Editorial
The
Working Class Must Advance Its Own Demands, Not Line Up Behind One or Another Section of the Capitalist Class
The economic crisis has just begun, but already it has propelled the disequilibrium crisis that has gripped Canadian politics since 1993 into a full-blown political crisis, with a constitutional crisis waiting in the wings. The Conservatives are attempting to whip up a frenzy of anti-Quebec, anti-eastern hatred, especially in the western provinces, by accusing the opposition parties of being anti-democratic and attempting to stage a coup d’état. For their part, the opposition parties are accusing Harper and the Conservatives of being anti-democratic and having lost the confidence of the House of Commons.
The event that triggered this
political crisis was the Harper government’s tabling of an economic statement
on November 27, purportedly to deal with the economic crisis. The Conservatives
used the cover of the crisis to propose cutting off funding to political
parties, effectively bankrupting the Liberals, as well as attacking the right
of public sector workers to strike and of women workers to seek pay equity.
Their statement essentially contained no measures to deal with the economic
crisis, with the government claiming it had already taken adequate measures
during the past two years.
The following day the Liberals announced their intention to bring down the government on December 1 and to ask the Governor-General to install a government in power comprised of a Liberal-NDP coalition with support from the Bloc Quebecois. Harper’s response was to cancel the December 1 Opposition Day and then to ask the Governor-General to prorogue parliament until January 26, 2009, a request that she granted.
Both the Conservatives and the coalition parties spent the subsequent week or so inflaming passions. Each side told people that they are the only ones who truly represent the aspirations and will of the Canadian people and that they are the only ones interested or able to deal with the economic crisis. Both sides claimed that their opponents were only interested in holding onto or seizing political power.
At the heart of this crisis is a sharp division within the monopoly capitalist class, primarily between the oil monopolies and the businesses dependent on the oil industry on the one hand and the manufacturing and resource extraction capitalists on the other. The Harper Conservatives, like the Bush administration in the U.S., is closely aligned with the oil monopolies, while the Liberals are more closely aligned with the manufacturing capitalists in southern Ontario and the mining and lumber capitalists of northern Ontario. The NDP gets most of its support from trade unions and workers that see their interests as corresponding to the interests of those same manufacturing and resource extraction capitalists. The Bloc Quebecois is aligned with the manufacturing and resource extraction capitalists in Quebec and the trade unions that identify with the interests of those capitalists.
During the past several years
both the manufacturing and resource extraction sectors have come under intense
pressure from all sides. They have faced severe competition from foreign
manufacturers, particularly from China. The skyrocketing price of oil - largely
a by-product of the policies of the Bush regime - has cut into their profits
further. To make matters worse, the high-dollar policy of the Harper
Conservatives has increasingly priced every commodity except oil out of foreign
markets, especially the American market.
Auto manufacturing, the backbone of the Ontario economy, has been particularly hard hit and the auto capitalists have been demanding handouts to prop up their sagging profits. The Harper government has consistently rebuffed those demands while handing out billions of dollars in tax cuts and other subsidies to the oil monopolies. With the price of oil now less than a third of what is was just a few months ago the conflict over which group of monopoly capitalists will control the state and the state treasury has now boiled over and is reflected in the current political crisis.
For its part, the Canadian Labour Congress and various trade unions have issued calls for their members to support the “progressive coalition” led by the Liberal Party. However, it is hard to see what is progressive about this coalition. The NDP and Bloc have both accepted the Liberal position on the war in Afghanistan and the Bloc has temporarily suspended its demand for Quebec sovereignty. Those are both major concessions to the Liberals at a time when the Liberals are in a very poor bargaining position.
The coalition has also promised
to adopt the Keynesian economic policies that were agreed to by all of the G-20
countries in recent meetings in Washington and Lima. However, it is unclear
what precise policies they are talking about. Keynesian economic policies
essentially involve putting government money in the hands of consumers in order
to stimulate demand for commodities. Traditionally this has been accomplished
by a combination of direct handouts to the poor and government investment in
various labour intensive projects.
Such policies take relatively long periods of time to work their way through the economy and restore the profit margins of the monopoly capitalists. But with some of the biggest capitalists, including General Motors and Chrysler, lining up at the trough and threatening to declare bankruptcy if they do not receive billions of dollars in government handouts, it is difficult to see how the coalition will be given the time for Keynesian policies to work.
Both the Conservatives and the coalition parties are creating maximum confusion on this issue. They are talking about measures to stimulate the economy in one breath and handouts to the capitalists in the next, as if they were equivalent. They are not. In fact, they are opposites. Measures to stimulate the economy rely on getting money into the hands of consumers so they can buy more products. Handouts to capitalists, on the other hand, mean taking money out of the hands of consumers and putting it directly into the pockets of the rich. Such handouts will be used to increase the dividends to shareholders and to purchase more modern technology to replace workers. In other words, handouts to the capitalists are a drag on the economy, not a stimulus. They serve to deepen the crisis, not alleviate it.
The trade union leaders try to camouflage this reality by insisting that the handouts must be accompanied by “ironclad” guarantees against layoffs. However, General Motors recently made such promises to the Ontario government in return for tens of millions of dollars, and then promptly reneged on the deal and laid off hundreds of workers with absolutely no consequences.
Regardless of how hard they try
to pretend that they have opposing visions on the direction of the economy,
both the Conservatives and the coalition parties are in basic agreement that
the people should be made to pay for the economic crisis. Their differences are
only on which groups of monopoly capitalists should collect the bulk of the
loot.
Therefore, while it would be a very positive thing for Harper’s government to be removed from power, there is nothing to be gained by the workers lining up to support the Liberals under the guise of a coalition government. During the recession of the early 1990s both the Liberals federally and the NDP in Ontario implemented the neo-liberal agenda of the Mulroney Conservatives with a vengeance. Why should we believe that this coalition will do anything different this time around?
The issue that nearly everyone appears to be avoiding in the midst of this political crisis is that capitalism has failed. It has failed to provide workers with secure jobs. It has failed to provide Canadians with adequate levels of health care, education and other social programs, and experience shows that what there is will soon be taken away. It has even failed to provide the capitalists with levels of profits that will allow them to remain in business. In other words, it is a total failure. When pseudo-socialism went into crisis in Eastern Europe in the late 1990s the headlines screamed that socialism had failed. Where are those headlines now that capitalism has entered an even deeper crisis?
Both the Harper Conservatives and the Liberal-led coalition are claiming that they know best how to guide the country out of the economic crisis. Both are lying. The economic crisis is a byproduct of the capitalist system itself and not of one or another policy of any government. If such crises could be avoided by wise government policies then they would not occur on such a regular basis. Furthermore, if either set of politicians were sincere about wanting to defend the interests of the Canadian people during this crisis, would the logical thing not be to ask the Canadian people what they would like to see done? Would it not make sense to organize a nation-wide discussion about how best to deal with the crisis in a way that causes the least harm to Canadians, instead of trying to put Canadians at each other’s throats? However, neither side will do this. Perhaps they fear that Canadians may well conclude that it is the capitalists and politicians whose system has caused the crisis and it is they who should be made to pay for it rather than the people.