“Middle Class” As Deflection

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Published on Thursday, 18 February 2021 05:58

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“Middle Class” As Deflection

Jeffery R. Webber

Saving the middle class has become fashionable again. With alarming regularity, opinion pieces in the country’s leading newspapers, magazines, and online media call for the reorienting of Canadian state policy around this elusive goal. Despite (or because of?) the shared commonsensical tone adopted in such commentary, explanations of the middle class, or indeed of social class in any sense at all, are vanishingly rare.

In all of these senses, Max Fawcett’s recent Walrus article, “How to Save the Middle Class,” draws the same useless cookie cutter from that old, cluttered baking drawer of mid-brow Canadian journalism. Fawcett’s use of “middle class” is symptomatic...

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Urgent pharmacare vote at parliament

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Published on Wednesday, 17 February 2021 07:36

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Navalny and the Protests: Some Clarification

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Published on Wednesday, 17 February 2021 04:40

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Navalny and the Protests: Some Clarification

Karine Clément

Who is Alexei Navalny? We now hear nothing but good things said about him in the West, and the enthusiasm should probably be tempered. I personally have never been a fan of Navalny. At the same time, the guts he showed in returning to Russia when he knew he was threatened both physically and legally unmistakably raises him to the level of a modern hero.

Navalny has just been sentenced to two years and 8 months in prison for a spurious reason, having broken the rules of his judicial review since… he was in Germany on authorization from the Kremlin to seek...

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GameStop and Share Markets: Between the Bad and the Ugly, There is No Good

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Published on Tuesday, 16 February 2021 06:10

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GameStop and Share Markets:
Between the Bad and the Ugly, There is No Good

Harry Glasbeek

The recent GameStop story coming out of the US pushed arcane financial dealings into a prominence they rarely enjoy. The public was introduced to weird concepts such as “short selling and short squeezes” and, for a while, they are likely to be part of many zoom conversations. Not least because, whatever these strange things are, to many they appear to have delivered a rare victory to the little guys who cunningly used apps to hoist the captains of finance – who often refer to themselves as the Masters of the Universe – on...

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Why Amazon Is Fighting So Hard to Stop Warehouse Workers From Unionizing

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Published on Monday, 15 February 2021 07:06

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Why Amazon Is Fighting So Hard to Stop Warehouse Workers From Unionizing

Sonali Kolhatkar

Thousands of warehouse workers at an Amazon plant in Bessemer, Alabama, are at the center of a potentially game-changing union vote taking place right now. On February 8, the warehouse workers were sent ballots by mail to decide over the next seven weeks if they want to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). Just getting to this point was a major victory considering the aggressive union busting by the world’s largest retailer and the fact that employees are working during a pandemic. If workers vote affirmatively, they would have the first unionized...

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The Politics and Geopolitics of the Coup in Myanmar

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Published on Sunday, 14 February 2021 06:28

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The Politics and Geopolitics of the Coup in Myanmar

Vijay Prashad

On February 1, 2021, Myanmar’s military – known as the Tatmadaw – invoked Article 417 of the 2008 constitution, dismissed State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi, and arrested her and other members of her National League for Democracy (NLD) party. Condemnation of the coup was swift, although there would be reason for hesitancy in the reaction: Aung San Suu Kyi, who had been the face of the democracy movement until her release from house arrest in 2010, ruined her reputation when she came to the International Court of Justice in 2019 to defend her country’s genocide against the...

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Community Helps to Sustain Portlands Ongoing BLM Protests

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Published on Saturday, 13 February 2021 05:40

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Community Helps to Sustain Portland’s Ongoing BLM Protests

April M. Short

At any given Black Lives Matter (BLM) event in Portland, you might encounter what looks like a farmers market stand, with woven baskets full of fresh veggies, fruits and flower cuttings. Look a little closer and you might come across an “Abolish the Police Lettuce Mix” or a fruit basket with a hand-painted sign that reads “billionaires are not essential.” This is the PlantBloc booth, where everything is freely donated and given away by Portland’s gardeners and plant lovers to support the movement against racism, and justice for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC).

PlantBloc operates only through...

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Council This Week

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Published on Friday, 12 February 2021 14:02

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Feb 14: Interpretation Machines /w Larry Lohmann

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Published on Friday, 12 February 2021 13:36

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r1

Contradictions of "Artificial Intelligence" in 21st Century Capitalism

Sunday, February 14th @ 2:00 PM (EST)

Since the nineteenth century, left movements have sought footholds among the ever-renewing contradictions of capitalist industrial mechanization and its relation to work and energy. These experiments, begun by Marx, remain fragmentary and contested. Yet the crises that twenty-first century digital mechanization presents and exacerbates may shed new light on this longer history of automation even as they confront the left with fresh puzzles.

This talk proposes three responses to these challenges. 1) It may be more useful to movement organizing to stress continuities between industrial-era and digital-era value-creation than to focus only on differences. 2) The contradiction between living and dead labor that Marx identified not only persists in today's digital economy, but also remains fundamental both to understanding crisis and to identifying possibilities for radical political change. 3) It may make more strategic sense for the left to approach the striking innovations in automation advanced over the past decade by the likes of Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba, Microsoft, and Apple as a new level of the mechanization of interpretive work than to promote mystifying labels such as artificial intelligence (AI).

Larry...

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New report on human rights defenders

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Published on Friday, 12 February 2021 08:38

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Dare to Hope

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Published on Friday, 12 February 2021 06:46

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In this edition, we bring you some reasons to keep fighting, and some reasons to be hopeful.

So here we are: we made it through the first month of 2021. Many of us had unprecedented struggles to face in the year 2020, and many of us had to adapt the way we lived, interacted and fought for climate justice. If there is one thing that is abundantly clear, it is that no matter how far apart we may feel, we can’t win this fight alone. In the first month of 2021, the world has faced increased climate disasters and injustice, but it has also seen some amazing wins for people power.

In this edition, we bring you some reasons to keep fighting, and some reasons to be hopeful.

Onwards,

Nona and Drue

In case you missed it

Cancelled pipelines: The Keystone XL pipeline is CANCELLED! On his first day in office, US President Joe Biden cancelled...

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In Memory of Ernie Tate (1934-2021)

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Published on Friday, 12 February 2021 05:08

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In Memory of Ernie Tate (1934-2021):
A Life of Revolutionary Activism

John Riddell

The socialist movement lost an outstanding educator and organizer with the passing of Ernest (Ernie) Tate in Toronto on 5 February. An outstanding partisan of global anti-imperialist solidarity, Ernie also contributed, with his partner Jess MacKenzie, to building revolutionary Marxist groups and to promoting socialist unity in Canada and Britain.

Raised in an impoverished working-class community in Belfast, Ernie left school at age 14, taking a job at Belfast Mills as apprentice machine attendant. An avid reader and a rebel at heart, Ernie sympathized – unusually, given his Protestant background – with the Irish republican movement.

During a...

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We admit we didnt get this one right

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Published on Thursday, 11 February 2021 17:20

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Trudeau promised green jobs. Where are they?

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Published on Thursday, 11 February 2021 12:06

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Dear Paov,

As you know, millions of Canadians lost their jobs over the course of the pandemic. January’s job numbers, which reflect the impacts of COVID’s second wave, just came out and they’re worse than most experts predicted.1 And, just like with the first wave, women, racialized folks, and young people were hardest hit.

In September’s Speech from the Throne, the Liberal government pledged that "climate action will be a cornerstone of our plan to support and create a million jobs across the country." There’s certainly no shortage of work to be done as we repair our damaged environment and race to build a fossil-free economy.

But, since last year, Trudeau hasn’t said much about green jobs at all. That’s why, with your help, we’ve been pushing him to deliver the Just Transition Act he promised in the last election to support workers and communities impacted by the shift off fossil fuels and by the worsening climate crisis. Done right, there’s massive potential to kickstart a green jobs revolution.

Today, we’re taking the next step in our Just Transition Act campaign with a cheeky new action. Can you take a few minutes to...

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