Twenty-five years ago today large crowds descended on Quebec City to protest the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Remembering is not simply nostalgia but rather we desperately need another Carnival Against Capitalism and can learn from the organizing done back then.
During the multi day Summit of the Americas 50,000 took to the streets against corporate globalization. In one of the largest ever explicitly anti-capitalist mobilizations in Canadian history, thousands attended the Convergence des Luttes Anticapitalistes’ Carnival Against Capitalism.
Protesting the FTAA was formative for me. During my first year in Montreal my main political activity was organizing against the capitalist summit and subsequently as vice-president of the Concordia Student Union I was arrested for handing out anti-FTAA leaflets in defiance of repressive measures introduced after Benjamin Netanyahu was blocked from speaking on campus. The FTAA was ultimately abandoned.
The FTAA protests were part of an upsurge of anti-capitalist activism in the imperial core. In the late 1990s and early 2000s meetings of the World Trade Organization, G7 and International Monetary Fund were met by tens of thousands of protesters.
Today it’s remarkable how little direct challenge there is of our wealth-concentrating, ecocidal economic system. But challenging capitalism is more important than ever.
A system of minority and class rule, capitalism is based on the private ownership of our social means of livelihood. Capitalist collectives (corporations) have socialized labour while operating as privately owned workplace dictatorships that centralize power in the hands of a small elite.
Capitalism’s need for constant profit maximization and growth is imperilling human survival. The last three years were the hottest in 100,000 years with CO2 levels at their highest in millions of years. Despite Canadians having among the highest per capita GHG emissions, capitalists continue to expand heavy emitting tar sands extraction. A recent federal government report noted that between 1990 and 2024 GHG emissions from tar sands operations increased 529 percent! As such, Canada cannot possibly meet its already insufficient emissions reductions commitments, yet few call to shut down the tar sands.
It’s not just the climate crisis. The search for corporate profits is driving mass species extinction, soil depletion, ozone layer thinning, loss of arable land, freshwater depletion and other ecological crises.
Capitalism is imperilling our ability to live on the planet but it’s also destroying our health. The growing health impact of plastics, a late twentieth century corporate invention, is a case in point. Researchers have found that most of us now have as much as a small spoon worth of plastic particles in our brains.
Capitalism also damages our mental health. Incessant messages to buy this and buy that are destabilizing. A staggering amount of resources and ingenuity are devoted to convincing us we need this or that (always more) to be satisfied.
At the same time as it wages a war on our psyche, capitalism alienates us from our labour. It devalues work, generally paying the hardest working people the least. In recent years Canadian capital has waged an unrelenting war on working class organizations, driving Canada’s private sector unionization rate to its lowest level in 80 years. Fifteen percent of private sector workers have the protection of a collective agreement.
As capitalists attack unions, the system concentrates wealth in the hands of an ever-smaller elite few. Canada’s 86 billionaire families control more wealth than the country’s 6.2 million least wealthy families. One single Canadian, Changpeng Zhao, has $150 billion.
It’s grotesque. Billionaires shouldn’t exist. Nor should one hundred millionaires or even ten millionaires.
Wealth concentration is a threat to democracy. The rich buy political parties, own the media, fund think tanks, organize themselves in business lobby groups, amongst other things. In short, capitalists try to mould societies’ political, cultural and economic structure to their benefit.
As capitalism has further concentrated wealth and spurred ecological collapse, direct challenges have largely dried up. For social and ecological reasons that must change. We need movements pushing to replace one dollar one vote capitalism with one person one vote economic democracy. Wherever there’s social labour, there should be community ownership and workplace democracy.
My campaign to lead the NDP generated some questioning of our economic system with 45 activists and researchers producing a comprehensive platform called Capitalism Can’t Be Fixed—Onward to a Socialist Future! Since its October release it’s likely been the most widely read anti-capitalist pamphlet/book in Canada, which is (unfortunately) not saying that much.
At the recent NDP convention hundreds of delegates snapped up copies of the well-designed booklet and the campaign organizes a weekly “Wednesday webinar” series to raise the issues. On May 24 the “Capitalism Can’t Be Fixed” campaign is organizing a daylong conference in Toronto to discuss next steps.
Whatever comes out of these efforts we need an organized movement questioning wealth concentrating, ecocidal capitalism.
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