Frances Abele CM is Distinguished Research Professor and Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy Emerita at Carleton University. She is a research fellow at the Carleton Centre for Community Innovation and the Broadbent Institute. Much of her work focuses on indigenous-Canada relations.
The slander against the Netflix documentary Seaspiracy says a lot about fishing industry influence in marine science. We have somehow allowed the fisheries industry’s own scientists to define sustainable fishing goals — it’s a disgrace leading to an ecological nightmare.
Last week’s cyberattack on an Iranian nuclear facility, reportedly by Israeli intelligence, is the latest gambit from the coalition of Israeli leaders, Christian fundamentalists, and hawkish Washington neocons who want to block a US return to the Iran nuclear agreement. If they’re successful, millions of ordinary Iranians suffering under draconian sanctions will pay the price.
For more than a century, one of the most persistent ideas in US politics has been that education is the best solution to inequality. But it’s not persistent because it’s true — it’s persistent because it’s a useful myth for political and economic elites jealously guarding their money and power.
Imran Khan’s government came to power in 2018 promising to reorient Pakistan’s economy toward the needs of the population. But faced with a debt crisis it soon dropped its reformist agenda — and now, the International Monetary Fund is pressuring it to place its State Bank permanently beyond democratic control.
The cameras and news trucks may be leaving town. But at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, where the company won a closely watched unionization vote last week, the fight isn’t over. And at Amazon’s other warehouses, it’s just getting started.
Movies about class and inequality are back in the mainstream. Ramin Bahrani’s The White Tiger is a powerful interrogation of the injustices of class and caste society.
To build worker power at a mass scale that can challenge Jeff Bezos’s behemoth, worker militancy at Amazon has to be as global and as extensive as the supply chain itself.
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s recent comments to a pro-Israel group were defensive and confusing. But her progressive record on foreign policy and Palestine is an indication that she could play a much stronger role in standing up for Palestinian rights.
After a serious extra-parliamentary campaign in which DSA and newly elected socialist legislators figured prominently, the New York State legislature just passed the most progressive budget in years.
Myanmar’s coup government has slaughtered workers for launching general strikes against the junta — but workers have doubled down, calling for comprehensive sanctions against the military. We talked to two leaders of the strikes.
To fight for historic worker rights legislation, the PRO Act, major unions and the Democratic Socialists of America are joining forces like never before.
No one on the French left wants the 2022 presidential election to be another contest between Macron and Le Pen, yet its own forces remain deeply divided. A left-wing alliance for the Hauts-de-France regional election is making parties like the Greens and France Insoumise put aside their differences — but also highlights the difficulties of forming any common strategy for national politics.
The union loss in Bessemer, Alabama against Amazon was a crushing defeat. It’s a reflection of a disjunction between “laborism,” the intellectual and activist infrastructure supportive of organized labor, and the labor movement itself.
After becoming the first man in space, in July 1961 Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin accepted an invitation to visit factory workers in Manchester. Gagarin delighted them by saying he was proud to be a worker — and that the collective endeavor that put him in orbit was also needed on Earth.
Capitalists are sometimes accommodating of electoral democracy. But at no point in history have capitalists ever accepted the outcome of elections that might threaten capitalist property relations.
Boris Johnson wants the UK to spend more on arms and reassert its “global role.” Along with a government clampdown on anti-racist organizing, his strategy is clear — imperial grandstanding and the crushing of dissent.
Over the last decade, streaming services like Spotify have become increasingly dominant, sucking up all the profits at the expense of the musicians who make the work. Now, the newly formed Union for Musicians and Allied Workers is mobilizing to ensure musicians receive the royalties they’re owed.
Sixty years ago today, Yuri Gagarin became the first man to leave our planet. The space race was inseparable from Cold War rivalry, but it also stands out as an inspiring example of what humanity can achieve through grand collective projects that aren’t geared to private profit.
With support from the Australian government, the Adani corporation is pushing ahead with an environmentally destructive coal mine in Queensland. But the traditional Aboriginal owners of the land, the Wangan and Jagalingou nation, are waging a determined fight to stop them.
HBO’s QAnon documentary has been criticized for its hands-off approach to its subjects, who include some of the most reactionary characters on the internet. But the film is a deft portrayal how a dangerous conspiracy theory could emerge from the internet’s fever swamps and cause real world damage.