Socialist Project

Winter Social
2019-12-08 16:30 - 19:00 (America/Toronto) | East of Brunswick Pub and Kitchen, 720 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, Canada
Join friends and old, new and emerging comrades for some winter social and cheer!

Protest for Green Jobs in Oshawa
2019-12-18 10:30 - 13:30 | GM Oshawa, Park Rd South and Malaga Rd, Oshawa, Ontario, L1J 4K1, Canada
We Build it, We Own It: Stand With Communities, Not Corporations!
We’re excited to announce that on December 18 we will be holding an event outside the (soon to be former) GM Oshawa facility. We’re going to show GM and the Government that Oshawa needs publicly owned electric vehicle production, NOT profit driven plant closures. But we need supporters of good, unionized green jobs like you to do it!
For all those interested in joining us on Wednesday, please let us know ASAP by contacting us at greenjobsto@gmail.com
If you are coming from Toronto and need a ride, or if you can provide a ride, please let us know. We will do our very best to ensure everyone who would like to attend has the ability to.
Looking forward to seeing many of you on Wednesday.
Take the plant, save the planet!
For those traveling from Toronto, here’s a link with instructions from Union Station. From Union Station take the 9:03 Lakeshore East train to Oshawa GO Station. From Oshawa GO take the Durham Transit 403 but to Malaga Road at Park Road South or take a taxi to the intersection of Malaga and Park Road South.

Book Launch: Socialist Register 2020: Beyond Market Dystopia, New Ways of Living
2020-01-22 19:30 - 22:00 | Lula Lounge, 1585 Dundas St West, Toronto, ON, M6K 1T9, Canada
We warmly welcome you to join us for the Toronto book launch of Socialist Register 2020 – Beyond Market Dystopia: New Ways of Living (edited by Leo Panitch and Greg Albo).
Connecting with and going beyond classical socialist themes, this volume of the Socialist Register combines analysis of the severe contradictions of neoliberal capitalism with plans for new strategic, programmatic, manifesto-oriented directions for alternative ways of living. Fourteen original essays locate such utopian visions and struggles in the dystopian present.
Doors open for food and drink at 6:30pm, and presentations begin at 7:30pm, with:
Amy Bartholomew: Beyond the ‘barbed-wire labyrinth’: migrant spaces of radical democracy
Michelle Chen: A new world of workers: confronting the gig economy
Stephen Maher and Sam Gindin: Class politics, socialist policies, capitalist constraints
Chaired by Leo Panitch and Greg Albo.
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*** Please note that dinner reservations guarantee seating, so book early and enjoy the show while exploring Lula’s delicious tropical fusion dinner and cocktail menus as well as their wine and beer offerings.
Visit: calendar.lula.ca or call 416-588-0307 to reserve.
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The Socialist Register has been the intellectual lodestar for the international left since 1964.
—Mike Davis
I know the Register very well and have found it extremely stimulating, often invaluable.
—Noam Chomsky

RedNights presents: Socialist Feminist Cabaret 2020
2020-02-29 13:00 - 15:30 | The Supermarket, 268 Augusta Avenue (Kensington Market), Toronto, Canada
Join us for a leap year night of live music and video!
With:
Lillian Allen
The Rise Up Feminist Jazz Band
Honey Novick in tribute to Sophie Tucker
Songs of Chilean resistance with Ernesto J. Espinoza, Oriana Barbato, & Pablo Gutiérrez
Catherine Phillips
Kate Kitchen
Thirza Cuthand’s “Woman Dress”
Complete lists of RedNights events

Book launch: Challenging the Right, Augmenting the Left
2020-08-13 19:00 - 21:00 | Ontario
2020 has seen an amplified struggle against the right and capitalism generally. This volume suggests it is essential to rethink longstanding assumptions, jettison wishful thinking and dated ideas, and recover wisdom from the past. The authors of Challenging the Right, Augmenting the Left put forward a range of approaches to help strategize the work that awaits the left in the 2020s.
Working within five major thematic areas, the contributors examine how to engage working class people in anti-capitalist struggles, oppose ethno-nationalism, build power inside and outside the state apparatus, find new strategies of environmental resistance, and promote solidarity and ecological responsibility. This book provides suggestions for working with popular disaffection by taking the left’s history of refusals and defeats as a starting point for next steps in the struggle against capitalism and the far right, rather than as the basis for more conflict or defeatism.
Brief presentations will be delivered by Niko Block, Gary Kinsman, Elise Thorburn, Sabrina Fernandes, David Ravensbergen, and Robert Latham.
Follow this link to join the event: ryerson.zoom.us

Pension fund capitalism and the campaign to “Make Revera Public”
2020-10-04 13:30 - 15:00 | Ontario
We welcome you to join us for Pension fund capitalism and the campaign to “Make Revera Public,” a public talk by Kevin Skerrett, co-editor of The Contradictions of Pension Fund Capitalism (Cornell University Press, 2018), Senior Research Officer assigned to pensions for CUPE, and a visiting professor at Carleton University’s Institute of Political Economy.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed some of the damage wreaked by neoliberalism to a harsh new light. The erosion of workers’ rights to basic safety and livable wages, the particular exploitation of women, racialized and migrant workers in our health care system, and the destructive effects of for-profit corporate management of long-term care, have all combined to make a serious public health crisis into something far more deadly than it should have been. In this context, there is an especially bitter irony in the fact that one of the largest profiteers to benefit from these trends, the corporate long-term care company Revera, is 100% owned by the pension fund that manages the investment of federal government employee pensions (known as PSP). However, as awareness of this ownership relation became public amidst the spiking death rates in Revera managed homes in May, the president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) issued a public call for the ownership of Revera to be “transferred into public hands”. Since that time, a growing number of public health advocates and trade unions have launched campaigns to transform all of the for-profit operations in the country’s long-term care system into properly funded and publicly managed facilities. Under a democratically accountable and public system, we could ensure that the workers are compensated in line with the importance and value of the care work they perform, and the residents can live their lives with dignity.
Join us for a discussion of these vital campaigns, and the positive opportunities that the COVID-19 pandemic may have opened up. Also, to learn more about the Ontario Health Coalition’s Day of Action, click here.
This is a free public event on ZOOM. click here to access ZOOM room at 1:25pm).
Bio: Kevin Skerrett is a Senior Research Officer assigned to pensions for CUPE, currently on a leave and teaching at Carleton University’s Institute of Political Economy. He was a co-editor of the Cornell University Press volume The Contradictions of Pension Fund Capitalism (2018), and the author of numerous articles, including this, this and this in The Bullet online magazine.

Pension Fund Capitalism and the Covid-19 Pandemic in Canada: A Socialist Perspective
2020-11-18 19:00 - 21:00 | Ontario
The devastating social and economic impacts of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in Canada have been felt widely. But the key statistic of the death rate has been heavily concentrated: over 80% of the deaths from COVID-19 have taken place in Long-Term Care of various types.
How did Long-Term Care – a vital component of the healthcare system – become so privatized, within a system that is so widely and proudly viewed as public?
This talk will examine the class politics of pension fund investment into for-profit Long-Term Care as a disturbing example of the commodification of social reproduction.
Kevin Skerrett is currently serving as a Fall 2020 Visiting Professor at the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University. He was a co-editor of the Cornell University Press volume The Contradictions of Pension Fund Capitalism (2018). He is on leave from his work as a Senior Research Officer assigned to pensions at CUPE, the Canadian Union of Public Employees.
Stephanie Ross, Director, School of Labour Studies, McMaster University, is chairing the seminar. The talk will be followed by a Q&A period.
Register on zoom.
Organizer: Institute of Political Economy, MA in Political Economy and Diploma in Work and Labour.

UK Launch of The Socialist Register 2021: Beyond Digital Capitalism
2020-11-28 11:00 - 12:30 | Ontario
As digital technology became integral to the capitalist market dystopia of the first decades of the 21st century, it not only refashioned our ways of communicating but of working and consuming, indeed ways of living. Even as the COVID-19 pandemic revealed not only the lack of investment, planning and preparation that underlay the scandalous slowness of the responses by states around the world, but also grotesque class and racial inequalities as it coursed its way through the population, the owners of high-tech corporations were enriched by tens of billions of dollars. Rejecting both technological determinism and facile ‘cyber-utopian’ thinking, the 57th annual volume of the Socialist Register addresses how to imagine, struggle for, and plan for, new democratic socialist ways of living after the pandemic.
Panelists:

Introductions: Hilary Wainwright (@hilarypepper) and Leo Panitch

UK essay contributors:

Grace Blakeley (@graceblakeley) ‘The big tech monopolies and the state’
Ursula Huws (@Ursulahuws) ‘Reaping the whirlwind: Digitalization, restructuring & mobilization in the Covid crisis’
Matthew Cole (@matthewacole) & Charles Umney (@CharlesUmney) ‘The political economy of datafication and work’
Benjamin Selwyn ‘Community restaurants: Decommodifying food as socialist strategy’
Massimiliano Mollona ‘Working class cinema in the age of digital capitalism’

Discussants:

Marzena Zukowska (@MarzenaZukowska), Red Pepper and Radical Communicators Network
John McDonnell (@johnmcdonnellMP), Labour MP, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer 2015-2020

A Tribute to Leo Panitch, 1945-2020
2021-01-25 14:00 - 16:00 | Ontario
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 rebroadcasting a webinar he did with us in July on “Capitalism, Socialism and the Pandemic.” We are joined in this tribute by Leo’s friend and collaborator Greg Albo and Dennis Pilon, a colleague at York, and former student of Leo.
For more than a quarter of a century, Leo Panitch was editor of one of the most important journals of Marxist thought in the world: the Socialist Register. This yearbook, in which Leo wrote significant essays, was on the cutting edge of Left thought. For him, the only way out of capitalism was by building on social democracy. Born to a Winnipeg working class family, he held firmly to the centrality of the working class if the socialist project was to have any future. Nevertheless he was deeply aware of the conservatizing trend within social-democratic parties, the increasing distance from the working class, and the impending disaster from the managerial takeover. His last book Searching for Socialism: The project of the Labour New Left from Benn to Corbyn was written with Colin Leys.

Socialist Register 21: Beyond Digital Capitalism
2021-02-10 19:00 - 20:30 | Ontario
Join us on Wednesday February 10th for the launch of Socialist Register 21: Beyond Digital Capitalism (Fernwood Press, 2020), with presentations by Greg Albo, Sam Gindin, Bryan Palmer, Joan Sangster, Stephen Maher, Pat Armstrong, Hugh Armstrong, Tanner Mirrlees, and Derek Hrynyshyn.
In memory of Leo Panitch, 1945-2020.
As digital technology became integral to the capitalist market dystopia of the first decades of the 21st century, it not only refashioned our ways of communicating but of working and consuming, indeed ways of living. The Covid-19 pandemic revealed not only the lack of investment, planning and preparation that underlay the scandalous slowness of the responses by states around the world, but also grotesque class and racial inequalities as it coursed its way through the population and the owners of high-tech corporations were enriched by tens of billions of dollars. Rejecting both technological determinism and facile ‘cyber-utopian’ thinking, the 57th annual volume of the Socialist Register addresses how to imagine, struggle for, and plan for, new democratic socialist ways of living after the pandemic.
For a 20% discount, purchase your copy of the volume from York University’s bookstore with this link.
The event will be on ZOOM: please get your free Eventbrite ticket by clicking here to register.
Check out the Facebook page for the event here.
Tickets available Friday January 15, 12pm.

Remembering Leo Panitch
2021-02-12 08:30 - 11:00 | Ontario
Global Left, Marxism and Democratic Socialism
Speakers:

Sam Gindin, Ingar Solty, Ana Garcia, Patrick Bond, Dinga Sikwebu, and Vishwas Satgar.

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. He is the author of numerous articles and books including The End of Parliamentary Socialism, Working Class Politics in Crisis, and Renewing Socialism.
Organized by Co-operative and Policy Alternative Centre, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Socialists on Social Media Platforms and Imagine Platform Socialism
2021-02-23 18:00 - 20:00 | Ontario
Communicating within and Against Digital Capitalism
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’.
Brecht’s ‘positive suggestion’ for a many-to-many communications system seems to have come to fruition with the internet, and more recently, with the spread of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Socialists around the world are now using these platforms to produce, distribute, exhibit, and consume socialist media and cultural works, and they are openly building events, movements, and organizations within digital capitalism, to go beyond it. That said, the internet and social media platforms are surrounded by all kinds of deterministic, optimistic, and pessimistic rhetorics that cloud a clear view of what they give to and take from socialist communicators, especially as compared to the twentieth century’s mass media industries, whose state and corporate owners tended to filter out and vilify socialist ideas.
Tanner Mirrlees is Associate Professor of Communication and Digital Media Studies at Ontario Tech University
Imagine Platform Socialism
Investigations have demonstrated the ways that the operations of the algorithmic processes that select and sort information for users of YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter not only distribute such malicious content, but also amplify its effects. In order to hold the attention of users, platforms tend to recommend increasingly controversial and sensationalist suggestions, leading users quickly into rabbit holes of conspiracy theories and extremist views that undermine attempts at informed and reasoned debate. Other studies showed that Google’s search engine was capable of exhibiting serious racist bias, and that the platforms’ attempts to limit access to hate speech and misinformation were of limited effectiveness.
At the same time, the monopolistic digital platforms are undeniably of great use to activists working for a more democratic world, including socialists. The events that triggered US President Trump’s demands for stricter platform regulation were part of a mobilization of dissent that came to be known by its Twitter hashtag, ‘Black Lives Matter’, and numerous other examples could be found of activists raising awareness in ways that would not be possible with mass media. Social media empowers individuals to participate in the distribution of their own ideas, although this empowerment is limited by the mediation of the flow of information by the owners of the platforms in ways that can have direct effects on how mobilizations are informed.
This makes it all the more necessary to explore the contradictions between our expectations of social media and the reality of its use, and determine if there are ways to avoid the harms done to democracy while preserving the benefits. The purpose of this presentation is to inquire whether and how social media could be organized more democratically, so that they allow our expressive capacities to be developed freely and not under conditions determined by capital.
Derek Hrynyshyn teaches in the Department of Communication Studies at York University in Toronto, Ontario.
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Take the Plant, Save the Planet: Workers and Communities in the Struggle for Economic Conversion
2021-02-28 15:00 - 17:00 | Ontario
Please join us for a discussion of the politics of plant conversion for an ecologically sustainable future.
The current pandemic crisis has dramatically exposed the need for a massive shift of new resources into the caring sector and the production of medical equipment to meet social needs. But even before the fallout for workers in many sectors from the ecological disruptions already being felt from global warming had already indicated the need for a comprehensive approach to industrial conversion. Several sectors immediately stand out in demanding an approach that goes well beyond a ‘just transition’ in moving workers from one job to another. There is a need for a more radical reworking of these sectors – transportation, military arms and fossil fuels, with the factories, facilities and workers steadily re-deployed to alternate socially responsible production. Ecological strategies focusing on conversion will be particularly promising in terms of their potential to actively engage working people by offering them a response to economic restructuring that emphasizes retaining our productive capacity. We need to think through the way unions, labour councils and communities can take the lead in campaigns for forming workplace conversion committees and regional technology and environmental hubs. We need to insist, as workers and as communities, that productive assets should not be abandoned at the will of the corporations, or simply accept what is being produced now no matter how destructive the good being produced.

Francesca Hannan is an active member of We Are Oshawa, Green Jobs Oshawa, and the Durham Food Policy Council. She has been involved in climate justice activism with Toronto-based groups, and her professional background is in environmental policy and law.
Stephen Buhler is an organizer with Climate Justice Edmonton and a full-time journeyman machinist currently working in the oil and gas sector.
Simon Black teaches in the Department of Labour Studies at Brock University and is an organizer with Labour Against the Arms Trade.

The event will be on ZOOM: please click here to join the meeting.
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The Big Tech Monopolies and the State /w Grace Blakeley
2021-03-14 14:00 - 17:00 | Ontario
As the effects of the coronavirus pandemic swept through the global economy, the average observer could have been forgiven for missing a critical piece of news: by May 2020, the combined market capitalization of the four largest US tech companies reached one fifth of the entire S&P 500. Four companies – Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Facebook – now account for 20 per cent of the combined value of the 500 largest US corporations – an unparalleled level of market concentration. Forty years ago, these corporate entities were either just beyond being plucky start-ups, or did not even exist. Monopolistic tendencies are not limited to the tech sector. In 1975, the largest 100 US companies accounted for nearly half of the earnings of all publicly listed companies; by 2015, their share reached 84 per cent.
Capitalist corporations appear monopolistic when they are able to access the investment needed to gain total market dominance – and as the 21st Century has progressed, this has proven easier than ever, especially in big tech. The tech companies emerged in a world of falling profits and associated rising volatility in financial markets – both of which facilitated their access to investment. Many of these companies were initially either unprofitable or loss making, as they had not yet developed to a sufficient size to exploit the network effects that would provide the foundation for their monopoly-like power. As a result, they required significant amounts of upfront investment to maintain their operations and to scale up to reach a position of market dominance that would allow them to turn a profit.
Grace Blakeley is a staff writer at Tribune and author of Stolen: How to Save the World from Financialization.
All events are sliding scale. No one is denied admission for inability to pay. If you are unable to pay and would like to attend the event, please write to info@marxedproject.org.
Part of the Socialist Register series: Beyond Digital Capitalism.

Life After the Pandemic /w Christoph Hermann
2021-04-27 18:00 - 20:00 | Ontario
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 during a lockdown and continue when the pandemic is under control. The insecurity of future profits instantly pushed the economy into an existential crisis. As a result, the crisis was not characterized by a lack of urgently needed supply, as one may expect during a period of large-scale economic inactivity.
While the coronavirus challenged the very foundations of the profit-driven economy, the lockdown provided the environment with a much-needed break. The pausing of industrial production together with the restriction of transportation, including international air travel, significantly reduced carbon dioxide emissions and other pollution. As a result, residents of smog-plagued cities such as New Delhi could suddenly see the sky. The crisis has shown that a focus on essential needs can provide breathing space for the global ecosystem. However, at the same time the crisis also sounded the death knell to all attempts to solve the ecological crisis through profit-based incentives. The dramatic fall in oil prices caused by the decline in economic activities will undermine the shift to less damaging energy sources.
In sum, what in a needs-based economy would be a formidable healthcare challenge and, perhaps, a major disruption of social life, but not a crisis of social reproduction, at least not as long as there is sufficient supply, turned in the profit-driven economy of capitalism into an existential threat. The anxiety about falling profits could only be calmed by flooding investors, businesses, and credit institutions with massive amounts of money. As a result, the US government will record the highest debt in its history. While debt is essential in a profit-driven economy, it is pointless in a needs-based economy. When the goal is that everybody receives what she/he needs, there is no need to go into debt. In this presentation Christoph will present some ideas for a needs-based economy.
Christoph Hermann is a Lecturer in History at University of California, Berkeley.
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George Elliott Clarke Presents 5 Poets Breaking into Songs
2021-05-14 19:00 - 20:30 | Ontario
A night with poetry, music and songs by 5 poets, 4 composers and 2 singers with former Canadian Poet Laureate and wide audience!
Co-hosts George Elliott Clarke and Ms. Yang Wang, of the East and West Learning Connections, will be pleased to bring you 5 fine poets:

Ayesha Chatterjee
Giovanna Riccio
Lisa Richter
Andrea Thompson
Anna Yin

All of whom will recite poetry and then have a song or songs performed by singers and a pianist: They are poets become songwriters!
Register for zoom link. JPG poster.

Far From Over: Class Struggle and Union Organizing at Amazon
2021-05-16 14:00 - 16:00 | Ontario
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 have quickly become one of – if not the – most powerful sectors of contemporary capitalism, and these and other companies have been equally creative and vicious in keeping their operations all but free of unions. The struggle to organize and unionize workers in “Big Tech” has recently become concentrated on Amazon, the pivotal company in the new logistics of distribution and retail, and now one of the largest employers on the planet, next to Wal-Mart and US Department of Defense. Significant class struggles have emerged in response to the brutal conditions of work and labour in Amazon warehouses, from Italy to Germany, from Bessemer, Alabama, to Brampton, Ontario. It was widely hoped that the pitched battle for union recognition at Bessemer would be a turning point in this struggle, setting off a series of unions being formed elsewhere. If lessons are learned and new strategies taken up from the failed vote, it still may be. If there is to be a renewal of the union movement and working-class politics in North America and beyond, Amazon is surely at the centre of the firms of digital capitalism that must be conquered.
Please register for the event on Eventbrite, and we will send you the link to the ZOOM room.
The event includes a 20-minute presentation on Amazon, capitalism, and class struggle by Alessandro, and followed by a 60-minute roundtable discussion with Alessandro, Ira and Fathia. Moderated by Jessica Ireland and Paul Gray.
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Alessandro Delfanti teaches at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology at the University of Toronto. He is the author of the forthcoming book The Warehouse: Workers and Robots at Amazon (Pluto Press).
Ira lives in Queens, the best borough of the best city in the world with his partner and three cats. Ira has worked at an Amazon delivery station for over a year and a half is a cofounder of Amazonians United NYC and is a communist who believes that the working class should call the shots.
Fathia has been an Amazon worker in Maryland for 6 months and is in the process of forming an organizing committee with her coworkers to organize around issues in their workplace. She is a queer woman of color with a background in worker and student organizing. She is committed to building worker solidarity across identities and borders and taking our power back from the greedy bosses who seem to think it’s theirs.

No Life Like It: A Tribute to the Revolutionary Activism of Ernie Tate
2021-05-30 14:00 - 16:00 | Ontario
Join us for a tribute to the life, activism and legacy of Ernie Tate (1934-2021)
We warmly welcome you to join us for a tribute to the life, activism and legacy of Ernie Tate.
Ernie Tate believed capitalism is a cruel and unjust system that has to be changed. Ernie was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1934 and emigrated to Canada in 1955. As a Marxist, union activist and revolutionary, Ernie spent his life working to achieve that in organizing against the war in Vietnam, in union struggles at Toronto Hydro, for protecting universal healthcare and living wages, and much else. Ernie, along with Tariq Ali, was a leading organizer of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign in Britain, worked for Bertrand Russell’s International War Crimes Tribunal and was a founding member of the International Marxist Group in Britain.’ In 2014, Ernie published a memoir of his life on the far left in Canada and Great Britain called Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s and 1960s. This two volume memoir is an important resource for anyone interested in a gritty account of mid-20th century revolutionary movements. It has been a source of information for the 2020-2021 Undercover Policing Inquiry hearings, taking place in England, in which the illegal and immoral activities of police agents in infiltrating the left have been laid bare.
Ernie died on February 5th this year. Please join us to reflect upon and celebrate Ernie’s life, activism and legacy with many of his comrades and friends from around the world, including: Tariq Ali and Phil Hearse (England), Richie Venton (Scotland), Barry Sheppard and Suzanne Weiss (USA), Pam Frache, Judy Rebick, Carolyn Egan, Sam Gindin, Bryan Palmer, Rob Fairley, and John Riddell (Canada), and Patrick Bond (South Africa).
The event will be online, on ZOOM. Please register for your free ticket on Eventbrite. After you register on Eventbrite, the link to the ZOOM room will be emailed to you a few times in advance of the event.
Hosted by Socialist Project, Centre for Social Justice, Spring, Resistance, Green Left Weekly, Socialist Viewpoint

EcoSocialist Alliance Challenges the G7
2021-06-09 14:00 | Ontario
Speakers from Green Left, Left Unity, ACR and WIN with others invited. This is discussion around the G7 meeting in Cornwall and how we as ecosocialists can present a real alternative.
Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US) have a great part of the immense wealth of the richest countries in the world in 2021. This wealth is more than sufficient to provide for the needs for food, water, health, housing and education of the global population. We face multiple interlinked and inseparable crises. Climate, environment, mass extinctions, emergent infectious diseases and economic. Oligarchic ownership of industry and the transnational corporations are key contributors to environmental degradation and to emergent infectious diseases crises. They are inimical and a core barrier to the urgent measures needed to address the nested crises we face.
The world and its population need system change, a just ecosocialist transition from the unsustainable chaos of neoliberal capitalism. The working class and the poor must not carry the cost.

Global Day for Climate Justice
2021-11-06 13:00 - 15:00 | Ontario
The Toronto Global Day of Action for Climate Justice is being organized by a coalition of environment and justice organizations and individuals in Toronto. It is timed to coincide with the COP26 (international climate summit) meetings in Glasgow, Scotland, and a worldwide network of actions.
Call to Action
Justice won’t be handed to us by world leaders or delivered by corporations. Only we can imagine and build the future that works for all of us.
The Issue
We are living through a period of multiple breaking points – from climate to Covid to racism. We know that these crises not only overlap, but share the same cause.
While no one can escape the impacts of these crises, those who have done least to cause them suffer the most. Across the world, the poorest people and communities of colour are too often those bearing the brunt of the climate crisis. From coastal villages in Norfolk whose sea-defences are eroding faster than ever, to people living by the Niger Delta rivers blackened by oil spillage.

58th Edition of Socialist Register
2022-02-07 09:00 - 2022-03-12 21:00 | Ontario
The 58th annual volume of the Socialist Register takes up the challenge of exploring how the new polarizations relate to the contradictions that underlie them and how far ‘centrist’ politics can continue to contain them. Original essays examine the multiplication of antagonistic national, racial, generational, and other identities in the context of growing economic inequality, democratic decline, and the shifting parameters of great power rivalry. Where, how, and by what means can the left move forward?
Edited by Greg Albo, Leo Panitch, and Colin Leys.

SIMON MOHUN: A contemporary portrait of neoliberalism: The rise of the one per cent
WALDEN BELLO: At the summit of global capitalism: The US and China
INGAR SOLTY: Market polarization means political polarization: Liberal democracy’s eroding centre
BILL FLETCHER, JR.: Trump and the danger of right-wing populism in the US
MARCUS GILROY-WARE: What is wrong with social media? An anti-capitalist critique
ADOLPH REED JR., TOURÉ F. REED: The evolution of ‘race’ and racial justice under neoliberalism
SAMIR SONTI: The crisis of US labour, past and present
SAM GINDIN: American workers and the left after Trump: Polarized options
JAYATI GHOSH: Pandemic polarizations and the contradictions of Indian capitalism
VISHWAS SATGAR: Epidemiological neoliberalism in South Africa
ILYA MATVEEV, OLEG ZHURAVLEV: Loft offices and factory towns: Social sources of political polarization in Russia
ANA GARCIA, VIRGINIA FONTES, REJANE HOEVELER: The far right, corporate power, and social struggles in Brazil
SAMIR GANDESHA: Identity crisis: The politics of false concreteness
DAVID HARVEY: The double consciousness of capital
JAMES SCHNEIDER INTERVIEWED BY HILARY WAINWRIGHT: Finding a way forward: Lessons from the Corbyn project in the UK

Permanent online access to the current volume, plus access to all previous volumes as long as a subscription remains current £25. PDF poster.

Socialist Register 2022 Launch in South Africa
2022-02-10 09:00 - 11:00 | Ontario
Speakers include Greg Albo, Colin Leys, Vishwas Satgar, James Schneider and Bill Fletcher and discussants are Samantha Hargreaves and Awande Buthelezi.

Socialist Register 2022: The Crisis of Centrism
2022-02-20 14:00 - 16:00 | Ontario
The stage is set well for Socialist Register No. 58 in the Preface by Greg Albo and Colin Leys: [In the midst of the] “current multi-dimensional crisis, the center-right consensus that was struck around the neoliberal policy regime has been steadily splintering, with a phalanx of far right and neo-fascist groups inserting themselves into electoral politics and gaining prominence ‘in the streets’ (not least in motley demonstrations against pandemic measures of any kind, from lockdowns to masking). The observation that capitalism is always characterized by just such economic and political polarizations has preoccupied – even haunted – socialist analysis from its very origins: in Marx’s and Engels’ memorable phrase of revolutionary optimism in The Communist Manifesto, ‘the more or less open civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and … lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat’. In the much picked-over chapter in Marx’s Capital on ‘The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation’, the language is just as vibrant but now stark in its imagery: ‘The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and therefore also the greater the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productivity of its labor, the greater is the industrial reserve army… Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time the accumulation of misery, the torment of labor, slavery, ignorance, brutalization at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital.’
Featuring

Greg Albo An Introduction to The Crisis of Centrism, Socialist Register 58
Walden Bello At the Summit of Global Capitalism: the US and China
Simon Mohun Portrait of Neoliberalism: Rise of the One Percent
Samir Sonti The Crisis of US Labor, Past and Present

A Left Response to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine
2022-04-07 19:00 - 21:00 | Ontario
Internationally respected linguist and analyst Noam Chomsky and well-known socialist Bill Fletcher, Jr. will be discussing the roots of Russian aggression in Ukraine, the background to the conflict, the US role, and how the Left can respond.
This will be live-streamed on YouTube.
Organized by Liberation Road, and endorsed by 15 other organizations.
PDF poster.

Global Political Struggles of the Working Class
2022-04-10 14:00 - 16:00 | Ontario
David Harvey: The Double Consciousness of Capital
Ilya Matveev, and Oleg Zhuravlev: Social Sources of Political Polariztion in Russia
Virgina Fontes, Ana Garcia, and Rejane Hoeveler: The Far Right, Corporate Power, Social Struggle in Brazil

DAVID HARVEY is Distinguished Professor of anthropology and geography at the City University of New York.
ILYA MATVEEV teaches politics at the Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, St. Petersburg;
OLEG ZHURAVLEV is a researcher at the Public Sociology Laboratory, Center for Independent Social Research, St. Petersburg.
VIRGINIA FONTES is professor of history at Fluminense Federal University, Rio de Janeiro State, and a teacher at the Florestan Fernandes National School of the Landless Workers Movement;
ANA GARCIA is assistant professor at the International Relations Institute of the Pontifical Catholic University and the graduate program in Social Sciences at the Federal Rural University, both in Rio de Janeiro;
REJANE HOEVELER is a lecturer in the School of Social Service at Fluminense Federal University.
PDF poster

SR 2022: The Direction Forward
2022-05-15 14:00 - 16:00 | Ontario
VISHWAS SATGUR: Epidemiological Neoliberalism in South Africa
In this presentation, Vishwas Satgar sets out the Covid-19 pandemic in South Africa as an example of polarized access to medical services shamelessly piled on top of acute polarizations of income and employment and ecological vandalism. But the ANC government’s neoliberal pandemic response, “has also unleashed a cycle of post-apartheid progressive resistance.”
JAMES SCHNEIDER and HILARY WAINWRIGHT: Finding a Way Forward: Lessons from the Corbyn Project
A discussion of the lessons to be learned from the experience of Momentum as a national campaign organization for the left wing of the UK Labour Party and its achievements (despite ultimate failure to elect a government led by Jeremy Corbyn). They are optimists in their accounting of the new spaces that are now open for a radical democratic politics in Britain.
ADOLPH REED, JR. and TOURE REED: “Race” and Racial Justice under Neoliberalism
This presentation links the rise of the hard right in US politics to the marginalization of the progressive pole as “the black political class” became embedded in “the Democratic Party’s commitment to a programme of retrenchment.” Addressing poverty and continuing social inequality in the black community requires building a broader working-class movement.
SAM GINDIN: American Workers and the Left after Trump: Polarized Options
Sam argues that the inherent limits of Democratic Party “Keynesian” reflation still constitutes a difficult terrain for the left in the USA, which needs to take care not to slip into the trap of spending all its energies defending the liberal forces exemplified by Biden as opposed to organizing labor and independent social struggles.

zoom.us

Rights, Regularization and Status for All!
2022-09-18 14:00 - 16:00 | Christie Pits Park, 750 Bloor St W, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
On September 18 – one day before Canadian Parliament returns – we will gather in the thousands to demand equal rights and permanent resident status for all undocumented people, migrant workers, students, families and refugees. A historic regularization program is on the horizon, but we need to take to the streets to ensure that no one is left behind. This is the one, ALL OUT!
actionnetwork.org

History, Theory and Politics: On Uno Kozo’s Theory of Crisis
2022-10-28 14:30 - 16:30 | 519 Kaneff Tower, York University, Toronto, Ontario, M3J 1P3, Canada
Our lives are now besieged by all crises, from inflation, incoming recession, and deadly migration from the Global South to the advance of the far-right and apocalyptic climate disaster. In what ways capital, industrial or financial, is at the heart of these variegated crises? Which is the weakest link to be broken to put an emergency brake on today’s world and revitalize the resistance? What insights can the experiences of imperialism and capitalism outside the West offer on these questions? If you are concerned about any of these questions, please come and engage with Ken Kawashima’s investigation of the crisis of capitalism. His talk will draw on Japanese Marxist Uno Kozo’s seminal book he translated, The Theory of Crisis.
In this talk, Ken C. Kawashima will discuss how Uno’s Theory of Crisis can inform and guide the analysis of capitalism’s historical crises, and how it gives us a theoretical grasp of Marx’s Capital that emphasizes the concepts of labour-power, excess capital, and surplus populations. In this regard, Uno’s Theory of Crisis is very different from orthodox Marxist approaches to Capital. Kawashima will discuss the political implications of Uno’s Theory of Crisis for today.
This event is organized by Hyun Ok Park (Sociology, York University). This event is presented by the Korean Office for Research and Education (KORE) at York University, which is funded by the Academy of Korean Studies. This event is co-sponsored by the Department of East Asian Studies at University of Toronto and the Marxist Studies in Global and Asian Perspectives (MSGAP) at York University.
*Please RSVP for this event by Thursday, October 27th.

Reinventing Work with Mike Yates
2022-12-13 19:00 - 20:30 | Ontario
The Socialist Project is proud to present Reinventing Work, a launch event for Work, Work, Work: Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle, the insightful new book by Mike Yates. Please join us for this special online event, featuring a presentation from Mike on the book’s perspective and its relevance to today’s moment, as well as opportunities for Q&A and discussion.
Leanne MacMillan and Herman Rosenfeld, both retired union staff persons, will comment on how the issues raised in Mike’s book relate to Ontario and Canada today.
Mike Yates is a long time Marxist and socialist writer and analyst, one of the editors of Monthly Review. He has written extensively about capitalism with particular emphasis on the working class, its life, potential, and role in transforming society. His latest book, gathers a series of his re-edited essays and articles dealing with various aspects of working in capitalist society, the working class, its institutions, its contradictions and potentials, and the broader social relations that drive all of this.
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Check out his articles.
Review of Work, Work, Work by Herman Rosenfeld.

Peace Initiatives
2023-02-24 09:30 - 2023-02-25 20:30 | Ontario
Demonstrations, conferences, grassroots activities and other organized by peace organizations in Europe to stop the war and build the peace.
Across Europe, 24 – 26 February, 2023.
