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Challenging Harper’s Imperialist Agenda
It has become commonplace to observe that the Conservative government of Stephen Harper has been re-making the symbols and practices of the Canadian state. Canada, in this view, was once the social democratic heartland of North America. But under Harper, Canada has been transformed into a hyper-regime of neoliberal market fundamentalism. Nowhere, it is argued, […]
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Shambles in Copenhagen
The United Nations conference to address climate change in Copenhagen over the last week has illustrated several crucial features of contemporary politics, as Obama completes a year in power, the NATO plots a military surge into the war spanning from Palestine to Afghanistan, and an economic recovery staggers along. Three Features of Political Climate First, […]
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Neoliberalism and Canada’s Ruling Class
For a discipline explicitly engaged in the study of power, particularly as exercised in liberal democracies, it is striking how little Canadian political science has actually examined the concentration of private economic power, the political organization of the business classes and the extension of that power into the political realm. Indeed, Canadian political science has […]
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Canada and World Order after the Wreckage
The active imagining of an alternate global politics could hardly be more pressing. Mounting global inequalities, the turbulence of climate change, and recurring military interventions by Western powers have been the daily fare of the neoliberal world order. This world order was constructed over the last two decades under the hegemony of the U.S., in […]
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Income Inequalities, Living Wages, and Union Organizing
It is now accepted across a wide spectrum of political thinking that the period of neoliberalism has sharpened income inequalities. This has occurred along a number of dimensions. The capitalist class has seen an increase in wealth from an increasing concentration of assets, a rapid run-up in asset prices, and corporate profits restored to historically […]
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Empire’s Ally: Canadian Foreign Policy
Since the coming into power of the Stephen Harper Conservative government in January of this year, there has been much gnashing of teeth over the foreign policy stance of Canada. In particular, Canada’s relation with the U.S. on a phalanx of fronts has been at the center of controversy. One has been the softwood lumber […]
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This Election Will Not End the Impasse of Canadian Democracy
By a vote of 171 to 133, the united parliamentary forces of the Conservatives, Bloc Quebecois and New Democratic Party felled the federal Liberal Government of Paul Martin at 7:09 pm of November 28 on a motion which simply read “This House has lost confidence in the government.” Thus the 38th Parliament of Canada ended. […]
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Debating and Contesting the “New Economy”
For some time now, students of radical political economy have been preoccupied with interpreting the new phase of capitalism that has followed the postwar boom and been dominated by neoliberal ideas and policies. This has meant, on the one hand, a number of declarations of political endings — the end of corporatism, the end of […]
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Democratic Economies
The impasse of the authoritarian command economic systems in the communist zones of the 1970s brought a great deal of rethinking about economic planning and co-ordination in non-market societies within the East Bloc and outside. As well, the acceptance of capitalism by the social democratic parties in the Western countries, and their accommodation to neoliberalism, […]