The Far-Right in the absence of a Strong Left: A Warning

This post actually isn't mine per say but it came from a blog called skeptic.ca, the author is an anarchist, through he has a degree of sympathy for the NDP while it was under Tommy Douglas.  This post was written as part of a longer post on that blog regarding the author's concerns about the NDP's movement to the center, which accelerated under Mulcair and his "third way politics" and cost them arguably the 2015 election. 

I decided to share it, while I may not agree fully with the ideology of the original writer, because of it's relevance to politics in both the US and arguably Canada too(not to mention that it kinda predicted Trump).  We may think that we have it so smug(despite the fact that our society was also founded as a settler colony at the expense of the indigenous population and rooted in racism too) or that we're somehow progressive and post-racial.  Yet, within days of Trump's victory, we have seen alt-right hate propaganda spreading across Canada targeting racial minorities, and a potential Trump in the wings in the form of Kellie Leitch.  Never mind we have our own racist demogorgues and maniacs in the form of Ezra Levant and Lauren Southern.  As I mentioned in my post back from my long hibernation, the rise of Trump was tied to the failings of neoliberalism.  And as Justin Trudeau is becoming more and more of just another neoliberal, maybe we ourselves need a strong progressive movement or face the same consequences as America. 

The post below.  The original post can be found here:

The time has come to confront, not individual nuances of the exploitive state-capitalist system, but rather the Conservative Corporate Welfare State itself, the present version of State Capitalism that is destroying democracy and our hopes for a better life for the future, a future for our children and grandchildren that has been decimated by corporate greed and public plunder. The time has come to fight against the corporations that have moved our jobs to Mexican and Asian sweatshops, exploiting and impoverishing workers there while destroying jobs at home. The time has come to fight against a system that has ensured that many of our fellow citizens work most of their lives in temporary labour without health insurance or retirement benefits. The time has come to stand up against the neo-feudalism that creates a society where individual debt is at an all time high while CEOs, prima donna professional athletes, "movie stars" and entertainers earn more in a day than most hard-working Canadians will in a year or even a decade, and where they get red carpet treatment by the legal system. You may rest assured, if the person who stole the $50 smart phone from Future Shop is caught he will likely go to jail as opposed to an investment banker who swindled people out of their entire livelihoods and futures. No one as has yet been held accountable for the massive swindles on Wall Street and elsewhere within the global financial community that has brought the global economy to its knees, thereby virtually bankrupting nations from the taxpayer bailouts of criminal financial behemoths like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.

The time has come to stand up against the daily violence of the system of state capitalist system (socialism for big business and the wealthy on the one hand and rabid competition for the rest of us on the other) with its destruction of decent jobs in Canada. It all amounts to entrenchment of poverty in the third world - and at home- all designed to satisfy the balance sheets of multinational corporations and an unsustainable consumerism. It's time for a big increase in the minimum wage and to institute a maximum wage. For the sake of argument suppose the average wage in Canada is $40,000. Is there a problem with a maximum wage of $4,000,000, with the excess going into social programs such as helping our worst off? Is it only the potential for obscene amounts of money that motivate people to work hard? I think not. And corporate tax rates in Canada federally are at 15% with provincial corporate tax rates in British Columbia at 4%. That's for corporations that have not moved their corporate charters to offshore tax havens so they do not have to pay taxes at all in the countries of origin, countries that legally sanctioned their corporate charters in the first place.

Most important of all, the time has come to organize a political movement of hands on democracy that will oppose this state-capitalist system and to give voice to this sentiment within our hierarchical representative forms of democracy, as well as within our communities. The entire system needs to be changed by endorsing anarchist-informed horizontal direct forms of democracy, because at least 95% of the people are not being fairly represented at all and never really have been.

The question of whether or not such a new libertarian socialist movement will succeed in winning this or that riding in the next election is not of significant importance. The Reform Party, as well as the NDP in their more radical days, demonstrated that a grassroots movement can affect the nature of the political debate without winning even a minority government. It is this victory, the altering of the political discourse in the country, that is the most important victory to win.

The process of altering the political discourse is by no means easy. The forces of the political right have shifted the debate such that, even when they are not in office their policies are still enacted. Another massive problem is the propaganda system of a right wing corporate controlled media where a half-dozen multinational companies control everything we read, see and hear. If and when these corporate brutes get control of the internet, all voices to the left of Attila the Hun will be silenced.

One should recall that the morally bankrupt ossified ideology of Conservatism was considered a draconian anachronism both ethically and intellectually by the time of the Great Depression of the 1930s and especially by the early 1960s when it was universally rejected in most liberal democracies throughout the world. Yet within a few years fanatical Conservatives (neo-conservatives) had succeeded in destroying the New Deal and Great Society programs in the United States. In Canada, they enacted Free Trade and NAFTA (in reality blank checks for corporations to wilfully exploit people and resources with impunity throughout the world) while underfunding social programs and privatizing anything they could while handing over public wealth to their pals in the private sector. Those on the centre/left should draw lessons from their tactics. The most important lesson is that an organized grassroots movement can alter the political landscape. But the future looks extremely bleak with governments at all levels financial stressed due to the global economic meltdown and massive corporate bailouts. But little or nothing is being done to help the victims of these corporate criminals and their neo-conservative pimps in government. And no one is being held accountable. Civil disobedience is one way and it could get ugly, as it has throughout the Middle East of late. Sadly one plausible scenario, if the moderate left does not get its act together soon, is the emergence of a fascist demagogue who will offer a salvation plan, a plan that people, in their desperation, may very well support. Look at the rise of the Tea Party movement and the emergence of extreme right wing demagogues like Glen Beck in the USA and, more recently, the moronic religious fundamentalist candidates vying for the leadership of the Republican Party - and remember the Third Reich.