Now that economic rethinking is on the agenda, argues Richard Swift, it’s a good time for those who see the ominous writing on the wall to challenge the growth consensus and promote a package of serious degrowth measures, some of which align with historic left demands and the Green New Deal which seems to have faded from view.

While not a market-worshipper of Danielle Smith’s ilk, Québec Premier François Legault has a vision of the province that still revolves around a profit-driven market economy with growth-oriented goals. For an increasingly large body of environmental opinion, however, the very nature of such an economy undermines efforts to ‘save the planet.’

Neither the anti-NATO nor the anti-Putin faction is long on nuance or empathy. It’s as if each is fighting its own version of a proxy war, both invoking the claim of anti-imperialism. If these groups cannot reach agreement on a thoughtful and even-handed proposal for peace, the chances of the actual combatants doing so are slim indeed.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine should have been pretty straightforward at least on the surface. A large authoritarian nuclear power launches an all out assault on a vulnerable and militarily weak neighbour to recover its regional hegemony and eliminate any semblance of a political alternative. This should be a no brainer for peace activists, or so you would think. But that assumption has turned out to be wrong.

The hope lingers that the extensive leaks contained within the Pandora Papers will force reform of the tax regime and reverse, or at least impede, the exacerbation of what is already a staggering level of global inequality. But it seems naïve to imagine that those who made the rules in favour of capital accumulation will now turn around and say “Gosh we never intended it to go this far.”

Challenging the Right, Augmenting the Left: Recasting Leftist Imagination is a fine collection willing to challenge and explore a number of different paths out of the ecological wasteland that the many forms of capitalism are condemning us to. But it also goes some way to addressing the largely unrecognized crisis of all too many of the alternatives to that capitalist system.

The COVID-19 crisis is making us do some of the things required to live within the planet’s ecological boundaries. We have a stark choice before us. Rework our economy and polity around the possibilities that tackle climate change, or continue to ratchet up the labour market to produce ever more jobs while paying no attention to their ecological implications or levels of pay and conditions of work.

Those we get to choose from are largely part of a class of professional politicians, mostly former lawyers or business executives with the occasional teacher thrown into the mix. Many such as Andrew Scheer have never been anything but career politicians. It’s a sad kind of symbolic democracy as opposed to any real self-rule with democratic decision-making embedded broadly in workplaces and communities.

Harry Glasbeek is a real oddity—a lawyer and professor of corporate law who specializes in exposing the way in which law is manipulated to provide aid and comfort to the dubious maneuverings of corporate power. In this concise book he moves beyond his earlier critique of the shield provided by corporate personhood to examine the ways in which the spirit of liberal jurisprudence is undermined by the way courts interpret corporate malfeasance.

Norman Nawroki, long a stunningly creative voice from out of Montréal’s anarchist community, combines spoken word with guitar, drum, piano and some very haunting violin in this compilation to benefit the city’s Immigrant Workers centre and Solidarity Across Borders. Nawrocki’s political poetry blends acute observation of the plight of migrant workers and refugees with musical and background voice arrangements.