SYC Speaker at PDC Holiday Appeal

State Repression Targets Protesters, Youth

(Young Spartacus pages)

On January 20, the Partisan Defense Committee held its annual Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners in Toronto. A Spartacus Youth Club spokesman, comrade H. Adil, gave the following speech, which has been slightly edited for publication.

The Occupy demonstrations that started in New York City in the fall and then spread around the world showed the anger and frustration that many people in society feel toward the gross injustices and inequalities that exist under capitalism. They also showed the nature of the state, which sought to crush these protests with brute force from Oakland, California to New York City. In these cities, the cops and courts fulfilled the identical function of arresting, charging and jailing protesters. Even these populist protests, which never went beyond the framework of reform of the capitalist system, were too much for the bourgeois rulers to tolerate.

In Canada, the police crackdowns were not as brutal as, for example, the crushing of the Occupy Oakland protest, but only someone with a short-term memory would argue that this is due to the benevolence of the Canadian rulers. It was only a year earlier that the Canadian state mobilized a huge army of 20,000 cops to guard the G20 summit in Toronto. In what was the largest mass arrest in Canadian history, 1,100 people were arrested, most of whom were never charged with anything. Among those who did face serious charges was Amanda Hiscocks, a long-time anarchist activist who on January 13 was sentenced to 16 months in prison. At her sentencing hearing, she was defiant, saying:

“Throughout this farcical legal process that’s coming to an end today, the accused have been told that our actions were an attack on the rule of law…. Well good. Our society is racist and colonial, it’s rooted in wealth and power, and so is the rule of law that upholds it.”

Another G20 activist, Alex Hundert, also faced trumped-up “conspiracy” charges before pleading guilty to lesser charges of “counselling” to commit mischief and obstruct police. He expects to face 13 1/2 months in jail. The police identified him by going undercover and infiltrating protest groups. Conspiracy charges have historically been levelled by the capitalist state against its perceived enemies such as militant trade unionists and activists when no evidence exists of an actual crime being committed.

But what’s the “crime” of breaking a few bank windows or burning down a few police cars, compared to the crimes of the capitalist system: the harassment and deportation of undocumented immigrants, the racist police targeting of Native and minority youth, the torture and indefinite imprisonment in Guantánamo Bay and secret detention centres, and the imperialist bombings of neocolonial countries. These protesters, including the Black Bloc anarchists, did not commit any crime from the standpoint of the working class and should never have spent a day in jail. We demand that all the G20 protesters be freed and that all charges be dropped immediately!

The G20 mass arrests marked an intensification of criminalization of dissent and were clearly meant to intimidate anyone who would oppose the violence, poverty and war that are endemic to the capitalist system. These cases of brutal state repression did not come as a surprise to us. The Marxist understanding of the state teaches that the state is an organ of oppression of one class by another. The capitalist state, at its core consisting of the cops, courts, military and prisons, exists to maintain the rule and profits of the bourgeoisie. It is the dictatorship of capital over the working class and oppressed. It cannot be reformed to serve the interests of those it oppresses; instead, it must be smashed through socialist revolution and replaced by a new kind of state, a workers state, the dictatorship of the proletariat.

This revolutionary understanding of the state and the fact that it must be overthrown does not come automatically to a young activist or worker, no matter how many times they attend protests or how many times they confront the cops. It requires the intervention of a revolutionary vanguard party, armed with the Marxist program, which is rooted in historical experience and a scientific understanding of capitalist society. In our interventions into the Occupy movement, we always stressed two things: one, the centrality of the working class in the struggle to overthrow the capitalist system, as against the petty-bourgeois populism of the protests; and two, the cops are not your friends! But illusions in bourgeois democracy and, by extension, in the bourgeois state, permeated the Occupy protests. There was the widespread view that cops are “part of the 99 percent.” In Toronto, the organizers of the protests even thanked the cops for showing “restraint” as they were being kicked out of their encampment in St. James Park.

Reform vs. Revolution

There were fake-left groups that were in or around these protests, and their everyday activity only served to reinforce the illusions that most protesters had in the state. Recall that in the aftermath of the G20 protests, the social-democratic Fightback organization refused to defend the Black Bloc anarchists from the brutal police crackdown, instead slandering them as police provocateurs. We took a principled stand of defending those caught in the state’s crosshairs, despite the fact that we disagree with their political views. But Fightback’s position on the G20 was in line with their longstanding support for cop “unions,” which they say can bring the cops closer to the workers (maybe, close enough to wield a baton). We say: the police are not “workers in uniform.” All cops, prison guards and security guards out of the unions!

The history of state repression in Canada goes back way further than the last two years. It is not just a case of the current right-wing Harper Conservative government. It was a Liberal government under Pierre Trudeau that sent the army with armoured cars to occupy Montreal during the “October Crisis” of 1970. What followed was the jailing of hundreds of militant fighters for Quebec independence, leftists and trade unionists. The oppression of Quebec remains the key issue dividing workers in English Canada from Québécois workers. We oppose the prevailing Anglo chauvinism and advocate Quebec independence in order to get the national question off the agenda and pave the way for united class struggle by workers of both nations.

Not so with the NDP. Anglo-chauvinist to the core, the NDP has always represented the interests of Canadian imperialism, from the invasion of Afghanistan to the recent bombing of Libya. And NDP governments in power rule for the bosses and are every bit as guilty of repression as Liberal and Conservative governments, from the jailing of striking postal workers by the former NDP government of Ontario to attacks against Native protesters by its provincial partner in British Columbia.

The historically pro-Zionist NDP has taken a hard line against anyone who would defend the oppressed Palestinians. When the “Freedom Flotilla II” convoy was sent to help the Palestinians in Gaza, the ships were detained in Europe and one was attacked by Israel with the full support of the Canadian government. Only two NDP MPs voiced support for the Palestinian aid convoy, and the full weight of the NDP leadership, including Jack Layton himself, was brought to bear to force them in line with the party’s official program, which is support for Israel and opposition to defense of the Palestinians.

The anti-Palestinian witchhunt also extends to those supposed bastions of free speech, the campuses. In Toronto, the Graduate Students’ Union at the University of Toronto threatened to remove funding from the Ontario Public Interest Research Group, which had been described as “not represent[ing] student interests,” notably over its support for Students Against Israeli Apartheid. In Vancouver, the student government at the University of British Columbia allied with the Zionists in attempting to prevent the group Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights from receiving a donation for the Canada Boat to Gaza, even going so far as to call on CSIS to “investigate” supposed “links to terrorism” of the pro-Palestinian groups.

In our work on campuses, we have always stridently opposed all attempts by the administration, student bureaucrats or right-wing groups to stifle dissent, including through our call for cops off campus. So for example at a campus sale a few months ago, we jumped to the defense of another group that had stacks of its literature grabbed by a Zionist, loudly sloganeering for the defense of the Palestinians and their supporters on campus. At the same time, we opposed any illusions that the campus police would intervene on the side of the pro-Palestinian activists. These examples illustrate the repression of dissent on campus, an ominous turn toward making it more difficult for opponents of capitalist oppression to do work or even exist on campuses.

The bottom line is that the myriad forms of oppression, exploitation and injustice that have sparked protests around the world have one thing in common: they are the direct products of the capitalist system which is based on the exploitation of labour and production for profit. What’s needed is a revolutionary internationalist workers party to lead the struggle to overthrow capitalism through world socialist revolution. This is the only way to eliminate economic crises, mass poverty and imperialist wars and build an economy based on production for human needs, jobs for all and free education for all. The role of the Spartacus Youth Clubs is to bring Marxism to a new generation of youth and to win them to the side of the working class.

Concretely, that means allying with the power of labour against the bosses, from Rob Ford’s war on city workers to the attacks against teaching assistants at U of T to Harper’s war on the CUPW postal workers. Picket lines mean don’t cross! We call to abolish the university administration and for worker/student/teacher control of the universities and for open admissions and free tuition for all. If you want to fight for a communist future, check out our press, come to our events, and get involved with the activities of the Trotskyist League and the Spartacus Youth Club.