(The following article is from the November 16-30, 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.)

Despite the bland reassurances of the Harper Tories, upheavals continued in financial markets, along with a rising tide of layoffs in the USA, Canada and other countries, and warnings that the capitalist world faces a prolonged economic crisis. In this commentary, Sam Hammond, chair of the Central Trade Union Commission of the Communist Party of Canada, analyses these developments and looks at the way forward for the working class.

The Mulroney/Reagan/Thatcher resurrection of a "de-regulated capital" - discredited in the 1930's for its part in causing the suffering of the Great Depression - has just imploded. Now it threatens to consume the accomplishments of generations of working people into its cauldron of speculation and super-profit. The rising dominance of uncontrolled speculation gone wild, where hedge funds, private equity and mutual funds lever takeovers and acquisitions of companies, has actually seriously eroded the manufacturing base of real wealth.

     Even though excesses of greed and corruption are rampant, they are the normal products of capitalism, and should not obscure the inherent structural contradictions that created them. The primary root problem is not speculation, but the very nature of capital that created it at this level. If the market economy is viewed as a permanent meeting place between buyers and sellers, it is inevitable that the speculators would sooner or later make the medium of exchange - money and bonds - into commodities that inflate or depress the value of real wealth they are supposed to represent. Left unchecked, an escalating series of financial crises will inevitably bring more impoverishment, more unemployment, more under-employment, more war, more disease and more environmental damage. This is the historic legacy of capitalism escalating rapidly at its imperialist stage.

     The people of the world are living in the vortex of a whirlpool that is sucking up our pension plans, our savings, our jobs, our sovereignty. The future of our children, and even the sustainability of life on our planet, are threatened. In short, all we have won through generations of stubborn struggle is being stripped from us to replenish the coffers of financial speculators who have become the dominant movers of unfettered uncontrolled capital, disguised and peddled to us by their media as the efficient free market economy. The speculators, even though they are moored in nations, roam the world and violate borders with their imposed trade agreements and neo-liberal agenda. To them, the real production necessary to sustain life and social being is just a transient financial opportunity from which to extract as much value as possible, and then dispose of. Acquisition, consumption, disposal. The result is a decline in wages, the destruction of the ability to purchase, triggering more market decline, massive layoffs and more market decline: depression.

     Those who used the state to attack labour, drive down wages, sell off public property and deliver to the speculators everything that can generate a profit, now use the remaining wealth of the state to reward the perpetrators with an exchange of our real wealth for their worthless paper. Trillions of real dollars representing our real resources, our real work and productivity, our pensions and services, are given to the bandits to help them escape and then rob again.

     The labour movement finds itself trying to deal with shifting coalitions of investors, who acquire control only to create the illusion of "balance sheet" value through cutting costs, reducing employment, outsourcing, concessionary bargaining and betrayal of any morality. The present climate is characterized by the actual destruction of the productive forces (through NAFTA and de-industrialization), the corruption of real material wealth, the decline in real wages and the disappearance of domestic markets, leading to more downsizing and unemployment and the inevitable bankruptcy of our infrastructure.

     Even the most determined and militant unions are drawn towards an elusive treadmill, trying to negotiate with phantoms who sit in the background and pull every string but never come into the daylight. These financial speculators are free of constraints, shielded behind layers of shadowy investors. They are protected from legislated labour relations or contractual obligations by the agreements negotiated with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, by our own compliant governments who sell us out.

     We are not "all in this together." We are in it very separately. The interests of the majority of the Canadian people and the interests of the Canadian capitalist class are polarized in opposite directions and rapidly widening. The differences within the working class - between those who gamble on riding out the storm and those who favour organizing resistance - are more and more becoming topics of debate, but this is our debate and this is our class. This debate does not have to divide us, it can make us stronger. In central labour conventions and union conventions can be seen the sometimes contradictory tendencies of compliance and resistance. This is understandable when working people search for solutions and debate tactics, especially when many are under extreme duress. But progressive steps are developing. The voluntary decision of ten union leaders announced at the last CLC convention to cease raiding, and the recent historic non-raiding pact between the CSN and the QFL in Quebec, are symptoms of a desire for unity, for a common front to the enemies of working people that lays the groundwork for unified resistance. Already militant resolutions and statements are flowing from Labour Councils and union head offices.

     The Communist Party calls upon the most important section of the working people, the labour movement, to react to the financial crisis which is just beginning. Labour, the historic shield of the people, can be the catalyst of all the social institutions that traditionally protect us and fight for us, that represent the needs of our people. Labour has a long history of doing this, but necessity demands swift action, because the dangers are as real as they were in 1930, perhaps greater. Labour has the capacity, the organization and the ability to seize this moment. To do this would replenish labour, expand its ranks with the very best of our youth, stop the decline in sector density, and capture the loyalty of the majority of working people.

     We call upon all progressive trade unionists to push for resolutions and actions to activate the labour movement, to agitate for a rapid response to the attack of finance, for reclamation of our sovereignty, and for public ownership and control of our resources.

     The Communist Party is the party of socialism; we have never forsaken our legacy. We are committed to another, better world. We believe not only that a better world is possible, but that the people have the strength and courage to make it real, to make our country an important part of that struggle for this goal. But it is not necessary for all of us to agree completely on ideology and method. The road may be long and difficult, and there will be ample time for dialogue along the way. The crucial need today is for the labour movement and its allies to embark upon this road immediately, moving from condemnation of those who created the present crisis, into mass action to defend the interests of working people.