The B u l l e t
Socialist Project • E-Bulletin No. 400
6 August 2010
The Greater Toronto Workers’ Assembly
Herman Rosenfeld and Carlo Fanelli
At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Left around the world is undergoing reformation. As the Great Recession has vividly demonstrated, more than three decades of neoliberal capitalism have eroded many of the significant gains won in the immediate decades following World War II. From wage and benefit concessions to reductions in social services, in an openly anti-union political climate, it is now being demanded that the working class pay for a crisis which it did not create. With the impasse of the anti-globalization and other new social movements that burst onto the scene in the early 2000s, coupled with the inability of many historically progressive unions, trapped in erstwhile social democratic parties, to mobilize their membership base, the Left is in a period of experimentation.
There have been important developments: the emergence of explicitly anti-capitalist parties such as Die Linke (The Left) in Germany, the Left Bloc in Portugal, and the New Anti-capitalist Party in France; the re-emergence of working class discontent in the streets of Greece, Spain, and Italy; and a left tide throughout Latin America. What about North American developments, however? A June 2010 article by Robert McChesney and John Bellamy Foster discusses the weak state of progressive forces in the United States and their inability to translate significant support for their political positions into commensurate political influence. This article updates reports on attempts in Toronto to build an anti-capitalist political movement bringing together trade unions and working class communities, first published in the pages of Relay: A Socialist Project Review and Monthly Review.[1]