'Workers Against the Empire'
at 2004 Toronto Socialist May Day

(Over seventy people attended the 18th annual Socialist Action May Day Celebration in Toronto on Saturday, May 1 at the Free Times Cafe. The following message was presented by Socialist Action writer Barry Weisleder. Since it was delivered, the British Columbia strike movement was sold out by the top west coast union leadership, and the Newfoundland public service workers are considering their next move in the face of a provincial government-imposed settlement including stringent penalties for any resumption of job action.)

Sisters and brothers, comrades and friends:

It is our custom, on May Day, to reflect on the year past, and to identify some trends for the future.

A year ago, George W. Bush declared major hostilities ended in Iraq. He declared terrorism in retreat and in decline. (Apparently he wasn’t referring to his own brand of terrorism.) The price of oil would be stable. There’d be an economic boom, fuelled by military spending.

In Canada, Jean Chretien said he’d stay on for another year. He said that Quebec nationalism is dead, that healthcare and municipalities would be funded in the next budget, and that the Liberal Party was sure to win a majority in the next federal election.

Things didn’t turn out quite as Bush and Chretien forecast.

Hostilities are on the rise in Iraq, because the Iraqi people are firing back. They’re hitting the armies of occupation, fighting for national independence. As U.S. war casualties mount, increasingly words like quagmire, cover-up, and Vietnam are used to describe the position of the occupiers. A year ago it was only radicals who claimed that Bush’s fixation on Iraq was not about weapons of mass destruction, but about oil and geo-political hegemony. Now it’s common knowledge. The anti-war movement was said to be a blip on the screen. On March 20 the global anti-war movement proved it is alive and well. Millions marched, including tens of thousands across Canada who called for the removal of our troops from Afghanistan and Haiti. Spain and others are pulling out of Iraq. Bush has no replacement for the discredited Iraqi puppet council, but he’s given them a flag.

Canadians are closer to Star Wars 2, but farther from secure jobs and prosperity. Just ask hospital workers in B.C., or steelworkers in Hamilton, or Alcan workers in Quebec, or fish packers in Atlantic Canada.

Chretien quit early, but not without leaving a thorny problem for Paul Martin. And Martin’s gift to working people was a pro-war, bankers’ budget that pumped billions into bank profits, millions into U.S. approved military adventures, and left short rations and vague promises for healthcare, cities and education. The Liberals are in a jack pot called the sponsorship scandal. Their bigger crimes are robbing the poor, stealing from E.I., and making a joke of Kyoto.

Majority government? Unlikely at the moment. The Liberals trail the Bloc Quebecois by 18% in Quebec, and they’re losing ground everywhere else. The NDP is on the rise, doubling party membership and voter support in the polls. The Conservatives look rather wobbly in second place, watching Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney battle over the old franchise. If someone takes the muzzle off Stephen Harper, and if young people decide to vote this time, the NDP could play leapfrog.

It’s a volatile situation to say the least. Underlying the political instability is a resurgence of workers’ struggles. Workers are responding to years of job cuts, contracting out of services, a virtual wage freeze, and speed up. They’re fighting back. Instead of taking it on the chin, Newfoundland public service employees launched a massive strike. We hope the Tory back to work legislation runs into an iron wall of resistance and a wave of solidarity actions. B.C. health care workers are saying enough is enough. They’ve taken mass job action to stop further job cuts, and they’re standing up to the threats of Liberal Premier Campbell. B.C. is on the way to a general strike. Hamilton steelworkers and allies marched today in their thousands to challenge Stelco’s concession demands. We say ‘hands off workers’ pensions and jobs’. Keep steel alive to meet human needs. Nationalize Stelco, without compensation, under workers’ control.

Quebecois workers are outraged at the Jean Charest attacks on public services and union work rules. Mass pickets and street demos in the Fall and Winter are leading to a showdown with the Quebec Liberal government. A common front general strike is in the works – we say: the sooner the better! Anti-poverty and refugee rights actions increasingly challenge the rulers’ domestic war on civil liberties and the poor. Aboriginal peoples mobilized and forced the feds to withdraw colonial style legislation.

Volatility at home is matched by turmoil around the world. The Middle East is a bloody battlefield of many fronts: Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine. The peoples have suffered enormously, but still they resist. They show the feet of the occupier are made of clay. The fig leaf is gone. The naked greed and brutality of the Empire is exposed. Illusions about Oslo and Geneva Accords, about the two-state solution, have been dashed against the apartheid wall, and murdered by assassination squads. Permanent insecurity and conflict will give way only to a Democratic and Secular Palestine. It will take mobilization of the entire Arab nation, and the overthrow of all the corrupt vassals of the Empire, to bring this about – but Bush seems to be propelling it forward.

Latin America is in turmoil. The neo-liberal prescription has heightened inequality and produced tremendous anger. Workers and the poor block highways, organize grassroots councils and occupy factories. In Colombia, civil war rages. In Venezuela, two attempts to overthrow Hugo Chavez by typical ‘Made in USA’ coups, were reversed by mass mobilizations in support of the left populist regime. It was a major blow, but the Empire will try again soon. The U.S.-made coup in Haiti is a training exercise for Venezuela and Cuba. A U.S. invasion of the Cuban workers’ state would set off continental insurgency. And on the other side of the globe, armed revolts continue in the Philippines, Nepal, parts of Indonesia and Sri Lanka.

Huge protests against capitalist globalization continue. Up to 200,000 gathered for a World Social Forum in Mumbai, India. Last week, one million marched in Washington for women’s right to choose abortion. The fight for equal rights for same-sex marriage has made tremendous gains over the past year. Movements for feminism and gay-lesbian liberation are alive and well. Workers across Europe are forcing governments to back away from the Bush wars. They’re mobilizing to defend jobs, pensions and public services, and they’re turning more and more to anti-capitalist parties like the Scottish Socialist Party, the Revolutionary Communist League in France and the far left in Italy.

‘Workers against the Empire’ is not just an idea, it is a newly developing trend.

Increasingly workers are re-discovering that the problem is capitalism. The world capitalist system is characterized by overcapacity, overproduction of useless things, and a mountain of debt. There cannot be justice or genuine democracy so long as capitalism rules. All of these examples, at home and abroad, serve to illustrate an important point. When shown some leadership, workers and other social forces are more than willing to move into struggle. Despite unfavourable conditions, workers and our allies are more than willing to challenge the powers that be.

Leadership is the nub of the problem facing our class. Unfortunately, the leadership offered is often better suited to the bosses than it is to workers. UFCW members at Loblaws were saddled with a two-tier wage structure and didn’t even get to vote on it. Air Canada workers gave wage concessions, and now the CAW urges the government to allow foreign capital to purchase the airline, rather than fight for public ownership. Aluminum workers in Arvida, Quebec occupied and ran their own plant to save jobs, then union leaders agreed to a cash settlement allowing the company to dismantle the works. Hotel workers in Toronto have to press their union officials to support grievances over health and safety issues and over the harassment of linguistic and cultural minorities. Toronto substitute teachers in OSSTF are fighting to end a vicious trusteeship imposed a year ago. It was used to conduct a political purge, to gut the collective agreement, and officials to dissolve the our militant, democratic bargaining unit altogether.

You can see why we argue for a new leadership, for a class struggle leadership.

Because that’s what we need in order to stop the subordination of workers to management, much less to make any headway.

We are dealing with a global bosses’ agenda that aims to dismantle all the past gains of the class struggle. It aims to rachet up private profits at the expense of workers’ wages, job security, living conditions and the environment. The bosses are obliged to do this, not just out of greed, but to sustain their anarchic, crisis-wracked capitalist system. We, however, are not obliged to accept it. We are not obliged to accept their trade deals which make public ownership a crime, and make Capital a god. We are not obliged to accept homelessness, poverty, disease, ignorance and strike breaking as inevitable features of human nature and human society – which they are not.

As OCAP says, now is not the time to look for excuses, but to take to the streets.

Now is also the time to link militancy to a political strategy for fundamental change. Activism is inspiring. But activism is not a strategy. A change of government does not necessarily put the interests of the majority first. One has only to think of Ontario Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty to know what I say is true. Activism will not replace the bosses’ government with a workers’ government. And nothing less than a workers’ government will stop exploitation and oppression, and save this planet from the polluters and war makers.

To achieve a workers’ government at least two things are necessary: (1) the majority of the working class must break from the parties of big business, and (2) large sections of the class must come together into a political organization that fights for a Workers’ Agenda.

One big obstacle to a Workers’ Agenda is the conservative bureaucracy that dominates our unions and the NDP. The bureaucrats’ embrace of capitalism prevents them from fighting to abolish the FTAA. Their commitment to class peace causes them to stifle protest. They killed the Ontario Days of Action and the 1997 teachers’ strike, and they propped up an NDP leadership on the road to oblivion.

Under these distressing circumstances it is easy for activists to make a very big error. That error is to confuse the present leadership with the mass membership of the workers’ organizations. That error is to confuse the union brass and NDP tops with the thousands of union and NDP members who walk picket lines and march in anti-war demonstrations. That error is to think that a new class struggle workers’ movement is going to emerge entirely, or even largely, outside the existing workers’ organizations, especially the unions and the NDP. Socialism without the working class is impossible. The socialist left which is outside the unions and the NDP is not a decisive force. It can give tactical leadership on specific issues, but it is separated from the masses it needs to become a majority, to become capable of transforming capitalist society.

Fighting to become a majority does not mean catering to the prejudices of prevailing opinion. But it does mean working within the rank and file, setting a militant example in the mainstream organizations, and advancing the ideas that can help working people to emancipate ourselves.

The Socialist Caucus of the NDP stands on a class struggle programme – the Manifesto for a Socialist Canada -- and it intervenes in a mass labour-based party. The Socialist Caucus believes that the NDP belongs to the workers and farmers who launched the CCF in the 1930s, and built the NDP in the 1960s as a political movement independent of the Liberals and Tories, independent of the banks, big business, and their media mongrels. The NDP belongs to the millions who built this country, whose toil and intelligence make this country run. It is not a private club for the current leaders, but a political party of the class that must come to terms with the anachronism known as capitalist rule.

That is how we must approach the problem, the problem of power. Capitalism must go. But it won’t go quietly. We must force the issue, or we’ll continue to live like slaves. To free ourselves and humanity, we must break the majority from ideological slavery to the system and the big business political parties.

The NDP represents a partial break, an organizational break from the parties of Capital. The next step is to deepen that break politically, and to base it on a programme for working class emancipation. This is the direction that the Socialist Caucus proposes. Hundreds of NDP members voted for our candidate for federal Leader, Bev Meslo. She is now the NDP candidate in Vancouver South. Another SC supporter, Max Silverman, is the NDP candidate in Eglinton-Lawrence. I’m seeking the NDP nomination in St. Paul’s, and you are welcome to attend the St. Paul’s nomination meeting on May 16.

The New Politics Initiative, with its call for grass roots democracy, shook up the NDP in 2001. Unfortunately, it backed away from the fight and dissolved a few months ago. A socialist programme and a working class base must be forged through organized struggle inside the unions and the NDP. Unfortunately, there’s no short cut.

Socialist Action strives to forge a leadership, a socialist cadre, which can make an indispensable contribution to this process. That contribution will be the living memory of our class, the vision of a socialist future, and a strategy to get there from here. That contribution will be unbending loyalty to workers’ interests, and unyielding opposition to capitalist rule. That contribution will be for socialist democracy, for women’s and gay/lesbian liberation, for ecology, political pluralism, internationalism, and the construction of a cooperative commonwealth. If you share those goals, if you believe in those principles, you should join SA tonight.

Together we can fulfill the promise of May Day. We can create a future worthy of humanity. For that we need a revolutionary workers’ organization. Join us. There is nothing to lose and a world to win.

Long live international workers' day!

Long live the struggle for freedom, social justice, and workers power!