This World is Going to Hell...How to Stop It

That hoary old cliché, “the world is going to hell in a handbasket”, seems truer every day. Wake up this morning and you can read about the ongoing worst environmental disaster in human history, a gushing torrent of crude oil destroying not only one of the world’s most diverse wildlife preserves, but the economy and way of life for millions of Gulf state residents. You can read about Sergeant James Patrick Macneil, 28, the latest Canadian soldier to die in our pointless imperial war in Afghanistan. Closer to home, we see that the federal government is getting its money’s worth out of the $1 billion it squandered on security for the G20 summit in Toronto. Pepper spray, LRAD sonic weaponry, plastic bullets, and now, we get word that they will indeed be breaking out the water cannons. Yes, free speech is alive and well in the Great White North, as you can tell by the ominous police presence that surrounds any hint of spontaneity or protest. But it’s not just here that speaking out about injustice can get you tossed in a jail cell. The Supreme Court of the United States just voted 6-3 to severely restrict First Amendment rights by declaring that verbal support for non-violent, lawful activity is equivalent to giving material aid to terrorists. Jimmy Carter better be careful the next time he monitors elections in Lebanon. Finally, I just looked up at the TV to see that Canada has placed additional sanctions on Iran, the pariah state that absorbs all the collective wrath of the wealthiest nations on earth on behalf of oil companies and the military-industrial complex. I’ve said what I wanted to say about the ongoing propaganda campaign to depict this weak nation - which has fully complied with its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, unlike other countries which refused to even sign it - as some kind of sinister threat to world peace. Unfortunately, the Money Boyz control the flow of information and they are fixated on regime change in Iran. Which, of course, has nothing to do with oil.


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!

Keith Jones and the Socialist Alternative

The dysfunctional state of Canadian politics may be a regular topic of discussion among the nation’s leading news outlets, but the system itself is rarely challenged. While the New Democratic Party is derided by conservative elites as “socialist”, its actual policies leave much to be desired among Canadian progressives (to note but a few examples: dropping all serious opposition to the war in Afghanistan, propping up the Harper government, rebranding itself as a “business-friendly” party dedicated to balancing budgets while the vast legions of unemployed continue to suffer).

The need for a challenge to political business as usual has rarely been more urgent. While Kingston has been insulated to some degree from the ravages of the Great Recession due to its large public sector workforce, the city has nevertheless suffered from the economic downturn. The local unemployment rate rose from 5.1% in February 2009 to 5.5% in February 2010, according to Statistics Canada. Well over 18,000 people live below the official poverty line, based on 2001 census numbers (the most recent data available for this area). And with one of the lowest vacancy rates in the country, affordable housing has become increasingly hard to find.

But politically speaking, Kingston remains a Liberal stronghold, represented by Speaker of the House Peter Milliken federally and MPP John Gerretsen provincially. Voters looking for left alternatives are effectively tied to the NDP and the Green Party. More radical parties, such as the Communist Party of Canada, have abandoned Kingston, directing their supporters to vote either Liberal or NDP depending on the comparative strength of the Progressive Conservatives. The radical left, in effect, barely registers on the electoral radar, whether in Kingston or nationwide.

Hoping to fill that void is the Socialist Equality Party. The SEP is a Trotskyist party affiliated with the International Committee of the Fourth International. While originating in the United States, the party aims to create an independent working class political movement with an international perspective, based on the Marxian principle that “the workers have no country.”

The SEP’s youth wing, International Students for Social Equality, has a Queen’s chapter organized by history student Graham Beverley. On Wednesday, March 31, the ISSE invited Keith Jones, national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (Canada), to speak at Mackintosh-Corry Hall.

Jones is a regular writer for the World Socialist Web Site, the SEP’s primary means for communicating its ideas. A teacher for many years, Jones writes on Canadian and international issues for the WSWS, which analyzes world news from a Trotskyist perspective (for the uninitiated: Leon Trotsky was a leading figure in the Russian Revolution who was exiled from the USSR and eventually killed on Stalin’s orders. He and Stalin engaged in a power struggle after Lenin’s death partly based on differing ideas: Stalin’s “socialism in one country” vs. Trotsky’s “permanent revolution”. Trotskyists are staunch anti-Stalinists who harshly criticize the former USSR as led by a counterrevolutionary bureaucracy).

In sharp contrast to what it derides as the “reformist” tendencies of social democratic parties like the NDP, the British Labour Party or the German Social Democrats, the SEP follows a sharply anti-capitalist line. Their website explains:

The Socialist Equality Party is a political party of and for the working class. The SEP seeks not to reform capitalism, but to create a socialist, democratic and egalitarian society through the establishment of a workers’ government and the revolutionary transformation of the world economy. We seek to unify workers in the United States and internationally in the common struggle for socialism—that is, for equality and the rational and democratic utilization of the wealth of the planet.

Speaking at Queen’s to a small audience of half a dozen committed socialists (and one or two curious newbies), Jones presented a harrowing view of the Harper government rooted heavily in class analysis. He began:

It is the contention of the Socialist Equality Party, that this government both represents a continuation, in a certain sense, a natural evolution from the right-wing policies that were carried out by the Liberal governments of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, but also that the Harper Conservative government represents something new…a further lurch to the right…and has carried out a series of significant attacks on democratic rights.

The Harper Conservatives have co-opted an aggressive style of partisan politics from U.S. Republicans (such as referring to NDP leader Jack Layton as “Taliban Jack”). In a climate of deepening inequality, Jones argued that Canada’s ruling elites have cultivated such reactionary appeals as a means of building a social base for their anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian agenda.

Recalling the 1993 federal election, Jones noted that the Liberals ran on a platform that included three main points:

1. Overturning the conservative policy of focusing on the deficit at the expense of jobs;
2. Eliminating the GST, and
3. Getting Canada out of NAFTA.

On this side of history, those pledges now look ridiculous, since the Liberals quickly used their electoral victory to begin dismantling the welfare state. Unemployment Insurance was reduced to Employment Insurance; today, less than half of workers are entitled to it. The haemorrhaging of Canada’s manufacturing sector also began under the Liberals.

The Chrétien government justified massive cuts to social spending by citing a supposed deficit crisis, with the same pattern playing out nationwide. In Ontario, the Conservative government of Mike Harris sharply reduced government spending; Harris initiated a draconian program of spending cuts, taxes on unions, and slashing welfare rates by 21% while cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy. In Quebec, Lucien Bouchard’s Bloc Quebecois carried out similar cuts with the collaboration of the trade unions.

While the SEP is committed to working with the trade unions, the party has long criticized the unions’ bureaucratic leadership, which it sees as having interests antithetical to those of the workers they claim to represent. In a recent example, the Canadian Auto Workers leadership collaborated with General Motors and the Canadian and U.S. governments to force its members to accept deep wage and benefit cuts.

Jones characterized government actions from 1995-2000 as a massive reversal of the social benefits won by workers in the years after World War II, when widespread anti-capitalist sentiment – bolstered by the traumatic experience of depression and war – compelled even Liberal prime minister Mackenzie King to run under the slogan “For a New Social Order”. In the immediate postwar era, a worldwide offensive of the working class produced universal healthcare for Canadians, as well as the American Civil Rights Act and Great Society programs. Protests against the war in Vietnam created a thriving counterculture that sufficiently unnerved the ruling classes to result in a reactionary backlash at the end of the 20^th century in the form of conservative rulers Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

By the end of the 1990s, the Liberals’ policies had borne the fruit of a balanced budget, but the tax system had been radically redesigned to serve the interests of the wealthy. Canadian fiscal policy now corresponds with Lenin’s observation that the state is “an apparatus for the domination of one class over another.”

The effects are visible in Harper’s recent budget and the austerity programs currently being pushed by governments worldwide. In Ontario, Premier Dalton McGuinty has introduced the harmonized sales tax, heavily favoured by big business because it transfers the tax burden from businesses to consumers. Kingston MPP and Environment Minister John Gerretsen supported the HST, but managed to conveniently miss the actual vote.

The Harper government has also built on the Chrétien-Martin legacy by increasing military spending. In 1999 Canada played a leading role in NATO’s campaign in Yugoslavia, and it was the Chrétien government that initiated Canada’s involvement in the Afghan War. While it did not officially sign on to the Iraq War, the Liberal government’s lack of support was characterized by Jones as an eleventh-hour decision finalized only when it became clear France and Germany would not support the invasion. The Chrétien government recognized that Canada’s global position might be jeopardized by flagrant U.S. unilateralism. Yet Canada played a larger role than many official members of the “coalition of the willing”; only two weeks prior to the invasion, Canadian military planners helped design the “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign. Jones stated:

In effect, what is being said here is that if the Canadian ruling elite is going to be able to advance its interests on the world stage, it has to be an active participant in the division and redivision of the world, and certainly has to align its foreign policy even more closely with that of the United States.

It was a Liberal government that first attacked democratic rights by overturning key civil liberties in the heat of post-9/11 hysteria. Jones was careful not to overlook the role of current Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, a supposed human rights expert who supported the Iraq War and helped provide the intellectual framework to justify torture in his book The Lesser Evil.

Economically, the Harper government has continued Liberal tax cuts that transfer wealth to the already wealthy, as well as reducing the state’s fiscal capacity in order to erode social programs and thwart their further expansion. Harper has been a huge proponent of the discredited policy of deregulation; when the government was obliged to hire new meat inspectors for Canadian exports to the United States, Harper advocated “self-inspection” by companies. Deregulation, Jones noted, is intimately tied up with the government’s unhelpful attitude towards the tar sands and global warming.

Current events have followed a similar pattern in all capitalist countries. There has been a vast increase in social inequality, most marked in the United States, but by any measure an international phenomenon. In the fall of 2009, Western governments put up hundreds of billions of dollars to back up the same financial aristocracy that had mercilessly pushed an anti-working class agenda over the last few decades in the name of efficiency. Jones went on to say:

Recent months have proven to be extremely profitable for Canada’s banks, as it has banks in the United States, and of course these same banks are resisting tooth and nail any suggestion – not that they need to worry about it from the Harper government…that there should be increases in taxes because the banking system worldwide has benefited from state support.

The financial system has been held together; at one point there was serious concern it was going to completely collapse. It’s been held together by basically socializing the debt, by transforming the debt of these large financial institutions and making them into government debt. And now of course, what we’re seeing is all over the world, big business is demanding, and governments are delivering, massive budget cuts on the grounds that these debts are unsustainable. They have to be repaid, and who has to repay them? They’re going to have to be repaid by working people, in the form of cuts to social programs and social services, university tuition hikes, other fee hikes, and this is now beginning.

Jones cited austerity measures announced in recent weeks by the federal Conservative government, the Ontario government and the Quebec government, which he says will lead to a change in class relations at least as significant as those in 1995, as big business takes the wrecking ball towards whatever remains of the welfare state.

For example, The Globe and Mail – disparaged by Jones as the voice of Bay Street – has lately been talking about the “unsustainability” of Medicare. He summarized their view as, “we’ve got all these people that are getting old, we’ve got these massive debts, what the hell are we going to do? We need to find new sources of funding for health care.” The reality, he said, is that Canadian elites intend to use the crisis created in the health care system by government budget cuts to build up a popular constituency for the dismantling of Medicare and the promotion of private health care.

“There are two objectives behind this,” said Jones. “First, they want to transfer the burden of health care back onto the individual. And secondly, health care is a massive business, and they want all obstacles and impediments to making profit off of this business…removed.”

Such open class war, Jones declared, would provoke massive resistance by working people – resistance that must be guided by socialist principles.

Jones ended his lecture with a discussion of the political crisis of November/December 2008. He argued that while Harper succeeded in proroguing Parliament with the support of the Canadian elite, the programme of the potential Liberal-NDP coalition government would have been equally right-wing: fiscal responsibility as primary concern, implementing Harper’s corporate tax cuts, and staying in the Afghan War until 2011. Of course, like Harper, the Dion-led government would have taken “some” action to stimulate the economy – mainly to ward off social unrest and keep Canada competitive with other countries.

In rock ‘n’ roll terms: meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Since the programme of the coalition government was so similar to Harper’s, why did Canadian elites so vehemently oppose it?

“The reason that they opposed it was, quite frankly, because they didn’t think it was necessary under these conditions,” said Jones. “Certainly they have had a situation where the NDP has had a share of power – not federally, but in various provinces – and while the NDP hasn’t necessarily done everything that big business has wanted, it certainly has shown itself to be a party that is devoted to the capitalist order in Canada and will carry out right-wing attacks against the working class, impose austerity measures and so forth. But big business didn’t want to see a government of this particular composition at this time, and it was quite prepared to see democratic rights – basic parliamentary norms – set aside to prevent it from coming to power.”

Jones posed the question to his audience: if elites will happily disregard democratic norms to serve their own interests, as in this case, what would they do in the face of a real challenge by the working class? The Liberals, the NDP and the trade unions were all willing to join in a right-wing programme and played possum after Harper shut down Parliament. These groups, Jones argued, are dedicated to preserving the existing order and serve as a “safety valve” for the bourgeoisie.

Jones pointed to the memoirs of NDP national campaign director Brian Topp, which detailed Liberal-NDP coalition negotiations in which the first priority was picking a cabinet, with policy a distant second. The NDP has been pushing for a coalition since 2004, and Layton continued to plead for one long after Ignatieff made it clear he was not interested. While the NDP feared an election, they also wanted to show big business that it had nothing to fear from an NDP government. Since September 2009, the NDP has supported the Conservatives after gaining minor concessions to unemployment benefits.

Jones urged students to help the working class break free from their nominal leadership, the NDP and the trade unions, which have become completely integrated into the capitalist establishment. Canadian youth, he stressed, were one of the primary social groups that could assist the working class in advancing a truly socialist programme.

The discussion period that followed weighed realistic strategies for advancing a socialist agenda in Canada. Asked what he thought of the Communist Party of Canada, Jones dismissed it as defending the legacy of Stalinism. While the CPC has admitted to certain mistakes by the Soviet Union and the CPC, it still holds that the political line of the Soviet leadership was basically correct. Historically, the CPC justified Stalinist opposition to the proletarian internationalism that was the hallmark of Leon Trotsky (and lately, the SEP). It promotes Canadian sovereignty from American imperialism, an overly nationalist perspective in the view of the internationally-minded Socialist Equality Party. The CPC supported the NDP-Liberal coalition and, according to Jones, appeared overly enthused by the election of Wall Street puppet Barack Obama. Finally, it has mainly devoted its energy to pressuring existing political parties (and therefore, in Marxist parlance, advocating a “reformist” stance”).

To borrow another phrase from Lenin, what is to be done? Over the past few decades, social democratic parties have steadily dismantled the very social programs they claimed showed that capitalism could be reformed. For Jones, the key task is to develop an independent, non-reformist political formulation to lead the working class.

The deepening of geopolitical conflict in the midst of the economic crisis, Jones predicted, would have a radicalizing effect. Unions in 2010 have a very different perspective than unions in the 1970s, let alone the more militant 1930s. Although there has been a “huge degeneration” in workers’ class consciousness, the basic idea of unions – that the rights of the working class can best be defended through collective bargaining – remains as viable as ever. But actual class struggle will always be an uphill battle; witness the widespread derision that DriveTest employees (represented by the United Steelworkers) faced when they went on strike last year.

Revolutionary socialists, it seems, must work outside existing state structures in order to achieve their desired end: a society based not on the pursuit of profit but on serving human needs.