Every co-worker who is Black that I spoke to said they were "relieved" that the cops had not arrested a Black person. They said every time this happens they and their kids get more racist cop harassment on the street. I said I knew where they were coming from, but I pointed out that an arrest doesn't mean guilt. We have to defend the presumption of innocence, which cops don't do.
Another co-worker said that the cop "was too young to die." The media has been playing up the fact that Hancox was a father with a wife who is eight months pregnant. The cops and capitalist politicians are organizing a massive "law and order" funeral August 10. Ten thousand cops from a variety of cop agencies throughout Canada and the United States are expected to attend.
I replied that I get angry when I see these pro-cop campaigns and political funerals every time a cop is killed.
Where are the parades and media campaigns for safe working conditions when ordinary workers get killed on the job, like the 26 Westray coal miners who were murdered by their negligent profit-hungry bosses in Nova Scotia a few years ago in an explosion caused by an illegal buildup of coal dust? The company owners and managers got off without criminal charges. The Steelworkers union is now trying to get the federal criminal code amended so that employers who kill workers can be charged.
The Toronto Star reports that between 1961 and 1997, 112 cops were killed on the job in Canada. Over that same time span, tens of thousands of workers were killed and maimed on the job.
The USWA lawyer working on the Westray case reports that today in Canada 900 to 1,000 workers die on the job each year - that's three a day!
Two weights, two measures. Two classes with different interests. For ruling-class families, the life of a cop who defends the "law and order" of their profit system, is sacrosanct. The death of a worker who creates their wealth by selling his or her labor power, is not worth mentioning. It's just a cost factor in their balance sheets.
John Steele
Toronto, Ontario
`Lenin on Trade Unions'
I bought On Trade Unions by Lenin at the Pittsburgh Active
Workers Conference and began the task of reading it. The
passage noted below reminded me of some aspects of the
discussion and presentations:
"The spontaneous upsurge of the masses in Russia proceeded (and continues) with such rapidity that the young Social- Democrats proved unprepared to meet these gigantic tasks. This unpreparedness is our common misfortune, the misfortune of all Russian Social-Democrats. The upsurge of the masses proceeded and spread with uninterrupted continuity; it not only continued in the places where it began, but spread to new localities and to new strata of the population (under the influence of the working-class movement, there was a renewed ferment among the student youth, among the intellectuals generally, and even among the peasantry).
Revolutionaries, however, lagged behind this upsurge, both in their `theories' and in their activity; they failed to establish a constant and continuous organization capable of leading the whole movement."
David Johnson
Toronto, Ontario
Editor's note: The excerpt Johnson cites is from V.I. Lenin's pamphlet What is to be Done?, written in 1901 as part of the fight to forge what became the Bolshevik party.
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