Tag: Capitalism

Amid escalating tensions between the U.S. and Chinese governments, a troubling campist discourse has been growing in the Canadian left. Socialists should side with neither the American nor the Chinese state – instead, we need to build internationalism from below.

How WE Charity helps cleanse white Canada of white guilt

A Master Plan was put in place to ensure the integrity of Regina’s iconic park, but over the past few years, the plan has been undermined and business has begun to encroach on public space.

Who’s making bank off COVID-19, and who’s fighting back? A summary of Resource Movement and Briarpatch’s webinar, “Pandemic Profiteers & the Movements Trying to Stop Them”

From socially-distanced protests to virtual union drives, five vital signs of worker organizing during COVID-19

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.

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.

In this open letter, 33 recipients of TD’s Scholarship for Community Leadership ask that TD withdraw its support for the pipeline, which violates Wet’suwet’en sovereignty

A full transcript of Briarpatch’s webinar with David McNally, Isaac Murdoch, Nandita Sharma, John Clarke, and David Camfield on the global COVID-19 and economic crises.

Briarpatch hosted a discussion between David McNally, Isaac Murdoch, Nandita Sharma, John Clarke, and David Camfield on the global COVID-19 and economic crises. Here are the key take-aways.

Saskatchewan’s freezing evictions and Trudeau’s promising $2,000 to laid-off workers. But activists are calling for cancelling rent and more protections for workers.

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.

Resource Movement asks – earnestly – how can a group of rich kids help advance social justice movements?

The argument for a reduced work week asks: why do we work to produce so much more than we can possibly use? Why not work less, waste less, distribute better, and enjoy the age of abundance that we’ve been promised?

In a recent article, Vijay Prashad argues that the challenge of the left is to be both present- and future-oriented at once. As the federal election looms, that’s what I’ve tried to do in this issue of Briarpatch.

Today’s left wins when we challenge the right’s cruel and exclusionary imagination with more just, more beautiful world-making projects of our own.

Mexico’s new president promised “the end of neoliberalism.” But as he forces through megaprojects and steamrolls over Indigenous dissent, activists are beginning to understand that anti-neoliberal doesn’t always mean anti-capitalist.

Whose interests guide the state apparatus that sets the parameters of city development? Yutaka Dirks reviews Samuel Stein’s Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State.

Around us, we see fear and uncertainty about the world that is coming into being. This issue of Briarpatch came from a desire to articulate a hopeful vision of the future, and a plan for how to get there by addressing interwoven social and environmental crises.