The Left is Losing, Pollievre and the Liberal-NDP Deal

 

I can't help mentioning this Jacobin article I read a little while ago: "Capitalists Are Escalating Their Shakedown of American Workers" by James Rushing Daniel:

Americans are more poorly positioned than we have been in nearly fifty years. By almost every measure — inflation, wages, medical expenses, student debt, rent, transportation costs — we are struggling. We are paying more for necessities and experiencing deepening immiseration while corporate profits are higher than they’ve been in nearly a century.

...

Wage theft and opportunity hoarding are perennial concerns, but what we are seeing now is a gold rush on working people’s remaining savings, scant as they are. In this, Americans are being tested to see just how much we’re willing to endure. Capitalists, having been instrumental in creating a workforce too exhausted and disorganized to mount an effective defense against plummeting quality of life, are betting the answer is quite a lot. And while inspiring union votes are being held across the country, the overall lack of any significant and sustained anti-capitalist movement telegraphs that we will still put up with more.

We need to show that we won’t.

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Broke and bullied, we’re discovering that capitalists are trying to squeeze consumers and workers for all we’re worth — even if that means putting us in positions where we are literally dying for the job.

Inflation has decimated the modest wage gains workers saw last year. An hourly earnings increase of 0.4 percent, reported back in October, was obliterated by nearly 1 percent inflation for the month. Over the course of the pandemic, net hourly wages have declined 1.2 percent, while prices have climbed 7.5 percent over the past year, both due to inflation and because of the padding of corporate profits. Food prices, in particular, are up over 10 percent from a year ago.

Rents have similarly exploded, with some cities seeing as much as a 40 percent increase over the past year. 

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Student debt also remains a significant burden on Americans. While Biden has forgiven $15 billion of the $1.7 trillion total, including most recently a $415 million package, these drips and drops fall far short of campaign promises. With student loan repayment set to begin shortly, tens of millions of Americans will once again be thrown into debilitating economic stress. 

The effects of the current shakedown go beyond mere impoverishment, which is certainly dire enough. American life expectancy also infamously dropped in 2020, from a previous 78.8 years to 77.3. While in part attributable to COVID, Americans are statistically dying younger from other causes as well — homicide, diabetes, and what Anne Case and Angus Deaton have called “deaths of despair,” including liver cirrhosis and drug overdose.

It goes on and on.  And while Mister Daniel mentions signs of worker pushback, the enormity of this suffering, the inequality gap, the capitalists' power to do as they please, ... the fact that "Americans are more poorly positioned than we have been in nearly fifty years" ... all of this certainly would seem to give the lie to any previous talk of left "victories" and the effectiveness of our "resistance" during my lifetime.

Particularly touching is Daniel's statement here:

And while inspiring union votes are being held across the country, the overall lack of any significant and sustained anti-capitalist movement telegraphs that we will still put up with more.

We need to show that we won’t.

What exactly does he mean by that?  What is ANYONE planning on the left to show genuinely massive worker refusal to continue to take this abuse?  What is happening to make the capitalists and their political hirelings fear the consequences of continuing to abuse us?  MASSIVE one-day peaceful rallies?  MASSIVE petitions?  In the United States a MASSIVE "get-out-the-vote" campaign for the Democratic Party?

As with all things, many human beings within the community of the political left seem to be cut-off from understanding the meanings of the words that they utter.  Just as so many people, within the context of the crisis of Putin's invasion of the Ukraine, blithely discuss the possibility of nuclear war as if they really don't understand that it means certain death for themselves and everyone that they love and the extinction of the entire human race, so too, do these people not understand that their "fighting back" and their "resistance" and their "struggle" and their "coalition building" and their "activism" have accomplished sweet fuck all and that the outcome for the future looks to be more of the same.

People!  Whatever you've been doing, it's obviously not working!

Not everyone on the right-wing is a hopeless deplorable.  (And, yes, nazis of any persuasion are deplorable.)  Some of them are confused and/or ignorant.  (And some are intelligent people who are leery of societal change.)  Hard economic times makes people "conservative."  It makes people retreat into smaller, like-minded (or whatever) groups to preserve resources for themselves and their in-group.  It makes them distrustful of others, "outsiders," seeing them as rivals for those scarce resources.  Some of these people we should try to reach.  If, by any stretch of the imagination, we were winning practical benefits for people on our side we perhaps could have some of these entitled blowhards putting their self-interested activism on OUR side.  (They might be distasteful allies but you don't always have the luxury of choice when you're outgunned and losing.) Alas, our society has degenerated to the point where a vile turd like Pierre Poilievre.  This shit-head was an embarrassment to someone as loathsomely stupid as stephen harper.  And yet, the second-biggest political party in Canada, the one that continues to receive the endorsement of the majority of the capitalist media's "journalism" products, has a good chance of having this imbecile as it's leader.

This career politician who disparages government while serving as a whore for corporations; this asshole who abused public resources for partisan propaganda; this racist scumbag who hates the First Nations even more than Justin Trudeau does, ... this tool represents a sizeable proportion of the Conservative Party of Canada!  Yet more evidence of the incapacity of the human species.

Oh well.  To end on a higher note though I'll celebrate the possibility that the federal NDP salvaged its relevance by agreeing to a "Supply and Confidence Agreement" with the federal Liberals in return for a national dental and pharmacare plan for low-income Canadians.

It's for the best that the NDP and Libs have been able to come to terms on a supply and confidence agreement which should at least provide for substantial material gains for people who need them, and may go further in setting up core elements of a universal health care system which have long been lacking. And it's particularly gratifying to see at least some recognition of the leadership that requires. 

But while it's well worth celebrating what looks like a turn for the better, it's also worth a reminder as to what - and who - has prevented that type of cooperation from happening in the past.

Remember that Jagmeet Singh's message after the 2019 election was one of willingness to work with the Liberals on shared priorities. And Justin Trudeau's response was...to reject any systematic cooperation with a single party, as he preferred piecemeal politics and perpetual Parliamentary chicken to acceding to any NDP priorities in exchange for ongoing confidence.

...

Needless to say, that leaves reason for concern that the same factors will affect both the length of time the current agreement figures to hold up, and the expectations as to what will be achieved while it does. And while the points of agreement may make some major achievements seem like real possibilities, there's a lot of work to be done to keep pushing toward actually bringing them to life before the Libs decide to go it alone.

The NDP disappoints so often and is so uninspiring and hopeless that I have walked away from them on a few occasions.  But this is something that reminds us that they still have their purpose.