Socialist Project

Far From Over: Class Struggle and Union Organizing at Amazon
2021-05-16 14:00 - 16:00 (America/Toronto) | 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.

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.

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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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.

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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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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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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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: 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

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.

Winter Social
2019-12-08 16:30 - 19:00 | 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!

FilmSocial Presents: Soylent Green
2019-11-30 19:00 - 23:00 | Eyesore Cinema, 1176 Bloor Street, Toronto, Ontario, M6H1N1, Canada
FilmSocial screens the dystopian cult classic Soylent Green. Saturday, November 30th @ 7:30pm at Eyesore Cinema (1176 Bloor, back room).
Soylent Green (1973) brings us to New York in the year 2022. Rising global temperatures combined with food and water shortages only serve to exacerbate capitalism’s pathological excess. Charlton Heston stars in this classic sci-fi/police procedural where the characters must navigate a world marked by deep class division, corporate control over valuable resources, police corruption, and the overall monetization of fear and misery. Sound familiar? The screening follows the next Global Climate Strike event. Stay after the film for a discussion of the themes of the film in light of socialist responses to climate change.
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Take the Plant, Save the Planet: Creating Good Jobs, Making Sustainable Products, Challenging Climate Change
2019-09-30 19:00 - 21:00 | Steelworkers Hall, 25 Cecil, Toronto, Ontario, M5T 1N1, Canada
GM’s bosses are closing the auto plant in Oshawa but workers want to repurpose it to create good jobs and produce green and sustainable energy products. Join us for a discussion with Linda McQuaig (author and journalist), James Hutt (LEAP), Rebecca Keetch (autoworker, Green Jobs Oshawa) and Fred Hahn (CUPE Ontario). Show solidarity with Green Jobs Oshawa, make public ownership of the Oshawa plant an election issue.
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GM Oshawa was once the home of the largest auto facility on the continent. GM no longer wants it, aside from a small project that might at most, provide 300 jobs. But workers do, and they have plans for it. The Oshawa plant could create many more good, sustainable jobs, by converting the facility into a manufacturing hub for electric vehicles and other sustainable energy products. This requires that governments step in, and have democratic public ownership replace corporate ownership and make products that challenge climate change. To make this possible we need to show solidarity with Green Jobs Oshawa, the worker-led movement leading this campaign. We need to build a worker-green alliance grounded in concrete struggles, making the idea of Just Transition, something real. In the upcoming federal election, we need to push politicians and their parties beyond platitudes about climate change and green jobs. Here is a concrete opportunity to really do something about it. This requires placing, to the extent we can, a radical transformation of economic structures and power, led by workers, on the public agenda.
Tell us you will attend and help spread the word #GreenJobsOshawa:
https://www.facebook.com/events/2411270225607689/
Sponsored by Centre for Social Justice, Socialist Project, Green Jobs Oshawa, and The LEAP

Poetry Night w/Giovanna Riccio and Alvin Wong
2019-09-24 19:00 - 21:00 | Tranzac Club, 292 Brunswick Ave, Toronto, ON, M5S 2M7, Canada
Toronto’s most diverse and brave poetry reading and open mic series.
At Shab-e She’r (Poetry Night) we don’t just wait for diversity to happen: we actively invite it.
Featured poets: Giovanna Riccio and Alvin Wong
Hosts: Bänoo Zan and Terese Pierre
Giovanna Riccio immigrated from Calabria, Italy to Canada at the age of 6. A graduate of the University of Toronto, she majored in philosophy. She is the author of Vittorio (Lyricalmyrical, 2010), Strong Bread (Quattro Books, 2011) and Plastic’s Republic (Guernica Editions, 2019). Her poems have appeared in numerous national and international publications as well as various anthologies, the most recent being Dis(s)ent, Heartwood and A Filo Doppio, (Donzelli Editore, Rome). Translations of her work have been published in Italian, Spanish, French and Romanian. She regularly participates in literary events and has performed at Blue Met, The Edinburgh Fringe and the University of Calabria Italian Diaspora Conference to name a few.
Alvin Wong is the senior editor of Inspiritus Press. He has poems published in Half a Grapefruit Magazine and Temz Review along with a short story in Ricepaper magazine. He co-authoured a chapbook with Stanford Cheung, We Could be Anything from Crevasse Press in Ibaraki, Japan.
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The 1919 Winnipeg Strike
2019-09-19 19:00 - 21:00 | UJPO, 585 Cranbrooke Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, M6A 2X9, Canada
The Story of Jewish Involvement in the 1919 Winnipeg Strike, with Roz Usiskin and Harriet Zaidman. Leo Panitch of The Socialist Project will moderate.

Roz Usiskin was the first president of the Jewish Heritage Society of Western Canada and a past president of UJPO-Winnipeg. Her father, Joseph Wolodarsky, was a strike participant. Usiskin published two books of her father’s letters that she translated from Yiddish. Her father had written “…someday, the historian may look into my archives as a record of our history.”
Harriet Zaidman is a UJPO-Winnipeg member and author of the novel, “City on Strike,” based on the events in 1919. Her family was greatly affected by the strike. Copies of this book will be available at the event. Zaidman is also author of two children’s books, Daisy’s Biggest Success, and Sherman and the Sheep Shape Contest.
Leo Panitch is a professor of political science at York University and the co-editor of the Socialist Register. He is co-author, with Sam Gindin, of The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire.

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General Strike: Cabaret 1919
2019-05-14 19:00 - 23:00 | Tranzac Club, 292 Brunswick Ave, Toronto, ON, M5S 2M7, Canada
An exciting cabaret evening of theatre, music and poetry on the centenary of the Winnipeg General Strike will celebrate its historical importance and enduring relevance to a diverse range of contemporary struggles.
FEATURING
Remembering the Winnipeg General an original play by Thomas McKechnie, performed by Heather Marie Annis and Ximena Huizi, directed by Erin Branderburg, with original music composed by Kristine Schmitt. In the play, the events of the 1919 strike are a springboard to examine the modern political moment.
Toronto 1919, an original play written by Craig Heron and performed by the Toronto Workers History Project Theatre Group. This play returns to the exciting weeks of May 1919, when Toronto workers organized a general strike in support of the eight hour day.
Mohammad Ali, the socialist hip-hop artist, performing ‘Solidarity Forever’ from his new album Labour of Love, a hard-hitting selection of worker’s anthems.
George Elliot Clarke and Giovanna Riccio, Canada’s celebrated revolutionary poets, present powerful original works especially written for this occasion.
The Afro-Metis Nation, a trio of Black and Indigenous musicians, perform songs celebrating the melding of heritage and struggle.
1919, a short experimental fictional film directed by Noam Gonick about a group of gay men who frequent a Chinese bathhouse, which just happens to be headquarters of the Winnipeg General Strike.
Honey Novick, a Toronto singer and songwriter – and the daughter of the last milkman in the city to do house deliveries with a horse and wagon – will make Joe Hill ‘alive as you and me’.
Mike Katz & Rick Pearson, a popular Ontario guitar folk duo, pay raucous musical tribute to Union Maids.
Zing! Zing! Zing! – the participatory singing choir of the United Jewish People’s Order – will bring down the house by leading the audience in a multilingual rendition of the Internationale.
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Produced by the Cultural Committee of the Socialist Project and the Centre for Social Justice, and co-presented by The Toronto Workers History Project and Mayworks 2019.

Uber-Capitalism: Platform Mobility/Mobilizing Workers
2019-03-21 18:30 - 20:30 | Ontario
After launching almost a decade ago, the transportation network corporations Uber and Lyft rapidly expanded their operations into cities around the world, disrupting taxi unions, degrading labour rights and diminishing public transit ridership. While “uber-capitalism” was incubated in the USA, the global system’s technological-core, ride-hailing corporations are emerging around the world, and workers from New York City to Jakarta are organizing to challenge their deleterious social effects.
In this session of The Capitalism Workshop, Bronwyn Frey examines some of the worker organizational strategies emerging within Indonesia’s vast informal transportation sector, where precarity is longstanding and perhaps less exceptional than in the West. Frey highlights how motorcycle taxi (ojek) drivers in the city of Bandung are collectively responding to the precarious platform labour regime of Go-Jek, a major Indonesian ride-hailing firm. Although highly antagonistic towards each other, ojek pangkalan (older-style informal-sector drivers) and HDBR (a grassroots app-based driver association) use similar organizational strategies to establish claims to their working lives and challenge Go-Jek. Informality in Indonesia thus offers forms of social security in a platform labour context that add to Euro-American mobilization repertoires such as policy change and platform cooperativism. By examining informal organization repertoires among app-based and older-style ojek drivers, this session contributes to knowledge about capitalism by considering how precarity is produced, experienced, and challenged. Herman Rosenfeld (TTC Riders, Free Transit Toronto) will then discuss how municipal struggles for bigger and better public transit might be one way of contesting uber-capitalism.

The World Turned Upside Down: Launching SR 2019
2019-02-04 18:30 - 22:00 | Lula Lounge, 1585 Dundas St West, Toronto, ON, M6K 1T9, Canada
Join us for the launch of Socialist Register 2019: The World Turned Upside Down.
Featuring presentations by Nicole Aschoff (“American’s tipping point? Between Trumpism and a new left”), Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin (“Trumping the Empire), and Colin Leys (“Corbyn and Brexit Britain: Is there a way forward for the left?”).
Moderated by Greg Albo.
SR 2019 poses two overarching questions for the new period opened by the Trump election and the continued growth of right-wing nationalisms. Is there an unwinding of neoliberal globalization taking place, or will globalization continue to deepen, but still deny the free cross-border movement of labor? Would such an unwinding entail an overall shift in power and accumulation to specific regions of the Global South that might overturn the current world order and foster the disintegration of the varied regional blocs that have formed?
Sponsored by: York University Book Store, Brunswick Books, Socialist Project, Centre for Social Justice and Socialist Register.
facebook.com/events/2007698415973523
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Dinner is available and reservations guarantee seating: lula.ca
SR Subscriptions available at: socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/about/subscriptions.

FilmSocial: Sorry to Bother You
2019-01-29 19:00 - 22:00 | Eyesore Cinema, 1176 Bloor Street, Toronto, Ontario, M6H1N1, Canada
Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You was one of the most critically acclaimed films of 2018. Through a brilliant mix of satire, drama, and humour, Riley is able to capture the horror, absurdity, and contradictions of life within contemporary capitalism. Exploring themes of exploitation, racism, alienation, and the strained relationship between activism, art, popular culture, and profound social change, Riley effectively captures the tensions, paradoxes, and necessities of the modern political landscape. Following the film there will be a short presentation and discussion on some of the important political questions raised by the film.
Download PDF poster.

Action Keele: Outreach Meeting
2018-12-12 17:30 - 19:30 | Downsview Public Library, 2793 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, M3M 2G3, Canada
Join the fight for transit justice! Action Keele will be holding an organizing meeting on Dec 12. All welcome. For more information, contact: actionkeele@gmail.com

Non-Denominational Holiday Social
2018-12-09 16:30 - 20:30 | Pauper’s Pub, 539 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Join the SP and friends for some holiday cheer!

Action Keele: Meeting and Public Canvass
2018-12-06 15:00 - 19:30 | Downsview Public Library, 2793 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, M3M 2G3, Canada
Join the fight for transit justice! Action Keele will be holding an organizing meeting on the afternoon Dec 6, before heading out to talk to 41 riders. All welcome. For more information, contact: actionkeele@gmail.com
3:15-5:15 (Meeting)
6:00-7:30 (Canvass)

Action Keele Campaign Launch
2018-12-01 14:30 - 16:30 | Downsview Public Library, 2793 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, M3M 2G3, Canada
After months of talking with 41 bus riders about their concerns and issues, we are ready to officially launch the Action Keele Bus Riders campaign!
Join us Saturday, December 1 from 2:30 – 4:30 at the Downsview Library for a discussion with Action Keele organizers, community members, and labour union and social movement allies. Come together to fight back against austerity and win improved public transit for working people, and enjoy pizza and fun!
The overwhelming community support for our petition for a #41 bus every ten minutes is very encouraging. Let’s keep up the momentum to meet our goal of gathering 1,000 signatures by the time we plan to deliver the petition to Mayor John Tory and the City Council on February 1!
Poster

What's Left, Toronto? Radical Alternatives for the City Election
2018-09-19 18:30 - 21:00 | Friends House, 60 Lowther Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, M5R 1C7, Canada
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 the number of wards for Council elections. Debates about specific City issues have been limited, pitting a few right-populist voices from the Conservative Party against liberal and progressive voices from the Liberal or New Democratic Party. Ford’s shadow looms over every discussion and risks constraining debate about the mildest reforms even further.
This public forum seeks to keep alive more expansive political horizons about possible futures for Toronto. Organizers from various social movements will come together to discuss a range of issues – from migrant solidarity and economic justice to jobs, housing, transit, the environment, and the nature of electoral politics. They will bring ambitious and radical perspectives that engage with but go beyond the policy planks gaining the most attention in the corporate media.
Speakers:

Alia Karim, student organizer, Fight for $15 and Fairness
David Kidd, longtime community and labour activist
Stefan Kipfer, York University, Free Transit Toronto
Mercedes Lee, No One Is Illegal – Toronto
James Nugent, Faculty of Environment, University of Waterloo
Taraneh Zarin, Free Transit Toronto

PDF poster | Facebook event
Sponsors: Centre for Social Justice, Free Transit Toronto, Socialist Project.
