Class Struggle from Above

Class Struggle from Above:The Canadian State, Industrial Legality, and (the Never-Ending Usage of) Back-to-Work Legislation Charles Smith (bio) In capitalist societies, few moments bring to the surface already existing class divisions more than a strike. When the poor, the dispossessed, the disadvantaged, and all those who work for wages engage in mass protest – through the withdrawal of their labour or by the mass disruption of bourgeois normality – the everyday struggles of people navigating already existing oppressions erupt into broader public consciousness.1 The historical significance of these struggles will vary depending on time and space, but these conflicts continue because, as Bryan Palmer and Gaétan Héroux argue in their exceptional history of Toronto's poor, class inequality is produced structurally as a relationship to capitalism and its unequal division of the surplus derived from human labour power. Yet, because class is built on a foundation of power predicated upon unequal exchange, it is shaped and moulded by "the crucible of struggle and resistance."2 In that crucible, Marx and Engels observe, the bourgeoisie may produce "its own grave-diggers" because it creates and is dependent upon the misery that compels working people to resist.3 Strikes can take many forms, including prisoners refusing the orders of the guards, women refusing to perform culturally imposed domestic labour, Indigenous peoples placing their bodies between their lands and colonial development projects, and working people walking off the job to pressure a recalcitrant employer. While strikes can occur in isolation over issues pertaining to wages or workplace conditions, they can also break out into broader challenges to existing social relations. In these moments of crisis, strikes expose and break down the contradictions on which capitalist societies are founded. While strikes occur in all capitalist countries, the Canadian state has always been defined, in the words of Leo Panitch, by its particular "commitment to private capital as the motor force of the society."4 These early commitments, [End Page 109] rooted in English Canada's peculiar embrace of colonial Toryism, witnessed an economic élite utilizing the state to foster capital accumulation first through Indigenous disposition and later through active recruitment of a landless working class to labour in large public work projects and fledgling factories in the 19th and early 20th centuries.5 Since the end of World War II, the foundations of the Tory state may have shifted to a more coercive liberal order, yet the same philosophies that guided the 19th-century state regarding labour relations have led to a system that remains wary of working-class struggles that challenge the basic foundations of accumulation, even on the margins.6 Particularly exceptional about the state's continuous intervention in labour disputes are the numerous legal barriers erected by the state before workers can engage in strike activity. And notwithstanding those numerous legal barriers, governments continue to intervene to end strikes through what Leo Panitch and Donald Swartz describe as "ad-hoc back-to-work legislation."7 For Panitch and Swartz, each occurrence of back-to-work legislation passed by federal and provincial governments since 1950 – which stands at more than 144 separate occurrences as of 20208 – represents a turn toward "permanent exceptionalism." What is contradictory about the increasing use of back-to-work legislation by Canadian governments is that the coercive acts are "continually portrayed as exceptional, temporary, or emergency-related, regardless of how frequently they occurred or the number of workers who fell within their scope or were threatened by their example."9 Since the 1950s, and with increasing frequency by the end of the 1970s, the so-called "temporary" and "exceptional" nature of back-to-work legislation has been muddled by government insistence that it respects the foundations of industrial legality but must restrict the ability of workers to strike in order to solve a looming emergency – real or imagined – within the specific regime of capitalist accumulation. [End Page 110] When the capitalist offensive turned against the postwar Keynesian consensus in the 1970s, back-to-work legislation became the state's rather blunt instrument with which to discipline Canadian workers and weaken resistance to the otherwise violent process of neoliberalization.10 Often these

Bourgeoisie · Capitalism · Class conflict · Class consciousness · Colonialism · Commodification · Economics · Economy · Indigenous · Legislation · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Proletariat · Resistance (ecology · Sociology · Working class · Labor Movements and Unions · Law

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  Stuart Henderson•The Sixties•2009

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• Class Struggle from Above

  Charles H Smith, Charles W Smith et al.•Labour / Le Travail•2020

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• Forging Responsible Unions

  E Tucker, Judy Fudge•Labour / Le Travail•1996

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• We No Longer Respect the Law

  Joan Sangster•Labour / Le Travail•2004

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