Rebirth of a Nation: US History According to DW Griffith

BY JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

 NOVEMBER 24, 2023
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Still from Birth of a Nation.

Since many high school students across the country will be back to learning their history of the US from Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, it’s perhaps instructive to recall that when Birth of a Nation premiered at Clune’s Auditorium in LA, to large protests by the NAACP, it was still called The Clansman, the title of the racist novel by Thomas Dixon it was based on. In fact, it’s possible that the print that was shown at the White House, which generated such a frenzied reaction from Woodrow Wilson, was still called The Clansman. Dixon was a pal of Wilson’s and had arranged the showing, the first film ever screened at the White House.

Apparently, the film hit Wilson with a kind of cinematic gestalt, liberating his inner racist, which, of course, was never too deeply submerged in his twisted psyche to begin with. After emerging from Griffith’s three hours of depraved melodrama, which rewrote American history as a story of white grievance and retribution, Wilson pronounced: “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”

DW Griffith was a southerner, raised in Kentucky on the myth of the Lost Cause. Did he really believe it? Who knows? Griffith was an educated man, but he knew the allure of myth, the desire to right history’s wrongs and make them feel like your own, as in the novels of Walter Scott. Griffith took the most modern medium and technology and used it to look back, not forward. The camera lens became a kind of time machine, a deeply reactionary one in his hands.

Intertitle from Birth of a Nation.

Birth of a Nation doesn’t present a particularly coherent narrative. The film unfolds as a sequence of disjointed episodes, with a cliffhanger every 15 minutes or so. Dixon got a big payday, maybe the biggest of any writer ever in Hollywood, but he didn’t write the script. There wasn’t really a screenplay. Despite his grandiosity and repeated mining of historical and biblical subjects, Griffith’s about words or facts or story or even plot. It’s about the manipulation of feelings and buried anxieties and prejudices. It’s about using images to pull emotional and psychological triggers.

This was American history viewed through a distorting lens, where the players were projected in reverse: the victims became villains, the villains became villains, the terrorized became terrorists, and terrorists became avengers. There it was up on the screen. Who was a teacher or a book to tell you any different?

Thus Birth of a Nation set the template for modern advertising, public relations and politics. Forget what the books and newspapers say, trust your eyes and your gut.

When the lights went down in the theater, what did those audiences think? Were they watching history or were they living it? Did they thrill to torch-lit rides of the Klan or feel motivated to light a torch themselves? Did the film vindicate bigotry or inflame it?

How persuasive was this cinematic myth-making, this re-birthing of American history. Well, consider that Erich von Stroheim, who went on to direct Greed, that mangled indictment of American capitalism, was Griffith’s top assistant on Birth of a Nation. Though eccentric, Von Stroheim was a smart, if not brilliant, man. Did he understand the kind of film he was making and the kind of demons it would spawn?

Consider also that DW Griffith, the neo-confederate, and Charlie Chaplin, the communist, were not only pals but business partners. They founded, along with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, their own production company, United Artists. Chaplin was later chased out of the country by the kind of hysterical politics Griffith let loose on the Republic, the kind of politics that needs a constant stream of new villains–if the new villains are old friends, so much the better, it increases the tension of the melodrama.

Lift the hood from one of the Klan nightriders in Birth of a Nation and you’ll find the face of John (Jack) Ford, who in a couple of years would start making his own revisionist films about the history of conquest and colonization in the American West: Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Rio Grande, Hondo and The Searchers.

Even more intriguing is the way Griffith’s work was embraced by the early Soviet film-makers, like Vsevold Pudovkin (Storm Over Asia) and Lev Kuleshov (The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks) who saw in Birth of a Nation and Intolerance a method of making historical melodramas that also served political purposes. It was, however, Sergei Eisenstein who absorbed Griffith’s lessons about how film can be used to remake popular history the most deeply. In 1925, Eisenstein made his masterpiece, Battleship Potemkin. It was commissioned by the Soviet government to commemorate the 1905 revolution. Billed as the cinematic chronicle of a mutiny against the repressive Tsarist navy, the most powerful scene in Eisenstein’s film, the massacre on the Odesa Steps, was entirely invented for its dramatic and propaganda effect, which proved so overwhelming that the screening of the film was banned for prolonged periods in the UK, France, the US and eventually the Soviet Union itself. Most governments–regardless of their political brand–would tremble at the rebellious sentiments those scenes aroused in the audience.

Still, Battleship Potemkin found one official admirer in Joseph Goebbels, who raved about Potemkin as “a marvelous film without equal in the cinema. Anyone who had no firm political conviction could become a Bolshevik after seeing the film. When it came time to assemble the final print of October, his film on the Bolshevik Revolution, for Stalin’s approval, Eisenstein left all traces of Trotsky and Zinoviev on the cutting room floor. Two years later, Eisenstein was in Hollywood pitching a screenplay about an all-glass city, whose inhabitants are under 24-hour surveillance. Wonder where he got that idea?

Odessa Steps massacre scene in Battleship Potemkin.

Birth of a Nation was the first blockbuster. It played to packed movie houses across the country and Europe. People cried, screamed at the rape scenes, jeered the white actors in blackface and cheered as the Klan rode to the rescue, their white sheets unfurling like banners of triumph across the screen. From Atlanta to Chicago, crowds gave the film standing ovations and returned to be inflamed by its reactionary thrills again and again. And the film also did exactly what the NAACP predicted, it revived the KKK from its zombie-like repose with the imprimatur of the nascent Hollywood and a Democratic president. There were 700 hundred lynchings in the year following its release. They haven’t stopped yet, although most are now done by police and filmed by their own bodycams.

Birth of a Nation was also a story of the commodification of racism. The film built fortunes. In fact, it many ways it built Hollywood. Thomas Dixon, the writer of the novel, earned 25% of the profits of the film, which was enormous. By one account, Birth of a Nation amassed a global box office of $50 million in 1915 ($1.3 billion in today’s dollars), as Europe was at war with itself. And Louis B. Mayer, then the owner of movie theaters in Boston, somehow wrangled the distribution rights for all of New England. He pocketed a million from the deal and soon moved to Hollywood himself and became one of the first moguls. By 1927, Mayer was earning a higher salary ($800,000 a year) than any other executive in the country, even the CEOs of Standard Oil and US Steel. But he never forgot the themes and tropes of the picture that made him rich.

Fortunes are to be made in the promotion of racism, which is probably the lesson that will be taught in economics classes across the New (i.e., no longer restricted by the Mason-Dixon Line) South. Of course, they’ve been teaching the same thing using different terms at the University of Chicago for decades.

Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3. 

Capitalism as we know it has failed. Not even the Tories can defend it

Nick Timothy
Sun, July 2, 2023 

Canary Wharf

Larry Summers, the former US treasury secretary, once explained why he thought inequality had risen. “One of the reasons,” he said, “is that people are being treated closer to the way that they’re supposed to be treated.”

That story is recounted in Hell to Pay, a brilliant new book by Michael Lind about how the suppression of wages is driving economic, social and political crises in America. The idea that we are paid what we deserve – and that the decline in mid-skilled, mid-paid jobs simply reflects the high-tech, globalised economy in which we live – derives from free market theory. But it is, Lind argues, utter nonsense.

In Britain, like in America, the labour market has bifurcated because of political choices and corporate behaviour. Businesses have reduced employment costs by offshoring production to countries with lower labour standards and wages, or by using immigration to import cheaper workers. They have replaced full-time employees with rights and pensions with part-time contractors and gig economy workers. The post-war militancy and overreach of trade unions, and the restrictive laws that followed, has given employers monopsony power: that is, the ability to lower the price of labour because of their relative power over workers.

At the heart of all these changes is a model of globalisation that has caused the economic elites of the West to get richer, and which has allowed millions of people in Asia to escape poverty, but which has also relentlessly and systematically damaged the interests of the Western working – and increasingly middle – class.

Our model of globalisation was not, as Tony Blair put it, as inevitable as summer giving way to autumn. Trade agreements were struck, international institutions created, and when the likes of China broke the rules, dumped goods, stole industrial secrets, and used the system the West had created against us, reality was ignored. In as much as anybody noticed the effects on British workers, the reaction was to subsidise low pay, through tax credits, or – better, but not enough – increase it through minimum wages.

Regardless of the model of globalisation, there always remained choices for domestic policies. We can see this, for example, in how the breakdown between improvements in productivity and increases in pay have differed from country to country. In the US, it is longstanding and chronic. In Britain, more recent yet acute. In Denmark and Sweden, recent and mild.

A recent academic study showed that, contrary to popular perception, Britain and America have tax systems more progressive than in Europe – based on the difference between the taxes paid by the top decile to the bottom half of earners – and redistribute a greater proportion of national income to the bottom half. The reason Europe is less unequal than Britain and America is that wages themselves are more equal.

But wages are not the only way in which capitalism is in crisis. In Britain, everything seems to be in the red: we have a trade deficit, a budget deficit, and a house-building deficit. Personal debt stands at around 130 per cent of household income. The only surplus we seem to run is in net migration: millions have been added to our population in recent years, and 606,000 in the last year alone. Since the financial crash, we have had anaemic growth and stagnant pay. Stuck in a rut of low investment, poor productivity and low pay, we earn no more in real terms, on average, than we did in 2005.

Globalisation is part of the story, but so too is the quality of British economic policy. George Osborne used to describe himself as a strict fiscal conservative but a “monetary policy radical”. But while a fiscal correction was necessary after the financial crash, austerity went too far and for too long. According to Andy Haldane, former chief economist at the Bank of England, “this ruptured growth and was self-defeating for debt”.

Radical monetary policy poisoned the well, inflating asset prices, keeping zombie companies alive, discouraging bank lending to businesses and slowing the circulation of money through the economy. The government and the country became addicted to cheap credit, and left us exposed now the music has finally stopped. It was regressive, hurting households with less, helping those with more, and making it harder for young people to get on to the property ladder. And it caused an orgy of financial restructuring, through share buybacks and leveraged debt.

This is part of the shameful story of the water companies – regulated monopolies that have racked up £65 billion in debt, even as they paid executives multi-million pound remuneration packages and their foreign owners large dividends, all while failing to modernise our creaking infrastructure.

As with the energy companies, this is not just a symptom of monetary policy, but a failure of regulation – which encourages systematic over-reward for investors.

We know capitalism, untempered, can be rapacious: brilliant, innovative and wealth-creating, but also exploitative and careless about the externalities of doing business. Think for example of those tech firms that profit from and care little about the algorithms that send inappropriate content to children. Our economic pain is sometimes caused by a failure to regulate – but when we do regulate we often get it horribly wrong.

From the absurd complexity of the planning system to the failure of pension regulations that drives our savings away from British equities, we have built an economic model that rewards the wealthy not the many, the incumbent not the challenger, the bureaucrat not the entrepreneur, the rentier not the risk-taker, the financier not the maker and the old and not the young. We are serfs to debt, trapped by low pay and bloated assets.

Conservatives should accept that to criticise capitalism is not to succumb to socialism, but turning a blind eye to the failures and excesses of capitalism – especially the crony capitalism we have brought on ourselves – makes defeat to Left-wing parties more likely.

It is often said that those without capital will not support capitalism, but if what we have today is capitalism, it should be up to conservatives to change it – and not just defend the indefensible.

Empire not only made the colonies. It made the unequal Britain we see today


openDemocracy’s new film BOOMERANG, exploring the legacies of empire through Liverpool’s docks, is available online


Kojo Koram

openDemocracy,

Lenin’s famous quote that “there are weeks where decades happen” would be a suitable epitaph for the tombstone of the Liz Truss premiership.

As commentators focus on her obvious personal limitations as a politician to explain her spectacular failure, the truth is far broader than one person being out of her depth. Truss and her reckless experimental budget unleashed the full weight of decades of British post-imperial economic ideologies, which collapsed upon the hapless prime minister and washed her out of office in record time.

Britain’s stagnant growth and productivity, spiralling wealth inequality and disappearing industries are long-standing issues that not only predate Truss, but connect all the way back to the dramatic changes that Britain’s economy has undertaken over the past century.

We often talk about Britain as the birthplace of industrial capitalism as though industrialisation occurred via immaculate conception on this sacred island. In fact, the industrialisation of Britain is a story that spans the four corners of the global map, stretching from the manufacture of cotton in India to the extraction of gold in Guinea and the cultivation of sugar in Jamaica.



Similarly, we talk about Britain’s deindustrialisation as if it was solely a domestic story, a tale of Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill, the National Union of Mineworkers and the Institute of Economic Affairs, the locking of doors of factories in the north whilst erecting new skyscrapers in Canary Wharf. But the deindustrialisation of Britain, like its industrialisation, is part of a global story, one that is intimately connected to the challenge that decolonisation posed to the global capitalist world during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

In recent years, decolonisation has come to mean statue wars, curriculum debates and tedious media storms about cancel culture and political correctness. Almost entirely erased is the extent to which the actual era of formal decolonisation was a profound disruption in the given structure of capitalist production and exchange.

Related story

Oligarchs stash dirty money in Britain because of its colonialist laws
15 March 2022 | Kojo Koram

Ministers patronise those who call for decolonisation. But UK financial loopholes are a product of the imperialist legacy we don’t want to face

Imperialism meant that when the colonial companies that ran the British empire traded from Kenya to Nigeria to Barbados to Burma, they were operating within one single jurisdiction.

However, decolonisation brought about the proliferation of sovereignty, meaning all of these territories suddenly had their own governments that could pass regulations that might interfere with the established processes of profiteering – labour laws, tax laws, and protectionist laws could all provide new boundaries against trade. A counter-revolution to decolonisation was required, one that would allow the transnational capitalism to neuter these governments through odious debt, conditional loan agreements and structural adjustment programmes.

This story is the often-ignored prelude to neoliberalism. And the economic disempowerment of the newly independent former colonies would have major ramifications for the industrial cities of Britain that had been built up by imperial trade.

Leaders in the former colonies of Britain that dared to confront the capitalist interests hungover from empire were immobilised – such as Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Michael Manley in Jamaica and Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran.

Deindustrialisation occurred in many parts of the world, but nowhere did it bite harder and faster than in Britain

Their countries were turned into playgrounds of capitalist production, no longer just sources of raw materials. Weak tax demands and labour regulations made it inviting for companies to relocate their factories from the industrial heartlands of Britain.

During the age of empire, Britain had been both the banker and the workshop of the world, but after decolonisation, it closed down the factories and put all its energy into the finance office.

Along with deindustrialisation came financialisation as consecutive governments protected and promoted Britain’s banking, insurance, accountancy and commercial legal industries above all else.

The questions of political economy thrown up by decolonisation and its counter-revolution has now created a post-imperial Britain where huge swathes of the population are surplus to the requirements of our hyper-financialised system of growth. As the value of work across the board has been erased, rentierism, asset speculation and inherited wealth have become the main paths towards economic security for millions of everyday British people.

And the impact on the great industrial cities was devastating.

A new documentary from openDemocracy, ‘BOOMERANG: How the legacies of empire are breaking Britain’s economy’, which is narrated by me and features legendary footballer John Barnes, journalist Dalia Gebrial and MP Clive Lewis, tells the tale of the rise and fall of empire and industrialisation through the docks of Liverpool.

But it could easily have told the same story through the steel factories of Sheffield, the shipyards of Glasgow or the automobile plants of Coventry.

Of course, deindustrialisation occurred in many parts of the world but nowhere did it bite harder and faster than in Britain. Entire industries that had given rise to burgeoning cities over the past couple centuries just vanished from the map. This wasn’t just Thatcher or the 1980s but a historical process, tied to the way decolonisation remade the dynamics of the global economy, especially for the country that had been the superpower of the imperial age.

Liz Truss and her ill-fated mini budget were a product of this history, a hubristic attempt to complete this economic arc and ‘unleash’ the financial potency of Britain’s elite at the expense of everything else. Her government knew its tax cuts would hurt the most vulnerable people in our society, but this was a price worth paying to realise the dream of a hyperdynamic, post-imperial British financial juggernaut.

But unfortunately for Truss, this dream incinerated upon impact with reality as ordinary people didn’t accept it and global investors didn’t believe in it. However, it is not enough for the ‘Britannia Unchained’ version of our future to have failed, we need to actively cultivate a positive, egalitarian vision for what Britain can look like after empire if we want to stop elements of the Truss vision re-emerging in zombie form.

My book ‘Uncommon Wealth’ and ‘BOOMERANG’ meets this challenge by examining how an honest reckoning with the legacies of empire can help us understand and address the roots of our current crises to finally create an economy that works for all.

openDemocracy

16 November 2022

 

Risk of extinction by AI should be ‘global priority’, say tech experts


Hundreds of tech leaders call for world to treat AI as danger on par with pandemics and nuclear war

Geneva Abdul

THE GUARDIAN
Tue 30 May 2023 

A group of leading technology experts from across the globe have warned that artificial intelligence technology should be considered a societal risk and prioritised in the same class as pandemics and nuclear wars.

The brief statement, signed by hundreds of tech executives and academics, was released by the Center for AI Safety on Tuesday amid growing concerns over regulation and risks the technology poses to humanity.

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” the statement said. Signatories included the chief executives from Google’s DeepMind, the ChatGPT developer OpenAI and AI startup Anthropic.

The statement comes as global leaders and industry experts – such as the leaders of OpenAI – have made calls for regulation of the technology amid existential fears the technology could significantly affect job markets, harm the health of millions, and weaponise disinformation, discrimination and impersonation.

Earlier this month the man often touted as the godfather of AI – Geoffrey Hinton, also a signatory – quit Google citing its “existential risk”. The risk was echoed and acknowledged by No 10 last week for the first time – a swift change of tack within government that came two months after publishing an AI white paper industry figures have warned is already out of date.

While the letter published on Tuesday is not the first, it’s potentially the most impactful given its wider range of signatories and its core existential concern, according to Michael Osborne, a professor in machine learning at the University of Oxford and co-founder of Mind Foundry.

“It really is remarkable that so many people signed up to this letter,” he said. “That does show that there is a growing realisation among those of us working in AI that existential risks are a real concern.”

AI’s potential to exacerbate existing existential risks such as engineered pandemics and military arms races are concerns that led Osborne to sign the public letter, along with AI’s novel existential threats.

Calls to curb threats come after the success of ChatGPT after its launch in November last year. The language model has already been widely adopted by millions of people and has rapidly advanced beyond predictions by those best informed in the industry, said Osborne.

“Because we don’t understand AI very well there is a prospect that it might play a role as a kind of new competing organism on the planet, so a sort of invasive species that we’ve designed that might play some devastating role in our survival as a species,” he said.

Yes, you should be worried about AI – but Matrix analogies hide a more insidious threat

We need not speculate on ways AI can cause harm; we already have a mountain of evidence from the past decade

Samantha Florea
Tue 30 May 2023 

As the resident tech politics nerd among my friends, I spend a lot of time fielding questions. Help! I’ve been part of a data breach, what do I do? What on earth is crypto and should I care? And lately: should I be worried that AI is going to take over and kill us all?


‘They’re afraid their AIs will come for them’: Doug Rushkoff on why tech billionaires are in escape mode

There is so much hype around artificial intelligence that the concern is understandable but it’s important that we hang on to our critical faculties. The current AI frenzy ultimately serves those who stand to benefit from implementing these products the most but we don’t have to let them dictate the terms of the conversation.

If there is one thing that I try to impart to friends – and now you – it’s this: Yes, you should be concerned about AI. But let’s be clear about which boogeyman is actually lurking under the bed. It’s hard to fight a monster if you don’t know what it is. No one wants to be the fool using a wooden stake on a zombie to no avail.

Rather than fretting over some far-flung fear of an “existential threat” to humanity, we should be concerned about the material consequences of far less sophisticated AI technologies that are affecting people’s lives right now. And what’s more, we should be deeply troubled by the way AI is being leveraged to further concentrate power in a handful of companies.

So let’s sort the speculative fiction from reality.

Every other day a high profile figure peddles a doomsday prediction about AI development left unchecked. Will it lead to a Ministry of Truth a la George Orwell’s 1984? Or perhaps hostile killing machines fresh out of Terminator. Or perhaps it’ll be more like The Matrix.

This all acts as both a marketing exercise for and a diversion from the more pressing harms caused by AI.
... We’re not talking about the danger of some far-off sci-fi future, we’re talking about the amplification of systems and social problems that already exist

First, it’s important to remember that large language models like GPT-4 are not sentient, nor intelligent, no matter how proficient they may be at mimicking human speech. But the human tendency toward anthropomorphism is strong, and it’s made worse by clumsy metaphors such as that the machine is ‘hallucinating’ when it generates incorrect outputs. In any case, we are nowhere near the kind of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or ‘superintelligence’ that a handful of loud voices are sounding the alarm on.

The problem with pushing people to be afraid of AGI while calling for intervention is that it enables firms like OpenAI to position themselves as the responsible tech shepherds – the benevolent experts here to save us from hypothetical harms, as long as they retain the power, money and market dominance to do so. Notably, OpenAI’s position on AI governance focuses not on current AI but on some arbitrary point in the future. They welcome regulation, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of anything they’re currently doing.

We need not wait for some hypothetical tech-bro delusion to consider – and fight – the harms of AI. The kinds of technologies and computational techniques that sit under the umbrella marketing term of AI are much broader than the current fixation on large language models or image generation tools. It covers less show-stopping systems that we use – or are used upon us – every day, such as recommendation engines that curate our online experiences, surveillance technologies like facial recognition, and some automated decision-making systems, which determine, for example, people’s interactions with finance, housing, welfare, education, and insurance.

The use of these technologies can and do lead to negative consequences. Bias and discrimination is rife in automated decision-making systems, leading to adverse impacts on people’s access to services, housing, and justice. Facial recognition supercharges surveillance and policing, compounding the effect of state-sanctioned violence against many marginalised groups. Recommender systems often send people down algorithmic rabbit holes toward increasingly extreme online content. We need not speculate on ways this tech can cause harm; we already have a mountain of evidence from the past decade.

As for generative AI, we are already seeing the kinds of harms that can arise, in far more prosaic ways than it becoming sentient and deciding to end humanity. Like how quickly GPT-4 was spruiked as a way to automate harassment and intimidation by debt-collectors. Or how it can turbocharge information manipulation, enabling impersonation and extortion of people, using new tech for old tricks to scam people; or add a hi-tech flavour to misogyny through deepfake porn. Or how it entrenches and seeks to make additional profit from surveillance capitalism business models that prioritise data generation, accumulation and commodification.

The through-line here is that we’re not talking about the danger of some far-off sci-fi future, we’re talking about the amplification of systems and social problems that already exist. Sarah Myers West of AI Now said that the focus on future harms has become a rhetorical sleight of hand, used by AI industry figures to ‘position accountability right out into the future.’ It’s easy to pay attention to the fantastical imaginary of AI but it is in the more mundane uses where the real, material consequences are happening.

The future of AI is chilling – humans have to act together to overcome this threat to civilisation
Jonathan Freedland

When interviewed about his warnings on the dangers of AI, the so-called ‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton dismissed the concerns of longstanding whistleblowers such as Timnit Gebru and Meredith Whittaker, claiming their concerns were not as ‘existential’ as his. To suggest that rampant bias and discrimination, pervasive information manipulation, or the entrenchment of surveillance is not as serious as the chimera of AGI is disturbing. What such people fail to realise is that AI does pose an existential threat to many, just not people they care about.

Too often AI is presented as a risk-benefit tradeoff; where the historical evidence and present risks are dismissed as the cost of an overblown hypothetical future. We are told that there is so much potential for good, and that to slow ‘progress’ or ‘innovation’ would prevent us from realising it. But overlooking material impacts of past and present AI in favour of an imaginary future will not lead us to socially progressive technology. And that’s way more worrying than speculative AI overlords.

Samantha Floreani is a digital rights activist and writer based in Naarm

How Canadians Are Losing Medicare

Dr. Susan Rosenthal describes the rise of Canada’s public health system during labor’s rebellious postwar period and the corporate profiteering by which it is now being destroyed.

By Susan Rosenthal

March 17, 2023

Source: Consortium News


Ontario’s Bill 60 has delivered a potential death blow to public Medicare. If it becomes law, the provincial medical system will no longer operate as a public service but as a profit-taking business managed by the private sector.

While defenders of public Medicare blame Conservative Premier Doug Ford, British Columbia, Quebec and Saskatchewan are going down the same road.

If we hope to reverse this disaster, we need to know how Canadians won Medicare in the first place, and why they are losing it.

World War II saw a global upsurge of labor protest. Union membership more than doubled in Canada, and the number of strikes tripled. During the early 1940s, one-third of all workers in Canada were on strike. To calm the rise in worker rebellion, governments agreed to fund social programs like Medicare.

At the time, Canada had virtually no public medical system. Doctors charged whatever they pleased and bankruptcy from high medical bills was common.

The Canadian Labour Congress pushed for a comprehensive public medical system available to all. The corporate class pushed back, opposing any government control over medicine. Insurance companies feared losing business. Drug companies feared losing profits. And doctors were horrified at the thought of losing their elite status as independent entrepreneurs.

On July 1, 1962, Saskatchewan launched North America’s first government insurance plan to cover hospital care and doctor visits. That same day, 90 percent of Saskatchewan’s doctors went on strike. The doctors’ strike was deeply unpopular and collapsed after 23 days.

The 1964 federal Royal Commission on Health Services suggested a class compromise. For the working class, it recommended government-funded medical insurance. For the business class, it recommended the right to deliver medical services “free of government control or domination.”

Class Compromise


The Saskatchewan Legislative Building. (Stonedan, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

The business class and the working class have opposite interests. For the working-class, medical care is a human right and a vital necessity. For the business class, healthy profits take priority. This class conflict shapes the quality and accessibility of public programs.

Workers in Canada were strong enough to win public funding for medical care, but not strong enough to kick out the profiteers and win the fully public system they wanted.

The federal Medical Care Act of 1966 was based on class compromise. It established government funding for hospital care and doctors’ visits, while excluding essential medical services such as dentistry, eye care, home care, long-term care and prescriptions. These exclusions enabled insurance companies to continue selling policies to cover such services. (The insurance industry is exempt from human-rights legislation and can legally deny coverage on the basis of a person’s age, past medical history and current state of health.)

Another class compromise was to maintain private-sector control over out-patient care. Doctors were allowed to remain independent contractors charging for each service they provide.

From the start, Canadian Medicare was designed as a two-tier system that gave the private sector room to grow. And grow it did.

Funding Cuts

When Medicare began, Ottawa agreed to pay half the cost of all medical services performed in hospital. This did not last.

In response to the 1970s’ global recession, governments boosted profits by cutting corporate taxes.

Canadian corporations contributed more than half of all tax revenue in the 1950s. Today, they contribute around 12 percent. To offset the loss of corporate revenue, governments cut spending on public programs.

“From the start, Canadian Medicare was designed as a two-tier system that gave the private sector room to grow. And grow it did.”

In 1977, the Trudeau Liberals reduced the federal share of medical funding from 50 percent to 20 percent, forcing the provinces to also reduce their spending. The federal share has varied since then, and currently stands at 22 percent. Less funding for public Medicare enabled private corporations to step in to fill the need.

The 1984 Canada Health Act reassured nervous Canadians that Medicare was safe. Behind the scenes, politicians continued to advance the privatization agenda.

The Drive to Privatize

Business and government view public-sector spending as a drain on the economy. While public facilities can deliver social services more effectively, this costs money. The same services delivered for profit in the private sector make money, and that is seen as a benefit for the economy.

In Caring for Profit (1998), Colleen Fuller documents how plans to open Medicare to the private sector date back to the 1990s’ push to integrate the world economy (“globalization”).

Corporations need a profitable home base on which to grow into global players. Governments provide that base by, among other measures, opening public services to the private sector.

A 1994 Report to the Ontario Ministry of Health advised expanding the domestic for-profit medical industry to help it compete in the global market. The federal government was on the same track. As a 1997 Report for Industry Canada stated, promoting Canadian companies as global health-keepers is the main objective driving the strategies and plans of the government for the medical devices, pharmaceutical and health-services sector.

The Canada Health Act compels government to pay for all medical services provided in hospital. It does not prevent those services from being removed from hospital and handed to the private sector.

Every medical service that can be removed from hospital has been removed or soon will be. The only services left in the public sector will be those too unprofitable to privatize.

Loblaw Companies Ltd. is Canada’s largest food and drug retailer, with more than 2,400 retail outlets across Canada, including its Shoppers Drug Mart subsidiary. Ninety percent of Canadians live within 10 km of one of those outlets, enabling Loblaw to position itself as a major private provider of medical services.

In 2006, Loblaw purchased MediSystem Pharmacy. In 2020, it launched the PC Health app that offers live chats with registered nurses and dietitians. In 2021, it purchased a top chain of physiotherapy clinics. New grocery and pharmacy locations will include clinic spaces and older locations are being retrofitted to offer medical services.

Hospitals themselves are being privatized through Public Private Partnerships (P3s). A P3 hospital is built with public funds and managed by a private corporation. There are more than 50 P3 hospitals across Canada, and the Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnership is pushing for more P3s in medicine, education, transportation and public utilities.

P3s are a prime investment for the private sector. Governments put up the money and take all the risk, while corporations take all the profit. It’s a familiar story: we pay and they profit.

Working Conditions

Doug Ford campaigning in Sudbury during the 2018 Ontario general election. (CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Whenever the private sector take over a public program, we see a consistent pattern of higher cost, lower quality service and deteriorating working conditions. A 2021 report comparing public and private sector workers in Ontario found,Workers in the government sector (federal, provincial, and local) earn 11 percent higher wages on average than their private-sector counterparts.
84 percent of government workers are covered by a registered pension plan, compared to just 25 percent of private-sector workers.
Government workers retire about 2.5 years earlier.
Private sector workers are more than four times more likely to lose their jobs.

Schedule 2 of Bill 60 allows government to reduce spending in the public sector by creating new categories of lesser-skilled, lower-waged medical workers to perform duties currently performed by registered doctors, nurses and medical technicians.

Poor quality working conditions result in poor quality service.

“Governments put up the money and take all the risk, while corporations take all the profit. It’s a familiar story: we pay and they profit.”

For-profit facilities invest the minimum in patient care so they can maximize dividends to shareholders. That is why the Covid death rate in Ontario’s for-profit nursing homes was four times higher than it was in public municipal nursing homes. Yet these same for-profit corporations, who are responsible for the deaths of 4,000 Ontario residents, were granted 30-year licenses and permission to add 18,000 more long-term-care beds.

Burden the Family

Social services distribute the cost of caring across society. Loss of public support for medical care, childcare, home care, disability support and long-term care shifts the burden of care onto unpaid family care-givers, who are mostly women.

Employers generally pay women less because of their family and care-giving responsibilities. When public care is not available, the person with the lowest wage typically stays home to provide it. The result is a vicious circle that traps women in lower-waged jobs and also in the unpaid work of domestic care-giving.

Globally, it would cost $11 trillion annually to provide the socially necessary care that women provide for free in the home. That’s more than triple the size of the world tech industry. The system saves a ton of money, while 42 percent of all women cannot get waged work because of care-giving responsibilities.

British Columbia Family Day 2016.

 (Province of British Columbia/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The increasing loss of public programs is increasing the need for home-care and for women to be home to provide it. Restricting or eliminating access to abortion is one way to do this.

Women rely on abortion care so they can stay in waged work, support their families and leave violent partners. Loss of access to abortion is driving vulnerable women out of waged work and trapping them in the family.

Growing economic reliance on the family is also driving horrific attacks against trans people, gender rebels, drag artists, cross-dressers — any behavior that challenges traditional family and gender roles.

Damage Control, Not Health Care

It used to be that women could get secure, well-paid, union jobs in the medical industry. No longer. In the 1990s, Ontario adopted a cost-saving, “just-in-time” staffing system pioneered by the auto industry.

In Saskatchewan, hospital managers followed nurses around with stopwatches to track and time every movement, from turning around (one second) to checking supply rooms (three seconds).

“The loss of public programs is increasing the need for home-care and for women to be home to provide it. Restricting or eliminating access to abortion is one way to do this.”

Just-in-time staffing relies more on casual workers than on permanent full-time staff. The result is rising costs, more overtime, more stress-related leave and thousands of nurses leaving hospital work.

Just-in-time staffing crippled the ability of hospitals to respond to the 2003 SARS outbreak and the Covid pandemic. Nevertheless, it is still in use, while governments demand even more cost-cutting measures.

Treating staff as replaceable widgets is stirring systemic violence. So is making people wait too long for the care they need, when they get it at all. No wonder patients lash out in desperation.

Hospitals have become dangerous workplaces where staff suffer beatings, sexual assault and racist attacks every day. In British Columbia, incidents of physical violence directed against medical staff more than tripled between 2015 and 2022.

Medical workers are seven times more likely than manufacturing workers and 45 times more likely than construction workers to be injured from violence on the job. Instead of making work safe, managers post signs warning, “abuse towards staff will not be tolerated.”

When cost-cutting results in fatal medical errors, hospitals are never held responsible for creating conditions that raise the risk of such errors. Instead, individual medical workers are blamed and criminally prosecuted.

A system that violates the health of its workers and those they serve should not be called a “health-care” system. It is a system of damage-control. Employers are free to sicken, injure, and kill workers, and the medical system manages the resulting damage.

Backlog

In The Shock Doctrine, the Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007), Naomi Klein explained how the business class exploit social crises for profit.

While populations are reeling and disoriented, their economies are pillaged in a capitalist feeding frenzy. Public wealth is handed to the private sector and private debt is transferred to the public sector. A few become fabulously wealthy, and the majority are impoverished. By the time the population recovers, the economy has been looted and the theft sanctioned by law.

When the Covid pandemic overwhelmed public hospitals, governments promised to “build back better.” They did not mean better for the majority; they meant better for the profiteers.

The Ontario government insists that the pandemic-related backlog of more than 200,000 surgeries can be cleared only by doing them in private medical clinics. To promote this transition, the province under-spent its budget on public Medicare and overspent its budget on private clinics.

The public medical system could easily clear the surgical backlog if it had enough staff. In 2022, 158 emergency rooms in Ontario had to close for lack of staff, and hospital operating rooms remain underused for the same reason.

On a per-capita basis, Ontario has the lowest hospital funding, the fewest hospital beds, and the fewest nurses in the country. Fifteen thousand registered nurses and registered practical nurses have left Ontario because of low wages and abysmal working conditions, including the outrageous demand to work while sick during the pandemic.

The province insists that moving hospital surgeries to private clinics will reduce patient wait times. It will do the opposite.

No one can work in two places at the same time. Pulling medical staff away from public hospitals to work in private clinics will decimate the public system. Any reduction in wait times in the private sector will be offset by even longer wait times in the public sector.

To maximize profits, private clinics will do simple surgeries such as cataracts and hip-and-knee replacements, leaving more difficult, complex surgeries in the public system. When clinic surgeries become complicated, patients will be off-loaded to the public system, along with the cost of treating their complications (assuming patients survive the transfer).

The loss of simple surgeries will devastate small and rural hospitals. Complex surgeries were moved to larger centers some time ago. Without income from simple surgeries, smaller hospitals will have to close, reducing access in already under-served areas.

Private surgical clinics will not produce more family doctors. Last year, more than 2 million Ontarians did not have a family physician, 24 percent more than two years ago. The shortage of family doctors across Canada is predicted to more than double over the next seven years. Overwhelmed with patients, some Ontario doctors are offering rapid access to a nurse practitioner, for $30 a month.

The province says patients will not have to pay out-of-pocket in private facilities, but they will.

The Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) pays only a base rate. To meet shareholder demands for maximum profit, the province allows private clinics to “upsell” by charging patients a fee for premium or upgraded services. While politicians call this “patient choice,” those who cannot pay will have no choice. Those who can pay will be milked.

The push for maximum profit inevitably leads to fraudulent billing. As the Office of the Auditor General warned, the ministry has no oversight mechanism to prevent patients from being misinformed and being charged inappropriately for publicly funded surgeries.

Finally, the Canada Health Act does not compel government to pay for out-of-hospital care, so public funding will be reduced to the absolute minimum, returning us to pre-Medicare conditions.

Which Way Forward?

Downtown Ottawa, 2012. (Tullia, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

How can we stop the profiteers, revitalize public programs and improve working conditions in the public sector?

The Ontario Health Coalition (OHC) is a prominent research and advocacy organization that opposes profit-taking in medicine, lobbies for public Medicare and is mobilizing public opposition to Bill 60.

In 2016, the OHC launched a referendum campaign at 1,000 polling stations in 40 communities across the province. Almost 94,000 people voted, with 99.6 percent demanding that government stop cutting hospital funding and services.

The OHC is launching another referendum campaign to send the government an even stronger message to reject privatization and invest in the public system. Why would this referendum be more effective than the previous one?

Politicians already know that the majority want fully funded public services. A 2022 poll revealed that 92 percent of Canadians oppose funding cuts to healthcare, education, and other social programs, and 88 percent favour a wealth tax to fund these programs.

Public mobilization campaigns are based on the assumption that politicians will respond if enough people pressure them to do so. When such campaigns fail, blame is directed at a presumably uncaring or apathetic public, as recently expressed by one OHC representative.

There may not be a great impact as a result of the referendum, but it will inform Canadians who think they’ve got public health care. That Canadians are just unaware, completely zombie-like in their perspective is a grave misunderstanding. After decades of setbacks and defeats, most people feel powerless to improve things at work or in society. Their lives are getting harder, and they see no way forward.

Politicians lie (the Ontario premier campaigned on a promise not to privatize Medicare). Unions have failed to deliver real on-the-job improvements. And past public campaigns have proved ineffective. Discouraged people need a real win, not more campaigns that raise their hopes and deliver defeat.

No Democracy

Democracy literally means rule of the people. If Canadians lived in a democracy, they would have a fully public medical system, because the majority want it. The fact that they do not have such a system proves they do not live in a democracy.

There is no democracy in the economy. The majority get no say over what is produced, how it is produced, and for whom. The result is toxic pollution, deforestation, species extinction and global warming.

There is no democracy in foreign policy. Canadians did not vote to send troops to Haiti to put down a popular rebellion (again). They did not vote for Canada to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia or build military bases around the world. And they certainly did not vote for World War III.

There is no democracy at work. Workers have no say over what they do or how they do it, even though they know best what needs to be done and how to do it well and safely.

There is no democracy when it comes to spending the social surplus. Canadians do not get to vote on whether to invest in war or in the environment, in police or social supports, or in private or public services.

In a democracy, the business class would be forced to share their profits, which have never been higher.

In 2022, the Shell oil company posted a record profit of $40 billion, more than double what it raked in the previous year. Chevron reported a similar record-breaking profit. You could make $53,000 every single day for over 2,000 years and still not have that much. Nevertheless, every year, Canada gives $4.8 billion in subsidies to the fossil-fuel industry.

Shell station in Canada. (Raysonho, CC0, Wikimedia Commons)

Capitalism is the enemy of democracy. Any form of collectivism (prioritizing public need) is considered a threat to private enterprise, because it is. Premier Doug Ford calls government-funded or socialized Medicare “communism” and privatized medicine “freedom” — freedom for the few to profit at the expense of the many,

Capitalist Dictatorship

Modern technology could enable everyone to vote on every issue that affects their lives and society. However, capitalism is based on depriving the majority of what they need, and who would vote for that? To maintain capitalist rule, people are not allowed to vote on anything that might disrupt the flow of profit.

The entire social system is structured to transfer wealth from the working class to the business class. Every human activity is treated as an opportunity for profit-taking.

“We live in an anti-democratic, authoritarian, capitalist dictatorship. The entire social system is structured to transfer wealth from the working class to the business class.”

The dismantling of Medicare can only be understood in this context. Capitalism is based on the conversion of common property into private property. From the 18th century enclosure of common lands, to the current privatization of public services, capitalists strive to transform what belongs to all into what belongs exclusively to them. Their wealth is built on deprivation and their power on subjugation. Their greatest fear is a working-class rebellion that could end their rule.

Class Power

The quality of public programs does not depend on what the majority want or who they vote for but on the balance of class forces, that is, on which class is using its power to make the other back down.

Decision-makers respond to majority demands only when their power is threatened. When workers exercise power on the job, when they make the bosses back down, politicians get scared and deliver pro-worker reforms in hopes of buying labor ‘peace.’

Canada’s first Royal Commission to study government-funded health insurance was launched in 1919, the year of the Winnipeg General Strike.

Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) was established in 1948 to calm a post-war workers’ rebellion. As a Conservative member of the British Parliament warned, “If you don’t give the people reform, they will give you revolution.”

Canada’s Medicare system was consolidated in the context of rising workers’ struggles that peaked in the Quebec General Strike of 1972.

Picket line during the 1972 Québec general strike.

 (Michel Giroux, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Since the mid 1970s, the working class have suffered decades of setbacks and defeats, losing much of what they won in the past, including solid union jobs, the 40-hour week, and robust public services.

The more workers retreat, the more the business class push their agenda, regardless of which political party is in office. The process of dismantling Medicare began in the 1970s and has continued under every form of government: Liberal, Conservative, and NDP (social democratic).

Experience shows that the problems created by capitalism cannot be solved by electing different politicians or parties to office. No matter who is in charge, a social system that is structured to exploit humanity and nature for profit cannot be made to do the opposite — promote the well-being of people and the planet.

Social systems are structured to achieve specific goals. The goal of capitalism is capital accumulation, which it does extremely well. The call to prioritize human need is a call to change the goal of society. This is no easy task. A different social goal requires a fundamentally different social system, one that only the international working-class can construct.

All Strikes are Political

All strikes are political battles over what matters more, human need or corporate greed.

Strikes are not merely means by which workers achieve gains in the workplace. Rather, they are moments in the process by which workers constitute themselves as a class — building solidarity, raising class consciousness, creating their own norms and institutions and discovering their own forms of class power. (Class Struggle Unionism, p.59)

When factory workers reject forced overtime, when education workers demand smaller classes, when nurses demand staff-to-patient ratios and when anyone demands higher wages, they are challenging the primacy of profit, the foundation of capitalism.

The outcome of these battles depends on which class uses their power to make the other back down.

The power of the capitalist class lies in their control over social institutions including the legal system, the courts, the police, and the media. However, the power of the working class is greater.

Workers are the vast majority, and nothing moves without their effort. Stopping work stops the flow of profit. When workers stand together, they can defeat the bosses and make governments change course. To keep workers down, the ruling class must block effective strikes.

Governments justify anti-strike legislation by insisting that strikes are not in the public interest. The opposite is true. Business-as-usual is not in the public interest. Successful strikes raise living standards, which is very much in the public interest.

Playing by the enemy’s rules is a sure way to lose a battle. To strike effectively, workers must be willing to violate restrictive labor laws and make them unenforceable.

After launching a solid, 17-day, illegal strike, Canadian postal workers won the legal right to strike in 1965.

That same year, Ontario hospital workers were denied the legal right to strike in order to hold down the wages of a predominately female, immigrant and under-paid workforce. (This same strategy is still used against public-sector workers.)

“Playing by the enemy’s rules is a sure way to lose a battle. To strike effectively, workers must be willing to violate restrictive labor laws and make them unenforceable.”

In 1981, 13,000 hospital workers across Ontario launched an illegal strike to protest wage cuts and degraded working conditions. They held out for nine days against hospital management, the provincial government, the courts, the police, and the media.

Initially, union officials for the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) opposed the strike. When workers struck anyway, union officials issued a statement of support, but failed to mobilize other CUPE locals to build the strike. Isolated, the strike crumbled in defeat.

Weak Unions

University of Toronto, 2015. (OFL Communications Department/Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

Why do union officials collapse strikes, as CUPE did recently with the education workers, instead of broadening them? Why did the Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL) surrender to wage-busting Bill 124 instead of mounting a mass public-sector strike to force the province to back down?

While union officials vigorously object to the loss of public services, they refuse to organize the class power of workers to make governments reverse course.

Union officials are committed to bargaining with the business class, not challenging their rule. To protect their relationship with the employer, union officials hold workers back, mounting ineffective strikes that typically end in defeat.

Unwilling to do what it takes to deliver real on-the-job improvements, union officials launch toothless public-mobilization campaigns. Instead of leading class rebellions, they pin their hopes on electing a labor-friendly government that will pass pro-labor laws, meaning, make capitalism work in their favor.

These are safe strategies for union officials. Lobbying campaigns make it appear that they are fighting for workers’ rights, without challenging the social order that violates those rights.

For workers, this has been a losing strategy. The social order must be challenged in order to win meaningful reforms.

Centering Work

Pandemic Physician: one of the doctors in Toronto who joined a protest at the conditions of homeless shelters during the Covid pandemic, April 15, 2022. (michael_swan/Flickr/CC BY-ND 2.0)

Public-pressure campaigns appeal to all social classes to exert moral pressure on authorities to do the right thing. Such mobilizations can be powerful when linked with workplace battles. In the absence of workplace action, they can only threaten to vote for different politicians or parties. An electoral focus limits what can be achieved to what capitalism allows.

Public Medicare could be rebuilt if hospital workers won good contracts that a) pull money back into the public system and b) improve working conditions to attract and keep qualified staff. They cannot do this on their own, nor should they have to.

The labor movement is based on the principle that an injury to one is an injury to all. When any group of workers is attacked, all are at risk. When any group of workers win, it is easier for the next group to win. Workers have tremendous power when they stand together. Fighting separately is a recipe for defeat.

“Workers have tremendous power when they stand together. Fighting separately is a recipe for defeat.”

To build a fighting labor movement that can win real improvements, workers must be willing to challenge the existing order, including defying anti-worker laws. They must be willing to fight together, as a class. That means all-out support for every strike.

All-out support means public-sector workers striking together: medical, education, library, clerical, postal workers, all together. They all have the same employer – the government!

All-out support means public and private sector workers supporting each others’ strikes, not merely in words, but by swelling picket lines and mounting solidarity strikes. A strike that gains momentum day-after-day is the bosses’ worst nightmare. They will concede whatever they must to prevent a workers’ rebellion from growing beyond their control.

Who Can We Count On?

Covid exposed capitalist priorities for all to see. We saw corporations profit from the pandemic while doing nothing to protect their workers. We saw politicians accept millions of Covid deaths instead of legislating paid sick leave and making schools safe. In contrast, we saw ordinary working people risk their lives and those of their loved ones to serve the public.

Who can we count on to protect our public services? Corporations are not required to protect the public interest. Their only legal obligation is to deliver profits to shareholders.

Politicians will not protect the public when doing so means angering the business class and losing corporate donations.

The only people we can really count on are those who work in public services, because their job conditions directly affect the quality of our services.

Who would you rather manage a hospital? Executives and bureaucrats obsessed with the bottom line? Or medical and support staff who actually do the work? I will take my chance with workers in charge, any day.

It is useless to blame the loss of public Medicare on any particular politician or political party. All over the world, people are facing the same problem — a global capitalist system that values profit over human lives. The profiteers are taking everything away from us, and they will not stop until there is literally nothing left.

Last month, a million people marched in Madrid to protest the dismantling of their public medical system. Tens of thousands of nurses in the U.K. went on strike because they know that quality care cannot be delivered without quality working conditions. And in 2021, half of all strikes in the United States were strikes of medical staff.

Power on the job means power in society. A strong labor movement can win strong public programs. The loss of public programs signals a weak labor movement.

Class struggle won public services like Medicare, and class struggle is the only way to win them back. To succeed, workers must not allow the class enemy to dictate what is and is not acceptable. They must exercise their right to fight effectively, and not back down until they win.