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Currently viewing articles tagged with Socialism.
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Canada Steel
Every street in every old Canadian industrial town has its own Gus Popadopolous. He’s the old timer on your block that stuck around when the abandoned factory morphed into gentrified condos. His mode of dress is a white undershirt, no matter what the weather. His all-purpose accoutrement is a shovel, not a cell phone. He might cheer you on at road hockey, but wouldn’t hesitate to yell at you if the ball went into his garden. You know him. You might even be him!
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May ‘68: An Appreciation
The earth moved. It was one of those rare moments in history when all that had been solid (and stultifying) seemed to melt into air. As William Wordsworth wrote of the epoch of the French Revolution, in 1805 — verse that also captured something of the spirit of the ‘68: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/ But to be young was very heaven!”
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Ideas for Popular Assemblies
In Canada and elsewhere there is currently a wide range of impressive constituency-based struggles around specific issues. But without some broader coherence to these movements, this fragmented politics leaves us frustratingly marginalized in terms of reversing and reshaping the larger agenda.
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Cuba After Castro
Reporters and friends keep asking: “so what’ll happen when Castro dies?” “A big funeral in Havana,” I reply with certainty.
One other sure thing: Anti-Castro exiles in south Florida will throw a mammoth party. On July 31, Fidel revealed he would have surgery and ceded temporarily responsibilities to his brother Ra l. Little Havana’s streets erupted in celebration. Politically, Fidel again showed his ability to induce obsession in his enemies, thus making it difficult for them to think clearly apart from questions of bad taste. Fidel’s stature will continue to cloud south Florida’s political reality.
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The New Secularism
I always learn something from going on right-wing U.S. talk shows like Bill O’Reilly’s show on Fox. Once he introduced me as a columnist for “a left-wing Canadian newspaper.” I said I hated to use the pittance of time I was given between his long diatribes to defend the Globe & Mail. But I couldn’t let what he had just said stand: the Globe is in fact a conservative, business paper. He scoffed: “It’s a secular paper!” That’s what I mean by learning something. Alongside Afghanistan under the Taliban and the Iran of the mullahs, the U.S. is that rare nation that defines the left-right political spectrum in terms of the secular and the religious.
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Fanning the Flames
“Hey, where’s the Russian flag?”
Windsor’s Labour Day march, 1957, and I was three years old. Marchers carried flags of Canada, England, the United States. I rambunctiously blurted out the question above as my parents tried to hush me up. I had no idea there was a Cold War. In my child’s mind, Russia helped win the war against the bad Nazis. “We were Russian! Weren’t we the good guys, too? Wasn’t the flag with the hammer and sickle a good flag?”
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Old endings, new beginnings: Realignment on the socialist left
The old Communist and social-democratic projects have run their course. The consequence for socialists is a certain opening to structural and ideological creativity emerging in the space vacated by the traditional Left.
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Bolivia
The multitude of Bolivians who were blocking the roads, building barricades and surrounding the presidential palace — the peasants, miners, street venders, unemployed and many others — were the product of at least a half-century of revolutionary struggle against landlords, mine-owners, big-business people and the U.S. Embassy.
Beginning with the social revolution of 1952, which expropriated the mines and landed estates of the oligarchy and destroyed the military, the Bolivian workers and peasants forged their own class-based trade unions and militias. State power, however, was taken by the middle-class National Revolutionary Party (MNR), which began a process of re-establishing capitalist hegemony in alliance with the United States.
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