Let Educators Continue to Speak and Act in Their Own Name
- Laura Chesnik -
One challenge facing the movement for workers'
rights and the right to education is to ensure
the system of representative democracy does not
divert it into a blind alley. In the lead-up to
the 2022 provincial election, representative
democracy and its cartel parties will try to
divert any independent movement into becoming a
vote bank for one of the parties vying for
positions of power in the Legislature.
At the present time, no alternative is being put
forward within the Legislature to the
neo-liberal austerity agenda. Working people
themselves and their independent movement have
brought an alternative agenda into being and are
pushing it through their actions and voice.
The cartel parties both provincially and
federally base themselves on the neo-liberal
assumption that workers are a cost of production
and that the government's role is to ensure
monopoly right and paying the rich are upheld
above all else. They assert that only through
their neo-liberal prejudice can the economy
prosper.
 Reduce the "cost" of workers and
put those saved funds into the hands of the rich
is the mantra, and voilą, the economy
will blossom. Of course, the cartel parties
argue over how best to do this and who should be
in control in doling out public funds to the
rich. They try to embroil the workers in
choosing which cartel party to vote for and
whose policies they should prefer and would be
best or even the lesser evil for working people
and society. They seek to provide their
illegitimate austerity agenda with legitimacy.
Needless to say, this neo-liberal outlook has
not permitted any of the ongoing and persistent
problems plaguing Ontario's economy and
education system to be resolved in a manner that
favours the people.
The way the electoral system operates, the
cartel parties are supposed to do everything in
their power to try and appear as representatives
of the workers' movement and curry favour with
this or that group in hopes of winning the
election. Once elected they are free to declare
that funds for education and other public
services must be cut, either because new
investments are allegedly not possible, or
because cuts are inevitable given the size of
the debt and deficit, which of course must be
serviced and even increased because the
institutions of the rich profit from it. In this
way of governing, the voice of the working
people is not supposed to have its own
expression. It is just supposed to become the
echo of what the various cartel parties claim
are the issues, solutions and agenda.
More and more, teachers and other education
workers have shown that they are quite capable
of thinking for themselves and speaking for
themselves on what is required in Ontario to
improve the education system and solve its
problems so it becomes a truly modern system
that guarantees the right to education for all
at the highest possible level. They have shown
this in both their resistance to the austerity
agenda of the rich and in the electoral arena.
During the strike actions in Ontario over the
past few months, teachers and education workers
have also broken through the notion that they
are just a pressure group that looks for good
media coverage and for things to happen beyond
their control. They have taken up speaking for
themselves and mobilizing public opinion on
their own terms. They have begun to use new
forms and technology to create their own forums
to unite and fight for their rights and the
rights of all and forge a way forward that
favours the people and not the financial
oligarchy.
The experience of having a teacher as an
independent candidate in Windsor-Tecumseh in the
last provincial election also shows that
education workers are not leaving the political
arena to others from the cartel parties to
occupy and use to divert people from presenting
their own agenda based on their own outlook.
All these experiences stand the movement in good
stead and are becoming a bulwark against the
efforts and noise of the cartel party system to
block the movement's advance and divert it into
giving up its own initiative, outlook, agenda
and voice, and accepting the choices the
electoral system of representative democracy
imposes on the people.
Sticking to their own experience and independent
agenda and continuing to act and speak in their
own name and not through this or that cartel
party representative are key to teachers and
other education workers moving forward.
This article was published in
Number 11 - March 12, 2020
Article Link:
Let Educators Continue to Speak and Act in Their Own Name - Laura Chesnik
Website: www.cpcml.ca
Email: editor@cpcml.ca
|
