Briarpatch Articles

To avoid police and prisons, more leftists are turning to accountability processes to repair harm. But fractious accountability processes are tearing communities apart. How might returning to transformative justice’s Black feminist roots help break the cycle?

Is the idea of Indigenous sovereignty really in conflict with the well-being of migrant communities? A review of “Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants.”

By remaining silent during the invasion of Wet’suwet’en land, settler feminists in Canada have risked both complicity in this violence and irrelevance in a women’s movement that is global in scope.

It’s a demand that’s easy to understand and easy to fight for, which is important because we’ll need a lot of people to help us win it.

Free speech isn’t a cause the left can afford to leave to liberals or the right. And when “no platform” is called for, we shouldn’t appeal to authorities to do it.  

“A Planet to Win” does not call for a utopian adoption of yet-to-be-invented technologies to fix things, but contends that we can build using the technology we have now to both address people’s real needs and decarbonize.

Today, Tamil people are Toronto’s working class as well as, increasingly, its elite – but behind the Canadian Tamil community’s historic struggles and resistance lies the fact that most of us arrived in Toronto fleeing a genocide

The Democratic Socialists of America Canada Twitter account was fake – but its popularity was not. What’s the power of socialist branding to shape a movement?

The massive fraud at The Pas is a modest entry in the annals of Canadian racial capitalism. In light of the town’s history of Cree and Métis political action, it could be said that a quarter-billion dollars were stolen out of the mouths of children, from over the heads of families, from people seeking meaningful work in the prime of life.

In Guatemala, traditional Indigenous governments are battling municipalities and transnational corporations for control of their land

In February, in the midst of solidarity protests against the RCMP’s invasion of Wet’suwet’en territory, I created a Google Doc: “How to explain what’s happening to the Wet’suwet’en people in Chinese.” The long history of grassroots translation work shows that it is one of our strongest tools to build solidarity against white supremacy.

Briarpatch began 49 years ago as a four-page newsletter produced by and for low-income earners, welfare recipients, and the unemployed. Today, as so many of my friends lose their jobs or have their shifts halved during the COVID-19 pandemic, I can see clearly the thread that connects Briarpatch to its origins half a century ago.

I know that Black and brown bodies hampered in water, drowning Black and brown bodies, absent Black and brown bodies are required for and useful to whiteness. I see this Jim Crowed reality every time I enter a pool and my fast and skilled Black body is punished for contravening white aquatic segregation.

In Toronto’s easternmost suburb, a photographer seeks out beauty in immigrant communities that are literally pushed to the edges of the city.

“If Canada wants to live up to its lie of a reputation / then there at least needs to be justice involvement. / The way of Indigenous life / has become learning to live with injustice.” Best of Regina winner of our ninth annual Writing in the Margins contest.

“if word of such devices spreads, / and more than word, / it may not be just capital that overcomes / the hardened borders of the future capital’s / intent that most of us won’t see.” Poetry runner-up of the Writing in the Margins contest.

Exploring the anti-colonial, egalitarian roots of Sikhi, and tracking the extraordinary political power of the Sikh community in Canada today

“you bear their names like heavy robes. say it. / bind your waist in white ribbon. history’s seams / are tearing. you learned violence as the sweetest love / but you learned from the wrong people.“ Poetry winner of the Writing in the Margins contest.

As another recession looms, the left must be ready when it hits – with anti-capitalist theory that can tell people why we’ve had 12 economic crises in the last century alone, why the rich just get richer each time, and why it’s working class people who always lose. 

150 years ago, Karl Marx observed that crisis is encoded in capitalism’s DNA. Today, Canadian capitalism has entered another period of serious volatility – one that may culminate in a crisis even deeper than that of 2008.