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.
From Calgary to Los Angeles, everyone knows that sports arenas are a bad deal for cities. But the problem isn’t just the use of public subsidies for private profit: the whole multibillion-dollar sports venue industry is built on the backs of poorly treated, underpaid workers.
The fall of state socialism in Bulgaria in 1989 brought neither the promised prosperity nor a flowering of popular democratic politics. Three decades on, elites still blame Bulgaria’s woes on a supposedly incomplete transition to capitalism — the excuse for an unending series of measures to run down public services and strip workers of their rights.
Workers in the United States have lost control of perhaps the most important aspect of their lives: their time. Getting that time back is crucial — for workers’ well-being, for democracy, and for weakening the tyrannical power of the boss.
Card check helps workers claim their rights by making union certification straightforward. British Columbia’s newly elected NDP majority government must bring card-check certification back to the province and help rebuild the power of workers.
With US hegemony in decline, China and the European Union are each vying to impose their own leadership over the next wave of digitalization. Donald Trump’s talk of “America First” expressed this rivalry in especially crude terms — but even after his departure, the contest among the main world powers is only intensifying.
For more than 40 years, Kim Stanley Robinson has written radical science fiction that offers readers not an easy vision of utopia, but a hopeful alternative that still confronts the ecological devastation wrought by capitalism.
Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension from the Labour Party is shameful, not least because he is one of the party’s most steadfast longtime anti-racist activists. We should know: we fought by his side to end apartheid in South Africa.
With Italy’s tourist sector sunk by the pandemic, authorities are now hiring cruise ships as floating jails for refugees. The migrant prisons show capitalism’s ability to restructure in times of crisis — but also the potential resistance to it.
Anthony Albanese may be the first federal leader of the Australian Labor Party to hail from the Socialist Left. However, his track record in New South Wales shows that he rose to his current position by collaborating with the party’s right wing to crush genuine ALP socialists.
Throughout the Cold War, Moscow-backed bodies like the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association and the Tashkent Film Festival brought writers and filmmakers from across the Third World to the USSR. Their exchanges with their Eastern Bloc counterparts reflected the ambitions and limits of Soviet internationalism.
Joe Biden says he’ll be a pro-labor president. But his funding from anti-union corporate executives, his Obama administration record, and his flirtation with Silicon Valley all point to a gap between rhetoric and reality.
Triumphalist celebrations of Joe Biden’s hollow win over Donald Trump are a master class in ideological hubris. Canada’s New Democratic Party absolutely should not take the wrong lessons from his feeble victory.
Nancy Pelosi is a barrier to transformative change. Socialists and progressives should oppose her reelection as House speaker.
Never Trumpers are pushing the narrative that their efforts, like the Lincoln Project, played a key role in securing Joe Biden’s victory. All you have to do is take a cursory glance at the numbers to see that isn’t true at all.
Poland’s protests can be a rallying cry for a new feminist internationalism that demands and wins public services for care, social housing, universal health care, and wage justice.
The GOP isn’t being shy about their attempt to steal the election. It’s a long shot, but history suggests that Democrats relying on a passive strategy to win is risky.
Joe Biden didn’t campaign on significant coronavirus relief measures despite the incredible pain felt across the country right now. It’s up to the Left to demand he pursue such measures in office, centered on three issues: addressing economic misery, expanding health care, and paying for it all by taxing the rich.
The Democratic leadership went into this election with a strategy: stick to the center, avoid the Left, and promise bipartisanship. When the results proved disastrous, guess who they decided to blame: the Left.
A Joe Biden presidency will attempt to return to the hawkish Democratic status quo on Israel. Leftist activists and elected officials have to be prepared to stop him.
It hasn’t taken long for Joe Biden to get down to the business of preparing to assume the presidency — by drawing staff from hawkish think tanks financed by arms companies.