Farmers Union in Canada Warns against Fracking

The following article on the dangers of extracting oil or gas through fracking was published in April 2013 by the National Farmers Union, a Canadian affiliate of La Via Campesina. – JR

There are shale gas or coal bed methane formations in northern BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, which lie mostly beneath farmland. It should be no surprise, therefore, that at the 2012 National Convention, the National Farmers Union (NFU) resolved to call on governments to implement a series of recommended regulations regarding hydraulic fracturing (fracking). In March 2013, the NFU submitted a response to Alberta’s Energy Resources Conservation Board’s (ERCB) request for public input about its proposed new regulatory framework to deal with unconventional oil and gas development.

Neil Davidson on rethinking bourgeois revolution

The most contentious debate at the Historical Materialism New York 2013 conference last month took place over a topic that might seem familiar and well digested: “How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?” Neil Davidson, author of the recent book by that name, squared off with Jeff Goodwin and Charlie Post (audio file here).

Chávez: tribuna de los desposeídos del mundo

Por John Riddell. Este articulo primero fue publicado en la revista venezolana América XXI. Click here for English text.

Hugo Chávez no fue sólo un gran patriota bolivariano; él fue un defensor de los desposeídos del mundo.

Hugo Chávez: Tribune of world’s dispossessed

By John Riddell. The following tribute was published in Spanish on April 15, 2013, in the Venezuelan publication América XXI. Click here for Spanish text.

Hugo Chávez was not only a great Bolivarian patriot; he was a tribune of the world’s dispossessed.

• At an anti-imperialist conference in Cairo in 2007, I heard Chávez hailed for his solidarity with Palestinians as “a better Arab than the Arabs”; “closer to us than the Arabs that impose injustice.”

New York conference charts path toward ‘System change not climate change’

By John Riddell. The Ecosocialist Conference, a broad and enthusiastic all-day meeting in New York April 20, took a big step toward creating an anti-capitalist wing of the environmental movement.

The conference was arranged in just six weeks by organizers of the Ecosocialist Contingent in the mass demonstration against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline in Washington February 17. It was supported by 29 groups who subscribed to the Ecosocialist Contingent statement for “system change, not climate change.”

Lars Lih online: Nine recent studies on Bolshevism, Lenin, and Kautsky

Lars Lih is widely known as one of the most influential and innovative contemporary historians of Marxism. He has provided the following listing of his online articles on Lenin, Karl Kautsky, and Bolshevism. For each article, I have added a quotation indicating its topic. — John Riddell

Fortunes of a formula: From ‘DEMOCRATIC centralism’ to ‘democratic CENTRALISM’

By Lars T. Lih. Lars Lih is a Montreal-based educator and historian of Marxism. Vladimir Nevsky (1876-1937) lived the life (in the words of an autobiographical sketch written in the 1920s) of an “ordinary party worker”, a professional, in the Bolshevik underground. Joining the party in 1897, he was a mid-level Bolshevik praktik who played a visible role in 1917 conducting party work in the army. Like so many others in his generation, he was arrested in the mid-thirties and executed in 1937.

Toronto pipeline fight links local and global issues

By John Riddell. “Our campaign against Line 9 is an essential element of the global effort to save the climate,” Ian Angus told 150 participants in the “No Tar Sands in Toronto!” meeting held April 7 in the city’s East End.

Line 9 is a 37-year-old pipeline that oil industry giant Enbridge Corp. wants to modify to carry tar sands oil across Toronto. If this is done, Toronto could face toxic spills like the one on March 29 that devastated a subdivision in Mayflower, Arkansas.

Farmers’ Union: Why we support Idle No More

Omnibus Bills, Idle No More, and the NFU:
OUR COMMON LAND, OUR COMMON GROUND

This statement in support of the Indigenous protest movement Idle No More is published in the Spring 2013 issue of Union Farmer Quarterly, the official publication of Canada’s National Farmers Union (NFU), an affiliate of La Via Campesina.

With a January 15 media release, we made public our support for the Idle No More movement, saying:

“The NFU is proud to declare its solidarity with Idle No More, which is bringing people together from across Canada to stop the Harper government from riding roughshod over our collective rights. We want a better Canada.”

Street-level organizing against tar sands threat

By John Riddell. I’ve spent time recently at literature tables on streets  here in Toronto’s East End explaining the tar sands threat to neighbours for whom this topic is quite new. I meet every conceivable response, from tar sands enthusiasm to determined opposition.

Let me explain how this developed.

The challenge in engaging with climate change is to find ways to relate the overall global crisis to immediate, specific issues that visibly affect people’s quality of life and security.

We must embrace women’s gains on responding to sexual assault

By Ian Beeching. The following guest article first appeared in International Socialism (UK) with the subtitle, ”On My Resignation from the International Socialists of Canada.”

The crisis in the British Socialist Workers Party raises an important issue of principle for socialists throughout the world. A serious accusation of rape was made by a teenage member of the SWP against a Central Committee leading member of the party in his 40s. How socialists respond to allegations of rape is not a tactical question nor is it the internal affair of a single organization. Internal organizational practices are reflections of principles. Although internal organizational mechanisms may vary, when mechanisms to address violations of principle fail, credibility and capacity to participate in movements against oppression are damaged.

Party democracy in Lenin’s Comintern – and now

How did Communist parties handle issues of internal discipline and democracy in Lenin’s time? An intense discussion now under way within the British Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) raises issues related to the nature of internal democracy in the Communist International (Comintern) during 1919–23, the period of its first four congresses.[1]

‘Toward the United Front’: Translations for the twenty-first century

On February 3, 120 socialists took part in a Toronto meeting to celebrate publication of Toward the United Front: Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 1922, available in paperback from Haymarket Books. This 1,300-page volume is the seventh book of documents on the world revolutionary movement in Lenin’s time edited by John Riddell. Riddell’s address to the Toronto meeting, below, explains the purpose of the book and the publishing project. For the video record, see LeftStreamed.

Toronto rally welcomes ‘Toward the United Front’

By Sarah Berliner. Toward the United Front, John Riddell’s edition of the Communist International’s Fourth Congress, is “an outstanding achievement in the recuperation of pivotal historical experiences for the revolutionary left of today and the future,” Marxist author David McNally told an enthusiastic gathering of 120 people in Toronto, March 3.

The Fourth Congress proceedings, 1,300 pages long, make up the seventh installment in a series of documentary volumes edited by Riddell, which present a record of the world revolutionary movement in Lenin’s time. The soft-cover edition has just been published by Haymarket Books.

Lenin, the Communist International, and the cooperative dream

By John Sharkey. This guest article expands on a presentation to a study session on “Toward the United Front”. As a Toronto community activist living in the Bain Apartments Housing Cooperative, affectionately known as The Bain, it was an eye-opener to read the debates on the role of the co-operative sector during the Russian Revolution.