It's Personal With Me

The thing is, for the past 15 years or so, a big part of my real-world thinking and writing has been on using our present parliamentary system of representative democracy/constitutional monarchy/whatever you want to call our quasi-democratic-part-time-rule-of-law system, to constitutionally enshrine the human rights of people within their workplaces.

Barring the possibility that neoliberal scumbag politicians will read our petitions or hear our protests and the scales will fall from their eyes and they'll legislate whatever we want when we want it, or of that the Canadian state will be brought to its knees by a dozen masked anarchists smashing windows on Yonge Street, I argue that the only way that real progress is going to be made on a number of essential fronts is if we attack the capitalist power that distorts democracy, ruins the environment, condemns people to poverty, at its heart, through the legitimate political process.

We will respect their system and we will ask that they respect us should we obtain the right to enshrine the humanity of workers within their workplaces. This was (is still) meant to be an enormous effort. It's called "Workers as Citizens" and we can argue about it some other time.

The main point is that I think that the leftist habit of empty protest, small-scale mitigation of blatant abuses, petitioning and minor acts of vandalism, is ridiculous and we ignore a powerful tool by disparaging and discounting the actual political process.

That's why stephen harper's serial abuses of this process infuriates me. It is the one way we have of peacefully realizing a massive advance in human civilization and he is rendering it null and void. It's personal with me. If I don't succeed in bringing harper to heel (either through a movement of my own or someone else's), then I will say to hell with it all. If you hear of a rising superstar televangelist conman in Canada 5 years from now, you'll know what happened.