One of the things which distinguishes the Communist Party from other groups on the left – from the NDP to anarchists to the different Marxist political organizations – is its focus on and treatment of the question of strategy and tactics.
Strategy refers to the overall plan for achieving our goal, and tactics are the concrete application of that strategy in specific conditions, generally towards more specific objectives which relate to our overall goal.
We all know Marx’s famous comment from the Thesis on Feuerbach, which is also inscribed on his grave – "Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it!"
The question of strategy and tactics is what brings us to that point – it is our live conduit into the concrete class struggle.
A correct approach to strategy and tactics means that, whether the working-class movement is weak or strong, whether it is under attack or on the attack, whether it is fighting in a defensive position or an offensive one, communists can identify concrete pathways to help build the working-class struggle and move it forward.
Our strategic line takes us into the fights for reforms but takes us away from the limits and illusions of reformism, which restricts the class struggle to fighting for reforms. Communist strategy promotes the necessity of revolution but rejects the self-imposed isolation of “pure” revolutionaries who denounce this and that as being insufficient or compromised, while standing alone in splendid isolation from the masses.
Communist strategy gets our hands dirty in the fertile ground of the class struggle and plants the seeds of change. Application of tactics in the concrete struggle is a test – are our strategy and analysis correct? It provides us with real experience and feedback, which we use for evaluation, correction, etc. And the communist approach is dynamic – changing conditions require changing tactics, and maybe even changing strategies – tactics that to not develop with the concrete conditions are doomed to be left behind by them. This would be a fatal weakness in the movement for socialism, to not be armed with and guided by revolutionary strategy and tactics, and that is why we spend so much of our time and energy on developing them, on evaluating and updating them as necessary.
Strategy
Tactics emerge from strategy and strategy emerges from a goal.
The goal of the Communist Party is socialism, but there have been different movements for socialism throughout the past two centuries, each with different strategies. Some of the approaches of those different movements still have an impact today. In broad terms, we could generally divide these movements into three groups: utopian, reformist and scientific.
Utopian socialism is usually used in reference to early 19th century movements, perhaps the most famous being that of Robert Owen. Utopian socialism is often thought of as having been swept aside by later movements, but its basic features do still echo today. It relies on moral and ethical arguments to convince people – all people, including the owning class – to share and cooperate for the common good. We see elements of utopian socialism in the British Labour Party under Tony Blair, who publicly argued for “ethical socialism,” and it is also often seen in religious or pacifist movements for socialism which eschew class struggle in favour of a moral appeal to all people. It also informs parts of the environmental movement and the mutual aid movement.
At heart, this is an idealistic vision that almost always turns its eyes away from the actuality of class society, and certainly divorces itself from the reality and necessity of class struggle. As such, while it may advocate a compelling vision of an ideal society, it is not grounded in reality and cannot project a strategy for actually achieving socialism.
Reformism refers to the view that fighting for reforms is sufficient – that reforms are, essentially, an end in themselves. While fighting for reforms is a critical component of the struggle for socialism, reformists restrict the aims and activities of the working class to the winning of reforms. Rather than struggle for the overthrow of capitalism – for a rupture with the capitalist system – reformism proposes that workers need only win and accumulate a sufficient quantity of reforms to that system, in order to morph it into a better one.
Lenin described reformism as a “bourgeois deception of the workers, who, despite individual improvements, will always remain wage-slaves, as long as there is the domination of capital.”
Reformism is the prevailing ideological current in the working-class movement in Canada, particularly the labour movement. Its main political expression is social democracy, mainly represented (especially in English-speaking Canada) by the NDP. Precisely because it is so dominant, we need to understand reformism from a strategic and tactical point of view, and also recognize what it does to the working-class movement.
In many ways, reformism is most limited by its view of the capitalist state, which it sees as an impartial authority, standing above classes. Based on this distortion, reformism tends to restrict people’s movements to narrow parliamentary aims and partial reforms. In the working class, it leads to class collaboration and the illusion of a possible class partnership between workers and capitalists.
The weakness of reformism is evidenced by the fact that much of the social democratic movement in Canada and globally has completely abandoned the goal of socialism. Of course, there are elements that remain – often under the name “democratic socialism” – and many of those people move into political action around key struggles, and we work with them to advance those struggles. But objectively, by defining the aim of socialism as a “just society” or “welfare state,” and by positioning socialism as the outcome of endless improvements or stages of capitalism, reformism politically disarms the working class and adapts the labour movement to the preservation of capitalism, not its overthrow and replacement.
Scientific socialism approaches questions of societal change from a historical viewpoint, understanding that social and political developments are largely determined by economic conditions. Change does not come about through moral appeals or through enlightened legislators, but through struggle – it is the masses who make change.
Furthermore, scientific socialists recognize the class nature and role of the state – that it is not a neutral body existing above classes, and that while governments can be elected and changed the capitalist state itself cannot be reformed into something else. It must be replaced by a workers’ state – that is what we mean by working-class power (the dictatorship of the proletariat) which is necessary to build socialism.
Rooted in historical and dialectical materialism, Marxism-Leninism is scientific socialism, and this is the outlook of the Communist Party. Sometimes we refer to it as the theory and practice of socialism. It isn’t a dogma, laid down for all time and recited by rote like a catechism. Rather, it is a living, developing theory, a tool of analysis and guide to action which incorporates the concentrated experience of all the struggles of the working class, both in Canada and around the world.
We use this to analyze the concrete conditions of the class struggle – including the nature of capitalism and its sharpening social contradictions, the balance of class forces, the composition and organization of the working class, the composition and organization of progressive and democratic movements, the relative strength of the revolutionary movement, etc. And from that analysis, we get a clearer picture of the path forward (which is not always obvious!) and can develop a strategic line for building the class struggle.
The strategy document of the Communist Party is its program, Canada’s Future is Socialism. The program includes a comprehensive Marxist-Leninist analysis of the concrete conditions of class struggle in Canada, and this underpins the strategic line whose core is found in Chapter 5, “The Working Class and People’s Struggle” and Chapter 6, “For a People’s Government.”
The most concise statement of the Party’s strategy is at the end of Chapter 5:
“In all of its mass political work, the Communist Party strives to help build a democratic, anti-monopoly, anti-imperialist alliance. Such a new alliance will include the Communist Party and other parties and political organizations, democratic people’s organizations in Quebec and English-speaking Canada, Indigenous peoples, the trade unions, farm organizations, youth and student organizations, associations of intellectuals and professionals, women’s and 2S/LGBTiQ organizations, senior citizens organizations and cooperatives.
“The Communist Party works to unite all these people’s forces as the basis for a democratic, anti-monopoly, anti-imperialist people’s government, led by the working class, in which the Communist Party aspires to play a key role.”
This alliance would work to advance working people’s interests through all available avenues of struggle, based on massive and united extra-parliamentary action. It would seek to build a parliamentary reflection, which could win electoral advances and carry out a sweeping progressive program to democratize society and transform economic relations in the interests of the working class and people as a whole.
In the effort to defend and extend these gains against the counterattacks from capital, during which the working class and its political forces become more experienced and confident, revolutionary conditions will develop and the socialist option advanced by the Communist Party will win wide support.
This is, in a very brief nutshell, the path which communists see for winning working-class power and building socialism in Canada.
Mass action is what makes change, so our strategy is to unite the masses in action. And it isn’t just any type of mass unity – it has shape and content, a basis, which is democratic, anti-monopoly and anti-imperialist. It is rooted in the working class not only because the working class is the majority of the population, but because our strategy emerges from an analysis of class society in which working-class interests are, objectively, directly opposite to those of capital. The experience of working together in capitalist society disciplines and trains workers for potential collective action. Because of this, workers can act effectively in support of their class interests, against the interests and policies of the capitalist class. And not only can they do this – they must do it. This makes them the natural leaders of all the progressive forces, and it establishes the primary importance of the labour movement, which is the most organized section of the working class.
There are at least five strategic elements that contribute to building such a democratic, anti-monopoly, anti-imperialist alliance.
Unity of the working class. The leading role of the working class is the indispensable factor for effective united action of the people against monopoly capital, and the unity of the working class is essential to its ability to carry out that leading role.
Strong and united trade union movement. Unions are the basic organizations of class struggle. As the most organized section of the working class, a strong and united union movement is vital to the defence and advance of the class as a whole. Union gains serve the interests of all working people, organized and unorganized, by helping to raise living standards and social conditions for working people in general.
To fill this role, the union movement must be united on a particular basis, that of class struggle policies and militant actions. Class struggle unionism and coalition building are necessary to oppose reformism and collaboration. Union sovereignty and independence are key elements of this.
Unity based on equality. The kind of unity necessary for building the mass struggles of the working class and the people must be based on equality. This means that the working-class movement, and the trade union movement in the first place, has to recognize, confront and overcome inequalities that are perpetuated by capitalist society. These include inequalities based on gender, racialization, national identity, age, disability and others.
National equality and sovereignty. Among the inequalities mentioned above, those reflecting the national question bear separate mention because they have a reflection in the structure of the state (in the case of Quebec) and because they involve questions of land and territory. Canada is a multinational state – within in are many Indigenous nations, Acadia, Quebec and English-speaking Canada.
Advancing the struggle requires a powerful alliance of the working class and progressive forces in of all those nations. Such an alliance must be built on the basis of a commitment to national equality and sovereignty – this includes opposing the colonial and genocidal policies which lie at the heart of the foundation of the Canadian state and remain in place today, and also recognizing the right of nations to self-determination up to and including secession.
Building alliances among people’s forces. Monopoly capital is attacking the living standards and interests of a huge range of the population, including the working class and other strata. This means that a broad and expanding cross-section of the people are compelled to fight back against the power of capital and the state, in order to defend their own economic and political interests.
People’s movements involve growing numbers of the population in extra-parliamentary political activity. They are typically organized in a cross-class manner, although they involve many working-class people (sometimes a majority). To build a vehicle for democratic and social advance, we work to unite these forces with the working class – particularly the labour movement – into broad coalitions which lay the foundation for the further development of social-political alliances.
Each of these elements contributes to the central (and immediate) aim, which is to unite all the people’s forces into a democratic, anti-monopoly, anti-imperialist alliance that is led by the working class.
This, then, is the Communist Party’s strategic line. Rooted in a historical perspective and firmly based a conjunctural analysis of the current concrete conditions, it outlines the path forward to defeat the dictatorship of capital, replace it with working-class power, and begin to build socialism in Canada.
Next issue: “Part two: Tactics as the concrete application of strategy”
The climate crisis that humanity faces has been addressed by bourgeoisie theorists as a non-class issue to be resolved either by restraining consumption or by internalizing climate costs in prices that disfavours polluters. The presumption for such theories is that individual consumption patterns involve increasing use of energy and particularly fossil fuel and to restrict carbon emissions climate action calls for restricting consumption.
Tax on polluters and subsidizing green goods alters the price signals in the market and facilitates ecologically sustainable consumption habits. Discussions on sources of emission have been largely individual centric and inequality in income and wealth has been identified as one of the reasons of differential access to consumption and hence emission. In other words, rich consume more or rich countries consume more and the poor or the poorer countries are relatively less responsible for climate change. The global south versus north and the rich versus poor in ecological left discourse also revolves around differential access to consumption as the major plank of climate justice.
Carbon footprint accounting simply measures the carbon equivalent of emissions generated from human consumption. Neoliberalism incorporates the consumption argument and tries to reconcile climate issues by the levers of the market. Structuring incentives and strategizing resources for green technology is the usual recipe of intervention to correct market failures. The other aspect of climate politics is the predominance of knowledge workers and professionals who see climate justice in the light of awareness and science and perceive the problem as a persistent denial of climate problem due to mass ignorance. Therefore, according to this view the real challenge is to make people realize how current consumption patterns lead to a planetary crisis.
What is missing in these perspectives is the realm of production and the recognition of the fact that the biggest share of emissions originates from industry, and those are run not to satisfy some rich or poor human needs but to make profits. Fossil fuel, cement, steel, chemicals, fertilizers account for the largest share of carbon emissions in the world and the process of production as well as the generation of demand for those goods are primarily driven by capitalist principles which is hardly consistent with the cause of ecological sustainability.
Production or consumption
The climate issue apparently seems to be a class neutral challenge to entire humanity. It affects the rich and the poor individuals and countries almost similarly although the incidence upon the poor used to be much greater. Most importantly the universality of the planetary crisis is so diffused that climate action requires a tedious process of building collective responsibility. It becomes difficult to ascertain immediate goals and necessary actions for decarbonization as it falls upon everyone, and no one could be individually or as a group held responsible for environmental degradation. On top of that, most of the discourses of climate action refer to consumption habits and immediate actions often relate to cutting down consumption invoking notions of degrowth. Also, climate issues often appear to be elitist as it entails a trade-off between employment and sustainability.
Increasing costs of production through carbon tax, curbing use of fossil fuel and chemical fertilizers and promoting green technology immediately raises costs and reduces employment in traditional industries. Therefore, issues of environmental degradation and immediately necessary actions often appear to be against the majority of working people. Restricting consumption makes no sense to those who do not even achieve a good standard of living. People who lost their real incomes and hence access to healthy food, shelter, health services and education because of commodification of essential needs in the neoliberal regime can hardly relate to the idea of reducing consumption. Instead, their fight to achieve higher consumption levels and protecting livelihood sounds more attractive and meaningful.
In fact, the absence of class in many climate movements seems to hide the crucial fact that capitalism as a system is not driven by the necessities of consumption and the crucial source of emission is production which accounts for more than half of emissions occurring in the world. The drive to produce in capitalism emerges from the appetite of profit. The circuit of capital is money to commodity to more money, and augmenting money is the specific feature of capital. Here production of commodities and the nature of commodities is subservient to the goal of producing surplus value.
In fact, new commodities and new demands are generated to achieve this goal. Even the capitalist hardly has individual control over this systematic need of making profit; rather the capitalist is also compelled by the rules of market competition which is beyond individual control. For the worker, the circuit is selling labour power as commodity to the capitalist against wages and spending the received wages to buy another set of commodities for their use. This is a non-capitalist circuit driven by production and exchange of use values. Reducing the consumption of use values hardly alters the dominant capitalist circuit in any way. True altering of consumption habits is required to organize society in a radically different way but altering the motivation of social production is a necessary condition to facilitate such changes in consumption patterns.
Relative surplus value
A capitalist survives and grows in the market by continuously reducing unit costs of production, which is largely a combination of increasing productivity and reducing wages. It also involves innovation and research that reduces costs of production. All these combined imply an increase in relative surplus value. Extracting materials without being concerned about the sustainability of resources reduces costs of extraction, material research increases the durability and multiple use of raw materials, use of chemical fertilizers increases yield at the cost of the soil, increased urbanization requires cheap housing and demand for construction, an increased number of urban houses increases demand for energy and so on. Processes to increase productivity essentially rely upon cheapening of labour and nature engaged in production. Such processes are in no way inconsistent with the goals of creating profit but essentially in conflict with the goal of maintaining ecological balance. Therefore, it would be erroneous to suggest that the approach to nature and the environment is the same for all human beings independent of their class positions. It is not the high consumption level of a rich capitalist that creates high degree of emissions rather it is the profiteering motive of the capitalist class that should be held responsible for the climate challenge.
The working people who are the majority are considered as workers because they do not decide what to produce and how to produce. In any case they are alienated from the means and processes of production and expected to follow the instructions of capital. As workers, they do not produce goods for their own consumption, but they are relevant to the capitalist system because they produce commodities for sale and, finally, surplus value for the capitalists. But these are the people who are most affected by global warming or rising sea levels and erratic climate changes. It affects their livelihood more than that of the rich.
Hence mobilization for climate action must begin with the people who are the immediate victims of climate change, who live and work in polluted atmosphere very different from that encountered by their office bosses. It should begin with a move to de-commodifying basic needs which would enhance the possibility of de-commodifying labour power as well. The issue that should be brought to the centre stage of the climate movement is not what we are consuming but a majoritarian control over the decision regarding what and how to produce.
THE IDEOLOGICAL DIVIDE: SOCIAL DEMOCRACY AND COMMUNISM
Jeanne McGuire
Many social democrats and others on the non‑revolutionary left have been critical of social democracy. There are legions of books and articles which have laid bare the “failures” of social democracy in practice. In every country where the local variant of social democracy has formed the government, in every Canadian province where the New Democratic Party (NDP), and the Co‑operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) before it, has been elected, there have been those both from outside and within its own ranks who have bemoaned the failure of those governments to deliver the changes which were promised, and which were eagerly anticipated. And there have been myriad reasons offered why those governments have failed. This is an issue to which I will return later in this article.
Social democracy has been described by its own documents as well as by its academic supporters as the peaceful, electoral, evolutionary (as opposed to revolutionary) road to socialism. Increasingly, however, many of the official social democratic parties and their supporters no longer even refer to socialism at all, in their documents or in their rhetoric. A revolutionary rupture with the past is seen as neither necessary nor desirable. This opposition to a revolutionary challenge to capitalism has meant that those who are adherents of social democracy see social democracy not merely as an alternative to communism. Based on their actions and often their rhetoric, the conclusion is inescapable that the official party and the leadership of social democratic parties, in particular, see communism as more of a threat than capitalism.
It is this assessment—that communism, not capitalism, is the real enemy—that has produced some of social democracy’s most egregious behavior. It provided the rationale for social democrats to destroy militant trade unions and to reject alliances with communists which might have led to working class gains. It provided the basis for its support of military alliances whose aim was to threaten socialist countries, its support for military actions aimed at the overthrow of governments labelled as communist, communist‑leaning, anti‑Western, “undemocratic,” or any of a whole host of other designations which the capitalists and the states in their thrall have identified as requiring removal and replacement. They agreed to the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran (Britain), to the operations against Cheddi Jagan in Guyana (Britain), they agreed to the inclusion of Canadian involvement in the invasion of Afghanistan (Canada), they joined the invasion of Iraq (Britain). The Canadian arm of social democracy initially failed to speak out against the bombing of Libya, has backed away from its opposition to Canada belonging to NATO and has supported the membership of Ukraine in NATO.
There are Marxist assessments which have examined the constraints which social democracy has accepted and the concessions it has made—over time and across nations—in order to present itself as a credible alternative.[1] There are Marxist assessments which have analyzed the divisions between social democracy and communism. Sam Hammond in The Spark! #26, summer 2017, wrote an excellent article delineating the difference between reformism and the struggle for reforms, between reformism and revolution. These are important and useful to understand social democracy and how communists differ in their approach to practical political questions.
This article hopes to address a separate issue, the theoretical distinction between social democracy and communism. What constitutes the ideological foundation for the divide between reformism and revolution? Why is it they are reformists and we are revolutionaries?
Many social democrats and communists agree that the system is unjust and inequitable and becoming more so, that it treats some people cruelly, that it discriminates, and that it ignores catastrophic issues of climate change, environmental degradation and the threat of nuclear war.
Why, then, do we disagree on how to address those problems? In my estimation, the answer lies in differences in theoretical understanding with respect to a few, but significant, features of the system which both social democrats and communists agree produces these unacceptable results. It is these differences in the theoretical understanding of the nature of the problem and consequently, the solution to the problem, that lie at the heart of the “great divide” within the working class between reformism and revolutionary politics.
Before I begin to outline those theoretical differences, I must make the following disclaimer. Not every social democrat accepts all, or even some, of the ideas that I am attributing to social democracy. These are the ideas which have been the distinguishing ideas of social democratic parties and governments and many of those who have led those parties in different countries and over many years. Obviously, they are also the ideas of many of social democracy’s supporters.
The first theoretical difference is in the understanding of the nature of the society in which we live. Social democracy identifies Western societies not primarily as capitalist, but as democratic. This reflects an idealist focus on ideas and superstructural features as being the most significant features in defining the nature of a society. This definition of the West as democratic also includes the view that socialist societies are totalitarian. Communists see production—what is produced and how it is produced, how it is distributed, how much to whom, who owns the production process, who controls the surplus that is produced—as the defining attribute of a society. Thus, communists see Western societies not as democratic, but as capitalist, and see societies organized around the social ownership and control of production not as totalitarian but as socialist. The mechanisms of representation and accountability with respect to how policy decisions are made—while important and worthy of scrutiny and assessment—are less important than the issue of private versus social ownership.
Another way in which social democrats and communists differ with respect to the nature of capitalism is on the issue of exploitation and the degree to which capitalism is amenable to change. Social democracy agrees that capitalism is unfair, that working people get the dirty end of the stick when it comes to wages, access to resources, and services like housing, education, security of incomes and employment. The job confronting social democracy, then, is to make it fairer, to enact policies to redistribute income through state provision of certain services, through welfare schemes and taxation laws.
Communists approve of all these measures but for communists, capitalism cannot be made fair because capitalism is based on the exploitation of labour power, that is, the private appropriation of the surplus that is produced in the process of production. Since capitalism by this theory must exploit workers, to end exploitation it is necessary to end capitalism. Production today is a process involving masses of people across a variety of individual industries which employ workers who labour in social collectivities, all working in a multitude of complementary activities contributing to the final product. In other words, production is social at the factory level and across the economy. Therefore, the only way workers as a class can have control over production, decide the objectives of the economy, and determine the use of social wealth, is to become the owners of the industries and corporations where production takes place. There is just one way for them to do that: by owning them in common. To be free of exploitation requires workers to do away with private ownership and to place industry in the hands of society as a whole.
The second theoretical difference is in the understanding of the state in capitalist society. There are two ways in which the social democratic view of the state differs from a Marxist view of the state. First, social democracy views the state as supra‑class and as the arena in which differing ideas about how best to organize the social aspects of society are contested through elections. In other words, for social democracy the state is neutral and subject to the democratic wishes of the citizenry. Marxists view the state as a mechanism of class rule, as predating capitalism and as existing primarily to ensure the continued existence of whichever class is in power. As The Communist Manifesto so succinctly puts it: “The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” This is in no way a simplistic view of the state. It allows for a wide range of options for how best to achieve the ongoing stability of the system: from democracies that range from neoliberal to social democratic, to authoritarian regimes ranging from repressive monarchies to military juntas—and a whole range of governmental systems in between. It allows for policies, within each option, that cover the spectrum from benevolent to totalitarian, from progressive to reactionary, from enlightened to repressive.
A further difference between social democracy and communism with respect to the state is the view social democracy has that what constitutes the state is the government. Social democrats believe that once they are elected, they are in control of the state. This explains why social democracy focusses on elections. If real control over a society is possible just through elections, then it is rational to emphasize elections over all else.
For communists the government is merely one aspect of the state—its administrative arm. In addition to the administrative apparatus of governments, the state includes a whole range of agencies, organizations and bodies such as schools, hospitals, libraries and the CBC (in Canada), which deliver agreed‑upon services and meet certain state‑assigned needs of the ruling class—yes—but also of the whole society, or at least large sections of it.
The state plays an important role providing ideological legitimation for the existing class relations by promoting the idea that the way society is organized represents the best possible way, and if there are problems, they are minor and can be fixed with small administrative adjustments. Moreover, since everyone has the right to vote, whatever exists, exists because the majority of the people support it. The state is not the only mechanism for transmitting this message. Newspapers and other media such as movies and the internet (both privately and, too frequently, publicly owned) play a significant role broadcasting and echoing this theme, with a thousand variations.
This ideological legitimation incorporates the doctrine that the people who own the major corporations do not exercise undue control over the administrative arm of the state, and if they do, that we can either agree that it is acceptable that they do (U.S.) or that we can limit some facets of the undue influence (Canada). Furthermore, this view holds that ownership reflects the innate abilities and intelligence of the owners. The workers earn what the job they do deserves, and the owners earn more, sometimes hundreds, even thousands of times more, by virtue of their greater abilities, and as their return for risk‑taking. The efficacy and success of this message means that under normal conditions elections can, indeed, be free and fair without any threat to the existing social order. When there is a threat to the social order, or even a hint of a threat to the social order, the other side of the state comes into its own.
Crucial to the communist analysis of the state is the presumption that the state requires the capability of physically repressing the subordinate classes should they ever attempt to alter class relations. One of the prerogatives of the state, in fact, is that it holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. That is an important distinction. It does not hold a monopoly on the use of force, but on the legitimate use of force. Anyone else using force to achieve their aims may be judged to be legal or illegal, depending on the circumstances. In most cases it is not acceptable to use force to direct the behavior of others, although here we see another example of American exceptionalism. The state, however, is deemed to have the right to do exactly that at all times.
The institutions that are given responsibility for this function include the police, the army, the prison system and the judicial system. These coercive elements are crucial to the maintenance of the class relations of society, and to be unaware of their power and relative autonomy from administrative control can prove fatal. Examples of the military stepping in to prevent a democratic alteration of class relations include: Spain (civil war); Indonesia (military intervention); the Democratic Republic of the Congo (military coup); and Chile (military coup). There are other examples. In these instances, the most powerful of the repressive forces, the military, acted to overturn or, in the case of Indonesia, prevent the election of, a government with an agenda of substantial change to the society, which might have curtailed the power of the ruling class.
Understanding the repressive nature of the capitalist state and understanding what agencies constitute the threat of repression does not guarantee that a government hoping to enact substantial social change will have the resources necessary to counter that threat. Believing that the military serves the nation rather than the ruling class, however, means that such a government doesn’t even know there is a threat and therefore has no way to resist it when that threat is unveiled.
Moreover, because the state is legitimate, the amount of power it can normally exercise far exceeds that of any other social force which might emerge to challenge it. That is why the American so‑called right to take up arms to overthrow an unjust government is a joke. It would be pitting guns against tanks, flame throwers and armored vehicles, jet bombers and missiles. In the same way that notions of taking on the police in any way other than civil actions, demonstrations, political organizing and pressure on politicians would be calamitous. Unless, of course, those who protest have those who wield power on their side. This is the reason for the leniency often shown by the police in the face of right‑wing actions which challenge the state. We are aware of this leniency but we should not be surprised by it, for those right‑wing challenges are not to capitalism but to more liberal, often secular, less socially backward administrations of capitalism.
This imbalance in access to force is the reason communists argue for mass, extra‑parliamentary activity since the only power progressive elements have that exceeds the coercive power of the state is the power of the many—many in action, many united and many determined to change the way society operates. Communists accept that they must articulate this need to achieve unity and help to organize to achieve that unity and strive always to articulate the program required to mobilize the many—the working class.
There have been some instances when the revolutionary movements have been able to overcome the enormous power of the state through combat (e.g., Cuba). Most movements for social change, however, have relied on the sheer weight of numbers to overcome the willingness of the armed forces to suppress their aspirations. Uprisings such as occurred in Egypt in 2011 were initially successful because of their numbers and persistence. I say initially, because, once the uprising felt it had achieved its goals, the armed forces were still there, willing and able to reassert past power relations. The other condition under which a movement for social change can assert itself occurs when those who are responsible for upholding that power no longer feel any loyalty to it (e.g., Portugal, 1974). In other words, when the army and the police refuse to turn their guns on the protesters. As I noted above, this most often occurs when the protests are made up of right‑wing elements. However, if the overwhelming majority of the people support revolutionary demands, then the protests will include the parents, siblings and children of the police and army, and that can induce an unwillingness to use force against them.
One way or another, for a revolutionary change in the social system to occur, the power of the bourgeois state must be overcome by force, by uncontainable numbers or by the unwillingness of the repressive agencies to exercise their capability. The use of force is never the decision of the revolutionary movement. It is always the decision of the class in power not to cede its place to the contending class under any circumstance other than the defeat of the palace guard.
Another theoretical difference between communists and social democrats is the attitude towards the nation. Social democrats, when faced with a crisis, even if that crisis has been manufactured, have traditionally opted to support the so‑called national interests of their country against the interests of the working class at home and (weighing with them even less) the interests of workers in other countries. They have supported sending their own working class to die in the wars that the rulers have said must be fought.
This was one of the first cracks in the unity of the parties of the working class when the social democratic parties of Europe supported their governments’ call to arms in World War I.
Communism places its emphasis on class and—in the case of capitalism—the working class and the capitalist class. Communists contend that each of these classes has its own interests, and that they are, ultimately, in opposition to each other. While communists do support the right of those living under the yoke of imperialism to take up arms to rid themselves of imperialist domination, communism opposes workers being used as cannon fodder in the defence of imperialist goals.
With few exceptions this difference has continued down to the present. Social democracy has continued to support the “national” interests and communists have supported workers’ class interests. See the instances cited above of social democratic parties’ collusion with their national bourgeoisie against efforts within colonies and former colonies to alter power relations.
Nationalism has been a monumental obstacle to working class unity. Even communists, whose ideology opposes nationalism, have at various times over the course of their history fallen prey to its allure. The French Communist Party, for example, betrayed their class for the “national interest” when it supported the participation of France in the invasion of Afghanistan and, more recently, when it supported the intervention by France in Mali initiated in 2018 by the President of France, Francois Hollande of the Socialist Party. Nationalism continues to plague the working class, obscuring the face of the real enemy of working people, and allowing the capitalist class to claim it as their ally in conflicts around the world.
There is one other issue which I would like to address. It is true that social democratic governments have, historically, delivered some important reforms to health care, education and infrastructure, as well as other areas within society. It is also true that social democratic governments have been unable to meet the expectations of many of their supporters, particularly with respect to policies that would constrain the corporations or reduce their profits. That is the criticism of social democracy by many social democrats. I stated above that I would come back to this point. Many left social democrats voice disappointment (or even outrage) at what they perceive as a failure (or even betrayal) on the part of the social democratic parties in office to follow party policy as decided in convention, or to deliver upon promises made in elections. This failure—or betrayal—is often seen as a result of the lack of commitment on the part of individual leaders, a matter of their personal culpability. The critics sometimes attribute it to an all‑consuming desire to be elected and the perception on the part of electoral players in the party that adhering to policy would be detrimental to their electoral chances. These reasons may indeed be at play in decisions they make once elected, particularly if they are elected but do not form the government.
Footnotes
A writer with exceptional clarity of analysis and language can be found on ZZ’s blog (http://zzs-big-blogspot.com). He has written equally insightfully on this subject supported by a wealth of historical detail.
For example, the head of the British army, General Sir Nicholas Houghton expressed the opinion that then left‑leaning head of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn’s views “made him unfit to be the prime minister” (The Guardian, November 9, 2015); and another, “anonymous” general was quoted as saying “there was a very real prospect of an event which would effectively be a mutiny” if Corbyn was elected Prime Minister.
The history of capitalism is marked by two major contradictions. One centres around the confrontation between imperialism and the nation, between domination and oppression, between sovereignty and subordination. The other centres around the divide between the working class and the bourgeoisie, capital and labour, capitalism and socialism. The latter is the fundamental contradiction, the one that predominates in our contemporary world.
But it so happens that the former, at varying times and under specific conditions, is the principle contradiction. This can be seen in the case of colonized peoples and nations, of states ruled by a “comprador bourgeoisie” whose subordination to the imperialist powers prevents the completion of a bourgeois democratic revolution and the process of national liberation. This was also the case for countries under fascist occupation during the Second World War.
Among those countries where the imperialist- national contradiction temporarily takes precedence over the fundamental contradiction of capitalism, we can identify Bolivarian Venezuela in its struggle against bourgeois attempts to exploit its natural and human resources for the benefit of US imperialism and its allies, or Palestine under Israeli occupation, or Western Sahara under Morocco.
Communists are thus challenged to maneuver between these two contradictions and to analyze the dialectical relationship which unites them, assessing the best interest of the working class in its struggle for socialism.
Thus, in its appeal “To the Workers, Soldiers and Peasants of Russia” at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets on 25 October 1917, the Russian Revolution recognized for the first time the right of all nations within Russia to self- determination. This call also condemned “any incorporation of a small or weak nationality into a large or powerful State [...] regardless of the period during which this violent incorporation was accomplished, regardless also of the annexed nation’s degree of development or backwardness [...] independently of the place where this nation lives, whether in Europe or in the distant transoceanic lands.”
Through this appeal, the Russian Revolutionaries declared the right to self- determination a fundamental and inalienable principle. The Revolutionaries also did not see the problem of the emancipation of oppressed nations as a question apart from that of class, and they reiterated that this question must first be considered from the perspective of class relations, and that the unity of the working class must be prioritized over national unity.
Laying the groundwork of the national question
Before tackling the national question and its implications in Canada, it is necessary to first consider the theoretical foundations of the problem.
In considering the evolution of these two contradictions in a dialectical manner, it becomes clear that any analysis of the national question must emerge from a class-based perspective. Indeed, as with any other democratic issue, the national question may be approached from two different points of view: that of the working class, and that of the bourgeoisie. For us Communists, whatever the eventual conclusion of our analysis, the national question is subordinate to the class question. Thus, in order to understand the links which unite the national question and the class question, we must first define the concept of the “nation” from a Marxist perspective. Marx and Engels rarely discussed the national question as a problem in and of itself. When they did discuss it, especially in the case of Ireland, it was only occasional and on a case-by-case basis, rather than developing a specific theory on the subject. The national question only became a regular topic of discussion for Marxists later – and for good reason – following 1848’s “Springtime of the Peoples” and its repercussions in Europe and internationally. That being said, in the Manifesto, Marx and Engels had already laid the foundations for analyzing the dialectical relationship between democratic and social struggles.
It is from this perspective that, when confronted with the national question in a practical sense, many Marxists, especially those of Central and Eastern Europe (eg. Otto Bauer, the Bund, but above all Lenin and Stalin) have more systematically considered the question.
In 1912, exiled in Vienna, Stalin was commissioned by the Central Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) to write a report on the national question. This report would become the basis of the Marxist conception of the national question, which would subsequently be supported by various other writings, including those drafted by Lenin.
Through these documents, the nation can be understood as a stable group sharing the following four characteristics:
a common territory;
a common language;
a common economy (which does not necessarily mean a self-sufficient economy, but rather a unified economy, as opposed to the fractional one which predominates feudalism);
a sense of national belonging which manifests itself as a common culture.
From these characteristics emerges a key observation: that the national question is both objective and subjective. Indeed, as Stalin emphasizes, these four characteristics must be fulfilled for a community of individuals to be considered a nation. It is not enough to share the objective characteristics (territory, language, economy), just as it is not enough to simply share the subjective characteristic (a national culture), in order to constitute a nation. It would thus be illusory to claim that the existence of a nation may be determined independently by the group concerned, or by an outside group. Rather, the existence of a nation is based both on the subjective as well as objective recognition of the nation.
If a group lacks one of these characteristics, it cannot be considered a nation. It may instead be considered a national minority, which allows it to assert its own democratic and cultural rights (education and services in its mother tongue, cultural rights, etc.), without having access to the same rights afforded a nation.
Moreover, according to Stalin, the national question possesses a fundamental dynamism. As noted in his 1912 report, the emergence of a nation is contemporaneous with the rise of capitalism. In other words, the existence — and the relevance — of nations has everything to do with the goals of capitalism and the need to organize production within units, bringing together the exploited and the new ruling class.
The nation is therefore a historical construction specific to capitalism; the nation appears and disappears in the same way that the seigneurial system disappears with the fall of feudalism.
Generally, capitalists favour the nation state as the organizational model. Despite propaganda forwarded by the neoliberal elites of the imperialist nations and the existence of increasingly-present supranational alliances (such as the European Union), the fact is that these alliances cannot exist without the endorsement of the nation states concerned.
Canada, however, is an exception to this rule. Due to French colonization, the British Conquest, and the resistance of Indigenous peoples to assimilation, different nations have formed. That being said, these nations do not exist on an equal footing: aside from English-speaking Canada, none of them may exercise the right to self-determination, nor do they have the final say on broader political, social, and economic issues. It is partly on this national inequality that the first monopolies of Canada were built: the theft of Indigenous lands and genocide, maintaining Quebec in a state of economic backwardness in agreement with the bourgeoisie and the Catholic Church, all this served the interest of the dominant nation’s capitalist class.
Canada’s existence as an unequal union of nations is a central theme of the country’s politics. Therefore, it is natural that the Communist Party should have considered the national question early on.
A fundamental principle: the right to self-determination
During the course of the Communist Party of Canada’s past 100 years of struggle, the position of the Party has been refined continuously, not only through considering fundamental texts and the exchange of information, but through our practice and the ongoing wider evolution of the national question itself. But that does not mean that the fundamental principle, our guiding principle – namely, guaranteeing the right of self-determination up to and including secession, first of the French-Canadian nation, then of Quebec, Acadia, and Indigenous nations – is reflected in each of our analyses.
It is true that in our early years, this principle was conceived as secondary to the class struggle. A rather mechanistic view dominated the Party during this time: in 1929, the Report to the Sixth Congress of the CPC stated that “the struggle for free and full independence for Canada, the guarantee for complete self-determination (French-Canada) can only be achieved through revolutionary action.” Moreover, in 1934, the Party’s theoretical journal stated “While we do not make of the French question in Canada a national problem, we recognize that the French Canadians form a nation [...]. Therefore our first slogan... should be ‘The Right of Self-Determination up to Separation!’”
In the context of the 1930s, with the rise of fascism supported by the Catholic Church with its wider influence within the French-Canadian national movement (and even a portion of the labour movement), it may be said that this position on the national question was before its time. The existence of French Canada as a nation was recognized very early on by our Party – well before any of the other federal parties. However, there existed some confusion regarding how to deal with the issue, and how to link the struggle for socialism with the struggle for national equality.
In the 1929 report it appears clear that the struggle for national equality would flow naturally from the struggle for revolution and social transformation. The 1934 report is somewhat ambiguous; it does recognize that French-Canadians form a nation, but it does not recognize the problems that are specific to them as a nation. Until the end of World War II, the Communists perceived national equality primarily as a social and economic problem. However, from a Leninist perspective, the right to national self- determination means control by the oppressed nation (in this case, the French-Canadian nation) of its own state, and of being able to freely choose whether such a state exists separate from the dominant nation or within a new partnership.
We shall understand here that until the late 1940s, what can be designated as Quebec’s national movement was dominated by reactionary and clerical ideas, such as those found in the writings of Abbé Groulx, Henri Bourassa or André Laurendeau, but also found in Duplessis’s cassock nationalism. It is only by the end of the 1940s, particularly with the 1949 Asbestos strike, that an important part of the people’s movement and labour movement starts to break with Duplessis. Among these, the Canada’s Catholic Workers’ Association (the present-day CSN, Confederation of National Trade Unions) took the path of secularization, bringing many Québecois workers into working class struggles. It would also be important to mention the student movement, which organized, in 1958, a general strike that 120,000 students participated in. Therefore, starting with the 1950s, all these actors gave a mass and progressive character to Quebec’s national movement.
Faced with this development, the Communist Party of Canada at its 17th Congress in 1962 declared its support of “the demand for a new Canadian constitution; for the negotiating, on a completely equal footing, of a new confederal pact between French and English Canada, safeguarding the equality of rights and the interests of each, and containing explicit guarantees of the right of national self-determination for French Canada.” In other words, the issue of national inequality was now seen as a crucial democratic concern and not just a side-effect of capitalist exploitation.
The 1960s were marked by numerous strikes and workers’, farmers’, and students’ struggles. The soil was now fertile enough to permit a spate of new parties that claimed to link the struggle for national emancipation with the struggle for socialism. It was in this context that the Quebec Communists, with the support of the CPC’s Central Committee, formed the Communist Party of Quebec as a separate entity in 1965. The goal of this important change was, on the one hand, to better reflect the multinational character of Canada within the Party and, on the other, to guarantee Quebec Communists the latitude necessary to gain the confidence of Quebec workers, like other progressive groups.
This was a successful tactic, as it allowed the PCQ by the end of the 1960s to participate in creating a “federated mass party of labour” (according to the time-honoured words of Sam Walsh, at that time President of the PCQ) with the aim of uniting various left-wing groups, labour groups, and popular movements, whose main goal was to fight for necessary social and democratic reforms, including the recognition of Quebec as a nation, and the proposal of a new partnership with English-speaking Canada. The most important factor of this federated party was to place social and popular struggles at the forefront, rather than independence.
Despite fruitful discussion, 1968’s creation of the Mouvement Souveraineté-Association (a predecessor to the Parti Québecois), by René Lévesque and other dissidents from the Liberal Party, considerably slowed down this project. In fact, during the 1960s, the national movement began to be co-opted by the petty-bourgeoisie, who advocated secession as a priority. Thus, an important ideological struggle emerged between those who advocated the unity of the left beyond the national question (including the PCQ), and those who promoted independence. Through the MSA and the PQ, the latter group found a political vehicle through which to abandon the project of a federated mass party in favour of one which appeared to be social-democratic, but was above all pro-independence.
Indeed, even if the Parti Québecois did attempt to join the Socialist International, it was never a social democratic party. At no time did René Lévesque claim it was. While certain aspects of the PQ program prove confusing, they have everything to do with acquiring the support of the working masses for independence, a project essentially devoted to the interests of Quebec’s petty- bourgeoisie. To convince the working class, following the victory of the PQ in 1976, a number of measures were passed (“anti-scab” laws, universal auto insurance, the Quebec Charter of Rights and Freedoms, etc.). But, once the referendum was over, policies changed dramatically under the second Lévesque government, including the imposition of Bill 105, which forced a 20% pay cut and an increased workload on government employees. It was also during this time that one of Lévesque’s former ministers laid the groundwork for the state, employers, and unions to finance Quebec businesses.
That the adoption of these anti-social policies coincided with the party’s new orientation (the beau risque bet on independence) is not accidental; rather, it is a testimony to the true petty- bourgeois character of the Parti Québecois and of the Quebec independence project. Indeed, by implementing such policies, the Parti Québecois revealed its commitment to capitalism, a commitment it previously had to hide before the 1980 referendum so as to gain the confidence of the working masses and secure a “yes” vote. These policies reveal the true nature of the independence project, namely the creation of a new state through which the Quebec national petty-bourgeoisie could establish itself as a class monopolizing state power.
This aspect is present from the very beginning of the independence project (or the project for “sovereignty association”, to put it in Lévesque’s modest terms). In proposing a “sovereignty association”, it is interesting to note that Lévesque compared his project to some international examples, and he seemed to entertain the possibility of a North American equivalent of the European Economic Community (the predecessor to the European Union), which would have the consequence of pitting workers against one another. It is therefore clear that the independence project has always been intended to serve capitalist interests, particularly through the greater integration of Quebec into the US market — an integration which would undoubtedly have the same effect in the rest of Canada.
This is corroborated by the position taken by the Quebec separatists at the end of the 1980s, who supported the Free Trade Agreement between Canada and the United States (which would later become NAFTA). During the referendum campaign of 1995, the “yes” camp published a manifesto in which it clearly stated that Quebec’s existence within Canada hampered its ability to join NAFTA.
On this note, it is interesting to observe similar arguments currently being used in Europe. For example, one of the key arguments of the Scottish National Party is that its campaign for Scottish independence revolves around greater integration into the European Union. There is no doubt that this argument is gaining strength in the post-Brexit period. Similarly , the Catalan independence movement uses the same pro-EU rhetoric, as do several autonomist movements which advocate the weakening of the EU’s states in favour of strengthening its supranational character.
Faced with this apparent contradiction (integration with imperialism by way of national liberation), one must remember that the national question, like any democratic question, can be perceived in two ways: from the point of view of the working class, or from the point of view of the bourgeoisie. From the point of view of the latter, it is obvious that national interests are invoked because it is inappropriate for the ruling class to speak of its own interests as the exploiting class. However, as “unifying” as this nationalist discourse may appear, the fact remains that each nation – even an oppressed nation – is separated into two classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. One must never forget that national liberation is inevitably a bourgeois project. History has shown how most national liberation struggles (Algeria, Angola, Egypt, Iran, etc.), in which the Communists had no choice but to support the various united liberation fronts, ended up turning against them and the working class, if they were not able to win the fight against the nationalists after independence.
The question that arises is therefore whether the alliance between the proletariat and the national bourgeoisie is necessary to advance the struggle for socialism or whether, contrary to this, that alliance would slow down this struggle. In Canada, as in Spain and several other European countries, the Communists do not believe that the main contradiction is between the oppressed nations and the dominant nations, but rather between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In Canada, we reject nationalist speeches which perceive the main contradiction to be between the Indigenous peoples and the descendants of European settlers, or between Quebec and the rest of Canada. Adopting such a position, in addition to forcing an alliance of the workers with the national bourgeoisie, would imply that an intermediate stage of national liberation would be necessary before embarking on the struggle towards socialism. However, this intermediate step, in our current circumstances, would only strengthen the bourgeoisie of this or that nation and would present the danger of balkanizing Canada into a series of more vulnerable nations, which would therefore be more dependent on the US imperialists.
If we believe, however, that no national liberation struggle takes precedence over the class struggle in Canada, we recognize the persistence of closely-related aspects of these struggles, and it is necessary to devise a truly democratic solution to the national question. We are not nihilists, and we reaffirm that the unity of the working class of every nation which inhabits Canada is only possible if we fight relentlessly, first against the chauvinism of the oppressing nation, then, parallel to this, against the narrow nationalism of small nations. This assertion does not mean that national equality should be achieved first as a precondition for the struggle for socialism, but rather that these two struggles complement each other. One should also note that in this sense, the existence of the Communist Party of Quebec as a separate national entity within the CPC since 1965, as well as the publication of an autonomous Quebec Communist press, plays an important role which makes it possible to mobilize people around the national question according to different strategies in the oppressed nation as compared with strategies in the dominant nation.
Whatever criticisms we may make of the national movement (even when considering the danger that the movement may be co-opted by imperialism), nothing justifies deviation from our fundamental principle, namely the guarantee of the inalienable right to self-determination of all nations, up to and including secession. As with a marriage, for the union to be free, consenting, and egalitarian, both spouses must be able to freely exercise their right to divorce. This does not mean, however, that we are in favour of divorce, but that without the clear guarantee of this right, the union between different peoples can only be unequal and forced. Indeed, without being guaranteed the right to separation, the nation remains oppressed, as it is deprived of the political leverage which allows it to guarantee its collective rights. If a union of nations is no longer considered an option, the nation has the right to leave the union unilaterally.
With these two principles (unity of the working class, and national equality), the Communists have over the past 100 years fought tirelessly for a new Canadian constitution which would guarantee the right to self-determination up to and including secession for all of the nations that make up Canada, on the basis of a new and voluntary partnership. The Quebec Communists have even committed themselves to a Quebec constitution, which would serve as the basis of what could become a Quebec republic within this union of nations.
During 1970’s October Crisis, which saw the Canadian army occupy Quebec, the imposition of the War Measures Act for the first time during peacetime, when 3,000 people were victims of police raids and 500 were arrested (mostly progressives who had nothing to do with the dozen FLQ members), the Communist Party of Canada was the only federal party which denounced this repression. While the other federal parties blamed the handful of petty-bourgeois adventurists, the Communists recognized that the root of the problem was the refusal to recognize Quebec as a nation and the refusal to guarantee its self- determination.
In 1972, the Communists were the only ones to actively mobilize within the Canadian Labour Congress to guarantee the autonomy of the FTQ (Quebec Federation of Labour), a battle which we won and which affirmed that Quebec’s working class could rely on the Communists to defend their national rights. Within other popular and democratic movements, particularly the student movement, the Young Communist League of Canada has always concerned itself with reminding student unions in English-speaking Canada of the need for an equal dialogue with Quebec student unions. In the peace movement, the Communists succeeded in ensuring that the Quebec Peace Council has its own seat within the World Peace Council, and this is true too within the women’s movement and the Cuban solidarity movement.
After a long campaign to alter the referendum question in 1980, and after it became clear that the question would not be changed, the Communists analyzed the situation and, considering the stakes as well as the positions adopted by the trade union movement, while also understanding that the “no” vote corresponded to the position of the monopolies, the Communists resigned themselves to calling for a critical “yes” vote. At the same time, in English-speaking Canada, the Communists campaigned to promote Quebec's right to sovereignty.
In 1995, following the attempted liquidation of the Party in the early 1990s, the Communist Party became disorganized in Quebec. However, this weakness did not prevent the Party from reaffirming its position to guarantee the right to national sovereignty. As the Liberals squandered public funds to allow Canadians from across the country to assemble in Montreal for a pro-Canada and pro-status-quo rally, a rally in which some left forces demonstrated their support, the Party issued an appeal to workers from both nations and stressed the importance of a new constitution for Canada.
Today, our party is the only pan-Canadian party to unequivocally denounce the Clarity Act, whereas the NDP and the Green Party refused to support a Bloc Québecois motion to repeal it. This position is far from trivial: through their actions, these two parties are making a clear anti- democratic statement. Not only do they refuse to support Quebec’s right to self-determination, but they put the final nail in the coffin by arguing that 50% plus one is not enough for Quebec’s secession to be valid... yet 50% minus one would be enough to keep Quebec within Canada...?
We should also note that the Communist Party has recognized the existence of Quebec as a nation since the 1930s. It was not until 2006 that the Conservative Party recognized this (no doubt as a political calculation by which to rally its strength against the Bloc Québecois in Quebec and navigate the sponsorship scandal). The NDP thus felt obliged to do the same and, in advocating an “asymmetric federation”, adopted the Sherbrooke Declaration — yet it does not recognize the right to self-determination, nor does it promise a new constitution.
In 1998, the reorganized Communist Party of Quebec wagered that the organization of a federated party of the working masses, as promoted earlier in the 1970s, was relevant during a period in which a growing number of trade unionists and progressives felt alienated by the neoliberal turn of the Parti Québecois under Lucien Bouchard. Thus, Communists, social democrats from the Parti pour la démocratie sociale (PDS), and trade unionists from the Rassemblement pour une alternative progressiste (RAP) founded the Union des forces progressistes (UFP) – which originally sought to constitute a union of progressive forces, beyond their individual positions on the national question. But, even though all member groups agreed that the issue of independence would not be at the centre of their agenda, the UFP was forced to rule on the issue very early on. Again, it was the Communist proposal that won the confidence of the congress. It was through this proposal that the UFP recognized the existence of two positions on the national question, one pro-independence (the majority position) and the other (the minority position) which promoted the unity of the working class. These two positions came together in the recognition that independence would not be the end in itself, but rather a means of providing Quebec with extensive social programs.
Victim of its own success, the UFP aroused the envy of several groups and individuals, each with varying degrees of militancy and left roots. In 2005, the UFP merged with the Option citoyenne movement, maintaining certain of the characteristics of a coalition, in particular assuring its original member organizations seats on its governing body, but it became become a unitary party known as Québec solidaire. Gradually , QS abandoned grassroots political activism in favour of bourgeois electoral politics. Its Coordination Committees no longer act as a catalyst for struggle, but as an electoral machine. Consequently, QS has moved away from popular, democratic, and labour struggles in order to be seen as a “reasonable” party, capable of assuming power and managing capitalism successfully in Quebec.
One of the last elements that distinguished it as a militant party was its position on the national question, inherited from the UFP . Even though QS asserted itself as an independence party, it refused independence through referendum and fought for a constituent assembly which would have the task of drafting a Quebec constitution. This constitution, according to the original program, did not necessarily seek to lead to independence, which allowed us Communists leeway to promote our idea of an equal and voluntary partnership. Thanks to this position, QS showed that it was possible to fight against the status quo without at the same time promoting independence as a solution to the national question. This stance contrasted with the vision of the federalists and nationalists, for whom combining the right of separation and unity of the working class beyond the nation is anathema.
For many leading members of the QS, this audacious proposal, too anchored in struggle, had to go. They tried three times: the first two times were without success, particularly thanks to the mobilization of the Communists. However, the third time around, they sidestepped the problem and used the pretext of a merger with a small nationalist group, Option nationale, to force members to accept their position on the national question.Today, QS still claims to fight for a constitution-drafting assembly, but its outcome will have to be independence. In other words, rather than a constituent assembly, it is a constituent referendum: “Independence, and a constitution to fix the details!” Following this change, we had no choice but to leave Québec solidaire, and our comrades who were still active there resigned.
This saga, in which the Quebec Communists were engaged for over 10 years, shows that our position on the national question, just like our strategy of a federated party for the working masses, has proved its worth, but that the main way that we can optimize carrying out this strategy is through the strengthening of the Communist Party .
We Communists do not claim to have a complete answer to the national question. In fact, several questions remain unanswered, including the form that this equal and voluntary partnership should take. For Quebec, we demand the existence of a sovereign nation, which would benefit from its own constitution, but be associated within the framework of an equal and voluntary partnership. However, for other nations, depending on what they choose freely, the exercising of their right to self-determination may be different, and may take the form of greater autonomy. From this arises several questions, not least of which is: should the dominant nation have its own state, or it will merge with the newly created central state? What about Indigenous peoples? Let us dare to ask the question: which ones constitute a nation, and which ones do not?
All of these questions are now circulating, and are subject to discussion as part of a democratic process. What is important for now is the guarantee for each of Canada’s nations to its inalienable collective right to self-determination up to and including secession.
Beyond this fundamental principle, we have a series of more concrete proposals to structure the debate, offering workers of all nations in Canada a say in what this new constitutional pact would look like and how we propose, concretely, to guarantee the right to self-determination for all nations that inhabit Canada.
As we have pointed out, the current Canadian Senate is unquestionably the institution that best personifies national oppression within Canada. Thus, our proposal is its abolition — pure and simple — and its replacement by a Chamber of Nationalities, on which will sit an equal number of elected representatives of each nation that makes up Canada. Thus, to the proportional and democratic representation of the equivalent of the House of Commons will be added the equal representation of each nation. Any bill will have to be endorsed by both chambers before it becomes law, and, when a bill concerns a particular nation, that bill will have to have the support of its representatives in the Chamber of Nationalities.
This proposal is the only truly democratic solution to the national question in Canada. It is the only one which makes the unity of the working class its fundamental principle while continuing to guarantee the inalienable right to self-determination of each of the Canadian nations. This is the only proposal that is truly unacceptable to the big corporations, because it concerns the right of nations to self-determination, including the vetoing of laws that would affect them negatively. It is also the only proposal which attacks the narrow, exclusive and selfish nationalism currently present in the oppressed nation, while pulling the rug out from under the national bourgeoisie, which uses the national question to advance its class interests. It is only through this proposal that the different national movements can come together in their common fight against state monopoly capitalism, the main enemy of the working masses of Canada and the basis of Canadian imperialism. It is also through this proposal that, by guaranteeing full equality as among nations, will enable the working class to unite and fight for the democratic sovereignty of Canada against the United States
This is what makes ours the only truly revolutionary proposal.
THE CONTRADICTIONS OF CAPITALISM AND TECHNOCRATIC UTOPIAN FUTUROLOGY
A CRITIQUE OF FULLY AUTOMATED LUXURY COMMUNISM
Review by Roger Perkins
[Author Aaron Bastani, formerly known as Aaron Peters, one-time contributor to the UCL Conservative Society newspaper and researcher for the Blairite thinktank Demos]
There is no single contradiction or combination of contradictions that will make capitalism miraculously dissolve away into a communist nirvana. Capitalism in severe crisis does not collapse or fade away. Capitalism always fights back, searching for out-of-the-box configurations that give it new life. Therefore, capitalism must be consciously brought down and replaced with a new consciously-built socialist society. This imperative, the most important in human history, must begin, if not yesterday, then certainly today.
Contemporary capitalism is split by serious contradictions and seismic fault cleavages under increasing stress. The basic contradiction of capitalism is the contradiction between the social character of production and the private capitalist form of appropriation. In Anti-Dühring, Engels stated:
The contradiction between socialised production and capitalistic appropriation manifested itself as the antagonism of proletariat and bourgeoisie. (Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, Volume 25, page 256)
The resulting class struggle together with numerous economic crises and cycles have proven in the short and medium term to be features of a more or less “stable” capitalism and do not by themselves threaten the immediate collapse of capitalism.
However from time to time Marxists, non-Marxists, and even a few capitalists have sought out the fatal contradiction of capitalism. For example, it was postulated that the “Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall” would cause capitalism to grind to a halt. Investment would end if profit was no longer likely. But a tendency for the rate of profit to fall is not the same as an iron-clad law mandating the rate of profit to always fall. Counter tendencies, in theory and observed in practice, can bring about a rise. This was the view of Marx. Although Marx asserted that the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall was “the most important law of modern political economy” and “the most essential one for comprehending the most complex relationships ….” (Collected Works, Volume 29, page 133; Penguin Grundrisse, page 748) he nevertheless also stated that this law “operates only as a tendency. And it is only under certain circumstances and only after long periods that its effects become strikingly pronounced”. (Capital, Volume III, Collected Works, Volume 37, page 237; Penguin translation of Capital, Volume III, page 346) Only until capitalism is finally declared dead on a world-wide basis and the inevitable socialist forensic autopsy is performed will one be able to determine the extent a “falling rate of profit” played in its demise.
A more recent attempt to single out a possible fatal contradiction of capitalism occurred in conjunction with the so-called “greening of Marxism”. James O’Connor, founding editor of the eco-socialist journal Capitalism, Socialism, Nature, put forth the view that the “contradiction between the forces and relations of production” resulting in overproduction, crises, etc. is now in the process of being overshadowed by a Great Second Contradiction of Capitalism. Expandor-die capitalism is incapable of greening itself or reversing its expansion imperative to become a stable, steady-state capitalism. The dynamic logic of capitalism forces it to foul its own nest with run-away civilization imperiling climate change, environment destroying pollution and depletion of necessary resources. In addition to O’Connor’s “forces of production and relations of production” the conditions of production have now allegedly risen to prominence and will severely, even fatally, log-jam capitalism to a halt. Capitalist think-tanks are busy in search of ways to overcome this Great Second Contradiction of Capitalism while staying within the boundaries of a still recognizable capitalism and not straying over the border into obvious socialist solutions. So far they have not been anywhere near successful.
While O’Connor’s Great Second Contradiction of Capitalism is said to be located in production (conditions of production), the contradictions engendered by ever-increasing automation are observed in the sphere of consumption. At first automation was said to create as many new jobs as it displaced. But as the twentieth century progressed it became clear that the new jobs were mostly low-paid, precarious jobs for those who were able to obtain them and long-term, debilitating unemployment for those who did not. The working class, to an even greater extent than before, no longer had the purchasing power to buy what it produced – thus an under-consumption crisis.
This can be illustrated by the famous legendary encounter between Walter Reuther, head of the United Autoworkers of America (UAW) and a Ford Motor Company executive who had invited Reuther to tour the just-opened automated Ford plant in Cleveland. Reuther was confronted with acres of automated machines and robots. The usual assembly line of workers was nowhere to be seen. Instead a few thinly-dispersed technicians stood before a panel of green and yellow flashing lights making occasional adjustments to the production process. The Ford executive, with a gloating and gleeful grin turned to Reuther and confidently declared, “These robots, of course, receive no wages, zero pensions, never go on strike and they don’t pay any union dues to you!” Reuther immediately replied: “And neither do they buy any of your cars.”
The natural tendency of capitalism to cause a crisis of overproduction with the resulting temporary layoff of workers is said to have been morphed into the permanent massive disappearance of jobs accompanied by massive underconsuption.
In addition to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the destruction of the conditions of production and everincreasing automation there are many other contradictions of capitalism. For those who want to explore further, the following books may be of use:
Seventeen Contradictions of Capitalism, David Harvey, 2014
Breakdown of Capitalism: History of the Idea in Western Marxism 1883-1983, F. R. Hansen 1985, reprinted 2017
Capitalism’s Contradictions: Studies of Economic Thought Before and After Marx, Henryk Grossman, reprinted 2017
Contemporary Capitalism: New Developments and Contradictions, N. Inozemtsev, Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1974
The Scientific and Technological Revolution and the Contradictions of Capitalism, N. Inozemtsev, Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1982
With the arrival of the twenty-first century, Aaron Bastani, the author of Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto, believes a new third qualitative leap in human history is about to take place. The first qualitative leap was the invention of agriculture, which was vastly superior to hunting and gathering. The second was the Industrial Revolution, particularly the invention of the steam engine which accelerated capitalism and sped it down the tracks to eventual world dominance. And three, the epoch we are now entering, one of boundless abundance made possible by hyper-fast quantum computers exhibiting high levels of artificial intelligence (AI).
In Bastani’s mind automation itself will undergo a capitalism-ending giant qualitative leap which, while ironically solving most of the existing contradictions of capitalism, will nevertheless become the fatal contradiction of capitalism. This new artificial intelligence (AI) society will result in the vanishing of the working class because living labour power will no longer be hired. The working class has been digitized into computer zeros and ones. Variable capital has now become constant capital – or so Bastani claims.
The author states that all of our material needs will be produced very, very cheaply – almost for free – by gigantic computer-commanded 3-D printers. Bastani operates under the slogan “Information Wants to be Free” and gives the example of music now being free (but perhaps illegal) on the internet after having been digitized. This AI/knowledge society will be incompatible with a capitalist market economy, thus negating capitalism as well. But, according to the logic of Bastani, capitalists without a market would find themselves disoriented and confused. Under the infinite weight of AI technology they would not resist their inevitable demise. Therefore there would be no need to consciously overthrow capitalism and replace it with socialism. Capitalism just becomes irrelevant and sublimates away like dry ice. Such a view has more in common with 1950s social democracy than Marxism – an extreme version of “peaceful transition”.
And all of this will happen, not in some indefinite distant future when lowerstage socialism has evolved into communism, but only a few short decades away from now– maybe as little as only two decades away (around the 2040s). If only these fantastic predictions of Bastani were true! Communism is only twenty years or so hence and no revolution or socialist transition period necessary!
[Bourgeois futurologist pulp dates gracelessly in capitalist society: the above book chokes up the dollar bins of the English-speaking world]
Unfortunately, the author has combined some of the worst features of early utopian socialism with the speculative endeavors of modern bourgeois futurologists. Marx was hesitant to describe the future in more than a sketchy outline and certainly not in the fleshed-out and extensive details of the utopian socialists. Bastani on the other hand has no such hesitation. Meat would be grown in vats of nutrient fluid. There would be no need to cut down the oxygen-generating Amazon rain forest to create grazing land for methane-emitting cattle which would then get slaughtered for McDonald’s burgers. Declining scarce resources on Earth? Just get them from the moon or other planets – or, better yet, lasso a mineral-rich asteroid and tow it into a near-earth orbit. The author fails to mention any breakthrough regarding nuclear fusion on Earth, but why bother, we already have the sun. The new AI society will tap this free energy. No need to burn fossil fuels and Voila!, the climate change crisis solved.
The author provides technological solutions to most of the problems facing capitalism today, including health care (genetic modification and AI designed super drugs) and growing poverty (food, clothing and shelter – almost free due to AI mass production).
But the predictions of futurologists have often proven quite wrong. For instance, sixty years ago it was believed that by the year 2000 we would all be driving flying cars. It didn’t happen. This is most fortunate because automobiles raining down from the sky after an aerial freeway pile-up would be a very dangerous hazard indeed. A new category of statistical information would be necessary – death by falling vehicle.
Bastani doesn’t seriously consider that predictions are just that – predictions. He projects observed trends into the future as certainties, even having them manifest themselves almost within the same decade – a very unlikely occurrence. Even if one trend came true as predicted, he ignores the fact that a collectivity of many and different, interacting trends complicates accurate forecasting to an extreme degree. His thinking is mechanical, linear and not dialectical. He does not comprehend that all trends are subject to various contingencies, unintended consequences and even collateral damage to other trends, thereby altering the development path projected. Nevertheless Bastani plunges into the future with a fully elaborated utopian scheme – Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC). The author utilizes cherry-picked quotes from Marx throughout his book but is, in reality, much more a utopian technocratic futurologist than a clear-headed Marxist.
Who then is Aaron Bastani?
Bastani, UK-born and with a Ph.D. in political communication from the University of London, started his political journey with a family-inherited Tory outlook. He later opted for the Green Party, read Marx, continued his journey to the left and has now parked himself in the Labour Party recently led by Jeremy Corbyn. Along the way he co-founded Novara Media – a British left-leaning alternative media platform. However, Bastani’s media appearances are not confined to Novara and other fringe outlets. He is often invited as a guest on establishment media as well – BBC, Sky News, etc., where he sometimes dons a black T-shirt emblazoned with the message: “I am a Communist”. But is Bastani , his subjective beliefs notwithstanding, really a communist? Only by expanding the meaning of the word to its outermost fuzzy boundary, can Bastani be hesitantly identified as some sort of technocratic utopian “communist”. His views are not at all compatible with those of Marx, Lenin or historical materialists of today. The author’s political journey has definitely not arrived at the place called “Marxism”.
For Marxists, class is of the essence. For Bastani, class forces play little role. It is the forces of AI technology that have taken over. The working class (a prominent feature of Marxism) seems to have “died and gone to heaven”. It has been replaced by zeroes and ones and can no longer be exploited by capital because it has been absorbed into capital itself. As for the bourgeoisie, its class power has been sucked into the black hole of ever- increasing artificial intelligence. There is, however, a technocratic, vanguard-elite stratum of the population in his vision of society, but nowhere does the author state outright that it has become a new ruling class. What we are left with is some sort of amorphous multitude where class concepts are no longer applicable.
The political expression of this multitudinous blob of humanity Bastani calls “luxury populism”. Because Bastani believes the soon-to-arrive FALC is so overwhelming and inevitable, he doesn’t envision much political self-activity from the declassed and depoliticized masses. Although the author believes “the party form … makes increasingly little sense”(p.194), he flip-flops and advocates a FALC-led electoral party not too dissimilar from the Labour Party of 2019 – one of the very few instances where he recommends any sort of political action whatsoever. This party is necessary because the not-to-be trusted masses of Luxury Populism could go astray if not guided by the wisdom of committed FALC-ites. This party of “communist” technocracy would organize perfunctory “demonstration elections” because “people do not care about politics" and “it is only around elections” that the multitude is “open to new possibilities.”(p.195).The author is oblivious to other events that cause people to “care about politics” and become “open to new possibilities” – e.g. general strikes, wars, revolutionary situations, etc.
Apparently humankind’s path from capitalism to communism doesn’t include general strikes or revolutionary situations.
As for the possibility of war – imperialist nuclear war that could kill billions and set humanity back many thousands of years – Bastani obviously sees little danger because he fails to discuss this horrible possibility. If so, he is walking towards his “inevitable” utopian future with his eyes closed.
Though ignoring the working class in general the author does issue advice to present-day trade unions. To resist austerity is okay, but traditional trade union demands against capital should be shunted aside. Instead, unions should reorient themselves and attack the necessity of work itself. They should force corporations to introduce AI as soon as possible and as deeply as possible!
There is an anti-communist white thread running throughout the book. The only type of communism Bastani approves of is the “communism” of his own concoction –FALC. The author claims FALC differs from traditional communism in that it “recognizes the centrality of human rights, most importantly the right of personal happiness”(page 193). He gives no examples whatsoever to support this slanderous assertion. In answer to this anti-communist slop, let it be stated that communists are, of course, strongly in support of personal happiness and hold that it is achieved not in individual isolation but in the practice of a collective /individual dialectic. Human rights must be viewed not in the abstract in a form devoid of class content. They must be viewed concretely and the following question asked: “human rights” for whom and for what purpose? A capitalist whose bank has been nationalized would surely claim that the human right of ownership has been violated. That capitalist would also probably claim that the right to a job, healthcare and education are not human rights. And then there is “human rights imperialism”. Let us hope that Bastani has not fallen victim to such lying hypocrisy. But his “new communism” must, by any means necessary, be strongly marked off from the “old” communism.
Although Bastani does not extensively attack Lenin and the Russian Revolution, he does make his views known. He identifies with the Mensheviks who claimed that Russia was too technologically backward to even consider setting out on the path towards socialism/communism. The fact that he often quotes Marx but not Lenin is telling in itself (Marx good; Lenin bad). He describes the Bolshevik Revolution as an “anti-liberal coup” (p. 193). He condemns Leninism by falsely claiming that it “views production, and by extension working class subjectivity, as critical while ignoring a world whose ideas and technologies are hugely changed” (p. 196). But it is Bastani himself who views technological AI production as critical while failing to grasp that workingclass subjectivity (consciousness) is indeed one of the most important necessities in the defeat of capitalism.
Bastani instinctively knows that Communists would be highly critical of his smooth and speedy road to Fully Automated Luxury Communism – therefore Marxism Leninism must be run-over and left behind as road-kill.
The Scottish poet Robert Burns famously said that the best laid plans of mice and men go oft awry. No doubt reality itself will cause Bastani’s grandiose FALC to crash to earth. Will the author then concoct another and different utopian blueprint or will he become a disillusioned and cynical Labourite and maybe concentrate more on his business ventures? Or will he continue his political hopscotch and jump to the left and finally become a clear-headed Marxist (and Leninist)? It’s unlikely, but let us hope so. Or will he instead jump to the right and follow in the footsteps of former Labour Member of Parliament Sir Oswald Mosley, who had been considered a potential Labour Prime Minister? Mosley, however, defected from the Labour Party and founded the British Union of Fascists in 1932. Mosley’s mentor, Benito Mussolini, was also once a “socialist”. This reviewer will make no speculative predictions concerning the exact arrangement of Bastani’s future political kaleidoscope. It is his present political orientation as expressed in FALC that should cause concern.
The 1989 Hollywood hit movie Field of Dreams gave us the classic dialogue quote: “If you build it they will come.” In contrast Bastani’s 2019 science- fiction Field of Dreams tells us: Don’t build it and communism will come.
By relying on the almost infinite power of a qualitatively new artificial intelligence the author ignores the revolutionary practice of oppressed classes. No need to build any foundational construction that prepares for a revolutionary situation. Technological determinism has run amok. Just let the fatal contradiction of capitalism do its thing. The author leaves us with the impression that even if all anti-capitalists, revolutionaries and militant workers were to be placed in the deep sleep of suspended animation until after 2040 they would wake-up to Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Revolutionary cadres and a revolutionary organization not needed. This book is worse than seriously flawed; it is even dangerous, because it leaves us with the impression that passivity is a viable option.
Communists are not Luddite opponents of automation and AI. Many of the predictions of FALC will eventually become true although on a varied and much-altered time scale and under very different conditions than those envisioned by the author. But, however embodied or personified AI becomes, it cannot by itself function as avatar or proxy agent for qualitative change from one socioeconomic system (capitalism) to another (socialism/ communism). That role still belongs to a new and always changing working class. For Bastani the working class is not an agent of social change – only flotsam in the AI tsunami. For revolutionaries the working class, its party and allies must be recognized as the decisive core of the coming revolutionary process. The publishing of Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism will not get him rewarded with rapture to AI heaven. Instead, without decisive working-class action he will find himself engulfed in the flames of a capitalist hell-on-earth.
In conclusion: The declassed technological delusions and utopian visions of Aaron Bastani are dangerously wrong. The publisher, Verso Books, has given us a lemon, the lemonade of which is useful only to those who undertake grand “thought experiments” or seek truth via the maze of error.
Furthermore, speculations about the fatal contradiction of capitalism must be subordinated to the organization of a consciously socialist working class whose party is ready for and knowledgeable regarding what Lenin called a “revolutionary situation”. There is no single contradiction or combination of contradictions that will make capitalism miraculously dissolve away into a communist nirvana. Capitalism in severe crisis does not collapse or fade away. Capitalism always fights back, searching for out-of-the-box configurations that give it new life. Therefore, capitalism must be consciously brought down and replaced with a new consciously-built socialist society. This imperative, the most important in human history, must begin, if not yesterday, then certainly today.
Leslie Morris at his typewriter. [Communist Party of Canada]
Welsh-Canadian Leslie Morris was a Communist Party activist in the nineteen-twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, and into the sixties. Elected Party Leader in 1962, he died in 1964. Through much of that time he wrote a regular column for the Communist press. Here are some examples.
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The Labour Temple at 167 Church Street, Toronto. (1965) [York University Archives]
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(In 1921, while Canada was still under the War Measures Act, the Communist Party organized itself secretly in a barn near Guelph, Ontario. In 1922, the above-ground Workers Party of Canada was formed, and in 1924 it changed its name to Communist Party of Canada. Leslie Morris was there, and in 1938 reflected on the Party’s founding.)
December 24 | 1938
Party of the Builders of Canada
Daily Clarion
Seventeen years ago this month in December, 1921, a group of men and women gathered in the Labor Temple in Toronto to form a new party. They came from all parts of Canada. All of them had been active for years in trade unions, in the Socialist movement of various wings; some were connected with labor papers, others with cultural associations among the immigrant groups.
But, no matter what their background was, they were all fired by one great enthusiasm: to restore to the Canadian working class that genuine Socialist leadership which had led the workers and peasants of the tzarist empire to victory, and which at that very moment was organizing the defeat of the interventionists.
There are those who say the Communist Party is an "importation." Nothing can be farther from the truth. The men and women who made up that provisional conference in Toronto were a cross section of the people who had built this new country. If anything can be more Canadian than a workingman, no matter where he was born, who laid the steel and bored the blast holes and broke the virgin sod of the prairies, we should like to meet him!
True, the world experience of the working class movement in the war years and in the revolutionary upsurge which began in 1917, had its profound effect upon Canada. National boundaries cannot prevent the migration of ideas and feelings. But it would be wrong to say that these experiences came only from the outside, from Europe. The Communist Party sprang from Canadian conditions: from the Socialist movement which existed here from the turn of the century; from the trade union movement, which gave us leaders like Tim Buck; from the movement for political democracy which had its earlier champions in Mackenzie, Papineau, Gourlay,* Riel.
The provisional conference of December, 1921 which decided to call a constituent convention in Toronto in February 1922 (again in the historic Labor Temple on Church Street) indeed marked the opening of a new chapter in Canadian history.
Up to that time the Socialist movement had been divorced from life. It preferred to ignore the living stuff of the daily class struggle. It chose to ruminate and philosophize. It did not give leadership.
With the coming of the Workers' Party (later to be known as the Communist Party after the third convention in 1924) the labor movement underwent a change.
Andre Malraux, in his latest book, Man’s Hope, remarks through one of his characters that the favorite Communist word is “concrete” – that is to say, that the Communist is characterized by his burning desire to stick to the facts and on that basis to propose a definite course of action,
Just as in the Daily Clarion the other day, Lenin's telegram to the revolting German soldiers in the Ukraine in 1918 did not come swathed in a bundle of congratulatory phrases, but came as a simple, direct call to pursue the next practical step towards securing the success of their action against the Hohenzollern [the Kaiser’s] machine.
One of the most important changes in the Canadian labor movement brought about by the Communist Party lay in the concreteness with which the tasks of labor were set forward, not always in the best manner in those early days, but in a way not exceeded by any other group, and with clarity of purpose as its keynote.
Empty philosophizing was condemned in the sharpest terms. “Back to the masses" was the slogan the early Communists adopted. “Learn to swim in water," was one of the mottoes hung up in the party rooms in Winnipeg at that time. "No struggle too great, no struggle too small” another read.
So the Communists commenced their Herculean task of rebuilding the labor movement, of ridding it of the isolation from the daily lives of the people which was part of our heritage from the past. The slogan of unity was advanced in that time: unity of the union movement; unity between farmers and workers; unity with the masses for winning those concessions like relief [forerunner of welfare] (which at that time after the war were not yet known to people) and in later years, advancing those policies which were first the property of the Communists and later of the entire people.
Remember some of those slogans: unemployment insurance, trade union unity, national unification, against the Hepburn-Duplessis alliance [Hepburn, Duplessis, reactionary premiers of Ontario and Quebec] – remember them next time a red-baiter spouts the slander that the Communists are “foreign agents," and then realize that these great Canadian ideas, first advanced by the Communists, are today the issues around which the whole political life of our country is revolving.
Nineteen twenty-one has given place to nineteen thirty-nine, but the party founded by Tim Buck and his comrades grows and flourishes – because it is flesh of the flesh of the laboring masses of Canada, the custodians of the destiny of our country.
That oneness with Canadian life, guided and enriched by the world experience of the workers, is the guarantee for the success of the principles which the Communist Party has held aloft through thick and thin, in fair weather and foul.
* Robert Gourlay, early democratic reformer, opponent of the "Family Compat" in Upper Canada, banished for sedition in 1819.
Detail from Soviet anti-imperialist political cartoon. (c.1960) [Public Domain]
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(In 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was set up under U.S. leadership. Canada was a founding member of that military alliance, supposedly organized to block “Soviet aggression and disruption” – meaning by “disruption”, working class and left opposition to post-war capitalist “stabilization” in Western Europe. Now the Soviet Union is gone, but – surprise! surprise! – NATO remains. NATO now openly declares its sphere of activity to be world-wide, not just confined to the region of the North Atlantic, even though the United Nations Charter expressly prohibits – without Security Council authorization – “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state,” while allowing “regional arrangements or agencies for dealing with … the maintenance of international peace and security.”)
May 30 | 1949
Tragedy and Farce
Canadian Tribune
The genius Karl Marx, whose stature as the teacher of mankind grows with each passing day, remarked that great facts and personages appear in history the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce.
This wisdom is called to memory by a comparison between the Anti-Comintern Pact in the 30s [“Comintern” – short for the Communist International] between Hitler, Horthy [of Hungary], Mussolini, Tojo [of Japan] and Franco [of Spain] – which produced the Munich Pact of 1938 and the world war of 1939, and the Atlantic Pact which we are told "preserves our freedom."
The arch-criminals concocted the Anti-Comintern Pact and said it was to preserve “western civilization against the Soviet Union and communism.” That was the Axis – which gave rise to the name “Axis powers" to describe the fascist states.
This is an historic occasion. It is certainly one of the greatest steps toward world peace and security…. This agreement marks the opening of a new era of cooperation and understanding.
That is how [British Foreign Minister] Ernest Bevin described, in parliament on March 18, the Atlantic Pact [which gave rise to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization].
Now, a voice from the past which was strangled by the hangman:
The conclusion of today's agreement is an epochal event. It is a turning point in the struggle of all nations which love order and civilization against the powers of destruction.... This agreement is a guarantee of peace for all the world.
So spoke Ribbentrop, Hitler's foreign minister, when the Anti-Comintern Pact was concluded in November, 1936.
Not even the grace of a change in language – because the motive for both pacts is the same!
Another voice from the dead, Ciano, Mussolini's foreign minister whom he later put to death:
The (Anti-Comintern) Pact has no hidden aims. It is directed against no one. ... It is an instrument placed in the hands of peace and civilization.
Compare this with Ernest Bevin's praise of the (North Atlantic) Pact:
This Pact is a powerful defense arrangement, it is not directed against anyone... If we are accused of ganging up against any country or a group of countries, I should say simply: “Examine the text. There is no secrecy about it; there are no secret clauses."
Two hundred and fifty million people are a rampart against the menace of Soviet aggression and communist disruption.
So shout the press and politicians.
Hitler's main newspaper, the Volkischer Beobachter, hailed the Anti-Comintern Pact in November, 1937, in almost the same words:
The... agreement is a bulwark of peace. A dyke of two hundred million human beings is being formed to protect the peace of the world from Bolshevist disruption.
The chief of the U.S. Air Force said March 1, 1949, referring to the arrival of his Atom Bomb squadron in Britain:
The shadow of United States Air Power can be cast over any part of the world.
Mussolini declared after the signing of the Axis Pact against Bolshevism:
The shadow of our planes will darken the sky.
The Anti-Comintern Pact paralyzed the governments of the western democracies and opened the door for Hitler's armies of invasion. The Atlantic Pact puts the governments who signed it right into the clutches of the United States which alone has the power to enforce its provisions.
Hitler's attempt brought tragedy into the world. The U.S. attempt to repeat what Hitler has done has all the elements of farce attached to it – remembering that farce recoils mightily upon the heads of the ill-doers.
The Communists warned that the Axis Pact and the Munich Pact would lead to war. They were right, and people said so. They say again, the Atlantic Pact is a war pact – but the forces of peace, ten times stronger than in 1938, can defeat the new Axismen – who are ten times weaker than before the war.
The cover of the New Party movement’s 1960 platform paper. [Public Domain]
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(From the mid-1930s on, Canadian social democracy, or at least the social-democratic leadership, has for the most part eagerly taken on the mission of fighting Communism. The Communists have mostly sought co-operation wherever possible with all popular forces, including social democrats, in working-class and people’s struggles generally. At the time of the New Democratic Party’s founding in 1961, such prospects again got nowhere, to nobody’s surprise. In fact, the infant NDP reversed the get-out-of-NATO policy that its predecessor party, the CCF, had adopted. The policy was later to be once again adopted by the NDP, and then again later dropped once more. Even when it was official, Convention-adopted NDP policy, the public scarcely knew about it.)
March 27 | 1961
The Communists and the New Party
Canadian Tribune
The Communist Party always has supported the idea of a mass labor party, a united front of the workers for independent political action. It also has emphasized that such a party must bring in the farmers and the middle-class people of the cities and towns.
This is not a matter of words but of long years of Communist activity.
In 1921 the Canadian Labor Party* was formed at the time of the Winnipeg convention of the Trades and Labor Congress (AFL). It was a federated party. When the Communist Party was formed in December, 1921, almost 40 years ago now, it supported the CLP. In his book, Thirty Years, Tim Buck described this effort in the following words:
In every locality all unions and other working-class organizations affiliated to the party (the CLP -L.M.) coordinated their parliamentary activities through a delegate council.
Each provincial section held separate annual conventions, the annual conventions being made up of delegates elected in provincial conventions. The CLP was open to all and any working-class organizations. The only conditions were that affiliated organizations should abide by the program and discipline of the CLP in electoral activities and should not at any time engage in anti-working-class activity. The CLP was a working-class political united front. Some marked gains were made during the five years in which its unity was maintained. There is no doubt whatever that its continued development would have made the organized labor movement an important parliamentary force in Canada.
For some time the Communists were in the Canadian Labor Party. One of the reasons the CLP failed was that for the right-wingers the issue became not the workers' needs but “Communism."
The Communists have advocated a mass labor party all these years because they are the strongest fighters for the working-class united front, of which independent labor parliamentary political action is one of the most important parts. It is not the whole of the united front because labor's struggles are not only in the parliamentary arena, but on the industrial front and at times in great demonstrative actions outside of parliament.
This is not to say that the Communists have not made mistakes about the united front from time to time over the years. Of course they have – and they have openly discussed and admitted them. But they have made no big mistakes on unity, because they have always stuck close to the basic truth – that the working-class united front, and people's unity against the monopolies and for peace and independence, are the fundamental questions of present-day Canada. The mistakes never involved these fundamental necessities but always were connected with how to bring them to life.
One of the earliest political memories of this writer is the efforts that were made in Winnipeg in the early 1920s, shortly after the General Strike, to reach electoral agreements with the Independent Labor Party for a parliamentary united front of the working-class voters. The right wing defeated us.
During the years of the CCF the Communists sought to build electoral unity, and were as often rejected by the right-wing leaders and their "red bogey.” At times this struggle for unity reached a high pitch, as when the Labor Section of the CCF was expelled for supporting the united front in Ontario in the mid-1930s.
There is no use blinking one's eyes to the fact that you can achieve unity only by fighting for it. It does not fall like manna from heaven.
The long and bitter struggle to build anti-fascist unity in the years before World War Two and the mighty movement to aid the people of Spain produced big gains and much political education in those stirring days – but always the right wing set its face against mass popular action. The war broke out, and Franco still is in power [in Spain].
The economic crisis of 1929-32 struck Canadians like a thunderbolt and millions recovered from their initial shock to enter massive economic struggles. These never became concentrated in a great parliamentary movement of the workers and farmers because the idea of political unity was not yet strong enough to defeat the right-wing: leaders of the CCF, who ran this chance into the ground.
Now Canadians, living in a world which is being transformed daily before our eyes, when we are menaced by the 20 megaton H-bombs that [scientist] Prof. Linus Pauling described in Toronto last Sunday – bombs that can wipe cities off the map in the twinkling of an eye; and when the idea of Canadian independence is gathering ground and another economic crisis is mounting against us to bring Canadian national policy into its deepest crisis yet - now we have a new chance – as we had in the 1920s and 1930s – to forge that instrument of mass political action which is so urgently required.
Will the new chance be muffed, again? Or will it succeed this time? That is the question.
As far as the Communists are concerned they have made their views on the New Party known, directly and plainly, for they are plain spoken people, not given to double-talk and double-thinking.
They support the New Party, welcome its appearance and see in it a chance of success in defeating the old-line capitalist parties, so much so that the Communist Party raises the possibility of electing a government of the New Party in the coming federal election.
This can be done, say the Communists, if the New Party learns the lesson of the past: that unity – working-class, labor-farmer, all-in people's unity – must be the heart and soul, the backbone, of the New Party if it is to fulfill the hopes many thousands are placing in it.
It can be done if the New Party is the party of Canadian independence, disarmament, peace, and new economic policies to put the country to work for its people instead of for the giant U.S.-Canadian monopolies.
Such a program would immediately win mass support and would roll up further backing as it got rolling in a great crusade.
The Communist Party program, The Road to Socialism in Canada, puts it this way:
Independent labor-farmer political action can be the means of winning away masses of workers and farmers from their traditional support for the capitalist parties and setting them on to the path of political independence. The Communist Party works for the election to parliament of a labor-farmer government. The formation of a labor-farmer government would be a defeat for the monopoly capitalists, instilling political confidence among the workers and farmers... The Communist Party believes that the road of a united, all-inclusive labor-farmer political party is the most advantageous way to bring about the parliamentary defeat of monopoly capital and its parties, and to unite all democratic, freedom-loving forces among the Canadian people to achieve independence, peace and social progress.
In its attitude to the New Party, the Communist Party is faithfully carrying out its program.
It does not ascribe to the New Party a socialist aim, as John Diefenbaker did at the Tory clambake in Ottawa the other day, in an obvious effort to make socialism, falsely, the issue in Canada today, and so to try to scare away potential supporters of the New Party who want new policies short of socialism, and by means of this trick to cover up his own sins in connection with nuclear armaments and unemployment.
There is only one party in Canada which is the party of socialism, the party of the working class, and that is the Communist Party. The Communist Party, as its program says, regards a mass labor-farmer party as a part of the long struggle towards political maturity gained out of experience. It stands on the socialist principle that to build a socialist Canada we shall have to have a working-class dictatorship, a new kind of state led by the working class, possessing a traditional Canadian parliamentary form but with a new class content - a working-class state.
Naturally, such a principle could not be the foundation of the New Party, and the Communists are the first to say so. That is why we speak of the New Party as a party of reform. But reforms, and the fight for them, can help the working class gain strength and experience for the final historic socialist goal.
If unity is built and maintained around the fight for reforms, which will have to be very deep-going to meet the needs of Canada today, then we can foresee the New Party becoming a movement that will do what has been sorely needed for these many years – taking millions of workers and farmers away from the habit of voting for the bosses and voting for themselves for a change.
This is the attitude of the Communist Party to the New Party.
Trade unions, farmers' organizations, New Party clubs and all kinds of popular groups should send hundreds of delegates to the New Party's founding convention. If they are determined to stand for unity there, and fight to adopt a real people's program, then the New Party will correspond to the demands of Canadian life.
If the Founding Convention becomes the scene of anti-Communist misrepresentations, and if the Communists rather than the monopolists become the main target, then the chance will be missed again.
Canadian labor history tells us the choice is as plain as that.
* The name used in the formative stage of the New Democratic Party
Tommy Douglas is carried to the convention platform after the announcement was made that he had won the NDP leadership. (1961) [The Associated Press]
***
October 1961
The New Democratic Party Founding Convention
Marxist Review (Excerpt)
... The active political leadership and control were in the hands of the right wing, from the very beginning, long before the convention. Anyone who, not being at the convention, saw it on television and heard it on the radio can testify that the union men and women, farmers, French-Canadian delegates and others who made up the convention, displayed an enthusiasm and vitality and readiness to battle which the labor and progressive movement are sorely in need of. They would have responded to a solidly consistent progressive, militant line on peace, Canadian independence and economic reconstruction. And likewise, it is clear that such a fighting policy could have been taken to the electors with greater benefit than [NDP Leader T.C.] Douglas is now able to do with his "safe" line on the key issues, sugared as it is by his specious agreement with Diefenbaker's challenge to fight the next election on the issue of “socialism." Very safe, that, so long as NATO, peace, independence are not at the heart of the struggle!
WHAT IS LEFT FOR PHILOSOPHY? A DISAGREEMENT WITH STEPHEN HAWKING
By René Simard
Hawking in action, explaining black holes.(2018) [Redux/Muir Vidler]
Physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking, who died on March 14th, was an inspiration not only because of his spectacular scientific achievements in the face of the neuronal disorder that gradually paralyzed him over the years. He deserves credit for progressive political stands on behalf of the environment and the campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people. But that needn’t stop us from debating with Hawking over what he had to say about philosophy.
***
In a conference for Google Zeitgeist in 2015, Stephen Hawking repeated what was already found in his book Grand Design, written jointly with Leonard Mlodinow. Here is what he wrote there:
Humans are a curious species. We wonder, we seek answers. Living in this vast world that is by turns kind and cruel, and gazing at the immense heavens above, people have always asked a multitude of questions: How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? How does the universe behave? What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a creator? Most of us do not spend most of our time worrying about these questions, but almost all of us worry about them some of the time. Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge. The purpose of this book is to give the answers that are suggested by recent discoveries and theoretical advances.1
If Hawking is right, philosophy cannot respond to such gazing or wondering as has been traditionally considered the beginning of philosophy.2
The reason for such hostility towards philosophy is perhaps the mistake made in expecting that particular discipline to provide us with definitive answers. For, according to Bertrand Russell, “The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty,”3 Then, once definite knowledge on a subject is possible, that subject does not belong to philosophy any more and turns into a science. This has indeed been true about cosmology, and astronomy, for instance. So Hawking faults philosophy because it does not give us a supply of uncontested, demonstrable truths, and this lack of definite answerability is considered to be a characteristic feature of philosophical questions.4
Russell is not alone in this assessment. In Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (What is Philosophy?), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari say, “What science is about isn’t concepts, but [mathematical] functions that are given as propositions in discursive systems. The elements of functions are called functors. A scientific notion is not determined by concepts but by functions.”5
Let us reformulate our initial question – What is left for philosophy? – in the framework of the three questions that Immanuel Kant thought his whole philosophy aimed at answering: What can I know? (the question he responds to in the Critique of Pure Reason); What do I have to do? (to which he responds in the Critique of Practical Reason and The Metaphysics of Morals); and, What may I hope? (to which he responds in several works, particularly Religion within the Boundaries of Reason Alone). While scientists such as Hawking can say that philosophy has nothing to say about the first question, the second and third questions, thanks to their nature, might seem to remain for philosophy.
In what follows we can see a response by the philosopher of practice – Marx6, who, unlike Deleuze, does not foresee a future for philosophy if it does not get past itself.
In the Eleventh Thesis in Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach”, which Marx wrote in 1845, we read, “The philosophers have merely interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it”.7
Bees constructing new comb. (n.d.) [Public Domain]
We can see that in saying this Marx is offering a response to at least the second and third of Kant’s three questions. These are matters that remain beyond purely scientific demonstrability. But one may ask if Marx thinks that this changing of the world is on the agenda for the first time in his own epoch. An answer to this can be found in the first volume of Capital, where he writes about what distinguishes us from animals:
A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally.8
Here Marx acknowledges that even a bee changes its life. In order for an organism to change its physical environment the only necessary condition is its existence.9 This point, recently discussed in the philosophy of biology, was already recognized by Marx. But it is necessary from the very beginning to draw a distinction between biological changing and human changing.
It is possible to go even further and emphasize the point that Marx doesn’t say for whom it is important to change the world. Is the second part of Thesis Eleven the problem of philosophers also? Who, after all, is it that has to change the world? According to the understanding being proposed here, the question for Marx is not whether philosophers should or should not change the world: in a sense, they do that in their daily life. What important is, in a different sense, to replace this world with another one.
Marx’s slogan is therefore not “let’s change the world”, but “let’s change the world by replacing the existing world with the true reality”. The textual support for this reading may be found in Marx’s letter to Arnold Ruge of September1843:
Reason has always existed, but not always in a rational form. Hence the critic can take his cue from every existing form of theoretical and practical consciousness and from this ideal and final goal implicit in the actual forms of existing reality he can deduce a true reality. Now as far as real life is concerned, it is precisely the political state which contains the postulates of reason in all its modern forms, even where it has not been the conscious repository of socialist requirements. But it does not stop there. It consistently assumed that reason has been realized and just as consistently it becomes embroiled at every point in a conflict between its ideal vocation and its actually existing premises.10
By adopting such a standpoint, Marx in a sense follows a tradition known ever since Plato said (in The Republic 509b) that the good is transcendence of what exists, beyond being.
A term in need of explication, used also in the Theses, is the Germam word Praxis (translated as “practice”). Etymologically related to the verb prattein in Greek, it means human action. There is a need to distinguish involuntary from voluntary actions. If what a human does is different from other animals, it is just because it is the action of a human being. At the same time, what Marx wants to propose here is: for humans, in order to exist biologically they have to exist socially. In any case, all humans are already incessantly changing the world. Even more: in fact, every organism, changes its own environment. And, in the same way that there is no organism without there being the environment of that organism, there likewise is not that environment (the way it is) without that organism. Each organism determines its environment and is also determined by it.
A young Karl Marx speaks to his fellow students, flanked by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus, in a painting from China's Marx200 Exhibit. (2018) [Public Domain]
From this follows the critique, in Marx’s Third Thesis on Feuerbach, of the materialist doctrine that takes humans to be the passive products of circumstances and education. This doctrine takes the transformation of humans simply as the product of the transformation of circumstances. In so doing it
forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.
The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.11
One key word in this passage is “coincidence”, which signifies that by coevolution, mutual transformation of the organisms and the environment, we and our environment co-adapt.11a The world is then in constant change, and we can neither stop this change nor stop playing a role. For the human organism, the change means simultaneous creation and destruction. Whereas in D’Alembert’s Dream Denis Diderot (1713-1784) tells us “everything changes, everything passes away, the only thing that remains is the whole”, for Marx the whole changes as well. We, as long as we exist as organisms, constantly and inevitably export entropy to our environment, and, in so doing, we change our world as well as ourselves.12
This truism is to remind us that philosophers are not exceptions here. Hence, the point stressed here by Marx in this Thesis is nothing but an invitation for a particular change. He thinks that, although humans make their history and change their world, including themselves, they do not do this on the basis of conditions they have chosen, “but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”13
This is a point established in the philosophy of science. In his article “Extended Phenotypes and Extended Organisms”, Scott Turner, the philosopher of biology writes:
“When organisms can modify environments to beneficial ends, they are liberated from being simply slaves at the mercy of the environment, and become, in a profound sense, its masters.”14
This could also be the slogan of Marx. Philosophy, according to Marx, is a practice engaged in by humans, and like all other practices has some direct or indirect influence on life. What is characteristic of Marx’s era is the following (to quote Ernst Bloch): “Thus the beginning philosophy of revolution, i.e. of changeability for the better, was ultimately revealed on and in the horizon of the future; with the science of the New and power to guide it.”15
If this interpretation is acceptable, Marx intends to introduce an epistemonic approach,16 without employing the term – the term which I want to use to emphasize an approach that retains the unity of intellectual and material life without accepting Hegelian idealism. Once more, like all of us in society, philosophers are certainly changing the world in their daily life. What Marx wants to say is rather that the world’s philosophers, along with all others, should orient their philosophy towards this particular change; a change that is on the one hand conscious and on the other hand enriched by their daily life as philosophers. To give a concrete example, like all other members of the society, the philosophers either participate in elections, or they do not. They make their definite choices in a social milieu and choose one candidate against another, or refuse to vote. Here, as always, even in choosing to be passive, one is in another sense inevitably active.17
In insisting on this type of transformation of the world, Marx remains in the philosophical tradition seen since, for instance, the portrayal of Socrates as depicted in Plato’s dialogue The Crito (47a), where Socrates finds himself obliged to follow the arguments where they lead, and hence offers the prototype of the unity of the practice and theory well known in Marxist thought.
To revitalize this in our era, to orient themselves towards such a change as the response to the second and third questions above, the philosophers have to familiarize themselves with political economy, and scientists have to be acquainted with philosophy, and go beyond their own narrow disciplines.
Detail of Rodin's La porte de l'enfer (The Gates of Hell) at The National Museum of Western Art (2011) (2011) [Creative Commons]
Conclusion:
I would like to finish this article with a reference to a scene from the famous movie, Zorba the Greek, made in 1964 and based on a book with the same title by Nikos Kazantzakis, the progressive Greek writer.
First, a few words on what goes on in the film. Basil, a young British writer, returns to Crete to manage a mine left to him by his father. He meets Zorba, an exuberant Greek who insists on serving as his guide and assistant. The two are different on all counts: Zorba loves to drink, laugh loud, sing, and dance; he follows his own unique lifestyle. Basil, on the other hand, is too polite, timid, and reserved, obsessed by his reading. Nonetheless, they make friends, and collaborate in developing the mine. Zorba agrees to construct a cable-car to develop the mine. Basil trusts him; the project fails in the end.
The particular scene related to the discussion here is the following. Seeing his inability to save a widow killed by the villagers for having sexual relations with the Englishman (Basil) instead of marrying one of the men in the village, Zorba asks Basil:
Why do people die? Why? Tell me!
Basil says: I don’t know.
Zorba: What is the use of all this crap that you read, if they do not respond to such questions? What do those books tell you?
Basil: They tell me about the torture of the ones who cannot respond to such questions.
Zorba: I don’t like torture.
We as philosophers have to contribute in responding to the questions of the Zorbas of our time, including ourselves. Their questions are more horrendous. Here is an example: Why is it that, according to UNICEF, “every 3.6 seconds one person dies of starvation. Usually it is a child under the age of 5.”?18
A philosophical approach aiming at questions of this type does not leave philosophers calm, as Russell suggests, or leave philosophy as a discipline with its own particular function in contrast to science, as Deleuze suggests. Contrary to what is suggested by Deleuze, the aim of this philosophy is still truth, and not just getting a sense of things, as he says.
Nonetheless, in proceeding as philosophers, as Deleuze does suggest, we will be able to “write for the illiterate” where the word “for” in this sentence will not mean “intended for”, or “instead of”, but before, that is, in front of.19 Like Russell, we can be engaged in our life philosophically with the questions posed by our time. Personally, this engagement led to Russell’s loss of his academic position and six months of imprisonment. Deleuze famously says that in philosophy we formulate the problems of our era and create new concepts in response to those problems. In doing so, we can have “a constitutive relationship between philosophy and non-philosophy.”20 Without confronting the intertwined problems of our era, our philosophy remains abstruse and isolated from social life; that is the death of philosophy.
1 Hawking, Stephen; Mlodinow, Leonard, The Grand Design (New York 2010), p. 10.
2 Plato, The Theaetetus, 155 d.
3 Russell, Bertrand, Problems of Philosophy (New York 1997) p. 156
4 Russell, p. 155
5 «La science n’a pas pour objets des concepts, mais des fonctions qui se présentent comme des propositions dans des systèmes discursifs. Les éléments des fonctions s’appellent des fonctifs. Une notion scientifique est déterminée non pas des concepts, mais par fonctions.» Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris 2005), p. 117.
6 The greatest thinker of the second millennium according to the BBC (BBC October 1, 1999) (After Marx come Einstein, Newton, Darwin, Aquinas, Hawking – the greatest scientist ever according to Nature, November 6, 2013).
7 Karl, Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, in Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, Volume 5 (Moscow 1976), p. 5.
8 Marx, Karl (1976) Capital I, Ben Fowkes translator (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England 1976), p. 284.
9 Pearce, Trevor (2011) “Ecosystem engineering, experiment, and evolution”, Biol Philos, Volume 26 (2011) 793–812, p. 800
10 Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, Paris 1844, Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 3 (Moscow 1975), p. 143.
11 Karl, Marx (1845), Theses on Feuerbach, in Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 5, p. 4.
11 a Here, I use the modified version of what is proposed by Richard C. Lewontin in “The Organism as Subject and Object of Evolution”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftzoa2dw3CQ
12 Pearce, Trevor “Ecosystem engineering, experiment, and evolution”, Biol.Philos, Vol. 26 (2011): 793-812, p. 799.
13 Karl, Marx (1851) The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 11, (Moscow 1979), p. 103.
14 Turner, Scott (2004) Biology and Philosophy, Volume 19 (2004): 327–352, pp. 328-329.
14 Turner, Scott (2004) Biology and Philosophy, Volume 19 (2004): 327–352, pp. 328-329.
15 Bloch, Ernst, The Principle of Hope, translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight, Volume 1
(Cambridge, Massachusetts 1976), p. 283.
16 I think this can also be seen in the conception of truth as introduced by Marx in the Second Thesis: reality [Wirklichkeit] is introduced as a characteristic of truth besides this sided-ness [Disseitigkeit] and along with power [Macht]. Marx, Karl, Theses on Feuerbach, Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 5, p. 3.
17 Thus we underline the reverse of the slogan Hegel wrongly attributes to Spinoza, “Omnis determinatio est negatio”. (“Every determination – any definite way that something is – is a negation [of alternatives]”.)
18 https://www.unicef.org/mdg/poverty.html
19 “Écrire pour les analphabètes”, Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris 2005), p. 111.
20 “Un rapport constitutif de la philosophie avec la non-philosophie”, Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris 2005), p. 111.
The location of René Simard's philosophical inquiries is Montreal.
MARXISM AND OPPRESSION: THE STRUGGLES OF WOMEN AND RACIALIZED PEOPLES UNDER CAPITALISM
By Rozh Em
[Workers' World]
Oppression is integral to the development and expansion of capitalism. Capitalism has historically thrived on systemic oppression and continues to do so today, as it justifies the hyper-exploitation of certain segments of the working class while dividing workers on the basis of race and/or gender. In contrast to “intersectionality” theory, Marxists understand that class exploitation isn’t simply another form of oppression but, rather, functionally central to the entire capitalist system we live in and key to labour relations in our society – making it distinct from other forms of oppression. Moreover, one’s class is not simply determined by one’s income. It is determined by one’s relation to property – with the capitalist class being the ones who own property and the means of production, while the working class sells its labour power for wages that amount to less than the value of the commodities they produce for the capitalist class. The labour of women and racialized people in the working class has historically been devalued because of the oppression they face in society. Therefore, as Marxists, we have always seen socialism as a vital step towards the liberation of the oppressed. Today, oppression doesn’t simply and only occur on an individual-individual basis nor is it a rare phenomenon. Although we live in a different time, sexism and racism still exist structurally and are still key features of the capitalist system. This article will specifically look at how the oppression of women and racialized peoples is connected to capitalist exploitation.
Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State discusses how the power disparities between men and women were not based on their “inherent nature,” but derived from social and historical circumstances rooted in the development of class-based societies.1 While Engels did argue that a sexual division of labour existed before class-based societies, he explains how indigenous nations often had equitable and cooperative gender relations, or even matriarchal societies. He assesses how family relations within these societies were fundamentally different from the nuclear family structure because it was based on clans and social groupings. However, with the rise of private property, gender-relations also changed, particularly the notion of the “mother-right.” For Engels, Patriarchy became a system of inheritance that allowed men to pass property and ownership to their male counterparts.2 Therefore, the mother line no longer determined family groupings, which left women with less control within the family structure. Engels concludes that therefore, “the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became a mere instrument for the production of children,”3 thus suggesting that exploitative class relations were what led to the initial oppression of women.
See Red Women's Workshop poster. (c.1980) [See Red Women's Workshop]
Lise Vogel’s Marxism and the Oppression of Women further examines these phenomena, illustrating how Marx’s own analysis can also be looked at to examine how households became essential social units for the “reproduction of the working class itself.”4 She believes that Marx’s work on women, the family, the division of labour according to sex, and the reproduction of the working class are under-valued by socialists who study the oppression of women. Marx analyzes the ways working-class women are exploited under the context of capitalist development, particularly after the introduction of machinery (though it should be noted that before capitalism, Black women forced into slavery in the USA worked day-to-night under some of the most exploitative and brutal conditions). Vogel takes up Marx’s argument and states that, because operating machinery was known to be less physically demanding, it “enabled employers to hire women and children,” who were then paid lower wages than male workers because their labour and status in society was devalued.5 Therefore, capitalists could make greater profits. To this day, women working full time in Canada make 74 cents to every dollar men make, both because women’s labour is seen as less worthy than men’s labour and because more women are employed in low-wage jobs and industries.6 Women who graduate from university still make less than their male counterparts because regardless of their qualification, their labour is still worth less than men’s. In addition, more women than men work in precarious, part-time jobs, particularly racialized women, many of whom end up working in the service sector and taking long shifts in order to survive on a minimum wage.7 Essentially, even though ruling class women found new opportunities after second wave feminism, such as being CEOs of big companies or attaining political positions within the capitalist state, the hyper-exploitation of working class women, particularly those from racialized communities, is still relevant today.
Vogel specifically stresses how the subordination of women is most apparent in the family structure under capitalism. In short, their labour is crucial to social reproduction, which Vogel argues is a key feature of the capitalist system.8 Housework, such as cooking, cleaning, childbearing and child care, are ways in which women within the working class socially reproduce the labour force. They provide means of subsistence to workers, as well as create a new generation of laborers. Today, working class women are still overburdened with the majority of household labour, whether it be within their own families or through having to work for ruling class families. The live-in caregiver program in Canada brings in thousands of migrant women from the Third World to do cheap household labour for upper-class families, often replacing ruling-class women in homemaking roles within their own families. And, since neoliberalism has led to the privatization of public services, it has become more difficult for working class families to afford childcare. This disproportionately impacts working class women, as they are often the ones either leaving their jobs or taking on more household labour to support their children—once again sharpening the gendered division of labour.
Marxist analysis concludes that the oppression of women is integral to the socio-economic development of capitalist societies, particularly because women’s subordination within the household plays a key role in maintaining the capitalist system, while their devalued labour creates further profit for the capitalists. Thus, on one hand, working class women face more exploitation in the “sphere of production” because of their oppressed status in society, and, on the other, they became the key laborers in the working-class household. To maintain this cycle of oppression, the capitalist state has historically played a regulatory and repressive role to ensure that women are confined to their “place” in society, especially when it comes to producing “healthy” and “disciplined” children, who can then loyally play their part in the capitalist system. This is why women were always pressured to be so-called “good wives” or “good mothers.”
Those who challenged the nuclear family structure were even further subordinated and oppressed by the state. Those from the LGBTQ community who fought for the state to recognize same-sex relations, and Indigenous families who did not conform to “Western” values, are examples of those subjugated by the state for challenging the nuclear family. Nowhere can we see this more vividly than in the case of the Residential School system, which tore indigenous children away from their families — whose cultures challenged and resisted both “whiteness” and capitalism — and forced these children into institutions that disciplined and assimilated them into capitalist society. After generations of abuse within these institutions, we still see the state play a regulatory role in monitoring indigenous families through the foster care system. Indigenous mothers are far too often seen as not “suitable” to raise their children, being subjected to impoverished conditions and disproportionately incarcerated because of systemic racism.
See Red Women's Workshop poster. (c.1980) [See Red Women's Workshop]
Similar to gender oppression, racism has historically played a key role in the development of capitalism, especially since it justified and continues to justify colonial expansion and imperialism. As Marx states in Capital, “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal populations, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.”9 Rosa Luxemburg and V.I Lenin both expanded on these thoughts — with Luxemburg discussing how the accumulation of capital relies on colonialism, while Lenin assesses the exploitative nature of European imperialism, and its development as an advanced stage of global capitalism.10 By stripping their land from indigenous peoples, privatizing it, and allowing a segment of the ruling class to make immense profit, colonization led to the accumulation of capital. Racism justified this by portraying the European colonizers as benevolent forces bringing “civilization” to “backward” nations, who were deemed unable to govern themselves. Racism also justified the enslavement of Black people, whose labour gave the ruling class their wealth to begin with.
Additionally, during the era of slavery, Black women faced even more oppression as acts of violence towards them became political tools for colonizers, who established their power by violently prohibiting resistance and using sexual violence to create a new generation of slave workers. This is why Angela Davis argues that “institutionalized patterns of rape during slavery ... was a weapon of domination, a weapon of repression, whose sole purpose was to extinguish slave women’s will to resist.”11 Violence against women was crucial to reinforcing the status-quo — a system that profited white ruling-class men. Today there are parallels between the violence committed against women of colour and the historic/systemic use of violence by white European men against colonized or racialized people. For instance, the case of Missing and Murdered Indigenous women in Canada, or the use of rape during imperialist wars, such as the sexual violence women in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan faced, are not products of isolated incidents, but a continuation of the ways sexual violence was utilized since the beginnings of colonization. In fact, understanding the use of violence during colonization shows us why racialized women today are disproportionately subjected to violence as a result of racism and/or imperialist wars, and why this violence is so often ignored by the ‘justice’ system. As Angela Davis states, “men of the capitalist class are immune to prosecution because they commit their sexual assaults with the same unchallenged authority that legitimizes their daily assaults on the labour and dignity of working people … [and] the men who wield power in the economic and political realm are encouraged by the class structure of capitalism to become agents of sexual exploitation.”12
Meanwhile, racialized peoples are over-policed and over-represented in prisons. Black people in the United States and Indigenous peoples in Canada are particularly targeted by the police and disproportionately incarcerated. In Canada, the number of racialized inmates increased by around 75% in the last decade.13 The rate of incarceration of indigenous women increased by 80 per cent in the past decade.14 Moreover, the United States – the country that wholeheartedly represents capitalism in all respects – has the highest incarceration rate in the world. There are around 10,000 children who faced life sentences in the United States, and approximately 2500 children are facing life sentences without the possibility of parole.15 As expected, many of these children are also racialized. Additionally, those incarcerated often become a source of very cheap labour for the capitalist class, as many are forced to work for only a few cents an hour in order to produce commodities for big corporations that profit immensely from prison labour.16 There are clearly parallels between these hyper-exploitative working conditions and slave labour, particularly since many of these prison labourers are Black.
It’s important to mention that police brutality and repression against racialized peoples has historically occurred because the capitalist state has been threatened by resistance movements initiated by these oppressed communities, who were not passively accepting the injustices they faced but were actively organizing themselves and fighting for liberation. One such example is the Black Power Movements we saw during the late 1960s. While years of resistance by oppressed communities resulted in many victories, such as the abolition of slavery, the right to vote, the end of Jim-Crow laws, the decriminalization of same-sex relations, and the end of Residential Schools, oppression still exists today. Despite the many changes that have occurred as a result of resistance and social movements, oppression is still a reality, based on structural inequalities.
"Still Dancing", a painting in honour of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. (2016) [Jonathan LaBillois]
As Communists, we must stand with oppressed peoples, and show solidarity to the new movements being organized by those from oppressed communities. These are not separate from working class struggles, but essential to building resistance against capitalism. As Lenin states, “The socialist revolution is not one single act, not one single battle on a single front; but a whole epoch of intensified class conflicts, a long series of battles on all fronts, i.e., battles around all the problems of economics and politics, which can culminate only in the expropriation of the bourgeoisie. It would be a fundamental mistake to suppose that the struggle for democracy can divert the proletariat from the socialist revolution, or obscure, or overshadow it, etc. On the contrary, just as socialism cannot be victorious unless it introduces complete democracy, so the proletariat will be unable to prepare for victory over the bourgeoisie unless it wages a many-sided, consistent and revolutionary struggle for democracy.”17 Ultimately, the most significant question is how we resist the oppression that exists today, and show our solidarity to those who are actively fighting, resisting and looking for alternatives.
It is important that Communists stand in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement that is currently calling out systemic racism, police brutality and the blatant disregard for the lives of racialized people. It is vital that we participate in anti-pipeline movements led by Indigenous communities throughout Canada because, as anti-capitalists and anti-imperialists, we know that the ruling class depends on the theft of land and resources to maintain its wealth and power. We must provide solidarity with women who are fighting gendered violence, such as the many indigenous nations demanding justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous women. We need to stand with the LGBTQi2A community, who continue fighting against the violence they are so regularly subjected to. We need to stand with women workers struggling within the service industry, many of whom are racialized. We need to stand with those fighting for more accessible childcare, as this is one significant way the burden of household labour is lifted from women’s shoulders. We must also stand with migrant workers, who have consistently tried to organize to fight their harsh working conditions, while in fear of being deported.
Overall, we need to engage with these movements that fight oppression so as to both play a role in reforms that better the lives of some of the most marginalized in our society, and also contribute to strengthening these movements by providing an anti-capitalist analysis, which is necessary for achieving the long-term goal of full liberation from oppression. The cause of socialism is the true alternative, because fighting oppression without understanding the necessity to fight against capitalism as well will only go so far. As Angela Davis once said, “Only under socialism could the fight against racism be successfully executed. And the mainstay and beneficiary of sexism is capitalism. So women also have a special and vital interest in the struggle for socialism.”
1 Engels, Frederick, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State Karl Marx Frederick Engels,
Collected Works, Volume 26 (New York: International Publishers, 1990), pages 129-276).
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid. page 30
4 Vogel, Lise, Marxism and the Oppression of Women, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983), page 85.
5 Ibid. page 59
6 Canadian Women's Foundation. Fact Sheet: The Gender Wage Gap in Canada. Canada: Moving Women out of Poverty 2017.
7 Ibid.
8 Vogel, Lise, Marxism and the Oppression of Women, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983).
9 Marx, Karl, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 31 (Karl Marx Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Volume 35 (New York: International Publishers, 1996), page 739.
10 Luxemburg, Rosa, The Accumulation of Capital, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951) and Lenin, V.I.,
Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963).
11 Davis, Angela, Women, Race and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), page 23.
12 Davis, Angela, "Rape, Racism and the Capitalist Setting," The Black Scholar 12, No. 6 (November 1981) pages 39-45.
13 Brosnahan, Maureen, "Canada’s prison population at all-time high," CBC News, November 25, 2013.
14 Ibid.
15 Quandt, Katie, "Why Does the U.S. Sentence Children to Life in Prison?" JSTOR Daily, January 31, 2018.
16 Johnson, Kevin R., "Prison labor is modern slavery. I've been sent to solitary for speaking out," The Guardian, August 23, 2018.
17 Lenin, V.I. The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1916), Collected Works,
Volume 22, page 144.
Rozhin Em is an activist with the Young Communist League currently enrolled at the University of British Columbia studying to be a high school social science teacher.
US President Donald Trump, centre, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, right, and Mexico's President Enrique Pena Neto, left, participate in the USMCA signing ceremony, Friday, Nov. 30, 2018 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
The United States Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA) is overall worse than North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) but both the USMCA and NAFTA are worse than no deal at all. Should we be surprised? Trump pushed the negotiations. No one in Canada suggested the need for a renegotiation. How could we expect a better deal?
Before NAFTA, there was the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement (CUSFTA, or simply the FTA) implemented in 1988 despite a bitter fight, which mobilized the trade unions, workers and progressives across Canada. On January 1, 1994, when the FTA was extended to Mexico, with the creation of NAFTA, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation led an armed revolt while the political and military elite were celebrating the New Year. Neither the CUSFTA nor NAFTA improved working or living conditions for the majority of the population in any of the three countries.
Meanwhile there has been a general reduction in trade barriers for all countries through Word Trade Organization negotiations. The world economic situation has changed significantly as considerable manufacturing has been shifted to low wage areas with limited environmental controls, in a process organized by gigantic corporations.
On August 16, 2017, after months of threats by Trump to withdraw from NAFTA, Canada, Mexico and the United States began renegotiations. One year later Mexico threw in the towel. The deal Mexico signed put enormous pressure on the Canadian government which wanted desperately to maintain NAFTA. The result was that Canada caved in too.
This article will focus on some of the impacts on Canada with occasional references to Mexico.
First let us look at some improvements to NAFTA.
Interestingly, the most important improvement is something we owe to Trump, who does not like transnational arbitration, rather than the skill of our negotiators or any Liberal backbone.
1. The ability of companies to sue our governments for loss of expected profits found in Chapter 11 of NAFTA has gone. Under NAFTA as soon as a government was forced to improve environmental conditions, companies would sue them for millions of dollars. Examples are the MMT additive in gasoline and limits on fracking in Quebec. This is a big improvement. However, Trump was the moving force behind this change.
2. Energy proportionality has gone. Under NAFTA Canada could not reduce the share of oil and gas going to the United States even if we were running short. Moreover, this was a moving minimum. If the percentage went up so would the guaranteed US percentage.
3. What appears to be a positive element for Canada but not for Mexico is the requirement that 40-45% of automobile production be made by workers earning over $16 USD per hour. However, the increase in North American production from 62.5% to 75% could help auto production in all three. The further requirement of 70% North American content for steel and aluminium will encourage these industries. However Canadian aluminium and steel still face high tariffs under U.S. Trade Expansion Act section 232 – U.S. “national security”. The auto industry appears to be protected by a side letter from the application of tariffs based on section 232.
4. A section on the environment lists a number of environmental questions which need to be dealt with including: the ozone layer, maritime ship pollution, maritime litter, biodiversity, invasive species, overfishing, shark finning, bycatch preservation of sharks, turtles, sea birds and whales. It also requires the three governments to provide a means for public input. Although the means to implement these aims are weak, this section may give some arguments to environmental groups to use against their respective governments.
5. A section on labour will probably have limited impact except for Mexico. Although a number of rights are suggested, they are presented as examples of what might be done. The emphasis is on the need to enforce national laws, not to change them. The deal sees a problem when existing statutes are weakened in a sustained and recurring way to encourage trade and investment.
Positive elements which might give tools to workers are a requirement that migrant workers are protected under labour laws, that there is protection against employment discrimination on the basis of sex and the need for labour tribunals to be fair, equitable, evidence based, and impartial with procedures to enforce decisions. Although disputes about this section can be taken to the panels in the dispute settlement system, given the language in the agreement, it is unlikely to happen.
However, the section on Mexico is much stricter. Mexico must adopt legislation by January 1, 2019, that supports collective bargaining and workers' choice of union representation, prevents employer interference in unions, and creates independent entities and labour courts to support this with sanctions for those in these entities who obstruct or act in favour of one of the parties. The entry into force of the USMCA may be delayed until the legislation is passed.
6. There are references in a number of sections to aboriginal peoples which recognize aboriginal interests and offer some protection to aboriginals.
Changes to supply management open our market to rBHG hormones widely used in the US to incresae milk production. [Toronto Star]
Now let’s look at the negative changes from NAFTA to USMCA
1. Stronger protection for pharmaceutical companies will delay generic medicine for two more years, increasing the cost for both individuals and Medicare. As drug costs expand, governments will try to contain costs by reducing personnel and cutting maintenance. Sound familiar? Waiting time for emergency treatment, hospital beds and elective surgery will increase.
The pharmaceutical companies argue that the high prices are needed to fund expensive research. However, studies have shown that pharmaceutical drug promotion (24%) takes double the funds dedicated to research (13%). More generic drugs which are much cheaper would free up the funds needed to deal with the chronic problems of our medical system.
2. Even before the USMCA, the U.S. dairy industry had been doing very well in its relations with Canada. U.S. dairy exports to Canada increased 54% from 2012 to 2015 to $474 million and the US has a $400 billion trade surplus in dairy products. Canada is its second largest market for dairy products after Mexico.
Although Trump has complained about high Canadian Dairy tariffs, he does not mention the US tariff of 350% on tobacco or 164% on peanuts.1 In the USMCA Canada is allowed to export the equivalent of 0.1% of US sugar production. Any extra sugar faces a 95% tariff. Products containing at least 10% sugar are taxed up to 150 percent.2
The USMCA agreement opens supply management further for American milk and poultry producers, adding to the breaches found in the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Canada Europe Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). With USMCA American producers will have increased access to about 3.59% of the Canadian market for various dairy products such as milk, cream, ice cream, yoghurt, and cheese. For milk up to 85% is limited to entrants to Canadian industrial milk products (cheese, ice cream etc.) The remaining 15% can be any kind of milk including milk to drink. For cream the same 85% still applies but only for the first year.
These changes would open our market to rBHG hormones widely used in the United States to increase milk production. rBHG use frequently leads to infections in udders, which results in much greater antibiotic use. It also exposes our dairy farmers even more to the heavily subsidized American dairy industry. A recent study3 showed that American dairy subsidies equal $22.2 billion USD per year equal to 73% of dairy products sold.
It is possible that prices would fall on certain products. However, concentration is high in retail grocery stores, so that might not reach consumers in any major way. Federal compensation will be expensive and will not compensate for the decline in jobs and general economic activity.
3. The strong protection for agricultural innovators suggests that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) will be protected and cherished. Not only will this affect our health, but it will also further complicate our trade relations with the European Union, which bans GMOs. It is unlikely that labeling of GMOs will be made mandatory.
4. Cross-border trading will become easier as there will be no duties on goods less than $150 nor taxes on goods less than $40. Online sales will expand and local retailers who pay both taxes and duty will have more trouble surviving. As local stores close, their workers will lose their jobs. Companies that survive and have unions will fight harder to keep down wages and benefits.
5. Financial services (including banks, insurance, and investment counselling) will receive national treatment and most-favoured-nation status. This may knock off some of the smaller Canadian companies. Smaller companies which survive will shrink.
6. Protections for data will be reduced as there can be no requirements for local data storage. This means that companies can shift their data storage to the United States where it will be subject to U.S. government access.
7. Copyright protection will be extended by 20 years to life-plus-70-years. Canada was in the process of discussing the possibility of reducing copyright protection in order to expand the public domain and allow the potential for increased creativity that this would allow.
8. Neither Ontario nor British Columbia can require that private wine stores favour the distribution of their own wines beyond the extent favoured in 1989.
9. The USMCA is precarious and open to renegotiation at any moment. There is a sunset clause of 16 years when the agreement terminates. However, any party can withdraw with 6 months written notice. The agreement will be reviewed every 6 years. At that time all parties must state if they want to extend the agreement for another 16 years. If they all agree to extend the agreement by 16 years, then the reviews continue every 6 years. If all do not agree, there will be a review every year. This officializes the precarity introduced by Trump. This is not a positive change. The Canadian government would have to be constantly ready to resist U.S. pressure for change.
Anti-NAFTA protest in Ottawa. (2018) [CPC]
So what does all this mean?
The major advantage with the USMCA is the dispute settlement system. However, there is a similar dispute settlement system in the WTO. The end of chapter 11, energy proportionality and the increased security for the auto industry are also important. However, the gains from the USMCA do not compensate for the losses. This is only to be expected, since the U.S. forced the renegotiation in order to improve its trade situation.
The alternative of staying with NAFTA does not exist. Therefore, the real alternative is to go without either. A rejection of the USMCA would eliminate the threat to water, stop patent changes which will attack our medical system, protect our farmers, prevent the expansion of rBHG and GMOs, protect our small retailers and smaller financial companies and prevent the creation of a situation of instability which will enable continuing pressure to remove protections.
Life without the USMCA would be okay.
Much has changed since 1994. Tariffs have been reduced across the board. A study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) showed that if NAFTA disappeared, Most Favoured Nation status through the WTO would work just fine. The US MFN rate for 41% of our exports is 0%. This includes aircraft, natural gas, lumber and medicine. Thirty-nine percent of our exports to the U.S. have an ad valorem tax (tax based on value). However, 65% face a duty of less than 3% and 97% less than 9%. Nevertheless, 1% face a tariff over 25%. These include foodstuffs, textiles, footwear and trucks. Although trucks face a 26% MFN duty, the U.S. sells more trucks to Canada than it buys. U.S. truck exports would face the same 26% tariff when they entered Canada, an easy place for a compromise. There are also specific tariffs on certain goods. However, 78% of the value of these taxes falls on petroleum products, which pay a tariff of only 6 cents per barrel. Overall, with MFN duties, American importers buying Canadian exports would pay in duty only 1.47% of the value of these exports.
Therefore, we could produce and market our products using the MFN duties and get rid of the serious problems and irritants in NAFTA. Not a bad deal for no deal.
What if Trump changes the rules, exits the WTO and goes it alone?
American trade policy is set by Congress, not Trump. Large American corporations have done very well with the existing WTO rules. There is no desire on the part of Congress to change this. It will be even less likely after the midterm elections.
What should we do?
We need to point out the problems with the USMCA and explain that a rejection is a valid alternative. A worse agreement than NAFTA? Forget it. Why make a bad agreement even worse? No agreement is much better.
1 Paul Wiseman and Christopher Rugaber, (2018, June 3) AP Fact Check: Trump partly right on Canada’s dairy industry tariffs in the Financial Post, https://business.financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/ap-fact-check-trump-partly-right-on-canadas-dairy-tariffs
2 Barrie McKenna, (2018, October 8), “The sweet US tariff deal that Trump doesn’t want to talk about”, Globe and Mail Report on Business, page B1.
3 Grey, Clark, Shih & Assoc. US Federal and State Subsidies to Agriculture. http://www.greyclark.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/US-Subsidies-Post-2014-Farm-Bill-FEB-2018.pdf
Fred Jones is a progressive economist based in Montreal.
Ontario PC leader Doug Ford stands on stage in Toronto with his family as confetti falls after winning a majority government in the Ontario Provincial election. [The Canadian Press/Mark Blinch]
The victory of Doug Ford’s Conservatives in Ontario is one example among several in Canada, of hard-right parties making electoral gains that immediately threaten the incomes, working and living conditions, and social and economic rights of millions of working people. Ford joins with governments in New Brunswick, Quebec, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and, perhaps soon, Alberta, in implementing policies that aggressively clear a social, economic and political path for increased corporate profit and power.
Add to this the resurgence of far-right and reactionary parties globally, plus the real possibility of a Conservative victory in next year’s federal election, and we have the makings of a perfect storm in which the working class, people and environment will face a brutal onslaught with devastating consequences. On the other hand, we also have a wide-open terrain for building a strong fightback that can confront and defeat these forces of neoliberalism and austerity. Within this resistance, we find the fertile ground for growing the struggle against capitalism itself and for socialism.
One of the challenges we face is in identifying and organizing around the key tasks that are necessary to build this fightback. Without question, the working class and progressive forces in each area and sector face particular conditions that shape how their struggle develops locally. Gathering our insights together and analyzing them from a scientific point of view can be useful for formulating a generalized approach across Canada.
In Ontario, the government and capital have moved quickly to implement a hard-right agenda but the resistance has been slow to develop. There continue to be impressive moments of spontaneous struggle, evidence of a high degree of opposition and capacity to mobilize around that. However, there have been very few steps taken to develop the unity, organization and militancy necessary to confront and defeat Ford’s government and the neoliberal austerity agenda behind it.
Communists have been working with the non-sectarian left to identify some of the key tasks for building an escalating resistance to the Ford government. In part, this work is the product of analyzing the balance of forces involved in the provincial election campaign, the fightback as it has emerged to date, and an evaluation of the provincial struggles against the Mike Harris Tories in Ontario in the late 1990s, and against the Bill Bennett Social Credit government in British Columbia in 1983.
Premier Doug Ford posing for a photo with white supremacist Faith Goldy (2018) [Twitter]
1. We need to expose the class nature of these governments
The dominant message in the Ontario election campaign was that it was a referendum on the McGuinty-Wynne Liberals, who had been in government for 15 years. This narrative focused on voter fatigue and leadership personalities, and projected the conclusion that there simply needed to be a change in ruling party – the politics, or the shape and content of that change, was unimportant. Both the NDP and, in particular, the Conservatives parroted this narrative of de-politicized change, which had been promoted for months ahead of the campaign by the corporate media. In the process, the Conservatives’ hard-right message was often treated as mainstream – Doug Ford’s public admiration of Donald Trump or his organizational connections with far-right and reactionary forces were ignored in the media. Virtually all mainstream discourse overlooked the fact that the Conservatives’ policies (they only released a platform in the dying days of the campaign) were copied nearly verbatim from the election document of Ontario Chamber of Commerce. The result was an election debate that was almost devoid of any reference to the class nature of the issues at stake.
This is a problem that has now been projected into the post-election discourse.
There has been plenty of criticism of Ford’s rapid-fire attacks on public services and public sector workers, education, health, Indigenous and racialized people, the poor, women and LGBTQ persons, the environment, and local democracy. But overwhelmingly, the depth of that critique has been utterly insufficient, with most of it focusing on Ford as a mean-spirited buffoon who is guided by his personal scores to settle. Building an effective fight against the Conservative government involves recognizing and understanding corporate interests that are driving most of their hard-right policies. One of our first tasks is exposing these interests.
Generally, people understand the link between lower wages or privatization and corporate profit. However, many of Ford’s attacks have come in the form of administrative changes, and here the link is less obvious but just as real.
One example of how this works is the changes to local democracy that were introduced just prior to the municipal elections in October. The legislation canceled elections for the heads of council in the regional municipalities of Muskoka, Peel, York and Niagara, and replaced them with appointees from the council. The heads of council are the Chief Executive Officers of huge and strategically important areas within the “Greater Golden Horseshoe” region (GGH), which generates two-thirds of Ontario’s and one-fifth of Canada’s Gross Domestic Product. The Muskoka Region is especially noteworthy, as it is a gateway for infrastructure relating to the enormous mineral wealth in Northern Ontario’s Ring of Fire. By replacing the elected heads for these regional municipalities by appointees, Ford is accelerating corporate access and influence over the bulk of the province’s infrastructure, services, industry, and resources.
The same legislation cut Toronto’s elected council in half. One immediate and dramatic result is that councillors have no time or energy to properly monitor, let alone expose or challenge, a staff-driven city government that is enormously vulnerable to the pressures of both corporate lobbyists and provincial political pressure.
The response from people in Toronto to the cuts in councillors was swift and dramatic – protesters filled Nathan Phillips Square and the gallery at Queen’s Park, where several people were arrested for disrupting the legislature. Unfortunately, though, virtually none of the political discourse noted the way in which the legislation served the interests of corporate developers and other sections of capital. Instead, the message that emerged from the protests was that Ford was settling scores with his political enemies at Toronto City Hall. Such a narrative is not only incorrect, it actively extinguishes the development of a broad resistance, by obscuring the broad nature of Ford’s assault and guiding people into individual “fightback silos” that are only active for a brief moment, around highly localized issues.
Exposing the class nature of the government’s attacks brings their full scope into focus and helps build strong solidarity between different local or sectoral struggles.
Days of Action demonstration at Queen's Park, Toronto. (October 1996) [Public Domain]
2. We need to call for a united, "all-labour" resistance
In British Columbia in 1983, Communists and progressives insisted that the coalition against Bennett’s SoCreds include all trade unions, whether or not they were affiliated with the BC Federation of Labour. Operation Solidarity, as the movement became known, was an historic moment in which BC Fed affiliates and unaffiliated independent unions set aside their bitter rivalry and mobilized alongside one another against a common enemy.
The current effort to build resistance to the Ford government is complicated by the division within the labour movement, in which Unifor has departed from the Canadian Labour Congress and its provincial affiliates, who have in turn demanded that local labour councils exclude Unifor members. So, at precisely the moment when labour unity is most needed, it is undermined by the actions of the leadership on both sides of this split. Trade unions in Ontario need to take a lesson from 1983, to set aside this rivalry and work in solidarity against the provincial government.
But the working class is more than just the trade union movement, so an “all-in” struggle against Ford needs to engage the full range of labour allies. This includes anti-poverty coalitions, housing and tenants organizations, health care activists, Indigenous and racialized groups, youth and students movements, women’s and LGBTQ groups, and others. Many of these sectors of the working class will face the brunt of Ford’s immediate assault. Actively and genuinely engaging them in a structured resistance ensures an organized reflection of the full breadth of the working class, and the scope of the issues that the working class faces under capitalism.
An “all-labour” resistance does not, in and of itself, guarantee a successful struggle, but excluding sections of the working class from the struggle will undoubtedly guarantee its failure.
Hundreds protest against Ford’s plan to cut the size of Toronto City Council down to 25 seats before the fall municipal election. (July 2018) [Toronto Star/Steve Russell]
3. We need to build a local base of vibrant fightback committees
Well before the election, there was ample evidence of an increasing mood to fight against austerity and neoliberalism. Among union members and local labour leaders, this militancy was present in both the public sector – the Ontario Public Service Employees Union college faculty strike, the Canadian Union of Public Employees’ fights at public libraries and Children’s Aid Societies across the province, and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers’ refusal to distribute fascist material through the postal service – and the private sector – the United Steel Workers’ ongoing struggle against the liquidation of Canada’s steel industry, UNITE-HERE’s strikes for a $15 minimum wage at campus food services, and Unifor’s strike at CAMI Automotive to protect jobs and wages in the face of NAFTA. This sharpened sense of struggle has continued this year with the CUPE strikes at Carleton and York Universities, the latter being the longest university strike in Canadian history, the defiance of teachers’ union who refuse to stop teaching a progressive sex education curriculum, the Unifor workers who blockaded the Goderich salt mine against scabs during their 11-week strike at Compass Minerals, and two strikes by workers in the health care sector in Thunder Bay.
Outside of trade union disputes, this rising militancy is on display in the Women's March in January, the September 21 walkout by 40,000 high school students from 160 schools across Ontario against Ford’s attack on sex education, the October 15 Day of Action in defence of Bill 148 (the 2017 Fair Workplaces, Better Jobs Act), which included rallies in 50 communities across the province, and the October 23 provincial rally for health care.
Despite the lack of a lead from the OFL and many provincial labour affiliates, the working class is moving into action – increasingly, albeit unevenly, defensive struggles are shifting to the offensive and local disputes are connecting with political struggles. Where this is happening is at the local level – within workplaces, communities and schools. In some instances, these grassroots efforts have pulled the provincial leadership into action, demonstrating the capacity of class struggle positions to win over the majority.
One of the pillars of the 1990s fightback against then Premier Mike Harris was the provincial network of local social justice coalitions. These groups worked with local labour organizations to broaden the reach of anti-Harris mobilizing. Very few of these coalitions exist now, but the elements of vibrant, grassroots anti-Ford committees exist in the spontaneous and local mobilizations that have already occurred.
A key task is to build these local committees and connect them to one another in a provincial network that projects the militancy, audacity and tactical creativity needed to unite and engage the entire labour movement in a militant and dynamic class struggle.
OPPOSITE: Days of Action demonstration, Toronto. (1996) [Toronto Star/Andrew Stawicki]
4. We need to project a program of working class demands
Without a clear set of political, economic and social demands, a resistance movement will not have the glue needed to hold itself together over the course of a prolonged struggle. As impressive as they were, the Days of Action mobilizations in the 1990s never articulated a clear set of political goals. There were voices from the left who promoted specific demands at the different actions, but there were also Liberal Party forces whose message was that the government’s cuts were “too much, too fast.” The NDP and organizations tied to it tended to engage with the resistance very cautiously and only insofar as it helped to raise the profile of their candidates in preparation for the next provincial election. The overall tone of the movement never moved beyond being a protest against the Harris agenda, which itself was differently defined by various groups within the coalition.
The resulting lack of political focus – or focus on program – made it that much easier for the Days of Action to be stopped – just as the movement was building to a province-wide shut-down – by an OFL leadership who wanted instead to rally union forces towards the NDP election campaign.
A similar situation exists now. At its convention in November 2017, the OFL adopted a tactic of uncritical and unconditional support for the NDP in the provincial election. While that party’s platform was an improvement on their disastrous 2014 version, it remained tepid and business-friendly. The majority of the trade union movement leadership, however, continually presented it as the pinnacle of working class demands, and some actively characterized as unrealistic and irresponsible genuinely progressive polices that emerged from voices beyond the NDP. A significant minority of the trade union leadership, including Unifor and some teachers’ unions, advocated strategic voting – supporting the individual Liberal or NDP candidate who stood the best chance of defeating the Conservative in a specific riding.
Both of these strategies – blanket support for the NDP and strategic voting – compel the labour movement generally to fail in its responsibility to project an independent working class voice in the election campaign. The practice of directing all of labour's political work outside of itself is a weakness that contributed to the pervasiveness of a de-politicized call for change, and that finds its echo in the weakness and tentativeness of the post-election fightback.
The Communist campaign during the 2018 Ontario provincial election included two slogans: “Demand a People's Alternative” and “Ignite the Movement for Socialism.” The two messages are related, and provide a path to one another, so long as they are projected in way that is scientific, materialist, and non-sectarian. To demand alternative policies and programs that truly reflect people's needs is to counter-pose such policies to existing ones, exposing the class character of the latter and drawing people's consciousness increasingly toward the need to change the existing capitalist system. Similarly, building a movement for revolutionary change involves engaging in the immediate struggles of the working class to win and defend gains, and working to weld socialist consciousness on to that concrete experience.
Communists have a longstanding theoretical grasp of the relationship between reform and revolution. How we put this understanding into action has a huge impact on our ability to build the forces for socialism. As the CPC's Ontario election slogans suggest, meeting this challenge requires a unified approach based on two complementary tasks: (1) we must cut through and isolate political policies and movements that are opportunist or reformist and replace them with an analysis that understands the class nature and role of the state and the necessity of mass action (and, ultimately, revolution), and (2) we need to reject sectarianism and forge the broadest possible unity in action to win, defend and extend immediate reforms that benefit the working class and the people generally.
A comprehensive program based on working class demands, which combines action on immediate issues with more far-reaching change, is a crucial element in uniting and sustaining a strong resistance to neoliberal austerity.
A scene from the Hamilton Days of Action. A crowd marches through downtown to Copps Coliseum. (February, 1996) ["Celebration of Resistance"/Vincenzo Pietropaolo]
5. We need to built it
It should go without saying, but in an age of “clicktivism” and self-selecting social media circles we need to be reminded that movements have to be built and organized in the concrete world. Wishing something into existence by setting up a Facebook event page does not make it so. Even if the trade union leadership were to sign on to an action plan that included advancing labour’s independent political voice, with the goal of bringing down the Ford government, nothing of substance would be accomplished without the daily door-to-door and face-to-face work of pulling together and mobilizing a base.
In the late 1990s, the speed and breadth of the Conservative government’s attacks led to spontaneous and mass mobilization. This spontaneity was a key factor in rapidly building up fightback structures that organized the single-day general strikes and protests of the Days of Action. The important lesson here is that spontaneous resistance and opposition needs to become organized if it is to be sustained and developed.
Clearly, the actions of the Ford government are also provoking a spontaneous mass response. What is needed now is still the same – organization and leadership. Writing in 1901, in a moment of very sharp and widespread spontaneous struggle leading up to the revolution of 1905, Lenin observed:
“This struggle must be organised, according to ‘all the rules of the art’, by people who are professionally engaged in revolutionary activity. The fact that the masses are spontaneously being drawn into the movement does not make the organisation of this struggle less necessary. On the contrary, it makes it more necessary.”
What was true in 1901 remains true today.
Dave McKee is the Ontario leader of the Communist Party.
“THE FUTURE IS SOCIALISM”: DISCUSSION ON THE AMENDED COMMUNIST PARTY PROGRAM BEGINS
By Liz Rowley
A cross-country discussion on the road to socialism in Canada is opening up this winter as the Communist Party begins preparations for its 39th convention and its 98th birthday in May 2019.
The 2016 convention mandated the incoming Central Committee to conduct a review and update the Party’s program, Canada’s Future is Socialism, which was published in 2001.
The Program Commission was struck by the Central Committee and has worked since April on extensive amendments which will go to Party clubs and members for 4 months of discussion and debate prior to a vote at the Convention.
The amendments prepared by the Program Commission focus on six main areas: the environment, the national question, women and gender, populism and fascism, the working class and social democracy, and the impact of the 2008 capitalist crisis.
THE ENVIRONMENT AND CLIMATE CHANGE
The sections dealing with the environment focus on the fundamental contradiction between the capitalist mode of production and the global environment, citing the arrival of the Anthropocene – the sixth major wave in the earth’s history of extinctions and loss of biological diversity which is directly related to the impact of human economic activities, especially climate change and global warming caused by carbon emissions.
Canada’s continued support for the oil companies producing and exporting heavy oil from the Alberta tar sands has made the tar sands the largest single contributor to carbon emissions and climate change in North America.
The Communist Party calls for immediate closure of the tar sands, and for public ownership of Canada’s energy and natural resources including renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, thermal, tidal and other developing sources. The Party also calls for job guarantees at equivalent or better wages for displaced tar sands workers in the renewable energy industries and in other sectors of the economy.
But capitalism by its very nature is incapable of resolving the environmental crisis since its inherent drive for profit tends to accelerate the expansion and intensification of resource extraction. It will take urgent and mass united action by the world’s peoples to prevent this looming catastrophe.
Protection of the environment is in the long-term interests of sustainable employment, requiring unity of Indigenous peoples, environmentalists, communities and workers against their common enemy, monopoly capitalism.
The Program looks at the role of the socialist countries, including errors that were made in the twentieth century, and the big advances being made today to restore and protect the environment, and halt climate change, by the governments of Cuba and China.
Idle No More protestors march towards Parliament Hill. (2012) [Postmedia/Julie Oliver]
THE NATIONAL QUESTION
Changes to Chapter 4, on the national question, are also extensive. The 2001 Program asserted that Canada was a multi-national country, comprised of English-speaking Canada, Quebec, Acadia, and various Aboriginal nations across the country.
New amendments elaborate on this thesis, with particular attention to Indigenous nations and peoples whose development as nations was violently interrupted by European colonization and subjugation, which included state policies of physical and cultural genocide, forced assimilation and elimination of land and inherent rights, spanning generations up to the present.
Indigenous demands for self-government have given way to demands for national self-determination, demands which the Communist Party recognizes as just and their fulfillment long overdue. This includes just and early settlement of Indigenous land claims and nation-to-nation relationships with the government of Canada. The Communist Party also demands preferential treatment for Indigenous peoples and nations, with government funding to enable Indigenous nations to raise living standards, create jobs, vastly improve education, healthcare, housing, and services to Indigenous peoples and youth living on and off reserve lands.
The Program amendments elaborate the Party’s long-standing proposal for a new Constitution that would recognize the multi-national character of Canada, and guarantee the right of each nation to self-determination including the right to secession.Self-determination can be expressed in any one of three ways: secession (separation), self-government, or autonomy. The Communist Party asserts that the nations in Canada have the right to opt for any one of these three options without interference from the Canadian state.
The Communist Party also asserts that the current Canadian Constitution, which denies the existence of any nations in Canada other than the predominant English speaking majority, is a recipe for continuing national oppression and division that will not disappear, and could lead to civil war as has occurred in Northern Ireland, and to military occupation as has occurred in Catalonia (Spain), among other examples. The passage of the Clarity Act in Canada’s parliament, with the support of all parties (save the Bloc Québecois), has provided the federal government the legal authority to use military force to prevent Quebec from exercising its national right to self-determination, which includes the right to secede. This is a very dangerous development.
While the Communist Party does not advocate secession as a solution to Canada’s unequal union – created at the point of a gun – it recognizes the right to secede, and advocates for a new equal and voluntary union – a genuine partnership in other words, the terms of which would be worked out in a Constituent Assembly comprised of representatives of Canada’s nations and peoples, and enshrined in a new and democratic Canadian constitution. This Constitution would guarantee the right of nations to secession at any time, not just at the outset. Like a marriage, the option of divorce is always present, and is a vital tool in the on-going struggle for a union that is equal, voluntary, and dynamic.
This new partnership includes the Acadian nation located in New Brunswick whose limited language rights are already under attack by reactionary forces there.
The Program amendments also elaborate on the rights of national minorities to education, culture and government services in French, English, or Indigenous languages, where numbers warrant.
The amendments also elaborate on the rights of immigrants to state support for their maternal languages and culture, delivered through after-school programs, cultural and community supports. Additionally, the Communist Party fights to extend the labour and democratic rights and services available to Canadian citizens, to immigrants, refugees, and residents.
Relating the national question to the class question, the Program states: “The Communist Party of Canada stands for the liberation of Indigenous peoples and other oppressed nations in this country, and for the unity of the working class of all nations and peoples, to achieve genuine democracy, equality, environmental survival and socialism.”
WOMEN AND GENDER
The amendments concerning women and gender start with the updating of language, and make reference to the ongoing struggles of women, lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex, asexual, queer, and two-spirited (LGBTiQ2S+) people for equality rights and for full equality in the context of neoliberalism and austerity, and the ascendancy of reaction and the alt-right. Attacks on equality rights are often hidden in attacks on sexual orientation and gender identity and expression, and are an entrée into new immigrant communities where English and French are often not well understood, for the ultra-right. The attacks and deliberate distortions concerning sex education curricula in schools across the country is an example of how the ultra-right and the religious right attempt to terrorize immigrant communities, and drive them to the political right.
The amendments refer to the changing composition of the organized labour movement, in which women now constitute a majority of the members, most of them in the public sector. This shift has brought new dynamics and resurgence into the class struggle.
The largest proportion of women in Canada are now in the paid work force, including a significant proportion in low-paid precarious jobs. Many of these women are racialized, immigrants, and Indigenous. A number are active in the struggles to raise the minimum wage across Canada.
The Program notes that the absence of a Canada-wide coalition of equality-seeking women’s groups, such the National Action Committee on the Status of Women was during the 1980s and ‘90s, continues to hobble the struggle for women’s equality, and for unity of the labour and democratic movements fighting for social and economic advance. This struggle continues under increasingly onerous conditions for women brought on by right-wing governments and corporations.
POPULISM AND FASCISM
The amendments on populism and fascism are mostly additions to the Program, reflecting the changing conditions of struggle over the last twenty years. The additions describe fascism and populism with references to Georgi Dmitrov’s speech to the Seventh Congress of the Communist International.
The additions point out that the rise of fascism is an indicator of the deepening systemic crisis of capitalism. Fascism’s ascendancy is not a normal transition of one government to another, but a clear break from one form of capitalist rule to another: from bourgeois democracy to an open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.
As Dmitrov said, fascism’s purpose is to crush the working class movement and popular resistance to capitalist rule and unbridled capitalist exploitation. Fascism is unbridled chauvinism and predatory war. Fascism is rabid reaction and counter-revolution. It is the most vicious enemy of the working class and all working people.
The Program notes that in many countries, including the US and Canada, right-wing populism is used to divert the growing anti-capitalist sentiments of those victimized by austerity and capitalist globalization, and by the unparalleled greed of the banks and the corporations. Like fascism, right-wing populism capitalizes on the people’s anger, their grievances and outrage, using demagogy to denounce the "elites", the "special interests", and "corruption" to demand fundamental change.
Like fascism, right-wing populism plays on division and inflames prejudice, particularly against immigrants and racialized peoples. It thrives on xenophobia, Islamophobia, racism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia. Its leaders present themselves as the people’s champion, disclaiming political allegiances to the most reactionary elements of finance capital that would expose their anti-working class and anti-democratic essence.
The Program amendments note that right-wing populism does not always lead to fascism, as Canadian history shows, but it can open the door to fascist movements and ideology, as we are seeing in Canada today. The key conclusion is that a mass struggle to defeat right-wing populist and fascist ideas when they are germinating is the key to defeat fascism. In other words, not a narrow or sectarian struggle, but a mass struggle involving the broad labour and democratic movements, and not a struggle that waits until fascism has established itself and dissolved labour, democratic and civil rights altogether.
US Senator and self-proclaimed "democratic socialist" Bernie Sanders speaks at the University of Toronto. (2017) [Canadian Press]
SOCIAL DEMOCRACY
The amendments to this section take into account the exposure of right-wing social democracy over the last two decades as the “humanizing” agent of capitalism. In its place, left social democracy or “democratic socialism” has emerged – while right-wing social democrats nowadays prefer to avoid the word “socialism” altogether.
The Program amendments identify the similarities in left and right social democratic parties globally, while also recognizing that many activists are drawn to "democratic socialism". Both right and left social democracy are built on a theory which rejects scientific socialism, and is a dead end in the working class movement: it is not class-based, anti-capitalist or revolutionary. "Democratic socialism" defines the communist movement as undemocratic. It rejects the need for a revolutionary political party of the working class, and negates the historical achievements by the working class under socialism; its essential content is class collaboration and anti-communism.
The Program links right-wing social democracy with social reformism and class collaboration in the trade union movement. The amendments include a demand that “[c]lass struggle policies and an agenda that expands to represent the broadest sections and strata of the Canadian people are necessary to replenish the ranks of labour and to win the popular support needed to become the catalyst uniting the people as a whole into a left political movement. The transition to class struggle trade unionism and coalition building is necessary for a struggle against collaboration and a struggle for democracy and class unity.”
IMPACT OF THE 2008 STRUCTURAL CRISIS
The amendments here are also new additions to the Program, detailing the causes of the 2008 "economic meltdown" – the largest and most severe capitalist crisis since the Great Depression. A consequence of neoliberalism and unlimited corporate greed, the costs of the crisis were borne by millions of workers through wage cuts and austerity while state treasuries bailed out the banks and the corporations. The continuation and speed-up of the same neoliberal policies in the years since have also moved the world closer to the next crisis and meltdown which it is anticipated will be worse than the crisis of 2008.
This section of the Program also includes new sections on US imperialism’s economic decline and the rise of China as the world’s economic powerhouse. US imperialism’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy and its drive to war and regime change against China, Russia, Cuba, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Venezuela, Iran, Syria and all those who do not bow to US diktat threaten world war and global catastrophe. The Communist Party calls for a mass struggle against war, reaction and fascism, as an urgent matter for working people worldwide.
These are the main areas of discussion that will engage the members and friends of the Communist Party over the next few months. Discussion and debate will take place in all of the clubs and in public gatherings in cities across the country. There will be a written Program discussion bulletin, to which all members and friends will be invited to contribute, and that will be distributed across Canada. Members, clubs and elected committees can also submit amendments for discussion.
A lot has changed in almost twenty years. But some things don’t change.
The struggle for peace, for environmental sustainability, and for working class political power – for socialism – is the constant through all these developments.
Workers of the world unite!
Liz Rowley is the leader of the Communist Party of Canada.
PM Justin Trudeau shakes hands with US President Donald Trump during the G7 leaders summit in La Malbaie, Quebec. (June 8, 2018) [The Canadian Press/Justin Tang]
***
At the time of writing, the Trudeau team are still congratulating themselves for having dodged a bullet in the NAFTA/ USMCA negotiations. By agreeing to some U.S. demands, they avoided others. But it is perfectly clear who was mainly calling the shots.
The Globe and Mail Report on Business reported on October 6:
One Canadian official confided that, policy purposes aside, there was another reason Mr. Trudeau’s advisors had marked Chapter 19 from the start as the hill to die on: They were confident Mr. Trump would not. [Chapter 19 in NAFTA provided for the adjudication of inter-country disputes by transnational panels.] Whatever happened in the negotiations, the official said, Canada was certain the U.S. would ultimately concede dispute resolution, giving Ottawa something substantial to claim as a victory.
It was a gamble that paid off rhetorically, though some argued it came at a cost to the deal itself – and explained how the talks ended. By advertising Chapter 19 as a red line, some observers said, the Canadians gave [U.S. negotiator] Mr. Lighthizer a point with which to inflict pain. He simply held out until he felt he had won enough from Ottawa for a satisfactory deal. As soon as he conceded it, the agreement was made.
“The U.S. was just holding back Chapter 19 until the end to squeeze out every last concession,” said Mr. Ujczo, the [Ohio-based] trade lawyer. “And it worked.”
We owe to progressive economist Fred Jones the critical run-down of the new agreement’s details, starting on page 26. But, above all, what people often do not realize is that NAFTA, and now the USMCA, have never been for the most part really about trade. Canada has always traded with the USA – with and without any trade agreement. Under World Trade Organization rules, most trade is limited to tariffs of only about two percent, anyway. And the USA, on and off, acts without regard for signed trade treaties all the time – not just under Donald Trump. For example, by its actions against Canadian softwood lumber (1982-2006, and continuing), which Canadian governments have felt it necessary to make concessions to. And by the “national security” tariffs against Canadian steel and aluminum – which are still in place at the time of writing, and unlikely to be removed without some further concessions by Canada.
The truth is that our “trade agreement” with the USA is actually about investor protection mainly. It’s about restricting what elected federal and provincial governments can do – to protect the environment, for instance. It’s about curtailing democracy. In that case, why is Canada tied up in it? Canadian monopoly capital has judged that its overall interests are best served – in mining operations in South America and Africa, for example – by mostly hitching its wagon onto the geopolitical war chariot of United States imperialism. That is the underlying reality.
So it turns out that Canadian dairy farmers and egg and poultry producers – whose operations are often still intermediate-size family enterprises – will now see their market position further eroded in favour of large U.S. agribusinesses.
Westerners remember the Canadian Wheat Board – a government-organized co-op for marketing Canada’s wheat output. Most western wheat farmers wanted to be farmers, not international price speculators. So they were happy to leave selling their wheat to the specialists at the Wheat Board, while they got on with actually growing it. Against their will, Stephen Harper sold off the Canadian Wheat Board, and what is left of it is now a profit-making corporation majority-controlled by the Saudi Agricultural and Livestock Investment Company.
That was a short-sharp-shock delivered against Canada’s wheat farmers. Our medium-sized dairy, poultry and egg producers are now threatened with a slower process of death-by-a-thousand-cuts. They are, that is, unless and until a broad-based fightback of Canadian working people can succeed in forcing a more general reorientation of government policies in a democratic direction.
CORRECTION: “Surplus Value”
In The Spark! #28, Liz Rowley’s contribution, “On the 200th Anniversary of the Birth of Karl Marx”, carried a footnote (at my urging – D.G.) attached to her quotation of Frederick Engels’ statement that Marx’s “discovery of surplus value suddenly threw light on the problem ... which all previous investigators, both bourgeois economists and socialist critics, had been groping [for] in the dark”. But that footnote was not quite correct. It was correct in making the point that Engels wasn’t crediting Marx with the discovery that in our sort of economy the workers do the work and the capitalists cop an enriching “free lunch” out of it. Socialist critics of capitalism had called attention to that long before Marx came on the scene. The footnote quoted a letter of Marx’s to Engels in which he said that the best things about his book Capital were taking note of “the two-fold character of labour according to whether it is expressed in use- value or exchange-value” and “the treatment of surplus value regardless of its particular form as profit, interest, ground rent etc.”; but the note was wrong to say that treating all capitalist revenue together as “surplus value” was what Engels meant by “the discovery of surplus value”.
The puzzle Marx’s discovery solved was this: how does the capitalists’ enrichment come about in a free market where commodities are exchanged, equal value for equal value, without force or fraud? (Not that the capitalists don’t often enough employ force and fraud too.) Marx’s answer was that in exchange for their wages the workers sell a commodity: their ability to labour, their labour-power; and in the consumption of this commodity by the capitalists the use the capitalists get from it – the actual work done – creates new value, by turning the material inputs into more valuable commodities to sell on the market. Engels explains the point in his book Anti-Dühring, Part II, Chapter 7:
… The simple owner of commodities sells in order to buy; he sells what he does not need, and with the money thus procured he buys what he does need. The incipient capitalist starts by buying what he does not need himself; he buys in order to sell, and to sell at a higher price, in order to get back the value of the money thrown into the transaction, augmented by an increment in money; and Marx calls this increment surplus-value.
Whence comes this surplus-value? It cannot come either from the buyer buying the commodities under their value, or from the seller selling them above their value. For in both cases the gains and the losses of each individual cancel each other, as each individual is in turn buyer and seller. Nor can it come from cheating, for though cheating can enrich one person at the expense of another, it cannot increase the total sum possessed by both, and therefore cannot augment the sum of the values in circulation. "The capitalist class, as a whole, in any country, cannot over-reach themselves." [Marx, Capital, Volume I, Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 35, page 173]
And yet we find that in each country the capitalist class as a whole is continuously enriching itself before our eyes, by selling dearer than it had bought, by appropriating to itself surplus-value. We are therefore just where we were at the start: whence comes this surplus-value? This problem must be solved, and it must be solved in a purely economic way, excluding all cheating and the intervention of any force -- the problem being: how is it possible constantly to sell dearer than one has bought, even on the hypothesis that equal values are always exchanged for equal values?
The solution of this problem was the most epoch-making achievement of Marx's work. It spread the clear light of day through economic domains in which socialists no less than bourgeois economists previously groped in utter darkness. Scientific socialism dates from the discovery of this solution and has been built up around it.
This solution is as follows: The increase in the value of money that is to be converted into capital cannot take place in the money itself, nor can it originate in the purchase, as here this money does no more than realise the price of the commodity, and this price, inasmuch as we took as our premise an exchange of equivalents, is not different from its value. For the same reason, the increase in value cannot originate in the sale of the commodity. The change must, therefore, take place in the commodity bought; not however in its value, as it is bought and sold at its value, but in its use-value as such, that is, the change of value must originate in the consumption of the commodity. "In order to be able to extract value from the consumption of a commodity, our friend, Moneybags, must be so lucky as to find ... in the market, a commodity, whose use-value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value, whose actual consumption, therefore, is itself an embodiment of labour, and, consequently, a creation of value. The possessor of money does find on the market such a special commodity in capacity for labour or labour-power." [Marx, Capital, Volume I, Collected Works, Volume 35, page 177]
… The owner of the money has paid the value of a day’s labour-power; his, therefore, is the use of it for a day – a whole day’s labour. The circumstance that the value which the use of it during one day creates is double its own value for a day is a piece of especially good luck for the buyer, but according to the laws of exchange of commodities by no means an injustice to the seller. …
In thus showing how surplus-value arises, and how alone surplus-value can arise under the domination of the laws regulating the exchange of commodities, Marx exposed the mechanism of the existing capitalist mode of production and of the mode of appropriation based on it; he revealed the core around which the whole existing social order has crystallised.
By Jeanne McGuire (Speech given on November 18, 2017 at a banquet in Toronto celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution.)
Soldiers carrying a banner that reads “Communism” march toward the Kremlin Wall in Moscow in 1917. [Public Domain]
No one here this evening has any doubt that the October Revolution was a watershed, that the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was fractured at that moment. From then on there was before the Revolution and there was after the Revolution.
And what was so GREAT about this October Revolution?
Well, certainly its values were great – as it put forward a prospect for humanity that called for the equality of all peoples, all nations, for an end to inequality based on race, ethnicity, religion or sex.
It was great in its aspirations as it enacted laws designed to bring an end to – the inequality of women, to poverty, to exploitation, to war. What other government of the day conceived of such a society?
It was great in that it was a revolution like no other. Previous revolutions had only replaced one class of property owners with another class based on a different kind of property – owners of land with owners of capital. And in those previous revolutions the old and the new ruling classes were able to come to an accommodation, a modus vivendi – they mingled, they merged and they married. In this revolution the old ruling class could not be accommodated and could find no modus vivendi. They and their entire international class fought back, fought ferociously, fought like cornered rats to retain their power, their profits and their privilege. And they fought it from the day the Soviet Union was born to the day it died – unceasingly, unrelentingly. Indeed, they are still fighting it – the ghost of that monumental event.
It was a revolution like no other in that, not only did it sever the power of property and challenge the very basis of capitalism, it challenged the very basis of what was called socialism at that time, what today we would call social democracy, for it was revolution built by a movement for peace when all those other socialists had answered the master’s bugle. And it was a revolution which asserted that the class to which you belong was more important than the country in which you resided when those other socialists were waving national flags and paying the price for their collaboration by wrapping the dead of war in that same flag. Peace and Internationalism, right from the start, and while peace was not always an option – during the civil war, the invasions by foreign troops, the invasion by the forces of fascism, and then the Cold War - the internationalism endured.
Lenin speaking in Red Square in celebration of the first anniversary of the Revolution. (1918) [Public Domain]
It’s a wonder that it happened at all and you have to admire the audacity of those who took the step – over the edge, into the unknown, totally uncharted territory with few navigational tools. If it had failed, we would have called them fools for even thinking they could pull it off.
And the Revolution was the easy part –that it survived was truly remarkable. And it survived not just a few months as was the case of the Paris Commune – it survived the chaos and confusion of the first heady months, it survived the onslaught of Civil War and the invasion of foreign armies – Canadians and Greeks, Americans and British, Estonian and Chinese, Italians and Japanese, Australians and Punjabis fighting for Britain, Romanians and Czechs, all came in force to reinstate the old order.
And it was great in its achievements and accomplishments. In a country with over 125 million people, less than 15% of whom were urbanized, they improved the living standards, provided health care and housing, built schools and universities, gave workers holidays and women maternity leave. They funded sports and culture. They industrialized. They defeated fascism.
Internationally they supported the anti-colonial aspirations of millions of people, many of whom found inspiration in the victory of the revolution. People in India, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Angola, South Africa and Palestine benefited from their voice in the United Nations, from their economic support, their assistance in struggle. Many were educated in the universities of the new Soviet Union at no cost to themselves. Today the coffee shops of North America boast when they serve coffee that is Fair Trade. The Fair Trade movement has nothing on the trade deals made by the Soviet Union that were often more than advantageous to those struggling ex-colonies.
We in the developed capitalist world also gained by virtue of the success of that revolution. It fueled our demands for the things they had achieved – free education, health care, pensions, maternity leave, daycares, workers’ compensation, abortion rights and paid holidays. The existence of these gains in the ever-to-be-feared socialist alternative facilitated our victories.
So let us celebrate their achievements and acknowledge the debt of gratitude that so many in the world owe to that revolution.
And let us admit that there were errors. And if we are ready to admit that there were errors, let us also admit that most of us don’t really know what those errors were. Did they do too much or too little? Did they go too fast or too slow? Did they take steps too soon or too late? Were they too repressive or not repressive enough?
To inherit a country with little industry, a huge population with enormous needs, with a recent rapid increase in urbanization adding a layer of difficulty to a country steeped in a feudal tradition, backward, Church-ridden and hidebound, presented monumental challenges.Governing in such a situation with no allies or support would not be difficult, it would be nearly impossible.
In Afghanistan, some of the first steps taken by the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan were agricultural reforms including the distribution of state and royal lands and the granting of women’s rights. It was these measures which stirred the resentment amongst warlords and religious zealots that the U.S. then funded to overthrow this progressive new government. Too much, too soon, too fast? And if they hadn’t – what would the critics of Communism have said then? Not enough, too late, too slow.
It is easy to criticize and offer advice – you should have done this, you shouldn’t have done that – but none of us have had to make a decision with the kind of consequences that followed from the ones they made.
So let us look at some specifics that most people think were problems. A common one is the forced collectivization of the land. Harsh measures indeed. The primitive accumulation of capital to fund the process of industrialization; capitalism did it with the enclosure acts and evictions and it was done over decades, even centuries. In the Soviet Union the industrialization was done in less than 1/10 of the time. Michael Hudson, who writes on economics, suggests that the same accumulation of capital could have been achieved by giving the land to the peasants and then using price controls to extract the surplus – in the manner of Cargill and other grain companies, as he put it. But that would have created a huge peasantry and I’m sure you all know that poor peasants do not dream of becoming workers. They dream of becoming rich peasants. As Zhou En Lai is reported to have said to Nikita Khrushchev when Khrushchev made the comment that the difference between the Soviet Union and China was exemplified by the fact that he, Khrushchev came from the peasantry and Zhou En Lai came from a privileged segment of Chinese society, Zhou En Lai replied, “That’s true, but there is this similarity. Each of us is a traitor to his class.” Turning peasants into workers is difficult no matter who does it – but becoming workers in the sweat shops of London or Dhaka, the mines of Silesia or Bolivia, or homeless in the streets of Bangkok or Madrid was a far less salubrious transformation than the one that took place in the Soviet Union.
Another criticism is the lavish privileges of the upper echelons of the party and state. And those are the words the critics always use – lavish and privilege and upper echelons. And yes – those petty privileges may have grated and irritated. But to call them lavish is laughable compared to the really lavish privileges of the upper echelons of capitalism. No one in the Soviet Union bought themselves multi-million dollar estates, considered owning a private jet in case they wanted dinner in Rome this weekend, bought a sports team to amuse themselves, was paid in the millions of dollars. How lavish is it when eight people own as much of the world’s wealth as the bottom 50% - about three and a half billion people? If what those privileged Soviets had was so lavish, try offering it as an incentive the next time the Blue Jays want a new pitcher – I doubt it would provide much attraction. The fact that it was seen as unseemly testifies to an underlying commitment to equality within the society. Capitalism doesn’t just tolerate homelessness, poverty, massive inequality– it glorifies gigantic wage differentials as rewarding achievement, defends the removal of social security provisions as tax savings, insists that precarious work contracts are a necessary flexibility.
The harsh treatment of opposition is another criticism. And yes it probably happened and happened more often than is acceptable. But if you are in fact surrounded, not just by opposition but enemies – and the revolution was surrounded by enemies– it might be hard to distinguish between opposition hostile to socialism and opposition supportive of socialism.
It might also be hard to resist the temptation to extend the areas of decisions from those that are the proper concern of policy makers into those that are not – cultural, social and personal behavioral issues. And just because every mention of Shostakovich seems to require a reference to Stalin and the fact that the Toronto Symphony Orchestra dropped six players from their roster in 1951 for being communist sympathizers isn’t even remembered, that doesn’t make it acceptable.
The invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia are also cited as examples of unacceptable developments in the Soviet Union. We are critical, suspicious of the reasons given, refer to the invasions as errors or mistakes. Canada led in bombing Libya, participated in the invasion of Afghanistan, sends advisors to Iraq – do the supporters of capitalism call that an error or a mistake? No, they rename the 401 the Highway of Heroes. The U.S. killed more than one million Vietnamese – do the supporters of US imperialism call that an error or a mistake – no, they build a monument to those that did the killing. We debate the legitimacy of the actions of the Soviet Union. For the most part capitalism claims all its actions from Hiroshima to Syria as not just legitimate, but glorious examples of their essential goodness.
And we know that, just because the other side does it, that doesn’t make it right for us to do it. We also know that, like everything else, the magnitude of the destruction matters. And we know that on a scale of horrors our errors are miniscule compared to the entire history of capitalist plunder and brutality from its very inception through the long ugliness of colonialism to the ravages of modern imperialism.
The writer Andre Vtlchek, whose father was a professor, a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and a supporter of Alexander Dubcek, points out that when his father tore up his membership card to protest the invasion, nothing happened to him. Andre says that perhaps he didn’t get the promotions he would have otherwise received but he continued to teach and nothing happened to him. Compare that, he says, to what happened to those professors who supported Allende when the generals decided he had to go, or, I might add, to the Hollywood Ten, to the TSO six, to Paul Robeson, to Pete Seeger.
October Revoluion 50th anniversary celebrations in Moscow. (1967) [Public Domain]
We are sometimes more critical of our errors than we are of the policy and practices of capitalism. We hold ourselves to a higher standard – to the defence of people’s rights, the expansion of human rights and freedoms, and the implementation of working class control over the means of production. We hold ourselves to a higher standard and it is to our credit that we do.
And while we have the right to make judgements, perhaps an obligation to make judgements, we need as well to be conscious of the basis of our judgments. I’m sure that the overwhelming majority of humanity at the time looked at the Soviet Union and saw a society that provided so many of the things that they did not have and wanted. But in the developed West, and only after World War II, many of us accepted that the world was divided between communism and democracy. And of course it was not – it was divided between communism and capitalism. And we so often ignored that, when democracy would destroy capitalism, capitalism destroyed democracy – in Guyana, in Chile, in Indonesia where up to three million people (many of them Communists) were killed to prevent the Communists winning the election, in Vietnam where General Eisenhower admitted that the Communists would win any election so an election could not be held. And many of us came to agree that individual freedoms were more significant than collective rights to employment, medical care, pensions and workers’ rights. And while we in the capitalist West did have those rights (mostly – there were lots of exceptions) those in the capitalist south did not – or had them only precariously. For Palestine is capitalist, and so is Pakistan, Riyadh is in a capitalist country and so is Attawapiskat, Haiti is capitalist and so is Honduras, Germany under Hitler, Spain under Franco, Chile under Pinochet, Iran under the Shah, Indonesia under Suharto, South Africa under Apartheid were all capitalist countries. And now so is Libya. And now so is Russia. And look at it now. 50% of its wealth held by 1% of its population according to a recent report, – like capitalism everywhere, a few are enriched and many are impoverished.
So the October Revolution was our first real victory, the first one that survived – this one for 74 years. An astounding achievement! We’ve had a few more victories since then and each of them was made possible, or at least easier, by the first – China, Cuba, Vietnam, Angola and Mozambique. But we’ve had even more defeats. Twice we lost in Germany; we were defeated in Spain; in Indonesia we didn’t lose, we were exterminated; in Guyana where the British overthrew the democratically elected Cheddi Jagan; in Chile where the socialists won the election and were unable to enjoy their victory; in Grenada where American medical students were the excuse to invade.
And, as we celebrate this revolution, the October Revolution, the Great October Revolution, let us remember that it was our class, the working class that won that day. And it was our class, the working class that made whatever errors were made. That is was our class, the working class, that held out its hand to the exploited and oppressed, which stood up for equality and justice. For the Revolution that allowed our class, the working class, their first chance to run a victory lap, and for those that had the audacity to dare, the capacity to win and the tenacity to survive, let us give them our applause!
Jeanne McGuire is a progressive educator and past president of the Congress of Canadian Women, living in Toronto.
Socialists need to seriously contend with the economic and structural role the internet is playing today in our politics and struggles, both here in Canada and around the world.
In October 2016, Breitbart News Network, a far-right political website headed by eventual for-one-year White House Chief Strategist,
Steve Bannon — with close (and publically verified - see Bernstein, [2017]) ties to the white supremacist “alt right” movement — opened an online store to sell branded merchandise. On this store, Breitbart was to sell t-shirts with an assortment of racist dog-whistles and anti- immigration rhetoric celebrating the soon-to- be President Elect’s border wall (Daro, 2016). The functioning of this store was made possible with tools provided to them by Shopify, a Canadian e-commerce company based in Ottawa. Shopify provides the interface, the point-of- sale system, inventory management, and other tools for, typically, small-to-medium-sized businesses whose primary activity is conducted online. Essentially, Shopify functions as an intermediary or middleman for the circulation of capital (which Marx [1893] discusses in detail in Capital, Volume II).
On February 2, 2017 it came to light that behind the scenes at Shopify, numerous employees were “quietly urging” management to end their business relationship with Breitbart (Daro, 2016). Six days later, Shopify’s CEO, Tobias Lütke, published a defence of Shopify’s official stance to continue supplying ecommerce tools for Breitbart. Lütke stated: “products are speech and we are pro-free- speech. This means protecting the right of organizations to use our platform even if they are unpopular or if we disagree with their premise,” (Lütke, 2017).
Shopify, a company whose products usually keep them out of the spotlight, found itself at the centre of a public conflict: employees and critics pointed out that by providing tools for Breitbart, they were implicitly endorsing the hate that Breitbart used to peddle its clickbait articles like t-shirts. Yet according to Lütke’s professed fidelity to an unsophisticated liberalism, a private company had no right to restrict the speech — in this case, the buying and selling of products — of others. This public relations crisis surrounding Shopify and Breitbart is just one example of the increasing conflicts that are made apparent by the growth and increasing monopolistic status of companies that have based their business model on and around the internet.
While this conflict was quickly forgotten in the churn of the news cycle and the eventual election of Donald Trump, I think it illustrates that socialists need to seriously contend with the economic and structural role the internet is playing today in our politics and struggles, both here in Canada and around the world. There are two good reasons for this. The first is that we use the internet to communicate, build solidarity, and organize. It’s a powerful infrastructure that enables all kinds of communication in tangible ways. This is especially apparent when considering the growth of progressive movements around the world, including ours, in the last 10 years. Because we rely on them it is incumbent upon us to understand the history and workings of the technologies we use to build our movement.
The second reason we should understand the internet is that it’s at the centre of today’s version of monopoly capitalism. While resource extraction, commodity production, and agriculture undergird the majority of global capitalism’s ongoing operation and reproduction, the advanced capitalist countries have simultaneously put the internet at the centre of their economies, rhetorically and literally. It’s not that the biggest companies by revenue will necessarily be companies whose business exists only on the internet. In Canada, for example, the biggest companies remain in the hands of our banks and mining corporations. Instead, it’s that every company, in pursuit of what Marx called “relative surplus value” can’t be competitive without relying heavily on the communication tools provided by internet-based platform owners (such as Facebook, Shopify, Alphabet [formerly Google], etc). The internet is where capitalists go to try to transcend space and time, because if they find the right tool, they will find themselves at the cutting edge faster than their global competitors. If they play their cards right, they will leverage that, gain advantage and possibly even restructure the market.
In academia, one book that addresses this process, Nick Srnicek’s Platform Capitalism (2017), is an important (if limited) look at the growing importance of platforms in the global economy, written from an explicitly Marxist perspective. In it Srnicek describes how businesses on the internet function just like any others: “we can learn a lot about major tech companies by taking them to be economic actors within a capitalist mode of production.”
The argument of the book rests on the economic history of capitalism that is laid out by Robert Brenner (2006) in The Economics of Global Turbulence, which itself was a critique of some of the core arguments in Sweezy and Baran’s (1956) Monopoly Capital. Brenner’s argument is that competition from East Asia, Russia, and Brazil exacerbated the decline in profits for manufacturing in the core capitalist countries. As a result, less and less capital was finding its way into manufacturing, and found itself in need of productive use. So, something we are now very familiar with, it found its way into finance. Part of this move towards finance resulted in the dot com-crash of the late 1990s, as well as the housing bubble of the last decade. It also found its way into companies specializing in business on the internet, many of them promising low fixed capital costs, room for expansion, and high margins.
Srnicek argues that this money-capital, sitting in bank accounts in desperate need of investment is what explains the massive growth of internet-based companies like Alphabet, Microsoft, and Facebook — all successful companies making money from a variety of sources. It also explains the recent growth of other companies, what Srnicek calls “lean platforms”, like Uber or Airbnb: companies that specialize in making themselves the mandatory go-between for the so-called “sharing economy”. From these platforms, Srnicek argues that there are roughly four tendencies for the future of platform capitalism: the expansion of extraction (the intensification of data mining, which is productively sold to advertisers and marketing companies for a profit), a company positioning itself as a gatekeeper (gaining control over vital exchange points for capital and labour), convergence of markets (the tendency for companies in previously different markets to find themselves in competition), and the enclosure of ecosystems (putting users into walled, fully controlled “gardens”, like Apple’s iOS).
It is in this vortex of capital that we currently find ourselves. All the time it feels like platforms and corporations like Facebook, Google, or Apple are what the internet “is”, instead of the network being what provides their infrastructure. There’s also the ever- present and depressing daily pressure on the working class, on our friends and family, to sell off their lives to companies like Uber or Airbnb to cover the crisis of rising fixed living costs like rent.
Srnicek suggests that one possible solution goes beyond state regulation of these technologies: “Rather than just regulating corporate platforms, efforts should be made to create public platforms — platforms owned and controlled by the people” (p. 128). I certainly think that’s a noble goal, and it could be something those advocating for socialism should incorporate into our analysis and policies. Platforms — the places where goods and services are exchanged and where all kinds of communication takes place — can and will be genuinely useful and important technologies for the development of socialism. At the same time, we should also recognize that existing platforms are there to extract data from us and exercise control over us. Platforms shape how we consume, and they function as a propaganda distribution system, while also doubling as a surveillance system for the repressive bourgeois state. It would be a huge misstep to argue that the internet and the technologies it enables are neutral in the class struggle.
If I have an immediate pointed criticism of Srnicek’s case for emancipatory platforms, it’s that there’s no historical discussion of past struggles concerning communication technologies. Communication has been, and continues to be, an important consideration for any revolutionary program for a better world, especially in the multitude of struggles of the twentieth century. There’s a history of Marxist political economy that took imperialism very seriously, and centred on the struggles of people under the thumb of imperialism who attempted to use communications technologies against it. They didn’t hedge their bets by imagining a utopian society: instead they had to start with the state of communication technology at the moment of struggle, and to do what they could at that specific historical juncture.
For example, take what Herbert Schiller and Dallas Smythe wrote in a report titled Chile: An End to Cultural Colonialism while consulting with Armand Mattleart and Salvadore Allende’s Popular Unity coalition in Chile in 1972:
“It seems clear that this gap [between the nationalization of basic infrastructure and the relative free market treatment of the culture industries] will be a site of a coming struggle – a battle for control of the mass media, a battle which the left in Chile is a long way from resolving in a strategy for winning. First they must decide what policies a proto-socialist mass media structure would follow. The problem is incredibly more complex than, say, how to nationalize copper. Among the reasons it is difficult to analyze is that in concentrating its attention on man as affected by his production relations, Marxists have relatively neglected man as affected by his consciousness, his leisure relationships, his cultural relations. It is in analyzing this problem and solving it that Chile has the opportunity to make an historically new contribution to the development of socialism.” (p. 61)
Clearly, the success of the fascist coup that came soon after illustrated that this aspect of the struggle was by no means solved conclusively. It could very well have been fatal.
Applying Schiller and Smythe’s concerns about the complexities of proto-socialist communications systems in a time of struggle and revolution to the internet increases the complexity drastically. The relative decline of broadcasting, the rise of platform owners and software as service companies, the proliferation of intermediaries and our dependence on social media mean that the question extends way beyond the (still very important) questioning of who owns this or that radio tower, TV station, or newspaper chain. Instead, we have to think about what companies, such as Shopify, maintain and profit by maintaining the infrastructure of the internet. Complicating matters for Canadians, very few of these organizations are based in Canada. Our local media monopolies like Rogers and Shaw own the physical infrastructure that allows us to access the internet, but in the end most of us rely on Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix and dozens of other US-based platform owners to filter, organize, secure, and regulate our communication. I don’t have an answer to these problems. The only way we will get to them, however is by our analysis taking them into account. It’s important to not put the cart before the horse. Start with things as they are, and then go from there. If this is the case, it’s doubtful that any of the existing platforms could in practice be nationalized, much less used to build socialism. Whatever comes next will have to be built anew, conditions permitting.
We need answers because in the meantime those advocating for a socialist future are sadly tied to media platforms with no meaningful democratic accountability, despite being considered by liberals as the guardians of a democratic discourse. For example, there was Facebook’s January 2018 change to its news feed towards personal items, which was, by their account, designed to encourage what they describe as “meaningful interactions”. In other words, the one platform that is most relied on for news is shifting its focus away from news. Facebook justified this choice partly on psychological research they had conducted about what kind of posts they thought people wanted to interact with. The place where the majority of people get their news was fundamentally changed, with no democratic input, entirely on the basis of what Facebook thought would increase their bottom line.
Hanging over the corporation, and much discussed, was also the moral panic surrounding state-sponsored Russian “fake news” proliferating through Facebook, and presumably swinging undecided voters towards Donald Trump. No doubt by shifting focus towards social interaction with no news content, Facebook can safely tell their lobbyists to assuage the hypocritical liberal Russophobia and paranoid concerns of their political benefactors. Justin Trudeau’s meeting with Sheryl Sandburg, Facebook’s Chief Operating
Officer, was clearly related to such public relations concerns about possible government regulation of advertising and news distribution.
At the same time, we know from past efforts that Facebook’s tackling the “fake news” problem is likely to target both reactionary right-wing news outlets, and also, though, critical, progressive and explicitly socialist outlets. Not long ago, Facebook sounded like Shopify’s Tobais Lutke, professing a maximalist liberal conception of the neutrality of platforms towards content in “the marketplace of ideas”. Now Facebook has stated that they do, in fact, have an opinion about what qualifies as “real” journalism. Anybody who understands the history of how media monopolies function and what their actual goal is (to collect and sell audiences to advertisers and collect subscriptions) knows that the kind of journalism they will protect will be that which stands up for, and protects the bourgeois state and order of things.
It’s up to us as socialists to keep challenging this narrative, and keep a critical eye on the internet in general.
REFERENCES
Baran, P. A., & Sweezy, P. (1966). Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (1st Modern reader paperback ed edition). New York: Monthly Review Press.
Bernstein, J. (n.d.). Here’s How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas Into The Mainstream. Retrieved October 14, 2017, from https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/heres-how-breitbart-and-milo- smuggled-white-nationalism
Brenner, R. (2006). The Economics of Global Turbulence (1st edition). London ; New York: Verso.
Daro, I. N. (2017, February 2). Shopify Employees Want The Company To Stop Doing Business With Breitbart. Retrieved September 5, 2017, from https://www.buzzfeed.com/ishmaeldaro/shopify-breitbart-store
Farnsworth, M. (2018, February 9). Watch the interview: Facebook’s heads of News Feed and news partnerships. Retrieved February 13, 2018, from https://www.recode.net/2018/2/9/16996696/how-to-watch-livestream- facebook-head-of-news-feed-partnerships-campbell-brown-adam-mosseri
Marx, K. (1893). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. (F. Engels, Ed.) (Vol. 2). Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Schiller, H., & Smythe, D. (1972). Chile: An End to Cultural Colonialism. Society, 9(5), 35–39. https://doi.org/10.1007/ BF02697609
Daniel Joseph is a political economist and freelance writer researching digital distribution platforms, games, and labour.
RESPONSIBILITY TO *PROTEST*-- THE PEACE MOVEMENT AND THE CHALLENGE OF “R2P”
By Dave McKee
Hands Off Syria rally in Toronto. (March 2018) [Toronto Association for Peace and Solidarity]
As the dangers of mass destruction through war grow, the challenge to the peace and anti-imperialist movements involves exposing the real, imperialist reasons behind interventions cloaked in the humanitarian language of "responsibility to protect".
Over the past decade, a frequent topic of debate in progressive circles has been the persistent weakness of the peace movement across Canada. With perhaps only two notable exceptions – the brief but impressive mobilizations against the US-led invasion of Iraq in early 2003, and consistent activity in support of the Palestinian people’s struggle against aggression from Israel – the peace and anti-war movement in this country has been unable to mount a coherent and meaningful opposition to imperialist wars and aggressions over the last 20 years. This includes many examples in which Canada has actively participated: Yugoslavia in 1999, Afghanistan beginning in 2001, Haiti in 2004, Libya in 2011, Syria from 2012 to the present, Ukraine and Eastern Europe from 2014 to the present, and Venezuela from 2014 to the present. There are a number of reasons for this problem, but a key factor is an ideological weapon that emerged in the twenty-first century: the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect, or R2P.
The specific formulation, “Responsibility to Protect,” first appeared in early 2001 but many of its features were developed and tested in the context of NATO’s 1999 aggression against Yugoslavia. These same features can be roughly encapsulated in NATO's 1999 New Strategic Concept document, which was formally adopted in April of that year and included the following key policy formulations:
a shift in focus away from “collective defense” of member states in the North Atlantic arena, toward explicit sanction of NATO out-of-area action on a range of security and politico-economic concerns;
a specific articulation of NATO actions as independent from the UN Security Council deliberations, sanction and oversight;
the discarding of NATO's 1991 statement that "none of its weapons will ever be used except in self-defense;”
a commitment by NATO members, in their effort to defend “common security interests”, to participate in operations beyond alliance territory; and
a reiterated and strengthened commitment to expansion in Europe.
While these policy statements did not fundamentally change the nature and character of NATO as an aggressive, imperialist military alliance, it is important to note that they represented a dramatic and deliberate shift in how the organization projected its role in the world.
To understand why the NATO states would commit to this sweeping reorientation, it is useful to review the key events of the time. In the early 1990's, most of the capitalist world was struggling with a severe and lengthy economic crisis that had begun around 1987 and continued into the mid-1990s. In Canada, this developed into a long period of economic recession that was exacerbated by corporate trade deals with the United States. In general, capitalist globalization (related, in part, to developments in technology) was on the rise and this resulted in huge changes to economies around the world – the comprehensive economic restructuring meant that, in some national economies, entire sectors were decimated and some new sectors emerged and grew. These developments sparked extensive discourse between corporate boardrooms and imperialist governments about how to reorient in order to safeguard their existing interests, as well as how to identify and exploit new global opportunities.
Alongside the economic crisis, perhaps the central development at this time was the sudden demise of the Soviet Union and socialist community of states, and the massive geopolitical changes that followed. Huge areas of the world were now viewed as “opened up” to Western capitalism (whose members were fighting amongst themselves for positions of competitive advantage – for control of resources and markets at the expense of their imperialist competitors).
At the same time, of course, the “end” of the Cold War meant the sudden loss of NATO's pretext for existing, and it embarked on a long search for a new identity and role.
In Canada, a key moment in this ongoing discussion about changing foreign policy in the “post-Soviet” era is represented by the 1999 Symposium of the Conference of Defence Associations (CDA). The CDA is an old and extremely influential Canadian advocacy group, whose membership is made up of over 50 military organizations. It is large, well-funded and well-connected. Part of its funding comes from the Department of National Defence, so it is clear that when CDA speaks the government listens.
The 1999 symposium was focused on changing strategic assessments within the context of the massive geopolitical changes mentioned above. Specifically, the symposium identified the following strategic issues:
the pressing need for reorientation in Canadian foreign policy (military and economic) in light of the demise of the Soviet Union;
the rise of China as a political and economic world power, a rise characterized as “the most serious challenge to Western interests in the Pacific”;
the importance of retaining and developing NATO as a counter-balance to changing geopolitics that challenge Western interests;
the destabilization of the central Asian states as a strategic and economic opportunity, and specific opportunities for Canada in the vast energy reserves of the Caspian Sea Basin and central Asian region;
the necessity for Canada to integrate military and economic issues within foreign policy discussions, in order to exert global influence and reap economic benefit;
the government of Iraq – characterized as a “rogue state” – as a specific barrier to securing Western interests in the central Asian region.
Virtually all of the above concerns were under discussion at the same time by other Western states. These preoccupations are reflective of two of the key concerns of imperialism: the territorial division and re-division of the world amongst the most powerful states, and the military force required to achieve, enforce and maintain such a division.
As imperialist states discussed – individually and collectively, in moments of collusion and moments of competition – how to confront the twin challenges of the economic crisis and the geopolitical shifts, Yugoslavia emerged as the immediate practical arena in which new policy directions were tested and clarified. This engagement was continued, in rapid succession, through the aggressions against Afghanistan, Iraq and others.
The loss of the socialist community of states provided imperialism with a conundrum. On the one hand, two important opportunities emerged. First, a massive region of the world was now deemed to be “opened up” to capitalism – resources, markets and trade routes were available for control and plunder. Second, the absence of the Soviet Union at the international table meant that the main obstruction to imperialist – especially US – expansion was removed.
On the other hand, however, the end of the Cold War also meant that the “spectre of communism” was lost as an justification for huge military expenditures. The peoples of the NATO countries moved quickly, especially in the context of economic crisis, to demand a “peace dividend” – large reductions in military budgets and reinvestment in social programs and infrastructure. Without the endorsement, or at least passivity, of public opinion, imperialist states would have difficulty in securing the resources necessary for the implementation and consolidation of their new plans.
Imperialism desperately needed to find a new pretext for continued militarism, aggression and war. Part of the answer to this search was provided by the “war on terror”. But another part came in the form of the doctrine of “Responsibility to Protect,” and this involved a comprehensive rewriting of the foundations of international law.
The roots of R2P lay in the broad notion of “humanitarian intervention” (or “HI”). HI emerged as a theme in international relations in the early nineteenth century, in the context of competition among the major European powers for influence and control over the territories of the declining Ottoman Empire. Its use during this period was characterized by depictions of Ottoman repression of minorities, coupled with extensive agitation for military intervention to prevent atrocities. To be effective, HI had to be invoked in a sophisticated manner that could grasp hold of public opinion. Part of this involved highlighting the supposed virtue of the imperialist nation while demonizing the character of the target state, and positing a war of “humanitarian intervention” as a moral duty.
One of the most vocal advocates of HI, John Stuart Mill, promoted the issue in skillful – if quite hypocritical – terms:
"To go to war for an idea, if the war is aggressive, not defensive, is as criminal as to go to war for territory or revenue; for it is as little justifiable to force our ideas on other people, as to compel them to submit to our will in any other respect. But there assuredly are cases in which it is allowable to go to war, without having been ourselves attacked, or threatened with attack; and it is very important that nations should make up their minds in time, as to what these cases are... To suppose that the same international customs, and the same rules of international morality, can obtain between one civilized nation and another, and between civilized nations and barbarians, is a grave error...[Barbarians] have no rights as a nation, except a right to such treatment as may, at the earliest possible period, fit them for becoming one. The only moral laws for the relation between a civilized and a barbarous government, are the universal rules of morality between man and man."
(“A Few Words on Non-Intervention”, 1859)
Mill's remarks are notable in that they reflect the ongoing dilemma of proponents of humanitarian intervention: how to justify intervention in the face of the long-accepted legal principal of state sovereignty.
Throughout the nineteenth century, as humanitarian intervention was repeatedly used by each imperialist state to justify their drive to re-divide the world, it became deeply embedded in the dominant ideology and had various cultural reflections. One of the most famous imperialist writers of this era was the English poet, Rudyard Kipling. His 1899 poem, “The White Man's Burden”, celebrated the seizure of the Philippines by the United States, from Spain. The poem portrayed such colonization as a noble enterprise that carried out the moral responsibility of European and American imperialists (“whites”) to reign over the other peoples of the world. Kipling offered the poem to US President Theodore Roosevelt, suggesting it could help solidify American public support for the “rescue” of the Philippines from Spanish oppression.
Of course, US seizure of the Philippines did not yield Kipling's imagined goals of social, economic and cultural development. Instead, it resulted in the Filipino-American War, in which an estimated 1.4 million Filipinos died, followed by decades of occupation and repression. Far from its noble pretext of humanitarianism, the American invasion of the Philippines was clearly motivated by, and enormously important to, the drive by US imperialism to establish and expand its control over foreign resources and markets.
Demonstration in Quebec City against Canadian military involvement in Afghanistan and the deployment of additional troops to Kandahar. (2007) [Edgar Zessinthal | Creative Commons]
In the course of the twentieth century, imperialism continued to use “humanitarian intervention” as a pretext for expansion but was often held in check, to varying degrees, by a range of factors. These included:
1. Public opinion: Despite comprehensive and sustained ideological assaults, campaigns against imperialist policies emerged early on and continued to grow. The American Anti-Imperialist League, for example, was formed in 1898 with the purpose of opposing US seizure of the Philippines. Within a year, it had organized over 100 local committees across the country and had a membership of over 25,000.The League was able to sustain its work against imperialist foreign policies for two decades and is one example among several similar movements, in countries all over the world.
2. Institutionalization of state sovereignty in international law: While it is legally rooted in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the concept the territorial integrity of states was confirmed and codified by the League of Nations and, to a greater extent, the United Nations. Article 2.4 of the UN Charter, for example, compels member states to “refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” Humanitarian intervention routinely violated this article.
3. The Soviet Union: As suggested earlier, this was perhaps the single most significant obstacle to imperialist expansion. The October Revolution served as a powerful magnet for workers and progressives, and it inspired the birth of many powerful anti-imperialist movements all over the world. Furthermore, as the Soviet Union developed, it emerged as a powerful political-diplomatic force that was capable, to some extent, of containing imperialism.
By the late twentieth century, in the wake of the end of the Cold War and in the context of deep economic crisis, imperialism was presented with both the need and the opportunity to reorient.
Nearly 100 years after Kipling wrote “The White Man's Burden”, the NATO states revisited the idea of humanitarian intervention and began updating it. As in the nineteenth century, the competitive imperialist drive to re-divide the world was justified through the moral imperative of humanitarian intervention. However, the obstacle of the sovereignty of states remained. As Edward S. Herman has noted, imperialism sought to permanently overcome this problem:
"...this morality surge occurred at a moment in history when the Soviet constraint was ended and the United States and its close allies were celebrating their triumph, when the socialist option had lost vitality, and when the West was thus freer to intervene. This required over-riding the several hundred year old Westphalian core principle of international relations – that national sovereignty should be respected – which if adhered to would protect smaller and weaker countries from Great Power cross-border attacks. This rule was embodied in the UN Charter, and could be said to be the fundamental feature of that document, described by international law scholar Michael Mandel as ”the world’s constitution.” Over-riding this rule and Charter fundamental would clear the ground for R2P and HI, but it would also clear the ground for classic and straightforward aggression in pursuit of geopolitical interests, for which R2P and HI might supply a useful cover."
(“Responsibility to Protect” (R2P): An Instrument of Aggression, 2013)
Accomplishing such a sweeping change would require a specific expression of the idea of humanitarian intervention. In particular, the new formulation would have to:
1. be carefully rooted in the existing institutions of international law, to cloak it with sufficient legitimacy that the undermining of the principle of state sovereignty would appear to be an acceptable consequence of the “evolution” of international law;
2. change the notion of sovereignty to focus more on the responsibilities of a sovereign state, rather than its rights, in order to facilitate the depiction of target states as failing their responsibilities and thereby forfeiting their rights;
3. develop mechanisms for quickly confirming the perpetration of atrocities and assign responsibility for such acts to the government of the target state;
4. situate the mechanism for intervention (the military force) outside of the United Nations, in such a way that the mechanism is both independent from, and deemed essential to, the UN.
In addition to these specific features, the new HI framework would benefit from being presented as having emerged from a concrete, successful application in an existing situation.
The specific points of departure were the Bosnian civil war and the Rwandan tragedy in 1994. Both of these crises were presented as internal ethnic conflicts that resulted in mass atrocities, which threatened to continue and expand, and to which the international community had a moral duty to respond. The role of foreign interference in the development of these conflicts was obscured and, in fact, the lack of foreign intervention was identified as a failure of the international community to prevent atrocities.
This promotional campaign was hugely effective – by the time of NATO's 1999 war against Yugoslavia, notions of moral outrage and humanitarian duty were so deeply embedded in the public discourse that opposition to the aggression was practically neutralized in many areas. In some countries, whole sections of the peace movement not only failed to mobilize against NATO, but actually encouraged and justified its intervention. In truth, anti-imperialist campaigns did respond, but they were generally weak and ineffective. Certainly, however, the peace and progressive forces within the countries of the imperialist camp were consumed by deep confusion and bitter divisions that resulted from the states' misinformation campaigns. Notably, these difficulties persist to the present day, and they continue to be obstacles to developing effective anti-war campaigns.
Perhaps most interestingly, the bulk of the debate over NATO's 1999 actions focused on the completeness or veracity of the stated pretext for intervention: preventing mass atrocities from being committed in Kosovo. Whether it was supported or challenged, the pretext for war had become the central and singular question. Debate over the real motivation for war – imperialist expansion – was kept to a minimum.
Cathy Fischer of the Regina Peace Council described this:
"Protecting the rights of Albanians in Kosovo was the excuse for intervention. Before NATO began bombing, president Milosevic of Yugoslavia was given the option of signing the Rambouillet Agreement. This agreement meant NATO troops would occupy the whole of Yugoslavia, not just Kosovo, and it provided for privatization of their many state enterprises, including takeover by foreign companies. Milosevic refused to sign, and with this came the call for immediate ‘humanitarian intervention’ – the bombing of Yugoslavia. U.S.-NATO planes spent 78 days, from March 24 to June 10, dropping 20,000 bombs on the people...
Along with military targets, the bombing destroyed utilities, roads, bridges, hospitals, clinics, schools, TV stations and the Chinese embassy. There was no spring planting, countless wells were poisoned, factories were destroyed putting thousands of people out of work. Many of the shells used were coated with depleted uranium, spreading deadly radioactive dust. Almost a million refugees fled the bombing. All this ‘humanitarian intervention’ because Yugoslavia had a domestically controlled economy, a strong publicly-owned sector, a good and free health care system and its own defence industry. Its population resisted the cuts to its social programs demanded by the International Monetary Fund. It refused to allow U.S. military bases on its soil, and did not want to join NATO. So the country was bombed to smithereens."
(“Today’s Trojan Horse: Humanitarian Intervention and the Responsibility to “Protect”)
Belgrade burns during NATO's "humanitarian intervention". (24 March, 1999)[Public Domain]
The 1999 aggression against Yugoslavia was the first application of the ideas of “Responsibility to Protect”, as well as NATO's New Strategic Concept. This is important for two key reasons. First, the aggression provided a testing ground for the new policy orientation, and the results would be used to justify the rapid institutionalization of R2P by the United Nations. Second, it concretely identified NATO as the vehicle for implementing the “moral duty” of the international community and deeply embedded NATO into the role and work of the UN. Responsibility to Protect is the diplomatic and ideological tool, providing the moral cover necessary for the implementation of the New Strategic Concept.
Shortly after its application in Yugoslavia, the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect began to be codified. In 2000, the Canadian government – who had participated enthusiastically in the bombing campaign in 1999 – sponsored the founding of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS). This body was responsible for crafting a legal justification for imperialism's new framework of humanitarian intervention. In its report, it concretely addressed some of the key requirements, identified above, for accomplishing a sweeping change in international law:
Rooting Responsibility to Protect in the existing, but evolving, institutions: Great care was taken by the members of ICISS to situate R2P within the context of the UN Declaration of Human Rights and a range of UN covenants, conventions, treaties and other mechanisms. At the same time, the incompleteness, or immaturity, of the institutions of international law was underscored. The commission's report notes, for example, that “even though in some cases imperfectly implemented, these agreements and mechanisms have significantly changed expectations at all levels about what is and what is not acceptable conduct by states and other actors,” and goes on to suggest that “the universal jurisdiction of these instruments [of international law] is starting to be taken very seriously.”
Changing the notion of sovereignty: One of the most formidable and enduring obstacles to the pretext of humanitarian intervention is the Westphalian concept of sovereignty. The ICISS approached this cleverly, and depicted sovereignty not as a state's right to territorial integrity, but rather as a state's responsibility to protect its people. The key “obligations of sovereignty” were then specifically equated to the components of humanitarian and human rights law. The ICISS then asserted that a state's failure or inability to guarantee these obligations meant the forfeiture of its sovereignty: “Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect.”
Developing mechanisms for confirming atrocities: In order to generate the combination of a sense of urgency and a sufficient level of public confidence, the proponents of R2P needed a reliable mechanism for investigating alleged atrocities and ensure that blame was clearly ascribed to the target state. The ICISS report identifies specific bodies whose structure is ad hoc, thereby liberated from ongoing scrutiny, and whose performance in the service of imperialist expansion was reliable and worthy of emulation. The report singles out, for example, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), the International Criminal Court (ICC), as well as numerous Non-Government Organizations whose work and structure lie completely beyond the influence of the United Nations. Interestingly, the applicability to this work of the UN's own mechanisms – which are much more transparent, democratic and accountable – is downplayed.
Situate the mechanism for intervention outside of the UN: Clearly, the question of how to guarantee legal sanction to the international activities of a military organization is a delicate one. In its report on this matter, the ICISS identified “multinational coalition operations” as the appropriate vehicle for military action. Furthermore, the commission notes that “given...the shrinking military budgets of most countries in the post-Cold War era, there are real constraints on how much spare capacity exists to take on additional burdens.” It then hints at the key role for NATO in the UN's work on global security: “UN peacekeeping may have peaked in 1993 at 78,000 troops. But today, if both NATO and UN missions are included, the number of soldiers in international peace operations has soared by about 40 per cent to 108,000.”
Largely on the basis of the ICISS report, the R2P doctrine became an “international norm”, by which the institutions of international law would be interpreted and implemented. However, it was not introduced and implemented through anything close to international consensus – on the contrary, it was repeatedly denounced by a majority of the governments of the world. In 1999 the 113 member states of the Non-Aligned Movement rejected the “so-called ‘right of humanitarian intervention’ which has no legal basis in the UN Charter or in the general principles of international law.” A year later, the Group of 77 issued a declaration to the same effect.
Responsibility to Protect is certainly not the only pretext for justifying imperialist aggression, but it is one that has proven to be enormously effective, in a short period of time. It has been used – sometimes on its own and sometimes in conjunction with other pretexts – to justify imperialist aggressions against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Mali and Syria, as well as the current provocations against Iran, Ukraine and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Part of its strength is that it appeals to, and plays upon, basic humanitarian concerns that people of all nations share. We do not like to see our fellow human beings suffer through tragedies like war, repression and poverty, and we feel the need to assist in some way. Many people view humanitarian intervention as a concrete vehicle for providing that assistance, and so they become supportive of R2P. Melding imperialist foreign policy onto the moral fabric of imperialist societies, it is the modern “White Man's Burden”.
The logical outcome of such a situation is a lack of strong opposition to imperialist expansion and aggression. At times, sectors of the progressive movements are actually co-opted and help to justify the pretext for aggression. At other times, there is less active support but the ideological softening of public discourse results in neutralization of the anti-imperialist message. In both cases, however, opposition is confused and fragmented and the imperialist powers enjoy a high degree of freedom to pursue their interventions, and this, in turn, further emboldens them.
The Trudeau Liberals plan on increasing annual military expenditures by $14 billion to over $32 billion a year within ten years. (2017) [Sean Kilpatrick | The Canadian Press]
As the dangers of mass destruction through war grow, the peoples of the world face an increasingly stark and urgent choice. The challenge to the peace and anti-imperialist movements involves exposing the real, imperialist reasons behind interventions. It requires a clear assessment of the main dangers to peace at any particular moment, and the projection of concrete bases of unity for building mass opposition. It challenges us to strengthen, and perhaps update, our understanding of sovereignty, and be able to justify that principle in the face of disinformation that is cloaked in “humanitarian” language.
The extent to which we can dismantle a social morality that justifies imperialist aggression depends, to no small degree, on our ability to propagate a solidaristic and internationalist morality. We need to undermine the “Responsibility to Protect” and replace it with a “Responsibility to Protest.”
We can find optimism in the fact that among the most deeply held humanitarian convictions of the peoples of the world is the desire for peace. They will continue to demand it, whatever the circumstances, and they will achieve it. Our survival depends on it!
Dave McKee is former of President of the Canadian Peace Congress, and is currently chair of the COMMUNIST PARTY's Peace and Disarmament Commission.
QUÉBEC SOLIDAIRE: UNITING INDEPENDENTISTS RATHER THAN THE LEFT
By Pierre Fontaine
[Québec Solidaire]
Québec solidaire remains a left-wing and progressive organization, but the merger with Option nationale opens the door to a possible nationalist degeneration.
[Since 2006 the Quebec political scene has included a strongly left party, Québec solidaire, with significant though unofficial ties to organized labour. QS was formed by combining the Union des forces progressistes – Union of Progressive Forces – and Option citoyenne – Citizens’ Option. The UFP itself had been formed in 2002 by a federated coming-together of the Rassemblement pour l’alternative progressiste – Union for the Progressive Alternative – the Parti de la démocratie socialiste – Party of Socialist Democracy (up to then the Quebec wing of the NDP) – and the Parti communiste du Québec. Québec solidaire now has three members in the Quebec National Assembly, all from Montreal.
[QS has stood up strongly for the interests of working people, for women, for peace, for indigenous rights, for immigrants, and for most progressive causes, including opposition to imperialist “globalization”. It has been pro-independence, but has allowed members to dissent on that issue, and even to run as QS candidates for the National Assembly. It has called for the convening of a constituent assembly to decide Quebec’s future, but up to now has said that whether or not to secede from Canada would be up to that Assembly to determine. Now it has decided to merge with Option nationale, a breakaway from the Parti québecois sharply critical of the PQ for not making independence an urgent enough issue.]
In early December 2017, Québec solidaire and Option nationale at their respective conventions both adopted the terms of an agreement in principle leading to their merger into a single organization. While "Québec solidaire" will remain the name of the merged organization, it is nevertheless Option nationale that has won the most with respect to the contentious elements of the two programs.
Moreover, as soon as the agreement in principle was made public by the QS and ON leaders in March 2017, l’Aut’Journal, organ of the left of the PQ, declared with satisfaction that the Option nationale leadership had "succeeded in significantly altering the direction of Québec solidaire".
Although there was internal debate in both organizations, the understanding, in reality, was to take it or leave it as it stood. Since their respective conventions calling to approve it took place within a few months of the next provincial election, the pressure was extremely heavy on the delegates to adopt the agreement. Leaders, particularly at QS, even intervened directly to exert pressure against any dissent that had arisen in the pre-convention period.
One of the most important consequences is that QS accepts that the constituent assembly it proposes is now "closed", that is, the result is predetermined to be in favor of an independent state, although a few months earlier, its own congress had expressly rejected such a proposal and confirmed the creation of an "open" constituent assembly as a fundamental part of its program.
As stated in the report of the last plenum of the CPC Central Committee, on the occasion of this merger with ON, QS seems to be making a significant qualitative change in its political line by making Québec's independence an objective in its own right, even the party’s main purpose.
Nationalism and reformism
That QS is in favour of Quebec independence is neither new nor surprising. This was already the case with the UFP previously. QS explains the reasons for this position as follows in its program:
"Québec's aspiration to be seen as something other than a province like the others has been constantly opposed by the federal government and the rest of Canada. Over the years, through constitutional battles, certain administrative agreements have indeed been concluded in limited areas. However, any further reform in depth of Canadian federalism has proved to be totally impossible.”
In its program, the Communist Party (PCC-PCQ, Communist Party of Canada-Communist Party of Québec) makes the exact same statement:
“The current constitution [of Canada] perpetuates the injustices and inequities of the old BNA Act. 'Provincial rights' were substituted for genuine national rights” [...] “At the heart of the crisis of confederation is the refusal to recognize the right of every nation to self-determination up to and including the right to separation; that is, the right to choose the form of sovereignty which the majority of the people of that nation desire.” […] “The sharpest expression of the constitutional crisis relates to Québec’s national status and the failure of the Canadian state to recognize Québec’s right to national self-determination, up to and including secession.”
From this observation, QS deduces that,
“Canadian federalism is fundamentally unreformable. It is impossible for Quebec to obtain all the powers it aspires to, not to mention those that would be necessary for the profound changes proposed by Québec Solidaire [...]"
and that consequently,
“[...] the entirety of its project for society can be realized only if Quebec has all of the full range of political, economic and cultural powers.”
Nevertheless, once independence has been acquired, QS considers that,
“for geographical as well as historical reasons, (Québec) should maintain and develop its special ties with Canada, the Acadian nation, the French-speaking Canadian minorities and the indigenous nations of North America.”
The PCC-PCQ, on the other hand, proposes for our part the development of a new constitution based on an equal and voluntary partnership between Quebec and English-speaking Canada, guaranteeing the full participation of Aboriginal peoples and protecting their ancestral national rights, including the right to self-goverment, etc. The PCC-PCQ proposes to make Canada a Confederal Republic of the different nations.
So we could sum up the two points of view as follows: while QS proposes independence first, then to negotiate an equal relationship with Canada and other nations, the PCC-PCQ proposes changing the constitution of the whole country to establish from the start an egalitarian relationship amongst the nations, Québec, Canada and the other nations.
Finally, while the approaches to achieve this are a little different, there is, on the other hand, no real difference in terms of the desired result with respect to the constitutional relationship to be established between nations, which, in the end, could in both cases resemble a kind of sovereignty-association. Moreover, at the time of Sam Walsh’s leadership in 1967, the PCQ had adopted the position that Quebec should have a constitution and become a national state to form a pact with Canada on an equal footing. (Samuel Walsh, "This Tendency to Confuse Notions of Sovereignty and Separation," Combat, April 11, 1969, vol. 4, page 2).
Nor is the difference that QS and PCC-PCQ would make a different diagnosis of the possibility of reforming Canadian federalism, since in both cases their proposals imply a radical break with it. (As the latest events in Catalonia demonstrate, the support of the working class across the country for the right to self-determination will be crucial in either case.)
The difference in substance is that QS and the PCC-PCQ do not represent quite the same interests: what is of concern to QS is above all the nation, and therefore it limits its action exclusively to Québec, while what is of concern to the PCC-PCQ is the entire multinational working class across Canada.
Of course, QS is progressive and adopts trade-union and popular demands. But, it does not really propose to abolish capitalism. Rather, it proposes to control it, to limit neo-liberal excesses, to "go beyond" it, as it claims, and to do this exclusively in Québec. Its approach is essentially reformist and nationalist.
The PCC-PCQ goes much further. It proposes the overthrow of the Canadian bourgeoisie and the seizure of power by the Canadian working class, the establishment of socialism. It aims to unify the working class of the country beyond national divisions, so that it will be able to accomplish its historic mission. Its approach is revolutionary and internationalist.
Initially, sovereignty in the service of the class struggle
Despite this essential difference, the PCC-PCQ has worked very hard for several decades to establish a united front with progressive reformist organizations to fight against capitalism. In particular, for almost twenty years now, the PCC-PCQ has put a lot into the creation of the Union of Progressive Forces (UFP) and then QS.
Particularly after the defeat of the sovereigntists in the 1995 referendum, the reformist left was eager to equip itself with its own political vehicle to free itself from the grip of the Parti québecois, to regain its own voice and to assert its progressive positions of social solidarity which, for decades under the banner of the PQ, had been downplayed so as to preserve the unity of the sovereigntist camp. Various symposia to this effect seeking to bring together the progressive sovereigntists were organized at the end of the 90s.
The PCC-PCQ was involved in this process but proposed instead to bring together the forces of the left despite differences of views on the national question. First the UFP and then QS were born precisely from the will of the political left of Quebec to emancipate itself finally from the guardianship of the PQ, particularly, though, by uniting various forces of the left despite their own differences about the resolution of the national question.
The UFP was created on the basis of the component groups’ electoral platforms, which themselves were based on the demands of the workers' and popular movements against the neoliberal policies of the government. The PCC-PCQ itself ran in elections with an election platform to the same effect. As for the national question, although putting forward the independence of Québec, the UFP admitted, first, that there was no consensus in its ranks and, secondly, that it conceived it solely as a useful tool for the realization of its program of progressive social reforms, and not as an end in itself. The same thing continued with QS as we saw earlier.
Option nationale leader Sol Zanetti (centre) with Québec solidaire co-spokespersons Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois (left) and Manon Massé (right). (2017 [Jacques Boissinot | The Canadian Press]
Now, priority to the nation
This was the main criticism that Option nationale addressed to QS. In a document of one of its political commissions, ON declared that,
"the struggle for independence should not be confused with the promotion of a particular divisive project for society".
Finally, by affirming the pragmatic approach of Option nationale, with respect to the economic model that QS advocates, it concluded that,
"our positions are less controversial and we privilege the change of political regime rather than the change of economic and social system."
In other words, ON proposed, more or less, that the social status quo be maintained in order to ensure, first and foremost, the unity of the independentists.
But the debate over what should take precedence, the class struggle or the national struggle, has continued despite everything from the very beginning within QS (and even before that within the UFP). The rapid and significant development of QS in particular, which went from a few dozen members in the UFP at first, to a few hundred then and several thousand today with QS, inevitably ensured the opportunity to continually put this debate back on the table.
The elements within the QS leadership that put the national struggle first, which they believe transcends all other struggles, at least for now, were all too happy to take advantage of this opportunity. This explains why the debate was continually brought back to conventions on the pretext of making an alliance with the other independentist forces, particularly with the PQ. Up to the last convention, delegates rejected this perspective on several occasions. But, on the eve of the next election, the merger with ON was the best pretext for a major coup to definitively impose the nationalist view as predominant. If ON was able to impose its views so easily during the negotiations with QS, it was because it could actually find a lot of support within the QS leadership.
The more nationalist tendency within QS, which often idealizes the 1976 first election of the Parti québecois to government, would like to replace the PQ at the head of the independence movement, because it considers it to have become insufficiently or falsely independentist, and, in a pinch, also too close to capitalist interests. Now QS freely declares it wants to unite the (progressive) pro-independence forces rather than the forces of the left.
Michel David of le Devoir, insightfully wrote:
“It would be illusory to think that tripartite negotiations can be relaunched before the October 1, 2018 election. The brutal rejection of the electoral alliance with the PQ by the last Congress of QS has caused too much bitterness and, in any case, both will be preoccupied with their electoral preparations. The acceptance of the principle of the 'closed' constituent assembly nevertheless removes the main obstacle to 'convergence', which the reconfiguration of the political chessboard in the aftermath of the election could greatly favor.”
This was confirmed by Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois in an interview with l’Aut’Journal:
“[...] if the convention decides in favor of a constituent assembly with an independence mandate, as stipulated in the agreement with Option nationale, it will bring us closer to the 'Roadmap' and we can return to the table of the OUI-Québec (Organizations United for Independence) with a renewed and clear position.”
The merger with ON is therefore an important qualitative change for QS. Although QS had for some time put forward more and more strongly its position in favor of independence, by proposing a so-called "open" constituent assembly, it allowed non-independentist forces to support it and even join its ranks on the basis of its left program. By closing the mandate of the constituent assembly, it has just slammed the door in their faces.
More than a step back, it is a negation of the conditions of its birth. It is no longer a question of uniting the left, but the independentists, a mission assumed by the PQ. On the other hand, it must be recalled that ON was not really a party of the left, something it itself denied, but a breakaway from the PQ on the basis of a more radical independentism.
The national struggle by its nature leads objectively to a collaboration, indeed an alliance, between those that the class struggle puts in antagonistic opposition. In fact, the latter contradiction between the working class and the capitalist class is the most fundamental of our world today.
Of course, QS remains a left-wing and progressive organization. But the merger with ON opens the door to a possible nationalist degeneration. The future will tell.
The PCC-PCQ recommended that delegates at the QS convention reject the agreement in principle and instead return to the bargaining table. There would have been no merger, but it would still have been possible to propose an electoral agreement to ON on the basis of a progressive joint program clearly highlighting measures to support the various social struggles against austerity, degradation of the environment, exploitation and oppression of all kinds rather than using the pretext of a merger to allow the QS leadership to do an about-face not only on its founding principles, but on the mandate that it had made a commitment to respect in the course of various conventions.
Pierre Fontaine is the leader of the PARTI COMMUNISTE DU QUÉBEC, a distinct entity within the COMMUNIST PARTY OF CANADA.
Frederick Engels & Karl Marx; front: Marx daughters Laura, Eleanor and Jenny, before June 1864. Reproduced from a daguerreotype. [Public Domain]
Married to Laura Marx in 1868, Cuban-born French and Creole socialist Paul Lafargue reminisces about his father-in-law. Originally written in 1890.
(Karl Marx and his wife Jenny had three children who lived to reach adulthood – daughters Jenny, Laura and Eleanor. Paul Lafargue (1842-1911), who came to London in 1865 after being banned from all French universities for student activism, married Laura Marx there in 1868 and, back in France after 1882, was one of the founders of French Socialism (which was much later to split into the Communist and Socialist parties). Lafargue served a term in the French Chamber of Deputies and a couple of brief terms in jail as a political prisoner. His writings include The Right To Be Lazy (La droit à la paresse, completed in prison in 1883), on the importance of reduced hours of work. The nineteenth century had a Romantic image of what a “genius” should be like, but probably Lafargue did not have to exaggerate very much to make his account of Marx fit. What we print here is excerpted from his longer essay on Marx, written in 1890, as republished in Reminiscences of Marx and Engels (Moscow, no date), pages 71-74.)
I met Karl Marx for the first time in February 1865. The First International had been founded on September 28, 1864 at a meeting in Saint Martin’s Hall, London, and I went to London from Paris to give Marx news of the development of the young organization there. M. Tolain, now a senator in the bourgeois republic, gave me a letter of introduction.
I was then 24 years old. As long as I live I shall remember the impression that first visit made on me. Marx was not well at the time. He was working on the first book of Capital, which was not published until two years later, in 1867. He feared he would not be able to finish his work and was therefore glad of visits from young people. “I must train men to continue communist propaganda after me,” he used to say.
Karl Marx was one of the rare men who could be leaders in science and public life at the same time: these two aspects were so closely united in him that one can understand him only by taking into account both the scholar and the socialist fighter.
Marx held the view that science must be pursued for itself, irrespective of the eventual results of research, but at the same time that a scientist could only debase himself by giving up active participation in public life or shutting himself up in his study or laboratory like a maggot in cheese and holding aloof from the life and political struggle of his contemporaries.
Paul Lafargue in 1871. [Public Domain]
“Science must not be a selfish pleasure,” he used to say. “Those who have the good fortune to be able to devote themselves to scientific pursuits must be the first to place their knowledge at the service of humanity.” One of his favourite sayings was: “Work for humanity.”
Although Marx sympathized profoundly with the sufferings of the working classes, it was not sentimental considerations but the study of history and political economy that led him to communist views. He maintained that any unbiased man, free from the influence of private interests and not blinded by class prejudices, must necessarily come to the same conclusions.
Yet while studying the economic and political development of human society without any preconceived opinion, Marx wrote with no other intention than to propagate the results of his research and with a determined will to provide a scientific basis for the socialist movement, which had so far been lost in the clouds of utopianism. He gave publicity to his views only to promote the triumph of the working class, whose historic mission is to establish communism as soon as it has achieved political and economic leadership of society. [...]
Marx did not confine his activity to the country he was born in. “I am a citizen of the world,” he used to say; “I am active wherever I am.” And in fact, no matter what country events and political persecution drove him to – France, Belgium, England – he took a prominent part in the revolutionary movements which developed there.
However, it was not the untiring an incomparable socialist agitator but rather the scientist that I first saw in his study in Maitland Park Road. That study was the centre to which Party comrades came from all parts of the civilized world to find out the opinion of the master of socialist thought. One must know that historic room before one can penetrate into the intimacy of Marx’s spiritual life.
It was on the first floor, flooded by light from a broad window that looked out on to the park. Opposite the window and on either side of the fireplace the walls were lined with bookcases filled with books and stacked up to the ceiling with newspapers and manuscripts. Opposite the fireplace on one side of the window were two tables piled up with papers, books and newspapers; in the middle of the room, well in the light, stood a small, plain desk (three foot by two) and a wooden armchair; between the armchair and the bookcase, opposite the window, was a leather sofa on which Marx used to lie down for a rest from time to time. On the mantelpiece were more books, cigars, matches, tobacco boxes, paperweights and photographs of Marx’s daughters and wife, Wilhelm Wolff and Frederick Engels.
Marx was a heavy smoker. “Capital,” he said to me once, “will not even pay for the cigars I smoked writing it.” But he was still heavier on matches. He so often forgot his pipe or cigar that he emptied an incredible number of boxes of matches in a short time to relight them.
Jenny Laura Marx. (n.d.) [Public Domain]
He never allowed anybody to put his books or papers in order – or rather in disorder. The disorder in which they lay was only apparent, everything was really in its intended place so that it was easy for him to lay his hand on the book or notebook he needed. Even during conversations he often paused to show in the book a quotation or figure he had just mentioned. He and his study were one: the books and papers in it were as much under his control as his own limbs.
Marx had no use for formal symmetry in the arrangement of his books: volumes of different sizes and pamphlets stood next to one another. He arranged them according to their contents, not their size. Books were tools for his mind, not articles of luxury. “They are my slaves and they must serve me as I will,” he used to say. He paid no heed to size or binding, quality of paper or type; he would turn down the corners of the pages, make pencil marks in the margin and underline whole lines. He never wrote on books, but sometimes he could not refrain from an exclamation or question mark when the author went too far. His system of underlining made it easy for him to find any passage he needed in any book. He had the habit of going through his notebooks and reading the passages underlined in the books after intervals of many years in order to keep them fresh in his memory. He had an extraordinarily reliable memory which he had cultivated from his youth according to Hegel’s advice by learning by heart verse in a foreign language he did not know.
He knew Heine and Goethe by heart and often quoted them in his conversations; he was an assiduous reader of poets in all European languages. Every year he read Aschylus in the Greek original. He considered him and Shakespeare as the greatest dramatic geniuses humanity ever gave birth to. His respect for Shakespeare was boundless: he made a detailed study of his works and knew even the least important of his characters. His whole family had a real cult for the great English dramatist; his three daughters knew many of his works by heart. When after 1848 he wanted to perfect his knowledge of English, which he could already read, he sought out and classified all Shakespeare’s original expressions. He did the same with part of the polemical works of William Cobbett, of whom he had a high opinion. Dante and Robert Burns ranked among his favourite poets and he would listen with great pleasure to his daughters reciting or singing the Scottish poet’s satires or ballads.
Paul Lafargue was born in Cuba to French and Creole parents and married Marx's second daughter, Laura.
