The MUD (Democratic Unity Roundtable) enjoys the political, financial and logistical support of the United States and the EU, while members of other opposition parties have been denounced and sanctioned by the US for negotiating with the Maduro administration. These elections should put the Biden administration on notice that continuing to support the MUD, and the fiction of Guaidó as “interim president,” is a failed policy.

The piggy bank was rattled again. In September 2021, the United States Agency for International Development gave $6,669,000 in grants for projects aimed at “regime change” in Cuba, a euphemism to avoid saying “direct intervention by a foreign power.” The United States’ current Democratic administration has especially favored the International Republican Institute with a bipartisan generosity that Donald Trump never had.

There is perhaps no bigger controversy among partisans of the left than the nature of China and its economy. Is it socialist? Capitalist? State capitalist? A hybrid? That so much debate swirls around this issue is its own proof that the question doesn’t have a definitive answer, at least not yet. What we can do is analyze the actions and words of CCP leadership, which has carried out a slow progression toward capitalism.

We are often told that voting is a form of ‘harm reduction.’ But consider all the energy and resources poured into trying-and-usually-failing to get NDP candidates elected to a parliament where they likely cannot or will not make any difference in the actual policy output. What if we put those resources and energy into the actual harm reduction itself?

Where every other party is obliged to broker the interests of working class and colonized people to the grand abstraction of ‘The Economy,’ balancing corporate interests with the best of their respective platforms, the Communist Party of Canada can confidently name the profit system that dispossesses all, however differently—of land, of lifetime, of the wealth that we incessantly create.

Jagmeet Singh and the NDP have come out with a bold costed platform that is a marked departure from Canada’s long neoliberal consensus. It makes a concise and powerful pitch: Canada is plagued by social and economic injustice that has only been intensified by COVID, and as we build out of this crisis, regular Canadians need help, and the rich have the responsibility and ability to contribute to a just recovery.

The narrative that has emerged in the current election has given eco-socialists an opening that is unprecedented. Government activism has never played such a starring role in a federal election. Austerity, lower taxes, cutbacks—the usual themes on the electoral political stage—have been written out of the campaign scripts and the loosening of public purse strings now implies placing the public interest above private greed.

Today, in a time of overlapping crises and fast-paced social media cultures, sectarianism has taken on new and destructive forms. We regularly put energy into tearing down the efforts of others who share many of our aims but who we see as wrong-headed. But many of us, as activists and organizers, are exhausted from cycling through teardowns and hungry for something more constructive.

Single party bureaucratic socialism creates a kind of political demiurge that escapes the rule of law, since it places itself above it, accentuates political extremism and separates itself from the citizenry. So far all models with these characteristics, far from leading to a socialist society, have disguised a state capitalism with features of corruption and elitism.

As repugnant as these nouveau-cowboy colonizers are, they are not, as individuals, the problem: they are expressions of a system that is destroying the earth and exploiting working people, cleverly justified with an ideology of do-good philanthropy. They are given too much of a free ride by an uncritical media. The answer to polluting industry on earth is not to send it to the moon but create socialist solutions on earth.