February 23 rallies outside the British Columbia (B.C.) legislature and in a dozen other cities and towns throughout the province are the latest focus of this deepening social resistance. The actions' organizers demand, in the words of the B.C. Federation of Labour's publicity, "jobs, public services, health care, and education." The rallies build on the impact of a range of strikes and protests that have already helped to educate and galvanize broader layers of working people.

These union fighters and youth are responding to a wide-ranging assault on working people's social wage--the public provision of hospitals, schools, and other essential services--by federal and provincial capitalist governments across Canada. The Liberal Party administration in British Columbia has aimed its attacks on the social wage, first and foremost at workers in the schools and hospitals.

In preparation for these assaults, new leg-irons have been placed on workers' right to withdraw their labor. The rulers have reduced the say of the health-care union over severance pay and seniority issues. By declaring education an essential service, the government eliminated the teachers' right to strike last August.

Teachers, students, health-care workers and others have shown since then, however, that it will take more than a stroke of the pen to force them off the picket lines and out of the streets. In resisting layoffs and budget cutbacks they and many others are acting to defend essential social rights won through historic struggles.

The fight to defend the social wage has broad implications for workers, farmers, and the oppressed. As Jack Barnes writes in Capitalism's World Disorder in reference to the U.S. system of Social Security, the "broader historical struggle for Social Security is about whether workers have a lifetime right to medical care" and other benefits. The struggle, he says, "is part and parcel of the fight for affirmative action to combat racist and anti-woman discrimination, so we can unite our class and strengthen the labor movement. It is about the fight to ensure jobs for all; to raise the wages and shorten the hours of the working class; and to defend health and safety on and off the job. It is a fight to keep the capitalists from tearing the working class apart." Capitalism's World Disorder and other Pathfinder titles, including Cuba and the Coming American Revolution, place these battles in their historic and international context. Many of the workers and youth who are mobilizing in British Columbia and elsewhere will want to buy and read these political weapons, along with the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial. Through study, discussion, and action they can come to see their struggle and themselves in a different light, as part of the historic fight by working people to overthrow capitalist rule and establish a government of workers and farmers.  
 
 
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