Socialism and A Rise of the Far Right, the NDP, Historical Repression and Canada's Exodus

Socialism and and A Rise of the Far Right, the NDP, Historical Repression and Canada's Exodus

Talk of the NDP debating its constitutional clauses of Socialism led me to write this blog.
First off, if the NDP is not socialist, is not in favour of wide-ranging social and econimc reform, how is it different from the Liberals, other than a matter of party history and present personalities. Who would join the party then decide to change it from what it is. Why not just join the Liberals?
Some may want to drop the NDP's socialist raison d'etre, in order to facilitate a coalition with the Liberals, while others say that the two parties are so close together why not make a coalition. So both processes feed off each other to the harm of the NDP's future and past. (see my blog on "The Risks of Political Co-operation Historically")
Secondly, the question of whether or not a socialist, or more socialist, economy and society is a worthwhile goal for the NDP.
one internet comment-or wrote that the problem with socialism is it is a system based on other people's money. To which I responded:
the problem with Capitalism is eventually working people realize that the rich got rich off their backs. Private control of the economy means that workers are paid less than they produce while working and very little when they are sick, disabled, or too old to work, and farmers get as little as agri-businesses decide to pay them, meanwhile much of the wealth produced by ther workers and farmers go to banks, the owners of large corporations, their shareholders, and private owners of workplaces, many of which are idlers, or at least unproductive in their activities, such as golfing
Socialism does work to the benefit of the public at large, just look at public roads. People use them as public utilities, they derive much convenience from them, while governments pay for them out of public funds.
That is one type of socialism.
Another type is co-operatives, common even in the supposedly pro-capitalist oil-heavy province of Alberta. The UFA co-op farm supply stores and the Co-op Federated grocery stores are common sights in the Alberta countryside, well patronized by rural residents.
Church organizations, benevolent associations (Kinsmen Clubs, etc.), the member-owned Alberta Motor Association, the non-profit Canada Welding Bureau and the Canadian Concrete Assocation that oversee the construction codes for their respective industries, credit unions, city, provincial and federal government services, such as libraries, health clinics, public schools, are also valuable socialist forms of activity.
Competition and selfishness do not have to be, and are not, the hallmark of all types of operation that provide goods and services.
But when people realize this, the powers-that-be have the choice of peaceably accepting the demand for change in favour of the people or fighting it with means foul and fair. Foul means would include putting unionists and political activists into prisons or concentration camps (such as Hitler's Fascists did in their initial time in power to weaken the forces against them); other means include undercutting socialist organizations and pushing them to change to become only mildly reformist groups, with political office, public prestige, large salaries as consultants, and ex-officio seats on boards of corporations, as the carrots for this change.
The moves to protect the SYSTEM increase obviously when the attacks are the strongest. And so we see that now when many people are holding "business leaders" up to disgust for the selfish behavoiur and socialist reform is being increasingly discussed - not in the mass media but on the internet - that the powers-that-be are pushing harder to weaken those who are pushing for socialist reforms.

The rise of the far-right takes little more than good people doing nothing, that is to say, for moderates (people unwilling to make critical decisions in the people's favour when needed) to rise to power. The term in the brackets may seem strong - but think that Premier Ralph Klein was recently described as a moderate by a pundit who was pursuing the theses that Canadians preferred moderates in power. Klein was (reputedly) popular so therefore must have been moderate. Klein engaged in radical changes to how government operated in Alberta and could only be described as a moderate as form of whitewash, anything pro-people is radical, anything pro-business is moderate.
For instance, Pierre Van Paasen,  in Days of Our Years, says Hitler came to power in 1933 due to the lack of strength among the leadership of "the powerfully organized bodies of the working class." The military would have acted against Hitler's 100,000 followers that crowded into Berlin if the moderates in government had called on them - and the moderates would have acted if they had the approval, or at least the ear, of the president von Hindenburg. But he was held out of reach by corrupt landed gentry in the government, and the socialists dithered, arguing late into the night, standing stubbornly against calls by Brandlerists and Troskyites for a "general strike, the immediate mobilization of a united Red fighting front, the creation of a workers' militia, demonstrations, barricades, anything!."

Van Paasen, in Germany  at the time as a foreign correspondent, hoped for a resistance to crystalize in the south and east, in Saxony and in Bavaria, where the Spartacist movement had had one of its strongholds, the Bavarian Soviet Socialist Republic (April-May 1919). He went to Munich to observe events. There caught by police for aiding a leftist to flee to Switzerland, he was tortured and thrown into the Dachau concentration camp. After ten days of this hell, he was released, due to pressure by Press colleagues, and deported. (Van Paasen, Days of Our Years, p. 204-206) (He also mentions an uprising in a working class neighbourhood of Berlin in 1933 that was not supported by the moderates in government, and was put down.)
 

It is not impossible for the far-right to come to power through a "moderate" NDP or a newly-made-politically-attractive NDP-Liberal coalition. There are great incentives for a government, even a staunchly radical one, to tone down its rhetoric once in office. The dictates of assuaging the pride of those who own the factories, those who have highly paid skills that the society depends on (such as doctors), of balancing books and being fiscally responsible with public funds, the need to be free of accusations of corruption, real or rumourd, - it is easier to disprove a rumour of personal corruption if the government is respected for doing a good job in other ways, The government is pushed to favour the needs of highly-visible taxpayers over the needs of unseen public employees who work in the sewage plants, the basements of hospitals, the garbage dumps, etc.
 

If a government came to office, with all these pressures and felt the need to favour the upper middle class for re-election, a goal it wuold conceivably hold above all else including radical reform for citizens, it could easily unleash police hell on peaceful protestors, on the radical socialists within its party, on Natives rightly digusted at their life-situation, participating in the Idle No More movement.

 

There is a very slim line between the behaviour of such a government and that of a Fascist regime. it is said that Fascism is Capitalism plus murder, but I would clarify that - Fascism is monopoly capitalism grown strong and overbearing and using government tax functions to help itself. Usually this evokes a counter-movement, and at this friction point a Fascist govenment engages in murder and other repressive measures. I say usually because the Canadian people seem quite tolerant of undemocratic behaviour by their governments. In Alberta we have recently seen the provincial government extend the term of civic government from three years to four without holding a referendum by the people on the issue. (see my letter to the editor, in the Alberta Views magazine March, 2013) 

 

How could people stand for this weakening of their democratic control of their elected representatives? However they did, and a Fascist government would appreciate that tolerance and find it very easy to do whatever Big Business required at the expense of the people. So ther ewoud be no friction point and thus no murder or other repression. (The people would self-repress, to coin a phrase, if no one else has invented it yet.)

 

It is not impossible for Canada to slip into Fascism, despite its 150-plus year history of more-or-less respesentative democracy.

Chile, Argentina, Lebanon, etc. all were long-time bastions for democracy and moderation, until the fit hit the shan. It just takes a "moderate" (moderately-pro-business) government to be squeezed under pressure, to be put in a crisis situation, for the authoritarian, anti-people elements lying dormant in the existing political-social system to push the government to take extra-ordinary measures that deprive citizens of their rights, their livelihoods, even their lives.

In the 191-14 crash, and in the post-war recession of 1919-1920 and the "Great Depression" of the 1930s when the Canadian economy was repeatedly tumbling or collapsing, it was not unknown for radicals to die:

The 1914 death of IWW-supporter Hiram Johnson of Lac La Biche (see Schultze's work on the IWWs of Edmonton and Calgary)
the shooting of Ginger Goodwin

the 1932 death of Farmers' Unity League activist Carl Axelson,

those murdered by police at Estevan,

those who died in 1935 in the final suppression of the On-To-Ottawa Trek,
etc. etc.

 

As well, kidnapping and assault and battery on activists in those years such as:
tar-and feathering of OBU organizers at Drumheller in the early 1920s (noted in my book Protest and Progress),
repression of protests, demonstrations, G10,  etc.

Another example:

OBU activist P.N. Christophers (later Alberta MLA) was beaten up  at Estevan (a year before the police shootings there). he was then  kidnapped and driven across the U.S. border because the thugs thought he must have been from the U.S., apparently because no correct-thinking Canadian could wish to upset the apple cart.

(Now of course, Canadians, by reputation if not often in fact, are thought to be more progressive than their U.S. counterparts. But the evidence of  the U.S.'s drone missile attacks set against the high rate of Native incarceration in Canada, the little regard for third parties in the U.S. set against Canada's un-elected Senate, etc. makes an exact comparison difficult to master.
 

It is fair to say that neither country is a workers' paradise. Ernest Brown, one of Edmonton's most radical thinkers and writers (albeit unpublished), pointed out that if there had been built a wall around Canada's population in 1867 and no immigration or emigration allowed, through natural increase, Canada would have more people that it had with fairly open immigration. In the 1920s when he made the calculation Canada would have had  more than 10 million, a number it did not achieve until the 1930s.

How did this happen?

because Canada kept losing people to other places, most predominantly to the U.S. Sure, the Canadian weather, sure, the U.S. glitz and glamour, But Brown said, it was mostly the pro-monopoly, pro-Big Business, the anti-people policies of the government that drove Canadians away.

Just something to think about.

Thanks for reading.

 

the mathematics:

3.5 million in 1867

2 percent natural increase (compounded) means doubling each 36 years

so 7 million in 1903 (in actuality, 5.5 M)

14 million in 1939  (in actuality, 11.5 M)

28 million in 1975  (in actuality, 22 M)

56 million in 2011  (in actuality, around 30 million)