[Marxism] Forwarded from Eugene

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(trimmed because of excessive length)

well well isnt this interesting, I found this at the Canadian Dimension
site....Labour Historian and activist Bryan Palmer addressed the AFL at
their biannual members meeting in May. Here is his analysis of the
failure of unions under state capitalism in Canada... eugene

System Failure: The Break-Down of the Post-War Settlement and the
Politics of Labour in our Time

by Bryan Palmer

Text of the keynote speech delivered by Professor Bryan Palmer on May 7
at the Alberta Federation of Labour membership forum

I want to start by thanking Kerry Barrett, Jim Selby and the Alberta
Federation of Labour for inviting me here to speak. It represents
something of a pardon from a wing of the official House of Labor. The
last time I spoke to a provincial Federation of Labour body was more
than 20 years ago. After the Solidarity debacle in British Columbia in
1983, I was a severe critic of labour officialdom, and for my crime I
was exiled to the margins of the workers' movement, where I have been
toiling as a labour historian, and still fairly persistent critic of
elements of the trade union hierarchy. So I am honoured and delighted to
be welcomed by you tonight. But I do not want to begin under false
pretenses. Were I in British Columbia today, I would, of course be a
repeat offender, for what has happened with the recent termination of
the hospital workers' heroic struggle, and the widespread support of the
trade union movement, which threatened a General Strike against the
Campbell government's retrograde actions, is unacceptable. Union
officials and the head of the B.C. Federation of Labour, who ended this
battle in such an abrupt way and on terms which secured the working
class so little when so much more could have been won, have dealt all of
Canadian labour, including their own militant ranks, a severe blow, one
all the more devastating because it comes from those who should be
leading rather than capitulating.

This of course is not the usual assessment in the academic milieu from
which I come. Most academics speak loudly of class struggle in their
writings, especially if they are about the past, but excuse trade union
leaders almost anything, retreating into rationalizations of how the
ranks of workers' organizations are divided, unprepared for
confrontations with capital and the state, and reluctant to sacrifice
for a better society. I adhere to other views, and ones that can be
located in the history of Canadian class struggle. When W.A. Pritchard
addressed the jury in a 1919-1920 state trial, in which he and others
involved in the Winnipeg General Strike were charged with seditious
conspiracy, he articulated a sense of possibility concerning the
Canadian working class and its relation to international developments
and concerns:

Reason, wisdom, intelligence, forces of the minds and heart, whom I have
always devoutly invoked, come to me, aid me, sustain my feeble voice,
carry it, if that may be, to all peoples of the world and diffuse it
everywhere where there are men of good will to hear the beneficent
truth. A new order of things is born, the powers of evil die poisoned by
their crime. The greedy and the cruel, the devourers of people, are
bursting with an indigestion of blood. However sorely stricken by the
sins of their blind or corrupt masters, mutilated, decimated, the
proletarians remain erect; they will unite to form one universal
proletariat and we shall see fulfilled the great Socialist prophecy:
"The Union of the workers will be the peace of the world."

full: http://www.canadiandimension.mb.ca/extra/d0609bp.htm


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