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Socialist Interventions
Pamphlet Series

This pamphlet series is meant to encourage principled debate amongst the left and the working class to advance a viable socialist movement in Canada. Democratic debate is encouraged within and beyond the Socialist Project. These publications (and others), are available as free downloads at Reading From The Left.

The pamphlets are freely available for download. Printed copies are available at $3 each or $25 for a bundle of 10 copies (postage extra).

What's happening is a renovation of left-wing thought. The ideas of revolutions that we used to defend in the 1970s and 1980s, in practice, have not materialized. So, left-wing thought has had to open itself up to new realities and search for new interpretations. It has had to develop more flexibility in order to understand that revolutionary processes, for example, can begin by simply winning administrative power.

One of the problems is reflected in the leadership of cadre, accustomed as they are to thinking: when we take office, we change. We are democratic while working in a movement, but when we take office, we become authoritarian. We don't understand that, in the society we want to build, the state has to promote protagonism of people, rather than supplant their decision making. It happens in some left-wing governments: government officials think that it's up to them to solve problems for people, rather than understand that they must solve problems together with people. If our government officials are to be wise, they must be pushed by popular initiatives so that the people can feel they are doing it themselves. The state's paternalism, in building socialism, may help at first, but we must create popular protagonism.

I insisted in 1999 that we use the term "political instrument" because "the party," in some cases, is a worn-out term. We were interested in creating an agency that is in accordance with the needs of the new society, rather than copying the schemas of already obsolete parties. The party, classically, has been a group of cadre who, at bottom, are seeking to prepare themselves for taking political office, winning elections, with methods of work that we copied from the Bolshevik Party, which were democratic, not clandestine. We mechanically translated that structure.

The results of renovation of what used to be our political parties, or rather social movements that participate in this political construction, are now instruments that belong to social movements. Therefore we think that political instruments, whether they are fronts or whatever, must be the critical consciousness of the process. — Marta Harnecker

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Over the last quarter century, the left in most of the developed world has been marginalized as a social force. The ‘culture of possibilities’ for left alternatives has correspondingly narrowed. But historic changes, above all the discrediting of neoliberalism, hold out the potential of at long last reversing that earlier defeat. With the continuing financial turmoil and the global economy about to enter the worst downturn since the great depression, the desperate need for alternatives is clear enough; the question is whether we can develop the capacity to once again be a relevant social actor.

To this point, this opening for the left has been primarily polemical. Its true of course that in the recent elections, politicians – in Canada no less than in the U.S. – continued to insist on their allegiance to lower taxes and to run from significant redistributions in income, let alone wealth or power. In the U.S., an affirmation of American patriotism remains the condition for raising even moderate criticisms of foreign policy. But neoliberal ideology is reeling and the delegitimation of freer markets as the solution to everything has already made the right more defensive on economic issues than it has been for a generation. They can no longer get away with calling for the freeing of corporations and financial institutions from regulation to ‘unleash the creativity of markets,’ or rejecting out of hand state involvement to address social needs.

Moreover, the depth and global scope of the downturn will leave the state with little choice but to introduce massive public expenditures. Working families, experiencing the frightening erosion of their effective savings – their pensions and home values – have already started to cut back on consumption in order to rebuild some future security. Private investors, seeing few opportunities and reacting with caution and uncertainty toward the future, are not investing. For the immediate future, neither private incentives nor freer markets, neither the easy hand of more credit nor the promise of more exports, will end the news of failing companies and rising unemployment. Only public investment has a chance of leading an economic revival.

It is difficult to imagine an alternative politics that can match what we are up against without an organization whose focus is on building the essential relationships and political capacities across sections of the movement and within them. There should, for example, be hundreds if not thousands of meetings taking place every week across the country to discuss what we currently face and what to do about it. But this simply can’t happen spontaneously. How we build this kind of capacity is what the question of ‘alternatives’ is ultimately about.

This latest pamphlet in the Socialist Interventions Series has a range of contributions that look at the nature of the crisis in Canada and internationally; and also takes up the questions of building left alternatives.

Financial Crisis Analysis and Resources

The financial and economic crisis currently enveloping the world market is causing an enormous amount of social chaos. Workers and families are being dislocated from their communities as factories and workplaces are shutdown. Immigrants already forced to migrate to find work are amongst the first laid-off and pushed into even more exposed social settings.

Women's work is becoming increasingly precarious, and the pressures on women to undertake unpaid care work increasing. A vulnerable planet is under greater pressures as measures to improve the world's ecology are sacrificed to the need to restore corporate profits. As Mike Lebowitz notes in the pamphlet below, the logic of capital is opposed to the logic of human development. In an economic crisis, all is sacrificed to the restoration of capitalist profitability.

A new anti-capitalist movement is emerging. This is renewing the popularity of the writings of Karl Marx, and in particular his penetrating analysis in Capital, still the foremost analysis of why capitalist development inevitably leads to economic crises. The ideas of socialism are re-gaining popular resonance. New study groups and activist campaigns are growing daily. The Path to Human Development: Capitalism or Socialism? is a significant contribution to these efforts. Read it. Study it. Debate it. Circulate it among friends and comrades. Take part in the anti-capitalist movement that is emerging across the world. Alternatives to financial greed, economic chaos and barbarism are not only possible, they have taken on an urgency.

Socialist Interventions Pamphlet Series
Date	Author	Title	Download
#10. August, 2010	Marta Harnecker	Ideas for the Struggle	HTML	PDF
#9. October, 2009	Socialist Project	Financial Meltdown: Canada, the Economic Crisis and Political Struggle		PDF
#8. April, 2009	Michael A. Lebowitz	The Path to Human Development: Capitalism or Socialism?	PDF (letter size)	PDF (half-page)
#7. May, 2008	SP Labour Committee	Labour Movement Platform	HTML	PDF
#6. April, 2008	Richard Roman and Edur Velasco Arregui	The Oaxaca Commune: The Other Indigenous Rebellion in Mexico	HTML	PDF
#5. June, 2007	SP Labour Committee	The Crisis in Manufacturing Jobs: Struggling for Answers	HTML	PDF
#4. Dec, 2005	Armstrong, Hugh, et al.	Whose Health Care? Challenging the Corporate Struggle to Rule Our System	HTML	PDF
#3. Mar, 2005	Carlos Torres, et al.	The Unexpected Revolution The Venezuelan People Confront Neo-Liberalism	HTML	PDF
#2. Jan, 2005	Leo Panitch	Whose Violence? Imperial State Security and the Global Justice Movement	HTML	PDF
#1. April, 2004	Sam Gindin	The Auto Industry - Concretizing Working Class Solidarity: Internationalism Beyond Slogans	HTML	PDF

August, 2003		Socialist Project Constitution	HTML	PDF
2004		Founding Statement	HTML	PDF
2004		A Different Canada is Possible! Charting a Democratic Agenda for the 2004 Federal Election	HTML	PDF
April, 2005		Saying NO to Neoliberalism in France and Canada	HTML	PDF
February, 2010	Socialist Project	The Venezuelan Call for a New International Organization of the Left	HTML	PDF