I'm going to go on for a bit. Five minute read, if you've got the time...
When I began teaching in 1988 I had to join the teachers union. At first I was baffled by all the attention given to equity, social justice, democratic processes, etc. There was a constant flow of information. Before I was a teacher unions were nothing to me.
But as I got more into it I realized that a main task of the teacher's union, beyond preserving and promoting good teaching practice, was to create a professional association that was representative of the diversity of its members. I watched the process of merging the men's arm of the public teachers union - the OPSTF - with the women's arm - FWTAO. It was a critical step in being more representative of the diversity of teachers within similar working conditions. (We're not all the way there; Catholic Teachers remain in a separate union, as do francophone teachers and Secondary School teachers.)
"Stronger together" was the idea that kept it moving forward. Nowadays, within ETFO organization, as in any union, there are committees that grapple with equity and issues surrounding various cultural or special interest sub-groups within the organization. The ETFO annual general meeting, for me, was a fascinating look into the complexity of a large professional union that was striving to represent all its members.
It was complex, it was not simple, it took a lot of work, and it was maddening to repeatedly deal with governments that would try to work against the union for political reasons. The fact that all teachers were not working in a single union made it frustrating. I've seen the Divide and Conquer strategy used against groups many times. I worked through all three parties NDP, Liberal, and PC -- in one way or another the gov't would end up looking to the teachers for concessions.
Withdrawing my labour was never anything I thought about seriously, until through my union community I saw my fellow workers in a different light. It didn't matter who they were or their background, or even their political beliefs; what mattered was we are in this together and we will stand up for our working situation - together.
Back to your article. If we can figure out how to create a bigger umbrella to represent working people from all sectors and professions, from all cultural mixes, I would say it is possible. But it will take a lot of effort! There will need to be an entirely new message and new approach, as alluded to in your article.
Where are the strong leaders who can prepare and inspire and lead the way, and where is the possibility of a political party ever wrapping its head around this challenge?
The questions posed need to drive policy proposals yet in today's climate of rage, instant judgment and rise of right wing populism, policy advocacy is taking a back seat.
However, there are groups in Canada that promote a fairer society with ideas that can form the basis for economic justice. Generation Squeeze, UBI Works, Centre for the Future of Work, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives to name a few but other than snippets on TV, the very people who could benefit from initiatives don't get involved.
All these groups get little traction or they lead with ideas like tax the value of the home that strike fear in the hearts of homeowners who've lived in the same bungalow since the 70s in cities like Vancouver where the property values due to scarcity have massively increased with no fault of their own.
When I mention to people well off like myself that a guaranteed basic income is needed, all I hear is it will produce lazy people or more drug addicts despite studies showing its not true but it will give youth a leg up on paying for education or pursuing their life's interests and passions with the goal of reducing poverty and stopping the flow into homelessness.
A key for me is that you can never solve problems unless you understand the underlying issues and how we got to where we are in Canada where younger generations pay more in tax collectively than prior generations.
While it's true for many that hard work will stay get you to success, the reality that with housing costs relative to incomes, the young middle income earners will continue to struggle as no one foresaw the day when incomes wouldn't keep pace with housing costs.
The decline in union power globally corresponds nicely with the flatlining of real income growth combined with the freer movement of labour and capital to low cost countries.
The irony of the attacks on the federal government in Canada is that the Liberal Party policy conventions and MPs believe in a basic income but currently it'd be a tough sell right now. It will require a strong NDP to promote that.
The political discourse right now is rage and foreign interference. Ironically, foreign actors who want to disturb and disrupt western democracies can take a break now in Canada as we're doing it to ourselves.
There are appearances on TV at times with those with bold forward thinking ideas yet it's like trying to start an old gas lawn mower where it sputters but never starts. Amanda Lang on Taking Stock did a show on income levels recently yet after 30 minutes it's gone. The wrong stuff hits the news and gets legs.
I agree a basic income is needed, but unlike everyone else advocating for it, I believe it should NOT be a liveable income, but rather about half a liveable income - for a single at least, a higher percentage is more appropriate when children are involved, or the recipient is disabled or a senior. This leaves some personal responsibility with the recipient while not bankrupting the government.
The problem with any basic income is how it is integrated into taxation, because clawing back a basic income as income rises is going to combine with regular tax rates to produce a combined marginal rate that would make any top income earner squeal. Combined marginal rates for tax, tax credit and welfare clawbacks are already over 80% for some income ranges.
But, integrating half a liveable basic income - ballpark 10K per year for a single, and clawing it back at 40% until you get to income of 25K where you start paying tax, is quite do-able fiscally. (Clearly the current 15K basic personal amount needs to be increased to that same 25K.)
Mark makes a valid point that the issue of how a basic income scheme is integrated with the income tax provisions is important.
The advocates for UBI believe as you note that it's the up to the person to decide what they'll do beyond the basic income. In my mind, it'd allow people to pursue their passions in the arts, sports, or whatever or work part time or study (and even today those costs have risen to the point of not being affordable for many.
The premise of "personal responsibility" is a major hurdle with those who believe that all you need to do is get out and work and you'll find living affordable yet there's clearly not enough well paying jobs for everyone to make living wages and unless housing costs come down dramatically, we'll still see people falling into tough times.
I pulled into a rest stop on a trip back to Vancouver near Abbotsford, BC that's has many residents living in trailers and campers with a deadline to get out coming up and these were not the homeless camps we see in the cities. Many had quite nice campers and trailers and when interviewed for TV including working families.
Homelessness and poverty come with many more costs than benefits to all of us as we can see pretty much in city Emergency wards and in our all sizes of cities in the downtown areas.
Unfortunately, like a lot of other divisive issues these days, people on each side of the divide treat individual responsibility as an all or nothing proposition.
Those on the right seem to have forgotten how their success was due in no small part to state/community involvement in education etc., and thinking the beneficial tax rates on capital gains, especially the zero tax on principal residences that has driven their bungalows from the 150K they paid 40 years ago to today’s 1.5M, are a God given entitlement.
The left thinks it’s always 100% the system’s fault when some individual screws up.
The truth is nearly always somewhere in the middle.
I'm going to put this book on my reading list as it is a topic I've grappled with for some time. And I'm sure I'll probably re-think this diatribe after reading it, but for now, the demise of the Left, as I see it, can’t be understood without at the same time looking at the ascendancy of Capital.
One could, I think, credibly argue that the left reached its zenith in the tumultuous 60s and 70s. The civil rights movement, women’s liberation, the fight over the ERA, Vietnam war protests, & the strikes that paralyzed European manufacturing in the 70s all found their source in the foundational ideas of the left. But they were, at best, small victories aided, in part, by a crisis in legitimacy in free markets: high inflation, unemployment, and slower growth. Capital, nevertheless, remained firmly in control, even if shaken, and it responded rather quickly to these new threats. It moved manufacturing to the 3rd world, it expanded offshore tax havens, it welcomed new globalized partners, it created new dodgy financial profiteering tools, and it discovered effective branded messaging. It began to understand that the best way to protect their profiteering was to win the war that was being waged by the Left against its very legitimacy. To that end, it employed anyone and everyone willing to help. From Reagan decrying ‘welfare queens’, to the Moral Majority, to libertarian ideologues, and the usual bad actors, all of it in service of delegitimizing what the Left had until that point won. It bought editorial spaces, created its own TV pundit class, expanded think tanks, and ultimately, created bullshit mills like Fox News. In short, it mounted a massive counter-offensive.
The Left wasn’t just fighting the Company Store anymore. It now had to contend with international behemoths with their own PR apparatus who, in some cases, were bigger than some nations . Workers in the West, already reeling from high inflation, were now pitted against workers willing to work at half their wage. Whatever power they previously had, it was pretty quickly evaporating. And there was simply no answer to that. Over the next 20 years, the wealthy took a bigger share of income and wealth. And they increasingly tilted government legislation as well as public opinion in their favour. Meanwhile western labour’s wages stagnated and repeated attacks on unions further diminished previous gains. There’s a reason why, in many US states, the min wage is still $7.25/hr. The battle, if there was ever one, was effectively over, Capital won.
For its part, the Left has largely maintained its commitment to fair wages, fair taxes, the plight of the poor, better housing, etc. But it has done so from the margins. The landscape had vastly changed and the Left’s weapons of collective bargaining, worker consciousness had been thoroughly nullified. We now live in a world where money is free speech and even pointing out inequities in housing, education, or healthcare invites derision. Save for the Twitter dumpster, nothing, IMO, demonstrates this better than the current folly of ‘woke’. There is now a significant portion of the public, especially those with little or no power, who believe that empathy, inclusion, pluralism, fair tax and wages, anti-racism…even climate change and vaccinations are all bad things. A testament itself to Capital’s victory.
Could the Left have countered all this? I don’t know that it could have. The structural advantages for Capital were too great. Organizing global peoples with disparate needs and conditions, is near impossible, but not so for Capital. It’s reach isn’t degraded by borders, language, culture, race, or religion. Add in the other bad actors put in service like the Christian Right, the racists, the xenophobes, and the other nutty haters and you get a perfect environment for Capital to profit regardless of what a marginalized Left can do.
I think you hit on one of the weaknesses of the book -- which you'll find if you read it. They don't fully grapple with the ascendancy of capital and the challenge it presented. They're right that the left sort of rolled over and went third way, but I'd have liked to see more on the capital rise.
Read this great book a couple of weeks ago, David. Thanks for the excellent review. I cannot add much to what you have said but wanted to mention the trashing they gave to postmodernism and their milder critique of poststructuralism...solid analysis in both cases. The chapter on identity politics also stood out, as it is in this area that the tension between and amongst competing groups and the larger commonweal is so fractious as to seem unresolvable.
Ultimately, their arguments were coherent, solid, convincing... and to me, an old Trotskyite, thoroughly depressing but essential reading.
In my case, age cautions me that change is slow. We college Boomers really thought that the whole world would be turned into peaceful, anti-militarist, pro-social Utopia once we were in charge, we on the other side of the "Generation Gap" from the old, pro-war generation. Everybody was looking at the 10,000 Boomers that marched for civil rights, not so much at the millions that *volunteered* for Vietnam. The Tea Party Generation, age 55-70 in 2010, were also the Woodstock Generation, just the ones not at Woodstock.
A focus on re-unionization - including unionization of people with technician degrees, running the automated factories, unionization of database administrators and security analysts - might be important. Local unions were how the left organized at a low level, were the building blocks of larger, national organizations. When's the last time that a union boss was a household name, a player, like Walter Reuther?
I notice in the article that "left" is sometimes capitalized, sometimes not. What are the rules on reifying "The Left"?
Like "Steve" below...I'm old. But an "old righty". However, my age softens the harder edges of my individualism and self-sufficiency. But Ayn Rand still tinkles in the background. Hence, this article re-introduces the notion of the "left behind" left. What's missing, tho', is the identification of the strong and uniting force necessary to re-energize "a left". I posit that, economically, there is little to no such force.
Yes, we have wide gaps in economic experience. But none so wide as existed in 18th/17th century England. And we have culturally induced societal symptoms like the single parent families that plague so much of the black population.
I do not see the coalessing factor necessory for emergence of a "new left".
At a glance, this seems to be very similar to Chris Hedges’ “Death of the Liberal Class” (2011), a good book, but like a lot of others, blames capitalism rather than the people at the top - of both the political and corporate worlds.
Market capitalism is to money what democracy is to politics. It’s a system that allows individuals to make their own choice. Having those choices limited by those at the top skewing the playing field is not an indictment of the system, it’s an indictment of those people.
Of course it’s easy to blame capitalism when that’s the way it’s been since feudal times, but that’s not the way it has to be.
Interesting read. Thank-you.
I'm going to go on for a bit. Five minute read, if you've got the time...
When I began teaching in 1988 I had to join the teachers union. At first I was baffled by all the attention given to equity, social justice, democratic processes, etc. There was a constant flow of information. Before I was a teacher unions were nothing to me.
But as I got more into it I realized that a main task of the teacher's union, beyond preserving and promoting good teaching practice, was to create a professional association that was representative of the diversity of its members. I watched the process of merging the men's arm of the public teachers union - the OPSTF - with the women's arm - FWTAO. It was a critical step in being more representative of the diversity of teachers within similar working conditions. (We're not all the way there; Catholic Teachers remain in a separate union, as do francophone teachers and Secondary School teachers.)
"Stronger together" was the idea that kept it moving forward. Nowadays, within ETFO organization, as in any union, there are committees that grapple with equity and issues surrounding various cultural or special interest sub-groups within the organization. The ETFO annual general meeting, for me, was a fascinating look into the complexity of a large professional union that was striving to represent all its members.
It was complex, it was not simple, it took a lot of work, and it was maddening to repeatedly deal with governments that would try to work against the union for political reasons. The fact that all teachers were not working in a single union made it frustrating. I've seen the Divide and Conquer strategy used against groups many times. I worked through all three parties NDP, Liberal, and PC -- in one way or another the gov't would end up looking to the teachers for concessions.
Withdrawing my labour was never anything I thought about seriously, until through my union community I saw my fellow workers in a different light. It didn't matter who they were or their background, or even their political beliefs; what mattered was we are in this together and we will stand up for our working situation - together.
Back to your article. If we can figure out how to create a bigger umbrella to represent working people from all sectors and professions, from all cultural mixes, I would say it is possible. But it will take a lot of effort! There will need to be an entirely new message and new approach, as alluded to in your article.
Where are the strong leaders who can prepare and inspire and lead the way, and where is the possibility of a political party ever wrapping its head around this challenge?
That is a question I ask myself every day.
The questions posed need to drive policy proposals yet in today's climate of rage, instant judgment and rise of right wing populism, policy advocacy is taking a back seat.
However, there are groups in Canada that promote a fairer society with ideas that can form the basis for economic justice. Generation Squeeze, UBI Works, Centre for the Future of Work, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives to name a few but other than snippets on TV, the very people who could benefit from initiatives don't get involved.
All these groups get little traction or they lead with ideas like tax the value of the home that strike fear in the hearts of homeowners who've lived in the same bungalow since the 70s in cities like Vancouver where the property values due to scarcity have massively increased with no fault of their own.
When I mention to people well off like myself that a guaranteed basic income is needed, all I hear is it will produce lazy people or more drug addicts despite studies showing its not true but it will give youth a leg up on paying for education or pursuing their life's interests and passions with the goal of reducing poverty and stopping the flow into homelessness.
A key for me is that you can never solve problems unless you understand the underlying issues and how we got to where we are in Canada where younger generations pay more in tax collectively than prior generations.
While it's true for many that hard work will stay get you to success, the reality that with housing costs relative to incomes, the young middle income earners will continue to struggle as no one foresaw the day when incomes wouldn't keep pace with housing costs.
The decline in union power globally corresponds nicely with the flatlining of real income growth combined with the freer movement of labour and capital to low cost countries.
The irony of the attacks on the federal government in Canada is that the Liberal Party policy conventions and MPs believe in a basic income but currently it'd be a tough sell right now. It will require a strong NDP to promote that.
The political discourse right now is rage and foreign interference. Ironically, foreign actors who want to disturb and disrupt western democracies can take a break now in Canada as we're doing it to ourselves.
There are appearances on TV at times with those with bold forward thinking ideas yet it's like trying to start an old gas lawn mower where it sputters but never starts. Amanda Lang on Taking Stock did a show on income levels recently yet after 30 minutes it's gone. The wrong stuff hits the news and gets legs.
I agree a basic income is needed, but unlike everyone else advocating for it, I believe it should NOT be a liveable income, but rather about half a liveable income - for a single at least, a higher percentage is more appropriate when children are involved, or the recipient is disabled or a senior. This leaves some personal responsibility with the recipient while not bankrupting the government.
The problem with any basic income is how it is integrated into taxation, because clawing back a basic income as income rises is going to combine with regular tax rates to produce a combined marginal rate that would make any top income earner squeal. Combined marginal rates for tax, tax credit and welfare clawbacks are already over 80% for some income ranges.
But, integrating half a liveable basic income - ballpark 10K per year for a single, and clawing it back at 40% until you get to income of 25K where you start paying tax, is quite do-able fiscally. (Clearly the current 15K basic personal amount needs to be increased to that same 25K.)
Mark makes a valid point that the issue of how a basic income scheme is integrated with the income tax provisions is important.
The advocates for UBI believe as you note that it's the up to the person to decide what they'll do beyond the basic income. In my mind, it'd allow people to pursue their passions in the arts, sports, or whatever or work part time or study (and even today those costs have risen to the point of not being affordable for many.
The premise of "personal responsibility" is a major hurdle with those who believe that all you need to do is get out and work and you'll find living affordable yet there's clearly not enough well paying jobs for everyone to make living wages and unless housing costs come down dramatically, we'll still see people falling into tough times.
I pulled into a rest stop on a trip back to Vancouver near Abbotsford, BC that's has many residents living in trailers and campers with a deadline to get out coming up and these were not the homeless camps we see in the cities. Many had quite nice campers and trailers and when interviewed for TV including working families.
Homelessness and poverty come with many more costs than benefits to all of us as we can see pretty much in city Emergency wards and in our all sizes of cities in the downtown areas.
Unfortunately, like a lot of other divisive issues these days, people on each side of the divide treat individual responsibility as an all or nothing proposition.
Those on the right seem to have forgotten how their success was due in no small part to state/community involvement in education etc., and thinking the beneficial tax rates on capital gains, especially the zero tax on principal residences that has driven their bungalows from the 150K they paid 40 years ago to today’s 1.5M, are a God given entitlement.
The left thinks it’s always 100% the system’s fault when some individual screws up.
The truth is nearly always somewhere in the middle.
I'm going to put this book on my reading list as it is a topic I've grappled with for some time. And I'm sure I'll probably re-think this diatribe after reading it, but for now, the demise of the Left, as I see it, can’t be understood without at the same time looking at the ascendancy of Capital.
One could, I think, credibly argue that the left reached its zenith in the tumultuous 60s and 70s. The civil rights movement, women’s liberation, the fight over the ERA, Vietnam war protests, & the strikes that paralyzed European manufacturing in the 70s all found their source in the foundational ideas of the left. But they were, at best, small victories aided, in part, by a crisis in legitimacy in free markets: high inflation, unemployment, and slower growth. Capital, nevertheless, remained firmly in control, even if shaken, and it responded rather quickly to these new threats. It moved manufacturing to the 3rd world, it expanded offshore tax havens, it welcomed new globalized partners, it created new dodgy financial profiteering tools, and it discovered effective branded messaging. It began to understand that the best way to protect their profiteering was to win the war that was being waged by the Left against its very legitimacy. To that end, it employed anyone and everyone willing to help. From Reagan decrying ‘welfare queens’, to the Moral Majority, to libertarian ideologues, and the usual bad actors, all of it in service of delegitimizing what the Left had until that point won. It bought editorial spaces, created its own TV pundit class, expanded think tanks, and ultimately, created bullshit mills like Fox News. In short, it mounted a massive counter-offensive.
The Left wasn’t just fighting the Company Store anymore. It now had to contend with international behemoths with their own PR apparatus who, in some cases, were bigger than some nations . Workers in the West, already reeling from high inflation, were now pitted against workers willing to work at half their wage. Whatever power they previously had, it was pretty quickly evaporating. And there was simply no answer to that. Over the next 20 years, the wealthy took a bigger share of income and wealth. And they increasingly tilted government legislation as well as public opinion in their favour. Meanwhile western labour’s wages stagnated and repeated attacks on unions further diminished previous gains. There’s a reason why, in many US states, the min wage is still $7.25/hr. The battle, if there was ever one, was effectively over, Capital won.
For its part, the Left has largely maintained its commitment to fair wages, fair taxes, the plight of the poor, better housing, etc. But it has done so from the margins. The landscape had vastly changed and the Left’s weapons of collective bargaining, worker consciousness had been thoroughly nullified. We now live in a world where money is free speech and even pointing out inequities in housing, education, or healthcare invites derision. Save for the Twitter dumpster, nothing, IMO, demonstrates this better than the current folly of ‘woke’. There is now a significant portion of the public, especially those with little or no power, who believe that empathy, inclusion, pluralism, fair tax and wages, anti-racism…even climate change and vaccinations are all bad things. A testament itself to Capital’s victory.
Could the Left have countered all this? I don’t know that it could have. The structural advantages for Capital were too great. Organizing global peoples with disparate needs and conditions, is near impossible, but not so for Capital. It’s reach isn’t degraded by borders, language, culture, race, or religion. Add in the other bad actors put in service like the Christian Right, the racists, the xenophobes, and the other nutty haters and you get a perfect environment for Capital to profit regardless of what a marginalized Left can do.
I think you hit on one of the weaknesses of the book -- which you'll find if you read it. They don't fully grapple with the ascendancy of capital and the challenge it presented. They're right that the left sort of rolled over and went third way, but I'd have liked to see more on the capital rise.
Read this great book a couple of weeks ago, David. Thanks for the excellent review. I cannot add much to what you have said but wanted to mention the trashing they gave to postmodernism and their milder critique of poststructuralism...solid analysis in both cases. The chapter on identity politics also stood out, as it is in this area that the tension between and amongst competing groups and the larger commonweal is so fractious as to seem unresolvable.
Ultimately, their arguments were coherent, solid, convincing... and to me, an old Trotskyite, thoroughly depressing but essential reading.
Thank you!
Good review, thanks! I also though an opportunity was missed by ‘the left’ post-GFC. Adding this book to my reading list.
Thank you!
In my case, age cautions me that change is slow. We college Boomers really thought that the whole world would be turned into peaceful, anti-militarist, pro-social Utopia once we were in charge, we on the other side of the "Generation Gap" from the old, pro-war generation. Everybody was looking at the 10,000 Boomers that marched for civil rights, not so much at the millions that *volunteered* for Vietnam. The Tea Party Generation, age 55-70 in 2010, were also the Woodstock Generation, just the ones not at Woodstock.
A focus on re-unionization - including unionization of people with technician degrees, running the automated factories, unionization of database administrators and security analysts - might be important. Local unions were how the left organized at a low level, were the building blocks of larger, national organizations. When's the last time that a union boss was a household name, a player, like Walter Reuther?
I notice in the article that "left" is sometimes capitalized, sometimes not. What are the rules on reifying "The Left"?
Re: the Left/left, I capitalize when talking about the broader movement, but it's possible the lower case was an error.
Like "Steve" below...I'm old. But an "old righty". However, my age softens the harder edges of my individualism and self-sufficiency. But Ayn Rand still tinkles in the background. Hence, this article re-introduces the notion of the "left behind" left. What's missing, tho', is the identification of the strong and uniting force necessary to re-energize "a left". I posit that, economically, there is little to no such force.
Yes, we have wide gaps in economic experience. But none so wide as existed in 18th/17th century England. And we have culturally induced societal symptoms like the single parent families that plague so much of the black population.
I do not see the coalessing factor necessory for emergence of a "new left".
Forwarded this on to my soon to be 18-year old. We must engage the youth.
A fascinating topic for as an old 'lefty.' Thank you.
At a glance, this seems to be very similar to Chris Hedges’ “Death of the Liberal Class” (2011), a good book, but like a lot of others, blames capitalism rather than the people at the top - of both the political and corporate worlds.
Market capitalism is to money what democracy is to politics. It’s a system that allows individuals to make their own choice. Having those choices limited by those at the top skewing the playing field is not an indictment of the system, it’s an indictment of those people.
Of course it’s easy to blame capitalism when that’s the way it’s been since feudal times, but that’s not the way it has to be.