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Bankruptcies and Bailouts
Edited by Wayne Antony, Julie Guard
Recession? Depression? Market adjustment? Billion-dollar bailouts? Just what is happening to the economy? Like the rest of the industrialized world, Canada is in the midst of an economic crisis that is cleary of global proportions. Yet, Nobel Prize winning economists failed to see it coming. This is unsurprising since, in the words of the newly humble Alan Greenspan, the crisis revealed “a flaw in the model ... that defines the way the world works.” Bankruptcies and Bailouts explains… (more information)
Economic Democracy
The Working Class Alternative to Capitalism
Allan Engler
Identifying capitalism as a system of socialized labour, privately owned capitalist collectives (corporations) and workplace (dictatorships), this book proposes economic democracy as an alternative form of organization. Unlike the capitalist system, which centralizes power with a small elite, economic democracy entitles everyone to a voice and equal vote in their communities’ economic and political decisions. Workplace and community democracy will replace capitalist (corporate) dictatorship… (more information)
If You’re in My Way, I’m Walking
The Assault on Working People since 1970
Thom Workman
“If you’re in my way I’m walking.” This arrogant statement by former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien on the occasion of his physical altercation with a protester in Hull, Quebec in the mid-1990s symbolizes the spirit of the relentless drive of capital to rewrite the historical compromise reached with working people after World War II. This early post-war compromise—sometimes referred to as the Fordist Compact—was associated with improving wages and rising… (more information)
Our Board Our Business
Why Farmers Support the Canadian Wheat Board
Edited by Darrell McLaughlin, Terry Pugh
Our Board Our Business is based on presentations made to a symposium on the Canadian Wheat Board organized by the National Farmers union held in Regina, Saskatchewan, February 24 and 25, 2006. The central purpose of the book is to help farmers and non-farmers better understand the essential role of the CWB in the lives of western wheat producers and their communities, and the Canadian economy. The need for such an understanding has been made all the more urgent by Prime Minister Harper’s neo… (more information)
Parliamentary Socialism
A Study in the Politics of Labour
Ralph Miliband
Of political parties claiming socialism to be their aim, the Labour Party has always been one of the most dogmatic—not about socialism, but about the parliamentary system. This is not simply to say that the Labour Party has never been a party of revolution: such parties have normally been quite willing to use the opportu-nities the parliamentary system offered as one means of furthering their aims. It is rather that the leaders of the Labour Party have always rejected any kind of political… (more information)
Public Service, Private Profits
The Political Economy of Public-Private Partnerships in Canada
John Loxley, Salim Loxley
PPPs/P3s have become all the rage amongst every level of government in Canada in recent years. Proponents claim P3s reduce the costs of building and operating public projects and services,that projects and services are delivered more efficiently through the P3 model, so that in the end taxpayers are better off economically and as consumers of public goods. This book tests all of these claims, and more, finding them mostly empty, ideological assertions. Through an exhaustive series of case studies… (more information)
The Global Food Economy
The Battle for the Future of Farming
Tony Weis
The modern food industry is a paradox: surplus “food mountains” sit alongside global malnutrition; the developed world subsidized its own agriculture while pressurizing the developing to liberalize at any cost; and an increasingly aggressive export competition is accompanied by a growing reliance on imports in many countries. The WTO’s uneven application of neoliberal economics to food production is relatively new, and the consequences of mounting deficits, rising “food miles… (more information)
The Socialist Register 2010
Morbid Symptoms: Health Under Capitalism
Edited by Colin Leys, Leo Panitch
Health care rights are fought over between commercial forces that seek to make health into a commodity (for those who can pay), and popular forces that seek to reduce gross inequalities and try to make (or keep) health as a public service. These essays analyze the global health industry: the corporations that sell pharmaceuticals and insurance and push to expand the consumption of goods and services, making health care everywhere a field of capital accumulation. (more information)
The State in Capitalist Society
Ralph Miliband
Almost as soon as The State in Capitalist Society was published in 1969, it was recognized as one of the most important books in political science and sociology to have appeared since the Second World War. Four decades later, and in the wake of a neoliberal era almost universally characterized in terms of the re-treat of the state, “the massive scale of state intervention today makes the re-publication of Ralph Miliband’s classic study extremely timely. Its famous opening sentences… (more information)