Laundry Workers Fight Privatization

Around the world Laundry and Custodial workers are the 'canaries in the mine' of public sector privatization.What happens to them will happen to you.

A question was posted on H-Labour Discussion about the history of Laundry workers in the US. Having written and researched the privatization of Laundry Workers in Alberta's hosptials I responded with a note and the links below. I expanded the links to include a wide variety of countries to show the battle of laundry workers against privatization of is world wide.

The privatization of the work of this largely immigrant and female workforce is widespread through out Canada and around the world. Even when unionized these workers remain the lowest paid in the workforce. They become interchangable workers, being the same workers who are forced into low waged jobs in the private sector, if their public sector jobs are privatized they end up being the benificaries of a reduction in wages. In the UK and other countries these same workers also are part of the underground economy, as illegal immigrants they are paid under the table and work the same jobs as their 'legal' counterparts.

Overall these jobs in hotels, hospitals, schools, etc. are done by 'invisible workers', when we think of staff in schools or hospitals we refer to the professionals or para-professionals in those institutions, teachers, doctors, nurses, teacher aides,etc. We do not consider the importance or impact of those who 'clean healthy built environments'. Instead these invisible workers are the first to be laid off, cut back or privatized. They and their jobs reflect the 'canaries in the mine' of capitalism, if a move is afoot to privatized or contract out their invisible services will be the first to go.

But laundry workers have fought back, despite the government, the privateers and even their own unions. The Calgary Laundry workers, largely immigrant women, held a wildcat strike in 1995 to save their jobs, it almost led to a General Strike of workers not only in Calgary but across Alberta. A General Strike that would have done more to stop the Klein government then the marches and demonstrations in the streets did.

It was the power of women workers, once again, who having nothing to lose actually fought against the contracting out of their jobs. The union representing provincial workers AUPE and the national public sector union CUPE both had jurisdicition in the hospitals, and like the government the leadership of the unions was terrified of a general strike. So they capitulated to the government, and accepted the death by a thousand cuts, the eventual contracting out of these workers jobs.

Jobs that were lost to K-Bro an international company located in Edmonton. K-Bro eight years later is benefiting from the B.C. governments largese, and the unions protesting the privatization had an opportunity to nip it in the bud in 1995. But they are terrified to use the power of the General Strike and once again as in Alberta, on the verge of a General Strike in B.C. last summer, the unions packed up and went back to the table to .....get what? Nothing. Another sell out.

Contracting Out (privatization, outsourcing) is the beginning of the process of casualization/flexible work at all levels of the organization except administration and management. It is the management theory of just in time production/delivery developed by the Japanese state capitalist corporations after studying the works of U.S. engineer Demming and his Total Quality Management (TQM) theories.This coincides with increasing reliance on technology to impose more teleworking, home working and contracting out of IT services at the higher end, again resulting in lowering of wages and reducing organizational costs of benefits and pensions. What begins with laundry workers ends up with part time nurses, etc.

The great irony of contracting out is that it actually began over two decades ago in the computer industry and IT services, where it still dominates today. It began with having a just in time delivery process for production of semi conductors produced by low waged immigrant women workers who were not unionized, then led to the idea that IT services themselves were best delivered not by inhouse IT specialists but by IT corporations. Today outsourcing of IT services is the norm. However in Canada, where the largest outsourcing of IT has been done by the Federal Government this has led to massive cost overruns as well as outright theft by IT contractors. The billion dollar Canadian Firearms Registry boondogle is just one example of how expensive outsourcing can be.

Outsourcing was part and parcel of the 'Reinventing Government' movement of the ninties, the creation of lean mean, government, replacing government delivery of services with the contracting out of those services for private delivery. It's the new bugaboo of CNN's Lou Dobbs, who sees American jobs going to China and India, however he didn't go on a tirade when American corporations laid off workers and contracted out their work in America nor did he oppose the privatization of government services all of which logically and eventually lead to outsourcing work abroad. And he goes on nativistic tirades about illegal immigrants, ignoring the fact that they are needed for working inthe new just in time contracted out form of globalized capitalism in the era of free trade. If there were no jobs available there would be no immigrants, illegal or otherwise. It's not that Canadians or Americans or Brits don't want these jobs, it's the fact they are low waged jobs and they certainly are not what one considers 'careers', which now includes many IT jobs such as call centres. And in some cases this low waged work such as nannies, are only available to immigrant women who are willing to agree to live in indentured servitude, slavery by any other name. Contracting out profits from low wages despite rhetoric about better service delivery, efficiencies, or quality etc. This is the real secret of this new age of global capitalism; privatization and outsourcing. See: Global Labour in the Age of Empire.

K-Bro is based in Edmonton Alberta Canada though it has venture capitalist shareholders in Boston. They have benefited the most from this which is why the IWW Edmonton Branch issued a call out to labour unions to oppose K-Bro and the privatization of laundery workers in B.C.

Unfortunately privatization of support services, laundry and caretaking, did not get criticized in the Romanow report on health care commisioned by the Federal Government. In fact Romanow, ever the social democrat approved of contracting these "non-essential" service, which is ironic because if they ever went on strike they would be deemed as 'essential', as Romanow did when he was Premier of Sasakatchewan.

All the reports on Medicare in Canada have allowed for the contracting out of these support services. They have not called for a reduction of administration, or putting doctors on salary, or reducing the university qualifications for a basic GP degree. Nope these might break the doctors guild monopoly they have on services. Easier to pick on the immigrant workforce, they are replaceable and interchangable. The same workers unionized today, will be working tommorow for contractors.

The Edmonton IWW criticized the Romanow report for these shortcomings as did unions representing public sector workers. And as we can see from the result of the privatization putch in B.C. , "Alberta set's the agenda for the rest of Canada". Like Alberta (which has been ruled by a one party dictatorship for 33 years under the Conservatives, and a decade under the Premier privateer Ralph Klein) Gordon Campbells Liberals ( an unholy alliance of the Old Socreds -Social Credit-Federal Reform/Alliance/Tory party members, the B.C. Conservative Party and the B.C. Liberals) won an unprecidented 98% of the seats, decimating the NDP and leaving an opposition of two! With this mandate, the Liberal Government went on a privatization spree, especillay in Health Care using the old deficit/debt hysteria to claim that health care costs were out of control. They also sold off B.C. Rail and are looking at privatizing liquour sales, and hydro.

This is already the case in Alberta, where electrical deregulation has created increasing profits for electrical utilities and higher costs for consumers including industrial and farming consumers (businesses) and the governments liquor board was privatized, stock and buildings sold below cost, and wiping out small distributors as the market ineviatbly moves towards monopolization. The favorite argument of the right is that the State has a monopoly on public services and privatization increases competition and lowers prices. The facts show otherwise, private contractors lead to increased costs over time and monopolization of the market. That old Karl Marx was right on, again.

K-Bro purchased the actual laundry equipment from the University of Alberta Hospital, the Royal Alexandera Hospital in Edmonton, and hospitalis in Calgary at cut rate fire sale prices. They have used this model for privatization across Canada and into the United States. They not only provide the workers and their own laundry equipment, they make sure their monopoly is maintained by stripping hospitals of their taxpayer funded laundry equipment so they don't face in house competition. And it makes it harder if not fiscally impossible for hospitals to return to in house laundry services if they have to purchase new equipment. Where hospitals have maintained their own laundry equipment they eventually returned to in house services, finding that the contractors were more expensive, and increased their charges for services (surprize, surprize).

To add insult to injury, as the B.C. government forced opening of collective agreements with HEU, the International Woodworkers of America( IWA) began raiding public sector unions, hand in paw with the privateeers. See Has the IWA, the flagship of B.C. labour unionism, signed a yellowdog contract with a multinational British health services corporation, the Compass Group?

Once again business unionism proved it was a business first and a workers organization second. Facing declining membership and reduced dues, the IWA looked at the privatization of laundry workers as an opportunity to gain membership and dues. It created an unneccasary second front battle between the unions as the workers were getting screwed by the government. Laundry workers were privatized and those who joined IWA took a 50% cut in pay to save their jobs. Between a rock and a hard place they had no other choice when sold out by a business union. The declining fortunes of the IWA led to it raid HEU and then to do what all capitalist organizations eventually do when faced with an economic decline; mergers and acquisitions. The result was the IWA has merged with the USWA the Steelworkers.

THE DIRT ON K-BRO
Workers Air Boston's Dirty Laundry... Until September 1995 when Royal purchased K-Bro, another industrial laundry offeringhigher wages and benefits, Royal workers received no sick days, holidays ...

M & A Divestitures Advisory Services

BG Affiliates LLC is a private equity investment firm that provides capital to high quality, middle-market operating companies.

Berkshire's no tortoise, but slow and steady wins the day

Edgar Search of SEC on Berkshire Reality co.

Canadian Corportation Profile K-Bro, Industry Canada

City of Toronto Report on K-Bro In September 1998, K-Bro terminated its agreement with the City of Toronto. As a result of the circumstances surrounding the termination, the parties have exchanged correspondence identifying areas of financial dispute. In addition, when K-Bro terminated the agreement, their unions filed complaints with the Ontario Labour Relations Board. The City of Toronto is a respondent to these proceedings.

City of Toronto-The Community and Neighbourhood Services Committee recommends the adoption of the following report (July 16, 1998) on K-Bro


ALBERTA

1995 Health Care Reform in Alberta by the United Nurses of Alberta (UNA)

Laundry: Where are we at? Calgary Health Region 1998

B.C. GOVERNMENT PRIVATIZES HOSPITAL SUPPORT STAFF SERVICES

CUPE on Privatization of Laundry Services in B.C. 2002

BC Legislature Hansard Debate on Privatization of Laundry Services

BCNU on contracting out laundry work to K-Bro

Health Authority short-sheets laundry workers Chilliwack Times

THREATENING OUR RIGHT TO HEALTH CARE: Contracting Out Support Services

Swept away Vancouver Courier

Health care: American connection in hospital laundering

Formal FOI appeal launched to force release of laundry privatization deal

Vancouver Sun: Sodexho Blacklisting Union Members? - 5/4/02

This story comes from a Colorado university student labour web site where the French company Sodexho is attempting to take over laundry services. Sodexho is another large scale privateer who provides support staff services, custodial and laundry, etc., for universities, hospitals, nursing homes, etc. and have been the beneficiaries of State funded contracts thus allowing workers as taxpayers to pay for the contracting out of their jobs and for the use of worker/taxpayer funds to promote low wage work...makes a lot of sense.... to capitalists and their right wing think tanks........to the rest of us working folks we are being asked to pay and pay and pay while watching our jobs be privatized. The New Deal: public funding of private profit.

Hospital workers deserve higher pay than hotel employees: economist

Do comparisons between hospital support workers and hospitality workers make sense?by Marjorie Cohen

Destroying Pay Equity: The effects of privatizing health care in British Columbia by Marjorie Cohen

Council of Canadians AGM October 25, 2003 BC's Experience in Privatization

Taped phone calls reveal health service contractors vowing to fire, blacklist thousands of health workers in first wave of Liberals' hospital privatization

BC Privatization Agenda Exposed -Working TV reveals online the taped phone calls

Pink slips and gin and tonics

Breaking Contracts

Environmentalists slam FHA scheme to ship four million pounds of hospital laundry to Calgary

Privatizing hospital support services B.C. Teacher Magazine

Northern Directions Health Care contracting out support staff

Despite critical nursing shortage Filipino Health Workers in Canada May Lose Jobs

The Real Story (sic) on the Hospital Employees' Union Strike BC Liberal Government Caucus Briefing Notes


Quality Reports from Vancouver Hospital Authorities 2004
As part of managment strategies around privatization is their counterpart in the Team concept of TQM, Total Qaulity Management, that is doing quality reports on the contractors. However they have no base data to go from, that is they DID NOT do quality reports prior to privatization. Here are the reports on K-Bro for Laundry services and Aramark for custodial services. Aramark is a large American service contractor, orginally owning hotels and operating hospitality services- see Marjorie Cohens work above on the difference between cleaning hospitals and cleaning in the hospitality industry.

Satisfaction is always a subjective matter, what is clean to one person is not clean to another. Whether cleaning a room or laundry. What these stats show is that cleaning times have decreased, thus saving money, and any savings made has been only because the hospitals no longer have to pay wages, benefits etc. directly. The savings end up being reletevaly small while the reduction in work time for cleaning clearly will have a long term impact of leaving rooms dirtier and dirtier.


Clean Hospitals Prevent Disease

Health Reform Cutting costs at patients' and workers' expense

Workers Who Care A Health Care Workers' Roundtable Our Times Fall/Winter 2002

SARS & NEW NORMALS Health and Hospitality Workers Fight Back Our Times Summer 2003

SARS spread aided by contracting out hospital cleaning and laundry, says head of Taiwan's disease control agency


ONTARIO & QUEBEC
Follow Alberta and B.C.
Liberal government plan to slash hospital workers' wages and contract-out jobs will hurt patient care CUPE PRESS RELEASE November 26, 2004

Anybody but the ADQ: unions

SASKATCHEWAN
Does NOT follow the privateers lead
Union commends government for laundry decision


USA

Among the Most Exploited?: Fair Labor Standards Act and Laundry Workers
Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) on June 25, 1938, the last major piece of New Deal legislation. The act outlawed child labor and guaranteed a minimum wage of 40 cents an hour and a maximum work week of 40 hours, benefiting more than 22 million workers. Although the law helped establish a precedent for the Federal regulation of work conditions, conservative forces in Congress effectively exempted many workers, such as waiters, cooks, janitors, farm workers, and domestics, from its coverage

Field Service Company Soldiers take pride in their work In Iraq soldiers who support combat troops in the field find themselves working beside private contractors doing laundry work. In this forthcoming article from the US Field Infantry the soldiers who do the laundry raise the same issue as their counterparts in civilan life: they provide better services and quality than the private contractors. This report from troops in Iraq show the extent of the privatization of war that the US government has engaged in. See my article on the privatization of war.

When the boss is Uncle Sam

State WORKERS /State WAGES: North Carolina

Think Big about the Living Wage

Alameda County Superior Court rules that laundry workers claims for unpaid wages may go forward

California Government Code SECTION 19130-19134 Contracting Out

"Privatization, Labor-Management Relations, and Working Conditions for Lower-Skilled Workers of Color" by Immanuel Ness & Roland Zullo July/August 2003 issue of Poverty & Race

Hotel Laundry Lockout Ends December 2004

GAO report on Contracting out Support Services for Veterans Affairs

THE STATE OF THE VETERANS HEALTH CARE SYSTEM AMERICAN FEDERATION OF GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES, AFL-CIO

Bring It BACK!
Privatized jobs return to the public sector as governments discover the flaws of contracting out.

Clean Sweep Laundry Workers Win Union Recognition, Contract

Subcontracting Med Center duties is dirty business

Dirty Laundry Literally and figuratively, the UCSF-Stanford hospital merger gets fouler every day


UK
The two-tier workforce: an IPPR briefing

The textile maintenance markets UK Competition Commission

Information on assessment of Government contracts

CONTRACTED OUT SERVICES IN THE NHS SOUTH EAST

NEW ZEALAND
Union welcomes Greens ERB Paper on contracting-out

Sue Bradford Speech on Employment Relations Bill Tuesday, 8 August 2000, 5 Speech: Green Party


AUSTRALIA
Government hospital support workers in Western Australia have borne the brunt of cuts to the health system over the past 8 years.

ASIA
NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND HOTEL, RESTAURANT, CATERING AND TOURISM WORKERS
This paper was written by Gerard Greenfield for the 6th IUF Asia Pacific Conference for unions organising in the hotel, restaurant, catering and tourism (HRCT) sector, held in Manila in May 1999.

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Make the bigots pay! Tax the Churches!

And the mosques, temples, synagogues, etc.

Well tax time rolls around again, as we prepare to get our T4 income tax slips from our employers. The majority of Canadians pay taxes, unless you bank offshore like the Bronfman and Irving families and Prime Minister Martin.

Corporations can defer theirs while calling for more handouts. As studies have shown, the average working Canadian is paying the bulk of the support for the State, while the corporations have seen their taxes decline from 60% of the governments income to a mere 20%. This led to a federal deficit and forced the Liberal Government to steal funds from Employment Insurance (formerly Unemployment Insurance) to prop up its artificial budget surpluses. Again taking money from Canadian workers.

Tax breaks, Tax Breaks Tax Breaks, all for the rich and corporations but none for the rest of us. Last election the only political parties calling for a tax break for the average Canadian working Jane and Joe was the NDP and Bloc Québécois, both on the Left. The Liberals didn't talk tax breaks since they had implemented them for Canada Inc. already, and the new Federal Tories, parroting their Republican mentors in the South, had no other economic platform.

Tax Time For Canadians, but NOT all Canadians

The greatest outrage is that there is a sector of Canadian society that pays NO taxes.They own huge tracts of land, buildings, publishing houses, media conglomerates. They employ low waged workers, and rely on volunteer labour; they prey on the old, the weak, the disabled. They are an effective political lobby, which can be used for social good or social evil. They have been accused of child abuse, pernicious racism and abuse of native peoples; they have abused pregnant mothers by locking them away in secret cloisters. Over the centuries as they amassed amazing wealth, property and power, they have encouraged and promoted policies of genocide against those who would stand in their way. They are an undemocratic, unelected, non representative monolith able to avoid prosecution because of their special political and social relationship they have with the state, which some would call blackmail. They are indeed the ultimate economic Ponzi scheme, a multilevel marketing insurance scheme that takes your money and makes promise they can't prove or deliver on. As Joe Hill the Wobbly poet wrote; "They will give you pie in the sky when you die."

I am of course talking about "organized religion", of all varieties, Catholics, Protestant, Orthodox and Evangelical Christians, Muslims, Jews, Bahai, Buddhists, all religions that hold state power, from A to Zoroastrians. Ok the Zoroastrians don't hold state power anywhere, but if it weren't for Persian dualism we wouldn't have God and the Devil. And they did hold power in the Ancient world, so there!

In the West the power of the Church has been the defining power of the State. The Papacy, the Byzantium Empire and the Church of England all defined the political and economic forces of Europe and North America over the past millennium. And these anachronistic medieval institutions are still with us today, preying on us as they have in the past, despite their profuse apologies to one and all about their past indiscretions; the European genocide against the Jews, the Native Americans, etc. etc. ad nauseum. They have apologized to each other for their wars and assaults on each other. But they have NOT apologized to homosexuals, for whom they reserved a special place in hell which they have historically dispatched them to as quickly as possible.

While the canon laws against Witchcraft and eventually against the Jews were ended, those against sorcery and sodomy remained. Sorcery was often used as the definition of not only heresy but of sodomy. The pogroms gained the church and the feudal state property and monies from those they killed, maimed, imprisoned or exiled. The Protestants were as ruthless as their Catholic counterparts, continuing their witch-hunt well into the 18th century. And they shipped there bigotry across the sea to America to justify massacring native peoples as well as turning on women and people of colour at Salem.

The Church of England and its State, continued to hang homosexuals as they once hanged witches right up until the fin de sicle of the 19th century, when they liberalized the law and threw them into prison. From Lord Byron to Oscar Wilde, the crime which dare not speak its name (in public) was the moral crime ne plus ultra. This crime was closely followed by the crime of abortion, which after the repeal of the witchcraft acts, was still used to prosecute non state healers; midwifes, herbalists, women healers all.

The Christian churches have blood on their hands and it is not that of their beloved Messiah or the saints. It is the millions of lives they have taken in the name of morality and church law. Bigotry suckles at the bosom of mother church. Patriarchical religions, regardless of their mythic origins, of all shapes and kinds, have created caste systems which are with us today.

The Hindus as Indo European (Aryan) racists and fascists imposed the caste system, which is with us today. The Dalits, the untouchables, are reduced to no political or economic status except as social slaves within the Hindu society even today. They do not view Hinduism, no matter its form, as being in anyway enlightened. While Buddhism spoke to this oppression, its adoption as a State religion in Tibet, Japan, and other Asiatic countries has also bespoken its patriarch cal origin. Islam a syncretistic religion of the Middle East spread through out Asia, replacing Hinduism and Buddhism as the new State Religion.

And all these religions being patriarchical have little use for women as human beings, but simply as breeders of the race or in some special cases, carrier of the Messiah. The bigotry of patriarchical religions is their Demonization of earlier pagan religions, religions based on a Mother Goddess and her son, which they adapted, throwing down the mother and raising the father to crown of the world.

So bigotry, the bias against a people, is deeply embedded in these religions, it is the core of their teachings no matter how much they apologize or reform. Homophobia, Misogyny, Anti-Semitism, and Racism are their real moral values.

The battle lines have been clearly drawn in the war over Family Values. As you can tell in my previous articles on this issue, I have a low tolerance for the religious argument that the family is a sacred institution, when in fact it is a property relationship. And for that matter religious institutions are not sacred institutions either, they are the medieval remains of the feudal system existent in modern capitalism, like the Monarchy and other aristocracies.

The bigotry of religion has raised its ugly face in the news as the Federal Government considers passing a law recognizing gay marriage. In the last two days the voice of religious leaders have not counseled tolerance, but have donned their white hoods and called for "using the not withstanding clause" to void the constitutional protections of equal rights to gays and lesbians. Worse one Catholic Bishop, Fred Henry, from Calgary, actually suggested that the state use its "coercive power" to deny any rights to gays and lesbians.

"Bishop Henry, in his letter, abruptly linked homosexuality with adultery, prostitution and pornography as human acts that undermine the foundation of the family, and argued for "the state . . . [to] use its coercive power to proscribe or curtail them in the interests of the common good." He also appeared to challenge the late prime minister Pierre Trudeau's famous dictum that the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation. "It is sometimes argued that what we do in the privacy of our home is nobody's business," the bishop wrote. "While the privacy of the home is undoubtedly sacred, it is not absolute. Furthermore, an evil act remains an evil act whether it is performed in public or in private." Globe and Mail, January 20, 2005

When the bishop calls for coercive power, is he perhaps not pining for the good old day of the noose for sodomites?! The Bishop was ridiculed for extremism and apologized for offensive language after his comments were published. But apologetics aside the Vatican (the last of the medieval city states in Europe) has sanctioned these assaults by the Church on civil society by saying: "Those who would move from tolerance to the legitimization of specific rights for cohabiting homosexual persons need to be reminded that the approval or legalization of evil is something far different from the toleration of evil." Evil indeed, that's the pot calling the kettle black. What is this evil; is it the same evil that led the church to sanction pogroms against Jews, heretics, witches, sorcerers, and sodomites.

It is not evil it is a political choice the church has made to define civil society in terms of its medieval thinking. The same thinking that burned Giordano Bruno at the stake, because he said the universe was not earth centric which was 'evil'. The same evil that obviously infected Galileo and Copernicus, today we know this 'evil' as science. We laugh at the churches belief in a flat earth, and in the future we will laugh at their insistence that human sexuality is "evil". And that’s their real moral message; human sexuality is evil. It is a bigotry that has plagued humanity since the destruction of the culture and economy of paganism.

"Cardinal Aloysius Ambrozic, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Toronto, sailed full-steam yesterday into Canada's marriage debate, making public a letter to Prime Minister Paul Martin urging him to maintain marriage as a heterosexual rite and use the Constitution's notwithstanding clause to override the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The cardinal warned the Prime Minister that, if Parliament were to proceed now to pass legislation permitting same-sex marriage, Canada would be tipped into an uncharted sea fraught with risks to some of the country's most significant social institutions, such as public education. The cardinal, as head of Canada's largest and most multicultural English-speaking Catholic diocese, with 1.4 million adherents, is an important voice in the Canadian church, the country's largest faith group. Its collective leadership body, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, stated five weeks ago that "as pastoral leaders of the Catholic community in Canada, we intend to be part of this [marriage] debate."His proposals come as the Prime Minister felt the heat of religious criticism yesterday in India, where the Sikh religion's leading cleric, Giani Joginder Singh Vedanti, condemned Canada's same-sex-marriage policy and urged Sikhs to prevent such marriages from occurring in Sikh temples anywhere in the world.Mr. Martin said such concerns were misplaced. "This is a question of civil marriage, not religious marriage," Mr. Martin told reporters after his visit with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh."No church, no temple, no synagogue will be forced to provide a marriage in any other way than with those [values] which are accepted by its own beliefs." Globe and Mail, January 20, 2005

Paul Martin is bending over backwards for these political lobbyists, which now includes the diversity of medieval thinkers including religious Jews, Muslims and sects like the Sikhs. With their political allies in Stephen Harpers Tory Party of Social Conservatives, and with the Liberal party divided [with the likes of David Kilgour one of two Liberal MPs from Alberta, who proclaims on his website that Christians are an oppressed minority (sic) ] the bigots at the pulpit have declared class war on civil society.

And how do these bigots intend to pay for this war? Why with the shekels they get from you. Since they are tax free charities, they can spend their money any way they want. Despite Revenue Canada rules against political lobbying by registered charities, Christian churches and other religious bodies in Canada flaunt this ruling daily. If its not attacks on gays and lesbians, it’s the effort to make abortion illegal.

As the largest political lobby in Canada it is time that these bigots paid the price for their attempts to drive civil society into some medieval past. Its time to TAX religious organizations. As a tax free institution in civil society, they can espouse their bigotry as morality and not have to pay the piper. They can mobilize their wealth to deny others their human rights. They demand assurances they will not be forced to marry gays and lesbians, and will be protected by the same constitutional rights they would deny gays and lesbians. The hypocrisy would do Pontius Pilot proud.

"Dr. Janet Epp Buckingham, the Evangelical Fellowship's legal counsel and director of law and public policy, said the Fellowship has no objection to the notwithstanding clause but does see it as a short-term option without significant majority public support. The only long-term solution, she said, is enshrining heterosexual marriage in the Constitution where it would be beyond reach of the provisions of the Charter. " Globe and Mail, January 20, 2005

The homophobia of the church knows no bounds, despite being regularly exposed as child molesters; they dare to link homosexuality to pedophilia. This is the real moral underpinning of all their feigned concern. Homosexual = pedophile is the subtext here. Unfortunately the facts show that having a career in the clergy produces more pedophiles, than being homosexual. Undeterred their moral solution is heterosexual marriage enshrined in the constitution, an institution that will supposedly prevent this problem. If such was the case the Catholic Church should heed its own dictum and allow priests to marry to reduce the pedophilia that has historically plagued it. Opp’s that didn’t work for Pope Alexander VI (Caesar Borgia) who not only was married, but had a mistress and relations with his daughter; Lucrecias Borgia. Ah, heterosexual marriage that bastion of morality in an immoral world. Except would it allow for marriage with ten year olds?

" A man who married a girl when she was 10 said Wednesday he did nothing illegal because, he argues, Canadian law allows people of any age to wed.The law has been kept secret from the public, the man told his preliminary hearing on five sex-abuse charges. Quebec court has ordered the man's name cannot be published to protect the identity of the girl, who is now 15. A court order has kept him away from his bride, stating their relationship compromised her safety.The man, who is now 52, said outside court that current laws make it possible to marry anyone - "even a baby" - because there is no minimum age.However, he also said "federal common law" puts the minimum age at seven years old."People don't know the law and the law has been hidden from the population," said the man, who is acting as his own counsel because he can't afford a lawyer."Because the law allows marriage at a young age, the government did not want people to know it was legal and rather than changing the law, it just kept the law and made people believe it was not legal."He said the federal common law originated with the Romans about 2,000 years ago, was transferred to England and France and then made its way to Canada and the provinces.The law was codified in the provincial common law and the Civil Code of Lower Canada in Quebec in 1866, said the accused, who is a pastor in a Christian sect."There's a continuity of this law that has never been changed for 2,000 years," he said.He has acknowledged that Quebec law set the marriage age at 16 in 2001 but maintains the amendment doesn't apply to him because he had already wed the girl.The man also said he does not support gay marriage, noting that "I don't think gay people should have sex."The man said he had the consent of the girl's mother, who is a single parent. He didn't know the whereabouts of her father at the time and still doesn't.Asked by reporters if he thinks it's right for a man to marry a woman 40 years younger, the man replied: "I would say it's none of your business.""It's something that is not seen well but the question is whether it's legal."The man said he wants the case sorted out so he can also get on with his plans to minister to married couples."I need my wife at my side to do such a ministry," he said.January 20, 2005 © The Canadian Press

Can we expect an outbreak of pedophilia if we enshrine heterosexual marriage in the Constitution "where it would be beyond reach of the provisions of the Charter". It appears likely if this case is any example. Sure there will be those who say this is unique, a single case, but it exists because anyone can form a Christian sect in Canada, and get tax free status.

Its not a moral issue, its an economic issue, if you can create a tax free cult or sect, based on some personal revelation, more of these abuses will happen. If churches actually had to pay taxes, such sects would be seen for the mentally defective criminal organizations they are. But as long as they can cloak their moral crimes in religion, they often remain out of reach of the courts. In this case being a self proclaimed sect, gives this criminal little protection. On the other hand when you have a criminal organization the size of the Catholic Church, they can move abusers from location to location, not face criminal charges, pay a fine and do what they do best; "apologize".

Both Dr. Buckingham and Cardinal Ambrozic expressed concern about the impact a legal redefinition of marriage would have on public education. If same-sex marriage were to become law, they said, public schools would in all likelihood feel obligated to present heterosexual and homosexual activity as morally equivalent -- which would be totally unacceptable to parents from several faith groups." Globe and Mail, January 20, 2005

Gadzooks, of course public schools would. Homosexuality is a fact, it is a historical fact. It is not Evil or a moral question but a question of human sexuality and evolution. Freud and others have pointed out as human beings we are all bisexual, with social conditioning defining our gender identities, we developed the modern heterosexual identity as a property relationship based on private property. The end of communalism saw the development of the patriarchy as a social, economic and political force based on the ownership of land.

It’s not a moral question any more than the social construction of race is, it is about property relations, and when it comes to property Churches, Temples, Synagogues, etc. own more of it than anybody. So let’s tax them. They should have to shoulder the burden of the social restriction they have imposed and continue to impose on society.

It was Christian ideology that viewed Canada's first Nations as primitive, child like and "evil", it was their policy of assimilation which was codified by the Canadian State. The State funded religious residential schools and the result was the horror of abuse now being revealed after eighty years. The Church, before the advent of modern civil society with its social welfare plans, was the agent of the State in providing social services. Paid for by the taxpayers of Canada, the Churches made money abusing children, single mothers, the poor and indigent, the mentally and physically challenged.

The charitable model of social services that George W. Bush calls Faith Based is in reality just the same old poor houses and workhouses of the 19th Century of Dickens. It attempts to have churches do more with their money for civil society, while priming the pump by funding them. We need the churches and the religious organizations in Canada to be morally responsible for the result of their politics and the best way to do that is to tax them. Then we could afford to pay every Canadian a living wage, whether they work or not, and would no longer have to worry about funding the dark dank morass of charitable institutions for the poor, the unwed, etc.

It's a plan as long as they don't figure out that they can bank offshore like the Canadian ruling class has.

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Whose Family Values?

Women and the Social Reproduction of Capitalism

"proletarii, propertyless citizens whose service to the State was to raise children (proles).”
Classical Antiquity; Rome, Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, Verso Press 1974

The issue facing women working at home or in capitalist society is the matter of unwaged servitude versus wage-slavery. The social reproduction of capitalist society is found both in the workplace and the home.

"It is not a question of wages or prices; these are but the reflections of the social relations of capitalism." K. Marx

As Marx states it is not an issue of wages but of the relationship we have to the means of production, wages reflect the minimal share of profit from the social reproduction of value. To that end all relationships are matters of capitalist relations of production.

So the stay at home mother is reproducing the capitalist relationship in the home, and reproducing the proletariat.

"That the abolition of individual economy is inseparable from the abolition of the family is self-evident. " Karl Marx, The German Ideology

The capitalist relationship of the home was structured in the 19th century with the development of the nuclear family. The rise of the ‘modern woman’, and the middle class values of the family were created in this era (which saw the emergence of homemaker magazines dedicated to women’s morality) as the extended family was replaced with the nuclear family. What is often overlooked in this era is that those advocates of the stay at home mother were well off and had servants, nannies or governesses to raise children, the whole age of ‘Upstairs Downstairs’.

The 'woman' in the household was allowed leisure time to persue reforming society because servants, usually Irish immigrant women, did her work. This also applied to the skilled tradesman and his family. They too employed servants to work in the home. This was true right up until the 1920's in North America and the UK. The creation of modern etiquette manuals and homemaker ideology was crafted by these middle class women, who of course were speaking to their own class of women, not to the servants in the household.

The early wave of 19th century feminism that fought for women’s rights, the abolition of slavery also coincided with the movement for temperance and for moral virtue. They blamed drink for working class men’s violence, and fallen women- prostitutes-- who for the most part were unemployed Irish serving girls---for the degradation of the moral virtues of womanhood. The reformers and their feminist agenda were the well off wives of the labour aristocracy and the small business owners.

This class conflict can be seen in the controversy raised when the black former slave Sojourner Truth made her famous speech; And Ain't I A Woman, to the 1851 Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.

Sojourner raised herself to her full height.

"Look at me! Look at my arm." She bared her right arm and flexed her powerful muscles. "I have plowed, I have planted and I have gathered into barns. And no man could head me. And ain't I a woman? I could work as much, and eat as much as man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne children and seen most of them sold into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me. And ain't I a woman?"

The impact of this black woman on the predominately white middle class convention shocked much of the audience. Just as Yoko Ono would be in the 1970's when she wrote the equally controversial song; Woman is the Nigger of the world. And of course in today’s hip-hop and rap vernacular we still hear women devalued as 'ho' and 'bitch'.

Woman and her work is devalued because it is not seen as producing surplus value, but rather seen as the reproduction of the world we live in. In other words she produces and reproduces 'use value' in Marxist terms. She is the proletarii producing the proles of capitalism.

Women’s work outside the home socially reproduces her work in the home. Teacher, nurse, nun, seamstress, waitress, cook, daycare worker, laundress, janitor, chauffeur, home-care worker, model, prostitute, stripper, etc. are reflections of work in the home in capitalist society. Women workers are subjected to the division of labour of the home in the work they do in capitalist society.

Even the medical challenges of biological reproduction, cloning, artificial insemination and fertility drugs, birth control reflect this division of labour of women’s work of actual biological reproduction from one of sexuality into capitalist commodification. Capitalism cannot function without the social reproduction of women’s work, waged or unwaged.

The Living Wage campaign dovetails with the need to argue for Wages for Housework, an issue whose time has come. We need a social wage that constitutes both the living wage and wages for housework. This wage includes full benefits including pensions, medical, dental, etc. for all proletarians waged or unwaged.

Wages were once upon a time tied to the ability of a skilled craftsman to support the basics of life for his family. Today all the proletarians in the family work, father, mother, even children. The capitalist system of wage slavery has once again been reproduced not in the ‘satanic mills’ of the first wave of industrialization, but in the very society we live in. It is not uncommon for us to work for minimum wages in two or three jobs. And these jobs are also where we socialize, the mall, or consume, i.e. Macdonald’s.

Like the middle-class women of the 19th century, who had time to raise her family thanks to nannies and servants, today that same professional class returns to the bosom of the nuclear family, as stay at home moms. Only because they and their husbands are professionals earning incomes that can support both of them. and of course can afford the indentured servitude of a live in nanny.

It is they who promote the ideal of the family values of the stay at home mom, and call for tax credits for this voluntary bourgeois vocation. Of course these same stay at home moms of the professional classes also have maids, and nannies (indentured servants from the Philippines instead of Ireland). They see little need for socialized daycare, or for a living wage for the proletarian family whether it be a single mother family, a heterosexual or lesbian family. And like their moralist predecessors they couch their version of the bourgeois nuclear family in terms of Christian family values.

The World’s Largest Workplace: Social Reproduction and Wages for Housework by PJ Lilley & Jeff Shantz, discusses this movement which began in the 1970's and was a source of much controversy. Many feminists of the time decried the idea of recognizing woman’s work in the home as waged labour, instead advocating for the abolition of housework. All housework should be shared, women and men should work outside the home and the work of the home should be shared. Unfortunately the ideal did not match reality. Women still to this day do the housework while men do not. Even now that woman are liberated to find work in society, no longer relegated to being the little woman at home, when she returns from her job, the job at home is still waiting.

"Women's full-time participation in the labor market drops off dramatically with the second child," says Rebecca L. Upton, an anthropologist at the U-M Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life.
"While most paid professional women return to the work force full-time after the birth of their first child, over 50 percent change to part-time work or take a leave of absence after the birth of the second.
"A second child also profoundly affects a couple's relationship to each other, with even the most equalitarian men and women assuming more traditional gender roles," says Upton, who is presenting a paper titled "The Next One Changes Everything: Having a Second Child in the American Middle-Class Family."

Wages for Housework was a Marxist-Feminist analysis, written by written by Selma James and Maria Rosa Dellacosta, of this division of labour applied to women as unwaged work. It declared women were proletarians, and that their struggles were key elements in the class struggle, especially in the working class communities where we live and reproduce the social relationships of capitalism and patriarchy.

DellaCosta was part of the workers and womens autonomist movement in Italy, which called for the social strike the refusal to pay rent or utilities, during the economic crisis in Italy in 1971.

As she says now;

"The work I produced from the early 1970s and part of the 1980s is probably fairly well-known and readily available in print. The material emerged from a collective debate with other women focussing on the analysis of reproductive labour and the question of the struggle for wage/income, starting with wages for housework. These days, given the pervasiveness and destructiveness of this most recent phase of accumulation, I feel that a commitment revolving exclusively round the wage/income and the reduction of labour time is inadequate unless it is pursued in step with a series of other issues which I will try to highlight.
In fact, I think that, from various viewpoints, the problem of human reproduction is indissolubly linked to issues - above all, land - raised by the indigenous movements. Women continue to be primarily responsible for human reproduction in all regions of the planet, and the problem of their condition cannot ignore the horizons that these issues outline, whether in families of the advanced areas or the village communities of the 'developing' countries." The Native In Us, the Earth We Belong To

Selma James was the wife of CLR James the Trinadian born Marxist. And like Raya Dunesevkeya (CLR James former political collaborator) Selma contributed to recognizing that proletarian struggle is the struggle not only of the industrialized working class but also of women and of those exploited by race (recognizing their proletarian relationship under capitalism as slaves or indentured servants). See her seminal work on this: Sex, Race and Class. And like Della Costa, Selma James is still active with Wages For Housework campaigns internationally see her Global Women’s Strike web site which also advocates for migrant women and open migration against the migration of global capital.

Babies and Bosses: OECD Recommendations to Help Families Balance Work and Family Life states: the recent OECD report exposed English Canada's failure to develop a cohesive program of childcare, unlike Quebec, that is not just babysitting services. In comparison with other OECD countries, capitalism in Canada fails to pay for the social reproduction of itself, relying on increasing its profitability not only off the surplus value of its workers, but the expense of the family being a further economic burden on these workers.

“Declining fertility rates are a concern in most countries, particularly in Japan, where birth rates are dropping as more people put jobs before childbearing. In Switzerland, as many as 40% of women at age 40 with university degrees are childless. Strong economies and manageable pensions systems depend on both higher fertility rates and higher employment rates. Many governments are investing in family-friendly policies which have societal benefits for the next generation. Support for working mothers will reduce the poverty which impacts negatively on child development and support for pre-school care outside the home can better prepare children for formal schooling. Pay gaps still affect the relative earnings of men and women. Even in families where both parents work, men typically earn 33-66% more than women, so it is usually mothers who take time off to look after children. In most countries, fathers work more than men without children while mothers spend less time in paid employment than other women. “

The National Child Poverty 2004 report from Campaign 2000, shows an increase in child poverty amongst working families, reveals the need for a comprehensive social wage campaign.

The child poverty rate in Canada is up for the first time since 1996. After five consecutive years of decline, the child poverty rate increased to 15.6% in 2002, which means 1,065,000 children, or nearly 1 in 6 children in Canada, live in low-income families. Fifteen years after Parliament's unanimous all-party declaration to end child poverty, Campaign 2000's 2004 Report Card on Child and Family Poverty in Canada reveals that governments are failing to take sufficient action to reduce child poverty and low-wage labour markets are letting parents down.

Pay equity continues to be ordered by the courts in Canada and continues to be challenged by the state at all levels,forcing unions to fight again and again to see it implemented in the workplace. Even the capitalist state enjoys the fruit of the feminization of poverty, which it supposedly opposes in policy. The wage differential between women workers and men, will continue as long as women’s work is seen as an extension of their housework.

Campaign 2000 calls for a federal provincial commission on a Living Wage that wage would be a minimum of $10 per hour. Something the IWW Edmonton Branch has been one of the most outspoken advocates for, in the Alberta or Canadian labour movement.


What is really needed a social wage; Wages for Housework and a Living Wage, of at least $10 per hour including benefits and transferable pensions for waged and unwaged workers. We need business to carry this expense, and to provide on the job daycare facilities as well as paying for the daycare costs of their workers who may use public daycare facilities.

The failure in Alberta, and across English Canada, to provide a comprehensive day care and early childhood program, unlike Quebec, reveals the failure of state-sanctioned tax credits.

These tax credits have not created a social day care program, but have been pocketed by the well off professional class and used to promote family values; that is mothers should stay at home as if having to work was a choice. The cost of childcare the creation of and support of ‘proles’ is a cost being born by working families not by the capitalist system which needs its wage slaves.

"The tax system is now being drawn into the emerging debate in Canada over how to address women's tightening double bind of paid and unpaid work, generating a rash of recent proposals, discussed infra, to give tax relief for caregiving work provided within families. I argue that these proposals are not well designed to improve women's economic equality. While a higher visibility for women's unpaid labour is welcome, the tax reforms being suggested do little more than legitimate the reprivatization of social welfare costs onto families." TAXING THE MARKET CITIZEN: FISCAL POLICY AND INEQUALITY IN AN AGE OF PRIVATIZATION

The need for such a social wage highlights the failure of the capitalist state in Canada to deal with the real costs of social reproduction of the proletariat and its value in creating capitalism. Instead at the behest of business the state issues tax credits to taxpayers, giving back in effect personal taxes, while business pockets their profits and gives their CEO’s record bonuses and wage increases. The capitalists and not taxpayers or the state must pay the social wage with benefits.

A social wage reveals the contradictions of the capitalist value that women’s work is social reproduction for use value rather than a reproduction for surplus value. As such it is seen as a cost of doing business that cuts into the rate of profit.

The proletariat reproduces themselves for the benefit of wage slavery under capitalism and creates the surplus value that is the very source of capitalism. A social wage is a direct assault on the rate of profit capitalists enjoy, and they will fight hard to oppose it, as they have done over minimum wages and reductions in the hours of work.

Women have always controlled their own bodies, regardless of the patriarchy, abortion and birth control, are some of the most ancient of women’s mysteries and social practices. Patriarchy recoils at the thought of women controlling their own sexuality and the reproduction of the human race. It devalues their work of social reproduction, in order to cover up it’s irrational religious fears about women’s and natures domination of “man’s” (God’s) world.

Capitalism on the other hand values this social reproduction but as a commodity, one which is now being removed from the destiny of biology and being transformed by the development of industrialized biotechnology. In her work the Dialectics of Sex, Shulamith Firestone, discusses the attempts by capitalist patriarchy to control women’s reproduction with the introduction of the technology of reproduction; that is cloning, fertility drugs, etc. The ideal, of capitalist patriarchy would be reproduction without women, Firestone asserts. Again her work is from the 1970's, and was well ahead of its time, and while it is somewhat dated it rings the clarion bell over the issues of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and the efforts to commodify women’s sexuality outside of the womb.

A woman’s right to choose, her right to control sexual reproduction, the ultimate source of social reproduction, remains the key issue in the struggle for women’s liberation. It was when Emma Goldman fought for birth control information to be freely available last century and tragically remains so today. It continues to be challenged by religious patriarch’s as a moral issue. And now it is being challenged by industrialized medicine with its attempts to create life outside of the womb through cloning, and by its attempts to create life in the womb with fertility medicine. The latter uses women as wombs for multiple births. While the moralists deny a woman’s right to abortion and birth control, the medical patriarchs view her as a ‘subject’ for their experimentations.

Whilhem Reich’s work the Sexual Revolution is a critique of the psychic plague that capitalist patriarchy creates in all of us. His assertion is that the very nature of authoritarianism and domination is reproduced under capitalism by the nuclear family under the domination of the father.

Why does society repress sexuality? Freud's answer is that it is the sine qua
non of civilized life. Reich replies that sexual repression's chief social
function is to secure the existing class structure. The criticism which is
curtailed by such repression is criticism of today's society, just as the
rebellion which is inhibited is rebellion against the status quo.Closely
following Marx, Reich declares, "Every social order creates those character
forms which it needs for its preservation. In class society, the ruling cass
secures its position with the aid of education and the institution of the
family, by making its ideology the ruling ideology of all members of the
society." To this Reich adds the following "it is not merely a matter of
imposing ideologies, attitudes and concepts....Rather it is a matter of a
deep-reaching process in each new generation, of the formation of a psychic
structure which corresponds to the existing social order in all strata of the
population." Bertell Ollman, Social and Sexual Revolution: from Marx to Reich and Back

It is our socially constructed roles as men that determine our participation in the social reproduction of patriarchy and capitalism. The sex economy of capitalism is the social reproduction of familial slavery. The slave owner cannot conceive of the slave, the ‘other’ as being anything but a ‘slave’, and the slave who cannot conceive of any other relationship and sees the ‘master’ as natural, always present, all powerful, godlike-the benefactor, the giver of life and death, (Hegel).

Capitalism cannot conceive of any other relationship than the monogamous family, and even those patriarchal religions, sects and cults of which allow for polygamy, remain merely multiple monogamous family units, many wives one husband. It is the very nature of the family that is the source of women’s oppression. It is why the challenges to the family are a key element in revolutionary struggle, and why the reactionary ideologues of patriarchy are united to promote their “Family Values”. It is major battle in the class war to challenge the ruling classes and its family values. (See my; What’s Love Got To Do With It? )

And yet the left has failed to rise to this challenge. Steeped in social democratic ettiquette, the left has not challenged the right wing fundamentalists or the ideology of capitalism and its Family Values. We have a long history of alternatives to bourgoise family values, and yet the silence on the left is deafening. It is time that we recognize, as the right wing has, that the battle lines have been drawn in the class war and that war is not just about the shop floor but the family as well.

“The modern family contains in germ not only slavery (servitus), but also serfdom, since from the beginning it is related to agricultural services. It contains in miniature all the contradictions, which later extend throughout society and its state. Such a form of family shows the transition of the pairing family to monogamy. In order to make certain of the wife's fidelity and therefore of the paternity of the children, she is delivered over unconditionally into the power of the husband; if he kills her, he is only exercising his rights. “ Karl Marx

Capitalist patriarchy will not be defeated by men flagellating themselves for being 'bad'. DeSade and Masoch already tried that, but hey if you like that sort of thing.....go ahead punish yourself..(see Sacher Masoch an Interpretation by Gilles Deleuze, Faber 1971).

3.1 SACHER-MASOCH and DE SADE - Immanence vs Transcendence
In his 1967 monograph on the writer LEOPOLD VON SACHER-MASOCH, Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty, DELEUZE works on the rehabilitation of the clinical phenomenon of 'masochism' and against its conceptional link to 'sadism' understood as equivalancy ever since KRAFFT-EBING'S and FREUD'S analysis. In order to do this DELEUZE compares the literary work of SACHER-MASOCH (especially Venus in Furs) and the work of the MARQUIS DE SADE.
DELEUZE shows here that the idea of a possible transformation of the sadistic drive into the masochistic drive is grounded in the Freudo-Lacanian assumption of gaining pleasure by lack, which can either be achieved by receiving pain - in the case of the masochist - or by giving pain - in the case of the sadist. Against this model DELEUZE exemplifies the originarity of the masochist, who obviates the need for transcendence by infinitely suspending the (sexual) climax.
The activities of the masochist are 'political acts'. Unlike the sadist of DE SADE, who wants the world to be regulated by universal institutionalization of punishment and prostitution, the masochist is in agreement with his domina, that the 'treatments' are not to be totalized. Thus, attaining of pleasure is not - as in the case of DE SADE - the application of an idea to the world, but, in contrast to this the prevention of the transgression of the material toward an idealistic principle. Hence the desire of the masochist is immanent to pleasure and not the consequence of a preceding transcendent lack.
Immanence and Deterritorialization: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari by Stephan Günzel

“I’m a bad boy mommy” is a patriarchal response to women’s power of social reproduction and a lack of recognition of that power by inverting it to one of dependency. The result of this patriarchal dependency on women “knowing their place” creates in men fear, hatred and ultimately violence when “their” property, “doesn’t know it's place”. Ultimately this response is both sadistic and masochistic, it is the schizophrenic nature of capitalism that reduces women and children to chattel property; “she is delivered over unconditionally into the power of the husband.” These are the so called "Family Values" of patriarchy, that the bourgoise family and its religious proponents are advocating as immutable, eternal, and natural. It is the old axiom; There is No Aleternative (TINA), but as we all know there are alternatives.

"Deleuze and Guattari argue that capitalism is a schizophrenic system. Because it is interested only in the individual and his profit it must subvert or deterritorialize all territorial groupings such as the church, the family, the group, indeed any social arrangement. But at the same time, since capitalism requires social groupings in order to function, it must allow for reterritorializations, new social groupings, new forms of the state, the family, or the group. These events happen at the same time. The life of any culture is always both collapsing and being restructured" Deleuze and Guattari: An introduction

It’s not about being bad men it’s about valuing social reproduction as important. That means we value child raising and home/house work as important. And even if as men we share less in the housework, it is a matter of finally recognizing it as work and that it is a division of labour, which makes women proletarians!

Women’s struggles are the class struggle. Women’s struggles historically have always been the spark that has lit the fires of revolutionary social change.

Proletarians of the World Unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains, is the banner and the watchword of the women’s movement for liberation. And their liberation is the liberation of all of us.

“The repression of sexuality has social and economic origins not biological ones. Sexual repressiveness appeared at the beginning of class society and the institution of private property and patriarchy….In modern times, such repression remains indispensable in order to safeguard the two essential institutions of society; monogamous marriage and the family. It constitutes one of the means of economic enslavement. The sexual revolution is only possible
through social revolution.” Daniel Guerin, Homage to Wilhelm Reich

A class-struggle program based on women’s liberation

Social Wage Campaign being a living wage for women working outside of the home, who are usually the worst paid, and wages for housework for those at home.

Daycare; public daycare centres open to all, not private home based babysitting services, daycare centres in the work place, both programs paid for directly from the profits of business, not their after tax profits.

Publicly Available Abortion Services: After the supreme court decision that women in Canada have the right to abortion, the campaign for a woman’s right to choose, packed up. Unfortunately as I have shown in my article: “A Woman’s Right to Choose? Choose What?”, that decision left the politicians federally and provincially off the hook. Dr. Morgentaler’s method of safe effective abortion has not been adopted in hospitals, nor does Medicare cover his services. In effect abortion services are a medical service that is privatized in Canada and still restricted to hospitals which voluntarily choose to provide these services. In some provinces these services are not covered at all. A public campaign to provide full access to the Morgentaler method paid for by Medicare is a very real campaign against the privatization of medical services as well as a campaign for a woman’s right to choose.

Campaign To End Slavery; “Indentured servitude” is just another term for slavery. In Canada Nannies and Farm-workers are covered by federal and provincial labour legislation that allows them to be exploited by their employers. While some progress has been made in Ontario in getting union recognition for exploited farm-workers, usually male, such has NOT been the case with Nannies. A campaign to change the law and to recognize Nannies as workers, including their right to freely organize into unions. This campaign also needs to address the rights of immigrant women and women refugees fleeing patriarchal relationships or regimes.

Lesbian Mothers Rights: Lesbian women have been discriminated against in adoption rights, and campaigns to defend these rights again challenge the monogamous bourgeois family.


Sex Workers Union: Whether strippers, prostitutes, escorts, porn actors, etc. women workers in thus unregulated industry face the dual oppression of being exploited by owners and customers, and their banishment by society at large. The exploitation of children and young adults as well as immigrant women is allowed to exist due to this free market. Laws against prostitution need to be abolished and the regulation of this industry be under workers control through a sex workers union.

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The Sanctity of Marriage Debate

What’s Love got to do with it?

An Anarchist Response to The Sanctity of Marriage Debate
December 2004 (Revised edition)

The popular notion about marriage and love is that they are synonymous, that they spring from the same motives, and cover the same human needs. Like most popular notions this also rests not on actual facts, but on superstition. Emma Goldman, Marriage and Love

The hue and cry that has been raised by patriarchal monotheists over Gay Marriage belies the real truth about marriage. A veritable united front of Christians (all 57 varieties), Jews, Moslems and sects such as Mormons, have been denouncing the Canadian Supreme Court ruling that declared Provincial marriage acts as discriminatory, because the existing law did not provide for homosexual couples, only heterosexual couples.

The vast right wing media monopoly in Canada has joined in denouncing the government for attempting to change the law in Canada to recognize Gay Marriage. The federal Conservative Party and its provincial counterpart; the Alberta Government, have declared their opposition to gay marriage.

And what is this common cause between the Church and State in opposing Gay Marriage, ah well there’s the rub. It’s all about the “Sanctity” of Marriage, a sacred act between a man and a woman, declared so by some holy book or other. And if this piece of historical revisionism wasn’t enough to convince you, then the opponents of Gay Marriage declare that marriage is all about the family, having children, the family as you know is the very basis of society, or at least the health of the State.

As a wise woman once said; “the truth shall set you free”, and the truth is Marriage is about property and chattel slavery, it’s supposed sacredness is the cloth of oppression that obscures this horrible
truth.

Yes I did say chattel slavery, for Marriage began before the advent of the Jewish, Christian or Islamic faith. Marriage was the property law of the Greek and Roman Empires, it allowed men to own women, children and slaves as possessions, including taking possession of their names and their property.

The family was key to the formation of both the Greek and Roman states. The family is the state, as much as it is community and society. The formal family is defined by law, laws being needed to legitimate ‘property relations’, as opposed to moral customs which define and legitimate interpersonal relations.

The original meaning of the word "family" (familia) is not that compound of sentimentality and domestic strife which forms the ideal of the present-day philistine; among the Romans it did not at first even refer to the married pair and their children, but only to the slaves. Famulus means domestic slave, and familia is the total number of slaves belonging to one man.

Fredrick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

The current hue and cry about marriage is a defense of an institution founded on slavery and reformed in the 19th Century into what we know today as the nuclear family; dad, mom and the kids.

From ancient times, and in other cultures and societies, the family was communal, in fact it was the village, hence the axiom “it takes a village to raise a child”. This is still true today in many aboriginal cultures. The customs of marriage, rather than its legal existence, vary through time and space of human history. There is NO one form of marriage.

For anarchists we believe that love should be the condition of companionship, and that love is free, not subject to state or church recognition. In fact it is the recognition of common law, or custom versus legal sanction. This is known as Free Love.

Free Love was the harbinger of feminism in the 19th and early 20th Century, its advocates were feminist socialists like Victoria Woodhull, Stella Browne, Emma Goldman, and Alexandra Kollanti.

It was the bane of church and middle class morality of its day. Today with the liberalization of social relations, the acceptance of no fault divorce and common law relations and even birth control, we forget that these were the social outrages of a mere 40 years ago, and the social improprieties and moral turpitude of the past century. The social outrage of editorialists, church leaders and politicians, was heaped on the advocates of Free Love. Today it is this same outrage that vents against Gay Marriage.

Contrary to the assertions of the radical right, and the fundamentalist religious types of all patriarchal denominations, we as libertarian socialists, need to reaffirm the principles of Free Love. Marriage is NOT sacred it is a property relationship that oppresses women. All relations should be civil unions between consenting adults, not a special relationship recognized by the Church and State.

Marriage is a property relationship, and we have yet to hear the Canadian left criticize the statements coming out that make it somehow a sacred ancient institution of the church-state. Have we failed to read our Engels or Emma Goldman?

Religion, especially the Christian religion, has condemned woman to the life of an inferior, a slave. It has thwarted her nature and fettered her soul, yet the Christian religion has no greater supporter, none more devout, than woman. Indeed, it is safe to say that religion would have long ceased to be a factor in the lives of the people, if it were not for the support it receives from woman. The most ardent churchworkers, the most tireless missionaries the world over, are women, always sacrificing on the altar of the gods that have chained her spirit and enslaved her body.

Emma Goldman, Woman Suffrage

Anarchists do not support church state sanctioned Marriage and therefore do not believe that gay marriage is any less oppressive than straight marriage. As radicals we advocate free love relations, relations freely entered into by people under common law without need of the recognition of the church, mosque, temple or State.

That being said it is clear that the state can't have it both ways it can't have civil unions for some and marriage for others. Does this mean we support the institution of church/state marriage? Not at all, free love unions should be seen as civil/common law relations, with full benefits that heterosexual couples have. It has taken many years for the Canadian State to recognize common law relations between heterosexuals and then only for the taxes it brings in.

All marriage relations are property relations, even common law, and are recognized as such based on the necessity of taxation by the state. Where they are religious, they condemn women to the continuation of oppression by patriarchal men. There is no sacredness in such institutional slavery.

Pierre Elliot Trudeau said that the State had no place in the bedrooms of the nation. He legalized sexual relations between consenting adult’s even gay and lesbian relations, back in 1968. This was done before the Stonewall riots in the United States! The fact is that the Canadian liberal social democratic state and its Supreme Court, having ruled in favour of women’s privacy regarding abortion, would naturally recognize the significance of the Trudeau law as paving the way for gay marriage in Canada.

The inequalities of property among the individual heads of families break up the old communal household communities wherever they had still managed to survive, and with them the common cultivation of the soil by and for these communities. The cultivated land is allotted for use to single families, at first temporarily, later permanently. The transition to full private property is gradually accomplished, parallel with the transition of the pairing marriage into monogamy. The single family is becoming the economic unit of society.

Fredrick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

The provincial Supreme Courts in Canada have taken the position that the state cannot define marriage as limited to only heterosexual couples it has secularized marriage to mean any two people. This does not change the relationship from its bourgeois form it merely expands the private property relationship engendered in bourgeois marriage to now include gay and lesbian couples.

Should the Supreme Court in Canada and the US allow for Gay Marriage? Absolutely as it recognizes this as a common right anything less would be discrimination and an injustice. As long as the state denies some of its citizens the benefits of marriage as a tax-based institution, then it is discrimination.

But free love unions are common law, in that the church or state does not sanctify them. Free love common law relations are freely entered into by lovers/comrades/companieros and are not formally recognized by the state, though after a period of time the Canadian state and its tax department will recognize those relations if they are declared.

We must continue to oppose marriage as an institutional form of oppression, instead we must promote the free association of lovers.

Down with all forms of patriarchal marriage!
Anarchie Amour!
Free Love!

Only a true libertarian communism, antiauthoritarian and antistatist, would be capable of promoting the definitive and concomitant emancipation of the homosexual and of the individual exploited or alienated by capitalism.
Daniel Guerin, Homosexuality and Revolution.

UPDATE
As of this date, December 2004, the Supreme Court has ruled as expected, upholding the provincial court rulings because the Federal government did NOT appeal them. It further stated that same sex marriages were allowed under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Therefore we expect the government to bring in a bill in January to this effect.

Ralph Klein the opportunist premier of Alberta was slapped down by the Supreme Court (again), but that has not stopped him from refusing this basic civil right. Playing to the right wing religious social conservatives, he has made the gay marriage issue his personal political whipping boy. Of course if ordered by the Federal State to comply his sturm and drang will turn out to be no more than a bluster of hot (Southern Alberta) air.

Conservatives are not in the least mistaken when they speak in general terms of Revolutionists as enemies of religion, the family and property. Yes; Socialists do reject the authority of dogma and the intervention of the supernatural in nature, and, in this sense however earnest their striving for the realization of their ideal, they are the enemies of religion.

Yes; they do desire the suppression of the marriage market; they desire that unions should be free, depending only on mutual affection and respect for self and for the dignity of others, and, in this sense, however loving and devoted to those whose lives are associated with theirs, they are certainly the enemies of the legal family.

Yes; they do desire to put an end to the monopoly of land and capital, and to restore them to all, and, in this sense, however glad they may be to secure to every one the enjoyment of the fruits of the earth, they are the enemies of property.
Elisee Reclus

A perfect union? Marriage has seen many makeovers
The push to allow gays to wed is just the latest of many social forces that have reshaped matrimony

By Ron Grossman
Tribune staff reporter
Published February 29, 2004
©Chicago Tribune


When President Bush last week pronounced marriage "the most fundamental institution of civilization," he was in good company--at least rhetorically. That link has been proclaimed every time marriage has gone through changes, as it has frequently done throughout history.
The Roman statesman Cicero held that "the primary bond of society is marriage," suggesting an immutable institution. In fact, it has always been shaped by social currents, sometimes progressive, but often not.
Through the ages, the institution of marriage has been unfair to women, has banned the union of people of different races or religions, and has typically been far more concerned with property rights than romantic love--a very modern notion.
Now, as gay marriage has ballooned into a major issue of the presidential campaign, historians and voters alike are reflecting on an institution that truly is a foundation stone of society--for better and for worse.
"Since the 19th Century, people have treated family and marriage as the litmus test of society," said Michael Grossberg, an Indiana University professor who submitted a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of several historians to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, whose ruling in favor of gay marriage triggered the national debate.
"Those who fear social change see any change in marriage and the family as a disaster," Grossberg said.
Ironically, the most enduring aspects of marriage tend to be the very opposite of those qualities its most vocal defenders associate with it. Romance, companionship, the warmth of family life, were rarely connected with marriage until recent times. In the beginning, it was chiefly an economic institution.
An engagement party in ancient Greece was a commercial transaction, said Marilyn Yalom in "A History of the Wife." "It was essentially an oral contract, made between the man who gave the woman in marriage--usually her father--and the bridegroom," Yalom wrote. "The bride was not present."
In this country, the conception of marriage as a transaction between father-in-law and son-in-law meant a woman went from being economically dependent on her father to the same status vis-a-vis her husband. Under a legal theory called "coverture," the married pair became one--the husband.
American wives couldn't own property--even that which they inherited from their parents--until various states gave them the right between 1839 and 1887. Before then, even the wages a working wife earned belonged not to her but her husband.
Husbands could physically discipline their wives, as long as they used what was euphemistically called "moderate correction." If that, or anything else, prompted women to leave home, their husbands would advertise the fact in newspapers, right alongside the ads Southern plantation owners placed for the return of runaway slaves.

`A state of slavery'
The U.S. Supreme Court (news - web sites) was loath to tamper with that tradition of the man as lord and master of the household as late as 1911, when it rejected the idea that a wife could sue an abusive husband. The justices called the very thought "revolutionary," "radical and far reaching."
Little wonder then, that the 19th Century abolitionist and feminist leader Lucy Stone said, "Marriage is to woman a state of slavery."
And although clerics and statesmen praised marriage's civilizing virtues, the institution wasn't always available to all Americans.
Black Americans couldn't be legally married in the antebellum South. The idea was seen as threatening to slavery, upon which the region's economy depended. Even long after the Civil War, blacks and whites couldn't marry each other in many states. In the Western states, where anti-immigrant fever was high, Asians and whites were barred from marrying each other.
In 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court finally voided those "anti-miscegenation" statutes, as they were called, 16 states still had them on their books. Even then, South Carolina didn't remove its statute until 1999.
America's marriage laws and traditions had a long prehistory by the time they came to this country, observed Harvard historian Nancy Cott, author of "Public Vows," a study of marriage and public policy in American history. Ultimately, they trace to Christian roots.
When the Roman Empire became Christian in the 4th Century, the church took charge of marriage. Chief among the rules it set for the institution was that marriage had to be for life--though earlier cultures had provisions for divorce--and monogamous.
Curiously, that later rule finds no sanction in the Old Testament, a text from which Christianity derives its moral code. The Jewish patriarchs and kings were polygamous--Solomon alone is said to have had 700 wives. Sephardic Jews, who lived in Arabic countries, continued to practice polygamy until well into the Middle Ages. Eventually the "ketubah," Judaism's wedding contract, held a groom to taking an oath that: "he shall not marry another while he is married to the present bride."
Christianity's victory also put homosexuality beyond the moral pale.
The Greeks, the ultimate founders of our civilization, didn't have the same qualms about same-sex relationships, though historians are divided over the extent of homosexuality in ancient Greece.
Richard Saller, a University of Chicago historian, observes that in the ancient Greek city of Thebes, homosexual unions were considered not a danger to the state, but its last line of defense. The elite force of the Thebean army was the Sacred Band, a battalion of 150 gay couples, never beaten until it fought to the last man against the Macedonians. After the battle, King Philip of Macedon came to where their bodies lay, reported the ancient writer Plutarch.
"Perish any man who suspects that these men either did or suffered anything that was base," Philip said.
The Roman Empire flourished for hundreds of years after a notable pair of high-society same-sex marriages. The Emperor Nero fell madly in love with a boy named Sporus.
"He married him with all the usual ceremonies, including a dowry and a bridal veil, took him to his house attended by a great throng, and treated him as his wife," noted the ancient biographer Suetonius, who also reported that Nero tied the knot a second time with a male marriage partner.
Christianity's marriage rules passed into English common law and from that into the legal systems of the early United States. Thus, Christian doctrine was embedded into American law, despite the constitutional provision for separation of church and state, Cott observed.
The leading 19th Century treatise on the U.S. law of marriage defined it as: "the civil status of one man and one woman united in law for life."
Cott noted that in the 19th Century, Western colonialists and missionaries went around the world imposing monogamy on cultures where it was not native. The U.S. did the same, forcing Native Americans to give up their traditions of multiple marriage. Fear of Mormon polygamy held up the admission of Utah to the union.
Birth control made an impact
Since the era of World War II, Americans' conception of marriage has been rapidly changing, said Princeton University historian Hendrik Hartog. Women entered the workforce, making them less dependent on men. Birth control made it practical to separate sex and marriage from procreation. Romantic love, a theme that had been acquiring emotional power for a century, became more the norm.
"Marriage became identified with individual human happiness," said Hartog, author of "Man and Wife in America." "Social conservatives haven't been happy with that shift, but they've lost at every stage of the game."
Among those stages, he said, were divorce-law reforms that made it possible for couples to end unhappy marriages and, should the parties wish, try again for happiness with another partner.
Hartog thinks the gay community's push for same-sex marriage is a logical extension of the idea of marriage as a vehicle for self-fulfillment. Yet he wouldn't hazard a guess on the outcome of the current battle.
One thing seems sure, though: People will always wonder and worry about the well-being of marriage.
The pioneering sociologist Edward Westermarck, who wrote the first serious study of marriage roughly a century ago, had an ornithologist colleague who, reflecting on divorce and adultery, concluded that humans are morally inferior to winged species that mate permanently.
"He is so filled with admiration for their exemplary family life," Westermarck said, "that he enthusiastically declares that `real marriage can only be found among birds.'"

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