Articles
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Article
The Interpersonal is Political: Lessons from Indigenous Solidarity Organizing
Reflections on Union Activism and Indigenous Solidarity Work
I’m in the Home Hardware in Sioux Lookout, nearly 1,750km from my Toronto home, arguing over a pickaxe. I’m overcome with worry as I stare in disbelief at its price tag and mentally calculate what my group has spent so far in the trip and what is left. While I anxiously negotiate our budgeting,...
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Gaza, Lynchings, and the Genocidal Logics of Settler Colonialism
How do we make sense of the Israeli massacres in Gaza during the summer of 2014? The searing images of the destruction of Palestinian life and the scenes of an incremental colonial genocide still pulsate, assault, and force one into silence. Words cannot fully describe the aggression that began on J…
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Energizing the Climate Movement
The news is in, and it’s good (sort of). Although the world is in dire circumstances, an increasing number of mainstream and progressive people are making statements that would have shocked radical environmentalists and anti-capitalists 20 years ago. The UN is calling for a mass transition away fr…
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Students Not Investors
The Human Capital We Don’t Want to Become
In 2012, Québec’s Liberal government, led by Jean Charest, defended a raise in tuition fees of $1625 over five years as a historic student strike roared across the province. Their arguments were simple: given that higher education almost inevitably leads to better job prospects and higher income,...
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Organizing Against Climate Catastrophe
The forces responsible for changing the climate and endangering the future of humanity have names, names including Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Saudi Aramco, and Petróleos de Venezuela. They are the predominant names responsible for playing havoc with our collective future. In fact, two-thirds of historic…
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Liberatory Midwifery: Towards People-Powered Health Care
Despite a history embedded in social movements, Registered Midwifery is now situated in petty bourgeois professionalism and biomedical practice. Following the medically-unattended home birth of my daughter in 1997, I became involved in the struggle for legalized and publicly-funded midwifery. I beli…
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Commons Against and Beyond Capitalism
In our view, we cannot simply say “no commons without community.” We must also say “No commons without economy,” in the sense of oikonomia, i.e., the reproduction of human beings within the social and natural household. Hence, reinventing the commons is linked to the reinvention of the commu…
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Reporting From the Inside
Interview with Ali Mustafa
Today, Syria is on the verge of collapse. What began as a grassroots protest movement, inspired by revolutionary action in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere in the Middle East, is now a bloody civil war. As media headlines focus on the armed aspects of the battle against the dictatorship of Bashar al-As…
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Take it Back and Keep it
Strikes, Autonomy, and Legacy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico
For those of us who identify as anti-globalization movement alumni, 1999 was a pivotal year. Following an enormous Reclaim the Streets solidarity action in New York City, I walked into my university cafeteria elated at headlines announcing that over 50,000 people had shut down the WTO summit in Seat…
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Networked Leninism?
The Circulation of Capital, Crisis, Struggle, and the Common
The current moment is one in which both crisis and struggle are beginning to converge in heretofore unforeseen ways across the globe from the Euro-Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Middle East to our very own backyard. New insurgencies spring up, circulate, illuminate, and inspire, but have not y…
