Larry Gambone long time Canadian anarchist and an old pal has launched his own blog; Porcupine. You will find him commenting on my articles here and at Vive Canada!
Recently he has blogged about the Zapatistas, a libertarian peasant movement in Chiapas, Mexico that has been the most successful organizing attempt since the FAI (Federation of Iberian Anarchists) organized in Spain during the Spanish Revolution and Civil War 1936-39. The Zapatista's have put out a call to move towards greater broadbased community and political organizing. Larry points out, correctly, that the movement is more libertarian than lenninist. Which bodes well for models of revolutionary struggle in the newly capitalized world, also known as the Newly Industrialized Nations (oh, he says, is that what NIN stands for).
Kevin Carson runs mutualist.org , Free Market Anti-Capitalism, and has his own blog. Quoting from the libertarian right and the marxist left is a hard balancing act to do, yet he does it admirably. As I wrote here about the need for a real Movement of the Libertarian Left, Kevin fits that description admirably.
An example of Kevin's analysis from left/right libertarian perspective is in his blog comment that Toyota will be developing another new car factory here in Canada, because of our state subsidized infrastructure. And how some American commentators who have taken note of this news, were offended when Toyota explained it was because Ontario had a skilled workforce. It's not because workers in the Southern U.S. right to work states (read non-union) are dumber than unionized Canadians workers, perhaps less well trained was the actual statement from Toyota, as Kevin points out it was actually because;
In addition to lower training costs, Canadian workers are also $4 to $5 cheaper to employ partly thanks to the taxpayer-funded health-care system in Canada, said federal Industry Minister David Emmerson. "Most people don't think of our health-care system as being a competitive advantage," he said.
While Americans give tax breaks that are greater than those offered by Ontario and the Federal Government, we have medicare, and a social welfare system that is a real economic advantage to monopoly capitalists, as Kevin points out.
For instance the only profit GM made last year was from its Financial Credit business and auto sales in Canada. GM sold more cars here than in the U.S., but not nearly as many as Toyota has. And Toyota will be scooping up a laid off workforce from shut down operations of the Big Three in Ontario. In otherwords thanks to the Big Three and their policies of downsizing, outsourcing and refusal to build smaller cars, Toyota has a capitve pre-trained workforce that is unemployed and ready to work. Big advantage that.
"The level of the workforce in general is so high that the training program you need for people, even for people who have not worked in a Toyota plant before, is minimal compared to what you have to go through in the southeastern United States," said Gerry Fedchun, president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers' Association, whose members will see increased business with the new plant....
And they can thank NAFTA for having opened up the market by ending the Auto Pact. While CAW like other Canadian Unions opposed NAFTA, and sort of still do, the result was the expansion of the non unionized Toyota operations in Canada and secondary parts companies. The auto belt in Canada is home to the successful non-unionized Magna parts company, which daddy gave to Belinda Stronach to run before she was seduced to run for the Conservatives, which is critical to just in time supplies to automakers who have outsourced those operations.
And while the CAW has lobbied for state funding for the Big Three which it has contracts with, the result of those efforts have also opened the playing field to Toyota. So the CAW will have to get busy doing what unions are supposed to do, organizing Toyota and Magna, and worry less about brokering deals between the NDP and the Liberals .
Ah the great thing about blogging you can add information to the page as you find it. And upon wandering in the blogosphere I came across another Libertarian blog that call itself CLASSical Liberalism, "a blog for all things CLASSical Liberal, with an emphasis on educating about aspects of classical liberalism (hence, the "CLASS" in CLASSical Liberal)--history, theory and, of course, practice." He has a series of biographies on line of Robert Anson Heinlein, Emma Goldman, Harriet Martineau, Liberal Economist and Sociologist, whom I hadn't heard of, and a great summer reading list. He's putting Class Struggle back into Libertarianism. Congrats on a thoughtful and good reading blog.
Anyways just a way of introducing a couple of great libertarian blogs to read in our little corner of the blogosphere.
Thursday, July 07, 2005
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
The Sexual Revolution Continues
Stephanie Coontz is a socialist feminist and an academic she has written a controversial essay in the New York Times, which I have reprinted below, reminding us that it was the Sexual Revolution of the Sixties that opened the doors to Same Sex Marriage.
The Social Origins of Private Life; A History of American Families 1600-1900, her excellent social history, I reviewed back in 1996 for Labour News. I used it as a critique of the right wing definitions of 'family' of the time. It is online at: Whose Family Values? The Clash Between Middle Class And Working Class Families .
As I wrote a decade ago:
For the past decade the battle cry of the right wing, in both religion and politics, has been; " return of Family values". Every Reform or Tory politician raises the banner of the Family as the solution to the social problems of their own creating. While the business agenda has been to make Alberta and Canada a lean and mean competitive economy modeled after the United States and wrapped in the rhetoric of laissez fair capitalism, free trade and survival of the fittest. The apologists for the ensuing unemployment, poverty and destruction of social programs hearken back to some golden age of the family as the solution to all our problems.
If the issue is declining education, the solution isn't better funding or ending cutbacks, the solution is the family, giving money to parents to fund their child's education. If John or Jane aren't doing well in school its because they aren't being taught traditional family values.
If there is crime and poverty its probably because of the insidious machinations of the left wing to steal children from their parents and put them into day care centers. If there is unemployment its probably because there are too many women in the workforce, or taking advantage of that insidious day care, and its all the fault of the government which has failed to support the Family.
No this family is the social creation of the Canadian and American middle class. It is a family whose values are thrift, self-help, charity not welfare, pick yourself up by your bootstraps and get the job done, mom in the kitchen, the pleasant patriarchal father and the well behaved children out of the Dick and Jane reader. This family is a myth, a useful political tool of the right wing to blame social problems on us as individuals rather than blaming the capitalist system.
The Origin of the Family, as Frederick Engels pointed out over 100 years ago, is in private property. To understand the different kinds of families, and their class nature it is important we understand their property relations. There are no neutral family values. All values and roles reflect the very material reality from which they originate and which they reproduce. The so called "traditional family values" being extolled today are the middle class values of Dickensian world of dog eat dog. These are not, and never have been, the values of the working class. Our values reflect the traditions of mutual aid and solidarity, values that are not found in the world of high finance or the back benches of the Klein Government.
And in this whole sanctity of marriage debate I come back to my same conclusions as I did then whether the issue is gay marriage, family values (sic), women’s role in society, daycare, etc. What I said back then, still applies today. This can be clearly seen in the vitriolic rantings of the right wing and its religious allies over Same Sex Marriage in
Stephanie Coontz also comes back to her original arguments from her 1991 work and those she has published since. In her essay from the New York Times yesterday she reminds us of the forgotten revolution of the sixties, the sexual revolution and its importance in setting the conditions for Same Sex Marriage.
The family changed with the sexual revolution that Wilhelm Reich documented back in the 1920's and by fifty years ago it was in full blown assault on so called traditional family values. Jews were no longer discriminated against by the WASP country club set, Civil rights were being demanded by Afro Americans, and Playboy had just published its first edition.
But inter-racial/ inter-religious marriage was still taboo, whether it was between Jews and gentiles, or between Afro-Americans and whites. Ironically in post war
And the same arguments against Same Sex Marriage were used back then to deny inter-racial or inter- religious marriage. You wouldn't want your daughter to marry one applied to the Jewish Doctor, as well as the Black Stevedore and today it applies to the Divorced mother of two.
Common law relations were a sin, divorce was a sin and hard to get. The same arguments about the break down of the family that have surrounded the Same Sex Marriage debate occurred then too over the sin of divorce and the sin of common law relations. No Fault divorce was going to bring down the family and destroy society.
Birth control was a no-no, even after the discovery of the Pill. Always in initial caps, the Pill released women from having to merely have sex for reproduction. Controversial, for the decade of the sixties it was essential to women's freedom and to their pleasure as the feminists advocating birth control in the early 1920's like Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger knew. The Pill began the modern sexual revolution.
And with it came the outing of the most noxious of the anti-sex secrets of the day; abortions. They were conducted in secret by back alley butchers, with women's sexual freedom came the demand of safe medically delivered abortions, this was a key demand in the new Sexual Revolution. And it remains a demand today as the forces of darkness and moral pulchritude attempt to force women back into the alleys.
And not much has changed with the Catholic Church teachings on these matters even today.
Sex education books were being published in the sixties which discussed 'petting and necking' and whether one should go 'all the way'. Definitely not before marriage, they advised. Sex education then WAS abstinenance education, and that was all it was.
Homosexuality was a deviance that could be cured these little pamphlets explained, and having a crush on your gym teacher was natural and did not mean you would grow up to be a homo.
As Coontz outlines in her essay it was the sexual revolution of the sixties that liberated us from all the old shit that dominated sexual relations. And not without controversy and the usual detractors from the right, who still to this day blame that revolution for all of society’s problems today.
And it was the 'hetero'-sexual revolution that did influence Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation back then, as witnessed even in the support these movements got from Playboy, much to the chagrin of later anti-sex feminists. But once the hetero-Sexual Revolution began it broadened the meanings given to sexuality and loving and living relationships between people. The Women’s Movement and the Gay Liberation Movement originated in the ideals of the sexual revolution of the sixties.
And it is this revolution that is still being fought against the forces of darkness that insist that their Family Values are sacred, traditional and the best for all of us.
July 5, 2005
The Heterosexual Revolution
© New York Times
By STEPHANIE COONTZ
THE last week has been tough for opponents of same-sex marriage. First Canadian and then Spanish legislators voted to legalize the practice, prompting American social conservatives to renew their call for a constitutional amendment banning such marriages here. James Dobson of the evangelical group Focus on the Family has warned that without that ban, marriage as we have known it for 5,000 years will be overturned.
My research on marriage and family life seldom leads me to agree with Dr. Dobson, much less to accuse him of understatement. But in this case, Dr. Dobson's warnings come 30 years too late. Traditional marriage, with its 5,000-year history, has already been upended. Gays and lesbians, however, didn't spearhead that revolution: heterosexuals did.
Heterosexuals were the upstarts who turned marriage into a voluntary love relationship rather than a mandatory economic and political institution. Heterosexuals were the ones who made procreation voluntary, so that some couples could choose childlessness, and who adopted assisted reproduction so that even couples who could not conceive could become parents. And heterosexuals subverted the long-standing rule that every marriage had to have a husband who played one role in the family and a wife who played a completely different one. Gays and lesbians simply looked at the revolution heterosexuals had wrought and noticed that with its new norms, marriage could work for them, too.
The first step down the road to gay and lesbian marriage took place 200 years ago, when Enlightenment thinkers raised the radical idea that parents and the state should not dictate who married whom, and when the American Revolution encouraged people to engage in "the pursuit of happiness," including marrying for love. Almost immediately, some thinkers, including Jeremy Bentham and the Marquis de Condorcet, began to argue that same-sex love should not be a crime.
Same-sex marriage, however, remained unimaginable because marriage had two traditional functions that were inapplicable to gays and lesbians. First, marriage allowed families to increase their household labor force by having children. Throughout much of history, upper-class men divorced their wives if their marriage did not produce children, while peasants often wouldn't marry until a premarital pregnancy confirmed the woman's fertility. But the advent of birth control in the 19th century permitted married couples to decide not to have children, while assisted reproduction in the 20th century allowed infertile couples to have them. This eroded the traditional argument that marriage must be between a man and a woman who were able to procreate.
In addition, traditional marriage imposed a strict division of labor by gender and mandated unequal power relations between men and women. "Husband and wife are one," said the law in both
This law of "coverture" was supposed to reflect the command of God and the essential nature of humans. It stipulated that a wife could not enter into legal contracts or own property on her own. In 1863, a
Even after coverture had lost its legal force, courts, legislators and the public still cleaved to the belief that marriage required husbands and wives to play totally different domestic roles. In 1958, the
As late as the 1970's, many American states retained "head and master" laws, giving the husband final say over where the family lived and other household decisions. According to the legal definition of marriage, the man was required to support the family, while the woman was obligated to keep house, nurture children, and provide sex. Not until the 1980's did most states criminalize marital rape. Prevailing opinion held that when a bride said, "I do," she was legally committed to say, "I will" for the rest of her married life.
I am old enough to remember the howls of protest with which some defenders of traditional marriage greeted the gradual dismantling of these traditions. At the time, I thought that the far-right opponents of marital equality were wrong to predict that this would lead to the unraveling of marriage. As it turned out, they had a point.
Giving married women an independent legal existence did not destroy heterosexual marriage. And allowing husbands and wives to construct their marriages around reciprocal duties and negotiated roles - where a wife can choose to be the main breadwinner and a husband can stay home with the children- was an immense boon to many couples. But these changes in the definition and practice of marriage opened the door for gay and lesbian couples to argue that they were now equally qualified to participate in it.
Marriage has been in a constant state of evolution since the dawn of the Stone Age. In the process it has become more flexible, but also more optional. Many people may not like the direction these changes have taken in recent years. But it is simply magical thinking to believe that by banning gay and lesbian marriage, we will turn back the clock.
Stephanie Coontz, the director of public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, is the author of "Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage."
Tuesday, July 05, 2005
Conservatives Bash Canada
By and large Canada Day was slagged from the Right in a demagogic hatred not seen since the debates during the Viet Nam war in the American press. And at that time the Right in the U.S. responded with the simplistic 'Love It or Leave It'.
It seems approriate then to adopt this slogan and apply it to the current crop of virulent Canada bashing right wingers in Canada; those who are columnists in the mainstream, read right-wing, press especially the Sun newpapers and the National Post. The irony is that they get paid for their calumny. America is soooo much better than Canada, but their paycheques are made in Canada, and their health care and social benefits they despise are still delivered to them regardless of their opinions.
Canada basher Ezra Levant's Calgary Sun column; Canada Day looked like a Liberal campaign ad made his comment appropriately on July 4th, not July 1st. Showing his Canadaphobia is merely good old Americaphilia it comes down to the simplistic arguement that goes Canada=The Liberal Party.
Levant whose an out and out Republican like his other Calgary pals Anders and Kenney, wants not only deep intergration with the United States but would like to be American. He even goes so far in his All Things American are good by calling his national publication the Western Standard after the American Conservative magazine the Weekly Standard.
Typical of the right wing in Canada who once upon a time opposed the Liberals under Trudeau they embraced being Anglophiles, all that was British was good.
Levant hearkens back to this time honoured tradition of being an apologist for the good old days of British colonialism (the specious arguement being that
Canada would not be a country if the Brits had not defeated the French and that they 'allowed' us independence under the Act of Westminister) .
In his column he says: "Once upon a time, Canada Day -- when it was called Dominion Day, when we had our old flag, not Lester Pearson's new flag, in Liberal colours -- celebrated what really did make our country great".
It's not just the old union jack or the red ensign that Levant embraces but that other fine Anglo American tradtion; child labour, that so offended Charles Dickens.Decisions on young workers and sour gas deserve cheers
Like the vast majority of Alberta right wingers, Ezra is an Anglo-American apologist by ideology (he was an intern at the Fraser Insitute the voice of the neo-conservative agenda in Canada) while being a Canadian by the accident of birth. He and his ilk's final solution, to what he sees as a degenerate left wing Canada, is to call for Alberta to Seperate from the rest of Canada. Forgetting of course that this American identity is strictly a Calgary phenomena, being the largest American city north of the 49th parallel. Those of us in Redmonton would then demand the right to Seperate from a Seperate Alberta, which true to form would continue on its right wing path of being a one party state in the tradition of Mussolini and Stalin.
Meanwhile not to be outdone, in the city of Toronto another Sun columnist Michael Coren, a born again papist, Anglophile and proud homophobe, denounces Canada in his column: Canada Day? Bah, Humbug!
where he says: "The notion that this is the greatest country on Earth and that our cities are "world class" is, frankly, quite ludicrous. We have little history, few passable museums, mediocre galleries and minimal national pride".
Well there's a case of the pot calling the kettle black, hard to have national pride when those in your nation, the so called patriots continue to bash it in favour of the good old days of British Colonialism or by embracing modern era American Imperialism. Our neo-cons ideology is a mix of bad old Socreds and sad sack Republicans.
And like Levant that is what Coren says; Brits and Americans good Canadians bad: "That's not difficult, of course. We make dreadful television and movies, whether they are funny or not. There are diluted versions of American and British programs and politically tendentious films that are instantly identifiable. They're characterized by bad acting and unfailingly lugubrious plots that often include a hackneyed and out-of-context gay relationship.".
The fact that we make very good TV and have long supplied the humourless Americans with their funniest comedians, since the early days of Hollywood to Saturday Night Live, seems lost on Coren. And with his predicatable homophobia, he dismisses Kids in the Hall was a funny series in both Canada and the United States. But hey why worry about facts when you are bashing Canada and gays in one breathe.
The columnists are not alone in their hatred of Canada, as I pointed out in a recent blog comment on Medicine Hat MP Monte Solberg who expressed much the same senitiments after the same sex bill passed.
Jim Elves at Blogs Canada exposes the rants of the right wing Canada Bashers in blog space with his blog article Calling on the Right to Quash Canada-haters .
Like their paid brethern in Canada's right wing press these supporters of all things Conservative, once again come up with the solution to their woes is to take Alberta out of Canada. They love the one party state in Alberta but hate the one party State in Ottawa, which is actually now a minority government something Albertans have never tried.
What they hate is not a country, not a government in Ottawa, hell when Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservatives were in power they hated them as well.
Nope they hate Canadians, they want to be Americans.
We Canadians are basically a peoples who embrace a social democratic ethic, that we support individual rights when they are not only good for the individual but for the good of the community as well. The right wing is opposed to all that makes us Canadian.
Thus they oppose gun control in principle, despite the fact that the majority of Canadians approve of gun control and despite the fact it works according to Stats Canada; Gun deaths down in Canada.
And they fail to see that the Federal government billion dollar boondoogle over the gun registry is because it embraced the neo-conservative ideology of privatization and private public partnerships, and because they did not expect the provinces like Alberta, not to buy in (ok that was stupid, but the point is that cost all of us part of the billion).
These yahoos on the right in Alberta have a history that is ridden with anti-french, anti-semitic, anti-native, anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-women, anti-union traditions. A right wing based in the old Social Credit party and the KKK in Alberta.
Federally they became Preston Mannings Reform Party/Alliance/Conservative Party, they are Albertans first, Canadians second. Which much to their own chagrin puts them in the same camp as the Quebecois, whom they bash out of jealousy for their asymetrical autonomy.
This then is the politics of the right in Canada as embraced by the Levants and Corens, and by the Reform/Alliance/Conservative party of Harper. Simply put they are not just pro-American, but virulently anti-Canadian and anti- Quebec because we are both Social Democratic countries.
As long as the majority of Canadians and Quebecois embrace the politics of the left by voting for the NDP, Liberals and BQ, the Conservatives will remain a regional party of Alberta. Ralphs party on the federal stage. A party that wanted to create a firewall around Calgary but disguised their aristotilian city state aspirations for an American outpost in the heartland of Canada's energy market by calling for annexation of the entire province.
Albertan's who are conservative never think of themselves as Canadians, to do so would mean we would have to share our wealth with the rest of the country, rather than horde it in a mean spirited way. The Alberta Government and its Federal arm; the Conservative pary, want deep integration with the United States, hence their support for the right wing rump that calls for seperation.
Since the right wing is so concerned with democracy and applauded the American invasion of Iraq to bring down a dictatorship and give the people a democracy perhaps they will applaud if the Federal government did the same thing in Alberta to secure the oil reserves for all Canadians, and to bring democracy to the oppressed and exploited peoples of Alberta. But somehow I don't think so.
Once upon a time the conspiratorial right wing published a manifesto of the new right in America it was entitled "None Dare Call It Treason". The new right in Alberta has supped deeply at the cup of this kind of politics and encourage if not call for Alberta seperation outright. But I dare to call it what it is; Sedition and treason agianst all that is Canadian, and the rantings of Levant, Coren, Solberg and the bloggers continues to prove this time after time.
It seems approriate then to adopt this slogan and apply it to the current crop of virulent Canada bashing right wingers in Canada; those who are columnists in the mainstream, read right-wing, press especially the Sun newpapers and the National Post. The irony is that they get paid for their calumny. America is soooo much better than Canada, but their paycheques are made in Canada, and their health care and social benefits they despise are still delivered to them regardless of their opinions.
Canada basher Ezra Levant's Calgary Sun column; Canada Day looked like a Liberal campaign ad made his comment appropriately on July 4th, not July 1st. Showing his Canadaphobia is merely good old Americaphilia it comes down to the simplistic arguement that goes Canada=The Liberal Party.
Levant whose an out and out Republican like his other Calgary pals Anders and Kenney, wants not only deep intergration with the United States but would like to be American. He even goes so far in his All Things American are good by calling his national publication the Western Standard after the American Conservative magazine the Weekly Standard.
Typical of the right wing in Canada who once upon a time opposed the Liberals under Trudeau they embraced being Anglophiles, all that was British was good.
Levant hearkens back to this time honoured tradition of being an apologist for the good old days of British colonialism (the specious arguement being that
Canada would not be a country if the Brits had not defeated the French and that they 'allowed' us independence under the Act of Westminister) .
In his column he says: "Once upon a time, Canada Day -- when it was called Dominion Day, when we had our old flag, not Lester Pearson's new flag, in Liberal colours -- celebrated what really did make our country great".
It's not just the old union jack or the red ensign that Levant embraces but that other fine Anglo American tradtion; child labour, that so offended Charles Dickens.Decisions on young workers and sour gas deserve cheers
Like the vast majority of Alberta right wingers, Ezra is an Anglo-American apologist by ideology (he was an intern at the Fraser Insitute the voice of the neo-conservative agenda in Canada) while being a Canadian by the accident of birth. He and his ilk's final solution, to what he sees as a degenerate left wing Canada, is to call for Alberta to Seperate from the rest of Canada. Forgetting of course that this American identity is strictly a Calgary phenomena, being the largest American city north of the 49th parallel. Those of us in Redmonton would then demand the right to Seperate from a Seperate Alberta, which true to form would continue on its right wing path of being a one party state in the tradition of Mussolini and Stalin.
Meanwhile not to be outdone, in the city of Toronto another Sun columnist Michael Coren, a born again papist, Anglophile and proud homophobe, denounces Canada in his column: Canada Day? Bah, Humbug!
where he says: "The notion that this is the greatest country on Earth and that our cities are "world class" is, frankly, quite ludicrous. We have little history, few passable museums, mediocre galleries and minimal national pride".
Well there's a case of the pot calling the kettle black, hard to have national pride when those in your nation, the so called patriots continue to bash it in favour of the good old days of British Colonialism or by embracing modern era American Imperialism. Our neo-cons ideology is a mix of bad old Socreds and sad sack Republicans.
And like Levant that is what Coren says; Brits and Americans good Canadians bad: "That's not difficult, of course. We make dreadful television and movies, whether they are funny or not. There are diluted versions of American and British programs and politically tendentious films that are instantly identifiable. They're characterized by bad acting and unfailingly lugubrious plots that often include a hackneyed and out-of-context gay relationship.".
The fact that we make very good TV and have long supplied the humourless Americans with their funniest comedians, since the early days of Hollywood to Saturday Night Live, seems lost on Coren. And with his predicatable homophobia, he dismisses Kids in the Hall was a funny series in both Canada and the United States. But hey why worry about facts when you are bashing Canada and gays in one breathe.
The columnists are not alone in their hatred of Canada, as I pointed out in a recent blog comment on Medicine Hat MP Monte Solberg who expressed much the same senitiments after the same sex bill passed.
Jim Elves at Blogs Canada exposes the rants of the right wing Canada Bashers in blog space with his blog article Calling on the Right to Quash Canada-haters .
Like their paid brethern in Canada's right wing press these supporters of all things Conservative, once again come up with the solution to their woes is to take Alberta out of Canada. They love the one party state in Alberta but hate the one party State in Ottawa, which is actually now a minority government something Albertans have never tried.
What they hate is not a country, not a government in Ottawa, hell when Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservatives were in power they hated them as well.
Nope they hate Canadians, they want to be Americans.
We Canadians are basically a peoples who embrace a social democratic ethic, that we support individual rights when they are not only good for the individual but for the good of the community as well. The right wing is opposed to all that makes us Canadian.
Thus they oppose gun control in principle, despite the fact that the majority of Canadians approve of gun control and despite the fact it works according to Stats Canada; Gun deaths down in Canada.
And they fail to see that the Federal government billion dollar boondoogle over the gun registry is because it embraced the neo-conservative ideology of privatization and private public partnerships, and because they did not expect the provinces like Alberta, not to buy in (ok that was stupid, but the point is that cost all of us part of the billion).
These yahoos on the right in Alberta have a history that is ridden with anti-french, anti-semitic, anti-native, anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-women, anti-union traditions. A right wing based in the old Social Credit party and the KKK in Alberta.
Federally they became Preston Mannings Reform Party/Alliance/Conservative Party, they are Albertans first, Canadians second. Which much to their own chagrin puts them in the same camp as the Quebecois, whom they bash out of jealousy for their asymetrical autonomy.
This then is the politics of the right in Canada as embraced by the Levants and Corens, and by the Reform/Alliance/Conservative party of Harper. Simply put they are not just pro-American, but virulently anti-Canadian and anti- Quebec because we are both Social Democratic countries.
As long as the majority of Canadians and Quebecois embrace the politics of the left by voting for the NDP, Liberals and BQ, the Conservatives will remain a regional party of Alberta. Ralphs party on the federal stage. A party that wanted to create a firewall around Calgary but disguised their aristotilian city state aspirations for an American outpost in the heartland of Canada's energy market by calling for annexation of the entire province.
Albertan's who are conservative never think of themselves as Canadians, to do so would mean we would have to share our wealth with the rest of the country, rather than horde it in a mean spirited way. The Alberta Government and its Federal arm; the Conservative pary, want deep integration with the United States, hence their support for the right wing rump that calls for seperation.
Since the right wing is so concerned with democracy and applauded the American invasion of Iraq to bring down a dictatorship and give the people a democracy perhaps they will applaud if the Federal government did the same thing in Alberta to secure the oil reserves for all Canadians, and to bring democracy to the oppressed and exploited peoples of Alberta. But somehow I don't think so.
Once upon a time the conspiratorial right wing published a manifesto of the new right in America it was entitled "None Dare Call It Treason". The new right in Alberta has supped deeply at the cup of this kind of politics and encourage if not call for Alberta seperation outright. But I dare to call it what it is; Sedition and treason agianst all that is Canadian, and the rantings of Levant, Coren, Solberg and the bloggers continues to prove this time after time.
Monday, July 04, 2005
A NEW AMERICAN REVOLUTION
HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY
WORKING PEOPLE OF AMERICA
"It has been my fate to be a worker all my life."--Jo Labadie
Independence day,was a day forgotten by the early 19th Century American master craftsmen, landowners, rich farmers, and religious revivalists. It was revived and celebrated by the 'mechanics and artisans' of the American Republic. The origin of July 4th celebrations in the United States were the celebrations of apprentices and journeymen in revolt against the social conservatives of the the day, their masters. It was their day to demand the fruits of the revolution their right to the fruits of their labour. (Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic; New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class 1788-1850, OUP 1984)
It was this struggle of labouring men and women in America that led to the Free Labour movment which eventually confronted the Democratic Tyrants of Tamminy Hall in New York with a new political party called the Republican Party. It was this party under Abraham Lincoln that called for the freedom of the labouring man, and freeing of the slaves so that they could enjoy the fruits of their labour as mechanics, artisans and farmers. (Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labour)
Freedom was no slogan for a new toothpaste, or another coffee shop. Freedom was not something to be exported at the end of the bayonet. Freedom was for the individual to enjoy his or her right to the fruits of their labour. For it was well known that labour produced all value.
The radical American individualist was an anarchist. Influenced by Prodhoun, Stirner and the First International Working Mens organisation, anarchists like the Haymarket martyrs were joined by the individualist anarchists like Benjamin Tucker and Joseph Labadie, who understood the labour theory of value was essential for demanding individual freedom.
The anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats. They believe that “the best government is that which governs least,” and that which governs least is no government at all.
They shared no cant with the capitalist, the monopolist as they called them, for these robber barons stole the labour of others, leaving them in poverty while living in mansions fit for kings. They were athiests, abolitionists, feminists, and socialists. Their socialism was not that of Europe, not State Socialism, but that of the 'free association of producers'.
Not to abolish wages, but to make every man dependent upon wages and secure to every man his whole wages is the aim of Anarchistic Socialism. What Anarchistic Socialism aims to abolish is usury. It does not want to deprive labor of its reward; it wants to deprive capital of its reward. It does not hold that labor should not be sold; it holds that capital should not be hired at usury. Benjamin Tucker
They were individualist socialists. They were a 'unique', as Stirner refered to the egoist, socialist movement in a new nation. A nation that was built not on monarchies or old families, nor status or wealth but built by labour. Their individualist anarchism enthralled and influenced the emigre anarchist Emma Goldman, and horrorfied statist socialists and craft unions. They were the extreme left of the labour movement .
IF I WERE to give a summary of the tendency of our times, I would say, Quantity. The multitude, the mass spirit, dominates everywhere, destroying quality. Our entire life--production, politics, and education--rests on quantity, on numbers. The worker who once took pride in the thoroughness and quality of his work, has been replaced by brainless, incompetent automatons, who turn out enormous quantities of things, valueless to themselves, and generally injurious to the rest of mankind. Thus quantity, instead of adding to life's comforts and peace, has merely increased man's burden.
The oft repeated slogan of our time is, among all politicians, the Socialists included, that ours is an era of individualism, of the minority. Only those who do not probe beneath the surface might be led to entertain this view. Have not the few accumulated the wealth of the world? Are they not the masters, the absolute kings of the situation? Their success, however, is due not to individualism, but to the inertia, the cravenness, the utter submission of the mass. The latter wants but to be dominated, to be led, to be coerced. As to individualism, at no time in human history did it have less chance of expression, less opportunity to assert itself in a normal, healthy manner. Emma Goldman, Minorities Versus Majorities
American Anarchist Socialism was the result of the direct experiences of working men and women as they suffered abject poverty while wealth flowed around them. It was the poltical and economic trajectory of a nation of labourers and farmers an Artisnal nation. And it was the artisan that celebrated 'their ' independence as being one and the same as their 'nation'.
But all that changed through the Civil War and after as America became an industrial capitalist nation of robber barons. Great monopolies were created, the first military industrial complex, one that gave power to the two political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans. No longer were either the voice of the 'workingman', whom they gave sufferage to in order to win their votes. Thus was born the rebellion of workers to create a 'third party' as well as various socialist parties and social organizations like unions and the farmers Grange movement.
There were from the beginning two different strands within Socialism: one was the Right-wing, authoritarian strand, from Saint-Simon down, which glorified statism, hierarchy, and collectivism and which was thus a projection of Conservatism trying to accept and dominate the new industrial civilization. The other was the Left-wing, relatively libertarian strand, exemplified in their different ways by Marx and Bakunin, revolutionary and far more interested in achieving the libertarian goals of liberalism and socialism: but especially the smashing of the State apparatus to achieve the "withering away of the State" and the "end of the exploitation of man by man." Interestingly enough, the very Marxian phrase, the "replacement of the government of men by the administration of things," can be traced, by a circuitous route, from the great French radical laissez-faire liberals of the early nineteenth century, Charles Comte (no relation to Auguste Comte) and Charles Dunoyer. And so, too, may the concept of the "class struggle"; except that for Dunoyer and Comte the inherently antithetical classes were not businessmen vs. workers, but the producers in society (including free businessmen, workers, peasants, etc.) versus the exploiting classes constituting, and privileged by, the State apparatus.
While there was plenty there was plenty of want as well, as thousands of new immigrants flooded America seeking their economic freedom from serfdom in Europe. What they found was an America that would use and abuse them for their labour by allowing capital its unfettered freedom. Such freedom of capital is often mistakenly called, even today, individualism. But it is not. As homegrown Socialists like Jack London would discover.
Man being man and a great deal short of the angels, the quarrel over the division of the joint product is irreconcilable. For the last twenty years in the United States, there has been an average of over a thousand strikes per year; and year by year these strikes increase in magnitude, and the front of the labor army grows more imposing. And it is a class struggle, pure and simple. Labor as a class is fighting with capital as a class.