People’s Social Forum — A magnet for thousands
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For critics of the capitalist system across the Canadi an state, this was one of the largest, most representa tive gatherings ever. Thousands of activists from Que bec, English Canada, and aboriginal communities— including workers, students, seniors, and the unem ployed—converged at the University of Ottawa for a four-day People’s Social Forum, Aug. 21-24. Women constituted a large proportion of the participants.
Major unions and mass organizations, whose mem bers speak English, French, and indigenous people’s languages, resourced the festival. The hundreds of workshops, and scores of film screenings, art exhibits and topical assemblies took years of planning.
At the same time, this grand venue of issues, cam paigns, and discussions exhibited the political weak ness common to the main organizers and social part ners—the lack of an anti-capitalist plan of action, much less a socialist strategy centred on working-class struggle.
An opening day “Unity March” to Parliament Hill, its contingents festooned with scores of union flags and political banners, was preceded and concluded by speeches of labour officials. They condemned auster ity and neoliberalism, but not the Liberal Party, nor the pro-capitalist leadership of the labour-based New Democratic Party.
Calls to defeat the widely hated Stephen Harper Conservative Party regime in the 2015 federal elec tion were not matched by appeals for a Workers’ Gov ernment committed to socialist policies. Only the last of a dozen speakers at the front steps of Parliament, Vancouver-based Harsha Walia, identified capitalism as the main enemy, and socialism as the goal. And those words were spoken as the crowd, estimated by the Montreal daily newspaper Le Devoir as between 5000 and 10,000 at its peak, scattered under a heavy thundershower.
During four days of workshops and assemblies, ac tivists seized the opportunity to educate and forge links on a wide range of issues, including cuts to pub lic services, climate justice concerns, electoral reform, and the scandal involving thousands of missing and murdered aboriginal women.
Dozens of simultaneous, compelling topics made it difficult to decide which forum to attend. Highlights included Palestine and Cuba solidarity, ecosocialist strategies in the fight against climate change, and an assembly to Take Back the Labour Movement. Each of these attracted over 100 participants.
Under the banner of justice for Palestine, activists heard reports and discussed ways to advance the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign aimed at the Israeli apartheid state. Sadly, even as Gaza is be ing pummelled by the U.S.-Canada-E.U.-backed Israeli war machine, some insular leftists oppose BDS on the grounds that it “divides the working class.” The over whelming sentiment of the Social Forum favoured the Palestinian and global labour-backed campaign to starve the Zionist state of weapons and commerce, and to mobilize protests to end the siege and the oc cupation. A spate of recent sit-ins at local offices of NDP MPs across Canada has drawn broad critical at tention to the reactionary pro-Israel policy of NDP Leader Tom Mulcair.
Ecosocialists gathered to consider how to strength en opposition to various pipeline construction proj ects, and to go farther. Their aim is to develop a class-conscious movement for socialist transformation of the carbon-burning, private profit-obsessed, capital ist energy economy. Only a planned economy under workers’ and community control can marshal the re sources needed to effect such a colossal change. Many will take that message to the monster Climate march scheduled for New York City on Sept. 21.
The Take Back the Labour Movement assembly, a three-hour Saturday morning forum convened by or ganizers of the Hassan Husseini campaign for presi dent of the Canadian Labour Congress last spring, re viewed decades of struggles to reform the CLC, includ ing the heroic efforts of former CUPW President Jean Claude Parrot, who spoke to the crowd. The assem bly, consisting of individuals from dozens of unions, bolstered by a large contingent of CUPW members, demonstrated a radical outlook. Kyle Buott, president of the Halifax-Dartmouth Labour Council, put it this way: “It’s not enough to oppose neoliberalism. We need to talk about capitalism being the fundamental problem, and socialism as the alternative.”
After small group discussions on a distributed set