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Indentured immigrants: Recent failures to curb migrant exploitation in Canada
Desperate for sponsorship, Canadian newcomers often pay recruiters to find employment. This process can not only be costly, but it can lead to employment characterized by exploitation. With immigration targets set at record numbers, migrant exploitation will be more widespread in the coming years, enabled by flaws in current immigration policy and a lack of government oversight that make exploitation possible.
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Socialist savant: Leo Panitch (1945-2020)
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.
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How neoliberalism is fanning the conflict in the Tigray region of Ethiopia
In a clash of ideological paradigms, Abiy Ahmed’s administration has embarked on a path of neoliberalism that has placed Ethiopia in direct conflict with the Chinese-backed developmental state initiated by former leader Meles Zenawi. In part, the military intervention in Tigray is a push by Abiy to integrate the rebellious region into the neoliberal fold and to eliminate any remaining obstacles to his Western-backed reform agenda.
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The Capitol raid and ‘real-existing democracy’
COVID was not planned, the election was not stolen, and the Democrats are not running a pedophile ring. However, there are some serious problems with how powerful groups and the media have framed the events. In particular, the storming of the Capitol building is being used to reaffirm the greatness of America’s pre-Trump “democracy” even though capitalism has existed in opposition to that democracy for more than a century.
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Learning from the mistakes of the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike
Strikes remain the most powerful tool available to regular people under capitalism, and the general strike is the most powerful kind of strike. Even if it takes a half century or more, it is better to begin today than tomorrow in working towards the point at which the working class “shall demand, not the half-loaf which is said to be better than no bread, but the whole bakehouse.”
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Brian Pallister’s long war on workers must mark a new era for labour in Manitoba
The Pallister government expects Manitoba’s workers to pull themselves up by the bootstraps while it actively steals their boots from under them. The labour movement has been losing its war with employers and the state since the radical wings of Canadian unionism dissolved. Reformism lacks the leverage needed to earn a seat at the negotiating table. A better world is possible, but it is achievable only through direct action from below.
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Varieties of anti-capitalism for a 21st century economic democracy
While not a heroic call to arms, Wright’s last book is useful in its analysis and concise in its strategy. His life’s work imagined utopia, and while some may find this manifesto too tame of a project or too naïve to embark upon, it ought to be a great starting point for those who feel stuck in capitalism’s contemporary quagmire and have yet to envision a socialist alternative.
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Beyond the New Democratic Party
In charting a course forward, amid the pandemic and beyond, socialists must use their energy strategically. Transforming the New Democratic Party, for many, might simply prove to be too costly or too pointless to manage in a time of great upheaval and even greater opportunity. With so many trains leaving the station, is the NDP’s the right one to jump on?
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Divided health and the crisis of capitalism
In a class-divided political economy, many risks are likely to impinge primarily (often only) on the working class; all too often on the poor, those with little power, and upon non-white, racialized, or Indigenous peoples. In those settings there is a much reduced impulse to avert the risks, especially if such attention demands restrictions on the ceaseless drive for the maximization of profits that is the life blood of capitalism. Class matters. It always did.
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Why isn’t the NDP questioning the largest military procurement in Canadian history?
Amidst growing criticism, NDP Defence Critic Randall Garrison has said nothing regarding the runaway costs of the Canadian Surface Combatant project, the secrecy surrounding it, or the offensive weaponry set to be equipped on the warships. What is the point of having a defence critic if they are unwilling to question or challenge the largest military procurement in Canadian history?