Review: New World Coming

[Karen Dubinsky, Catherine Krull, Sean Mills, and Scott Rutherford, editors. New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness. Toronto: Between The Lines, 2009.]

This is a big book but I'm only going to give it a brief review, mostly because, for various reasons, I only read about 80% of the essays and even some of those got less focused attention than I usually give to books I intend to write about.

That said, this is an interesting and varied collection. It comes out of a conference of the same name held in June 2007 at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. The goal of both the conference and the book is to unsettle conventional narratives of "the sixties" (understood more as a political phenomenon than a rigidly bounded block of time) in part by decentering the U.S. New Left and other elements that usually get priority in the standard narrative of what the decade meant, and by emphasizing a more global approach. This is an important project, though as Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi points out in "Whose 1960s? Gender, Resistance, and Liberation in Palestine" -- the first essay of the book, and also one of the best -- this goal has so far remained more of an aspiration and a question than an accomplished fact at the conference and in its resulting publication. Though that essay, the introduction by the editors, and another couple of pieces point out that the breadth of material is not what it could be (or, politically, what it perhaps should be), there is still quite a range of approaches and focuses, from political graphics of the '60s to the Cuban women's movement to political violence in Italy to the politics of soul music in Tanzania to the Republic of New Afrika in the U.S. The best word for the feel of the volume as a whole, in fact, is "eclectic."

To the extent that I felt a unifying thread through the book, it is the question of how to understand the relationships among political struggles in different times and places. Where does energy for change originate and how does it move? How do struggles circulate? How do we, in the course of memory production, decide what matters, and what is connected to what else?

This book does not answer those questions, and really only a few of the essays tackle them with any directness -- most concentrate on portraying some particular struggle or issue from the "long '60s." However, all of them implicitly provide an answer to such questions in how they contextualize whatever it is that they are focusing on, and those implicit answers tell the reader as much about how contemporary lefty academics think about the '60s and about relations of struggle as any of the more direct responses. And one of the things that it tells me is that the details of how struggles are related and how they circulate need to be the subject of much more research and thinking and writing.

[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Movement History Update

This morning, for the first time in far too long, I sent out an email update to the list I have of participants, supporters, and observers of my social movement history project. Take a look below at the update, and if you want to be added to the list, then email me at scott.neigh(AT)movement-history.ca and let me know.

Hello!

This email is one of a series of irregular (no more than several times per year, and much less lately!) emails updating progress on www.movement-history.ca and the oral history project of long-time Canadian social movement activists to which it is attached. If you wish to have your name removed from the list please email me and let me know. Please see the bottom of the email for sample material from the interview with Muriel Duckworth, a long-time activist in Halifax and a wonderful person, who died recently at the age of 100.

It has been quite a long time since the last update -- in fact, much longer than I had remembered. The project has been moving slowly forward, but it is finally winding its way to a close.

Though the project began with 47 interviews that involved 50 participants, the long and difficult process of turning these stories and all of this wisdom into a book has involved making difficult choices.The current model for the book is that it will have twelve chapters featuring a total of seventeen of the participants that I talked to. Each chapter begins with material in my voice which introduces some relevant ideas and some historical context, and then features one or two interview participant voices (mixed in with other context) to present the balance of the chapter. At present, eleven of the twelve chapters have been written. That means that one remains, plus assorted work to clean up the text and plug various small holes.

The question of publication remains unresolved. The latest phase of the process began by sending queries to numerous independent Canadian publishers, and then a proposal plus sample chapters to those publishers which requested them. In some cases, some supplementary sample material was also sent at a later date. So far, none of the publishers has said yes. A number have said no, and there are still three that have not, after their expressions of initial interest and detailed evaluation of the submitted material, provided a definitive answer. The evidently serious consideration, including time- and labour-intensive editorial evaluation, that the proposal has received at a number of presses has been encouraging, even if "yes" has so far been elusive. The plan at the moment is to complete the writing and then reapproach the three that appear to have left the door open, providing them with new material and the assurance that the draft manuscript is done. After that, we'll see!

Below is the excerpt from the interview done with Muriel Duckworth of Halifax. Muriel died recently at the age of 100, after more than 80 years spent active in the service of social change. She was very active in the peace movement both locally and nationally, including playing an important role in Voice of Women (the oldest national progressive women's organization in Canada and an important part of the country's peace movement), as well as in many local peace and social justice activities in Halifax in the last half century. A much earlier verison of these updates included an excerpt from her interview talking about her earlier political life. The excerpt included here focuses more on her early involvement in Voice of Women.

Please forward this update email to anyone you know who might be interested, and encourage them to get in touch with me at to join the update email list.

Peace and solidarity,

Scott Neigh

http://www.movement-history.ca
http://scottneigh.blogspot.com

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SN: What kind of peace movement groups or organizations existed here
in Halifax when you first moved here?

MD: In ’47. No, nothing. Nothing. People here were still talking about the war. They were talking about accidents. I mean, German ships had been right outside the harbour, people had been killed. There were still war ships in Bedford Basin when we came in l947, still sitting there. They hadn’t – I don't know what they did with them, probably sold them to somebody else. It was the war that was occupying peoples’ minds. I don’t think any minister was preaching peace, I don’t think anybody was talking about peace when we first came here in 1947. And we weren’t either. People we met in Halifax – the war was then two years past – they had so many stories to tell about it.

SN: What do you remember about how the anti-nuclear movement got going here in Halifax?

MD: It was started by a small group of people. I remember the first couple of meetings. Gordon Kaplan was teaching science at Dal at that time. He knew the effect of a nuclear bomb. He could describe it in detail, including the deadly effects of fallout. And David Hope-Simpson, who now lives in Wolfville, was teaching at Saint Mary's University. And [my husband] Jack, who was local chairman of the Canadian Committee for Control of Radiation Hazards, and a member of the national executive. Jack didn’t know as much about it, but he was good at organizing. I remember Gordon was the first speaker that I heard speak about it. His wife became one of the first members of Voice of Women. That would have been either in ’59 or early ’60, because the Voice of Women was founded in '60.

I remember meeting in the school auditorium about the nuclear threat, and the dangers of the nuclear threat and nuclear testing. Then there was the first CBC national television broadcast originating in Halifax. They asked me to be on it. I was the only peace voice and the only woman. Topic: "Should Canada stop trying to be a world power?" What a subject! Too bad we still haven't said "Yes!" to that question. That was in 1962. There was a panel of nine people. I don’t think CBC trusted us to be able to discuss it, because they brought somebody down from Toronto to be the the guy who really knew what he was talking about. But I was the only one who took a peace position. I did get some correspondence about that afterwards and I think the whole discussion helped the peace movement.

That anti-nuclear group, which was largely men, was founded first. And there were "the wives." At some point David Hope-Simpson got a phone call or a letter from somebody in Toronto asking him, "Do you know anybody who would form a Voice of Women in Halifax?" So he discussed it with his wife, who had four small children at that time, not thinking that she would take it on. She said, "Well, why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t I?" She and I didn’t know each other very well then. She was in Dartmouth and I was in Halifax. She phoned me and we had the first meeting in my living room. More than twenty women came to the very first meeting. We planned our first public meeting, which was in opposition to the United States dumping nuclear waste off the coast of Nova Scotia, because the American Atlantic states wouldn’t let them do it. That got us off to a good start. We had a real issue to begin with. Then we began really studying the situation.

SN: What did the Voice of Women do in terms of action?

MD: We had a big public meeting. Everybody knew about the protest. Whether we sent a protest to the Canadian government, I don’t remember that. We just made a big loud fuss about it. CBC used to have a person in charge of "public affairs" in each station. It was Harold Hathaway, the man in that position at the CBC here at that time, who told us about the possible dumping. He cared about it, too, and saw to it that it got a lot of publicity. Television hadn't been in Halifax long but the meeting was covered. It was publicity that we got about it that was the important thing. We went on from there.

Thousands of women had joined VOW all across Canada. We had two main committees in Halifax. We were all in the same group, but we decided that we had to tackle human rights as well as peace. Now they call it "peace and justice." We decided that we would do something about the state of employment of Black people in Halifax. One group did that and the other group kept on doing educational things, having public meetings and educating people; and ourselves, because we needed a lot of education ourselves about war and peace. Also, from the very beginning nationally we did a lot of interviewing of politicians and sending delegations to Ottawa with very well prepared statements of what Ottawa should be doing and what it wasn’t doing. I remember a delegation going to Halifax city hall. I think that was to try to get the city declared a nuclear-free zone. And constantly pushing for some action to stop the nuclear threat and change government policies. We also learned to use the street; none of us had done that before.

SN: What was the significance of Voice of Women being a _women’s_ peace group? Why was that important?

MD: The groups of women I have belonged to over the years have always given me strength and community by sharing their wisdom and spirituality. At the beginning Lotta Dempsey, a columnist for the Toronto Star, responded in her column to the crisis of threatening nuclear war with a plea to women: "Where are you while the men are preparing to destroy the world? You aren’t going to have a say even in the peace movement if you just go in and leave the leadership to the men." That was how that was initiated. But it happened that, at the same time, a group of women in Toronto had begun to think about having a women’s peace movement, and there was already a women's peace group in Vancouver. I still think it was a very good idea. I think it was a very important idea because women have different ways of thinking about things, often quite different ways of thinking about things. And running their own show, which was very important, because any other group I’d ever been in, if it was a mixed group it was always the men in leadership.

Long Quote: A Myth of the New Left

One of the great myths of the history of the new left is that the early phase of the movement was characterized by a "prefigurative politics" of participatory democracy, while the later phase, when the working class and lumpen rose to lead the movement, did not centrally contain this dimension. Many books characterize the early new left as peaceful and democratic and its later phase as undemocratic and violent. The myth of the "pure" participatory democracy of the upper-middle-class college students of the early 1960s was first given the lie by women who criticized the patriarchal control exerted by a few men. African Americans simultaneously examined critically the presence of white activists as well as the strictures of non-violence imposed upon them by pacifists, whose mainstream media power made them larger than life. Studied ignorance of watershed events like the direct democracy practiced in Philadelphia at the [Revolutionary Peoples' Constitutional Convention] is an essential means of perpetuating the mythological superiority of the early 1960s.

In October 2006 I was privileged to attend the fortieth anniversary celebrations of the Black Panther Party. At that event, many chapters had mini-reunions before reporting back to the group on what had happened in their cities four decades previously. FOUR DECADES! Because of the bitter internecine split in their ranks and the brutal repression they suffered from police and FBI, Panther members had not had an opportunity even to discuss what had happened. As we listened to reports from people who had been party activists in places such as New Bedford, Massachusetts, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I reflected on how many former college students active in the early 1960s had been given the opportunity to write their memoirs and imprint their perspective on the movement on future generations, while key activists from the movement's later phase were killed or remain imprisoned.

-- George Katsiaficas, pp. 352-353 of "The Global Imagination of 1968: The New Left's Unfulfilled Promise," in New World Comming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness edited by Karen Dubinsky et al., Toronto: Between The Lines, 2009.

Mind Blowing Science Fiction by Women and People of Colour

In response to the posted table of contents of a new anthology called The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF, which contains only stories by white men, check out these posts soliciting suggestions for "mindblowing" work by people of colour and women, and the resulting list presenting the suggestions. It has plenty of great books and stories to keep your pleasure reading time mindblowingly full for the foreseeable future!

(Found via this post.)

Review: Canada's 1960s

[Bryan D. Palmer. Canada's 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009.]

Before I started reading, a friend warned me that this was a kind of peculiar book. I wasn't sure how to take that and mostly just shrugged it off. After all, I have read some of Bryan Palmer's work before, and am aware of him as a prominent Canadian labour historian of the generation that entered the academy in the '70s. I also know that Canada's social movements of the 1960s have received very little attention in book form -- see here for a review of an important early exception -- and I was keen to see what he had to say on the subject.

Except this isn't quite the book that I had thought it would be. The second half is, mind you -- it looks at various Canadian social movements of the 1960s, synthesizing things I'd read about elsewhere with other things that were completely new to me. Various chapters were more or less successful, of course. The chapter on spontaneous youth unrest was a bit odd (see below) but interesting and new to me, and I particularly liked the chapter on the wave of rank-and-file labour militancy that washed across the country in the mid '60s. I also appreciated the chapter on the uprisings in that era in Quebec, since that has received so little treatment, particularly treatment-from-below, in English. I didn't think the chapter on the student New Left was quite as strong, but it was still full of good stuff. The chapter on indigenous resurgence in that era was a rare instance of trying to transcend the very fragmented, partial ways I've seen it dealt with before, when it gets attention at all, though I think the chapter illustrated for me that a lot more basic groundwork remains to be done to unerase that important piece of history.

So some of it was stronger and some of it not so strong, and I think perhaps there would have been something to be gained by an examination of the decade treating the 1960s as a political moment with unclear boundaries rather than as ten specific years bounded by the calendar. However, it was all well worth reading.

Except that was only half the book.

The first half had a very different feel to it. I'm not sure if I'm using this term in the same way that academic historians would, but it felt to me like cultural history rather than movement history. Which on a certain level is fine, even positive. I think sometimes people who write about social movements don't do enough to explore the intersections between movements and the broader environments in which they operate. I also learned a lot from each and every chapter in this section of the book. Yet the combination of how Palmer chose to put this section together and the larger purpose he had in doing it left me feeling -- well, a little peculiar.

You see, the overarching thesis of this book is about nationalism and Canadian identity. Palmer argues, as I understand it, that the 1960s represented a decisive shift in Canadian identity, an end once and for all to the vestiges of Canada as a purely imperial, British-identified project, and a shift towards a much more unsettled identity that the decade failed to clearly define. I think critical scholarship focused on the (English) Canadian nation is important and one of the many possible projects I have simmering away in the background of my mind for when I'm done my current book has to do with that, but this book's approach has quite different politics than I would be likely to adopt. One thing I found useful about the book was Palmer's engagement with mainstream reflections on nationalism and the nation in the decades following World War II, which is a literature that I doubt I would enjoy reading but which might be useful to me in future projects, so it was nice to get a sense of its landscape. I have mixed feelings overall, though, about the book's assertions around Canadian identity in the 1960s -- some felt like they had been clearly demonstrated, but others just did not. Moreover, it did not feel to me like the book was asking the questions that I would want to ask.

The oddness I experienced in reading the first half of the book may have to do with this divergence of interests in the nation, though I don't think that completely explains it. I felt like the "cultural history" chapters lacked adequate attention to a basic social fact that is (or should be) at the forefront of social movement history: that society, that the nation, is inevitably divided and constantly in struggle. Shifts in attitudes and practices, even when they are driven in large part by changes in hegemonic institutions like the state and the mass media, simply cannot be understood without examining in some detail their complicated interactions across those social divisions which are the fault lines that organize where everyday and collective struggles occur. In too many instances, the "cultural history" in this book did not do that.

As well, I just didn't get the specific choices of focus in these chapters. It's not an unusual practice in the writing of history to take some quirky specific and use a detailed telling of that as a way to illustrate a particular phenomenon more broadly, but that technique, which is used extensively in the first half of this book (as well as the chapter looking at youth unrest), felt kind of awkward here. Which isn't to say I didn't learn from this section -- I learned a lot about machinations surrounding the Canadian dollar and Parliamentary sex scandals and the function of celebrity for Marshal McLuhan and Pierre Trudeau. I even think there's some useful stuff about shifts in relations of white supremacy in Canada that could be brought out more explicitly from the chapter on the big Maple Leaf Gardens fight between George Chuvalo and Muhammad Ali. It's just that many of the choices in this part of the book remain a bit mystifying to me, and I'm not convinced that, when they are put together, they are the most effective way to get at cultural shifts in (early) 1960s Canada.

So I guess the message is the same as it is with any book: take what you need, enjoy what you can, and don't get bogged down by the rest. Many of the parts are interesting, and most that talk about social movements are both interesting and useful. And if the whole is not quite what I expected and not organized around the questions that interest me the most, well, that's fine -- there's still a great deal of value in the book.


[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Muriel Duckworth, Rest In Peace

To produce the book that I am one chapter and change away from finishing, I interviewed 50 Canadian activists who have been "long distance runners" in struggles for social change. Though the plan for the book that I have ultimately settled on does not have a chapter focusing on my interview with her, Muriel Duckworth, who died today at the age of 100, was the longest active person that I had the pleasure of talking to.

Duckworth was originally politicized while a student at McGill University in the late 1920s, through her involvement in the Student Christian Movement. (The SCM is an organization that was originally created by returned veterans of the First World War. Its activists combined radical explorations of Christianity with a commitment to change in the service of social justice -- at some moments, quite a radical vision for social justice. It is not nearly as influential today as it was in a long-gone era, but it still exists.) She and her husband, who was already a committed pacifist when they married, arrived as students at New York's Union Theological Seminary, at that time a stronghold of progressive and leftist Christian politics, not long after the great stock market crash in 1929. When they returned to Montreal a few years later they got deeply involved in the League for Social Reconstruction, the Fellowship for a Christian Social Order, and the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation -- all key organizations working towards a particular version of democratic socialism during the Great Depression in Canada.

She and her husband belonged to the Fellowship of Reconciliation before the outbreak of Word War II, and he was a conscientious objector during that conflict. After the war they moved to Halifax, where they continued to be involved in the adult education movement and in the peace movement. She was involved in the very early anti-nuclear arms movement, which began in Canada around the time of the Bomarc Missile controversy during John Diefenbaker's time as Prime Minister. She is perhaps best known for her long-time involvement, including a stint as national president, with Voice of Women, a very important organization to both the peace movement and the women's movement in Canada. The group was started nationally in 1960, and the Halifax chapter began soon after. The Halifax group had an early commitment both to working on human rights issues, particularly around the oppressions experienced by the African Nova Scotian community, and to anti-nuclear and other peace issues. VOW played an important role in Canadian organizing against the Vietnam War. One of their most important initiatives at the height of the U.S. assault on Vietnam was to bring Vietnamese women on a tour of Canada to talk about their experiences. They were also involved in the resurgent anti-nuke movement of the 1980s, in introducing feminist practices and values to national spaces of the Canadian peace movement despite ongoing resistance from others in the movement, and in a great many other struggles for peace and justice over the years. Muriel was also active more broadly in the Halifax community.

When I spoke to Muriel in 2004, she was no longer as able to be central to organizing as she had once been, but it sounded like she still managed, at 96, to make it to many of the social justice and peace-focused events that happened in Halifax.

The last question I asked her was what she would say to young people who are newly discovering the messed up state of the world, and just starting to get involved in activities for peace and justice. This is what she said:

Stick to it. [laugh] That's what I would say to them. Keep it up. Because I think there's so much, so much opposition to the violence, to the poverty, to the misuse of power, amongst young people. Everywhere, everywhere young people are not happy about what's going on. Probably we all need to know more. There are some wonderful young people giving leadership. And to keep up their belief that somehow they can make a difference. Somehow or other we all have the responsibility of changing the social organization so that they can have access to power, which they feel very cut off from. Anything that the older generation's going to do to help them to get access to power is worth doing. Keep singing and dancing and loving.

Most of us can't do much alone. We need the strength of others who share our concerns. We help each other to understand the issues and figure out how to deal with them.

One more thing I would say to a young friend, which A.J. Muste said years ago: "There is no way to peace. Peace is the way."

Of course different people with different visions of social justice and liberation might indulge the inevitable leftist propensity to quibble with some of the details of her advice, but much more appropriate to the moment would be, I think, to take some time to learn more about Muriel. Let us contemplate her example and honour her life and her commitment to social change, which extended through an amazing eight decades, by reflecting on how we can apply the lessons of her unwavering passion for justice and peace to our own choices and activities.

It was an honour to have had a chance to meet her.

Urge Tim Horton's to Stop Supporting Anti-Queer Group

Check out this post, which describes how Tim Horton's is sponsoring an event in Rhode Island opposing civil rights for queer people and even allowing its logo to be plastered all over promotional material for it. As the post says, "To be clear, this is an event hosted by an organization that has said gays and lesbians are a threat to children, and a group that openly promotes discrimination toward gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender citizens."

I think it is important for those of us who live in the areas where Timmies makes most of its money -- which also tend to be areas in which there is at least passive majority support for basic civil rights for queer people -- and who may occasionally enjoy a double-double and a honey cruller, to let them know that this is not okay and that their business is going to suffer if they don't repudiate their involvement with anti-gay politics. Learn more and then tell Tim Horton's not to support bigotry like this.

(Thanks to SC for the link.)

My Article on the Inco Strike

The following is an article called "Nickel, Neoliberalism, and Nationalism" written by yours truly on the current strike against Inco by workers in Sudbury and other locations across Canada. I am not a member of this group, but the piece was written for and originally published at The Linchpin, the site of the Ontario anarchist organization Common Cause. It has also shown up on a few other sites as well.

Nickel, Neoliberalism, and Nationalism
By guest writer Scott Neigh
August 1, 2009

More than 3300 employees of mining giant Vale Inco are on strike in Sudbury, Ontario, and in other Canadian communities to defend decades' worth of gains. Beyond that, the strike by members of Locals 6500 and 6200 of the United Steel Workers of America also raise important questions about how unions orient themselves towards their communities and towards the nation-states in which their members live.

There are a number of "very provocative issues for the men" in the company's demands, according to a 21-year veteran of Inco's transportation division who requested to remain anonymous when interviewed at a picket line in the Sudbury community of Copper Cliff.* He pointed out, "There's absolutely no monetary raise in this contract" and no expectation by the members that there would be one, given the low price of nickel and the state of the global economy.

However, he said, "We're not going to go back thirty years." He pointed to hard-won victories in past strikes, including the massive one in 1978-79 -- "My dad went on strike for 9 months... They fought real hard for this thing." Key issues include pensions, seniority rights and what is called the "nickel bonus."

For the moment, the company is not touching the pension plan of current retirees and workers, which pays a guaranteed, regular amount upon retirement. However, it is demanding that all new hires starting in 2010 be enrolled in a plan in which the amount paid in is defined but the actual amount that workers receive when they retire is not, and depends heavily on fluctuations in the stock market.

The same worker quoted above calls it a "lose-lose situation" in which the current workers have the choice of agreeing and knowing "we've sold out the next generation" or standing up and fighting and getting labelled "spoiled union workers" by anti-union voices in the media.

The nickel bonus is an additional payment beyond base wages received by employees only when the price of nickel is above a certain level, with the amount of the bonus proportional to the price. This mechanism was won in the 1980s at a time when the company was doing poorly. According to a striker who gave his name only as "Gates," who has worked for the company for 22 years, this was accepted by workers in lieu of a raise, and he thinks that if the company wants to tamper with it they should raise basic wages in exchange.

"They're not taking it away from us," he continued, "but they're dangling the carrot so far from the end of our noses that we can't reach it" by significantly raising the price at which the bonus kicks in.

The attack on seniority rights would prevent workers from bidding for other jobs within the company any more than once every three years. This would lead to situations in which workers with decades of seniority might be laid off before newly hired workers.

Given these company demands, workers in Sudbury and Port Colborne, Ontario, voted more than 85% in favour of strike action. Vale Inco workers in Voisey's Bay, Labrador, will also be on strike starting at the beginning of August.

The Company

In 2006, Canadian-based transnational Inco was bought by Brazillian mining transnational Companhia do Vale Rio Doce (CVRD) and renamed Vale Inco. The company's position so far in the strike, in this case voiced by company spokesperson Cory McPhee, has been that "until the union accepts the fact that change is required for our business to be competitive in all price cycles, there's little for us to talk about." They are also blaming costs associated with environmental regulations for the need to cut other expenses.

The CEO of Vale, Roger Agnelli, has gone so far as to describe mining operations in Sudbury as economically "unsustainable," a comment that some company spokespeople have since claimed was taken out of context.

Another anonymous picketer, this one with three and a half years of experience with Inco, argued, "There's been no explanation of how we have become an 'unsustainable' industry in the last three years," when Vale decided it was good business to spend $19 billion to buy Inco. He pointed out that Inco was managing to make money with significantly lower nickel prices just a few years ago.

He continued, "They want to never have a loss. That's not realistic in the mining industry." He said that the history of Inco has been one of occasional losses alternating with periods of huge gains. In the current market, the company is going to briefly lose money "unless we come in here and do volunteer work."

In addition, workers point out that two of the three biggest rollbacks demanded by the company have absolutely nothing to do with making the company profitable during economic downturns. Eroding seniority rights has little directly to do with profitability, and nickel bonuses are not paid at all during bad times.

Possible insight into Vale Inco's deeper goals comes from a former Inco executive quoted anonymously in a recent Globe & Mail article, who said, "They just want to break the union. They want to completely hit the reset button on the entire labour situation and the agreements that have been put in place in the past."

Critical Solidarity?

For many union officials and some workers, as well as plenty of commentators and letter writers responding to local news outlets, the non-Canadian ownership of the company is a key issue and the strike is frequently being framed in patriotic terms. The emphasis, in many of these instances, shifts focus from the company's treatment of workers to its "foreignness." While this appears to have resonance for some, others in the community have deep misgivings about this strategy, as well as concerns about the long-term approach of the leadership of Local 6500 in relating to other unions and other struggles for social justice.

Gary Kinsman, a Professor of Sociology at Laurentian University in Sudbury, is one of the people with these misgivings. He is a long-time activist himself and has written extensively on Canadian social movements, including co-authoring Mine Mill Fights Back, a book about an important strike in 2000-2001 by the other main union of mine workers in Sudbury, Mine Mill/Canadian Auto Workers Local 598.

He said of the current strike, "I certainly support it. I certainly don't want those workers to be defeated." He sees the situation as Inco "taking advantage of the economic crisis to impose a series of rollbacks." A loss by Local 6500 would be "a bad precedent for other mine workers and other workers more generally."

However, he is skeptical of the choice made by the union leadership to organize much of its rhetoric around nationalism. "It doesn't actually make sense, because Inco itself, when it was not foreign owned, was doing horrible things to these workers. It's about class and capital, not foreign companies." He pointed to unions in the United States, which have made extensive use of flag-waving and foreigner-blaming rhetoric, but have failed to prevent the decimation of the manufacturing sector or the historic decline of the strength of industrial unions south of the border -- "American nationalism hasn't got those workers anywhere."

Instead, he urged strategies that emphasize international solidarity among workers. As one small example of what might be possible, he pointed to Mine Mill/CAW Local 598's success during its 2000-2001 strike in building relationships with a Norwegian union that resulted in a sympathy strike at a plant in Norway owned by the same company.

Steps in this direction are already being made in the context of the current strike, with the recent signing of a strategic partnership agreement between the international leadership of the Steel Workers and the leadership of the Brazilian CUT, to provide unspecified support for workers in negotiations with Vale. However, Kinsman worries that these efforts may be undercut by the extensive use of nationalist rhetoric to mobilize support in Canada: "'Canadian equals good, foreign equals bad' -- that sets up a precarious position if you are trying to build long term relationships among working-class people around the world in the context of global capitalism."

Local 6500 also has a very mixed relationship with other unions and with struggles in the community. Its very existence is because of a major raid on the Mine Mill local in the 1960s, which at that point was an independent, left-leaning organization that represented all mine workers in Sudbury. "There are still reverberations of that split today," according to Kinsman -- people who won't talk to one another, for instance, and people who refuse to read the Sudbury Star, which supported the raid by Steel so many years ago.

The massive strike in 1978/79 by Local 6500 was under a more progressive leadership, and it won important gains. Along with contract improvements, the magnitude of the workers' struggle forced Inco into a number of measures to try and salvage its reputation, such as making major investments in initiatives to re-green the city of Sudbury. The strike also lead indirectly to the opening of French and English women's centres in the city, the expansion of employment opportunities for women at Inco, and the federal government's decision to locate the national taxation centre in Sudbury to diversify the local economy.

However, the progressive leadership of the Local in that era was soon marginalized. During the Days of Action campaign against the Conservative provincial government of Premier Mike Harris, Local 6500 used its dominance at the Sudbury and District Labour Council to prevent that body from sponsoring the Sudbury Days of Action. This furthered splits between private and public sector unions and between the labour movement and community movements in the city, in the context of a longer term trend in which Local 6500 has done very little to support other forms of struggle in the community.

Despite these misgivings, in the context of the current strike, Kinsman said, "I think it's important to join picket lines and show support for Steel. But I think in the name of solidarity we need to ask them to get out and support our struggles."

With the strike only two weeks old, the impact on the community has so far been minimal. According to the picketer who gave his name as "Gates," "So far, from what I can tell, the community is backing us up 100%." However, his sense is that things are just getting warmed up: "It's going to be a long one."

Scott Neigh is a writer, activist, and parent who lives in Sudbury, Ontario. For more of his writing, visit scottneigh.blogspot.com.

Written for Linchpin.ca, a media project of Ontario anarchist organization, Common Cause. The views expressed here are not necessarily those of the Linchpin.ca editors or Common Cause.

*Editor's note: Linchpin.ca strives to print the names of persons interviewed whenever possible in keeping with journalistic standards. That all the workers interviewed in this article chose to remain anonymous speaks to the vulnerability of even unionized workers to reprisals from powerful employers.