Save Meadowlily Woods!

Published September 22nd, 2008 in LPPS Blog. 0 Comments

The LPPS has endorsed the London Coalition for Sustainable Cities, and we fully support the work they’ve been doing, with others, in promoting the campaign to save the Meadowlily Woods environmentally sensitive area. Londoners need to get behind these campaigns, which are not only important for moral reasons, but also stand a good chance of winning. Local environmentalists have been doing great work in the past few years, pressuring city council to take issues of environmental justice and sustainability seriously. It needs to continue, and we all need to do our part.

Update on the LPPS

Published June 2nd, 2008 in LPPS Blog. 8 Comments

Those who haven’t been to an LPPS meeting for awhile may be interested in an update on our activities. So here it is.

Since our formal founding meeting (October 2007), we have had several “regular general meetings” (or RGMs). These RGMs have never had fewer than 8 people in attendance, and never more than about 15. We have also had a few “special event” meetings (film showings and a public forum with John Clarke and Justin Podur as speakers), which have had between 20 and 50 people in attendance. Details about the above events are available on our “Events” page.

Over this time, we have continued to clarify the nature of our project. One expression of this is our adoption by consensus of a “What We Do” statement, to supplement our original “Mission” statement. Essentially, we see the LPPS as a vehicle for promoting the visibility and “presence” of radical (anti-racist, pro-feminist, anti-capitalist) politics here in London, Ontario, and for enhancing the effectiveness of radical activism. We accomplish these ends in two key ways: first, by organizing discussion of radical analysis, strategy and vision, supplemented by skill-sharing workshops; and second, by organizing LPPS committees through which members of the LPPS can work collaboratively on pursuing more focussed political projects in a sustained way. (So far, we have a “public space committee” underway, and a committee on co-operatives is probably going to be established very soon. There is also talk about a “Right to the City” committee possibly to be established this summer.)

In some ways it is a difficult time to be launching an initiative like this one. It is not happening in the context of a major upsurge of progressive activism, as happened in the early days of the Global Justice Movement (say, from 1999 to 2001), and then again in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq (early 2003). Instead, today in London (Ontario) there are widespread problems of morale on the activist left, with a certain amount of infighting and a lot of difficulty building and sustaining organizations with active memberships. But these difficulties only underline the importance of what we’re trying to do. London needs people willing to actively work on helping to strengthen the left, and to help build the capacities of our activist community, and the LPPS is committed to participating alongside others in that process.

Another aspect of our work has been getting in touch with the wider network of “PPS” groups, extending not only to different North American groups, but also to groups in Africa, Europe and Oceania (see our “Links” page to visit some of their web sites). An email network has been established between these groups, and a common newsletter may be developed. (These groups are all quite different, having sprung up spontaneously and independently, with somewhat different priorities and methods. But we share a common commitment the transformative ideal of a post-capitalist, participatory society, based on social and environmental justice, and economic and political democracy.)

Anyone wishing to find out more about the LPPS, is invited to contact us via email, at participatory.society@gmail.com, or to come to one of our meetings, as listed on the “Events” page. You can also ask a question by commenting on this post.

    What’s the Point of Having a Revolutionary Strategy?

    Published June 1st, 2008 in LPPS Blog. 920 Comments

    One of the things that distinguishes a “radical” activist from a more broadly “progressive” activist is that the radical looks ahead to the transition to another kind of society, and acts today with those more distant possibilities constantly in view. Already in 1848, in the Communist Manifesto, Marx made this point very clearly. What distinguishes radicals, he said, was not that they “set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement.” On the contrary, he argued, radicals “always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.” Instead, the really distinctive characteristic of radical activists is that they have “the advantage of clearly understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the working-class movement.” In other words, they act today with tomorrow in mind: they work for “reforms” or immediate victories, but they are not “reformists” because they are always trying to build the capacities of resistance movements to the point where they can become capable of challenging the system itself. In short, radical activists have a strategy for radically transforming society, and immediate victories are fought for with that larger aim in view.

    What does this mean in practical terms? To answer this question is to take up the most difficult question facing radicals today: the question of how to engage in revolutionary politics in a non-revolutionary time. It is a very difficult question, and most attempts to address it succumb to one or both of the two most destructive temptations affecting radicals: nostalgia (doomed attempts to relive perceived high-points in the history of radical politics, such as the Russian Revolution or the Paris Commune, etc.), or delusions of grandeur (attempts by tiny groups of isolated radicals to represent themselves as having some grand destiny to shape the future course of world history).

    But the frequency with which radicals go astray in these ways should not deter us. Radicals have a responsibility to confront the problem of revolutionary strategy, and the only way to do so successfully is to take the problem up collectively, in good faith dialogue with others.The conversation is already underway, and here are a few links to contributions to this necessary discussion:

  • Building a Pareconish Movement” (Michael Albert)
  • Which Way is Left?” [pdf] (Freedom Road Socialist Organization, USA)
  • “War of Position: Anti-Capitalist Attrition as a Revolutionary Strategy for Non-Revolutionary Times” (SJ DArcy)
  • “The Rank and File Strategy: Building a Socialist Movement in the US” (Kim Moody)
  • “Elements of a Revolutionary Strategy” (François Sabado)
  • “Debate: Change the World without Taking Power? Or Take Power to Change the World?” [pdf] (John Holloway, Daniel Bensaid, Hilary Wainwright, and others)
  • “Why Participatory Democracy Matters — And Why Movements Matter to Participatory Democracy” (Hilary Wainwright)
  • “Where They Retreat, We Must Advance: Building Dual Power” (Wesley Morgan)
  • “The Socialist Project: Founding Statement” (The Socialist Project)

    • Check out some of these articles, and, if you want to add one to the list, post a comment!

    SEIU and UNITE-HERE Make Secret Deals with Employers

    Published May 10th, 2008 in LPPS Blog. 1315 Comments

    The Wall Street Journal reports that the officials of two of the largest private-sector unions in North America have entered into secret agreements with employers (notorious food service ‘outsource’ corporations Sodexho and Aramark), which “give the companies the right to designate which of their locations, and how many workers, the unions can seek to organize” (Wall Street Journal, 10 May 2008). The two unions involved are SEIU (the Service Employees International Union) and UNITE-HERE (formed by the 2004 merger of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees and the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union). According to report, “a summary document put together by the unions says it is critical to the success of the partnership ‘that we honor the confidentiality and not publicly disclose the existence of these agreements.’ That includes not disclosing them to union members.” The secret deals directly affect 1.7 million workers who provide outsourced food, laundry and housekeeping services. More broadly, this union-official/employer alliance to thwart grassroots organizing efforts by service-sector workers adversely affects all workers, and all advocates of social justice and economic democracy. All advocates of workers rights should do whatever they can to support any effort to drive the current ‘leadership’ of these unions out of office, and to return these unions to control from below by their rank and file members. Such an effort is already underway in SEIU, and some work has been done on fighting to take back UNITE-HERE from its boss-friendly officials. (Link to news article)

    Putting the Food Crisis in Political Perspective

    Published May 8th, 2008 in LPPS Blog. 1255 Comments

    According to UNICEF, about 30,000 children die each day within the world capitalist system due to easily preventable conditions related to poverty and malnutrition. But the longstanding failures of the system to feed those who live under it — for the simple but shocking reason that feeding some people is simply not profitable for the capitalist food industry — has recently taken a turn for the worse. The global food crisis is wreaking havoc in many communities worldwide, leading this year to food riots in many countries, including Haiti, Cameroon, Indonesia and Egypt, to name only a few. For some in-depth analysis of what’s wrong with the system of capitalist food production, a recent book, The Global Food Economy: The Battle for the Future of Farming, written by London’s Tony Weis, is well worth checking out. So, too, is an article in the new issue of Monthly Review, called “The World Food Crisis: Sources and Solutions,” by Fred Magdoff. These problems are not going to disappear any time soon, and radicals need to equip ourselves with a sophisticated grasp of the issues, one which goes beyond the superficial coverage available in mainstream sources.

    Canada: Report Documents 25 yrs of Income Redistribution from the Poor to the Rich

    Published May 4th, 2008 in LPPS Blog. 0 Comments

    According to a new report from Statistics Canada, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. That may be no surprise. But the scale of the injustice, and its persistence for a quarter century, is remarkable. According to the report: “Between 1980 and 2005, median earnings among the top 20% of full-time full-year earners increased by 16.4%. In contrast, median earnings among those in the bottom one-fifth of the distribution fell 20.6%. Median earnings among those in the middle 20% stagnated, increasing by only 0.1%.” (link)

    The Continuing Relevance of Socialist Feminism

    Published May 3rd, 2008 in LPPS Blog. 0 Comments

    Nancy Holmstrom, a long-time socialist feminist activist/intellectual in the U.S., recently gave a talk in Toronto on the topic of the “Socialist-Feminism, Then and Now,” the text of which is available on the web site of New Socialist magazine. In her talk, Holmstrom offers both a useful historical survey of the early years of (2nd Wave) socialist-feminism in its North American version, and also a convincing case for ongoing importance in today’s movements.

    She writes: “We have made enormous changes in gender relations since the 1960s but the ones we need to make now are more difficult since they push up against the limits of capitalism…. Today’s struggles tend to be fragmented – labor, environmental, anti-war, women’s, so our main challenge is to think of ways to integrate them and try to form alliances with others who share our interests and concerns and try to build the movements capable of making the changes we need. Whatever movements we are in, the women’s movement, labor, anti-war or environmental, we have to try to bring up a socialist-feminist angle, one that addresses the interests of the majority of the women of the world. One thing we know from the ‘60s and ‘70s is that enormous and totally surprising changes are possible and sometimes they come very rapidly – so we need to be prepared with good theory and practice.” (link)

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