Topics – Economy
Economics ultimately concerns the forms of value generated and destroyed through our means of production and exchange. Within capitalism all things—land, water, and even human capacity or “labour”—are converted into private goods for exchange and profit. Exploitation of life and land, endemic poverty and forced migration are all manifestations of the rise of capitalism as the dominant economic paradigm. While holding industry and government to account through investigation and analysis, Briarpatch highlights the resistance struggles that open pathways to a post-capitalist future.
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compass/check/pulse point
Book review
Cynthia Dewi Oka’s first collection of poetry, nomad of salt and hard water (Dinah Press), drops anchor in the transoceanic struggle of bodies against borders
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Baseball in December
Short-fiction honourable mention
The end of contract supper starts out like a normal meal in a normal restaurant, but then Smiley hails the waiter and the five of us closest to him realize it’s on.
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Freshwater food security
A profile of the Grand Rapids Fishermen’s Co-op
Many fishers are passionately opposed to wasting fish but struggle to survive in an industry where the price paid per pound has declined over the years while costs such as gasoline, labour, and equipment have only risen. Fishers in Grand Rapids have come up with a potential solution.
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Killers in high places
Drugs, gangs, and Harper’s war on the poor
If the drug war is a tool of social and territorial control and capital accumulation, it’s not enough to simply accuse Harper’s Conservatives of pursuing a misguided strategy.
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The olive grove
A graphic narrative
The annual olive harvest is a key economic, social, and cultural event for Palestinians. The olive oil produced makes up 14% of agricultural income in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and helps support 80,000 families.
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Outsourcing sovereignty
An interview with Justin Podur on Haiti’s new dictatorship
Haiti is an avant-garde microcosm of the privatization, deregulation, and loosening of state structures and protections that is happening everywhere.
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Trespassers on their own land?
Resource extraction is displacing traditional economies
Economic development based on resource extraction and other high- impact activities continues at the expense of traditional Indigenous land-based economies. While military, oil and gas, and uranium industry development in traditional Dene, Cree, and Métis territories offers some wage labour, it displaces traditional labour such as hunting, trapping, fishing, and gathering.
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Constructed categories
Avoiding the race to the bottom
If labour is imagined outside of wage work and governmental categories, it gives us the tools to further a more collective struggle against the living legacies of dispossession, colonization, and exploitation.
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‘Right-to-Work’ legislation provides no rights and no work
Labour law reform: consultation or imposition?
Will the comprehensive changes to labour legislation that unfold in Saskatchewan be a model for right-wing parties across Canada?
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Revitalizing the Canadian labour movement
Book review
Rethinking the politics of labour in Canada offers a sombre yet honest analysis of the current situation of labour politics
