Everywhere we look, we are confronted with the same picture: crisis, instability and chaos. Unmarked graves of Indigenous children, record heat waves caused by climate change, police brutalizing homeless encampments, cuts to health care in the middle of the pandemic, the piling up of unprecedented debts on government balance sheets, the growth of the far right and conspiracy theories. These are the symptoms of a society in crisis at every level: economic, social and political. Indeed, the capitalist system, both at home and abroad, has entered the deepest crisis in its history and each day brings yet more evidence of the complete impasse of the status quo.
The decay of capitalism
The present crisis is particularly cruel since it comes on the heels of what has been a “lost decade” stemming from the crisis of 2008. The Great Recession resulted in savage cuts to public services, the stagnation or outright fall in the real wages of workers and, for the first time since the Second World War, a generation of youth poorer than their parents.
The slow accumulation of misery and inequality of the 2010s has now been transformed into an explosive and unpredictable catastrophe by the COVID-19 pandemic. Public health care systems, already weakened by decades of austerity, are now at a breaking point. Essential workers such as nurses, celebrated as “heroes” by the politicians who bungled the pandemic response, are confronted by dire working conditions and an erosion of their living conditions.
Racialized workers, women and youth, who had already been struggling to keep their heads above water, have borne the brunt of the losses in jobs and pay cuts; the recent rise in the cost of food and housing are only compounding these hardships. While the corporate media loudly complains about the $100 billion in emergency payments to workers, they are completely silent on the $700 billion spent to keep the corporations afloat. The government justifies this spending by claiming that all this money helps the corporations pay the wages of their workers. This is a lie. The corporations are simply using public money to increase dividends and executive bonuses while laying off workers in massive numbers. It is therefore no surprise then that Canadian bosses and billionaires have seen their wealth skyrocket while the rest of us are being denied anything that makes life half-livable.
Young people have been one of the hardest-hit layers of the population. Youth unemployment, already higher than the rest of the population, increased precipitously during the pandemic. For many post-secondary students, who were already stretched thin financially, this means that daily necessities are becoming increasingly unaffordable. We already have instances where students have to choose between paying for tuition and paying for food. However, instead of lending a helping hand, universities are jacking up tuition fees. This is despite the fact that students have gone a full year without access to extracurriculars, counseling, sports facilities and in-person discussion with professors. With the added struggle to keep up with classes and to maintain their mental health, many students end up dropping out. This not only undermines future job prospects but students are also on the hook financially for loans they may have taken out to attend school. On top of this, new entrants to the job market face an opaque and frustrating job application process where the jobs they do get pay low wages for long hours and bad working conditions. The situation of the youth in Canada thus contains in microcosm the crisis of the whole capitalist system.
Side by side with the degradation of the health and living conditions of workers and youth, we are witnessing the accelerating degradation of the environment. This year, North America was hit by an unprecedented heat wave which would have been nearly impossible without climate change. This resulted not only in massive wildfires, one of which burned the town of Lytton down to the ground, but the heat led to several hundred deaths in British Columbia. The excess mortality was concentrated among the most vulnerable layers of the population, in particular the elderly who live in working-class neighborhoods and care homes with inadequate facilities.
The capitalist state—an organ of repression
This heat wave and its effects are a harbinger of what is to come if we fail to overcome the capitalist system. However, instead of reorganizing production to build a sustainable energy infrastructure and creating good jobs in the process, the Canadian fossil fuel executives and their state are engaged in efforts to ram even more pipelines through unceded Indigenous lands. When Indigenous people attempt to resist the construction of pipelines which poison their lands for the sake of profits, they are met with the full force of the RCMP. The Canadian spooks in CSIS even go so far as to label Indigenous people as “subversive” and “terrorist”.
This same repressive state apparatus is now unleashed on anyone and everyone who dares to get in the way of the capitalists and their profits in other spheres of life. The blistering pace of growth in the cost of housing, driven by financial speculation on the part of housing corporations and the wealthier layers of society, have also driven many poor workers into homelessness. As a result, cities all over the country have witnessed a rise in homeless encampments. The people in these encampments are constantly hounded by business owners and harassed by the police. One such encampment, at Lamport Stadium in Toronto, was slated for eviction. Upon hearing this, many community members and youth showed up to the park to show solidarity and to defend the homeless. Although completely unarmed and peaceful, this didn’t save them from being beaten, pepper-sprayed and choked by the police. This comes on top of years of police harassment of racialized youth in the cities through practices such as “carding”, which is just racial profiling by another name. This is also the same police which enables the violence of the far right against anti-racist activists.
Finally, if anything captures the magnitude of the crimes committed by the capitalist system, it is the discovery of thousands of unmarked graves of Indigenous children on the grounds of former residential schools. The outpouring of anger and grief has not only affected Indigenous communities but has led to a sea change in attitudes towards the Indigenous struggle in Canada. Whereas a few years ago, much of the Canadian population was indifferent or occasionally even hostile to issues affecting Indigenous people, today the overwhelming majority of people and in particular the youth have a growing awareness of the historic and ongoing oppression of Indigenous people.
Coming as it does in the midst of pandemic profiteering, low wages, unaffordable housing and austerity, the discoveries of mass graves have completely exposed the lie of “we are all in this together”. This in turn has accelerated the growth of a socialist consciousness in society. Not only have we had magnificent solidarity demonstrations involving thousands of people in every major city but in places like Baffinland, we have seen an organic striving towards class solidarity from workers of all backgrounds.
This kind of solidarity between workers and oppressed people shows the way forward and it shows that the class struggle is only just beginning in Canada. Between colonialism, residential schools, poverty in First Nations communities and encroachment of private corporations on Indigenous lands, Canadian capitalism has much to answer for.
The developing world revolution
While the decay of capitalism can lead to many people being pessimistic about the future of humanity, contradictorily, the crisis of the system is also producing the potential for a new society. Working class people and youth all over the world have been rising up to fight against oppression and exploitation like never before.
Even before the pandemic, Chile was gripped by a truly insurrectionary mass uprising in 2019. In the same country where Augusto Pinochet once drowned the workers in blood, the Chilean masses took to the streets in millions to land a blow against the hated Piñera regime and Pinochetist conservatism. In Colombia, a country which seemed for decades to be a bastion of Latin American reaction, we witnessed a national strike movement which magnificently demonstrated the initiative and creativity inherent to the working class. Not only did the Colombian masses organically establish workers’ democracy through strike committees and neighborhood committees, but the masses had enough energy to overthrow the hated Duque regime. In Peru, the popular election of teacher and trade unionist Pedro Castillo represented a severe blow against decades of rule by the arch-reactionary Fujimori family and their cronies.
Halfway around the world, in Russia, we see a similar situation where tens of thousands of people are expressing their discontent in the face of severe repression by the state. The bravery of the Russian masses even extends to the youngest sections of Russian society. The present upheaval is particularly significant since it comes right after a mass movement in neighbouring Belarus. However, when it comes to the masses fighting police terror, the most inspiring example comes from our working class brothers and sisters south of the border. In the belly of the beast of world imperialism, in the richest and strongest capitalist country in history, the workers and the youth have been fighting back. This was most obvious with the magnificent mass movement following the murder of George Floyd. It is estimated that, at its height, this movement drew in even more people than the civil rights movement of the 1960s. It also resulted in the burning down of the third police precinct in Minneapolis, which was seen as a justified action by a majority of Americans! Beyond that, as in many other countries, we saw the spontaneous emergence of neighborhood self-defence committees in cities like Minneapolis and Seattle and uncountable instances of solidarity actions by unions and individual union members. The situation in the U.S. alone provides undeniable proof of the power of the working class.
In the face of crisis and inequality, events around the world demonstrate that the working class can and will fight back against the capitalists and their state. While the situation may seem different in Canada, things are headed in the same direction and revolutionary events are on the horizon. The ongoing struggles in the rest of the world may not show an exact image of our own future, but they do show in silhouette what we can expect in the coming years. The Trudeau government may have temporarily stabilized the situation through a massive program of state spending. But all the debt they are taking on will come due one day and we can be sure that Trudeau will not be coming to his rich friends for the bill. Sooner than people think, the same struggles being fought out on the streets of Chile and the United States will be fought out on the streets here in Canada, as workers and youth refuse to pay for this crisis that we did not create.
Fight for revolution in Canada!
While capitalism offers a cruel and inhospitable world where people are alienated from each other and themselves, we offer solidarity and a cause worth fighting for. Today, as capitalism lurches from one crisis to the next, it is not only the right but the duty of all of us all to make this fight our own and to join in solidarity with workers and oppressed groups to fight for a better world—a socialist world.
The only way to settle accounts with this rotten, oppressive system is for the workers who make society function to take control of the commanding heights of the economy and run society under democratic workers’ control. Only with the socialist transformation of society will we be able to use the enormous wealth of society to ensure decent livelihoods and genuine equality for all.
In the teeth of the worst crisis of our lifetimes, Fightback is organizing to prepare for the coming revolutionary events and present a socialist solution to the nightmare of capitalism. And in this regard, our numbers and our resolve are not only growing but thriving! Join us as we raise the red flag of revolution from coast to coast to coast!
