Tag: Capitalism

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.

We convened a roundtable of activists from different movements to talk about what a just transition means to them, and what it looks like on the ground.

Pour les partisans de la décroissance, il est urgent que nos sociétés rompent avec la course à la croissance économique avant que les limites biophysiques de notre planète ne nous imposent une décroissance forcée et brutale. Aujourd’hui, le mouvement fleurit au Québec.

I sat down with six economists to ask them two pressing questions: first, what are the biggest economic barriers to a just transition in Canada and, second, how do we overcome them?

“There is a Sunday quietness / to the sea with just one diseased whale with sad, ulcerous eye / and her dead calf swirling around the tepid / teacup of brown water.” Best of Regina winner of the Writing in the Margins contest.

Winnipeg has been shaped by settler city planners and capitalists who sidelined Indigenous plans for decolonized urban development. Emily Leedham reviews Stolen City: Racial Capitalism and the Making of Winnipeg by Owen Toews.

Anti-consumerism is a noxious, tone-deaf, and fundamentally reactionary concept that absolves capitalism of its crimes – and should quickly be banished from serious leftist discourse.

Sorry To Bother You shows why we need anti-capitalist art that’s both radical and popular.

Autoconvocados – self-organized student protesters – are mobilizing against the repressive Ortega government. But their movement threatens to fall into the hands of nationalists and pro-capitalists.

Could a new crown corporation – SaskOil – allow us to wind down the industry, get off oil, keep people employed, and repatriate land, resources, and decision-making to Indigenous peoples?