this is going to be the first in a soon-to-be-discontinued series of snippets of my ideas about peacefully achieving revolutionary change in Canada.
The first thing we have to do is to communicate to ordinary, a-political or non-revolutionary Canadians not only the extent of the problems we're facing, but the significance of its nature.
For example:
It's not like Paul Martin Jr. was a flawed democrat who cared about his constituents in Montreal, and who de-funded public health care and destroyed Haiti's government out of some misguided priorities. Paul Martin Jr. was a member of the political and economic elite. He ran a company Canada Steamship Lines, under the flag of a poor country in order to avoid Canadian taxes and labour legislation. He's a capitalist, with capitalist values, which are primarily about maximizing profit over everything else.
Capitalist politicians see the desires of their own class as being more important than anyone else's. Therefore, destroying public healthcare for the interests of the private insurance business, robbing workers' paycheques to gouge them for "Employment Insurance" premiums while giving tax-cuts to the wealthy and to business, subsidizing the oil industry regardless of hard-won Kyoto Accord requirements, ... all are par for the course.
Stephen Harper isn't a "conservative" who cares about the social values of his reactionary constituents. He's a paid shill for the oil and private insurance companies.
Bah. I'm too tired to develop this line.
What I'm trying to say is that voting Liberal or Conservative isn't about voting for "sensible social democracy" or "tax-cuts and law and order" or whatever people who vote this way imagine that they're doing.
It's voting for ecological suicide, class warfare, imperialism, ... and a whole host of other perversions.
What we have to do first is point out to people how these things aren't unpleasant outgrowths of our political system, they are essential foundations to it. In the way that I'm always going on about death-squads and their significance. The suppression of protesters at neo-liberal economic conferences isn't due to police over-exuberance and excessive "security." It's based on the fact that neo-liberal capitalism is built on a totalitarian mindset that believes that people (if they are workers, or simply non-capitalists) aren't worth shit.
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So how do we communicate it? What are we to do to encourage genuine engagement, to maximize the chance that these ideas might be considered genuinely and seriously on their merits rather than dismissed out of hand because they sound foolish or dangerous? How do we foster critical consciousness (while remaining open to transformation ourselves)?
Well, we have to communicate in plain English (in our case) and we have to stay focused upon what the issue is.
We really don't often draw a clear line connecting A to B, and we don't often focus on the underlying inevitability of the problems we identify.
It comes across as an endless list of problems, or, we come across as people who complain endlessly.
We have to stay on focus that these things are unavoidable, and explain in the simplest terms why.
Here's an example: We spend a lot of time complaining about the corporate press, but we're unfocused and sometimes we give the impression that shaming some newspaper, or media conglomerate, or getting our own letters and viewpoints out there is going to change things.
Jonathan Schwarz cuts to the chase here and here
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