The Red Review | Issue #8 (April 2024)
The Red Review | Issue #8 (April 2024)
Editor: Gary Porter
Managing Editor: Yener Kara
Federal Secretary: Barry Weisleder
Editorial - Against all odds, the first step has been taken towards Canada getting universal pharmacare
But the pharmacare step is very fragile and has many powerful enemies. There will be a war against it by corporate actors and capitalist politicians to impede any further progress.
Just a year ago, it seemed almost certain that the Liberals would cave to corporate pressure and abandon the promise of universal pharmacare, despite its immense popularity.
But this week, the tide seems finally, to have turned in favour of working people— with the introduction of a pharmacare bill that defies decades of industry pushback.
Back in 2023, stunning reports had revealed the health minister was colluding with Big Pharma to halt reforms that could have saved Canadians billions in drug costs. Then, a string of high-profile resignations at the drug price regulator underlined the excessive industry influence over Health Canada’s decisions.
Trudeau's Online Harms Act (Bill C-63) Threatens Civil Rights in Canada
By John Wilson
On February 26th, the federal government tabled Bill C63 (also known as the Online Harms Act) in parliament. At 100 pages, this verbose, imprecise proposed legislation has so far not resulted in much general public discussion, but it should. All of us who support freedom of speech and other democratic rights should be urgently concerned about the dangerous threats this bill contains. This Bill comes from the same government that imposed the Emergencies Act to deal with the illegal occupation of downtown Ottawa by the so-called Freedom Convoy, to cover up the almost total inaction of state agencies (very much including the Ottawa police, the federal government and the Ontario provincial regime), on this issue.
NDP Breaks Ground in Parliament Against Full Throated Support of Israeli Crimes by Liberals and Tories
By Yves Engler
I’m loath to congratulate the NDP for any step they take to lessen Canadian complicity in Israel’s violence since Jagmeet Singh’s Palestine policy swings wildly based on backlash. But the reaction of some Palestine solidarity voices to the social democratic party’s call for an arms embargo, recognition of Palestine, funding of UNRWA etc. misses the big picture.
In response to Monday’s opposition day motion the opinion editor at The Maple Davide Mastracci posted to X, “Once again, the NDP has wasted our time.” He linked to a statement showing how the NDP had accepted Liberal demands to water down an already weak resolution. Be that as it may, the motion is a step forward in upending Canadian complicity in Israeli colonialism and violence.
The opposition day motion was the first ever focused on Canadian policy towards Palestine/Israel. Supposed to be debated March 1, the NDP (cowardly) agreed to postpone it after former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s death. This gave Palestine solidarity groups time to flood MPs emails, even propelling the NDP leader to put out a video calling on people to “fill Justin Trudeau’s inbox” in support of it.
Buried trial verdict confirms false-flag Maidan massacre in Ukraine
Ivan Katchanovski* / February 20, 2024 - First published at Canadian Dimension
Ukrainian-Canadian political scientist and professor Ivan Katchanovski on the hidden origins of the Russia-Ukraine war
A nearly one-million-word verdict from Ukraine’s Maidan massacre trial has recently confirmed that many Maidan activists were shot not by members of Ukraine’s Berkut special police force or other law enforcement personnel but by snipers in the far-right-controlled Hotel Ukraina and other Maidan-controlled locations a decade ago today. The verdict, handed down on October 18, 2023, states specifically that this hotel was controlled by Maidan activists and that an armed, far-right-linked Maidan group was in the hotel and fired from it. It also confirms that there was no Russian involvement in the massacre and that no massacre orders were issued by then President Viktor Yanukovych or his ministers. The verdict concludes that the Euromaidan was at the time of this massacre not a peaceful protest but a “rebellion” that involved the killing of Berkut and other police personnel.
This is an important official acknowledgement, not only because the violence represented the most significant case of mass murder, violent crime, and human rights violations in independent Ukraine to that point, but also because of the subsequent conflicts to which it has led or contributed. Notably, the massacre precipitated the violent overthrow of Yanukovych and his government, who were falsely blamed for carrying it out. It then spiralled into the Russian annexation of Crimea, the subsequent civil war and Russian interventions in the Donbas, and the conflicts between Ukraine and Russia, and between Russia and the Western powers, which Russia dramatically escalated with its illegal invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
Chinese Communist Party: a party of workers or capitalists?
By Michael Roberts
It’s 100 years today since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was first formed by just 50 members, mostly intellectuals, but including railway and mine workers. 100 years later to the day, the official membership figure is 95m and there are 4.8m party branches. This is surely the largest political party the world has ever seen. A quarter of the membership is under 35 years; 29% are female, up from 12% in 1949 and over half of members have college degrees (that means half don’t!).
In 2021, is the CCP a party of, and for capitalists or, of, and for workers? The short answer is that it is neither. But the long answer is more complex.
The CCP was led at first by two intellectuals, Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, with the help of the Communist International (Comintern). These leaders saw the CCP as the party for the Chinese working-class (tiny as that was), modelled on the Bolshevik party in the Soviet Union. For them, the working-class was the agent of change and revolution in China, not the peasantry that constituted 90% of the population. Nevertheless, the CCP did lead various peasant movements in 1925-27 period.
Do Canadian Workers have Revolutionary Potential? A Defence of the Working Class
By Gary Porter
Marxism : According to Karl Marx (1818-1883), human beings are naturally productive, sociable beings who find fulfillment and meaning in their lives through the free exercise of their natural powers. They fulfill themselves through their creations, so that what they make is an expression of who they are. This is why he described the seizure by capitalists of the products of our labour, which are an expression of who we are, as alienation. A dispiriting and dissipating separation of our creation from ourselves. This is the source of so much mental illness, anxiety, depression and ruined unfulfilled lives under capitalism and a form of mental, physical and spiritual violence that capitalist production imposes on all of us. Socialism will end all that and make all of us whole again.
My purpose here is to take on the doubters and the cynics, the middle-class layers, the academics, the petit bourgeois currents among students and young radicals, the labour bureaucrats and NDP brass. None of these believe the Canadian working class can make a revolution and overthrow capitalism in Canada.
Our lives and our work in Socialist Action are based in the proposition that they are all wrong. That is what I am talking about here.
Russia was 80% rural in 1917, mostly peasants. The army was huge because World War I was in progress, and overwhelmingly peasant based. In spite of this, the workers led the entire country not merely to an overthrow of the Tsar but to a workers’ government on the way to a workers’ state. The workers, constituting about 18% of the population, led the struggle, won over the peasants and even the peasant-based army, isolated the bourgeoisie and won. How could this happen?
Who Loves the Legacy of Brian Mulroney?
by Barry Weisleder - March 18, 2024
Justin Trudeau, Jean Chretien, Pierre Poilievre and Jagmeet Singh echoed media moguls in saying that they admire the record of Canada’s 18th prime minister, Brian Mulroney, who died on February 29, 2024 at the age of 84. This is more than a matter of expressing apt condolences to the family and friends of the departed one. It is the embrace of a political legacy that, from the standpoint of the working class, is utterly deplorable.
Mulroney, diplomatically touted as a highly “consequential” PM, left the vast majority of people in the Canadian state robbed of wealth and weakened in the face of the corporate agenda to which Mulroney was utterly devoted. The lad of humble roots from the small resource town of Baie-Comeau, Quebec scrambled to make himself a career as a lawyer, as Iron Ore Corp. president (where he earned his anti-labour credentials), and as leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada.
Ukraine, 10 Years After the Reactionary Illegal Coup
Situation report from Ukraine by Dmitri Kovalevich, in A Socialist In Canada, March 1, 2024
(Dmitri Kovalevich is the special correspondent in Ukraine for Al Mayadeen English, where this report first appeared on March 1, 2024. You can read or download this report here in pdf format: Two years of the Russian military operation in Ukraine)
The end of February 2024 marks the tenth anniversary of the pro-Western coup in Kiev, Ukraine that overthrew the country’s elected president and legislature. It is also the second anniversary of Russia’s entry into the civil conflict in Ukraine that has raged ever since the 2014 coup. Russia’s ‘Special Military Operation’, as the Russian government and people call it, is a direct consequence of the coup and the deep divisions in Ukrainian society that the coup brought to the fore and deepened.
The main trigger of the coup was the violent overthrow of the elected president of Ukraine and, shortly after, its elected legislature. The coup touched off a violent and unrelenting ideological and institutional drive to suppress the multinational character of Ukraine, as inherited from the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the decades of progress and development during Soviet Ukraine before and after World War Two. All things ‘Russian’ were henceforth targets for elimination by an emboldened Ukrainian ultranationalism on the march.
Foreign dominance crumbles in Haiti as popular forces assert control
Analysis by Steve Lalla, first published in Orinico Tribune, March 13, 2024
With the resignation of Haiti’s ‘prime minister’ Ariel Henry, the U.S. has suffered another humiliating foreign policy defeat. Though never elected, Henry was encouraged by the United States and the ‘Core Group’ of foreign powers dominating Haiti to seize power in July 2021. This, then, sparked a prolonged popular revolt that never recognized his legitimacy.
The ‘Core Group’ is a shadowy imperialist cabal composed of representatives from the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Spain, the European Union, Brazil, and the Organization of American States (OAS). The cabal has attempted to run Haiti since 2004 when the democratically elected and hugely popular president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the government he led were overthrown in a paramilitary coup with essential backing from the U.S., France and Canada. Aristide was abducted in the middle of the night by U.S. marines and flown to the Central African Republic. He was only able to return to the country in March 2011, and only as a private citizen.