Oct 2018 Socialist Party of Canada Monthly Report

[Socialist Party Head Office]

T HE S OCIALIST P ARTY OF C ANADA

worldsocialism.org/canada | spc@worldsocialism.org | twitter.com/spc_news
PO Box 31024 Victoria B.C. Canada V8N 6J3

Secretary’s Report for October 2018

Email Report – Good of the Movement
– SPC Toronto Branch members hosted a public literature and information table at
September 23rd ‘Word on the Street’. The work was well received and donations,
sales of literature, higher than anticipated. Visit https://web.facebook.com/Toronto-Branch-Socialist-Party-of-Canada-1120836671294008/ for additional photographs and information.
– SPC involvement re: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: 100th anniversary of Winnipeg’s 1919 General Strike will be marked with monument, movie, books – http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/1919-winnipeg-general-strikecentenary-1.4669345

– Comrade Muirhead seeking peer collabators for socialist articles and summaries.
Write to Comrade Muirhead at worldsocialismbc@outlook.com.

– Seeking member input and solutons to service interruption of the main spc@worldsocialism.org email, which has been inoperable for numerous weeks. If able to assist email: spc@iname.com.

General Administrative Committee
– One GAC seat remains open. Interested members and nominees in filling this seat please forward to spc@iname.com.

Dues – $25 per year or $2 per month. Funds conduct Party post, photocopies, public meeting expenses and internet services. All other Party activity is voluntarily run. Members needing dues waivers please contact our treasurer or general secretary to arrange.

F ood for T hought – member views & contributions – send to spc@worldsocialism.org
● In their issue of September 1, the Toronto Star included a 14 page Labour Day supplement. It contained 10 articles, 11 advertisements for various unions and 2 reprints of bills of Labour laws, all of which could be summed up in a sentence: ” If the capitalist class in Canada and Canadian governments at all levels would co-operate with the unions we would all be better off”. One
would think the Ontario Federation of Labour, which financed it, and their members who contributed articles, are unaware there is such a thing as the class struggle and everyone being nice reasonable folk just won’t cut it. All the O.F.L. and unions anywhere can hope for, through their efforts is a temporary improvement in life under capitalism. We Socialists want a permanent improvement, which is the abolition of capitalism.

● David Olive, the Toronto Star’s economic expert, wrote a pretty gloomy piece in the edition of Sept. 15. The fact that is ain’t a barrel of laughs is indicative of the fact that the apologists for crapitalism have given up trying to put a brave spin on things. Olive reviewed the last ten years since the financial meltdown and said,”Theres still reason to worry”. Aw Gee! and here is poor silly
me thinking capitalism had corrected all its problems. Perhaps the most disturbing thing Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky said were his words of warning for Canadians: ”The global financial system is intimately connected, like the neural networks of the brain. At all times the world’s 300 or so biggest banks, including Canada’s Big Six, have enormous short-term loans outstanding to each other. Which means that the failure of just one giant financial institution could bring them all down”. Chilling words indeed.
● A study conducted by McMaster University in Hamilton and the Poverty and Employment Precarity in Southern Ontario surveyed 1,189 employed young people in Hamilton and concluded it was an accurate picture of what it is like for most workers under 35 in Canada. They see the lack of full-time jobs, permanent jobs and affordable housing as the greatest causes of depression and anxiety. Only 44 per-cent have found full time, permanent jobs. The majority reported not having jobs that have health benefits, pension plans or employer funded training, while 38 per cent said they expected to be worse of than their parents. There is no escaping the conclusion that whether one has a job or not, life under capitalism at any age is very insecure.

● This item is of no profound significance, but I’ll mention it to be boring and because the subject
matter is a welcome break. As some of you may know TCM, recently has been showing many movies in the Film Noir genre. The announcer said, in effect, that whereas mainstream Hollywood movies depict a world where if one works hard and has what it takes that person will make a fortune, but Film Noir movies say, ”it doesn’t work that way for everyone”. Though some have happy endings and none suggest that society should be radically changed, nevertheless its refreshing to watch the dark side of capitalism being shown in all its lack of glory.

● Numbers released in August by the various transit commissions across Canada, state that since 2007 there have been 1,235 track level deaths on railway corridors in Canada. Experts say these numbers would not be so bad if transit agencies installed platform-edge barriers which is a series of sliding doors barring access to the tracks. They open once the train has stopped. The head of the
Amalgamated Transit Union of Canada, Paul Thorp said,” Such barriers should be in place nationwide. Any transit agency that is not putting in these barriers due to financial costs needs to stop putting a price on humanity”. Under capitalism money counts, people don’t.

● More than 5,800 Canadian children and youth have died by suicide during the past 13 years, some as young as 8, according to data compiled by the Ryerson School of Journalism in Toronto.
Since 2007 emergency department mental health visits for patients aged 5 to 24 have increased by 66 per-cent. One in 12 was given mood/anxiety or antipsychotic medication. Hospitalizations due to
intentional self-harm increased by 102 per-cent for girls aged 10 to 17 between 2009 and 2014, which was 4 times higher than boys. Nobody seems to know what’s causing this, though bullying is a definite factor, which has increased through social media — in other words through one click of the button. As for prevention, Kimberly Moran, the head of Children’s Mental Health Ontario said, ”There needs to be counselling and therapy for moderate mental health issues as well as specialized mental heath services for those eho may be suicidal and require 24/7 intensive treatment”, which
maybe alright as far as it goes but doesn’t go nearly far enough. An economic system which doesn’t cause people to have severe mental health problems would be a better answer.

● In August an SPC’er took a trip across Canada to Vancouver. Here are a few of his observations.
In Finns Slough, just outside the Richmond, B.C. city limits people are living in shacks, like third- world squalor. On Gastown Vancouver, its worse; there are no shacks, they live and sleep on the street, victims of a system that uses people and spits ’em out when they are no longer productive.
At the intersection of Abbot and Hastings there are on opposite sides apartments for millionaires and those for the almost destitute, highlighting capitalism’s glaring contradictions between wealth and poverty. Near the coast there is, under construction, a building which looks about 2 square miles in area. It will be to receive goods coming in from that great capitalist power, so-called communist China. I stayed at a very nice and small hotel the Delta Inn which is in Delta,B.C. and is close to a network of main roads and highways. Because of its acccessibility, it will soon be torn down and a casino will be built. The almighty buck rules. Sydney on Vancouver Island is a very nice small coastal town, buts its not so nice at night when the tides out. The ocean floor is covered with garbage which is dumped there by ocean liners. The local folk are not amused.
Racist attitudes are common among Vancouverites. They feel bitter about Asian immigrants buying property there and call it ,” The Asian Invasion”. Another way capitalism divides worker against worker. While traveling across Canada I noticed how similar the cities looked. Didn’t the authors of the Communist Manifesto, say something to the affect that capitalism seeks to make the world in its own image? The joke being that critics of Socialism have said it would create uniformity.

● By now most of you are awugy shrugged it aside and said there is a, ”notwithstanding clause”, in the constitution which allows him to ignore the ruling. Reaction has been swift and ferocious. Former Prime Minister of Canada, Jean Chretien, retired Chief Justice of Ontario, Roy McMurtry
and former Saskatchewan Premier Roy Romanow condemned Ford’s action in a joint statement issued on September 14. They spelled out that the clause was meant to be invoked in, ”exceptional situations and only as a last resort after careful consideration. “Ford’s actions” they added, ”did not meet this criteria; we condemn his actions and call on those in his cabinet and caucus to stand up to him.” Toronto city clerk, Ulli Watkiss has her panties in a twist and has hired an outside lawyer in an attempt to tell Ford to back off. She said a fair election was becoming, ”virtually impossible to carry out”. In order to print a planned 2.6 million ballots on time, the printers will need to work
14 hours a day for 7 days and that the current schedule does not provide any room for the correction of errors. At the time of writing it is not known how things will play out, but what we do know is that this is just another attack on democratic procedure. In this respect Ford is no different from Erdogan and Trump. Michael Moore, when wishing to stress the fragility of democracy, said recently that when Hitler became Chancellor, the mainstream newspaper of Germany’s Jewish community told its readers that they shouldn’t worry, Germany was a democracy and they had a constitution. The political stooges of the capitalist class will always attempt to erode if not outright abolish democracy. We Socialists see it as a useful thing to have around as it is easier to propagate for Socialism than it would be under a dictatorship, but that doesn’t mean we will work to preserve it. Our job is to work for a society where democratic rights are a given and situations like the above will not arise – So why not join us?

Socialist echoes from our not too distant past . . .
From one of the World Socialist Party of America’s most able writers, J. A. MacDonald offers below an excellent analysis of craft unionism (Gomperism) versus the bottom up organizing of the Industrial Workers of the World. MacDonald, according to his daughter Mary MacDonald, wrote, spoke and helped any organization, including the Wobblies, which would entertain discussing capitalist society and all its trappings enslaving workers.

Unemployment and the Machine

Confusing
Capitalism
and Labor
Unionism The difficulties of Mr. Lewis are those which are common to many so-called labor leaders. He makes the common mistake of considering such organizations as labor unions, an error out of which arise many other inconsistencies. They are not labor unions. In their ownership of small banks, coal mines, with armed guards, and industries, they are capitalism, and small capitalism at that. In their activities as aggregations of certain workers they are small, inefficient job trusts selling craft skill to the bosses. These job trusts function through limiting the supply of workers, denying those they refuse to organize the right to work, and dividing the workers. In one phase of their activity they are small capitalists; in the other they are a means of division of the workers for the benefit of capitalism. When Mr. Lewis and others understand that the organization he is head of, and the organization which Mr. Stone is the leader, and the trade and craft organizations in general are not labor unions, he will find their actions and his own to be completely consistent with what the trade organizations really are. He will discover that as capitalistic institutions they are all consistent with the nature of capitalism; that the action of the Brotherhood is the natural evolution of craft organizations. If one expected capitalism to function as a labor union, many contradictions to this premise would become evident, which when it was considered as
capitalism would disappear. The apparent condractions which many find within craft organizations are due to a similar error. They are entirely consistent with themselves, and the inconsistent form of small capitalism which they are. The industrial revolution which is undermining their power as small capitalism, will permanently settle their quarrels over scab coal mines through the further development of the machine in land transportation and corresponding changes in other industries. But it must also vastly increase unemployment in the immediate future unless workers organize into the real union of the working class—the I.W.W.
J.A. MacDonald 1934
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/unions/iww/1934/unemployment.htm

S ocialists R eadings in the M odern R age
– Edgar Hardcastle Archive 1900-1995 https://www.marxists.org/archive/hardcastle/

– Producers and Parasites (1935). By John Keracher.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/keracher/1935/producers-parasites.htm

– History of the Socialist Party of Canada (1973). By J. M. Milne
http://www.socialisthistory.ca/Docs/SocialistParty/HistoryofSPC.pdf

W.A. Pritchard address to the jury in the Crown vs. Armstrong, Heaps, Bray, Ivens,
Johns, Pritchard, and Queen: Indicted for seditious conspiracy and common nuisance,
Fall assizes, Winnipeg, 1919-1920. Winnipeg: Defense Committee, 1920.
http://peel.library.ualberta.ca/bibliography/4627.html

– Socialist Studies http://www.socialiststudies.org.uk/ | Marxian Economics YouTube Channel
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXq0kw9sU6xvrr34yezA_Tw
Kenworthy, John Coleman (1900). The Anatomy of Misery: Plain Lectures on Economics.
(With Introduction by Count Leo Tolstoy & Appendix of Correspondence on the Present Political-Social Situation
between Dr. A. R. Wallace and the Author) https://archive.org/details/anatomyofmisery00kenw
– History of Economics: A Scientific Investigation into the Political Economy and Its Swindler ‘Economics’
published. 50.00 Rupees/CD$1-1.50. Contact E-mail: wspindia@hotmail.com; Website:
http://www.worldsocialistpartyindia.org for more information to purchase.

– Red Lion Press:
 Revolutionary Socialist: Life of the Socialist Party of Canada and the OBU, 1910-1922.

 Thinking: An Introduction To Its History and Science.

 Method in Thinking: An Introduction to Dialectics.
Costs: $3 for Pritchard, $6 each for the Casey’s plus postage costs. Contact E-mail: redlionpress@hotmail.com or enquire with the publisher: https://web.facebook.com/search/more/?q=Larry+Gambone&init=public

– Ward, O. (1888). The ancient lowly: a history of the ancient working people from the earliest known period to the adoption of Christianity by Constantine. Chicago, Charles H. Kerr.
The Open Library: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL13490680M/The_ancient_lowly

For socialism, Steve, Mehmet, John & contributing members of the SPC

[Socialist Party Head Office]

Autumn greetings Everybody,

We hope you are well and ducking the gloom of any bad bosses.

Please find our October 2018 Monthly Report for your review, provocations, and feedback.

Yours for Socialism, John, Mehmet, Steve & GAC members
Socialist Party of Canada
PO Box 31024 Victoria BC Canada V8N 6J3
https://www.worldsocialism.org/canada/ | https://twitter.com/spc_news[https://twitter.com/spc_news]

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