FocusOnLabour

Focus On Labour


Workers are confronted with massive erosions of living standards, wages and retirement security. Intensification of labour through job eliminations, speed-up and longer work hours are threatening Canadian families’ mental and physical health and well-being.  War undermines Canadian sovereignty and the expansion of the economy, transferring massive amounts of capital from peaceful purposes, such as manufacturing, low cost housing and health care, to war profiteers and investor classes, who care little about the fate of working families so long as their profits remain unchallenged and their pockets books continue to be fat and bloated with cash.

The Canadian labour movement is waging important struggles to defend and secure the economic positions of workers. Many in the leadership of the trade union movement feel the approach to struggle is through partnerships with the bosses and political parties. The Canadian labour movement has a rich history of militant struggle. History has proved time and again that the only way workers defend their economic situation is through organization and independent militant struggle and independent political action.

Focus On Labour examines labour politics and comments on the current struggles Canadian workers face. We examine Canadian and international labour politics through a Marxist-Leninist analysis.  We analyse the positions of political parties towards labour and attempt to expose the parasites living off of all the unpaid labour time and national wealth created by the over whelming majority of working Canadians  the labouring Canadian working class.

Please send us articles of the struggles and battles raging in your workplace, in your schools, in your hospitals, on your construction sites and plant floors - no fight is too small in the defence of workers.


World Federation of Trades Unions
16th World Trade Union Conference
Athens Greece, April 6-9, 2011

For further information you can contact us at our e-mail:
wftu-16Congress@hotmail.com


 Read Issue Two of WFTU - Reflects

 Read Issue One of WFTU - Reflects


WFTU - Flashes Asia/Pacific Region:
 July 2010 Issue
September 2010 Issue


World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU)
4th Presidential Council Meeting - Resolution and Plan of Work

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
February 22-23,  2010

Read the Resolution...

4th Strike in a Month: The Streets Flooded Again with the Workers of PAME
Communist Party of Greece (KKE)
March 12, 2010

On Thursday March 11th the streets in 68 cities and towns were rivers swollen with anger as employees, youth, women and pensioners demonstrated with PAME.

Read...

Speech by WFTU General Secretary George Mavrikos at the International Seminar on: “The Economic Crisis and the Role of the International Trade Union Movement”, October 5-6 2009, Brussels.

October 5, 2009

As we all know, the international capitalist economy is going through a deep crisis with extensive synchronization. This situation began firstly in 2007 in the U.S. in the construction sector. The risk of collapse of U.S. financial giants with strong positions in the international market caused a gradual and generalized big value drop in major stock markets of the World. This was the “tip of the iceberg”. There are many analyses of the outbreak of the crisis. We believe that the most reliable one is that it is a crisis of overproduction or otherwise over accumulation of capital. A crisis is a component of the capitalist system and it is also a mechanism of reconstruction that will bring it back stronger, with the support of the State. Through the crisis, the corrections of the more extreme imbalances of capitalism takes place momentarily and partially, to then start a new cycle of unregulated and broadened capitalist reproduction. Already in 1847, Karl Marx gave a scientific explanation for the crises of capitalism. He explained that these are inevitable, cyclical and repetitive. Life itself has confirmed this explanation.

Read...

 

 

Canadians for Peace and Socialism
May Day 2010 Statement
Read...

 

May Day 2010: Message by the CC of KKE

Communist Party of Greece

April 30, 2010
Read


 

CAW Embattled – Solidarity and Support
 

April 22, 2009

Don Currie, Chair - CPS


Which Side Are You On?

No labour struggle in Canada today puts the question “which side are you on” more starkly than the bitter confrontation now underway between the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) on the one hand and the anti-labour Harper Conservatives, the Dalton McGuinty Liberals and the big three auto corporations, GM, Ford and Chrysler on the other.

An anti-union coalition of governments and corporations has been forged to take advantage of a global capitalist depression to wring more concessions from the union, further reduce its membership, and drive down wages and ultimately break the union. This anti-labour alliance as its first priority seeks to maintain and increase corporate profits to satisfy bond holders and big stockholders, company brass and promote the narrow political interests of the Obama and Harper Governments.

Read...

Workers retake the streets from March to May 2010
Mobilization plan proposed by the Labor Act
Communist Party of Venezuela (CPV)

Caracus Feb 22, 2010 - The Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), and called on workers in the country to return to the mobilization and pressure to the National Assembly this year to get approval of the New Labor Act (Act) that has been stalled in the Standing Committee on Social Development Comprehensive legislative body.

his was expressed, Pedro Eusse, Workers and Trade Union National Secretary and member of the Political Bureau of the tent red, who insisted on the need to be workers and their unions to fight for the legislation that has over ten years late and that was mandated by the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. "We emphasize the need for the workers and put us at the forefront of this struggle," he said.

 





Cuba Files

International Communist Review

4th European Communist Meeting on Education

 
 Australian Marxist Review

   
Lebanese CP - Monthly Bulletin No. 11

G8/G20 Imperialist Summit Toronto, ON June 26, 2010
Police Charge Patriotic Canadian Youth

30,000 Say Yes to Peace! No to NATO!

Lisbon Nov.21, 2010

Portuguese Communist Party

 Free The Cuban Five



The Latest From FOS:

  • International
    The Way I See It - Afghanistan Revisited

    Those of us who support CPA, including the members of CPS assert that anti-Sovietism was and continues to be pro-war and anti-peace. During the darkest days of the cold-war when the threat of nuclear war loomed over the planet, the Soviet Union was the main force of restraint over the worst of the US imperialist reactionary forces thirsting for war.
    Read more...


  • Marxism-Leninism
    Proposal for a New International

    The proposal last November 2009 to organize a new international having the support of left-socialist revolutionary parties in Latin America, on the initiative of Hugo Chavez, is an important development in the anti-imperialist movement urgently in need of credible communist analysis.
    Read more...


  • Federal Politics
    Prime Minister Harper (Assisted by Jim Flaherty and Peter Van Loan) Leads the Whole World Forward To the New “Enlightened Sovereignty” of the 21st Century

    Prime Minister Harper’s address to the World Economic Forum (WEF)[1] in Davos Switzerland January 28, 2010 can’t be dismissed as just unctuous and vapid; it was worse than that.  Harper adopting his familiar and grating patronizing manner underwhelmed the elite audience of capitalist intellectual luminaries, by suggesting that minority Conservative Government economic policies under Harper’s leadership is the example the nations of the world must follow to emerge triumphant from the worst capitalist depression since the market crash of October 1929.
    Read more...


  • Federal Politics
    Organized Labour and the Politics of the Class Struggle Today

    A Convention of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) is always a significant event in the struggle of the working class to defeat capitalism and replace it with socialism.  Only the Communists strive to take responsibility for the whole revolutionary process underway in our own country and globally.  Every revolutionary class conscious worker is concerned that the Communist Party becomes strengthened and more effective in fulfilling its historic responsibilities to the working class of Canada and all of its peoples and for the victorious outcome of the cause of the International Communist Movement.
    Read more...


  • Federal Politics
    The Way I See It! - Some Critical Comments

    The main link that can move the entire political process forward is a clearly articulated and unambiguous revolutionary working class program to confront US-Canadian corporate power and its stranglehold on Parliament, the State, the military and the economy. That task must be the main theme of the upcoming 36th Convention of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC). From the convention an appeal that reaches out to all of organized labour and the democratic forces of our country with a plan to unite electorally to defeat Harper, and decisively, will be influential within labour and garner widespread appeal with Canadian workers. That is a concentration task and if it is solved, the organizational tactics to achieve it can be worked out.
    Read more...




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What Was Said

New Page 2

V.I. Lenin State and Revolution – 1916 – Volume 25 page 410 Progress Publishers Moscow 1964.


“Imperialism – the era of bank capital, the era of gigantic capitalist monopolies, of the development of monopoly capitalism into state monopoly capitalism – has clearly shown an extraordinary strengthening of the “state machine” and an unprecedented growth in its bureaucratic and military apparatus in connection with the intensification of repressive measures against the proletariat both in the monarchial and in the freest, republic countries.”

VI Lenin - Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism


“As long as capitalism remains what it is, surplus capital will be utilised not for the purpose of raising the standard of living of the masses in a given country, for this would mean a decline in profits for the capitalists, but for the purpose of increasing profits by exporting capital abroad to the backward countries.”

WWS Archives...



36th Convention of the Communist

 

News and Statements from:
The Communist Party of Canada

Communist Party of Canada May Day Statement 2010
Unite to Demand a People's Recovery!

The corporate‑owned mass media greet us daily with upbeat economic reports about how the global economic crisis is over and that ‘recovery is now well underway’. This is all very comforting, but it’s also a gross perversion of the truth.

In reality, there is no recovery for most working people in this country. Unemployment and job insecurity remain high, with over 1.5 million (8.2%) out of work according to official statistics; real unemployment is closer to 12%. Since 2003, more than half million well‑paying manufacturing jobs been wiped out, 290,000 in the past two years alone. Soon EI benefits will be running out for hundreds of thousands of these unemployed workers.

Nor is there any recovery for young people trying to find work or to complete their education. Or for Aboriginal peoples who continue to suffer systemic joblessness and grinding poverty. Or for new immigrants and their families trying to build a better life. Or for pensioners and others on fixed income.

So what kind of recovery is this? It’s a recovery for the profits of the biggest banks and corporations, and for those who own and control them.

Read...


The Communist Party of Canada has issued the Main Political Resolution coming out of the 36th Central Convention February 2010.  Canadians for Peace and Socialism will be commenting on the document in the coming weeks and months.  It is an essential document for all workers to read, discuss and distribute.

 

From the Keynote Address to the 36th Central Convention by Comrade Miguel Figueroa:

 

“The second and final point I wish to make refers to the centrality of our theoretical and ideological work. Of course, we have a clearly delineated theoretical perspective and world-view – Marxism-Leninism – which is reflected in our Party program, our strategy & tactics, and our daily work as Communists. We all remember Lenin’s famous dictum: “without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement”. But the theoretical basis of our Party – and that of the Communist movement internationally – can never be neglected or taken for granted, for without its constant development and application to ever-changing conditions, our theoretical basis, and with it our movement itself, would wither and perish.

 

"As important as this question always is, it could rightly be argued that it is even more critical today, for it is undeniable that as the class struggle intensifies, so too does the ideological struggle – the ‘battle of ideas’ – sharpen. It is hardly coincidental that it is precisely now, when the crisis of capitalism is deepening, that we witness an increased ideological offensive from our class adversary in the form of a revival of anti-communism, ‘philosophical’ attacks on the concept of socialism, and crude attempts to falsify or re-write the history of our movement in Canada and around the world.

CPC 36th Central Convention Main Political Resolution

 

Build Solidarity with the Striking Sudbury Miners at Vale Inco
March 5, 2010

Read...

 

Militant May Day Greetings 2010
April 30, 2010
Read...

Rebel Youth Magazine Blog:
75,000 Quebec Workers March!

March 20, 2010

A few days after the expiry of collective agreements for employees of public and parastatal sectors, thousands of people, members and friends of the Common Front SISP-CSN-FTQ from all regions of Quebec, marched in the streets of Montreal to remind the government that the solutions to improve public services go through the negotiation.

Read...

 

Speech by Johan Boyden, YCL-LJC General Secretary
To the 36 Central Convention Communist Party of Canada

Three years ago, the YCL stood at this podium giving greetings on the eve of our re-founding convention. New delegates may not know this, but in a deliberate and calculated attempt to attack the Communist Party of Canada thirty years ago, a campaign was initiated to destroy, terminate, liquidate the revolutionary youth around the Party. Some members who fought against that attack are here today.

Read...

 

25th Central Convention of the YCL-LJC
September 24-26, Toronto ON

DISCUSSION BULLETIN #1
DISCUSSION BULLETIN #2
DISCUSSION BULLETIN #3

 YCL Central Convention Announcement

June 23, 2010

NEW DATES : September 24-25-26

Dear comrades and friends,

As you no doubt have heard, due to unexpected circumstances the Central Committee of the YCL-LJC was forced to postpone our 25th Convention, originally scheduled for May. We are now pleased to announce the new dates of the convention: Friday September 24 to Sunday September 26, to be held in Toronto. We are re-issuing the original convention call, below, which can also be found online, together with registration.

The Central Committee encourages all clubs and members to continue to meet this summer to discuss the main documents, the pre-convention discussion, and nominate delegates. As we enter an extended period of ideological mobilization, clubs and committees should compare their concrete political realities of struggle with the framework of the main convention documents and deepen discussion of the documents.

We also encourage all clubs and committees of the YCL-LJC to re-enforce their activities building the convention financially, organizationally and politically, and to broaden and deepen our engagement with friends and allies regarding the convention.

The Central Committee has struck a special committee to review and discuss the YCL-LJC Constitution as an additional item of business for the Central Convention. The committee will be reporting by early September as a special discussion bulletin.

The deadline for convention discussion bulletin #4 is July 1, 2010.

With the additional time to organize, let's  make this convention an exciting moment for the YCL-LJC and the youth struggle!

In solidarity and comradeship,
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