What can we in Canada do to end the killings?

On February 26, the United Nations Security Council voted for sanctions against the Libyan regime, including an arms embargo and  the freezing of assets of Qaddafi and his family. These measures are hardly more than cosmetic, serving to polish up great-power credentials.

Four days earlier, the New Democratic Party called for stronger action, advocating that Canada press the United Nations to “establish a no-fly zone in Libya’s airspace.”[1]

The “no-fly” proposal conjures up the vision of a protective hand stretched over Libya’s troubled skies. But as Robert Dreyfuss commented in the Nation February 23, it is a dangerous idea.

“A no-fly zone is worthless unless the United States is prepared to back it up with overwhelming military force,” Dreyfuss says.[2] In other words, U.S. fighters would invade Libyan airspace and shoot down any aircraft they find there. A no-fly zone is an act of war.

We know the logic of such actions from Iraq, where a U.S.-imposed no-fly zone was an initial step toward a murderous all-out assault.

Significantly, few calls for military intervention have been heard from Libya, a symptom of the imperialists’ lack of influence in an insurgent movement that seems mindful of the need to protect national sovereignty.

Solidarity

Nor were such calls made when Libyan-Canadians and their supporters rallied in Vancouver and Toronto February 26. Some of the signs carried by the 500 Toronto protesters read, “No Libyan blood for Libyan oil,” “Freedom for the Arab world; kick out dictators.” Actions took place in at least seven other cities.

A statement by the Toronto Arab Solidarity Committee, organizer of the action there, commented, “It is imperative that no military intervention is undertaken under the pretext of protecting the Libyan people… Decisions to support Libyans must be based on the demands of Libyans themselves and not on the agendas of international alliances.” TASC consists of about a dozen Arab-Canadian organizations as well as Toronto Stop the War Coalition.[3]

Similar actions took place in seven other cities.

Derrick O’Keefe, an organizer of the Vancouver action and co-chair of the Canadian Peace Alliance, said the CPA “wanted to make clear that we would strongly warn against … any kind of NATO military intervention.”[4] Sending in NATO “would be like calling the arsonist to put out the fire,” O’Keefe told this writer. He pointed to the example of Iraq, where “the oil fields were protected while hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed.”

Some writers have suggested that concern with intervention is misplaced. “We don’t believe, truly, that NATO is going to invade Libya,” write Santiago Alba Rico and Alma Allende in Rebelión. Raising this spectre “has the effect of entangling and blurring the anti-imperialist camp.”[5] The authors enumerate the Qaddafi regime’s many recent services to imperialism, including its active participation in George Bush’s “war on terror” and setting up “concentration camps where thousands of Africans headed for Europe are held.”

Alba Rico and Allende have their facts right but draw the wrong conclusion.

In an earlier period, the imperialist powers were at odds with the Qaddafi government, vilifying and harassing it. Indeed, in 1986 the British and U.S. governments carried out a brutal airstrike against the country, in which 60 Libyans were killed and 40 aircraft destroyed. But those days ended long ago. In recent years, the Qaddafi regime has been on the best of terms with the NATO powers.

Canadian complicity

Canada has long been complicit in supporting the Qaddafi regime – in fact, Canadian engineering giant SNC-Lavalin has been building a $275-million jail in Tripoli.

According to U.S. State Department cables revealed by Wikileaks, Petro-Canada paid Qaddafi and his cronies a $1-billion “signing bonus” to obtain rights to extract Libyan oil for 30 years. These rights now belong to Suncor, one of Canada’s largest energy companies.[6]

It is not the Qaddafi regime that worries Stephen Harper and his allies, but a revolutionary people’s movement aiming to overthrow the dictatorship. To the NATO powers, that spells “instability” and an insecure oil supply. If they intervene, it will be in an attempt to quell the insurgent movement and reassert control in the guise of a new client regime. And Qaddafi’s murderous war against his people, if it continues, offers the NATO powers an opening for such an intervention.

As the British Stop the War Coalition notes, “Such interference over the last century is the root of the region’s troubles…. The future of Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen and all the other states facing popular uprisings must be determined by the people of these countries alone.”[7]

So far, the Libyan protesters have showed great courage and resourcefulness, winning control over a large part of the country.

The Libyan insurgents have not yet enjoyed the political freedom to chart a new course for their country. The immediate results of their struggle are unpredictable. But the broader significance of their movement is already clear. It forms part of the great rising of Arab peoples, whose aims are democracy, human rights, popular sovereignty, and a chance to struggle for social justice.

Their victory in this difficult struggle would give a mighty impetus to the movements for liberation throughout the region.

The Arab revolution has already changed course of history. It is this great uprising, not the initiatives of Canadian and allied governments, that points toward a better future for the Arab peoples and the world. The Libyan and other Arab insurgents deserve our full support.

Notes

[1]. http://www.ndp.ca/press/new-democrat-statement-on-ongoing-protests-in-libya-throughout-middle-east-north-africa

[2]. http://www.thenation.com/blog/158818/against-no-fly-zone-libya

[3]. Contact the Toronto Arab Solidarity Committee at arab.freedom2011 <AT> gmail.com

[4]. http://www.straight.com/article-376924/vancouver/vancouver-demonstration-planned-saturday-support-libyan-people

[5]. Translation from http://machetera.wordpress.com/2011/02/26/from-latin-america-to-the-arab-world/

[6]. http://tgam.ca/BiZ3

[7]. http://stopwar.org.uk/content/view/2276/1/

Michel Martelly was placed on the second-round ballot following an extraordinary intervention by the United States and the Organization of American States that saw candidate Jude Célestin removed from the ballot. According to Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Commission, Célestin narrowly beat Martelly for second place. But his key backer, incumbent President René Préval, has lost favor in Washington, Ottawa and Paris, in part because his administration is deeply unpopular among the Haitian people for its failure to act decisively in post-earthquake relief and reconstruction.

The Center for Economic Policy Research in Washington DC has conducted extensive examination of the chaotic balloting on November 28. Its report concluded that no fair and accurate count is possible. Earlier, the organization condemned the political exclusion that characterized the vote as well as the inadequate voter registration and election-day balloting that effectively disenfranchised a large part of the Haitian electorate. It says the November 28 presidential election saw the lowest voter turnout of any country in the Western hemisphere since at least 1947.

The tyrant who formerly ruled Haiti, Jean-Claude Duvalier, made a surprise return to Haiti from France on January 16. Meanwhile, Jean-Bertrand Aristide remains in exile in South Africa. The Haitian government bowed to widespread pressure and recently issued a passport to Aristide. But it has not taken other necessary steps to facilitate his return to the country. The United States, Canada and the OAS have warned that they do not wish to see Aristide return before the conclusion of the March 20 election/selection process.

The following article was first published in the New York/Port au Prince weekly Haiti Liberté on February 15.

++++++++++++++++++++++++

Failed Reconstruction in Haiti Debated in Canada

Sharp critique of relief effort voiced by Michaëlle Jean on earthquake anniversary

By Roger Annis

The first anniversary of Haiti’s devastating earthquake was marked in Canada by widespread media disclosures concerning the failure of the international relief effort. Reports showed that considerable barriers exist to delivering the aid and reconstruction so desperately needed one year later.

Many Canadians continue to act in solidarity with the victims of the tragedy. But while the Canadian government promises much, it has delivered little. It staunchly defends an earthquake relief effort that many aid workers, human rights agencies and other observers consider to be deeply flawed. Meanwhile, Canada continues to intervene destructively in Haiti’s internal political affairs.

More promises than aid

Ottawa has spent only a fraction of the funds it claims to be spending in Haiti. It says it will have spent “one billion dollars” in Haiti from 2006 to 2012, a figure cited by the media as well. The true amounts are far less.[1]

• In the two months following the January 12 earthquake, Canada gave some $150 million to UN agencies and NGOs for emergency relief.
• At the International Donors’ Conference Towards a New Future for Haiti held in New York City on March 31, Canada pledged $325 million to Haiti for 2010/11 and $75 million for 2012 and beyond. $113 million was promised for “recovery and development” for 2010, including $34 million in debt relief. Debt relief was paid; less than half of the remaining amount was disbursed.
• In a July 12 press release, Minister of International Cooperation Beverley Oda cited only two projects that Canada had funded to that date—the pre-donor conference $150 million humanitarian expenditure and the $34 million debt relief.
• $7 million was donated to international health agencies for cholera treatment following the outbreak of the epidemic in October.
• The two largest non-police spending items by Canada are $19 million to the World Food Program and $19 million to construct a hospital in Gonaives. The hospital has been promised for many years and still sits as an empty field outside of Gonaives, with a sign over it announcing a “future” hospital to be funded by Canada.

These spending promises overlap with Canada’s pre-earthquake, $555 million aid budget for the years 2006-2011.Much of them are simply the pre-existing budget dressed up in new clothes.

The government says its priority in Haiti is the funding of “security,” meaning training and equipping police and building prisons. Since the earthquake, Canada has announced spending in this area of at least $58 million. This includes the construction of a training academy and a new national headquarters for the Haitian National Police.

Leaving aside the dubious claim that backing a repressive and dysfunctional police and judicial system in Haiti constitutes “earthquake relief,” even this priority spending has not been fulfilled. According to a January 20 report in the Montreal daily La Presse, three of the six “security” projects announced by the government in 2010 have now been cancelled or postponed.

On January 11, Minister Oda announced several new expenditures totaling $93 million, including “a project to provide free, basic health services to three million people, the rebuilding of Haiti’s midwifery school, new maternity beds and a pediatric ward.” Details of these projects are typically sparse. Only time and dogged research into inadequate information sources will tell which of them is realized.

Backing repression and electoral fraud

By far the most significant response to the Haiti earthquake by the federal government was the rapid dispatch of 2,000 soldiers and sailors in the days following. They performed rudimentary assistance in the regions of Leogane and Jacmel and were withdrawn a scant six weeks later, their declared mission of assuring “security” in post-earthquake Haiti deemed to be accomplished.[2]

Providing “security” in Haiti is foreign power doublespeak for preventing a return to the policies of social justice that guided Haiti’s last sovereign and freely elected government from 2000 to 2004. That government, headed by President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was overthrown by a foreign military intervention in which Canada took part.

The fraudulent election of November 28, 2010 shows that the same interventionist policies behind the 2004 coup d’état are still very present in Haiti. The election, which U.S. attorney and Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights Bill Quigley recently termed a “puppet show,” was crafted for the express purpose of selecting a president and legislature beholden to U.S. and other international capitalist interests. Only 22 per cent of the Haitian people voted; the country’s most popular political party, the Fanmi Lavalas of exiled president Aristide, was formally banned from participation.

The Organization of American States, backed by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, then ordered the Haitian government to proceed to a second round (now scheduled for March) in which the declared second place finisher in the presidential race would be replaced by the third place finisher. They made clear that Haiti would pay a steep price if it refused to comply with this dictat.

In an emergency debate on the election held in the Canadian Parliament on December 13, all parties expressed support for taking the fraudulent vote to a second-round runoff.

Canadian immigration rejects almost half of Haitian applicants

Immediately after the earthquake, demands poured into the Canadian government from the Haitian community and other interested parties to fast-track permanent or temporary residency of victims of the earthquake with family members in Canada. A special immigration program was established for this purpose; it closed on August 31.

The Ottawa Citizen reported February 10 that 49 per cent of the 4,800 permanent residency applications have been rejected. In contrast, the overall rate of approval for permanent residency applications to Canada in 2009-10 was 81 per cent.

In another area of the special program—temporary visas—the number granted to Haitians actually declined following the earthquake—from 4,400 in 2009 to 3,100 in 2010.

Another reunification program fared much better. Operation Stork successfully speeded up the adoption of Haitian orphans by prospective parents in Canada. Most of those parents are not of Haitian origin.

Marjorie Villefranche of the Maison d’Haiti community center in Montreal told the Citizen that rejection rates for Haitians are high because federal officials make few concessions to the situation in Haiti.

“They have been acting as if there had been no earthquake at all. … There has been a real lack of humanity” in the way the program has been administered, she charges.

La Presse reported November 4 that the government of Quebec had received 8,354 family reunification applications. Of those, 2,400 were accepted and passed on to Ottawa for final approval. Only 18 had been accepted by the time of publication.

Former governor general speaks out

Among the sharpest critics of the international aid effort in Haiti has been Canada’s Haitian-born former governor general, Michaëlle Jean. Last November, Jean was appointed Special Envoy to Haiti for UNESCO.

“As time passes, what began as a natural disaster is becoming a disgraceful reflection on the international community,” Jean wrote in an open letter dated January 11, co-authored with Irina Bokova, Director General of UNESCO.

“Official commitments have not been honored. Only a minuscule portion of what was promised has been paid out. The Haitian people feel abandoned and disheartened by the slowness in which the rebuilding is taking place.”

The letter was published in major newspapers, including Canada’s Globe and Mail and Le Monde in France.

Jean traveled to Haiti on January 12 and called for an abrupt shift in policy. Her concerns were widely aired by television and news reports in Canada during her visit to Haiti. She told CTV’s Tom Walters, “It’s time that the money that was promised, all those means, they have to start to deliver, deliver changes, and make sure the population is included.”

Michaëlle Jean’s critical views are echoed by many others in a position to know. Robert Fox, executive director of Oxfam Canada, says extensive rebuilding of Haiti should have started by now. He says government and international agencies are moving too slowly and getting bogged down in bureaucracy. Reconstruction, he wrote in the January 12 Ottawa Citizen, “has yet to begin.”

Fox’s colleagues in Oxfam U.S. produced a highly critical report of earthquake relief on the one-year anniversary.[3]

The international response to the cholera outbreak in Haiti has also drawn much criticism. In late December Unni Karunakara, president of the International Council of Doctors Without Borders, said “The inadequate cholera response in Haiti … makes for a damning indictment of an international aid system whose architecture has been carefully shaped over the past 15 years.”

A better year ahead?

Most United Nations officials and many corporate NGOs are offering quite a different view of their work. Nigel Fisher, the United Nations humanitarian spokesperson in Haiti, told CBC radio on January 12 that aid and reconstruction is going as well as can be expected. “I’ve been here for most of the year, now, and I have seen change—debris removed, children back in school. We had a goal of building 30,000 transitional shelters last year and we’ve exceeded that target.

“Much of the resources last year were focused on humanitarian relief. The development resources have come on tap slower…”

Asked for his expectations in 2011, Fisher said, “We need a better year.” Referring to the electoral crisis, he added, “We need political stability. What keeps us worried is how long this current crisis will go on.”

Fisher and his colleagues in the United Nations’ MINUSTAH military occupation regime in Haiti backed the fraudulent election staged November 28, ignoring widespread calls to cancel the vote and start anew at a later date.

A similarly positive spin was presented by the president and CEO of Save The Children Canada, David Morley. “I think the effort at relief worked well,” he told listeners to the CBC’s Cross Country Checkup January 16. He said the camps of internally displaced Haitians are “in good condition.”

“All of the camps I have visited…have health care, the beginning of school and there is water.”

This flies in the face of reports by journalists and other Haitian and foreign observers. They report harsh conditions in most camps. Sanitation, potable water, schools for children and job prospects are in short supply. Haitian and international police have proven unable or unwilling to protect women residents of the camps from sexual violence.

Notwithstanding its claim to be “non-political” in its work, the Canadian Red Cross is another of the agencies arguing that the world is doing the best it can in Haiti. It is the largest recipient of donations from individual Canadians as well as Canadian government “matching” funds, some $200 million in total. Red Cross societies around the world have spent less than 25 per cent of the $1.2 billion they received.[4]

Why this indifference to the urgency of the Haitian crisis? Without doubt it reflects a cynical view in Ottawa, Washington and allied capitals that the desires and interests of Haiti’s people can be safely ignored, such as the popular demand for the return from exile of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. But they are running the very gamble they just lost in Egypt, a country of great strategic importance to them–the misguided idea that a people driven to desperate conditions will not find a way to assert their rights and their dignity.

Roger Annis is a coordinator of the Canada Haiti Action Network and an editor of its website,www.canadahaitiaction.ca. He can be reached at rogerannis(at)hotmail.com.

Notes:

1. Figures on Canadian aid to Haiti are drawn from two sources: the UN Office of the Special Envoy on Haiti, and various announcements by the Canadian government and its Canadian International Development Agency.

2. See “Exaggerated Claims: Assessing the Canadian Military’s Haiti Earthquake Response,” by Roger Annis.

3. http://www.oxfamamerica.org/publications/haiti-progress-report-2010

4. UN Office of the Special Envoy on Haiti, “Overall Financing: Key Facts,” December 2010.

Todd Gordon’s new book provides a compelling case that Canada is an imperialist country in its own right. His factual presentation of the matter will reinforce what is already a growing perception among Canadians.

Gordon’s book concludes with a statement of purpose: “I hope Imperialist Canada will encourage people to re-think the traditional Canadian view of Canada’s role in the world, and serve as a resource for those who have already moved beyond (that) them.”

The traditional view to which Gordon refers is expressed by the title of Linda McQuaig’s 2007 book, Holding the Bully’s Coat. This title reflects the widely held assumption that Canada serves U.S. interests rather than its own. An important correction was provided by Yves Engler’s The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy (2009). However, Engler did not address the structural roots of Canadian policy (see review at http://www.socialistvoice.ca/?p=567).

Imperialist Canada explains that Canada’s increasingly imperialist actions in national and international affairs flow from the inherent tendency of capitalism towards over-accumulation. Gordon also emphasizes that “primitive accumulation” (seizing common property to accelerate capitalist exploitation) continues to play an important role.

This is not the first book to describe Canada as imperialist. However, Gordon argues that Canadian imperialism directed against Indigenous people within Canada is ongoing and central to the nature of Canadian capitalism. The book is an important advance over previous explicit characterizations of Canada as an imperialist state that did not develop this side of the analysis.

Chapters on “Violence and Eco-Disaster: Canadian Corporations in the Third World” and “Coups, Invasions and Occupations” offer case studies of key actions by Canadian imperialism abroad. The economic, diplomatic and military policy supporting Canadian corporate interests are systematically addressed in “Creating a World After its Own Image” and “Making the World Safe for Capital.” The attention given to the record of Canadian mining corporations at home and abroad is a particularly useful contribution.

Gordon underlines that this county is a larger direct investor in the Third World than several other G7 countries widely considered imperialist. A strikingly inconvenient fact for traditional left-nationalists is that by 2008, “Despite Canada’s economy being less than a tenth the size of the United States’, Canadian corporations invested $17.1 billion more in the U.S. than American corporations invested in Canada.”

Imperialist Canada raises several questions that need to be clarified and discussed by supporters of its basic analysis. The first that comes to mind is the book’s near-equation of Canada’s relationship with Indigenous peoples within Canada to its relationship with countries in the Third World. Are there important differences that also need to be explored? And what about the internal imperialism against Acadians and Quebec that is not discussed but is also surely central to any understanding of Canada?

A second point is the ambiguity about what is new about Canada’s more obvious imperialist stance in recent decades. Does the dramatic rise of its foreign investment and its lust for resources and labour on Indigenous territories within Canada register qualitative change in Canada’s imperialist status? Part of understanding Canadian imperialism is its coming into being – when and how did this occur? Gordon’s focus on the recent decades of neo-liberalism and globalization suggests a more recent turning point than is assumed by other characterizations of Canada as imperialist.

Todd Gordon has accomplished the purpose he set out of “encouraging people to rethink Canada’s role in the world.” It is hard to imagine that anyone who reads his account of Canadian mining companies will think of the big bad multinational corporation as (almost always) American. He has assembled the key facts and arguments to make the case that there is “nothing inherently progressive about Canada that is being warped by American influence…. Pretending that this is the case misdirects our energies and anger from where it should be focused – the capitalist system of imperialism and the ruling elite in Canada.”

This article analyses the significance of the mass uprising in Egypt for the future of the Middle East and its peoples. Following it is a short report on a Toronto celebration of Mubarak’s fall.

An important element of the uprising in Egypt has been the struggles of workers during recent years under exceptionally difficult conditions. The explosion of strikes by workers in the days preceding Mubarak’s downfall sealed the fate of his rule. A very informative look at Egypt’s trade union and working-class struggles was presented in the February 10, 2011 broadcast of Democracy Now. A lengthy interview with Stanford University Professor Joel Beinin begins at the 12-minute mark. He is the former director of Middle East Studies at the American University in Cairo. http://www.democracynow.org/shows/2011/2/10.

Dr. Beinin was the principal author of a 136-page study on the Egyptian labour movement that was published in February 2010 by the Solidarity Center (AFL-CIO). You can read it here: http://www.solidaritycenter.org/files/pubs_egypt_wr.pdf

Egypt’s military have now announced plans to ban strikes.

A perceptive article, “Islamists and the Egyptian Revolution,” has been published on the English-language web publication, Al Masry Al Youm: http://www.almasryalyoum.com/en/opinion/islamists-and-egyptian-revolution.

*****

Huge Protests and Strike Wave Topple Mubarak

By Tim Dobson

(Green Left Weekly, February 13, 2011) In a world-shaking event, after 18 days of constant street protests, the Egyptian people’s revolution won a huge victory when dictator Hosni Mubarak finally resigned on February 11.

On that day, designated the “Day of Departure” by protesters, an estimated 20 million people (out of a population of about 80 million) were reported to have taken to the streets.

They defied a regime that had tried to crush the movement in blood. More than 300 people have been killed by security forces or pro-regime thugs since the uprising broke out on January 25.

Earlier in the week, there were fears the revolution was stagnating or even declining in the face of Mubarak’s refusal to go. But huge protests took place across Egypt on February 8 as the pro-democracy movement took the offensive once more.

The Sydney Morning Herald said on February 9: “AFP journalists … confirmed it was the biggest gathering yet in a movement which began last month… Witnesses in Egypt’s second city Alexandria said a march there also attracted record numbers.”

Al Masry Al Youm said the protest in Tahrir (“Liberation”) Square in Cairo surpassed one million people.

The huge protests were a response to a speech by Egyptian vice president and long-time intelligence chief Omar Suleiman that made it clear the regime was not willing to accept the demands of the protesters.

“”The February 8 New York Times said Suleiman “does not think it is time to lift the 30-year-old emergency law that has been used to suppress and imprison opposition leaders. He does not think President Hosni Mubarak needs to resign before his term ends in September.

“And he does not think his country is yet ready for democracy.

“But, considering it lacks better options, the United States has strongly backed him to play the pivotal role in a still uncertain transition process in Egypt.”

The effect of the February 8 protests was almost immediate. Protesters marched on Parliament house and tried to storm the building. When repelled, they settled for blockading and setting up camp outside the entrance.

ABC Online said on February 10: “An army general who ordered the protesters outside parliament to disperse and go back to Tahrir Square was met by chants of ‘we are not leaving, he is leaving’.

In a significant development, a strike wave swept Egypt the next day. Three independent trade unions began an indefinite strike combined with economic and political demands on the regime.

The strikes involved factory and textile workers, steel and iron workers, teachers, workers in the health ministry, workers in the military factories and even journalists working for state-run media.

The New York Times said on February 9: “In the most potentially significant action, about 6,000 workers at five service companies owned by the Suez Canal Authority — a major component of the Egyptian economy — began a sit-in on Tuesday night.”

Striking iron and steel workers demanded: the end of the regime; the dismantling of the union federation controlled by the ruling party; the “confiscation of public sector companies that have been sold or closed down or privatised … and formation of a new management by workers and technicians”; and the “formation of a workers’ monitoring committee in all work places monitoring production, prices, distribution and wages.”

The Associated Press said that day: “For the first time, protesters were forcefully urging labour strikes despite a warning by Vice-President Omar Suleiman that calls for civil disobedience are ‘very dangerous for society and we can’t put up with this at all.’”

Such calls have especially come from the April 6th Youth Movement, which was formed in 2008 in solidarity with striking labourers in Mahalla.

AP said many workers were “motivated to strike when they heard about how many billions the Mubarak family was worth.”

The British Guardian said on February 4: “President Hosni Mubarak’s family fortune could be as much as [US]$70bn (£43.5bn) according to analysis by Middle East experts.”

The regime continued to try to hold out. At least five people were killed and 100 wounded on February 9 when police opened fire on protesters.

On February 10, however, the strike wave spread further. Public transport workers went on strike, and about 24,000 textile workers struck in Mahalla.

Lawyers, doctors, public transport workers and energy workers joined the strike.

As protests and strikes built throughout the day, Egypt’s Supreme Military Council met to discuss “necessary measures and preparations to protect the nation.” It released “Communique No. 1,” which said the military would “support the legitimate demands of the people”.

Many took this as a sign that, under pressure from the army, Mubarak would step down. Speculation reached fever pitch when Egyptian state television announced Mubarak was to address to the nation.

Hundreds of thousands of people in Tahrir Square went silent as they waited for Mubarak’s expected resignation.

Silence turned to rage when it became clear Mubarak was refusing to go. When Mubarak spoke about all that he had done for the country, thousands held shoes in the air in a sign of disapproval.

Mubarak’s speech, described by the Angry Arab News Service (AANS) as the “dumbest speech ever delivered by a dictator,” appeased no one.

The next day, Tahrir square quickly filled to capacity after afternoon prayers. With no room in the square, some protesters marched on the state television office and the presidential palace to join protests that began the previous night.

Huge protests occurred in every big city in Egypt. There was a heavy military presence in the streets, as the Supreme Military Council met again.

Protesters waited to see if the military would live up to its words that it was “with the people.” The mood was again expectant, with one protestor writing on Twitter: “This is the third Friday of our revolution. The first was bloody, second was festive and third should be decisive.”

Signs emerged that Mubarak’s reign was truly on the brink.

Al Jazeera reported during the day: “An army officer joined protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square say[ing] 15 other middle-ranking officers have also gone over to the demonstrators.”

At the state television office, activist Alaa Abdel Fatah told Al Jazeera: “The army have now given up and are letting the protesters control the flow of people around the state television building.”

The newly appointed general secretary of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party also resigned.

At 6pm Egyptian time, Suleiman addressed the nation with the words everyone was waiting for: Mubarak would step down. The president’s powers would be transferred to the military command to oversee a transition.

Jubilation broke out throughout Egypt, reporters on television couldn’t be heard due to the sheer noise. People power had beaten a dictator backed by the most powerful nation on Earth and who had ruled over them for three decades.

The army is widely respected in Egypt, but there is mistrust of many of the generals who were close to the Mubarak regime. The widespread feeling in among Egyptians is it was they who forced Mubarak out and it was their revolution.

Whatever comes next, Mubarak’s resignation is a big step forward — as is the apparent side-lining of Suleiman, who is infamous for heading Egypt’s torture program.

AANS said: “The biggest victory is that … Suleiman is out of the picture now. Israel/US/Saudi Arabia were hoping that he would be the extension of Mubarak until some other clone of Mubarak is found.”

The impact of Mubarak’s fall on the already explosive Arab world remains to be seen. The Egyptian revolution was inspired by the overthrow of a dictatorship in Tunisia. But Egypt is much more central to the Arab world – and therefore to the interests of the US and Israel.

Already, the Hamas-led government in Gaza has called for the Egyptian government to open its border with Gaza to ease Israel’s crippling siege – a move that would be hugely popular among Egyptians.

But the most immediate impact is on the consciousness of Egyptians. A 35-year-old Egyptian teacher told the February 5 Guardian: “People have changed. They were scared. They are no longer scared.

“We are not afraid of his system any longer and when we stopped being afraid we knew we would win. We will not again allow ourselves to be scared of a government. We will not be afraid to say when we think the president is wrong or the government is bad.

“This is the revolution in our country, the revolution in our minds. Mubarak can stay for days or weeks but he cannot change that.”

This attitude was reflected on the streets of Egypt after Mubarak’s resignation. Amid the scenes of wild jubilation, many protesters said they would not leave until they got some guarantees from the new government. Near the top of the list is a guarantee Mubarak will face trial for his crimes.

Egypt will never be the same again.

*****

Toronto‘s Egyptian Community Celebrates Victory

By John Riddell

(Toronto, February 13, 2011) In yesterday’s Toronto Star, columnist Thomas Walkom bluntly termed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s departure from office that day a “military coup,” in which “one faction of the armed forces ousted another.”

He continues: “Egypt’s military and business establishment remains firmly in charge. Mubarak may have gone. So far, Mubarakism remains.”

It is hard to quarrel with this as a bare statement of fact. Yet there was no hint of this concern in yesterday’s rally celebrating Mubarak’s ouster, attended by more than 500 people from Toronto’s Egyptian community and many friends and supporters. This was the fourth such action in two weeks, following on one the previous evening.

It was a joyous occasion, reflecting the conviction that a decisive corner had been turned. Among the chants (mostly in Arabic): Egypt is free!; Egypt: congratulations!; Long live Egypt! Free at last!

The rally featured an open mike, and all participants were invited to speak. A great many did so – mostly quite young and apparently unaffiliated to any political current. Speakers alternated between Arabic and English. Many read poems composed for the occasion, honouring the sacrifice and courage of the Egyptian activists. Many played popular Egyptian patriotic music over the loudspeaker, and everyone sang along. The Egyptian national anthem was sung several times.

James Clark of the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War led what he called an Arabic lesson for the Canadian public. He spoke words in English (“dignity”, “freedom,” etc.) and the crowd roared back the Arabic equivalents.

A Ugandan activist said, “This is a great moment for all Africa.”

Almost all the speakers were young, and – despite their eloquence – seemed new to politics. The few speeches by veterans of solidarity politics were brief and to the point.

Mohammed Shokr of the Egyptian National Assembly for Change, who spoke so searchingly last week about the many steps needed to achieve freedom, focused this time on the significance of the moment. “We gained this freedom by our own means and not through America,” he said. “Arabs will never be taken for granted again.”

Khaled Mouammar of the Canadian Arab Federation led a moment of silence in honour of the martyrs of the struggle. The millions who joined in this struggle, people of every viewpoint and persuasion, have inspired the whole world, he said. Noting the protestors’ courage, eloquence, and adroitness in action, he said “all the world can learn from this.”

Stephen Harper’s comments on the overthrow of Mubarak expressed no respect for the Egyptian people, Khaled said. Instead, Harper praised the dictator, conceding only that “they’re not going to put the toothpaste back in the tube.”

Ali Mallah of the Canadian Arab Federation said, “Yesterday, Tunisia. Today, Egypt. Tomorrow, Palestine.” He called this “a new day of history – out with all the dictators. Solidarity with all Arab people: We will rise again.”

Did the Toronto demonstrators miss the essence of post-Mubarak Egypt, as expressed by Thomas Walkom – perhaps out of political inexperience? I think rather that they were grasping for a deeper truth about the victory in Egypt. A great historic victory has been won, which must be savoured and understood, to prepare us all for the new stage of struggles already unfolding in Egypt.

[Socialist Worker (U.S.), February 4, 2011] – Anti-Mubarak demonstrators gathered in the hundreds of thousands on Friday, in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, in Alexandria and in cities and towns across the country for a new day of mass protest against the regime.

In my estimation, the Tahrir Square demonstration was even bigger today than it was last Tuesday, when across Egypt, between 6 million and 8 million people protested, according to estimates. As the hour for curfew came and went tonight, thousands of people were still arriving to demonstrate. In Alexandria, an estimated 1 million people also turned out.

Everywhere, people were united around the slogan that Mubarak must go now. In Tahrir Square, there was an echo of the old civil rights slogan in the U.S. “We shall not be moved”–hundreds of thousands of people were chanting, “He should go! We will not move.” Then there was my favorite slogan of the day: “Ya Mubarak, sahi el noum, inaharda akher youm!” It sounds better in Arabic because it rhymes, but it translates roughly into English as: “Wakey, wakey, Mubarak, today is the last day!”

To understand the importance of today’s massive turnout, you only have to remember what happened on Wednesday and Thursday, which can only be described as the unleashing of the hounds of hell–thugs of the regime sent out in a coordinated assault on the demonstrators at Tahrir Square and the whole of the pro-democracy movement.

The scale of violence was seen by millions of people around the world. They threw rocks and Molotov cocktails, and they wielded knives and all kinds of other weapons in an attempt to intimidate, injure and drive out the demonstrators from Tahrir Square.

They also made a particular point to beat up journalists and drive them out of the square, and they raided hotels where news organizations like Al Jazeera and CNN were headquartered, trashing their operations. They also attempted to incite fear against foreigners–anything that would drive a wedge among the demonstrators and that would intimidate people from coming out on Friday.

The violence was so bad that Omar Suleiman–the newly appointed vice president, whose previous position was head of the army intelligence services, someone who must have overseen the arrest and torture of thousands in that post–came on television last night to deny any involvement on the part of the National Democratic Party, Mubarak’s ruling party.

Suleiman claimed that no one had any idea who organized the onslaught–despite the fact that several of the thugs were captured, and their police or government employment IDs were shown in the media. So the hollowness of his claims weren’t lost on the Egyptian people.

There was even a moment of bizarre other-worldliness when Suleiman–this organizer of repression and torture–appealed for prisoners, who according to many reports had been released from jail by the regime’s thugs to help in the violence, to show up at the prisons again and turn themselves in.

That’s the context of today’s demonstrations–after two days of systematic violence against the anti-Mubarak protestors, people turned out in the hundreds of thousands today, and it turned the balance back again in the favor of the demonstrators.

* * * * * *

As in every revolutionary situation, there has been a dramatic ebb and flow to the events in Egypt.

The demonstrations began on January 25–ironically, on “Police Day,” which was previously a celebration of the regime’s strength. On that first day, the movement broke through a kind of psychological barrier by moving into the streets in huge numbers, something that didn’t happen under the Egyptian police state.

The demonstrations continued through last Friday, when there were huge battles with the police that pushed the security forces off the streets. The government’s response was to deploy the army, which is seen as “above politics”–but to allow Cairo to descend into a kind of chaos, with gangs of thugs roaming through neighborhoods, many of them organized by the regime. The mass of Egyptians responded to this by organizing neighborhood defense committees to protect the people.

Last Tuesday, the demonstrations were the biggest yet. Mubarak spoke on television that night, declaring that he wouldn’t run for re-election, but had no intention of stepping down. The thugs were unleashed the next day to show what Mubarak had in mind as a transition.

But Friday represents a new stage following the two days of violence that came before it. In the preceding two days, not only was the anti-Mubarak demonstration in Tahrir maintained–that is, the heart of the uprising and its best-known expression was defended from forces determined to drive the protesters out–but the manner of its defense produced a response in support of it that could be seen throughout the day today.

Early on Friday morning, there were literally thousands of people lined up to go into the square. The army had taken up positions after the two days of sustained violence, not wanting to appear helpless, but what was phenomenal was that it wasn’t the army guarding the entrances, but lines and lines of stewards from the demonstration. They searched people as they came in, making sure no one had the kind of weapons that the pro-government gangs had used against them. I’ve never been frisked so often, and with as many apologies for being frisked.

The army is continuing to maintain its role as a force supposedly above politics. Unlike the last two days of uncontrolled violence against the protesters, which the army didn’t intervene decisively to stop, today, it helped create a buffer zone around Tahrir Square. So once the attack on Tahrir Square failed, there was barbed wire and tanks in all the pivotal positions around Cairo.

I got to Tahrir in the morning, before the end of prayers, when even larger numbers came to the demonstration. But already, the crowd numbered half a million, if not more, by my estimate.

Once inside Tahrir, you could see a level of organization and solidarity unlike anything I’ve seen before.

The first thing that struck me was the makeshift clinics set up all over the place, with dozens and dozens of nurses and doctors–many of whom said they were unemployed–stitching up people’s legs or arms or faces. These injuries were the result of the pro-government thugs–there were dozens of people walking around who had been patched up.

In addition to that, people had brought medical supplies with them. Others were circulating through the square with bags of bread, with water, with candy.

One of the aims of the pro-Mubarak forces had been to drive out all journalists–they focused in particular on foreign journalists to try to raise anger at a supposed foreign plot against Egypt. So it was good to see that journalists were operating freely and quite welcome in the crowd.

Probably the most significant sign of the health of the protest was the continued political discussion and debate within the square. I also saw dozens and dozens of people who were calling friends and relatives, and encouraging them to come to the square–trying to convince them of the fallacy of the government’s claims about chaos and violence.

* * * * * *

According to press reports, the U.S. government is lobbying hard to get officials around Mubarak to pressure him to step down.

The U.S. maneuvers around this question must, as always, be taken with a grain of salt. No one will say it in the mainstream media, but Obama could have held a press conference in which he simply declared that aid to Egypt is cut off, that this kind of violence will not be tolerated, and that the U.S. now stands squarely with the protesters.

But of course, he won’t say that because that’s not how diplomacy works. And the reason it doesn’t work that way is you can’t send that signal about a dictator the U.S. has been supporting for 30 years. Not because Mubarak isn’t finished, but because of how his downfall on those terms would affect other relationships and the whole Middle East.

So the U.S. is scrambling to find an alternative, and there are plenty of options. Amr Moussa, the head of the Arab League, showed up to the demonstration today to be among the protesters. He’s clearly thrown his hat in the ring to be the next president. There’s also Mohamed ElBaradai. There’s the Muslim Brotherhood. Even the current defense minister, Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, made the rounds through Tahrir Square today, under protection of soldiers, without much opposition to him.

But there are still plenty of difficulties and contradictions for the U.S. and for the rulers in Egypt, because there are significant problems from trying to gently step back from a military dictatorship.

Egypt is still that, in many respects. I should add that a couple offices of human rights and labor organizations were raided yesterday and closed down. It’s still very gingerly that people produce any public literature that’s against the regime. So it was quite an exercise, for example, to get leaflets into Tahrir Square today.

One problem for the U.S. is that Omar Suleiman figures prominently in their plans for a post-Mubarak transition. Many of the demonstrators were dismayed by Suleiman’s speech last night. But of course, most know the history of the man–that he was involved integrally in the repression that took place under Mubarak’s regime.

In general, most demonstrators still agree that their central demand is for the removal of Mubarak. That’s not to say that the rest of the regime should get off scot-free. But Mubarak’s downfall is what the movement has focused on so far, and when that’s accomplished, that significant victory will then open the process.

My own view is that it’s virtually impossible to imagine the departure of Mubarak without the cabinet and the government he’s put into place then becoming the central question for the movement. That’s the underlying dynamic.

Mubarak is the lightning rod that has brought all the forces together. Those forces don’t necessarily agree on the same outcome, but they’re at least agreed on the central necessity of seeing him go, and that will become the practical measure of what’s been accomplished.

* * * * * *

One of the most interesting conversations I heard was one man trying to explain on the phone to someone the profoundly democratic thrust of the protests.

He said to the person he was talking to that people see demonstrators chanting “Allah Akbar,” and they conclude these protests must be organized by the Muslim Brotherhood. Then they see many famous actors and musicians showing up to Tahrir Square today, and they think it’s just a middle-class protest of the intelligentsia.

But it’s not the Muslim Brotherhood behind all this. It’s not the middle class. It’s not, as this man went on to say, only socialists and Marxists talking about workers’ rights, and it’s not people talking about just women’s rights. This is really a protest of all Egypt united in a profound movement for democracy.

I think that’s the first thing that has to be grasped about the uprising–that this is a movement that seeks fundamental democratic rights. As a friend of mine put it a few days ago, it’s the 1789 of Egypt–similar to the opening of the French Revolution in that way.

I think the second aspect that became certain today is that this is no longer the Egypt that existed prior to January 25–and there’s no turning back, however much violence the regime tries to organize. A tipping point has been reached in terms of the willingness of masses of people to put themselves on the line and defy the existing order, and that’s a genie that will be very difficult to put back in the bottle.

The third aspect apparent today was, as I described earlier, the enormous self-organization of the movement in the face of horrendous violence and repression–most especially, the attacks that took place over the past few days.

The fourth point is broader–about what happens next. You now have a movement that has emerged in a most explosive fashion and is present in every Egyptian town and city, which is the product of many, many years of injustice, including around economic questions of unemployment and dispossession. But it’s also an expression of the rise of a number of social struggles in Egypt, including the strikes of the last few years and the riots over rising food prices.

Right now, the movement is united around the political aim of getting rid of Hosni Mubarak. But hopefully, once Mubarak is unseated, the political questions will then mesh with social questions that still remain unresolved.

If that happens, there will be a really explosive mix of political and social issues that represents the possibility of political and social revolution.

I think that’s the key to understanding why Mubarak hasn’t left yet. It’s not just a question of his own stubbornness, but how the regime can continue and the status quo can be maintained, not just for the Egyptian elite, but for Israel, the U.S., its European allies and so on.

Their interest is in preventing this process from triggering an even greater change. That’s what these demonstrations are heralding, and we hope it’s a process that will continue.

One last story from today: When Mubarak spoke on television on Tuesday night and said that he wouldn’t run for re-election, he vowed that he was going to die on Egypt’s soil. One Socialist Worker reporter quipped at the time, “We should tell him that the soil is ready for him.” I translated that today at Tahrir Square, and I can report that it was greeted with wild applause and cheers–it’s another part of the ongoing Egyptian revolution.

Transcription by Matthew Beamesderfer.

Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action (UTA), which is published twice a year in Toronto, offers a stimulating mix of anarchist and Marxist viewpoints on important issues. Issue #11, published in November 2010, is no exception.

Indigenous struggles: defending the land

A short piece in this issue by UTA co-editor Tom Keefer makes a profound point regarding indigenous struggles. Responding to a letter from Frances Widdowson and Albert Howard, well-known in the mainstream media for their book-length polemic against Indigenous sovereign rights,[1] Keefer notes that “Indigenous struggles remain one of the primary barriers to capitalist development in great swaths of the country.” Where Widdowson and Howard urge that this barrier be dismantled, Keefer views it as a starting point for progressive struggles.

“Indigenous peoples and anti-capitalist activists have common ground for a struggle against the commodification of land and labour,” says Keefer. “Marxists should not rule out the possibility that these struggles could point towards the evolution of non-capitalistic social practices in the here and now.” (p. 27)

Keefer’s views on this topic are more fully developed in UTA #10 (“Marxism and Indigenous Struggles”) and UTA #7 (“Six Nations, Direct Action, and the Struggle in Brantford”).

In Keefer’s view, the potential for “non-capitalistic social practices” arises from a social foundation: namely the absence of private property in land on Native reserves. His account of the Six Nations struggle demonstrates another factor: surviving traditions of collective community defence.

‘Special Diet’ campaign

A different type of community defence is discussed in UTA #11 with reference to the work of two Toronto social movements, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) and No One Is Illegal–Toronto (NOII).

A survey by OCAP organizer John Clarke of the last ten years of OCAP activity focuses on an imaginative effort to combat hunger among recipients of social assistance. The drastic cuts in Ontario’s social assistance payments in the 1990s left a loophole: a provision for cash supplement, called the Special Diet, which was available to recipients who had a diagnosed medical condition requiring that they consume an adequate diet. “We promoted knowledge of the benefit and won the co-operation of medical providers, who worked with us to hold ‘hunger clinics,’” says Clarke.

“It has been, very literally, a fight all along,” Clarke notes. Government resistance was intense. Last year it abolished the Special Diet provision, but only after millions of dollars had been won for poor people. While it lasted, the Special Diet campaign created a tiny refuge of solidarity against one aspect of capitalism’s inhumanity.

Sanctuary/Solidarity City

Another type of community in struggle is discussed in a round-table among prominent activists in NOII-Toronto’s campaign assure that non-documented immigrants obtain secure access to all city services. The Sanctuary/Solidarity City effort is an extension of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT) campaign in the U.S., which has won ordinances in several cities barring the use of city resources, including police, to enforce immigration policy.

In Toronto, NOII persuaded the District School Board to adopt a DADT policy, protecting non-documented students from entrapment or victimization on the grounds of their immigration status. Getting this policy implemented at the school level has been a struggle, NOII activist Farrah Miranda reports, but “in September 2010, we were able to get every school in the city to put up a poster welcoming students without full status.”

Mobilizing the G20 protests

The building of a community of quite a different sort is taken up in Lesley Wood’s article in the same issue, “Bringing Together the Grassroots: A Strategy and a Story from Toronto’s G20 Protests.” Wood’s account begins with a critique of previous summit protests, “exciting events” that “often left local organizations facing criminal charges, non-association conditions, local hostility, and financial ruin.”[2] By contrast, organizers at the Toronto summit sought an emphasis on “local organizing, anti-oppression politics, and coalition building”; their goal was to “strengthen long-term campaigns.”

Supporters of this strategy – or story,[3] as Wood calls it – united in the Toronto Community Mobilization Network (TCMN), aiming to mobilize a broad range of organizations for an entire week of action. Consistent with the local-organizing focus, “no invitation to participate was extended to people in other cities.”[4] However, “our story had unintended consequences,” Wood says. Many who were attracted to the project had goals different from the TCMN vision. The TCMN story “reactivated a division between a grassroots, marginalized identity engaged in community organizing and a white, young, militant, ‘anti-capitalist’ identity and strategy,” Woods tells us. “At no point did we strategize … about how to disrupt [the G20] without undermining our other goal of remaining welcoming to as many participants as possible.”

Wood also identifies other constituencies that were not encompassed by either the “community-organizing” or “militant anti-capitalist” stories represented in the TCMN. “The story we told did not resonate with immigrant organizations working on issues in their home countries,” groups that had been prominent in Toronto street protests during the previous years. Moreover, “the story we told largely excluded the labour movement,” a central organizer of the June 26, 2010, anti-G20 mass action.

Wood’s account touches on a general challenge of working-class political organizing. Any broad movement contains a multiplicity of forces, each with a distinctive “story.” The movement’s task is to unite these forces in a common intent, a common agenda. Wood’s article makes clear that this was not achieved by the G20 protest organizers.

The People’s Summit

Nonetheless, the G20 protest movement succeeded in creating a shared space of discussion and protest that was truly impressive. Wood does not discuss this experience, but its character sustains her analysis. A week of protest, called the People’s Summit, included a wide range of organizations, viewpoints, and forms of activity, including many street actions, and leading up to a mass march. In the teeth of fierce police pressure, the movement created a community, analogous to those described in the other articles discussed here.

As we know, the community came under attack. It was disrupted by a rampage of police brutality, mistreatment, more than a thousand arbitrary arrests, and hundreds of unjustified criminal charges. Clearly, another “story” was at work here – trumpeted by the mass media during the G20 preparations. This story told of a city and a summit menaced by supposed terrorists and extremist hooligans, a city that therefore had to be protected by a mobilization of tens of thousands of cops and a budget of more than $1 billion for “security” costs. For most of the population at large, this was the main story, indeed the only story they heard.

Despite vigorous protests, the police were able to act out their story, leaving anti-capitalist movements facing the same burdens that Wood perceives in the outcome of previous summits: many activists paralyzed by detention or non-association conditions, legal costs running into six figures, and widespread public hostility.

Wood does not discuss the police story or how it worked out. But surely this had to be a central consideration in strategic discussion both before and after the G20. How was the People’s Summit and the G20 protests in general to be defended against the state’s repressive onslaught?

The Black Bloc story

The editorial of UTA #11 also takes up the G20 events and also raises the issue of defence – although in quite another context.

The article, entitled “Behind the Mask: Violence and Representational Politics,” does not mention the TCMN, the People’s Summit, sustainable community organizing, the cop rampage, or any of the stories cited in Wood’s account. Instead, it tells the story of the Black Bloc – something Wood does not mention.

As the UTA editors see it, “three social forces – the capitalist state, the social democratic left, and the small but active radical left – contended with each other” during the anti-G20 protests. Events were “defined by two controversial violences: that of the state’s Integrated Security Unit (ISU) and that of the Black Bloc.”

The editors set down basic facts regarding the Black Bloc contingent. The contingent moved away from the main march and the police presence; individuals within it “targeted several unguarded stores,” “smashed windows,” and “set fire to police cars.” The contingent then rejoined the main body of protesters in the “designated protest zone” at Queen’s Park. Police surrounded the protected zone and “began conducting mass arrests of activists regardless of whether or not they were with the bloc. Police continued to make mass arrests throughout the weekend.”

The Black Bloc is anonymous and mute. It makes no demands and does not state its intentions, leaving us all to draw our own conclusions. Yet according to the UTA editors, “Its very presence called into question the state’s monopoly on the use of force.” It is “a body that does not recognize the sovereignty of the state and, as such, is capable of progressing along the continuum from politics to war.”

Bold words indeed. Many in the Black Bloc are doubtless motivated by legitimate anger and revolutionary aspirations, but still, the progression from window breaking to war is quite a leap.

Educational purpose

Elsewhere, the editors interpret the Black Bloc’s purpose in terms of education. The Bloc reveals “that the realization of ‘another world’ requires that we come to terms with the violence underlying every political act,” they say. Does this mean that every act of anti-capitalist resistance is in some sense violent? If so, it turns reality on its head. The underlying violence in our society is that of the state, which utilizes repression to enforce exploitation and rein in anti-capitalist movements. To come to terms with this violence, we must show that it is caused by capitalist oppression, not by the people’s resistance, and we find effective ways to counter it.

How was the gathered community of anti-G20 protesters to be protected against the outrageous limitations on freedom of movement in downtown Toronto, the threat of police attack, and the arbitrary arrests, which had already started even before the June 26 mass march? Was Black Bloc property destruction on June 26 an appropriate response to the cop mobilization and the arrests? The UTA editorial does not take up these questions.

Regarding the Black Bloc episode, the editorial states that “such an illumination is pedagogically important” and must be “presented in contexts where large numbers gather on the basis of shared hostility to bourgeois ‘politics.’” At its best, the Black Bloc model of “illumination” fails to engage broader forces as protagonists, reducing them to the role of spectators.

However, as the editorial concedes, “the moment of illumination is traumatic.” In the G20 action the Black Bloc action was imposed on the demonstration as a whole without consent, bringing with it heightened physical danger and, for many, arrest and police mistreatment. The Black Bloc acted with authoritarian disregard for the goals of the mass of demonstrators.

In the UTA editors’ view, governmental organizers of the cop mobilization faced a dilemma. “But what threat could they cite to justify such dramatic expenditures and violations of legal norms?” they ask. Further, “In the absence of organized worker resistance, the ISU operation seems absurd in its disproportion.” We can safely assume that the police strategists wished to test their new tactics and weaponry regardless, by bloodying the demonstrators. But their repressive violence needed a pretext, a “story” that could be sold to a public that believes in civil liberties and democratic rights.

Although this pretext could have been provided through disruptive actions by undercover agents, such provocations are chancy and risk exposure.[5] How convenient for the police that the pretext was provided by a small group among the protesters. I would question any imputation that Black Bloc participants intended to put fellow protesters in harm’s way. Nonetheless, it is undeniable that their actions made it much easier and less costly for the police to carry out their rampage.

While defending the Black Bloc action, the editorial also suggests that future initiatives might take another form. It quotes approvingly an anarchist commentator at Infoshop.org who proposes that “the next convergence of anarchist forces” not be seen “as a theatre where the same routine can be played out again.” It regrets the absence at the G20 of non-violent civil disobedience, which “constantly seeps outside the representational framework of bourgeois politics” and thus has merit as “implicit violence.” The term “violence” seems here to mean no more than defiance of bourgeois legality.

Let us hope that forces that supported the G20 Black Bloc episode succeed in adopting more constructive tactics in the future.

The role of defence guards

The UTA editors also list a number of historic experiences with groups providing an “extrinsic reference” that they say is similar to Black Bloc: three examples of defence activities during the Black civil rights struggle in the U.S. (Deacons for Defense and Justice, the Fruit of Islam, and the Black Panther Party) and two from recent Indigenous struggles in Canada.

All these examples concern defence guards, whose purpose was to deter and fend off attacks by the state or right-wing forces and to protect oppressed communities or progressive movements. Such bodies are formed frequently; I myself have participated in several. They can be seen now, in embryo, at threatened Toronto meetings or demonstrations.

Guard duty is only a small, if central, part of such efforts. The heart of defence strategy lies in rallying opposition to the violence of the police and rightists, in demonstrating how the threatened community or movement is seeking to affirm the goals of freedom, democracy, and human rights that all victims of capitalism hold dear.

Instructive examples

The Six Nations struggle described by Keefer in UTA #7 provided a graphic example of how such a defence effort can stymie police violence. The moral authority of Six Nations Indigenous activists was so great that occupied lands could be defended with minimal use of force. “Six Nations has always occupied building sites peacefully and without using weapons,” Keefer reports. On one occasion, when cops invaded Indigenous land, “unarmed Six Nations community members physically drove off several dozen police officers armed with automatic rifles, tear gas grenades, pepper spray, and tasers.”

As I write, Egypt is in the grip of a people’s insurrectionary movement. Mass demonstrations took place aiming to overthrow of a brutal dictatorship and win democratic rights for the population. When attacked, the demonstrators found ways to resist and drove back the police. Protesters formed defence guards to prevent looting and property destruction. They forged bonds of solidarity with rank-and-file soldiers. It is not yet clear whether this movement will win or lose, but it has already made its mark in world history.

Conditions in Canada are far removed from those of Egypt. Yet whatever the fate of the mass movement there, it shows an effective approach to the challenge of state violence, aimed at rallying the immense majority in defence of human rights and avoiding needless provocations, while isolating and pushing back the forces of repression.

The Black Bloc, by contrast, did not rally broad forces around commonly shared democratic goals, did not challenge the cops’ trampling of democratic rights, and did not serve to defend the protesters against the G20 summit.

Community defence

As Leslie Wood’s account shows, the G20 protests involved the creation of a community in struggle, one that was expressed in the People’s Summit, the mass June 26 protest, the limited attempts to disrupt the summit, and the subsequent anti-repression protests. This community was menaced by state violence. It needed and deserved to be defended by a united effort of all participants.

The Six Nations, OCAP, and NOII articles in UTA describe militant efforts to defend such communities. The same approach is needed in drawing a balance sheet of the June 2010 G20 confrontation.

During the nine months after the G20 protests, a great deal has been achieved in discrediting the police and challenging their violations of human rights. Continued defence efforts are urgently needed on behalf of the many activists threatened with serious charges and to help build the support for political rights needed to carry out future mass mobilizations with success.

For further discussion and for references to other articles on the G20 experience, see http://www.socialistvoice.ca/?p=1315.

Upping The Anti is available in hardcopy format for $20/year (Canada); individual articles can be downloaded for $0.99 each. Go to www.uppingtheanti.org.
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Notes

[1]. Frances Widdowson and Albert Howard, Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation, McGill-Queen’s U.P., 2008

[2]. A “non-association condition” is a bail provision that bars the accused from meeting or communicating with named individuals and organizations.

[3]. Wood’s use of the term “story” follow a current of radical thought – she cites Eric Selbin and Charles Tilly – which stresses that “the stories organizers tell deeply influence the way that organizing takes place.”

[4]. Many protesters did in fact come from outside Toronto and were welcomed into the anti-G20 activities.

[5]. An attempt by disguised police officers to unleash violence at the 2007 Montebello summit protest was exposed and widely ridiculed; see www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2007/08/23/police-montebello.html.

The critique he delivered to the newspaper is especially significant for Latin America and the Caribbean because Seitenfus is Brazilian. Sensitivity is running high in the region over the evident failure of the international relief effort led by the big powers – the United States, Canada and Europe – whose interventionist policies had already done so much harm to Haiti before this latest catastrophe.

Brazil is the leading country of the UN Security Council’s military occupation force known as MINUSTAH. Eight other countries of Latin America provide foot soldiers to the force, including Chile, Argentina and Bolivia. Brazil has also supplied important humanitarian assistance, but Cuba and Venezuela have distinguished themselves by providing massive effective aid that is unsullied by participation in an imperialist-initiated military occupation force.

By Roger Annis

(This is a slightly revised version of the original first published on Upside Down World, December 28, 2010.)

As the one-year anniversary of Haiti’s earthquake approaches, a brutally frank account of the plight of its people has been delivered by a highly placed foreign diplomat. Ricardo Seitenfus, the representative to Haiti of the Organization of American States, delivered a hard-hitting assessment of the foreign role in that country in an interview published in the December 20 edition of the Swiss daily Le Temps.[1]

The interview also appeared in the right-wing, Haitian daily, Le Nouvelliste. For his words, the diplomat was immediately recalled from his posting.

Seitenfus is Brazilian and a graduate of the Institute of Advanced International Studies in Geneva. The truths he pronounced in the now-famous interview are not unique; they have been voiced by many Haitians and their allies abroad. But to hear them uttered by someone of his standing is a sign of the unraveling of a miserably-failed foreign military and political occupation force in Haiti.

The Failings in Haiti

Seitenfus questions the legitimacy and utility of the UN Security Council occupation force known as MINUSTAH. It numbers 13,000 military and police (an increase of 50 per cent since the earthquake) along with several thousand political officers. “Haiti is not an international threat,” he says. “We are not experiencing a civil war.”

He is asked, is it a counter-productive presence? His answer is, yes. The diplomat traces the 200-year history of foreign subjugation of Haiti. He draws a line of continuity to the present. “The world has never known how to treat Haiti, so it has ignored it.”

He says the country has lived a “low intensity war” since 1986, the year of the overthrow of the Duvalier tyranny. “We want to turn Haiti into a capitalist country, an export platform for the U.S. market, it’s absurd. Haiti must return to what it is, that is to say, a predominantly agricultural country still fundamentally imbued with customary law.”

Noting the large number of Haiti’s people living abroad (a high-sounding estimate of four million), Seitenfus says he does not pine for a return to a quaint rural past as a solution to Haiti’s present crisis. But he believes that the foreign intervention runs contrary to the country’s interests and needs. “The problem is socio-economic. When the level of unemployment is 80%, it is unacceptable to deploy a stabilization mission. There is nothing to stabilize and everything to build.”

When the interview turns to questions of aid and earthquake relief, Seitenfus drops a bomb in declaring, “If there is proof of the failure of international aid, it is Haiti.” Charity and aid to Haiti have enfeebled the Haitian state.

“Emergency aid is effective. But when it becomes structural, when it replaces the state in all its duties, collective responsibilities in society end up abandoned.”

His words for the world of charities and NGOs are harsh. Haiti, he says, has become a “Mecca” for them, a “laboratory,” a “go-to” destination, and worse – a stage in their professional development. For these NGOs to exist, he says, Haiti must fail.

“Haiti is ground zero of humanity’s tragedy and the failings of its international solidarity.”

A disastrous election

The dismissed ambassador does not comment on the electoral exercise that was staged in Haiti on November 28. It’s not difficult to imagine that, like many others in the world, he was aghast at what took place. By any measure, the vote was a violation of the democratic will of the Haitian people:

• It was financed by foreign powers, to the tune of at least $30 million.
• The country’s most representative political party, the Fanmi Lavalas of exiled, former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was ruled off the ballot.
• The list of registered voters that was used by the country’s electoral commission predated the January 12 earthquake and therefore contained the names of the more than 250,000 people no longer alive.
• It was difficult, if not impossible, for voters to register and cast their ballots. In the last genuinely democratic election in Haiti, the year 2000, there were some 12,000 polling stations. This time, there were less than a thousand.
• Widespread violations and irregularities at polling stations on election day were observed and reported.

But none of this has slowed the international powers in Haiti from pressing ahead to a second-round presidential vote in what many Haitians term not an election but a “selection.” Haitians will end up with a foregone result – a “president” whose extreme-right political leanings will be at odds with the political sentiments of the vast majority of the people but perfectly suited to the interests of the foreign powers.

The cholera tragedy

Perhaps the most tragic of the calamities that have befallen Haiti is the introduction of cholera into the country by the very occupation force criticized so heavily by Ricardo Seitenfus. The disease has taken a heavy toll with more than 2,000 killed and tens of thousands fallen ill. Its economic consequences, especially on Haiti’s vital agriculture, will be costly and long lasting.[2]

After weeks of denying any responsibility for introducing cholera, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced on December 15 that the organization would conduct an inquiry into its possible role. French epidemiologist Renaud Piarroux says “no other hypothesis” could explain his findings that cases of the diarrheal disease first appeared near a Nepalese-staffed MINUSTAH base in central Haiti.[3]

The inquiry will need to look not only at where and how cholera was introduced, but also what measures, if any, were taken by the UN to prevent its occurence. For as New Scientist writer Debora MacKenzie wrote in the December 7 issue of the prestigious weekly magazine:

“UN peacekeepers around the world are largely supplied by poor countries, and of the top 15 contributors, which supply 71 per cent of UN troops, 12 harbor cholera. If Haiti’s cholera did indeed come from Nepal, it was a foreseeable accident. More caution is called for.”[4]

MacKenzie’s column slammed the UN for stalling an inquiry and the World Health Organization for stating that finding the source of the disease was “not important.”

Another startling element to the cholera saga was brought to light by Joia Mukherjee, Executive Director of Partners In Health, in an article written shortly after the outbreak. She reminded the world that among the victims of the aid embargo against the government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide instituted by the U.S., Europe and Canada following the 2000 election were water treatment facilities in the very region where cholera first appeared.[5]

A challenge to Latin America

Seitenfus’ views reflect the concerns of growing numbers of people in Latin American and the Caribbean over Haiti’s treatment. These concerns were underscored when CARICOM decided to lend legitimacy to the November 28 election by sending a delegation of monitors and then endorse the outcome as regrettable but legitimate.

This writer and co-author Kevin Edmonds published an article on November 15 that argued,

“The decision by CARICOM to participate in this deeply flawed election constitutes a significant reversal of the position it took in February 2004 when Haiti’s elected president and government were overthrown by a paramilitary revolt with key backing from the U.S., Canada, France and the UN Security Council. At that time, CARICOM condemned the overthrow.”[6]

Ricardo Seitenfus says that as a Latin American, Haiti’s treatment shames him. It’s an “offense to our conscience.”

Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic Policy Research warns in a recent article that the continued participation of Latin American countries in the MINUSTAH military mission is increasingly untenable as the mission’s predatory role becomes more and more evident.

Referring to the attempted coup d’état against the elected government in Venezuela in 2002, he asks rhetorically whether any Latin American government would have dared to participate in an occupation mission had the coup succeeded.

Weisbrot explains the stakes for Latin America and the Caribbean in Haiti thus:

“People who do not understand U.S. foreign policy think that control over Haiti does not matter to Washington, because it is so poor and has no strategic minerals or resources. But that is not how Washington operates.… Left governments will be removed or prevented from taking power where it is possible to do so.”[7]

‘Enough of playing with Haiti’

In his damning interview, Ricardo Seitenfus describes a vision for Haiti that would see true international solidarity come into play. “Enough of playing with Haiti!” he declares.

While paying tribute to the outpouring of solidarity and compassion following the earthquake, he says that charity cannot be the driving force of international relations. What is needed, he argues, is autonomy and sovereignty of peoples, fair and equitable commerce, and respect by human beings towards each other.

In Haiti, “We must build roads, hydroelectric dams, assist in building government structures, including a judiciary system.”

“The UN says it is not mandated to do that,” he laments. “It’s mandate in Haiti is to maintain the peace of the graveyard.”

His prophetic words may no longer grace the offices of the OAS in Haiti. But they have given voice to countless Haitians still living in the miserable conditions of the camps of internally displaced or still waiting for the promised “reconstruction.”

They will not wait forever. They will continue to assert their rights. The longer the elites of Haiti and the world fail to offer a vision for the future of the country, the more certain become social explosions through which the people reassert their dignity and their rightful claim to social justice.

Roger Annis is a coordinator of the Canada Haiti Action Network. He resides in Vancouver and can be reached at rogerannis(at)hotmail.com.

Notes:

[1] Haiti is Proof of the Failings of International Aid (in French), interview with Ricardo Seitenfus, Le Temps, December 20, 2010.
[2] Impact du cholera sur l’agriculture haïtienne (in French), by William Michel, November 26, 2010.
[3] Haiti cholera outbreak ‘came from UN camp’, by Deborah Pasmantier, Agence France Presse, November 29, 2010.
[4] Haiti: Epidemics of Denial Must End, by Debora MacKenzie, New Scientist, December 7, 2010.
[5] Cholera in Haiti: Another Disease of Poverty in a Traumatized Land, by Joia Mukherjee, October 22, 2010.
[6] With Friends Like These…CARICOM and the Flawed Election in Haiti, by Roger Annis and Kevin Edmonds, November 15, 2010.
[7] Wikileaks Cables Show Why Washington Won’t Allow Democracy in Haiti, by Mark Weisbrot, The Guardian, December 17, 2010.

Recommended reading on Haiti and Latin America/the Caribbean:

• Fidel Castro comments on Ricardo Seitenfus, Cuba’s Training of Haitian Doctors, December 27, 2010.
• The Denial of Self Determination: Haiti and the International Community, by Kevin Edmonds, first published in Spanish in America Latina en movemiento, December 2010.
• With Friends Like These…CARICOM and the Flawed Election in Haiti, By Roger Annis and Kevin Edmonds. November 15, 2010.

Campbell’s Liberal Party will now attempt to rise from the wreckage of the hated consumption tax it imposed in 2009. A new leader will be chosen at a convention early next year, following which the party will claim it has something “new” to offer for voters. A snap election would catch the opposition seriously unprepared.

For its part, the trade union-based New Democratic Party is facing a wrenching decision, namely, whether it wants a new leader and platform that would distinguish it from the government’s course. The outgoing leader never did that. A significant section of the party decided it was unlikely it could win government with her at the helm.

But replacing the hated Liberal regime with a government committed to social justice will be a tough political battle for NDP and social activists, facing not only the Liberal Party but also a conservative, entrenched leadership of the NDP/social movement/trade union alliance.

Liberals under the gun

The Liberals’ principle undoing has been the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST), announced without prior warning just days after a provincial election held on May 12, 2009. It took effect on July 1, 2010. It  taxes the purchases by individuals of many goods and services that were previously exempt, while lifting many production input sales taxes paid by businesses.

The announcement sparked popular outrage and a petition campaign to get rid of it. Seven hundred thousand people signed the petition during the past summer. It was submitted to the provincial Legislature in September.

Under the province’s petition law, the government was left with two choices: either submit the petition’s demand for recall of the tax to a vote in the Legislature, or call a referendum vote. It opted to buy some time by announcing a referendum vote in September 2011.

But anti-HST organizers were having none of that, not least because the government can change the referendum date on a whim. They have moved ahead with Plan B: Recall of government members of the legislative assembly (MLAs). The campaign is now petitioning to unseat three of those judged most vulnerable, with more to follow.

The government presently holds 47 seats out of 85 in the Legislature.

The government launched a sputtering propaganda campaign in late summer extolling the virtues of the tax. Then on October 27, in a blatant attempt to buy support, it announced a personal income tax cut of 15 percent for the first $72,000 earned. Nothing worked. The premier’s popularity dropped to the single digits in polls. The prospect of getting rid of Campbell, and the HST, proved far more attractive than any income tax reduction he might offer. Out he went. His announced tax cut was cancelled.

Big business loves the HST. Billions of dollars of taxation will be shifted onto individual taxpayers. It has supported the tax strongly. But it is dismayed at the how badly the government fumbled its implementation. The Liberal leader who replaces Campbell, and the party elected in the next provincial election, will face unrelenting pressure to repeal the tax. For big business, this all sets the very bad precedent that popular will can prevail over capitalist economic policy.

NDP crisis

Several challenges now confront the working class. One, whose interests will be served by a repeal of the HST? The right-wing populists who have dominated the anti-HST campaign are hoping to use popular anger to boost the electoral chances of a more overtly right-wing party than the Liberals. They will use their anti-tax/anti-government message to pressure whoever forms the next government to curtail public services and social programs even more than the Liberals have done.

And two, how can the NDP alliance organize to not only defeat the Liberal government and its hated tax but also elect a new government committed to defending public services and the living standards of working people?

The downfall of Carole James has several origins. There is dissatisfaction within and without the party with the business-friendly course that she has followed since her election as party leader in 2003. There is also opposition within the party, including among its MLAs, with an autocratic internal party regime that brooks little tolerance for differing ideas.

As well, James has lost two elections as party leader, in 2005 and 2009. She resisted pressure to step down after the 2009 loss. Polls show her popularity has remained flat, even in the face of the Liberals’ HST meltdown.

Her ouster seemed sealed on December 1 when the party’s longest-serving member of the provincial legislature, Jenny Kwan, went public with a searing blast against James’ leadership. Kwan said the leader lacked sufficient appeal to lead the party to victory in the post-Campbell election that looms.

Kwan also said that internal party democracy has been squashed. “Debate has been stifled, decision-making centralized, and individual MLAs marginalized.”

Twelve other NDP MLAs said they backed her challenge.

The internal battle lines were drawn in October when James booted MLA  Bob Simpson out of the NDP caucus for writing a mild criticism of her in his local, weekly newspaper column. He complained she had offered few new ideas in a speech given to the annual convention of the BC Union of Municipalities.

The following month, the MLAs now grouped around Kwan refused to be pressured into a degrading display of public support for James – the wearing of yellow scarves – at a party provincial council meeting. The meeting voted by a large margin to refuse opposition MLAs’ request for a party convention and leadership election.

Few substantive policy differences have emerged between the two MLA groups. Simon Fraser University professor and former federal NDP candidate Kennedy Stewart told CBC Radio on the day of James’ resignation, “I have never heard of any discussion of policy differences between the two groups.”

Kwan explained in her December 1 open letter, “British Columbians want more than an opportunity to vote the Liberals out of office, they want the chance to choose a party with an inspiring vision and a clear alternative, progressive point of view.”

When asked by another CBC interviewer what direction she would like to see for the NDP, she offered nothing different that the mantra of Carole James. “We want to defeat the BC Liberals and we’re going to come together to do that.”

Bob Simpson told a radio interview on December 6 that the NDP should fight the next election on a platform of “good governance.”  He has since announced his resignation from the NDP.

Pro-business course of the NDP

Since her election to leader in 2003, James has taken the NDP further along a pro-business course. Laurie Jones of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business praised James during a December 7 CBC Radio interview. She said James has “gone out on a limb” to court business interests and promise they would be looked after under an NDP administration.

British Columbians are rightly wary of such a political course. Big business under the Liberals has devastated British Columbia since their election to office in 2001. The Liberal government has imposed widespread cuts to social services, kept welfare rates and the minimum wage at well below the poverty line, given vast subsidies to environmentally destructive or socially regressive projects such as expansion of fossil fuel production and hosting of the 2010 Winter Olympics, and drastically reduced public supervision of the vast forest industry in the province.

Large reductions in income and corporate taxes have made BC the most “business-friendly” jurisdiction in Canada.

All of these measures have been urged by the very business interests in whose partnership James says the future of the province lies.

The NDP stood largely aloof from struggles against the harsh cuts and regressive industrial policies. In her speech to the BC Federation of Labour convention just a few days before her resignation, James staked out few positions on the difficult challenges facing working people.

To the extent the NDP has opposed cuts to social programs, these are usually voiced as opposition to the timing or exact form that cuts would take. The NDP gave only half-hearted support to strikes of hospital workers in 2004 and teachers in 2005 that could have mobilized the entire province in a general strike showdown with the government. It has offered little by way of alternative to the Liberals environment-wrecking industrial megaprojects.

Even on the hated HST, the NDP has soft-pedaled. It has ridden the wave of the popular revolt and gained in polls as a result, but James said she would not repeal the tax if elected. Right-wing populists have been left to control the message and direction of the anti-tax campaign.

Why the political timidity over the HST? Because the fight against it necessarily requires a clash with big business. The fight also encourages people to look for more radical policy alternatives, including anti-capitalist ones.

A glimpse of where James and her entourage want to take the NDP can be found in municipal politics in the city of Vancouver. An alliance of big business interests and municipal reformers, including leading NDP figures, came together in a party called VISION to win the 2008 election. It oversaw the construction and real estate bonanza leading into the 2010 Winter Olympics. Lots of money flowed to real estate and other capitalist interests, but municipal taxpayers have been left to foot the bills and the city’s marginalized population is poorer than ever.

The VISION government has also implemented a significant tax shift mirroring the HST, away from business and onto individual taxpayers.

New ideas needed

James’ departure leaves the labour movement adrift. If there was any dissent from her leadership and support for the opposition MLAs, it was not in evidence at the BC Federation of Labour convention which met during the very week in which Kwan and her supporters delivered their bombshell.

The unions have stayed on the sideline of the anti-HST fight, assuming, along with the NDP, that the party would automatically garner the lion’s share of the electoral shift resulting from the anti-tax revolt.

But this is playing with fire, and is a betrayal of working class people. In the recent municipal election in Toronto, a rightist politician, Rob Ford, played heavily to working class dissatisfaction with “big government and high taxes.” He came out of nowhere, seemingly, to win the mayoralty.

Two reasons for Ford’s success were the record of the outgoing and discredited VISION-type mayor, David Miller, whom the union movement backed in the 2003 and 2006 elections, and the tepid, status quo platform of the candidate that the labor movement and NDP backed to replace him this year.

The BC Liberal Party is damaged, but working-class people have yet to organize a campaign for a meaningful, alternative governing course. Surprisingly to many, polls taken since Campbell’s resignation show that the Liberals will remain competitive with the NDP if they can pull off a successful public relations drive around a new leader.

A fighting alternative

There are issues and social movements with which the NDP could successfully ally itself. These include:

• Significant protests taking place across the province to cuts in education by teachers, parents, students and elected members of school boards. As well, university and college students are protesting the fact that they now pay more in tuition than corporations pay in earnings taxes.
• A burgeoning environmental movement that opposes the expansion of oil and gas drilling, coal mining and related pipeline and transportation megaprojects; calls for an end to factory farming of salmon that is devastating the wild stocks of the fish; and is fighting for expansion of public transit in the Vancouver region instead of more highways.
• A broad movement for social housing and other services for the poorest and most needy, including raising of welfare rates and the minimum wage.
• Widespread anger over the violations of democratic principles that have marked the Liberal record, such as the privatization of BC Rail and the imposition of the HST.
• Support for improvements to the electoral system, notably proportional representation.

Championing these social and protest movements is one way for the NDP and trade unions to turn the anti-HST campaign in a positive direction. This would also help reach the fifty percent of eligible voters who no longer participate in elections. Failure to do so leaves the political terrain open to the right wing populists and their dangerous propaganda that blames “taxes” and “big government” for the world’s ills.

There are strong traditions of social struggle in British Columbia that can be drawn upon for such a course. And the broad, fighting movements that are emerging in many European countries provide new inspiration and examples to follow.

One of the keys to success will be to ally with protest movements emerging in other provinces so that the ultimate culprit in socially regressive policies in Canada be targeted – the federal government in Ottawa and the capitalist system it upholds.

It is a no-brainer to ask this but there are no easy answers it appears.

To understand the goals of Canada’s role, he said, we need to examine the forms of intervention under current consideration as alternatives to Ottawa’s combat mission in Kandahar. During extensive travels in Afghanistan in 2007, Skinner studied firsthand Canada’s intervention, assisted by Afghan-Canadian reporter Hamayon Rastgar, and has written widely on this question. The two men formed, along with fellow-researcher Angela Joya, the Afghanistan-Canadian Research Group.

When considering the example of Canada’s supposed “humanitarian” aid projects, which the New Democratic Party and the Bloc Québécois propose as an alternative to a military mission, Skinner emphasises the limitations of the approach and the bad feelings it can engender.

“Canadian aid agencies in Afghanistan have to follow the orders of the military,” he says. “Aid is meted out as rewards to co-operative communities and withdrawn from others as punishment.”

It was not always the case. “Canadian development and aid agencies — like Care Canada and the Red Cross — had been working in Afghanistan, through all the upheavals in government, the Soviet occupation, and then, after 1992, the Mujahedeen period, and, after 1996, under the Taliban regime. “They operated in very difficult conditions, negotiating with the government in power,” Skinner says.

NGOs conscripted to military service

“In 2008, these organizations were told that humanitarian operations had to serve military purposes. If they did not, they would be in ‘very threatening circumstances,’” Skinner says. In effect, the non-governmental organizations were constrained to become part of the U.S. military’s counterinsurgency program.

NGOs also were imperilled by “special ops” — secret strike forces of the Canadian and U.S. armies. “U.S. special forces have impersonated NGO workers, posing as civilians,” Skinner says. When fighters resisting the U.S.-led occupation see this, all NGO workers become suspect in their eyes.

“NGOs began protesting against these practices as early as 2004.” In 2008, “many NGOs, including Care Canada and the Red Cross, pulled out from conflict zones in Afghanistan.”

Under the Obama presidency, U.S. military control of “humanitarian aid” was heightened. Eight NGOs including Care and OXFAM criticized the use of “aid as a weapons system” in a joint statement released in Jan. 2010. In February, United Nations aid officials refused to co-operate with U.S.-led military operations, which the UN officials describe as the “militarization” of Afghan Aid.

In the early stages of the war, the occupation of Afghanistan consisted of two separate operations, Skinner explains. “There was OEF (Operation Enduring Freedom) — the original invasion carried out by the Anglo-Saxon states: the U.S., Britain, Canada, and Australia.” OEF, organized under the umbrella of GWOT (Global War on Terror), operates worldwide: it directs the war in Somalia and the decades-old U.S. involvement in civil conflicts in the Philippines. Ominously, OEF/GWOT started up operations in 2008 in the Caribbean and Central America.

“A second parallel mission, sanctioned by the United Nations and under NATO leadership, is the International Security and Assistance Force, which is supposed to conduct ‘peace’ operations and help stabilize the Karzai government. But Obama rolled both operations into one under the command of General [David] Petraeus,” strengthening U.S. military control of “aid” projects.

‘Training’ for what?

As for the military ‘training’ mission favoured by the Conservative and Liberal parties, Skinner asks, “just what are we training Afghan soldiers to do?”

Here we must examine, he said, the record of U.S. training missions around the world in recent decades. “They have immense experience around the world, in the Vietnam war, elsewhere in southeast Asia, and in Latin America. This ‘training’ has had devastating results for the people of these regions.”

The U.S. military have ‘trained’ more than 60,000 Latin American soldiers in their notorious Fort Benning, Georgia, School of the Americas, now renamed WHINSEC (Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Co-operation). The school’s alumni include prominent supporters of rightist military coups, repression, torture, and killings directed against democratic movements.

The U.S. and its allies have been ‘training’ Afghan soldiers for almost a decade, Skinner noted. “What is this army for? Simply to control the population by military means,” he suggests. The intent is to ensure that people will consent to massive projects to extract and ship raw materials, which will displace large numbers of residents — “like in North America in the 18th and 19th centuries, except that now extermination is not an acceptable option.”

Secret military operations

Unmentioned in the present debate on Canada’s Afghanistan involvement is its Special Operations forces — the 600-member JTF 2 (Joint Task Force Two) and two recently formed units. Such elite units carry out special strike missions, “avoiding any kind of accountability.”

“They are never mentioned in the press or official documentation. Are they operating with the U.S. in covert actions in Pakistan? Probably. But a member of parliament can’t get an answer to that question.”

When Canada ends its “combat mission” in Afghanistan next year, will JTF 2 and other special ops groups be withdrawn? Not necessarily. “It’s not clear.”

A worm’s eye view of the occupation

During his 2007 travels in Afghanistan, Skinner interviewed more than a hundred Afghans on their view of the occupation — intellectuals, farmers, miners, university students, shopkeepers, and human rights activists.

“Afghans don’t see Canada’s involvement as a sudden rush to their aid. Their urgent needs — fresh water, sanitation, basic infrastructure, electricity, telephone — they see little of that. Instead, they see construction of infrastructure for large-scale commercial development,” he notes.

“They are sceptical of electrical development, for example, which is more likely to provide power for smelters, not meet people’s needs.”

Canada’s signature development project, he said, was the rebuilding of a dam in the Helmand river valley — repairing a U.S.-sponsored development project of the 1950s that had a devastating impact on local farmers and the environment. The repair project “has now been apparently abandoned – a boondoggle for SNC-Lavalin,” the major contractor.

Opinion polls in Afghanistan have shown a majority against the invasion of the country, Skinner adds.

Opening Afghanistan for capitalism

“What was the goal of the invasion?” Skinner asks. “Liberation of women? If that was the goal, it has failed. Build the state? A failure. But on other issues, the invasion has been very successful, and Afghans are quite perceptive of this.”

Afghanistan is “important real estate,” Skinner says. “It sits astride the shortest route between China and Europe, between India and Russia.” Iran, China, and Turkey are all active in Afghanistan, “and they have great economic and social advantages over the Western countries.”

The U.S.-led invasion is part of a two-track policy articulated in the 2008 U.S. National Defense Strategy. The first and preferred track, Skinner notes, is to engage China and Russia within the globalization of capitalism. Failing this, the second track is a “containment policy reminiscent of the Cold War. Occupying Afghanistan serves both purposes of engagement and potential containment.” Previously, “Afghanistan was cut off as a buffer zone; today it is a bridgehead into Eurasia.” For the invading powers human welfare is secondary to the “opening up of Afghanistan to capitalist development.”

What should Canada do?

In Skinner’s opinion, under present conditions — foreign occupation, all-out war, and a puppet government — none of the forms of involvement now being considered by Canada’s political parties will serve the needs of the Afghan people.

What should Canada do? “Ask Afghans what would help them. Don’t ask Karzai, ask the people. That is easy to say but hard to do. We need to open up communications with Afghan organizations on the ground.” There are many such organizations, isolated by the language barrier and silenced by repression. “We have a task here of human solidarity.”

But the first step, Skinner says, is clear: “The Canadian state needs to dissociate itself from the U.S. imperial project in Afghanistan — fully and completely.”

John Riddell is a Toronto-based activist and co-editor of Socialist Voice. This article was first published in rabble.ca

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This review of an important and controversial new book first appeared in Green Left Weekly, December 5, 2010. Socialist Voice believes it merits widespread discussion, and we encourage all readers to post their comments in the Feedback section at the end of the article.
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The onset of the global economic crisis in mid 2008, symbolised by the collapse of some of Wall Street’s most iconic companies, led to soaring sales of Karl Marx’s seminal work Das Kapital, as many sought explanations to the tumultuous events unfolding.

Although written more than 100 years ago, this devastating and insightful dissection of how capital functions is still a powerful tool for people looking to understand and change the world.

Marx’s aim was to provide a handbook for working-class activists that unravelled the logic of capital and its inherently exploitative nature. Marx said this was necessary because as long as workers did not understand that capital was the result of their exploitation, they would not be able to defeat their enemy.

Michael Lebowitz’s latest book, The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development says it is essential also to investigate the important insights Marx made regarding the alternative. This easily accessible book is written to provide young and working-class socialist militants a weapon in their struggle for a better world.

It is hard to agree more with Bill Fletcher Jr., when he says this book “should be the focus of discussion groups of activists as they attempt to unite their radical practice with theorising a radical, democratic and Marxist alternative for the future.”

Lebowitz rejects the old saying that “if we don’t know where we want to go, any path will take us there.” Rather, if you don’t know where you are going, no path will lead you there. Lebowitz says: “The purpose of this book is to point to an alternative path” focused on the “full development of human potential.”

Pulling together the different threads in Marx’s various sketches on socialism, and drawing on his own personal experiences and studies on “real existing socialism,” social democracy, and most importantly, Venezuela’s struggle for a new socialism for the 21st century, The Socialist Alternative aims to “develop a general vision of socialism and concrete directions for struggle.”

Lebowitz’s idea of socialism breaks from the dominant vision that prioritises “the development of productive forces” that, supposedly, will one day provide abundance and “allow everyone to consume and consume in accordance with their needs.”

Instead, he places humans at the centre of its focus.

The book does not set out to be about the Bolivarian process in Venezuela — Lebowitz has lived in Venezuela since 2004 — but many of the ideas in it will be familiar to those acquainted with the ideas being debated today within a mass movement where the idea of socialism has gripped the mind of the masses and converted itself into a material force for change.

The idea that self-emancipation and struggle are the keys to changing the world and people is essential to Lebowitz’s argument. Citing Friedrich Engels, Lebowitz maintains that the aim of communists is “to organise society in such a way that every member of it can develop and use all his capacities and powers in complete freedom and without thereby infringing the basic condition of this society.”

The only way to do so is through “revolutionary practice” because human development is not a gift given from on high. Marx explained that revolutionary struggle produces a simultaneous “changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change.”

Put another way, “without the protagonism that transforms people, you cannot produce the people who belong in the good society … and understand that the development of the human capacities on the one side [cannot be] based on the restriction of development on the other.”

Capitalism offers no alternative in this regard. Rather, it is a system based on a “vicious cycle.” People have real needs but do not possess the means to satisfy them. They are therefore forced to work for those that do (capitalists) and compete against others in repetitive labour, so as to be able to buy at least some of the products they need.

Lebowitz says:

“Add to this the fact that workers’ needs to consume grow as a result of the combination of the alienation (the impoverishment, the “complete emptying-out) characteristic of capitalist production and the constant generation of new needs by capital in its attempt to sell commodities, and it is easy to see why workers are compelled to continually present themselves in the labour market.”

This vicious cycle never stops under capitalism. Capital requires workers to see the cycle as a “normal” part of life. “The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirement of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws,” wrote Marx in Capital.

Today however, capital is haunted by the spectre of “socialism for the 21st century.” Drawing on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and what he calls “the elementary triangle of socialism” — social ownership of the means of production, social production organised by workers, and production for communal needs — Lebowitz outlines what is at the heart of this radical alternative for the 21st century.

Private ownership of the means of production must be replaced with social ownership of the products of social heritage and social labour as the “only way to ensure that these are used in the interests of society and not for private gain”.

But social and state ownership are not the same. A real socialist alternative requires a “profound democracy from below rather than decisions by a state that stands over and above society”, where all workers are able to develop their human capacities.

Critical to this is the second side of the triangle: social production.

In opposition to the command-and-obey workplace, a socialist alternative must be based on the replacement of the division of labour between those that think (intellectual labour) and those that do (manual labour). This artificial division can best be overcome with collective democratic decision-making in the workplace.

To complete the triangle of social ownership and worker management, Lebowitz says productive activity must be geared towards the needs of others. That is, the creation of a society based on solidarity, where there is an exchange “not of exchange values but ‘of activities, determined by communal needs and communal purposes’”.

The second half of the book deals with how we get there: “Knowing where you want to go is only the first part; it’s not at all the same as knowing how to get there.” Here again, Lebowitz puts stress on revolutionary practice. He says the impulse for the development of socialism must be the drive of workers for their own human development. Workers need not only “seize possession of production” to introduce worker management and communal production. They also need to “seize possession of the state” and conquer political power.

As the Communist Manifesto says: “The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class.” From this position of power, “the proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state”.

The experience of the Paris Commune convinced Marx and Engels workers could not use the ready existing state for its own purposes; rather it had to be smashed and replaced by a new state of “self-working and self-governing communes.” So the struggle for a socialist transformation must unfold on two fronts: within the state that owns the means of production, and in the workplaces.

But the struggle also unfolds within the context of an emerging new society that is, said Marx, “economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old [capitalist] society from whose womb it emerges.” For the struggle to succeed, it is vital to fight consciously against the “defects” inherited from the old society and subordinate — rather than try to use — these defects to one’s ends.

Lebowitz is opposed to a vision of socialism that suggests it must pass through distinct stages, where priority is first given to developing the productive forces to create a world of abundance, and says this was not Marx’s view.

Chapter six, “Making a path to socialism,” offers a kind of transitional program for socialism in the 21st century. Lebowitz’s starting point is that the transition towards socialism must move forward simultaneously on all three fronts of the socialist triangle. He says every concrete measure must serve to change circumstances while helping to produce revolutionary subjects and raise their capacities.

“Only in a revolution”, wrote Marx and Engels, can the working class “succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew”.

Threats to this revolutionary process are always present from counter-revolutionary capitalist elements, the tendency of bureaucrats to “seize production” for themselves and the tendency to rely on the market to resolve problems. To combat this, a “socialist mode of regulation” is essential to allow socialism to subordinate all elements of society to itself, and create the organs it still lacks.

This encompasses an ideological struggle against capitalism and for socialism (“The Battle of Ideas”); the creation of worker and community councils where people can organise to change their circumstances and themselves at the same time; and “a state that supports this struggle ideologically, economically, and militarily and thus serves as the midwife for the birth of the new society”.

At this point, Lebowitz asks a central question: “What do we mean by the state?

“We have to talk about two states here — one, the state that workers captured at the outset and that initiates despotic inroads upon capital, that is, the old state; and, second, the emerging new state based upon workers councils and neighborhood councils as its cells.

“The two must coexist and interact throughout this process of becoming.

“The inherent tension between these two states — between the top-down orientation from within the old state and the bottom-up emphasis of the workers and community councils — is obvious.”

“Yet”, Lebowitz argues adamantly, “that tension is not the principle contradiction”.

Given the presence of revolutionaries in the old state, it would be an error to act as if it was the same as the capitalist state. Similarly, it would be a mistake to ignore the vices of the old society present in the embryonic forms of the new state. The struggle against bureaucrats seeking to defend their privileges or ideological inertia will unfold within both states.

At the same time, Lebowitz says, “interaction between the two states is essential.” The old state has the advantage of being able to see the picture as a whole and concentrate forces, but it also has a tendency to act from above and prioritise expediency over revolutionary practice. The new organs can identify “the needs and capacities of people and can mobilise people to link those needs and capacities directly.”

But there is also a tendency towards localism and the new emerging state “is not capable at the outset of making essential decisions that require concentration and coordination of forces.”

Critical to all this is a political instrument — or political party — that can provide leadership. This is needed because a society marked by the vices of the old cannot produce a process where all workers become socialists at the same time.

But a new kind of leadership that :

“fosters revolutionary practice only by continuously learning from below. There is, in short, a process of interaction, a dialectic between the political instrument and popular movements.

“By itself, the former becomes a process of command from above; by itself, the latter cannot develop a concept of the whole — that is, it cannot transcend localism.”

The Socialist Alternative is an inspiring and insightful contribution to the discussion of rebuilding the socialist project in light of past failures and the current challenges facing anti-capitalist activists everywhere.

No doubt here in Australia, in the context of the resources boom and the growing environmental crisis, the ideas raised in the book regarding social ownership and the need to struggle for transparency – “open the books” – will provide much food for thought for ecosocialists in the battles that lie ahead of us.