“Power concedes nothing without a demand,” abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass declared 161 years ago. Last week saw that truth on broad display as Amazon, facing growing political and organizing pressure, announced it was setting a minimum wage of $15/hour for its U.S. workforce and also raising wages in England. The company’s declaration followed months of … Keep reading »

Episode 7: Canada is in the midst of an opioid overdose epidemic. In 2016 there were 3,005 opioid-related deaths in Canada. In 2017 the figure jumped to 3,996. Listen to audio »

In August this year, the acclaimed socialist writer and activist Samir Amin (1931-2018) passed away. Born in Egypt and educated in Port Said and Paris, he eventually settled as director of the Third World Forum in Dakar, Senegal from 1980. Samir was author of numerous books including his well-known Accumulation on a World Scale (1970), … Keep reading »

The decision in Yaiguaje v. Chevron Corporation by the Ontario Court of Appeal denied justice owed to some 30,000 Ecuadorian people grievously harmed by profiteering oil companies. The story is an example of how the routine application of formality in law, accompanied by the pulverization of the dispute’s setting, is designed to benefit the truly … Keep reading »

Radical Alternatives for the City Election As the Doug Ford Conservatives unpack their agenda, towns and cities across Ontario are getting ready for the October municipal elections. In Toronto, much of the early public debate leading up to the elections has been narrow and dominated by the Tories’ Bill 5, which proposes to cut in half … Watch video »

British Labour Party’s shadow chancellor and close Corbyn ally, John McDonnell, sets out a vision that breaks with the old bureaucratic state model. Keep reading »

Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell MP has unveiled Labour’s plans for a new, publicly-owned water system, run by local councils, workers and customers and for “unprecedented openness and transparency” in how the industry will be managed. Building on Labour’s manifesto commitment to bring key utilities back into public ownership, for the first time McDonnell has outlined … Keep reading »

In early 2017, it was revealed that eight men owned as much wealth as half the world’s population (Oxfam 2017). This is in a world where, according to the most conservative figures, around one in three workers live in poverty. More realistic calculations show that the majority of the world’s population suffers from poverty of … Keep reading »

Authoritarian neoliberalism, the advance of the far right, and dilemmas for the Left More than a decade after the global financial meltdown, Europe is in the midst of a series of crises that is even difficult to enumerate: the rise of far right and fascist forces; the inequalities and welfare state cuts from unending austerity; … Watch video »

Sunday’s election in Sweden shows how the decline of robust social-democratic guarantees can feed the rise of the far right. Keep reading »

Episode 5: Expressing solidarity with Palestine and criticizing the state of Israel can be a challenge. To explore this challenge, we talk to William Robinson about his recent book We Will Not be Silenced. Listen to audio »

More then 50 people of all ages joined in Toronto August 2, 2018, in an international day of remembrance and recognition of the Romani Holocaust (Porajmos) in Europe. They heard Arif Virani, federal member of parliament for Toronto Parkdale-High Park, read a statement issued that day by Justin Trudeau’s government which said, in part: “On … Keep reading »