Introduction
I thought it would be interesting to see if one of the candidates for leadership of the Canadian federal New Democratic Party (a social-reformist party) expresses similar cliches as many of the Canadian unions–especially now (see Fair Wages: Another Example of the Ideological Rhetoric of Canadian Unions, Part Three: The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) or Another Abstract Slogan or Cliche of Unions: Employers or Corporations Paying Their Fair Share of Taxes, Part Two: The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) that the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), the largest Canadian union, has endorsed him for leader.
Lewis offers typical cliches of such unions as CUPE without addressing the necessary exploitation and oppression of workers in the context of most workers having to work for an employer. In effect, his aim is to humanize capitalism and roll back history to immediately after the Second World War, when workers were armed and organized and capital had been destroyed massively–the aim of many social reformers. Conditions, however, are hardly the same now, with workers experiencing often enough economic and political crises.
Most of the bolded words are my emphases.
Evidence of Lewis’ Use of Reformist Cliches
- From [no date] (https://lewisforleader.ca/ideas/dignified-work-full-plan):
Our campaign’s five-point plan for Dignified Work in a Digital Age offers real solutions to both the old and new problems facing workers—this is a roadmap to give workers more power, security and control over their lives:
Workplace Democracy & the Right to Strike
Our Humans-First AI Policy
Defend Workers’ Rights
Employment Insurance that Works
Justice for Migrant Workers, Immigrants and Refugees
Lewis is typical of many social reformers. He does not provide an objective assessment of the necessary situation of workers in a society characterized by the class power of employers. Worker in such a society are means to ends not defined by them–necessarily (see The Money Circuit of Capital). He assumes, without proving it, that workers can somehow achieve “dignity” when workers are employees, dependent economically on employers and often fearing being unemployed. He never addresses how workers can achieve dignity in such a situation.
2. From the same site:
Among the crises we face today, few are as urgent as the loss of fair and secure work. Our campaign’s five-point plan offers real solutions to the problems facing workers in Canada. …
An Avi-led NDP would:
–Support Gig and Tech Workers. Guarantee labour protections, collective bargaining rights, and fair wages for creators, platform workers, and digital labourers.
CUPE uses the same cliche of “fair wages” (see the link above). Can wages ever be fair when the employment relation is necessarily characterized by exploitation and oppression? Wages involve payment for subordination of workers’ wills to the will of employers. In the case of all private-sector workers, at least, work does not just involve oppression but also exploitation (for some examples, see The Rate of Exploitation of General Motors Workers and The Rate of Exploitation of Workers at Maple Leaf Foods, Or: How Unionized Jobs Are Not Decent or Good Jobs). Lewis simply relies on the cliche without showing how fair wages is possible in the social situation in which workers find themselves, day in and day out.
What does Lewis mean by “fair wages?” He implies that fair wages consist of “Full-time jobs with benefits and pensions are being replaced by temporary, contract, or part-time work.” Essentially, unionized jobs or jobs where the existence of unions have resulted in employers providing full-time jobs, benefits and pensions in order to retain employees. Unionized jobs hardly convert “wages” into fair wages because unionized jobs only limit the power of employers to exploit workers–not prevent such exploitation. Indeed, if unions did prevent employers from exploiting workers, employers would not exist since the material basis of the existence of employers is the exploitation of workers.
3. From the same document:
We can end the exploitation that temporary immigration breeds. We can build a country with one set of rights for everyone.
The above quote implies that non-temporary regular workers are not exploited. If all workers have the same rights, it implies, then exploitation will come to an end. Such a conclusion is reinforced by the explicit reference to exploitation in the following paragraph:
- End exploitation by eliminating work permit restrictions that give employers extreme power over workers and control over their whole lives. No more permits tied to a single employer or limits based on sector, hours, occupation, or category; Build a single-tier immigration system with permanent resident status for all and equal rights from day one; Create and enforce real housing standards for migrant workers—clean water, locks on doors, cooling during heatwaves. No more cramped, unsafe, and overpriced housing; Sign the UN and ILO conventions protecting migrant workers’ rights and make Canada follow international law on worker protections.
This view feeds workers’ illusions that they are not exploited.
4. From (https://lewisforleader.ca/):
We can build a Canada based on care instead of greed, but only if we do it together. Let’s win a government that serves the many, not the money.”
As long as work is governed by the class power of employers and subject to the money circuit of capital (a.k.a. greed as the motive–although it is much more than that–a structural process that forces employers to act as they do on pain of ceasing to exist), such a government cannot, even if it wants to, “serve the many.” Such a view creates the illusion among workers that they can achieve the impossible of converting a government subject to the dictates of capital accumulation and its associated exploitation and oppression into “a government that serves the many.” Lewis assumes that the government is somehow “neutral” and can serve the many, but even after the end of the Second World War–the “golden age” of socail democracy and social reformism–workers were exploited and oppressed.
5. Lewis seems to have a solution to the issue: worker cooperatives. From the first document sited:
Workplace Democracy & the Right to Strike
Extending democracy into the workplace means making it easier for workers to join unions, giving them a voice and protection on the job, and defending the right to strike that the current federal government has trampled on repeatedly in recent years.It also means expanding worker ownership in Canada. We know this model works. The Mondragón Corporation is a Spanish federation of 90+ worker co-ops, employing over 80,000 people in manufacturing, finance, and retail in the Basque Country, and proving global competitiveness under worker ownership.
This is especially important given how workers are being left at the mercy of big corporations. At the CAMI Plant in Ingersoll in December 2025, General Motors stopped production of electric cargo vans and laid off 1,100 workers. And just before Christmas this year, Algoma Steel in Sault Ste Marie announced 1,000 layoffs, after receiving hundreds of millions in corporate welfare.
The federal government acts like they’re powerless in the face of these layoffs and shutdowns, but they’re not. We cannot allow workers, their families and entire communities to be thrown on to the scrap heap by CEOs who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Here’s how an Avi-led NDP would democratize the workplace and save plants from closing:
Create a National Worker Ownership Fund to help employees buy out businesses when owners retire, sell, or relocate.
Pass Right of First Refusal legislation giving workers the first chance to purchase their workplace when the boss walks away.Provide low-interest financing and technical support for worker co-ops, especially in manufacturing, tech, and services.
This proposal is interesting in that Lewis refers to “fair wages” and “dignity,” but the proposal implies that working for an employer is unfair and undignified. Why else try to develop worker cooperatives? If it is possible that working for an employer is dignified and wages are fair, why then propose cooperatives. This proposal, in practice, would probably own be applied in limited cases to employers who close shop–certainly an improvement over no such provisions, but it hardly addresses the daily exploitation and oppression.
Lewis’ proposal of “worker democracy” in the context of a world characterized by global competition and exploitation seems to look toward an eventual taking over of the economy by workers through–their self-exploitation–what Lewis calls “worker democracy.”
Lewis does not even consider the fact that workers who work at particular companies, even if they own them, are disconnected from the workers in other companies, and such disconnection still results in the performance of abstract labour, the production of value and the need to produce surplus value and hence the need for exploitation. Workers who do not meet the challenge of the worker cooperative engaging in exploitation sufficiently will go bankrupt, just like any capitalist employer. This “gradual” approach to “worker democracy” never would touch the structural problem of performing labour that is not social while it is being performed.
John O’Neill (1991) has some interesting things to say on that score. From “Exploitation and Workers’ Co-operatives: a reply to Alan Carter,” in pages 231-235, Journal of Applied Philosophy, Volume 8, Number 2, pages 233-234:
… institutions can act as ‘persons’ or ‘agents’. Institutions can act as persons oragents in owning property; they can in virtue of this be the subject of liabilities for damages. Similarly, institutions can act as exploiting agents. Within existing capitalism,institutional exploitation is already becoming the dominant form of exploitation: the surplus extracted from workers is transferred not to individual capitalists, but to institutions such as pension funds and insurance companies. Applying this to the case of workers’
co-operatives, while no individual within the co-operative can exploit him
or herself—that, indeed, would be self-contradictory—the institution, the workers’ cooperative, can exploit its employees in the standard Marxian sense of exploitation: it extracts surplus value from them. …one central normative and explanatory use of the Marxian concept of exploitation is retained: it highlights and explains a conflict of interests in capitalism between wage-workers and the employer. This applies whether the employer is a human being, a number of human individuals or an institution. Where the employer is an institution, a conflict exists between the interests of the institution, which lie in the maximisation of the extraction of surplus value in order to finance investment programmes necessary to ensure its survival in the competitive market, and the interests of the institution’s employees, which lie in seeking improved wages and conditions of work. This conflict of interests between the institutional employer and its employees remains a central feature of workers’ co-operatives within a market economy. Where workers’ co-operative retains a traditional management structure, the conflict takes its traditional appearance as a conflict between workers and management, with the traditional negotiation patterns and forms of industrial action [6]. It underlies the justifiable complaint sometimes voiced within such enterprises that the change in property rights changes nothing of significance. Within democratic co-operatives the conflict takes a different form as a conflict of interests amongst members of the institution depending on which of two different roles they play—as policy formulators for the institution or as the recipients of wages. It is in such situations that the inaccurate and misleading term ‘self-exploitation’ appears appropriate. The conflict also reveals a way in which, when the term is used in connection with workers paying themselves low wages, this may not be a confusion as Carter claims [7]. It is when workers find themselves forced by market demands to pay themselves low wages that the conflict of interests between workers in their different roles becomes most clearly apparent. Indeed, the first time I heard the term ‘self-exploitation’ was not from a member of the authoritarian left (towards whom I share Carter’s antipathy), but from a member of a medium-sized co-operative with a democratic structure who used it in reference to just the conflict of interests I have described. The interests of the institution in increasing profitability in order to finance the investment programmes necessary for its survival—and, hence, in maximising the surplus product it extracted—conflicted with his interests, as a wage-worker, in pay and conditions.
6. From December 20, 2025: (https://www.facebook.com/AviLewisOfficial/posts/its-been-a-year-since-the-liberals-used-section-107-to-squash-the-cupw-strike-an/1162788249348691/):
It’s been a year since the Liberals used Section 107 to squash the CUPW [Canadian Union of Postal Workers] strike, and postal workers are still waiting for a fair deal. I stopped by the commemoration rally in Vancouver today, one of many nationwide.When workers are under attack, there’s only one thing to do – stand up, strike back!
He said his leadership campaign focuses on how corporate centralization has hindered Canada’s affordability. He pointed to a lack of competition across various sectors of the economy, including telecommunications, groceries, oil and gas, and banking.
A wealth tax is a central component of his platform.
“People are not getting a fair deal and there’s no competition,” Lewis said. “What we’re saying is the government has to step in and actually force some real competition on these corporate cartels.”
Conclusion
It has been shown that Avi Lewis’ political stance involves aiming for a humanized capitalism, ignoring the necessity for exploiting and oppressing workers in a society dominated by a class of employers and the associated economic, political and social structures. Calls for an end to exploitation ring hollow when there is no call for challenging the class power of employers as such. Claiming that workers can achieve dignity in such a context paints over exploitation and oppression–unless a dignified life involves class exploitation and oppression. Claims that workers can receive fair wages when they are exploited and oppressed serves, not the interests of workers, but the interests of employers. Claims that the current form of government, which constitutes protection of the principle of private property, can somehow magically serve the many and not money, involves hiding the reality of the nature of the kind of social relations at work and outside work–social relations that serve the accumulation of capital, including money, and serve people only as a by-product of that process people’s needs.
One of the solutions proposed by Lewis, worker cooperatives, does not solve the problem of exploitation and oppression at work since the structures associated with the class power of employers would remain intact.
Another proposed solution is to introduce a wealth tax–certainly better than no wealth tax, but such a tax can then and often would be converted into a denial of the exploitation and oppression of workers. Since corporations, if they pay a wealth tax, now pay their “fair share of taxes” (another favourite cliche of the social-reformist left), the implication would be that there is no exploitation and oppression of workers (see for example Another Abstract Slogan or Cliche of Social-Democratic or Social-Reformist Organizations: Employers or Corporations Paying Their Fair Share of Taxes, Part Four: The New Democratic Party (NDP)).
Another solution–the Green economy–is a utopian ideal that ignores the infinite nature of capitalist accumulation (outlined in the money circuit of capital) and proposes only social reforms within social relations defined by exploitation and oppression.
All in all, Lewis’ political stance has little to offer the working class other than false definitions of the problem and solutions that will limit the class power of employers and the associated economic, political and social relations rather than eliminate that power and relations. However, such a stance is the stance of most Canadian unions. Lewis’s political stance, therefore, is just a generalization of the political stance of most Canadian unions.
Workers deserve much more than what that stance has to offer.
The Abolitionary 