Andrew Loewen

What is the relation between organized labour, social movements, and electoral politics?

Of the dozens of generally crappy jobs I’ve held since my teens, only two have been at union shops. That’s two more union jobs than most people under 35 have had.

During the economic expansion that followed WWII, organized labour won significant gains in exchange for embracing capitalism. Long since the crises of the 1970s, and decades into organized labour’s decline, major labour organizations still talk as if a return to that postwar compromise is possible. What can be done – what is being done – to challenge this orientation?

Dignity is, ultimately, why we are on the political left. It is connected to the energy by which we can reckon with domination rather than crumple in its grasp. It is why we have each other.

The primacy of place and, more pointedly, an essential relation to the land is largely absent from the aesthetic theories of those in the modernist and Marxist traditions. In a settler-colonial society, such abstract sensibilities are untenable.