Marxism is in the throes of a great intellectual renewal worldwide reinforced by the ongoing capitalist crisis and the intellectual and political exhaustion of liberalism, neoliberalism, postmodernism and even cultural studies. But now in the face of the rise of China and the world capitalist crisis Marxism and Marxists are being forced to reconsider their own history.

Based on the latest scholarship in the field, University of Winnipeg professor Jim Silver tells the story of early modern poverty with due attention to questions of child poverty, the condition of women, slavery and colonialism with illuminating examples of upper-class cruelty visited on those without means who were considered responsible for their own fate.

As Owen Schalk and Henry Heller explain, given Ottawa’s increasingly belligerent actions in the Pacific, its growing military cooperation with states hostile to Beijing, and the openly antagonistic way Canadian officials discuss China, it seems that Canada wants to delink its economy from China’s in order to prepare for a direct military confrontation.

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.

The US is using what remains of its strength to try to restore its global position. This aggressive drive is fueled by its long history of wars which helped to recast American society into one managed by corporations and the state. What is paradoxical is that its imperial ideology happens to be not fascism but a form of liberalism refitted for rationalizing military and political expansion.

America’s goal has become to preserve its imperial hegemony no matter the cost to others. Whereas Xi insists on the necessity of a more open world in order to allow the further development of today’s immense global forces of production the United States has regressed toward the reestablishment of trade blocs, economic sanctions and war in order to maintain its dominance.

It is impossible to say how far the crackpot realists in the West are prepared to go in defending their system. Hopefully they will bow to the force of circumstances which are not in their favour. But short of all out war we are looking at the emergence of new world system in which China has provided a key model of independent development for other states.

We cannot view the Ukraine conflict in isolation, writes University of Manitoba professor Henry Heller. It is negatively impacting the global economy as well as international relations across the board. At a time when the world urgently requires more international cooperation and integration it has once again become divided into antagonistic camps.

As I walk the line in the bitter cold talking with chemists, social workers, sociologists, accounting professors it occurs to me that we are in the end the university and that management is in the end the product of an ongoing usurpation of both labour and knowledge. Next week I will lecture on this in an improvised teach-in on the picket line. Learning must go on.

Bizarre as it is, this fanatical and reactionary movement is bent on chasing the imperialist West as well as Russia out of Arab lands. From the midst of the millions of Arabs brought to Europe as workers, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) has been able to recruit a few to bring the war home to the West.