[The Spark!, No. 21]

EDITORIAL

On June1st NDP MP Pat Martin stood up in the House and said, “When I announce that I am a socialist, I guess it is no surprise because we are all socialists now. We just bought General Motors. ... The fact is we now have Marxism realized. We own the means of production, and we didn’t have to fire a single shot.”

Was Mr. Martin really serious? In fact, no. (“I always thought one of the signs of the apocalypse would be when General Motors went bankrupt,” he said. “Is that not when the four horsemen appear on the horizon and there is darkness at the break of noon, when GM goes bankrupt?”) But Mr. Martin wasn’t entirely unserious either, more’s the pity. In his conception of society, class has disappeared. “We own the means of production,” he says. Who? He and his fellow members of the parliamentary club? Does he really think that’s who sit in the driver’s seat in this country?

Push him and surely he would accept that the whole purpose of the GM bailout was to keep capitalism afloat. That’s why no class struggle was required to have this massive state takeover – temporary, as the US, Canadian and Ontario governments have made a point of stressing. Communists always fault social democrats for their tendency to prefer easy options, underestimating the intense class struggle required even to win quite modest gains.

Is Canada really ruled democratically through parliament, or undemocratically by a small group of monopoly capitalists? Certainly there are important qualifications to be made, but the main story is one of minority domination thanks to systematic support from the mass media, church and school, tradition and ingrained habit – not to mention the army and police, should push come to shove.

“The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie,” says the Communist Manifesto (Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 6, page 486). At the time of writing this, over 160 years ago, there probably weren’t many states Marx and Engels would have considered “modern”. (Maybe only Britain, France, Belgium, Switzerland, the USA and some South American states.) And critics have asked how this statement can be squared with the evidence of their complex, concrete discussions of various different countries’ politics, and with the relative autonomy that Marxist science in principle attributes to the state and its affairs. (Have these critics ever personally had dealings with any actual executive committees? If so, they wouldn’t find “relative autonomy” such a very difficult concept to grasp.)

Last December Canada’s Tory Finance Minister Jim Flaherty appointed an eleven-member advisory committee consisting of four billionaires, five other business executives, one pro-big-business professor and one right-wing Liberal politician, who resigned her seat in the B.C. legislature to chair this Economic Advisory Council. We can be glad there is no class-collaborating labour representative on the panel. The Globe and Mail Report on Business commented on its front page (December 19, 2008) that there was “not a banker in sight” on it – which may or may not tell us something about Minister Flaherty and his boss Stephen Harper.

These eleven advisors meet together in private, but only a few times a year, we’re told. Undoubtedly this will be a powerful source of capitalist-class input into government policy, but certainly only one source of influence.

Another is the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (formerly the Business Council on National Issues). The Globe Report on Business (of June 26, 2009) tells us, “... the head of the CCCE or its staff have met with the Prime Minister’s Office or Federal finance officials a total of 15 times in the past 18 months, according to the Federal lobbyist registry. These talks ranged from tax policy to energy and small business. On at least three occasions [CCCE head Thomas] d’Aquino had face-to-face meetings with Mr. Harper.”

And there are also other business groups exerting influence on government policy, such as the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. And then, as well, there is individual corporate lobbying. Canadian billionaire Frank Stronach’s Magna Corporation needed the backing of a number of governments, including Canada’s, for his bid to take over European car-maker Opel from bankrupt GM (a bid which ultimately failed because the mainly government-appointed GM Board of Directors was “relatively autonomous” itself and wavered but in the end decided not to sell). According to the Globe Report on Business (June 1, 2009), Stronach declared, “I pretty well called everybody in Ottawa and said: ‘Look, call the Treasury Department, because in the final analysis the Treasury Department has to agree.’” We can notice that Stronach speaks only of getting through to the Ministry of Finance indirectly (and he seems to have forgotten the Ministry’s correct name; he surely didn’t mean the much less important Canadian Treasury Board). But get through to the government he indeed did. And we know how all this compares to the efforts of Canadian people's organizations to catch the government's ear.

Yet, with a sufficient head of steam, an aroused public, especially in a minority government situation, can influence even a Stephen Harper administration, as seen on issues such as Afghanistan, Quebec, the environment and (un)employment insurance. As these meagre examples show, though, the concessions wrung from a down-the-line big business government are miles and miles from what is needed. We know that a progressive majority of MPs committed to a people’s alternative policy agenda will only become possible to the extent that labour and other people’s forces are successfully mobilized outside parliament first.

n Danny Goldstick

FOLLOWUP: In deference to Canadian insurance companies and their affiliated independent insurance brokers (and the further development of an election campaign pledge), Finance Minister Flaherty faxed a letter to bank CEOs October 7^th telling them regulations would be issued extending the existing rule against selling insurance in bank branches to a ban on their insurance subsidiaries doing business on banking websites. Complained Canadian Bankers Association CEO Nancy Hughes Anthony:

“By and large the banking industry has an open dialogue with the minister and the minister’s department, and we have to. We’ve had this through thick and thin over the past 18 months. So to have something that just kind of came out of the blue, on which we were not consulted in advance, obviously was a shock to many members of the industry. ... It’s not the normal way we do business with the government, that’s for sure.”

An unnamed “senior employee at one of the big banks” was quoted commenting, “I don’t think the memory of this is going to fade any time soon.” (Globe and Mail Report on Business, October 16)

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Editorial Comment

Dan Goldstick

As this is being written, good-paying unionized manufacturing jobs in Canada are being lost, the international devaluation of the United States dollar continues, and stock market prices are bouncing up and down – mostly down. A couple of Quebec financial institutions have taken a heavy beating in last summer’s “sub-prime” mortgage smashup on Wall Street, and so has the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and the Bank of Montreal, among many others. Only a fool would attempt to prophesy with any confidence about the shorter-term economic consequences, but it certainly underlines the instability inherent in even monopolized “free market” capitalism.

It was a financial newsletter issued by the same CIBC from which Jason Mann quoted in the July People’s Voice, just prior to the latest business shocks. Writing in the June 15, 2007 issue of StrategEcon (published by CIBC World Markets Inc.), Jeff Rubin and Warren Lovely told their readers:

“The Bank of Canada, eying an economy operating above its non-inflationary speed limit, will welcome the dampening influence of an even stronger currency on both economic growth and inflation. A couple hundred thousand additional factory job losses, while far from derailing domestic economic growth, might be a route to opening up a bit of slack in today’s ultra-tight labour market, forestalling a more serious wage threat.”

Got that? Forestalling a serious wage threat. Who is it that would be threatened? Not wage workers. Which leaves their capitalist employers, then, as the ones menaced by the prospect of having to pay higher wages.

This was not just some imaginative theorizing in the heads of two business writers. It continues to be the official stated – but not loudly stated – government policy in Canada and other capitalist states even in so-called good times to keep up enough unemployment to make workers replaceable so that they won’t get too far out of line when it comes to pay.

But are not high wages inflationary! How so? Inflation is rising prices. If capitalists are not to reap less profit, they must raise the prices of what they sell whenever their labour costs go up. And so they do. They don’t have to go on strike and negotiate with consumers in order to do it. They simply do it.

(Well, to be sure, sometimes they can’t do it, or can’t do it fully. Sometimes they would lose more in lost sales than they’d gain by charging more in each sale. In such cases the wage gains made aren’t inflationary.)

But then again, improved workers’ wages could be inflationary by putting more money in their pockets than there are things to buy – provided, of course, that there can’t be any cut in production to meet the capitalists’ personal and business requirements. These are the generally accepted conceptions of bourgeois economics. It isn’t that these ideas are all wrong. What’s devilish is the extent to which they’re right!

Economics classes from one end of the country to the other are taught that to guard against inflation interest rates have to be made high enough to ensure some “slack” –unused human and other resources – in the national economy as a whole. The poor economy must not get [“overstretched”] “overheated” – that is: everybody working at a job with good pay.

What a system! For business to prosper some Canadians have to be kept unemployed and poor. That is the way it works. In a rational economy, so long as people have unmet needs, and there are resources in the ground capable of meeting those needs and workers available with sufficient skills to turn those resources into the products needed, those workers will be employed producing those products to satisfy those needs. But that is socialism. For that, working people need to take over the economy and run it themselves, hiring (as capitalist owners do) any expert managers they require. Who needs capitalist bosses anyway?

Meanwhile, back in the economy which we have, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives reported in March 2007 that workers’ real wages (corrected for inflation) have remained static for the past thirty years despite economic growth and gains in per-worker productivity – which increased by 51% during that time (www.growinggap.ca).

So what, then, happened to the increased output that workers’ static wages weren’t enough to buy? Canadian capitalists’ personal consumption certainly didn’t go up that much. What working-class families consumed they bought by taking on greatly increased debt. And some Canadian profits were sent back home by foreign-owned businesses. Some profits, again, were spent on expanding Canadian businesses here and abroad. A lot of money was used to expand the Canadian military and military production. And a really big chunk of cash was pushed speculatively into stocks and bonds and laid out on mergers and acquisitions without actually producing anything more. No wonder economic “instability” is now being experienced.

What economic “instability” means is that you could lose your job and you could lose your home. Under capitalism the working class cannot stop the inevitable “business cycle”; but unity and militancy can shift some of its effects off our backs. So it is time now to roll our sleeves up for the fight ahead.

One thing Communists claim they help the people’s struggle by contributing is Marxist science, with a rational society-wide view of the stakes, the forces, and the possibilities. But scientific insight into social reality doesn’t fall from the sky. It comes out of the actual experience of struggles – but then also it comes from study and criticism.

All science, we know, is dependent on study and critical discussion. That is why the theory of art too is a subject that revolutionaries can be better equipped for their job by understanding, for art too is part of social reality. Science’s need for criticism exists because it is never humanly possible to possess all the answers.

In his article “The Nature of the State Under Bush and Harper” Stephen Von Sychowski continues the debate on the extent to which what we already have here now is disguised fascism. He quotes former U.S. Communist leader William Z. Foster noting in effect that, though in World War II the USA was locked in a life-and-death struggle against foreign fascist dictatorships, real conditions back home fell far short of full democracy even then. And today the situation is worse. Cuban leader Fidel Castro has commented that the U.S. [The present U.S. Communist leader Sam Webb says his state] practises fascism abroad but, so far, something partially different domestically. Do we Canadians live in a democracy? Yes, to a degree, but not when it comes to controlling Canada’s economy. And you might well wonder how democratic the social life you experience is, for instance, if you belong to a racialized minority.

Or to an Aboriginal community. We are honoured to have a Spark! discussion contribution in this issue from Indian nationalist Ray Bobb, who makes a case for fighting oppression by uniting together with the working class movement and the left and, furthermore, by resisting the treaty process, which (he argues) weakens the Aboriginals by disuniting them into a large number of “first nations”. A point on which the Communist Party at present disagrees with him is his view that Aboriginals – or non-Inuit non-Métis at any rate – today form a single nation, rather than a group of peoples and nations who face a common oppression. It’s up to them, of course, to determine the forms and strategies their resistance will have, but their collective consciousness and united struggle has so far not taken the one-nation form Bobb favours. From developing events, from united action, and from respectful discussion we all should be able to learn a great deal.

Lastly, are the present-day economy and state in China essentially socialist-tending or capitalist-tending? The answer for which C. J. Atkins in general terms argues in “The Leninist Heritage of the Socialist Market Economy” will certainly not end the ongoing debate about that, which continues within China as well. The Soviet example warns us that revolutionary gains can be lost all too easily if the working class, for whatever reasons, is not up to defending its rights and interests. Like other classes, working classes too need leaders and parties; but it isn’t good enough simply to back them and trust them. This applies also to our Party. Democratic leadership is not about trust, in the main. What even the most progressive leaders can achieve for people will largely depend on the active, intelligent militancy of the people themselves.

Spark 20, Summer 2007

Editorial Comment

Danny Goldstick

It ought to have been mentioned here before this, but the year 2004 marked a milestone for Marx-Engels studies in the English-speaking world with the publication of the 658-page fiftieth and last volume in the English-language Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, begun over thirty years earlier as a Moscow-London-New York collaborative project. Over those years this international co-operative effort was not without its strains, but it soldiered on throughout, in spite of unexpected developments like the banning of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the management buy-out of the London publisher Lawrence and Wishart.

Some of the material published was in fact written by Marx and Engels in the English language originally. A further sizable fraction had previously been translated. But over half was being put into English for the first time. And even the existing translations could not be just reissued unrevised. As anybody who has ever had anything to do with it knows, translation is one of the black arts. Experts will not ever stop debating what is the best way to render a given phrase.

It isn't that issues of translation here give rise to disagreements over what Marx and Engels' basic ideas were, for the most part. But differences in translation can make a difference still.

A widely used English version of the 1848 Communist Manifesto, for example, says that "the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to establish democracy" – meaning, rule by the toiling majority of the people. Instead of the phrase "to establish democracy", Volume 6 of the Collected Works has "to win the battle of democracy" (page 504). The explanation is that in the original German Marx used a word derived from the verb "erkämpfen", to gain by fighting.

All of the Collected Works volumes contain quite a few pages of explanatory footnotes. Volumes 28 through 37 are devoted just to Capital and related economic writings by Marx, of which only the first volume of Capital (Volume 35 of the Collected Works) saw its way into print during Marx's own lifetime. Volumes 1 through 27 are filled with other writings by Marx and Engels, and Volumes 38 through 50 are reserved for the very interesting letters which they wrote, especially to each other. Economics, philosophy, politics and personalities – all get discussed in those letters. The two friends are not afraid to express disagreements with each other – as scientists do – with the object of strengthening through discussion their joint grasp of reality.

The last four volumes, dating from the period between Marx's death in 1883 and Engels' passing in 1895, are for letters written just by Engels, of course. Not everybody knows that during a visit to the United States Engels took a quick trip through Canada in September 1888, crossing over at Niagara Falls and proceeding through Toronto, Kingston and Montreal before returning to New York. By this country as it was in 1888 Engels was not at all impressed, it is fair to say:

"The transition from the States to Canada is a curious one. First of all you imagine yourself back in Europe and then you feel you're in a land that is positively retrogressing and going to rack and ruin. Here you can see how essential the Americans' feverish spirit of speculation is to the rapid development of a new country (given capitalist production as its basis). In ten years this sleepy Canada will be ripe for annexation – by which time the farmers in Manitoba, etc., will be demanding it themselves." (Volume 48, page 213)

Most of us reading these words, written from Montreal on September 10, 1888, will be glad Engels turned out to be wrong about that. But how do any of us feel about our casual comments getting scrutinized a century or so from now? People's letters have long been an invaluable resource for historians; however, since the advent of the telephone and now the Internet, many have worried that little of this kind of material will be available in the future. The problem, as far as it exists, is less, of course, for those on the receiving end of either "electronic surveillance" or more old-fashioned intelligence gathering, at the taxpayers' expense.

One eye-opening afternoon early in 1962 I had an interesting look at the contents of the Communist Party of Canada's Toronto filing cabinets, which had been seized just as they were in connection with the 1931 prosecution of "Tim Buck et al" under section 98 of the criminal code (subsequently repealed under popular pressure). The entire files, still tied up with red tape, had later been moved from the office of the Ontario Attorney General to the Provincial Archives. As a fellow student doing a history M.A. commented to me at the time, these papers did show that the CPC was certainly the most internally democratic of all the Canadian political parties at the beginning of the thirties.

In the ensuing criminal trial of 1931, which led to the conviction and Penitentiary imprisonment of Tim Buck and seven others, the presiding judge formally addressed the jury and said: "Here the evidence would appear to indicate, if you accept it, that this Communist party divides the people of Canada into two classes. … In a democratic country … is it a just, proper and lawful thing to set one of these classes against the other?"

This certainly reminds us of the effort being made in Europe today to vilify and criminalize the very idea of communism for "inciting class hatred". And parallel charges are often made against Islam. The contemporary accusers, of course, are all other-cheek-turning Christians!

To criticize the domination of Canada by a class of people really doesn't necessarily mean that the members of that class are all hateful individuals personally – though a number of individual capitalists certainly are, and the capitalist system certainly is. To contest and ultimately break the power of the capitalist class in Canada, that is our sworn objective. Without their power, the capitalists will cease by degrees to form a class at all. Only when all danger of capitalist restoration has permanently passed will the workers' militant class consciousness cease to be essential for real democracy. If democracy means the rule of the majority over the minority, our society will from then on be a post-democratic one.