NOVEMBER, 2022 – To students of twentieth-century Russian history, the name Vladimir Il’ich Lenin is a constant, and inevitable, presence. But the name Iulii Osipovich Tsederbaum—better known through the pseudonym “Iulii Martov”—is either entirely absent from view or present only as a mysterious, and often unsavoury, figure. Prior to the revolution of 1917, this would not have been the case. Boris Souvarine would until 1924 be a close collaborator with Lenin. But for Souvarine and others of his generation growing up in France, “Lenin was only an indistinct reference point. Very few people had even heard of him. Trotsky, Martov…
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OCTOBER, 2022 – On June 24, 2022, in a stunning reminder of the depth of the backlash against women’s rights, the United States Supreme Court officially reversed the historic Roe v. Wade ruling which provided legal protection for abortion rights in that country.[1] Within two weeks of the ruling, some half of all states in the US saw court filings and amended laws challenging the legal status of abortion.[2] There are far-reaching international implications of the US reversal of women’s right to choose, and the Canadian context cannot be assumed to be unaffected.[3] Importantly, in Canada, we have a long…
Leave a CommentDECEMBER, 2021 – When on the second day of January 1988 the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (CUFTA) was signed by representatives of Canada and the United States, 2,000 gathered in a protest march on the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor and Detroit.[1] That march was one aspect of the movement against what at the time we called “free trade”[2] – a set of policies pushed by Ronald Reagan in the United States and Brian Mulroney in Canada, a phrase that came to symbolize the employers’ offensive in both countries, and in spite of considerable opposition, a policy which came into effect…
Leave a CommentNOVEMBER, 2021 – It was in 1974 that I first picked up a copy of The Gulag Archipelago. I didn’t finish reading it until this century. It is a very long book—seven books to be precise, published in three volumes that together run to roughly two thousand pages in English translation. But it shouldn’t take forty years to read a book, even a very long one. Why it took me four decades to finish reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s crowning achievement requires a little backstory and can serve as an entry point into the present book. The above is the first paragraph of…
Leave a CommentAPRIL 5, 2020 – When Mel Watkins[1] warned of the dangers of a “staple trap” looming in Canada’s path, he announced himself as a key theoretician of what has been, without question, the dominant strand in Canadian political economy (CPE). In fact, for many, Watkins’ staple approach has been seen as synonymous with CPE. As well as making key contributions in political theory, Watkins was committed to political practice, being one of the leaders of the Waffle – the most important left-wing challenge to traditional social-democracy of his or any subsequent generation. Watkins’ theory and practice deeply influenced myself along…
Comments closedFEBRUARY, 2020 – Led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Canada’s governing Liberals were re-elected in a national (federal) election October 21, but reduced from majority to minority status. This means that issue by issue, they will need to seek alliances with one or more of the other major parties — Conservative, Bloc Québécois (BQ, a Quebec sovereigntist party), the social-democratic New Democratic Party (NDP), and Green. The above is the first paragraph of “Canada’s 2019 Election”. [1] The complete text can be found here. [1] Paul Kellogg, “Canada’s 2019 Election,” Against the Current 204, no. January-February (2020), https://againstthecurrent.org/atc204/2019-canadian-election/.
Comments closedMAY, 2018 – Frustrated at what his friend Frederick Engels called the “peculiar product … known as ‘Marxism’ in France,” Karl Marx at one point declared “One thing for sure — me, I’m not a Marxist.”[1] If there were many reasons for Marx to be “not a Marxist” in the 19th century, the decades since have given us many more. The above is the first paragraph of “‘Ruthless Criticism of All That Exists’”. [2] The complete text can be found here. [1] Quoted in Frederick Engels, “Engels to Eduard Bernstein in Zurich [Letter],” in Marx and Engels Collected Works (MECW),…
Comments closedJames Laxer: 1941-2018 MARCH 4, 2018 – The sudden and unexpected death of James Laxer has come as a shock to all whose political lives were shaped by the profound social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Laxer’s generation emerged in the shadow of issues which will be familiar to readers of the Canadian Journal of Development Studies – U.S. militarism, Vietnam, Quebec’s not-so-quiet revolution, and apartheid in South Africa – issues which radicalized thousands. Laxer was one of the most prominent representatives of that generation. His role as a professor and author of some two-dozen books is well known,…
Comments closedAPRIL, 2017 – The structure of Escape from the Staple Trap[1] was consciously chosen. In the face of deeply held political economy epistemologies, it was important to first construct a strong empirical foundation – using data extensively, looking at that data from multiple sides, as well as questioning and critiquing certain key hegemonic interpretations of empirical data from earlier eras. This empirical work revealed clearly that Canada must be considered a Global North country at the core of the world system. Only with that empirical foundation constructed, did the book then draw some political conclusions. In this Global North, core…
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