To an ever greater degree and in ways we can’t yet fully appreciate, the unfolding climate disaster is transforming the class struggle and posing massive challenges in the process. In our unions and communities, we need to take stock of these developments, set new goals and develop strategies that reflect the harsh reality that we are now in a struggle for survival.

Two Canadian mining companies have drawn the ire of activists and Indigenous groups in Ecuador, where the government is using Toronto-based Adventus Mining’s Curipamba copper-gold project in Las Naves and Atico Mining’s La Plata project in Sigchos as test sites to impose a new and controversial process for environmental consultation under Decree 754.

I sincerely hope that campaigners are able to make these wildfires into the “critical juncture” we’re all waiting for. But doing so will require taking an approach that makes one thing clear: human social structures exist within complex ecological systems. We can’t solve systemic problems in silos, or with a reductive focus on individual facets of the much bigger, more fearsome, beast.

If we want the recent changing of the guard in the mayor’s office to make any difference, the very worst approach would be to leave it all in Chow’s hands. She will need vigorous social movements pushing at her back, and ready to push harder at the first sign of retreat. If we can muster those forces, some real victories are entirely possible in the days ahead.

Environmentalists like Mariano Abarca face tremendous oppression from foreign-owned mining companies. This means, inevitably, that they face the wrath of Canadian companies, given that Canada-based companies make up 41 percent of the largest firms in Latin America. Community activists who oppose Canadian mines are frequently harassed, intimidated, or killed.

The essays comprising For a Better World contain a contradictory interpretive dynamic, in which a present-minded insistence that the Winnipeg General Strike unfolded within a white working class erasure of Indigenous peoples co-exists with a more traditional analytic accent on the politics of class struggle.

After years of passivity in the face of upper class greed workers have begun to fight back. As Henry Heller explains, recent walkouts in Canada and around the world reflect a pattern of rising participation of workers in strike activity evident since 2020 as a belated response to years of wage suppression and recent spectacular increases in consumer prices.

Intentional endings are important. I know very little about the deliberations that went into the decision by OCAP members to retire their organization. But I have deep respect for groups of people that do the difficult, unglamorous work of reflecting on their efforts, determining that their organization is no longer viable, and purposefully bringing it to a close.

The “in and against the state” view that is promoted by the Socialist Register has considerable support on the socialist left. Given the extraordinary period in the evolution of global capitalism which we are living through, this perspective needs to be carefully considered. The latest volume of the Socialist Register is an excellent basis for moving that process forward.

Corporate Pride is not about liberation but about keeping the potentially unruly in line. If Pride must maintain its corporate sponsorships, then I can only work to abolish it in the same vein as I work for police and prison abolition. This June I will be attending Abolition and Anti-Fascist Pride events for the second year in a row, where politics and a good party are intimate partners.