The Ideological Struggle is a Fight for a Working Class World View

A war is being waged. Canadian workers are being punished in record numbers by monopoly capital for its callous policies of profit first, people second. As the spin-doctors for the capitalist press announce almost daily that the ‘recovery is just around the corner’ or the ‘end is in sight’ the reality for millions of Canadian workers and their families can be farther from the truth. Outrage is boiling over in Ontario where the brave CUPE municipal workers in Windsor and Toronto, resisting the combined efforts of business and government forces to break the union, are fighting to protect decades of hard won working class gains clearly demonstrate.

The class divisions within Canada are more evident then ever. While the majority of Canadians are dependent on wages to provide security for their families a shrinking section of the parasitical classes, holding the commanding heights of economic, political and ideological power, attempt to foment ruptures and turmoil within working class unity.

The thin veil of ‘equality’ is being violently stripped off the working class by the economic realities of the capitalist crisis to expose the real depths of class divides and the ideological and economic basis of these schisms. Newspaper editorial blogs deliberately sow confusion within unorganized and unemployed ‘private sector’ workers. News website reader comment sections are bursting with class confusion, bourgeois parroting and anti-worker hate mongering unwittingly among this section of the working class and maliciously by the ideological agents of business dogma that troll anonymously posting outlandish lies and assertions.

Business doctrine is spread liberally by monopoly capital’s bought-and-paid-for ideological think-tanks, academic stooges and hired management consultants, targeting the least class conscious sections of workers. The main objective of these attacks is to win public sentiment for the profit first policies of monopoly capital, divide organized labour into isolated factions and break unions into compliant and voluntary tools of monopoly capital policy.

Objectively, the only barrier between the open dictatorial rule of monopoly capital is organized labour. This is what the CUPE resistance is primarily about. What started as an ‘economic’ struggle is quickly exploding into a broader political struggle. The deepening antagonisms within the growing capitalist crisis are also revealing more clearly two world views – that of peace and progress which is upheld by labour, and that of reaction and violence which are expressed in the anti-union ideology of imperialism led by the minority Harper conservative government.

The municipal workers strike has also exposed the greatest weakness within organized labour – ideology. While the valiant efforts of 24,000 CUPE workers that walk picket lines is a testament to their outrage and courage, the struggle is hand cuffed because they are not armed with partisan working class theory – Marxism. The fight to infuse Marxist ideology into the labour movement is urgent. The forces of peace and socialism are called upon to make the ideological struggle the struggle of primary importance.