Rising Up: The Fight for Living Wage Work in Canada edited by Bryan Evans, Carlo Fanelli, and Tom McDowell (UBC Press), shows how living wage movements have transformed, or are campaigning to transform, labour policy in Canada and stimulated broader public debate about income and social inequality. Canada has one of the highest rates of … Keep reading »
The past four decades have seen a tremendous transformation in how we clothe ourselves. The way clothes are produced, traded and sold today around the world reflects many of the problems today’s capitalism poses to the working classes, with deleterious consequences for the environment as well. Global supply chains, in which non-finished goods flow back and forth around the world so that brands and retailers can increase their profits, dominate the landscape of this industry.
Writing in the 2021 Socialist Register, Sean Sweeney and John Treat call for a major shift in transport policy: a break from the model of development centered on private personal vehicles to one that places mass public transport at the center of future passenger mobility. The current approach – reliance on incentives and assurances to … Keep reading »
Covid-19 has exposed too many weaknesses in the neoliberal capitalist system to count, especially when it comes to the most vulnerable. For 10 years our international, interdisciplinary research team has been documenting the profound weaknesses in nursing home care within Canada, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the UK, and the US. Many of the current deficits in … Keep reading »
Unlike earlier experiences, with Covid-19 we see an emergence of the whole world as a stage where the drama unfolds. This is, of course, due to the technological shrinkage of time and space in our age – now, microbes take flight. But the spectacular similitude of crises and responses at this level demonstrates how social … Keep reading »
From Production for Profit to Provision for Need Perhaps the greatest flaw revealed by the Covid-19 crisis is capitalism’s addiction to profit. The main goal of capitalist production is the maximization of profit; the satisfaction of needs is only a by-product in the endless process of accumulation. This means that the economy cannot simply pause … Keep reading »
Community Restaurants: Decommodifying Food as Socialist Strategy with Benjamin Selwyn The outbreak of Covid-19 has exacerbated many of the system’s worst aspects. In the UK, the birthplace of free wage-labor based capitalist agriculture, the pandemic has exacerbated existing food inequities. The pandemic has stimulated discussions about how to remedy the world’s corporate-dominated food system. The … Keep reading »
What will Covid-19 mean for humanity’s future? And how can we relate our understanding of that pattern to the national communities in which we live? Join us as world-renowned scholars, journalists, and activists address these questions. May 13, 2021, 7pm: Mike Davis, co-author of Set the Night on Fire. Zoom meeting ID: 937 3986 0877.
A night with poetry, music and songs by 5 poets, 4 composers and 2 singers with former Canadian Poet Laureate and wide audience!
A presentation and roundtable discussion on class struggle and union organizing at Amazon warehouses with Alessandro Delfanti and Amazon workers and organizers Ira and Fathia. A central political challenge for the Left today is to organize gig workers across the sectors of digital capitalism into unions. High-tech corporations such as Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook … Keep reading »