by David Camfield
Published in Midnight Sun

Flight attendants at Air Canada and Air Canada Rouge, around 10,500 workers, went on strike from August 16 to early in the morning on August 19. The workforce is 70 percent women and mostly young – three-quarters of them have fewer than five years of seniority. They are members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) because Air Canada was once a federal Crown Corporation that was then privatized.

Workers had been on strike for only a few hours when the Liberal federal government intervened. The jobs minister told the Canada Industrial Relations Board (CIRB) – the federal labour board in whose jurisdiction workers in air transport fall – to direct the union to end the strike and order that the dispute be resolved through binding arbitration. This intervention was widely expected, since the Liberals have done this before on several occasions, using Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code.

On most of those occasions, union officials simply complied, but this time they didn’t. The workers stayed on strike. CUPE National President Mark Hancock tore up the CIRB back-to-work order in front of a cheering crowd of strikers at Toronto’s Pearson Airport. The message from CUPE’s top officers and those of CUPE’s Air Canada component was clear: the only way the strike would be settled would be through negotiations. This was undisguised defiance of the order under Section 107, whose legitimacy CUPE officials rejected.

Hancock said he was willing to go to jail if that’s what it came to. This can happen. CUPE National President Grace Hartman did time in jail back in 1981 for not ordering Ontario hospital workers who were on an illegal strike to return to work, and Jean-Claude Parrot of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers was jailed in 1978 for not telling members to respect a back-to-work law passed to end a postal strike.
The Air Canada strike was absolutely solid, which was no surprise because the strike authorization vote had been 99.7 percent in favor, with a 94.6 percent turnout. Flight attendants were strongly in support of the key union demands: significant wage increases to make up for all the erosion of their wages’ buying power under the previous contract – which had been a ten-year collective agreement! – and an end to the unpaid work that’d long been accepted in the industry: the norm according to which flight attendants are paid only for the time the plane is in the air, not for any time they spend on the plane while it’s on the ground, before or after a flight.

Although the strike completely grounded Air Canada flights and was disruptive for travellers, there was a lot of sympathy for the flight attendants. CUPE officials had laid the groundwork for this with effective public communications efforts focused on the issue of unpaid work. Members of other unions and other pro-union people started to join the picket lines. For many active union members, leftists, and, I think, lots of other working-class people, seeing Hancock tearing up the back-to-work order and insisting that the strike wouldn’t end until the union had negotiated an agreement was electrifying. For anyone who’s been dismayed by the federal government’s use of Section 107 to snuff out strikes and worried about how that gives the idea to provincial governments that they could add similar provisions to the provincial labor laws that cover about 90 percent of workers in the Canadian state, CUPE drawing a line against the back-to-work order was really inspiring.

The Canadian Labour Congress put out a statement on August 17 demanding that the order be withdrawn. It pledged financial and other support for the strike, and “unwavering solidarity” if the government took legal action against CUPE. No surprise that it was vague about what action that commitment would translate into, but it was still unequivocal support for a law-defying strike. And it called on the government to pledge not to use Section 107 against a strike again and to remove that section from the law as soon as parliament next sits.

The strike continued into Monday, August 18, with bargaining suspended, but that evening it was announced that the union’s bargaining team would be meeting with Air Canada. Early in the morning on Tuesday, they announced a deal had been reached and the strike was over. CUPE’s statement made it sound like a great victory had been won:

Flight attendants at Air Canada and Air Canada Rouge have reached a tentative agreement, achieving transformational change for our industry after a historic fight to affirm our Charter rights. Unpaid work is over. We have reclaimed our voice and our power. When our rights were taken away, we stood strong, we fought back – and we secured a tentative agreement that our members can vote on.

That’s how most people who supported the strike are thinking about the outcome, but it didn’t take long before facts came out that paint a different picture.

An offer they couldn’t refuse?

The tentative agreement that flight attendants ended up with gave them a choice between ratifying the deal and rejecting it, in which case annual wage increases would be determined by arbitration, but everything else that was negotiated would end up in the collective agreement anyway. That’s not at all how the collective bargaining process usually works. Unionized workers have the right to vote to accept or reject a tentative agreement in its entirety, unless binding arbitration is being used to determine outcomes. But in this case, very unusually, because the CIRB had declared the strike was over in legal terms, workers were presented with a ratification vote that didn’t  allow them to actually reject the deal. CUPE officials agreed to a settlement that denied workers that right and prevented them from going on strike again to fight for a better deal in this round. They didn’t win a negotiated tentative agreement that workers could accept or truly reject, which would have treated the back-to-work order as a dead letter, let alone force a withdrawal of the order.

As for what was in the four-year tentative agreement, there were wage increases. For people with fewer than five years of seniority, it was 12 percent in the first year, and for the rest, 8 percent. After that, it was 3 percent, 2.5 percent, and 2.75 percent. (This was far less than what Air Canada pilots – mostly men – got in 2024 in the first year of their new contract: 26%.) There was also partial ground pay, for an hour or just over an hour per leg of a flight, depending on the width of the plane body, with percentages rising from 50 percent of flight attendants’ in-flight hourly pay rate this year to 70 percent in 2028. Those were gains, absolutely, but they don’t mean unpaid work is over or that this is a transformational change.

Flight attendants showed what they thought of the proposed negotiated wage increases by how they voted in the ratification vote that ended on September 6: 99.1% voted to reject, with a 95% turnout. While voting no when there was no prospect of going on legal strike again was obviously an easier decision for workers than in a situation where that refusal would’ve sent them back to the picket lines, the overwhelming rejection expressed a clear sentiment: anger with Air Canada, the federal government, and, for some, CUPE. Arbitration is unlikely to result in significantly better raises. Although it’s hypothetically possible that flight attendants could still respond to the arbitrator’s eventual decision on their annual pay increases by going on a wildcat strike that defies the law and their union officials, I don’t think that’s going to happen. There would have to be really strong organization among rank-and-file workers outside of the official union structure, with confident militant rank-and-file leaders, preconditions that seem doubtful right now. There’s some evidence that as the collective experience of the strike recedes into recent memory, flight attendants are instead expressing their anger at the employer in individual ways. For example, the Instagram account @unfair_canada reports that “flight attendants [are] booking off [sick] in record numbers.” CUPE’s Air Canada Component posted on Facebook that “there has been an unprecedented increase in the number of disciplinary meetings for social media posts, particularly screenshots taken from the Air Canada Flight Attendant Discussion Board on Facebook. These posts are leading to discipline, up to and including termination.”

All in all, I think the outcome was a partial and complicated win. Workers won real gains in pay, but not the right to reject a deal and fight for a better one. What happened seems unlikely to be a big deterrent to the federal government using Section 107 to end strikes in the future. And a situation where workers didn’t have the right to reject the deal presented to them was clearly advantageous for Air Canada – and for CUPE officials. The company got a guarantee that the strike wouldn’t resume, and union officials got insulation against rank-and-file pressure to fight for a better deal and lead more strike action. Also, making a deal that workers can’t genuinely reject is bad for union-building. It’s not democratic. It took the decision about whether the deal was good enough out of workers’ hands. This isn’t going to encourage the most militant workers who were really inspired by striking to get more involved in the union.

A bigger victory was definitely possible. Air Canada was completely grounded. They were losing a lot of money, so they were under a lot of pressure. Management was completely unprepared for what happened. They expected the federal government would intervene and then CUPE officials would tell workers to comply with a back-to-work order. During the strike, CUPE put out an online graphic with a quote from an interview that Air Canada’s CEO Michael Rousseau did with BNN Bloomberg on August 18. Rousseau said, “Well, we thought, obviously, that Section 107 would be enforced, and that they wouldn’t illegally avoid Section 107.”

If the strike had gone on longer, I think flight attendants could have achieved a much bigger win for themselves and for the working class as a whole. Even if they hadn’t forced the government to rescind the back-to-work order, they could have won a deal with bigger gains that treated the order as a dead letter – a deal that workers could ratify or truly reject. That would have been an amazing precedent. And if there had been sympathy job action by airport workers or any workers at Air Canada’s main competitor WestJet – slowdowns, calling in sick, or not crossing picket lines – other employers would have been freaking out behind the scenes and leaning on Air Canada to settle. I don’t know whether any sympathy action would’ve happened if the strike had lasted longer, since it’s illegal and most workers today have no experience of doing it, but it’s not impossible that at least a little bit could have happened, especially if the government had moved to punish CUPE for defying the law. Aina Kagis, former CUPE Regional Director for Saskatchewan, sees the way this “inspiring” strike was ended as “an excruciatingly disappointing outcome for the flight attendants” and “an opportunity squandered.” According to Kagis, “CUPE’s leadership could have nurtured the flight attendants’ militancy, creating momentum for growing militancy within the labour movement.”

A missed opportunity for building momentum

So why did CUPE officials end the strike the way they did? For the top people at CUPE National, I think the main goal was to negotiate a settlement with some gains for flight attendants. They didn’t want to have everything decided by an arbitrator. After the government intervened, that was still their overriding goal. Winning a political victory against the use of Section 107 against strikes, which would have been a victory for the working class as a whole, was secondary. Once the strike forced Air Canada back to the bargaining table, union officials dropped that objective and focused on the main goal. They did so because, above all, they’re committed to collective bargaining. That legally regulated, tightly controlled process is at the core of what the layer of full-time union officials, both elected officers and staff, do. It’s their key function, along with handling grievances, which is how disputes over workers’ rights in collective agreements are dealt with in between rounds of collective bargaining.

I think the top leaders at CUPE have shown they’re prepared to support militant action if that’s what it takes to preserve conventional collective bargaining. That makes them different from the heads of many other unions. Blatant government intervention with back-to-work orders and legislation undermines conventional collective bargaining. So CUPE’s leaders are sometimes willing to support workers challenging that kind of attack on bargaining or even lead the challenge, as they just did. They’re willing to sometimes use militant tactics to fight for goals that aren’t radical.

That militancy is constrained by the fact that defying the law can lead to massive fines for unions. This can damage unions as institutions, and even threaten their ability to operate. For the union officialdom of full-time officers and staff, that’s a different kind of problem than it is for rank-and-file union members, because the former depend on the union machine in order to keep on functioning as officials. So once CUPE’s top officers saw a path to getting a deal that would end the strike and defuse the threat of big fines or criminal charges against them for defying the law, they went for it.

This isn’t the first time they’ve done it. In 2022, when CUPE’s Ontario School Board Council of Unions (OSBCU) was in bargaining and then was hit with preemptive provincial legislation to stop them from striking, they defied the law and struck anyway. Other workers began organizing sympathy strikes to support OSBCU. Yet, as soon as Ontario premier Doug Ford said he’d withdraw the law if the strike ended, CUPE National officials and other union officials put pressure on the president of OSBCU to accept the offer and go back to bargaining without the power of striking workers and their many supporters as leverage. And that’s what happened.

From a distance, the outcome of the Air Canada strike can easily look like what CUPE National said it was. So lots of people probably think it was simply a tremendous win. That will encourage union activists to use it as a positive example. They can say, “Look, CUPE defied the law and won; that’s what we should prepare to do if we have to.” That’s good. It’s good that flight attendants showed you can have a strike that’s popular and that defies the law and wins, even though it causes inconveniences for lots of people. It’s good that Hancock tearing up the back-to-work order was all over the news.

But what actually happened wasn’t what it looks like from afar. To me, what happened confirms that we can’t rely on the union officialdom to fight to win in a consistent way, even when the officials are more militant. Union members who want unions that are really militant, democratic, and solidaristic need to organize themselves on their own and work to change our unions. We need to build caucuses, groups of members who take to heart what the Clyde Workers’ Committee said in Scotland back in 1915: “We will support the officials just so long as they rightly represent the workers, but we will act independently immediately they misrepresent them.”

Originally published in Tempest.

by David Camfield

Flight attendants at Air Canada (AC) and Air Canada Rouge, around 10,500 workers, went on strike from August 16 to early in the morning on August 19. The workforce is 70 percent women and mostly young—three-quarters of them have under five years of seniority. They are members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) because AC was once a federal Crown Corporation (a publicly owned company) that was then privatized.

Workers had been on strike for only a few hours when the Liberal federal government intervened. The jobs minister told the Canada Industrial Relations Board (CIRB), the federal labor board in whose jurisdiction workers in air transport fall, to direct the union to end the strike and order that the dispute be resolved through binding arbitration. This intervention was widely expected, since the Liberals have done this before on several occasions, using Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code.
On most of those occasions, union officials simply complied, but this time they didn’t. The workers stayed on strike.

CUPE National President Mark Hancock tore up the CIRB back-to-work order in front of a cheering crowd of strikers at Toronto’s Pearson Airport. The message from CUPE’s top officers and those of CUPE’s Air Canada component was clear: The only way the strike would be settled would be through negotiations. This was undisguised defiance of the order under Section 107, whose legitimacy CUPE officials rejected.
Hancock said he was willing to go to jail if that’s what it came to. This can happen. CUPE National President Grace Hartman did time in jail back in 1981 for not ordering Ontario hospital workers who were on an illegal strike to return to work, and Jean-Claude Parrot of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers was jailed in 1978 for not telling members to respect a back-to-work law passed to end a postal strike.

The strike was absolutely solid, which was no surprise because the strike authorization vote had been 99.7 percent in favor, with a 94.6 percent turnout. Flight attendants were strongly in support of the key union demands: significant wage increases to make up for all the erosion of the buying power of their wages under the previous contract—which had been a ten-year collective agreement!—and an end to the unpaid work that’d long been accepted in the industry. This work is just part of the job for flight attendants, who have only been paid for the time the plane is in the air, not for any time they spend on the plane while it’s on the ground, before or after a flight.

Although the strike completely grounded AC flights, and was disruptive for travelers, there was a lot of sympathy for the flight attendants. CUPE officials had laid the groundwork for this with effective public communications efforts focused on the issue of unpaid work. Members of other unions and other pro-union people started to join the picket lines. For many active union members, leftists, and, I think, lots of other working-class people, seeing Hancock tearing up the back-to-work order and insisting that the strike wouldn’t end until the union had negotiated an agreement was electrifying. For anyone who’s been dismayed by the federal government’s use of Section 107 to snuff out strikes and worried about how that gives the idea to provincial governments that they could add similar provisions to the provincial labor laws that cover about 90 percent of workers in the Canadian state, CUPE drawing a line against the back-to-work order was really inspiring.

The Canadian Labour Congress, the equivalent of the AFL-CIO in the U.S., put out a statement on August 17 demanding that the order be withdrawn. It pledged financial and other support for the strike, and “unwavering solidarity” if the government took legal action against CUPE. No surprise that it was vague about what action that commitment would translate into, but it was still unequivocal support for a law-defying strike. And it called on the government to pledge not to use Section 107 against a strike again and to remove that section from the law as soon as parliament next sits.

The strike continued into Monday, August 18, with bargaining suspended, but that evening it was announced that the union’s bargaining team would be meeting with Air Canada. Early in the morning on Tuesday, they announced a deal had been reached and the strike was over. CUPE’s statement made it sound like a great victory had been won:

Flight attendants at Air Canada and Air Canada Rouge have reached a tentative agreement, achieving transformational change for our industry after a historic fight to affirm our Charter rights. Unpaid work is over. We have reclaimed our voice and our power. When our rights were taken away, we stood strong, we fought back—and we secured a tentative agreement that our members can vote on.

That’s how most people who supported the strike are thinking about the outcome, but it didn’t take long before facts came out that paint a different picture.

The tentative agreement that flight attendants will be voting on only gives them a choice between ratifying the deal and rejecting it, in which case wages will be settled by arbitration, but everything else that was negotiated will end up in the collective agreement anyway. That’s not at all how the collective bargaining process works in the Canadian state. Unionized workers have the right to vote to accept or reject a tentative agreement in its entirety, unless binding arbitration is being used to determine outcomes. But in this case, very unusually, and because the CIRB had declared the strike was over in legal terms, workers have been presented with a ratification vote that doesn’t allow them to actually reject the deal. CUPE officials have agreed to a settlement that denies workers that right and prevents them from going on strike again to fight for a better deal in this round. They didn’t win a negotiated tentative agreement that workers could accept or truly reject, which would have treated the back-to-work order as a dead letter, let alone force a withdrawal of the order.

For people with under five years of seniority, it’s 12 percent in the first year, and for the rest, it’s 8 percent. After that, it’s 3 percent, 2.5 percent, and 2.75 percent. And there is partial ground pay, for an hour or just over one hour per leg of a flight, depending on the width of the plane body, with percentages rising from 50 percent of the hourly pay rate this year to 70 percent in 2028. Those are gains, absolutely, but that doesn’t mean that unpaid work is over or that this is a transformational change.

The ratification vote is ongoing, from August 27 to September 6, online and by phone, and I expect that some won’t vote at all because of their disappointment, anger, and resignation from knowing that even if they reject the deal, they won’t be allowed to fight for a better one. But because expectations were high, maybe a majority will vote no. Although it’s hypothetically possible that flight attendants could reject the deal and then go on a wildcat strike that defies the law and their union officials, I don’t think that’s going to happen. There would have to be really strong organization among rank-and-file workers outside of the official union structure, with confident militant rank-and-file leaders, preconditions that seem doubtful right now.

All in all, I think the outcome is a partial and complicated win. Workers won real gains in pay, but they don’t have the right to reject a deal and fight for a better one. What’s happened seems unlikely to be a big deterrent to the federal government using Section 107 to end strikes in the future.

It’s worth pointing out that negotiating a deal that workers don’t have the right to actually reject had advantages both for the company and for CUPE officials. The company got a guarantee that the strike wouldn’t resume, and union officials got insulation against rank and file pressure to fight for a better deal and lead more strike action.

Also, the outcome of a deal that workers can’t genuinely reject is bad for union-building. It’s not democratic. It took the decision about whether the deal was good enough out of workers’ hands. This isn’t going to encourage the most militant workers who were really inspired by striking to get more involved in the union.

A bigger victory was definitely possible. Air Canada was completely grounded. They were losing a lot of money, so they were under a lot of pressure. Management was completely unprepared for what happened. They expected the federal government would intervene and then CUPE officials would tell workers to comply with a back-to-work order. During the strike, CUPE put out an online graphic with a quote from an interview that AC’s CEO Michael Rousseau did with BNN Bloomberg on August 18. Rousseau said, “Well, we thought, obviously, that Section 107 would be enforced, and that they wouldn’t illegally avoid Section 107.”

Air Canada was completely grounded.If the strike had gone on longer, I think CUPE could have won a much bigger win for flight attendants and for the working class as a whole. Even if they hadn’t forced the government to rescind the order, they could have won a deal with bigger gains that ignored the back-to-work order—a deal that workers could ratify or truly reject. That would have been an amazing precedent. And if there had been sympathy job action by any airport workers or any workers at WestJet, which is AC’s main competitor, like slowdowns, calling in sick, or not crossing picket lines, other employers would have been freaking out behind the scenes and leaning on AC to settle. I don’t know if any sympathy action would’ve happened if the strike had lasted longer, since it’s illegal and most workers today have no experience of doing it, but it’s not impossible that at least a little bit could have happened, especially if the government had moved to punish CUPE for defying the law.

So why did CUPE officials end the strike the way they did? For the top people at CUPE National, I think the main goal was to negotiate a settlement with some gains for flight attendants. They didn’t want to have everything decided by an arbitrator. After the government intervened, that was still their overriding goal. Winning a political victory against the use of Section 107 against strikes, which would have been a victory for the working class as a whole, was secondary. Once they forced AC back to the bargaining table, they dropped that objective and focused on the main goal.

Why did they do that? Above all, they’re committed to collective bargaining. That legally-regulated, tightly-controlled process is at the core of what the layer of full-time union officials, both elected officers and staff, do—that, along with handling grievances, which is how disputes over workers’ rights in collective agreements are dealt with in between rounds of collective bargaining.

I think the top leaders at CUPE have shown that they’re prepared to support militant action if that’s what it takes to preserve conventional collective bargaining. That makes them different from the heads of many other unions. Blatant government intervention with back-to-work orders and back-to-work legislation undermines conventional collective bargaining. So they’re sometimes willing to support workers challenging it or even lead that challenge, as they just did. They’re willing to sometimes use militant tactics to fight for goals that aren’t radical.

We need to remember that defying the law can lead to massive fines for unions. That can damage unions as institutions, even threaten their ability to operate. For the union officialdom of full-time officers and staff, that’s a different kind of problem than it is for rank and file union members, because they depend on the union machine in order to keep on functioning as officials. So once CUPE’s top officers saw a path to getting a deal that would end the strike and put an end to the threat of big fines or charges against them for defying the law, they went for it.

A knowledgeable CUPE person put it to me this way: “You have to hand it to National for playing their cards so well—they effectively posture as bold militants to the membership and public, while effectively containing struggles within status quo parameters. They get their cake and eat it too.”

This isn’t the first time they’ve done it. In 2022, when CUPE’s Ontario School Board Council of Unions (OSBCU) was in bargaining and then was hit with pre-emptive provincial legislation to stop them from striking, they defied the law and struck anyway. Organizing toward sympathy strikes to support OSBCU started to happen. As soon as the provincial premier said he’d withdraw the law if the strike ended, CUPE National officials and other union officials put pressure on the president of OSBCU to accept the offer and go back to bargaining without the power of striking workers and their many supporters as leverage. And that’s what happened.

From a distance, the outcome of the Air Canada strike can easily look like what CUPE National said it was. So lots of people probably think it was simply a tremendous win. That will encourage union activists to use it as a positive example. They can say, “Look, CUPE defied the law and won, that’s what we should prepare to do if we have to.” That’s good. It’s good that flight attendants showed you can have a strike that’s popular and that defies the law and wins, even though it causes inconveniences for lots of people. It’s good that Hancock tearing up the back-to-work order was all over the news.

But what actually happened wasn’t what it looks like from afar. To me, what happened confirms that we can’t rely on the union officialdom to fight to win in a consistent way, even when the officials are more militant. Union members who want unions that are really militant, democratic and solidaristic need to organize themselves on their own and work to change our unions. We need to build caucuses, groups of members who take to heart what the Clyde Workers’ Committee said in Scotland back in 1915: “We will support the officials just so long as they rightly represent the workers, but we will act independently immediately they misrepresent them.”

For more on this strike, check out episode 57 of the podcast Victor’s Children.

Originally published in Midnight Sun

The fall of the state projects sometimes called “actually existing socialism” (AES) in Eastern Europe and the USSR from 1989–91 was widely interpreted as the end of communism and any other project of constructing an alternative to capitalism. The 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-democracy protestors by the Chinese military fed into the same view; if the Chinese Communist Party survived as a ruling party, unlike its counterparts in the USSR and Eastern Europe, it was only through bloody repression. Around the world, parties that supported AES lost much of their support. Radical left forces that were highly critical of AES but considered it better than capitalism also suffered. Over time, the widespread perception that the alternative to capitalism had failed reduced the appeal even of radical politics that held that AES societies had not been in transition to communism at all. This belief in a historic failure fed into the mood expressed in the saying of unknown origins reported by cultural studies scholar Fredric Jameson: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” 

Nevertheless, the realities of capitalism fuelled global surges of anti-capitalist sentiment and politics in the short-lived global justice movement that began in the late 1990s, in the wake of the Great Recession of 2007–09 and the austerity drive that followed, and more recently in response to climate change, how states handled the COVID-19 pandemic, and racism. This sentiment has often boosted support for reformist socialism: the left social democracy of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France, Bernie Sanders and the kind of politics dominant within the Democratic Socialists of America in the US, and the like. Today there are also many people who dream of freedom, of liberation, of a future more radically different from the present than what left social democracy seeks. However, they often think politically in terms of abolition, feminism, trans and queer liberation, degrowth, and/or anti-capitalism without also being communist (the point is not whether people use the term “communism” to name the society for which they wish to fight but what kind of society they wish to see established). The mood captured by Jameson is still very widespread. 

All strands of communist politics have also been affected by how their political magnetism has been depleted by the ending of what we can call the classical workers’ movement over the closing decades of the twentieth century, decades in which employers and states inflicted major defeats on the global working class. Of course, there are still unions and, in some places, other mass organizations of the working class. What no longer exists almost anywhere are, as I once described them in an article for the online edition of the magazine Salvage, “configurations of workers’ organizations with a strong relationship to at least a small but significant minority of the class that affirm a commitment to the creation by workers of a fundamentally different society.” What is more, “infrastructures of dissent” – defined by theorist Alan Sears as “the means through which activists develop political communities capable of learning, communicating and mobilizing together” – are much weaker than they once were. 

In part because of these developments, popular discontent arising from changes in society that have worsened life globally for many people since the Great Recession is being tapped and moulded by rising right-wing forces. These include both fascist and other far-right organizations, which aim to do away with capitalist democracy altogether, and a larger set of forces that want to weaken it further. Together they make up an “array of antidemocratic and reactionary forces seeking to reassert class rule and privilege, to exit the crises of our times on terms set by capital, to bring a specific kind of order to an increasingly unstable world,” as theorists Todd Gordon and Jeffery R. Webber perceptively observe in an article for the magazine Spectre. In these conditions, is communism a meaningful political project?

Before addressing that question, one objection needs to be discussed: even if socialist revolutions happen, the global ecological crisis will make transition to communism impossible. Upheavals stemming from climate change lie ahead, along with other dimensions of the crisis, including more pandemic outbreaks. Humanity needs to shift to non-fossil sources of energy as quickly as possible – an enormous undertaking. Doing this while at the same time allowing imperialized countries of the South to improve the lives of their inhabitants will require reducing energy use in imperialist countries. The use of many non-renewable resources must also be reduced, agriculture transformed, food systems changed, and many forms of pollution stopped. According to some ecologists, people would not be able to both make such changes and also move towards communism, which they believe would involve ecocidal industrial growth. My response is that this is true for a transition towards “productivist” communism – one that would ignore or downplay the limits of our biosphere and retain most of capitalism’s technological structure and the wasteful, consumer goods-fixated, car-dependent, jet-travelling way of life spawned in the imperialist countries during the post–World War II economic boom and then spread around the world. But there is no reason to assume that people who had taken control of society and started to reconstruct it would take a productivist path. The extremely democratic institutions of self-government they would have created would provide an unparalleled framework for debating which priorities would shape the democratic planning of production and the reorganization of social life. Within that framework, and no longer shackled by capitalism’s ecocidal drive, it would be far easier than in any capitalist society to argue for ecological concerns to be prioritized. “Private sufficiency, public luxury” could be a principle in the transition to an ecological communism, which is a goal worth fighting for no matter how severe the ecological crisis gets. Without such a transition, capitalism will make it impossible to achieve all of the far-reaching changes that are urgently needed to address our dire ecological situation.

Is There Any Hope for Communism? 

Returning to the question of whether communism is a viable political project today, it is not hard to understand what capitalism is doing to humanity and the rest of nature. Some of this was touched on at the outset of this book, and much has been written about it. Capitalism is doing what it is doing because of the essential character of its social metabolism. This is driven by its irrational logic: the competitive accumulation of capital on an ever-larger scale and at an ever-faster speed. Capitalism operates as it does not because of an imbalance that can be corrected but because of its inherent systemic imperatives. As the saying goes, “The system isn’t broken. It was built this way.” This is why it is necessary for humanity to move from capitalism to a better and entirely different way of organizing social life. 

Whether communism is possible is where the major problem arises. Even many sympathizers are skeptical because we have not yet had a historical experience in which people have really begun to reconstruct society in the direction of communism, yet we do have a history of defeated revolutions and the disastrous experience of AES. Moreover, we are all affected by living in an age in which there is a sense that history is over, that we live in a world of the eternal present, that the future will be like the present, but probably worse. This context clouds our ability to see that the world is not closed but “open, incomplete, unfinished,” as the Italian historian Enzo Traverso puts it. We can better appreciate that openness if we understand that the present is just a moment of history. Over time humans have organized societies in a wide variety of ways, even if societies have been structured by a limited number of modes of production. 

The status quo that we often take for granted did not have to be as it is. It is the outcome of events and processes shaped by clashing class and other social forces in particular times and places. It is not the inevitable culmination of laws of history that could not have unfolded otherwise. Nor is it the product of random chance. Consider just one counterfactual scenario: if the Russian Communist Party’s surplus-extracting state of proletarian origin had been overthrown in the early 1920s, it would have been replaced by a horrific counter-revolutionary military dictatorship: “The world would have had a Russian name for Fascism,” as Trotsky once put it. At the same time, communist politics would not have been distorted by Stalinism, and AES would never have existed. The history of the twentieth century would have been dramatically different. 

The status quo that we often take for granted did not have to be as it is. It is the outcome of events and processes shaped by clashing class and other social forces in particular times and places. It is not the inevitable culmination of laws of history that could not have unfolded otherwise. Nor is it the product of random chance. Consider just one counterfactual scenario: if the Russian Communist Party’s surplus-extracting state of proletarian origin had been overthrown in the early 1920s, it would have been replaced by a horrific counter-revolutionary military dictatorship: “The world would have had a Russian name for Fascism,” as Trotsky once put it. At the same time, communist politics would not have been distorted by Stalinism, and AES would never have existed. The history of the twentieth century would have been dramatically different. 

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This is an excerpt from the new book Red Flags: A Reckoning with Communism for the Future of the Left (Fernwood Publishing), printed here with permission of the publisher.