workers are the ones who suffer DURING the recent debate over the Mulroney/Reagan "free trade" deal, many Canadian nationalist voices were raised in protest against the supposed threat to Canada's sovereignty. Revolutionary socialists asked: whose sovereignty? Workers', or their Canadian bosses?
BARRY WEISLEDER W E ARGUED that the real issue was the bosses' hidden agenda of social expenditure cutbacks, privatization and de-regulation of the economy in the interests of private profit.
A recent Statistics Canada report reveals that the sovereignty of Canadian big business was never in doubt. To the contrary, Canadian capital has safeguarded and even enhanced its sovereignty rather well, thank you very much. Since the mid-1970s, foreign ownership of the Canadian economy has declined steadily. In 1986, outside investors owned 23.6% of non-financial corporations, down 13% from the 1971 peak. Their share of profits fell 11%, down to 36%.
The Canadian corporate elite can, in part, thank former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Through the late 1970s and early 1980s his Liberal federal government's economic nationalist policies not only strengthened Canadian corporate control over the domestic economy. It stimulated an empire-building binge abroad — all at the expense of working class taxpayers and consumers. With more resources at their disposal, Canadian capitalists bought up US retail businesses, banks and real estate, and also expanded their exploitative operations throughout the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, and Africa.
Canada, as a member of the exclusive G-7 club of imperialist countries, enters into the new trade deal with the US from a position of strength relative to twenty years ago.
Restructuring the North
American economy
Canadian bankers may complain about proposed new laws that would permit domestic competition from US financial institutions, like American Express, but this did not prevent them from bankrolling the Conservative's re-election campaign. While Tory continentalism will undoubtedly disadvantage some sectors of Canadian capital, the biggest enterprises are big enough to benefit from greater access to the US market. (Naturally, they also appreciate the accompanying stepped-up attacks on the rights of labour in Canada.)
The trade deal will not transform Canada from a secondary imperialist power into a neo-colony. It will, however, accelerate the 7 restructuring of the North American econo-
CANADA • USSR my — and the losers will be workers on both sides of the border. Already workers are being forced increasingly into lowwage, part-time jobs with few, if any, benefits and poor, unsafe working conditions. Plants will be freer to "run away" to lower wage, anti-union regions within and beyond the North American trade bloc.
Canadian capital is getting ready for the new era of North American protectionism. It is preparing to battle competitors in a market increasingly dominated by huge transnational firms with a global reach. The question is, how can Bay Street best use its considerable resources to achieve its objectives? Shaken by the stock market crash of October 19, 1987, big business is loath to invest in new plant and equipment. Instead, big capital moves to swallow up its smaller competitors in an insatiable drive towards monopoly control.
There is no shortage of very recent examples. When Molson and Carling O'Keefe breweries merged on January 18, they created a joint venture with a stranglehold on 53% of Canada's beer market and sales of over C$2.3 billion. When PWA, owner of Canadian Airlines International, bought Wardair for C$241 million, the number of national airlines was reduced to two. Other important takeovers have been carried out recently by Imperial Oil, the Canada Malting Co., and Royal Trustco.
Of course, the commercial media is less concerned with the inevitable result for
ANA 8 working people of such a wave of mergers and takeovers namely, higher prices and interest rates, and thousands of jobs lost to corporate rationalization.
Mergers and takeovers cross borders in both directions. But Canadian capital is particularly well positioned to act now because it is so incredibly concentrated. In fact, Canada has the highest level of aggregate corporate concentration among Western industrialized countries. Although there are about 350,000 corporations in Canada, the top 25 control 35% of the business assets in the country, up from 30% in 1976. Their share of profits went up too, from 24% to 30%. Canada's 100 largest non-financial corporations controlled 55% of the country's business assets in 1986. By comparison, in Japan the top 100 control less than 25%; in the USA the figure is 28%.
Choosing sides is a dangerous diversion
Not surprisingly, the increase in corporate concentration over the past decade has coincided with a sharp rise in the number of large takeovers. In 1982 there were only two corporate acquisitions in excess of C$100 million. Every year the number increased until 1987, when there were 47; last year there were 46 takeovers exceeding C$100 million.
Pro-capitalist economists and academics say this is good because it will help Canadian corporations to compete internationally. But this will not be of any help to workers and the unemployed, here or abroad. As workers, our livelihood, our safety, our old-age security count for nothing on the financial ledger. Corporations are loyal only to one rule — the rule of maximizing profits.
Corporate concentration means antidemocratic concentration of decision-making authority in the hands of fewer and fewer businessmen whose gaze is fixed on the "bottom line". The potential for economic error and waste, and the abuse of the rights and needs of humanity, grows exponentially with greater corporate concentration.
The big business media love to criticize "socialism" for being horribly bureaucratic, wasteful and tyrannical. Naturally, they don't bother to explain that the usual objects of their criticism, social democraticled capitalist governments or totalitarian Stalinist regimes, have little to do with real socialism. The truth is that capitalism is the system most guilty of tyranny and waste, not to mention that capitalism constitutes a threat to the very survival of the planet due to its profit-driven militarism and environmental destructiveness.
Choosing sides between "our" capitalists and those in the USA or elsewhere (an unfortunate preoccupation of liberals, social democrats and Canadian nationalists generally) is, at best, a dangerous diversion. *
Debate on the national question in the USSR THE PROBLEMS posed in the USSR and the way they are perceived must be clarified as much as possible "from within." The article by Boris Kagarlitski in International Viewpoint 157 on February 20, contributes the point of view of a leader of the Moscow Socialist Initiative Club to a necessary debate.
Precisely because he is a militant known for his class and internationalist standpoint, it is important to discuss certain aspects of his assessment. In doing so, I do not claim to have ready-made answers to the difficulties that have been encountered. But let us at least try to begin the debate.
N THIS article, I want to raise only one point. There is no equality between nations and languages in the
USSR. Kagarlitski calls for such an equality. But he does so without taking into account the different status Russian enjoys from the outset by comparison with all the other languages. He therefore poses the problems faced by the Russian minorities outside the RFSSR as symmetrical with those of all the other nationalities and languages.
The lack of symmetry in fact indicates rather a different treatment of such problems, depending on whether they concern dominant nationalities and languages or dominated nationalities and languages.
Russian, as is well known, has been a vehicle of Stalinist domination. It remains, in particular in the army, an instrument of bureaucratic centralism. But it is well to avoid any simplistic approach. Great Russian chauvinism suited Stalin
For one thing, for the bureaucracy it is ite nrivileged and tharefore ite moliticl its privileges and therefore its political power that are essential. The means are not very important. In this respect, pragmatism is the rule. While Great Russian chauvinism indeed "fitted in" with the oppressive centralism aspects of the rise of Stalinism, a recognition of centrifugal national tensions was and will be able to force the bureaucracy to seek national (or even nationalist) intermediaries to consolidate its own power. The most corrupt sort of Brezhnevite "national" bureaucracy dominated Kazakhstan and still dominates Ukraine.
Moreover, Russian domination does not mean that the Russian population is favored. It is not necessarily favored as regards the options of planned development. Also, it has "shared" in Stalinist repression and oppression with others, even been among the worst hit.
The impact of the Great Russian nationalist and anti-Semite organization Pamyat and its renowned "village" writers, such as Valentin Rasputin, reflects in a reactionary way the diffuse feelings of a population that was originally peasant en masse and religious in its culture and which was subjected brutally to forced collectivization and bureaucratic repression of the church. This population interprets its own oppression as a "Russian question."
Boris Kagarlitski is also right to say in the interview published in International Viewpoint (issues 151 and 152, November 14 and 28, 1988), that the Russians outside Russia are far from having always and everywhere been dominant. It is also true that the Russian immigrant workers in Estonia are unskilled workers and that they make up in fact the majority of the working class in this republic's big plants. That they are not responsible for this state of affairs.
Nor is the policy of Russification entirely (and perhaps not even primarily) the reason for it. The attraction of a republic more developed than Russia (offering a better living standard and better jobs) is sufficient to explain this tendency. Bureaucratic centralism facilitated this process by financing the hiring and housing of these workers in a planned way.
However, it remains no less true that Russian dominates in the Union and sometimes even in the regions. Therefore, even
USSR
Independent Lithuanla! Independent Latvla! Independent Estonla!
— "And what If we organized a referendum?"
- "That's not funny, Rocarov!"
LITUANIE
ET Sİ ON
ORGANiSAiT
INDÉPENDANTE
ROCAROV,
UN
VOUS N'ỆTES
RÉFÉRENDUM?
PAS DRÔLE!
=
INDÉPEN-
KETTOWIE
ESTONIE
DANTE !!
INDEPENDANTE independently of a deliberate policy of Russification, the automatic processes favor Russian over all other languages, even if they have equal rights. Concretely, since Russian is a socio-economic vehicle facilitating mobility from one republic to another, a free choice of language impels people to learn Russian.
### Taking the historical context into account
In his article, Kagarlitski uses an argument, "equal civil and cultural rights," which the English speakers also use in Quebec, basing themselves on (individual) freedom of choice and the right (which every individual is supposed to have to be the equal of any other) to use "his or her" language. Individual rights here collide with protection of threatened communities.
The English-speaking minority in Quebec is dominant in Canada, as the Russian minority in Estonia is dominant centrally (and may already be or become a majority in certain regions of Estonia or Latvia). It cannot be treated in the same way in general as "real" minorities. In brief, there is a need for specific protection against the strength of Russian.
This question obviously combines with the political crimes of the Stalinist past. The forced assimilation of the Baltic republics into the USSR requires a special recognition of the national feelings that are expressed in them. The role of the left in Russia, in particular, unquestionably is first of all to explain this past to the Russian working class in Estonia and get it to recognize the need for respecting the priority of the Estonian language within the republic and the right to self-determination of the Estonians.
Of course, reciprocally, the Estonians have every interest in winning the working class in their republic and in the USSR in general to their cause, if only to establish a relationship of forces against the bureaucracy. The present context of glasnost favors the spread of anti-bureaucratic struggle through the Union and to other East European countries. But this also requires that it be linked indissolubly with social questions and democratic, political and national demands. This is why Kagarlitski is right to worry about social dimension of the program of the Estonian Front (but the problem arises everywhere) and about the struggle for a redefinition in general of the relations between the nationalities in the USSR; and, I would add, among so-called socialist countries. Bureaucratic manipulation can exploit the national feelings of different nationalities in order to divide and rule. There can be no laxity toward this. In this respect also, Kagarlitski article is useful. On the other hand, the point of view of the (Russian) working class should not be reflected by treating profoundly unequal national realities in a symmetrical way.