Canadians for Peace and Socialism (CPS)

May Day Statement 2012 (Part Two)

The General Crisis of Capitalism

Don Currie, Chair CPS

April 22, 2012

CPS May Day statement Part One  ^[1] drew attention to the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada (CEP) and the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) New Union Project calling “for a new kind of Canadian unionism.”

The trade union militants in these unions who initiated the project will arrive at their own conclusions as to what they believe must be done to restructure organized labour for the struggles that lie ahead. 

However the objective conditions that prompted their reappraisal concern all workers.

The General Crisis of Capitalism

Humankind is living through the era of the general crisis capitalism, the last and final stage of the system, state monopoly capitalism, imperialism. The system is characterized by the domination of bank-industrial capital over all of economic development. The export of capital prevails over the export of goods as the primary source of profit.

The main drivers of global imperialist profiteering include but are not limited to:

• The export of capital by the leading G7 imperialist states to seize and control markets, exploit resources and the labour of other lesser countries.
• Global concentration and centralization of bank-corporate financial power among the leading imperialist states determining at high level secret meetings, its planning, management, control and division of spoils.  
• Secret trade deals among leading imperialist states to carve up entire zones of joint capitalist exploitation without regard for people’s sovereignty.
• NATO Imperialist wars to seize and control global energy, water and mineral resources.
• Deep integration of state monopoly governments and hi-tech aero space and communications systems companies to control all information traffic to enhance government-corporate control over society and to militarize the functions of the state.
• State corporate profiteering from the export, procurement and supply of war material to foreign military bases to conduct NATO wars of regime change.
• Central bank manipulation of the supply of capital affecting speculative real estate profiteering in all capitalist countries.
• Massive bank credit to profiteer from increasing personal consumer and mortgage indebtedness.
• Bank-corporate interest exploitation of the mass of petty-owners, small farmers and the self-employed workers requiring small loan capital to survive.
• State monopoly fiscal, monetary and taxation policies, crafted at secret meetings that relieve corporations of tax obligations and supply them with generous state subsidies and services.
• Mass consumer marketing by box store chains flogging useless commodities (the trinket economy).
• Mass marketing and franchising of bad food, sports spectacles and cheap entertainment.
• The corporate ownership, domination and control of agriculture at all stages of its production.
• The degradation of women, men and youth and even children in the mass marketing of pornography.
• Privatization of the full range of state capitalist social programs providing health, seniors, child care, education subsidies to students and trades and technical training to youth.

A debased media-academe, well paid for their efforts, flood the global corporate controlled mass media networks with a glossy image of a dying system as 21^st century “freedom”. Pundits, media hacks and self-promoting academic celebrities advise labour to confine its role to assisting state monopoly capitalist governments make it all work and keep it going because “we are all in this together”.

The ruling finance capitalist elites of Canada have no interest in the vital needs of the working class. Capitalists are deeply involved in the global melee to promote their profit goals. Anything workers might get is coincidental.

Banks and corporate investors seeking maximum quick profit take it wherever it can be found regardless of the consequences on the laboring masses and the natural environment.

Prime Minister Harper, Finance Minister Flaherty, Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney Promote Capitalism. Why Should Organized Labour?

Prime Minister Harper, Finance Minister Flaherty, Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney and their secret big business advisors, crafted the March 2012 federal budget to ensure that wage earners and salary earners get less and banks and corporations will get more out of Canada’s enormous wealth creation potential.

Wages have been essentially frozen as bank profits soar. Front line federal employees are thrown on the bread line as the needs of general population for better health care and public services rise. Women workers remain in a second class wage earning status as child care costs increase. Highly educated youth can’t find jobs and tuition fees for post-secondary education are soaring. Pensioners in need of decent housing and better nutrition and special health care needs are denied. Workers planning to retire are forced to work longer to get a meagre old age pension. Poverty is growing and the racist denial of the needs of First Nations people is a national disgrace.

Full employment without inflation, job security and improved working conditions and poverty reduction are considered by Harper, Flaherty and Carney to be obsolete concepts. Mass unemployment is a business opportunity to suppress wages, increase labour competition and force higher per capita productivity through longer hours of work.

The division of opinion within organized labour’s ranks is about whether the working class should help finance capitalists manage their system, or begin to act as a class for itself, oppose monopoly and struggle for an entirely new system where labor, representing the majority, has the political power to make its societal interests primary.

Labor apologists for capitalism peddle the capitalist line that periodic depressions and mass unemployment are part of the price Canadian workers have to pay to live in “the best country in the world”.  That presumes the system is simply going through a bad patch and will spontaneously correct itself. Capitalism does self correct - for capitalists! Not for workers!

Organized Labour Poses the Question Correctly

The CAW-CEP Discussion Paper is important because it asserts; “Global capitalism is proving itself incapable of righting itself and we are likely at the beginning of a long period of economic turmoil and stagnation.” That correct assessment has led the authors to assert that the labour movement needs a new strategy of struggle.

It is undeniable that the global capitalist system is in a chronic general crisis of overproduction resulting in uneven economic development of its member states. Mass poverty for billions deprived of means exist side by side with unprecedented wealth in the hands of powerful banks and monopolies. Cyclical boom and bust expansion and contraction of capitalist markets create anarchic demands for labour followed by periods of mass unemployment. Millions are driven to leave homelands in search of work in developed states giving new meaning to Marx’s well known adage that workers have no country. Inter-capitalist competition for resources and markets is expressed in rising militarism and NATO wars. Nuclear weapons stockpiles and environmental degradation threaten all life.

The irreconcilable interest of the working class versus finance capital has never been more stark or clear as it is today. Big wage and job security struggles are in the offing and cannot be avoided. It is this reality that is driving the search for a new labour strategy for the 21^st Century.

What Should Labour’s New Strategy Be?

World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) Athens Pact

The CAW-CEP statement is as close as the organized labour movement in Canada has come thus far to what the delegates to the 16^th World Trade Union Congress of the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) concluded a year ago in its Athens Pact Statement of April 6-10 2011. ^[2]

The WFTU delegates affirmed: “The 16^th Congress of the World Federation of Trade Unions is taking place at a time when the global capitalist system is in the middle of a deep and multifaceted economic crisis of the system itself.” 

The WFTU in contrast to the social reformist International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) bases its assessment of what “the main direction for the international class oriented trade union movement…” should be, on Marxism.

Quoting Marx the WFTU document asserts that the “the economic crisis exposes the basic contradiction of capitalism – the contradiction between the social character of production and the capitalist form of ownership of the means of production and the appropriation of its results.”

The WFTU quotes a cogent observation of Marx’s close collaborator Frederick Engels who said:

“The productive forces rebel against the relations of production which they’ve surpassed, they left behind (…) Means of production, means of maintenance, available workers, that is to say all factors of production and social wealth are super-abounding.”

Capitalism in the 21^st century has not overcome that fundamental contradiction. Capitalism in Canada has evolved from its early 17^th century colonial mercantile roots to 21^st century state monopoly capitalism, imperialism, fully integrated in the international system of capitalist exploitation, militarism and war.

After 400 years of Capitalism - Want In the Midst of Wealth

Canada in the 21^st century is a finance capitalist G7 NATO state “super-abounding” in wealth, well trained people willing to work, technologically advanced, science and technology at hand, unimaginable natural wealth in particular vital energy and minerals, a highly developed manufacturing and industrial potential and an agriculture sector capable of making Canada completely food self sufficient. In addition to having everything that is required to ensure the rising needs of all Canadians, the country is capable of developing its export potential across the full range of commodities it produces. 

Why then does the April 26, 2012 Stats Can report on wages and inflation show that workers wages have fallen behind the rate of inflation. ^[3] The trend has been evident for some time.

Prime Minister Harper, Finance Minister Flaherty and Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney, claiming to be experts on managing the capitalist system, can’t explain why an economic system with a labour force of 17.5 million creating a GDP of more than $1.5 trillion can’t provide full employment without inflation for workers and their families. They can’t explain why Canada after nearly two centuries of capitalism is still a boom and bust economy characterized by uneven development, its manufacturing sector in decline and the economy in near total reliance on energy resource extraction and export, bank speculation and wasteful arms spending.

Parliament is embroiled in a bitter debate over the Conservative government’s plan to spend billions on F35 fighter jets to fight future NATO wars at a time when the federal budget is freezing government transfers for health, planning large scale layoffs of front line public employees, contracting and liquidating vital government services and forcing any worker under the age of 54 to work until age 67 before receiving and old age pension. ^[4]

The Corporate Plan to Scuttle Parliament

End Secrecy Restore Democracy!

Why doesn’t Parliament act and work for the workers and farmers of Canada?

There is much press speculation about the Harper government budget cuts to foreign embassies, international trade offices, food inspection services and even government oversight of CSIS intelligence functions.

Part of the answer is that vital functions of the Canadian state are being privatized, internationalized and contracted out to the finance capitalist mandarins at the IMF, OECD, EU, World Bank and NATO. More vital decisions affecting Canadians are decided in secret meetings in Brussels, New York and London than in Parliament of Canada.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney are integrated in this secret society of international bankers and financiers and routinely participate in deciding major economic, diplomatic, foreign and military policy outside Parliament at secret meetings with unelected private sector advisors and G7-IMF-World Bank-OECD-EU mandarins.

After making decisions with international finance capital, they present them to Parliament for rubber stamping. By and large, the opposition parties let them get away with it.

Big capital doesn’t need bourgeois parliaments. Even capitalist democracy has become too cumbersome for profiteering. When everything is pre-decided in secret meetings abroad Parliamentary approval in Canada is largely a nuisance as far as big investors are concerned. Hence the Harper Government’s plan to scuttle environmental review assessment procedures, cut back on food, pharmaceutical and health and safety standards.

The Harper-Flaherty-Carney budget means in practice less democracy resulting in less employed wage and salary earners compelled to work harder, longer for less in more dangerous environments to assist banks and corporations prop up the profit system until the next depression.

Workers ousted from manufacturing jobs during this depression, instantly forgotten, are now “free” to look for work in the “recovering economy” and start all over again. Front line public employees about to be laid off will join them. Another wave of unemployment, before the last one has abated is in the making.

The Corporate Bamboozle – Sharing Equally in Restoring Capitalism!

Harper, Flaherty and Carney assert that banks, corporations, big private investors and the working class share equally in the task of digging Canada out of the hole that capitalism got us all into in 2008. 

This corporate bamboozle is promoted by a debased media-academe as “freedom for all”.

Government-corporate funded think tanks are in the forefront of this disinformation scam. The Conference Board of Canada, the C.D. Howe Institute, the Fraser Institute, the Conference of Defence Associations ^[5] and the Canadian Council of Corporate Executives to name a few all promote the phony “equality of sacrifice” line.

The 2008 global depression did not fall with equal severity on workers and bankers. Bank and corporate profits continued to rise throughout the depression. Worker’s wages stagnated and have not risen above the rate of inflation. The hardships imposed on working class families by large scale layoffs remain. The 2008 depression deprived many working class families of their homes, savings, pension benefits, and hopes for higher education for their children. Unemployment remains approximately the same as four years ago. Underemployment among the youth continues. Working class indebtedness has risen.

How many bankers, corporate executives, government hacks and MP’s can’t pay their bills, lost their homes or forced to wait for pensions until they are 67?

The System is In Crisis and the Crisis is Not Going Away!

The G20 capitalist states have been compelled by global depression, to mobilize all of its resources to prevent total collapse. Its success is far from assured. The recently concluded G20 meeting admitted in its final communiqué that global recovery from the 2008 global depression is far from over.  ^[6] The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in its March meeting was glum, predicting further shrinking of the GDP of Germany, France and Italy. ^[7]

The governments of the G7-NATO states within the G20 are the aggressive driving force, in collusion with the OECD, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) attempting to reassert dominance and control over crisis ridden capitalist economies. 

Compliant right-wing G7 governments acting for the largest private banks and corporations have agreed to use a combination of reduced corporate taxation, plunder of state treasuries, massive military spending and attacks on the social gains of the working people as the principle means to recoup profit losses during the depression. These anti-working class attacks utilize state legislative power and compliant courts, to suppress strikes, de-certify unions, abrogate collective bargaining rights and by state violence suppress mass protest demonstrations of workers and students. In Canada at both federal and provincial levels, state monopoly attacks on organized labour and students are intensifying.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and Governor of the Canada and Bank of Canada Mark Carney are the main architects of imposing IMF austerity on Canadian workers. Dutifully they concocted a federal budget that has reduced federal transfers to the provinces, cut funding to the public broadcaster, underfunded environmentalist review procedures, reduced old age pensions and dismissed front line public service workers. All of this was done as Finance Minister Flaherty travelled the world boasting of his Government’s success in reducing the impact of capitalist depression in Canada.

All of the progressive forces in Canada have condemned the federal budget as a corporate profit recovery on the backs of the Canadian working class. Harper, Flaherty and Carney simply agree that is just what it is. They boast of attending secret meetings of big business advisors who approved their plans. 

If exposure could make things better for workers, that would have happened by now since the exposures are thorough and well documented.

The discussion needs to go deeper and go to the past to go forward into the future.

What Did Cold War Class Collaboration Lead To?

The chronic and general economic crisis of capitalism continues after the countries comprising world socialism have been converted back to profit systems. Twenty years ago imperialism aided by anti-communists inside the socialist states, overthrew the Soviet Union and the European system of socialist states. Capitalist theorists predicted a new era of global expansion that would lift all boats.

The counter-revolutionary overthrow of the Soviet Union and the European socialist states was supposed to have ushered in a new era of unbridled capitalist expansion that would destroy forever the revolutionary trend in the international working class, and free of communist influence, reintegrate the working class into a dutiful and rewarding partner role within capitalism.

Accordingly the EBRD was set up in 1991 to accelerate the penetration of foreign investment capital in collusion with rogue anti-communist capitalist interests inside the former Soviet Union and the former European Socialist states. The Canadian Government was an active player in the EBRD from its inception and is its eighth highest investor country today. Canadian governments both Liberal and Conservative were heavily involved in bankrolling the rise to power of the capitalist classes of the former socialist states. ^[8]

The western imperialist governments and the international finance organizations that do their bidding, counted heavily on the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and the International Labour Organization (ILO) to assist them to frame economic policies that would pacify and relegate labour in both the former socialist states, the EU and North America, to the tail of state monopoly capitalist plans. The ITUC outdid itself in providing international finance capitalism with advice on how to restore capitalism to socialist states with the expectation they would be rewarded. ^[9]

It is undeniable that the right wing social democratic leadership of the Canadian labour movement was actively involved in that cold war enterprise.  

It didn’t happen that way.

The revolutionary trend in organized labour was not destroyed with the overthrow of the Soviet Union. It has revived and reasserted its class struggle role in other continents and in other countries, led by the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU). The class struggle line of the WFTU was reaffirmed in Athens Greece in 2011 in the Athens Pact Document. ^[10] The WFTU in the Athens Pact elaborated its world view of the struggle of the international working class and its standpoint on the class collaborationist line of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC). ^[11]

The top leadership of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) is unlikely to repudiate or even mildly criticize the class collaborationist stance of the ITUC since it has been actively involved in implementing its line in Canada. However not even the CLC leadership, can now ignore what is happening in the ranks of organized labour internationally and in Canada where dissatisfaction with business as usual trade unionism is being criticized for not measuring up to the new demands of organizing effective resistance to the attacks of the employer and big business investor classes on working class gains.

Something new is stirring in the ranks of organized labour and it will grow, mature and break out of the constraints imposed on independent trade union political action by the deeply ingrained habits of cold war anti-communism. 

That is a long way from asserting that the theories, ideology and practice of social reformism are still not dominant in the Canadian trade union movement. What has been posed by the CAW/CEP New Union Project is the necessity of reviewing business unionism that arose during the cold war with new labour practices of a new type that measure up to the demands of 21^st century class struggles. 

At the root of that process of reassessment are profound differences over what the capitalist system is and whether it can be made to work for wage earners. More correctly: Is the global system of capitalism and its component parts, capable of reform, and should organized labour work within the system to affect that reform or is state monopoly capitalism incapable of further progressive development on behalf of the laboring masses of the world and all labour strategy should be based on the opposing it, overthrowing it, and considering in the greatest detail what should replace it.

The WFTU takes the latter standpoint. Their world view merits respect and consideration. The WFTU predates the ITUC and the ICFTU. The WFTU was created in the aftermath of the defeat of fascism and has demonstrated its partisanship for the cause of the international working class throughout its history.

May Day 2012 Bench Mark for New Struggles!

May Day 2012 will be a bench mark event. Hundreds of millions of workers on all continents will demonstrate their rejection of capitalist government edicts that labour rights must be surrendered, wages reduced, living standards lowered, so banks and corporations can recover and increase profits lost during the 2008 global capitalist depression.

The necessity of a bigger counter-attack on state monopoly capital’s attempt to burden the working class with the consequences of the 2008 global capitalist depression is clear to every aware working class militant.

Without exception, the opposition parties in Parliament share the view of Harper, Flaherty and Carney that capitalism is capable of further progressive development for the common good. Their only difference with the Conservatives is that they have a better plan. All political parties seek electoral support to be better managers of the capitalist system and flee from the suggestion that it needs to be replaced.

Everything that is happening in our country proves the opposite. Unless the system is changed the ruination and despoliation of Canada for the majority of its people is a certainty.

Labour has a better plan. The beginnings of a discussion about what that plan should be has been initiated by the CAW/CEP call for a new strategy for labour.

This May Day is a good time to join that discussion in earnest.

The NDP and Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) top strategists have missed opportunity after opportunity to proclaim a labour program for Canada. The NDP-CLC strategists base their political tactics on an unreasoning trust in an ideal of Parliamentary democracy that does not exist in practice and delegating their independent political action to the NDP. The CLC strategists persist in this folly even when the Harper government demonstrably is the worst enemy of peace and the well being of working Canadians and their families. 

Telling Canadian workers that the Harper Government is inimical to their interests is not a policy it is a lament that doesn’t change anything with the telling.

The NDP-CLC strategists may be incapable, because of their social reformist beliefs to drill down through the media hype to where the problem of the chronic and unrelieved exploited status of Canadians workers lies, in the system of state monopoly capitalism itself.

That is what must be discussed this May Day. How to change the system and what is required to take its place.

May Day 2012 is the time to proclaim Canadian labor’s program for Canada. May Day is the opportunity to advance the slogans and organize mass action to:

• Full employment without inflation.
• Increase wages for all.
• Close the gap between the purchasing power of wages and rising cost of food, housing and transportation.
• Demand insurance coverage equivalent to union wages for the full duration of unemployment.
• Remove and redress all wage inequalities between women and men workers.
• Defend, restore and expand full essential health and pension benefits for all workers, organized or unorganized, working, planning to retire and retired.
• Expand labour rights. Remove restrictions on the right to strike, picket, organize and bargain collectively
• End strike breaking back to work legislation.
• End state violence against students
• Implement First Nations anti-poverty demands.
• Oppose NATO wars and cut the arms budget.
• Struggle to place labor in the political leadership of the country.

The above is a partial list of demands that the International Movement of Communist and Workers Parties (IMCWP) has called upon the workers of all countries to demonstrate for this May Day.

Regardless of where workers are at in their political understanding of their class interests, what the Communists are saying must be taken seriously. The capitalist are listening to be sure. In Europe fascist laws are being revived to suppress the communist leadership of unions.

Communists representing Communist and Worker’s parties from all continents of the globe met together in Athens Greece on December 8-11, 2011 in the midst of a global capitalist depression and NATO wars. The IMCWP statement was addressed to the workers and laboring masses of all countries to unite in struggle in their own class interest, rejecting all attempts of finance capital and social democratic apologists, to integrate the organized labour movement in capitalist solutions to the crisis. ^[12]

The statement was a succinct and profound summing up of the critical tasks facing the international working class in the period of state monopoly capitalism, imperialism. It deserves to be read and studied. 

The statement adopted unanimously by the representatives of all parties attending was more than summation of principles it was a declaration for action summarized in a document entitled “Main Axis of Joint Actions for the Coming Period”.  ^[13]

The history of organized labour in Canada can record many May Day manifestations within which workers regardless of where they were at in their ideological understanding of what needed to be done united to assert their rights and just economic demands.

During the cold war such May Day mobilizations by organized labour were abandoned. That was because right-wing social democracy aligned itself with cold war anti-communism to defeat the militant leaderships of many unions, many of whom were communists, and succeeded in formally aligning organized labour in Canada with the anti-communist International Confederation of Trade Unions (ICFTU) and its successor the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).

The militant revolutionary traditions of May Day in our country were for a time subsumed into class collaborationist trade unionism.  That is changing because its outmoded concepts then and now are inimical to the interests of the working class.

Life is determining what must be done. It is late but not too late.