Make the Minimum Wage a Living Wage!

Brief to the Minimum Wage Board
Presented by Darrell Rankin
Leader, Communist Party of Canada – Manitoba
May 17, 2001

[The Manitoba government may create a two-tier minimum wage for workers under the age of 18 and for tipped workers. That would be a serious blow to women, youth and immigrant workers – mainly the unorganized workers who have no trade union protection. All workers should be treated with equal dignity and without discrimination!
It is essential that people speak out and protest against a two-tier minimum wage.
The minimum wage is already too low. About $1.9 billion of income has been lost by minimum wage

workers over the last 25 years because the Manitoba government has failed to protect minimum wage workers from the effects of inflation (making certain assumptions, see the brief below). This represents a shift of this amount from workers to capitalists.

The very fact that the government has to legislate a minimum wage to protect the most oppressed sections of the working class is in itself a shameful indictment of the capitalist system. Some of the work force is not even covered - farm workers, so-called “independent” contractors (eg., courier drivers), domestic workers, etc.]

The Provincial Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Canada – Manitoba welcomes this opportunity to contribute to the discussion on the minimum wage in Manitoba. I represent the Communist Party of Canada which has for eighty years fought to advance the rights and conditions of working people and everyone in need, opposed the corporate agenda, and has a goal of a socialist society in Canada.
The Communist Party pioneered many social programs in Canada. We helped mobilize public opinion so that governments of the day were compelled to act on the struggle for jobs, equality, medicare, unemployment insurance, social programs, trade union rights, peace and disarmament, a democratic solution to the constitutional crisis in Canada and many other issues.
We have always pointed out that reforms have never gone far enough, that conditions are getting worse for millions of people, inequality is greater, and wealth and technology are being used and accumulated in the interests of a small minority of people, the capitalist class.
Brutal, reactionary neo-liberal policies in the last twenty-five years have shifted the balance of forces in favour of the corporations and at the expense of working people and the environment. But these policy changes are themselves partly driven by growing impasses and setbacks in the world capitalist system, a system increasingly unable to meet the needs of the large majority of people.
Manitoba’s economy depends more on an unstable and slowing global economy.
The kinds of jobs that have been created in this period are part time, temporary, low wage, while thousands of better paying, full-time jobs are disappearing. For example, Mr. Buhler is threatening to close his Versatile tractor factory, a closure that would result in the loss of hundreds of better paying jobs.¹ While more people have found jobs in Manitoba in recent years, many working families are only one paycheque away from poverty, the food bank or losing their home or their farm.
In recent years, corporations in Manitoba have intensified their efforts to drive down wages and create a class of workers desperate to sell their labour power for any price. Our newspapers are carrying reports of employers bringing workers illegally from China and the Ukraine, and blackmailing them to work in slave-like conditions.
Young workers, especially, have experienced a dramatic decline in earnings. Between 1977 and 1995, real annual earnings for men aged 18 to 24 working full time, year round, declined 20 per cent. The same figure for women – starting from an already low, unequal figure – was a 9 per cent decline. A society that ignores and punishes its youth has no future, and the capitalist society in Manitoba is no exception.
All this means that Manitoba’s minimum wage policy affects or should affect many more people than twenty-five years ago. In 1997, an estimated 16,900 people earned the minimum wage or less, another 30,300 earned not more than 60 cents an hour more than the minimum wage.
When the minimum wage increased in 1999 to $6 an hour, and using the 1997 figures referred to above, almost 15 per cent of workers in Manitoba were earning the new minimum wage or less. While that compares very unfavourably to the 4.8 per cent of workers across Canada who earn the minimum wage, we are sure that many employers did raise their wages to comply with the law.
But far too many working people work at or close to the minimum wage in Manitoba. A person working at $6.25 an hour for forty hours over 52 weeks would expect to earn $13,000, far below – or 72 per cent of – the 1999 Low Income Cut-Off for a single person family of $17,886. The minimum wage for a single parent with one child is only 58 per cent of the 1999 Low-Income Cut-Off.
Provincial governments in Manitoba since 1976 have been willing supporters of the corporate agenda when it comes to the minimum wage. Regrettably, there is little difference in the record between the NDP and Conservative governments. If the 1976 minimum wage had been indexed to the rate of inflation, it would need to be $9.25 today (if the March 2001 rate of inflation holds to the end of the year).
The difference since 1976 between the minimum wage and where it would be without inflation has created an enormous shift in wealth and income from workers to capitalists. For example, inflation robbed a minimum wage worker of 25 cents an hour (rounded to the nearest 5 cents) in 1977, or $520 a year. If there were roughly 17,000 workers earning the minimum wage, this would represent a shift of 9 million dollars from workers to capitalists.
By 1998, the figures are $6,760 per minimum wage worker and a shift of 155 million dollars. Altogether, minimum wage workers have lost about 1.9 billion dollars because of the pro-corporate policy of recent governments to let inflation erode the value of the minimum wage. This is money that is owed to minimum wage workers in Manitoba, who helped create much of the new wealth in this province.
A rough calculation (assuming a constant 17,000 minimum wage workers per year) shows that both political parties are almost equally responsible for these lost wages. The NDP was in power for ten of the last twenty-five years (40 per cent of the time), and in the years it was in power as of December 31 minimum wage workers lost about $698 million due to eroded minimum wages, or about 37 per cent of the $1.9 billion in lost wages.
The fact it has been necessary to legislate a minimum wage in order to protect those parts of society that have no trade union protection, and groups like youth, women (who comprise about two-thirds of minimum wage earners) and the differently abled is itself a shameful indictment of the capitalist system.
Increasing the minimum wage is only one measure necessary to eliminate poverty and improve equality in Manitoba. To be effective, such a measure should be combined with other fundamental economic and social policy changes. Ultimately, the abolition of the wages system itself will be needed to achieve a society without the exploitation of labour, discrimination and oppression.
Measures such as a guaranteed annual income (GAI) under the capitalist system are too open to abuse and may contribute to a lowering of wages by forcing people to work for low wage jobs to supplement an inadequate GAI. The capitalist system which must compel the working class to sell its labour power would never exist with an adequate Guaranteed Annual Income.
The Communist Party opposes the differentiation of the minimum wage according to age or occupation. We believe all workers should be treated with equal dignity and without discrimination. We believe the minimum wage should apply to all currently excluded groups, such as farm workers, domestic workers and contractors. We support “fair wage” laws that require union rates of pay for contracted work at all levels of government. The minimum wage must also be indexed at least to the rate of inflation, after it has been substantially increased. We support a minimum wage of $10.50 an hour. Given recent reports of abuses, we demand the enforcement of all employment standards including the minimum wage.
It is clear that policies must now be implemented to counter not only the overall corporate attack on wages, but specifically address the growing problems of capitalist impoverishment, the growth of the working poor and the marginalized sections of the working class.
The scope of the problem goes well beyond Manitoba’s borders: 820 million workers in 1995 were under- or unemployed, one third of the global labour force. Record numbers of youth are entering the labour force – 700 million were aged 15 to 24 in 1999.²

The lost productive forces now unemployed by this system is enormous, as is the burden of an enormously bloated class of big capitalists and their servants, unsustainable depletion of resources and dangerous military pursuits.
The future that capitalism now holds for working people, including farmers and small business, is a bleak one. The large majority of people stand only to gain with realistic policies to create jobs and reduce poverty. A significant boost to the minimum wage to make it a real living wage, combined with a shorter work week with no loss in pay, taxes based on ability to pay and improving and creating new social programs – these realistic policies alone hold promise for the future.
The capitalist system may not have the ability to reform itself any more, as it has attempted to do in the past. But the failures of capitalism themselves are creating the conditions for its replacement. The low-wage policy of recent Manitoba governments is just one more obstacle that will have to be overcome on the road to a better society.

[Postscript: Manitoba raised the minimum wage to $6.50 per hour; unlike other provinces, it did not introduce a two-tier system.]

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Notes:

1 – After a long strike and lockout, Don Buhler had to pay substantial compensation for unfair bargaining, but the Versatile workers lost their jobs, and Buhler now has a union-free plant.

2 – OECD figures. Vancouver Sun, June 6, 1995; “Record numbers of youth will seek work: UN,” Globe and Mail, September 2, 1998.

Sports ‑ the house of cards

Jane Bouey

"Sports Franchise Sold for Record Amount" ... "City Parks and Recreation Budget Cut Again" ... "Star Athlete Signs Unprecedented Contract" ... "Obesity Rates In Children On the Rise"

Headlines such as these appear in our news on a regular basis. They are stark evidence of the contradictions within sport in our capitalist society. Vast sums of money flow into professional sports, at the same time as communities cut physical education programs in schools, and decrease accessibility to public recreation and amateur sport. (For example, the decision to spend $400 million on Skydome was made around the same time as it was "found" there was not the $500,000 needed to acquire new parks in Toronto.)

The last two decades have seen a massive transfer of public money into private hands. The declining rate of profit in some industries has forced corporations to look for new sources of investment. This transfer of funds has been done primarily through tax cuts, privatization and cuts to social spending. In the area of sport, these methods have been combined with large government subsidies, such as the expenditure of public funds to build stadiums for privately-owned sports franchises.

Throughout North America, cities clamour to see who can give pro sports the best deal:

"We'll build you a free stadium and all the roads and transit to get people there. You can have all the revenue derived from that stadium."

"No, we'll give you all that and a tax free status." And on and on it goes.

Supposedly, cities receive a huge financial benefit from having a "major league" franchise. Yet independent studies usually prove that these benefits have been greatly exaggerated. As outlined in Field of Schemes: How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money into Private Profit (by Joanna Cagan and Deil deMause, published by Common Courage Press), these studies point out that money spent by families to attend sporting events is money that they would otherwise have spent elsewhere. There is no new wealth generated, and the jobs created tend to be minimum wage, part‑time work in the service sector.

In fact, Field of Schemes refers to studies showing that taxpayers' money spent on stadiums or tax bail‑outs would result in greater benefits if spent on public services and programs.

Yet again and again, politicians make the decision to support big time sports. The same federal and provincial governments which refuse to build public housing can suddenly come up with the funds to do so... if the housing is tied to an Olympic bid. Once the bid is lost, the dollars disappear into the wind.

Some US cities have held referendums on building private stadiums with public money. Even when citizens have turned down these schemes, state governments sometimes override their decisions (as happened in Seattle), or a series of referendums are held with the pro‑stadium side spending increasing amounts of money.

Why are governments making these decisions?

The reason comes down to money. The money in sports goes to some of the world's largest corporations: media monopolies, developers, breweries, and sportswear companies. A substantial portion of cash goes to the very small number of elite athletes who fit advertising's sexy image ‑ whether through becoming stars in a "hot" sport, or by their own looks.

Increasingly the entire concept of sport is tied up with the corporate (often sexist) images of Nike, Adidas, Michael Jordan, Tiger Williams, Anna Kournikova, GatorAde...

Hundreds of billions of dollars are connected with this branding, which even reaches into "amateur" sport. The corruption of Olympic officials and the drugging of athletes are inevitable results of the corporate dollars involved.

Faced with decreased funding, city councils, parks and school boards are being "bribed" with corporate funds to allow this branding of our public space to expand, often for very little return.

While this corporate strategy has been effective, there are signs that the loyalty of fans to particular sports teams ‑ one of the basic cards on which the entire house is built ‑ is eroding. Teams relying heavily on corporate money (with luxury boxes and sponsorships), have put tickets out of the price range of ordinary working class people. An increasing number of televised games are only available on pay‑per‑view. The threats to move teams, the constant flipping of players, and the focus on money ‑ all have alienated much of the fan base.

Even in amateur sports the focus on elite athletes has been a mistake. The Globe and Mail ran an article (August 13, 2001) showing the deteriorating results by Canadians in international track and field. Canada's head track and field coach was quoted as saying "We shifted our focus to the athletes on top... Now we have to shift focus to younger athletes..."

When will professional sport's house of cards fall? This is an interesting question, but the greater issue is the impact of the distortion of sport on society in general, and on youth in particular. The health of young people, both physical and mental, is in danger as access to recreation becomes more expensive, as physical education programs are cut back in school, and as corporate branding of public space spreads.

Professional sports are still indelibly a part of our culture. Why this is the case, and why there are such deep loyalties, is a subject for another article. The point is what to do about it.

From early Communist civic politicians like Joseph Penner in Winnipeg, to municipal unions like CUPE today, working class activists have struggled for decades to build community centres and to protect and increase access to recreation. In recent years we have added the fight against the corporate branding of our parks and schools to the list. Is it possible that a struggle for democratic control over our sports teams could be on the horizon?

Today, money is sucked into elite level and professional sports to fill the coffers of corporations. But imagine a society where sports teams are owned and run by the people, where players make a fair and just wage, and profits flow into amateur and recreational sports. A society where the emphasis is placed on increasing access for all, including those with low incomes, women, and people with disabilities.

This is possible. Even within the confines of capitalism, the struggle for people’s sport can have a real impact, as an important part of the overall movement for progressive and democratic cultural change.

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(The author, a life-long sports fan, is active in struggles for women's equality and public education in Vancouver.)

The Place of the Restoration of Capitalism in the Historic Process

Victor Trushkov, Doctor of Philosophy,
member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation

(International Correspondence, no.2, 2001)

Despite the dramatic events of the 1980s and 1990s, when socialism had to fold up its banners over an immense area stretching from the Elbe to the Pacific Ocean and from Kouchka to the icy seas of the north, the present historical epoch preserves traits characteristic of the passage from capitalism to socialism on a global scale (...).

In his "Critique of the Gotha Programme" Marx wrote: Between capitalism and communism there is a period of revolutionary transformation of the first into the second. This is the period of political transition". (...) In the course of the second half of the 20th century a number of Marxist philosophers categorically stated that "the scientific category of `the transition period' is only applicable, in Marx and Lenin's conception to the analysis of the revolutionary process of liquidating capitalism and building socialism" (...) All transition periods have this in common, that they are based on a pluralist economy, where the presence of a dominant system is still, to a large extent, illusory.

The elaboration of the methodological bases of the transition period was the work of Lenin. In particular he devoted a series of writings to it in the period of April/May 1918, (...) the period just after the signing of the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty (...) These works allow one to distinguish at least two states within the transition period (...) using Lenin's image, the first is necessary to reach the "antechamber of socialism" and the second is the antechamber itself. In the course of the first stage, society accomplishes tasks that belong, objectively speaking, to the previous system which have been "inherited". (...) The tasks of the second stage are directly linked with the building of socialism on the basis of a level of civilisation, of productive forces capable of ensuring the highest possible labour productivity and the satisfaction of the principal reasonable needs of the individual. (...)

I would like to draw attention to the fact that two other stages complicate still further the transition period: a) the social restoration of the previous regime and b) the elimination of that restoration. (...)

It must be recognised that, by excluding the category of restoration from the theoretical analysis of the transition period, Marxist philosophy, in the period 1930-80 greatly weakened its immunological capacity, and so our ability to prepare for and to resist it. Instead, we indulged in a sublimation of the successes achieved. Thus the completion of the tasks of the first stage of the transition period in the end of the 1930s was declared to be "the building of socialism" and, at the beginning of the 1960s, when we had barely completed the reconstruction of the national economy destroyed during the Great Patriotic War, we proclaimed the "total and final victory of socialism" and announced the "broad building of communism".

Perestroika undoubtedly contributed to the restoration but I'm not talking about so called "catastroika" (...). Perestroika, considered as a restructuring of economic, political, social cultural and administrative relations is an objective fact of the passing from one stage to another, as is revolution when passing from an obsolete to a progressive mode of production.

Reconstruction-perestroika was already necessary in the 30s, when the tasks leading up to the "antechamber of socialism" had been successfully completed. It is no accident that the theme of the perestroika of the administration dominated the debates of the 18th national conference of the CPSU in February 1941. Attempts to restructure Soviet society on a socialist basis were undertake several times in the 1950-70 period. I will not discuss here the successes and setbacks of each of them.

The restoration of capitalism in the USSR and Eastern Europe is due to a considerable extent, to the interest that it has for the forces of world imperialism. In his polemic with Kautsky, Lenin had warned "Even if the exploiters are wiped out in a single country, they remain nevertheless stronger than the exploited because their connections at international level are enormous. That some of the exploited belonging to the least educated strata are capable of following the exploiters has been demonstrated in all the revolutions, including the Commune". (...)

The mere fact of the survival of exploiters on world level does not, in itself, mean that socialism is condemned. External pressure would only become threatening when there exist forces inside the socialist system who have an interest in restoring capitalism. It is about these forces that we must consider.

I think that the picture of Soviet society as a practically classless one in the 80s, the idea that the two forms of socialist property -- state and cooperative -- were sufficient to define the productive relations in the USSR, is far from reality. A mixed economy existed in the country at that time.

First of all I would recall the short-lived debate that took place in 1984-5 about incomes that did not come from work. Whatever one's political appreciation of that debate, it certainly pinpointed the existence of a system of small-scale retail trade. In law, this was barely legal and economically it was falsified insofar as the producers used means of production that did not belong to them but to the state. But between the moonlighting bricklayers and taxidrivers and the sales of the product of smallholdings it meant that this retailing was relatively important.

As for the private wholesale trade, which existed in the form of a parallel economy, its economic power was even greater. These were rumours of its importance current in the 1980s ‑- some research workers stated that its turnover was comparable to that of the state.

The measures taken in the context of perestroika in the 1987-88 period ensured the legalisation of retail and wholesale trading. This allowed those active in the field to seek political means of protecting their interests.

Nor, I believe, was the form of property called state property a uniform economic system. To be sure it had socialist aspects (...) but it was not "uniformly" socialist, rather it was a symbiosis in which state capitalism was the second constituent. Nor must we regard this as a colossal defect of Soviet reality. Lenin had already, 80 years ago, on 29 April 1918, in a speech to the Russian Central Executive Committee outlining his programme, stated that "State capitalism, for us, would be a step forward"¹ (...) This form of symbiosis of socialist and state capitalist systems inside state property is extremely important for analysing the driving forces behind the restoration of capitalism.

Although it is the workers as a whole that act as carriers of the socialist character of society, state property was, in practice, administered by the apparatus (what the "democrats" nicknamed the "nomenklatura of the state and party"). The fact of taking part in the socialist system made of this social stratum supporters of the Soviet regime whose principal characteristic was the fact that, in the work of the Soviets, legislative and executive functions coincided. But their belonging to the state capitalist sector required that they embody political interests of the apparatus in the separation and promotion of the executive branch of authority, in the broadening in the USSR of elements of bourgeois parliamentarianism. And when the Gorbachev-Yakovlev tandem started to introduce the bourgeois system, opening the horizon to semi-legal and illegal systems, an important part of the apparatus discovered it had competitors in those acting in the already existing forms of private property and expressed the will to preserve its privileged status (the privileges of power) by themselves appropriating state property. What happened must not be rejected, because when the restoration is over, the economy will remain pluralist for quite a long time and the role of state capitalism will be even more important.

Thus the possibility of capitalist restoration is determined by the transitional character of the period, by the preservation of a mixed economy in a society that was in the "antechamber of socialism". So long as the socialist system can be deprived of the "commanding heights" the transition period and the danger of restoration remain. Several factors make this possibility a reality. They are to be found, especially, in the social restoration.

Firstly, just after a revolution, there occurs a sort of "accelerated advance", the adoption of measures that rest on no solid economic basis. Let us remember the "Levellers" of the English Revolution and the Jacobins of the French Revolution. In the course of the Soviet Union's 70 years, one can also talk of a chain of "acceleration", whether the too high legal level of socialisation of the economy, the slogans about "broadening the building of communism" and of "developed socialism" or of Khrushchev's attack on the collective farmers' private plots of land.

Secondly, the experience of the preceding period always made itself felt, which led to a "traditionalism" even in innovative actions -- out of habit, in memory of earlier successes brought about by the use of certain social techniques. This "experiment" showed itself in the concentration of power in the hands of one man to reach the level of a personality cult (leaving aside other aspects and beginnings of this complex phenomenon) as well as in the use of war-time methods of mobilisation in peace time, etc.

Thirdly, the fits and starts of the economic system, the elements of crisis. In the USSR they showed themselves in a lowering of the rate of growth of social production at the start of the 80s, in the flagrant lack of balance between the amount of money and the amount of goods at the turn of the 1980s to 1990s, in the serious technological backwardness in relation to the scientific and technological revolution.

Fourthly, restoration is often preceded by war. The particularity of the restoration of capitalism is that the war was exceptionally long and hard, even if it was "cold". Moreover, the Soviet system was also greatly weakened by the participation of its troops in the armed conflict in Afghanistan.

However, all these factors were only the beginnings which made possible the restoration of capitalism. That transformation process became a reality through the action of a "subjective factor" that can be broken down as follows:

- the weakening of the "traditional" vanguard role of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the country's life

- the decomposition of society into social strata, including within the CPSU itself, reaching a critical level for the Soviet regime

- the too self-confident indulgence of the sincere supporters of socialism, which allowed a global offensive against the existing political and economic system, against the traditional Soviet values, including attacks on V.I. Lenin.

- the degeneration of the "revolutionary" power which led to its political betrayal. (...)

In the restoration process it is the state that finds itself in a vanguard position. It does not act like a superstructure on an already established base but as a means of stimulating the regression which the wholesale trading system needs so as to become the base. We are thus faced with a unique situation: the functional relations between base and superstructure are reversed -- it is the political that determines the economic. Even Choubais has recognised that privatisation has, so far, been carried out for political rather than economic reasons. (...)

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Endnotes

1- For example:

"Only the development of state capitalism, only the painstaking establishment of accounting and control, only the strictest organization and labour discipline, will lead us to socialism....

"I told every workers' delegation with which I had to deal when they came to me and complained that their factory was at a standstill: you would like your factory to be confiscated. Very well, we have blank forms for a decree ready, they can be signed in a minute ... But tell us: have you learnt how to take over production and have you calculated what you will produce? Do you know the connection between what you are producing and the Russian and international market? Whereupon it turns out that they have not learnt this yet;...

"The situation is best among those workers who are carrying out this state capitalism: among the tanners and in the textile and sugar industries, because they have a sober, proletarian knowledge of their industry and they want to preserve it and make it more powerful -- because in that lies the greatest socialism. They say: I can't cope with this just yet; I shall put in capitalists, giving them one-third of the posts, and I shall learn from them." (V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 27, page 297)

2- Anatoly Borisovich Choubais, "father of Russian privatization" from November 1991 on; today CEO of Russian joint stock company RAO UES (Unified Energy System of Russia).

The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea

Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998, xxi + 274 pages.

Reviewed by: Geoffrey Reaume

In July, 2001, John Manley, then Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, criticized the Bush administration’s rejection of implementing a ban on the use of germ warfare. This ban is supported by almost all 55 countries at the negotiations in Geneva where diplomats have been trying for years to reinforce the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. The current US position that outside inspections would “put national security and confidential business information at risk” (National Post, July 26, 2001) could have been written 50 years ago. As Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman reveal in their important book, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea, the United States has never been forthcoming about the history of their involvement in germ warfare.

In 1952, when representatives of North Korea and China made public their claims that the US had used biological warfare (BW) to spread disease during the Korean War, their charges were dismissed by the US and their allies, including Canada, as communist propaganda. Later when captured American flyers made statements that they had, in fact, been involved in the BW campaign, spreading infected insects and animals parts in northwest China and North Korea, these claims were also dismissed by Western officials. After repatriation in 1953, some of the American flyers claimed that they had been forced into making these statements after days of interrogation. The authors make a convincing case that their retractions were, in fact, due to the threat of court martial by US officials who had no desire to be exposed as having employed such odious weapons in an offensive manner rather than as a defensive reprisal measure. With World War II war crimes still a fresh memory, this charge had too many horrific implications. Most importantly, Endicott and Hagerman build up a “long circumstantial trail of corroborative evidence that the United States experimented with biological weapons in Korea… This was too large and too complex an operation, and was possessed of too much inner logic, to have been concocted by the Communist side for propaganda purposes, as some have suggested” (p. 195).

In building their case, the authors provide ample context, including the previously exposed use of Japanese war criminals led by Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii. He and his co-killers in Unit 731 conducted deadly medical experiments on “at least ten thousand prisoners of war” in occupied China (p. 39). In exchange for immunity from prosecution, their knowledge was secretly used by American officials to develop their own BW program. The global political crisis of the second half of the 1940s and early 1950s, is also succinctly discussed as are domestic American political developments in which congressional and military figures sought to comprehend how the US “lost” China in 1949, only to be determined to not “lose” South Korea when war broke out in 1950. By this time, there was burgeoning interest in BW among academic and military circles, especially between 1949-53, as being a less expensive way of killing or immobilizing people and animals than atomic weapons or conventional bombs.

Pharmaceutical business interests, led by George Merck, also pushed for this program, arguing that BW posed no special moral dilemma, while research scientists at Camp Detrick, Maryland, displayed an enthusiastic academic interest in the subject with the publication of over 200 papers in 1949 alone. Clearly there was money to be made in this campaign, as well as geo-political points to hammer home. American Defense Department BW funding expanded from $5.3 million for 1950, to $345 million between 1951-53. As the US became more frustrated with the war in Korea, which had bogged down in stalemate by the second year of the conflict, they resorted to the use of weapons which they hoped would spread sickness and death behind their enemies’ lines, leading to demoralization, defeat and an eventual victory over China and North Korea. The fact that these experiments were used in Korea also indicates the racist nature of a war where Asian lives were expendable in an effort to figure out if BW weapons were “effective”. Beside not wanting to “lose” Korea, the authors note that many top US military and political officials expected a general military showdown between capitalism and communism to be in the offing. Thus, testing these weapons was part of US preparations for World War III. Fortunately, these weapons were not as effective as their users had hoped. But some people did die like Qu, a railway worker, who succumbed after coming into contact with beetles infected with anthrax that were dropped by US aircraft in 1952 near Manjing railway station.

Quick response by health officials in the affected areas helped to prevent epidemics from occurring. Because BW weapons did not aid in ending the conflict, American officials became less enthusiastic about pursuing this program after the Korean War, though research continues to this day, witness the Bush administration’s latest effort to try to keep this matter hidden from prying eyes. It is fortunate that Endicott and Hagerman pried into documents in various countries including the United States, Canada and China, to help to expose a topic that is another aspect of “hidden history” that too few people in the west know about. Canada played a not insignificant part in this history by supporting BW through academic research and colluding in the cover-up. The authors’ discussion of censored, and in some cases, destroyed sources, reveals how much there is to still learn about what happened. This research may be impossible to complete due to missing documents from US Army files, difficulty in gaining access to sensitive archival material in Western countries and China and no access whatsoever to North Korean archives.

While they acknowledge the help provided by Chinese officials, Endicott and Hagerman manage to couch their language about selective access to archival material there with a good deal of diplomatic aplomb. In this respect, it will be apparent to anyone who reads this book that it is written by historians who support the Chinese and North Korean version of events, and the views of Professor Endicott’s late father James Endicott who published a pamphlet in 1952 on this topic. There is nothing wrong with this – historians who claim to be “unbiased” usually are kidding only themselves or simply don’t have anything new to say. This book, however, has a lot to say and deserves a wide audience. Whatever their biases, the authors provide a fair-minded synopsis of views contrary to their own, while also refuting these same arguments with their extensive research. Still, there are times when their partisanship wears thin as in Chapter 7 which is a good contextual chapter on the history of the Korean War, but which is obviously slanted to de-emphasizing North Korean and Chinese defeats and highlighting their victories. (As an aside, there also should have been a follow-up reference to the fact that the leading Chinese general of the war, Peng Dehuai, was later purged for having criticized Mao’s disastrous policies during the “Great Leap Forward” in 1959).

Nevertheless, these points do not mar the overall thrust of their work which is to document, as much as is presently possible, a dark chapter in recent world history where scientific researchers colluded with military and political leaders in enforcing US strategic interests during the early Cold War by developing one of the most vile weapons possible. One bright spot in recent developments to this story is that Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister spoke out publicly to criticize the retrograde US position in 2001. While it would be naïve to expect much independent thinking from the Chrétien government in its relations with the American empire, Manley’s position is nevertheless a hopeful sign that Canada’s stand on BW will take the side of all humanity compared to fifty years ago. Now, if only the Bush administration would listen to their “Canadian friends”, or most of the rest of the world for that matter, these appalling weapons could be eradicated. Endicott and Hagerman’s book should be required reading for everyone involved in the current negotiations on banning germ warfare, especially American officials. But, unfortunately, expecting that to happen is being truly naïve.

[Editor’s note: This review was written in August 2001, i.e., before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the U.S.]