SPC Dec 2018 Report

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December 16, 2018 at 7:08 pm #171929

Socialist Party Head Office
Participant

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 December 2018
Email Report
– WSP (India) EC meeting minutes No. 193, Sunday, November 11, 2018, and November 3 & 4 Autumn School & General Membership Meeting minutes: received with thanks.
Good of the Movement
– SPC Toronto Branch meeting held Wednesday, 28 November 2018. Visit https://web.facebook.com/Toronto-Branch-Socialist-Party-of-Canada-1120836671294008/ for upcoming events.
– SPC involvement re: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: 100th anniversary of Winnipeg’s 1919 General Strikewill be marked with monument, movie, books – http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/1919-winnipeg-generalstrike-centenary-1.4669345
– Peer collaborators generating socialist articles and summaries – write to worldsocialismbc@outlook.com.
General Administrative Committee
– One GAC seat remains open. Member nominations 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 – views & contributions to spc@worldsocialism.org
● With all the uproar concerning the Toronto municipal election of October 22, one factor was overlooked by many until our reformist friends at the Toronto Star brought it to the public’s attention. This was the ”success” of the far right, nationalist and white supremacist candidate, Faith Goldy, who was third in a field of 35 candidates, with 3.4 per cent of the vote. This may not seem like much, but the Nazi’s didn’t get much more in the first election they contested. The Star did not mention that the last three years have seen an increase of 20-25 per cent of white extremist groups, and one thing we should never forget is how these lovely people spread their poison rapidly in relatively bad times. Ms. Goldy’s platform was to evict illegals from homeless shelters and give them back to homeless Canadians, provide subsidized housing only to people born in Canada, stop illegal immigration, monitor Imans and Islamic organizations to possibly revoke the permits of Mosques where extreme views are taught and re-institute carding, the police practice of routinely demanding black and brown people answer police questions even when they are not being investigated. There is more which you can look up on the internet, but the above will give you an idea of what the Golden girl is all about. In the SPC we may prefer a more or less politically democratic form of capitalism instead of Fascism, which, lets face it, is just a despotic way of running the show, but there is no way we will fight in any way, shape or form, in favour of it, because no form of capitalism is worth fighting for. In WW2 the working class were told they should fight to make the world safe for democracy, yet after it more people lived under dictatorships than before it. The only world worth fighting for is one where Ms. Goldy and her friends can live in peace, harmony and prosperity without fascist fantasies propping up capitalism.
● In case anyone has any illusions of just how bad things are today, all they need do is read the business sections of the Toronto Star, which doesn’t sugar coat anything, but suggests dumb remedies. Here are a few of the captions from its section of November 3.
• Bowring, Bombay & Co. declare insolvency.
• Investor says Tesla sales will wane soon.
• Millions in losses for Bausch Health.
• Finding stocks to buy in an era of rising prices – As inflation fears grow winners could be determined by pricing power and brand.
• Supply crunch looms in commodities market – Some expect lack of investment to tighten supplies, pushing metal prices to new levels.
• Sysco’s shares take hit as costs grow.
• Ralph Lauren weighed down by sluggish store sales.
• Petrobras results jump on rising oil prices.
• Banks push for regulators to ease up on them.
• Cloudy skies in China for small U.S. aircraft makers.
• And yet TV stations still show horror movies on the premise that people like a good scare.
● On November 7 the Universities of British Columbia and Western Australia issued a report called,”From the Sea Around Us”, which called attention to the amount of slavery going on today, particularly in the fishing industry. According to the 2018 Global Slavery Index, Canada ranked sixth highest globally for annual imports of US$15 billion worth of goods produced through slavery. It found that 24.9 million people are enslaved. This, though, is not a great big surprise; in 2015 investigators for the Associated Press found that that slave fisherman were marooned and kept in cages on Indonesian Islands. The fish and seafood they caught were traced to supermarkets and supply chains around the world. Canada is lagging behind other countries in suppressing slavery, which occurs in several other industries such as textiles and timber. Certainly, this sort of slavery should be abolished, but why not everybody participate in abolishing all types of it, including the wage slavery of capitalism altogether.
● Canada’s unemployment rate fell to a 40 year low in October. But since we live under capitalism whenever there’s good news its always followed by bad news. Stats-Canada released data on November 2 that showed low employment gains, a shrinking labour force and the slowest wage gains in years. It will be worse in Ontario where Doug Ford froze the minimum to $14 an hour, so much for his predecessor’s good intentions. So folks it ain’t a case of, “Hey Everybody Let’s Party”, it’s Get Back to Work and Work Faster!
● A new bill on workplace standards introduced by the Ontario Government October 23 is a great one for capitalists and therefore sucks eggs as far as the working class is concerned. To get the full import of it look up Bill 47 on the internet; for our purposes here I’ll give you an overview. Doug Ford and his partners-in-crime made attacks on the minimum wage, Equal pay for Equal work, Sick days, Scheduling, Employee misclassification, Enforcement, Union rights, Leaves of absence, Sexual and domestic violence, and holidays. So one government passes relatively good laws, the next one changes them; so much for the benefits of reforms – two steps forward, three back – it’s crapitalism.
● Reaction to Bill 47 has been fast and furious by students who demonstrated against it on November 9. Their bitterness is compounded by the fact that Ontario is the only province to have a lower minimum wage for young workers than adults. Now the new government has frozen the minimum wage students who were expecting to get $14.10 an hour next year will stay at $13.15. In 2017 an independent report noted that 59 per cent of young people making less than the general minimum wage saved their employers $25 million a year. The government has argued that young people don’t have big financial responsibilities therefore don’t need a big fat paycheck. They replied they do have large tuition fees. NDP-MPP Jessica Bell said, ”Bill 47 serves an economy of the rich.” A masterpiece of understatement!
● As a nutty economic system capitalism will naturally throw up nutty situations. A typical one being the Federal government’s monumental,” Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act”, passed in 2014. Excuse me! The entire working class is exploited: is the government going to protect it and if so how? This act is in the news recently because of the efforts of a former sex worker, Kerry Porth, who once worked in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The act was to decriminalize prostitution and if one plows through all the legal jargon what it says is that it’s legal to sell sex in Canada, but illegal to buy it or help someone sell it. Yes that makes sense. According to Ms. Porth it hasn’t done anything for sex workers, except to force them underground and therefore expose, no pun intended, to who knows what. The immoral to the story is don’t look for sanity under capitalism folks, cos you ain’t gonna find it.
● On November 6 the Federal government outlined its plans for the elimination of poverty, which will be ”enshrined” as Bill C-87. Social Development Minister Jean Duclos said, ”Our vision for Canada is to become the world leader in the eradication of poverty”. Their plans include child benefits payouts, increases in the income support for seniors, and billions slated for spending on public transit, housing, child care and tax refunds for low income workers. The Federal largesse will vary according to which of the 50 regions it applies to. In Toronto a family of 4 whose combined income is less than $41,287 a year will be eligible for handouts. At least it will be a good laugh watching them fail. The cause of poverty is the ownership of the tools of production by a small minority and their ‘Trickle Up’ effect of wage slave exploitation. And no tinkering around with poverty laws will change that!
● As you can see 4 articles in this report are about reforms, or if you will, good laws and their failure to cut it. Since the capitalist class achieved political power about 200 years ago there have been thousands of good laws, some of which have been mildly beneficial, but have become obsolete years later. Furthermore, new governments can abolish or water down existing laws and in the almost final analysis reform laws are also beneficial to the capitalist class. I say almost because in the final analysis no amount of reforms can provide the answer to the worlds problems. Despite all reforms we are still grappling with poverty, crime, racism, war, pollution, global warming, preventable disease, starvation, and mental health problems are as bad as ever. No laws will eradicate any of that, but a Socialist Society will.
The Head-Fixing Industry
John Keracher’s delightful little pamphlet still offers workers in the modern rage a highly readable, and every bit as applicable, analysis of the swindlers and their means of propaganda as when it was published in 1935. Keracher was a bit of working plug polymath, writing on subjects as diverse as religion, economics, and working class history for audiences socialist, anarchist, and revolutionary trade unionist. Check out this writer’s many works online free for entertaining reads you won’t be disappointed to pass along to friends.
https://libcom.org/library/head-fixing-industry
Working-Class Education
Public opinion, as we have endeavored to show in this pamphlet, is only capitalist opinion. The most effective way to combat it is to put forth, in opposition, workers’ opinion. But how is this workers opinion to be formed? How is working-class opinion going to become “public opinion”?
The working class constitutes the vast majority of the population. This majority has a means at its
disposal, propaganda. The individual worker carrying the message of working-class emancipation to his fellow worker is a powerful factor, especially if put to work systematically. Speaking from working-class platforms, in halls and on street corners, and the printed word, the periodicals of the workers and for the the workers, are all effective means of reaching the masses.
There is also at work a still greater force than propaganda, a force that is bound to shape “public opinion.” Social evolution is at work. Its great economic pressure is bearing down upon the workers and forcing them to think. It is sharpening the struggle between the classes, between those who own the means of production and the class that must work for those owners in order to live. In a word,
experience, the workers’ everyday experience, is the greatest force working toward the social awakening. To give awakened workers greater understanding of their class interests, to impart information in relation to the social system under which we live, is the object of such a pamphlet as this. Also, the labor press, particularly its more advanced section, is useful in teaching the
lessons of organization and action. Every means at the disposal of the working-class movement must be made use of the enlighten the masses and to convey the necessary knowledge of their class problems and the nature of the historic task that the proletariat is confronted with.
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_TwArchive of Socialist Studies (except no. 36): https://1drv.ms/f/s!AvbgU4NFjvNHgV9xDR5_Om8AtJjF
Kenworthy, John Coleman (1900). The Anatomy of Misery: Plain Lectures on Economics.
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 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.
Inquires to 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
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