“Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.” —Bertolt Brecht

Sections of CUPE 3903 were motivated by the dream of a general strike. But their self-aggrandizement and disdain for working with other unions effectively undermined the objective conditions that would make such a struggle possible and winnable. While unions must be willing to strike to win, it is also necessary to build coalitions and to coordinate larger collective actions.

If a union can be legislated back to work simply because the employer refuses to bargain, where does that leave an already embattled labour movement in the throes of a capitalist crisis? If this is the new climate in which labour must operate, efforts like that of CUPE Ontario to organize coordinated bargaining on a provincial level may be a crucial step in building the political will to defy such legislation.

The recent strike by CUPE 3903, which represents the contract faculty, teaching assistants and graduate assistants at York University, has left deep divisions in the union and on campus. In a heated discussion about the merits of the two articles we commissioned, the Dimension collective generated a number of questions over which no agreement emerged. We thought it would be useful to share these questions with our readers.

The political and economic setting facing the union movement today is the most difficult since the Great Depression. Unions have already confronted two decades of unrelenting assault from neoliberal policies of labour-market flexibility, austerity and political conservatism. Then, the global financial crisis ripped across the entire world market. Many forecasts for 2009 are projecting negative growth for the world economy as a whole for the first time since the 1930s.

Global capitalism’s deterioration is fast outrunning the disorganized, uncoordinated patchwork of too-little-too-late government “programs.” Nothing illustrates this sorry spectacle better than the twists and turns of U.S. monetary policy to be executed by the Federal Reserve, and Congress’s just-passed “stimulus” program, about to be enacted by the Obama administration.

Posters have been banned on two university campuses in Ottawa because they used a cartoon image depicting an Israeli AH-64 attack helicopter firing at a Palestinian child. The poster’s artwork, by Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff, is based on reality.

One might think that a prolonged and deep recession would provide the inspiration for socialist renewal. The contradictions of capital, combined with the insatiable greed of many capitalists, have once again revealed how this system doesn’t work for people who depend on selling their labour. But failures of capitalism don’t automatically lead to thoughts of socialism. If history can teach us, we should look beyond the labour movement for sources of new inspiration and leadership.

Disability, Mothers, and Organization: Accidental Activists, by Melanie Panitch, looks specifically at the development of the community living movement across Canada, an organization that (broadly speaking) assists people with developmental disabilities in meeting their needs.

The series of events that occurred from 1941-1949 and 1965-1974 give rise to Greece’s current state today. The complicated and dramatic course of the war and civil war in Greece has, for lack of parties interested in reconstructing the truth of events, has never before been narrated in full. I am a direct descendent of the ELAS (Greek Peoples Liberation Army). I have relied on testimony painstakingly collected from survivors of this tragedy.