For most people, the daily challenges of work, home, school or other responsibilities mean we don't often stop to try to figure out what's going on in the society in which we live. Committed activists have the same problem, since we're often so busy with meetings and activities of one sort or another, we don't make time for serious thinking about the powerful forces that shape the terrain on which we're active.
The aim of this article is to identify some features of Canadian society today that everyone who believes that this society needs to be changed from the roots (that is to say, radically) needs to understand. If we are serious about radical change, we owe it to ourselves not to shy away from trying to understand the society we're trying to transform. After all, if it's true that people make their own history, we don't make it in circumstances of our own choosing, but in those in which we find ourselves.
What activists do needs to be guided by strategic thinking that starts from an analysis of these conditions of life and struggle.
Today, Canadian society is marked by how successful its ruling class (major employers and other capitalists along with politicians and top state managers) has been over the past quarter-century in putting workers on the defensive, implementing its preferred policies, reorganizing work and labour markets, and defeating Quebecois and aboriginal challenges to "national unity."
Canada's rulers gradually developed their current right-wing agenda after the end of the unique period of global capitalist expansion and prosperity that lasted from the end of World War Two until the first major post-war recession of 1974-75. In the mid-1970s, Canadian governments and big business - like their counterparts in the US and Western Europe - were confronted with serious problems: falling profits, high inflation, citizens who expected rising wages and better public services, confident unions and high levels of strikes (almost 600,000 workers struck in 1974). In Quebec, the nationalist Parti Quebecois was elected in 1976. Its demand for sovereignty was a response to the national oppression of Quebec and called into question the federal structure of the Canadian state established in 1867.
Ruling Class Offensive
By trial and error, the Canadian ruling class went about trying to restore order. It set out to discipline the working class, defeat Quebec nationalism and create better conditions for investment and profit-making. This was not a conspiracy by unpatriotic Canadian CEOs and politicians to sell out the country to the US, as some Canadian nationalists allege. However, capitalists and politicians did consciously use state institutions as well as associations like the Business Council on National Issues to develop an agenda and press for its implementation.
Labour militancy was the first target. Federal and provincial governments imposed wage controls and frequently used back-to- work legislation to end strikes. The federal government took on and defeated the most militant and radical union, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, and jailed its president. The combined impact of these attacks put the labour movement on the defensive. Working-class confidence gave way to uncertainty and compliance.
In this climate, employers began to reorganize workplaces and jobs to boost profits. Early experiments evolved into extensive work reorganization, often referred to as lean production or Total Quality Management. Workers across the private and public sectors have been subjected to schemes designed to intensify their work and increase management control in the workplace.
There has been a shift away from the norm (never a reality for most women and workers of colour, nor for many white male workers) that paid employment means a full-time, year-round, open-ended job with adequate wages and benefits working for a single employer. The emerging new norm is full-time or part-time fixed-term contract work with few or no benefits, and involves changing employers. As a result of capitalist restructuring, the experience of wage-work today is much more insecure and stressful than it was a generation ago.
Employers' efforts to reorganize workplaces and jobs have both been helped by and have inspired the neo-liberal approach to state policy that gradually came to replace the post-war welfare state model. Neo-liberals believe that state power should be used to strip away barriers to capitalist profit-making. The "free trade" deal with the US in 1988 and then the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994 have helped Canadian capital invest and export commodities across the continent. The pace of cuts and neo-liberal "reform" of unemployment insurance and other government programmes increased sharply after the election of the Liberals under Chretien in 1993. In the name of deficit-cutting, billions of dollars were cut. Less than 40 per cent of the officially unemployed now qualify for Employment Insurance. Poverty and homelessness have risen.
Provincial governments of all stripes have also embraced neo-liberalism. They have implemented workfare and privatized services. Education is being "reformed" (see Alan Sears, "Education for Lean Times," in New Socialist 43, Sept-Oct 2003). The role of the federal government in all this has often been obscured, since it's shrunk transfer payments and left it to the provinces to decide what programmes to cut.
The federal system was stabilized by the defeat of the movement for Quebec independence in the 1980 referendum and the adoption of a new Canadian constitution in 1982 without Quebec's consent. Overconfident federalists nearly lost the 1995 Quebec referendum. After that, they wasted no time in going on the offensive against Quebec nationalism, passing the "Clarity Act" that further restricts Quebec's ability to determine its own future. Because the PQ has embraced neo-liberalism and severed the cause of Quebec sovereignty from the social-reform agenda with which it had been associated since the 1960s, it has been unable to revive support for sovereignty.
The very existence of aboriginal land and treaty rights continues to be an obstacle to firms in resource industries and an affront to the widespread racist belief that aboriginal people should have "no special rights" (read: no compensation for centuries of colonial oppression). Unfortunately, the official leaders of most First Nations are, willingly or unwillingly, stuck in drawn-out negotiating processes that can at best produce small gains for aboriginal people. Flare-ups of aboriginal resistance have caused short-term problems for governments and companies and drawn attention to oppression, but haven't built a new aboriginal movement.
So the ruling class has been quite successful in carrying out its agenda. The working-class movement (unions, community-based organizations, and the NDP) was largely unprepared for the attacks that began to rain down in the mid-1970s. It has put up significant resistance, from the one-day pan-Canadian general strike against wage controls in 1976 to the wave of mass protests and political strikes in Ontario from 1995 to 1997 and the December 2003 day of disruption in Quebec. By and large it hasn't been devastated like the US workers' movement. Support in the movement for feminism, anti-racism and lesbian and gay rights has grown stronger. However, activists committed to the kind of militant, democratic, solidarity-building strategy and tactics needed to win struggles today are few in number and dispersed.
Bitter Fruits
The mobilizations of other social activist groups, which in the 1990s included the Quebec and pan-Canadian Women's Marches, anti-poverty struggles and many student protests, have kept a spirit of resistance alive. However, they have won few major victories. The global justice movement showed real potential with the Quebec City protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas in 2001, but it hasn't recovered from the demobilization that followed 9-11. The movement against the 2003 war on Iraq reached mass proportions, especially in Quebec, but declined even faster than it rose.
The success of the ruling-class offensive has had important results. Crucially for capitalists, it has boosted corporate profits. According to Marxist economist Fletcher Baragar, the average rate of profit of Canadian business in the 1960s and early 1970s averaged just over 8 per cent. In the 1988-1999 period, it was 6.4 per cent. The average for 1999-2001 was 9.1 per cent. Although these high profit levels may well prove to be short-lived, capital has increased its exploitation of labour, with profitable results.
Capital's victories have had many other effects on the society in which we live. Crucially, they have weakened the working class as a social and political force. Inequality, competition and divisions among working people have deepened. The percentage of workers outside agriculture who are in unions has declined from its peak of 40 per cent in 1983 to around 30 per cent. Many individuals and families have adopted private and individualistic ways of getting by, as seen in support for right-wing tax-cuts. The number of workers who went on strike annually between 1993 and 2002 averaged around only 180,000. Dependency on wage-labour has been reinforced, with more people now forced to hold down more than one job. People of colour, aboriginal people, women and queers are often blamed by members of dominant groups for the difficulties in their lives. All this makes for fertile ground for the "common sense" ideas of neo-liberalism that dominate official politics.
The options represented in official politics have shrunk. Neo-liberalism reigns supreme in all the major parties except the NDP. At best, the NDP calls for more funding for some public services while accepting the parameters of capitalist discipline (such as balanced budgets). No wonder, then, that many people see the parties as basically the same and voter turnouts are falling.
Hope And Opportunities
At the same time, all this has produced an important minority of people who are thoroughly disgusted by what they see as the "corporate agenda" or "globalization." They understand that public health care is being eroded. They oppose tax cuts that are tied to slashing social services. Some see that women are bearing most of the growing burden of care-giving caused by cutbacks. They have supported nurses' and teachers' strikes, cheered anti-poverty actions and marched against war.
The full potential of this layer is rarely realized. Most unions don't even try to mobilize and educate workers except in limited and controlled ways. The bureaucratic character of unions is a major problem, and traditions of grassroots self-organization are weak. Nor is there a mass political movement or party that clearly expresses the sentiments of this minority, let alone one that argues for radical politics and builds movements.
Among union and social justice activists, there is much disaffection with the NDP (whose roots in the workers' movement were never as deep as those of European social democratic parties). However, no alternative left-wing political formation has been able to establish itself, in part because no political project on the Left today has much credibility. The New Politics Initiative proved incapable of taking advantage of its strong showing at the 2001 federal NDP convention. In Quebec, the future of the Union of Progressive Forces (UFP) is not yet clear.
There are three currents on the broad Left. The one which leads the NDP and most unions basically accepts neo-liberalism and seeks to soften it (sometimes called "social-liberalism"). This sends the message that there is no alternative to austerity and concessions, and has done much to aid the ruling class and discredit labour and the Left.
Another current opposes neo-liberalism more or less consistently. Its spokespeople include the leaders of the Canadian Auto Workers, the Council of Canadians and the UFP. Most activists on the frontlines of everyday workplace and community struggles identify with its politics.
Then there are smaller numbers of anti-capitalists: people who identify with outspoken radicals like Jaggi Singh and John Clarke and who understand that the enemy isn't just neo-liberalism but capitalism itself. Our concentration in the intelligentsia (university students and university-educated workers), lack of organization and disunity help explain the weakness of the anti-capitalist left.
If the analysis outlined here is basically correct, in the next several years we should expect neither social peace nor a rising and spreading wave of struggle and radicalism, but sporadic flare-ups of resistance. These strikes and protests give us opportunities to strengthen grassroots self-organization and radical consciousness. Will we be up to the challenge?
Sebastian Lamb is an editorial associate of New Socialist. In the next issue, he will focus on key challenges facing workers in Canada today and how left activists should respond.