Your search
Results 3 resources
-
Members of the Socialist Party of Canada (SPC) played a prominent role in the labour revolt of 1919, the One Big Union, and the Winnipeg General Strike. The “failure” of all three has led labour historians to focus on the inability of the party to connect with Canadian workers, an inability fuelled by dogmatism, “impossibilism,” and the exclusion of women and workers of colour. This article turns this approach on its head, pointing out that these events have been unequalled in Canadian history, and seeks to explain why this should be so. It challenges the perception of the party as being wed to evolutionary thinking that caused its members to wait around for the revolution to happen. Instead, it reveals the powerful influence of the dialectical method developed by G. W. F. Hegel; its focus on human action was the philosophical underpinning of the spc’s relentless attack on the wage system and the capitalist system’s commodification of labour power. Far from being “metaphysical” or “otherworldly,” the SPC’s insistence that workers must gain control of the product of their own labour spoke directly to them, including women and workers of colour. In the creation of the One Big Union, in the solidarity of the Winnipeg General Strike, and in the promise of the labour revolt of 1919, we find the legacy of a party committed to workers rising up.
-
There has been an increasing tendency in recent decades to characterize North American Indigenous peoples as "people of the corn" living in permanent or semi-permanent settlements. This approach focuses on matrilineal, agricultural societies in which women play a central role in the economy and the organization of domestic life. Iroquoian women have been at the heart of this approach, while Algonquian women from patrilineal, hunter-gatherer societies remain in the shadows of the men who continue to be perceived as the main providers. In reality, on both the land and the water, the "nomadic" way of life of the people of the forest was anchored in the courage, strength, and endurance of Algonquian women providers.
-
This article challenges Verity Burgmann’s claim that “Classical Marxism” is fatally enamoured with the dynamism of capital and therefore unable to sustain resistance to globalization. It argues that this charge rests on an overly neat identification of Classical Marxism with Second International orthodoxy and a distorted reading of Rosa Luxemburg’s work, particularly The Accumulation of Capital, which is shown to emphasize the violent incorporation and intensified exploitation of colonized and racialized workers rather than celebrating capitalist advance. The article also contends that Burgmann’s dismissal of Leninism and Third International Marxism erases their formative role in anti‑colonial struggles across Africa, Asia, and Latin America that helped make later anti‑ and alter‑globalization movements possible. In addition, it questions Burgmann’s elevation of anarchism and autonomist Marxism, noting her neglect of feminist organizing and women’s movements, and arguing that many of the qualities she attributes to these currents, above all, an insistence on agency, consciousness, and mass self‑activity, are already present in Luxemburg’s and Lenin’s Marxism. The article concludes that Marxism, understood through Luxemburg and Lenin rather than through Burgmann’s caricature of Classical Marxism, offers a still‑vital framework for confronting contemporary globalization, grounded in working‑class self‑emancipation and internationalist opposition to imperialism.