This challenging and illuminating account is truly a new history for the twenty-first century, one that lays out how the country’s past lies before us, demanding redress. The two books that comprise this retelling of Canada’s rise from a colony to a nation that has routinely and relentlessly colonized, should and will be widely read by all concerned with basic issues of social justice.

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.

Has there ever been a campaign so insipid? So incapable of rousing anyone but the most fevered reactionaries or conflicted social democrats? People will vote, of course, but almost certainly in depressingly low numbers. But they will cast their ballots out of little more than what they regard as biological necessity, and with not much more in the way of enthusiasm.

A working-class autodidact, Ernie Tate was a literate and cultured man, able to reflect engagingly on art and literature, film and music. He could build a cottage and renovate a house, organize a demonstration, engage a crowd, and convince others of the need to use their particular talents to fight for a better world. A love of food and sociability, valued friendships and good health, were paramount in his everyday life.

Leo Panitch was a socialist savant whose lifelong opposition to capitalism and its deformation of human experience never wavered. As Leo made abundantly clear, in so many ways, over so many years of involvement in and contribution to the socialist left, it is time to get rid of this system of exploitation and oppression, whose inherent destructiveness now places all of humanity at obvious risk.

Progressive mobilizations against the right and its reactionary politics rarely, under capitalism, garner an appreciative response from the so-called mainstream centre, even as it often benefits from this support. For after Biden’s slow trotting victory lap in the calm atmosphere of a congratulatory consensus, a hard rain’s a-gonna fall. And the deluge will not be pounding the right. It will be drowning the left.

As the world’s premier Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm’s intellectual range was unrivalled. Never one to pander to conventional politics, he was often a brave voice of dissent. Today more than ever, Hobsbawm’s work deserves serious examination. Here, Bryan Palmer reviews Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History, by Richard J. Evans.

Reclaiming the legacy of the 1919 general strike is a formidable task – one that will only happen if the unions and the Left are rebuilt in a reciprocal renaissance of the politics of opposition and class struggle.The prospects of either of these linked movements reviving alone, without the advance of the other, are slim indeed.

Rebel Youth is ordered by two claims. The first is that the explosion of defiant youthful anti-authoritarianism in the cultural arena, rebellious uprisings of young wildcat strikers in 1965-1966, the rise of New Left opposition and protest, and young radicals’ support for a series of 1969-1972 strikes need all be understood as “aspects of a single youth phenomenon.”

Few figures loom larger in the making of the first, late 1950s, New Left than E.P. Thompson and C. Wright Mills. Both were big. Both fit uneasily, to say the least, in the company of any established intelligentsia.