They ain’t what they used to be, but protest movements can serve a purpose

THOUGH NOTHING LIKE THE heyday of the 1960s, protest movements are back in fashion of late. From Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter, we’ve seen people out on the streets to demand the end to systemic injustices.

Much of what we’re seeing today has its roots in movements that took center stage in the 1960s, notably in the U.S. where the civil rights struggle really came to a head. There was also a student movement pressing for greater student power; a movement to protest the Vietnam War; the women’s movement, which fought to bring full equality to women; the gay rights movement, which tried to end traditional biases and laws against homosexuals; and the environmental movement, which brought to light the perils of pollution, exploitation of natural resources and dangerous population growth.

Today’s protests aren’t nearly as overarching. People take to the streets, but in nothing like the numbers seen in years past. We can probably chalk that up to growing apathy, detachment from society and self-involvement, along with systemic repression through government and corporate media. But technology, including social media, has provided alternatives to marching in the streets.

Going back to the antiapartheid movement of the 1980s, for instance, we’ve seen what diversified boycotts and pressure can do to change society’s ills, of which many remain. That long list includes worsening corruption of governments and the electoral system by those with the money to do it. These are the people behind oppressive “public safety” measures – the spying and militarization of police, for instance – and the globalization that’s repressed wages and human rights. Globalization has in fact spawned its own protest movement involving those who can see where that road leads, despite the propaganda. In that vein, former U.S. presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders points out the perils of trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership in supporting the launch last week of the online site Our Revolution, looking to build on the progressive movement his candidacy spawned prior to the ascendancy of corporate-owned Hillary Clinton.

Calling such trade deals a “race to the bottom,” he pointed out that these agreements have little to do with trade. Rather, they are about entrenching corporate access to profits above those of the public good and national interests, the so-called investor state dispute mechanisms. He notes that Trans Canada, the Canadian company behind the Keystone XL pipeline, is suing the U.S. for $15 billion under those provisions in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

“The idea that a major, multinational corporation can sue us for $15 billion because the president made the decision that he thought right tells you what trade agreements are all about. They are designed to protect corporate profits and the hell with the environment, human rights, health care or the needs of the people,” he said. “And that is why the TPP has got to be defeated.”

Canada, too, is a party to the TPP. As with the U.S., defeat of the TPP will come through political pressure to counter the establishment opinion that trade agreements bring prosperity, a myth that gets recycled with every new deal. That pressure is unlikely to include masses in the streets, whatever talk of revolution has greeted recent social movements, including the progressivism espoused by politicians such as Sanders.

This is in direct contrast to the much older footings of the protest movement, which a century ago was focused on the well-being of workers and farmers (the country was much more agrarian then). Though we’re heading into the Labour Day weekend, most Canadians are far removed from the struggle that gave them such things as statutory holidays, weekends and the 40-hour workweek – that much of that is under attack today has yet to resonate the way it did decades ago.

The farmer-led protests still have resonance today, of course, if only in the form of the NDP, the successor to the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. In the early part of the last century, farmers were active in bringing their grievances to the attention of government, culminating in farmers’ protest parties winning office in Ontario, Alberta and Manitoba, and became briefly the second-largest party in the House of Commons after the 1921 federal election.

Workers, too, were very active, organizing unions and literally fighting with employers who were usually backed by police and government in direct violence against workers striking for improvements to their often-abysmal situations.

Often a passive lot, Canadians were anything but in some circumstances, most notably the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919. Workers took to the streets to protest low wages, poor working conditions and the refusal of employers to recognize unions.

On May 15, 1919, when negotiations broke down between management and labour in the building and metal trades, the Winnipeg Trades and Labor Council called a general strike. Within hours some 30,000 workers left their jobs. The almost unanimous response by working men and women closed the city’s factories, crippled Winnipeg’s retail trade and stopped trains. Publicsector employees, including police, firefighters, postal workers, telephone operators and employees of the city utilities, joined the private-sector workers in solidarity.

At the time, government officials were anything but friendly to the plight of average citizens, frequently siding with employers to crush workers, often by force. (We can argue not much has changed today,

including the use of policestate tactics to counter protests.) The federal government ordered its workers back on the job, threatening them with dismissal. Strike leaders were arrested. Winnipeg’s mayor literally read the Riot Act and called in Royal Northwest Mounted Police who rode in on horseback charging into a crowd of some 25,000 strikers, beating them with clubs and firing their weapons – known as “Bloody Saturday,” the day ended with federal troops occupying the city.

Ten days after the strike began, participants returned to work. From that bitter experience, however, Canada saw an increase in unionism and worker mili- tancy.

Later, a Royal Commission that investigated the strike was critical of government and employer actions, suggesting that “if Capital does not provide enough to assure Labour a contented existence ... then the Government might find it necessary to step in and let the state do these things at the expense of Capital.”

While many of us can clearly identify the deplorable conditions that existed a century ago, today we may be missing the log in our own eyes. By taking to the streets, those involved in today’s protests are drawing attention to just how far we’ve drifted from a political and economic system that’s supposed to serve the public good.