The Marxist-Leninist Daily

The insecurity, fear and hardship caused by the anti-social offensive and economic crisis are best overcome in battles for the rights of all. This past year workers from across the country have waged courageous struggles to defend their right to a Canadian standard claim on what they produce and services they provide. Civic and forestry workers, steelworkers and nickel miners are some of the legions of Canadian workers that have taken up the battle to defend their rights and dignity at the workplace and to oppose concessions, deindustrialization and nation-wrecking of the rich and their monopolies. Postal and other public sector workers have waged campaigns against the regressive privatization of public enterprises and national assets that is meant to enrich the few at the expense of the people and economy. Other activists in the trade union movement have made great strides in organizing the unorganized and defending the growing number of indentured slave workers being brought into Canada under the new private monopoly-controlled immigration regime.

The greatest weapon in the hands of the owners of capital to negate the rights of workers and cause fear, insecurity, concessions, loss of bearings and capitulation is the disunity and competition of an unorganized working class within the capitalist labour market. The state-organized and imposed disunity and competition of the labour market festers and does its dirty work in the absence of effective worker defence collectives and an independent working class perspective and thinking. The state-organized labour market should long ago have been declared obsolete and inhuman and thrown on the junk heap of history along with the slave market.

The greatest weapon in the hands of the working class to negate its negation on the economic front is its strength of numbers and its unity and social solidarity through conscious organizing and determination to defend its dignity and rights. To overcome the state-organized disunity and competition of the capitalist labour market and the constant mass media onslaught on working class thinking and its independent perspective requires conscious participation in acts of organizing the class into effective militant collectives that fight to defend the rights of all and to present its own views and program for nation-building and on all matters of concern to society.

Organize all workers, employed and unemployed, into effective defence collectives!

Fight for an alternative and the right to a Canadian standard claim for wages, benefits and pensions and to employment for all without fear and insecurity!

Workers have rights by virtue of being the producers of wealth and the providers of services!

Political Front of Struggle

Politics is the fight for the necessary resources and right to solve problems in society. Being political means fighting for the necessary resources and right to solve problems and winning that right through the conquest of political power and vesting sovereignty in the people.

Under the current state dictatorship of the owners of monopoly capital, everything is done to marginalize the working class and prevent it from having the necessary resources and right to solve problems in society. The representative system of cartel party governance is designed to block people from consciously participating in solving the many problems plaguing the economy, workplaces, communities, regions and nation-building.

The charade of whether or not a federal election will be called and which cartel party is up or down in the polls are diversions from the reality that anti-social decisions are being made by a very small group of owners of monopoly capital and enforced through their state machine regardless of which cartel party is in control of the government. The ruling elite are secretly planning to broaden the anti-social offensive and plunge Canada into more disastrous colonial and inter-imperialist wars led by the U.S. global empire.

Canadians must break through the block on solving problems by consciously participating in life as worker politicians and building committees for democratic renewal at their workplaces, communities, educational institutions and wherever else people gather. Being political demands fighting to harmonize the conditions of life workers have been born into with the authority to solve the problems that emerge from the socialized reality. Those problems broadly speaking are economic, political, social and cultural.

Solving problems in the economy means to have the authority to control the direction of the economy or at least to be an effective opposition, which can restrict monopoly right, and be actively organizing to win control.

Canadians are constantly told that no matter what party is in power it can do little because the economic crisis is global or that monopolies have the legal right to serve their narrow interests without serious consideration of the views of the people, public good and nation-building. Workers are left to suffer wrecking of the economy, deindustrialization, concessions, layoffs, insecurity of employment and retirement, no increase and even cuts in investments in social programs and ruination of the natural environment because pro-social solutions to the economy and other problems pounding the country are deemed implausible. Besides, the people are told constantly in the mass media by well-paid experts in academia and capital-centred think tanks that pro-social solutions that favour the people could never be implemented because economic problems originate in the global economy beyond our control and pro-social solutions restrict monopoly right, which is illegal under current commercial law. Some even go so far as to suggest in the most self-serving way that the marketplace controls all and wields an invisible hand that both constructs and destroys in mysterious ways beyond human understanding and should be left alone to work its magic. In other words, workers must sit passively and suffer the consequences of a system of ownership and control that is obsolete yet supposedly beyond the capacity of humans to bring under control, change and move forward to one that is in harmony with the socialized conditions of production.

A similar anti-conscious stance of the owners of capital could be taken in the face of any social or natural phenomena such as fire, but that would not be human, as humans have always confronted phenomena and problems with enthusiasm and a desire to discover their inner contradictions and laws and use that understanding to humanize their social and natural world. Long ago humans discovered energy from friction could produce fire and then later found that fire could be reconverted back to forms of mechanical energy using steam or internal combustion. That is the conscious forward march of humanity, and the working class is the social force that today represents the progressive conscious march of human beings and its desire to solve problems not obfuscate and say the world is unknowable and unchangeable and deny that alternatives are possible.

Owners of capital and their retinue within the middle strata including the political elite refuse to change the situation because they profit from it and derive their privilege and power from maintaining the status quo no matter how destructive that may be. They trot out a million and one excuses to attack the working class and demand it make sacrifices for the good of the rich and their monopolies and the maintenance of their crisis-ridden system. They begin from the false premise that workers are a cost to the socialized economy. Imagine, all the anti-worker experts and capital-centred theoreticians clamour that the actual producers of wealth and providers of services are a negative cost in the production of the very wealth they produce and make available! But when this human "cost" stops producing wealth for whatever reason, say a strike, then all hell breaks loose and the human "cost" is cajoled, even criminalized by the state and otherwise forced back to producing wealth and being a "cost" once again, not of course to the socialized economy but to the owners of capital. This conception of workers as a cost of production is an excuse to attack the dignity of workers and their central decisive role in producing social product and nation-building and to divert attention away from the reality that claims of owners of capital on social product are outmoded and even destructive and should be thrown into the dust bin of history along with their anti-human labour market.

Canadians are also told the country is captive within its resource-based export economy and cannot develop and progress into self-reliance even though the land, people and five main regions are more than adequate to produce almost everything we require for a sustainable modern lifestyle and to trade for what is lacking based on mutual benefit.

Annexation into the U.S. global empire is a fact that cannot be changed, so say the monopolies and mass media. U.S. Steel shut down its Ontario mills without a second thought because it serves the narrow interests of the monopoly owner. The Canadian auto industry has been ravaged because factories are mostly owned abroad and serve a U.S. market that has collapsed and nothing can be done to change the direction of those plants or so the people are told. The forest industry is suffering its worst crisis in memory. The global monopoly Vale-Inco slanders the Sudbury nickel belt as "unsustainable" and demands extensive concessions from miners and refiners. Why is Canada captive to this nonsense and abuse? Because the working class is denied the necessary resources and right to solve problems. The Canadian working class is marginalized and blocked from politics and control over its economy. That situation must change if retrogression is to be stopped and Canada put on the path of nation-building.

The working class must view the world from its own perspective and thinking, which is founded on solving problems, gaining understanding of the socialized economy through conscious participation in acts of finding out, and moving society forward under a program of its own making that favours the people and not the rich and their monopolies.

If the global economy is the problem then a solution can be found in a self-reliant, all-sided, pro-social Canadian economy. A large resource-rich country with an educated and experienced working class such as Canada has no excuse not to be self-reliant, all-sided and successful in humanizing the social and natural environments; it has no excuse not to be directly responsible for its success or failure based on Canadians' own efforts and not squirm and blame others and say nothing can be done and no alternative exists to wrecking, deindustrialization, layoffs, concessions, paying the rich, depriving social programs of investments and driving down the standard of living. Leaders in the economy and politics must be denounced for saying problems cannot be solved under the hoax that those problems are said to originate globally or are unknowable. That is a cop out. That is inexcusable and the working class cannot tolerate such anti-social anti- conscious deception and capitulation to real or imagined factors that supposedly cannot be solved.

Workers must step forward and consciously participate in the political and economic affairs of the country. This does not mean supporting the establishment parties of the ruling elite as voting cattle. It means becoming worker politicians in your own right at whatever level you are capable. This requires organizing the working class into committees for democratic renewal to step up the fight to be political, to negate the negation of workers' right to solve economic, political and social problems. It means breaking free from the stale captive thinking of the capitalist ideology and mass media through conscious participation in acts of finding out.

Organize to vest sovereignty in the people.

Stop paying the rich! Increase investments in social programs!

Manufacturing yes! Nation-wrecking no!

Fight to guarantee the rights of all through conscious organizing of the working class into effective defence collectives!

Fight to be political, which is the right to have the necessary resources and to solve problems confronting society at all levels.

This Labour Day 2009, let us discuss how to defend the dignity of workers and their central decisive role in nation-building and to turn the situation around.

Long live the Canadian working class, a progressive social class that recognizes its right and duty to solve problems and move society forward!

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Workers' Struggles in the Past Year

Toronto, Labour Day 2008

Cultural workers in Toronto on Labour Day and Montreal on September 4 and Edmonton on October 1,
denounce the Harper government's attacks on culture and the arts during the federal election.

Edmonton, September 21, 2008: 325 members of United Food and Commercial Workers Canada Local 1118
on strike at the Maple Leaf poultry plant.

Workers in Val d'Or, Quebec on September 30, 2008 during the federal election, blockade Stephen Harper's campaign bus as it passes through Abitibi-Temiscamingue to denounce the anti-social anti-worker attacks of the Harper government.

Timmins, October 1, 2008: 675 CAW Local 599 workers went on strike at the metallurgical site
of Xstrata's Kidd Creek operations.

Striking postal workers and their supporters, November 2008.
Top: Calgary, Halifax; bottom: Halifax, Quebec City.

London and Toronto, December 10, 2008: LCBO workers demonstrate against plans to casualize their workfoce.

Hamilton, December 12, 2008: USW Locals 1005 and 7135 rally against layoffs.

Ottawa-Gatineau, December 29, 2008: Striking OC Transpo workers.

Militant actions across Canada against the siege of Gaza, December 2008-January 2009.

Demonstration to demand the repatriation of Omar Khadr, Toronto, January 17, 2009.

February 24, 2009: CAW Local 598 takes seven busloads of Sudbury workers to Huntsville to picket the
constituency office of federal Minister of Industry Tony Clement to demand Xstrata be forced to abide by its
July 2006 commitment of no layoffs for three years.

Old Dutch workers on strike, Calgary, March 2009.

Ontario Nurses Association rally against cuts to nursing at Queen's Park, March 5, 2009.

International Women's Day 2009: Toronto (top) and Montreal.

March 17, 2009: Demonstration against visit of war criminal George W. Bush to Calgary.

CAW Local 195 workers and their supporters rally at the blockaded
Aradco and Aramco plants in Windsor, March 18, 2009.

Hamilton, March 21, 2009: USW Local 1005 holds a mass rally to denounce the closure of
Stelco (U.S. Steel) plants and demand emergency measures to address the crisis.

Montreal, April 3, 2009: Demonstration of striking professors from the Université du Québec à Montréal.

Canada-wide Day of Action Against NATO, April 4, 2009

Toronto, April 5, 2009: Demonstration against immigration raids on migrant workers.

Active and retired autoworkers call on MPPs to live up to their social responsibilitiy and defend their pensions.
Top: Constituency office of Essex MPP Bruce Crozier, April 17, 2009; bottom: Constituency office of Windsor West MPP Sandra Pupatello, April 16, 2009.

Queen's Park, April 23, 2009: Mass rally of 20,000 workers from across Ontario demand
that federal and provincial governments protect pensions for all workers

Defend the Dignity of Workers and Their Central Decisive Role in Nation-Building

Economic Front of Struggle

Political Front of Struggle

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Workers' Struggles in the Past Year