One has to hand it to the neo-liberal ideologues and the neoconservative political movement in Canada; they have managed to get all political parties, the mainstream media and most of the population on board the "tax relief" train. To one degree or another, they all kneel at the alter of this ultimate false god.
And in the wake of round-after-round of federal and provincial income, sales and corporate tax cuts, the threat of severe austerity measures grows as each year passes.
While this story has played itself out across the country, right now it is doing so most dramatically in the province of Ontario, where citizens are faced with an austerity agenda that will be one-degree-or-another of the disgraceful Drummond Report
The massive income tax cuts of the 90's and the past decade in Ontario are the chickens that have come home to roost and they are directly why our governments claim they cannot "afford" to fully fund the programmes that citizens depend on, and why they are increasingly rattling the sabres by giving us the entirely false and unnecessary choice between supposed impending economic collapse and massive service cuts and user fees.
To put this in perspective, we have to begin by looking at what potential revenue was lost by Ontario's two decades of tax cuts. By 2003 the Harris era personal income tax cuts alone were removing $11.6 billion per year from the Ontario treasury. (1) These tax cuts, which were never reversed, (and which no one is proposing to reverse) have meant that Ontario has lost a minimum of $90-100 billion in revenue since 2003, not including the further tax cuts of the McGuinty era and not including the revenue lost during the Harris era itself. They also were of far greater benefit to the upper income brackets than the lower.
The reversal of these specific tax cuts would have reduced Ontario's overall debt from in excess of $236 billion to under $140 billion. This is very significant, given that Ontario paid out more in interest on this debt in 2010-2011 than it spent on post secondary education. The interest the province is handing to global financial concerns would have been around half the nearly $10 billion it was. That pays for a lot of programmes. It would also have meant that instead of facing an approximately $16 billion deficit this year we would be facing at most a deficit of $4.5 billion.
And this does NOT include all the other tax cuts; the cuts to corporate taxes, to small business taxes, to personal taxes since 2003 under McGuinty, etc. It only includes cuts to personal taxes that occurred under Mike Harris.
In fact, McGuinty's government has bragged that it is cutting income taxes even further. In Ontario's Tax Plan for Jobs and Growth the Ontario government is openly proud about how their personal income tax "relief" will benefit 93% of Ontarians (which means many very well-off people) and take another $11.8 billion in revenue out of the coffers over three years. That's almost $4 billion a year. And that means that, without these additional tax cuts, had there not been the "tax relief" since 1995, there would have basically been no deficit and their would be no need for the austerity agenda at all.
If the corporate and small business tax cuts of the 1995-2011 period had not happened, combined with the restored revenues from personal income taxes mentioned above, we would be running a surplus now and we would have an overall debt well under the $100 billion mark.
And yet no one, in any of the mainstream political parties, is advocating for reversing the vast bulk of these taxation policies. Not even close.
It is very important to understand that for the majority of citizens the money that they have received through this "relief" does not even remotely compare to the services, social cohesion and opportunity that they have lost as a result of it.
Unless you are in one of the small tax brackets at the pinnacle of our very steep income pyramid, tax relief is no relief at all. 100 per cent the opposite in fact. Tax relief is the key reason we can't "afford" and do not have programmes like universal day care. It is the reason that "economists" like Don Drummond can claim a fiscal crisis where none need exist and advocate to cut your programmes to the bone in the name of "fiscal responsibility". It is the reason our social programmes are not as good as they were in the '80's and early '90's. The reason our social and even physical infrastructure is falling apart. The reason why all those kid's programmes that used to be free or at very low cost are now either gone or charge often high user fees. The reason why public transit exists at levels way below what is required. The reason why if you lose your job you can't count on any real long-term government help, why health care is in "crisis", why tuition fees are way up, and so much more. It is a large part of why it seems, despite unprecedented economic "growth" over the last 25 years, that we are asked over-and-over again to make sacrifices to keep the wealthy wealthy and big business afloat. And it is the primary reason we have been utterly unable to really confront the stain of child poverty and it is a root cause of the massive growth in social inequality.
The results of the theory and practice of "tax relief".
Tax relief is the greatest snake oil salesperson political trick of all time...it promised to deliver financial aid and social stability but, for the bulk of the population, it delivered the exact opposite.
After the 2008 crisis of capitalism and the massive funds that were found to bailout major corporations in both Canada and the USA, it is also very clear that the idea that all this "tax relief" would result in eternal prosperity, corporate investment and trickle-down wealth has now obviously been shown to be the total nonsense that it always was. Most of the population has less job security, less access to programmes and less of a share of overall social wealth than they did when it all began. So, one has to ask, what was the point if not simply to benefit companies and those with higher incomes?
But there is no real political counter-offensive against the basic idea of personal tax cuts.
As shown the McGuinty Liberals have carried the Harris tax cuts further, and have pledged repeatedly that any tax hikes are off the table. The Tories advocate for even deeper tax cuts, and have implied that they would, if they could, implement Drummond's report in its entirety: a recipe for Greek-style social collapse.
The Ontario NDP has called for a raise in the corporate tax rate back to 14%, but the money that this would put back into government coffers would be offset in large part by what the government would lose by the NDP's promises to cut the HST on home heating and gasoline, and by tax breaks to small business. They outline this themselves in their Plan for Affordable Change. Nowhere does this platform call for any personal tax increases, not even on the highest income earners. (2)
The plan's constant refrain of "Rewarding Job Creators", "Living Within our Means", and "Making Life Affordable" expose the central idiocy of the tax relief idea. These targeted tax cuts of the NDP are bad environmental policy, as many have pointed out, most notably the David Suzuki Foundation. But also, would life not be made considerably more affordable for the pocketbooks of "working families" if we reversed personal income tax cuts and used the money to create a provincial system of, for example, free daycare or free pharmacare?
These are programmes that cannot really happen in any other way. Sometimes one can't help but feel that Social Democrats in Canada think that one day they will deliver Scandinavian Social Democracy and social programmes with US level tax rates. They won't.
These are just two examples of the programmes that could have, and could yet exist, if we turned back the near twenty years of personal and corporate tax cuts. Instead we will likely see more service cuts, and we will see a yet greater burden on the province's poor, its workers and its middle-class.
In fact, of course, without personal tax increases on, at the very least, the top income brackets, all the rhetoric of the "shared pain" that is flowing from Queen's Park is unbelievably and contemptibly hollow.
Now, more than ever, we need to fight for real, fair, steeply graded progressive income taxes and to understand that only with these taxes can we build the kind of society that we want and can we fight the inequality that is the hallmark of our times.
(1)http://www.policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/publications/Ontario_Office_Pubs/bti_taxcuts.pdf
(2) The platform, I would note, also envisions savings from the kind of fictional government "gravy" that Rob Ford said was being wasted in Toronto. And yet increasing income taxes marginally on even the top 25% of incomes in Ontario, which it does not advocate, would generate far more government revenue than all these "savings" combined, and many times over.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Monday, February 20, 2012
The World that made Don Drummond
In his opening paragraphs to the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx noted that people "make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past."
It is one of the most basic and fundamental insights into the way our society, its politics and its mass thinking work, and yet its meaning is often forgotten or ignored.
We, as people exist in a context, and that context shapes the way we think and the way we act. That context is sometimes of our own making, in part or in whole, but regardless, it is inescapable and it frames the way we think, react and act as a society, often imperceptibly.
This social discourse evolves constantly, and the actions of politicians and political advocates help to shape what becomes the essential framework of their day.
The citizens of Ontario have come under a kind of full frontal ideological assault recently, delivered to them by an agent of their own provincial Liberal government, the former TD Bank economist Don Drummond. His commissioned report has recommended deep cuts to programmes that millions depend on. It disgracefully calls for the imposition of user fees on things like school buses (as one small example), massive cuts to health care, farcical ideas such as ending all day kindergarten or cutting access for seniors to medication, etc. It seeks to undue the little that the Liberals can claim as their attempts to reconstruct an inclusive civil society in the wake of the Harris years.
But what is fascinating about the Report is that the reaction to it has been akin to the reaction to a hurricane or some other unavoidable though unfortunate force of nature. Much of it has accepted its basic premises (even when somewhat critical) and has promoted it as a "bitter pill" that was overdue.
The "progressive" Toronto Star has had the Drummond Report as a link under its own masthead on its website since it came out. Some of its less interesting commentators, such as Martin Cohn, have written nonsensical articles with idiotic narratives about the "chickens coming home to roost" economically etc. The National Post, Globe and the Toronto Sun, hardly surprisingly, have embraced its recommendations with a glee bordering on the obscene. It is as if they cannot wait to take these programmes away from people and to watch life become that much harder for Ontario's citizens.
The report seeks to make constant the false ideas that neoconservatives used to deconstruct the post-war social compromise, and it seeks to do so as a kind of permanent counter-revolution against the gains of workers and other groups economically that were the dominant ideological hegemony and narrative after the Second World War and until the mid 1980's.
But the report did not fall out of the sky and its defenders are not merely post-modern Chicken Littles. It is the outcome of an ongoing process of ideological reeducation within the developed West that seeks to both reverse any traces of economic Social Democracy (in the traditional sense of the term) and that also seeks to make perpetual economic turmoil a constant so as to subsidize the lifestyles of people exactly like Don Drummond and so as to aid in the shareholder return driven amoral culture of profit that has destroyed the North American industrial base, wiped out the communities and jobs that existed for so many and that has successfully made even "left" parties sing its tune.
The idea, of course, is rather simple. Supposedly, despite decades of massive economic growth, despite record corporate profits, despite the fact that the wealthy are wealthy to a degree unparalleled since the "Gilded Age" era of capitalist Robber Barons, and despite the demonstrably obvious fact that our society is wealthier and has more overall social capital than it did forty years ago (and remember, the forces of capitalist ideological hegemony have hitched their fences to the logic of its capacity for perpetual growth, so they will not even deny this), we are still told to beleive that governments cannot afford to implement or sustain the kinds of programmes they introduced in the 1950's!
If that is the case then capitalism has manifestly failed. It has failed by even its own logic.
But how have we gotten to this point of absurdity? This surreality where we are told that capitalism has delivered tremendous material reward and incredible advances in social wealth, and yet, somehow, we cannot afford to fund basic social programmes and we are now suggesting that parents should PAY to have their kids bussed to schools that they have a legal right to have their kids attend.
And how is it that it is not noted that this supposed lecture and recipe for "recovery" comes from a social aristocrat, who was instructed to NOT discuss tax increases (not that he would have), and whose version of austerity would inflict far greater pain upon working people than it ever would upon those of his peculiar pedigree of social leach. Telling the masses to depend less on government while making an enormous personal sum off of government to say this.
Why did McGuinty hire him in the first place? Was it not perfectly obvious that Drummond had a vested interest in a specific agenda? To hire him to suggest how government could better govern itself was akin to appointing the head of the Yankees to run a commission on how to deal with revenue sharing in baseball. In other words, it was either stupid or this is what the McGuinty government wanted. It does not really matter which is true.
McGuinty, sensing perhaps that the "Report" would be nasty, tried to do the usual preparation for its impact in January, by telling everyone that they would all have to "share the pain" when the austerity regime started.
But never has this rhetoric been less true. There is no "sharing" that will occur. Millions of people will have their lives impacted on in ways that will range from the severe, in the case of the poor, to the serious, in the case of much of the middle class.
But others, like Don Drummond, given that tax increases are off the table, will feel little to nothing at all.
If you want to see how this really works, check out
http://www.mittbucks.com/
Here you will see that "sharing pain" in this era of grotesque inequality is a farce. For austerity to have an impact on the lives of the welathy like it will on the rest of us, taxes would have to be massively increased and laws put in place to remind corporations of their social responsibility to the society that created them and that they could not have existed without.
Instead, not a single party in mainstream "left" thinking is calling for anything like this at all.
They have completely capitulated to the forward march of the relentless neo-liberal economic logic of tax cuts, service cuts, deregulation, anti-unionism and much more.
Louis Menand of The New Yorker, when reviewing Rick Perlstein's "Before the Storm" put what I am trying to say very well..."It's not only that more politicians today sound like Goldwater than like Tom Hayden. More politicians today sound like Goldwater than like Lyndon Johnson". What this was pointing out was that the ideological spectrum has changed to the point that the ideas of the "extreme" presidential candidate Barry Goldwater are now mainstream thinking, while the ideas of Johnson, who declared a "War on Poverty" that actually achieved results, would be regarded as unrealistically and even ridiculously radical now.
In Canada we can see the ideological shift in many ways. Unlike the USA and the UK, Canada took slightly longer to capitulate in the face of the new hegemony. Even as late as 1989, all federal parties were willing to agree that it was the function of government to actually attempt to eliminate child poverty by the year 2000. They spectacularly failed to do so, but, far more significantly, none of them would really make this pledge now.
In 1995 a Liberal federal government introduced a budget that signified the first shift of "progressive" forces away from the ideas of interventionist government and the social responsibility of the wealthy and corporations.
The NDP has followed suit. It has also bought into all of the basic ideas of the new neo-liberal ideological framework, as is clearly shown in Manitoba, and, more bitterly, Nova Scotia, where the government has singularly failed to act on the few promises it made to organized labour and is bringing in a preliminary form of its own austerity agenda.
In Ontario the shift can be seen in how the party, which has sought in an entirely reactionary way to distance itself from its Bob Rae past, called their 2011 platform (such as it was) "The Plan for Affordable Change" as opposed to Bob Rae's "Agenda for the People". The difference in tone is quite telling. So is the reality that the ONDP's 2011 platform was far to the right of Rae's re-election platform in 1995 let alone the 1990 one.
Andrea Horwath, reflecting this now, released a statement calling for a "Balanced Approach to a Balanced Budget" as if a balanced approach is really what is needed and as if a balanced budget, with the fetishistic right wing reductionist logic that this entails, is actually what should be the government's focus as opposed to the well being of its citizens and the attempt to end the suffering and deprivation that poverty and social inequality cause.
The federal NDP has also done this, and the Jack Layton lead "Orange Crush" took opposition on what was without any doubt the most right wing platform the party has ever run on. Read it for yourself:
http://www.ndp.ca/platform
As with the Democrats in the US and most of the Socialist and Social Democratic parties in Europe, the Liberals and the NDP have bought into almost every fundamental aspect of the new ideological order and, by doing so, have created and helped to perpetuate the very ideas and philosophies that hinder them in their pursuit not only of power but of actually making a difference and being anything other than a last defence against the "Storm"
They have aided in their rhetoric, their platforms and, most importantly in their acceptance of the basic premises of the neo-liberal right, in perpetuating the ideological and social ideas that allowed this report to be taken seriously at all, which it would not have 30 years ago (despite the fact that our economy has supposedly "grown" so much in the meantime).
They have helped in every meaningful way to manufacture the world that created Don Drummond.
It is one of the most basic and fundamental insights into the way our society, its politics and its mass thinking work, and yet its meaning is often forgotten or ignored.
We, as people exist in a context, and that context shapes the way we think and the way we act. That context is sometimes of our own making, in part or in whole, but regardless, it is inescapable and it frames the way we think, react and act as a society, often imperceptibly.
This social discourse evolves constantly, and the actions of politicians and political advocates help to shape what becomes the essential framework of their day.
The citizens of Ontario have come under a kind of full frontal ideological assault recently, delivered to them by an agent of their own provincial Liberal government, the former TD Bank economist Don Drummond. His commissioned report has recommended deep cuts to programmes that millions depend on. It disgracefully calls for the imposition of user fees on things like school buses (as one small example), massive cuts to health care, farcical ideas such as ending all day kindergarten or cutting access for seniors to medication, etc. It seeks to undue the little that the Liberals can claim as their attempts to reconstruct an inclusive civil society in the wake of the Harris years.
But what is fascinating about the Report is that the reaction to it has been akin to the reaction to a hurricane or some other unavoidable though unfortunate force of nature. Much of it has accepted its basic premises (even when somewhat critical) and has promoted it as a "bitter pill" that was overdue.
The "progressive" Toronto Star has had the Drummond Report as a link under its own masthead on its website since it came out. Some of its less interesting commentators, such as Martin Cohn, have written nonsensical articles with idiotic narratives about the "chickens coming home to roost" economically etc. The National Post, Globe and the Toronto Sun, hardly surprisingly, have embraced its recommendations with a glee bordering on the obscene. It is as if they cannot wait to take these programmes away from people and to watch life become that much harder for Ontario's citizens.
The report seeks to make constant the false ideas that neoconservatives used to deconstruct the post-war social compromise, and it seeks to do so as a kind of permanent counter-revolution against the gains of workers and other groups economically that were the dominant ideological hegemony and narrative after the Second World War and until the mid 1980's.
But the report did not fall out of the sky and its defenders are not merely post-modern Chicken Littles. It is the outcome of an ongoing process of ideological reeducation within the developed West that seeks to both reverse any traces of economic Social Democracy (in the traditional sense of the term) and that also seeks to make perpetual economic turmoil a constant so as to subsidize the lifestyles of people exactly like Don Drummond and so as to aid in the shareholder return driven amoral culture of profit that has destroyed the North American industrial base, wiped out the communities and jobs that existed for so many and that has successfully made even "left" parties sing its tune.
The idea, of course, is rather simple. Supposedly, despite decades of massive economic growth, despite record corporate profits, despite the fact that the wealthy are wealthy to a degree unparalleled since the "Gilded Age" era of capitalist Robber Barons, and despite the demonstrably obvious fact that our society is wealthier and has more overall social capital than it did forty years ago (and remember, the forces of capitalist ideological hegemony have hitched their fences to the logic of its capacity for perpetual growth, so they will not even deny this), we are still told to beleive that governments cannot afford to implement or sustain the kinds of programmes they introduced in the 1950's!
If that is the case then capitalism has manifestly failed. It has failed by even its own logic.
But how have we gotten to this point of absurdity? This surreality where we are told that capitalism has delivered tremendous material reward and incredible advances in social wealth, and yet, somehow, we cannot afford to fund basic social programmes and we are now suggesting that parents should PAY to have their kids bussed to schools that they have a legal right to have their kids attend.
And how is it that it is not noted that this supposed lecture and recipe for "recovery" comes from a social aristocrat, who was instructed to NOT discuss tax increases (not that he would have), and whose version of austerity would inflict far greater pain upon working people than it ever would upon those of his peculiar pedigree of social leach. Telling the masses to depend less on government while making an enormous personal sum off of government to say this.
Why did McGuinty hire him in the first place? Was it not perfectly obvious that Drummond had a vested interest in a specific agenda? To hire him to suggest how government could better govern itself was akin to appointing the head of the Yankees to run a commission on how to deal with revenue sharing in baseball. In other words, it was either stupid or this is what the McGuinty government wanted. It does not really matter which is true.
McGuinty, sensing perhaps that the "Report" would be nasty, tried to do the usual preparation for its impact in January, by telling everyone that they would all have to "share the pain" when the austerity regime started.
But never has this rhetoric been less true. There is no "sharing" that will occur. Millions of people will have their lives impacted on in ways that will range from the severe, in the case of the poor, to the serious, in the case of much of the middle class.
But others, like Don Drummond, given that tax increases are off the table, will feel little to nothing at all.
If you want to see how this really works, check out
http://www.mittbucks.com/
Here you will see that "sharing pain" in this era of grotesque inequality is a farce. For austerity to have an impact on the lives of the welathy like it will on the rest of us, taxes would have to be massively increased and laws put in place to remind corporations of their social responsibility to the society that created them and that they could not have existed without.
Instead, not a single party in mainstream "left" thinking is calling for anything like this at all.
They have completely capitulated to the forward march of the relentless neo-liberal economic logic of tax cuts, service cuts, deregulation, anti-unionism and much more.
Louis Menand of The New Yorker, when reviewing Rick Perlstein's "Before the Storm" put what I am trying to say very well..."It's not only that more politicians today sound like Goldwater than like Tom Hayden. More politicians today sound like Goldwater than like Lyndon Johnson". What this was pointing out was that the ideological spectrum has changed to the point that the ideas of the "extreme" presidential candidate Barry Goldwater are now mainstream thinking, while the ideas of Johnson, who declared a "War on Poverty" that actually achieved results, would be regarded as unrealistically and even ridiculously radical now.
In Canada we can see the ideological shift in many ways. Unlike the USA and the UK, Canada took slightly longer to capitulate in the face of the new hegemony. Even as late as 1989, all federal parties were willing to agree that it was the function of government to actually attempt to eliminate child poverty by the year 2000. They spectacularly failed to do so, but, far more significantly, none of them would really make this pledge now.
In 1995 a Liberal federal government introduced a budget that signified the first shift of "progressive" forces away from the ideas of interventionist government and the social responsibility of the wealthy and corporations.
The NDP has followed suit. It has also bought into all of the basic ideas of the new neo-liberal ideological framework, as is clearly shown in Manitoba, and, more bitterly, Nova Scotia, where the government has singularly failed to act on the few promises it made to organized labour and is bringing in a preliminary form of its own austerity agenda.
In Ontario the shift can be seen in how the party, which has sought in an entirely reactionary way to distance itself from its Bob Rae past, called their 2011 platform (such as it was) "The Plan for Affordable Change" as opposed to Bob Rae's "Agenda for the People". The difference in tone is quite telling. So is the reality that the ONDP's 2011 platform was far to the right of Rae's re-election platform in 1995 let alone the 1990 one.
Andrea Horwath, reflecting this now, released a statement calling for a "Balanced Approach to a Balanced Budget" as if a balanced approach is really what is needed and as if a balanced budget, with the fetishistic right wing reductionist logic that this entails, is actually what should be the government's focus as opposed to the well being of its citizens and the attempt to end the suffering and deprivation that poverty and social inequality cause.
The federal NDP has also done this, and the Jack Layton lead "Orange Crush" took opposition on what was without any doubt the most right wing platform the party has ever run on. Read it for yourself:
http://www.ndp.ca/platform
As with the Democrats in the US and most of the Socialist and Social Democratic parties in Europe, the Liberals and the NDP have bought into almost every fundamental aspect of the new ideological order and, by doing so, have created and helped to perpetuate the very ideas and philosophies that hinder them in their pursuit not only of power but of actually making a difference and being anything other than a last defence against the "Storm"
They have aided in their rhetoric, their platforms and, most importantly in their acceptance of the basic premises of the neo-liberal right, in perpetuating the ideological and social ideas that allowed this report to be taken seriously at all, which it would not have 30 years ago (despite the fact that our economy has supposedly "grown" so much in the meantime).
They have helped in every meaningful way to manufacture the world that created Don Drummond.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
On "Winning" Parts 1-2
1) Introduction
Karl Marx once remarked that the generations of the dead weigh like a nightmare upon the brains of the living.
Never has this been truer than in the history of the socialist left. Our decades of grasping failure from the jaws of victory have left us, as a movement, in a weaker position than ever, despite the reality that at the dawn of the last century, and with the coming of the economic crisis in this one, many felt that the future was and is ours to inherit.
It has also exposed the fallacy that the election of people from these parties, firmly ensconced as they are within an ideological idea that would have been anathema even a couple of decades ago, signifies anything at all.
And yet, somehow, we repeat the errors of our forebears. Errors compounded by the fact that they have been repeated so often.
These errors stem from a basic misunderstanding by the left of the traditional idea of what constitutes “victory” for both the socialist left and those that the socialist left claims to represent, the broad mass of humanity that can be shown to, to one degree of wealth or another, be outside of the structural power and social elite.
This mass is not simply the traditional industrial working class, but also must be said to include the hundreds of millions of the underprivileged in the Third World, the members of what Marx described, increasingly inaccurately, as the “Lumpenproletariat”, the wide strata of “white-collar” workers who often work longer hours for less reward than the few factory workers left that they sought not to be, and the permanent near underclass that we have created with our untenable civilization of tremendous productive capacity and wealth generation and a bizarre social unwillingness to include the vast bulk in this progress, rendering them open, at any moment, to impoverishment.
To those who would seek to solve the issues addressed herein through traditional democratic capitalist methods, I would suggest that you need read no further.
This is not an attempt to justify democratic socialism, it is, rather, a suggestion as to how to secure its future.
While, and I feel that this is tremendously important, it is absolutely necessary and reasonable to debate whether or not democratic socialism is the path to be pursued to resolve the social questions that confront us, this is not meant as a defense of socialism per se.
Instead it is an attempt, in several parts, both tactically and morally, to suggest why socialism, in both its revolutionary and parliamentary forms, has failed, as well as to suggest how we might, as a broad movement, go about attempting to reverse this history.
The fact is, like-it-or-not, that the socialist movement in either of its broad incarnations, while successfully forcing the creation of a more broadly inclusive civilization in the developed West, and to a degree elsewhere, has also either failed to have any lasting structural effect where democratically elected, or has, in every single case, become tyrannical and has debased its alleged lofty goals where “successful” through revolutionary methods elsewhere.
Why?
The moral imperative of socialism is undeniable. It is born of inequity and inequality and its cauldron is the flame of injustice that our civilization brands so many of its citizens with.
The basic error that we have made as socialists, that we have made as people who wish to see a successful transformative social movement actually succeed in attaining a lasting effect, is in our basic misunderstanding of what constitutes “winning”.
What unites the revolutionary and parliamentary left, and what unites them with their opportunistic centrist opponents, though not their Rightist opponents, is the fixation on power as a constructive end. “Winning” is assumed to be the assumption of power by election in the case of Social Democrats, or by revolution in the case of the remaining revolutionary left.
Yet the reality is that the socialist movement should not directly, as an aim, attempt to take power at all.
In the case of revolutionary “victories”, the self-defeating problem is the overwhelming preoccupation with the maintenance of revolutionary power, which must be virtually the sole basic focus of a revolutionary government due to the fact that the government itself becomes an island under siege very quickly after assuming power. Violence as a structural arm of governance becomes a necessary component of revolutionary government directly due to the reality that a truly revolutionary government is not always a government that comes to power due to a “revolution”. Often it is by definition attempting to force consciousness forward. In this they cannot succeed.
I realize that this is a difficult thesis to accept, but only if the thesis is misunderstood, deliberately or otherwise.
The immediate charges will be those of “defeatism” or “utopianism”. Oddly, and this is worth noting, these exact same charges will be leveled from both the “hard” and “soft” left. The reason is simple. They have the same overwhelming desire to be in power.
(In fact, as I will discuss at length later, the entire purpose of the Communist and revolutionary Left movement and its imitators, is the attaining and maintenance of power.)
Broadly speaking, however, this is not so much an argument against the idea of forming a government as it is an argument against the immediate utility of such a goal.
In fact, I wholeheartedly support continued efforts to democratically attempt to attain and to hold power where possible. I simply feel that this parliamentary aspect of the struggle for a democratic socialist social transformation must be a secondary goal. I also feel, as I will expand upon later, that those who seek a rapid revolutionary or violent (and all rapid social transformations are of necessity violent) social transformation are doomed to failure even in the rare cases that they do take power, due to their subservience to a deeply reactionary and elitist idea that a government of revolutionary vanguardists can force the ideological and cultural victory of humanity over its “baser” instincts.
The primary battle, very simplistically put for now, must be a battle for people’s hearts and minds, for their consciousness, in a long-term sense, and not for their votes come election time or, more perversely, for their temporary participation in some “revolutionary moment”. The struggle is an ideological one, not a tactical one.
“Victory”, in any meaningful sense of the term can only come after this laborious battle for the consciousness of people and not before. Winning power in elections or in a grasp at power during some revolutionary moment when the system is in a temporary state of objective collapse or weakness will not accomplish this end. While the democratic triumph of socialist governments can help in the process, they can only help. The true battle remains outside of the structure of government.
And, as a result, it is winning itself that is often the first defeat.
2) On the Framework
Hierarchy, as much as class and sexism, is the enemy, and the left has had a hard time accepting this. It is its dilemma. It has opposed a system while accepting much of its structures and its methodology in its own practice.
The Left has, historically, opposed bourgeois structuralism while implementing an identical version of it within its own parties, with leaders, sycophants, employees, "whips" and all of the detritus and ass-licking that makes bourgeois society function.
It should be obvious to note that one will not defeat a system by adopting all of its basic power and hierarchical tenants, but it seems a lesson lost on the vast bulk of left parties. There is no basic difference in the way that most Left parties govern themselves and structure themselves and the way that Right parties do. This alone should be an alarm.
It is one thing to accept the reality that we live within this context and that we, to a certain extent, must function within it. It is another thing to accept the context and its legacies within our own movements and organizations.
The hierarchical, personality & elite leader driven culture of Left parties is identical to that of right parties. There is no difference whatsoever other than in the apparent aims and the alleged goals. Left parties have become institutionalized in bourgeois democratic culture. They are both its false "nemesis" and its pressure valve outlet when the broad section of the populace become angry.
Having basically accepted not only the ideological underpinnings of capitalism, but its very structures, these parties are a false threat. They, when elected, serve only to humanize the inevitable shift that they no longer ideologically oppose. There is not a single socialist or social democratic party in the developed West, outside of Scandinavia (arguably), that has governed as an anti-capitalist party once elected in the last 25 years.
Even the few, such as the Bob Rae government in Ontario, that actually governed from the Left, in a capitalist sense, were destroyed by their own lack of ideologically cohesion and by the stunning counter-assaults by the Right which both undercut the government and made many of its allies turn against it. The irony was that many of these erstwhile allies were only to reemerge later as defenders of an NDP that has shifted far further to the right than the Rae administration ever was.
There is not a single governing faction of the NDP, federal or provincial, that would run remotely on the platform that Rae ran on for re-election in 1995, let alone what the Rae NDP ran on in 1990 with the "Agenda for the People".
The Rae government stands alone as the sole government in North America that chose to not fight the Recession of the period on the backs of workers...every single NDP government now has, or would.
Why is this broadly the case?
In large part it is that these parties do not seek to alter the framework of capitalist discourse, but they rather seek to "win" within it. They feel that by attaining government they can effect some kind of "change" and that they can represent certain interests ahead of others.
And this is, no doubt, true. There is little question that an NDP government, for example, would govern more "fairly" that a Tory government.
The question that emerges is fairly in what context? And, to what end?
For all of the endless defenses that one hears from Liberals, Democrats, Social Democrats or Democratic Socialists, the irrefutable fact remains that, whether these parties were in or out of power, the social discourse and the policies of governments of all stripes have gone fundamentally to the right. And they have often been in "power".
We live in a context where the election platforms of North American conservatives with regards to economic policy in 1975 are far more radical than those of "left" parties today. There has been a tendency, of late, to blaim this on quasi-conspiratorial ideas that "Wall Street" or the "1%" has somehow imposed this agenda on the people of the First World.
But this is wishful thinking at best and it undermines any real left attempt to turn the tide.
The Right has won the broader ideological battle by relentlessly sticking to ideological points that were very unfashionable and unelectable 30 years ago and making them "mainstream". Ideas like "tax relief", "deficit" fighting, "privatization" and others. They have conjoined this with a religious opposition to the sole accomplishments of the "Left" over the past period of capitalist retrenchment, which are the gains of women, the LGBT community and "minorities".
This is a very clever combination in that it claims to empower many of those that the rest of their agenda disempowers in every meaningful social sense. Even if they have lost their jobs and social security, they can still proudly claim that they have "defended" their family "against" people like Gays or Islamics who have now become the social "others" along with the poor and the no longer acknowledged working-class.
There is no possible way to confront this new "political correctness" and ideological hegemony other than by attempting to do what the right has accomplished...actually altering the the framework of the discourse. Only when this is done can we "win". Otherwise our victories are not victories at all, they are simply delaying tactics to prepare citizens for the worse that is to come.
The left, economically, has not won one single, lasting and transformative battle of any kind for nearly 30 years. Conditions for workers, the poor, unions, and much of the White Collar working class have only gotten more and more tenuous regardless of who was in power. That by accepting the basic precepts of right-wing thinking parties like the Democrats, Liberals or NDP are a basic part of creating this new hegemony is only something that can be denied by the delusional.
These parties, basically, did this to "win". They shifted as they felt the shift would help to elect parliamentarians. That it also reinforced the basic ideas and tenants of the system did not factor into the thinking.
By placing the notion of political or electoral victory ahead of the idea of changing social and political discourse to reflect our ideas, as opposed to those of the right, we lose in advance.
...to be continued...
Karl Marx once remarked that the generations of the dead weigh like a nightmare upon the brains of the living.
Never has this been truer than in the history of the socialist left. Our decades of grasping failure from the jaws of victory have left us, as a movement, in a weaker position than ever, despite the reality that at the dawn of the last century, and with the coming of the economic crisis in this one, many felt that the future was and is ours to inherit.
It has also exposed the fallacy that the election of people from these parties, firmly ensconced as they are within an ideological idea that would have been anathema even a couple of decades ago, signifies anything at all.
And yet, somehow, we repeat the errors of our forebears. Errors compounded by the fact that they have been repeated so often.
These errors stem from a basic misunderstanding by the left of the traditional idea of what constitutes “victory” for both the socialist left and those that the socialist left claims to represent, the broad mass of humanity that can be shown to, to one degree of wealth or another, be outside of the structural power and social elite.
This mass is not simply the traditional industrial working class, but also must be said to include the hundreds of millions of the underprivileged in the Third World, the members of what Marx described, increasingly inaccurately, as the “Lumpenproletariat”, the wide strata of “white-collar” workers who often work longer hours for less reward than the few factory workers left that they sought not to be, and the permanent near underclass that we have created with our untenable civilization of tremendous productive capacity and wealth generation and a bizarre social unwillingness to include the vast bulk in this progress, rendering them open, at any moment, to impoverishment.
To those who would seek to solve the issues addressed herein through traditional democratic capitalist methods, I would suggest that you need read no further.
This is not an attempt to justify democratic socialism, it is, rather, a suggestion as to how to secure its future.
While, and I feel that this is tremendously important, it is absolutely necessary and reasonable to debate whether or not democratic socialism is the path to be pursued to resolve the social questions that confront us, this is not meant as a defense of socialism per se.
Instead it is an attempt, in several parts, both tactically and morally, to suggest why socialism, in both its revolutionary and parliamentary forms, has failed, as well as to suggest how we might, as a broad movement, go about attempting to reverse this history.
The fact is, like-it-or-not, that the socialist movement in either of its broad incarnations, while successfully forcing the creation of a more broadly inclusive civilization in the developed West, and to a degree elsewhere, has also either failed to have any lasting structural effect where democratically elected, or has, in every single case, become tyrannical and has debased its alleged lofty goals where “successful” through revolutionary methods elsewhere.
Why?
The moral imperative of socialism is undeniable. It is born of inequity and inequality and its cauldron is the flame of injustice that our civilization brands so many of its citizens with.
The basic error that we have made as socialists, that we have made as people who wish to see a successful transformative social movement actually succeed in attaining a lasting effect, is in our basic misunderstanding of what constitutes “winning”.
What unites the revolutionary and parliamentary left, and what unites them with their opportunistic centrist opponents, though not their Rightist opponents, is the fixation on power as a constructive end. “Winning” is assumed to be the assumption of power by election in the case of Social Democrats, or by revolution in the case of the remaining revolutionary left.
Yet the reality is that the socialist movement should not directly, as an aim, attempt to take power at all.
In the case of revolutionary “victories”, the self-defeating problem is the overwhelming preoccupation with the maintenance of revolutionary power, which must be virtually the sole basic focus of a revolutionary government due to the fact that the government itself becomes an island under siege very quickly after assuming power. Violence as a structural arm of governance becomes a necessary component of revolutionary government directly due to the reality that a truly revolutionary government is not always a government that comes to power due to a “revolution”. Often it is by definition attempting to force consciousness forward. In this they cannot succeed.
I realize that this is a difficult thesis to accept, but only if the thesis is misunderstood, deliberately or otherwise.
The immediate charges will be those of “defeatism” or “utopianism”. Oddly, and this is worth noting, these exact same charges will be leveled from both the “hard” and “soft” left. The reason is simple. They have the same overwhelming desire to be in power.
(In fact, as I will discuss at length later, the entire purpose of the Communist and revolutionary Left movement and its imitators, is the attaining and maintenance of power.)
Broadly speaking, however, this is not so much an argument against the idea of forming a government as it is an argument against the immediate utility of such a goal.
In fact, I wholeheartedly support continued efforts to democratically attempt to attain and to hold power where possible. I simply feel that this parliamentary aspect of the struggle for a democratic socialist social transformation must be a secondary goal. I also feel, as I will expand upon later, that those who seek a rapid revolutionary or violent (and all rapid social transformations are of necessity violent) social transformation are doomed to failure even in the rare cases that they do take power, due to their subservience to a deeply reactionary and elitist idea that a government of revolutionary vanguardists can force the ideological and cultural victory of humanity over its “baser” instincts.
The primary battle, very simplistically put for now, must be a battle for people’s hearts and minds, for their consciousness, in a long-term sense, and not for their votes come election time or, more perversely, for their temporary participation in some “revolutionary moment”. The struggle is an ideological one, not a tactical one.
“Victory”, in any meaningful sense of the term can only come after this laborious battle for the consciousness of people and not before. Winning power in elections or in a grasp at power during some revolutionary moment when the system is in a temporary state of objective collapse or weakness will not accomplish this end. While the democratic triumph of socialist governments can help in the process, they can only help. The true battle remains outside of the structure of government.
And, as a result, it is winning itself that is often the first defeat.
2) On the Framework
Hierarchy, as much as class and sexism, is the enemy, and the left has had a hard time accepting this. It is its dilemma. It has opposed a system while accepting much of its structures and its methodology in its own practice.
The Left has, historically, opposed bourgeois structuralism while implementing an identical version of it within its own parties, with leaders, sycophants, employees, "whips" and all of the detritus and ass-licking that makes bourgeois society function.
It should be obvious to note that one will not defeat a system by adopting all of its basic power and hierarchical tenants, but it seems a lesson lost on the vast bulk of left parties. There is no basic difference in the way that most Left parties govern themselves and structure themselves and the way that Right parties do. This alone should be an alarm.
It is one thing to accept the reality that we live within this context and that we, to a certain extent, must function within it. It is another thing to accept the context and its legacies within our own movements and organizations.
The hierarchical, personality & elite leader driven culture of Left parties is identical to that of right parties. There is no difference whatsoever other than in the apparent aims and the alleged goals. Left parties have become institutionalized in bourgeois democratic culture. They are both its false "nemesis" and its pressure valve outlet when the broad section of the populace become angry.
Having basically accepted not only the ideological underpinnings of capitalism, but its very structures, these parties are a false threat. They, when elected, serve only to humanize the inevitable shift that they no longer ideologically oppose. There is not a single socialist or social democratic party in the developed West, outside of Scandinavia (arguably), that has governed as an anti-capitalist party once elected in the last 25 years.
Even the few, such as the Bob Rae government in Ontario, that actually governed from the Left, in a capitalist sense, were destroyed by their own lack of ideologically cohesion and by the stunning counter-assaults by the Right which both undercut the government and made many of its allies turn against it. The irony was that many of these erstwhile allies were only to reemerge later as defenders of an NDP that has shifted far further to the right than the Rae administration ever was.
There is not a single governing faction of the NDP, federal or provincial, that would run remotely on the platform that Rae ran on for re-election in 1995, let alone what the Rae NDP ran on in 1990 with the "Agenda for the People".
The Rae government stands alone as the sole government in North America that chose to not fight the Recession of the period on the backs of workers...every single NDP government now has, or would.
Why is this broadly the case?
In large part it is that these parties do not seek to alter the framework of capitalist discourse, but they rather seek to "win" within it. They feel that by attaining government they can effect some kind of "change" and that they can represent certain interests ahead of others.
And this is, no doubt, true. There is little question that an NDP government, for example, would govern more "fairly" that a Tory government.
The question that emerges is fairly in what context? And, to what end?
For all of the endless defenses that one hears from Liberals, Democrats, Social Democrats or Democratic Socialists, the irrefutable fact remains that, whether these parties were in or out of power, the social discourse and the policies of governments of all stripes have gone fundamentally to the right. And they have often been in "power".
We live in a context where the election platforms of North American conservatives with regards to economic policy in 1975 are far more radical than those of "left" parties today. There has been a tendency, of late, to blaim this on quasi-conspiratorial ideas that "Wall Street" or the "1%" has somehow imposed this agenda on the people of the First World.
But this is wishful thinking at best and it undermines any real left attempt to turn the tide.
The Right has won the broader ideological battle by relentlessly sticking to ideological points that were very unfashionable and unelectable 30 years ago and making them "mainstream". Ideas like "tax relief", "deficit" fighting, "privatization" and others. They have conjoined this with a religious opposition to the sole accomplishments of the "Left" over the past period of capitalist retrenchment, which are the gains of women, the LGBT community and "minorities".
This is a very clever combination in that it claims to empower many of those that the rest of their agenda disempowers in every meaningful social sense. Even if they have lost their jobs and social security, they can still proudly claim that they have "defended" their family "against" people like Gays or Islamics who have now become the social "others" along with the poor and the no longer acknowledged working-class.
There is no possible way to confront this new "political correctness" and ideological hegemony other than by attempting to do what the right has accomplished...actually altering the the framework of the discourse. Only when this is done can we "win". Otherwise our victories are not victories at all, they are simply delaying tactics to prepare citizens for the worse that is to come.
The left, economically, has not won one single, lasting and transformative battle of any kind for nearly 30 years. Conditions for workers, the poor, unions, and much of the White Collar working class have only gotten more and more tenuous regardless of who was in power. That by accepting the basic precepts of right-wing thinking parties like the Democrats, Liberals or NDP are a basic part of creating this new hegemony is only something that can be denied by the delusional.
These parties, basically, did this to "win". They shifted as they felt the shift would help to elect parliamentarians. That it also reinforced the basic ideas and tenants of the system did not factor into the thinking.
By placing the notion of political or electoral victory ahead of the idea of changing social and political discourse to reflect our ideas, as opposed to those of the right, we lose in advance.
...to be continued...
Thursday, January 12, 2012
On Pornography and the Persistence of Patriarchy
There is a debate that exists among leftists and feminists as to pornography. This, as a result of the imagery and social implications of the Internet, is an increasingly important debate.
As a man, I cannot speak to the differences that exist within the feminist movement regarding pornography. It is not, by definition, my place.
But I can speak to the perceptions or misperceptions of pornography that seemingly exist within the broader left and among men.
I can also speak to the fact that, as uncomfortable as it may make us, the commercialization of depictions of sexuality, of whatever type, have become frequently an enemy of the same sexual "liberation" that they allegedly flowed out of.
There is little doubt that a double-standard of sorts exists in the left with regards to the sexual, and more importantly, in some respects, the commercial exploitation of people who "willingly" participate in pornography. While one would be hard pressed to find someone in left circles who would seek to justify the exploitation of minimum wage workers on the grounds that they "freely chose" to take these terrible dead-end jobs, there remains a legion of them who will, to one degree or another, do so for the desperate women (and men) who end up selling themselves for the sexual gratification of others.
Let us be clear. Like all capitalist transactions involving the primarily poor or desperate this is a profoundly unequal transaction. This is not art, and it is not erotica. The idea that one should view the transaction differently as a result of the fact that the commodity is sex is at best wishful thinking. In reality, in almost all cases the physical, emotional and personal exploitation of people in this "industry" is far worse than that of workers in standard industries. This is not a reflection on the individual morality of the people in question; it is a reflection of the morality of the producers and consumers of this material.
What has obfuscated the issue in the minds of many, understandably, is to not want to support a religious or moralistic form of anti-sex backwardness. This is often tied into a civil libertarian fear that the government should not involve itself in the policing of depictions of sex.
And it should not.
That is not the issue at all. Censorship is not a sensible solution to pornography for many reasons, not the least of which is that, as has happened in the past, the censors will largely concentrate on LGBT erotica and pornography. To that small minority of people on the left who advocate banning pornography (as if such a thing is possible), I would suggest that they think again. It will not turn out as you might suppose.
The "Sexual Revolution", with its embrace of modernity, homosexuality and lesbianism, so-called "deviant" behaviour, and other forms of human sexual impulse, made important strides forward in the cause of personal liberation. But it left people in a seeming conundrum where, if they believed in "liberation" and "liberalism", somehow they felt that they had to be uncritical of sexual depictions, whatever their broader social and political context might be.
And yet we must not abandon a critical viewpoint of the increasingly prevalent culture of pornography and the dangers it represents due to the essentially misogynist nature of much of these representations of human sexuality and due to their widespread embrace by men. This has been massively abetted and amplified by the ease of access presented by the Internet.
Even a cursory examination of pornographic websites on line, and we all know this, exposes profoundly misogynist language and depictions of women. Insulting terms like slut, bitch, whore, and much, much worse are commonplace. Revolting depictions of male dominance through acts like "facials' etc.., are also the norm. There is no possible way to frame the use of the now popularized term "money shots" other than through the lens of patriarchy unless one is willfully blind. This "sexual" act is an explicit and clear act of physical domination and cannot be explained otherwise.
To excuse its vile symbolism on the grounds that the participants willingly degraded themselves is as absurd as saying that workers willingly buy into their own exploitation by working. It may heal the consciences of those who find sexual self-gratification in these depictions, but it does not change the reality of the social transaction.
Pornography is not the explicit depiction of people having sex, it is the transformation of this sex act into a commercial commodity for popular consumption. These are not morally the same the same at all. Further, in the continued context of a hierarchical and patriarchal society, pornography reflects back the fears and desires of the oppressors upon the oppressed.
In the online pornographic world any man can quickly find the reaffirmation of his own self-perception of being dominant over women. It is hard to understand its generally appalling terminology and imagery other than as a rear guard psychological defence against the idea of women's personal and sexual equality.
No sexual transaction that is paid for and that involves submission in a context of having been paid for, is anything other than an exploitative transaction by definition. This applies also to men who get caught up in the web of pornography and its particularly dehumanizing form of using people. But that does not change the fact that the entire framework in which this occurs is as a direct result of social patriarchy in a capitalist context. The men, ironically, are also victims of patriarchy.
We do not act, most often, in the full understanding of our actions. If you want to understand the social function of patriarchy, in the same way that one understands the social function of hierarchy, one has to realize that it is pervasive and that we are all, to some degree or another, participants in it. That we may not want to be changes little. Even the most progressive men cannot completely escape it anymore than the most progressive leftist can escape capitalism. It is systemic, and therefore it is a part of our daily discourse and thinking.
Pornography, however, has undergone a revolution. It is now available, easily, 24 hours a day for everyone. It has become an industry that is vastly more profitable than Hollywood. The sites are usually free "fronts" for a network of corporate and sometimes illegal interests, who use young women in heinous and ugly ways to make money.
This is what online pornography is. It is a forum that takes women who need quick "solutions" to personal problems and are, very often, 18-25, (or made to look like they are), and it uses them as chattel. If for no other reason this alone makes it something that must be fought. It is a meat grinder and its form of oppression makes Wal-Mart look good.
Remarkable money is made off of these "actors"...and they see very little of it. They are paid FAR less than a minor actor in a mainstream film, despite the fact that the movies they are in will possibly make more profit than many, if not all "small-budget" mainstream movies, most of which lose money.
Enormous numbers of phony "amateur" sites exist to complete the fraud that this is all "good girls" gone "bad" or some other sexist narrative. But they are not amateur sites at all, of course, they are run by criminal or corporate interests as a front to draw in willing "dupes" who pretend they think they are participating in some kind of "authentic" experience.
The reason that this is significant is simple. Misogynist depictions and commentaries about women are now commonplace on the Internet. They have even, to a degree, become hard to avoid. They are exposing large numbers of young men to very hardcore and degrading depictions of sexual acts in ways that are profoundly demeaning to women. The views of these men towards women are inevitably effected.
They cannot not be.
As leftists and as leftist men, we must stand up and acknowledge that this commercial sexual use of fellow human beings in this way is not an expression of sexual freedom, but is a capitalist perversion of it.
As a man, I cannot speak to the differences that exist within the feminist movement regarding pornography. It is not, by definition, my place.
But I can speak to the perceptions or misperceptions of pornography that seemingly exist within the broader left and among men.
I can also speak to the fact that, as uncomfortable as it may make us, the commercialization of depictions of sexuality, of whatever type, have become frequently an enemy of the same sexual "liberation" that they allegedly flowed out of.
There is little doubt that a double-standard of sorts exists in the left with regards to the sexual, and more importantly, in some respects, the commercial exploitation of people who "willingly" participate in pornography. While one would be hard pressed to find someone in left circles who would seek to justify the exploitation of minimum wage workers on the grounds that they "freely chose" to take these terrible dead-end jobs, there remains a legion of them who will, to one degree or another, do so for the desperate women (and men) who end up selling themselves for the sexual gratification of others.
Let us be clear. Like all capitalist transactions involving the primarily poor or desperate this is a profoundly unequal transaction. This is not art, and it is not erotica. The idea that one should view the transaction differently as a result of the fact that the commodity is sex is at best wishful thinking. In reality, in almost all cases the physical, emotional and personal exploitation of people in this "industry" is far worse than that of workers in standard industries. This is not a reflection on the individual morality of the people in question; it is a reflection of the morality of the producers and consumers of this material.
What has obfuscated the issue in the minds of many, understandably, is to not want to support a religious or moralistic form of anti-sex backwardness. This is often tied into a civil libertarian fear that the government should not involve itself in the policing of depictions of sex.
And it should not.
That is not the issue at all. Censorship is not a sensible solution to pornography for many reasons, not the least of which is that, as has happened in the past, the censors will largely concentrate on LGBT erotica and pornography. To that small minority of people on the left who advocate banning pornography (as if such a thing is possible), I would suggest that they think again. It will not turn out as you might suppose.
The "Sexual Revolution", with its embrace of modernity, homosexuality and lesbianism, so-called "deviant" behaviour, and other forms of human sexual impulse, made important strides forward in the cause of personal liberation. But it left people in a seeming conundrum where, if they believed in "liberation" and "liberalism", somehow they felt that they had to be uncritical of sexual depictions, whatever their broader social and political context might be.
And yet we must not abandon a critical viewpoint of the increasingly prevalent culture of pornography and the dangers it represents due to the essentially misogynist nature of much of these representations of human sexuality and due to their widespread embrace by men. This has been massively abetted and amplified by the ease of access presented by the Internet.
Even a cursory examination of pornographic websites on line, and we all know this, exposes profoundly misogynist language and depictions of women. Insulting terms like slut, bitch, whore, and much, much worse are commonplace. Revolting depictions of male dominance through acts like "facials' etc.., are also the norm. There is no possible way to frame the use of the now popularized term "money shots" other than through the lens of patriarchy unless one is willfully blind. This "sexual" act is an explicit and clear act of physical domination and cannot be explained otherwise.
To excuse its vile symbolism on the grounds that the participants willingly degraded themselves is as absurd as saying that workers willingly buy into their own exploitation by working. It may heal the consciences of those who find sexual self-gratification in these depictions, but it does not change the reality of the social transaction.
Pornography is not the explicit depiction of people having sex, it is the transformation of this sex act into a commercial commodity for popular consumption. These are not morally the same the same at all. Further, in the continued context of a hierarchical and patriarchal society, pornography reflects back the fears and desires of the oppressors upon the oppressed.
In the online pornographic world any man can quickly find the reaffirmation of his own self-perception of being dominant over women. It is hard to understand its generally appalling terminology and imagery other than as a rear guard psychological defence against the idea of women's personal and sexual equality.
No sexual transaction that is paid for and that involves submission in a context of having been paid for, is anything other than an exploitative transaction by definition. This applies also to men who get caught up in the web of pornography and its particularly dehumanizing form of using people. But that does not change the fact that the entire framework in which this occurs is as a direct result of social patriarchy in a capitalist context. The men, ironically, are also victims of patriarchy.
We do not act, most often, in the full understanding of our actions. If you want to understand the social function of patriarchy, in the same way that one understands the social function of hierarchy, one has to realize that it is pervasive and that we are all, to some degree or another, participants in it. That we may not want to be changes little. Even the most progressive men cannot completely escape it anymore than the most progressive leftist can escape capitalism. It is systemic, and therefore it is a part of our daily discourse and thinking.
Pornography, however, has undergone a revolution. It is now available, easily, 24 hours a day for everyone. It has become an industry that is vastly more profitable than Hollywood. The sites are usually free "fronts" for a network of corporate and sometimes illegal interests, who use young women in heinous and ugly ways to make money.
This is what online pornography is. It is a forum that takes women who need quick "solutions" to personal problems and are, very often, 18-25, (or made to look like they are), and it uses them as chattel. If for no other reason this alone makes it something that must be fought. It is a meat grinder and its form of oppression makes Wal-Mart look good.
Remarkable money is made off of these "actors"...and they see very little of it. They are paid FAR less than a minor actor in a mainstream film, despite the fact that the movies they are in will possibly make more profit than many, if not all "small-budget" mainstream movies, most of which lose money.
Enormous numbers of phony "amateur" sites exist to complete the fraud that this is all "good girls" gone "bad" or some other sexist narrative. But they are not amateur sites at all, of course, they are run by criminal or corporate interests as a front to draw in willing "dupes" who pretend they think they are participating in some kind of "authentic" experience.
The reason that this is significant is simple. Misogynist depictions and commentaries about women are now commonplace on the Internet. They have even, to a degree, become hard to avoid. They are exposing large numbers of young men to very hardcore and degrading depictions of sexual acts in ways that are profoundly demeaning to women. The views of these men towards women are inevitably effected.
They cannot not be.
As leftists and as leftist men, we must stand up and acknowledge that this commercial sexual use of fellow human beings in this way is not an expression of sexual freedom, but is a capitalist perversion of it.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
The Trouble with the 99%.
There can be little doubt about the importance of the Occupy movement to our recent political discourse. It succeeded in getting a significant amount of media attention and it forced politicians of all stripes, including those on the right, to acknowledge the danger that severe and rampant inequality pose to our social order and structure.
This ad hoc movement inspired many and managed to put its issues on the table to a sufficient degree that politicians of both the Social Democratic and Liberal brand, as well as some on the Far Right, have attempted to bask in its refracted glow. That none of them offer the slightest threat to the system that Occupy apparently opposes appeared often lost on the participants, however.
Naomi Klein, no less, told them that they were the most important political movement in the world. And, perhaps for that moment in time they were.
And yet a narrative, to be lasting, has to have longevity in its meaning and analysis, even if that meaning and analysis are distilled down to basics or essentials. What I mean by that is that this analysis has to be, basically, true and that it also must have transformative solutions to offer and not just injustices to expose.
Last week I approached the issue of what I felt were the organizational flaws with the Occupy idea. And these flaws are really troubling and fundamental. In my opinion they essentially doomed the movement tactically from the start. This does not mean that what happened was not inspiring, significant or important. It simply means that the methods could not, in even the short term, succeed in any systemic sense.
I also touched on the problem with Occupy's basic "Us vs. Them" 99% analysis. And it is to this I wish to return.
There is little doubt that the 99% slogan became the movement's greatest asset in terms of propaganda and mass appeal. It resonated and enraged and inspired. It motivated and was basic enough in its narrative that it could not help but be picked up by the media.
The message, from Occupy Wall Street and others can effectively be distilled down to this blurb from one of the websites:
"We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we're working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent."
With a variety of small or minor variations, this became the movement's primary ideological message.
But, the message is false. And this, in the long run especially, matters.
Occupy, of course, began in New York. As a Canadian, interested in the Canadian political context I will discuss the slogan in our statistical terms, though, as can be easily shown, this would apply equally in the United States.
There is no question about the grotesque growth of social inequality in the West. That the destruction of the post-war social compromise by the forces of reaction and neo-conservative ideologues has led to alarming levels of inequality has, as previously mentioned, even been accepted by much of the Right lately. That this push towards a State Capitalist system, where corporations are bailed out for their misdeeds while workers and much of the middle class, but most horribly (and least mentioned) the underclass and retail working class, are made to pay for the subsidization of the wealthy and the said bailouts, is real is not open to serious dispute. It is not the focus of this article. That this obvious fact has been ignored and even reinforced by the austerity agendas of all governments, regardless of political stripe, plays into an overall sense of hopelessness and reinforces reductionist and absolutist, totalizing ideologies and political views. The inherent danger when democracy becomes seemingly impotent.
But the trouble lies in understanding that undue corporate power and the rise of a new "Gilded Age" ultra-rich power elite does not mean that all of society, the media, politicians, governments, the courts, etc...are beholden to this elite, nor, more importantly, does it mean that the "99%" share common interests and that they can work together, in any meaningful sense, to rectify the problems as raised.
It also does not take into account the basically dangerous aspect to a world view like this...a world view that is both disingenuous and bourgeois in its desire to eclipse real issues of class, management, Social Mandarins, and the true underpinning of inequality with a slogan that appears to embrace "everyone", in the classic American way, but, by doing so, embraces many, if not most, of the basic enemies of working class and Socialist or anti-Capitalist politics, and embraces them in a way that lets them entirely off-the-hook for their political, economic and social actions that have helped greatly to lead us to this point.
In the last available stats the top 1% of tax filers in Canada made a minimum of $169,300 as individuals. They made, on average, $404,500.
The 99% is everyone else.
While normally I am loathe to use personal example, here is a case where, for the sake of simplicity, I will.
In the very late 1990's I worked as a manager in a transportation company. I did sales and public relations, but I had managerial control over the office and ground staff in many cases. I made, at the time, $45,000-$55,000 a year, depending on performance bonuses. That would likely translate to $55,000-$65,000 a year now, more-or-less.
This would place me, at the time, well within the 99%,(and,I can assure you,I am there still!) But were my class and social interests, were I to follow those, the same as the phone workers or couriers at the company? Really?
More basically, almost everyday I walk into my local Shopper's Drug Mart. The young woman at the cash, with two kids and a husband I have found out works at a non-union job site, makes, at most $12-13 an hour. The main Pharmacist who works there, who has a college education, makes in the range of $50,000-60,000 a year. Are their class interests the same? They are both in the "99%".
This view of society, while assuaging the guilt of the children of the bourgeoisie, would have you believe that they are "victims" of the system in the same way the children of the working-class, the underclass and the retail working class are. That may make them feel good about themselves, and aid in their often reactionary analysis, but it is pure American nonsense from a society that denies the very existence of social class, despite the fact that even Rick Santorum admitted that the US has less social mobility now than Europe or Canada.
There is no 99%. It does not exist as a meaningful class or political entity. There are the remnants of the old industrial working class, the underclass, the retail working class, the office level lower middle-class.
Then there are the managerial and middle-managerial class, the small business owners, professionals, media workers (who are often said to be tools of the 1%), academics...etc...
Their class and social interests are not the same and a movement seeking real transformative social change and seeking to actually confront capitalism as a system needs to understand this. Working and fighting in the interests of the former can be an effective way to really confront inequality. The latter's interests are, almost always, in perception or reality, running counter in whole or in part to this change.
What it comes down to is this; according to the 99% view someone who pays minimum wage while pulling in $100,000 a year on their business, someone who works at a corporate office for $125,000 a year, someone who has a $100,000 a year dental clinic, an $80,000 a year professional, a $65,000 a year middle manager, a $55,000 shop owner, etc...are all part of the 99%.
I am sure that they like that idea.
But beyond the problems of class analysis that this presents, it also plays into the worst aspects of pseudo-conspiratorial and reductionist ideas.
I will begin by saying that our courts, governments, media, economy, and social forces are not, actually, ruled and governed by 1% of the population. That is a ridiculous idea that does not withstand even the slightest true scrutiny. It is a good way for social democratic parties or liberal politicians like Obama to get out of their complicity in the creation and maintenance of the present ideological hegemony, but the reality is that we live in a very complex society where even supposed "agents" of the 1%, like the Toronto Star, for example, will suddenly endorse the federal NDP. Part of the plot? Or is capitalism a system and not a slogan and are it problems a fundamental outcome of this system and not a perversion of it?
Looking back at the quote from Occupy above consider this:
"Shrewd and calculating, their hearts are filled with lust for power and consumed by greed for money. Rich and aristocratic, they despise Christians and they loathe the lowly working class. They control the world's press and virtually all our banks and financial institutions. They screen and choose who America's leaders will be and even determine who will run on the Democratic and Republican Party tickets"
or..."crony capitalists were the ones that benefit from contracts from government, benefit from the Federal Reserve, benefit from all the bailouts. They don’t deserve compassion. They deserve taxation or they deserve to have all their benefits removed.”
The first is from anti-Semitic Bilderberg conspiracists and the the second is from the fanatically right-wing Ron Paul.
Surprising how "class" rhetoric devoid of class content can sound "left" wing.
The fact is that these kinds of reductionist slogans are dangerous because they imply, by definition, a simplistic social order and simplistic mechanism of systemic social control and they thus offer simplistic and often neo-utopian (in the Marxist sense) solutions.
Once you accept the 1% idea, that means the other 99% is innocent, so to speak. It is entirely analogous to notions that imply that "good" common people are perverted or led astray by an almost hidden overclass that shapes the political and social agenda by meeting in Colorado once a year or, more often, by being a part of a named or unnamed, but implied Jewish conspiracy.
This small group of financiers, industrialists, etc...have cheated us all of our democracy and stolen our futures and rights. That we and others may have played ourselves a role in it, in how we have voted and what we have sought politically and socially is, of course, largely left out. It absolves us of blame other than as being dupes of "their" media or victims of forces beyond our control (and these forces, by the way, were not and are not beyond our control).
We are the 99%, after all. We share common interests, shopkeeper, stock broker, cashier, factory worker, academic, single mother, dentist, stock boy, manager, minimum wage worker...our commonalities outweigh our differences because we share a national, democratic or popular narrative....and we have a very simple common enemy no matter our actions or own divisions, divisions outweighed by our unity in struggle against this greater enemy.
Familiar at all?
But inequality, at root, is not an aberration of capitalism, it is a function of capitalism. While, in large part with the willing and active complicity of large sections of the middle class and traditional industrial working class, the assault by neo-conservative politicians and parties on the gains of the post-war social compromise have led us back to social inequality at levels akin to those of the "Guilded Age" of the 20's, the inequality inherent to capitalism never went away. And it won't, without changing the fundamental nature of capitalism's economic relations. As the reversing of the economic aspects of the social gains of the 1945-1980 period clearly shows, cosmetic changes,while they have a real impact on people's lives and on our social cohesion, can be undone by shifting the terms of the ideological debate, which the Right has done rather successfully. The debate has been so successfully shifted that all major political parties in North America accept the fundamental premises that led us here.
This was not a conspiracy, and it was not done by the 1% and their "agents", though they have been its most pronounced, though by no means sole, beneficiaries. It was done by a political movement that stayed true to its principles and objectives, even when confronted by serious setbacks and even when their ideas were at first fringe ideas, and who remade our society by pursuing these objectives relentlessly in the political and popular arena. The degree of this achievement can be seen in relatively small ways, such as the widespread belief in the rhetoric of tax-relief or the amazing contempt that many who would most benefit from them hold for trade unions, or in more significant ways, such as the fact that if one were to propose the social and economic platforms of, say, the Trudeau Liberals of 1976 one would be regarded as an ultra-radical. Not a single political party is even proposing that we go back to the levels of taxation and interventionism that existed in 1980, let alone proposing actual systemic change.
And the reversal of this ideological victory can only, in any meaningful sense, be accomplished by doing the same thing on the Left. By building a coherent,long-term and ideological challenge to capitalism as a system in the streets, in the popular discourse and, most importantly, in the political arena. It can only be done by advocating for democratic socialism, and doing so consistently and regardless of electoral setbacks and short term opinion polls. "Winning" on grand rhetoric to then basically implement the essence of your opponent's agenda when in government,or to more "humanely" or "fairly" manage austerity or "growth" is a hollow victory indeed.
It is so hollow that one need only reflect on the fact that the march towards where we are now has continued, without serious detour, despite different shades of government, whether Liberal, Democrat or New Democrat. The victory of this ideological hegemony is so great that the NDP in Manitoba in the last provincial election, for example, did not dispute the widespread media reporting that there was little, in terms of economic policies, that separated them from the TORIES! In fact,they seemed rather proud of their record as "sound fiscal" managers.
But this is not a cause for despair, it is a cause for an ideological counter offensive that does not paint the 1% as the problem or cause of inequality, a rhetorical flourish that any populist politician, right or left, can embrace, but that recognizes that capitalism itself is the cause. They are simply its effect. While the 1% certainly has an entrenched and direct political stake in the continuation of the present state of affairs and the continued corporate power of State Capitalism, they are not the only people who have this stake, perceived or real.
However, as the effects of the victory of this ideological offensive become clear, decreased economic and social equality and democracy, decreased oversight of corporate activity, increased environmental degradation, rampant and soulless community destroying commercialism, the loss of social stability, union jobs, industrial production, and so much more, the seeds of the turning of the tide are sown.
Occupy, in a very original and inspiring way, has put these problems back into popular consciousness and political discussion. Now it is to us to build a class aware, avowedly socialist political force that will present real transformative solutions and alternatives in the coming years and that will work to see these policies enacted and implemented whether in or out of office. It would also, perhaps most importantly, work to popularize anti-capitalist ideas.
When we have won the broad ideological struggle against the ideas of both capitalism and neo-liberalism, we will have won the key struggle in ending grotesque human inequality and social injustice.
This ad hoc movement inspired many and managed to put its issues on the table to a sufficient degree that politicians of both the Social Democratic and Liberal brand, as well as some on the Far Right, have attempted to bask in its refracted glow. That none of them offer the slightest threat to the system that Occupy apparently opposes appeared often lost on the participants, however.
Naomi Klein, no less, told them that they were the most important political movement in the world. And, perhaps for that moment in time they were.
And yet a narrative, to be lasting, has to have longevity in its meaning and analysis, even if that meaning and analysis are distilled down to basics or essentials. What I mean by that is that this analysis has to be, basically, true and that it also must have transformative solutions to offer and not just injustices to expose.
Last week I approached the issue of what I felt were the organizational flaws with the Occupy idea. And these flaws are really troubling and fundamental. In my opinion they essentially doomed the movement tactically from the start. This does not mean that what happened was not inspiring, significant or important. It simply means that the methods could not, in even the short term, succeed in any systemic sense.
I also touched on the problem with Occupy's basic "Us vs. Them" 99% analysis. And it is to this I wish to return.
There is little doubt that the 99% slogan became the movement's greatest asset in terms of propaganda and mass appeal. It resonated and enraged and inspired. It motivated and was basic enough in its narrative that it could not help but be picked up by the media.
The message, from Occupy Wall Street and others can effectively be distilled down to this blurb from one of the websites:
"We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we're working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent."
With a variety of small or minor variations, this became the movement's primary ideological message.
But, the message is false. And this, in the long run especially, matters.
Occupy, of course, began in New York. As a Canadian, interested in the Canadian political context I will discuss the slogan in our statistical terms, though, as can be easily shown, this would apply equally in the United States.
There is no question about the grotesque growth of social inequality in the West. That the destruction of the post-war social compromise by the forces of reaction and neo-conservative ideologues has led to alarming levels of inequality has, as previously mentioned, even been accepted by much of the Right lately. That this push towards a State Capitalist system, where corporations are bailed out for their misdeeds while workers and much of the middle class, but most horribly (and least mentioned) the underclass and retail working class, are made to pay for the subsidization of the wealthy and the said bailouts, is real is not open to serious dispute. It is not the focus of this article. That this obvious fact has been ignored and even reinforced by the austerity agendas of all governments, regardless of political stripe, plays into an overall sense of hopelessness and reinforces reductionist and absolutist, totalizing ideologies and political views. The inherent danger when democracy becomes seemingly impotent.
But the trouble lies in understanding that undue corporate power and the rise of a new "Gilded Age" ultra-rich power elite does not mean that all of society, the media, politicians, governments, the courts, etc...are beholden to this elite, nor, more importantly, does it mean that the "99%" share common interests and that they can work together, in any meaningful sense, to rectify the problems as raised.
It also does not take into account the basically dangerous aspect to a world view like this...a world view that is both disingenuous and bourgeois in its desire to eclipse real issues of class, management, Social Mandarins, and the true underpinning of inequality with a slogan that appears to embrace "everyone", in the classic American way, but, by doing so, embraces many, if not most, of the basic enemies of working class and Socialist or anti-Capitalist politics, and embraces them in a way that lets them entirely off-the-hook for their political, economic and social actions that have helped greatly to lead us to this point.
In the last available stats the top 1% of tax filers in Canada made a minimum of $169,300 as individuals. They made, on average, $404,500.
The 99% is everyone else.
While normally I am loathe to use personal example, here is a case where, for the sake of simplicity, I will.
In the very late 1990's I worked as a manager in a transportation company. I did sales and public relations, but I had managerial control over the office and ground staff in many cases. I made, at the time, $45,000-$55,000 a year, depending on performance bonuses. That would likely translate to $55,000-$65,000 a year now, more-or-less.
This would place me, at the time, well within the 99%,(and,I can assure you,I am there still!) But were my class and social interests, were I to follow those, the same as the phone workers or couriers at the company? Really?
More basically, almost everyday I walk into my local Shopper's Drug Mart. The young woman at the cash, with two kids and a husband I have found out works at a non-union job site, makes, at most $12-13 an hour. The main Pharmacist who works there, who has a college education, makes in the range of $50,000-60,000 a year. Are their class interests the same? They are both in the "99%".
This view of society, while assuaging the guilt of the children of the bourgeoisie, would have you believe that they are "victims" of the system in the same way the children of the working-class, the underclass and the retail working class are. That may make them feel good about themselves, and aid in their often reactionary analysis, but it is pure American nonsense from a society that denies the very existence of social class, despite the fact that even Rick Santorum admitted that the US has less social mobility now than Europe or Canada.
There is no 99%. It does not exist as a meaningful class or political entity. There are the remnants of the old industrial working class, the underclass, the retail working class, the office level lower middle-class.
Then there are the managerial and middle-managerial class, the small business owners, professionals, media workers (who are often said to be tools of the 1%), academics...etc...
Their class and social interests are not the same and a movement seeking real transformative social change and seeking to actually confront capitalism as a system needs to understand this. Working and fighting in the interests of the former can be an effective way to really confront inequality. The latter's interests are, almost always, in perception or reality, running counter in whole or in part to this change.
What it comes down to is this; according to the 99% view someone who pays minimum wage while pulling in $100,000 a year on their business, someone who works at a corporate office for $125,000 a year, someone who has a $100,000 a year dental clinic, an $80,000 a year professional, a $65,000 a year middle manager, a $55,000 shop owner, etc...are all part of the 99%.
I am sure that they like that idea.
But beyond the problems of class analysis that this presents, it also plays into the worst aspects of pseudo-conspiratorial and reductionist ideas.
I will begin by saying that our courts, governments, media, economy, and social forces are not, actually, ruled and governed by 1% of the population. That is a ridiculous idea that does not withstand even the slightest true scrutiny. It is a good way for social democratic parties or liberal politicians like Obama to get out of their complicity in the creation and maintenance of the present ideological hegemony, but the reality is that we live in a very complex society where even supposed "agents" of the 1%, like the Toronto Star, for example, will suddenly endorse the federal NDP. Part of the plot? Or is capitalism a system and not a slogan and are it problems a fundamental outcome of this system and not a perversion of it?
Looking back at the quote from Occupy above consider this:
"Shrewd and calculating, their hearts are filled with lust for power and consumed by greed for money. Rich and aristocratic, they despise Christians and they loathe the lowly working class. They control the world's press and virtually all our banks and financial institutions. They screen and choose who America's leaders will be and even determine who will run on the Democratic and Republican Party tickets"
or..."crony capitalists were the ones that benefit from contracts from government, benefit from the Federal Reserve, benefit from all the bailouts. They don’t deserve compassion. They deserve taxation or they deserve to have all their benefits removed.”
The first is from anti-Semitic Bilderberg conspiracists and the the second is from the fanatically right-wing Ron Paul.
Surprising how "class" rhetoric devoid of class content can sound "left" wing.
The fact is that these kinds of reductionist slogans are dangerous because they imply, by definition, a simplistic social order and simplistic mechanism of systemic social control and they thus offer simplistic and often neo-utopian (in the Marxist sense) solutions.
Once you accept the 1% idea, that means the other 99% is innocent, so to speak. It is entirely analogous to notions that imply that "good" common people are perverted or led astray by an almost hidden overclass that shapes the political and social agenda by meeting in Colorado once a year or, more often, by being a part of a named or unnamed, but implied Jewish conspiracy.
This small group of financiers, industrialists, etc...have cheated us all of our democracy and stolen our futures and rights. That we and others may have played ourselves a role in it, in how we have voted and what we have sought politically and socially is, of course, largely left out. It absolves us of blame other than as being dupes of "their" media or victims of forces beyond our control (and these forces, by the way, were not and are not beyond our control).
We are the 99%, after all. We share common interests, shopkeeper, stock broker, cashier, factory worker, academic, single mother, dentist, stock boy, manager, minimum wage worker...our commonalities outweigh our differences because we share a national, democratic or popular narrative....and we have a very simple common enemy no matter our actions or own divisions, divisions outweighed by our unity in struggle against this greater enemy.
Familiar at all?
But inequality, at root, is not an aberration of capitalism, it is a function of capitalism. While, in large part with the willing and active complicity of large sections of the middle class and traditional industrial working class, the assault by neo-conservative politicians and parties on the gains of the post-war social compromise have led us back to social inequality at levels akin to those of the "Guilded Age" of the 20's, the inequality inherent to capitalism never went away. And it won't, without changing the fundamental nature of capitalism's economic relations. As the reversing of the economic aspects of the social gains of the 1945-1980 period clearly shows, cosmetic changes,while they have a real impact on people's lives and on our social cohesion, can be undone by shifting the terms of the ideological debate, which the Right has done rather successfully. The debate has been so successfully shifted that all major political parties in North America accept the fundamental premises that led us here.
This was not a conspiracy, and it was not done by the 1% and their "agents", though they have been its most pronounced, though by no means sole, beneficiaries. It was done by a political movement that stayed true to its principles and objectives, even when confronted by serious setbacks and even when their ideas were at first fringe ideas, and who remade our society by pursuing these objectives relentlessly in the political and popular arena. The degree of this achievement can be seen in relatively small ways, such as the widespread belief in the rhetoric of tax-relief or the amazing contempt that many who would most benefit from them hold for trade unions, or in more significant ways, such as the fact that if one were to propose the social and economic platforms of, say, the Trudeau Liberals of 1976 one would be regarded as an ultra-radical. Not a single political party is even proposing that we go back to the levels of taxation and interventionism that existed in 1980, let alone proposing actual systemic change.
And the reversal of this ideological victory can only, in any meaningful sense, be accomplished by doing the same thing on the Left. By building a coherent,long-term and ideological challenge to capitalism as a system in the streets, in the popular discourse and, most importantly, in the political arena. It can only be done by advocating for democratic socialism, and doing so consistently and regardless of electoral setbacks and short term opinion polls. "Winning" on grand rhetoric to then basically implement the essence of your opponent's agenda when in government,or to more "humanely" or "fairly" manage austerity or "growth" is a hollow victory indeed.
It is so hollow that one need only reflect on the fact that the march towards where we are now has continued, without serious detour, despite different shades of government, whether Liberal, Democrat or New Democrat. The victory of this ideological hegemony is so great that the NDP in Manitoba in the last provincial election, for example, did not dispute the widespread media reporting that there was little, in terms of economic policies, that separated them from the TORIES! In fact,they seemed rather proud of their record as "sound fiscal" managers.
But this is not a cause for despair, it is a cause for an ideological counter offensive that does not paint the 1% as the problem or cause of inequality, a rhetorical flourish that any populist politician, right or left, can embrace, but that recognizes that capitalism itself is the cause. They are simply its effect. While the 1% certainly has an entrenched and direct political stake in the continuation of the present state of affairs and the continued corporate power of State Capitalism, they are not the only people who have this stake, perceived or real.
However, as the effects of the victory of this ideological offensive become clear, decreased economic and social equality and democracy, decreased oversight of corporate activity, increased environmental degradation, rampant and soulless community destroying commercialism, the loss of social stability, union jobs, industrial production, and so much more, the seeds of the turning of the tide are sown.
Occupy, in a very original and inspiring way, has put these problems back into popular consciousness and political discussion. Now it is to us to build a class aware, avowedly socialist political force that will present real transformative solutions and alternatives in the coming years and that will work to see these policies enacted and implemented whether in or out of office. It would also, perhaps most importantly, work to popularize anti-capitalist ideas.
When we have won the broad ideological struggle against the ideas of both capitalism and neo-liberalism, we will have won the key struggle in ending grotesque human inequality and social injustice.
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Towards Socialism & on the dangers of Occupy, 99% and "Entryism"
The Occupy movement accomplished one tremendous thing; it put the issue of inequality back into daily political discourse, and this was a remarkably important accomplishment to which all on the left owe its activists a debt of gratitude.
However, as a way to start a real discussion as to its methods, tactics and primary slogan, I begin by reposting this (name deleted) from the "Occupy Toronto" wall on Facebook.
"Who's in charge of the donations? $40,000 ..this budget is enough to have real demonstrations and banner drops against back to work legislation and protect the wheat board and tuition freeze ... "
To me this is an important discussion about the limitations of so-called "direct democracy". As hard as it may be to believe, things like voting, "Robert's Rules" and constitutions were created to PROTECT the powerless and less powerful against those with wealth and power, as well as those who would assume power. They exist as a barrier against the social power of the wealthy as well as those who would seek to rule by decree, and that is why the radical right is doing whatever it can to destroy these protections.
So, who are "we"? Who is in charge of donations to the "Occupy" movement and who has oversight over their decisions? Who opens the credit union accounts and decides what the money should be spent on? Who is accountable if these funds are not used appropriately, and what governing body decides what is appropriate? What rules govern the discussions and dictate when people are being out-of-order or working in counter-productive ways? Who, now that the movement has been shut down has control over that money, which was in the tens-of-thousands, and who dictates its distribution? Was this not money of working people donated through the OFL? So where exactly is it now and who has control over the bank accounts? What are their names? Where did it go after the end of the "Occupation"? Was it given back?
Without rules or constitutions do you really trust millions of people, if we were to win, to not make decisions that are arbitrary or dangerous? Or is it a non-issue because "democracy" will only be extended to the "enlightened"?
Rules and law protect regular and innocent people. They are safeguards against arbitrary actions by corporations, governments or self-appointed vanguards and we should not get rid of them. Our forebears on the left died to create the context in which we now work and joining the right in trying to rip it down will help no one.
There are three obvious things wrong with so-called "direct" democracy:
1) It is not direct at all. Voting is direct. Open discussion around motions is direct. Actually coming to a resolution as a group is direct. Nebulous personality conflicts and discussions around immediate day-to-day aims or factional disagreements is not direct.
2) In a "direct" democracy who actually decides? When you have a collective vote, an idea that millions of women and men on the left have and continue to fight and die for, everyone plays a part. Should there be more of them and in more areas of life? Yes. But with no votes decisions will end up being made by a very small group of the same handful of individuals over-and-over again. Voting has faith in and empowers everyone, "consensus" disempowers everyone other than a central few figures willing and able to commit to dominating the group. It is charismatic despotism.
3) Rules are not bourgeois. They are not capitalist. Safeguards, constitutions, rules-of-order, voting, rights, formats, were all created to AID the working class and the people not to hinder them. Prior to their existence power, violence, despotism, were the norm. Feudalism and slave based misogynist "Republics" were all based on the "direct" model. The "direct" power of the boot to your face if you were not part of the ruling clique.
Rules, constitutions, voting and democratic norms are all that the Left and civil society has. Discard them at your own peril.
But, beyond that, the Occupy slogans are based on false and bourgeois premises.
The basic problem with the 99% slogan is that it is false. The idea that you can distill the complexities of modern global capitalism and class conflict down to the notion that all the courts, laws, governments, bureaucracy, etc all function with the exclusive purpose of doing the bidding of 1% of the population over the interests of the other 99% of the population is not merely reductionist, it is absurd. It is also dangerously conspiratorial in its world view.
While it may be effective as a slogan, it is profoundly ineffective as an ideological vision or a social analysis and the negative aspects of its use outweigh by a large margin any benefits.
On the most basic level it is wrong because it asserts that what is left of the traditional working-class, the white collar lower middle class and the new retail working class, among others, share essentially common interests with parts of the middle managerial class, less successful or lower level entrepreneurs, many, if not most, professionals, police officers, academics, small business owners, many stock brokers, bank branch managers or loan officers, etc, who are all a part of the "99%".
They do not.
In fact, the simplistic message of this idea has far more in common as an ideological perspective with crank theories about "Bilderbergers" and plots to create "One World Government" than it does with traditional socialism and Marxism. It presents our society as if it is akin to the Russia of Ivan the Terrible in the nature of its power structures; a notion that is at best simple-minded. This in large part explains why Occupy was more about the airing of grievances than it was about the attaining of solutions. What solution to such a world view is possible? There are only two. Either you capitulate to liberalism and try to wrest "concessions" of some type or another from the "1%" or you seek for a rapture in revolution whereby you remove the "1%" in some way-or-another (though one would have to think that, if you actually believe our society is constructed this way that this would have to be through enormous violence...if 1% of the population has society in thrall to it they will not give up without a hell of a fight) and then presumably everything will be better.
I have written at greater length about this here: http://rabble.ca/news/2012/02/trouble-99-cent
Given that Occupy refuses rules, constitutions or votes of anykind one can only suppose that this result would be more akin to the Khmer Rouge than it would to the New Jerusalem.
Ultimately it is something of a moot point as the very tactics of false consensus, the "human mic" and the notion of "Occupying" a specific space doom it to failure from the start. For one thing it certainly makes it easier for the authorities to find exactly who they need to when the crackdown comes. And once it has, what then?
And then the futility of "entryism"
Entrysim, originally, was an idea that one would, for a short period, infiltrate "mainstream" left-wing parties so as to agitate for the creation of a more radical political formation. The intent was, in fact, to be expelled. The hope was that this would draw others out with you.
While some, correctly perhaps, have questioned the basic morality of this entryist concept, it, at least, had some connection to reality. It accepted the obvious fact that the parties in our system were not actually revolutionary nor were they radical. The entryists never hid their goals nor did they subsume themselves in the rhetoric of the right Social Democrats they opposed.
The "entryists" in Canada of are a somewhat different breed.
They, and there are several variations and factions of them, now make the mainstream social democratic party, in this case the NDP, their permanent home.
Because they perceive themselves to be sharks in a small pond of leftist minnows they accept, for years-and-years, that they will actively advocate for what are pathetic and Neo-Liberal platforms in the entirely delusional idea that this will aid their ultimate objectives.
They do this to avoid expulsion, of course, as if they actually were to advocate for their ideas in any meaningful sense the NDP would, in fact, expel them. (And they have invalidated everyone of their victories...and they will continue to do so).
These entryists lack the stomach for a real fight.
Instead they campaign for, canvass for, applaud and seek to ideologically justify programmes that, election after election become more and more right wing.
To a very large degree they justify their existence through the refracted glory of having been involved in outright "Third Way" campaigns and they claim "success" when these campaigns "succeed".
But it is a very hollow "success".
Despite the efforts of the entryists, the NDP has gone nowhere but to the right. With no threat, in any electoral way, the NDP has no need to heed the efforts of its left-wing as it knows they do not pose a threat to their electoral objectives. And that is all they care about.
The Entryists have aided this by making the most Faustian of bargains: claiming to represent a truly Socialist viewpoint while actually running on the opposite; being unwilling to truly criticize farcially liberal campaign platforms and then having the nerve to claim a moral high ground on these same platforms that are no challenge to the neo-liberal order and that embrace its very underpinnings.
They, by accepting that this is the framework, have lent it their moral and political endorsement. And the inane idea that one has to be in the "mass party of labour" both misrepresents the actual NDP and is pseudo-vanguardist.
In the end these Entryist "Leftists", like the Now Magazine or Labour Council types, are basically unwilling to admit, as they all know, that the NDP platform, on any level, is a sad joke, in so far as it even exists. And yet they remain its most stalwart defenders by their absurd and exaggerated rhetoric in defence of a party that long abandoned what they have fought for and they show themselves up by trying to actively fight against real alternatives that actually advocate for what they claim they represent.
However, as a way to start a real discussion as to its methods, tactics and primary slogan, I begin by reposting this (name deleted) from the "Occupy Toronto" wall on Facebook.
"Who's in charge of the donations? $40,000 ..this budget is enough to have real demonstrations and banner drops against back to work legislation and protect the wheat board and tuition freeze ... "
To me this is an important discussion about the limitations of so-called "direct democracy". As hard as it may be to believe, things like voting, "Robert's Rules" and constitutions were created to PROTECT the powerless and less powerful against those with wealth and power, as well as those who would assume power. They exist as a barrier against the social power of the wealthy as well as those who would seek to rule by decree, and that is why the radical right is doing whatever it can to destroy these protections.
So, who are "we"? Who is in charge of donations to the "Occupy" movement and who has oversight over their decisions? Who opens the credit union accounts and decides what the money should be spent on? Who is accountable if these funds are not used appropriately, and what governing body decides what is appropriate? What rules govern the discussions and dictate when people are being out-of-order or working in counter-productive ways? Who, now that the movement has been shut down has control over that money, which was in the tens-of-thousands, and who dictates its distribution? Was this not money of working people donated through the OFL? So where exactly is it now and who has control over the bank accounts? What are their names? Where did it go after the end of the "Occupation"? Was it given back?
Without rules or constitutions do you really trust millions of people, if we were to win, to not make decisions that are arbitrary or dangerous? Or is it a non-issue because "democracy" will only be extended to the "enlightened"?
Rules and law protect regular and innocent people. They are safeguards against arbitrary actions by corporations, governments or self-appointed vanguards and we should not get rid of them. Our forebears on the left died to create the context in which we now work and joining the right in trying to rip it down will help no one.
There are three obvious things wrong with so-called "direct" democracy:
1) It is not direct at all. Voting is direct. Open discussion around motions is direct. Actually coming to a resolution as a group is direct. Nebulous personality conflicts and discussions around immediate day-to-day aims or factional disagreements is not direct.
2) In a "direct" democracy who actually decides? When you have a collective vote, an idea that millions of women and men on the left have and continue to fight and die for, everyone plays a part. Should there be more of them and in more areas of life? Yes. But with no votes decisions will end up being made by a very small group of the same handful of individuals over-and-over again. Voting has faith in and empowers everyone, "consensus" disempowers everyone other than a central few figures willing and able to commit to dominating the group. It is charismatic despotism.
3) Rules are not bourgeois. They are not capitalist. Safeguards, constitutions, rules-of-order, voting, rights, formats, were all created to AID the working class and the people not to hinder them. Prior to their existence power, violence, despotism, were the norm. Feudalism and slave based misogynist "Republics" were all based on the "direct" model. The "direct" power of the boot to your face if you were not part of the ruling clique.
Rules, constitutions, voting and democratic norms are all that the Left and civil society has. Discard them at your own peril.
But, beyond that, the Occupy slogans are based on false and bourgeois premises.
The basic problem with the 99% slogan is that it is false. The idea that you can distill the complexities of modern global capitalism and class conflict down to the notion that all the courts, laws, governments, bureaucracy, etc all function with the exclusive purpose of doing the bidding of 1% of the population over the interests of the other 99% of the population is not merely reductionist, it is absurd. It is also dangerously conspiratorial in its world view.
While it may be effective as a slogan, it is profoundly ineffective as an ideological vision or a social analysis and the negative aspects of its use outweigh by a large margin any benefits.
On the most basic level it is wrong because it asserts that what is left of the traditional working-class, the white collar lower middle class and the new retail working class, among others, share essentially common interests with parts of the middle managerial class, less successful or lower level entrepreneurs, many, if not most, professionals, police officers, academics, small business owners, many stock brokers, bank branch managers or loan officers, etc, who are all a part of the "99%".
They do not.
In fact, the simplistic message of this idea has far more in common as an ideological perspective with crank theories about "Bilderbergers" and plots to create "One World Government" than it does with traditional socialism and Marxism. It presents our society as if it is akin to the Russia of Ivan the Terrible in the nature of its power structures; a notion that is at best simple-minded. This in large part explains why Occupy was more about the airing of grievances than it was about the attaining of solutions. What solution to such a world view is possible? There are only two. Either you capitulate to liberalism and try to wrest "concessions" of some type or another from the "1%" or you seek for a rapture in revolution whereby you remove the "1%" in some way-or-another (though one would have to think that, if you actually believe our society is constructed this way that this would have to be through enormous violence...if 1% of the population has society in thrall to it they will not give up without a hell of a fight) and then presumably everything will be better.
I have written at greater length about this here: http://rabble.ca/news/2012/02/trouble-99-cent
Given that Occupy refuses rules, constitutions or votes of anykind one can only suppose that this result would be more akin to the Khmer Rouge than it would to the New Jerusalem.
Ultimately it is something of a moot point as the very tactics of false consensus, the "human mic" and the notion of "Occupying" a specific space doom it to failure from the start. For one thing it certainly makes it easier for the authorities to find exactly who they need to when the crackdown comes. And once it has, what then?
And then the futility of "entryism"
Entrysim, originally, was an idea that one would, for a short period, infiltrate "mainstream" left-wing parties so as to agitate for the creation of a more radical political formation. The intent was, in fact, to be expelled. The hope was that this would draw others out with you.
While some, correctly perhaps, have questioned the basic morality of this entryist concept, it, at least, had some connection to reality. It accepted the obvious fact that the parties in our system were not actually revolutionary nor were they radical. The entryists never hid their goals nor did they subsume themselves in the rhetoric of the right Social Democrats they opposed.
The "entryists" in Canada of are a somewhat different breed.
They, and there are several variations and factions of them, now make the mainstream social democratic party, in this case the NDP, their permanent home.
Because they perceive themselves to be sharks in a small pond of leftist minnows they accept, for years-and-years, that they will actively advocate for what are pathetic and Neo-Liberal platforms in the entirely delusional idea that this will aid their ultimate objectives.
They do this to avoid expulsion, of course, as if they actually were to advocate for their ideas in any meaningful sense the NDP would, in fact, expel them. (And they have invalidated everyone of their victories...and they will continue to do so).
These entryists lack the stomach for a real fight.
Instead they campaign for, canvass for, applaud and seek to ideologically justify programmes that, election after election become more and more right wing.
To a very large degree they justify their existence through the refracted glory of having been involved in outright "Third Way" campaigns and they claim "success" when these campaigns "succeed".
But it is a very hollow "success".
Despite the efforts of the entryists, the NDP has gone nowhere but to the right. With no threat, in any electoral way, the NDP has no need to heed the efforts of its left-wing as it knows they do not pose a threat to their electoral objectives. And that is all they care about.
The Entryists have aided this by making the most Faustian of bargains: claiming to represent a truly Socialist viewpoint while actually running on the opposite; being unwilling to truly criticize farcially liberal campaign platforms and then having the nerve to claim a moral high ground on these same platforms that are no challenge to the neo-liberal order and that embrace its very underpinnings.
They, by accepting that this is the framework, have lent it their moral and political endorsement. And the inane idea that one has to be in the "mass party of labour" both misrepresents the actual NDP and is pseudo-vanguardist.
In the end these Entryist "Leftists", like the Now Magazine or Labour Council types, are basically unwilling to admit, as they all know, that the NDP platform, on any level, is a sad joke, in so far as it even exists. And yet they remain its most stalwart defenders by their absurd and exaggerated rhetoric in defence of a party that long abandoned what they have fought for and they show themselves up by trying to actively fight against real alternatives that actually advocate for what they claim they represent.
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
The Ten Pat Martin Rants of the Holiday Season. F' You Capitalism or...I am Mad as Hell and I am NOT Going to Take it Anymore!!!
Written and posted originally on Facebook over 13 days..my left wing ode to the Holiday Season...Thanks Pat!
In honour of the 45 minutes that Pat Martin actually used to say what I suspect he and much of of his caucus actually think but are terrified to normally say...I have instituted my countdown of ten Fuck Offs over ten days to the system that are inspired by Martin's outburst...and Pat...let me say to you that if you are really mad, maybe you should cut the Rusty Anchor of Capitalism...it has been far more harmful to democracy and society than the socialism you ranted about at the convention!
FUCK OFF#10 Child Poverty is a Fucking National Disgrace!
Quoting (loosely!!!) the suddenly angry Pat Martin...Fuck you Conservative assholes and eat my shorts. Say what you want about the supposed laziness of the poor (what a joke given the golf course circle jerks of the rich) but even if you buy into this total horseshit how does this morally or ethically include children? How is it morally right to condemn over a million Canadian children to poverty through no fault of their own. How can this human disgrace be justified?
How can you say we have experienced "economic growth" between 1995 and now when child poverty has INCREASED in this period? What kind of "growth" is that?
What form of eugenics, quasi-Social Darwinist bullshit or simple self-centred nonsense leads you to think that it is OK for your kid to freeload off of whatever little you did to succeed while you condemn or look down on those on welfare, social assistance and working people? Why should your kid be given, through no effort of their own, whatever you have, while the children of others have no such starting point? How is this equality of opportunity?
I guess your kids must be superior.
Well, I say it is time for all kids to be on an equal footing and I say that what exists now, unopposed by any major party in a real way is neo-feudalism and is a total fucking mockery of what equality of opportunity was meant to be!
And I think it is time that all the parties in Canada, including the NDP in its provincial governments, actually live up to the 1989 farce that we would end child poverty by 2000...it was a social democratic lie then and it is a hollow joke now.
Fuck Off #9: Really...union workers are overpaid?
Hardly a day goes by that I don't hear someone complaining about... "overpaid" union workers. "I wish I made that kind of money!". "Why should they get well paid for driving a bus?" Well you can make that kind of money...try to form a UNION... or at least support them! And why the fuck shouldn't they be "well-paid"? Unions benefit you, even if you are not in one. It is not the fault of mail workers, bus drivers, teachers, auto workers, or other unionists that your salary sucks and you have no benefits...it is the fault of YOUR BOSS!
Then you get the absurd musings of the sociopath Hudak that he is going to somehow impose a public sector wage freeze in a province where he lost the election. How are you going to pull that off Tim? Are you and your buddies from the Sun newsroom going to reenact the March on Rome?
So is the person who drives your bus or cleans city toilets overpaid if they get, say, $25 an hour + benefits assuming a 40 hour work week? Well if you think so, why not first direct your anger at the assholes in the link below...the top of which made $11,642.81 an hour... your anger at union workers does nothing but pad his fucking bank account!
http://www.vancouversun.com/Photos+salaries+Canada/4646295/story.html
FUCK OFF #8 We ARE the 15%
Our culture, as the First World, is the most rapacious and predatory culture in the history of the world. We are literally destroying it to subsidize unsustainable and self-indulgent lifestyles. 15% percent of the world's population consumes 80% of its resources. The electronic "toys" we take for granted, including the one I am writing this on, are made in the most appaling conditions in the Third World. Think Steve Jobs was a great man...check out where Apple products are made and how the workers are treated...it might leave a bad taste in the mouth.
We have gotten very used to drawing a line between work and home...we have gotten good at thinking only in our own context as if the global community does not exist...we have gotten very good at justifying anti-environmental stupidity (such as, I hate to say, lifting the HST on the home energy bills in Rosedale...or even Parkdale...don't lift the tax...tax CONSUMPTION) and thinking that because we are not part of the 1% here in Canada we are not part of the problem.
But we ARE part of the problem. It may be hard to avoid but is essential to recognize. The way we live, the way we play, the way we heat our homes and drive alone in our cars, the way we buy cheap products at Wall Mart, McDonalds, Starbucks..or even at our own local small businesses, is all done on the backs of the workers of the Third World and is an unacceptable system that cannot and will not last.
We have to start thinking differently now...and realizing that we cannot expect the rest of the world to prop us up forever.
Fuck Off#7: Update to terrified suburban people who watch local news too much...THERE IS NO CRIME CRISIS IN CANADA...!!!!
You know sometimes I can wake up, turn on the news to hear some conservative idiot ranting about crime and the new horseshit legislation the Tories are bringing in to help build the police state that they long for, and I think, holy shit...time travel is possible and I am back in Miami in 1984 and Crockett & Tubbs are about to fucking walk in in white suits, smoking Lucky Strikes to "take out the trash" and lecture some sub-committee about the need for bigger guns!
News bulletin assholes...the CRIME RATE HAS GONE DOWN! It is lower than it has been since 1973. The Crime Severity Index, which measures (amazingly) the severity of crime, has reached its lowest point since 1998.
But reality doesn't matter when you have an agenda...what was it Hitler said about the bigger the lie? This all started in earnest with the stampede that led even those on the so-called left to join in on the crime fighting bully pulpit and buy into the media distortion of the "year of the gun" in Toronto and it was more than slightly alarming to see "left" politicians echoing what was a right-wing war cry with a very strong racial undercurrent...but its votes that matter, right?
And when you give a little you get the Tory omnibus bill...it is a direct line...talking macho tough on crime only ever helps the right.
But...even worse...when confronted with actual crime statistics the Tories and their media defenders simply say the stats are wrong...that crime is actually, despite all evidence, much higher than that...but why be surprised...this is the same group of idiots that have caucus members who have denied evolution and have insisted that climate change isn't happening because it would hurt Alberta's economy if it was.
They are obviously trustworthy!
Crime is well down without these expensive and cruel laws. They have been done & they have FAILED...US programmes show that tougher laws and bigger jails do no good and much harm, that mandatory minimums are ridiculous and have terrible unintended consequences, including judge & jury nullification, and that fighting poverty is the way to fight crime. And as to harsher drug sentences...really? Now, could we move on to real issues.
Fuck Off #6 Being a Creationist, and a bunch of other silly things, is not a legitimate opinion...it is JUST FUCKING STUPID!
Democracy is a forum in which all expressions of non-hate based opinion are allowed. This does not, however, mean that they are legitimate...a distinction that our media and others have trouble mastering.
Creationism is NOT a legitimate point of view. It is fucking idiotic. It is exactly as stupid as believing in a flat-Earth or a Ptolemaic solar system. There is NO evidence for it and a MOUNTAIN of evidence against it. Even the former Hitler Youther atop the great fossil that is the Catholic Church acknowledges evolution. You know who doesn't? Morons.
The Creationists have used the media's supposed objectivity to get attention where none is deserved. Why are members of the Flat Earth Society not allowed on the mainstream news...we all know why, because what they are saying is as dumb as the conversation at a Rob Ford family dinner. As is creationism. That a bunch of evangelical fascists purport to believe in it does not change how fucking stupid it is.
Could I pause to point out that they do not deny that dinosaurs, for example, existed...they claim they lived with people and became extinct...4,000 years ago! They even give pictures to their kids of humans using dinosaurs to pull carts. Why? Because obviously the evidence shows they are full of shit...but they have to explain their theory somehow...right? The whole consruct is so ridiculous that it is truly hard to imagine what level of intellectual denial you have to be on to adhere to this.
But I don't want to only call out these anti-social jackasses...also dangerous are other science denying delusions like...those opposed to inoculations of children, crystal healers, ghost believers, climate change deniers, psychics, tarot card users, diviners, people who think the world is ending in December 2012....and so many more. It is all a bunch of bullshit...and the anti-science basis...even the outright anger towards science, plays into a profoundly reactionary anti-modernism.
But whatever, they have a right to their "opinion" such as it is...but remember that most of the time there is someone making lots of money off of this nonsense or who is using it for a political purpose. It is complete rubbish ...and on some level I suspect everyone involved knows that.
However, if, for whatever reason, going to someone down the street in a dimly lit room to be told, after handing over your $50, that someone still loves you from "beyond" is your thing...fine...but let's leave superstition for personal lives and not public policy or real political discourse...
Fuck Off #5: There is no such thing as "sexism" against men and there is no such thing as "racism" against white people.
This is one of my favourites. Men & white people, and their sycophants claiming reverse discrimination. "Ads make fun of men but they would never make fun of women", "white people are discriminated against for certain jobs", "Why is it ok to make jokes about white people but not Blacks/Asians/Natives/Jews...", etc...
BULLSHIT. This is PURE AND UTTER, TOTAL AND ABSOLUTE BULLSHIT. It is completely false on every level.
I could point out that everyone of the above statements is false already. Ads constantly demean, objectify and make women look stupid. So do TV shows, comedians, magazines, right-wing politicians, etc. The notion that "only" white males are "targets" anymore is a fucking farce. The people complaining about "white people" jokes...and I have yet to hear any that were actually nasty in any meaningful way, know full well that REALLY offensive and racist water cooler jokes are a dime a dozen. And white people are NOT discriminated against for any jobs. They just seem to often think they are entitled to them.
But that is not the key point. The key point is that sexism against men and racism against whites in the present social and political context is NOT POSSIBLE in anything other than an entirely incidental way.
Racism and sexism are SYSTEMIC problems that have existed for centuries and that represent a fundamental and encompassing oppression against which millions have sacrificed to fight for justice and equality. These oppressions have claimed literally hundreds-of-millions of victims and continue to degrade and demean and condemn people globally and in Canada to lives of injustice. They are manifested every single day in the ways in which women and people-of-colour continue to endure SYSTEMIC discrimination and SYSTEMIC inequality. The occasional joke that makes fun of white people (if these jokes even exist) or the occasional instance where, in one isolated case, the opposite of the norm may have been true changes nothing.
In many cases where men do suffer, and they do, it is as a result of patriarchy itself. Patriarchy does, indeed, oppress men in a certain sense as a result of its relentless and very narrow definition of what a "man" is and what "male" sexuality should be, and these views are deeply tied to homophobia. But that oppression and suffering is a corollary of patriarchy itself and can only be overcome by accepting its root causes and realizing that the way forward is its ultimate defeat.
As a civilization where racism and sexism were part of the founding principles of North America, and were, indeed, built into its initial laws and constitutions, to deny the breadth and depth of their reach is simply a convenient lie. The continuing stains of racism and sexism taint our discourse now and will, sadly, for a long time. The idea that whites or men in Canada face reverse sexism and racism that inhibits their ability to succeed is ridiculous, manifestly and provably false and just plain offensive and pathetic. And it is a part of the broader assault and propaganda campaign to make the dis-empowered, and many men and white people are, think that it is not a result of capitalism, but rather it is the fault of fellow workers, of women or of people-of-colour, and that fighting against the rights of these groups will preserve what little are left of their own.
It won't.
Fuck Off #4 Tax "Relief" is NO Relief at All
You have to hand it to those clever neo-liberal ideologues...they have managed to get all political parties, the media and most people on board the "tax relief" train. To one degree or another, they all kneel at the alter of this ultimate false god.
Unless you are in a very small tax bracket at the very pinnacle of our very steep income pyramid, tax relief is no relief at all. 100% the opposite in fact. Know why we can't "afford" universal day care: tax relief. Know why the frauds at city hall can claim a fiscal crisis where none exists and cut your programmes to the bone: tax relief. Know why our school programmes are not as good as they used to be, why our roads and bridges are falling apart, why all those kids programmes that used to be free are now either gone or charge fees, why public transit exists at levels way below what is required, why if you lose your job you can't count on any real long term government help, why health care is in "crisis", why it seems, despite unprecedented economic "growth" over the last 25 years, we are asked OVER-AND-OVER again to make sacrifices to keep the wealthy wealthy and big business afloat...TAX RELIEF. That is why...period full stop!
The massive income tax cuts of the 90's are the chickens that have come home to roost and they are DIRECTLY why our governments cannot "afford" to do the things that need to be done. For the VAST majority of citizens the money that they have received through this "relief" does not even remotely compare to the services and social cohesion and opportunity that they have lost as a result of it.
Lets point to an obvious example of the idiocy of the "tax relief" mantra and how it has coloured the thinking of all the parties; the ONDP's programme to benefit the "pocketbooks" of "working families" through tax breaks to small business and lifting the HST on home heating. Hey, just a thought, but don't you think free daycare and free pharmacare, for example, would help their stretched pocket books a whole lot more? Maybe just a little bit more?
And how would we pay for such things...maybe by reversing all this so-called tax relief!!! And not just on the wealthy alone. Like collective insurance programmes at work, middle-class and working-class citizens will get more out when needed than they pay in, never mind all the other social benefits, such as not having the stress of being a paycheck away from destitution hanging over your head. Tax cuts for most income brackets must be stopped and, indeed, in many cases reversed.
Tax relief is the greatest snake oil salesperson political trick of all time...it promised to deliver financial aid and stability and, for virtually everyone it delivered the EXACT opposite.
So, while so many on the so-called left appear mystified at the causes of the remarkable growth of social inequality and social insecurity since the 1980's, they should get their heads out the sand...one of the basic reasons is simple, that is when Tax Relief began!
Fuck Off #3: Our Banks are "A" Fucking OK
Remember when Occupy Toronto started and the media had all the strutting...... imbecilic peacocks of the business commentary community (the worst form of life on Earth, they are not actually rich...they just make a living kissing the asses of the rich...wow guys, why not cheer for the fucking Yankees or applaud the Death Star as a necessary step to profitability for the Empire) spouting off with a bunch of horseshit about "The people in New York may have a point but our banking sector is just fine. It is not like the USA"
Fucking right! Our banking sector is indeed just fine. While YOU are being asked to take cuts to your transit, social programmes, reason to live, union job security, etc...the banks in Canada are DOING JUST FUCKING FINE. A++++ in fact!!! :)
Lets take a look at the latest Stats from our friends at the Glib and Stale (a review of the ten most profitable companies in Canada):
1) RBC $5 Billion plus in profits...up 35%
2) TD Bank $4.5 Billion plus...up 49%
3) Bank of Nova Scotia $4 Billion plus...up 20%
7) BMO $2.5 Billion plus...up 57%
8) CIBC $2 Billion plus...up 109%
Hey, don't you feel better now! The banks are in Canada ARE DOING GREAT!!!!
They have made so much profit off of you that they have more money than most provincial governments. That is WONDERFUL!!! The system is working perfectly here. No need for protests.
How did they do this...well off of your savings and farcically lax Canadian bank fee laws...but why worry...no need to fret if the banks are making billions. Stay home, content with no daycare, no transit, no job security, no rights as workers, no real hope of a socially just future...and be happy as yet again you are asked to "sacrifice" more...it is all OK because OUR BANKS ARE DOING JUST FINE!!!!
Fuck Off#2 Last Night I Had the Strangest Socialist Dream
So, last night I had the strangest dream...it was just like those bank ads about how "if you don't want to pay bank fees..." or something. Anyway I was, in my dream, lying in bed, heart racing, the weight of one terrible question pressing down on me..."How, given all of the media bias and the overwhelming power of the forces of capital, can we fight for socialism?"...and then appearing at the door with a near heavenly glow behind was my daughter and she said "hey old man...if you want to fight for socialism...fight for socialism."
Let's cut the bullshit. Capitalism is not working. It has survived only due to massive government intervention and the creation of socialism for the wealthy. It cannot survive in any other way. All of the rubbish from Milton Friedman or Ayn Rand is a proven total pile of crap.
But, with capitalism clearly bankrupt and its very logic obviously shown to be false after 2008, where are the socialists? While I admire Occupy it highlighted problems not solutions. And the NDP...really? Has anyone bothered to check out its provincial governments lately...never mind the farcical programmes they ran on in Ontario and federally?
The greatest crisis to hit capitalism since the 1930's came and the NDP proposed tax cuts for small business and talked a lot about fiscal responsibility. Fuckin' A!!!!
So...how can we fight for a socialist platform and a socialist vision of society? Well we could start by actually doing it! Sometimes the journey from point A to B is really that simple. If capitalism is not working...say so. If we need a new socialist economy and vision...say so. Don't campaign or work for a platform where the best they can do is eliminating ambulance fees...or hold endless discussions about how to best fight for what you want to fight for or how best to campaign and run candidates for socialism while not actually campaigning or running candidates for socialism.
The NDP is not a socialist party. Over the last forty years, from the Waffle to the NPI to the utter futility of "entryist" groups today, these efforts have seen the NDP go further and further to the RIGHT, no more so than under the leadership of Jack Layton, Andrea Horwath and the basically Liberal governments in Manitoba and Nova Scotia. The "real" Liberals have lost any trace, other than as an echo, of Social Democracy and the Just Society and are little more than the last stand quasi-progressive rump of the upper middle class, and the Greens have no coherent vision of any meaning at all.
Frankly, fighting for a "platform" that you do not really believe in, advocating for it on the doorstep, running for it in elections, and trying to use it in the hope that somehow by doing this you will advance socialism is just plain stupid. The essential logic is not at all different than the old Liberal refrain that you will get "real results" by voting Liberal instead of "wasting" your vote. In a sense they were right. Once you accept the premises of capitalism why not vote Liberal? They are obviously better than the Tories and if the NDP is not even remotely advocating for a socialist society, why not back the winning horse if winning is what it is all about? And now that the NDP has risen why not vote NDP? If what you want is reformist capitalism then they are the best of the "progressive" lot, federally, no doubt. (provincially in Ontario and elsewhere, I am not so sure.) The CAW has bought into this, and NOW Magazine and the Toronto Star buy the logic, so why not you? The advocates for Capitalism with a Human Face can't all be wrong.
BUT...if you want to vote for a socialist agenda and political platform, if you want to advocate and run in elections in opposition to capitalism itself, then DO SO and try to build a party in your area and federally that will. Otherwise, just admit that that is not what you are interested in at all because you will never build a socialist electoral agenda advocating for any of the mainstream "progressive" parties that exist today, and while you may get to booze it up over "victories" they will be victories that will not fundamentally change anything in a socialist sense and that are a tacit or outright endorsement of the basic ideas and logics of the capitalist system. And...like Kaiser Soze...socialism as an idea will simply disappear from popular discourse other than as an insult.
Updated ending:
In honour of the 45 minutes that Pat Martin actually used to say what I suspect he and much of of his caucus actually think but are terrified to normally say...I have instituted my countdown of ten Fuck Offs over ten days to the system that are inspired by Martin's outburst...and Pat...let me say to you that if you are really mad, maybe you should cut the Rusty Anchor of Capitalism...it has been far more harmful to democracy and society than the socialism you ranted about at the convention!
FUCK OFF#10 Child Poverty is a Fucking National Disgrace!
Quoting (loosely!!!) the suddenly angry Pat Martin...Fuck you Conservative assholes and eat my shorts. Say what you want about the supposed laziness of the poor (what a joke given the golf course circle jerks of the rich) but even if you buy into this total horseshit how does this morally or ethically include children? How is it morally right to condemn over a million Canadian children to poverty through no fault of their own. How can this human disgrace be justified?
How can you say we have experienced "economic growth" between 1995 and now when child poverty has INCREASED in this period? What kind of "growth" is that?
What form of eugenics, quasi-Social Darwinist bullshit or simple self-centred nonsense leads you to think that it is OK for your kid to freeload off of whatever little you did to succeed while you condemn or look down on those on welfare, social assistance and working people? Why should your kid be given, through no effort of their own, whatever you have, while the children of others have no such starting point? How is this equality of opportunity?
I guess your kids must be superior.
Well, I say it is time for all kids to be on an equal footing and I say that what exists now, unopposed by any major party in a real way is neo-feudalism and is a total fucking mockery of what equality of opportunity was meant to be!
And I think it is time that all the parties in Canada, including the NDP in its provincial governments, actually live up to the 1989 farce that we would end child poverty by 2000...it was a social democratic lie then and it is a hollow joke now.
Fuck Off #9: Really...union workers are overpaid?
Hardly a day goes by that I don't hear someone complaining about... "overpaid" union workers. "I wish I made that kind of money!". "Why should they get well paid for driving a bus?" Well you can make that kind of money...try to form a UNION... or at least support them! And why the fuck shouldn't they be "well-paid"? Unions benefit you, even if you are not in one. It is not the fault of mail workers, bus drivers, teachers, auto workers, or other unionists that your salary sucks and you have no benefits...it is the fault of YOUR BOSS!
Then you get the absurd musings of the sociopath Hudak that he is going to somehow impose a public sector wage freeze in a province where he lost the election. How are you going to pull that off Tim? Are you and your buddies from the Sun newsroom going to reenact the March on Rome?
So is the person who drives your bus or cleans city toilets overpaid if they get, say, $25 an hour + benefits assuming a 40 hour work week? Well if you think so, why not first direct your anger at the assholes in the link below...the top of which made $11,642.81 an hour... your anger at union workers does nothing but pad his fucking bank account!
http://www.vancouversun.com/Photos+salaries+Canada/4646295/story.html
FUCK OFF #8 We ARE the 15%
Our culture, as the First World, is the most rapacious and predatory culture in the history of the world. We are literally destroying it to subsidize unsustainable and self-indulgent lifestyles. 15% percent of the world's population consumes 80% of its resources. The electronic "toys" we take for granted, including the one I am writing this on, are made in the most appaling conditions in the Third World. Think Steve Jobs was a great man...check out where Apple products are made and how the workers are treated...it might leave a bad taste in the mouth.
We have gotten very used to drawing a line between work and home...we have gotten good at thinking only in our own context as if the global community does not exist...we have gotten very good at justifying anti-environmental stupidity (such as, I hate to say, lifting the HST on the home energy bills in Rosedale...or even Parkdale...don't lift the tax...tax CONSUMPTION) and thinking that because we are not part of the 1% here in Canada we are not part of the problem.
But we ARE part of the problem. It may be hard to avoid but is essential to recognize. The way we live, the way we play, the way we heat our homes and drive alone in our cars, the way we buy cheap products at Wall Mart, McDonalds, Starbucks..or even at our own local small businesses, is all done on the backs of the workers of the Third World and is an unacceptable system that cannot and will not last.
We have to start thinking differently now...and realizing that we cannot expect the rest of the world to prop us up forever.
Fuck Off#7: Update to terrified suburban people who watch local news too much...THERE IS NO CRIME CRISIS IN CANADA...!!!!
You know sometimes I can wake up, turn on the news to hear some conservative idiot ranting about crime and the new horseshit legislation the Tories are bringing in to help build the police state that they long for, and I think, holy shit...time travel is possible and I am back in Miami in 1984 and Crockett & Tubbs are about to fucking walk in in white suits, smoking Lucky Strikes to "take out the trash" and lecture some sub-committee about the need for bigger guns!
News bulletin assholes...the CRIME RATE HAS GONE DOWN! It is lower than it has been since 1973. The Crime Severity Index, which measures (amazingly) the severity of crime, has reached its lowest point since 1998.
But reality doesn't matter when you have an agenda...what was it Hitler said about the bigger the lie? This all started in earnest with the stampede that led even those on the so-called left to join in on the crime fighting bully pulpit and buy into the media distortion of the "year of the gun" in Toronto and it was more than slightly alarming to see "left" politicians echoing what was a right-wing war cry with a very strong racial undercurrent...but its votes that matter, right?
And when you give a little you get the Tory omnibus bill...it is a direct line...talking macho tough on crime only ever helps the right.
But...even worse...when confronted with actual crime statistics the Tories and their media defenders simply say the stats are wrong...that crime is actually, despite all evidence, much higher than that...but why be surprised...this is the same group of idiots that have caucus members who have denied evolution and have insisted that climate change isn't happening because it would hurt Alberta's economy if it was.
They are obviously trustworthy!
Crime is well down without these expensive and cruel laws. They have been done & they have FAILED...US programmes show that tougher laws and bigger jails do no good and much harm, that mandatory minimums are ridiculous and have terrible unintended consequences, including judge & jury nullification, and that fighting poverty is the way to fight crime. And as to harsher drug sentences...really? Now, could we move on to real issues.
Fuck Off #6 Being a Creationist, and a bunch of other silly things, is not a legitimate opinion...it is JUST FUCKING STUPID!
Democracy is a forum in which all expressions of non-hate based opinion are allowed. This does not, however, mean that they are legitimate...a distinction that our media and others have trouble mastering.
Creationism is NOT a legitimate point of view. It is fucking idiotic. It is exactly as stupid as believing in a flat-Earth or a Ptolemaic solar system. There is NO evidence for it and a MOUNTAIN of evidence against it. Even the former Hitler Youther atop the great fossil that is the Catholic Church acknowledges evolution. You know who doesn't? Morons.
The Creationists have used the media's supposed objectivity to get attention where none is deserved. Why are members of the Flat Earth Society not allowed on the mainstream news...we all know why, because what they are saying is as dumb as the conversation at a Rob Ford family dinner. As is creationism. That a bunch of evangelical fascists purport to believe in it does not change how fucking stupid it is.
Could I pause to point out that they do not deny that dinosaurs, for example, existed...they claim they lived with people and became extinct...4,000 years ago! They even give pictures to their kids of humans using dinosaurs to pull carts. Why? Because obviously the evidence shows they are full of shit...but they have to explain their theory somehow...right? The whole consruct is so ridiculous that it is truly hard to imagine what level of intellectual denial you have to be on to adhere to this.
But I don't want to only call out these anti-social jackasses...also dangerous are other science denying delusions like...those opposed to inoculations of children, crystal healers, ghost believers, climate change deniers, psychics, tarot card users, diviners, people who think the world is ending in December 2012....and so many more. It is all a bunch of bullshit...and the anti-science basis...even the outright anger towards science, plays into a profoundly reactionary anti-modernism.
But whatever, they have a right to their "opinion" such as it is...but remember that most of the time there is someone making lots of money off of this nonsense or who is using it for a political purpose. It is complete rubbish ...and on some level I suspect everyone involved knows that.
However, if, for whatever reason, going to someone down the street in a dimly lit room to be told, after handing over your $50, that someone still loves you from "beyond" is your thing...fine...but let's leave superstition for personal lives and not public policy or real political discourse...
Fuck Off #5: There is no such thing as "sexism" against men and there is no such thing as "racism" against white people.
This is one of my favourites. Men & white people, and their sycophants claiming reverse discrimination. "Ads make fun of men but they would never make fun of women", "white people are discriminated against for certain jobs", "Why is it ok to make jokes about white people but not Blacks/Asians/Natives/Jews...", etc...
BULLSHIT. This is PURE AND UTTER, TOTAL AND ABSOLUTE BULLSHIT. It is completely false on every level.
I could point out that everyone of the above statements is false already. Ads constantly demean, objectify and make women look stupid. So do TV shows, comedians, magazines, right-wing politicians, etc. The notion that "only" white males are "targets" anymore is a fucking farce. The people complaining about "white people" jokes...and I have yet to hear any that were actually nasty in any meaningful way, know full well that REALLY offensive and racist water cooler jokes are a dime a dozen. And white people are NOT discriminated against for any jobs. They just seem to often think they are entitled to them.
But that is not the key point. The key point is that sexism against men and racism against whites in the present social and political context is NOT POSSIBLE in anything other than an entirely incidental way.
Racism and sexism are SYSTEMIC problems that have existed for centuries and that represent a fundamental and encompassing oppression against which millions have sacrificed to fight for justice and equality. These oppressions have claimed literally hundreds-of-millions of victims and continue to degrade and demean and condemn people globally and in Canada to lives of injustice. They are manifested every single day in the ways in which women and people-of-colour continue to endure SYSTEMIC discrimination and SYSTEMIC inequality. The occasional joke that makes fun of white people (if these jokes even exist) or the occasional instance where, in one isolated case, the opposite of the norm may have been true changes nothing.
In many cases where men do suffer, and they do, it is as a result of patriarchy itself. Patriarchy does, indeed, oppress men in a certain sense as a result of its relentless and very narrow definition of what a "man" is and what "male" sexuality should be, and these views are deeply tied to homophobia. But that oppression and suffering is a corollary of patriarchy itself and can only be overcome by accepting its root causes and realizing that the way forward is its ultimate defeat.
As a civilization where racism and sexism were part of the founding principles of North America, and were, indeed, built into its initial laws and constitutions, to deny the breadth and depth of their reach is simply a convenient lie. The continuing stains of racism and sexism taint our discourse now and will, sadly, for a long time. The idea that whites or men in Canada face reverse sexism and racism that inhibits their ability to succeed is ridiculous, manifestly and provably false and just plain offensive and pathetic. And it is a part of the broader assault and propaganda campaign to make the dis-empowered, and many men and white people are, think that it is not a result of capitalism, but rather it is the fault of fellow workers, of women or of people-of-colour, and that fighting against the rights of these groups will preserve what little are left of their own.
It won't.
Fuck Off #4 Tax "Relief" is NO Relief at All
You have to hand it to those clever neo-liberal ideologues...they have managed to get all political parties, the media and most people on board the "tax relief" train. To one degree or another, they all kneel at the alter of this ultimate false god.
Unless you are in a very small tax bracket at the very pinnacle of our very steep income pyramid, tax relief is no relief at all. 100% the opposite in fact. Know why we can't "afford" universal day care: tax relief. Know why the frauds at city hall can claim a fiscal crisis where none exists and cut your programmes to the bone: tax relief. Know why our school programmes are not as good as they used to be, why our roads and bridges are falling apart, why all those kids programmes that used to be free are now either gone or charge fees, why public transit exists at levels way below what is required, why if you lose your job you can't count on any real long term government help, why health care is in "crisis", why it seems, despite unprecedented economic "growth" over the last 25 years, we are asked OVER-AND-OVER again to make sacrifices to keep the wealthy wealthy and big business afloat...TAX RELIEF. That is why...period full stop!
The massive income tax cuts of the 90's are the chickens that have come home to roost and they are DIRECTLY why our governments cannot "afford" to do the things that need to be done. For the VAST majority of citizens the money that they have received through this "relief" does not even remotely compare to the services and social cohesion and opportunity that they have lost as a result of it.
Lets point to an obvious example of the idiocy of the "tax relief" mantra and how it has coloured the thinking of all the parties; the ONDP's programme to benefit the "pocketbooks" of "working families" through tax breaks to small business and lifting the HST on home heating. Hey, just a thought, but don't you think free daycare and free pharmacare, for example, would help their stretched pocket books a whole lot more? Maybe just a little bit more?
And how would we pay for such things...maybe by reversing all this so-called tax relief!!! And not just on the wealthy alone. Like collective insurance programmes at work, middle-class and working-class citizens will get more out when needed than they pay in, never mind all the other social benefits, such as not having the stress of being a paycheck away from destitution hanging over your head. Tax cuts for most income brackets must be stopped and, indeed, in many cases reversed.
Tax relief is the greatest snake oil salesperson political trick of all time...it promised to deliver financial aid and stability and, for virtually everyone it delivered the EXACT opposite.
So, while so many on the so-called left appear mystified at the causes of the remarkable growth of social inequality and social insecurity since the 1980's, they should get their heads out the sand...one of the basic reasons is simple, that is when Tax Relief began!
Fuck Off #3: Our Banks are "A" Fucking OK
Remember when Occupy Toronto started and the media had all the strutting...... imbecilic peacocks of the business commentary community (the worst form of life on Earth, they are not actually rich...they just make a living kissing the asses of the rich...wow guys, why not cheer for the fucking Yankees or applaud the Death Star as a necessary step to profitability for the Empire) spouting off with a bunch of horseshit about "The people in New York may have a point but our banking sector is just fine. It is not like the USA"
Fucking right! Our banking sector is indeed just fine. While YOU are being asked to take cuts to your transit, social programmes, reason to live, union job security, etc...the banks in Canada are DOING JUST FUCKING FINE. A++++ in fact!!! :)
Lets take a look at the latest Stats from our friends at the Glib and Stale (a review of the ten most profitable companies in Canada):
1) RBC $5 Billion plus in profits...up 35%
2) TD Bank $4.5 Billion plus...up 49%
3) Bank of Nova Scotia $4 Billion plus...up 20%
7) BMO $2.5 Billion plus...up 57%
8) CIBC $2 Billion plus...up 109%
Hey, don't you feel better now! The banks are in Canada ARE DOING GREAT!!!!
They have made so much profit off of you that they have more money than most provincial governments. That is WONDERFUL!!! The system is working perfectly here. No need for protests.
How did they do this...well off of your savings and farcically lax Canadian bank fee laws...but why worry...no need to fret if the banks are making billions. Stay home, content with no daycare, no transit, no job security, no rights as workers, no real hope of a socially just future...and be happy as yet again you are asked to "sacrifice" more...it is all OK because OUR BANKS ARE DOING JUST FINE!!!!
Fuck Off#2 Last Night I Had the Strangest Socialist Dream
So, last night I had the strangest dream...it was just like those bank ads about how "if you don't want to pay bank fees..." or something. Anyway I was, in my dream, lying in bed, heart racing, the weight of one terrible question pressing down on me..."How, given all of the media bias and the overwhelming power of the forces of capital, can we fight for socialism?"...and then appearing at the door with a near heavenly glow behind was my daughter and she said "hey old man...if you want to fight for socialism...fight for socialism."
Let's cut the bullshit. Capitalism is not working. It has survived only due to massive government intervention and the creation of socialism for the wealthy. It cannot survive in any other way. All of the rubbish from Milton Friedman or Ayn Rand is a proven total pile of crap.
But, with capitalism clearly bankrupt and its very logic obviously shown to be false after 2008, where are the socialists? While I admire Occupy it highlighted problems not solutions. And the NDP...really? Has anyone bothered to check out its provincial governments lately...never mind the farcical programmes they ran on in Ontario and federally?
The greatest crisis to hit capitalism since the 1930's came and the NDP proposed tax cuts for small business and talked a lot about fiscal responsibility. Fuckin' A!!!!
So...how can we fight for a socialist platform and a socialist vision of society? Well we could start by actually doing it! Sometimes the journey from point A to B is really that simple. If capitalism is not working...say so. If we need a new socialist economy and vision...say so. Don't campaign or work for a platform where the best they can do is eliminating ambulance fees...or hold endless discussions about how to best fight for what you want to fight for or how best to campaign and run candidates for socialism while not actually campaigning or running candidates for socialism.
The NDP is not a socialist party. Over the last forty years, from the Waffle to the NPI to the utter futility of "entryist" groups today, these efforts have seen the NDP go further and further to the RIGHT, no more so than under the leadership of Jack Layton, Andrea Horwath and the basically Liberal governments in Manitoba and Nova Scotia. The "real" Liberals have lost any trace, other than as an echo, of Social Democracy and the Just Society and are little more than the last stand quasi-progressive rump of the upper middle class, and the Greens have no coherent vision of any meaning at all.
Frankly, fighting for a "platform" that you do not really believe in, advocating for it on the doorstep, running for it in elections, and trying to use it in the hope that somehow by doing this you will advance socialism is just plain stupid. The essential logic is not at all different than the old Liberal refrain that you will get "real results" by voting Liberal instead of "wasting" your vote. In a sense they were right. Once you accept the premises of capitalism why not vote Liberal? They are obviously better than the Tories and if the NDP is not even remotely advocating for a socialist society, why not back the winning horse if winning is what it is all about? And now that the NDP has risen why not vote NDP? If what you want is reformist capitalism then they are the best of the "progressive" lot, federally, no doubt. (provincially in Ontario and elsewhere, I am not so sure.) The CAW has bought into this, and NOW Magazine and the Toronto Star buy the logic, so why not you? The advocates for Capitalism with a Human Face can't all be wrong.
BUT...if you want to vote for a socialist agenda and political platform, if you want to advocate and run in elections in opposition to capitalism itself, then DO SO and try to build a party in your area and federally that will. Otherwise, just admit that that is not what you are interested in at all because you will never build a socialist electoral agenda advocating for any of the mainstream "progressive" parties that exist today, and while you may get to booze it up over "victories" they will be victories that will not fundamentally change anything in a socialist sense and that are a tacit or outright endorsement of the basic ideas and logics of the capitalist system. And...like Kaiser Soze...socialism as an idea will simply disappear from popular discourse other than as an insult.
Updated ending:
http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/michael-laxer/2012/12/happy-xmas-war-not-over
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