Workers Need to Speak in Their Own Name
Absurd and Outmoded Nonsense
Spoken on Campaign Trail
— Pierre Chénier —
The nonsense which the leaders of the parties that form the cartel party system are speaking “on the campaign trail” is mind-boggling. They concoct “issues” according to what their expensive campaign handlers think will get them votes, as if the real world and real people do not exist. This underscores once again the need for the working people to speak in their own name to make sure things are turned around in their favour in the coming period.
Workers in this country will advance the struggle for the rights of all and for people’s empowerment by speaking about their real living and working conditions and how to sort out the problems that they and society face. They can contribute to developing an agenda that truly represents the people’s concerns and opens a way to have them addressed.
Day in, day out, workers across Canada stand up for the rights and well-being of all but, when an election rolls around, they are cajoled to entrust their fate to the parties that form the cartel party system in a parliament which never addresses their concerns in a manner which favours them. It is indeed absurd and outmoded to think that narrow global private interests bring prosperity or care about people, communities, societies or the natural environment. But this is what fills the airwaves day in and day out.
Successive governments in Canada, the provinces, Quebec and the territories all implement decisions which favour global private interests in every field of the economy with detrimental results. But now, on the campaign trail, Trudeau is telling us that this is a success story while others are promising more of the same but “better” — more fiscally responsibly, more socially responsible, more environmentally responsible, more transparent, less corrupt, genuinely consultative, and so on. All of them say they speak for the workers or people or middle class or everybody. They seek to reduce the working people, who form the majority, to spectators of electoral shenanigans and demand they line themselves up behind those who promote irrationality unconcerned.
It is indeed absurd and outmoded.
In this campaign, The Marxist-Leninist Party calls on Canada’s working people to speak out against the anti-social, anti-worker, anti-national and pro-war decisions which are imposed and the charade maintained that the decisions are democratic because, through the election, the government receives a mandate from the people. This notion that an election campaign confers a mandate is absurd and outmoded.
The nonsense spewed by the leaders of the parties which form a cartel party system to keep the people out of power reveals the need for the working people to place themselves at the centre of political activity and discourse.
Let’s participate in this election campaign by not permitting this suffocating and stultifying anti-people, irrational discourse to turn our brains into mush. Let us vigorously intervene by using our own voices to speak in our own name to discuss our concerns, the real conditions that exist and the solutions to the problems we face.
Pierre Chénier is the secretary of the Workers’ Centre of the Marxist-Leninist Party and the MLPC candidate in Châteauguay—Lacolle.