Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading. – Christopher Thompson highlights how the use of monetary policy to fuel economic growth rather than a progressive fiscal policy alternative has served largely to enrich the already-wealthy. Rachelle Younglai and Murat Yukselir report on Canada’s growing income gap, while Andrew Jackson points out
Continue readingTag: Socialism
Babel-on-the-Bay: “Nice suits and empty slogans.”
That comment about suits and slogans was in the last line of the Toronto Star’s pompous editorial on “The challenge for Singh.” The newspaper editorialists want Singh and Trudeau to square off on progressive policy issues in the 2019 federal election. Lot’s of luck on that! But the problem is
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: What ‘New’ Democratic Party?
We are hearing that ‘Love is in the air’ and the New Democratic Party of Canada is facing the future to the beat of new drums. Everyone anticipates that this new day will start with the election of the new leader of the party. And if you believe all this
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – George Lakey describes how Denmark has built the world’s happiest society by building a political movement and an economic model centred around providing for everybody: Using the crisis as an opportunity, the Social Democrats secured the foundation of the Nordic model, the
Continue readingwmtc: rtod: herbert marcuse
Revolutionary thought of the day: Liberty Can be made into a powerful force of domination. Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slave — free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if those good and services sustain social controls
Continue readingwmtc: join the ndp and vote for niki ashton: deadline aug 17
The deadline to join the NDP and vote for Niki Ashton is August 17. Last night I saw something that shocked me, and today I did something I’ve never done before: I joined a political party. And I did it so I can cast my vote for Niki Ashton for
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Jerry Dias and Dennis Williams write about the fundamental changes which we should be seeking to make to NAFTA in order to ensure that workers’ and citizens’ interests aren’t left out of trade rules: Meaningful Nafta renegotiation must comprehensively focus on balanced
Continue readingwmtc: the politics of the hardboiled detective novel
I love these old covers! Last year, I blogged about a wonderful essay by Raymond Chandler called “The Simple Art of Murder“, written in 1950. Reading that, I realized that I knew the work of both Chandler and Dashiell Hammett — the originators of the hardboiled detective genre — only
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Why progressive elites are losing.
The disappointment progressives have felt with the New Democratic Party over the last couple decades has been something we have argued about but maybe not understood as well as we should. Maybe Robin V. Sears of the NDP put his finger on it the other day when complaining in print
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: The poster boy and the NDP.
Charlie Angus meet Jagmeet Singh. No doubt Charlie Angus MP, candidate for the New Democratic Party leadership has met Jagmeet Singh MPP, the newest candidate for the NDP leadership, before, but not likely as a competitor. The only surprise about this meeting is that both these gentlemen are in the
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: 150 Years of Marx’s Capital
Photo by Thierry Ehrmann This is a collection of videos dealing with Karl Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. This playlist starts with an audio recording of Capital Volume 1. And here’s a link to the text of Capital. It is 150 years since Karl Marx published the first
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Richard Wolff: What is capitalism? What is socialism?
In this interview with acTVism Munich, American Marxian economist Richard Wolff answers: What is Capitalism and Socialism? What differentiates Capitalism from Socialism? Has either system ever existed in its purest form? Was Capitalism actually overcome by Socialism when the State took over private ownership? What changes are required in society
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Dietrich Vollrath discusses both what’s included in our societal capital, and how best to think of redistributive policies as means of fairly dealing with it: (T)axes are a way of collecting the royalties on trust and scale that we inherited and/or create
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Dietrich Vollrath discusses both what’s included in our societal capital, and how best to think of redistributive policies as means of fairly dealing with it: (T)axes are a way of collecting the royalties on trust and scale that we inherited and/or create
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Mapping the Canadian Left: Sovereignty and Solidarity in the 21st Century
Demonstration against Jean Charest’s Bill 78, 2012 • Photo by Fightback/La Riposte If there is a single theme that has distinguished left politics in Canada and Québec at least since the 1960s, it is the aspiration to national sovereignty. For both the social-democratic and radical left in Québec, the pursuit
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: ‘There is no Alternative Unless We Build One’
Photo by Roger Blackwell The varied left histories dating back to the long 19th century gained momentum during the tumultuous first decades of the 20th century and for some time after. They came to an end, at one point or another, between the military coup in Chile (1973), the elections
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Class, Party and the Challenge of State Transformation
‘The Hand That Will Rule the World’ by Ralph Chaplin, Solidarity, June 30, 1917. The following is excerpted from Socialist Register 2017: Rethinking Revolution, edited by Gregory Albo and Leo Panitch. Populated by an array of passionate thinkers and thoughtful activists, Rethinking Revolution reappraises the historical effects of the Russian
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Food for Revolutionary Thought
For those of us long enough in the tooth to recall what it was like ‘way back when’, there is sometimes a distinct whiff of something like the old sectarianism in the air these days. And it most often comes, oddly enough, from precisely those quarters which contrast their embrace
Continue readingPaul S. Graham: Reclaiming socialism for this new millennium
L. B. Foote / Winnipeg Free Press Archives1919 StrikeCrowd gathers at Victoria Park Sometime in the 1990s, it became fashionable for many socialists to refer to themselves as “anti-capitalists.” I’m not sure why this was the case, but I suspect it involved a large measure of opportunism; socialism (at least
Continue readingParchment in the Fire: The party that’s pulling the Belgian left to the left – POLITICO
The ascendant Workers’ Party has learned to punch above its weight. Source: The party that’s pulling the Belgian left to the left – POLITICO Filed under: Socialism Tagged: Belgium, Far Left
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