February 2021
Socialists on Social Media Platforms and Imagine Platform Socialism
Bertolt Brecht, in the 1932 essay ‘The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication’, made a ‘positive suggestion’ to transform radio into a dialogical medium for many-to-many communications. ‘Radio is one-sided when it should be two’ said Brecht. Brecht saw the state as the only entity capable of remaking radio in this way, but because radio’s ‘proper application’ might make it a ‘revolutionary’ medium, Brecht concluded the bourgeois state would have ‘no interest in sponsoring such exercises’. Presentations by Tanner Mirrlees and Derek Hrynyshyn.
Find out more »Interpretation Machines /w Larry Lohmann: Contradictions of “Artificial Intelligence” in 21st Century Capitalism
Since the nineteenth century, left movements have sought footholds among the ever-renewing contradictions of capitalist industrial mechanization and its relation to work and energy. These experiments, begun by Marx, remain fragmentary and contested. Yet the crises that twenty-first century digital mechanization presents and exacerbates may shed new light on this longer history of automation even as they confront the left with fresh puzzles.
Find out more »Remembering Leo Panitch
Leo Panitch was a Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science at York University, a renowned political economist, Marxist theorist and editor of the Socialist Register since 1985.
Find out more »Socialist Register 21: Beyond Digital Capitalism
Join us on Wednesday February 10th for the launch of Socialist Register 21: Beyond Digital Capitalism (Merlin Press, 2020), with presentations by Greg Albo, Sam Gindin, Bryan Palmer, Joan Sangster, Stephen Maher, Pat Armstrong, Hugh Armstrong, Tanner Mirrlees, and Derek Hrynyshyn.
Find out more »The Time of Our Lives /w Bryan Palmer
Reflections on Work and Capitalist Temporality with author Bryan D. Palmer For socialists time and its meaning and organization have always been a central concern, if only because capitalism has placed such a premium on controlling time and subordinating it to its imperatives. At the current conjuncture, time has become the challenge for socialists to address, not only because it defines what does and does not constitute the working day, but because it is increasingly obvious that time and its…
Find out more »January 2021
Reaping the Whirlwind /w Ursula Huws
First session of Socialist Register 2021: Beyond Digital Capitalism: New Ways of Living An introduction to this year’s book with Greg Albo & Stephen Maher (in memory of Leo Panitch). Followed by “Reaping the Whirlwind: Digitalization, Restructuring, and Mobilization in the Covid Crisis.” Ursula Huws’ essay addresses the changes sweeping through global labor markets during the coronavirus pandemic, looking in particular at the concentration of capital and expansion of market share by global corporations, bringing with it the digital management…
Find out more »A Tribute to Leo Panitch, 1945-2020
Progressives lost one of our leading lights last month. Leo Panitch died December 19 in a Toronto hospital where he was being treated for cancer. His prognosis was good, however he contacted Covid-19 and died in a few days from a fulminating pneumonia. He is sorely missed on both sides of the Atlantic. A man with an amazing generosity of spirit, he was a pillar of the international left. The Center for Global Justice pays tribute to Leo Panitch by…
Find out more »Transforming Brown to Green
Environmental Organizing in Toronto in the 1970s An evening to look back at the environmental issues and organizing that took place in working class communities. Join our Zoom meeting.
Find out more »An Army Like No Other
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) was established in 1948 by David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, who believed that “the whole nation is the army.” In his mind, the IDF was to be an army like no other. It was the instrument that might transform a diverse population into a new people. In an insightful new history of the IDF, An Army Like No Other: How the Israel Defense Forces Made a Nation, Israeli author Haim Bresheeth-Zabner argues that the…
Find out more »December 2020
Lower Fares, More Service! Public Transit Struggles In and After the Pandemic
A second wave of the pandemic is raging across the country, and Toronto and other cities are again in lockdown. Austerity for social provisioning including public transit is high on the agenda for city governments across North America. In Toronto, both the city government and the Toronto Transit Commission are juggling much needed public transit expansion with budgetary restraints. We are at a crucial turning point for the public transit and ecology movements. What is the current state of the public…
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