Anti-Austerity Struggles and the Canadian Election
The economic crisis that whipped across the advanced capitalist countries in 2007-09 has now moved into a phase of unprecedented government austerity. Rather than spelling the end of neoliberalism, the response to the crisis is intensifying its primary distributional and administrative norms. Workers everywhere are being asked – by political intimidation and market imperatives – to pay for the crisis through wage restraint, pension cuts and reduced public services. This is the case whether or not there exists a social democratic government in power (Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Nova Scotia, Manitoba), or not (Britain, Italy, France, the U.S., Canada). Social democracy has long adapted itself to neoliberalism, and it is impossible to identify where it is struggling to form non-austerity path out of the crisis.
The social struggles against austerity are largely occurring outside the arena of parliaments, particularly in North America. The long organizational decline of the left has made its presence marginal in these spaces, incapable of contesting political power concentrated in the state system. Extra-parliamentary struggles are, however, forming new alliances between public sector unions and community groups, challenging some of the entrenched prejudices of unions and widening the political space for new organizations, particularly in political systems where the Left has maintained a presence.
In many cases, the discontentedness with neoliberalism, and the sheer injustice of having workers pay for a crisis caused by the speculators in the financial sector, is shaking up the electoral system and disrupting once stable political alliances. Cracks may yet open for more radical political options that would fuse extra-parliamentary struggles with new electoral possibilities that would break the stranglehold of neoliberalism. This would necessarily place the anti-capitalism question back as a central political issue.
The 2011 Canadian election is occurring in this context: a ruling class driving full-speed with the austerity agenda; a deeply entrenched neoliberal policy framework across the state system; a social democratic party in the form of the NDP (New Democratic Party) that has accepted neoliberalism (and all that this means in terms of the Canadian ruling class) as a reasonable price for the pursuit of power; a labour movement in decline and in strategic disarray; and relatively weak social movements fledgling to form anti-austerity coalitions. The political terrain is such that apathy, resignation and boycott of the electoral system are typical forms of expressing political discontent and estrangement from the options available in actually existing Canadian politics. The vision and struggle to build real political alternatives is an active daily concern of more and more working class Canadians. But it is still only in the far margins of political life.
Only on the political Right in Canada are ideological commitments and voting allegiances tightly bound. This encompasses about one-third of the Canadian population, and it gives the ruling classes, increasingly united in their support for the Conservatives, a huge electoral lead at every level of the Canadian state. For the rest of the population, the linkages between class, ideological commitments and voting behaviour, are more loosely wound together (although there is some important regional variations). This is why Canadian politics as a whole, and especially at the national level, produces systemic stability for ruling class power and domination, but also great volatility in electoral results and alliances (that, in turn, tend to generate minority Parliaments). With the decline of social democracy as an alternative policy and distributional framework within capitalism (with the NDP being one of the most politically ambitious of the social democratic parties), it is increasingly the clichéd adage that the more things change electorally in Canadian politics, the more things stay the same politically.
The precise political outcome of the May 2nd election may well have the NDP make an unprecedented electoral breakthrough in Canada and Quebec. This would be a major step in its long desire to displace the Liberals as the other dominant national party, partly to become something more like the Democratic Party in the U.S. and partly to become the alternate centrist political option like the British Labour Party and the German SPD. This is already what the NDP is in Western Canada and Nova Scotia. This needs to be placed in the context of an international political conjuncture where ruling class forces have, paradoxically, gained strength and momentum over the crisis to date; and set against the enduring institutional characteristics of the Canadian political and electoral systems that, if anything, the political parties and campaigns have reinforced.
The Bullet here publishes two other contributions to assessing the Canadian election, fighting austerity and the dilemmas of building an anti-capitalist project.
— Socialist Project
Canada’s Federal Election 2011:
Should Radicals Care?
Alan Sears and James Cairns
Despite severe problems with electoral politics, radicals building movements for real social change need to engage seriously with elections. In this article, we look at the current Canadian election from a Toronto perspective.
The 2011 federal election in Canada is taking place at a crucial moment. A massive wave of austerity is heading this way, after sweeping across Europe, the United States and much of the Global South. You just need to look at the attacks on pensions in France, the tripling of tuition fees in Britain, the devastation of public services in California or the elimination of collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin and a number of other states to see the kinds of attacks that are on the way.
The austerity agenda is basically neoliberalism hyped on speed, though it’s being presented as the necessary and inevitable response to the economic turbulence following the financial meltdown of 2008. The mantra of neoliberalism, which has been the core of the pro-capitalist policy agenda since the mid-1970s, is that the resources of the state must be focused on supporting the market system and corporate profitability, pushing people into the market to meet all their wants and needs.
The main feature of the austerity agenda at this point is a withering attack on the public sector. The rights, wages and working conditions of public sector workers are being pummeled. Massive layoffs are on the horizon. At the same time, governments are slashing or privatizing a wide range of public services (in areas such as health, education, welfare and transit) that have already been weakened through years of underfunding.
Age of Austerity
We can see that we’re entering the so-called “age of austerity,” and yet there is no way to vote against it in the upcoming federal election on May 2nd. Since the 2008 financial meltdown, governments of all political stripes have attempted to restore corporate profitability by taking over bad private sector debt and making the population pay through cuts to social spending and services. All the major parties in Canada are completely committed to austerity approaches, focusing government on strengthening market forces and enhancing private profits while cutting social programs and services, such as education, health, public transit, social assistance and unemployment insurance.
No one is promising to reverse the cuts to social programs, or to restore taxes on corporations and the rich. Simply raising welfare rates in Ontario to match 1995 levels would require a 55% increase at this point, as the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) has pointed out in the Raise the Rates campaign. Of course, social assistance rates are provincial and municipal issues, but the overall context is set by federal transfer payments. Meanwhile, corporate tax rates have fallen from just over 42% to 16.5% since 2000. All major parties are committed to continuing along the same path, though at slightly different paces. The NDP and Liberal parties are both talking about a slight rollback in corporate tax reductions, so as to level off but not reverse the huge reductions of the last decade.
This is not to say that there are no differences in policy, but these are variations within a very narrow range. The big story is the fundamental agreement of the major parties on the inevitability of austerity. It is as if a hurricane is approaching and all the parties are saying we have to batten down the hatches. But the economy is not a weather system. It is an arrangement of relations between humans, and between humans and nature. Unlike a weather system, the economy is something people can (at least potentially) shape. But this election, there is no serious debate about economic issues, as all parties are competing to show that they favour responsible administration, which they define as balanced budgets and low taxes.
So should we hold our noses and vote for one version of the austerity agenda over the others? It is a stomach-turning choice. No wonder a lot of people are not inspired by the election. There has been virtually no substantial discussion of how to address housing needs, racist immigration policies, indigenous issues, foreign policy and Canadian imperialism, or racial profiling and the criminalization of the poor. Syed Hussan recently wrote: “Canada is a settler state on Indigenous land and has no moral authority to impose a government. Elections are the means by which this colonial project claims legitimacy for its aggressive policies of cultural and material appropriation and murder.”
Reasons to Avoid Elections
It is not difficult to come up with reasons to avoid elections. Party platforms offer more of the same or worse, leaders are uninspiring and media coverage tends to obsess over meaningless squabbles. These trends are not surprising, as a key part of the neoliberal agenda since the mid-1970s has been to narrow the realm of politics by claiming that the only role of government is to support the penetration of commercial relations deeper into every corner of life. This has not resulted in “less” government, but a refocusing of policy on policing the population and stripping away non-market means to meet our wants and needs (such as public transit, social housing, social assistance or unemployment insurance).
This neoliberal view of politics was clear in the English-language leaders’ debate, when Harper requested a majority, asking: “Do you want to have this kind of bickering, do you want to have another election in two years? Or do you want a focus on the economy?” According to Harper, politics is just so much noise distracting from the key role of government, which is to focus on the economy and be the guardian of corporate profitability. Harper was challenged by Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, who said, “There he goes again with this word ‘bickering’…This is a debate, Mr. Harper. This is a democracy.” But in reality it was a pretty thin debate, and a very narrow version of democracy, as no one presented a substantial alternative to Harper’s economic or social visions.
Clearly, elections are not sufficiently democratic, in all kinds of ways. The real issues facing us are presented as extra-political, beyond the realm of debate. So there is a very real question about whether those of us fighting for radical social transformation ought to care about elections at all. Does participation in these elections, voting for one version or another of the austerity agenda, simply foster illusions in the democratic character of the system, or might it increase a sense of power over the world and challenge the view that we simply watch the world unfold like a television show?
Elections Matter
One thing we should recognize is that elections matter to large numbers of people. In fact, it’s probably safe to say that elections are the core political reference point for huge segments of the population, whose radicalization is essential if we are going to seriously shift the terrain of politics. It is only a massive mobilization of people in demonstrations, strikes, occupations and other forms of activism that can build the basis for another kind of politics that addresses the real questions by opening up serious debates about the kind of future we seek. The lack of alternatives in the leaders’ debate was not simply a result of gutlessness among politicians, but also of the absence of a widespread activist movement in the streets, schools, neighbourhoods and workplaces that can contest the austerity agenda.
We need to seek out ways to use elections to build the movements that will ultimately transform society. And between here and fundamental social change there is a lot of movement building to do. People who do not consider themselves political will need to choose activism. New discussions and debates will need to be undertaken, as people become persuaded of their own potential power to change the world, both through activism and the struggle around ideas. The reason that elections are relevant to these processes is that they open up unique moments when more people than usual are thinking about, and prepared to talk about, politics.
Look at the number of people who watched the leaders’ debates last week. Around 4 million watched the English debate. It attracted more viewers than the last Grey Cup, and more than twice as many as the highest-rated Canadian television show does on any given night. It’s safe to guess that these same 4 million people are not watching parliamentary debate on a regular basis. Something about election time is different.
You can probably think of a time when you’ve had a political conversation during an election that you might not have had otherwise. Anti-capitalists face the challenge of becoming part of that conversation. We are not suggesting that the way to build radical movements is simply by having as many of these individual, random conversations as possible. Successful movements for social change are by nature collective, organized processes. But given that our movements aim to engage people in political conversations in the hopes of drawing them into action, and given that politics (albeit politics of a distorted form) are high on the public agenda during elections, election time would be an odd time for radicals not to reach out to folks outside the movement with the hope of drawing them in.
The argument to boycott elections on the grounds of their impurity excludes in broad strokes the political relevance of people who don’t already “get it.” This approach threatens to insulate today’s tiny Left from anything outside the small groupings of the already-converted, but it also goes against the radical assumption that people have the capacity to learn and to transform themselves.
Our challenge is to find ways to engage people at the very moment when many of them are thinking about their capacity to act upon the world. There are obviously problems with the youth campaigns to increase voter participation we’ve seen springing up on university campuses this election. They tend to fetishize the power of electoral politics in general, and the power of individualized actions in particular, and they reproduce white, middle-class privilege and flag-waving celebrations of all-things-Canadian in various ways. But we should presume that at least some of the students who joined a “vote-mob” or attended a political rally are seeking to develop capacities to change the world so they might have a better future. Sure, dedicated Young Liberals and Tories are probably too convinced of their party’s perfection to be interested in talking about the limitations of their approach. But many young people turn to electoral politics not because they find it especially honourable or exciting – in fact, many find it slimy and boring – but because they see no alternative way of making a difference in the world. Many are motivated by a sense of justice and want to see the world change. It’s just that at the moment their hopes are placed in a system that’s incapable of making real change happen.
Our aim must be to build a movement that expands the horizons of possibility and hope. The African-American historian Komozi Woodard has said that the foundation of emancipation is the widespread belief that we all deserve better than this. Unfortunately, there is no perfect recipe for fostering this feeling and building a movement to make it so.
The question of how radicals can use elections to help build such a movement is especially challenging at a time when the overall size of the Left is relatively small. There have been periods in the past when the Left has had significant social weight, and regularly influenced events and ideas in the mainstream. The strength and size not only of anti-capitalist political organizations, but of radical groups within unions, neighbourhoods, schools, campuses, and workplaces meant that radical activism and ideas had more influence on events and a more prominent public profile.
By contrast, the Left at this moment is fragmented and tiny. Most of today’s Left campaigns and demonstrations draw upon a relatively small group of dedicated radicals without whom the movement would collapse altogether. But the fatigue and frustration that is bound to result from tireless organizing on the part of these same people can lead to an inward-looking Left. It is difficult to reach out when capacity is so limited.
Yet reaching out is essential, and elections have the potential to be part of that process. The way to build a new Left with real social weight is both to build militant movements and to seek out every opportunity we can to engage with wider layers of the population. Specific radical groups have every reason to ask themselves what strategies or actions they might undertake within an election campaign in order to further their agenda. But as a whole, individuals and organizations to the left of the NDP should also be asking themselves and each other about what sorts of strategic spaces we need to be building in order not only to intervene in elections, but to make reaching out to yet-to-be-radicals one of our top priorities.
At a recent public forum in Toronto, Adam Breihan and Andrew Sernatinger, fresh from the mobilizations in Wisconsin, were asked to reflect upon what their campaigns lacked during those days of militant protest. Both lamented the absence of preexisting broad-based, inclusive “strategic spaces” to discuss ideas about how to push the movement forward and to democratically plan actions. In spite of their pride in the resistance that emerged and their hope that it will continue to develop, they both talked about the serious drawbacks of working within a fragmented Left. This was clearest to them when protestors needed to make quick tactical decisions. Adam said plainly, “I wish we’d already had a space to work out these questions together.” This points to a weakness in terms of mobilizing in the streets, and also to a larger gap on the Left in general. [See complete video LeftStreamed No. 99.]
Strategic Spaces For the Left
Building these strategic spaces is not easy. There are political differences that divide individuals and groups, and the difficulty of contending personalities is no small thing. The Left is not free from the systems of inequality that structure society, and building a Left with social weight means addressing head on privilege and exclusion within our movements. Doing so is often a source of deep pain – but it’s nonetheless essential. The challenge of all this is monumental. But to refuse to take it up is to admit defeat.
There is amazing work being done on the Left at this moment. To name but a few recent Toronto examples: The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, in collaboration with CUPE Ontario, has initiated a crucial campaign to raise social assistance rates and restore the Special Diet Allowance cut last year by the McGuinty government; Students Against Israeli Apartheid at York University and the University of Toronto have launched a divestment campaign that marks a major step toward ending these universities’ complicity in Israeli Apartheid; No One Is Illegal-Toronto is in the midst of organizing a community-based May Day march that puts demands for migrant justice and indigenous sovereignty front and centre; and the work of the Greater Toronto Workers’ Assembly aims to pull together groups from different political traditions. But regardless of the outstanding work of these and other groups, none of them alone is capable of transforming society as a whole. That will only happen when masses of people collectively recognize the injustices of the present system, and through their own hands, work to bring about a better world. This process requires a large and growing pluralist Left that looks out beyond its borders.
Elections offer an important moment to reach outside the existing Left. Further, even if the range of alternatives is highly limited, the results of elections do matter. A Harper majority, for example, would be taken as a clear signal to move full speed ahead with the austerity agenda, just as the election of Mayor Rob Ford was in Toronto. People on the Left might therefore choose to work and/or vote for progressive candidates, hold alternative public forums to raise issues specific to the election context, and talk to people within their unions, neighbourhoods, schools and workplaces about the choices we face, as well as the limitations of electoral democracy.
The fact that election results matter does not mean that people should vote for the Liberals to forestall a Harper majority. The Liberals are a pro-business party that has been a crucial player in the implementation of neoliberalism in Canada. It was a Liberal government in 1995 that delivered perhaps the sharpest single blow to health, education and social programs. The current Liberal leader has attacked free speech on campuses, calling Israeli Apartheid Week “a dangerous cocktail of ignorance and intolerance” and condemning this crucial form of Palestine solidarity work every chance he gets. It sows illusions in the system to suggest that voting for the alternative party of the ruling elite is in any way progressive.
Unfortunately, the Green Party in Canada has developed as a pro-business party that seeks to reconcile capitalism with environmental sustainability. At this point, the Greens seek to combine austerity with ecology in ways that are deeply problematic.
This leaves (in Canada outside Quebec) the NDP. Although the NDP today is not what it once was, the history of the NDP (and its predecessor the CCF) is different from the other parties in that it grew directly out of the workers’ and farmers’ movements. It arose as the representation of activist workers and farmers within liberal democracy and the capitalist system, just as unions represent workers within the existing corporate structure. Yet despite these origins, the NDP and similar social democratic parties around the world have become thoroughly neoliberal and have embraced the austerity agenda. Provincial NDP governments in Manitoba and Nova Scotia make this very clear. The NDP has also never come to terms with the right to self-determination of First Nations people or the Quebecois.
We face a huge challenge when the Left is too small to have a real impact on the election but at the same time recognize that this election matters. There is no ideal choice on offer. One possible path is to vote for the NDP on the basis of its history, on the record of certain MPs who do speak out on real issues, as Libby Davies did on Palestine (only to get beaten down by the party leadership for doing so), and on the basis that the overall size of the NDP vote is often interpreted in the mainstream as a bit of an ideological measure of where people are at politically and what they are willing to tolerate. We think it is probably the best we can do in the short term, while we engage in building a new Left with real social weight – one that can begin to make a real difference in the larger social and political climate.
The upcoming election matters, then, for two main reasons. First, it matters in that the outcome will be important in shaping the ideological terrain for the next period of time, signaling the pace at which the austerity agenda might proceed. But second, and no less importantly from our perspective, it matters in the sense that it could help today’s tiny radical Left think seriously about the kind of organizing that would need to happen in order to develop a new Left with real social weight in the years ahead. •
Alan Sears teaches at the Department of Sociology, Ryerson University, Toronto.
James Cairns teaches at the Department of Contemporary Studies, Laurier University, Brantford.
This article first appeared on the New Socialist Webzine.
Neoliberalism, the NDP and the Anti-Capitalist Left
Herman Rosenfeld
I read with a certain amount of dismay, your editorial of April 12, “To Defeat the Right, the Left Must Organize Itself.” As an English Canadian resident of Toronto, I have no desire to tell progressive political activists in the Quebec nation what electoral strategy they should or shouldn’t choose. But I find there is a certain amount of misunderstanding about the political realities of the NDP in the so-called Rest of Canada.
First, for most of the socialist and anti-capitalist left in the rest of Canada, the NDP does not represent any real “political alternative.” It is a social democratic party, which, in today’s neoliberal universe, supports the continuing reliance on the system of private capital accumulation. This stands in contradiction to the party’s half-hearted defence of the welfare state reforms that are under attack by the business community and all of the parties currently holding political power in Canada (and the rest of the capitalist world). Reforms that seek to limit the power of capital and protect the rights of working people are barriers to the kind of austerity and restructuring that business calls for in order to be competitive in this moment of neoliberal intensification. The NDP and social democratic parties around the world have no answer for this. As such, while they can provide a mild critique of the policies being pursued by the older business-oriented parties when in opposition, they don’t present any real alternative and won’t even put forward the kinds of reforms necessary to protect working people, let alone challenge the system.
See full animation on YouTube – by Mike Constable.
There are few socialists in Canada that see the NDP as any more than a kind of “lesser evil,” that might include the odd left candidates who – as individuals – usually get support from the left in their individual ridings. The reality is that, on the whole, the Canadian left is conflicted about what to do during elections: we have no political party or movement that identifies with the interests of the working class and challenges either the logic or policies of neoliberal capitalism. We clearly fear and oppose the hard right, embodied in Harper’s Conservatives, we have no illusions about Ignatieff and the Liberals and don’t see ourselves as part of Layton’s appeal to “families” and the “middle class.”
We want to do what we can to stop Harper, are divided over whether a coalition between the other parties would be a step forward, have mixed feeling about how much effort or resources should go into supporting the odd NDP candidate (some of whom are rather progressive, but are all tied to the essential platform of the party’s milder form of neoliberalism).
The union movement is divided and conflicted in its relationship with the NDP, as well. While it tends to support the party, its relationship is no longer characterized by the kind of organic unity that preceded the neoliberal era. Experiences with the Bob Rae, BC and prairie governments, have taught unionists that the NDP has no answer to neoliberalism, even though it can be preferable to the others in some ways. On the other hand, the lack of a real option for the working class, and the fear of a hard-right Harper majority, often drives labour to embrace strategic voting of various sorts. Another choice is to concentrate on organizing around individual candidates that one supports, or building a campaign around a critical issue or set of issues.
The fact is that we are in a kind of transitional period, politically. There is no political representation for working class people and there is no socialist political movement that is able to act in the electoral sphere – or between elections – as a mobilizer, educator and organizer of the working class. Our options are limited and our emphasis has clearly to be in creating the conditions to build such an option. And, our electoral choices – who we vote for or decide to support – are limited, certainly not exciting and nothing to celebrate. We know that more NDP MPs would help limit the damage, but that’s not the same as seeing this as a real political option.
The Quebec Solidaire experiment is something that we are all watching. While we have some experiments of our own – like the Greater Toronto Workers’ Assembly – we are nowhere close to building the kind of party that many of us see as moving forward with QS. Perhaps you should look toward developing relations with the socialist and anti-capitalist left in the rest of Canada. Many of us would certainly welcome it and learn from your experiences.
And, on another note. It is problematic to infer that there is a parallel between the hard-right coming together to form the Conservative Party of Canada, and the “left” coming together to form an alternative of some kind – as in the possible coming together of the Liberals, NDP and the Bloc. Whatever alliances these parties form that might end up toppling or replacing the Conservatives as the ruling party – and whatever improvements
their policy agenda would be over the current government – we, on the left, have little capacity to shape or influence that possibility or outcomes. While many people on the left in the rest of Canada (including me) would rather have the latter in power than Harper and his gang, both are groupings which operate within the constraints of neoliberalism and accept this as something that cannot and should not be challenged. Therefore, it makes no sense to refer to them as “left.”
Our challenge is to create something else. •
Herman Rosenfeld is a former national representative in the education department of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) and now teaches Labour Studies at McMaster University.
