Poverty in Canada

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Nearly five million people in Canada—that’s one out of every seven individuals—currently live in poverty. At the dawn of 2018, poverty is a widespread issue across the country and around the globe. People liv­ ing with disabilities, single parents, elderly individu­ als, youth, and racialized communities are more sus­ ceptible to impoverishment.

The effects are expressed in various ways, includ­ ing food security, health, and housing. The following statistics, from www.cwp.csp.ca*, show the different manifestations of poverty in Canada, one of the rich­ est countries in the world today.

• One in seven (or 4.9 million)people in Canada live in poverty.

• Poverty costs Canada between $72 billion and $84 billion annually; Ontarians pay $2299 - $2,895 per year: British Columbians pay over $2100 per year.

• Precarious employment has increased by nearly 8 SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 2018 50% over the past two decades.

• Between 1980 and 2005, the average earnings among the least wealthy Canadians fell by 20%.

• Over the past 25 years, Canada’s population has increased by 30%, and yet annual national invest­ ment in housing has decreased by 46%. Marginalized Communities Which groups are particularly likely to experience poverty?

• People living with disabilities (mental or physical) are twice as likely to live below the poverty line.

• Nearly 15% of people with disabilities live in pov­ erty, 59% of which are women.

• Estimates place the number of homeless individu­ als living with a disability or mental illness as high as 45% of the overall homeless population.

• Children with disabilities are twice as likely to live in households relying on social assistance.

• 21% of single mothers in Canada raise their chil­ dren while living in poverty. (7% of single fathers raise their children in poverty).

• Women parenting on their own enter shelters at twice he rate of two-parent families.

• Indigenous Peoples (including First Nations, Mé­ tis, and Inuit peoples) are over-represented among the homeless population in virtually all urban centres.

• 28%-34% of shelter users are Indigenous.

• One in five racialized families live in poverty in Canada, as opposed to 1 in 20 non-racialized families.

• Overall, racialized women earn 32% less at work.

• Nearly 15% of elderly single individuals live in poverty.

• Nearly 2 million seniors receive the Guaranteed Income Supplement, and live on about $17,000 per year. Yet the most basic standard of living in Canada is calculated at $18,000 per year for a single person. n * Canada Without Poverty is a federally incorporated, non-partisan, charitable organization. Stemming from the Poor Peoples’ Conference in Toronto in 1971, it was founded later that year as the National Anti-Poverty Organization. In April 2009, it changed its name to Canada Without Poverty.

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... Iran Revolution (continued from page 7: “Rise and fall of the 1979 Iranian Revolution: Lessons for today”)

the choice of continuing with the monarchy that they had just overthrown or the undefined Islamic Repub­ lic. The voters rejected the monarchy by an over 98% majority; Khomeini and his allies claimed that such huge majority actually wanted an Islamic Republic which at the time was just a slogan empty of con­ tent. He then used the vote to exclude all non-Islamic groups from the legal political discourse. In April, a mass circulation daily, Ayandegan, which was critical of Khomeini, was shut down by force.

This was followed by a war waged against the Kurdish people, who have been struggling for self-determination for decades. At the same time, armed Hezbollah gangs were used to ransack headquarters of socialist parties, and 40 newspapers were shut down. Meanwhile, Khomeini decided that instead of a democratic constituent assembly based on grass­ roots organizations that had issued from the revolu­ tion, an Islamic Assembly of Experts should write a constitution for the Islamic Republic he had rubber stamped in the April referendum.

By all appearances, the reactionary offensive of the summer of 1979 had consolidated the Islamic Republic and all opposition parties were driven un­ derground. However, when a select group of pro-Kho­ meini students took over the US embassy in October, streets of Tehran and other cities were once again filled with millions of anti-imperialist demonstra­ tors. Open political activity revived. Once again, the workers showed the way forward. United workers’ councils led several mass demonstrations in Tehran and elsewhere. Workers’ councils that sprang up in individual factories had learned that in order to man­ age their workplaces they need to link up with other workers’ council within the same industry, region, or industrial group. Peasant councils were also formed, and some linked up with others, and land occupations were underway. This posed the problem of working-class management of the economy and society and the need for a workers and peasants government.

What was lacking was a working-class leadership to link up these class-specific demands with the anti-imperialist movement and the defense of democratic and political freedoms through the expansion of the already existing grassroots organizations, in particu­ lar workers and peasants councils; this would have created a workers and peasants government. Only such a government, like the one that issued from the October 1917 revolution, and subsequently in Cuba after 1959, could have charted a consistent anti-im­ perialist, that is, anti-capitalist and socialist, course. History has produced no other alternatives.

Such leadership did not exist. Instead, Stalinist and centrist parties were essentially divided into two camps. A group best exemplified by the Tudeh party and Fedayeen Majority argued that the conflict with imperialism and monarchism required political sup­ port for the “anti-imperialist” Khomeini regime. Oth­ ers such as the Mujahedin and Fedayeen Minority countered that Khomeini is the gravest danger facing the revolution. Thus, they each looked for an alter­ native force within the Islamic Republic and in the bourgeois political spectrum. President Bani-Sadre temporarily provided such a bourgeois figure for the Anti-Khomeini opposition. In practice, each of these two camps subordinated actual class struggle to their perceived need to either politically support or to mili­ tarily confront the Islamic Republic.

Take the case of the workers’ council movement. In the spring of 1980, the Islamic Republic party begun to systematically organize and use Islamic Associa­ tions in workplaces to divide the workforce into “fol­ lowers of Imam (Khomeini)” and those who were not prepared to pledge allegiance to him. The same scheme was used to split workers’ councils and es­ tablish the corporatist Islamic Councils of Labor. This scheme not only split the working class according to workers’ religious or ideological belief, it also created organizations of workers with the explicit goal of sup­ porting the clerical, capitalist regime and its manage­ ment in the State sector of the economy, which was extensive thanks to the expropriations. Further, this policy created tensions and conflicts among workers, which allowed management and State officials to in­ tervene. After the start of the Iran-Iraq war, workers’ resistance to these and any other capitalist policies were labeled as “counter-revolutionary.”

The Tudeh party and Fedayeen Majority asked their membership to identify themselves as Muslims and “followers of Imam.” They even joined noon time prayers at workplaces. The Mujahedin and Fedayeen Minority and others who placed open struggle against Khomeini quickly came against a still substantial sec­ tion of the workforce that still harbored illusions in Khomeini and the Islamic Republic. These groups were quickly isolated given that they had no proposal for uniting workers as a revolutionary class. Their fol­ lowers in factories were quickly fired or were forced to operate secretly.

In September 1980, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran. Khomeini called this “a divine gift.” He and the Islam­ ic Republic began an offensive to destroy the grass­ roots organizations and political parties. Workplaces, especially factories, were militarized. All workers’ protests against the management or the State were called “counter-revolutionary.” Soon after the war began, Khomeini heeded the demand by Ayatollah Golpaygani and Ayatollah Mar’ashi, two arch-conser­ vative Shiite leaders, to discard a modest land reform bill in the Islamic parliament. Landowners went on an offensive against peasants.

Socialists and others who did not agree with the Islamic Republic but wanted to participate in the defense of the revolution against Saddam Hussein’s army were expelled from the fronts. Meanwhile, the Iraqi army destroyed the oil industry in the South, thereby undermining the strongest section of the Ira­ nian proletariat, the oil workers. In the villages, the Iraqi army executed members of the peasant coun­ cils.

At the same time, imperialist and monarchist terror­ ism provided additional opportunity for the regime to clamp down on political freedoms. The failure of socialist currents to join the fight against imperialist and monarchist terrorism and the increasingly sys­ tematic State repression undermined independent working-class organization and action.

In the summer of 1981, under blows from the Is­ lamic Republic, the Mujahedin leadership decided to stage an “armed insurrection.” This putsch failed quickly. The government used it to justify a murder­ ous campaign to physically destroy the Mujahedin and the armed centrist groups such as the Fedayeen Minority. The Tudeh party and Fedayeen Majority helped the authorities in identifying and persecuting these groups whose members and sympathizers were routinely imprisoned, tortured and in the summer of 1981, executed. As a result, Mujahedin and Fedayeen Minority and other centrist groups retreated to Kurd­ istan, which still was not under the full control of the Islamic Republic. Most these groups eventually splin­ tered and no significant organization remains today. The exception is the Mujahedin, who built a cult or­ ganization in the service of imperialism (the French, and later, American imperialism) and then organized an armed unit of several thousand to attack Iran from Iraq at the pleasure of Saddam Hussein.

After dealing a decisive blow to the labor move­ ment, the Mujahedin, and centrist groups, all with the complicity of the Tudeh party and Fedayeen Majority, the government turned against them. Late in 1982, the government arrested the bulk of the Tudeh lead­ ership and some of the Fedayeen Majority leadership. Some were tortured and executed. Others appeared on the State television to denounce Marxism, explain how they spied for the Soviet Union, and praise Kho­ meini and the Islamic Republic.

The combination of these Stalinist betrayals and centrist policies disoriented workers and the youth and facilitated capitalist attacks on the labor and mass movements. These led to demoralization of a generation of youth and working-class fighters well before the Soviet bloc collapsed.

By 1983, all grassroots organizations and socialist political currents were effectively destroyed in Iran.

(Above) Women march without head scarves in huge demonstration in Tehran on March 8, 1979, International Women’s Day.

Khomeini pursued the fratricidal war with Iraq even after the Iranian army and volunteers had effectively driven the invading forces out in the spring of 1982. The war continued until 1988 when both sided were exhausted and over a million were killed or mimed. After 1988, the Islamic Republic began a massive eco­ nomic offensive against the working class that con­ tinues to this date.

Lessons for today The 1979 Iranian revolution could be gainfully com­ pared to the 1917 Russian revolutions. In both revolu­ tions workers and peasants brought down autocratic monarchies. Although the Bolsheviks’ influence had indirectly prepared the workers, the February revo­ lution in both countries triumphed without the lead­ ership of any individual or party. In both revolutions, grassroots organizations of workers and peasants were formed: The soviets in Russia and the workers, peasants, and other popular councils in Iran. But here the similarities end.

In Russia, Lenin recognized that proletarian char­ acter of the revolutionary process and educated and mobilized the Bolshevik party to fight for a govern­ ment of the commune-type based on the soviets of workers, soldiers, and peasants deputies. In Iran, the Stalinist and centrist parties, much like the Menshe­ viks in the Russian Revolution, called for support to the capitalist Islamic Republic or other bourgeois forces within or outside of it (or organized their own sectarian, sometimes armed, campaigns). These class-collaborationist and sectarian policies were de­ cisive in the defeat of the working class and the revo­ lution.

Unfortunately, the experience of the Iranian Revolu­ tion is not unique. As noted, similar policies defeated the mass upsurge in Iran from 1945-53. Dozens of revolutions in the industrial capitalist counties and in the periphery have suffered a similar fate. With the demise of the soviets’ power and the rise of the Stalinist bureaucratic caste, the Bolshevik program, strategy, and tradition were buried in favor of a new doctrine suitable to the conservative new elite. These polices were imposed on the young Communist par­ ties, and those communists who opposed them were violently purged, sometimes murdered. Thus, the communist movement was defeated as a mass move­ ment by the end of the 1920s.

The Marxist theory of socialism seeks human eman­ cipation through self-organization and self-activity of the proletariat as the ruling class. This is also what Lenin stresses in “State and Revolution.” The funda­ mental lesson of the Iranian Revolution is to return to this long lost treasure of working-class and socialist movements: to critically re-appropriate the Bolshe­ vik legacy (which includes Trotsky’s) in light of what Marx and Engels left us from their critical appropria­ tion of the 19th-century struggle for socialism.

Marx’s legacy is an open system, and the socialism of the 21st century will have to tackle new problems, most importantly the fight to the re-appropriation of nature in theory and practice as the basis of our hu­ manity and a fundamental plank of Marxian social­ ism. However, to tackle new problems, it is impera­ tive that we find the courage to learn from previous defeats and to revise the theory and tradition that has contributed to our victories. n SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 2018 9

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cal in demanding the total destruction of