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Focus on Socialism
The Political Journal of Canadians for Peace and Socialism
State, Government and the Working Class
By Don Currie: Chair � Canadians for Peace and Socialism
August 18, 2008
The Global Economic Crisis of Capitalism � Here and Now!
The economic crisis gripping the USA has now spread to all capitalist countries from the fully developed to the least economically developed. A convergence of recent crisis phenomena superimposed on the general crisis of imperialism is resulting in global economic disorder, instability and eruption of military confrontations. None of this volatility is responding in the same manner as previous imperialist economic upheaval to control mechanisms imposed by NATO, the IMF, and the WTO, the EU or decisions taken at recent G8 meetings. The �geniuses of high finance� cannot even agree on a control strategy except one; to protect the profit system by whatever means necessary at the expense of working people.
The current crisis is at an early stage of its development and has neither reached a trough nor does it show any sign of recovery. The crisis phenomena are similar for all leading capitalist states, differing only in the degree of severity. Neo-liberal policies adopted in past decades, and now fully maturing, are causing havoc in the global economy, explaining some of the current instability and chaos. Others more recent attest to the anarchic state of capitalism in the modern era. The major phenomena include but are not limited to:
1. Escalating costs of US-NATO imperialist and proxy wars of aggression and occupation that burden states with uncontrolled and rising arms expenditures on top of massive arms budgets allocated to maintain weapons systems, foreign military bases and large standing armies.
2. High monopoly energy prices resulting in fluctuating and unpredictable costs to key economic sectors namely manufacturing, agriculture, transportation, and utilities, the latter both private and public.
3. A world wide failure of the capitalist credit system resulting in bank failures and investor losses arising from the mortgage debt crisis in the USA.
4. Emergency interventions by all leading capitalist states to prop up the value of paper assets of banks and near banks in an effort to recover losses of investors and speculator classes through the forced sale of millions of repossessed workers� homes at depressed prices.
5. Government fiscal and monetary policy dictated by finance capital and parasitic investor classes that reduce taxes on corporate, usury and speculative income, and increases taxes on wage earners and small property owners.
6. Government approval, support and legislation permitting the plunder by finance capital of workers� private and public pension funds that transfer them to corporate coffers to finance corporate takeovers and to prop up sagging stock markets thereby endangering retirement incomes of millions working families.
7. Government privatization of state capitalist functions resulting in a loss of public oversight and control of health, education, welfare, food, infrastructure, transportation and vital research and development programs benefiting the people.
8. Government sale of state assets and property to enrich private investors and speculators artificially inflating the value of corporate real estate and increasing rental and purchasing cost to small business and price rises of residential property for workers.
9. Profiteering by corporate investors, stock traders and marketers capitalizing on the demand for industrial agricultural products for energy inflating worldwide food prices, causing hunger and starvation among the poor.
10. Shifting the costs of the economic crisis from corporate profits to employed workers by implementing wage freezes, roll backs and wage increases below the rate of inflation, intensification of labour and off loading rising costs of social programs; health, education, child care and pensions, from the state to wage earners and by increased taxes on income.
11. A drop in purchasing power in the hands of working people accompanied with growing unemployment in key sectors of the economy especially manufacturing and permanent underemployment in the remainder.
The Fault Lines of Imperialism Stressed � Class Struggle Intensifies
All of these intersecting economic and political crisis factors severely impact working people. They occur in the midst of an accelerating cannibalistic process of finance capital monopoly mergers, consolidations, takeovers and the wholesale sell off of state assets resulting in work force �rationalization�, the export of jobs to lower wage markets, the ruination of medium and small companies and disruption and destruction of home markets.
The crisis exposes the advanced stage to which the merger of the state and monopoly capital has progressed and how its instruments and functions are now dedicated exclusively to the interests of finance capital. This occurs with the full support and collusion of elected officials without regard to its impact on society as a whole. The chasm between the ruling elites and the masses of working people has never been so wide and unbridgeable as it is today.
These crisis phenomena have stressed the fault lines of the imperialist economic system to the maximum. Relief can only come as a result of a radical readjustment of economic and political power relationships in all countries affected. Respite from the deepening crisis will come at the expense of either the vital interests of the working masses or that of the ruling capitalist classes. The status quo is not an option. That is the objective reality at the moment. The outcome is being decided by bitter class struggles that are breaking out on all continents and in all exploitative countries.
Politically, finance capital is turning to right wing corporate style governance in all leading capitalist states as the preferred option of class rule and systematically ousting liberal democratic regimes where possible. The inter-capitalist struggles, agitate all upper classes with a direct stake in the system, and politically alienate the lower middle classes. It places severe economic pressure and hardship on workers who increasingly are victims, rather than beneficiaries of political change.
The slogan, �for real change� has a hollow ring since it is advanced by all parties of big business and addressed to its base support and not working people.
This process has been unfolding for some time and will continue in more acute political forms political, military and economic crisis for the foreseeable future. This intensifying process poses the need for a complete reappraisal by the left, and in the first place by the Communists, as to where the political process is leading, what special responsibilities revolutionary Marxist Leninist forces have at this juncture and the tactics required to mount counter attacks as the fault lines in imperialism are exposed and stressed.
Let�s first consider some obvious factors.
Capitalists Are Not United � US Imperialism�s Struggle for Dominance
The present crisis is affecting all classes including the capitalist classes. Capitalists are far from united on which strategy to adopt to save their system from the effects of the current global economic and political instability. Power relationships occurring within and among the leading imperialist states and the rest of the capitalist world are changing and will not return to the order they occupied prior to the present crisis.
Does that mean that the worldwide system of capitalism is about to collapse? No it doesn�t. Neither can it be said definitively that it won�t. What can, and should be said, is that this extreme instability will create and expose points of weakness in the system to be exploited. The advanced forces of the left and the organized working class are more urgently called upon to study those weaknesses and fault lines, consider how to mount offensive struggles and advance new tactics, alliances and organizational structures in their own vital interests. These points should form the basis and focus of discussion within the journals, meetings and campaigns of the Canadian left.
The current crisis is resulting in realignments of imperialist power, the outcome of a struggle now underway among the largest global monopolies for maximum profit. This process of realignment manifests itself in wars for control of natural resource bases, destruction of home and foreign markets and increased domination of global stock markets over national economies. Weakened competitors are destroyed, market share is reapportioned and medium and small businesses are eliminated. We read about it everyday in the capitalist press.
The inability of US imperialism with its vast military and economic power to unilaterally re-order the world in its own strategic interests, as it planned to do when President Bush enunciated the New American Century, is under review by the American establishment. The Bush Doctrine is a fiasco and the November election is about replacing a failed and discredited US policy while retaining its principal strategic goals.
US imperialism is marshalling all of its economic and military power to retain its dominance within the system as it attempts to ride out the current crisis by employing any and all means necessary including fomenting new wars of aggression. Regardless of the outcome of the US November 2008 Presidential elections the aforementioned reality may be altered but not changed in its fundamentals. Not a single US Presidential hopeful, with the exception of Kucinich, repudiated unequivocally the military planning now underway at the highest levels of US power for a combined US-Israeli attack on Iran and a possible expansion of the war into parts of Pakistan. Hillary Clinton actually called for Iran to be obliterated. That fact should be a sober reminder that US imperialism operates according to objective laws and not the subjective utterances of its ambitious political aspirants.
Millions Make the Difference - The Theory of the Decisiveness of Mass Movements and Alliances in Contemporary Struggles
The theory of mass movements determining the outcome of major confrontations with big capital is objectively based and critical to an understanding of how the working class advances to higher levels of struggle. The experience gained by millions engaged in mass struggle, often in a contradictory and spontaneous way, usually as a response to war and economic hardship is the process presently underway to greater or lesser degrees in the USA. The struggle for peace and economic reform is being waged through mass participation in electoral struggles � not a revolutionary rise of working class struggle.
Movements that draw millions into a great and historical electoral struggle, as presently unfolding in the USA, will determine which section of imperial power has sway in the next immediate period, are significant. Communists and all left progressives enter into these struggles in a fulsome an unconditional manner and without attempting to opportunistically impose an ideological agenda on the movements as the �hyper-left� often does. No one, including social reformists have a monopoly of political virtue over such developments. Leadership is earned not proclaimed.
The working class is not indifferent about which representatives of the capitalist class are in power. With no mass revolutionary parties of labour to advance their interests it could not, at this historical juncture, be otherwise. The repudiation of the Bush variant of imperialist policy and along with it the current US Republican administration would not be insignificant for one overriding reason; it would be the result of the coming together of millions of US voters opposed to right wing extremism, war and economic chaos. It would strengthen similar trends in Canada and Mexico.
The defeat of the Bush Republicans has international implications; it would mark a tangible rise in the political consciousness of millions of US voters, mostly notably workers. It will represent a break from the insular view of US exceptionalism and entitlement, a world view imposed on them by corporate media hacks. It would mark a political shift, difficult for Barak Obama to ignore.
The victory of such an electoral movement would be more politically significant than the actual removal from power of the Bush administration. At the forefront of the democratic alliance forming around the candidacy of Obama are demands for public Medicare, a shift from war expenditures to people�s needs and some form of retreat from the war in Iraq. The election would be the end of one process of struggle, an electoral struggle, opening another - the struggle for peace and basic social reform.
What can alter the power relationships in Canada, the USA and Mexico is the involvement of millions in progressive politics. Mass movements led by labour, including electoral alliances of a left-centre type, can forestall war and affect the development of productive forces. Compelling finance capital to reduce arms spending and institute state capitalist reforms through labour led mass political struggles will result in real gains and a qualitative change in working class thinking about its own organizations and how they should participate in politics.
Organized struggles of the New Deal era in the USA, and the reforms instituted by the Liberals following the defeat of Iron Heel Bennett in the late 1930�s, resulted in pensions and unemployment insurance. In the post-war WW2 era they finally won public health care. The constitutional reforms, in particular the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and some of the foreign policy doctrines of peaceful coexistence espoused by Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau are other examples of bourgeois democratic reforms that have benefited the working people.
There Are �Reforms� and then There Are Reforms
Impermissible among Marxists, is the adoption of an above class or non-class view of the struggle for reforms. The aforementioned reforms were ameliorative reforms reluctantly conceded by the ruling class confronted with a disaffected electorate. They were designed to protect the capitalist system while simultaneously retaining capitalism�s fundamental grip on power. It is also a fact, that some of the worst crimes of imperialism were committed even as the ruling classes of the leading capitalist states were reluctantly forced to concede certain social and democratic reforms to their own people.
Imperialists were able to carry out such crimes abroad by a masterful use of the psychology of mass fear at home, borrowed from the Nazis, of �external� threats menacing �western values�. These were all euphemisms for an exaggerated and undifferentiated position of privilege, allegedly enjoyed by all working people, in the western world. Such a view was never true and is not true today.
The impoverishment of the majority of the global masses that must labour to live is catastrophic and severe, and cannot be equated to the struggle to maintain standards of living prevailing in advanced capitalist states. At the same time sweeping definitions of the South versus the North, of the �rich west� versus the impoverished developing states, of environmental protection versus industrial development, if not carefully defined from a class standpoint, can be interpreted carelessly as an alignment of the working classes and exploited of the advanced capitalist countries in alliance with their ruling class against the oppressed masses of the world. Such a world view does not accord either with the tenets of Marxism nor with the unfolding reality in western capitalist states.
No doubt the imperialist ideologues that preach we must �arm to the teeth to protect our way of life� against the poor of the world will find supporters among the top echelons of society including what Lenin termed the �aristocracy of labour�.
Internationalists reject any calls from any quarter that align workers with their oppressors and stand for the unity of all working people, citing the objectively true slogan of the Communist Manifesto, �Worker�s of the World Unite�.
To return to the matter of reforms; there is a difference between concessions the ruling class is prepared to make when confronted by a dramatic loss of support among the masses and concessions wrested from the ruling classes by movements that arise independent of the capitalist parties. The latter are an advance over other reforms because they result in a dramatic rise in partisan political class consciousness that openly questions existing power relationships. The development of such struggles can be rapid, arising from war, economic, political, constitutional or democratic crisis, quickly transitioning to higher political struggles that begin to delineate class lines.
That was the case in the Winnipeg General Strike 1919 and that arose again in the On To Ottawa Trek in 1935. Some strikes in Canada such as the Miners strikes in Nova Scotia, of 1922 -25, the Saskatchewan Souris Valley Coal Miner�s strike in summer-fall 1931 and the Crows Nest Pass coal miner�s struggles encompassing a long period from the 1930�s to the mid-1950�s are other examples. The Common Front Strike of the public sector and private sector unions in Quebec in the period 1970-72 that intersected with the imposition of the War Measures Act during the October Crisis of 1970 is another example. All of these struggles aroused the alarm bells at the highest levels of corporate power, caused them to employ the suppressive power of the state against the people, because they began to articulate revolutionary ideas of working class power.
An advance in working class internationalist consciousness occurred during the mobilization of volunteers in defence of Republican Spain and again during the period of WW2 and its immediate aftermath, when there was widespread popular support for the Soviet Union and awareness of the threat of Nazism to democracy. The decisive role of the Soviet Union in the defeat of Hitler raised socialism to unprecedented heights of prestige and began to win wide adherence in Europe and acceptance in North America for the ideas of peaceful coexistence and its promise of a long period of post-war peace. Churchill�s Fulton Missouri cold war speech in 1946 was no accident. It was a deliberate, panic response by imperialism against a dramatic loss of control over mass ideology.
A rise in class revolutionary consciousness is qualitatively different from bourgeois democratic reforms. Revolutionary consciousness is the coming together of both economic and political awareness and organization arising from a particular set of class relationships that have reached a point where it is impossible to continue in the old way.
It Is Impossible to Continue in the Old Way
Canadian labour politics has reached the point where it has become impossible to bring about an improvement in the conditions of the working class without engaging in political struggles. Without political struggles the main issues standing in the way of the progressive advance of the country as a whole cannot be resolved. In other worlds labour must lead the whole country or lose the struggle for its own vital interests.
An active and organized campaign for an anti-monopoly economic program which openly challenges the power base of the ruling class will result in a qualitative advance in working class politics. An anti-monopoly economic program must:
� Openly challenge the militarization of the economy,
� Demand Canadian withdrawal from imperialist military alliances such as NATO, NORAD and NORTHCOM,
� Demand the permanent ban of nuclear weapons and new weapons systems in space,
� Call for the shutting down of foreign military bases and a return to the fundamental principles of the UN Charter,
� Demand that key sectors of the economy be nationalized, in the first place energy and mineral resources, transportation and communications,
� Demand a halt to privatization and make all social programs that benefit people permanent and unassailable,
� Call for the nationalization the banks and demand controls be placed on the tyranny of finance capital over all economic development.
Such demands, supported by millions, will inevitably confront the furious and violent opposition of the ruling elites, compelling all classes to consider the questions of power and pose the need for socialism.
Even the concept of anti-monopoly struggle can be a somewhat orderly view of political development. If it is embraced in a doctrinaire fashion it will not correspond to the way in which crisis phenomena actually appear in the global system of capitalism. That is what Marxists, Socialists and Communists must be prepared to respond to. It would not be dialectical to think otherwise.
The Global Economy - An Unfolding Contradiction
The thesis that the global economy is homogenized, undifferentiated and that individual countries are incapable of resisting or breaking out of the orbit of imperialism is unsupportable by the facts. Even US imperialism does not view the world that way. Imperialism is engaged in attempting to save its system and its privileged position within it by exploiting the weakest states to protect the strongest.
US imperialism is off-loading the crisis it is mainly responsible for creating, onto others, wherever the opportunity arises, and using crass appeals to organized labour to �keep our jobs while destroying theirs.� The gross irresponsibility of the Harper Government is to spread the illusion among Canadians that the US ruling class has a benign view of Canada and its people. Prime Minster Harper spreads the illusion that the US takes a different view of Canada in relation to other nations. He insinuates that the US excludes Canada from the predatory actions and aims of its investor classes and power elites. That is far from the reality of US-Canadian relations which always have been, and remain, contradictory and conflicted.
Industries both private and state capitalist, in states such as Canada, that are heavily dependent on primary resource extraction and energy exports as the principal means of economic development are particularly vulnerable to foreign takeover and the destruction of their core manufacturing and industrial industries. Canada is no exception. What is criminal is a government that not only lets it happen but actively promotes it as a desirable policy.
Since the onset of the economic downturn US finance capital has accelerated its takeover of Canadian enterprises in all sectors of the economy. This accelerated annexation of Canadian industry is resulting in permanent job loss and acceleration. It is a rapid and brazen repatriation of high paying Canadian jobs to low wage areas in the USA. US finance capitalists, with the support of a small insider group of Canadian collaborators, have achieved greater dominance in the determination of overall Canadian economic development since the Harper Conservatives have occupied power. That is why Harper�s approval rating with George Bush is high and dismal among Canadians. Canada is more vulnerable to the affects of the global economic crisis now underway in the USA since the Harper administration has taken the reins of power. His talk about Canadian sovereignty is the most contemptible form of political deception.
The World System of Capitalism is Evolving - A Moment of Weakness for US Imperialism
All of these factors taken together mean that nothing as it was prior to the current crisis can remain the same. Power relationships are being altered and not to the advantage of US imperialism. The capitalist global system is vulnerable to demands by the working masses. The general crisis of imperialism is deepening and the imperative for socialism is more apparent. The current interdependence of China and US imperialism, enabling US imperialism to wage war and pacify its populace with cheap consumer goods, is being altered by the current economic crisis. That relationship is not permanent and beginning to fray.
US imperialism�s inability to decisively and quickly conclude its wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan and seize all regional oil and mineral resources, oust its competitors and extend its dominance from Iraq to the Caspian in one fell swoop has resulted in a costly strategic miscalculation. The most recent example is the defeat of Georgia, a former Soviet Republic and now a US puppet regime, by the Russian army, after being goaded by the Bush administration into a costly adventure costing the lives 1,400 people in South Ossetia. The war instigated at the time of the Olympics and timed to complicate the Obama presidential campaign, may also be a dangerous cover for a US attack on Iran.
Resistance from countries and political forces opposed to US war for oil strategy in the region extending from the Caucuses to Central Asia and the Middle East is stiffening and spreading. What was planned as a �shock and awe� victory has turned into a debilitating and costly quagmire for the US military and a millstone on the US economy. The Bush Administration with the help of �new labour� Tony Blair dragooned its NATO allies into the so-called �Coalition of the Willing� and in the process destabilized international capitalist relations, weakened the cohesion of NATO relations and aggravated global capitalist economic relationships. This has creating irreparable stresses among participants.
For the people of the Middle East and Central Asia the illegal aggression of the Bush Administration into their countries is a crime against peace and a violation of national sovereignty that has brought death and misery to millions. The popular resistance of the Iraqi and Afghan people to the imperialist intrusion into their countries is understandable and justified. The resistance may not as yet have succeeded in ousting the US military and the economic power of the corporations profiteering from the war, but it does represent the irretrievable loss of US imperialism�s political influence representing, in dramatic terms, the irreversible historic decline of its dominance in the entire region.
The fact that both Presidential candidates enunciate changes in policy but not in US strategic goals, originally proclaimed by the Bush administration, means that there are no circles among the ruling US elites that have drawn the necessary historical conclusions for the requisite retreat of the empire. It means that all factions of US power will continue their quest for dominance and the negative economic affects of the US-NATO wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan will continue long after the November elections. These policies will continue to undermine and destabilize the USA and all western economies, and with the utmost certainty, that it will continue to worsen the current economic problems facing Canadians.
These facts reveal a fundamental truth. The crisis in the USA is not caused by Bush, Cheney, Rice or Gates or any other corrupt group of servants of imperialist power. The Bush administration is a product of a system, the result and operation of the objective laws of capitalism in its final stage of development - imperialism. Capitalist politicians will admit that a policy is flawed and must be altered, but not a single one will admit that the system itself is broken and cannot be repaired. Capitalism is historically spent and must be replaced. This is what working class leaders are called upon to do � lead the struggle to replace capitalism with socialism.
The Nature of the Crisis and the Prospect of Revolution
Revolution, like cyclical capitalist crises, is an objective reality of the development of society and its productive forces in relation to the private ownership and accumulation of capital. Revolution will not disappear because it has been demonized by finance capital and defined by academia as some aberration of human development. Pleading with capitalism to reform itself will not halt the build up of revolutionary forces or limit revolutionary movements to demands of reforms. What Marx and Engels described in their day and Lenin in his, was not the form that revolution might take, but its underlying causes and its inevitability. Why is revolution inevitable?
What all capitalist societies and the global profit system confront is the seismic build up between a rapid growth of the productive forces in the era of the scientific and technical revolution and the antiquated relations of production that attempt to compress and contain it. Summed up, the contradiction that underlies our modern world and which has taken on global proportions is the contradiction between social production and private ownership of the means of production and appropriation of the result of that productive relationship.
Every �left� theorist acknowledges and describes, sometimes brilliantly and in the greatest detail, the growing disparity in global wealth and poverty but few reflect on its inevitable outcome, the revolutionary convulsions it creates.
�Left� social democracy is stuck in a perpetual circle of descriptive analysis of the horrors of imperialism and an outpouring of ameliorative �fixes� to alleviate its worst features, but few accept imperialism�s certain demise and that socialism, it�s inevitable, necessary and historical replacement, results from revolution.
What crisis phenomena will come together to create conditions for a rapid revolutionary advance is not completely predictable. But not to study them from the perspective of a revolutionary view of historical development is not reality.
Today the world system of capitalism is in a stage of volatility. That is why it is imperative that the socialist alternative to capitalism never be set aside for the future, as something of a wistful notion not for our time. It can very rapidly become the urgent necessity around which millions would be prepared to unite if the economic conditions of the working class made it clear that socialism was the way out. Socialism is the way out and it is incumbent upon all who claim to want �genuine change� to say so.
Such is the view of the Communist Parties of Greece, Portugal and Cyprus and now India where active mass parties of the left, including mass Communist Parties, have won support of important sections of working and exploited classes. Venezuela and Bolivia have joined Socialist Cuba where revolutionary class forces have assumed power and proclaim their intention to institute socialist solutions to the development of their economies.
The socialist states and those in transition to socialism and all of the non-aligned countries impacted by the current global crisis of capitalism are in a better position to preserve peace and mitigate the ruinous effects of the current crisis of capitalism on working masses of their countries. That is what socialism offers the working class and its allies, peace and the opportunity to build the economy in their own interests.
What has all of that to do with Canada? Do these events offer the opportunity to pose the socialist alternative? They do!
How it is to be done requires some careful thinking. Where does it start? It starts with recognizing that the system is both in a general crisis and is at the beginning of an eruption of a new cyclical crisis of unknown depth and duration.
Canadian Parties of Big Business Cower and Wait
The economic crisis of the system creates a moment of indecision for the capitalist parties. Political paralysis is gripping the Conservative minority government and the Liberal Opposition as their leaders wait timorously for the outcome of the US elections in November and a new President to establish the framework of Canadian US relations for the next four years.
The total bankruptcy of Canadian capitalist politics is now fully exposed. The fact that not a single party leader has the courage to step forward before the US November elections and enunciate an independent program that places the interests of Canadian working people first lays bare this reality. The fear in Canadian ruling circles to confront the new US president and Government with a program of economic and political development, that befits a fully sovereign state and places the interests of its working people at the top of the political agenda, stands in stark contrast to socialist Cuba and Venezuela that have embarked on an independent path of development without seeking US approval.
Prime Minister Harper and his government are incapable of conceiving of a world without US imperialist oversight. All issues impacting the vital interests of Canadian working people are subordinated to US strategic goals. Canadian economic policy as far as Prime Minister Harper is concerned; await the outcome of a US Presidential election.
An independent economic program to protect Canadian workers from the made in USA global economic crisis which is destroying Canadian jobs, depressing wages, slashing purchasing power, burdening taxpayers with bank bailouts, paying for a war and occupation in Afghanistan, shipping Canadian energy resources to US refineries and militarization of the economy can only be won by openly confronting Canadian capital power relations.
The Energy Sector � Strength or Weakness?
US dominance both as the principal importer and owner of Canadian energy resources reveals the vulnerability of the Canadian people to the policy of resource sell out promoted by the Harper Conservatives. Instead of a source of strength in the present crisis as Prime Minister Harper vaingloriously asserts private foreign control of Canadian energy resources and a single US market for the product is Canada�s greatest economic weakness.
The enormous profits generated from the Tar Sands that Harper boasts makes Canada the new energy superpower are being gleaned from the labour of the energy sector workers of Alberta, Northern BC and now Saskatchewan. These workers construct the plant and refineries, install and maintain the gathering systems and pipelines that extract, produce, and transport both raw and semi-processed oil and gas to the US market. Their labour is the principal source of new capital flowing into the hands of private investors. What happens to this capital?
Capital Formation from the Energy Sector
Capital accumulations from the exploitation of the Tar Sands are not used to either lower costs of energy to Canadian consumers, industry and agriculture or to help halt the precipitous decline of eastern Canadian manufacturing. New capital from the Tar Sands go directly into the pockets of the private energy sector to re-invest in exploration and production and increasingly to engage in foreign investment plays in South America, Central Asia and the USA.
It is also increasingly being used as the principle strategic source for meeting US military fuel requirements. Large increases in upgrading and refining capacities in Illinois, Oklahoma and Mississippi are being constructed while upgrading and refining capacities are being curtailed in Canada. Royal Dutch Shell (RDC - formally Shell Canada) announced in June that it is halting its planned Sarnia Ontario expansion and with it thousands of Canadian construction, operation and maintenance jobs in a region in desperate need of jobs. RDC said the very next day after the Sarnia announcement that it will stop any further planned expansion of Phase II through Phase IV of its Ft. Saskatchewan Alberta upgrader. Shifting the upgrading capacities to Oklahoma and into non-union jurisdictions where wages are lower and safety regulations are voluntary by the contractors and owners.
In their insatiable greed, the energy investors are plotting to replace Canadian energy sector workers with imported foreign labour under the terms of the new immigration rules of Bill C50. Together with the Harper Government�s amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA), it will clear the way for a flood of low wage foreign temporary workers into the energy sector to be used as cheap labour to further weaken the building trades unions working in the construction of Tar Sands mega projects.
Bill C50 is part of the set of agreements struck under the SPP and TILMA in an effort to depress wages, break unions and ruin stable communities. The Alberta energy giants CNRL and Suncor have constructed barrack like camps at Fort McMurray which house the influx of large numbers of foreign workers directly competing with Canadian workers in the field of skilled trades, technology and engineering.
This is what Prime Minister Harper means when he speaks of Canada as an energy superpower. Removing the rhetoric we are left with the power of the energy developers to shape government policy to provide cheap labour, keep corporate taxes low, remove all export barriers and defy the rising public outcry against rising prices and the obvious environmental damage being created by irresponsible and uncontrolled private development. As others have said, the Prime Minister is nothing more than an energy super marketer, selling out the future of the resource and the energy needs of the whole country for a fast buck.
Production Capital Out, Usury, Speculative Capital In!
Further exacerbating the current economic crisis is the conflict among some sections of the capitalist classes that derive their profits from exploiting workers engaged in the production of industrial and manufactured commodities. The Canadian Manufacturers Association supported by the Liberals confront Finance Minister Flaherty�s edict that economic planners must accept as their first duty to their class, the Bank of Canada and Federal Government policy of bailing out the banking sector, shoring up usury capital and shoring up the losses of large investor speculators. The productive sector gets what is left. The meetings between Ontario and Quebec premiers were a reaction to that policy and the most recent meeting of the provincial premiers in Quebec City revealed that split between resource sector provinces and manufacturing based provinces is real and growing. The fiery denunciations by Premier Danny Williams of Newfoundland-Labrador of Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a revealing symptom of the splits within the ruling elites
Two Servants Fighting to Serve the Same Master
To say there is no difference between the Liberals and Conservatives is the same as saying there is no difference between the US Republicans and Democrats, the British Tories and the British Labour, the Sarcozy Republicans the French Socialists, and on and on. Such tautology gets us nowhere.
There is broad agreement on the left that the divisions among capitalist parties are quarrels among servants vying for the rewards flowing from serving the same master, finance capital. What is not often considered is that these quarrels are real and can become bitter and sometimes, as is happening in Turkey and Pakistan, quite bloody.
In Canada these realities of capitalist politics stem from the confrontation between the dominance of new capital arising from energy production, and the old capital invested in manufacturing, the parasitical weight of banks, usury and speculative capital versus the needs of the productive sector of the economy for cheap investment capital. It partially explains the splits in the capitalists parties, the divisions between eastern and western regional capitalist interests, between the federal government and the provinces, all attesting to disunity among competing capitalist interests engaged in the most vile and acquisitive pursuit of self interest at the expense of Canada and its people.
Similarly on an international scale, competition both within and among imperialist trading blocs, principally the EU and NAFTA and, its most recent iteration, the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), are sharpened by the current global crisis further inflaming inter-imperialist rivalries. Within the EU itself, there are stresses and disunity. These are exemplified by the recent defeat of the EU Reform Constitution by the voters of Ireland. This disunity has created a serious crisis of political and economic development for European finance capital and its plans to transform a capitalist Europe into a contender with the USA for world imperialist domination and control.
The dreams of the ambitious corrupt ruling elites of Ukraine, dismembered Yugoslavia and Kosovo, Georgia and former European socialist states admitted to NATO, that a cornucopia of riches and wealth would reward their betrayal of socialism and the people confront a bitter reality. These states, confront the hard nosed demands of the dominant European capitalist states, Germany, France, Italy and the UK. The supplicants must first give up their sovereignty, their markets and their resources and all of the gains made under socialism, before they will be let in the door.
In the case of Poland and Czechoslovakia, and Ukraine where a small elite begging the USA for a position of privilege within NATO and at the imperialist table, permit the USA to station forward advanced nuclear weapons installations on their territory thus menacing Russian security, expose their own countries and its people to certain destruction in the event of nuclear war.
The Road Ahead � Increased Instability of the Capitalist System
All of these factors are bound to create extreme political instability within each capitalist country and the global capitalist system that will shape class relations for some time to come. To say the global system of capitalism is integrated without explaining the tenuous and contradictory nature of that integration robs the working class of an important weapon in its struggle for its own interests, the ability to take advantage of inter-capitalist and inter-imperialist contradictions. Worse than that, it perpetuates the illusion of the invulnerability and permanence of global capitalism in the imperialist stage of its development.
Another World in the Making
The doctrines of a small group of imperialist states led by the USA that rely on military power and political and economic threats, and proclaim their �right� to violate the sovereignty of people�s and nations to exact �regime change�, to intervene militarily and unilaterally in international affairs is being challenged.
More peoples and countries, recognizing that imperialism cannot be reformed, reject its tenets and are taking matters into their own hands. They are declaring peace as their right and boldly establishing new forms of governance utilizing their own natural resources and peaceful creative labour to provide for the economic and social needs of their people.
A group of states, the People�s Republic of China, the Democratic People�s Republic of Korea, the People�s Republic of Viet Nam, the Republic of Cuba, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and the Republic of Bolivia have chosen socialist models of political, economic and social development. These models are based on state ownership of the commanding heights of the economy combining other innovative forms and methods of production to overcome problems of underdevelopment.
The socialist states emphasize economic cooperation, the application of science and technology to increase productivity and ease labour to meet the rising needs of the people for necessities. At the same time the socialist states are systematically improving the health, advanced education and cultural life of the people and implementing vigorous programs to preserve the environment, conserve energy resources and avoid the worst aspects of consumerism.
Other states such as Ecuador, Chile, Paraguay, Nicaragua, Argentina and Brazil, Russia and India, South Africa and Byelorussia (Belarus) and many others that are considering joining them, represent nations in transition that are not fully in the orbit of imperialism and opt for a non-belligerent stance in international relations.
These states are weakly integrated in the global economic system of imperialism and often act independently of it when their vital economic interests are at stake. They are actively engaged in building new non-belligerent trading blocs, free of military threats and imperial ambition. Mutually beneficial economic relationships built at a regional level and that objectively challenge the dominance and extreme aggressiveness of the leading imperialist states led by the USA is something new in international economic relations since 1990.
The new trends in international development attract the attention of the majority of the people of the world and raise high the hopes for peace and economic progress free of war and oppression.
These trends also arouse the enmity and scorn of the old discredited imperialist centres of power and privilege and their dominant role in global affairs. These trends are causing old imperialist powers to resort to threats, occupations, militarism and war, inflicting unspeakable crimes against the people, as people attempt to emerge from poverty and exploitation.
Canada�s Choice - Old Imperialist Conflict or Towards a New Era of Non-belligerence and Cooperation?
These developments challenge Canadians to consider alternatives to the dominant-subordinate relationship that presently exists between Canada and the USA. With a different government, Canada could move closer to these trends in international relations that reject war, aggressiveness and belligerence among states.
Prime Minister Harper does the opposite and has abandoned any pretence of promoting a foreign policy of peace. US-Canadian military and foreign policy collaboration has led Canada into membership in the imperialist military alliances of NATO, NORAD and NORTHCOM, adapting and integrating Canada�s military and foreign policy in step with US imperialist global ambitions.
Canada, the Working Class and the Future
Canadian capitalism is not immune to the current global crisis; in fact the decisions of the Harper Government aggravate the general crisis and make it worse. All of the solutions offered thus far promoted by the minority right wing government are designed to deepen Canadian involvement in imperialist war, divert public wealth to bail out private investors, and promote high energy prices and a low wage policy that reduces purchasing power of consumers for all but the upper income elites.
All of the �solutions� offered by �geniuses of high finance� are designed to protect the profits of richest and most powerful finance and resource capital formations. From the Governor of the Bank of Canada to the Finance Minister, to bank CEO�s and the full range of corporate groups such as the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE), the Canadian Manufacturers Association (CMA), the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) and the stock exchanges S&P/TSX, while disagreeing on methods, all agree that it is the working class and the non-corporate taxpayers that must bear the brunt of this latest �free market� driven fiasco.
Capitalists in all countries, including Canada sensing the vulnerability of politically and economically unorganized working people will impose harsh conditions that include rising monopoly prices, wage freeze, and severe consumer debt pressure. These measures all result in falling purchasing power in the hands of workers. This process will characterize the class struggle so long as the current crisis worsens.
The crisis has sharpened all class relationships and will compel all those who must labour to live to reconsider their previous assumptions about the capitalist system�s ability to meet their needs now and in the future. The crisis poses these questions most urgently to the working class. Workers confront a bitter choice. Believe the theories of those who claim capitalism can master the current crisis and manage its way out and wait for them to attempt to do it, or do their own thinking and intervene in the political and economic process to defend their interests now, and work on a working class solution for the future. How each worker and each working class organization answers that question will determine how rapidly the working class enters the struggle for its own vital class interests.
The theses of a wide range of economic analysts from the avowedly pro-imperialist to an array of neo-Marxist academics and even some Communist theorists is, that the current situation is simply another predictable and recurring cyclical event in evolving global capitalist economy and that the economic gurus of Wall St., Fleet St. and Bay St., can manage their way out of the crisis - again. That bland assurance, in all of its �left� and right variants is propagated every minute of every day by the corrupt media. It is suspect and should not be taken at face value. The current crisis needs deeper analysis and that can only come from a fresh look.
What do all of these theorists invite the working class to believe? The working class of the leading capitalist states, are invited to believe that the ruling elites of the imperialist system of states have mastered the laws of capitalist development and in time will devise a plan, and in fact are busy implementing such a plan. The plan most assuredly, will save the status and privileges of workers and farmers in the advanced capitalist states at the expense of workers and farmers in underdeveloped states. Such theories are flawed.
A Capitalist Crisis Striking at the Epicentre of Imperialism
The current global crisis of capitalism is most severe at the epicentre of the imperialist system - the United States of America. In fact, it arises from there. Unlike previous crises of capitalism such as the Asian crisis, the Argentina crisis, the collapse of the Russian economy following 1990 counter revolutionary overthrow of the Soviet Union, USA finance capital is unable this time to turn a capitalist crisis of global proportions into an opportunity to strengthen its dominance in the global imperialist system of states.
In fact the current crisis is weakening US dominance and exacerbating inter-imperialist tensions. Regardless of how the current crisis is resolved, the USA will emerge from it weaker than when it began. This is not the aftermath of WW2 when the US economy emerged unscathed by war on its territory and became the undisputed dominant global imperialist power. At that time US finance capitalists embarked on a long trajectory of profit making by investing in the reconstruction of war ravaged capitalist Europe and the rearming of Germany in violation of solemn agreements with the Soviet Union. US imperialism created and armed NATO and built up the first strike strategic nuclear capability of the US armed forces, all of which was aimed at destroying the only threat to US imperialist ascendancy, the socialist system of states led by the Soviet Union.
The capitalists of the west European states, ruined by Hitler�s war of aggression learned nothing from that experience. In fact many of them had actively collaborated with Hitler and expected to be the beneficiaries of a fascist victory. Thwarted, they eagerly embraced the US finance capitalist plan for the anti-communist reconstruction of Europe. Anti-communism has always had its rewards for its most ardent exponents and still does to this day.
The long post-war period of unimpeded US expansionism is over and US imperialism is now entering the period of its historical decline. As any dying organism, it resorts to any and all means to prevent the inevitable. In its moribund state, US imperialism resorts to militarism as its first option in asserting its primacy in the imperialist system.
Legions of bourgeois theorists and neo-Marxists never tire of asserting that US imperialism transcends the laws of capitalist development and is exceptional for its ability to manage its way out of crisis and overcome the fundamental law of capitalism, social production and private appropriation of surplus value.
The theory of American exceptionalism, in essence a theory of capitulation to imperialism, was first propounded by Kautsky and demolished by Lenin. It is based on the theory that imperialism has evolved into a unified system that has eliminated inter-imperialist rivalry. It therefore logically creates an overarching single finance capitalist monopoly that directs the whole system thereby removing the basis of inter-imperialist war and conflict. And therefore as a unified system it can manage the fundamental law of capitalism - the contradiction between social production and private appropriation.
The theory received its greatest �vindication� with the counter-revolutionary undermining of the Soviet Union. With the destruction of the Soviet Union and along with it, the European system of socialist states, imperialist theorists and academia in general proclaimed the �end of history� and engaged in a great search for the next �theory� that would replace Leninism.
For the imperialist realists running the show, the removal of the Soviet Union, the main support for the peace and disarmament movements, of the anti-colonial movement, for the non-aligned states, for the anti-imperialist and socialist movements, for the working masses and in particular the working class, the global landscape was changed. It opened up the possibility for US imperialism to expand empire, steal market share, plunder resources, and exploit foreign labour, without the complexity and burden of having to form alliances with anti-communist factions to achieve their goals. Following the removal of the socialist roadblock the dreams of German, British, French, Italian imperialists to re-establish their lost colonial possessions, their former pre-socialist dominance in Europe soared to giddy heights.
Because the current crisis is weakening the US economy, the ability of US finance capital to use its economic power to coerce other capitalist states into absorbing the costs of the crisis is less effective and more complex and contradictory. From a source of strength for other imperialist states, the US economy is now its principal weakness. In fact for the US to survive the current crisis it must aggressively and ruthlessly export its economic problems first of all to its own working class and to the working masses of other capitalist and non-capitalist states, but also to other capitalist states and classes.
The current crisis as in all previous crisis leads to the destruction of small and medium size businesses and in a ruthless and bitter struggle for dominance and survival among large finance capitalist interests. This process is leading to growing worldwide resistance from the victims of the global crisis, in the first place the international working class and a weakening of the political cohesion of the entire imperialist system.
There is very little in current US crisis management proposals emanating from its principal power centres, the Whitehouse, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Federal Reserve that resonates positively in the capitals of the EU, Asia or South America. In particular the deliberate devaluing of the US dollar, the capitalist world�s principal reserve currency, has the effect of devaluing US debt owed to foreign investors, such as China, India, Japan and several front rank Middle Eastern oil exporting states. Foreign investment in US treasury bills and US capital markets bought with US dollars ten or twenty years ago are worth much less today.
The US is also engaged in attempting to repatriate some of its outsourced industrial and manufacturing capacity. Corporations have driven down wages in the USA to third world levels making it attractive to bring some of that production back to the USA. Countries such as Canada that became heavily dependent on branch plant economies such as auto manufacturing are feeling the affects. The effects are also beginning to show in Canada�s energy sector as we discussed above.
The closer the states affected by the crisis are to the epicentre, the more integrated and dependent they are on the US market, the more integrated they are with the US finance capitalist system, in particular its banking sector, its arms industry and specifically its costly military system, the more involved they must be in costly wars US imperialism has instigated in Iraq and Afghanistan, the more vulnerable these states are to a general collapse of the global system.
Capitalist economists and theorists have postulated the opposite. That view drives the ideology and world view of Prime Minister Harper. He asserts that the closer the most advanced capitalist economies are to the USA, the more dependent they are on the US dollar, the more reliant they are on US finance capital, the more dependent they are on the US military system for their defence, the more willing they have been to participate in US wars of aggressions, the more strengthened will be the domestic capitalist economies they command, the more dependent they are on the US market, the more secure their profit and therefore the people of Canada.
The Path Forward
Working class analysts and political leaders that fail to study more deeply these evolving trends and adjust their policies accordingly will be relegated to irrelevance. Finance capital dominates capitalism and commands such economic power that it buys governments to do its will. All governments in Canada are state monopoly governments. State monopoly governments manage the economic political affairs of the country in the interests of finance capital and their pursuit of maximum profit.
The capitalist state is an instrument of class rule that utilizes the military, the courts, the police and vast states apparatus to administer the affairs of the country, to coerce the working classes to subordinate their class interests to the profit goals of big business.
Every citizen knows this to be the real state of affairs in all capitalist countries from their own experience. Whether the economy is in an expansion or a cyclical crisis phase, all of the major decisions of government are taken with one purpose, to preserve the profit system and the interest of those classes that are the main beneficiaries.
The deep economic roots causing the political turmoil afflicting all advanced capitalist countries including Canada is gradually compelling the �non-sectarianleft�to enter into a more sober analysis of modern capitalist development. The Communists are playing catch up. For too long, a non-class liberal, social democratic analysis has dominated the theoretical discussion and kept it at the level of academia where neo-Marxist �stars� appropriate the leadership of the discussion. Workers and farmers, working class youth and students are left scratching their heads in bewilderment as brilliant descriptions of capitalism and globalism are elaborated but without advancing a single solution that breaks the stranglehold of the profit system over the economy and their lives.
How will we explain the differences between the Communist vision of Canada and the Liberal-social-democratic vision? Communists argue that the need to abolish the profit system is revealed, not primarily by the exposure of the hypocrisy of what capitalism says about itself, something all social and liberal democrats are adept at doing and often do very well, but primarily by the exposure of the actual source of the causes of the steady decline of the economic conditions of the working people.
The Communists say the source of the worsening economic conditions of the working class is the system of capitalism itself and that capitalism is irreparable and must be replaced with socialism. The liberal and social democrats say the source of the causes of the deteriorating conditions of life of working people is a malfunctioning capitalism and all that is required is to repair the system.
Communists assert that it is impossible to seriously consider a solution to the dilemma faced by half of all Canadians who rely on wages and salaries to live, and who are only two pay cheques away from poverty, without considering how to fundamentally change the political and economic system that expose workers to such economic uncertainty.
While the immediacy of the possibility of replacing capitalism with socialism may legitimately be discussed, it is incumbent upon those who advocate deferring the discussion of socialism to some distant time, to explain how that deferral strengthens the immediate and contemporary struggles of the people for peace, democracy and social and economic progress. To assert that socialism is not on the agenda implies that capitalism is durable and has overcome its internal contradictions and periodic crises eliminating the possibility of revolutionary situations thereby obviating the need for a revolutionary party. To assert that socialism is not on the agenda can also be a convenient way to evade the task of defending the achievements of previous socialist revolutions and the internationalist duty to organize solidarity and support for existing socialist states and contemporary socialist revolutions.
Postponement of the discussion of the dialectical relationship between socialism and immediate struggle for reform reduces the role of Communists to a choir for social democracy and reformism and becomes in practice an accommodation with neo-liberalism and an unintended concession to anti-communism.
The answer to anti-communism is consistent partisanship for the sum total of the historic experience of the struggle of the working class for socialism. Communists concede nothing to the anti-communist revision of working class history. The working class creates its own history in struggle and it will decide what is relevant and what is to be learned from that history. Imperialist ideologists, theorists and apologists have nothing to teach Marxism.
The Source of Opportunism Today
The greatest threat to the working class fight back against the present unfolding crisis is the illusion it is simply another mechanistic cyclical event that shall self correct, that the high priests of finance capital will save the system and the interests of the working people along with it. Such illusion is the form that political opportunism takes today. Accompanying this opportunistic assessment is the canard bandied about by a coterie of neo-Marxist academics that the working class is corrupted and incapable of fighting back. They imply that because of its integration in the capitalist system, through private ownership of property and savings from deferred wages in the form of RRSP and other small investments, workers� are unable to mount an offensive in their own class interests.
�Left� theorists spend their time hand wringing and churning out treatises explaining what the current crisis isn�t. They solemnly declare it isn�t a recession or a depression or a 1929 crash or a global collapse of the capitalist economy. Lenin and Marx have been �disproven� which seems to be the objective of their efforts. Since the current crisis isn�t exactly the way Marx predicted it in Capital in the 19th Century and Lenin described it in Imperialism in 20th Century the neo-Marxists and their wide-eyed coterie of �hyper-left� followers, busy themselves in the 21st Century correcting Marx and Lenin and seeking a more cogent analysis that winds up with an appeal to workers to become �revolutionary� as though they were waiting around just to be told.
Workers Remain Workers
The economic ruination of workers, those well established and those carrying large debt loads happens all of the time and is happening now and in a particularly acute way. Workers don�t have sinecures. Ruination is class based. Workers with built up economic cushions in the form of savings or pensions or additional income from petty bourgeois enterprise does not change their fundamental position in the relations of production. There is no doubt that some imagine they do, having accepted the spin of capitalist apologists that everyone is the author of their own misfortune.
What is primary is not what is believed or imagined but what exists objectively independently of our individual actions. What is primary is the fact that workers do not own the means of production and must sell their labour power to live. So long as their principle income is from selling labour power, when there is no market for the skills they have to sell, the effect is instantaneous and bleak.
Marxism-Leninism studies class relationships as they exist objectively, to discover the laws underlying their development and to base programs, strategies and tactics on that reality. The class struggle is a process and like all processes, is a development not an event.
From the moment of the onset of a global economic crisis of the system of capitalism such as the one that is upon us now, there is a nascent period, a period of quantitative build-up before struggles mature and take a qualitative leap. For example, the 1929 crash followed a long period of relative full employment during the post world war one recovery when a stratum of workers had achieved a relatively high standard of living. The high priests of finance capital preached a world of prosperity for all that would never end. Well it did.
When the depression hit it ushered in a long period of economic hardships for the working class as a whole, both employed and unemployed, causing both mass unemployment and a drastic drop in purchasing power of those who continued to be employed.
The period between the 1929 crash and the On to Ottawa trek and the Dominion Day Riot in Regina of July 1st 1935 encompassed six years of bitter class battles during which time the working class and farmers realized from their own bitter experience that their only alternative was organized struggle. Other historical examples can be cited. The crisis now breaking out is still at an early stage of its development.
Now is the time to deepen the analysis, draw on all of the historical lessons of the past, apply the science of Marxism Leninism to the understanding of the realities of today and broaden and deepen the discussion in the most public of ways.