Tag: Social Movements

Their demonstrations have shaken Quebec in recent months, and yesterday students and environmentalists won major victories. At her first news conference as premier, Pauline Marois announced that her Parti Québécois government had cancelled the university tuition fees increase imposed by the Charest Liberal government, and would repeal the repressive provisions

Occupy Tactics: Violence and Legitimacy in the Occupy Movement and Beyond from brandon jourdan on Vimeo. It finally happened. After months of anarchists howling over journalist Chris Hedges’s controversial article “The Cancer Within Occupy,” the author debated the subject of non-violence and the diversity of tactics in the Occupy Wall

Numerous books and professional articles have been written about class – inequalities, culture, internal differentiation (gender, ethnicity etc.). Labour specialists have discussed strikes, protests and collective bargaining. Few if any writers have attempted to elaborate on analytical framework, which sets forth the specific dimensions of ‘class struggle,’ namely its historical,

By passing Bill 78, a law designed to curb freedom of assembly and the right to strike, Premier Jean Charest expected to quell the three-month-old Québec student strike against tuition fee hikes. But this authoritarian gambit only galvanized the student movement and summoned a wave of support which transformed the

Medicare was born in Saskatchewan on July 1, 1962. It would be the first government-controlled, universal, comprehensive single-payer medical insurance plan in North America. It was a difficult birth. The North American medical establishment and the entire insurance industry were determined to stop Medicare in its tracks. They feared it

The following article draws attention to an important issue that has been largely overlooked in the Quebec student strike. The author, Pierre Graveline, is a well-known journalist, editor and publisher, and is currently the executive director of the Fondation Lionel-Groulx. A former official with the Quebec teachers union, he is

David Harvey addressed a crowd in the heart of London’s financial district early in November 2011. “We need to mobilize in such a way that we can genuinely threaten major commercial and financial interests,” Harvey said in his speech at Occupy London. “You’re in the heart of the beast, the

The idea that economic growth can not continue indefinitely, or even for more than a few generations, is as old as economics itself. The classical economists — Smith, Ricardo and, of course, Malthus — each offered reasons for thinking that the human population would eventually outrun the capacity of nature

Growth, conventionally defined as the ever increasing flow of goods and services on the market, is a mantra that continues to be embraced by nearly the entire political spectrum, even though, in the contemporary period, the biophysical, social and economic “limits to growth” have been identified as an urgent problem