In an historic victory for grassroots resistance, an Italian court has set a precedent by recognizing moral grounds for defying state violence. On December 12, 2024 a Bologna court ruled that members of Làbas, a social centre in Italy’s most left-wing city, acted out of “particular social and moral value” when they resisted a violent eviction by militarized police in 2017.

The decline of the Liberals is part of an international trend where the political centre finds it harder and harder to hold off challenges from the populist right. The inability of the Biden-Harris administration to forge an effective alternative to Trump is an obvious case in point. The Conservatives in Canada are poised to benefit from Trump’s victory.

The only lasting solution to this crisis is the upending of the economic order and the creation of a just and equitable mode of production—one that is able to rise to the challenge of climate breakdown, one that can claw back the wealth that has been hoarded by a tiny few, and one that is able to care for, educate, and give hope to all.

The Canadian establishment doggedly enables Israel and finds it advantageous for supporters of the Palestinian struggle to be contained. However, the lobby’s role in equating Jewish identity with Zionism and labelling opposition to this colonialist ideology as antisemitic is a potent factor that we should not underestimate.

Efforts by Western governments to suppress evidence-based history, whether through banning “critical race theory” or a focus on ideologically sifted “facts and dates” must be fought. We need to insist on national histories being told from the point of view of the common people with that history placed in the context of the whole history of our species.

Like our Palestinian allies in this struggle, we refuse to be patronized by Canadian policymakers. We refuse to be told that we are making a mountain out of a molehill. And we refuse to be told that we lack understanding by politicians who are in fact contradicting themselves. Our demands are simple and we will not stop pressing for them until they are realized.

For Malcolm Norris and Jim Brady, the struggle for socialism was inextricable from the struggle for Indigenous rights. Their vision of social and economic democracy was rooted in the Métis experience of violence, racism, and dispossession at the hands of the Canadian state, including after the 1870 Red River Resistance, and the implementation of the scrip system.

The musings of billionaires, the pronouncements of leading politicians and the version of events that we get from the corporate media all reveal how the rich and powerful view the world and their own place in it. We need to be alert to the common ways in which they misrepresent and distort reality for their own advantage, writes John Clarke.

The level of political consciousness of unionized workers in Weimar Germany was very similar to that of current progressive workers and equity advocates. Tragically, German progressives failed to take concerted action to mobilize democratic forces against Nazism until it was far too late. The consequences of inaction this time could be at least as devastating and even more enduring.

We cannot afford to treat the role art has in “politics” as some abstract or existential dilemma. In Toronto, the delegitimization of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian speech has taken on many forms, including high-profile firings, acts of censorship, cancellations and arrests. Indigo and the Giller’s assaults on language have had material, and potentially irreversible, consequences.