Toronto’s Poor: A Rebellious History

By Bryan D. Palmer, Gaétan Héroux and Frances Fox Piven

Toronto’s Poor reveals the long and too often forgotten history of poor people’s resistance. It details how people without housing, people living in poverty, and unemployed people have struggled to survive and secure food and shelter in the wake of the many panics, downturns, recessions, and depressions that punctuate the years from the 1830s to the present.

Written by a historian of the working class and a poor people’s activist, this is a rebellious book that links past and present in an almost two-hundred year story of struggle and resistance. It is about men, women, and children relegated to lives of desperation by an uncaring system, and how they have refused to be defeated. In that refusal, and in winning better conditions for themselves, Toronto’s poor create the possibility of a new kind of society, one ordered not by acquisition and individual advance, but by appreciations of collective rights and responsibilities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Release date: Dec 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781771132824

Bryan D. Palmer

Bryan D. Palmer was the Trent University Canada Research Chair (2001-2015), and currently chairs the Department of Canadian Studies.

Book preview

Cover: “Toronto’s Poor: A Rebellious History”, by Bryan D. Palmer and Gaetan Heroux.

Toronto’s Poor

"Toronto’s Poor shows us the importance of knowing and understanding our history because history can repeat itself. Whether it is in the nineteenth or twenty-first century, poor people’s experience of cold and hunger, crummy shelter conditions, inadequate housing, and vulnerability to dying early are caused by bitter and punitive social policies. What is most exciting about this book is the mostly untold story of poor people’s resistance, activism, and fight-back struggles that have and will continue to win huge victories alleviating poverty."

—Cathy Crowe, Street Nurse

Palmer and Héroux show that Toronto has been an exemplary Canadian city: its poverty has been inclusive, although not perfectly equal-opportunity. It has embraced male and female, young and old, city and suburban, immigrant and native born, and not excluding First Nations. This is Toronto’s history from the bottom up, and with attitude. Long overdue.

—Richard Harris, School of Geography and Earth Sciences,McMaster University

"Toronto’s Poor is a trove of well-chronicled moments in the enduring history of oppression and dispossession of the lives lost in the cogs of progress. It isn’t just that poverty and marginalization have been the framework for centuries of economic scapegoating, it’s that we begin to see the energy behind the travesty of disregarding the poor."

—Victor Willis, Parkdale Activity-Recreation Centre (

PARC

)

"Toronto’s Poor tells an important and under-told side of this city’s history, where the civic narrative has often focused on waves of growth and prosperity, ignoring a continuum of dispossession and struggle here since before the city’s founding. In an era of precarious employment and when poverty is even more hidden than ever in the suburbs and apartment towers, Toronto’s Poor provides some context for current conditions."

—Shawn Micallef, editor at Spacing, Toronto Star columnist, author of Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto and Frontier City: Toronto on the Verge of Greatness

An extremely well-documented history of how Toronto’s destitute, homeless, and unemployed were scapegoated and typecast as undeserving of social support, and how they and others resisted and fought back against great odds. This is a history of capitalism, crisis, and class as played out in Canada’s largest city over two centuries. It brings into the picture the dispossessed and the struggle for progressive social change, which historical research too often ignores. An excellent account for all who care about the struggle for social justice.

—J. David Hulchanski, professor of housing and community development, University of Toronto

Toronto’s Poor

A Rebellious History

Bryan D. PalmerGaétan Héroux

Between the Lines · Toronto

Toronto’s Poor

© 2016 Bryan D. Palmer and Gaétan Héroux

First published in 2016 by

Between the Lines

401 Richmond Street West

Studio 277

Toronto, Ontario M5V 3A8

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be photocopied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of Between the Lines, or (for photocopying in Canada only) Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, M5E 1E5.

Every reasonable effort has been made to identify copyright holders. Between the Lines would be pleased to have any errors or omissions brought to its attention.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Palmer, Bryan D., 1951-, author

          Toronto’s poor : a rebellious history / Bryan D. Palmer and Gaétan Héroux; foreword by Frances Fox Piven.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77113-281-7 (paperback).—ISBN 978-1-77113-

282-4 (epub).—ISBN 978-1-77113-283-1 (pdf)

1. Poor—Ontario—Toronto—History. 2. Poverty—

Ontario—Toronto—History. 3. Toronto (Ont.)—Social

conditions. I. Héroux, Gaétan, author II. Title.

HV4050.T6P34 2016           305.5’6909713541           C2016-904718-0

                                                                                       C2016-904719-9

Text and cover design by

David Vereschagin/Quadrat Communications

Front cover, top photo: York University Libraries, Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections, Toronto Telegram fonds, ASC19077, Evening Telegram Staff. For details see p. 122. Front cover, bottom photo: OCAP Archives. For details see p. 363.

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing activities the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council, the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

Printed in Canada

Logo: Canada Council for the Arts. Logo: Conseil des Arts du Canada. Logo: Government of Canada. Logo: Ontario Arts Council, an Ontario government agency. Logo: Conseil des Arts de L'Ontario, un organisme du gouvernement de l'Ontario.

For Catherine & Joan

Contents

Foreword by Frances Fox Piven

Acknowledgements

Part I

IntroductionThe Long History of Toronto’s Poor: Conceptualizing the Dispossessed

Capitalism, Crisis, and Class: Why Have the Poor Always Been with Us?

Dispossession: The Nursery of Class Struggle

Capitalist Crises: Class Conflict from Above and Below

Toronto: A Locale within the Global

Class Struggle in Our Times: Bringing the Dispossessed into the Picture

Class Politics and Dispossession: The Left and the Wageless

Part II

Cracking the Stone:The Origins of Toronto’s Dispossessed, 1830–1928

Land and Labour in Old Ontario

Toronto’s House of Industry

In the Era of Confederation: Capitalist State Formation and the Poor

The Underside of the Great Upheaval, 1873–1896

Protesting Labour Tests

The Black Flag Remembered; The Tramp Reviled

Capitalist Consolidation and the Left-Led Unemployed Movement in Pre–First World War Toronto

The Left and the Toronto Jobless before the Great Depression, 1915–1925

Part III

United We Eat; Divided We Starve:The Toronto Unemployed Movement, 1929–1939

Reds and the Unemployed in Canada’s Great Depression: From Third Period to Popular Front

The Single Unemployed and Toronto’s Communist Battle for the Streets: Heroes 1914–Bums 1933

The Single Unemployed: Bound for Anything but Glory

Laver vs. The Lodge: The Voucher War of 1932–1933 and the Consolidation of a Regulatory Order

On the Trail of Harvey Jackson, William M. McKnight, Clifford Mashery, and George Haig: The Single Unemployed Present at Their Own Remaking

Marginalizing the Marginal: Single Unemployed Women

Toronto Trekkers

Depression’s Denouement: The Winding Down of the Struggles of Single Unemployed Men, 1937–1939

Crisis of Unemployment = Housing Crisis

Evictions: They Shall Not Pass

The Jobless Take Job Action: Early Relief Strikes, 1932–1933

A Red among Relief Recipients: Long Branch’s Ernest Lawrie

Reds, Riots, and Raising the Relief Rates: March–May 1935

Upping the Ante: The Hepburn Offensive and the Militancy of the Unemployed, 1936

Lakeview Militancy and a Hepburn Ambush, 1938

Closing Out the Decade: Relief Strikes and the Call to Abolish Relief Work

Part IV

A Hopeless Failure: The Limitations and Erosion of the Modern Welfare State, 1940–2015

The Uneven Origins of an Incomplete Welfare State

In the Shadow of the Great Depression, War, and the Emerging Welfare State: Episodic Struggle in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s

A Sixties Turn: The Just Society, the New Left, and the Discovery of the Poor, 1965–1975

Hard Times: Capitalist Crises, Ideological Initiative, and the State Assault on the Dispossessed, 1973–2015

Part V

Fight to Win!:The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and the Return/Revenge of the Dispossessed, 1985–2015

Marauding through the 1980s and into the 1990s: The Many-Sided Attack on the Poor

Mobilizing against the Marauders: Reviving Poor People’s Agitations in the 1980s

Marching to Mobilization: The Beginnings of OCAP

Mulroneyville, NDP Welfare Cheats, and Operation Desert Gypsy

Revolution from Above, against Those Below: The Poor Fight Back

Homelessness and the Freezing Deaths Inquest, 1995–1996

Squats and NIMBYs: OCAP Escalates the Struggle

More Deaths, More Protests, More Complacency (and Worse)

Squeegees, Soliciting, and the Safe Streets Act: OCAP Continues to Counter

Ottawa Bound and Bringing the War against Poverty Back Home to Queen’s Park

The Long Retreat is Over

Squatting with the Pope and the Tenants of Tent City

Miller Time: Streets to Homes and the Death of Paul Croutch – Two Faces of Social Cleansing

A Women’s Squat

Raise the Rates! The Special Diet Supplement

Turning on the TAP: Toronto Against Poverty

Another Demolition Job: The Community Start Up and Maintenance Benefit

Hostels under Attack: OCAP Fights Back

Part VI

ConclusionBread I Want, and Bread I Will Have

Notes

Index

Foreword

Frances Fox Piven

This remarkable book is an account of the political struggles of the poor in the city of Toronto over the last 150 years. The politics of the poor only rarely get this kind of scholarly attention. Social scientists who study the evolution of social policies focus instead on elites and reformers, on political parties and unions, or on inherited institutional constraints, while the efforts of the poor themselves as they try to shape the world they must inhabit are ordinarily ignored. Bryan Palmer and Gaétan Héroux break with that social science tradition and instead follow a path that connects them with the work of the social historians, especially the British historians of the past half century–mentors like E. P. Thompson, George Rudé, and Eric Hobsbawm–who placed the poor front and centre in their narratives of the past.

I think the historical moment demands that approach. We need to pay attention to the self-activity of the people at the bottom of our societies if only because the legions of the left-behind are growing, not only in the desperate regions of the southern hemisphere but also in the countries that were once the pioneers of redistributive welfare state policies.¹ Moreover, there are signs everywhere that the poor are in fact in motion, rising to protest their circumstances, even in the most affluent nations of the world.

So one reason this book is important is that we do not know much about political action by the people we call poor, and still less about their actual influence on public policy. In the pages that follow we learn a history that is rarely reported, and the careful and detailed narrative is valuable for that reason alone. The narrative also helps us understand something of why the politics of the poor remains in the shadows. An aroused poor only rarely find respected and powerful allies and, indeed, even when the poor are spurred to become defiant they rarely name themselves as poor. The very term indicates a socially humiliated stratum, and defiance leads people to seek a prouder identity. The poor become the Indignados, or they name themselves Black as in Black Lives Matter, or Palestinian or Zapatistas or Mothers. Note that in the 1960s, it was the United States government’s war on poverty that responded to the riotous inner-city poor that deployed the language of poverty and not the rioters themselves.

Another reason this book is important is that the authors have a clear and illuminating understanding that the hardship and humiliations imposed on the poor mesh with the deteriorating life circumstances of the mass of working people. Note the parallel trends: as poverty and extreme poverty grow, so do the life conditions of the working people (who are not officially poor) become more insecure under the aggressive form of capitalism we call neoliberalism. Earnings are stagnant or shrinking, the terms of employment have become insecure or precarious, and the trade unions that once fought for higher wages and improved the terms of work are weakened.

Palmer and Héroux see clearly that these trends are related, that the penury and insult that our policies impose on the people we call poor also enfeeble working people. This crucial relationship emerges clearly from the history of poor relief policies that branded (sometimes literally) the poor, displayed them for public ridicule in the marketplace, starved them in the poorhouse, all to shore up the dictum of less eligibility, meaning that no one who depended on public charity should be as well off as even the lowest paid worker. Less eligibility is not merely a historical relic. Palmer and Héroux show how recently it was that the Toronto poor were made to toil at breaking the stone in return for their meagre fare. And in the United States, also a settler country and a child of the British Empire, a decades-long campaign against the programs that presumably encourage the dependency of the poor continues, with the result that assistance programs have been slashed and the number of households in extreme poverty is rising. Those households now include close to three million children.²

Less eligibility, in other words, is not only a material arrangement pegging relief payments to wages, and it does not only affect the poor. It is an arrangement that distributes social acceptability and disgrace along with survival resources, and it distributes social acceptability in ways that inevitably affect not only those who are disgraced but also those who struggle to preserve whatever dignity is afforded them by wage work. Consider for example the U.S. campaign to slash cash assistance to poor families that resulted in 1996 in the elimination of a six-decades-old program called Aid to Families of Dependent Children. The campaign was fuelled by the argument that assistance to the poor sapped them of the drive for economic self-reliance through wage work. The solution was to make assistance hard to get and harder to keep. And those who were assisted were subject to strict surveillance and rituals of humiliation. The welfare rolls plummeted and when the smoke had cleared the proportion of poor children who received cash assistance had fallen from 68 percent to 26 percent. In the process, New York City recipients were made to don orange Day-Glo vests while they cleaned the parks and roads, there to be observed by all those who were struggling to stay afloat on shrinking wages and lengthening hours.

This history of the Toronto poor helps us to see how people resist these policies. To be sure, they do not triumph, at least not yet. But their resistance against great odds reveals their extraordinary capacities and gives us hope that there will be a future.

Acknowledgements

This book has been sustained and nurtured in a variety of ways over the course of a number of years. Our thanks are many.

Gaétan Héroux gratefully acknowledges receipt of a John Bousfield Grant through the University of Toronto’s Department of Geography. He also thanks the Toronto Jane Jacobs Walk, which provided him with an important venue to present the history of Downtown East Toronto in a popular format, enabling him to organize and better understand the research material he was working on. Bryan D. Palmer benefitted enormously from the support of the Canada Research Chairs program, administered through Trent University, where the Canadian Studies Department has provided a congenial research environment for more than a decade.

Portions of Part II appeared previously in our jointly-published essays, Marching under Flags Black and Red: Toronto’s Dispossessed and the Age of Industry, in Leon Fink, Joseph McCartin, and Joan Sangster, eds., Workers in Hard Times: A Long View of Economic Crises (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 19–44 and ‘Cracking the Stone’: The Long History of Capitalist Crisis and Toronto’s Dispossessed, 1830–1930, Labour/Le Travail 69 (Spring 2012): 9–62. We thank the editors of these volumes for permission to reproduce segments of essays that originally appeared in their pages.

Research of the kind that this book is built on depends on archives, libraries, special collections repositories, and the men and women who do so much to gather, preserve, and provide access to needed documents. We thank the knowledgeable and helpful staff of the Baldwin Room at the Toronto Reference Library, the City of Toronto Archives, the Ontario Archives, the Thomas Fisher Rare Book and Special Collections Library at the University of Toronto, and the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections at York University.

So many individuals have provided us with help and encouragement over the years that in naming only a few of those whose contributions were invaluable we risk passing over many others to whom we are grateful. Nonetheless, Gaétan Héroux thanks Stefanie Gould and Rachel Huot for encouraging him in his research and helping him to prepare grant proposals. He is indebted to all of those individuals who took the time to read and provide important criticism of the early, unpublished transcripts of his study of the history of Downtown East Toronto. He thanks as well the anti-poverty activists in Montreal with whom he worked over the years and who enhanced his understanding of poor people’s struggles, in particular Richard St. Pierre and Alexandre Popovic. Bryan Palmer thanks especially two young scholars, David Thompson and Jonathan Greene, who generously made their unpublished dissertations on poor people’s struggles available. His colleague in Canadian Studies at Trent University, Jim Struthers, not only read the entire manuscript with a critical and supportive eye, but also has contributed immensely to our understanding of the limits of the welfare state with his rigorous scholarship. Finally, we are indebted to Danielle Koyama, A. J. Withers, Beric German, and John Clarke who read Part V of the book and offered important and frank criticism of our treatment of OCAP and other developments associated with the recent history of Toronto’s poor people’s struggles.

We gratefully acknowledge the work of the many individuals in OCAP who have been involved in developing the organization’s website and its archives, both of which proved invaluable in the writing of this book. Many individuals also provided photographs of OCAP demonstrations and activities over the last twenty-five years. In particular, we wish to thank Don Johnson, Graeme Bacque, and John Bonnar. Also noteworthy, in terms of other photographic material utilized in this study, are the abundance of illustrative riches present in the Toronto Telegram fonds of York University’s Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections, where we found Julia Holland especially helpful. We thank Stephen Gardiner of Trent University’s Geography Department for designing the book’s maps.

Gaétan Héroux has learned much from the many people living on social assistance in Toronto and who have organized selflessly over the years, building a poor people’s movement in Toronto. Listing all of their names is impossible, but he wants to acknowledge in particular Ken Nebone, Steve Lane, Don Weitz, Brian DuBourdieu, and Marque Brill. In his work in various social service agencies and anti-poverty activism, Héroux met and interacted with thousands of poor people. Many have subsequently died, but their lives and stories remain very much with him and serve as a foundation on which he has conducted research and worked on this book.

Bryan Palmer’s original contact with OCAP came through discussions with the late Norman Feltes. After Norman’s death, his regard for OCAP deepened with a growing sense of the organization’s militancy, appreciation of the practical contributions OCAP made in bettering the lives of Toronto’s poor, and a profound respect for those like John Clarke and Peter Rosenthal, who worked with the anti-poverty organization in different capacities. He was also later influenced by his contact with a brilliant student in Trent’s Canadian Studies Department, Sue Collis, whose OCAP activism preceded her development as a promising scholar.

Bryan Palmer owes a special debt to two historians, Sean Purdy and Marcello Badaró Mattos, who arranged a 2014 visit to Brazil and provided accommodations in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, where an important segment of the writing involved in this book took place.

For Gaétan Héroux, this book would have been impossible without the encouragement of his parents, Anna Gibson and Osias Héroux, both of whom have passed away since he began researching the history of Toronto’s poor. Growing up in poverty with his parents, his three sisters Ginette, Jocelyne, Michelle, and his brother Alain, fundamentally shaped his understanding of what it means to be poor, developing his sense of class consciousness.

Toronto’s Poor is dedicated to our partners Catherine Cumberland and Joan Sangster. We end with statements of our respective appreciations.

Gaétan Héroux: My work with OCAP and the writing of this book could not have happened without Catherine, my partner for more than forty years. Despite the stress that I have caused her through the many years of activism, the many arrests, periods of unemployment, and long hours spent at meetings, our relationship has survived and remains the most important part of my life.

Bryan D. Palmer: Joan Sangster’s contribution to this book is not measured in statements corrected, sentences improved, or struggles reinterpreted. She does all of that, to be sure. But more importantly, this book is part hers because she understands my outrage and my refusals, my insistence that fundamental social transformation is indeed necessary. Without that understanding, so rare and so important in keeping alienation partially at bay, I cannot imagine writing books like this or indeed doing so many other things that occupy our time. The world we live in often seems to have ground to a bad halt, but Joan, after twenty years, still manages to make it go merrily round for me.

Part I

Introduction

The Long History of Toronto’s Poor: Conceptualizing the Dispossessed

It is January 2015, and temperatures are plummeting, approaching -20 degrees Centigrade. Homeless men are dying on the streets of Toronto. Over the course of four days, three deaths are reported in the news, almost all of the accounts shrouded in the anonymity that covers the destitute in cold comforts. The first body was discovered on the morning of 5 January in a Davenport Road-Lansdowne Avenue shipping yard, where a regular at a local Drop-In Centre had been living in a derelict truck. A second homeless man was found less than twenty-four hours later in a Toronto Transit Commission shelter near Yonge-Dundas Square. Clad in only a T-shirt and blue jeans, he exhibited no vital signs and had apparently succumbed to hypothermia and cardiac arrest. He was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital a short time later. A third victim of homelessness, aged sixty-one, died in his sleep at a Peter Street shelter on 8 January.¹

Less than a week later, a fourth man came to a sorry end in an industrial area in the McGowan Road-Nugent Avenue vicinity. Acts of kindness culminated in the death of Grant Gunner Faulkner, who perished in a fire after another homeless man loaned Gunner his small makeshift hut for the night, as well as a propane heater to ward off the frigid temperatures. Apparently the device was turned up too high, and cardboard was placed over its top, probably to maximize the retention of heat next to the sleeping Faulkner. A conflagration then engulfed the shed and incinerated the homeless man who, in his late forties, was unemployed as a result of losing his job in an automotive systems factory in Cambridge. Globe and Mail columnist Marcus Gee pointed out that Faulkner, who was battling alcohol abuse at the time of his death, was a stark reminder that living on the streets was not just a problem associated with Toronto’s downtown core. Studies conducted in 2006 and 2013 had shown that of the hundreds of people down-and-out in Toronto, upward of 30 percent of the dispossessed could be found in districts such as North York, Scarborough, and Etobicoke. Yet of the forty-eight shelters run by the city, community organizations, and various agencies, only eight were then located in Toronto’s blue-collar suburbs.²

As homeless men were dying in January 2015, mainstream political commentators were calling attention to the obvious. Konrad Yakabuski questioned the smart growth policies animating urban decision-making in places like Toronto. Drawing on a Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, Yakabuski pointed out that a median-priced home in Toronto cost 6.5 times the city’s mid-range household income, a rise of 65 percent over the course of a decade. With a multiple above 5.1, the Demographia data indicated that Toronto housing was in the severely unaffordable category, the city’s accommodation costs surpassing those of New York. Even allowing for Demographia’s political agenda, which undoubtedly looked to curtail restrictive legislation on land use and bypass eco-friendly initiatives to contain urban sprawl, housing in Toronto was clearly priced beyond the reach of many inhabitants. This situation was paralleled by a language of official politics that, in Jeffrey Simpson’s words, collapsed public discussions of policy into the expansive container of a terminological muddle labelled the middle class. What was of interest to this socioeconomic chimera, the widely appealed to middle class, structured the rhetorical and programmatic appeals of Conservatives, Liberals, and New Democrats alike. The poor, Simpson argued, have disappeared in Canadian politics, as no Party leader was prepared to ask citizens to think about the less fortunate, as if to do so would invite voters in the elastic middle class to think they might lose something in the process. Simpson’s conclusion, coming from a voice of the liberal centre, was that a failure to think about the poor, let alone talk about them, impoverishes politics–it spins the discourse around what’s in it for me, rather than what’s in it for all of us.³

We are not of the liberal mainstream. What follows brings the long history of Toronto’s poor very much to the forefront. Readers of this book will be introduced to how the destitute, the homeless and the unemployed were socially constructed and characterized, often as undeserving of social assistance. They will also be shown how these same people fought against their subordination and the often worsening conditions of their lives. The dispossessed of Toronto’s old urban core are examined, but so too are suburban homelessness and the struggles of out-of-work residents in these municipalities to raise relief rates and keep their homes amid efforts to evict them during the prolonged crisis of joblessness in the 1930s. Sadly, what is happening to the poorest of Toronto’s poor today is anything but new. There is a history of the dispossessed reaching back to at least the 1830s and carrying forward to our current moment that is continuous and troubling. The plight of the poor that emerges out of this past is too often reduced to scapegoating and typecasting. Those who find themselves without waged work, without homes, and without sufficient wherewithal to provide adequately for themselves and their families have been criminalized and assailed as shirkers, unfairly labelled the architects of their own misery.⁴

These dispossessed are also routinely lost in the shuffle of responsibility among municipalities and provincial and federal governments, bodies that have long jockeyed to pass the buck of which level of government should pay how much for what kind of funding allocation. As we write this introduction, Ontario is leading a charge on behalf of the provinces against Ottawa, trying to negotiate a change in the management of $2 billion in annual transfer payments that relate to job training, funds paid out of Employment Insurance (EI) premiums. Meanwhile, the percentage of out-of-work Canadians who qualify for such unemployment support under the EI program has been steadily in decline for a number of years. It now dips below the 40 percent mark. This means that the majority of the 1.3 million Canadians who were jobless in 2014 would not have been eligible for traditional unemployment insurance benefits or for the programs of upgrading skills and retooling that are now built into EI’s practices.⁵ None of this is new. The story of the levels of the state fighting over the costs of provisioning for the poor, rather than combining to act on behalf of the disadvantaged themselves, is indeed an old tale. As this book shows, cities, provinces, and federal authorities have expended considerable energy dodging the bullets of joblessness and destitution as they are repeatedly fired from the weapon of capitalist crises, an armament aimed at the collective head of the waged and the wageless.

This study of Toronto’s poor and out-of-work, which we refer to as the wageless, the jobless, the unemployed, and, ultimately, the dispossessed, has its origins in an understandable, but somewhat unusual, collaboration. As an anti-poverty activist affiliated with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), one of the authors, Gaétan Héroux, was involved with protests and confrontations with politicians and police over the course of the 1990s and early years of this century. He was told, time and time again, that poor people’s mobilizations demanding adequate housing, diet, clothing, and basic necessities, were anything but the norm. OCAP, its critics and supporters alike often intimated, was pursuing a course of militant action with no precedent in Toronto’s past. Yet when Héroux began to explore the history of those in Toronto who found themselves jobless and dependent on aid dispensed by institutions like the House of Industry in the nineteenth century or the relief administrations of Toronto’s downtown wards or its working-class suburban municipalities in the 1930s, he discovered an obscured and little written about history of radical and relentless struggle. The more he dug into the primary sources of original newspaper coverage of poor people’s campaigns, the more he saw continuities and parallels with his own OCAP experience. If anything, some of the actions of the out-of-work, especially during the Great Depression mobilizations of the Toronto unemployed, outstripped OCAP’s endeavours in terms of audacity and angry confrontation.

The other author, Bryan D. Palmer, a historian of labour and the left, was drawn to OCAP in the 1990s and beyond precisely because of its militancy. As is the case with most historians of the working class, the bulk of Palmer’s writing and research has addressed workers who were employed in waged occupations, who formed unions, and who participated in political parties of the left. For the most part, his published work has not been about the wageless, but addresses, instead, the waged. In this, his subject of research and writing has followed paths common to most working-class historians and labour studies practitioners. Nonetheless, as an advocate of militant working-class action, and as a researcher increasingly drawn to the history of the revolutionary left, Palmer was attracted to OCAP. The antipoverty group led militant mobilizations of the poor at a time when revolutionary organizations were in disarray and mainstream trade unionism was in retreat, in danger of losing sight of its origins in class struggle and combative resistance.⁶

We thus first met, as activist and engaged labour historian, in the OCAP-organized mobilizations of the 1990s and 2000s. There was no talk of writing books. Our conversations turned on wrongs and rights; on injustices and how to overcome them; on rallies, and protests, and what happened at them and why.⁷ There was, of course, always something of the activist in the labour historian, and a little of the labour historian in the activist. But we did not envision merging our roles, becoming collaborators in a project of the kind that ultimately resulted in this book. Nonetheless, amid police riots at the Ontario Legislature and legal battles that saw John Clarke, Héroux, and others put on trial for their activism, there was common agreement that if the dispossessed were ever to gain ground they had to be prepared to fight to win. When, more than a decade later, various developments led us to discuss the possibility of co-authoring a wide-ranging study of the out-of-work and the kinds of mobilizations they sustained, a solid basis of common positions and co-operative thinking had long been in place.

Fundamental to the inquiry we envisioned was appreciation of three important conceptual premises: 1) the role of capitalism, as a system ordered by crises, in establishing the material conditions of deprivation, destitution, and dispossession that forced so many people into acts of resistance;⁸ 2) the necessity to see the working class whole, not just as those employed in particular occupations, but as all of those people who have been dispossessed of fundamental control over their lives; and 3) the importance of grappling with the reciprocities of resistance, in which the role of conscious radical and revolutionary leadership is addressed without suppressing the agency and initiative of the dispossessed themselves.⁹

Precisely because these analytic fundamentals both animate the collaboration that orchestrates this study and underlie every page of our joint venture, they merit further comment. Moreover, if this book is to be more than a mere description of past happenings, as we hope it will be, it is vitally important to make explicit just how our approach is meant to inform future activism and broaden interpretive understandings in ways that have practical consequences. It is our purpose in this study to play some small role in insuring that the high price of dispossession does not continue to be paid in lives drained of hope or lost to deplorable conditions. Indeed, we provide this account of the past as a contribution toward the creation of a future in which abolition of the dispossessed is finally realized. What follows in this introductory section, then, introduces conceptual appreciations of capitalism, crisis, and class in ways that are meant to both explain the past and inform present struggles. We are not believers in the Biblical maxim that the poor shall always be with you.

Capitalism, Crisis, and Class: Why Have the Poor Always Been with Us?

In the arm-twisting between the expropriated and the elite that reaches from the 1830s to the present lie important and suggestive insights into how capitalism functions as a socioeconomic political order, setting the stage on which calamities unfold and ideologies and cultural certitudes consolidate. In this process, class is, of course, made structurally, as a relationship to capitalism and its mills, factories, mines, construction lots, commercial outlets and other such sites of employment. But it is also forged in the crucible of struggle and resistance. As we will contend below, capitalist crises figure centrally in such a history of class confrontation, and the depressions, recessions, and panics that constitute the material reality of a crisis-ridden economic order routinely threaten and disrupt the employment security of working-class men and women, whose fundamental relationship to the means of production, and the wage that this generates, is one premised in expropriation. The Marxist economist Ernest Mandel identified seventeen global capitalist cycles over the course of the century-and-a-half reaching from 1816 to 1958, indicative of the recurring sequence of boom/prosperity, overproduction/crisis, slump/depression. If a working man had been fortunate enough to reach the age of seventy in 1921, as Alexander Keyssar points out in his study of unemployment in Massachusetts, he would have lived through six downturns in the economy. In Canada, between 1873 and 1978, there were twenty-three recessions/depressions in which total production declined for at least six months. And Murray E. G. Smith has suggested that Canada since the 1970s has experienced routine decadal downturns.¹⁰ The bad times, for workers, are as much a part of everyday life as the so-called good times. And in bad times, people lose their jobs, their homes, and their sense of self-worth. The very expropriation that leaves labour without ownership of the means of production too often leaves many without work at all.

Part of our purpose in writing this history of Toronto’s dispossessed is to suggest that the out-of-work are as much a part of the working class as those engaged in wage labour; that the struggles to organize unions, resist wage cuts, and rally men and women to the banner of class struggle are organically linked to reciprocal campaigns of the jobless to secure work or to wrestle from authority minimal standards of existence. As James C. Scott has recognized, these struggles of the dispossessed are integral to the inseparable relations of class and state formation. Gypsies, vagrants, homeless people, itinerants, runaway slaves, and serfs have always been a thorn in the side of states. Efforts to permanently settle these mobile people . . . seemed to be a perennial state project–perennial, in part, because it so seldom succeeded.¹¹

This book, then, contributes to an expansive understanding of class that resists attempts to reduce class to any simplistic understanding of this narrow group of paid workers or that particular stratum of employees. This perspective demands, moreover, that attempts to create a sense of new class formations rooted in precariousness will inevitably founder on the shoals of the hard reality that waged employment, seemingly secure in certain economic sectors, is in fact historically precarious and unstable. All workers, we argue, confront dispossession and walk the thin line separating employment and unemployment in ways that highlight possible job loss and potential dispossession. Whatever the seeming bounty of its ostensible high remuneration, union protections, and entitlements, wage employment is premised on the reality of dispossession, which can, at any time, given the possibility of capitalism lurching into crisis, be extended to the ultimate socioeconomic precipitation into wagelessness. The working class has no security that capitalism is bound to acknowledge, let alone preserve. Waged work in those economic sectors associated in North America with the Fordist regime of accumulation, too easily and unthinkingly assumed to be layered in stability in the 1940s and 1950s, has withered on the fragile vine of capitalist crises in the post-1973 years of austerity and massive industrial job loss.¹²

We aim to demonstrate just how the emergence of a working class in one of North America’s leading cities, Toronto, was always structured by capitalism’s capacity, not just to create waged work, but to manufacture, as well, wagelessness. In this dialectic of creation/destruction, capitalism foments crises to further its insatiable accumulative appetite, which must be fed by profit, the rate of which tends to fall as productive enterprise atrophies over time and the limitations of markets are reached.¹³ The amassing of wealth, which accrues from value extracted from workers’ productivity, necessitates new rounds of technological invention and managerial reorganization of the labour process to enhance profit and lessen reliance on waged workers. This process, in turn, leads to more and more workers being employed in less and less secure and permanent ways, leaving labour more partial and casual and, in periods of acute distress, subjecting workers to crises of unemployment. This tension at the heart of class formation has been present, as we discuss below, from the beginnings of capital’s colonization of Upper Canada in the decades before Confederation. It is a recurring theme in the everyday lives of Canadians today. In both the social conflict of the Great Depression that erupted in Toronto, and in protests of the poor and the organized labour movement across Ontario in the 1980s, 1990s, and into the first years of the twenty-first century, there were signs as well of how a militant labour revolt, on the part of both the waged and the wageless, was brewing.¹⁴

Class has always been made as a relationship to the means of production, to be sure, but this does not mean that it is only a productive relation. Cataclysmic change within relations of production brought to the fore the inevitable and multiplying crises of capitalism. In the 1873 Afterword to the second German edition of Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, Marx declared that,

The contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society impress themselves upon the practical bourgeois most strikingly in the changes of the periodic cycle, through which modern industry runs, and whose crowning point is the universal crisis. That crisis is once again approaching, although as yet but in its preliminary stage; and by the universality of its theatre and the intensity of its action it will drum dialectics even into the heads of mushroom upstarts.

Capitalist progress was thus premised on capitalist destruction. The growing incompatibility between the productive development of society and its hitherto existing relations of production expresses itself in bitter contradictions, crises, spasms, Marx wrote in the Grundrisse, concluding that, The violent destruction of capital not by relations external to it, but rather as a condition of its self-preservation, is the most striking form in which advice is given it to be gone and give room to a higher state of social production. Socialism, Marx and Engels reasoned, was necessary if humankind was ever to transcend the destructive logic of the profit system, which was too narrow to comprise the wealth that it created: And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand, by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

Class formation, about which Marx wrote relatively little, was never separable from this understanding of capitalism as crisis. Earlier epochs had seen society fragmented into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank [composed of] patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves . . . feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs. Capitalism, in contrast, simplified the class antagonisms. Under the revolutionizing drive of the bourgeoisie, civil society was split into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. This was, for Marx and Engels, the fundamental sociopolitical fact of the human relations of capitalism. As much as the working classes, pluralized in the mainstream language of the epoch, were fragmented by identities of nationality, religion, morality, and status, Marx and Engels insisted that the proletarians, recruited from all previous classes of the population, were finally brought together in inevitable association because of what they lacked: property. An original expropriation, generalized (sometimes over generations) to dispossession, defined the mass of humanity as inherently opposed to the propertied and powerful minority, and the isolations of labouring life would eventually give way to revolutionary combination. Capitalism and the bourgeoisie had produced their own gravediggers. This was fundamental to what Marx and Engels insisted was a process, spawned in all that was once solid melting into air, of men and women at last being compelled to face with sober senses, their real conditions of life.¹⁵

Such real conditions of life can perhaps be boiled down to one essential social fact: capitalism’s irrevocable dependency on the continual creation and ongoing expansion of humanity’s dispossessed. As Marx noted in an 1849 pamphlet, Wage-Labour and Capital, that had its origins in a series of lectures delivered to the German Workingmen’s Club of Brussels, the war for economic supremacy that characterized capitalism’s ongoing development was won less by recruiting than discharging the army of workers. The generals (the capitalists) vie with one another as to who can discharge the greatest number of industrial soldiers.¹⁶

An illustration showing the rich Capitalists oppressing the working class people. The working class, often poor, suffer constantly. Capitalism's grip on the working class is often described as Capitalism’s periodic crises.

Capitalism’s periodic crises.

Grip, November 3, 1883, J. W. Bengough.

Dispossession: The Nursery of Class Struggle

In hindsight, and with a historical appreciation of the longue durée of class formation, it is clear that Marx and Engels wrote at a specific juncture, preceded by the dissolution of feudal relations and followed by the consolidation of increasingly structured capitalist social relations, of which differentiated labour markets were an integral part. To be sure, Marxist analysis of class relations necessarily addresses value, extraction of surplus, and regimes of accumulation, but the prior (and always historically ongoing¹⁷) process on which all of this is premised is necessarily expropriation and, in the long term, the continuity of dispossession. Marx declares, in his discussion of simple reproduction and the relations of seigneurs and serfs, If one fine morning the lord appropriates to himself the land, the cattle, the seed, in a word, the means of production of this peasant, the latter will thenceforth be obliged to sell his labour power. In Chapter 25 of Capital, on the general law of capitalist accumulation, Marx criticized (but drew on) Sir Fredric Morton Eden’s book The State of the Poor: Or, an History of the Labouring Classes of England (1797). Against Eden’s view that those emerging capitalists who commanded the produce of industry owed their exemption from labour to civilization and order, Marx argued that

the reproduction of a mass of labour-power, which must incessantly re-incorporate itself with capital for that capital’s self-expansion; which cannot get free from capital, and whose enslavement to capital is only concealed by the variety of individual capitalists to whom it sells itself, this reproduction of labour-power forms, in fact, an essential of the reproduction of capital itself. Accumulation of capital is, therefore, increase of the proletariat.

Marx quoted the eighteenth-century satirist, philosopher, and political economist Bernard de Mandeville, who noted, It would be easier, where property is well secured, to live without money than without the poor; for who would do the work? Dispossession, then, is the basis of all proletarianization, which orders accumulation.¹⁸

This process was always disorderly: the old jostled with the new, layers of labour were structured into seemingly contradictory locales, with their designations running from the aristocratic (the black-coated worker) to the derogatory (the dangerous classes, the residuum).¹⁹ And complicating this chaotic making and remaking of class experience was the potent disruption of capitalism’s persistent underside: crisis. This ensured that class, once consolidated, was also always precarious.

Michael Denning, for instance, has recently suggested the necessity of radically reconceptualizing life under capitalism in ways that decentre wage labour and replace a fetishism of the wage and the employment contract with attention to dispossession and expropriation. Marx, after all, did not invent the term proletarian, but adapted it from its common usage in antiquity, when, within the Roman Empire, the word designated the uncertain social stratum, divorced from property and without regular access to wages, reproduced recklessly. J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi drew on this understanding in an 1819 work of political economy that chronicled the threat to public order posed by a miserable and suffering population, dependent as it was on public charity. Those who had no property, Sismondi wrote, "were called to have children: ad prolem generandum. Max Weber commented similarly: As early as the sixteenth century the proletarianising of the rural population created such an army of unemployed that England had to deal with the problem of poor relief. Three centuries later, across the Atlantic, transient common labourers were being described in a discourse seemingly impervious to change: a dangerous class, inadequately fed, clothed, and housed, they threaten the health of the community. Historically, then, it can be argued that unemployment precedes employment, and the informal economy precedes the formal . . . ‘proletarian’ is not a synonym for ‘wage labourer’ but for dispossession, expropriation, and radical dependence on the market. As Denning insists with a bluntness that is both insightful and myopic, You don’t need a job to be a proletarian . . . wageless life, not wage labour, is the starting point for understanding the free market."²⁰

For all that Denning stresses the fundamental importance of wagelessness, all the more so within a context of capitalism as crisis, his dichotomization of wageless life and waged labour substitutes subjective experience, as important as that may be, for objective assessment of how, under capitalism, dispossession, whatever its gradations, structures commonality as much as it accents division and differentiation. Denning thus nearsightedly clarifies the importance of dispossession while obscuring the extent to which this important foundational and ongoing reality of proletarianization is meaningless outside of the existence of the (often distant) wage as both an enduring if universally unpleasant end and a decisive means of survival within an economic order governed by the cash nexus. This reality frames the class resistance that invariably punctuates the social relations of capitalist political economy.

Capitalist Crises: Class Conflict from Above and Below

Toronto’s mobilizations of the wageless, as we will show, followed the contours of capitalist crises. Economic dislocations haunted the pre-Confederation period, with recessionary downturns in the 1830s and 1840s and a major depression of 1853–57 realigning the relations of production and exchange. Closing out the last decades of the century were the economic crises of 1873–77 and 1893–96. The business cycle dipped dramatically in panics that punctuated the pre–First World War years, and if the 1920s was stamped by oscillations in the rhythms of material life, the 1930s were associated with unambiguous collapse, marking an entire decade as the Great Depression.

Thereafter, for the better part of three decades, the establishment of the welfare state and governing authorities’ embrace of Keynesianism masked an always somewhat unstable economic order. The seeming calm of the 1945–75 period was broken less by protests of the out-of-work, although these did occur, than by youth revolt, antiwar mobilizations, and uprisings of radical nationalists in Quebec, wildcatting workers, women, and Aboriginal peoples–all associated with the tumultuous 1960s and the transition of a politics of disaffection into the 1970s.²¹ But with the fiscal crisis of Western capitalist states unfolding in the mid-1970s, the periodic crises of capitalism went into accelerated overdrive. Toronto, like Canada and much of the advanced capitalist world, experienced the debilitating impact of twinned stagnation/inflation over the course of the mid- to late 1970s and early 1980s, unleashing the hounds of state repression. War was declared against the organized working class; employers sought concessions in collective bargaining, while the state looked to legislation to curb the supposed wage-push that was declared responsible for rising prices and currency devaluation. Then, under the gathering storm clouds of a neoliberalism kick-started by the coming to power of the New Right–Reagan and Thatcher–a concerted assault on all counters to the unfettered dominance of the invisible hand of the marketplace targeted the power of the unions and the entitlements of the poor simultaneously. By the 1990s, metropolitan centres like Toronto were increasingly rocked by global economic crises that stalked the years 1990–2008 incessantly. Financial and currency markets were left reeling, stock markets riding wildly to new highs that were then countered with dramatic lows. This paved the way to the subprime mortgage meltdown of 2007–8.²²

The response of Toronto’s poor and out-of-work was not always decisive, but it was persistently present. Unfolding weakly in the nineteenth century, albeit often in reciprocal relation to the better known and more adequately charted resistance of the waged working class, the force and conviction of the wageless strengthened throughout the depressions of the 1850s, 1870s and 1890s, and was bolstered by the working-class mobilization of the 1880s known as the Great Upheaval and associated with the Knights of Labor.²³ By the opening decades of the twentieth century, with the leadership of the waged working class consolidated in conservative trade unionism,²⁴ the struggles of the out-of-work began to be led by the revolutionary left. In the 1930s, as capitalist crisis registered in ways more dramatic than ever before, the leadership of the unemployed was not quite a monopoly of the left, but the decisive role of Communists in the agitations of the out-of-work was increasingly obvious. That influence was broken with the Cold War. As anticommunism permeated the unions in the late 1940s and 1950s, this reactionary turn drove many on the revolutionary left into retreat. It severed, in some ways, future struggles of the unemployed from the organic connection to radicalism that had developed out of the first left-led mobilizations of the jobless in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, and that deepened with the developments of the pre– and post–First World War years, the 1920s, and the 1930s.²⁵

Put on relative hold by the limited welfare state that was, in part, a response to the militant protests of 1930s Canada, and channelled into state-orchestrated inquiries and funding initiatives for youth, anti-poverty protest in the years 1945–75 was simmering but less than scorching. A relatively effective welfare state lid clamped down on much of the potential rebellion, containing somewhat the discontents of the dispossessed.²⁶ But stopgap measures and the limited programs of the Just Society could not be sustained over the long haul, especially as capitalism lurched from crisis to crisis after 1975. Capital, realizing that it was now locked in a war with the dispossessed, barred its teeth and dug in its heels; the state snapped to coercive attention. Class struggle’s capacity to wrestle meaningful concessions and appropriate a part of the surplus extracted from the hide of exploited labour weakened dramatically as the terms of trade in the war between capital and labour, always mediated by the state, shifted. The routine tempo of class struggle, registering in advances that saw the percentage of the non-agricultural workforce organized in unions climb to 35–40 percent in Canada and the United States, slowed to a climacteric. Union density plummeted, dropping to below 11 percent in the United States and falling to around 27 percent in Canada, where highly organized public sector workers such as teachers and government clerks skewed the statistics. Among Canadian private sector workers the percentage of the workforce organized in unions declined to less than 14 percent. The confidence of working-class combatants waned as the advantage was seized by capital which, in the post-1975 years, utilized deepening and ongoing crises to discipline not only labour, but all dissident forces, drawing on the myriad powers of the state and unleashing an ideological assault of unprecedented vigour.²⁷

Signs of strain were evident by the early 1980s, especially in British Columbia. A Solidarity movement brought the grievances of organized labour as well as the poor and a wide array of social movements together in a massive six-month campaign of resistance that, were it not for a tepid trade union officialdom, threatened to erupt in a province-wide general strike.²⁸ By the 1990s, with economic instability intensifying and the ideological climate no longer one of appeasement, but of attack and cutbacks to all manner of social programs and entitlements, the ranks of the wageless grew, the insecurities of the waged multiplied, and even an NDP government that came to power in Ontario with Bob Rae at its head in 1990 could not step down from the restraint bandwagon. It came under forceful attack from the very trade unions that social democracy had long considered its political friends.²⁹ With the subsequent rise to power of the Mike Harris Conservatives, with their Common Sense Revolution, composed of dismantling the public sector, waging war on the unions, and adhering to nineteenth-century notions of labour tests (now called work fare), there was no corner in which the poor, the out-ofwork, and the homeless might find refuge. Toronto became a site of the return and revenge of the dispossessed, organized as a fighting contingent by a militant band of committed activists known as the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty.

Toronto: A Locale within the Global

What happened in Toronto locally was unfolding internationally. In the global South, where rates of unionization were less the measure of proletarian well-being than the absolute immiseration of the dispossessed, the International Monetary Fund and other powerful agencies of deregulatory expropriation enforced programs of de-peasantization. These initiatives quickened the flow of surplus rural labour to urban slums. The formal economy of waged employment was contracting at the same time as populations of the poor were expanding.³⁰ Processes such as this drove the engine of dispossession to the point that one billion of the world’s people existed in dire poverty, surviving on less than $1.25 daily, while a further two billion found themselves classified in the ranks of the moderately poor, where sustenance could be calculated as costing $2.50 a day. Informal economies, black markets, and a Dickensian underworld of employments were now central to capitalist globalization.³¹

As John Bellamy Foster, Robert W. McChesney, and R. Jamil Jonna have suggested in the pages of Monthly Review, Marx’s way of seeing class can now be appreciated for being ahead of its time. For Marx anticipated how modern imperialism and the relentless march of capital accumulation on a world scale would result in the quantitative expansion and qualitative transformation of the global reserve army of labour. The International Labor Organization (ILO) has recently estimated that this sector is now larger than the approximately 1.4 billion workers who are totally dependent on wage labor. An astronomical 1.7 billion workers can currently be classified as vulnerably employed. A significant component of this rising reserve is undoubtedly wageless, members of marginal domestic economies eking out material being through unpaid labours, scavenging, and other illicit endeavours of the kind associated with life in the favelas, barrios, and shanty towns of the developing world. This sector knows little of the securities of the wage, which is usually unavailable or is accessed only intermittently, in sporadic, but always finite, clusterings of paid employment. For precarious workers such as these, subsistence rests as much on the trappings of petty entrepreneurialism of the self-exploiting penny capitalist kind as it does on classical waged employment. Mike Davis insists that what he calls the global informal working class, a socioeconomic stratum that he sees overlapping with but non-identical to the slum population, now surpasses one billion in number, its ranks expanding in an unprecedented frenzy of class formation. What all of this suggests is that in any analytic grappling with the historical record of workers and ongoing, accelerating capitalist crises, it is mandatory to see proletarianization whole. As Denning’s excursion into wagelessness and Davis’s slummification of the planet suggest, it is imperative not to centre our studies of labour in the logic of capital’s determinations, in which the working class can be validated only to the extent that it is waged.³²

As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, a developing ideological hegemony reinforced and deepened material trends.³³ The implosion of the Soviet Union and the profound crisis sweeping through the locales of actually existing socialism from China to Cuba either culminated in or threatened capitalist restoration. A generalized demoralization of the revolutionary left and its organizations that had been ongoing in the capitalist West for decades meant that capital and the state faced an opposition as weak and incoherent as at any point since at least the 1880s. All of this left global capitalism crisis-ridden, the logic of its own contradictions intensifying, but not in crisis, in the sense that alternatives and challenges were seemingly in retreat. Relatively secure, global capital consolidated a political economy that crowned a triumphant post–Cold War American empire.³⁴

The hegemony of neoliberal thought and its incomplete, but nonetheless significant, penetration of the consciousness of workers and their institutions combined with the declining capacity of labour to resist not only direct attacks but also devastating and destructive incursions on areas long held to be bastions of class distinction. This has heightened the sense that class is being remade in ways that undermine the possibilities of working-class strength. Proletarianization is accelerating, but in ways that often obfuscate understandings of collective class experience. Expropriation in the developing world marches forward in seven-league boots, while the uneven and combined nature of capitalist development elsewhere culminates in social relations of production in which precariousness is an increasingly common component of class formation in the modern world.³⁵ In Portugal and Spain, the marginally, casually, and insecurely employed are an expanding and increasingly significant percentage of the working class (upward of 40 percent), exhibiting organizational initiatives (such as the formation of the Precári@s Inflexíveis Movement) that reflect this reality.³⁶

Expectations of job security have been eroded as a new principle of lean marketplaces; the young are bombarded with axioms that have taken root in the consciousness surrounding work and its possibilities. The message is unambiguously one of destabilization: jobs are not permanent, and labour, like life itself, is not structured around entitlements. Just how much all of this is truly new remains open for discussion, but the perception that the machinery of class has been broken apart into distinct components, with crucial new elements ostensibly added to the debris, is widespread. Class coherence has thus been dealt a series of harsh blows, and the dispossessed, many of whom are young people, have been force-fed an ideological diet fattening the individuated labour market. Acquisitive individualism in the capitalist West is the logical antidote to the collectivism of class, while in the developing world the Fanonesque wretched of the earth express the solidarities of the dispossessed in acts of desperation. Mike Davis concludes his discussion of the world’s urban poor with a poignant summary of what he calls a sinister and unceasing duet:

Night after night, hornetlike helicopter gunships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of slum districts, pouring hellfire into shanties or fleeting cars. Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions. If the empire