As a result of September 11 and the United States declaration of a nebulous War On Terrorism, we once again face the chilling prospect of repression of all democratic free speech, especially speech opposing the war and its encroachments on civil rights.
In the past nine months the Canadian State has passed legislation giving itself extensive police powers, powers that go beyond those used in the War Measures Act.
The criminalization of dissent and protest is a direct result of these so called "war powers/anti-terrorism" acts. And it is intentional.
Already the threat of identifying legitimate protest and civil disobedience as “terrorism” has been uttered by Premier Ralph Klein in regards to opposition to the upcoming G8 summit. He has declared that protestors are terrorists, while the federal government spends millions in security and military actions in Alberta to secure the site of the G8 meeting in Kananaskis and surrounding areas.
The history of state repression during war and times of crisis is the story of the free speech movement and the radical labour socialist traditions, which have been repressed by the state.
During World War I the labour movement faced unprecedented assaults by the United States Government and the Canadian Government, which banned membership in anarchist groups and in unions like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), known as Wobblies.
In the United States The Palmer raids (named for the then Federal Attorney General) were aimed at the labour movement and were an assault on that movement for daring to challenge capitalism. This was even before the Bolshevik Revolution, which added a new dimension to capitalism’s fear of “foreign agitators”.
The Wobblies had been engaging in free speech fights across North America, demanding the right , the same right in fact that the Salvation Army had, to speak on street corners to workers. To voice opposition to capitalism and declare that workers needed One Big Union to challenge the bosses and their government.
Anarchist orator and propagandist Emma Goldman called for the overthrow of capitalism and Eugene Debs, leader of the Socialist Party of America, called on workers to vote for socialism.
Across America local authorities used the police to break up free speech meetings, demonstrations and public lectures. This was even before World War I broke out.
By the time of America’s involvement in WWI the radical left was speaking out against the “Imperialist War”, and declaring opposition to the draft.
Declaring the new immigrant working class from Eastern and Central Europe as unwanted foreign agitators, the Palmer Act in the United States, and the War Measures Act in Canada were used to deport labour activists, socialists, anarchists and Wobblies during WWI.
Eugene Debs, who got over 1 million votes in the American Presidential election, was jailed for advocating that workers refuse the draft. In Canada Wobblies were deported back to the United States or Europe as unwanted radicals as they were in the U.S.
Laws were passed to censor the mainstream press, which it accepted gladly, and to ban out right thousands of workers and radical newspapers and publications.
Hundreds of newly immigrated Canadians from Eastern and Central Europe were arrested and detained in internment camps during WWI since they were identified as members of the “enemy” Austro-Hungarian Empire. Ukrainians and others were then sent to forced labour camps, to build the railroad through the Rockies and to clear the National Parks in Banff and Jasper.
Even after the war ended these laws and acts were still on the books and used to repress the workers movement after the General Strikes of 1919 spread across North America and as a consequence of the corresponding social revolution in Russia.
The Russian Revolution so terrified the ruling classes in both countries, that acts which should have ended with the war were extended to be used in the 1920’s to ban membership in the Communist Party and to deport its members as “foreign agitators”.
Emma Goldman was exiled from the United States under this act, and in Canada Communist Party Leader Tim Buck faced a criminal trial and deportation under the red scare of the 1920’s.
Yet social justice, radical labour and socialist ideals spread as did the movements of workers and farmers against capitalism, in North America and Europe despite the repression. Socialism was the populist politics of the day, and workers fought to not only to win a better deal under capitalism but to overthrow it. The repression they faced was not about some abstract notion of free speech, but about how speaking out against capitalism would not be tolerated by the capitalist state.
The rise of fascism in Europe during the Spanish Republican struggle of 1936-1939, at the height of capitalism greatest meltdown; the world wide depression, led many Canadians, Americans and Europeans to volunteer to defend revolutionary Spain against the Nationalists of Franco and his German and Italian allies. Yet they too faced laws that banned their volunteering to fight in a foreign war. Despite the fact that Canada had previously raised volunteer expeditionary forces to fight against the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution.
During WWII the left made common cause with the State to fight fascism, and Russia joined the Allies in defeating Hitler and Mussolini. The same War Measures Act that allowed for conscription and detention in WWI now was used to draft Quebec War Resisters and intern Japanese Canadians as it had been used to intern Ukrainians in WWI.
With the end of WWII the uneasy truce between Russia and America and Britain were over as the race for atomic weapons balance began. America declared the Smith Act and identified communists as foreign agents under the Smith Act. This act made the entire left suspect of collaboration with Stalin’s Russia, the Cold War had been declared in 1948.
It would be a two-decade long struggle, where Republicans and Democrats alike would hound active communists and left wing labour activists. Before Joe Mcarthy began his anti-Communist trials in the late1950’s the Kennedy’s had been active in hounding the Teamsters and other unions, not for racketeering but for being hotbeds of socialism, Trotskyism and communism.
Mcarthyism, or the period of our popular culture known by that name, led the labour movement into an internal internecine battle, between its left wing, which was under attack by both the American and Canadian state, and those more moderate social democrats and liberals who saw unions in partnership with capitalists in rebuilding the world after the war.
In the 1970’s Canada saw the Federal Government under Trudeau invoke the War Measures Act against its own citizens, declaring the FLQ crisis in Quebec an apprehended insurrection, in fact a civil war. Never before had this act been used in peacetime to repress democratic freedoms of speech, assembly, and publication.
This was the last time the act was declared, and subsequently in the 1980’s was withdrawn as Trudeau introduced a formal declaration of human rights and a constitution in Canada.
As a result the Federal Liberal Government on September 11 did not have its old club, the War Measures Act, to use. Like all moments in history, and especially in those times of War, social activism and protest are fermenting this time is no exception.
We have seen the development of a mass anti-capitalist movement around the world in response to twenty years of neo-liberal free trade endeavours by governments and business.
Like the movements prior to and after WWI and during the Great Depression, this movement has arisen in opposition to the excesses and greed of global capitalism. The attacks on the United States on September 11 and its subsequent declaration of its war on terrorism, have been used as excuses by all States to increase repression against advocates of social change and justice.
The State has once again declared in its jingoistic and racist manner that its “Us Against Them”, them being foreign agitators, and the right wing has taken up the cudgel and banner by calling, once again, for the deportation of immigrants.
It’s the same old story. But freedom especially freedom to protest, are only lost if they are not used. Protests and occupations occurred as the government attempted to pass its various anti-terrorism bills- C-42, C-36, ad-naseum.
Federal and provincial New Democrats spoke out and supported popular opposition to these draconian attacks on our civil liberties.
We now face the situation where increasing police powers are being used against us, by intrusion into our lives at all levels. Immigrants suffer racist profiling and summary detention, without recourse to lawyers or contact with their families and subsequently Star Chamber justice. Police and army personnel as well as intelligence services are being mobilized to deny us the right to freedom of speech and assembly.
Even before September 11 anti-globalization activists were arrested and detained at the border. Now under the terrorist hysteria, anti-capitalist activists have been identified as public enemies of the corporate state, apparently far more dangerous to Bush, Chretien and Klein than Osama bin Lada and Al Quaida.
But this has been the history of capitalism and the left for the past 100 years, War is the result of a crisis in capitalism, that crisis has been used as an excuse to smash the workers movement and movements for social change.
Submitted to the Strathcona New Democrat summer 2002
Friday, January 14, 2005
Thursday, January 13, 2005
Book Review: BEHIND THE TIMES
The Decline and Fall of Twentieth Century Avant Gardes by Eric Hobsbawm
1999 Thames and Hudson Press (UK)
48 pages Illustrated
30th Walter Neurath Memorial Lecture, given at the National Gallery (UK) 1998
Founded by Walter Neurath fifty years ago, Thames and Hudson are the preeminent publishers of art books in the UK. For the past thirty years the annual Neurath Memorial Lecture on Art was given by one of the worlds leading art historians, curators, or artists.
The Neurath memorial lecture, marking the half century of this fine art publishing house, was given by Eric Hobsbawm, England’s leading Marxist social historian. His lecture, The Decline and Fall of Twentieth Century Avant Gardes, published by Thames and Hudson this spring, is controversial and challenging.
Hobsbawm challenges the orthodoxy of art ideologues and art historians, by declaring the avant-garde as a failed project. Modernism says Hobsbawm did not succeed, in fact it was a double failure. If Modernism is a failure as Hobsbawm asserts then ipso facto post-modernism must be viewed as still born, if not an abortion, a hysterical pregnancy in the mind of a select few academics.
Hobsbawms short essay focuses on the failure of modernism as an avant garde movement in visual arts; painting and sculpture.
“More than any other form of creative art, the visual arts have suffered from technological obsolescence. They, and in particular painting, have been unable to come to term with what Walter Benjamin called ‘the age of technical reproducibility’.”
Modernism is the technological innovation in the arts that defines the twentieth century.
Unfortunately in the visual arts, and painting in particular, modernism has meant short lived avant gardes that announced the supersession of their art as it was superseded, leaving painting less of an influence than other forms of mass reproducible art.
In many ways Hobsbawm reiterates and expands on Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay: The Work of Art In The Mechanical Age of Reproduction. Benjamin applies a Marxist analysis to art, and in particular visual art, painting, sculpting, architecture, film and photography, in looking at how the visual art has been transformed by new technologies and techniques of mechanical reproduction.
“Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses towards that art,” says Benjamin. “The reactionary attitudes towards a Picasso painting changes into a progressive reaction towards a Chaplin film.”
And Hobsbawm agrees, “The crisis of the visual arts is therefore different from the twentieth century crisis so far undergone by the other arts….The good news for avant-garde painting was therefore that it was the only live game in town. The bad news was, that the public didn’t like it.”
The avant-garde movements in painting were a reaction to the technological innovations of the twentieth century that embraced the modern while wanting to hold onto the outdated ‘special role’ that the artist had in salon society of the 19th Century.
This contradiction gave the avant-garde painters and their movements and manifestos “a paticular desperation” says Hobsbawm. “They were constantly torn between the conviction that there could be no future to the art of the past - even yesterday’s past, or even to any kind of art in the old definition - and the conviction that what they were doing in the old social role of ‘artists’ and ‘geniuses’ was important, and rooted in the great tradition of the past.”
Hobsbawms conclusion is clear, post-modernism in art predates its academic vogue by fify years in the revolutionary struggles of the avante-garde art movement. Their 'desperation' to move through and past modernism,whether dadaist, surrealist or futurist, was to be the percusor to revolution. Revolution was the avante gardes post-moderism, not the academic one which has recuperated it's name but none of its essence.*
This review was orginally published July/August 1999 issue of Fifty3 , the Latitude 53 Newsletter, Vol 1. Issue 2, Latitude 53 Society of Artists, Edmonton Alberta.
*Updated Jan. o2, 2005
For Tommie Gallie, who appreciated it the first time
art
surrealism
del.surrealism
socialism
anarchism
1999 Thames and Hudson Press (UK)
48 pages Illustrated
30th Walter Neurath Memorial Lecture, given at the National Gallery (UK) 1998
Founded by Walter Neurath fifty years ago, Thames and Hudson are the preeminent publishers of art books in the UK. For the past thirty years the annual Neurath Memorial Lecture on Art was given by one of the worlds leading art historians, curators, or artists.
The Neurath memorial lecture, marking the half century of this fine art publishing house, was given by Eric Hobsbawm, England’s leading Marxist social historian. His lecture, The Decline and Fall of Twentieth Century Avant Gardes, published by Thames and Hudson this spring, is controversial and challenging.
Hobsbawm challenges the orthodoxy of art ideologues and art historians, by declaring the avant-garde as a failed project. Modernism says Hobsbawm did not succeed, in fact it was a double failure. If Modernism is a failure as Hobsbawm asserts then ipso facto post-modernism must be viewed as still born, if not an abortion, a hysterical pregnancy in the mind of a select few academics.
Hobsbawms short essay focuses on the failure of modernism as an avant garde movement in visual arts; painting and sculpture.
“More than any other form of creative art, the visual arts have suffered from technological obsolescence. They, and in particular painting, have been unable to come to term with what Walter Benjamin called ‘the age of technical reproducibility’.”
Modernism is the technological innovation in the arts that defines the twentieth century.
Unfortunately in the visual arts, and painting in particular, modernism has meant short lived avant gardes that announced the supersession of their art as it was superseded, leaving painting less of an influence than other forms of mass reproducible art.
In many ways Hobsbawm reiterates and expands on Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay: The Work of Art In The Mechanical Age of Reproduction. Benjamin applies a Marxist analysis to art, and in particular visual art, painting, sculpting, architecture, film and photography, in looking at how the visual art has been transformed by new technologies and techniques of mechanical reproduction.
“Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses towards that art,” says Benjamin. “The reactionary attitudes towards a Picasso painting changes into a progressive reaction towards a Chaplin film.”
And Hobsbawm agrees, “The crisis of the visual arts is therefore different from the twentieth century crisis so far undergone by the other arts….The good news for avant-garde painting was therefore that it was the only live game in town. The bad news was, that the public didn’t like it.”
The avant-garde movements in painting were a reaction to the technological innovations of the twentieth century that embraced the modern while wanting to hold onto the outdated ‘special role’ that the artist had in salon society of the 19th Century.
This contradiction gave the avant-garde painters and their movements and manifestos “a paticular desperation” says Hobsbawm. “They were constantly torn between the conviction that there could be no future to the art of the past - even yesterday’s past, or even to any kind of art in the old definition - and the conviction that what they were doing in the old social role of ‘artists’ and ‘geniuses’ was important, and rooted in the great tradition of the past.”
Hobsbawms conclusion is clear, post-modernism in art predates its academic vogue by fify years in the revolutionary struggles of the avante-garde art movement. Their 'desperation' to move through and past modernism,whether dadaist, surrealist or futurist, was to be the percusor to revolution. Revolution was the avante gardes post-moderism, not the academic one which has recuperated it's name but none of its essence.*
This review was orginally published July/August 1999 issue of Fifty3 , the Latitude 53 Newsletter, Vol 1. Issue 2, Latitude 53 Society of Artists, Edmonton Alberta.
*Updated Jan. o2, 2005
For Tommie Gallie, who appreciated it the first time
art
surrealism
del.surrealism
socialism
anarchism
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
Anarchism and the Left
I will limit my comments to the current state of anarchism in Canada, as our anarchism is more closely associated with socialism of the European left than with the libertarian/liberal right wing individualist traditions coming out of the United States.
And it is here we must make a differentiation, because while in the US the Libertarian movement is identified with republican liberty, individualism and the free market, with a corresponding development in the American anarchist movement with a heavy emphasis on Nietzche, Stirner and individualistic anarchism. Such has not occurred in Canada to the same degree. So American libertarianism, right and left, has had little impact in the Great White North.
Oh sure there is a Libertarian Party of Ontario, and various neo-conservative pseudo libertarian think tanks, the Fraser Institute, the National Citizens Coalition, Market Institute of Atlantic Studies, etc. but you cannot separate these from their business class interests and their political party; the Canadian Alliance.
Objectivism and Ayn Randism, is a miniscule movement on University Campuses. It appeals to Engineers who believe Rand is a philosopher of some renowned because they failed to take any philosophy courses, they believe she is a great novelist, because they didn’t take any English classes either. An equal amount of Engineers that read Rand read Technocracy.
However during a recent anti-war demonstration in Edmonton the capitalist libertarians clustered to denounce War and Socialism! Considering they were less than a handful, in a sea of 20,000 mostly social democrats, those that believe in Socialism pitifully outnumbered them. And they were even outnumbered by members of the IWW as well as the Anarchists who carried the banner: No War but Class War. A statement more startling to the mass of demonstrators than the Libertarians presence, this was because it was an Anti-War march, with hippie feel good pacifism as ideology.
On the left in Canada we have a mish mash of so called anarchists and anti-authoritarian socialists, and I think it is here we need to clear up who is calling themselves what these days and see if they really are anarchists or just non aligned leftists.
We have the anti-capitalist /anti-globalization movement, which has ties to NGO’s and unions. Many self-described anarchists are also members of one of these NGO’s the nationalistic statist Council of Canadians. This anti globalization organization was founded by Mel Hurtig, a nationalist Liberal, and is run today by his heir apparent the non elected Maude Barlow, she too is a nationalist Liberal. It was to be the nucleus of a new Nationalist Social Democratic political party much like the New Political Initiative (NPI). The lack of democratic organization and top down personality cult does not hinder the involvement of young activists.
In relation to the anti-capitalist movement these activists are not really anarchists as much as non-aligned leftists. They have no party to join so they start their own. Complete with mutual inter personal ground rules and common ideological viewpoints, the non-aligned leftist is not an anarchist as much as a consumer of left wing viewpoints, many undeveloped and undefined.
This was clear from the Sven Robinson NDP Leadership campaign and in some aspects the recent Layton leadership campaign. In the case of Sven Robinson, thousands of young activists, many calling themselves anarchists mobilized in support of Sven’s leadership. They swelled the NDP ranks with young people, who were then smashed and disenchanted when Sven without the courtesy of ‘consulting’ with his troops, crossed the floor and admitted defeat. The impact of this sellout was enormous and created an atmosphere of alienation and disenchantment with social democratic electoral politics that created the New Politics Initiative. But again the NPI while relying on these young activists, relies on a self appointed hierarchy of leaders, Judy Rebick, James Staford and yes Sven Robinson. These media stars are professional paid agitators promoting direct democracy, while practicing politics as usual.
Pierre Ducasse the Quebecois candidate for NDP leadership spoke from a left libertarian position, shocking many, especially with his call to end the parties focus on statist solutions and look at the libertarian alternative of worker/producer, consumer cooperatives. Here was a libertarian candidate for Leader of the NDP, one who faced opposition from the trade union and left establishment in the NDP.
Within the New Socialist Group (NSG) the anarchist milieu did not arise as a left wing critique of founding theoretician Dr. David McNally and his criticisms of anarchism, but as direct action anarchists who support black bloc actions at demonstrations.
Another common thread amongst these self-described anarchists, is that of a fetish for Direct Action and Consensus politics. Were the recent black bloc attacks against the Gap, in Montreal during the August WTO meeting, a protest of their use of Sweat Shop labour or because the Gap is merchandising the circle A and protestor chic clothing. It has its own line of protest chic which happens to be exactly what wearing black and covering your face with a balaclava has become. The social image of the black bloc is too reminiscent of the black shirts of Germany, and in many ways its anonymity and tactics are more akin to fascism then anarchism.
The black bloc vandalism is not followed by any communiqué, we are supposed to telepathically grok what the meaning of their actions are. And in media-ated society this image is that of the old style anarchist bomb chucker. This was also the case of the three activists who pied Ralph Klein, of course this was no Riechstag fire, but like their predecessor Milus Van der Lube, they too failed to issue a communiqué as to what precipitated their actions.
While Cesar may deserve his due, the masses side with the leader when he is attacked which is why fascists engage in armed actions, to increase the calls for law and order and the fuerher principal. Let us not forget the French fascist movement of the 1970’s was known as Action Direct.
Fascism is reactionary content combined with revolutionary emotion. Wilhelm Reich
The fact is that the black bloc is imitating the 1970’s autonomists, who themselves degenerated into Laroucheite style attacks on workers on picket lines. The Italian autonomists attacked striking workers claiming they were the labour aristocracy and the autonomists were the voice of the unemployed, the lumpen, Negri’s “new class” not the mass worker but the social value worker.
Direct Action is not vandalism or destruction of property during demonstrations to make the demonstrations more radical, it is the use of the sit down strike, the use of occupations and squatting, the taking of action, the wild cat strike. If Starbucks workers walked out in a wild cat strike that would be direct action, the trashing of the storefront window is mere vandalism.
Amongst the self-defined anarchist youth are several tendencies, the individualistic, ironically tend to see process as most important, as well as lifestylism. All the old shit of the New Left seventies is back again, communal love fests, white skin privilege, and the need for a nudist vegan bicyclist lifestyle, with a dash of consensus building.
Ah consensus, the anarchists answer to the tyranny of parliamentary procedure, consensus versus Roberts rules. Again we return to the seventies, with this Anti-Mass critique. These anarchists insist all meetings must drag on for hours as each person is asked their opinion, fingers waving in the air in silent appreciation of a point well made, looking a lot like a born again revival meeting only lacking the whoo whoo sound effects of the three stooges. The only problem is that every political point is heard and never critiqued. The local anarchists are great at building united fronts with disparate nationalists, patriarchal religious view, liberals and leftists, but never have their own political position.
The popular Consensus process is not left wing but actually arises from the work of Edward Demming and the Team Management theories of the eighties that were imposed on the working class in order to dumb down and multitask work. There is the rub, the consensus model is used to get workers to buy into being part of a team, a team that opps has to cut back hours of work, numbers of workers, workers self management subverted by capitalism becomes the self management a thousand cuts, but hey we all feel good because we all had input and we reached consensus. Fingers wave whoo whoo.
So where do we go from here? In the anarchist milieu in the US the debate is on that anarchism is anti politics, anti-organization. With the recent anti-war movement the right wing libertarians are suddenly abandoning their neo-conservative/neo-liberal allies, and wanting a dialogue with the anarchist left.
Since Canada is a social democratic country, with a philosophy of social justice, collective as well as individual rights, the appeal of libertarianism comes up when some one tries to tell us where we can smoke, or tries to impose their rules on us. For most of the time, we are in many ways indistinguishable from the rest of the left, except during elections, and even then many anarchists, non-aligned leftists, still hold their noses and vote for the NDP, or Greens, or CP. Anarchists are involved in the NPI but the contradiction of a self appointed leadership of the same old leftwing professional revolutionaries still has not been confronted by those participating in this project.
We need a debate and a dialogue as to what the hell it means to be an anarchist in these movements, what direct action really is ( a good example would be the wave of sit down strikes that spread across North America in 1937, rather than the current tendency to trash the G@P).
We need to look at the appeal that Pierre Ducasse had with his libertarian economic proposals of worker/consumer coops within the NDP milieu.
Where anarchists belong to existing political parties, socialist, green, NDP, etc. and in the unions, we need to ask what it is we are doing and why.
Within the broader social movements, struggles against poverty and homeless activism, animal rights, feminism, gay rights, paganism, etc., again we need to articulate what anarchism means in these movements.
So far the articulation of anarchism on the left has been the nihilist response of Marlon Brando in the Wild Ones; “What’cha rebelling against Johnny?”
“ I dunno, what’cha got?”
Published in Any Time Now, Winter 2003 as part of a larger discussion on
Anarchism and the Left.
socialism
labour
Canada
Politics
anarchism
feminism
political
And it is here we must make a differentiation, because while in the US the Libertarian movement is identified with republican liberty, individualism and the free market, with a corresponding development in the American anarchist movement with a heavy emphasis on Nietzche, Stirner and individualistic anarchism. Such has not occurred in Canada to the same degree. So American libertarianism, right and left, has had little impact in the Great White North.
Oh sure there is a Libertarian Party of Ontario, and various neo-conservative pseudo libertarian think tanks, the Fraser Institute, the National Citizens Coalition, Market Institute of Atlantic Studies, etc. but you cannot separate these from their business class interests and their political party; the Canadian Alliance.
Objectivism and Ayn Randism, is a miniscule movement on University Campuses. It appeals to Engineers who believe Rand is a philosopher of some renowned because they failed to take any philosophy courses, they believe she is a great novelist, because they didn’t take any English classes either. An equal amount of Engineers that read Rand read Technocracy.
However during a recent anti-war demonstration in Edmonton the capitalist libertarians clustered to denounce War and Socialism! Considering they were less than a handful, in a sea of 20,000 mostly social democrats, those that believe in Socialism pitifully outnumbered them. And they were even outnumbered by members of the IWW as well as the Anarchists who carried the banner: No War but Class War. A statement more startling to the mass of demonstrators than the Libertarians presence, this was because it was an Anti-War march, with hippie feel good pacifism as ideology.
On the left in Canada we have a mish mash of so called anarchists and anti-authoritarian socialists, and I think it is here we need to clear up who is calling themselves what these days and see if they really are anarchists or just non aligned leftists.
We have the anti-capitalist /anti-globalization movement, which has ties to NGO’s and unions. Many self-described anarchists are also members of one of these NGO’s the nationalistic statist Council of Canadians. This anti globalization organization was founded by Mel Hurtig, a nationalist Liberal, and is run today by his heir apparent the non elected Maude Barlow, she too is a nationalist Liberal. It was to be the nucleus of a new Nationalist Social Democratic political party much like the New Political Initiative (NPI). The lack of democratic organization and top down personality cult does not hinder the involvement of young activists.
In relation to the anti-capitalist movement these activists are not really anarchists as much as non-aligned leftists. They have no party to join so they start their own. Complete with mutual inter personal ground rules and common ideological viewpoints, the non-aligned leftist is not an anarchist as much as a consumer of left wing viewpoints, many undeveloped and undefined.
This was clear from the Sven Robinson NDP Leadership campaign and in some aspects the recent Layton leadership campaign. In the case of Sven Robinson, thousands of young activists, many calling themselves anarchists mobilized in support of Sven’s leadership. They swelled the NDP ranks with young people, who were then smashed and disenchanted when Sven without the courtesy of ‘consulting’ with his troops, crossed the floor and admitted defeat. The impact of this sellout was enormous and created an atmosphere of alienation and disenchantment with social democratic electoral politics that created the New Politics Initiative. But again the NPI while relying on these young activists, relies on a self appointed hierarchy of leaders, Judy Rebick, James Staford and yes Sven Robinson. These media stars are professional paid agitators promoting direct democracy, while practicing politics as usual.
Pierre Ducasse the Quebecois candidate for NDP leadership spoke from a left libertarian position, shocking many, especially with his call to end the parties focus on statist solutions and look at the libertarian alternative of worker/producer, consumer cooperatives. Here was a libertarian candidate for Leader of the NDP, one who faced opposition from the trade union and left establishment in the NDP.
Within the New Socialist Group (NSG) the anarchist milieu did not arise as a left wing critique of founding theoretician Dr. David McNally and his criticisms of anarchism, but as direct action anarchists who support black bloc actions at demonstrations.
Another common thread amongst these self-described anarchists, is that of a fetish for Direct Action and Consensus politics. Were the recent black bloc attacks against the Gap, in Montreal during the August WTO meeting, a protest of their use of Sweat Shop labour or because the Gap is merchandising the circle A and protestor chic clothing. It has its own line of protest chic which happens to be exactly what wearing black and covering your face with a balaclava has become. The social image of the black bloc is too reminiscent of the black shirts of Germany, and in many ways its anonymity and tactics are more akin to fascism then anarchism.
The black bloc vandalism is not followed by any communiqué, we are supposed to telepathically grok what the meaning of their actions are. And in media-ated society this image is that of the old style anarchist bomb chucker. This was also the case of the three activists who pied Ralph Klein, of course this was no Riechstag fire, but like their predecessor Milus Van der Lube, they too failed to issue a communiqué as to what precipitated their actions.
While Cesar may deserve his due, the masses side with the leader when he is attacked which is why fascists engage in armed actions, to increase the calls for law and order and the fuerher principal. Let us not forget the French fascist movement of the 1970’s was known as Action Direct.
Fascism is reactionary content combined with revolutionary emotion. Wilhelm Reich
The fact is that the black bloc is imitating the 1970’s autonomists, who themselves degenerated into Laroucheite style attacks on workers on picket lines. The Italian autonomists attacked striking workers claiming they were the labour aristocracy and the autonomists were the voice of the unemployed, the lumpen, Negri’s “new class” not the mass worker but the social value worker.
Direct Action is not vandalism or destruction of property during demonstrations to make the demonstrations more radical, it is the use of the sit down strike, the use of occupations and squatting, the taking of action, the wild cat strike. If Starbucks workers walked out in a wild cat strike that would be direct action, the trashing of the storefront window is mere vandalism.
Amongst the self-defined anarchist youth are several tendencies, the individualistic, ironically tend to see process as most important, as well as lifestylism. All the old shit of the New Left seventies is back again, communal love fests, white skin privilege, and the need for a nudist vegan bicyclist lifestyle, with a dash of consensus building.
Ah consensus, the anarchists answer to the tyranny of parliamentary procedure, consensus versus Roberts rules. Again we return to the seventies, with this Anti-Mass critique. These anarchists insist all meetings must drag on for hours as each person is asked their opinion, fingers waving in the air in silent appreciation of a point well made, looking a lot like a born again revival meeting only lacking the whoo whoo sound effects of the three stooges. The only problem is that every political point is heard and never critiqued. The local anarchists are great at building united fronts with disparate nationalists, patriarchal religious view, liberals and leftists, but never have their own political position.
The popular Consensus process is not left wing but actually arises from the work of Edward Demming and the Team Management theories of the eighties that were imposed on the working class in order to dumb down and multitask work. There is the rub, the consensus model is used to get workers to buy into being part of a team, a team that opps has to cut back hours of work, numbers of workers, workers self management subverted by capitalism becomes the self management a thousand cuts, but hey we all feel good because we all had input and we reached consensus. Fingers wave whoo whoo.
So where do we go from here? In the anarchist milieu in the US the debate is on that anarchism is anti politics, anti-organization. With the recent anti-war movement the right wing libertarians are suddenly abandoning their neo-conservative/neo-liberal allies, and wanting a dialogue with the anarchist left.
Since Canada is a social democratic country, with a philosophy of social justice, collective as well as individual rights, the appeal of libertarianism comes up when some one tries to tell us where we can smoke, or tries to impose their rules on us. For most of the time, we are in many ways indistinguishable from the rest of the left, except during elections, and even then many anarchists, non-aligned leftists, still hold their noses and vote for the NDP, or Greens, or CP. Anarchists are involved in the NPI but the contradiction of a self appointed leadership of the same old leftwing professional revolutionaries still has not been confronted by those participating in this project.
We need a debate and a dialogue as to what the hell it means to be an anarchist in these movements, what direct action really is ( a good example would be the wave of sit down strikes that spread across North America in 1937, rather than the current tendency to trash the G@P).
We need to look at the appeal that Pierre Ducasse had with his libertarian economic proposals of worker/consumer coops within the NDP milieu.
Where anarchists belong to existing political parties, socialist, green, NDP, etc. and in the unions, we need to ask what it is we are doing and why.
Within the broader social movements, struggles against poverty and homeless activism, animal rights, feminism, gay rights, paganism, etc., again we need to articulate what anarchism means in these movements.
So far the articulation of anarchism on the left has been the nihilist response of Marlon Brando in the Wild Ones; “What’cha rebelling against Johnny?”
“ I dunno, what’cha got?”
Published in Any Time Now, Winter 2003 as part of a larger discussion on
Anarchism and the Left.
socialism
labour
Canada
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anarchism
feminism
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Tuesday, January 11, 2005
Anarchist Censorship
The Article Infoshop Does Not Want You to Read!
I emailed Chuck O the 'owner' of Infoshop, an American anarchist web site, on 14.06.2004 asking him to post my article Post-McQuinn Anarchism,(see below) on Infoshop as part of the Post-Left Anarchist debate he and Jason McQuinn, 'owner' of Anarchy 'a Magazine of Desire Armed', are foisting on the anarchist movement in North America.
I had posted it to the International Anarchist Studies website as a reply to the debate ongoing there between Peter Staudenmaier and McQuinn.
It is in the reply section under Peters article entitled:
Anarchists in Wonderland: The Topsy-Turvy World of Post-Left Anarchy
In reply to my request to the Rev. Chuck O (as he titles himself at Infoshop, clearly appointing himself as an anarchist of the 'catholic' persuasion: his way or the highway) that he publish this on Info shop he sent me the following dismissive response which I have included below. And in my own charming way asked him again to publish it. He did not reply.
That little spat did nothing, there was no posting of my article on Infoshop. So on June 18 I posted it myself under Anarchist Opinion on Infoshop. And low and behold, it still, as of this date June 22, has not appeared.
The very reverend Chuck O. as the owner of the site, in violation of the anarchist principle of free speech, has censored an opinion he does not like. I leave it to you to determine, whether you agree with me or not as Voltaire would say, whether such obvious censorship should be practiced by self proclaimed anarchists.
In true American entrepreneurial style of his libertarian predilections, Chucky has decided that ownership allows him the corporate right to determine what gets published on 'his' web site. So much for Infoshop being a voice of the anarchist movement. This is another case of Anarchism Inc. once again proving that "the only free press belongs to those that own one."(A.J. Liebling)
Now that I am on Chucks enemies list I feel I am in good company. But at least we all know now that Chuck O. is truly an American libertarian, and like his pal McQuinn, they believe they own the rights to (c) anarchism. This is the reality of their post-left-anarchism. Hey they would do Murray Rothbard proud just kidding, he at least supported free speech. McQuinn and Chuck O. are not anarchists they are members of that fraternity of American Exceptionalism known as libertarianism. Ironically they would say they are the left of that movement.
Finally I am incredulous that the Institute for Anarchist Studies has even given the Post Left Anarchism debate any academic credibility by allowing it to be seriously discussed in the Theory and Practice section of their web site. It is a chimerical debate of navel gazing proportions. It is simply an argument circulated by McQuinn and Co. as simple economic self promotion, it sells his magazine, and gets him paid speaking engagements. It has no more credibility than that.
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CHUCKO EMAIL
At 11:36 PM 6/14/04 -0700, you wrote:
>What a pile of crap and ignorant garbage!
>
>It's a good thing that anarchism has moved beyond marginal cranks such as
>yourself!
>
>Oh, by the way, as somebody in "McQuinn's circle of friends," I've long
>appreciated Bookchin andhis contribution to anarchism.
>
>Chuck0
>
Ouch you cut me to the quick I am stunned and agog at your debating skills, your Swiftian editorial pen, please, please do not pummel me oh great one.
If I am a marginal crank it must be because I belong to a marginal movement or are you in your American wisdom assuming that the anarchist movement is marginal in Canada?
Did you even bother to read my article or in fact do you even read the shit you publish on Infoshop, be it the utopian ranting of CrimeThInc. or even over the top ranting of your 'friend' McQuinn when he is challenged.
Shall we hum a few bars of Phil Ochs small circle of friends....you can barely fund raise the money you need to continue your publishing efforts, while Democrats score millions from their web sites, talk about marginal.
But I digress, I don't give a shit if you don't like my opinion, at least if you are going to debate my ideas debate them, do not dismiss them as crap or marginal, twit. Do you intend to publish it or are you the Chief Anarchist censor now?!
As for you liking Bookchin good for you, however I maintain that McQuinn is trying to posit his critique as post-bookchin, and he is not a major anarchist theorist except in his own mind, and obviously yours. I noticed you didn’t mention Dolgoff so am I to assume that like McQuinn Dolgoff is too left for you.
Yours from the margins,
Eugene Plawiuk
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AND NOW THE ARTICLE CHUCK O. DOESN'T WANT YOU TO READ:
Post-McQuinn Anarchism
Girl: What'cha rebeling against Johnny?
Johnny: What'cha got!
The Wild Ones
This in a nutshell sums up the rebellion of Jason McQuinn, and the debate on Post Left Anarchism. That this debate, which in itself is a strawdog, should appear on the web site of IAS befuddles the mind (as it clearly befuddled Mr. McQuinn from his snarky comments on your asking him to publish here).
It is strictly an American debate. It takes place in the context of the American Anarchist Milieu and that milieu alone. It does not encapsulate the rest of North America, such as Canada or Mexico, nor does it address the anarchist movement in Europe, Latin America, Central America, Africa, the Middle East, and Australia-Asia.
It is an argument that has been used to sell a magazine, and to prop up the Infoshop web site with an apparent theory they can embrace. It did not need to be placed with such prominence on the IAS site, which only gives greater credence to this little idea whose time has come and, unfortunately for its authors, gone.
It is not a new idea, as McQuinn admits, it is founded on the ranting of self-appointed theorist Bob Black. Mr. Black is very good himself at taking other peoples ideas and making $$$$ by restating them as his own. In this case his critique of work, workerism, etc. was lifted from LeFargue's The Right to Be Lazy, the proto-situationist text The Right to be Greedy, and from the writings of Wilhelm Reich and the European far left (such as Paul Cardin/Castoradis and Maurice Briton).
Mr. Black has made a tidy sum and a small reputation by attacking and denouncing those he does not like. This he believes makes him a critical thinker in critical theory, actually all it does is make him a critic.
A rebuttal of Mr. Black's post-left anarchism is the essay McAnarchism by Tim Balash.
McQuinn's essay is overly generalized, setting up strawdogs (and proceeds to berate his critics for doing to him what he does in his own essay) of some ambiguous Leninist left. Painting with broad brush strokes the workers movement, the socialist movement, and the communist movement and yes the anarchist movement as if it were all one large monolithic structure unaffected by history. This static strawdog is then knocked down with a fallacious argument that there needs to be a new theory of anarchism, that there has not been any new anarchist theory since Malatesta died.
Ah and that’s the crux of this post left anarchism. It is the new theory of the movement, brought to you by Mr. McQuinn via Mr. Black. The fact that Mr. McQuinn, supposedly a student of Paul Goodman, misses a vast school of post-Malatesta anarchist thought in his essay shows just how specious his argument is. He mentions nothing of Emma Goldman, Alexader Berkman, Elise Recluse, Victor Serge, Ward Churchill, Nicholas Walter, Stewart Christe, Albert Meltzer, Wilhelm Reich, Alex Comfort, George Woodcock, Paul Goodman, Sam Dolgoff, Murray Bookchin, etc. etc. I could go on and on. But you get the point.
That is the crux of his argument, that there has been no new anarchist theory, (which is an entirely false argument) and post left anarchism is the answer. If it is an answer what is the question? Well simply put it is what is the alternative to Murray Bookchin. Let’s call a spade a spade shall we. Stripped of its vacuous rhetoric, vast flourishes of generalizations, McQuinn is, like his mentor Bob Black, attacking Bookchin. So Post-Left Anarchism should rightly be called Post Bookchin Anarchism.
No one in the McQuinns circle of friends, those being the folks publishing and editing his little magazine, likes Bookchin. And resent his popularity, his efforts to theorize, any more than they like Sam Dolgoff, or Malatesta. Like Bob Black, they literally seethe with apoplexy against anyone who would align anarchism with class struggle.
It is the individual that is supreme, cries these radical subjectivists. Ah yes that revolutionary school of thought of Francis Dashwood, DeSade, Stirner, Nietzche, and Crowley that desire must be unleashed. The individual is king, we are all to be kings, in worlds of our own creating. Such magickal thinking is not a theory it is the musings of would be aristocrats, looking backward to some decentralized village community where hermits freely associate or lock their doors.
It is American Exceptionalism not anarchism. It's roots are in the rural artisan culture of America that harkens backwards to its past, rather than accept that America was and is part of the ascendancy of Capitalism. It is, like Proudhonism and his American proponents Tucker, Josiah Warren and Lynsander Spooner, the anarchism of small shopkeepers.
There is nothing new in this. Its clear in the wrintings of the Greenwich Village bohemian anarchist artist Hyppolite Havel, long before Mr. McQuinn or Mr. Black recuperated it for themselves.
Stripped of its rhetoric it is the theory that Anarchism is Anti-Political, and Anti-Organization. That small sect of Anarchists that would have nothing to do with any organization that would have them as a member, as Grucho Marx would say.
And again it is an attack on those who see class struggle as a crucial part of anarchism, in this case the unstated object of this attack is Bookchin, but it could just as easily be Dolgoff.
There is no class struggle in America is the crux of American Exceptionalism and it is the crux of McQuinns theory. So what is the basis of the struggle? Well as the quote says above, What'cha got. We should just revolt, because freedom is revolution. Or as Abbie Hoffman once said; Revolution for the Hell of It.
This is not a theory and it is certainly not an argument that demolishes class struggle anarchism, nor is it even an alternative to class struggle anarchism. It would like to be but it isn't. It is however an argument that is made to criticize class struggle anarchism, and to say American anarchism is an exception.
It is an attempt to say that any subjective struggle is anarchism as long as it is not organized, not permanent, and not political.
It is the anarchism of food coops, food not bombs, homes not bombs, the black block. It is the anarchism of hippie culture, and DIY. It is in a word not anarchism but reformism. McQuinn's anarchism can be summed up in the old cliche, if it feels good do it.
Shucks I just hate dating myself, by even remembering all this old stuff from the Movement days of the late sixties and early seventies, but since we are looking backwards with McQuinn and company, his argument is based in the little pamphlet still in circulation entitled Anti-Mass. Add some Bob Black school of vitrupitive caustic comments posing as a critique and there you have post left anarchism.
In fact I am surprised that McQuinn did not entitle his essay Listen Anarchist! But that would have been too obvious as to whom his comments were aimed at. After all the Bookchin debate has been going on for decades so it hardly qualifies for a "new" theory.
I certainly hope that we can move on from this navel gazing self-aggrandizing debate that exists simply to sell Mr. McQuinns magazine and assuage his ego that he his a profound thinker. His desire may be armed but his Post Left Anarchism is sightless.
June 2004
Posted on the web on Indymedia, Resist.ca, FLAG, and through email lists.
NOT posted on Infoshop by decision of the ‘owner’ Chuck Muson.
socialism
Canada
Politics
anarchism
political
Monday, January 10, 2005
An Infantile Caricature of Anarchism
Ann Hansen author of Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla
Ann Hansen was a member of the Squamish 5 AKA the Direct Action 5 from Vancouver. In the 1980’s they engaged in robberies, bombings, firebombing and other acts of violence against property. In one action a bombing of a Litton plant in Ontario ten workers were seriously injured. The group was eventually arrested and imprisoned. Ann has recently published a book defending their actions, she is currently on tour across Canada promoting her book and her ideas around armed struggle and urban guerrilla warfare to anti-capitalist and anti-globalization activists.
"I am certainly not opposed to peaceful protest. Yet, I also believe that to make real social change people and movements must be prepared to go beyond. In some cases that means so-called political violence. We didn't see ourselves as terrorists. I prefer the term sabotage because that implies a strategic action, with references to economic issues, and not simply a violent reaction or lashing out in frustration. I don't agree with terrorism as a political tactic because it is morally wrong to punish the innocent for the crimes of their leaders. And it's not politically effective because fear does not enlighten people, but instead will often drive them to support even more reactionary actions by their leaders."
Ann Hansen, author of Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla, in conversation with Peter Steven, 2001
Ann Hansen and the Direct Action / Squamish 5 group out of Vancouver never were anarchists. They are and were armed struggle advocates, influenced by Maoism and third worldism more than by the philosophy of socialist anarchism.
Their infantile actions, during the mass movement against the cruise missile, resulted in the bombing of the Litton factory and the injuring of ten waged workers. Litton had been the focus of the anti-nuke/anti-cruise movement because they produced cruise missile guidance systems, systems that had been developed at Simon Fraser University by a resident professor. The cruise guidance systems were developed in Canada and tested here because our geography and terrain is similar to Northern Russia.
The idiocy of the Squamish Five, also known as the Direct Action 5, was their complete isolation from the mass movements, which they impacted on with their bombings.
Its as if the lessons we learned over a century ago that the Politics of Dynamite[1] were a failure. The Haymarket riot, the French Anarchist bombings and robberies in the 19th Century, and of course the ill fated stupidity of, Alexander Berkmans attempt to assassinate Frick, came back to haunt our movement in the form of this little band of adventurers.
They and their ilk have mistaken direct action for attacks on property. They are divorced from the struggle for building mass movements. This same mistaken ideology, that anarchism equates with violent actions like street fighting, sabotage, bombings, window breaking, looting, is reflected in the misanthropic politics of some Animal Rights Activists and the Black Bloc.
In Edmonton in the 1990's the self styled anarchist/direct action Animal Liberation Front managed to firebomb a truck load of Lobsters at Billingsgate Foods, in an effort to liberate these poor souls from their ultimate demise on a dinner plate. Instead they cooked these victims of speciest oppression. Other acts of violence against property the ALF in Edmonton took were equally stupid and resulted in an increase of police repression against the movements they were involved in and their ultimate capture and imprisonment.
Having not learned their lesson several members of the Edmonton ALF were released from jail only to be implicated by the police in sending mail bombs to neo-fascist Ernest Zundel as well as BC Bear Hunters and their hunting associations. Sheesh some people never learn; you can't just blow up a social relationship....you need mass mobilization of people to change the structure of society.
Young liberals, who mistakenly believe they are anarchists, embrace the actions of Ann Hansen and her pals. In reality they are infantile leftists, literally as well as figuratively. This infantilist form of liberalism, mistakenly equated with anarchism, was reflected in the politics of Love and Rage group, as well as the Black Block and CLAC.
The members of the Squamish 5 were the product not of classical anarchism but of the New Left the theories of the Weathermen, Maoism, the idea of vanguardism reeked through their thought and actions. Not believing workers and the masses are intelligent enough to resist capitalism they sought to replace mass action with their "direct" actions of firebombing, and blowing up hydro lines. With little care for how this impacted on the struggles that they embraced.
“That we believed we could create a revolution ourselves. On the contrary, our aims were always more modest--to jolt activists into seeing the seriousness of the issues, and to hope that our radical actions might spark a new militancy. During our trial and afterwards we were looked at with a magnifying glass, but there was no serious discussion about the need for, and effectiveness of, our strategies.”
Ann Hansen, author of Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla, in conversation with Peter Steven, 2001
Class War is the continuous struggle of waged and unwaged proletarians struggling against capitalism and its state, it is not an armed struggle of small bands of individuals. The fetish for so called “direct action” bombing, smashing property, fighting with the cops, etc. is closer to the actions of fascist movements, and in fact there is no difference between the direct action of liberals when they engage in bombing from the actions of fascists[2] who do the same thing.
Whether blowing up or smashing property is done by misdirected liberals or by fascists it always leads to police and state repression of mass movements and activists. The underlying ideology developed in the sixties and seventies was that such repression was good (sic) as it would force the working class to wake up and embrace the struggle. Such cynicism in those so young. Such worldly knowledge divorced from reality, such disdain for the dull monotonous day to day struggles working class folks have to face.
Of course such disdain comes easily when you live in a dope smoking, lifestylist commune. Building the new society within the shell of the old.... divorced from the reality of the single mother working to feed her kids, divorced from the reality of the hydro worker, or even the Litton workers you injured. And let’s understand that Ann and her pals for all their apologetics, are thugs. Litton did not stop production of cruise missile parts, all that happened was that workers, those oppressed and exploited by capitalism, were injured by their self appointed revolutionary saviors.
"I'm sorry about some things that happened, but not everything. An underground group was probably not necessary--we should not have been so isolated from the social movements. The bomb we used at the Litton building was too big and we didn't properly assess the police response. We thought that they would take our warning seriously and clear the building. I am very sorry that people were hurt. And yet, there was, and is, huge damage being done by our governments--look at the legacy of the Cruise missile, in the Gulf War, for instance."
Ann Hansen, author of Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla, in conversation with Peter Steven, 2001
To blame the cops, as Ann has in interviews, for not warning Litton, is to absolve oneself of responsibility for ones actions, a truly liberal trait not one of anarchism. Instead of admitting she and her pals in the Squamish 5 fucked up, it’s the cops fault.
Well the cops didn't plant the bomb. And if the Squamish 5 hadn't wanted to blow something up they wouldn't have armed it. Which they did. And 10 workers were injured. They didn't care. Anyone, who works for the Man is as guilty as the Man, is the logic here.
The adventurism of armed struggle was embraced by many who called themselves anarchists. Anarchism was a convenient label, nothing more. It was convenient for Ann and her comrades as it was for the Unabomber. It was and still is an inappropriate one. The politics of the Squamish 5 and other such groups that support armed struggle, like Arm the Spirit, are being promoted as belonging to the milieu of the broad left anti-capitalist movement. Ann is currently peddling her book to this milieu as if she has anything to teach us. In reality they are vanguardists no less than the Leninists they decry. In fact the armed struggle ideology of these vanguardists is by its very nature, secretive and isolated from the real movement, making it more akin to fascism[3] than any form of left wing politics.
"We suffered from all those mistakes, and we also didn't fully think through the consequences. But the most important error was in not realizing that without a revolutionary social movement in place urban guerrilla tactics won't work--there is no continuity. These links between social movements and radical actions are strategic political questions that must be addressed."
Ann Hansen, author of Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla, in conversation with Peter Steven, 2001
Ann now says she has learned her lesson. That armed struggle must occur as part of a mass movement. Oh joy. Again the vanguardist ideology, that these real revolutionaries will lead us dumb masses by their actions, is still underlying her philosophy. Even a superficial reading of Lenin and Trotsky would illuminate these junior Che Guevera's. An armed insurrection of the working class, is not the same as armed struggle of little bands of vanguardists. It is part of a mass rebellion and overthrow of the state during a revolution. This is the difference between the Russian and Spanish Revolutions, where the masses armed themselves and the failure of Che in Bolivia.
What lessons can we learn from Ann and her friends? Nothing. They have nothing to say or teach us. They are not people we should be emulating, unfortunately some self styled anti-authoritarian liberals (interesting they call themselves anti-authoritarian instead of anarchist) still embrace this vanguardist armed struggle philosophy. Ironic because it is an authoritarian vanguardist ideology, that dismisses real class struggle, and real work of building a mass movement, for the instant gratification of making the news.
It is the philosophy of the street fighter and juvenile delinquent. It would be hoped it would be a phase one grew out of, sort of like being a greaser. Yet this form of infantile direct action, repeats itself over and over again in the anarchist milieu. Now we have the Black Bloc advocating the same stupidity as Ann has.
The Squamish 5 should never be confused with Haymarket martyrs. They were not class war political prisoners, since they attempted to replace class struggle with armed struggle.
Unfortunately, history has shown that the politics of street fighting ends up creating just as many Horst Wessels[3] as it does Ann Hansens. There is no difference between them regardless of Ann’s protestations to the contrary.
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[1] “propaganda by deed”: that is, the use of violence as a political weapon and a form of political expression. It was used in Europe and the United States by various anarchists. “In France from 1891-4, Ravachol exploded bombs in the homes of two officials connect with a recent anarchist trial,; he was guillotined in 1892. Valliant was executed for a bomb-explosion in the Chamber of Deputies in December 1893, which killed nobody. Emile Henry threw a bomb in the Cafe Terminus, which , much against his intentions, caused only minor injuries; executed in May 1894. Caserio, a young Italian anarchist, stabbed President Carnot to death in June of the same year.” Victor Serge Memoirs of Revolutionary , Chapter 1 page 42. Oxford Press 1963
[2] Benito Mussolini was educated as a socialist and anarchist. He embraced the direct action of street fighting and the use of revolutionary violence; the politics of the deed. Deserting the socialist cause, he applied the ideology of "politics of the deed" to creating the fascist movement in Italy. “In Italy,in Pagine Libere of 1 January 1911, a young Socialist agitator, Benito Mussolini, was chanting the praises of the anarchist desperadoes” Victor Serge Memoirs of Revolutionary , Chapter 1 page 43. Oxford Press 1963.
[3] Nazi Youth Leader in Berlin’s working class Ghetto who led street fighters against Communists. He was killed early on and became the first Martyr for the Nazis, who created the hymn the Horst Wessel song in memory of him.
Published in Social Anarchism #35 Winter 2002-2003 (edited version),
Any Time Now, On Infoshop with discussion and comments, posted to a variety of email lists and on Indymedia and Resist.ca
Armed Struggle is NOT Class StruggleA Reply to My Critics
RE: Ann Hansen an Infantile Caricature of Anarchism
Of course I used loaded language and sarcasm to confront, what I see as hero worship of an advocate of armed struggle by, those who equate anarchism and direct action with street fighting, bombings, store trashing, shop lifting, and revolution for the hell of it. No demonstration is a success unless the cops attack it seems to be the underlying ideology of these self-declared activists. That my critique of Ann and the Direct Action 5 has upset these folks is to be expected.
When Ann is advertised as A Revolutionary Speaker that is pretentious, she is no revolutionary. She was a provocateur and remains one. We have to ask who benefits from her touring while on parole. By advocating for Armed Struggle, which she still does, to the newly growing anti-capitalist/anti-globalization movement of young activists, the State has effectively set a fox amongst the chickens. If her actions are inspirational to activists, then the State will have succeeded in diverting us from movement building. Someone will be inspired to take up the call of Armed Struggle, in isolation from the rest of the anti-capitalist movement, opening it up to increased police repression and political division. This occurred in the mass movements of the seventies and again in the eighties with the actions of the Weathermen, Symbionese Liberation Army and other provocateurs and promoters of the underground armed struggle. Need we repeat that those that don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it?
After all the breast beating about my being condescending most commentators still managed to miss the point. Armed Struggle is NOT Direct Action, it is not class struggle, it is not part of movement building, it is isolationist substitionist and vanguardist. It is not a moral question about the uses of violence, it is a political question about strategies and tactics that help promote social revolution.
Those who advocate Armed Struggle, seek to justify their actions as necessary because either larger political and social actions such as demonstrations and strikes have failed, or because of an inbred cynicism that they have the revolutionary practice and vision while the rest of us don’t. It is clearly an authoritarian theory and practice at best and bourgeois individualism at worst.
Some of those who criticized me wanted to challenge me on a factual basis; that no one was killed at Litton. That is true, I had changed it in most sections of my article, referring to the fact that 10 workers were injured. When editing I had failed to remove that one reference. Mea culpa. But 10 wage slaves were harmed, while Litton continued with business as usual and the cruise missiles were tested and eventually used in the Persian Gulf War. So the bombing was not effective, period.
Several writers dismissed these injuries with comments like “it would be far better to bomb the home of a Litton executive or that Simon Fraser University professor who designed cruise missile guidance systems. But I can't feel too much sympathy for the imperialist-country labor aristocrats who make the weapons that kill real proletarians in the oppressed nations.” This commentary, referring to low paid wage slaves in North America as equivalent to the well heeled bosses of unions shows that there is little real concern for workers where we live, while concern is shown for those workers in the newly industrialized world. It is bleeding heart liberalism. And as Stuart Christie once said; a liberal with a gun is still a liberal.
This is exactly the Third Worldism, I referred to in my critique. It permeates the anarchist web sites and chat sections as well as the thinking of many in the anti-globalization movement. It is the mistaken political ideology that workers here are labour aristocrats even if they are janitors or security guards working for corporate capitalism.
That ideology also permeates the environmentalist movement, and was typical of Earth First, and its monkey-wrenching tactic of spiking trees to save them, while disregarding the injuries to forest workers. If the workers got injured, the logic goes, then they deserve it, since they are willing participants in the destruction of the Old Growth forests. In fact it took Judi Bari and the IWW to challenge and change this view, though as we can see there is still many who support this view. Working for the man makes you the man, is liberal politics at its worst.
This ideology has been an abject political failure as the Weathermen, the Red Army Faction (which Ann was involved with) and Red Brigades as well as sections of the Italian Autonomists have proven. The logical conclusion of some autonomists was to attack unionized workers in Italy because they were not as impoverished as other members of the proletariat. Capitalism exploits us all regardless of geography, that is the point of globalization, to expand capitals ability to exploit the whole world, all of its people, its animals and its resources.
I was challenged over the ALF/ELF. They did not have the influence some have credited them for. Rather it was the mass movement against the fur trade that forced Europeans to quit buying furs that had greater influence on the fur industry in Canada. In Edmonton’s case the businesses targeted were local furrier’s, small craftspeople mainly small businessmen. Big businesses like the Hudsons Bay were not targeted as frequently. Many furriers in Edmonton were older well established family businesses, they closed due to retirement, and decreasing business as the anti-fur message became more popular.
The public protests at the stores drew attention to the anti-fur campaign far more effectively than the sabotage of the ALF, which included gluing the locks of the doors and some window damage. Are furs still available, you bet, but the small local furriers have passed on, stepping off the stage of local capitalism. Such is the history of petit-bourgeois, the artisan and small craftsman in the era of monopoly state capitalism. The small craftsman lives between becoming a capitalist or becoming a proletarian, as their business is superceded by history.
In the case of the hunters associations in BC and Ernst Zundel members of the ALF were busted and implicated in both cases as their own testimony on the web indicates. But both the RCMP and CSIS dropped the charges in 2000 after a flubbed five-year investigation. The ALF is not really underground, the cops know who they are, and have targeted them for continual harassment and observation. This is the same as Ann and her comrades, their house was bugged. The cops have extensive documentation on the ALF and its actions. So they will always be a target and thus of limited influence except as agent provocateurs in a larger movement. Knowing this, that the state has identified these activists and is engaged in a campaign against them, we must protest against state sanctioned harassment, but we must also be critical of the stupidity of these folks to continue to give the state grounds for that harassment. There are other tactics that can be used by activists, besides guns, bombs and razor blades in letters. Again these only encourage the States repressive apparatus to act.
It is the mass movement for animal rights, not the ALF, that has influenced the consumer society, and that is what it is; a movement around consumerism. Its impact on production and workers such as farm workers, trappers, etc is limited to shutting those industries down with no alternative work plans. Such is the limitation of liberal environmentalism. The anti-fur movement, as a consumer action, doesn’t give a shit about producers, its purpose is to eliminate fur production. Period. Thinking capitalism cannot adapt to this consumer movement shows the vacuous thinking of the ALF and other animal rights activists. Mistaking this liberal bleeding heart moralist movement of consumers for an anti-capitalist struggle, is the fuzzy thinking of those who would place the struggle for faux fur on par with class struggle.
Another comment made was typical of the foggy liberal thinking that passes off as radical, whether self identified as anarchism or anti-capitalist; “She did not come across at all as putting armed struggle above other tactics. She simply stated that it should be a tool in our toolbox of tactics and that we should try to understand people who use these tactics (worldwide) before we pass judgment upon them.”
There we go armed struggle is just another tool in the toolbox of diverse tactics. Again the liberal cant of “we should understand people who use these tactics.” Yes we should and where appropriate we may defend them but not their actions. Politics is about passing judgement on people’s theories and their actions. Politics is the understanding of those people and their actions and we have a responsibility to critique and challenge them. Regardless of where in the world they live. Again the aura of liberalism; don’t criticize struggles elsewhere because of our privileged position in North America.
Well capitalism is global, has been for the last hundred years. Nationalism and anti-colonial struggles have failed to create socialist societies; at best they have created some nationalized industries and developed a proletariat out of a peasant society. At worst they have been juntas and military dictatorships with a revolutionary rhetoric that belies the real politics practiced. Such is the case of Cuba, which one writer referred to as a successful example of armed struggle. Except Cuba was not a socialist revolution, anarchists and socialist labour activists were jailed and their organizations banned. Gays were persecuted, freedom of speech, and criticism of Castro were restricted. Workers have no autonomous organizations; all unions are state sanctioned.
Yes Cuba has faced an American Imperialist blockade and constant assaults by the neo-fascist Cuban exile community. And yes you can oppose that blockade, and still call for workers revolution in Cuba. Such was the case of the old Soviet Union as well. Cuban troops who fought with the Marxist-Leninist MPLA in Angola were used to protect Shell Oil refineries that had been seized by oil workers during the Angolan revolution. It seems that workers had mistakenly taken to heart the teaching of Marx and Lenin and declared themselves a Soviet, placing the oil refineries under workers control. Again an armed guerrilla war is not a revolution and never will be. As it came to power the MPLA made sure that the oil kept flowing. The role of these armed anti-colonial struggles in the developing world was to transform agrarian peasant economies into modern capitalist economies.
Another comment on my critique was:
“This is another example of white first world privilege. We have the fucking privilege to be passive and sit on out asses unlike people in "developing" and "third world" countries who have to fight every day of their lives. If the state wants to come down on you, then its gonna come down on ya. Not much you can do about that. The reason the state doesn't do much shit to us (Yeah, yeah, yeah they may send in an infiltrator or two, watch you a little bit and shit like that), is because we are not a threat to it. Groups like MOVE, the Black Panters, American Indian Movement, and even the Southern Christian Leadership Center (lead by Martin Luther King Jr.) were a bigger threat to the power. Until you have constant survallience on you or get murdered in your sleep don't complain about "a heavy-handed response from the State" which you nor I know a damn thing about. “
Actually we all do know the heavy-handed response of the State since 9/11. Canada has passed repressive anti-terrorist laws as has most OECD countries, restricting our rights and increasing police powers.
That being said we see the old New Left Third Worldism being exhorted here. White first world privilege, etc. This was tripe in the 1970’s when the Weathermen and Rote Army Fraction used it. Thirty years later it’s still tripe, albeit with the stench of a rotting corpse of a bankrupt political ideology long ago defunct. And here I will point out to my critics that their new found ideology of post modernism, post colonial deconstruction and identity politics all come down to being a rehash of New Left political ideology, from the seventies. Which was when most of the academics professing this ideology were active.
Indeed it is ironic that Third Worldism and liberal guilt still blinds radicals in North America to the fact that since the 1950’s the working class worldwide has increased. Agrarian economies have disappeared, peasants have been forced from their villages, and to become wage slaves in Nike factories. The newly industrialized world, such as the Pacific region, or the Middle East, has a lot more in common with the West then ever before, workers are organizing and mobilizing now not against this or that petty dictatorship, but against global corporations and global capital, as workers.
The armed struggle guerrilla warfare of the seventies, the nationalist armies in the forest are now a side show in most of these countries, isolated and reduced to ethnic and religious minorities, not mass movements of workers. Nike and other companies expanding into the newly industrialized nations have created an industrial working class, whose experiences are now the same as workers in other industrialized countries.
Our solidarity with workers in Nike factories in the Pacific Basin is not charity, it is seeing a common struggle that is global, there is a global working class that is revolting against capital. When Cicih Sukaesih, a Nike worker from Indonesia traveled across Alberta on a labour sponsored tour she experienced strikes of so called “white privileged workers” (many of them women). These workers made more money and had more privileges than her. At the Alberta Federation of Labour convention, she clearly identified her struggles at Nike with striking Safeway workers. She saw the struggles as class struggles that even here in the advanced, developed west, class struggle continued. Sure the picket lines were safer, but the struggle was the same as she had experienced at Nike in Indonesia. And yes she saw this struggle as women’s struggle, but she clearly identified it as a class struggle. This from someone with little formal education, but who had put her life on the line working for Nike and daring to organize a union under a military dictatorship. That is class-consciousness, something lacking in the declasse activist milieu that whines about white privileged workers.
The Black Panthers, AIM, even workers who faced down cops, Pinkerton agents, the military, all these acted in self defense. While the politics of the Panthers, MOVE, AIM can be critiqued, their actions when armed were NOT those of the Weathermen, RAF or even Ann Hansen and her crew. These movements engaged in self-defense of their communities against the racist police and the state. Just as the Pullman strikers and other strikers have had to defend themselves against armed police and militias. This is self-defense.
I did not say I was against workers and the oppressed arming themselves in self-defense. I stated that advocates of armed struggle would replace mass struggle with the secretive cabal of self-appointed liberators. The struggle of the Panthers and AIM were in the streets and on native land. They were not underground, hiding out and striking out as the Weathermen, RAF, Red Brigades, and Ann and her friends did.
Direct Action is more than trashing a Nike or MacDonalds store. Isolated trashing of a MacDonalds store even if it is during a larger protest is not the same as the mass movement direct action struggle in France by Jean Bove, which also effectively sabotaged MacDonalds. That was a mass action not the action of a self appointed cell of psuedo-guerilla warriors who blow up a MacDonalds and disappear into the night.
Direct Action was when Rosa Parks left the back of the bus and Afro-Americans had sit ins in Whites Only restaurant section. Direct Action was the linking of Afro American community issues with strikes such as the Memphis Workers strike where Martin Luther King was about to join before he was assassinated. Direct Action can also apply to the tactics of Saul Alinsky, when he exhorted Chicago Afro-Americans to pay their rent and bills in pennies.
The Panthers emulated Malcolm X’s call for community self defense, “by any means necessary”. While showing off being armed, the popular photo image from the capitalist press, the reality was that the Panthers “served the people” by creating alternative programs, that the state and capitalism was unwilling to provide in the Afro-American community. The Panthers were effectively practicing Direct Action by providing hot lunch programs to Ghetto children. That was their real success and the real threat to the state.
When communities organize to resist uranium exploration in their watershed, as happened in the B.C. interior in the late 70’s, that threatens their lives and safety. When ordinary people, cub scout leaders, house wives, union workers, take actions which are ‘illegal’ or are confrontational, stopping miners from exploring, blockading roads, this is direct action.
One writer commented, tongue in cheek, that I was hard pressed to explain violence on picket lines. Again, where does the violence originate? From cops protecting scabs crossing the line. The use of scabs by the boss and their protection by the state immediately places the workers in a position of being opposed to the state and capital.
Workers resist on picket lines, they are loath to attack scabs, unless provoked. Workers can be armed as happened in mining strikes in the twenties, but they are armed in self-defense, against armed agents of the state.
I do not believe that my critics would be exhorting us to go out and leaflet striking workers encouraging them to kill and maim scabs. That would be a provocation. Yet the actions of small vanguards of armed struggle advocates are embraced and supported, which is no less vanguardist than exhorting workers to kill scabs.
Finally there are those who complain my critique is divisive, and that it does not represent all kinds of anarchism. Well true, there are many kinds of liberal notions of what anarchism is. Some claim that nudism, bicycle riding, veganism, etc. are forms of anarchism, some claim that environmental issues, or identity politics (gay, feminist, black, etc.) are anarchism. These are as Luigi Fabbri and Sam Dolgoff has pointed out forms of bourgeois anarchism, bourgeois individualism, and mistaking classic liberalism for anarchism. I include below a selection from Victor Serge on the Anarchist movement in France at the turn of the twentieth century, which I feel expresses the failure of this ideology of the politics of the deed and the politics of lifestylism.
Another writer attacks me stating that I put class above other issues. In fact all forms of oppression exist within a class society, they are aspects of capitalism and patriarchal authoritarianism. Regardless of ones identity, one either owns the means of production or sells their labour (even Bakunin encouraged Anarchists to read Marx, something I would remind those who accused me of being a “Marxoid”).
When a company pollutes or degrades the environment it also endangers its workers health and safety both at the source of production and in their communities. So environmental issues are not separate from class issues. When workers are divided along artificial lines of privilege, which is the source of racism, or divided by sexuality, nationality or culture and religion, these too are class issues. To identify with oppressive nationalism’s, religions or cultures, because they are not part of the White First World is to fail to understand the common source of anarchism and other forms of socialist thought in modernism.
The call of Modernism, which has yet to be fulfilled, is Fraternity, Equality, and Liberty, which we can sum up with one word: Solidarity. The idea that an Injury to One is an Injury to All is modernist. The attempt to fracture the movement for human freedom and socialism comes when we separate people into their individual identities. The postmodern dilemma is to see us as gay or straight, white or black, yellow or red, male or female, young or old, First world or Third World, rather than seeing us as all part of the working class.
Freedom for women in the west is no different than freedom for women in the Middle East. Embracing the hajib here to express solidarity with Muslim women is no different than saying Nuns are free to be who they are, and adopt the practice of wearing the whipple. These institutions of patriarchal religions are Medievalist, and oppressive and must be overthrown. No God, No Master is the anarchist answer to identity politics.
As to politics, well that’s what we are all about, if Ann extols the virtues of Armed Struggle I have the right to critique this political misdirection. My little article is far from as vile a threat to the anarchist movement as the very real political naivete of those who call themselves anarchists and claim that Armed Struggle is just “another tool in the tool kit “ of mass resistance to globalization.
To that, no matter how old fashioned and out of sorts it is I reply; Class Struggle NOT Armed Struggle.
Postscript:
“Anarchism swept us away completely because it both demanded everything of us and offered everything to us...Shot through with contradictions, fragmented into varieties and sub-varieties, anarchism demanded, before anything else, harmony between deeds and words( which in truth is demanded by all forms of idealism, but which they all forget as they become complacent). Individualism has just been affirmed by our hero Albert Libertad. His teaching which we adopted almost wholesale was: "Don't wait for the revolution. Those who promise revolution are frauds just like the others. Make your own revolution, by being free means and living in comradeship." Its absolute commandment and rule of life was: 'Let the old world go to blazes.' From this position there were naturally many deviations. Some inferred that one should 'live according to Reason and Science, and their impoverished worship of science led them on to all sorts of tomfoolery, such as saltless, vegetarian diet, and fruitarianism and also in certain cases, to tragic ends. We saw young vegetarians involved in pointless struggles against the whole of society. Others decided 'Lets not be outsiders'. The only place for us is the fringe of society. They did not stop to think that society has no fringe, that on one is ever outside it, even in the depth of dungeons, and that their 'conscious egoism', sharing the life of the defeated, linked up from below with the most brutal bourgeois individualism. Many comrades were soon to slide into what was called 'illegalism', a way of life not so much on the fringe of society as on the fringe of morality. 'We refuse to be exploiters or exploited', they declared without perceiving they were continuing to be both these and what is more, becoming hunted men. So ended the second the second explosion of anarchism n France. The first equally hopeless, was that of 1891-4, signaled by the outrages of Ravachol, Emile Henry, Valliant, and Caserio . (Ravachol exploded bombs in the homes of two officials connect with a recent anarchist trial,; he was gullotined in 1892. Valliant was executed for a bomb-explosion in the Chamber of Deputies in December 1893, which killed nobody. Emile Henry threw a bomb in the Cafe Terminus, which, much against his intentions, caused only minor injuries; executed in May 1894. Caserio, a young Italian anarchist, stabbed President Carnot to death in June of the same year.) The same psychological features and the same social factors were present in both phases; the same exacting idealism, in the breasts of uncomplicated men whose energy could find no outlet in achieving a highter dignity or sensibility, because any such outlet was denied to them. These struggles also testified to the failure of an ideology. Between the copious theorizing of Peter Kropotkin and Elisee Reclus, and the rage of Albert Liertad, the collapse of anarchism in the bourgeois jungle was now obvious. In Italy,in Pagine Libere of 1 January 1911, a young Socialist agitator, Benito Mussolini, was chanting the praises of the anarchist desperadoes. These struggles have taught me that, in any man, the best and worst live side by side, and sometimes mingle-that what is worst comes through the corruption of what is best.” Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary. Chapter 1 World without Escape: France 1906-1912. Pages 18, 20, 42-44.
January 2004
Web posted on Infoshop with discussion and comments, posted to a variety of email lists and on Indymedia and Resist.ca
[1] “propaganda by deed”: that is, the use of violence as a political weapon and a form of political expression. It was used in Europe and the United States by various anarchists. “In France from 1891-4, Ravachol exploded bombs in the homes of two officials connect with a recent anarchist trial,; he was guillotined in 1892. Valliant was executed for a bomb-explosion in the Chamber of Deputies in December 1893, which killed nobody. Emile Henry threw a bomb in the Cafe Terminus, which , much against his intentions, caused only minor injuries; executed in May 1894. Caserio, a young Italian anarchist, stabbed President Carnot to death in June of the same year.” Victor Serge Memoirs of Revolutionary , Chapter 1 page 42. Oxford Press 1963
[2] Benito Mussolini was educated as a socialist and anarchist. He embraced the direct action of street fighting and the use of revolutionary violence; the politics of the deed. Deserting the socialist cause, he applied the ideology of "politics of the deed" to creating the fascist movement in Italy. “In Italy,in Pagine Libere of 1 January 1911, a young Socialist agitator, Benito Mussolini, was chanting the praises of the anarchist desperadoes” Victor Serge Memoirs of Revolutionary , Chapter 1 page 43. Oxford Press 1963.
[3] Nazi Youth Leader in Berlin’s working class Ghetto who led street fighters against Communists. He was killed early on and became the first Martyr for the Nazis, who created the hymn the Horst Wessel song in memory of him.
Published in Social Anarchism #35 Winter 2002-2003 (edited version),
Any Time Now, On Infoshop with discussion and comments, posted to a variety of email lists and on Indymedia and Resist.ca
Monday, December 27, 2004
Alberta Provincial Election 2004
FAIR COMMENT
Below are articles I have written during the Alberta Provincial Election Campaign.
The Election was held November 22, 2004 and saw the ruling PC's lose 17 seats, which still left them with an overwhelming majority of 61 seats in the legislature, returning Alberta again to a one party state.
These stories were also posted on the web at Indymedia, StriaghtGoods, and Rabble.ca, as well as being circulated over a variety of listserves.
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Ralph Klein kicked off the provincial election campaign kicking the disabled while they are down. Ralph is using his position as Premier not just as a bully pulpit, but as the pulpit of a bully. Making a caricature of disabled protestors, who rightly demanded a few crumbs from the Alberta Advantage (oil), Klein instead warned them that they looked able enough and that he would crack down on those abusing the system.
This is the same Premier who while drunk in public entered the single men’s hostel in Edmonton seeking out the poor to shove, berate, and threaten. His excuse then was he had a drinking problem.
No he has a poverty problem, he cannot believe that anyone in Alberta, er HIS Alberta, isn't as well off as the members of the PC's (Party of Calgary). He likes to bully the poor, the disabled, those who protest his decisions or lack of decisions.
Lets compare crooks, there is no evidence that people on AISH are taking advantage of us. For 5 years there has been no increase in AISH payments and for the past decade the number of people on AISH has not increased. 31,450 Albertan’s get $850 a month from AISH, half that is federal funding, excess federal tax credits for the poor get clawed back by the Alberta government. That comes out to over $2.6 million annually, less then the cost of the current Senate election.
If the disabled work their wages are used to claw back the $850. If they do work it will be at minimum wage, which is the lowest in Canada. In Alberta working full-time for minimum wage would earn a you $860 a month. The severely disabled are expected to live on $10,200 a year. That is below the national poverty level, no matter who calculates it Stats-Can or Ralph’s pals at the Fraser Institute.
If there is any financial funny business going on its in the Legislature, not in the AISH program. Take the Health minister's executive assistant for one. He got $400,000 for giving advice on health care projects, work he supposedly did but did not have any evidence of doing, and he got his contract without tender. We call that cronyism if not criminal. But in Ralph's World he calls it good government. Lets see that $400,000 would support 4000 severely disabled Albertan’s on AISH for a year, with spare change left over.
If this were the federal government doing this, Ralph would be joining his Calgary pal Steven Harper calling the Liberals crooks. Wait it did happen, it’s called Adscam.
But this is Alberta home of the longest lasting single party government in North America, if not the world. We are a single party state and have been for over 70 years. First it was 20 years of the United Farmers of Alberta then 35 years of Social Credit theocracy and now 33 of the right wing Tories. That is longer than Castro has ruled Cuba. It is longer than one party state rule in the Soviet Union.
Ralph likes to refer to the mythical volk of Alberta, as severely normal, so there cannot be anyone poor in Alberta, or injured workers, or seniors, or disabled. And woe betides those that insist they are not getting a fair shake in Ralphs Volkstadt. It’s the Alberta Advantage Uber Alles.
Peter Elzinga, a long time PC insider and the un-elected deputy Premier for Edmonton, is still managing this election for the party of Ralph, while he is employed by Suncor as legal counsel as they sue the Alberta Government over royalties they owe us.
And Ralph is going to lecture the disabled on abuse of the system. That’s a clear case of the kettle calling the pot black.
With 74 of 83 seats Ralph can bully anyone he wants from his Teflon pulpit. He can with the aplomb of a King Charles dismiss the legislature as a damned nuisance that gets in the way of his government. Nor does his view of parliamentary democracy include an opposition, they too are a nuisances, just as Cromwell was.
He can walk out of the Federal health care meeting to go gambling, dropping some cold Alberta cash into the VLT's in Quebec. Showing his political solidarity with the Quebec government of his protege; Jean Charest no doubt.
He dropped a wad that would have paid the rent and utilities for at least one person on AISH.
Ralph likes to drink, so we privatize the government liquor stores. Ralph likes to gamble so we introduce VLT's into bars. On the other hand, women’s shelters in Alberta have to beg for money to meet increased insurance costs.
He can hold another useless Senate election a $3 million dollar red herring while claiming there is no democratic deficit in Alberta. It would do Bonnie Prince Charlie proud. And like other leaders who follow the fueher principle Klein dismissed elected health board representatives two years into their mandate, because they were not Tories. They were another opposition to his government. He has dismissed school board trustees for the same reason. They voiced opposition to government cuts. Vox Populi is not popular with Ralph. If Ralph and the PC's had their way every level of government in Alberta would be dominated Tories. And opposition be damned.
And the reason for electing another senator in waiting, we already have two from the last exercise in futility in 2001, is because Alberta Tories want to reform the federal government. But no reform is needed in Alberta insists Ralph, where the legislature sits less often then in any other parliamentary democracy. In Alberta the most important matters of State are decided in closed cabinet meetings.
But that should be expected from a Premier who states in the legislature that Augusto Pinochet is just a misunderstood democrat. He was forced to overthrow a democratically elected government because it was socialist. Them reds got what they deserved. And with unabashed aplomb his evidence for this opinion was an essay he wrote for a University course. The fact he plagiarized whole sections of his essay off the internet was dismissed with a wave of a hand. And the iron fist of his Minister of Learning who met with Alberta’s University Presidents and demanded they write public letters of support for Ralph saying he didn't really cheat on his homework. In Alberta when it comes to the crime of plagiarism, to paraphrase Geoge Orwell, some undergraduates are more equal than others.
Ralph claims there is no democratic deficit in Alberta. In Calgary home of Canada's corporations and right wing lobby groups, all is well for the Party of Calgary and Ralph, the Reform, er Alliance, er Conservative Party of Stephen Harper demands fixed election dates, referendum, recall, and proportional representation in Ottawa. What is good for goosing Ottawa dare not be gandered in Alberta.
This election is being held 3.5 years into a possible 5-year mandate. And while our Teflon Emperor has proclaimed this is his last election that will mean Ralph expects to rule until 2010. By that time Alberta may be the last single party state in the hemisphere, including Cuba.
For the mythical "severely normal Albertans; Martha and Henry" Ralph may be their boy, for real Albertan’s living in Ralph’s World it’s Caveat Elector.
ALBERTA’S NEW DEFINITION OF ‘PC’ (Party of Calgary)
When Ralph Klein announced shortly before the election call that his government was giving $3 billion dollars as a ‘gift’ to Alberta municipalities, it looked like another typical Tory election ploy of buying votes with our own money. But in this case there was a twist, the $3 billion was not going to be divided evenly between Alberta’s two largest cities. Rather Ralph’s hometown of Calgary was going to get $1billion, Edmonton was going to only get $750 million based on its population, while the rest of the money was to be spent across the province in smaller cities and municipal districts. The reason Ralph gave for giving Calgary more than Edmonton was revealing he stated that it was because the Mayor of Calgary had come up with the idea in the first place and asked him for the money. Once again Calgary benefited while the Capital City was short-changed by Ralph and his PC party.
In Alberta it has become clear that in this election the term PC does not mean Political Correctness, nor does it mean Progressive Conservative it’s new meaning is PARTY OF CALGARY. Having re-branded themselves the Progressive Conservative Association, deleting any reference to being a political party in their ads, the PC’s as they have been known since 1971 have become a regional party representing Central and Southern Alberta. They are an ‘association’ a corporation which runs the province from the real centre of power; Calgary. They have returned to their roots, which was in the office towers of Calgary in particular the offices of the Mannix Corporation, which hired Peter Lougheed and later Ernest Manning.
After 35 years in office as the provinces ruling party, the Social Credit party of Manning was in decline with a lame duck Premier Harry Strom. In the 1971 election the small PC caucus of six swept the province with an overwhelming majority. And has stayed in power for almost as long as their predecessor.
The success of the PC’s under Lougheed was engineered by the former quarterback by amalgamating the interests of Calgary’s Liberals and Tories and with a backroom deal with Ernest Manning to quietly throw his support behind the new party pulling southern Alberta votes in for the Lougheed team. The Socreds disappeared off the map over the next decade, slowly becoming irrelevant as the PC’s amalgamated their party along with the Liberals. Only the NDP with one member in the house stood as an opposition to the Lougheed Government.
With the oil boom of the seventies and eighties, the governing Tories could do no wrong. Until that fateful mechanism of capitalism, the boom and bust business cycle slammed into the province in the 1980’s. The recession that had been hitting the rest of the world and Canada had been avoided in Alberta with the expansion of the tar sands oil project. The boom busted. Unfortunately it busted as prices for refined oil increased, while raw product declined. The bust in Alberta was a boon for eastern Canada, in particular Ontario, where much refining was done. Alberta’s export prices were kept down for a made in Canada price, while its ability to refine, process and export to the US market were limited. This was the real crisis that caused oil executives in Calgary to leap from their executive offices in a repeat of the great Wall Street crash of 1929. Construction dried up, laying-off thousands of trade’s workers, thousands of white collar workers in the oil industry in Calgary were laid off, steel and pipe manufacturing plants closed.
In order to stabilize oil prices in Canada, the minority Liberal Government in Ottawa under pressure from the NDP introduced the NEP, (ironically named since an earlier form of the NEP was Lenin’s attempted to create a market space for capitalism in Russia in the 1920’s) and created Canada’s national Oil company PetroCanada. In Alberta this partial ‘nationalization’ of Alberta’s oil production in order to create a provincial refining processing industry is still seen to this day as having ‘caused’ the crash of the eighties. What Albertan’s forget when they mention the dreaded NEP is the famous Globe and Mail photograph of then Prime Minister Trudeau and Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed, toasting champagne glasses together over the creation of PetroCanada, as a result of the NEP. PetroCanada saved Calgary from its market forced crash. It revived the oil industry in Alberta by increasing investment in the refining process, and contrary to the gnashing of teeth and spitting of blood over the NEP, allowed for Alberta to enter an unprecedented twenty-year boom.
A room full of monkeys could have governed this province over that time, and in fact that is exactly what happened.
After Peter Lougheed retired, the natural governing party of the PC’s elected its first Edmontonian as leader; Don Getty. Getty while an Edmontonian and former football teammate of Lougheeds, was well connected with Calgarys Petroleum old boys network. He was their point man in the Provincial capital, acting an oil business consultant and lobbyist. He however was unfortunate enough to takeover the party as the economic crisis continued in Alberta. However with record oil reserves, the government was able to throw money around ‘like a drunken sailor’ in order to save collapsing farms, as well as collapsing secondary and tertiary businesses. In rural Alberta it subsidized secondary processing plants for canola, beef, and pigs. In order to save the construction industry, and maintain its rural Social Credit base it built hospitals and schools, it expanded university construction, and in order to win seniors votes it built seniors housing in the cities. And it got re-elected.
Unfortunately even though the government built much, it was unable to fund staffing for seniors homes, hospitals or universities. And it couldn’t find enough tradesmen to build infrastructure.
It invested in meat packing plants, in a hazardous waste reduction plant in Swan Hills, it began partnerships with Japanese companies in building processing plants for timber export, all with an open cheque book paid with oil money and interest from the heritage trust fund.
Getty ended his short-term premiership in a personal and political crisis. His son was busted dealing cocaine (after his parole he was hired by Tory Bagman Ron Southern of ATCO as favour to Getty), his reputation was besmirched by the party as having been a lame duck premier. The knives were out after Getty lost his seat in Edmonton to a Liberal and hadto run in Stettler in a safe seat to retain his party leadership. Getty continued to be attacked by the opposition as well as by party insiders, in particular by leadership candidate Ralph Klein. The Liberals who had not been on the Alberta political map since they lost to the United Farmers at the beginning of the 1920’s had been revived as a centre right party to contest the Tories domination of the Alberta political map.
Under Getty the party lost a record number of seats to the NDP and Liberals, and the PC’s forced Getty out. In a closely fought leadership race between Edmonton MLA Nancy Betkowski (who would later become a lame duck leader of the Liberals) and former Calgary Mayor and boozing good old boy Ralph Klein, Getty was attacked for having created a fiscal crisis in the government.
In reality Getty had primed the pump in a good old-fashioned Keynesian attempt to forestall the worst crisis the province had seen since the Great Depression.
And the Depression was a memory in the province that still brought shivers to those who had lived through it. It was this memory that had kept the Socreds in power for 35 years, it would be the NEP that would be blamed for the crisis Getty faced. Albertans have long memories of those who done them wrong and those who saved them. In the Depression it was the Socreds that challenged the ‘eastern bastards’ in Ottawa as Klein called them, after the NEP fiasco it was the Tories who challenged Ottawa. To this day Klein uses Ottawa bashing to gather round the wagons and the mere whisper of NEP is enough to silence provincial opposition politicians and federal politicians as well.
Klein won the leadership race by Getty bashing, and in no small way Edmonton bashing. If Ottawa bashing won votes in Alberta, Edmonton bashing was equally a winner in the rest of the province.
Obviously Edmonton as the Capital of the province was like Ottawa a government town, though in fact it is the largest working class city in the province, full of tax and spend bureaucrats, government workers and folks who don’t know how to balance a budget. The Tories returned to their roots in electing Klein, and once again became the Party of Calgary.
The next test of the Party of Calgary came in the provincial election of that year, which saw former Edmonton Mayor Lawrence Decore leading a revived Liberal Party face off against former Calgary Mayor Ralph Klein leading the Party of Calgary. The NDP had been the official opposition for the first time in it’s history prior to the election, but by the end of the election were wiped off the map.
Like the rest of the country and in fact the rest of the world, the province was facing a short-term deficit which was increasing the provincial debt. All levels of government were facing increasing debt as corporations and foreign investors began divesting themselves of bonds in order to have access to cash.
Once again the business cycle of capitalism was glossed over, while politicians blamed the Getty government for its excess spending. In the United States and England Ronald Reagan and Margret Thatcher were elected and blamed Keynesianism for the economic downturn. It was the big lie of debt and deficit that allowed right wing politicians to begin to move towards increased privatization and outsourcing of government services based on the demands of business lobbies with cash to invest.
Decore called for ‘brutal cuts’ to government spending, Klein called for ‘massive cuts’, Klein won. Albertans stick with the one that brung ya. The vote was, ironically against the Tory government of Don Getty, with both Klein and Decore making him the boogieman.
In Edmonton and Calgary a sense that the crisis facing the Tories could mean a Liberal victory, led to strategic voting which ended in a wipe out of all the sitting members of the NDP, a larger Liberal Opposition and the election of Ralph as Premier of Alberta.
The Tories could do no wrong in Alberta except in Edmonton, where every sitting Tory lost to the Liberals. The Edmonton Sun renamed the city Redmonton, after the Liberal party colour of Red.
It would be a black day for the city, for government services, for democracy in the province as the Klein government would adopt the Republican Agenda, the New Zealand Agenda and the Thatcher Agenda to deal with its short term deficit crisis.
The Klein Government embraced privatization and outsourcing of government services and cutting payments to the poor, the disabled, and the artistic and cultural communities. Getty style Keynesianism was replaced with Fraser Institute policies. In fact Ralph became the poster boy for the Fraser Institute and its Free Market / Less Government policies.
Calgary became the HQ not only of the Oil industry in Canada but the HQ of privatized federal corporations like CN and former Quebec companies like the CPR. It became the HQ of National Citizens Coalition, (NCC) the right wing political arm of the Fraser Institute and the Business Council on National Interest. And it gave birth to the Reform Party of Canada, led by Ernest Mannings little boy Preston. The Reform party became the Canadian Alliance and now today is the Federal Conservative Party (having dropped any pretence to be being ‘Progressive’ by removing that prefix). The current leader of the Conservative Party is Stephen Harper who was also spokesman for the NCC.
Under Klein Calgary has boomed with growth of white collar, high-income movers and shakers. While across the rest of the province secondary and tertiary industries have declined like meatpacking. Hospitals have been closed, nurses and doctors laid off, social services have been cut, work for welfare has been imposed, private secondary and post secondary schools compete with the public schools and universities, teachers have been cut.
Where there haven’t been cuts is in Northern Alberta, where there is a construction boom in the oil industry of the Tar Sands and the secondary refining and processing plants in and around Edmonton.
This later boom was originally created by the NEP and has been funded by reduced royalties that the Klein government introduced when it took over. It was these very reductions in royalties that exasperated the Alberta deficit that led to such brutal cuts in the nineties.
It is Calgary where the right wing think tanks, the political science department at the U of C, and others have launched their cross Canada attempts to promote: charter schools, privatization of liquor stores, an elected Senate, and a firewall around the province. Calgary represents the new conservative politics of the Republican Party North.
Jean Charest when he was leader of the Federal Progressive Conservative Party during that first term when Klein began his ‘revolution’ said "Alberta sets the agenda for Canada". Today Charest is Liberal Premier of Quebec and modeling his restructuring of Quebec’s social contract on what he learned from Klein, as is B.C. Premier Gordon. That Agenda is alive and well in Canadian politics provincially and federally, but let’s call a spade a spade, it’s not the Alberta Agenda anymore than Klein’s Party of Calgary represents the province, it’s the Calgary Agenda.
ALBERTA’S SENATE ELECTION-Don’t Vote It Only Encourages Them
Below are articles I have written during the Alberta Provincial Election Campaign.
The Election was held November 22, 2004 and saw the ruling PC's lose 17 seats, which still left them with an overwhelming majority of 61 seats in the legislature, returning Alberta again to a one party state.
These stories were also posted on the web at Indymedia, StriaghtGoods, and Rabble.ca, as well as being circulated over a variety of listserves.
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ALBERTA UBER ALLES
(1214 words)
Ralph Klein kicked off the provincial election campaign kicking the disabled while they are down. Ralph is using his position as Premier not just as a bully pulpit, but as the pulpit of a bully. Making a caricature of disabled protestors, who rightly demanded a few crumbs from the Alberta Advantage (oil), Klein instead warned them that they looked able enough and that he would crack down on those abusing the system.
This is the same Premier who while drunk in public entered the single men’s hostel in Edmonton seeking out the poor to shove, berate, and threaten. His excuse then was he had a drinking problem.
No he has a poverty problem, he cannot believe that anyone in Alberta, er HIS Alberta, isn't as well off as the members of the PC's (Party of Calgary). He likes to bully the poor, the disabled, those who protest his decisions or lack of decisions.
Lets compare crooks, there is no evidence that people on AISH are taking advantage of us. For 5 years there has been no increase in AISH payments and for the past decade the number of people on AISH has not increased. 31,450 Albertan’s get $850 a month from AISH, half that is federal funding, excess federal tax credits for the poor get clawed back by the Alberta government. That comes out to over $2.6 million annually, less then the cost of the current Senate election.
If the disabled work their wages are used to claw back the $850. If they do work it will be at minimum wage, which is the lowest in Canada. In Alberta working full-time for minimum wage would earn a you $860 a month. The severely disabled are expected to live on $10,200 a year. That is below the national poverty level, no matter who calculates it Stats-Can or Ralph’s pals at the Fraser Institute.
If there is any financial funny business going on its in the Legislature, not in the AISH program. Take the Health minister's executive assistant for one. He got $400,000 for giving advice on health care projects, work he supposedly did but did not have any evidence of doing, and he got his contract without tender. We call that cronyism if not criminal. But in Ralph's World he calls it good government. Lets see that $400,000 would support 4000 severely disabled Albertan’s on AISH for a year, with spare change left over.
If this were the federal government doing this, Ralph would be joining his Calgary pal Steven Harper calling the Liberals crooks. Wait it did happen, it’s called Adscam.
But this is Alberta home of the longest lasting single party government in North America, if not the world. We are a single party state and have been for over 70 years. First it was 20 years of the United Farmers of Alberta then 35 years of Social Credit theocracy and now 33 of the right wing Tories. That is longer than Castro has ruled Cuba. It is longer than one party state rule in the Soviet Union.
Ralph likes to refer to the mythical volk of Alberta, as severely normal, so there cannot be anyone poor in Alberta, or injured workers, or seniors, or disabled. And woe betides those that insist they are not getting a fair shake in Ralphs Volkstadt. It’s the Alberta Advantage Uber Alles.
Peter Elzinga, a long time PC insider and the un-elected deputy Premier for Edmonton, is still managing this election for the party of Ralph, while he is employed by Suncor as legal counsel as they sue the Alberta Government over royalties they owe us.
And Ralph is going to lecture the disabled on abuse of the system. That’s a clear case of the kettle calling the pot black.
With 74 of 83 seats Ralph can bully anyone he wants from his Teflon pulpit. He can with the aplomb of a King Charles dismiss the legislature as a damned nuisance that gets in the way of his government. Nor does his view of parliamentary democracy include an opposition, they too are a nuisances, just as Cromwell was.
He can walk out of the Federal health care meeting to go gambling, dropping some cold Alberta cash into the VLT's in Quebec. Showing his political solidarity with the Quebec government of his protege; Jean Charest no doubt.
He dropped a wad that would have paid the rent and utilities for at least one person on AISH.
Ralph likes to drink, so we privatize the government liquor stores. Ralph likes to gamble so we introduce VLT's into bars. On the other hand, women’s shelters in Alberta have to beg for money to meet increased insurance costs.
He can hold another useless Senate election a $3 million dollar red herring while claiming there is no democratic deficit in Alberta. It would do Bonnie Prince Charlie proud. And like other leaders who follow the fueher principle Klein dismissed elected health board representatives two years into their mandate, because they were not Tories. They were another opposition to his government. He has dismissed school board trustees for the same reason. They voiced opposition to government cuts. Vox Populi is not popular with Ralph. If Ralph and the PC's had their way every level of government in Alberta would be dominated Tories. And opposition be damned.
And the reason for electing another senator in waiting, we already have two from the last exercise in futility in 2001, is because Alberta Tories want to reform the federal government. But no reform is needed in Alberta insists Ralph, where the legislature sits less often then in any other parliamentary democracy. In Alberta the most important matters of State are decided in closed cabinet meetings.
But that should be expected from a Premier who states in the legislature that Augusto Pinochet is just a misunderstood democrat. He was forced to overthrow a democratically elected government because it was socialist. Them reds got what they deserved. And with unabashed aplomb his evidence for this opinion was an essay he wrote for a University course. The fact he plagiarized whole sections of his essay off the internet was dismissed with a wave of a hand. And the iron fist of his Minister of Learning who met with Alberta’s University Presidents and demanded they write public letters of support for Ralph saying he didn't really cheat on his homework. In Alberta when it comes to the crime of plagiarism, to paraphrase Geoge Orwell, some undergraduates are more equal than others.
Ralph claims there is no democratic deficit in Alberta. In Calgary home of Canada's corporations and right wing lobby groups, all is well for the Party of Calgary and Ralph, the Reform, er Alliance, er Conservative Party of Stephen Harper demands fixed election dates, referendum, recall, and proportional representation in Ottawa. What is good for goosing Ottawa dare not be gandered in Alberta.
This election is being held 3.5 years into a possible 5-year mandate. And while our Teflon Emperor has proclaimed this is his last election that will mean Ralph expects to rule until 2010. By that time Alberta may be the last single party state in the hemisphere, including Cuba.
For the mythical "severely normal Albertans; Martha and Henry" Ralph may be their boy, for real Albertan’s living in Ralph’s World it’s Caveat Elector.
ALBERTA’S NEW DEFINITION OF ‘PC’ (Party of Calgary)
(2336 words)
In Alberta it has become clear that in this election the term PC does not mean Political Correctness, nor does it mean Progressive Conservative it’s new meaning is PARTY OF CALGARY. Having re-branded themselves the Progressive Conservative Association, deleting any reference to being a political party in their ads, the PC’s as they have been known since 1971 have become a regional party representing Central and Southern Alberta. They are an ‘association’ a corporation which runs the province from the real centre of power; Calgary. They have returned to their roots, which was in the office towers of Calgary in particular the offices of the Mannix Corporation, which hired Peter Lougheed and later Ernest Manning.
After 35 years in office as the provinces ruling party, the Social Credit party of Manning was in decline with a lame duck Premier Harry Strom. In the 1971 election the small PC caucus of six swept the province with an overwhelming majority. And has stayed in power for almost as long as their predecessor.
The success of the PC’s under Lougheed was engineered by the former quarterback by amalgamating the interests of Calgary’s Liberals and Tories and with a backroom deal with Ernest Manning to quietly throw his support behind the new party pulling southern Alberta votes in for the Lougheed team. The Socreds disappeared off the map over the next decade, slowly becoming irrelevant as the PC’s amalgamated their party along with the Liberals. Only the NDP with one member in the house stood as an opposition to the Lougheed Government.
With the oil boom of the seventies and eighties, the governing Tories could do no wrong. Until that fateful mechanism of capitalism, the boom and bust business cycle slammed into the province in the 1980’s. The recession that had been hitting the rest of the world and Canada had been avoided in Alberta with the expansion of the tar sands oil project. The boom busted. Unfortunately it busted as prices for refined oil increased, while raw product declined. The bust in Alberta was a boon for eastern Canada, in particular Ontario, where much refining was done. Alberta’s export prices were kept down for a made in Canada price, while its ability to refine, process and export to the US market were limited. This was the real crisis that caused oil executives in Calgary to leap from their executive offices in a repeat of the great Wall Street crash of 1929. Construction dried up, laying-off thousands of trade’s workers, thousands of white collar workers in the oil industry in Calgary were laid off, steel and pipe manufacturing plants closed.
In order to stabilize oil prices in Canada, the minority Liberal Government in Ottawa under pressure from the NDP introduced the NEP, (ironically named since an earlier form of the NEP was Lenin’s attempted to create a market space for capitalism in Russia in the 1920’s) and created Canada’s national Oil company PetroCanada. In Alberta this partial ‘nationalization’ of Alberta’s oil production in order to create a provincial refining processing industry is still seen to this day as having ‘caused’ the crash of the eighties. What Albertan’s forget when they mention the dreaded NEP is the famous Globe and Mail photograph of then Prime Minister Trudeau and Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed, toasting champagne glasses together over the creation of PetroCanada, as a result of the NEP. PetroCanada saved Calgary from its market forced crash. It revived the oil industry in Alberta by increasing investment in the refining process, and contrary to the gnashing of teeth and spitting of blood over the NEP, allowed for Alberta to enter an unprecedented twenty-year boom.
A room full of monkeys could have governed this province over that time, and in fact that is exactly what happened.
After Peter Lougheed retired, the natural governing party of the PC’s elected its first Edmontonian as leader; Don Getty. Getty while an Edmontonian and former football teammate of Lougheeds, was well connected with Calgarys Petroleum old boys network. He was their point man in the Provincial capital, acting an oil business consultant and lobbyist. He however was unfortunate enough to takeover the party as the economic crisis continued in Alberta. However with record oil reserves, the government was able to throw money around ‘like a drunken sailor’ in order to save collapsing farms, as well as collapsing secondary and tertiary businesses. In rural Alberta it subsidized secondary processing plants for canola, beef, and pigs. In order to save the construction industry, and maintain its rural Social Credit base it built hospitals and schools, it expanded university construction, and in order to win seniors votes it built seniors housing in the cities. And it got re-elected.
Unfortunately even though the government built much, it was unable to fund staffing for seniors homes, hospitals or universities. And it couldn’t find enough tradesmen to build infrastructure.
It invested in meat packing plants, in a hazardous waste reduction plant in Swan Hills, it began partnerships with Japanese companies in building processing plants for timber export, all with an open cheque book paid with oil money and interest from the heritage trust fund.
Getty ended his short-term premiership in a personal and political crisis. His son was busted dealing cocaine (after his parole he was hired by Tory Bagman Ron Southern of ATCO as favour to Getty), his reputation was besmirched by the party as having been a lame duck premier. The knives were out after Getty lost his seat in Edmonton to a Liberal and hadto run in Stettler in a safe seat to retain his party leadership. Getty continued to be attacked by the opposition as well as by party insiders, in particular by leadership candidate Ralph Klein. The Liberals who had not been on the Alberta political map since they lost to the United Farmers at the beginning of the 1920’s had been revived as a centre right party to contest the Tories domination of the Alberta political map.
Under Getty the party lost a record number of seats to the NDP and Liberals, and the PC’s forced Getty out. In a closely fought leadership race between Edmonton MLA Nancy Betkowski (who would later become a lame duck leader of the Liberals) and former Calgary Mayor and boozing good old boy Ralph Klein, Getty was attacked for having created a fiscal crisis in the government.
In reality Getty had primed the pump in a good old-fashioned Keynesian attempt to forestall the worst crisis the province had seen since the Great Depression.
And the Depression was a memory in the province that still brought shivers to those who had lived through it. It was this memory that had kept the Socreds in power for 35 years, it would be the NEP that would be blamed for the crisis Getty faced. Albertans have long memories of those who done them wrong and those who saved them. In the Depression it was the Socreds that challenged the ‘eastern bastards’ in Ottawa as Klein called them, after the NEP fiasco it was the Tories who challenged Ottawa. To this day Klein uses Ottawa bashing to gather round the wagons and the mere whisper of NEP is enough to silence provincial opposition politicians and federal politicians as well.
Klein won the leadership race by Getty bashing, and in no small way Edmonton bashing. If Ottawa bashing won votes in Alberta, Edmonton bashing was equally a winner in the rest of the province.
Obviously Edmonton as the Capital of the province was like Ottawa a government town, though in fact it is the largest working class city in the province, full of tax and spend bureaucrats, government workers and folks who don’t know how to balance a budget. The Tories returned to their roots in electing Klein, and once again became the Party of Calgary.
The next test of the Party of Calgary came in the provincial election of that year, which saw former Edmonton Mayor Lawrence Decore leading a revived Liberal Party face off against former Calgary Mayor Ralph Klein leading the Party of Calgary. The NDP had been the official opposition for the first time in it’s history prior to the election, but by the end of the election were wiped off the map.
Like the rest of the country and in fact the rest of the world, the province was facing a short-term deficit which was increasing the provincial debt. All levels of government were facing increasing debt as corporations and foreign investors began divesting themselves of bonds in order to have access to cash.
Once again the business cycle of capitalism was glossed over, while politicians blamed the Getty government for its excess spending. In the United States and England Ronald Reagan and Margret Thatcher were elected and blamed Keynesianism for the economic downturn. It was the big lie of debt and deficit that allowed right wing politicians to begin to move towards increased privatization and outsourcing of government services based on the demands of business lobbies with cash to invest.
Decore called for ‘brutal cuts’ to government spending, Klein called for ‘massive cuts’, Klein won. Albertans stick with the one that brung ya. The vote was, ironically against the Tory government of Don Getty, with both Klein and Decore making him the boogieman.
In Edmonton and Calgary a sense that the crisis facing the Tories could mean a Liberal victory, led to strategic voting which ended in a wipe out of all the sitting members of the NDP, a larger Liberal Opposition and the election of Ralph as Premier of Alberta.
The Tories could do no wrong in Alberta except in Edmonton, where every sitting Tory lost to the Liberals. The Edmonton Sun renamed the city Redmonton, after the Liberal party colour of Red.
It would be a black day for the city, for government services, for democracy in the province as the Klein government would adopt the Republican Agenda, the New Zealand Agenda and the Thatcher Agenda to deal with its short term deficit crisis.
The Klein Government embraced privatization and outsourcing of government services and cutting payments to the poor, the disabled, and the artistic and cultural communities. Getty style Keynesianism was replaced with Fraser Institute policies. In fact Ralph became the poster boy for the Fraser Institute and its Free Market / Less Government policies.
Calgary became the HQ not only of the Oil industry in Canada but the HQ of privatized federal corporations like CN and former Quebec companies like the CPR. It became the HQ of National Citizens Coalition, (NCC) the right wing political arm of the Fraser Institute and the Business Council on National Interest. And it gave birth to the Reform Party of Canada, led by Ernest Mannings little boy Preston. The Reform party became the Canadian Alliance and now today is the Federal Conservative Party (having dropped any pretence to be being ‘Progressive’ by removing that prefix). The current leader of the Conservative Party is Stephen Harper who was also spokesman for the NCC.
Under Klein Calgary has boomed with growth of white collar, high-income movers and shakers. While across the rest of the province secondary and tertiary industries have declined like meatpacking. Hospitals have been closed, nurses and doctors laid off, social services have been cut, work for welfare has been imposed, private secondary and post secondary schools compete with the public schools and universities, teachers have been cut.
Where there haven’t been cuts is in Northern Alberta, where there is a construction boom in the oil industry of the Tar Sands and the secondary refining and processing plants in and around Edmonton.
This later boom was originally created by the NEP and has been funded by reduced royalties that the Klein government introduced when it took over. It was these very reductions in royalties that exasperated the Alberta deficit that led to such brutal cuts in the nineties.
It is Calgary where the right wing think tanks, the political science department at the U of C, and others have launched their cross Canada attempts to promote: charter schools, privatization of liquor stores, an elected Senate, and a firewall around the province. Calgary represents the new conservative politics of the Republican Party North.
Jean Charest when he was leader of the Federal Progressive Conservative Party during that first term when Klein began his ‘revolution’ said "Alberta sets the agenda for Canada". Today Charest is Liberal Premier of Quebec and modeling his restructuring of Quebec’s social contract on what he learned from Klein, as is B.C. Premier Gordon. That Agenda is alive and well in Canadian politics provincially and federally, but let’s call a spade a spade, it’s not the Alberta Agenda anymore than Klein’s Party of Calgary represents the province, it’s the Calgary Agenda.
ALBERTA’S SENATE ELECTION-Don’t Vote It Only Encourages Them
(881 words)
For the third time in seven years Albertan’s will get the privilege of electing our Senators in waiting, which are the proverbial bridesmaids of Canadian Politics. This is a $3 million dollar farce foisted on the taxpayers of this province by Ralph Klein in order to appease his parties Calgary rightwing rump, who are the movers and shakers in the new federal Conservative party. Albertan’s are one again being led down the golden brick road by Ralph, in this election which is non-binding on the Federal government. Don’t peek behind the curtain, or the smoke and mirrors of this non-event will become clear.
It’s all about the old Reform party agenda of having a Triple E Senate, ‘Equal, Elected, Effective’, but wait the Reform party is no more. And the masses have not been clamoring for an elected Senate, heck Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party (the Reform party in wicked witch of the west drag) didn’t even raise the issue in the June Federal Election. Ralph wasn’t even going to run any of his own party candidates in the Senate election till he faced pressure from some of those same Federal Conservative faithful about what a sham a Senate election looked like when the ruling party in the province didn’t play along.
So the provincial Tories are running candidates. The newly formed Alberta Alliance (another incarnation of Mormon-Elder Randy Thorsteinson attempt at creating a rural right wing party, he was the leader of the Alberta Social Credit party in the last election) is running the majority of candidates and there are three Independents all former supporters of the Reform party.
It’s a race to the right. The provincial and federal Liberals and NDP are not running candidates, nor is the Green Party, or the Communist Party, or the Communist Party Marxist-Leninist, nor even the Natural Law Party.
During the last Senate election at least there were truly independent candidates, severely normal Albertan’s as Klein calls them, running. Not so in this non-event. And the lack of any real election presence, signs, leaflets, radio, TV or newspaper ads underlies the whole phoniness of this election of a Senator in waiting.
And given the fact that Senate appointments are a lifelong appointment to the Red Chamber, one has to wonder how you can even elect one once every twenty-five years let alone having three elections in seven years.
Did I mention that Senators are appointed? Appointed by the Government of Canada, the Senate is a Federal institution and it has not been reformed to be a Triple E Senate, despite the feeble attempts by the Calgary based right wing party known as the Reform-Alliance-Conservatives, in its early years to make this an issue.
The only place one hears of Senate Reform is from the mouths of Calgarians, such as Peter Lougheed, Preston Manning and Stephen Harper. For the rest of us in Alberta and across Canada it’s a non-issue.
And we still have Senators in waiting elected prior to this election awaiting appointment by the Federal government, so why do we need more? The fact that these previous elected Senators, members of the Reform party, like the current crop has a snowballs chance of being appointed is irrelevant. It is another shtick the right wing can use to proclaim from the office towers in Calgary of how the West Wants In and no one in Ottawa is answering the door.
Once upon a time it was about electoral reform in Canada, the agenda of the Reform party was Referendum, Recall and a Triple E Senate. As it went through its transformations into the Conservative party, it dropped all pretence to democratic reform, and is now all about States rights, err Provincial rights, Flat Taxes, Tax Reduction, Privatization, the Republican Agenda for Canada.
The real question is not about reforming the Senate but why we should even have this elitist institution, a vestigial remnant of the British Parliamentary system modeled on its House of Lords. In order to be appointed to the Senate you must be a landowner. You must own property renters need not apply. It does not even represent all the parties in the Federal House of Commons, there are neither NDP nor BQ Senators. Of course in the case of the NDP that’s because they have held that this elitist establishment should be abolished. Now there is a real reform.
We should not be electing Senators but abolishing the Senate. Real reform would be to expand the House of Commons through a system of proportional representation to make up for elimination of this archaic vestige of British colonialism.
Senate reform is not on the agenda for any of the Federal parties, proportional representation is.
In Alberta on the other hand such radical ideas challenging the severe democratic deficit we face under the one party state of Ralph Klein is not even on the horizon. Instead Ralph gives us a phony election for a phony senator. Smoke and mirrors.
When it comes to electing a Senator from Alberta the old adage; "Don’t Vote It Only Encourages Them", holds true.
For background on Abolish the Senate Campaign in 2001 see my web-site:
http://www.connect.ab.ca/~plawiuk/senate.html
THE ALBERTA LIBERALS ARE NDP LITE
(540 words)
If imitation is the highest from of flattery, Brian Mason and the NDP should be blushing. With only two members in the Alberta Legislature they have been the sharpest critics of the Ralph Klein regime. The Alberta NDP has set the agenda in Alberta for mobilizing opposition to the right.
It’s the proverbial battle of Alberta. It’s the Edmonton Oilers against the Calgary Flames, the Edmonton Eskimos against the Calgary Stampeders. It’s a case of Edmonton Reds versus Calgary Rednecks.
With the election of Kevin Taft as leader of the Liberal Party and the ‘official’ opposition, which have seven seats all from Edmonton, the Liberals have abandoned their centrist attempt to be Tory Lite and have become NDP Lite.
Since this election is a forgone conclusion, the only real challenges and races will be in Edmonton. It’s the battle for Redmonton. And Tafts Liberals keep trying to be the NDP.
They have called for public auto insurance, a long time NDP policy. They have called for tuition freezes for post secondary students, the NDP has called for a 10% rollback in tuition and a freeze.
The latest election foible Taft has thrown out is a call for a review of Alberta’s Democratic Deficit, which really is what this election should be all about. He is calling for proportional representation, which the NDP has called for over the past two elections. He has raised the issue of reducing the number of seats in the Legislature to 64, an issue the NDP raised back in 1986.
There is nothing that the Liberals have said this election that differentiates them from the NDP.
They even changed their party logo to appear more radical, they have eliminated the Lubex L that symbolized their party in the past, for a slick black and red banner, an obvious attempt to appeal to the anarchist youth vote.
The Liberals have been on a decline since their heyday over a decade ago under the leadership of Lawrence Decore. Since then they have had three leadership changes, every time they lost the election to the Tories, they lost seats, and inevitably they bring out the knives and change leaders.
Today they are a left rump in Edmonton. But the NDP has returned, and with only two MLA’s in the house has still been a more effective opposition than the Liberals, who maintain ‘official opposition’ status by the skin of their teeth. Decore’s neo-conservative Liberals are no more, the Liberals under Taft are the left of the party, and what’s left of the party.
Instead of being NDP Lite they should simply give up their pretence to being a centrist-left party and join the NDP, giving Edmontonians a solid voice of opposition to the Party of Calgary and its leader Ralph Klein. The battle is for Redmonton and it is only a matter of time before this stark choice will be made clear to Taft and company. That time is fast approaching and will be made very clear on Nov. 23.
The Liberals are only the official opposition in name and should do Edmontonians a favour and unite with the NDP.
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