Society is in crisis. Living conditions decline steeply as millions of people are pushed to the brink. Breadlines reminiscent of the Great Depression have popped up in all major cities and food bank usage has reached unprecedented levels. Inflation erodes wages and increased interest rates are bankrupting millions of families. Let’s not fool ourselves, the class war is at our doorstep—let us prepare for it!
Class peace is over
In the past, in advanced capitalist countries like Canada, this situation was unheard of. On the basis of the postwar boom, the capitalists could buy class peace. They granted concessions like pensions, unemployment insurance, healthcare and decent unionized jobs for a significant layer of the working class. They established a social contract through collective bargaining agreements and the recognition of the right to strike. But this is all a thing of the past.
Even before the current crisis, bourgeois governments at all levels had in practice torn up the old social contract. Collective bargaining rights have been trampled on and the right to strike has consistently been violated with back-to-work legislation. Whether Conservative or Liberal, the federal government has taken away the right to strike of railway workers, postal workers, and federal government employees just to name a few. And provincial governments have been even worse, taking away the right to strike countless times in the last couple of decades.
While this situation was already bad enough, inflation is now added to the mix. Previously, during the past few decades of low inflation, workers would grudgingly accept one to two per cent wage increases a year. But this is now untenable and any union agreeing to below-inflation wage increases is signing a contract of wage erosion. It doesn’t take a genius to see that sooner or later, something has to give.
Europe shows the way
While the crisis of capitalism is bad in Canada, in Europe it has been far worse. It is therefore not surprising that we are seeing unprecedented working class mobilization in a wave of strikes and mass movements. Britain has been shaken by the greatest strike wave since the 1970s with half a million workers on strike on both Feb. 1 and March 15. Similarly, the German proletariat has woken up after 30 years with a “megastrike” which shutdown the transportation system on March 27 with workers demanding higher wages amidst rampant inflation. Similar smaller strikes of airport and train workers have erupted in countries like Spain and Italy as well.
But the most impressive movement of the working class in Europe is clearly in France. Even prior to the current crisis, French capitalism had been in decline for a whole period. For the government of Emmanuel Macron, the solution to the problems of French capitalism is to attack key gains made by French workers in the past, starting with increasing the retirement age from 62 to 64. But the working class of France is not taking this lying down and has responded massively, with a sustained mass movement with millions demonstrating against the government for the past three months.
While we are not there yet in Canada, we would be blind not to see that things are headed in the same direction. Inflation is front and centre in every trade union negotiation. The central antagonism between the workers and the bosses stares us in the face. Workers do not want their living conditions eroded and capitalists do not want to foot the bill for higher wages. And this is without even addressing the question of the astronomical government debt which sooner rather than later needs to be paid. Even the Trudeau government is starting to pivot, with $14.5 billion in cuts in the recent budget. With a victory of rightwing populist Pierre Poilievre in the next election a distinct possibility, the scene is set for a class struggle of epic proportions.
Prepare for class war
And the first shots of this class war have already been fired with the Ontario education workers strike last fall. Faced with inflation levels not seen since the 1980s, the union demanded an 11.7 per cent wage increase each year for three years. Refusing to budge, the ham-fisted government of Doug Ford moved to take away the democratic right to strike and even went so far as using the not-with-standing clause to impose a poverty-wage contract. While the right to strike had been violated countless times before, this time the workers decided to stand up. After defying the unjust legislation and threatening a general strike, Doug Ford was forced to back down. This fantastic example of working class militancy shows how we can win the class war: by fighting back!
The fact of the matter is that the bourgeoisie have abandoned the social contract and class peace of the past. All of us in the labour movement need to get that through our heads. They are conducting a policy of class war. They are underfunding our schools and hospitals. They are privatizing our healthcare system. They are attacking our pensions. They are pushing two-tiered wage contracts to erode solidarity between workers and destroy our unions. And they don’t respect the right to strike when we decide to fight back.
Sooner or later someone has to stand up and say: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! Collaboration with the bosses and faith in nice-and-friendly negotiations have proven time and time again to be a mistaken strategy. The result of this business-unionism approach has been completely ineffective at winning anything significant for working-class people and in fact has only emboldened the capitalists and the government to continue.
In Quebec, leading up to the general strike of 1972, the CSN (one of the main unions) published a manifesto with the title “Ne comptons que sur nos propres moyens”—“Let us rely only on our own means.” This idea must be revived today. No capitalist politician will save us. As working-class people, we must fight like tigers in this war being waged against us.
Unless we demonstrate our power as working-class people through militant strike action, the capitalists and their governments will never take us seriously. They will continue to violate our rights and deteriorate our living conditions. We cannot trust the bourgeoisie and their governments to bargain in good faith. The only thing that forces them to come to the table and take us seriously is a demonstration of workers’ power.
Indeed, unions all over Europe have conducted heroic strikes and have won significant wage increases over inflation. This shows the way forward. If we do not take a similar approach in Canada, wages will continue to be eroded and the livelihood of millions of workers will be ground into dust.
And there are many opportunities to fight back. At the time of writing, 155,000 federal government employees organized in the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) have begun the largest pan-Canadian strike in a generation. As PSAC president Chris Aylward stated: “We didn’t cause inflation, we shouldn’t have to pay for it!” And this is correct. With inflation eating into workers’ wages, no agreement should be signed with below inflation wage increases. Every union should require a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) to be built into every collective agreement so workers will never be pushed over the edge.
This is what the common front of public sector unions in Quebec representing 420,000 public sector workers are demanding. The unions who are negotiating with the right-wing government of François Legault are asking for their wages to be indexed to the rate of inflation, as well as for a three per cent wage increase per year for three years to make up for wage erosion. Anything below this is a decrease in living conditions. Insultingly, Legault has made the counter offer of no indexation and a simple nine per cent wage increase over five years! Legault clearly is insisting on further impoverishment of the workers. If the government refuses to listen, our motto must be: STRIKE TO WIN!
Revive the revolutionary traditions of May Day
May Day finds its roots at a time when unions were largely illegal. The working day was long and wages were a mere pittance. The bosses brutalized workers with impunity and when they could not rely on the police, they had their own private thugs and militias who would systematically kill workers’ leaders. The most well known case of this in relation to May Day is the Haymarket massacre of 1886 but there are countless other examples.
The rights that workers enjoy in Canada have not been granted to us by a benevolent government but wrested from the hands of the bourgeoisie. In Canada it was the victory of the GM workers in Oshawa in their battle against the company and their thugs (known as the “sons-of-Mitches”) which sparked off a wave of strikes and unionizing drives, winning the right to collective bargaining and the right to strike. But these rights are now being tossed out the window.
Ultimately, the reason for this reversal, for this onslaught on the living conditions of workers everywhere, is the crisis of the capitalist system. We are not in the post-war boom any more. Capitalism is on the decline and all over the world the bosses and their politicians are offloading the cost of the crisis onto our backs. Therefore, not only do we need to fight for better living conditions, but we need to fight for a new society: a society in which the massive wealth that the working class collectively produces can be put to use to liberate hundreds of millions of workers from destitution. We must fight for socialism.
The labour militants who pioneered May Day in the early days of this tradition were brave because they were driven by a farsighted vision of a society without poverty and without exploitation. As Lenin explained in a 1904 text about May Day: “Now these disinherited toilers have declared war on the moneybags and exploiters. The workers of all lands are fighting to free labour from wage slavery, from poverty and want. They are fighting for a system of society where the wealth created by the common labour will go to benefit, not a handful of rich men, but all those who work. They want to make the land and the factories, mills, and machines the common property of all toilers. They want to do away with the division into rich and poor, want the fruits of labour to go to the labourers themselves, and all the achievements of the human mind, all improvements in ways of working, to improve the lot of the man who works, and not serve as a means of oppressing him.”
This is the way forward for the working class in Canada.
Strike for COLA!
Prepare for class war!
Fight for socialism!
