The Socialist Alternative
by Sebastian Lamb

Second (revised) edition.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Is there a future Socialism?
  
  
  1. From Bad to Worse
  2. The Failure of Capitalism
  3. The NDP's Road to Nowhere
  4. Socialism
  5. One Solution: Revolution
  6. Why the Working Class?
  7. Women's Liberation, Anti-racism and Lesbian and Gay Liberation
  8. Canada, Quebec and the First Nations
  9. Renewing Socialism
  
  
  
• Sources for Further Reading

Introduction: Is There a Future for Socialism?

It is clear to millions of people that poverty, unemployment, hunger and pollution are getting worse everywhere. Capitalism, the system that dominates every country in the world, is not working.

The collapse of the "Communist" East Bloc and the end of the Cold War at the close of the 1980s was not followed by the prosperity and peace that Western leaders promised.

The inability of politicians from any party to tackle social problems is making people more desperate and angry. People have less faith in "the system" than in the past.

But despair and cynicism are also widespread because most people don't think there is any alternative to capitalism. Many understand that the kind of society we live in caters to the rich and powerful, leaving ordinary women and men to struggle to get by. But isn't that the way things always have been and always will be? This pamphlet argues that there is an alternative: genuine socialism.

"Socialism? You must be joking!" is how many react to this claim. Most people think that socialism is what once existed in countries like the former USSR, or what parties like the New Democratic Party stand for. But neither of these has anything to do with socialism, as this pamphlet explains.

Socialism is a society of real democracy and freedom in which people produce goods and services to meet human needs, not to line the pockets of the owners of big corporations. In a socialist society working people would not be bossed around by employers and bureaucrats. The oppression that many groups of people experience today would be eliminated.

At a time when socialist ideas are rarely taken seriously even though they make more sense than ever, it is important to explain what socialism is really about. That is why the New Socialist Group has produced The Socialist Alternative.

The Socialist Alternative argues that getting involved in the fight for socialism isn't a crazy idea. Put simply, it is entirely possible to get rid of capitalism and build socialism. Of course, putting an end to capitalism isn't easy. Socialism is certainly not inevitable. It can only be achieved through a long struggle against those who hold power today. This pamphlet tries to explain that struggle and why everyone who wants to see society change should be a socialist.

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I. From Bad to Worse

From the poorest nations of Africa, Asia, Central and South America to the richest countries like Western Europe, the US and Canada, millions of people's lives are going from bad to worse.

Working harder but getting poorer

From the end of the Second World War in 1945 until the middle of the 1970s, most working people in North America and Europe felt they were doing fairly well. Economic growth was reasonably steady, and it was much easier to find a secure job that paid well. Most workers' living standards got better, and most people expected their children to be better off than they were themselves.

Now all that has changed. In the wake of the third global recession in two decades, unemployment levels in most Western countries are several times higher than they were in the 1950s and 1960s. People who work are also earning less. The real incomes of Canadian workers have fallen by some 15 per cent since 1977. Instead of gaining a little bit every year, many workers are seeing their wages cut or frozen.

Employers, on the other hand, aren't doing badly at all. For example, Lawrence Greenberg, president and chief executive officer of First Marathon Inc., took home $6.9 million in 1993. Matthew Barrett of the Bank of Montreal got a measly $2.5 million in 1995. Top managers, government officials, high-powered lawyers and others at the very top of society continue to grow wealthier while ordinary people find it harder to get by.

In Canada and around the world, there is a clear trend: working people are getting poorer while their bosses are getting richer. It's not just that workers can buy less with the wages they're paid. Whether work means answering telephones, teaching, typing away in front of a computer screen, working on an assembly line, waiting on tables or caring for hospital patients, work is getting tougher.

Many people with full-time jobs have to put in fifty hours a week. Lots of other people are stuck with part-time work. "Downsizing" means that fewer workers are expected to do the work that larger numbers once performed. Shifts are often longer and more likely to be scheduled in ways that disrupt people's lives.

Young people are finding it harder than ever to find work. The well-paying secure jobs that some of their parents had seem to have largely disappeared. Most of the jobs available are dead-end "McJobs": poorly paid, with little in the way of benefits, holidays or job security. Hardly the kind of job that promises a bright future - but this is the future. More and more people in the "new economy" will have these jobs.

It costs money to provide proper safety features, and following safety procedures often requires that work be done more slowly. That's why management so often dispenses with safety on the job. This leads to more health problems, accidents and deaths.

In Canada, four workers die every day from on-the-job injuries. The explosion that killed 26 coal miners at the Westray mine in Plymouth, Nova Scotia in May 1992 showed what the results of putting profits before safety can be.

When people ask the boss for different shifts or speak up about workplace hazards, or when they get together and threaten to take some action like joining a union or going on strike, they discover that there's absolutely no democracy at work. Management's word is final. No matter how stupid or wrong, the boss is the boss.

Even worse, trying to change things at work can get you fired. Then you'd be out of work, and there are a lot of people without jobs these days.

Out of work

Unemployment grinds down the lives of many people who would readily work if only they could find jobs. Factories shut down, stores and offices close their doors. People who have held the same job for years are left to try to support themselves and their families with shrinking "employment insurance" benefits - if they qualify. In 1990 85 per cent of unemployed workers could collect benefits. By 1995 less than 50 per cent could, and that was before another round of cuts by Liberal federal government. If people who lose their jobs are lucky, they find new jobs with poorer wages and benefits.

Even the official unemployment rate, which doesn't count those who have given up looking for work, is around 10 per cent. In some communities the rate is much higher. For instance, on many native reservations, unemployment is over 90 per cent. In reality, two million workers in Canada have no jobs. The level of unemployment is not likely to fall significantly for any length of time.

Unemployment wrecks lives in many ways. Being without work gnaws at people's self-confidence. It leads to violence, as depressed and angry people take out their frustrations on their spouses, partners or children. Sometimes the despair even drives people to take their own lives.

Unemployment wastes the energy and skills of an enormous number of men and women. It's not that there is any shortage of work that needs to be done. But governments everywhere make little attempt to mask their belief that high levels of joblessness are here to stay.

In 1993 Kim Campbell found out what that meant. She proudly took over as Tory Prime Minister from Brian Mulroney and inherited the legacy of the past decade and a half - layoffs, cutbacks and corruption. During the election campaign she declared that there would be mass unemployment in Canada until at least the year 2000. Is it any wonder that she marched the Tories into the worst federal election defeat in Canadian history, one that left them with only two seats in the House of Commons?

Jean Chretien was more clever. He led the Liberals into office in large part by talking about his "Red Book" job creation plan. This helped him camouflage the Liberals' real history as a party that has always been as committed as the Tories to helping the rich and powerful get richer and more powerful - all at the expense of ordinary working people. Now people can see that the Liberals' job plan has meant no more for the unemployed than Mulroney's promises.

The assault on social programs

With so many people out of work, thousands have been forced onto the welfare rolls. Provinces are slashing welfare rates, with Mike Harris' Tories in Ontario leading the way with their 21.6 per cent cut in 1995. A single parent with one school-age child in Toronto can get at most $1149 per month in welfare payments and tax credits. The Social Planning Council of Metro Toronto estimates that such a family needs at least $1651 per month. A single employable person can get $569 but needs at least $1220. The low level of welfare payments has made food banks a permanent feature of many cities, and one in five children belongs to a family living below the official poverty line. Governments are implementing "workfare" programs that force welfare recipients to work for their benefits at rates below minimum wage.

All this is bad enough. But many politicians, corporate leaders and high-ranking government bureaucrats also blame the jobless and the poor for being the cause of their own problems. They rarely say that the reason they are slashing benefits, introducing workfare and cutting people off welfare is to try to force people to accept crummy "McJobs" without complaining.

Moreover, people without jobs are being treated like criminals and blamed for all that's going wrong in society. Before Harris was elected, the Ontario NDP government followed the lead of the Quebec government in hiring welfare cops to pry into the lives of people on social assistance. Harris' Tories added a "snitch line." Politicians claim that the purpose of this snooping is to eliminate "welfare fraud." They would like people to think that there isn't enough money for social assistance because of widespread cheating.

But every serious study shows that such claims about welfare fraud are greatly exaggerated. Even where cases of so-called fraud do exist - like when a single parent brings in $20 from babysitting and doesn't declare it so it isn't deducted from the next month's cheque - they are just ways that low-income people try to make their lives a little less miserable. There's nothing wrong with that.

"Employment insurance" and welfare aren't the only social programs under attack. The federal government is slashing billions of dollars from transfer payments to the provinces and letting them decide what to cut. Education, health care and welfare are all being hit hard. Tuition at colleges and universities is skyrocketing. Hospitals are closing. User fees for health care are on the way.

If politicians are really so concerned about stopping cheating and saving money, why aren't they tracking down and punishing the executives of major corporations who regularly cheat on their taxes? If there isn't enough money to create jobs and maintain social programs, why do governments write off hundreds of millions of dollars in uncollected corporate taxes every year? Why do 60,000 profitable Canadian corporations pay no taxes at all while working people's taxes are rising?

If the U.S. government could spend a billion dollars a day to fight its 1991 war against Iraq - which killed between 100,000 and 200,000 Iraqis - why did it offer only half a billion dollars in aid to Rwanda in 1994? Canada spent $2 billion on its military contribution to destroying Iraq, but gave only two per cent of that to Rwanda.

Why is so much money devoted to waging war abroad when health care, education and public transit services are being cut at home? Why can't steps be taken to end the pollution of the air, land and water? Why do homeless people live on the streets of wealthy countries that can put satellites into space?

Why is life for most people getting worse?

In North America, Western Europe, Japan and other developed countries, millions of people are asking these questions about societies that put profits before people. What they see when they catch the news from other parts of the world is even worse.

The Third World

Deteriorating working conditions and unemployment are found in the many poor countries of Asia, Africa, Central and South America commonly known as the "Third World." But there living standards are appalling, and sinking lower.

The situation in the Third World is extremely bad. For example, in 1994 the World Bank admitted that it will take forty years for African income levels to climb back up to even the very low levels of the 1970s. In truth, even that is probably too optimistic, since for years there has been a net flow of wealth from the Third World to the banks of the developed countries.

In the three decades following the Second World War, most Third World countries gained their independence from the colonial rule of Western states and experienced real economic growth. However, since the early 1970s the world economy has been hit by three major recessions. The weak economies of the Third World have been devastated by falling prices for their major exports. Western banks and institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank encouraged Third World countries to borrow money to finance growth in the 1970s. Unable to pay back their debts and forced to borrow more money just to pay the interest on what they borrowed, most Third World countries are getting poorer every year.

This poverty kills. While thousands of people go to bed hungry in Canada, between 18 and 20 million people die of hunger every year in the Third World. According to the World Bank, there are some 500 million people living in absolute poverty in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In conditions of such misery, diseases that are rare or non-existent in the developed countries flourish, killing millions of people weakened by poor nutrition. Access to clean drinking water, sanitation and electricity are all denied to billions of people.

Yet even in some of the poorest countries, one finds heights of wealth similar to those enjoyed by the rulers of the most developed countries. In most Third World countries there is a tiny class of rich and powerful people who can fly abroad and take holidays in the places where only the very wealthiest Europeans, Japanese and North Americans go.

Knowing all this, it's entirely rational to ask why so many people starve to death or live in utter poverty when there is enough grain grown in the world to provide every person on the planet with 3600 calories per day - more than the 2300 calories required to live a reasonably active life. What's more, food production is growing faster than the world's population.

Unemployment, hunger, disease, war, the destruction of the environment, the growing gap between an immensely wealthy minority and the working majority - these are only some of the horrible features of our world.

However, none of these are natural "facts of life" that we just have to accept as inevitable. These things exist because of the kind of social and economic system that exists around the world: capitalism. This is the system that socialists want to abolish.

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II. The Failure of Capitalism

The most astonishing fact about the world today is that although more wealth is produced every year, inequality gets worse. The productive powers of humanity - our ability to do things like grow food, generate electricity, build roads and houses, invent new technologies and manufacture all kinds of useful things - are expanding. But this isn't making people's lives better. If we want to change this, we have to understand why the world works in such an upside-down way.

The madness of the market

The way capitalism works guarantees that all sorts of utterly irrational things happen.

Take one example. In major North American cities thousands of people are homeless. In the same cities there are many unemployed construction workers and huge office buildings furnished with carpets, heating and air conditioning that sit empty. It's not difficult to imagine how unemployed construction workers could quite easily turn these and other unused buildings into housing for people in need. Why isn't this done?

Government officials have a quick answer. "Of course," they say, "such a scheme is impossible. There's no money." Spokespeople for corporations or professors of economics add "In a market economy, there's no money to be made building homes for people who can't afford to buy them."

Such arguments also arise when it's pointed out that millions of people starve to death even though there is more than enough food stored in North America and Europe than is needed to feed all the hungry. There are 200 million tons of grain alone in storage. Farmers are paid not to farm their fields so that rising productivity doesn't drive prices down.

"There's no demand for food" the experts say. What they really mean is that those who need the food can't pay for it.

This murderous contradiction is one of capitalism's foundations. Goods and services are not produced to meet people's needs. Production is carried out for the profit of the small proportion of people who own and control the factories, offices and other workplaces in which most people toil.

This means that unless you have money, your needs don't count. They don't exist as far as corporations are concerned. It doesn't matter how much you may need food, shelter, a drug to cure a disease, transport to help you search for a job, or a vacation to get away from a job that's driving you crazy. No money? Tough luck.

Capitalism's profit-driven logic also makes it an incredibly inefficient way of producing goods and services. There is no coordination between companies, so there are always several firms competing with each other to sell similar or identical commodities to the same people. That's why capitalism lurches between boom and bust, going through cycles of recession, recovery and recession again.

This leads to wasted resources. Companies can't predict how many units of a particular product will sell. As a result, what tends to happen is that either too many or too few items are made. Supply rarely equals demand. When commodities don't sell they gather dust on shelves or sit in warehouses.

If there aren't enough units of some product available, several companies may end up rushing in to meet the demand. But since they are in desperate competition with each other, they will tend to produce more than they can sell. The result is more waste. Steel rusts in storage and food is burned or dumped into the sea, not because these things aren't needed but because they can't be distributed where they could be used.

Defenders of capitalism say that without competition between many firms in what they call the "free market" there would be no way to guarantee that people get high quality products. They are wrong on two counts.

First, we don't get the quality we're promised. What we often get are goods designed in accordance with "planned obsolescence." In other words, products are made in ways that ensure they don't last as long as they would if the best designs were used. This ensures that companies always have consumers to sell to. Second, competition doesn't equal better quality. It just means we get more or less the same tomato soup or laundry detergent with different labels on the outside.

The market system is also the cause of the ongoing damage being done to the environment. It isn't only the needs that billions of people have for food, water and housing that aren't met under capitalism. We also need a healthy environment. This means a world in which the ozone layer is not so depleted that it's unsafe to spend time outdoors, a world where breathing the air doesn't cause lung problems. What good is it if people have water that is unsafe to drink, or food so full of poisons and emptied of nutrition that it's hardly worth eating?

It is capitalism that is destroying the environment. In a society where profits come first, non-renewable resources are devoured without giving a thought to the future. Pollution won't end under capitalism because corporations and governments won't pay for cleanups or replace "dirty" technologies with cleaner ones that cost more. Government anti-pollution regulations are so feeble that they don't make big corporations change their ways.

Production could be carried out in ways that wouldn't destroy the natural world. But there is no doubt that such a thorough reorganization would require a great deal of scientific research and hard work to implement, and who is going to pay for it? Just as people stay hungry when they can't afford to buy food, the reorganization of society along environmentally-sound lines isn't possible under capitalism because no one is willing to spend money on it.

The capitalist "free market economy" is praised by politicians of all political parties and upheld by corporate executives as a wonderful way of running society. Yet it is clearly a disaster. Where production is driven by the need to make profits many human needs will never be met. The squandering of human talents, the waste of manufactured goods, poor quality products and the destruction of the environment are all inevitable in a market economy.

Class and exploitation

In addition to being a system of production for profit, capitalism is also a society in which people are divided into classes. A class is made up of people who share a common relationship to the way production is organized. In advanced capitalist countries like those of North America, Western Europe and Japan, there are two main classes: the capitalist class and the working class. The capitalist class (also known as the bourgeoisie) includes the people who own and control the factories, offices and other workplaces that socialists call the means of production. Top government officials, judges and generals also belong to this class. These are the people who call the shots in society, the ruling class. There aren't very many of them: in Canada they add up to about 2.5 per cent of the population.

The working class (sometimes called the proletariat) is made up of the vast majority of the population. Everyone who doesn't own or control their own factory or office must sell their ability to work, their labour-power, to the employers. The working class is made up of the people who work for a wage or a salary and who aren't managers.

It doesn't matter if you wear overalls or a suit and tie to work. If you work for somebody else and don't give orders, you're part of the working class. In Canada, that's about three-quarters of the population.

Everybody in between the capitalist class and the working class - people like farmers, small business people, self-employed professionals and lower-level managers - makes up the middle class.

In a capitalist society, the working class sells its labour-power to the capitalist class. What workers receive as wages is the price they are paid for, say, forty hours of work per week. As a factory manager quoted in Bryan Palmer's book Working-Class Experience put it, "We have to buy many commodities... To us labour is just like copper, rubber, steel, paint and so on. It's a commodity that we need. And we're going to buy it for the lowest price we can."

That's what work is all about: the majority selling their ability to work to a minority who control the workplaces. That minority tells mostof us what to do and gets rich off our labour. None of society's wealth could be created without the labour that working people do every day. If workers didn't work, no wealth would be created. You can see this whenever workers go on strike and stop work: nothing happens.

In return for doing the work, workers are paid wages. But - and this is very important - what workers are paid is less than the value of what they produce. The idea that workers receive "a fair day's pay for a fair day's work" is a myth. The difference between workers' wages and the value of the products that they have produced with their brains and hands is pure profit for the capitalists. Just think of the difference between what autoworkers are paid annually and the price of all the cars they produce in a year.

What happens to all this profit that workers have created but capitalists pocket? It is spent by the capitalist class on new machinery, on keeping their workplaces running so they can make more profits, and, of course, on their lives of luxury.

If workers were really paid for all the work they did, there would be no profits for their employers. In short, the capitalist class systematically rips off the working class. This is what socialists call exploitation. It is the key to understanding capitalism.

In addition to being exploited, when workers sell their ability to work to a capitalist they lose control over what they do on the job. There is no democracy at work. Sometimes managers go through the motions about consulting workers, but this is only a sham. Asking workers how to best implement a plan already drawn up by management isn't democracy.

The lack of democracy at work goes further. Working class people are the majority. They create all the wealth in society. But they have no say in what they produce, how it is produced and what is done with it afterwards. Decisions about all these things are made by the capitalist class and their irrational market economy.

Having no control at work means that workers aren't allowed to think on the job. They are only supposed to use their brains to carry out orders from their employers. If workers do come up with ideas about how to do things better they aren't the ones who benefit. For instance, if you find a way to do a certain task faster and management finds out about it, your job won't get easier. Management will just make you do more.

Without the freedom to make decisions at work, workers have little reason to care. If ideas about how to work more efficiently just end up making work harder, there is no motivation to think any more about the job being done than is absolutely necessary. These are some of the consequences of the lack of control that is built into work in a capitalist society - what socialists call alienation.

Exploitation and alienation: that's what capitalism will always mean for the working class.

Is American domination the problem?

There are people who can see that things like unemployment and poverty are terrible but deny that capitalism is the root of the problem. According to the New Democratic Party and the leadership of the trade union movement, too much American influence on Canada - particularly the free trade agreements between Canada, the US and Mexico - is to blame.

The argument that high unemployment, cuts to social programs and growing poverty are caused by American domination and free trade can seem quite convincing. After all, didn't big business and Mulroney's Tory government clamour for free trade. Wasn't the signing of the Free Trade Agreement between Canada and the US in 1989 followed by a wave of factory closings and cutbacks worse than anything since the Great Depression of the 1930s?

But seeing free trade as the cause of all sorts of real problems is like confusing a fever with the disease that causes it.

Of course Mulroney's Tories brought in free trade agreements for their friends in the boardrooms of major corporations. Of course it was right for unions and the left to oppose the free trade deals along with every other part of the corporateagenda.

However, that doesn't mean that free trade is the source of the problem. It isn't free trade or American and Mexican workers that take jobs away from workers in Canada - the capitalist class does.

At the same time that unemployment soared in Canada, hundreds of thousands of workers all around the world were losing their jobs. American and Mexican workers were being laid off in growing numbers, so they were hardly "stealing Canadian jobs" as some have claimed. They too were suffering from the same global recession that hit Canada so hard.

Nor is Canada being taken over by the US. This is an idea that simply doesn't fit the facts. While in 1971 foreign (mainly American) capitalists owned some 37 per cent of the Canadian economy, by the late 1980s their share had dropped to around 25 per cent.

Free trade isn't about selling Canada out to the US. Rather, by putting the finishing touches on the integration of the economies of North America the free trade deals help Canadian and American capitalists compete against their rivals in Europe and the Pacific. The Canadian capitalist class doesn't want to sell the country. Why would they? They're the ones who own most of it and they're doing pretty well for themselves.

Canada is a major power, not a victim of American domination. The rulers of Canada frequently cooperate with their American counterparts because it is in their interest to do so. This cooperation doesn't prove that Canada is run by the US. It's only a sign of the obvious fact that Canada is a smaller and less powerful capitalist country than the US.

Nevertheless, Canadian capitalism is highly developed. Canadian corporations have been expanding outside the country, searching out opportunities to make profits in the US, the Caribbean and elsewhere. Canada is no Third World country.

Those who blame the free trade agreements rather than capitalists and their system are barking up the wrong tree. If free trade had been stopped it would have been a defeat for the capitalist class in North America. However, capitalism would have survived and workers would still have suffered layoffs.

In the late 1980s most of those who opposed free trade thought they had a solution. They claimed that the corporate agenda could be defeated by replacing Tory and Liberal politicians backed by big business with NDP governments.

The election in 1990 and 1991 of NDP majority governments in Ontario, British Columbia and Saskatchewan has tested this strategy. The results have been a disaster.

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III. The NDP's Road to Nowhere

Until recently, most activists who wanted a political alternative to the right-wing parties of big business thought they had one in the NDP, the main force on the left in Canada.

Many dedicated union militants, student activists, feminists, anti-racists, lesbian and gay activists and other people who wanted to change society have looked to the NDP to implement an agenda different from that of the Tories, Liberals and other parties that openly back the corporate agenda. Some thought that NDP governments would bring about substantial changes, redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor. Others, noting that the party's leaders didn't seem very radical, sought to push the party further to the left. Even among those who didn't place all their eggs in the NDP's basket, most thought that NDP governments would at least bring in minor reforms to help working people.

Today, many NDP supporters aren't so sure about the party. Instead of benefiting from the widespread hatred of the Mulroney government the federal NDP was, like the Tories, almost wiped out in the 1993 federal election. Reduced to nine seats, the NDP lost official party status in parliament.

What force was responsible for dealing such a blow to the party that claimed to be opposed to the corporate agenda of the Tories? Why is support for the NDP still so weak when Chretien's Liberals, Harris' Tories and other provincial governments are overseeing mass layoffs and cuts to health care, education, employment insurance and other social programs?

The answer is that the experience of three NDP provincial governments that have behaved in more or less the same way as Tories or Liberals has done tremendous damage to the NDP, the traditional party of the left.

Giving Bay Street a hand: the NDP in government

To the surprise of many, in September 1990 the Ontario NDP swept David Peterson's Liberal government out of office. Bob Rae became the premier of Canada's largest province, and the legislature at Queen's Park became a centre of attention. How far would Rae and the other NDP MPPs - many of them recently active in the labour movement or community groups - go in their fight with big business?

Careful observers soon got a hint. In a speech the day after the NDP's election victory Bob Rae tried to reassure the capitalist class that his party was not going to rock the boat: "Having an economy that provides jobs means having a market that works efficiently and fairly and having a business community that has confidence in the future of the province." The NDP also wouldn't promise to defy the federal government's proposed law restricting women's access to abortion, even though Rae himself had spoken at pro-choice rallies.

A business community confident in the future means one that is satisfied that no attempt will be made to attack its wealth and power. Before long it became clear in what direction the Ontario NDP was heading.

Rae's government initially pledged that it would not listen to the shrill cries from major capitalists and the federal government about the need for harsh cuts in government spending, claiming that it was proud to be fighting the recession and not the deficit. It soon changed its tune.

After a budget without major cuts was announced, a strange sight was seen in the streets of downtown Toronto: a demonstration of Bay Street types in suits and ties, howling for cutbacks. The NDP got the message. To keep the capitalist class happy it had to do more than maintain the status quo, miserable as it was. Instead it had to give Bay Street a helping hand and "govern responsibly." In other words, it had to implement the corporate agenda.

And so it did. In its first year alone the NDP government slashed $75 million from spending on health care and $13 million from colleges and universities. It prosecuted and jailed three activists in the Toronto local of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers for violating court injunctions aimed at breaking their strike. Tuition was increased for university and college students. Promises to bring in a public auto insurance system and 20,000 new child care spaces were broken.

Then in 1993 came the hardest blow. The NDP introduced what became known as the Social Contract, which a columnist in The Globe and Mail described as "one of the most draconian and mean-spirited pieces of legislation to be proposed in recent years."

The Social Contract meant cutting $2 billion from the wages and benefits of over 900,000 public sector workers. Thousands of jobs would be lost, wages would be frozen for three years and all but the most low-paid workers would take a five per cent pay cut.

The NDP gave public sector unions a "choice": opening up their contracts and negotiating cuts of their own members, or having the cuts imposed on them by the government. This meant an end to collective bargaining for about one in four Ontario workers. Union leaders denounced the Social Contract and threatened strike action. However, they refused to organize any real resistance to this massive attack from the party they had long supported.

As if this wasn't appalling enough, the next summer the Ontario NDP sold out on its commitment to equality for lesbians and gays. By refusing to insist that NDP MPPs vote in favour of Bill 167 the NDP helped defeat its own bill. The result was the defeat of a bill which would have granted access to medical and other benefits to same-sex couples and improved legal rights for gays and lesbians.

The NDP's "free vote" policy on this bill was in sharp contrast to the order given the previous summer that all NDP MPPshad to vote in favour of the Social Contract. This "free vote" stance fueled the anti-gay backlash being whipped up by the Roman Catholic Church, the provincial Tories and Liberals and other bigots around the province.

This record is what Bob Rae was referring to when he said in a reflective moment "I've learned a lesson in four years. Don't let your ideology get in the way of common sense." In other words, don't let election-time rhetoric about fighting the corporate agenda get in the way of implementing that very agenda when in government. Ontario finance minister Floyd Laughren made the NDP's commitment to cutting the living standards of workers and the poor quite clear: "We're trying to gear down people's expectations."

By implementing the corporate agenda and promoting the idea that there was no alternative to cutbacks and layoffs, the Rae government paved the way for its own defeat and the election of a Harris' savagely right-wing Tories. Many people figured that if there was no alternative to the corporate agenda, why not vote for the party that seemed most committed to it?

Attacks by an NDP government on working people have not been confined to Ontario. Mike Harcourt's government in British Columbia broke a teachers' strike with legislation forcing the teachers back to work. It brought in a Social Contract-style deal for health care workers in the province. Harcourt's successor, Glen Clark, has cut welfare rates and brought in workfare.

In Saskatchewan, NDP premier Roy Romanow embraced cutbacks like any business spokesperson: "We can no longer have small slices out of programs or readjustments. We are talking about - if I may be rather gruesome about it - amputations of programs."

The NDP's eagerness to serve the capitalist class is not confined to the provinces. In the run-up to the 1993 federal election The Globe and Mail noted with pleasure that "the federal NDP is showing a distinct preference for pro-business economic policies."

This kind of embrace of capitalism isn't new to the NDP. In 1991 the party supported the Canadian military presence in the Persian Gulf. The military was helping to enforce the blockade that aimed to starve Iraq into submission for the sake of the profits of oil companies and the continued domination of the region by Western states. The NDP wasn't against this aggression, it just didn't think the time for war had come yet. When the destruction of Iraq by the air power of the US, Canada and other states began, the NDP refused to join the anti-war movement's call for "Troops Out Now!" NDP MP John Brewin called a Victoria anti-war demonstration "in bad taste and politically wrong."

No wonder that so many NDP supporters who really do want social change left the party in the early 1990s. While some who vowed never to return to the NDP have gone back after seeing Harris elected in Ontario, the party has not changed. Few of the NDP's supporters have high hopes for it.

Why the NDP is a dead-end

The NDP tries to present itself as the party for people who want to at least make capitalism a little less brutal. But in office it has shown itself committed to actively attacking its own supporters and strengthening capitalism. Why does it do this?

The NDP's actions are the result of the kind of party it is. The NDP is a social democratic party, like the Labour Parties in Britain and Australia and the Socialist Parties that exist in most European countries. Social democrats (who when they are trying to appear radical sometimes call themselves "democratic socialists") are committed to making capitalism work, not abolishing it.

The NDP and parties like it are capitalist workers' parties. They depend on the labour movement for funds and activists, but they are loyal to the system that exploits workers.

Their strategy for changing society is simple: promise anything to get elected while trying to maintain a base of support among working people. Once elected, they hope they can govern in a kinder and gentler way than the parties openly backed by big business. They talk about bringing in reforms (which is why genuine socialists often refer to them as reformists) but they have no intention of challenging the exploitation and alienation at the heart of capitalism.

When working people demand radical change, social democratic leaders can sound very left-wing. But most of the time they try to appear respectable and moderate, hoping that this will be enough to get them elected. They try to discourage militant protests and strikes and channel all opposition to the system into support for themselves.

A good example of this was the performance of the NDP in BC when in 1983 the Social Credit government of Bill Bennett announced large cutbacks. Union leaders refused to launch the kind of general strike that could have defeated the government. They arranged a sell-out deal that ended Operation Solidarity, the anti-cuts movement they had formed.

What role did the NDP play in the battle against the cuts? Party leader Dave Barrett gave no support to public sector workers who struck against the government, saying that action "on the streets" wouldn't achieve anything. Other NDPers even stated that their party would be better at controlling the labour movement than Social Credit.

In the 1990s the NDP hasn't been any better. Its leaders have done little to mobilize active opposition to the cuts because they believe politics is about elections every four years and that not much can be done outside of election campaigns except to prepare for the next one.

It's not surprising that social democratic parties behave like this. After all, any militancy they encourage when they're not in government could be turned against them if they get elected. Parties like the NDP want to administer the system, not get rid of it. That's why they don't encourage workers to fight back.

When social democrats actually do get to form governments, they discover that being in office is not the same as holding power. In country after country they have found out that power really lies not in parliament but in the hands of the capitalist class that owns the economy and runs the state.

What social democratic governments can do isn't determined by how radical the ideas in their heads are, but by how well capitalism is functioning. When the economy is doing well, social democrats - or Liberals and Tories for that matter - can deliver reforms.

It was a Saskatchewan government formed by the NDP's predecessor, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, that in 1946 brought in the first public health insurance in Canada. However, federal medicare was brought in by a Liberal government in 1957 after the governments of Saskatchewan, BC and Ontario had shown that business interests weren't threatened by a reform that improved workers' health.

But that was at a time when the world economy was growing as never before. Today governments have to dance to the tune that the capitalist class plays, no matter what their leaders want to do or what their party policies are.

At any time, attempts to make changes that threaten capitalism's priorities are resisted by the unelected top civil service bureaucrats and generals, and by their friends in big business. If necessary, capitalists can always rely on these people to overthrow a government they can't live with. The people of Chile found this out: in 1973 a government of left-wing parties headed by Salvador Allende was overthrown by the military, which slaughtered 30,000 leftists and union activists.

Rae's mistake was to make promises that he knew he wouldn't keep. Other federal and provincial NDP leaders have tried not to raise expectations of change so that fewer people feel betrayed when NDP governments turn out to be not so different from any other government. This is what most social democrats now try to do: keep a progressive image but promise as little as possible.

Some NDPers, disgusted with the party, argue for a new social democratic party. Others think that they can transform the NDP from within by electing new leaders and winning the party to a more left-wing program. Svend Robinson's 1995 bid to lead the federal party and Peter Cormos' challenge six months later for the leadership of the Ontario NDP were supported by NDP members who sincerely want a left-wing party that implements reforms, not the corporate agenda.

But NDP betrayals are not accidents or errors. The right-wing performance of the country's party of the left is not the result of bribes from big business or the fact that party leaders have sold out and accepted pro-capitalist ideas. Because they depend on organized labour, social democratic parties have to present themselves as some kind of alternative to the parties directly tied to big business. But at the same time, the social democratic strategy is to try to change capitalism through the institutions of the capitalist state.

Even a party that talked about a parliamentary road to socialism (as some reformist parties have) would find itself in the same position as Rae, Clark and Romanow - or Allende - because the real power in society lies outside of parliament.

But social democracy's failure does not mean that there is no way to fight capitalism. There is an alternative: socialism from below.

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IV. Socialism

Socialism isn't a very popular idea today. The collapse of the bureaucratic dictatorships in Russia and Eastern Europe that called themselves "Communist," along with the experience of social democratic governments around the world, has gone a long way to making most people think socialism is a terrible idea.

However, the idea that "Communism" and social democracy ever had anything to do with genuine socialism is one of the most mistaken and dangerous myths around. Meeting human needs, not profit

Socialism has nothing whatsoever to do with NDP-style reformism or the monstrous dictatorships that once ruled the former USSR and Eastern Europe.

A country can't be a bit socialist, just like a person can't be partly alive. Having a lot of state-owned industries or social programs isn't socialism. There are only two possibilities. If a capitalist class rules, the country is capitalist. If the working class is in power, the country is a workers' state on the road to socialism. It's that simple.

Socialism is about a society that puts the needs of human beings first. It is about organizing society to meet those needs, not to maximize the profits of a tiny minority. Under socialism the mass of ordinary people themselves, not a tiny capitalist class, would make the important decisions about how society is run.

Socialism means an end to capitalism's market madness. By democratically planning the production and distribution of goods and services in accordance with what is needed, not what is profitable, the labour of millions of people will not be wasted on useless things like ever-deadlier weapons.

Replacing profit making with meeting human needs as the driving principle of the economy would make eliminating hunger, homelessness and poverty around the world a realistic goal. Once the objection "it can't be done - it's not profitable" is removed, there is no reason why the vast quantities of food that currently sit in storage couldn't simply be given to those who need it. If the economies of the Third World weren't being bled dry by the banks of the developed capitalist countries, the people of Asia, Africa and Central and South America would be able to grow enough food to feed themselves.

If the working people of countries whose capitalist rulers have been robbing the Third World for so long were in control of society, real aid could be given to greatly improve the living standards of the billions of people who now live and die in the depths of poverty.

If production wasn't organized by the uncontrolled drive for profit, pollution could be reduced and eventually eliminated. Environmentally-sound technologies could replace destructive ones, and there would be no objections from corporate executives about the cost. Great efforts could be devoted to cleaning up and repairing the damage already done.

Economists and other supposedly smart people argue that this kind of society isimpossible. Economies, they say, are far too complicated to plan. They point to the former USSR as an example of what trying to plan an economy leads to. They also claim that scarcity is a fact of life, and that if people were given what they need for next to nothing, chaos and greed would be unleashed.

These fans of capitalism forget that some services are already available for little cost. Water, for instance, costs very little in Canada, but how many people keep whole tubs full of it around the house just for fun? As a society run by working people developed toward socialism, more and more goods and services would be available for people to draw on as they need, in a way similar to the way water is now. Others would be made as inexpensive and high-quality as possible until they too could be added to the list of things available for free. "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need" is the principle towards which a socialist society would develop.

The enthusiasts of the "free market" who claim that economic planning is impossible also forget that production is already highly organized in capitalist society. A small number of gigantic corporations, some producing more than entire nations, dominate most economies. The operations of such corporations are not left to the whims of the market.

However, socialist planning is not about bureaucrats trying to direct a whole economy from above (as in the former USSR) but about democratic planning from below by working people. Modern computer technology would make this easier than ever to implement.

Real democracy and freedom

"Socialism destroys democracy and crushes freedom" is a common objection. When most people think of socialism they think of bureaucratic one-party dictatorships.

But far from abolishing democracy, genuine socialism is about greatly expanding it. All aspects of society would come under the democratic control of working people. Parliamentary democracy, in which every four or five years people can decide on which party will oversee their exploitation, would be replaced with a much more democratic system of workers' councils.

Delegates to workers' councils would be elected by mass meetings in every workplace. People without jobs could also elect delegates. Unlike MPs today, council delegates could be recalled and replaced at any time. They would receive no more pay or privileges than the average worker. Any party that accepted the council system could participate in the lively debates that would undoubtedly take place in a workers' state.

This socialist democracy isn't a fancy plan thought up by some dreamer. In the course of their revolutionary struggles against capitalism working people have invented and re-invented it, starting with the short-lived 1871 French workers' uprising known as the Paris Commune.

Councils arose, for instance, in the 1905 revolution in Russia and the victorious Russian Revolution of 1917, in Germany and Italy during the revolutionary wave that swept Europe after 1917, and in the revolutions in Spain in 1936, Hungary in 1956 and Iran in 1979.

Work itself would also become democratic. Workplaces would be run by committees elected by everyone who worked there. James Rinehart's book The Tyranny of Work mentions that in 1981 workers at BC Telephone Company took over their workplaces, drove out their supervisors and for six days ran the service themselves. The lesson they learned - "That we don't need management" - would become clear to all under socialism.

Alienation would disappear under this system of workers' control as people decided for themselves how they would organize their work. The argument that people are too lazy to work without being bossed around would be disproved once and for all, since people work best when they care about what they're doing and they themselves control what they're doing. Just think of how much work car-lovers put into their vehicles or how much time and energy some people devote to cooking elaborate meals for special occasions.

Without a parasitic capitalist class always trying to squeeze more out of workers and living off the wealth that they produce, the working week could be shortened. With the end of alienation, everyone - not just a lucky few - could enjoy whatever pastime they were interested in. Free time would be truly free, not just time to recover from being ground down at work. Artistic creativity and the development of human beings' potential would flourish.

In the long-run, all traces of class division and social oppression would disappear. In such a truly socialist society, even the revolutionary state would be dismantled, since state institutions (the police, armies and prisons) only exist so that one class can keep another down. In the words of Karl Marx, socialism would be "a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle."

What was "Communism"?

Socialism isn't anything like the kind of society that used to exist in the USSR and Eastern Europe and still hangs on in some form in a few countries.

Genuine socialists refer to this kind of society as Stalinism. Joseph Stalin was the dictator under whose rule it was first established in the USSR in the late 1920s. In Stalinist countries, power rests in the hands of a ruling bureaucracy that runs the government and controls the state-owned economy. These rulers use socialist rhetoric, twisting the words of genuine socialists like Marx to justify police states where workers are denied even the right to form independent labour unions.

But just because a Communist Party bureaucrat in China wears a pin with a picture of Marx on it doesn't make China socialist. The so-called "Communist" countries were never socialist in any way.

Stalinism first came into existence in the USSR. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the only time that socialist democracy has been successfully established. After an heroic struggle in what was then a very poor country, Russian workers and peasants managed to beat back attempts by their old rulers and many capitalist countries (including Canada) to overthrow their new state.

Tragically, the Russian workers' state remained isolated. Cut off from the rest of the world in an impoverished land, the revolution degenerated. A bureaucracy emerged as the working class was decimated by war and poverty. By the end of the 1920s this bureaucracy had become thoroughly counter-revolutionary and crushed all opposition to its own brutal rule. The only thing that linked the bureaucratic class to the real tradition of socialism was its rhetoric.

After the Second World War, the armies of the USSR imposed Stalinism in Eastern Europe. Despite periodic workers' revolts, these regimes survived until the people of these countries rose up and got rid of their "Communist" governments in the revolutions of 1989-90.

In China, Cuba and other Third World countries Stalinism was established by middle class radicals who led national liberation struggles that toppled cruel and corrupt colonial regimes. Once they took power, these new leaders concentrated power in their hands and as a new ruling bureaucracy tried to industrialize their nations using methods similar to those used by Stalin in the USSR.

No matter how much Stalinist bureaucrats talked in socialist language or were supported by people in other countries who thought of themselves as Marxists, the countries they ruled were no more socialist than the US or Canada.

The idea that these countries were socialist, or at least better than capitalism, held back the cause of genuine socialism for more than sixty years. Now that virtually no one has illusions in Stalinism, an enormous obstacle that stood in the way of building a new socialist movement has been removed.

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V. One Solution: Revolution

It is clear that socialism cannot be achieved from above, through the parliaments of capitalist states or by a minority seizing power "on behalf" of a passive majority. Genuine socialists - supporters of socialism from below - contend that a revolution is necessary to overthrow capitalism and put the working class in power. That's why socialism from below is revolutionary socialism.

What a revolution is

Socialist revolutions cannot be started by socialists. They begin spontaneously when millions of working people who never previously thought of themselves as revolutionaries come to feel they can no longer go on living as they have in the past. They take to the streets in protest, determined to get rid of a hated government or seize stocks of food they cannot afford to buy. They go on strike to press their demands.

As revolutions unfold, workers begin to set up democratic committees to direct the struggle and organize tasks like distributing food when everyone is on strike. These committees can develop into workers' councils, the basis of socialist democracy.

In revolutionary situations all sorts of marvelous things start to happen as the long-suppressed creative energies of millions begin to be unleashed. Everywhere people are hungry for ideas and discuss how society should be organized. For the first time ordinary people feel they really have some say. In the words of V.I. Lenin, the leader of the socialist Bolshevik party in the Russian Revolution (who, contrary to popular belief, was not an evil genius responsible for Stalinism), "Revolution is a festival of the oppressed."

What the experience of revolution does is to transform those who participate in it. People become much more self-confident when they feel their power and realize that they themselves actually brought down a government or drove hated managers out of a factory. Old attitudes bred by generations of subservience and alienation begin to break down. Karl Marx put it well: "revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the old crap and become fitted to found society anew."

Revolutionary uprisings have happened many times this century. Some of the most important revolutions were mentioned earlier in the discussion of workers' councils. Other revolutions or near-revolutionary situations include the French worker and student uprising of 1968, the Portuguese Revolution of 1974-75, Poland in 1981 at the height of the Solidarity workers' movement, and the pro-democracy struggles in China and Eastern Europe in 1989.

It is the failings of capitalism, not socialists, that make revolutionary situations inevitable. But for a revolution to develop to the point where workers come to realize that the only solution is that they themselves must take power, the creativity, courage and determination that millions of people display in revolutions is not enough. For that to happen, socialist organization is critical.

The role of socialists is not to substitute themselves for the working class and make the revolution. Their role is to convince a clear majority of the workers that their class must take power. That doesn't just mean making speeches and distributing socialist leaflets and newspapers. It means leading actions that push the revolution forward so that workers begin to figure out for themselves what they must do.

To do this most effectively, revolutionary workers need to be organized in a party of their own. Such a revolutionary party must not rush ahead with a premature insurrection. If they seek to lead the working class' taking power into its own hands, revolutionary workers must patiently prove to other workers the need to finish off what has already been started. Only when the majority of the working class is convinced about what must be done does the party organize an insurrection.

In all but one of the workers' revolutions that have taken place in the past, revolutionary parties were either inexperienced, too small to be effective or absent altogether. The Russian Revolution of 1917 succeeded where other revolutions failed because in Russia a revolutionary party, the Bolsheviks, had been built in the years of struggle before the revolution. Without a party, a socialist revolution cannot succeed.

Nevertheless, socialists must always remember that workers must free themselves through their own struggles. Even the best socialist workers' party can never be a substitute for the working class.

The only way

The idea of revolution conjures up the idea of a bloody reign of terror, with the massacre of innocent people. For many, revolution means a small band of dedicated conspirators or terrorists seizing power in an undemocratic coup. But that is not what supporters of socialism from below mean when we talk about revolution. What we advocate is a mass uprising of the working class - and, in the Third World, peasants and workers together - which breaks the power of the ruling class and puts working people themselves in power through their radically democratic councils. The economic power of the capitalist class will vanish as workplaces come under the democratic control of those who work in them.

Revolution is necessary because the ruling class will fight any movement that threatens its power with all the forces at its disposal. It will not hesitate to order the police and the military to kill thousands of people to maintain its grip on power. There are all too many examples of this, including the massacre of demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in China in 1989, the execution of thousands in Chile in 1973 and the Finnish ruling class' murder of over 20,000 workers in 1918 to prevent a revolution like the one that had just been victorious in Russia.

The ruling class must be forcibly disarmed. Its main weapon - the capitalist state - must be smashed by a revolutionary insurrection. The purpose of such an insurrection is to dismantle the police, the military, the secret service, the prisons and the rest of the state apparatus. For an insurrection of this kind to succeed, the majority of the working class must actively support it. Working people must also be able to win over most ordinary soldiers (most of whom come from working class backgrounds) to their side.

A workers' state based on socialist democracy can then be firmly established. A new justice system with juries, democratically-elected judges and a militia drawn from the working class and under its democratic control through its councils will replace the old institutions that answered only to the capitalist class.

The experience of past revolutions shows that there is always some bloodshed involved. But violence can be minimized by a high level of unity and organization among the revolutionary masses. A fledgling workers' state would, like the Russian workers' state after 1917, have to defend itself from hostile capitalist countries while the revolution spread to other places. Unless workers in other countries take power and come to the aid of a successful revolution that revolution is doomed to be destroyed by capitalism. The experience of the Russian Revolution showed this all too well.

Capitalism is a world system. To replace it with socialism, world revolution is needed. This does not mean that workers in every country in the world will rise up in revolution at the same time. However, a successful socialist revolution in one country would soon inspire others.

If this sounds too violent, think of the alternative. A successful revolution is much less bloody than one that the ruling class massacres. It takes much less violence for the majority to disarm the tiny capitalist class than it does for that class to terrorize an insurgent people into submission.

Most importantly, the violence involved in revolution is limited to what is needed to finish off a social order built on much greater violence. It would take volumes to list all the violence for which capitalism is responsible. The completely unnecessary death from disease and hunger of millions each year and the murder of young black people in the streets of North American cities by racist police officers are just two examples of the system's violence.

It would be far better for that system to come to a violent end than for it to continue to kill millions while threatening all life with destruction by nuclear weapons or by poisoning the environment beyond the point of no return. Sadly, there is no way to abolish capitalism except through revolution.

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VI. Why the Working Class?

Throughout this pamphlet a lot has been said about the working class as the force that will get rid of capitalism. However, many people, even radicals who hate capitalism and want to tear it down, don't think the working class is up to the task. Workers in Canada and lots of other countries are hardly clamouring for socialism today. So why do socialists see the working class as so important?

The power to break the chains

Socialists are not committed to the working class because we believe that workers are smarter, more left-wing or braver than students (many of whom are also workers) or middle class people. The reason the working class is the key to the fight for socialism is that it is the only force that has the power to overthrow capitalism.

It is the labour of the working class that keeps capitalism going. When working people refuse to work, as they do when they go on strike, nothing gets done unless workers make it happen. The stunning stillness that descends upon a city or country gripped by a solid general strike is the strongest argument against fashionable academics and social democratic leaders who believe that the working class doesn't exist any more.

Despite the popular image of Canada as a sleepy and conservative country, workers here have indeed shown their power. In one famous example, Winnipeg workers shut down their city for six weeks in 1919. Only vehicles authorized by their strike committee were permitted to move through the streets. In thirty towns and cities workers went on strike in solidarity with Winnipeg.

A lesser-known strike wave hit Quebec in 1972, when 300 000 rank and file workers waged spontaneous illegal strikes during a ten day battle with the provincial government. Nine towns were taken over and run by workers, who in some cases occupied radio stations and broadcast revolutionary music.

The working class is both male and female, gay and lesbian and straight, white and people of colour, born in this country and abroad. It is made up of the very poor and the better-paid. It is also an international class that exists wherever capitalism does. It is a class that is still growing across the world. Oil workers in Nigeria and auto workers in South Korea are just some of the many combative groups of workers that capitalism has created around the world in recent decades.

Capitalism brings workers together collectively at work. Workers may sleep, shop and party as individuals in all kinds of different neighbourhoods, but in the workplace they are brought together. It is there that they can unite against their common enemy, the capitalist class. Capitalist competition continually drives employers to try to squeeze more out of workers, and this can sometimes make previously timid people fight like tigers.

Because of what the working class does, the strike is the most powerful weapon workers have. As Rosa Luxemburg (a Polish-German socialist murdered at the orders of the German social democratic government in 1919) argued, the chains of capitalism must be broken where they are forged: in the workplace.

It is in the workplace that workers are strongest. For socialists, the over 100,000-strong labour demonstration in Hamilton against Harris' Tories in February 1996 was an important show of force. However, the thousands of workers in the region who went on an illegal strike the day before dealt a more powerful blow to the Tories and Bay Street. In November 1995 an illegal strike of 120 laundry workers in Calgary sparked a week of walkouts by 3500 Alberta health care workers. This made "unstoppable" Tory premier Ralph Klein blink and cancel $53 million of cuts. In late 1995, 2.5 million public sector workers in France struck against cutbacks in a movement that shook the country and won concessions from the government.

Socialists support and participate in strikes and other workers' struggles in the hope that the workers involved will win as much as they can. But strikes are also important for another reason: struggle is the most important way working people learn about their own power and about the system they're up against. As a result of their experience of collective struggle, workers' ideas change. They can become more self-confident, more united, more ready to fight their own boss again and to support other workers' struggles. And just because socialists have an understanding of capitalism in general doesn't mean we don't also have a lot to learn from the battles workers are fighting today.

When workers mobilize they can also begin to break with the many reactionary ideas fostered by everyday life and by the media, the school system and religion. These include ideas about the inferiority of women, lesbians and gays and people of colour, and the idea that the police and the courts are neutral representatives of society. All of these ideas weaken the working class and hold back workers' struggles. For instance, how can white workers win a strike if their racism separates them from workers of colour in the same workplace? The experience of striking can teach workers important lessons about the need for unity and whose side the police and courts are really on.

When people argue that the working class as it exists today couldn't possibly overthrow capitalism, socialists agree. It is only through the experience of mass struggles against the system that workers can organize themselves as a class movement that fights for its own interests, become aware of the need to get rid of capitalism and organize themselves for revolution. This is the only way that workers can free themselves.

Eugene Debs, an American railway unionist who became a socialist after the state broke his union's strike, expressed the belief of every genuine socialist when he declared: "Too long have the workers of the world waited for some Moses to lead them out of bondage. He has not come; he never will come. I would not lead you out if I could; for if you could be led out, you could be led back again. I would have you make up your minds that there is nothing you cannot do for yourselves."

This is the central idea of socialism from below. Marx, who first developed this idea, summarized it in the words "the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working class themselves." The only genuine socialism is socialism from below. It is the complete opposite of the elitist belief held by many on the left that a dedicated minority of politicians, guerrillas or a party of Marxists can hand down liberation to the masses from above. Supporters of socialism from below recognize that only the working class has the power to overthrow capitalism and that working people must free themselves.

Unions

For as long as they have been exploited under capitalism, workers have come together in collective class organizations, trade unions, to defend themselves. Unionized workers are better able to resist employers' attacks on their wages, benefits and working conditions and to fight to improve them.

However, struggles over how much workers are paid cannot abolish exploitation. Such battles, which will go on as long as capitalism exists, only determine the price for which workers sell their ability to work. Exploitation can only be ended when workers seize control of their workplaces and get rid of the capitalist class and its system.

Workers need unions. Unfortunately, unions in Canada and most other countries have become bureaucratic machines. A layer of full-time officials has grown up at the top of the union movement. They form a bureaucracy that negotiates the price that capitalists pay for the labour-power of union members. What unions can legally do has become highly restricted by all sorts of laws designed to prevent and control militant action by workers.

Union full-timers are far away from the workplaces where their members work. They don't have to deal with the pressures that workers face on the job every day. What matters most to them is the survival of the union machine. Without it, they wouldn't have jobs. Consequently, no matter what their politics are, union bureaucrats tend to play a conservative role. Even when they make militant speeches or lead strikes, the union bureaucracy is always looking for ways to compromise with the employers. They usually hate workers' action that breaks the law because they can be held responsible and fined or jailed.

The union bureaucracy isn't against capitalism. This isn't surprising, since it isn't in their interest: if capitalism was abolished union bureaucrats wouldn't be needed because there would be no bosses to negotiate with. In Canada, most bureaucrats support the NDP, which they fund with the dues of their members so they can have a political voice.

Because of what the bureaucracy exists to do, it isn't interested in challenging alienation either. For decades most union contracts in Canada have included a "management rights" clause that gives employers almost total control over what happens in the workplace. This is the union's blessing of the boss' authority.

Despite their conservative role, union leaders aren't capitalists. They do go out of their way to avoid strikes and confrontations with the employers and the state - even to the point of accepting outrageous wage and job cuts without a fight, as Public Service Alliance of Canada leaders did in 1995 when faced with the loss of 45,000 federal government jobs, the biggest mass layoff in Canadian history.

But because they are not completely cut off from pressure from the rank and file union members whose dues pay their salaries, and because they sometimes need to show employers that they have to be bargained with, bureaucrats will sometimes lead strikes. When they do, they almost always refuse to challenge laws which force unions to fight with one hand tied behind their backs, as the Ontario public service strike of 1996 showed clearly.

Socialists want workers to have the strongest unions possible. That means a membership that is active, united and able to fight the employers and win gains. That also means rank and file organization in the unions of workers prepared to act independently of the union bureaucracy and challenge the official leadership whenever they get in the way of workers' struggles.

For that reason, we don't see electing left-wing union leaders as the key way to make unions fight. Although socialists in unions will vote for left-wing candidates for union office, they argue that left-wing full-timers cannot be relied on.

The sad truth is that even the best militants can be tamed when they become part of the union bureaucracy. One example is Jean-Claude Parrot. Once a radical who came to head the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW), he went to jail in 1978 for refusing to tell CUPW members to obey an anti-union law. By 1987 he was telling cleaners on strike in Toronto's main postal terminal that CUPW members had to cross their picket lines. Now a vice president of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), he is part of the labour leadership that has yet to organize a serious action campaign against attacks on workers by capitalists and the state.

Parrot was once committed to class struggle, but the pressure of being part of the union bureaucracy changed him. This shows why socialists have a different strategy for building a fighting union movement. The priority of socialist unionists is organizing networks of rank and file activists in the unions, not electing new leaders at the top. These groupings of shop stewards and other militants can try to push the union leadership to act in workers' interests. However, they must be prepared to organize independently of the official leaders to lead whatever action is needed, even if this means breaking anti-union laws.

Today the rank and file networks that existed in many Canadian unions in the 1970s have disappeared. Most militants feel isolated and on the defensive. But there is no substitute for the task of promoting solidarity and patiently building networks of activists. That's the only way unions can be turned into organizations that truly serve workers in their struggles under capitalism.

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VII. Women's Liberation, Anti-racism and Lesbian and Gay Liberation

Capitalism exploits the working class. It also oppresses many other groups of people (most of whom are also workers). Women suffer sexism. People of colour, immigrants, Jews and francophones in English Canada face racism. Lesbians and gays are the targets of bigotry. Young people suffer discrimination, as do people with disabilities. Oppression takes different forms, from beatings to demeaning "jokes" to being unable to find a decent job because of discrimination.

Members of oppressed groups are oppressed regardless of the class they belong to. For instance, a woman who works at the top of a major corporation may be raped by her husband, and so may the cleaning woman who cleans this capitalist's office at night. A middle class black man may be pulled over by the police because they think he must have stolen his expensive car.

But not everyone who is oppressed suffers equally. It is much easier for a capitalist woman to leave her husband and get an apartment on her own than it is for a woman worker, who is less likely to be able to pay for an apartment for herself and her children. Gay and lesbian lawyers can be more open about who they love than gay and lesbian secretaries who fear getting fired if a bigoted boss finds out they're not straight.

Socialists are opposed to every form of oppression, no matter who it affects. We are for the most vigorous fight possible against oppression in the here and now. We don't tell oppressed people to "wait until after the revolution and everything will be all right," as some on the left have said.

Oppressed people resist and organize themselves in response to the conditions they face, just as workers resist exploitation and alienation at work. Supporters of socialism from below celebrate and work to strengthen the social movements that oppressed groups organize. We realize we have a lot to learn from them, just as we have a lot to learn from workplace struggles.

However, that doesn't mean that socialists always agree with the strategies for fighting oppression put forward in movements of the oppressed. While socialists are happy to cooperate with activists who aren't socialists in today's struggles, we believe that oppression divides and weakens the working class and that it needs to be fought in a way that builds unity and solidarity. As long as capitalism exists, so will different forms of oppression.

Let's take a look at the socialist approach to fighting three kinds of oppression.

The struggle for women's liberation

Women have been oppressed since societies divided into classes first developed thousands of years ago. When Europeans arrived in North America, some of the aboriginal peoples they encountered lived in classless societies in which women and men were equal. The European settlers soon put an end to that. Today sexism is something women experience on a daily basis, at home, at work, at school.

Although most women work outside the home for less money than men, women are also expected to do the bulk of the work inside the home. Cooking, cleaning and child-care are mostly done by women for free. Even in countries like Canada, where some claim sexism is a thing of the past, not all women have easy access to the safe and reliable birth control and abortion they need so they can decide if and when to have children. Sexual assault and violence against women are a terrible reality in many women's lives.

Since the end of the 1960s, a women's movement has developed in Canada and elsewhere. It has fought for equal pay, for access to safe and legal abortion, against sexual assault and for other important reforms. Socialists support all struggles of women against oppression and defend the women's movement against right-wing attacks. But we have a different perspective than most feminists because we believe that revolution is necessary for women's liberation.

Some feminists concentrate on winning rights for women through the court system and by lobbying politicians. Although this strategy has allowed some women (mostly in the middle and capitalist classes) to get better jobs, it cannot end the oppression of women. After all, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms says women are equal, but sexism hasn't disappeared.

This approach doesn't see how the courts and the rest of the state are actually part of the system that oppresses women. Despite the importance of securing reforms that help women today, no strategy that relies on politicians and judges can win major gains. Nor does such a strategy mobilize women to take to the streets or go on strike to win their demands - the kinds of action that socialists encourage. It just aims to make capitalism less sexist.

Other feminists agree with much of this socialist criticism, but argue that because all men have a stake in keeping women down the fight for women's liberation must be waged only by women. Socialists disagree. We understand that women will lead the fight for their own liberation, but we don't see the fight for women's liberation as a struggle against all men or male power.

It's clear that some people benefit from women's oppression: the capitalist class saves billions of dollars by not having to pay for all the unpaid work that women do in the family. Unpaid work in the home keeps capitalism going by covering much of the expense of raising the next generation of workers and making sure that workers are fed, clothed and able to go to work the next day. So ruling class men - and ruling class women - have a direct interest in keeping women oppressed. They also benefit from the divisions that sexism creates amongst working people, pitting them against each other instead of against capitalism.

Working class men, on the other hand, don't really benefit from women's oppression. Some get their meals cooked and their clothes washed because sexist ideas and practices pressure women to do most work in the home. Yet male workers suffer from the damage that sexism does to their class' strength and unity.

Miners working for Inco in Sudbury learned this when the company successfully turned women against their striking husbands in order to defeat a 1958 strike. But in the long 1978-79 strike a group called Wives Supporting the Strike organized pickets, mutual aid and educational activities to build a united fight of women and men against Inco. As a result, many women became more self-confident and gained a sense of the potential power of working class struggle. Many male miners learned that they had to unite with women to challenge the power of the company.

It is in the interest of all workers to end women's oppression. To do this, women must be freed from the burden of unpaid work in the family. That's only possible if capitalism is overthrown and free community laundries, restaurants and child care made available. Women must also have full control over their own bodies. Dramatic steps in this direction were taken after the Russian Revolution, but Stalinism destroyed the gains women had made.

Socialism and women's liberation cannot be won without the real unity of men and women workers. This means that the fight for socialism must include an active fight against every form of sexism today.

The fight against racism

Racism is a fact of life for many people in Canada. Everyone who doesn't "look white" knows what's it like to be treated as an inferior, no matter where they were born or what language they speak. Some people who do "look white," such as most Jewish people, European immigrants who speak little English and francophones in English Canada, are also the targets of racist abuse.

Black people are often harassed by the police and treated with suspicion. They can be murdered by police who are almost never found guilty of any wrongdoing. Like many women, many people of colour are trapped in dead-end low-paying jobs. They are often seen as foreigners even if their families have lived in Canada for over a hundred years. Nazis and other thugs assault people of colour on the streets.

How can racism be challenged? Governments and many of the middle class leaders of the communities that face racism argue that racism can be fought with public relations campaigns that promote the idea that prejudice is bad. This greatly underestimates how deep the roots of racism really go. Racism is about more than wrong ideas or bad attitudes in the heads of some people. As the black militant Malcolm X said, "You can't have capitalism without racism."

Racism - the idea that some people are inherently inferior to others - arose in the 1600s to justify the enslavement of Africans by the rulers of Europe. Slavery was the source of enormous wealth for them at the time that capitalism was developing. Immigrant workers have long been used as cheap labour. The Chinese workers who built the railroad across Canada in the 1880s are but one example.

Today racism persists because capitalism pits workers against each other in the scramble for jobs, housing and other opportunities. Racism appeals to white workers by giving them a false sense that they're superior to someone else and should be thankful for not being at the bottom of the heap.

Racism hurts - and sometimes kills - people of colour. It is also against the real interests of white workers, just as sexism holds down male workers. Racism allows capitalists to pay workers of colour less than white workers. Capitalists can then use their low wages as a way to get white workers to accept less for fear of losing their jobs. Only the capitalist class benefits from this arrangement. The nineteenth century black anti-slavery activist Frederick Douglass summed up this strategy in the phrase "They divided both to conquer each."

So how should racism be fought? Socialists disagree with the strategy of those who condemn racism but claim that whites will always be racist. Such people sometimes concentrate on developing businesses in communities of colour. A strategy of separating off from the rest of society may benefit some middle class people of colour, but it doesn't help most of those who face racism on the streets and at work and school.

The socialist strategy for fighting racism is also different from that of radicals who want to fight the racist system but believe that whites can't be part of the anti-racist struggle. Socialists argue that whites can and must be challenged to put themselves on the line in the fight against racism.

Socialists support all people of colour against racism even if we disagree with some of their political ideas. We help to organize militant multiracial campaigns and demonstrations against racist attacks, the racist state and Nazi violence. We try to bring anti-racism into the unions and other organizations we work in. These are steps towards building a united working class struggle against racist capitalism.

Lesbian and gay liberation

People who love people of the same sex are oppressed by anti-gay and lesbian bigotry (heterosexism). Many gays and lesbians are forced to hide their feelings and live their relationships in secret for fear of losing their jobs or homes or being rejected by their families. Those who do come out of the closet find that their relationships aren't treated equally by the law and most employers. Abuse ranging from anti-gay remarks to bashing is common. The police are no more help to lesbians and gays than they are for people who face racism.

Since the birth of the gay and lesbian liberation movement following the Stonewall Riot in New York in 1969, more and more lesbians and gays have decided to live openly and proudly as who they are, showing that there is nothing wrong with being lesbian or gay.

Lesbians and gays have had to fight to simply have legal and public relationships. They have responded angrily to harassment of their community's bars, clubs and bookstores. Gays and lesbians have led the fight for better treatment for people with AIDS and for popularizing safer sex, in opposition to the heterosexist backlash whipped up since the start of the AIDS crisis.

Socialists take up the call of the lesbian and gay liberation movement of the early 1970s for sexual liberation: all people should be able to express their sexuality in whatever way they want, so long as those involved give their consent. We are opposed to the state, the church or anyone else regulating sexuality, and we fight for the freedom of lesbians and gays to live openly without fear.

Lesbian and gay liberation cannot be achieved, however, by retreating into the gay ghettos found in large cities. Nor is electing lesbian and gay politicians and lobbying governments enough.

The ghetto is a place where lesbians and gays can try to temporarily escape from harassment. But it doesn't do much for those who can't afford to live or hang out there. The lobbying strategy of some gay and lesbian rights groups has failed to win legal equality. For example, this strategy was powerless to prevent the Ontario NDP government from caving in to bigotry and refusing to pass its same-sex spousal rights and benefits bill in 1994.

Socialists recognize that the oppression of lesbians and gays is a result of capitalism's compulsory heterosexual nuclear family system. Getting rid of capitalism would uproot the family system that is the basis of lesbian and gay oppression as well as the oppression of women.

Scares around alleged threats to "family values" are used by right-wingers to scapegoat women and gays and lesbians who refuse to be passive and obedient. Such scapegoating is intended to get people to blame oppressed groups for the problems capitalism creates. Like lies about crime waves caused by immigrants, witch-hunts against lesbians and gays serve to intimidate anyone who wants to challenge oppression.

The socialist response to scapegoating is to pin the blame on the real criminals, the ruling class. We work with community groups to organize demonstrations that bring together lesbians and gays with straights who want to fight for lesbian and gay rights. We try to get unions to take action in support of gays and lesbians.

Winning labour support is not a pipe dream. In May 1994 the Canadian Labour Congress adopted a policy statement that declared "The labour movement can and should play a key role in the achievement of lesbian, gay and bisexual rights." The next month union leaders spoke out against the Ontario NDP government when it let its same-sex spousal rights bill be defeated. Some unions in Canada have been able to win benefits and protection from discrimination for lesbian and gay workers.

It is vital to push unions to act on their promises and actively combat the oppression of gays and lesbians. Together with militant movement organizing against heterosexism, such efforts can forge greater working class unity and take a step in the direction of socialism and lesbian and gay liberation.

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VIII. Canada, Quebec and the First Nations

Another kind of oppression is that experienced by nations oppressed by other nations. Two of the better-known examples are the Palestinians, who still don't have a real state of their own, and East Timor, which was conquered in 1975 by Indonesia. However, the oppression of one nation by another doesn't just exist overseas. The Canadian state, "the true North strong and free," isn't as free as it claims. It was founded on the conquest of native peoples and Quebec.

The First Nations

The over one million aboriginal and M�tis (people of mixed French and native ancestry) inhabitants of this country have been oppressed since European colonists arrived in North America. Today First Nations people face racism every bit as bad as that against people from Africa, Asia or the Caribbean. They are denied the right to govern themselves on the land that once was theirs. Unemployment is 90 per cent or more on some native reserves. Poverty and sickness are rampant. Little wonder, then, that the suicide rate amongst natives is more than three times higher than the Canadian average.

French and British settlers stole land from aboriginal people from the earliest days of the colonies that eventually became Canada. Many natives were killed by diseases brought from Europe to which they had little immunity. In the years after Confederation native people were driven off most of their land and into reserves that they couldn't leave without permission - a system later studied by South Africa's white rulers when they were organizing their racist apartheid system. The terms of the Indian Act dictated that natives who didn't live on reserves would lose the status and rights granted them in the Act.

Native people were forcibly converted to Christianity and ordered to speak English. Missionaries and teachers tried to prevent them from preserving their culture. Their traditional religious items were taken away and put on display in museums where visitors would be shown the artifacts of so-called "savage Indians." For most of the 20th century natives were generally thought of as members of a broken and dying people, victims of the development of modern Canada. On and off the reserves, most lived in dire poverty. Contact with whites generally meant having to endure vicious racism.

In the late 1960s the struggle for black liberation in the US inspired a "Red Power" movement amongst North American aboriginal people. In Canada, Red Power militants organized a 1974 protest caravan to Ottawa and other actions in their fight for land rights and self-government for the oppressed native nations.

This aboriginal movement gave rise to the Assembly of First Nations, the Native Council of Canada, the Inuit Tapirisat and other organizations. For years these groups have been involved in long and drawn-out negotiations with federal and provincial governments. Natives had to force governments to join them at the negotiating table. However, negotiations have won only a few limited gains. More militant First Nations activists have organized themselves in groups like the Mohawk Warrior Society to defend native people from police harassment and to assert aboriginal sovereignty over their land.

The 1995 killing of Anthony (Dudley) George by police during the occupation of Ipperwash Provincial Park in Ontario, like the 1990 police attack on Mohawk activists defending land near Oka, Quebec and the 78-day siege mounted by the army and police that followed, have shown many people that the Canadian state is not the peace-loving and fair-minded institution portrayed in school textbooks and Canada Day celebrations. Ipperwash and Oka prove that Canada's rulers are prepared to use force against First Nations people who decide to fight for their rights.

Quebec: an oppressed nation

The oppression of the First Nations is better understood by radicals in English Canada than the oppression of Quebec. Although the Qu�b�cois certainly don't live in conditions like those on native reservations, Quebec is an oppressed nation.

In the 1608 the King of France gained a new colony in North America. French settlers led by Samuel de Champlain founded New France in what is now southern Quebec. In 1759, New France was conquered by British troops in one of the many wars of the time. Ever since then the people known today as the Qu�b�cois have been oppressed. They have been denied the right to freely decide for themselves what kind of relationship to have with English Canada.

The British ran their newly acquired colony through a French-speaking elite, but it was English-speakers who were in control. In 1837-38, francophone radicals led an armed uprising for democratic rights that was violently put down by British soldiers. The rebellion's leaders were executed and many others deported. By 1867 Canadian capitalists were strong enough to press for a state of their own with more independence from Britain. Quebec became one of several provinces. But it was not a province like the others. It was an oppressed nation whose French-speaking Roman Catholic majority was ruled by a largely English-speaking Protestant elite.

Outside of Quebec, the francophone minorities in New Brunswick, Ontario and other parts of English Canada were often treated as second-class citizens. It was not uncommon for them to betold to "speak white" - proof that they too faced racism.

In 1885 francophone M�tis and natives on the Western prairies rose up to fight for their rights. Their rebellion was crushed by Canadian troops. Louis Riel, their leader, was hanged. Many Qu�b�cois made their feelings clear by showing support for Riel. Large numbers of Qu�b�cois were also opposed to taking part in the First and Second World Wars, wars fought for governments in Ottawa and Britain which didn't represent them.

The "Quiet Revolution" of the 1960s saw the birth of the modern Quebec nationalist movement. Led by middle class intellectuals, some of whom later formed the Parti Qu�b�cois (PQ), the Quiet Revolution aimed to strengthen the Quebec economy, reduce the power of the Catholic church in Quebec and make it possible for the francophone majority to speak their own language at work and at school. Some pressed for independence from Canada. This movement helped fuel the struggles of Quebec workers against their employers.

Some Quebec nationalists went further. Inspired by Third World struggles against colonialism, the small Quebec Liberation Front (known by its French initials as the FLQ) began a campaign of planting bombs and kidnapping leading government officials to win independence. In 1970 the federal government reacted by suspending civil rights under the War Measures Act and sending the army into Quebec. Over 450 nationalists and leftists were arrested. Most had no connection to the FLQ. Pierre Trudeau's Liberal government in Ottawa claimed in public that there was going to be an insurrection in Quebec, but in private the politicians didn't actually believe this wild claim. The real purpose of the occupation of Quebec was to teach the Qu�b�cois that the federal state was boss.

Since the 1970s the Qu�b�cois have tried to win more rights for francophones within Quebec, and for Quebec within Canada. Some gains have been made by Quebec francophones, such as the right to speak French at work. But the persistent hostility to Quebec in English Canada has convinced many Qu�b�cois to support separation.

The latest round of conflict began in 1988 when the Canadian state interfered in Quebec's affairs by overturning part of the law passed to ensure the right of francophones to speak French in Quebec. This revived the nationalist movement that had been on the defensive since it lost the Quebec sovereignty-association referendum of 1980.

The constitutional debates of the 1990s have been fueled by the fact that the federalist Liberal Party of Quebec was unable to get the federal government to grant Quebec even token recognition of the "distinct society" status it was denied in the 1982 Constitution. This led to the rise of the Bloq Qu�b�cois in 1993, the election of another PQ provincial government and the sovereignty referendum of 1995, which the PQ-BQ alliance nearly won. None of this would have happened if Quebec was not an oppressed nation denied its right to self-determination.

Socialists and nationalism

Supporters of socialism from below are internationalists, not nationalists. Nationalism is a ruling class idea that hides the class divisions in society. It fosters the illusion that workers and the capitalists who exploit and oppress them have common interests because they both belong to the same nation.

However, not all nationalisms are the same. The nationalism of oppressed nations like Quebec and the First Nations is different from the nationalism of an oppressor nation like Canada.

Although the leaders of the NDP, unions bureaucrats and most of the left deny it, Canada is an imperialist country. It oppresses Quebec and the First Nations. Along with the US, Japan, Britain, France and other imperialist powers it participates in the oppression of Third World countries. Canada is not an American colony, but one of the most advanced capitalist countries in the world. Canadian nationalism is the ideology of Canada's ruling class, and it is always reactionary.

The nationalisms of Quebec and the First Nations are different. Because these nations are oppressed, their efforts to get more decision-making power bring them into conflict with the English Canadian ruling class. This weakens Canada's rulers, and a weaker ruling class is an advantage for the working class. For that reason, socialists give their unconditional support to the struggles for self-determination of the First Nations and Quebec, up to and including independence if they so choose.

There is another important reason why socialists do this: to cut against the anti-Quebec and anti-native ideas that many workers accept. Like racism against immigrants, nationalism divides the working class and weakens its ability to fight the capitalist class. Unless Qu�b�cois and native workers see that English Canadian workers support them, they won't be convinced to ally with fellow workers instead of the bosses of their own nations.

But this attitude doesn't mean that socialists are not critical of the politics of the Quebec and First Nations nationalist movements. Both the PQ and aboriginal leaders have shown that they are happy to try to wring more rights from Ottawa at the expense of each other. Neither is interested in the needs of working people.

The PQ's nationalism has pitted it against immigrants and aboriginal people living inside Quebec's borders. Some leaders of the First Nations have joined in the attacks on Quebec's right to decide its own future. Several have supported the idea of calling on the Canadian army - the same force that besieged the Mohawks near Oka - to come to the defense of First Nations in Quebec if Quebec chooses independence. Only the English Canadian ruling class benefits from such conflicts between oppressed nations.

Setting up new capitalist states is not a solution for working people. Being exploited by capitalists in an independent Quebec would be no improvement for workers there. Likewise, only a few privileged aboriginal leaders would benefit if self-governing but still desperately poor First Nations territories were established.

The working people and the poor of Quebec and the First Nations will not find solutions to their problems in nationalism. Their hope lies in a united struggle with workers in English Canada, who must take up the fight for the right of both oppressed nations to determine their own future.

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IX. Renewing Socialism

To get progress towards freedom and plenty for the bulk of humanity, capitalism will have to go. Socialism is necessary. Working people will have to make a revolution to free themselves from the chains of exploitation and oppression. That much is clear. But what should people who agree with the ideas of socialism from below do right now?

In order to show people who aren't socialists that the strategy of socialism from below is the best way to change the world, socialists need to be able to explain their ideas to others in a persuasive way and put them into practice in the resistance going on today. To do this effectively, socialists need to be organized. But how should socialists organize in Canada today, when the socialist movement is very small and has little credibility?

The left in Canada used to be dominated by the NDP and the small Stalinist Communist Party. The NDP has lost many of its activist members and supporters. The fall of Stalinism broke up the Communist Party. Many young and older people who once would have been drawn to the left now see no left-wing alternative.

The old left collapsed because it didn't understand two simple things: the so-called "Communist" countries weren't in any way socialist, and parties like the NDP will inevitably attack their working class supporters when in office and won't lead a serious fight against the corporate agenda when in opposition.

As a result, much of the left is in total confusion at the very time when there is a crying need for activists to organize resistance to the unemployment, cuts and scapegoating bred by capitalism.

Some socialists who reject the NDP and Stalinism believe that because a revolutionary party is needed for a revolution to succeed, socialists must organize themselves as a tiny version of what they imagine such a party would be. This is a mistake. Pretending to be a miniature party leads many such socialists to treat their little group - not the working class - as the centre of socialist politics. A socialist workers' party can't be built if there aren't thousands of revolutionaries in the working class. In Canada and most other countries today, no such vanguard layer of workers exists.

Instead, supporters of socialism from below need to organize in a group that helps them spread socialist ideas and be more effective activists. Such a group needs to dedicate itself to renewing socialism. What's needed is a new socialist movement which both involves more people and is developing a better understanding of capitalism and the working class and how they are changing at the end of the twentieth century. Socialists need to take part in the movements and struggles happening today against the ruling class' offensive. In this way they can contribute to the eventual emergence of a new vanguard of socialist workers and a real socialist party.

In order to do this, a socialist group has to be firmly committed to socialism from below. But its members also need to be honest about the fact that they don't have answers to every political question in advance.

What socialists can do is learn and develop the analysis of the real Marxist tradition of socialism from below: the theories developed by socialists like Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, V.I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Antonio Gramsci. These ideas have inspired this pamphlet. The writings of these revolutionaries are not holy books that contain the answer to every question. All of these socialists contributed brilliant insights, but they lived and fought in an earlier time when the socialist movement was stronger. They all made plenty of mistakes too. By using what is most valuable in the ideas they came up with in response to the struggles of their times, today's socialists can better understand the world we live in. Without a clear understanding of the world, how can we hope to change it?

Too many people have been turned off socialism by the arrogance, dogmatism and undemocratic ways of socialist groups that pretend to be more important than they really are and have easy answers to every question. A group that wants to renew socialism needs to be democratic, honest about its real strengths and weaknesses, open-minded, and flexible in the way it organizes.

We in the New Socialist Group (NSG) are working to build such an organization in Canada. We produce the magazine New Socialist as a voice for socialist analysis of what's going on here and in other countries, to explain socialism in a way that people today will enjoy reading, and as a forum for debate and discussion on the left. Our members include activists in the unions, the student movement and other social movements.

If you agree with the ideas in this pamphlet, we invite you to join us.

It doesn't matter what your age is, how many years you've been to school or how much money you have. You shouldn't feel that you can't join the NSG because you haven't read enough about socialism. This pamphlet outlines what we stand for, and there's plenty of time to learn more. Don't let a busy life prevent you from joining: both unemployed students with lots of free time and working people with children are needed in the struggle for socialism! What's important is that you want to be part of building a socialist alternative. Being an active socialist isn't only for a select few.

We need the different talents and ideas that people have. Everyone who joins the NSG can play a role. Everyone can help circulate the NSG's magazine New Socialist, whether at demonstrations, on the streets or to people they know. It's not hard to talk to people you know about how they can get involved in the movements that are fighting back, and invite them to the regular meetings that NSG branches hold to discuss what's going on in the world and to organize our work.

So why not get involved? If you're not sure about joining yet, you're welcome to find out more about the NSG and work with us.

The lean and mean global capitalism of the 21st century offers nothing to most of humanity. Socialism is the only alternative. Achieving it will take the efforts of many people, people whom the uncaring rulers of our society think are stupid and weak.

Let's show them how wrong they are by doing what we can to build the kind of revolutionary movement that working people need if we are to free ourselves and open the way to a better world.

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Suggestions for Further Reading

Socialism from Below (new edn.) by David McNally is a pamphlet that explains what genuine socialism is and outlines its history.

If you want to read Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in their own words, start with The Communist Manifesto. Rosa Luxemburg's Reform or Revolution and Lenin's The State and Revolution are good places to start reading their writings.

James Rinehart's The Tyranny of Work is a Marxist study of work in Canada and workers' resistance to alienation. Working-Class Experience (2nd edn.) by Bryan D. Palmer is the best available history of the Canadian working class.

Alex Callinicos' book The Revenge of History looks at the fall of Stalinism and challenges the idea that this means the end of socialism.

Lise Vogel's Marxism and the Oppression of Women and Lindsey German's Sex, Class and Socialism are attempts by socialists to analyze women's oppression and the struggle for women's liberation.

Gary Kinsman's The Regulation of Desire (2nd edn.) is a book about capitalism, the history of sexuality and the politics of lesbian and gay liberation in Canada. Alex Callinicos' Race and Class is a short Marxist analysis of racism.

John Bellamy Foster's The Vulnerable Planet examines the links between capitalism and the destruction of the environment.

Some of these books are available from the New Socialist Group.

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Published in Canada August 1996 by the New Socialist Group Copyright � New Socialist Group and Sebastian Lamb
(First published as Why You Should Be A Socialist)