Sunday, November 17, 2024

 

Capitalist politics in crisis: Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and the struggles ahead in the United States

By Justin Akers Chacón
Published 
Kamala Harris

First published at Spectre.

It’s a pathetic spectacle watching the Democrats form their circular firing squads blaming each other for their total defeat in last week’s elections. It is equally disturbing watching frantic and enraged middle-class liberals gather into virtual lynch mobs, seeking to blame and shame whichever marginalized group refused to sufficiently support Kamala Harris’s right-wing, blood soaked, imperialist presidential bid. The blame extends — whether it be a forlorn Joe Biden (criticized for not self-diagnosing his own deteriorated faculties early enough and bowing out of the race) or blaming a relatively small uptick in the number of “Latinos” (an incoherent category to begin with) who didn’t vote for Harris as key to delivering the presidency to Trump.

Another target for liberal derision has been Arab and Muslim voters. These groups, however small or insignificant in the number of actual votes cast, had the audacity to vote for antigenocide candidate Jill Stein. Alternatively, many refrained from voting within an imperialist electoral edifice whose two faces of death are systematically obliterating their families, friends, relatives, memories, and homelands in a macabre and endless orgy of US-backed Zionist annihilative violence.

Today’s stalwarts of the Democratic Party — primarily white middle-class liberals and centrists — are ready to punch down and blame everyone below themselves for the Democrats’ failures; never punching up or trying to actually analyze and understand why the Democrats can only operate within the constraints determined by the prerogatives and exigencies of US capitalism and imperialism.

It’s true that large numbers of people opted to vote for someone other than Kamala Harris and the imperial Democrats. More significantly, millions of people justifiably stayed home on polling day. According to the numbers, an estimated 14 million fewer people voted for Harris in 2024 than Biden in 2020 while Trump’s vote was slightly less than in 2020.1

To understand Harris’s resounding defeat by voter abstention, we need look no further than Harris and the Democrats themselves. The Democratic Party has moved so far to the political right in the last four years that it has become practically indistinguishable from Trump and the Republicans on main policy issues. By 2024, Kamala Harris was running as the more efficient of the right-wing options — mimicking, aligning, or adapting Trump and the Republicans’ hard right policy frameworks while promoting herself as more capable than Trump.

Unlike her fellow right-wing Democrat Joe Biden, who was compelled to make “progressive” campaign promises by the Black Lives Matter rebellions, the left populism of the Bernie Sanders Campaign, and the mass protests against both Trump’s violent separating, caging, and deporting of migrants and the debacle of his handling of the pandemic. For her part, Kamala Harris offered the working class and oppressed groups nothing.

Even less than nothing, “Kamala the cop,” ran a campaign farthest to the right in the modern history of the Democratic Party: promising to build the most “lethal” imperial military the world has ever seen to conduct the next generation of war, vowing enthusiastically to continue to arm and enable the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, shifting rightwards and obfuscating on protecting full abortion access and support for trans people, and promising to “close the border” and recriminalize migrants and refugees along the same lines as Trump.

As this is the essence of Harris’s politics, many would-be liberal, left, or progressive voter constituencies who remember her previous and current record on these issues, were never courted, nor offered reasons to believe her presidency had anything to offer people, and so never jumped on her bandwagon. In the 2020 primary elections, Harris’s policy proposals were so poorly received that her popularity languished in single digit territory for the campaign’s short-lived duration, and she was one of the first candidates to drop out for lack of support.2 Her rise to the presidential ticket in 2024 could only happen by top-down appointment, bypassing a primary process that she would have surely lost. On Palestine, she was heckled and protested by antigenocide protestors everywhere she went, while the polls showed most people supported a ceasefire and an arms embargo on Israel.3 Instead of “being pushed left” by popular sentiment, she instead pushed back and silenced, shamed, and insulted the pro-Palestine movement. With all eyes on her campaign, she demonstrated that the prowar and genocidal needs of US imperialism were far more important and necessary than basic human rights and democracy.

After suppressing the voices of the left, she turned right to build an electoral alliance for her campaign. She enlisted support from the top echelons of the non-Trumpian right wing of the Republican Party. She rolled out a “Republicans for Harris” campaign that included over two hundred top-ranking political figures including George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Mitt Romney, and a wide range of high-ranking officials, pundits, and funders.4 She courted antiabortion Republican women, who were “given permission” by Republican Liz Cheney to vote for Kamala, falsely believing that hedging her commitment to defend abortion rights provided enough ambiguity for right-wing middle class and bourgeois white women to flock to her campaign out of disgust with Trump.5 None of this worked. Instead, Harris’s message that she would rule from the right — essentially presenting a version of Trumpism without Trump — only enabled Trump to determine the political narratives heading into the election.

Like in 2016 and 2020, Trump ran his campaign on the issue of immigration, using the most violent and racist rhetoric to date. He promised that he would carry out the largest mass deportation in history and close the border to migrants and refugees. While her semantics were different from Trump’s, her policy proposals were not. In fact, Kamala Harris ran on promoting the passage of a hard right-wing Trumpian immigration proposal concocted by House Republicans in 2024.

During his first term, Trump began dismantling US asylum policy, which previously allowed people to enter the US refugee process by reaching a US port of entry and declaring for asylum. Trump’s closing of this policy blocked tens of thousands of asylum seekers. The 2020 Biden-Harris campaign promised to undo Trump’s immigration policies, to place a moratorium on deportations and, along with a 2021 Democratic majority in Congress, to pass legislation providing for legalization for millions of immigrants.6

None of this came to pass.

Instead, the administration backtracked, kept most of Trump’s punitive policies in place, and even expanded them.7 Instead, Kamala Harris’s first official act as Vice President was to travel to Central America and conduct a high-profile press conference to proclaim to refugees and asylum seekers “do not come.”8 In this act, the Biden-Harris administration affirmed Trump’s policies and doubled down on them.

By the summer of 2024, Republicans in Congress tried to pass their own immigration proposal to codify Trump’s previous efforts to “close the border” to asylum seekers and shape the false political narrative of “border invasion” into federal legislation. The bill, “S.4361 – Border Act of 2024”, was introduced into the Senate in May of 2024.9 If passed it would have granted the sitting US President “DHS emergency authority to summarily remove or prohibit the entry of certain non-U.S. nationals within 100 miles of the southwest land border. DHS may exercise this authority if DHS encounters an average of 4,000 non-U.S. nationals within a seven-day period.” In other words, the bill would give the President the authority to conduct mass deportations of those seeking refugee status.

After the election, the Biden-Harris administration quickly pivoted from the rhetorical posture as “defender of refugees” to becoming an actual mass deporter of refugees. For instance, by the end of their first year the Biden-Harris administration deported over 20,000 Haitian refugees.10 The criminalization of Haitians was later seized on by Trump during one of his many vile and racist tirades against migrant refugees. The number of deportations under Biden-Harris even surpassed the total number deported during the Trump administration during his first four years by early 2024.11

Instead of undermining Trump’s xenophobic platform by defending immigrants and refugees, providing relief and sanctuary for asylum seekers, legalizing the undocumented, ending mass deportation and detention, and explaining how immigrants were revitalizing communities and providing significant gain to the US economy, the Democrats shifted further to the right to “out-Trump” Trump.12 Capitalism’s appetite for the suppressed wages of criminalized and degraded labor is too great. So too is its need for political scapegoats amid the ongoing capitalism-fueled crises of deepening inequality and poverty.

By the summer of 2024, the Biden-Harris administration had shifted to making hardline anti-immigration into “their issue” as a way to coopt Trump’s main platform point. The Biden-Harris Administration officially endorsed the Trumpian immigration plan and appealed to the far right to work together to make it into law. Nevertheless, Trump ordered his lackeys in Congress to oppose it so as to not give the Democrats a “win”—even if it was their plan being implemented — effectively killing it.13 Not to be derailed from this march to the right flank of immigration by Trump, Biden issued an executive order in June that gave him the power to close the border by decree in accordance with what the now-dead Republican plan bestowed.14 In turn, Kamala Harris then campaigned on passing the Republican immigration bill, championing it as her own, and then doubling-down on being tougher than Trump—even criticizing Biden’s executive order for not being punitive enough!15

Undoubtedly, some of those millions that stayed home or refused to vote for Kamala Harris chose not to vote for either version of Trump’s border policy.

The defeat of the Democrats is not a reflection of hard right political shifts in the working class or the population as a whole. Rather, it is more accurate to understand the rejection of Kamala Harris and the Democrats as a rejection of that party’s hard right shifts amid a deepening confluence of overarching crises. As the preferred party for the capitalist ruling class, Kamala Harris and the Democrats could only offer what the billionaire and corporate backers of the party were willing to offer: nothing.

At this moment — amid a tanking and fragmenting global capitalist system, expansion of imperial war on a global scale, and deepening social polarization amid widening social inequality — the Democrats had nothing to offer the vast majority of the people except more austerity, war, genocide, authoritarianism, and criminalization. Trump, his far-right billionaire backers, and his radical reactionary and fascist following have even less to offer except victims and scapegoats.

There must be a complete rupture with this system of declining capitalist imperialism and its rapidly decaying political institutions. Moving forward from this moment of profound political — perhaps a terminal — crisis will depend on the mass organization of resistance movements rooted in the working class and in active solidarity with the oppressed populations that are the targets of this rightward moving ruling apparatus. In the period ahead, there will be the possibility to continue and begin building new radical and revolutionary left-wing organizations out of the class struggles that undoubtedly lie ahead. Building our capacity to resist and overturn this system is the most urgent thing we can and should be doing right now.

Justin Akers Chacón is a professor of US History and Chicano Studies in San Diego, California. He is the author of Radicals in the Barrio: Magonistas, Socialists, Wobblies, and Communists in the Mexican-American Working Class (Haymarket, 2018) and coauthor, with Mike Davis, of No One is Illegal (Haymarket Books, 2nd ed. 2017).

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Boris Kagarlitsky: ‘Do not include me in any prisoner exchange lists!’

By Boris Kagarlitsky
Published 

Boris Kagarlitsky Rabkor graphic

Translation by Dmitry Pozhidaev for LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal.

Recently, discussions about another exchange have intensified.

It is still unclear who Russian political prisoners are to be exchanged for, but there is already an active debate over who should be included in the prisoner exchange lists and who should not. I have stated several times, and I will repeat it once again, that I do not wish to participate in such exchanges and ask not to be included in these lists. I see no sense or benefit in emigrating. If I wanted to leave the country, I would have done so myself. But I have no intention of leaving my homeland, and if staying means being in prison, then I will stay in prison. After all, imprisonment is a normal professional risk for a left-wing politician or social scientist in Russia, one that must be accepted when choosing this path. It is like being a firefighter or a rescuer — just part of the job, which I have done and will continue to strive to do as conscientiously as possible.

Since ancient times, exiling dissident citizens has been a form of political repression. And if we are fighting for freedom, then such repression, even in this softer form, must be condemned. Political prisoners must be fully freed — all of them — and in their homeland.

It is said that some participants in the previous exchange were taken out of Russia without their consent. I do not know what truly happened, but I want to make it clear: if anything like that is attempted with me, I will consider it an act of kidnapping. I will file a lawsuit against any foreign government as accomplices to this crime if they attempt to accept me against my will.

I am grateful to my family for their support and understanding, as well as to the many people who have written to express their approval of my decision. But this is not just about me. There are broader issues that need to be addressed.

There is a danger in replacing the fight for the complete release of all political prisoners (which would not only be a humane act but also a step toward transforming the moral climate in the country) with the compilation of exchange lists aimed at freeing a few dozen relatively well-known individuals, while hundreds or even thousands of other prisoners of conscience remain behind bars. Moreover, those compiling the lists take it upon themselves to decide who will walk free and who will stay in prison. This is unjust and undemocratic, contradicting the very principles for which we make sacrifices. The only correct demand is the release of all participants in non-violent political protests and all those arrested for exercising their constitutional right to criticise the authorities' decisions.

There is another important factor that must not be forgotten. Political prisoners are not only a reality in Russia. Everything happening to us carries global significance. If dictators worldwide realise that political prisoners are a valuable resource that can be successfully exchanged or sold, they will work to increase their “exchange fund”. They will imprison even more people. Meanwhile, the goal must be to make it unprofitable for states to have political prisoners, ensuring that repression becomes too costly for ruling circles. This was the case in the late 20th century, when democratisation processes unfolded not only in the former Soviet bloc countries but also in other regions of the world. We know that this democratisation was extremely superficial and did not challenge the dominant position of the elites. Nevertheless, it was a step forward. Now, we are witnessing a reversal of these processes everywhere. This is precisely why it is crucial to fight not for the release of individual high-profile political prisoners but for an end to political repression as such.

Of course, there are different situations, and in some cases, exchange is the only available means to save a person. The conditions under which political prisoners are held vary widely. I am well aware that my situation is far from the worst in comparison. For this reason, I do not presume to decide for others or present my personal opinion as a universal principle. However, I would recommend, first, that those political prisoners who have the physical and moral strength to continue the struggle refuse to participate in exchanges. Second, I ask the organisers of exchanges and those compiling lists to include only those prisoners who have explicitly agreed to accept freedom at the cost of being exiled from the country.

In conclusion, I will say: whatever choice we make, we must never forget that our goal is freedom and rights for everyone — not only for those behind bars but for those subjected to other forms of oppression in Russia and around the world.


The Trump effect

By Boris Kagarlitsky
Published 
Donald Trump on phone

First published in Russian at Rabkor. Translation by Dmitry Pozhidaev for LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal.

Alas, I must begin this article with inevitable self-criticism. When the Democrats in the United States replaced the ageing [President Joseph] Biden with the youthful and elegant Kamala Harris, I, like many others, concluded that the return of Donald Trump to the White House could be prevented. Of course, I can now justify myself by pointing out that, being in prison, I did not have sufficient access to current information and could not follow all the twists and turns of the electoral race.

However, the problem is much deeper. I underestimated the scale of bureaucratic inertia among the “reasonable” camp (Democrats, liberals, leftists and all those who know for sure that the Earth is round and that humans evolved from ancient primates), as well as the degree of demoralisation and demobilisation among the masses, tired of two decades of empty politically correct chatter. I thought that the looming real threat would force the political apparatus to mobilise beyond the usual electoral measures and that the masses, dissatisfied with the current state of affairs but unwilling to return to the past, would awaken from apathy. The election results show that the mere threat of a reactionary turn was not enough. Liberals and liberal leftists are now doomed to reap the fruits of their catastrophic policies, the dire consequences of which many have already written about — from Thomas Frank to the author of these lines. But importantly, this will affect not only the United States but the entire world.

What has changed since 2016?

But is the danger really that great? After all, Trump was already in power from 2016 to 2020, and nothing terrible happened. Strictly speaking, nothing happened at all. Even the promised wall along the Mexican border was not built. But the fact is that over the past 4-5 years, the political situation has changed not only in the United States but worldwide, including in Russia.

In 2016, it was possible to gloat over Trump’s victory: “These are the worthy fruits of their wickedness.”1 The Democratic Party apparatus, through manipulation and falsification, suppressed the activists’ rebellion, eliminated the threat of a “left turn”, and derailed Bernie Sanders’ candidacy, ultimately resulting in Trump in the White House. Moreover, many disgruntled Sanders voters supported Trump back then. A millionaire from New York played the role of a protest candidate for the people, partly in spite of his own views and plans.

If you think the same thing happened in 2024, you are deeply mistaken.

Over the years, a revanchist coalition has formed around Trump, uniting all varieties and sorts of reactionary forces that seemed to have been rejected by the history of the 19th and 20th centuries. From opponents of revolutionary theory to provincial isolationists who believe that the US entry into the war against [Adolf] Hitler was a fatal mistake. The inertia of the protest that arose in 2016 has been successfully exploited by Trumpists, but the social program the winners are preparing to implement will primarily harm those who voted for the jovial Donald. It must be admitted that the US’s incomplete and chaotically constructed social policies are inadequate, but dismantling them will make the situation even worse. The hardworking “rednecks” who believe they can achieve anything through their labour, will soon feel the consequences of their choice.

What does this mean for us?

If Russian officials and propagandists who praised Trump hope he will solve their problems (primarily concerning Ukraine), they are, of course, mistaken. Trump’s isolationism (and that of his business colleagues), combined with his manic drive to start a major trade war with China, promises Russia nothing good. Since Russia cannot be a US ally in this trade war, it will inevitably become an adversary.2 This means seeking partners not only in China but also in Western Europe, with which Moscow (unlike Beijing) has burned its bridges. However, regardless of how international events unfold, the Russian bureaucracy is tempted to freeze decision-making until spring 2025, when the new administration in Washington will finally take office. It is clear that during this time, domestic affairs will become even more entangled, and contradictions will deepen.

What could counteract this situation?

First, the worsening of economic problems and rising inflation, which the Central Bank is trying to curb by raising the key interest rate to an exorbitant 23–25%, stifling demand in non-military sectors.3

Second, pressure from “brotherly China” that, on the eve of a potential trade war with the US and the loss of part of the US market, is particularly interested in resuming railway transit of its goods to Europe via Russia and Ukraine. This means inevitable “coercion to peace” by Chinese 
“brothers”.

Finally, third, the sharpness of contradictions within the Russian elite itself. These contradictions are accumulating and intensifying, without resolution. Moreover, they concern far more than just foreign policy.

What does this mean for the future?

In 2016, both the liberal establishment and liberal left received a very serious lesson. But they did not learn from it. Worse, they doubled down on implementing principles of political correctness against the backdrop of dismantling the welfare state and pursuing market reforms. The result has been an objective intensification of class contradictions, with no political representation for the interests of the lower classes. This gap made it possible for the growth of right-wing populism, exploiting mass discontent but directing it not against dominant economic interests, but against ethnic minorities, liberal intellectuals, external enemies, and so on. Of course, there is nothing new here. This is exactly how fascists in Italy and Nazis in Germany ran their campaigns in the 1920s — and successfully so. But there are two significant differences.

The first is that in the 1920s, there was a strong leftist movement represented by Communists and social democrats. Yes, they quarrelled and obstructed each other. But they were strong and popular. Today, no such movement exists.

The second difference is that in the 1930s, the far right managed to implement a program of regulating capitalism. Now, however, their program boils down to economic protectionism combined with creating a “free market for their own”. At best, they might remove cheap migrant labour from the workforce and close markets to cheap Asian goods. Such a program will not work.

The paradox is that Trumpist economic policy is likely to destabilise global and US capitalism. Theoretically, this (along with the demoralisation of the left and classic liberals) potentially creates space for new class-based left forces. But potential and realisation are two different things. And let us not forget the prophecy of the Strugatsky brothers: “After the grey ones come the black ones.”4 If the political vacuum representing the working majority is not filled by an adequate leftist force, the consequences will be tragic.

And if anyone thinks “the worse, the better,” they are also mistaken. Recall the slogan of the German Communists in 1932: “Lass Hitler kommen, nach kommen wir” (“Let Hitler come, we will come after”). Unfortunately, the price of such illusions can be unbearably high.

  • 1

    “These are the worthy fruits of their wickedness” (original: «Вот злонравия достойные плоды») is a quote from the 18th-century comedy The Minor (Недоросль) by Russian playwright Denis Fonvizin. It is spoken by one of the characters to describe the brutish selfishness and crudeness of the poorly educated minor from the country gentry, who mistreats his parents — a consequence of their own wickedness in raising him.

  • 2

    Kagarlitsky analyses Russia’s limited political options, given the irreconcilable positions of the US and China, in his previous interview on LINKS Boris Kagarlitsky on the US elections, Trump, peace talks and prospects for world war. There he argues that any rapprochement with the US would require one very important condition: that Russia become a key US ally in the fight against China. But for the Russian economy, which has grown increasingly dependent on China, a pivot to the West would be catastrophic, economically and geopolitically.

  • 3

    Kagarlitsky refers to the decision of Russia’s central bank in October to raise the key rate to 21% to rein in higher-than-forecast inflation. The economic community agrees that the rate is likely to be raised again in the near future.

  • 4

    The quote is from the Strugatsky brothers’ novel Hard to Be a God (Трудно быть богом): «Там, где торжествует серость, к власти всегда приходят черные», which translates to: “Where mediocrity triumphs, the blacks always come to power.” In the novel, “greyness” symbolises mediocrity and complacency, while “the blacks” refers to a fictional clerical reactionary order that established a brutal dictatorship characterised by mass murders and pillaging.

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Canada’s Temporary Foreign Workers Program is a Massive Violation of Human Rights


by Owen Schalk / November 16th, 2024

On August 11, 2022, workers in Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) penned an open letter about their experiences in the program. “As it currently stands,” they wrote, “the [SAWP] is systematic slavery.” The article was written by Jamaican workers, but they asserted that migrants of other nationalities had faced similarly dehumanizing experiences. “It feels like we’re in prison,” they continued. “[Bosses] physically intimidate us, destroy our personal property, and threaten to send us home.” Workers were “treated like mules” by unaccountable companies that the Canadian government had empowered to repress migrant workers’ labour rights and political voice.

The SAWP was created in 1966, a time of labour militancy for much of the Canadian working class – in fact, in the mid-1960s, Canadian workers were striking more than one thousand times per year. The SAWP, which allows Canadian businesses to employ workers from Mexico and the Caribbean on temporary visas, provided Canadian companies with workers who existed in a more precarious position than Canadian employees. Therefore, they were less likely to cause labour disruptions.

From the very start, workers in the SAWP resisted their dehumanization and exploitation. In 1966, a group of Jamaican workers refused to work on Saturday, the Sabbath day of the Seventh-day Adventist faith. One year later, Trinidadian workers engaged in wildcat strikes, hoping to pressure their employer to rectify their poor working conditions and unequal pay between Canadian and Caribbean employees.

Gabriel Allahdua, whose 2023 book Harvesting Freedom is the first published account of the life of a migrant farm worker in Canada’s SAWP program, wrote: “I began to notice the echoes of slavery, indentured labour, and colonialism in my experiences as a migrant farm worker.”

Ottawa launched the SAWP at the same time that Canadian capital was globalizing. While Ottawa was promoting Canadian investments around the world, the Canadian government also spent money in nations like Allahdua’s home country, St. Lucia, to persuade workers into joining the SAWP. Workers were presented with a rosy, misleading notion of Canada’s government and society, bolstered by Ottawa’s funding of education initiatives overseas. With this hopeful image of Canada in their minds, many workers initially felt privileged to join the SAWP. However, even for those who were optimistic about their lives in Canada, there were often early warning signs. Allahdua himself noted that, in the early 1990s, the Canadian government was funding unpopular resource extraction projects in the region. “This was an early red flag about Canada for me,” he wrote.

When Allahdua arrived in Leamington, Ontario, the greenhouse and migrant worker capital of Canada, his preconceptions about the country were “completely shattered.” His employer worked him for fourteen hours or more each day, and there were no mandated breaks. It was, to use Allahdua’s word, an “authoritarian” system. According to Canadian law, migrant workers were not entitled to the following: “daily and weekly limits on hours of work; daily rest periods; time off between shifts; weekly/bi-weekly rest periods; eating periods; overtime pay.” At the same time, companies exercised total surveillance over workers’ lives. All activities were logged so the bosses could track workers’ movements; meanwhile, employers flaunted their power over workers, openly telling Allahdua and his fellow migrant workers “If you only knew how much money I’m making off you” and “We own you all.”

When workers tried to unionize, they were fired, as Allahdua observed when a group of Mexicans who tried to unionize were simply replaced with Guatemalans. “The element of fear is built into the SAWP and serves as a powerful tool for employers,” writes Allahdua. “A populace in fear cannot fight back.”

As Edward Dunsworth explains in his introduction to Allahdua’s book:

…workers in the SAWP are tied to a single employer, unable to freely choose or change who they work for. Those employers wield an immense amount of power over workers, and not only during the workday. Workers live in employer-provided housing, and they often find their social and private lives – where they go, who visits the bunkhouse, and so on – monitored and controlled by their bosses…A further disincentive against rocking the boat is the fact that employers enjoy essentially free rein to fire workers and send them back to their home countries should they be dissatisfied with them in any way. In the SAWP, then, farmers are not only participants’ employers, but also their landlords and immigration agents.

Effectively, the Canadian government has stripped an entire population of their labour and political rights in order to benefit Canadian businesses.

In addition to dehumanizing the migrant workforce, the SAWP is useful to Canadian capital because it suppresses wages. A 2014 study from the C.D. Howe Institute admits as much: “The goal of a temporary foreign worker (TFW) program is to accommodate shortages of labour that otherwise would cause wages to rise substantially or possibly stop production because of the difficulty of finding resident workers.” A 2012 analysis of Canada’s migrant labour regime also notes that the program “has the broader function of regulating labour supply in a fashion optimal for employer bargaining power.” In other words, it serves companies’ profitability by attacking the rights of workers.

“From the standpoint of capital,” write professors Geoffrey McCormack and Thom Workman in The Servant State: Overseeing Capital Accumulation in Canada, “migrant workers make the perfect worker: obedient, non-confrontational, cheap, unlikely to organize a union…”

Alone in a foreign country, Allahdua and his coworkers lived in low-quality company housing in which visitors were not allowed. Many of his fellow migrant labourers had low literacy rates and did not understand the contracts they had signed. “The program is calling for people of colour,” writes Allahdua.

The program is calling for people who are illiterate, or who are struggling with English, or who have English as a second language. The program is calling for people who are largely ignorant about labour issues and human rights issues. These are the kinds of people that the program is really calling for – people who are easily exploited. To me, this was the slavery and colonial handbook being used in modern Canada…So many of these [injustices] make me think about the conditions of enslaved Africans during the colonial period in the Caribbean (and elsewhere) and of the indentured labourers who came afterwards.

In 2022, the Canadian Migrant Workers Centre interviewed 30 migrant labourers who had fled their workplaces. The results show that racism and abuse are ingrained in the everyday functioning of Canada’s migrant labour system.

29 [of the 30] had experienced financial abuse. This came in the form of unpaid wages, unpaid overtime, excessive hours, forced return of wages to the employer, and extortionate recruitment fees. Seventy percent of the workers experienced employers who were verbally and psychologically abusive. They had faced verbal insults, threats of deportation, and/or racist and discriminatory remarks. Thirty percent of the workers experienced physical abuse by their employer, and 10% experienced sexual abuse.

A United Nations report released in 2024 accused Canada of relying on modern-day slavery. Released by UN investigator Tomoya Obokata, the report notes that Canada’s foreign worker program is a “breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.” In researching the report, Tomoya investigated working conditions in Ottawa, Moncton, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. According to the UN’s findings, Canada’s migrant labour regime “institutionalizes asymmetries of power that favour employers and prevent workers from exercising their rights.”

One year prior to being accused of contemporary slavery, the Canadian government approved the hiring of 239,646 temporary foreign workers, more than double the 2018 total. Despite global condemnation, Canada has continued to impose “contemporary slavery” on migrant workers so Canadian companies can increase their profits. Many employers now use temporary workers as a permanent labour supply.

By promoting neoliberal policies and imperialist interventions abroad, Canadian foreign policy helps create the conditions that force citizens of the Global South to migrate to Canada, where many are deprived of their rights so that Canadian companies can profit. Ottawa’s globalization agenda, aimed at promoting Canadian profits abroad and restricting foreign states’ ability to rein in capital, “directly feeds into the displacement of workers from their countries of origin – and their subsequent migration to countries like Canada,” as Amanda Aziz of the Migrant Workers Centre writes.

When migrant workers displaced by globalization organize to improve their pay and working conditions in Canada, they are often abused, fired, and deported, as many personal testimonies reveal. This needs to change. Canadians must organize to dismantle the system of “contemporary slavery” that our leaders have allowed to grow, in spite of UN warnings, on behalf of Canadian businesses.

Owen Schalk is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, among them two books on Canadian foreign policy. Among many other writing credits, he is a columnist at Canadian Dimension magazine. Read other articles by Owen.
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Losing Honestly and Gracefully


by Robert Jensen / November 16th, 2024

After election defeats, political writers are quick to explain that if only the politicians had read my book and followed my advice, things would have been different for our side.

My pitch is a bit different. Please read It’s Debatable: Talking Authentically about Tricky Topics, but not for a winning electoral strategy.

If candidates opposed to reactionary authoritarian nationalism had advocated the positions I endorse, Trump and like-minded Republicans still would have won control of all three branches of the US government. But at least Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party, and activists further left (the category I put myself in) would have lost gracefully by being more honest.

The book starts with an analysis of contemporary intellectual culture (defined in a non-snobby way, not just people with advanced degrees but the way we think together) before taking on three hot-button topics in today’s politics—race and white supremacy, sex/gender and the trans movement, and the economic implications of an ecological worldview.

On race: I don’t hesitate to criticize the jargon and haughtiness of some anti-racist activists and acknowledge the failures of many institutionalized DEI programs, arguments that may have resonated with some white folks who voted for Trump. But I also argue that the United States remains a white-supremacist culture and that we white people have an obligation to change. Such “messaging” wouldn’t have won Democrats many white votes.

On sex/gender: Mainstream feminism in the United States has gone all-in on the demands of the trans movement, even though that movement has never offered a coherent account of transgenderism. The Republicans exploited that incoherence effectively. For a decade, I have articulated a feminist challenge to transgender ideology, a position that would have made the Democrats a more credible voice for women’s rights. But because my analysis is rooted in a radical feminist critique of institutionalized male dominance, it’s bound to scare away many conservative voters.

On environmentalism: Almost without exception, politicians on all sides advocate economic growth. The debate is usually about which policies are likely to be more effective. When population comes up in the United States, the most common concern is falling birthrates, not the problem of overpopulation. I argue that human survival depends on “fewer and less”—a dramatic reduction in the population and a dramatic reduction in aggregate consumption, with steps taken to ensure a fairer distribution of wealth. I know of no politician from any party who faces the reality that the human future—if there is to be a human future—depends on our ability to shrink the economy, not expand it.

I realize that my race and sex/gender arguments are radioactive in some circles, and that demanding an ecological reckoning guarantees being ignored by most everyone in the mainstream. If unsuccessful center/liberal/left candidates had embraced these positions, they likely would have lost by larger margins than they did. But at least they would have lost gracefully, making principled arguments that may not carry the day politically but offer a model for honestly engaging difficult questions.

If I can’t promise electoral success in the short term, why should anyone bother with these critical perspectives? That’s a reasonable question, given that electoral success matters. I don’t believe that any of today’s politicians are going to magically solve our problems, but which politicians are setting policy today can either reduce the chances of a decent human future or carve out some space for hope.

My only answer: Responses I have received to the book tell me that there are people—not a majority, not even a significant minority right now—who are facing tough questions and want a space to explore this kind of politics without fear of being baited or insulted. It’s possible that from that small group, a more honest and graceful politics is possible.

Robert Jensen, an Emeritus Professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author of It’s Debatable: Talking Authentically about Tricky Topics from Olive Branch Press. His previous book, co-written with Wes Jackson, was An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity. To subscribe to his mailing list, go to http://www.thirdcoastactivist.org/jensenupdates-info.html. Read other articles by Robert.
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