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…
Comments closedTag: Open Access
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.…
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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…
Comments closedSEPTEMBER 5, 2012 – For the Financial Post, the actions of the Bolivian government in nationalizing a Canadian mine this summer, confirmed the country’s status as an “outlaw nation” (Grace, 2012). But for less biased observers, the reality was a little different. Responding to pressure from local indigenous communities the Bolivian government confirmed, August 2, that it would expropriate the operations of a Canadian-owned mining project. This represents in the short term, the success of local social movements in putting an end to violence created by the tactics of the corporation, and in the long term, one small step towards…
3 CommentsJULY 26, 2011 – As July came to an end, the United States central government had come up against its congressionally mandated debt ceiling. Without an agreement to raise that debt ceiling – last set at $14.3-trillion – the U.S. central government will be unable to borrow money to pay its bills. The consequences could be extremely serious – soaring interest rates, a collapse of the U.S. dollar, not to speak of social security stipends, pensions and salaries going unpaid. The barrier to raising the debt ceiling comes from the sudden rise of a new right-wing in the Republican Party.…
Comments closedMARCH 30, 2011 – The passing of Dudley Laws is a blow to all supporters of justice and equality in Toronto. His life and accomplishments will be an ongoing inspiration to all those today, who seek to build a world without racism and oppression. I first encountered in Dudley in 1988 after the police shooting of Lester Donaldson, an African-Canadian suffering from depression, and partially paralyzed as the result of an earlier police shooting April 11 that year. August 9, in his Lauder Ave. home, he was killed by a bullet from the gun of Constable David Deviney. His wife…
Comments closedDECEMBER 2, 2010 – There is a growing chorus of voices in the media and the academy singling out the actions of the Chinese state as central to the dilemmas of the world economy. This focus finds its most articulate presentations, not in the xenophobia of the right, but in the polite analysis of many left-liberals. Paul Krugman, for instance, writing in the run-up to November’s G20 summit in South Korea, praised the United States’ approach of creating money out of nothing (“Quantitative Easing”) as being helpful to the world economy, and criticized the Chinese state’s attempts to keep its…
One CommentOCTOBER 26, 2010 – It is not difficult to see that the events of September 30, in the Latin American country of Ecuador, amounted to an attempted right-wing coup d’état.[1] Mass mobilizations in the streets and plazas of Quito (the capital) and other cities – in conjunction with action by sections of the armed forces which stayed loyal to the government – stopped the coup before the day was out. But those few hours highlighted, again, the deep dangers facing those fighting for progressive change in Latin America and the Caribbean. Remarkably, the first task is to re-assert that in…
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The Ideal Immanent Within the Real
Published March 1, 2016 by pkellogg
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]…