25 janvier, 2017 – Chaque fois qu’un anniversaire d’importance de la Confédération approche, une attention considérable est accordée à l’histoire de la démocratie au Canada, la célébration prochaine des 150 ans de la Confédération canadienne en 2017 ne faisant pas exception. Or une préoccupation véritable pour notre avenir démocratique exige que nous examinions sérieusement cette histoire, en mettant en lumière ses limites et ses forces. Le rapport récemment paru de la Commission de vérité et réconciliation du Canada signale en outre une dimension nouvelle de cette question. Il existe en effet une histoire de la démocratie, peu souvent prise en…
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JANUARY 8, 2017 – For more than a generation, we have been witness to an increasingly interventionist and militarist foreign policy stance in Canada. Explaining this transformation is the first object of Jerome Klassen in his very useful contribution, Joining Empire: The Political Economy of the New Canadian Foreign Policy.[1] In the penultimate chapter, he directly engages with two of these new moments of Canadian militarism – Afghanistan and Haiti – and clearly documents Canada’s role as a middle imperialist power, using its military to project economic and geopolitical interests abroad.[2] The second – and closely related object of the…
Comments closedMARCH, 2016 – The overall aim of Peter Hudis in Marx’s concept of the alternative to capitalism is to unearth “the prefigurative”—the vision of a new post-capitalist world—from the writings of a Marx usually seen as agnostic on the question. The search for this prefigurative Marx raises an old issue: how do we reconcile the objective with the subjective, the objectively determined laws of motion in the economy with the emergence of a mass revolutionary subject? The above is the first paragraph of “The Ideal Immanent Within the Real: On Peter Hudis’ Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism”. [1]…
Comments closedOCTOBER 14, 2014 – Some 300,000 barrels of oil per day, sometime this fall, were to have begun flowing from Sarnia, Ontario to Montreal, Quebec – courtesy of Enbridge “reversing the flow” on its 40-year old “Line 9” Ontario and Quebec pipeline. But a surprise ruling by the National Energy Board (NEB) will delay that flow for a few months (McCarthy 2014). Dilbit Line 9 is destined to carry, among other products, diluted heavy crude from the Alberta oil/tar/bitumen fields. A spill of such heavy crude would, of course, be very serious, as the residents of Kalamazoo Michigan well know,…
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OCTOBER 9, 2013 – Charlie Kimber and Alex Callinicos (2013) have written a defence of the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP), a party wracked by crisis since late 2012. This crisis was precipitated by the response, on the part of the SWP leadership, to allegations of rape and sexual assault. However, Kimber/Callinicos assert that “all those involved … have agreed that the case itself should be treated as ‘closed’” and therefore barely address issues of sexual violence, sexism, women’s oppression – the substantive issues that have generated the current crisis. Others will, no doubt, respond to Kimber/Callinicos on these points.…
2 CommentsAPRIL, 2013 – Finally, almost a century after the fact, the proceedings of the 1922 Fourth Congress of the Communist International are available in English, thanks to the diligent translation and careful scholarship of John Riddell. Toward the United Front: Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 1922 – the latest in a multi-volume collection of documents from the years before, during and after the Russian Revolution of 1917 – was made available to a limited audience in its 2011 hardback edition, and as of November 2012 in a much more affordable paperback version published by Haymarket Books.…
Comments closedJANUARY 13, 2013 – 1. Richard Seymour is author of the widely read blog, “Lenin’s Tomb,” and a prominent member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the largest group left of the Labour Party in Britain. In an article written in the days following the January 4-6 annual conference of the SWP, Seymour made public a controversy inside the party, a controversy so serious he says: “the future of the party is at stake”. Speaking of the party’s Central Committee he said: “they are on the wrong side of that fight”. Speaking to fellow members of the party, he wrote:…
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JANUARY 4, 2013 – The tar sands development in northern Alberta is an ecological nightmare, and an insult to indigenous land rights. This nightmare and this insult are profoundly Canadian – shaped by Canadian corporations and Canadian government policies. Unfortunately, there has been a tendency by some in the movement to try and “off-shore” the problem, shifting the blame, in particular to China. This has no basis in fact, and opens the door to a nasty politics of xenophobia. Listen to the rhetoric. Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party, rightly highlighted concerns about a trade deal between Canada and…
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NOVEMBER 5, 20212 – An economic crisis of enormous proportions has erupted in a first world country in the Global North. The scale of the economic crisis in Greece has few modern equivalents, and is at the root of a massive social and political upheaval. Navigating that crisis poses difficult challenges for the social movements in Greece, and has important lessons for activists around the world. The notes that follow are an attempt to provide information that can assist those, unfamiliar with the situation in Greece, in navigating this situation. Notes on Greece 1: Economic crisis The economic crisis in…
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Coalition building, Capitalism and War
Published March 31, 2017 by Paul Kellogg
APRIL, 2017 – European civilization degenerated into horrifying violence during the “Great War” of 1914-1918. In the wake of that war, upheavals shook old empires to their foundations, as literally millions of peasants and workers rejected old patterns of life and rule, and sought out new ways of organizing society freed from the barbarism of war and capitalism. A vigorous left wing developed in many countries on the backs of this revolutionary upheaval, but only a fraction of the writings and discussions of this left have been available to an English-speaking audience. That is beginning to change. Ten years ago,…