(The
following article is from
the December 1-31,
2007
issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles
can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in
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People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St. Unit 502,
Hamilton,
ON, L8P 2H3. By Sam Hammond, chair
of the Central Trade Union Commission, Communist Party of Canada The disputes raging around the
CAW-Magna deal have sparked a deeper debate over the right to strike.
This article will review the debate from a Marxist perspective. The point is
made by some that
thousands of workers have improved their lives without the right to
strike. Many unionized health care workers in Ontario and elsewhere
have been legislated out of the right to strike, yet have managed
through collective bargaining or arbitration to improve wages and
working conditions. How can a Marxist explain this? Some also
express an opinion
that the strike weapon is unrealistic in the present environment,
calling for putting "new thinking" into the equation. The majority
of commentators
have expressed alarm and insist the right to withdraw labour is
fundamental and must be protected at all costs. They are correct, but
why? It is
possible, but
unscientific, to start with a conclusion - the right to strike is
sacred - and then find the evidence to support it. The truth of the
matter is that we have never had a complete right to strike. The right
to strike in Canada is qualified in every collective agreement. The
historic trade-off between representatives of capital and the organized
working class is the presence in collective agreements of a standard
"no strike/no lockout" clause for the duration of the agreement. This
condition was won by
militant and vicious strike struggles. The "no strike/no lockout"
provision is a step in a staircase, which from a left point of view was
not supposed to end there. Of course
unorganized workers
who withdraw their labour are subject to unchecked retribution from the
bosses. Organized workers who violate the terms of a collective
agreement by withdrawing their collective labour - the strike weapon
unsheathed - are invariably at odds with the law. But, these wildcat
strikes are not uncommon in Canadian history. Looking at
the environment
subjectively will inevitably lead one to adjust to tide and flow, to
survive for the moment, the day, the year or until the next contract.
This view of the world doesn't require an understanding of where the
road began or where it leads. The issue is not really whether we have
the right to strike, but at what level we have it, and whether or not
it should be expanded or given up as a negotiating point in exchange
for some kind of real or imagined benefit. Nothing in
the universe or in
human social development is at an absolute state of rest. Phenomena
develop from the simple to the complex. Marxists base their scientific
world outlook on studying the objective conditions of social being,
seeking to discover the laws that govern development, the relations
between quantitative and qualitative change, and antagonistic and
non-antagonistic opposites. The Marxist world view known as Historical
Materialism sees the class struggle as the interaction of antagonistic
opposites in exploiting society, where the victory of one over the
other leads to qualitative change, a revolutionary leap forward or a
counter-revolution, a setback. History does
not stop. Struggle
and change do not cease. Ever since the development of class society
that progressed through slavery, feudalism and capitalism, antagonistic
class relations have determined the state of our social being and
determined who and what we are, slave or slave-owner, serf or
landowner, worker or capitalist. There are strata that straddle classes
or operate transiently around them, but our social identity is the
product of the relations between workers and capitalists, and the level
of our social and political consciousness can be measured by how close
our subjective understanding is to the objective reality that exists. Ever since
capitalism reached
its highest and last stage, imperialism, its ideologues and its ruling
classes - because they can see the gates of the graveyard on the
horizon - have tried to slow down the objective social processes that
will inevitably lead to their funeral pyre. Their
weapons include military,
economic and legal and social means. Our weapons are our ideology, our
working class parties and the strike weapon. But bo matter how
aggressive the tactics of the ruling classes appear, they are defensive
in nature. Their own
economic cannibalism
makes it very difficult to sustain control, and the cost of an ever
demanding military apparatus so necessary to their existence becomes a
component in their economic nightmare. Therefore
they must use or
manipulate every organ of state power, media, educational institutions,
labour law, workplace control, parliamentary parties, false ideology,
etc., to try and control, to slow down the rise of social class
consciousness in the exploited class. If the
social class
consciousness of the working class matches the objective reality of
their social being, in the ensuing sunburst of cognizance it will
become obvious that the capitalist class cannot exist without us but we
can exist much better in a better environment without them. It will be
obvious, as clear as
the right to private property, that we possess the only thing that if
taken away can destroy them, our labour. The will and ability to do
this is the most dangerous threat to the ruling class and our most
important asset. It is
enshrined in the working
class and organized labour as the right to strike, a legal and
political right we have won only partially in industrial society, more
in some states less in others, never completely. The struggle
to control our own
labour is the most fundamental democratic and social struggle we take
part in. Therein lies the ability to defend, the ability to negotiate
social conditions, the ability to protect our families, the ability to
secure a greater share of the wealth we produce and the ability to act
in solidarity with our brothers and sisters internationally. To those who
support capitalism,
those who do not care as long as they can survive amidst carnage and
suffering and to those who are just socially-historically ignorant, the
right to strike qualified or not, is not important. But there
are those of us,
whatever we call ourselves, who live to make real that vision of a
better world, who feel anger at the conditions of ours and others
lives, who resent dangling at the end of the precarious thread of
capitalist greed, who are internationalists and emancipators. We are the
left and we will
fight for control of our labour until the negation of exploiting
capitalism and the transition to socialism. The fight for the right to
strike, to withdraw our collective labour is the defining point of
where we measure up in the struggle for emancipation and social justice. Suffering is
an inherent state
of existence for the exploited classes throughout history. It is
relative and can be eased by militant struggle, but a rest is not a
holiday, and respite is not liberation. The fact of the matter is that
both are worth fighting for, and the short term is a component of the
larger vision. Struggle teaches method, and method requires, in the
social sense, social weapons. To those who would disarm us we can very
justly ask: which side are you on?
Found at:
http://www.peoplesvoice.ca/articleprint08/03__THE_STRIKE_WEAPON_-_NECESSARY_OR.html