Capitalism is the Virus, Unionizing is a Vaccine

All the people who work on The Red Review live and work on stolen Indigenous lands across Turtle Island. There can be no reconciliation without restitution, which includes Land Back, RCMP off Indigenous land, and seizing the assets of the major resource corporations and returning them to the commons.

In this special episode of The Red Review, brought to you by Socialist Action, we rebroadcast a conversation between Emily, Daniel, and comrade Chris Wanamaker, host of The Open Mic, a Literary Journey into Words on local 107.3 FM in St. John's New Brunswick. In this conversation, Daniel reads out an article he published, "The Virology of Capitalism," which Chris connects to Emily's experience organizing a union of teaching assistants at Wilfrid Laurier University. Stay tuned until the end for Emily's brilliant rendition of "Union Maid."

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Transcript

Daniel Tarade  
Hey comrades, it's Daniel here. Welcome to another episode of The Red Review, but today we are doing something different. Recently, Emily and I were a guest on a comrade's radio show. Chris Wanamaker is the host of The Open Mic, a Literary Journey into Words on local 107.3 FM in St. John's New Brunswick. We spoke about a article I wrote called "Capitalism is the Virus," and we connected that with Emily's unionizing experience at Wilfrid-Laurier University. So the title of this podcast episode is "Capitalism is the Virus and unionizing is the vaccine." But first, both Emily and I work and live on stolen Indigenous land on Turtle Island, and all members of Socialist Action live and work on stolen Indigenous land. So we echo the call for land back. And we demand that there can be no reconciliation without restitution. And that includes seizing the assets of the major resource developers and returning it to the commons. So before we get into this interview that we recorded, and which has been aired a few times in St. John's, I wanted to just break down the title a little bit more — "Capitalism is the Virus, Unionizing is the Vaccine." And I think it fits because unionization, just like vaccination, is not the be-all, end-all. Vaccination cannot stop this pandemic, and we've seen that because the virus mutates around it, especially if we let the virus proliferate unchecked. In the same way, unions provide workers a means to negotiate with the bosses as a class and to win gains. But as the global economy changes around us, we see union leadership becoming bureaucratic, becoming stagnant and refusing to mobilize to win gains for the workers in this period of neoliberalism. That does not mean we do away with unions, just like the reduced efficacy of vaccines in the situation of a mutating virus does not mean we do away with vaccines in general. It means we need to revitalize our union movement. It means we need to not neglect other means of organizing workers. And it means we need to keep pushing for the ultimate prize, that of a society run by the exploited and the oppressed, a society where "each according to their needs, from each according to their ability" rings true as an anthem. So I really hope you enjoy this discussion where Emily and I play the role of discussant and Chris Wanamaker, our dear comrade in New Brunswick, gets to play host. And as a special treat at the end of this interview, you can hear Emily's rendition of a union classic. So the whole thing it's a hoot, I swear.

Chris Wanamaker  
The open mic! 

Emily Steers  
The open mic. 

Chris Wanamaker  
Welcome to the program. I'm Chris Wanamaker, and we have today guests that we have never had on our program before, and I'm so pleased to have them on today. I have Daniel Tarade and Emily steers. Daniel lectures in the life sciences at both the University of Toronto and Toronto Metropolitan University. He obtained his Bachelor of Arts and Science in 2015, with a major in biochemistry and a minor in communications, media and film from the University of Windsor. What a unique combination of studies. In 2021, Daniel successfully defended his Ph.D. — wow — in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology at the University of Toronto, where he specialized in the biochemistry and structural biology of oxygen-sensing proteins and published in numerous peer-reviewed articles as lead author. We're going to hear some of his writing today. Daniel plays a leading role in the Socialist Action Party and the Workers' Action Movement, where he ran for Secretary Treasurer at the 2021 Ontario Federation of Labour convention as a member of the Labour Forward slate. He regularly writes on the philosophy of science and socialism for Socialist Action. What credentials you have, Daniel. They're very impressive but also impressive are the credentials of Emily Steers. Emily joins us on this program as well. She's a community musician based in Guelph, Ontario, and she's involved in local organizing. She recently was involved in a successful union organizing effort at Wilfrid-Laurier University. Welcome to you both.

Daniel Tarade  
Thanks, Chris. I'm excited to be here.

Chris Wanamaker  
Welcome, Emily. Welcome, Daniel. And Daniel, we're going to start off with this essay that you have recently written and published. It's a bit on the academic side, but it says some very interesting things about capitalism and what capitalism is and how it spreads. And Daniel, I'm going to leave it up to you to take it away. If you can read this very interesting, but somewhat academic paper, if you can read it very slowly, so we can follow it.

Daniel Tarade  
Okay, thank you, Chris. The virology of capitalism. Capitalism is killing you. That was the photo that we put with it. In response to the COVID 19 pandemic, socialists insists that capitalism is the virus. Such a phrase is not a casual flip of the script, or a what-about-ism. Popular discourse surrounding virology and epidemiology simply accounts for capitalist rhetoric, Neo-liberals apply concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to viruses, to humans, to businesses, to ideas, and to our capitalist economy. By picking at these threads, the slogan, capitalism is the virus, becomes more analytical. Simultaneously, we critique capitalism by highlighting how the material conditions it fosters prompts pandemics and how the solution is socialism.

Chris Wanamaker  
There's a lot in that first paragraph. You could elaborate on that I imagine for hours. You condense so much into that paragraph. What struck me is that it sounds like you are looking at capitalism as a virus, as an infection, as something that's spreading that is not good for the human race. And yet, we're surrounded by capitalism, we live in it, we breathe in it, it's everywhere. Capitalism is the society in which we live, and people have defended it and, and have even fought wars and died for it. So for you to say capitalism is a virus might come as a surprise to some people. But maybe you can elaborate.

Daniel Tarade  
There's this funny anecdote, again, from an epidemiology background, where it took a very long time to establish a link between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer. And in hindsight, it seems so obvious. You had this very precipitous increase in lung cancer rates. Lung cancer used to be a very rare form of cancer historically, and then all of a sudden became one of the more common forms. And yet, no one suspected a link with cigarettes at the beginning because everybody smoked. It was so ubiquitous that the quote, and I'm paraphrasing here — and I also forget which epidemiologist to attribute it to, but that's okay — they said that it would have been just the same to imagine that nylon stockings were causing cancer because of how ubiquitous it is. And I think that's the same situation with capitalism. For the majority of people on this planet, they've lived and work their whole lives under a capitalist system. So it seems entirely natural. And that's one of the purposes behind writing an article like this is to try and find a angle at approaching capitalism that will hopefully be able to illuminate it for what it is.

Chris Wanamaker  
It seems to me that you're talking about something that a lot of people don't talk about in everyday conversation. And I'm thinking that if I were a fish, and I lived in an ocean, and I was surrounded by the water, I wouldn't really think that there is any such thing as dry land. And if I — and maybe every once in a while, as a fish, I would fly up into the air, but I fly right back down into the water again, I wouldn't really get much of a glance at the land or the sky, maybe a little bit, maybe, but you know, it's kind of like that, like we're surrounded by capitalism. And if you're saying that capitalism is a virus, again, you know, this, this doesn't sound very good. It sounds like you might be a bit ahead of your time. Can you read a little bit more of your essay for us?

Daniel Tarade  
Absolutely. Throughout history, viruses and bacteria, tuberculosis, pneumonia, smallpox, polio, measles, influenza, cholera, etc, killed more humans than anything else. It is only recently in the last 50 to 100 years that chronic diseases, like cancer and heart disease, killed more people than infectious diseases in the Global North, and life expectancy has soared from around 50 years to 80 years of age. This dramatic shift is commonly attributed to scientific and technological advances like the discovery of antibiotics, which entered clinical practice in 1942, and widespread vaccination programs that became common around the same time. By extension, these advances are credited to capitalism, the free market of ideas, and competition between corporations for profit. Although a tempting hypothesis, this relationship is not borne out in the data.

Chris Wanamaker  
So Daniel, what do you mean by the free market of ideas? I guess some people would say that if ideas are competing against one another, then the best ideas will win that competition. And that explains why apparently, supposedly, capitalism has been so successful in advancing science. But you disagree?

Emily Steers  
If I may jump in, having an open marketplace of ideas and allowing the ideas to, you know, compete with one another for which one is superior, that assumes that all ideas are on the same footing and have the same ideological supports and the same motivations for their advancement. You know, we can all think of ideas that are winning in the so-called marketplace of ideas because they have backing, because they have funding, because it serves a particular interest. So I am very leery of the idea of the marketplace of ideas because it's not necessarily the best ideas that win out because the best ideas are often very complicated, very difficult to understand, very difficult to grasp, or very deeply unpopular.

Daniel Tarade  
Yeah, may I add that they might be just not as profitable. And with the free market of ideas, it does assume that everything's on equal footing. Emily gave a great explanation there. And so in the sciences, I got another anecdote from my time as a graduate student where I was in a seminar. This was the seminar given by the graduate student based on who had the, quote, unquote, best paper of the year. So again, kind of fits that idea of the free market of ideas, this person had the best scientific advance out of us that year, and the science was cool. He was studying processes by which cells can recycle internal components. But you can see in capitalism that we're constantly evaluated based on our ability to make profit. And so even as a graduate student, this person presented on a link between this cellular process he was studying and a disease that's pretty common in sub-Saharan Africa known as kwashiorkor. It's a disease of protein deficiency. If you see the photos of children with the distended bellies, that's caused by this, where it might look like they're not malnourished because they do have a pretty full belly, but that's really actually from the decaying of the body and the swelling. And it's because they have a very deficient protein diet. So this student studied this, found out some of the pathways that are happening at the cellular level but then propose that they can develop a drug to treat this disease. And that was a moment for me where I started looking around in that lecture hall. Did anybody else hear this? They're proposing a pharmacological intervention for this disease, when we all know that the cure is food. The best idea is that they need food — peanut butter is a cure for this disease. But depending on the material conditions, depending on the economic system, the political system, certain ideas are invisible. And often the ideas that would help the most people are invisible, but the ideas that allow some people to advance beyond others and make more money, those are the ones that are the most visible. And it's very similar for how we tackle most problems in society, from the pandemic, to other diseases, the solutions are the ones that are gonna make the most money. Those are the only solutions that exist in capitalism. As I sometimes say, capitalism is a very efficient system. But the only way it evaluates its own efficiency is by profit. It is the best system in the world for maximizing profit. It is. But the thing is, profit is so often untethered to human need.

Chris Wanamaker  
It sounds like the marketplace of ideas is not really free. It sounds like ideas are free. If you come up with an idea and you promote it, it sounds like that's, you know, you're not paying to do that. In some respects, creativity might be free. But creativity also sounds like it's restricted. It's just permitted in certain areas, and especially if profit is involved, then that idea takes priority. And that seems to be what you're saying. What a great example, Daniel. Wow, that's mind blowing. So that person was deemed to have the very best paper among a particular group of students then. 

Daniel Tarade  
Yeah, yeah. In the biochemistry department at University of Toronto.

Chris Wanamaker  
And was there ever a pharmacological intervention that that was developed as a result?

Daniel Tarade  
No, no, it's actually funny. Their presentation included a pretty heavy focus on this disease. By the time the paper was actually published, you know, that was kind of dialed back there. And you can see the process by which everybody is incentivized to try and really broach the outer limits. You know, what can we develop in terms of intellectual property because intellectual property is profitable. And so they even took a swing at developing intellectual property for a disease that can be cured by peanut butter. Just because it didn't make it there yet doesn't mean that it's not an example of how perverted the system is, if you will, excuse my language there.

Chris Wanamaker  
So you're right, people make money by coming up with ideas, ideas that are promoted by capitalism, or endorsed by capitalism.

Emily Steers  
Capitalism is very good at selling you solutions to the problems it has created. You know, a classic example would be Elon Musk and Tesla and the electric cars, selling you these luxury items so that you can feel good about your climate impact because of the catastrophe that is human-caused climate change.

Daniel Tarade  
And meanwhile, it's not as a very effective intervention at all. The solution isn't to get more cars on the road or to replace a subset of the cars on the road. It really does become branding at that point, marketing. That's mostly what pharmaceutical companies do as well; it's just marketing and branding.

Chris Wanamaker  
So capitalism seems to create needs and then it tries to fulfill these needs through the market. Yet what you both seem to be suggesting is that the marketplace is not the best place to come up with the best ideas. You're kind of alluding to socialism as an alternative to capitalism. But we haven't gotten there yet with your essay, Daniel, so maybe you can continue.

Daniel Tarade  
Yeah, there's a few more examples coming up. Mortality due to tuberculosis already declined a full 90% from its peak in the mid 1800s before effective antibiotics entered clinical usage. 90%. Measles killed fewer and fewer people, despite no change in incidence level, before an effective vaccine in the 1960s caused the number of cases to plummet. So what was the cause of the decrease in infectious disease mortality in the years leading up to effective treatment and vaccines? Thomas McEwan, epidemiologist and historian of medicine, put forth a thesis in the 1960s that argues that increases in population in the 1800s resulted from increases in nutrition due to improving economic conditions. And this idea has since gained traction. What brought about improved nutrition? The Industrial Revolution, associated with more efficient agriculture and increased wealth generation, was necessary. Importantly, it was not sufficient. The first wave of the Industrial Revolution in the mid 1700s no doubt increased wealth for the ruling class in the global north fueled by slavery and colonization of the global south. But for the working class of the global north, the Industrial Revolution produced the crowded, impoverished cities that spread tuberculosis. It took at least 50 years before the working class gained any significant increase in wages and living conditions. Why did wages increase? It is not a law of capitalism that real wages for the working class increase over time. Quite the opposite. As rates of profit fall due to competition, workers get squeezed one way or another; by outsourcing automation, stagnating wages, layoffs, slashed benefits. Instead, workers organized unions, fought for better wages, safer working conditions, and more democratic control. Mass organization, general strikes, and militancy redistributed some of the massive wealth accumulated in the early capitalist system. The resultant improvement in proletarian living conditions fostered resilience to pestilence and increased life expectancy in the global north while colonization continued to fuel so-called tropical diseases in the global south. Today, the connection between poverty and mortality, the social determinants of health, is taught in medical school, but the relentless austerity endemic in the capitalist system necessary to combat declines in the rate of profit and to keep the capitalist machine humming along promotes and maintains the poverty and malnutrition that makes people susceptible to both infectious and chronic diseases.

Chris Wanamaker  
So I think people confuse the workers movement historically with the development of capitalism. It does sound like the two are obviously related, but they're different, right? Like, just because society is a capitalist society doesn't mean that it produces benefits for workers. Workers really have to band together and fight and do whatever they can in order to achieve whatever benefits they can get. Whether it's an eight hour working day or vacation time or benefits for medical purposes, whatever those conditions might be that will increase their living standards, they really have to get together and organize and fight for. That seems to be what you're suggesting, is it not? 

Daniel Tarade  
It is. 

Chris Wanamaker  
And Emily, you would be a good person to speak to this because you organized a union successfully. In my experience, that's very difficult. I had an experience one time when I just simply contacted a union representative to come into the workplace. And so the person did, and they spoke to a few of the workers. And immediately in my casual job, at that point, I didn't have any more work — my work vanished for some reason. And I've heard of other people who have been warned that if they even use the word union in the workplace, that they will no longer be able to work. Now, not all workplaces are that extreme. I worked at a college one time where we were permitted, actually allowed, to have union meetings during work time and to communicate with union members during that work time. And that was a unique experience in my life experience. But Emily, can you share how you went about organizing a union? I think it was for Wilfrid Laurier University, you said. 

Emily Steers  
Yes! I was literally just reading, it was a short thing someone that's shared online last week. My father would tell me stories about growing up. My grandfather was a coal miner, and my father would say, you know, some years at Christmas, I'd get a toothbrush for my Christmas present. And then other years, you know, I got a bike. So it was just so inconsistent. You never knew what the mine was going to be bringing in. And I shared that story with my grandmother a few years ago, and she said, you tell your father that the year he got a bicycle was the year we got a damn union.

Chris Wanamaker  
Wow. Great story. Great stories.

Emily Steers  
I'll have to track down that story online because I thought it was fantastic and see if we can link it in your show. But yeah, to my own experience with unionization, I will admit we had an easier time than most simply because of the situation we were in. TA unions are very, very common across Canada and especially in Ontario. The vast majority of universities have teaching assistant unions. So graduate students who are employed by the university in a teaching role, assisting professors with grading, with lesson planning, with running lectures, with office hours, etc. They do really, really valuable work and as we have seen from TA strikes, they are absolutely essential in the continual running of universities. So Wilfrid Laurier and University of Waterloo were the only two universities in Ontario that did not have a union and that fact was reflected in our pay. At University of Toronto, for example, the standard TA wage is $45 an hour. And that wage, some might say that seems really high, and I will say it's not. They are asking for very, very skilled, specific labour that is essential to the continued maintenance and operations of the university. And at Laurier, we were getting far less than that. And it was also wildly inconsistent between departments. Like my wages were comparable to the wages of unionized universities. However, the unionization efforts at Laurier had been ongoing for three years now, and there had been a corresponding pay increase to kind of keep them happy and keep them thinking, Oh, maybe we don't need a union because they're giving us pay raises. Whereas my friends at University of Waterloo, I've talked to some of the engineers there, and I've said, are you interested in unionizing? And they've said, No, because they're getting paid 1000s. They're making really, really good money in their TAships. Whereas my friends in the environmental sciences and english departments have said, Oh, I'm getting paid $16.50 an hour for my TA job, which is just barely a living wage. Furthermore, universities do make us sign contracts that if we are full-time students working as TAs, we should not seek external employment. So you are really, really bound by the university. And thus, they have an obligation to make sure you are supported in the work that they are demanding you do. So our unionization effort was really, really successful. As I say, I came in right at the end. And I feel very, very lucky that I was there when I was because the unionization effort had been ongoing for three years prior to my arrival. So there had been a lot of really, really excellent groundwork laid by some really, really fantastic people. Shout out to all of you on the WLU Organize committee. So we were really hitting the ground. Obviously, there were a lot of limits. So if we were often waiting in the courtyards outside of large graduate student classes, waiting with a bunch of cards to say, like Hello, consider unionizing. And we're just like getting as many cards signed. We're talking to as many different student councils and graduate student committees as we possibly could and comparing you know, here's what the health benefits are at unionized universities. Here are what the wages are, here's what the holiday benefits are. Here's, you know, all of these different very tangible benefits. 

Chris Wanamaker  
Very tangible. 

Emily Steers  
Yeah. And that really engaged people. They're like, Oh, my gosh, I didn't know. And I was like, Yeah, and you know, a lot of people were operating without a specific contract. They were just told, here's the university professor you're assigned to, and they could basically tell them to do whatever.

Chris Wanamaker  
So there were no, there were no conditions associated with their work, then?

Emily Steers  
It's entirely dependent on the department, it was entirely dependent on the professor, and there was no external body. And actually, this had resulted in a little bit of a crisis for Laurier before, which was the Lindsay Shepard incident. I don't know if anyone here remembers that particular incident, but I can share the details thereof. 

Chris Wanamaker  
Go ahead. 

Emily Steers  
So the Lindsay Shepard incident. This was after noted Canadian spokesperson Jordan Peterson had been making headlines for refusing to respect students' preferred pronouns and had been getting a lot of attention in the media. So Lindsey Shepard was a TA. To be clear, I'm not saying this in support of Lindsay Shepard. It's just an incident that I think is worth drawing attention to in the context of why unions are useful. So Lindsey Shepherd highlighted this story and had a discussion of just like, trans rights, are trans rights human rights, let's discuss. And of course, a lot of trans students who were in that classroom and trans allies were like, umm, don't love trans rights being you know, something to be debated for fun in class. And so Lindsey Shepard had not had that lesson plan approved by the prof, hadn't run it by the prof, and she was teaching on her own that day. So students complained to the prof. The prof basically, as far as I remember, fired her and reprimanded her and she had no recourses. She had no one else to go to. And the university sided with the professor and basically just suspended her of her position. And she had no recourse, so she immediately went to the press, and the right-wing press immediately seized on this, you know, TA fired for standing up for free speech, et cetera, et cetera. And there are massive — this was in 2017, which was a bad year, as we all know, for right-wing mobilizing, but there was a massive convergence of right wingers and alt-right people and so-called free speech defenders in Waterloo. And you know, even the likes of Faith Goldy and Rebel News, they all showed up, and it became this huge disproportionate thing. And we said — the situation Lindsey Shepard was in, you know, I'm not siding with Lindsey Shepherd by any means, I do not agree with her views, I do not agree with what she says by any means. However, that is a situation that could have really, really easily been avoided if she had had a third party to go in and support her and advocate for her, if she had clear stipulations in her contract, if there had been clear terms of her contract that she could refer back to and that the professor could refer back to in terms of what disciplinary action would have been appropriate and what consequences would have been appropriate for that kind of ethical breach.

Chris Wanamaker  
That really would have been helpful in that instance to everybody actually involved.

Emily Steers  
It would have made the whole situation so much less of a big deal and would have saved everyone a lot of time and energy.

Chris Wanamaker  
I think the lack of clarity around teaching assistant jobs if the teaching assistants don't have a union — actually, I experienced that big time myself. At University of Alberta years ago, I was a teaching assistant to two different professors. And in one case, the professor didn't assign any work. And in the other case, the professor assigned a lot of work. And I was actually grateful that the first professor didn't assign too much work because there's enough work in grad studies anyway. So and there was no union, there was no laying out of expectations. It was just, you know, every once in a while, the professor would contact me and ask me to maybe compose a multiple choice exam or to grade some papers or maybe to assist students with some questions and answers related to the material. And I dutifully would, I wanted a good reference I, I wanted his approval, I was also taking a course from him at the time. So, you know, I was under his authority, so to speak, but there was no external source that I could refer to in terms of contracts, in terms of hours or wages. There was no resolution for disputes that was available. And then this other professor didn't assign me a thing. And then one day, I met him in the elevator, and I was feeling a little bit remiss that maybe we hadn't communicated and he said, Are you feeling guilty for not doing any work for me? I actually was feeling a little bit guilty. And I was I was kind of sheepish in the in the elevator. And he said, Don't worry about it. And he just he just marched on, you know, which is really interesting. Maybe he realized that the other professor was giving me lots of work, I don't know. But again, the situations that we find ourselves in, if you're a teaching assistant, or even in other workplaces can seem very mysterious, right? Like, what is going on? Like, why am I being given lots of work now, whereas I wasn't before or vice versa. So I think unionization actually clarifies the conditions under which people work, and allows them to negotiate for better conditions. And I think that's a wonderful freedom that unions give people. But it's very rare, in my experience, to be talking about this kind of thing on a radio show. Because even the big unions don't have airtime a lot of the time. They don't have access to the so-called free press, which isn't really that free when you come to think of it. It's not free at all, just as we've been talking, there's not really a free marketplace of ideas. And there's not really a free press because the existing press very much supports capitalism and business interests. And if there is a story about unions, then that story kind of breaks when there's a strike or something big is happening. But it's very difficult to get union news unless you get it from the union itself, unless you are unionized. But going from being non-union to union is such a critical process. And it's amazing that well, as you said, Emily, your situation was an easier one than most people find themselves in. You were able to get people as they were coming out of class, you were able to present them with specific figures that showed the advantages of unionization, you were able to get them on board quite easily. And many workplaces, especially today, with people working at home, it's not as easy to do that in-person organizing. And it seems to me that organizing is so absolutely critical to what you and Daniel have been talking about. Do you have any tips for organizing at all? Is there anything that you might say to somebody who would be considering this possibility?

Emily Steers  
Absolutely. And actually, interestingly, the union bug has been spreading over the road to the University of Waterloo, which as I said, has been extremely hostile to unionization efforts in the past, like there are very, very few unions on campus for faculty and for staff. So they absolutely have a much bigger fight ahead of them. However, I think they remain the only university in Ontario to not have a TA union because as I said, there's ample precedent and ample evidence that TA unions work and are in their best interests, and they have been organizing. So just for a bit of a timeline, our union vote at Laurier happened in December of 2019. Ratification was massively delayed due to the pandemic. So we passed the threshold of the vote very, very marginally. It was a really big fight to get over that threshold. But then we were due to start collective bargaining talks in late March 2020. And of course, then everything exploded. And it was only recently like very, very recently that the Laurier TAs finalized their first collective agreement with the University. Like, it was this year. So it's been a really, really long time coming. It's been a lot of really difficult negotiation, it's been a lot of really difficult engagement, and keeping the fledgling union alive through social distancing, through online learning, through campuses being closed has been a real challenge. And the University of Waterloo has faced similar challenges in trying to just get a union mobilization effort off the ground in the first place. They've been doing a lot of excellent work, they've been hosting, you know, online socials, and, you know, come to get to know your team. And the union has been doing a lot of work, but like I've said, it's really, really slow going. It's very, very, very difficult to do during the pandemic because, you know, people are so overwhelmed with Zoom. You know, if you're doing zoom classes, Zoom assignments, Zoom lectures, you know, you're you're really tired of Zoom meetings and online socials by the end of the day. So it's been very difficult, but they've had a lot of success with some on-campus organizing now that campus is reopening. So that's incredibly exciting. The campaign of Waterloo, now that they are able to return to campus, has seen a lot of success. There's been a lot of interest in, you know, pub nights, and they've been canvassing around campus as much as they can. But obviously, there's a lot of oversight. But it's one of those things where it's a very fortunate campaign in that there's ample evidence of the benefits of unionization and the success of unionization at other campuses. And it's starting to become a thing that TAs are going wait a second, why don't we have a union? It doesn't make sense for us not to have a union because everyone else I know, all of my colleagues at other universities, are unionized. And that's going really well for them. They're not seeing any of the negatives. And I'm seeing a lot of very tangible positives. However, I do want to say that, you know, we are white-collar workers. This is a white-collar union. And I think that's really important to highlight because the challenges we face in unionizing are very, very different than those that manual labor and blue-collar workers are facing. You know, the risks we run of being run ragged and underpaid are very, very different than the risks run by less well-regulated industries without union benefit, like being forced to work in dangerous conditions and risk of workplace injury and death. Those are very, very real risks that unions help to mitigate and force companies to meaningfully address, and it is very, very important that we highlight the different levels of risk and reward that come from unionization efforts. And correspondingly, a lot of jobs face a lot more severe pushback from unionization efforts. Not only being dismissed but having their homes, their families, their friends harassed, having union busting campaigns, sabotaging them in really, really serious and dangerous ways. The risks to unionization are not to be understated. We are very, very fortunate in that we did not face that kind of push back, that kind of union busting effort.

Chris Wanamaker  
I once asked somebody who had experience in organizing unions, I said, How should one go about organizing a union? And his answer was "very carefully." And I think that that is so true. Daniel, I think we need to get back to your essay because this is The Open Mic, a Literary Journey into Words, and I think we've heard about three paragraphs of your paper so far. Let's hear another one.

Daniel Tarade  
Next paragraph is profit versus lives. This is not the only way capitalism is a virus. The profit motive led companies to bury internal studies linking a diet high in sugar with diabetes, smoking cigarettes with lung cancer, and industrial carcinogens with multiple forms of cancer. Instead, corporate-funded think tanks and industry groups obfuscated and lobbied against regulation. The pandemics of lung cancer, mesothelioma, other environmentally-linked cancers and diabetes, so-called diseases of old age, would have been largely mitigated if profit did not factor into the equation. Similarly, the most pressing emergency in the world of microbiology, antibacterial resistance, springs from the bowels of capitalism. Although a redistribution of wealth decreased mortality from bacterial infections well before antibiotics were discovered, the new medications did save lives. However, pharmaceutical companies quickly obtained patents and aggressively marketed antibiotics. This essential medicine could be found in toothpaste, gum, and lipstick. Pharmaceutical companies lobbied doctors to prescribe their new antibiotic. Worse, antibiotics became entrenched in industrial agricultural practices, where they are commonly added to feed to promote animal growth. Unnecessary usage of antibiotics, driven by profit, selected for resistant microbes, and now antibacterial resistance kills an estimated 700,000 people a year. If we do nothing to address this crisis, it is predicted that resistant microbes will kill 10 million people annually, some 400,000 in Canada, by the year 2050. 

Chris Wanamaker  
Scary. 

Daniel Tarade  
While humanity suffers, is Big Pharma redoubling efforts to save us? Not a chance! Despite the pressing danger of antimicrobial resistance, company after company is shuttering their antimicrobial drug pipeline. Only four of the top 50 pharmaceutical companies by sales operate an active antimicrobial drug discovery pipeline. Why? it is not profitable. Short courses of antibiotics for acute infections or the development of vaccines for unpredictable pandemics are not as profitable as lifetime treatments for chronic diseases like diabetes or heart disease. This is not a conspiracy. These companies are very open about it. A rule of capitalism is that short-term profits are better than long-term losses. There's no purifying selection in capitalism that roots out companies that place human survival in peril. Just the opposite. More profit is to be had from slashing workers benefits, selling antibiotics for animal feed, funding disinformation groups, and selling addictive and harmful products. In the pharmaceutical industry, the bigger a company gets, the less it spends on research and development and the more it spends on lobbying. That is how they increase profit. Not by developing new drugs that help people but by increasing market share and getting doctors to prescribe their costlier medication instead of alternatives. The profit motive also rules the carbon sector, which is why catastrophic climate change is driving humanity to the brink of extinction. This is why life expectancy in the US is actually now decreasing. The gains of past working-class struggles are being erased.

Chris Wanamaker  
So Daniel, why are the past gains of the working class being erased? Does anybody know the answer to that question? Because people said capitalism was working because of the high rate of unionization. Especially in the in the 50s, and maybe the early 60s, it seems like society was functioning in a much, much more beneficial way. And unionization has declined in recent years as I understand.

Daniel Tarade  
It has, absolutely. In Canada, now we're down to about 30%. But like Emily already mentioned, the union bug is spreading, so now we're starting to see it tick up for the first time in a long time. The ebb and flow of the conditions of the working class only makes sense if you see society through the lens of class warfare. The language of you know, depression and recession and boom and bust that ignores class seems random. Why does our economy constantly go from a bull market to crashing and vice versa? It doesn't make sense until you realize that you have inherent tension between the different classes. What's good for the bosses isn't good for the workers and vice versa. If you look to the 30s, if you look after the post-war period, and really at fairly regular intervals, you see upswells in class consciousness and organizing in response to attacks on the working class by the bosses. And as the workers get more organized, more militant, they organize strikes, general strikes, they're able to rip from the hands of the bosses concessions, they're able to win shorter workdays, they're able to win safer working conditions, higher wages. But the reason why the bosses give those in the first place is to placate the workers. That's why the New Deal is actually something very important to understand in the history of working-class politics. The New Deal, as ushered in by you know, FDR in the states and other politicians around the world was meant to placate the workers, not meant to advantage them — it was actually done to take the wind out of the sails of the workers who are fighting for even more than what they ultimately won. Because when capitalism gets bad and inevitably does, workers begin fighting for complete control of the economy, where the workers get to democratically decide how things are run, and that's the scariest thing for the bosses because then they will lose complete control. And like Emily said, that's why even when unionization drives, if that's being spread on the winds, that's when you might get some raises even without a union. They're basically trying to remove that incredible need to unionize by making it more of a want by taking away just a bit of the worst parts of it. Our less of the New Deal as we need to push all the way through.

Chris Wanamaker  
I guess we do. Emily, do you have anything to add to that at all?

Emily Steers  
Well, and also I do want to say, unionization in and of itself is not the end goal. The end goal is the restructuring of society so that we are not dependent on wage labor for survival. As Marxists, we often refer to the quote from each according to their ability, to each according to their need, which is to say we as a society, we know what needs to be done. We know! Like affordable housing needs to be available in our communities. We know we need to reskill and move away from fossil fuel-dependent economies and fossil fuel-dependent jobs. We need to you know, invest in childcare and in in families and in communities and health care. Like we know what work needs to be done. We need creativity and artistry and expression and a diversity of thought in our cultures. We know the work that needs to be done. But the work that needs to be done is not the work that is profitable. And so unions are a step towards building a more equitable society and a tool for us to push for better conditions. However, they are only a stopgap measure on the longer journey to a better world, a better society, a society where we work for what is needed, and we can support the people who can contribute what they can. This is the world we are striving for. 

Chris Wanamaker  
I'm wondering if I can play devil's advocate here just for a second with you both. Because this is the kind of thing that I hear when I'm advancing the kinds of arguments that you're making. People say socialism hasn't worked, and therefore the only alternative is capitalism. Have you heard that before at all?

Daniel Tarade  
Of course, it's one of the most common retorts, and people have different countries they like to point to. First, I think we need to start the discussion off with an accurate and honest analysis of how capitalism is faring. And capitalism, I would also argue is working according to its own internal set of rules, but it's not working according to the needs of humans. And that's undeniable when you have more houses than people on this planet, yet you have people still living in the streets, and we make enough and grow enough food every year to feed twice the population over, yet we have people starving to death. So at this point, capitalism is also a failed system. Yet the retorts to you know, socialism has failed in the past, well, at least our analysis is socialism in one country can never succeed. So we're fighting for an international socialist movement, an international working class, and the alliance between the international oppressed and exploited. That's the only way to fully deal with this wretched system once and for all. 

Chris Wanamaker  
Wow, okay.

Emily Steers  
I will also say, a lot of the things that people point to as failures of communist and socialist governments, the horrors that people experienced there does need to be acknowledged. Absolutely. There was incredible violence, there was incredible harm, displacement, very poor decisions and warfare that was completely unnecessary. And I don't point to those necessarily as failures of communism because the capitalist system does the exact same thing. The capitalist system exploits, the capitalist system is incredibly violent. There are so many problems that are not contradictory to the statement that we need to be striving for a better world and that socialism gives us a roadmap to get there. The problems inherent are problems of power and corruption. The problems are ones inherent in hierarchy, when you have a small minority of people making vast, far-reaching decisions for a broad majority of people without their knowledge, without their input. This is where harm happens. People in power tend to think that power organizes itself correctly and that they deserve to be in power. We see this time and time again. And so anytime there is a consolidation of power, power will try to reinforce itself and protect itself. And that is where we see violence. That is where we see state violence and prisons and disenfranchisement and forced displacement. When we are able to actively consult with a broad base of people, when we are able to get input from the people and actually meet their needs and figure out how to build a society that meets the vast majority of people's needs — that is the path to liberation.

Chris Wanamaker  
To each according to his or her ability, to each according to his or her need. And I think Karl Marx said that, right? So wow. So you're actually in the process of imagining how a new kind of socialistic society would work that would be more inclusive and actually more socialistic than societies in the past, it sounds to me.

Daniel Tarade  
Yeah, we need to break with the Stalinist tradition. Our party, we're opposed to Stalinism. But that's an important conversation to have to show people that we're willing to acknowledge history. I think when people bring up that argument about, you know, socialism failed in the past, some people do it in bad faith, and they'll never be convinced otherwise. But I would argue that the most of the people are just concerned about — are you aware of these pitfalls? Are you aware of these things? They don't know what to think because they know that the system today doesn't work well, but they've been made to fear the unknown even more. And that's a really great strategy for the ruling class. The ruling class doesn't you need to convince people that the system that they're living in today is good, just that maybe the alternative is not even any better and it's not worth the struggle. Stalinism replicated a lot of the worst things of capitalism with a top-down bureaucratic approach that deprived the masses really of the say in their own lives, and that's not what we're fighting for. 

Chris Wanamaker  
Wow, Emily?

Emily Steers  
We do not think the world will be better when we are in charge. That is not what we are thinking. We are thinking the world will be better when people, oppressed people and working people, are able to control the material conditions of their lives. We are fighting for that, but that doesn't mean we are fighting for power.

Chris Wanamaker  
Yeah, I love what you're saying. 

Daniel Tarade  
What is the solution? Socialism! Just like mass mobilization led to real material gains for the working class in the 1800s, which directly lead to improve nutrition and less death due to pestilence, it's time to rise up around the world, reclaim our industries, and put them to work for us — not for the capitalists who leech off of social production. We can learn from the shortcomings of past movements. History teaches that simply relying on legislation or on reform of capitalism results only in temporary wins, which are restricted by borders and maintain the colonial and capitalist states responsible for global poverty and its pandemics. In capitalist society, the ruling class controls the means of production, but what they lack is a superiority in numbers. That's why it is vital to mobilize the masses with the vision of workers' control and workers' democracy in mind — for workers of the world to unite. When the moment comes, and with many capitalist catastrophes on the horizon it maybe soon, we seek to elevate the working class to the role of rulers of society. It is absurd to expect capitalists to play politely, to put the interests of the vast majority first. Have no illusions in phony class alliances with them. Capitalism is the virus. We must inoculate ourselves against corporate propaganda and wipe this system of exploitation and oppression off the face of the earth.

Chris Wanamaker  
Wonderfully said. Very clearly said and articulately said and compellingly said, Daniel, wow, there is so much to your short essay. It's very short, but it's very impactful. Thank you so much. And thank you both so much for your wonderful comments today. And for articulating so well the socialist cause and the cause for unionization, the cause for workers' rights, the cause for health and wellness in a system that is fair and equitable for all. That's wonderful. It's very inspiring. I really appreciate it. You've been listening to The Open Mic, A Literary Journey into Words. We've been talking with Daniel Tarade and Emily Steers, who have both been on the forefront of Socialist Action, an organization that is promoting socialism in Canadian society and around the world. Can you say just a little bit about the party that you are connected with?

Daniel Tarade  
Anybody listening, Socialist Action is active from coast-to-coast-to-coast. We have members from Victoria to New Brunswick. We have branches around the country. No matter where you're listening, there's a way for you to join the struggle. We need to come together. When we're isolated, we have virtually no power. But when we come together in organizations with a clear vision for what we want to build, then anything becomes possible.

Emily Steers  
If you would like to hear more from us, Daniel and I do have a podcast together. It is called The Red Review. And it is bringing a socialist perspective to current events. And we have a lot of really fantastic discussions with really interesting guests and covering angles that you won't often hear in the mainstream news media. So please check us out and I hope you enjoy.

Chris Wanamaker  
Thank you both once again. And now to conclude our program, here's Emily Steers herself, once again, singing a great union classic!

Emily Steers  
Now there once was a union maid, she never was afraid. Of the goons and the ginks and the company finks And the deputy sheriffs that made the raid. She went to the union hall where a meeting, it was called. And when the boys would come to her, oh this is what she'd say. Oh, you can't scare me, I'm sticking to the union, I'm sticking to the union, I'm sticking to the union. Oh, you can't scare me, I'm sticking to the union. I'm sticking to the union till the day I die. Now this union maid was wise to the tricks of the company spies. She'd take the dare, she didn't care, she'd always organize the guys. She'd always get her way when she asked for better pay. She'd show her card to the national guard. Honey, this is what she'd say. Oh, you can't scare me, I'm sticking to the union. I'm sticking to the union, I'm sticking to the union. Oh, you can't scare me, I'm sticking to the union. I'm sticking to the union till the day I die. Now you women who want to be free, just take a tip from me, Join your hand with a union friend into the 21st century. As Angela Davis found, we’re all together bound. Let race and class and gender join to stand on common ground. Oh, you can't scare me, I'm sticking to the union, I'm sticking to the union, I'm sticking to the union. Oh, you can't scare me, I'm sticking to the union. I'm sticking to the union till the day I die. One more time. Oh, you can't scare me, I'm sticking to the union, I'm sticking to the union, I'm sticking to the union. Oh, you can't scare me, I'm sticking to the union. I'm sticking to the union till the day I die