A vicious attack by a group of neo-nazis on Calgary anti-racist activist and Communist Party member Jason Devine and another person in Devine's home early on Nov. 8, the worst in a string of attacks on Jason Devine and Bonnie Devine, that included the firebombing of the house, was followed by a move by government social workers against the activists' custody of their children, which has now fortunately been dropped.
"As people of conscience, who care deeply about Jewish history, social justice and human rights, we are appalled that your government is claiming to have Jewish Canadian support for legislation that so blatantly criminalizes refugees and targets them for imprisonment and/or deportation." You can read and sign the letter here.
"The CPCCA (Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism) and the ICCA (Inter-Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism) are important beachheads in Israel's attempts to create a political environment and legal system that suppresses a full story of events on the ground" in Palestine, write Mordecai Briemberg and Brian Campbell. Read their article on the Nov. 7-9 ICCA conference in Ottawa here, read the report of the Toronto-based Palestine Freedom of Expression Campaign and watch the new video Defend Free Speech: The Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism and the New McCarthyism
Canada Post's work reorganization scheme known as the Modern Post is being implemented first in Winnipeg -- and the harm it's doing to postal workers is already clear. The Winnipeg local of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers has set up a blog for members in the city and beyond to talk about how they're being affected and what to do about it: The Workers' Struggle with the Modern Post.
Meanwhile, negotiations for the contract that covers most CUPW members are getting underway. The union leadership has produced a discussion paper, The Future of Canada Post.
At last! A book that looks systematically at Canada's place in the global system has long been needed, as an alternative to misleading ideas about Canada as a force for peace and democracy in the world or Canada as a nation subjugated by the US. Now we have one: Todd Gordon's Imperialist Canada.
This looks like it will be a great resource for anyone concerned about what Canadian companies are up to in countries of the South, the oppression of indigenous people within Canada's borders, the foreign policies of the federal government, etc.
See the event listings section for book launches in Toronto and Winnipeg in November. Hopefully there will be more in the months to come.
Glen Ford writes that "Barack Obama’s totally predictable failure to lead the nation on a transformative path all but guaranteed that the United States would revert to default mode: rule by a plutocracy backed by a white electoral base intent on cutting off their own noses to spite Black and brown faces" and concludes "Let there be gridlock." Read his article here.
The analysis of class in Ford's article isn't very strong (corporations vs "the people"). All the more reason to also read Richard Seymour's "The Class Basis of US Elections." I think he's wrong to treat all "professionals" and "managers" as being outside the working class (many such people should be seen as better-paid "white-collar" workers) but his analysis of the US electoral system and this election is definitely worth reading and his point that 17% of the adult population of the US is barred by law from voting due to deliberate racist state policies is important.
The Canadian media is giving a lot of attention to the Tea Party movement and the mid-term elections in the US in early November, but very little of this coverage sheds much light on what's really happening south of the border.
For alternative analysis, check out these views from the US:
"There are few professors with a higher profile than Jared Diamond... With his avuncular beard, Diamond is the perfect figure to explain to middle-class television audiences why some people are on top and others are on the bottom." Read Louis Proyect's useful critical article about Diamond here.
"The bill greatly expands the power of the government to detain non-citizens. It requires that a person be detained while the minister investigates a suspicion that they might have committed a criminal offence outside of Canada. The scope of this provision is dangerous as it can even be applied against permanent residents who have lived in Canada for years," writes Lorne Waldman. Waldman's perspective on the issues is not that of the editors of this site (we support status for all who wish it, and oppose immigration controls) but his article is worth reading here.
After the most recent meeting of top leaders of France's various union federations, "The state of the struggle across Europe hinges upon what French grassroots forces beyond the trade union leadership are able to achieve in the republic in the coming hours and days." Read the short article "French union leadership raises white flag" here.
Stefan Kipfer's article on Rob Ford's campaign is a breath of fresh air after the mealy-mouthed pandering to the Right that most of the 2010 Toronto election analysis has been. His essential point -- that the ground for Rob Ford has been prepared by the social democrats in power -- is lost on the mainstream press, who can't see past tactical voting. By supporting the social democratic mayoral candidate Joe Pantalone, Now Magazine has positioned itself to the Left of the rest of the liberal press. The Star is endorsing Liberal Party stalwart George Smitherman, while Eye Magazine has distinguished itself by trashing the deficit-hysteria arguments of the Right but calling for tactical voting -- which, in practice, means supporting the very people, like Smitherman, who support those arguments. Many people are scared of Rob Ford and his plans to gut city services in the name of taxpayer fairness; but few acknowledge how he's managed to shift the debate to the Right, making him sound reasonable. Smitherman, capable opportunist as ever, has tacked hard to the Right to steal some of Ford's support; yet the anybody-but-Ford sentiment has only succeeded in rewarding Ford's bluster by supporting a candidate who shares his agenda.
Kipfer takes this sorry mess and contextualizes it. He dissects right-wing populism by showing the grain of truth at the centre of it: Ford can play on the anger created by departing mayor David Miller's pro-growth agenda that ignored the needs of local residents in favour of developers, and the continued underfunding and attacks on unionized workers that have degraded the quality of city services. In other words, the Left has caused Rob Ford as much as the Right has: by creating a cross-class coalition that tied labour and progressives to capital, Miller has put the Left in the unenviable position of defending social liberalism, neoliberalism with window-dressing. Voters have every reason to be angry, even if Ford will bring them more of the same.
I have only one disagreement with Kipfer's analysis. He states at length that we must be on our guard against assuming Ford is the lesser evil: that, since he shares an agenda with Smitherman, it would be better to have the unalloyed face of capitalist rule in Ford, rather than a more pleasant-sounding version. The danger, Kipfer says, is that this allows the Right to set the tone of the debate, like it has during the election campaign, further marginalizing the left.
As an argument against complacency, this is true. Kipfer is correct that hard-right populism is on the march and needs to be confronted, warning that "A generation of electoral successes by the populist hard right should have taught us a few lessons about underestimating the danger of apparent simpletons with harebrained agendas." He lists some of the heroes of neoliberalism as examples: "Margaret Thatcher, George Bush, Jörg Haider, Christoph Blocher, Silvio Berlusconi, Nicolas Sarkozy, Preston Manning, Mike Harris." However, these figures did not emerge in a vacuum: they came from the ability of the soft Left to implement neoliberal policy. Figures like the UK's Callaghan from the Labour Party, Mitterand for France's Socialists, and Bob Rae for Ontario's NDPers, were instrumental in demobilizing the Left, paving the way for a hard-right reaction. We're seeing the same process happening, albeit in a much paler form, in the U.S. midterm elections, as President Obama's failure to do even the small things he promised has demoralized his base and emboldened the right.
Kipfer provides ample evidence of how Miller ruled in the interests of capital, through promoting privatization and deregulation, naming it as "Third Way Urbanism" i.e. urbanism that brings labour and capital together to help the latter. Ford and Smitherman are, as Kipfer shows, "fundamentally agreed about the need to constrain or cut public services, promote privatization and public-private-partnerships (P3), beef up police services, and further deregulate real-estate development." The problem is that, in practice, the argument to oppose Ford has not been framed in terms of politics but Ford as a -- particularly nasty -- individual. If Smitherman gets elected, he will do everything Ford wants, pace tearing up bike lanes, and the Left will remain as confused by the old feint of the 'lesser evil' as it was by Tony Blair in the UK and poor Ralph Nader in the 2000 U.S. election. It's true, now more than ever, that you defeat the right by opposing it, not appeasing it. The challenge for the Left is to oppose all neoliberal agendas, and that means two things: 1) seeing Ford as part of a spectrum, not an anomaly or even the biggest enemy; 2) mobilizing outside the ballot box, to defend public services no matter who is attacking them.
No doubt there are many sources of information on Cuba. These are two that I find useful. Havana Times I enjoy for it portrayal of everyday life in Cuba and the life experiences of Cubans. At first i thought it must be from outside Cuba, given the severity of the criticism. But that is not so.
Letter to a Cuban Abroad I’m writing to let you know that here everyone is breathing, sleeping, eating and panicking over the “readjustment of Cuba’s economic model.”
http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=31348
THE CUBAN REVOLUTION: CHALLENGES AND CHANGES by Dave Holmes http://www.socialistvoice.ca/?p=1369 For more than 50 years tiny Cuba (its population is currently about 11.25 million) has punched well above its weight in world politics. That's because it carried out an authentic socialist revolution and has ceaselessly fought to defend and extend it in the teeth of remorseless pressure from its giant neighbour.
The widely-supported mass movement against the government's attack on pensions is continuing. Some 3.5 million people took part in the Oct. 19 day of strikes and protests, including many high school students. Other struggles also continue to take place, including an occupation of the museum of immigration by 500 striking non-status workers (this article in English is a good look at the movement of non-status workers in France today).
This Oct. 18 article is a good introduction to the struggle so far.
For reports in English on unfolding events, check out the Oct. 20 updates at the Guardian.
Useful articles in French can be found on the websites of Solidaires, the NPA and the Swiss site A l'encontre.
From the bottom of my urban project Deep into your countryside The reality has changed And the revolt is brewing everywhere
In this world there was no place for us We didn't look the part We were not to the manor born Not on daddy's plastic
The homeless, the unemployed, workers Farmers, immigrants, the undocumented They wanted to divide us And to say they succeeded
As long as it was every man for himself Their system could prosper But one day we had to wake up The heads had to roll
We'll never give an inch
They told us about equality And like fools we believed them "Democracy" makes me laugh If we had had it we would have known it
What's the worth of our votes Up against the law of the market? They say "my dear fellow countrymen" But we're fucked all the same
And what's the worth of human rights Up against the airbus sale? The bottom line, there's only one law, in sum: "Sell yourself more to sell more."
The republic is a whore Walking the street of dictators We no longer believe Their beautiful words Our leaders are liars
We'll never give an inch
So stupid, so trite, To speak of peace and brotherhood When the homeless are dying in the streets And the undocumented are being driven out
Crumbs are thrown to proles That's just in the history of the silent They don't attack millionaire bosses "Too important for our society"
It's crazy the way they are protected All our rich and powerful Not to mention the help they get For being the friends of the president
Dear comrades, dear "voters" Dear "citizen-consumers" The alarm is ringing It's time To reset to zero
As long as there's struggle and hope As long as there's life and battle As long as we're fighting, we're standing Here's the key We're standing, we won't give an inch
The passion for victory runs in our blood Now you know why we are fighting Our ideal, more than a dream Another world, we have no choice
We'll never give an inch
"On lâche rien," a song by HK & les Saltimbanks (Kadour Haddadi and his band), has been adopted by French workers on strike against the Sarkozy-Woerth plan to raise the retirement age.
Simon Pirani, author of the valuable historyThe Russian Revolution in Retreat, 1920-24: Soviet Workers and the New Communist Elite has written a reply to a hostile review of his book by Kevin Murphy published in the journal of the British SWP. Read it here. Pirani has also written a supplement of additional details about Murphy review, on his book's website here.
Update Oct. 16: Richard Greeman writes from France about the inspiring mass mobilization and the difference between what workers and students are fighting for and what union leaders and Socialist Party politicians are up to. See below for Greeman's observations.
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The Sarkozy government is determined to press on with its attacks on pensions -- but many workers including many young people are equally determined to stop the attacks.
This English-language text by workers at Agence France Presse who belong to the radical Solidaires union federation argues that "Pushing back the retirement age is an absurd measure. The real debate should be about how to bring about further cuts to working hours in order to mop up unemployment, and about ways to improve, rather than degrade, our pension system."
For those who can read French, this Oct. 15 statement from Solidaires argues that a general strike is needed to stop the attacks. To that end, it calls for people to join in the hundreds of Oct. 16 demonstrations scheduled to take place across France and then take part in the day of strikes and protests on Oct. 19, a day that will be an opportunity to support workers who have been on strike since Oct. 12, to integrate strikes in some sectors scheduled to begin on Monday, Oct. 18 and to escalate the struggle.
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Dear Friends,
People ask me what’s it like living in France during these massive one-day strikes and popular mobilizations against the conservative Sarkozy government’s pension ‘reforms.’ These cuts would push the minimum retirement age forward from age 60 to 62 and the minimum age for receiving full benefits from 65 to 67. For details: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/14/world/europe/14france.html?ref=todayspaper
On the one hand, it is thrilling to see millions of citizens taking to the streets as well as hundreds of thousands of workers striking in defense of their hard-won social rights defying an increasingly reactionary government. Indeed, what is most heartening is that the ‘troops’ seem to be more radical than their official leaders, the union chiefs and Socialist Party politicians. Recent polls showed the French public not only supports the one-day strikes (which make life Hell for commuters and parents of schoolchildren); nearly half are in favor of an open-ended general strike to make the government yield -- a strategy advocated by the far-Left parties like the NPA as well as by militant rank-and-file workers and local unions who are chomping at the bit.
Once again I am reminded about what I love about France: a still-living revolutionary tradition of popular mass mobilization and struggle that goes back to the sans-culottes of 1789, the revolutions of 1830, 1848, and 1871 (the Paris Commune), the sit-down strikes of 1936, and in my own lifetime, the nationwide student-worker uprising of May-June 1968 and the1995 nationwide strike of public employees that went ‘wildcat,’ paralyzed France for two months (during which Parisians cheerfully commuted by bike and event boat) and forced an earlier conservative government to withdrawn its unpopular welfare ‘reforms.’ It’s also a great pleasure to see a nasty right-wing s.o.b. like Sarkozy humiliated by millions of angry, jeering citizens blocking the trains and taking over the streets.
On the other hand, I also have a disheartening feeling of déjà vu. Why? Because the unions used the same dilatory tactics of spaced one-day work public sector stoppages in 2009, and the government simply bided its time until summer, when the French go on vacation, and rammed the cuts through parliament late one August night. And this wasn’t the first time these tactics failed.
Indeed, ever since the runaway general strike of 1995, every time the French have massively demonstrated and gone on national strikes in opposition to government attacks on their labor and welfare rights (as in 2009, 2008 and 2003), the official leaders of the unions have imposed the delaying tactic of spaced one-day national work-stoppages and demonstrations – marches and counter-marches designed quite precisely to ‘demonstrate’ to the government their ability to call out their troops (and thus presumably to reign them in). These demonstrations are great for letting off steam, but inevitably they run out of steam. Time is always on the side of the government and the capitalists in the class struggle. The masses’ only strength is in numbers and resoluteness, and their most effective tactic, once they are mobilized, is to stay mobilized, spread the movement to all sectors of the economy, go for broke and paralyze the country until the bosses give in. As they did in 1936, 1968 and 1995.
The apparent purpose of the leadership’s military-style maneuvers is to make a show of force and induce the government to invite the union leaders to a round table -- thus recognizing their legitimacy as the official representatives of labor. This plays out in the media through competition over how many demonstrators went into the streets in each successive demonstration. Social struggle reduced to sports statistics. The unions count 3.5 million people, the police count less than half. The union leaders go on TV and call it a success: the government says it is not impressed and won’t budge. Then the politicians get into the act. With presidential elections looming and Sarkozy’s popularity at an all-time low, the Socialists, who in power also imposed neo-liberal cuts, grandstand their support for the movement. They, too, have an interest in prolonging the struggle against Sarkozy as they hope of reaping the results of his unpopularity at the polls. Former Socialist presidential candidate Segolène Royale encourages the youth, specifically high schoolers, to join the demonstrations. The Right (which has been cutting back teachers like mad) cries ‘scandal.’ Another political horserace.
The goal of the mass movement quite different. The strikers and demonstrators sincerely want to use their mass power to force the government to rescind the cuts, as the Chirac-Juppé government was forced to do in 1995, when rank-and-file assemblies ignored the unions’ cautious tactics and took matters into their own hands. Those 1995 strikes got out of hand and continued for two weeks until they achieved complete victory and the cuts were rescinded. Paradoxically, this victory was a stinging defeat not just for the government but also for the unions, who were de-legitimized as responsible ‘social partners’ unable to control of their troops.
This is worrisome for the brass at the CGT, CDFT and other federations, since only about 23% of French workers belong to unions, which are supported not by dues but by government allocations. Since 1995, the unions have tightened their control over the movement to prevent another wildcat breakaway. And you can’t cynically turn mass enthusiasm and anger on and off like a water tap without exhausting it, so such tactics inevitably spell defeat for working people whose dream of retiring keeps receding into the future while they remain on the treadmill.
Similar masses struggles are happening all over Europe, where the same neo-liberal cutbacks are being imposed in the name of paying ‘the debt’ (created by bailing out the banks). Yet here again, the Left politicians and union leaders, far from seeking strength through international solidarity, remain staunchly isolated within their national boundries, despite the obvious fact that the European Union has created a common economic zone! But the unions and left parties depend for their ‘franchise’ on the national state, which subsidizes them directly.
One hopes the French people, who are always full of surprises, will find some way out of this impasse in which their ‘representatives’ – the union leaders and the official left parties – are apparently their worst enemies.
Tuesday, October 12 saw the most extensive strike action yet against the move by the right-wing government of Nicolas Sarkozy to raise the age at which people can collect a full pension and also the minimum retirement age. Some groups of workers have voted to turn today's day of action into an indefinite strike.
"The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has won the latest round in its ongoing, three-year campaign to crush dissident California health and hospital workers – its own members, incidentally, and at their expense," writes Cal Winslow. Read the rest of his article about how SEIU beat out the much more democratic and militant NUHW to represent workers at US health care industry firm Kaiser Permanente here.
The corporate media focuses on medals won, attendance and the construction of facilities -- but there's another story: as many as 40 000 poor people were evicted to make way for the stadiums and parking lots built for the Commonwealth Games, as this video explains.
"What parts of the Marxist heritage clearly belong to the past, and which ones do you feel remain equally relevant today?" This is the first of a series of questions that a group of socialists in Russia asked French Marxist Daniel Bensaid (1946-2010) in 2006. An English translation of his answers is now online on International Viewpoint.
If you'd like to read more about Bensaid, check out this tribute, "The Red Hussar" and this review of a book of translated articles by Bensaid that was published earlier on this website.
That's the title of US writer Paul Street's latest article on the political significance of the Obama presidency. He suggests there are five ways in which Obama's presidency does not help the struggle against racism. The article is worth a read -- on ZNet here -- though I think it should also have considered the anti-racist impact of having a Black president, small though it may be.
A statement from the indigenous organization CONAIE is online here. It argues that "The best way to defend democracy is to begin a true revolution that resolves the most urgent and structural questions to the benefit of the majority."
Below is a communique from an Ecuadoran feminist organizations in response to the Sept. 30 coup attempt.
People who understand Spanish should check out Telesur.
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Communiqué of the Assembly of Popular and Diverse Women of Ecuador – Casa Feminista de Rosa No to the Coup d’Etat!
The women grouped together in the Assembly of Popular and Diverse Women of Ecuador reject all attempts of a coup d’etat wherever they come from. After Latin America passed through decades of cruel dictatorships that meant disappearances, torture, and assassinations for entire generations – that left behind peoples silenced and without rights – and that facilitated the advance of neoliberalism throughout the continent, we cannot allow the return of coups and dictatorships. Never again in Honduras, in Latin America! No to the attempts of a coup in Ecuador! No to CIA interference in our countries! We are not going to allow them to carry out coups that run against popular mandates and that install regimes of terror, persecution, and intimidation. The Constitution of Montecristi of 2008 is the expression of many of our struggles, proposals and dreams and we demand that that the constitutional mandate be fulfilled, democracy be respected and our rights guaranteed!
We call for political solidarity and coherence among all the people, all social sectors, movements and organizations.
Asamblea de Mujeres Populares y Diversas del Ecuador
We are glad to publish this letter from the US, and invite comments from readers.
2010-09-25
Dear New Socialist Group,
A friend recently sent me issue 60 of New Socialist. I enjoyed reading it, especially the discussions of unions and union organizers. I plan to read a lot more of your writings as soon as I'm able.
In this letter I'd like to pose some respectful questions and criticisms. I also want to think out some issues I am unclear about and have been having conversations about with some close friends and comrades. Just so we're clear, and since electronic communication makes it much easier to come off polemical when that's not my intention, I mean these as a sort of "can think about this together?" rather than an attempt at the sort of point scoring that sometimes stands in for political discussion. I've only read some of your publications - I plan to read more of them - so if you deal with my questions elsewhere I would love to know. I should also say, I'm a member of the small radical union the Industrial Workers of the World and the small political organization the Workers Solidarity Alliance. My experiences in those organization shape my views, but I write in a personal capacity.
I liked the piece on the comrade who worked for SEIU. It did well in getting at some of the limits of AFL-CIO and CtW unionism. I would like to know, however, if she learned anything positive from doing that work. Perhaps she didn't. My experience working as an organizer had a lot of the negative components that that comrade described and others too, which is why I no longer do that kind of work. I ran into iterations of the same problems when I worked as a community organizer too.)
That said, as much as working as an organizer was a lousy job, I learned a ton doing that job. As much as the bosses were jerks, I learned a lot from following their orders and from the training they provided. I learned stuff which set me up to go on to organize at my own workplaces in the jobs I worked afterward, and this has enriched my IWW activity too, in my opinion. I'd like to know if NSG has anything to say about working as organizers in order to learn things for a while - not as a career path but as an educational detour. Personally, I think more radicals should so then come back to the shop floor.
It seems clear to me that we agree that there are major structural problems in the labor movement, including problems with the role of staff. People taking staff positions for a while to learn the skills that come with those positions could play a useful preparatory role. I hope it's clear, I'm not advocating for staff positions as a political activity, but I do think stints in staff positions can be useful for later doing political activity after leaving the staff job.
Staff aside, there's a lot of great stuff in the issue critical of the mainstream labor movement that I agree with. And there's a lot of great commentary on how to fight within those unions. On the other hand, organizing the unorganized gets almost no treatment at all. Sebastian Lamb's piece is really excellent on everything it talks about but it basically spends only a short paragraph on organizing the unorganized. Given that only a minority of workers in Canada (and even fewer in the US) work in unionized workplaces - and this tends to be age stratified as well, so youth are even less unionized - the idea of leftists concentrating on the unions leaves out most of the working class. Furthermore, it leaves out those leftists who aren't able to get jobs in unionized shops.
I'm not criticizing the strategy that the articles advocate for socialists who are union members. I'm not really even criticizing the strategy of socialists trying to get union jobs. I would, however, like to see an additional strategy for the rest of us who aren't able to get union jobs, specifically a strategy for organizing in our own workplaces.
I think we in the IWW are one of the only voices, perhaps the only voice, that has some details worked out on doing this actively. I wish that weren't so, I wish there was a lot more emphasis on organizing.
Following on from this, I want to be a bit more critical or make this a more urgent point. The thrust of many of the articles are about the limits of the mainstream labor movement. And as I said there's almost no talk about organizing the unorganized. The implication or de facto position here seems to be that organizing the unorganized is to be left to the mainstream unions, whatever their other flaws. There's no real alternative to this presented.
Given how bad the mainstream unions come off in these articles, that seems like a big mistake to me. As I said, I think we in the IWW are some of the only people on the left with the goal of getting workers organizing on the job (rather than staff, as described in the piece on SEIU) and with a plan and some infrastructure to actually implement this. Like I said, I wish we weren't unique on this, I wish the left as a whole was fighting to build organization on the job across the class.
A friend of mine in the IWW has recently begun to argue that we should study some of the experiences of the groups who engaged in workplace organizing (often calling it "industrial concentration") in order to have more sense of what's been tried in the past. That seems worthwhile to me, though I think the emphasis should be primarily on fighting employers and building organization regardless of whether there is a union present. The emphasis should not so much be on the labor movement and its membership as on workplaces and workers.
I'd now like to sketch some of the things that my closest comrades and I have been thinking about and discussing informally for a while when we talk. Our view is that while we are members of the IWW today, we know the IWW today is not the IWW of its heyday. As NSG members will know, the IWW was founded in 1905 when numerous groups came together to consolidate into one organization. In many respects we today are less like the people who came together at the 1905 founding convention than we are like the people who tried to build the groups which later knitted together in 1905. That is to say, we see our efforts as in many respects preparatory for a later, larger effort. In this light, we've tried to emphasize less numerical growth of membership than we've tried emphasize numerical growth of dedicated long term organizers and the qualitative improvement of organizers in terms of commitment, confidence, and capability. Of course we wish we were succeeding better, but we're proud of what we have managed to achieve.
I say all this not to brag about our activity but to raise two issues related to goals. This may be a bit jumbled as I am relating points that are not fully fleshed out or thought out. I relate these in part because writing them out helps me think, and even more so because I would love to hear what the NSG comrades think of this.
In the long term we are revolutionaries who want to end capitalism. In the more short term, our emphasis is on winning dedicated member-organizers. This means we do not prioritize right now either structural power relations/the balance of class forces nor do we prioritize material gains for workers. For us, we do not see ourselves right now as being able to truly shift the balance of class forces. We see ourselves as being able to prepare the ground work for shifting the balance of class forces in the future. In addition, we are not sure what the relationship is between winning gains and having successful revolution. We do not believe that we can simply win enough gains that capitalism goes away.
Of course we want people to have better lives, but our view is that people are not so much radicalized by what they or others win - we do not think that people are radicalized by pay raises that bosses are forced to give or seeing others get such pay raises. Instead we believe that people are radicalized by the experiences of conflict and collectivity that happen in struggles. These experiences are of course greatly shaped by outcomes - success and failure are experiential categories, so to speak - but the point is that our criteria of evaluation are not measured in the cost of concession made by employers so much as in relationships built and workers won to greater class consciousness and desire to fight.
To put it more simply, we place a pretty strongly emphasis on subjective factors over either changing the structural balance of power and over material gains. We do of course think that there is an important link between fights for material gains and class consciousness. We think that needs/desires for gains allows an opportunity to get people involved in struggles which are potentially transformative. For us, though, the true goal is not really the gain so much as the transformation of the people fighting for that gain. And of course we do recognize that eventually the working class will need to take up the issue of the balance of class forces, as I said we see our work as preparing the ground for that but don't see that as being in the cards in the short term.
I lay all this out for a few reasons. As I said, writing this to you helps me to flesh these ideas out. And as I said, I am keen to hear what NSG comrades made of this. In addition to those reasons, I think that these closing issues relate back to the matter of a needed conversation about how to organize the unorganized (rather than leaving that task to the AFL and CtW unions), as well as to the limits of the unions. In my view, concerns such as these and questions about what we are organizing for should inform conversation about how to organize. Furthermore, it seems to me that unions are incredibly important and yet they have a contradictory relationship to the transformative potentials of struggle that I mentioned and that my comrades and I have been talking about.
The way I see it, the unions are like a kerosene lamp. The lamp has components that create fire, that sustain fire, that contain fire to keep it from getting above a certain temperature and from spreading or joining up with other fires. Unions create class conflict, sustain class conflict, manage class conflict to keep it from getting too hot, and they prevent it from spreading around the class. The managerial roles are built in to the labor law, to encourage or force unions to contain workers (I don't know much about Canadian labour law but I do know something about US labor law, and the National Labor Relations Act when originally created had a preface that argued that collective bargaining was necessary for labor peace). In our efforts to organize, we should be clear about these different relationships to the fire of class struggle, and if possible seek to build organizations that have the first few functions - creating and sustaining struggle - while avoiding or minimizing the containment functions. Here too is another reason not to leave organizing to the unions.
In closing, thanks again for New Socialist. I plan to read much more of your writings. Thanks as well for taking the time to read my letter. I hope it's clear that I send this in a comradely spirit, interested in a mutually beneficial conversation and interested in hearing your thoughts, and not to engage in one-upsmanship or self-aggrandizement.
