Par Barry Weisleder, secrétaire fédéral Socialist Action Canada/Ligue pour l'Action socialiste Ce jour-là, le 26 juillet 2023, des millions de personnes ont célébré la Journée de la rébellion à Cuba. Il y a soixante-dix ans, Fidel Castro a dirigé l'expédition…
Read More Malheurs du Milieu de l’été : Climat, Guerre et Itinérance
by Barry Weisleder | Socialist Action Canada Among the 102 candidates in the June 26 Toronto mayor by-election, former city councilor and MP Olivia Chow is certainly not the worst. Among the establishment contenders, she appears slightly to the left…
Read More Olivia Chow, a vote for mediocrity, evasion and capitalist rule
Discontent with the capitalist status quo is spreading rapidly. At the forefront are mobilizations in France against President Emanuel Macron's reform of the country's retirement law. Under Socialist Party President Francois Mitterrand and up to the 1990s the legal retirement age with full pension was 60 years. Since then, right wing governments have pushed it up to 62 years. Macron announced a move to raise it to 65 years, but backed down. He now proposes age 64. Mass action involving strikes and demonstrations, one day at a time, usually once or twice a week, have followed the parliamentary calendar. More militant sectors in the union movement have been calling for renewable strikes from one day to the next, towards a general strike.
The policy of the Socialist Caucus includes nationalization of the Irving Empire, under workers’ and Indigenous control. In practice, and by being true to our working class roots, we will change New Brunswick and the world for the better.
The global political situation is sobering, even dire, but its very volatility is pregnant with radically progressive potential outcomes.
Efforts to rebuild the New Brunswick New Democratic Party as a socialist, labour-based, working class party made considerable progress at a convention held at the Lions Club Community Centre in Moncton, July 22-24, 2022. It was the first NB NDP convention in five years. It attracted over thirty delegates, both in-person and online, plus several observers. In the struggle to organize and convene the gathering, the NDP Socialist Caucus played a leading role, spear-heading efforts to overcome resistance by the provincial NDP leader who resigned rather than comply with the party’s decision to proceed.
It was a mockery of workers' democracy.
The zoom conference hosted by the labour bureaucracy on June 20, it's so-called review of the June 2 Ontario election, along with a look at the future of the unions, allowed no grassroots workers to speak. Only a panel of NDP cheerleaders and labour hacks offered versions of the same opinion -- that it is necessary to work harder in order to win the next provincial election. If any further proof was needed, this echo chamber exercise demonstrated that there will be little progress until the conservative bureaucrats are replaced by class struggle militants, from the bottom up. The urgency of building a chapter of WAM in every union and allied workers' mass organization is very clear.
In the lead-up to the June 2 provincial election, Conservative and Liberal leaders are scrambling to align with public opinion by professing ‘progressive’ policies. Tory Premier Doug Ford hopes voters will forget he spent years attacking workers’ rights, broke a teachers’ strike early in 2020, privatized nursing homes and grossly mishandled the pandemic. Claims by Liberal leader Steven Del Duca that he will hike funding for healthcare and education are belied by his record as a cabinet minister in the Kathleen Wynne government which watched hospital services and schools deteriorate drastically, and sold off Ontario Hydro for a pittance.
Ottawa’s promise to “Build Back Better” is gonzo. In its place are billions more in military spending, billions more in subsidies for Big Oil and Gas, and a fake social housing agenda. Liberal Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland forecasts a lower deficit, which means a return to austerity -- even as working people struggle to cope with an ongoing pandemic, record-high inflation, and unfolding climate catastrophe.
1+1 Ep 123 Yuri & Barry Weisleder of Socialist Action Canada on NDP issues, NDP-Liberal Pact & covid
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh found a way to avoid a federal election, and to gain a vague promise of health service reforms – likely at the cost of huge increases in military spending. The Liberal-NDP deal paves the way for Justin Trudeau to stay in power until 2025, at least. That goes to serve capitalist political ‘stability’ in the relentless march to climate catastrophe, growing social inequality and the horrors of inter-imperialist war.
Enjoy Socialist Action's wonderful webcast for the 2022 celebration of International Women's Day!
Responding to the call of Toronto Rise-Up, some seventy people, including members of at least four socialist parties, held a rally at the Toronto intersection of Christie and Bloor Streets to “take back (public) space” from far-right organizations. The latter recently led the anti-vax, anti-Covid-mandate, so-called Freedom Convoy that blockaded border crossings and occupied downtown Ottawa for nearly three weeks.
By postponing the Ontario New Democratic Party Convention (for nearly a year) to occur just four months prior to the Ontario provincial election, party officials tipped the scales to minimize criticism of its policy and Leader. And leaving nothing to chance, they ensured that dozens of submitted resolutions calling for democratic and socialist policies were ranked low on subject priority lists so as to never see the light of day. Milquetoast motions that did get debated (February 4-6, 2022) mostly garnered over 95 per cent approval. The 1,100-plus registered delegates endured a long parade of NDP and Labour bureaucrats who repeated arguments at the virtual PRO mic, ad nauseum. But don't think that this was a convention of calm consensus. Up to a quarter of the gathering, representing thousands of rank and file members of the only mass, labour-based, working class party in North America, frequently challenged bureaucratic rules and pro-capitalist policies.
How is this possible? Only exceptionally weak NDP policy and leadership can account for this disturbing situation. It’s certainly not a function of popular satisfaction with the status quo.
The British Columbia New Democratic Party (BC NDP) Convention, held online December 11-12, met against a backdrop of capitalist catastrophes that are more frequent, more severe and cause greater waves of devastation in their wake. The convention of the labour-based party, originally scheduled for November 17-19, was postponed due to the torrential, record-breaking deluge that swept southern BC.
The downpours tore up roads, railway tracks, took out bridges, caused the collapse of buildings and mountainsides, overflowed dykes, flooded the best agricultural land in Canada, destroyed homes, killed tens of thousands of farm animals, and killed countless wild animals. The agricultural destruction is causing continued food shortages in BC.
A heat wave in June set a global record in which parts of BC were hotter than Death Valley.
This document outlines and reinforces that position, updated to the present reality. In general, we are applying the Marxist-Leninist method to worker-based parties with petty bourgeois leaderships and bourgeois programs that aim to reform capitalism, rather than to overthrow it in favour of the construction of a workers’ state towards building socialism.
In this bonus episode of The Red Review, brought to you by Socialist Action, Emily and Daniel interview Mackenzie Thomason, bus driver, CUPE 1253 member, and recently acclaimed leader of the New Brunswick NDP. Mackenzie talks picket line vibes, community support, demands of striking workers, taking on the Irving empire, government ban on land acknowledgements, and a surging New Brunswick NDP that puts people first, not profit!
To quote Yogi Berra, “It’s deja-vu all over again.”
The 2021 federal election, which Justin Trudeau called just to gain a majority of seats, looks much like the 2019 election result. The same parties are in place, each with nearly the same number of MPs as before.* But something has changed. All the leaders are skating on thin ice. One has resigned; another will soon be forced to do so. And Justin Trudeau is considerably weakened as Prime Minister. With zero appetite for another election, the Liberal minority government will have to lean heavily on the labour-based New Democratic Party to pass legislation. That means working class organizations have a great opportunity to extract concessions from the ruling class.
Thursday, September 23, 7 p.m. Eastern Time, Election 2021: Results and Prospects, with Leah Gazan, NDP MP for Winnipeg Centre, Barry Weisleder, Socialist Action federal secretary, and Christopher Thompson of the New Brunswick NDP Socialist Caucus. Link: https://youtu.be/lvpyJUqcg2c
