first was to effectively eliminate the need for a real social movement with politically active members, taking their fight directly to the government. Once the struggle was constitutionalized it became exclusively a matter of government lawyers sitting down with First Nations lawyers (paid for, of course, by the government). That 30-year process produced just what successive federal governments hoped it would: a largely quiescent (idle?) aboriginal population still marginalized and impoverished. The cost of funding aboriginal political organizations was a pittance compared to that of actually delivering social and economic justice to hundreds of thousands of aboriginal Canadian citizens. The other effect was to separate the aboriginal struggle from that of other social movements. In the early days of the movements (at least in Saskatchewan) there was some co-operation and ongoing conversation between labour, youth and aboriginal leaders. But once Treaty Indians defined themselves as nations the potential for working with — and perhaps benefiting from — non-native groups gradually dried up. If you are your own nation, joining with people of a separate nation (especially one which you define as an oppressor) doesn’t make much sense.

Of course, in this case, the nations in First Nations were totally dependent on the nation they were negotiating with. While the government has constitutional obligations towards First Nations there is nothing in law that says they have to fund their organizations. That fact is never lost on AFN leaders and may well have been on Shawn Atleo’s mind when he decided to meet with Stephen Harper.

There are some fascinating similarities between the Idle No More phenomenon and the Occupy movement. Both reflect a political dualism: they are focused on the lack of democracy, justice and equality for ordinary people and they are implicitly (and with Idle No More explicitly) telling conventional movement organizations that are supposed to speak for them that they have failed.

And it should come as no surprise that most members of the leadership of Idle No More are women. By the late 1980s government funding had established a mutually beneficial relationship between governments and aboriginal leaders. Into this status-quo of continued poverty came native women’s organizations which were genuinely radical (they had no big salaries to lose) and often critical of the totally male dominated aboriginal groups. They were the voices of aboriginal communities — but lack of resources and bullying by the government-funded “official” organizations eventually prevailed. That they are back in leadership roles is one of the most important and positive aspects of the movement.

Idle No More is the most exciting development in aboriginal politics in two generations. It has rightfully scared the hell out of the entire First Nations leadership — from Shawn Atleo down to the hundreds of chiefs, too many of whom do in fact live high on the hog while their band members suffer. And it has got the attention of Stephen Harper, a man who has dedicated his political career to the interests of the oil and other resource industries threatened by Idle No More. Remember that he cancelled the Kelowna Accord soon after he became prime minister. The only reason Harper met with First Nations leaders is because his intelligence gathering told him this could be real trouble. Let’s hope it is.

More Idle No More

Editorial (Forthcoming issue March/April 2013) — 2013-01-16T17:02:38+00:00

Canadians are hardly living up to their reputation for complacency. Coming hard on the heels of the ‘maple spring’ in Québec and the earlier Occupy movements across the country, and building on a longstanding grass roots opposition to the Enbridge Pipeline proposal, Idle No More has captured our attention and support as a promising moment of opposition to the Harper regime. For the moment to become a sustained movement it will have to develop a stronger analysis and better organizational capacity, but the breadth and depth of the social support it has already generated show an enormous hunger for social change pointed towards social justice.

The Harperites seem determined to stall, delay and do as little of substance as possible. A small but important historical fact may provide some context here: in the mid 1980s, a recommendation in a report commissioned by the Mulroney government to propose significant government cutbacks actually developed a ‘minimum standards’ approach to funding the reserves.

The Nielsen Report was prepared to recommend a kind of ‘starve First Nations people to the point of forcing them to abandon their reserves’ approach to policy making. Although the Report was not implemented, its hard to look at the last three decades and not see ‘minimum standards’ as the actual state of affairs in Indian country, a state of affairs for which Liberal as well as Conservative regimes bear responsibility, and which the current pack of oil company lackeys, led by Mr. Harper, have escalated in a morally reprehensible manner. It is worth noting that the Kelowna Accord brokered by Paul Martin would have done nothing to change policy or the structure of colonially inspired poverty, though it would have offered significant resources on the liberal benevolence, band-aid solution model.

Chief Theresa Spence of Attiwapiskat First Nation began a heroic hunger strike that continues as of this writing, initially demanding a meeting with the Prime Minister and Governor General. Her community on James Bay in northern Ontario is typical of the mid-northern, isolated indigenous hunting communities that have been forgotten by the establishment in Canada. The movement that has sprung up around her represents the latest wave of discontent with the Canadian status quo. People representing a wide variety of interests have found the Idle No More banner an umbrella under which they can express their concerns.

A striking and energetic international movement has been mobilized, deploying social media and, in the heart of Canadian winter, not being afraid to use shopping malls and other nominally private spaces as venues for lively and inspired dissent. Non-violent, civil disobedience actions – blockades, occupations – directed at specific corporate or government targets have a long history of achieving limited victories for a variety of First Nations, from Haida Gwai or Temagami to Lubicon or Grassy Narrows’ territories.

These grass roots movements have in recent years become drivers of policy, as governments beholden to capital interests are forced to tack against social winds of change, finding they cannot so easily do as they please. The fact that Harper, however begrudgingly and however fruitlessly, was forced to a table he didn’t want to sit at is evidence of where power really lies in this country. The elite strut and swagger but in the end rely entirely on the assent, active or tacit, of the rest of us.

The meeting with the Prime Minister ended with no real accomplishment. Harper appears not even ready to concede enough to National Chief Atleo to prop him up for much longer as leader of the Assembly of First Nations. It appears that Idle No More will continue and will even escalate. As we noted at the outset, though, to turn itself into a self-sustaining movement it will need to move past this exciting moment of social media inspired activity and build two things: a platform of demands and an organizational capacity.

In terms of demands, it is clear that a federal policy framework based on respect for indigenous rights and treaty rights is called for. Within such a framework, First Nations would have the right to refuse resource development projects on their traditional territories, and the right to gain direct resource royalty revenues where such projects take place. Very simply put, capital would finally have to ‘pay to play’ in northern Canada.

Autonomous, self developed, indigenous self governments would be formally recognized by the federal government under a ‘First Nations Recognition and Validation Act’ that would replace the Indian Act. With this as a basic structure, many other things would finally begin to change and there would be hope that instead of an international embarrassment for Canada, its treatment of First Nations could rightly become a source of pride. Similar policy proposals have long been circulated; the Defenders of the Land represent one online source that offers more detail.

As to organization, the Left has much to offer here. The union movement in Canada could provide initial financial resource assistance to Idle No More activists, helping them create a durable infrastructure of dissent. The Left more broadly could stop seeing indigenous rights as the issue of the week, and instead focus its energies here, on the understanding that in Canada this is the defining issue of our generation. With its networking experience, organizational acumen, and concern for social justice, the Left has much to offer a nascent indigenous resistance movement. But it has to be prepared to do some following.

Finally, a warning regarding historical patterns is in order. Since the late sixties a disturbing pattern has emerged around indigenous activism. Activists, tired of the same old misery, take to the blockades and streets. The ruling elite is forced to make some form of accommodation to their processes. The accommodation fizzles after a few years. The activist groundswell develops again. Only this is a cycle, not a circle. The level of activism each time appears to increase, as does the level of violence of the State’s response.

From the Native Trek caravan of 1974, where the new riot squad of the RCMP was deployed to ruthless effect, to Oka, to Stoney Point and Gustavson Lake, we have an escalating series of crises. The withdrawal of the White Paper, the adding of Aboriginal Rights to the constitution, the establishment of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, are all accommodations that grew out of this dynamic.

We enthusiastically applaud and support the many thousands who have joined Idle No More. The national leaders of this country have to realize that they are playing, now, with lives when they refuse to offer a substantive response to the growing chorus of demands for sanity in indigenous policy-making. We urge them to move soon, knowing that for so many people in so many communities ‘soon’ is already too late.

The Temps

Glen Harper — 2013-01-15T16:28:24+00:00

It was all a big sham, I finally saw after working for 11 months as a temporary worker at a warehouse for a global supply chain solutions company. The use of temporary staff was not about reducing costs for the company, either through flexibility, withholding benefits, or lower wages. Nor was it about increasing productivity for the company, either through agency screening of employees, or offering full-time status as an incentive. Indeed, the use of temporary staff had little or nothing to do with these business practices. Temporary workers were brought in by the company primarily as a means to turn the staff against each other. Over a period of four years, first as a temp and later as a full-timer, I watched as the workers argued with each other, criticized and insulted each other, and directly undermined each other in an artificially created, viscously competitive work environment.

Flexible Staffing?

One of the biggest justifications for using temporary workers is the flexibility it provides in staffing, and the cost savings as a result. Temporary workers can be leased for only the precise number of hours that their labour is required. In this way the company can cover fluctuations in business, and keep labour costs as tight as possible.

But if business increased, the company could ask the permanent staff to stay overtime or work weekends just as easily as the temporary workers. Indeed, whenever the volume of goods coming through our warehouse increased, the Lead Hand called together both the temporary and permanent staff and asked for volunteers for overtime. While at least half of the permanent staff declined to work longer than eight hours, so to did many of the temps decline company demands for overtime work. On every occasion, half of the temps walked out after eight hours and declined weekend work. Ultimately, the company relied on permanent staff just as much as temp workers, to cover any spike in business.

So too could the company have asked the permanent staff to go home early on the slow days just as easily as asking the temporary workers. Indeed, in periods of slow-down management asked if anybody wanted to leave work early. Several of the full-time guys always agreed to go, and it would have been more if the company did not require them by contract to stay for forty hours per week. Going home early cut into discretionary days off and potentially holidays, and so some of the full-timers declined the company request to leave work early. Moreover, I had seen full-timers approach the Lead Hand on their own initiative to leave work early on slow days.

The company could also be flexible with its permanent staff in the event of a prolonged downturn in business. When cutting staff and wages through a voluntary reduction in hours of work was insufficient, the company could always resort to layoffs. Indeed, under the Employment Standards Act of Ontario, an employer can serve an employee with a “Temporary lay-off,” which is partially defined as “a lay-off of not more than 13 weeks in any period of 20 consecutive weeks.” Thus the employer has three lay-off months to work with, and up to five months if they provided that employee some work during that time, such as can occur when business fluctuates as much as it did in our department.

Temporary workers, then, afford the company no more flexibility in staffing than permanent workers. Permanent workers are just as capable of covering peaks in business through overtime, slow days through voluntary reduction in hours, and prolonged slow downs in business through layoffs. The regular use of temporary workers cannot be justified by the argument of staffing flexibility and controlling wages.

Withholding Benefits?

Another justification for the use of temporary workers by the company is the opportunity to withhold employee benefits, and again save money. As temporary workers are employed by the staffing agency, the company can exclude them from the benefits plan set up for the so-called full-time staff.

But company benefits did not necessarily cover the full cost of any claims. Custom made orthotics was covered for only 70 percent, with the remaining 30 percent covered by the employee. Employees also paid for 25 percent of prescription medication, and anything over $30 for visits to the massage therapist, physiotherapist, and chiropractor, among other services. A 20 percent deductible was also in effect for some dental care. On top of the deductible for many benefits, there was a weekly premium from eight to ten dollars paid by the employee. Through these direct and indirect costs, the 13 full-time staff in our department contributed $13451.92 to the company benefits plan between April 2005 and January of 2008.

Nor was the benefits plan being fully utilized. One of the staff made no claims for the first two and a half years, and another claimed nothing in his first year. Only two of the guys claimed for orthotics, two for chiropractic, one for massage therapy, one for eye glasses, and five for dental benefits. Four of them made no claims for medication. Moreover, no dental claims were allowed for the first nine months of employment. For short-term disability, if the company doctor assessed the injury as minor, the employee was denied time off work and required to work on light duties. As a result of the low number of employee claims, and the conditions imposed on the benefits, the company paid out only $13989.26.

The payroll savings program cost the company even less than the benefits program. Only one out of the thirteen staff involved in my departmental survey had signed onto the company-sponsored Defined Contribution Pension Plan, and was engaged for only seventeen weeks out of the period from April of 2005 to January of 2008. With the company contributing four percent of his gross pay per week into the fund, as the specified maximum, he collected only $514.45 of company money. That $514.45, along with the company benefits contribution of $13989.26 mentioned above, added up to $14503.71, which was only $1051.79 more than the total benefits contribution from the employees, or only $420.68 per year. That was hardly enough to justify using temps.

Temporary workers, then, afford the company virtually no cost savings on benefits over permanent staff. The permanent staff has to pay a weekly premium, a deductible on most claims, and most under under-utilize the program, including the payroll savings program. The regular use of temporary workers cannot be justified by the controlling of benefit costs.

Wage Savings?

The third cost-reducing justification for the use of temporary workers by the company is the savings on wages. Temporary workers work for the staffing agency, which can offer their labour at a lower wage than the full-time company staff. By maintaining as many temps as possible on staff, the company can significantly reduce its payroll, and also exclude the temps from any company bonus or incentive plans.

But the wages were not all that was involved in a company paying for a temporary worker. The staffing agency had to pay for recruiting its temporary associates. Part of that recruiting was advertisement, such as with websites, and the phone book. After getting potential workers through the door, they had to be screened. I filled out a lengthy questionnaire about my employment background and skills, and then underwent an interview. Finally, I had to take a computer aptitude test when I indicated some background in Microsoft Excel. All of that advertising and human resources involved in recruiting cost money, money I am sure the agency added to the bill when it leased a temp to a company.

Another cost of a temporary worker was the administration. To begin with, the agency had to provide training and orientation. Two of us were brought into a room to watch a video on health and safety, and then a company video about good manufacturing practices. We were then tested us on both videos, and then also introduced to agency policies and procedures. The second part of that administration was getting paid. While we punched in and out at the company, it was the agency that directly paid us. Weekly payroll was carried out by the agency, a cost which, along with the training and orientation, would have been added to the company’s bill for leasing us as temporary workers.

A third cost of a temporary worker was staffing agency infrastructure. Every month the lease for the agency office had to be paid. Further infrastructure included all of the necessary equipment, such as computers, printers, regular and specialized software, video machines, fax machines, and telephone systems. Moreover, there were desks, chairs, and filing cabinets, along with more basic supplies such writing instruments, stationery, and envelopes for all correspondence. Finally, the agency had to invest in recruiting and training its own personnel. All of those costs could not be borne by the staffing agency. Instead, they had to be calculated as part of the overall bill for leasing a temporary worker to a company.

Temporary workers, then, afford the company no savings on wages over permanent staff. In leasing a temporary worker from a staffing agency, a company has to pay not only for the wages, but also the recruiting, administration, and infrastructure behind that worker. Moreover, the company also has to pay for the profit. The regular use of temporary workers, therefore, cannot be justified by the argument of controlling wages.

Obtaining Better Workers?

Temps are also justified as a means to boost company productivity. One of the ways in which this boost in productivity supposedly takes place is by getting higher quality or more suitable workers. Staffing agencies specialize in staffing, in screening applicants and providing the most reliable and properly trained of their temporary associates to your business, maximizing efficiency and output.

But the temporary workers were hardly screened at all by their respective staffing agencies. I failed the test on Microsoft Excel and still was dispatched to the job. Many other temps must have failed their tests as well, as hardly anybody showed up with prior training in Excel. Moreover, practically nobody arrived in that department with prior experience in shipping freight. The same was true for agency screening on PITO. I had not driven a forklift in at least five years, and never operated a walkie, and was still dispatched to that job. Only five temps that arrived were apparently trained on a walkie, and two of them were so poor they had to be re-trained, by the company.

The agency did no better in screening temps on heavy lifting. While the questionnaire asked if we could lift seventy pounds, it should have asked if we could lift tens of thousands of pounds. That was the requirement for lifting on the brick-load, a 53-foot transport truck un-loaded by hand by a crew of eight guys. Sometimes we got four of these trucks in a day, each one with a thousand or more boxes. It was very hard work, and while some of us adapted to the task, very many more of the temps who arrived on the crew over the next three years did not. Some guys would show up, barely get through one truck, and just disappear.

The staffing agencies also misunderstood screening for personality. Very few of us were just the “warm bodies” the agencies and the company were looking for. We had to make a living, support families, save money for tuition, and support the arrival of family members from overseas. We were naturally ambitious and competitive. We did not like being perpetual temporary workers, and this caused the company a lot of problems. On multiple occasions I argued with the Lead Hand and the Supervisor about when I was going to be hired on full-time. Other temporary workers argued as well, pointing out that they were told that they would get close to, if not the full 40 hours per week.

Clearly staffing agencies are unable to obtain more effective workers for the company. Only half of the temps were wiling to work the expected overtime hours, and the large majority did not possess the job-related skills or the “warm body” mentality. The use of temporary staff, then, cannot be justified on the grounds of obtaining better workers and boosting productivity.

Evaluating The Workers?

Another way in which temporary workers supposedly boost performance and productivity is through the incentive to get hired on full-time with the company. Full-time status is not guaranteed to you as a temporary worker. If you work hard and contribute to the company, you receive the rewards of a full-time employee. Through this approach the company can get the maximum performance from its staff.

But full-time status was not offered as an incentive to temps who worked hard and learned new skills for the company. To begin with you received little support for training. The full-time staff were not about to just let a temp take over the role of shipper. If an opportunity did arise, then you had to compete with half-a-dozen other temps. I waited several months for an opportunity to train as a shipper. Support for training on the Powered Industrial Trucks was equally weak. While at first management allowed unlicensed people to practice on the walkie and forklift truck, and eventually be tested for a license, this practice was shut down not long after I arrived at the warehouse.

Learning new skills for the company did not necessarily mean promotion to full-time status. A fellow named Mukhtar could move fast on the computer and just crank out the orders for the entire shift. Eight months later he still was not hired on full-time, and did not achieve that status until transferring to a third department and higher position four months later. Faisal had an even poorer experience as a temp worker in our department. Within a few months he was shipping freight from the Option trucks as efficiently as Mukhtar, and yet after 14 months he was still working as temp, and was then let go by the company.

The company promoted some people to full-time status who did not distinguish themselves in skills or effort. Walter did not learn any of the shipping procedures. All that Walter could do was ride a walkie, fold packing slips and help out unloading trucks on the DAV crew. While Ophir could load and un-load trucks, he also did not learn to do any shipping. The same was true for Davis when he was hired on by the company in 2009. All of the tasks they performed were important, and all of these guys deserved to become full-timers. But after adding up all of their skills, these guys hardly contributed more to the operation than Muhktar and Faisal.

Full-time status was not being offered as an incentive to the temporary workers. There was little support for training in the shipping and other skills that you supposedly needed to get hired on by the company. If you did learn these skills you did not necessarily get promoted to full-time status. And some staff were promoted despite being average. The use of temporary workers cannot be justified as a means to enhance staff performance, and consequently boost company productivity.

Dividing The Workers

The use of temporary workers by the company was not about enhancing labour flexibility, or withholding benefits from the workers, or paying out lower wages. Nor was the use of temps about better screening or evaluation of potential staff. The company achieved virtually no cost savings or increase in productivity by using temps. What the company achieved was division among the staff. With only a few full-time positions available over a period of four years for dozens of temporary workers brought into the department, it was only natural that we would compete and turn on each other for so much of our time on the job.

One of the ways we competed with each other was over the opportunity to learn new skills. I came into work early to lay claim to the DAV work station. I started arranging the area and opening up the appropriate programs on the computer to let the guys know I was in charge. When one guy realized that he would have to shove me out of the way to get in, he left. Other temps challenged for the opportunity to ship the freight, and when my presence was not enough, I didn’t hesitate to swear at them. “I’m doing the shipping,” one of them said to me one day, to which I responded, “Fuck you, I’m doing the shipping.”

Another way in which we competed with each other was by trying to elevate ourselves over other temporary workers. One temp, with only a few months on the job, was attacked when he told a new temp what to do as a fresh truck arrived and had to be un-loaded. First the new guy argued, and then he pushed the other temp in the chest and knocked him to the floor. A similar situation developed when, as a shipper, I assigned a task to a new temp. He refused to carry out the task, and when I said, “If you don’t like it fuck off,” he responded, “No, you fuck off. You’re an agency guy just like me.”

The temps also verbally attacked each other as lazy and weak. “Come on, do something,” one of them said to another at the work station for shipping Option one day. “Would you do some work,” all of us shouted at one temp on the DAV crew. Not long after, that temp’s work assignment was cancelled. If a temp did not do overtime work, or supposedly took too long on break or lunch, it was immediately noticed by the other temps. I asked to take half a day off after doing a lot of overtime work, and when I returned, one of the temps immediately said to me, “Are you all right now, with your day off?”

Making mistakes on the job was another source of verbal attack between the temps. Whenever a box was placed on the wrong skid when we unloaded trucks by and, we jumped on each other. “Oh look”, we would say, “you fucked-up again.” Elsewhere in the department it was the same. “That guy doesn’t know how to ride a walkie,” one temp would say about another. Some temps would even involve the Lead Hand. I had stuck the packing slips on the wrong side of some TV boxes while they were lying on their sides, and instead of approaching me directly so I could fix the mistake, the one temp told the Lead Hand and really embarrassed me.

Not only did we dump on each other for apparently being lazy and weak, and for any mistakes on the job, but also for not being ambitious enough in learning new skills or helping the company. “That guy doesn’t do any shipping,” we would all say to among each other. “All that guy does is fold packing slips,” was another regular comment among us, despite the fact that somebody had to do that task. Then there was the matter of overtime work among temps. While half of the temps refused to put in overtime, and were not required by law to do so, the rest of us still gave them a hard time about not helping the company.

The temps also turned on each other whenever it appeared that one of us was gaining some advantage. One day a temp came up to me and said, “Did you get overtime today?” He did not get overtime hours, and I replied, “I did, have you got a problem with that?” Another temp turned on me as I took over shipping duties. Whenever I gave a task to a new temp, he would jump in and say, “You don’t have to listen to him.” Later on that same guy went after another temp on the rumour that he was going to be hired on full-time. “Why is he getting hired on,” he said? “All he does is fuck things up.”

Conclusion

This abuse of temporary workers, in the name of good business, has perhaps been the most insidious and effective corporate move against workers over the last two decades. North American corporations have succeeded in seriously undermining unity among labour where it counts most, on the shop floor. If workers are to restore a better work environment for themselves, and be stronger in the fight against managers for a fair portion of the fruits of our economy, then the abuse of temporary labour must be eliminated. Companies already have a three month probationary period in which to evaluate a prospective employee. The same three month rule should be applied to any temporary worker leased by a company. In this way, if the company relies heavily on temps as regular staff, they will have a high turnover and a substantial number of only minimally trained staff. The company will be compelled to hire on most temps soon after they arrive, and the competitiveness and conflict between the temps will virtually disappear.

Review: Rethinking the Politics of Labour in Canada

Scott Neigh — 2013-01-13T22:29:35+00:00

[Stephanie Ross and Larry Savage, editors. Rethinking the Politics of Labour in Canada. Halifax & Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2012.]

This book is, I think, tailored for use in labour studies courses. The selection of essays on various aspects of political action by Canadian unions and workers would serve very effectively as an introduction and as an overview. The writers approach the topic from a pro-labour perspective that is nonetheless quite capable of being critical of the movement but is never polemical, and the criticism is mostly tempered by a sober appreciation of practical constraints.

The first section sets some of the context and it is where the collection does some modest but useful work to introduce new ideas for thinking most generally about labour politics. I quite appreciated Donald Swartz and Rosemary Warskett’s conceptualization of the labour movement’s history and the challenges it faces today through the frame of evolving forms of solidarity and the capacity of those forms to meet (or not) certain practical challenges. I also think that Stephanie Ross’ materialist complication of the ideal-types of “business unionism” and “social unionism” is an important piece of groundwork for effective discussions about labour’s future directions.

The second section is about labour and electoral politics — the NDP, the different trajectory between labour and parties in Quebec, strategic voting, and electoral reform. All four of these pieces combine history and contemporary analysis. I think that the essay on the NDP will be useful to me as a resource to inform discussions on the left about what we can and cannot expect from future NDP governments, particularly the author’s patient cataloguing of recent NDP regimes at the provincial level and his illustration that not a single one has been even marginally non-neoliberal since 1988. I also got a lot out of the piece on Quebec, about which I previously knew relatively little in this area. The final section is on extra-parliamentary activism, with chapters on gender equity, indigenous people, the environment, community unionism, anti-poverty organizing, migrant workers, and the prospect of progress through the courts. In each case, the included essays present useful mixtures of history, current activity, possibilities, and limitations, none of which should be taken as the final word on any of the topics but all of which provide a good basis for further discussion.

The two main limitations I see with the book are both connected to its form. The first is its (presumed) classroom orientation. While careful scholarly criticism is certainly more useful than, say, tired Trot or anarchist polemics that read current events into eighty year-old debates in ways that make it harder to respond dynamically and radically to contemporary circumstances, I think scholarly criticism has limits as well. In particular, I think one important way to learn about labour politics is to read things produced in the midst of struggle which are less concerned with obedience to the demands of academic civility and careful-speaking: For instance, instead of just hearing about the trajectory of conventional unions interacting or not with community-based direct action anti-poverty work, let’s include a pull-no-punches account from someone involved in the latter about the pros and cons of working with conventional unions. The same for immigrant workers of colour, and for indigenous workers, and so on. I wouldn’t want that material to displace what’s already there, but I think it could be a useful and powerful supplement.

The other limitation that I see in the collection has to do with the ways in which the survey form can make it very easy for us to ignore the interlocking and intersecting character of apparently disparate issues in how he read, write, think, and act. When you produce a collection that divides one broad topic into a number of specific elements, you inevitably produce a certain kind of organization for the knowledge that you present. Often, the fact that this is going on is not obvious because such division tends to reproduce already-existing dominant assumptions about the centre and periphery of the overall topic, and to naturalize the divisions between the components. Of course pieces need to have a focus, and no piece can do everything. But when you have one piece that is designated as your piece about indigenous workers, and one piece that is very clearly your piece about the NDP, and one piece that is about the environment, and one that is about migrant workers, you are setting up a situation in which intersections among these can easily be ignored. You make it more likely, for instance, that the analysis of the NDP will centre the category “worker,” which in North America tends to centre whiteness when that is not explicitly disturbed, and so you get an essay that does not necessarily have much to say about how workers of colour have experienced the NDP. Or, say, the one on the environment doesn’t do anything with indigenous/settler dynamics, presuming that to be a topic for a different piece, and the mainstream assumptions of what “labour movement” and “environmental movement” mean displace any possibility of approaching the question with an anti-colonial environmental justice lens. In other words, the survey form makes it look like we are covering all of the bases in terms of voices and critical orientations, but in fact it allows us to isolate them in individual chapters rather than taking them into the core of what we are doing. (In noting this, I don’t at all mean to detract from the good things that the collection does, and I certainly recognize that the choice to use this particular form is a practical and common one, and that the choice to do things in a different way would inevitably face push-back. Still, I think critical attention to interconnection and to challenging the received social organization of knowledge is absolutely crucial for building the movements that we so desperately need.)

Despite these limitations of form, I think this book is a very useful one, and one that I hope is widely read. I’m happy to have it on my bookshelves as a good first-line reference for future reading, thinking, and writing I might do on these many and varied topics related to the politics of labour in Canada.

[Scott Neigh is a writer, parent, and an activist based in Sudbury, Ontario. Fernwood Publishing recently published his two books looking at Canadian history through the stories of activists, which you can learn about here and buy here. This review originally appeared on his personal blog, as have many other book reviews.]

Idle No More: A profound social movement that is already succeeding

Judy Rebick — 2013-01-12T15:44:40+00:00

I haven’t written about Idle No More yet because I am inspired by the plethora of Indigenous voices that we are finally hearing across the country, including of late in the mainstream media. If I learned anything from the women’s movement it is that we have to speak for ourselves, not be represented by others, however well meaning and supportive. Instead I have devoted my support for the movement to sharing the many brilliant and informative articles, the announcements and reports of events and the beautiful graphics and photos from Idle No More to my rather large social media network. The spurious attacks against Chief Theresa Spence over the last couple of days have made me decide to speak out.

I don’t know if Theresa Spence is a good chief. It seems to be that is up to the members of Attawapiskat to decide. Others, more informed than I, including most eloquently Chelsea Vowel who writes the blog âpihtawikosisân, have countered the attacks against her by pointing out, among other things, that most of the problems reported in the audit happened before she was elected chief in 2010. A fact that most media is ignoring.

What I do know is that Chief Theresa Spence’s hunger strike has inspired a generation of Indigenous youth to stand up, organize and speak out. “She is prepared to die for us,” one young man explained. Whether or not she is a good chief to her reserve is irrelevant to the fact that she is a courageous and inspired symbol for her people. What’s more, she has accomplished what no one else has been able to do, including the premiers. She has forced Stephen Harper to do something he didn’t want to do.

The other thing that is driving me crazy is this constant questioning of whether Idle No More is a movement, whether it is the new Occupy, what it can possibly accomplish. Yes, Idle No More is a movement. I’ve been part of and studied social movements all my life and it fits the description of a movement perfectly. Of course, it looks different than the movements people of my generation, like journalist and environmentalist Terry Glavin, are used to. It is a 21st-century movement decentralized and deeply democratic in the sense that much of the initiative belongs to the grassroots. In that way, it looks like Occupy but as Pam Palmater, now a spokesperson for Idle No More, has explained, it is a movement of a group of people with a common identity and despite the different history and cultures of their nations, a common history in relation to Canada. In this way, the Idle No More movement is better compared to the civil rights movement and women’s movement.

As to whether they will effective, my answer is they have already been effective. First and foremost, they have mobilized Indigenous people, the most oppressed group in our country, by showing them that they can organize and make change; that many non-native people will join them; and that their culture is beautiful and worth celebrating.

This is always the most important feature of a social movement. This was what the black liberation movement, including both the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement, did for African Americans. They did not achieve full equality but who amongst us would claim they didn’t achieve anything. Similarly with the women’s movement of my generation. The most important change we made was not the rights we won or the laws we changed, however important they are, but the change in women. When I was young, women didn’t think they could be politicians, journalists, musicians, artists, carpenters, lawyers, doctors, professors. We were supposed to support men to do all those things. It was when the women’s movement started organizing and demanding equal rights, that our consciousness was changed. The consciousness-raising groups of the late ’60s and early ’70s, much ridiculed in the media at the time, showed us that what we thought were personal problems were really political and social problems and that women were capable of solving those problems collectively.

Oppression only works when the oppressed internalize the idea that they are inferior to the dominant group. Breaking out of that paralyzing internalized oppression is central to any movement. Idle No More is breaking out of internal oppression, both through celebrating Indigenous culture and through providing hope of change.

For the first time I can remember we are hearing and seeing multiple Indigenous voices in the media. Last night TVO’s the Agenda had a panel of four speakers, three of whom were Indigenous. They had many agreements and some differences but it was a great discussion and I learned a lot. On the same night, the National had a panel with two Indigenous people, promising the first in a series in the “countdown to Friday.” I have seen individual Indigenous leaders in the media, usually the Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, but I never remember hearing from this many Indigenous people. That’s another accomplishment of Idle No More.

Idle No More is being led by women, which is amazing and wonderful. Perhaps they are also providing a direction of change for the women’s movement. It may be time for women to move much more into the lead of bringing change to our communities, our countries and our planet. I think the mostly female leadership has provided a very different approach than men often do. The unity they have achieved, the non-violent nature of the actions and the focus on relationships all reflect this difference.

What Idle No More wants is as significant, if not more significant, a change to our culture and our country as the black liberation or the women’s movement. And just as white people and men have to recognize their privilege and how they benefit from the oppression and discrimination of black people and women to be true allies, so we settlers have to recognize the great privilege each of us has, as a result of the colonial exploitation of First Nations historically and today. The problem of the relationship between First Nations and Canada is not just a government problem, not just a problem of a right-wing philosophy, it is all of our problem. This means trashing the stereotypes, learning the history and the real economics of the relationship between Canada and First Nations. This too Idle No More is accomplishing by inspiring through blogs, Facebook, Twitter, articles and teach-in as well as alternative and mainstream media coverage. I have provided some links at the end of this article.

Idle No More builds on a proud history of Indigenous struggle for self-determination at a national and international level. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal, Section 35 in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms are all the result of those struggles upon which Idle No More is building. The American Indian Movement, the struggle led by George Manuel for Section 35 to be included in the constitution, the successful battle to defeat Meech Lake, inspired by Elijah Harper and Oka as well as numerous local and regional battles. But so far, the achievements of these movements and struggles and the laws and reports produced have not fundamentally changed the conditions of First Nations or their relationship with Canada. Idle No More is saying ‘enough’. The time has come to end the broken promises and recognize the rights of the first people of this land. I must say that Idle No More is much more generous to us settlers than we in the women’s movement were to men. As a result, the support from progressive Canadians has been extraordinary and hopefully will grow.

The other reason there is so much support from non-native Canadians is because Idle No More is posing the struggle as in our interests as well. As Pam Palmater has said so eloquently, “Canadians need to realize that we are their last best hope at saving the lands, waters, plants, animals and resources for future generations because our Aboriginal and treaty rights are constitutionally protected.”

It is Jeffrey Simpson and others who support the current neoliberal economic system that are living in a dream palace (whatever that is). They believe that we can continue exploiting the planet in the interest of profit, putting economics before survival. If that isn’t living in a dream world, I don’t know what is. We have to make a sharp turn away from the politics of Stephen Harper and his like not only by electing someone else the next time but by changing our relationships to each other and to the planet. From what I’ve seen, Indigenous people whether in Bolivia or in Canada seem to have a better idea of how to do that than anyone else. If that makes me a romantic, so be it.