John Clarke, former major organizer for the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), posted on Facebook about a week ago the following:
I’ve been asked to write a review of Éric Toussaint’s latest work on the World Bank. It exposes very well the role of this vile institution. People can do dreadful things in haste or anger but the most powerful people on this planet spend decades hatching and deliberating implementing plans that ensure maximum profits at the cost of death, misery and degradation of the natural world.I don’t see how anyone can have before them the evidence of how global capitalism functions and imagine that incremental change is possible. We live at a time when the choice between socialism or barbarism is more stark and urgent than it has ever been.
Clarke forgets that he too, just a few years ago, also implicitly believed in “incremental change.” See, for example, Basic Income: A Critique of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty’s Stance and “Capitalism needs economic coercion for its job market to function” (Ontario Coalition Against Poverty: OCAP)).
The radical left should never forget the extent to which social reformism has been the predominant “leftist” agenda of both the union movement and the political movement of parties connected to the union movement (such as the New Democratic Party (NDP) here in Canada. Given this fact, the radical left needs to engage in simultaneous criticism of the class of employers and the criticism of reformist tendencies within the union movement and within political parties; neither should be indulged in but be subject to radical critique.
Clarke, by forgetting that he too implicitly advocated an incremental approach not too long ago, will probably be too indulgent of the social-reformist or social-democratic left. Such indulgence, however, has contributed to the economic and political situation in which we now live.
Of course, being part of the radical left does not just include criticizing abstractly the class of employers and the social-reformist left. It also involves the criticism, when one works for an employer, of one’s own employer and not just other’s employers. If workers are to develop a movement that is capable of both challenging the class power of employers and creating a society without employers, they will have to engage in activities that threaten their own livelihood. After all, there are objective conditions for realizing any aim, and one of the objective conditions for the overcoming of the class power of employers is to challenge workers’ own employers.
How many so-called radical leftists, though, actually do ever engage in such activities or are willing to do so? If they do not or are not willing to, then they are armchair radical leftists–nothing more.
Clarke, even in his reformist stage, was undoubtedly superior to such armchair radicals; he was willing at least to place his own life in jeopardy in order to challenge those with power.
The Abolitionary 