Mackenzie Valley Pipeline

Back in 1980 when I worked as a custodian in the Alberta Legislature I cleaned Premier Peter Lougheeds offices which included the Sanctum Sanctorum the inner cabinet room. On the wall was a large geophysical map of Alberta and Northern Canada showing the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline project, the jewel in the Alberta Crown of Oil resource development.

It was to be the second greatest pipeline debate in Canadian history, and the second one to challenge the ruling Liberal party of the day.

Back then the Pipeline was projected to cost the same as it is today. The cost in the 1970’s was estimated at 8 billion dollars.

But it was halted at that time by Justice Berger. It was the real nail in the coffin of the NEP. Subsequently the petro-economy went through a tail spin downward in the 1980's allowing for the pipeline which was put on hold to be forgotten, and in the intervening years new deals were struck with Northern communities and peoples for self government as Berger had recommended.

With the oil boom of the 1990's the Mackenzie and Alaskan Pipelines became economically viable once again.

The proposed gas pipeline from the Beaufort Sea to markets in southern Canada and the United States was billed in the 1970s as "the biggest project in the history of free enterprise."

Mr. Justice Thomas Berger

It was up to a Canadian judge, Mr. Justice Thomas Berger of British Columbia, to examine the impact of the pipeline on the people who lived in its path. Berger took to the job so thoroughly that some said he ran off with the terms of reference that established what was formally known as The Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, embarrassing the Liberal government that appointed him.

On May 9, 1977, Berger's report was released in Ottawa. Significantly, Berger titled his report Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland, for above all he wanted the world to know that though the Mackenzie Valley may be the route for the biggest project in the history of free enterprise, people also live there.

Berger warned that any gas pipeline would be followed by an oil pipeline, that the infrastructure supporting this "energy corridor" would be enormous - roads, airports, maintenance bases, new towns - with an impact on the people, animals and land equivalent to building a railway across Canada. Some dismissed the impact of a pipeline, saying it would be like a thread stretched across a football field. Those close to the land said the impact would be more like a razor slash across the Mona Lisa.

The hard news of May 9, 1977, was Berger's recommendation that any pipeline development along the Mackenzie River Valley be delayed 10 years, and that no pipeline ever be built across the northern Yukon. The pipeline was delayed far longer than 10 years.

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in a gas pipeline up the Mackenzie Valley, and many of those now pushing for the pipeline were the young radicals who opposed it with such vehemence 25 years ago.

With the war in Afghanistan and Iraq reducing oil capacity, and with projected peak oil reserves waining by 2020 the new gold rush in oil was being pushed by the US. With their eyes on the prize of Alaskan Oil the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline once again became an economically viable alternative to the Alaskan Pipeline.

In 2001 the Mackenzie Valley pipeline was projected to cost between $2-3 billion. In 2002 it was estimated to cost between $3 billion and $4 Billion. In 2005 estimates for construction were double that of 2001; $5 Billion. In 2006 the total cost was expected to be $7 billion.

Basically the cost estimates jumped a $1 Billion annually then suddenly this year
it is quadruple the cost, it is estimated to cost $16.2 Billion.

New estimates of overall costs for the Mackenzie Gas Pipeline project have hit $16.2 billion, from an original $4 billion, Imperial revealed before stock markets opened early Monday.

The massive project's in-service date was also rescheduled to 2014, three years past original estimates, due to significant delays in regional permits and approval.

CALGARY/AM770CHQR - Jim Prentice, the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development says, somehow, the Mackenzie Valley pipeline will be built.
Imperial Oil says it will cost a whopping $16.2 billion.
Prentice says, however, the project is a key piece of oil and gas infrastructure.

"We'll be studying the information and I will be proceeding to cabinet to examine alternatives and options. But this is a very important piece of infrastructure that we are committed to."

And Gary Lunn, Minister of Natural Resources, echos Prentice saying the federal government will do anything it can to help support this project, within limits.
Both Lunn and Prentice were in Calgary Monday.

However this is the total cost of the pipeline operations including finding oil fields. The actual pipeline cost remains $7.8 billion.

In other words one billion more than 2006, which is in line with the annual cost increases predicted by Imperial Oil which calculated that the pipeline could cost up to $10 billion when the project first came on line.

The original opposition to the Pipeline was over Native Rights and self government, as well as its environmental impact.The first nations issue was resolved by the Berger commission and today the first nations are full partners in development.

The opposition now is by a few bands that do not have first nations status and the environmental lobby. But Berger addressed the environmental concerns in his report; . Berger sees no compelling environmental reasons why an energy transportation corridor could not be established along the Mackenzie Valley. That development is being challenged by environmental groups because they see the pristine north as wilderness, now threatened with development. They want NO development in the North.

Most Canadians have never seen it. But it is perhaps our nation’s most treasured natural feature...the Mackenzie River.

The entire Mackenzie Valley is now threatened by Canada’s biggest natural gas pipeline project ever. The Mackenzie Gas Project (MGP), likely to cost at least CDN $7 billion, includes three major natural gas production fields north of Inuvik and two underground natural gas pipelines (the longest is 1,220 km) to carry the gas south along the Mackenzie Valley to northern Alberta. Other pipelines would be built connecting other gas fields to the main pipelines.

If it proceeds, this mega-project will trigger the transformation of the Mackenzie Valley from largely intact wilderness to industrial landscape. The environmental impact would be massive. It will fragment habitat for bears, caribou and wolves. It will harm fish and fish habitat by increasing sediment deposition into the rivers and streams of the valley from constructing pipeline crossings. It will permanently damage important breeding or staging areas for millions of geese, tundra swans and other migratory birds. Read about the Kendall Island Migratory Bird Sanctuary. It will cause forests to be clear cut and heavy machinery deployed to construct the infrastructure and the new underground pipelines which would tunnel under or cross 580 rivers and streams along the way. It will trigger a rush of oil and gas development in the Mackenzie Valley, which would accelerate further damage to wildlife and ecosystems. It will increase greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels by heavy equipment and from the cutting of boreal forests, destruction of wetlands, and melting of permafrost. It will accelerate climate change in the Mackenzie Valley. Even now, thawing permafrost is collapsing roads and buildings. Warmer, drier summers are causing the worst forest fires ever. Infestations of southern insects, especially the spruce budworm, are likely. Depletion of Arctic sea ice will likely push polar bears, walrus and some seals into extinction within 50 years.

The old alliance between first nations and environmentalists is now broken, and development of the North becomes the economic life blood for Northerners especially because of climate change.

It was, in fact, just a matter of time before this modern version of the Gold Rush resumed in earnest. The prize is simply too alluring. The National Energy Board estimates there are nine trillion cubic feet of discovered natural gas reserves in the Mackenzie Delta - and at least another 55 trillion yet to be found. In sheer volume, that would amount to more than a third of the known reserves in the more traditional gas fields of Alberta. To the west of the delta, at Prudhoe Bay, there are proven gas reserves of 30 trillion cubic feet and estimated total reserves of more than 100 trillion. Northern Alaska is already a significant oil-producing area, generating over one million barrels per day, which is piped south across Alaska and then put on tanker ships.

The opening up of the arctic due to global warming means once hard to access oil, gas, coal, uranium and other mineral deposits become economically feasible.

A proposed Mackenzie Valley natural gas pipeline is still before the regulators and it's already creating massive new plans for industrial development in the Arctic.

Vancouver-based West Hawk Development (TSXV:WHD) has unveiled plans to strip-mine extensive coal reserves along the Mackenzie River and begin building $2 billion worth of coal gasification plants to tie into the pipeline within four years.

"It's a property we're feeling very comfortable with in terms of generating natural gas from coal," West Hawk president Mark Hart said Monday.

The west was opened up by the railway, the north will be opened up with pipelines and mining. The difference is that development will be ameliorated by environmental watchdogs, and by the Northerners themselves which did not exist when the railway opened the west and the great Buffalo slaughter happened.

But already development and climate change have affected the peoples of the North and development of their resource base is crucial now to their survival.

Until about seventy years ago, the native peoples of the far north relied on their skills as hunters to feed their families and were self-sufficient. With the extension of Canadian sovereignty northwards, the nomadic people were encouraged to gather in permanent settlements where they could be supplied from the south with food, education and medical care. Settlements, such as those in the Arctic Islands for instance, were often well north of natural food supplies, leaving the inhabitants dependent on a supply route from the south. While fresh food and lightweight goods can be brought in by air or by road, heavy freight such as fuel still depends on the barges that travel in the Mackenzie River during the short summer navigation season. This is a life critically dependent for the necessities of life on the continued availability of fossil fuels.

It also offers an alternative to the Alaska pipeline, one that would destroy the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve, ANWR. Which puts environmentalists in a difficult position. Unless the oppose all development of the North. Which essentially they do.

The proposed Alaska pipeline is estimated to cost roughly CDN $20 billion (US
$16.16 billion)9. This is a higher cost than the proposed Mackenzie pipeline and has a
number of stumbling blocks of its own. It also has a later estimated date for possible
completion, somewhere around 2014 by optimistic estimates10. It connects to a different set of deposits than the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline, as the Alaska line is intended to allow for shipment of the Prudhoe Bay gas. There have been suggestions that a smaller pipeline could be built between the Prudhoe Bay fields and the Mackenzie delta, to allow both deposits to be distributed through one pipeline.

Those who dream of some idyllic past for Northerners and their land, the noble savage in the pristine wilderness, fail to understand the revolutionary nature of capitalism, which is to destroy all those village traditions and replace them with dependence on development and civilization.

And they fail to understand that these people will not have a pristine wilderness to hunt and fish in given the changes happening in the Arctic thanks to global warming created by capitalism. Their survival is now to adapt to capitalism, not to hold back the development of the North. It is something they understand but Southern Environmentalists fail to. The reality of the North is that climate change is making development crucial to the survival of the peoples of the North, halting mega-projects like the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline will not stop climate change, but it will limit the survival of traditional communities now dependent on the South for food and fuel.

In the end, large construction projects are an essential part of human civilization, they just have to be done right. A genuinely useful megaproject must arise out of any public planning process, in which the citizens of the region looked at the long-term needs and options and discussed what should be done. The hype surrounding megaproject proposals also serves as a convenient way to distract the public from the more day-to-day problems of society and government. Seriously addressing our state's shameful social problems requires fundamental questions about the way our society functions, the types of questions that politicians hate being asked.

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Free Trade=Cheap Wages

The truth is in reading the fine print. Free Trade is not about trade, or sustainable markets, it is about off-shoring production and contracting out services.

India also offers Canadian companies another cheaper-wage locale besides China where they can shift production to save money and remain competitive.

This little fact will get lost in the hoopla that will be generated around a bilateral free trade agreement between Canada and India.



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Brief Cases vs Batons

Lawyers fight riot police in protest against Musharraf

The brief cases were a flying, as the batons crashed down on their powdered wigs. Barricades were built with case files as suits were stuffed to act as decoys. The real power of the State is not its laws or lawyers but who carries the baton of office.

See

Lawyers

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Nortels Chickens Roost

It takes the American SEC to actually charge the folks behind Enron North. Investors got tired of waiting for the Ontario Securities Commission to do anything. Another reason for having a single national regulator.

And Nortel has been a bigger loss for more seniors and retiree investors than the Income Trusts.

SEC files charges against former Nortel execs

The securities regulator alleges the execs at the Toronto-based telecom maker repeatedly engaged in accounting fraud "to bridge gaps between Nortel's true performance, its internal targets and Wall Street expectations." "Each of the defendants betrayed Nortel's investors and their misconduct gave rise to billions of dollars in shareholder losses," said Linda Thomsen, director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement.

In the go go world of a long bull market like we have seen, the only house rule for casino capitalism is that rules are meant to be broken. The wave of criminal fraud cases that have hit the market are a result of the politics of Greed that we saw in the eighties and before that in the seventies and early sixties.

Gekko: Greed - you mark my words - will save Teldar, and that other malfunctioning corporation, the U.S.A.

During bull markets the movers and shakers of real existing capitalism, not the Von Mises /Hayek fiction, find accomplices like Accounting firms to do their bidding, which is to hide money away from the government, and also to make as much money as quickly as possible. Both of these ends then require a means, which is fraud, pure and simple.

The use of back dated shares, accounting practices to pump up market prices, accounting practices to avoid taxes, hedged bets on mutual funds after closing, these are all business as usual until they are declared fraudulent by those who are supposed to be regulating the market.

It is the political dominance of finance in the marketplace.

Nortel is not Canada's only criminal capitalist on trial in the U.S.

Establishment-watchers eagerly await Black's trial

See

Nortel Slash & Burn

NORTEL: REDUX

NORTEL: Canada's Enron

Dalai Canuck

Criminal Capitalism

We Need a Living Wage

The Phoney Debate On Net Neutrality

CEO


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Kettle Pot Pace

Onward Christian Soldiers.

Gen. Pace Calls Homosexuality Immoral

And killing people is moral?

And it gets better;

Marine Gen. Peter Pace likened homosexuality to adultery, which he said was also immoral,

So I guess that leaves Newt out of the army. And Karl Rove.

"I do not believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is OK to be immoral in any way," Pace told the newspaper in a wide-ranging interview. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Monday he considers homosexuality to be immoral and the military should not condone it by allowing gay soldiers to serve openly, the Chicago Tribune reported.

Heck I guess that means the U.S. military won't accept any divorced folks in their ranks. Nope that ain't true.

The Pentagon Thursday sought support for Defense Secretary William S. Cohen's choice to head the Joint Chiefs of Staff - a general officer who has admitted committing adultery - but the battle quickly widened into an effort to convince the public that the military was not applying a double-standard on sexual infractions. One day after the Pentagon's disclosure that Air Force Gen. Joseph W. Ralston conducted an adulterous affair more than a decade ago, officials sought to explain how in different circumstances such relationships could put some service members in jail and others in retirement while not eliminating one - Ralston - from candidacy for the armed forces' most coveted post.
Los Angeles Times June 6, 1997.

Or folks who have stolen post it notes from the office supplies.

I thought the U.S. Military swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States not the Ten Commandments. Wait a minute there is no condemnation of homosexuality in the Ten Commandments.....


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Achoo Cough Wheeze Hack Hack

I have a bad bout of bronchitis and a cold /flu so I am not blogging over the weekend. You have been warned, so I hope you don't catch it from reading this....

No,no. thats another kind of virus...I am hacking but not a hacker, well I guess I am literally a hacker if I hack hack , cough cough.....right, see what I mean I can't think straight....

In fact the inside of my head feels like this;











Some folks who read this blog would say that's how it works normally.

But then they think I am sick , and not just this weekend.

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Chrysler Made In Canada?

Since the Harpocrites love Made In Canada Solutions here's one; nationalize Chrysler through tripartite fund raising and purchase. Both levels of government; provincial and federal funding for compact and hybrid cars and trucks, with funding from CAW and Big Daddy Warbucks; Magna's Stronach confirms Chrysler interest

With CAW members along with environmental and consumer advocates on the board as worker and public representatives. This is how the German Auto Industry built itself up. An why it will cut its relationship with Chrysler.

Because Dahlmer wants to sell. And if these guys get it the will slash jobs and contracts, affecting CAW and Stronach. It is widely rumoured that private equity powerhouses Cerberus Capital Management LP and Blackstone Group LP are also considering putting Chrysler in their portfolios.

$700-million Chrysler plan at risk, union says

Potential Chrysler buyers call CAW's Hargrove

Magna chief looking at Chrysler



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From Orthodoxy to Orthodoxy

I missed the passing of this feminist and Marxist historian. It is interesting to see her make the same historic transition in her life that many classic American liberals before her did back during the Cold War. Going from toying with Marxism to becoming hardened right wingers.

ELIZABETH FOX-Genovese, a controversial figure in American feminism, passed away last week at 65. The career of this remarkable writer and scholar illustrates the complexities and challenges of 20th- and 21st-century feminism. She evolved from a left-wing Marxist feminist into a deeply conservative Catholic anti feminist, two positions that are equally alien to me. Yet she managed, along the way, to raise many important questions and offer many brilliant insights.

Fox-Genovese's journey from Marxism to Catholic traditionalism -- shared by her husband, historian Eugene Genovese -- could be seen, from a classical liberal point of view, in starkly negative terms: as a full-circle transition from one anti-individualist, antiliberal philosophy to another. Yet when it comes to women's issues, her critique of individualism contains an important kernel of truth. Reconciling women's pursuit of their new roles, freedoms, and opportunities with the needs of families and children has often been a rocky road, as several generations of feminism's daughters have found out.

The advent of the victory of the Neo-Cons in setting the political agenda after 1989 was the advent of a new Cold War against "The Cultural Left". With the phony war on Terrorism in 2001, several on the Left became self professed War Hawks such as Christopher Hitchens, just as their liberal predecessors did having been rabid anti-Stalinists they devolved into New Right anti-communists during the Viet-Nam war.

The Fox-Genovese story is just another pathetic story of two liberal intellectuals in America who embrace ideas not praxis, subsequently careerism and opportunism shatters all their ideological flirtations with Marxism.

No different then the Daniel Bell story.


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What's That Smell?

A new task force funded by the Canadian government and the province of Alberta will study ways to capture and store greenhouse gases emitted by the province's massive oil sands projects, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said on Thursday. The task force will be headed by Steven Snyder, chief executive of TransAlta Corp., a Calgary-based power company that operates coal-fired plants in Alberta and elsewhere.

TransAlta the historical retirement home for ex Cabinet Ministers from the Alberta Government. Like Jim Dinning.

What's that smell? Nepotism? Nope just good old Alberta politics.

After all Steve Snyder knows how important the environment is, and how crucial CO2 sequestration is cause he told folks in Seattle about it five years ago!!! Just waiting for the government to tell them to do it. And to fund it.

Environmental issues today are greater than they've been in probably the history of the industry, and particularly in the Canadian context, with Kyoto at the forefront, but regardless of the CO2 issue, knocks, socks, water issues, in this industry are out there and bigger than ever. This is -- you know, the whole Kyoto argument has become a proxy for the environment, so it's raised environmental issues on everyone's mind. So whether, you know, the U.S., whether they sign Kyoto or not, I don't think it's the point. The point is, people are more conscious of the environment than they were, you know, asking for more action, and our industry's at the forefront of that. I mean, raising capital today, we all know that is more difficult than it was three years ago, so for a capital intensive business, that's pretty -- a pretty tough equation to be in. TransAlta Corporation Investors’ Days Presentation Seattle Seattle, Washington November 25, 2002

So If Steve and the boys at TransAlta were 'at the forefront five years ago how come we are only seeing them act now on CO2 sequestration and other environmental solutions. Just waiting with their hands out. Ottawa spends $155.9M to make Alberta oil industry more green

TransAlta is Alberta's first P3.

With ties to the provincial and federal governments and the Conservative party historically. During the Socred era and later with PC's a position on the Board was practically guaranteed if you were a well connected Calgary Cabinet Minister.

The forerunner of TransAlta Utilities, Calgary Power Company, was founded by banker W. Max Aitken in 1903. Aitken, who later became Lord Beaverbrook, reorganized a number of utilities as a subsidiary of his Royal Securities Company. He was joined in this venture by his friend and mentor R. B. Bennett, who served as Canadian Prime Minister from 1930 until 1935. Some business leaders felt that Aitken and Bennett were an unlikely team, since Bennett was known as an upstanding young man, while Aitken had earned a reputation as something of a renegade. Nonetheless, the pair joined several other prominent Canadian businessmen on Calgary Power's initial board of directors. Among these board members were: A. E. Cross, one of the founders of the Calgary Exhibition and Stampede; Herbert S. Holt, a Montrealer who was later knighted; and C. B. Smith, president of Calgary Power's forerunner, Calgary Power and Transmission Company Limited. Aitken soon became Calgary Power's first president.

In 1947, two years after the war ended, Calgary Power moved its head office from Montreal--then the nation's largest city and prime business center--to Calgary, reorganized, and incorporated as Calgary Power Ltd. At that time, Calgary Power supplied the province of Alberta with 99 percent of its hydroelectric power. Also in 1947, Calgary Power built its Barrier Hydro Plant and used it to test the use of a newly developed remote-control operation system. The automation efforts worked well enough that Calgary Power soon converted all of its plants to the Barrier Plant system. A control center that could operate the company's entire system was built in Seebe in 1951. The company continued its string of innovations by testing 'mobile radio' communications in its line patrol trucks.

Although electricity had begun to spread to rural areas in the 1940s, only 5 percent of farmers in the province had electricity of any kind. The majority of farmers were hesitant to adapt until it became obvious that electric service could increase farm production as well as provide modern conveniences. The main problem for utilities in supplying farms was a financial one: at the time, it was estimated that it would cost $200 million--or twice the provincial debt--to expand service and supply all of the farms with electricity. This dilemma led to an unprecedented cooperative effort between Calgary Power, farmers, and the provincial government.

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IWD: Raya Dunayevskaya

Since today is International Women's Day I thought I would blog about an overlooked founder of the New Left and Marxist Feminism; Raya Dunayevskaya.
Founder of News and Letters, and a Marxist philosopher whose praxis focused on the revolutionary potential of youth, women and black workers and the anti-war movement.

I cannot recommend highly enough Eugene Gogol's historical biography of her life and work which she termed Marxist Humanism. Raya Dunayevskaya: Philosopher of Marxist-Humanism, Wipfandstock Publishers: Eugene, Oregon, 2003. This extraordinarily accessible work covers the development of her ideas and theories in relation to her life which was a revolutionary praxis.

I can think of no higher praise then the fact that I lent the book to a friend who while a Leftist had not heard of Dunayevskaya. He read the whole work in week, and while the work deals with Hegelian and Marxist Philosophy, Gogols presentation, within the context of her life and political development, my friend was suitably impressed that he went in search of her works online. He returned the book, and related to me that not being as computer literate as some, this was the first time he had downloaded her papers to read later. If you know nothing of her, then this is the political biography to read.

This philosophical comprehension of Marx's mature work of political economy needs to be reckoned with by today's "anti-globalization" movement. That movement is largely motivated by the injustice of the huge disparity in wealth between the northern, advanced capitalist nations and the nations of the south. The rallying cry is for a more just distribution of the world's wealth. Marxism and Freedom moves beyond this politics of equity. It illuminates how deeply capital must be uprooted in order to transform labor into an activity for human development and the realization of individual potentialities.

Dunayevskaya highlights the question, "What are we for?" Typically it is more immediately clear what we are against-capital's globalized reach, or imperialism. The question of the kind of society we are working for is usually ducked as too remote or potentially divisive. Dunayevskaya nonetheless insists on the need for full-fledged discussion within the movement and a collective focus for working it out.

This orientation comes out of Dunayevskaya's embrace of Hegel's method of the negation of the negation. She likens it to Marx's concept of "revolution in permanence," which "made it clear that the revolution does not end with the overthrow of the old but must continue to the new, so you begin to feel this presence of the future in the present" (12). The revolutionary impulse thus seeks the creation of a new human being beyond the uprooting of the old society. Only this ceaseless negation, including the negation of the initial attempts at negation, can lead us beyond a reshuffling of the cards so as to achieve an equitable redistribution of the world's wealth.

For Dunayevskaya the dialectic of negativity is the notion that forward movement emerges from the negation of obstacles to freedom. Negation needs to go further than the refutation of the given, because the first negation is still imprinted with the old. Only when negativity goes on to become self-directed, self-related, or in Hegelian terms "absolute," does it create the positive and the truly new.

While the aim of a humanistic transformation of society has this dialectical philosophical basis, it emerges out of actual human struggles. Dunayevskaya anticipates the focus on fighting for "new human relations" that later became central to the women's, Black liberation and workers' struggles. She quotes a young worker from Los Angeles who asked: "What skill do you need in this day of Automation? What pride can you have in your work if everything is done electronically...? What about the human being?"

She was raised in the Ukrainian diaspora in Chicago. Amongst the immigrant workers who shared the ghetto and jobs in the meat packing plants with their African American neighbors. It was in this community that Raya began as a young Communist to identify the indigenous class struggle in America as dealing with the Negro Question and Womens Liberation. They were not side issues, or matters simply of oppression, for her they were were key to class struggle.

"Those who have dedicated their lives to the creation of more just societies stand back now and take stock of the disintegration of so many of the socialist experiments. Feminism was palpably missing from those plans drawn up by men. Raya Dunayevskaya knew the importance of a feminist vision and hers informed the Marxist-Humanism she explained so well. Women's Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution is as relevant today as when it was written, perhaps more so. This is necessary reading for all who want to know what went wrong and how to do it better next time."— Margaret Randall

While many will point to others as founders of the New Left, in reality it was her and her comrade's C.L. R. James and Grace Lee Boggs that really gave birth to the American Marxist New Left. While much of the New Left in America was shaped by the baby boom and subsequent proletarianization of post secondary education and the consequences of the draft which created a youth revolt, it was the change in production that is Fordism that really was key to Dunayevskaya's work.

under capitalism machines exploit labor. “Capital is then a material thing which exploits labor” (p. 13). Instead of analyzing the capitalist labor process and thus discovering how a material thing becomes an exploiting force, ........that the thing, means of production, has become the social relation, capital, because of what Marx calls “the contradiction between the personification of objects and the representation of persons by things.”

The focal point of Marx’s analysis of capitalist society is his critique of capitalist production. The ideology which flows from this historic mode of production is enveloped in the perverted relation of dead to living labor. Marx pointed out that the very simple relation—capital uses labor—expresses “the personification of things and the reification of people.” That is to say, the means of production become capital and are personified as capitalists at the same time that the workers become reified, that is, their labor becomes objectified into the property of others.

Marx’s critique of capitalist society, based primarily on this inverted relation of dead to living labor at the point of production, extends also to the surface of society (the market), where the social relation between people assumes “the fantastic form of a relation between things.”This is the fetishism of commodities.

Marx proceeds to analyze the capitalist mode of production. Now that the worker is in the factory, the “social relation” becomes a production relation.

By virtue of that fact his relationship to the boss is very clear; it in no sense assumes the fantastic form of a relation between things. On the contrary, there the worker overestimates the capitalist’s might. He thinks that the capitalist alone is responsible for his plight instead of seeing the cause in the mode of production which the capitalist represents. There the worker personifies things: the means of production used as capital become the capitalists. We are here confronted with what Marx called “the personification of things and the reification of people.” Marx was most emphatic in laying bare this “reification of people” because that is the very heart of his critique of political economy. He grasped this very early. “When one speaks of private property,” wrote the young Marx in 1844, “one thinks of something outside of man. When one speaks of labor, one has to do immediately with man himself. The new formulation of the question already involves its solution.”

Dunayevskaya Outline of Marx's Capital--volume one

In evolving through the Communist party to Trotskyism, Dunayevskaya and James became the Forrest Johnson Tendency after Trotsky's death as a political crisis shook the Fourth International. They articulated the earliest State Capitalist critique , within Trotskyism, of the Soviet Union and subsequently of historical capitalism as it evolved through WWII and the Cold War.

She became Leon Trotsky’s Russian-language secretary in 1937 during his exile in Mexico, but broke with him in 1939 at the time of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Her simultaneous study of the Russian economy and of Marx’s early writings (later known as the 1844 Humanist Essays) led to her 1941-42 analysis that not only was Russia a state-capitalist society, but that state-capitalism was a new world stage.

It was this articulation plus their emphasis on women, blacks and youth as part of the class struggle, culturally as well as politically and economically that set them apart from the rest of the Left. They were part of a movement known as the third way, but different from its other proponents because even though they were steeped in Leninism, they confronted the failure of the Vanguard of professional revolutionaries and their parties, to really speak for the whole of the class.

When we reach state-capitalism, one-party state, cold war, hydrogen bomb, it is obvious that we have reached ultimates. We are now at the stage where all universal questions are matters of concrete specific urgency for society in general as well as for every individual. As we wrote in The Invading Socialist Society:

“It is precisely the character of our age and the maturity of humanity that obliterates the opposition between theory and practice, between the intellectual occupations of the ‘educated’ and the masses.” (p. 14.)

All previous distinctions, politics and economics, war and peace, agitation and propaganda, party and mass, the individual and society, national, civil and imperialist war, single country and one world, immediate needs and ultimate solutions – all these it is impossible to keep separate any longer. Total planning is inseparable from permanent crisis, the world struggle for the minds of men from the world tendency to the complete mechanization of men.

State-capitalism is in itself the total contradiction, absolute antagonism. In it are concentrated all the contradictions of revolution and counter-revolution. The proletariat, never so revolutionary as it is today, is over half the world in the stranglehold of Stalinism, the form of the counter-revolution in our day, the absolute opposite of the proletarian revolution.

It is the totality of these contradictions that today compels philosophy, a total conception. Hence the propaganda ministry of Hitler, the omnipresent orthodoxy of Stalinism, the Voice of America. The war over productivity is fought in terms of philosophy, a way of life. When men question not the fruits of toil but the toil itself, then philosophy in Marx’s sense of human activity has become actual.

World War I plunged the world into complete chaos. Lenin between 1914 and 1917 established in theory: (a) the economic basis of the counter-revolutionary Social Democracy (The economic basis of imperialist war had been established before him.); (b) the Soviet democracy in contradistinction to bourgeois democracy. But before he did this, he had to break with the philosophical method of the Second International. He worked at this privately in a profound study of the Hegelian dialectic applied to Marx’s Capital, the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Thirty years have now passed. Lenin’s method of economic analysis is ours to use, not to repeat his findings. His political conception of complete abolition of bureaucracy and all ordering from above is today to be driven to its ultimate as the revolutionary weapon against the one-party state. But today the problems of production which Lenin had to tackle in Russia in 1920 are universal. No longer to be ignored is the philosophical method he used in holding fast to the creation of a new and higher social organization of labor as "the essence” of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is not the Marxists who have compelled society to face this issue. Today in every layer of society, the great philosophical battles that matter are precisely those over production, the role of the proletariat, the one-party state, and many of the combatants are professed dialecticians.

The crisis of production today is the crisis of the antagonism between manual and intellectual labor. The problem of modern philosophy from Descartes in the sixteenth century to Stalinism in 1950 is the problem of the division of labor between the intellectuals and the workers.

Source: State Capitalism and World Revolution, by C.L.R. James in collaboration with Raya Dunayevskaya & Grace Lee; with a new introduction by Paul Buhle. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1986. Chapter XI, pp. 113-135. Original publication: 1950. Note: Asterisks were changed to numbered footnotes for greater clarity.

News and Letters, Dunayevskaya's organization evolved out of the post war Cold War as the Left faced the crisis of Imperialism and Stalinism. Those who came out of the Trotskyist movement created a new force on the Left called the Third Way, neither supporting Stalinism or American Imperialism. In Europe they moved beyond Trotskyism into Libertarian Marxism and Socialism.

Like News and Letters, these organizations were small and centered around the need to build radical rank and file based proletarian organizations, like the ICC and Socialism and Barbarism in France and England. These organizations originated out of the crisis of the Fourth International as well as the Left/Council Communist movement.

What made News and Letters unique, was they did not give up on class struggle, instead they focused on the new wave of post WWII Fordist industrialization and the new proletarianization of African Americans, women and youth.

While originating out of Leninism, James and Dunayevskaya's praxis made them critical of the Leninist, Trotskyist and Stalinist left, and its failure to see the working class as a broad based movement of race, sex and class. Most of the left had identified with the white industrial working class, rather than understanding the key to class struggle in America was the self organization of the most oppressed and exploited proletarians.

The New Left would mistakenly identify this later as groups who were the revolutionary vanguard, always looking for a vanguard to be the vanguard party of. Third Worldism, support for Black Power and the Black Panthers, the very origins of todays 'identity politics' by the New Left saw youth, blacks, the oppressed in general as revolutionary and rejected the white industrial working class as reactionary.

Such was not the case with Dunyaveskaya and her group News and Letters. In fact one of her collaborators for many years was Martin Glaberman. Together they identified with and worked in building rank and file movements in the Detroit area unions, the very heart of modern and post modern Fordism.

In 1953, Dunayevskaya split with Lee and James, leading to the formation of Marxist-Humanism by Dunayevskaya (later solidified into the group News and Letters), while James and Lee would go on to form a new group, Facing Reality, which would eventually see the split between James and now Grace Lee-Boggs. James' work would continue to influence other people through the journal started by longtime co-revolutionary Martin Glaberman called "Radical America", whose writers are a virtual "Who's Who of the Marxist critique of racism and white supremacy, including George Rawick and David Roediger. The group Sojourner Truth was influenced by James' work and took up the name of autonomist Marxism, but independent of James' practical organisational efforts. The work of Noel Ignatiev and Race Traitor would form the other well known tendency within the Marxist critique of white supremacy through the theory of 'white skin privilege.'

Dunayevskaya and News and Letters have been influenced by the early Hegelians and the Frankfurt School and themselves represent one of the more vocal defenders of a Hegelian Marxism which they refer to as Marxist-Humanism, having made theoretical contributions to the study of Marx and Hegel and the post-Marx Marxist world, as well as innovative readings of Lenin and issues of race, gender and sexuality. The group is also influenced by Rosa Luxemburg and did much to resurrect her in the English-speaking world as a major theorist.

Rank and file organizing against the union bosses and bureaucracy, self organization, the need for revolutionaries to recognize all struggles of the oppressed in America as part of the class struggle took News and Letters and Glaberman and Dunayevskaya, into a different non-Leninist non-vanguard form of revolutionary organization and praxis. As their detractors have pointed out; There is also a close internal relationship between Dunayevskaya and the morality of anarchism.

Indeed Dunayevskaya, Glaberman and James influenced many of the anarchist and autonomists of the 1970's. In Canada their works influenced a Toronto Libertarian Socialist mileux called Lotta Continua, aka The New Tendency which was situated in the Post Office. Most of the Left at this time was adopting a back to the factories approach to revolutionary politics. The failure of the social revolution to occur through and around the Anti-War and Youth movements, led the socialist groups in Canada to identify student and anti-war movements as petite-bourgeoisie and they needed to hone their revolutionary practice by engaging the working class.

What they overlooked was that they were the proletariat, whether in school or in the factory. Many went to work in auto plants in Southern Ontario, but by far the vast majority went to work at the Post Office. The Post Office struggles became the class struggle for the left in Canada, every one of Canada's socialist groups had a cell in the Post Office, and still do today, their influence is felt in CUPW the postal workers union they helped build in practice. Which is why CUPW still to this day uses the slogan Lotta Continua, the Struggle Continues.

That praxis was far more in keeping with the class struggle as Glaberman and Dunayevskaya saw it than the ideologies of the Heinz 57 varieties of Leninist organizations that headed back to the factories.

I was introduced to their works from having heard CLR James speak in Edmonton, in the Seventies, and we carried their books at our anarchist bookstore Erewhon Books.

All her life as a revolutionary Dunayevskaya was an optimist, she saw the revolution not as armed struggle, or a mere moment in history, she like Marx saw class struggle as the evolution of society towards a better more human future.
And her view of that class struggle was inclusive formulated as it was in the Chicago ghetto where she grew up.


Her work is approachable, important and still relevant.

MARX AND CRITICAL THOUGHT.

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