To Renew Working-Class Resistance, the Labour Movement Must Be Democratized<https://socialistproject.ca/?p=3489>

Bryan Evans, Carlo Fanelli, Leo Panitch and Donald Swartz

Since its initial publication in 1988, From Consent to Coercion: The Continuing Assault on Labour by Bryan Evans, Carlo Fanelli, Don Swartz, and the late, Leo Panitch has offered leftists an exhaustive history of the onslaughts against trade union rights and freedoms in Canada. The book charts the increasingly brutal setbacks and depredations experienced by organized labour, from the postwar decades to today. These developments are explained thorough a Marxist lens, through which the authors carry out a rigorous, oftentimes withering analysis of labour issues and politics.

Now in its fourth edition, out this month from University of Toronto Press, From Consent to Coercion remains an invaluable tool for understanding how the state and capital manage the subordination of labour. The new edition contains timely material that wrestles with the pressing issues of precarity and polarization and the dire need to rebuild and renew socialist politics. The following is excerpted from the book.

Much of what was achieved through the class struggles of the 1930s to 1970s has dissolved. So-called Keynesian capitalism was predicated upon a set of compromises between capital and labour that accepted organized labour as a junior partner in the management of the political economy. Social democracy, as the major political orientation within working-class politics, was instrumental here. Today, however, social democracy offers no vision of a society beyond capitalism, offering up instead a technocratic managerialism to coordinate the state and economy.

The undemocratic and increasingly authoritarian variant of neoliberal capitalism has gradually insulated state institutions from popular pressures through concentrated power in the political executive and central bank “independence,” among other transformations within the state. As there is “no going back,” these developments raise the question as to whether democratic capitalism has arrived at a dead end.

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