(The following article is from the November 1-15, 2008, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St., Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3.)

People's Voice Editorial, Nov. 1-15, 2008

During the early 1980s, Canada was hit by a severe economic downturn and sky-high interest rates, costing millions of people their jobs, homes and economic security. At the time, William Kashtan, leader of the Communist Party of Canada from 1965 to 1988, made the following points about the crisis. His comments remain highly relevant to the current economic meltdown:

     "One must also see the other aspects of the crisis, those that are advantageous to the financial and industrial oligarchy and which serve its economic and political purposes. First, by ruining mainly the mass of the petty and middle producers, the crisis promotes the concentration of capital and the consolidation of the positions of the ruling groups of the financial and industrial oligarchy, the growth of their economic strength on a process not unlike `natural selection' within the bourgeoisie to ensure the survival of the strongest and most predatory, those who are best adapted to the new conditions of the competitive fight. For instance, in the ... capitalist countries, there has been a snow-balling of bankruptcies, with a simultaneous growth in the concentration of production and the wealth in the hand of the monopoly elite.

     "Second, and most important, in the atmosphere of crisis, the big bourgeoisie expects to have additional opportunities for weakening its main adversary, the working class, to resist its socio-economic and political demands more effectively and ultimately to tighten up the screws of exploitation and entrench its domination. The owners of capital and their servitors are trying hard to use the crisis above all to deprive the working people of their socio-economic gains which they won in the preceding period through bitter struggles."