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 closedTag: Book Reviews and Cultural Commentary
MARCH, 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 closedAPRIL, 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 closedThe golfer, Eldrick “Tiger” Woods is back in the news, after winning the Arnold Palmer Invitational tournament on the Professional Golf Association (PGA) tour. This was his first PGA tour victory in 2-1/2 years. In that period of time, Woods has been in the news, not for his golf, but for his personal life. He is not the first successful PGA professional to from time to time have his personal life trump his golf game. John Daly comes to mind. But Daly is white, and Woods is black. The different colour of their skin has resulted in their personal “indiscretions”…
2 CommentsSometimes it is hard to credit progress when it happens incrementally over decades. Watching “Mad Men” (whose long anticipated Season 5 is scheduled to begin in March, 2012) provides a jolt of noxious memories from the 1960s – the restrictions on abortion, and the casual sexism which dominated gender relations, to name just two. It provides a useful reminder that between the 1960s and today, there have been several waves of feminism which have profoundly improved modern society. Popular music provides another interesting marker of these changes. Here’s a little story about two songs which indicate the impact of several…
2 CommentsDecember 11, 2010 (Last in a series of articles, “Reflections on 2010”) • Eldrick “Tiger” Woods might have lost his top spot in golf rankings in 2010, but he kept his place at the top of search engines around the world, coming in, for instance, at seven out of 10 for the year on searches carried out by Yahoo Canada.[1] Of course what drove this was not his golf game. For the first time since 1995, Woods did not win a tournament, let alone a major. The year 2010 saw his record 623-week reign as the world’s number one ranked…
2 CommentsIf you travel to Washington D.C., and you visit only one historic site, make it the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. A gentle scar in the park that surrounds it, the modest stone wall slowly emerges into view as you walk towards it. On the pathway by the wall, medals lie propped up, along with letters, teddy bears – mementos of loved ones who passed away in the hell that was the American War in Vietnam. And on their knees, head in hand, or on their toes, reaching up to touch a name carved on a high portion of the wall, middle-aged…
Comments closedWho among us was really prepared for the full horror of the conclusion to six seasons of “Lost”? Not that the show hadn’t prepared us well. The terror of a plane breaking apart in mid-air; the imprisonment of Sayid, Ben, Jack, Kate, Sawyer; the deaths, the murders, the betrayals; and finally the torture, the repeated, terrible scenes of torture of Ben, of Sayid, of Sawyer – a torture whose normalization through this show and others (“24” comes to mind) should give all of us pause. But all of that was beside the point. In the end, it was all about…
2 CommentsSEPTEMBER 13, 2009 [1] – Bruce Cockburn sang against U.S. imperialism in Guatemala. He sang for the revolution in Nicaragua. He is now singing for Canadian imperialism in Afghanistan. Our movement is weaker for it. In the 1980s, Central America was in the throes of revolution and counter-revolution. The signature event was the 1979 overthrow of the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, an overthrow led and organized by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). That revolution was bitterly opposed by the Generals who controlled many Central and South American states at the time, and the United States which had long…
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Coalition building, Capitalism and War
Published March 31, 2017 by pkellogg
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,…