this extreme insider perception of the liberal party (which, despite staying closer to the ideological goals of liberalism than american liberal parties have, is largely true) has made them less competitive through much of the working class. this opens up a lot of three way races in working class areas, and often pits the socialists directly against the conservatives. now, a lot of these areas are specifically auto union areas, where wages are high enough that we're not talking lowest tax bracket. we're talking union areas where average wages are more than one jump up. so, the socialist party actually has to float these policies to keep union members from jumping to the conservative party, which may in fact more accurately reflect their class interests. this has left people in the lower end of the wage spectrum without political representation, but it's been a slow process of awakening to this.
the debate has sort of trickled down, too. it has a little bit to do with lingering resentment about an introduced consumption tax called the gst. now, that was a long time ago, but it's still just massively loathed. this works in two ways. first, the conservative party did decrease this by 2%. it may not have actually saved anybody any money in a measurable sense, but it's a symbolic thing; correctly or not, there's a perception in the working class that tax cuts are things they benefit from, because of that association with the gst cut. but it's a half-right sort of thing. consumption taxes are regressive. there was a big debate ten years ago about it; the liberals and ndp wanted to cut income taxes instead. this was in the context of giant surpluses (themselves stolen from ei premiums) that have since disappeared...due largely to cuts in corporate taxes.
but the take-away is that the process that goes through the heads of the lower wage people is taxes=gst=bad. tax cuts = no gst = good. breaking through that might actually be impossible. it might be an irreversible shift in canadian politics.
what i wanted to point out though is what i thought leo was going to talk about, which is that the ndp are actually in favour of pipelines so long as the oil is refined in canada, so as to create refinery jobs in canada. that is, so as to increase union membership. this is something else that is confusing canadians, but the policy has been very clearly stated: the ndp considers jobs more important than the environment. which is again just like the conservatives....
d scoleri
This is pure bullshit..I had a couple of classes with Leo at York..He is a Marxist and views everything through that lens! Cannot believe anything he says!!
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d scoleri
You actually need me to define it for you? Easy, Marxism is a failed system of governmental control over the entire economy... with no private property rights. Essentially, it's a world run by bureaucrats. The only ones to prosper in this type of economy are bureaucrats and the so called intellectuals (such as Leo Panitch) they use to try and justify their existence. How about some examples? Soviet Union, Cuba, Vietnam, China can be viewed as somewhat Marxist but luckily for them, they realized the fallacies of the system and have turned more and more to capitalism.
CryptedSky
No. Marxism is not a system of governance, it's a swooping ideology through which you can analyse and comprehend the events driving history and the economy forward. An analysis of a certain situation is Marxist when it defines a class structure and describes conflicts happening in a society as part of a far-reaching struggle between these classes. Classical marxism explains the conflicts found in a society as reflections of the meta-struggle between the poor disowned working class (proletariat) and the rich proprietor class (the bourgeoisie). Further marxist analysis reveals that the middle class is the buffer class emerging out of the inevitable victories of the working class and that if this middle class erodes, violent social conflict is sure to reemerge. TBH, it's a very matter-of-fact uncontroversial notion that even heterodox capitalists have embraced.
Some scholars and political thinkers have pushed this type of reflection even further during the last decades of the cold war as it was becoming clear that the cold war was turning out, in practice, to be a tacit contract between the USA and the USSR to allow them to colonise the third world without even a slap on the wrist (see Noam Chomsky). The most notable is probably Immanuel Wallerstein's description of what he calls the World-System Theory which describes globalisation's end game through a marxist viewpoint in which the proverbial «west» is the metropolis for the benefit of which the periphery is robbed of it's ressources and labor and given hope by the implementation of a «semi-periphery» which is semi-rich and acts as an economic buffer zone between the extreme wealth of the «core» and the extreme poverty of the «periphery». It's an amazing analysis.
Tl;dr, Marxism is not a system of governance, it's an intellectual instrument of social-political and economic analysis.
Wether marx himself was a communist or not is irrelevant to his work as a philosopher.
deathtokoalas
it's been my experience that academic marxists are generally more interested in his philosophical arguments, which have little application to reality, and are even generally hostile to the basic socialist premise of workers owning their own means of production because they view them as too incompetent to manage it. i don't want to paint a wide brush on either of these commentators, but the reality is that most "academic marxists" are really just liberals, and often not even particularly radical ones.
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deathtokoalas
they'll often use marx to analyze capitalism, but in the end present some kind of keynesianism or heavily watered down lassallianism as an alternative. marx would rip most of them apart as bourgeois fakers.
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deathtokoalas
well, yeah, that's just it. it's the hegelianism that these academics are really on about, not anything about social revolution. it's a little annoying that they call it "scientific socialism" when hegelianism is inherently anti-scientific, but that's just where the problems start. it's a lot of teleological nonsense, really. in the worst cases, they'll take the ideas to these scary extremes that suggest that freedom is really just an illusion, so the key to a happy working class is tricking them into thinking they're happy. that may in some sense come from marxist thinking, but it kills the spirit of marxism - which is meant to be a way to salvage self-ownership in an era of socialized economics. that's not a desire for a system of collectivization, it's a reaction to the technological innovations that have asserted it as an unpreventable necessity. even today, socialized production is the norm from the auto plants of detroit to the clothing factories of bangladesh. so, how do we reassert the free, liberal individual in such an economy?
then, when you read some, like, foucault, where he's talking about the state enforcing hegemonic norms through social ostracism...where's the individualism in that....
it misses the point.
proudhon wasn't really a disciple of marx, he was more of a competitor to him. marx wrote some scathing criticisms of his influence on the paris commune revolts (specifically, he blamed the failure of the revolt on the proudhonists refusal to seize the banks, because they were opposed to centralized banking. this allowed the state to raise the funds necessary to retake the city.). personally, i'd categorize proudhon as a liberal (and what you're calling libertarianism to be indistinguishable from classical liberalism) rather than a socialist, although his idea was to combine the two things. if this is your position, you probably don't have any significant disagreements with the bulk of these so-called marxist profs. it's probably all minor disagreements about which order things should occur in. it's just a matter of getting underneath the rhetoric and getting them to admit that they basically just want better laws to redistribute wealth more fairly and stop bankers from being so corrupt.
i sit more on the bakunin-kropotkin-malatesta strain of anarchist communism, which is both a legitimately revolutionary perspective and puts me in a lot of opposition to marxism (which i consider to be an authoritarian, statist form of governance). but, i do rely on some marxist analysis, where it's reasonable. and i realize there's a lot of hot air around who claims they're a marxist...
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jabraun10
Does Canada have the ability to enact a vote of no confidence?
deathtokoalas
canada has a parliamentary democracy, which means that the prime minister is chosen by parliamentary vote rather than by direct plebiscite. it's less like a president and more like a speaker of the house. the parliament could theoretically elect anybody as prime minister, subject to very mild requirements of things like citizenship.
no confidence votes are generally considered to occur around money issues. the opposition could vote down the budget, for example. that would trigger an election.
currently, the conservative party has a majority of the seats in parliament. that is why they were able to elect the prime minister. it is also makes a vote of non-confidence virtually impossible.
so....sort of. it is a possibility that enough members of the sitting party could vote with the opposition to force an election. however, it is exceedingly implausible.
it should also be noted that canadian voters tend to cynically interpret such votes as opportunistic and politically driven. harper was recently declared in contempt of parliament, and yet managed to win a majority (up from a minority) shortly afterwards. conversely, the man that engineered the vote that declared him in contempt of parliament lost his seat.
canada suffers from tremendous vote splitting. until that is addressed, these sorts of tactics are more likely to backfire than succeed in removing harper from office.
it should also be pointed out that harper is actually a more moderate face fronting a group of radicals that would instantly do things like ban abortion and move back to "free market" health care if he wasn't stopping them (because he knows such reckless action would collapse a conservative movement that has recently been through collapse and reconstruction). replacing him with somebody else, like jason kinney for example, may actually lead to more radical policy. the less freaky possible replacements (such as john baird) have identity issues that are likely to explode on them should they take a serious run.
nor are the opposition parties much better at this point. the reality is that the chinese may actually prefer to see baby trudeau in office, because he could get away with burning down the entire rainforest - whereas harper needs to be more careful about what he does. kind of like how obama can get away with open drone strikes, where bush had to be more crafty about how he lied in public.