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Originally posted by John Smart:
What other events, if any, are happening to mark this anniversary?

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Well, FM has mentioned one.

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Ottawa historian and archivist John Smart and his wife, noted literary critic Patricia Smart are inviting people to a public reading of the Manifesto at the Glebe Community Centre in Ottawa August 18.

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Perhaps, rather than transform it into an inspirational scriptural text honoured more in the breach than in the observance, someone might be inspired to update the Manifesto for our times, without doing violence to the original analysis and goal?

So, let the work begin. We know all about the failures of democratic socialism, I mean the kind of work needed to convince the great unread that we have the answers. Which repeated appeals for the development of which have come to nought( was that a sentence?) It'll have to do.

[ 10 August 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]

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Originally posted by pipedream:
The CCF was founded in Calgary in 1932 according to Wikipedia followed by a convention in Regina the following year which drafted the Manifesto. It dedicated itself to eradicating capitalism in Canada. The Manifesto was dropped later was the CCF watered down its policies and tone in order to win elections. What's to celebrate?

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Good golly.

The fascinating thing is that if you actually read the document in question you'd understand there's a lot more to it the the call to "eradicate capitalism". The Manifesto, by and large, avoided empty rhetoric and focussed on drafting an ambitious roadmap for Canada's future.

What's most interesting is how many of the original goals put forward in the Manifesto have actually been achieved. It wasn't just a bunch of empty rhetoric but a blueprint that Canada followed - if only halfway:

- Section 98 of the Criminal Code has been repealed and, while imperfect, Canada now has a Charter of Rights that ensures some measure of equality before the law.

- While banking and financial services haven't been nationalized Canada's capitalists were forced to create a Central Bank - the Bank of Canada which played a siginifcant role in the subsequent creation of Canada's welfare state.

- Co-operatives and credit unions have not taken the leading economic role envisioned by the CCF but they have expanded dramatically since 19933.

- Socialized medical care is now the norm.

- Taxation has shifted largely to a progressive income tax system (though bizarrely some progressives want to turn back the clock to more consumption taxes).

[ 15 August 2008: Message edited by: Mercy ]

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Originally posted by pipedream:
The Manifesto was dropped later was the CCF watered down its policies and tone in order to win elections. What's to celebrate?

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Consequently, the capitalists made some pretty significant concessions to workers in Canada and U.S. after the manfesto was drafted, and gradually over time after the collapse of laissez-faire capitalism in the U.S. and Canada. The manifesto had to be re-written decades later to reflect the new mixed market economies and developing of social welfare state in Canada - as well as in response to marauding international capital. In other words, the CCF-NDP didn't knuckle under to capitalism so much as capitalism had to adopt several socialist policies in order to remain viable.

And now the new Liberal capitalism is on the wane with deregulation distaster after disaster and bubble economies as far as the eye can see. Deregulation and globalization of laissez-faire capitalism made new again as "neoliberal capitalism", isn't working today as much as it didn't work from 1929-33.

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Originally posted by Mercy:

- Taxation has shifted largely to a progressive income tax system (though bizarrely some progressives want to turn back the clock to more consumption taxes).

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I think it depends on who is calling for consumption taxes. Social Democrats have made consumption taxes work for the common good in countries like Sweden and Denmark.

Political Liberals here would grab the revenue from their flip-flops on GST and give it to bankster friends or pals in the fossil fuel industry while strangling social spending and create huge infrastructure deficits in paving the way for more useless rightwing ideology. And conservatives would likely spend it military as well as corporate welfare.

[ 15 August 2008: Message edited by: Fidel ]

Are there any plans to update the Manifesto?