Left Wexit Manifesto from leftwexit.com website
Here are its 28 touchstones of a future Left and Independent Alberta.
However if intent is to start a new party, then I am against it.
And even my support for independence is not strong, My big thought is what is independence without independence from domination by U.S. oil companies?
The best chance for the Left in Alberta is for Alberta to be left in Canada.
But I do see much good in many of the statements expressed below:
The Left Wexit Manifesto
For an Independent Socialist Alberta
Our aim as democratic socialists is to build an independent socialist Alberta. Our aim as supporters of the Left Wexit Party is to make it a truly socialist party.
The achievement of socialism awaits the building of a mass base of socialists, in factories and offices, on farms and campuses. The development of socialist consciousness, on which can be built a socialist base, must be the first priority of the Left Wexit Party.
The Left Wexit Party must be seen as the parliamentary wing of a movement dedicated to fundamental social change. It must be radicalized from within and it must be radicalized from without.
The most urgent issue for Albertans is the very survival of Alberta. Anxiety is pervasive and the goal of greater economic independence receives widespread support. But economic independence without socialism is a sham, and neither are meaningful without true participatory democracy.
The major threat to Albertan survival today is American control of the Albertan economy. The major issue of our times is not national unity but national survival, and the fundamental threat is external, not internal.
American corporate capitalism is the dominant factor shaping Albertan society. In Alberta, American economic control operates throughout the formidable medium of the multi-national corporation. The Albertan corporate elite has opted for a junior partnership with these American enterprises. Alberta has been reduced to a resource base and consumer market within the American Empire.
The American Empire is the central reality for Albertans. It is an empire characterized by militarism abroad and racism at home. Albertan resources and diplomacy have been enlisted in the support of the empire. In the barbarous war in Vietnam, Alberta has supported the United States through its membership on the International Control Commission and through sales of arms and strategic resources to the American military industrial complex.
The American empire is held together through worldwide military alliances and giant monopoly corporations. Alberta’s membership in the American alliance system and the ownership of the Albertan economy by American corporations precludes Alberta’s playing an independent role in the world. These bonds must be cut if corporate capitalism and the social priorities it creates are to be effectively challenged.
Albertan development is distorted by a corporate capitalist economy. Corporate investment creates and fosters superfluous individual consumption at the expense of social needs. Corporate decision-making concentrates investment in a few major urban areas, which become increasingly uninhabitable while the rest of the country sinks in underdevelopment.
The criterion that the most profitable pursuits are the most important ones causes the neglect of activities whose value cannot be measured be the standards of profitability. It is not accidental that housing, education, medical care, and public transportation are inadequately provided for by the present social system.
The problem of regional disparities is rooted in the profit orientation of capitalism. The social costs of stagnant areas are irrelevant to the corporations. For Alberta, the problem is compounded by the reduction of Alberta to the position of an economic colony of the United States. The foreign capitalist has even less concern for balanced development of the country than the Albertan capitalist does with roots in a particular region.
An independent movement based on substituting Albertan capitalists for American capitalists, or on public policy to make foreign corporations behave as if they were Albertan corporations, cannot be our final objective. There is not now an independent Albertan capitalism and any lingering pretensions on the part on Albertan businessmen to independence lack credibility. Without a strong national capitalist class behind them, Albertan governments, NDP and Conservative, have functioned in the interests of international and particularly American capitalism, and have lacked the will to pursue even a modest strategy of economic independence.
Capitalism must be replaced by socialism, by national planning of investment and by the public ownership of the means of production in the interests of the Albertan people as a whole. Albertan nationalism is a relevant force on which to build to the extent that it is anti-imperialist. On the road to socialism, such aspirations for independence must be taken into account. For to pursue independence seriously is to make visible the necessity of socialism in Alberta.
Those who desire socialism and independence for Alberta have often been baffled and mystified by the problem of internal divisions within Alberta. While the essential fact of the Albertan history in the past century is the reduction of Alberta to a colony of the United States, with a consequent increase in regional inequalities, there is no denying the existence of two nations within Alberta, each with its own language, culture, and aspirations. This reality must be incorporated into the strategy of the Left Wexit Party.
English Alberta and Quebec can share common institutions to the extent that they share common purposes. So long as Alberta is governed by those who believe that the national policy should be limited to the passive function of maintaining a peaceful and secure climate for foreign investment, there can be no meaningful unity between English and French Albertans. So long as the federal government refuses to protect the country from economic and cultural domination, English Alberta is bound to appear to French Albertans simply as part of the United States. An English Alberta concerned with its own national survival would create common aspirations that would help to tie the two nations together once more.
Nor can the present treatment of the constitutional issue in isolation from economic and social forces that transcend the two nations be anything but irrelevant. Politicians committed to the values and structure of a capitalist society drafted our present constitution a century ago. Constitutional change relevant to socialists must be based on the needs of the people rather than the corporations and must reflect the power of classes and groups excluded from effective decision-making by the present system.
A united Alberta is of critical importance in pursuing a successful strategy against the reality of American imperialism. Quebec’s history and aspirations must be allowed full expression and implementation in the conviction that new ties will emerge from the common perception of “two nations, one struggle”. Socialists in English Alberta must ally themselves with socialists in Quebec in this common cause.
Central to the creation of an independent socialist Alberta is the strength and tradition of the Albertan working class and the trade union movement. The revitalization and extension of the labor movement would involve a fundamental democratization of our society.
Corporate capitalism is characterized by the predominant power of the corporate elite aided and abetted by the political elite. A central objective of Albertan socialists must be to further the democratization process in industry. The Albertan trade union movement throughout its history has waged a democratic battle against the so-called rights or prerogatives of ownership and management. It has achieved the important moral and legal victory of providing for working men an affective say in what their wages will be. At present management’s “right” to control technological change is being challenged. The Left Wexit Party must provide leadership in the struggle to extend working men’s influence into every area of industrial decision-making. Those who work must have effective control in the determination of working conditions, and substantial power in determining the nature of the product, prices and so on. Democracy and socialism require nothing less.
Trade unionists and New Democrats have led in extending the welfare state in Alberta. Much remains to be done: more and better housing, a really progressive tax structure, a guaranteed annual income. However, these are no longer enough. A socialist society must be one in which there is democratic control of all institutions, which have a major effect on men’s lives and where there is equal opportunity for creative non-exploitative self-development. It is now time to go beyond the welfare state.
Left Wexiteers must begin now to insist on the redistribution of power, and not simply welfare, in a socialist direction. The struggle for worker participation in industrial decision-making and against management “rights” is such a move toward economic and social democracy.
By strengthening the Albertan labor movement, Left Wexiteers will further the pursuit of Albertan independence. So long as the corporate elite dominates Albertan economic activity, and so long as worker’s rights are confined within their present limits, corporate requirements for profit will continue to take precedence over human needs.
By bringing men together primarily as buyers and sellers of each other, by enshrining profitability and material gain in place of humanity and spiritual growth, capitalism has always been inherently alienating. Today, sheer size combined with modern technology further exaggerates man’s sense of insignificance and impotence. A socialist transformation of society will return to man his sense of humanity, to replace his sense of being a commodity. But a socialist democracy implies man’s control of his immediate environment as well, and in any strategy for building socialism, community democracy is as vital as the struggle for electoral success. To that end, socialists must strive for democracy at those levels that most directly affect us all — in our neighborhoods, our schools, and our places of work. Tenants’ unions, consumers’ and producers’ cooperatives are examples of areas in which socialist must lead in efforts to involve people directly in the struggle to control their own destinies.
Socialism is a process and a program. The process is the raising of socialist consciousness, the building of a mass base of socialists, and a strategy to make visible the limits of liberal capitalism.
While the program must evolve out of the process, its leading features seem clear. Relevant instruments for bringing the Albertan economy under Albertan ownership and control and for altering the priorities established by corporate capitalism are to hand. They include extensive public control over investment and nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy, such as the essential resources industries, finance and credit, and industries strategic to planning our economy. Within that program, workers’ participation in all institutions promises to release creative energies, promote decentralization, and restore human and social priorities.
The struggle to build a democratic socialist Alberta must proceed at all levels of Albertan society. The Left Wexit Party is the organization suited to bringing these activities into a common focus. The Left Wexit Party has grown out of a movement for democratic socialism that has deep roots in Albertan history. It is the core around which should be mobilized the social and political movement necessary for building an independent socialist Alberta. The Left Wexit Party must rise to that challenge or become irrelevant. Victory lies in joining the struggle.
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