#8 november / december 2005 · relay • november/december 2005 5 the union des forces...

R EL A Y#8 NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2005

HAITI DEBATE * AMERICAS SOCIAL FORUMBC TEACHERS STRIKE * SOCIALISTS & THE SIXTIES

SOFTWOOD LUMBER * CUPE CONVENTION

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Relay, A Socialist Project Review, intends to act as a forum forconveying and debating current issues of importance to the Left in Ontario,Canada and from around the world. Contributions to the re-laying of the foun-dations for a viable socialist politics are welcomed by the editorial committee.

Relay is published by the Socialist Project. Signed articles reflect the opinionsof the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the editors.

About the Socialist Project

The Socialist Project does not propose an easy politics for defeating capitalismor claim a ready alternative to take its place. We oppose capitalism out ofnecessity and support the resistance of others out of solidarity. This resistancecreates spaces of hope, and an activist hope is the first step to discovering a newsocialist politics. Through the struggles of that politics – struggles informed bycollective analysis and reflection – alternatives to capitalism will emerge. Suchanti-capitalist struggles, we believe, must develop a viable working class politics,and be informed by democratic struggles against racial, sexist and homophobicoppressions, and in support of the national self-determination of the many peo-ples of the world. In Canada and the world today, there is an imperative for theLeft to begin a sustained process of reflection, struggle and organizational re-groupment and experimentation. Neither capitalism nor neoliberalism will fadefrom the political landscape based on the momentum of their own contradic-tions and without the Left developing new political capacities. We encouragethose who share this assessment to meet, debate and begin to make a contributionto a renewed socialist project in your union, school and community. For moreinformation on the Socialist Project check our web-site at www.socialistproject.caor e-mail us at [email protected].

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RELAY CONTENTSNovember/December

2005

#8

Canada

Legionnaire Outbreak 2005 ........................................................................................... David Kidd 4Challenges: The Québec Left and the UFP ............................................................. David Mandel 5Learning and Not Learning from the Softwood Lumber Dispute ............................ Ian MacDonald 6Religions and Secularism Locking Horns ............................................................ Saeed Rahnema 8Secularism & Socialist Politics ............................................................................................... Relay 9Defending Healthcare Is Not Enough ................................................................... Socialist Project 10

Labour

10 Days in Brazil ................................................................................................... Richard Harding 12Signs of Hope at the CUPE National Convention ........................................................... Dan Crow 13CBC and Hydro Workers Defending Good Jobs ........................................................ Bryan Evans 15What Should We Make of the Teachers’ Job Action in BC? ................................... Sharon Yandle 17Law & Dissent: Examining the BC Teachers Strike .................................................... Chuck Smith 19

Socialism or Barbarism?

World Capitalism and Global Resistance: Socialism or Barbarism? ................... István Mészáros 22China and the Future of the Capitalist World Economy ..................................................... Minqi Li 27Global Imbalances, Global Crisis? ................................................................................. Greg Albo 29Restructuring Labour, Restructuring Class Formation ................................................ Sam Gindin 31

Culture Front

Six String Belief ................................................................................................................. len bush 33Barry Sheppard’s “The Sixties” ....................................................................................... Ernie Tate 34

Latin America

Pascua Lama, Barrick Gold, and Neoliberalism ................................................... Carolyn Watson 38The Americas Social Forum ...................................................................................... Carlos Torres 39Lula’s Lament ...................................................................................................... Hilary Wainwright 41

The Haiti Debate

Haiti, the Struggle Continues .................................................................................. Pierre Beaudet 44Haiti: Getting the Facts Right .................................................. Charles Demers & Derrick O’Keefe 45Malign Neglect or Imperialism? ...................................................................... Nikolas Barry-Shaw 46

Relay • November/December 20054

Toronto’s historical development as a city has been markedby progress in public health. In the early twentieth century, Dr.Charles Hasting, Toronto Medical Officer of Health (MOH),fought the spread of tuberculosis and diphtheria in the city’s over-crowded slums and its luxurious residential areas. A public healthcampaign of education and treatment was prescribed. Public healthnurses and inspectors were hired to respond to the challenge.

Fast forward to the first decade of the 21st century with thesevere acute respiratory (SARS) outbreak of 2003 and the recentLegionnaires’ disease outbreak at a City of Toronto Home for theAged, Seven Oaks. Within two weeksof the outbreak first being noted, sev-enteen people had died, and close toa hundred people were infected. Re-sponding to this outbreak, Toronto’sMOH Dr. David McKeown con-stantly assured the public that the riskof the disease spreading was “ex-tremely low,” even as the deathsmounted.

Toronto’s mayor and its local me-dia echoed McKeown’s contentionthat it was unlikely that the infectionwould spread, especially after the glo-bal media giant, CNN, reported theoutbreak. A number of city sectorsfeared a repeat of the SARS-scare of2003, when Toronto was identified asan unhealthy city. As a consequenceof the SARS-scare, tourists and conventions were deterred fromvisiting the city and many hotel and hospitality workers lost theirjobs. Presently, the tourism and service industry is slowlyrecovering. Hotel vacancy rates are just getting back to the annualaverages recorded in the years before 2003.

The outbreak of a disease can have a real and negative im-pact on a city’s economy and the livelihood of its workers. Never-theless, during such outbreaks, it is the job of public health officialsto not just protect the city’s international reputation, but moreimportantly, to protect the health of its residents. Our cities andour planet face an environmental and healthcare crisis. We needpublic health officials to provide us with accurate and timely in-formation. Without accurate and timely information, the public isat risk.

Information about the potential political and economic factorsthat may have contributed to the Legionnaire outbreak, namely, thetransformation of healthcare facilities resulting from neoliberal andcorporatist government policies, may have not reached the public.

Legionnaire Outbreak 2005Collateral Damage in the Marketing of Toronto

David Kidd

Seven Oaks’ staff are concerned that the diminishment of rig-orous cleaning practices due to financial cutbacks contributed tothe outbreak’s development. This would not be entirely surpris-ing, given that Ontario Health Minister Smitherman perceiveshousekeeping and cleaning in care facilities as no different fromcleaning procedures in private banks and offices. The cleaning oflong term care facilities has been reduced, care facilities are im-agined by management and government as little corporations, andthe overworked housekeeping staff are expected to clean morerooms in a faster method than used to be practiced.

It also took almost two weeks forhealth officials to determine what dis-ease they were dealing with at SevenOaks while outdated urinary autopsytests were used to determine the out-break’s cause. This tardy and anachro-nistic response might be attributed todownsizing of the Ontario Ministry ofHealth during the neoliberal offensivemounted in the Harris years. MikeHarris’s provincial government cut 38senior scientists from the Ontario Min-istry of Health that were involved withthe Ontario Public Health Laboratory.The McGuinty Liberal government hasfollowed through with this neoliberaltransformation by hiring under-qualifiedlab technicians to replace specializedand qualified scientists.

And what about the seventeen people that died? Would thegovernment response to and public concerns regarding the SevenOaks outbreak be greater if the victims were kids or from wealthierbackgrounds? The victims were seniors and from working classbackgrounds. City officials might be more pre-occupied with sav-ing Toronto’s international reputation from another SARS-likescare than caring for its most vulnerable residents. They may bemore concerned with retaining a marketable image of Torontothan providing the public with a full account of the multiple po-litical and economic determinants of the Legionairre outbreak.Unless we are to cynically accept a degree of human collateraldamage in exchange for a neoliberal image of Toronto devoid ofinequity and conflict, we should judge our city not on its ability toattract the most wealthy global tourists and capacity to captureinvestment-oriented capital, but on its ability to care for itsresidents. R

David Kidd is a CUPE member in Toronto.

Relay • November/December 2005 5

The Union des forces progressistes (UFP) has its origins inthe provincial by-election campaign of Paul Cliche, a former trade-unionist and journalist, in Montréal in 2001. Cliche was backedby a coalition of three small left parties: the Parti de la démocratiesocialiste, with a Trotskyist (revolutionary socialist) core; theCommunist Party of Québec (PCQ), a party based mostly on itsCommunist “identity” and support for unions; and theRegroupement pour une alternative politique, which defined itselfas “anti-neoliberal.” The campaign also attracted non-party left-ists and community activists. Cliche took 24% of the vote.

This encouraging electoral performance and the experienceof cooperation on the usually fractious left led to the founding ofthe Union des forces progressistes in 2002. The party recognizesthe right of organized tendencies, the main ones being Gauchesocialiste (revolutionary socialist) and the PCQ. The vast majorityof the UFP, whose present membership is about 1200, are vaguelyleft and not clearly defined politically. The party’s public image,however, is social-democratic and “anti-neoliberal,” but the cor-relation of forces within it is far from stable, and many undefinedmembers could potentially be won over to a coherent socialistanalysis and credible programme. Some aspects of the UFP’s pro-gramme go somewhat beyond restoring the welfare state and areturn to Keynesianism, but the term “socialism” is absent fromit.

For the socialist left, the attraction of the UFP was the pros-pect of emerging from political marginality. At least potentially,the UFP opened a space, that otherwise would not exist, for dia-logue between revolutionary socialists, on the one hand, and otherleftists and community activists, who had not given much thoughtto the nature of contemporary capitalism and the character androle of the state.

Another attractive aspect of the UFP was that it could finallyoffer the labour and other popular movements an alternative tothe Parti Québécois, which for the last 30 years has been widelysupported as the “lesser evil” to the Liberals, even though, inpractice, the PQ differs little from the Liberal Party of Québec,except on the matter of sovereignty. Québec has never known theequivalent of a provincial NDP, and many on the left see even asocial-democratic party as a real step forward. Most of the unionmovement is still wedded to the PQ, with the notable exception ofthe Montréal Council of the CSN (heavily public sector and notaffiliated to the CLC), which has supported UFP candidates. Butthe Montréal Council has always been on the left of that federa-tion and something of a pariah within it. The UFP, like the PQ, issovereignist, but, at least for the socialist wing, the path to inde-pendence is part of a strategy for breaking with the capitalist state.

The UFP defines itself as a “party of the street and the ballot

David Mandel

box.” But what that means in practice has never seriously beendiscussed, and at present, the party has a marked electoralist ori-entation. This tendency risks growing stronger with the upcomingmerger in January 2006 with Option citoyenne, another recently-formed vaguely left party with about 1000 members, led by thefeminist activist Françoise David. On the other hand, the mergerwill give the party significantly greater credibility as an electoralalternative to the PQ and bring into left party politics a significantnumber of community activists, who form the core of Optioncitoyenne.

The challenge for socialists in the UFP is to develop a strongenough presence to force debate and education on the fundamen-tal questions that so far have been studiously avoided, such as thenature of the state and of contemporary capitalism and a corre-spondingly realistic strategy for progressive change; the causesof the universal rightward shift of social-democratic parties andthe kind of party and strategy needed to avoid that fate; why theleft should demand independence and how that demand relates toa project for progressive change; the sort of party needed to over-come the allergy of many politicized young people on the left toparty politics. A key instrument for increasing the influence ofsocialists in the UFP is a planned monthly journal, which, it ishoped, will attract broad participation of the party’s left wing.

Another priority is organizing the trade unionists in the UFPin order to work out forward-looking alternative union strategiesand to offer each other support in promoting them in the respec-tive union. This will have to be done against the opposition ofmore moderate elements in the UFP, who often have union tiesand oppose treading on “union territory” for fear of alienatingpotential support from union leaders. Meanwhile, the Québec la-bour movement seems in a dead end, its leaders having allowed itto be pushed even further (than it already was) onto its knees bythe Liberal government, while they await the return of the PQ.The PQ’s policies will scarcely be more pro-labour, but unionleaders will at least have their status as “partners” restored andwill probably be asked to participate in a referendum campaign.

In the Québec context, participation in building the UFP, de-spite the obvious risks (the fate of the socialists in the BrazilianPT illustrates many of them), appears as the most promising op-tion for Québec socialists. Much will depend on their determina-tion, energy and intelligence in creating a political pole within theparty that can act as a counterweight to the electoralist tendencyand offer realistic solutions that point beyond capitalism. R

David Mandel is the author of Labour After Communism: AutoWorkers and their Unions in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus,released last year.

Challenges: The Québec Left & the UFP

http://www.web.net/blackrosebooks/after.htm

http://www.web.net/blackrosebooks/after.htm


When Ronald Reagan and Brian Mulroney signed the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement (CUFTA) into law, Canadiannegotiators hoped that they had finally resolved the softwoodlumber issue. At the heart of the agreement was Chapter 19, whichreferred trade disputes between the two countries to a bi-nationalpanel that would make binding decisions on whether governmentswere following theirown trade remedylaws. The chapterwas later incorpo-rated into the text ofNAFTA.

Chapter 19 fellshort of deliveringthe long held dreamof the Canadianbourgeoisie of openand secure access tothe richest market inthe world. It did notestablish a substan-tive supranationaltrade remedy regimeand did not do awaywith the complexand effective web ofU.S. trade laws de-signed to protectdomestic producersfrom foreign compe-tition of the “unfair”variety. Neverthe-less, when theCUFTA deal wasclosed Canadian ne-gotiators announcedthat Chapter 19represented thedawn of a “rules-based system,” much preferable to the alterna-tive of a “power-based system” and well worth Canadian conces-sions on investment restrictions and access to energy.

The insistent claim that the Canadian state had made an endrun around American protectionism, cleverly binding the hegemonwith the rules of its own making, was soon revealed as naïve.Softwood lumber was the first major test for CUFTA and hasbedeviled NAFTA. Two years into the free trade period, the

Mulroney government ended an export restriction agreement thathad left Canadian lumber with only a quarter of the Americanmarket. The U.S. International Trade Commission responded byimmediately imposing duties. Notwithstanding several CUFTA,GATT and later NAFTA rulings which determined that there wasno justification in American law for the duties collected, Canada

agreed to anotherexport restrictionagreement. The ex-piry of this agree-ment in 2001 led tothe re-imposition ofU.S. duties, whichwere the subject ofthis summer’sNAFTA and WTOpanel decisions.This last cyclebrings the disputeinto its third, mostbitter decade.

Some thingshave not changed.American softwoodlumber producersremain committedto a protectioniststrategy of keepingCanadian lumber atunder a third of theU.S. market. Theforestry manage-ment practices ofCanadian provincesare beside the point.The contention thatthese constitute asubsidy is made

because it gives the U.S. lobby some grounds for complaint underAmerican trade legislation, which has evolved over time to be-come more obliging to this particular argument. For its part, theCanadian foreign service continues with a strategy of exploitingdivisions within the American ruling class by aiding and coordi-nating the lobbying efforts of the U.S. real estate and home con-struction and renovation industries, while it hopes that new de-mand in the American housing market will make the whole thing

Learning and Not Learning from the

Softwood Lumber DisputeIan MacDonald


go away. But divide and conquer has not worked in the past, andlumber prices remain low even after Hurricane Katrina’s devasta-tion. Overproduction in the North American lumber industry isperennial. This, in fact, is the root of the whole problem. Theissue, as always in these circumstances, is the following: whichcapitals will be destroyed?

Neither NAFTA nor WTOrules and institutions are powerfulenough to determine this question.The solution will emerge not fromrules, but from power politics. Whatis new in the current round of thedispute is the readiness of the Ca-nadian state to initiate massive re-taliation against U.S. exporters. Ifthe Canadian government had beengranted permission by the WTO inits August 2005 ruling to retaliateagainst the U.S. in excess of $4.25billion, it is entirely likely that itwould have done so. To initiate thecomplex process of levying sanc-tions, to secure permission from the

WTO, to make the threat and then back down at the last momentwithout securing any concessions is very bad for a state’s futurebargaining position.

The Canadian state is forced to act tough for two reasons: therise of American protectionism and the increased dependence ofCanadian capital on the U.S. market as a result of continentalrestructuring. Since 2002, the Bush administration has broughtthe world to the brink of a trade war in steel, has implementedlegislation that channels duties to the U.S. industries that lobbyfor them (effectively rewarding them twice) and has ignored un-favourable WTO decisions with perfect equanimity. A series ofpolls conducted by Compas and the National Post reveal increas-ing apprehension at these developments within the Canadiancapitalist class. They fret about lumber of course, but also over awhole range of commodities including beef, wheat and cars. Theymost certainly don’t want a trade war, but neither can they affordto be constantly harassed in their most important foreign market.The softwood lumber dispute is taken so seriously by the Canadianstate because of what it entails for the trading relationship as awhole as well as for the very accumulation strategy of the Cana-dian bourgeoisie.

LEFT RESPONSE

The softwood dispute, a seemingly intractable conflict withinwhat is still the largest bilateral trading relationship in the world,is a rebuke to the globalization project and exposes the falsity ofneoliberal arguments. But it also calls into question a prevailingline of critique within the anti-globalization movement which hasaccepted the premise that domestic ruling classes have shed theirantagonisms by becoming more interdependent within the worldeconomy, and that every protectionist device or regulation thatcould possibly be defined as such is being undone. Left critiques

have rightly called into question the fairness, sustainability anddemocratic credentials of neoliberal globalization. But rarely havethese recognized that the internationalization of capitalism in itsneoliberal phase heralds a more intense and high-stakes form ofcompetition between what are still predominantly nationally andregionally-based capitals which engage fully empowered statesin their defense.

The left should not take sides in this contest any more than itshould participate in the race for productivity and competitive-ness. Corporate Canada has a long term plan to confront Ameri-can protectionism, and it strikes against everything the left in thiscountry stands for. The Compas poll cited above asked CEOs ofCanadian corporations what the government should do to avertthe protectionist challenge. A majority strongly favoured increaseddefense spending, participation in the war against Iraq, and whatthe poll referred to as “more careful monitoring of visitors andimmigrants.”* Proposals for Deep Integration being circulatedby right-wing think tanks would offer some combination of thesemeasures in exchange for a final guarantee of secure access to theU.S. market. Call it the triumph of hope over experience.

Our immediate strategy is to continue building the opposi-tion to Canadian and American imperialism, and our long termstrategy should be to build solidarity movements across bordersthat can one day subordinate international exchange to humanneeds, not profit. R

* “Canada-US Relations: BDO Dunwoody/Chamber WeeklyCEO/Business Leader Poll by COMPAS in the Financial Post”(April 12, 2004) www.bdo.ca/en/library/polls/ceopoll/0412.pdf

Ian MacDonald is a York University grad student studying inNew York.

“The left shouldnot take sides inthis contest anymore than itshould partici-pate in the racefor productivityand competi-tiveness.”

WWW.SOCIALISTPROJECT

.CA

http://www.bdo.ca/en/library/polls/ceopoll/0412.pdf

http://www.socialistproject.ca


Throughout Canada religions are onthe offensive. They advocate conservativeand retrogressive agendas, and the rightwing politicians, hungry for votes, supportthem, without regard for long-term conse-quences. In addition to the majority Chris-tians, Canada now enjoys the presence ofthe followers of almost all other religionsof the world: Judaism, Islam, Hinduism,Sikhism, Buddhism, and many other reli-gions, each thriving and growing in size todifferent degrees.

Altogether, the non-Christian religionsform a very small minority, about sevenpercent of the Canadian population accord-ing to the latest 2001 Canadian Census. Yet,their leaders have become growingly ac-tive and vocal, lending their support to theconservative and anti-secular voices amongthe majority Catholics and Protestants.More and more, the non-Christian religiousgroups demand privileges similar to thosegranted to the Catholics during the colonialera when they were a religious minority.

The controversial Arbitration Law ofOntario, allowing the use of Halacha andShari’a as the basis for arbitration, and thedecision to provide public funding to Jew-ish schools in Québec, later withdrawnunder pressure, are examples of religiousencroachments to secularism anduniversalism of rights in Canada. Thepresent concerted effort on the part of allthese religions, spearheaded by majorityChristians and supported by conservativepoliticians, to derail same-sex marriage leg-islation is another example of this (un-)holyalliance against secular democracy. Theadvances made by religious conservativestranslate into more setbacks for the pro-gressive forces and their long-cherishedseparation of church and state, a major pil-lar of democracy in Canada.

In pushing for their conservative agen-das, religious leaders often claim and pre-tend that they represent their entire com-

munity, a vision sadly supported and rein-forced by the dominant stereotypes thatassume religious and ethnic communitiesto be homogenous. The reality, however,is very different. For example, some leadersof the Muslim communities claim that theyrepresent more than half a million Muslimsin Canada. But while statistically there areover 590 thousands Muslims in this coun-try, Muslims constitute a very diverse popu-lation.

The Muslim community, being theyoungest and fastest-growing communityin Canada, (over 128 percent growth since1991) has about 30 percent of its popula-tion below the age of 15, a quarter of whomare babies and children.

Like other religions, Muslims are di-vided along sectarian lines, not only Sunni/Shi’a but sub-divisions among them.Moreover, unlike most European countriesthat have their Muslim population originat-ing predominantly from a particular nation-ality, for example, mostly Pakistanis/Bangladeshis in England, Turks in Ger-many, Algerians in France, and Moroccansin Spain, Canadian Muslims come fromvery diverse national and ethic origins,ranging from India, Pakistan, the Arabworld and Iran, to Africa, China, thePhilippines, and Latin America.

The multiple identities of CanadianMuslims and their remarkable diversityshould make it difficult for any religiousleader to claim their representation. Evenwithin each of these ethnic and sectariangroups of Muslims there are significant di-visions. A case in point, as reported by acolumnist of the Iranian weekly Shahrvandin Toronto, is the rivalry between two Ira-nian Shi’i mosques: The Imam-Ali Centreand Mahdiah, with seemingly similar iden-tities, being Iranian and Shi’i, and bothsympathetic to and having links to differ-ent degrees with the Islamic regime inTehran, are located side-by-side on a prop-

erty owned by an Iraqi Shi’i trying unsuc-cessfully to evacuate his Iranian Shi’i ten-ants, who in turn are suing each other inOntario courts over financial matters!

Understandably, all religions try toshow they have a large following of de-vout and active believers. While statisti-cally they are growing (except for mostProtestant denominations which areactually declining), the rising figures arethe result of population growth andimmigration, not all of whom are devoutMuslims. Moreover, an important fact iscompletely ignored. That is the relativelylarge and growing number of secular peopleand Canadians with no religion at all.

It is interesting to note that the com-bined number of Canadian Agnostics,Atheists, Humanists, Pagans and those withsimply “no religion” is more than twice thesize of all non-Christian religions inCanada. According to the 2001 census,there were 4.9 million, or 16.2 percent ofCanadians with no religion, showing agrowth of 44 percent compared to the 1991census. The vote-seeking politicians maywant to pay attention to this growing groupof the population. (Though perhaps not afit for Mr. Harper!)

The point is that many religious insti-tutions remain simply places of worship forbelievers and act as a centre for commu-nity support and provision of useful socialservices. This is true of all religions, par-ticularly the minority religions whose fol-lowers face serious problems of racism inthis country. Apart from lingering and evengrowing anti-Semitism which has plaguedthe Jewish community, and hostilities to-wards Hindus and Sikhs, Canadian Mus-lims are faced with expanding and deep-ening Islamophobia.

Prevailing racism and discriminationhas marginalized many Muslims. The cen-sus data shows that Canadian Muslims,despite having a post-secondary education

Religions and SecularismLocking Horns

Saeed Rahnema


level twice that of the national average,have an unemployment rate twice that ofthe national average, and their medianincome is 37 percent below the national av-erage. The situation has only gotten worsesince September 11. Parts of the Muslimcommunity now find themselves in avicious cycle, whereby the moremarginalized they become, the more likelythey are to turn to traditions and religionand in some cases to fundamentalism,which only further marginalizes them.

Conservative religious leaders take ad-vantage of this vicious cycle to attract peo-ple and to preach and propagate their tra-ditional views. In a sense, we are facing amost puzzling irony of social change. Thatis that in less-developed societies, includ-ing Islamic countries, progressive secularintellectuals act as agents of change, work-ing towards forward-looking transforma-tions of their societies, against conserva-

tive values and practices, whereas in themore developed Western countries whichhost Muslim diasporas, including Canada,it is the conservative religious communityleaders who act as agents of change, work-ing towards regressive transformations,hoping to push back modern values andpractices. Moreover, in Islamic countries,the progressive, change-seeking forces aresuppressed by the authoritarian regimes andby the reactionary forces, while in the West,the reactionary, change-seeking diasporicforces gain the support of democratic re-gimes in the name of multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism as opposed toassimilationism is no doubt the best re-sponse to social harmony and respect forgroup rights in a multicultural society likeCanada. In granting group rights, however,attention should be paid to the fact thatthere are contradictions between the rightsof a specific group and the universal rights

Socialist political theorists have long critiqued religion forthe role it has played in buttressing the existing social and politi-cal order, oppressing women and dominant groups utilizing reli-gion to suppress other religious and national minorities. Marx sawreligion as both an expression of social alienation and as a limited,but distorted, view of the human collective. Occasionally, the latterview has found political expression when religion and human lib-eration have been linked, as in Catholic liberation theology inLatin America from the 1960s. This movement linked doctrinesfor human liberation, social equality and the dignity of the poorwith a Christian ethical mandate. But even in the liberation theol-ogy case of a positive role of religion in an emancipatory politicalidentity, there was seldom compromising on the defence of asecular state and the demand to end public subsidies of religiousinstitutions, the foremost positions socialist thinkers and move-ments, across a wide spectrum, have defended.

The demand for a secular state has gone along with theinsistence on the protection of the rights to practice religion inprivate life and as part of rights of freedom of assembly, and thenon-discrimination against religious minorities. These are posi-tions socialists have always defended as basic to democracy andcivil rights. Engels, Lenin and Trotsky all tended to be morescathing in their attitudes toward religion than Marx. But theywere consistent on the pursuit of a wholly secular state and therights to the private practice of religion without discrimination.

Here is a sample of excerpts from their writings:

Ø Karl Marx from “Introduction to A Contribution to the

Secularism and Socialist PoliticsCritique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” (1843)

“Man makes religion, religion does not make man.”

“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the ex-pression of real suffering and a protest against realsuffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature,the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soullessconditions. It is the opium of the people.”

Ø Frederick Engels from “The Program of the BlanquistFugitives from the Paris Commune” (1874)

“...the only service, which may still be rendered to Godtoday, is that of declaring atheism an article of faith to beenforced...”

Ø Frederick Engels from “A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Program of 1891”

“Complete separation of the Church from the state. Allreligious communities without exception are to be treatedby the state as private associations. They are to be deprivedof any support from public funds and of all influence onpublic schools. (They cannot be prohibited from formingtheir own schools out of their own funds and from teachingtheir own nonsense in them!)”

→

of all citizens, and betweenthe rights of a group and therights of its individual mem-bers.

Canadian democracy andits social cohesion is in dangerif the religious assaults con-tinue to go unchecked and arenot confronted by a concertedresponse by the progressivesecular forces who believe inthe separation of church andstate and respect for citizens’rights, as guaranteed by theCharter. R

Saeed Rahnema is aProfessor and PoliticalScience Coordinator at YorkUniversity’s AtkinsonFaculty.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1874/06/26.htm





Defending HealthcareIs Not Enough

The following excerpt is from the introduction of SocialistProject’s forthcoming pamphlet on healthcare.

Most Canadians generally reject a healthcare system that isdriven by profits, limited by the size of people’s wallets, and thatprovides health only alongside the threat of going into deep fi-nancial debt. This popular understanding of the importance ofaffordable healthcare – for one’s own family and as a shared rightwith others – has been at the core of limiting the erosion ofhealthcare.

But just defending healthcare is not enough. It doesn’t pre-vent a slower ‘death by a thousand cuts.’ Indignant governmentcampaign speeches against privatization turn out to only lead tomore subtle forms of privatization – privatization by stealth. Evenwhere privatizations are curbed, the rules under which hospitalsare run are transformed so they reflect the thinking and practiceof competitiveness and commercial values, not social values. Cut-backs may be checked today, but revived tomorrow after tax cutsor an economic downturn lead to budget deficits that ‘demand’new restraints. Any problems in the healthcare system that do occurlead to public frustrations which are then manipulated to developsupport for ‘repairs’ and ‘innovations’ based on giving privatecorporations greater control over our health.

At the same time, examples from abroad (not the USA ofcourse, since this contradicts their arguments) are brought intothe debate – sometimes via misinformation, sometimes withoutthe larger context, sometimes presenting defeats as victories – toconvince us that our resistance is futile, that we are swimmingagainst an inevitable tide. And as we are overwhelmed bydefending the healthcare system, we forget that our healthcaresystem is both incomplete and depends on so much beyond thatsystem – from the impact of poverty on a minority, to the workingconditions many of us face, to the polluted air all of us confront.

We need to both extend healthcare and place the fight forhealthcare in a broader context. The attack on healthcare is partof a broader offensive taking place throughout the capitalist world– an offensive whose earlier promises of security and rising livingstandards have now been widely exposed. But if neoliberal ideol-ogy (the freedom of corporations and markets, not the expandedfreedom of people) is going to dominate every other sector ofsociety, then healthcare cannot remain safe. Unless we take on thelarger battle of what kind of society we want, healthcare riskseventually becoming isolated and eroded. On the positive side,the issue of healthcare actually provides us a vital opening forthat larger struggle, including the expansion of its underlying prin-ciples to other dimensions of society.

Ø V.I Lenin from “The Attitude of the Workers Party to Religion”(1909)

“Marxism has always regarded all modern religions andchurches, and each and every religious organisation, asinstruments of bourgeois reaction that serve to defendexploitation and to befuddle the working class.”“Social-Democrats regard religion as a private matter inrelation to the state.”

Ø Leon Trotsky , Writings on Britain “Brailsford and Marxism”Pravda (1926)

“I once visited, together with Lenin and Krupskaya, a ‘freechurch’ in London where we heard socialist speeches in-terspersed with psalms. The preacher was a printer whohad just returned from Australia. He spoke about the so-cial revolution. The congregation begged god in the psalmsthat he establish such an order where there would be nei-ther poor nor rich. Such was my first practical acquain-tance with the British labour movement nearly a quarter ofa century ago (1902). What role, I asked myself at the time,does a psalm play in connection with a revolutionaryspeech? That of a safety-valve. Concentrated vapours of

discontent issued forth beneath the dome of the churchand rose into the sky. This is the basic function of the churchin class society”

Canada has a long awful history of religious bigotry, towardthe aboriginal peoples and religious minorities, as well as the scan-dalous grants of lands to the churches in Canadian history (theseland grants still have an important legacy in the economic basesof the major Christian churches). We are a long way from a secularstate on constitutional matters, civil proceedings, church subsi-dies, and administrative supports for religious education, welfaredelivery and other activities. This is shameful, particularly as thenumbers of non-believers grows and the multicultural and hencemulti-religious basis of Canada increases.

Several recent texts have explored some of these issues: SukeWolton, ed., Marxism, Mysticism and Modern Theory (1996);Michael Löwy, The War of Gods: Religion and Politics in LatinAmerica (1996); Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, eds., Socialist Reg-ister 2003: Fighting Identities: Race, Religion and Ethno-nation-alism (2003); and Gilbert Achcar, “Marxism and Religion –Yesterday and Today” available at http://www.marxsite.com/Marxism%20and%20Religion.pdf (2005). Please look at the SPwebsite (www.socialistproject.ca/relay) for web links to the quotescited above. R

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1909/may/13.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/britain/problems/ch03.htm

http://www.marxsite.com/Marxism%20and%20Religion.pdf

http://www.marxsite.com/Marxism%20and%20Religion.pdf

http://www.socialistproject.ca/relay


As long as we are primarily defensive about our health caresystem, we tend to place ourselves in indefensible positions. Costsin healthcare have indeed been escalating and some services arenot what they should be. If we ignore these realities, we risk los-ing even what we have. Our response must be twofold. First,privatization is not the answer; the extent of existing privatizationwithin our healthcare system is in fact an important source of theproblems.

Second, the healthcare issue is indeed – as the supporters ofincreased dependence on private healthcare insist – about choices.We do have to decide how much of a priority healthcare is initself, and in the context of a society that makes claims to a basic

degree of equality and democracy. But those calling for a greaterrole for healthcare based on profits see this in terms of expandingthe choices of a few (defined by their ability to pay) while weak-ening the choices of the majority (by undermining the public sys-tem). And their argument that numbers alone dictate that the gov-ernment cannot go on paying for higher healthcare costs createsthe illusion that if it is private, we are collectively not paying any-thing. Yet we live with a tell-tale example to our immediate south,where the lesson is, as even General Motors has belatedlyrecognized, that the more private-oriented the system is, the higherthe overall costs and the worse the care.

Addressing cost and service concerns requires expanding andimproving our healthcare system, not contracting and commer-cializing it. For example, we need to ask:

a) Why is public pharmacare not on the agenda? Thedrug companies’ drive to profitably ‘sell medicine’ hasraised questions about their concern with both preven-tion and drug side-effects at the same time as no sectionof healthcare costs has risen as fast as that involvingdrugs.

b) Are we using expensive new technologies appropri-ately? The dramatic increase in the use of privately-generated new technologies is a major element inescalating healthcare costs. In the face of increasinglyfor-profit rules that determine hospital budgets, hospitalshave come to look to new high-tech equipment as acompetitive weapon to attract ‘customers.’ This leads todocumented waste, a distortion of overall care, and amisuse of the actual potentials of technology.c) How should doctors be paid and how should we relatetheir role in the healthcare system to their role as privatepractitioners?d) How should hospitals be run? All large institutionssuffer from bureaucratic problems. Making hospitalsmore like corporations adds anti-social goals to thebureaucratic irritations. The question we should beasking is therefore not how to make this worse, but howto invent new models of social administration that allowsfor a deeper democratization of healthcare – greaterinput from both those the service is for and from thoseproviding the services – not only the doctors, but alsothe nurses and hospital workers.

Given what we are up against and what must be done, health-care won’t be saved without a much greater commitment to mobi-lization than we’ve seen to date. This pamphlet hopes to contrib-ute some tools for the discussions and increased mobilization tocome. The articles to follow come from both activists who workat the base and academic-activists who have long studied devel-opments in healthcare and brought their analysis to the popularstruggle to defend and extend healthcare. Contributions to the pam-phlet include:

Hugh Armstrong lays out the principles of the Canada HealthAct, analyzes where we fall short (do we really have socializedmedicine?) and points to where the Health Act gives us ammuni-tion for moving ahead.

Pat Armstrong warns us of the various ways in which privati-zation is already, or may potentially, penetrate healthcare.

Colin Leys and John Listir each examine what is in fact hap-pening with healthcare reform in Europe, especially in Englandwhich has been used as a battering ram to push reform in Canada.Leys and Lester strip away the argument that bringing the corpo-rations in adds to our health, rather than sacrifices it to profits.

Joel Lexchin takes on the role of the private pharmacare in-dustry, which has managed to generally escape public anger inspite of its responsibilities for much of the rising costs and prac-tices that border on irresponsibility in improving health.

Mike Hurley, the president of the Ontario Council of HospitalUnions (CUPE’s health division), discusses how the health issueis seen by his members, the internal education undertaken by theunion, and the forms mobilization has taken.

Natalie Mehra, the Provincial Coordinator of the OntarioHealth Coalition (OHC), assesses the Coalition’s shortfalls along-side its important achievements and points to both the OHC’simmediate objectives and longer-term strategic focus. R


Between July 9 and 18, 2005, I at-tended the Transnational Information Ex-change (TIE) for Ford workers, held inBrazil. With delegates from the U.S., Rus-sia, Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina, and, ofcourse, Brazil, I spent nine days touringFord plants, Metalworkers union halls, andthe CUT headquarters. The trip was an in-formative and profound look at the prac-tices, history, and current struggles facedby Brazilian and international autoworkers.

Upon arrival to Brazil, the U.S. del-egates and I were driven through Gran SaoPaolo, a sprawling city-state of approxi-mately 17 million people. Passing an aban-doned Ford plant that, prior to its closurein 2000, employed 3000 workers, the di-sastrous effects of neoliberalism in the re-gion became clear. This plant was recentlydownsized and then moved to SaoBernardo (one of Gran Sao Paolo’s manymunicipalities), where a meagre 700 work-ers are now employed.

After checking in at the hotel, beingassigned a roommate (Jim McColloh fromUAW Local 249 in Kansas City was as-signed as mine) and meeting the other del-egates (not including the Venezuelans, whowould didn’t arrive until Tuesday, and theArgentinians, who met up with us in Bahiastate), I went for dinner. There I met unionleaders from the ABC region (as the areais called), including the president, JoseLopez Fujos, and one of our interpreters,Leandro Moura.

Over dinner Leandro explained the his-tory of Brazil and the Metalworkers union.I learned that in 1978, during a twenty-yearmilitary dictatorship, the ABC Metalwork-ers Union was founded. The union was aproduct of the militant actions of the Met-alworkers in the Gran Sao Paulo region thatspanned the 1970s and culminated in a 250,000 strong six week strike in June of 1980.The strike was brutally put down by theregime and many of its leaders were ar-

Meetings between the workers concerningplant issues are held for half an hour eachweek at the plant (and on company time).There are no appointees or five-minutecompany safety meetings. Workers dealwith management after they collectivelylearn about each other’s concerns. Unionmembership and dues are handled differ-ently as well. Membership occurs on an in-dividual basis and membership dues are notautomatically deducted, but rather, paid tothe government and then back to the union.The discussion between me, the other del-egates, and the Sao Bernardo workers, thenturned political.

Upon arriving to the union office, itwas hard to ignore the political posters onthe walls featuring candidates and cam-paigns of the PT. I also got a peek at a CheGuevara poster in what I assumed to be theCoordinator of Ford Sao Bernardo’s (JaoCayres’) union office. Politics, I learned,are a big deal to Brazilian workers, espe-cially the Metalworkers. The Metalwork-ers have come a long way since theirstruggles with the military dictatorship, andthey continue to be very proud of theirachievements. Many workers sported PTpins. Political discussions about the gov-ernment between union representatives andunion members were constant and vibrant.For example, while I was visiting, a scan-dal erupted in the Lula government thatthreatened to bring it down or destabilizeit. The plant buzzed with this news andmany workers saw the scandal as an act ofsabotage by the government’s coalitionmembers that are unfriendly to workers. Itwas no coincidence to these class-con-scious workers that as union struggles foran urgently needed labour law reform wasgaining momentum that a scandal regard-ing Lula’s government emerged.

The next stop in our tour was the head-quarters of the ABC Metalworkers, a mas-sive building equipped with a newspaper

rested. Luis Inacio Da Silva (or ‘Lula’), thecurrent president of Brazil, was one of thedetained leaders. Undaunted by this statecoercion, the workers formed the PT(Workers Party) in 1980, and the CUT, acentral labour body composed of manyunions in 1983.

For much of the 20th century, a focalpoint of working class resistance in Brazilhas been the state’s anti-union legislation,which was based on laws implemented byMussolini’s fascist dictatorship in 1935.These laws banned the formation of Bra-zilian national unions by limiting union for-mation to mostly municipal levels and se-verely restricting the collective bargainingrights of workers. In response to the coer-cion of these old fascist laws, thousands ofunions were formed, and thousands moreare moving through the application process.Many of Brazil’s unions, however, are notradicalized or oriented toward socialistprojects. The political importance of thePT to the Metalworkers struggles never-theless became more apparent to me as Iwas introduced to more of its members.

The next morning we visited Ford SaoBernardo Do Campo, where two plants arelocated. A truck plant builds the Cargo, F-250, and F-350 at the rate of 18 vehiclesper hour. The car/light truck plant buildsthe Ka, Fiesta, and Charro (light truck) allon the same line at the rate of 16 per hour.I did not see one robot, though I was toldthere were some in the paint shop. Assem-bly workers here are paid approximately$5 U.S. per hour and they labour for about44 hours each week. Workers get a one-hour lunch break, and usually dine in a largeand spotless cafeteria that sells a variety offruits, vegetables, and meats.

After the tour of these plants, we talkedwith Sao Bernardo workers in their unionoffice. They explained how their unionworks. For them, autonomy and democracywithin the union is of utmost importance.

10 Days in Brazil:Sao Bernardo and the ABC Metalworkers

Richard Harding

Labour


It has been a busy year of labour conventions for CUPE ac-tivists in Ontario. May saw the Ontario Division convention, Junethe CLC, and November will bring the Ontario Federation of La-bour convention (for those locals still affiliated to the OFL). TheCUPE National convention, held in Winnipeg during the first weekof October, gave, to my mind, the most reason to believe that ourmovement still has potential for fighting back. Of course this as-sumes (with good reason I believe) that the OFL convention yetto be held will be less than a barnburner. This is not to say that theconvention wasn’t without its limits. Yet in the midst of certaindisheartening trends, there were signs that the labour movementmight be ready to take some risks on more radical positions andmore militant actions.

There was nothing in the opening of convention that would

Signs of Hopeat the CUPE National Convention

Dan Crow

constitute a departure from recent labour movement practice. Theusual formal ceremonial trappings were there, including an ob-ligatory speech by the NDP premier of Manitoba, Gary Doer.Doer’s presence, however, sparked a bit of a backlash from theassembled delegates. CUPE local 2153 (Winnipeg Child andFamily Services) at the time was in a set of difficult negotiations.The employer had used essential services legislation to designate70% of the members as essential, making them ineligible to strike.Doer’s government, despite promises, had failed to repeal the Torylegislation that made this possible. Moreover, the employer hadthreatened to use scabs in case of a strike. A flyer was distributedthat morning, outlining the situation, and during Doer’s speechmany delegates held the purple sheets up to try to force the Premierto address these important issues. Predictably, he did not.→

editorial office, a research department, acredit cooperative, and an education de-partment. From the newspaper office, theTribuna Metalurica, which focuses onlabour issues, union events, and govern-ment policies, is printed and then distrib-uted throughout the local communities. TheABC Metalworkers also have their ownpressroom.

The research department, or InterunionDepartment of Statistics and Social/Eco-nomic Studies (DIEESE), publishes infor-mation on Brazil’s national, state, and lo-cal economies.

The Credit Cooperative of ABC Met-alworkers (CREDABC) offers low creditloans to union members. Though interestrates in Brazil are at 20%, the cooperativeoffers them at 2% a month (simple inter-est). The Credit Cooperative’s membershipfee is 115R (approximately $50 Canadian)and 10R per month. A union Credit Coop-erative member can borrow up to four timesas much as they put in, so long as they paythe money back in twelve instalments.

The education department’s mandate,as explained to me by the Director, PauloCayres, is to provide education to interested

militant workers and provide them with agateway into the union. Educational ses-sions inform workers about collective bar-gaining strategies, health and safety rights,the relation between unionism and citizen-ship, and even one that informs aboutBrazil’s government policy called “Beyondthe Factory Walls.”

Following the tour of the headquarters,we visited the ABC Metalworkers’ train-ing facility, which meets the union’s needto educate members and the broader com-munity. This facility features an auditoriumthat seats 120 people and a library stockedwith books dating back to the industrialrevolution and the colonial period in Bra-zil. Commenting on the institutional andpolitical achievements of the Metalwork-ers, Paulo explained that “many workersdied for the union [and for us] to be in thisposition; we have the responsibility to carryon.” The spirit of worker solidarity is veryevident at the training facility.

Outside of the facility, delegates no-ticed a plaque dedicated to UAW brotherJohn Christensen. Christensen, a Fordworker, had developed a great respect andadmiration for the Brazilians and willed

that his ashes be buried in the Ford plant inSao Bernardo. The request was denied sohis ashes were buried by the Metalworkerson the site of their centre. A Pau Brasil, ornational tree, was planted on the site tosymbolize the working class struggle thatChristensen took part in. Paulo said: “thehope is that international solidarity will notbe restricted to one tree, but become a for-est and call for us to join the struggle ofthe international working class.” Paulo, andhis brother Jao, are formidable union andpolitical leaders.

Sunset was on us as we departed theheadquarters of the ABC Metalworkers.We jumped in the waiting cars. I drove withthe Mexican delegates and a Brazilian Met-alworker. We took a detour into Sao Pauloso the Mexicans could buy some SambaCDs. I was a bit concerned that we wouldbe late for dinner. I discovered as the tripwore on, in Brazil, it was not appropriateto be too early or on time for anything –except work. On we went into Sao Paulo,an experience that I’ll never forget. R

Richard Harding lives in Windsor and is aCAW activist.

Labour


At the end of his speech, a delegate rose to a microphone to askwhy essential service legislation could still be used to underminefree collective bargaining, and why there is no anti-scab legisla-tion in Manitoba. Paul Moist (national president) responded byasking that the Premier be treated as a guest – meaning, in es-sence, “stop asking questions that might be embarrassing.” ThePremier remained silent.

Interestingly, later the next day, the convention passed a reso-lution calling for all governments to pass anti-scab legislation. Inaddition, the resolution requires that CUPE refrain from support-ing any party that fails to support anti-scab legislation, and toactively campaign against any party that supports any limitationon free collective bargaining. If adhered to, Doer’s governmentcannot count on CUPE’s support in any form. Carole James inBC might also be a target after her statement that the BC teachersshould ‘obey the law’ and go back to work.

There was, however, one issue that threatened to divide theconvention. Despite comprising 60% of the union’s membership,women hold less than 25% of the positions on the National Ex-ecutive Board. In an attempt to remedy this, a constitutional amend-ment was proposed to add five temporary regional vice presidentpositions for women to the NEB, and a general resolution wasintroduced to create a taskforce to determine the causes of, andprovide remedies to women’s under-representation. Debate washeated, with both women and men speaking on both sides of theissue. In the end, the constitutional amendment failed to win therequired two-thirds majority, but the resolution to create thetaskforce was adopted. Failure of the amendment cannot be blamedon the leadership, all of whom campaigned in favour. Still, theresult means that concrete action on women’s under-representa-tion will be delayed by at least two years.

Discussion on other issues was often equally heated, but farless divisive. On a resolution to defend the Rand formula, in theevent that governments attack this measure of union security, SidRyan of CUPE Ontario gave an impassioned speech, which endedin a call for a general strike if necessary to defend automatic duescheck-off. Perhaps it’s not a radical issue, but certainly a call fora militant response. In defense of the BC teachers, Barry O’Neillof CUPE BC echoed the willingness to engage in a general striketo defend basic union principles. On an emergency resolution thatcalled for support for the teachers up to and including a generalstrike, the delegates gave unanimous endorsement.

One final item might also signify that a more assertive trendis developing. A resolution calling for the nationalization of in-dustry beginning with the commanding heights of the economywas submitted to the convention’s resolutions committee. The reso-lutions committee was responsible for setting the agenda for whichresolutions to be debated, but also had the power to recommendwhether or not delegates should accept a resolution. Although itdid not actually make it to the floor, the resolution in question didcome back from the committee with a recommendation of con-currence. This is, to be sure, more speculative than the other signs.After all, the resolution didn’t actually come to a vote. But resolu-tions that the leadership tries to kill usually come back from thecommittee with a recommendation of non-concurrence. Becauseof procedural rules, this is a tactic that virtually ensures death to

an idea. Since this came back with an affirmative recommenda-tion it could be assumed that someone in the leadership is at leastwilling to debate increasing public ownership and planning. That,if nothing else, gives us encouragement to keep putting these ideason the table for debate. R

Dan Crow teaches at Brock University and is an activist in CUPE.

Resolution onNationalization

At the end of CUPE’s convention, all resolutions thatdidn’t make it to the floor were referred back to theNational Executive Board. The resolutions committeehas recommended that the following resolution beadopted.

Submitted by CUPE Local 4207 (Ont.)

WHEREAS privatization is a threat to publicservices and public sector workers; and

WHEREAS union density is highest in thepublic sector; and WHEREAS increased publicownership will give CUPE greateropportunities to organize new workers; and

WHEREAS public ownership has the potentialto allow for greater democratic control ofproduction and distribution of public goodsand services;

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that CUPElaunch a public campaign to push for nationali-zation of industry, beginning with thecommanding heights of the economy; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that CUPEmake every effort to include provincialdivisions of CUPE, the CLC, provincial labourfederations and other national unions in thecampaign to extend the democratic controlover production and distribution.

Labour


CBC and Hydro WorkersDefending Good Jobs

Bryan Evans

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, the locked-out members ofthe Canadian Media Guild at the CBC, voted 88.4% to acceptmanagement’s latest, and clearly politically pressured, offer. Fed-eral cabinet ministers began to openly criticize the CBC’s seniormanagement handling of labour relations which is in and of itselfan interesting case study in the adoption of private sector stylemanagement in public sector organizations. Beyond this, LabourMinister Joe Fontana went so far as to criticize the policy of ex-panding the use of insecure, contractual work, not just at the CBC,but generally. On this point the strike by Energy Professionals atOntario Hydro One (and even the lockout of Telus Workers inwestern Canada) have much in common with the struggle justconcluded by the Canadian Media Guild.

First and foremost these struggles for decent work are takingplace in what has been termed a turn to a “Judas’’ economy – aneconomy where the promise of good, stable, decent paying workis replaced by one where insecurityreigns. Both the CBC and Hydro areseeking to embed further a strategyof ‘management by stress’ in thename of competitiveness. The man-agement is extending this strategyinto the broad public sector, andapplying it to not only unskilledworkers (who have born the bruntof these strategies underneoliberalism) but also highlyskilled and professional workers. Inboth lockouts, the employers are ag-gressively seeking greater flexibil-ity in the terms and conditions ofwork, massively wanting to extendcontract employees. The workers and unions are fiercely resist-ing ‘Walmartization’ and work intensification.

Some perspective is needed to understand these labour con-flicts. From the late 1980s on, a number of union struggles andresearch studies came forward alerting us to the decline in thequality of jobs available in the North American economy. Note-worthy was the 1990 study by the now defunct Economic Councilof Canada entitled, aptly, “Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: Employment inthe Service Economy.” These were the days of the ‘jobless recov-ery’ when profits began to rebound while unemployment and un-deremployment remained stubbornly high. The early 1990s weresomething of a ‘depression in slow motion’ – the increase in an-nual incomes was actually lower than during the years of the GreatDepression of the 1930s. A recent study by the Canadian LabourCongress measured the extent of insecurity and dissatisfaction

which Canadian workers live with. It noted that more than 10percent of workers earn poverty-level wages, a further 18 percentfelt their incomes inadequate, 30 percent feared impending jobloss, and 27 percent held jobs that were either part-time ortemporary in duration.

A new study from Statistics Canada, “Are Good Jobs Disap-pearing In Canada?”, found that while nominal hourly wages haveremained remarkably stable for two decades (which translates intoloss of real wages due to inflation and the share of new outputfrom increased capacity to produce all going to the companiesand a minority of Canadians), there has been an important changein the economic position of newly hired workers. This does notmean young workers in all cases, as it includes older workers be-ginning a new job. With the frequent job changes as a result ofrestructuring, something economists call ‘labour market churn-ing’, StatsCan’s findings are not encouraging. Between 1981 and

2004 newly hired men saw theirstarting wages drop by 13 per-cent, while for women the start-ing wage fell by 2 percent. Aswell, jobs with pension cover-age sharply declined for menfrom 54 percent to 42 percent(there was a slight increase forwomen as a whole, although foryounger women pension cover-age also fell). And in terms ofjob security and stability, manynew hires were left to the wolveswith 20% of men hired as tem-porary workers and 23% ofwomen. This is the era of per-

manent insecurity, and the climate where corporations can ag-gressively pursue ‘management by stress’.

The lock-out at CBC and the strike at Hydro One are indicativeof the strategy to institutionalize this insecurity into the publicsector. This is a sector, it needs noting, which has been character-ized by relatively good employment conditions as measured bywages and salaries, pensions, benefits and relative stability.

There are interesting parallels between what the 5500 locked-out members of the Canadian Media Guild and the 1000 strikingmembers of the Society of Energy Professionals at Hydro Oneare facing. The employer in both cases are seeking to create atwo-tier workforce. CBC is seeking to expand the use of tempo-rary workers, while Hydro One wants to impose a different salarygrid for new hires. The result is the same: new hires will not enjoythe same security, compensation or benefits as long-term →

Labour


staff. Needless to say, in Ontario and Canada this will accentuateracial and gender divisions.

The Hydro One strike began in the first week of June of thisyear after the members of the Society of Energy Professionalsvoted 95 percent to reject the offer of the employer. Among theemployer’s proposals rejected were: (1) an increase of the basework week from 35 to 39 hours with no increase in compensa-tion; a reduction of wages by 10 percent for all new hires; and aninferior benefit plan for all new hires, as for example proposals tolimit dental coverage to $1,000/annum.

The Canadian Media Guild had been locked-out since Au-gust 15, with CBC seeking: greater flexibility to hire new em-ployees on a temporary basis; contracting-out more productionto outside companies; and limiting employment protection forstaff in the event of downsizing.

The employer campaigns to flexibilize the terms of employ-ment at these two crown corporations may be something of a har-binger of the next round of assaults on public sector workers. Thesituation at the CBC is particularly worrisome. Management hassought to role back a significant union victory of the 1996 roundof negotiations (which were an astonishing 19 months in length).The Guild was successful in ‘normalizing’ the employment rela-tionship of more than one thousand workers by winning them theright to choose to move from contract status to permanent staff.The 1996-97 cuts to the CBC budget totaling some $450 millionhad, however, the perverse effect of actually keeping many con-tract staff from making this choice as movement to permanentstatus would have increased the likelihood of layoff. In the 1999round of negotiations the Guild was again able to open a windowwhereby contract workers could move to permanent status andmore did so.

Throughout the term of the last collective agreement, the Guildhas had to invest heavily in policing the contract as managementhas played a game of “catch me if you can.” They have systemati-cally rotated ‘temporary’ workers through various jobs in the hopethat the Guild will not notice that these individuals are continu-ally employed. These tactics are referred to as ‘laundering’ and

‘checkerboarding’by the Guild. Laun-dering involves aprocess of hiring,terminating and thenrehiring a worker;checker-boardinginvolves moving aworker from con-tract to a fixed-termfreelance positionand then back to acontract while stillperforming thesame type of work.These are bothvariations of simply‘churning’ job sta-

tus. As if to illustrated the employers underhandedness and con-tempt for the collective agreement, between 2001 and 2003 theGuild forced the employer to convert at least 250 temporary andcontract jobs into permanent staff positions.

While bringing the CBC lock-out to a conclusion is a greatthing for the workers, and one must add for those who appreciatehigh-quality programming, the new contract, particularly on theissue of contracting out, actually represents a victory for manage-ment. The freshly-minted collective agreement will now allowmanagement to cap the number of contract workers at 9.5% of thepermanent workforce. This may not seem to be much of an issuebut as Kate Taylor, writing in the October 5th, ‘Globe and Mail’commented, “What is new is the agreement to allow a set ratio ofcontract workers to permanent staff – and that gives managementnot just a foot in the door but a leg in the front hall”. In otherwords, the principle of contract work has been accepted and thisratio represents a ‘beachead’. Job insecurity ahs not been beatenat the CBC but has instead become institutionalized and as KarenWirsig notes in a recent article appearing in Our Times, it is theyoung, women and persons of colour, who pay the price of thisinsecurity.

What is still occurring at the CBC and Ontario Hydro is notspecific to these employers. Whether the workers know it or not,they are on the front-line of defending good jobs in our economy.This is the link to the campaign to unionize WalMart. Or thestruggle over pension rights and employment levels at Stelco. It isthe link between the struggles of workers in both public and pri-vate sectors today. These conflicts may well be as important, andperhaps more so, to Canadian workers than the mobilization ef-forts of the Canadian labour movement to date indicate. Clearly,capital – employers – are willing to aggressively undermine pay,pensions, benefits, limitations on working time, and health andsafety. Workers and their unions need to be equally aggressive inresponding to what might well be the beginning of the next waveof assault. R

Bryan Evans teaches public administration at Ryerson Univer-sity.

Labour


Sharon Yandle

What Should We Make of the Teachers’Job Action in British Columbia?

The short answer: BC teachers arevery courageous in taking a stand.

A longer answer: Teachers’ actionshave initiated an important public debatethat is significantly raising consciousness,mostly about reduced standards in publiceducation. There is a lot of support for theteachers, in part because it’s obvious tomany that classroom conditions have de-clined, teachers have been stripped of thepossibility of negotiating improvements(the government has decreed zero forwages and removed the right to negotiatebasic working and learning conditions), theprovince has a hefty surplus (and mostpeople want more money put into educa-tion and healthcare) and nobody but theteachers seem to give a damn about educa-tion.

Jinny Sims, the British ColumbiaTeachers’ Federation (BCTF) president, isarticulate, persuasive and held in high re-gard by her members and the union has po-sitioned itself brilliantly in identifying theissues. They have also come out swingingon the importance of disobeying bad laws.Even jocks, who are usually moaning aboutnot being able to coach their teams, havestated that they’re on another team as welland they’re team players.

Labour leaders are promising full sup-port which the teachers welcome but, hav-ing long memories of other times whenmilitancy disappeared overnight, havelearned to rely on themselves. Certainly thelabour movement’s track record over recent

years is less than inspiring. Thoseoutside BC may not be aware of

just how right-wing GordonCampbell’s Liberals are,

driven by their mis-sion to privatize

ernment from shredding workers’ rightsand public services. This includes, ofcourse, thousands of union members andmany of their leaders who may well be gal-vanized by the spectre of somebody finallydoing something. The labour movement’sresponse is cautious, but it’s there. The BCFed has organized a limited protest – anexpanded lunch hour rally or half-day walk-out – involving some Victoria unions. Butthere will be workers off the job in supportof the teachers and that’s a good start.

How long can the teachers hold out?The BCTF says they’ll stay out till the leg-islation is repealed, but this is a very toughposition to uphold – imagine what wouldhave to happen for the government to agreeto that. The employers’ association is sit-ting back on its heels and saying nothingmore than is required of it, no doubt hop-ing the strike will go on and on and breakthe BCTF, which is certainly a possibility.Crippling fines are only a court applicationaway and the right-wing lawsuits that havestarted on behalf of “parents” may wellsucceed.

While reserving on imposing fineslater, the Court’s first attempt at enforcingits order effectively placed the BCTF un-der trusteeship. The Court has told theunion it can’t pay strike pay, can’t use itsresources to communicate with its mem-bers, can’t call meetings or place adver-tisements – i.e., can’t act like a union. Theemployer and government could scarcelycontain their glee – so much more thenthey’d asked for – fully expecting that in-dividual teachers would now be starved offthe picket line and that the BCTF couldnot counsel their members to continuealone. Believing, as employers always loveto believe, that “their” employees are some-thing apart from the big bad union, theycould not conceive of a job action continu-ing without the labour bosses tellingeverybody what to do.

Remember when the grinch stoleChristmas, roast beast and all, →

what is now public and to get the govern-ment out of the business of governing. Todo this has meant destroying whateverpower unions had to stop them. Legisla-tion has ripped up contracts, slashed thewages of thousands of public sector work-ers, eliminated their benefits, wiped outtheir pension plans and encourageddecertifications. In response, labour lead-ers have made militant speeches and or-ganized mass rallies characterized by headyrhetoric. (“We will not back down!”),shouted from the podium to try to drownout the crowd chanting “General strike!”)But after the mikes were dismantled, ban-ners folded and leaflets collected andtossed, no serious fight back occurred.They did, in fact, back down; sabre rattlingwith cardboard swords doesn’t scare any-body. In the result all the public sector un-ions signed on to wage scales of zero zeroand zero, sometimes appended to guttedcollective agreements. Only the HospitalEmployees’ Union struck and tried to takea stand but it was beaten into submission,signing on to an ignominious and humili-ating defeat. (The BC Federation of La-bour, in urging the government to negoti-ate with the teachers, now points to theHEU settlement as proof that deals can bemade even while job action continues.)

Until the teachers struck last weekthere has been a profound lack of leader-ship in the once militant BC labour move-ment and, as in even the smallest collec-tive bargaining dispute, without leadershipnothing much is going to happen. It’s as ifthe only options the leadership saw were(a) a general strike or (b) a complete cave-in. And they weren’t going for a generalstrike. In the result, defeats were paradedas holding our own, even to the memberswho had to bear them, within a generalmessage that really, nothing can be done,at least not till the next election.

What the teachers have done is assertthat leadership and give some heart to

those who truly want to stop the gov-

Labour


but Christmas came anyway? The teacherson the line are virtually unanimous in say-ing they don’t need their union to tell themanything at this point. They know whythey’re out. The system has taken every-thing else away from them; it might as welltake their strike pay, too. All they need tobe told is when they can vote on a negoti-ated settlement so they can get back toclass. The BCTF, really a profoundlydemocratic union, has done its groundworkover the years and this kind of comprehen-sion and commitment is the result.

While the court order prohibits theBCTF from using its “books records andoffices to permit third parties” to help out,teachers’ unions in Alberta, Manitoba,

Back-to-Work legislation – laws that temporarily (often forseveral years) deprive specific groups of workers of their rightsto bargain and to strike – have a long history in Canada. Publicsector workers who had undertaken perfectly legal strikes have inparticular been targeted by governments which have reacted withspecial legislation declaring their strikes illegal (although in somecases the mere threat of a strike has been sufficient for govern-ments to impose such legislation). These repressive measures wererelatively infrequent during the immediate Post-WWII period, butwith the increasing unionization of public sector workers coin-ciding with end of the post-war boom, these measures increaseddramatically. Governments attempted to solve their budgetaryproblems on the back of public employees while at the same timesetting an example for all workers as part of the neoliberal policyshift towards advancing capital’s rights and interests over thoseof labour. The use of such measures has continued right throughto the present, as the table below shows.

Back—To—Work Measures [Federal and Provincial]1950-1959: 3 1980-1989: 491960-1969: 13 1990-1999: 251970-1979: 41 2000-2002: 16

The decline in the 1990s is in fact misleading in that manygovernments had more general restrictions such as legislated wagefreezes in place during the 1990s which made back-to-work leg-islation redundant. Indeed, the legislation has also become muchmore coercive over time. While the early legislation typically re-ferred the dispute to arbitration, it is now common for it to rewritecollective agreements, eliminating many past gains and/or impos-ing wage reductions, backed by massive fines and jail terms forunions and/or individual workers in the event that they refuse toend strike action and acquiesce to the legislation.

Despite such threats, some well-organized, determined groupsof workers have resisted. The most successful example of thiswas the Alberta Nurses Union’s successful illegal strike in 1988 -

Ontario and Washington State have linedup to provide strike pay. College teachersin BC are going straight to the picket lineswith $200,000 – if we can bring coffee anddoughnuts to the lines, they say, we canbring cash, too.

The teachers have potentially tremen-dous power if they follow the scenario ofrefusing to pay any fines that are levied andgo to jail instead, as Jinny says she will do.The government doesn’t want martyrs butthey might get them anyway. The courtsmay also impose individual fines on teach-ers which would scare them but whichwould also anger people and possibly gen-erate greater support. Individual teacherswould then have to refuse to pay the fines

as well. It’s hard to imagine anyone stand-ing up to that kind of pressure. But if theycould it would create a major problem forthe government. How long could they al-low the schools to be closed? Can they fireall the teachers?

To get back to work with the fines heldin abeyance and a dispute resolutionmechanism would be a big win. As my oldfriend Ray Haynes once said, anytime aunion takes on the government and gets outwith its ass intact, you got to call that a vic-tory. R

Sharon Yandle is a long-time Vancouverlabour activist.

which may serve as model for the BC teachers today.The well-organised and militant nurses’ union, which had

defied back-to-work legislation in the early 1980s and, along withother hospital employees, had their right to strike abrogatedthrough Bill 44 in 1983, proclaimed they would not accept anarbitrated settlement as prescribed in the legislation. When theLabour Board hastily intervened to declare even a strike vote ille-gal, this had the perverse effect of getting more nurses to vote forstrike action. When the strike began, the government, togetherwith the Labour Board, the hospital managers and the courts, threwone punitive measure after another at the nurses and their union,including $400,000 in fines, the firing of 22 nurses, and in thecase of one Edmonton hospital, actually serving nurses who en-tered the hospital to provide emergency services with contemptpapers. The solidarity among the nurses was very strong, withfewer nurses crossing picket lines than in earlier legal strikes; manyof those who had crossed before explained that they now believedthe most basic union rights were at stake. Sympathy for nurseswas not new, but the committed ideological and material mobili-zation on their behalf by the Alberta Federation of Labour underthe presidency of Dave Werlin galvanized crucial public support.Donations of half a million dollars were collected, and the unionrather than the government came to be seen as occupying ‘thehigh ground of protection of the public interest. Admonitions bycabinet ministers that “the law is the law” and should be obeyedregardless were met by cynicism. Both major city newspapers raneditorials denouncing the government’s handling of the strike and,implicitly at least, condoning the illegal action.’ So strong andconfident was the nurses’ leadership that, when the strike endedwith a negotiated settlement, they would still not take their mem-bers back to work until the six month freeze on union dues im-posed by the Labour Board under the new Labour Code was notimplemented.

– from Leo Panitch & Donald Swartz, From Consent to Co-ercion (Garamond 2003).

Back-to-Work Legislation & How to Win Against it

Labour

http://www.garamond.ca/consent.htm

http://www.garamond.ca/consent.htm


As the British Columbia teachers’ strike concludes this week,it is important to review how the state sought to consolidate re-sistance to the right to strike through the imposition of restrictivelegal tactics. One of the themes running throughout the strike wasthat the BC teachers’ union faced immense legal pressure to returnto work. This kind of pressure is not without recent historicalprecedent. In the past, provincial governments have often resortedto questions of legality in order to quell trade union resistance togovernmental policy. To recount, this pressure has come fromstrong-armed anti-strike legislation passed by the Liberalgovernment early in its first mandate when it introduced TheEducation Services Collective Agreement Act (Bill 27) and ThePublic Education Flexibility and Choice Act (Bill 28) in January2002. Under the conditions of Bill 27 and28, the Liberal government repealed an ex-isting contract and imposed an agreementwhich unilaterally dictated the conditions ofwork, legislated class room size and heldthe teachers to a zero, zero, and zero wageincrease over three years. By destroying anexisting collective agreement (a legallybinding document) the government went astep further and declared that the act ofteaching was itself an “essential service,”which is a politically loaded legal devicemeant to shred workers of the basic right towithhold their labour in the event that theemployer takes drastic action to change theconditions of work. In breaking the termsof a legally binding collective agreement,the government chose to ignore decades oldcollective bargaining procedure and insteadinvoked a narrow definition of parliamen-tary procedure (closure) in order to speed-ily defy existing legal precedent. In short,in its position as the employer and as thegovernment, the Liberals unilaterallychanged the rules of the game in order tomeet their own political agenda.

The Liberal government’s most recentdecision to extend the conditions of the BCTF’s collective agree-ment in The Teachers Collective Agreement Act (Bill 12) in Octo-ber of 2005 again imposed a collective agreement on teachers.This time, however, the teachers responded by defying the Liber-al’s rules and walked off the job. It is this act of political defiance– disobeying the rules imposed by the Liberals in their dual roleas the employer and as government – which shaped and defined

Law and Dissent:Examining the BC Teachers Strike

Chuck Smith

the teachers’ strike in British Columbia. Indeed, commentators inthe mainstream media, including those in The Globe and Mailand on radio throughout British Columbia, denounced the teachersfor defying the law by participating in an illegal and thereforeillegitimate strike. Yet, these same commentators scarcelymentioned that it was Liberal contempt for the “law” which startedthe strike in the first place.

Despite the sanctimonious position of the mainstream media,there has been little attempt to place the events in British Colum-bia in any historically comparative context. In so doing, we cansee that there is enough historical evidence to show that whengovernments attempt to vilify public servants for not obeying thedraconian rules imposed by the employer, the public will often

turn on those that poisoned the workplace in the first place. In-deed, what we learn through an examination of public and privatetrade union struggles is that the extension of collective bargaininglaw in Canada was not handed to workers by benevolent employ-ers or compassionate governments. Rather, workers have only wonthe right to collectively bargain and to strike by challenging a lawwhich prohibited workers from forming trade unions in the →

Labour


first place. This has been true across Canada, but has beenparamount in teachers’ strikes in both Ontario and in British Co-lumbia in the past three decades.

ONTARIO

The economic history of Ontario has been shaped by labourunrest since the time of Confederation. Indeed, until the TorontoPrinters walked off the job to protest low wages and a dangerouswork environment in 1872, the very act of forming a trade unionwas defined by the law as “a conspiracy in the restraint of trade.”It was only by defying the employer’s (in this case, George Brownand his paper The Globe and Mail) use of the law to break thePrinters union that trade unions themselves were able to emergefrom behind the veil of illegality.

Fast-forward to the late twentieth century and eerie similari-ties continue to shape and define trade union struggles, particu-larly in the public sector. In Ontario, the Conservative govern-ment elected in 1995 put forward an aggressive plan to reign incosts by cracking down on government expenditures. A key com-ponent of this strategy was to reform education by limiting issuescovered by collective bargaining and the elimination of direct jobaction by teachers. In 1997, the government introduced The Edu-cation Quality Improvement Act (Bill 160) which removed severalthousand members from teacher’s bargaining units while virtuallyeliminating the ability of teachers to bargain over pension ben-efits, class size and prep-time. In response, 125,000 teacherswalked off the job in order to prevent the passage of Bill 160.The government, having declared such action illegal, sought tohave the courts impede the ability of the teachers to strike byimposing an injunction. While the court refused to issue theinjunction, the role of the court became paramount when the certainelements of the trade union leadership decided to end its two-week strike because of the threats of fines and jail time for tradeunion members. That, however, was not the end of the story. TheConservative government was able to win re-election in 1999,but with labour relations in the public sector poisoned and teachermoral at an all time low. After 1999, the teachers continued toresist Conservative cuts through the initiation of rotating job action,limiting their job time to in class activity which virtually eliminatedextra-curricular activities from public schools. The situation againboiled into an outright strike shortly before the election in 2003.In response, the provincial government legislated the CatholicToronto District School Teachers back-to-work rather than facestriking workers in the middle of the campaign.

In the end, the government applied three tactics to stop teach-ers from challenging government policy through job action: (1) itsought to eliminate teachers’ rights to strike through back-to-worklegislation; (2) it then sought to eliminate job action by legislat-ing teachers to resume extra-curricular activities; and finally, (3)in the campaign of 2003 the Tories promised to eliminate teach-ers’ right to strike by declaring them an essential service. Ulti-mately, however, the government’s strong-arm tactics failed toincrease the idea that vilifying teachers was an adequate formulafor actually improving the quality of public education in Ontarioand the government was defeated in the 2003 election.

BRITISH COLUMBIA

Like Ontario, British Columbia has a long history of aggres-sive government action aimed at limiting the ability of teachers tocollectively bargain and strike. In 1987, for instance, the VanderZalm government attempted to limit the rights of public sectorworkers by passing The Industrial Relations Reform Act (Bill 19)and The Teaching Profession Act (Bill 20). Bill 19 and 20 playedan important role in the Social Credit Party’s strategy to limit thepower of private and public sector unions from challenging thegovernment’s austerity program. Bill 19 gave both governmentand employer’s more power to interfere in the internal workingsof unions, especially targeting the ability of unions to initiate andmaintain a strike. Bill 20, however, directly targeted the freedomof BC teachers to engage in meaningful collective bargaining.Bill 20 sought to weaken the bargaining strength of the teachers’union by removing principles and vice-principles from thebargaining unit while placing numerous restrictions on the BCTF’sright to strike. In response, the teachers received a 70 percentstrike mandate and called on all provincial locals to walk off thejob in protest. The reaction of the BC labour movement was swift,as 300,000 workers walked off the job in a provincial wide strikeon June 1, 1987.

Using a strategy that has become popular with governmentsfacing labour unrest, the Vander Zalm government appealed tothe courts to declare the province-wide strike illegal. Arguing thatsuch job action by teachers was tantamount to using force in acriminal conspiracy, the government hoped to have the strikeweapon itself declared illegal. Yet, as it would in 2005, the courtrefused to declare the strike illegal per se, but warned that suchlabour unrest could quickly escalate towards illegality if there wasgeneral erosion of peacefulness on the picket line. Stung by suchmoderate judicial support the Vander Zalm government was forcedto moderate its program as it was quickly losing support from the

Labour


general public. The continued assault on public sector workersand further labour unrest in the schools, combined with internalscandal and a general sense of incompetence was beginning totake its toll on the voting public. Ultimately, not even further leg-islation, deemed to stream-line education policy by again limitingthe collective bargaining rights of teachers in the School Act 1989,could save the government. In polls leading up to the 1991election, respondents placed scandal, public education and eco-nomic stability as important areas of public concern. In all areasthe provincial government was failing and in the subsequent elec-tion, the Socred dynasty was ended and the party was soon wipedoff the electoral map.

The two NDP governments that followed Vander Zalm at-tempted to put forward a plan for peace within public sector la-bour relations. Bill 84, which amended the BC Labour Code,erased many years of Socred duplicity within public sector labourrelations, but the party was unwilling to legalize secondary boycottsor political strikes in a labour disruption. This proved importantas the NDP demonstrated that it was just as willing to use strong-arm legal tactics when the collective bargaining process did notwork in their favour. In May 1993 the NDP legislated teachers inVancouver and Surrey back-to-work after an embarrassing strikeshowed that there were cracks in the government’s claim that BClabour relations were on a new, peaceful course. In order to avoidfuture strikes in individual districts, the NDP introduced Bill 52the Public Education Labour Relations Act which restructuredcollective bargaining so that all major issues would be negotiatedthrough the Province rather than through individual school boards.The long-term affects of this reform would lay the groundworkfor the current labour dispute in 2005. By imposing Bill 52, theNDP’s changes sought to centralize bargaining with thegovernment while eliminating political action as a legitimate formof strike activity. These changes immediately shifted power withinthe collective bargaining process to bureaucrats within the Ministryof Education and a range of industrial relations experts (lawyers,mediators and arbitrators) while taking it away from individualschool boards and the BCTF itself.

After the NDP’s devastating defeat in 2000, the centraliza-tion of power within the Ministry of Education resulted in a stringof imposed contracts and cost-cutting measures by the Liberalgovernment. For the Liberals, there were numerous weapons touse against the teachers, who they saw as overpaid, overprotectedand key supporters of the opposition. The Liberals took away theright to strike, imposed essential service legislation and mediatedcontracts. When that failed to stop the 2005 strike, they turned tolegal experts: the labour board, the courts and the lawyers withinthe ministry. When that strategy failed to turn public sympathyagainst the strike, and forced with the possibility of a larger strikeaction by CUPE and other public sector workers in Vancouver,the Liberals acquiesced on their “no negotiation with law break-ers” stance and appointed mediator Vince Ready. Ready’s even-tual report included an award of $40 million to “harmonize” teachersalary throughout the province. According to sources, thisamounted to a 2 percent wage increase, but only for teachers whowere on the lowest end of existing salary levels. The report alsocommitted the government to address and negotiate classroom

size, which the teachers saw as the first sign that the governmentwas willing to move on a negotiated settlement. In the end, thegovernment was willing to give a verbal (it refused to give a writ-ten agreement), on classroom size and small salary increases. Tiredand angry, the teachers accepted the mediators report with a 77per cent mandate to return to work knowing that the next round ofbargaining was only 6 months away.

CONCLUSIONS

Can the strike be considered a victory for BC teachers? Inreviewing the history of recent teacher strikes in Ontario andBritish Columbia, it is difficult to determine who “won.” In bothprovinces, the governing parties, in their dual roles as employerand as the government, were able to define the way in which col-lective bargaining took place or if it would take place at all. Inevery case examined, a government aimed at scaling back publicexpenses - as the Vander Zalm, Harris and Campbell were - willalways vilify public workers who defy such austerity programs.They are able to do this precisely because they maintain the legis-lative hammer to change the law so it fits their political goals.Under such a pretense it became easy for the media to argue, asthe Globe and Mail did (Editorial, October 12 2005), that a demo-cratically elected government has the right to limit the use of thestrike in order to set its own finances in order. Yet, hidden behindthe façade of public finance reform is a very real attempt by gov-ernment to use the legal tools available to it in order to restrainpolitical dissent. In both cases, the government wrongly assumedthat public support would fall on the side of legal experts dictat-ing the terms of collective agreements. In both cases, they werewrong. In this regard, the teachers strike must be seen as limited,albeit important, victory. R

Chuck Smith is a graduate student at York University and a memberof CUPE 3903.

Labour


Mehdi Kouhestaninejad (MK): Can youtalk a little about your perspective on thecurrent agenda of the American occupationin Afghanistan and Iraq, and how theAmericans have used nations like SaudiArabia for its purposes?

István Mészáros (IM): You see, oil is im-portant in the sense not simply as posses-sion of oil, of controlling the sale of it, butcontrolling access to oil. That is the mostimportant aspect of it. The Americans areusing the Middle East for the purposes ofAmerican domination, not only of that area.Because now they have oil for their imme-diate needs, they can have oil not only fromSaudi Arabia, but also from Mexico, Ven-ezuela, Nigeria, and so on. So there are anumber of oil resources which the Ameri-cans can access. But by far the most im-portant oil resources, in a longer-term per-spective, are of course the Middle East.

MK: And what do you think about the re-sistance right now in Iraq, the resistance ofthe people in Iraq?

IM: I think the development of resistanceof the Iraqi people is of tremendous sig-nificance, because eventually, no matterhow often President [Bush] will continueto repeat that “We are not going to run fromanything,” the resistance of the Iraqi peo-ple will make them rethink this, because ofthe body bags which are going back toAmerica. They can lie about it when it hap-

pens, they can lie about the casualty fig-ures, I am sure that the casualty figures aremuch, much greater than what they tell usthey are. But they cannot lie about it interms of the serious injuries. All those,sooner or later, accumulate in the UnitedStates, and I think that it is bound to gener-ate the kind of movement which I remem-ber at the time of the Vietnam War. Whatin the end compelled the United States toget out of Vietnam was the enormousnumber of injuries and deaths imposed bythe resistance of the Vietnamese people tothe American occupation. Now I don’t saythat it can be as great as that in Iraq; it willtake a different form. But it will be a kindof erosion of the American position there,and sooner or later it will have an impactboth in America and also among the“allies,” so to speak, of America.

You know, Socialism or Barbarismwas written two years before the Septem-ber 11th event which is used as a pretextfor the aggressive American policies. I wasvery clearly showing in that book that theseAmerican policies were already in the pipe-line before that, and well before 1999 even.I just happened to write the book in 1999.And it is in the logic of capital’s develop-ment, you see, this is the most serious as-pect of it, that capital has reached a stagein its development that it has to dominateeconomically the rest of the world; the mostpowerful forces of capital are bent on domi-nating the rest of the world. And it isthrough that – how do you find the politi-

cal forms through which the domination canbe achieved? Now this creates enormouscomplications and contradictions, becausethe political organization, the politicalforces of our lives, are national. Every-where. And that is why during the mostaggressive imperialist ways of imposing,of superimposing, the one nation over therest of them, you can’t listen to any one ofPresident Bush’s speeches without hearingat the end of it, “The best in the world, thegreatest in the world, are the United Statesof America.” All of the time, this is therefrain that comes out of his mouth. Whichis completely absurd. Because at the sametime they are preaching to all of the othersthat they should not pay attention to theirown national interests. The nationalinterests of the other nations count fornothing!

And also on that score, it must fail, allthis must fail. China is the power whichcan put up resistance against this Ameri-can domination, because the others can besubdued at least temporarily by Americanfirepower, by American aggressiveness.You know, Americans are now working ona system whose elements will be partlyoperational by next year, and fully opera-tional by 2007. Now this system, this newmilitary system, will operate in such a waythat it will not have to occupy military bases– although they also have those, but theycan do without military bases – and it willbe able to deliver high explosives 9,000miles away from America, you know, 9,000

World Capitalism & Global Resistance:

Socialism or Barbarism?An Interview with István Mészáros

Imprisoned for her virulent anti-war position, Rosa Luxemburg penned her famous essay, The Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis inGerman Social Democracy (1916), against the horrors of World War I and the collapse of opposition to the war by leadingsocial democratic parliamentary leaders. Her warning was that the world faced a choice between ‘socialism or barbarism’:

“We stand today ... before the awful proposition: either the triumph of imperialism and the destructionof all culture, and, as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery; or, thevictory of socialism.”

With global neoliberalism, an aggressive American imperialism, and new military conflicts, this opposition is again beingposed by many. One of these is the Marxist intellectual István Mészáros in his recent book, Socialism or Barbarism (2001),which warns of the structural geopolitical and social conflicts embedded in contemporary capitalism. Mehdi Kouhestaninejad,President of CUPE Local 3261 at the University of Toronto, took the opportunity to interview Mészáros at a recent politicalgathering in Paris. We print a portion of that interview here, as well as responses to the wide-ranging analysis Mészáros putsforward for socialist theory and politics by Minqi Li, Sam Gindin and Greg Albo.

Socialism or Barbarism

http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius

http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius


miles distant, and the military vehicleswhich will deliver these payloads are go-ing to fly at 10 times the speed of sound.So, colossal, and practically unstoppable.And the people who are criticizing it arealso saying that this infernal system ismeant to blast people in other parts of theworld, even if they don’t want to have any-thing to do with the U.S. So again obvi-ously the principal enemy in this respectwill also be China. The principal purposeof such military machinery is to have a kindof blackmail, you know.

MK: So, what do you think about China’srole right now? They have become a majorsource for cheap products, they have a largesource of cheap labour and lack a genuinelabour movement.

IM: The idea that China will become a bigcapitalist country is wrong as this is im-possible, and you have even today onlyinroads of capitalism in China, and theoverwhelming majority of people in China,which is one billion people, one thousandmillion people, live in a very different way.So, much the same remains today as fiveyears ago, and I don’t think that we canassume that this is going to change. Youknow, to give you an example, the balanceof trade of China with the United States isin the hundreds of billion dollarsin the red for the United States.And as you can imagine, there isan enormous protest now develop-ing in the States against this, andmuch controversy on how to alterthat situation. So ultimately, whenyou think of the development ofChinese capitalist interchange withthe rest of the world, it is not ten-able for the capitalist side, it is nottenable to let this go on indefinitely.So I think it is extremely problem-atic, not to mention the other as-pects of it – you know, if you havea kind of capitalistic China with thekind of developments which weknow from our own experience –that could only be a disaster for allof us, including China, the kind ofdevelopment which is in that wayenvisaged. And I don’t think thereis any evidence of that in China it-self.

You know there is already very, veryserious labour unrest in China, and veryserious oppositions developing there. Youknow, in China, surplus labour is still po-litically regulated. In our societies the ex-traction of surplus labour is largely througheconomic mechanisms; not in China. InChina, the only way you can have this ab-surdly cheap labour is through a politicalregulation which is provided by the gov-ernment. And in no way is it possible tochange this without a major change in gov-ernmental policy. I don’t know whetherthere is any indication of this happening,because so far I cannot see anything point-ing in that direction. And in various partsof China what you have obviously is grass-roots protest movements developingagainst cheap labour, but of course whenyou have the policy of cheap labour at agovernmental level, small grass-rootsmovements are not going to reach to thatlevel. They are unlikely to get to such aposition where this is feasible. And with-out a major change in policy at the govern-mental level, I don’t think you can envis-age anything coming out of that protest.Now what goes against government poli-cies, again with that alteration of strategyof cheap labour, is that China derives greatadvantage for itself out of cheap labour,because through cheap labour it can pen-

etrate other markets, like the Americanmarket or even the European market. Youknow, I have a copying machine, aXeroxing machine, and its parts are madein China, even the toner it needs – which isthe most important element on it – is madein China. So it penetrates already every typeof market you can think of, in Europe andin America.

So you have a very significant tradingadvantage, and at the same time there isalso the problem of the military disadvan-tage China had in the past vis-à-vis theUnited States. So you have now a majoreffort on the part of the Chinese to catchup. Recently we had the manned spaceflight in China. Now that is an enormousachievement when you think of it; the com-mentators in this field were saying that itwould take China ten years to catch up withAmerica in that respect, and that ten yearshas become a few months – one year in-stead of ten. It is an immense achievement,yet we shouldn’t have illusions about it, thatthis is for the exploration of outer space.The purpose of such ventures, the mostimportant purpose, is military. And Chinahas every reason to be cautious about this,to be concerned about it, because I men-tioned in Socialism or Barbarism how cer-tain American circles have been envisag-ing China as the major enemy. They were

describing China in those terms,and undoubtedly, even if for tac-tical reasons they can be set asidefor the moment, especially whenyou have such events as the waragainst Iraq and the war againstAfghanistan and who knows whatis next, in such a situation Chinais tactically pushed aside. Butdon’t have illusions on that scorethat the ultimate adversary is notChina. China must be theAmerican’s ultimate adversarybecause China is the only coun-try which can potentially stand upto America; their missile technol-ogy, exemplified by sending up ofa manned space flight, indicatesan enormously advanced missiletechnology. And that missile tech-nology is also capable of deliver-ing military warheads anywherein the world, just as the Ameri-cans are capable of doing. →



MK: István, you are one of those Marxistswho works with the theory of value. Myquestion is this: Since the workers in theprivate sector, in manufacturing, are in nu-merical decline, at least in Canada andprobably in Germany and France, what isthe impact of public sector unionsbecoming the leading edge in the labourmovement, and what is the meaning for thetheory of value?

IM: You know,the private com-panies are not indecline, they aresimply becom-ing bigger andbigger; mo-nopolistic ten-dencies arewhat are verymuch on the in-crease. Now themonopolist ict e n d e n c i e sdominate alle c o n o m i cactivity; at thesame time, theprivate corpora-

tions, including the biggest monopolisticprivate corporations, need money, need thefunds and resources, and the only placefrom which such funds can be provided arefrom public funds, from public finances.And that is actually the great weakness ofthe capitalist system today. That is part ofthe structural crisis of the system, that it isunable to generate the funds for the healthyrunning of the system. So I don’t think thatthis represents any problem for a Marxistway of approaching things. On the contrary,when you think of what is happening in theworld today, there is no way in whichcapital accumulation could work the wayit did even thirty years ago. The structuralcrisis of the system manifests itself prima-rily in the inability to proceed with healthycapital accumulation.

And you find this in two principalways, it is manifested in two ways: first,much of capital is channelled into parasiticspeculative funds instead of productiveaccumulation, which is not available. It ispresent everywhere in parasitic, specula-tive ventures; you name it and it is there.

At the same time, the corollary of this fail-ure to accumulate is the aggressiveness, theincreasing aggressiveness, of the UnitedStates and at the same time the submissionof several of the capitalist countries whichin the past would have had their owndesigns, such as the British and the French,and now also the Russians are aligned withthe Americans that way. The Americanaggressiveness doesn’t encounterresistance because powers such as theBritish, the French, and the Russians arealso hoping that through this new design,this new aggressive design of the world,that they also are going to reap the ben-efits.

This crisis means that capital accumu-lation has become difficult, and thereforethe system is also unable to deliver thegoods to labour. And I think we should notforget this dimension of it because in thepast, when you go back thirty years, labourcould get benefits out of the expansion ofcapital. Now this expansion of capital isnot proceeding the way it did in the past,and therefore instead of a gradual increaseas we witnessed in the post-war decades –that labour could gain quite a lot in thecapitalistically advanced countries, out ofthis capital expansion – now it has to beclawed back. So, much of what has beengained by labour in this post-war periodhas to be clawed back by capital, and inBritain certainly, attacks on the socialservices continue. The result is more andmore privatization and casualization, un-der-employment and contracting out.

MK: What do you think of this – in thetime of Marx, we did not have a public sec-tor, and manufacturing was the main focusof the labour movement, so manufacturingworkers were on the front line in the fightagainst capitalism. And right now we seethat they have become a huge bureaucraticorganization too. The public sector, forwhich all of the funds come from the gov-ernment, includes the health sector, educa-tion, childcare, social services, municipalemployees, all of them are coming fromwhat we call the “public sector.” Publicsector unions are both progressive andconservative – in high levels of the union,the leadership has to be accountable to themembers. The leaders are very radical, butbelow them you do not see that much

activism. But the other side of the coin,those private manufacturing sector unionsare not working their sector anymore. Theyhave become broader in scope, because forthem it is necessary to maintain their or-ganization, since they keep losing theirmembers through job losses.

IM: Yes, and that is part of the story. Butanother part of the story is that many ofthese jobs are exported to the so-called“third world.” So when you think of themanufacturing part becoming less impor-tant, that is perhaps an optical illusion,because when you add to this the workforce, the labour force, in India, in China,and elsewhere in the so-called “thirdworld,” so-called, because I hate that ex-pression, you see that the older work or-ganization has been exported, ok? The“third world” is in the same world, but it isa structurally subordinate part of the world.So what happened was that capital rear-ranged its production sectors in such a waythat the dirty and dangerous part of it wasshoved off to the so-called “third world.”And if you look there, there is no such dimi-nution in the manufacturing sector, on thecontrary, even an increase in the last dec-ades. We have to be always very careful,this is where our global view has to pre-vail, because globalization, all the talkabout globalization, wants to forget thesedimensions of globalization, these dimen-sions of how the global economy is underthe rule of capital, rearranged and redefinedin such a way. It has also the benefit of theideology of the capitalist system in that itcreates the illusion that labour doesn’tmatter anymore.

So, this has to be resisted and foughtagainst, because in reality, that brings inagain the importance of an internationaldimension, the international way of think-ing and organizing, because if you thinkof labour as a global entity, it is evidentlythe case that labour remains as importantas ever, and in fact more important than inthe past. And what is painfully missing fromthe equation is precisely the organizationalequivalent, and also consciousness, be-cause you don’t get organization withoutconsciousness. And the consciousness ofthese matters is missing. The ruling ideol-ogy is what filters down from the regentsof capital, precisely through labour organi-

“The American ag-gressiveness doesn’tencounter resistancebecause powerssuch as the British,the French, and theRussians are alsohoping that throughthis new design, thisnew aggressivedesign of the world,that they also aregoing to reap thebenefits.”



zations like the New Labour Party, like thenew Italian Democratic Party of the Left,and in France and so on. It is pathetic howthey are dominating. Now, through theirway of thinking, capital dominates. Capi-tal interests are asserted, and we can’t getout of this vicious circle without regainingthe ground at the level of consciousnessfrom which, of course, a proper way of or-ganizing the international labour force be-comes possible.

MK: Given what you have just said aboutorganizing the international labour force,and about the current situation of labour,what do you think are the challenges forthe communist movement right now, andhow does it move forward?

IM: We socialists have to start organizingfrom the base and make it international.You know, at the present time there is noway we can compete with our adversarieswho are well organized internationally, andon our side, we are not! We are fragmented,we are in a way at their mercy. And I thinkthat the time has come when somethingmust be done about this everywhere. Thesocialist movement is so fragmented, un-fortunately it even fights among itself. InEngland, there are 45 different groups, andmuch of their time is wasted on fightingeach other, and denouncing each other; Imean, I despair sometimes when I read theirpapers and see what they are doing, insteadof concentrating on their adversary. It isvery, very disheartening for the time being,so I think that the kind of work that you aredoing with the Iranian–Canadiancommunity is very important, that youshould also reach out to other communi-ties.

You have also the same problem inCanada, and in America, you have noth-ing. You don’t have a mass party for whichpeople could even vote. Now the situationis very sad when you look to Europe; theLabour Party which was once upon a timea radical party has become worse than theLiberals. In England now, the Labour Partyis to the right of the Liberal Party, and whenyou look to France and Italy, the situationis not better. In France there used to be aSocialist Party and the Communist Party.Both of them have completely disinte-grated, they are no longer representing any

serious demand for a radical transforma-tion of society. And when you look at whathappened in Italy, which had a major Com-munist Party, a very, very strong Commu-nist Party, that party also has completelydisintegrated. So now the great majority ofthat former Communist Party calls itself“Democrats of the Left” or some similarfancy name, and there is nothing Left aboutit. It is in no way better than its alterna-tives; there is only one party that could besaid to have a radical programme, theRifondazione Comunista whose GeneralSecretary is Fausto Bertinotti. But in elec-toral terms it is a tiny group. So the situa-tion is similar all over the world, when youlook at it, except in Latin America. Yousee, in Latin America the situation is verymuch better. In Latin America there arevery strong movements, including labourmovements. But in Europe and in NorthAmerica, it is quite devastating, and I thinkthat when you look at it in this way, theparties which once claimed to reform,claimed to be reformist parties, are nolonger even reformist. They don’t want toreform the system; for them the system isok.

So I think this is what has to be changedin the future and it can only be changedthrough a major international effort of or-ganization. Not occasional ones, as in the

past when we could mobilize millions ofpeople for a particular occasion, like theanti-war movement. That is not enough –our adversaries are organizing all the time,are doing everything in their interest on apermanent basis. We are not doing anythingof that kind. There is no internationalequivalent of what we all would like to do,the Labour International doesn’t exist. TheInternationals ceased to exist.

There have been four Internationals inhistory. The first turned sour already inMarx’s lifetime, so Marx wanted to put anend to it and therefore transferred it toAmerica because of the way in which it wasdisintegrating in Europe. And it fadedaway. Then we had the Second Interna-tional. Now you know what happened tothe Second International. The Second In-ternational turned itself into a defender ofthe capitalist system. Then we had the ThirdInternational. The Third International wasturned into an instrument of Stalin’spolicies, and through that condemned it-self to failure. And then you have the FourthInternational which never even got off theground. It never had a general following inthe labour movement. So it was not reallyan International in the sense in which wecould call a mass movement an“International movement.” And I thinkprobably the time has come when we →



have to think about starting a Fifth Inter-national and organizing under this umbrella– the demands for changing society, a radi-cal change in society, a different order ofsociety. I think that is very much on theorder of the day.

MK: Do you think, when you are talkingabout a Fifth International, that the annualWorld Social Forums are something simi-lar? What do you think about the workingof the Social Forum?

IM: Well, I think the Social Forum is veryimportant. But it is a social forum whichwants to stay away from politics It wantsto stay away from [political] parties. It hasas one of its principles that particular par-ties cannot affiliate to it, and that is not re-ally manageable, because in Brazil, the PTis very important. You see, the PTwas in fact very closely co-oper-ating with the World Social Fo-rum; without the PT’s support, theWorld Social Forum would nothave been possible at all. The PTprovided the funds for it in PortoAllegre, and things have becomedifficult precisely because PortoAllegre was lost to the adversar-ies because again we see that in-side the PT some groups werefighting each other.

MK: What do you think rightnow, today, about the kind of situ-ation that we have, and what kindof alternative we can have to theWorld Bank and IMF? Every-body, when we are talking aboutthis situation, feels that we must have somealternative; these are the organizations thatrun this globe right now. I’m not talkingabout reforming the IMF, but the challengefacing us is taking on the IMF and theWorld Bank and the WTO. The capitalistshave become more globalized than the peo-ple of the resistance.

IM: All of these organizations are domi-nated by American capital. The IMF, intheory, is an international organization ofall of its members, but who dictates therules? It is always U.S. capital which dic-tates the rules in the IMF and the World

Bank – and of course this includes theWTO. The principal rules in the WTO re-veal an American bias. You remember thebusiness of the steel tariffs which theAmericans arbitrarily and one-sidedly im-posed on Europe – it took 18 months forthe WTO to come up with a resolution con-demning this American move. Now it maytake another 18 months before it can be im-plemented, and by that time of course itmeans nothing.

Since all of these organizations aredominated by the Americans, alternativeorganizations need to be devised. Is it pos-sible to have something equivalent to theIMF or the World Bank? That is a big ques-tion, because we don’t have the state or-ganizations at our disposal to provide thefunds for us. This is the same story as withthe NGOs. The NGOs are independent in

name, but in reality they are very closelyattached to various governments as in Eng-land where it is the Ministry of OverseasDevelopment (tellingly once called theColonial Office) which provides the fundsor doesn’t provide the funds, depending onwhat it feels like. And I don’t know if wecan think of something equivalent to theIMF or the World Bank as an alternativefor the future. The World Bank is going tobe dominated by the capitalist enterprises,just like the International Monetary Fund.What we can do is to organize actionsagainst their dictates – that we can do.Social movements, and in this respect the

World Social Forum itself, can be activatedfor this, because although they are againstparties entering and perhaps also dominat-ing this organization, they are not againstworking in conjunction with a great numberof social movements who are workingagainst policies such as those of the IMFor the World Bank and the policies of thoseorganizations which they want to imposeon various countries. When you think ofthe dam-building project in India, there hasbeen an enormous movement against that,and I think that the world social movementswould be willing to intervene and do some-thing about it.

So these are some important initiativeswhich are now taking place. When youthink of the Internationals of the past, theyhave failed because they dictated from thebeginning the kind of organization which

it had to be; doctrinalunanimity was assumed. Andit was thought that all themembers that were going tojoin in would be in conform-ity with this doctrinal unity.Now that could not work. Onthat basis, the Internationalscould not work in the pastand could not work in thefuture. What will be neces-sary is to take the existingactivities of the variousgroups, political, tradeunions and so on, and try tobring them together towardssome fundamental objectiveswhich we all share. We wanta different kind of society; allof these groups which you

can think of would like to have a differentsystem. How do we reach this system –well, that’s a big question. And if weassume a doctrinal unity, that also alreadyassumes that we know for every one ofthose members how to move forward. Idon’t think that can be the future. They haveto contribute, all of them, working in theirown sphere of activity, providing the scopefor their own kind of action, and throughthat also to influencing the others, becauseat some point, at some stage in the future,it will be also necessary to have a coherentinternational way of acting, an active formof organization against our adversaries. R



The rise of China as a major player in the capitalist worldeconomy is likely to become one of the most significant develop-ments in the first half of the twenty-first century. After more thantwo decades of consistently rapid economic growth, calculated atpurchasing power parity, China now accounts for 12 per cent ofworld output and stands as the world’s second largest economy inthe world. China is emerging as the centre of world manufactur-ing exports and has been playing a crucial role in financing theU.S. current account deficit.

Some speculate that China might replace the U.S. and be-come the next hegemonic power. For instance, Giovanni Arrighiplaces much hope on the renaissance of Chinese civilization andhopes that the re-emerging China-centred civilization wouldprovide system-level solutions to the system-level problems leftbehind by U.S. hegemony, and lead the transformation of themodern world into a commonwealth of civilizations. IstvánMészáros, in his interview, expressed the hope that “China is thepower which can put up resistance against this Americandomination.”

Several questions can be raised. First, there is the question ofhow China’s internal social relations of production and class struc-ture have evolved over the past quarter century. Second, there isthe question how China’s rising importance in the capitalist worldeconomy would affect the current and future operations of theexisting world system. Third, there is the question of to what extentChina’s current transformation could prepare the conditions forfuture revolutionary changes within China as well as in the world.

CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT IN CHINA

István Mészáros is quite correct in pointing out that it isimpossible for China to become a “big capitalist country” in thesense that the existing world system cannot accommodate Chi-na’s rise into the rank of core states. However, this is a questionquite separate from how China’s internal social relations of pro-duction have evolved and of what has become the nature of theserelations.

In short, over the past quarter of century, through successiveclass struggles, the Chinese worker and peasants have largely lostthe extensive social and economic rights that they once had duringthe years of Maoist revolutionary socialism, and China’s socio-economic system has undergone fundamental changes. The statesector now accounts for no more than one-third of the nationaloutput, and state-sector workers have been largely reduced to wage

Minqi Li

workers under the constant threat of unemployment. The rest ofthe economy has been dominated by production for profit andwage labour relations. The fact that the Chinese governmentimposes “a political regulation” that ensures “this absurdly cheaplabour” does not make the Chinese economy any less capitalist.On the contrary, it only demonstrates the collaboration betweenthe Chinese state and trans-national capital, and the political weak-ness of the Chinese working class at the present moment.

CHINA AT THE CENTREOF GLOBAL CAPITALIST INSTABILITY

However, the expansion of Chinese capitalism is not withoutcontradictions. In fact, it could have very de-stabilizing effects onthe existing world system in the coming decades. The capitalist“reform” has led to growing inequality in income and wealth dis-tribution and absolute pauperization among large sections of theworking people. As the working people’s real income stagnates,mass consumption lags behind the pace of economic growth, andthe expansion of the Chinese economy has become increasinglydependent on foreign investment and exports, especially exportsto U.S. markets.

China’s export-led growth strategy has greatly intensified glo-bal over-production and increased competitive pressures on therest of the periphery. As China’s huge surplus labour force is addedto the global reserve army of labour, it has undermined thebargaining power of working classes in many countries.

Under the neoliberal regime, the global economy has tendedto stagnate and has been characterized by growing instability. Theglobal economy has not sunk into a vicious downward spiral,largely because the U.S. economy, given its hegemonic position,has managed to grow at a relatively rapid pace, pumping demandinto the rest of the world economy. The imbalances in the globalgrowth structure have resulted in the ever-growing current ac-count deficits in the U.S. The deficit now stands at 5.7 per cent ofU.S. GDP and, if the current trend continues, the U.S. net foreigndebt could reach 40–50 per cent of GDP by 2008, and more than300 per cent of exports. The U.S. already absorbs about 80 percent of the global surplus savings. As the U.S. current accountdeficit keeps growing, private capital inflows have become in-creasingly inadequate and Asian central banks have played anincreasingly crucial role in financing the deficit (See: StephenRoach, at www.morganstanley.com/GEFdata/digests, September27, 2004). →

Chinaand the

Futureof the

Capitalist World Economy


http://www.morganstanley.com/GEFdata/digests/20040927-mon.html


tions on the global environment and the global geopolitics are difficultto predict (See: Andy Xie at ww.morganstanley.com/GEFdata/di-gests, May 24, 2004).

In this sense, it is very correct for István Mészáros to argue that“when you think of the development of Chinese capitalist interchangewith the rest of the world, it is not tenable for the capitalist side, it isnot tenable to let this go on indefinitely… that could only be a disasterfor all of us.”

SOCIALISM OR BARBARISM?

Since the early 1980s, under the name of “market reforms,”China has gradually adopted the capitalist model of developmentbased on the exploitation of the broad masses of working people,dominance of foreign capital, and dependence on exports to foreignmarkets. Despite rapid economic growth, such a model has producedgrowing economic, social, and environmental contradictions. Evenif Chinese capitalism can survive the destructive consequences ofthe coming global economic crisis, it would not be long before it

meets the environmental limits toaccumulation.

Capitalist development inChina has produced striking socialpolarizations, and increasinglylarge sections of the working peo-ple are suffering from absolutepauperization. The social bases forcapitalist development have be-come increasingly narrowed as the“market reforms” proceed. Thegrowing social contradictions havebeen reflected in the ideologicalfield. Sections of the Chinese in-tellectual class have offered, to dif-

ferent degrees, criticisms of free market, capitalism, and imperialistdomination. This is in contrast to the ideological conditions in EasternEurope and China before 1989, where independent intellectuals wereoverwhelmingly influenced by neoliberal ideas.

As China experiences rapid industrialization and urbanization,China’s class structure is being fundamentally transformed. The shareof the proletarian and semi-proletarian wage workers in the totalpopulation have substantially increased. The past historicalexperience suggests that as the degree of proletarianization rises,the proletarian and semi-proletarian workers are likely to demand agrowing range of political and social rights. These demands couldimpose growing pressures on China’s regime of capital accumula-tion.

In the future, if the emerging anti-capitalist critical intellectualscan join force with the growing resistance struggle of the Chineseworking class, then it may not take long before a powerful revolu-tionary socialist force re-emerges in China. Given China’s huge sizein population and territory, a revolutionary change on China’s politi-cal stage could have enormous global implications. R

Minqi Li teaches political economy at York University, and writesextensively on the world economy and China.

Among Asian economies, China has played a central role.With its large cheap labour force, China has become the centre ofAsian export accumulation. China’s foreign exchange reservesreflect not only trade surpluses, but also capital inflows from otherAsian economies, such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.China’s central bank is in effect re-channelling Asian surplus sav-ings into dollar-denominated assets.

As the Chinese central bank accumulates foreign exchangereserves, it generates money supply leading to credit explosion inthe bank sector that in turn results in speculative investment boomand property bubbles. China’s investment boom cannot be sus-tained as it results in huge excess capacity and has created bottle-necks in several key commodities, such as food and oil, drivingup their prices. Given China’s central role in the Asian exportregime, as the bubble collapses, it could bring down not only theChinese economy, but also other Asian economies that depend onexports to China for growth. With the huge excess capacity thatwould be left over with the bursting of the bubble, the globaleconomy may sink into deflation. Alternatively, if major centralbanks attempt to ease the global recession with loose monetarypolicies, rising oil and food prices could lead to global stagfla-tion.

As the global imbalances and U.S current account deficitskeep growing, the global economy is confronted with increas-ingly larger and more destructive bubbles. It seems that China hasbecome the epicentre of the latest round of global instability. Inthe words of Stephen Roach, the chief economist of MorganStanley, “with the world’s growth dynamic now being effectivelydriven by just one consumer – America – and just one producer –China – the odds are growing short that such an increasingly tenu-ous arrangement can be sustained. China is probably the weakestlink in this chain.” Let us watch if the Chinese capitalism and theneoliberal global regime can survive such increasingly destruc-tive bubbles and crises.

ENVIRONMENTAL LIMITSTO ACCUMULATION

Capitalist development in China has brought about not onlysocial destructions but also resource depletion and environmentaldegradations. According to Lester R. Brown, the director of theEarth Policy Institute, “China is exceeding the carrying capacityof its ecosystems – overplowing its land, overgrazing itsrangelands, overcutting its forests, overpumping its aquifers.” Aswater shortage and soil erosion become increasingly serious,China’s grain production will continue to stagnate and will de-cline, threatening to drive up world food prices.

China’s rapid accumulation has deepened the world energycrisis. China’s oil consumption is expected to double in the com-ing decade. Taking into account the effects of China’s consump-tion of oil on oil prices, China may have to spend $300 billion toimport crude oil and related products by 2014, acting as a hugedrag on the Chinese economy. China is rapidly catching up withthe U.S. to become the largest emitter of green house gases, andthe leading contributor to one of the greatest global environmentalproblems – global warming. The potentially destructive implica-





Over a number of signal texts, IstvánMészáros has lucidly pointed out the struc-tural obstacles to human emancipation un-der capitalist relations of production. Thelimits to meeting human needs or overcom-ing alienation are a consequence of the nec-essary internal relations of the capitalistsystem. The products of our labour aredenied us, take the form of commodity-capital, and are appropriated andaccumulated as money-capital by a classof non-producers. This class of capitalistsrules over us through the particular formof liberal democratic states, where we areall formally equally as citizens but sociallyunequal as political and economic actors.In this sense, capital rules politically, butalso over our entire social being: behindthe veil of appearances of liberal freedoms,the real social relations of capitalism are“unfreedoms” for the working classmajority. These limits are social and par-ticular to the capitalist economic system.They can only be overcome by moving“beyond capital.” These are the themes ofMészáros’ two great works, Marx’s Theoryof Alienation (1970) and Beyond Capital(1995).

In Mészáros’ view, moreover, there isinternal to “late capitalism” a structural cri-sis. As capitalist markets become more uni-versal and intensive on a global scale as aregulator of social life, and neoliberalismas an ideological doctrine gains influence,the worst features of capitalist societiestowards militarism, ecological degradation,human alienation and exploitation are ac-centuated. This is the world drawn in hisclarion Socialism or Barbarism (2001).And he continues that point here arguingthat there is “a big problem, misrepresentedas fully successful globalization. For in re-ality various constituents of global capitalare still pulling apart. The various nationalentities have interests of their own whichthey try to assert…. The structural crisis ofthe capital system continues to assert itselfin this way.”

What, then, are some of the character-istics and contradictions of neoliberal glo-

Global Imbalances,Global Crisis? Greg Albo

balization, and the dilemmas they pose forthe left today to put in perspective theforeboding vision – if animated by thesteadfastness of the revolutionary – whichIstván Mészáros has given us?

First, neoliberalism is not simply a setof market-oriented policies or New Rightgovernments; rather it is the social formof rule specific to this stage of capitalism.

Neoliberalism began as a policy re-sponse to the economic and political crisisof western capitalism in the 1970s. It wasthe ideology of the free market and thepolitical project of powerful internationaland American private economic intereststo defeat an upsurge in working class mili-tancy and rebellious “third world” states.But neoliberalism is now much more thana strategy of the new right: neoliberalismis foremost the way the ruling classes ruletoday; it is the way social relations andpolitical domination are reproduced withinand across the international state system.

Neoliberalism is, within this widerframe of reference, a particular re-organi-zation of the practices of the state that givesprecedence to: inflation-targeting inde-pendent central banks; the re-orderingindustrial and commercial policies andstate apparatuses toward international com-petitiveness and the internationalization ofcapital; fiscal constraint and tax cuts;means-tested welfare policies; and disci-plinary free trade regimes. Together thesetransformations decrease democratic andstate capacities to determine the usage ofthe social surplus inter-temporally betweenpresent consumption and future investmentand inter-sectorally between public andprivate sectors in the composition of output.These planning capacities have beenallocated to financial capital and thebureaucracies of large corporations.

Neoliberalism is also the reproductionof certain distributional norms: annualwage increases being kept below the com-bined rates of inflation and productivity,thereby shifting an increased share ofincome to profits; increasing inequalities

within the working classes through higherlevels of labour reserves, longer hours ofwork, the informal sector and precariouswork, and sharp cuts in welfare transfers;increased reliance on credit and financialmarkets for current and future livingstandards; and privatization and user feesincreasing the commodification of dailylife.

Neoliberalism has come to encompassthe world market and the institutions gov-erning the international state system. It isregistered in the increased internationali-zation and financialization of capital; thevast extension of foreign exchange trans-actions and secondary derivatives markets;and the expanded disciplinary role of in-ternational financial markets overeconomic calculations in local and nationalstates. The international governance insti-tutions of the World Trading Organization,Internatioal Monetary Fund and WorldBank have supported these developmentsand enforced limits on the autonomy – andeven sovereignty – of national socio-eco-nomic policies that might impinge on theinternationalization of markets.

Neoliberalism has secured new politi-cal conditions for the production of value,the circulation of capital, and the distribu-tion of social output. This in no way canbe seen as mere symptoms of capitalism incrisis.

Second, neoliberalism has accentu-ated the unevenness of capitalistdevelopment.

The economic crisis that overtook theadvanced capitalist countries with the de-cline in profits and end of the postwar boomin the mid-1970s cut growth rates in theadvanced capitalist countries through the1980s. Since 1990 the uneven developmentof the world market has continued to re-veal itself. Growth rates in the U.S. pickedup in the “boom” of 1993–2000 to about3.5 per cent. However, across the businesscycle a modest slowdown in U.S. accumu-lation is also apparent. The U.S. upturn wasa result of internal demand stimulus →



but also enormous foreign capital and mi-gration inflows from the rest of the world.The brief recession of 2001–2002 wasquickly erased by the extraordinarily loosemonetary policy and the huge budget defi-cit from tax cuts (the deficit at about $560billion and 4.5 per cent of GDP for 2004).With U.S. growth since then back to the 3–4 per cent range, it has been one of the twokey engines propelling world accumula-tion. In contrast, the EU hadgrowth of just over 2 per centof GDP from 1991–2001, andhas stagnated further since. Ja-pan experienced a sharp reces-sion after the asset meltdownof the early 1990s, followed bya deflation that until recentlystill has had nominal GDP ac-tually shrinking. With U.S.output growth since 2000 twiceas fast as that of Europe andmuch more so against Japan,neoliberalism has re-estab-lished the place of the U.S. atthe centre of the world market.

The second engine toworld economic growth has been the emer-gence of China as a global capitalist power.It has grown on average at over 9 per centa year since the late 1970s and DengXiaoping’s famous turn of “building a so-cialist market with Chinese characteristics.”China continues to grow at this pace, al-though dependent on cheap peasant labourbeing drawn into urban sweatshops, foreigncapital, exports and the tying of the yuanto the dollar. China now constitutes closeto 15 per cent of world GDP, and hasbecome the new “workshop of the world.”This growth has spilled over into other partsof East Asia and India. Alongside thestimulus provided by the U.S., Chinesegrowth is why world economic growth hasrisen to 4–5 per cent over 2003-2004.

In the rest of the world, the story hasbeen quite different. Except for a few oilstates and the last two years, accumulationin the Middle East, Africa, Latin Americaand much of Eastern Europe has beendismal over the period of neoliberalism andhas, in many cases, registered a fall in percapita GDP.

The production of new value-addedduring the period of neoliberalism is moreuneven and punctuated by cyclical crisis

than the postwar period, but it is not out ofline with historical patterns. Most impor-tantly, the restructuring of capital and classrelations of neoliberalism has restored prof-itability. The internal contradictions ofneoliberalism – the over-reliance on theU.S. and China for net new effective de-mand in the world market, the tendenciesto economic slowdown and working-classausterity, the scale of the consumer credit

expansion and mortgage lending, the sus-ceptibility to energy price shocks, structuralpayments imbalances, marginalization ofperipheral zones – need closer examina-tion. The possible fissures withinneoliberalism reside here.

Third, the patterns of trade and capi-tal flows in the world market have sus-tained increasing asymmetries in globaleconomic balances and the circulation ofcapital between the three main blocs in theworld market.

The central register of the imbalancesin the world trading system is the U.S. cur-rent account deficit, currently running atabout $650 billion for 2005 and 6 per centof U.S. GDP (accumulated to about $3 tril-lion since 1982). This is matched by sur-pluses in the rest of the world, and espe-cially East Asia. For example, Japan stillexports about a quarter of its total exportsto the U.S., and ran a current account sur-plus of just under 20 trillion yen for 2004.East Asian lending, as well as the accumu-lation of huge foreign exchange reservesin the form of U.S. dollar holdings andtreasury bills, has supported the U.S.’s debt

levels and current account. To take thesame example, Japan had over 400 trillionyen of international assets of various kindsat the end of 2004, with portfolio invest-ment at over 200 trillion yen, and foreignreserves approaching 100 trillion yen, heldlargely in U.S. assets and dollars. If currenttrends stabilized or continued to grow overthe next decade as they have been, U.S.net liabilities to the rest of the world would

range from 80–120 per cent ofGDP (levels that are quite un-sustainable for other countries).

The U.S. trade deficit is aneffect of long-term patterns ofaccumulation and relative com-petitiveness, and cyclicalgrowth and exchange rate pat-terns. The catch-up of the post-war boom and the 1980s meanta structural decline of the U.S.competitive position and an in-crease in East Asia and Europe.This was seen, in part, throughthe steady movement towardconstant trade surpluses in Ger-many, Japan and then the

“Asian tigers.” But the superior productiv-ity performance in the U.S. from the 1990son has improved U.S. relative unit labourcost performance (although the rapid in-crease in Chinese competitiveness in highervalue-added goods is adding a newpressure). Hence the dynamic of competi-tive austerity in the world market – the U.S.pushing down the wages of its workers toimprove competitive position, and the restof the world doing the same to maintainexport market share because of weak do-mestic accumulation – that has been inte-gral to neoliberalism.

As a consequence of the structural im-balance, the U.S. is absorbing about 80 percent of global savings to cover its tradedeficit. Something in the order of $1.5 bil-lion per day is sought on international capi-tal markets largely through corporate bondsor the sale of U.S. treasury bills (about halfof all T-Bills being held outside the U.S.).As well, global foreign exchange reserveholdings of U.S. dollars has beendramatically increasing, growing fromabout $1.7 trillion in 2001 to $3.7 trillionat the end of 2004. The largest holders ofU.S. assets and dollars are China, Japanand other East Asian countries.



As surplus capital flows into Chinafrom the rest of Asia through the extensionof subcontracting networks there, China inparticular has been massively increasing itsreserves and purchases of U.S. dollarassets. For 2004, China had new foreigninvestment of almost $50 billion, and itsforeign exchange reserves exceeded some$650 billion. In a sense, along with Japan,China is bearing the central risk of U.S.dollar decline. This is one of the main prac-tical reasons for the sustained pressure forappreciation of the yuan; pressure is com-ing from Japan, the EU, and especially theU.S., which is running a trade deficit ofsome $160 billion per year with China. Butfor many reasons China is reluctant to re-value, and will remain cautious about lib-eralising exchange rates.

A structural U.S. trade imbalance cov-ered by capital inflows in the form of bor-rowings is clearly unstable for the worldeconomy in the long-run. It depends onforeign private sector and governmentagents willing to hold U.S. assets denomi-nated in U.S. dollars, with both the valueof the assets and the dollar under pressures.Losses would – as they already have beenwith dollar devaluation and weak U.S.equity markets over the last 4 years – beunavoidable. It is either that or to continueto maintain the existing values and pricesand the U.S. as “importer of first resort.”

Fourth, the current phase ofneoliberalism continues to disorganize theleft, and a sustained period of forming anti-neoliberal alliances contesting neoliber-alism and the new trade architecture “inand against” national states needs tounfold.

A number of structural transformationshave altered the organizational foundationsfor left politics: the changes in the natureof employment towards more networkedproduction processes and fragmented serv-ices provision; the increasing internationalcirculation of capital; and the internal dif-ferentiation and stratification of the work-ing class. Neoliberalism has contributed tothese pressures. Left alternatives have alsosuffered historical defeats, for good and ill,in the end of authoritarian communism andthe realignment of social democracy towardincreasing accommodation of the marketand existing distributional relations. Thesedevelopments have shifted working classcapacities in terms of workplace organiza-tion, political leadership of oppositionalforces and ideological inventiveness. As aconsequence, left politics under neo-liberalism has oscillated between, on theone hand, a “politics of chaos” that in factreflects the disarray of left forces and or-ganizational weakness, and, on the other,short-term political calculation to avoidfurther social erosion.

Above all, then, the socialist left mustbe actively fostering the formation of newpolitical agencies. One necessary aspect ofsuch an engagement is class reformationthrough revitalization of unions, and thelinking of unions to workers in new sectors,the struggles for gender and racial equal-ity, and the marginalized outside “normal”work processes. It is also necessary to ex-periment in organizational convergencebetween the remnants of the independentLeft, civic organizations, and the sectionswithin social democracy that remainedcommitted to a transformative project.Such a reformation needs to be groundedin the building up of educational, commu-nicative and cultural resources indispensa-ble to forming the political identitynecessary for a “new socialism” for thetwenty-first century, pre-figured here inMészáros’s calls for a new international-ism. And concrete anti-neoliberal alliancesforged in struggle to defeat particular ini-tiatives and make inroads againstneoliberalism will make such a process ofreformation “organic.”

Without such new democratic collec-tive capacities, the barbarism that isneoliberal globalization will indeed con-tinue to yield its daily horrors from one partof the globe to another. R

Greg Albo teaches political economy atYork University, Toronto.

In his interview, István Mészáros raises important issues aboutthe significance of the combined tendencies toward a decline inthe weight of manufacturing in overall employment, the intensi-fied commodification of labour (casualization), and the emergenceof the public sector as ‘the leading edge in the labour movement.’These comments merit additional reflection.

The neoliberal shifts in the nature of employment being raised,for instance, represent more than material defeats for the workingclass: they also impact dramatically on class fragmentation andclass formation. Three dimensions of this seem especially impor-tant with regard to understanding the present impasse of labour:

Restructuring Labour,Restructuring Class Formation

Sam Gindin

the radical changes in the ways in which workers, especially or-ganized workers, gain access to consumption; the internal stratifi-cation of the working class; and the determination of capital andstates to commercialize, and not just privatize, social services.

ACCESS TO CONSUMPTION

The relative decline in the weight of unionized manufactur-ing workers in the economy does not in itself account for the de-cline in this sector’s leading role. It is, I think, important to seethat the development of neoliberalism did more than →



attack workers; it also included particular structural changes thatsupported the internalization of certain neoliberal values, withimplications for class formation and class resistance.

While real wages of workers in Canada and the U.S. havegenerally grown very slowly (if at all), the private consumption ofworking class families has in fact continued to grow. The stagnat-ing wages have been overcome by more family members workinglonger hours, and through increased borrowing. At the same timepressures to reduce social consumption have undermined the le-gitimacy of taxes, while the threat to public pensions has led work-ers to depend more on private savings, mutual funds, and the suc-cess of the stock market. What all these responses have in com-mon is that workers who formerly looked to collective solutions –struggles on picket lines, in the street and electorally – now in-creasingly address their material needs through individualizedsolutions.

None of this was of course inevitable; it reflected one of theconsequences of the economic and political defeats we sufferedover the past quarter century. In the absence of left alternatives,neoliberalism structured working class options toward mechanismsthat reinforced individual discipline and negatively affected theformation of working class consciousness, expectations, and col-

lective capacities. In general, it is this, and not the inability toconsume, that the left must address if it hopes to revive theliberatory potential of the working class. The unequal distribu-tion of consumption is a different problem, and it is addressedbelow.

CLASS STRATIFICATION

We spend a great deal of time – for obvious reasons – on theneoliberal impact on the class divisions of wealth and income.We need, however, to speak more to the divisions that haveemerged within the working class itself. The ‘reserve army’ is nolonger just the unemployed but the legions of casually employed.Relatively well-paid auto workers are disciplined by the warningthat layoff may result in finding other employment, but at jobswith drastically lower wages and even worse reductions in ben-efits. Low-paid service workers are vulnerable to resentment

against the privileges unionized workers seem to have; nor canmost of these workers make up for their already low wages throughworking harder or longer and going into debt as discussed above– the barrier may be that corporate ‘flexibility’ denies them regu-lar hours or, as in the case of single mothers with small children,there are no husbands and sons to increase the working hours andno collateral on which to get cheap loans.

Class solidarity can hardly be a natural development in sucha context. Nor is it likely to emerge – at least to the extent re-quired in today’s harsh climate – out of the more unionized sec-tors trying to organize the unorganized in order to maintain theirown collective bargaining standards or to strengthen their institu-tions through increasing the number of dues-paying members. Ifa breakthrough in solidarity does come, it can only arise out ofsome combination of a revolt amongst those who were formerlythe most exploited, and a corresponding new understandingamongst relatively stronger sections of the movement. Such a newreorientation will require moving from viewing ‘organizing’ in-strumentally (what does it do for me?) to seeing it as part of build-ing a working class with the capacity to act independent of capital(how does it fit into class power?).

THE PUBLIC SECTOR AS THE LEADING EDGE?

The potential for public sector unions leading the next stageof the battle lies in their acting on the specific ways in which theyare different from private sector unions. In the private sectorneoliberalism meant an intensification of the competitive logicthat was already in place; in the public sector it means imposing acommercial logic where a different logic, based on social needsand equality, had a significant degree of legitimacy. In the privatesector, restructuring could quite easily hide behind market dic-tates; in the public sector, restructuring more clearly involves class-based choices (in spite of claims on the part of states that ‘themarket made us do it’).

The neoliberal restructuring of the state therefore raises po-litical issues that, while affecting the working class as a whole,immediately and most directly impact on state workers. The ques-tion is whether the public sector unions will respond to the re-structuring they face in traditional union terms (make the bestaccommodation possible) or open up the potentials in the moreexplicitly political nature of the restructuring. To the extent thatthey identify their own struggle with the larger attack on workingclass needs, they may in fact come to be the ‘leading edge’ of thestruggle. But, again, this will require more than an opportunisticappeal to the importance of social services. It will mean articulat-ing and mobilizing around a counter-ideology that is both radi-cally democratic: the issue is not just more expenditures, but howwe provide the services involved and include affected communi-ties in these decisions. It must also be radically anti-capitalist: wecan’t really defend and build on social services unless we are readyto challenge not just the present nature of the state but the privatesector it is ultimately based on. All this is necessary to under-stand Mészáros’s assessment, being raised again today, of ‘so-cialism or barbarism?’. R

Sam Gindin is the Packer Chair in Social Justice at York University.



Son Volt, Okemah and the Melody of RiotSony, 2005

Jay Farrar, along with former bandmate Jeff Tweedy (now the creative forcebehind the very popular band Wilco), arewidely regarded as the chief innovators ofthe “alternative-country” music genre.Uncle Tupelo, their now defunct band, re-leased a couple of brilliant albums beforeFarrar and Tweedy separated. Tweedy,leading Wilco, went on to produce somefabulous albums. The most notable col-laborates with the legendary Billy Braggand reworks a variety of previouslyunreleased Woody Guthrie tunes.

Farrar went on to produce a few criti-cally acclaimed solo albums and also de-veloped Son Volt, his latest band. Okemahand the Melody of Riot (2005) is Son Volt’slatest album (the first to be released inseven years). Though it lacks the musicalsynthesis achieved by other Son Volt al-bums (perhaps because it was composedwithout the original Son Volt members), itshould nevertheless be considered one ofthe best albums of 2005. Its anti-imperial-ist and revolutionary messages are compa-rable to those expressed in Steve Earle’sThe Revolution Starts Now (my review ofEarle’s album appears in the January/Feb-ruary 2005 issue of Relay).

Like Earle, Farrar is a product of a po-litical history that he seeks to change. Asthe Bush Administration tries to concealor rationalize the death, destruction and suf-fering that has resulted from its invasionand occupation of Iraq, Earle, Farrar, andmany progressive-minded cultural workersare engaging in aesthetic political strugglesto raise a critical anti-imperialist conscious-ness. Given Son Volt and Steve Earle’s leftpolitics and vocal opposition to the Ameri-can empire’s war against Iraq, they are bothlikely uncomfortable with the musicindustry’s tendency to categorize them onlyas “alt-country” performers.

Nevertheless, these musicians’ abilityto combine excellent alt-country musicwith an intelligent anti-imperialist politicshas earned them a devout following. Earle

and Farrar’s popular musical success mightalso be attributed to audiences identifica-tion with these performers on and off-stagepersonas: Earle appears to audiences as aworking class troubadour, a storyteller forthe industrial proletariat, while Farrar ap-pears as an consciousness raising politicalartist, a middle-class student that sets radi-cal poetry to music.

Okemah and the Melody Riot is morepolitically committed than most of Farrar’sprevious work (although I would argue thata political perspective has always beenpresent in his albums). Perhaps becominga parent has made Farrar more concerned

about the fate of his children, which mustbear the future consequences of the capi-talist system. Bandages and Scars, ac-counting for how capitalism’s past (andstruggles against it) have shaped thepresent, has Farrar singing: “the words ofWoody Guthrie ringing in my head.” Thetrack also seeks to reinvigorate the strug-gle toward a much different system: “Blameit on the system / Those that came before /Updated consciousness / Knocking ondoors.”

Okemah and the Nelody Riot is notnecessarily an album of protest songs. It isbetter listened to as a collection of reflec-tive tunes that react to the horrific local andglobal effects of American-led capitalistimperialism. A lyric from a track entitledEndless War pokes holes in the Americanempire’s moral rationalization for its oc-cupation of Iraq and accounts for the

media’s ability to bring devastating war-images into homes: “When morning bringsnews of wasted life / When video bringsfootage of children dying / No moral faceto the endless war.”

The DVD that accompanies the albumfeatures Farrar’s most overtly politicalsong: “Joe Citizen Blues.” This song is apowerful indictment of how war is foughtby the majority of working people to ben-efit a small and protected minority of po-litical and capitalist ruling elite: “Leaderssleep while thousands die / To protect fromweapons of imagination / The ruling classdoesn’t fight the war / Stock options andfortunes to be made.” Lyrics like this make“Joe Citizen Blues” one of the most poi-gnant anti-war songs ever written.

The album not only criticizes the hor-rors of imperialism, but also inspires hopefor different future. Anticipating the event,leader or movement that will unite and ig-nite a global effort to sweep the rot of theexisting imperial system away, Farrar, in“World Waits For You,” sings: “In thisdarkest hour / A brave face will break soon/ The world waits for you.”

“6 String Belief,” my favorite track onthe album, is a striking call to revolution-ary arms: “The declaration framer statesrevolution sets the course straight / It wasnecessary then and it’s necessary now / Cor-ruption in the system a grassroots insur-rection / Will bring them down, will bringthem down.” “6 String Belief” also seesrock and roll music as part of the revolu-tionary struggle: “Rock and roll around myhead alive and kicking / Rock and rollaround my head 50 watts happening / Rockand roll around my head like a six stringbelief.”

Son Volt fuses revolutionary politicswith exceptional music in Okemah and theMelody Riot. Toronto fans might want tocatch Son Volt on October 17th, 2005 atthe Opera House. R

len bush is a member of the SocialistProject in Ottawa where he works for anational union as a way to maintain his allconsuming addiction to CDs.

len bush

Six String BeliefCulture Front


The Socialist Workers Party, 1960-1988.Volume 1: The Sixties, A PoliticalMemoir, 354p.Resistance Books, Sydney, 2005Order from: www.haymarketbooks.org

These days, it is commonplace on tel-evision and in the movies that when ac-counts of “the sixties” are portrayed, thepolitical radicalism of the period is oftendown-played and represented only in termsof the rise of cultural anarchism and “per-sonal” liberation. Although changes inpopular culture were important features ofthose times, they are not by any means thewhole story, not by a long shot, as BarrySheppard’s memoir reminds us.

The period Sheppard writes aboutsaw one of the deepest radicalizations inAmerican history, which curtailed theruling class’ ability to manage its war inVietnam. Tens of thousands of people, es-pecially youth, questioned the very exist-ence of capitalism itself. Hostility towardracism and against all public expressionsof prejudice, the widespread acceptancetoday of women’s equality and gay rights,first developed wide-spread support thenare now part of the political fabric of soci-ety. Part of neoliberalism’s agenda is toroll-back the progress that resulted fromthose times. The absence in popular cul-ture of representations of the intense po-litical struggles of that period, often led bysocialists, is part of the process of trying tomake us forget our own history.

The author, a socialist, is active in Cali-fornia and is a regular contributor to theAustralian Democratic Socialist Party, jour-nal, Green Left Weekly. A leader of theAmerican Socialist Workers Party (SWP),he was also editor of its weekly, The Mili-tant. He left the SWP in 1988.

The book can be read on several lev-els, such as a socialist explanation of thetimes; an inside look at the functioning ofthe SWP from 1959 until 1973; or how the

party formulated its policies around its in-tervention in the tumultuous events of thoseyears, when the group went through a rapidexpansion to become a major force on theAmerican left. The SWP has its origins inthe 1928 purges – by the world’scommunist parties under the direction ofStalin – of the followers of Leon Trotskywho had challenged the bureaucratic de-generation of the Russian Revolution. Theparty was founded by James P. Cannon inthe hope that it would displace the Ameri-can Communist Party as an effective forcein American politics. Cannon had been aleader of the International Workers of theWorld before the First World War and wasa leader of the early Socialist Party, fromwhich he led a split to help found the earlyAmerican Communist Party.

At the time Sheppard joined the SWPin the 1950’s, the party was led by FarrellDobbs, who has an important place inAmerican labour history as the leader ofthe Teamsters during the city-wide strikesin Minneapolis in 1934. Dobbs left theTeamsters to become a full-time nationalleader of the SWP, a remarkable step forsomeone who could have easily been anational leader of Teamsters, with all theprivilege and recognition such a careermove would have brought. Dobbs was amentor to Sheppard in later years.Sheppard discusses Dobbs’ approach toaccomplishing a transition in the SWP’sleadership after Cannon had re-located tothe West Coast, where he still exercisedstrong personal influence in the party,sometimes in ways which undercut Dobbs’position as the new party leader. This wasnot generally known in the organization atthat time. For Dobbs, the collective func-tioning of the leadership and the injectionof new blood into it was an absolute prior-ity. The process of including the representa-tives of the new generation, who had comeinto the party at the end of the fifties – andof which Sheppard was a part – washandled by Dobbs in a conscious and

Barry Sheppard’sBarry Sheppard’s “The Sixties”“The Sixties”Ernest Tate

systematic manner as part of the properfunctioning of a socialist organization. Thebook is dedicated to Dobbs’ memory.

A key question raised by the book iswhat kind of organization is required byworking people to bring about socialismand how are such organizations defined,especially in light of the experience of theSWP’s later evolution and decline. TheSWP of today is virtually unrecognizablefrom what it was in the sixties. It is hostileto the movement against the war in Iraq,for example, and has withdrawn from anyserious engagement with the rest of the left,which it dismisses as being “middleclass.”The SWP in Sheppard’s book stands as asharp condemnation of what the SWP hasbecome. Sheppard is now working on thesecond volume of his memoirs, where hewill take up the reasons why he thinks thishappened, which will cover the periodfrom1973 to 1986, when he left the group.

Born in 1941, Sheppard was at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology ona partial scholarship studying mathemat-ics when he became a socialist and politi-cally active.

He was part of the new, younger radi-cal generation who were moving towardsocialism as the anti-communist witch-huntwas subsiding in the fifties. I first met Barryin the late 1950s in New York, shortly afterthe founding of the Young SocialistAlliance, the youth organization of theSWP. I was an active supporter of the SWPduring those years and belonged to theLeague for Socialist Action (LSA), itsorganization of co-thinkers in Canada.

Later, in 1969, I worked with Barrybriefly in Europe – when he was assignedby the SWP to work with the leadership ofthe Fourth International (FI) – during whatwere difficult times for him and his com-panion, Caroline Lund. The FI was themain international organization to whichmost of those who called themselves,“Trotskyist,” belonged. I had been in Eng-land since 1965, “loaned” to the FI by the

http://www.haymarketbooks.org/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=Haymarket&Product_Code=MSTP


LSA as part of our contribution to helpovercome the division in the FI supportersin Britain. Jess MacKenzie and I helpedget the International Marxist Group (IMG)established in 1967 (the book has a factualerror, indicating that the IMG was alreadyin existence before I got there). I rememberBarry being appalled – as were all my Ca-nadian and American comrades who cameto Europe at that time – at the lack of or-ganizational infrastructure in the FI. Itseemed a very feeble organization. Few ofthe national sections had offices or staff.It would only be later that I realized thatthis issue was more complex than it firstappeared and was a reflection mainly ofhow the groups viewed politics and not justa problem of resources.

Barry and Caroline arrived in Brussels,just as a heated debate erupted in the FIaround the question of orienting the sec-tions towards guerilla warfare in LatinAmerica. Sheppard highlights the issuesinvolved in that discussion and locates theproblem of the heated atmosphere in thediscussion, in the impatience of the youth,of whom many had been recently recruitedto the organization, especially in Franceduring the 1968 May events. Barry andCaroline felt socially and politically iso-lated. Six years later the FI formally cor-rected its mistake on Latin America, butby that time many sections, especially inArgentina had suffered severe repression.

Sheppard grew up in New Jersey andcame to political consciousness in the1950’s, during Senator Joe McCarthy’switch-hunt. He conveys very well the op-pressive atmosphere of those times whenthe witch-hunt was at the centre of poli-tics. Socialists were isolated from theirworking class base. Militants in the unionswere purged; the SWP-led opposition inthe Maritime Union, for example, wascrushed; many were black-listed andhounded out of the industry, never to workthere again. Throughout the country, tensof thousands of people lost their jobs, es-pecially teachers. The unions had been re-structured by the government under theTaft-Hartly Act of 1947 to render them lesseffective in opposing government policy.

Despite the reactionary character ofthose years, there were important changesin the fifties, which anticipated the radi-calism of the next decade. More and more

Americans publicly refused to appear be-fore the House Un-American ActivitiesCommittee (HUAC), in an open challengeto the witch-hunt. Cultural conformity be-gan to break down with the appearance ofthe literature of the Beat Generation. Con-formity in politics began to ebb with therise of the black struggle in the southernstates. Moreover, a major blow to the U.S.ruling class took place at the end of thedecade, not on the soil of the U.S., but afew miles off the coast of Florida in Cuba,where the workers and peasants radicalizedin reaction to U.S. intervention, leading tothe overthrow of capitalism.

The book describes how the SWPmade solidarity with Cuba against U.S. in-tervention a priority, and organized a

defense campaign. Before the U.S. govern-ment imposed its travel ban to Cuba, lead-ers of the party traveled there many timesto gain an understanding of what was tak-ing place. The party’s paper, The Militant,became a major source of information foranyone wanting to find out the truth aboutthe revolution. The SWP was behind thesetting up of the Fair Play for Cuba Com-mittee (FPCC), a defense organization en-dorsed by many American intellectuals (asuccessful committee was also set up inCanada). Part of the media used the pretextof Lee Harvey Oswald’s membership in theorganization to try and witch-hunt theFPCC at the time of President Kennedy’sassassination.

Sheppard stresses that the two primaryfactors which drove the radicalization ofthe sixties were the struggle of blacksagainst racism in the South – which beganwith lunch-counter sit-ins, later spreadingto the north, especially to the black ghet-toes – and the rise of the mass movementagainst the Vietnam War. These two mightyforces opened the door for the entry of othersocial movements onto the political stage,for example, the emergence of the BlackNationalist movement and the feministmovement. The SWP was the backbone ofthe campaign for abortion rights as the1970’s opened up, as Sheppard points out.In California, the Chicano movement firstappeared on the scene. As the sixties cameto a close, the birth of a new movementnever seen before in history made its ap-pearance, around the struggle by gaysagainst sexual repression, homophobia andfor democratic rights. It was with this lat-ter phenomenon that the SWP had the mostdifficulty in coming to terms, even thoughit adopted a position of fully supporting it.

The SWP was one of the first groupson the left to support Malcolm X and ex-plain the significance of the new movementof Black Nationalism for the left. For ex-ample, at a time when many on the left weresuper-critical of Malcolm X, The Militantprinted many of his major speeches, be-coming an invaluable source of analysisand information for the new radicalizinggeneration about the new movement he led.Sheppard initiated one of the last interviewsgiven by Malcolm, a few weeks before hewas assassinated, where Malcolm soughtto overcome characterizations in thecapitalist media of him being a “racist” andexplain his differences with the Nation ofIslam, from which he had broken. It is clearthat as Malcolm moved further and furtheraway from the Nation of Islam, he beganto modify his thinking to include all theoppressed in capitalist society and was evenre-examining the idea of “black national-ism”, and that after his trip to Africa, hewas thinking of a more general strategy forblack liberation.

The SWP also campaigned to stop thepersecution of Robert Williams, the blackmilitant NAACP leader from Monroe,North Carolina, who was forced to flee theU.S, under false accusations of kidnapping.

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A country-wide man-hunt was con-ducted by the FBI in the U.S. in cooperationwith the RCMP, in such an inflammatorymanner as to ensure he would be killed.Williams was helped out, in Canada, mainlyby Verne Olsen, who was the head of theFair Play for Cuba Committee, and his wifeAnn Olsen, who gave Williams shelter andwho, as Sheppard says, arranged “an un-derground railroad and brought him toCanada and from there to Cuba where hewas given political asylum.”

A major narrative in the book is a de-scription of how the SWP developed itsapproach to the anti-war movement, whichhad exploded onto the scene in 1965 witha demonstration of 20,000 in Washington,organized by the Students for a DemocraticSociety (SDS). The “largest student dem-onstration in U.S. history up to that point,”Sheppard says. Later, SDS, the largest stu-dent based radical organization in the coun-try, would make an ultra-left turn and a co-lossal error by opposing the organizing ofmass anti-war demonstrations.

In the beginning, the traditional peacegroups, Sheppard explains, saw the Viet-nam issue to be too radical and buckledunder heat of anti-communism. He saysthis was a legacy of the lingering effects ofMcCarthyism, which had also permeatedthe leadership of the AFL-CIO underGeorge Meany, who had declared that op-position to the war was unpatriotic, a policyit maintained over the course of the war.

It was the socialists, mainly the SWP,CP, and other smaller groups, who foughtthe government on the Vietnam War issuethrough the tactic of building coalitions toorganize mass actions against the warwhenever possible. While the book goesover some of the ground covered in FredHalstead’s important 1978 book,“OutNow! A Participants Account of the Ameri-can Movement Against the Vietnam War”(Monad Press, 1978), it provides additionalinsights into SWP’s strategy, as it soughtto keep movement focused on getting thetroops out of Vietnam immediately. Thebook is worth reading for this alone. Alsodescribed is the struggle between the maingroups in the coalition, who sought to winit over to their respective points of view,the mass of activists who were in neitherof the left organizations, with the CP try-ing to influence the new movement into

supporting electoral politics and, especiallyin election years, supporting the Demo-cratic Party under the theory of “lesser evil”politics. It’s an argument that continuestoday in the movement against the war inIraq.

The SWP’s basic orientation in fight-ing to end the war was to try to build thebroadest possible movement which wouldinclude all those who opposed the war; tokeep the movement mass-based and inde-pendent of the capitalist parties and focusedon bringing the troops home. The SWP sawthis as the best way to defend the principleof self-determination for the people ofVietnam and end the war.

Over the decade, the mobilizationsagainst the war would become larger andlarger, involving millions. They were oftenpreceded by large assemblies (which issuedthe call for them) with over 3500 activistsin attendance, the great majority of whomdid not belong to any of the politicalgroups. Even though all the groups in thecoalition were small organizations – includ-ing the SWP, which at its peak had a maxi-mum membership, in my estimation, ofaround 2000 – the power of the anti-warmovement became such that it began toinfluence all sectors of society, causingeven sections of the ruling class to ques-tion the wisdom of President RichardNixon’s policy of expanding the war.Sheppard mentions the SWP had a mem-bership of fewer than 600 in 1959, aboutdouble what it had when I joined in 1955.By 1972, over 1,100 people attended itseducational conference in Oberlin, Ill., andthe next year, it held its largest conventionever, with more than 1400 in attendance.

Barry Sheppard’s next volume will at-tempt to explain why the SWP, since theperiod he covers in this book, squanderedall the promise and hopes of those times,to end up in the isolation it finds itself intoday. As a contribution to a discussion ofthat balance sheet, I suggest that a fewcritical errors began to creep into our wayof thinking, which set us on a wrong course.Our main error was in political economy.We developed an incorrect assumption,which postulated that as the Vietnam warended, a major crises would be engenderedin the American economy causing a con-comitant rise in general class conscious-ness, in the “heavy battalions of the work-

ing class,” as we used to say then. A con-viction in the revolutionary possibilities ofthe working class was fundamental to SWPthinking. We kept looking for the workingclass to enter the fray. But as Sheppardpoints out, the radicalization “did not reacha stage of a generalized radicalization ofthe working class… (and) this was the pri-mary cause of the winding down of theradicalization.” Workers as an organizedforce were mainly absent. The 1950’s anti-communist campaign in the unions still hadsufficient influence to make the workersvery cautious; in addition, the success ofthe government in pursuing domestic poli-cies to keep the economy expanding, evenif modestly, re-enforced this passivity.

But in the very early seventies, in-spired by some left developments in theSteelworkers and in the Mineworkers, theSWP began to look for opportunities whereradical ideas might get a broader hearingand began, for the first time, to sell itsweekly paper outside plant gates. The bookrecords speculative discussion in the lead-ership about a possible rise in class con-sciousness. However, when the war ended,instead of a major crisis, one of the longestexpansions in the history of U.S. capital-ism took place, with the working class stillremaining relatively passive.

The SWP had been looking to the kindof radicalization that had occurred in the1930’s with the rise of the Congress of In-dustrial Organization (CIO). It had failedto recognize the important changes whichhad taken place within U.S. capitalism,giving it more resiliency than many on theleft thought was possible, and allowing thesystem to overcome what we thought wereits inherent “contradictions.” Moreover, theinability of the SWP to see this and correctits mistake and to adjust its wrong analysis,meant the organization was unable tocorrect or modify its later, all-consuming,“industrial turn.”

Members were strongly encouraged togive up their jobs or school and go into thefactories, a tactic driven forward by theleadership in such a single-minded manneras to virtually ensure many of the memberswould abandon the organization. After themembers had been told by Jack Barnes(who succeeded Dobbs as leader) that the“workers would march out of the plantsunder the red banner of Communism,” try-


ing to function as socialists in an atmos-phere of a low level of class consciousnesswas a shock. The leadership had set theman impossible task, and increasinglyblamed them for the problems in imple-menting the new “turn.” I should enter amea culpa here: I too supported the neworientation, but I later came to theconclusion that the way it was being im-plemented was extremely destructive.

I think these problems were also com-pounded by the way we viewed ourselvesas an organization. Over time, we began tochange our definition of the organization.When I joined, the leaders were clear thateven though the word“party” was in thetitle of the SWP, itwas not by any meansa party, in the Marxistsense of that word,that is of being a massworking class party,or a party that had thesupport of an impor-tant part of the work-ing class – the correctdesignation, in myopinion, of what con-stitutes a revolution-ary party. The SWPnever got further –like all the groups onthe left who want tolead the working classto socialism – thanbeing a propagandagroup. The major partof its energy was con-sumed in explainingcomplex ideas to small numbers of peo-ple. In 1965, the SWP was very clear onthat reality. “We knew we were a smallrevolutionary propaganda group, not yet areal revolutionary party,” Barry Sheppardsays (p. 146).

However, as we moved into the 1970s,this concept of “propaganda group” be-came more and more blurred. It began tobe replaced with the notion that the SWPitself indeed was “the party,” and that it waswithin the range of possibilities that it couldwin the working class directly to itself,instead of recognizing that such a party hadyet to be built and would most likely bequite different from what the SWP was

then.As I have mentioned earlier in this ar-

ticle, the SWP, for its size, had a large su-perstructure, and was greatly admired forthis in the FI. This was comprised of animpressive headquarters in New York,which provided space for its print shop andbook publishing operation and offices forthe staff for a weekly newspaper and itsinternational and theoretical publications.Its branches across the country each hadfull time organizers. At its peak, I estimate,it had around sixty people – not well paid– on staff. A major part of the SWP’s re-sources were allocated to keeping the or-

ganization functioning. I remember JoeHansen, who had been Leon Trotsky’s sec-retary in Mexico in the 1930s and then acentral leader of the party, responsible forits international work, wryly commentingthat they had an apparatus and facilities foran organization ten times its size.

Definitions such as “nucleus” or “em-bryo” as in “nucleus or embryo of a revo-lutionary party” started to be more andmore used to describe the organization.Throughout the book, Barry uses theseterms to describe the SWP, but I questiontheir usefulness. Ernest Mandel, for manyyears the main theoretician of the FI, alsoused these terms, but in a journalistic way,

perhaps to describe the reality of the FI atthat time, in his 1983 address on “vanguardparties” at the University of Manitoba.

But how do we then deal with the co-nundrum of defining the various socialistgroups on the left to determine, in advance,which of them will become a revolution-ary party? When these terms are appliedto political organizations, there is an im-plication of what will take place in thefuture. How do we know? Surely, only his-tory will determine which organization was“the nucleus” or “the embryo” of a revolu-tionary party, a qualification Mandelmakes? In Marxist political economy,

should there now bea new category ofpolitical organiza-tion? For thosegroups who callthemselves “revolu-tionary,” aren’t theyall simply propa-ganda groups, somemore revolutionarythan others? Arethere objective crite-ria for determiningwhat is a “nucleus”or “embryo” of arevolutionary party?A group’s rogrammeand its relationship tothe working class arevery important, butsurely it is what a so-cialist group doesthat has the mostimportance. Usingsuch expressions as

“nucleus” and “embryo” only cloud ourthinking and are a form of self-delusion.For those of us who were supporters of theSWP, our emphasis on building the orga-nization and seeing “the party” as a solu-tion to everything allowed politicaleconomy to become less and less impor-tant.

The SWP has paid a heavy price forgetting its politics – and I believe its or-ganizational concepts – wrong. BarrySheppard has made an outstanding contri-bution to the discussion in the left aboutwhy this happened. I look forward to hissecond volume. R


High in the Chilean Andes along theborder with Argentina are a group of threeglaciers that provide the only water to riv-ers of the arid Huasco Valley below, in theAtacama desert where grapes, avocados,citric, and tropical fruits are produced.Now, through the neoliberal policies thatprotect and strengthen transnational corpo-rations, this region, called Pascua Lama, isfacing the very real threat of both losingits water supply and further contaminatingthe air, water and soil with toxic runoff andvapours from a mining project that pro-poses to “relocate” the glaciers in order toestablish an open-pit mine to extract gold,silver and copper. The perpetrator of thisventure is Canada’s Barrick Gold.

The Pascua Lama project wasapproved in 2001 by Chile’s ComisionNacional del Medio Ambiente(CONAMA). According to Barrick Gold,the 17.6 million ounce reserve of ore willtake 21 years to extract through open-pitstrip mines. These mines will require theuse of cyanide, arsenic and mercury thatwill directly contaminate the air, soil andwater of the area. The ore, however, is lo-cated beneath three glaciers that Barrickplans to “relocate” with hydraulic machinesto a fourth glacier, the Guanaco IV, twokilometers away. Some experts in the fieldof glaciology predict that the extra weighton the Guanaco glacier will increase therate of deformation and fragmentation. Dr.Cedomir Marangunic, glaciologist at OhioState University, says that what is knownfor certain is that the dust produced fromthe relocation of the glaciers will be de-posited on the Guanaco glacier causing itto absorb more heat and melt faster. Thiscombination of environmental contamina-tion and destruction will be devastating forthe people who live in the region and relyon the land for their survival.

Pascua Lama,Barrick Gold,and Neoliberalism

Carolyn Watson

The basis of this obvious disregard forthe environment, and the people living inthe region, is rooted in the neoliberal eco-nomic model implemented in the 1970s and1980s by Chilean dictator AugustoPinochet that – after dismantling popularorganizations through flagrant violations ofhuman rights – opened the country up to

being sold off pieceby piece, making itextremely difficultto protect natural resources and the envi-ronment when doing so conflicts with pow-erful transnational corporations. UnderChilean law, foreign investors are treatedthe same as Chilean investors and there-fore face few legal hurdles. In order foranyone to begin extracting minerals frombelow the earth’s surface, the individual orcompany only has to register the proposedextraction with the Ministry of Mining andbegin working the claim within four yearsof filing. Owners of the land do not havesubsoil rights to minerals below unless theyfile a claim with the Ministry of Mining.If damage to the environment or peopleoccurs as a result of the process, repara-tions must be made, but there is no law inexistence that requires assurance that nodamage will occur, or to prevent damage.Chile and Argentina also have a miningtreaty that allows regions extending across

the border to be exploited as one entire re-gion instead of two regions belonging totwo separate countries. Barrick is wellaware of the timelines and the flimsy leg-islation connected to mining. While Barrickdoes not plan to begin extraction of oreuntil 2009, it hopes to be able to begin con-struction of the mine by the end of 2005(four years after filing its intent), after fi-nalizing “fiscal and taxation matters.” Thisfinalization should not be a problem asBarrick has a reputation for incorporatinglocal political and finance figures into itsdirection wherever it operates. Barrick has

also promised some farmersin the region $60 million overtwenty years in an attempt toweaken local opposition toPascua Lama.

Making contributions tolocal politicians, however, isnot Barrick’s only question-able business practice. The

company was originally founded by Saudimillionaire and arms dealer AdnanKhoshiggi, who has been linked to the Iran-Contra arms scandal and is a personalfriend of George Bush Sr. The chairmanand cofounder of the company is CanadianPeter Munk, who in the 1960s was the mainfigure involved in an insider trading scan-dal regarding a stereo factory that he con-trolled – he dumped his stock just beforethe company declared bankruptcy. Munkbegan to recover his fortune and his repu-tation in the 1980s, however, when heteamed up with Khoshiggi on hotel ven-tures. Munk later invited George Bush Sr.to Barrick as an honourary board memberin 1995 and donated a substantial amountof money to the University of Toronto tobuild the Munk Centre for InternationalStudies, which rewarded Bush Sr. with anhonourary degree from the University of

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Toronto in 1999. Given the history of someof Barrick’s most important and influen-tial board members, it is hardly surprisingthat potentially threatening or displacing afew thousand Chileans high in the Andeswould raise concern.

The only political figure to condemnthe project to this point has been TomásHirsh, the Humanist candidate of a largecoalition of progressive anti-neoliberalgroups in the upcoming presidential elec-tion. Chileans have, therefore, decided tofight the project themselves. Young people,

farmers, some local politicians and evenpriests have protested against Pascua Lama,lobbied politicians, and appealed to theinternational buyers of fruit from the re-gion to put pressure on the Chilean gov-ernment. The theory is that if fruit becomescontaminated through the process of ex-tracting ore, Chile will lose its export mar-ket, therefore, calling attention to this pos-sibility both domestically and internation-ally may help to halt the project.

Time and again, proponents ofneoliberalism laud the benefits of free and

unrestricted markets for both individualsand transnational corporations, but PascuaLama is another example, among many,that neoliberalism serves to benefit only bigbusiness. Will the Chilean State realizethis and act to save its citizens andenvironment, or will the Chilean peopleconfront Barrick Gold and Pinochet’slegacy on their own? R

Carolyn Watson is a PhD candidate in LatinAmerican History at the University ofMexico.

THE WSF’S DEVELOPING POLITICALFRAMEWORK

A political analysis of the conjuncture surrounding the Ca-racas World Social Forum finds much more aggressive USAforeign policies toward the Americas. This is coupled with anintense popular resistance and mobilization against neoliberalpolicies and the empire’s intervention in the region. Sites ofpopular resistance, as we can observe in the cases of Bolivia,Ecuador, Uruguay and Argentina, indicate a sizable struggleacross the entire continent. There also exist mobilizations againstthe CAFTA in Central America and renewed efforts of theZapatistas for gaining a higher profile in Mexico. The BolivarianDemocratic Revolution is at the epicenter of this process andCuba, of course, is the eternal obsession of the empire.

The crisis in the Workers Party (PT) in Brazil has added anew dimension to the political reading of this region. Since beingelected to office, the PT has managed to adopt an independentforeign posture and has helped enhance the vast resurgence ofsocial movements in the Americas, both at the level of socialstruggle and the electoral. Yet the PT’s predicament representsa crisis that has been brewing for a long time. In fact, issuesrelated to transparency, ethics, relationships between parties andsocial organizations, as well as the role of the state and visionsof democracy, have propelled this recent corruption crisis. Ofcourse, the quandary of the PT also illustrates issues that affectthe entire spectrum of the left. All of these struggles havemanaged to keep both neoliberals and an aggressive U.S. courseof action at bay in most of the southern region of the continent.

Keeping this analysis in mind as a context for the develop-ment of the WSF, the Polycentric World Social Forum and the

Carlos Torres

THE AMERICAS SOCIAL FORUM:THE AMERICAS SOCIAL FORUM:How it fits into the World Social Forum process

II Americas Social Forum should address not only the big themesof the WSF, but also issues related more to the region itself.This estimation is the outcome of the previous open consulta-tion process organized by the Organizing Committee of theupcoming Forum; in other words, how the big ideas must beput into practice.

A STEP FORWARD

The last WSF realized two specific developments: A meth-odological innovation, which included the self-organized events,and territorial social building. These ideas encompassed →

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the concept of polycentrism or a decentralized forum, yet fol-lowed a main global agenda which includs the specificity ineach region in which the WSF takes place. Although all of thesedevelopments denote a step forward, they also raise new chal-lenges related to the articulation and networking of social orga-nizations and movements. Another dimension of thispolycentrism relates to the need of enhancing the politicaldebate both in the WSF organizing process and in the CaracasForum.

In addition to embracing new challenges, the WSF is alsodevoting time and resources to develop and expand the organi-zational process in relation to the building process of the Poly-centric Forum. This is fundamental to the current organizationalprocess, but also key to understanding the thematic, sectoraland geographic expansion of the Polycentric Social Forum.

The WSF is a very complex process both organizationallyand politically, but there is a desire to work together to over-come limited resources and time. Nevertheless, internationalsupport will be crucial to make sure that the forum process keepsthe course. In assessing this new process, one can say that in theprocess of building the next Social Forum there is a strong con-vergence of the ‘old’ and the ‘new.’

WHAT IS THE WORLD SOCIAL FORUM?

The World Social Forum (WSF) is an open meeting placewhere social movements, networks, NGOs, and other civil so-ciety organizations opposed to neoliberalism and a world domi-nated by capital, or by any form of imperialism, come togetherto pursue their thinking to democratically debate ideas, to for-mulate proposals, share their experiences freely, and networkfor effective action. Since the first world encounter in 2001,the WSF has taken the form of a permanent world process seek-ing and building alternatives to neoliberal policies. Thisdefinition is in the Charter of Principles, the WSF’s guidingdocument.

The WSF is also characterised by its plurality and diver-sity. It is non-confessional, non-governmental and non-parti-san. It proposes to facilitate decentralised co-ordination andnetworking among organizations engaged in concrete actiontoward building another world – at any level from the local tothe international – but it does not intend to be a body representingworld civil society. The World Social Forum is not a group,nor is it an organization.

The World Social Forum has an International Council, cur-rently consisting of over 150 networks and social movementswith regional and national articulations, whose role is to facili-tate and provide orientation to the process.

A BRIEF HISTORY

There have been five world encounters of the WSF (2001,2002, 2003, 2005 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and 2004 in Mumbai,India) each one increasing in numbers and participation with

MAIN THEMES OF THE NEXT WSF

Power, politics and struggle for social emancipation• Imperial strategies and peoples’ resistance• Resources and rights for life: alternatives to the current model of predatory civilization• Diversity, identities and worldviews• Work, exploitation and reproduction of life• Communication, culture and education• and, because of their significance, Gender and Diversity were defined as transversal axes.

For more information:www.forosocialmundial.org.vefsmcaracas@[email protected]

VI World Social Forum andVI World Social Forum andII Americas Social ForumII Americas Social Forum

24-29 January 2006 Caracas-Venezuela

Venezuela will be the host in January of next yearfor the Polycentric WSF. Delegations from theAmericas and other regions of the world will uniteunder the idea that...

Another World is Possible!

broad expressions of diversity in the peoples, struggles and pro-posals.

Throughout the world the process has held various regional,thematic and national forums calling for “Another World is Pos-sible” in diverse presences and contexts.

In the continent of the Americas the first Forum took placein Ecuador in 2004, where 450 activities were held attended by15 000 registered participants and 900 organizations, from 60countries of the five continents of the world. This Forum pro-vided the opportunity to position broad hemispheric debatesand make visible autonomous thinking and the richness of thestruggles and diversity that characterise the social movementsand initiatives. To strengthen and follow-up on this process, itwas decided that the II Americas Social Forum will be celebratedin Caracas in January 2006.

The upcoming WSF and Americas Forum is a unique op-portunity for Canadians of all sectors, organizations and com-munities to attend a Hemispheric event in which movementsand organizations from the Americas will come together. Con-vergence and networking along with exchanges of experiencesand debates are among the main features of the Caracas Forum.Panels, conferences, workshops, along with cultural and musi-cal events, will provide a space for everyone, a prelude or apreamble to the future in which ‘there will be room for all.’ R

Latin America

http://www.forosocialmundial.org.ve


The success of the Brazilian Partido dosTrabalhadores (PT), or Workers Party,acted as a beacon to the left worldwide.Now it has been revealed that it wasgoverning on the basis of systematiccorruption. Hilary Wainwright reportson how the quest for power perverted thePT and subverted democracy.

‘When there is such an overwhelmingdisaster and you see yourself as part of thisdisaster, you begin to question your wholelife. Why so many years of sacrifice andstruggle?’ Congressman Fernando Gabeiraexpresses the feelings of many petistas –members or supporters of the BrazilianPartido dos Trabalhadores (PT) – whenthey heard that the party they built orsupported as an instrument of democratic,ethical politics, was governing on the basisof systematic corruption.

The Brazilian left is in a state of pro-found shock and confusion. Over the pasttwo decades hundreds of thousands ofpeople have devoted their lives to creatingthe PT as a principled and forceful instru-ment of social justice against one of themost corrupt and unjust ruling elites in theworld. Now they are having to come toterms with their own party’s lack of princi-ple.

The exact details of the corruption arestill being investigated. It is generally ad-mitted that the cúpula (group at the top) ofthe PT bribed political parties of the rightto join their alliance in Congress and gavemonthly payments to congressmen of theright to support their legislation. (The PTpresident, Lula, won with 67 per cent ofthe vote but the PT only has a fifth of theseats in Congress – though it is the largestparty.)

As for the legislation itself, Lula’s gov-ernment pushed through neoliberal reformsof which Tony Blair would be proud. Theseincluded the reform – effectively partialprivatisation – of an extremely unequalpublic pensions system, which nevertheless

Lula’s LamentThe Crisis of the PT in Brazil

Hilary Wainwright

left the inequalities almost untouched; andamending Brazil’s relatively radical, albeitcontradictory, 1988 constitution to facili-tate the creation of an independent bankwith the freedom to raise interest rates ashigh as it wants. There have been socialreforms – for example, a basic (but verylow) income for all poor families – thoughthese are hardly adequate to the problems;and many of them, along with the relativelyprogressive aspects of Lula’s ambiguousforeign policy, did not need Congressionalapproval.

The corruption also extended to thePT’s strategy for winning the election. This,it turns out, was based on a caixa dois (lit-erally ‘a second cash till’ – a secret slushfund) whose sources of donations seem tohave included businesses contracted by PTmunicipal governments, public companiesand private companies seeking governmentcontacts. The publicist responsible forLula’s 2002 advertising campaign admittedhe had received money from these PT fundsthrough an illegal account held by the PTin the Bahamas.

There is evidence of personal corrup-tion. The PT treasurer received a LandRover; the finance minister and Trotskyist-turned-monetarist, Antonio Palocci, madea suspiciously vast speculative gain on ahouse. But far more important than corruptindividuals is the corruption of democracyand of political goals and values as a resultof the instrumental political methodologyof ‘any means necessary.’ It is significantin this respect, that the mastermind of allthis was José Dirceu, an ex-guerrilla leader,responsible indeed for kidnapping the Ger-man ambassador and a devoted party man.He had been party president since 1994 andthe architect of Lula’s election campaignsfrom 1994 to the victory of 2002. It’s un-likely that his record will show any sign ofpersonal corruption.

The evidence of corroded ends is stark.The revelations of political corruptioncame after it had become clear that the

government had moved from a supposedlytactical acceptance of the IMF terms to awholehearted acceptance for neoliberalorthodoxy. Interest rates are, at 19 per cent,among the highest in the world. The gov-ernment continues to generate an internalsurplus far high than that demanded by theIMF, which no longer feels it has to havean agreement with Brazil. It can rely onthe economists who determine policy in thePalácio do Planalto.

Perhaps the most crucial signal that theleadership had broken the bond at the heartof the original PT project – that of achiev-ing social justice by building on the powerof popular movements to do so – was Lula’sfailure to turn his electoral mandate andhuge international support into a demo-cratic counter force to drive a hard bargainwith the IMF. ‘He could have got muchbetter terms in order to pursue the socialprogramme for which he was elected. Atthat point, the people would have been onthe streets behind him,’ says Plinio deArruda Sampaio, a founder of the partywith Lula and now, in his 70s, standing inthe party’s presidential election, to test ‘forthe last time’ whether the party retains anyintegrity. It’s a widely shared belief.

It’s not just Brazilian leftists who areshocked and disoriented by what has beenhappening in the elegantly designed corri-dors of office – but patently not of power –in Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia. Lula and thePT are not a Soviet-style ‘god that failed.’But many western leftists, myself included,vested great hopes in the PT’s ability tocombine, in Plinio de Arruda Sampaio’swords, ‘the building of popular movementswith occupying spaces in the politicalsystem.’

This was seen as a strategy for social-ist change more powerful than the failedparliamentarism of west European socialdemocracy, yet building on struggles forthe franchise and other liberal politicalrights in a way that the Leninist traditionrarely did. The disaster of the Lula →

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government is not just a repeat of the clas-sic scenario of a social democratic partythat talks left in opposition and is pressuredinto compliance when it gets to office. ThePT’s particular origins in mass movementsresisting the military dictatorship of the1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, along withstrong traditions of popular education andself-organisation, produced something new.

One illustration of the PT’s innovativepolitics was its relationship, historically,with the landless movement MST – amovement that occupied the land of the richlatifúndios and then tried to use it for co-operative agriculture. The PT both sup-ported this movement and was supportedby it, while at the same time respecting itsautonomy. Another illustration was the waythat when the PT won the mayoral elec-tions in cities such as Porto Alegre in RioGrande do Sol, Rio Branco in the Ama-zon, Sao Paulo, Recife and very recentlyFortaleza in the north east, it sought to‘share power with the movementsfrom whence we came.’ Thesewere the words of Celso Daniel,the mayor of Santo André, whowas murdered in 2001 for tryingto stop corruption. The PT did soby opening up the finances of themunicipality to a transparent pro-cess of participatory decision-making through which localpeople had real power. One of themain driving motives behind thisexperiment was to expose andeliminate corruption.

How, then, could the party ofparticipatory democracy havebecome the party of corruption,following the methods of everyother Brazilian party before it? Iwent to Brazil to find out.

I had been to Brazil severaltimes to write about the partici-patory political experiments ofthe PT and to engage in the WorldSocial Forum hosted by the thenPT government of Porto Alegre.What had happened to all thisdemocratic creativity? Was theemphasis on participatory de-mocracy really only a feature ofthe state of Rio Grande Do Solwith it’s highly developed civilsociety? For a reality check I be-

gan in Fortaleza, where a radical PT mem-ber, Luizianne Lins, had stood for mayorand won against the wishes of the leader-ship; Jose Dirceu had flown in from SaoPaulo to campaign against her. I attendedmeetings of citizens deciding on their pri-orities for the city’s plan to negotiate overthem with Luizianne. The partcipation wasstrong, pushing municipal policies in amore egalitarian direction. The co-ordinator of the Office for ParticipatoryDemocracy, Neiara De Morais explainedhow they were developing the politics ofparticipation: ‘popular particicipation isabout more than the budget: we aim for itto run through every aspect of the munici-pality.’ They also have a process of train-ing or ‘formacão,’ explaining the workingsof the government machine, especially thefinances and helping ‘people to becomefully conscious of the process, improving,taking control over it.’ Clearly, in Fortaleza,2,500 miles from Porto Alegre, here was

a participatory administration that hadtaken the process deeper than its originaland world famous home. My next stop hadto be Sao Paulo and then to Rio to talk withpeople who had sounded the alarm aboutsigns of a leadership that bypassed thisgrass roots radicalism at an earlier stage.

I visited Chico De Oliveira, Marxistsociologist and a founder of the PT, fromPernambuco, like Lula. He had recentlywritten an excoriating letter of resignationfrom the PT over the government’s eco-nomic policy. His analysis was comprehen-sive. First he stressed the context of theBrazilian state, which gives greater pow-ers of patronage to its politicians than pos-sibly anywhere else in the world, offeringhuge opportunities for clientelism. Thepresident has 25,000 jobs in his gift. TheFrench socialist president, FrancoisMitterand, by way of contrast, had 150. Theelectoral system, in which people tend tostand not on party lists but as individuals,

also makes for weak parties. Pa-tronage and bribery has been anormal way of getting measuresthrough congress, and throughthe assemblies of regional andmunicipal government, whichmirror the presidential system.

It was exactly this systemthat the participatory budget wasfashioned to attack. The idea wasthat instead of bribery and pa-tronage, the mayor or governor(and, it was imagined, eventuallythe president) would rely on aprocess of shared decision mak-ing with institutions of popularparticipation. This would be un-derpinned by a process of directand delegate democracy thatcouncillors and regional deputieswould be unable to ignore be-cause their voters were part of it.A visit to Porto Alegre confirmedthis. ‘We ruled for 16 years with-out bribery,’ said Uribitan deSouza, one of the architects of theparticipatory budget, both inPorto Alegre and for the state ofRio Grande Do Sul.

The essential principle guid-ing Uribitan, Olivio Dutra andthe other pioneers of participa-tory budgeting was the recogni-

Latin America


tion that electoral success does not on itsown bring sufficient power even to initiatea process of social transformation but thatan electoral victory can be used to activatea deeper popular power. Such an approach,without immediately developing new insti-tutions, would have led at least to the kindof mobilisation that petistas expected fromLula in dealing with the IMF and a hostilecongress and Brazilian elite. Indeed, onegovernment insider told me that bankersexpected it too and were reconciled to sometough bargaining. But from Lula’s 1994election defeat (when many had been look-ing forward to a PT government) to thesuccessful campaign of 2002, the leader-ship of the party was not in the hands ofpeople with a deep commitment to partici-patory democracy.

D’Oliveira stresses the emergence ofa group of trade union leaders, includingLula, whose approach was essentially oneof pragmatic negotiations. He argues thatin the 1980s, when the independent tradeunion movement was highly political as itsevery action, however economic or sec-tional in intent, came up against the dicta-torship, they appeared as radical politicalleaders. But as the militant trade unions, inthe car industry especially, faced risingunemployment and declining influence, theinfluence of leaders was one of caution andpragmatism. Another group in the post1994 leadership – for example, ex-guer-rilla José Genuino – had reacted to the fallof the Berlin Wall by dropping any beliefin radical change and adopting a variant ofTony Blair’s ‘third way,’ weak social de-mocracy. And finally there was Dirceu,whose break from the Communist Party inthe 1970s had been over the armed struggle,not its instrumental, ends-justify-meansmethodology.

Dirceu’s end – shared by every petista– was ‘Lula Presidente’. For Dirceu, thiswas by playing ruthlessly the existing rulesof the game. For most petistas it was byalso mobilising and educating the peopleto be ready to take actions themselves. Butthe difference in methodology was over-whelmed by the desire for a PT victory.People who tried openly to warn of cor-rupt deals with private companies, likeCésar Benjamin, a leading official of theparty until 1994, were rebuffed as disloyal.

‘We believed too much in Lula,’ con-

fesses Orlando Fantasini, a deputy for SaoPaulo. A radical Catholic, Fantasini is partof a ‘Left Bloc’ of around 20 deputies anda few senators that was quick to demandan investigation into the corruption revela-tions. Many of these are now likely to joinother parties, most notably the PSOL, aparty formed by PT deputies who split fromthe party over the pension reforms.

Throughout the 1990s, Lula personi-fied petista hopes for social justice andpopular democracy. If Dirceu and the in-creasingly tight cúpula demanded greaterautonomy, or argued for a centralisation ofthe party at the expense of the local nucleiin the name of a Lula victory, their demandwas granted. In election campaigns, politi-cal campaigning in the market places andstreet corners gave way to marketing on theconventional model, activist campaigninggave way to paid leafleters. Meanwhile,Lula drank bottles of whisky with thebosses of Globo, Brazil’s Murdoch-likemedia monopoly, thinking he could getthem on his side. The PT had establishedBrazil’s first mass political party accord-ing to its own ethics of popular democracy,but after the disappointment of 1994 – andeven more so of 1998 – it accepted the rulesof Brazil’s corrupt political system.

The PT’s reputation for democracy hasbeen based partly on the rights of differentpolitical tendencies to representation at alllevels of the party. But from the mid-1990s,according to César Benjamin and others,Dirceu started to use the slush fund tostrengthen the position of the ‘CampoMajoritário’ (literally, majority camp),building a network of local leaders whodepended on him. This, along with the au-tonomy demanded and granted for Lula’sgroup, meant that the PT’s democracy be-come ineffectual as the majority tendencymonopolised central control and no othermechanisms of accountability were put inplace.

As I listened to party activists and ex-activists at every level, from the organisersof Fortaleza’s new-born participatory de-mocracy to a veteran leftist advising Lulain the Palàcio do Panalto, it became clearhow interlinked the two scandals are. Theneoliberalism of the government and thesystematic corruption in the organisationof the party go hand in hand. The steadystrangling of democracy – which is, after

all, what corruption is about – meant thatthe party lost all autonomy from the gov-ernment. It also meant that all the mecha-nisms linking the party to the social move-ments and therefore acting as a politicalchannel for their expectations, their pres-sure and their anger had been closed down.Even Marco Aurelio Garcia, co-founder ofthe PT and Lula’s chief advisor on foreignaffairs, felt he had no way of calling theeconomics minister to account.

What now? Everyone recognises thatthe corruption disaster is a huge defeat.‘Our strategies have to be for the longterm,’ says José Correio Leite, from thenow-divided left tendency Democratic So-cialism (DS). After the party’s presiden-tial elections, assuming the CampoMajoritário wins – and it is assumed thateven now corruption is playing a part intheir election campaign – he and most ofthose who have been supporting Plìnio deArruda Sampaio will leave the party. Somewill join the PSOL but all will be workingto create a widely-based ‘socialist move-ment’ or some such framework that willnot see electoral activity as its priority butrather will return to working with socialmovements.

‘We must find a way of consolidatingand developing the real PT traditions. Wecannot let the cúpula destroy this,’ saysLuciano Brunét, who is supporting fellowPorto Alegren, Raul Pont, for party presi-dent on a platform of political reforms ofthe party and the state.

All agree ‘the situation is open – veryopen’, as a group of Plinio supporters putit. They also stressed the importance ofinternational discussions. Across the world,there is an experimental left refusing theidea that all that remains for the left is akind of Blairism, or an abandonment of anyengagement with electoral politics. Thedisaster facing the PT requires us not toturn away and search elsewhere for a newpolitical holy grail, but rather to learn withour petista or ex-petista friends from theirdefeat and deepen the innovative but in-complete answers they were beginning togive to questions that face us all. R

Hilary Wainwright is editor of RedPepper.

Latin America

http://www.redpepper.org.uk

http://www.redpepper.org.uk


There has been considerable debate on the left in NorthAmerica about the current situation in Haiti. As part of this debate,there have been accusations that those of us critical of Aristidehave somehow sold out to the forces of evil. The situation inHaiti is dire and deserves a serious debate rather than accusationsand counter accusations. Some of these accusations have beendirected against Alternatives. Over the years, Alternatives, aMontreal-based solidarity movement, has stood by several popularmovements in Haiti and extended its communication skills to anumber of community media and journalist associations. Backhome in the meantime, Alternatives has helped a number oforganizations from the Haitian Diaspora in Canada to partici-pate in the campaign of solidarity for Haiti, including pressingthe Canadian government for more generous aid policies andmore support for a genuine democratic process involving thesociety at large, and not just the political elites.

More than 200 years ago, the African slaves of Haiti defeatedFrench and later Spanish and British imperialism. The first re-public of the hemisphere had a very difficult beginning. Franceand Britain, then later the United States never gave in to what wasperceived as a mortal threat to the interests of the slave-owners.The Africans in Haiti were also split between various factionscombining race and class factors, which did not help to create theconditions for a democratic state. In the early part of the 20thcentury, the U.S. intervened directly with military occupation andrepression. Resistance continued, however and in the 1930s, anew populist movement came about under François Duvalier (thefather). After flirting with the popular classes, Duvalier estab-lished his own dictatorship, courting an African “middle class”and enlisting Haiti in the Cold War led by the United States.

THE RISE & FALL OF ARISTIDE

In the 1980s, Duvalier (the son) was unable to crush the risingtide of people’s resistance to the dictatorship. Out of this, acharismatic priest active in the shantytowns of Port-au-Prince, JeanBernard Aristide became the spokesperson of the movement. In1990, he was swept into power through Haiti’s first democraticelections. But U.S. imperialism and the local ruling group couldnot accept this democratic verdict. A few months later, the militaryoverthrew Aristide opening a new cycle of violence and repres-sion during which many of the popular leaders were executed,jailed or exiled. In 1994 under Haitian and international pressure,the U.S. was forced to bring back Aristide from his Washingtonexile. Artistide’s movement, Lalavas, which was a sort of rain-bow alliance during its first incarnation, began to fumble after thereturn of a transformed President who was mostly concerned with

Haiti, the Struggle ContinuesHaiti, the Struggle ContinuesPierre Beaudet

reaffirming his control rather than engaging in the political, socialand environmental reconstruction of the country. Many supportersof Lavalas broke away, including most of the left factions that hadsupported him initially. Dissidents of various stripes became thetarget of Aristide, such as the famous journalist-agronomist JeanDominique and many other popular leaders. Subsequent electionswere rigged to the extent that most of the opposition boycottedthe futile exercise. In the last presidential election in 2000, lessthan 15% of the Haitians bothered to vote (for René Preval, the“stand-in” for Aristide). By 2003 and 2004, populardemonstrations, strikes and riots multiplied, creating more distur-bances. In the meantime, the economy went bankrupt, increasingAristide’s drive toward the side of drug dealers who transformedHaiti into a major smuggling operation.

DESCENT INTO HELL

All throughout that period, the big international players kept out,creating around Haiti an invisible wall of isolation and neglect.None of them were interested really in supporting the democraticopposition. For the United States particularly, Haiti had to be savedfrom itself only to avoid a major influx of boatpeople. Later, theold gangs of Duvalierists and ex-military thugs engaged into theirown destabilization with the help of the Dominican governmentand mafia. They came out with their guns and kicked Artistide’ssupporters out of several cities. Port-au-Prince became ungov-ernable. Then the panic-button was hit. In February, U.S. Marinescame to “surgically remove” Aristide who was shipped to Africa.In a few days, the coup was endorsed by the UN under a jointresolution to the Security Council presented by France, the U.S.and Canada. Later a UN-mandated Brazilian-led contingent wassent to protect a “transition” in principle managed by a non-electedgovernment. The left and many of the popular movements thathad led the democratic struggles in the last decade came out ofthis series of extraordinary events quite stunned. Some decided toside with the transitional government in the hope of rebuilding aminimum space for democratic governance. Others aligned withAristide defending the principle of national sovereignty above andbeyond anything else, including the crimes that everyone knewAristide had committed. Some of the radical groups refusedhowever to side with one or the other and announced that theywould fight “on two fronts.” In the meanwhile, the situation hasgravely deteriorated. Most of the members (with exceptions) ofthe “interim government” have been ineffective as it was predictedin the beginning. Aristide has succeeded in joining hands withsome of the hard-nose gangs in the capital to create havoc. Manyof his supporters on the other hand have been arbitrarily repressed,even those who had nothing to do with crime or drug trafficking.


In addition to the misery and famine inflicted on the Haitian people,insecurity and violence now prevail in many parts of the country.Tons of promises by the “international community” to clean themess have been left into the air.

THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY IS NOT MY FRIEND

Aristide, who has been suppressed by the United States, has triedsuccessfully to present himself as a “martyr” and a victim of im-perialism. For sure, he was punished, as were several others whohave dared to confront at one point or the other the arrogance ofthe powerful. He is not alone in that family that includes genuinepopular leaders but also distorted populist thugs such as Noriega,Saddam Hussein, Robert Mugabe and others. In their desire tooverthrow these regimes, imperialism is much less concerned withdemocracy as it is with the protection of its own interests. While“bad” dictators are overthrown, “good” dictators are supported

and promoted by Washington when they are able to ‘do the job’properly, like in Saudi Arabia, Colombia or Indonesia. In any case,should solidarity movements support Aristide because he was pun-ished by the USA? Well-known Haitian left activists like CamilleChalmers say that in no way can they support Aristide even thoughthey are highly critical of the way he was expelled and more over,of how the international community has handled the situation sincethen. The sovereignty of the nation has to be preserved, and at thesame time, the Haitians want democracy and social justice, notthe coming back of the thugs. How to do that? Chalmers con-cludes that there is no escape from rebuilding an alternative throughthe popular movements that struggle and propose. There is noquick-fix and the task is tremendous. This is where solidarity move-ments should stand. R

Pierre Beaudet is the Executive Director of Alternatives.

Haiti: Getting the Facts RightCharles Demers & Derrick O’Keefe

With Aristide elected, then kidnapped,where ‘we’ stand is not the question: Areply to Pierre Beaudet.

Comrades: We cannot, as NorthAmerican progressives, fall in to a defenseof the thuggery, autocracy and brutality ofthe Viet Cong bandits – even if we are un-comfortable with elements of the Ameri-can intervention in Vietnam. Instead, wemust insist on building the civil societymechanisms needed to ensure the mostdemocratic Republic of South Vietnampossible.

Comrades: It’s useless to call for thereturn of the strong-arm Bonapartist, HugoChavez. We must work within the new po-litical context, under President Carmona,to build a viable, participatory Venezuela.

Comrades: Cuba – I mean come on.What can I say about Cuba?

With an endless list of populist, demo-cratic, and even authoritarian third worldleaders deposed in the “post” colonial eraby the wealthy countries of the North tograve ends and with disastrous conse-quences in the South – Mossadegh,Lumumba, Allende, Sukarno, and, yes,even the ill-conceived, vacuum-inducingouster of the barbarous Saddam Hussein,which has set the context for decades of

confessional violence in what was once Iraq– at least one lesson of history ought to beabundantly clear for the left.

That lesson is that, even with the bestof intentions, empire-builders drunk on hu-bris have not built and cannot build safety,democracy or security over and against thewills of subject peoples (even if the dubi-ous claim that this is what they’re doing istaken at face value, which it oughtn’t to be).

The failure to learn this lesson is thecrux of the problem with the recent contri-bution of Pierre Beaudet to the discussionon the orientation that progressives andsolidarity activists should adopt towards thesituation of French, American and Cana-dian mandated regime change Haiti; agreater problem even than his bungling ofsimple, basic, and straightforward facts.(Beaudet has, for instance, René Prevalrunning as a “stand-in” for Aristide in theelections of 2000, when in actuality, thelatter overwhelmingly won that electionhimself).

On the facts of the matter, the recentlyreleased book Canada in Haiti, written byYves Engler and Anthony Fenton, rigor-ously exposes Ottawa’s financial, politicaland military role in the February 29, 2004coup d’état and subsequent occupation, aswell as the facts on the ground in Haiti.

Beaudet gives scant attention to these

matters, preferring to recycle unsubstanti-ated (and un-cited) blanket assertions of“rigged elections” under Aristide. In fact,rather than explicitly addressing the left’sand his own organization’s position onHaiti, Beaudet sets up a familiar and un-convincing straw-man: that those activelyinvolved in opposing the occupation ofHaiti and calling for the return of constitu-tional order are uncritical apologists forAristide and the shortcomings of his gov-ernment

The facetious, hypothetical polemicsadvanced at the opening of this essay withregard to Vietnam, Venezuela and Cuba,are meant as more than simply cheeky rhe-torical devices; we are trying, instead, tohighlight the absurdity of a debate whichought to have been easily resolved withcommon sense, but instead consumes theLeft on issues such as Afghanistan, Iraq andHaiti.

Put simply: it is a sad, dangerous daywhen the imperatives and priorities of “firstworld” NGOs, churches, trade unions orother associations (no matter how well-meaning or benign) come to override thesovereignty of elected and, even, unelected“third world” governments. Beaudet’sanalogizing Aristide to Hussein andNoriega is mendacious and absurd, but, inthe end, moot; even in those horrific →

http://www.alternatives.ca/en


What is happening right now in Haiti is probably Canada’sworst foreign policy crime in the last 50 years. The Canadiangovernment helped plan and carry out the destabilization of Haiti’selected government, culminating in the February 2004 coup d’état/kidnapping of President Jean Bertrand Aristide by U.S. Marinesand Canada’s Joint Task Force 2. Since then, the coup-installedgovernment and its death squad allies have waged an all-out waragainst Aristide’s Lavalas movement and its supporters with thefull and enthusiastic backing of Paul Martin’s Liberal government.

Canadian police lead the UN police mission (UNPOL) re-sponsible for training, vetting and overseeing the new HaitianNational Police (HNP). Under their watch, hundreds of formerHaitian Army (FAd’H) officers, death squad members and indi-viduals who “have been involved in drug rackets, kidnappings,extra judicial killings or other illegal activities,” have been inte-grated into the HNP, according to the Catholic Institute for Inter-national Relations. The result has been massacres, violent andindiscriminate raids on poor neighborhoods, summary executions,attacks on journalists and peaceful demonstrators and arbitrarymass arrests. Thousands have been killed and thousands morehave gone into hiding or taken exile in another country. Whenasked about reports of these abuses by human rights groups andmainstream news agencies, Foreign Affairs Minister PierrePettigrew has scornfully dismissed all evidence as “propagandawhich is absolutely not interesting.”

Canada is also deeply involved in the functioning of Haiti’sjustice system. Deputy Justice Minister Philippe Vixamar is adirect employee of the Canadian International DevelopmentAgency (CIDA) and was assigned to his position by the Agency. In an interview, Vixamar revealed that the U.S. and Canadiangovernments play key roles in the criminal justice system, includ-ing paying high-level government officials. The prison system is

Malign Neglect or Imperialism?NGOs Blind to Canada’s Crimes in Haiti

Nikolas Barry-Shaw

cases, progressive, internationalist prin-ciples dictate the opposition to destabili-zation, regime change from outside, andforeign intervention.

The overriding fact of the matter is:the recognized and sovereign nation ofHaiti carried out legal elections in the year2000, a process more decisive and perhapscloser to ideal than elections carried out inanother former slave republic of the Ameri-cas that same year. In the midst of his term,the legitimate president was kidnapped byhistorically hostile interlopers who ferriedhim into an exile from which he has beenunable to carry out his mandate. The clock

stopped then for Haitian democracy; itstarts again when he comes back. With America pretending to controlover Iraq, many “progressives” in theUnited States are trying to make the bestof a “bad” situation; at least one sectariansocialist newspaper has called for Iraqis tomake use of the “civic space” opened upby the occupation. But whether it’s Chris-topher Hitchens supporting the Iraqi occu-pation to advance secularism and Kurdishrights, or Pierre Beaudet supporting theNGOs backing Aristide’s ouster for what-ever “democratic” rationales, their funda-mental validations of the imperial project

massively overcrowded with hundreds if not thousands of politi-cal prisoners, including Lavalas presidential candidate and Am-nesty International “prisoner of conscience” Father Gerard Jean-Juste. Meanwhile, death squad leaders such as Louis JodelChamblain are acquitted in sham trials. Special Advisor to thePM on Haiti Denis Coderre has been exceptionally duplicitouson the matter, claiming, without apparent irony, “Canada wouldnot get involved in Haiti’s justice system.”

Repression is the only means of holding power available toan illegitimate government pushing through an anti-popular pro-gram, as the installed regime of Prime Minister Gerard Latortuehas amply demonstrated. Canada helped craft the neoliberal planfor post-coup Haiti and has played a crucial part in propping upthe corrupt cabal of technocrats and supporters of the formerDuvalier dictatorship that forms the interim government. As partof this plan, subsidies for Haiti’s impoverished farmers have beenslashed, the minimum wage has been reduced and an extremelysuccessful adult literacy program has been dismantled by theLatortue regime, while large businesses have been given a three-year tax holiday and ex-FAd’H soldiers have been paid the outra-geous sum of $30 million in “back wages.” The ground is alsobeing prepared for the privatization of Haiti’s state enterprises, apolicy vigorously opposed by the Haitian people. The InterimCooperation Framework (ICF), a document outlining the priori-ties of the “transitional government” and the donor countries, touts“private sector participation” in state enterprises and makes clearthe anti-democratic nature of these reforms: “The transition pe-riod . . . provide[s] a window of opportunity for implementingeconomic governance reforms . . . that may be hard for a futuregovernment to undo.” Canada helped draft the ICF and has do-nated $147 million in support of it.

Straightforward graft is flourishing under the installed gov-

are untenable and unjust. After over 200 years of intimida-

tion, debt, slavery and foreign invasion, theHaitian people deserve the freedom to cre-ate their own national destiny – replete withglories and mistakes. This is where soli-darity activists should stand: behind theHaitian people, and the organized expres-sion of their own free will. R

Derrick O’Keefe and Charles Demers arefounding editors of Seven Oaks Maga-zine. This article first appeared onRabble.ca

http://www.sevenoaksmag.com

http://www.sevenoaksmag.com

http://www.rabble.ca


ernment. Early on, the Office of the Prime Minister was rockedby a corruption scandal that involved diverting 15,000 bags ofrice destined for the poor of Port-au-Prince, resulting in the sus-pension of two high-level officials close to Gerard Latortue. YouriLatortue, nephew of the Prime Minister and security chief of theNational Palace, has been dubbed “Mister 30 Percent” by theFrench press for the cut he takes on favours, and is reportedlyinvolved with smuggling drugs and guns. Recently, the Haitiannews service Agence Haitien de Presse revealed that the govern-ment had been writing monthly checks for 6,000 police officers,despite there being only 4,000 officers in the HNP.

Despite (or perhaps because of) this atrocious record, theCanadian government has used every diplomatic means availablein an effort to provide legitimacy to the installed government. High-level Canadian officials, such as Paul Martin, PierrePettigrew and Denis Coderre have made numerous visits to Haitisince the coup to “underline Canada’s support of the interim gov-ernment and [their] intention to remain involved for the long term.” Canada has also organized and hosted international conferenceswith the Latortue government and chided other nations to dis-burse their aid more quickly. Paul Martin has even chastisedCARICOM (the group of Caribbean countries) leaders for theirrefusal to recognize the installed government and their continuedcalls for an independent investigation into the removal of Presi-dent Aristide. CARICOM is not alone in its opposition to the coup:Venezuela and the 53 nations of the African Union have also with-held recognition of the Latortue regime, and the ANC, SouthAfrica’s governing party, has launched a campaign calling for thereturn of democracy to Haiti.

It hardly comes as a surprise that Canadian government offi-cials and their PR flaks to have sought to deceive the public whilecarrying out their nefarious dealings in Haiti. Yet the governmenthas received help in this endeavour from some unlikely sources: various self-denoted “left” or “progressive” NGOs have misrep-resented the causes of the human rights disaster in Haiti and ig-nored Canada’s intervention almost completely, thus becomingcomplicit, wittingly or not, in the government’s “perception man-agement” operations. Pierre Beaudet’s Rabble.ca piece “Haiti:Where should the left stand?” defending his organization Alter-natives’ position on Haiti is but the most recent example. Whilehis distortions of Haiti’s history since 1995 (especially concern-ing the 2000 elections and after) are significant, it is Beaudet’sassessment of the present that we will look at here.

Beaudet seriously minimizes the ruthless violence of the in-terim government and its Canadian-trained police force, devotingall of one sentence to the repression of Lavalas and voicing onlytepid opposition to it. Moreover, Beaudet prefaces his trite refer-ence to the anti-Lavalas witch hunt with the discredited notion ofAristide using “hard nosed gangs” to “create havoc,” implicitlylaying the blame on the victims. Indeed, the Lavalas movementis portrayed as little more than a gang of criminals and drug run-ners in Beaudet’s article. Yet the depth of support Lavalas con-tinues to enjoy belies such characterizations. First of all, the largemajority of Lavalas’ base is located in the countryside, where atleast 65% of the population lives. Rural Haiti is not exactly thepreserve of ganglords and drug dealers, as Dr. Paul Farmer, re-

nowned for his work against AIDS, malaria and TB in the CentralPlateau and other parts of Haiti, explains: “I personally, in all myyears in Haiti, have never once seen a peasant with a gun. Andalmost all of the ones around these parts are members of FamniLavalas (Aristide’s party). Now I’ve tended to many gunshotwounds, but they’ve been inflicted by former soldiers, police, orpeople who have cars to drive – not peasants.” In the cities, Lavalashas mobilized tens of thousands of people for demonstrations manytimes since the coup, despite the (frequently realized) threat ofpolice using gunfire to break up protests. Even observers as hos-tile as the American and Canadian embassies have acknowledgedthat Lavalas is still the most popular political movement in Haiti.

While rhetorically opposing imperialism, Beaudet’s actualcritique of the foreign powers’ current involvement in Haiti boilsdown to an accusation of malign neglect: Canada has not been“generous” enough with its aid policies and the international com-munity have failed to “clean the mess” in Haiti as promised. YetUN troops have been trying to “clean the mess” by carrying outfrequent raids into pro-Lavalas slums, with deadly consequencesfor the population, and contrary to Beaudet’s belief, Canada hasbeen extremely generous to the de facto Haitian government ithelped install. What is Beaudet’s criticism of Gerard Latortue’sgovernment, an exceedingly corrupt and undemocratic adminis-tration that is repressing its political opponents on a massive scaleand reordering Haiti’s economy along neoliberal lines? Merelythat it has been “ineffective.”

The hypocrisy (and serviceability to power) of this stance isworth noting: Aristide was accused of having these very sameflaws (undemocratic, corrupt, neoliberal) and received unrelent-ing condemnation from NGOs such as Alternatives, yet no suchopprobrium is forthcoming from Beaudet when it comes to theU.S./Canada puppet regime. Indeed, Beaudet seems more inter-ested in talking about “the crimes that everyone knew Aristidehad committed,” than about the serious and ongoing crimes ofCanada and the interim government, crimes for which we, as Ca-nadian citizens, hold far more responsibility.

In short, Aristide is not the issue; Canada’s role as a juniorpartner to U.S. imperialism is the issue. R

Nikolas Barry-Shaw is a member of Haiti Action Montreal.

A Haiti solidarity demonstration inOttawa this summer

http://www.canadahaitiaction.ca/local.php?id=4

#8 november / december 2005 · relay • november/december 2005 5 the union des forces...

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