Comrade:Cassette/notes/Communist party of canada

Program

The Development of Capitalism in Canada

What was the basis for imposing early colonial structures

• Mercantile capitalism through the trade of fish, fur and timber with the colonies and France and Britain.  

Mercantile capitalism eventually gave way to?

• larger-scale operations, especially in forestry and shipbuilding, were started.

Who's capital was Canada dominated by at first and who did that change to?

• Canada was under the domination of British capital. Early in the 20th century however, trade and debt dependence on Britain was gradually replaced with an even more debilitating dependence on U.S. capital and technology.  

Which economic structures did US gain control of

• Manufacturing and natural resources

What did this result in?

• Canada becoming more integrated into and more dependent on the U.S. economy than any other developed capitalist country.  
• The growing presence of U.S. and other transnationals increased pressures for the exploitation of Canadian natural resources. It has also led to a massive and growing outflow of profits, interest, fees, and other transfers, stifling new development, jobs, and research, and easing the political and cultural penetration of U.S. imperialism.

State Monopoly Capitalism

What is state monopoly capitalism?

• merging of the interests of finance capital with the state

What does finance capital use the state for?

• to provide orders, capital and subsidies, and to secure foreign markets and investments

Monopoly capital supports the expansion of the state sector – both services and enterprises – when that serves its interests, and at other times it uses the state to cut back and privatize.

How does state-monopoly capitalism undermine bourgeois democracy?

• Big business openly intervenes in the electoral process on its own behalf, and also indirectly through a network of pro-corporate institutes and think tanks. It uses its control of mass media to influence the ideas and attitudes of the people, and to blatantly influence election results. It corrupts the democratic process through the buying of politicians and officials. It tramples on the political right of the Canadian people to exercise any meaningful choice, thereby promoting widespread public alienation and cynicism about the electoral process.

What does International finance capital also require?

• Institutions of regulation ratified and supported by the imperialist states to protect and advance their interests. It has amplified the role of existing international capitalist institutions – the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Bank – to enforce its global hegemony, as well as numerous regional economic blocs to protect the interests of the respective imperialist centres. These powerful international structures undermine national and state sovereignty, thus giving rise to new conflicts and contradictions in the system of monopoly capitalist regulation.

Canadian Capital and the TNCs

What does Canada have the highest level of among imperialist countries

• Foreign ownership

What is Canadian finance capital largely interlocked with?

• U.S. transnationals and international finance capital in general

What has intensified this process of capitalist integration under U.S. domination?

• Imposition of neo-liberal policies especially under the free trade agreement

Canadian monopoly groupings control many sectors of the economy and control the Canadian state, but international finance capital – primarily U.S.-based TNCs – control substantial parts of the resource, manufacturing and service industries

What does this result in?

• Important decisions on investment policy, technological change, plant closures and layoffs are made outside our borders. No sector of Canada’s economy is free from U.S. and other transnational influence.

Capitalism Generates Crises

What led to Keynesianism being implemented?

• widely implemented during the prolonged post-W.W.II economic boom to stabilize capitalist economies, weaken and deflect the militancy and internationalism of working class movements and weaken the powerful attraction of the socialist alternative.

What was the impact of these policies

• Keynesian prescriptions helped capitalist governments to temporarily ease the worst effects of cyclical crises but ultimately failed to prevent them. It also tended to inhibit international capital flows and TNC activity, and in general submerged the capitalist state in staggering public debt, the servicing costs of which were borne primarily by working people.

What brought us out of Keynesianism?

• By the mid-1970s, finance capital turned towards neoliberalism. Under the slogan of a “return to the free market,” capitalist governments in Canada and elsewhere began to impose a vicious, pro-corporate and anti-people agenda which included liberalized or “free” trade, deregulation and privatization, corporate tax cuts, an intensified assault on labour and democratic rights, and various measures to drive down real incomes and living standards of working people to the benefit of the banks and monopolies.

What were the consequences of this?

• It was successful in temporarily halting and reversing the decline in the rate of profit, and accelerated the accumulation and concentration of wealth in the hands of the ruling capitalist elite. This forced a decline in the purchasing power of the vast majority of the people which led to a decline in aggregate demand for commodities and services.

How was the decline in the purchasing power handled?

• Extending cheap credit which increased the debt load borne by households and governments alike.

What did this debt bubble lead to?

• the “great economic meltdown” of 2007-08 – the largest, most widespread and protracted capitalist crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Production and international trade collapsed, and mass unemployment and poverty soared in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere around the world. The ruinous consequences of neoliberalism stood fully exposed.

Since the ruling circles of finance capital have refused to change course and turned to being bailed out, austerity measures and wage cuts which has resulted in?

• real economic growth in GDP has remained stagnant, while government and household indebtedness have grown even larger than 2007-08 levels, setting the stage for another, even more devastating capitalist crisis.

Productivity, Unemployment and the Working Class

What has increased exploitation and alienation of the working class and is accelerating the antagonism of the two classes

• Technological and scientific progress

What is a general way it is doing this?

• Technology is used to lower production costs by replacing human labor with machines

How has this impacted the manufacturing industry?

• Workers in manufacturing (with the exception of auto assembly) have been reorganized into smaller hi-tech production units where smaller groups of precariously employed workers are isolated from the mainstream of organized workers. This has broken up the collectivization of what has been the most militant and organized portion of the industrial working class

How does this increase the gulf between the working people and finance capital?

• The more technological progress there is, the higher the productivity rate, the higher the rate of exploitation, and the higher the intensity of labour, deepening the gulf between finance capital and working people. The longer hours and increased physical and mental stress demanded of the individual worker has a negative effect on the health and safety of all workers.
• My note: this makes me think of one of the reasons Chris Smalls and others organized a union at Amazon because having to keep up with the machines made the work dangerous and stressful.

How is work over digital platforms (like remote work) changing working conditions?

• Creating a shift towards hiring employees on a short-term, temporary basis, without fixed hours, wages or benefits. They are usually classified as "independent contractors." Terms and conditions of work are often controlled from other geographic jurisdictions, beyond the reach of labour standards legislation or guidelines, subject to change without consultation. Workers are often placed in competition with each other and may never meet in person.

What is rapidly intensifying the contradictions in tech these days?

• Advancements in AI: AI has the potential to enhance the health and quality of life for all humanity, to facilitate scientific breakthroughs to reverse environmental destruction and climate change, and to sharply reduce necessary labour-time, increase leisure time, etc. But under capitalist relations, AI research is instead directed to enhance the profits of employers by eliminating whole categories of human-based labor, at the expense of workers, their families and communities, and toward military applications (such as lethal autonomous weapon systems) which could threaten all humanity. Unless reversed, this path will lead to the widespread marginalization and pauperization of the working class, to the further degradation of labour and democratic rights, and to aggression and war.

What does Tech do that doesn't benefit transnationals and financial groups?

• Tech innovation is very expensive and it's application intensifies the tendency for the rate of profit to fall

How does finance capital try to offset this tendency of the declining rate of profit?

1. driving down its labour costs through wage cuts, benefits cuts, pension cuts, speed-ups, lengthening the work day, contract work, redundancies, plant shutdowns, and other forms of corporate restructuring
2. absorbing or merging with its competitors
3. redistributing income from the working people to the capitalist class through taxation policies
4. privatizing parts of the public sector and turning them into new sources of profit
5. forcing open access to new markets through trade and investment agreements and, where necessary, through military aggression

How does the increased mobility of capital harm the workers?

• enhancing transportability of production: In expanding numbers and types of industries, capital can respond to strikes or workers’ demands by quickly – and almost seamlessly – relocating entire production processes on a permanent or temporary basis.

How does the domination of advanced tech by U.S. transnationals further undermine Canadian independence and sovereignty?

• inhibit's research and development and reduces the availability of skilled and high tech jobs to Canadian workers

How are the high costs of modernizing the economy with the latest tech paid for?

• It is financed by the profits from exploiting the working class in the advanced capitalist countries, capital bled from the most exploited and impoverished countries by the transnational corporations, and through vast government handouts to commerce and industry paid for by the taxes of the working people.

What have free trade agreements resulted in?

• de-industrialization and the export of hundreds of thousands of jobs, creating a large pool of unemployed people who are used to drive down wages and working conditions of the employed and organized workforce.

What is one of the tools used that threatens state sovereignty and democracy in the free trade agreements

• Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) clauses: a tribunal of corporate lawyers can overrule state domestic, health, environmental and financial legislation. A trans-national corporation that claims it has been denied current or future profits from the application of these laws can sue the state. These corporate appointed tribunals allow the lawyers to rotate between serving as “judges” and bringing cases for corporations against governments – a conflict of interest that should be illegal in law. Only corporations can sue the state. The state cannot sue corporations.

What is the best way to counteract all this?

• International working class unity and solidarity

How has this impacted unemployment?

• While job creation has tended to expand the engineering, research and hi-tech sector of workers, the rate of job formation has dipped below the rate of growth of the population as a whole. Higher levels of permanent unemployment and underemployment have become a mass phenomenon, independent of cyclical recovery and boom.
• Canada faces the tragic consequences of having a generation of young people, many of whom may never work full-time or never work at all. Unemployed workers labeled “older” by employers are discriminated against and being denied re-entry into the labour force because of inadequate skills and the unprofitability of retraining them for a relatively brief remaining work life.

How does the growth in part-time, temporary and contract work impact workers

• Regressive labour legislation often denies these workers minimum wage guarantees, job protection, social security benefits or the right to organize. This separates many part-time workers from the workforce as a whole and particularly from the trade union movement

How does this deepen divisions between people who work, the unemployed and those permanently displaced from the labour market?

• The reserve army of unemployed drive down wages and pits sections of working people against each other. The working population, constantly forced to pay more direct and indirect taxes, is pitted against the poor and unemployed, who also pay direct and indirect taxes but whose plight becomes more desperate as social programs for their relief are consistently cut back.

What was the main source of growth in the working class in the past?

• The movement from rural to urban

What is the main source of growth now?

• Its ranks now grow mainly from the tendency to collectivize and proletarianize professions, semi-professions, clerical, commercial and administrative sectors and from the increased participation of women and new immigrants in the paid workforce.
• Public sector and service industries have seen a lot of development. Also increasingly, workers in new mass technological industries, public institutions and large-scale service industries are playing a full and active role in the organized labour movement, alongside workers in traditional industries (workers in factories, mines and large scale industries).

What do new immigrants bring to our working class?

• ethnic and cultural diversity, and their experience, militancy and class consciousness developed through class struggles in their originating countries.

What currently has the biggest impact on organized labor today?

• the development of the public sector unions which now represent more than 60 per cent of organized labour and are comprised of a majority of women members

What percentage do women represent in all organized labor?

• Over 50%

Since the 1970s, why has there been a growth in the number and proportion of self-employed persons in Canada?

• This is the result of subcontracting, layoffs, and poverty, with little independence, and lower standards of living. These "entrepreneurs" have more in common with workers than with capitalists.

Crisis in Rural Canada

How has the concentration of wealth in Canada pushed out small farmers?

• Farmers can't pay for more productive machinery which the industrial monopolies can. Financial and industrial monopolies dominate agriculture, and farmers are compelled to pay high monopoly prices for seed, equipment and other inputs, while the prices they get for their produce are set by the powerful packing, milling, grain-handling and railway monopolies. Monopoly capital fleeces the farmers through control of markets, prices and credits. It is extending its domination over agriculture through agribusiness and the forced introduction of bio-technologies such as genetically-modified crops, the use of which is strictly controlled by the agri-monopolies.
• Increasing monopoly control and ownership of land and capital resources imposes crushing debts on the family farm, accelerating bankruptcies and driving the farm population off the land in record numbers.

What are some of the direct consequences that we see today of finance capital control of agriculture and the food processing and agricultural machinery industries?

• The ruination of the family farmers or their transformation into agricultural labourers, their increasing proletarianization, and the growing use of highly exploited migrant labour

What other industries face this similar plight?

• fishers and wood-lot owner
• The small primary producers are also at the mercy of these big corporations, to which they must sell their harvest. Squeezed between increasing monopolization, higher operating costs and debt, lower wholesale prices, and dwindling resources, the incomes of these primary producers and their families are shrinking; thousands have been forced to abandon their livelihoods completely.

What is one of the ways, that hasn't been talked about, it impacts them?

• introduction of high tech harvesting and processing equipment, is rapidly depleting the resource base, in some cases leading to environmental disaster.

This depletion of natural resources is also impacting heavily...

• industrial workers, especially miners and workers who live and work in rural isolated communities.

To sum up...

Many thousands of well-paid, unionized jobs have been eliminated as a result of automation and/or resource exhaustion.

The crisis affecting family farmers and primary producers, miners and woodworkers is destroying the economic basis of many rural communities and small towns across Canada, ruining small-scale independent businesses, and increasing unemployment in the countryside.

Environmental Crisis

What is one of the propaganda tactics employed by capital to resist efforts aimed at curbing the environmental devastation resulting from its pursuit of profit?

• hunt for ever increasing profits is being disguised as a concern for jobs. Some resource based unions have bought into the corporate agenda that pits environmental protection against employment

Chapter 3: Canada in a changing world

What is one of the alarming trends?

• The increase of fictitious capital. Vast resources are no longer employed in productive enterprises, but are diverted to speculation in currency, “futures” and the stock market, where huge profits are siphoned off without ever generating increased production. This speculation worsens the anarchy inherent in capitalist production, giving rise to deeper cyclical and structural crises within countries, regionally and globally.

What are the three main imperialist centers?

• EU, US, Japan

The CP-Canada party believes in upholding the role of the UN while pressing for it's democratization...

The UN Charter and the principles of international law – premised on the full equality, sovereignty and territorial integrity of all states – are now routinely violated by the imperialist powers under the pretext of the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) doctrine and/or the ‘right’ to protect their national security interests. In these circumstances it is vital to defend these principles of international law, and to uphold the role of the United Nations, while pressing for its democratization.

How is fascism different from right wing populism

• Like fascism, right-wing populism plays on division and inflames prejudice, particularly against immigrants and racialized peoples. It thrives on xenophobia, racism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia. Its leaders present themselves as the people’s champion, disclaiming political allegiances that expose their anti-working class and anti-democratic essence. Unlike fascism, however, right-wing populism may maintain some elements of liberal democracy, like bourgeois elections.

Does right wing populism lead to fascism

• Right-wing populism does not inevitably lead to fascism, as the long history of struggle against Social Credit in English-speaking Canada, and the Creditistes in Quebec, clearly shows.
• However, in today’s context of increasingly reactionary measures being enacted to curtail and suppress labour and democratic rights, to curtail the rights of Parliaments and legislatures, and to intensify repression of socialism and the revolutionary movements in all of the capitalist countries, it is clear that right-wing populism often prepares the ground for the emergence of far-right political movements and parties including fascist and white supremacist organizations.

While the international expansion of capital is transforming the role of national governments and restricting their economic regulatory function in favour of institutions such as the WTO, IMF and World Bank, the coercive function of the state remains a vital instrument to protect the interests of monopoly capital and to repress opposition. Therefore, the struggle for deep-going democratic and anti-monopoly reforms, and ultimately for working class political power must still be conducted primarily at the level of the national state in each country.

But given the global character of contemporary capitalism, class and democratic resistance at the state level, in and of itself, is no longer sufficient. Struggles waged in each country must be combined to an ever-greater extent with coordinated regional and global forms of struggle. An international democratic and anti-imperialist front is urgently required, to bring together the democratic, working class and progressive forces around the world to confront the unfettered power of international finance capital. Such a front or alliance can be forged around a program for genuine internationalization, based on: the principles of peace, non-aggression, and global disarmament; respect for the sovereignty of all states, for the equality and rights of all nations, large and small, the peaceful coexistence of different social systems, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; fair and balanced trade and economic cooperation; respect and promotion of cultural diversity; and protection of the global environment.