It’s bad enough to read all this bad news. But what’s far, far worse is watching the media trot out, day after day, the same people who are responsible for these disasters and injustices, who profit from them, who keep them going, to defend the actions of the elite, block any positive changes, and shower blame on the victims of their criminal policies. Of course, it’s hard to beat the American media elite for sheer tone deafness. Jabba the Hutt lashed out at the poor again on his radio show the other day, literally ridiculing children who go hungry and depend on school lunches to obtain sufficient nutrients. Fat man Rush, who likely hasn’t seen his toes since his last Vietnam deferment, suggested they could just look in the fridge for ding-dongs, and if not, there's always the dumpster. There is literally no difference, save a couple centuries, between his despicable "advice" and Marie Antoninette suggesting that the solution for starving French peasants is to “let them eat cake.”
Then there is the ever-more extreme backwaters of the American far right, which gets nuttier by the day to the corporate media’s delight. Sharron Angle brought out an old Republican standby – denigrating the poor and unemployed as “deadbeats” determined to stay on welfare. The meme was echoed by Fox News talking heads, who rubbed salt in the wounds of the 1.2 million Americans whose unemployment benefits just ran out by declaring that they spend most of the money on junk food, beer, cable TV and comic books anyway. Also, Tea Party favourite Dr. Rand Paul insisted that the unemployed are just afraid to get their hands dirty and need to start doing lousy jobs, but that didn’t stop him from defending high pay for medical practitioners. Doctors, he declared, “deserve to earn a comfortable living.” As Digby declared, isn’t it funny how those advocating “tough love” austerity policies are never in danger of being affected either way?
I despair for humanity. The only real solution for the problems that plague the world today, from foreign wars to ecological disaster to extreme inequality, is socialism, the democratic control of society’s resources and the means of production on behalf of the working class. But such a proposal is unthinkable to the corporate overlords that control our society and the information that reaches the masses. They actively fight it through their politicians and their media, but there’s only so much they can do to control an enraged population faced with long-term unemployment and governments they correctly feel do not represent them. More dangerous is when they take that legitimate rage and deploy it against powerless targets like unions, the poor and minorities, through the help of bought-and-paid for demagogues like Glenn Beck or whoever his Canadian equivalent will be on the just-announced Sun TV News Channel. And the scariest part is that it seems to work.
No matter how bad things get, the broad masses appear equally unable to imagine alternatives to the status quo, despite their much-hyped exasperation with it. Elections across the world have repeatedly returned to power the same bourgeois political parties, all with the same deranged, nonsensical neo-Hooverist prescriptions for the global economy: austerity, cutting spending, and reining in the deficit, because what matters is continued profits for banks, not the devastation which prolonged unemployment continues to wreak on working people. And yet the people just keep voting them back in. Britain elects Conservative David Cameron. Germany throws in its lot with Angela Merkel and the free market-worshipping Free Democratic Party. No matter how much bad press Stephen Harper gets, Canadians remain enslaved to the Conservative-Liberal big business duopoly while the NDP runs from any thoughts of socialism. American primary voters backed corporate whores like Blue Dog “Democrat” Blanche Lincoln (D-AK), the senator from Wal-Mart, simply because Obama endorsed her. They also rejected progressive voices like Marcy Winograd in California. It seems there’s only one direction for working-class politics in America to go – further and further right.
Part of the problem is that there is no strong, organized working class movement in any of these countries that can find representation in government. Traditional social-democratic parties are a joke, having been completely enslaved to neoliberal dogma years ago. All will embrace the austerity policies that make the working class pay for the banksters’ crimes (see: France’s Socialist Party, the British Labour Party). The decades-long demonization of Marxist ideas during the Cold War has ensured that the most powerful theoretical tool for understanding the current economic crisis goes ignored by the masses that would most benefit from that knowledge.
The Canadian citizen who wishes to take a Marxist approach to the political struggle has a range of choices, none of them all that appealing. The Communist Party of Canada is the second-oldest political party in the country after the Liberals, yet its historical associations with Stalinism have left it on the political fringe. The party membership has aged to the point where it cannot represent an active, youthful political movement. As good as the People’s Voice newspaper is, its writers retain a 1930s view of the working class and revel in archaic terminology. Whatever the party’s policies, its unwillingness to confront the legacy of Stalinism or adopt the internationalist approach of Leon Trotsky means it will remain glued to the Soviet past. To take a coldly realistic view of the situation, it is highly unlikely that any party with the word “Communist” in its name will be able to avoid the totalitarian connotations of historical Communist parties led by Stalin and Mao, with their gross crimes against humanity. That fact also condemns the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist), which ran out of steam around the time it fixated on Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha as its anti-revisionist model.
The Socialist Equality Party (Canada), which I’ve written about before, seems to have by far the best platform of any leftist party. Its policies are Trotskyist in nature and internationalist in scope, which in my mind points the way forward for the proletariat: the unity of workers across borders against their exploiters in the parasitic corporate-financial class. Unfortunately, my early enthusiasm for the SEP has waned somewhat after discovering how little infrastructure the party has in Canada – in my experience, basically none. The SEP’s Canadian office does not even have a phone number or e-mail address, and there’s little realistic hope for a party with such a laughable lack of organization. Short of spreading the word through social media and registering the SEP as an official political party, it remains very much a movement in theory only.
That leaves the New Democratic Party. I was made aware via Facebook that there is in fact an NDP Socialist Caucus. I completely agree with the Caucus’ policies and their general direction, i.e. the only way the NDP can survive as a relevant party is by moving to the left. Canada already has a centre-left bourgeois party: the Liberals. The NDP need to reclaim the ideological high ground by drawing on their roots with Tommy Douglas and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, which declared its intention to work until capitalism was eradicated. While the NDP leadership is considerably to the right of its rank and file, its existence as a major political party with representatives in Parliament gives it a clout that no other Canadian party to the left of the Liberals can boast. For now, with the SEP little more than a publishing organization, there seems to be little alternative to pushing for the adoption of socialist principles within the NDP. Ontario party leader Andrea Horwath has indicated her openness to this approach, suggesting an NDP where members need not “check their socialism at the door.”
The political element is an important part of the class struggle, but any real progress is years away and will not affect the underlying dynamic of Canadian politics today, nor the subservience of our politicians to the interests of transnational capital. For the moment, the only course of action is mass organization, demonstrating on the streets in defiance of our government’s corporatist polices. I call for this tactic regularly, but too often it remains purely abstract and theoretical, with no real-world lynchpin.
Well, the opportunity arrives this weekend as the G20 congregates in Toronto. The Harper government’s monstrous waste of $1 billion for security, not to mention the overall tone of media reports promoting new weapons the police seem keen to use, indicate that the state is fully prepared to use violence as a means of crushing dissent. That fact in itself is not surprising, but the media’s approach suggests they will pin any blame on protesters. The use of police provocateurs to justify a crackdown is not out of the question. The decisive factor is, will the citizenry allow itself to be intimidated? Or will it make its presence and concerns known to a nationwide, nay, worldwide audience? Will it refuse to submit to the bludgeoning force of the modern police state?
I’ll be in Toronto this weekend to answer in the affirmative. So should you. Make your voice heard!
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