Books

The Forgotten Prophets of the Occupiers

A fascinating Canadian book urges 'political action for the 99%.' It was written in 1943.

By Crawford Kilian, 6 Jan 2012, TheTyee.ca

Occupy Toronto protestor

What's new? Protesters at Occupy Toronto. Photo via Nonprofitty.

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  • Make This Your Canada
  • David Lewis and Frank Scott
  • Hybrid Publishing Co-operative Ltd. (2001; originally published 1943)

The Occupy movement has fallen out of the headlines for now (though not out of the twitterverse). We wait to see if it moves beyond a six-month wonder, from the first announcement of Occupy Wall Street to its present obscurity.

But I've recently learned that Occupy's basic critique of society is at least 70 years old. It is essentially that of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, which transformed itself into the New Democratic Party half a century ago.

A friend gave me a notable Christmas present -- a book published in 1943 titled Make This Your Canada. The authors were none other than David Lewis and Frank Scott, legendary figures on Canada's left. Scott had helped to write the Regina Manifesto; Lewis was the national secretary of the CCF and the father of Stephen Lewis.

The book summarized CCF policy and principles as they had developed through the Depression and the first years of World War II. The authors' purpose was to envision a postwar CCF government operating under those democratic socialist principles. One chapter in particular might have been written in 2012, not 1943. Its title: "Political Action for the 99%." They wrote:

"Many of us have become cynical where politics is concerned. Corruption, class legislation and political irresponsibility no longer move us to indignation. Instead, we shrug our shoulders, as if to say, 'What can you expect?' This attitude threatens the whole democratic fabric of our country.

"The cause for this attitude is not far to seek. For many years now, the distinctions between the old political parties have ceased to have any meaning in the lives of our citizens. The people's experience has always been that their lot was neither better nor worse under one or the other government. Political promises seem never to be fulfilled and yet are shamelessly repeated at every election. Democracy has been frustrated by political machines and huge campaign funds supplied by those who are not in the habit of investing without profit... In short, democracy has become a form with little of soul or substance."

'The people's will must be made effective'

"Let there be no mistake: the political life of the country will be controlled, if not by the people, then by the vested interests. Indifference on our part is precisely the guarantee that special privilege will continue to rule. The people's will must be made effective. To achieve this end, they must gain control of economic and political power."

After describing the major Canadian groups -- workers, farmers, and middle classes -- Lewis and Scott drew a dramatic contrast:

"How big are these groups? All of us, of course, know from our experience that together they comprise the majority of our population, but few realize just how big a majority." Lewis and Scott cited a table, based on 1931 census data, showing the percentage of Canada's population in these three groups:

Working Classes: 815,000 families; 42.5 per cent of the population
Farm Classes: 598,700 families; 31.2 per cent of the population
Middle Classes: 492,000 families; 25.7 per cent of the population
Sub-Total: 1,905,700 families; 99.4 per cent of the population

To these they added the "Well-To-Do," defined as earning $10,000 a year or more -- the equivalent in today's money of $153,000. This group made up 0.6 per cent of Canada's people.

"The well-to-do group," Lewis and Scott wrote, "is merely a dot in proportion to all the other figures and needs a magnifying glass to be identified. It is to this dot that the whole country pays tribute. This group not only receives a disproportionate share of the national income but owns the bulk of the capital goods which are necessary to produce that income... The basic struggle to-day is between the 99 per cent who are reaching out for the economic and political power which the one per cent now effectively control."

Sixty-nine years later, little has changed. But for 30 years, it seemed to change. As the late historian Tony Judt noted, after World War I Europe's middle classes were ruined and went fascist; the working classes were ruined and went communist. After World War II, the one per cent saved itself with a modicum of regulation and wealth redistribution.

"Monopoly capitalism" accepted relatively high taxation, both corporate and personal. Unions fought for good wages and working conditions within the system, rather than stage a red revolution. Almost everyone lived well for three glorious decades into the mid-1970s. By then wages had begun to stagnate. Women went to work -- not to express their liberation, but to help support their families' standard of living.

From capitalism to cannibalism

"There is a lot of ruin in a nation," Adam Smith famously said, and it took close to 40 years before North Americans and Europeans finally realized what had happened to them. The one per cent were firmly in control and always had been. But now they had changed from capitalism to cannibalism. They were feeding off the people who had once been both their workers and their customers, people who still clung to the dreams of home ownership, steady work, and social mobility.

The Occupy movement finally arose to protest this exploitation. It has dragged income inequality into what passes for modern political debate. It has not, however, answered its own question: "What is our one demand?" No doubt it has escaped being pigeonholed by its very lack of a program and a leader.

But its demonstrators have settled for martyrdom rather than achieving real change and implementing it. Given a choice between framing an agenda and getting pepper-sprayed, Occupy has gone for the pepper spray every time.

David Lewis and Frank Scott had seen it all in the 1920s and '30s. They were old enough to remember the Winnipeg General Strike and countless other disasters. They certainly understood how hard it was to organize and articulate the protests of the disorganized and inarticulate. They understood that the continued rule of the one percent was ipso facto proof of the lack of democracy.

I wonder what Lewis and Scott would think of their own political great-grandchildren in today's NDP, who have maintained an embarrassed silence about the Occupy movement. As the one per cent steadily regained its power, the New Democrats accommodated themselves, to the point where they prefer to describe themselves as "social democrats" rather than socialists. Yet they must know that if they ever do move from opposition to government, however mildly they rule, the one per cent will fight them to the death. And likely win.

The NDP (or for that matter the Liberals) might actually strengthen themselves by recognizing the Occupiers as their brothers and sisters, not just an awkward squad of hippies and homeless. If some political party can articulate the Occupiers' problems as Lewis and Scott did, and offer solutions as they did, we might just achieve what Lewis and Scott foresaw in 1943: a genuine Canadian democracy. [Tyee]

Crawford Kilian is a contributing editor of The Tyee.

13 Comments:

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  • Fiat lux

    20 weeks ago

    There's no chance for any

    There's no chance for any change for the better, as long as our universities are brainwashing their students and the public with the present neoclassical economic propaganda at the intellectual level of Hitler's racial theories.

    The ruling classes of history have always been promoted and licenced to enslave people
    with religious and now ideological/economic theories.

    There's no hope in hell for humanity until people realize the extremely difficult to understand fact that: "Wealth can not be created, only taken"....

    This has nothing to do with any religion, or ideology, but the simple fact of Thermodynamics; "We can not create anything, only turn resources into other forms".

    Which also includes waste, pollution, climate change and impoverishment some people are making fortunes of, while destroying and enslaving others, while calling it "freedom".

    Ed Deak.

  • MJK

    20 weeks ago

    Read George too

    George Woodcock's seminal work Anarchism shows that the Occupy movement's roots go back a few hundred years at least. The classic anarchist isn't the black bandana-wearing Vancouver or G20 window smasher, but people who think that government must be dismantled (okay... smashed) in order to gain individual freedoms. The much ostracized Sons of Freedom Doukhobors, that Woodcock writes about, were really Occupiers in the Kootenays and here on Vancouver Island.

  • macsasquatch

    20 weeks ago

    We Need A New Lollardry...

    I sometimes think that John Ball, Wat Tyler, John Wyclif and the Lollards were on to something. Of course, they based their views and actions on their interpretation of their faith.
    They saw a parliament made up of land owners and wealthy burghers, secular and church nobility, slicing up the commons and converting it to their own private use. for example, after disease in the mid 14th Century reduced the numbers of the labouring class both in rural and urban England, parliament passed a Statute of Labourers which restricted mobility of rural and urban workers, and capped wages.
    The peasants tried to follow the contemporary rules in addressing what they saw as injustice. Only treachery, military force and short circuiting of the justice system did them in.

    We each are born into a common wealth made up of the air, water, sub soil, soil, flora, fauna, our institutions, traditions, experience and ideas. Through history, various groups have co opted this commons to their own private ownership and use: priests, warrior classes, aristocrats, and today, corporate giants. They have co opted larger and larger chunks of the commons, and then claimed (through their control of information) that their ownership is divinely sanctioned, and that their accumulated wealth is evidence that they themselves actually created that wealth.

    One of the verses from the protestors who Ball and Tyler lead to London to petition the young king was:
    When Adam delved and Eve span,
    Who then was the gentleman?
    It came to be presented as a childish gibber.
    But I don't think that the question in that verse has ever been adequately answered.

    So, Ball and Tyler, Wyclif and the Lollards could be styled 'Occupiers' of their time.

  • raging senior

    20 weeks ago

    Crawfor Killian,s article - very good.

    I enjoy Ed's comments. I have been involved in many movements and have put articles in our local paper, the Editor has been supportive and has printed almost all I have submitted.
    What I believe is that most people read articles in the papers and items on TV and if it does not effect them directly they are not interested. Examples are how votes were bought in the HST vote, $7 million brought the percentage down from 85% against to 55% against. The Enbridge pipeling is another, on CBC radio they were talking to people in Prince Rupert and Kitimat, the responses were astounding, "I don't know anything about it, how can you stop a big company from doing what they want, people seem to have given up and only want to exist. The tragedy is, we in BC take all the risks of spills, the royalties go to Alberta, we in BC will get, maybe 50 full time jobs. The pipeline will be built by professional pipeliners that will live in camps and supplies will be bought whole sale in Alberta. With the Primiers of BC, Alberta and the Prime Minister of Canada are PIMPING the project it will be a large strugle to stop the pipeline.

  • meljoyconn

    20 weeks ago

    forgotten prophets

    Re: "I wonder what Lewis and Scott would think of their own political great-grandchildren in today's NDP, who have maintained an embarrassed silence about the Occupy movement.": Lewis would have been very proud of his grandaughter-in-law: Naomi Klein!

  • metacomet

    20 weeks ago

    Pidgin Wholes

    It took a few weeks for MSM to pigeon hole Occupiers as a bunch of radical, no-count street urchins, having to wait until the broader social representations, which included an unusually large contingent of ordinary, middle class Canadians, went back their jobs and homes. The remainder, who had every right to participate, were left to hold down the fort. MSM then focused on their particular concerns, totally legitimate in their own right, to misrepresent the original movement as a special interest group to inculcate longstanding prejudice against the disenfranchised while at the same time criticizing the so-called 99-percenters for being unfocused and inarticulate. The incongruity of pigeon-holing a generalization in such a blatantly biased fashion made MSM, and the big business interests they serve, look weak and inspired every Occupier, entrenched or itinerant.

    The biggest feature of the Occupation is that it includes such a broad cross section of society, as such almost impossible to pigeon hole. Theoretically it should be possible with the 1-percenters, but that would also be too facile, and would analytically miss the variety of interests within this wealthiest percentile. Seemingly allied and monolithic (the "one" in one percent ), they really only co-operate when it's in their respective interests, otherwise regarding each other strategically much as sovereign states do, where stabbing erstwhile partners in the back and beggaring the competition are perfectly acceptable and understood. Big they are, but few in number, more vulnerable to attack in detail than the unfocused, inarticulate masses could ever be.

    "Name the one single thing the Occupiers stand for" and the supposed pact of conspirators, the "one" percent are both semantically incorrect and therefore only able to communicate in a language that neither side wants to exist, but one that, for all practical purpose, must exist: a pidgin.

  • VivianLea Doubt

    20 weeks ago

    our one demand?

    It seems to be that the movement of the CCF - and it was a movement - ceased to be relevant when its NDP children made their one demand: to be elected. Over and over again we heard the refrain " We can do nothing until we are elected." And then proceeded to cut welfare rates in BC to the bone...That example has been done to death, sure...as have many of the poor.

    Yes, the strength of the Occupy movement is in its being a movement, at least for the moment. I think we (occupiers) are taking note that we do not really want to be explaining our embarrassed silence some decades in the future. Whatever may come, we can say that we stood on the side of an economy that works to serve the majority of people. And that is in direct contrast to MLAs and MPs, whose salaries put them in the top 5%, if not the 1%.

  • Cynic

    20 weeks ago

    I know what my "one demand"

    I know what my "one demand" is: No More Debt. The 1% are the 1% because they have us trapped in a false belief that we owe them. We don't. Money and banking are a clever little scam to transfer the wealth that we create with our lives into their pockets while they do nothing. They are parasites, like bloated tics hanging off the flanks of a horse.

    What else could we demand? Doesn't matter, we won't get it as long as the elite control the money supply.

  • frank2

    20 weeks ago

    The Occupiers have one major

    The Occupiers have one major accomplishment: giving currency to the 1%/99% idea.

    Now it's up to the NDP (and other left and green folks) to enable the the 99% to understand and believe that we 99%ers (also 1%ers for that matter) derive tremendous benefits from many public services -- and that we should willingly pay for them with fair taxes and fees.

    HOW to accomplish that requires making the case in ways which resonate with folks' values, feelings and beliefs. So far, the "dark side' seem to have mastered the art of persuasion. Anyway, reliance on cold logic and facts won't hack it. (Imagine the reactions if the 1%ers (Tories, etc) used facts and logic to explain the implications of their policies for the 99% and the 1%!!!)

    Just how to frame the issues and get the message across needs qualifications above my pay grade!

  • margot

    20 weeks ago

    taffy? and trivial?

    Bravo, Crawford and all, what a great start to the new year.

    It's easy to feel stuck in taffy.

    Which makes it somehow all the more ironic that the federal NDP doesn't get the OWS attention and respect, that the fed NDP doesn't seem to get widely held objections to their applause for NATO trashing Libya. Bedazzled with what passes for success, they are behaving like the very people they shook their fingers at to get elected.

    Lewis and Scott didn't just start twirling. Socialist versus social democrat, bah bah bah. Years ago now, my credit union replaced "credit union" on everything with something utterly fatuous like "Great to be here". Cheques, statements, stationary, the lot, and lo, after a brief rummage through my floor stuff, I find they have had the good sense to remove the ill-fated slogan. But they didn't replace it with "credit union". Perhaps some anti-clutter buff insisted on the need for blank space.

    Bland is better. Blank is more spiritual.

    I only subscribed to cable TV for about six months (yah, in my life), during which credit unions spent a lot of my money on Bank Head ads, which I believe is exactly when "credit union" was struck off all paper coming my way.

    Struggles are being at least partially successful, if not celebrated.

    The message is a swarm of messages. Trivial is a dangerously vague adjective.

  • realisticman

    19 weeks ago

    As Murray Dobbin wrote...

    "We can quickly dispose of Thomas Mulcair as a possibility. He is an unrepentant capitalist and big 'L' Liberal at heart who is barely out of synch with the 1 per cent the Occupiers have targeted. In 2007, Kady O'Malley interviewed Mulcair and asked him to describe himself as a politician. He replied: "Above and beyond anything else, I'm a public administrator and a manager. I chaired Quebec's largest regulatory agency and reduced staff there and brought in management schemes to make things more effective. ... When I was minister of the environment, I reduced by 15 per cent the budget of the ministry." ..."

  • hg

    19 weeks ago

    Occupy

    Nothing is going to change until citizens exercise their right to vote. It is a must. This important necessity should be taught from grade school on. Parents must vote and instill this into their children. Than it might be possible to change to a proportional more representative voting system. And then it would be possible to elect a government pursuing the common weal.
    Everybody that does not exercise her or his right to vote is just as responsible for this mess we are in as the 1 %, their media hacks and the opportunists hanging on to them.

  • igbymac

    19 weeks ago

    cynic

    no more debt? How about no more usury instead?

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