Bertolt Brecht, in the 1932 essay ‘The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication’, made a ‘positive suggestion’ to transform radio into a dialogical medium for many-to-many communications. ‘Radio is one-sided when it should be two’ said Brecht. Brecht saw the state as the only entity capable of remaking radio in this way, but because radio’s ‘proper application’ might make it a ‘revolutionary’ medium, Brecht concluded the bourgeois state would have ‘no interest in sponsoring such exercises’. Presentations by Tanner Mirrlees and Derek Hrynyshyn.

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 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.

The Case of Nursing Homes Speaker Dr. Pat Armstrong is Distinguished Research Professor in Sociology at York University. After the talk there will be a Q&A period. About the presenter: Dr. Pat Armstrong is Distinguished Research Professor in Sociology at York University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She held a CHSRF/CIHR … Keep reading »

Seniors for Climate Action Now! (SCAN!) is a newly formed Ontario-based organization seeking to inform and mobilize seniors in an effort to address the climate emergency. We recognize that climate action is also a call for social justice and economic transformation - the opportunity, as well as the need, to address racism and economic inequities. … Keep reading »

Why does the story of cinema begin with the end of work? Is it because, as has been suggested, it is impossible to represent work from the perspective of labor but only from the point of view of capital, because the revolutionary horizon of the working class coincides with the end of work? After all, … Keep reading »

Rising Up: The Fight for Living Wage Work in Canada edited by Bryan Evans, Carlo Fanelli, and Tom McDowell (UBC Press), shows how living wage movements have transformed, or are campaigning to transform, labour policy in Canada and stimulated broader public debate about income and social inequality. Canada has one of the highest rates of … Keep reading »

The past four decades have seen a tremendous transformation in how we clothe ourselves. The way clothes are produced, traded and sold today around the world reflects many of the problems today’s capitalism poses to the working classes, with deleterious consequences for the environment as well. Global supply chains, in which non-finished goods flow back and forth around the world so that brands and retailers can increase their profits, dominate the landscape of this industry.