A Socialist Credo

...But its very excesses should not blind us to what makes sense...

...If we ignore any of them, we are in trouble...

...Wouldn't most people be moved by the most essentially human arguments about what we owe each other...

...It is interesting that in matters of life and death we would not dream of leaving the decision to the market place, and that here the greatest efficiency, and greatest quality, is achieved simply by mobilizing people's capacity for altruistic love...

...Jobs will change, hours of work will change...

...They are subject to harassment on the job and violence in the home...

...The growth of the welfare state, and attacks on some of our achievements from the New Right, have forced us to spend much time simply defending our historic achievements, like medicare...

...Surely the triumphalism of the right is as misplaced as its Marxist predecessors: the socialist ideal will not disappear...

...It produces opulence and squalor, technological achievement and environmental disaster, personal triumph for a few and oppression and failure for many more...

...If our interest in democracy is to increase participation by workers and the public generally in the life of the company and the economy, then making the government the only shareholder isn't really the answer...

...It is no guarantor of personal spiritual happiness...

...This is combined with the inevitable tendency of competitors to devour their opposition in a frenzy of takeover and monopoly...

...Without exception, they are now having to reform and come to terms with the need for realistic pricing, a respect for supply and demand, an understanding of the positive role of competition, the need to serve the consuming public and an appreciation of the advantages of change, dynamism, and yes, entrepreneurship and efficient management...

...But every company doing business in Canada and Ontario plans for the future and has a corporate strategy...

...Yet we live in a business civilization that not only creates inequality, it also creates a culture in which many aspire, not to be equal, but to be better than, richer than, more powerful than, and apart from everyone else...

...Democracy is also about the other major revolutions in our time: the women's movement and civil rights...

...Broader social changes are happening as well...

...The environmental crisis is not just some buzz-word invented by the ad industry...

...We can't talk about waste without talking about the workers who make their living producing too much packaging or producing goods that will simply be thrown away...

...The child in Oregon would probably have had a statistically better chance of living longer than my brother, but that choice was not given to him...

...If the distribution of wealth and power is not changed, less growth will simply mean more unemployment, more poverty, and meaner, tougher lives for hundreds of thousands...

...Are we prepared to use less of the world's resources, and share what we have more fairly with the rest of the world...

...The flexibility and quality of public service must be improved...

...It responds to something deep and important within human nature, certainly deeper than the acquisitive spirit, which is at the heart of this, and every other, capitalist revival...

...When workers become more aware that this is their money, and they should control it, a huge economic power base will shift toward democracy...

...In the States, families are offering to pay for transplants, pay for donors...

...The challenge we face is more compelling and difficult...

...Unless the "green" revolution is matched by a "democratic" revolution, and a real increase in the power and authority of working people, then we know only too well the consequences: working people alone will bear the burden of change, and alone will be asked to pay the price...

...We must insist that what is produced should be shared more equally...

...In the United States, this operation would cost more than $250,000...

...If you're deaf, or physically or mentally disabled in any way, you're likely to be poor, badly housed, unemployed and on your own...

...It cannot protect us from all the tragedies of life...

...The remarkable NDP victory in Ontario is described in a report on p. 19...

...If scarce resources are going to be limited even further, this will have a dramatic impact on people's lives...

...We know the result: we live with it...

...Democracy has been interpreted in this way as simply what progressive governments do in their efforts to control the excesses of the capitalist system...

...There is a will to solidarity, to community, and to love...

...Creativity, inventiveness, technical ingenuity and, most important, consumer choice are all positive aspects of markets...

...And it is important that we come to terms with this as socialists...

...The command economies of the East have been a disaster...

...One of the critical missions of socialism has been to expose the absurdity of simply seeing the economy as a tight world of private economic relationships, quite separate from the public world of politics and government...

...People will not be paid exactly the same, and they certainly won't live the same, but there is clearly no excuse for vast disparities between rich and poor...

...It lacks dynamism, energy, a willingness to change...

...Finally, there is the positive and necessary role that markets can play in a socialist system...

...Are Canadians really prepared to work less, and share work differently...

...It can break barriers of class, of upbringing, of color, of language...

...Women have entered the work force in the millions this past decade, but are systematically paid less, are forced into parttime jobs, have fewer benefits, less protection, and less security...

...Do away with this now-widespread notion in our labor law that everything not mentioned in the collective agreement belongs to the company...

...What strikes me now, some 15 years after that experience, is that in Toronto we now have the same level of absolute homelessness that I encountered as a community worker in north London, the same absurd contrast between the living and working conditions of my constituents and those of the power elite in our society...

...The interests of economic democracy would be better served by some immediate, practical changes to our laws on labor relations, company law and employment standards...

...Now we must state again what we are for in the future...

...q WINTER • 1991 • 45...

...These are, we are told, private things best left to private moments...

...We must create a society where change does not mean dramatic income loss, loss of self-esteem, the dark hole of poverty and helplessness that social and industrial change has come to mean to millions of workers since the Industrial Revolution...

...It has nothing to do with the ideas, beliefs, and nostrums of Conrad Black, Malcolm Forbes, Margaret Thatcher or the allegedly superior practices of General Motors or Bay Street...

...If you're blind in Canada, chances are you're unemployed...

...The question for socialists is not whether we will have policies on pollution and cleaning up the environment: these we have, and can continue 42 • DISSENT A Socialist Credo to develop...

...Socialism is not a religion...

...As a moral system, it utterly fails to enlist people's will to a shared freedom, to justice, to equality, to community, or to love...

...That they have collapsed is a tribute to the millions of democrats—many of whom are still proud and determined to call themselves socialists—who have fought them, from within and from without, since 1917...

...Are men prepared to take on family responsibilities that for centuries have been assigned to women...

...If the answer is yes, then we are talking about a different value system...

...As a political system, it fails miserably to address the ordinary needs and demands of its citizens...

...Capitalism as a system of power and values is at once remarkably tenacious (and in that sense "successful"), and yet profoundly limited...

...For example, we volunteer to give blood...

...Several states have stopped paying Medicaid for transplants because they're too expensive...

...If the answer is no, then our policies will simply be a marginal tempering of the status quo, increasingly difficult to distinguish from the environmental policies of the other parties...

...The child died—even though transplants are more often than not successful with young children in putting the cancer into remission...

...We have a different way of caring for each other when we are sick than anything we do at any other time...

...This is far too limiting a concept of democracy...

...But there are other sectors of the economy where such direct public ownership would be profoundly counterproductive: a huge investment of public dollars for little real return...

...I had the operation, with no thought or question as to cost, and my brother fought on, in and out of hospital, with enormous courage, before he died...

...Planning" on its own does not work: it ignores too many choices, too many unknowns, too many actors in the system...

...It is real, and demands actions and changes that will affect how we live...

...In fact, there is really nothing risky about the operation for a donor, and the pain is usually shortlived, but that last point really got me: "What do I owe him anyway...

...Our focus on social issues has often made us look at the world of the economy as something dark and unknown, almost unclean...

...We owe each other love, and the action that flows from that...

...We can't talk about eliminating chemicals in agriculture without talking about what happens to farmers...

...We express that love in deeds, in actions, in laws, institutions, entitlements...

...It may not be fashionable to talk about love and solidarity as political and economic duties...

...In short, we must see socialism as embracing a creative tension between three realities: planning, democracy and markets...

...Those economies that have ignored or obliterated markets have done so at their peril...

...We have to understand it better, and at the same time insist that the economy respond to our values and priorities...

...If the best democratic socialism can offer is "a little more of this and a little more of that," we might as well pack our bags and call it a day...

...But I refuse to interpret those astonishing events as a vindication of capitalism, or a repudiation of anything I would call democratic socialism...

...Yet socialists have to come to terms with some critical realities as well...

...Politicians of all stripes are mouthing rhetoric about the environment...

...We can't talk about new transportation policies without talking about what happens to auto workers...

...We think this text by Premier Rae is an admirably lucid statement of the outlook of democratic socialism.—EDS...

...The world of the corporation, the rights of shareholders, takeovers and mergers, plans to invest here and disinvest there, the WINTER • 1991 • 43 A Socialist Credo introduction of new technology and new products, the ending of old lines and old products, these are all decisions that deliberately and systematically leave out governments and workers...

...Power and wealth are passed from generation to generation...

...The text is taken from the Toronto Globe and Mail, October 1, 1990...

...But it must do what it can...

...Do we understand what all this means for the competitive white man's world in which we have all grown up...

...The communist regimes in these countries have about as much to do with social democracy as does the Mafia...

...It is our world...

...We must open up government and the ways in which it delivers services...

...Get rid of the huge differences between the way management and workers are treated...

...There will always be those who say that you can't possibly plan an economy or an industrial strategy in a capitalist economy in an open society with the rest of the industrial world...

...Give the public a direct say on boards as well...

...ike millions of others around the world, I have cheered the triumph of popular democracy in Eastern Europe...

...The key is to match our commitment to democracy, security and solidarity with what we all must recognize as the positive aspects of markets...

...One mother in Oregon trooped around the legislature with her dying child trying to guilt them into paying for his treatment: they didn't succumb...

...Yet this is how we make our living...

...But aren't there some things money can't buy...

...There are some sectors, and some situations, where government buyouts make sense...

...In our economic life we are ruled by an unelected elite whose power and wealth are in good measure inherited...

...The civil-rights movement has forced us to wake up to the scourge of racism...

...Give workers direct access to boards of directors, not in a token way, but as a major exercise in democratization...

...I can also remember reading a newspaper article about a family in the States where the brother said there was no way he was going to do a transplant— too painful, too risky, and he hadn't seen his brother in a long time and didn't think he owed him anything anyway...

...But we all know that, if market principles are tied to exclusively private, corporate forms of ownership and management in an over-all climate of speculation and greed, the result is not a productive economy but a casino...

...Feminism has made us all realize that where power is biased toward the interests of men and patriarchy, women are demeaned and exploited...

...After a battery of blood tests, I was found to be the most compatible donor...

...Capitalism's ability to "deliver the goods" economically has been much exaggerated...

...Are we ready to become a "green" party, a party that puts as much emphasis on peoples' relationships with nature, and our obligation to future generations, as on the distribution of power and income...

...Our health and social services spend billions of dollars, yet in many cases they are neither accountable nor participatory...

...It will require enormous political will to accomplish, because those who have control of these funds will not give this power up without a struggle, but if Lech Aren't There Some Things That Money Can't Buy...

...If you're black, or a visible minority, chances are you're in a worse job, with lower pay, less recognition and less opportunity than your white neighbor...

...It is a recipe for industrial confrontation, bitterness and, ultimately, a world that increasingly belongs to the few able to ride the wave of change successfully...

...Politics should not try to do too much...

...Is it really too abstract, too corny, too difficult, to understand that simply giving the chance at another round of life is value in itself...

...R. 44 • DISSENT A Socialist Credo Walesa can do it to the communist bureaucracy, we ought to be able to do it here...

...Perhaps the clearest example of this in Canada is our system of medical care...

...There are stronger arguments for social and economic democracy than we realize, and they take root in institutions...

...This will mean a profound change for the party...

...I went into politics as a result of a basic experience: as a dispirited graduate student I regained a sense of purpose and direction only when I went to work in London, England, in a housing-aid project helping homeless people and young kids in difficulty with the law...

...They have savings, in the form of pension funds, which for generations have simply been managed "on their behalf" by corporate interests...

...There are other ways in which workers can take more control of their lives...

...we don't demand payment for it...

...Only governments have this enormous reluctance to get organized about where the economy is going...

...After initial treatment, we were told that the next step was a bone-marrow transplant...

...But they are public values as well...

...Two years ago my brother David was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer...

...Social democracy has much to teach the green movement as well...

...Still, we have to get over the conceit that the world is simply there for the use of our generation...