(The following article is from the December 1-31, 2007 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.

By Sam Hammond, chair of the Central Trade Union Commission, Communist Party of Canada

The disputes raging around the CAW-Magna deal have sparked a deeper debate over the right to strike. This article will review the debate from a Marxist perspective.

     The point is made by some that thousands of workers have improved their lives without the right to strike. Many unionized health care workers in Ontario and elsewhere have been legislated out of the right to strike, yet have managed through collective bargaining or arbitration to improve wages and working conditions. How can a Marxist explain this?

     Some also express an opinion that the strike weapon is unrealistic in the present environment, calling for putting "new thinking" into the equation.

     The majority of commentators have expressed alarm and insist the right to withdraw labour is fundamental and must be protected at all costs. They are correct, but why?

     It is possible, but unscientific, to start with a conclusion - the right to strike is sacred - and then find the evidence to support it. The truth of the matter is that we have never had a complete right to strike. The right to strike in Canada is qualified in every collective agreement. The historic trade-off between representatives of capital and the organized working class is the presence in collective agreements of a standard "no strike/no lockout" clause for the duration of the agreement.

     This condition was won by militant and vicious strike struggles. The "no strike/no lockout" provision is a step in a staircase, which from a left point of view was not supposed to end there.

     Of course unorganized workers who withdraw their labour are subject to unchecked retribution from the bosses. Organized workers who violate the terms of a collective agreement by withdrawing their collective labour - the strike weapon unsheathed - are invariably at odds with the law. But, these wildcat strikes are not uncommon in Canadian history.

     Looking at the environment subjectively will inevitably lead one to adjust to tide and flow, to survive for the moment, the day, the year or until the next contract. This view of the world doesn't require an understanding of where the road began or where it leads. The issue is not really whether we have the right to strike, but at what level we have it, and whether or not it should be expanded or given up as a negotiating point in exchange for some kind of real or imagined benefit.

     Nothing in the universe or in human social development is at an absolute state of rest. Phenomena develop from the simple to the complex. Marxists base their scientific world outlook on studying the objective conditions of social being, seeking to discover the laws that govern development, the relations between quantitative and qualitative change, and antagonistic and non-antagonistic opposites. The Marxist world view known as Historical Materialism sees the class struggle as the interaction of antagonistic opposites in exploiting society, where the victory of one over the other leads to qualitative change, a revolutionary leap forward or a counter-revolution, a setback.

     History does not stop. Struggle and change do not cease. Ever since the development of class society that progressed through slavery, feudalism and capitalism, antagonistic class relations have determined the state of our social being and determined who and what we are, slave or slave-owner, serf or landowner, worker or capitalist. There are strata that straddle classes or operate transiently around them, but our social identity is the product of the relations between workers and capitalists, and the level of our social and political consciousness can be measured by how close our subjective understanding is to the objective reality that exists.

     Ever since capitalism reached its highest and last stage, imperialism, its ideologues and its ruling classes - because they can see the gates of the graveyard on the horizon - have tried to slow down the objective social processes that will inevitably lead to their funeral pyre.

     Their weapons include military, economic and legal and social means. Our weapons are our ideology, our working class parties and the strike weapon. But bo matter how aggressive the tactics of the ruling classes appear, they are defensive in nature.

     Their own economic cannibalism makes it very difficult to sustain control, and the cost of an ever demanding military apparatus so necessary to their existence becomes a component in their economic nightmare.

     Therefore they must use or manipulate every organ of state power, media, educational institutions, labour law, workplace control, parliamentary parties, false ideology, etc., to try and control, to slow down the rise of social class consciousness in the exploited class.

     If the social class consciousness of the working class matches the objective reality of their social being, in the ensuing sunburst of cognizance it will become obvious that the capitalist class cannot exist without us but we can exist much better in a better environment without them.

     It will be obvious, as clear as the right to private property, that we possess the only thing that if taken away can destroy them, our labour. The will and ability to do this is the most dangerous threat to the ruling class and our most important asset.

     It is enshrined in the working class and organized labour as the right to strike, a legal and political right we have won only partially in industrial society, more in some states less in others, never completely.

     The struggle to control our own labour is the most fundamental democratic and social struggle we take part in. Therein lies the ability to defend, the ability to negotiate social conditions, the ability to protect our families, the ability to secure a greater share of the wealth we produce and the ability to act in solidarity with our brothers and sisters internationally.

     To those who support capitalism, those who do not care as long as they can survive amidst carnage and suffering and to those who are just socially-historically ignorant, the right to strike qualified or not, is not important.

     But there are those of us, whatever we call ourselves, who live to make real that vision of a better world, who feel anger at the conditions of ours and others lives, who resent dangling at the end of the precarious thread of capitalist greed, who are internationalists and emancipators.

     We are the left and we will fight for control of our labour until the negation of exploiting capitalism and the transition to socialism. The fight for the right to strike, to withdraw our collective labour is the defining point of where we measure up in the struggle for emancipation and social justice.

     Suffering is an inherent state of existence for the exploited classes throughout history. It is relative and can be eased by militant struggle, but a rest is not a holiday, and respite is not liberation. The fact of the matter is that both are worth fighting for, and the short term is a component of the larger vision. Struggle teaches method, and method requires, in the social sense, social weapons. To those who would disarm us we can very justly ask: which side are you on?

Found at: https://peoplesvoice.ca/articleprint08/03__THE_STRIKE_WEAPON_-_NECESSARY_OR.html