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  • This essay is an attempt to outline recent trends in the criminalization of working-class lives. It casts the net broadly, both historically and geographically, situating capitalist austerity's recent turn to mass incarceration in the United States and Canada in early 19th-century poor law sensibilities. What is happening now differs from the workhouse regime of industrial capitalism's new poor law, of course, but it has undoubted connections to this older regime of regulation. The new new poor law of our times is part of a long history of how dispossession has been pivotal to capitalism's project of uninhibited accumulation and suppression of those driven to defiance and dissent. It reveals how, as profit declines in the productive sphere, incarceration itself can be made to pay. The new new poor law is fundamental to contemporary capitalist political economy as the politics of austerity, the dismantling of the welfare state, and an assault on working-class entitlements and trade unionism are complemented by the rise of a prison-industrial complex. Driven by class antagonisms and racialized scapegoating, the new new poor law inevitably draws into its sphere of influence public-sector workers employed in the criminal justice system. It also unleashes intensified grievances of the incarcerated, stimulating the birth of movements of protest in which prisoners and proletarians search out ways of making common cause.

  • The article reviews the book, "Waiting for the Revolution: The British Far Left from 1956," edited by Evan Smith and Matthew Worley.

  • At the current conjuncture, histories of Canadian Communism seem analytically stalled in a fruitless (if inadequately addressed) historiographic impasse, ordered by oppositions: Moscow domination vs. local autonomy; authoritarianism vs. the pursuit of social justice. We need to confront these experiences, not as dichotomies, but as related phenomena, developing our histories of Communism around more totalizing appreciations that encompass both sides of a seemingly divided logic of classification. Having myself tried to see beyond the limiting oppositions of the extant historiography, I will explore how certain historians seem unwilling to look past the conveniently counter-posed analyses of two existing schools of thought, labelled traditionalists/revisionists in the United States and essentialists/realists in the United Kingdom. As distortions of my own writing suggest, we have reached a point where it is both appropriate and necessary to be more rigorous and fair-minded in our characterization of the historiography. --Introduction

  • Provides an illustrated overview of the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 and its significance today for working-class organizations and socialism. Contents: Introduction: Revisiting the workers' revolt in Winnipeg / Sean Carleton and Julia Smith (p. 23) -- 1919: Recovering a a legacy / Bryan D. Palmer (pp. 24 - 31, 40) [https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/1919-recovering-a-legacy] -- 1919: A graphic history of the Winnipeg General Strike [reproduction of the cover and illustrations from the book by the Graphic History Collective and David Lester] (pp. 32, 36-37) --  Red flags: Reflections on racism and radicalism / Owen Yoews (pp. 33-35, 40) [https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/red-flags-reflections-on-racism-and-radicalism] -- From 1919 to the fight for $15: Working-class organizing in Winnipeg today / Emily Leedham (pp. 38-30) [https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/from-1919-to-the-fight-for-15-working-class-organizing-in-winnipeg-today].

Last update from database: 4/9/25, 4:10 AM (UTC)

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