Socialist Project

Social / Website Launch
2018-02-03 19:00 - 23:00 (America/Toronto) | Dooney’s, 866 Bloor St W, Toronto, ON, M6G 1M5, Canada
The Socialist Project is throwing a social to celebrate the launch of its beautiful new website and the shiny new OCAP pamphlet Basic Income In The Neoliberal Age.
Please come out to Dooney’s on Saturday February 3rd, have fun, and bring anyone who likes to talk politics and have a good time!

The Capitalism Workshop: Rethinking Contemporary Anti-Capitalism
2017-09-20 18:30 - 21:00 | Ontario
Uneven and combined development remains crucial for understanding the continued widening and deepening of capitalism. However, the nature of the heterogeneous and uneven development of contemporary capitalism, especially since the 1970s, makes problematic the characterization of capitalist totality, as a coherent stage and as a singular, albeit uneven, combination. This complicates the successful pursuit of anti-capitalism, which now requires varied but interrelated responses at all scales and involving a range of approaches, from local community activism and non-capitalist alternatives to mass Leninist-inspired parties and an international socialist movement. Thus, a far more uneven anti-capitalism is appropriate; and a single, overarching anti-capitalist process such as Permanent Revolution may not be the only or way forward. This is not an argument for a post-Marxist horizontal heterogeneity; but rather an exploration of the reasons and possibilities for a dialectical anti-capitalism, where beneficial encounters occur across the arc of anti-capitalism, within which proletariat mobilization remains a central component. Such confluence offers one starting point for contending with the perennial duality of reform and revolution, manifest today in the either/or of an anti-capitalism of total revolution and an agonistic, fractional post-Marxist politics working to reduce oppression and hardship within capitalism.
Robert Latham is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at York University. His research includes political economy, critical theory, the politics of new media, and trans-national politics. Latham recently co-organized the “Augmenting the Left” symposium and his most recent book is The Politics of Evasion: A Post-Globalization Dialogue Along the Edge of the State.
RSVP to attend: thecapitalismworkshop@gmail.com
thecapitalismworkshop.com

Art vs Alt: How We Challenge the Right
2017-05-27 08:00 - 17:00 | Steelworkers Hall, 25 Cecil, Toronto, Ontario, M5T 1N1, Canada
Art vs Alt is a day of conversations and a platform for presentations of work by concerned artists, a day to come together to work out how to collectively confront the dramatic rise of the right.
The conference is open to anyone interested in the culture and politics of the left. Discussions and plenaries on subjects chosen by participants will be held throughout the day. Artists are also invited to give a 3-minute presentation of their work during four half-hour segments scheduled throughout the afternoon. Come and participate in the presentations and the conversation.
Organized by Cultural Committee of the Socialist Project | www.eventbrite.ca | www.evensi.ca | PDF poster

FilmSocial: Poverty and the Welfare State, Then and Now
2017-03-23 19:00 - 22:00 | Ontario
Ken Loach’s award winning newest film I, Daniel Blake (2016), brilliantly exposes the discipline, humiliation and frustration which people who rely on welfare benefits are subjected to in contemporary Britain. To coincide with its Toronto release, we are showing Cathy Come Home (1966), Loach’s first great film on this subject, made exactly 50 years earlier.
Cathy Come Home is the story of Cathy, a working class woman who loses her home, husband and her child as result of an inflexible British welfare state. Ken Loach’s hard hitting realist drama takes on the social problems of poverty and homelessness in mid-sixties London. At the time of its launch, one critic described the film as “an ice-pick in the brain of all who saw it.”
Half a century on, poverty and homelessness persist in cities all over the world. These problems are acute in Toronto, the “inequality capital of Canada.” Campaigns against regressive government policies that adversely affect the working poor and homeless are urgent and growing.
What does Cathy Come Home tell us about capitalism, poverty and the welfare state, back then, and now?
Discussant: John Clarke, from the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP)
