"Fuck the vote!" will be a main rallying cry for activists in a Kingston May 1 march. This is just one more sign that growing numbers are rejecting the parliamentary system altogether in the realization that real change is only possible when we organize on the streets!


For information about the upcoming event - as well as other boycott-related events in Ontario and Québec - please see the "Events" tab.

NDP: Part of the Imperialist System

Taken from the first edition of Partisan newspaper:

The New Democratic Party (NDP) promotes itself as the option for the left in Canada. But just like the Conservatives and Liberals, the NDP is steeped in imperialism, in which Canadian business and political elites exploit and impoverish already poor countries for the benefit of Canadian companies.

One of the most visible ways the NDP is pro-imperialist is its support for wars in the Middle East. Certainly no self-proclaimed leftwing parliamentary party is going to go so far as to advocate national wars, but the NDP goes to war none the less. When it does war -the NDP initially supported Canada's involvement in the US invasion of Afghanistan and currently supports the NATO invasion of Libya- it is framed as a humanitarian intervention, like a 'no-fly zone', or a human development initiative like 'aid' and 'rebuilding'.

On Libya, NDP leader Jack Layton said in late March that Canada should "draw a lesson from the war in Afghanistan and give parliamentarians a surveillance and oversight role." He neither challenges the imperialist motives of both wars, nor criticizes the conspicuous militarization of Canada.

The reason NATO countries including Canada are occupying Afghanistan is not to advance democracy but to secure access to the country's vast mineral resources and control pipelines that bring natural gas and oil from adjacent countries to the Arabian sea and Caspian sea basin. The US military expressed surprise in 2010, when it Afghanistan's untapped mineral wealth was estimated at $1 trillion, but the surprise was phony: geological surveys conducted in the 1970s and 1980s revealed Afghanistan was a gold mine (as well as a mine of several other minerals including copper, bauxite, lithium and uranium).

Well aware that an advanced military is required for ensuring cheap access to natural resource in foreign countries, the NDP supports Canada's increasing militarization. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives reported that Canadian military spending is 54% higher than it was before 2001. The NDP has promised not to cut military spending, but to keep it at the $26 billion proposed in the most recent Conservative budget. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute ranks Canada the 6th largest military spender within NATO's 28 state membership, and 13th in the world. In Nova Scotia, the provincial NDP government contributes to this militarization by funding Lockheed Martin, the biggest military contractor in the world.

If we demand from our government social security from exploitative economic forces, how can we settle for a solution financed by the exploitation of foreign people? Do we not become the exploiters if our governments provide services that are paid by the conquest of other peoples and we do not fight for a solution that would put people before corporate growth?

In Canada, we may not see the suffering and devastation caused by imperialist wars. Instead we see only a trickle of migrants and refugees fleeing poverty and wars that are the direct result of policies and military intervention by imperialist powers. Fortunately for Layton, he has a solution for these victims of imperialism within Canada's borders: on April 6, he announced his party would fund 2,500 more cops.

Boycott des élections: le point de vue de la classe ouvrière

Article paru dans le premier numéro du journal Partisan:

La campagne que les supporters de ce journal mènent pour le boycott des élections rencontre un écho favorable en milieu ouvrier. De fait, tout porte à croire que plus de la moitié des travailleurs et des travailleuses n'iront pas voter le 2 mai prochain.

Ce phénomène, on l'observe immédiatement dans les circonscriptions à forte concentration prolétarienne, où le taux de participation est généralement inférieur à la moyenne nationale. Quand on tient compte du fait que des centaines de milliers de prolétaires, qui vivent et travaillent sur le territoire canadien, n'ont pas droit de vote parce que résidents permanents ou sans statut, l'abstention ouvrière dépasse largement les 50%.

Outre celles qui proviennent des partis bourgeois eux-mêmes, les réticences les plus fortes que l'on rencontre envers le boycott viennent de cette gauche qui espère encore que le système bourgeois puisse faire preuve de «compassion» et adoucir les horreurs dont il est pourtant responsable. Il faut dire que beaucoup de gens parmi cette faune (militants syndicaux, salariéEs de groupes communautaires, etc.), dont les intentions sont par ailleurs sans doute honnêtes - là n'est pas la question - sont eux-mêmes liés par mille et un fils à l'appareil d'État. Ce système, ils vont apparemment y croire encore toute leur vie...

Ces gens-là nous disent qu'il faut aller voter parce que sinon, on aura le gouvernement qu'on mérite et qu'il sera trop tard ensuite pour se plaindre de ses décisions. Mais depuis quand la légitimité de notre colère et de nos revendications dépend-elle de notre bulletin de vote? En fait, ce sont ceux qui participent au système électoral qui vont conférer une légitimité au prochain gouvernement. Qui donc sera élu le 2 mai prochain? Harper, vraisemblablement. Ignatieff, peut-être. L'un ou l'autre, c'est sûr.

Comment peut-on imaginer que le vainqueur appliquera un autre programme que celui de la grande bourgeoisie canadienne? Et de quoi auront donc l'air nos valeureux «démocrates de gauche» au lendemain de l'élection? Espérons qu'ils ne ressortiront pas leurs pancartes où c'est écrit «J'ai jamais voté pour ça» parce que de fait, ils auront voté pour ça: pour un gouvernement bourgeois qui pourra se réclamer d'un mandat populaire fort et légitime, élu avec à la complicité d'une gauche servile.

Certains nous disent que cette fois-ci, c'est différent, que Harper est plus dangereux que les autres et qu'il faut tout faire pour freiner la «montée de la droite». Le problème, c'est que le durcissement du pouvoir bourgeois auquel on assiste effectivement, qui par ailleurs n'est pas un phénomène strictement canadien (ça se passe aussi dans la plupart des pays capitalistes que l'on dit «avancés»), touche tous les partis et tout l'appareil politique dominant. Quand c'est rendu que le principal parti «de gauche», le NPD, vote en faveur du déploiement militaire canadien en Libye et promet l'embauche de 2 500 flics supplémentaires et le maintien des dépenses militaires à leur niveau actuel s'il est élu, on peut douter sérieusement de sa capacité à freiner la droite - si tant est qu'il en ait la volonté.

Les travailleurs et les travailleuses ont bien raison de se désintéresser du cirque électoral qui se déroule sans elles et eux. Boycotter les élections, c'est commencer à cesser de penser comme nos ennemis; c'est un premier geste de rupture, le début d'une réappropriation de notre identité comme prolétaires.

Our Voices Are Our Fists!

This message is from a supporter of the Boycott the Elections 2011 campaign in Central Ontario:

On May 2nd the capitalists will have their so-called election. We as Communists will never support such an obvious attempt at securing power for the wealthy ruling class. They produce mass amounts of propaganda about how we must vote in order to exercise our so-called democratic right. What we must do is resist everything that the ruling class tries to do. We must fight with out voices and our fists...

This system needs to be shattered with no mercy. In order to do this we must boycott this phony election. They want us to vote, we will vote with out feet and our fists; we will show them just how sick we are of all their shit. The time for talking is over, no longer can the working class support the mistakes of the wealthy. We must make them pay for all of their faults, for everything they have done to the working class in this country.

Instead of voting on May 2nd, march on May 1st! Our voices are our fists and we must make every fist we have a weapon. In this struggle we are vastly outnumbered, however we have a few things that the ruling class will never have and that is Pride, Honour and Anger... We cannot fail and we will not fail. Our goal is simple: The destruction of the ruling class and its system! On May 2nd don't prop up this system by voting, show it your frustration by voting with your fists!

Hans Pedersen

Nos poings sont nos voix!

Message reçu d'un supporter de la Campagne 2011 pour le boycott des élections du centre de l'Ontario:

Le 2 mai, les capitalistes tiendront leur prétendue élection. Comme communistes, nous n'appuierons jamais cette tentative évidente de renouveler le pouvoir de la richissime classe dominante. Les capitalistes nous assènent une propagande démesurée pour nous convaincre d'exercer notre soi-disant droit démocratique. Il faut résister à ces manœuvres. Nous devons nous battre avec nos voix et nos poings...

Il faut briser et détruire ce système injuste! Boycotter cette élection bidon, c'est un pas dans cette direction. Les capitalistes veulent que nous votions, mais nous allons voter avec nos pieds et nos poings; nous allons leur montrer à quel point on n'en peut plus de toute leur boulechite. Le temps des discussions est terminé, la classe ouvrière n'en peut plus de subir les erreurs des riches. Nous devons leur faire payer pour tout ce qu'ils nous ont fait subir, pour tout le mal qu'ils ont causé à la classe ouvrière de ce pays.

Au lieu de voter le 2 mai, nous allons marcher le 1er Mai! Nos poings sont nos voix, on doit les utiliser comme une arme. Dans la lutte âpre et certainement difficile qui nous oppose aux capitalistes, nous disposons d'un certain nombre d'atouts que la classe dirigeante n'aura jamais - la fierté, l'honneur et la colère... À terme, nous vaincrons. Notre objectif est simple: c'est la destruction de la classe dirigeante et de son système! Le 2 mai, n'apportez pas votre soutien au système avec votre bulletin de vote; exprimez votre frustration en votant avec vos poings!

Hans Pedersen

[EN] Other forces are campaigning for abstention
Common Cause in Ontario and “Union Communiste Libertaire” in Québec are officially campaigning for abstention in the May 2 federal election. They launched a common website (www.genuinechange.info) that includes some material explaining why they consider “genuine change can only come from ourselves.”

Meanwhile, Montréal “Reconstruction Communiste Canada” officially endorsed the 2011 Boycott Elections Campaign. These comrades are helping flyering and postering in the areas where they are active.

[FR] D’autres forces se rallient au boycott
Depuis quelques jours, l’Union communiste libertaire et son pendant ontarien Common Cause font officiellement campagne pour l’abstention en prévision de l’élection fédérale du 2 mai. Les deux groupes ont lancé un site Web conjoint (www.levraichangement.com) où ils expliquent que «le vrai changement ne peut venir que de nous-mêmes».

Entre-temps, un groupe montréalais appelé «Reconstruction communiste Canada» a annoncé son appui à la Campagne 2011 pour le boycott des élections et participe à la diffusion du matériel à divers endroits de la métropole.

Our comrades in Ottawa put together this powerful video in response to a Rick Mercer report that encouraged young people to vote in support of this whole, rotten system. Check it out!

RADIO INTERVIEW [English]

On Radio Basics in Toronto, Louise Jones and Joshua Moufawad-Paul were interviewed about the campaign.  Several members of the community called in and produced a thoughtful discussion.

Listen to the interview here.

Direct download available in the Materials section.

Don't Vote, Fight!

[English]

Originally posted on M-L-M Mayhem

by JMP [ENGLISH]

"Fighting" through the electoral process in this social context, and generally in the context of the imperialist centres of capitalism, is a rigged game and a waste of our time as leftists who speak of revolution on the one hand and then, when it comes to our activism, hide our politics by sublimating them in reformist organizations.  I know I've wasted time and energy in these types of coalitions, convinced that official trade union politics represent the beating heart of proletarian consciousness and willing to suspend my theoretical communism in order to work alongside social democratic labour activists.  This is the gap between theory and practice that was critiqued at the Second Canadian Revolutionary Congress I attended in December: we argue that capitalism cannot be defeated by bourgeois parliamentarianism, we understand why theoretically, and yet our activism often gravitates towards the very parliamentarianism we philosophically reject.

Therefore, the elections boycott is motivated by two central concerns and aims to cognize the distance between leftwing activists and the masses they claim to support: 1) leftwing activists who understand that revolution does not come from voting often waste their time trying to claim electoral space and concessions; 2) possibly 60% of the Canadian masses do not vote.  The point of the proposed boycott movement is to clarify the distance between these two concerns.  In my mind it represents what Alain Badiou calls a philosophical situation––that is, a "situation [that] involves the moment in which a choice proclaimed – a choice of existence, or a choice of thinking."  And the "proper task is to make the choice clear." (Badiou, Polemics, 4)  The event on March 19th that has started, at a micro-level, to stir up some controversy is designed to make our choices clear, to draw a line, to demonstrate not only the gap between theory and practice but also the gap that still exists between leftwing activists and the vast majority of the working and non-working poor.

Again, the event is not aimed at social democrats who already believe that change can only come through the electoral process and that our current system determines the parameters of reality.  Nor would any boycott movement be aimed at the population they represent: the liberal middle class, the concerned ex-hippies, the conscientious objectors.  Their position in this debate is already clear, they have never pretended to be anything but social democrats, and we know from the very beginning that they would be horrified by anything that insults their understanding of democracy where change can only come through voting in the most socially democratic and reformist party.  And yet there are many of us who claim to reject the philosophy of social democracy but still act according to socially democratic ideals––and we reject the possibility of a boycott movement for various reasons, some of which I will attempt to demystify below.

1.  While it is true that bourgeois democracy will not usher in the revolution, the masses aren't ready for anything but reforms so they need to vote for these reforms.

This is the main justification for working in social democratic and ultimately reformist coalitions/institutions for those who theoretically believe that reformism is not the same as revolution.  Since the possibility of revolution is set beyond the horizon of the foreseeable future, as if this can be predicted through a social-science crystal ball, then the best we can do is agitate for reforms by trying to vote in the most socially democratic party (in Canada this is the New Democratic Party [NDP]).  Then the masses, once they see how we have helped win them reforms, will be ready for revolution.  Or, at the very least, their lot in life will be better.

Except that the masses have already spoken by not voting, demonstrating that there is an implicit boycott already in affect.  So if the masses have spoken, and you claim to represent the masses concerns, it is insulting to say that they aren't ready for anything other than voting for reforms.  Clearly they are not willing to vote for reforms and to argue that this is because they are stupid or not even ready to vote is just rank pessimism.  They are not voting because voting does not communicate to their material existence and no party apparently represents their interests: we need to figure out what this means rather than waste our time, again and again, trying to get them to vote and then complaining that they are apathetic or dumb when they don't listen.  Besides, the social democratic parties have enough of their own resources and loyal followers to agitate for this on their own––so why do we waste time agitating with them when the hard left is strapped for resources as it is?

Moreover, if we waste all our time in reformist pursuits, how can we build a militant left movement that can actually challenge capitalism?  Why do we refuse to speak of a strong anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism?  Why do we say that we need an anti-capitalist organization and yet build nothing more than social democratic coalitions, secretly imagining that they will one day magically transform into revolutionary parties and organizations when "the masses are ready"?  So when will the masses be ready in a context where we are always fostering the ideology that they are not ready?

2.  Rosa Luxemburg argued that social reforms, though not an end goal, are necessary to support because they alleviate the suffering of the poor.  And Lenin once argued, in the case of England, that it was "ultra-leftism" to allow the reformist-electoral spaces to be claimed by liberals.

The problem is that when these arguments are made they are both made out of historical context.  Both Luxemburg and Lenin were speaking of social democratic parties that were far more radical than the social democratic parties of the North American context where it is difficult to even call the NDP (in Canada) "social democratic" anymore, and impossible to call the Democratic Party (in the US) "social democratic" even at its inception.  Luxemburg was speaking of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (where we get the in-leftist slur "social democrat"), which was still motivated by a defanged marxism, and Lenin was speaking of the Labour Party in Britain that, at that time, was filled with unionists who were arming themselves (and the Labour Party in England now is a far cry, all Tony Blair imperialism, from the Labour Party of Lenin's day).

Then there was the fact that Luxemburg was speaking, in her article, of building a revolutionary party that was not reformist––something we are not doing in our context––and her ultimate argument was that those who call themselves "revolutionaries" should not be wasting their time in reformist organizations.  It is also interesting to note that the voted-in Social Democratic Party of Germany was not able to stop the Nazi rise to power, even collaborating with the Freikorps to crush the Spartacist Uprising and have its leaders, Luxemburg included, murdered.  And again, the SDP was far more to the left than the supposedly "social democratic" parties in the North American context.

Furthermore, Lenin was actually proved wrong about the Labour Party.  As one of my good comrades never tires of reminding me, Lenin's "Left-Wing Communism: an infantile disorder," a piece that is often used to justify entryism, was probably one of Lenin's weakest pieces.  Not because he was wrong about some of the theoretical positions he argued but because the concrete tactics he supported in Britain––that were rejected by Sylvia Pankhurst––actually failed.  And yet this tract is still treated as dogma by some leftwing groups who would prefer to ignore everything Lenin wrote about "opportunism" and spend most of their time insulting everyone who does not want to be a social democrat as "ultra-left."

3.  We need to work hard to vote in a social democratic, or at least liberal, government because of the swing to the right and the rise of conservative parties.  Fascism is a real danger.

This argument seems reasonable on the surface but, concerned only with appearance, fails to even engage with essential questions about fascism.  Fascist movements are generally populist movements that begin outside of the electoral process by disaffected masses manipulated by a monolithic capitalism.  If and when they come to power through parliamentarianism this demonstrates two things: 1) the election is only the end point of something larger; 2) bourgeois parliamentarianism is often sympathetic to fascism.

Look at the rise of the Tea Party in the US, accompanied by open fascist policies, and the danger of fascism is clear.  Moreover, this is a danger that happened both in spite and because of leftists wasting their energy on social democratic pursuits (if you can even call it that in the American context).  The movement that cohered around Obama, raised against the weak fascism of Bush, did nothing but waste the energy of the left: capitalism is still being protected, imperialism is still alive and well, and in response to this election a fascist movement is growing.  And those who sublimated their energies and beliefs in the Obama election are proving incapable of combating this movement; their blunted revolutionary politics, their inability to communicate with the deep-seeded disaffection of the poor, neutralizing them in the face of contemporary fascism.  What would have happened, we need to rhetorically ask, if the US left had not wasted all of its time in getting a Democrat elected and instead concentrated on building a parallel movement?

Fascism lurks at the threshold of the bourgeois parliamentary process and we render ourselves incapable of dealing with this danger the more we hide ourselves within this process and deny that the threat is coming from those spaces in which we fail to organize.  And these spaces are not primarily the privileged spaces of unions because we live in a context where the majority of the most exploited labour is non-unionized, oft-times migrant, and subordinated to the threat of a massive reserve army of the poor and deportation.  This is not to say we should ignore union spaces, and the resources these spaces possess, but that we need to start thinking outside of the traditional "this-is-the-proletariat" box––a box that is often the box of the labour aristocracy.

And if the terrifying conservatisation of our society is a warning of the dawn of real fascism, then we need to ask ourselves why we have failed to prevent conservatism in the past with all of our voting power, all of our mobilization, all of our attempts to prevent these anti-human politicians from winning the ballot.  We keep arguing that we need to vote in some social democratic government to end the rise of the right and yet our arguments have been proved, time and time again, completely wrong.  In the US Obama's election is not preventing the right from gaining power, state by state, from gaining both popular and electoral support.  In Canada we keep getting the Harpers and Fords elected.  Then we blame the poor who do not vote for spoiling our social democratic fantasies, imagining that they are stupid rather than asking why they don't vote in the first place.

Meanwhile, imperialism, settler-colonialism, and capitalism continue.  So many of us lock ourselves in reformist and/or trade union contexts and complain that there is nothing powerful enough to challenge actually existing capitalism and yet do nothing to change this state of affairs.

Let us be clear: the electoral space in these centres of capitalism is a moribund vehicle for change and our participation in this space has done nothing to prevent enemy forces from growing.  Moreover, and this is very important, social democratic electoral parties continue to move to the right: conservatisation is not limited to the conservative parties but is currently part of the entire process of electoral politics.  And this despite every attempt on the part of a left that should know better to fight for social democratic spaces in parliament.

As the RCP Canada argued in 2004:

No election in the framework of bourgeois democracy will transform the army, the police and justice to put them at the service of the exploited.  We have to prepare for this confrontation, not with unarmed pro-bourgeois parties, which the State can easily ignore.  We must prepare by finally building a revolutionary party serving the oppressed that will not be afraid to say: the bourgeoisie will never abandon its power by itself!  The majority has to seize power by the force of its numbers and defend it by every means necessary!  Against elections, let's prepare the revolution!

Bourgeois democracy, the Parliamentary system and workers power

“Instead of worrying about bourgeois organs of power, we should be busy constructing our own proletarian organs of power.”

Read this extensive post from the Social Revolution Party, an Ottawa-based communist group.

Les étapes de la formation du parti unique de la bourgeoisie canadienne

Article ayant été publié quelques jours avant le déclenchement de l'actuelle élection fédérale, qui trace à grands traits les caractéristiques des trois grandes étapes qui ont marqué la formation par la bourgeoisie canadienne de son parti unique:

On saura dans quelques semaines si une élection fédérale aura lieu ce printemps. Si c’est le cas, on vous annonce dès maintenant que le parti unique de la grande bourgeoisie canadienne va reprendre le pouvoir! Ses deux ailes, le Parti libéral et le Parti conservateur sont, parmi tous les partis bourgeois d’Occident et du monde impérialiste, au nombre des cinq ou six partis, tout au plus, qui ont construit les liens les plus durables, qui ont assis leur longévité sur l’implantation dans les milieux capitalistes et la défense des intérêts communs à toute la bourgeoisie, parmi les plus solides que l’on puisse trouver à travers tous les parlements bourgeois.

Lire la version intégrale sur ledrapeaurouge.ca.

Des mots qui tranchent et qui ne véhiculent aucune illusion:
Boycottons les élections!

En politique, la langue des bourgeois est maintenant une langue vieillie, pétrifiée, qui n’a plus de sens, et que de moins en moins de travailleurs et de travailleuses écoutent avec respect et soumission. Le prolétariat a besoin plus que jamais de parler et d’agir par lui-même. Et en l’espèce, aujourd’hui, il est écœuré de voter pour le «parti unique» de la bourgeoisie.

Que ce «parti unique» soit bicéphale ou tricéphale, qu’il se compose d’un gros corps obèse et totalitaire libéralo-conservateur et de deux flancs: un flanc gauche et un flanc droit plus ou moins visible ou discret selon les époques et les circonstances, cela importe tout compte fait assez peu. Ce qui compte vraiment, c’est que les mêmes intérêts (ceux des capitalistes) règnent à la fois au gouvernement et dans l’opposition, si bien que quand la représentation parlementaire change d’une élection à l’autre (et elle doit changer pour que l’édifice tienne), la nature du Parlement, elle, reste la même.

La société bourgeoise actuelle cherche son souffle, cela est évident. Mais une chose est certaine, c’est qu’elle a beaucoup de peine à trouver ce souffle supplémentaire du côté de la démocratie. Son parlementarisme apparaît de plus en plus une œuvre du passé, déconsidéré dans le présent, et dépourvu de toute utilité pour l’avenir.

Les militantes et les militants d’aujourd’hui aspirent à renouveler la participation des pauvres et des exploitéEs à la transformation radicale de la société. C’est ce qu’on appelle la révolution. En boycottant les élections, ils et elles nous disent clairement deux choses. D’abord: qu’il n’y a pas de pauvres ni de travailleurs ou de travailleuses révolutionnaires dans les parlements, et qu’il est inutile de les y chercher. On y retrouve certes des bourgeois, des petits-bourgeois et des labour lieutenants, mais pas de pauvres ni de travailleurs ou travailleuses révolutionnaires.

Cela en soi est significatif. Mais plus significative encore est la deuxième chose qu’ils et elles nous disent, à savoir que les pauvres et les travailleurs et travailleuses révolutionnaires ne cherchent surtout pas à entrer au Parlement! Leur politique va plutôt dans le sens de le détruire et avec lui, de détruire les autres appareils de l’État bourgeois qui sont, considérés dans leur ensemble, les moyens de la domination de classe de la bourgeoisie sur les travailleurs et les travailleuses.

Lisez la version intégrale de cet article sur ledrapeaurouge.ca.

Words that convey no illusions:
Boycott the Elections!

In politics, the language of the bourgeoisie is now an old language, petrified, that doesn’t have meaning anymore and that fewer and fewer workers listen to with respect and submission. The proletariat needs more than ever to speak and act by itself. Today, it is sickened to vote for the bourgeoisie’s “single party.”

Whether this “single party” has two or three heads, is composed of a large obese liberal-conservative body and two sides (a left side and a more or less visible or discrete right side according to the times and circumstances): that doesn’t matter very much in the final analysis. What really counts is that the same interests (those of the capitalists) reign at the same time in the government and in the opposition. Thus, when the parliamentary representation changes from one election to another (and it must change to give the system a fake credibility), the nature of the Parliament still remains the same.

The actual bourgeois society seeks its breath, that’s obvious. But it’s certain that the bourgeoisie cannot find much air on the side of the democracy. Its parliamentarism seems more and more a work of the past, discredited in the present, and deprived of any utility for the future.

Today’s activists intend to renew the participation of the exploited and the poor in a radical social transformation. This is what is called revolution. By boycotting the elections, they clearly tell us two things. First: that there are no poor nor revolutionary workers in the Parliaments, and that it is useless to seek them there. We can certainly find there a lot of bourgeois, petit-bourgeois and “labor-lieutenants,” but not a single poor nor revolutionary worker.

That, in self, is significant. But still more significant is the fact that the revolutionary poor and workers do not seek to enter at all to the Parliament! Their interest rather go in the direction of destroying it, and with it, the other apparatuses of the bourgeois state which are, considered as a whole, the tools used by the ruling class to ensure the continuation of workers’ exploitation.

Read the whole post on theredflag.ca.

NDP supports jailing youth and funding corporate criminals

The New Democratic Party recently revealed it would like to fund 2500 more cops, give more money to prosecution (which will only further criminalize and limit the options of youth) and keep military spending at the same level as the Conservatives! The NDP is supposed to be the most "progressive" of the three parties. The truth is it is the most progressive. And that's not only deplorable, it's also unacceptable.

Even former NDP organizers, Andrew Klochek and Michael Laxer think that the NDP "would do nothing to alter the political economy of the country" and that "the time has come to fight state capitalism itself."

The old white boy's club: Jack Layton (L) is just like the rest!

Boycott the elections! Let's fight the whole system!
 


The following is excerpted from a recent article Klochek and Laxer wrote for rabble.ca, the full text of which is available here.



Over the last 40 years, the ideology of neo-liberalism has won every battle in its attempts to reshape our society...
With the willing complicity of our self-proclaimed voices of the left, we have instituted a system of socialism and welfare for the rich. The effect of this political order is to prop up the failures of our societies' wealthiest while abandoning everyone else, including our societies' most vulnerable, by stealing tens of millions of their dollars to fund CEO slush funds and salaries.
While workers were forced to make concessions and millions of them lost their jobs, CEO's salaries went nowhere but up, all subsidized by your tax dollars. Instead of using the power of government to declare war on poverty, we have declared war on the poor and the middle class.
The issue is not that the NDP supported stimulus spending in order to save jobs. The issue is that in supporting these measures, they did so without actively calling for fundamental changes to the system that required bailouts in the first place. As a result, in the final analysis they basically called for the government to back up the tremendous social inequality that is represented by these same CEOs who forced this bailout and yet are now making over 150 times what the average worker does.
...
In the face of this system, the NDP, which once articulated a vision for an alternative economic order, now merely argues for changes that are cosmetic, not structural. Rather than help organize citizens at grassroots levels to fight this assault in their communities, they offer band-aid solutions while editing their language and image in the vain hope that they can marginally increase their seat total in an election which, even if they won, would do nothing to alter the political-economy of the country....
The time has come to fight, not individual aspects of the state-capitalist system, but rather State Capitalism itself. The time has come to fight against the corporations that have moved our jobs to China, impoverishing workers there while destroying jobs at home. The time has come to fight against the system that has ensured that many of our fellow citizens work most of their lives in temporary labour without health insurance or retirement benefits. The time has come to stand up against the neo-feudalism that creates a society where individual debt is at an all time high while CEOs, "movie stars" and entertainers earn more in a day than most hard-working Canadians will in a year or even a decade, and where they get totally different treatment by the legal system. Rest assured, if the person who stole the $50 TV out of your house is caught they will likely go to jail as opposed to an investment banker who screwed people out of their entire livelihoods.
The time has come to stand up against the daily violence of the system with its destruction of good jobs in Canada and its entrenchment of poverty in the third world, all designed to satisfy an unsustainable consumerism.
...An organized grassroots movement can alter the political landscape more effectively than a political party that won an election on a platform patched together from focus groups and pollsters. Focusing on short-term electoral victory may bring more immediate gratification compared with the hard work of building a grassroots movement that will reawaken opposition to the existing socio-economic order. But where has this led us? The left has done focused on short-termism for 30 years and we have only lost.
There is an alternative.

Will voting bring real change? 

The following article on the boycott was published by Basics News.

By Louise Jones

As the election nears, Canada’s three major parties all claim they’ll take action that will help workers and their families. But the track record of these parties tells a drastically different story.

The Conservative Party

One of the first things the Harper minority government did when it came to power in 2006 was to withdraw billions of dollars from Aboriginal communities, even though the Kelowna agreement guaranteed these funds. His government also eliminated the Status of Women Canada, a federal agency focused on promoting women’s equality, illegally defunded KAIROS, a faith-based charity organization critical of Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza and spent more than one billion dollars to violently quash dissent in Toronto during the G20 protests. And that’s just to name a few of the current government’s memorable moments.

These symbolic manoeuvres fall in line with the larger conservative policy trend to divert taxpayers money away from social programs. This money is instead spent on security at home, to better protect the political and economic elite, and abroad, where a handful of corporations make a literal killing from imperialist occupations. The current conservative government allocates $30 billion for fighter jets and $13 billion for what mainstream media have termed “US-style mega prisons.”

While it was a Liberal government that first sent troops to Afghanistan in 2001, the Conservatives extended the mission two times, most recently saying Canadian soldiers will remain in the country in a “training capacity” until 2014. Testimony from Afghani people and Wikileaks documents revealed that NATO forces fund warlords and even the Taliban themselves as they attempt to establish a west-friendly regime in a land rich with minerals.

The Liberal Party

Historically, the Liberals have dominated parliamentary politics in Canada. The Liberal Party was in power for 17 of the last 30 years alone. During this time, the richest one per cent of Canadians nearly doubled their wealth, from 7.7 per cent in the late 1970s to 13.8 per cent today, according to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Meanwhile, according to the United Way of Greater Toronto, the number of those living in poverty in Toronto has doubled since 1990, to nearly 30% of all families.
How did the Liberals facilitate this massive shift of wealth from the poor to the rich? Like the Conservatives, they cut taxes on corporations, privatized state assets and axed social spending. Paul Martin slashed corporate tax rates from 28 per cent to 21 per cent when he was in government and as leader of the party in the 1990s, Jean Chrétien severely restricted access to unemployment insurance and privatized CN Rail and Petro Canada.



The Liberals, as with the NDP, portray themselves more progressively in opposition than when they act in power. For example, Michael Ignatieff’s announcement of a $500 million childcare plan is a stripped down version of unfulfilled pledges for national childcare programs that Liberal leaders have made since the 1980s. (On the childcare note, despite repeated calls from women’s and anti-racist organizations, neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives have bothered to address the abysmally low pay, exhausting hours and violence faced by the overwhelmingly Filipino women in the federal Live-In Caregiver (LCP) program.)

New Democratic Party

The NDP has never won at a federal level but the party has won many provincial elections across Canada. Although the party tends to oppose corporate tax cuts during campaign time, NDP leaders have actually given corporations tax breaks at the provincial level. In the last decade, NDPer Lorne Calvert reduced the corporate income tax rate from 17 per cent to 12 per cent in Saskatchewan and Gary Doer, the former NDP premier of Manitoba, cut the rate by nearly 30 per cent to “provide business with a competitive environment,” as he put it.
Despite being the party of choice for major unions like the Canadian Auto Workers, the NDP does not treat the working class radically different than other parties. When Chrétien cut 45,000 public sector jobs, current NDP leader in Ontario Andrea Horwath responded by saying, “everyone knows that times are tough…[public sector workers] have to do their part as well.” Bob Rae, the NDP premier of Ontario from 1990 to 1995, imposed a wage freeze on public sector unions. Michael Harcourt, who ran the BC government in the 1990s, cut off welfare to some of the province’s most impoverished, referring to them as “deadbeats and varmints.” Although the NDP has introduced some legislation that aims to cushion the blow of capitalist exploitation, the response of the NDP to the pressures to promote economic growth is to fall in line with the other two parties, by cutting corporate taxes and social spending.

From a foreign policy standpoint, the NDP is now critical of the war in Afghanistan but the party didn’t raise any objections until 2006, when the occupation was more than four years old. In Nova Scotia, the provincial NDP government has partnered with Lockheed Martin in energy development and frequently praises the company for employing Atlantic Canadians in producing military technology. Lockheed Martin is one of the biggest military contractors in Afghanistan and the Palestinian occupied territories. Like the other two parties, the NDP responds to pro-Israeli lobbyists in Canada. NDP MP Svend Robinson was stripped of his Middle East portfolio when he accused Israel of war crimes and many NDP condemned the use of the term “apartheid” to describe the gross injustice Palestinians face. Most recently, on March 20, 2011, the NDP lined up with the other parties in supporting the imperialist military aggression against Libya.

Vote with your feet?

None of the parliamentary parties in Canada truly represent the people as they all prioritize the needs of investors and so-called “security” over the needs of the people both in Canada and abroad. In a true democracy, we should be able to actually influence the economic, environmental and education policies that affect our everyday lives. Instead, we’re given the option to vote for one of a handful of pro-capitalist parties every four years.

For this reason, a coalition of anti-capitalist groups has launched a boycott campaign to draw attention to the lack of real democracy in Canada and inspire a conversation about how we can fight for a truly egalitarian and democratic society. After 150 years of this so-called democratic system, the boycott campaign is calling on Canadians to organize for real people’s power.

Why I Don't Endorse Voting in the May 2nd Elections [English]

By Rowland Túpac Keshena 

This was originally posted on the excellent blog Speed of Dreams.

If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal – Emma Goldman

With the announcement of the dissolving of the current Harper settler government in Ottawa and the scheduling of yet another election (the 3rd in my 5 1/2 years of being in Canada) for May 2nd, the topic has come up a lot in my circle of friends and other contacts of who one should vote for, or shouldn’t vote for, and why. Indeed, this discussion started to pop up before the official announcement of the election, as it was pretty clear that the government was going to fall. So I’ve had quite a bit of time to put some thought into my answer to this now very common question.

So what do I think? Well, as the title of this post would I hope imply, I don’t endorse voting in the federal election, or actually provincial elections either when those roll around. None of the major federal parties (Green, Conservative, NDP & Liberal) reflect my views on things. This of course should be obvious. I consider myself a revolutionary communist, I don’t really try and conceal that, and of course none of the major parties, even the most left elements of the NDP, espouse politics even remotely close to that. But then again, I don’t endorse voting for the Communist Party of Canada (original flavour or Marxist-Leninist), or the so-called revolutionary elements within the NDP either. So obviously my objections to the elections run a little deeper than the fact that there are no communists on the ballot.

The quote from Emma Goldman that I started off with touches on the surface of what I actually believe. As she said, so aptly, if voting was going to change anything, they’d make it illegal. She means that voting ain’t gonna change shit! So why isn’t voting going to change anything? Sure it might bring about more or less superficial changes in society (welfare, queer rights etc.), but the fact is that the very basis of Canadian, and for that matter wider North American, society is what prevents, and always has, and always will prevent, “change” through the electoral process.

At its core North America (the states popularly known as the United States, Canada and Quebéc) is a settler-colonial society. This means that the principal contradiction, the one that defines all class struggle in the society between the working class and the bourgeoisie, is between the colonizer and the colonized. Some leftists, especially those who advocate voting for parties like the NDP and even most that don’t, will not fully interrogate this, but it is the reality of the situation here.

So what does this translate into in terms of electoral politics?

It means this: all political parties that run in elections, even the most left-wing of the social democratic formations, are parties of a settler-colonial government, vying on behalf of this or that element within the settler nation (or nations, in the case of Canada) labour aristocracy to be chief exploiter of the colonized peoples. These parties, again we include the most supposedly left-wing factions, will NEVER be interested in any kind of meaningful national self-determination for the colonized nations. This is not because they’re not smart, and don’t realize the nature of things, it is because of the very opposite in fact. They know the game. They know the score. They know that their very existence is rooted in the existence of the colonial state, and as such they have a vested national and class interest in the maintaining of the current colonial state of affairs.

Working with or within these formations of the colonizer labour aristocracy and complete and utter waste of time and energy for serious revolutionaries on this continent, and in this country. Again, as it bears repeating, even the most left-wing factions, both in and outside the social democratic NDP organizations, because they do not want to alienate the core of their labour aristocracy voting bloc, will never take anything resembling a strong anti-imperialist stance, on any issue, and definitely will never do anything approaching true internationalism with the anti-colonial struggles WITHIN North America, aside from perhaps every once in a while saying some harsher than usual words regarding the abuse of the “rights” of the colonized, which are of course “rights” understood in a Fanonian sense as something to be granted, and thus also taken away, by the colonial state.

So that’s why I do not endorse voting for any of the parties in the May 2nd election. I hope you, whether you are Native or an ally, will give some thought to this if you choose to enter the voting booth come next month.