From Bolivia, a trade-union appeal for international anticapitalist solidarity

Introduction

As a follow-up to the June summit meeting of the G77 + China leaders, held in Santa Cruz, the Bolivian government and the Bolivian Workers Central (COB) sponsored an “Anti-Imperialist International Trade Union Conference” in Cochabamba, June 30-July 2.

The conference was attended by representatives of unions in 22 countries, affiliated with the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU). Founded in 1945 as a postwar international labour organization, parallel to the United Nations, the WFTU became during the Cold War years a federation primarily of unions led by members of pro-Moscow Communist parties. Although it declined precipitously after the fall of the Soviet bloc, in recent years the WFTU has experienced a certain revival, and now claims a membership of 86 million in 120 countries. The Cochabamba conference marked the integration of Bolivia’s COB in the federation.

At its closing plenary session, the conference adopted an “Anti-Imperialist political thesis, ” published below, outlining an “anti-imperialist, anti-colonial and anti-capitalist” strategy aimed at pointing the way toward a socialist world order. It is a strong statement of solidarity with anti-imperialist liberation movements and the “process of change” in Bolivia and other Latin American countries.

Addressing the closing session, Bolivia’s President Evo Morales called on workers around the world to prepare to confront new forms of imperialist aggression and plunder in the coming years. In this connection, he identified four phases in history when the world’s empires had agreed to “carve up” the world among themselves in spheres of influence.

The first, he said, was the Treaty of Tordecillas in 1494, when Spain and Portugal had “divided Abya Yala” (the indigenous name for the western hemisphere) with a declaration that what is now Latin America belonged to them as invaders.

The second division was the Berlin Conference, meeting in 1884-85, in which the major European powers divided Africa among themselves.

The third division took the form of a secret agreement in 1916 (the Sykes-Picot Agreement) between Great Britain and France to divide the Middle East between them at the end of the First World War.

Today, said Morales, the great powers are engaged in the fourth “imperial carving up” of the world, not through treaties but through the United Nations Security Council, and using NATO to “invade and secure control of natural resources.” (Morales did not mention another division of the world: the post-WWII agreements between Stalin and his wartime allies Britain and the United States, dividing the world between imperialist and Soviet spheres of influence.)

The translation of the Cochabamba conference’s “political thesis,” which follows, was prepared by Jordan Bishop and Federico Fuentes, with some revision by me, from the Spanish text.

– Richard Fidler

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Anti-imperialist political thesis of Cochabamba

Document approved during the closing plenary session of the Anti-Imperialist International Trade Union Conference organized by the Central Obrera Boliviana [Bolivian Workers Central – COB], and the World Federation of Trade Unions [WFTU], with the support of the Government of the Plurinational State of Bolivia.

“I believe that this idea of an offensive in defense of humanity is increasingly interlocked with the reality that we are experiencing in this world.”  – Hugo Chávez

“I want to propose something that concerns the social movements of this world: how can we, in a united fashion, confront capitalism? I am convinced that we must elaborate a new thesis to save the planet, a doctrine in support of life.” – Evo Morales

Introduction. The crisis of capitalism and its consequences for the working class

The peoples of the world, and especially the popular sectors, are suffering the consequences of a crisis of capitalism. This is a crisis unlike any we have seen before, a crisis that is both global and structural. 

It is a global crisis because, unlike previous crises of capitalism in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, in this capitalist world system the resistance movements are locally-based but have yet to create a united front that could constitute an alternative to capitalism. The peoples of the world are abandoning the belief that capitalism is democratic or that there is such a thing as capitalist democracy. However, a global alternative, one as global as the crisis we are now experiencing, has not yet emerged. 

This is a structural crisis because it is the combination of various crises: economic, financial, energy, climate, food, water, institutional, political, and of values. We are suffering the crisis not only of an economic system of production that is overstretched, but of a system that in order to increase profits or maintain the surplus value produced through the exploitation of peoples, workers, and nature in the South, has to convert Mother Earth and humans into an object of its merciless, predatory domination.

We wish to highlight the climate crisis as the crystallization of all these crises. The supposed alternative of a green economy as a response to the environmental disaster that we are suffering is nothing more than the privatization of nature and all other common goods. In addition, it is clear that there is no such thing as capitalism with a human face. We are in a stage of capitalism where everything is commodified, including life itself and all common goods.

All this is occurring at the same time as imperialist wars are unleashed with the aim of plundering the peoples’ natural resources, part of a vicious circle in which these natural resources serve to fuel the war industry, thereby demonstrating the voracity of imperialism. Natural resources, energy and water are objectives of imperialism that the peoples and workers must defend since they constitute the future that we shall leave as our legacy, the Mother Earth that we must look after, for it is our home. 

Capitalism has therefore adopted a planetary geopolitical standard, and the crisis reveals the basic contradiction of capitalism: the contradiction between the social character of production and the capitalist form of property over the means of production and the appropriation of its results. In these crises, the whole mechanism of the capitalist mode of production is subordinated to the pressure of the productive forces created by capitalism itself. 

The consequence of this is that there are a billion people who go hungry, according to the FAO [Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations], and since the crisis began the number of poor people has increased by some 100 million. 

But while poverty and hunger are the most visible effects of the crisis of capitalism, all of this is linked to the peoples’ loss of social rights, especially labor rights. Capital will attempt to ride out the crisis on the backs of the workers. 

The higher phase of capitalism is imperialism and neoliberalism, which involves creative destruction and anti-worker policies. In some Latin American countries, it was possible to block the Washington Consensus and the recipes of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank that attempted to impose privatization and restrictions on social policies, but there are other parts of the world where the people continue to suffer as a result of the neoliberal recipe presented as a supposed solution to the crisis. Yet unemployment rates continue to rise, and cuts to social benefits, health, and education continue, even as whole families are evicted and banks are rescued.

Nevertheless, neoliberal recipes cannot resolve even the problems of the countries at the centre of the world capitalist system. These countries at times have parallel governments in the form of transnational corporations, which are new instruments imperialism has created to be able to operate in countries that are supposedly undergoing development. The wealth of a few presupposes the misery of a good part of the planet. 

This was perfectly summed up by Warren Buffet, one of the wealthiest men in the world: “Of course there is a class struggle, and our class is winning it.”

Therefore, if the class struggle is more alive than ever, the elaboration of an alternative project to confront the crisis of capitalism can only come from the popular sectors and organized labor. The struggle of organized labor therefore gains a special significance at this time. 

Furthermore, the struggle of organized labor against capitalism can only have socialism as its horizon. In a globalized world in which social democracy has sold out to neoliberalism, and where 20^th century socialism had serious weaknesses, the building of a socialism in the 21^st century that is immune from the weaknesses and backwardness of the first attempts to implement it is an urgent and necessary task. 

As the Central Obrera Boliviana explained in its Socialist Thesis of 1970, those who believe that labor organizations should limit themselves to the role of trade unions, that is to say, dedicated to purely economic struggles, are mistaken. Without abandoning the struggle to defend material conditions, workers must take part in the political life of the country in our role as a revolutionary vanguard. This is a vanguard that, in the case of Bolivia and other countries, is complemented by the political project of indigenous nations and peoples, and campesinos, fusing labor and community struggles around the goal of “communitarian socialism.”

Bolivia’s contribution

Workers of the world have held this Anti-Imperialist International Trade Union Conference in order to recognize and learn from this Bolivia of many hues and colors, in which workers, campesinos and indigenous people have joined together in a communitarian struggle dedicated to building a socialist future. 

We see in Bolivia a government of social movements, in which the direction of the process is in the hands of popular sectors, in which the state has fused with civil society. This process is based on historical struggles against colonial domination, as well as against capitalism and neoliberalism. This is a political project, uniting indigenous, worker and campesino struggles, which is still under construction but one with which the popular sectors of our countries can identify. 

We recognize that in Bolivia the state has taken control of strategic sectors of the economy, hydrocarbons and energy in general, telecommunications, health and education. These now belong to the state rather than individuals, a state which is a synthesis of an epochal change in Latin America, a state that belongs to the people, because it is of the people and functions on the basis of popular needs. 

In Bolivia, popular sectors and workers’ organizations are not only not repressed, but are encouraged and supported politically and materially through the establishment of a participatory democracy that incorporates workers in its decision making. 

This alternative model of relationship with mobilized sectors of society is something that demonstrates to us the existence of a living, participatory, intercultural and communitarian democracy. Workers’ organizations of the world, meeting in Bolivia have been able to study the new Bolivian paradigm that proposes the idea of “Living Well” to confront the crisis that we are suffering. We strive for a development model and a political model that conceptualizes the economy from a community standpoint, looking to the emancipation of peoples and communities as a means of living in harmony with Mother Earth. 

Commitment to socialist integration

The crisis of the capitalist world system and the geopolitical struggle for control of natural resources is leading the peoples and workers of the world towards a scenario in which it is necessary to choose between one of two projects in contention — socialist emancipation or neoliberal restoration. 

Bolivia and the movements for change in Latin America have opted, with differing rhythms, intensities and nuances, for the emancipation of their peoples, their inhabitants, and their nature, recovering sovereignty over their natural resources in order to confront the imperialist and neo-colonial project. 

Because of this today, here and now, the working peoples of the world want to build upon the thinking of our compañero President Evo Morales, and propose a thesis to save the planet, a doctrine in defense of life, as opposed to the doctrine of death embodied in capitalism. This thesis can have only one goal, that of socialism — with the contribution that we have taken on board from Bolivia, to incorporate the communitarian dimension — and must be based on three solid pillars: anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism and anti-capitalism. 

An anti-imperialist, anti-colonial and anti-capitalist thesis pointing to socialism

Our national realities have different rhythms and intensities, but we should view them through the prism of Bolivia, where the people have moved from resistance to the building of a political instrument for taking power, and from the taking of power to the construction of a political project of the people and for the people. 

Now we want to create a world political instrument for the construction of a global political project that can provide a response to the structural crisis of capitalism. 

Anti-imperialism

The aerial kidnapping of President Evo Morales a year ago, putting various European countries on their knees, revealed that imperialism will not remain quiescent in the face of projects of social transformation that implement processes of change in defense of social majorities. 

A project based on anti-imperialism must therefore repudiate the armed wing of the United States called NATO, the political and military instrument of imperialism. 

Our anti-imperialist project denounces the military bases that imperialism has established throughout the world as a means of intervention. In Latin America there are 77 known military bases that violate the political and territorial sovereignty of the countries of Our America.

Colombia merits special attention due to the US bases installed there, a beachhead for surrounding the Amazon, a central element in the geopolitical disputes of coming years. Peace in Colombia, to which we are deeply committed, requires the closure of these military bases, as well as ensuring that peace is accompanied by the political participation of the insurgency and the working class and popular sectors of Colombia as a means of guaranteeing social justice for the Colombian people as a whole. 

Just as we condemn imperialist interference through the installation of military bases, we also denounce so-called “humanitarian wars,” “wars against terrorism,” “preventative wars” and “peacekeeping missions.” We express our solidarity with the popular sectors and working class in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, which have seen their countries destroyed by imperialist greed, military wars becoming economic and cultural wars against the peoples. 

Similarly, we condemn any kind of interference against sovereign governments in Latin America in the 21^st century, whether through espionage or coups d’état, as happened in Honduras or Paraguay in addition to the failed attempts in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador that were defeated by popular mobilization.

These interventions have been accompanied by media terrorism against processes, unions and social movements, the so-called Fourth Generation War, the attempt to establish a hegemonic order of communication controlled by transnational media capital that attempts to impose their political, economic and social objectives, consistently in opposition to the interests of the working class and popular sectors. 

As a means of overcoming interference against the political and economic sovereignty of our peoples, we support the abolition of the Security Council of the United Nations and the democratization of the United Nations system itself. 

Anti-colonialism

We believe that the model of colonization imposed by the countries of the North involved crimes against humanity, looting and the subjugation of our peoples, and that wars have been an instrument of subjugation and domination that imperialism has employed to impose its political and economic will. 

The colonial order is the nucleus of the genocide, the millions of human beings exterminated, the hundreds of languages annihilated in the interests of a supposed homogenization, the subordination of systems of economic complementarity based on barter to mercantilism, the subjection of advanced civilizations to the Inquisition, and the individualist overpowering of a social order based on reciprocity. 

We strive for decolonization and the destruction of the material and subjective foundations of racism, internal colonialism and the new forms of external colonialism. Decolonization means undoing the institutional, economic, political and cultural foundations of the old regime and the construction of new institutional, economic, political and cultural foundations as a new way of organizing social life. 

Decolonization is a revolutionary process that struggles against financial capital and the big transnational corporations. We must extinguish the myth of a democratic capitalism or a capitalist democracy. Decolonization also implies struggling against ideological and cultural colonialism, racism and all forms of discrimination.

We should mention here the role of women in the labor struggle. We commit ourselves to the struggle against patriarchy, celebrating the process of de-patriarchalization promoted by the Bolivian government and its social movements. 

Decolonization similarly implies a struggle for interculturality, for another education model dedicated to an open, humanist, scientific, technological, productive, liberating and revolutionary, critical, education within a framework of solidarity, oriented to conservation and protection of the environment, biodiversity and territorial sovereignty. 

Decolonization implies confronting the neocolonial situations that our peoples still experience. In the case of Latin America we repudiate the imperialist occupation of Puerto Rico; of Guantánamo in socialist Cuba that continues to heroically resist a criminal blockade; of the Malvinas Islands by the United Kingdom and NATO. And we undertake to support Bolivia’s claim for access to the sea with sovereignty, access that was forcibly removed in an imperialist invasion promoted by Chilean economic elites to seize Bolivia’s natural resources. Real Latin American integration includes a solution to Bolivia’s just claim against Chile. Nor can we forget about other parts of the world; thus we reject the occupation of Palestine and the genocide of an entire people being committed by Israel. 

Anti-capitalism

Our struggle is against capitalism and all of its expressions. It is against this model that destroys all forms of life and appropriates the surplus value generated by peoples, persons and our Mother Earth.

All of this is taking place during an historical moment marked by a high intensity financial war against the processes of change. We add our voice to the statements by President Evo Morales in solidarity with Argentina and against the unjust and immoral global financial system and the so-called “vulture funds” that are out to crush the processes of change through debts contracted by military dictatorships and neoliberal governments that served the interests of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. 

This international financial system uses the IMF and the WB, as well as the ILO [International Labour Organization], to weaken the economic sovereignty of the peoples and their workers. We denounce this kind of financial neocolonialism carried out by the “Wall Street Boys”, the operators of speculative financial capital, and we strive for a new international financial architecture. 

The Havana Conference on External Debt will celebrate its 29th anniversary in July this year. External debt is an illegal mechanism used under capitalism to continue the colonial exploitation of the peoples. We repudiate all of the debt of the misnamed Third World and strive for the total cancellation of this debt. 

The evolution of financial capitalism has in part involved free trade agreements that actually amount to territorial control over the processes of transformation and peoples’ natural resources. We especially repudiate the sophisticated re-edition of the FTAA [Free Trade Area of the Americas] that the peoples of Latin America and progressive governments defeated in 2005 in Mar del Plata, and is now called the Pacific Alliance, an imperialist tool of the United States designed to undermine the process of regional political integration in Latin America and to recover areas lost to the advance of processes of change. 

In the face of the Pacific Alliance, we propose the Alliance of the Peoples of the South and of the working class in defense of the peoples’ natural resources and Mother Earth. 

It is not by chance that Venezuela, a country with the biggest oil reserves in the world, has had to confront a terrorist attack, just as Bolivia and Ecuador did previously. The sovereign recovery of natural resources is fundamental, since it constitutes the material basis for the whole process, for the possibility of wealth redistribution and the reduction of inequalities in countries that have suffered 500 years of colonization. 

Just as we defend sovereignty over natural resources, we must also defend food sovereignty. We join in solidarity with the struggles of campesinos against transnational corporations, agribusiness, the use of toxic chemicals and GMOs, as well as in defense of food sovereignty. 

Towards Socialism

It is on the basis of these three pillars that we propose the coordination and cooperation of the working class and of popular sectors that are struggling to build socialism at a national, regional and global level. 

In order to achieve socialism we must first of all achieve the unity of all revolutionary forces in a popular anti-imperialist, anti-colonial and anti-capitalist front, based on an alliance of workers, campesinos and indigenous peoples, an alliance of popular sectors. 

A socialism that can only be democratic, expanding the margins and limits of liberal democracy, an anti-imperialist and anti-colonial socialism that can overcome all forms of alienation under capitalism, that emerges from its roots in the working class and indigenous and campesino movements, from the factories, fields and communities, to create the kind of society and community to which we aspire, a society in which use-value takes priority over the exchange value imposed by the market and capital. 

A socialism where the means of production are socialized through a society in which basic services, along with labor rights, are guaranteed for everyone, in which everyone enjoys all of these rights. 

The crisis of capitalism brings with it the need to maintain profit rates through the exploitation of workers. In almost every country in the world, the retirement age has gone up, pensions have been reduced and health care has been privatized and commodified. 

Obviously, the socialism to which we aspire recognizes the struggles and aspirations of the working class throughout history. We want a public, universal and mandatory system of social security for all countries, in addition to the lowering of the retirement age and an increase in pensions, since only in this way can the popular classes live with dignity after retirement. 

Our socialist project must guarantee that water and basic services are human rights, which requires sovereignty over natural and energy resources that are vital to social and labor rights. 

In order to guarantee social and labor rights, we must develop a vision that differs from capitalist development. 

The socialist outlook must be internationalist, an internationalism that, as Che noted, is based on the love of the peoples. We defend an internationalist alliance of the workers’, campesino and indigenous movement together with all national liberation movements and all movements of the oppressed across the globe that struggle for a world and a future based on peace and social justice. 

This class-based and socialist internationalism should be based on political education. If we want to confront capitalist hegemony in the economic, political, cultural and media sphere, we must prepare ourselves for the Battle of Ideas. A Battle of Ideas that, as Comandante Fidel Castro points out, is not only about principles, theory, knowledge, culture, arguments, responses and counter-responses, the destruction of lies and diffusion of truth; it must involve concrete actions and achievements. 

Conclusion

We recognize the contribution of the World Federation of Trade Unions in its 69 years of existence in defense of the working class in Vietnam, Cuba, Korea, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Greece during the heroic civil war, along with Guatemala, Angola, Grenada and Chile, South Africa, the Congo, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Egypt, the Golan Heights, Lebanon, Iraq, India, Indonesia, East Timor and the Western Sahara. 

We also recall the legacy of all those who struggled for freedom and gave their lives for the national and social liberation of their peoples: Bolivar, Zapata, Martí, Sandino, Che, Ho Chi Minh, Sankara and Comandante Chávez, in addition to recognizing the contribution that the Cuban revolution, headed by Comandantes Fidel and Raúl Castro, has made to this present moment of history.

The period of transition we are living through demands coordination between trade unions, social movements, youth, women and committed intellectuals, so that from a position of defending these processes of change we can seek to build a political project of national and social liberation of our peoples. 

But our liberation is not only the liberation of our peoples. It is at the same time the liberation of all of humanity, since we are not struggling to dominate others; we struggle in order that no one shall dominate anyone else. 

And on the road to liberation, it is important to maintain the achievements already made, which is why we proclaim our solidarity with the process of change in Bolivia that we hope will be strengthened once again in the October 12 presidential elections.

Long live the Bolivian process of change!

Long live the struggles of the working class!

Against capitalist barbarism, for peace and a world without exploitation!

Cochabamba, Plurinational State of Bolivia, July 2, 2014.

‘A New World Order for Living Well’

Evo Morales’ message of global solidarity

Address at the opening of the Group of 77 Special Summit

Introduction

The Summit of the Group of 77 plus China, marking the alliance’s 50^th anniversary, closed in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, on June 15 with the adoption of a Declaration containing 242 articles, entitled “For a New World Order for Living Well.”

The Summit set a record for high-level participation, with the presence of 13 presidents, 4 prime ministers, 5 vice-presidents and 8 foreign ministers among the delegates of the 104 countries in attendance out of the 133 of the global South that now make up the Group of 77 plus China (also known as G77+China). The Plurinational State of Bolivia is chairing the alliance this year, and its president Evo Morales hosted the Summit.

The choice of Santa Cruz as the venue had particular significance in Bolivia. In 2008, this eastern lowland city, with a population of predominantly European origin, was in violent rebellion against the Morales government and Bolivia’s new constitution, which for the first time in the country’s history had recognized the 34 distinct languages and the national rights of Bolivia’s indigenous peoples who make up a majority of the population. Sharing the platform with Morales at the Summit’s opening ceremony this month were leaders of that separatist uprising — a striking manifestation of the degree to which the Bolivian government, led by Morales’ Movement Toward Socialism, has since then established its hegemony throughout the country.

There are two different but complementary dimensions to the adopted Declaration, writes Katu Arkonada, a Bolivian of Basque origin, in Rebelión. The first, focused on reform of institutions, sets out sustainable development objectives to replace the United Nations’ Millenium Goals. It points to the need for an approach integrating economic, social and environmental strategies that promote sovereign control of natural resources in harmony with nature and “Mother Earth.” The document’s proposals for confronting the challenge of climate change are particularly notable — not least because they would, if implemented, mark a significant departure from current international practices, including by many G77 member states.

The second dimension of the Declaration is addressed to the construction of “that other possible world, a world of sovereignty for the global South, free of all forms of colonialism and imperialism.” It calls for a radical reconfiguration of international political and financial institutions to correspond to the geopolitical realities of an emerging multipolar world “based on the principles of respect for sovereignty, independence, equality, unconditionality, non-interference in the internal affairs of states and mutual benefit.”

The Group of 77 plus China is a very heterogeneous group of countries and governments. While many were once colonized and all are to varying degrees subject to domination by imperialism as a system still hegemonized by the United States, they have mixed records (to say the least) when it comes to confronting imperialism. The group even includes now some emerging imperialist states such as China (and soon Russia if it accepts the Summit invitation to join). A few, such as Brazil, have been characterized by some analysts as “sub-imperialist,” although that concept is the subject of varied interpretations.[1] Bolivia itself has not hesitated to participate with other G77 members in the military occupation of Haiti following the 2004 overthrow of the progressive government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide by France, the USA and Canada.[2]

However, the radical anti-imperialist and ecological content of the Declaration, as well as many speeches at the Santa Cruz Summit, reflected the input of Evo Morales and his government, who have played a leadership role in drawing international attention to the mortal danger to the global environment posed by capitalism and the imperialist plunder of renewable and non-renewable natural resources. Morales set the tone in his remarkable opening speech to the Summit, published below — a clarion call to the peoples and governments of the world for a coordinated anti-capitalist response to the combined threats of economic, social and environmental catastrophe now looming as never before.

The Summit was preceded by a mass meeting of Bolivian social movements with the presidents of some Latin American countries, among them Raúl Castro (Cuba), Nicolás Maduro (Venezuela), Rafael Correa (Ecuador) and Salvador Sánchez Cerén (the new president of El Salvador), as well as personalities such as Guatemalan indigenous leader Rigoberta Menchu and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Evo Morales told the huge crowd that if the imperialist aggression against the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela were to continue, Venezuela and Latin America could become a “second Vietnam for the United States.”

I have edited slightly the official and hastily issued English translation of Morales’ Summit address to correspond more closely to the original Spanish transcription. The Spanish phrase Vivir Bien (Living Well), which recurs throughout Morales’ address, refers to the Andean concept of living in harmony with the community and nature, ensuring the sufficient means to live well without always seeking more and thereby depleting the resources of the planet.

– Richard Fidler

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For a Global Brotherhood Among the Peoples

Evo Morales Ayma

President of the Plurinational State of Bolivia and pro-tempore President of the Group of 77 plus China

Fifty years ago, great leaders raised the flags of the anticolonial struggle and decided to join with their peoples in a march along the path of sovereignty and independence.

The world superpowers and transnationals were competing for control of territories and natural resources in order to continue expanding at the cost of impoverishing the peoples of the South.

In that context, on June 15, 1964, at the conclusion of an UNCTAD[3] meeting, 77 countries from the South (we are now 133 plus China) met to enhance their trade bargaining capacities, by acting in a bloc to advance their collective interests while respecting their individual sovereign decisions.

During the past 50 years, these countries went beyond their statements and promoted resolutions at the United Nations and joint action in favor of development underpinned by South-South cooperation, a new world economic order, a responsible approach to climate change, and economic relations based on preferential treatment.

In this journey the struggle for decolonization as well as for the peoples’ self-determination and sovereignty over their natural resources must be highlighted.

Notwithstanding these efforts and struggles for equality and justice for the world’s peoples, the hierarchies and inequalities in the world have increased.

Today, 10 countries in the world control 40% of the world’s total wealth and 15 transnational corporations control 50% of global output.

Today, as 100 years ago, acting in the name of the free market and democracy, a handful of imperial powers invades countries, blocks trade, imposes prices on the rest of the world, chokes national economies, plots against progressive governments and resorts to espionage against the inhabitants of this planet.

A tiny elite of countries and transnational corporations controls, in an authoritarian fashion, the destinies of the world, its economies and its natural resources.

The economic and social inequality between regions, between countries, between social classes and between individuals has grown outrageously.

About 0.1% of the world’s population owns 20% of humanity’s assets. In 1920, a business manager in the United States made 20 times the wage of a worker, but today he is paid 331 times that wage.

This unfair concentration of wealth and predatory destruction of nature are also generating a structural crisis that is becoming unsustainable over time.

It is indeed a structural crisis. It impacts every component of capitalist development. In other words, it is a mutually reinforcing crisis affecting international finance, energy, climate, water, food, institutions and values. It is a crisis inherent to capitalist civilization.

The financial crisis was prompted by the greedy pursuit of profits from financial capital that led to profound international financial speculation, a practice that favored certain groups, transnational corporations or power centers that amassed great wealth.

The financial bubbles that generate speculative gains eventually burst, and in the process they plunged into poverty the workers who had received cheap credit, the middle-class savings-account holders who had trusted their deposits to greedy speculators. The latter overnight went bankrupt or took their capital to other countries, thus leading entire nations into bankruptcy.

We are also faced with an energy crisis that is driven by excessive consumption in developed countries, pollution from energy sources and the energy hoarding practices of the transnational corporations.

Parallel with this, we witness a global reduction in reserves and high costs of oil and gas development, while productive capacity drops due to the gradual depletion of fossil fuels and global climate change.

The climate crisis is caused by the anarchy of capitalist production, with consumption levels and unharnessed industrialization that have resulted in excessive emissions of polluting gases that in turn have led to global warming and natural disasters affecting the entire world.

For more than 15,000 years prior to the era of capitalist industrialization, greenhouse gases did not amount to more than 250 parts per million molecules in the atmosphere.

Since the 19th century, and in particular in the 20th and 21st centuries, thanks to the actions of predatory capitalism, this count has risen to 400 ppm, and global warming has become an irreversible process along with weather disasters the primary impacts of which are felt in the poorest and most vulnerable countries of the South, and in particular the island nations, as a result of the thawing of the glaciers.

In turn, global warming is generating a water supply crisis that is compounded by privatization, depletion of sources and commercialization of fresh water. As a consequence, the number of people without access to potable water is growing apace.

The water shortage in many parts of the planet is leading to armed conflicts and wars that further aggravate the lack of availability of this non-renewable resource.

The world population is growing while food production is dropping, and these trends are leading to a food crisis.

Add to these issues the reduction of food-producing lands, the imbalances between urban and rural areas, the monopoly exercised by transnational corporations over the marketing of seeds and agricultural inputs, and the speculation in food prices.

The imperial model of concentration and speculation has also caused an institutional crisis that is characterized by an unequal and unjust distribution of power in the world in particular within the UN system, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization.

As a result of all these developments, peoples’ social rights are endangered. The promise of equality and justice for the whole world becomes more and more remote and nature itself is threatened with extinction.

We have reached a limit, and global action is urgently needed to save society, humanity and Mother Earth.

Bolivia has started to take steps to address these issues. Up to 2005, Bolivia applied a neoliberal policy that resulted in concentration of wealth, social inequality and poverty, increasing marginalization, discrimination and social exclusion.

In Bolivia, the historic struggles waged by social movements, in particular the indigenous peasant movement, have allowed us to initiate a Democratic and Cultural Revolution, through the ballot box and without the use of violence. This revolution is rooting out exclusion, exploitation, hunger and hatred, and it is rebuilding the path of balance, complementarity, and consensus with its own identity, Vivir Bien.

Beginning in 2006, the Bolivian government introduced a new economic and social policy, enshrined in a new community-based socioeconomic and productive model, the pillars of which are nationalization of natural resources, recovery of the economic surplus for the benefit of all Bolivians, redistribution of the wealth, and active participation of the State in the economy.

In 2006, the Bolivian government and people made their most significant political, economic and social decision: nationalization of the country’s hydrocarbons, the central axis of our revolution. The state thereby participates in and controls the ownership of our hydrocarbons and processes our natural gas.

Contrary to the neoliberal prescription that economic growth ought to be based on external market demand (“export or die”), our new model has relied on a combination of exports with a domestic market growth that is primarily driven by income-redistribution policies, successive increases in the national minimum wage, annual salary increases in excess of the inflation rate, cross subsidies and conditional cash transfers to the neediest.

As a consequence, the Bolivian GDP has increased from $9.0 billion to over $30.0 billion over the past eight years.

Our nationalized hydrocarbons, economic growth and cost austerity policy have helped the country generate budget surpluses for eight years in a row, in sharp contrast with the recurrent budget deficits experienced by Bolivia for more than 66 years.

When we took over the country’s administration, the ratio between the wealthiest and poorest Bolivians was 128 fold. This ratio has been cut down to 46 fold. Bolivia now is one of the top six countries in our region with the best income distribution.

It has been shown that the peoples have options and that we can overcome the fate imposed by colonialism and neoliberalism.

These achievements produced in such a short span are attributable to the social and political awareness of the Bolivian people.

We have recovered our nation for all of us. Ours was a nation that had been alienated by the neoliberal model, a nation that lived under the old and evil system of political parties, a nation that was ruled from abroad, as if we were a colony.

We are no longer an unviable country as we were described by the international financial institutions. We are no longer an ungovernable country as the US empire would have us believe.

Today, the Bolivian people have recovered their dignity and pride, and we believe in our strength, our destiny and ourselves.

I want to tell the entire world in the most humble terms that the only wise architects who can change their future are the peoples themselves.

Therefore, we intend to build another world, and several tasks have been designed to establish the society of Vivir Bien.

First: We must move from sustainable development to comprehensive development [desarrollo integral] so that we can live well and in harmony and balance with Mother Earth.

We need to construct a vision that is different from the western capitalist development model. We must move from the sustainable development paradigm to the Bien Vivir comprehensive development approach that seeks not only a balance among human beings, but also a balance and harmony with our Mother Earth.

No development model can be sustainable if production destroys Mother Earth as a source of life and our own existence. No economy can be long lasting if it generates inequalities and exclusions.

No progress is just and desirable if the well-being of some is at the expense of the exploitation and impoverishment of others.

Vivir Bien Comprehensive Development means providing well-being for everyone, without exclusions. It means respect for the diversity of economies of our societies. It means respect for local knowledges. It means respect for Mother Earth and its biodiversity as a source of nurture for future generations.

Vivir Bien Comprehensive Development also means production to satisfy actual needs, and not to expand profits infinitely.

It means distributing wealth and healing the wounds caused by inequality, rather than widening injustice.

It means combining modern science with the age-old technological wisdom held by the indigenous, native and peasant peoples who interact respectfully with nature.

It means listening to the people, rather than the financial markets.

It means placing Nature at the core of life and regarding the human being as just another creature of Nature.

The Vivir Bien Comprehensive Development model of respect for Mother Earth is not an ecologist economy for poor countries alone, while the rich nations expand inequality and destroy Nature.

Comprehensive development is only viable if applied worldwide, if the states, in conjunction with their respective peoples, exercise control over all of their energy resources.

We need technologies, investments, production and credits, as well as companies and markets, but we shall not subordinate them to the dictatorship of profits and luxury. Instead, we must place them at the service of the peoples to satisfy their needs and to expand our common goods and services.

Second: Sovereignty exercised over natural resources and strategic areas.

Countries that have raw materials should and can take sovereign control over production and processing of those materials.

Nationalization of strategic companies and areas can help the state take over the management of production, exercise sovereign control over its wealth, embark on a planning process that leads to the processing of raw materials, and distribute the profit among its people.

Exercising sovereignty over natural resources and strategic areas does not mean isolation from global markets; rather, it means connecting to those markets for the benefit of our countries, and not for the benefit of a few private owners. Sovereignty over natural resources and strategic areas does not mean preventing foreign capital and technologies from participating. It means subordinating these investments and technologies to the needs of each country.

Third: Well-being for everyone and the provision of basic services as a human right

The worst tyranny faced by humankind is allowing basic services to be under the control of transnational corporations. This practice subjugates humanity to the specific interests and commercial aims of a minority who become rich and powerful at the expense of the life and security of other persons.

This is why we claim that basic services are inherent to the human condition. How can a human being live without potable water, electrical energy or communications? If human rights are to make us all equal, this equality can only be realized through universal access to basic services. Our need for water, like our need for light and communications, makes us all equal.

The resolution of social inequities requires that both international law and the national legislation of each country define basic services (such as water, power supply, communications and basic health care) as a fundamental human right of every individual.

This means that states have a legal obligation to secure the universal provision of basic services, irrespective of costs or profits.

Fourth: Emancipation from the existing international financial system and construction of a new financial architecture

We propose that we free ourselves from the international financial yoke by building a new financial system that prioritizes the requirements of the productive operations in the countries of the South, within the context of comprehensive development.

We must incorporate and enhance banks of the South that support industrial development projects, reinforce regional and domestic markets, and promote trade among our countries, but on the basis of complementarity and solidarity.

We also need to promote sovereign regulation over the global financial transactions that threaten the stability of our national economies.

We must design an international mechanism for restructuring our debts, which serve to reinforce the dependence of the peoples of the South and strangle their development possibilities.

We must replace international financial institutions such as the IMF with other entities that provide for a better and broader participation of the countries of the South in their decision-making structures that are currently in the grip of imperial powers.

We also need to define limits to gains from speculation and to excessive accumulation of wealth.

Fifth: Build a major economic, scientific, technological and cultural partnership among the members of the Group of 77 plus China

After centuries under colonial rule, transfers of wealth to imperial metropolises and impoverishment of our economies, the countries of the South have begun to regain decisive importance in the performance of the world economy.

Asia, Africa and Latin America are not only home to 77% of the world’s population, but they also account for nearly 43% of the world economy. And this importance is on the rise. The peoples of the South are the future of the world.

Immediate actions must be taken to reinforce and plan this inescapable global trend.

We need to expand trade among the countries of the South. We also need to gear our productive operations to the requirements of other economies in the South on the basis of complementarity of needs and capacities.

We need to implement technology transfer programs among the countries of the South. Not every country acting on its own can achieve the technological sovereignty and leadership that are critical for a new global economy based on justice.

Science must be an asset of humanity as a whole. Science must be placed at the service of everyone’s well-being, without exclusions or hegemonies. A decent future for all the peoples around the world will require integration for liberation, rather than cooperation for domination.

To discharge these worthy tasks to the benefit of the peoples of the world, we have invited Russia and other foreign countries that are our brothers in needs and commitments to join the Group of 77.

Our Group of 77 alliance does not have an institution of its own to give effect to the approaches, statements and action plans of our countries. For this reason, Bolivia proposes that an Institute For Decolonization and South-South Co-operation be established.

This institute will be charged with provision of technical assistance to the countries of the South, as well as further implementation of the proposals made by the Group of 77 plus China.

The institute will also supply technical and capacity-building assistance for development and self-determination, and it will help conduct research projects. We propose that this institute be headquartered in Bolivia.

Sixth: Eradicate hunger among the world’s peoples

It is imperative that hunger be eradicated and that the human right to food be fully exercised and enforced.

Food production must be prioritized with the involvement of small growers and indigenous peasant communities that hold age-old knowledge in regard to this activity.

To be successful in hunger eradication, the countries of the South must lay down the conditions for democratic and equitable access to land ownership, so that monopolies over this resource are not allowed to persist in the form of latifundia. However, fragmentation into small and unproductive plots must not be encouraged either.

Food sovereignty and security must be enhanced through access to healthy foods for the benefit of the people.

The monopoly held by transnational corporations over the supply of farm inputs must be eliminated as a way to foster food security and sovereignty.

Each country must make sure that the supply of the basic food staples consumed by its people is secured by enhancing productive, cultural and environmental practices, and by promoting people-to-people exchanges on the basis of solidarity. Governments have an obligation to ensure the supply of power, the availability of road connections and access to water and organic fertilizers.

Seventh: Strengthen the sovereignty of states free from foreign interference, intervention and/or espionage

Within the framework of the United Nations, a new institutional structure must be promoted in support of a New World Order for Vivir Bien.

The institutions that emerged after World War II, including the United Nations, are in need of a thorough reform today.

International agencies that promote peace, eliminate global hegemonism and advance equality among states are required.

For this reason, the UN Security Council must be abolished. Rather than fostering peace among nations, this body has promoted wars and invasions by imperial powers in their quest for the natural resources available in the invaded countries. Instead of a Security Council, today we have an insecurity council of imperial wars.

No country, no institution and no interest can justify the invasion of one country by another. The sovereignty of states and the internal resolution of the conflicts that exist in any country are the foundation of peace and of the United Nations.

I stand here to denounce the unjust economic blockade imposed on Cuba and the aggressive and illegal policies pursued by the US government against Venezuela, including a legislative initiative offered at the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee designed to apply sanctions to that country to the detriment of its sovereignty and political independence, a clear breach of the principles and purposes of the UN Charter.

These forms of persecution and internationally driven coups are the traits of modern colonialism, the colonial practices of our era.

These are our times, the times of the South. We must be able to overcome and heal the wounds caused by fratricidal wars stirred by foreign capitalist interests. We must strengthen our integration schemes in support of our peaceful coexistence, our development and our faith in shared values, such as justice.

Only by standing together will we be able to give decent lives to our peoples.

Eighth: Democratic renewal of our states

The era of empires, colonial hierarchies and financial oligarchies is coming to an end. Everywhere we look, we see peoples around the world calling for their right to play their leading role in history.

The 21st century must be the century of the peoples, the workers, the farmers, the indigenous communities, the youth and the women. In other words, it must be the century of the oppressed.

The realization of the peoples’ leading role requires that democracy be renewed and strengthened. We must supplement electoral democracy with participatory and community-based democracy.

We must move away from limited parliamentary and party-based governance and into the social governance of democracy.

This means that the decision-making process in any state must take into consideration its parliamentary deliberations, but also the deliberations by the social movements that incorporate the life-giving energy of our peoples.

The renovation of democracy in this century also requires that political action represents a full and permanent service to life. This service constitutes an ethical, humane and moral commitment to our peoples, to the humblest masses.

For this purpose, we must reinstate the codes of our ancestors: no robar, no mentir, no ser flujo y no ser adulón [do not steal, do not lie, do not be weak and do not flatter].

Democracy also means distribution of wealth and expansion of the common goods shared by society.

Democracy means subordination of rulers to the decisions of the ruled.

Democracy is not a personal benefit vested in the rulers, nor is it abuse of power. Democracy means serving the people with love and self-sacrifice. Democracy means dedication of time, knowledge, effort and even life itself in the pursuit of the well-being of the peoples and humanity.

Ninth: A new world rising from the south for the whole of humanity

The time has come for the nations of the South.

In the past, we were colonized and enslaved. Our stolen labour built empires in the North.

Today, with every step we take for our liberation, the empires grow decadent and begin to crumble.

However, our liberation is not only the emancipation of the peoples of the South. Our liberation is also for the whole of humanity. We are not fighting to dominate anyone. We are fighting to ensure that no one becomes dominated.

Only we can save the source of life and society: Mother Earth. Our planet is under a death threat from the greed of predatory and insane capitalism.

Today, another world is not only possible, it is indispensable.

Today, another world is indispensable because, otherwise, no world will be possible.

And that other world of equality, complementarity and organic coexistence with Mother Earth can only emerge from the thousands of languages, colours and cultures existing in brotherhood and sisterhood among the Peoples of the South.

Santa Cruz, 14 June 2014

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[1] For a recent discussion of this concept, see Raúl Zibechi, Brasil Potencia, now available in English.

[2] A common error of G77 members is to equate anti-imperialist solidarity with political support of member governments. A glaring example was provided by Bolivia’s parliament immediately after the Summit, when it awarded a human rights medal to the President of Sri Lanka, whose government is notorious for waging a genocidal war against the country’s minority Tamil nation — strange conduct indeed by Bolivia’s “Plurinational Legislative Assembly.”

[3] United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

Learning from our history: Ernie Tate’s memoir of his early years

Photo by David Carrington

Ernie Tate and Jess MacKenzie

[The two volumes reviewed below were launched at a meeting attended by about 70 persons in Toronto on June 11, sponsored by the Centre for Social Justice and Socialist Project. The meeting, introduced by Greg Albo, was chaired by Carolyn Egan of the United Steelworkers and the Toronto & York Region Labour Council.

[Among the speakers were Bryan Palmer, the prominent labour historian; Chris Schenk, recently retired Research Director of the Ontario Federation of Labour; myself; and the author, Ernie Tate. The following is an expanded version of my presentation.]

– Richard Fidler

* * *

Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s and 60s: Ernest Tate, a Memoir

Volume 1, Canada 1955-65. London: Resistance Books, 2014, 268 pp., C$15.00.

Volume 2, Britain 1965-70. London: Resistance Books, 2014, 395 pp., C$21.00.

I will start with an anecdote that is not included in Ernest Tate’s two-volume account. I mention it because it was one of the first occasions when I encountered “Ernie,” as all of us came to know him.

In July 1960 a young man was caught by the police in the middle of the night painting “Ban the Bomb” in big letters on three sides of a demonstration fallout shelter erected at the corner of College Street and University Avenue in Toronto. It was the height of the Cold War. The Diefenbaker government was under pressure from the Pentagon and the opposition Liberals (headed by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Lester Pearson) to arm the Bomarc missiles it had installed north of Toronto and Montréal, under the Norad agreement, with nuclear warheads. Meanwhile, the government had erected this fallout shelter as part of a general effort to foster the illusion that somehow we could survive a nuclear holocaust.

The newspapers reported that the slogan-painter was Ernest Tate, a 26-year old stationary engineer. When he told the magistrate he would do the same thing again if given the opportunity, Tate was ordered to pay $35 for the cost of painting over the slogans and fined $15 or two days in jail for malicious damage.

At the time, as a high-school student in Toronto, I was active in the ban-the-bomb movement. Reading the news reports, I recognized a kindred soul. Soon afterward, I was fortunate to meet Ernie and we have been close friends and comrades ever since.

I was reminded of this incident when I approached the end of Ernie’s second volume. In a gripping chapter he describes the critical debate at the 9^th world congress of the Fourth International, which he attended as a delegate, over the adopted proposal, supported by Ernest Mandel among many others, that all the FI sections in Latin America implement a continental tactic of rural-based guerrilla warfare in supposed emulation of the Cuban revolutionaries and Che Guevara’s ill-fated Bolivian experience. Ernie was in the minority that opposed this, arguing that revolutionaries in Latin America should determine their own tactics in light of the distinct and varied conditions of the class struggle in their respective countries.

But Ernie follows this account with a chapter on the disastrous attempt by the FI’s Argentine section, the PRT-Combatiente led by Roberto Santucho, to implement the g-war strategy, albeit in a predominantly urban context in that country. While critical, Ernie evinces an air of admiration for Santucho and his comrades and their bold adventurism — the kind of thing that would become known by our European comrades like the late Daniel Bensaïd as “initiatives in action,” bold attacks on institutions and individuals associated with the regime in the hope of stimulating mass consciousness and revolt. Was Santucho a “kindred soul” to the Ernie Tate of that audacious anti-bomb action of 1960?

‘A trove of movement history’

Stories like these — and there are many in these two volumes — bear out a point made by John Riddell in his review of Ernie’s account of his first 15 years in the Trotskyist “movement” (as we called it).[1] And that was the very positive impact that Ernie had on young radicals like us in a period when it was winning its first student members. As John puts it, “An experienced union activist, Tate also had an instinctive feel for and capacity to learn from the nascent social movements in which the student comrades worked…. What is more, Tate could speak in the idiom of radical youth….”

These books will have wide appeal to today’s radicalizing youth, bringing to them (as Derrick O’Keefe writes in his preface) a “trove of movement history” viewed through the lens of “a life lived in the struggle for a better world,” and now leavened by “an accumulation of experience and wisdom — more compassion, less dogma and better political judgment.”

These volumes highlight Ernie’s first decades as a political activist, from poverty-ridden Belfast to immigration to Canada, his initial encounter with a small group of socialists and his subsequent experiences in working with his comrades to build a revolutionary Marxist current rooted in the actuality of the workers movement of the day — in particular the trade unions and the CCF/NDP — but alert to new possibilities opened up by the crisis of Stalinism, the Cuban revolution and the youth radicalization of the Sixties. The second volume documents how he applied the lessons of these experiences in building a revolutionary Marxist group in Britain.

Here I want to draw particular attention to three aspects of Ernie’s experiences that I think are relevant to today’s young anticapitalists.

A coherent world view

The first is what he says about discovering Marxism and the Marxist movement. When he joined it in the mid-1950s, the Socialist Education League (SEL) was a very small organization, although it was part of a somewhat larger international current, the Fourth International. This put him in contact with a coherent body of ideas and the experience of an international tradition of struggle, independent and critical of Stalinism and Social-Democracy, and that carried forward the best traditions of revolutionary Marxism.

“… for me as a young person,” Ernie writes, “joining a socialist organization, no matter how small, was like at last awakening from a long sleep. Vague ideas and feelings I had about society that I had come to by myself now began to be integrated into a systematic historical and political outlook, a new understanding about the world and how society is organized and a conviction about the grim future of humanity if fundamental change did not take place. Above all, it gave a coherent expression to what had been a sense of injustice that I had until then been unable to articulate…. To this day I have always separated those two phases of my adult life: the period before and after joining the group….” (pp. 30-31)

A second feature of Ernie’s memoir is the emphasis he gives to international solidarity as a crucial ingredient of socialist politics.

Fully one fifth of the first volume is devoted to describing our efforts in building a united-front defense of the Cuban Revolution, including a long-overdue tribute to the work of Vern Olson in the leadership of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

Cuba solidarity

Our Cuba solidarity work involved far more than campaigning against the imperialist blockade around slogans like “Hands Off Cuba!,” important as that was. A major objective was to “get out the truth about Cuba” as a massive social upheaval led by new revolutionary forces influenced far more by anti-imperialism than by Stalinism. We translated and published dozens of speeches by its leaders, and accounts by Canadians who visited Cuba of how the revolution was unfolding. (The two pamphlets of this nature mentioned by Ernie are available on-line on the Socialist History Project web site.[2])

An offshoot of this work (not mentioned by Ernie) was our participation in the successful international campaign to save the life of Hugo Blanco, a young Trotskyist in Peru sentenced to death by a military court for his leadership of a peasant movement. Hugo, who will be 80 years old this year, is still an influential political activist known throughout Latin America, as I confirmed in recent months while residing in Bolivia.

Later, in Britain, as Ernie describes in his second volume, solidarity with Vietnam and opposition to the Labour government’s complicity in the US war occupied a major share of the activities of the revolutionary Marxists with whom Ernie was working to build a section of the Fourth International. From modest beginnings, the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign grew exponentially, mounting demonstrations of tens and even hundreds of thousands.

Russell War Crimes Tribunal

Of particular interest is Ernie’s account of his work with the Bertrand Russell Foundation and with Isaac Deutscher, the biographer of Trotsky, in setting up the Russell War Crimes Tribunal to expose the imperialist atrocities in Vietnam. Much of this fascinating history was new to me.[3]

Vietnam solidarity was, unfortunately, far down the list of priorities for most of the British left, including the far left, Ernie reports. Some argued that nothing meaningful could be done on the issue until the working class and the labour movement became involved — an insularity that our current would in the past label “imperialist economism.”

“I put it to them,” says Ernie, “that defending a third world country’s right to self-determination was the highest expression the class struggle in an imperialist country such as Britain could take.”

Solidarity with Cuba and Vietnam, in different ways, frontally challenged the Cold War mentality of a geopolitical bipolar opposition between imperialist “freedom” and soviet “totalitarianism.” And in fact Cuba and Vietnam benefited to varying degrees from the existence of a bloc of countries, led by the USSR, able to provide an alternative source of material support — crucial in the case of Cuba, more problematic in Vietnam owing in part to the negative ramifications of the Sino-Soviet dispute and the bureaucratic rivalries it engendered.

In today’s world, increasingly multipolar but still hegemonized by a single imperialist power, the USA, international solidarity is more complex and no single anti-imperialist (let alone socialist) struggle dominates the international political landscape. In countries like Iraq or Afghanistan the forces under attack from imperialism do not elicit our political support as the Cubans in particular did. If anything, however, this problematic points to the importance of infusing our solidarity with a clear understanding of the dynamics of imperialism in its current stage and the many ways in which it opposes even the more limited challenges to its domination by governments and social movements in Latin America and elsewhere.

Labour and the NDP

A third prominent feature of Ernie’s account, which runs like a leitmotiv through his first volume, concerns our work in the mass organizations created by working people in the course of their struggles. For the SEL, activity in the trade unions was of central importance, he explains, and “we believed that any organization that aspired to change society should have the bulk of its membership in them… even if we had little influence in the unions.”

As it happened, the Trotskyists in Toronto, later organized in the 1960s as the League for Socialist Action and by then beginning to recruit radicalized students, did get to play an influential role in a major labour struggle that developed unexpectedly in a corrupt union then under trusteeship, the Teamsters. Ernie devotes a fascinating chapter to describing the LSA’s participation in this prolonged experience of wildcat strikes and battles for internal union democracy. He estimates that up to 40 Teamsters joined the League at some point or another, although in the absence of a general rise of class struggle it proved hard to retain most of them.

Another aspect of the League’s “proletarian orientation,” often misrepresented by our critics in the left and the labour movement, had to do with our “orientation” to the social-democratic Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and its successor the New Democratic Party (NDP). With some notable exceptions, this was largely propagandistic; the party leaders were quick to expel any members they identified as Trotskyists. But it provided an anchor for our politics. Our general approach was to look for ways in which to popularize our ideas by presenting them as specific proposals for adoption and action by the unions and their party in English Canada. This allowed us to address the political issues of the day in relation to the mass organizations and party of the working class[4] — a valuable antidote to the sectarian impulse inherent to any small propaganda group.

Like our work in the unions, we gained few recruits to our tendency from this approach, although here again there were exceptions: some of the early student recruits came from the New Democratic Youth in its formative years, with a later influx from our participation in the NDP’s left-wing “Waffle” caucus. At the same time, the NDP orientation in no way inhibited us from engagement in our own independent election campaigns municipally or in by-elections not contested by the NDP, as well as in unions like the Teamsters not affiliated to the party, or in a host of other activities.

Although Ernie frequently refers to the NDP orientation as an “entry tactic,” it differed from the “entrism sui generis” first advocated by the Fourth International in the early 1950s, a long-term submersion by Trotskyists in the existing Stalinist and Social Democratic parties. In fact, the SEL that Ernie joined in 1955 had been constituted to terminate an “entry” by the Trotskyists in the CCF that had resulted in the loss of some valuable cadres. And Ernie’s memoir recounts at length the efforts led by Ross Dowson to re-establish the public face and activities of the revolutionary Marxists — an approach that encountered considerable resistance in Vancouver, where the residual existence of an influential left wing in the CCF and NDP provided a comfortable milieu for the local Trotskyists.

Similarly, much of Ernie’s second volume describes his efforts to convince his British co-thinkers of their need to establish a publicly identified Marxist group and to supplement their work in the Labour party milieu with independent activities particularly in the antiwar movement.

The party project

Much of our activity during this period was of an educational nature: regular publication of a newspaper, the operation of bookstores, sponsorship of weekly public forums on issues of the day, as well as occasional cross-country tours to meet other socialists. In the absence of major class confrontations, most of our members were recruited individually as a result of their encounters with us through these activities.

Once recruited, a member would experience an intense level of activity internal to the organization, including the weekly membership meetings that were the norm. All members faced enormous demands on their time, and most of all the full-time staff who had to make do on subsistence salaries.

In a small group with such a demanding regime, personal differences can loom large. Ernie frequently references the difficulties he and many others encountered in dealing with Ross Dowson, the pre-eminent leader of our group who played an inordinate role as the most experienced member, with a remarkable capacity to recognize and take advantage of opportunities as they developed but who also played in many respects a very negative role, driving some fine comrades out of the movement. Such tensions were perhaps inevitable in a small, tightly disciplined group.

All of our activities were infused by the concept we all held then of party-building. That is, our objective was to build a “vanguard” organization of committed cadres who would, we hoped, be instrumental in helping lead the working class to triumph in a socialist revolution. We had an exalted conception of ourselves, reflected in the title of the SEL/LSA biweekly newspaper (which I edited for six years) — The Workers Vanguard, “more of a promise to the future than a reality,” says Ernie. And our small propaganda group was misconceived by Dowson and others as the “embryo” of a mass revolutionary party. “Only history would decide if that was the case,” Ernie aptly comments.

Our model was what we viewed as a “Leninist” party, emulating the party that had led the successful Russian Bolshevik revolution of 1917. We now know, thanks to the scholarship of Lars Lih and others,[5] that Lenin’s party was quite different from the reality of our cadre formation, which organizationally was modelled much more closely on US Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon’s conceptions. However, in the period covered by Ernie’s memoir, the leaders of the US Socialist Workers Party were a counsel of immense value to our relatively inexperienced membership, not least through the SWP’s diligent production of educational materials and activities that assisted us in developing our own grasp and application of Marxist theoretical conceptions.

Our goal was an audacious one, and ultimately — in a later period that Ernie just adumbrates in an Epilogue — proved a failure. A contemporary reader might well wonder, was it all worth it? Ernie shuns such introspection. “I have always been uneasy about retrospective judgments based upon hindsight,” he writes in the introduction to his second volume.

“Of course, we could have done things better and it’s easy to see now that some of our problems arose from failure to grasp the nature of the period we were living through, including a lack of a good appreciation of the resiliency of capitalism and its ability to survive crises, including an underestimation of the ruling class’s capacity to learn from such things…. But I have few regrets about all this. I was educated in the school that taught me to deal with mistakes as a normal part of trying to succeed, and that the worst mistake of all is to do nothing and allow oneself to retreat into sectarian isolation…. I feel we did the best we could with the hands that we were dealt. If we are going to be judged, then it should be done in comparison to what all the other socialist groups were doing at the same time.”

By that criterion, we acquitted ourselves well, as Ernie demonstrates convincingly in his account.

And with all due respect…

Like Ernie in his day, the great Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui travelled in the early 1920s to Europe, where he participated in the founding of the Italian Communist Party and worked with such luminaries as Antonio Gramsci. While there, he fell in love with an Italian woman, Anna Chiappe. Returning to Peru, he famously told friends and the media that “I have come back with a wife and some ideas.”

Well, while in Britain Ernie fell in love with Jess MacKenzie. She returned to Canada with him in 1969 and they have been partners and collaborators politically and in life for almost 50 years now. As Ernie says, in his second volume, “The story I am writing here about those years in England is just as much hers as it is mine.”

As to the ideas, Revolutionary Activism has many. It is not a recipe book. Ernie does not touch on the mass movements that emerged in the mid-1960s — such as the Quebec labour and nationalist upsurge or the powerful second wave of feminism. Neverthless, his volumes provide us with a compelling account of how revolutionary socialists could work in and learn from the movements of their day when revolution in Canada, or Britain, was still a far-off dream.

– Richard Fidler

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[1] “Breaking a path for the sixties radicalization,” http://johnriddell.wordpress.com/2014/05/18/breaking-a-path-for-the-sixties-radicalization/.

[2] http://www.socialisthistory.ca/Docs/docs.htm#FairPlay.

[3] The Russell Tribunal became the inspiration for many such tribunals on other issues in following years. For example, the Permanent People’s Tribunal, an international tribunal independent of state authorities, has in recent decades held more than 40 such public hearings around the world invoking international human rights law and the UN declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to investigate and expose human rights atrocities committed by states and corporations. The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal session on the Canadian Mining Industry in Latin America, held in Montréal May 30-June 1, traces its origins to the Russell Tribunal of 1966. See the trilingual PPT Canada web site at http://www.tppcanada.org/a-propos-du-tpp/?lang=en.

[4] We may have exaggerated somewhat in our characterization of the NDP as the Canadian “labour party.” Founded in 1961, in the anticommunist environment of the day, its component unions already heavily bureaucratized under the dual impact of capitalism’s postwar expansion and the constraints of the Fordist industrial relations regime, the party at no point managed to gain more than 15 percent of union members as affiliates, and notably very few in Quebec. See, for example, my article “The NDP, poised for power but to what effect?,” http://canadiandimension.com/articles/5196/.

[5] For a hyperlinked collection of Lih’s major studies, see http://tinyurl.com/nhvvopr.

Building coalitions against austerity — Some lessons from Quebec

Some important initiatives are being taken in my home town Ottawa, to fight the austerity offensive of governments and Big Business.

In the forefront is Solidarity Against Austerity (SAA), a newly formed network of community, student, labour, peace, environmental, and anti-poverty organizations, which is organizing to stop the cuts to our public services and defend workers’ rights.

On May 1^st, SAA organized a march of several hundred people through city streets to the prime minister’s office; such demonstrations on May Day are an annual event now in Ottawa, but an innovation this year was a feeder march of several dozen workers who marched across the bridge from neighboring Gatineau, Quebec to join the Ottawa march.

On April 26 Solidarity Against Austerity organized a day-long “School on Past and Current Struggles” that drew about 75 activists to the meeting hall at Ottawa’s new left and progressive community centre, 25One Community at 251 Bank Street. The centre houses a number of progressive organizations, including the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, and a branch of the left bookstore Octopus Books.

Those in attendance included a fair sampling of militants in local public and private sector unions, as well as activists from other social movements. One was Carleton University professor Hassan Diab, who is now, in the wake of an adverse ruling by the Ontario Court of Appeal May 15, appealing to the Supreme Court of Canada against his extradition to France on a highly suspect charge of involvement in the 1980 bombing of a Paris synagogue.

After an excellent talk by David McNally on “Global Austerity and Global Resistance,” which set the context for the event, the school continued with a panel on “Learning from Our Past” featuring a film on the 1980 seminal public service clerks’ strike and presentations by Rosemary Warskett and Jean-Claude Parrot.

During the lunch break we were addressed by Hassan Husseini, the candidate for president of the Canadian Labour Congress of the Take Back the CLC campaign, aimed at reorienting the labour movement in a more progressive activist direction. Although the campaign had a major impact at the CLC convention in Montréal May 5-9, winning the support of some unions and many militants, Husseini withdrew his candidacy in order to ensure the victory of another candidate, Hassan Yussuff. The outgoing Secretary-Treasurer of the CLC, Yussuff managed to defeat the incumbent president Ken Georgetti in a close vote.

The afternoon session began with a panel on Fighting Austerity Today with speakers Natalie Mehra of the Ontario Health Coalition, former Solidarity Halifax activist Dave Bush and a representative of Ecology Ottawa. This was followed by a panel on Organizing Beyond Current Struggles, featuring a number of labour activists and, as wind-up speaker, Jérémie Bédard-Wien, a leader of the massive 2012 student strike in Quebec.

With his permission, I publish below the text of Jérémie’s remarks, which were delivered in an impeccable English.

– Richard Fidler

* * *

We’ve had a pretty exciting day today. We’ve heard from people from across the country: I’d like to tell you what’s happening in that nagging little province on the other side of the Ottawa River: two interesting events in particular.

One, we have a new provincial government. The Parti québécois have suffered a historic defeat at the polls — given their xenophobic Charter of Values, I think that deserves a round of applause. What is less deserving of your smiles is that the Liberals are back in power. The prime minister, the education minister and the health ministers are three doctors; two of them are ex-lobbyists for private healthcare investment funds. Coincidentally, the first budget they saw fit to cut was free dental exams for children under 10, who apparently don’t need good teeth while they attend 20%-more-expensive childcare!

What the election of the Liberals means is more austerity. What it means is dishonest negotiations with unions. What it means is the plundering of Northern Quebec for the benefit of mining and energy companies, with First Nations communities standing to lose the most.

But I have good news for you. Quebecers won’t go down without a fight. Four days before the election, a demonstration of 10, 000 people took to the streets of Montreal to demonstrate against austerity.

What’s interesting, apart from the fact that it wasn’t a hockey riot, is that it was held while the Parti québécois, the traditional “partner” of the Left, was still in power. Quebecers had enough of standing by while the PQ copy-pasted the agenda of the right. Quebecers are beginning to see that governments, blue or red, will not listen to popular will if we don’t force them to listen. And if we want to push for lasting change, we have to do much more than “get Harper out” in 2015.

The left has developed an annoying obsession, in Quebec, in Canada, and in much of the Western World, with elections. And we’ve often chosen to favor support for whatever stands as the left, followed by lobbyism when they’re in government, over the hard work of mobilization. The problem is that it doesn’t work.

No matter how many millions we spend in advertising, our demands are whispers compared to the shouts of the private sector. These governments want to demonstrate they can be “responsible managers.” And so, time and time again, we are told that their progressive promises will have to wait after millions and millions in cuts to balance the budget. When they do, they cut taxes.

Adopting the playbook of the right is a losing strategy. Instead, we should be radical, in the traditional sense of the term: look at the roots of what made the Left so strong.

The student movement of 2012 was successful precisely because it looked to 40 years of left history and unearthed the heart of our movements: mobilization and democracy.

We in the labor movement often deplore that so few members get involved in our activities. In my day job, as a union coordinator for a local of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, I have witnessed many disappointing assemblies, and many excuses to explain poor showing. “Our members are right-wingers”, I often heard. “They’re always complaining about dues, there’s no way.” But it’s surprising what happens when you actually talk to them. The labour movement of this country was built on mobilization.

We have to talk to our members, talk to their fears, share our worldview, and, more often than not, we may find they are quite different than what we expected. And then we have to invite them to a general assembly.

The Quebec student movement wasn’t successful because we had 22 million dollars to spend on ads against tuition increases. No, it was successful because every single one of those 300,000 students on strike had a part to play in shaping the direction of the movement, in directly democratic general assemblies held on every campus. That’s a tremendously effective way to foster engagement.

Participating in a general assembly where you have real, binding power to change the orientations of your movement, from the date of your local’s Christmas party to the recalling of your federation’s president, is a transformative experience. To me, it’s an experience that carries more weight and meaning than a vote in any election, and it’s an experience both borne out of struggle and leading to mobilization.

I’d like to congratulate Hassan Husseini for courageously challenging the leadership of Ken Georgetti of the Canadian Labour Congress. We need troublemakers like Hassan in our movements. But even his election — there’s no doubt in my mind Hassan will be elected, given Georgetti’s stellar leadership — will not be enough. The best cure against the old boys’ club is a much larger club: you and me, hundreds of thousands of rank-and-file members.

To go back to the student strike, our leaders were under constant pressure to negotiate worthless settlements. They were under constant pressure to be the reasonable ones and “stop the violence”; yet the horizontal structure of the student movement prevented them from caving in under that pressure. Six months passed, the threats mounted, and not one of our leaders called for the strike to end. It turns out people on the ground were just as radical as the people at the top, because people on the ground weren’t fighting against a tuition hike; they were fighting for systemic change.

I wasn’t lucky enough to attend David McNally’s presentation this morning, but I’d sure like to see him speak to every single audience like this one. In Quebec students understood, thanks to painstaking mobilization work, that the issue of tuition was part of a much broader international shift in the funding and objectives of higher education. In response, we wholly rejected that framework and asked for entirely free education.

Our challenge is similar. We cannot understand the attacks we are facing as a series of disconnected measures, and we have to escape the narrow possibilities afforded by the framework of neoliberalism. Instead of arguing about the economic feasibility of the changes we advocate, we should challenge the economic dogmas that point to only one way forward: more austerity.

There has been much talk about how defensive our demands are, particularly in the labour movement. And the truth is, we have to fight against those attacks — there’s no way around it. But we should go further. We cannot afford to fight our struggles in our own corners. As someone said earlier, we need a coherent global response to a global attack. We need to build coalitions that can agree on common demands and share a common analysis: coalitions that can win.

I’d like to give two examples, from Quebec, of successful coalition-building on the left.

First, I’d like to talk about Québec solidaire. In Quebec, when we looked at the National Assembly, we found three parties whose main point of contention was how quickly should we cut into social services. For years progressives reluctantly supported the PQ, only to be bitterly disappointed. For years they built modest electoral initiatives.

Now we have a proper left party, Québec solidaire, built on the idea that a political party can be active both in parliament and in the streets. I was lucky to work on Québec solidaire’s campaign in March and April. We fought our campaign on issues that were strangely absent from the national public debate: the environment, education, tax fairness and an inclusive Quebec independence. Yet almost 400,000 Quebecers chose to give their vote to a coalition of community groups, feminist groups and Trotskyist parties. Thanks to Québec solidaire, progressive Quebecers have a loud voice in the National Assembly.

Outside of the National Assembly, we’ve also managed to build bridges between community organizations, unions, student associations, and the radical left. CLASSE, the student coalition built for the student strike, was itself a coalition of student associations, each with their own realities and expectations, from all across the province. The student movement is also part of a broader coalition, the Red Hand Coalition, an assembly of community groups, militant unions and student organizations. That coalition set four objectives when it was founded, in 2010. Thanks to that focus, they were attained.

These coalitions are not passing alliances between self-interested groups. They reflect the values of internal democracy, mobilization, political education and commitment to structural change that we hold dear at the grassroots level. Most importantly, they reject the right’s playbook. They resort to demonstrations and long-term action plans to build leverage in order to achieve their demands. That’s where our collective power lies.

When we think we can’t achieve mass mobilization, when we think Canadians are too conservative anyway, when we think we should better listen to those who say we can’t do it, we set ourselves limits.

The takeaway of today is that those limits do not have a basis in reality. Ahead of the first Social Forum in the history of this country, I’m confident we are able to surpass them and build a Canadian response to the global alternative rising internationally. We can fully realize our collective power.

Thank you.